1740 days ago today

Last year
she asked:

"Have you
written any
poetry lately?"

Well, I remember

(which does not mean:
I remember well)

one I wrote
one thousand
seven hundred
seventy-five days

ago today

[lapse]

She asked:

"Are you an artist?"

I f a lt e re d

What I meant to say:

"I'm living."

(I guess this makes this
an artist's commune)

Life as Picasso:

Longing an O'Keefe:

Words like teeth do chomp:

"The word 'art' interests me very much.
If it comes from the Sanskrit, as I've heard, it signifies 'making.'"
-Marcel Duchamp

Thank you,
I said, for asking.

Angry Birds, or: "So that's what they mean by process addiction..."

For years I have puzzled over the phenomena of process addictions: behaviors that, although not inherently mind-altering, nonetheless result in patterns as predictable and vice-like as those inspired by more well-known substances like caffeine, gluten, and sugar. Gambling and video game addictions have thus remained equal parts incomprehensible and anathematic to me... until now.

Yesterday I was introduced to Angry Birds by a friend of mine at work. Like any first-time user, I felt a little hesitant, asking questions that sounded like those of a character out of Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy: "What does the little blue ones do? ... How about the red one? ... How about the white? ..."

'

easily Matt Dillon's best role to date

Soon I found myself at home, alone, with nothing to do. My yin, invariably tempering influence on my temperament, was at a Gillian Welch concert 700 miles away, and Andy Sipowicz had not joined me for the evening. Before I knew what had happened, nearly two hours had passed, and then a message arrived from the one who gave me that first sweet taste...

Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I hear my yin's voice, "Yes, that's exactly what you should be doing with your time..."

near misses , or (that's) "The Way It Goes"

Hurricane Irene skated by the coast of South Florida yesterday afternoon, and other than a handful of jackasses being knocked around by waves up the road at Boynton Inlet, the area has once more escaped damage. In fact, since I moved here a little less than five years ago, there have been no tropical weather related maladies, and I sometimes like to credit this fact to my mere presence.

(Yes, that is the sound of me removing my tongue from my cheek.)

Anyway, this year's August has thus far been defined by near misses. The week I left North Carolina, for example, Neko Case played not once, not twice, but three times within a three-hour radius of Boone. And tonight, while I'm lurking around like some curtain-bound cave-dweller, my yin, my brother, and his wife are going to see Gillian Welch at App State:

"That's the way that it goes..."

It isn't all sour grapes, though. Besides Irene missing us, earlier this week I narrowly avoided a head-on collision with past karma at one of my workplaces, and at the other school I was fortunate enough to receive a warning ticket instead of the real thing after inappropriately backing into a parking spot.

But poorly chosen automotive metaphors are beside the point.

The point is that yesterday one of my students spoke about the importance of timing when it comes to communication. It was an insightful observation, and this past week has done nothing so much as reinforce this idea. Often times we get so lost in the 'should and should not happens' that we forget we are ultimately not the ones in charge.

Time and timing follow a logic all their own, and the difficulties arise only when we begin to think that we could orchestrate it better. But the near misses are just as important, just as meaningful, just as rife with possibility as the times when things go exactly the way we want. Of all the qualities I've heart exhorted as virtuous, patience is undoubtedly the least contentious.

In fact, the ability to wait, easefully, for the right moment to present itself is the goal of all my metaphysical pursuits and interests. It is the reason I was meditating before 6am this morning, the reason I find myself living a life that seemed equally unlikely whether one chooses a time frame of 5 or 10 or 15 years. I accept and celebrate the time and Timing of these things; I do not covet God-Realization, Enlightenment, Nirvana, or Heaven.

[lapse]

Coming full circle, Neko Case has some things to say about this as well:

"I have waited with a glacier's patience..."

repost: question, representation and beauty

part one: question

The question was asked:

"Why are we here?"

Some people answered.
Some said nothing.

