nobody

save for the reckoning
of doubt and determined, ghosts
of bitter yearnings and silence
tipping the salt and swaying lamps
subtle signals sent desperately
we are here across the table
so much between us and the moths
drawn to the lights
I want to be in love again
but mostly happiness like a shallow pool
engulfs me and wading further seems
foolish having wisened in my old age
purpose fashioned like a flattened hat
these are our days and nights
and we laugh, long term plans pressed
further out in measured days
this week our demons live in cigarettes
sleeping in and missed text messages
nothing so serious as
all the stars that died to
build our bones
we are merely breathing
it is a nice night
cats are out and they come up
in passing to
say hello.

poem

suddenly I want to write again
compulsively on napkins and bathroom walls
feeling like there is too much to ever know where
to begin or to ever say all of it
instead of feeling like it's all been said

The hopelessness I once felt in bookstores and libraries
has utterly dissipated even as I
have forgotten how to spell words,
lost some entirely and
no longer own any pens worth writing with.

This sudden transition, while hopeful
is marked by such a deep unfathomable
sadness
I don't want to show it to anyone
partly because
it is so deep and so wide I
can't imagine that we are not
all in it together
touching fingertips already
I want to show
the darkness to itself outside
in between the trees where
the real world is

Away from the bright city
we have built to distract us
its own adoring idol
the unmade bed of our
lost lust for
the naked soil
beneath our beating hearts.

bread and water

love is such a misery
shallow poison weak and petty
lead bellied heart hardener
hands that feel hunger
for touch
the cold clammy sweat of
bitter jealousy
the smell of your warm breath
when you snore
my body is a team
of animals
visceral menagerie under house
arrest
the tigers lack restraint
scratch at the furniture
say things they shouldn't
and will
shred everything to spaghetti
and eat it
if you fuck with them.

a few more of the same difference

A POEM FOR TODAY
this poem doesn't belong in today
it belongs to the marching band
that day in new york near the ferris wheel in coney island
where I had so longed to go I'd forgotten why
and the drummer fell and broke her crown and the crowd loomed in near
the cops calling out to step back we
were on the sidelines in passing
watching, the party suddenly over and yet
still your birthday.

someday I will die.

and her blood on the sidewalk, and whatever happened of 
the little drummer girl
will have one fewer witness
one by one by one
till we all pop off into nothingness, waning.

Till I fade utterly,
I will love you in that moment.
(Us silently watching, holding the others 
back.  Waiting, the red lights swinging 
round the hushed crowd.)
And even then,
still.

ONCE

Once I read my poems to some French girls who 

didn't understand them

they were young and listened

like lambs might

eyes glazed but excited to be here 

amdist the herd

i wished i could know the

sounds of my words

through their ears foreign syllables

unfathomable i wished

i could hear the way

the french do

our course language

our house of the mind

the windows just so

the walkway perhaps too long.

Door rather square.

And now for something completely different.

Arm your heart with empty
face pressed to face
love like the sewing of flesh
we are knit into becoming
and wear ourselves out of it
here
are my fingers these are
my teeth we
latch onto our undoing
this is my spirit
you can't see it she is
bigger than your eyes can see
she slows my pulse stops me
shivering, dilates
my eyes, wiggles
my ears always
fun at parties when she
wants to be
does not
fear death.
There are no words and
no actions for you from me.
All that I am says nothing for you now but
figure
it out
for yourself.

II.
The Cure For Happiness
The Deaths and the dying of loved ones
once hated
made plain
scraping the frost off the windows
with the heater going my
fingers like little slugs
No coffee is strong enough
to Wake us
I am pressed against the morning
like a tongue on a flagpole
half pulled back
not wanting and wanting
the wild agony I
wait hoping
the warmth of my very breath
is salvation
Love
(like mine for you) is what binds us to Being
blinds ties and fetters but what's more
is not merely the great source of our Happiness, but
the cure for.

Surgery in minor

I've had minor surgery.  I don't have cancer.
I told a friend this and she said "yet" because it's true it's implied in this day and age, with my background, with the world itself being increasingly carcinogenic.  I don't have cancer (yet).  I said it was implied though, and needn't be articulated.  It's like saying I'm not dead (yet).  I plan on dying.  I'll be very surprised if it doesn't happen.  I'll have a lot of explaining to do.
Where to begin.
This surgery.
I've had a pea sized cyst in my nether regions for some time.  I don't know that it's appropriate, dear internet, to be precise.  Let's call the area in question the sandwich islands.  The sandwich islands feel like they got stuck in a zipper today.  I am on all kinds of pain killers, and still hate almost everything.  But I don't have cancer.  And some day soon, I will be able to ride a bike.
This pea in the sandwich islands has been a very mild concern for a couple of years now on account of it being misdiagnosed as a bartholin's cyst repeatedly, being buried from view, and really only bothering me or being apparent in any way when I went cycling.  During my attempts at biking in the last couple years, I would find myself thinking quiet contemplative thoughts about the fairy tale "The Princess and the Pea," which I kept entirely to myself.  When I came out from under anesthesia, my charming anesthesiologist popped in and asked me if I knew where I was.  "A hospital.  OHSU.  Multnomah Pavillion."  I said.
He laughed.  "That is the most precise answer I have ever received."  I said I didn't really remember what happened and asked if I said anything weird under anesthesia.  "You had a dream about coffee, and you told us all the story of the Princess and the Pea."  Well.  Nice to know the demons of my subconscious were amiable enough to the gathering of visitors to the sandwich islands.
A friend came over to accompany me in my convalescence and offer what available comforts she could think of, which included painting my nails gold.  They're flaking off now and the effect is something like an old wheel barrow.  The opiates heighten the effect of being a disused tool.  I forget suddenly what I was doing, concentrate on the pain for a moment and then forget I was doing that.  I'm idly watching the time tick down in an auction for gold boat shoes I've bid on on ebay.  Gold boat shoes.  I'm barely real right now.
All the more awkward that I keep getting business phone calls in the bath.  I don't seem able to articulate how completely incapable I am.  I may be too well versed in transmitting my thoughts under intoxication to adequately express my incompetence.  I am a wheel barrow right now.  For some reason I have answered the phone.
"Hello?"
"Hi, um, I'm calling about having been over charged on my credit card.  I'm sorry I thought I spoke to you earlier.  I was under the impression this was a business phone."
"Oh it is."  Realizing that the bath water can probably be heard in the background.  "I will have a manager look over your account and return your call in the near future."
Must keep good notes regarding the conversations that occur, since they almost immediately disintegrate into the ether.  Who was I talking to?  Why did I answer my phone?
The sandwich islands are numb.  My head throbs gently.  My eyes are dilated.  I have sudden rushes of unbridled creative ideas that pass like ships racing, rarely dropping into harbour.
If today were a prayer it would be a prayer to Persephone.  Here in my red room with my red things, trolling the internet for red shoes, if I had a pomegranate I would forget not to eat it.  The confusion and despair of a long winter.  The earliest version of Persephone was a goddess without arms or legs emerging from the soil.  If I could paint I would paint her, like Buttercup from The Princess Bride emerging from the sand, gasping for air and sputtering soil out of her mouth.  Dear Persephone, in the minds of the dead and the unfathomable reality in which you are waiting out the winter in hell, I hope you are happy.  I hope Pluto is an alright guy with a bad rap, and that you get to drink hot chocolate and don't know it's snowing outside.  Princess this winter bullshit gets old sometimes.
Baby it's cold outside.

