Peripatetic Life Paths

Art need not be a conundrum if you do not concern yourself with audience. Stability is a comfort that you do not need if you keep your eye, and your thoughts, on the next exploration. Stay a year or two ahead of yourself, and you don’t have to worry about uncertainty. The only problem – SNAP! – is that you can’t live in 2007 or 2008. Abstract time is as non-material as dreams are.
There are no bass lines in the future. In the future there is no early morning clarity that comes the moment when you wake up before the alarm clock and say to the world – when I rise I shine – and mean it. There is really not much of anything in the future, because it doesn’t hold steady and keep its constituent parts close. So go ahead and table art, and table the next exploration, and enjoy it all as much as you can right here, before it fades away. There is dignity in crouching behind a patch of juniper for fifteen minutes watching five mule deer nudge small patches of grass with their liquid mouths and look at you without seeing you every thirty seconds or so. There is dignity in being patient and listening to a classroom of teenagers with elementary reading levels work through a short story you read when you were 12, and sharing with them enough of what’s going on in the lines of black type to make three or four get big eyes of recognition and perhaps, if you’re lucky, follow up with a question that takes the discussion further down the road. There is dignity in not being lucky. There is dignity in driving down gravel roads with Wu Tang blaring out the open windows, watching magpies rise from the rabbit carcass on the side of the road and chatter at you with as much inspiration as U-God ever summoned. But then again, comparisons are odious. U-God is U-god, and magpies are magpies. If you can’t tell the difference, you didn’t grow up SoDa with aspirations toward urban sophistication that mutated into visions of valleys encircled in mountain ranges that breed herds of cumulous clouds stretching into the horizon. So be it.

Elements

Water


When I was fifteen, I went into the lake near the Japanese Gardens in Sioux Falls with two nubile girls in one piece suits that presented curved shoulders and hints of cleavage. I scuttled around in the water, splashing and sneaking longing looks, waiting for the signal to depart the murky brown water of the lake to walk to the nearby swimming pool and risk chlorine sting for a better view of what went on beneath. At some point, my weight shifted to my left foot, I sprung half out of the water with a sharp rock as a spring and sliced my big toe. The pain quickened. I limped with the others to the pool. The rinse in the shower and the wet cement floor dulled the pain of the wound, the scale of which I dared not come to know. The lifeguards in red suits and nonchalant glances, the calls of Marco Polo, and the humdrum mechanical rhythm of bounding divers of the flexible boards helped me forget what happened. I came home, took off a bloody sock, and saw an elegant red slice whose edges were encased in dirt. To the emergency room went I, with a nurse for a mother who remained adamant that this indeed was necessary. I remember receiving a Sprite as an initial palliative, before the attending came in and had me lay on my stomach with my legs from the knees down hanging off the little table they ask you to sit on in hospital examination rooms. He dug out the dirt, dilating the cut in the process, and I imagined the sound of my skin being widened as I bit my lip’s surfaces to create a distraction from the more immediate pain.

Air

A stringy piece of beef, used in mother’s stew, caught in my throat and tickled the esophagus with its filaments. I was ten. I haltingly grabbed the glass of milk and attempted to bully the meat down, but the milk lost the battle and came back up in defeat. Off rushed we to the emergency room.

Fire

You’d be surprised how fast fire moves. A little bit a wind, especially a hot prevailing wind cutting up a draw with downed timber and cured grass, is quite a catalyst. On the other hand, you’d also be surprised how quickly a black area becomes home to little sprouts of green, how quickly ponderosa pine that the fire toppled over allow themselves to become fuel for the next generation of little five-inch tall brethren.


You go with Archimedes? You think all is flux, can’t step in the same river twice? Cool beans.

Amnesia Fix

Sometimes forgetting is a blessing. Images in your mind, triggers that bring to consciousness certain things you’ve been doing your damnedest to keep suppressed, slowly lose focus and suddenly you can count of a few hours on one hand during which you weren’t brought to your knees by thoughts that serenade you one moment and condemn you the next. That’s a bit intense, but we have no qualms with a two-month period of intensity, especially before winter doldrums set in. A full calendar – meetings and self-authenticated commitments (ya’ll dig up on that LSAT shit, yo?) and four hour seizures of graphomania – this makes the forgetting that much easier to resuscitate, like giving a small flame a bit of your breath to make it spread out over the tinder and take on a life of its own. And one morning you wake up at 5:30 in the morning because for one month you’ve been doing it just to see if you can, and you can’t remember exactly what you were trying to forget. Presto.

