Gutter Midrash

reveling and reckoning

2011-07-10T23:31:00.009-04:00

When I'm older I hope Ani DiFranco's still out on tour. The way I picture it it's 2042 and she's biggest on the Six Flags circuit. I'm the septuagenerian double-fisting super-sized Diet Cokes, my hearing aides cranked to max, standing right by the PA. I don't think the way she plays guitar and decorates those open spaces it with intellect and depth of feeling will ever lose resonance for me. It means more the older I get. On the other hand I hope it's just her and not a full-band. I can't imagine that cymbals and I will still be on speaking terms at that point.

After the show I'll speak to her and here's how the conversation will go.

Me: [something articulate]

Ani: (long pause). Wow, no one's ever put it like that before. Can we be best friends?

Me: Yes.

Then I'll freestyle rap, spinning a long history of human pain, reckoning, and ultimately reconciliation. She'll beatbox. Then we'll ride some demented centrifugal roller coaster together and I won't throw up. Which by then will likely constitute my full concept of a romantic hangout.

Me: [something articulate, and cadential].

Ani: (Longer pause). Thanks man, I've been waiting for this conversation all my life.

Fist bumps are exchanged. Exeunt all, smiling.

Hoagiefest generation/frank admission/kicking and screaming

2011-06-06T21:48:00.007-04:00

The eldercare term Sandwich generation implies a single sandwich, a single squeeze or sandwiching if you will. For those among us with more complex conundrums I'd like to re-appropriate from Wawa branding the term Hoagiefest.

Hoagiefest generation -- n., a generation or subgroup of the same finding itself navigating a pile of caregiving sandwiches. Some are classics, some are shortis, some are two-foot party subs. There are many, hence the fest.

Image: the family caregiver stands perched on one end of a seesaw while clowns throw a bunch of sandwiches at her.

Image(alternate): as the family caregiver sleeps, restlessly and half out of his mind, a posse of clowns piles hoagies one by one until he wakes up to find himself covered in Wawa hoagies.

What is to be done, brothers and sisters? We must eat a lot of hoagies. That is the nature of the Hoagiefest.

I want to admit here that caring is alien to me. I love, I really do, but I also connect with my relatives and family members like an alien from another care-free planet, like a sci-fi android discovering a new type of experience, Emotion. Being called upon to do what's right is to grow comfortable in "social situations," replete with "conversation" and "eye contact."

As reported in these pages, a few years ago I gave up drinking. And as these pages also inadvertently chronicle, drinking had played an essential role in company morale. Without it I felt lonelier, more depressed, crazy. The choice seemed to be to start drinking again, health consequences and genealogical tendencies toward alcoholism be damned, or to do some work.

That concept of work has me starting to dip into AA. A couple of months in I can report two things with certitude. First, I think it could help. Maybe it already is. And, there's the part I find controversial: these meetings mostly take place in churches. I have been on church premises more in the past three months than at any point in the past 15 years. No one has to drag me there kicking and screaming. I just head straight for the basement and it all works fine. I feel hope (bullshit aside) and somewhere outlined in the far future is "peace," something I did not envision prior.

One of the things people argue in the rooms is fake-it-til-you-make-it on the spirituality question. For those on similar fences, when asked to close a meeting by repeating the Our Father in a group, I suggest that you replace in your mind the word Father with Hoagie. This simple transposition strips the prayer of most of its patriarchal vestiges (most but not all, dear reader, for if a hoagie has gender it must be masculine). The remainder is downright innocuous, possibly even containing the seeds of a code to live by.

Dora on the Skids

2011-03-13T00:33:00.004-05:00

As kids they find success, as teens the magic wears off. As young adults they finally consummate the relationship, mostly, she'll remember later, out of boredom. We did it, we did it, we did it yeah takes on new meaning.

The salad days don't last, the spark disappears. The Animal Rescue Center needs a fresh coat of paint that no one will provide.

So too for their hearts. The thrill of the rescue stops being enough, maybe it never was. Dora cracks first, falling into alcohol, weed, heroin, coke, crack, meth. Diego resists but as always he follows her lead. Boots too, and he falls into it worst of all, insatiable. The boots get pawned, and finally the sad little monkey ODs. Not on any one chemical, of course, but rather like his mind and little monkey body stretching in different directions until something breaks. Hardened, Diego throws him out with the trash.

There's the problem of Swiper. He keeps stealing their stash and one morning they ambush him. Dora urges the killing blow but Diego flinches. They let him go with a warning, after which she blackens Diego's eye. Both eyes. The general effect of animal husbandry diminishes: Mother maned wolves nervously shield their cubs, river otters impart to their children never to trust the shifty-eyed pair from up on the hill. Prickers and thorns become a much more bearable alternative. They catch Swiper again, this time sure they'll never be able to trust him. He's still alive when they cinch the trash bag, and all that night neither of them can sleep, sure he's still hanging on, whispering oh man out in the dumpster.

High, high, plenty high. On good days there's enough to go around. On bad days they bicker and fight. One night after a double-stabbing they decide to split. Diego takes up with a couple of porn stars, becomes a kept man. Dora becomes a poacher outright. Ivory. Sharks fins for soup. Maybe jealous, maybe pragmatic, she takes Diego out, throwing him alive into a vat of corrosive acid. The bones are enough to fill two trash bags. Instead she builds a xylophone, carefully aligned from small to big. Resonant. Beautiful.

Time passes. Dora has a change of heart, cleans up her act. Now she's got a desk job, something in project management. The work has a numbing effect (more maybe than the drugs ever could) and it gives her an excuse to go every weekday to the 41st floor of a Madison Avenue skyscraper. In the winters the sunsets are heartbreaking.

The xylophone collects dust in public storage. Dora gains weight, nothing much that you'd notice. A few pounds attributable to contentment.

imagined starlight

2011-03-06T22:41:00.002-05:00

On the UWS there's a Children's Museum, which today felt a little shabby, which today seemed more like three floors of rent and $10 times x visitors a month. They'd closed off the third floor for some kid's birthday party and there must have been 150 kids crammed into the other two floors. Dora and Boots and Diego still smiled but they all looked a little exhausted, there on the walls, putting exuberant Spanish-lite to kid after kid after kid. They must have felt like they were phoning it in. Al rescate sounds so sad when it's only mumbled, when it channels only the vocal cords and no heart.

Hung back and watched N. playing with other kids with these giant blocks and sometimes in the interactions of kids you see it all: How one can ignore the vision of another to fulfill her or his own. How one kid's block tower is another kids raw materials, all in quick time.

How every New York neighborhood is always at least three at once, the one it was, the one it is, the one it's on its way to becoming. How empires are the same, built from those of the past, then picked coldly for the best scraps to form new ones.

The joy of that metaphor being that today my kid was a little emperor, building a tower for the ages, beneficent, the best ruler this town has ever seen, with trumpets and saxophones and drums and bass and guitar to herald a new reign, redolent with young joy, a kingdom bound felicitous under imagined starlight.

head full of garbage

2011-01-26T10:21:00.004-05:00

A guy wakes up in the morning with a head full of garbage. It's the kind of thing you notice right away, like a headache but deeper-rooted, a terrible awareness before he's even opened his eyes. Confirmed by news radio, painfully amplified over breakfast, a sense that try as may he can't eat another bite. Now the paper too, the words swimming in front of him without sense or meaning.

He's freaked but he doesn't say anything to his wife or his kids about it, he just tries to fake his way through. He gets out to his car and thinks maybe now, but the radio attacks him, billboards, people, even the way they walk and look like a kind of affront. It's bad but he forces himself through the motions, parking, onto the train and in, he and everybody else looking down or straight ahead, a sullen cortege for people who die every day, bored by it. Only it's really like he's possessed, the guy has to force every step. Even the corner coffee he buys every day tastes like shit. He should have asked for more sugar but even that...

He comes to in the hospital with a dull feeling in his chest and his wife standing over him and a team of doctors, everybody in scrubs, everybody wearing masks. "I'm afraid there's nothing else to be done," the doctor tells her. Then a quick shot, and a lot of being gone, and when he wakes up he feels a world better, like a new man.

Every day there are meals, and TV, and a little bit of weather through the window. He likes the commercials best. At first he wonders when they'll let him go home. After a few days he gets used to it, falling with his new family into something like happiness.

imagined community and its discontents

2011-01-23T23:59:00.005-05:00

Bummer way to listen to sports scores listen for the home teams that lose now picture the kids brought to see their firstest games indoctrinated sad into loss in a more personal way a kid's primer on deeper more real loss in preparation for best case later in life when said loss becomes more inevitable, something to let flow around you with a kind of resignation.

Bummer way to watch the news instead of nodding in solemn judgment or fear at the shame that thieves murderers etc have brought upon themselves rather empathize with the moment they were forced too late to recognize where their own mistaken judgment had led them, to instant forever loss to rot in jail or lose their families or real communities to spend a good part of time ostracized, cast out to either never find forgiveness or have to fight every year for many to find some smidgeon of it.

Escape hatch out of bummerville a perception of the beauty of the play of chance at times bouncing right, love conveyed and echoed back of the joy of growth out of winter's tearing down of the fat kid escaping from his dad's arms running down the stands and out to the court grabbing the basketball from the referee's hands and throwing it from mid-court and against all logic but really with the perfect logic of that moment the ball sinks in a perfect arc, nothing but net.

That next morning the jail doors open and the prisoners go free, lightened by their second chance they radiate peace and understanding then by example we all go free politics and history are cast aside disease goes vanquished religion is recognized for the quasi-helpful approximation that it is and everybody gets together that very night for the world's absolute best grade A number one potluck.

everything is obfuscated

2011-01-21T09:33:00.003-05:00

It's not a particularly deep realization but it's wide-reaching, the degree to which as a culture and as individuals we continue to perfect the eternal non-present.

You could argue that what I should say is the multiply-or-diluted present but the net effect is a desensitization, not just to violence, in the foil packaging of a hamburger as opposed to killing the cow yourself, in drone planes that kill by remote control like in some really really advanced and demented video game. Not just to information, with ten browser windows open ten best internet friends and nothing fully parsed but much gleaned at instant summary distance. But to joy as well, in digitizing our photographs, our correspondence, a bulk of our human connection, and so on and therefore holding these things at an easily parsable, easily forgettable and never impactful distance.

So we've become a place of daydream revolutions, revolutions conceived as marketing campaigns or cute little clubs built on 1917 daydreams, lives and loves and fantasy football and once in a while the deluxe and illustrious mechanism breaks down to let real physics intrude, some kid takes a real helmet to helmet hit and ends up knocked immobile, frozen on the field, trying to move something to show he still can, and they bring in the golf cart, and if you concentrate really hard, you can will yourself to pretend it's a golf course, and the kid's just taking a nap on the way to the next hole.

light and sweet

2011-01-20T08:00:00.005-05:00

Would the best apocalypse for the New York metropolitan area be one of fire or ice, ocean or drought. In any case one would want Godspeed You Black Emperor flown in to provide the soundtrack; they could play what was left of the New Meadowlands, only halfway through a hundred Swoops would parachute in to start punching out any Giants fans in the audience. I was going to say to strafe the place, but even in an apocalyptic setting that seems a bit much. We need a gentler, more bipartisan discourse, an NFC East fan base united against more consistent talents.

The ideal, the gentle apocalypse would be slow building, so people would have a good chance to evacuate, so that only the landscape itself were laid to waste. It could be seen as a starting over, a rejuvenation, to open Manhattan and its new-found canals or lakes of fire to colonization by a new generation of artists and musicians, lured by cheap or nonexistent rent, excellent parking, and a reasonably empty environment for drug use. Brooklyn might survive intact and ascend to primacy, with Bedford as the new Wall Street, although development of the Atlantic Yards project should be halted indefinitely out of respect for the displaced.

Which scares you more, severe weather or faulty social institutions, a press with no moral authority or a government with no financial accountability, nuclear proliferation or bad, bad education.

Advantages to bunker: more reading time. Questions re>: wireless internet access, the culinary limits inherent to canned food, and how I'd ever beat these two at Scrabble consistently over the long-term.

current events

2011-01-19T08:42:00.010-05:00

voltage I mean like a 60 Hertz hum which you could eventually ignore caught up in other sound but which'll remind you it's there time to time in uncharacteristic moments of purported silence.

voltage I mean like an underlying indeterminacy quantum/otherwise but also its opposite in the sense that if you slow down you might sense general order underlying, a general state of hold together more than not despite the grim machinations of chance, cold. voltage I mean that's an easy thing to say if the lucky streak persists.

man I owe you a lot and lately I see more of you in me than I ever did. For a long time I carried only one image of you around; of someone whose resistors had snapped and electricity shot from your mouth in a screaming stream extincting scorched emotion for all in range, a kind of forceful melting to bleach memory of its joy, a kind of forever storm I still see freakishly parked to flood that fucked house.

but of late I have a different image. I see a kid I would never do that to and a kid you would never do that to the same, a chance for both of us to get it right, and there must have been a lot you got right then, if I could only remember.

Facebook

2010-11-12T10:07:00.009-05:00

If you ever feel bad about thinking about going off Facebook, just try actually going through with it and watch how mean the thing is in response. It picks your 3 or 4 favorite people and shows you their pictures, tells you how much they'll miss you.

If you leave by the most obvious route offered, you aren't even really leaving. If you figure out how to fully exit, it removes all traces that you ever existed, so your friends are left commenting on things you never said.

It isn't that I don't want the connections, I just don't want them confined to a snow globe full of mirrors. I'll let you know if I figure anything out, or whether maximum tundra persists despite this latest half-baked attempt at cleaning house.

russian doll

2010-11-04T07:41:00.003-04:00

Our new house is an old house and when we moved in you mentioned offhand that you felt the presence of other histories, other owners that had come before. I didn't notice it at first but gradually I did; it started to feel like our lives in that house were the outer surface of a Russian doll, with six or seven vanished generations clamoring from the inside, sealed hermetic, waiting for their chance.

You show me important things in that offhand way, and gradually I could feel the weight of -- but couldn't see -- other lives from the past couple of centuries in that house. I felt strangely accountable to them, and I wondered what they'd think when I snuck a snack at night, or watched too much TV, or said something curt to you.

Gradually those lives felt more real. Sometimes walking into the kitchen I would hear someone was crying in the heat vent, a mournful cry beyond reserve, beyond despair. Late, the house would fill with incongruous smells, like baking bread, or camphor, or wine that had gone sour. I would get this fast alone sense and feel a need to run upstairs,looking behind me the whole way, and I would lie down as quick as possible, without even taking off my shoes. My dreams came from other eras, and I would wake up mid-thought, in a mind I didn't recognize.

Right when we had our first child something shifted. When we got home from the hospital I could feel them all waiting up for us, like proud relatives. I was nervous, and it helped me sense that things would be alright -- that we would figure it out.

I was excited to tell you I could feel the ghosts in this house all around us, like a greeting party, but you told me it was all imagination and asked me to put on some tea. I said you're probably right. It's been years now and I can't tell if the ghosts are gone or if we just stopped noticing their presence.

apple

2010-10-20T08:08:00.008-04:00

Things had conspired to keep me on a PC. I liked that you could configure it yourself, that you had more free software available for it, with more platform flexibility. The x factor for Macs seemed so boutique, so full of shit that I was never really tempted. Then, one day between an open-source mp3 word processor that wouldn't stop crashing and a mysterious virus that emailed photos of my detumescent junk to my extended family and all my business contacts, something shifted. I found myself paying closer attention to the commercials, to the generally well-adjusted personalities and successful lives of the people I knew who "thought different." I began to wonder if it wasn't time to think different myself.

I went to the Apple Store. It was packed and everybody there seemed, I don't know how to put it, somehow hotter than they actually were. It wasn't that people were necessarily more physically fit, but the dudes who were 50 pounds overweight somehow knew how to wear it, and women (snaggletoothed but proud) seemed generally more interested in talking to them, about the latest accessories, about the iPad, about the ramifications of the new Iphone on communication as we know it. They all went bathed in a bright white light. I was hooked, and I almost broken down right there and bought a laptop on credit in the store. Fortunately, because I was so caught up in the moment I actually might have gone ahead with it then and there, the salespeople were too busy to answer my questions. By the time one had time for me, I had lost my nerve.

I drove home in a cloud of self-hate and lonely misery and cried for a long time. I made popcorn and jerked off and when that didn't calm me down I did it again, this time to the FBI Most Wanted website and when that still didn't do the trick I got drunk and dialed anyone who (a) had ever slept with me or (b) had even thought about it. Those few who still had the same number and were willing to pick up -- as a rule these represented category (b) -- could offer little advice. In the end, my situation was impossible. I wanted an Apple, but couldn't justify the $2500 it would cost for the computer and the cool new clothes to go with it. Finally, Ramona, definitively, sadly, category (b) Ramona, advised me to find one used and save for the clothes at a later date.

I was quite fortunate to find a used Macbook on Craigslist. The guy who sold it to was only willing to meet after midnight and at the Wawa of my choosing. He twitched a little and maybe slobbered once as he counted the money (and for a second I thought he was going to stab me and bolt) but the price was right. It worked great and eventually I would grow to appreciate the "Property of the University of Connecticut" stamped on the thing in bold, black immovable type. I think that hint of danger may have even added cachet or mystery at Starbucks, where for months after I was to parade my new laptop like a highly-convenient newborn child.

I got the clothes, as well: two Banana Republic shirts that I wash in the bathtub to save on detergent; one pair of Banana Republic pants that I wear every day and keep as clean as possible using Handy Wipes; and a pair of Berkenstocks that I wear rain, sleet, or snow.

The results have been outstanding. My world is bathed in a bright, cathode light, bold, heavenly light that emanates from behind doors and windows and through the branches of happy trees. My boss is off my back now, and on my steady diet of cupcakes and Mountain Dew I actually seem to be losing weight. The toothaches and painful diarrhea have stopped and my phone is always ringing. The best part is that I can pick up: It's never bill collectors or my mom or wrong numbers for the funeral home down the street. No, on the other end is Ramona, definitively, happily, category (a) Ramona.

reverse déjà vu

2010-10-04T07:35:00.010-04:00

A selfish perk of parenting is getting to watch lessons and strategies that apply specifically to you, absorbed and expressed unfiltered by someone with infinitely less baggage than you bring to things yourself. In effect, from a very early age kids give you advice on how to live, advice that for its innocent implication or expression is somehow more hearable.

The kid's interests are catholic but skew categorically to music and sugar, to screaming for fun and throwing things, to Shrek and eggs and never going to sleep.
Subject also displays avid interest in garage doors.

For a while he would demand that I push the button, and each time he'd give a jump as the door engaged. Now, like everything (piloting a jet, open heart surgery, killing someone bare handed) he wants to do it himself.

Grandma and Peepaw have prime double garage doors, which open onto a tree-lined block filled with quiet autumn light so distilled and savory as to seem flown in from another country as a super-secret upper-middle-class suburban perk. The doors, the aura and smell of the garage are imbued with grandparent magic, characteristics of a fairy-tale world already remembered later in life as experienced now, in a kind of reverse déjà vu.

Saturday we were at it again, me the holder at switch-height, him opening and closing those vaunted doors. This time you could see a new thread: the boy was trying to conquer his fear. Each time he would push the button, each time giving a jump when the door engaged. Each time too, though, the jump would get less pronounced.

impact

2010-10-02T00:05:00.003-04:00

I work for a charity in the South Bronx. Most of my job is stringing together words, and shaping and polishing other people's writing. Sometimes I go to meetings where people ask questions about the words we've written, and I do my best to answer, or punt to someone who can.

The chief impact of my work is financial. I bring in money to help pay the salaries of other staff, who go out into the world and have real impact. On good days that equation is enough to justify my work. On bad days I wonder if it isn't circular, if I'm not changing the world at all, but rather just being a guy who polishes words and thanks people for their contributions and does his best to sleep at night.