One person wrote:

"So we can leave."

a) On the grossest level, this means nothing more (or less) than the certainty of bodily death, and while this fact seems mundane, true understanding can only be obtained as a side effect of our ultimate demise. This being the case, I will refrain from speculation.

b) On a more subtle level, leaving means much more than the body – it means recognizing the transitory nature of our beings. The "me" writing this now is not the "me" I was when I started. for example, i have just heard the most amusing song:

But I know that this amusement will be gone by this time tomorrow; it will probably be gone within the hour. This is the nature of thought and emotion.

The longer I study the nature of the (or at least "my") mind, the more convinced i become of two things:

1) The contents of the mind are ever-changing.

(and)

2) At least so long as we are embodied, the mind itself is ever-present.

Memory inevitably fades or fabricates, and even those sublime moments when we let go of identification can only be read against the moments that came before and after.

(fort and da)
(fort and da)

So, why are we here? We are here so we can leave, so we can let go of all those moments before and after, the moments we believe our existence can ever be fixed, defined, or understood.

part two: representation

Last night I sat in a room with eight other people and we stared at a machine approximately similar to the one upon which I currently type. The machine presented a two dimensional image of a person in Vancouver. The words spoken in Canada were transmitted to the room in Florida.

Sometimes the technology works well, but other times:

Without saying so, the person in Vancouver was talking about the nature of representation. This is a topic with which I have some familiarity. Afterward I picked up where he left off:

If one were to go to the beach, he or she could make a list of 50,000 distinct characteristics. Each of these 50,000 characteristics would be unique to the moment. Repeat this experiment 100 times.

After each repetition

(fort and da)

the characteristics will be slightly, or vastly, different. And yet, there is some experience of the beach that is consistent. It cannot be named, nor can it be denied.

But this is too simple.

Looking a little more deeply, one will inevitable encounter a problem. The sight of the water, for instance, is not instantaneous. The interaction between light, cornea, optic nerve, and brain create a lag between perception and cognition that is insurmountable. Therefore, to see the beach is actually to know the beach as it was; to hear the waves is to hear the waves as they were. The distance between us and the moment is structural, not conceptual, and everything in nature is pointing us to the answer given to the question in part one.

It is only

the persistent insistence of our existence

that prevents us

from
spinning
into nothing.

part three: beauty

An ancilla of last night's trans-continental discussion had to do with beauty and left me with more questions than answers. Like all transcendental categories, beauty encounters substantial obstacles when one ventures to dip below the most superficial of levels, and here are three points i continue to ponder:

1) For starters, if, as the truism argues, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" then who is it that trains the eye?

(I recall Laura Mulvey had something to say about this.)

2) Furthermore, in defining beauty do we not also necessarily define its lack? Does not, as Ani Difranco argues, everyone harbor a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room? If so, is beauty nothing more than a side effect of ego, a severing of oneself from the Source of all creation?

3) And, most perplexingly, what does Morrissey think of all this?

(fort and da)
(fort and da)
(fort and da)

"It's gruesome that someone so handsome should care."

sepatation anxiety

Yesterday afternoon I dropped my computer off at the Apple Store, after a twelve-hour day of outlines and classes and identification cards and hurricane watching and nothingness. My ongoing crisis of motivation continues, and the loss of my primary source of productivity and diversion comes a mixed blessing.

On the one hand, it affords me the opportunity to put some distance between myself and distraction; on the other hand, it separates me from the tool I've come to rely upon to create and write and organize my days away, stretching one after another towards an unknowable future, a future that seems less and less certain the closer it gets.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that my yin-in-law graciously loaned me her computer, which means that for the next 5-7 days I'm returning to the world of Windows and personal computing. So far the transition hasn't been too bad, and I've even been able to access some of the files from my Mac-formatted hard drive with a nifty (and clunky) third party software.

Also beside the point.

The point is that, using this particular utility, I couldn't help but feel like it was the summer of 1995 all over again when my parents bought me my first-ever computer, a P-75, from a CompUSA in Dallas. I was staying with my mother for six weeks in Plano, and I spent my days on the couch with my Korean-made Stratocaster (the "Koreacaster") playing along with CDs and MTV and the VCR and any other damn acronym I could find. There was a record store across town called Bill's, and I would drive there at least once a week to look for bootleg albums and break the monotony of 100-degree temperatures and the loneliness of knowing a town well enough to get around, but not well enough to strike up a conversation.

