The epitaph said – He loved the earth but could not stay

“The way I see it now is that you either make a little nation and solve its historical and personal problems within the format of your own household – accepting the mistakes that you’ve made, all the ones your parents made, all that your children make, and all the mistakes your country made – and you win that one or you lose the only war worth fighting. Moreover, as soon as you step out of this personally constructed world and, say, drive into town or stand out on I-90 and watch our nation cycle through these placeless arteries, it’s there that you confront the true horror of the other option.”

- a quotation from a novelist who lives near I-90.


Every once in awhile, remember that George the Bush claimed isolationist turf in his debates with as-wizened-then-as-now John the Pitbull McCain. This was back in 00 (double-ot, before things done changed) when the stars shone red and everyone was doing like Richard Dreyfuss and shaping mashed potatoes into Devil’s Tower facsimiles. George the Bush insinuated that he didn’t want American boys out solving troubles America had no part in making. If we don’t have a dog in the fight, he seemed to say (or I imagine him saying), don’t go buying a damn dog.

Now of course we are in the middle of the historical moment. Our kids may ask about it when they get to be indignantly idealistic (if we have kids and if idealism still exists as valid concept for the young). George the Bush no longer mutters much of anything that sounds isolationist, but the concept may still hold truck in how we relate to the historical moment itself. I am beginning to think that the answer you give your kids will say less about you than it says about the particular constellation of media sources to which you have consciously or unconsciously pledged fealty.

In that regard, are we all isolationists now? Not so much in our willingness to engage the world, either personally or via foreign policy, but in the sense that the stream of empirical data (statistics, polls, death toll numbers) and the narrative threads (amputee soldiers, water works projects, neighborhood “purification”) we encounter tend to be narrow and self-enclosed. Am I wrong about this? I get this feeling that there are a decent amount of people out there who think to themselves, “Well it can’t be going that badly” and who consider themselves to be informed on what’s going on over there. On the other side, there are people who go to go hear speakers on college campuses demonize George the Bush and the gaggle of blue-suited guys who head up his staff and, once enough shit is flung, the crowd starts to cheer. “This is what we came to hear. It really is that bad!” and the clapping goes on and the audience goes home knowing in their bleeding hearts that they had the real skinny on what’s going on over there.

I don’t consider myself to be informed on the issue – I mostly glance at the numbers listed in New York Times headlines and skim on occasional WSJ op-ed that insists good stuff is still going – but it’s seeming that media are only going to accentuate whatever fault lines have formed on basis of political, cultural, ethnic, regional, and economic identity because media are making their home on those fault lines. Make enough niche markets that pander to people’s need to have their basic worldview affirmed, and then market a Reagan as a reconciling force (or flip the coin three decades later and see what an Obama will get you) and see if your net is big enough to capture that minority in the middle that seem (all this seeming is making my brain hurt) to matter the most. Are you in that middle? Do you know where its fault lines lie? Do you care?

Inventing Reasons to Be Sullen

It’s not hard to imagine exemplary instances of shittiness that would justify a certain level of morose grumbling. Say your cubicle is so far inland and the windows on the outside edges of the square building are so tiny that sunlight doesn’t penetrate your work universe except as a far off glare. Say your upstairs neighbors have a large stereo and are big fans of Daddy Yankee. Say Cholie’s pizza goes out of business and the 2 for 10 deal on which you’ve relied every Tuesday and Thursday for about three years goes out with it. Say you have hemophilia or at least go around acting like you have hemophilia and being careful at all times. Say the last true physical adrenaline rush you felt involved a reenactment of Michael Jordan driving on Craig Ehlo with you reprising the role of “spotup-shooting white guy who gets burned.”
All of this shittiness could exist, but the desire to fixate on these or other manifestations of it is no good. I do not condone the diametric opposite of bootstrapping – it’s a pet peeve. Being sullen may not always be a choice, in the same sense that being sane or being joyful or being slow-witted may not always be a choice. But increasingly I’ve found myself hovering in physical space with people who seem to enjoy not enjoying anything at all, and I want to kick their shins repeatedly. In my particular circumstance, they are dreary teachers with tenure, feeble imaginations, and unbridled animosity, but I’m sure they take many forms. The exuberance they feel for bitching and moaning has had a salutary (if also antagonistic) effect for others: we appear to be relatively stoic in keeping complaints tethered or at least in not expending a lot of energy trying to find things to complain about. I have no thesis – the glass is not always half-full, nor should it be, given our current liquid predicaments, nor is silent suffering necessarily an end worth seeking – I’m just thinking out loud to drown out the braying from next door. Maybe this situation is better than being around people who are constantly finding little instances that called for joyousness and constantly called attention to it.

Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence

When I was a fifth grader, my math/reading teacher handed out a copy of Desiderata, explaining that this was a famous piece of writing found in an abandoned church in Texas and thought to be written by a monk whose identity was never determined. We read this handout and I remember writing it out in my notebook in red pen. I felt like it was expounding something I might want to access later, in case things got messy.

It turns out that the myth of Desiderata is that it was found in Baltimore – Olde St Paul’s Church – in the 1690s. I may have conflated Texas with Baltimore (it happens) or perhaps my math/reading teacher was wrong. Either way, this myth about anonymous monks and fortuitous happenstance recoveries of sagacious messages – unlike the myth positing that a close encounter with an owl is an indication that death is near – is false. Turns out a guy named Max wrote the Desiderata.

Having almost uniformly failed the research paper recently assigned, my students were excited at the prospects of an extra credit assignment, which consists of reading Desiderata and isolating two stanzas. Two stanzas, two responses, minimum two paragraphs per response. Tomorrow I want to ask them if they got anything out of it or if they thought it was mushy sentimental bullshit. You see, I have this sense that they may have a complicated relationship with bits of counseling that run like, “You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here” or “With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.”

Sometime between the age of 11 and 17 I started becoming indignant about anything that sounded remotely like Desiderata. I’d see it in family rooms of houses where families were holding celebratory parties for baptisms, weddings, graduations, etc. – standard fare red juice with little napkins to put carrots and that sugar-saturated, cavity-inducing cake – and as a kid I somehow associated the stupidity of these functions with the thing up there on the wall I painstakingly copied down in the notebook, and I somehow felt duped, which was gasoline on my angst-ridden teenage heart. Why didn’t I recognize this as a concatenation of fortune cookie sayings from the start, rather than the mysterious musings left behind by someone who seemed to have figured something out, which is what I took it be at first? Now – no surprise – I’m swinging back towards being mildly interested and open to this Desiderata, and I don’t know what that means, anymore than I know what “Desiderata” means. Is “you are a child of the universe” is really worth getting indignant about? Because I do like the idea of going placidly amidst the haste, especially as it seems to outlaw the possibility of procrastinating for hours in an uncomfortable chair and chain-smoking Camels with bad backpacker hip-hop on the stereo.

My students have an unpredictable response to baldly expressed sentiment – sometime they fall for it with a kind of abashed, I-couldn’t-help-myself charm and other times they revolt and accuse me of being a soft-headed blanket-coddling sap. They don’t say that, but it’s pretty apparent from the silent ceiling staring that that’s what they are thinking. I’m interested to see if this even registers with them, especially as I’ve tried to stay away from proselytizing in the Dave Pelz/Chicken Soup for the duration of my tenure here.

It doesn’t seem like the empirical evidence would indicate many Americans actually hold to the advice proffered in these stanzas; they serve more like psychological ballast to prevent feelings of doom from taking pride of place in middle class milieus. Is there anything wrong with that? Not really. Being older means being less willing to traffic in the airtight black/white demarcations of right and wrong, unless being older just means being more distracted from the fundamental aspects that make such demarcations possible or desirable. So, yes – I’m hoping for full-fledged blanket condemnation of Desiderata’s syrupy sentiments and a full-scale awestruck acceptance of the way in which Desiderata’s words illuminate something about going forth in the world that tends to get lost behind all the theatrics on the surface. Tomorrow I want both the black and the white, the pure teenage pronunciations in absolute terms, because soon enough I won’t have the chance to witness that unblemished, indignant self-righteousness that tends to diminish over time.