Today is a Monday's Monday

I have the belief that if you want to know how to do a thing drunkenly, you need to spend some time practicing it whilst you are actually drunk.  For this reason today I spent an hour or so playing the fiddle while drinking hot toddies.  Now it is 5:30 pm and I am moderately sauced.  I am the level of sauced that is an awkward combination of irritable and anxious, midway between desires to continue drinking properly or take a nap and sober up.

In this state I have been sitting in bed paying the bills and contemplating my life.  In a month and a half I will turn thirty, and the gravity of the big round zero in that number has me thinking about it way in advance.  I don't like it.  I don't like that I've been around for three decades already.  I keep thinking of the various five-year plans I have constructed in the course of my life and then haphazardly abandoned.  I think about the things in those plans that once seemed important to me.  Are they still?

The kicker I think are the things that I never wrote down because they seemed like such obvious goals there was no need to precisely articulate them.  I think these are the kinds of thoughts that I have been mulling over on backburners for years without consciously and attentively addressing them.  These are the kinds of thoughts you tell people on the bus when you are chatting honestly with a stranger, and when you articulate them audibly you are forced to recognize that your ideas do not make sense.

This one time I sat next to a guy on a greyhound bus and we talked for three hours.  I was nineteen and he was thirty-ish.  I had an Ameripass, which was this kind of greyhound ticket that was good for any bus anywhere in the states for a two month time period, so I sat next to a lot of people, and a lot of them were crazy.  This particular guy had actually negotiated being on this bus in part because of me, because of our brief interaction over the borrowing of a lighter and a cigarette.  He had changed his schedule to be on the same bus with me, something I suspected which slowly came to light over the course of our conversation.

He told me his name and I immediately forgot it.  I told him mine.  After a few minutes of casual pleasantries, I asked him why he was going west and he wouldn't tell me.  He didn't want to answer certain questions about himself.  I decided to level with him.  Look, I said, I forgot your name.  He started to tell me but I stopped him-- that's not the point.  What I'm saying is that even if you tell me your name again, I'm going to forget it.  The option we have before us on our three hour bus ride is this:  we can be polite and cordial and have a casual conversation about nothing particularly relevant, or you can tell me the real reason you're heading west and maybe we can actually discuss something of interest.  In either case, when we get off this bus I won't remember your name.  The result is the same.  The options are boring or interesting.

He thought about it for a second and I could tell he was really thinking.  I could tell too that other people on these buses sometimes worried about me.  I could see their concern, and I found it plainly comforting but didn't contemplate it any further.  The guy said he'd give me a hint and see if I could guess.  He said he was going west to one of three counties where a certain activity had only just recently been legalized.  He said a couple of those counties were near Las Vegas.  He looked at me and waited.  I considered this a fair way to introduce the topic, seeing if I was really up to discerning the likelihood that this guy was headin' west to be a prostitute.  For a few seconds I attempted to suppress a shit-eating grin as I considered whether or not I wanted to feign ignorance.  No, not my style.

He only liked to sleep with couples.  And he felt like he had been born to do this work.  He was doomed, from the day he was born, to do this work, and was going to spend the rest of eternity in hell because of it.  His idea of hell was a particularly interesting one.  He believed that the sinner repented by repeatedly engaging in the sinful act, over and over, eternally.  He said that he figured it wouldn't be so bad for the first couple thousand years.  But then, you know, it would be terrible.  About that time, he asked me to marry him and I changed seats and went to sleep.

It was an interesting bus ride.  There were a few points as he was talking where I could tell he was probably saying his actual beliefs out loud for the first time in his life.  I will allow that it is possible I am entirely wrong, and that actually this guy was pulling my leg for a good long while, and maybe enjoying it a bit too much.  I don't think this is the case.  There are seven billion of us now, and this character was a real person I sat next to on the bus, and I'm the real person who talked to him for hours because it amused me to do so.

Ten years later I don't think I'd have the same discussion.  I wonder though what deeply-held beliefs I've nurtured in dissonance and never adequately articulated in the intervening period, whilst I was so interested in the lives of others.  What would I say to my 19 year old self were I to sit next to her on the bus?  She would pry and I would say I think the world is ending.  I would say it makes me sad when I see children.  I would tell her I still don't have a clear vision of how I can do anything, and I'm beginning to think I should just move as far out into the boonies as I can bear to be, get a rocking chair and a dog and try to relax.  Take up knitting.  Maybe a little recreational knife-throwing.  Learn to whittle.  Grow some vegetables.  Avoid making any better mousetraps, so the world leaves me the eff alone.