For whatever reason, the memory of that summer returns to me this morning. and looking back I know those months between May high school graduation and August collegiate matriculation mark a rite of passage for middle class adolescents. There is excitement and dread, opportunity and uncertainty... But most of all there is a profound loss of identity. One can no longer think of himself as a high schooler, he knows nothing yet of college life, and the title of "recent high school graduate" is far too fleeting and empty to provide much comfort.

Music, then as now, helps to make sense of these things...

Newton and Sipowicz, music and inertia (bored of being bored)

part 1

part 2

part 3

There's a line in an Eleanor Friedberger that begins, "You and me could go on and on and on..."

And this line could easily be used as a prologue to my love letter to Andy Sipowicz. Most actors' performances come across as absurd to me, and I don't know if this is because I'm overly critical, underly emotional, or if I suffer from some sort of genetic predisposition that prevents me from adequately suspending disbelief.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that Dennis Franz's portrayal of Detective Sipowicz has always been an exception to this rule, and this past week I've been watching the first two seasons of NYPD Blue for the first time since I caught them in reruns back in the mid-2000s. At that time I had a Roku, a generous paycheck, and a plate of misery heaped so high that I could hardly tell the pirogies from the dog turd dumplings.

(Sounds like something Sipowicz might say, no?)

In the midst of this confusion was Andy, a damaged detective struggling to find redemption. He, of course, was his own worst enemy in this regard, but it was something else beyond the cliché that garnered my attention. Most characters cast into the role of anti- or redeemed hero suffer from a lack of consistency. Their actions are marked by wild fluctuations between the heroic and depraved, and from these extremes the viewer is supposed to surmise that the character portrayed is therefore troubled or nuanced or psychologically complex.

But Andy Sipowicz did not conform to this mold, opting instead for the middle. His indiscretions, albeit multifarious, were never as extreme as those of his colleagues, and the darkest corners of his past (such as his penchant for domestic violence) were safely cordoned off by the black hole of the show's pre-history. All television programs have this device at their disposal, but NYPD Blue was incredibly effective at using it to insinuate Sipowicz's past without making it explicit. The viewer is then left to fill in the blanks on his or her own, providing just enough turpitude to set the story arc of Andy's morality into motion.

As a result, Sipowicz doesn't have to be overly heroic either, which makes it all the more believable that his attempts to do good represent real spiritual progress. Since the viewer is unable to know how far he had fallen, it is likewise impossible to know if he is ever full redeemed. His acts of kindness therefore reside in a limbo of sorts – admirable in the context of given episodes, but still suspect when taken in the context of the larger diegesis.

part 4

part 5

The point of this exercise (assuming their is one) is that I've been re-watching NYPD Blue this week because I've felt stuck. Not lost, but stuck, and sometimes the only way to get unstuck is to wade through the muck, trudge onward not in a posture of resistance but in that of surrender.

If Robert Smith were here, he would know what I'm talking about...

repost: two years ago North Carolina was like...

l
o
n
g dinner table discussions

and

yellow jackets nesting
in my lover's hair.

the wondering

lurking fear
of

potential chance encounter.

meditating
to the sound
of gunfire
while
yellow
butter
flies
chase

dragonflies
mating
and

Jesus watches over
the
shoplifters

and transients
talk about the
recession

while

a dog chases
cattle staring
at a deer.

staring into
the bluest eyes
lakeside and windy

realization:

my mother's temperament

my father's capacity

tiger eye mala beads and

giggling climax at midnight.

on the first day of school

Today was the first day of school, and unlike previous years, I'm no longer wearing two hats, no longer straddling the line between student and instructor that defines one's time in graduate school. It's too new to know exactly what all the differences entail, but I'm certainly grateful that there are no theses or term papers or heavy theoretical readings on slate between now and December. Applications for doctoral programs, on the other hand, are a different story altogether...

But, at least for now, this is beside the point.

The point is that the first day was a fine day, and I managed to make it through all three classes without the slightest case of the nerves or dread or any of the other common maladies that one typically associates with the start of a new job. A lot of this, I believe, has to do with the fact that my new colleagues are, to a person, helpful and friendly.