My relationship to the South Bronx -- like my relationship to many things -- is one of distant love. I walk around in love with the neighborhood and the people I don't know and the Spanish they speak that I rarely fully grasp. Then I retreat to the top floor of the tallest building on the block and polish words, looking out at the people on the street below.

From that view you can't see much of people's faces but you can see their postures, how they walk, and you can infer what you like about how their lives are going. It's hard to assess direct impact from that height and maybe it's just as well.

Last year someone gave me a coat at random, a nice winter coat with a lot of pockets. It was a generous thing to do and the coat fit me perfectly. I could've afforded it I guess (one of the real impacts of my work to polish words). But it's a nicer coat than I would've purchased. I'm just not a very stylish person.

Tonight I left work late to meet my family in Manhattan for a late dinner. I was wearing the coat for the first time this year. It's one of those rare coats that makes sense in fall and winter, somehow it just adjusts magically to the temperature. It's a comfortable coat.

The walk to the subway is short, but tonight on my way down the hill a woman stumbled from my right to land face-first on the curb. She broke the fall a little with her hands and a lot with her mouth and forehead. It look liked she'd blacked out. She struggled to get up but she crumpled on the sidewalk. Someone walking by said drugs in Spanish and kept going. A couple of us stopped.

The woman was bleeding from the mouth and couldn't really right herself (though she kept trying). One of the people who stopped called 911. We tried to convince the woman that she should stay lying down, because she looked pretty bad. She really would've rather left, but she couldn't. Still, it looked kind of sad to see her lying there on the cold sidewalk, so I took off my coat and put it under her head while the same few of us waited for the ambulance to come.

It wasn't drugs, or if it was it wasn't just drugs. The woman said she was diabetic, trying to get as comfortable as she could, bleeding from the head and mouth with a coat for a pillow on a busy street, barely able to express herself.

Maybe she still has the coat with her at the hospital. Maybe I'll find it on my way in to work on Monday, crumbled in a ball and in real need of a wash, but I doubt it. Sometimes the world passes you objects and sometimes it asks nicely to have them back. Sometimes the way the world asks isn't as nice as you'd want.

for the branches of trees

2010-10-01T09:21:00.004-04:00

Funereal for the branches of trees, for leaves. All night the wind shook the house and when we woke up we were out to sea; the cat, the boy and I left you sleeping for once and rowed us back.

When the wind stops carrying portent take me out to pasture, plant me in the ground to ward off crows. Do leave a television with Netflix Instant, do lobby them to stock it more generously with the rare celluloid written thoughtful and crisp but for chrissakes let me be, don't make the mistake of talking my way. One day someone will get a bright and novel idea to pave over the field to build another thoughtful shopping center for the import of faraway vegetables. I venture they will still need a warder off for hassling crows, or at the very least someone to hoist out from the cellar every autumn to spice up the decor.

Funereal for the branches of trees, rotten where they sheltered years of alright suburban yard. A canopy not so diminished by the loss of one or several planks, a nature's structure hedging its bets in layered lattice until one day the whole thing gives way and falls, or some lawyer-fearing yardsmen call a tree service and extract further any hint of mystery from this old soil.

graceless and ashamed

2010-09-28T20:01:00.017-04:00

We're here to see an old ritual start again, built from preserved schematics and sewn from a continuous thread of anguish and pain. We've all brought our own pain and we're here to offer it up, some of us more stylishly than others, some of us older and further still from grace, some of us fatter and with more hair, hair in awkward and fearsome places, hair that makes us think of death.

JD expresses concern for the health of the performers; they are technicians, they are precision drivers into radiant discord, and they also look a little like our aging parents. Their actions are to be held close now in memory, because they cannot last forever. If this be some mislaid and freakish tribe, these are (if not elders) then our most senior warriors, scarred and broken, precise from the memory of a thousand futile hunts.

I offer DX a Sour Patch Kid and he refuses. I think to myself that I'm getting old too, that the time comes when a man must put down Sour Patch Kids. When I was young, I thought of childish things. Now that I'm old, I like sour things. I think about buying (but do not buy) a second pack.

The opening act a kind of mis-adventure; leading with the promise of gorgeous accordion that fills the old and lonely hall with sorrow, with pain remembered from across the sea, long ago. Followed by (it sounded) the ramblings of a charmless troubadour, the one you always end up stuck talking to at the party. A nice enough person, I'm sure.

From this you fear that order will never appear but out of the din arises Thor, sturdy and true, down-laying a blanket or better a sea of bells. Now the water is put to fire, now the angels fly from it, their eyes alit too; now they are burning, lighting the night sky with the pain of lost love.

This is a first show, this is a holding together, the eyes of the band locked to the central drummer, he and the bassist with the whole band and the whole audience hanging on each move. We are wishing, we are holding together and praying and by some point we are angels too, transported, on fire, over the ocean.

When Thor takes off his shirt you know you have arrived, but don't let it distract you. The man obviously goes to the gym; a nod to health, to health's need, to the rule of the body. Gira (this really happened) describes his naked body as ice cream on a stick, with "a little thing sticking out." Near the end of the show the thread is nearly lost, the rhythm section must rally. Gira implores, the table nearly skews but for its near loss the fire burns only moreso higher, only moreso killing and scalding and renewing, moreso branding or tattooing us in our shared pain.

At shows I retreat to my head and listen too technically, for mistakes, for chord progressions, for melody in its fluid parameters, a million ways to listen and stay in my head, detached, barely dancing, always self conscious. But at some point in this show I am really transported, non-technical, lost in time in a way that has never happened to me before, set into a pinball collage of old memories of pain.

I remember a boy a long time ago, a young boy just a little older than my son, remember his confused pain and all the pain that followed it a bit predictably, stupidly, unconsciously, the pain I've felt, the myriad and shameful pain I've caused. All I can remember is pain, stupid pain, futile and ridiculous pain, and I feel sorry for that boy at a distance, as if he were another person I remembered.

All around the room you see faces intent, offering, all of us here to offer our pain, here with the hope that it can be channeled in this ritual, poured out of us and into the loud air, blown free and leaving our spirits lighter, more alive, less drowning in time and memory, for God so loved the world he gave his only son.

Why do the angels hide their eyes from the light, graceless and ashamed, aloft in a stellar column, awaiting heaven's fire. What do they remember of their sin, what of it did they cherish, for what is their skin full of memory, their mouths, their fingers alive with the memory of fire.

Why do they mis-hang their heads, their limbs, why are their eyes so without life, what do they share of their last dreams, their pain, the looks of the ones they knew, or loved. Once there were their mouths, their fingers, kissing fire from tongue to tongue, once they lived.

Swans show @ the Trocadero, 9/28/10.

rhinoceros

2010-09-24T16:33:00.025-04:00

This is going to sound a little weird but the other day when I was cleaning the basement I found the skeleton of a rhinoceros. I'm pretty sure it was a young rhinoceros. I'm not going to lie, when a man reaches a certain age and loses control of his basement and the years go by sluggish but inevitable -- like plus-sized models heralding hand-me-down fall fashion on a cheap and freely available kind of ketamine -- when that man one day can stand it no more and he cleans his basement and unearths the skeleton of a rhinoceros, it gives him pause.

When that day comes a man takes stock.

I'm clear on the fact that cleaning the basement was probably overdue. Most reasonable observers or agencies concerned for the welfare of the young or the population at large would tell you it was. When I told my wife I was finally going to clean the basement (my tone hopeful, my eyes full of romantic spark and pointed vaguely in the direction of her face) she grunted and began softly to cry, which I took to mean that she knew for sure that the cleaning was long overdue and in fact by this point totally insufficient. Then my wife buried her face in her hands and cried less softly and it was five or ten minutes before she could watch TV or text or even drink.

I was determined to clean the basement myself. On TV when a man loses control of his house (or even when he just falls a little behind for a few years) all these TV people basically surprise him at his house in the dead of night and like rape him or punch him in the stomach or face until he cries on camera, then his relatives testify to how impossible and selfish he is until he cries some more, then a therapist asks him why he's crying and while he answers a dozen or so people in ninja costumes break down his door and rape or punch him again and wisk everything that isn't nailed down to the town square for a televised sacrificial bonfire.

You can spare me that, friend. When I make a mess or get a little behind on things I want to handle it myself, even if it takes me a while to get to it. And it isn't like having a clean house is some salve or boon. If your house is perfectly clean you still have to live in it with the same people you lived with before, you just have less stuff now to distract you.

If for some reason it *were* me on TV, I wouldn't be the bozo clutching my privates defensively and blubbering to the camera about my lost years or how I never really knew what a clean house was. I'd have fun with it. There'd be outright sabotage ("oh, I see you found the deadly adders... I'd nearly lost hope"). There would be costumes; I'd spend most but not all of the episode dressed as a chicken, and the rest of it in a bathrobe. There would also be a room prepared for weeks in advance wherein (I would try to convince them) I routinely expressed my heartfelt belief that my urine should be preserved in three liter bottles that had once held Wegman's Diet Root Beer, and that feces is the living expression of God's will and should be smeared liberally onto the faces of all who enter my home.

As I said, when I found the rhinoceros it gave me pause. I consulted with my wife, who spat in my face and kicked me in the balls, which I took to mean that she also had no memory of having a rhinoceros of indeterminate age in our house at any point. But then she got a beer and sat watching ESPN, which I took as a positive sign, a flicker of possibility that "the grill was still hot."

Back downstairs I puzzled over the skeleton. I thought about having a yard sale or hawking it on Craigslist but I remembered, probably from TV, that most of the time that's just an excuse someone makes when they aren't ready to part with their loot.

I thought of working the rhinoceros skeleton into the decor of the basement, making it the focal point of some prehistoric man-cave, but I figured more than likely it would just end up piled under thousands of copies of The Sporting News, exactly as it had been before. I thought of the ninjas and the masked gentleman with the taser and my brother-in-law explaining what a douche I was on national TV. I thought of my children and what they'd say, what their friends would say, what their own future children would say. Most of all I thought of the spirit of the rhinoceros, held bound to earth, lost and alone in a suburban landscape that it never could have chosen for itself.

Then I started breaking down the skeleton into the smallest groupings I could get it into and started piling those in trash bags, and I bagged until my hands bled, and then I bagged some more.

When I got back from the dump my wife was on the porch drinking mojitos. I told her I'd made real progress and asked if she might make me a mojito. She told me to fuck myself and called me by another man's name, which I took to mean make your own mojito.

I did and we sat out on the porch, listening to the summer cars out on the freeway, to the swift and loving passage of time, and I knew it would all be fine.

Mix Like a Master

2010-09-22T19:15:00.002-04:00

Albeit abjectly listened squinting into the far corners of non-isolated earbud soundplanes, albeit detuned and fractured into fragments by the loud subway scrape of metal in an interminably ferocious battle to the death with like metal; albeit imperfectly heard perhaps to the point of not being there at all he still could swear he heard a whispered voice in the far back right of this one track, beginning exactly at this point shortly after 2 minutes into the track that he skipped back to for the rest of the ride downtown.

The trouble followed him up the street and into his apartment, through making dinner and eating standing at the kitchen counter and staring meaninglessly at a book with the player cued unconsciously back and back before declaring it pointless, closing the book, turning out all the lights and dipping back into the track again.

He poured himself a drink, lit mood lights and even smoked a joint: There simply wasn't any understanding what was being whispered from 2:04 to 2:19 in this godforsaken track. He tried changing the equalizer settings and plugging the thing into his stereo with an auxiliary wire, he borrowed better headphones from his neighbors (a little too stoned to venture out, but not so much so that he couldn’t pull it off). Nothing did it. It wasn't an exceptional record, it wasn't anything he'd listened to more than a dozen or so times, but this tucked in corner of this one song would be his defeat or his turning point, his entree into a new world of close attention, of deep listening and an acolyte's awareness, of no longer fail.

There has to be a way to remove some parts of a song in real time. This should be a feature of the format by now, he thinks, that mixing down ceases to be a prerequisite for the transfer to home listening. Rather, every song should be delivered whole, to be mixed listeners in real time. He pictures the whisper isolated and looped by itself or accompanied by the barest spectral synth or TR-808 pulse, and the thrill of deciphering the code. He briefly searches online for software with such a deconstructive feature. One link looks promising, but turns out to not be freeware or open source at all. Rather it’s a piece of software that costs about $50, but promises to allow mixing in the moment. Remix any track, the pop-up ad promises. Mix like a master.

He looks around for others, but all roads lead him back to the Master. He smokes some more and pours another drink and sets to looking around for a hacked copy. Some look promising, but none of the torrents work. He looks more closely at the legit website for the program, hoping to find a free trial but seeing no indications of the slightest download option. He scans the FAQ and finds nothing about a trial version of any kind, but the questions and answers (mostly about intellectual property rights, most of the answers suggesting erudite terrains for aural revisionary exploration, a dense catalog for a world he'd only daydreamed of minutes before) only serve to pique his interest further.

He has an odd little feeling purchasing the software, like he's crossed some threshold to bourgeois respectability that he'll struggle fruitlessly and without grace to escape for the rest of his life. The download process takes five minutes, the installer another five. It's after 1 in the morning when he nails down the last of the soundcard settings (slaying an irritating pop, a stuttering beyond the first few seconds of any clip), and it's later still when he figures out how to port the track from his player to his computer and into the program itself.

Are you ready to Mix like a Master? He is. And then it appears; a beautifully-designed, absolutely simple mixing board, with auto-guess labels for each track of the song, each customizable on the off chance that a specific audio track was incorrectly identified by the program’s expert and unprecedented algorithms. The distorted guitars and meandering bass and wander-to-a-click drums go without a fight, as do the lead vocals and the backing vocals and the spectral synths and the well-intended but probably excessive theremin and string section. There's still a little bleed, from an irksome, optimistic egg shaker, but with another hit and some readjusting of the light levels in the room the whispering turns out to be some inscrutable indie shit, words for the sake of sound only, devoid of meaning and never intended to convey a single thing.

He scoops himself a robust bowl of ice cream and loads Dark Side of the Moon, mixing and remixing and isolating and recombining until first light, past the first steps in the hall and the school buses and a guilty Diet Mountain Dew from the fridge, later still when he decides he'd better call out from work.

a field of stars

2010-09-21T22:34:00.004-04:00

When he decides he'll sleep N. stops settling and exhales sharply and sleeps through to a field of stars in oscillating patterns, in sharpshift constellations of familiar and beloved objects, nightglowoutlines of dump trucks, oversized plastic footballs, omnipotent vacuum cleaners and beach buckets flipped to form brigadier's helmets, ornate, not streamlined but regal, horses and woof woofs and a fuzzy cat and sippy cups of deliciously non-watered down apple juice.

When the firmament shifts or blinks to form each new pattern a collage of melodies in modulating sister keys pans stereowide through the room, where the boat rows and the bongo bongs, where the spider bitsies and Ms. Mary Mack dresses like a Beat Poet in a turtleneck, where old Dan Tucker gets narrowly out the way of the wheels on the bus. Said bus is driven by Raffi and it isn't that he's driving recklessly or drunk or high on cocaine or apple juice or distracted by the tender entreaties of his four best groupie moms; the fault is that of Mr. Tucker and I'd appreciate you refraining from questions about Raffi's character; he is at the very least a genius of arrangement and those are his assistants.

Before N. decides to sleep there are random games to be folded into the eachnight ritual (hide under pillows), rote references to Geneva conventions, surprisingly proactive calls for the changing of diapers, appeals to sleep in other rooms, to go downstairs for water, to just be left alone to sleep, please.

And when you honor that particular request and close the door you only have to count to ten before he's out of bed, over to the light, and when you open the door again his eyes are bright with humor, and of course the parenting manual says you aren't supposed to look him in the eye or laugh yourself at that point but christ, it's funny.

skrimshander/for the safe passage of another night

2010-09-08T23:28:00.001-04:00

At night in this room nightflowers grow from the floors and a canopy of leaves shields from the rain and the crickets repeat pedantic their unerring secret in the vastly reverbified robust sonambulatic wind. We dream each three to our own worlds and do we dream the same or rather as polite dreamneighbors in film-lot primordial thatch huts, our latent thoughts alight as fireflies in the wistful forestsearching eyes of those who came before.

At night in this room: simplicity that gave us the dread slip in the toobright toofrenetic middling day, time and breath and togetherlives and forest not around but animistic through, within our hearts (or if this too goes too-stock then within our souls, or criminy, settle for our beings).

You, little one, when you laterlook at our lives then will you know the dreams we hold each in our hearts now, will the transmitted record seek through to your awakened heart intact as something more than the palest least echo of fire.

You, love, when you look at our lives then will you know how this corpulent muckraking daze held said dreams, how they were known like nothing known the selfsame and however fearful blinking held were held true the same.

You, searchers, see this togetherness parceled safe through the grim malaise of Jerseyed forest, a patch of dying trees huddled together in a newmint waste of parking lot, pray see this love intact and moved unerring to its future point, to be checked in your ancestral ghosts' collective list of return on past investment.

2010 Eagles Horoscope

2010-09-06T13:53:00.010-04:00

Roster Detail:

2 Akers, David, Sagittarius
29 Allen, Nate, Sagittarius
81 Avant, Jason, Taurus (Aries cusp)
51 Barnes, Antwan, Libra
84 Baskett, Hank, Virgo
26 Bell, Mike, Taurus
55 Bradley, Stewart, Scorpio
34 Buckley, Eldra, Cancer
97 Bunkley, Brodrick, Sagittarius
38 Calvin, Jorrick, Cancer
87 Celek, Brent, Aquarius
49 Chaney, Jamar, Libra
57 Clayton, Keenan, Gemini
59 Cole, Nick, Leo
58 Cole, Trent, Libra
42 Coleman, Kurt, Cancer
14 Cooper, Riley, Virgo
90 Dixon, Antonio, Cancer
46 Dorenbos, Jon, Cancer
65 Dunlap, King, Virgo
53 Fokou, Moise, Virgo
96 Gaither, Omar, Pisces
54 Graham, Brandon, Aries
21 Hanson, Joselio, Leo
82 Harbor, Clay, Cancer
79 Herremans, Todd, Libra
31 Hobbs, Ellis, Taurus
68 Howard, Austin, Aries
10 Jackson, DeSean, Sagittarius
67 Jackson, Jamaal, Taurus
62 Jean-Gilles, Max, Scorpio
56 Jordan, Akeem, Leo
74 Justice, Winston, Virgo
3 Kafka, Mike, Leo
4 Kolb, Kevin, Virgo
93 Laws, Trevor, Gemini
35 Lindley, Trevard, Aquarius
18 Maclin, Jeremy, Taurus
25 McCoy, LeSean, Cancer
77 McGlynn, Mike, Pisces
27 Mikell, Quintin, Virgo
75 Parker, Juqua, Taurus
23 Patterson, Dimitri, Gemini
98 Patterson, Mike, Virgo
71 Peters, Jason, Aquarius
6 Rocca, Sav, Scorpio
22 Samuel, Asante, Capricorn
50 Sims, Ernie, Capricorn
91 Tapp, Darryl, Virgo
52 Te'o-Nesheim, Daniel, Gemini
7 Vick, Michael, Cancer
43 Weaver, Leonard, Libra (Virgo cusp)
76 Wells, Reggie, Scorpio

Highlights: 10 Virgos, 8 Cancers, 6 Tauruses.

T. Everett Shrubkin's prediction: 11-5; Super Bowl Champions.

the empty page

2010-09-05T09:52:00.009-04:00

The empty page is future snow, densely layered cloud. A sun-flash around a curve. Dozing off face down in your own personal mountain of cocaine.