I probably just need a vacation, but damn there is nothing like working in the service industry for five years to make you not care about a stranger's random opinion of whatever.  I long for the day when I don't have to go home and read yelp reviews about me.  Oh I'm sorry your server was just ok man, especially since you consider it compulsory to actively judge everything all the time.  At least I'm not in prostitution.  I bet those reviews are brutal.

I listened to a radiolab episode yesterday about the slinky.  Rob Krulwich was all weirded out by the idea that if the sun vanished, we wouldn't find out for 8 minutes or so.  He didn't like the delay, the 8 minutes of being blissfully unaware.  It sounded like he felt tricked by reality.  It got me thinking about determinism, inevitability, my own death.  Thinking of the two ideas simultaneously, I was imagining the sun as my death, the distance between us as my life.  I'm falling always towards this inevitability, and I know this.  It's the nature of existence.  Only I don't know how long it will take to get there.  It's as if my death is already a real and concrete thing, approaching through space-time already, and I'm blissfully unaware.  Maybe it's difficult to convey how unusual this sensation was for me because usually I feel kind of surprised that I'm still alive.

There is a privilege operative to idly contemplating what kind of life would make me happiest, and how best to lead it.  Is this a true statement?  Lately I've been prone to little panic attacks, fits of anxiety that well up suddenly unbidden from no apparent source, my heart racing and face flush.  It feels more like a nervous tick than anything associated with anything.  Chaos theory.  I imagine that in a neighboring universe, the sun has gone out.  In this world I am fine, I'm okay, it's just a bit too close for comfort.  Other times I wonder if my body has forgotten how to burn calories and like a fire suddenly encountering a knot in some dense wood, my heart slows and then races wildly.  Hey there, I say, calm down.

It's thirty, I think.  I turn thirty a few days before the end of the Mayan calendar, and the theme of the party is "I'm' turning thirty and the world is ending."  But what is the party like?  Once upon a time, I believed that almost any problem could be solved with the right party.  I keep trying to envision this party.  I got to send out invitations soon.  How do I want to inaugurate the coming decade?  I envision the party and nothing seems quite right.  Champagne, potlucks, dancing, karaoke.  What did I used to like about parties?  What would I want out of a party if it was really the last one?  Could the people I love most get along long enough to share a meal?  What is the point?

Dead Bunny

Last week my pet bunny died.  I woke up and took a shower and peeled a banana for her.  I was plodding out into the backyard to bring it to her and saw her little body, tipped over in the grass.  Rigor mortis was just setting in, her eyes still shiny, the sun reflected in them.  I knelt down and cried for a while, as you do when a loved one dies.  I touched her little bunny feet.  A few flies had just found her so I covered her with my partner's robe.  I didn't want to leave her, but I realized she was already gone.  My wittle baby bunnykins.

I want to get a tattoo of her to memorialize her.  Today I was researching the purported mystical attributes of bunnies.  Most of what I ran across was about fear, and how fearful bunnies are, and what they teach us about fear.  It's all about how weak and fragile and exposed they are, and it's a bunch of bollox.  It's true that rabbits in general are prey more than predator, more defense than offense, and their primary evolutionary magic trick appears to be reproduction.

What can we say about the human "medicine card"?  Humans appear pretty similar to rabbits when considering the species in broad generalities.  My god there are a lot of us, with our iffy little canine teeth and poor posture.  We've done a lot with the use of tools but are largely still fear-driven.  As a species we're fiercely territorial and competitive beyond all rationality.  Our wits appear as ill-proportioned as our canines when considering the level of cognitive dissonance we frequently nurse.  A good many of us have a poor view of the species in general, but in general we are rather fond of our familiars.  We extrapolate that the hoards of unknown people must be basically okay, if flawed, based on our emotional attachments to the people we hold dear.  Thus we grapple with being members of a species insofar as we are capable of projecting a sense of similarity.  In precisely the opposite reduction we view individual animals of other species.  We have ideas of animals we've never really encountered based on generalizations about their species and anthropomorphic caricatures.

I feel that I have just ceased to know a great rabbit.  I perceive her as remarkable to the degree that she differs from accounts of rabbits as a lot.  She was a fearless little creature, in complete disregard of her fragility.  Twice I witnessed a cat stalking her and once it came into her view, she went running up to greet it.  Not surprisingly, the cats ran away.

The night she died I had a dream that a lion was after me.  It was somewhat unclear what the lion wanted with me, but it was completely without fear.  It ignored every obstacle in its single-minded pursuit.  I suppose there's a cop-out option of getting a little lion-hearted bunny tattoo; but the point here is that she had a rabbit's heart.  She was a fearless little creature, not in spite of or in relation to the ideas held about her; she just was.

It's strange coming to know an animal that isn't a dog or a cat, growing to understand the gestural vocabulary of a completely quiet animal.  If she was happy she would leap into the air and spin, or run around you in circles as fast as she could go.  If she was upset she would stomp her foot and turn her back on you, looking over one shoulder to be sure you saw her performance.  If there were twenty people in the room dancing she wanted to be there too, immediately underfoot, or on the couch getting her eyes rubbed.  If you tried to give her half the banana, she would take the other half away from you.  She would try to steal my popsicles, especially the strawberry ones.  She preferred carrot-tops to carrots, and would try to climb into the fridge any time it was opened in general disdain of her rabbit pellets.  She liked to dig deep holes in the lawn and eat the weeds in the garden, and stare at the squirrels as they barked at her.