While this in and of itself isn't particularly surprising, it did strike me how accustomed I had become to the underlying tensions that were part and parcel to graduate school. My colleagues (and I suppose myself as well) were constantly pulled between our own interests (graduation, outside work, maintaining a social life) and those of the university (teaching undergrads, administrative deadlines, etc.). The end result was that everyone was in a different place, responding to different demands in different ways to varying degrees of success.

("Degrees"... You see what I did there?)

That wasn't so much the case yesterday, though. The adjunct office really is an office, with professors preparing for classes or engaged in other productive activity rather than badmouthing their students, or lamenting the bureaucracy of higher education, or blaring reruns of Friends on Youtube (horror of horrors). The ways in which graduate students find relaxation is a many-headed beast:

Hercules fighting the hydra

Now I have more quotidian concerns, like the comparison of my morning and afternoon commutes, or what I plan to cook for supper. It feels a little strange, and it fits nicely with the current tamas I've been experiencing. Overcoming inertia, as Newton would attest, is just as difficult as slowing down momentum, and each day since returning to Florida I've been trying to motivate myself to do a little bit more, run one more errand, take care of one more loose end...

Some of them, like the satchel full of unsorted paperwork, have been dangling for two years or more. Others, like unpacking the car and buying groceries, are as fresh as the morning dew back home in North Carolina. New or old, all of them must be addressed. The music helps...

one last look back...

Tomorrow is the first day of school, and on the eve of my return to real-life it seems reasonable to pause for a moment and consider the past several months. My yin and I were away for three months, and I left North Carolina Monday morning without her. She has a little more than three weeks left on her contracts there, which means I have two dozen blocks of cheese to look forward to.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that when I remember this summer, it seemed so much busier than the last. But when I look a little closer, I see that it was actually and alternately manic and lethargic, somber and strange. The honeymoon comedown dominated the last week of June and first half of July, lingering like the clouds overhead that blocked out the sun and kept us chained to the couch in a willful and celebratory procrastination. The middle third was defined by the onset of sadness, the realization of what the television and laziness had kept at bay, and these final two weeks – and especially the past seven days – have felt the shift back into forward momentum: working with the half-Canadian, editing my yin's DVD, little blips of missing our condo.

The knives.

My desk.

Our bed.

Even now the words feel strange. Other than the recounting of our travels, this venue has hosted little more than themes recycled at best, and regurgitated at worst.

I suppose this, too, will dissipate, but right now it cloaks everything with a certain somber glow, a special malaise that is neither dramatic nor memorable. It feels more than ever as if I'm writing into a void, filling empty time and empty lines with words inadequately beautiful, beautifully inadequate.

And so

the eulogy

stops.

a letter to my mother

Mom,

...

Self-reflection is always a good thing, Mom, but too much rumination inevitably leads towards lugubrious thoughts and regret. You don't need to know how to "be a parent" to adult children. D__ and I are grown men, and we wouldn't be the people we are if not for the love and care and attention and greatness and weakness that we learned both from you and Dad. The joy about being an adult child (and likewise a parent of one) is that it frees up the relationship, allowing it to develop in whatever direction it needs to rather than having to follow the prescribed roles of a "good" parent or "good" child (whatever those things mean).

If I were you, I would practice concentrating more on your life now, on your living and enjoying your relationships now, rather than analyzing why or how they are the way they are. I love you. D__ loves you. N__ and P__ love you. Your sisters love you. C_____ loves you. You don't have to do anything to make this happen. Just be yourself, accept yourself, love yourself. It's not your job to try to make other people like or accept you. The person you already are is the one that everyone loves so much.

As far as the past goes, there's a line in a Chris Marker film that says the moments we remember are made memorable "on account of their scars." I believe this is true, and yet it is inconceivable to think of a life without memory. The term "human being" loses all comprehensibility without it, and sometimes, when we're in the grips of a sadness or depression, it's easy to forget that happy moments also leave their scars. This is what happens when we finds ourselves grasping onto some moments more than others, wanting to pick and choose which experiences are fleeting and which ones can linger. The Buddha called this tendency attachment, and our grasping inevitably leads to suffering. The answer is ultimately to surrender. Surrender to the moment. Surrender to the present. Surrender to the past. Surrender even to memory – but only insofar as it allows us to connect to a time that would otherwise be lost to us, to reunite with the fragmented parts of ourself that still need our love and compassion.