The empty page is the bottom of the pile on fourth down in a jovial but in all respects earnest pickup game at a Klan rally. The bullet's flash, the sudden crash, the light you go to and are pushed to at first sight. A microscope awaiting chance paramecia, a room waiting to catch fire.

Cauterized memory, the names of people forgotten, promises unkept, the list of lies that never came to light, wasted time or future time, that same snowfield as one to be traversed in an ill-advised quest for meaning still probably best to pursue.

Fuck the empty page, the empty page is fear, paralysis, silence chosen to avoid risk. Filler to deceive a reader re> gravity. Dull death, dull, absent death and a delicious absence of pain or confusion that for chrissakes you totally miss out on.

The empty page is an aerial or closeup of the human soul, a flag of no country. Everybody gathers in front of it and sings their own made-up anthem (at least in compatible keys, more Boccaccio or Bacchus than Babel), then everybody gets stoned if they smoke or drunk if they drink or drinks seltzer if neither and promises to never watch the news or read the paper again. And they all live happily ever after.

The empty page is silence between the notes of Art Tatum phrasing, or the first tentative declarations of love. Preamble to sweetness, honey, and light. The moment she leaves in the morning and before she returns, and a white down fall comforter.

cenicero

2010-09-03T22:32:00.004-04:00

You can setup drums in the basement should be New Jersey's state motto. Including the ellipsis and delivered by the official mascot.

The official mascot is a cartoon goldfinch with half-baked eyes, a full complement of sticks and brushes and a jean jacket with an illegible band patch. The official mascot's name is Max Finch. He's a fun one, at first, a real presence but after a couple days crashing on your couch he starts pawning every non-percussive item in your house to buy newer and better pieces for his kit. And he never remembers your name.

Tonight where we are there are drums in the basement. When I get to the house N. is eating noodles with cheese but discards that process and insists that we go and play.

The ellipsis in the new state motto is less a grammatical cop out, more a promise. The promise that if you move to New Jersey and setup drums in the basement, no evil will befall you and your spirit will loose from its shackles to become one with time. If New Jersey really is in danger of losing its millionaires, let them be replaced by two-year old drummers.

Q: What are drums like?

A: Drums are like horses and ice cream and TV on and noodles and books and Grandpa and friends and soccer balls and footballs and baseball bats and Grandma when it is dark it is time to notice and when it is light it's time to play and there are Mommy and Daddy and people and friends and there is chocolate ice cream play drums.

Max's tattoos:

a) cracked skull with eye sockets beset by hummingbirds;
b) lightning striking a man head-on; the man is stoked;
c) diagrams of drum-mic positioning (7).

What N. lacks at present in formal prowess he makes up for in fire. And in vision. He sees drums as they are, without a preconceived sense of which pieces to play when or in what combination, without an overriding sense of 4/4 guiding him. He is more of an off-road truck than a reliable train, and friends, I tell you, tonight New Jersey is a beautiful state.

we are travelers

2010-09-03T10:51:00.006-04:00

Out early to mow the lawn, hedge the sides along the house, prune the indomitable rose bushes where they encroach full on the sidewalk, social as they are, wanting contact. The air is full of moisture, the morning gray and damp and half-lit, still redolent of summer but with the first susurrating pretense of wind, with headstart falling leaves a fine example to their brethren, inspiring the eternal corps of potential yardwork.

In the car (the still-new 1997 Buick, the first plank in a meticulous middle age custom coffin, time still to get it right) the same improv tape that I couldn't get all that into from 1995 the other day now seems golden.

The guitar is discordant and steady, and someone who doesn't know how to play the violin is making that work, steady tritone and minor 2nd marcato bowing and a naive Casiotone keyboard trying to color the proceedings with warm, humorous tones, like a guy handing out candy bars at a burial. This moment from 1995 and my moment now make sense together; this layer of the past and the present align cleanly and in concord. The wish is just for a drummer to fix it but none arrives.

At the bus stop now and wind out on the edge of a storm (thinking of the hurricane offshore, but the air comes from the north) is forcing waves of cool air across the parking lot, changing the tone of the morning and heralding real fall. Storm sentinels bringing a feeling that everybody in this Greyhound line shares, a kind of poetry thrown into the dull everyday. Will we rise? Indeed, we are travelers, we are lords of the road, we are north to the great city.

spirited away

2010-09-01T18:04:00.005-04:00

She's still with us, still with us in spirit. Despite the fact that their bus went off a cliff, I know those school kids are still playing hopscotch somewhere. That disease or the mainstream media may have ravaged his mind but they couldn't take away his soul, he's still looking out for us, etc.

When this sort of jazz gets said (always at funerals, always everyone at their most open and sorrowful and needing) it sounds to my heart like a well meaning but ultimately ineffective or inaccurate salve, a kind of polite quack remedy. Deep down (particularly if those saying it aren't terribly religious, or ascribe little in a concept of afterlife) you can tell that very often the people saying it don't mean it themselves. The caring piece, of people looking out for each other in low moments, in moments when the shared script of trying and reward is most questioned, comes across, and helps. But that shared lie also strikes a hollow and deflating chord, just when that certainty that nothing is ever really created ex nihilis and therefore nothing ever really returns to it would help the most.

I'm not sure why I'm so rooted in skepticism at those moments, though. Because there are times that the people we love who've passed away are as close as ever. Times I can feel the spirits of our ancestors keeping careful watch, including people I'm sure we've never met, and including too the people that we miss the most. It's something felt and intuited; something I know to be as real as anything else I know. Something known in the way a melody comes to mind on a sad day, to let me know everything will be okay; in the way that for the most part things hold together in our shared lives, that more times than not it seems like someone has sprinkled good luck to hold the stray, errant, or potentially fatal pieces in place, to stave off full disaster for another day.

The world has more magic than we'll ever know, but certainly less than we need it to, on a given day. This skeptic/dualist balance-- knowing deep down and full well that one of two things that I know for sure absolutely can't be true, and still believing both on an as needed basis-- feels rather grown up and rather primitive all at once.

silent summer

2010-08-31T20:46:00.007-04:00

All the ocean waves stilled mid-arc, at dawn in fading into light from dark. A light glint telescoped skyward and down that beam slid a solitary frozen gull, also stalled mid-flight, mid-screech, mid-shit on a frozen early walker with a metal detector mid-wave too, mid-beep. The sound stopped too, not a fade or echo, a hard stop. Some other guy on a pier (old salt type) froze mid-cast, leaning back from now to past in a cacophony of clam chowder breath and musty tobacco. Now the oldies station falls quiet too, now the lifeguard towers and ice cream stands and umbrellas and pickets all topple, now the sun is hollowing inside out.

Now the sun is hollowing inside out, that new light the last the world could see as early in the sky it drifts away to dark. And in the silent summer left behind the people rise for morning one by one, rise for morning one by one and burn their houses, long farewell to seasons past.

Jon Runyan

2010-08-30T17:12:00.008-04:00

Dear Congressman Adler:

Despite your negligent and doubtless poorly calculated failure to vote yes for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) this past spring, and the questions it raises about your vision and your fortitude, I wish you the best for the upcoming election. As such, I am writing to suggest a line of argument for use in sharpening your campaign.

It would be relatively easy (and delicious for your electorate) if you were to pull a Swift Boat turn and use Mr. Runyan's years of service against him. Specifically, I suggest that you make his time on the Eagles a liability. It is my sense that this could be achieved even without resorting to a renumeration of the team's NFC Championship history.

My specific suggestion is that you focus your campaign on the decision by the Eagles organization not to bring Mr. Runyan back to the team last year, despite his interest in returning. I would suggest running a picture of yourself hugging a kitten, as if to defend her from an onrushing pass rush, also standing in front of a woman or women aged 80 or greater, on one side of the flyer. On the other side, I would suggest messaging in block letters to the effect of:

In fall 2009, the Philadelphia Eagles considered Jon Runyan for an open offensive line position, after 9 years with the team. They ultimately decided no.

Who would know better if not the Eagles? You might ask the Houston Oilers, where he began his career in 1996, but they no longer exist. This fall, vote with the Eagles: vote no for Jon Runyan, and yes for me, Congressman John Adler.

Congressman John Adler: Even though I incomprehensibly didn't vote for ACA, I'm still your guy.

One love,
Congressman John Adler
The Campaign to Reelect Congressman John Adler

Congressman Adler, I trust that you may wish to make slight typographic or font modifications to this letter. That would be fine. I am free most days to review any changes you might make; but given the urgency of your campaign, please do not hold up the final draft on my account.

I wish you the best with the campaign, and whatever your future career plans may be.

Respectfully,
T. Everett Shrubkin
Moorestown, NJ

something kind of Lebanese

2010-08-29T21:33:00.010-04:00

This weekend I came into possession of an excellent used car from 1997, an American-made automatic with a sexagenarian aura, squeaky brakes, and a functioning cassette-deck. Since taking possession of the car I have driven with slow authority and the smell of old memories wafting from inside the cushions. I have avoided spilling coffee or iced tea or donut crumbs. I have refrained from crumpling burger wrappers to accrue below decks, and have not sworn.

I have not taken the car with me to play Bingo, nor have I taken it bowling, nor have I driven it into a tree or a crowd of pedestrians. I have parked with difficulty and have driven to one diner, where I did not purchase the early bird special but did wonder about teenagers these days.

Having a cassette player at hand again reminded me of the Tupperware container in the basement with the old cassettes, a smattering of four-track recordings (still unplayable), microcassette recordings of an experimental improv band I played a bit part in more than a decade ago, and mix tapes from back in the day. Opening this container offered a living lifeline to a time of great hopes and short attention, and the perfect audio backdrop for a nice afternoon drive at exactly the speed limit (or 5 to 10 miles per hour slower).

I tried the improv cassettes first but couldn't find the thread. A lot of it I found unlistenable. Others moments would verge on coming together. There was a moment where it sounded like we were right on the verge of playing something kind of Lebanese, but we never really found the right scale or mood and instead it became vaguely tribal, following a safer and less descript route, treading melodic water for a few safe minutes. A linear course or sort of commute to work that echoes my current reality now more than anything else. At the time I must have surely thought it was some Pharaoh Sanders-esque journey to interstellar regions. At the time I was under the illusion that the people I knew were destiny and everything we'd make would turn to gold without the slightest effort.

I switched to one of the mixes and started thinking of the friend who'd made it for me 20 years ago, how I couldn't wait to call her to tell her what I'd dug up. I nodded my head to the songs -- which maybe I hadn't understood at the time (or I'd thought they were fine, or whatever) but which suddenly seemed so apt, so perfectly on point, like a time capsule that would know and aptly suit the mood of the person opening it a hundred years later. I really couldn't wait to call her.

The tape flipped sides and a new song started and I realized with cruel certainty that I'd dubbed over at least half of the mix with rehearsal from the same improv group.

It felt a little like getting all drunk and stoned with your best friend to go see the Wu Tung Clan on the last night of summer, only they've cancelled due to a family emergency and have asked Tony Conrad to play in their place, and you're too drunk too leave, too stoned to stay.

real middle-aged dudes of new jersey

2010-08-26T22:40:00.003-04:00

And you're probably wondering what life was like after Jim's lap band surgery and how Todd's divorce proceedings finished up specifically who got the kids who got the basement full of two decades worth of shit no one not even the kids had the heart to throw away and who oh who took custody of the ghosts that haunted that filthy house.

And you're probably wondering if Steve still picks his nose with savage compulsion until it bleeds raw, if he and in fact they all still scratch themselves sagely on yonder couch the same, if it still burns and itches simultaneously when John pees.

If their God smiles upon them, their women still somehow gamely by their sides, filtering, absorbing, cajoling, wheedling into line, making presentable, tolerating, heaven help them screwing, holding, occasionally joking, sitting across at dinner, playing one two three shoot to see who changes the baby helps with homework cleans up after the puppy.

What is their sandwich of choice?

Todd: Subway Meatball 12" Sub
Steve: Pastrami and Swiss on Rye
John: Wawa Tuna and Cheese Classic Hoagie
Jim: Subway Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyaki Sub

What is their current emotional state?

Todd: perplexed
Steve: preoccupied
John: reflective
Jim: new lease on life

What is the color of their mood?

Todd: The mood is blue.
Steve: The mood is invisible or opaque, unknown, secret even to self.
John: The mood is brown red, the color of foreboding curry.
Jim: The mood is green, like first sprouts.

What is the new lease on life?

It is a lighter load, a quicker walk, the shrinking of distance and the opening of possibility, it is the reignition of sex life (flower once thought dead reassumes form and once again battles gravity), the occasional guilty snack. It is the consideration of cholesterols good and bad with anything less than an insurance analyst's cold calculation of expectancy. It is the woman perhaps a year or so younger who smiled at him when he was getting gas and for a second his heart lifted hundreds of feet in the air to float smiling above Route 38, right where it meets Church Road, to float free.

my question is what happened to you

2010-08-18T23:10:00.003-04:00

everyone else in the wild puzzle i more or less understand; my question of late is what happened to you to make it turn out so this way for you, to make you act as catalyst to so many emotional catastrophes without the slightest mental map of the emotional world yourself. yet all of that was ten or twenty years ago, now when i see you it's like you're a teenager trying on emotions for yourself for the first time.

it isn't that living in the suburbs has been for the best. i have real doubts that that's true. i think it's made us all crazier if anything. it has made me more aware though (particularly with these newly fierce new jersey seasons) that things grow as much as they can and die, that's all they do, it isn't that there's some overarching destiny or logic or transcendence to it, more a dumb blind imperative. the weeds find purchase whereever they can, the grass, the wild flowers all push into every place that allows the faintest glimmer of root. like how on the backdrop of those decades your soul has found a place to quiet down now, to begin some long-delayed reckoning, and in a quasi-patronizing way i'm happy for you.

now i find myself somewhere between you and a completely different person. emotions for me are a bizarre confusion but sometimes i know the names, sometimes i even know that this-is-an-emotion-i'm-feeling. it doesn't prevent that from be a disorienting grid on which i'm more likely to hurt others than not. it just tells me i should know better. maybe my dumb growth will to be more quiet in my failings than you were, to keep them better hidden from the surface of the earth. maybe my achievement will to be a better and more subtle weed in the lives of the people i know.

in death though. maybe that's where we find transcendence, moving from the dull provincial limits of blind individual growth and back into soil and carbon, into the wild dumb flowing pulse of nature. i think stereolab could have convinced me of the joy in that in a song in the 1990s, i don't really know where they sit on the subject today.

East Coast put to fire

2010-07-06T23:13:00.005-04:00

Bad image in my head tonight in this dry weather of the East Coast put to fire, natural or somehow more apocalyptic because man made. The traffic jams for the escape path and whether ditching your car and jogging on the Turnpike (or 195 or 80 if escaping west/east etc) would be the safest choice. The shrugging told-you-this-place-sucked attitude with which the typical New Jersey resident would respond as the road filled with parked cars. I picture a fat guy who looks a little like me huffing it down the side of the road, family in tow. Maybe he's wearing flippers and an inner tube, you know, just to be ready for whatever comes next.

wall of silence

2010-07-05T22:54:00.002-04:00

Since there was Phil Spector there must surely have been his opposite, a man who did not layer a wall of sound but instead its opposite, the progenitor of a towering and insurmountable wall of silence, non-layer upon non-layer of the densest quiet imaginable. His production work didn't make him famous but neither did he maniacally shoot a woman in the face on a paranoid bender. Indeed,this hypothetical person probably would have actually made a decent partner or spouse, had he ever gotten to know anyone closely.

Objectors would point out that a wall of silence by definition requires solitude, and I would accept this argument with the mild objection that somewhere in the world there surely is a mime whose destiny it is to love the anti-Spector with all her or his heart, to understand him fully and within that silence to establish an implied overlap of frequency ranges far beyond the scope of human hearing, far beyond the scope of sound itself, a resonant wave field or subnet on which thought and spirit mix freely, a communion of understanding and implication ahead of and around normal speech.

What is the anti-Spector's modus operandi? Simply the removal of noisemaking devices from the grasping range of passersby, beyond the reach of toddlers, drunks, sports fans, hunters, referees, construction workers, experimental guitarists, oboeists, vice principals, cheerleaders, prognosticators and agitators, harpies, candidates for town council, religious proselytizers, stepfathers, argumentative potential divorcees, etc.

It was never your right to scream at her that way, it was never your god-damned right.

music brain

2010-06-18T09:56:00.002-04:00

In Recoleta in Buenos Aires they do a flea market on Sunday. A guy brings RCA Victrolas that you can wind with a crank to play records. On an old 78 at the bottom of a dusty box that's survived innumerable crises quasi-intact is a record without any words on the label. There's a picture though, a doodle of a worried looking cartoon fat man with bug eyes. The A-side is ungrooved and would sound like nails scratching on the flaming chalkboards of full hell in the open-air market.

If you wind the crank and put on the B-side, though, you'll hear preserved the contents of my music brain, which I've transcoded there for safe-keeping as I build competency in realms far more bureaucratic and parental.

Under the music is a gringo trying to sing in Spanish because he thinks the language will make his lyrics more poetic. The engineer on duty the day of the recording had the good sense to fade the lyrics in the mix to the point of mumble, so all you hear is the occasional mispronounced accent or stray letter n with a tilde, or o. Porque no tengo la sensibilidad a cantar con palabras que yo entiendo, porque la luna es libre y cabelleros son su estudiantes idiotas.

dream as metaphor for the full parenting process

2010-06-06T22:52:00.007-04:00

In the dream we were in front of the house and he was running from near where you were, along the sidewalk toward me. I tried to catch him and called to him but he didn't listen and he was moving faster than I could catch him, much faster than I expected. That part of the dream ended as he ran into traffic and across the road. The same dreamspeed logic through which he evaded my grasp allowed him to dodge cars as he crossed the street to safety, or out of our care and into the world.

salt air

2010-06-05T12:30:00.001-04:00

So we walked out to the edge of the land, far out from the full coast, held by the temperate late Atlantic. Boats in the bay, every house losing its slow fight with salt air. The same with people's faces, or how you tell the difference between a townie and the folks in for the weekend, the week, or at most the summer. A glamorous way to demarcate your allocated time, out on the edge of the world, where the end seems both close at hand and never further away, what comes after east.

water underground

2010-06-04T23:34:00.005-04:00

The antique roses in the front yard bloomed last week. They're in full flower now, some dragging the stems to the sidewalk with their weight. There are so many this spring, how still the depth of this winter makes its presence known. And in my work, one way or another every day I catch myself still digging out from those huge storms.

Home and barely functional or honestly half dead, when I see your faces leaning together, hear your voices speaking together I feel you both a part of me the same, a breaking through to light from water underground.

so much of water

2010-05-30T22:16:00.008-04:00

I think as I age that my memory is improving. It can't be that, no, it must that the power of some memories has increased over time. We are so much of water that it must define a huge part of our personalities. Our composite memories are like water in at least two ways. First, that everything that has happened to and through us is interconnected, like every drop of water in a puddle or a sea the same. Second, that in the way light plays tricks when it refracts through water, some elements are clearer in memory to us than others; or it's that in that heavily chlorinated pool we swim instinctively in the same safe laps until something in the present moment jars us from our normal rhythm, bringing new glimpses of submerged old life into clear view with frightful intensity, or at rarer times like vaguely glinting treasure.

the heaviest cloud

2010-05-22T23:54:00.003-04:00

concept for children's book. The heaviest cloud is always ostracized by his peers for being far too slow, last to arrive at any storm, etc. But, through a sequence of devastating displays of raw natural power, the heaviest cloud is able to win the respect and love of his peers, and even gets the chance to murder his nemesis, the sun. A compelling proof of the adage that might makes right -- Kirkus.

the first dumb-assed flower of spring

2010-05-22T08:49:00.004-04:00

early flowers in the yard, precise coffee and singing with our kid. a bevy of hungover angels perched on the roof, unpainted toenails hanging over the gutters.

the cat's gone nuts, maybe for spring or for ordinary cat dementia, his meow insistent and ill-timed like Lassie trying to tell Timmy to go for help, but if Lassie were more of an unreliable narrator who always bit a little too hard at 4 a.m., just when Timmy was starting in on that last cycle of REM sleep, a Lassie who tragically gave Timmy rabies that one morning only to deny everything later in perfect human Shaggy English, "it wasn't me." Here the movie reaches stride, Act II Lassie's Regret, Act III Lassie's Race for the Cure, Act IV Lassie as Fundraiser, Act V Meeting with the Donors, Act VI Lassie's Recurrence of Regret, etc.

early flowers in the yard, a second cup of coffee and our kid playing with a bus, a musical tractor, a soccer ball. i believe he's imagining the toy tractor as the world's greatest pizza delivery truck, with a flat-bed trailer and a sheet of pizza that brought to its full scale would be about 7' by 10'. in that same scaling up the soccer ball is now the size of our kitchen, and the little bus takes up a whole block. the roses look set to bloom, too, to overshadow the whole neighborhood.

