Stop it.

"I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on some path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the thir time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable – if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them."


Insomnia is productive of déjà vu, in my experience. Perhaps the hallucinatory state sleep deprivation inspires opens up a portal that is peculiarly susceptible to incantations of past experience. I am making a choice (of sorts) to stay awake and click these keys in the hope that something redeemable will come out of it.

State of stomach – think coffee ulcer with an overlay of not-quite-done rice and vegetables.

State of mind – oscillating between pure confusion and ecstatic clarity.

State of the union – oh, well, that’s just precious, isn’t it? I’m reading Robert Penn Warren’s Poetry and Democracy, which if nothing else supplies an historical pedigree to the feeling that everything is so ineluctably fucked the proper step may be to subvert all expectations and enlist in OCS, the better to get inside the schizophrenic animal that is our national consciousness.

State of the book – Joan Didion’s old shit kind of rocks, you know? Don't even try to creep on the White Album or Slouching toward Bethlehem; you have to bumrush the both of them, setting aside entire afternoons when you should be writing that seminar paper but instead you're sitting in some cramped Fargo bar alternating between coffee and Grain Belt until it's suddenly six and your brain is warped and elated for it.

State of letter writing – I have purchased paints in order to add excitement to the non-existent missives, the writing of which I have penciled in to my non-operative datebook.

State of insomnia – omnivorous. See above.

State of technological détente – I log on to a computer for about seventeen minutes a week. I have this labtop here in the apartment for clicking and clacking, but the world wide web does not generally ensnare me for long periods of time. This is refreshing, especially given the possibility that world war four is not just a rhetorical device employed by that one guy from Soundbombing III, but a clearly educible potentiality.

Be Someone On Whom Nothing Is Lost

The perpetuation of strangeness in the life and times of Monsieur Me has relegated newspaper reading, Israel/Arab relations thinking, and sleeping to a secondary importance.

Awhile back I tried a temporary halt to news-related consumption, more for curiosity’s than principle’s sake. Now I am embedded in a more serious declension that stems from circumstance, and I’m just realizing that I have no idea what is going on out there.

So. In the spirit of navel-gazing, I will now direct you to the texts.

Dispatches by Michael Herr -

Don’t front on Vietnam. Our presidential elections still coalesce around questions of credibility and authenticity, and what you did during this time frocking matters. Point-blank, brutal, hysterically lucid, this book is.

Pancho & Lefty, song sung at campfire during visit to lakehouse two days ago. (I was not the singer. I do not sing.)

This song is good. So were the hot dogs I ate while listening to it. It turns out that the combination of acoustic guitars, campfires, renditions of old Guthrie, Seeger, and labor songs, and midnight swims is not passé after all. Who’dathunkit?

Old, decimated farm buildings that lean and pitch and engage each other in architectural conversation.

Since I’ve abandoned all delusions of being above being sentimental/hokey/not my Dad, life has become more interesting. There are buildings out here that have outlived whoever built and lived in them, and their saggy foundations and petrified wood appearances document time. Check that shit out.

I would not dare defeat you, confrere

The image is from Whet, who I thought had retired from this gig.

1) Notes on travels


Winnipeg is suprisingly cosmopolitan, and there are also quite a few drug addict types who are skinny and shirtless and in need of cigarettes.

The road to East End, Saskatchewan, home of Wallace Stegner, offers such a flat expansive tableaux that everything seems to collapse into one dimension: yellow flax fields, brown wheat, and the dull blue sky, as if a neophyte art student couldn't quite get a handle on his/her perspective.

I slept out in a field in a railyard for two nights of the trip b/c accommodations were spotty (no AC, roaches, bordello type upholstery) i would not be a hobo by choice. the wind, mosquitoes, and earthquake arrival of the train make sleeping unlikely, if not impossible. that said, i didn't pay $30 to the short-haired weasel-faced extortionist proprietor of the Commercial Motel across the street, and i sit here pride intact as a result.

2) Said (Sigh-eed), Edward

The relationship between bodily condition and aesthetic style seems at first to be a subject so irrelevant and perhaps even trivial by comparison with the momentousness of life, mortality, medical science, and health, as to be quickly dismissed. Nevertheless, my contention is as follows: all of us, by virtue of the simple fact of being conscious, are involved in constantly thinking about and making something of our lives, self-making being one of the bases of history, which according to Ibn Khaldun and Vico, the great founders of the science of history, is essentially the product of human labor

3) the etiquette of accepting compliments

I was always taught that the proper response to a compliment directed at oneself was to look at one's shoes, mumble something self-deprecating, and exit quickly. a women in the seminar i am in thought this response unsatisfactory, and followed me, repeating said compliment, which not only confused me, it began to terrify me: I cannot look you in the eye, woman, and accept what you're saying, even if I think it is true. I am limited in that way, and am sorry we cannot seem to reach a common understanding on this point.

There are no new ways to be new, or how my appropriation of a man’s sentences can redeem the past selves that you and I once allowed to commingle

It is 12:54 am CST. I am drinking Grain Belt, a Midwestern beer, Minnesota beer to be exact, and I regret not being in bed right now but that regret is reserved for tomorrow, on ice as it were. Here is a pair of sentences:

Time, a traditional means of order, is melted down into the simultaneity of solipsism or the drugged consciousness. Form means nothing – what is admired is anything that turns the reader on, and this may be better done by irrational than by formal means.

