Self Conscious, the J Eric Miller blog

a prayer. (you'll like this one because you're in it).

2005-04-01T12:02:00.001-08:00

This is all possible.
It is possible that this rather tight knit group of bloggers that has been together for a few months now, that they don’t really exist. That one person is writing all these blogs, downloading and scanning a few pics to make them more realistic. To suggest real human beings, when in fact they are just stolen faces.
It is possible.
That there is no Larry, Melissa, Holly, or Jilleyn. No Radio Humper. No Odd Child No Leva Malone or Kung Pow/Adrain. No JEricMiller. No Cersten or Kriwki Girl.
It is not unequivocally impossible.

It is possible that:
There is some savant kid writing all of this from his parents’ basement.
Or:
One of these bloggers is real, and the inventor of the rest.

Made up people commenting on other made up peoples' made up blogs, having programmed interactions.
It is possible that this little blogger world is the creation of one mind and that mind gods it all.

Maybe it’s Holly or Jilleyn, who know each other like, well, sisters, but maybe one of them or the other, maybe she’s behind it. She’s created all the rest of us, and the other, she doesn’t even know it. She believes in Larry and JEricMiller and Melissa.
Or maybe it IS Melissa, whose blog suffered a martyr’s death but about which we hear whisperings of resurrection. Maybe she’s behind it.
Or maybe it is Larry (notmyrealname) Jones, and all the rest, they are just facets he sees of himself.
Cersten? Kwirki? Odd Child?
Who?

In any case, it can’t be J Eric Miller.
I told you from the start I was made up.
What I want to know is: which one of you did it?
I woke up at five this morning and I want to know who wrote that into my existence. Couldn't you let me sleep?
The truth is, I’m not one hundred percent happy with how you’ve been blogging me.
The truth is, I’d like you to fix some things.
All right? Do I need to say please?
Start with this: make my brain well.
I want an easy mind. And I don’t want to have to go through a lot of work to get there. Don’t write me into counseling. Just fix it. Snap your fingers. Give me an epiphany. Blog it. Type it out.
Ok?
Give me that entry.
Ok?

And I want a soul that’s clean.
I don’t want you to write me through the myth of baptism or something like that. Just do it, wash me. Give me that entry. Type: I know I am good. Blog that for me.
And hurry up with that one, would you?

And add three inches to my height and, say, twenty five pounds to my weight. We’re talking about muscle, here, ok? And don’t make me go to the gym to maintain it. Just freeze me in that body. I’ve got other physical complaints. So what I’m asking, is that you be my surgeon. Can this please be my extreme makeover day, but without all the blood and stuff?
Just write it.
Just blog it.
It’s just a fucking entry. It’s just words. Would you do that?There’s so much I want.
And it is so easy for you.
Whoever you are. That kid in the basement writing me up. Or Radio Humper. Or Leva Malone.
Whoever you are, listen to me.
Please.
I want other things.
Listen.
All right, here’s what I want. I’m going to give you five days from Sunday to fix it.
I want:
I want the Garden.
I want the Eve.
I want the Vegetarian Paradise.
The wolf and the lamb.
My own heart at ease.

Am I asking for much?

life is crazy candy baby

2005-03-31T14:50:00.000-08:00

ok, so i'm proud of myself.
in my office, ready for my graduate seminar, and what i want, it's sugar.
swedish fish.
cinnamon bears.
something like that. a kick of some kind.
my job, it sounds easy, and maybe it is, but you're drained after a class. all that emmotional energy. maybe it's just from trying to take yourself seriously.
(my little addiction to my little instant audience).
you need something to start with.
mike and ikes.
dots.
laughy taffys.
you know, a rush.
thursday and i'm always tired by this time.
but i'm trying not to do that.
you know, sometimes i go all the way. i've been a fruition for a few months and that's tough. try it: only uncooked foods, raw vegetables, nuts, fruit.
but what i play with with a lot more frequency is the no refined sugars, few processed foods type thing. you ask yourself, what do you want. and you don't know.
(body fat 3%.)
(optimal health)
(the feeling of having defeated yourself, your worldy hungers [right, try giving up kissing then, fucking])
i'll hit it hard for a few months and then eat a fucking bear.
or fish.
a friend of mine, m, who is hiding out in mexico, literally, he has all kinds of habits.
i knew him in beirut where he was on the outs with his wife, a professor who hated him and probably still does.
he sweated bourbon and he was the kind of guy that could get you in real trouble.
of course, a tree doesn't fall when someone pushes on it. it's got to be ready to go. i saw him lean once against another friend and the trouble that resulted when that tree fell was tremendous.
anyway, trouble in beirut, if you can get to it, that can be hardcore. in a place where you americaness buys you everything, there are certain lines that if you cross, you'll never recross. you're done.
specail treatment, like love, can so quickly turn into its opposite.
anyway, m, he only does heroin once a year, on his birthday.
(is there any such thing as clean?
sure, being dead.)
so, i walk over to the bookstore as i've done the last few weeks. get out my card so i can buy a bag of candy. a handful of sugar.
standing there, foot to foot. every decision a hard one, and the counter girl, she's used to me.
candy candy i can't let you go. candy candy i love you so.
hot tamales.
lollipops.
and then: fuck it. it's not my birthday.
fuck it. walk away.
now i know this doesn't seem like that big of deal, but you know, for me, in this one day at a time sort of way, i like it.
winning like that, it gives me a kick.
not as much of a kick as sugar, but still.

today

2005-03-31T13:41:00.000-08:00

i've been productive.
i wonder, if i'd written reproductive, what would you imagine me doing?
on sunday, i'm going to dissapear for five days or so.
not like the invisible man.
i'm not going to be swept away by aliens.
or the government.
a quieter quiet than all that. there will be nothing really to talk about when i get back.
like the pictures cut out of your memory. the scenes on the editing floor.
i'm going to dissapear for five days or so and none of what happens then will seem essential.
but then again, none of any of this really does, does it?
perhaps this is why i've had a recent post frenzy.
i'll keep it up. look for me tomorrow. saturday.
anyway, it's been a productive day. the things i've gotten done. just sat down and gotten done. hmmm.

2005-03-29T16:36:00.000-08:00

post op

pluck me

2005-03-29T13:07:00.000-08:00

the girl that waxes my eyebrows, she tells me she's half cuban.
i tell her all the girls i meet here seem to be half cuban.
i tell her i have personal space issues.
i tell her i don't like leaning back in the chair with someone hovering over me.
no offense, i say. it's not about you. and it's certainly not about the pain--does it hurt much?--but i just don't like having anybody in my space.
in that chair, i babble and babble. i’ll say anything when i’m not sure of myself.
this whole thing, it's worse than a haircut but not as bad as the dentist.

how i end up here is a bunch of different things. first, my ex wife, the good one, on my last visit to colorado, she told me i ought to get my eyebrows waxed. she's always trying to get me into some kind of condition where some poor girl will accidentally fall in love with me and remove some ill defined feeling of guilt from my ex wife's conscience.
anyway, she tells me this: get your eye brows waxed.

and i considered it before, with the second now ex wife, who was obsessed with hair removal, who used to visit (probably still does) a doctor with a laser, but since she took her clothes off professionally i guess you'd call that a business expense.

these ex's, they get hair on my brain.

and so i've meaning to do it. i don't know what for. some kind of preparation. maybe for the Apocalypse, Yeah, ok, he can come in--sharp eye brows, the rest of those untweezed bastards, send 'em to hell.

other girls try to convince me to get even balder. they want to see some serous shaving. me, i’m just procrastinating this little eyebrow thing.

but then i come home from getting my taxes done, and i see the car of the cleaning lady.
(yes, this too is not something i normally do; seriously, what am i preparing for?)
anyway, you know how uncomfortable that is, being in your house while somebody you’ve paid cleans it.

so what i do, i start driving. and i pass a salon with a sign in the window.
WAXING

it’s no done deal yet.
i hang out in front of the salon for awhile. not sure how i feel about going in. about actually telling somebody what i'm thinking about doing. when the lobby area is all clear of customers, i bite the bullet.
the truth is, if the girl behind the counter was my type, if i found her attractive, i’d still be bushy above my eyes, because i just wouldn’t be able to bring myself to even say the word “wax” to her.
but as it happens, she’s not my type.
the girl behind the counter, she and i stare at each others eyebrows for a few moments after i tell her in a quiet voice what i might be there for.

and then she starts hollering the name of another girl, calling her up front, V! V! and i know that i'm already committed.

of course V, she’s the kind of girl i’m attracted to.

so back there, in the little room with the nice lights, leaning back in the chair, still as hell, i am telling the girl all these things.
i’m telling her about my personal space issues and ex wives and all the half Cuban girls i know.
i'll say anything when i'm nervous.
and she's is applying and ripping and it all hurts a bit. like this burn.
i’m babbling and trying to keep my eyes closed and she is breathing on my face and what i feel for a few moments is that love we feel for those people who have us in absolute power.

then it’s over. red slashes below and above my eyes, like i’m wearing some pink eye shadow.

the house is clean, the day is pretty, my taxes are done, and whatever i think i ought prepare for, well, i have.

my son and me

2005-03-28T19:04:00.000-08:00

last Colorado visit, pre-Karate class

Schiavo

2005-03-28T18:27:00.001-08:00

My son, over the telephone, what he wants to know, if he goes “unconscious”, is it ok, or at least should it be ok to not feed him? I try to remember what I thought about when I was four. I try to remember what I was figuring out. I don’t know. I don’t have much to say. It just bothers me is all.

a friend indeed

2005-03-27T15:07:00.000-08:00

…A friend from a time when I made little friends calls me in the late Saturday night, from some sleep I’m fortunate to find, and the phone rings, this girl calling in the rain, outside a bar, I can hear the water and the music and the people, a little drunk this friend, and what she says is, she’s got a ride home, but she’d rather have a ride from someone else.

And it makes me feel good to know that I can be that somebody else, that at two thirty in the morning you might call me, not just for a ride, but a particular kind of ride, a particular kind of company. This friend whose just been through an auto accident, who is afraid now of driving even when the rain doesn’t pour, she’s going to feel safest with me.

I pull up sleepy eyed, and she comes running out of the bar, all black hair and red shirt, all cleavage and attitude and smile, her little crowd of fans at the plastic patio windows, and I wonder if she even really knows how it is, almost like a butterfly, so innocent of her attractiveness, almost unaware, but then again, if she were unaware, she wouldn’t choose that shirt, those pants, this girl who gets into the cab of the truck, where it is warm, who brings the smell of liquor and smoke and the deeper scent of her perfume and of her; this girl who is a mixture of calculated and accidental beauty.

And the boys press their nose against the plastic and think seedy things and she never stops smiling, wiping the water from her face, shaking out her hair, and it’s warm in here, and the rain falls hard and the conversation, this drive home, it’s good.

I think how lucky it is for both that something between us survived that meeting in a bar, so few things, including my first marriage, that begin that way do, and fewer yet the oversexed openings of half drunk kisses and wherever they may lead.

And yet here we are, in the comfort of something that has evolved into full on friendship, each a person to whom the other can speak honestly, and in soft voices against the beating of the rain, we do.

She’s telling me about the accident again, how it made her feel, this thing that repeats itself in her mind, sudden mortality, absolute chaos…

She’s telling me about the summer before when we met and how we went to a fountain in a square and got wet, and along with everything she says, she is smiling, no bitterness in this girl.

She says, I’m taking stock of my life, taking stock of this last year.
And I think, Yes, taking stock.

She’s telling me about the trauma in which we met.

This last year.

(A year ago, I woke every morning as if to a sonic boom.
All around me, everything was shaking.
Every day was a sleepwalk day.
I was living in a vacuum.

{Even if you tell her to go, this is what she leaves, the empty space where her body has been; even if you doubt your love—and it was dumb to doubt your love but then again if you doubted it, was it love?—there is still the habit of her to break; so she’s gone because you’ve asked for her absence, and in that following dark, after the slamming of the door, this girl you loved with and without doubt, this girl to whom afterwards you will always bitterly refer to as the stripper ex, when in reality you know they want to be called dancers, when in reality, she is not reduced by a long shot to that profession in your mind, this thing you call her justthesame because reduction is in fact necessary, when this girl, this wife, is gone you will miss her, and your will romanticize her, the way you do the places you’ve been and the people you’ve been with}.

How do you come to termsl with your choices? You try to make them right.

And perhaps my choice was right.
But in the resulting confusion of decisions made big, I assumed that my desire to separate myself from this second wife, this dancer, this stripper, this unreducable entity, was because I wanted to trade one for the many.

And Darwin winds his clock.

But if it was right, that choice, it wasn’t based on that kind of trade.The choice to be justified, it has to be the one for the none.

{“I wanted so much/to have nothing to touch/I’ve always been greedy that way.”}

Only I didn’t know it. Or want to face that knowledge. Or myself all alone.

Those nights of furious dating. You wait for the girl to see through you. The rattle of your laugh. The distance in your eyes. Something, anything. To ferret out the mechanics of the fucking. That you weren’t really there. That’s the secret you’re keeping, but so well that even you yourself won’t admit to knowing it. That’s me a year ago, in the aftermath of another divorce. These things compound upon each other. Soon, you get to suffer every goodbye in each subsequent goodbye.

Your life is about reverberation, echo, aftershock.

That’s me in the later winter and early spring; that’s me in the summer.Working up a proper face, a proper costume with which to go out into the night, to take some girl by the hand, anything at all to keep away from being alone with my thoughts.

Like any period of sickness. Or maybe that was recovery. What is sickness but the process of recovery? Or complete loss.

(It will go one way or the other. You’d better know when you take the field that this is a battle to the death.)

Waiting for someone to unmask you.
Someone to remind you that you’re not ready for any of this.
That you ought to go ahead and just face your demons.
Survive your exorcism.
And so on.
That’s you pressed against some girl and in the center of that pressing, or maybe around it’s edges, there’s always the moment that feels like epiphany, that perhaps illusionary moment when you feel somehow torn open, somehow seen inside of, and you believe in communion, in bonding, you could be those candle figures with a single wick burned to melt together.

{No wonder the French call it the little death}

And if she won’t ferret the truth out, you will.
Those zombie days of deaf and dumb hollow head walking, when your eyes catch on anything and stay without any real reason. Those furious nights of serial dating.)

We’re driving in the rain, the heater on, the music light, the company of a friendship that was born in the heart of that old storm, the easy voice of a rare person I know to trust, red shirted and black haired, that smile she really doesn’t know, it's so natural, like the lines on her hand.

She’s telling me about her boyfriend, she’s telling me about her accident.
You feel her embracing the world. The energy of more than youth.

And I take stock of the last year, as if she is there to ask me to do that.

(What do I have to my name?
An flat and wide screened television.
A thousand dvd’s.
These are my valuables.
The things I carry.
I’ve gained another divorce.
Survived pneumonia.

And now it is spring again, of a new year in which nothing really terrible has happened.
This 2005.
This year in which from time to time I’ve even acted wisely.
Who knows, it could be the best year of my adult life.

[No year will equal that of a childhood year.])

This last year, when we met, this white smiled girl and I, in trauma, and this new year, when we survive sickness and accident, and are ready to take stock.

And we arrive, and sit talking for awhile longer, this cleaner communion, one more real, that doesn’t require any grasping, any gasping, anything at all but the ease from which almost all good moments are born, I think about us, the two of us, good enough people in the end, really, and how we’re both ok, at this moment, and, even, in the context of our lives.

I think about the simple pleasure of friendship, that more rare than we know thing.

paging doctor freud

2005-03-26T09:17:00.000-08:00

(what you ask yourself: if your eyes were a different color, would your life had been the same?)

Strange dreams the night before last: an earthquake (and god, how the building of my class did roll for a moment in reality that morning); and then: a night like a painting of a night, the colors were so moody, and me on a rock in a sea the same color as the night, sloppy waved and dangerous, and the girl, a girl i knew long ago, one of those people who isn’t evil but essentially too self absorbed to have the capacity for real empathy, this girl whose parents must never have loved her properly, this poor girl who was so intent on taking care of the little girl inside her that she could never love another, this girl who also as it turns out was one of the most sexually deviant people i’ve known (if you believe in sexual deviance, and remember, whatever you do, somebody, somewhere, would call it deviant), this girl who was always walking around the outside of the fire and trying to get people to take her inside, in my dream she was on the rock with me, opposite side of the jagged dome, this girl with her pale skin and dark hair, she was wearing only panties, white, if it’s significant, looking small but not cold and not as afraid as i was, appetizing if you stared at her only for a moment, if it is possible to stare for a moment, if you didn’t see the coldness in her eyes or the way her smile looked cruel, if you kept your vision on belly, on hip, on collarbone, the twist of waist, the slope of her ribs, she and i were on the rock and speaking too each other in this dark night above these dark waters, but in this dream, there are no voices, no sounds, or perhaps it was that there was so much sound that all sound was insignificant, so it was our mouths that were moving, and i thought as i often do about the importance of teeth (give me a woman with good teeth and some kind of exercise addiction), and i believed she was trying to lure me into something, this very specific woman who as it may turn out was more than just that one woman, this woman who was perhaps trying to make me re-want her, if want her i ever did (and in fact, once upon a time, i did, and i ate at the table), she was trying to convince me of something i did not trust, and i knew it was my own desire which would betray me, and there was something she was selling, something she was asking for, who knows what, but even if one could know those things, he wouldn’t know enough…

And it occurs to me just now, as I finish writing about it, that perhaps it wasn’t that she was too deep, her motives too complex; perhaps it has something to do with just the opposite, that she was too shallow, her motives too base…

And my own. That side of ourselves we're always trying lobotomize away, though we don't really mean it, though we're in way too much love with it, though we're way too much co-dependant on it, to really really make that change; the way we're always asking ourselves, yes, but who would I be then?

Later, I dreamed of a bear that only wanted to sleep but through some semi-farcical mis- maneuverings between me and a dog, we kept waking the bear, and it was comical to a degree but the consequences felt grave, as they did on the rock with the girl, as if the dream goes on too long, someone is going to get hurt.

This long night of many dreams which is good because it means I've really slept, and I know it in the morning. Trying to emmerge from my dream world into this real world. Trying to figure out if the me in the dream is the same as the me that wakes.

And in the bright and burning light of the first reallyreally legitimate spring day in Kennesaw, GA, a day as hot as the mid-summer day of my childhood mountain home, where the ice wasn’t always off the lake by the end of May, this sunsunny day, I go running, ghost like, the way one runs and gets into another type of consciousnesses, sort of removed from this world, not entirely, but removed just the same, in that state of mind, or that near state of mind, that state of mindlessness perhaps, I pass a woman, in a skirt, linen, I think, and in the sun, her legs show through, shadow legs, like my shadow on the sidewalk, smoother and better than I am, and in my ghost mind this makes her almost magic, almost angelic…

There are pinprick moments of true love based on almost nothing, the perception of a person in orgasm, when everything is golden and anything is possible.

These little addictions that keep us passing the open windows.

addict. oral sex. flyover states. pain. love.

2005-03-23T15:57:00.000-08:00

after eight chocolate dark chocolate mints, they've got NO dairy product.
i'm interested in discipline.
there are things i like to deny myself.
being a vegan is about control, but not about controlling myself.
i make that choice for the illusion that i am controlling the world. that i'm controlling the amount of suffering in it.
it's more like a prayer or a wish.
but it's not about discipline.
still, discipline is a byproduct of being a vegan.
you think about what you put in your mouth. your choices are limited. fucking whey, how many otherwise dairy free products are ruined by whey? and the eggwash at the bakery.
etc.
you do this for years and you break to some degree or another that thing we have with food. that emmotional hunger that eating covers up for us. or smoking. or drinking. of fucking.
i never said i wasn't an addict.
i just said i've mostly broken with food. outside of natural hunger, the kind that reminds you your body need nutrients to stay alive, it's not go that much control on me.
still, these moments of weakness.
after eight dark chocolate mints. what i do, i buy a package from time to time. and then because it is a protein thing, what i do, i make little peanut butter sandwhiches with them as a reward after i work out. eight mints, four scoops of peanut butter, one perfect after workout snack.
only what happens, every time i do that, i feel funny in my heart. god's truth, all slowed down. like the peanut butter is literally in my blood. only when i eat peanut butter on an apple or something, that doesn't happen. so it's the chocolate and the peanut butter. god's truth, every fucking time, it feels like i've been poisoned. i get slow and light headed ten minutes after eating. maybe this is some kind of allergy.
but how stupid am i? how disciplined?
the next day, after the workout, like today, i look at the box, and i just want.
i just want the dark chocolate mints with peanut butter.
this want, it's next to need.
just like the girl you shouldn't fuck again. you know how it's going to go. but your imagination fails you. you tell yourself, it can't be that bad.
hunger.
the thing about pain, whether it is physical or regret based or guilt based or whatever, you never remember how bad it is unless you're in the moment.
like those mints you shouldn't eat. that girl you should sleep with.
god, i can't wait until this box is gone. i have to eat them all. i can't just throw them out. but when they're gone, i'll not buy another. won't have to feel like this again.
.........................................................................................................................................................................
the problem with oral sex is that we treat it as some kind of favor. it's like this thing that if we're lucky, if the girl feels like indulging us, we might get it done. otherwise, outside of that context, sex is all about devouring. mutual desire. what of hers i put in my mouth i don't just do becuase it feels good to her. i do that because it is an act of intimacy. but as guys, this one thing, it's like something we are supposed to be thankful for. there are such girls that treat it as a treat from their side of the event as well. rare and wonderful girl. who goes down just because she can't help it. i remember a woman, not such a long time ago, but in a life that feels different than the one i'm leading now, who acted that way but would follow up with the comment: i love doing that, such an fun way to show i care.
show me you care in other ways. i'd rather see your hunger now, thank you.

(it reminds me, do you remember that story i told you some long time ago, about knead and need? the most hate email i've gotten off the blog, incidentaly. but i mantain, it's a poignant and important story).
........................................................................................................................................................................
a friend of mine, she's just started reading this blog, and she gave me the best description of it.
it's kind of a anti-personal, she said.
yes, i like that.
.........................................................................................................................................................................
speaking of starving (and yes we were if you read between the lines), i wonder wonder what that is like. that kind of hunger. i wonder if that girl they'll turn the machines off on will feel it in anyway. she'll die of thirst, of course, and rather quickly, but i wonder if she'll be aware of it somewhere.
i hope not a lot.
the neccessity of pain in this world.
the way you'd just wander into a fire if it didn't hurt.
the way you'd just never drink if you didn't feel the pain of thirst.
the sharp things we'd not keep away from.
what's wrong with the world is that it is a world that requires pain.
..........................................................................................................................................................................
and on tv, there is the story of all these people, 40,000 a year who seem to go under, who are perfectly still, but fully conscious.
they don't even blink.
they certainly don't speak.
they seem ideally bound with the anesthetic.
but they are full conscious. and the doctors begin to cut. watch those discovey channel operations. doctors are rough. pulling things apart. treating the body like it is dead already.
you'd never want to see your own operation.
and these people, 40,000 a year, they feel it, from beginning to end.
that kind of torture.
now i'm scared to death. what if some day i have to have an operation? what if i don't go under but they think i have?
oh. oh. oh.
what if that happens to somebody i love
..........................................................................................................................................................................
we could all love everybody.
if the world lasted long enough.
while the monkies typed shakespeare.
we could.

list and then block

2005-03-20T19:27:00.000-08:00

it's official:
--punk'd is tired and watered down, and no matter how much ashton k howls and grins, it doesn't mean he's done anything truly funny.
--my new book is out, bloodletting and fruits of lebanon. http://www.litpotpress.com/Fruits/Fruits.html for info.
--nobody really knows which way the rainbows.
--melissa's blog has been dismantled.
--i hate the word novella.
--atlanta is 2142.56 miles from san diego, 2677.33 miles from seattle.
--people love to be the spy but nobody can keep a secret
--the best time you'll ever have with the thing you buy is when you buy it.
--the smartest people i know are all women, but each of them is a little boyish.
--love songs are mostly written from the perspective of that first buzz of obsession or that deepblueregret stage of romanticizing someone you didn't appreciate when she was around.
--butterflies don't kiss.
--there are no beautiful women
--there are no strong men
--that's ok.
--leonard cohen knows he's going to die. listen to his latest album.
--sometimes, even you know you're going to die.
--the kind of parenting with which most people credit God would get you a dirty look in a grocery store.
--grains of pepper are bigger than grains of salt, but you wouldn't want either in your eye.
--if you could push your belly button and be instantly dead, nobody would survive the teen years
--this is not harpers.
--writing is the same form of vanity as modeling. "look at my brain! look at my soul! look at my heart!"
--if you live long enough, you'll probably forgive yourself everything.
--fish feel pain.
--kpp has a name, adrian, and a face
--vonnegut was mostly right. god bless your mr vonnegut.

........................................................................................................................................................................
friday and saturday at the bars. met a local author, i'll plug her book: flyover states. very clever stuff, snappy and insightful. i was innocent enough to be reading it at the gym. me sitting there with chick lit in my lap. at a bar i met a girl who had been on room raiders. she challegned me to a sword fight with those little red drink swords. i've watched room raiders. i'm not proud of this or much of the tv to which i'm witness. i tried to remember if i'd seen her episode. she had one of those mouths that look capable of real acts of devouring. through it she told me something clever i meant to remember for this blog but have forgotten. everybody was drunk. god, it just dawns on me: that's what bars are for. seen from a really grave distance, this would seem problematic. some outerspace race studying us would it find it very odd. that and all our other little suicides. all the destructive things we do that pass for remodeling. on the radio last week they were advertising a "little person" stripper. they were going to have her at a local club, dancing under the name pixie. i've really got little taste for strippers after having shared a divorce with one. it's not the profession, it's just the contex, it's full of memories. the way certain albums you might not listen to again for awhile. anyway, i never was really a strip club guy. you know, seduction is too serious to bring cash into the question. it was really a flat weekend of drinking and semi-socializing. nothing sticks from it very hard. what's there i've got to really drag up, and it's only sunday. my brain is getting worse. depending on what you mean by worse. tomorrow, noon, i read. i'll write you about me reading. then i'll read you about my writing. something like that. driving home one of these weekend nights it occured to me that i'm again at a place where i could stand not to be alone. hmmm.

Yes, Physically.

2005-03-18T14:41:00.000-08:00

--I talk with an old friend, D, of Jersey. D, he’s just returned from Vegas and LA. LA, that’s where we knew each other. What I think about D, he was an innocent when I met him.

There was a night at a bar when I was trying to show a girl some a dark side of me so that she’d want to stop dating. Some things never change, though I’m subtler now. I’d hauled D and one of my roommates with me, and the four of us sat around a dark table with me drinking hard and trying to convince the girl through conversation and action of what bad guy I was.

(You write something like that down and you realize what a dumb ass you have been and sometimes still are).

D, he hadn’t even had a drink at that point in his life. He’d grown up the ward of his grandparents who lived in a community that didn’t allow children. He grew up, essentially, hidden away. Now he was taking care of his grandfather, who had Alzheimer’s, and who was, as far as I could tell, a lovely old man. Anyway, the absoluteness of D’s loyalty to his grandfather endeared D to me.

So how do I reward him? I invite to a bar to see me be an asshole, and while there, when perhaps I’ve run out of really terrible things to suggest to the girl, when there is all ready a broken glass on the table and the night is really a mess around us, I say, D, have you ever had your ass kicked?

And he looks at me sort of blankly across the table, looks at me over his Seven Up or tonic water or orange juice or whatever the fuck he was drinking in those good old days before he learned to pretend he liked the taste of the kind of poison we all chug, D looks past my roommate, who loved shows like these, who came along often to see my relationships, if you could call them that, crash, D looks past her to me, and past the girl, M, the girl I’m trying to get rid of, this girl who had very long legs, and who, as it would turn out, would not be fully fed up with me yet, this poor long legged girl who sat there sort of pretending it was just a night out with a with friends and the guy she was fucking, D looks over at me blankly for a moment and then says, What, do you mean physically?

…A couple weeks later, with a couple girls I know, we do, in fact, get in a bar fight. D does in fact get his ass kicked. Physically.

This is not all my fault.

Part of the problem is D chugs a half glass of brandy at my apartment before we go. He does this primarily because of the girls. Asshole that I can be, I never goaded D to drink. I just enabled his decision to do so.

So now we’re at Canters with these girls and one thing leads to another and the long and the short of it is that it’s D, whose never had his asked kicked physically, end up on the floor while the guy who has thrown him there is standing over him kicking, and me, I’m rolling around in a booth with a couple of the guy’s friends while a few of the others try to reach in and punch.

When it’s all said and done, which really doesn’t take very long, D wants to know, How’d I do?

This is on the way home with the girls who are pretty silent.

Well, I say, Did you land any punches?

No, he admits. I didn’t have a chance.

So in essence, he was thrown to the floor and kicked repeatedly and wants to know he did.

There’s a little bit of blood on his teeth, but nothing serious. The whole thing starts when he thinks one of the guys is looking at one of the girls with us. Out to impress her or me or something, D, he starts glaring. Me, ever willing to help somebody dig themselves in a deep hole—but also only if I can come with—I roll up a piece of gum wrapper and throw it at the guy.

The rest is history. When it’s all said and done, in the fight I’ve lost the band I wore around my neck in honor of a lost love, and I’ve got a number of little bumps all over my skull. D, he’s got a little blood on his teeth.

He’s been drunk, been in a bar fight over a girl, walked out of it without serious injury, and he wants to know how he did.

Just fine, I tell him.

…And it occurs to me now that probably as often as not those that have come into contact with me, that have known me well and for some amount of time, have been corrupted to some degree or another. Unless they were worse off than I am to begin with. That rare person, though I’ve know them. And depending on what you consider corruption.

the post without a name

2005-03-14T19:56:00.000-08:00

coffee and cigarettes, that's what i'm watching. neither of them a habit of mine. coffee, that stains the teeth and fouls the breath. cigarettes, the same but worse. though i'm a person who is more at ease when i've got something with which to seem occupied. in fact, i'd make a perfect smoker. in fact, i could stand a cigarette right now. i'm sort of edgy. it's the sleeping pills. this is the third night in a row, and they give a kick before they put the hammer to my temple. i'm in the kick part. all kind of jagged. there was a girl, she taught me about the devil's hit. or the double hit. i was never sure what it was called. what it is, she would drag off the cigarette and then put her mouth on yours and blow it in. this was sort of a kiss. we kissed a lot this way, pretending it wasn't really kissing. probably i got a little bit of cancer off her. J. that was her name. but with more letters. what other stuff we did, we couldn't excuse with smoke. she was not a bad sort. she was dating a man from poland or some place like that. he was a writer i've never read, or heard of except for from her. she told me the story of how he came home one day with a grant check from the NEA, proud, inspired, someone had found him worthy. she told me that and blew cigarette smoke into my lungs. lightness into my head. that was a long time ago. i think it was NEA. it was one of those thirty thousand dollar things. i'd like that. that's not going to happen to me. i have a reading on monday. what i need, i'm serious, take me seriously, a valium. how easily can i get that? do one of you have an extra? i'd give you ten bucks if you'd send it to me. is that illegal to ask? probably illegal to do. i've never had a valium. readings, it's like nothing else. not like teaching. i like teaching. readings, i'm not sure i like them. i used to think so but not so much anymore. i'd rather stand in the proper light and make muscles. no, i guess when it comes down to it, the idea of that sort of bothers me too. i guess i'd rather be accidentally witnessed. wouldn't you? this film, it's not bad. very short pieces, semi sharp, the one with iggy pop and tom waites the best so far. tom waites, they played one of his songs in the movie i went to today. robots. that sucked. ask my son. i don't go to the movies anymore. i don't like being with all those people. especially if they eat. especially if they eat popcorn. i used to tend to move around in the movies a lot. this speaks a lot about my inability to really be with people. ask any girl whose not with me and thinks its her idea and she'll tell you that we're not together because i couldn't sit still in the movie theatre. she'll say, he couldn't be around people he was always moving away. people made him under easy. that's what that girl would say. there was a time when i went to all of them, all the movies. the summer before i went for my master's in screenwriting, i thought my life was going to be about movies. so i saw everything. even dennis the menace. god, what the parents must have thought about me. the little girls, they sat behind me bouncing popcorn off the back of my head. but that was a long time ago and now i refuse the theatre. unless my son wants to go. since returning to the country almost three years ago, i've taken him to two movies and seen one other. this was a date. i must have really be trying to convince myself and that girl that i liked her. i know what the problem with this writing is. it's too blocky. this will cause you to skim. all the words jammed together. you look for something of interest. most certainly you are not fully with me. right now, i feel more close to you than normal. isn't that odd? and common. that lack of balance. are you going to give me a valium? that's care. one time, i was working at CBS, the price is right, and a woman, she gave me a pill. she was young and she said i seemed stressed. i liked that she was brave enough to offer a pill to a stranger. especially one in a position that seemed to be of authority. i don't know why i ate it, but i did. it didn't do anything to me. or nothing that i could tell. those were the days. that's a lie. there never have been days. today, today is the day. that's what you'll tell yourself tomorrow. yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. ask most anybody who knows me and they'll tell you that i'm always singing beatles songs. if you don't know this about me, then you don't knowknow me. you know? i remember, graduation party for high school. we had this teacher, mr p, good guy. what he did, he introd us to poetry by starting with songs. sounds of silence. white rabbitt. american pie. we'd analyze those and then move on to poetry poetry. you know, ee cummings. buffal bills defucnt/used to ride a silver smooth stallion/and shoot clay pigeons/onetwothree juslikethat/god he was a handsome man/and what i want to know/is how do you like your blue eyed boy mr death? anyway, he gave us elanor rigby, mr p did. we were all of us drunk at the graduation party singing it, teaching it to an underclassmen who walked around all night drunk and singing it and crying. there was a fire and i burned my platstic gown. those were the days. ask elanor rigby. this reading, monday. christ. what is writing? like everything else, an act of seduction. god, i've gotten lazy about these things. as if people will just fall at your feet. robots, by the way, was souless. even a little kid can see that. especially a little kid can see that. watching my son at karate, i remember how i never learned what people tried to teach me. i learned everything only as i wanted to. i've been a terrible student of everything. even wrestling, i never had the basic moves. i was good, too. third in the state, a wrestling state, but i couldn't do the most basic take down. with me, it had to be other things. other ways. as if people will just roll onto their backs. these colorado days, these colorado nights, they're almost over. what is writing? it is really talking to hear your own voice. only you've got an excuse. you imagine an audience so you're not crazy. not even that vain. is that the right spelling? about that valium, hate to return to it, but it is the one thing that links all this. it is the one thing that acknoweldges you completely. honestly. jarmusch, he lights people properly. do you know how interesting looking you can be? god, with the right camera person, with the right lighting person, you could be something to behold. you know that, right? i'm not talking just about beauty. that might be part of it. but you know, other things can make one interesting. there is no way to end this. where do you think you get the faces of strangers in your dreams. this is important. are they just faces you don't remember remembering or have created them entirely. how close to god do you think you are? do you want to be? answer me, would you? any question here. any stated or implied question. but not later. answer me, you know, now. i would like to read someone else's work. i'd like to fold orgami. is that the right spelling? i'd rather be a dancer or a goalie. in hockey, i mean. there is no way to end this. something abrupt is going to happen. so it goes. i guess most people either feel they are not watched at all, which is not true, no such thing as the invisible, or they feel that they are more watched than they actually are. what would you rather be, if you had to be one or the other, if you COULD be one or the other--absolutely invisible (ok, the absolutely part is redunant, as if there are degrees of invisibility) or fully witnessed? you want your fifteen minutes, but only if you can shape them. do you want people to watch you treating your girlfriend like hell? faking an orgasm? drinking out of the carton? plucking your eyebrows? shrinking in front of your doctor? getting petty over something stupid? scratching? putting on a bandage? oh, no. suck in your stomach, stick out your chin. strike a pose. even the ugly things you talk about, make them virtues. the way if you call yourself a bitch, it implies something good about you. here, do this. make a list of the truly awful stuff about yourself and post them in the comment section. go on, get naked. i dare you. cheap trick, by the way, daring. childrens' games. all this goading. i really like you right now.

perfect day

2005-03-13T20:10:00.001-08:00

The park in Pueblo, it’s different that those Denver suburb parks, those soccer mom gatherings, the parking lots full of Lincoln Navigators and Saabs, the kids in clothes from grown up people stores that decided to franchise into child wear.