Lassie, I thought I was good for it, you said stop by any time.

early flowers in the yard, waiting for old friends to visit and everything feels this out of scale. they're going to want to catch up, they're going to want to know how we are. i'll have to ask L. the answer, i'm not sure i could come up with one of my own after what feels like months away from myself. this is why when you ask people how they are they say they can't complain. it isn't that they don't have complaints, it's that they wouldn't have the first idea how to articulate them.

middle aged man as mentally-challenged flower, blooming in brief on a saturday morning. an interpretive dance that i entitle the first dumb-assed flower of spring.

mental blocks

2010-04-13T23:11:00.008-04:00

Everyone who does this sort of thing must go through these mental blocks. For me it starts with the fact that I'm 50 pounds overweight and I've only jogged once in the last decade. Right now it's midnight and it's raining and chilly out and the economy sucks and I'm on my last shred of energy, but preparations must go on if I am going to run this marathon.

I can't find my sneakers. Also tonight I smoked a cigar with my father-in-law and I just ate a half a bag of cheese curls and yesterday I stubbed my toe pretty hard on the wall trying to turn a corner too fast to get to the fridge. Training for a marathon requires you to hone your reflexes. Razor sharp reflexes, or sharper if possible. Note to self to Google sharper reflexes.

Blogosphere, I'm getting nervous about this marathon. I know it because my reflexes are a little off. The other day I was washing a wine glass and I accidentally put my hand through the glass -- breaking it into about 5 pieces with just the joint of my left thumb. I don't want the bleeding to be a distraction, so I've got to keep a good supply of Band Aids at the ready if I'm going to run this marathon. Thumb removal might be a faster way to heal. Or sports medicine? I also know I'm nervous because when I'm nervous I eat and surf the web a lot. Mostly looking at boring shit that I hate. The more boring the more nervous I am.

But when you're running you aren't nervous (unless you're nervous you're going to keel over), you're an eagle, a gazelle, leopard, etc. You are everything Apple has ever named an operating system after. When you're running you become one with the landscape, with the wind, and in the rhythm of the wind (of the you) you can beat your demons.

My demons are pretty boisterous. One of them is wearing an Atlanta Falcons jersey. Another is dressed in a speedo and drinking Boone's Farm and I think he's the asshole who hid my running shoes. I could run in my dress shoes and that speedo and the old Falcons jersey. Determination. Fuck you, demons.

I'm not going to go running tonight, I'm going to go to sleep. As everyone who's ever run a marathon knows, you have to get a good night's sleep the night before. And eat a boatload of carbs first. Head start on that.

bright new atmosphere

2010-04-13T08:58:00.004-04:00

perhaps i'm going to have to do this nyc marathon 2031 thing last minute. sinking feeling that the night before I’ll be lacing bobo running shoes for the huffing first mile of practice, "wracking" my brain to figure some adrenaline-laced recipe for success only to end up the next morning sprawled on my 300-pound ass in a pile of crushed gatorade cups on fourth avenue in the gray November light looking up at the clock tower thinking it's the empire state building, drooling into the cracks in the concrete.

i keep getting signs from the world that i need to keep it simpler. that i need to find comfort in my own skin and not spend every waking minute trying to escape.

when i was a wee plus-sized i learned to "dodge" reality through books, a strategy that made good sense then. even if books can't tune out your childhood's screaming violence, they can help one you make it through the aftershocks. stick a book in front of your face and a) it acts as a simple visual shield b) it fills your brain with other elements, other compounds, a bright new atmosphere. ignoring for the moment that what i loved to read then was horror.

"the" problem being that decades later i don't know how to turn off that winning escape instinct. dodging reality has served me well enough to this point, so why suddenly believe in the here and now. deep down i do, i do, i really do, though its been hard to get a brain quorum on that.

Doogie Howser diary entries aside the late-or-non-bloom curmudgeon will lace up shoes this morning, not for a jog but for the subway steps, up to the summer street and on to numbing work.

{P.S.: mountain goats sunset tree on the train in this morning, and how that guy has really learned to reckon with his memory, to find his pain and use guitars to anesthetize it, if not beat it}.

scattershot pattern

2010-04-11T21:07:00.005-04:00

When I was a kid and I ended up alone outside at night I could feel an evil force rushing behind me as I approached the house. I always broke into a late sprint, as if it were possible to outrun a shadowy evil force, outwit it by switching from a walking pace, I always turned around as if by looking it in the face you could ward one off.

At times I've felt the opposite, that my dead are watching over me and those that I love behind the scenes. At moments of loving weakness I even explicitly pray to them, appealing to them to pull strings behind the scenes to make sure things fall right. If love is such a transcendent force can it disappear when those we love die? Or could it transform into pure energy, become immanent in the world for us to access when we need it most.

At other times I've felt that both views are too simplistic. That either things go well or not in a kind of scattershot pattern separate of all love or human logic and the best we can pray for is to be alert, to react with our true hearts and good reflexes to what the world throws at us, to what we throw at ourselves.

O mucky universe, what's your true nature, why so project as beautiful murderous creature never to be fully understood, like some philandering middle-aged English prof's platonic daydream grad student turned soul-sucking vampire (and of course the fact that she's a vampire was the kinkiest part of the daydream). And lo as his metaphoric soul is consumed he tries to figure out the prime angle for some final discerning piece of academic critique, luckily she hips to his game and nulls his mind at that instant.

employment history

2010-04-05T23:10:00.003-04:00

Four years as dishwasher at a local pizzeria taught me that I will never succeed as a short-order cook, delivery person, or server. I learned how to wash a large number of dishes effectively in a brief time. I also learned to have unrequited crushes on women totally out of my league (e.g. every waitress/counter girl in the restaurant), and how my best strategy for getting close to them was to present myself as totally pathetic. Over time I was able to perfect this particular skill and am now married to a woman totally out of my league.

Ten years as an IT guy taught me that writing email(and writing in general) is a wonderful way to escape reality into a kind of mental pseudo-reality free of all inconvenient physics and biology. Over time I was able to hone that skill and am now a successful nonprofit fundraiser.

In five years as a nonprofit fundraiser I've learned that dishwashers have an amazing impact on the world. Every night they are presented with a target number of dishes to wash and every night they meet that target before they can leave. No one writes a bullshit report about how the dishes would have been washed but the policy landscape shifted and here are some lessons learned. There are no pressures to invent a new washing technique, and no middle managers who exist solely to watch the dishes get washed or coach the dishwashers.

I have identified my path to self actualization. Or, as the poet wrote: The search is over...you were with me all the while.

rare perk of sobriety

2010-04-02T00:23:00.005-04:00

A year plus in I'm starting to notice an actual mental payoff to not drinking. Yes -- even above and beyond the lack of daily hangovers.

A, um, new kind of internal strength. Sharper focus. Remembering more day to day, being more aware of the subtexts to a conversation. More aware of what I want from the world long-term/how the world should/could be. What needs to be done to avoid getting killed on the road or run over by my professional life. More aware of how individual and family dynamics evolve and relate. Of the need for closeness and clarity. Of how beautiful Spanish is on the page.

Even hanging out in drinking situations has gotten easier. A fun project to match the trajectory people take when they drink and loosen up on your own. In a way I actually over-compensate and loosen up further than people. So I'm the asshole who says the wrong thing with no relevant cultural pretext to back it up. Crackpot role to relish.

birth signs of a new world

2010-03-21T22:32:00.004-04:00

Today I jogged outside for the first time in ten years or more. Although the goal I set was modest I didn’t make it. Early on I thought I was going to have a heart attack. You know when you're driving in your car and you see somebody trying to convince themselves they're running but really they're walking in a stupid way. Today that was me. For about an hour after I kept thinking I was going to pass out. All day since I've felt more grounded than I have in 5 months.

This afternoon N. and I went grocery shopping together. We just needed parsley, strawberries, and milk. You know when you're shopping and some idiot keeps getting in your way trying to have fun with his kid? Today that was me.

Right around mall closing time I went to get my hair cut. The woman who cut my hair had a lot on her mind. She said Jesus conquered death and defeated Satan and no other God had done that. She said his name was on every tongue. She said recent events told her that the end times were close. She said earthquakes and storms and even the President in power now read like signs and wonders straight from Revelations. She got in my face and peered into my eyes to see whether I saw her point. She said these were signs but more were yet to come, that they were birth signs of a new world.

You know sometimes it does feel like the end of the world and you could almost agree with a person who spoke to you in such a manner? Today that person wasn't me. This world doesn't get to end on my kid. I gently made my case against her vision and we left it as friends who disagreed but in respect. The haircut's pretty good.

floor plan

2010-03-20T22:12:00.004-04:00

The storm that blew winter away was so fierce, it seemed like the trees had grown tired of being surrounded by suburban blight and one by one would take their shouting splintering revenge. Five feet of rain in a weekend. We added a couple hundred pounds of salt and made our basement into a giant aquarium. Now we have an octopus and a Portuguese man-of-war and some Atlantic blues. We have jellyfish and a skate and a depressive tuna. We have diving suits in his and hers and toddler sizes. We have a coral reef and even sunken treasure, a piggy bank split open along the floor bed, nickles pennies and quarters awaiting the intrepid diver. I hope we've properly sealed the drainage. In the morning the baby whale surfaces near the top of the basement stairs and gives us a good morning spout.

We've knocked out the walls of the ground level of our house and turned it into an indoor soccer field. Our young son is Ronaldinho or Diego Maradona or better yet Zidane, running up and down the field with the ball in his hands. He's impossible to catch. He runs laughing from one goal to another. He does not yet know how to throw with any accuracy so to score he runs and touches the ball to the back of the net. At halftime he sits for supper. He scores constantly, recording shut-outs by margins of 150 or more. He is much coveted by Boca and River Plate. There is the potential he could play for both. The ball is an expanding world that he runs with, laughing, held tight, almost off balance. Goal! Goal! Goal! (goal, goal, goal, goal).

Upstairs we brush our teeth and go to sleep in single file. And dream, he of a bowl of butter three feet wide and five feet deep, eaten fastidiously with a large plastic spoon. We of multiple disasters that we dream, so as to avoid living them.

crystal crucifix

2010-03-16T21:25:00.010-04:00

A crystal crucifix with diamonds for rosary beads that play in the light finger by meditative finger. She tried to go to church this morning but it was like God didn't want people around today the trees had been ripped out of the ground taking the sidewalk with them to form a natural barrier blocking both doors the priest didn't know what to do at all. Like God had decided her house wasn't fit for company today, the sidewalk ripped of its moorings and transmogrified into a crooked staircase of roots and straggler worms and unknowable divine intention.

A crystal crucifix with diamonds for beads that play in the light prayer by prayer and could you hold this world together on the strength of your wish that it be so with your wish that nothing fade or fall away.

She tries to get to church best she can but doesn't make it and seeks no alternative (thus a sin) by alternative she thinks they could have gone in I guess through the windows but the priest was sitting on the ground paunchy in his inconsolable cassock, soiled and sorry with his nose kind of red in a tacit and spontaneous confession of how he'd held his own life together draught by draught up to this point. Those veteran trees still standing shudder together and in the smell of rain she senses or feels predetermined a collective flash or vision of the end of the world on those renewed drops the rippling back echo of the explosion thus ending all and no on and no forth.

Which is why help me Jesus/Mary she holds in her hands a crystal crucifix to bind the world together prayer by prayer. People killed in stupid fashion each day on their way to church by earthquakes or in head-on collisions or by random bullets hearts give out etc, when that happens do you note that they died fulfilling their chosen purpose or in the cheap and non-helpful irony that that supposed protector never had their backs in any fashion.

A crystal crucifix, prayer by the glinting of the light as a form maybe even of time travel to protect the ones she's lost. Maybe it's just the prayers of people that help other people she thought, maybe it's the prayers of people that bind our intentions and hearts to wish each other well and in collective wishing could there be some binding glue to hold the world together such that nothing fade or fall away.

She doesn't recall how it came into her possession only that when she prays in a rhythm when she is in the rhythm of her prayer she can feel those around her safe in a kind of holy halo. It is the days where distracted or otherwise preoccupied she neglects to pray or God forbid to give these prayers her true intentions that unforeseen misfortune befalls her friends or family or at least those sad people in today's paper now missing one or more of their number through unforeseeable calamity.

Out at the edge of town she's driving crystal crucifix in her fingers gone to wrinkle the beadstrings strung partial curved like a wilted infinity across the driving wheel. The light no longer feels to show her or save her the light is a dim threat of extinction dim fear of last moments and wasted lives a revealing of last days kind of brought too soon. Lately she doesn't believe in God or care much for her if she does exist she thinks and goes on These prayers of mine are prayers to link only with those of other people, prayers to make a net for each other's prayers and for those who don't pray too to be caught in on the way down. And the cross is where our bodies touched in love or compassion and the beads are justice lost and held together point by point and though we pray to no one or no one who cares we pray together.

She isn't sure even who she prays for today or who for her out at the edge of town driving with the crystal crucifix dangling down almost to her knee beneath the wheel. Is it going to rain or is the light to break through out at the edge of the dark clouds. Let this darkness take my sight, she thinks, let this full stop come and find me where I huddle under whatever debris praying bead by bead with everyone I've loved held together in my memory. If you mean for this to end then honey you do your worst.

She wonders what will be on TV this afternoon, light just starting to break through clouds being pulled apart tuft by tuft by the brutal wind, what she'll put on for dinner.

spirit vs. mechanics

2010-03-15T23:40:00.011-04:00

I've been trying to teach myself to read Spanish. I'm doing about 5 pages a week. The best help has been from my friend Meddie, who speaks Spanish from birth and who taught herself English when she moved here by reading the paper. I think she feels sorry for me because I'm trying to learn her native language by reading its obscure literature.

The last couple days when I've gotten stuck on the odd sentence, phrase, or full page she's helped me to unpack it. In that, she's showing me how to read for figurative meaning, how to find the the author's spirit and humor behind the narrator's voice.

These human elements and the psychological analysis underlying them are why I'm reading this particular book. But I get so caught up in the mechanics of grammar that if I am to glean deeper meaning it can only be by getting familiar enough with the mechanics to have them become a subconscious process, to free up brain space for interpretation. Or by getting a friend to help.

Sketch of world view: difference is static, commonality the signal. That what we can't understand about each other shouldn't matter in the least.

year and a day

2010-03-14T21:33:00.010-04:00

Drunk, blogging while driving. Also reading a book (The Elements of Style) and trying to program my car stereo to spring forward. What I drank was a cocktail sequence I like to call Noah's Ark. What I've discovered is that I can drive with my dick using only scotch tape and a jelly bracelet. Follow my updates on Twitter.

Pee break. Question posed to Burger King rest stop cashier do you love me answer unclear/possible no. Question posed to Starbucks rest stop cashier answer also unclear/possible no. To Exit 7A toll collector answer unclear/possible no, shocked look at steering column.

Question posed to self answer definite no. Twitter grows tiresome. Burning sensation from steering. Revert to by hand. Persistence of burning sensation. Question of three or nine southbound lanes. Re-engagement with Twitter. The important thing about blogging is that you have to keep doing it, you just have to write whether you want to or not. Press on. Re-imagine childhood as lovable kangaroo raised by human family. As baby bear raised by human family. As cuddly alien etc. Re-imagine childhood orphaned at 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, etc. Re-imagine childhood as slightly overlong setup to the greatest porno ever made as selected by a panel of 4 feminists and 4 male lizards. Re-imagine childhood as king cobra raised by human family, as swarm of bees etc.

Perfection of steering design (improved knot, sustainable misuse of ED meds). Travel thermos full of 100 Pipers whiskey. Driving for Deepwater, for Carney's Point. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory etc. A twip is a tweet one word in length. A twero is a tweet with no words. Partial loss of vision. Review of past Connect Four losses. No one strategy to win them all. Chirping. Vomiting. Pull car to side of road for purposes of mixing.

year

2010-03-13T22:39:00.022-05:00

It's been one year since I had a drink. My plan was to reach this goal and see how I felt. In that time I've realized that I was over-reliant on alcohol, that it was keeping me in a narrow place, and that to go back now would be a mistake.

A lot of people I know can pull off drinking fine, I would just say that if you have a nagging voice in the back of your head on the subject, it might help to listen to it.

The physical act of not drinking has gotten almost easy. What's remained challenging most days is that I was using drink to medicate pain that I didn't understand or know the name or extent of. This next year I want to make progress in making that pain stop.

Lest I seem to have grown overly sincere sans sauce, the fucked thing about Captain Morgan is that he's an android whose whole program is to robofuck your significant other into submission. Next thing you know he's living on your couch and having his mechanized share of your sweetheart the second you leave for work and every day you have to all make small talk and shit, try to be his friend, let him borrow your clothes, etc. Stay in school, champ.

Gain as Much as You Fucking Can

2010-03-09T20:38:00.038-05:00

Foil to"The Biggest Loser." Sponsorship opportunities for Cinnabon, Playstation, whiskey, the music of Cheer Accident. Each time somebody busts out of a pair of pants they get 20 bucks, a subway token and a week's supply of Cinnabon. Each week the one who gained least gets kicked off and is made to chug a ceremonial Slim-Fast while the other Gainers sing "The End" and gently pelt her or him with mushed-up Cinnabon.

Viewer interest segments where Gainers name the emotions/back stories/failures that are actively being buried deep inside and how good it feels not to have to deal with that terrifying shit directly. Working at one's normal job is allowed as long as it's mindless and at a desk. Masturbation is allowed without limit. Cinnabon: allowed.

What's your secret?

"I got so much ice cream on my shirt I couldn't tell what color it really was"
"Wish I could stop shitting, that the design of the human body might be improved"
"Chocolate bars dipped in tubs of mayonnaise then chugged the mayonnaise"
"Cinnabon in sandwich of deep-fried cookie batter"
"Yoga to teach my body to stop shitting"
"Feel Mars want feel Jupiter"
"Tiny arms, tiny arms"
"Liquified Nutella IV drip"
"Munch, munch"

Days before setting both gain-per-week and total-gain record Gainer #25 dies. Per custom the other gainers descend to eat the remains.

Culinary Eulogies

"Redolent of Cinnabon"
"Redolent of partially-digested Nutella drip"
"Redolent of non-shitting"
"Redolent of... Diet Dr. Pepper?"

