The immigrants had a work ethic that made Trollope look like a simian

RE: the recent canonization of Kurt Vonnegut. It’s not hard to find the expected honorifics in the various obits and Vonnegut-centered features, likewise in the comments appended to them. If you poked around long enough, you might find a few people who took his death as inducement to symbol-searching, which often resulted in dismally serious “we live in dark times” pronouncements. These are dark times, as, I would assume, most times are, and though the era lacks a distinguishing mark1, one recurring theme is clear: our unerring need to carve the recent present into discrete, disposable parts.

Today’s events are rendered significant, labeled and packaged in rhetorically bloated clothing, then left to calcify on the sidelines until tomorrow’s news cycle arrives and become assimilated again. Our appetites hold us steady in the process by which we think we might become satiated. Righteous indignation quickly becomes pussified through sheer hubristic repetition, consecratory gestures turn out to be all shadow when put on public display, and at odd intervals it becomes obvious that the mass of opinions we wade through on a daily basis have fucked with, if not wholly infantilized, our ethical sense, whatever exactly that may be.

The edge to Vonnegut’s work – or what I recall of Vonnegut’s work – lingered on the question of what comforts can be derived from an effort to be decent, which I’ll proffer as the thing the ethical sense is calibrated to recognize and pursue. In Vonnegut, decency is the necessary but elusive salve that can lessen the pain of loneliness, the unalterable wound afflicting the modern, mostly American types that populate his fiction. Accumulated wisdom, housed in historical documents and examples and in the teachings of prophets and soothsayers, braces the effort to be decent but is generally lost in the shuffle. Good-hearted but essentially fallible characters make attempts to do some good and prevail over loneliness. Over and over, they fail, except in brief instances when they don’t. Before too long, the human aggregate, forever limping toward the finish line, catches up to them and off they go again, trying to right themselves.

And so on, with variations that enlarge and enliven each other from novel to novel, adding up – in my view – to something rich and American and worthy of celebration if you can stomach celebrating something that bears traces of a complete and unbroken fidelity to sadness.

I had pretty much forgotten about Mr. Vonnegut prior to his death. The media swell suggested he was an inveterate pessimist, and he may have been. The interviews and profiles I read made it seem like he viewed pessimism as a direct consequence of seeing things with as much as honesty as he could muster. An ethos, then: the world is broken and our efforts to fix it are at best ineffectual. You add to the problem if you suggest otherwise or avert your eyes completely. You can leaven your ineffectuality with curiosity, bemusement, and an appreciation of the good in whatever form you find it.

It seems like Vonnegut’s large scale response to this set of circumstances was to depict stories that would entertain people (maybe make them more expansive in the process) and to call bullshit on hypocrisy as he perceived it. By all accounts his small scale response was to be as gracious, kind, and decent a person as he possibly could be. The weave of personality that connects the artist (to whom we still have access) and the persona presented to the world (to whom we probably never did) doesn’t work through the large and small scales in a clearly defined pattern.

As a result, synecdoche has little purchase when applied to Vonnegut if all it does is make his death an occasion for sorrowing. There’s little evidence that he thought his death an occasion for sorrow. Simply put, he was an octogenarian who died after protesting in interview after interview that he was (RIP B.I.G.) ready to die. I’d rather Updike die than he (for me, the difference between the death of Updike and the death of the wooly-legged spider crawling across my ceiling is negligible at this point), but any keening worth the effort seems more appropriately directed at the clusterfuck tragedies parading around in our collective consciousness right now.

1. What, literally, are these times called? The Aughts? The Zeroes? And what do we call the progeny of the Boomers? Am I one of this unnamed generation? Is this confusion a direct consequence of the fragmentation of media and lifestyle choices that began in the 80s and continues today to an ever greater degree? Once we weren't shackled to ABC, NBC, and ABC and the big three newspapers, did it become impossible to harness an entire demographic within a given term? Or is it that we're not trying hard enough? You tell me.

Night sweats

Something sounding like foghorn came in on 2 and 3 with a delayed swing beat beneath it; all the kids in the lunch line wearing yellow backpacks from Target were swaying from left to right, all languid-like, and they kept chanting:

Break down k’s into dimes and sell ‘em like gobstoppers

Two of L.A.'s top rival cops are going to have to work together... Even if it kills them.