That’s not Pueblo. My parents, they live there, in a four story Victorian, a nice neighborhood surrounded by not so nice neighborhoods. Three blocks in any direction will bring you face to face with graffiti, and graffiti artists. You hear of robberies and drug busts and you see the kinds of cars people drive, old and big, and everything is made of crumbling brick. What Phoenix will rise here? What fire first must finish its burn?

And yet, this is the nicest of towns in which I’ve been. In every store, the people are friendly. That slow, old fashioned, real friendliness, that friendliness that only comes from a sense of confidence. Nobody here needs to prove anything to you, whatever side of the counter they’re on. Everybody seems at ease. And easy with you.

This is a predominately Latino town, and the cadence of speech, it’s like that of the rez, so it gives me a sense of nostalgia, and like all nostalgia, there is in this a sense of comfort.

So the parks, they’re different. In Denver, it’s all moms and me. In Pueblo, they’re fathers. Young men mostly, in street dress, the tattoos on their arms, on the back of their necks, wearing sunglasses as they push little kids on swings, watch little kids go down the slide, these few years that these men have to make good, when the idea of fatherhood has half pulled them out of the hood life and before they’ve re-succumb to it, if re-succumb indeed is what they’ll do. And there are grandmothers, sitting on the park benches wearing their quilt jackets in the sun, smoking and staring through glasses at little packs of children that know above all else how to look out for each other.

And we make friends here, too.
And the grandmothers tell me stories.
And the young men never seem to see me.
And the children whiz by.
We stand around with our arms folded.
We smile and we scold gently.
And the kids, they just play.

I can remember exactly what it is like to be one of them. I am glad my life behind me has clear windows into it. I’m glad I still know.

These are the days before the storm.
On Saturday, the wind is up. The sun is warm. It is lovely, lovely, lovely. God, the butterflies have appeared. It couldn’t be better than this. All Saturday this is how I think. Sitting in the park Saturday, this is how I feel.

The calm of this town. The calm of these people, at this moment. The warmth of this spring before it is temporarily reburied.

This is the most perfect day of the year.
I can feel the minutes. I can feel them go. Like the strings of balloons you don’t intend to release. These perfect days. These perfect moments.

Random Thoughts from Colorado

2005-03-09T20:29:00.000-08:00

…Napoleon Dynamite is Cosmo Kramer as a teenager who has yet to outgrow his angst. This is what passes for epiphany in the tired brain I call mine.

…Speaking of fatigue, it occurs to me in the late night, when I’m not asleep, or when a voice wakes me—my own voice, I assume, talking, or sort of half yelling about godknowswhat to godknowswho in the dark, from my so called sleep—and I peer around uncertain and then settle back to take stock of myself, at this, my most desperate of moments, these late night forays into frustration and hopelessness, that no matter what woman I can imagine loving or what women I can remember having loved, not one of them placed beside me in the bed at a time like this could ease me. If anything, my body would only go more rigid. Her voice, her touch, this perfect picture of beauty and grace, this person who best witnesses me, this person I know best and who best knows me, there in that dark, this finally stirred mixture of want and need and care, she could do nothing for me.

And if not her, then who?

Such are you thoughts at night?

…And in the day, at the park, I’m most happy. It’s been that way for two years now. The moments to which I must often return, they have nothing to do with open mouths, with unwarranted bar room attention, with chess board or football field victories, with words that by accident are chosen well.

No.

What I like best to remember, when I’m at my most happy, it’s when I’m at the park. Connect them like dots, my park visits, through this year, through the one that came before, and you would have a different picture of me than I could suggest here, or at least than has been suggest. That picture, it’s my favorite.

Even in the darkest hour, a gray spring day not long after the oh so permanent and absolutely inevitable departure of my second wife (whose idea do you think that really was? Hers? Or this empty-room-addict I call me? This holdmetightgetthefuckoffofmesonofabitch who goes by my name?) I lie there at the bottom of a slide, having gone down head first, having dripped off the end slowly, into the chipped wood, I lie there on my back, face upward, the sky low with clouds, the wind sort of blowing, but such an ease in me, and at such a dis-eased time, a soft place inside all that bruise, and I thought: this is peace; I could die right now and it would be all right.

…It occurs to me that the mirror in which I’m the ugliest is in the bathroom of my first wife, the mother of my son. I wonder if this has anything to do with the power of suggestion, if I’m giving it the power to be symbolic, or if it’s just bad lighting, or maybe just really honest lighting.
In any case, I can hardly bear to see myself there. Once I do, I can hardly quit staring.

…But that parks.

That’s us today, my son and I, and the park full, and it’s lunch time, and everybody there is a mother but me, and in a different life, or maybe just a different frame of mind, some of them would make me hungry, but that’s now how I feel in parks. This is not Candyland. Nothing here makes you ecstatic. That’s not the point.

The sun, it’s warm. The children swarm. The sandwiches are good and we eat before he plays. Then he is gone into them, that world.

Today, a little girl, tall, three years old, so her grandmother tells me, this little American-Asian girl, as her grandmother identifies her, this grandmother who tells me about internment caps, this little girl who never plays with anybody, she takes the hand of my son and she will not let it go.

He is hypnotized, a bit startled, more than a little in love. Up the ladders, down the chutes.

This little loner, so the grandmother tells me, this little girl and my son, they won’t leave each other. When on the big slide, he shoots down faster than she does, she grabs his jacket, pulls it off in her desperation to hold onto him.

…And in the car, he says to me, out of the blue, and I do mean blue, this day, that crystal Colorado blue, that we’re-oh-so-close-to-the-sky blue, my son, he asks me: Would Mommy find it beautiful if you brought her flowers?

This four year old still trying to negotiate the concept of divorce.

…And death.
If you died, Daddy, I would protect your bones, he tells me.

And he begins to ask my about my grandparents.
What were there names?What did they look like?

And the subtle accusation: why am I not guarding their bones?

…The best thing I ever did in terms of writing, I wrote down my history, the story of my life, and then I wrote down everything I knew of the story of his mother’s life, both of ours right up to the point of the writing, and hers, what I knew of the childhood, the stories she’d told me. I wrote about her parents and mine, everything I knew. How they married, where they grew up, in what manner, their awards, their losses. I wrote about their parents, and, in the case of my family, what little I knew about the people that came before. I wrote things that I thought were important but things I did not. I tried not to give the story too much meaning. I tried to give the details, cleanly, honestly.

He has it now, though he doesn’t know he has it. This book that is full of information I wish I had been given. The things I’ll never know. That my parents wouldn’t find it important or prudent to tell me. That they themselves will forget.

All these lost moments.

All these ways I try to hold on.

Pictures and words, you can burn them into discs. You can make them feel almost eternal.

frequent flyer

2005-03-07T19:25:00.000-08:00

How often these days I travel. The good trip toward, the bad trip away.
It always puts me out of my head to fly. These trips are always made more tired than I would drive.
The plan at the takeoff tilt.
The heads before me getting smaller row by row, the way the overhead bins suggest converging lines.
There’s something about it that suggests eternity. You could only imagine it in that kind of dentist chair fog, that laughing gas fatigue where nothing really matters, not even how they mean to maim you.
Asleep before it levels off.
Before seatbelts can be removed.
Asleep until you should wake.
These good trips toward. These times when you wake to a better world.

(the post before this one is the only one that counts)

2005-03-06T14:34:00.000-08:00

…The lead singer of Ratt was at Dixie Fri night. What the name of his new band is, I don’t know. They just explain the ten dollar cover charge to you by saying that the lead singer of Ratt is playing. He doesn’t sing Ratt songs. He sings Guns and Roses and Poison and so on. What does the lead singer of Ratt do? He fronts an 80’s hard rock cover band.

He screams into the microphone, They tell me rock and roll is fucking dead, but they should look in this fucking room. It’s not fucking dead!

And I look in the room, 150, 200 people bouncing around, swaying and leaping, mid life crisis babies and kids who will dance to anything, and I think to myself, Rock and Roll is dead. Or if it’s not, it life support system has nothing to do with the people on the dance floor or the man screaming fuck into the microphone.

And that lead singer from Ratt, he’s old.
And so am I.
And I can muster more sympathy for him than I can for myself.

--The Irish girl is back.
The swing couple still works her.
The little squat man, like a runaway from a Peter Jackson film.
The wife who grows on you, the way, as my friend suggests about the movies you watch enough to begin to like, you will want to fuck anybody you stare at long enough.

She’s always smiling and he’s sort of grim. He knows how thin it all is, this line he is trying to straddle between control and emasculation. I wonder what stories he tells himself, and how they’ll have to shift as the gap between them continues to grow.

--The Irish girl, I haven’t seen her in months, but I’ve been mostly retired, and now she is here, M, she has an almost impossibility pretty face, though there is something destroyed around the mouth. It is destroyed in a way I’ve never quite seen and it is destroyed in a place I’ve never seen destruction, from the corners of the mouth to the chin, on either side.

This destruction, it is a sort of attraction.

--I’m thinking of California, Santa Monica, the beach there at night, not quite safe, the girls I used to go walking with in the sand, scratching messages to each other with the toes of our shoes.

I am thinking of CC and how we drank at a bar at the top of a hotel there and a man played music through a single microphone, Gordon Lightfoot when I asked, and CC, she was small and adorable, and I remember clearly how she looked one hot evening when she stood before a fan in her living room and lifted her skirt to cool down, a sexy act of perfect innocence, and I remember the story she told about a bottle of wine, a man she didn’t like, and what they done in the dugout of the park in which we were standing. It was a sexy story not only for its details but mostly because she was telling it to me.

That kind of intimacy.

--Why I’m at Dixie Friday night thinking of LA, I don’t know.
It’s overly full.

With every drink you are a different person. These are not the stages of inebriation necessarily.
Just the changing you.
Just the fast forward or rewind button toggling in your personality.

I’m not a discerning person. I don’t see that well. My sense of smell, of taste, of hearing, they’re all average, or below.

And yet all Friday I’ve smelled something foul in everybody who has spoken close to me, something from the flesh perhaps, but mostly from the mouth. Students bending toward me in class, they have the odor of stomach disorder, of old garlic. It’s the same in the Dixie tavern and I remember how it was last week, that woman that reeked.

(Was that a week ago? Only? I recognize my life is reshaping into what it once was. Like a crumpled paper made ironed by the hand. The words are still the same.)

This is no gift. I imagine to see very well, to hear very well, all of these heightened senses would be more burden than they would blessing. Who wants to know that much about a person? What they have eaten. What they are like deep down inside. Who wants to appraise every pore?

Give me blurred vision. All people should shake and smear before me. As if they are the same. And of a different world entirely.

--But I think of California at the Dixie on Friday. I think of the make up artist, the girl with the name of a goddess, we rolled around on that beach, this girl who would never take her panties off, no matter what we doing, as if somehow that exempted her from the carnality of those acts we performed.

Am I remembering the way she looked properly? We met at the Viper Room. She had a kitten that was dying though she tried to keep it alive. After a certain point, the cruelty was in her care.

I knew her for perhaps two weeks, maybe a bit more.

I’m thinking of California, LA, but mostly the beach, Santa Monica.

These memories. These fragments. Nothing is remembered in whole. Everything is the condensed version. “To remember a day would take a day. To remember a lifetime would take a lifetime.”

And before those days of California fucking, when I was a kid from the country gone off to the big city, the end of Western civilization, this place that all that Manifest Destiny that began with the Greeks and the Romans finally came to rest, LA, my friends, JA and JT, later to be my roommates, we came driving down to the beach.

We were kids. We were happy. We sat on the top of lifeguard houses and threw the melons and oranges that had washed out of the sea back into it. I went running nude and white into the water, that kind of baptism.

These good friends, these non-acquaintances, these people who knew me when I was not who I am now but know me who I am now too.

We make of that knowledge something almost sacred.

--This girl at the Dixie, she’s blond and overly young and hanging around me but acting snotty, just as she did last week when L and I were here. If she knew how far I was from wanting to kiss her, she’d try very hard to get me to do that.

It occurs to me at the Dixie and then the night after, Saturday night at the Dark Horse and the other bar in Midtown, that I am in no mood for games of seduction

--L comes into the city with me, Midtown, those bars. Right away there is trouble with a man. Later, there is more trouble.

L wonders why I see to have brought out the worst in men.
I don’t know.
I don’t look for trouble.
I don’t even relate to other men in bars.
I try to imagine a world in which only the women count.

I decide finally that it must be pheromonal. That just as there are time when it seems more women than my haircut can justify seem to be attracted to me—and that must be some invisible chemical scent thing—there are time when men just seem to want to have trouble with me. Maybe that too is an invisible scent thing.

Different bars bring different types of trouble. If you have at the Dixie, it is a face to face thing and fairly combustible. In Midtown, mostly, it starts as a passive thing, that man, he’s trying to see what he can get away with at your expense, if you turn to him fully, he’ll shiver, shimmer, and fade out.

--The problem with the person you fight in a bar is you don’t really know anything about him. You don’t know if he is an off duty policeman. A profession fighter.

A man who has just lost his job. His wife. A man who has been diagnosed with something awful. A man who feels in perfect health but has grown a small clot in some artery that if hit properly and not even hard could break free and explode against his brain. A man who will take whatever you do to him home and there take it out on his wife. Or his dog. Or his child.

You can beat darkness into another man. Sometimes, it doesn’t even take your fists. But the game, it’s all about emasculation, and you can force darkness into a man like that.

And it’s a game of odds, no guarantee, what he’ll do with that darkness. What it will do to him.

Or whether or not, rather, that he’ll be beating it into you.

The problem with fighting in bars.

That makes me think of California too, all those puffed up wanttobeactors, lifting weights on the advice of agents, managers, wondering what to do with these muscles they’ve grown. End of the night frustration.

The good old American dilemma: sex of violence?

--A girl introduces herself by pointing to another girl and asking, Who looks smarter, me or her?

And you say, Shouldn’t you be asking who is hotter?

And that type of patter begins.
At certain moments, when the music is low enough and the vodka sits just right, you could have these conversations with your eyes closed.
In fact, at certain moments, you do.

--It doesn’t matter. The Dixie tavern, where everybody seemed to stink, or the Midtown bars where the girls look like they are wearing things they got at sweet sixteen parties, where the boys where button down shirts with rolled up sleeves and docker slacks. LA bars or Montana bars. The nightclubs of Beirut.

It’s the same.

Girls whose lizard minds try to make them prove, over and over, through smear of makeup, arch of back, semblance of availability, that the male of the species want to fuck them.

Boys who try to suggest, by size of wallet or muscle, by clench of jaw, but narrowed eyes, by push or kiss, that they can the girl, these boys whose lizard brains tell them WIN THE FUCK WIN THE FUCK WIN THE FUCK.

(Even though this won’t be legitimate mating. When our instincts catch up to our birth control, we’ll really be in trouble).

And a man who tells you he is completely over male games, he is the rare and enlightened, or, more likely, he just means: I know I can’t win them anymore.

--And everything ends well.
The ride home, the weekend mercifully sunsetting into Sunday.
I always ask myself, in the guilt that comes with my involvement in any of it, however minor, is this the world you mean to leave to your son? And I always tell myself, How can it be avoided?

Every father, he’d like to control the nature of the world. But it is the rare that can control even himself.

High Horse

2005-03-04T18:31:00.000-08:00

It is now again legal to capture and slaughter wild western horses. You thought they were gone, but they’re not.

(In this cruel natured world where extinction is the only possible salvation and mercy the only legitimate virtue.)

Largely in part to public reaction to The Misfits (see review), these wild horses were protected since 1971.

Before 1971, the bulk of wild horses captured, killed, and rendered were turned into pet food.

Now they will sold to French and Asian restaurants and food distributors.

If you want to thank somebody for this sudden turn in the fortune of the wild horses, consider Conrad Burns, Republican, of Montana, a senator who brings a spittoon to DC.

… I imagine it bothers you to think of horses being caught, slaughtered, and turned into meat.

I imagine that you are disgusted by the thought of somebody not just ingesting, but enjoying the well charcoaled or perhaps rare slab of muscle that made up the flank of a horse.

Probably you’re an American and you think of the horse as a symbol of freedom and the West. Perhaps you have even had a horse nuzzle you for a bite of apple. Maybe you’ve rubbed that place between its ears or felt the hardness of its jaw. Maybe when you were a child there were pictures of horses on your wall.

Who can’t love a horse, elegant as they are and with such sensitive eyes?

It disgusts you, both in the stomach and in the conscience, that someone would eat a horse.
The way it disgusts you that someone would eat a cat or a dog.

In your world, cats and dogs are pets.
In your world, these animals are meant to be nurtured, not eaten.
They are capable of loyalty, even love. You’ve seen it expressed.
It hurts your heart to think of the dog pound, those little cages, those injection deaths.

(Does it occur to you that any brained thing can express loyalty, even love? A porcupine. A rat. A pig.)

…In countries where dog and cat are eaten, a popular method of execution is hanging. This is thought to tenderize the meat.

(The outrage in this county over furs from overseas is not that about what they do to the minks, how many are cruelly raised and more cruelly killed to make a coat, it is that jesusgod sometimes cat fur is mixed in.

In your world, it’s not right to stick a baby cat in a cage. To let it grow a little. To analy electrocute it and strip its skin. In your world, it’s ok to do that with a mink. Or a fox. Or a beaver.)

…The horses will be rounded up by helicopter mostly.
That kind of terror.

It bothers you to imagine them wild eyed in the small corral. Thirsty and covered in sweat and stinking of adrenalin.

These slaughterhouse trips.
Those numbed slaughters.

Does it bother you?

A woman on the news voiced outrage over the capturing, auctioning, and deaths of these horses. She said that she can’t imagine how anybody could be so cruel as to kill “an animal”. She meant to add an adjective or two, maybe something like “such a noble” animal, but all that came out was that she couldn’t imagine that someone could kill an animal.

She was wearing leather gloves, a leather band around her hat.

…Your pigs and chickens and cows, they’re not fed or watered during their last seventy hours—that nutrient would be wasted. The bulk of them are not dead before the rendering begins. This means that when they’re legs are being sawed off, their skins peeled open, they are alive.

You don’t want to believe that. The evidence is indisputable. As PETA suggests, meet your meat.

(Did you know that eels mate for life?
That pigs are considered to be smarter than dogs, on whatever scale that intelligence is measured?
That the central nervous system of an earthworm is similar to your own?)

…People like Gandhi, like King, they understood that true empathy is boundless, that suffering links us all.

You’ve been taught not to think of it like that. In your world, it’s ok to kill a cow but not a horse. In some other world, it’s ok to kill a horse but not a cow. In some other world, all this killing is wrong.

Everything dies. Perhaps the dispute has less to do with than the manner of death, and the manner of life before that death. You think that cow you see in the field, that pig you sung about at Old MacDonald’s, you think that’s where you lunch comes from? That it just grazes and plays and one day they sneak up and give it a shot and it drops down into peace and is then turned into something you can eat?

You’ve seen them on the freeway, pigs or cows, in any weather, jammed into trucks, moving from some factory farm to some slaughterhouse. Where did you think they were going? You’ve seen their eyes peering out. You know what I’m talking about. You know what you ate for breakfast, for dinner. You ate fear. You ate pain.

That animal you ate, it’s already dead. The money you paid for it, that’s the money they’re going to pay for somebody to kill the next one.

Failure of Exercise

2005-03-03T11:40:00.000-08:00

Weaker running today than I was when I re-begin. Why is that?
(What does J Eric Miller write about? exercise; girls; and so on).

Maybe it’s the cold air.

It occurs to me halfway through that I might not make it.

I’ve never not made it, this or any run.

What will I think of myself if I have to walk the last of it?

…I remember a failure in exercise. This was years ago, a decade, a little more.

I live in an unfinished basement.

This girl and I, that first girl I thought I loved but only wanted, the burnmyfingertipwithcaramelgirl, she and I have parted, and what sticks in my minds, it is what she’s said to me some time before: You’re skinny, but I love your body.

(That viscous little paradox).

I find myself that summer buying a bench, buying weights. Plates and bars.
This is new for me. As a wrestler, I eschewed all but the stamina exercises.
The kids I wrestled, most of them, they were bulky.
Me, I was smart and tricky.
I wrestled like a thief, and that’s why I won.

But now I want to bulk up.

(and jesusgod, yes, i see that, the possibility that it all begins there, with this girl, this branch of my particular quest for acceptance)

Concrete floor with little rugs.

And what happens, a few months into it, I watch the Rocky series. The first three or four. Up until the Russian. Draco.

I’m working out. The bench, it’s tilted. This is called the incline press. It develops your upper pectorals, and, of course, to a lesser degree, your tris and your shoulders.

I know my limits. I know at this particular weight, I should be able to lift it six times. I’ve no spotter. After six, I must replace the bar, let the bench take the weight for me.

But I’ve watched all these fucking Rockies. I’ve got the eye of the tiger. And I know, I am absolutely sure, that you can make your body do what you tell it.

(You never have to stop running. You never have to lift your head out of the bathtub water.)

So after six, I say, One more.
Maybe it was like this, One more, mother fucker.
(I’m not polite to myself in the gym. Or the basement.)

So I do it, I bring it down and I push it up.
And now I am Rocky. Or the Russian, that cold looking son of a bitch, that Hitlerdream of height and weight and Anglo. Or Clubber Lang, that savage.
(These are not my stereotypes. They belong to the films.)

Go, I say, again.
And it comes down, that bar, the weight.
(You tear muscle, and muscle regrows. That’s what lifting weights is. You make yourself stronger by destroying yourself. Like any love affair. The way at the end our bodies will be destroyed, or chiseled, our hearts torn to pieces or hard).

And halfway up, my arms start to shake. And I’m not going to make it.

They’ll never go up again. No matter how much I believe.

(What do you do when your faith surrenders to reality?)

So they quiver, my arms.

This is the moment before the car accident.
The moment on the end of the rope.
That frozen second when you see the bad thing that is about to happen.
That shock.

My left gives out first. Once it gives a little, it gives all the way. The elbow drops.
That side of the bar goes slamming down across my face, my eyes socket. The plates on that side, they tumble off. Now there is an imbalance. No weight on the left, lots on the right. That arms gives out too. That elbow drops too. The bar crashes across the bridge of my nose, across the other eye socket. The weights slide off.

I’m there, holding the bar, trembling. Blood and sweat. I’d like to believe that I thought to laugh right then. Probably I didn’t because I thought I was dead.

(If you see some malformation in my face, this is where it happened. Fucking Sylvester Stallone. I got a lawyer, but nothing ever came of it.)

…All of this occurs to me as I run.
You cannot make yourself finish.
Just like you cannot make yourself a genius. Some things are not acts of will.

What will I think if I have to stop and walk?

And then, I come up the parking lot, it’s a bit of a hill in places, and I see at the top, there’s a girl, one of those vultures we all become, waiting in our cars to find some walking somebody to follow to his or her parking spot.

She’s waiting. And I’m dragging. I’m not running up this hill. I’m jogging up it.

But it’s a girl. She doesn’t have to be pretty. I don’t look long enough to notice. She might even be a boy who looks like a girl.

The bottom line is that in the presence of what I believe to be the female species, I have to speed up. I can’t appear to drag in front of her. I run up the hill. I run right by her.

And out of her sight, I’m not so far from home, but how will I make it?

(And it occurs to me as I run, I have more in common with a male baboon than I do with a female human).

(It’s good that things occur to you running. The more you think about, the longer you think, the more steps you’ve taken, the closer you are too the end. If you don’t look at your arms when they are shaking, maybe they don’t have to break. If you don’t think about drowning beneath the surface of your tub, maybe you don’t have to drown.)

(It is fortune that gets me home not crawling.)

(It is not will alone.)

(It is not faith alone.)

Faith nor will can save you. But they help.

phone card blues

2005-03-02T19:13:00.000-08:00

…My credit card showers me with affection. Like a lover, they do things to please me.
This is, of course, a trade off.

I call them up to ask them to remove two charges.

This phone card company on the internet—phonecardsavenue.com—it sells me two phone cards that drain of minutes. You use them, and then you go to use them again, and they are empty, or nearly empty.

I have friends in the Middle East. I wonder if my blog just got red flagged. I have friends I like to call. And in Canada. So I buy phone cards on the internet, and these phone cards, they drain.

So you call customer service.
These are people in India.
They are always very sorry about what is happening to you.
They restore your minutes. But however many times they do that, the minutes always disappear.

I try not to hate them, these people in India who are trained to be very sorry.
I try not to love them, these reps at my credit card company who are trained to make me feel that they have an affection toward me.

I am reminded of what I sometimes tell myself, that almost noone is worthy of my love or hate.

fuxxing

2005-02-27T15:55:00.000-08:00

What is fucking?
It is our wish to make what is abstract concrete.
To externalize desire.

And not just that old primal desire.
Does anybody over twenty two fuck for that reason?
We’re all too adept at masturbation.

What is masturbation? The sound of one hand clapping.

…Should I be using the word “fuck” as opposed to “make love” or have “sex”?
Any freshman boy who thinks he’s above the prowl on which he’s set, he’ll distinguish those word for you.

Philosophy 101.

I won’t make those distinctions because I’m afraid of peddling clichés.

What is it to be clever? Cleverness is to articulate a cliché in a way that seems fresh.

What is the problem with our culture? We’ve consciously rejected the intelligent for the clever. We fell in love with the clever. It’s easier and more fun.

Fucking, like dying, is an act of animal intelligence.

(This almost clever reference to the petite morte).

…What is a whore? Someone who fucks more than you do.
Though it should be noted, there are places in the world where two unmarried people holding hand are considered dirty.

The question that counts, it is: what is your reason for holding hands?What is your reason for fucking?

…What is the process?
The most important moment in the fucking is not the coming, it is after the coming.

(There is a blue room. This is long ago. The room is blue because the only light on is blue. We had finished. This was before everything really came together. Before everything really feel apart. All things fall apart, like your body, like your fortune. There is nothing so basic to the nature of this world as decay. We had finished and lie together in the blue light. In that moment, the long pause after fucking, in the blue room, the room with the mirrors, I knew it would end. I saw it ending soon.

And I said: What is going to happen now is we’re going to die.
And you put your head on my shoulder and your hand on my chest.
And we were still.
And I said: we are going to die now. Only first, we will have a death dream, and in that dream, we will rise from this bed. We will dress. We will go back into the world. That dream world. We will lead our dream lives. There will birthdays and funerals in this long death dream.

We will lose each other, it is almost certain, in this dream.

But remember, this moment, it is the last one, so it is the only one that counts.

Then one day, decades from now, at the end of our dream lives, we’ll come sailing back.
We will be reborn into this unfinished moment.
Reawaken to this incomplete reality.
Your head will be on my shoulder. Your hand will be on my chest.

You were nodding your head as I spoke.

We closed our eyes. We went into the dream. Later, we rose up and went about our dream lives.
I thought we would part more quickly, but it took us years.

And the dream keeps going.

Perhaps it is true that at the end of my dream world I’ll come back. And you too. And we’ll find ourselves sealed together in the blue right. The room with mirrors. Your head on my shoulder. Your hand on my chest. That moment before we die.)

…I want to believe that love is eternal.
That what we do in our blue rooms, what we say, what we feel, that we are tied to it.
Whatever happens, whatever changes.
What is sanity? Sanity is the acceptance of the rejection of the eternal.

What is fucking? It’s a flesh picture of want. It is a moving muscle structure of need. It is a breathless conversation. Let me in, let me in, let me in… Those almost divine grasps we make for that which can’t really be grasped. The noble effort. The first and the last resort.

2005-02-25T14:08:00.000-08:00

…Reading Time’s Arrow, a gift from a woman, awhile ago.
I feel stupid reading at the gym, but I do it anyway.

And this book, I’ve tried to avoid reading it, but now that I’ve started, I find it hypnotic.

(Just because she gave it to you doesn’t mean it’s bad.
And that it’s good, that really has nothing to do with her giving it to you.)

And anyway, that woman is gone, I don’t know where.

You have to careful what you read, what you listen to.
The things that girls give you, these Greeks bearing gifts.
It is how they try to get into your head. It’s how they try to establish territory inside of you. If the piece is strong, if it moves you, if you like it, or godforbid, love it, then she has linked to you through it.

(I know this because I give books. I give music. I stake claims.)

Try to sever that link.

Try to wring her out now, you who are so addicted to wringing things out.

…The first book I got from a woman, a long time ago, it was The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

This is a book that if your capable of crying for things that are outside of you will make you cry.

This woman, she’d written in it, I simply want to give you something I love.

I keep the book, twelve years later, having read it once. I throw little away. I can dredge up her face if I want to. I can imagine that she is alive in this shared world if I try.

Have I told you this story before?

(I know I’m repeating myself.)

…What does J Eric Miller write about?Girls
Exercise
Parenthood, sort of.

What has his life been about?Apparently, these things and little else.

Everything there is to voice from the limited resources of his mind has already been voiced.

Whatever he is trying to show you about his heart, his soul, if you believe in these things, you’ve already seen it. Whatever value you’ve placed on it, it’s already set. However you’ve damned or praised it, it’s been done.

(Sometimes when my brain talks at night and I can’t sleep for it’s chatter, I just start screaming ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Sometimes I clap my hands against the outside of my skull.
Try it.
In it’s way, its addictive.)

How will he keep his audience?
With some magic tick?
With some promise?
By uping the stakes?

Can he not find new stories, different way to see the world, and different things to see in it?

The situation is dire.
And a sort of relief.
The way you feel when your house has been robbed and all the things you tried to own, they’re gone.

“You get used to an empty room”.
A blank wall.
A wordless bubble.

…The pain we feel while doing things that cause the pain is much less than the pain it will cause us to feel more of after we are done.

…She was thirty something and it was the year before I turned twenty one, wintertime in Montana.

Missoula, that college town. In retrospect, I find it charming. And safe.

I memorized an ee cummings poem I knew she liked.
She gave me The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
And that inscription.

She was engaged to a friend of mine, a sort of friend really, a guy who hung out in my crowd. Or, I suppose, it was that I hung out in his.

(That marriage never happened, but it’s not happening had nothing to do with me. Those long engagements. That sort of silliness).

…Her apartment was a brick building with a stairwell on the outside, open aired, steel step that clatter when you run down them.

I was always running down them.

I wanted her and she frightened me.
I didn’t understand the complications of the world then.
That she and I could seem to be growing closer while she moved toward some white gown date.

(You don’t believe this about me, but once upon a time I didn’t think things could work like that. Men and women, they said love, they sunk into Eden, they waited happily through their lives to die [anyone died one day i guess/and noone stooped to kiss his face/busy folk buried them side by side/little by little/and was by was/all by all and deep by deep/and more by more/they dream their sleep/noone and anyone/earth by april/wish by spirit/and if by yes]).

It was confusing, that we could be alone and she’d want to touch me. That I’d want to touch her was a given.

(I didn’t know then about the exit strategy a woman will try to turn you into. About the transition she’ll ask you to become).

It was confusing that we could all of us be together, her lover and me and her and other friends, bowling, or playing tag football. That we would could go sledding and eating pasta at D’s house and drinking wine and they could be, that engaged couple, so…I don’t know…together.

(I didn’t know about secrets then. Nor divided hearts.
You won’t believe this, but, once, I was innocent. [and only the stars can begin to explain/how children are apt to forget to remember/with up so floating many bells down]).

That strange winter. Dark early. Everything happened beneath the stars. Everything happened with the snow falling softly.

…How she and I would go to the movies.
Meet for lunch.

And I memorized a poem for her. And she gave me a book.

She’d lean into me and I read out loud that book to her, my hand moving up her thigh like it thought it had to sneak.

How patient she was with me.

And how these sessions always ended with me running away. Not just down the steps of that brick apartment building. But out, across the field, all the way home.

…There are many times when I wanted to be young again. When I wanted to unknow what I’d grown to know.

When I wanted to unwant what I’d learned to want.

…I read at the gym. It keeps me from the company of people I’ll never really know and the boredom inherent in the absurdity of all this effort for ten or fifteen pounds more of muscle, something a family of four could eat in a day.

This girl gives me Time’s Arrow and I put it on a shelf. Not letting her in my head.

One day, when I’m safe from her, when I have nothing to take to the gym, I pluck it down.
I begin to read.

…Time’s Arrow, it’s about a soul that gets stuck in the body of a dying man, and then starts to witness from the inside the life of that man.

But that life is moved through backwards. The soul it sees everything unwinding, people walk backwards and say goodbye when it seems they greet, for the soul it doesn’t know this is a tale told in reverse.

The soul watches through the eyes of a man who daily grows younger in place that ends in children seemingly stuffed back into their mother’s wombs.

Two people go into that room, that room with the forceps, the soiled bib. Two go in. But only one comes out. Oh, the poor mothers, you can see how they feel during that long goodbye, the long goodbye to babies.

Running Down Memory Lane

2005-02-22T16:14:00.000-08:00

I go for a run today, first time in a long while. I go out to see what the pneumonia has done to my lungs.

This is after a haircut. This girl, she hasn’t cut my hair in two years. I was married then. I remember thinking in the pit of my loyalty that she was very pretty then, more pretty than
I find her now.

The way it’s easy to find somebody attractive in the absence of possibility.

Bad haircut, this hit or miss transaction.

..And the storm last night, thunder and lightning, then the ice—they call it hail—falling against the windows, the walls, like something that wanted in.

The streets filling up with water, the water muddy.

Dark. And quite aside from the weather.

It’s the kind of weather in which bad things happen.
If I had bad things in mind, if I were a bad person, this would be the night for me.

Hidden impulses invograted.

The kind of night for murder and museum robberies.

…I wear a hat when I run.
Not always, but fresh from my cut I do.
Pulled down on my face, that traveling shadow.

No butterflies today, the campus quiet, the green perfectly round, and those steps up which I can semi thunder.

…I remember a storm two years ago, Cartersville, that second wife, those few months of hope and maybe even beauty.

(There’s a picture of us from then.
We’re shirtless, embraced, and we’re kissing.
It’s accidentally beautiful.
And the only real proof I have.
Most of the time, I wish I didn’t).

The wind and the rain, Biblical.

We lit candles, but the house was too dark even with them.
The town itself was dark.

So we went driving.

Rain beating the windows. Water swelling up around the tires.

It seemed a dangerous night to drive, but we felt almost safe, the way it is at the amusement park, those rides meant to frighten, those rides from which, occasionally, people really do fall.

The streets deserted.
The houses appearing deserted.
The trees leaning over the roads.
Their branches on the ground, cracking under our tires.

Even the men in their blue lights out there working on the lines, they looked ominous in their overalls and hoods. Sparks flying in the water, faces masked. Hell’s maintenance.

…I go running today, the first time in months.
I like to run. But more, I want to know what’s left of me.

It takes me almost ten minutes longer then it did the last time I ran. But it is a good run, liberating somehow.

This pretty day. In this sun after the storm, my skin pale enough to make a Renaissance woman swoon.

…And I remember my first or second blog came after a run.

None of you were with me then.

I remember what I wrote, that what I need was not exercise, but therapy.

I’m different now.
(Though still in need of therapy).
The way I’m different than yesterday.
(But only from a true artist of the craft, a near genius, not just somebody with a degree)
Most change, it is not sudden.

Most change, you can’t see it even with a stop frame camera.

That late summer, early fall.

Everything was hard then, the ground, my flesh, my heart.

It’s muddy today, my new shoes sinking in the ground.
My lungs, they’re soft, my flesh too.

Pain focuses me. Makes me hard.

What to do with ease, what to do in the calm after storms, when you’re heart’s not fully broken…?

…There was a girl in the front seat of a white limo. It was half in the street and half in a yard.