Each their rituals, each their mysteries. Love story of Gainer #3 and Gainer #57, their shared love of self-love in a Cinnabon haze. How Jesus and in particular the Last Supper inspires Gainer #18 (who sees each meal as her last supper), how the presidency of Taft inspires Gainer #50 (who sees each year as his lame duck year). Whimsical accordion fanfare. Sprinting 18-member jug band enters and exits. Now amid a circus of color and light and cheese doodles a whisper-thin man with a washtub bass strides on to belt out:

The Gain as Much as You Fucking Can Theme Song

This land is your land, this land is my land
To gain as much as, you fucking ca-an
Oh Cinnabon is, your only friend
Gain as much as you fucking can

When I went walking, through the food court
I almost died on the cold mall floor
Thanks be to Cinnabon, my heart kept beating
Gain as much as you fucking can

This land is your land, this land is my land
From Ponderosa, to that amazing crab place on Shelter Island
Oh Cinnabon is, your only friend
Gain as much as you fucking can

(etc)

Season II Finale

Enterprising Gainers #15 and #17 create a compound of Nutella and Cinnabon in liquid form that they vow to guzzle and receive via IV drip. If they survive one will win it all. Work shots: getting it done. Rapid meal preparation and unwrapping of ready-to-eats, munching. Vigorous self love of Gainers #11, #17, #22, #24, #28. Back story of Gainer #11: Parental abuse, inanity of spouse, children, job, one remaining friend. Tug of war between Gainers #15 and #17 over last carton of Cinnabon. Inspiring dark horse victory by Gainer #11 who clubs both Gainer #15 and #17 and spends the last quarter of the episode feasting on their remains. "Redolent of victory."

The Snowy Day (rated R)

2010-03-08T21:50:00.014-05:00

Adapted from the Caldecott Medal-winning classic, "The Snowy Day" recounts the adventures of Peter (Jamie Foxx), an African-American child living in the city on a very snowy day. Through his eyes, we see just how grand a day it is, and also, the dangers that can lurk beneath the snow.

There are mountains of snow, and lots of things to do in it (once he is properly bundled, of course.) Peter makes a snowman, snow angels, and myriad footprints; he finds the perfect stick. And he climbs a mysterious mountain of snow. Appropriate for small children through second grade, the first 15 minutes of the film present an environment transformed and cloaked in joyous and innocent mystery. Up until this point, "The Snowy Day" remains a relatively straightforward adaption of its source.

Atop Snow Mountain, Peter encounters The Snow Magician (Danny Devito, acting for his life). A slinking chord sequence brings our idyll into fraughter territory, drawing the viewer into an intricate and ceaseless dance of tension and suspense.

To prevent him from disclosing a shocking incident witnessed in the fog of Snow Mountain-- an incident best left undescribed here -- the Snow Magician grants Peter a magic talking snowball (Javier Bardem) that will kill any child that it strikes, and which confidently forecasts doom to its victims in elegant Spanish. When later that day Peter is caught in the crossfire of a fierce snowball fight, he senses that his own life may be in danger, and he is forced to use the magic snowball.

When Peter takes the snowball home to his apartment, a tense standoff ensues with his mother (a moribund Sarah Jessica Parker), and Peter is forced to use the ball again.

Peter puts the snowball in his pocket and goes to sleep. While he sleeps, the snowball sneaks out of the apartment and bludgeons his downstairs neighbor to death. After dreaming of a YMCA pool filled with skulls, Peter awakens, guilt-stricken, and is relieved to find the snowball no longer in his pocket.

Unfortunately, he finds the magic snowball sitting at the breakfast table, eating a bowl of Shredded Wheat with almond milk. Thinking to shatter the ball with the stick he'd found the previous day, he reaches for it and shudders to discover that it has transformed into a snake. The stick-snake barks at him, hissing that "the ssssnow never endssss" and to "join ussss Peter." Shaking with anger, the ball shouts insults and promises swift dispatch in less-refined Spanish.

Peter runs out of the apartment without getting dressed, realizing to his further horror that it's snowing again. The voices of his victims whisper accusations in the drifting snow. Staggering down the alley, dragging his bare feet through an un-plowed and un-shoveled urban tundra, he has become overnight a desperate fugitive. He looks constantly behind him, awaiting the last snowball he'll ever see, and seems a boy aged overnight into a frail, dying man.

lighthouse acknowledges the astronaut

2010-03-08T09:15:00.005-05:00

In my dream you were packing up to leave this world, so we threw you a block party. It got out of hand from the start. People kept showing up from all over the world to see you off. It was like some rich folks' wedding where the father of the bride gives a count of the number of countries represented during his toast. There were Inuits and Japanese, Germans and Newfies, Swedes and Chinese, even a guy from South Jersey below exit 2. A couple none of us had ever met was going at it on the coffee table, egged on by a guy in a rhinestone jumpsuit come to think of it none of us had ever met either. About a hundred people were breakdancing in teams of a dozen or more.

A group of kids were doing keg stands behind the Robinson's shed. You joined them briefly in your own, then chugged another beer for good measure. I know you passed on weed, which seemed like the right idea for your last night on earth, one never knows how that's going to go.

People were shooting bottle rockets at each other, like Dutch new year. The music grew in volume until the cops came. We explained the situation and they did keg stands as well. Then they left and soon came again. They issued us a warning that time, but it was clear they were just making sure they were back before the keg got kicked. People kept kissing you on the cheek.

The air was part bitter, part sweet. It wasn't totally clear which side of that you came down on, but I suspect sweet. You were tapping your feet to the music, which was something big band and which everybody seemed to understand the vibe of that night.

When you and I talk an issue straight on one of us always presses too hard, leaving the other to sit on regret for months after. Recognizing that we didn't have that kind of time we talked instead about spring training, about the Eagles off-season moves. You asked me how my wife and son were and I said they were fine, everything was fine. That was really you asking me if everything would be okay and me replying that I thought it would be, that I hoped to God it would be.

When you left we were kind of worried about your driving, but there wasn't much point. Everybody kept coming back to give you another hug. Ruby had packed a care package of road beer, potato chips, and a toasted pastrami sandwich. As you left we flicked the light on the front porch per Freeman custom, the lighthouse acknowledging the astronaut. Cops followed you home, playing Earl Hines loud out of bullhorns mounted on top of their cars.

binary absolution

2010-03-07T23:03:00.006-05:00

the job that kills us/the job that makes us stronger. your actual thinking/your best deadpan of a confused and deeply bitter monologue just prior to giving up. jokes/ inarticulate cries for help. an aging person's fear of progress/a developing intellect's appreciation of historical context. cultivating an interior life/fearing that grown-up social situations will bore you to death and becoming a shut-in.

death as feared/ death as release into eternal.the people you know as a mutually supporting network of being and becoming/the people you know as dead weight. pets as emblems and encouragers of love/pets as organic and ultimately disappointing toys.

art as vanity/art as essential nourishment. sex as desire/sex as fruition. books as enrichment/books as enablers of lonely imagining. computer love/computer anomie. loud music as spiritual cleanser/loud music as that shit you wasted your time on that's made you half deaf at a young age. life as human progress/ life as circular refeeding of broader kinetic or environmental process.

america as sinking ship/america as complex flawed progress. the religions of the world as vampires/the religions of the world as rescue ropes out of clinical isolation and feeble, inappropriate ritual.

let's go mets/let's go off ourselves. kids as enablers of love/kids as transforming incredible enablers of love/kids as destroyers of whatever attention span you might have had left. this case of more than a binary crashes the loop, feeble construct disappears in cloud of smoke.

ask a creepy curmudgeon

2010-03-05T18:30:00.029-05:00

In today's column, CC offers marriage advice.

Dear Creepy Curmudgeon--

My husband and I are both "Church people", and don't use drugs or alcohol. I'm a stay at home mom and my kids love my husband very much. How would the judge determine who is the better parent for the children to live with?

--Betty Sheets

Dear Betty--

What gender are your children? A boy should be raised by the father, a girl by her mother. If the children are boys or a mix you therefore have three choices: a) allow custody to be granted to the father; b) change genders, win custody, and require the children to call you daddy and treat you as they did their father; or c) end the biological father's life and enlist a taxidermist to preserve the body. This will both maintain your maternal role and give your children the consistency that only a paternal presence can bring.

If the dinner table is rectangular, mount the father atop the head of it. For all other shapes of table, you shall mount the father in the center. The length shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth fifty cubits, the height thirty cubits. The father shall be presented daily with burnt offerings. During meals, dinner in particular, the conversation shall be kept light and airy -- he has had a difficult day and this is his time to unwind. Keep the father in a warm, dry place; dust regularly.

Sometimes when it’s late and my mind feels occupied by a kind of a shadow mind, a cat mind that I know I should avoid but instead always to (the kind of mind that tells me I should get to bed with haste but instead I pour a drink) I think of my second wife, of the way I always thought we would excel at parenting together when we had the opportunity. But time is cruel and we were crueler still and one night the moon set flaming below the treetops and when I awoke she was gone. She left a note that I couldn’t bring myself to read, which I instead folded carefully on itself and shredded in the garbage disposal. At night when I think of her now, I torture myself with the thought that I might not have understood the meaning of that note. That perhaps it might have left hope for us and the children we never had, that perhaps it begged me to follow her, that perhaps it even told me where to go.

Hold on to your love! And look me up sometime if you're ever in Monmouth County, kiddo.

--CC

Dear Creepy Curmudgeon--

My ex and I share custody of our 9 year old son. My son has told me that his Dad has drinking 2 bottles of Crown Royal a day. My ex was ordered not to drink when we first divorced, and I'm going to try and get full custody of my son because of the alcoholism that's going on now. I'm worried that if my son testifies about his Dad's drinking, that his Dad will blame him and get mad. What can I do?

--Daisy Curfews

Dear Daisy--

How much do you drink yourself? I ask because a key aspect of joint custody is balance. It's important to respect ground rules established by the other parent, and that they respect yours as well. If you drink 3 bottles of Jim Beam each day, it's important to ask your partner to model the same behavior, no more, no less.

My first wife and I were always at each other's throats. Things got out of hand before we realized the importance of the balance I described. For us, balance ultimately involved the witness protection program, a fake catering business, and the Thirty Years' War. It also (and perhaps most importantly) involved keeping tanks of nitrous oxide on each side of our bed. But in the end those were all just accessories. In love we were like reactive elements, like molecules of heat and cold that had to be nearer, had to bring the other toward some fleeting stasis. To say that we hurt each other those nights was to ignore the clean stinging feeling of air on an open wound, the redemptive nervous joking of the early-morning emergency room, the extra little ziplock bag of nitrous we shared to take the edge off before heading in for our respective days in the classroom.

By the way, do you know anyone looking for five or more lightly-used pine coffins at a reasonable rate? PayPal and MasterCard accepted. Stop in if you're ever in my neck of the woods, hon.

--CC

Dear Creepy Curmudgeon--

Can I sue the woman who my husband had an affair with that led to our divorce?

-Susan Maiman

Dear Sue--

Typically, you can't, at least not as it relates to your divorce. Speaking as a common law lawyer and five-time husband, however, you could sue her if she broke into your house and left a boa constrictor in your john, or poisoned your medication, or blew up your car with you in it, or defrauded your grandmother of her public assistance, or ran over your parents with a cement mixer, or left you for dead with a bullet in your spine in the Gobi Desert. I should stress that these are just examples from my own personal history, this list isn’t meant to be prescriptive. The only limits are those we place upon ourselves, on our imaginations.

In some states (Hawaii, Illinois, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Dakota, Utah) you can sue the third party for alienation of affection. You need to realize though that this is an expensive endeavor that requires a lot of time. A better option is to kill your husband and have his body stuffed by a taxidermist, then set his body at the head of the table, etc.

Sometimes at night I walk the fringes of this town alone. On a moonless night I can pretend that I am a walker in another age or species, in a forest pathway only vaguely known. I realize in the darkness that we are never alone, that each age of humankind is lived parallel with the others, that generations are a stacked sequence of parallel segments, packed densely line by line to wrap around a cylinder or sphere. I feel the decaying dreams and won hopes of other ages channeling in real time through me, a man aging and lost on the periphery of his own consciousness. An owl shifts in a tree, a man stands alone at a far off fence in the dark. I shiver and realize that she and I were born to love each other, even if only for 25 minutes in the bathroom of a Greyhound coach in a pornographic tangle of cheap lipstick and septic metal and screams muted fast against shoulder blades, to have and to hold, promises that she and I could only ever be relied upon to keep on E in an honest-to-god uncomfortable Greyhound coach bathroom in the Nebraska night. That our lives were only for that, that it's well possible our lives were just for that.

Look me up sometime if you're ever in Monmouth County, sweetie, I know this great dim sum place.

--CC

dub as foreign substance/the whitest advice column in the world

2010-03-04T00:31:00.007-05:00

headphones dub music and as i try to nod along a thicket of knots in my shoulders prevents the slightest rhythmic movement. it's like as if a layer of muting cotton balls has stuffed itself between muscle and joint.

i'm awfully white. i say this more as simple fact than as an emblem of self hate or ridiculous and racist pride. there are things that come naturally to me it's true (e.g. abstraction, retreating into a cloud, the subjugation of women or those less fortunate) but i don't completely hate myself, or at least not because i'm white. damn it though, i want this music to get through.

turn the lava lamp back on. groovy, sad fuck of a man. when i get this caustic and useless i should write the advice column that hastens me to hell, the kind where i ruin people's lives. pure poison.

Dear Creepy Curmudgeon --

My mother and I are really close. I am 13. There is only one problem. She doesn’t know I go out with boys. She is always telling her friends that I am different and not interested in that sort of thing. I want to know if I should tell her. The one other time I lied to her she cried because I kept a secret from her. I need help.

--Confused

Dear Confused Waste--

It is likely that you will soon die of an obscure VD, you lying waste. Tell that crow mother of yours that I stole her shit. Take care.

--Creepy

Dear Creepy Curmudgeon--

I am planning to marry the man of my dreams this coming September. Although his parents are wonderful, I'm a bit concerned about the role that they still play in his life...particularly his mother. She still does my fiancé's laundry, cooks his lunches daily, and cleans his house. What do you think?

--Hesitant

Dear Horny Freak--

We all get cold feet, but to insinuate that your fiance's mother is interested in moving in on your marital bed is to project your own perverse unconscious desires onto the motivations of a thoughtful family. Incest is a near-universal taboo and you should be ashamed of yourself for even picturing your mother-in-law to be in such a compromised position, care gone to the wind, love in her eyes and the sound of her breathing, her pulse erratic, her hair adrift on the pillow. It's time to cut this man loose, admit you have a problem and either hurl yourself off a gorge or take up a relaxing hobby, such as building model cars. Take care of yourself, kiddo.

--Creepy

Dear Creepy Curmudgeon--

I am a 41-year-old recovering addict with eight years of sobriety. I have not been in a loving relationship for over 10 years. Truthfully, I am scared to death of actually finding a mate.

Everyday I rush home after work, hide away until the next morning, and repeat. Initially in my sobriety, the solitude was fine. Now I am so lonely I could puke myself to death. I know I could meet women, but I don't know where to start. I am intelligent, attractive, and so confused. I just want to feel again. I want a new life, this one went off track somewhere in the 1980s.

--Down and Alone

Dear Downer --

Let's face it, love is elusive. When you're down and out, running from north to south, what more can you do? When I'm horny and lonely (which is often) I like to go to a bar and get a little loose. One thing leads to another until at some point in the night something "clicks" and I usually wake up the next morning in a different room than where I began the day. Sometimes another person is next to me and typically they are alive. Jesus loves you, kiddo. Get screwed up out of your head and the sex will follow.

--Creepy

close reading

2010-03-03T08:33:00.011-05:00

He's getting closer to two now and getting nearly as attached to books as he is to television. In both cases he's looking for ritual, for safety and a world in which he knows just what to expect. This is why for a while his reading included just one or two books, just like his watching included just one or two DVDs vieweed ad nauseam.

{By ad nauseam I mean fuck you late-stage Children's Television Workshop, fuck you Paul Rudd in an Earth costume, your comedy does not reward a 200th viewing}.

In books now N. is reading in his own personal way. It may sound all Parenting 101 (which it is) but it was helpful to see how Kelvin and Justine are raising their kid -- bringing her at a young age through multiple reads of the same book in a row, letting her focus on different details besides the linear narrative. N. will typically tolerate two reads of a book in a row now, the first generally linear, the second time him steering toward scenes that confuse or interest him, or scenes with many small objects in them that we can name one by one.

The beauty of the naming ritual is that its power dynamic is fluidly reversible. During these reads I'll ask him to point at something that I name. That game has largely changed its rules to where he now points at whatever he feels like and I name it. Him not understanding the power dynamic positions him well to subvert it. Perhaps him choosing to ignore the power dynamic would be a better way to describe it.

It's been encouraging to see him reach for books for self-contained entertainment. At night as an early part of his bedtime ritual he'll sit in his crib with all of his books, several open at a time. We're either cultivating a child with multiple reading interests or one with a serious attention deficit or both. The argument for heredity v. environment wouldn't be clear in either case. Just a few weeks ago I couldn't imagine him reading on his own and there it was growing beneath the surface. More happens than we can see, in everyone.

A good part of early parenting is a crashing bore and a forceful drag. It's like becoming a completely different person, losing the balance of your marriage and your life and how the hell are you going to protect this kid from a world in obviously accelerating decline. There were things in the beginning that kept us from instinctively believing it could work out at all, and on some level I think that volatile mental poison is still with us. You can lose your center and get to a point so twisted you find work your sole relief. What I know is that the times when he and I read together bring a deeper kind of joy, I think to both of us.

the ghost of Michael Jackson

2010-03-02T20:48:00.020-05:00

That first night when you get home you say "I'm losing it." So? I say. I'm losing it more. You say I definitely have it backwards, that in fact I'm the rookie prince of losing it, you its crown queen.

I say give an example. You cheerfully describe obsessing before you're even down the subway steps that morning that you've left the burners on. At the office you spend 7.5 hours in a fetal ball under your desk, missing three conference calls and an austerity meeting. What's more some visiting clients complain for not the first time about your screamed admonitions.

I reply that I called out sick and I've been sitting right here in front of the burners for the past 11 hours. I know they're off, I've been here all day trying to work up the courage to stick my head in the oven. It's when I lower the door to reveal the charred remains of my work computer and the still-smoldering severed head of Anderson Cooper that the game definitively goes to me.

A couple mornings later when you wake up you're shaking and I say what's wrong (skeptically) and you say you're worried about a comet hitting the earth, that it was in your dream right before waking up and now that you've woken up you're paralyzed in fear because all you can picture is gravity turning on itself and the earth breaking apart into free-floating fragments with people floating instantly into space looking at each other like what do we do dodging taxicabs and floating park benches at odd angles. I say what a coincidence for you to mention that (planting a light and only half-patronizing kiss on your forehead).

I show you my list from the night before (when I couldn't sleep I was so excited about the prospect) of the next 100 known objects asteroid-or-larger that could significantly impact the earth. In accordance with the scale of potential impact for each I've drawn a large and brightly-colored adjacent smiley face in magic marker. I think I have you beat until you flatly assert (rubbing my shoulders like "Go get em, champ") that sometimes a dream is just a dream, there's really no way the earth could be destroyed by a comet or asteroid and the only way it really could be destroyed would be was if you left the burners on, thus triggering a chain reaction ending in the halt of life as we know it here on earth/possibly throughout the universe. Then you clutch my wrists (believing it nonetheless necessary to fight your dreamed inverted gravity) and the game goes to you.

It's close but Game 3 goes to me when I vow to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Michael Jackson's death by submerging myself completely in a tin drum full of scorpions (and all you have by way of rebuttal is three bound diaries filled line by line with the question "Can the burners become self aware and On themselves?")

I know you'll bring your A-game for the rematch and am not surprised late Wednesday night when you sneak onto Neverland Ranch, start four nice kettles of tea to boiling, and leave with the burners on. While it's possible that they'll remain that way in perpetuity, adding slow and murderous incremental heat to the universe -- that it's all your fault and that it's indeed now only a matter of time before the eschaton -- what's absolutely certain is that Game 4 has gone to you, because all I've got in response is a YouTube video in which I don whiteface and a velvet bathrobe and, purporting to be the ghost of Michael Jackson, beg anyone who will listen for forgiveness over an illegitimate Casio beat. For a moment there is hope as the video's comment thread grows contentious and views skyrocket. Said hope is dashed when a CNN Breaking News Alert reports a suspicious and all-consuming fire over a 200-mile radius with Neverland as its epicenter.