Netflix Chronicles

Watching movies alone, like drinking alone, takes a certain kind of discipline. Standards of what is and is not acceptable, with pathetic as a value at the far end of the scale, oscillate with mood, temperature (Air Conditioning being a luxury we pseudo-ascetics don’t deign to assimilate into our lives), and “x” variables such as what day of the week it is and how many papers you have to correct. Last night was a night of Syriana, tonight was very much a Crash night, and the acceptability ratio was very much pro-play button.
Watching movies alone in a rocking chair, after having run a mile and a half and jettisoned the idea of turning on the oven to cook a dinner you really have no desire to eat, also takes a certain kind of discipline, not unlike that which allows you to put one foot in front of another at an 8 minute mile pace for fifteen minutes even as the tar from eleven years of cigarettes seeks escape from the alveoli in which it has made a comfortable home.
Watching movies alone, with full acknowledgement of your addictive personality and the ease with which you could rack up a movie a night for God knows how long, takes a certain kind of discipline, not unlike the discipline it takes to limit yourself to one cigarette a day for two weeks and simultaneously supplant the habit with a fervent, shed-eight-pounds-in-one-week, transforming acquiescence to the need to make your body move frenetically for at least two hours a day until your calves seize up like pistons suffering from viscosity breakdown. Makes the day go by quicker, is the thing. The movies and the exercise and the pain and the flush of all the toxins that stand steady in your blood like remoras flitting in and out of a shark’s gill: either side of the same coin, is the thing.

you bring the hamburger buns, i'll bring the baked beans

Rez scenes: three young boys in the back of a pickupwith big toothy smiles and shirts flapping, staring atme over the hood as they pass on their way up theAshland Divide - a black dog with a brown mask aroundthe eyes prancing in the ditch as busted out carsstream by on Lame Deer's streets - big burn swaths surround the courts where i play basketball and look across a field of pathetic charcoaled tree trunks that witness a swishhere and a clank there, and tiny little sprigs ofgreen shoot up hopefully, with clear burn linesthat show where people stood encircled around a housein the distance keeping the flames at bay - studentshere for volleyball and football practice sprawledacross the quads, laughing and running and throwingpinecones at each other - wisps of smoke rise in thedistant hills, the morning after a big lightning stormrolled through and made a car alarm go off down thestreet, which i stood outside and watched pass over -Ernie, w/ big bulbous alcoholic nose and the unsteadywalk, wipes his hands on his red shirt and walks outfrom underneath the alcove of the store to beg forchange to buy a forty, laughing the whole time - theladies at the bank who give me a shit b/c i'm youngand unmarried and tease me about taking out money onFridays and ask "Well what are you up to? I bet nogood." and covering their mouths, they laugh so hard -deer shit (small circular pellets) and four stepslater, I look across the meadow, three deer, cluelessfor a half a second and then pogo-ing away from mewith large white tails waving a goodbye.

Did Jesus laugh? We know he wept, right? But was there laughter involved?

I found myself in a strange position last night. A neighbor with whom I’ve had a few neighborly conversations and who’s helped me out in areas where I am an idiot (read: car troubles, other mechanically-rooted problems) came across the street to talk to me just as I pulled up from a trip to the store. It was a hot, muggy day and the thunderheads that had sat to the west all afternoon were finally mobilizing and throwing some lightning around. The neighbor’s name is Park, and he’s Cheyenne. I’ve watched him skin out deer, put together a trampoline, discipline his kids, and all the other upclose stuff that you get to see when you live in a small community where not much of anything goes on. He quit smoking awhile back, and always asks me if I’ve quit yet. He’s also a pretty dedicated Christian. None of this was really present in my mind as we talked about our summers and commented on how fast time goes by, the usual bullshit, right? Then I mention how hot it is in my apartment and how I’m not really looking forward to turning on the oven to cook, which sparks an invitation from him to come and eat with his wife and three young sons (4,3, and 10 months). I have no out available, and I’m trying to keep with the general spirit of trying new things, even if there’s really no super good reason for it and even if trying new said thing may take me out of comfort zone.

