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.