Pearling

AA In Boston

2011-08-21T18:02:00.000-07:00

So I've been here a little over a week. I have been twice to a Sunday night meeting in the basement of an Episcopal church which, in itself, has the charm of something out of a European village; its Biblically correct foundation built on native rock, and the stairs which you climb to the front door are carved out of this rocky hillside, so that it juts skyward, with all the attendant spiritual connotations. The basement room where the meeting is held is not nearly so inspiring. It's your typical tile-and-cinderblock arrangement, with a central series of tables surrounded by folding chairs.

The woman next to me today had interesting second and third toes -- they came out from the foot nearly an inch before bifurcating into distinct digits -- almost as if they couldn't decide until the last moment whether to be one toe or two. She'd tipped all five metatarsals in a glossy brown. I can't remember a thing about her other than her toes.

When I got to the meeting I was freaking out. I was lonely, heartsick, bored, angry, a little depressed, and haunted as usual by my endless self-jugments and evaluations. But, I sat still, and listened, and something very powerful occurred. I saw my higher power take shape in the room, through the faces and voices of the people who had gathered there. I don't want to go into particulars in case I compromise someone's anonymity, but I will say that people were honest and forthright, and that there was none of the empty showmanship and bravado of some meetings I've been to in the past. And I will say that I arrived at two truths about myself which I think I could do well to consider in the days to come:

1. I don't want to admit what I'm feeling

2. I don't want to ask a higher power for help.

This, after nearly 11 years in the program. Well, I can change that, starting today. I even had the thought, as I was sitting there, that my higher power had perhaps gotten me to Boston purely to get me back into AA. Probably not. But can you put it past him?

What a Week

2011-07-24T06:40:00.000-07:00

Something called the Bullpen at work. I have to drive to a major city and participate in this all week. I am not looking forward to it, and I am feeling anxious. It is at times like these that I have to remember my purpose, which is to increase the peace and joy in the world through acceptance and creativity. If I can remember those things, then my purpose gets easier. I don't have any doubts about my abilities to achieve my purpose.

But I do have fears about loss of control, fears about fears, fears about the unknown, and so on. Those are all things I can't control. Those are all things over which I am powerless. Today is a good day to ask my higher power for help.

From the last time I blogged until this one I was doing pretty well, despite my thinking that I needed to work 66 hours last week. Most of that was an exercise in people-pleasing, which I do regret somewhat. However some of it was challenging myself. I remember a line from REBT which says that one should strive to enjoy oneself rather than prove oneself. That's a key line, and gets back to the purpose.

Last night at dinner my wife brought up the idea that even if you can't always be in your purpose, you can strive for situations in which you're doing something purpose-neutral. That is, you're at least not going against your purpose, or depleting your energy for your purpose. I put things like right livelihood into this category. My thoughts are jumbled because I feel I have lots to do today to prepare for my trip, and because I feel guilty for leaving my family. But the best way I can handle that is to go down and hang around with them, without feeling that I owe them anything. I don't owe anyone anything. Only myself, and what I owe myself is compassion, forgiveness, and kindness. Higher power, help me to use those tools today, starting with myself.

I'm Getting It

2011-07-16T08:26:00.000-07:00

So, my good doctor, you are now working with me on my anger -- and yesterday I was disconcerted because you didn't affirm me the way I wanted to be affirmed. You remained passive when I wanted you to leap out of your chair and declare me healed. Yes, I wanted you to be an external validation point in this journey of mine.

So, I think I get how internal and external validations fit together. First, let me list the external validations I came up with:

External		How do I value myself currently?
Achievement		Ability to succeed in an occupation that is outwardly challenging and commands respect, and that causes more anxiety and pain than the occupations of others.
Family		Putting in time doing family things like mowing lawn, cleaning, watching kid. Performing acts that I anticipate others want me to peform, and that I find difficult
Financial Freedom		Making over 100k
Productivity		ability to compulsively deliver "products" on very little rest. Work, home, writing
Security		Approval of family and work, no challenges, mental control, no anxieties or anger, no sadness, no thoughts I don't want to have
Health		No negative feelings no blood sugar issues no gerd, no anxiety
Time freedom		Never mention my need for free time
Reliability		Emotional perfection -- no anxiety/anger, no fear, no doubt, no pain

So looking at the list above, I was prompted to think about my anger, and where that might come from. Obviously the list above is pretty rigid -- and it really comes down to my need to manipulate/control the reactions of others to always fill me up with positive validation. But it doesn't stop there, of course. I also need to manipulate the rest of the world, too -- other drivers, the weather, the functioning of my own mind -- in order to have a successful day. Seeing and thinking about this led me to consider my 4th step inventory, where I listed a number of different figures and situations in my past, and then tried to describe the self-defeating belief (SBD) that came from those figures and situations. I'l list that table here with some names redacted:

Person	Events that caused the feelings	Feelings still harbored	Beliefs that support these feelings (all external values for the most part)
Stepfather	Abuse and belittling throughout my childhood. Specifically spanking with kite rod, and interrogation techniques revolving around rhetorical questions	Fear, shame, hatred (him and me), rage	1. You must be perfect and never have bad feelings or behavior 2. You must never be angry or you will probably lose your sanity 3. The world will judge you harshly so you had better be perfect. 4. You are a powerless victim who can’t protect or defend yourself
Wife	Our fights, her chronic discontentment	Sadness, shame, feelings of failure	5. Other people can’t be trusted, they will hurt you if they can 6. If other people are disappointed in you they will destroy you 7. It is your responsibility to protect yourself by controlling the feelings of others. Nobody else is allowed to feel bad
Mom	Her failure to protect me. Her failure to listen to me. She never listened to what I had to say, and I was afraid to tell her	Sadness, loneliness, isolation	8. It’s not okay to have feelings because nobody will listen to you and it only annoys them and drives them away.
God	Didn’t protect me from stepfather or that crazy church. Let me be an addict and alcoholic	Sadness, loneliness, powerlessness, rage	9. Even God doesn’t like me, because he’s a judgmental prick 10. The world (God) owes me complete satisfaction for the things I suffered in my childhood. If I don’t get complete satisfaction it makes me angry
Brother	Became a second parent and always criticized me, relentlessly	Rage, loneliness, shame, sorrow	11. Even those closest to you still think there’s something wrong or defective about you.
Church	Talk of demons, hell, sin, god’s judgment, man’s unworthiness,	Fear, shame, sorrow	12. You are a danger to yourself because you have the debil in you 13. You must be careful around others because their feelings will contaminate you 14. Sanity and salvation are the same thing. Sanity and dark emotions are incompatible because you may open yourself up to eternal disconnection from God

Looking at this inventory, and cross-referencing it against the SBDs above, I think I can begin to see where my anger comes from. Not only am I asking myself to be perfect, in order to remain sane, but I am also asking the world to never test me, and to never thwart my desires. Of course all this is asking the impossible. It's very helpful to see that.

I don't know where it goes from here, but I feel hopeful, and not too angry today. As you pointed out, anger can also be very tiring -- but feeling it beats the alternative, because when I don't feel it, I can't even begin to see where my valuations and beliefs have strayed off course.

Sequels

2011-07-10T17:40:00.000-07:00

My wife is sitting across the table from me and our laptops are out in battleship configuration. She told me she'd give me a topic on which I had to write -- immediately I felt myself getting angry. Not a good sign, perhaps for a man about to enter an MFA program. Nonetheless I pretended to be interested, and asked, what was the topic?

Sequels, she said. But then, being well-versed by now in my limited repertoire of facial expressions, she added that I really didn't have to do anything. Making the sign of a zipper across the mouth and discarding a tiny key, she began to type.

Sequels. That's fine. I think first of sequins, of some spangled gown, but there's nothing in that direction since the wardrobes which which I come into most contact, my wife and my son's, are composed primarily of cottons and various wicking fabrics that one finds at outdoor and adventure stores.

I did experience a sequel of sorts today -- my last surf session here in Florida before I head up to frigid and brainy Boston, Boston of the milky sky. My surfing friends have always been unreliable. I also fit into that pattern of behavior where they are concerned. Missed movies, broken promises to do dinners together, surf trips to Costa or Niceragua aborted at the last moment. Just about the only thing we could rely on was that we'd show up when it was time to surf. In preparation for my move I was selling off my meager quiver of boards. I had a 9'0" longboard that I put on Craigslist, but my friend J came by to see me and told me, in his casual way (standing with legs spread, sunglasses posted on forehead) that he would be happy to buy it from me, because he needed a longboard.

That was Saturday. Today I got a call from him. He wanted to go surf. One last time. One last sequel. Since he hadn't purchased my board yet, I took it with me. Waves were waist high, water cold from some upwelling event, sky clear above us but dark to the south, that darkness emitting an occasional low growl of thunder. I was happy, and wistful. I'd had so many great sessions here, along this bit of coast, too many to count. I'd had a run of wonderful sequels which was now coming to a close. No more mild Florida water. No more chats with the other surfers in the lineup. No more moments of frozen time and complete oblivion as I guided my board along the face of some wave. My surfing life was coming to an end. That was sad. And yet, I was happy too. Happy that I'd come here. Happy that I'd made friends with people like J, who really knew how to rip, and who took their surfing to a level of artistry that would always elude me. I liked watching him. I liked his ease in the water. I liked his faded tattoos and the swell of gut he'd acquired since I first started surfing with him. I even liked (not the pain he experienced but the many stories he had acquired as a result of) his tendency to marry neurotic women. This time, though, he felt he'd gotten it right. Since we started surfing he'd been divorced twice, and now his girlfriend was pregnant. This made him nervous. I was glad to hear him talk about it in the waves. There are things you can say to your surfing friends in the lineup that you can't say anywhere else. It's like opening the door on your subconscious. We happily gave vent to the most vile and disgusting images in our psyche. We traded vicious insults. We picked out waves for each other.

I had to be home for lunch. This is what I'd promised. There was packing to do and a young son that needed attention. I looked at the pier, and down the coast toward the two hotels which marked the halfway point of the beach. I thought about all the sessions, the friends, the waves, the shifting sand, the hurricanes, the crazy wipeouts I'd seen, the girls ripping, the young dudes throwing jellyfish at each other, the broken boards, the bloody faces, the hope of every surfer, always believing in that next wave. And that's the thing about surfing, I guess. Each session is a series of sequels. Each wave is a step into the next perfect moment. I promised myself to find a way to surf when my school was done.

I don't know if I'll make it back or not. Boston might change me. Make me happy in tweeds. I might to my horror love sailing or sculling. I might turn into some red-faced pedant on skates, or some ecstatic ski bum in the northeastern mountains. I sure hope not. There's nothing like glass. But I guess Boston is the next sequel. It's my wave and I'm taking it.

And by the way, J. never called to buy the board. I will have to sell it to a stranger. I'm glad that old J. didn't let me down by suddenly becoming reliable.

Emotions

2011-07-10T06:11:00.001-07:00

Imagine my surprise to find out I was an emotional perfectionist. I never would've seen that coming. I always knew that emotions such as anger, or fear, or sadness, were unpleasant to me, but I didn't realize the level to which I had suppressed these feelings as a means of being "saved" or "sane" (in the world of my upbringing Christian salvation and sanity were conflated with one another). Since I really believed that salvation or sanity depended upon my not feeling these emotions -- that is, that if I did feel these emotions it must have meant there was some flaw in me, some part of the system which I was applying incorrectly, I spent lots of time and effort not feeling angry, upset, sorrowful, scared, etc. Once in a while these emotions would erupt -- but for the most part I kept them "successfully" repressed.

This emotional perfectionism led me to distance mentally from any real-world cause of distress. For instance, if I felt anxious, I would attribute this to some dietary change, some subtle imbalance in chemistry brought about by the over-or-under-application of a supplement or medicine. Sometimes I would blame my family, or someone around me, as if they were projecting the unwanted feeling on me.

The people whom I resented were invariably the people who represented my experience of one or more of these unwanted feelings. Rather than deal with the issues, I would avoid the people -- or control them in such a way as to ensure that they didn't ask me to experience anything negative.

As I said before, once in a while I would have some cathartic experience which left me feeling relaxed and happily empty -- but these experiences were accidental, and sporadic. It makes sense to me now that this model is not integrative at all. My behaviors of avoidance and control make sense to me. My search for external validation and valuation make sense. Not that I am endorsing them, but that I better understand the motivation.

I am changing my goals from the model above to a goal of integration. That means I am going to begin rewarding myself based on internal valuation and will reward myself for the successful experience of emotions -- the whole palate. One last thought in this ramble; it makes sense now that when I would travel for business I would feel so fulfilled. Unable to control my environment, I was also unable to keep the "bad" feelings at bay -- and consequently, at the end of the day or at the end of my trip I would feel relaxed and happy. I had been forced by circumstances to integrate, and it felt good.

I guess that's where the seventh step comes in. I can ask my higher power to help change my intolerance of "shadow" feelings, and allow me to better feel and integrate these emotions.

High School Football

2010-10-23T06:18:00.000-07:00

Took the young son to a local high school football game last night. On the drive over we saw a ring of white illumination far across the waterway -- the famed Friday night lights. It was after halftime when we arrived, and the ticket booths were already closed, so we walked right in. The concrete bleachers were a little daunting for the young son, and he asked daddy to carry him up. We sat halfway up the bleachers, just next to the band section, which, as it was after halftime and the band was taking a break, was empty. The field itself sat inside a large cinder track, and the blaze of the lights made a thick black curtain of the sky surrounding the field. Little man wanted to know about everything. Who were the cheerleaders? What were they doing? Who were the dancers? Why were people yelling? Where was the ball? Who was wonning?

My wife and I answered the questions as well as we could; little man sat on my wife's lap. A large African-American woman sat in front of us, cheering on her son. When she shifted in hers seat she emitted a rather nauseating stench. Behind us a trio of high-school girls, big, and rubbery, and outrageously awkward, were fighting over a paper basket of French fries. The game was 26-0 in favor of the home team, so naturally I began to root for the visitors, who could not advance the ball on offense to save their lives. The only play which worked for them was a draw or trap to the fullback, a powerful brute who shed would-be tacklers with a twitch of his shoulders -- but alas, he was not fast enough to evade the fleet defensive backs who dove at his feet, and tripped him up. He went down under a pile of yellow jerseys. When the visitors were on defense, they had a cornerback with skills -- he had one interception, and another near-pick. Other than that, the home team dominated to such a degree that eve the fans around us seemed bored.

Perhaps were were all taking our cue from the cheerleaders, who showed little interest in pep, or rallying. They talked amongst themselves, or did impromptu dances. When a player was slow getting up, they sat down and crossed their fingers to indicate their good wishes but then they were screened from the field by the backs of the football team, and they often remained sitting on the track long after the injured player had gone back to the sideline. The few cheers they did crank out were ragged, and uninspiring. The dancing girls in their black leotards were not much better. They repeated a rump-shaker routine which involved one hand behind the head and the hips thrusting outward. They spent long stretches socializing with each other, and with the boys who packed the front rows of the bleachers. Only when the band came back did the game take on a real football atmosphere. The drummers were vigorous, and enthusiastic, and the horns blared, and the people in the crowd swayed or clapped along. Even the cheerleaders and dancers were roused from their listlessness, and began to move crisply. A large dark girl whose body was perfectly square, like a Lego character, did a tumbling routine down the track and finished by pointing at the band, as if to direct the crowd's adulation to the proper object.

My wife gave out son a ring pop. He wriggled his little finger into the plastic hoop, and popped the blue candy diamond into his mouth. The stream of questions was interrupted while he got his sucker warmed up. The woman next to us pointed out her son, a defensive end on the home team. I watched him rush the passer and get turned away by a massive tackle from the visitors. He was too slight to play defensive end.

Finally, in the fourth quarter, the visiting team kicked a field goal, and so avoided a shutout. We left soon after to avoid the traffic. I could see that ring of light sinking below the trees in my rearview mirror. My son, when asked what he liked about the football game, said, "I liked all of it about it."

Within My Heart

2010-10-04T04:03:00.001-07:00

You ask me how I know he lives? He lives within my heart.

Yes, it's true. He's in there. It's rather unpleasant, actually, and was quite a shock the first time the x-rays indicated some guppy-like presence within my chambers, swimming about. An ultrasound made visible a robe and a staff, and a long dirty beard, and showed this tiny creature gesturing as if in the middle of a sermon.

Nobody is sure what to do. Surgery has been suggested but the risks are too great. He apparently draws nourishment from my blood through some gill-like system, so any attempts to starve him out, or to poison him, might prove fatal for the host.

Within My Heart

2010-10-04T04:03:00.000-07:00

King of the Waves

2010-10-04T03:54:00.000-07:00

At Terra Marr, a left breaking off a small point, a reef left so you know it was consistent, and steady and consequently drew a crowd, which on this rather gray and blustery day included a fellow on a stand-up board who perambulated the far outside like a seagull flapping and hovering over some choice rubbish bin, waiting for a tasty morsel.

He was easily three hundred pounds, and wore a regal purple rashguard over his large, firm belly. He had a head of dirty gray curls, and a large white mustache which, due to the length of his upper lip, was exceptionally wide and thick, and was tinged at the tips with a dull yellow. When the set waves came, he dropped in far outside of every other surfer, and came barelling down the line, shouting everyone else off his wave with curses and insults. He pumped the wave like a madman, with godlike wrath and lust, as if slaking himself on some helpless concubine, and if some unfortunate outpaddling surfer did not clear his path soon enough he would drive right for them on his massive board. Isolated as he was by the overhang of the wave, he seemed like a creature from a fresco, a god some minor mythology; and as he came hurtling along, the sound in my mind a heavy growling, like a bowling ball hurtling toward a clutch of hapless pins.

Malibu

2010-09-15T06:55:00.000-07:00

Last night, after a day's worth of meetings, we all went to Malibu for dinner at some restaurant on the pier. To get to Malibu we had to drive through the mountains. Quite a breathtaking drive, that. Vertical and horizontal folds of earth, green distant valleys shimmering in the sunset while the car plunged through shadow, little hillsides furrowed with rows of grape vines, which made one think of a child's head done with cornrows, which of course turned everything back on itself, as sights such as this inspired the term "cornrows" in the first place. There were some long tunnels too, with tiled, arched walls, and hung with round lamps at even intervals. Then the ocean came into view for the first time, its silver expanse backlit by a band of rose-colored light that stretched along the horizon. Quite nice. There was a rundown hotel right on the beach, and then Pepperdine University, and finally the pier. In the distance, to the south, you could see the ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier spinning like a tiny spark just above the water, and the planes at LAX lined up and slowly ascending with their lights flickering in the fog.
The restaurant was fine. The food was adequate. The conversation was typical of businessmen after a long day -- reminiscences, commentary on the state of local and national politics, a few bon mots thrown out by someone whose intellectual curiosity, and whose desire to have a really meaningful conversation, was duly ignored. While we were waiting for the entrée I excused myself and went outside to call my wife. I walked to the edge of the pier as I was talking, and happened to look down at the beach below. A couple of leather-clad cyclists, a man and his girlfriend, were crouched on their helmets, looking out at the water, and having a smoke. I could hear the flick of his lighter; she pulled her head back and, pointing the cigarette skyward, took a long drag. Then, holding the cigarette away, she lowered her head, and exhaled.
The beauty of the mountains and the ocean made the whole experience well worthwhile. I can't imagine how Sean Penn could live here and still be angry enough to punch out all those photographers.

Monday Agoura

2010-09-13T22:01:00.000-07:00

Here in Augoura Hills now. It is very dry and bright. The hills are craggy, dark green, and lost in haze or shadow most of the time. My new colleagues seem to like Glen Beck a lot, but they are nice, nonetheless. There will be little opportunity for cultural discussions, perhaps, but that's okay. If the work is fun, and the pay is good, then I can be happy with that.

The restaurants are restaurants, the hotels are hotels, the executives are the same, and the conversation stays within certain carefully defined boundaries. And everything runs smoothly. Busy day tomorrow.

Final San Diego County

2010-09-13T12:08:00.000-07:00

Saw my friend JR last night. Hair is a little longer, has a bit of a beard, but with him it remains uncertain whether this is a matter of personal style or neglect. We ate at a fish place with JR and his wife and their adorable 1 year-old daughter. Since I've had a child of my own every baby is adorable, and I want to hold every baby. They all recoil from me however, and cling more tightly to the parental neck. Thank goodness my own son is more accommodating.

In the morning we did a DP. It was gray and cold, and the waves were holding up a bit in the high tide, but even so it soon became crowded. Caught some nice waves. Said a mental goodbye to the SoCal vibes and the consistent swells. Went back to the room, showered, dressed, and then drove 2.5 hours to Agoura Hills, where my meetings will be this week. Through LA, past the sign, past the famous boulevards. Even I, who would probably argue intensely and sardonically (or rather I would attempt the latter) against a culture of celebrity, even I had a creepy sense of deja vu seeing all these landmarks in person and I began to hate myself a little as I imagined the patient, weary glance of a Tom Hanks or a Brad Pitt or a Larry David sweeping past my insignificant form.

Further SoCal

2010-09-12T15:20:00.000-07:00

So, some observations from SoCal so far.

1. AB tending to exaggerate the menace of the local inhabitants: First we were driving through Oceanside, and he said that it was a very dangerous place, full of thugs. To illustrate his point, he directed my attention to a fellow crossing the street in front of us.
"Look at that thug!" he said. "Long hair, bulldog."
It was true, the fellow had long hair, but it was elaborately coiffed and colored, and it was true he was wearing a flannel shirt but it was a soft, intricate pattern. It was true the fellow had a bulldog, but it was an old, swaybacked, kindly-looking bulldog who scuttled timidly forward when a car nearby honked its horn.
Later, as we were turning a corner, AB pointed to a parking lot and said, "Look at that homeless guy, what's he doing?"
So I looked. The homeless guy was gaunt, with stringy gray hair, and a pile of blankets and bags around his feet. He was busy nodding encouragingly to a passing car and giving it the aloha sign.
I just didn't think it was so dangerous.

2. The immense variety of vegetation. There are towering palms, huge linden or eucalyptus trees, cabbages, pine trees, fruit trees, avocado trees, all kinds of grasses, all sorts of flowers.

3. Cyclists. Of all ages, all in silks, forming peletons up and down the road. Most of them are older, and riding extremely expensive bikes. At a stoplight a gentleman with freckled, shaved legs and gray hair stopped to take a sip of water. The wheels on his bike alone cost 4k apiece (as AB was quick to point out)

4. Runners. Everywhere.
5. Kayakers. So many cars, mostly station wagons, with kayaks on top, and kayakers in the waves, dropping in on the surfers.
6. Houses along the coast. From the waves, looking back at the houses on the cliffs, most of them with huge, multistory windows looking out at the ocean, a whole variety of architectures, from Spanish to modern to Mediterranean villas even what looked like a modified Victorian.
7. Gray. It's been gray all the time. The fog over the coast seems permanent. At the break we surfed this morning, the old longboarder men were discussing how summer never really came this year. One old man complained that his friends inland all had healthy tans, but he was pale because he lived on the coast. He had skin the color of an old penny -- I can't imagine what his "tan" friends must have looked like.
8. Yoga. It's everywhere out here, in all varieties. Studios on every block, people walking along with rolled up mats slung over their shoulders.
9. Meditation chapel. Found a meditation chapel in Encinitas, overlooking the ocean. I did not meditate but I enjoyed looking at the waves below, while imagining that from the chapel behind me the enlightened beings were radiating waves of well-being which would somehow soak in.

CA Day One

2010-09-11T21:40:00.000-07:00

Hi There. I don't always do so well, talking on the phone, but the last I can do is try to tell you some of the things that I missed saying, and probably will never say, if I don't write them down.

So, the flight out from Houston to LAX. One thing really stands out: I was sitting in my aisle seat, watching all the late arrivals go through their dance of trying to find space in the overhead bins, and here game a very large, very old Mexican woman in a mu-mu, followed by a Mexican fellow in a cowboy hat, holding the hand of a small child. As the woman drew abreast of me, she turned to try to shove something in the overhead bin, and in the process she stuck out her hindquarters, and enveloped my shoulder and arm with her buttocks and legs. It as extremely warm, soft to the point of a gooey texture, and my shoulder was wedged so firmly in between her buttocks, which were draped over it like a large hot-water bottle, that I sensed the outline of another cleft, if you get my meaning, much further in than the first, and my horrified imagination told me that a certain moisture was being transmitted from that dark place to my poor shoulder. Then it was over; the woman had secured her bag, and was lumbering rearward. I reflected later that my experience really was the precise opposite of a man groping a woman. Instead, I had been groped by a woman's private parts -- and while I can't speak for the female perspective in a typical groping scenario, let me just say, I did feel violated.

The rest of the flight was uneventful, and the drive along the 405 and the 5 was remarkable only for the fact that the traffic was stop-and-go even at nine on a Friday night. The hotel room was clean, and the grocery store where I purchased some water and some wheat thins was practically deserted.

In the morning AB picked me up and, in typical AB fashion, we had to drive to a spot, check it out, decide that it wasn't the right call, go back to his house to score a longboard, and then drive to a new spot, where we finally managed to park and paddle out. Del Marr, just south of the beach entrance. The weather was cloudy and cool, and the waves were chest high on the early sets, dropping to waist high on the later sets. AB let me use his longboard, and he rode RB's Island Girl, a board that is painted with flowers and has a particularly feminine shape -- AB hates the board, but derives a perverse pleasure from making it work for him. AB complimented my surfing -- of course it's easy to look good on a longboard, but it was still nice to hear him say that I was styling and dialing. Of course AB got into a conversation with a another fellow nearly as garrulous as him, and before long AB was telling his new friend all about his Hawaiian youth and his motocross adventures. Meanwhile I was sitting about 50 yards down picking off the lefts. Eventually it got too flat to surf any more, and we went to eat.

AB picked Swami's, a little SoCal/Mex joint just across the PCH from a famous break named after a meditation center. We sat outside and ate egg burritos, and AB drank coffee and ruminated on the state of his career, and on what he'd do once he made it out of the Coast Guard. After we were done we went to check another break from a cliff overlooking the water, and AB enjoyed critiquing the surfers below, but he felt that having his coffee tumbler in his hand would make the whole experience more relaxing and enjoyable, and he worried for a while about going to fetch his coffee tumbler, but in the end decided that we could just go.

I came back to the hotel and studied. Nothing interesting to report there. The room has two double beds, a rattling window unit for hot and cold air, and a tiny bathroom with a tiny, perfectly circular toilet. You can hear the traffic from the 5 rushing past at all hours.

After the studying, AB and I went to fetch another longboard for our afternoon session. While AB had enjoyed surfing Island Girl in a certain perverse way, the same way that men must enjoy making stubborn animals bend to their will, he was not willing to do a second IG session. We drove east, into the hills. The mountains rolled off, purple, in the background. There were moments when you came around a bend and saw a mountains side laid before you, with grids of agriculture and clumps of shingled houses, and large brown bald spots, furrowed as if in consternation, as if the mountain was trying to make up its mind if it should shrug its shoulders and dislodge all these bothersome creatures, or if it should continue to lie there, half-asleep. AB's friend lived in a little community about five miles from the beach, in stucco house with a pool and a vaulted ceiling. AB's friend and his wife are of Latin-American descent, and the living room was incongruously crowded with an extended family, including teenage girls and grandparents who were stuffed together on a small sofa, staring intently at the television.