We were worried at one point that she was lonely and we adopted a little bunny playmate for her.  He is, by all accounts, an ordinary rabbit.  He is afraid of all of the things.  He mostly eats grass and his pellets, and mostly ignores the carrots.  It is difficult for me to discern between his various states of nervous, fear, attentive, and territorial poutiness.  This week, it is clear to me that he is sad.  He loiters around the spot where the other bunny died and smells the ground.  He seems to be looking for her.  I don't know how to make it better, because I don't feel like he relates to me as anything but the bringer of food and the giver of medicine.  He tolerates being held without biting, his most extravagant social grace.  Our only bond is that we miss the same dead bunny.  I feel sad for him, but I venture no further guesses as to what else he feels.  I hesitate to project my emotions beyond what I feel is obviously and viscerally comprehended by my own deeply incomprehensible impulse to sit near the ground where I found her in vain disbelief.  My best hope is this gesture is so base as to be meaningful, a comfort to him, in that all misery loves company.

checkers

I'm procrastinating.  Decisions have been made to do things and I am lying in bed before all those decisions, here in a dark cold basement with sea-foam green cement walls.  Outside it's sunny and beautiful and I could be biking or swimming or whatever.  I'm going to tell myself it's a good sign that I'm procrastinating by writing because I should be writing more.
I'm never sure how much of my life to place on a blog.  Omission surely is the key to a good story, and the slow reveal will likely be less painstaken for anyone who actually stumbles upon my life here, collected into a few pages.  It's been decided that we should move from our cute little house into a friend's spare room.  I need to go through all of my belongings and pare them down.  I am trying to rustle the will to do this.  In the meantime, I am avoiding my brother, who is presently living in the same house.  This complicates the process of cleaning the entire house.  In 29 years, the whole of my life, my brother and I never had a fight until last week.  Then we did, and now I'm sulking.  I can see this is basically what's happening, but this fact will not change my behavior.
I realize I had invested a lot of ethereal qualities into the one relationship in my life that seemed pretty solid, the one family member I didn't consider to be an asshole.  This week's theme is that we're all total assholes and I'm having a little trouble coping.
Predictably, I find myself missing the dead.  I believe that if I could only call my granma she would put my mind at ease.  I can hear her voice.  It's been 13 years since she died?  Has it really?  I barely believe.  My grandma was an asshole but she was awesome.  When I was fourteen we would split a beer and play checkers, since one whole beer was our mutual tolerance.  Toward the end she would forget which color she was playing and king my pieces, get frustrated and fling the entire board up into the air, laughing and cursing.  I think that was my favorite, the laughing and cursing.  I've only known old people to master this particular trait, never anyone under fifty.  I think the sentiments of "this is hilarious" and "fuck it" can only be equally conveyed with decades of practice.
Who was my grandmother as a child?  It's an impossible hypothetical situation to me.  I may as well imagine being an elephant.  What would it be like to have a trunk?  To slurp up water in my nose and clean my own face with it?
Ganesha, this week's prayer is to you.  This week I will wear red and make candy as I put all the things in my life into boxes, removing the obstacles.  Help me to find a path somewhere under all this crap.

Juneuary

Many things happened in the month of June this year.  Most of them fall into the category of "bag of dicks."  The two things at the top of this column include my getting a head injury and my father attempting suicide.

It's July now.  Do we talk about these things or do we simply move on?  I have come to believe, in the course of this last month, that humans count time so meticulously in order to maintain the sense of progress, or at least progression.  Mondays are miserable and horrible but expire suddenly at midnight, when we can  become optimistic for the future, until humpday when we must mourn until Thursday, which is nearly the weekend.  Almost a month ago, I awoke on the cement floor in the kitchen in a puddle of blood. Not only am I fine now, but that was almost a month ago.

There are, of course, those things that happen that stick with you in an "always" kind of way.  There are those things that happen that will always be immediately present to you, hinting in an ethereal Einsteinian way that, were it not for "time," all things would happen now.  All things might, in fact, be happening now, but we merely regard them as vignettes, a slide-show of pictures already taken and laid out for perusal.  

When I was three years old, my father found me playing with a gun in our living room.  It was an antique, unloaded but potentially operational, sitting next to the family photographs gathering dust.  He became incensed, very concerned suddenly that his habit of leaving guns lying around the house might be at odds with being the father of a small child.  His response was to load the weapon with a plug of toilet paper and a charge of gunpowder and have me, little three year old me, discharge the weapon into the bathroom (in laymen's terms: BANG!).  Therefore, technically, the first time I fired a gun I was three years old.  I remember this moment vividly.  I could draw you a picture of the bathroom in the intensity of my dilated eyes.  I remember being a small child, scared and crying, knowing what guns are for with a sudden intensity that was vividly effective, like knowing what knives are for, or hot stoves, or fists.

The cop called me the day after my head injury.  I was lying on the couch reading a book, having a little trouble concentrating, on some mild painkillers.  She wasn't very clear about what had just happened.  It occurs to me now that I should write the police and tell them they should outsource the breaking of bad news to people who don't suck at it, or potentially practice it a little amongst themselves.  It would be preferable, perhaps, not to use terms like "chickened out."  It might be best to open with "everyone is okay now."  

My dad fired a hole through two walls and a door with a single shot.  The first round was intended to verify that the weapon was operational, the second was intended for his head.  He only fired the first round and then went to get help.  My dad has had six strokes over the course of the last four years and is now scarcely capable of speech.  He forms a few complete sentences a day, and is otherwise largely incomprehensible.  Given a moment to reflect, it's not difficult to comprehend why the man might want to top himself.  Nonetheless I have irrational emotional responses.

I saw him last week and heard myself ask if he was mad at me.  Why would he be?  Do I delude myself into believing I am an entirely rational person?  He said no, clearly surprised.  Why would he be mad at me?

My partner went to collect the gun after my father was hauled off to the VA mental ward in the ambulance.  It sat in a locked box within a locked box in the basement for a couple weeks.  I saw my dad.  I cried irrationally.  Everything was fine.  Nobody was hurt.  A day more passed and I got properly drunk and opened the cases.  It's a five-shooter, a smith and wesson .357 magnum.  Pro series.  With a new grip, the kind with a laser sight in it.  Obvious questions cascade through my mind.  Why would he buy such a nice gun?  Who sold a gun to a man that can't talk?  Why would you need a laser sight if your intent was to put the barrel in your mouth?