1) The mythology of the NBA playoffs is self-regulating, as seen via analogies to the career of Sylvester Stallone. Shaq is the Viagra Rocky and LeBron is Cliffhanger Guy, the Suns are like that scene in Over the Top when Sly’s character pushes the body guard through the plate glass window and takes his son with him to the championship, and the Chicago Bulls (check your pulse, bitches) are essentially but not inevitably Ray Tango. I am not sure now, nor have I ever been sure, who Kurt Russell’s Cash should then be.

2) Recently handed out:

Guidelines for this assignment:
- You are encouraged to be creative and use your imagination. This is an assignment that requires you to make stuff up. Enjoy the process.
- This assignment involves use of the Internet as a research tool. You are expected to use it for research, not to check basketball scores, update your MySpace account, or visit other websites.
- The assignment will test your ability to do work independently. You are free to ask your classmates or teacher for assistance but you should complete the work on your own.
- You are working under a timeline. There will be limited opportunities for you to use the computer to complete the research portion of this assignment. Do not waste time. You will be expected to come in before or after school if you are behind. Don’t be a slacker.

Extravagantly Yours

I know that I will do better if I can calmly denounce the urge to sequester the urge to do better. If that makes sense. Twice in the past month I’ve pulled off the interstate and checked into a hotel to establish a scene where my thoughts can come into focus and stop playing coy. Both times I ended up watching a fair amount of Sports Center and exploring the streets of the city in which I placed myself. For less than a hundred dollars I’ve purchased two nights in completely anonymous non-smoking rooms and the Bible in the sliding drawer was the same (looked the same, and I’m guessing contained the same) each time. I’ve taken ice that rumbled out of a machine into my own personal plastic bucket, dumped it into the sink, and made a little refrigerator for my beer. I’ve left for supplies and come back to slide the keycard down the slot, making the dead eye blink green. On commercial Western-themed paintings bolted to the wall and instructional cards admonishing me to be as comfortable as possible, mine eyes have feasted. America has these gifts to offer across its great expanse and you can never be sure if it wants you in on the joke or not.

On these overnight trips, I know I will forget to take pictures if bring my camera and still I bring it anyway. My hands will smell of gas and cancer. The CD player will overheat and won’t allow a disc to load properly; I will steer with my left knee as I try to coax it into its proper slot without feathering myself with cigarette ash. I will fly by vehicles, looking to the right to see who steers them and casually register the passing with a moment’s worth of eye contact. Drivers of vehicles who fly by me will do the same. Sometimes this makes it easier. The antelope of eastern Montana and northeastern Wyoming will gather at the fence line to show me their white asses and atavistic cranial structures – I remember now that ground antelope meat tastes vaguely of sage and pretty much demands an overnight marinade or integration into a red spaghetti sauce – and they will not be in the slightest bit shy about mixing with the cows or the horses, especially in a north wind.

I know I will wake up some Saturday in the near future ready to depart. I will pack a lunch, a book, pen, paper, and a dose of geniality. The urge to go is borne out of desperation and contentment, and if this is a contradiction it is one I have become accustomed to. On state highways, each sharp curve comes with its own bouquet of white crosses. Ninety percent of vehicles in the other lane offer a one-fingered wave in passing. On gravel roads, you might both slow down a bit, ostensibly to give enough berth but more often than not to get a better look at one another. Most of the time gravel offers few encounters. This makes it easier to remember that uninhabited space is not empty.

Last fall I found a strand of cottonwoods where two bald eagles roost. For a half an hour I watched them swoop down to feed on a deer carcass about two hundred yards from the road. They’d land and feed for a minute, then flap their wings as if it took effort to stay rooted to the meal. Eventually a truck came up from the opposite direction – blue Ford, probably as old as I am, with a car seat mounted in the bed in case the passenger load exceeded two – and the guy driving it saw what I saw and pulled off to watch about fifty yards from me. When the eagles flew exited over the nearest ridge, we both pulled out and passed each other with a little nod of recognition or greeting or whatever it was.