That was that night in Cartersville when we went driving around, that second wife and me, tourists in a world gone dark and wet, with the radio playing and the heat coming out and the dashboard lights on our faces.

That world we thought we knew but could hardly recognize.

Coming up that narrow street, through that bad neighborhood.

The limo a bit in the yard of that house, a place you imagined people buying drugs and things less savory, it’s broken porch, the men you’d see there in the day, riding past on your bicycle, riding fast.

The limo was white but dirty.

She was thin, sitting alone in the dark of the front seat of it.
The house was even darker than the other dark houses.
Her shoulders were bare.

The lights washed over her and she looked blank and then scared, wearing a thin dress or maybe just a slip, very white, this girl, and young. Her hair blond.

I can see her better now than anything.

What we said to each other, that wife and I, in this moment just before or just after our beauty proven or at least illusioned in a photo, what we said after the headlights had moved past that girl was that she was in trouble.

But we did not stop. We did not get out.

This is a safari, but the animals can still eat you.

Stay in your world and I’ll stay in mine.

…I feels good this run, this post storm proof of survival.
The ground squishy.
The sun warm
I feel strong making it Maybe I don’t have the courage of kick at the end, but I’m happy with myself, coming through the door.

Like nothing can make me not live.

… We went home then, after the girl in the limo.

That night, in the candles, in the absence of tv, of any kind of noise that wasn’t the weather, what did we do, that wife and I, with the rain on our walls and the darkness pervading?

What did we do when we came in, took off our wet jackets, sprung those matches?

It was just us then, us and the dog that is now dead, and I imagine, because I cannot remember, that we could all hear each other breathe.

I try to remember, I try to imagine. That night in the house against the storm, what we did, if we whispered, how we looked.

L Cohen writes, “Let’s be alone together/let’s see if we’re that strong”.

it occurs to me

2005-02-22T00:11:00.000-08:00

that anon might not have understand the suicide references in the last post had to do with the death of hunter s thompson.
most of the time, i give my readers not enough credit.
anon, you remind me that sometimes there can be too much.
if you thought you read some promise in the aforementioned post, then read it again. and read it better.
it wasn't a post about me. i suppose that makes it one of the less selfish of my posts, in fact.
for me, that's not even a question. there are too many birds in beriut. too many cats in the bushes. too many dogs at the pound. not to mention flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood.

stay a little longer

2005-02-21T11:31:00.000-08:00

lightning strikes.
phone's out.
guy at the gym spots me though i never asked him to. i feel about it the way i do at the public urinal. people should just mind their own business. i don't want to feel your hands suddenly beneath my elbows, thank you very much. what i'm doing here, it's personal.
and hunter s thompson is dead, and somehow, in the world in which i find myself living, this is not huge news.
even for many of the people of my generation, that name rings only a distant bell. and some of them even saw the second movie.
read the hun's eulogy.
she'd never herself call it that.
and the thunder and the rain.
i know that cat is around because the food i leave, it's always gone.
we feed the living the dead.
there's a lot to remember. there's a lot to forget. i'm going to clean my house. i'm going to wait for the phone to work again.
if you wonder about suicide, what you should do is a hold a table lamp beside your head in a very dark room. only, the light should be on so it's not that dark. yet. you should hold the bulb fairly close and you should put your finger against the on/off button. the trigger.

go method now.

this is a gun. this is your personal endofdays. the armaggeden you were always promised. your ability to percieve, that about to end. get in that frame of mind. trigger. gun. trigger. gun. finger. trigger. gun.

push.
(or as my father always tried to teach me, squeeze. squeeze the trigger.)
hear the click. embrace the black.

(and the next time you bathe, sink yourself under. keep saying: what's one more second. no matter how it hurts. stay a little longer. in that other world beneath the water. in that bleary eyes worlf of muted echoes. push it. no matter how it hurts.
stay a little longer.
s, she tells me there is euphoria in drowning.
i think in every kind of death that is not sudden we must find that stage.)

Rent a Coma. Why Me? Borderline Truths. Dixie Tavern ReRedux. Firewood.

2005-02-20T12:29:00.000-08:00

I’ve got a wonderful business idea.
Rent a Coma. The ultimate vacation.

You need beds, the kinds of machines that feed people and monitor their hearts and lungs and brains and you need machines that exercise the muscles.

A person comes in and pays x dollars and is given a very heavy sedative, something that sends one into a deep deep sleep. For one week.

Hooked up to the machines, taking that near death rest.

You go on your cruises, your trips to the mountains, your flights abroad, you come home tired. Not vacated. Just exhausted.

Rent a coma, the real vacation. You wake up ready for the world again.

…Typically, what a girl wants to know at first, it’s why me?
She’ll ask you that in a number of ways.
What I haven’t got a hold of, it’s what’s behind that question in all it guises.

Is it a simple search for compliment?
Is it the symptom of a type of insecurity?
Is it a manifestation of the desire to be recognized as absolutely unique?

And men, maybe I’m wrong, they don’t do they often, do they?
This is, isn’t it, more of a gender issues than a species issue?

If so, if men don’t ask that question, why don't they?

Is it because men take things for granted?

...I hear from a friend in Beirut. The assination of Hairi. The tension in that country.
Suddenly, the US is best friends with Lebanon.

If you think the US wants Syria out of Lebanon for the sake of the Lebanese, think again. The US wants Syria out of Lebanon because Syria backs the Hezbollah who have arms all along the border and can continually put pressure on Israel with them.

And why our interest in Israel, beyond the strong Israeli lobby in this country?
We need that very solid ally in the Middle East. We need a country that needs us.
We need place on which the other Arab countries will focus. A place that will keep them slightly unstable, not fully united, a continual thorn against which they will burn resources and energy.

Protecting Israel = protecting the safety of our oil.
It means keeping one foot solidly down in the Middle East.

Getting Syria out of Lebanon would be good for the Lebanese, if it can be done without sparking another civil war, just as getting Saddam out of Iraq was good for the bulk of the Iraqi people--but that doesn’t mean it’s why the US did it.

We’ve always got our best interests in mind.

Wait until they find huge oil reserves in Africa. Then we’ll really begin liberating people there, too.

…Another night at the Dixie.
I stop for drink somewhere else first. The bartender, an ex student from two years ago. She introduces me to the regulars. They have their names on little brass plaques all around the bar.

It's not fully awkward, that association seemingly so old.

Then forward, onward, not upward.

The truth is, I’m not even in the mood.
This story I keep telling you, it’s getting old even for me.

…You go here out of habit.

As if what you’ve drawn around you isn’t a cocoon.
As if you don’t want to be a butterfly.

Or maybe it is the opposite.

Maybe this is what you are.

Overly solemn either way at the Dixie Tavern.

And the woman whose husband has your name, he’s a loud man, unlike you, they’ve been to a wedding, perhaps it was a long day, for though her makeup seems in place, her hair perfect, her teeth as white as her blouse, she’s got the odor of sweat coming off of her.

It a rare thing to pick up off of a woman.
And it makes me worry that it’s not her at all but me reflected.
(Don’t let me be one of those people that sniffs himself in bars).

The smell, it comes and goes as she leans toward you and away. She owns it. You get used to it.

All this flesh, the girls who show their bellies and their shoulders, the top of the line that divides their asses.

In the right light, everything looks perfect.

You could take almost any girl in here and find her, coming out of a stream, in the deep country in which you are hiding, the deep forest meant to keep you from the law, in this Bonnie and Clyde, this Kit and Holly fantasy, almost holy in her beauty, the water on her shoulder blades, the sun coming down. The two of you against the world and what you like best about her ass is that it is hers. See her in the light, the droplets in her hair, look at the way she smiles.

Or perhaps it is an Eden; you and her imprisoned alone together, beneath the falling fruit, above the growing grass, not quite beyond the eyes of an imagined God.

In all that wild, against your primal sense of the aesthetic, you could find her just …so.

The way arranged marriages work better because people come in knowing they have to make them work. The way in the absence of choice you marry yourself to the present.

And the woman, the one with the odor, she’s got eyes the color of root beer.

There’s a girl here who resents you. And you should be resented. That old and familiar feeling of someone in a room who has something against you. The memory of the girl in LA who was rumored to have you hanging in effigy in her room. This girl at the Dixie Tavern, she positions herself with her friend by the door.

You’re tired and can talk with her or sneak out.

(Eventually, you’ll wait until boys are standing in front of those girls and glide by.
So that she’ll call you at four and on the phone call you out, Why did you just sneak out?

Not just of the pub.

In that late night, from that slumber, you’ll wake and tell her the truth. That she’s right. That it was long ago. That she deserved better.

If we lived long enough, we receive all the absolution we need).

…And the woman with the teeth and the eyes and the odor, at first you think that she and her husband, they must be swingers. That she is working you and he is hoping to be that special kind of witness.

You’ve seen those kind of transactions at the Dixie Tavern before.

And your slightly cold. The night is cold. You’re under-connected, here out of habit, a habit that is not at this moment pleasing you.

Staked out by the door is a girl that resents you.
A student from last semester has come in. At first you can’t be sure but then her two friends are staring at you and then all three come over.

It doesn’t have to be awkward but it is. The things that you bring to bear.

…That couple, it’s not some odd seduction. You realize it is just an attention thing.

He needs it on her and she needs it on her.

…You’re ready to go home long before you go.

And the ride home, that drive, you pass the gas station, see the bundles of wood for sale, want to buy one, not because you have a fireplace, not because you want some flame, but because they are for sale and to buy them, it would make you feel like you belong more.

The way in the late night, when the world is more quite, we all feel everything has gone too much asleep.

Bloggers. Masturbating. The Stories We Tell. A Failure of Imagination.

2005-02-18T22:50:00.000-08:00

…Old blogger friend reappears, new blogger friend disappears, and old blogger hater proves he’s still around.

1. Where did Dena go?2. And welcome back Leva Malone.
Who has blogged a story startling enough to make Holly Sargis gasp.
(and if you get that reference…I don’t know…some kind of extra special kudos).
3. And Al (only a few of you have been around long enough to remember Al) how he found some November post shallow and curtly called it writer and all of the people who had commented on it incapable of true emotion .

Surprise surprise, turns out he’s still reading (see comment section for Hair Today…).

Al, this post is dedicated to you. Sure, you’ve been a bit rude, but I have to adore you.
You want to hate me but can’t. Most people, they want to love me but can’t.

And you’ve proven yourself an avid reader.

I thank you for your addiction.
I’m really flattered.

...It occurs to me that you know you’re in trouble when you fall asleep masturbating.
If this happens to you, it’s not about fatigue.
The problem is deeper is deeper than that.

It’s not a problem I’ve had by the way.

I’m much too narcissistic for that.

…I used to have this idea about connections.
Because for me the apocalypse is always visible in the genesis, I know that things will end, everything.

When I say hello to you, the echo I hear is goodbye.

And when you think like that, you either stop, or you find a way to deal with it. To allow yourself to touch when you know that you’re going to have to un-touch.

What I used to tell myself, it was a story. In that story, I met the same people over and over. My lovers, they were the same girl. I never really said goodbye to her, just some particular makeup of flesh and bone, just some distinct voice and eye color.

This Girl, it was her soul over and over. We part and meet up again and part again.

These are the kind of stories we tell ourselves to keep on going. To give meaning to our lives. To make things ok.

Like the stories we tell ourselves about Olympus, or the Rainbow.
Like, in fact, most of the stories we tell ourselves.

…Perhaps the greatest failure we face as humans is the failure of imagination.

So I imagined that when we touch and have to let go that some consistent soul links them all, all the touches. So I imagined that there was never a real goodbye. That was useful in that it let me touch.

And sometimes, it helped me to let go.
What happens when you think like that, you float too far above. You’re half a suicide. This is your death dream.

This is you looking at your life through a telescope. This is you drifting up beneath a balloon, the ground getting far away, the people turning into squiggles.

The stories we tell ourselves and how they lead us astray.
The way our imaginations refuse to try to summon up the truth.

We imagine that the stars guide us, so that whatever happens, it’s destiny. We imagine destiny is good. In that story, Somebody somewhere has a plan, and no matter how things all seem to go wrong, it’s ok, because that’s how the Author wanted it.

Ask Pirandello.

…The near-husband who stands on the alter, he fails to imagine himself in seven years, that slow burning itch. He imagines a love song come to fruition in a world where there is no desire to stray. There is no argument that can’t be simply overcome. How can he prepare for all those hard roads when he’s imagined it all wrong?

That near-wife, same problem. Imaging every love story she ever watched, every fairy tale she ever heard. If she’d only imagine how it will really be, maybe she could do something about it.

Poor woman. Poor man.

…There was a time when I’d look at a girl, and what I’d see, it was a cure for all that ailed me. If I could only see her nipples, touch her vagina, get inside of her. Then we’d sacredly bond and everything would be better than all right.

What I do now is I make myself imagine what she’ll seem like to me when we’ve done all that. When I’ve scratches the physical surface of her mysteries. When I’ve convinced her to surrender and to accept mine.

What will she look like to me then?What will she sound like?
Feel like?

Like Ben and Elaine on the bus at the end, how will we see each other when the excitement of the chase is over?

This helps a little.

This unfailure of imagination.

…When I lived on the rez, city people would come out, grow braids, beat drums, build sweat lodges. They imagined some purer life was to be had with indigenous peoples. They got nostalgic over the times the tribal people had before Anglo contact, before Manifest Destiny, before the devil on the Mayflower.

As the victim is sacred.

As if women weren’t marked by men with knives; as if they didn’t war from one tribe to the other over resources; as if the individual wasn’t plagued by greed and jealousy.

There was never a garden like that.
Only children., bless them, live in that kind of paradise. And not for long.

These credit card hippies with their blond braids, they couldn’t imagine what it really was like in the onceupontime they’d dredged up so that they could believe the world was ever un-corrupted and that it could be communed with in that way again.

We don’t imagine things the way they were or are or will be.
We imagine things the way we want them to be.

And dreamers are lovely, but what little good we do dreaming.

Birds, In Beirut

2005-02-17T10:11:00.000-08:00

…There was a bird in Beirut.
In fact, there were two. And to tell this story properly, I actually need three.
Of course, there were other birds than those three, but the birds I’m talking about, they are all that are important to this story.

Two of those birds, they started out as eggs.
Of course, all three birds at some point were eggs. All birds were, in fact, eggs.
But what I mean is that two of those birds, when I met them, they were eggs.

In my sixth floor apartment in Beirut, there were two bathrooms, one with a tub, and one with a shower. They were connected by a single window sill, and each had a window, the one above the bath with a screen, and the one that looked out from inside the shower without a screen. You could open the windows by pushing them out. The screen you could open by pulling it in.

I like to take baths.

This is a story about a Genesis and Apocalypse.

…On the sill, in the little V of space between the half opened window and the screen, a bird built a nest. This nest was above my bathtub.

I didn’t have the heart to knock the nest down, though I wanted to. I had a feeling that something bad would come of this, or at least I remember it that way.

This is a story about the bad things that come when you think they might.

I took my baths beneath the nest.

…Not longer after the nest appeared, I found in it two eggs.

These birds, they were doves.

Of course, at this point, they weren’t anything yet, but a bit of mucus looking stuff and some smear of yellow. They weren’t doves, but maps of doves. They were doves coming together.

This is a story about mercy killing.

…What I thought of those eggs was that I ought to smash them.
I ought to drop them to the parking lot below.
There are good reasons to think like this.

I would preempt the suffering of the birds those eggs were trying to be.
Life, as I see it, is above all things, the potential for suffering.
(Not my life. My life is easy. But I’m not a dove in Beirut or a parakeet with its wings clipped or a chicken in a cage or a pheasant in the mouth of a fox).

And also, how would I bathe if those eggs finished up and hatched?
I don’t like to shower every day. I like to bathe.

This is a story about water.

…What I realized was that some nestbuilding egglaying bird would return to my window sill, and what she’d feel would be pain. Her eggs were gone.

What I realized was that if I’d pushed the nest off before the eggs had appeared in it, I could have stopped all of this. I could have ended this story. But I didn’t. And now it was too late. Now the mother of those eggs was emotionally and instinctually attached to the baby doves they were trying to turn into.

I couldn’t break them.

Later, I would wish that I had.

This is a story about regret.

…In Beirut, there was a family that lived on the roof of my building. Three daughters and a son. The mother, she made me food. They’d gone up there during the war and fifteen years later, they remained, in little furnished edifices, the life they’d created for themselves.

When the eggs hatched, I found them, bald and ugly, two baby birds, doves. I closed the bathroom door and left the birds alone. I begin taking showers, and I kept the shower window closed so as not to overly disturb the baby birds or their mother.

I was a father myself. I am a father. I will always be a father. God, if God created the world, if God destroyed the world, he'd still be its father.

This is a story about parenting. About being the parent of a little bird or a little boy or the planet earth.

Sometimes I’d peek.

The oldest girl, D., she came from the roof to visit me and I told her about the birds.

She wanted to see them. I felt I ought to say no. But I have a hard time saying no to girls.

This is a story about how hard it is to say no.

If you wonder about God, do you ever wonder when God started to realize that things were going sort of wrong?

…We crept down the hallway. D opened the door and went in. She was getting closer and closer to the nest, much closer than I’d been since the first time I’d come in.

I should have said, Stop, but I didn’t.

Then she was standing in the tub.

And the mother bird, she flew up then.
She saw, D, she let out a cry, she reeled, and then she was gone.

This is a story about open and closed doors.
This is a story about how you don’t know if things will come back.

…You know what they tell you. That if the bird mama smell human on its baby, it abandons the baby.

We closed the door. We worried.

Then D left and I worried alone. From the balcony, I watched for the return of the mother. From my bed, I listened for her return.

There was no return.

The following day, I was certain she had not been back.
She would not be back.

If you wonder about God, do you ever wonder if God didn’t hold finger and thumb over the world, consider crushing it as a mistake?

I went and I stood in the tub. Those little doves, they were all bone and skin spattered with a few unwarm looking feathers. They were painfully ugly.

What I thought then was that I ought to kill them.
In the day there was the heat of the sun. In the night, the cold.
And they had no mama anymore.

This is a story about hunger and thirst.

Those are the things I thought about when I went to bed at night.

…On the third day, I imagined ways one might kill a baby dove.
Drowning, perhaps.
That seemed the least messy idea.

And I kept hoping that I’d go in and they’d be dead.

But they never were.
They were crawling with bugs, over the lids of their open eyes, over the eyes themselves.
They were miserable, huddled.
I saw how it was in this world. How it has always been, how it will always be.

I understood the flood not as an act of punishment.

This is a story about regret.

…I did not drown them. I put a jar lid full of water beside the nest.
I tried to imagine they would drink from it.
I tried to imagine that if they did, that wouldn’t just prolong their suffering.

…On the fourth day, I bought food from a pet store.
I made a paste and put it on a tongue depressor. I pulled open the screen and put the tongue depressor close to the baby doves. Their bugs and their bones.

The doves, they were afraid of tongue depressor. I left it sticking into the nest. I smeared food on the sill.

This is a story about how hard it is to feed the hungry.

This is a story about how we are all ignorant.

…Days passed. They didn’t eat the food. They didn’t die. The water in the lid would evaporate and I’d refill it.

The birds were always on my mind.
I was always plotting their mercy killing.

This is a story about cowardice.

I thought about how stupid I had been, not to break those eggs.

I would go in there and stare at the birds, the bugs seeming to eat them alive, as if decay had begin before the corpses were complete, and I’d think about how much suffering my early indecision had given birth to.

This is a story about what happens when you don’t drop nests. When you don’t break eggs.

…They were getting bigger. That’s what I finally realized. Bigger and more feathers. And one day, the bugs were mostly gone.

This is not a story about miracles.

And I knew, I’d been wrong.I never saw the mother. I never heard her. But she was feeding them. Plucking bugs off of them.

This is a story about how some mothers return.

…I closed tight that door.
I would not bother them.
D would not bother them.
I would stand between them and the world if I could.

I imagined, One day, they would go away. I would throw down the nest. The story would be over.

…I like to bathe.
I missed my baths.

The shower beat down on me.

One day, I opened the door to the other bathroom a little. I looked in. The nest, it was empty.

The birds, I said to myself, the birds have gone!

But: One can’t be sure.

This is a story about that. About how one can’t be sure.

Perhaps they were just wandering up and down that long outer sill.

I went into the shower and pushed open the window there. That way, I’d be able to look down the full length of the sill and be able to tell whether the baby doves were really gone.

This is a story about accidents. About how almost everything is an accident. Your good intentions that cause bad things to happen. Your muddled intentions that result in good.
This is a story about chaos. Some people, they tell you the earth was built from it. Some people, they tell you the earth was built of it.

…I pushed open the window.
This is not just a story about opening and closing doors, but also windows.

There was a THUNK.

And everything froze.
The bird, he was knocked off the sill.
That little dove.
And what he did is he beat his wings furiously.

I saw him. He saw me.
He hovered there, beating his wings. I saw his little legs stretch toward the sill. I saw his little talons straining.

He tried very hard, but he could not reach. Nor could he stay in hover. It was probably a second. Maybe one and a half.

This is a story about how birds fall, whether you mean them to or not.

He shot down. Straight down. I watched him tumble.

… S, an urbantribal dancer, amonst other things, asked me to tell her a story about Beirut. This is that story.

If you wonder about God, do you wonder if God thinks the story of this planet is a sad or happy one?

That dove, he tumbled perfectly.

And then, before he hit the ground, he suddenly arced away from it. He begin to fly. It was graceful. He flew up and around and away.

This is a story about how birds fly, whether they mean to or not.

All of this, maybe it took three seconds. And then I turned my head. There was the other bird. Looking at me. He was to the edge of the sill. His talons, they were curled over it. He was leaning forward. He did not like the look of me. He did not like what I’d done to his brother.

And before I could pull myself away from the window and relief him of this stress, he leapt.

This is not a story about suicide. Animals don’t think like that. This is a story about mercy killing.

He hoped he could fly. In fact, he could. His flight was at first more wobbly than the flight of his brother, but he did not get nearly so close to the ground as the first. He flew almost from the moment he leapt.

…I begin to bathe again.
This is a story about water.
And food.

Thirst and starvation and bathing and floods.

This is a story about how no story is just about Beirut. Or just about birds. Or just about the story itself. This is a story about how all stories are about every story.

…You can think of it in a number of ways.
Sometimes, this story, the memory of it, it makes me smile.
Sometimes, I think about the idea that those doves have since died.
I think about the sickness of birds. I think about the heat deaths of birds. The cat pounce agony of birds. I think about the hunger of birds. The windows they fly into.

I know those doves suffered their lives.
I know they suffered their deaths.

I know they pulled suffering insects from safe haven bark. I know they ripped suffering worms from lawns.

This is a story about existence.
It cannot then be a fully happy story.

I think about who I was and who I am, if I can break the egg, about the feeling that once the nest is built, and especially once the eggs are laid, and most especially, once the doves hatch, it’s too late.

The story has already started.

This is a story about helplessness.
This is a story about intentions.

You may see this as a story in which everything worked out as if there were plan to it.

This is a story about two birds in Beirut in the late spring of 2002, their lives and their deaths. That’s all.

Hair Today. Chewed. Sickoes. Nice Ass. X. Profundity.

2005-02-15T12:55:00.000-08:00

…I’ve had a good hair day but it wasted on a faculty meeting.
I need some other social interaction to justify it.

…In one of those carts where they put really discounted items at the grocery store, I spot this bottle of pink body wash. What I think is: Son of a bitch, wouldn’t it be cool if that stuff made you smell like bubble gum?

I mean, I knew it wouldn’t. But I bought it. And now, out of the bath, having lathered up with it?

I do. I smell like bubble gum.

This, if nothing else, makes the world feel in order.

…Everybody is sick.
Coughing and sore throating and sniffling and fevering.
Damn it.

Antibiotics.
I’ve taken enough as of late.
Those magic pills.

If I knew how they really worked, I wouldn’t believe in them.

The same way if I were on the telephone with a scientist and he or she explained to me that our voices are not actually being projected these great distances, but that little electronic things are mimicking vibrations that have been mimicked by other little electronic things, I’d not believe in the telephone any longer either.

Because that just doesn’t sound right.
That means when I talk to you on the phone, if I ever do, that’s not really your voice. That’s electricity mimicking your voice.

I can’t believe that.
I’d have to hang up on that scientist.

…In Star or People, whichever of those magazines have the un-airbrushed photos—and that’s a lovely thing, photos which makes you re-remember the cliché that nobody, not even stars, look like stars—there is a picture of Paris Hilton’s ass in a bikini.

Ass is the wrong word, and if you’ve seen the photo, you know what I mean.

…What happens to me, I’m like everybody, show me a face long enough, tell me that she’s hot long enough, give her a lot of attention, and I’ll end up wanting her.

Ashlee Simpson. Paris Hilton. These girls I wouldn’t spend time with in a bar.
But exposure has made them too my taste. Or made my taste to them.
The way you learn to drink beer.

Anyway, this photo of Paris’ butt, it’s awful.

(I think of a girl in LA a long time ago and how after we finally coupled she put on a shirt but no pants and followed me out onto her porch as I was going, and when I turned to look at her waving it seemed almost obscene [that half nudity midnight public] to me and how when she then turned to go in I saw not an ass, but a butt, and how driving away I was haunted by the idea of how small she was, how insubstantial she, it all, seemed)

And there is Paris, her bottom in a bikini, as if she had back all the way to her legs, and somebody had made a small vertical incision, a shallow line, in her back to suggest two halves.

Ugh.

That’s me sitting in the gym reading People or Star or whatever because I forgot to bring a book, thinking, as soon as I turn the page away from that particular photo: Yes, but I want her anyway.

…My son gets sick on the day he is to fly back with his mother. So he and her and me, we had another day together.

And I realized that for some long time, as good as things are between us, my ex wife and me, as well as we get along, as much as we share about our son, she’s shut a part of herself off to me.

This necessary coldness.
A testament to pain.

The trauma we inflicted there, it was lethal.
Or maybe this is just a coma.

…And wandering around the university today, a gray day, a thought comes into my head.

My head, it is stuffy, my chest, it is a coughy, and I slept too much last night, and not at all the night before; my head, it is made strange by the time of day, a sudden burst of aimlessness, the weather.

I’m waling. And it’s coasting, my brain.

Then suddenly it thinks something so loudly that I say it through my mouth.

That’s me waling, talking out loud, not even to myself.

And my brain, it doesn’t know where that something comes from. My brain, it thinks it channeled it or that it was delivered by angels.

My brain in its fatigue so anxious to believe in truth through inspiration.

So this phrase hatches out of my mouth, into the gray air, over the offgreen grass, this phrase, it hatches right out in front of me and comes back into my ears, back into my brain.

And what I think at first, what my brain thinks, it thinks: Jesusgod, that was profound.
It thinks, You’ve come right up against the mysteries of the universe.

Stupid brain.
Like a drunk brain ready to embrace a t-shirt, a bumper sticker, any catch phrase as the sermon on the mount.

What did it make me say?
It made me say: You’d not be here if you hadn’t come.

Read wisdom into that if you can. I can’t.

(…Forgive me for wanting Ashlee Simpson. I mean, I don’t really. I know what a talentless moron she is. It’s just that I’ve seen her pic once to often.)

2005-02-13T22:36:00.000-08:00

Valentine, 1993
What is this mark on my belly?
Do you recognize it?

As if two people can be bound by the mutual rememberence of a short film.
Of an 80's song.
Of a bad tattoo.

Girls tell me now to get rid of that mark.
That mar.
That stain.

This unburst thing like a bad but working heart.

That's us, stumbling into a tattoo parlor on Valentine's Day one thousand years ago. Stumbling though we were not drunk. Stumbling because we were children, I more than you.

Do you remember the cold that night?
As if two people can be bound by it.
By mutual flesh pain.
By near innocence.

If that was you in the dingy parlor where the wolf was chained and sad eyed, where the man who called himself an artist wore a handlebar moustache and a leather vest over his bare skin, if you remember any of this, if you remember the good intentions with which we commissioned the making of this bad tattoo and your own, slightly better, if all or any of this is familiar to you, then don't you think you ought to find me?

Not so that we can fall in love again.
(There's no virtue in a second love.)
But so that I can believe as if I'm not the only one who doesn't forget to remember the legitimacy of the things that pass between people. However long ago.

So that I can think that not everybody from the past first sees me through glass and then not at all.

(The way everything fades; the way love never seems eternal).

If you know this tattoo, I mean really know it (and if you don't-I don't mean to exclude you-can you tell what it is?), then don't you think you ought to find me?

To validate the promises of people like us, the mashing together of body, everything that is said in breath and ink?

And the doctors, they'll tell you that to be healthy one moves on, puts things behind her, etc.

(Give me then the irrational women, the ones capable of madness, of extremes of jealousy, who are cursed with an inability to un-remember).

This tattoo, what it says: forgetmenot.

And you, that Valentine's date (and ones like you, those later dates), lost in the world, testaments to the idea that every possession is temporary.

That every ghost can be exercised.

...But some of us, we meant every scar and other mark, whatever they meant when we took them on.

Me, I'm haunted.
Consider it a virtue.

To you then, LK, and those that came after and went as well, and the few that came and went before, and those that have recently come and will soon enough go, and those that will someday come and likewise be gone, I say:
you'll be in my mind longer than I'll be in yours.

Consider that a virtue.
Don't those buy one anything?

Rye

2005-02-12T17:26:00.000-08:00

--An eight hour stint, babysitting, like a very extended play date, the son of a friend, that boy my son’s friend.

The same age, these little boys.

They wear each other out almost as much as they do me.

--I sit on the picnic table at the park, watching them, playing with sticks and toy swords, sliding the slides, swinging the swings, merry go rounding.

Like brothers, the way we’re all brothers, not Biblically, or Quaranically, not in the eyes of any god, and not brothers in arms. Brothers in company, in care, the way everything is reduced for a child.

The way that which is immediate, you accept, especially if you’re young.

And on this Georgia winter day that is like a fall day in the places I’m from, I sit on the picnic table in the weakened sun and I watch them, on the playground equipment, in the leaves on the floor of the forest beyond, and they might as well be brothers.

And I watch other kids fill up the park, and I see how they mingle and how they share. My son handing his sword to a kid who doesn’t speak English, or at least won't speak it now. A bigger kid, but not by much.

At first, I think that the kid will reject it, but then he carries it around for awhile

Later, that kid embraces my son as we are leaving. That simple and sincere communication.

And what I wish for, it is that the world was full of only kids and Catchers.

--Earlier, the three of us go to the store, we buy food for the limping black cat that is hiding in the bushes close to the apartment.

We place the food and disappear, hope that the cat comes out to eat.

Inside, we say a prayer for it, the two little boys and me, that one day it will walk well and that it will not know hunger.

And we look into a marble, a crystal ball, and we think we see something there, the good future of that good cat.

And secretly, I check the food. That cat hasn’t eaten. Who knows where it has gone. Not tame enough to catch and cage and take to some kind minded vet. A cat like many I’ve know for who there is no easy answer. Thin and with that messed up foot, fearl and furitive and desperate. A cat close to that inevitable that we all reach but want to avoid, those final days nobody, not even those with courage, wants to witness.

Something you don’t see in a crystal ball, not if you’re in control of the vision.

--And A, formally of LA, this friend I’ve had almost as long as anybody, this girl with whom I’ve never slept, who has seen me through two marriages and three loves, who knew me before I knew my first ex wife, she calls in the late last night.

Her voice on the machine in the morning: I need to get away. I’m going to come and stay with you.

This mirage of escape I sometimes hear from her. And it’s never been true, but for all I know, she is en route. The way patterns break finally because they must. Because life can't sustain them.

Her marriage, this new one, shaky, those old problems, the same problem over and over. The way we always have the same problems, in some guise or another, with people we try to stay intimate with.

(And so if they ask you: should you really stay married for the children? you should answer yes, because your next marriage, if you believe in marriage, it will reach this point too; this hump, you’ll either get over it with someone or never get over it; [the same thing is always waiting in the middle of the road; you put it there, you ought to know] you’ll either always stop in the midst of the journey and start over again or you’ll finally make it past that stopping point—so why not now, this time, with this person, for the sake of the children; both of you, you’ve got it, that fucked up thing that you bring to dismantle whatever you’ve mantled; you hit that point and say, jesusgod, I better find another person to be with... but you’ll carry that thing with you to that person too, and that person, damn it, that person too will have a thing to put down in the path that you thought was meant for you both; so yeah, for the sake of the kids, really try to get over it this time and not with the next person—either that, or go it alone, give up on that kind of combining [Happy Near Valentine’s Day]).

She calls as she has done from time to time, saying she will come to hide from the world with me.

As if I hide from the world.
Though it may be said I’m quite distant from hers. Maybe that’s good enough.

One of the smartest girls I know, this girl, which makes her one of the smartest people I’ve known, for all the great minds I can think of having known personally are, but a very few, those of women.
Terribly smart.
As terrible as it can be to be smart like that.
All that legitimate pain.

--This girl, she scares me because she is always right about me, the kind of things people tell your about yourself and your situations that you don’t want to believe. But ought to.

None of the doctors healing themselves.

And the old fantasy that we had that I would get rich and save her, this girl I’ve known more than a decade and never slept with, whose mouth has been against my mouth but a few times.

So that we are beyond the question of seduction, that old cycle no longer valid.

This character from an F Scott Fitzgerald novel, this person that lives closer to literature than anybody I know, as awful as that is in reality.

--And the innocence with which I used to believe in what I could imagine:
My back so broad that all the waters of the sea rose and fell against it but no wetness came through to the other side, whoever huddled there dry and safe.

That kind of impossible shelter.

--What I imagine, in the park, but before then too, what I’m always imaging, it’s some kind of a place into which everyone I care for can run.

And, you know, live happily ever after.

The way I’ve come to see it, it’s all steel siding and spike, the only kind of Eden I can imagine.

This trail of women and children. The cows and that limping cat.

--All the kids movies we're watching, all the ones worth a damn, they're built around something sad. The only ones that stuck with me, sad ones. The only ones that made me grow, if growing is good, somehow sad. Tears as nutrient.

--And I know how we’d get bored in there, that spiked Eden.
The children becoming their lord of the flies games.
The women missing the grand swap of seduction.
The cat missing the death of the butterfly.

And me, when I pray for myself, what I pray is not for peace, but that I may find ease in peace. That when it comes to rest on me, as it does from time to time, that I do not have the urge to run, to rock, to dredge up some old tension or create some new one.

Peace for us all and ease in peace.

Psychosomatic.

2005-02-11T03:06:00.001-08:00

--What is it that brings me awake at five in the morning?
These cough medicine asleep nights long after the cough is gone.
That and other addictions.

Here I am with the morning stars, feeling rather rested just the same.
Nothing grim in this day to follow, unless you consider Lost Highway grim.
Or showing it to forty students grim.
Some of them still nearly newborn into this un-innocent world.
These jobs we give ourselves, bringing darkness, bringing light.

--And Valentine’s Day approaches.
A day for amateurs, really.
The way a real jokester leaves April 1st alone.

Still, one thinks of love. If candy hearts makes you think of love. If red balloons makes you think of love. If people talking about love makes you think of love.

--True story, and it has nothing to do with love:
The first time I thought I was in real love, the girl in question, we’ll call her Megan because that was her name, she went on a trip.

This was college and what made me start to use the word love was that we’d fucked. And for me, well, that was brand new and pretty exciting.

I was a boy.
Nothing new for her, except for maybe the quickness of it all.

Before me, she’d had a live-in boyfriend.
She was an actress and she performed a monologue about the day she kicked him out of her apartment.

So that spring we ate taffy and had sex and I was always listening to They Might Be Giants and taking long runs and thinking about her.

How young was I? I slept in her bed with he night after night with my pants on.

The way I used the word love, it was like this: I love you.
What she said, it was: Does it bother you that I can’t say that?

You can see how wise she was. She probably knew that I didn’t know what I was talking about, either.
That I was referencing a new addiction.
That I was saying want so much I can mistake it for need but will call it love.