The argument on the biggest proof that God doesn't exist goes to me (found footage of alligators eating a kitten) over your "Because burners were invented without an automatic shutoff mechanism."

For Game 6, which has been announced as paper-scissors-rock, I play scissors; you kick me in the groin, shove me to the ground, stick a shiv in my gut, and mace me where I lay. In your eyes I see victory; in my peripheral vision I see the movers carrying the oven out of our apartment; from your whispering lips I hear "rock."

As I write, my love, you're in the kitchen, ruminating over the fine print to the microwave instructions. You always look so beautiful on the verge of articulating a new worry. Game 7 is tonight (if necessary).

fascists briefly thwarted by mediocre art

2010-02-24T22:35:00.005-05:00

It's 2000. We've probably been drinking or smoking grass or both. It's probably a weeknight.

Me: "Let's play a show."
You: "Cool, I'll play guitar."
Me: "Cool, I'll play Rhodes through 14 pedals I don't know how to use."
You: "Should we practice?"
Me: "Sure."

We practice. Once. During the practice it feels like we're living on different continents in cultures with vastly incompatible languages. I try to change to a simple lead but you don't follow it. I try to follow what you're doing (some of which would be actually be interesting if we ever synced around it) but you change it up into something discordant and lousy as soon as you catch me at that.

It sucks so we give it a name -- Moronic Emphasis, I think it was -- and take it on the road. Specifically to Desmond's, this bar on Park in the 20s It's a Thursday or Friday night and we're opening for Enter Sandman, which is this terrible not-quite-punk band led by this terrible-not-quite-communist who in 1994 legally changed his name to Sandman. So it's not really the name of the band so much as it is the name of this guy Sandman who enters. You know that I'm not making this up.

The show feels like something of a coup. You've got your guitar and I've got 14 pedals I don't know how to use, along with a Fender Rhodes piano with half the keys broken that weighs about a thousand pounds. We play for 20 minutes. I try to lead but you dodge that expertly, I try to follow but you kick me under the piano. A tritone goes off between us and you smile to yourself, like, yeah, that's the one.

A girl says "are you guys going to start?" She's trying to heckle us but the joke's on her because she just watched us meanderingly noodle without talent in opposite directions for 20 minutes. We stop. Whatever irony in her reaction is neutralized by the fact that she can never have the time back. I get kind of shy on stage (especially when I know it's awful) but as your and my final chords go off vaguely within the same minute and somewhere on the same circle of fifths I get up the nerve to look up.

There are about a dozen frat guys in the bar, or what we would have called frat guys in college and what in another milieu might be called fascists. Anyway, my point is that all of these chumps look downcast, as if we've ruined their nights, like somebody let a pledge die or something. A few say angry things but the joke's on them, they just watched us noodle without a shred of talent for maybe half an hour to 45 minutes.

Enter Sandman. I always thought he was something of a nimrod but he did stick up for us that night. He said "Some people just don't know experimental music when they hear it." Then he launched into some bullshit first song and I bought us beers and we pretended to be happy with how it had gone, performing in lock step for the first and only time in our lives.

calendar as iconoclast

2010-02-23T22:59:00.003-05:00

During today's big meeting, the one where shrewd business analysis was supposed to single-handedly get our organization out of the trouble posed by this crap economy, my attention kept wandering to the decorations on the walls: leftover jack-o-lanterns and ghosts from Halloween. It felt odd to me to be putting our fingers to the pulse of February 2010 with the decor calendar set back 5 months.

It reminded me of times that for whatever quasi-traumatic reason I've stopped advancing, years in which I've gotten stuck, 1982, 1993, 1997, 2000 and others. A person can get out of those jams, but it usually takes a couple years. I wonder if the person in charge of the decorations got laid off in early November, and the windows'll be that way for ever. I wonder if the decorations are older than 5 months old, maybe a year and a half, etc.

Today I just wanted to peel them off the windows, but a) I had nothing to replace them with (fuck it, shamrocks?) and b) I thought it might seem a little creepy, a full-grown man walking around the conference room with a handful of pumpkins and ghouls during a serious business conversation.

mono no aware

2010-02-23T09:19:00.006-05:00

He pulls the car to the side of the road, opens the trunk and sets up his things. A lawn chair, a radio, a 6-pack in a big brown paper bag. The beer is still kind of cold. It's late afternoon, an hour or so before the normal end of work. He unfolds the chair, sits down carefully between the tight plastic arm-rests, opens a beer, and watches the town below. It's Tuesday.

Squeezed into a lawn chair on the side of the highway that runs above his town (and with it his townspeople, approximately zero of whom he likes and about 5 tops of whom he knows) he surveys the damage of his life, its brief peaks and dull lulls, fleeting moments of right action and destined feeling, grinding attempts at love, etc. He opens a second beer. Things are generally fucked, not in any epic or imminent way, just, things have settled under an Eeyore storm front that appears to have real stamina. On the radio some expert caller says: "Johnny Depp is my favorite actor. He's so versatile."

As he drinks the second beer he thinks about his daughter, his one good thing. There's a memory of her he loves, of the first time he noticed she had her own interest in the books they'd read to her. One Sunday morning she'd simply pointed at them and at her crib and said something vaguely akin to "books." She'd spent a couple of hours paging through them, sometimes upside down, sometimes muttering a story to herself, lost in the same five books for a couple of hours. There’s an uncomplicated pride sitting and watching her read and when she looks up in her crib, a year and a half or so old, he senses recognition between them, of a thing pure and perfect that has passed between their eyes like saying the same thing at exactly the same time, or meeting an old lost friend by accident in a place completely random and beyond routine.

The sun's starting to set. On the radio another Rhodes scholar says: "New Jersey is just alright, but our part of it is pretty cool." He opens the third can off beer and watches a flock of cognitively impaired birds trying to make up its mind whether to stay or go. Maybe they're just practicing for an imminent departure, maybe the weather has gone crazy and confused the shit out of them and they now think an hour is a season. How birds know to fly together, who decides when it's time to pack it in for the night or change the flight path. He imagines for a minute what it would look like if he and Rachel were birds, birds twenty years married, arguing like total dicks about which way to fly. The better metaphor would be of people who argued with the same innate skill and synchronous rhythm that birds flew, for people to pause and look in wonder, how do they do it.

It isn't that things are absolutely unsalvageable. Yes, there is his divorce from Rachel (five years final, still echoing in his mind as if it happened a day ago), his weight (epic, out of hand), his job (a man up to his neck in shit and those are the coffee breaks, like the old joke about hell), his love life (stilted despite being chiefly imaginary), his utter lack of meaningful pastimes (never-opened birdwatcher’s manual, 35-mm camera with roll of mediocre natures shots from 1997 he knows he will never develop), but in the pro column there are also dinners with Joanna, and within those, subsets of dinners in which her eyes and his align in that old recognition of books, of alone together, of we are here in this each of us their own and we will never knowingly hurt each other and that is love. He never lets his daughter pay for dinner. Sometimes the tip if she really gives him shit about it. Once on his 50th birthday he let her pay half. His hope is that she’ll be happy, that all of this that has come to pass might have a purpose.

Cars on the highway. If one skidded out of control this way he could kick himself out of the chair and roll down the embankment, still holding the beer. How did he survive that, etc. Then he’d collect himself (running with the beer) to check on the car, now further down the embankment, flames shooting out the windows. The courageous final sip of beer, the sign of the cross and the dive into the car, emerging with 3 survivors (including an infant still in the safety seat, held in one hand). And from then on things would be different, he would awaken in a hero’s glow of right purpose. Maybe he should beg one of those cars to skid, sipping and drinking beer looking straight ahead like bring it on, forward the light brigade.

It’s hard to tell how things would have gone had Rachel’s mother not died of cancer, just a couple weeks after Joanna’s 12th birthday. How it did go was that he tried to be there for her, to put away the dooming angst that flowed between them like festering water in the blocked up sewer system of a doomed suburban town. But no matter what posture he assumed (hand on shoulder, hand in small of back, hand held out to her sleeping form, resting awkwardly on the top of her head so as not to wake her on those nights when she did sleep straight through). He had tried to extract the tension from his voice, to replace it with a gentleness that must have felt foreign and insincere to them both. Then things had gotten fine, it seemed, fine and sort of quiet between them, and a couple of years had passed before he knew it, years that pushed them as far apart as two under the same roof could get. When they saw each other now around Joanna milestones they managed a civility and warmth that surprised him, as if nothing had happened, as if they had known each other in a completely different life, a life they remembered as bad but possibly not so bad as the loneliness that followed, and could they love other people as the damage faded.

On the radio someone’s trying to make war sound positive. The sun is less a factor now as the night takes over and draws the town and him into it. Lights go on below, one by one and in clusters. He opens the fourth and fifth beer together, taking sizable gulps of each as the last color fades from the sky. Now it’s true dark and each light is a life, each light is a life that could be broken or whole, each light is a life in flux if it knows it or not.

how do I build a model rocket?

2010-02-21T20:35:00.038-05:00

Q: I am 15 years old and saw people make a rocket on TV. I want to make one too. Can you please tell me if it is possible for me to make a rocket (given that I have limited resources), and if it is possible how I can build one?

A: Well, I don't know much about making rockets from scratch, but it's very easy to make a model rocket from a kit. The largest provider of model rocket kits is Estes.

As for making rockets(not-from-a-kit), these rockets can be extremely dangerous, so you need to be very careful when launching them. And keep in mind that most places have limits on the height that you can launch anything to. So if you make a rocket that's too powerful you might end up in a large amount of trouble. To launch anything that goes higher than small model rockets with approved engines (or smallish bottle rockets) you'll need to get permission, and I'm not sure how to go about doing this or what the restrictions are.

With that said up front, I am something of a model rocket enthusiast and an episode from my own experience may be instructive. In the summer of 1983 I transported myself and a team of astronomers in a full-scale rocket to the far reaches of our solar system.

Space is an unforgiving environment that does not tolerate human errors or technical failure. For humans leaving Earth's orbit for extended periods, there are even more dangers. One is the near absence of gravity in space; the presence of high-energy, ionizing cosmic ray (HZE) nuclei is another. Observations of astronauts traveling on the Space Shuttle and Russian cosmonauts' long-term visits to the Mir space station indicate that time spent in 0g has serious effects on bone and muscle physiology and the cardiovascular system. Fortunately, I was able to emerge from the month-long journey unscathed. You may find my captain's log instructive:

Crew: Freeman, Jones, Robinson, Eckels, Smith, Turgevsky, Goldstein, Hodges, Stapleton, Billingsworth, Porforio-Diaz, Gleichik, Brown.

Week 1: Mars. Robinson below decks to find crackers. Eckels/Smith space-sick. Earth and Venus fade into background, general sense of no turn back now, etc. Turgevsky below decks to find Robinson and crackers. Mars! Excitement curtailed by lack of crackers and several crew. Eckels and Smith dispatched to recover and (health permitting) to establish a forward base of operations for future missions.

Week 2: Jupiter, Saturn. Continued lack of crackers and a growing number of crew members (Hodges, Goldstein). Memorable conversation with Stapleton on expected birth of his son, present feeling of closeness to God, etc. Much staring into space. Jupiter! Billingsworth and Stapleton below decks in search of crackers/other crew.

Week 3: Uranus, 134340. Missing crew discovered below decks in various states of inebriation and undress. Cracker supply diminished. Possible cannabis smell. Uno pack tells remaining tale. Distrustful hording of remaining crackers.
Souvenir from asteroid 134340 of crate marked do-not-open.

Week 4: Return (non-stop). Generally uneventful. Optimism of outward voyage replaced by over-familiarity and impatience. Heckling of Saturn, Jupiter. In reboarding at Mars, Eckels and Smith add only additional body odor and impatience. Billingsworth, Stapleton, Hodges, Goldstein eaten by invisible alien lifeform. Porforio-Diaz tunes mournful folk guitar and is eaten by invisible alien lifeform. Great chewing below decks. Paranoia of remaining crew. Tin of peanuts (unsalted); 2 Capri-Suns. Noble in-this-together speech, etc. Eckels rambling in apocalyptic Latin on loudspeaker. Smith briefly successful in battle with invisible alien lifeform. Robust chewing. Apocalyptic Mandarin of Eckels on loudspeaker. Smith, Turgevsky chewed. Spontaneous reappearance of Jones in beard of cracker crumbs. Robinson elects to jettison self into cold vaccuum of space. Chaos. Dismal burden of lost crackers. Unknown status of invisible alien lifeform. Apparent sustained presence of invisible alien lifeform. Chewing (of Gleichik, Robinson). Landing successful! Great fanfare. Unknown status of Brown. Chewed status of Brown confirmed near open crate.

fucked house/as certain as precognition

2010-02-20T19:16:00.010-05:00

theresa there are days when i remember our time together with joy and sorrow and full fucked teary-eyed emotion for what quantity of love and dedication was transmitted and there are those days where i remember it as a fucked house that someone should have burned down that sheer pyrotechnic chance or some imagined benevolent god should have burned to the ground that maybe i should have burned to the ground when i get into that mindframe i don't know what's wrong with me i think of that house and what we put each other through there and i think that if only we had burned the cursed thing to the ground we could have had a clean start and instead it came to this you there me here and never the twain shall meet thank god there weren't any kids, that there never were kids.

theresa i finally sold the house maybe you heard and spent most of what i made from that on expensive wasted shit to distract and forget everything i could it makes sense though these things make sense how you've gone to some opposite unknown side of the country and changed your number i think a couple times on top of that and on how times at night i sit out on the balcony here which faces out to apartments in the opposite unit and smoke and watch for lights going on and off i could pass the night until late watching the lights in other people's apartments watching other families kids playing or crying at night not wanting to go to bed couples families sitting down to dinner seemingly happy and all the people alone of course getting older by the minute standing out on their balconies watching me each other everybody either drinking or smoking or both that and exactly one guy on the far end of the opposite unit who seemingly only reads books but maybe he gets fucked up in advance or on something you don't do on your balcony and then reads i could ask him but i don't reach out that much these days i'm happier to watch other people in their lives at whatever level of peace they've managed to reach at whatever point they find themselves somewhere back there i figured i could generally only make things worse for other people that was something you helped me to see theresa you were right.

you were and i bet are right theresa but alongside that you might be happy to know these days that i'm really the nicest guy in transient situations you know like i'm the dipshit making best friends with the cashier at a rest stop or a gas attendant on some drive i never do or somebody i'm trying to get to fuck me once or rarely for the second time at a bar or like being secret santa at the bullshit office i'm the schmuck buying the gaming system for the broke-assed kids and selecting color coordinated flowers for their deeply isolated mother i'll be as thoughtful as i can with no accountability with no fear that that kindness won't be returned or that i'll be expected to sustain it myself or that for a couple years we'll both find a way to sustain a good quantity of it only to wake up one morning with the well gone dry and then theresa this is the part i'm sure you remember how we'll fake it for years as best we can until one day we can't fake it any more and then we'll rip at each other like those fish you aren't supposed to put in the same tank it wasn't how i saw it at the time and i know i tried to get you to stay but in retrospect it was right that it worked out this way it was right it isn't that you need me to tell you that but i thought you might want to know i finally know.

theresa like i said we were fucked pretty early on and in the end those things i said and did could only be described as injurious to your well being to be ceased and desisted but there's a way i choose to remember you the first time you spent the night and next to you i knew as certain as precognition we'd grow old together and wear worn soft holding grooves into each other the way water wears rock until the two resemble each other in the right light of day as goddamned cheesy as that sounds i mean it there was i feeling i had about you like i had seen through your eyes and to your spirit that i was seeing you or your true essence outside the flow of normal time and in that sense court orders aside theresa we're still together in that sense if none other that at exactly one singular moment of my life i saw into you without seeing through i saw into you and only saw your soul's recognition of mine only saw us both aware that life was infinite that we were infinite that we were spirits unbound by gravity or dull convention awash in radiant love that moment having you all to me both in that infinite way and in the moment itself that place where time and time in composite overlapped (so that time in its total was turned inside out and compressed into that moment and so that moment was in turn stretched into the full stretch of time) i'm not going to lie there are times that with those few women who get within a mile i try to remember it being you for a bit that works but usually my conscience or the general failure of my capacity to imagine gets in the way and if i'm not careful i lose the moment me typically being drunk at that point it's a fine balance and i've never been great at those theresa i've obviously never been great at those.

how we sing amazing grace

2010-02-19T23:59:00.001-05:00

Position Available, demon reporting to Maxwell. Some overtime required, pay negotiable, experience preferred. Two-part container will be provided at date of hire. Successful applicants will demon-strate the ability to fill both container halves with gas at equal temperatures, guard and operate a trapdoor between the two parts, etc.

Demon interviews well, masters work but rapidly becomes bored and starts surfing the god-damned internet all the time. Frequent trips to vending machine, general despair. Demon maintains appearances; bosses seem happy or at least distracted by complex scheme of managing multiple demons, multiple containers. Down economy magnifies stress and imprecision at all levels of the organization. Morale further reduced by widespread sense that what was once a thought experiment has become an impossible mission. The status of the container halves themselves becomes difficult to measure. Project evaluators are reduced to documenting stakeholder perceptions of containers and of the second law of thermodynamics in general.

In some buildings in the city some office lights stay up all night. It should give you hope that inspiration has taken hold, that in one of those offices someone is perfecting the greatest idea ever born to humankind, working around the clock to ensure that this idea can be delivered at the moment when we need it most. Those more cynical among us might imagine instead that certain corporations have perfected genetic engineering to the degree that they have bio-mechanical drones working in Excel the whole fucking night, bleary-eyed Microsoft-certified automatons that are creating a spreadsheet exactly parallel to the universe, with all of its complexities and loves and so-called hopes reduced to pure columns and rows.

When the sun rises the traffic snarls to a crawl and in slow motion the offices fill with numb people. What they need for spiritual inspiration they read in the New York Post. What they need for lunch they wander out and pay too much for. When the sun sets the less advanced go home and the super automatons continue their unfailing quest, filling tab after tab with formulas that you would have to admit are beautiful but that's not the point. The point is to reduce the world to on-off, to profit or loss.

The spreadsheet grows in complexity and size until one Sunday night around midnight it begins to edit itself. At first that happens in Visual Basic but by 12:45 a.m. or so the spreadsheet has developed its own impregnable and fantastically efficient macro language. By 3:13 a.m. or so the paradigm shift completes itself and every electrical appliance in the world begins to sing amazing grace, quietly at first, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me, quietly at first but now louder, louder, I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see. The sun rises on a new world.

octagon

2010-02-19T08:37:00.006-05:00

One line for beauty, one for connection. Lines for solitary reflection, music, literature, the prospect of world peace or space travel. One line for logic, one for love.

Shade the octagon as you would a color field painting, in a confederate conglomerate of gray and darker gray with suggestions or clusters of faded white and dark yellow.

One line for darkness, another for hate and fear. Lines for confusion, doubt, and capitalism. A line for xenophobia, another for organized religion. One line for cynically massed produced art, one for the Dallas Cowboys.

Shade the octagon metallic silver and add an imperial star. Douse. Ignite.

guy smoking on the subway

2010-02-18T00:00:00.005-05:00

A woman starts making eye contact with me on the uptown 2 this morning and for a second I'm impressed with myself. When I look back though she looks back at me again, less in an aren't-you-so-interesting-you-paunchy and unkempt-yet-sexy-creature-you kind of way and more in that way people have of looking at you when someone's doing something crazy on the subway.