After we got the board we drove to look at a few spots, and finally paddled out at Terra Marr, where we found a left hand peak. As we were pulling on our wetsuits only a single surfer was out working the peak, but by the time we'd gotten into our wetsuits and climbed down the brown cliffs to the beach, there were three surfers on the peak and eight more beginning to paddle out. They had seen the same thing, the were thinking the same thing and by the time we got out there, the peak was crowded. AB got frustrated with a few of the surfers, and made some comments, but nobody respond in kind, and once AB caught a set wave, he calmed down. The sets were easily overhead, and broke left for a long, long time. An enormous fellow, in a spring suit, riding a 30 inch wide, 10 foot longboard, caught one of the sets and came barelling left. It was quite a sight, to see this enormously fat, mustachioed, aggressive, hardcore dude on a massive longboard, just owning that wave, just claiming it and pumping it like a king. I was paddling out, and as I looked to right right and saw this fellow coming I kept thinking that I could almost hear the sound that a bowling ball makes when it grinds away on the alley, looking for some pins to bash into.

The left were fun. I had fun connecting sections, going to the top and bottom of the wave, and walking the board a little. AB was hungry, and went into the beach, and so I followed him in on my next wave. Then we ate at this Mexican restaurant nearby called "Norte." Out the window I could see a procession of luxury or antique cars, and it occurred to me that lots of people who live in SoCal don't have to work. They live on investments, or on royalties, or on some monies that the rest of us don't have, and can't even imagine, all sources of monies such as writing on balloons, or internet widgets, or grandfather's oil, or fast food, or god knows what. It seemed to me then that SoCal must be the place where you come when your primary aim is to enjoy yourself.

When the food came, AB and I ate like I think men often do: swiftly and silently. In a matter of minute the table was cleaned, and we were staggering out past the clatter of dishes and the buzz of conversation, out into the blue night.

Everett

2010-09-02T06:27:00.000-07:00

It was three hours to Valdosta and three back, and so despite the recent improvements in his digestion, Everett began fasting as soon as he opened negotiations with Bobby. The hunger made him lightheaded, and he could not understand Bobby’s croaking voice on the phone, and so there was a great deal of confusion regarding the purpose of his visit – he wanted it understood that he was coming to do an evaluation of Bobby’s wife, but was prevented from entering a sober negotiation of the ground rules by Bobby’s crackling ruminations on what they might have for lunch, and after several calls which ended with a mystified Everett shaking his head and muttering, he grew frustrated, and during the last call he held the speaker close to his mouth and repeated three times, in his loudest voice, “Don’t want no food. Got a tricky gut.” When he brought the phone back to his ear Bobby was saying something about his cancer. Everett wanted to know what this had to do with luncheon. When Bobby’s wife picked up on the extension to sort things out, her accent was so thick that Everett could not understand her, either.
Despite his anxiety, Everett was determined to go. It was important to follow through. He packed a cooler with some cold water and set out for Valdosta, eschewing the expressway for the country roads. His truck, the color and texture of a robin’s egg, rolled past double-wide trailers and emaciated silos, and lonely clumps of pine trees, and shrinking shadows. Everett sat erect in the cab with the white bristles of his chin pointing at the horizon.
Bobby lived close to the expressway, on a renovated army base where hoses wound through patchy lawns, and children were taking advantage of the sunny day to form packs of wobbling bicycles or to squat over chalk drawings on the sidewalks. Bobby’s house was green, with the trim painted the same color green, giving it a camouflaged appearance. Bobby and his wife sat in the watery light beneath the carport, and as Everett’s truck passed, and then reversed back to the house, Bobby’s head swiveled to follow its progress.
The sound of traffic twisted down from the tight sky, and Everett crouched in the shadow of his truck until he could orient himself; he was so engaged in this process that he missed Bobby’s initial nod of greeting, which prompted Bobby to raise his eyebrows to his wife in a silent continuation of their debate on Everett’s mental fitness. Bobby rose. One of his shoulders drooped like a broken wing. His head with its bright pink complexion wobbled atop his neck, which had been carved away on the left side so that when Everett thought about it later he was sure that from the front one could see the outline of vertebrae behind the rings of the esophagus. Bobby shuffled forward, and, swinging out an underhand grip, caught Everett’s hand in his.
“This time he acknowledges me. Good. Good ta see ya. Bobby James,” he croaked, thumping his chest. Then, indicating with his hand the Vietnamese, who had remained in her chair, he said, “This is my wife, Jennifer.”
Everett glanced quickly at the wife. The image in his mind did not make him hysterical, and so he worked up the courage to look again. She was short and dark. She had a vaguely popeyed expression, which did not correspond with his memories of Vietnamese women, and he wondered what sort of foreign strains might be present in her heritage; he now realized that he’d been hoping for a purebred Vietnamese, although he considered that with women, like animals, a cross-breed might be healthier and more even-tempered. She smiled, and nodded demurely, and pumped his hand with a small dry hand. She wore plastic sandals and a pressed white top. Everett could make out the line of two well-proportioned thighs below a linen skirt of acceptable length. There were only two folding chairs, and so, laughing silently, Bobby beckoned him inside. Bobby touched his neck often; a gauze pad covered a hole through which air whistled on every exhalation, and his speech was a crackling whisper which Everett could only make out by putting his good ear uncomfortably close to Bobby’s mouth. Jennifer seemed to understand him quite well, or not to care what he said; she sat on the other side of the living room in an overstuffed yellow chair, smiling and nodding. All the furniture was new; the coffee table was glass and chrome, and Bobby, who wore khaki pants, slid constantly into the crease of a leather sofa, and then worked his way back to the edge. To have any chance at understanding him, Everett had to pull a kitchen chair very close. He scrutinized the art on the walls: pictures of the jungle! He moved quickly to the next picture of a brown sun above yellow mountains, then to a sulky leopard. The cushions were vividly striped and shaped like peppermints. The house had been recently updated, which was disappointing, because he wanted to assess the Vietnamese’s grasp of home economy; how well could she clean? How did she work? He wanted to see her in action with some dishes or carpets.
“Much obliged for the hospitality,” he said.
“Thank you. My wife did all this.” Bobby croaked, waving his hand. “So you’re a lonely old prick, looking for a wife? Today is your lucky day, because I already did the hard work for you.” He launched into an account of his courtship; the phone calls and letters, and the visit to Tam Ky where they’d treated him like a king, and where one of his disability checks had been sufficient to purchase a new house for the family, after which they had literally carried him about the streets.
“I’m a hero in that village, I can get anything you want,” Bobby said. “Big change from the last time I was there. But you know what it was like.”
“Sure,” Everett said, uncertain what “it” meant, then understanding too late that Bobby meant the Vietnam War.
“I ain’t going to make you talk about it, don’t worry. Want something to drink?” He croaked for Jennifer to get them two beers and then, as his wife exited, he caught Everett staring intently at the slosh of her rump, and hit him on the arm. “That’s my wife, fella,” he said.
“I didn’t mean no harm, I’m just trying to see how good she walked, how her legs worked and such.”
“What are you looking for, a horse?” He made a drinking motion with his hand. “Relax, have a beer.”
“I don’t drink much,” Everett said. “At least I ain’t in some time.”
“That’s all right. I don’t either. It would run right out this hole.” Bobby shrugged, then backhanded Everett’s shoulder. “Her sister. Even younger. Real nice. Make you feel young again. Sweet as sugar.” Bobby narrowed his eyes, which were a bright minty green, and fringed with long lashes. “She says she wants a young man, but I think she’d do good with an older man, myself.”
“I need a woman who ain’t afraid to work a little bit, ” Everett said. “Someone who knows how to be happy in work.”
“They’re only girls.” Bobby leaned back and shrugged. “But I guess you remember how they work.”
Jennifer placed the beers on the glass table. Beads of moisture inched down the cans, each carrying a faint replica of the dark girl, the crippled man, and the bearded cowboy. The sun blazed, and Bobby’s eyes began to water profusely. Jennifer drew a pair of heavy curtains across the window. The girl was thinner than he’d first imagined. Thinner and shapelier, with hints of an elegance that might continue into her forties. Everett noticed a smell of medicine creeping from the hallway, astringent and sweet.
Bobby smiled at his wife. “Thanks,” he croaked.
Now why would you spoil her with all that thanking? Everett glanced sharply at Bobby, then back at the wife.
Jennifer murmured something into Bobby’s ear, and he nodded, and turned to Everett. “You plan to stay around here, right? No plans to move?”
“None I can think of,” Everett said.
“Good, because, you know, the sisters will want to be close. Raise their babies together, that kind of thing.”
“I think you and me should speak alone sir.” Everett delivered his salutations in the old country way, tacked on to a word like a diminutive: alonesir.
Bobby laughed soundlessly, wagging his head to indicate the extent of his mirth. “He’s ready for the altar, look at him. You haven’t even seen a picture,” he croaked.
Bobby glanced at his wife. She sprang up, catching at her lower lip to stifle a triumphant smile, and returned a moment later with a picture in a silver frame. Floating above the blue background that is the default choice of photo studios the world over was a young woman who looked very much like Jennifer, only with a longer nose and her bangs cut short. She was thin. Everett scrutinized her face, looking for traces of impudence or deceit. He could keep her away from television and other corrupting influences. He could still chop wood for her, he could work side-by-side with her. They’d grow happy without the need for conversation, because from conversation came lies. He had some old pictures of himself standing nearly naked beside the upended carcass of an alligator, with his skin blue-white and his hair flaming atop his head. He would show these to her so that when they made love she could sense the young man inside him, and she would not feel cheated.
“Pretty huh? Pretty? Come on.” Bobby hit his shoulder. “Prettier than you thought.”
“Let’s have us a little talk,” Everett said.
“Is it cold in here?” Bobby made a face and turned to his wife. “You cold?”
“I ain’t cold,” Everett said. “Let’s talk a little.”
Bobby nodded. “Let’s go to my office.”
This arrangement troubled Everett, as it should be the woman who left the room, but he let himself be led down a hallway so short and so filled with doorways and thermostats that there was no place to hang a picture. Bobby’s office was a shrine to his military career; there was a folded flag in a glass case on the wall, and a jumble of photographs behind the desk, within which sweaty men leaned on one another, or helicopters drooped amid menacing verdure. On the far wall was a photo of a swarthy tough with dog tags resting in the cleft of his pectorals. Everett reached out to steady himself, then shut his eyes tightly as the sweat poured out of his hairline. He had learned that if he could count to thirty, the worst would be past.
“I was a mothafuckin’ killer then. Afraid of nothing,” Bobby croaked, jerking a thumb at this photograph. “In the Mekong long enough to get a good dose of the orange, blue, pink, green, purple, you name it. What about you? Air Force? Navy? I know you weren’t getting juiced like me. Too healthy.”
“Now listen, does she talk back to you?”
“We’d see the planes overhead, lined up in formation. We’d cheer. What did we know? You could hear the chemicals fizzing on the leaves, like snow. Ever hear snow falling?”
“Is your wife a helpmeet, or does she give you attitude? I don’t stand for attitude. I can’t take no attitude.”
Bobby opened wide the purring, sooty eyes of an old womanizer, and shrugged. “She has moods sometimes. Don’t you?” He leaned in, working himself up to another statement. “We didn’t get it as bad as the Vietnamese. We just got trace amounts. Them, we really fucked up. Gutted ‘em and burned their villages, and if they got away from all that, we gave ‘em cancer. What a mess, huh?”
“Did you meet the sister?”
Bobby shook his head. “She was working at a farm when I went over. But listen now, she’s a good girl. A good, good, girl. Got me? All you got to is love her and you’ll be fine. Forget everything else.”
“And I guess your wife gives you sex whenever you want it, I guess there ain’t none of that sitting on the pussy like women here try to do.”
Bobby frowned and punched the metal desk. The other hand slowly wiped his face, which was suffused with pink tints. “God dammit, this is my wife here. This is the woman I love.”
“What do you want me to do, bubba? Just take this girl off your hands sight unseen? That don’t make no sense.” God damn, why did these things have to be so hard? It was a mistake, this whole crazy idea to have a Vietnamese wife. He’d never survive it, and to top it off this romancer would be his brother-in-law, and he’d have to hear about love and the war every time they visited. Everett’s stomach turned over heavily, and, fearing some explosion, he asked the way to the bathroom.
He found a sprawl of creams and prescription bottles atop the carpeted lid of the toilet tank; a line of grease ringed the bathtub, and hanging from the shower rod were IV bags which fluttered like bats in the gush of hot air from the vent. His dribbles of urine fell, and his stomach turned over violently, but held itself in check. He was grateful now that he’d fasted, but he was weak; he saw black spots in front of his eyes. On the way back he took a wrong turn and found himself in a kitchen among the disdainful company of sleek black appliances. Three trays were laid out, with slices of pork and clusters of gravy-covered beans on white plates. When Jennifer got him back to the living room he turned toward the area near Bobby’s crackling voice and declined forcefully the offer of lunch
“Seems like since you got here, you’ve had a problem,” Bobby said. “My wife worked hard on this meal.”
“I told you on the phone, bubba, I got a bad gut, and I can’t eat nothing. Now, I told you that.”
“She doesn’t use much spice, hardly any grease. You would never believe by the way it tastes that it’s good for you. You could at least taste it.”
“But I can’t eat it. That’s what I’m telling you, I can’t eat it.”
“You came back able-bodied, but you got something wrong in your head, is that it? You think someone would have an emotional problem it would be me. You know how many times I’ve been operated on? Twenty three times. Twenty three. Here I am beating cancer, and you don’t see me complaining. You don’t see me turning down a meal. You came back without a scratch, and you have emotional problems, is that it?”
“It’s an ulcer, bubba. An ulcer ain’t in your head, it’s in your gut.” Everett’s fists were clenched, and his chin was outthrust, and his glasses danced on his twitching temples.
Bobby waved his hand. “You worry too much. Look at you. What are you going to do, if you marry her sister? You won’t let her cook for you?”
“I tell you what I think.”
“Go on,” Bobby croaked. “Tell me.”
“You’re turning her head, bubba. It’s going to end bad for you, letting her play house. A woman will spoil quicker than milk, and then you’ll be in trouble. I guess if you think I’m going to do the sister this way, you got me all wrong, bubba. That ain’t for me, bubba.”
“And let me tell you something,” Bobby said. “I bet your wife left you, yeah? Your wife left because you were crazy, yeah? And you were hoping to pick up one of these Vietnamese gals because you wanted to fix the war? You figured they’d be grateful you could forgive yourself?” Bobby thumped his temple with a forefinger. “But you’re crazy. It’s in your head, and nothing can help you, there. And guess what else, friend? You were crazy before you went to ‘Nam, and there ain’t nobody to blame it on except yourself. I’ll bet you talk about flashbacks and shit. I know your kind. I been to the groups. Flesh cooking in the jungle. Heads rolling down muddy rivers, all that shit. You talk that, doncha?”
“Boy, you got no idea what you’re getting into.”
“You think I’m scared of you?” Bobby’s face was the color of old wine, his fists too were balled, and he lurched to his feet. “You insult my wife, you think I’m afraid of you?”
The leave-taking was brief. Everett said if there wasn’t ladies present he’d pop Bobby’s head clean off. On the sidewalk Everett turned and leered openly at Jennifer, letting his eyes linger on each usable part. When Bobby shuffled toward the house, presumably to get a weapon, Everett climbed into his truck, afraid for a moment that his back would lock up and prevent him from bringing his legs into the cab, but then he was in, and driving away. In his rear-view mirror he could see Bobby holding something in his hands while his head swung back and forth on that reedy neck.
He had difficulty focusing on the drive. The truck felt too large, the day remote, his body fluttered and flapped like a sail loose from its rigging. Bobby was letting his wife make a fool of him and it would end real bad. Everett had already been down that road. Not again, no sir. So many went down that road. An orange car flashed past; as it flickered over the asphalt a memory of fire, of green foliage writhing in flames as tall and broad as houses, returned to him, and despite his shame that his mind worked exactly as Bobby had surmised, he could not stop the damned memories, and with that memory came the sense of all he’d lost since then, including his wife and his daughter who was lost to him as as if she were dead, even more profoundly lost, because the dead can’t stop you from visiting them, and now he was out fooling around with these mail-order brides, anything to keep from being alone. Everett’s stomach produced a lower, sharper sequel to the squeeze he’d felt in Bobby’s office. Afraid to deny his bowels, he jerked the truck into a gas station. He shouldered into the bathroom and latched the stall and waited for the familiar issue of stinging mash. On the door was a poem which he’d read a thousand times before:
Here I sit with trembling bliss
Listening to the thundering piss
Now and then a fart is heard
Blended with a dropping turd
Everett’s bowels unknit. To his amazement, the production was solid. Then the urine started, warm and steady, Everett felt the sudden rush of clarity that comes with a satisfactory bowel movement, and with this new acuity of thought he observed that this poem was incorrect because one always shat and then pissed, that was the way of the body. Fishing his keys carefully from his pocket, he scratched “bullshit” in the khaki-colored metal, and put an arrow to the poem. He felt a plume of pride rise in his chest, intermingled with the triumphant spoor of the brown zeppelin circling in the bowl below. In this moment of clarity it occurred to him that Bobby was right, that he was trying to fix what could never be fixed. He was trying to fix the past, and fix the tragic things which had befallen him, in which he had participated, but all of that was remote and untouchable, beyond human influence. He’d been terrified to be alone with his demons, but when he really considered the facts, it was true that he was sleeping more, and fishing more, and that he’d even read a book recently, granted it was a Readers Digest abridged version, but he’d read it from start to finish. And with Sunny gone, there was no urgency to get better. Without Sunny to worry and shame him he might build something of his own. He could stay as sick as he was now, as long as he could tolerate himself, that was all that mattered. If he woke in the middle of the night with the urge to kill, if he took valiums and watched the pond all day, there was nobody around to be horrified and disappointed, nobody to urge him into VA programs and church prayer groups. So he had flashbacks. So he had paranoia. So what? At least he wasn’t like Bobby, setting up some woman to dominate and madden him. It hadn’t worked out the way he’d hoped with Bobby but maybe that was for the best. He’d survived those pictures of the jungle, those pictures which were as familiar and alien as a picture of one’s own entrails, he’d survived seeing a woman up close whose mother or whose uncle he might have killed in any number of ways, he was still alive. Alive and, by god, producing clean stools. That was a victory. Upon this turd he might raise up a tolerable life.
Two anarchy symbols etched in the steel mirror fit over his eyes like a pair of glasses. He felt weak, and he was a long time soaping his hands. When re-entered the afternoon, purple blotches rested like thistledown on the fields. He felt a powerful hunger.
He would stop and get some ice cream. He could do this, that he could spend hours on the toilet if need be, if he wanted the taste of ice cream all that bad. If Bobby wanted to make his woman fat and bitchy that was his business. Women were women. No matter where she came from she would know how to take a man’s happiness and squeeze it to death between her thighs. He would eat ice cream! The day was obscenely bright. Everett brushed at the sunlight behind his glasses and wished he could search in his glove box for a pair of tinted overlays, but his relaxation was so profound that it was all he could do to steer the truck. In the BiLo parking lot he sat and watched a mother and her three chunky children waddle into the store. Then he followed. He took four half gallons -- one vanilla, one chocolate, one mint chip, and one butter pecan – along with a bottle of ginger ale, these choices representing his traditional ideas about floats along with some of the more dangerous combinations with which he’d never allowed himself to experiment.
On the drive back to his house he clicked on the radio and listened to a news report about a plane that had exploded midair, hurtling a flight attendant 40,000 feet into the ocean. When they found her bobbing in the waves, gray with cold, she asked them for a cigarette. Everett laughed and, guarding his buoyant mood, clicked the radio back off. The spots in front of his eyes had grown more pronounced. Bobby’s wife was a dark-ass thing, and awfully cute, no question, and it would be hard to give up a woman as a goal, as a sexual and romantic destination, as a reason to live, as a bulwark against your panic and self-loathing, but it was probably for the best– he’d only hurt them and god knows how they hurt him.
The house came into view, molting in the sunlight, then the old oak tree, and the corn crib, and the trees peering at their reflections in the pond. He entered the back porch. In the kitchen window he saw an orange and black shape move noiselessly into the shadows. He was pulling his keys out of his pocket, wondering idly what sort of bird would cause that reflection, when the door swung back, and the smell of lemon soap drifted out, and he saw Sunny moving around in the gloom, using a towel to pat her hands.
“Oh, honey,” she said. “Oh, honey, I had to come back. Look at you. Just look at this place.”
“How’d you get here?” Everett said, dumbfounded.
“Buford brought me. Oh, honey.” She moved forward to embrace him, and in those few seconds his mental picture, his hagiograph, underwent a series of rapid alterations to conform to reality; pockets of jowl were hung from the jaw, wrinkles etched about the mouth, the hair coarsened, the body broadened; then she had him in her embrace, her teats pressing into his abdomen. When she pulled back she saw the look on his face and, misinterpreting the entreaty she found there, patted his bearded cheek. The rustle of the grocery bag caught her ear, and she reached down to pull the handles apart. She shook her head and clicked her tongue.
“What are you trying to do, kill yourself? Don’t worry, you sit there on the porch, and I’ll get you something easy on your stomach. Go on, go on and sit. “

Wrestley

2010-08-10T19:56:00.000-07:00

Young son has an alter ego named "Wrestley", a coy, quiet little boy who likes to stand in the shadows of trees, or to roll silently up to you on his bicycle, or to sit by the side of the pool, where he waits patiently for someone to notice him. This is where I come in. I have strict instructions to notice him, and to recoil in surprise, and to go through through this dialog (or a close variant) with him:

"Little boy, what is your name?"
"Wrestley."
"Wrestley, do you know how to swim/ride a bike/play baseball?"
"Yes."
"Wrestley I have been looking all my life for a little boy to swim/ride bikes/play baseball with me! Would you like to play with me?"
"Yes."
"And will you come home with me, Wrestley, and live with me forever?"
"Yes."

When this dialog is over we rarely proceed to the aforementioned activity. We might get started with something, but before we can get very far, the son can't resist a reprisal of our little drama and so we re-enact the moment of Wrestley's discovery in an ever-expanding collection of scenarios.

Character: Man in Gym

2010-08-09T05:39:00.000-07:00

He's got an elongated head, bald on the top, fringed with gray hair, which reminds you of the monastic and maniacal vultures that were featured in the early Disney animations. He favors tight undershirts of the Brando variety,out of which protrude a pair of bony shoulders covered all over in rambles of gray hair. He visits the bathroom often, and when he returns he is often sniffing his fingers with canine absorption, as if decoding some olfactory puzzle. He likes to warm up on a treadmill, which he sets at an angle so severe that he must hold onto the handrail in order to stay aboard. While he warms up he ogles nearby women with the most spectacular, enthusiastic, and shameless leer. His features light up, his head stays turned at a severe angle on his neck and his eyes grope up and down the anatomy of his unfortunate desire with impunity. In this, too, there is something cartoonish -- the glee and lust of a villain just before the dynamite is detonated.

Heights

2010-08-08T18:50:00.000-07:00

I sat on a stone bench in the courtyard behind our house and watched our robust koi swim about; the randomness of their movements soothed me, and on this sullen Saturday I was eager to unclench my mind and allow a few pebbles of inspiration to fall into my consciousness, because I needed a breakthrough, because for a month now Tai Ping had beaten me to every punch, and there were mutterings – in reality there were no mutterings, only the taut sound of a truth ripening in the collective awareness – that Tai Ping had surpassed his mentor. I was sitting quietly, hands on my knees, head heavy with thought, when Percy wobbled across the gravel and laid one of her warm hands on the back of my neck, and asked me if I was still afraid of heights, and her impudent tone clashed so violently with my anxious cerebrations that I became angry, and told Percy that a truly intelligent man has access to his entire consciousness, and nothing inside him is beyond remediation.
Her neat trick was making it a matter of honor. My objections to her salesperson colleagues, who bounced around boardrooms and ballrooms like fragrant, overstuffed children, gabbing for hours on end about golf and wines, were met with, “Well, if you’re afraid, we can cancel.”
Percy referred to the Colorado trip as a time of transformation and renewal, of fresh perspectives and sweeping change; as it was a gift from her company, I could not scuttle it on financial grounds. I tried to explain that a crisis at work precluded my attendance, but she only pressed her berry-bright lips together and shook that great head slowly from side to side, and told me that a rest would do me good. Perhaps I began to believe her! Perhaps I began to hope that on some hygienic mountaintop I would be struck by the inspiration that my faithful koi had lately withheld, and would descend with my eyes aflame, clutching algorithmic thunderbolts, a visage so stern and terrifying that even Tai Ping’s narrow eyes would widen in awe.

The phobia struck as I inched down the gangplank, in the shadow of Percy’s fragrant bulk. As we took out seats, the fuselage seemed to hiccup and undulate like some enormous throat; giddy blue seats shoved one another so that I found it nearly impossible to squeeze into my row. The pilot blurted muzzy syllables in an aftershave baritone. Nobody seemed to know or care what he’d said. The passengers shuffled in, glassy-eyed and abstracted, like cattle cramming into the slaughterhouse car. In order to quash the bubble of panic in my throat, I told myself I’d solve my work problem before we touched down in Colorado. Yes, that was better. I buckled up and attempted to slip into the world of pure thought, but a man with a chin like a bubble threw himself back in his seat, jamming his headrest into my nose. His cowlick hovered before my watering eyes like a vortex of stupidity. The flight attendant neglected to make him sit back up before takeoff. I hated Percy already for dragging me to this ridiculous boondoggle. The plane rattled down the runway, screamed, and yanked its feet from the ground.
I turned resolutely to my problem. Tai Ping was in the office this very moment, working in his frictionless, noiseless, heatless way, a model of intellectual and physical efficiency, to trump me. As the space allotted to my lap was insufficient for my computer, I made several sketches of the problem (so complex that the first order of business was to frame it in some comprehensible way) on the cocktail napkins, but then Percy had a sinus attack from a sudden change in cabin pressure and, resourceful girl, she pressed my napkins to her nose a split second before she was convulsed.
When Percy removed the napkins I saw my prim UML objects drowning in a mass of translucent goop. I considered asking her to open the second napkin for a moment so I could fix the notations in my memory, but I knew she’d guffaw something about my nerdiness, so I desisted.

As the plane descended, it groaned like a bully forced to release a limp wimp. Percy leaned across me and snapped open the shade. “Look at the Rockies, my dear, they’re magnificent.”
A bubble had formed in my right-hand Eustachian tube; no matter how I swallowed or chewed the air, the pressure only grew more intense. Then, with a hideous creaking sound, the bubble squeezed itself into some dark cranny. The more I frowned and pounded my head, the more difficult it became to feel its presence. I thought of the Ceti eel slithering into Chekov’s brain while Khan, pectorals a-bulge, looked on; Percy shared with Khan a vigorous air and an affection for leather and wool, and I allowed myself to briefly hate her for the campaign she waged, by means overt and covert, against my peace of mind.
Percy turned to the man in the aisle seat. “Going on a little corporate retreat,” she said, in her best woman-of-the-world tones. “My company is picking up everything, don’t you love it, not to worry a bit about money?”
The man muttered something indistinct.
“My husband, can you believe it, has never been higher than sea level in his entire life? And he was at MIT. It’s absurd, someone with his intellect, so afraid.” Guffaw trailing into bemused hum.
The man muttered something else.
I opened my eyes. Ribbons of beige light trailed from the oblong windows, mixing with the antiseptic blue. I did not look out. It was bad enough to feel the plane shifting, to get the sensation from the deepening hue in the fuselage that we were banking ground ward. I still had the two days in Colorado. I could solve the problem. Stay up nights. Sandbag the clever Tai Ping with meaningless tasks. And if I couldn’t solve it? Well, that wasn’t worth considering. The pilot gargled into the microphone. A gong sounded; passengers surged madly into the aisle. Percy shouldered a red-faced man backward and motioned with her hand for me to join her, join her.