I did not ask these questions of my father today.  It was our first time hanging out since his "attempt."  I drove him out to the Evergreen Aviation Museum and we looked at airplanes and spacecraft.  He used to be an aircraft electrician before he retired.  He worked for over twenty years on military planes as a civil servant.  He pointed out one of the aircraft he used to rewire, the F4-C.  He asked me if I remembered sitting in the cockpit as a wee kid.  I don't.  We toured the gun museum.

My partner later asked my dad what he thought of the gun museum and he said his fascination with guns had dissipated recently.  He stated it simply and clearly, one of his articulate sentences for the day.

It's July fourth now.  My throat feels raw and swollen.  My lymph glands feel like they're incubating eggs.  I still hope to see fireworks, but it may be from the back lawn.  I was going to write my blog more regularly, like weekly, since I had emerged from the depths of relative despair and felt like writing.  Perhaps I should write weekly anyway, regardless of the despair.  If this is my life, this is my life.  Waiting for the storm to clear is getting boring.

dreams and demons

Last night I dreamt I was roller skating and I got on the freeway.  It was a very vivid and intense dream, and it became more so as I picked up speed.  I heard once that if you realize you are dreaming and you want to remain in the lucid dream, you should look at your hands right away.  The more you focus on some relatively inconsequential detail, the more grounded you become in the reality of the dream.  This helps keep you from waking with the sudden adrenaline associated with the realization that you are dreaming.  I suspect this is why the dream became more intense as I merged with traffic and began going downhill, so fast that I had to shift to one skate.  I couldn't stop, and I had to wrap my other leg around to maintain balance.  I was keeping pace with traffic due to the decline, and for some reason, I was wearing hotpants.  I realized that if I hit a rock, my body would flay out over the asphalt, and that would be the end of me, but there was nothing much to be done about it.
Today in my waking life, I passed out and hit my head.  There are details surrounding this event and they may or may not be relevant.  I woke up in a puddle of my own blood and I walked into the next room where eight or nine people I work with were having a meeting.  Between the blood puddle and the door, I managed to keep my shit together, but the second everyone started freaking out about what a bloody mess I was, well, it was on and I was all hyperventilating and stuff.  It was interesting being surrounded by a group of people who are accustomed to working together.  One of them got me water and one got me orange juice and one wiped the blood off me and one wiped the blood off the floor and one stood there in case something else needed to be done.  One called zoomcare and one went to get a paper bag for me to breathe into.  I pretty much just freaked out until one commanded me to breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth.
The gash in my head is above the hairline and when the doctor looked at it, she decided it was best to braid it closed, as opposed to stapling or stitching it.  So I have a blood-soaked braid in my hair, which is pretty much the hippest coolest thing that's ever happened.
This is sarcasm.
I listened to a radio show (radiolab) one time about language, and how we basically have great difficulty thinking about things for which we have no words.  Was it Habermas who said language is the house of the mind?  It fascinated me.  Clearly there's a chicken and the egg thing operative here, in that we can't have developed the word first before some semblance of the concept.  I started thinking about how languages are dying all the time as cultures are quashed.  What words are we losing as these languages die?  Surely there are unique words that are already gone, whole concepts and ways of thinking we might never find again.  I started thinking about this, and I googled a list of words that only exist in one language.  I knew it was the kind of list that someone had already compiled, but that it might be difficult to find.  I tried "schadenfreude list unique words."
Schadenfreude is a German word for the pleasure derived at the expense of other's misfortune.  I had a conversation with a German friend about how Americans are totally fascinated by this word.  I have a theory for this.  For one thing, I think that Americans have this concept and it's mega-prevalent in our culture, but nonetheless we have no English word for it.  So when we hear this word, we get all excited that it exists.  Also, I think there's a certain schadenfreude in finding out that it's a German word, because how unfortunate for the Germans to be the ones to claim and name such a concept; poor bastards.
Is there a word for laughing at one's own misfortune?
I feel a little foggy today.  I suspect my sentence structure reflects this.
There's another German word on the list.  Torschlusspanik, the fear of diminishing opportunities as one ages.  Also very prevalent in American culture, we like to name existential crises and number them along a fictitious timeline according to which we die in our late eighties or early nineties (quarter-life crisis, mid-life crisis...).  I think it's a cop-out that we label our existential misgivings with this kind of word, betraying a false sense of being somehow entitled to a solid eighty years or so.  I prefer the German here, stark, direct, lacking guarantee that you will definitely die of old age.  Yet this word hasn't caught on in quite the same way.
My grandmother died at 86. She was the last of her friends to die.  She had her children and her grandchildren and her great grand-children, but everyone older than she was had passed.  She would talk about it, how strangely lonely it was.  It seems to me the most vicious and horrible way to die, old age.
My father has had six strokes and is 69 now.  For about four years, he has been completely certain that he will die in three months time.  This makes it very difficult to make any plans with him.  I can't convince him to get a dog.  He won't sign a lease.  He's a pain in the ass.
I saw that movie Krull when I was a kid and was totally caught up by the conversation about the cyclops knowing when he would die.  Would I give up an eye to know when I was going to die?  Dude, totally.  I'm much more afraid of wasting my life than I am of death.  And the idea here, obviously, is that some kind of calculation could be performed with regards to life remaining and tedium of tasks acceptable.  If you know you're going to die tomorrow, you don't stand in line at the bank.  You don't do your taxes.  You don't watch movies you've already seen before.  You go skydiving.  You spend all your money on a big party for all your friends.  You watch the fucking sunset.
It was the anniversary of my mother's death today.  She died twenty one years ago.  I was eight.  My dad woke me up in the morning and drove me out until there was some greenery on the side of the road, because he seemed to feel like some semblance of nature was required scenery to break the news.  He walked me out next to a tree, the traffic sounds still audible, freeway in sight.  He told me my mom had died and then drove me home as I sobbed inconsolably in the passenger seat.  I suspect that if he thought this part through, he may have opted for the backyard.  I remember being mystified by the beautiful weather that day.  How could it be sunny?  Didn't the sky know what had happened?  Was the world really going to continue as if everything was the same?
Yes.  Every world but mine.