And of course, she was wise enough to see the limits of us. That’s she never even feel that.

It only took her a few months to get tired of a boy that acted his age.
Of a lover who knew nothing about physical loving.
The arts of the body.

She went on a trip, and this is close to the part where I have to remind you it is a true story. She went to LA, and the night before, we were making caramel corn. The way we did this, we went to the grocery store and we bought caramels and popcorn. She popped the popcorn, I melted the caramel’s in a green tupperware bowl in her microwave.

I was about to be 19.
And that was a long time ago.
And yes, I can still see that bowl. Yes, it was green.

When the caramels came out of the microwave, I dipped my finger in the goo they had become. I suppose that the high of the mid spring season did that to me. The high of being in the company of the first girl I fucked did that to me.

I can remember how her apartment smelled. I can remember how her hair smelled.

That night, I just didn’t think very well.
I just thought: Wow. That looks good, all that melted caramel.

And stuck my finger in.

That burns. And you can’t get the burning melted caramel off.
You dance around screaming.

(You were always making a fool of yourself before this girl. Like the time you took her to your father’s house in the country because he was away and you leaned against the electric fence, thinking he’d turned it off, and it shot you forward, flinging her things in the air, you screaming like a girl, and the real unscreaming girl, not amused, but faintly disgusted, watching you kneel on the lawn and try to gather yourself).

You scrape the burning caramel off with a red washrag. It was a long time ago, but I can see that rag.

And the blister that followed.

So I was a kid with a blister and she was in LA for a week and I right away wrote her a letter. How sentimental was I? Or at least: how sentimental did I want to appear?

I wrote that it hurt my blister when I typed certain letters.
Hyunjm.
The letters that went with that finger. But that it was a good pain. Because it reminded me of the night we spent before she left. A good blister because I had gotten it in her company.

I don’t know how that struck her. She brought me back a Simpson’s t-shirt.

And now we’re very close to the part that necessitates me telling you that this is a true story.

This was mid spring and before early summer, she’d walk, like a good girl, like a wise girl. Not for the reasons they’d later walk, because I’d tell them to, my passive aggressive lunges for freedom.

(L Cohen writes:
I wanted so much, to have nothing to touch
I’ve always been greedy that way.)

She walked I suppose because she was bored of a boy.
And me, well, of course I thought my heart was broken.

What happened to my finger though, over the course of the second night that followed her walking, it regrew that blister. I woke up and there was a swollen pouch, and approximation of my caramel burn, on the tip of that finger.

This new blister, it didn’t hurt. Didn’t feel like a burn. But there it was, just the same, this risen skin gone clear.

--So Valentine’s Day approaches, and I think on this morning of two blisters nearly fourteen years old, the first girl I meant to fall in love with.

If I could meet that me, I’d want to embrace him, like a father embracing a son, I suppose. I’d want him to see how easy the world around him was. I envy They Might Be Giants. Those long jogs. Easy days on the campus. The world, it was open to him. He was young and un-creased. There was a certain beauty to his innocence.

He fretted so much over so little.

I’d want to save him that fretting.

And I know, I know.

Fourteen years from now, when I’m telling stories about the me that is now present, but will then be past, I’ll think the same thing.

I’ll see him in a haze of innocence, all seem in an open world, fretting unnecessarily.

I’ll miss him.

And so through memory we birth and re-birth ourselves, never quite letting it catch up to the moment.

The grass is always greener in the mind’s eyes, and there is no journey so impossible to re-take.

The Little Prince

2005-02-08T19:25:00.000-08:00

--My son and I, we watch The Little Prince.
This is the first movie I remember watching.

It stuck with me so well all these years because it sort of broke my four year old heart.

It is the earliest I remember being sad for someone outside myself.

And The Red Balloon, which they showed us in kindergarten, that’s the second film I can remember impacting me like that.

I’ve not seen either of them since them, but I remember each of them quite clearly.

Saint-Exupery disappeared in a plane over northern Africa after writing The Little Prince, the most magnificent thing, by my estimation, to come out of France.

--Sometimes I teach the book The Little Prince.

I ask my students if the story makes them cry.
Some of them admit it does.
I never tell them that it makes me cry.
They never think to ask.
They understand that my job is to dissect literature, not feel a story.

--When as a kid I'd watch a movie, usually a Western, with my father, I'd cover my head with my elbow if something made me cry.

Yes, Westerns can make you cry. Try McCabe and Mrs Miller. Try the orginal Monte Walsh. Try The Shootist.

And at the theatre, I tried to hide my head in my hood, my father asking my mother why I was crying at the ending of the White Buffalo, a movie about a killer buffalo that had to be hunted down and killed.

It was for the buffalo, my mother told my father.
And she was right.

And my father, that hunter, that taxidermist, he must have worried then tha the was raising a vegan.

--The Little Prince was the first film I remember seeing because it was the first thing I remember happening to me that didn't really happen to me.

It was the first thing I witnessed that did something to my heart.
I was four, crying into my elbow over the little prince.

--Really, what we cry for, even when we are four, it’s not the Little Prince, who falls as gently as a tree, but the pilot.

We cry for the pilot who loses the little prince. Who understands the transitory nature of the world Saint-Exupery has created, who understand that the prince must pass from this world to make it back to the rose, but who is not completely comforted by that knowledge.

Who must mourn the loss. Who must remain as one left behind.

--And later, what we cry for, when we’ve been taught to think of stories as a series of choices made by authors, when we’ve spend time studying and teaching literature and writing to the point where we never totally suspend our disbeliefs, what we cry for is the beauty of a mind able to conceive such moments.

--And so we cry together, my son and I, over something purely imagined.
This story that took place in someone else’s mind, that mind long since quiet.
We sit there with tears on our cheeks.
Hypnotized by the one devastating moment--as devestating as anything in film--the blur of the prince beneath the tree…

Feeding My Arms. Or Something Like That.

2005-02-07T13:55:00.000-08:00

--Because I grew up in the age of computer technology, a Tandy in the house when I was fifteen, I’ve got documents—letters, stories, novels, screenplays, assignments—that go back almost fifteen years. I’ve lost a lot along the way, but how odd it is that we can carry so many words on a disc.

All those freeze frames of who we were. Or thought we were. Or wanted to seem to be.

--I go back through folders, old stuff. This is a type of nostalgia.
Sometimes reading something and it feels like it wasn’t written by me.
Sometimes coming across something the context of which I cannot even invent.

--Always writing. No, not always. Since I was ten I guess.
Little stories. The school paper.
Older, there was almost always a girl or two to whom I wrote letters.
These very individualized audiences.

I realize these letters, they were exercises.
My writing, the stuff that I do professionally, the stuff that never pleases me, that’s the actual game. I’m on the field plying my craft. Trying to make do for real with what I’ve learned from practice and whatever it was I was born with.

I don’t write letters anymore. I email, but it’s not the same.

And I blog. Like the letters I used to write.
These exercises.
This slightly wider audience.

--I find these stories, these smears, I called them, for they aren’t really stories, just little expressions, the kind of thing you can type up in class when you are pretending to take notes.

In fact, when I was working toward my doctorate, I wrote a ton of them, and from a few of those grew the collection Animal Rights and Pornography, which was not my dissertation, which was instead my guilty pleasure.

Bad student that I was. Lost in the literature world which made up about seventy percent of my classes, those comprehensive exams looming heavy at the end of three years.

Me, I entered with a master’s in screenwriting. I didn’t even know what the Renaissance was. Couldn’t have told you even the century in which Bacon was born.

I worked my ass off, three years, reading all the time, outside of class.

But in class, minesweeper, letters, smears.

I’m reading them over this morning, before my son wakes up, and I find a few that are particularly telling, particularly consistent with who I am and I suppose have been.

So because I’m busy, because my son is in town, because the day is warm and the sky clear, because it will never see the light of day in other form (and I promise not to do this that often again), instead of blogging, here is one of those smears, those near stories, those somethings that I wrote once upon a time when apparently I wasn’t much different than I am now.

Feeding My Arms
I eat more than I naturally should. It is an effort of will. I am feeding my arms. I feed my arms all manner of foods. They are burning and engorged from repeated curls and presses with weights. I can feel the food squeeze up inside of them.

I have grown to hate food. I do not remember what it is like to be hungry. Hunger is a wistful fantasy. My mouth will not chew for me as quickly as I want it to. It, like my arms, is weary. I say to myself: I have to be relentless. I have to be tenacious. I have to be undaunted.

I imagine that some day my arms will be bigger than I am. You will see them out on their own without the benefit of me or my mouth.

The incredible cut and girth of them will hold your attention.

You will wonder how impossibly hard they can squeeze and of what lifting wonders they are capable.

People will say, perhaps in defense of some small or large wrong I’ve committed, “Yes, but did you see his arms?”

Help Less

2005-02-05T01:43:00.000-08:00

--The phone rings you awake at 4am.
Cough syrup sleep, that slight cold that comes back from Colorado with you.

--The cold that last night made you stick a thermometer in your mouth, something you found amnogst all the meds left by your first ex for your son. The lesson of your most recent sickness: check your temp.
It didn't work, that thermometer.
When you call her, your first ex, and ask her why, speaking around that thermometer that for three minutes will not climb above 93, she says it is not intended to be put in the mouth.

Jesusgod, you say, spitting it into your hand, where then?

Where is supposed to go and where has it been?

--The phone rings a little after four in the deep morning.

And that part of your mind, that part that you kind of hate because it thinks too often, it’s already solving the riddle: who is this, calling me at four in the morning?

Before the second ring, it is making a list.
A, whose emails get more desperate. Whose new husband either has flown the coop or been kicked from it. Who writes as she has for years, as she did with the last husband, as she will with the next, that she needs a place to run to, though she’ll never make that flight, though she is always welcome.

Or the good ex wife, returning at two in the morning from a bad date.

Or J, in LA, who doesn’t know your son is with you and like late night chats.

Your brain is making a list of possible callers before the phone rings again.

And you don’t always approve of this always thinking side of your brain. It should be asleep. But now, all of it, all of you is awake, and the person, she doesn’t say hello, she says: I’m sorry.

None of the above. Somebody other, but you would have gotten to her.

--Last night, it was a cat. Screaming. In rhythm, every six or seven seconds. And your brain telling you, Help the cat.

The other side of it saying, The cat can't be helped. Please, please don't try. Please sleep.

Coming all the way awake. Realizing, that's not a cat. That's your son, his breathing that ends in a high pitched snore.

And I thought of Beirut, the way the cats there screamed through the nights, males fighting and wanting fights and females raped. And all the cats you helped in Beirut, that one winter sickness that wiped them out, the kittens AJ had taught you to save, the hordes of them in her yard half grown, and healthy, and, for whatever it means, happy.

Dying runny eyed. Highly fevered. Beyond the help of anything. Beyond comfort.

The way no life is saved, but only death postponed, only suffering checked for the moment.
The best doctors, those that help you go into quietly.

--This four am, it's the real phone really ringing.

She’s crying. She says, You’re the only person I know who is completely at ease with being miserable.

And you think, Is that what am I?

And she she says, Would you please say something profound?

And you’ve got nothing. You speak through your cough, through your phlegm, these things that prove your limits, and you see the world for what it is.

You see the fragile of every life.

Everyone you love, fragile. Everyone you hate, the same. You make them into fields, into flowers in fields, the faces of men you’ve struck in bar fights and women you’ve fucked and friends who’ve stopped being friends and men who've struck you and women who did likewise and all the people around them and through that great chain of connection, everybody, every thinking thing, in fact, it goes in the field.

Waiting on flood, on fire, on ice storm, on virus.

You couldn’t feel more helpless.

--You think of that old blasphemy, If I were God.

And?

What would you do? Where would you begin?

The things you hate about the nature of the world, how could they be undone and the world still exist?

Do not get me wrong. I’m not endorsing it, but that doesn’t mean I know how to reform it.

But there is nothing to do but take away all the feelings, one by one, leaving only mild pleasure, only satisfaction. That eternal drug sleep. That forever soma.

But your conditioning as a human, it tells you to reject that. It tells you that is the same as death. All the creatures of the world caught in drug sleeps, it is the same as all of them caught in easy black.

Which is death.

If I were God, I’d clap my hands and the world would be between them.
That Assisted Suicide.
That Mercy Killing.

And as much as I believe in it, I could not do it to a planet on which live the few I love.
So then, how much do I really believe in the validity of That Kind of End?

--It doesn’t matter. I’m not God.
God’s not even God.

When a girl calls you at four am, and she needs something, what do you have to give, ever?

Your son, he sleeps. Your head, it aches. The medicine is rolling around in you. Your muscles, they want you to yawn, they want you to stretch, this sickly night when you’ve got nothing, when you need more air, more warmth.

This person out there in it, turning to you, and what do you have?

--You ask her to talk about her night. You try to hear in it the secret behind her unhappiness. What you think you hear, it is that she feels lonely, like the real lonely of the real truth of all our existences alone.

The lonely that follows those ugly moments of real perception when you see the limit of every connection.

This is what she is saying, maybe, though not that way. Maybe that's what she means. Maybe you read her, or anything, right.

The best you can do, you say it back to her, you try to show her that you understand, because in being understood there is perhaps some solace.

What little things we have to offer. What little things I have to give.

She’s telling you it’s ok, she’s telling you go back to sleep.

Over the telephone, through the dark, from wherever she is, whatever part of the night is around her, whatever corner of the world she breathes in.

Say something profound, she tells you to start the conversation.

And you, not God, not anybody really, just another fucking flower in the field, what have you got for her?

What have you ever solved with your words? With your lips. Your fists. Your penis. Your talk and your action, your promises of body and breath.

The way every solution is temporary.

Pop Goes the World

2005-02-02T23:32:00.000-08:00

--We’ve returned.
My four year old analyzing Pop Goes the World, the ultimate 80’s song.
His most recent addiction.
This is my doing. You can’t make somebody love something, but you can put those elements in the same vicinity.

These arranged marriages that turn out to be true love.

--When he was two, he’d insist on Video Killed the Radio Star, over and over, until I’d learned to hate it.
But not Pop Goes the World.
That is one of those few songs that absolutely transports me, not just in memory, but in emotional state, that kind of timetripping.

So I’m sixteen and standing in the predawn cold, winter time, it’s center, the rez, my outofthebath hair frozen in spikes; it’s so cold out it can’t even snow, and I’m waiting for the bus which will arrive some long time before the sun, the bus to take me to some wrestling tournament in the middle of the state, Montana really a place of prairie; but then there is somebody in a car, a place for me to wait, the warmth and the radio, and that song absolutely capturing me…

If I can’t afford the album, and I can’t, if I can’t ask my parents for money, and I won’t, I’ll steal it.

The Broncos are losing the Superbowl and I’m driving through a blizzard away from that paindful game on the tv, listening to Men Without Hats, that song…

And that song, it’s Montana winter, it’s soft snow, a lot of it, it’s wind and it’s always dark, but not that deep and ugly black, not that kind of blind; it is winter and I have friends the kind of which I’ll never believe in again, and youth, a certain innocence, and I can get swept away in a song so that it feels it ought to be part of me.

--I always get pangs coming from the airport.
Some of that is false.
Usually I make this trip alone.

And there was the girl, that second wife, it seemed I was always picking her up, taking her there, her long journeys and all that early hope when we first started.

What’s left, that last wife, it’s not real pain, just the memory of pain.

Which like the memory of warmth, that feeling the memory itself is not the feeling of the time itself, but an exaggeration of that period, we call that nostalgia; it’s opposite, the memory of pain, whatever you want to call the exaggeration of it, that is something I mostly keep away from now.

Not not thinking of it, but avoiding it, able to.

That’s me in the snow, the only time it snowed in Atlanta last year, standing in the middle of the road at dusk, my truck crumpled, the snow coming down, the bookstore where she used to study behind me, how it caught my eye and held it too long: was her car there?

And then the wreck.

Like all the shocking wrecks. Of car and relationship.

Me standing in the road feeling the way people feel in movies, when we see them from the outside, like this is too much to really be real, the snow coming down, soft, every flake a quick burn on the skin, head light enough to float.

Like this is scripted.

So calm you could die and really not sweat it.
So distance your only mildly curious.
But like a good audience member, you do feel a little something.

Not quite empathy, but at least sympathy.
With yourself, if that’s really you. Standing in the snow.

--And a year later, you can sort of remember, but with the veil of a greater blackness between you and the actuality, as if it a grave from which you’ve risen and not some life that you actually lead.

--Home again, late at night, me and the little one driving through the rain, singing: “Johnny played guitar, Jenny played bass,Name of the band is The Human Race.Everybody tell me have you heard? Pop Goes The World….

And every time I wonder if the world is right,End up in some disco dancing' all night & day.”

And, as Larry would tell you, there are worse things for him to listen to.
He could be quoting Leonard Cohen:
"I greet you from the other side Of sorrow and despair With a love so vast and shattered It will reach you everywhere..."

--Do you ever think about how that knowledge you’ve gotten of the world, you wouldn’t trade it away, find it necessary and valuable so would refuse if offered to cut it out…
but you’d NOT wish it on your child?

That’s the story of Genesis, of course, and the story of what follows, only told that Biblical way, the father is so angered at the inevitable and at his own inability to keep the child from the world that not even a rainbow can really mend the rift.

And your left with the absurdity of the crucifixion.
As if those red moments really sweep it white.
As if the momentary forsakenness could purify even a single life.

As if God could really be forgiven or justly held responsible for the nature of the world.

--“And Every time I wonder where the world went wrong,End up lying on my face going ringy dingy ding dong”

In Flight Blog

2005-02-01T17:36:00.000-08:00

--This girl on the plane, she’s lived in LA, in the same place I lived, but a year after I left. Park Lebrea. Close to the Tar Pits and the Farmer’s Market and the Beverly Center.

Park Lebrea, a little east of Beverly Hills, a little south of Hollywood. That big and nearly empty apartment, me and J and A, two girls and a boy on their own in the big city, a place where we had much to learn and to lose and to gain.

And this girl on the plane, she makes the coincidence greater, telling you she lived on the same floor you did.

Big complex, small world.

Very pretty through the mouth, through the eyes, this girl. She looks like what she is, a professional dancer, part of a troupe, she and her traveling companion both; I could tell that about them before they squeezed past me, some specific about their builds, about the way they moved.

And I don’t like to talk to people beside me on airplanes. Conversation up close, with heads half turned, it’s awkward. You learn to hide in your lap top, in books, in sleep, behind a blanked face.

Three one word answers will stop just about anybody from trying you again.

And yet the coincidence of LA, of Park Lebrea, the ease with which she laughs, it makes it conversation not just possible, but desirable.

So you sit there head half cocked trying to put your features at ease.

--And it brings back memories of LA.

LA, that’s where you first begin to learn about women.
You were a novelty there, a pseudo country boy with cowboy boots and the pockets still sewn shut on your sport jacket because you didn’t know they could be open. You hadn’t learned to tie a tie.

This is the University of Southern California, all these rich kids, an Autumn when California was burning, but then again, it seems to every Autumn.

All these rich kids and those of you poor enough to qualify for loans it will take the next thirty years to repay.

And you were a kid from the country, and the girls that came at you, they were mostly wealthy girls.

This was graduate school but you’d hardly grown up.

You might have known something about who you were, but you didn’t know how it worked between a boy and a girl. The way you thought it worked, you saw a girl that was pretty, you wanted her, you sought her, every now and then you got her, whatever getting meant.

That was what you knew of girls before LA.

If anything, LA is where it became confusing. What you really wanted wasn’t as clear as you’d imagined it was before. And there you were in the chaos of it, hanging on to that relationship with that girl in Seattle where you’d spent the summer, that first real love, the last bit of real innocence.

That was you in LA, a late bloomer, if what you did there suggests blooming, if what happens to you there suggests the opening of a bud.

… The girls on the plane, dancers.
They travel around, performing.
They talk about Syracuse, Oregon, New York.
A kind of ease with travel I’ve never had, a kind of which I’m envious.

They call what they do tribal fusion; they call it modern bellydance fusion. You like these names, the way they say them, the way the girl beside you is lit up by them.

They tell you to visit the website Urbantribaldance.com and you make a note to plug it.

One of them, the one by the window, she’s reading a book off of which she’s taken the cover: He’s Not Really Into You.

M, I remember, she swears by that book.

And the close girl, you think she’s Irish, but she says Scottish, Scottish and other bloods, maybe a bit of Irish, this dancer with the pretty eyes and mouth, she has a pleasant laugh, a pleasant way of talking.

They play clips of their dances, this tribal fusion, this modern bellydance, on a laptop. There’s no audio, just them on the stage, moving with impossible grace, unnatural control of the body that does not look unnatural as you watch it.

For a moment, you think they must be lovers, because you can’t understand how they could dance that sensually that close to each other and not fall into semblance of love.

The way you sometimes can’t imagine why women don’t always fall in love with women. Or at least lust. There’s so much to lust after in a woman.

--I’m hypnotized, watching the videos.

Caught in the momentary false love of the fan.
The way a woman must feel when she watches a goalie stop a shot. A quarterback throw a ball. The way we admire with a sort of longing an act of skill and inspiration.

The way sometimes when you listen to Mama Cass, fuck it, whatever she looked like, you could kiss her hard and long.

--The girl beside you, you are watching her in a different than real world light, on a stage, in her most perfect element.

Captive audience. Perfect witness.

The way we get seduced by rare and beautiful things, the creators of creations we think no one else can make.

…And I think of LA.

That first fall, before Park Lebrea, the beginning of those girls, especially the wealthy ones that found you a novelty, different than the boys they’d grown up with, gotten undergraduate degrees with, boys as moneyed and certain of success as they were.

V, tall, Polynesian, a girl who had two BMW’s, identical except for the color, the color to fit the mood, she’s in your screenwriting class. And sitting on a bench beneath a palm on the campus with its tall walls, outside of which riots had recently marched and drug boys chase your car down the street begging a sale, she says to you, through her sunglasses, I want you to stop it.

And you said, What?

You were twenty three, but much younger. And so you said, What? and you meant it.

Stop relating to me sexually, she said. I live with my boyfriend.

--LA is where you learn that girls with boys are much more open than girls without them.

LA is where you learn a lot of things, though at the time you don’t know you learn them.

What you learn in LA, you learn in retrospect.

--And V, you’re sitting in the sun before or after class, on a bench, the palm tree above, and she says for you to stop relating to her sexually.

You were young, and we could say naïve, and if we’re being kind, we could say innocent.

And you don’t know what she’s talking about. You don’t remember relating to her sexually. You’re not even sure what that means.

She wears sunglasses, peers through them. Her hair, it is perfect. Her makeup and every outfit she’s ever worn.

You say, Ok. I’ll stop.

--And in your cheap downtown housing, that place you lived before the earthquake freed you from its contract, this one room apartment, with its baby fridge and your thirteen inch television screen, you and V fuck. Her ass is hard, the thing you remember most about the physicality of it, her body with its elongated muscles.

And she tells you to come inside of her and when you do, she says, Why did you do that?

In retrospect, you know that you learned then that she was a little unstable.

You’ve got a girlfriend in Seattle. You’re 23, but younger than that.

And V, she starts to bring you things.
Exotic foods.
Wall hangings.
A sport jacket.

Making you and your place poverty chic.

--Seattle, that Christmas break, you and the Seattle girl, that first love, you travel south, rent a cabin on a beach, make love at the edge of a cliff just beyond a lighthouse, thinking it would be good to die now, the water so gray, the sky so gray, everything so lovely.

(How it bothers you now to not know where that girl is.)

--And back in LA, V has left her boyfriend.
This confuses and frightens you.
But you try not to look confused or frightened.
You try not to seem like a person who has always been in over his head.

Eventually, as she tries to grow on you, you find a way to say no more.
And she immediately finds a way to say she hates you.

--That nightmare that you’ve had of women scorned.
Of the first girl who ever said love and showed you hate.
Crazymad in that dream, in a van with the doors locked, running a chain saw, two children, a boy and a girl, trying to get away from her, and you trying to get in, and the woman screaming at you: You see what you’ve done.

The door won’t open. The children won’t quit screaming. The chainsaw buzzes.

--V hating you.
The way a few before had.
The way others will.
But at a time when you were too young to understand hate, or that type of it.

And then the earthquake. Everything either comes together or goes to pieces then, depending on how you look at it.

--A year later, you see V again, a few times, in her West LA apartment, her hate having subsided, the pretense of love completely replaced by the scab of lust; the hottub on the roof, a place you could fuck beneath the stars and against the fear and anticipation of being accidentally witnessed.

By that time, everything is different. You’ve torn Seattle off your map.
You’ve gotten rid of all the cds that you associate with that Seattle girl, that first real love.

You spend nights in bars, where the novelty is wearing off of you as you’re learning how to tie ties, to cut open your sewn sport jacket pockets, to get rid of your cowboy boots; where you are leaning to be just like everybody else.

You spend your nights in bars where the LA boys, having been sent to gyms by their agents and managers now have muscles they don’t know what to do with and try to come off hard; these bars where you find out how easy it is to get in trouble there, fucking and fighting.

There are girlfriends and wives of boys you’ll not meet, and what you begin to think is that if you had to choose the life of the wolf or of the sheep, you’d take the wolf.

You would make that choice if it were yours to make.
But between the heart and the mind most choices slip into something that resembles both the possibilities and replicates neither of them.

L Cohen write:You who must leave everything you cannot control,
It begins with your family but soon it moves round to your soul.

--Your two years in LA, this is where you learn to relate to women. It’s where you learn a way, anyway, to relate to them. And you learn all kinds of things about yourself.

This is where you learn what the set of the Price is Right looks like, how everything is more flimsy than it seems on tv.
This is where you learn to really drink.
This is where you learn the limits of your writing, and the limits of yourself in general.
Where you quit your CBS job on a lunchhour two brandy decision.

And you believe as you begin to make it in almost every connection you make.

And this is where you first begin to believe in the illusion of the power of being wanted.
As if when someone thinks she wants you her desire will keep her from turning on you.
Finding ways to try to harm.
Her confusion between desire and care is mirrored by your own.

--And, LA, incidentally, this is where you met your wife, the first one, the good one.
This is the city you ran away from together.
And the city, when you were afraid of the closeness with her, to which you ran back.
Only to see it differently, more clearly, LA, yourself in it, the context of liquor and bars and your bed.

On your return there, with eyes clear enough to recognize something like disillusionment, you bought that first ring at the Beverly Center.

Your fist wife.

--You’d met her in a bar, Tom Bergen’s, the name of which brings a smile to the face of the urban fusion dance girl beside you. She knows that bar.

--And this flight, for all it’s memories, none of them truly bad, or at least far enough away to bring about more nostalgia than regret, it’s a pleasant flight.

The girl beside you telling you about what it means to be a dancer.
Telling you about her life in San Diego, her life on the road, her month in Mexico.
These girls at ease with strangers on planes.

--This good flight.
They all are, bringing me toward my son, a trip on which I don’t need to bring sunglasses, for when I return, it will not be alone, but with him, no reason yet to cry.

Fashion Sense. Going to Colorado

2005-01-30T17:10:00.000-08:00

….Though I may not need a wife I certainly could use a woman to dress me. Or at least to tell me I’m dressed ok.

Think of Friday, dressing for class.
A sudden lack of faith.
I’m dressed wrong.

This rich brown of the jacket compliments nicely the light green of the shirt. That’s what I tell myself in the closet. Not even sure if rich brown is a good description. Maybe it’s auburn—what the fuck is auburn? Maybe it’s mauve.

I don’t know, but the way I say it, it sounds right. Rich brown compliments the light green. What is the name for light green? Lime?

It sounds good and I dress accordingly.

In the mirror, I think: Hell yes, that’s a sharp combo.

Five minutes later, in the kitchen, my eyes keep going toward my torso. Caught by something. Maybe something wrong.

This auburn, this brown, this mauve, it’s too rich for that very light green. Lime. Whatever.

That sounds right as well. Too rich.

So I go look in the mirror and now I can’t tell. All I see reflected is what I think. First it was good and now it bad. My perception corrupted.

It’s simple, I tell myself. It either looks good or doesn’t. Ok?

I move out of the doorway and lean against the bedroom wall and breath, focusing on a blue ball in the distance like the guy on the tape that my mother got me when I was a kid to help me fall asleep used to say: just watch the ball, clear your mind, bouncing away…

And then, when I feel half relaxed, I leap back into the doorway and look at myself. Trying to see what I really look like in this outfit. How I’d look to somebody outside my head.

Jesusgod! I’m an absolute stranger! Never mind the outfit. Who is that guy?
Forget about trying to figure out what he’s wearing and how it looks.
Just get used to the face.

Oh, me.

In a jacket that might not go with the shirt.

Flustered, beaten, unfaithful, I wear it anyway.

Friday morning, dressing for class.

…And now I find rather suddenly that it is bringyourdaytoschool day on Wednesday.
In Colorado, of course.
My four year old tells me this.
His mother, she doesn’t tell me. Not trying to be obtrusive, not knowing that he’d even know that was what they were doing that day, thinking, when she read the schedule, that she’d just keep him home.

And when she tells me this, it breaks my heart a little.

And when I tell her that he does indeed know, it breaks her heart a little.

The furthest I’ve ever felt us apart, bonded by the grief of the consequence of divorce for him, but separated by the idea that she didn’t just assume I’d come. That she didn’t at least mention it to me. That she didn’t think we should at least make that choice together.

That she doesn’t know almost no matter what I’d go.
It doesn’t really matter. It all works out.

The airlines give you tickets if you give them credit card numbers.

So I’m going, and it thrills him, and me, and her too, even.

And then I’ll bring him back, to hang out in GA with me for awhile.

The way I feel when he’s here, at ease, and as if nothing bad can happen.

I don’t nightmare when he sleeps in this house. I don’t nightmare when I sleep in a house where he is.

So cheers to the temporary end of nightmares, to quick trips and happy returns…

And the fact that the next time I blog, I’ll be in his company.

Some Say

2005-01-29T13:15:00.000-08:00

…Ice entombing my truck.

This is me, eleven o’clock in the morning, dressed for the gym, slamming my elbows into the sheet that covers the door. Hearing the crack and seeing it spread and thinking: Jesusgod, that was the fucking window…

But no, just the ice.

Chipping at it with my keys. Beating at it with cold hands.

On the road, the great sheet of ice that covers the hood lifts and hovers, becoming second and distorted glass through which I must try to see, and then it shatters. I yelp, half duck. The pieces fragment against my windshield.

Some say the world will end in fire.

This little false emergency.

Nobody on the roads. Nothing to wreck into.

Ask my son what is water and he will tell you: it is warm ice.

…And Bally’s, it’s closed, the bastards, and I scrawl a note on a piece of paper: If I could make it here so could you.

And I chew gum and spit it on the paper and with that glue stick the paper to the door.

My DNA, but no real crime.

…And I remember that a girl I know some months ago gave me an extra hotel key card because with that key card one can gain entrance as a Sub Lodge guest to the Gold’s Gym.

Which is open.
So I steal their services.
They’ve stolen enough from me.

…Full on work out, back to what I used to do, trying to get back to what I used to be.
Three other people in the gym.
We look at each other: the obsessed, or the simple, or the undaunted.

Those who don’t know better.

Thinking, This ice storm not all that it’s cracked up to be. Is it?

…L Cohen writes:
An Eskimo showed me a movie,
He’d recently taken of you,
The poor man could hardly stop shivering,
His lips and his fingers were blue.
I guess that he froze,
When the wind took your clothes
And now, he’ll just never get warm,
But you stand there so nice,
In your blizzard of ice
Oh, please let me into the storm.

…XXXXS I XXXX

And somewhere in the NE, K, she tells me her husband has had her followed, men with cameras, not just locally, but on her travels, cities in other states, evidence of secrets that are not so secret, the pain and relief with which we [not she and I, there is no she and i] are really found out; and KH, she wants me to meditate with her, she’s always trying to heal me, and her motives are pure, not one of those people that fixes you so that they can own you; and FJ, she says she’ll not marry again: she has her own house; her own career; good friends; when she wants sex, she knows where to get it—for what does she need a husband? and C, the internet porn girl, she moved to California where she thinks she belongs; and J, she comes home from California, another home for her, that divided heart; and AP, I don’t know her since she left California, but she sends me cryptic messages “where are you” as if I’m the one who moved; and JA, she says she’s suicidal but not really—there’s a sort of glee in this conversation and by the end a sort of ease, and all these conversations, they’re about love and lesser desires; and M, she offers up a funny story about a visit to the gynecologist, that mask of comedy, and like FJ, she says she’ll never marry again, that she’s learned from her own marriage and from mine and all the marriages she’s known, from Brad and Jennifer and Tom and Nicole, that it doesn’t work; and in my office yesterday I open not entirely innocently a video from a far away friend, this twelve second biting bite, something to send me in a blushed smile through the halls; and KU, she says she keeps busy enough not to think about it, a certain kind of end, and busy enough not to think to much about beginnings, how necessary they will become, this dead space in which she knows better and knows worse; and MT, she’s wearing underwear or not but you’re thinking about it either way; and D, she’s wearing boots like mood rings; and H, she’s hearing incredible things from a child, and noting that it’s all incredible, what we hear from children; and halfway around the world, A, she writes me to tell me that her mother needs to leave her father so that he knows what it is like, and then it will work out, that strategy the only flaw of which is that for a woman to make a man believe she is really gone, she really goes; and in Montreal, M is busy, these work until five in the morning undays, but sends kisses; and these are the girls I believe I know in some small ways, with which I have some small conversations.

And I realize there are no brother’s in arms. That I belong to no fraternal order.

But then I remember a recent conversation with my high school friend, B, that surface thing we call keeping in touch and do from time to time, how we say we ought to get together this year, I should meet his wife, he should meet some girl that’s willing to drag around with me, and blaa blaa and woof woof…

And then, after we say goodbye, his voice comes loudly, before I can click the phone dead: Hey, he says.

Yeah?

We should really do it this year, we should really find a way to get together.

And he means it.
I know that because I know it is hard for him to say.

…And here, in Kennesaw Georgia in the Greenhouse Patio apartment complex, icicles hang from my window and people call me on the phone and tell me that I must know what to do in this kind of weather, having grown up in the West, having know the mountains of Colorado, the rez of Montana, and I tell them: No, this is new to me.

The places I’m from, it snows. It doesn’t rain and freeze.

It’s pretty here, whatever it is, not a winterwonderland.
This place muted by cold.
Everything so still you might not be aging.

The pine needles in the twelve yard stretch of forest on the other side of my window, the lie in a sheet of ice, looking brittle, the ice and the needles.

I’d hate to see someone walking there.

Antagonistic. My Impulse. The Good Gig. Confession. Fairy Tale. Strippers. Our Parents.

2005-01-28T13:56:00.000-08:00

…I’m feeling antagonistic toward you today.
It’s been growing for some time and now its reached a bursting point.
You’re changing the way I write. Not in general--don’t let me flatter you--just here. This place.

This morning I type: Girls I Know; Girls, I Know; Girls: I Know.

Then it occurs: this is potentially offensive, the use of the word girls. As opposed to women. Or ladies. Or whatever you call them.

Remember the old days, when I’d talk about dating?
Remember the old days when I was unabashed?
Undercareful?
Risked alienation all the time?

Now I’m too aware of you for that.
And so I’m angry with you.

Of course, a good counselor would tell me you didn’t do anything to me.
Own your problem, the counselor would tell me. It is, after all, yours.

Mine.

…Still, you’re changing the way I write.
No, ok, fine, I’m changing the way I write.
You’re making me…I mean, I am… choosing to censor myself.

What I fear in a relationship, it is when she tries to take control of me. Or when I think she tries to take control.

I might seem to bend, before I realize what is going on, but then when I decide that is what is up, I revolt.

This has been every relationship I’ve had.

I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. The common denominator, it’s me.

…My impulse, it’s the same as always, it’s to make you walk.
I can’t walk myself.
I’ve never had the guts to face that responsibility.

I can make you want to go.

And the funny thing, not that it’s funny, it’s that when you do, I’ll go around feeling abandoned.