Our room looked out on the granite jumble of the Rockies receding into the distance like some impassable, Olympian barrier. Percy was in raptures. Immediately upon arrival she struggled out of her blue jeans and donned a capacious pantsuit, the slacks fitting high over her stomach. While she hung up her clothes she babbled about the good time we were going to have, the drinks we’d quaff, the meals we’d maw.
“I have some kind of pain.” I grimaced. “Something terrible in my right ear.”
“From the flight?” Flash of pursed lips.
“It’s simply agonizing.”
“Chew some gum, silly. It’s air pressure.”
But after she’d emptied her purse on the bed we discovered there was no more gum. In my annoyance I stalked to the window where I watched geese bob in Crayola-blue water.
Strolling to dinner: I was panicked over my mind’s inability to function. That pocket of ache had spread across the right side of my brain. I involuntarily recalled a medical film of an epileptic whose hemispheres been surgically disconnected; after the operation two distinct personalities emerged and the patient had carried on a conversation with herself, the face below the bandaged skull twisting this way and that. The mosaics on the arched ceilings depicted various alpine scenes. From the center of these tiled cups there hung crystalline chandeliers, drizzling glitter into my eyes.
“Oh, it’s gorgeous,” Percy said, adjusting her tomato-colored shawl.
The burnished doors of the elevator bonged open and we entered, rode upward (while Percy kissed at her reflection and made definitive marks along her upper lip with a pencil) and emerged on a stone terrace with misty clouds roiling only a few feet overhead. Percy snatched a flute of champagne and took three quarters of it in a drought, handed it to me, turned to a little man with a red beard and tiny eyes aglitter with avarice: “I can hand him anything alcoholic and I always know it’s safe. He doesn’t drink. Paul Zamm, meet my husband.”
Zamm trapped my hand in his broiling paw as he looked me up and down. “Meet my wife, Joan.” He never took his eyes off mine or indicated which of the women nearby was his wife. “You in sales, too?”
Percy rolled her eyes. “You kidding? Oh god no. He designs software. A genius.” she chortled.
“I won’t ask. You’ll talk all night, I know your type!” Zamm’s off hand palpated the vertebrae of a white-haired woman.
“And how are you?” The woman’s face was still shiny from a recent peel; as I cocked my head to pound again at my bubble, her implants made a wry smile in her plunged neckline.
“When did you get in?”
The woman nodded. “This morning. Paul wanted to do the train to the top of Pike’s Peak.”
“Oh, how was it?”
“I lost consciousness from the altitude,” Zamm said, giggling. “Sounds better than admitting that I had been drinking all day, and fell asleep.”
“Lush.”
“Do you know, the driver told us, anyone who ventures above 5,000 feet develops brain damage?” Zamm’s wife said. “Something about the oxygenation of the tissue, right? I told Paul that explains all those crazy mountain men.”
“How high are we now?” I said.
Zamm frowned and punched a query into his phone. “Too late!” He cackled. “We can’t be saved!”
“Get your picture taken yet?” Zamm’s wife said.
“Oh, god!” Percy seized my hand. “Catch up later?”
“Wait,” cried Zamm, rubbing the side of his nose. “How’d you do with virtualization?”
The photographer, an earnest- looking Asian with square trifocal lenses hovering before his sleepy eyes, put us against the stone railing and asked me several times (raising his hand as if pulling the strings on a marionette) to stand up straight. I resented him instantly. He reminded me of Tai Ping. I had once showed Tai Ping some sequences from the Pink Panther movies, a collection of those priceless battle scenes between Clouseau and Kato. Naturally I wept with mirth and expected Tai Ping, even if he missed Sellers’s subtle genius (twitching eyebrows, writhing mustache, lips puckering around some murdered syllable) to appreciate the slapstick combat; two men awash in feathers, shattering wooden screens.
“He said, ‘little yellow skin.’.” This from Tai Ping after the prolapse of an expressionless five minutes.
“Well, yes, but he’s a buffoon, you see.” I honked into my handkerchief, my cheeks a-quiver with suppressed guffaws.
“I find that offensive.” He stood and made for the door, his little back stiff with disapprobation.
The photographer asked me again to stand up straight.
“I am, damn you,” I said.
“He has a spinal condition,” Percy said.
“So sorry.”
“When did it get cloudy?” Percy said, through her fixed smile.
“Clouds roll down from the mountain.” The photographer adjusted us the way photographers always had, Percy at an angle and I facing the camera head on, my body positioned to make me look as wide as possible.
The photographer nodded with gratitude when Percy handed him a ticket from her purse. I dug in my ear, ground my thumb into the hinge of my jaw; was it possible that I was carrying around inside my head a small pocket of low pressure, stretching and deflating some crucial whorl of brain? Then there was a loud pinging sound which was picked up and repeated on the crowded balcony -- jewelry against champagne flutes.
“Dinner time!” Percy cried. “I’ll get us a seat. Refill my wine.” With this she took my face in her hand, compressed my cheeks, bussed me, and swung away through the crowd with ursine grace.

The reception dinner was one of those crowded affairs where conversation is made amid claustrophobic clusters of glassware; wine goblets, champagne flutes, the stolid water glasses with their dwindling pats of ice, the carafes of wine which constantly crowd one’s elbow. They brought out the courses as the band punched and tinkled through a series of muzak standards. Percy was already warmed up with her third wine and, casting out her stentorous net, raked in four people to her left with an amusing story about my fear of heights. I turned deliberately to my right. The woman there asked me a number of questions which, due to the noise, I failed to interpret correctly and before I knew it I was inveigled into a discussion about the chemical breakdown of lactose in the intestines. I could hardly hear my interlocutor (whom I will not bother describing except to say that her hair fell about her face like a potted vine), what with my damaged right ear and Percy’s nonsensical bleating in my left. Not that it mattered. People shouted. Bosoms heaved in glittering dresses. After a few cursory attempts everyone talked about whatever they liked. It was no more or less edifying than dining with a group of chimpanzees.
A small Frenchman sat on the other side of Percy, one of those Gallic bantams whose every expression conveyed resignation to his own desires and absolute intolerance of the world’s attempts to thwart him. His wife had coarse tresses and an aristocratic brow that lay across her nose at a perfect right angle, like a capital “T”. Francois and Anne-Marie. He wore a gray suit and a checkered shirt open two buttons at the neck, revealing a clipped carpet of chest hair. When he took a sip of his vodka-tonic he invariably shot his cuff to look at his Rolex. Percy found him charming and kept telling him so. Several times he reduced her to helpless fits of laughter during which she palmed her mouth, holding held her thumb and forefinger in readiness to pinch shut her nostrils, presumably to prevent a sudden egress of wine, as she was nearly always in mid-swallow when Francois delivered one of his bellicose punch lines. All this was agony to me; cooped up with these fluttering, flightless brains while what I needed was quiet, the gathering thunderbolt, the feverish solution!
But was I capable of logical thought? I could not stop worrying about the idea of tissue damage at altitude. Had my delicate mental ecosystem been dealt the kill shot on that airplane? I had to get back to that hotel room! God knows what Tai Ping had accomplished already.

Percy begged me to take a quick nightcap with the Emmanuels. We sat at a wooden table next to a pulsating brazier. The mountains crowded around like unwanted guests trying to hear the punch line of some joke. Percy chided me for my poor sportsmanship, for not participating in the festivities. She was drunk enough that her left eyelid had begun to droop; I’d have to take her home soon. I imagined her staggering and babbling, imagined letting her fall with a turgid splash into the pond.
I was angry. It was high time I started respecting my own genius; by god, who knew what Tai Ping had already uploaded into the source control system? Yes. I had to go. So, with a limp hand extended to Francois I took my leave, I dragged my long feet over the bridge and down and one of those endless carpeted hallways seen in horror-movie hotels. And then? An email with good news! Tai Ping had suffered a bout of food poisoning and would be out tomorrow. And then? I opened my laptop and began to code. After three breathless hours pursuing the scent of a solution through thickets of data, through shifting swamps of refactoring, I stood up abruptly. Time to take a break. I sloshed some water into a rocks glass, and went to the window. I threw back the curtain to espy Percy on a chaise lounge below me, in the relaxed posture that women assume when they are getting a spa service, only Percy was being serviced by the Frenchman, who was pressing his tidy buns forward, squeezing himself into her overgrown womanhood. I recognized in the comedic mismatch of their physical proportions my own ridiculousness all these years, the nerdy ectomorph rebounding like a ninepin from his Reubenesque wife in his frenetic attempts to bring her to pleasure, and, judging from the horrified and enthralled expression which had overspread Percy’s face, the little Frenchman was experiencing the success which had always eluded me.
No. I delivered a slap to my hollow cheek. It wasn’t real. I looked again. My god, he was rather energetic, he had the stamina of a true sex maniac. I must think. Not get emotional. I must not let this cloud my thinking. It was all too convenient. Why did they choose just this spot, directly below the window, to enact their grotesque sideshow? What did this mean? Was she trying to make me jealous, to distract me from my work? Did she believe, with an arrogance typically female, that my only chance at happiness lay in servicing her emotional needs? Was this how she’d bring me back to her, make herself relevant again?
I went to the laptop. I didn’t think of Percy and the Frenchman immediately, but as I stared at the screen my finger crept to my inflamed ear and my heart began to race. I was unable to make heads or tails of algorithms that I had written only minutes earlier. My mind slipped back to what I’d seen. I jumped up and drew the curtain. They were smoking cigarettes, their exhalations hanging like twisted paper above their heads. Perhaps it was only a hallucination. Perhaps the stress of the trip, perhaps that bubble in the brain, perhaps some change in routine, had rendered me temporarily insane. Had she loved him long? Had she brought me here to get rid of me? Were there drugs involved? Potions and powders slipped from sleeves? I frowned and sniffed at my water glass.

I woke in the morning a free man. I’d gone to bed with visions of righteous freedom burning in my mind and this idea of burning emerged from the changing room of my dreams as a line of fiery sunshine that flickered along the ceiling. And then as I watched the slurping tongue of fire and tried to establish (as a warm-up to tackling my code) the meteorological and floral conditions that allowed it to make those uncanny thrusts along the ceiling, I had an attack. Old Pan came whirling through the door, jaunty and evil as ever, doffing his ridiculous straw hat, his timeless eyes staring into mine, and I was gasping on the bathroom floor while Percy bellowed, through a cloud of wine fumes, something about my breathing into the plastic sack with which she was trying to asphyxiate me.
“You’re doing this to me,” I gasped. “I’m wise to your game.”
“Try to relax and breathe,” Percy said.

At breakfast I was forbidden to touch the coffee. Percy buttered her first roll, and then used the knife to punctuate a lecture on stress. I needed to take better care of myself, etcetera. She looked splendid; her dark complexion glowed with rosy tints. Her eyes sparkled with a child’s luminescence. My ear still hurt. I felt my mind caving in upon itself like a black hole.
When Francois came into the ballroom, his boots scuffing the garish carpet, Percy gave him a perfectly modulated smile and asked him to sit down, please. No, he couldn’t stay, he and Anne-Marie were going hiking. And we?
“Oh, wonderful! We’re going on a hike, too. Who knew we’d choose the same activity?”
“Funny we never discussed that last night,” Francois said, looking visibly uncomfortable. “But we were too busy doing this.” He tilted an imaginary glass of wine.
“Doing what, exactly?” I said.
“Oh, do you feel poorly?” Percy said to Francois.
“You don’t?”
“I feel wonderful,” Percy said.
“And you must feel fine too,” Francois said to me. “Mister non-drinker.”
I tried to stare him down, but he was standing in a blaze of sunshine, and my eyes began to water uncontrollably, and when I raised my trembling coffee cup, he averted his gaze and made some joke about the tendency of the French to avoid pointless exertion.

The van took us across a craggy red ridge; we descended into an amphitheater of rock, and parked in an deserted parking lot. We disembarked.
“And who is afraid of heights?” The tour guide said, raising her weathered hand.
Percy pointed at me.
“Okay, we got one?”
“I’m not afraid,” I said. “I am a vigorous man in the prime of life. Let’s go.”
I felt all my troubles stemmed from an inability act courageously, to wrest control from fate’s cold grasp. Would I just stand by while my wife boffed another man? Would I allow Tai Ping to chisel away at my feet of clay? I was devastated one moment, giddy the next. I felt capable of deeds heretofore reserved for fantasies; I began to picture a quick shove and a long, silent fall.
“Big talker,” Percy said.
“It is okay if I take pictures?” Francois had a camera slung around his neck, featuring a telephoto that must’ve been eight inches long. I wondered if Percy’s mind, as she admired the lens (“I’ll bet you could shoot just anything with that”), was calculating the diameter and length of the clammy tool in his shorts.
“Of course,” the guide said. “You should see the Japanese.”
“A bit of a stereotype,” Anne-Marie whispered, and I gave her a severe nod. I could revenge myself by seducing Anne-Marie. Ah, but she had no weakness for genius; look at Francois. I contemplated a rape and decided against it. I would avoid prison if possible. Had to keep a level head. Must not go giggling or barking mad, must go mad only on the inside. My revenge must be as elegant and cool as Percy’s provocation was obscene.
We went up a graded path, past several large outcroppings of rock against which the nimble Francois leaned Anne-Marie, taking pictures from all sorts of absurd angles. I tried not to ask about our elevation. Everyone else seemed fine. Percy, thick legs bursting from a pair of hiking shorts, pulverized the dirt with each step, panting like a locomotive as she made steady progress upward. The guide pointed out ponderosa pines, she pointed out lamb’s ear, aspen trees, and then, after a sudden turn, we came into view of a strange canyon. Spreading out below us at various distances were impossible vertical dimensions. A tiny pond closed its sightless eye as a cloud slid over the sun. The figure of a man, his arms and legs swinging, disappeared behind a low building. Even further away a man in climbing gear spidered up a wrinkled cliff. I felt my stomach turn and, before I could stop myself, I was pressed against the rocks behind us.
“Oh, his heights,” Percy said, twisting lips the color of old blood.
“Are you all right, sir?”
I couldn’t speak. My throat had been cemented over. The sunlight reached down and tickled me with thin fingers; my face was creased with a pleading smile.
“He’s had a bad time already,” Percy said. “He’s been working too hard.”
“We could connect with a tamer trail,” The guide said. “Why don’t we do that. This way, sir.”
Perhaps to reassure me, perhaps to distract me, the guide opened her map and pointed out with a calloused finger where we’d soon intersect a trail that ran, she said, “alongside a creek. Nice for everyone.”
I heard Francois, twenty paces ahead, groan and mumble something to his wife. She continued to ascend various rocks, she vamped from vertiginous perches for his massive camera. Francois spun his lens, he squatted and leapt upward, he ducked and dodged, he exclaimed, squinted at the sun, wiped his brow with a chamois which he kept in the breast pocket of his camp shirt. I staggered along the trail, as far from the edge as I could get, while the guide cupped my elbow. A fine position, this. Was I finished? Had Percy succeeded, like a modern-day Delilah, in robbing me of my powers? I tried to transform the clouds into software objects, I tried to imagine my way into a digital world where my problems could be solved, I beseeched my mind for some sign of its former splendor but got back only a dull ache and the sensation of oily smoke rising in my skull; I could not escape this oppressive reality.
We came back below the tree line. The shifting green light seemed to push the dirt around below my feet. Perhaps all I had left, like Samson, was a final press of the temple pillars. Only one chance, that was all I asked of life. Like a cloying melody, that vision of Francois and Percy recurred, it wove itself around my thoughts, Francois with his hips in motion and Percy with those legs thrust star-ward like twin telescopes; and now I pounded at my head for a different reason, and was told by Percy to let the bubble make a natural exit, but what I had in me now could only be blasted out, could only be shaken loose by some violent shock.
We came to a small clearing where the path forked. Both trails, the guide said, ran along the river – this one, as she’d promised (finger tracing the map again) went down while the other went upward a “few more thousand feet, to the waterfalls.”
“Is the upward trail difficult?” I said.
The guide shrugged. Her lower lip protruded. “Nah. I mean, not really, but if you have heights issues.”
“I’d like to take the upward trail,” I said.
“Now come on,” Percy said.
“Are you afraid?” I grinned. My face hurt.
“We can go that way if you want,” the guide shrugged and scuffed her feet.
“I don’t care,” Anne-Marie said.
Decision time: Francois or Percy? It was Percy’s fault, certainly, for dragging me on this trip and, by exposing me to these ruinous altitudes, turning my mind, my cornucopia of cognition, into a dry husk; her fault for the evil bubble in my ear, for the searing image of the chaise-boff which appeared ceaselessly before me. But still, she was my wife, after all – I was not one of those Hitchcockian monsters who calls his wife down to the basement so she can admire the grave he’s dug for her. No, I wanted to spare Percy, but she must be made to see, I must tell her in the silent language of horror, that I was not to be trifled with again.
“Some fine pictures up there, Francois.” As I let my eyes cycle through the granola guide, the severe Anne-Marie, the toady Francois; I could use his lust for the picturesque to get him alone.
“That may be,” Francois said, mopping his brow. “No offense intended but you are not much fun in this nature.”
“Let’s meet back in one hour,” I said. “Francois and I will go on up. Some lovely pictures there, I would imagine.”
“Are you sure?” Percy said.
“I can’t do that,” the guide said. “I’m responsible.”
“We’re in a public park. We can go where we like. Give me the map, please.” I snatched it from her hand. “One hour. We’ll go up for half an hour, then come back.”
“It’s fine.” Francois waved his hand, flipping his fingers upward like the bristles on a paintbrush. “I will take pictures, and he has something to prove, this man, I think.”
“I don’t mind going,” Percy said.
“You should keep Anne-Marie company.” I wanted to tell her she should be grateful I was sparing her bovine life, that she should be happy that I’d led her out to pasture instead of the slaughterhouse, but I desisted. I smiled. “I am excited to conquer one of my fears. Just the guys, hey?”

The map showed an unassuming black line that stretched through penciled trees, next to the gray band of a river. When we entered the trailhead there was very little dissonance between representation and inspiration. The trail was wide and the grade almost imperceptible. A small alpine stream babbled over the rocks. We stopped and splashed the cold water on our faces and then kept on. Gradually we came into regions more remote; the canopy overhead shut out the sky. The brook crept muttering away into the undergrowth. The grade grew more severe and our conversation (I was being as pleasant as possible), once fluid, now came in disconnected splashes. Francois, his pert buttocks pumping in green shorts, puffed his bearded cheeks and fell silent. There were switchbacks, and suddenly we were at the base of a massive frowning cliff whose fir trees jutted out like underbiting fangs.
“This is lovely,” Francois said. “I will take a few pictures.”
“Did you know, Francois that my wife planned your exhibition as a blow to my mental acuity?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Francois said, peering into his camera. The snaps of his remonstrating shutter hung in the air.
“Oh, I think you do,” I said.
He pressed on. I followed, a tuneless song whistling in and out of my lungs. The reduction in air pressure eased the pain in my ear and loosened the channels of my mind. I felt more comfortable. I attempted again to make Francois understand.
“Have you ever wondered, my friend Francois,” I panted, “The Faustus myth was never about the Satan, Il Duce, some divinity with a craving for souls, no, it’s about the willingness to make one’s bargains with the world. Like a bogeyman it guards, with its tale of a lost soul, the secret of personal power.”
“I am not a reader,” Francois’s voice brushed my face like a fog. “I am not liking all this talk by you. I may tell you frankly I find you unpleasant.”
I laughed. “Of course you do, my friend Francois.”
Through more switchbacks, along aspen-crowded tunnels, panting up a series of small hills (Francois’s little arms swinging from his narrow shoulders, his dainty feet crunching the dust. Oh, how I hated him). Then we turned and everything to our left fell away as if wiped clean by a giant hand. The plummeting space yawned below me, the air tugged at my pantleg. And there, perhaps a hundred yards distant or perhaps half a mile (it was impossible to judge the distance accurately), was another vertical face, the older brother of the first, orders of magnitude larger, menacing, richly forested with those vertical trees, each of the thousands my vision waving and undulating in the breeze. The effect was mesmeric, like the glittering scales of a serpent. I felt the remnants of sanity drain out the soles of my shoes, sucked up by the greedy mountain dirt. My papery heart crackled with each painful spasm. Still, I could not stop looking. To continue upward was impossible but to go back down was equally impossible. Something must change before we could go on. Time sloshed in its basin, hours splashed, minutes trickled. Had I already killed him? I began to pant; I pushed myself back against the rock. Carefully. Carefully. I opened my bottle of water and took a drink. And there was Francois, sitting on a rock nearby, framing that horrible sight with an eyepiece attached to his neck by a silver chain.
“Magnificent, I think, is the word?” he said. “You are not afraid?”
“Did you enjoy last night,” I said, my voice floating up from my belt. “Did you enjoy my wife?”
He did not lower the eyepiece. “Don’t be a fool.”
“It was grotesque,” I said. “But give her this. She did get my attention.”
“We were drinking a nightcap, nothing more.” He frowned and lowered the eyepiece. His puffy, ovoid eyes stayed fixed on my face.
“You drank your fill, from what I could see,” I panted.
“Perhaps you should see a doctor for your head.”
“And you must pay, Francois. You must pay.”
“I’m going back.” Francois grunted himself upright, fluffed his hair, which was like a puff of smoke in the slanting sunlight, and turned on the narrow pass. “I think that you are a little crazy.”
“Something must be done, Francois.”
“Look, what do you want me to say?” he half-turned, spread his hands. “Your wife is your business. She is nice enough, but too much for me. I would not know what to do with so much woman.”
He made as if to pass me, and I was filled with manic glee at the realization that he was in my power, the time was at hand. The time was at hand. I imagined my rigid fingers dive-bombing his little ribs, the electric stiffening of his body, the helpless giggles, his feet losing their grasp as I shoved him into space. I found myself sneaking behind him, my toes twinkling in my shoes, my arms above my head, fingers wiggling like worms. I suppose I looked at that moment exactly like Sylvester the Cat stalking poor Tweety Bird, and just as in those madcap cartoons, it was a chance movement that turned the tables; as I was preparing to pounce, to deliver him into the hands of green gravity, Francois spun to interject some axiomatic comment on the nature of women. His mouth was a pink hole in his beard. We collided. I rebounded. The lichen-covered rock slipped away from my feet. I pivoted backward and saw, in its upside-down splendor, the whispering mountainside, the wavering firs.
I expected to be dead in a matter of seconds. I even had a moment, god help me, where I thought of my life as one long joke culminating in this absurd punch line (the man afraid of heights goes off a cliff). Then I impacted the mountainside for the first time and I realized that Percy, clever clever girl, had won, had defeated me utterly. Then came the fast-whipping vegetation, my screams, my hopeless clutches, my somersaults suddenly and brutally arrested by the same trail some two hundred feet down the mountain. I did not even have the good fortune to black out. I stayed conscious while Francois explained over and over (to Percy, the guide, the medics) that I had tried to tickle him on the trail.
“Altitude madness,” someone said.
As they shut the doors on the ambulance I slipped into a daze; I saw myself in the hospital, hunched over my laptop where in a single incendiary session, lasting fourteen morphine-glazed hours, I would write over two thousand lines of code, and vanquish Tai Ping. Someone was clutching my hand. I squinted to make out the face, saw that familiar forehead, those soft jowls, covered with a black down that shimmered in the green light from the ambulance window. Her mouth was moving, and although I could not make out the words, I gave her a smile. If my arms were no longer functional she might have to serve as my amanuensis, because I could feel the ideas coming, really coming this time, marching across the darkness of my mind with the synchronized stride of soldiers on parade.

Music Board

2010-08-07T12:46:00.000-07:00

I listen to an online radio station pretty regularly; it is my "favorite" station, I suppose, and I like that I can go onto the message boards and see what people are saying about the song. Today I happened to go to the message board for a certain song, and I found that the artist had signed in, and thanked the station for playing his song. Now, that takes balls, to go in and read what other people are saying about you nearly in real time.

Joe Cromwell

2010-08-06T20:29:00.000-07:00

Today a recruiter sent me some resumes to look over, in preparation for an interview process starting Monday. The recruiter's first name was "Joe" and, while I noted the commonness of the name, for some reason it stuck with me. Tonight I was driving the family home from dinner at Mexican restaurant (with a baja flavor, walls decorated with surf posters, administered by a couple of hardy waitresses, one of whom was dressed in a taco suit) and I suddenly recalled another Joe -- Joe Cromwell, a friend of my brother and me from high school. We worked together on a construction crew for two summers. Our job was to go to the empty shell of a house and spread a massive pile of sand with our shovels. A menial, backbreaking labor, the end of which receded before you like a mirage. We were the lowest of the low on the totem pole, and were rudely ignored and insulted by the carpenters and cement men; we had a little radio we listened to, and at lunchtime we would throw down our shovels and head to a nearby convenience store to load up on fountain sodas and junk food, and to forget for a few minutes the long afternoon still to come.
Someone told Joe he looked like Richard Marx and so, as Joe was keen to increase his odds with the fair sex (and in high school nothing trumps a resemblance to a movie or rock star), he began to work on a Marxist lid. Over the course of two years Joe grew himself a magnificent mane which first equaled, then overtook, then completely dominated the hairdo which had served as its initial inspiration. Joe's hair was like an entity unto itself, with brassy sausage curls spilling down the back, to his shoulders, and ellipses of bleached bang falling rakishly over an eyebrow; that second summer Joe employed the 'do in a number of easy seductions at a nearby 7-11, which was staffed almost entirely by the cheerleading squad of a local high school. All those nights of lovemaking took their toll; Joe's eyes receded into the shadows of his bangs, and his face grew lean. After one of these sportive nights he would be found leaning against his shovel, staring into space, or snoozing in the shade of our giant sand pile. My brother and I felt it was our duty to support Joe's run; it was accepted as a universal truth that the pursuit of trim trumped all other concerns, so we let Joe sleep while we did our work and his, too. At lunch he related in painstaking detail every move, every word, every sensation with a crooked, incredulous smile. The carpenters and masons nicknamed him "loverboy." Joe did not lord his talent over us; he was always keen to find out if his latest girl had any friends. Alas, our short mousy locks, our tonsorial timidity, were disappointing to the wide-eyed cheerleaders, but there were occasions, in that second summer, when the three of us were all tired on the same morning and then we said very little, and just worked, and stayed lost in our private reveries.

So Long

2010-08-02T20:36:00.000-07:00

It's been so long since I've posted here with any regularity, and I don't have much to say at the moment except that the passage of time is such a strange thing -- the way it jerks you out of those valleys full of overgrown shadows, which you had stopped hoping to ever escape, and the way it tricks you into stepping off of those sunny mountaintops, giggling to yourself like Mr. Magoo. The projector whirs, the images flicker, and sometimes you are ready to assent once and for all to the wisdom of the nursery rhymes, and the big shivery nights of childhood seem as if they are just around the corner again.

The Story

2010-01-01T06:45:00.000-08:00

Thinking now, thinking now...fiction is so strange. For me, the tighter I grasp it, the more it eludes me. The harder I try to find the core of some character, to line up all the events and themes in a story, the more I find the characters splintering, fragmenting, opening themselves to endless combinations and possibilities.

I wrote a story about a man who is interested in UFOs. I am on my 10th version now, and only now am I pretty certain what I want him to do. The first drafts were all a bit pushy. There was no sense of ease or celebration. It hurt me, this story. I even tried (desperately, anxiously) a post-modern approach which involved the author himself making an appearance as the victim of the main character. It was all right, but of course the story hadn't been set up to support this twist, and I felt no inclination to do the work required to make it all line up.

So now I'm back to another idea. This is how it goes.

The Layoff

2009-07-22T07:46:00.000-07:00

And so I was hurled into the shitcan, seeing briefly my parabola recreated in the chrome lid before it raised like a respectful cap to admit me into the cozy darkness of unemployment.