For three years running, April has brought with it a need for decisive action. The ebb and flow of its weather patterns coheres nicely with my pussyfooting around decidedly different possibilities. I postulate the existence of grocery stores that sell tomatoes that aren’t translucent. I sift through abstract projections of future circumstances, tossing fictive realities around and seeing what sticks to the ceiling I stare at. Of course it’s not all that interminable a quandary because soon enough I’ll wake up, see that the alarm will sound itself in the next five minutes, and settle back into the routine that staves off thinking about anything but what I need to do to be where I need to be. Twelve hours later I’ll do the dishes, read until I can’t anymore, and get back to the question at hand.

Fifteen possible reasons it didn’t work out (not based on anything but the extra ten minutes I have before the next bunch of teenagers arrives)

My inability to believe in the power of life-changing epiphanies was taken as an inability to believe in life changes. I preferred serving meals that didn’t cause our guests to vomit, whereas she seemed not to. Sex isn’t the only important thing. There was disagreement over the plausibility of using Kremlinologist in actual conversation. She had terrible intuitive leaps of logic that inspired ill-conceived vendettas against co-workers and neighbors. I liked to jam out in the car, which turned, at some point, from being a sign of my loose unself-consciousness to a sign of my inveterate juvenilia. Being 27 is very different than being 21. Her mother never learned my name. Her cat died and my dog chewed on its carcass before we discovered it – and by chewed on, I mean “ate most of”. I had terrible fashion sense, and she had no tact. Those hips never quite qualified as child-bearing. My phone etiquette consists solely of repeating “yeah” or “uh-huh” over and over and over. What I thought of as the soul-deadening shittiness of Robin Williams entire oeuvre, she took to be light entertaining comedy. Her friends thought I was a shiftless loser. I never introduced her to my friends.

extractive economies, we like.

I have become the patron saint of lost causes. A little eight pound rez puppy – multi-hued, mix of breeds in its blood indecipherable – follow me home as a north wind pushes big wet April snowflakes into my chest. This is not a first time occurrence. Today the little black and brown mutt with a red collar followed me for two hundred yards and then scratched on the door leading into my apartment complex, which abuts the door to my actual apartment, for five minutes. I took a piece of bread and a microwaved hot dog out to it, squatting on my hams and letting it jump onto my legs and try to warm itself until the entire scene seemed without a possible solution. A little Cheyenne girl whose name I later found out was Amethyst walked up and told me I had an adorable puppy. I suspect she was about seven. She had an abrasion on her right cheek, which looked as if the scab had come off about two days ago so the scar tissue was only beginning to assert itself. The dog was shivering and whining, then playing with my shoelaces, then collapsing onto its back to have its stomach rubbed, and all the while Amethyst and I had a discussion about the virtues of the school where she attends and I teach. We decided Ammo would be a dignified name for the pup. She thought it wise of me to break the hot dog and bread up into appropriate-sized chunks before laying them on the doorstep to be scarfed up. It’s been snowing on and off for almost five days now, wet heavy snow that melts when it hits concrete and turns the earth into gumbo, clay soul that sucks at the soles of your shoes with each step. Not exactly an environment for the motherless.

I’m assuming the little puppy is dead or nearly so by now, unless Amethyst convinced her auntie to give it a home tonight. I went to check my mail, entrusting her to keep it out from underneath my wheels, and of course when I got home I took a half hour to search for it, towel in hand, ready to dry it off and redeem myself or it, whichever, by bringing it inside. Sometimes I like dogs better than humans in terms of company, and the thing is around here there are a surplus of dogs, all of which are more than willing to hang out for a day without having to commit to any long-term ownership/companion relationship. That’s a poignant metaphor to be made much of, but I’m not feeling it. I didn’t find the pup, and just now I stepped outside for a smoke with a small little particle of hope that Amethyst would be walking down the street, looking as she did this afternoon, coat halfway off, long black braids hanging off either shoulder, struggling to hold the puppy away from her body, ready to present it to me as if I’ve been selected for an experimental living situation. That’s the thing about these late night second-chance notions – they’re always already fat lady sung.