Because I’d rather see myself that way than see myself as one who abandons. In my world, any pain is better than guilt.

You think I’m much different than your last boyfriend, your ex-husband? Or if you’re the rare boy that reads this blog, that I’m much different than you are or have been?

You know I’m not.
You know exactly what I’m talking about.

What we’re really talking about, it’s that cliché of the fear of intimacy.

…But it’s a good gig, what we’ve got going here.
I listen to you and you listen to me.
That trade off.

All that quasi-affirmation of which we never got enough.

All the ways we begin to try to please our audiences.
Don’t go.

But we’ll wear on each other.
Tire of each other.
Get bored.

You put in that cd, and you realize, as much as I like this music, this is the last time, ever, I’ll want to hear it.

…My first wife, I never told you I was married twice, but the first one, she’s the good one, the mother of our child, the things she referenced as reasons to go, they were the things that brought her to me to begin with. The exact same three. The counselor, that last ditch effort, he noted that.

It didn’t matter.
I was telling her to walk. I thought it was good advice. In fact, it was.

This is what we do.
Hook up. Unhook. Marry. Divorce. Remarry. Redivorce. This long but not infinite dance.
Hoping halfway through that the fiddler calls for a switch.

…What I was thinking, it was: let’s have a different kind of love, the kind where you always like me just as I am, and vice versa, not just where you don’t get tired of my misuse of the semi-colon (I always dressed that way), but one in which the things you could have seen from the start and finally really see don’t bother you.

And don’t get bored.
And, you know, don’t get quit reading.

All that affirmation we never got.
Those tapeworms in our hearts.
The impossibility of enough nutrient.

…My second wife, the one I never used to tell people about, that two year intensity we called marriage, she became a dancer.

I’ve never been much for strip clubs. I take seduction too seriously to involve money. But I know the scene, have witnessed other men in it, have witnesses it through some very young me some long time ago, and after my second wife begin to dance, I got to know the scene much better.

What the men buy, most of them, it’s the illusion of connection. The good dancers, that’s what they sell; it’s not their bodies; it’s not their nudity; not the way they move; those things are peripheral. What they sell to most of those men, it’s the idea of some deeper connection, the kind she could never make to the customers before, the customers after, the kind he imagines her making only to him.

I wrote about it in “You Marry a Stripper”. I wrote that story years before I even knew the woman that I would marry that would become a dancer. These self fulfilling prophecies.

The men that get into money trouble in dance clubs, they are the ones who start to really believe in the connection.

And the dancers that get into a different kind of trouble, they’re the ones that start to believe in that connection as well.

…What we do, you and I, we dance for each other.

What we want, it’s not really love, it’s audience.
Which we confuse with love.
Which we confuse with acceptance.

L Cohen writes:
Cover up your face with soap, there, now you're Santa Claus. And you've got a gift for anyone who will give you his applause.

…I change the way I write so as not to lose you.
But once I perceive the need for change, it’s already lost.
It may be that I lost you, but it is certain that you lost me.

This is the trick that I play on myself.
Close to some one, I find reasons to distrust.
Tired of some voice, I find reasons to alienate.

I say, There is the door, this is the path.
I say, Go on now.
For real, I say, go.

…What I wonder about my father, it is if he ever decided to change.
What I wonder it is if he ever examined himself, if he ever knew something was wrong, if he ever tired to figure out what and why and how to change it.

I hope he didn’t. That wish, it’s for some difference.

When we think about our parents, we try to think about the things that will give us real hope of not turning out precisely as they did.

Good luck, right?

You're No Good

2005-01-27T09:44:00.000-08:00

What is that makes me put on Linda Ronstadt today? This afternoon, before going off to do my work, whatever that is, furrowing my brow over papers I seem to grade, staring at my office computer screen, wandering the buildings.

Classroom persona. Office persona. Hallway persona.

Anyway, what is it that makes me slip that cd into my player?
Why did I even buy that cd? How long ago and when?

No matter.

Like you, I’ve got hundreds of cds, maybe a thousand. And they can’t all be explained.

The question isn’t even really why did I put this one in.
The question is: what’s its effect on me.

This is me returning to complete health on a day when the sun shines.
This is me in this afternoon that feels like morning.
Sitting here tired eyed in my workout pants, clothes washing in the machine, bath running hot, tv dead.

Shades up, not a bad day at all, nothing dark on this horizon, the phone waking me up, my son calling, Good morning, daddy. How did you sleep? What did you dream?

Pneumonia fleeing my body.
Heartache like sore muscle pain, something you can enjoy.
This GA winter not rainy, not the way I remember the last two.

This is me greeting the day, reading the computer news, playing a few games of chess, drinking my chocolate soy milk.

This is me deciding on Linda Ronstadt, slipping her in.

Nostalgia factor, the music my mother listened to. The music I heard before I got out of the garden. Gordon Lightfoot. Jim Croce. Neil Diamond. Chris Williams.

I know why I have this Linda Ronstadt cd.
I have all of those cds.
I can quote you songs from them all.
The way my father taught me to collect movies.
The way I buy the Westerns we used to watch.
I can quote you lines from them all.

This is me, Thursday morning, revved up, feeling good.

First rift of “You’re No Good” and I’m out of the chair, pirouetting across the floor.
Dancing like Beavis, dancing light Elaine, dancing like a Saturday Night Skit.

But I’m not trying to be funny.
This is my joy dance.
Flinging my arms around.
Kicking my legs.
Winging walls, furniture, leaping over my laptop and again.
Getting all breathless.
Silly.

I’d never dance like this in front of anybody. Not unless I was a kid and it was my mother. I’d never let some girl see me like this.

But the funny thing is, unselfconscious as I feel, this is when I like myself the best.

Return of the Jedi

2005-01-27T07:32:00.000-08:00

…My ex wife, she calls wanting to know if I think Return of the Jedi is ok for our son.
It’s hard to say.

Me, I saw Jaws when I was four.
The Exorcist when I was five.
A Clockwork Orange when I was eight.

My parents, they were barely more than kids themselves.
They hardly knew what to think.

…Anyway, not knowing, I ask him what he thinks, if he thinks it may scare him.
He asks me, What are the scary parts.
I tell him about the parts that he might find scary.

He decides to watch it.

That’s what he and his mommy do.

Then he calls me back after.

No hello, but straight away: Darth Vader is Luke’s father, he tells me.

Perplexed. Trying to get his mind around it. How it is that a father comes to wear all black; what circumstances result in the idea of the son being the hero and the father the villain.

He doesn’t know what to ask, but he is anxious to understand something.

And I think about how we almost always fear things for the wrong reasons. It doesn’t mean our fear itself is wrong.

We worry about Jabba the Hut and the mouth in the desert , but its something deeper that scares our children. They see it already, the hints of real darkness in the world.

“He turned good again toward the end,” I finally offer to my son.

He’s got nothing to say to this.

Marry Me and Be My Wife/You Can Have Me All Your Life/I Love You and You Love Me..Tie Me Down and We'll be Free (props if you get the ref).

2005-01-24T16:55:00.000-08:00

…The next time I get married, I’m going to seek counseling.

And I know about marriage, that if anything, I probably seem like I don’t think marriage is a great idea.

And, in truth, I don’t.

Divorce is more natural than marriage. That’s what I think.

…And yet, I know I will be married again. I can see that as a type of destiny. Not just because I want to—maybe I don’t necessarily want to—but because that is how I am.

All the little accidents that draw people close enough to believe.
Even if you know they are accidents, it doesn’t stop you from believing.
Even if you know belief is an illusion, it doesn’t stop you from acting accordingly.

Being aware of your motivations, that doesn’t always stop you from being motivated by them.

Even if they’re sort of questionable.
And in the end, aren’t most of them?

Learning yourself doesn’t cure you of yourself. It just makes it more manageable. Like any number of diseases, like any number of dis-eases.

…So you better ask yourself about this marriage that you’re going to be in, this marriage that you’re in, if you’re willing to be cynical about it all, if you’re willing to accept that divorce is more natural than marriage, then what really are you’re reasons for wanting to be married.

You’d be ask it.

And don’t just go blurting out the name of somebody you love and making that declaration of love after the name. As if that is an answer.

If that’s what you’ve done, you’ve just told on yourself.
You’re talking about wanting to possess somebody.

That, what you’re talking about, your excuse for the aisle and the flowers, the tuxes and children bearing rings, that’s just want and need.

Here now, do better.
Really, why do you want to be married?

Because you understand, don’t you, that want and need isn’t going to hold it together? Love itself, real and caring LOVE won’t either.
So don’t go counting on things less than it.

And as L will tell you, or MT, alcohol, well that’s a false remedy too.

You’re in trouble.
That marriage of yours.
That marriage that will be yours.

All that post ceremony.
All that post honeymoon.
What is supposed to be the rest of your life.

…The trick is not to find good reasons.
They all sound like good reasons.

These bumperstickers you’re printing on your heart.
These tshirt designs you’re wanting to wear on your sleeve.

The trick is to be honest about your reasons, not to have ones that sound good.
That way, when it all starts to go to pieces, you can get out your real reasons for wanting to be married.

You can see why you really thought you wanted to be here.
You can think about it.

If anything will save it, your fucked up marriage, it will be the list or real reasons.

Not the: I loved her.
Not the: I needed her.
Not the: I wanted to possess her.
(Fill in him if you like.)

It ain’t got cut it.

Your weakness and hers or his, it might keep you together. But is that what you got married for? So that known would just slightly under-weight the unknown and you’d stick to it?

Tsk tsk.

Like a man in a prison that has no locks anymore.

…You need a better list.
Get on.

…The doctor, he sees me today.
He listens. He taps. Reads a little from my file.
No pics necessary, no vision of the me inside of me made visible through some technology that if you think about it hard for even a moment is miraculous.

I’m sort of holding my breath. Three weeks since the other doctor tells me I won’t be doing anything for three weeks, buddy.

A month, a full month, since that first doc, the one with the red patch under her eye, tells me I’m got full on pneumonia.

And I’m waiting for this doctor, not the buddy type, not the oddly skin diseased type, this third doctor who seems a little sick himself, I’m waiting for him to say anything at all.

And he snuffles and reads and glances up at me and reads.

So I ask him, Doctor, how I’m getting on? Am I well again? Can I go back to my old life?

And what he says, it’s yes.

Glee. This is how I look when I’m happy.

What he tells me, It is that I can gradually work my way back into my regular life routine.
And what I think, it’s: You lovely little monkey (a term of joyous affection in this moment), I already have been gradually working my way back.

Because what he’s told me, I’m through it.
I’m finished.

…And driving home in that glow, I think of how this hasn’t been so bad, that sickness.
Maybe even bad’s opposite.
Some cleaning effect.

The way sickness makes you better.

…When I get married again, I’m going to seek counseling.
Before there is even a problem.
Before I even get married.

When I start taking some girl very seriously again, and she me, I’m going to say: Let’s go to counseling.

She’d look at me strange if she hadn’t already heard this speech.
You know, the one that starts with, When I get serious with someone again, I want to go to counseling.

Shall have heard that between the third and fifth date. Even not earlier.

So that when I say it, she’ll know what it means is: I’m starting to take this seriously.

Only, because of how much I want to take a serious relationship seriously, and because I believe in all that stuff they tell you about communication, I don’t want to tell her that in code.

I’ll have told her that I’ll ready: I’m taking this seriously.

So when I say it, let’s go talk to a councilor, it should be no surprise.

…Incidentally, I’m not built to think like that.
To walk around with my problems or their potentials exposed in begging bowls.

Men don’t like other people to solve their problems, or to try to.

But I know that counseling isn’t about somebody who can do that.
Just like love is not about finding the perfect person.

There is no perfect person.
There is no councilor who can solve my problems.

Most of them, they’re just people with degrees.
I could have gotten that degree.
You could have gotten that degree.
My most crazy ex, the one who pointed a gun at me to prove her love (and how crazy am I to still find that wonderfully romantic), she is getting that degree.

They’re not geniuses.
Oh a few of them in this broad field, but not many. Ideally, they should all be as rare as real artists, but they’re not.

I know the limits of my therapist. I saw his weaknesses. I saw the weaknesses of his approach. I knew he wasn’t going to fix anything, not really.

He didn’t have the magic, didn’t have the touch.

You put your soul in the hands of a preacher as if he is closer to your God than you are. What rare man would that be?
That spiritual genius, that artist of the soul.

But that guy talking at you from the front of church, he just went to the seminary.
He just got trained.

Like my therapist, that unrare man.
That average joe with a degree.

…So what’s the point?

The point is, there will be a context, an office, a meeting time, when you are encouraged to say things you’ll not normally say.

To someone you forget to say things to.

This non-genius, this person who can’t save your mental health or your soul, he or she can get you talking about things.

He or she can remind you what you already known: that this person your holding hands and waging war with, she’s on your side.

That once upon a time, you believed your life could primarily be about making this person happy.
That you don’t like anything unhappy in this person.
That for crying out loud, you are the source of her misery.
And deep inside, you don’t like that.
Now what can you do differently?

And that might help you to cut it.

Maybe.

If you’re in touch with your real reasons for getting married and wanting to stay that way. If they remain valid.

…Because in the end, it will be an act of absolute will.
People say love is a choice, but that’s not true.
You love who you love and don’t who you don’t and desire which is often confused with love is also not a choice.

But marriage, remaining together, that’s a choice.
The desire to want to do so, that too might be a choice, at least to a degree.
You’ll have to make it.

…When I get married again there will be some dumb ass Kaiser office, cheap prints on the wall, some councilor sitting their rolling his pencil, and it won’t matter who he or she is, we’ll talk, we’ll do our best.

I wish us luck, the three of us.

…She’ll have to know me thoroughly eventually.

I’ll have to confess it all to her, who I am.

What is that opening attraction based on?
It’s mystery.
Oh, we say it is that men like breasts and asses and women like money and security, but that’s not it.

It’s mystery.
Men think they can solve it primarily through the flesh. None of the bull shit about getting back to the womb. He’s trying to find you in there.

And women, they think it has to be solved primarily in other ways, less tangible ways, but she’s just trying to get into you too.

All these marriages around me are going to hell.
I know what that is. It is the end for one of them or the other of mystery.

The woman, when she loses the sense of it, when she realizes there’s nothing so grand in there, she tells the man she’s lost respect. Respect she equates to love.

And the man, when he feels he’s thoroughly probed her, when he feels he absolutely knows her, what he confesses into his pillow at night is that he wants to find something new and exciting.

Sand art. You build it. You look at it for a little while. You sweep it away.

All these marriages falling apart around me, all these people who can’t survive the end of mystery.

…Female friends tell me about their affairs and I try to understand the role of the cuckold.

And at first I want to thank lucky stars that I’ve never had to play it.
And for a moment, I want to think about how great I must be at something, these women that don’t go looking.

And then it occurs to me that that’s not true. If I were so great, why the end of things?

And what I realize is that the fact we never reached that stage, it is a testament to the greatest thing wrong with me.

That thing that has fucked up all my relationships and will fuck up the ones in the future, too.

It is that the woman, even after years, she never gets to know me well enough to feel the mystery is solved.

But she never really gets to know me at all.

Rather than be disappointed in the solution, she is caught up in the frustrated investigation.

I keep her off guard. I keep her dancing. I keep her moving from foot to foot, from pose to pose, she hardly knows what to think, when to breath.

Like those cats they experiment on at some university, these cats these unethical and heartless bastards place on discs in pools of deeper water, the disc unbalanced enough to require that cat to keep conscious, careful, because if it doesn’t, if it relaxes and doesn’t constantly readjust, the disc will go completely off balance and the cat will fall in the water and drown.

That’s what I did to all those women. Unethical and heartless bastard.

Those asshole experimenters, they do this to study sleep deprivation.

And me, I’m not studying anything. I’m just indulging my fucked up nature.

…When I marry again, when I even start to work toward that in a relationship, I’m going to find a way to get her off the disc.

I’m going to find a way to put her at ease.

And I’m going to hope that when she gets there, it’ll be ok.
That somehow, we’ll work out a way to deal with the end of our mysteries.
With the idea that it is not necessary to begin a new one.

…What we all want, really really want in the end, it is to be loved for who we really really are.

And what we fear, what we really really fear, it is that won’t happen.
And it’s good fear.
There is a ghost in the dark.
A murderer beneath your bed.
A monster on the street corner.

Those people that we love and that love us, they’re poised to move on.

And yet really, finally we must accept the night; finally we must sleep; finally we must go walking that street. And hope it’s ok.

That luck and strength and preparation see us through.

Absence and the Heart

2005-01-22T21:03:00.000-08:00

…Driving to the bar, I’m excited, all blown up, happy.
There a light in me, around me, this rare moment.
As inspired by the music I’m listening to as if I’ve created it myself.
Free from the idea that I’m not free.

....What I miss for some reason I can’t quite figure is my ring.

There in the bar, the Dixie Tavern, an old friend of a place with no real friends in it, this respite from respite, I start to tap the glass, and there is something unfulfilling in this, and so I wonder: what? It’s the clink.

It’s the ring against the glass.

I wore my ring for a long time after I was divorced, but not for any reason based on bullshit theories about how women chase after men with rings. It was there for something else, some other security.

But still, that was ages ago, and why now when I tap my finger against the glass and expect that familiar clink, I cannot guess.

…Anyway, the Dixie Tavern, not overly full but I don’t need it to be.
I just need to be out. I just need to hold a vodka tonic. Well, that and drink it.

And what has blogging and this convalescence done to me, all this down time, all this time I’m stuck alone with my mind and my computer? It makes me sit there at the bar scribbling notes on napkins and stuffing them in my pocket.
Things for fictions.
Things for the blog.
Etc.

Napkins which now I can’t uncrumple well enough to really decipher.

…Beside me early on is girl, her back turned, one of those shirts that don’t go very far down, one of those pairs of pants that hang low on the hip, a perfect and tight lower back, an overlooked part of the body, or it so it seems to me now.

Not that I'm lusting after it, or anything below or above it.
I'm a man in a museum. The exhibits wander by.

In fact, I don’t feel any real lust, not right away, not at all this night. I’m happy to be here, that’s all. In the chatter and the smoke and liquor smell.

…At the Dixie Tavern I’ve learned it best to pay from drink to drink or your tab will never equate to the drinks you can remember having taken. I find the right bartender, the one that makes them stronger, that is generous because he understands his generosity is rewarded in the tip, and so he pours the vodka deep and we have an understanding.

Nothing’s different here.
The band girls.
The boys wanting to play alpha male games.
The pool tables.

This is an old outfit. It occurs to me now, this night, when it’s almost fresh again, when this visit feels like one to nostalgia, that some night I’ll have outworn it.

The way I hear a cd and it occurs to me that I’ll never put it in again.
These strange and undramatic goodbyes.

But tonight, it’s not that night. That night, it’s still coming.

…I feel distant from the people, more distant than I usually feel, but not in a bad way, with no darkness between us, just space, or perhaps a sense of near invisibility, that I tonight I can really be a witness and nothing more.

Enjoy the noise.

I don’t have to know what the face of the girl with the lower back looks like.
There’s nothing I mean to connect with.

…What I do, tapping my ringless finger on the glass and making no noise, I think about my ex wife a little, and what she told me she did to get over me, which was think about me all the time, which was to never go numb against the pain or hide from it in noise.

To lock herself up and welcome it, embrace it, challenge it.
Until finally it was done with her.
Brave girl and smart.

And it doesn't bother me to think of this. In fact, it gives me a sense of ease. Perhaps I smile.

...And for some reason I think of my second ex, the second serious one, it’s been a year, maybe exactly, since she left, and what I think about while sitting at the bar is her flaws.

I see them in my head.
I remember how she grew past them and onto me.
I remember that she is not perfect.

…Two girls, they put their faces side by side and hold up their camera phones at arms length and take pictures of themselves together.

It’s nice to drink again and I think what I thought this summer, with the girl that lied about everything. Butt once upon a time, I didn’t know her as a liar, I knew her as a real possibility, or as close as I could get at that time to one.

And what I thought then, one evening at her house in the country, on the porch that overlooked the wilderness, where we sat drinking, where she sat with her tan legs raised and her head thrown back and the sky above us, I thought: if I was always slightly drunk, I could really be with her.

Maybe really be with anyone.

If every night I came home and had a vodka tonic.
Maybe two.
We could always be high and happy, always be goofing.

There are worse glues with which to hold a thing together.

…Sitting in the Dixie Tavern I look around and wonder if I could fall in love with somebody here.

Drinking in the Dixie Tavern, I think that indeed, I could, that in fact, it seems simple, looking at a girl for a moment, wondering about all the mysteries of her, believing that if you could be allowed to start to solve them, you would trade everything, your life alone, the parts of you that you want to hide, that to really know her, whoever she is, you would give up yourself to her.

In the Dixie Tavern, where they will try overcharge you on your nightly tab, where the good bartender pours extra vodka for the dollar beyond the normal dollar tip, where the girl with the tight lower back has roamed off with some pretty boy, her face still unknown to me, where I sit feeling comfortably invisible and in no kind of pain, I think about that idea of love.

The one we think we can almost feel for strangers.

The way it easy to love or hate from a distance.
How up close, it's more complicated.

...And the boys play there alpha games and I’m too far from it to even rate a challenge, and the girls, they wander around looking like something with which I could try to fall in love, but I’m too far from it really think that way.

It’s as if on this juvenile night when I've run away from home, I’m all grown up.
For a little while in the Dixie Tavern, drinking vodka tonics and half listening to the band, I recognize the me that I will be when I really have grown up.

What an odd time to encounter him.

…I scratch notes about how I’ll blog it all, felt tip notes on folded and wrinkled napkins, notes I’ll not be able to read, and they strike me later, now, the day after, at the end of this hung over dead, like any writing I’ve lost does, like if I could find them, they’d say finally the perfect things I need to say.

The way the girl who wanders off, even if you sent her wandering, she’s the perfect girl.

…I’m not cynical at the Dixie Tavern, not this night. Every one is ok with me.
Nobody is so bad as to be worthy of my wrath.
Nobody is so good as to be worthy of my desire.

I like this moment, this night, and I’ll pay for it the day following, but it’s worth the price.

Now, sitting here to write it down, wishing I could make out something from these napkins, I smile. I think it is kind of nice the words are gone. They’ll live up to my expectations better that way.

Like the person you lost young and therefore can idolize.
Like the dream you forgot and thus never subjected to that inevitable moment of iconoclasm.

They’re frozen, those words, on this paper, smeared, wet-edged, better off that way, a souvenir from the only night I’ve had at a bar in perhaps a month in a half, maybe longer, a rare night, a night with which I’m at perfect ease.

And now I'm removed from it by a day.
Now it's back to this apartment.
The television.
The internet.
The books I'm trying to write.
The papers I'm trying to grade.
Phone calls I'm trying to answer and trying to make.

But it's more ok now, those routines, the short break like a good vacation, and me every now and then knowing the absolute right thing and doing it.

the hangover i deserve

2005-01-22T13:40:00.004-08:00

ok, so that was a hangover waiting to happen.
and now i'm waiting to get over.

and as soon as i can sit up for more than five minutes without feeling nausea, i'll tell you all about my night at the dixie tavern.

the hangover i deserve

2005-01-22T13:40:00.003-08:00

the hangover i deserve

2005-01-22T13:40:00.002-08:00

the hangover i deserve

2005-01-22T13:40:00.001-08:00

the hangover i deserve

2005-01-22T13:40:00.000-08:00

I Try to Make You Indignant

2005-01-21T17:55:00.000-08:00

I know what I need to do tonight. The tv is dead to me and I can’t turn it on. It’s been on and on, this beauty of a flat screen, this ode to my desire to posses that which is bigger and better and thinner and lighter and crisper and cleaner.

But I can’t turn it on. I can’t select a program. I can’t select a movie, not from the hundreds.

I can’t.

I know what I need to do tonight.

I need to get out. And it’s been ages.

…In the bathtub, in the candle light, in the bath salts (ty for that gift MG), with a beer on the rim, the second beer of the night, and god, your head gets light easily, it’s been so long, and you still aren’t getting all the air you’re used to, so the head, it goes light, in a good way, with the bath salts and the candle flicker and you take stock: How well have I come through this?

And the body, for those half assed workouts, for your refusal to save yourself from your vanity, for the sit-ups you perform coughing and slowly, for all your stupid work, for all that meaty useless work, it’s there, most of it, most of the lines you’ve drawn with repletion, this particular move, over and over, with something gripped in the hand, pressed by the heels, uplifted against the ankles, this monument to nothing traditional, not to battle or more simple survival, not even to athletics, this unfinished thing that you continually try to build, develop, into…what?

Whatever it is, it’s there, in the candle, in the water, that hot water, the bath salts.

You’ve treated yourself ok.
The surface, how you value it, for whatever reason, for better or for worse.

You roll in the water.

Your head light because your lungs are not all healed.

A good light.

You know what you need to do.

You need to take this thing that is you, your body, that mind behind it, that light head, back into the night, away from your defunct obsession with internet chess, your sickness induced obsession with sitcoms and Mtv, your fixation on blogs, on finding some perfect and new website that will make your real existence unnecessary.

You know what you need, on a night like this, so far removed from a night like this, you need that other false world.

We move from illusion to illusion.

We get tired of one and embrace another.

This is just another love story.

Alone, I think of how I’m really starting to love myself.
Alone, I think of how I’m starting to get addicted to the idea of being alone.
Who would have guessed that addiction follows comfort? I thought addiction came after some immediate and overwhelming high.

But no, ask yourself about the girl or the boy you really can’t release from your heart though she is far out of your life; that wasn’t based on one night of passion, one passing of eyes, that was based on comfort, on some slow coupling, a sort of arranged marriage of the soul, the kind that always works out best.

Alone, I get used to myself and start to really like it.
But then, as I did with any other lover, I get a little fed up. A little bored.

I don’t mind myself in the hot water, in the tub.
The candlelight and no other and I see in it what I have and have not lost. More importantly, what I am, of the flesh, and this is satisfying enough, but only if I go.

I love you, but I’m restless. That kind of thing.

I know what I need to do.
Vodka tonic.
Some bar.
This night.

Tired from the pills that made me sleep but not until it was too late.
Tired from the alarm clock that came on too early.

The class that lasted too long.
The socializing in the halls.
The gym that gives you some semblance of the body you think you need as bare minimum to be comfortable with yourself.

You are so unprepared for love it is absurd.
You’re a case study.
You should rent yourself to eager to learn psychologists.
You should rent yourself to somebody.

But it will be ok.

You're shaking with fatigue but even shaking is a reminder that you can't be still.
You're tired of being tired and if your confused its only the beer and the hot water gone warm and the vodkas you will drink and all that lovely light.

Your hair is bad, but your eyes, they're clear. And your intentions, they're muddled, but in the end, your heart is ok.

And you've got your green sweater; you've got your fake leather jacket.
You've got your shoes and the keys to your car and the cd in the player and the clear night, this shivering cold.
You don't have to feel it except for a little, that bit beneath your skin. You can shake it, you can shake anything. The strength that follows weakness. The greater dark that shatters in the rising sun. One or the other of those moments, but it's all transition.

Ridiculously unperfect. Me. You. One of us or both.

You know what to do, on a night like tonight, with a bad hair cut and a face you’re almost used to, your face, that face you grew up with and into, and body that you tried to control, with nutrition and exercise, that body, in fact, that you have sort of controlled, that is closest to what you want it to be, at least in this light, at least at this time of night, than anything else you’ve tried to make be.

And I know what you’ll want to write, you deep thinkers, you pseudo Zen masters, and it all sounds good and we can all say it—any of us can sound healthy if we think long enough about how we want to sound—but in the end, you’re not so far removed, and you’re not so close to comfortable, and you’re just like me.

We’re not copies. But you’re like me.

And it really doesn’t matter much if we’ve figured out how to stay in or how to go out.
It’s the same dilemma and it will show up again tomorrow or next week.

These and other questions.

And so on.

Stars. Rain. Sun. Moon. (And Only the Children Can Begin to Explain)

2005-01-19T18:33:00.000-08:00

…My ex wife calls me.
This is nothing extraordinary.
We share a child and talk every day.
More than that, we like and trust each other.

My ex wife calls me, and she’s crying, I can hear it.

This woman, my ex wife, the only one who loved me and still does in the way I want to understand love.

And I think how it is between us, how we’ve emotionally weaned ourselves off of each other, that painful and necessary process.

She calls and she’s crying, this woman, my ex wife, who lives on the other of a thin and deep chasm. Each of us, on our side, we have our worlds. But sometimes we run up to the edge, each of us, face to face, voice to voice, I can see her and she can see me.

You can’t leap over. I can’t go into her world. She can’t go into mine. But we can stand at the edges of our worlds. We can each of reach and almost touch.

This, as far as I can guess, is a best case scenario with exs.

…Sometimes, I find girls in my orbit.
This is not to suggest that I carry that kind of weight, that kind of gravitation, that I’m a planet and everybody else is moon.

All of us, sometimes we’re planets, sometimes we’re moons, and it hardly matters which, the universe is so vast, the astral bodies so many.

But sometimes I go still, and people always come round to look at still thing; they want to think about what it means and in that study they come to recognize the distance in which I already believe.

What I wonder sometimes, when I’m orbited or in orbit, when I’m closer to connected than most things are but still miles away, what I wonder is if I’ve ever been available, if anybody ever had a fair shake, if I did.

You ask yourself about the sickness. You ask yourself, Where did I catch this? Was it in my genes? Is it terminal? How long can I live like this?

You know how it is. You wonder how lost you really are. These girls in your orbit, or if we’re really talking about you, and we might be, perhaps it is boys. Whatever it is that moves around you, you wonder you’ll ever do more than plant a flag. Then take a step. And fly away again.

…
…My wife, she is crying on the phone because our little dog, Ginger, she’s too old for anything but pain, she’s going to the vet, meeting that shot, going to die now, quietly, without knowing that is death.

That’s how I think about it.
Strange that we give shots to dogs and consider it humane but wouldn’t do that for a human.

…Ginger, we got her, years ago, before we were aware that our marriage was doomed. From the pound, where we walked dogs, where we’d accidentally adopted one and then there she was, a puppy mill dog, with her teats hanging down, her fur all matted, close to death they said, just needing a place to die in a year or so.

Maybe they believed that; maybe that’s what the people that dropped her off said about her. That she was close to death. Or maybe they just wanted us to take her.

They’d guessed her for fifteen; they claimed her that eight years ago.

She didn’t die. She got a haircut. She got spunky. She moved around with us.
Me, my ex wife, my sontobe who was coursing around in the veins of us both, and the other dog, Saint.

Ginger, Saint, my ex wife, me, and the child we would someday make between us.

…When I was in Beirut, my ex wife, she called, crying like that, the way she was today, only she wasn’t my ex and Ginger wasn’t old, wasn’t going to be dead, but Saint, the other dog, the dog at the pound who stood in his little pen with a sign hanging on it that said BITE DOG looking half expectant, he’d gone missing.

My ex wife and my son, waiting for six weeks since his birth to pass so they could fly over, across the Atlantic and be with me again, they were there with Saint and Ginger and Saint had gone missing.

I felt that he was alive, just a little lost.
Don’t worry, I told her. You’ll find him.

One of those things where you can be write and wrong at the same time.

…In the evening, after dark, the Beirut night where the bats dive after clumps of berries that fall from the weeping tree, I went up the big steps, up through the campus, off to the internet café where I could call the States cheaply.

She’d just found him, in the fields, where the coyotes had run him down.

And I can’t hate the coyotes.

…Leave it to us, to this species, to make of dead dogs symbols for relationships gone wrong. You see the problem with that? I do. He was more than that. Everything that lives and wants to is more than a comment on the things we’ve fucked up or done perfectly.

The duck on your wall, that’s not a symbol of your marksmanship, or you stoicism, not a talisman against the other powers of the world.

That fish on your plate, that not proof of your good taste, your position on top of the food chain.

That dog half eaten in the field, that not omen of the death of your marriage.

That’s a real dog, and a real fish, and a real duck, and their lives, they were as sacred to them as yours is to you. As sacred as the lives of your loved ones to you. Those living things.

…I was wrong and I was right. She found him but it was not ok.

And staggering back through that Beirut night, where the lights come up off the Mediterranean, where the bats dive for berry bundles that fall from the weeping tree and where the cats all stray patter and freeze and patter, I didn’t know what to feel.

I mean I knew, but I couldn’t feel it.
Because I was half a world away?
Because I was alone?
Because nothing is real right away when you don’t want it to be.

Not your marriage, not your divorce, not the death of anything whose live you value.

…My dark apartment, a light on in the kitchen, and figures moving in there, this Beirut night, the sisters, very poor and very proud girls, girls whose mother cooked for me, having come into my apartment to leave me food and do my dishes.

These sisters trying to take of a man because his wife was half a world away and they didn’t think a man could take care of himself.

They break into my apartment to do my dishes, to wash my kitchen floor.

And me, not ready, in my haze, in my shock, shattered awake by the sudden presence in the kitchen doorway, screaming more loudly than I’d scream if in normal circumstances I faced a madman with an axe.
Screaming about everything, the death of everything, Saint, my own, yours, my loudest scream ever, the truest scream of my life, absolute terror.
And she screamed to, that sister.

We stood there screaming.

And when it stopped, I knew what to do.

Just sob.

…And now Ginger.
Her moment has passed.
A symbol of nothing.

It doesn’t stop us, not really. Maybe we scream, but we do what we do. We do not freeze.

We teach our classes. We write our blogs. We take our phone calls. Watch our television.

…On this day, I learn that I have a choice to make between doing something good and doing something that is not good. It isn’t so much that there is a good thing to do as that there is a bad thing not to do, but I can make the bad thing seem good.

Sometimes we find ways to feed our beasts and tell ourselves that good will come out of it beyond the pleasure it brings us.

This thing, it is nothing I’ve nurtured or known about, and it’s not what you think, whatever you think.

I promise you’ve got it wrong, whatever act of thievery or seduction you envision, that real only in the very generalities, in the way that must everything we do is an act of thievery or seduction.

The details are wrong, I promise, and more than that, they’re under-important.

This thing, it’s just something that from grave distance and sudden stillness I recognize as a bad thing that I’d probably momentarily enjoy doing.

…Once, I knew the grandfather of a friend.

This old man, he was deep in Alzheimer’s.

He never said anything you could understand. It was all gibberish, mostly in German, often he would sing it. This old sad-eyed Jew who had come from before the war.

This friend of mine, the grandson, he was trying to take care. He’d come get me, having lost his grandfather, having left a door unlocked, and we’d go looking and find the old man wandering around in a parking garage, staring into the corner or a lobby, standing on the sidewalk and studying the cars that passed.

This old man, in all that time I knew him, he offered me only one sentence that made sense; he said five words that added up to anything.

He said, You have a good soul.
He said it clearly.

He didn’t have to mean it. He certainly didn’t have to see it. I didn’t have to believe he saw anything good in me or meant what he was saying.

I didn’t have to think they were more than words, accidentally coming together. The way sometimes the dead seem animate because of gasses moving through the body.

He didn’t have to know what he was saying or who he was saying it too.

It was almost irrelevant, that sudden opinion in the midst of the chaos that defined him, that thing we could never get a hold of, that nobody knew how to control.

What it made me do, though, what he said, it made me feel like I wanted to make him right.

…Now I have a choice, and I don’t know what I’ll decide.
I think I know.
I think I’ve recognized bad and good.
I know at this moment what I’ve decided.

But my recognition will have to stand up to a lot. It may have to stand up to me second guessing, to me trying to separate what is truly bad and good from what we’ve been taught by our religious leaders, our school teachers, our society keepers.

I think I know what I think. What the real me things. But I’m not sure.

I think I know what I mean.

I knew when I married what it meant. What I meant for it to mean. That promise.
I knew when I divorced what it meant, too.

I wasn’t prepared for anything. I’m not prepared for anything. For any marriage, for any divorce, for any death.

Men, they don’t like change. Men, they focus on what is gone and what is lost, not what is there. Maybe it’s not just men. Maybe it’s just human. Maybe it’s even beyond that.