and suddenly i am compelled to write again

Some things happened recently.  What were the things?  How were they different from other things?  It is hard to begin to say.  Suddenly I want to write again.
Yesterday I woke up in the middle of the night and plodded upstairs into the bathroom to wee.  I turned the light on and went in and closed the door behind me.  I sat down and looked over at the door.  A shadow passed.  It looked like the light under the door flickered.  My eyes playing tricks on me?  I stood up and felt like something brushed against my feet.  And then I saw it, and I screamed.  If you know me, you know the scream I screamed.  It is the scream I make when I drop a spoon, not a knife.  It's the scream that errupts out of me as I try to suppress it simultaneously, saying to myself this is not screamworthy.  It sounds a lot like a mouse.  I know this because as I was screaming and running around the bathroom, so too was the mouse screaming and running around the bathroom, both locked in and doing our frightened little dance.  All I can say is it's a good thing I had already wee'd.
I thought as I was standing on the edge of the bathtub that maybe I should leave the mouse in the bathroom, since it clearly could not get out.  Maybe I could open the door quickly and rush out, and it would somehow be easier to trap it in this smaller enclosed space.  But the door was on the other side of the mouse, and I feel in the depths of my soul that the mouse and I both knew this was not actually going to happen.
I leaned over and opened the door, because I was always going to open the door.  I did it because rather than be trapped in a very small space with a diseased rodent, I would prefer to be in a slightly larger space.  These calculations, they are strictly emotional.  Reason is a lie we like to tell ourselves as if it differentiates us from the other animals.
If I could unzip myself into multiple versions and wander off to have alternate lives, I would spend one of those lives in the wilderness with the wild things.  I would touch base with civilization as little as possible, for coffee and socks and duct tape.  And in this alternate reality, I would not scream my little scream at the mice.  I would live in a fire tower or keep food in buckets, and if I saw a mouse I would say hey you.  Hey you.
In another life I study linguistics and learn sign languages and create a universal sign language like esperanto, only it would be way more awesome.  Because if you were speaking to someone who could hear, but couldn't understand your language, you could communicate effectively while teaching your own language.  And they could do the same with you.  You would be able to teach and learn a language while communicating effectively.
In another life I would learn to program computers and create a website that allows people to share resources like a dispersed library.  You could check out your neighbor's hammer, and your neighbor could give you a five star rating for returning it in good working order.  I would spend my whole life designing websites to share resources and refining them.
In another life I would only write.  I would write constantly unless reading.  I would write everywhere on everything, in bathroom stalls and in other people's books.  I would write so often and so effectively I would make a living doing it, and my vocabulary would never shrink, my skills get rusty, my habits fail me.  I would never break my heart and stop writing as if diseased and broken in a way I could scarcely have imagined before.
In some life, I have a dog and I teach children.  Mysteriously I don't long for alternate realities, because everyone I know is kind and good, I have the distinct sense that the world is getting better, and I never forget to brush my teeth.
Meanwhile, in the one life I really live, there is a mouse in my house.  We are aware of eachother.  I tell myself that some day soon I will catch it, but time is against me and in the midst of my procrastination, the mouse has gotten bigger.

i love my job

i wake in the night with a rumble in my gut and a soulless sense of wandering and that feeling that grabs you down in the diaphragm in your belly and says nothing but security is a lie you tell yourself anytime you might believe it but really all you know for sure is you're gonna die someday.

the things that warm me from this kind of bone cold chill are few. One of these is a simple truth as fragile as any other, and hints that my type A persona is a deep and abiding trait if any is:

I love my job.

That is all.

mom

My coworker, who also lost her mother at an early age, recommended a book to me and lent me her copy. It's called Motherless Daughters and I have finally begun to read it, crying intermittently. Every now and then I have to put down the book and sniffle for a minute or two before continuing.
A couple thoughts occur to me here. One is that this may or may not be appropriate blogging material. I just got a facebook account and have realized that it is not an appropriate forum for seemingly any quality of meaningful interaction, with the possible exception of party organizing. As an adamant sagitarian, I see this as a meaningful interaction. But any expression of genuine emotional or intellectual import is confined to a meager word count and has the aura of being taboo.
Why, now, as I'm losing my father, am I compelled to mourn my mother? When I actually write the question out the answer seems obvious. I am not eagerly anticipating the sense of being alone. But I am anticipating it, and in this anticipation I find myself missing the dead. Where is my dog? Where is my grandmother? Where is my mom?
The other thought that occurs to me is that this process is boring. I can eye it with a kind of intellectualized repose and say, yes, this makes sense. This is quite probably the part in the story where this occurs. But can't I skip ahead to the good part? I can't explain this any further. It seems like the dull and obvious truth of my tumultuous emotion. I can't possibly imagine why I'd write a long sad blog entry.
This is a blog entry about my mother, or what is left of her as such, which is to say my memories. This is one.
This one is about the time we went shoe shopping and I wanted a pair of shoes just like the ones I was wearing. Always this is how this story went. I have several memories of shoe shopping with my mother. She was always the one to take me shoe shopping. Always I wanted a pair of shoes just like the ones I was wearing, only bigger and newer. I only actually got my wish once, because we shopped at a shoe store that stocked new styles continuously at discount prices. I wanted pink shoes, but there was always an entire aisle of pink shoes. I liked velcro, and was especially fond of the shoes with the little lights in the soles.
My mother was very patient with me. She would put the shoe on my foot and push down on the toe. She would make me wiggle my toes. She would tell me to walk around the store. She would tell me to jump up and down. It would take a long time, this process. It always felt like a big deal.
One time we were in a hurry, and I was being a hellion, and was making a lot of noise and skipping around the store. How old was I? Six? Seven? Five? My mother kept threatening to give me a spanking. She kept threatening to take me outside and give me a spanking right then and there. But we both knew she had never ever hit me, and I ignored her. She threatened to do this all the time. And as I came skipping around the aisle she swatted my bottom, very lightly, as if there were a mosquito she was trying to kill. As if she didn't really want to kill it. And I burst out crying at exactly the same moment as she burst out crying, and we were both crying and holding eachother there next to the pink shoes. And she said she'd never do it again, and she was sorry, and I said I was sorry and we cried.
I remember the last time we went shoe shopping, because we came home and my mother discovered that I could fit into her shoes. My mom had tiny feet, smaller than size five, and I could almost walk in them comfortably. For some entirely unfathomable reason, this made my mother cry, which I thought was very funny and sad. I told her not to cry and I hugged her.

