natural selection/monkeys with typewriters edition

Implied in the bones of trees collected in water underground in the soil in the latent sky in the still holding together of nature despite our every abuse to its liver Implied in the rolling bending sixths of Misterioso in the chills one gets watching someone nail it on dumbass American Idol maybe even in indie rock or the avant garde Implied in evolution in the profusion and elegance of species in physics in the ineffable multiplicity of the universe Implied in babies, kids, in the light that lights the dying eyes of elders, the love and care people show each other when push meets shove So if all of this is (infinite) monkeys with (infinite) typewriters all the more it’s worth wonder and admiration scratching one’s head/hanging onto one’s hat Worth reverence and attempts at grace and honoring the singularity of the now its unbreakable tie to past sacrifice and future possibility the sheer stupid luck of existence by any reckoning Written on the cusp of spring, from a fucking Greyhound bus

replacements

The other night I received my four year sobriety coin. I was smiling, and I told my home group that while I first thought I could do this by myself, I knew now that that was wrong. I wasn't just saying shit I thought they wanted to hear. It was also what I really felt, or at least wanted to be truly what I did feel. In 2009 I knew I needed to stop drinking--the warning signs were myriad, bright and garish-but I was naive about what it would mean to go without medication I'd relied on for my entire adult life. The question for me has been about replacements. When I make progress it's because I'm being conscious about replacing alcohol with things that are actually good for a person: exercise, therapy, meditation, acupuncture, music, literature, being there for my family of choice and my family of origin, connecting with new friends and reconnecting with my old ones, seeking to reconnect with my sense of creativity, purpose, and destiny. When I falter it's by passive aggressively embracing death, isolating, hiding, falling into fear of a past I've never outrun, by overeating, by misgauging and poorly modulating my emotional, spiritual, and professional responsibilities on any given day, by looking at smoking as a solid alternative. In any moment I have a choice about which route to take, about which tendency to feed and push along. And if I sought your advice on the subject, which would you suggest.

the glacier arrives

Neural plasticity in extreme slow-mo or stop time captured by zero patient enough photographers: one step forward, a thousand steps back. The beauty of neural plasticity in this style being that moving in reverse at an average pace of -999 steps per, subject will arrive backwards at the right location. Less glacially the image could be captured by one step forward by some rotund guy and he falls into a kind of self-inflicted canyon for a year. Think Dagobah bog but with 100 drunk/demented/unforgiving Yodas, or that biopic scene where Bruce Lee fights his demons only substitute some white guy much more out of shape. The demons are better educated, better toned and our Mr. Smith's carrying just some kind of Nerf weapon, and he keeps digging himself further in, been down so long it... The glacier is busy but rest assured he hasn't forgotten you, he's on his way. The glacial profession one not so much of on-time delivery or reliability as its norm (you get what you pay for) only now scramble its compass or momentum. Add an ellipsis that in some Virginia Woolf way encapsulates a million years... and the glacier arrives. Something to promise your grandkids their great great grandkids will see. Geologic time as a precedent for a before work routine, or for the response to overdue correspondence. The spacetime continuum as a boundless storage place for disappointments and fears. Eastern Standard Time as an awkward collection of societal near misses and almost-there-for-yas. The glacier arrives and is met with zero fanfare, an empty town, a blinking neon sign for Vacancies. "The Glacier Arrives" the avant garde musical, with Korean opera as its inspiration, one beat per year. The Glacier meditation: focus on breathing for a split second, then panic for a year or so. If you realize you've stopped focusing on your breathing for Christ's sake you fuck get back to it. Don't feel guilty feel SUPER GUILTY and maybe if you meditated more it wouldn't function so flabbily. The glacier arrives: slow blog movement. In my next dispatch (July 2068?): live Tweeting the reluctant death bed scene.

reveling and reckoning

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

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

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 breaks 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. 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

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.