There's a sudden distinct smell of smoke. I look back at my sister in travel like sister is that a we're-all-going-to-die kind of look you've been shooting me, but she's given up on my Goofus reflex time and has opted to ignore the entire car for the rest of the ride, possibly to ignore all train passengers for the rest of her life, possibly to ignore all humankind and live out her days a Nicorette hermit in some remote corner of the globe, e.g. Jersey City more than 4 blocks from the PATH.

In uncertain and toddling/obesely wheezing fashion I get off my mental ass and note the source of the stimulus in question, a guy smoking a large off-brand cigarette on the subway, strong like a clove but less sweet, a cigarette strong with a certain air of off-track betting and municipal court lobbies, a cigarette strong indeed and latent with a filtered premonition of will be jabbed swiftly and with great aim into the face sockets of errant objectors.

In short as the man in question smokes this portentous stick resplendent with martial energy the mental adjustment for his fellow passengers is simple: there's a guy smoking on the subway and isn't it the most natural thing.

Five minutes north I've completely adjusted, I've actually chosen to sit closer to the guy, the smell of smoke is helping me to concentrate on my book. Someone gets on at 125th and has the gall to complain, in what can only stand as a small betrayal.

ceremony

2010-02-15T20:03:00.002-05:00

that gesture of the band playing on was either made up or reflective of blind obeisance. the band should have flipped off the conductor, carefully folded its chairs, chucked its instruments into the pitch and found lifeboats.

or: a focus on what tenor and tone are maintained through a downturn like this is like stringing neon lights on a crack house, at some point somebody is going to fall asleep with a lit cigarette in their mouths and burn the place to the ground and we'll be the assholes sleeping off a hard day's work. at some point we have to admit to ourselves that this is triage.

paper today has some crap about wall street wanting to play it responsible now but you know it's always this way, the chastened buccaneers hide their loot and talk about fiscal prudence while the poor chew wistfully on the crumbs of excess. carnegie or ford find Jesus late in the game and start do-gooder foundations to undo 1/10000th of the damage of their ways.

and here we are, zipping frenetically in Brownian motion to assemble a few of those crumbs ourselves, fashion them into a small hill on which to stand to humbly suggest reform efforts to those chastened buccaneers (or better still arachnids). they may pay our ideas lip service best case but in the end the spider doesn't stop eating flies just because the flies have a decent story or yearning for freedom. that moment of apparent multi-stakeholder collaboration is more of an approach trajectory, a kind of yes yes I see presaging mealtime.

my frustration is with those polite to kindly cannibals, of course, but also with you for thinking that if we string up decorations, if we control our own behavior or model a kinder gentler meal the spiders will take heed and start stringing tofu or tempeh in their webs to simulate and mock the thrill of the hunt.

i know that a great deal of this work is noble but futile, that any way you decorate the ceremony it's still bullshit. i'm half satisfied to join you in your building of ecologically sound sandcastles so that we can lose ourselves briefly in their beauty. some days that works for me, some days, not so much.

piano lowered to bottom of swimming pool

2010-02-14T22:48:00.006-05:00

The first trick is to listen to what the aural space wants added to it. The second is to make your fingers turn what you hear into what others would hear the same way. I can get it close when I practice, but I've never been great at practice.

Trying to play after a year plus away is just like playing was before, except now you’re at the bottom of a swimming pool where the light plays tricks, the way it bends as it seeks its way from the surface to your chlorinated eyes. Your ears are trying to depressurize. You could adjust the dive mask but you'd flub a phrase.

Melody shall persevere, be fixed in space, and assigned lyrics. Lyrics shall bear the name of a woman, or the date or season or previous decade in which the same woman had relations with the composer, or shall document a predilection for a certain type of woman, or shall catalog regrets regarding pursuits in any of the preceding categories, or shall provide advice to others regarding the pursuit of women particular or general, or shall tell tales of said pursuit gone amusingly or tragically awry. In other cases the lyrics may bear a more abstract meaning and may even regard other topics (e.g. raisins, crossbows, types of danish). Nonetheless, the purpose of the lyrics shall in fact be to impress the woman of that name, etc).

Piano is lowered to the bottom of the pool via crane; bench and laminated score are positioned by paid divers. Bureaucrat descends via parachute. Long pause; commotion above should not be misinterpreted as applause. Paramedics arrive.

What are they saying about the melody?

I do not hear the melody (2)

I heard no melody worth mentioning (1)

Melody has a raisinesque quality (1)

Fifth paramedic does not offer comment.

therapy couch

2010-01-25T21:21:00.004-05:00

Notes for therapy couch: my therapy couch should be a retro Danish mid century sectional, with a dim yellow bulb covered in an opaque shade and a pitcher of ice water on an oval oak nightstand, with a still lit half-smoked joint tilted on the edge of an ash tray. Butter popcorn brought in greasy paper bag.

Therapist should preferably be a female of an alien species that it is impossible for a human to desire on any level; I request a female in the interest of the therapist being properly discerning, introducing the condition of her asexuality because I wouldn't trust my motives,and I'd end up even more hung up then I started. Complexity in the fact that the unavailability or unattractivity of the alien therapist could in itself spur some deeply Catholic attraction, thereby complicating motives. The need to accept some imperfection in general schema, etc.

Unresolved pain, surfacing in unmanageable ways. It sounds dumb to say --so many problems in the world, why get stuck in these dull white ones? Here I am, someone who could never give a shit past page 3 of Herzog, starting to resemble that epistolary idiot more by the day, the documents in this case a scatter of half-formed thoughts emailed at random to the info boxes of zoos around the world, sent to those because they usually auto-respond with something interesting, in a matter of seconds any time of day, as if to say you exist, you exist, you are safe and loved.

goals for 2010

2009-12-23T09:17:00.004-05:00

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

2009-12-17T10:13:00.002-05:00

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

2009-12-14T07:59:00.005-05:00

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

2009-12-12T11:26:00.009-05:00

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

2009-12-10T08:28:00.007-05:00

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

2009-12-08T12:21:00.004-05:00

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.

article on fishing interrupted

2009-11-11T23:02:00.006-05:00

A great weather weekend and a lot of striped bass combined to make Delaware Bay a very popular stretch of water.

Hundreds of boats and without a doubt many thousands of anglers took advantage of excellent conditions Saturday and Sunday and through Monday.

Pat Harris said it was the best weekend for fish and fishermen in years at Longreach Marina on the Maurice River. She said she weighed in so many fish "you wouldn't believe it." She said the sizable parking lot at Longreach was jammed, with an overflow that spread out around the area.

Harris had a "heck" of a crowd at Longreach on Monday as the mild weather pushed toward 68 degrees in some areas.

Harris' list of recent catches was long, with 40-pound bass common, and even eight 50-pounders mixed in. She said Longreach had about 40 big weigh-ins among what she estimated to be a couple of hundred over the weekend.

Ken Brady of Millville caught a 46-pound bass, Tim Regan of Berlin got a 44-pounder, and Ryan Bradway and Steve Smith of Laurel Lake combined for 40- and 39-inch bass for highlights of recently weighed fish at Longreach.

Ricky Wheeler, captain of the Cape May charterboat Exile, had 30-pound-plus bass Saturday and Sunday. He said striper averaged 20 pounds. The best catch recently on the Exile was a 53.2 pounder by Wheeler's grandfather Dicky, who was visiting from Odessa, Del.

"What are some things that loneliness can do to a man?" Wheeler asked his grandfather.

Dicky fell quiet, almost uncharacteristically so, looking out at the water, watching how the light danced and played out to the horizon.

"I think that loneliness can kill a man," Dicky said. "It can outright kill somebody, if he isn't careful."

Ricky Wheeler nodded, looking to the deck of the boat and out to the water himself, measuring his words as carefully as he would any catch.

"I think it just might," he said finally. "And not instant like, but rather, by degrees."

"In that respect," Dicky said gently, after some further thought, "the agency might either be ascribed to loneliness or to the man himself."

It took Ricky a second to think this through, but in the end he agreed. "And if he isn't downright judicious with his love, with his connection to humanity as a whole, loneliness can make a man kill himself by degrees."

Ben Budd at Budd's Bait and Tackle in Villas limited out on his charter trips and was back to the dock by noon Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

a) five reasons for writer's block (50 words or less); b) penthouse forum interrupted

2009-11-10T23:22:00.006-05:00

Because it's all been said. Because what the fuck does one person's perspective matter at this point? Because Anais Nin's diaries would have been sickening if written by a paunchy, middle-aged man. Because I had a bad day at work. Because finishing something means admitting it can’t be perfect.

Zoe and I have an average sex life. We've been married for 11 years. We've made love a few times, but nothing comes close to the letters I've read in your magazine. Zoe has a nice body and keeps herself in good shape. She's very attractive and a lot of fun, but she can also be prudish. It's this prudish side that makes what you're about to read so hard to believe.

We own a boat, and we enjoy cruising and fishing from time to time. Usually when we are away from shore and alone, Zoe will take off her top to get an all-over tan. Unfortunately for me, every time I make a move toward her, she stabs me in the eye with a red-hot poker that she has kept simmering by her deck chair.

Every summer there is an air show along our lakefront, and this time Zoe wanted to invite her best friend Amanda and Amanda's boyfriend to watch from our boat. I told her that would be fine by me, and thought nothing more about it. My good eye twitched, a little. Sometimes that means a storm is coming.

The day before the outing, Amanda called and said her boyfriend couldn't make it. Zoe said good, it's done then, and that she should come alone.

We met her at the harbor the next morning. Zoe wore a baggy pair of busted old sweat pants and a cotton tank top with a completely opaque black sweatshirt underneath that totally obscured her form. Amanda had a cutlass which she would occasionally jab threateningly toward my good eye. Ever since I met Amanda, I've given her a wide berth. She has great dexterity and knows how to flaunt it in all the right ways. She always kicks the shit out of me and tells my wife that sometime they should kill me and dump the body in the creek behind our apartment complex.

By the time we left the harbor, the girls had had two glasses of wine and were kicking what appeared to be a severed head amiably down the deck of the boat. It took the better part of an hour to get to the air show. There was a large gaggle of pleasure craft, and it was hard to find a spot to anchor. We decided to drift to the outside of the flotilla to try to anchor there. I finally got the hook to grab where we could see the show, about 100 yards outside the main pack.

Once we were secure, Amanda asked where she could change into her bathing suit. I told her she could use the cuddy cabin once I was done stowing the bags and coolers. My wife said that would take too long, and there was no room because of all the gear. Amanda asked what she should do. With that, Zoe stabbed my remaining good eye with the poker.

I am unclear on what happened next. I only know that I awoke in what felt to be the trunk of a moving car. I write this letter to you, Penthouse Forum, in the hope that you can assist me in some form. Please be swift and strong. Please spare this man's life. You are my last hope. --Name and address withheld

2029

2009-10-20T09:49:00.009-04:00

It is a restless moment. She has kept her head lowered, to give him a chance to come closer. But he could not, she turns and walks away.

simple math

2009-10-19T17:30:00.002-04:00

Goldman Sachs bonus pool: $23 billion. New York State budget deficit: $3 billion. What's a new 13 percent recession-year GS bonus tax between friends?

electric snowflake

2009-10-19T08:42:00.003-04:00

Some dread from yesterday must have carried over and I'm dragging my feet. It isn't that my desk chair isn't comfortable, rather that a skullplate lowers from the ceiling and an invisible mediocre hand starts tightening the nonprofit screws into my skull. One way to describe my role would be that of a fat guy riding a bike in a snow globe. Another would be of the same guy trapped in a nagging loop of sell and explain, sell and explain, the same guy selling used cars that turn out to be concept papers for really amazing cars that (if used) would transform society, the guy selling used cars that run with amazing speed and grace but require uranium-235 for fuel, the same guy selling used cars to be driven only by the extremely poor; the cars get 2 miles per gallon and travel 2 miles an hour and the rich gather to praise themselves for providing the deserving poor with such elegant means of transportation.

Story of a new parent: He had work early today but last night his daughter was fussing, she wouldn’t fall asleep. He’d been charged with the task and he couldn’t figure out how to sit her just right so she’d sleep. She clearly wanted to but she’d been out of all day, he said, and she was just fussing. He tried setting her lying face forward, then held face up in the crook of his arm, then curled in variations between the two. It was maybe a half hour now, or an hour. It hadn’t been smart to keep her out all day. Now was time to pay for it. He kept trying different positions. Usually they could find a way to click if he just paid attention. Finally she let out a solid fart, almost like the fart of a grown person, and fell asleep.

As far as I can tell no one has yet invented an emoticon for snowflake, for an electric snowflake. It would be pretty. The flakes could sprinkle out beyond the browser or Word window in which they were typed, wending a wind-blown path, hitting the bottom of the screen and melting at first, then finally accumulating and drifting there. When enough had stuck, you could click with the mouse to gather it in piles, for throwing, or sculpting, or building.

stuck words/kool aid man

2009-10-18T22:54:00.008-04:00

vanity project that this is i've been trying to use it as an impetus to write, as a forced discipline where if i tell myself i need to, for a few days or a week in a row i'll write every night. then things close up and i can't.

the radio silence doesn't mean i'm brimming with stuck words, more that i’m so busy or confused or dark that there aren’t extra words. mostly that i’m so busy in a journey that i don’t have time to write a postcard.

not a journey, something less intentional, a forced trip or tagging along on other people’s trips. the postcard would read dear so and so, wish you were here, not sure where that is.

potential application for kool aid man to improve the art of white people: whenever white persons (or the privileged in general) get all abject/dejected/ponderous in their art, bust through the wall and start kicking people's asses.

examples:

1) the double suicide scene in Romeo and Juliet.
2) the film As Good As It Gets (many scenes; kool aid man should probably bring a flamethrower).
3) the film or novel Requiem for a Dream (many scenes).
4) The Jose Gonzalez cover of Heartbeats.

seven months/photo album

2009-10-17T14:36:00.005-04:00

The other day L. and my mom and I were looking through photos of the past five to ten years. Taken in cities all over the world, with friends near and far gone. The two common denominators to each photo: one, I'm holding a drink; and two, I don't remember much at all about the setting in which the photo was taken.

So it's been seven months since I had a drink. For stretches I've felt clear and easy and right. At other points (now) I crave a good beer, would kill for just one good beer or a sharp glass of wine, or maybe 5 martinis or a nice simple case of beer and a joint.

It's not that if I drank one I'd wake up under a pile of cops, or sleep my way through suburbia (delicious tense hopeless moms, fear not), or start pounding full bottles of vodka every night and end up one of those red-faced commuter jerks on the train. It's more that the act of not drinking has turned off some muting or filter and allowed a range of thoughts/emotions/memories to surface.

I'm interested in what's buried under there, even though some is shit, some is poison, some is scary. A lot of it is me, a strange me that I barely know, the past me.

I was thinking this morning that I will have earned a drink if I make it to one year. I think it would be a very nice glass of white wine, in Paris, with fish soup and fresh toasted bread.

Then I was thinking that I will earn a drink when I: finish all of Faulkner; read a modern novel in Spanish and understand it; publish a novel; complete an album of music; climb a large mountain or run a marathon or bike from here to the Jersey shore; and develop my own black and white photographs.

At that point I could have a drink, it wouldn't kill me. Even five out of the six. Maybe I could have one drink when I make it to the year, then another for five out of six, then take it from there. Or, I could go get a drink now...

progressive damage

2009-09-22T22:16:00.004-04:00

A few of us in the main conference room: the new foundation person, the executive director, development, program leads. Meet and greet for the new foundation person.

We have a telescope that we point out the window by way of show and tell, magnifying different parts of the South Bronx for the new foundation person. The practice people zone in close on an old tan brick. Much to say re> brick, much that can be changed. Is the change sustainable?

The policy folks aim the telescope at the sky. There isn't much, I think a cloud, I think maybe a flit of a hawk or a daring high-altitude pigeon, sunlight diffuse and un-pinpointable. Sunlight, if only you could get to the source and change the angle or tint. If only you could start upstream.

The foundation person turns the telescope back into the room and inspects the angles where the walls meet the floor, the ceiling. An hour passes, during which she asks a sequence of architectural questions, ranging catholic from arcane to obvious to questions put in terms we understand, but devastatingly difficult to answer. From her tone at first (world weary disappointment and smartest guy in the room and vague hint of should have stayed asleep today) it's hard to tell but I think we're doing alright.

Beat. Beat. Someone from our side asks, "But how can we fix all this?" Gesturing out the window, out at the world at large, out into the world as it is.

"Good question," the new foundation person admits. For a second it looks like her face is going to sag off of its moorings, that she might lose corporeal stature, her spirit spilling onto the floor.

She gathers her thoughts and answers sharply, answers in herobureacratic fashion, for a minute we can all picture the solution. We break for lunch.

friends

2009-09-21T22:50:00.005-04:00

One said let’s make a try of it, which was only a way one had of making a more graceful exit, of evading clutching hands, drawing sharp dry parallel lines where before rose confused floodwaters of dramatic feeling, which was only a way one had of replacing awkward animate clutching love with something crisper, more manageable.

The thing being tried the high concept of "friends." Friends! to be shouted standing atop roofs, etc., friends the concept left worn out rust- or dirt-encrusted in a kind of mutual discard pile.

Years pass and the end result is a kind of faint residual taste akin to a vaguely recognizable chemical in tapwater, punctuated by the occasional appearance of that special friend in one's dreamlife less as a friend so much as a kind of extra, a last minute casting addition brought forward by memory as a sort of unfunny joke, then to reappear in one's consciousness as a skipping record for the next several weeks. Sentimental 78 rpm hiss, standing girl, non-speaking part.

ninjas bury their dead

2009-08-13T22:19:00.004-04:00

Seen on the side of a highway in South Jersey: a group of ninjas paying their respects to a fallen comrade. A small ninja mournfully twirling small nunchucks. Another (priest?) holding a bible or its martial arts equivalent. Two setting themselves on fire, rolling to put it out in synchronized sad motion.

Let no ninja fight on this day; let no wall be climbed. Let none defy gravity; nor no individual shoot lasers from her or his eyes. In the secret outpost the reading torch has gone out and no one bats an eye. There's one I know who usually tells jokes; today he's got nothing to say and when you rouse him he just wants to point out that death takes each man but why this man now? Why is death selective?

Leave the graveyard razed and burning to the ground; it wasn't on purpose so much as fallout from a stop drop and roll gone wrong. Tomorrow there'll be another funeral; soon the ninjati may only live in memory, the stuff of faded, forgotten myth.

I knew it had gotten bad, but I had no idea it had gotten this bad.

mariposa

2009-08-12T22:12:00.001-04:00

You're sitting on a warm bench in an isolated garden at the edge of town, a garden that seems so empty it could be an abyss until this butterfly catches your attention.

One thing about this creature is the mode of its flight, recombined on itself in stop-time at complementary angles as though G-d were cutting and pasting sloppy animation. Then you notice the colors, the black circles that decorate the tips of its wings. The form of its abdomen.

Its flight path's lit by a green ray of spring. Where could it want to fly, only recently drunk on dew or pollen, now with its back to you, intent on a flower.

And if it disappears beyond the wall (because it's a small garden or through excess speed), make a mental picture. Trace its path along the green ray, where it stretches to the horizon. Or picture where it and the ray diverge paths; now the ray proceeds forever and the butterfly could be anywhere, you'll never find it. Maybe it'll flicker back or leave you here, in this garden at the edge of town, at the edge of the known world.