my new favorite artist

Aaron's niece has just recently turned four and is now a real little person. She is drawing real things now and had me label one of them for her. It is on the refrigerator and it goes like this: Supercat is getting the jelly bagel before it falls into the river!
She likes exclamation points.
That is all.

I am losing my memory

I am noticing that my childhood is leaving me slowly, the many memories I once had fading. What do I remember of being a child anymore? It's a strange feeling having the sense of my lifetime dwindling, even as I'm living it, like a candle burning from both ends.

I've long recognized that I remember much more of my childhood than most other people. For a long time I felt this was one of those unspoken but definitive characteristics by which people are classified. I imagined that for those who could not remember their childhood, their conscious memory is of being relatively adult. They recall having popped into existence, say age ten, and charging forth into the world to create a destiny for themselves. This is how I imagine the experience. I can't be sure. But I have polled people throughout my life, friends and acquaintances, and have noticed that those of us who recall those many long years at the whim of the giants surrounding us--we are different. It's not that we have lived longer in a sense or are more experienced per se, but we recall being so utterly helpless that we used to poke ourselves in the eye. It's almost like a memory of an entirely alternate existence. When I see a baby with red eyeballs from poking itself in the eye accidentally, I don't think, oh looky wooky it's a little pumpkin; I think: you poor bastard. That sucks.

The introduction into human existence is one of prolonged inability and powerlessness, a struggle for mastery even of the muscles in one's arm. And after this introduction, the story which begins to unfold is of such a different quality that it is almost a completely different story. Or, at least, one would like to believe this is so. It has occurred to me before that most people don't remember their childhood because of a compulsion to suppress it, and they've blocked it out. Or perhaps it simply seems so irrelevant because it's so divorced from the realities of daily life that one forgets it, like algebra. Sure there are those people who remember algebra and insist that it's useful in their daily lives, but for the rest of us who have dutifully forgotten it, this is a rumor told by eighth-grade teachers. It's a lie perpetuated by the minority of people for whom the math of daily living might mean something, the people for whom eighth grade was relevant.

I remember being prelinguistic and understanding a good bit of what adults said. I remember my mother had a friend with a baby boy, and she would bring him over and we would 'play.' I hated him. I hate hate hated him. He would chase me and I would crawl as fast as I possibly could, with him trailing after me, and when he would catch me he would pull my hair until I screamed and screamed, and then the adults would come running, wondering what might possibly have happened. Trapped in my inarticulate state, I would cry and cry. I would look at him and wonder if he knew I hated him. One day, it occured to me to pull his hair back. It's strange what a grandiose leap this was. Of course I was caught, and my mother was shamed, but none of this mattered to me in the slightest. The hateful boy went away. It was wonderful. I remember other discoveries as startling and amazing.

When it was time to take baby pictures, and my parents would dress me up and take me to the mall, and some lady would have funny little puppets and toys to rattle, and as soon as I forgot and smiled, she would take a picture and the bright light would scare me and hurt my eyes, and I would start screaming and crying. And then she would hold up the toy to take another picture, and I would look at her with total incredulity, like really? You think I'm going to fall for that again? And then she would switch toys, and I would be amazed by the new one. And then I realized, she's just using different toys for the same evil purpose! Don't be fooled by the new shiny object! The flash will still come and hurt your eyes! Don't smile, look away look away--

I remember the epic long hours in preschool, trying to kill boredom. What happens if you eat sand? What happens if you run around in circles really fast? What happens if you punch little Billy in the face? I remember talking to a stranger and the teacher yelling at me, and the stranger and I both turned to the teacher and yelled back at the same time. He's on the other side of a fence. What's he going to do?

And that one evil daycare teacher that caught me stealing a piece of tape, and her cop boyfriend was coming in to talk to us that day anyway, so she lied to me and told me he was coming to arrest me and take me away. And he came and talked about how cops are nice to little kids and they're around to help, and told us that prisoners don't really eat bread and water. And then she told him what she had said to me, and how I'd cried and cried, and he told her that was a horrible thing to do and he broke up with her. And I was like, snap. Take that. Oh wait, I still have to see you every freakin day.

What memories have I forgotten? Which ones have already passed into the ether? When you forget them all, do you breed?

I had a conversation about childhood memories with a friend who could dimly recall his own birth and we discussed the one truly blessed thing about having had a terrible childhood, which is that everything else is pretty awesome by comparison. Any day, no matter how bad, I can always think, at least I'm not two years old. That sucked.

How I stopped biting my fingernails.

When I was seventeen I went to France on this France trip with a bunch of other French-speaking high school kids. It was a school trip for three weeks, and we toured all over the place and ate French food and did French stuff and it was really fun and amazing.

Up until then, from the time I could reach my mouth with my hands, I would chew my fingernails down to my nubs, down to the quick, so they'd bleed. I would nibble furiously, uncontrollably. I tried to stop, but failed.