At least Paul Wolfowitz didn’t give himself a petty cash fund for Sri Lankan whores

The weird looking robins that hang out by the courts I play at have taken to dying. Three in four days, all on the concrete, inside the three point line but not in the paint. I suspect I merely witness what’s created when a super cat leaps of the roof of the school and ends lives. Possible but not likely. These birds are not mangled – they just have big eyes. I have developed a half-sweep motion that flings the birds into the grass for the rez dogs to get to.

I’ve made it a point to put the new Lil’ Wayne song (the one where he references Tony Romo and distractedly p-rump-pa-pum-pums through verse after destructive verse) on low volume throughout class this morning. Only a few eyebrows have been raised. Two comments from last weekend: “[after repeating my name three times and getting no response] You’re always ignoring my needs!” and a period or two later, in response to aan assignment: “Three pages? Tomorrow? D’you go and see Freedom Writers or something?”

Our dirty god, our dirty Bah-deeeeeezz

Doing bad things. Not doing bad things.

Acknowledging inevitable departure of Johann Santana. Remembering the 3-2-3 double play (Hrbek to Harper to Hrbek) that shines on.

Chewing a hole in my gums. Selling books I purchased for stupid education classes and buying motorcycle with the money.

Kurt Hinrich dropping knowledge on his own inadequacy. Chris Webber not playing basketball forever.

Roger Clemens not being just another dad with big veins in his neck yelling at his progeny. Long-haired Indian harmonica guy who you step over to get into the post office respecting my steez.

Making those phone calls to those companies whose employees you can’t help but yell at. Breaking the nostalgia hoe before more historical soil is turned.

Eating the supernachos because you don’t have time to go home for lunch. Killing em with a joke and launching into a silky smooth segue before they notice they’re getting meaningful things done.

Asking her about her weekend and learning that multiple funerals were involved. Laughing out loud when the metal kid said that you can recognize emo boys b/c they wear their younger sisters’ jeans.

Ex Cathedra Nihilo

i feel like if i had a confessor, someone to whom i related all the things i've done oflate that bespeak of mediocrity, although in a really mediocre sense, such that i dont really stand out that much, that person would be you. i could honest with you, and you'd react with a steely glance and your uniquely Midwestern brand of self-reliance bolstered w/ a not wholly unRepublican belief in personal responsibility, but you wouldn't blame me, i dont think, you'd just call it as you saw it and do what you could to make me see you acknowledged all my sins even if you (nor i) had no use for the hackneyed self-help notion that admitting to something is the same as atoning for it. Atonement is for optimists.

"Unadorned" is the exemplary depiction

Send the bookworms to the woods. Catch a bumblebee in a glass, freeze it for a minute, tie a string around it, and – wham! – your kite is living. Give conspiracy flesh. Assume the surface is signaling something and read into it. Send the loggers to the symphony. Don’t forget to let it all go eventually. Wave hello to an animal. Take the oars out of the kayaks and skin the stickers off the bumpers of all the extreme sports avatars’ cars. Drop the thermometer and murmur about the mercury puddle. Shadow the man on the street who rambles on and on about the shackles of capitalism and the immiseration of the working class. Send the inmates to the island and the Australians to the open country plains. Break a window. Buttress a compliment with a qualification. Skip rocks across a lake until the shore becomes something else entirely. Disallow references to other people’s superior metaphors.

the hard look I gave my life, I remember its brevity

i went on vacation, adding somewhere between 800 and 1000 miles to the halfass SUV death trap I drive before spending some money on books: David Halberstam stuff, Michael Connelly mysteries, some newish fiction, and Pete Dexter’s collection of newspaper columns and other pieces. I think Mr Dexter makes the world more interesting.
Visiting a place of complicated personal significance gives a glisten to all perception’s edges. My abdominal muscles – I like that word a lot: abdominal – ache from all the laughter; other parts of the experience were like a Raymond Carver poem. I chewed on a bunch of memories and thought patterns and unspoken intimations about disappearing acts for eight hours today as I drove past mountain ranges and tributaries that served as an appropriately dramatic backdrop.
Always interesting, driving across a big state by yourself with the windows down all the way, a broken CD player, and enough nicorette gum to last twelve weeks. I am bone-weary and ready for normalcy.

