close reading

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.