Waiting too Long to Eat

2009-07-14T02:24:00.000-07:00

When you are hypoglycemic, waiting too long to eat is a form of intoxication. Both the experience of reality's gentle recession into that gray tunnel and its vivid happy return as you finally tackle your meal.
Perhaps you are in a meeting, putting in your oar, throwing in your tuppence, all the while in a certain corner of your mind you are perhaps dreaming of a certain tupperware containing a chilled salad -- of course you don't bring your lunch to work, that is too much trouble, but tupperware and tuppence must be thematically connected in your mind and you wrestle with this absurd problem while the conversation before you fades into the background. You take idiotic pleasure in batting away the balloons of hunger while solving impossible puzzles. You remember there is a latin phrase for "one of a kind" or perhaps "in a class of its own" but you cannot recall it. You begin to devise tricks and traps via which you can tease it away from your miserly brain. All the time you are conscious that most of your personality has left your control, and that at any moment you might say or do something absurd, or worse. You remember two incidents which fill you with delicious fear: once in a meeting you heard that a certain manager named Deborah was going to attend a meeting in the third-largest city in Texas and these elements fit into the title of famous pornographic film and despite yourself you uttered that title, were immediately suffused with terror, but nobody had noticed. And further back, in your schoolboy days, when you had missed lunch for some reason and then torn the top from your desk in a blood-sugar blackout and come awake under a ring of laughing faces, your hands held like claws before you.
That all of this madness, this tragedy, this grandeur, could be resolved with a baloney sandwich seems the best joke of all. And so you put that lunch off just a little bit longer...

SSRIs

2009-07-14T02:17:00.000-07:00

I took SSRIs etc for a while. I never liked the side effects particularly that cottony sensation in the groin which no amount of stimulus could overcome, but I took them...
Goodness, I was a strapping young alcoholic back then and I cranked and flailed to the very limit of my strength but nothing resulted and I would be left starting down at that crimson cyclops, my own miniature Bartleby who despite the immense pressures I had brought to bear would still prefer not to.

Bernard's Problem

2009-07-01T04:02:00.001-07:00

And now, as I a prepare to disrobe, I should return to an idea at which I hinted long ago; this malformation of my forelimbs, the twisted musculature of my forearms, had another significant effect on my development. As it was nearly impossible for me to grip anything tightly for more than a few seconds, as I was unable to sustain any task that required digital manipulation, I had always been frustrated in my attempts at self-pleasure and in consequence my penis, which is after all a muscle, suffered from arrested development. When the rest of the boys were putting their male organs through vigorous nightly workouts my penis lay there unmolested, pressing with timid, tremulous sensitivity into the sheets, seeking blindly someone to thrash and cuff it into a hot plash of surrender. I won’t go into the various ways I tried to pleasure myself. Some were quite ingenious. Fruits, bottles, lengths of hose, an electric motor from a belt sander, all of these and more were employed in my quest. I was occasionally successful, but the preparations were complex and I was in constant danger of discovery as all my methods involved the noisome and frantic thrusting of the hips into some stationary object. I walked through my days plagued by a double consciousness; on the one hand there was ordinary life with its breakfasts, lunches, classroom bells, homework, and so on. On the other, there was this constant sense of penile retardation. I fantasized about some insatiable whore who would put my member through intensive remediation with her quick hot hands. I cast jealous glances at the generous portions of hairy meat which my classmates spilled out before the urinals. Whereas their young, slack monsters twitched and spat at the gridded drain near the floor my alabaster nubbin, the size and tensility of a door stopper, fired its steam at a right angle to my body where it exploded against the ceramic; a shower of rebounding droplets tickled my hand (whose involvement was purely decorative) and wet my trousers.
I sometimes dreamed that my brainwaves could mash together a golem who would take me in her clayey clutches and grind me into orgasmic death. I pressed myself against telephone poles, the cool metal of hallway lockers, the rug on my bedroom floor. If longing, if absolute fixation, could bring some event into reality, then I would have been rescued by some quick-fingered angel, and, as life with its zest for a good joke will do, I was presented with what appeared to be this very deliverance. I was in the 10th grade. Standing outside a Taco Bell, waiting for mother to finish her meal – she’d developed an obsession with chalupas – when a sky-blue Buick Regal pulled up next to me, its engine chuffing, and a tinted window disclosed two middle-aged women in a haze of incense and alcohol fumes. They were still eating; the passenger was attempting to bring a stray shred of lettuce into her mouth. The driver asked me if I liked to “scrump” and when I began to stutter she laughed and told me to get into the car. My scalp prickled with terror and joy. I looked around, determined that my mother was still absorbed in her meal, and then dove into the leatherette backseat. I was given a wine cooler. Then the passenger, a big woman with long frosted ringlets, turned to look at me. She wiped her flat, purple mouth with the back of her hand and then, with a voluptuous sigh, thrust a stippled leg over the seat. In another moment she was on top of me.
“Do you like to scrump?” she said.
I could only nod my head. I am afraid my excitement got the best of me and I was finished almost before she started. This development prompted an explosion of ribald laughter inside that parked, smoky car. I feared that I would be put out. I begged for another chance and the woman, with a kindly, gap-toothed smile, shrugged and, after wiping herself with a Taco Bell napkin, remounted. The ladies – my date’s name was Roberta Brennan and her friend was Jolene Mattheson – declared themselves impressed at my stamina and said that very few men or boys could have managed to do that three times in less than ten minutes. I begged them to meet me again here at the Taco Bell or anywhere, I begged them to give me their phone numbers before they put me out of the car and Roberta finally relented with an indulgent smile, saying that she could meet me here in a week, same time. I came back for three months, rain or shine. I waited, but they that Buick Regal never returned. Even now when I see that model rolling down the street a hand squeezes my heart.

Sun and Shade

2009-06-27T02:54:00.001-07:00

He started that screaming again, that nonsensical bawling which at first always makes me want to laugh, simply because the situation is as hopeless as it is absurd. Whatever I ask him to do, he wants to to the opposite:

Do you want to watch watch television.
No, I want to go to school!
Okay let's go to school.
No, no no! I want to watch television!

That last line delivered at an ear-shredding pitch and volume, his body twitching and flopping on his beanbag like an enraged pupa, his features already screwed into an expression of truculence, easy tears standing ready to burst forth in the inevitable next phase of escalation.

So I was driving him to daycare and he was screaming lustily over a series of outrages I'd visited upon him (putting on shoes, getting into the car, buckling the child restraints), soaring into new realms of keening aggravation, when I suddenly stopped the car and, turning to grasp his chin, said,

If you cry like a baby I'm going to treat you like a baby.

I won't pretend it was a great rejoinder on my part. But his screaming often leaves me so agitated that I'll talk complete nonsense, so this was practically a masterpiece of clarity. At least it had some bearing on the situation. And once I'd turned around the shrieks of anger turned to long, lusty wails of desolation, his mouth in the rearview mirror forming a plaintive rectangle, the lower lip outthrust and trembling, cascades of gem-like tears racing down those flushed cheeks. He wanted mommy now. Mommy, mommy, mommy.

Mommy. Is. At. Work, I said.

We turned onto the main road, out of our neighborhood. The marshes nearby gave the air a heavy sulfurous taste and the insects chittered in the grass. The sun, squashed against the horizon, glared at us between the long shadows of the trees and houses. The car was quiet. My son sniffled in this backseat, his little chest puffing and deflating in a long sigh. I reached back my hand and put it on his leg. He looked down, then looked away. I patted his knee a few times, then turned my palm upward. After a moment I felt his little hand slip into mine, and we drove that way, holding hands. We played a game where, when we rolled into sunlight, we said, "sun" and when the shadows fell across the road again we said, "shade." And that's how it is with him. Sun and shade. But that's love I guess.

Song List for Hot Slow Heartbreak

2009-06-24T02:55:00.000-07:00

Lonesome Tonight, New Order
Different for Girls, Joe Jackson
Turquoise Boy, Sonic Youth
Sway, Rolling Stones
Lifeline, Doves
Digging in the Dirt, Gabriel
Life is Long, Byrne
A Case of You, Joni Mitchell
Beautiful World, Colin Hay
I'll Be Your Mirror, Velvet Underground
Throwing It All Away, Genesis

The Crushing Heat

2009-06-21T17:29:00.000-07:00

I would write about the heat but I can't remember it. I think it has scrambled my brain. I was just outside lobbing the wiffle to my son and it seemed to hover and swoon in the soupy air. His red bat whooshed around at what seemed like a fairly decent clip but I was only able to put this together in retrospect. At the time it seemed as if the ball left my hand, I experienced the heat in a timeless thoughtless vacuum, and then I was congratulating my son (my voice sounding just as it does on tape, the tone harsh and the enunciation marked by the timid sloppiness of a tongue-chewer. As if somehow these words were exiting my head without vibrating the bones of my skull) and chasing after the ball as it ticked down the asphalt.

The sun grappled and grabbed, it pulled me out of the shadows and into another senseless struggle, it crept slowly around corners and had at me all over again. I felt my only hope was to outlast it, to let the turning of the earth's mighty shoulders wrest me from its grasp, but by then it might be too late.

And after lunch I'd read, while lying on the sofa in the study, about some artist whose name I can no longer remember who created works of such ludicrous uselessness that I wanted to laugh out loud, his concepts being the sorts of ideas that a thousand gutter punks in a thousand crumbling industrial towns holding in a thousand bong hits in two thousand lungs have uttered with in fits of glassy inspiration. And as I dozed I was conscious of this huge pulsating day holding the house in its golden grip. And I thought that there was no way I would ever be an artist. Because I lacked this man's courage, the courage to bring these horrible concepts to light, the courage to stand by my abominations with such firmness and conviction that others began to believe, too. And in the end the only ones still laughing where the sweaty and heat-addled dilettantes, twitching on old sofas.

After I woke I went to the park where I threw tennis balls to my son and he hit them with an old racket of mine, broken in a fit of anger but still serviceable. The sun had turned the tennis court into a lightless sun, radiating heavy heat up through the soles of my shoes, up the blooming legs of my shorts, into my nostrils. Drops of sweat leaped from my body as if from a burning building. And my son shouted and hit the tennis balls with a dull ping. He was fine.

I went to buy sunglasses at the surf shop but was so stunned from the heat that I fell into the clerk and we did a clumsy dance in the narrow aisle. He was a local surfer -- quite good, I knew him from the lineup, and I did not know how to apologize, so I asked him if he'd been out recently, and we had a conversation which I not only don't remember now, but in which I only barely participated at the time. Someone shouted "gangster rap alert" and the clerk/surfer ran to the counter to turn down a song in which, I now realized, someone had been describing a profane episode involving massive gonads, anal sex, the final stages of turning a girl out. Two young towheaded children stood at the counter, staring up at the speakers with awed expressions. The store was cool and the racks of t-shirts and wetsuits looked so crisp and colorful that I thought I might stay a while. I sat on the wooden steps leading up to the board showroom and waited. With heat like this, there was no reason to hurry.

And Then Comes the Longing and Regret

2009-06-20T02:52:00.000-07:00

Take me out tonight
Oh, take me anywhere, I don't care
I don't care, I don't care
Driving in your car
I never never want to go home
Because I haven't got one, da ...
Oh, I haven't got one

And if a double-decker bus
Crashes into us
To die by your side
Is such a heavenly way to die
And if a ten-ton truck
Kills the both of us
To die by your side
Well, the pleasure - the privilege is mine

Oh, There Is A Light And It Never Goes Out

Up Early

2009-06-12T02:25:00.001-07:00

The anklebones as I lay them on the floor crack like old branches. The belt buckle cling-a-lings. The house is dark, the ventilation system laboring in its sleep. I drink some water. Urinate in the darkness, seated, wiping my slack face. I drink some water, I sit down at the desk. I hope that the muse will reward me today. Just today.

It has been a struggle lately: missing data, fatigue, ennui, spasms of depression and rage, minor plagues visited upon me from within and without. Dreams of boils, of endless staircases, of vast logical problems designed not to yield a solution but to paralyze the brain, of glasses with drooping stems that hang from the face like overcooked spaghetti. Disease bubbling up from some vast reservoir within me. Well, I suppose I will work it all out on the page. I will push on. I refuse to be cowed by these guardians. If my understanding of mythology is correct I am on the verge of a breakthrough.

Data Separation Anxiety

2009-06-11T02:12:00.001-07:00

I lost my data over the weekend, all of it. The various devices failed in succession, like one of those devastating combination blows that one sees on martial arts movies, one of those miracles of timing and choreography,the baddie in perfect position to receive, the hero sweating, bloody, swollen, but calling on his superior inner resources, calling on memories of his loved ones, living and dead, and in this way reaffirming even in close combat the idea of man as a social animal as he strikes home with a back fist to the sneering cheek, a wind-stealing hook to the gut, straight kick to the chest that sends the baddie groaning with sullen resignation, popeyed, through the bamboo walls of the pagoda and into fern-tickled unconsciousness.

First my laptop failed, and my calm, masterful retrieval of ERD commander, my determination to grab my data and resume writing, was foiled by the dreaded BSOD. Ah so. No way to boot the laptop even from a bootable CD. No way to recover anything then. Perhaps my hard drive was bad. This was certainly indicated by my frantic internet searches. And I hadn't backed up in so long! I spent the evening researching different methods of remediation. None quite answered my situation. I called my company's tech support and talked very earnestly to a bored Indian fellow whose grunts of affirmation came at odd times, suggesting a game of Tetris or Breakout in the background. I googled over and over, tried various bootable CDs. Finally, feeling dejected and fearing the worst, I went to lie in bed. There I remembered that I'd saved not only the latest version of my novel but a story that I really really liked onto a USB flash drive. So, I told myself, in the morning you'll have that. You can start with that. It was something. A comfort. It helped assuage to some small degree my creeping dread of being data-less, of starting over from scratch. I have not managed in my life to accrue even modest wealth, but I have been a consistent generator and collector of data and it gives me great comfort to be surrounded by all this hand-selected information. Now it was all gone. But there was that flash drive!

The next morning I went downstairs very early and put the flash drive into the computer, intending to copy the data to my RAID 1 backup device. I was going to back everything up religiously, starting now. The USB drive failed. It simply failed. Nothing could be retrieved. It was a this point that I began to look around, incredulous, waiting to hear a divine chortle, or for the camera crews to come bursting in and get a close up shot of my despair and disbelief. I think I began to mutter to myself. I know I pulled my hair quite a lot, and that I walked around shaking my head. Two failures in 12 hours! Who would have thought it possible? If only I, like the kung-fu villain, could be relieved of this burdensome consciousness, if only I could lie insensate on the forest floor! But no, I went on living every moment, one after the other, I went on with my metaphysical, paranoid speculations as to why, how, to what purpose, this had befallen me.

Bernard

2009-06-10T05:40:00.000-07:00

There is apparently some disagreement between my hosts and myself about the purpose of this narrative, and after considerable debate I have decided to leave the issue to the side for the moment. Whether or not I am some poor deranged lunatic or the wrongfully captured star of a prog-rock band -- I assign us to that genre because it is the least offensive to our intellectual sensibilities, although in truth we have been called punk, garage, grunge and dance, as well as, in a Rotterdam scene-zine, a Beatles tribute act -- whether our band is a critical darling on the rise, just signed to play a series of European dates in support of our masterpiece or just the figment of my imagination, I will leave to the side for the moment. Of course, I know the truth. Genius is judged (and judges) by its own standard. I know that Embully and Lora, Mike the drummer, are already in Brussels on holiday (Lora no doubt dragging Embully on a tour of local guilds, trying as always via her endless speechifying and gymnastic blowjobs to bend his music toward some social issue). They will be expecting me aboard a flight no later than next week, so I do have a few days to humor these good people, to demonstrate my perfect composure, my sanity and rationality.

However I think my readers will find it difficult to distinguish between the confessions of a madman and the compulsory episodes in a rock and roll biography; I know well these stories of triumph and tragedy, of white-hot talent meeting opportunity, of practice sessions and drunkenness, of blood-soaked voodoo rags, of drugged withdrawal from the world, of dangerous spirals, final triumph before an adoring crowd, the apotheosis of commercial and artistic success rendering moot all judgments moral and psychological. Oh, how I devoured these biographies as a child, perched on my mother's chaise lounge in the little parlor off her room, a swollen white bookworm gorging himself volume by pulpy volume. The Beatles, the Stones, Iggy Pop, Sex Pistols, Roxy Music, Bowie, Zappa, Zepplin, the Who (the account of Keith Moon driving his car into the pool of our local Holiday Inn was a turning point. The gods of fame and fortune had visited our little town! I felt a dizzying double consciousness take hold as I looked down from fame's divine dirigible, below which the world lay open like a feast, in which one was endlessly served with mind-expanding drugs and sex, in which the heavy riffs and crushing drums made golden eardrums ring like church bells, I looked down and saw silent moldering Flint pass below while simultaneously I looked up to see the stately shadow of my imagined future pass before the sun. These two worlds, corporeal Flint and the iridescent bubble of my dreams, were passing so close that I felt time and space might collapse. A few years later, during one of my darker episodes I would try to recapture that rapture via a pilgrimage to that fabled pool, but the hotel, adjacent a failed factory, had been turned into a Days Inn and the pool was infested with screaming children and inflatable animals wearing painted expressions of mindless joy.), I have read them all.

And so I have no fear of revealing my life in all its details, both savory and otherwise, for the surpassing brightness which I eventually produced will more than offset any mild pangs of revulsion one might experience on reading these pages. If a little madness appears here and there, well, I won't hold it back. A tincture of madness only serves to dignify the artistic struggle, to give it weight, to rescue if from parody, propaganda, and delusion. Madness lurks in the grand parade of every artist's story, it juggles with the clowns, it feeds peppercorns to the sneezing elephants, it slips onto the stately floats and gropes the sequined beauty queens, but it is ultimately harmless, a stranger with whose vortical orbits are revealed on closer inspection to be a pair of novelty glasses.

I will start then with Formative Experiences, those moments of early promise and portent, and will move then without undue hesitation through the account of the band's origins and our early struggles. When I am finished I will have told my truth. So I will write it. I will write it, fear not. Even this experience, potentially humiliating, I will turn to account! I will have this manuscript bound (featuring the band on the cover, shoulder to shoulder, lean colored silhouettes), I will bound onto Oprah's stage with the hardcover in my hand, it will become a minor classic and its composition under duress in a certain Central Florida psychiatric institution will become part of its legend and in turn part of the greater legend of my life, which will continue to unfold in an endless chain of trancendences. I am only molting, my white-coated friends. I cannot be long restrained by your narrow attention to certain inconsistencies in my memory. Any moment I may shed this heavy skin and take to the sky. Do not be surprised to wake and find me gone, vanished, leaving behind only a faint sensation of melody and light.

Mine was not a typical childhood (but ours was not a typical band – as the reader will soon see). I was not poor although at regular intervals my father would be so overcome with self-loathing over having married money that he would be unable to sleep and could drink only cold coffee from a mug etched with a green spark plug. During these intervals he pored frantically over the biographies of military and business leaders and was excessively grim and gaunt. At dinnertime he would stand at the kitchen table, scapulae projecting through his suit coat, and subject mother and I to windy discourses on Order and Ethics while his mind cautiously revolved about, and sporadically illuminated, his utopian plan for a Culture of Accountability. It was important for every man and woman to find their Purpose, he said. They must heed their Calling. The must make their Mark. My mother listened with bright encouraging nods and wags, accompanying father’s most vehement outbursts with a few hummed bars of a Beatles song. Eventually father would exhaust himself and go haggard and miserable, his mania for order unsatisfied, to bed.

These episodes always culminated in some spectacular feat of austerity on my father’s part (cutting down every tree on our property, a four hundred page letter to the editor of the Flint Journal, a dehydrated collapse at the local police station) and the pedagogic imposition of manual labors upon my easeful childhood. Ergo, when I was in the fifth grade I found myself helping one Richie Moore, son of a company foreman, deliver newspapers. Richie had a sensitive face under a mop of russet hair and his couch-potato thighs were perpetually encased in designer denim. Prior to embarking on our route, we folded and rubber-banded the papers on the sunset shag of his living room floor. The console television was always tuned to MTV. After a few weeks in the Moore milieu my brain was a-whirl with the eyeliner whining of Duran Duran and my hands stained with news ink.

These manual labors were a terrible strain. I suffered from a certain mechanical defect that had driven me on occasion to near madness, and which turned any physical task into a labor of hercules. Now, the defect I am about to reveal is by no means the only flaw in my physique but it stands as the cornerstone of my suffering, it brought into being directly or indirectly all my other maladies and shortcomings. My forearms are excessively short. They are excessively short, these forearms. It is a structural defect passed down from my mother's side of the family, something carried over from snowy and gray-green Scandinavia, and it was only my ancestors' compensatory talent for acquiring and managing money that kept our line from dying out. The dwarven radial, the stubby ulna, these prevent one's musculature from forming correctly and so make it nearly impossible to sustain any task that involves gripping or manipulating. Farming, building, and fishing were all out of the question. Anything that involves what was once called “close work”, that is, any sustained digital manipulation, was impossible. Computer or piano keys, guitar strings, the three coquettish valves atop a trumpet, these mocked me, they lured me into worlds of pain and despair. Oh, I tried! You can only imagine how I tried, how I wrestled like a young lunatic with my toy pianos and xylophones, how I gripped and banged and howled, my toddler's head thrown back in outrage, the clotted muscles below my wrists twitching and cramping. Anyone who has ever struggled with a handicap knows that acceptance comes not all at once but results from the gradual accretion of failure in the mind. And yet, despite all the evidence, some part of one's brain goes on believing in a solution, one is constantly lured into ambushes of ineptitude and frustration. I could list here an endless procession of such moments, an massive collage of Bernard massaging his poor brachioradialis, recoiling from the jumprope, the belt sander, the breakfast spoon, as if from a hot flame. I could show you the present scene, where as I type this narrative I pause every few minutes to rest the flippers, contemplating that therapeutic plume of pressurized water that hovers above the stagnant pond outside.

In addition to the immediate complications which my membership in this short-armed and long-shinned tribe introduced, there were more subtle and more harmful effects which only revealed themselves in my teens, but I will have more to say on that later. For now picture me, a young boy, white and doughy from my sedentary and sportless life, conscious of my body, carrying about my father's opinion of me as a shirker, struggling against my own knotted forearms, my long and ironically elegant hands aching with each twist of the rubber band.

Richie and his family noticed nothing of this, and I betrayed nothing. I planned to do my time in this clapboard gulag and leave it behind me for good, however, as I represented the death of their American dreamlet, Richie’s family attempted to secure my goodwill via endless offers of Twinkies and bottles of Faygo cola on the presumption that all boys were keen, like Richie, to drive themselves to the brink of diabetes. Although I politely demurred, I was touched by their solicitude and I did fall half in love with that hot, cluttered house. Here there was no pressure to perform, no standard of excellence casting its shadows over one's hours. It was a carnival of kitsch in all its manifestations, torrents of schmaltz poured from televisions, pap oozed from radios, confections tumbled from the cupboards, and Riche’s father smoked voluminously, tamping his cigarettes into a little beanbag ashtray. These lurid stimuli glowed in my body while Ideas, nascent and malformed, flared and died in my brain. I felt emboldened in that house, possessed of vague powers. When I told Richie’s sister I was going to be a famous musician, that I was going to create works of nearly impossible difficulty and unutterable complexity, she laughed and rolled her eyes, biting back what was surely a scathing put-down for the sake of her father’s job. Later, however, as I was staggering under the weight of those accursed newspapers, she offered to help me raise my leg over the crossbar of my bicycle and in the process slipped a hand into my crotch where she gave my tender tripartite genitalia a bawdy squeeze.

When did I first know music as my destiny? Even I, with my prodigious mental powers, find it difficult to trace the thread of causality back to its origin; my cortices groan under the load of arranging in logical order the data which memory scatters though the electromagnetic wasteland of the brain, but perhaps it was always there, always within me, wired directly into the motherboard of my Bernardity.

Another Dream

2009-05-29T12:35:00.000-07:00

This time I was in a hotel and knew the girl was in the hotel also, ten floors below me. Rides in the elevators and loiters in the lobby revealed her presence; she was coincidentally in the same areas at the same times as myself however we were forbidden to talk, and moreover I believed that she enjoyed and wanted to perpetuate this painful silence between us.

She was undergoing metamorphosis. Her eyes became tear shaped and deeply purple and her hair, which was brown and naturally curly, grew gloss-black and straight. She reformed along taller and leaner lines, her bodily contours so elastic and swaying as to suggest that she'd dispensed with her skeleton altogether. She had an air of obscure glamour; a kind of elegance that inspired intense desire and fear. Her outfits were made of silk, hovering in that twilight area between mint and beige and gray, adhering to her contours and then fading imperceptibly away to reveal long stretches of close-knit flesh.

I went to my room and resolved not to come out until she'd gone. Dream-time weighed heavily on my hands and I went mad after only few seconds' interment in that tiny plastered room. Sweating, anguished, I crawled through my doorway (contracting into nothingness) and rode down to her floor. The elevator opened on a vast plateau of glass and brass, long staircases leading to glass rooms through which one could see endless diminishing repetitions of this motif. There were vivid ferns and white furs. There were sudden cascades of warm water that ran down staircases to plunge in a white, foaming pool that underlay this terrain of cabled platforms. Her rooms were the last word, fulfilling the wildest dreams of 70's opulence. She appeared before me, at the towering window, wearing a formless shift made of that chromatically unstable fabric. On her wrist was a silver bracelet whose lines were interrupted by a metallic swelling which, when inspected, revealed a tiny holographic image of a clock. This was her way of telling me that it was too late. She had grown a dusting of fine golden hair which lay in sweeps and whorls against her skin. I turned around and began my search for the elevator, terrified lest I fall into that white boil below where, I somehow knew, she was floating at her ease.

Charming Domestic Scene: Electric Boundary

2009-05-25T02:15:00.000-07:00

After six days of torrential rain the sun appeared yesterday, haltingly at first, peeping from behind long triangular wedges of gray and lapis which, sliding atop one another in a rapid shuffling motion, defeated the eye's attempt to find the sky. As the day wore on however sun's wan wan disc which lay so deeply ensconced began to blaze in patches of watery blue, and then the clouds, streaming up from the south, separated into long cottony furrows and the sun once again held sway.
I took the son to the beach and let him watch the surfers dropping into the big abrupt sections of gray glass. He climbed on the porous, encrusted rocks near the dunes, his little trouser seat wet with the seawater that had collected in their dents and pores. The sand was suddenly swarmed with tourists aggressively pursuing their long-delayed leisure, smearing one another with sun screen, throwing frisbees and balls, hurling their blubber into the molesting waves. My son grew bored, so we went to the the park, a shady, tree-sheltered place with tennis courts, basketball courts, swings, and slides. A pair of homeless men sat on the slides, absorbed in some earnest debate, their faithful bicycles wilting and dreaming against a nearby tree. Occasionally the men would pass a cup between them, savoring its contents, licking their lips, and under the heady influence of this elixir allowing their ragged voices to rise in passionate declaration. Then their summit was interrupted by my son's recreational shrieks and, with stares of blank disgust, they slowly dismounted the swings and wobbled off on their bicycles, leaving crinkling wrappers, empty cups, and a grimy cloth bundle on the swing set, a last memento of their debate. The anti-native Americans. Managing on every occasion, by dint of inculturation and ingenuity to produce some bit of trash. I wondered what it said about our society that even the lowest layer in our social strata pursued the production of waste with the same eagerness as the rest of us?