My mom got this gross stuff when I was a kid and painted it on my nails. It was just stuff that tasted bad and didn't wash off well, so it discouraged kids from biting their nails. I can still taste the stuff if I think about it. It didn't help. I grew to like it, nasty and terrible-tasting as it was.

Why do we do these things to ourselves? In France, after two and a half weeks of whirlwind adventure, back in Paris again, I remember waking up one morning and realizing that I needed to cut my nails. I asked one of the girls in my room if I could borrow her nail trimmers, and then I asked if she had any tips on how to cut them. She was like, why? And I realized, it was the first time I'd ever actually cut my nails, in my whole life.

Why did I stop biting my nails? I don't know really. The dramatic change of scenery and environment and the sense of disorientation. Maybe. I realize there are the things that happen, and there are the things we say to ourselves afterwards about how shit goes down. On some level, even the narrative is a kind of lie. How I quit biting my nails is I went to France. It doesn't sound real when I say it like that, because it's just the truth rubbed raw of all those other details that might muddle or muck it up. It's why I say the key to a good story is omission. But I don't know, and never have known, if this is a good story. I don't really think it is. There's a moral in it somewhere but I'm not sure what it is and I'm not interested in telling it, and maybe that the only human interest it's really got. That and it's true.

a cynical kind of day

If I'd known what kind of day I'd have when I woke up this morning, I might've skipped it altogether. Though I suppose it was an important one, full of new information and enlightening tidbits. I was supposed to run a workshop this afternoon an hour outside of town and it didn't happen because of seized bearings, someone else's busted arm and a rather large photojournalistic editing project. But these are merely the interesting details in what is otherwise a long and boring story.

I did not give any workshops today. I spent the day in doctor's offices and cars and other people's lives, and here I am in the relatively reclusive anonymity of my relatively unread blog, doing that potentially shameful thing akin to scribing a self-referential whiny diatribe on a bathroom wall. Everybody's doing it.

Psychic prediction: in the years to come when the neoliberal capitalist agenda becomes increasingly user-friendly and transparent, the concept of rights will be seamlessly fused with the concept of commodity. Today, if you have enough money, you can travel to Amsterdam from the U.S. and engage in activities there that are otherwise illegal as a U.S. citizen. In the future, perhaps a greener future where the fuel to fly you to and from this place are spared, you will merely purchase the right to enter an amsterdam zone on the end of your block, much like a door charge for a bar with a liquor license. Your id will be checked on the way in, and then you will be permitted to engage in activities which are not legal outside the building. The cost will be costlier, but theoretically the right to buy it will be available to everyone.

Citizenship will be phased out slowly as passe, the recognition that nation-states have been messy and outdated will be commonplace. Zones of appropriate rights will be established but will no longer be dilineated by borders. Fences will do. All people will be theoretically free to circulate, provided they have accumulated the capital to trade for the right. For some rights, the cost will be so exorbitantly high that only the concentrated capital of several lifetimes of labor will purchase it. You may not even know what these rights are, because you have no amassed the capital to imagine them.

Psychic prediction: tomorrow morning I will wake up and eat some toast and coffee. I will google the news. It will be raining. I will go back to bed and revel in holding very, very still for a long time. Sometimes, I will blink.

drinking out of bags

I was out with a friend of mine the other night, talking about sad stuff on a step somewhere, drinking out of a bag. There was this kitty that had followed us for a couple blocks and we pet her and she was hangin around us. She was a needy little kitty, still a kitten really, all black with white socks, very friendly. Prone to meowing. I was watching while we talked, and people would pass by and stop to pet the cat.

What is it like living in a world full of giants who want to scratch your back? They call you over and rub you behind the ears. All kinds of different giants, who don't necessarily talk to eachother or look alike or get along, but they all seem to like you.

I was watching these people and I felt okay about them. I kind of got this warm fuzzy feeling watching all these different people walk by and pet the cat. And I sort of felt like we had this unspoken comaraderie, just us among the conspiratorial cat lovers of the world.

I was reading about Iran, and the protests about their election, and I had this kind of awkward realization, feeling how humbled and awed I am by that many thousands in the streets. I believe those people. The sheer image of that many people makes me believe, instantly, before I even know what they have to say. I know it's potentially fallacious because the whole premise is ad populum, but that's the democratic shtick I guess. It's a potentially fallacious one. I see those pictures and my eyes tear up. I want those people to get whatever they want. I believe it can't be malicious, whatever it is that brings that many people together.

I find it interesting when I stumble across a belief. It often strikes me as a realization more than anything else. I just notice that I believe something. And I guess ultimately, I'm still really optimistic about people en masse, as individuals. I think we're doing something terribly wrong, but I believe we have a really incredible potential for doing things right.

All together now.

I want to do away with the concept of the past life, and the future life. I have a proposition, a supraconcept: the simultaneous lifetime.

I've been reading this book about these kids, and there are thousands of them, who have these distinct and vivid memories of past lives. They remember their houses, their phone numbers, their spouses, their children. And they can call them on the phone.

There are also those people, you've probably heard of them, who get regressed through hypnosis to some past life or other. But some of these cases have been debunked on the basis of such things as people remembering being two different people during the same period of time.

I have these dreams, and in these dreams I am two or three people, or four or five. I am all of them at the same time. And these dreams and I, we say why not? If you are taking as a fundamental possibility that the soul can be transferred between people, and that it maintains memories of distinct people and places and numbers, then why is the concept of linear time the sacred cow? Bring it to the slaughter. You are that cow (and the butcher, and the baker).

This too solves the intellectual quandry of there being more of us alive now than there have been ever before. Because we're just reincarnating here over and over again, for some undefined reason, crowding this place and time in some orgiastic feast of the multiplicitous self.

Think about it next time you're in the corner mart buying beer at two in the morning, right before the legal cut-off time, and you see that guy who's all shaky and sickly in front of you in line. He's buying tv dinners with his Oregon Trail card and you're a little worried about him but in your relative misery you think, almost against your will, at least I'm not that guy. But you are that guy. And he is you.