In any case, can we be held accountable for what we promised some time ago?

…L Cohen writes:
Through the days of pain that are coming
Through the nights of wild distress
Though our promises count for nothing
We must keep them nonetheless.

Nap. Naked. Cheap Shots. My Afterlife: Sex or Violence?

2005-01-18T13:16:00.000-08:00

…Don’t like to nap, but as this sickness wanes, I can’t help it.

You find yourself asleep at four in the afternoon. That’s not really sleep. You’re thinking. You’re thinking about what they’re saying on tv.
You think about what you’ve read.
You think about what you’ll write.
And then you get beyond it.

Your dream is not a dream. You are spinning narratives. Telling stories. Trying to make sense. And you are aware of this half sleep.

You know what it is going on.
Your mind, it is past you, it’s going. Like a computer that starting computing all on its own. That said it felt limited by the operator and decided to do things itself.

Solve problems and create them.

That’s my mind in a sick haze nap. That’s my mind and I’m a little afraid of it. I try to wake up, but I’m too heavy, my eyelids, the skin beneath my eyes, that other part of my brain, that conscious one.

Somewhere in there, my little lizard brain, it’s thinking about who there is to fuck and what there is to eat. And around that, that subconscious brain, it’s figuring me out, and the rest of it too, the me that is the world or the world that is me. It’s telling stories with themes built around philosophies, built around a world vision.

It’s more confident than I am.

It knows.

And me, the other me, this me, the one who will write about it later, he’s a little scared by it all. He thinks: I want to wake up. I want to call a girl and tell her that I love her.

That’s what men do when they are afraid. They start thinking of what women to tell the word love to.

And when I do wake, it’s nine. Or eight thirty. Or seven. Whatever. This little naps that I hate. These little nightmares of ultra reality. My eyes too heavy. The skin beneath them too heavy. My face itself heavy. And I’m aware of the muscle and flesh pressing against the skull.

I wake, and I don’t call any girl and say I love you. I’m not that afraid when I am awake.

I make a salad, a big salad, the kind that George would admire.

And I think about the nap: This lucid and limited thought process, it’s the closest you get to insanity; and insanity, that the closest you’ll get to genius.

…And at night, I’m falling asleep later and later.

Getting up to drink soy milk.
Lazy, practically sleepwalking, so I drink it from the carton. That’s not a habit I indulge.

Even when you live alone, even when you don’t think anybody else will drink from it, you still ought not do that.

Practice good manners in solitude, too, I tell myself.

The way I use my turn signal even when the road is otherwise empty.
So that I don’t get lax.

…In any case, I get up, tired but not sleeping, able to sleep only when I don’t want to and vice versa, and I fling open the refrigerator and I pull out the soy milk and don’t even think “Fuck it, I’ll just drink it like this”, but I do just that.

I pop open the top, I put it to my lips, I let my head sink back.

Nude, save my socks, meant to protective my overslysensitve feet from that godawful feel of sheets.

And when I lower my head and look out my kitchen window and see the person out there, standing with her Beagle—I think it’s a her, though it’s hard to say, she wears a red knit cap pulled tight—what I feel is not ashamed for my after the garden nakedness, but an awful feeling I’ve been caught in an act and defined by it.

That just the moment you let your guard down and do something sort of naughty somebody sees you.

That whoever is out there will go home thinking about the idea that I drink from my milk carton.

…Reading MT’s blog, the comments there, one in particular, I am reminded of a certain type of vulnerability, the kind most of us must have, some of us our immune to, the way that we can get our feelings hurt, our ire stoked.

And how hard it when there is nothing you can do about it.

How frustrating it is when you cannot punish those that fire at you, or that fire on the people you care about.

The way when I play internet chess and somebody says something insulting, I get to burning.

So that my fantasies become of an afterlife filled with all the people that took cheap shots at me when I couldn’t get at them. All of them jammed into a room, these people who flip you off from behind their windshields, these people who write you nasty emails, these chess nerds who suddenly try to demean you.

In that fantasy, I can pull them out one by one and box their ears, bruise their sternums, bloody their lips, break their noses.

Different than that afterlife fantasy of an island peopled with women—and me a sort of king, living in the highest treehouse, all of happily ever after with our endless stores of vegan eats and razors and deodorant and toothpaste.

Yes, yes. I know how bad both the fantasies are.

Movie Reviews. Dream. I Ask You a Question.

2005-01-16T16:18:00.000-08:00

…I’ve put up a movie review blog, not that they’re legitimate reviews. Just quick responses to some of the movies I watch.

MT helped me link to it from here. It’s on the right. Movies I’ve Watched.

Not all of them.
Just some.

… I dream I’m in the campus bookstore, after some long journey, and some girl, some lost girl I used to know, she’s got a gift for me, but I hate gifts; in the back room I see a poster and recognize the mountains of the town where I lived as a child; the view is from above and when I get there, close to it, it is real; I’m standing in some glass room looking down.

My son is now beside me, and I’m pointing it out to him, this place I lived as a little boy, far away, far below; the dirt street in which I used to throw the football to myself; the shack like houses melded together I called home; and beside me too is another member of that town, looking down, but with disgust, saying she’d never go back.

And what I see is that if I could get out of the glass, I could descend the side of the mountain and be there again, where everything is green and golden; where, anyway, I remember it that way, but even if I got out, it looks from this angle like more of a fall than a climb and the thought of it makes me dizzy.

I know what this dream is about.
Before falling to sleep MT and I had a conversation about innocence.

...MT, in a discussion concerning perfection, plastic surgery, etc, offers up the following:

“I wouldn’t go to work unless my hair was…(pause)…perfect…(pause)…you know, the way I like it.”

…And I think hard about what it is I’d do first. One of my eyes, the left one, it shows more lid than the other. What I’d do, I’d have it lifted, or the other one dropped. Beauty, according to the experts, is really symmetry.

And I wonder, what would you do?
If you were going to have plastic surgery, where would you start?
Yes you, the person who is reading this blog and can comment.

Be brave now. Tell us something. Tell us the truth.

Haircut. Matches. Plastic Surgery. Swine. Braless. L Cohen Redux.

2005-01-13T13:32:00.000-08:00

...M, a friend of mine, she doesn’t like my hair. Too poofy on the sides, she says.

Yes, yes, I know.

I’m trying to grow it out. Trying to get by with trims and thinning, those little shears that take uneven clumps.

It’s always hit or miss.

It can be a forty dollar haircut or a ten dollar haircut, but only accident will make it good. Even a woman who cuts my hair once in a way I like will not do so the next time.

And so I’m always getting my hair cut.

And I hate it.

I hate to be touched by somebody I don’t want to kiss.

I can’t bear to have somone, some strange person, wash it, me leaned back, open throated, completely vulnerable, no thanks.

Her hands rubbing my hair right down to my scalp, no way.

I leap from the shower, drive like a maniac, get to the haircut place, say: I’ve just washed it. No wash please. Just a cut, just a trim. I don’t want a wash, though.

This little panic that has more to do with the operation than the prep I know she’ll gladly skip.

Then it’s her, whoever she is, whatever her age, whatever frame, this woman who I’m supposed to remain still against while she touches and examines me.

The smell of the cigarette she’s been smoking.
The smell of cigarettes she will smoke.

This one, she talks over my head to another hairdresser and the client of the hairdresser about an accident a workman had on a freeway bridge.

He fell off.

A 20 year old Mexican, she calls him.

Did he live?

She says, If any gray matters shows, you can’t live. And she chuckles.

And I think: This is all so close to home, your home, the place you work, doesn’t it make you more reverent?

But I say nothing. I sit stiffly, almost the way I do at the dentist, with my fists tight, my abdominal muscles restricted, my eyes jittery.

…Grocery store afterwards, and I’m pleased to remember to buy matches.
I’ve not been to a bar in so long I’m out.

The other day, I took four off the school secretary, kitchen matches from a box.

Then home, wanting to light candles, I couldn’t find the right surface. I remembered how I’ve seen in movies or maybe even real life somebody light a match on the zipper of a pair of pants.

I put on my jeans.

I run the match up and down the zipper, wondering, vaguely, about the flammability of jean.

It doesn’t work.

Outside, I huddle over the sidewalk, holding the glass encased candle, holding the match. I switch the match across the asphalt. The red breaks off in chunks, but there’s not even a flash, not even the promise of fire.

Inside again, I turn on the burner of my stove, an electric burner, thinking maybe it will be so hot that it will ignite the tip of the match.

I remember the camping trip, years ago, me and RC and DL in my Suzuki Samurai, driving into the rez mountains, up old logging roads, miles and miles, then parking at the base of a hill, hiking up it, setting our tent, building our fire.

No matches.

Dipping tatters of paper bag in the gastank. Rolling them up. RC holding one a third of the way up the hill and DL another another third of the way up. Me holding a final gas dipped paper bag tatter rolled up to the cigarette lighter, that beautiful glow they get after the magic POP, the glow that made me once, as a child, so fascinated I stuck my finger against it, wanting to touch…

And nothing. No flame.

Just like now, with the matches against the burner.

But I’ve bought, for ninety nine cents plus tax, a whole box of my own matches, with its own strike chord.

I think, what a perfect and beautiful thing, a match. How lovely, how strange that so many can be bought so cheaply, this little stick of crafted wood, its decorative red top, the stuff of dreams, really.

…I burned our bathroom up when I was four. A lit match thrown into a wicker clothes hamper. An immediate thrill and an almost immediate sense of guilt. I wandered out to the living room. My mother, in those days that she drank, sitting up on the couch, asking me if I smelled smoke, me saying No, her going back to sleep.

I had to see again.
To watch.

Realizing when the flames were as big as I was, that I ought to blow it out. And really trying hard to do so, filling up my lungs, blowing the air out hard, the fire dancing in it, like a stripper to dollar bills.

…Candles burning in the apartment. They smell better when you blow them out.

…And M, who doesn’t like my hair, she tells me she’s going to meet with a plastic surgeon on Friday.

If it’s odd, it’s because she has a porn star body already.
That’s how I would describe her.
In fact, that’s how I have described her. Depending on the audience

That almost too rich perfection of breast and ass and all those things Larry and Kung-Pow have been talking about.

…And I think about their conversation, on Larry’s blog.
The apologetic way they are calling us, boys, pigs, our desires.
The way men have recently been trained to think of themselves.

As if women don’t do the same thing.
As if a woman who comes across you in a bar isn’t making split second decisions based on something she gleans off the surface.
As if a woman isn’t aware of the shape of your ass, hasn’t tried to imagine you naked.
As if she isn't trying to think of a way to get inside of you.

As if there is some hierarchy of connection, with that of the flesh being somewhere very low.

This puritan country.

And Bill Maher, the smartest man speaking loudly, he tells you that we live in America now that is phasing out male values.

…Incidentally, Bill Maher is a wonderful animal rights activist.
And a real “pig” when it comes to his choice in women.

…M, she tells me she doesn’t want to have to wear a bra.

And I’m thinking, Well, you really can. Now, before a surgery. If you want boys to follow you down the street, to carry memories of you home, over which to work themselves out, you can do it now.

It would be lovely and dangerous, I tell her.

…And I know I’m supposed to suggest that plastic surgery, especially when it appears so unnecessary, is a bad idea.

But I think about the things we buy to maker ourselves feel happy. To make ourselves feel armored. To make ourselves believe we have voices.

Our visits to the gym, our collections.

I’ll have a thousand dvd’s before summer. My flat screen televisions, my addiction to these things that really do little for me.

…M, she tells me over the telephone that she’ll meet with this doctor, and her voice is strange.

She says, I’m bleaching my teeth, I’m wearing cups on them.

And I tell her, Your teeth, they’re so white already.

And they are.
Porn star teeth.

And she says, Every few months.

…And I think about this quest for perfection and how you and I, we’re all on it, to some degree or another. What we despise in others, what we see them do that we reject, it’s just because it won’t solve our own self image problems, that method, or we haven’t got the means.

And if you don’t believe it, ask yourself again, the next time you touch up your lipstick, or re-tuck your shirt, or check your ass in the mirror and make a mental note to do more lunges; the next time you can’t decide if the top button should be done up or left undone; any time you put your fingers to your hair.

The next time you choose a cracker over a Twinkie, and not because you don’t like the way they get the milk out of the cow and what they do to the baby that was supposed to drink it.

The next time you shave your legs or anything else.

No, I’m just making myself presentable, you’ll argue.
But that’s all a matter of perspective, what you think presentable is.

Well then, you’ll suggest, Moderation.
Another matter of perspective.

…Doctors, dentists, who is to say what moderation is. Personal trainers, nutritional experts, therapists, psychologists, analysts, all these ways we try to make ourselves better.

Who is to say where to draw the line?

And I think of the Leonard Cohen song, these lines:

I asked my father,
I said, Father change my name
The one I’m using now it’s covered up
with fear and coward and shame…

…let me start again, I cried,
Please let me start again
I want a face that is clear this time
I want a spirit that is calm.

…And so on.

2005-01-12T18:52:00.000-08:00

my son and i, the blizzard that came after a sixty degree day...didn't know i was sick yet, and i'm glad for that, because if i did, we never would have this photo, which will last much longer than any sickness...

2005-01-12T18:50:00.000-08:00

i'm driving to colorado, giving myself pneumonia, no doubt, smoking a cigar like a dumb ass, as if to keep myself awake...and i like this picture despite the obvious ignorance because in it i accidentaly look young(er)...

fixed

2005-01-12T14:33:00.000-08:00

...Not me, though I bet some of you considered cheering, though I haven't referenced my dating life for a long time, and perhaps don't even have one, but still...in any case, i haven't gotten that type of lobotomy...but my home computer, it's FIXED, it's well again...the only loss, the documents that were on it...gonegonegone...and it's good to be back on...and bad...less quality time with myself, if that was quality time...the me and me that hung around together in this apartment in this sickness...a match made in purgatory...but still...
and so on.
fixed.
and back on.
etc.

Super, Man. Cycling. Sunday, Sunday.

2005-01-10T11:25:00.000-08:00

…I am getting stronger. How strong? Let me tell you:

I lift the vaccumn cleaner from the storage closet, not just lift it, but jerk it up and over the trash can there, quickly but with guidance, so as not to hit the valve of the water heater as I did a couple of months ago, opening up a drip that spread out as a dark carpet puddle a date and I could not understand, a puddle we dumbly watched grow, me finally figuring out the water heater was dripping but having no idea how easily shut off it could be, so by the time the mystery of it all was solved, the puddle was deep and deeply set and bowls had been filled and emptied and filled again.

Not this time, with ONE hand I lift it, pull it, jerk it up, control it, no valve struck, no trash can upset, just the vaccumn cleaner come free, and me vaccuming well, quickly and with assurance.

A little later, I pull free the plastic that covers the tofu with one quick jerk, another show of strength.

A household warrior.

…And now, Sunday morning, my computer still broken, the disc not here, a sort of relief, no internet access, just me and my laptop, a virgin laptop I will never plug in in that way, never give over to the mercy of the internet, that world unclean, like any world; I keep this laptop in the garden.

Not that the things I write on it are all apples and rainbow.

…And I think: Maybe the cycle is changing. Maybe it will change. Maybe I will change. Maybe that is possible.

Finally the weight of the last serious girl, it’s somewhat gone. I’m better than I was even a month ago. Her name is not so much lost in my mouth; the vision of her not so slipping around in my brain.

Maybe cleansed by sickness.

…And I see the cycle very clearly, this girl, the one before:

The raising, and the razing. The re-raising, and then the razing again.

Like a an act of Zen, but only externally. The way they slowly create that art in the sand and the sweep it away. How it calms them, how it proves their acceptance of the transitory nature of existence.

I create and sweep away but not to prove anything, not to calm; I sweep away by bad habit, out of fear, out of ignorance, I’m not sure.

It suggests and addiction to the process of building.

Or, as my friend AP tells me, an addiction to beginnings.

But we’re all like that, I swear. The whole history of this human world is that of building up into the near perfect thing and the finding excuses to tear it down or get others to tear it down.

So that we can go over the horizon and start again.

Biologically speaking, instinctually speaking, from a hunter gather standpoint, from a naked man in the cave standpoint, it is probably a healthy impulse.

In the spoils of this present tense, maybe not so healthy.

The way we lift torches and run through our houses, giving light to those possessions we wanted so much and worked so hard to have, giving burn to that material that is our shelter, that is our identity.

Drawing pictures of our perfect others, drawing them on beds asleep beside us, in that peace that is so like death, the way near perfect things, the way contentness sweeps over us, and suddenly we find fear: I will die without restlessness.

And I crumple those pictures.
Her laughing face.
The way we ran together through the grass.
They way she held her thumb against my pulse.
That’s her looking back over her shoulder. It’s not even sadness in her eyes, she just doesn’t understand.
It’s always too late to follow.
Your always too far down the trail. And if you turn, if you turn to go back, you will find she left that place you called home.

…And the mother of my son, my ex wife, the only woman whose love outlasted her want and need; the only woman who knew how to care…

This has all happened before.

…To these and other women.
To me and other mes.

…Lines of girls, this false sabbatical.

…Sunday and I think and think. Cabin fever and I think and think.

…And what do I know about women?

What I think I know about women I know from the ways they come at me and the ways they leave.

And the kinks they showed me in between

…And anything beyond purely sensation based sex, that straight on thoughtless fuck that is about nerve ending and nothing really more, is kink, the moment you eroticize the vision of the body moving against you, the head you hold in your hands, by the hair, pushing down, the taste of that other person, you’re already in your kink…

You think you like that position just for the way it feels?
What is your fascination with mirrors?

What I know about women I know from the ways they come at me and the reasons they do so.
What I know about women I know from the ways they leave and the reasons they do.
What I THINK I know.
And from that stuff that comes between.
It is, of course, a limited

Friday Without a Drink. Memory Lane. My Obsession. Rophie.

2005-01-08T09:53:00.000-08:00

…Odd to be home on a Friday night. A Saturday night.
How long has it been since I stood in a bar?
Since I hovered over a vodka tonic.
Saw my face behind bottles in the mirror.

I fill the bottom of a bowl with olive oil. Sprinkle paprika. Dip pieces of bread.

A simple pleasure, the way I spend some part of the evening.

…Watching Arsenic and Old Lace in the afternoon. Carey Grant, Mortimer Brewster. I played that part in HS, our rez production, not bad save the performances, and those not even that bad, BS bloodying my nose when he tied me to the chair, me holding the phone a good foot from my head in accidentally exaggerated effort not to smear my makeup, BB giving me hickeys at the cast party at my house.

It makes me get out the Year Book. Look at people’s faces. My own face.
15 years ago.
None of them, none of us, strangers.

I didn’t think life was simple then. But I know it was simpler.

And I get my phone list, want to call people I used to know. JC, BS, SM, PR.
Young faced, there in the Year Book.
Sort of ready for our marriages, our divorces, our children.

I graduated with 30.
This was Montana, small town.

I was a virgin and that didn’t make me innocent but I was pretty much innocent just the same; and those friends of mine, most of them weren’t, but they were only a little less innocent than I was.

We thought we’d known each other forever.
We thought the world was small.
We thought that what was out in the world beyond what we knew would prove to be magical.

Thinking like that, it got some of us in trouble. Depending on what you think trouble is.

…In truth, most of those thirty didn’t leave. Maybe five of us.
That’s the rez, that’s how it typically is.

…I’ve got the list out, but I don’t call anybody.
I could. I could say, Hey, JC, you remember?
Hey, BS, you remember.

Hey, let’s time trip, you wanna?

…I can see them in their costumes.

I can hear them say their lines.

We always look back. We, almost all of us, say: those were the days.
And someday, not even that long from now, I’ll be talking about this time now like that.

And I’ll be digging out lists, thinking to get back in touch with you.
And whoever it is the future me will think the present me is, I’ll be yearning to get in touch with him too.

…My obsessive nature.
Convalescing in workout pants. They have a string you can tie and an elastic band so you don’t have to.

Somehow, this elastic band becomes twisted. I follow it with my finger.
I twist it.
I turn it.
I want it to be all uniform, all one way, but when I maneuver one half to the same plane as the other I find the other shifts away.

Finally I give up. It shouldn’t matter.

Then I can feel it on my hips, against my abdomen.

I try to relax. Try to ignore it.

No. I go back at it, pushing my fingers in the little holes where the string comes out. Twisting, turning. Finally, it’s the scissors, me making bigger holes into which I can insert more fingers.

Nothing works.

These workout pants betraying me.

And eventually, they’re gutted, they’re rendered dead, like a patient in an ill-performed and sadly unnecessary operation, the doctor was not a madman, but he shouldn’t have been holding the scalpel. Look at the mess he’s made.

…Sort of missing the bar, the bars. I hear from friends who are making those journeys. Who are fortifying for them.

Girls dressing up, sipping wine, telling me the names of places they may go.

I sit over the corpse of my workout pants, wondering: when will I go out again?

…And I get to thinking about what it is that we search for.

We think we’re looking for love, but that’s not true. Or maybe it is true and it is our vision of love that is false.

We’re looking for somebody to hold our hands when it is dark.

To watch our backs amongst enemies. This is what we call care.

To witness the things we witness, as if they aren’t real if we see them alone. This is what we call sharing.

Love. We think we’re looking for it. Does anybody real go out just to get laid anymore?

I suppose.

…And I think about how I build walls, put up barbwire, trick myself to keep a girl from getting very far inside of me, very close to me, although consciously this is precisely what I want, a woman close.

The traps I build.
The shifting sand and fall away floor.

Those that have come across my heart did so by accident. There was no map. There was only some stumbling journey. I didn’t recognize her progress until it was too late to stop, and how sweet a moment that is.

Can that accident be counted on to happen again?

I imagine a different kind of rophie, a thing a woman can slip into your drink that will tear down all the fuckups of your childhood or your gender or your bloodline or whatever it is that keeps you suddenly dodging, against your will, her advances; that will still you, immediately and fully surrender you.

Dreamer. Shame. Rhesus in Hell. No Warrior. Little Boy Blue. Voices of Women. Humpty Dumpty Electronics

2005-01-06T09:32:00.000-08:00

…I dream often there is a woman in my bed. This is not an erotic dream. This is not a wish. This is not prediction, nor is it necessarily memory. The woman that is there, she’s vague, she changes, I reach for her sometimes. This reach is not with hunger; it is not sensual.

This reach is a question: who are you?

This is my hand on the pillow beside me in the dark waiting to see if that other hand will fall upon it, waiting to see what that will mean.

…And with this sickness comes shame.

I think when I wake in the night with the bed empty save me that were there a woman, I would not want her to hear me breathing in the way I must now breath; I would not want her to see me sunken, if indeed I’ve sunk.

I would not want her to feel on me fever.
Clamminess.
Fear or fatigue.

I would want to hide myself from her. To draw a line on the bed, a big bed capable of maintaining halves.

A relationship based on conversations, thoughts, distance.

Sort of like the one we share.

…In a book I was gifted (thanks MT) there is the true story of a Russian scientist who was able to plant the brain of a rhesus monkey in the abdomen of a dog. The brain was properly hooked up to blood lines so that it kept alive, insensate, but vital, full, we can imagine, of thought.

Full, we can imagine, of terror.

And how quickly madness must fall on one like that, robbed of all sensation, lost to all new experience, with only memories on which to dwell, a sort of Hell, maybe the very thing.

Leave it to our species to bring about that awful reality, the sort of thing no accident of nature, cruel as those accidents can be, could ever create.

…And at the gym I am ashamed too, this one the faculty gym, my workout so thin, so quick, so easy as to not justify a trip to Bally’s.

Faculty gym, I’m packed in warm clothes and lifting very little.

A man asks me about the book I’m reading. High Life.
Is it good?

I see him looking at the book but I suspicion that he is looking to see how much weight I’ve lifted.

I want to tell him, By the way, I’m quite sick. I usually lift more than this. More than you lift. I can be strong. Like a warrior.

…I dreamt last night of such a scene. I’m in a restaurant with a woman named Michelle and the man in the booth behind me, he is elbowing me, his arm draped on my side of the seat. I push and shove but I know that I am weak. He is with a family, his wife, maybe, along with his sister or some other girl.

There is another man with him, a short man, plump, older, matched with the second woman.

We rise up, ready to fight, me and this man and this other man, the three of us.
And I’m aware that I’m sick.
I know that I am weak.

Michelle, she watches, sort of excited.
And the women at the table of the two men, they want it too.

The short man, he grabs me from behind. I think of all the things the real me could do, the ways I could hurt him.

The other man, he begins to try to strike me.
I’m slow, but quick enough.
I get free. I land blows. They are not powerful. It will take an infinity of them to render either man damaged.

This is like Milton’s War: we can fight only to a draw.

…I dream also of buying a hat. A black knit cap to keep my head warm. To mess my hair.

…Coming home, I see the little boy on the second story balcony, the same boy I saw yesterday. Alone. 2, maybe less.

As he did yesterday, he totters to the rail and screams at me.
I wonder where he learned to scream, if it’s what his parents do, those people behind the open door and closed curtains.
Or if it is just organic to him.
I’ve never seen a child scream so and so bravely at a stranger.
But now I see he is semi-smiling. I try to imagine he likes me.

All around the steps are his things: two shoes; a car; his toys.
I carry them up and put them outside the door, feeling winded, wanting to rest. At the bottom of the stairs, there is one more toy, and I think to leave it, reach my apartment door before I must go back, lift it, take it slowly up the stairs, leave it on the pile of his other things.

He’s not screaming any more. He’s only smiling.

…And now, for my day of rest.
Movies.
Max Payne, 2.
The football game tonight.

…Men suffer sickness poorly, though we pretend and sometimes think the opposite.
Most women, they known, if they’ve lived with a man, that in fact he is very baby like, very child like in his weaknesses as they relate to sickness, and to other things.

It is no different with me.

Yes, we avoid the doctor, but that is only another sort of weakness.

…I’ve known always how my body works.
Sickness comes down on me hard, there is the cycle of it, and then my body repairs itself.

For the first time, I don’t trust it.
My faith has been corrupted. People are making me believe that I really have to be easy, have to be careful, that I won’t stop being sick if I don’t stop being active.
That you can’t work through it.

I realize, it is the voice of women that has gotten into my head. They are telling me things to scare me. Not of death or anything heavy, but just of being sick sick sick for some long time, sick and in need of all kinds of medical attention.

I don’t feel all that bad. Tired, certainly. Easily winded, yes. Sore of chest, ok.
Coughy, yep.

But: this is much less debilitating then the hard core flu, not so hard to deal with.

But these women, they are subverting my plans, modified as they are, for some kind of life beyond convalescence for the next few weeks.

These women, the voices of women, sounding wise, telling me their tales and sharing with me their cautions.

Is that what women do?

But of course, I don’t talk to men. Not really. Not often. Perhaps they’d do the same.

Where is that person that says: This is all peripheral. Do as you please, if you can, and it will pass.

…So it’s all new to me, these fears, this lack of faith.
I’m trying to find my place in this sickness.
Trying to find how to operate in it.

It makes me think of the older men I know, like my father, who live off of pills and who live with the side effects of pills, these men whose bodies betray them one way or another over and over.

It almost makes me believe in that as my destiny, as the destiny of us all.

And some of these voices, they come from women who have known me some long time, who have known me when I was young, when I was completely unbroken, when it was impossible to get anything but a passing bug, when I would never age.

…and my home computer is broken, and men in India can not save it, no matter how I plead with them, how I pay their company, how I shout.

…And school, it starts up in a few days, one class on Friday, no worries.
My apartment un-peopled, just barely inhabited by me, my life not lonely nor full of over alones, but still it will be nice, that old kick, that instant audience, that captive group…

Follow Up. Normal Activity. The Sound of Silence. Gifts. K. The Girls of KSU.

2005-01-04T08:36:00.000-08:00

…This doctor, he’s young. He spends no more than six minutes with me. Looked at some new x-rays without even seeing the ones they took in Colorado. He tells me that I can’t exercise, that I should not teach for awhile, that I’m not well. He’s there long enough to call me “buddy” a dozen times.

As in, “You’re lungs are full, buddy.”
As in, “You’re not doing anything for three weeks, buddy.”
As in, “Be well, buddy” as he’s rushing out the door.

And I’m sitting there with a new prescription and a bunch of questions.

…The pharmacist, she’s young and almost pretty. Behind me is a woman shifting from foot to foot. I cough.

I lean toward the pharmacist, and I say, “Sorry, maybe you don’t know, but with pneumonia, if I had a girlfriend…”I glance over my shoulder. The woman behind me shifts. I look at the pharmacist.

“As long as her immune system…” she says.
“No, I’m not worried about giving it to her,” I say. “What I mean, how…inactive…do I need to be, I mean if I had a girlfriend?”
I don’t have a girlfriend, of course. I just need to know.

The pharmacist, she looks like she thinks I might be trying to pick her up.

She tells me she’s not certain, but that maybe if I take my pills I can resume normal activity in a few days.

I like her advice better than the doctor’s. Normal activity.

…I’m going to watch a lot of movies.
I’m going to read.
When my computer is fixed, I’m going to blog.
I’m going to work on a rewrite of Fruits of Lebanon and Bloodletting.
I’m going to work out, slowly and without breathing much.

All this normal activity.

…Things have gotten serious for K, as they must, as they will, as all affairs end, as all affairs begin, at the intersection of the two, after the marriage crashes and the airbag of another possibility opens to make it feel ok, the reality settles around her, the realization that in every direction is pain, that no choice can be made without regret, that the divided heart suffers, that the heart divides before you even know it, that if you could have guessed, could have known, you would have remained quiet and blind and otherwise senseless.

And she’s into all of this, and she’s getting out of all of this, all these things that cause you to feel, these lives where we’re bored when were still and everything else hurts, or almost everything else.

There’s nothing to do for her. But listen. No real advice. Just the truth: It’s going to hurt worse. You’ve got to be strong.

And a girl crying on the phone, in person, it always gets me.

…I have a theory that when men cry it is usually for others, and that when women cry it is usually for themselves. I mean the typical woman. I mean the typical man. I mean usually.

But this is not the time for that discussion.

…And Jared, he tells me about Herbert. Doing ok. Have surgeried.
And that he collected 235 toward these operations.
Which means, I haven’t forgotten, I owe silence.
Not 235 hours, because 100 of that is mine.
But 135 hours. Of silence.

I’ll lay it out.
I’ll blog it all.

My silence will have its witnesses. My witnesses will have their silence.

…And the season, it’s over.
New Year, Christmas.
The things we give, the things we get.
Everything new settled into our lives, the year, the gifts, assimilated.
I think of how much more comfortable I am with giving then getting.

I think about those thoughtful gifts that came out, those ones that had meaning behind them, how they leaved me touched and how that leaves me raw, the way a real kiss does.

You ask yourself, Are you prepared for this?

…In my office, where I come while my home computer is down to check email, to upload this blog, etc, I find a calendar that has been slid under the door.

The Girls of KSU.

Students, I presume, young women, in all manner of near undress. Girls one would think he would recognize but does not.

Girls who under their bikini photos mention their majors—none of them in our department—and ambitions.
Things like: Get married and start a family, and most important, be happy.
And: To love the Lord, my God, with all my heart, soul, mind and strength.

The guys that put together the calendar have photos of themselves, fully dressed, and thank, amongst other people, their KSU marketing professors, who, I imagine or mortified. And, I suppose, the PC thing to do would be to feel some sort of indignation about this as well.

Indignation. I’m trying to work some up, but so far, just can’t.

I'm Back

2005-01-01T14:36:00.000-08:00

…I honestly meant to stop, but I’m a bit obsessive. I see the place I mean to be and I have trouble resting until I get there. But I honestly meant to stop.

Going through Kansas, I thought: It will be nice to stop.
I thought: I’m almost obeying the speed laws.
I thought: Oil wells in Kansas, isn’t that strange?
I thought: I hate the High Prairie.

I thought: I’ll get a nice motel, I’ll watch a movie on my laptop. I’ll sleep like a mummy, like a baby, like an angel.

And Missouri, with it’s anti-abortion signs and it’s off-ramp porn stores, it was too contradictory, too schizophrenic a place for me to imagine staying.

But at St. Louis, I still meant it. I thought: yes, sometime after the city, I’ll see a hotel, it will strike me, and I’ll stop.

Highway 64. Interstate 57. It’s raining. It’s night. There’s fog. I think about God. No, not really. I think about how people envision God. How they wanted the garden and he gave them Missouri. How they wanted rain and he gave them the flood. This God. These people of this world.

I think about the idea that like any of the abused they begin to tell themselves a story in which it was their fault—death, disease, pain, violence, the weather. I thought about how like most of the abused the people that envisioned that God, they told stories to help themselves deal with the nature of the world.

They told themselves they’d made a choice. As if there was a choice. As if one doesn’t have to go into the world. As if a child could always be a child. They told themselves that they’d made a bad choice and everything would suffer it for always.

They pretended it was ever in their control.
That story was for comfort.
It didn’t have to be chaos, they said.

You wanted unconditional love and he gave you a world of barter; you wanted forgiveness and he gave you a worship deal; you wanted peace and he gave you restlessness.

And the Father you envision, when he makes himself right, when he sees himself clear, he will say, Forgive me.

And that child that you are, which is a child of half light, a child like your father, not full of power, not full of grace, a child of limit and uncertainty, what will you say, how will you answer?

…And then I’m in Kentucky for a moment, and I have not stopped. And the New Year, it’s swept across the country; they’ve popped their corks; they’ve shot their guns; they’ve kissed each other.

And I have not stopped.

I mean to. I’m driving through the fog and the rain thinking about God, and maybe about you, depending on who you are. Or aren’t.

And I’m thinking, I’ve got to stop. I’m tired. It feels like my sockets are giving birth to my eyes.

My lungs hurt. My heart. The doctor said rest.

And I think: I’m not moving much. Just my feet. Just my hands. This is rest.

And I think: I’ve got to stop.

…Even into Tennessee I believe in my hotel. My laptop and a movie. I believe.

But in truth, by Knoxville, I’m already blogging. I’m telling myself what I’ll write. It will start, I honestly meant to stop, but I’m a bit obsessive.

…And now in the late afternoon, the early evening, I’m in Georgia. I’d write home instead of Georgia, but where is home?

These trips, they split one. And this traveling is never done.

And the new year started. The way we mark time. How lost we’d feel if time just was. If we didn’t know it by minutes and days and years.

There’s a big tv on my floor. Movies in my bag. Pictures of my son to load onto my computer. The sun going down; it’s not cold here. It’s not warm.

And I will sleep. Like a mummy, like a baby.

Community Acquired Pneumonia

2004-12-25T13:58:00.000-08:00

…When they tell you you’ve got pneumonia, the first thing you feel is more sick.

You think about the drive from Georgia to Colorado, the way you believed you could feel your heart, a bruise, your lungs, jellyfish on either side of it.

You think about St Louis and the Arch and the little cigars you smoked to keep you awake through the night.

The two hour nap in the cold cab at dawn.

Missouri, with its exit ramp porn stores and Kansas, which goes on forever and should have, even in the spring, killed the pioneers with its lack of variance, the unforgiving cop there who could have not written you up for lack of seat belt, or taken ninety down to eight-five, or ignored the fact that you were following the little yellow car too closely, but who didn’t, who spoke through the bad teeth under little a red near-Hitler moustache, who told you, “Your driving is getting erratic” and gave you tickets for everything he could.

Your arrival in Colorado, the picking up of your son, the long drive to the house of his grandparents. Your parents.

You think of the snowball fight at Bishop’s Castle, the scrambling on the red rocks of Garden of the Gods, the night of the blizzard and your discovery that falling snow in the dark shows up beautifully in the flashed photo.

You think of how you’ve been tired some long time, but more so this last few days, this last week …

You think: Here I am, only 33 (my age, it shows in every photo, in every passed mirror, in the reflection that is my father), and already pneumonia.

...And the Doctor, there’s some red rash behind her glasses, beneath one eyes, she’s peering at you sternly, telling you things you should and should not do, and to everything she says, you nod, though you are deciding secretly which of these things to take seriously, and she’s telling you: rest.