After my son went down for a nap I decided to bury the dog's electric wire. It is a simple but ingenious device consisting of a central transmitter into which a loop of wire is plugged and a collar which, encountering the radio signal sent along this loop of wire, will chirp in warning and then deliver an electrical shock from two metal posts. The dog, beside herself over the wildlife that had been evidencing in the wake of the rains, had already broken free twice and was hardly comporting herself with the dignity one might expect from a 10 year-old grand dame. Putting out the wire itself is no great trouble; it's getting the wire underground for the entire circumference of the yard that can be laborious and problematic. I drew a simple schematic, a simple plan describing the path the wire would take, and then it was time to get to work digging the two-inch trench into which the wire would go. I positioned my old, flat-bladed shovel against the sodden earth and pressed down with my foot. Nothing. I jumped a bit. Nothing. I jumped higher, landing violently on the top of the shovel, and was rewarded with the loud crunch of root. I'd forgotten that Florida grass is one big tangle of runners. Digging through this layer was like digging through a woven welcome mat. It would take one big push at a time, one shovel blade at a time. Two hours later, panting and dizzy, I was done with the trench. Then, crouching and sidling, I shoved the wire with my fingertips into the warm body of the earth, one small section at a time. When my legs gave out I would sit panting in the grass, watching the clouds slide and twist above me. I thought that if I worked hard enough I would get some peace, both within and without. I thought that if I could finish this task and demonstrate the working barrier to the dog, things would get better.

Charming Domestic Scene Regarding Aldous Huxley

2009-05-23T02:19:00.000-07:00

Was recently complaining of no book to read, and so was given Point Counterpoint by Aldous Huxley. Hadn't read much by Huxley, like every other college student I'd devoured Brave New World and his essay on Perception, but I did recall a few years ago I'd picked up a volume of his short stories at a library sale and been appalled by their shoddy construction and pedestrian characterization.
Still, I had opened my mouth, and here was this book in my hands. So, I launched myself into Huxleyland, my spirits buoyed by a dust jacket that proclaimed it a "Modern Masterpiece by Modern Master", or something to that effect.
Imagine my dismay to discover that Huxley the prose stylist was even worse that I'd suspected, the worst sort of pedant! Here was an essayist trying to write fiction, which inspires in me the same sort of dread one might experience watching a nurse perform open-heart surgery. He blunders about, writing everything that comes to mind in hopes of hitting on a good image or simile. And he occasionally makes contact, but of course by then you're too exhausted to care. Just one example, and I won't get this exactly right, but paraphrasation will (trust me) suffice: An old laboratorious gentleman pauses amidst his beakers to capture a faint melody, identifying it as Bach, charmed, transfixed. And there's a passage preceding the precious groaner (which still I withhold), something about the melody tracing itself on the air, which is nice enough, but then Huxley follows with, "The hairs in the old man's auditory canal were washed about like seaweed in a heavy sea."

That's all I have to say. I rest my case. Anyway, suffice it to say I was not making very good progress on Huxley's opus, and it was suggested by the good lady who gave me the book that I found it distasteful only because it had been her suggestion. To which I replied (and humor me, poor reader, as I so rarely get the good lines, as I so rarely get the zinger): "I don't like it because it's a bad book."

One thing I didn't mention: Mrs. Dalloway (a masterpiece) was published in 1925. Huxley's book came out in 1928. Did Huxley (oh did you, Aldous?) get swept away by Woolf's genius? Did he fall prey to the anxiety of influence? I must know the reason for this book's grand ambition and monumental badness. It shows every sign of loving care, of immense devotion and grinding toil, all details lovingly rendered. This is not a careless book, just a horribly misguided one. How did it come about?

The Lighthouse

2009-05-22T02:07:00.000-07:00

Recently changed the son's daycare to a place less than eight minutes away, a cute little place on the island that pops hopefully out from the backside of a curve and is denoted by sign upon which a smiling orange fish is followed by five multicolored minnows. It's a brand-new daycare run by two sisters and maintained by their vigorous retiree father who can always be found with some implement of mechanical remediation in his hand. The old man greets my son in the morning wearing the same forest-green polo shirt and wire spectacles, his gray curls in a state of dishevelment which he occasionally tries to address by dragging his palm across his forehead. He has the charming tendency, peculiar to certain grandfatherly types, of beaming with incredulous approval as my son hangs up his backpack and removes (with a wrench and a grunt) his shoes. The old man would clearly trade his wrenches and brooms for a chance to play games with the children, and conflict between duty and dalliance always leaves him a bit confused.
The two daughters, Masters of Education or Masters of Development (although I see the diplomas on their office wall every day I can never remember later the exact contents --the ornate font and the sunburst seal defeat my comprehension), are dismissive of "pop" and through the careful control of tone and glance direct him back to his list of chores before he gets himself invited to playtime.
The last week it has rained every day from sunrise to sundown and then on into the darkness, the quality of the precipitation ranging from prim gray slants to monsters of moisture that tried the windows with spongy hands.
I often ask my son, as we are driving to school, when he can see the lighthouse. At a certain stage in our journey it becomes visible over the treetops, and in response to my query he rocks in his child seat, craning his neck, struggling to see past the automotive obstructions. When he sights the lighthouse he is very proud. I then ask him what color is the lighthouse? And for the first sunny week he always responded the same way: "It's white and black and red."
This was true: white and black spirals running up its length, a red metal cap. However, when I asked him the same questions on a recent rainy trip, he (after the obligatory craning and rocking) said, "It's brown and gray and orange."
And so it was! Behind those gauzy curtains of rain, its stark coloration transmuted, the lighthouse screwed into the sky above the vivid foliage of the park. And then, as we rounded the turn that would bring Jonathan's daycare into our view, a trick of perspective made the lighthouse withdraw smoothly back into the treetops, as if it had never existed.
Sometimes just for a moment or two I imagine that I can see the world through my son's eyes -- massive, magical, infinite in power and promise.

Brett Settle

2009-05-19T14:10:00.000-07:00

I like this name. It sounds like a coin spinning to a stop.

The Dream

2009-05-17T02:22:00.000-07:00

A simple enough dream, really. Nothing too outrageous or illogical about the plot, this dream did not demand the extreme credulity of some (I am a fish, time is strapped to a spacial axis, powdered donuts with pulses and tender feelings), but played out in smooth, logical fashion: I was a member of the Detroit Red Wings whose success on the ice was matched only by my failures in my personal life. I was in love with a woman who, tiring of my inability to make commitments or decisions, had ceased to love me. Each time I went over the boards for my shift, the heavy syrup of this romantic disaster sloshed about in my limbs, gumming my movements. My skate blades hacked at the ice (the dull sound curiously isolated) to little effect, the hockey equivalent of dream-quicksand, as I tried to join the action.

Then, I woke. I think my son cried out from the other room. I'm not sure. Two cats were fighting in the street below me, and to my disoriented brain these sounds registered as police sirens, a party, a woman in prolonged ecstasy, a baby crying. I got up and paced, then came back to bed.

When the dream resumed the woman I had loved and lost was sitting in the stands, eating popcorn. I went over the boards and, stealing the puck at the blue line, glided in on short breakaway. I went high, the shot practically vertical and finding the top of the net just inside the post. The crowd went wild. My heart hammered in my chest as I scanned the roaring arena, looking for her, but she was gone.

Holy Working Man

2009-05-16T17:33:00.000-07:00

Work van. Through the back windows one could see steel shelves loaded with various tubes and small gray motors. Spools of wire hung from hooks on the ceiling. Grizzled driver, paisley bandanna swaddling skull, sunrise illuminating the filamentary hairs that stood out evenly from his bare shoulders to his forearms. As he stopped at a red light the driver turned on the radio, then reached down and retrieved a bowl of cereal. Three quick spoonfuls, his rose-red ears flexing with each chomp, his head nodding to some song on the radio. The light turned green, the bowl was replaced with a last reluctant glance, and the van lurched forward, switching lanes so quickly that its payload wobbled and rolled, and then it shot forward with a carburetive hiss and was soon out of sight.
I thought to myself, "that man is having a good day."

In the Cabin

2009-05-14T08:03:00.000-07:00

In that cabin of shellacked log, with Mary Jane Masters quivering below me, a certain diminutive glazed forelimb which had been heretofore camouflaged against those piney walls suddenly revealed itself as the missile of my ecstatic lust.

Katie

2009-05-09T03:32:00.000-07:00

Oh, Katie, Katie. She of the baggy sweatshirts upon which Mickey Mouse danced, from which the airbrushed faces of her cats regarded the world with crosseyed suspicion, she of the pixie haircut and the practical sneakers with the thick soles, she of the pink doilies on her end tables, of the printed pajama bottoms which she wore tucked into her snow boots. Katie who meekly awaited her unalterable destiny. Her pinkness, her dewy eyes, her malleable limbs were all captivating but from the first Claude was aware of her haphazard construction, he had read in her lineaments the chain-smoking crone who yanked slot handles while rubbing, for luck, a picture of two grimy grandchildren, who crowded her house with collectible figurines. Katie’s shift from youth to old age would be practically instantaneous, dictated by genetics and the insalubrious lifestyle of her social class. However (Claude raised a mental and actual forefinger) she had the makings of a good mother.

Hall and Oates

2009-04-12T12:14:00.000-07:00

We went to see Hall and Oates play the Saint Augustine Amphitheater this weekend. Before the show we had a quick dinner at a local restaurant that had moved all its tables outside to accommodate a small indie show.The fans were hanging about outside, waiting for the band to finish setting up, and were easily identified by their penchant for black and the orderly rows of small tattoos marching into their sleeves. They talked earnestly amongst themselves, snapped pictures with cell phones, and sometimes hopped up and down in place, their chain wallets jingling, their straw fedoras unsettled on their heads. A tremendously thin young man with black glasses and a mop of sandy curls held up a cardboard sign that proclaimed his need for a ticket. Later, possibly trying to carry of some subterfuge, he entered the queue only to be unceremoniously ejected when he reached the reception table that had been set up just outside the restaurant.

My wife and I ate our sensible dinner and felt very old.

We parked a few blocks away from the amphitheater and joined the rest of the crowd walking through the falling darkness. Ahead of me a was a gentleman wearing black pants pegged at the ankles, a mustard yellow shirt, his hair slicked with gel, his fingers smoothing a black John Oates-esque mustache. The crowd was a bewildering cross-section; gone was the stylistic uniformity of the indie show. Young louts in Slayer t-shirts mingled with mature ladies in nautical jerseys. Alcohol was carried and camouflaged in every possible fashion. One gentleman carried his beer bottle inside a sheaf of papers, raising the entire structure to his mouth when he took a drink.

Our seats were center right, perhaps 50 feet from the stage. Next to us was a group of Australian couples in their mid-40s. The ladies were dressed in a vague yachting style, with sweaters tied around necks, white pants, and boat shoes. They shrieked and waved their arms while the men, all sitting together, drained their beers without undue exertion. Then the crowd roared and the band came onstage.

Daryl Hall wore jeans, a black t-shirt, a leather coat, and sunglasses. John Oates work a snug jersey and a pair of black jeans. Gone was the signature mustache. They took their places on two stools while the rest of the band filed in. The saxophone player wore lavender suit, his long gray hair falling back over his shoulders in a ragged cascade. A percussionist in a short-sleeved turtleneck and dress pants picked up a pair of maracas, the drummer took his place behind the kit, and the band launched into one of their familiar hits. Several things stood out as noteworthy: First, Daryl Hall appears to have been living in a cryogenic chamber someplace, and his abilities with this technology apparently far exceed Michael Jackson's because he really does look, at least at a distance of 50 feet, precisely as he did in the 80s. The long hair still bounces and flows with the same shimmering elasticity as ever. The voice is pitch-perfect, absolutely assured, and so strong as to make you believe he's holding a gear in reserve, some special set of notes in a register only he could reach. He makes it look easy, flowing from one song to the next, hitting all the little soulful flourishes he built into his songs so many years ago and adding some extras here and there. It was somewhat disconcerting to watch him; one felt that somehow they were looking into a time warp, or witnessing the results of some Faustian bargain.

John Oates was not quite as faithful a replica of his 80's persona, but he filled the bill quite well. He's spread out a bit, gone somewhat egg-shaped, so that his arms seemed to rest against the bulge of his abdomen. The mustache is also gone, but the lid of unruly dark curls remains intact. He played the lead on many of the songs and showed his chops on several difficult solos.

They played all the hits, a non-stop onslaught of hits, from Maneater to Family Man to Sara Smile to One on One. The crowd was in raptures. All around the amphitheater one could see the ladies begin to rise, to flow into the aisles, to throw arms above their heads, to grind and shimmy. There was a collective sense of time rolling back, as if Hall and Oates's uncanny ability to hold the years at bay had been transmitted, via their music, to the dancing women. The ladies next to me were in ecstasies, holding beers aloft, whistling, singing the lyrics, making whoop-whoop sounds when the band entered a breakdown or a solo. The gentlemen in attendance were more subdued. Some approached their dates cautiously from the rear and pressed their hips forward in an awkward but unapologetic attempt to cash in on the sexual energy that had been let loose in the crowd. They were not rebuffed. The ladies didn't care; they were captivated by Daryl Hall's radiant presence and, without taking their eyes from the stage, they reached back to squeeze buttocks or ruffle hair, transmuting these awkward accountants and mechanics into the golden god onstage.

But there was nothing unattractive or disappointing or shopworn in any of this. The band was clearly having a wonderful time, every one of them. A cool breeze blew through the venue, forcing Daryl Hall to run his hands through that gorgeous hair. He smiled and blew kisses. The saxophonist strode downstage in his purple suit blew his solos at the stars. The percussionist danced as if he'd never danced before, and even the sober John Oates cracked a few wry smiles as the crowd bathed him in its lusty cheers. The songs held up well after all these years and the band's skill made them work beautifully in a live setting. This was no indie show. There were no important Ideas put forward. No earnest speeches from the stage. No long and challenging instrumental passages. This was all about having a good time, this was about raising the average to the sublime. And for two hours and two encores, Hall and Oates did just that better than anyone.

Cheese for Me

2009-04-05T18:45:00.000-07:00

I was living in Atlanta at the time, in an apartment above a real estate office in midtown. You turned the faux-brass handle and entered a short hallway whose carpeting looked like the pelt of some malnourished cat. A pair of bedrooms on your left. On the right was the door to the bathroom and just past that the small kitchen. Beyond the kitchen was a tiny living room which had been turned into a third bedroom by dint of large sheets of pink Styrofoam that our third roommate had scored from a construction site nearby. The name of an industrial manufacturer was embossed diagonally at upon these sheets at 18 inch intervals. It was a small apartment, made smaller by the makeshift room, but well-supplied with views. Each of the bedrooms looked out on the city and the window at the back of the kitchen led out to a flat rooftop from which one could see the trees above Piedmont Park.

We took possession in October and by the middle of that month I'd found a dealer. I worked at a software company all the way out in the suburbs and each day I'd drag my drug-poisoned body through the clogged channels of the city to my job in the basement of one of those office complexes that are typically occupied by dentists and insurance agencies. I shared my cube with a software developer named Ernest Shanks. He was a saggy black man who favored shiny pants and shirts and who talked incessantly about all the money he'd made in his career as a consultant. His confidence was in sharp contrast to my daily terror of being exposed as a disinterested addict who'd lied on his resume. We had company meetings in a little boardroom that had been outfitted with garish carpet, a faux-mahogany table, and a bay window that seemed more suited to the hosting of pork-chop dinners or the reading of Christian Science literature than the machinations of a future software giant. Our CEO was a short man with a brittle comb-over who held himself very erect and who constantly swigged cans of strawberry slim-fast from a small paneled refrigerator against the wall. His speeches were accompanied by the refrigerator's contented purr and the loud gurgles of his stomach as the slim-fast established its laxative effect. Sometimes, with a slight wince, he would lean his fists on the table and then, after a moment's pause, he would hurry to the bathroom just off the conference room, pulling shut the hollow door with self-conscious firmness. We would wait quietly while the exhaust fan's roar was interrupted by a quick series of muffled explosions. Moments later the CEO would reappear, serene, contemplative, his tones softer, exuding confidence.

Autumn came on fast and the days were gray, the gutters overflowing with the brilliant pulp of fallen leaves. By the time I left work in the evenings it was already dark and as I drove back to that little apartment, just another set of of brake lights in a river of red, I was frequently gripped by a feeling of loneliness so intense that it approached a kind of ecstasy. The gray office towers floated like ships above the misty expressway, and as their countless lighted windows loomed out of the fog I felt my anonymity, my smallness, my lostness. It was easy enough for me to justify another visit to the dealer.

During the Christmas holidays my brother went to New Orleans to visit his friend, an avuncular lawyer he'd known since college. I was invited to go but declined. I knew they'd spend all day drinking and visiting blues clubs and I was not in the mood for music. Our roommate in the foam compartment went to South Carolina and was then scheduled to represent some obscure magazine at a political conference in California. I was all alone. This idea both thrilled and terrified me. I had become merciless with myself. I was at a great distance from my body and used it only as a vehicle for pleasure. I'd learned to ignore its protestations. I slept very little and ate only when it was necessary. With nobody about and no work to regulate me I was afraid I might overdose. To guard against this possibility I instructed my dealer to switch me, for the holidays, from heroin to cocaine. On the 23rd I began my new regimen. At first everything was fine. I deposited a yellow mound of cocaine on the office desk I'd rescued from the curb outside a local fire station. It had metal drawers and plastic top made to resemble highly varnished wood. From the desk I looked out on the sodden city, a field of gray in which red and amber lights twinkled. During one of my trips to the store for cigarettes or beer I returned with with an old issue of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. I vaguely remembered bargaining with the Pakistani behind the counter and of pressing bills up against the bulletproof glass to induce him to slip it into the bag with my sweating bottles.

I worked my way through the cocaine. The skin of my face felt loose. My eyes floated in pools of warm oil. My hair seemed to hover like smoke above my twitching scalp. I found a picture in that magazine of a girl standing among the rocks of a dry creek bed. The day was gray and a chain of small mountains brooded in the background. She wore rubber boots, a yellow bikini, and a brown sweater. She was looking back over her shoulder at the camera with an expression of painful shyness in which one could discern glimmers of enigmatic hope. I was fixated on that picture. It was not perfect. Her bottom overhung her long tanned legs in what seemed a most unflattering way. It was an unflattering picture and yet here it was in the magazine. It seemed an unflattering picture and yet I could not stop looking. And it occurred to me that some photo editor had perhaps anticipated my state of mind exactly, the dreary darkened apartment in an empty city, the mound of cocaine, the overflowing ashtrays, the feckless blob of sentiment and adipose moving restlessly about inside, waiting for a deliverance that would never come. It was a picture from the end of a world and perhaps from the end of my world. There was something there, in that picture. The sky was so cloudy, the terrain so forbidding. The girl must be cold but she bore it patiently. Her little bikini. It was not so unflattering. I could not stop looking. It seemed to me that if I could only focus long enough I would come to some understanding that would set me free. It seemed strange to me that the sight of this girl filled so perfectly the void in my heart. I held the magazine up to the light, I went to lie on my bed and contemplate it there in complete silence. Sometimes the girl would waver and disappear in a blaze of thick blue fire, only to emerge again with white boots and gray skin and a black bikini, her lips moving as if trying to tell me something, something.

I allowed myself to fall in love. I lay still and imagined our life together from start to finish. I began to talk to her, to tell her all, my fears and my dreams. I told her about my crazy fantasies of transcendence and easeful death. She listened to all with an expression that was at once fixed and mutable. I could see small waves of feeling pass across her face from time to time. I loved that face. I felt its lines were written on my heart and that I would never forget her. I cried and held her close when I became paranoid and could not sleep. Sometimes I would press myself up against the wall, tennis racket in hand, while I waited for the footfalls on the stairs to reach the landing and for the doorknob to turn. She did not like this behavior. She felt I was losing my grip on my sanity. I told her that I might doubt anyone or anything but never her. And I told her that if I could survive this time in my life I might become a decent man who could treat her with the care and tenderness which she deserved.

When my brother and his lawyer friend found me I tried to tell them everything. I'd written four pages in a notebook and was attempting to crack the code of my own nonsensical scrawl. They made me drink vodka and V8, and then they ordered a pizza. The lawyer took me out on the little back roof where he spread out a poncho on the wet shingles and, patting it with his hand, invited me to sit. He told me it was time I considered a change in my life's direction. The night was not cold. The sodden bare branches of the trees seemed to wind like roots through the darkness. The lawyer's face hung in the air nearby, glowing like a lantern. I closed my eyes and focused on the soothing vibrations of his voice and the way it relaxed my aching brain. When I came back inside they made me eat two pieces of pizza, cut into small pieces and softened in a bowl of beer. Then they led me into my bedroom. My brother had cleaned. The cocaine and the ashtrays were gone. The carpet had been vacuumed. The sheets were clean and the magazine was gone. I was very glad the magazine was gone. I didn't want to see the girl again; she'd left me heartbroken and I resolved to never think of her again, but when I closed my eyes she reappeared, twitching, shuddering, palpating her limbs like a crazy woman. A buzzing sound came from her mouth. She did not remember me at all.

Man on Street

2009-03-31T02:16:00.000-07:00

As a general rule anyone walking along the side of a busy road is going to be interesting in some way although even here, two types predominate. Most common is the vagrant: faded eyes, lank hair, tattered clothing, an expression of lust and longsuffering. The other type is the accidental pedestrian: sweat-stained, clutching gas can, tottering through the grass with an aggrieved expression.

But the really choice subjects belong to neither of the above categories. The other day I saw a young man strutting along the grassy median, clad in black pants and a tight black shirt, wearing a black backpack. His head was shaved in a Marine Corps fade and his red, round face was twisted in an expression of disdain. He pumped his clenched fists with each stride, as if pounding the belly of some invisible victim. He was clearly enraged but with what or whom I would never know. He slipped into the rear view mirror, an anonymous black shape beside the endless river of automobiles.

The Dream

2009-03-31T02:07:00.001-07:00

In a dream last night it had all come together. I'd figured it out. I was a successful writer. I had a following -- modest, but devoted. I was earning a decent income pursuing my craft. I was happy with my position.

I would never be popular: I saw that. I could not sway the crowd but I might appeal to a little circle of kindred minds. The English critics, perhaps, would recognize me as one of the Celtic school by reason of the melancholy tone of my poems; besides that, I would put in allusions!

Yes, it's true that my dream may have resembled Little Chandler's musings as he made his way through the streets of Dublin but by GOD Little Chandler never worked as hard or as long as me.

The Randy Gent

2009-03-31T02:06:00.000-07:00

He belonged in another era, when randy gents of his type had so many outlets; starlets, prostitutes, charwomen. Trysts in hansom cabs, her pudgy hand framed against the slanting rain -- steaming horses, spasms of engorgement, satiation

Revolution Nein

2009-03-29T04:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning I took my son to the carousel park. We were early enough to interrupt a man working out amongst the playground equipment. He was in his mid-forties, wearing black from head to toe, and when he saw us approaching he frowned and exhaled violently through his nose. He had a strong but poorly defined build. As we timidly approached the swings he dropped to do a series of on one-armed pushups, then sprang up to the overhead bar where he executed a series of vigorous pull-ups, counting off a number somewhere in the 300s. He finished off this his creepy calisthenics by attaching plastic handles (which he’d secured to his leg with a black Velcro strap) to the chains of two swings and performing a routine that vaguely resembled the Olympic rings. The police were setting up a bicycle safety exhibition on the mulch and, as the fitness buff wobbled and groaned in his awkward flights, one of the policemen began to stare him down. The fitness buff finished his routine, re-attached the handles to his leg, and then ran down the street, only looking back when he’d crossed the intersection.

There were three officers. One older and bald, his once-powerful build gone to flab but still impressive in the leather-and-polyester of his uniform. He stalked around the tent, taking pictures with a digital camera. A younger officer unpacked bicycle helmets and the third officer, a tall and genial black man, filled out paperwork. Each of the policemen was accompanied by their preferred mode of transport. The older officer represented the police car, the younger the bicycle, and the black officer the motorcycle. My son was partial to the motorcycle. He asked to sit on the seat and when the big policeman reached down to shake his hand he gazed upward with undisguised awe. He was given a badge-shaped sticker which he patted now and then to make sure it hadn’t fallen off.

I took my son back to the swings while the policemen finished their set-up. The wind was blowing hard from the north but the sun was bright. Trucks and motorcycles ground through the intersection beyond the sleeping carousel. The policemen were talking about AIG. The older one rubbed his tan baldness as he scolded his younger colleagues for their anger over the bonuses.

“We’re shareholders in this company now. The taxpayer,” he said.

The younger policeman squinted.

“Which means we own this damned thing, and we’re letting these senators go crazy up there in Washington. This witch hunt, it’s driving down the value, don’t you get it?”

“You think we should just pay these guys?”

The older policeman took a sip from a soft drink, grimaced, and said, “You tell me. You think we can stand to have more failures in the financial system? Or you think we need to move on already?”

“People just don’t like it,” the younger one said.

“There’s lots of things people don’t like. That don’t mean it ain’t the right thing to do. Just pay ‘em and move on. It’s done now. You know what I’m saying? Let it go. It’s done.”

“There’s going to be a revolution,” the black officer said. “And people like you and me, man, we’re going to have to fight them back.”

The older officer pondered this, shrugged, and said, “I plan on being retired by then.”

I had come to this park a few months ago with my father and he’d told me, as we watched my son go up and down the slides, that things were bad in the heartland of America and that a secret movement was afoot to buy up all the guns available in preparation for a revolution. It would happen in the next five years, he said. Riots in the streets. Domestic terrorism. Lynchings. Currency collapse. Famines. Independent states. When I scoffed at this he only nodded his head and said it was always people like me who were caught unprepared and swept away in the tide. I’d put all of this out of my mind at the time. When you’re trying to raise a two year-old you don’t have much time to contemplate revolution.

But then last week I got an email from my uncle in which a Christian blogger predicted a rash of fires on the Eastern seaboard. God would punish us, the blogger said, by destroying New York, Boston, and DC. Of course, this fellow had been predicting the immolation of the east coast for the last 10 years. If he kept it up he was bound to be right eventually. And, I reminded myself, my father’s aggrieved and dramatic temperament had always been fixated on the overthrow of power. Still, it seemed strange to have heard the same idea from three independent sources. Would it really get that bad? Were we headed for total collapse? It made me tired and slightly sick to think about it. I had a little boy, after all. I wanted him to grow up in a stable and peaceful society.

It was a delightfully crisp morning. The sun sparkled on the backs of the slow-moving cars. My son kicked his little legs and yanked on the creaking chains, his solemn expression racing through thick lattices of shadow. It was a springtime morning and the world was pursuing the joy of rebirth, oblivious to our human problems. It was in this tangible, actual, and immediate world that my son still lived. He had not yet learned to substitute a collective human fiction for the simple reality of life. And standing there, pushing him, I could almost remember what it was like to live that way.

Higher Power

2009-03-15T19:03:00.000-07:00

At the request of a friend of mine I will elaborate here on a line of thought which I have been pursuing for the last few weeks. It all started with a contemplation of the third step (never investigated the twelve steps? Congratulations, you're still in the gilded era of your addiction or you were born healthy), which says, "Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the power of God as we understand it."

I've always had a problem with this step. I could never take it seriously. Oh, I would say the prayers but I didn't like them much, and no matter how long I "acted as if" my experience with my higher power just didn't seem to improve. I was still going it alone. After eight years I began to hear those recovery-blues whispers: "Is this all there is?"

A few years go I was in a meeting when a strange-looking fellow walked in. He had a red fleshy face, an unkempt mustache, and unruly hair which he slicked across his head. Dandruff lay across his shoulders like fresh snow and the buttons of his shirt strained against his expanding belly. He was always tugging at something: his nose, ears, shirt tail, mustache, blue jeans. He was one of those rare birds who appear unexpectedly in your meetings and who leave without warning: a mad scientist of recovery. When he spoke I experienced a sense of freedom and exhilaration which I'd come to associate with great works of art or spiritual truth. He told me to read Joe Klass's "Twelve Steps to Happiness." I did. Then he disappeared.

