Monday, December 17, 2007

This blog has sunk way back into the Id. It kind of goes in cycles but it hasn't been aired out in a while. Reading my friends' blogs has reminded me that events are usually more interesting than feelings.

I have decided to take a break from writing. That doesn't mean I will no longer write. It just means I'm unburdening myself of the self-imposed expectation to achieve brilliance in the form. I haven't written a poem in months. The dating blog kind of sucked the enthusiasm out of me, not that I ever really had that much to begin with when it came to sitting in front of a blank page feeling exasperated.

As a consequence, I'm trying to make music. I'm even taking singing lessons. Right now I'm feeling like I'm just poking my head out from beneath a rock. But screw the rock. I've routinely embarrassed myself in the past over things not one one-thousandth as worthy.

For Christmas, I'm taking my mother to a shooting range. Anyone who has met my mother will understand how bizarre this proposition is. My whole family are pacifists - I have never shot a gun. And that's the point. She quit the nursing job she held for twenty-some years, finally overwhelmed by the lack of self-preservation most of her patients demonstrated.

After I got into San Diego, we went to Balboa Park. As we were walking, I suggested off-handedly, "You should dye your hair purple." For all the times I've mocked this sentiment, it seemed like a good idea. To do it appropriately is a tall order, though.

When I resurrected Dillon, I reaffirmed an idea I've knocked around for a while: the big secret of life is that you set the rules for yourself and you can do anything at any time as long as you are congruous and confident about it. People move aside to accommodate your momentum. The strongest reality wins.

So I told my mom she should do something that threatens her comfort levels. I told her the best thing you can do for yourself is to temporarily become something you resent, or to participate in something that you hitherto felt you could never be a part of. We reached an agreement: she would go shooting if I agreed to take a personality test out of one of her "find your ideal career" books; something I have openly resisted for years.

It makes more of a difference than you might think. A lot sticks. Try it.

Monday, October 29, 2007

And honor just being happy to be twenty.

Sunday, October 28, 2007

One hour left. Just a number, just a number, just a number. But the heart says different.

It's my eighth birthday and I'm at school, fourth grade, orange shag carpet, even twelve seeming impossibly distant. All is bathed in holy self-assurance. Pain, yes. Loneliness. Purity, though. Selfness.

Then I'm bored and gradually diluted until the self-assurance is buried, seemingly irrevocably.

Then I'm burying friends and part of me secretly thrills at the thought of my house burning down.

And the only really heartwrenching thing, truly agonizing, is the ineffability. The story is too big. There is too much holiness. It can never be retold. It can never be understood, even by ourselves.

So I honor what I can.

Honor finding my mistreated pet hamster dead and stiff on the living room carpet.

Honor a dream of absolute, searing LOVE and togetherness, ONLY SIX YEARS OLD, waking in tears at the beauty of it and kneeling beside my bed, praying with clenched hands that it not be only a dream.

Honor the impeccable sanctity of the first years of a family.

Honor my first kiss, stolen, then given.

Honor the pain, HONOR THE PAIN, the dilution, body hatred, HONOR IT, loneliness, fear, HONOR.

Honor the joy of looking into friends' eyes and seeing there a home.

Honor the dead poets with black and white faces. Honor my desire to throw their books into the ocean and walk away forever.

Honor death. Honor change, which is death.


Honor Bryan. Honor to you, Bryan. You are here in my heart forever.


Honor my component realities. Honor Skate Town and Superbad. Honor Kerouac's Great Emptiness. Honor the cripple. Honor the hermit. Honor the King. Honor a distrust of the pointedly cool. Honor the pointedly cool. Honor inconsistency and the freedom to travel between these realities without fear of congruity.

Honor the bullies. Honor those I have bullied.

Honor Miramar Ranch Elementary School. Honor Thurgood Marshall Middle School. Honor Scripps Ranch High School. Honor The Evergreen State College. These places are in my blood. I trace their geometry with fondness and tragedy.

Honor moving at the age of five, telling my dad I want to go back and suck all the memories out of the house through a latch in the door.

Honor wanting to suck all my memories out of the world and keeping them in a chamber close to my heart where they will stay warm and I can protect and preserve them.

Honor this weblog, which is a chart of my sincerity.