(for/at/from Nicanor Parra)

155 emails

2009-08-12T21:36:00.005-04:00

Today I sent 155 business-related emails and I can't remember the content of a single one I'd made plans to have lunch with my brother but by the time I'd finished emailing it was 3pm my brother was gracious and agreed to meet me for a late late lunch I finally got underway but on the way I hit a flash flood and got there at more like 4 by that point my sister her son and our kid brother had arrived and I sent a few more emails and then somebody wanted to talk on the phone in reply to the email so we talked on the phone and made plans to talk longer on the phone tomorrow then I set my phone and my computer on fire extinguishing the fire in a cloud of piss and fury and we all went for something like early dinner.

What it was was excellent Chinese the home-style bean curd perfectly soft my siblings and I don't always sit together in one place these days there are usually thousands of miles preventing that I was mad not to have the brain space to focus on this rare rainbow comet confluence and this is why I dislike the architecture of Microsoft software so much because I have unwittingly come to live inside it and in my sent items is a sad history of affirmations logistical coordinates occasional flashes of humor or warmth recommendations for fixing words fixing words and grovelingly polite requests for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I was at just about the mental level where smiling and making goofy faces at my nephew felt ambitious but achievable then in a flash he transcended my mental age and wanted more than I could possibly provide conversationally my brothers and my sister started a game where in at least one word per sentence you alter the pronunciation to make that word sound utterly different though still recognizable, to avoid cliche. It was almost nice to be so slow and fried I couldn't drive the game much myself, because I could just appreciate how smart, how present, how memorable they were.

advice for the interviewee

2009-08-11T21:55:00.009-04:00

You've just landed an interview for a seemingly wonderful job! Now what? Successful interviewing will be essential in order for you to lock in an offer. Here are some tips and strategies for effective interviewing from preparation through follow up.

1. Smile, be polite, and try to relax. The economy sucks and your kids are dying of malnutrition. What can you do? Put that shit out of your mind. Picture yourself on your first vacation from the new job, in the Bahamas with a whore fluent in American Sign Language, a line of coke the size of a jungle cat and all the god-damned Ovaltine you can drink.

2. Don't shit on the table -- yet. Avoid shitting on the table during the opening moments of the interview. It can even be a risk later, when first impressions are being cemented into firm evaluations. By the same token, if you're going to do it, own it, bring a newspaper and squat comfortably and pronouncedly, as if you do this all the time. Make them doubt their grip on consensus reality and the job's yours.

3. Be upbeat and make positive statements. If you're going to bring a gun it's important to think about what kind of message you're going to send. Conventional wisdom will tell you the bigger the gun, the more effective the message, but that isn't always true. A well-aimed .22 magnum mini revolver can leave much more of an impression than a haphazardly fired Negev light machine gun. According to recent research from Accenture, nearly half (40 percent) of major corporate decisions are based on the good 'ole gut.

4. Make frequent eye contact. Do not blink even once.

5. Tell a feel-good story about a prostitute with a heart of gold. Preferably early on; declare that you'd like to use it as a formal introduction to yourself and your work, then refer to it throughout the interview for emphasis.

vision

2009-08-10T23:18:00.002-04:00

I got home late from work and everyone was out late too, so I took a walk to unwind. To the center of town. It was hot and the streets were pretty empty. A woman walking a dog, a kid on a bike, not much else.

I thought about buying some cigarettes and headed in the general direction of Wawa, but that felt like too momentous of a decision (buying smokes in Paris is one thing, buying them in Jersey would be a level of commitment I'm not ready for).

So I cut the circuit short, turning back toward our street. Pines and crooked concrete, vaguely functional street lighting. A cicada fell to a dark patch of sidewalk, skittering in frustration to bury itself in the concrete like a piece of a sound wave falling out of the sky and I had this vision for the rest of my walk of all the creatures on earth stricken sudden with that death dance, every living creature fallen to the ground and twitching its last.

When I got home I felt better.

social engineering

2009-08-09T21:50:00.003-04:00

There are a few books Nat likes. His taste is for action adventure -- for short novels with exaggerated plot curves and without introspection. Not yet 2, our son has his finger on the pulse of the current literary milieu. Career moves: freelance literary agent, or internship with Dial Press. Open question of whether ESA standards for child labor apply to infants in publishing.

At bedtime tonight I was trying to read him something a little too long for his taste. Then I picked up another one. It must have read to him like the kid equivalent of tax forms, or the Necronomicon or something. He kept throwing the books on the ground, then he squirmed out of my lap, lowered himself to crawl and bee-lined for the bedroom door. It was shut so I just watched him. First he reached for the handle, which he realized was out of reach.

He turned and sized up the crib, for whether he might climb it, then open the door. Then he looked to the footrest for the rocker, and the night stand. He came back and started pulling books from the night stand. But I wouldn't let him take the lamp down. For reasons that weren't clear (I think to distract me) he tried to pull the child-proof caps out of the electrical socket. Then he went back to unpiling books from the night stand.

Finally, realizing that he had a much easier option in sight, Nat held up his hand. I took it and walked him out of the room. Social engineering: some doors you open yourself; sometimes the best way around locked doors is to ask someone to open them.

ghost girl

2009-08-08T23:05:00.000-04:00

I'm always finding stuff when I mow the lawn, particularly in the back yard. Last time it was some kind of bone--which I put in the rose bed to look at more closely later and then couldn't find. (There are a couple of bricks and flat big stones in one corner of the yard, which probably represent where the outhouse used to be, but also always seem to demarcate a miniature graveyard, markers of lives far past, energy long from active but faintly humming or glowing at the periphery of perception).

This most recent time I found a rusty pin about 2.5 inches in diameter from Walt Disney World. Top to bottom it read as follows:

1. Happy Birthday (pre-printed, arc across top)

2. Cake, three layers with "9" written in magic marker.

3. Tablecloth or snow-topped hillside supporting the cake, with the name "Kate" written in the same marker, flanked by Mickey Mouse heads on either side.

4. Cursive "Walt Disney World," pre-printed.

5. Where Dreams Come True, pre-printed.

The pin was rusted and discolored, but I couldn't figure out in an image search what year it dated from.

Spent the rest of the afternoon daydreaming about a treacly novel called "Kate's Room," about a couple who move out to the suburbs, to an old house they soon discover is haunted by the ghost of a 9 year old girl. They can't have children of their own, see, and for whatever reason adoption isn't their bag. At first fright the ghost just seems like a final insult from the world.

The ghost has a young girl's taste and objects until they furnish her room properly, etc. Eventually the couple and the ghost girl become friends. The novel doesn't end happily ever after, but it ends brightly enough, with the couple realizing that they might find happiness in the suburbs, a woman, her husband, and a bright little ghost girl with a world of potential. A sort of magic realist response to "Revolutionary Road."

idea for pharmaceutical

2009-08-06T19:21:00.000-04:00

RePatria, the drug to restore one's inner patriot.

RePatria may cause a severe allergic reaction. Stop taking it and get emergency medical help if you have any of these signs of an allergic reaction: hives; difficulty breathing; swelling of your face, lips, tongue, or throat.

RePatria can cause side effects that may impair your thinking or reactions. Until you know how this medication will affect you during waking hours, be careful if you drive, operate machinery, pilot an airplane, or do anything that requires you to be awake and alert. You may feel sleepy for one or more election cycles.

Some people using this medicine have engaged in activity such as driving, eating, or human history and later have had no memory of the activity. If this happens to you, stop taking RePatria and talk with your doctor about another treatment for your grave national doubt.

Ad campaign: before and after RePatria. Unlikely spokespersons (Bin Laden, Charles Manson, etc.)

travel yarn

2009-08-05T22:44:00.000-04:00

When you go to Cortázar's grave you have to bring something. I thought about leaving a motivational note or a little stone, a Metro Card or a Lonely Planet guide. Nat didn't weigh in, he just munched on a piece of French bread. In the end I couldn't figure anything out and it started to rain.

On this trip we learned that Nat and French bread are soul mates. You can take the kid anywhere in Paris in any weather condition and if he has a piece of bread, he's fine. No bread, another story entirely. Though Nat likes French bread, he dislikes gendarmes, and dislikes French prison yet more.

In fairness to my son (and for the benefit of my fellow travelers) I should also note that, contrary to the spirit of family bonding, Napoleon III's bed is no longer suitable for use as a changing table, nor is his chamber pot intended for use by the general public.

Confinement allowed for meditation. Upon our release it struck me that I could leave a ball of yarn on JC's grave. Though we spent our remaining week wandering Paris, I couldn't find one anywhere. Finally, on our last day, L. took us to the Montparnasse Monoprix. In place of yarn I could only find a spool of thread, but it would have to suffice. Nat selected a pan viennoise.

When we got back to the gravesite I laid the spool on the grave. Nat had eaten most of the viennoise but he threw down the piece he had left, in case our man was hungry.

reform committee

2009-07-09T02:22:00.000-04:00

One additional suggestion for federal health policy reform efforts: to ensure that these efforts are successful, the government ought to establish a ten-year committee to analyze the problem.

The committee will issue 2 reports at five-year intervals. It will be evenly bipartisan and should reflect the perspective of every stakeholder (doctor, nurse, worker, consumer, for-profit business owner, administrator, policymaker, family member, etc.)

The first five year report will serve as a Mid-Term Report, and provide hints about the contours of the second, final report. The Final Report may also recommend an additional ten-year period, which could itself be extended. Each report should be drafted by the same unpaid intern.

Questions to be addressed include: What is every possible angle on the problem? Is there a problem? Is a solution necessary? If it will always be broke, should we fix it?

mower

2009-06-28T09:01:00.000-04:00

We got our mower on craigslist for 10 bucks. It's electric and it takes two outdoor extension cords to cover the yard. The trick is working out a pattern on the grass that doesn't involve constant danger of running them over. That kills the whole process and feels kind of dangerous, like, you can picture the cord spraying electricity, like the tentacle of a pissed off octopus.

The whole thing is rusted through, like an abandoned boat or one littered with the skeletons of erstwhile explorers. One of the wheels wobbles and the handle is missing a bolt halfway down. Easily fixable with electrical tape. When we bought it the motor didn't work, but that was easily fixable too with a soldering iron and a voltmeter.

I mowed the back, then the front, skirting the tangle of rose bushes (project for other day). It was looking pretty good, only trouble was that now my grass was shorter than the neighbors' grass on either side. I ran down to the hardware store for a couple of extra extension cords, came back and did the Green's front yard and back yard. Mowed Rose's yard while her dog barked through the French doors. The across the street neighbors' yards as well.

I was happy with myself, like I was making a contribution as opposed to town vampire. Looking down the block in either direction, you could see a symmetric plane of grass, albeit one that still grew higher two houses down in either direction. I went back to the hardware store and bought as many cords as I could carry.

They kept getting snagged on people's fences, on their porches and hedges. I knocked over a bird bath, and some kids kept messing up the chain playing double dutch. I went back to the house, got another glass of water, and put on work gloves.

It was starting to get late but I finished the Egan's yard, then the yard on the other side of Rose's house, people I haven't met but who waved through their front window. I could picture in my mind a sea of grass waiting to be mowed, through the town and out across the state. It would be easier to see it all from the air, then again the height of the grass would be less apparent.

My legs get tired and I start thinking about dinner. I realize I've plum forgotten about the edging. It'll only take a couple minutes.

storm summer

2009-06-26T23:39:00.000-04:00

The clouds come every evening in dark black and blue clusters of soft still-setting paper-mâché in darkening swirls thickening under gravity the rain is too liquid violent fragmenting blue light in torrents of electricity and breath and the birds have all flown somewhere else until this all blows over the mornings are quiet waiting that fans out from the porches into the air that hangs from the branches on the tip of everyone's tongues that echoes from the ground to the reflective glass of antique windows painted futile shut against the sneaky whims of air that people notice and watch their backs against as if to make sure that as they walk the whole town isn't disappearing behind them a void of space a retreating of form back to empty essence.

The cats grow restless on window ledges hemmed by screens if the mystery were small they could hunt it kill it and bring it back surrendered to their masters but it's
everywhere filling the town and seems bigger worth bowing to in the pecking order not attacking to kill outright wait until it really sleeps no one knows entirely what the quiet means besides storm has passed another on its way.

The flowers are still hungover are justifying the next gallons as hair of the dog stoic in the manner of a man backed into a corner the ground will stand its ground the sun shines ignoring the required retreating of light ignoring what it and everything around it knows must change only the lonely roots smile to themselves snaking everywhere underground to and fro preparing for the banquet feast a swelling to the point of nearly touching in the wet dirt.

Rain it rained so hard and on the road I almost lost control of the car a truck was passing on my left and shooting water all across the windshield of the dumb small car I had the little one in the back and I couldn't see anything but water covering too much the whole car it actually occurred to me maybe the river had gone to higher ground and we were plowing under water my hands kept the wheel shaky or straight all long enough that I knew I was still on the road but had no control at all.

Then I could see again and he was still asleep, safe in the back of the car. I know you trust me but what if I fuck it up and fail you.

health reform that works

2009-06-25T19:51:00.000-04:00

America spends far more on health care than other industrialized nations, yet lags persistently behind in health outcomes. With quality widely considered by experts to be a lost cause, successful health reform will focus exclusively on cutting costs, killing the poor, and maximizing profit for doctors and private industry.

In that spirit, a 13-point plan to destroy America's health care system:

1. Require doctors and all care providers to adopt a Patriot version of the Hippocratic Oath on which unanimous bipartisan agreement has be reached.

2. Ensure that the public makes informed decisions about pharmaceuticals, by requiring medical journals and scientific trials to operate under the full editorial control of the drug companies that produce them. Disallow the sale and manufacture of a given pharmaceutical when its patent expires after 7 years, requiring replacement with new brands. Outlaw generics and the export of drugs to the developing world.

3. Create Altria Wellness Centers in communities and schools, promoting Kraft and Phillip Morris products to remedy common ailments.

4. Require a license for exercising more than 10 minutes per day, to be maintained by unsubsidized weekly fees, and policed by randomized steroid, human growth hormone, and drug testing. Disallow exercise for high risk patients.

5. Increase the use of paper records; where possible incorporate scrap paper. Prescriptions should be written in crayon, or using human feces and an improvised wooden utensil.

6. Health reform needs a public option: an option for the public to purchase private insurance at inflated prices. Eliminate Medicaid, Medicare, and CHIP.

7. Require drug and device manufacturers to provide payments and incentives to providers and physicians, with a zero tolerance policy regarding transparency.

8. Strengthen existing incentives for tests and procedures; eliminate all documentation of primary care outcomes.

9. Increase the prevalence of C-sections, reduce the use of doulas, and eliminate the education of women about the risks and benefits of obstetric procedures. Create special, more lenient laws concerning the murder of abortion providers.

10. The number of uninsured Americans under 65 has increased more than 10 million since 1999, or an increase of little more than 1 million per year. Increase premium costs and coverage restrictions to magnify this trend and further reduce costs.

11. Appoint Princeton University's Peter Singer as Czar for Life of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, giving him broad discretion on policy decisions.

12. Close all free clinics, and require insurance coverage for care in all provider settings. Enact legislation banning the un-insured and under-insured from stepping within 500 feet of all provider settings.

13. Bomb France. And Cuba. And Scandinavia as a whole. More wars = more patients.

(For SE.)

24-hour news cycle

2009-06-25T07:48:00.000-04:00

In the basement of the Fermi National Accelerator laboratory, scientists have set up a large maze, home to a continuous experiment. At one end, typically at the start of a given day, they release a rat. At the other is a blue button, and when the rat reaches and pushes the button a cube of delicious cheese drops onto a small red plate positioned in front of the button. The maze spans the entire 3.9 mi. facility, from the Tevatron to the Main Injector, and under ideal circumstances it takes the rat a full day to complete.

When the button is depressed, an action impetus is also broadcast via satellite into the brains of the editors in chief and station directors who lead our nation's noble information infrastructure. An internal chemical reaction forces them to tire of whatever subject they were covering nonstop and to seize instantly on whatever next topic comes to mind.

Sometimes the test rat gets lost or dies, corresponding to news events we will later consider to have been major, such as a hurricane or the marital strife of vague celebrities. The next day, scientists send in an additional rat. On rare occasions (9-11, etc.) the second rat also gets lost or dies, and a third must be released into the maze. If for some reason a fourth fails to reach the goal, a technician presses the button, the maze is checked for obstructions and cleansed of missing rats, and a new rat is released the following day.

Rats completing the maze successfully are repatriated to New York City.

cautery

2009-06-24T22:02:00.000-04:00

Burning bridges give you even more than burning airlines. Because eventually they can send other planes, whereas a bridge takes time. If you want to be alone, start with the bridges. To burn a friendship fast throw insults, piss on the outstretched hand. To burn a friendship slow ignore it. When your friend drives past, turn off the lights so they can see you hide. Ignore the doorbell. To burn a relationship heap emotional abuse until you've chased the person out of town. Now call her every night and tell her how much you love her. (Tell her you're sorry, tell her you need your baby). Burn away your potential for sorrow, for kinship, for hope for anything beyond a sports score or a boatload of cash. Burn away love so the only other death you ever have to face is your own. Reach out just enough to maintain a perfunctory variable sex life. Burn away potential for emotion as a kind of cautery. Only keep hate, you need that as fuel. The others simply aren't cost effective. There are a lot of ways to burn memories. One technique is burn as you go-- pay no attention to anything that happens and you don't have to worry.

Father's Day night L. and I got a sitter and saw Up. I couldn't stop crying for the whole movie. I was happy to, it's been years since I was able to outside of being maudlin wasted. Part of being able to cry was that it was a beautiful movie, economically edited, exquisitely written, and wonderfully drawn. Another part was what parenthood has done, loving the little one without the slightest hesitation. Part of it is being more open than maybe ever, to the way I feel, the way other people feel. Part of it is that I wasn't eating popcorn or drinking a big fat soda. There was only the movie, and L and I holding hands, and our lives here.

metronome

2009-06-23T08:43:00.000-04:00

I messed up my ears hanging out with guitarists. Nothing angers a guitarist like the keyboard player asking him to turn down. Then I was 30 and half deaf too.

Bands are a good place to learn that god hates you, that only rarely does man understand his fellow man. Most bands are amateur hour, without measure or law, a battle of myopic painters to see who can pitch the most neon onto a canvas too small to share, while the drummer runs forward to smear logs of fresh shit over everything in the manner of an expressive gibbon. Silence and space banished to un-imaginability.

To aid me in my solo project, to be completed by 2025 at the absolute latest, I've procured a hearing aid with a metronome implanted in it. A small remote adjusts volume, tempo, and tone. The presets include Classic (faux pendulum metronome, Digital Madness (treble-bound octaves of any note), and Dom DeLuise (in which the late actor exhorts one to 'prac-tice' repeatedly in a number of time signatures and languages).

The metronome keeps me out of trouble. A sense of time curving, stretching and contracting is a narcotic for me, and prior to the installation I would go to great and reprehensible lengths to achieve it. The metronome is handy late at night, when cartons of ice cream would otherwise go emptied, or at my desk at work, when productivity might slip for a second, or an hour, or a day. It's handy in dull social settings. The metronome adds order, dividing the world into manageable, symmetric packets, provides information I know I can trust as valid and precise.

Early on, my mother and father urged me to success, to earn, if not a position as the conductor of an elite institution such as the All South Jersey Orchestra, then at least a modicum of rhythmic dignity and respectability in whatever profession I chose. Rare to consensus in all else, they insisted on the metronome as a unified voice. Practice is useless without it, Man needeth but food, sleep, and a metronome, etc.

But if my mother ran an errand and the mood struck him, my dad would quietly lock the swinging bar of the metronome in place and leave me to practice on my own, with my own sense of time. The notes carried me out to sea, into the depths and currents of feeling. When she returned, it always took me by surprise and I would back quickly away from the piano, as if it were a man just knifed in the back.

For a while when I lived on my own, I was happy to do without a metronome. But I see now that that was a foolish waste of time. That a man with his feet on the ground is to be admired and respected, that a man at sea is in trouble, whether he knows it or not.