So now as I considered my situation I remembered Joe Klass's advice to always look closely at steps which are not working as designed. I thought about the second half of the third step: "as we understand..." and I remembered the conversation between Bill W. and Ebby in the kitchen. This is one of the canonical episodes of recovery literature. Ebby tells Bill to choose his own conception of God.

I really thought about this. I really considered it from all angles and decided maybe, just maybe, this was worth investigating. I was tired of serving an agenda-driven higher power. I didn't want to pray any more to a god who had some master plan into which I must fit. I am selfish. I want to be happy and get what I want. And the Gods to which I have prayed aren't very helpful. The more I thought about it the more I realized that my conception of God encompassed (and elicited) emotions like fear, loss, loneliness and despair.

I became convinced that I was not praying to God at all. As matter of fact, when considered dispassionately, I was praying to the devil, Satan, whatever you want to call it. I was praying to an unintelligent, disdainful, agenda-driven, penurious, punitive deity and asking it (soul a-tremble with fear and foreboding) to have its way in my life.

So I decided to create my own God. It was fairly easy. I just listed 10 characteristics of this deity in no particular order. I review these characteristics before I say my third step prayer. Things are much easier now. As a matter of fact the higher power defined below is in direct opposition to the one I used to have (and the one which unfortunately is hardwired into my brain, necessitating a review of these characteristics each time I pray). So with out further rambling, here are 10 characteristics of my higher power (whom I choose not to call anything).

1. Intelligent -- the smartest guy on the block. Reads the New Yorker, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Science Magazine cover-to-cover on Sunday afternoons while the neighboring gods grind away on their heavenly lawns. He can read Proust in the original and has read and understood all Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. You get the idea.

2. Wants me to live authentically, to be my true self and would rather I err on the side of directness and authenticity.

3. Provides me with talents for my enjoyment and thinks I am already pretty special. Wants me to use my talents fearlessly and joyfully.

4. Doesn't want me to think too hard about solutions. Is at work on solutions and will reveal them in his time for me to admire, like a chess master.

5. Loves me dearly, which really means that everything I do delights him and amuses him to some degree. When he goes to hang out with the other deities he takes a picture of me in his wallet and bores them all with it. And after the picture has made the rounds, he props it against the water carafe and glances at it while he's eating.

6. He will solve any problem that I bring him. No questions asked.

7. He loves my writing.

8. Doesn't mind a bit of a mess, and when he feels hemmed in by his books and papers he bids them alight and fly back to their perches on his shelves.

9. Has never hurt anyone, not even people who deserve it.

10. Rewards me richly just for being me.

Punk Rock Chicks

2009-02-11T03:34:00.000-08:00

In the cold war era, when our biggest perceived threat was a Russian nuclear attack (after which we'd all revert to savagery and shamble about the hills on mutated appendages), nobody was very concerned with airport security. This was particularly true in Flint, MI. The airport there, which at the time was named merely Bishop Airport but has since become Bishop International Airport, had an observation deck which could be reached by ducking down a hallway and then climbing two flights of stone steps. There was a metal door, a glassed-in observation booth, and then past the booth another metal door which led to porch of sorts, tucked behind a wall and bordered by a steel railing. From there you could watch the jets whine and rumble down the runway and you could hear the desultory conversations between the semaphore men. You were hidden from view there, tucked behind that blank wall. If the observation deck was empty (as it was many nights) then the pursuit of your amorous designs was impeded only by your shyness or self-doubt. I had once come up on the deck to see a couple lying in the very farthest dark corner of the porch, his spasming back and her loosely draped legs making it clear that they'd abandoned themselves to their desire. But to encounter someone else on the observation deck was a rarity; most everyone watched the planes from the comfort of the glassed-in lounge.

I took girls there, punk rock girls in leather coats who wore safety pins in their ears and noses. They had colorful plumes of hair cascading over shaved napes and combat boots laced up on their calves and they mostly tasted of smoke and candy. They put their mix tapes into my cassette player as we rode to the airport and when we arrived at the observation deck they rarely bothered much with conversation. We kissed and groped. In the winter I let my icy hands roam free inside their leather coats. Nothing really important happened. Occasionally we'd actually watch the planes. You could see the pilots, erect and epauleted in the yellow cockpit, talking to one another or twiddling knobs. The punk rock chicks had a special hatred for anyone in uniform and the bolder ones would shout profanity into the deafening whine of the engine. This attitude struck me as brave and sad; most of the girls were, like me, from working-class houses and a uniform of almost any kind represented a step upward. But to these girls uniforms represented the abuse of power, nothing more.

After high school, however, their attitudes were modified somewhat. One of their boyfriends would enter the armed services -- out of economic necessity, via a court order, or with the desire to better himself -- and then these punk rock girls carried about with them a picture of some shaved Marine at attention before a powder-blue backdrop, squinting at the camera with a mixture of defiance and fear. When these boys came home on leave they were loved extravagantly by their punk rock girlfriends and once they'd ditched the uniform for blue jeans and combat boots, they looked like any other skinhead. By unspoken consent we all pretended their life in the army was only a dream. Nobody talked about it. And the punk rock girls loved them up on porches, in basements, and behind stacks of chairs at the hall shows. When leave was over the girls went to the airport again but this time they stood on the observation deck to watch an olive-drab figure cross the tarmac and disappear into the airplane. Perhaps they took a friend. Perhaps they shared a bottle with a friend as they waved the lumbering plane into the sky.

Mallards

2009-02-10T03:14:00.001-08:00

This is going too fast. I thought that yesterday, on the highway, as I was driving little man to the mall for some shopping, and the more I thought about this idea, the more it seemed to apply to my life on a broad scale. I think you've finally deserted me as muse, which hurts more than a little and leaves me feeling depressed and disinterested in my writing. This is a problem. A significant problem. It seems like a decision is facing me, as if there's a rapidly closing window of opportunity for me to reorient my life around your calmness and devotion to scholarship and your happiness, to reorient it around you (hang on, the oven is beeping which is sure to wake the household via a wobbling domino effect, the dog, with her traumatic memories of that beeping shock collar she wore in our fence-less yard in Atlanta will get up and pace nervously and smack her lips which will wake my wife who will bang about getting ready to go run, which will wake my son who will then roll and rattle his crib and begin the process of discovering that he needs milk). And I want to reorient it around you. And this is what troubles me; the idea that a window is closing and that I don't have all the time in the world to make a decision. Some opportunities don't come a second time. And as they say, to not make a decision is to make a decision. And my wife believes, I think, that we've got the whole issue resolved and that she and I are going to stay together. And I keep telling her, as clearly and as unambiguously as possible that I am not sure I want to be here. I'm in that uncomfortable space between knowing and not knowing. And I feel that, more than anything, I need to slow down.

I was thinking about this as we disembarked from the car and moved through the walkways of the mall. It was a pretty day, sunny and mild, with a milky blue sky and a hint of salt in the air from the easterly winds. I had come to get shoes -- oh, who cares? I don't even care. I can't pretend to be interested in this drivel. It's my life. It's not very interesting, I know. But there's something here. Something I'm uncovering. So I'll push on.

I go to the store, I look at the shoes on the rack, I dither. A salesperson in a forest green polo shirt comes along and recommends a shoe to me. I ask for my size. The shoes are brought out. The place is crowded. Big screens showing a Sunday sporting event. People sitting on benches next to stacks of boxes. Tissue paper strewn about. A steel foot caliper, looking like the frozen splash of a giant's step in a puddle, peeks out from under the bench. I can't decide between a 12 and a 13. I suspect the right foot of being larger than the left. None of this is relevant or interesting yet. I decide to order the 12.5 size in this shoe online and we leave. My wife is having a blood sugar attack so we roll down the sidewalk in the milky sunlight past hot dog vendors and panting perfumed storefronts. My son has a red plastic baseball bat which he waves about, impacting the knees and thighs of the passersby. We go to the local vegetarian restaurant and sit outside eating our cardboard containers of rice and vegetables. My son eats a cookie and is occasionally inspired by a fit of magnanimity to press toward our mouths a piece which he's broken off. He is proud of himself for sitting in a big boy chair and he takes small satisfied sips from his cup of milk and gazes indulgently at his rapidly disintegrating cookie.

After the meal my wife goes to the stores and I take my son to a little park that sits in the middle of a rotunda. There is a small snack vendor set up at one edge of the park where people are queued, waiting. A squinting bald man, his dome gilded by the sunlight, comes away with a cup full of French fries, smacking his lips in anticipation. There are three ponds in this little park, two of which hold various common marshland fauna. A few turtles stacked up on a sunny rock from biggest to smallest, their droll feat of balance and one-upsmanship drawing the shouts and pointed forefingers of an endless steam of children. Two mallards, male and female, on a nearby rock, sunning themselves. A ceramic frog. In the depths of the adjoining pond the colorful opaque koi whirl dumbly about, shifting their ocular bulges surface-ward in the hopes of snagging a dropped crumb. Two pelican statues spit water into the pond through a tube in their beaks. A third desists, spoiling it for the others with his iconoclastic ways.

Two women on the other side of the pond are smacking their lips and between utterances they probe with their tongues for stray morsels. They are both thin and dark, and wear huge dark glasses. A woman and her blonde daughter are in the same cycle of mallard-admiration as my son and myself, traveling from pond to pond as the ducks bob and flutter and paddle about. The woman tells me not to worry, that they aren't stalking me. I laugh and say, not at all. She's not tall, blonde, with large Gucci sunglasses, fairly thin, but with a certain amorphousness in her midsection. She wears sandals. Red bits of toenail pressed into pillowy toes. Her daughter is dressed in pink. The woman tells me that her husband travels a for work and that she's got a two month-old daughter at home. I am kneeling before the mallards, one hand rubbing Jonathan's back, as if in some act of worship. The woman continues to tell me about her birth-agonies and the agonies of deciding to have another child.

"But I was turning forty, so I knew it was now or never. And once I decided, it was fine, let's do it, another baby," The woman says.

I want to ask her what she means by that statement, I want to delve into it and figure out why exactly she chose the second child, I want to make the components of her situation analogous to mine and so guide my own deliberations, but the woman does not look like an intellectual (she's carrying a Matrioshka bag, stores nested within stores) and besides, I become aware that my son has just pooped (he was standing there so quietly I should have known).

We go find a place to change him. There's nothing. No changing station. So I change him on the sinks in the bathroom while impatient and disgusted men jostle me as they pursue their hasty ablutions. And as I bring my son outside I understand that all these little acts, these diaper changes, these conversations with strange women, these sunlit strolls through crowded malls, they are all taking me further away from you. Once all my motion seemed to being me closer, to draw me more tightly to you, but now the equation has been reversed. And I think, for one absurd moment, that I will stop right here. Hold Jonathan tight. Hold my breath. Stop my heart from beating. Right here right now I can still see you, if only faintly, but the moment is coming soon when you will slip over the horizon and be lost to me for good. The world moves me on. My son wants to see the ducks again.

ZAMM

2009-02-07T03:14:00.000-08:00

Maybe I did the right thing. I turned down that new company and their offer of a 15% raise. I still don't know why I did that. It feels like the wrong thing now, but I was trying to listen to my intuition. I am re-reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance at the behest of a friend of mine who did a Tarot reading on me and found that almost every card looks like I'm stuck. She had an intuition that there was a book I needed to re-read, a book that I'd been reading when I had my first knowing about addiction. It was her theory or intuition that I'd missed something in that book, that I had been presented with a fork in the road and had chosen the wrong path out of fear. ZAMM sprang immediately to mind. I hadn't read it since I was 20.

Back then I was finishing up a long stretch of intensive whiskey drinking. The King and I had decided one night as we were locked in another hot game of Lakers vs. Celtics on the Sega Genesis (I playing Phoenix so as to control Tom Chambers, the ultimate weapon, he had that swooping and unstoppable double pump floater from the far wing -- seriously the most devastating video game move I've ever encountered. The only thing that kept me from scoring every time was my own capacity for boredom. What I ended up doing was trying to keep within striking distance and then coming back in a mad rally with Chambers scoring that floater from all over the floor, his pixellated blond shag knifing through the crowd, while the King mashed the buttons of his controller and stared at the screen with fixed smile of pure hatred) that we would continue to drink, for 90 days, exactly what we'd had to drink that night, which as it turned out was a fifth of cheap whiskey.

The end of the 90 day stretch coincided with my birthday. I remember Detroit was cold and dark then, buffeted by winds and intermittent thaws which left large patches of sodden earth exposed and the streets perpetually shining with moisture. I was so sick from all the whiskey that I could barely make it out of bed. I dragged myself to my classes, green and bloated, and then I dragged home to the whiskey and the King and another game of Lakers vs. Celtics. After we'd finally finished I'd take myself up the stairs and collapse in the bed. I couldn't sleep. I read more ZAMM. On my birthday I was lying in bed with a terrible hangover, reading ZAMM and it happened, it seemed that the world inverted for me and I became a ghost trapped behind glass and I lay there while wave after wave of fear washed over me. Eventually my fear of lying still overpowered my fear of movement and I got up and went to class in a daze. I remember thinking that something essential had broken inside me. I didn't identify so much with the antagonist in ZAMM, that is, I didn't feel that I'd fallen off an intellectual tightrope, but I did feel as if the some essential buffer had been removed and that I was grinding against the hardness of life. I understood the problem in the book on an emotional level.

Poor sap. What a mess I was. It was raining. I was wearing a thin leather coat. My professor stared at me with concern and kindness as I smoked a cigarette and babbled something about Kant (even in my outcast state I didn't anyone to think I'd had a breakdown over a pop-cultural darling like ZAMM. If I was going to lose my mind I wanted it on the record that I'd done so over some recondite work of philosophy, that I'd been devoured in some remote jungle of ideas). Nothing was real. Not even my own voice. The hallways echoed unpleasantly. The rooms were too large. The people buzzed like insects. I couldn't intellectualize it. It was in my body, in my ears. I drove home in a panic. It was in my hands. Whatever I touched became unreal. Even the dogs became unreal, they seemed like fiendishly clever constructions of stuffing and glass.

So I'm reading ZAMM again. And it's not half bad. And I'm waiting for the answer to come. The book posits that being stuck is a requirement for answers. Well, good, because I'm good and stuck. And I'm still not sure I should've turned down that job.

Your New Genre

2008-05-30T08:15:00.001-07:00

This, my friend, my fellow writer, is why I can't wait to see you write some YA (first person or not, I don't give a shit...) This right here is magical.

"I waited a long time to answer. I could feel the warm blood singing in my ears and I imagined that I was outside the car, running fast, leaping mailboxes and ditches to keep pace."

Waiting...

2008-05-27T09:14:00.004-07:00

Sorry I haven't said anything sooner, but I wanted to say something about how much I was moved by your post below ("The Knife"). I was moved, haunted, floored by your honesty, the pain, how you took me right there, threw it up in front of me like someone ripping open his shirt and baring his chest. I felt like I was driving past a bad accident, horrified, but unable to turn my eyes away.

You have a gift, brother... I know you know that, and I know you struggle with that, and I know I struggle too. But don't forget, in all the craziness, that you have the gift. You do, motherfucker. You do.

So, I jumped in here to bitch and moan a bit before trying to glue my butt to the seat for a thousand words, and I saw your last couple of posts, and you humbled me, you bitch. Fucker. Goat fucker.

So... some bitching and moaning.

I am waiting. The wait swirls around in my body, mostly in my stomach and tight around my heart... an almost constant "fight or flight" feeling surges like I'm seeing police lights in the rearview mirror... sometimes it feels like I've got a fantastic poker hand and I'm about to go all in. But it's constant. It consumes me, invades my sleep, destroys any moment of serenity. Poor, poor me, to be in such a terrible situation. What a stupid, selfish mother fucker I must sound like.

Like most of my character defects, once again it all centers around not having complete control of the situation. I can't do anything about it (I can, but I've at least learned to stay the fuck out of it at this phase) and that drives me up the fucking wall. No control... all in someone else's hands right now... nothing I can do but wait, wait, wait.

I try not to complain, and I try to be mature, and I try not to lash out, and I try to use what I've learned in the program, and I try to hand it over to God, and I try not to go fucking crazy, but I do. I go crazy. I let the waiting consume me, eat me alive, take me every second, tie me to the ground and rape me...

Meanwhile, I try to work on my current project. I've finished the notes, some knock 'em dead characters, chapters outlined, ready to rumble. The characters are vibrant and alive and fresh and young and innocent and they wave silently at me from behind foggy glass, their eyes pleading with me to let them out... they've been in there for so long, for no real reason other than my childish procrastination, my neurotic need for validation... this sense that I must really, truly know that my career really has taken off before I can invest the soul energy to allow myself to be sucked into that world again. And I know, I know, I know that this is the wrong way to think, the wrong way to do. Surviving and continuing to work in this situation is where the real writers swim to the surface...

So I will try to swim... I try to do a little, a tiny bit every day, if anything just to keep the characters alive... otherwise their waving arms will slow down, they'll take out a deck of cards, or worse, plug into a video game, and when I'm finally down from my royal toddler throne, ready to act like I'm a real writer, they will have grown cold, distant, no longer interested in playing... they will have lost the magic, not even enough interest in me to look over their shoulders in disgust.

I will click "Publish Post" now and try to jump back in... desperately try to put one foot in front of the other... word by word, bird by bird... I will try to keep them alive, to nourish them, break the glass and let them free. They want so badly to share this world with us.

Hulking Up

2008-04-16T04:55:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: You must have, at a minimum, a passing familiarity with 80's professional wrestling for this to make any sense.

I need to Hulk Up. Remember Hulk Hogan? Not his Golden Hulk persona in Rocky III but rather the original fiction, the Hulk who wrestled in the squared circle for Vince McMahon and who now, so many years later, has a reality show where his look-alike daughter is attempting (what else?) a music career?

So back in the 80's Hulk Hogan had these wonderful wrestling matches that involved him and his opponent ricocheting off the ropes, hair flying, spangled boots raised to throats, bodies slamming canvas and then at a certain point, if this was one of Hulk's big matches, the script would settle into the most compelling stage of the Hero's Journey: defeat, death, finis. The Hulkster would be lying on the canvas or cruciformed on the ropes, or his back inverted in the dreadful "C" of the Camel Clutch (Iron Sheik nods and preens), his great blond head sagging, his musclebound corpus limp, those magnificent powerhouse-arms hanging slack from his shoulders. The referee, with a dubious and wistful expression, would grab one of those hands and, at the urging of the crowd, raise it skyward, and release. The hand fell back to the canvas with a wet plop. The crowd screamed for the Hulkster to wake up. The referee again raised the hand. Again it fell. Hulk's eyes were still shut, his heavy brow furrowed as if pricked by an invisible crown of thorns.

With a shake of his head, knowing it was hopeless but following the established protocol, the referee would raise the Hulk's hand one last time. Release. Fall. Full stop. Hand arrested before it touches canvas. Opponent's face distorted with rage and fear. Hulk's massive phalanges knitting into a fist. Fist pumping. Crowd screaming. Hulk's eyes open. He stands up! What ungodly power could've raised him to consciousness? The Hulk stands in the center of the ring and poses to restore his strength, supplementing his own power with the power of the crowd, whose roars he funnels into his ears with cupped hands. The opponent, terrified, is quickly slammed and piledriven into submission and now it's the Hulkster preening, with one boot planted on his opponent's chest, who listens to the three count.

Today I need to Hulk Up. I am pinned below a crushing weight but my spirit, like the Hulkster's, is soaring through the arena, gathering strength.

The Knife

2008-04-12T03:14:00.000-07:00

The John Birch Society must've promoted my old man. We left the trailer park for Lafayette, IN, a college town about 70 miles to the southeast. My old man had rented us a house and I remember my brother and I chasing one another through the somber empty rooms. It was a shotgun house with a big cement porch and buckled hardwood floors with the bedrooms tacked along right side like an afterthought, three boxes connected by a narrow hallway. You entered the basement at the back of the house through a door in the pantry, down a cramped set of slippery stairs, past the cobwebs and the indignant spiders into darkness that was sweet with mildew. My brother and I helped carry the old man's metal boxes of weapons into the basement and then we helped carry the emergency foodstuffs and the radios and the other survival equipment. He'd picked this house specially for the basement which, due to a lack of windows and five feet of earth above its ceiling, was a perfect bomb shelter.

"It will see us through a long bad time," he'd say.
"If it comes," my mother would say.
"It's only a question of when."

I was doubtful that we could survive long in that cold cramped little room and at night I dreamed of white-hot mushroom clouds and of rustling stealthy spiders plotting to liquefy our organs, leaving behind our dessicated and web-swaying skins.

The old man felt good about the new house and the new town; he began to make the occasional grim joke about our nightmare at the trailer park. After a month he got us another German Shepherd. We named her "Madchen." He kept her in the backyard where she began systematically leaving, in glazed cups of snow, little piles of candied excrement. One Saturday my brother dared me to pick up one of these little logs and hurl it at him, but I was afraid to do so because I imagined that beyond the shellacked surface lay a warm and loamy center and that it would crumble apart in my hands. My brother, tiring of this game, went inside to finish his Alistair MacLean novel and I, drawn irresistibly as all boys are, drifted toward the street at the front of our house.

The old man's green Vega was parked at the curb, his body wedged at an uncomfortable angle, his feet projecting into a snowdrift. I did not like my old man and in fact to be near him made my stomach hurt but the dazzling emergence of the sun and the those comical protruding legs allayed my fears and I moved close enough to peer into the darkness of the car.

He was lying there with one hand clutching a pair of bright unruly wires below the dash. The stereo and CB were lying on the floorboards. Protruding from his side, just above his waist, was the handle of the short knife which he ordinarily kept in a leather pouch on his belt. The old man made rhythmic animal groaning sounds as his right hand clenched and unclenched around the handle of his short knife. I could see now that the black upholstery sparkled in the sunlight where his blood had soaked it through.

"You okay?" I said.
"Hi. Hi." He spoke in the peaceful voice of some past or future self. "Go get your mother. I've had an accident."
"What's wrong?"
He was very calm and patient. He waited until his groaning stopped although his hand continued to clench and unclench around the handle of the knife. "Go get your mother I've had an accident."
"Are you okay?"
"Go get your mother I've had an accident."

Later when they wheeled him out of the emergency room I admired him for his handsomeness and the crease along his temple where he'd been shot in the head in Vietnam and for his coolness when the knife was stuck in his side. He was wearing a shirt my mother had brought from home and one could see the bulky gauze pad below the thin fabric. My mother cried at intervals as the doctors explained the particulars of caring for the wound.

"You could have died."
"But I didn't."
"He saved your life." My mother was referring to me.
The car was quiet. My mother cranked the starter and the engine coughed to life. Madchen, wedged in the backseat between my brother and myself, flattened her ears.
"He wasn't obedient," The old man said. "I had to ask him three times."
"You can't whip him, you're full of stitches," my mother said.
"I appreciate what you did but I had to ask you three times did I not?"
I waited a long time to answer. I could feel the warm blood singing in my ears and I imagined that I was outside the car, running fast, leaping mailboxes and ditches to keep pace.
"Did I not?"
My brother punched me in the shoulder and frowned.
"Yes, sir," I said.

He gave what seemed to me a deep and contented groan. As we rolled along the frozen streets I came to realize that I'd lost a chance that would never come again and I cursed myself for walking toward the street when I could've picked up one of Madchen's segmented candies instead. My stomach began to hurt. The bare branches of oaks and maples flashed over our little car, an endless parade of switches with which little boys could be and would be whipped.

Engelbert Humperdink

2008-04-08T12:34:00.001-07:00

Man, that Engelmbert Humperdink musta been one unhappy motherfucker in middle school. Don't ya think?

I love my dog very much, but I am unhappy with her current passion for licking her crotch. I can't expect her not to lick her crotch, she's a fucking dog... that's what dogs do. But like me, my dog takes everything to the extreme, strives beyond excess... this urgent, rhythmic, desperate licking, her back bent beyond its limitations, a slurp that sounds like a glug, but muffled, over and over and over again while I wonder to what end... is it menstrual, a yeasty adventure, fantasy filled? And she only does it when she is happy and comfortable and around me... ahh... life is good, well fed, recently walked, pretty day, quiet house, close to the Alpha dude, it's time... time to lick my doggie coochie, yeah...

God, there are times when I can't take it... I look down and yelp or slam my heels on my desk or throw a paperback at her...

Maybe it's just jealousy...

And again, it's not that she does it period... or even the duration... or frequency... it's the god-damned passion... how it becomes a life or death thing

fucking dog.

Warm Up

2008-04-03T02:30:00.000-07:00

There was this kid in my neighborhood named Andy K. He lived with his big Irish family in a rented house two down from us, on the other side of the walkway that led to the park. The house had green shingle siding and a carport covered with corrugated green plastic. When it rained, tines of clear water streamed down evenly along the length of the carport. From the window of my attic bedroom I watched this phenomena, captivated by its perfect uniformity. Then my mind always drifted to life within Andy's house.

His father listened to the opera and drank a big glass of red wine before dinner. His sister was a beauty queen who had been a finalist for Miss Michigan and held herself apart from life in the neighborhood. In the basement Andy had a Coleco Vision game system which I thought inferior to Atari but which I nevertheless condescended to play from time to time, mostly in hopes of glimpsing his sister in her rapid passages to and from her bedroom.

Andy and I were famous in our neighborhood for our series of fights. We'd been fighting since the day after my arrival in the neighborhood, and after each bout we'd agree on a winner and then mentally tabulate the overall score of the series and agree on that as well. Sometimes we fought over a disagreement, but as he was a polite boy and I was a polite boy we rarely disagreed, so we would agree to fight just to keep the series going. We always fought in his back yard. I remember the way the impact of his fist made a "chock" sound in the bones of my face, the stunning blast of pain when he bloodied my nose, and the groaning rolling clutches in the snow and the grass. He was a polite fighter and so was I. We really liked one another and always let up when the other was beaten. We were both very proud of our series and reported on it to our parents and grandparents. In all my letters to my grandmother I mentioned the latest battle and the overall score.

One day we stopped fighting. I don't know why; maybe we were too old, or too emotional now in puberty to trust that our friendship would survive, but the irony was that without the fights we had no real basis for friendship, and so we drifted apart. I became bookish and withdrawn and Andy K. began to avail himself of his brother's weights, put on fifteen pounds, and joined the football team. Andy went to the Catholic high school and I went to a Christian school but I followed his football career in the local paper. One day I saw him outside and congratulated him on his successes and he shook my hand in a massive and calloused hand and I was glad then, feeling his hand and looking at his powerful build, that we'd stopped fighting.

Sedulous

2008-04-02T05:13:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to express my admiration for "sedulous." I like counterintuitive words. For instance, I would imagine "sedulous" to have something to do with "seditious" and would consider it therefore to express a form of disloyalty or betrayal, but of course that's not the case.

Joyce is the only writer I've personally read who has used it in a sentence:

"When we were tired of this sight we wandered slowly into Ringsend. The day had grown sultry, and in the windows of the grocers' shops musty biscuits lay bleaching. We bought some biscuits and chocolate which we ate sedulously as we wandered through the squalid streets where the families of the fishermen live."

I'm a big fan of Dubliners. That's probably putting it mildly. I have asked my wife to read to me from Dubliners when I'm dying. I prefer it to the Bible as an expression of reverence and as an attempt to give form to the divine.