Honor overwrought tone. Honor the ability to laugh at anything, even staring down the barrell of two decades with damp eyes for the spectacle, the IMMENSE, CRUCIAL, YET UTTERLY UNGRASPABLE IMPORTANCE OF THE THING.

Honor the spectacle.

Honor the past.

Honor the future.

Honor the present, which is both.


Honor to these things.


Honor to these things.


Honor to these things.


Because that's all we can do.

Saturday, September 22, 2007

I was on the beach with my parents and we found a duck floundering in the sand. A female Northern Shoveler, probably point-guard of the winter migration.

"It's a duck."

"Well, it's a Shoveler. Look at the long beak."

It tries to move away from us by rolling its belly forward and kicking with its legs. Something is broken.

We stand and stare for many moments before going to look at the water. Blackbirds hop all around us.

Then we walk back, towards the duck. In my mind a man is standing over it, torturing gleefully and staring defiantly into my eyes. I am filled with hatred for this imaginary person, stamping out the bird's vulnerable life, every little kid flushing anthills with a hose, every person who doesn't care. Suddenly I am beating this man, screaming.

The duck rests in the lap of a woman sitting on a log with her boyfriend. We walk up and stare. She lifts a wing and I motion at the underparts with one earpiece of my sunglasses. I don't know what this is meant to signify. Neither of them speak English. We smile at each other, not knowing what we mean by smiling. "Ah, yes, what is to be done?"

She pets it as we walk off down the shore.

Saturday, August 25, 2007

I'm almost done reading The Gospel of Food, a book all about how liberal food politics are mostly based on fallacy and anti-science.

I think about the possibility that maybe everything is JUST OK and something shifts on a primal level and releases all kinds of confidence and endorphins. That maybe McDonald's provides edible meals and a welcoming atmosphere to poor families that would have to live on crackers otherwise. That maybe I can swear off the horrible "reduced" whatever food I was raised on, every bite laden with the unspoken fear of diabetes and cholesterol implosion heat death.

That maybe ballasting your soul with doctrines limits its potentials for fulfillment. That maybe limiting your potentials for fulfillment cripples your soul.

That maybe we're not all going to go screaming into an icecap apocalypse, that doomsday has been lurking at the edges of our dreams since we were squirted into the universe for a purpose whose continued obscurity honestly renders all judgment, comparison and prediction inherently faulted, that somebody's going to look back and regard the idea that bicycles and veggie burgers will save the world in the same way we shake our heads at how it was once believed that masturbation causes blindness.

That maybe we can drink in huge, blustering breaths of liberated air, embrace our ignorance, assume nothing and go tromping off into the future with excitement (how alien this concept, once so central to the human mind). That maybe the only gospel of worth is: go with it, dudes.

Monday, August 13, 2007

There is no way to tell someone you love them after they're dead.

Not enough words in the world for this.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Couple days ago had a quarter-conscious dream of retreating into a dark apartment, everything stone and candles, the home of Kenneth Patchen and also the idea of Kenneth Patchen, waypoint for every poor soul who inherits the holy William Blake endless night holy holy bullshit. No name dropping here, according to Patchen there is no name for it, just a vicious Knowledge creeping down the generations, beaming its doubt into the hearts and minds of serious serious serious young men. Sat there, in the stone room, at a wooden table, drinking something and dwelling in the residual company of those who came before, serious, ashen-eyed, dead and electrified by Loneliness.

Augh. Would rather not be one of the victims. I'm repeating myself.

Woke up into unbelievable head-shattering sleep paralysis, my body made of lightning, amplified again and again until it's never been so bad, trying to call out to someone to maybe come slap some life into my arms and legs but being only able to mutter out, "...muh." Then seeing my reading lamp hovering over me, thinking AHA, here is the trickster who renders me paralyzed two or three mornings out of the month! "Fuck you goddamned shit ass motherfucker..." realizing it is a lamp and, indeed, not a malevolent sleep demon from the nether.

Fun morning.

Dwell dwell dwell dwell malaise malaise Happy Self Indulgent Blog cantankerous buttercup. Zummm. Fuck it.

Friday, June 22, 2007

I'm sitting in a hostel in Munich and I have less than five minutes of internet time left.