So I go over to the house, sit down, eat meatloaf, ignore the wails of the oldest son, chat, chew thoroughly, talk with my mouth closed, and all in all behave agreeably/civilly. It is a nice dinner. There are a few awkward moments of silence, but nothing that would cripple the time entirely. Then I get up, excuse myself with something about “I have to make a phone call,” and as I’m out the door Park calls out an invitation to go to church with him on Sunday. I am being recruited, you see. Somehow in a previous conversation he had learned that I grew up Lutheran, and evidently I had not made clear that my status was ambivalent at best. I am something of a Chrieaster, a term I was introduced to only recently which means “someone who only goes to church on Christmas and Easter” and in fact I only go to these if I am within 30 miles of my mother.

So what do I say? I have no antipathy towards religion, the religious, or any affiliated entity. I have a big gaping hole of doubt and circumspection that I sometimes visit, usually at night when I can’t sleep and questions like “what does this all amount to?” are jarred loose from the little mental cubbyholes I’ve stowed them and proceed to march across my mind for hours at a time. Perhaps because of (or in spite of) this gaping hole, I also have no desire to go to church. So I look at my feet for a second, let out a “I don’t know if that would really work out, Park,” see his face collapse, till the gravel for a second, say “sorry,” and walk away.

This is really a very pedestrian incident, an unremarkable momentary dissonance between hoped for expectation and delivered result, but it seems like God followers have been picking up on some scent I’m giving off, because – OK so Park just walked into my classroom just as I typed out that “because” – and now he’s gone and I suspect he was going to follow up on the let’s go to church idea but I have a computer guy in here so maybe that wasn’t in the cards. This is weird. I was just going to explain how three people in the past two weeks have expressed an interest in the state of my soul, two strangers and a former high school teacher of mine who I saw at a coffee shop. The experience of being the selected target of someone else's humble but determined proselytizing is not aggravating, but it is is off-putting. Perhaps I have a look of guilt on my face. I do not know. Be well, people.

the OKness of sadness

There are infinite reasons that underwrite legitimate sadness, and we need not run the gamut from melancholia to anhedonia to ascribe some type of logic to the idea that there are times when it feels good – like you’ve become a fucking person again – to just sit there and wallow in how bad it feels to be you at that particular moment. I can’t say this is that particular moment; I’m just reflective about an upcoming westerly trip and the semblance of normalcy that will greet me upon my arrival. Normalcy is a specter, I’ve come to realize, and you only glimpse it in rare moments when you return to something that was familiar when you left it and hasn’t yet asserted its changed status to you. I look forward to the fifteen seconds, minutes, or days of normalcy I will have before I notice that just because I wasn’t around, doesn’t mean everything up and stopped. But I digress.

*****
It is a strange time. Heat lightning pulsates on a nightly basis in my particular geographical milieu, and with it comes sheets of rain. The basic dynamism of August thunderstorms and the psychic imprint of awe that they left on me as a young child makes it hard to sleep out of sheer excitement that rain has come. I woke up one morning some ten days ago and walked through the uncannily “movie set suburbia” neighborhood to kind of like right my senses after a strange confrontational night that had ended, oh, two and a half hours before I woke up. A mile away from the house, I heard the first rumble of thunder and knew I was in for a soaking. It came quickly – I walked slowly as a kind of counterpoint – and somewhere in the interval of turning around and opening the garage door I thought of five or six random people I haven’t seen in some time and may never see again. There’s something about being absent from the lives of people you genuinely care about that almost makes you want to believe in heaven, isn’t there? That last ten yards of walking up the driveway was sad, but the lucidity of the moment, the crispness of the feeling, coalesced with the sadness in a way that made the idea of actually continuing with the morning – smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee and reading that book that’s sat at the bottom of the pile for six months – somehow more than just bearable. That book, by the way, was worth reading.

*****
I had a younger cousin once who expressed surprise that we humans don’t melt when it rains. I’m not sure what he thought we were like, but thinking about that makes it clear abandoning the ambitious post I had conjured up around this topic is the right thing to do. Tomorrow I drive. And think.

Ex Machina

What ever happened to a scholarship of melancholy? I don’t anyone to open up a can of human condition worms, but isn’t there something to be said for touching on the things that stick with, and stick to, you, over time, insinuating themselves into your life until you must admit that they cannot be defeated, just lived with, or else they will defeat you. Whatever happened to tightly crafted rhetoric that curled in on itself like a porcupine and resisted every attempted deconstruction. Whatever happened to the agoraphobe geniuses who laughed out loud (to themselves) and hung out in small rooms staring at walls and scribbling out a reflecting pool of that process, giving me my life back to me for $24 and seven and a half hours of Other consciousness incarnation.