Here is the last column from Mr. Dexter’s book, Paper Trails:

The kid was big, but he was a kid.
He was standing beside the drive-in window
at Church’s Fried Chicken on North Broad, asking the people who came by for
money. “Do you have some change so I could get somethin’ to eat,
sir?” He said it like it was memorized.
It was early last week, the
weather was catching up with the season. He had taken his arms out of his
shirtsleeves and put them underneath, trying to stay warm, so when he tapped on
the window I figured he had at least a machete under there.
“Get the fuck out
of here,” I said. I did that without thinking about it, the same way you
check for cars before you cross the street.
He looked at me, I looked at
him. He took his hand off the car and put it back underneath his
shirt. He began to shake, then he moved away. I turned the radio to
put the kid out of mind. If there is anything you have to know in a city,
it’s how to put things out of mind. If you can’t do it, you better not be
here.
I have been in Philadelphia more than six years. It took a
while, but I can do that now.
The kid moved back to the corner of the
building, stared at the car. I cold see him in the side mirror. He
looked like he was seventeen or eighteen, but you couldn’t tell. He looked
cold in ever way there is to be cold. I put him out of mind again, but
every time I looked in the mirror, he was standing there, black and cold and
angry, and he wouldn’t move away.
I don’t know exactly when it happened, but
somewhere along the line I got tired of victims in groups – women, blacks,
Puerto Ricans, gay, and all the self-promotional bullshit that went with it –
then I got tired of victims in person. I didn’t want to see the mother and
father nodded out on heroin at the Fox Theater Sunday afternoon while their
four-year-old kid tried to wake them up anymore.
I didn’t want to see
old people who had been mugged, or fourteen-year-old alcoholics or abused
children.
So, as much as you can in the city, I quit looking. At least
I tried to only look once. There is too much of it to carry around with
you. And to do that, you have forget that you have been hungry too.
The kid moved again, slowly across the parking lot to the garbage kin.
He began going through it a piece at a time.
I was a couple of years older
than this kid, but I went about a week once without anything to eat. In
Minneapolis, in the coldest winter, I was hungry enough to go through garbage,
but in the morning it had passed and what replaced it was just an empty, weak
feeling, and later on a dizziness when I stood up. And much later,
something inside that kept saying I was getting myself in serious trouble.
I
wondered if the kid had heard that too. If he knew what it meant. I
turned around and watched him a minute. He held the garbage close to his
face, then put it back in the bin. A piece of paper stuck to his hand, and
suddenly he was throwing things. Picking up cans and bags out of the bin
and throwing them back, over and over. A beat-up gray cat with milk in her
nipples jumped out of the other end of the bin.
He stopped and sat
down, exhausted. He put his face in his hands. I said it out loud,
so I could hear how it sounded. “Get the fuck out of here.”
I ordered
two chicken dinners and drove back around the lot to where the kid was
sitting. I don’t think he recognized me because he got up, tapped on the
window and asked for a quarter to buy something to eat. There was garbage
stuck to his chin.
I gave him one of the chicken dinners and said I was
sorry. “I didn’t see you were hungry,” I said. The kid was looking
at a two-dollar box of chicken with something close to love.
“Thank you,” he
said. “Thank you very much, thank you . . . “
“I’ve been in the city
too long.”
He studied me a minute. “Me too,” he said. Then he
took the chicken and walked over to his spot near the garbage and sat down to
eat it.
The cat came out of the weeds toward him, a step at a
time. The kid looked up and saw her. He tore a piece of meat off the
breast and stroked her coat while she ate.