April Fool's Session

2008-04-02T01:53:00.000-07:00

Nobody played a joke on me for April Fool's Day, not even mother nature. We had waves. It was cool at the beach, with the sun blinking down from a milky sky, but the water was already in the upper 60's. From the sand, which was populated by bikini-clad girls posing for pictures or throwing Frisbees and petting dogs picturesquely, the waves didn't look so good but far on the outside, far, far past the end of the pier I saw a small surfer drop into a wave that was easily over his head.

It was a long paddle-out, particularly for an aging programmer who hadn't been surfing in months, but I finally made it outside and there, lo and behold, were some fairly groomed swells of 3-5 feet. What fun. What can I say? Getting on my feet the first time was a bit shaky; like trying to balance on a water ski, that wallowing back-and-forth motion as I went down the face of the wave, but I didn't care. And while I was surfing I remembered why I live here. And I remembered how rare and cool my life can really be when I make the time to paddle out.

Letter to Someone Who Moved on to a New Job

2008-04-01T02:15:00.000-07:00

This is how short-lived my gratitude can be. I am the master of disaffection. The master of sour, of entitlement, of the glass-half-full. This weekend I was worried that I wouldn't have a job at all. And now? See below as I participate in current-employer bashing with a former employee.

Go easy, JB. Go easy. Some of us are not out after all. I could see the Huey dicing the air above me, could see the extended hands of the grim medics. You were behind the machine gun, your body tick-tocking in slow motion rhythm as the brass shells arced through the smoky air and I tried JB, to grab something, anything, that would pull me to freedom but the helicopter leaned on its side and shrank to a small dot while the orchestra blared a symphony of death and desertion.

I am still here. Crouched at the foot of a palm tree, eyes shifting w/murderous anxiety in my mud-painted face, strangling my sweaty gun. I am still here.

The Rebound

2008-03-31T18:00:00.001-07:00

What a strange few weeks it's been. Since I last posted I've been given another three years until my next biopsy, which was good, and which I interpreted as a clear sign that I should take a certain job which had been offered to me and which was set to pay me ungodly sums of money.

To this kid from Flint it was an obscene amount of cash. After I verbally accepted the offer I walked around repeating the figure in my mind. It seemed like the kind of number that only one of life's real Winners would ever bring home. Yes I was one of life's real Winners.

I went to Houston on business, for my "old" company. I was just waiting for the final letter from the new job, the letter which wrapped up all the details, the letter which would serve as my conveyance to the new land of riches and professional conquest. All week I felt sorry for the people at my "old' job. They seemed slothful and ashen; they went around making mistakes. The coffee cups drooped in their hands. They had pimples and bags under their eyes and after lunch their cheeks filled, like tiny sails, with oniony belches that they stifled behind clenched fists.

Thursday came. The recruiters from the new job assured me that it was only a matter of getting the paper into an email and that the arrival of my final offer was imminent. I congratulated myself for my talent, my brilliant negotiations, my all-around pluck. I went into my boss's office at the old job and, as gently and carefully as I could, trying to spare her feelings, I let her know that I would most likely be moving along to greener pastures.

As I drove along Horatio Alger expressway to the airport, my cell phone rang. It was a strange lady from the "new" job. She wanted to know the terms of the deal I'd struck. I told her. She replied that such a job was impossible, that it didn't exist, that the deal, in a word, was off. And just like that, my new job was gone, the bright chiming fields of rotating Mario Bros. coins in which I jumped with maniac glee, evaporated. My sense of invulnerability, my understanding of the rightness of the world, gone.

Suddenly my old job became rather charming, quaint, and comfortable. I asked myself if the faults which has seemed to obvious before weren't instead shortcomings on my part. This was the first step in my long preparation to re-claim my old job before it was too late.

From one crisis to another: that's how I roll.

Birthday

2008-03-19T06:03:00.000-07:00

It was my birthday yesterday. I turned 36. I felt 49. My birthday fell in the trough between an endoscopy and the biopsy results. So naturally I was in a reflective mood.

What did I do for my birthday? Sat in five hours of meetings. Went for a walk in the evening. Played with my son, put him in the tub and then yanked him out. Felt old and frail. Thought about the pictures of my esophagus, a pink cone whose tapering interior was etched with livid red stripes. In my mind it was something tender and beautiful, this esophagus, this place where despite my best efforts the fear and rage had manifested as fiery tendrils. It seemed like poetic justice to me that my lifelong (and mostly successful) effort to be tough had been undermined by this soft little tube inside me.

As I pushed the stroller in the blustery evening vague thoughts of transformation flitted through my mind. Now and then my reverie was interrupted by my son's emphatic nomenclature: "bird", "flag," doggie."

I fell asleep reading an essay by Pushkin about a Cossack rebel. Pushkin's prose is pretty awful but it was the only Pushkin the library had. The library also has no Grass, one Hesse, and two Nabokovs. Presumably they have an entire shelf of Steven King. So ended the 36th.

Docent

2008-03-08T17:12:00.001-08:00

I have literally one person who on occasion reads this lousy blog and he chimed in with the correct word. It was "docent" yes, that is correct sir.

I'd been fasting today in hopes of obtaining a spiritual revelation. The jury is still out on that, but the low blood sugar sure did mangle my synapses.

So thank you, lone occasional reader!

Synonym for Guide

2008-03-08T08:49:00.001-08:00

This is killing me. I know there's a term to describe a guide in an art museum or perhaps a neighborhood, and I know it sounds like "bosun" or "dosun" but I can't for the life of me remember what it is, and the the tenuous relationship of the word to its literal definition makes it impossible for me to look it up. Damn, this is driving me nuts. I have a story where this word would fit perfectly and I simply cannot go on until I find that word.

In related news, I'm in the library and I just annoyed a homeless guy with the sound of my fingers on the keyboard. He glared at me, snapped his paper shut, and left. Interesting on several levels. For one, I'd imagine that, if you're homeless, there are all sorts of annoyances and indignities with which you must learn to live. Rain, for instance. Or snow. Or poverty. Perhaps the unfettered freedom of the homeless life makes up for these sufferings in some way. Perhaps my companion in the library had achieved a perfect but tenuous balance between suffering and freedom, and perhaps my fingers on the keys put him over the edge?

Or it could be simpler than that. Maybe he's learned to just walk away from anything that annoys him. Maybe that very ethic, the refusal to remain in a situation that is in any way uncomfortable or negative, is in some way responsible for his current homeless state. Or maybe I'm just an idiot who is looking to reduce a complex issue to a single cause that just happens to justify my underlying prejudice against the homeless. Guilty! But it's not prejudice! It's jealousy!

I might enjoy that freedom. It might be fun out there on the streets. God knows how many times I've wondered if there's really a payoff for all my hard work, the constant egress of monies to various creditors, the stress, the sleepless nights. I might find the homeless life congenial. I might enjoy indolent days swaddled in my own funk, defecation behind trees, grass-rolling drunkenness, the furtive hammering of some leathery harridan in a creaking shelter cot.

Aagh! I still can't think of that word!

To the New Father

2008-03-06T04:22:00.001-08:00

So the baby is born! As George Bush once said, "Mission Accomplished!" That was really the most difficult part. As I recall it's was pretty much a walk in the park from here. Baby comes home, you giggle, cuddle, and nap together. Once in a while they cry. True. Usually when they're not asleep, which is about 12 hours a day. But it's a soothing cry. They're not really upset at all. They just kind of coo at you in this outraged glass-breaking voice while waves of panicked heat radiate up your spine and into your brain.

So, you run around in a frenzy, going through the mental checklist: What Could Be Wrong With Baby?
Diaper
Bottle
Burp
Rock them
Walk them

Something else? In your exhaustion you often forget an item on the checklist and wind up making things worse. When the situation is finally resolved you look at your spouse and the two of you break into gales of laughter and it's like the end of a sitcom episode (credits, applause, fade out) except the next episode has already begun.

So, you find coping mechanisms, which is fun, too. For instance, I got a calendar and started marking off each of the 6,570 days that would elapse before Jonathan turned 18. That got depressing after awhile, so I turned to sullen disenchantment. This felt better for me, although my wife didn't enjoy it. We had an argument at about six weeks that went something like this.

Wife: "You're not a good father."
Me (wiping face): "Yes? Why not? I change diapers, I bottle feed, I stroll the baby, I clean up the vomit."
Wife (thinking): "Yes, but you're not enjoying it!

But...but...something happens. That baby becomes the most fascinating, the cutest thing in the whole world and pretty soon, almost before you know it (almost but not quite) you're actually rather proud of the vomit stains on your shirt, you're actually okay with leaving the house having forgotten to shower, and you can't wait to get home and see them again, you can't wait to start the madness. Rock stars might have exciting lives but it's nothing compared to parenthood.

Son

2008-02-20T02:10:00.000-08:00

Was sitting in one of those meetings that deals with one of those afflictions of balance (too much is never enough, the disease of more, etc.). A piece of approved literature was passed around the circle and each person read a page or so before passing it on to the next.

I heard something read that I'd not noticed before; a rather simple and innocuous sentence, really. Something to the effect that everyone, regardless of race, creed, color, or class, had the desire to love, to achieve and to reproduce. Something along those lines.

At first I rejected this assertion. I said to myself that not everyone wanted to reproduce. I mean surely there were those who didn't want to have children, right? And then I thought about how this applied to me, and how, before my wife and I had young son, I'd been furiously trying to reproduce myself through my writing; that is, if you stopped looking at reproduction as a purely biological act and started looking at it as building a monument to one's life, as preserving something of one's essence for posterity, then, yes, I had indeed lived up to that assertion. I'd been trying like hell to reproduce for some time, and, frankly, it hadn't been working very well.

Then we had young champion. Slowly, almost without my noticing, my writing began to change. I didn't see it right away, but now, looking back at the 1 1/2 years since he was born, I see that at some point, without my knowledge, my writing had shifted from monument-building to storytelling. That is, I was no longer trying to preserve some of my essence in words. Instead I was just telling stories. Perhaps that's because I'd already reproduced and therefore no longer needed my writing to serve this function for me.

Is it possible? I think so. I know the writing is much more fun since my son has been born, much more fun and much less of a grind. So that's all I've got. Just a thought.

Weekend Miscsellanea

2008-02-11T02:43:00.000-08:00

Spent the weekend with my son. Wife was out of town attending her sister's baby shower which, wouldn't you know it, turned into her sister's labor and then her sister's giving birth. So a day trip turned into two days but my wife still managed to fit this entire series of events into a weekend excursion.

So, while I was home with my son, we made some trips to the beach. The first trip was rather dismal; we didn't have a stroller (it had a flat tire) so we were left to walk, or I was left to carry, my son over the sand dunes to the playground, where the dog was tied up underneath one of the slides. She barked furiously my son and I as we passed overhead on our way to one of the blue plastic chutes. Later my son got hungry and insisted on stuffing both fists with goldfish. He staggered through the sand, slipping and inevitably falling, leaving little goldfish-strewn impact craters the size of baby fists. The dog and the son competed for these half-buried morsels, leaving both with shell and sand encrusted mouths.

Saturday night I was trying to get the baby son to eat something and he simply refused, shaking his head back and forth while making his negation sound, a bleating cry that will soon turn into "no." I got so frustrated, just for one moment, that I took his little head in my hand and forced that last piece of gooey cereal bar into the corner of his mouth. This had a devastating effect. He broke into hiccuping sobs, his little shoulders shaking, his little hands spread helplessly on the plastic highchair table, great swollen tears rolling down his cheeks. I felt awful. It took me a long time to calm him down.

The next day was better; I took him to the church nursery in the morning and then went into the sanctuary. The sunlight through the stained-glass windows had a strange magnifying effect on all the objects within. The elaborate carvings on the lintels, the heavy iron crosses that had been implanted with electrical bulbs, the mahogany pulpit, all these things seemed as if they'd moved toward me in space, as if some invisible hand had chosen to highlight them. That strange visual distortion brought out even more clearly the watery light of the interior, and I thought that the beauty of that morning was the perfect setting for a man who has lost everything to find peace. I started imagining such a story. It did not have to be so different from my own life. The stout minister in his white, rope-belted cassock with his white cropped hair seemed like a testament to the folly of ambition, as if he'd once been the man of my story and was now on the other side, happily ever after.

Later that day the baby son and I went back to the beach. A cool wind fluttered down from the north, turning the ocean a rich blue and sending the waves in at oblique angles. The sun glittered in the cinnamon dunes; my son staggered and shrieked in his playground paradise, following a horde of bobbed little girls who teased him, dragged him across the playground, and popped him on slides in the course of their ever-changing games. He bore all this with a glad grave expression, occasionally breaking into ecstatic shrieks, which caused the girls to snatch him bodily up and stagger a few steps before dumping him unceremoniously on his bottom (he didn't mind). Eventually these play-maddened children found a gray dog the size of a toaster and proceeded to bury the good-natured animal under a pile of sand until its owner, with shouts of vexation, dug it out. My son laughed when the dog, blurred by a cloud of shining dust, shook its coat.

Oh, one last thing. I was thinking that there's nothing more boring than a boring woman. A boring man becomes rather intriguing by virtue of his sheer unwavering consistency. A boring woman, however, bores you from a thousand different angles.

Can't Stop the Dance

2008-02-03T17:17:00.004-08:00

I was in the gym yesterday w/the iPod on "Shuffle Songs" and sometimes, I swear, it feels like the iPod is listening to my thoughts. I was working on back. Lat pulldowns. Thinking about my wife and how she's really getting worked by this life we're living, this ever-accelerating race to old age, and how I needed to stop somehow and make her know how much I love her. I was thinking these things just as "Two Hearts" by U2 came on.

I wanted to play the song for her somehow. Wanted her to feel how urgently my love still burned, how I cherished this absurd belief that we would fall together into the vortex of death only to emerge unscathed on the other side. I wanted to send it to her as an MP3. Burn her a CD. Copy the lyrics out by hand and leave them under her plate at dinner. Something to let her know that beneath the tired, cresting-the-hill fellow who trudged through her house, behind that set of masticating dinnertime jaws, somewhere deep within that deteriorating genetic machinery, the same ardent and sleepless young fool with whom she'd once fallen in love was still struggling to make himself understood, still and always undefeated by suffering or time's passage or persistent fear.

I did nothing. I listened to the song and did nothing.

Long Time Since I Posted

2008-02-01T17:45:00.000-08:00

Man it's been a long time since I posted. The draft of the novel was out for review. The reviewer pointed out some good things that need to be changed, but I'm out of energy. Out. Don't know what to do. Have to add a scene. Just can't get with it. Hmm...

Finished the First Draft

2008-01-19T11:49:00.000-08:00

See title above. It was a struggle. Took everything I had. Just as I was thinking that I had it about 90% done, my eye started to snag on all sorts of awkward sentences, baffling constructions, etc. And I had to ignore these things and press on to the end, get it into a big document and print it out and hand it off to a writer friend for a first look.

It's all difficult. I wake up in the wee hours thinking about certain points in the novel, tracing the plot backward and forwards, trying to decide if it holds up. My state of mind (burnout, insomnia) is reminiscent of the state I get into when I'm writing code. In both cases, the moment I lay down to sleep my mind turns a sweeping spotlight on the work I've just done and begins a serious but seemingly random inspection. All I can do is lie there and watch as lines of dialog or subroutines leap out and me and are slowly scrolled past my field of vision.

But the novel is away. It's off to the first of several reviewers for comments etc. I can't tell if it's any good. In baseball terms the novel is a home run swing, but I'm still not sure if I'm hearing the solid crack of wood on leather or a whiffing sound (complete w/groaning catcalling crowd).

Last night I had a dream that turned into a perfect short story. It involved a drive in an old sedan, a dirt road, an aged and hated rival, and the interior of a white cinderblock room with no doors or windows. The climax took place in the room. It was great. I woke up and told myself to remember it all. I lay awake and fixed all the details in my mind, then I fell back asleep. In the morning everything but the few details I've salvaged (and related above) was gone, washed away by a mighty river of dream-sewage. Oh well. That's how it is these days.

The Somnolent D.O.

2008-01-15T23:58:00.001-08:00

I've been sick, man. All kinds of sick. A sinus infection that sprinkled bits of jagged metal down my throat; an earache that's been leaking this clear substance, a headache of viselike proportions, and, to top it all off, some epic gas. It must be January, the month during which I always seem to fall apart.

So the other night I was lying in bed, trying not to choke on my own drainage, afraid to swallow for fear of the pain in my throat, slowly, with as much patience as I could stand, letting the clouds of my sweet noxious gas fill the night air. My fever was spiking and I'd thrown the blankets off to keep myself from sweating. In all respects I was a miserable man.

Then my sleeping wife, with a kind of sigh, sat up from her side of the bed, leaned across me (in the process penetrating the meaty center of my gas cloud), and threw the covers over my body. Then she tucked the bedspread tightly on either side of me, put her hand on my chest, murmured something unintelligible, and rolled back onto her side, all without waking up!

Yes, I was give the dutch oven by my wife, in her sleep. There was something so sweet about that, something so comforting, that I soon feel asleep myself.

Scrote Bite

2008-01-14T04:46:00.000-08:00

Ye who have young toddlers, beware! This could happen to you.

I was standing in the kitchen eating my dessert from a cup, holding the cup fairly high and looking across the room at my wife. This is the setup. It's important to know how my body was positioned in light of the coming event.

As I was rather engrossed in my conversation, I was not really aware that my toddler son was hanging on my legs and whining (he'd pretty much been hanging on my legs and whining all day). Next thing I know, a stab of intense pain radiated up from my scrotum and, looking down, I saw my son's little teeth clenched down on a tab of my shorts, which just happened to contain a piece of scrotum as well. Needless to say, my reaction was animated. I roared in pain, jumped back about three feet, and, pointing my finger, said "No!" to my little son.

Shocked by all this noise and motion, my son began to cry, and so, in a roundabout way, his mission was accomplished. He was once again being held and comforted by his father. Meanwhile, with my free hand, I massaged the bag. My goodness, what a shock.

Is there anything, anything in the world, that soaks up more of your time than a small child? Anything? It's really insane. Some weekends I really think I'm going to go totally insane. If I read ONE sentence of a book over a weekend it's a miracle.

Ducks

2008-01-10T05:11:00.000-08:00

Something, anything, in lieu of finishing the draft of the manuscript. I've hit a kind of mini-wall and am having trouble surmounting it. I don't know if it's the head cold that makes everything fuzzy and drains my writing of its emotional content, or if the writing itself is just bad. I do know that I have to keep pressing onward, one way or the other, and write something down so that I don't get completely bogged.

So last night a package arrived for the toddler son, a brace(?) of four rubber duckies with electrodes on the bottom of their bodies which, when connected by some conducting material such as a fingertip or water, caused LEDs in the ducks' bodies to begin flashing various garish colors such as electric blue, day-glo pink, sherbert orange, etc. You get the idea. Toddler son LOVED them. He went crazy. Tossed them between his hands, clutched them to his chest, staggered all around the kitchen pressing his awkward tiny finger against the two metal buds trying to ignite the ducks. But this was just the warm-up. When we put him in the tub with his ducks, the water of course kept them blinking nonstop (part of the design I'm sure). He had a fabulous time.

Wasn't so stoked when we shut the bathroom door and turned out the light, plunging the bathroom into complete darkness. Then he was not so stoked. The wild strobing colors made him nervous and I'm sure the laughing adult faces looked rather grotesque as they flashed and faded in our disco bathroom. He, of course, looked adorable throughout as he struggled to be brave, and lost. We didn't let him cry; when we opened the door to let the light from the hallway spill in, he immediately calmed down and went back to dunking and clutching those garish ducks.

The Dream

2008-01-08T13:52:00.000-08:00

So the dream started off on an old and venerable drawbridge spanning two Florida islands. Below me was a strip of bright-blue water. I was second in line at the drawbridge, behind a truck with a white Topper. I got out of the car and walked to the edge of the drawbridge to watch the various sailing vessels hurrying through the gap. As each boat passed, I swung somehow from its rigging and described these crazy loops, wild kiting swings above the bridge and water. As I descended from each of these euphoric leaps, I re-entered the crowd of people who had gathered on the edge of the bridge and every time I'd hit this dirty-looking, ponytailed redneck guy in the back. He had a maroon face and small round spectacles screwed into his fleshy cheeks.
Eventually the bridge went up, preventing one last hurrying sailboat from making its passage, and then the dream shifted to the sandstone dungeon of a Spanish Fort from the 1500's. The scenes were all exceptionally vivid and bright. The camera panned downward to a man in a khaki shirt, then ran behind him as he turned, and I realized it was me in the dungeon but with Robert Redford's body and that perfect Robert-Redford wing of blond hair sweeping across my forehead.
I was elated to be so handsome (and to have such perfect hair) but a bit mystified by this sudden transformation. I was let out by the jailers and found myself on the sidewalk of a modern city. I was heading home, feeling absolutely no worries. I was joined by a man in a dark suit who began to tell me that I had another "assignment"
I asked him if it was top secret (the POV had exited my body again and was tracking us as we walked along the street, the stranger a little ahead of me on a narrow sidewalk) and he said of course it was, handing me a slip of paper. I didn't understand the instructions on the slip of paper so the man took me to an outdoor cafe where we sat across from one another near some small pine bushes. While we were waiting for drinks, he began carving some kind of occult symbol into the wooden table with a meat cleaver
I found the stranger and his movements to be ominous and oppressive. The dream had turned from light to dark. I told my handler that I did not want to be in his employ, that he had the wrong man, that I was nobody's spy.
He said, "Don't you remember?"
My dream shifted to a little room, POV facing a small fire grate set at the base of a cinderblock wall. A head appeared in the fire grate. It was mine, but my features were coarse and aged and I was bald. Not the resplendent Redford, but just another grimy schmoe. Then the POV rushed back into my body and I saw, looking into the cinderblock room, that my wife (who happened to be Barbara Streisand don't ask me why) had been pinned to the wall. Her flesh was peeled off her bones. I thought she was dead, then I realized that there was something alive inside her, inside the spread-open cavity of her body, some entity that was roughly five feet long and worm-shaped, and this creature looked at me and began (to my horror, of course) to manipulate the slack facial features like a puppet master while making mewling sounds that I knew I should understand.
Cut to a small room with many shelves full of masks, prosthetic hands, fake legs, etc. and there I am in the center of the room, revealed as a wormlike creature now that I've shed my Redford-ness. I'm hooked to some kind of machine that injects a current of blue electricity through my body and I'm saying (while furiously smoking a cigarette w/my wormlike mouth) "I can live forever. I can live forever."
The predominating feeling was one of horror and loss. I woke up but was too afraid to move. I could not be sure I was no longer dreaming. It was 1:22 in the morning. I lay there asking for guidance. I was afraid to leave the room for fear of what I'd see. Some aspect of myself externalized, some indigenous secret horror. I continued to ask for help. Finally I was told to get up and go to the bathroom, and I did.
I came back to bed, still sweaty and oppressed. After about five minutes I delivered myself of a tremendous fart and immediately began to feel better. The spell dissolved with my flatus and I felt that I had again entered my "right" mind. Soon afterward I fell asleep.

My Wife

2008-01-05T17:22:00.000-08:00

My wife just imitated me while I was on the phone. When I hung up with someone she repeated the last few phrases with a kind of salacious twist, as if to imply that I was trying to seduce the woman with whom I'd been speaking. I get tired of that sort of thing; it's a drum she never tires of beating, even though I've never slept with another woman in our 453 years of marriage.

So, she became aware pretty quickly that I didn't find it funny and is now trying to make it up via a series of rather mindless comments designed to force a response from me. It's fine. I've responded. Set her mind at ease; why not? What the hell difference does it make to me? I'm a fucking husband and father, come on over here and trample on me, please. Don't worry a thing about it.

Random New Year Thoughts

2008-01-01T08:43:00.001-08:00

Hate Ed Harris. Why does he appear in so many movies? Can we please get someone else to do the steely-eyed, head-slightly-cocked thing? So tired of Ed Harris.

Last night my wife and I both had gas. Her flatuses smelled like the beach and mine smelled like burned meat. Together we had a sort of Luau going.

This morning we walked on the beach. We always see a man and woman in their 50's walking in the same direction; the man is usually wearing only shorts, his barreled, white-haired chest thrust manfully upward toward his shoulders, his short arms dangling over his hips. He looks vaguely apelike. His woman is the complete opposite. Where he is practically naked, she's completely clothed. She wears a long-sleeved shirt, long pants, sunglasses, and a floppy woven hat tied under her chin which completely obscures her face. Connecting these two wildly disparate persons is an old swaybacked German Shepherd with tufted fur. The dog always walks directly between the couple, never to one side or the other. We like to think of the dog as an equation. That is, that the dog represents an obscure formula which somehow unites the ape-man and the English gardener woman.

Also this morning, on the beach, my wife said that she likes to whisper things to into my baby son's ears, little sweet nothings which she imagines will become lodged in the nodes and whorls of his brain, and these whispers will wait there, packed tightly in their little nooks, until one day some emotional or physical cataclysm will shake them loose and then, in a time of crisis, he'll hear all those loving whispers as they trickle back out.

Too Much About Other People

2007-12-29T00:41:00.000-08:00

So I'm going through the manuscript trying to stitch up the gaping holes in plot, motivation, character. Don't know if this poor devil is going to make it. It's been a real trooper so far but I want to prepare myself for the idea that it might just bleed out right here on the operating table.

Seems like I've got too many chapters from other points of view. We'll have to see how that plays out in the end. So far it's one chapter after another from various other points of view, and I have a feeling that as we move deeper into the second (and then the third) act, the POV will resolve itself around the main character, and I'm not sure how that will work. Despite my grave doubts, however, I press on. Yes, like a set of adhesive fingernails, I press on.

Too Clever by Half

2007-12-27T00:50:00.000-08:00

Nothing worse than a writer who is aware of the big words and how they function but who lacks the overall command to make their vocabulary really work for them. And yet, you have to give people like that a bit of credit, no? For trying, anyway?

I don't know. Most of my drafts make me cringe at least once or twice per page; I always have a few groaners in there, a few places where I clearly got lost amid the glittering polysyllables.

But I have to keep trying, because for me (and this is difficult to articulate given my limited talent) the only real reward comes in telling a thing right, in making the words sing just a little, not much, but just enough that the constructions give an impression of solidity, give the reader a small pulse of aesthetic pleasure. For example, there's not a single misstep, a single poor sentence, in any of the JJ or VN canon (although VN's early short stories have their flaws) or, if you need something more immediate, read one of the stories from the New York Times online.

So having said all that I will now reproduce one of my groaners from years past that still makes me cringe today: I was trying to describe a man waiting for a train (on which he was to encounter himself, or his double -- I was reading a lot of Borges) who, as he made his way along the train station's concourse, weaved through the racks of postcards which were like "apocryphal trees."

Oh! Still makes me cringe! Like fingernails down the blackboard, these are the words of my life.

How I Operate

2007-12-26T10:28:00.001-08:00

Here's how I work it:

My mind riots with complaints and and woe-is-me visualizations all centered around the lack of time I get to write. I think about checking into a hotel. I think about running to some shack on some shaley mountainside in West Virginia to scriven to the strobe of a guttering candle. Ridiculous fantasies parade before my mind's eye: My son and wife weeping at my graveside, throwing skyward the pages of my latest manuscript which would have, could have been a masterpiece if only I'd lived to finish it! If only I hadn't died of overwork, broken down in the traces like an old mule.

Then, presto! I get a day to write. A whole day, how beautiful. And what do you suppose happens next? I screw around. I fritter. I procrastinate. Sand falls in the hourglass and still I postpone, I delay, I forestall...

Back to the AM

2007-12-24T00:11:00.001-08:00

Hey Steve:

Great post below. I was laughing out loud at the description of the cookies and their effect on your digestive system. I was laughing out loud at the blown budget and all the rest of it. Yes, I know how that goes. I know it all.