And you think: What does that mean, rest. Seriously, you think, what? Do I spend a lot of time in bed? May I drive places? May I laugh a lot? Cry a little? Do I refrain from sex? Masturbation?

And she tells you: don’t get stressed.

…And upstairs, at the pharmacy, there’s an hour wait, and the woman, she can’t find you on the system; she can’t prove to herself that you’re Kaiser; you have no card with you, have left it 1200 miles back; they made no fuss of it downstairs; your standing there, trying to tell her that surely with your social she can look you up…

Thinking to tell her: Look, the Doctor, she said not to get stressed. She said to take it easy. I was standing in line for an hour. And now, you’re stressing me…

But thinking, It’s not her fault.

Handing her your credit card. Saying, Thanks for trying. Saying, Merry Christmas. And meaning it.

…Down the street, there’s a hotel.

…And I am dumb enough—no, dumb is not the right word, it’s Christmas so let me put the good spin on it—and so I’m young hearted enough, to have the urge to flirt with the hotel check-in girl, to after stifling that urge, to ask her, Is there a fitness center here?

Not that I’m in the mood or health for seduction, for working out.
These old habits.

…And I think, as you must have thought if you’ve read much of my blog:

This is what you get when you choose flesh over meditation, smoky bars over your bed, exercise over therapy, pleasure over happiness.

…And I think, as I don’t doubt that you have thought:
Everything you’ve brought upon yourself.
Like this sickness, you earned.
Every disconnect.

No tragedy here.
If anything, you’ve lived a life of serendipities.

…This trip half over.

Those days with my son in the looming house of my parents, where my father keeps it near dark and too cool, where my mother folds her phone card and a bit of cash secretly into my hand, where I don’t battle my father about the lights or the heater, where I return the phone card unused.

The things your mother tries to make you owe her.
The things you father tries to show you he doesn’t owe you.

But for all of it, because of the time of year, because of the weakness in my heart, because of my age, their ages, whatever…

I soften.

…And the Man in the Moon, my father, he drops balloons with a letter and rocks from the fourth floor window, and my son, he gathers up these gifts, he shouts his thank yous, his cheeks are red, his eyes are shining.

…He watches A Christmas Story, the first full length non cartoon movie I’ve seen him watch, enthralled, really, and then, celebrating an early Christmas with those grandparents, he sees my father open a rifle, and he says, “Don’t shoot yourself. Don’t shoot your eye out.”

..My father getting himself this gift of a rifle he’ll probably never fire, the hunter in him retired, and a man who takes the firing of bullets too seriously not to have a death in mind when pulling the trigger, collecting guns even yet.

But that’s ok. We all collect things. Most of us. Anything to hang on our walls. To try to speak of who we are because we do not say it well enough. It doesn’t show on our faces, will not be written on our tombstones.

The dvds by the hundreds in my book case.

…And my son, a collector of Lord of the Rings action figures, and of Spiderman things, when he opens a pair of spider man boots, boots too small, but covered with Spiderman pictures, in a wonderful Spiderman box, my son, who heard from his grandmother, my mother, of a little boy on her caseload who has nothing for Christmas, who has no boots for the snow, my son says that we should give the boots to that little boy.

…And hugging your father when you leave, that slight hug, you feel something you thought not to feel anymore.

You realize, as you go walking with your son through the cold to the truck now completely warm, you still need something from them, your parents, even though you don’t think you’ll ever get it, that there’s nothing to get…and you think, No, even now, there was something, it was small.

…And on the long drive up from their house to the house of the mother of my son, you cough and wish that the wiper fluid wasn’t frozen; you peer through the dirt; you think about the fragments of your life, of any life, and how it isn’t so hard, if you relax into the moment, if you just put it together in your mind.

…These nights without rest.

Not full unconscious, so that I think about what I dream while dreaming it and then I think about what I think, the writer beneath the writer, the narrator wrapped in the narrator, these many near exact duplicate mes layered up on each other.

Always trying to shape, always trying to find the illusion of meaning.
Like a man who prays.

…This trip half over.
Not wasted coughing. The coughing irrelevant to what you’ve felt, what you think.
Not marred by sickness. The sickness just sickness.

…In my hotel room, I’m afraid to take my shirt off, though it is too warm in here, though typically when I am alone inside I like to have my shirt off.

I am afraid to take my shirt off, as though I’ve been invalidated.

And I think of the new Leonard Cohen album, the one I listened to sometimes on the long drive over, and the song, the one in which he builds from something which sounds like vanity to something which is self deprecating, and how as a whole it reads as both, that he knows it is true, his strength, his weakness, that he’s not afraid to speak of them both:
Because in a few songs I’ve spoken of their mysteries/ certain women are kind to my old age/they take me to secret places and undress themselves in ways/then bending over the bed/they cover me up/like a baby who is shivering…

…This hotel, on Christmas Eve, the moon nearly full and rising in the sky not yet dark, how pretty.

Your son not far from you, and you’ll see him tomorrow, in the glee of his gifts, and you’ll see him these next six days, in the light of your presence against his presence, the light you make together, and what you feel, it is good, like joy, like happiness.

happy holiday

2004-12-15T18:52:00.000-08:00

…I thought before I left, I’d have time with you. We always think things like that. There is not enough time, and yet most of the time most of the people I know are bored. So what to say to you, whoever you are, at this last moment? I don’t know. I’ll try to blog from the road, from my vacation, from this trip, but that may not happen. Don’t forget me. I won’t forget you. I’ll be back. Not too long from now. You are tired. Your year has been long. There are long years ahead. I wish you rest. I wish you everything good, your heart to fill, love to overwhelm you, cheer, warmth, all the things that are supposed to come with holiday, I’m wishing hard, with my eyes half closed, with the moon a quarter full and the stars around it, with a mist in the cold outside the window, all these omens of magic, I’m wishing…

Buying Something

2004-12-14T19:45:00.000-08:00

One of my students from last year, a truly good guy, one of the best I’ve known, adopted a rat, well, more like he rescued it, saved it…that’s sort of right. You know what, it’s his story. So I’ll let him tell it. The rat, it’s a girl, her name is Herbert and she’s got to have all her teeth pulled out. This is 278 dollar thing and only has to be done if he wants her to live.

Merry Christmas Jared, you're rat's going to die of long and misshapen teeth if you don't get them pulled out in a nearly 300 dollar ordeal.

Anyway, I know it’s a pinchey time of year, but I’d like to give you directions to Jared’s blog where he talks more specifically about Herbert and where he also posts pics and finally his address so that if you feel like dropping a couple of bucks, you can.

I bring it up to direct people toward her and also to legitimize what Jared is doing. I’ve met Herbert. I’ve fed her. My son has held her and always asks on the phone about her. She’s real. So too is her problem. Jared is not running a scam and has sunk a fortune into this problem plagued little rat already.

Here’s his blog’s address:
http://jmm4648.blogspot.com/.

For my part, what can I do to help beyond dropping him a check myself? Well, for every dollar he receives toward Herbert’s teeth pulling thing, I’ll vow an hour of absolute silence, no talking at all, not including the time I sleep. You all could shut me up for over a week. My students would adore you.

I know, you have no real stake in my silence, but it will still feel like you’re buying something.
If you can think of anything better, let me know. I'll do it.
And I'll blog it all.

Ballys. Backtrack: Saturday. Final Exam. The Man in the Moon.

2004-12-13T15:52:00.000-08:00

…I come back to the gym strong, stronger, even, than I was before, as if sickness has solidified something in me, and it all goes to prove the myth of what we think are our limitations.

Hardly anybody puts the plates away; or if they do, they put them in the wrong places. I obsessively rearrange plates and dumbbells, break down machines, so much so that occasionally I’m taken for an employee.

There are two types of dumbbells, the ones made of rubber coated plates and the ones made of metal.

The rubber weights bounce off of each other, in a strange springy way. They’re huge, and they don’t make you look bigger or stronger; rather, they make all your arm muscles and your hands look dwarfed.

And the steel weights, there’s the satisfying clink when they touch in the middle.

The rhythm of a good set.
So few of them are good.

…That’s you in the mirror.

You’ll never lift enough to please your father.
You’ll never make enough to please your mother.
You’ll never open yourself up enough to please a mate.

And I know, you think I’m bitching about my own life, but my sporadic use of the second person confuses even me.

…The only legitimate hope you have is to be a good father.
Maybe that’s a false hope.
But you believe in it.
You’ve got to believe in something.

…Saturday, a Christmas party, candles in red paper all up the driveway, everybody inside red cheeked and nosed, the night itself red, but not blood or hell red, but that good kind, that Christmas kind.

You hear the rumor of the threat of a set up but that never seems to transpire, or if it does, it does so subtly that you miss it.

You’ve never had a setup in your life that worked.
Nobody’s ever understood your taste well enough for that.

…How shallow are you? You bring Heineken to parties even though you don’t really like the way it tastes and absolutely hate the way it smells. Still, it is the beer that looks best in the hand, the one that seems to suggest a little bit more about you than a Bud Lite.

I stand there, a stranger to all but three, with my Heinekens, getting more social as the bottles get emptier and fewer.

I find myself saying, twice: What do you do?

A nice party, with two fires, one inside and one out, the hostess’s sisters out of control in a way that could have been scripted, so that I thought for a moment I was being Candid Camera’d, Punk’d, something…

But no.

And the hostess and her boyfriend have a lovely story about how they met in the woods when he was in a kilt.

As the liquor flows, and this collection of strangers, of real estate agents and school teachers grows drunk, the story takes on lascivious twists, the kind that make people giggle with a hand over the mouth, wink so heavily that you turn away before the lid can lift above the bulge.

…TD, he comes up from the South, a break from his all night writing sessions. He spends most of the party talking with a guarded woman with the palest color of blue eyes I have known or could imagine, a face unremarkable beyond them.

And I wonder: if your eyes were a different color, would your life be different?

The more drunk of the sisters starts telling TD that he is cocky. He sort of likes this. It makes him smile in a cocky way.

“Am I cocky?” he demands of me.
And I tell him what he wants to hear though he pretends not to, and I tell him what is true, “Hell yes, you’re arrogant.”

And the sister, she loves it, but she’s angry about something, angry at TD but not me.

And the girl with pale blue eyes, she’s putting on her seatbelt, she’s pulling her head into her turtleneck, and you remember her from a party six months ago, when you gave her and the boy she was devouring a ride home, the way you knew he was in over his head, that he would always be.

He was nice. But he is not here. He hasn’t been here for ages, has been asked to give up on figuring out how to make her his.

He is history.

…Three older men begin to play guitar and sing.
There’s warmth here.
This is a good party in that way.

No wonder you have to flee.

…A quick visit to the Dixie. It’s been awhile. It should have been longer.
You go home.

…And now it is Monday, and I must make up the final I am to give tomorrow.

If a professor were honest, what would he or she ask on the final exam, these attention addicts, these little Stalin’s, these stand up comics?

There are two types. The first wants nothing. They want to get paid. They want to do as little work as possible.

The second type, they want disciples, not students.

Oh, I suppose there is a middle ground, those few who believe they’re doing some kind of good and maybe even do it.

But what would that exam look like?
What color are my eyes?
What was the smartest thing I’ve said?
Did any of your classmates ever bad mouth me? When, and what was said?
And so on.

Your teacher is most likely an egomaniac.

…And then it is the grocery store.
I find myself talking to myself. Like an old man or an idiot.

I pick up a can of soup, read the ingredients, find it vegan. Good, I proclaim it.

I walk another aisle. See some mushrooms in cans, Maybe I’ll add mushrooms, I say to them.

I compare the prices on the organic and non-organic celery. But the organic, I tell the misted vegetables, is not that much more. I’ll buy it.

And so on.

And then thinking back on it (god, I’m always thinking back, always analyzing what has just happened to me for blog worthiness; this is bad; this is dangerous; perhaps it is time to retire, as I’ve heard one other blogger threaten): what is the matter with you, talking to yourself, talking in public like that? Where is your shame?

Thinking: was that not you, four hours ago, at the gym, thinking when the man on the bench beside you begin to groan and grunt, Shut up!

Thinking that he should have learned young like I did to exercise and come in silence.

…My son is expecting a call from the Man in the Moon, and so I deliver.

Suddenly nervous, unsure of my voice, I disguise it with a cockney accent, wondering: can a child even understand things spoken with a cockney accent?

And my son, who won’t speak to Santa on the phone or in person, he tells the Man in the Moon: Don’t be lonely.

He tells the Man in the Moon: I gave you a balloon.

And I remember that, the parking lot, nearly three weeks ago, the string I couldn’t quite nab, the red balloon getting smaller and smaller, pretty in the pale blue and not yet burst against the atmosphere, me saying: The Man in the Moon will take care of it.

My son saying: Who is with him there?
Me saying: Nobody, just him.
My son saying: He’s lonely there.

My son telling me that a divot in the asphalt was from something the Man in the Moon dropped, out his window, out of anger, out of loneliness, my son these days often confusing sadness with anger, loneliness with other emotions, the hard things we try not to learn when we have to say goodbye.

So now they talk on the telephone, that isolated man living in the moon with his coo-coo clocks and clutter, that lonely man with his telescope and cockney accent, he talks with my son, that little boy of four.

And the Man in the Moon, he promises to drop the balloon back down, but with a gift inside, some present from the moon.

And at my son’s request, the Man in the Moon promises never to be lonely.
He promises that when he is lonely, he’ll look down through his window and find my son and think on him and he’ll feel warm.

And my son, who is shy, telling the Man in the Moon, I have to go now.

And then it’s back to the world, him, me, the Man in the Moon.

Mark Me. Past Girls. Re-Run. Long Long Way from Home. A Tenth of a List. A Series of Fortunate Sperms. Scotch. Dive. Nemesis. I Came the Stars.

2004-12-11T11:13:00.000-08:00

…I like a girl who will mark me.
I know that’s tacky.

I like other tacky things in a women. Panty lines, for example.

…The problem with getting around a girl I like is that it brings into glaring focus other girls that I like that are gone and they get into my dreams and everything gets goofed because they stand there, those past girls, with their past faces, but wearing, for example, the hair of the new girl, or maybe her blouse; or maybe they speak in her voice; there is in any case some mismatched cut-and- paste version of Woman; and she is always telling you how everything can be mended, whatever was wrecked between you, whatever is wrong in you; she’s saying it in a voice that belongs to past and future from a face and figure likewise mixed; and that might not sound like a nightmare to you; but if it’s not why do I wake up with a start?

Not just afraid.
Not just alone.

Is there something beyond fear?Is there something beyond alone?

…Northbound again, back to that town that is a monument to a history you’d like to forget.

One drink leads to another and for whatever reasons all these drinks on all these night take you back to that town.

Eyes forward, hands on the wheel. Up between what they call mountains here and on the ramp and down the road into the Christmas lights of a place you knew two Christmases ago.

…When your were younger you could romanticize the lyrics of almost any song.

Dylan telling you:
You may find yourself tomorrow
Drinking in some bar to hide your sorrow…

And you thought: yes, let that be me.

Give me some war or heist to die in.
Give some woman that will miss me as I go riding off.
Give me a short life of long trails and lonesome tales.

And though you did not grow up, you grew enough to think about it differently.

Now you pray into the void:
Protect me and those I love from evil and mere chaos, for I am not large enough to hold it off.
And break my heart only so that a woman can crawl inside whether I think I want to allow it or not.

You think: don’t let yourself become the person you used to want to be in any of those songs; gather a life unworthy of song; build a life unworthy of storytelling, so full of calm and peace and ease and love.

…And you think about all the odds that must be overcome for a good match.
The laws of probability hard against it.
That she will find you in an unsheltered moment.
That you will find her between men that she calls shelter.
That you will not right away see her in certain lights.
That she will not right away recognize your age or desperation.
That she will live close to you or you to her.
That neither of you has been too recently burned or too far removed from burning.
That the first time you kiss is the justrighttime.
That you had the energy to rise.
That she had the courage to touch.
That your middle name didn’t offend her.
That the tattoo on her ass didn’t turn you off.
That she’s got three of the same kinks.
That you’re mind is open to her slowly opening history.
That you are not too enamored of your control.
That she is not too skeptical of your weakness.
That when cheat she will not know or will forgive.
Vice versa
That you’ll both remain unfocused on the part of the other you cannot see.
That you’ll both remain unfocused on the idea that the other is missing part of you
That she’ll not soon get cancer and die.
That you’ll not soon get brave and put yourself in the place of accident.
That neither sports nor beauty products will destroy you.
That lack of flowers nor overabundance of thorns will not destroy you.
That your dick properly fits her.
That her face climbs properly into your hand.
That other people find you beautiful together.
That she will forgive you for not being the way she wants to believe her father was.
That you will forgive her for being the way you hate to think your mother was.
Etc to near-infinity.

(Not just any match, remember, but the perfect match).

All these accidents of chaos that must line up to form the near-same magnitude of coincidence the like of which resulted in your birth; that one sperm from amongst the millions; and the whole world, it might have been different or not born; you might have been different or not born; and think about it:

All the generations of people that can before you whose blood and thoughts course through you, all the little deaths they avoided, all the near sudden changes of life they missed, so they could be in the right place at the right time to make inthatinstant one who would make one who would make one who would make one like you.

You’re not just the sperm who won the race. You a thousand generations, maybe more , of particular ones, going into particular eggs at particular times, this woman instead of that, and on Monday and not Tuesday, and not just dripping down her leg but deep inside, oh it is boggling--and you should not be, not at all.

None of us.

And now you want to leap a similar fence and find yourself matched for love?

…In truth, it is more likely that first the bullet will find the brain; the steering column the chest; the hard asphalt the soft spot of your skull; the clog the artery; the cancer your lungs.

…One drink leads to another. And the night unwinds.

That’s you, kneeling in the parking lot, a fit of coughing, not even drunk, though you look a drunk, ragged eyes, your clothing not properly tucked, not even pride enough to keep yourself on your feet.

…It’s Christmas in this bar and there is the smell of dead shrimp and you cannot help but be made nostalgic by it, the smell of all your Christmas Eves as a child, it could be human flesh frying and for the love of your innocence and your youth you would still not be able to help widening your nostrils to it and drinking quietly out of respect for who you used to be, and how near beautiful that, and his sad death.

And your hair is too long and your eyes are so puffy as to make you not just neutral but ugly, and for one of the few times in you life you celebrate this ugliness, feel the strength of it.

…The woman you talk to, her eyes are the color of root beer barrels.
You tell her your awful stories, the terrible things about yourself.
She nods. She likes these stories.
She tells you here stories, too.
You wonder how she sees them, what she thinks she is giving of herself in them.
You wonder how any of us, anytime, know what stories to tell; how do we decided what to put before people and what are our motives.

You realize you don’t like scotch.

…There’s another bar, you’ve been to it only once, a sort of a dive, halfway between the town of that old home and the town of your new home.

You know the owner, he’s inside, there’s a woman draped on him. You know his girlfriend, a twenty one year old barmaid, but she’s not working tonight.

She’ll be by, he says. I better behave.

He’s 40. He’s drunk and social, telling you the band is good and the bar is good and the people in the bar are good. He’s been here three years but Chicago is still in his voice and you wonder how it is a man comes to own bar in a place that can’t even be called a town.

This is a place where the girls always dance with girls, and mostly they are not club girls, save perhaps three, but rougher sewn sorts, and hungry eyed middle aged men sit around drinking their beers and still believing the lies of their youths as they watch the girls dance and imagine it has anything to do with them beyond the sullied value of their attention.

And there are the college students, one you’ve had in class a year ago, a big kid, a good kid. The woman who was draped all over the owner, S, she starts working on the big kid, holding his hands and dirty dancing herself low, then shaking her head in front of his lap so that her hair hits it.

He is not sure what to do. He wants to look like he thinks it’s fun but this isn’t his gig. And so he lets his head fall back and waits for her to rise and she will not rise and now her face is in his lap and he holds her hands loosely out to the sides and together they look like some malformed scene of crucifixion in which it is hard, impossible, to tell the crucified from the cross.

…You and S have a shot and another and you sit together at the edge of the small dance floor.

The crowd is varied. There’s a cowboy trying to dance with two girls who are trying not to dance.

A smoky bar, a throwback, with a machine that suddenly spurts out that rotten cherry smelling smoke and then later there are bubbles and the woman who was all over S and then your ex-student, she’s working on a bald man now.

Every woman in this bar is an amateur stripper.

S tells good stories and you imagine the lie of how nice this life must be, a bar owner, a place where you have regulars, where you are in charge of the life blood of the party, where it is your job to stand smiling, shaking hands, where you are the greatest celebrity of that world.

His girlfriend shows up with other friends, drunk and young girls.

And you know your job, you know your role, but you don’t fulfill it.
You’re tired and you want to sleep alone.

…Driving home, that half rage that comes without good reason behind a slow car in the fast lane; and you wonder, who is it that you slam past, that you jerk in front of, flip off in the headlights, who is that hiding in the dark of the cab of that car?

That could be anybody, an off duty cop, your next wife, an epileptic.

That could be your nemesis, the way the Greeks meant it, not your lifelong enemy but a creation by the gods to punish your hubris and who will do so quickly.

…You ask yourself in the dark black do you offer fidelity to one who is removed?

It was a week ago, something like that, and how the clock ticks, and how your fear over this and other things builds, and you how cough, and in your coughing you know the deaths of your ancestors and of your seed.

And finally, you remember, a part of a night, a moment of rest, on a blow up mattress in the bed of a pickup moving through the desert of Arizona, the blanket whipping around you, the friends far away but audible, their voices coming through the window in the back of the cab of the pickup, but of a different world entirely; and it was warm, the air, and there was the smell of dust and something green, and the stars were above, and something made you masturbate; and when you came, in that glorious seven seconds that is all coming, that casts the world in gold, that makes you believe in everything, even yourself, that as it empties you equates to the most addictive goodgoodgood there is , in that seven seconds, the stars themselves were like your seed, were, in fact, your seed, you were so large, so full of the world.

The Wrong Way to Go About It.

2004-12-09T09:36:00.000-08:00

…In the post section of the last entry, Melissa asks a hard questions. That’s ok. I asked it first. Maybe in my heart I wanted to answer it. The way we kiss someone the way we want to be kissed.

…I think about what it means to live.
To live is to perceive.
to see the sunthegrassthelionsandtherabbitsandthefishesandthestonesandthefreckles
to hear hemusictheheartbeatsthefallingthingsthebreakingthings
to feel theseathebreaththecoldthesplinterasitgoesin
to taste theplumthebitterthesugarthemetalherdeepinsideandherflesh
to smell therainthedeadthelivingthecandlesthewine.

All of these senses. Any of these senses. And for them to spatter on the brain, and for the brain to make sense of them, to find them: painfulorpleasurableorbeutifuloruglyorfrighteningormagnetic.

To live is to be aware.

…Naturally we think that if others perceive us, if they tastesmellseehearfeel us, in any way, in each way, if they are aware of us, our lives are somehow extended.

We will live more roundly.
And maybe longer.

Shakespeare’s immorality.

…We seek ways to project our voices.
We all of us belong to Pirnadello, characters in search of an author.

Me, what I am doing? What do I want?

It’s a good question, the best, and the most telling.
Kiss me the way you want to be kissed.

...My exhibitionism is like yours—anyone who reads and wants also to say—mostly internal.

I want you to know me on the inside of my skull.
I want you to rise and fall with my lungs.

But like an exhibitionist who once found it pleasing for people to see him posed ideally, in just the right light, with whatever imperfections hidden by turn of trunk and twist of neck, I’ve grown bored with that kind of writing.

That was the writing of my youth. When I tried to justify my life and suggest its exceptionalism. When I was the hero of every story I told, or at least every hero in every story I told was me in possibility.

…Bukowski tells us that the are no beautiful women, no strong men.
And as for the immortality, he tells us:
The lies of life, the lies of love
The lies of Blake, Aristotle, an Christ,
Will be your bedfellows, will be your tombstones
In a sleep that never ends…

That not through philosophy or mysticism or religion or love or anything shall we be made immortal.

And that there are not heroes.

Only people.

…In any case, I want you to know me for real.
I want you to see what is wrong.

And I want you to like me anyway.

…And what I bring up in you, hatred or desire, if it’s not spent, what is its value?

If you don’t want to kill me, or kiss me, or go on some long walk, or some short drive; if you don’t want to avoid me at all cost; if this doesn’t draw you to me or repel you away from me, of what value is it?

I don’t know.

…Can I properly answer the questions I throw out? Can I really kiss back the way I’ve kissed and been rekissed?

…Perhaps I seem to wax philosophical. Maybe I come across as if I know what I’m talking about. It’s hard to say. I don’t read my own writing closely enough.

But if that’s true--if I seem to wax wise--it’s only the truth of the tone.

It’s not me:

I know I know almost nothing.
There is almost nothing I can’t be retaught. And haven’t been retaught.
About much I am in the dark.

The bulk of my own mind, the character of my own soul, the depth of my own heart—these are mysteries.

Often, when small solutions accidentally present themselves, I’m not happy with what I learn.

That I could be so un-genuis.
Or so un-saintly.
Or so pained.

And I want you to know.

I don’t want you to find out too late.

I don’t want you to like my photograph, that particular pose.
Or my essay, that collection of craft.
Those false constructions.
Any spin I can give myself.

I want you to like me, opened up.
If it’s possible.
Perhaps it is.
Perhaps it’s not.

But one should try.

…And based on all that, even the first year psychology student would tell you: he writes this blog so that he can learn to accept himself.

And that student would tell you this is the wrong way to go about it.

The Cure. The Hired Hand. We Were Talking About the Space Between Us All. Angels.

2004-12-07T20:28:00.000-08:00

…I’m well enough to write as if the sickness is over.

And thanks to Holly, and thanks to Cheryl. Good advice I tried to follow, and it tried to work.

All that whiskey and near-honey and lemon.

…Last night I watched The Hired Hand. One of the most beautifully shot films I’ve ever seen. People call it a hippie-Western, but that is only because they have to call it something and don’t know how to pretend they understand it without a definition.

Maybe it was the whiskey. Or the sugar water in the whiskey. Or the sleeping pills I took half way through so that I’d go to sleep right after. Maybe it was the fever or the hangover of the fever or the hangover of the sleeping pills and whiskey and sugar waters from the day before, but the movie really got to me.

Nearly wet eyed, not because of the bond between the two men nor the triangle it creates with the once abandoned woman, these figments of someone’s imagination made visible with the bone and flesh of performers; not because of the sacrifice one character will make for another and so on.

But because I’ve never had a friend like that, where you go to die in the dust for whatever it is that cleaves you together; because I’ve never had a woman like that, where she’d wait for you to come back no matter what--and you’d actually come.

Christ, I’m making it sound like a typical Western and me a typical male who wants to weep at sentimentalized vision of the desperado in him.

In any case, I don’t do the film justice that way.
But I can’t let myself so easily off that or any hook.

The Hired Hand, it offers the most realistic and disturbing death scene I’ve ever watched.

…I think about this week of sickness.
Gray night after gray night.
And that one red one.

If anything cemented me to the full fall it was the demon lover.

…She’s not really a succubus, just as opposite; demon would imply that she materializes from hell—and that’s not true of her, though it sounds nice.

You can say she came from Never Never Land
or Oz
or the place where angels sleep and sometimes wake restless and alone.
You could say she popped out of a rabbit hole.

You could say anything that implied more magic than I’m due.

…But the hell, it exists.
That is the space between you and her, those hours implied by miles.
Those inches implied by seconds.

You think: all space is hell.

That only through space is violence possible, an area into which to swing a fist, fire a missile or bullet, strike a knife or match, the hell of pain, that which we inflict and that which is inflicted upon us and that to which we are witness.

And that only through space do we know that which is not us, be aware of the other, that hell of separation even when we embrace.

You think of the idea of some Eastern and Native American religions that Heaven is a state in which the essence of all thing bleed together and form a whole, perhaps a shattered god re-formed, a benevolent consciousness finally repairing from its shattering mental crisis, that cosmic split that gave birth to me and you and all these imperfect creatures.

And you think about how pain can only be created when there are miles between us.

This greed to possess you, though I never will.
This greed to be inside of you, though it will only be by inches and imagination.

Your veins alone laid end to end would reach around the world.
And I mean to know you?
I mean to explore you?

And end to space, and end to distance: you can only be perfectly bonded.
It is all that is left.

But I am not a mystic.
I don’t know better.
I know worse.

…And yet this day, it rains as if it Spring, and I walk out in my long jacket and my thick sweater ready to shiver but the sun is coming down through the rain.

What can not be made clean by all this water and all this light?

…Department meeting.
One hour and a half. I’m bored. I’m coughing still. I’m tired. My mind is soft.
I don’t know what I’m doodling.
And then I see.
It is a series of angels.

Succubus

2004-12-05T13:59:00.000-08:00

…Not as well as I thought.

I spend the night in the high hot arms of succubus; the brazing morning, the blazing morning, the morning of cough drops and cough fits, rolling against her and away.

…And in the day, the real light, the gray, I am sick.
I tell myself, Go to the gym.
Then I tell myself, No.

This is what the gym was for. So you could go round with your sickness; so that you could dance with your demon lover.

You don’t practice the day of the game.
Either the practices have done their work or they have not.

…She’s not really a succubus; not really a demon lover.
It is just that in this fever she burns.

She is a product of my heated brain; my imagination; of a virtual world; she is a blog; a photograph; a collection of haikus; she is a story I told myself when I was asleep and meant to dream; she is a fantasy I forgot to have and has risen up suddenly to demand her time; she is wispy; ghostlike; and she tells me through her actions that I meant to sweat it out.

Sickness and everything else.
That I meant to be emptied.

…And she almost leaves almost real marks on my flesh and earrings on my nightstand.

Getting Better All the Time. Memory Lane. Even Guinevere Was on Loan. Not Vodka. Rule Number 6. Ghosts of You.

2004-12-04T09:04:00.000-08:00

…Am I well you?
The question of my life.
Of any life.

...More than anything, its my head that hurts. A good, clean pain, at the temples, at the back of the skull.

…And I need out of this apartment.
KH tells me whiskey fixes a throat gone soar, lungs gone heavy.
And since I believe everything KH says, I decide on whiskey.

…And further, I decide to go down memory lane, or up the 75, to the town in which I lived with the last real girl, in a house that was fine, in a life that at least from a distance would have looked almost perfect.

But then again, from a grave enough distance, a paraplegic can not be differentiated from a ballerina.

…I go with a fresh face, shaved, as if one begins a new life with a razor.
As if one begins a new life by going to old haunts.
As if any of this has anything to do with a new life.

--But it does.
I feel a change.
The closing of some doors.
The opening of another.

I don’t know it when I’m the road, that old road…and I don’t know it when I’m in the bar, or the other bar…those old bars…but there is almost unbearably good news waiting for me at home…

I just don’t know it.

…And driving up the freeway, this ten mile stretch overly well known to me, too familiar, I ask myself: What are you doing?

Still trying to make myself tough?
No. Just trying to see if I am.

Telling myself: You go drinking in the only two bars you drank in in the town in which you lived with the girl that you will never see again the way one finally steps on a leg that was broken.

How does it feel?

What will it hold?

--The pain is more general.
It is the pain of the idea of that things are temporary, all things.

We want to buy not rent.
But everything goes.
Ask any Medieval writer.

The trick is not to see the amen in the genesis.

Most failures are failures of imagination. We didn’t see it properly, so we didn’t make it.

But there is such a thing as seeing too well. As seeing too far down the road.

There is the suicide note: All this buttoning and unbuttoning.

…I think of the Bighorn Sheep’s skull. My father found it in the mountains, the skull with its miraculous curls of horn. A record for the state, for the world, even.

And though he found it and hung it on our wall, it belonged and still does to the state of Colorado.
“I can keep it for them for my life,” he told me.

But it bothers him even then, that it is not really his.

…This then is something I will not inherit.
There are things anyway that should not be passed down.

…At the Appalachian Grill the bartender asks me if I like bourbon.
He’s got a bottle some salesmen left. Good stuff, he says.

He pours it deep, over three ice cubes, killing the bottle, and when I taste of it I realize it’s been months since I’ve had bourbon.

People are eating at the bar. Men with women. Girls with boys.

The men shoveling food into their mouths, their cheeks puffed out, their jaws grinding. The girls thin and glad to be out.

It stinks of fish in here.

The woman beside me and I talk about charisma. She argues that it has nothing to do with looks and I argue that it more than that but that also good looks help. Or at least extreme looks.

The whiskey is hard to drink. But I drink it.

…Down the street, the Irish Pub.
It’s been nearly two years since I set foot in here.
Nobody will know me. Nobody did then.

The last time I was at this bar it was to begin some trouble that followed me some long time, but that trouble seems minor now, a story I could tell myself over a drink.

And, remembering rule number 6, laugh a little.

Hell, maybe in this bar, I can laugh a lot, about all of it.
About everything.

…My barmaid remembers me, after all.
Her eyes are the saddest eyes I can think of.
I remember that she had a sore foot. I remember that she had a dicey marriage.

Her foot is better.
Her marriage is wrecked.

She is tall and speaks with her German accent and always a smile, but God, the eyes.

…And there is the moon.
And there is the road.
And there are the trees alongside it.

There is this drive.
I used to take it twice a day.
It is not the same drive.

I’m listening to a cd. It occurs to me as it sometimes does with cd’s that I’m hearing it for the last time.

That when I put it back in the album book, I’ll never take it out again.

It’s not sad the way you’d feel with a person.
The cd won’t miss you.

…And I think, what we miss, it’s not really so much the place, it’s not even really so much the person, though we do miss people and places.

The center of that pain though is that version of ourselves that we miss.
That person we used to be when we were in that place. With that other person.

We can’t help but think that whoever that was we were, he was more innocent than what we are now.

And that’s what we miss.

Somewhere on this freeway there is the ghost of me, driving that old drive, thinking the old things he used to think. If I should pass him, I’ll smile over.

Perhaps I’ll wave.
He won’t understand.
He'll know idea what's ahead of him. If he only knew. Poor man.

And I’ll forgive him for just about anything.

…And waiting at home, almost unbearably good news.

Sick. A Blond in Your Bed. Gym. Family Lore. Muscles.

2004-12-02T19:41:00.000-08:00

--Fever night.
Your brain is burning.
Sometimes you wake with your teeth chattering.
Other times it is too hot.

Your muscles are going taut. You can not get comfortable. Your throat has closed. Your lungs are weak.

Your dreams are strange.

--There is a blond in your bed.
You have the need to tell her something. Maybe you are afraid she is gone. Maybe you are afraid she is not.

You sit up and open your eyes, but you’re not really awake.

You lift pillows, blankets.
Where is she?

There is no blond in your bed.
This was a wish or a fear.

And the night air is blue.

--You stumble to the sink, to the cold water, to the mirror.

How pretty your eyes when you are sick.
How pale your skin.

--You wake for real in the morning, a phone call from LB. You sound awful, she says. I’m sorry.

And you will not sleep again.

You tell yourself: I’ve got to go to the gym. You fumble with your clothes. With your shoelaces. With the keys to the car and with the drive itself.

--Legs, shoulder, triceps.
Approximately two hundred and seventy reps.

Each one a more than normal act of will.
This is good.

In your fever, the people around you are not of the same world.
It is you and the weights and your sickness. And there is no blond in your bed. There was no blond in your bed.

You can see your skin trembling.
You can see your chest heaving.

This a test you like for yourself.

What can you make your body do of which it seems incapable?

--The game you used to play with the heating vent, pressing your fingers on the hot metal, telling yourself, just one more second, or the way you hold your head under the bath water repeating the same refrain.

Family lore: your mother noting a limp when you were five. Sitting you down. Peeling your sock off. Finding a rubber band twisted around the big toe and its neighbor, the toes purple and bulged and unhappy.

The look on her face. “What are you doing?”
“Learning to be tough.”

--These are your arms.
Deltoids. Bicep. Triceps. Forearm.
Sinew and vein.