The author of these sentences ascribes to his present (circa 1968) a flagrant disregard for form and order and traditional craftsmanship. He may be onto something. Perhaps though there are new ways to be new. Innovation as a concept seems to assure us of the possibility. I am in travel mode, taking on Fargo and revisiting Chicago, about to embark on a Canadian excursion, and I say to you: this early morning grandeur is something else, isn’t it? Those times when everyone else you love and care about are most likely sleeping, and you sit in your chair with your beer and your book reflecting on the dreams that they have and the small possibility that their dreams contain you – good times, most likely, but also absurd in a way, insomuch as you will never know if you are uttering redoubtable nonsense or unassailable truth.

I saw friends of late. Good friends, old friends – though the characterization as old seems strange and faintly unreliable. How many years need go by before “old” no longer feels novel as an adjectival construction to which one tethers one’s experience? Not fifteen minutes ago I came across this assertion: “a sense of historical time is absent from American thought.” In response, I thought: “No shit?” but this isn’t a journal and we no longer have time for any more delay.

I am attending a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar, and the capital letters give me license to pontificate and ask something of you, reader. Today I was witness to a presentation on memory, which entailed the inevitable reference to the Proust passage about the little cookies. It was good – that’s all I can say. Given the circumstances of my having recently returned from a vacation in Chicago, I was, in a word, reflective. Chicago is a grand city, and occupies a large space in my metaphysical heart. I so much enjoyed the wanderings and weavings that I experienced in the past five days: pink line excursion with Sam, gut-busting laughter with Thel and Mikey, looking at Ryan and knowing somehow he used to throw the post pattern ball unerringly, overnight extravangas that edified and realized hypothetical desire at the same time in random sleeping setups and non-sleeping outpourings. I must say, however, with a new Grain Belt in hand and increased anxiety about my ability to wake up on time without the benefit of an alarm clock, that a certain Chicago is now beyond my reach: third floor apartments and Boggle and paying Drea a dollar a day for an allotment of four cigarettes, White Sox outings and four dollar pitchers at the Cove, parties at DePaul with the music school kids with whom Zach consorted who knew that early Prince, late Al Green, and kegs of Budweiser made for a certain kind of ecstatic alchemy, three or four pitcher nights with Sam discussing arcane effluvia, going to a bar on the southside with Maggie and being greeted with “it’s been a long time since I’ve seen white people in here,” Julie with our ellipses and infatuation with professiorial diction, Tony Hawk Pro Skater with Aaron after a year of getting MGD’d before tofu and Buddha entered our lives, listening to Andy’s prefaces to stories that include Philadelphia geography and metaphysical musings, Steve McQueen McGuinn with his rambling soliloquies and my difficult time understanding life at Milton Academy, Clay and Laura hosting excellent meals and sordid affairs, Gruberg and 3N and the soothing aroma of coffee in the 2nd floor C-Shop as I tried to hide my previous night with gum and Snail Thai nourishment, Beatty at Elaine’s drinking expensive beer with his sister’s car outside, me telling Adams he needs to fuck his mother and kill his father at a boomcrash when trucker speed was all the rage – and on and on and on.

Before I opened this new Microsoft Word window I opened up a file I titled “Happy Birthday,” which file contained my annual birthday email and poem to my mother. Here is the poem I sent her in late September of 2006, which I include as some indication of my life in a small town in Montana that very few of you have ever visited:

Southwestern Montana Dog Song

Philipsburg, your chorus of barking dogs
On this winter day has not abated.
Leashless and mangy and unencumbered by thoughts of pedigree,
they take notice of your prosaic goings on –
How you summon men in pickup trucks giving one-fingered waves,
And how you offer hunched over pensioners walking to the Gallery Café for coffee
Or slinking to the Club Bar later on for an early afternoon whiskey –
Through it all your dogs refuse
to thread their voices into an empiricist’s causal fabric
and make sense of something dubiously arrayed.
Dogs do not have the flayed disappointment of
reflected upon experience woven into their skin.
They give voice to the groans that get you going every morning despite yourself.
Thank God and everlasting presence for canine annunciations.

It is not much, so far as poetry goes, but I include it here as indication of how serious my request of you, dear reader, really is. Think of Chicago, or Sioux Falls, or Minneapolis, or Brandon, or Philipsburg, or San Francisco, or whatever crossroads you and I happened to inhabit in what I hope was a glorious collision of sentiment and interpersonal necessity. Take whatever animating thoughts or sensations come to mind, or heart, and value them. It may be some time before you and I cross paths and occasion the opportunity for you to tell me the story that elaborates the feeling you have right now, so do what you may to remember this moment and perhaps it will be possible for you to reenact it for me some time hence. I tell you with a straight face that I am doing well and soon I will be in another country. Get back at me. Write a comment here and testify in some regard to the wounded horses, or send an email. Upon these connections I subsist. In the meantime, cheers. Dream on. Enjoy it all as much as you can.

one who sleeps on couches

It’s funny how sometimes time beats your best intentions six-love and you’re left wishing something else would have happened.

I’ve walked, limped, and crawled through Chicago spaces and I can tell you with all honesty we were kidding ourselves.

Fiction is its own self-reflective surface, which obviously becomes more and more tenable the more your stories match what I consider to be real.

I am done with that, the Hyde Park limbo, three pitchers here and nine shots there. It turns out that drunken smart people and drunken street people display similarly short attention-worthy behavior.

Not that I have much to say.

I continue down this path of doing things that I enjoyed and seriously contemplated, and then acting in such a manner that cannot account for the enjoyable, contemplative thing I did.

Think about Nelson Mandela.