Holidays. Well, my mother, who had been scheduled to come down and visit us, just backed out and is not coming after all. Less than 24 hours before her scheduled flight, she called and said that the last time we talked (when I was only trying to confirm how many reservations to get for a Christmas brunch) I'd hurt her feelings with my brusque and stressed phone-manner. Hurt her feelings to such a degree that she wasn't coming any more.

Who the fuck does that? This is like the third time she's canceled a trip to come and see us in the last two years. Who the fuck backs out of a Christmas trip at the last fucking second? I'm not so much angry for myself; I'm angry for my little son, who is only 14 months but is cute as can be, and who doesn't really have a relationship w/his paternal grandmother (kind of hard when she keeps backing out).

And how exactly is it my fault? What, I'm not allowed to be stressed? Isn't that the point of the holidays? I mean, motherfucker, are you telling me that my family won't see me unless I've been purged of all frustration, doubt, and acrimony toward my family? If that's the case, we might as well just call it a day and save ourselves the trouble of planning for all of the Christmases in the future.

Well, maybe that's God doing for me, etc. Maybe that's the way to look at this. Because now we're home, just me and the wife and the family, for Christmas.

BTW, our budget is blown too. Has been blown. Won't un-blow for months. Fucking Christmas!

Video Olympics

2007-12-21T09:10:00.000-08:00

Hey... sorry so long between posts...

I remember very early on in our relationship, perhaps even our very first meeting, when you told me that wonderful analogy... that old memory of hitting the keyboard keys to make that video olympics stick figure run down the track on the old Apple II... how you compared hitting those keys faster and faster to the time that builds up between sexual encounters... I fucking loved that... I knew we were meant to share our lives in some way when you threw that out on the table.

Sometimes I feel that way with this blog... it's almost like hitting the keys faster and faster is that build up of other bullshit that I write... some that I have to write... some that I write because I think it'll push my career forward... but it's almost never brutally honest... I haven't used the word fuck in any of the writing I've been doing... and that just ain't honest cuz I use the word fuck like six million times a day in daily conversation...

Anyway, I guess I get the occasional urge to really let loose, to let the shit fly without worry about who's reading it, repercussions, the impact on my career, my family, my golf game, my dog.... it's so nice to just not give a shit every once in a while.

I'm handling it all a lot better than years past. Talked about that in a meeting last week... I'm not so prone to grumbling and bitching... I know the Christmas bullshit is important to the wife and the kids, so I back off and participate as needed and give lots of smiles and hugs and just let it happen... cuz I think that's what God's will is... God's will is to keep Steve out of the picture as much as possible... at least when he wants to take action to make changes... let Steve get involved only when he's helping keep the Christmas magic alive for wife and kids... that's it.... when Steve's ready to start grumbling, he should take the fucking dog for a walk.

Christmas lights, fuses that have to be replaced, a Christmas tree that will be left alone for two weeks with lights on a fucking timer... bags and bags and bags full of bullshit and we haven't even begun to pack our clothes... two hundred Christmas cards out the door... holiday cookies... barely able to take a decent shit because my intestines are so backed up with shortening and sugar and butter and chocolate chips because I have no fucking power over cookies.... gingerbread that fills the house with delicious smells for days but pisses me off because it smells like Christmas, and that creates that immediate Pavlovian reaction of feeling the credit card burn its way through my wallet... scrambling so the kids can buy presents for their teachers... the stockings.. Oh God, the stockings.... when we're finally done shopping, blown the budget completely out of the water, the wife will head out "just to pick up a few little things for the stockings".... another couple of hundred bucks later and they overflow, candy, candy, candy that I will eat for weeks, and back up my intestines even more, the shit coming out in dribbly nonproductive rectum reddening squirts of guilt and remorse, and I will wipe my ass and wash my hands and open the cookie tin again before they are completely dry...

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas....

Anything is Better Than Working on the Book

2007-12-19T06:19:00.001-08:00

This is the dream I had two nights ago: A hockey game seen from the tenth row of the bleachers, slightly above and to the left of the action. Below me two goalies are fighting while the referees and other players (forwards centers defensemen) look on, sometimes skating around to get a better view. Both goalies are lying on the ice: a bearded man in a green sweater and a man with dreadlocks and a maroon sweater, both of them ensconced in their bulky goalie pads.

One of the bearded goalie's arms is missing below the elbow and has been fitted with a black wooden peg which the bearded goalie is using to steadily bludgeon his opponent. The blows from the black peg-arm fall with metronomic regularity; it's clear that the dreadlocked goalie is beaten and incapable of defending himself. I yell and pound on the glass for someone to stop the fight, but the steady driving blows from the black peg go on and on.

Eventually the all the hair and skin is pounded away from the dreadlock-goalie's head, leaving a white gleaming skull in which shift back and forth two helpless eyes. Now the wooden arm, as it lands its blows, makes a clinking sound on the shining bone in which the overhead sodium lights are reflected. The beaten goalie's face and hair hang around his neck like a frayed collar. Still nobody stops the fight. The referees, the players, and the crowd are all sunk, like me, in dream-quicksand.

A Helpful Dream

2007-12-18T14:09:00.000-08:00

Still not writing. But I did go lie in bed and read the last three pages of Lolita again. So now I've found two writers whose work consistently yields some lesson or pleasure every time I pick it up: Joyce and now Nabokov. I'm sure there are others! I spent twenty years re-reading Joyce and wouldn't touch Nabokov because of the lurid reputation that Lolita had acquired (even though I read it myself when I was a drunken collegiate lout). Which just shows what a fool I am.

Anyway, I was reading the final three pages when H.H. is standing there at the canyon's edge and hears the whispering of children at play. That passage is so satisfying that I decided to close my eyes and think about it awhile and my thinking slowly faded into sleep but right at the edge of sleep, just when my thoughts stop being my own and become someone else's, I heard this voice telling me that I should not judge myself too harshly, but should do my duty by my characters and give them the best possible story in which to live, and that when I'd made a good-faith attempt at this I would be free of them and could move on. This seemed like such wonderful, sensible advice that I promptly relaxed and went to sleep.

You might think that I awoke from my nap refreshed and that perhaps I tumbled drowsy and happy to my keyboard where the words came forth in a golden flow; that hasn't happened, I'm sorry to say. Apparently procrastination trumps epiphany.

Re-Writer's Block

2007-12-18T13:11:00.000-08:00

Just back from Disney. Took the 14-month-old son to the Magic Kingdom where he gaped at Disney characters, talking birds, singing bears, and rode as many rides as would let him on.

To me it was a bunch of cheap, contrived entertainment but to him, I'm sure (although he can't talk to let me know) it was magical. Needless to say I still haven't done any writing. The rough draft is just sitting there, staring back at me. I can't do anything with it. I know, I need to read it and get myself involved in the scenes. More than anything, I need to read it. But I can't, or won't. I don't know. It's just sitting there, and I'm sitting here. I think I have re-writer's block. Even my hands (I swear) feel all gummy and unresponsive. The word count is slow. The keys feel unusually far apart and only seem to click down under extreme pressure.

I am a Holiday-Hating Shithead

2007-12-16T10:58:00.001-08:00

My wife just took the small child to the Christmas Village, some absurd collection of Santa-themed merchants, activities, and public areas. I have no idea what goes on there, but I do know I probably should've gone.

Instead I'm here looking over the rough draft of my manuscript. Time to start cobbling it together. I read an article somewhere that described Scorsese's experience with The Departed; the account says that during editing he would come out of his hole, shake his head, and say, "We've got some great scenes in here, great scenes...but I have no idea if we've got a movie."

I feel much the same way. Let's see if I can turn all these scenes into something worth reading.

Opening up that Vein

2007-12-15T06:34:00.000-08:00

I have a friend who has a birthday today; nobody you know, but he's a very nice guy. And yet, despite his niceness, the only thing I wanted to do for him on his birthday was hire a midget to run up and kick him straight in the bully-bag.

The morning sitting in the auto repair place trying to get my words out. There's a flatus and possibly some excreta knocking at my back door but I will not answer. I will not pack up my laptop and cell phone (on which I'm streaming Groove Salad from somafm.com -- great ambient) and decamp to the tiled, fluorescent-pale bathroom where I'll have to make a strategic decision; go for the quick groaning all-out push (and make it fast but violent) or sit back a bit and let nature take its own course in its own time?

The first option gets me out of that single beige metal stall much faster, but it could be embarrassing if someone were to walk in mid-groan and pre-splash. The fact that I'm somewhat anonymous behind my little sheet-metal scrim is no comfort. The other option, of course, keeps me longer in the bathroom, but in that instance I don't have to feel invested. I can tell myself that I just walked in and did what came naturally.

Of course, there's a third option; hold it. Wait for the urgency to pass, let the spastic storm shade to a dull ache above my left hip bone.

Now, about waiting for a response from a publisher, which was, I think, what we were talking about last night. Yes, I can remember well that after querying my last novel I waited, and then almost forgot, and then a response came, and I remember the savagery with which I attacked my own starry-eyed hope, how I tried to plug that vein of fool's gold that ran all the way back to my earliest humiliations when I was a six-year-old boy in homemade plaid pants sobbing on my bed, starting there and incorporating all my failures and disappointments, all those old selves suddenly resurrected and queued up just behind my skin, pushing forward, urging me to open the envelope, open it...all of them waiting to be redeemed by the magical spell of legitimacy inside the envelope.

And with hands of cold clay I open the letter. Rejection. And all those old selves fade into the dark pool of memory, waiting until the next letter when they will rise again...

The Beowulf Grind

2007-12-12T18:37:00.000-08:00

Left the office early today with one of the project managers and we went to see Beowulf in IMAX 3D. Pretty amazing. Angelina Jolie is officially back on my lust list. Was she ever off? Well, I didn't kick her off, but she'd been bumped by other babes. My grip list is like a stack on an operating system. As I put chicks on the stack, everything moves down. It's a LIFO (Last In First Out) system, so only in times of drought do those old grip chicks bubble to the top.

I have girls in there from the 80s, I swear. The other day I gripped to Joan Severance...and if I were locked away in a prison cell with nothing but four stony walls for company, I would eventually grip my way down to a grayscale Mary Tyler Moore from the Dick Van Dyke Show. My god, that woman...I challenge you to find me a woman more resplendent than the young MTM (I think she just moved up the stack).

The cold is killing me. One half of my tongue is swollen. My head feels all dry and hollow. When I chew I can feel the contours of my ear canals shifting around above the two masticating plates of my jaws. I find myself choking on my own drainage, unable to speak. And these Indian dudes won't leave me alone.

The Houston Grind

2007-12-12T04:53:00.000-08:00

First, I have to agree with you, sir. A man will do anything believe anything suffer anything, if he's getting laid w/enough frequency. Anything. There is no religion I wouldn't adopt, no task I wouldn't perform, if I thought the endgame was a blowjob or some other form of nut-bustage. Agreed, absolutely.

Begins the third day in Houston. Cold is slowly building to a crescendo of mucous-choked coughs and sneezes; the crappy road food is lodged in my gut like the a loutish grown child who won't move out of your basement.
Last night I tossed and turned and emitted wavering red clouds (think Creepy Fogs from the old Scooby Doo episodes). In my half-sleep I would wake w/a sense of pride and anxiety at the monstrosity I'd just created and, cracking an eye, would take an indulgent, parental sniff (Chinese) before continuing my restless sleep.

So this is the grindy grindy part of being on the road. When you feel all punched-in but you go to the office anyway because really, where else you goanna go?

Today I'll diagram more systems on more whiteboards for more anxious, beetle-browed Indian fellows who will invariably tell me that they understand, they understand perfectly, and then they'll walk away without understanding a damned thing and the whole process will start over again. World without end. The eternal return of Nietzsche at work in the business processes of a software company. On days like this it's not hard to imagine that life is an eternal procession of conference rooms, squeaking felt pens, obsequious Indians, bad dinners, and hotel rooms where the day parts your curtains with its gray neuralgic hand, beckoning you out to begin it all again.

Having said all that, I'm kind of happy. Don't know why.

Six Ways to a Sexier Boyfriend

2007-12-11T13:10:00.001-08:00

Thanks for the comments about the Olive Garden post....

So I'm checking my Yahoo news... AP feeds, world news, etc... and I notice this little banner ad at the top of the page. A bloggish article by some dipshit expert on men who offered "Six Ways to a Sexier Boyfriend." Six ways to encourage your guy to get in better shape, smell better, be willing to do more around the house, etc... one was encouraging him to get more sleep... another was to buy a cologne that didn't smell like something he'd bought in the eleventh grade, etc... dipshit responses, dipshit article... the ladies probably eat it up.

I have a much better suggestion.

Tell your boyfriend you'll give him one blowjob for every pound he loses. Tell him you'll give him a blowjob if he tries a new cologne. Tell him you'll give him a blowjob when he finishes putting up the Christmas lights. It's simple. Guys will do anything... scoop the kitty litter... shop for wallpaper at Home Depot (that may be a two-blowjob task there...)

Don't the ladies know how much power they have? Don't they understand the control? Get down on your knees in front of me and I am your slave. Name your task.

Why not tell the truth?

Houston

2007-12-11T04:18:00.000-08:00

Like the pullback at the end of your post, Steve. The pullback is what makes it work so well. The camera beginning to slide backwards on its cables, retreating from the restaurant, pausing long enough to register the shock on the face of the thirteen year-old kid. Shock and excitement. And yes, that thirteen year-old kid was you. In this mythic Olive Garden you were multiplying like a Russian doll, old versions of yourself busing tables, carrying trays, washing dishes, eating, singing, and most of all watching, fervently hoping, that the confrontation at the table would explode into violence.

One thing I was considering when reading your account. Ever see a fight like that? Between two black girls? What I remember most is the speed. The blinding speed. It was like watching two dogs (not trying to be demeaning here, just what I've observed) in that I could not really follow the action. They both snatched at each other's heads and then, after three or four lightning-fast twitches, they were on the ground. It was like this. BitchSnatchTwichRoll.

Now white girls, on the other hand...those fights are somewhat more picturesque. They usually don't know what they are doing and their very ineptitude is kind of arousing. They stand there, whining, each with a huge fistful of the other's hair, red-faced, determined, sometimes crying..oh, yeah.

A final caveat. I know I just made a race-based generalization above, but that's just what I've observed.

Funny stuff.

I'm in Houston. Got up at 3:30 AM to catch my plane out. The weather is not good. I have a cold. I spent most of yesterday in a conference room diagramming a domain model for this application we're building. Only the red pen worked. All the other colors left dry ghostly smears on the board. One guy on my team came to me afterward and wanted to tell my about his daughter's chess tournament. As I was listening I slipped into tiny quiet dreams where I was still on the plane to Houston. Afterward I went and had Chinese food by myself, then went back up to the room.

I think I've discovered, at long last, the secret to business travel. Don't turn on the TV. Had a peaceful night doing some work, taking a call from the wife. At 8:30 I got in bed to read a bit and woke up at 1:30 with all the light still ablaze. Nice feeling when you realize there are still four hours of sleep remaining.

Miss Thang at the Olive Garden

2007-12-09T17:32:00.000-08:00

Walked about three miles this morning... then walked nine holes this afternoon... great exercise, feeling good about how healthy I've been, so then decided to go to the fucking Olive Garden.

Dear God... breadsticks dipped in greasy wonderful alfredo sauce... chicken parmesan... nothing like a little chicken dredged in high-fat parmesan and then deep fried and topped with cheese, next to a big glop of fettucini alfredo...

I am a fat pig. I just need to come to grips with that. Oh well.

Watched a patron and a waitress bonk heads at another table. The waitress was black... she had a little Miss Thang going... looking like she was at least trying to pretend she had some customer service skills... but everyone could tell what she thought of the bitchy lady sitting in front of her.

I wasn't sure what happened, because they were already going at it when we were walked to our table. Something about the waitress rushing them to order... they wanted to take their time and browse the menu, and they didn't want advice from Miss Thang... In her defense, I think Miss Thang was genuinely trying to be helpful, along with pushing what she's obligated to push from the menu, etc... But the bitchy lady got all in a huff and told Miss Thang she needed some time to look at the menu.

So Miss Thang came back in a few minutes, but now the stick was definitely up her butt. It was interesting watching her. She looked liked she came from downtown somewhere... probably would have cussed out Miss Bitch in any other environment. She looked like she was trying to look like she was being patient... but she wasn't trying too hard.

Miss Bitch ordered, and Miss Thang asked her something about her entree, and of course Miss Bitch snapped back at her... I couldn't really hear what they were saying, but I picked up most of the context from the menu, the waitress's notepad, etc... Miss Thang gave the table a tight, fake smile and spun on her heel. I could see the smile drop from her face before she took her second step away from their table. Miss Thang was not happy.

I stopped watching them once the alfredo sauce came to our table. Three breadsticks in a row dragged through that sauce, rolling the bread around, jamming the sauce into the corner of the little dish, trying to cover every square millimeter with high-fat cheese sauce... So good, salty, creamy...

Then Miss Thang swished back into the room... she had brought Miss Bitch's table the check, and Miss Bitch got upset because they hadn't been given the chance to order dessert.

And then Miss Thang crossed the dipshit line... she said, "Well, I'm sorry, but I was afraid to ask you anything, girlfriend..." Yes, she said "girlfriend..." I waited, a spoonful of pasta e fagioli halfway to my mouth... I expected to see some chicken marsala or some pasta florentine start flying.

Miss Thang had that fake smile on her face... it was interesting... it was clear to me that she had no interest in being nice, and that quite frankly she didn't really give a shit anymore, she'd written off her tip a long time ago... in fact, I was quite surprised that she'd come back to the table period... it looked like a smile that was on her face just in case the manager decided to walk by...

I didn't hear Miss Bitch's response... but she snapped her menu closed and handed it back to Miss Thang...

That was the end of the exchange... I have to say I was a bit disappointed... I had visions of Miss Bitch's face stuffed down hard into a half-eaten platter of angel hair pasta... Miss Thang reaching back behind her own head and pulling out the bobby pins to let her hair down and go total ghetto on this white bitch... the husband trying to interfere but falling back with an Olive Garden fork stuck in his neck, blood spurting across the table, splattering the specials menu with the lovely pictures of pork medallions... Miss Bitch coming up for hair, sliding away from the table, knocking over the bus pan on the table nearby... Miss Thang grabbing Miss Bitch by the hair, swinging her around, grabbing her by the ears and slamming her head against the wall, bottles of chianti tottering off the shelves above... in the distance, a small group of waiters and waitresses look up from singing their dipshit birthday song to some fat thirteen year-old sitting behind a giant bowl of chocolate gelato...

Concupiscent Prestidigitation

2007-12-08T08:49:00.000-08:00

Concupiscent Prestidigitation: a term that could be used to describe Roger Moore's uncanny ability in his Bond movies to trick a girl into bed. One second she's picking up a pencil, the next she finds herself locked in a passionate kiss w/the seductive and wily Bond. How did it happen? She may never know.

One moment she's shooting at the villains and the very next, a briskly executed judo toss deposits her naked on a bearskin rug while Roger Moore pumps and thrusts with cool detached precision, all the while keeping up a stream of desultory chit-chat about the weather, the skiing this time of year in Lucerne, and so on.

This is the thing about Roger Moore as Bond that goes unappreciated. While the rest of the Bonds had to soldier through the usual preliminaries, Moore just cut straight to the chase through a kind of romantic sleight-of-hand. If you could ask one of his conquests what the experience was like, she probably wouldn't remember. She'd have a vague memory of doing her taxes and an incongruent but related (although she couldn't say just how) soreness between her legs.

Wave Description

2007-12-05T08:12:00.000-08:00

It was one of those tricky waves that stands upright and staggers for awhile, this whole massive lip just balanced up there, and you have no idea when it's going to shut down but you know it's going to shut down hard. A drunken colossus come to crash on the rocks.

Drooling in Bed

2007-12-05T02:21:00.000-08:00

Got this little window...up at five. Got until six. Got to write, right now.

Last night wife wanted to cuddle. I acquiesced and moved closer to her to assume the spoon position, which of course only happens in the wintertime around here. That is, if the heat has been turned on, I can count on some form of cuddling in the evening; which means my wife is an exceptionally practical woman, literally using my body for warmth.

Anyway, I got into the spoon position, nestled my halfway-interested penis in the cleft of her buttocks, thought about making some kind of move, couldn't decide between the long hand-stroke of her arm (not advisable as she was swathed in covers and nothing is less romantic than a long session of making room under covers before a caress), a quick gentle kiss on the neck, or a grind of my pelvis into her bottom. The grind was the easiest and most direct approach but probably the one with the highest potential for total mood ruination (if there was, indeed, a mood going at all).

As I was mentally weighing these alternatives, I fell asleep. Woke up a few minutes later to my wife's complaint of "something wet" on her neck. Turns out I'd been drooling on her. No sex ensued.

So fuck it, I'll write.

Nabokov and Design Patterns

2007-12-04T03:55:00.001-08:00

I love them both. Last night I was reading Larman's book on software design patterns and thinking about a domain model I really needed to create. I've been reading this book on and off for almost a year. It's really one of the best books I know for taking business ideas to code. I mean, it's not comprehensive, but I would venture to guess that, with this book you could at least get by if you suddenly had to design an enterprise system.

Then when I got into bed I read some Nabokov. Haze was making this brilliant speech to Humbert Humbert which Nabokov ended in a small personal aside by Humbert. Just brilliant.

God help me, I love them both. If I didn't have to sleep, I'd be all right.

Mein Got

2007-12-02T14:13:00.000-08:00

I just wanted to thank you for putting into words what it's like to procrastinate, to put off, to delay, to do all the things that don't matter to avoid doing what you must.

Here's how my life goes: My wife generally tries to give me an hour window in which to write each Saturday and Sunday. If I don't take that fucking window and do something with it, that's it. That's the ballgame.

Today, as soon as she left, I pulled out my cock and gave it a few half-hearted cuffs. It kind of looked back at me. It reminded me of one of those short crystal formations, my balls as the base and my shaft as the one central crystal.

There were also some decidedly non-crystalline, obscenely long, pubes that looked as if they'd like to make a break for it and attach themselves to the sofa. My pubes like to give me away. My wife knows the pubes by sight and always busts me when she finds one. She's clever enough to understand that a found pube is overwhelming circumstantial evidence off a grip having taken place.

So I was sitting there contemplating my ugly and unresponsive penis when I remembered that I'd already gotten laid today. So, no grip required. That freed up a good deal of time.

I knocked out 1,200 words, so I feel pretty good, but I did make it close. After the abortive grip, I turned on the television and watched football highlights with my zipper down. I guess a part of me wanted to see if my penis would suddenly decide he was in the mood after all. But no, even the penis wanted me to write.

Just wanted to say one other thing: I went surfing today and dropped into this overhead wave that walled up just right for me. A left, nice big green ramp to go up and down, oh, it was lovely. I fucking love to surf. One day I'll write about a surfer.

One last thing in this horribly unfocused grab-bag of nonsense. Remind me to tell you about villainy and my writing. I think I'm onto something but want to run it by you.

Proscrazytination

2007-11-30T17:42:00.000-08:00

Wife and kids are downstairs digging out Christmas crap... whistling cheerfully to each other, listening to Christmas music (I hear Greensleeves right now)... I informed them that I was going upstairs to write for a while. I've been up here for forty-five minutes, during which I have done the following:

- stared at the manuscript notes scattered across my desk
- opened up online poker and lost twenty thousand dollars and then won back twice that much
- read from half a dozen other writer's blogs... a new hobby of mine now... following the pathetic ramblings of other writers... all the while searching out ramblings more pathetic than mine
- finished the last few sips of a Mountain Dew I had no business drinking
- read every word of my own last few blog posts... why do I read my shit over and over again... It's like some kind of literary masturbation... I just don't know
- stared at the manuscript notes on my desk

The dog came running into my office a few minutes ago with a gigantic bow tied around her neck. She looked quite verklempt... God I love that word.

Why do I put myself through this? Why can't I just crack open the file, follow the notes, make the changes, move on... why can't I just do it? I know I will, eventually... I'll get it done before it's due... I always do. But why must I torture myself? Is it some kind of psychological yoyo string that must be wrapped around and around until I'm ready to be flung into the air? What is it? I know it has to be done... I know I must do it. I know I must get it done soon. I know this procrastination is unhealthy, that it only serves to make my heartbeat a little faster and increase my blood pressure... I know that it would be easier, physically and psychologically, to just crack open the file and do the fucking work. But I won't. I won't until I'm up against the wall, the gun to my head. And then I'll do it, and I'll do a good job... but why this torture? Why this tightening rock in the middle of my chest?

Here are some theories:

- I'm afraid to open the manuscript for fear that I will realize how fucked up a particular area of revision is
- I just don't want to do the fucking work
- It's all been going well, and I don't want to deal with something that isn't golden and sparkly
- I'm a pussy.
- It just doesn't feel like the time is right yet, I'm waiting for the right moment to strike, when the planets are aligned and my aura is a light shade of purple (translation - I'm a pussy and I'm full of shit...)
- I'm just really fucking tired and I don't want to do shit.

Once again.... once again.... once again.... bottom line... I know, I know, I know, I know... that this is part of the process, my process, the process, I know that this is what I have to do, what I must go through, the battle I have to fight with myself to get the thing done and out the door. I've learned to accept this (at least I think if I keep telling myself that, I'll feel better).

I've also learned that I'm a big pussy.

But I'd love to be an independently wealthy, fairly well-known pussy, and in order to reach that status, I guess I need to get this fucking manuscript out the door.

Honestly, I don't have to be an independently wealthy, fairly well-known pussy insasmuch as I'd like to just be a pussy who's able to pay the bills.

Oatmeal Soldiers

2007-11-30T05:13:00.001-08:00

Loved the idea of little ranks of oatmeal-cookie soldiers preparing to (literally) throw themselves into the breach. Into the steaming, fetid jungle of Bill's maw.

The brave cookie soldiers know what sort of terrors await them in this godforsaken archipelago! They remember the cottage cheese/sunflower seeds massacre of '07. But they don't allow themselves to think about that. The land of Archway depends on them. They secure, with their sacrifice on the field of battle, the freedom of their cookie brothers and sisters back home.

I'm listening to streaming internet radio on my phone. It's MP3 quality sound; good reason to have a data package. And now I must get back to the steaming, fetid jungle that is my story.

Feet Up

2007-11-29T06:30:00.000-08:00

Glad to hear you're right where you're supposed to be with your writing. Glad we've figured it out that all this psychotic bullshit is a necessary part of the game. Doesn't make it feel any better, but there is a sense of deep-rooted security... that we know this is part of the game, we've learned to expect it, to ride with it like a particularly bad skid on black ice... hanging on the steering wheel, breathing, remembering not to crank the wheel too hard because we've learned... learned in the past... learned that we just need to breathe and let the ice take us and hope for the best... that the worst thing we can do is try to fight the ice, try to turn the wheel...

We've learned... and the roller coaster goes up after it goes down... always...

Loved the note about parrying the thrusts of your would-be seductress. I'll say it again... I'm proud of you... if I were your wife I'd give you a night you wouldn't forget after showing such true bravery in front of the temptress (though I know and understand that your wife will never know of your triumph... if you shared your story, she'd still be pissed at you, regardless of how faithful you were... I know how that goes)

Did the sugar-free oatmeal cookies give you courage? Was it a Popeye thing? Was it a sexual thing? Part of me wishes you'd set up a little video camera. I imagine myself cheering as I watch those defenseless little cookies... marching in ranks from the back of the package... heads held high, waiting for the five-fingered army personnel carrier to drive them to the Iwo Jima beaches...

Great talking to you yesterday... like a shot in the arm, really... looking forward to seeing you today for coffee...