--It reminds you of the time you were fevered but went rock climbing. That was with MC, years ago, in the Kootenai Valley, and winter wasn’t quite over, but snow was off the face of the rock.

You hiked to an over drop above the river and threw ropes over and with your backpack on begin your descent to the pebbled bank below. Three quarters of the way down, seventy or eight feet from the ground, you saw that you were out of rope. If you went three more feet you’d be off of it.

The face of the rock was too far away. You were hanging there, sick and stranded.

You looked up. Just the overhang. MC couldn’t see you.
And below: the gray water.
The gray bank.

You could feel the backpack pull on your shoulders.
You could feel your forearm stiffen where it held the rope taut in the belay device.

You didn’t have the heart to yell more than once or twice.
There was the sound of the river.

And the shock of emergency melded with the fever and you saw yourself falling over and over. You imagined how the backpack would act as anchor.

Eventually, MC, wondering why the rope never went slack, hiked down and looked up from the bank and saw the fix you were in. He hiked back and lowered and rigged a rope.

You’d been there maybe twenty or thirty minutes, thinking about many things. You can’t recall them now.

--In the gym, you push your shaking muscles.
You do reps against the fever ache.

Your eyes are green on days like this.

--This is your hamstring.
It is separate from the rest of you.
Feel it working.

It doesn’t matter about the pain in your throat. The throb in your chest. The burn along your scalp.

This is your quadriceps.

Would a woman ever love you for that muscle?
Would she sink her teeth and burst the teardrop of it? What kind of bonding that?

This is your quadriceps.

--You think silly things or maybe they are wise.
You think: I am not worthy of love or its opposite.
You think: Not for more than a moment, not for more than a pinprick.

Rising up before you, some gray eternity.
Your ashes will mingle with all the others, the billions.

This is your deltoid.

--And you remember there was a time when you hung there on the rope, thinking you were going to eventually slip the final three feet and be free to fall, that it was, in its way, funny.

And you remembered to laugh.

--And you think of the morning a week before everything crashed.
You turned to the woman and you said, “I think I’m in a time of crisis.”

And this woman, who feared your strength, who feared your seeming lack of need, who feared the illusion you offered that you carried no wounds, you nursed nothing, that pain was somebody else’s burden, she feared all of that imagined strength, but more than that, it was in her face: she feared this moment of weakness more.

--Quadriceps.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m learning to be tough.”

Adultery. Whatever Will Be Will Be. Lucky Penny. You Can Stick Your Little Pins in the Voodoo Doll. Idiot American. Means Nothing.

2004-11-30T18:39:00.000-08:00

--K tells me she “met someone”.
This was while she was on a trip.
Who can blame her?

Her husband hasn’t slept with her or seemed to want to in two years.

Of course she is going to meet someone. Over and over.
Until she learns what she is trying to teach herself.

Until she stops being where she doesn’t want to be.

--When a girl who has a boy starts cheating usually it is a transition strategy for ending the relationship.

When a boy who has a girl starts cheating he just wants to have his cake and eat another one too.

--This theory that things will work themselves out.

“If it’s meant to be, it will be.”

That supposes a meaner—someone or thing who means—and I guess most people would say their prime meaner is some god or another.

So when you speak that way about relationships, don’t you suggest a more Classical vision of not a god but gods, where Eros and Aphrodite take special interest in affairs of the heart, where designs are laid and followed and what is meant to be might very well be?

Oddly, most people who say that are Christian.
But I have a hard time finding a Biblical backing for the idea that God weaves plans of seduction and marriage.

It’s just what people say.
We say it, Christian and Greek and etc, so that we don’t have to think about what we must try to do, what we must risk, to make be what may not be.

So that when it is not, we can say: It wasn’t meant to be.

--Deboarding the plane, Atlanta again, I see a penny on the seat of the man who sat in front of me. My impulse is to pick it up but my pride is such that I don’t want anybody to see me do that.

Even though it is a penny.

And so it haunts me all down the walkway, all the way to the train and through the tunnels, this penny, sitting on the seat, my broken ritual of pennies found.

--And I’m not superstitious.

Although I heard of a woman in LA who kept an effigy hanging of me in her room and that bothered me to no end.

I didn’t even know there wasn’t peace between us but when that rumor reached me I tried to make the peace.
Perhaps I did.

Eventually, she gave me a concussion in Las Vegas, but that’s another story.

--I hate traveling. Don’t like the planes and the people on the planes fighting for their space and the airline attendants trying so hard to be snappy and clever and the pilot who always says things like “It’s a short two hours and twenty minutes” and tells you as you land about the weather.

I’ve flown too much.
Too many trips back from Colorado.
Too many times to Beirut and back.

None of this is good for a person like me. If I had the energy, I’d try to say what that was, a person like me. But fill in the blanks.

--In any case, I may not like to travel, but at heart, I’m still American.
Wherever I am, I want often to be elsewhere.
I still imagine New Canaan over the next horizon; that somewhere not here things are better.

Are good.
Are pure.

That there is some place to be where I will not even be me fully.

I don’ t like to travel, but I’m still restless as hell.

And other contradictions.

--That’s not really American.

In fact, all the things the people of the world want to heap on American are not really American. What is hated in the American character is not American character but the character of all humans.

We’re just the product of prosperity and power and luck.
Any country that experienced those things to the extant that we have would end up like us.

What we are, we’re just the natural end of common human aspirations, we’re just human desire taken to an almost absurd end.

Any nation would grow fat and bored and spoiled.
In fact, many of them have.

Any nation would throw round its weight.
In fact, most have tried.

It’s not Western.
It’s in the hearts of all these thinking creatures.
In the brains of all these opposed thumb giants.

--Read on the airplane Diary by Chuck Palahniuk.
Good line, one of the best: If you don’t understand it, you can make it mean anything.

Purple Martini, Denver Colorado

2004-11-28T07:01:00.000-08:00

--Three days with the parents will teach my to love the Purple Martini and the vodka tonics they pour there. My ex wife suggests it, from that distance that she’s taken from me, that spot so smart and secure.

--The barmaid is doing a stripper’s job, kneading my neck muscles and calling me sweetheart, trying to make me believe I’m the one customer in the bar for whom these words and gestures have actual meaning.

I half buy into it, even though I know she’ll have not even a glance for me when my check is settled and her tip is set in black ink.

--I think of my own stripper, that last real ex.

I’ve never been a boy for strip clubs. I take seduction too seriously to muddy it with cash. She started dancing long after we starting doing whatever it was that we were doing.

I wrote “You Marry A Stripper” long before I got with her and though I believe there is some kind of truth in that story it does not tell our story.

I’d written that story too. I’d written them all. Those that have happened to me and those that will. These little acts of frightening prophecy.

In any case, her dancing was neither what kept us together nor drove us apart.

It is a red herring.

--There is C, a girl who used to dance, now setting up her internet sex show site.

All that kind of thing used to be terribly fascinating.

--In any case, the bar grows busy. I am at a long table. Feeling out of place in a sweater I bought at Ross’s because I zipped my favorite sweater up in the suitcase and ruined it. Buying a new one was my way of mourning.

But it’s from Ross’s and I’m aware of that, feeling like it looks like a discount clothing store piece, even though it is Claiborne.

--I drink and I think of what I would not give that last serious ex, the girl who danced. I think of what she took. They were of a different order, those two sets of things, but maybe from some grave distance, it looks the same, the things she took, the things I did not give.

Maybe from some grave distance there is the point of breaking even. Objects bleeding into affections, or where they should have been.

--Down and across from me sit two women hiding their ages, though I can seem the truth of each of them Thirty year olds, with children and ex husbands, one blond and one with dark hair, talking to boys too young.

When the boys go away the women slide down.

“What are you doing here?” the blond wants to know. “You seem bored.”

And we exchange quick stories.

Indeed, divorced single mothers.

Neither of them is my type. I am probably not the type of either of them. It is under important.

--I look around. I wonder if I had to choose a woman to be with forever which would I choose? How would I choose?

I recognize physical imperfections n a heartbeat, but everyone has them. I ask myself first, is this one you could overlook in those opening moments when attraction is so tender, or in the second stage, when you’ve gotten used to the person, gotten past the question of sex, and see her again, see her really clearly for the first time?

But it’s really a minor question.

What I’m really trying to guess by cut of face and expression of eye is who has the kind of heart I seek?

--To the side of me a thin girl who keeps her spine very straight. She turns her head and for a moment the eye is perfectly caught in some light so that I can see the outward curve of it and the clear space between the final film and the colored disc.

It’s a personal moment, almost as intimate as anything I could imagine between us.

--The boys come back. Twenty seven or twenty eight. Full of themselves and good looking, but slightly thick of face and the type that will quickly fade.

One of them starts working the blond.

She goes so easy.

I feel a nausea.

It is for my ex wife, and all my exs, and all the women I care about who might be so easily maneuvered by anybody but me.

--It really grows. I’ve never waned to hit somebody more without actually hitting him.

It ebbs.

--Eventually he’s squeezing her neck and kissing her mouth and smirking to himself and to his friend.

I want to tell her, “You’ve disgraced yourself. Your children even. You are so easy.”

--All the party girls are out and I never knew how to take a girl like that.

There was that one time when the most celebrated of the party girls, when the one girl every boy in the bar wanted, chose, by some accident, me and glued herself against my body and pressed her face to mine.

Not just the pretty girl in the bar. That happens, but the girl in the bar who flits from group of boys to group of boys, demanding attention, gathering it up, and moving along

Of what use have I ever been to a girl like that, a sort of perfect attention whore?

Looking like a model on a binge, just one or two steps away from whatever it is a model is. But she’s never been on the other side of those steps. And she works everybody effortlessly so that she can pretend she has.

--So this one, not so long ago, she affixed herself to me.
And maybe because I did not give easily or maybe because she was especially hungry, or all of these things and others aligned, she begin to work I hard.

But then I was with the stripper and loyal and what could I do but push away?

--Vodka.

It is going in and in and in.

I hit the good moment.

I think, if I could meet any of the girls I’ve met, but meet them right now, freshly, in this bar, with the vodka just so, and the music making everything feel so dramatic, and the lights making everything just so lovely, I could love her perfectly.

If we’d never have to leave.

--Just as I used to think when I was dating the girl who lied about too much, even the birth date of her dog: I could do this.

I could be with her night after night.

If I only keep drinking.

--The night goes on.
The older women disappear.

There is a hand on my shoulder. Not the waitress. A girl in a black dress.

It is the immediate conversation by habit: how old are you?
21.
The reoccurring answer.

Don’t judge me by my age, she says. I’ve an old soul, she clichés.

Yes, yes.

Her skin is nice. The dress is black. The eyes are blue.

She tells me she likes my sweater, how it feels.
Bless you, I tell her.

I feel nothing serious. Nothing much at all. But I go on with it, trading flattery for flattery.

Soon she is kissing me, and I am holding the back of her neck.

And the older women, they return, and I realize that the blond is quite likely thinking of me just what I thought of her: that in some way I am disgracing myself.

--So off into the night.

Countrywestersongalone.

The holiday behind me, those in-nutrient gatherings with my families, the one I was born into, the one I created and dismantled.

--And I think how lucky I am to have a son. For without my responsibility to him, without the knowledge of the light I bring to his world, then I have nothing.

There is nothing I like to taste enough.
There are no dvds I can put in.
No PS2 games I can play.
No daisy fields through which I can walk.
No grand canyons.
My writing dreams are faded, and if they’d been fulfilled or if they will they would not have and will not fulfill me.
There’s nothing at all to justify this life but the light of me on the face of the child.

And that’s enough.

--The roads are frozen. This is not my state. This is a rental car.

I think of those ice deaths, McCabe, Women in Love.

And I drive carefully, like one who protects one who must be protected.

Fight Club. A Sport and a Pastime. A Brave Man.

2004-11-24T07:34:00.000-08:00

--Friend and colleague LD comes into the office visibly upset, having obviously steeled himself. He closes the door, my door, an act of aggression.

I want to have a word with you, he says.

I know this is no good.

You want to see that I'm a brave man? he asks. Then stand up.

I stand.

I don’t like it. This all feels wrong. Not just the violence that’s about to come down—perhaps, in fact, that will be the cleanest part of it. But the mess of grapevine and misunderstanding that must have lead him here, this all makes me tired.

Even makes me a little sad.

And it comes to me, this blog.

I square up and try to think of what it was I wrote that brought this on.

It is easy to be misunderstood or too well understood.

--In the other part of my mind there is that distance that comes before the fight, when you see it like a spectator, like a guy playing a video game, when you acknowledge the things in the room and the space between, when you mark out exactly over what the other person can be caused to trip backwards or forward; when you decide if you will aim to pummel or pull forward; when in thisonesecond you try to guess your opponent’s plans and step ahead of them.

There’s the dull pre-fight thrill, like drums far away, excited and exciting but muted.

--You can’t afford to think about it from anything but a distance.
The way that while you’re in it, you can’t afford to think of an accident from anything but a distance, lest panic deliver you up.

--And I’m still thinking in some other part of my mind: this sucks.
Thinking: aren’t you done making enemies yet?

Thinking: haven’t you settled yourself?
Accepted in lieu of real competition games of chess and occasional football afternoons?
Just the way you’ve mostly accepted slow and not always final seduction in lieu of that numbers game boys sport fucking?

Yet here you are, in the face of an enemy you don’t think you intended.
In some alpha male thing you meant to outgrow but haven’t outgrown.

--There’s nothing to do about it.

You remember how punches don't hurt when you’re fighting.
You remember that a punch never settles it anyway.
You remember that when you fight you go for the throat, the elbow, the incapacitation.

You think vaguely and briefly of the time in Beirut when there was a fight in the streets and all around you men were at each other and the one amongst them whose head was open and who kept trying to stand but wobbling back down and there was blood all about and there were bottles breaking and the soldiers had waded in outnumbered and slightly panicked and shoving with their rifles, and you did not move away from anyone or toward anyone but stood in the middle of it like the calm eye, miraculously unmolested, perhaps so far out of place in all that chaos that you were invisible.

You think of the thrill of it.
You think of all those primal things.

--And you think: haven’t I learned just to spectate?
Haven’t I outgrown all of these things?

--And his face breaks into a grin.
And he says: Got you.

--It’s healthy at best and interesting at least to be out of the real sense of things. Like in that moment between when someone leaps out to scare you and when you actually recognize it as a friend.

In that half second when there is absolutely no difference to your heart or your mind between this counterfeit emergency and one that was real, when there is no difference between the jokester and a killer with a knife.

--You try to know if you are a brave man or a coward.

--I think of the time at the subway station in San Francisco when four men had attacked another man. The man was beaten badly. He’d dropped his motorcycle helmet and his nose was broken in a way I’d have never believed, like Nichols Cage’s at the end of Wild at Heart.

I was a kid then, I’d grown up on violence, but I’d never seen it taken so far. I’d grown up on fights but never witnesses pure assault, never seen somebody bent on the act of destruction of another body.

It was that trip too that for the first time I stepped into a porno shop and saw all the video covers and magazines, not just the stuff I’d grown up on, but the hardcore reality of people doing everythingyoucanimagine and with cameras up close, and I realized: this stuff really exists; people do all these things.

People don’t just make out and make love and goof around; they go hard core and all down and what is left after that?

And violence.

In the subway station, where people weren’t just playing pecking order games but meaning to change someone’s life.

--They were telling him, get on the train.

He stood there wobbling, not getting on the train.

People had peeled away. My friend, DG, he went to the other side of the pole. Leave it alone, he said.

And they came forward and hit the man several times. He was bleeding worse now. They stepped back.

A man with a suit on and a girl beside him was watching, glad I suppose, that he’d not been chosen and feeling untouchable because of it.

One of the assailants asked him what the fuck he was looking at. He turned, taking the hand of the girl, and was safe.

The train door was open. The people were watching from inside of it.
I realized the man couldn’t get on the train.
They kept telling him too.
I don’t know why they were beating him, but I suppose maybe they wanted to stop and that’s why they wanted him on the train.
Maybe they knew if he didn’t get out of there they’d beat him until he was dead and they didn’t want that.

At that moment, I was brave.

I walked to him. I meant to take him to the train.

As I reached for him, one of the assailant came flying past, and landed a kick in the man’s chest. He stumbled back, onto the train, and as if it had been scripted and the choreographed, the doors closed.

I waited for something to happen to me, but nothing did.

--Years later, in my apartment with my wife in the late night I heard sudden explosions and went to the window.

I saw that in the parking below a man stood by the dumpster enclosure pointing a hand gun at somebody hidden by the enclosure but clearly on the ground.

It was a young man. There was a woman standing behind him, looking afraid.

It was my opportunity to be a hero.

I’d run down the steps and out the door and like a cat across the lawn and tackle down the shooter.

But I wasn’t brave that day.

I couldn’t move. My legs went soft. I gagged.

I was frozen and useless, no hero.

--And my eyes adjusted and I saw that what the man held was a pipe and that there was nobody on the ground but that he’d been beating on the side of the dumpster container with his pipe.

And the girl behind him, she wasn’t afraid. She was laughing.

--In my office, for those five seconds when I don’t know better, the question was not of courage or cowardice. It takes neither to fight.

The question is of fatigue.

The fear that no matter how you relate to another man, at the end of it all, he believes that you want to beat him at something.

The way that you fear that no matter how you relate to a woman, at the end of it all she believes you want to sleep with her.

The deeper fear, that thing that you purposefully doubt: maybe, at the end of it all, they’re right.

For those four or five seconds.

--And I think of LD now, the particular expression: You want to see that I’m a brave man?

Brave man.

And it takes courage to muster that even for a few seconds; not because of the threat of violence but because it is a kind of male confession, the one we always should be making, that we are concerned with how the world sees us, whether the world things we are brave men.

For he might have said anything to build his joke but he chose something honest—that he means to be considered a brave man.

He belied himself, and us all.

I like that about him.

The Death of Jim Loney. High Horse (see star). I Get off My High Horse. Blood in the Snow.

2004-11-22T20:39:00.000-08:00

--Teaching The Death of Jim Loney.
It makes my eyes wet.

And it shames me.
I’ll never write something as beautiful as that.
I wonder who it was that shamed James Welch.

But it’s not for the death of Loney that I cry, if I cry at all.
It’s not for any character that somebody dreamed up.
It’s for the mind that come up with thoughts as sad and as beautiful as those. That’s what I cry for. If I cry.

And I knew James Welch.
And his mind day to day was not that lovely. And he died of sickness, not of loneliness and loss the way his character died.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--I'm getting on my high horse.

*(Don’t tell the French, they’ll eat It, and if that bothers you, remember that some people think about cows the way you do about horses, and that the average pig is smarter than your dog and that a worm's central nervous system is as complex as your own).

--A hunter got into a dispute with other hunters in WI. He ended up killing six and wounding others. Authority Zeigle reports the suspect was “chasing after them and killing them,” with a SKS 7.62 mm semiautomatic rifle, a common hunting weapon. He then became lost in the woods and was lead out by other hunters whereupon he was recognized and arrested.

He’d run out of bullets.

I will make no light of this tragedy.

--Driving two days ago on the freeway I passed a SUV pulling a trailer with a four wheeler in it. Strapped to the four wheeler were the corpses of two deer.

You forget how it looks, something so large and so dead, if you haven’t seen it in a while. I grew up like that, with the dead all around me.

You can get used to anything.

I will make no light of this tragedy.

--I’m not as anti hunting as you would guess.
Oh, I’m anti hunting.
But many of the people who eat meat that has been slaughtered and packaged complain about the barberry of hunting and I find that a bit silly.

What happens to the cow or the pig or the chicken on the typical factory farm (where 99 percent of this country’s meat and dairy products come from) can only be defined as torture; what happens to them in the slaughterhouse is something beyond. The bulk of our meat animals are not even dead before they are being skinned.

Give me a bullet through the heart on a snowy day in November any time over the life and death of an animal whose meat you will be buying cellophane wrapped.

Give me even a not so sudden death, but a stumbling one. An hour in the cold in which I can see my breath go thin. But not a factory farm life or a slaughterhouse death.

--And at liveshot.com you can target practice in a virtual way but with real world outcomes. You control the firearm with your mouse, but there is a real firearm and it really fires a real bullet and it hits a real target. They’ll burn a dvd for you to show you your gun going off as a result of your will for it to do so.

And that must make you feel oh so powerful.

God knows, growing up with guns, that’s how I felt.

--They mean to offer virtual hunting with the same results.

“We are currently working on a very comfortable, ADA compliant blind which will house the LIVE-SHOT shooting system. Once this and the perimeter fencing are completed, will we be able to offer a unique computer assisted hunting opportunity.”

In short, you can kill an animal from the comfort of your own home. With the click of a mouse.

They way they promised us wars would eventually be fought.

--People tell me: what are you vegetarian for? That’s against nature.
And I tell them: if this was nature, I’d beat you over the head and drag your wife off and have my way with her.

But all are laws, those things that make us human, that nod to the development of our conscience as a species, those are the very opposite of the laws of nature.

For what is for an elk mating is for us rape.
What is for a sparrow forging is for us stealing.
We call assault (ask Artest) what any other species in the world considers a shot at survival of the fittest.

In short, the laws of nature are exactly opposite of our laws.
Except those that say: if it tastes good, kill and eat it.

--As a boy, I hunted with my father. Ironically, these are some of the memories that cause me the deepest sense of nostalgia.

Not for the kill. Not for the blood in the snow or the flavor of heart and liver mixed with scrambled eggs. It's because it was me when I was young and my father when I knew him less well than I know him now and therefore knew him as better.

But we were together. As I remember it, it was always dusk. I can hear his footsteps breaking through the curst. I can see the mountains blue around us. And I can feel the cold and the promise of the warmth to which we would return.

And I can remember the feeling that everything was in order, the world in its universe, me and my father on it.

Even though I was a killer I think of this time as my innocence.

--My mother keeps a photo. I find it hidden in her home in the room of her most prized possessions, in a wooden box my father bought for her in Chinatown, a place where I can only assume she keeps the most precious of mementos.

It is of me, smiling, eight or nine, holding the antlers of deer which dangles from the ceiling of the barn, its eyes blackly vacant, blood dripping from its tongue, me hefting the head upward as if I mean for it to pose there with me.

She keeps it I suppose lest she ever have to remind me that I am not what I think I am.

Sports Follies

2004-11-21T15:27:00.000-08:00

--Tony Dungy is upset about MNF intro, a sort of racy skit using Terrell Owens and one of the Housewives. In Dungy’s mind, the skit was racist.

“I look at that and what I see in an African American.”

That’s odd. All I saw was Terrell Owens.
I wide receiver.
And a proven asshole.
But that was about it.

--Jim McCurdie writes of Friday night’s basketball brawl:” …carnage…of one of the most reprehensible, unfathomable, undeniably sickening events to darken a professional sports stage in decades.”

I suppose a fan getting punched in America outweighs soccer stadium deaths.

And carnage?

Don’t we at least need a little blood to properly apply that word?

--How infectious is violence?
Ask the brawling football players from yesterday’s SC vs Clemson game.

Ask George Bush’s security posse who got into a shoving match with the Chilean President’s security personnel late Saturday.

(That really happened).

--Ask any boy sitting around any bar Saturday night if he didn’t feel a little less willing to put up with a perceivable sign of disrespect from another boy.

--And all these sports reporters basking in their indignation, ask them when they can answer honestly if something primal in them doesn’t stir when they see the footage of Friday’s basketball game, Saturday afternoon’s football game, or Saturday night’s Presidential reception.

Preamble. Los Reyos. McCracken’s. Dixie Tavern Revisited.

2004-11-20T08:01:00.000-08:00

--With the new girl it is as simple as this: I know she is good.
I can bluster about what I’m looking for, but at the end of the day it all boils down to simple goodness.
And I know she is.

In the middle of the day in this apartment that is mine we have decisions to make.
Her hips bones.
The x I scratch on my flesh and the way her mouth sinks toward it.

These are love story moments but this is not a love story.

--There are all these different ways to say goodbye.

She gives me the greatest complement I can remember receiving but she doesn’t even know it.

We take pictures.
Her face.
My face.

The blue frog that is sad.

These long strings of activities in code: goodbye.

--Perhaps it is like what killing must be like.
You get used to it.

--Early evening, a U function.

I can listen and listen and listen.
And I can nod.

And the liquor is free and that’s something but if you offered me fifty bucks to be here I wouldn’t so what really am I doing with this smile frozen on my face and this beer in my hand as if it solves anything?

This is not my crowd. These are not my people.

--The forty year old MBA: he understands women the way you do and women understand him the way you are understood.

He is known for his seductions and he wants to talk round about ways to you of them.

And his face is cracked and his suit is necessary.

What you realize is that he is who you will be or perhaps who you are. And he is bathed in pathos, even if the blond fresh to the program will fall into bed with him.

You see how small he is. And you know precisely how you relate.

Brother, you say.
Brother, he says.

It makes you like him a lot more and yourself a lot less.

--Exit strategy number two.

I realize: this evening I am fluid.
And I realize: this evening I cannot be still.

In stillness there is sadness and you aught move.

--Drink date, 8pm, she’s forty minutes late, an accident on the freeway.

This pretty girl with her eyes the color of root beer and very big and very round.

You could take her seriously but there was the fucked up moment on the weekend before.
You don’t know her well enough for even the smallest slip. And now she seems so together and so full and so potentially fulfilling you can hardly stand to stand there without touching her.

But it is an illusion.

You remember the fucked up moment.

Your guard went up and you wonder as you sip your drink and she drinks hers if she has figured out that she’ll never get it down.

--Outside, just a little rain. You stand on the balcony sharing a vodka tonic.

It’s good to be drunk and it’s almost holy.
At times like this you could believe in anything.

--But you’ve got to go.
You told her before she came that your night was short.

You told her even if you don’t mean it now.
Because you could just sink back to your place with her.
She showed you once that she knows things, how to relate to you in certain ways, and there is a comfort in that.

She is of the world. She is woman and not girl.
There is comfort in that.

But you’ve told yourself it is not that kind of night.

You are celebrating.
Or you are mourning.
--There is the girl of the afternoon and her ghost will not haunt you.
You are pressing on.
You are rowing your boat.

--The ballerina. She’s alone although you expected her with a friend.

She’s always so warm.
She’s all full of embrace.
And you are not worthy.

You’ve promised one drink. You have two.

This is an Irish pub. Her new haunt. Small and you can smell the baked potatoes, and the waitress is stunning.

This is LA. It’s always the same story with her: she recognizes that you are corrupt but in her innocence doesn’t really know what you’d take from her.

There is a pattern to your meetings.
The cab of a vehicle, those false restraints, and how you sometimes move beyond them.

But this is a night of the day in which you started breaking patterns.
You tell yourself: you are fluid.
There’s not a hand on you.

--She fixes your hair.

You tell her that you got a gray stubble.

She finds it.
She thinks it’s sexy.
She says, When I tell people about you, I always say you have this sexy splash of gray in your hair.

She has no way of understanding.
She doesn’t know how when that hair has gone gray and its yours you really understand it will never be anything else again.

--You ask her to request “Lay Lady Lay” and she does.
The man sings it.

It would be easy to stall now, in this music, in this warmth, with this woman who means to talk you into being bad for her.

And it’s not even for her sake that you go.

--Dixie Tavern.

This is where you belong but you were fucked up before you get there.
Your supposed to be home working on the treatment for PK.

But you are not home and this bar in your old neighborhood is not your bar, and this neighborhood is not your neighborhood, and what happened to send you from it was dark –the darkest moment of your life—so what are you doing here?

What sick habit is this?

This is where you go.

--And tonight? Nobody knows you.
Nobody likes you.
If a fight broke out they’d want to see you lose.

They’d cheer for your blood.

--It’s vodka. It’s vodka. It’s vodka.
You couldn’t be more lost.
You couldn’t be less social.

--Eventually, a girl you met at a party. She remembers you. She tells you the details of your break up.

You say, I must have been fucked up.
She says, Yes.

She sits down and her friend sits down. You straighten your spine.

Her voice is strained, as if she has been yelling all day or breathing too much smoke and perhaps one of these things or both are true.

You imply you’re too old for her. It is so that she’ll tell you that you’re not too old.
But she doesn’t.
What she tells you is that she’s not too young.

-- At the last bar, LA fixed your hair just so. Everything is, in fact, just so.

Now, for fifteen or twenty minutes, the light is right, and so too is the level of alcohol; and your stubble is perfectly grown, and you are handsome and you are young and all your blood is coursing in your muscles.

And she buys into the illusion of you.
And she presser her lips on your lips.
And you buy it too.

--And you’ve got a gray stubble.
And that hair that has died, it will never live again.
And that woman in your apartment this afternoon, she’s gone.

You’ve said goodbye.

You’re beyond the pail.

And you know what that means.

The Story of the Girl and the Boy (allow for slight variation)

2004-11-17T21:14:00.000-08:00

--They meet. Something about each alarms in wonderful ways the heart of the other.
They tell each other their stories; who the world thinks they are; who they really are; where they come from.
Heat runs between them when they touch.
The first few times they have sex each of them feels for entire half minutes to be in love.
As the glorious novelty of fucking burns away they spend more time doing other things.
They go for walks outside and they wander around Wal-Mart and Best Buy and she burns him a cd and he buys her a dozen clichés or a box of them.
They watch television programs together.
They begin to develop more deep seated affections.
Perhaps they cohabitate, but in any case, they sleep often in the same bed.
The pressure of the world is stressing him and she wants to help.
She never received the love she deserved and that implications of that frighten him; or, she received it to well and knows what to want and that frightens him too.
But she is beautiful and she may complete him in some way and he’ll see it through.
She sees his soft side.
He sees her strength.
They have their argument.
She understands that he can be cruel.
He understands that she can be cold.
The part of himself that he kept separate, that his daddy kept separate before him and that men have always been keeping separate, glows.
It says: I told you so.
He plants the seed of his bitterness there, where it will be nourished.
And she takes the disappointment to heart.
She says to herself: perhaps it is me. I bring this on myself.
But somewhere she knows that isn’t true.
However, she insists on the truth of it, at least for a time.
She tries to teach him how to treat her by treating him that way.
She buys him little gifts.
She complements his appearance.
She asks him about his day.
He gets annoyed.
She takes the little insults as they come.
He sees himself wrestling with the weight of the world; it is, he imagines, reasonable to insist that she not ask too much of him.
Perhaps he begins to fuck around with another woman.
If so, he will treat her with the affection that he seems no longer capable of showing to the original girl.
The new woman might very well be in some stage of the same story with a man not unlike him.
But perhaps he doesn't start that yet.
In any case, if they go on like this for long, he will.
You’re always stuck in something, she says. It is a screen or a book or something he calls hobby or work or addiction.
He has a blindness.
She does too.
Neither of them can really see the balloon that is forming in her heart.
When it bursts, its contents will change, in almost an instant, the way she feels for him.
Something will pour into her that will not erase but invalidate the thing she is calling love.
He can’t imagine that because as a man he doesn’t operate like that. There are no balloons.
She can’t imagine it because if she did she would understand that there is no security in this world, not even in terms of what she can known about herself.
He seems to grow harder and more distant.
They quarrel over little things.
They quarrel over big things.
When he throws her crumbs it is in his weak moments.
When he throws her crumbs it is so that she will put him at ease.
She doesn’t understand that he can’t see that she feels as if she drowning--it seems so obvious to her.
He does not think as much can go on in her heart or mind as goes on in his.
He tells himself she is simple.
Sometimes they have a perfect afternoon, or a perfect morning, a perfect minute, and they both know what it could be, what it should have been, what it is not.
She is alone; she never wanted to be alone.
He becomes more convinced his world is more complicated than she could ever guess.
Her job is to greet him when steps from it. And for that he will give her the warmth of his body and perhaps the shelter of his roof.
And he will mold the future; he will sculpt it; he will take responsibility ultimately for the two of them, their bodies in the world, their hungers for food and things.
But he will not listen to her for very long.
He is too tired and what she says means too little.
And he will not hold her for very long.
He wants to fuck when he wants to fuck.
When she does, she hardly knows how to ask, and after several times of being rebuffed, she won’t ask, or not easily.
She will remain awake while he sleeps tired, and oblivious.
The end of the world is swirling through her mind.
She’ll meet a man.
That man will listen to her.
That man will say in conversations that are becoming less and less veiled that she is beautiful and unique.
He will affirm that she is a rare thing to be treasured.
He will tell her good things about her outfit; about her hair.
And the other man, the original man, will tell her when she gets home: I don’t like your hair like that. You look strange in that sweater.
She will start to peel away.
As she begins to, he’ll think he wants it.
Let her go, he’ll tell himself. You really want to be alone anyway.
And secretly the weakness that is the center of all men believes that he is in control.
It can’t imagine a world otherwise.
That weakness that doesn’t want to envision chaos will tell him the decision is his and will always be his.
But he has lost the rights to such a decision.
The balloon breaks.
Her heart changes. It happens so quickly.
She doesn’t respect him or what they have anymore and therefore can never partake of it again, not naturally, anyway.
When that comes clear to him, the weak part will get honest with itself, because it must.
It will recognize that she has the control.
And it will recognize his need for her.
Get her back, it will cry.
And all the visions of love that he’d started to hide from himself will come slamming into the forefront of his mind.
He’ll cry on the telephone. Come back to me, he’ll say.
She cares for him. She feels something.
But she is gone.
That’s what she tells him.
There is that other man, that new man.
She’ll start again.
Maybe he’s starting again too.
Maybe they’ll work it out.

You know this story. You’ve played one of these roles. Over and over.

Goodbye, Philip Roth. Goodbye, Kinski. All of Me.

2004-11-17T18:49:00.000-08:00

--Bought dvds:

Nostalgia value:
Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, a film I watched several times with my father when I was young.

Arsenic and Old Lace. I played Mortimer in a HS production. What was that, fourteen years ago? And I remember so much of it clearly. The stage; the color of the set walls; the faces of performers, of the audience.

I can remember the way I felt, not just those nights, but the days and nights around them; I can put together almost my whole life through memories of feelings.

And is a memory of a feeling different than a feeling itself?

--And The Human Stain. I’ve never liked Nicole Kidman’s nose but she seems a good performer.

This is however not her finest hour and forty minutes. Her performance is overly mannered, completely intellectualized; she’s been lead to believe that if she talks in a low voice and blows cigarette smoke at fifteen second intervals, she’s acting.

Think again.

--A non-compelling film; a film full of heavy handed literary references; a reminder, like The Dying Animal, that Roth is dated, no matter how he tries to keep up; he has been dated for years, decades really.

--It has been a warm day. A butterfly flew alongside me for fifteen or twenty steps of my run.

It reminded me of the last scene of the Kinski documentary, a documentary which lays him open, a madman, a near monster, a spoiled genius, and yet he stands there in the jungle with a childish smile on his face, a butterfly floating around him, settling and lifting and settling again, as if it cannot leave him, as if it is drawn to some sweetness beneath the cracks in his flesh and the bile in his heart.

As if it means to tell us that he is good.

--Am I good?

If you saw me in the sun today, making long strides, the butterfly beside me, if you were witness to that illusion, you’d think: yes.

--And I recognize that I’ve made sort of screeching stop to the heavy dating.

I ask myself: why?
I ask myself: did you get tired?
Or was it because you found this new girl?
Or did you find this new girl because you were tired?

I tell myself: you did not invent the new girl.
She invented herself.
If you were set on such an invention, you would have used somebody else.

--And I think of how easy it is to focus on some part of the person and not the whole.

I recognize in most girls when they come at me that they are purposefully building blinds spots in their eyes, that there are scars about which she will not ask, histories she does not want to know.

I tell myself: She’ll fixate on and love some part of you.
I tell myself: But there is some part of you that she avoids which may eventually offset that love.

I don’t mean the new girl. Perhaps I’ve recognized something quite opposite in her. Maybe she seems to me unblinking. Maybe that's what I like.

But I just mean any girl. And her even, or one like her.

--And I think: if it is going to be proper, anything you are going to have with any girl, she must really see you first.

I must make her see me.
All of me.

Without the butterfly.