I love you, as ever,

J_____

Raleigh, continued... (a photoessay)

Our weekend in Raleigh, like so many other enjoyable excursions, began with falafel. Tucked away in a rather ordinary strip mall resides a rather extraordinary Middle Eastern restaurant, which my yin and I were introduced to during a comparable outing last year. While my yin played it safe, opting for the falafel pita wrap, I decided to be adventurous and try some Frankenstein Italian-Lebanese monstrosity called "pitza."

(You see what they did there?)

i
m
age
miss
in
g

But this is beside the point.

The point is that we went downtown after dinner to check out Raleigh's First Friday art crawl. The popularity of such events has been on the uptick during recent years, popping up everywhere from Boone to Miami, and I sometimes wonder about the forces directing this trend. Is art becoming more popular, or am I merely paying attention?

Does this man know?

Or is he as lost as his friends?

(insert obligatory squash pun here)

Could I learn the answer inside a giant trash bag?

Or would the refrigerator entrance be too cold to endure?

Maybe there are no answers at all.

Maybe there are nothing but silhouettes in the dark.

How long will we wait?

How many reflections must we chase?

How many false prophets litter our vision?

How many signs invade our sight?

How many circles point us in the right direction?

It's enough to make one's head spin.

But maybe, eventually, the light bulb will go on.

(Many thanks to George and Sara for another wonderful weekend...)

the drive, the gallery, the night

My yin and I returned to Raleigh yesterday, embarking on another weekend with a friend of mine from high school. More than one year had passed since our last visit.

a window memory, reflection-inflected, an already fading past...

On the drive:

I think of the memories locked inside my bones. I remember the thoughts that once populated my mind with such consistency that they took on the quality of constancy: six forks, five fingers, four evers, three hours, two lovers, one cubic centimeter. I see snatches of glimpses, snatches of glimpses; a red door entrance to a second story bar where Nancy once bought stock in Merck Pharmaceuticals five milligrams at a time.

urban horizon blue meets brick red sky...

In the gallery:

I speak with a docent who has asked us to step away from the art. The exhibit is composed of recycled and repurposed and otherwise disposed of material. I ask her if she appreciates the irony of the situation, how her role as museum employee has interpellated her in a manner contradictory to the impetus underlying the art. She says she does understand, and in the conversation that follows I come to believe her.

I tell her that the museum itself, which is housed in what was once a warehouse, represents a curious phenomenon in post-industrial America. Warehouses – the cultural spaces and physical places of the working class – have grown dark and empty and abandoned over the past thirty years, mirroring the hollowing out of the working class by the creeds of free trade and global capitalism that have come to dominate our ever waking moment.

Once empty, these spaces are filled with art objects and shopping malls and luxury lofts – the symptoms of lopsided wealth and trappings of high culture coming to colonize spaces that were once considered not worth possessing.

tiny concrete death masks of Adam Smith and his progeny...

In the night:

I dream of Nancy. She is coming for a private session with my yin and I try to sneak out the door, knowing the trouble that will follow. Nancy sees me.

Irate.

Spiteful.

Odious.

She is Medusa without feminism

X without Haley

memory without the past.

My yin, though, possesses a strength that runs deeper than the simple violence of malice. She ejects Nancy from the domicile and physically pushes her accomplice out the door.

I wake in a gasp.

Thunder rumbles and I hold my yin closer. "I had a bad dream."

(i imagine)

"Come here," she says. "I'll make it better."

Already, she has.

to be continued...

Tales of Ordinary Madness (book rant)

Last night I finished reading:

For the past week or so the book has provided virtually all of my bedtime stories, offering a kind of perverted, alcoholic lullaby that is only slightly less twisted than the fairy tales most people read their children. Why the story of a young girl (or three little pigs for that matter) being terrorized by a wolf makes for appropriate bedtime fare is beyond me.