What ever happened to the rah-rah-rah and the 4-6-3? What ever happened to four-on-the-floor? Are mutual funds that omnivorous?

How come whenever I come to a red light I want to look both ways, close my eyes, and hammer it? Or is that just in dreams?

Have you read Frost? “Design” gives the lie to the idea that “The Road Not Taken” matters. Simple. Direct. And has a white spider.

I am in a library, in the air conditioning. Be gone with me.

I guess this is what i would say

hey NY publisher friend: what are you publishing? please do respond to email.

hey Chicago U of C Press friend: have you found what you are looking for? Me neither.

Hey Oakland apostate: I'm so glad you can drive. I miss your parents' porch, and the New Years' Eve antipathy I rode in on (way back in the day).


SEcc: if not now, when?

Lawless, come speak to me. You to Scoot the red.

Here is to inundation.

i am now about to go gone.

me quoting someone more engaged with some things than i am (also smarter, by definition, than i)

this is my Berkeley CA friend (an excerpt from a way back post)

I think William James once defined sentimentalism by invoking the image of a rich woman crying ina performance hall over something like Les Miserables, but then brashly rushing past the poorbeggars on the steps outside the hall. The sentimentalism in this case had to do with her usingfictional desperation for her own emotional thrill and for a scheduled catharsis, but then losingthe apparent sympathy and sensitivity, which made the catharsis work at the performance, as soonas she faces desperation and poverty in reality.When people complain that television news in America these days in exploitatively emotionalist orsentimental, it has to do with a similar gratification of the viewer's emotional needs for thetragic. That this is a betrayal of the function of television journalism should be apparent to allwho watch the news at a critical remove. Anyone who is critical of the TV news must also beself-critical as a viewer in order to resist a manipulation which might not be the consciousintent of any news-reporters but which is startlingly clear to many viewers.For example, a quote from http://slate.msn.com/id/2125732/"We watched the news for hours, flipping from channel to channel, looking in vain for the kind ofinformation that would let two relatively non-brave people like us decide whether to launch out ona personal mission to evacuate people. As time passed, we became shocked, then enraged, that theTV news wasn't giving us this very very basic information. To show us a tearful woman begging toget out of the city, and not explain exactly, in detail, what the issues would be to get her outof the city, is just foul, disgusting, obscene, and inexcusable. All we saw was more and morefootage of sad, desperate, people. OK, we get it already.—James DurbinThat quote is from the readers' follow-up complaints to a story about hating the TV news by JackShafer in slate.com on sept 4, 2005. The TV news as performance has the same built-insentimentalism as James' opera hall example, except it collapses reality onto the stage: theemotional thrills given by the appearance of desperate people on the screen sentimentalizes theviewer into the crying woman, who can do nothing about what she sees.But it is reality mediated through the TV news that causes this catharsis, which makes itdifferent than James' 19th century example. The infotainment viewer craves the heightenedemotional experience that the news as infotainment provides. This is not every actual viewer, asis clear by the quote, but rather the implied viewer and the created viewer -- the one whogradually aquires an addiction and a craving. The craving built into the structure of infotainingTV news turns the viewer into a sentimental vampire who thrives on grandiose and incoherentdispatches of intensity from a real crisis, while relapsing into boredom and stasis or junkyishwithdrawal when nothing happens. The perversity is that this enjoyment -- of course in the formof painful or 'bad' emotions, and not recognized as 'enjoyable' -- it is the call of the TV newsfor the sentimental viewer. It is a source of unrecognized pleasure, and it should bother us thattelevision news reporting can convert events into catalysts for our hysterical enjoyment, withouteven addressing what the viewer who soberly 'gets it already' can do to respond to reports. Torepeat, not every viewer is the sentimental viewer here described. But with the educationaldemand of reality TV that the viewer love and need every recording of intense human drama, everyguaranteed authentic crisis of a real person somewhere, and every smoldering detail of someone'ssad exhibited desperation, there will be more viewers of this type and more news of this type.The integrity of any TV news today depends on its formal and generic difference from reality TV. I think this is why I, and a lot of us, can't tolerate the news we (don't)watch; not just that we don't like to feel manipulated, but that we can't witness the erosion of this difference.

Just go ahead and toss that lifejacket.

Oooooooooooouuuuuuuuuuuweeeeeeeeeeee!!!spunk.

Even if you dont care about basketball

you should read this. I am not kidding.

Untitled Repetition (Aesthetic Ethical Religious)

I saw this picture up close in person in MPLS while gallavanting in confused, if well-intended, pursuit of something that continually slips past my fingers right when I clutch hardest.

Lawless, you are right, but no I did not become a Republican.

I am in the Siouxland Library and I have a fifteen allotment to get enough of what's in my head down here on this screen to prevent neural synapse constipation. Therefore please forgive typos.


I would like to play a game of basketball, or Texas Hold Em, with Michael Wilbon. I like it when his eyes get big as he makes exclamatory remarks.

The Minnesota Twins are a regular season tour de force and (I fear) a postseason 60 year old impotent man with a cleft palate and unstintingly strong BO.

The man at the cubicle next to mine alternates between a short, hard guffaw with a strange dipthong ending, and silent chuckling that shakes the entire computer cubicle structure at which I am sitting.

Movies are better than television. Kung Fu Hustle, Godfather 1 and 2, Mumford, all were consumed by eyes in the last day and a half.


This is all so hollow, isn't it? Fundamental conceptual rejiggering of Wounded Horsedness is on my to do list.

excelsior

Day had a way of shaking Lacewood awake. Slapping it lightly, like a newborn. Rubbing its wrists and reviving it. On warm mornings, you remembered: this is why we do things. Make hay, here, while the sun shines. Work, for the night is coming. Work now, for there is no work in the place where you are going.
May made it seem as if no one in this town had ever sinned. Spring unlocked the casements. Light cured the oaks of lingering winter doubt, lifting new growth from out of nothing, leaving you free again to earn your keep. When the sun came out in Lacewood, you could live.



These are the first two paragraphs from novel called Gain, by Richard Powers. Powers is a MacArthur fellow, winner of awards, writer of other books, and all-around novelistic virtuoso. I will be reading this book until I finish it. There will be updates and excerpts. Go ahead and read the paragraphs out loud, if you hadn’t already. When voiced, their secrets are not held so close.

I used to be afraid.

My friend from MPLS says: Don’t talk to me.
What else does she say?

I have pink toenails. (Implicit, unsaid, a simple fact.)

Talk to me, Ms. MPLS?

Bright Eyes was on the radio and he made the porcelain sing effervescent songs.


They (my two MPLS friends) are going to the North Woods and one wants a journal and doesn’t want her husband’s half-finished journal.

She says: “I don’t want your second hand shit.”

Her husband – “you can write about your pregnant hand second hand shit.” (That’s not true. I made that up.)

She says to me: “You’re making stuff up.” And I would like to tell her: “that’s what I do”
But the grainbelt is to be attended to.


I don’t know if I am ready to make a baby, but when my friends have one I will celebrate.

email to S.J. the Red

You do not understand the volatility of the situations I've been in recently. I am now in MPLS. Life is a strange juxtaposition of utter vulnerability and acceptable necessity. I will see you in the next few weeks. Time will go on.
alex

PS i saw the twins beat the rangers 15-2. I like total ass kickings. i am not a good person - it is that simple.
SEE BLOG.

Non Sequiturs: Castro asks the pope not to talk about the surgery

The future is so bright, I have to wear shadows





Paul Beatty has things to say.
Renting hotel rooms makes me feel older.
Minneapolis has many streets.
Saint Paul is crisp.
I am in a room with plants.
Last night someone I love called me baby.
August is here: no bullshit.
Teaching is not a job, nor is it what one does when one goes to work.
“Hezbollah fires 200 rockets into Israel.”
Plainsfolk are full of conundrums.
My life has changed so much in the past three weeks, I can't even explain it.
I'm serious. it's not like I've converted to Hare Krishna and am now selling flowers at the airport, but. . .
I smoke cigarettes like cancer doesn’t kill.
One of my best friends will soon have a baby: ain’t life grand?
Explain to me again where Gaza is, can you?
Introspective is the new Bell’s Palsy.
Ambition is the old TB test, a needle in the arm.
You reader are the old conundrum.
The old is new problem made tangible.
Dead buildings, rotting being worked over by wind, will
Outlast even you –
So clutch whatever semblance of humble order
Your sense of decency has become
Enthralled with –
Having the oven on exacerbates
The feelings of my friend who’s
Pregnant –
Might not that idea in itself
Spur you on?