The obscurity of my situation - opposite side of globe, don't know what time it is back home, an empty checking account - is mighty powerful black magic against my state of mind.

Walking in circles around old cities, seeing the human creature poke its head out of history, feeling the experiment churn on under my feet, part of me, everyone, an equation of old statues, bronze becomes steel, mud becomes concrete, growing on forever.

Homesick fever dreams. Wonderful times, really, amazing, but no place like home.

Happy world. Lonely and OK world.

Out of time. Love you.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

SWEET MOTHER OF GOD, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!

I just received notice that I am being picked up for blog syndication on Nerve.com. I'm going to be paid $100 a month to go on dates and write about it for 1,000,000+ people to read.

Four hours in the computer lab filling out an application has set my life on a completely unexpected, bizarre, potentially wonderful course.

I can't express to you the joy and amazement I feel right now. I've basically started a career for myself and it all came to a head in a matter of two days.

HOLY SHIT!

I'll soon be appearing here: blog-a-log

My head is spinning. I don't even know what I'm going to do. I'm floating.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Yesterday I was on an America West flight from Las Vegas (wonderful playland fantasy city - totally bizarre and horrible but kind of endearing at the same time) to Seattle. Those little flip-down screens that are built into the ceiling consoles of many planes were flipped down when we boarded, playing a montage of placid music and scenes of mountains and fish and whatnot to soothe raging, panicked us. After we taxied, they retracted, then when we were at cruising altitude they extended back down and started showing advertisements for the airline and Cranium trivia. There were also ads for some stupid Cranium offshoot toys and photos of all the wonderful places America West - and only America West - can take you.

When the stewardess asked me for my drink order, I leaned over and asked, "Is this business going to be going on the entire flight?"

"Yeah."

"Can it not be going on the entire flight?"

"No. The advertisers require that we show it."

I groan and shake my head.

"Well it's not like you have to look at it. ("You fucking caveman idiot.") Does it really bother you that much?"

"Yeah, well, it's so obnoxious and intrusive."

She looks at me incredulously. "You're the first person to ever complain about that." Another stewardess approaches with drinks. The stewardess already berating me turns to her friend, motioning at me: "The first one."

"That's ridiculous."

I order water, and when I put my tray down I laugh, put the tray back up and take a full thirty seconds to process what I had just seen. The whole top of the tray was plastered with an ad for some obscure laptop. I put down the tray for the seat next to me and saw a different ad for the same laptop.

It may seem like I'm being affectedly shocked at all of this, but I was genuinely surprised. It was like some overdone movie parody of American marketing materialized before my eyes.

At the end of the flight, the Alpha-stewardess made this announcement to the cabin: "As we make our final descent, flight attendants will be coming through the cabin to collect any remaining service items."

WHAT! "Service items?" Who is so offended by the word "trash" that they require a euphemism for it? Do the America West managers really believe people could ever possibly be offended by that word if it wasn't suggested that they should be?

Craziness. George Carlin rolls over in the grave he has yet to fill.

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

I am done with this college that reads The Dharma Bums and sits in a circle sighing and nodding
you all talking about how it is a book for young people with a slow drawl making young people into
words like fuck and shit
(DO YOU HAVE NO PASSION MUST YOU SIT THERE AND BE ASTUTER-THAN-THOU AAALWAAAAYS!)
and I try to tell you No this book has conquered literature because it is Truth Forever and Ever
because it is a piece of a soul it is beautiful things and emptiness and honesty pacing back and
forth at the top of a mountain kicking rocks into the void
but your pencils go scribble-scribble-scribble
and your years calcify in your bowels.

Monday, February 19, 2007

Stuck In the Past Again

We all sit around the
fire on the beach feeling
"Let's have it, bring us
our futures" and
wandering about filled with
nameless knowing, touching
once and then again
at each others' elbows
until it is
time to
go.

Sunday, February 11, 2007

I've had about enough of contrived profundity,
of the urgency of poetry,
of the guilt over not being always prodigal.

Of crying over trees
of isms and
the masturbatory nonsense of plots and characters,
symbols,
even blankness.

Snore snore snore.
What is is.

Saturday, January 06, 2007

We're all so tangled it's charming.