It reminds me of a poem I wrote several years ago:

What lupine
machinations
operate
(un/seen)
giving us
safe
clean
well-lit
places in the night?

But this is beside the point.

The point is that I, like most people, was introduced to Charles Bukowski when I was 19 years old. As far as I'm concerned, this is the perfect time for a young person to be introduced to Hank's work because: 1) he or she is still young enough to assume the author's constant references to drunkenness, constipation, and hemorrhoids point towards some underlying profundity; and 2) he or she is not yet old enough to realize that the profundity of said subject matter is self-evident.

Bukowski's other great gift is his ability to write about the truly banal, without pretense or contrivance. Take, for example, this description whose misogyny is surpassed only by its conciseness:

"There was a girl whose ass looked like the bottom of heaven." (88)

There are no drawn-out, flowery descriptions in Tales of Ordinary Madness, and this holds true throughout the dozens of short stories that comprise the book. I do not know if this pattern exists in his longer fiction, but Bukowski's short stories are masterful in their ability to communicate a mood (typically alienation, longing, and/or disappointment) through the sparsest use of words imaginable.

Did I mention there is more simile in life than metaphor?

"The waitress was fat and stupid as a roach, unthinking – she’d never had a toothache, she’d never been constipated even, she never thought about death and only a little about life." (96)

While this description begins predictably, using the insect as shorthand for the woman's disgusting and contemptible nature, the middle portion gives teeth (pun intended) to what would be an otherwise boring characterization. Toothaches and constipation connote specifically human discomfort, pains from which the waitress is forbidden. Finally, and this is his genius, Bukowski makes the leap from the banal to the existential, framing the woman's stupidity as ultimately a matter of her inability to consider death and mortality.

These were the subtleties I missed when I was 19. Back then I could care less for Bukowski. His writing seemed needlessly grotesque and intentionally offensive. But as I've grown older, I've come to understand that his writing is about that very troubling (and very troubling) subject: the grotesquery of aging itself. This, more than anything else, seems to be Bukowski's strongest and most recurrent theme, and I wonder if it was because he was already middle-aged when he "made it."

Most authors seem to achieve Importance, if not Fame, by their late twenties, and I feel certain that these cultural phenomena interfere with what might be called the more "normal" aging process. We live in a society that not only values, but idealizes youth; a society where a distinction must be made between "growing old gracefully" and merely getting older. Bukowski's late-arriving recognition shielded him from this, allowing him to undergo the disappointments that seem part and parcel with the transition into one's thirties.

"I remembered when I was kid, I thought, I’d like to live to see the year 2,000, I thought that would be the magic thing, with my old man beating the hell out of me everyday I wanted to live to be 80 and see the year 2,000; now with everything beating the hell out of me I no longer have that desire." (154)

This passage communicates Bukowski's essential understanding of man's place (yes, always man with Bukowski) in the world: the chasm between the projections of youth and the disillusionment of experience. For him, this process is inevitably one that pulls one closer towards nihilism and emptiness, in spite of the individual's longing for liberation.

Booze, Sex, and Gambling fill this void; they are his trinity as much as the Christians have their Father, Son, and Ghost. A better analogy, though, might be to the Hindu understandings of Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Sustainer, and Shiva the Destroyer. In Bukowski's pantheon, Sex is the Creator, giving birth to desire and inspiring impossible aspirations. Herein lies the source of his misogyny because woman comes to embody this hope that gives rise only to disappointment. Gambling is Vishnu, sustaining him in the time between disappointments, and Alcohol is his Destroyer, obliterating the Sex and Gambling only to give rise to it all again.

Caught in this mêlée, man (yes, always man with Bukowski) is trapped in an inescapable cycle:

"All the people in Los Angeles are doing it: running ass-wild after something that is not there. It is basically a fear of facing one’s self, it is basically a fear of being alone." (190)

In the end, it is this solitude that exists as the sole constant of the universe, existing independently of the booze and the gambling, the heartache and rambling. Bukowski is the Buddha of post-War America, a Siddhartha who realized the first noble truth and went no further. And it would be simple enough to dismiss him as a depressive, an alcoholic, a madman, a coward, and a fraud... if only I had never heard his voice: