Dark clouds gather at the end of streets and behind towers. We rush to a square outside Santa Croce and lie on our backs over the cobblestones, watching those etched clouds swirl and bulge, swell and recede. Then came the rain. I saw individual raindrops plummet from the sky and land on my cheeks. When the rain started to come too strong, we crowded into the church with the others.
A downpour and thunder fills the square, driving away the tourists that crowded beneath shop awnings. The church becomes too crowded, so we take shelter beneath a network of scaffolding used to restore the old building. I crouched among the skeletons of scaffolding and stone and sang the blues in the key of an exhaust fan humming nearby; “I’m soaked to the bone and I feel like goin’ home…”
The rain lets up and the square is like a gilded mirror. Two blond girls are the first to venture out, walking brightly across this somber space. Patches of bright blue color the sky like the first strokes of a paintbrush on old canvas.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Saturday, December 04, 2010
The Grand Tour pt 5: Lamentations no. 1
Lost in a hotel room that is too large for me, a high ceiling, vast tile floor and a tiny chair. Where am I? Rome, I think, a beehive of cobbled streets, twisting alleys and whirring scooters. What street is this? Foreign drawl of a street name like the last words of a villager struck down by cholera. I’m lost in a city where I am lost in the hotel where I am lost in the room and where I am lost in this chair.
Walking now, marching twenty strides behind Odlef, a clumsy limp and with each step a wince of pain from the blister on my pinky toe. This little piggy is squealing “SHIT FUCK PISS” all the way home. The sun beats on Rome, bakes the stones and I walk on the coals. Dry air sucks moisture from my eyes. Trembling, hungering, baking, I fall out of the flowing current of pedestrians to lean against a wrought iron fencepost. I try to find my happy place inside my head, but all of my memories seem far away, across the ocean. But here’s one now: childhood days sprawled on the grass with the family dog. Playing kick-the-can with Mike and Jane. First snow of the year and I’m standing at the neighbor’s door, “Can Jane come out and play?” There now, something looks familiar. I remember every detail about a split second of those days.
Sometime during these musings I have fallen back in line behind Odlef, and I fully awaken as he comes to a stop. Look up, there is a heavy solid dome stretched above our heads, an open circle at the apex, a sunbeam shining through the cool moist air onto marble floors. This is the Pantheon.
Walking now, marching twenty strides behind Odlef, a clumsy limp and with each step a wince of pain from the blister on my pinky toe. This little piggy is squealing “SHIT FUCK PISS” all the way home. The sun beats on Rome, bakes the stones and I walk on the coals. Dry air sucks moisture from my eyes. Trembling, hungering, baking, I fall out of the flowing current of pedestrians to lean against a wrought iron fencepost. I try to find my happy place inside my head, but all of my memories seem far away, across the ocean. But here’s one now: childhood days sprawled on the grass with the family dog. Playing kick-the-can with Mike and Jane. First snow of the year and I’m standing at the neighbor’s door, “Can Jane come out and play?” There now, something looks familiar. I remember every detail about a split second of those days.
Sometime during these musings I have fallen back in line behind Odlef, and I fully awaken as he comes to a stop. Look up, there is a heavy solid dome stretched above our heads, an open circle at the apex, a sunbeam shining through the cool moist air onto marble floors. This is the Pantheon.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
The Grand Tour pt 4: Toulon Postcard
Old sailors grounded in Toulon sit on doorsteps throughout the day, sipping beer in the mornings, biting their fingernails in the afternoon, tasting the dirt on their tongues. Their skin is deep brown and liver-spotted, tattoos of ships broken up on their withered arms. Cobblestone alleys lead crookedly toward the Mediterranean shore. Speakers hang over the streets, tangled in lines of wire and cable, bringing the streets alive with American sixties songs. In the farmers' market, hordes of tourists shout in broken French with the vendors, a tangle of hands shuffling honeydew melons and yellow plums and paprika. Further up the avenues, away from the shoreline, the streets grow quiet. In the squares, lovers mill about with entwined arms or sat in patio cafes waiting patiently for their drinks. A fountain stood in the center of a square, water trickling down a swell of moss and vines, dripping into a pool. A blackbird fluttered in the shallows, water beading its feathers.
We stay at the hotel Le Petit Chateau and wash our clothes in the boudoir with hand soap. Eating sandwiches of liverwurst, sardines, and tomatoes on a fresh baked baguette, Odlef sits on the windowsill looking out over the chaotic jumble of flats with red-tiled rooftops. In the afternoon we buy three bottles of chilled white wine, drink in the night and come alive; this is our daily ritual, to be followed by numb, wordless mornings. My life is something like water: without taste, bland, lacking intoxication, even here in France. That is why I reach for the wine bottle.
I write a postcard to a friend back home. There is too little space to cover everything going on, so I decide it best to describe only the items on the table in our room:
- crusts of stale French bread
- two husks of beach melon
- two plums from the farmers market (yellow)
- two half full bottles of white wine
- ashtray, filled (one pack)
- Paris guidebook (tattered)
- Rome guidebook (pristine)
- backpack strap (useful) and an American penny (useless)
I take Odlef’s spot on the windowsill and claim my perch four stories above the street. Sallows fly in circles above the fountain in the square. Church bells toll the evening vespers. Pickpockets withdraw from their day of work, street urchins laugh into the face of the coming night, and a dog kills a cardboard box.
We stay at the hotel Le Petit Chateau and wash our clothes in the boudoir with hand soap. Eating sandwiches of liverwurst, sardines, and tomatoes on a fresh baked baguette, Odlef sits on the windowsill looking out over the chaotic jumble of flats with red-tiled rooftops. In the afternoon we buy three bottles of chilled white wine, drink in the night and come alive; this is our daily ritual, to be followed by numb, wordless mornings. My life is something like water: without taste, bland, lacking intoxication, even here in France. That is why I reach for the wine bottle.
I write a postcard to a friend back home. There is too little space to cover everything going on, so I decide it best to describe only the items on the table in our room:
- crusts of stale French bread
- two husks of beach melon
- two plums from the farmers market (yellow)
- two half full bottles of white wine
- ashtray, filled (one pack)
- Paris guidebook (tattered)
- Rome guidebook (pristine)
- backpack strap (useful) and an American penny (useless)
I take Odlef’s spot on the windowsill and claim my perch four stories above the street. Sallows fly in circles above the fountain in the square. Church bells toll the evening vespers. Pickpockets withdraw from their day of work, street urchins laugh into the face of the coming night, and a dog kills a cardboard box.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
The Grand Tour pt 3: Straw Dogs
Odlef and I follow a tour in a Paris guidebook in which you pretend you are walking through Montparnasse during the Lost Generation of the 1920’s. It is as though we are two starving nihilists who, armed with the guidebook, torch everything in the city while preserving only those great artifacts from Gertrude Stein’s Montparnasse. We see a new restaurant called the Hippo Grill; it does not exist. There is a café called Le Select, but at this hour in the tour guidebook there are no people. But I see the people, smoking, reading papers, making all of the correct motions of intellectuals, and yet we drop the curtain on their play; they do not exist.
We are poor and unknown. We smoke cigarettes on the curb outside of Closerie des Lilas. We cannot sit at the tables of Hemmingway and Fitzgerald. This is how we visit the cafes. This is our straw dog generation. Intoxicated on hunger, road fatigue, anonymity, and yet irrevocably present. Our goal is to become known, our ideas to become respected, or at least to have our presence affirmed, but according to the guidebook, we don’t exist either. There are only the ghosts of Ernie and Ezra huddled around a sidewalk table, and we are but the smoke from their cigarettes. What have we done to deserve our place at the table? Nibble the crusts of bread from the curb outside the cafés? Follow history from a tourist book and follow the movements dictated in a game of Simon Says? Perhaps Jim Morrison, too mythified and all too godlike in my eyes, said it best: “Where is the new wine, dying on the vine?” We need to kill our gods to take their seat.
We are poor and unknown. We smoke cigarettes on the curb outside of Closerie des Lilas. We cannot sit at the tables of Hemmingway and Fitzgerald. This is how we visit the cafes. This is our straw dog generation. Intoxicated on hunger, road fatigue, anonymity, and yet irrevocably present. Our goal is to become known, our ideas to become respected, or at least to have our presence affirmed, but according to the guidebook, we don’t exist either. There are only the ghosts of Ernie and Ezra huddled around a sidewalk table, and we are but the smoke from their cigarettes. What have we done to deserve our place at the table? Nibble the crusts of bread from the curb outside the cafés? Follow history from a tourist book and follow the movements dictated in a game of Simon Says? Perhaps Jim Morrison, too mythified and all too godlike in my eyes, said it best: “Where is the new wine, dying on the vine?” We need to kill our gods to take their seat.
Sunday, November 07, 2010
The Grand Tour Pt2: Atlantic Crossing
I am on the plane somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. Blackness fills the window; I have no fear of the ocean because I cannot see it. Yet it is there, those churning depths, those sharks and whales just below my body suspended in space, but right now I feel no nearer to the ocean than when I was lying in my bed in Iowa, imagining my Atlantic crossing. In fact, I was closer then. My room was dark. This plane is filled with light, stewardesses handing out blankets, and men with their shoes off to air out their stinking feet; this is my version of the Grand Tour, 21st century style.
How did I do it? How did I manage in one year to get thrown out of the Iowa writing program for mental indiscretions, move back home with my mom, and get signed up for this trip to Europe with a Dutch nobleman, Odlef? I paid for it myself, working a job that few people wanted at a local park, dumping garbage barrels, cleaning piss off of urinals, and waking up the drunks from the picnic tables where they had bedded for the night. More than the money, I had to overcome my natural Midwestern stoicism by staring off of that cliff face of doubt—and jump. Everyone tried to hold me back with that moral they held in such high esteem: stay home, stay grounded, and be realistic. But this was real. I imagined, I created, I formed in one flash of daydream this trip to Odlef’s Europe, and made it real. It was no different than writing a short story at the university, only I changed the medium. I became my own work.
I had to wait in Boston for a connecting flight. We were delayed because dense fog had had crept in from the harbor. Out of the fog rose boat masts, warped shacks, seagulls navigating the air above the waters. I saw a guy stranded at the same gate who looked altogether too much like me—same black leather shoes, faded jeans, unbuttoned flannel shirt and a tangle of bracelets around his wrists. He started up a conversation with me, the typical harmless banter of plane schedules and travel plans, until out of nowhere he interjected, “They shouldn’t cancel flights just because of a little fog. I think those people that are afraid to die should just die right on the spot, because they’re not really living, man.” Was this what I sounded like? Idiot, blowhard, self-important fraud. My Muses snickered from behind a potted palm while I ended our conversation at the first opportunity and tried to put some distance between me and my doppelganger. He was hard to shake. Now back on the plane, I’m thankful for assigned seats.
Odlef meets me at the Amsterdam airport. He has transformed himself once again after having left ISU. Back then he was a foreign exchange student, a fellow drinking buddy, a budding artist who, back home in the Netherlands, was a nobleman’s grandson and an economics prodigy destined for a career in global markets, but who in one year in the states took on charcoal life drawing, German philosophy, and Beethoven’s Sonata No.1 in F Minor on the piano in the dorm lounge. He grew his hair out just long enough to fit into a ponytail, tried to grow a scruff of blond whiskers on his eighteen-year old chin, and took to wearing long overcoats so that he looked like an extra in the movie “Wings of Desire.”
The young man now standing at baggage claim had shed his troubadour skin for neatly trimmed hair, a sport coat, white cotton shirt and a silk scarf tucked in at the neck. “Welcome to the mother country,” he says, holding out his hand, which I knock aside to give him a bear hug and a firm smack on the back. He grabs my bag in one hand and elbow in the other and marches us down the airport colonnade. “I’ve planned it all out for us: first, Paris. Then on to the south of France, La Cote d’Azure, then Florence, Rome, Budapeste—wait until you meet the girls in Budapest!” and like that, we pick up the thread of those college nights strung out on lack of sleep, too much Heidegger and too little Calvinism, a little weed and a lot of Grain Belt Premium Lager. Odlef whisks us out of the airport to the first of many train station platforms awaiting my next thirty days and nights of our tour.
How did I do it? How did I manage in one year to get thrown out of the Iowa writing program for mental indiscretions, move back home with my mom, and get signed up for this trip to Europe with a Dutch nobleman, Odlef? I paid for it myself, working a job that few people wanted at a local park, dumping garbage barrels, cleaning piss off of urinals, and waking up the drunks from the picnic tables where they had bedded for the night. More than the money, I had to overcome my natural Midwestern stoicism by staring off of that cliff face of doubt—and jump. Everyone tried to hold me back with that moral they held in such high esteem: stay home, stay grounded, and be realistic. But this was real. I imagined, I created, I formed in one flash of daydream this trip to Odlef’s Europe, and made it real. It was no different than writing a short story at the university, only I changed the medium. I became my own work.
I had to wait in Boston for a connecting flight. We were delayed because dense fog had had crept in from the harbor. Out of the fog rose boat masts, warped shacks, seagulls navigating the air above the waters. I saw a guy stranded at the same gate who looked altogether too much like me—same black leather shoes, faded jeans, unbuttoned flannel shirt and a tangle of bracelets around his wrists. He started up a conversation with me, the typical harmless banter of plane schedules and travel plans, until out of nowhere he interjected, “They shouldn’t cancel flights just because of a little fog. I think those people that are afraid to die should just die right on the spot, because they’re not really living, man.” Was this what I sounded like? Idiot, blowhard, self-important fraud. My Muses snickered from behind a potted palm while I ended our conversation at the first opportunity and tried to put some distance between me and my doppelganger. He was hard to shake. Now back on the plane, I’m thankful for assigned seats.
Odlef meets me at the Amsterdam airport. He has transformed himself once again after having left ISU. Back then he was a foreign exchange student, a fellow drinking buddy, a budding artist who, back home in the Netherlands, was a nobleman’s grandson and an economics prodigy destined for a career in global markets, but who in one year in the states took on charcoal life drawing, German philosophy, and Beethoven’s Sonata No.1 in F Minor on the piano in the dorm lounge. He grew his hair out just long enough to fit into a ponytail, tried to grow a scruff of blond whiskers on his eighteen-year old chin, and took to wearing long overcoats so that he looked like an extra in the movie “Wings of Desire.”
The young man now standing at baggage claim had shed his troubadour skin for neatly trimmed hair, a sport coat, white cotton shirt and a silk scarf tucked in at the neck. “Welcome to the mother country,” he says, holding out his hand, which I knock aside to give him a bear hug and a firm smack on the back. He grabs my bag in one hand and elbow in the other and marches us down the airport colonnade. “I’ve planned it all out for us: first, Paris. Then on to the south of France, La Cote d’Azure, then Florence, Rome, Budapeste—wait until you meet the girls in Budapest!” and like that, we pick up the thread of those college nights strung out on lack of sleep, too much Heidegger and too little Calvinism, a little weed and a lot of Grain Belt Premium Lager. Odlef whisks us out of the airport to the first of many train station platforms awaiting my next thirty days and nights of our tour.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
The Grand Tour, Pt 1
He dropped out of the Iowa State writing program weeks into the first semester, after he started binge drinking beer, half a liter of whiskey, and then rioting across campus in a bacchanalian frenzy, diving into creeks, hanging over cliff ledges, smashing beer bottles over his forehead. Campus security picked him up, and he was assigned to a campus psychologist. The counselor sat with knees crossed, notepad at the ready. “You’re clearly exhibiting self-destructive behaviors, but we haven’t talked about what’s going on inside. Why do you want to hurt yourself?”
“I don’t know,” the young man replied. Long stringy hair hung over his face but didn’t hide the stitches sewing up the gash in his forehead from one of the broken beerbottles. “I can’t take life anymore. It’s boring. It’s mundane. It doesn’t have any of the magic from Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat, and I feel cheated. There’s nothing for me to write about in this town. Worse of all, I’m freaking out. I’m nervous all of the time. I get panic attacks just walking into the classroom.”
“Why is that, do you think?”
“I’m supposed to read my work in front of the class.”
“And you’re nervous they won’t like it?”
“I don’t know. They like it fine. Some of them even tell me it’s better than anything they’ve read. Other’s tell me I ripped it all off from the poet maudits, from movies I’ve never seen, or that I use too many adjectives. But that’s not it. It’s being exposed like that in front of the firing squad, all of them watching me, all of their eyes on me, all of their judgments being processed at that moment, and I see myself through their eyes. I panic.”
“Your MMPI showed you have a number of personality disorders. Four, in fact. Nothing to get overly concerned with, any person taking the test will probably have a few disorders identified. You have Depression, Anxiety, Suicidal Ideation, and Social Phobia.”
“No pills.”
“But you’re already medicating yourself, and in all the wrong ways. Don’t you want to feel happy and at peace with yourself?”
“It’s not about being happy. I want to feel life, experience the full spectrum emotions. Live dangerously, sail my ships into uncharted seas. I want to open the doors of perception. I am the lizard king. I can do anything.”
“Okay, now you’re just quoting directly from Nietzsche and Jim Morrison.”
“Jim who?”
“So you think the magic is ‘out there?” the counselor asked, making a sweeping gesture with his arm.
“I hope so, because it sure as hell is not in Iowa.”
“So leave.”
“Leave?”
“Go on a road trip. See the country. Take the grand tour.”
“But I can’t. I don’t have any money. I’ve got my classes—“
“You’re flunking all of your classes.” The counselor dropped the notepad in his lap and raked his fingers through his hair. “Look, you’re dying. You’re killing yourself with this behavior, and you keep putting yourself into dangerous situations where you leave the choice of life and death to chance. You are not a happy person.”
A thought came to the young writer. “There’s Odlef. He’s a friend of mine, a Dutch foreign exchange student that lived in the dorm. We used to get drunk together a lot.”
“About the drinking—you need to stop.”
“Not likely. So this grand tour thing, you mean like how the young English aristocrats would travel around Europe, visiting museums, playhouses, operas?”
“Yes, it was considered a right of passage and that their exposure to European culture, art, and history would complete their education.”
“Odlef is back home now in Amsterdam. Could you get my Mom to pay for one of those train passes?”
“The Eurorail. Yes. I mean, no. It’ll be up to your mother whether she thinks this is a good idea, but I will recommend to the dean that you take a break from school without penalty. And I would like to talk with you mother, if you approve.”
“To convince her about this trip?”
“To talk about your issues, and about what kind of therapy that I can recommend.” The crestfallen look from the student stirred up his sympathy, and he added. “This treatment just might include Gestalt therapy, which essentially focuses on the experience of life; ‘send your ships into uncharted seas,’ as you said.”
As they wrapped up their session, the counselor couldn’t help envying the student, despite his mental anguish and inner turmoil. The boy was bright, literate, creative, and he would be headed on the grand tour that the counselor had never experienced. What kind of inspiration might he find while strolling the halls of the Uffizi, gazing up to the Sistine ceiling, breathing in the Parisian night air?
“I don’t know,” the young man replied. Long stringy hair hung over his face but didn’t hide the stitches sewing up the gash in his forehead from one of the broken beerbottles. “I can’t take life anymore. It’s boring. It’s mundane. It doesn’t have any of the magic from Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat, and I feel cheated. There’s nothing for me to write about in this town. Worse of all, I’m freaking out. I’m nervous all of the time. I get panic attacks just walking into the classroom.”
“Why is that, do you think?”
“I’m supposed to read my work in front of the class.”
“And you’re nervous they won’t like it?”
“I don’t know. They like it fine. Some of them even tell me it’s better than anything they’ve read. Other’s tell me I ripped it all off from the poet maudits, from movies I’ve never seen, or that I use too many adjectives. But that’s not it. It’s being exposed like that in front of the firing squad, all of them watching me, all of their eyes on me, all of their judgments being processed at that moment, and I see myself through their eyes. I panic.”
“Your MMPI showed you have a number of personality disorders. Four, in fact. Nothing to get overly concerned with, any person taking the test will probably have a few disorders identified. You have Depression, Anxiety, Suicidal Ideation, and Social Phobia.”
“No pills.”
“But you’re already medicating yourself, and in all the wrong ways. Don’t you want to feel happy and at peace with yourself?”
“It’s not about being happy. I want to feel life, experience the full spectrum emotions. Live dangerously, sail my ships into uncharted seas. I want to open the doors of perception. I am the lizard king. I can do anything.”
“Okay, now you’re just quoting directly from Nietzsche and Jim Morrison.”
“Jim who?”
“So you think the magic is ‘out there?” the counselor asked, making a sweeping gesture with his arm.
“I hope so, because it sure as hell is not in Iowa.”
“So leave.”
“Leave?”
“Go on a road trip. See the country. Take the grand tour.”
“But I can’t. I don’t have any money. I’ve got my classes—“
“You’re flunking all of your classes.” The counselor dropped the notepad in his lap and raked his fingers through his hair. “Look, you’re dying. You’re killing yourself with this behavior, and you keep putting yourself into dangerous situations where you leave the choice of life and death to chance. You are not a happy person.”
A thought came to the young writer. “There’s Odlef. He’s a friend of mine, a Dutch foreign exchange student that lived in the dorm. We used to get drunk together a lot.”
“About the drinking—you need to stop.”
“Not likely. So this grand tour thing, you mean like how the young English aristocrats would travel around Europe, visiting museums, playhouses, operas?”
“Yes, it was considered a right of passage and that their exposure to European culture, art, and history would complete their education.”
“Odlef is back home now in Amsterdam. Could you get my Mom to pay for one of those train passes?”
“The Eurorail. Yes. I mean, no. It’ll be up to your mother whether she thinks this is a good idea, but I will recommend to the dean that you take a break from school without penalty. And I would like to talk with you mother, if you approve.”
“To convince her about this trip?”
“To talk about your issues, and about what kind of therapy that I can recommend.” The crestfallen look from the student stirred up his sympathy, and he added. “This treatment just might include Gestalt therapy, which essentially focuses on the experience of life; ‘send your ships into uncharted seas,’ as you said.”
As they wrapped up their session, the counselor couldn’t help envying the student, despite his mental anguish and inner turmoil. The boy was bright, literate, creative, and he would be headed on the grand tour that the counselor had never experienced. What kind of inspiration might he find while strolling the halls of the Uffizi, gazing up to the Sistine ceiling, breathing in the Parisian night air?
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Getting My Land Legs
I’ve been out to sea for too long, working a small fishing boat, surrounded by nothing but water and a crew of derelicts, scoundrels, swine. The Captain was not so nice of a guy, either, as he set out to rob us of our half of the profits after the catch was hauled out of the sea. His plan? To toss half the crew overboard. I complied by taking the ankles, he the shoulders, and my bargain was that I could live.
As I stepped off the boat and back on dry land, I was struck with stage fright. The spotlights of street lamps blinded me, along with the attentive stares of passers-by along the sidewalks, looking at me as though they knew I had drowned my shipmates, and that each of them had been one of their loved ones. Which they probably were.
I stumbled through shrubbery and down shady lanes of elm trees. Women were everywhere, of all shapes, sizes, and colors; I was a kid in a candy store but no money with which to buy a gumball. I could beg, bribe . . . or steal. The sea washed me of my ability to commit crimes, but did not cleanse me of my proclivity for sin.
Come now, no need to stumble down damp alleys lined with stinking dumpsters, when pretty summer lanes stretch from here to the cornfields. I’d rather use this stick in my hand to drag across white picket fences than to poke dead rats. Look at those freshly trimmed hedges, ivy covered brick homes, and white mailboxes with the red flag lifted up. A little brown dog lies unleashed in the lawn, heavy lidded eyes, panting in the sun.
Something has to happen, right? I can’t just wander around town all day without a care in the world. There’s something I must care about, someplace I belong, or somebody I’m running from. Who am I going to see? Where’s my wife, my kids, my dog? Which neighbor double crossed me, and where is my mother buried? Each time it takes a little longer to regain my land legs.
As I stepped off the boat and back on dry land, I was struck with stage fright. The spotlights of street lamps blinded me, along with the attentive stares of passers-by along the sidewalks, looking at me as though they knew I had drowned my shipmates, and that each of them had been one of their loved ones. Which they probably were.
I stumbled through shrubbery and down shady lanes of elm trees. Women were everywhere, of all shapes, sizes, and colors; I was a kid in a candy store but no money with which to buy a gumball. I could beg, bribe . . . or steal. The sea washed me of my ability to commit crimes, but did not cleanse me of my proclivity for sin.
Come now, no need to stumble down damp alleys lined with stinking dumpsters, when pretty summer lanes stretch from here to the cornfields. I’d rather use this stick in my hand to drag across white picket fences than to poke dead rats. Look at those freshly trimmed hedges, ivy covered brick homes, and white mailboxes with the red flag lifted up. A little brown dog lies unleashed in the lawn, heavy lidded eyes, panting in the sun.
Something has to happen, right? I can’t just wander around town all day without a care in the world. There’s something I must care about, someplace I belong, or somebody I’m running from. Who am I going to see? Where’s my wife, my kids, my dog? Which neighbor double crossed me, and where is my mother buried? Each time it takes a little longer to regain my land legs.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Getting My Land Legs
My creative funny bone has not been smacked in quite some time. How do I get back to that place inside my head, how do I find that playground of my youth? My lack of inspiration is evident even in the storyline of my dreams. Now, when I feel bored, I reach for the cheap escape of “Desperate Housewives”, or catch “Sherlock Holmes” at the discount theater, or I play hours of solitaire on my iPhone. I search for high-priced gadgets to distract me, while what my soul really requires is something as simple as pen and paper. We compromise: an hour on my laptop for a little stream-of-consciousness. The lowest priced effort for the would-be writer.
Out of the morning mist emerges a tea house, about a hundred yards from the docks. Inside gather Harajuku girls, professors, grandmothers. Drifters slink to the shadows of the back room, sipping their oolongs and nibbling dried scones like the rats down at the pier.
In the front room by the portrait window, huddled in overstuffed chairs with their feet propped on footstools, the silver-hairs click their knitting needles and unravel infinite balls of yarn. I sneak down the back hallway towards the store room, riddled with crates of tea. There’s a cracked cellar door leading to the basement, where century old wine casks lay broken amid the cobwebs and dirt floor, the stains of their contents still discernable on floor, or is that blood? In the center sits a small round table with the melted stub of a candle where the tea shop owner escapes from the bustle of the shop to read through his wife’s diary.
I leave through the coal chute and head further inland. Dogs bark all over town, lunging into the dark but snapping back in mid-leap as they reach the end of their leashes. Dark clouds roll in, electricity in the air, green skies ready to hatch. Children on their bikes pedal hard for the hill from which to watch the storm pass. One giant lightning rod, that hill. They don’t know the danger in which they put themselves. Twelve years ago Sally was struck and lived, followed by her prolonged hospital stay with her fried nerves, muscle twitches, blackouts. People plied her for visions embellished on her through the lightning bolt. She waited for supersensory abilities, but no such magic came. She told them that the rare honor of being struck by lightning and living was like a steel rod being pounded from the crown of her skull through her spine and out through her heel bone, and that was all, yet people still asked her if she could pass on a message to their dead mothers, what day of the year they should plan for their wedding to ensure a lasting marriage, or where they could find their car keys. In frustration she started to make up answers. She was right almost every time.
Out of the morning mist emerges a tea house, about a hundred yards from the docks. Inside gather Harajuku girls, professors, grandmothers. Drifters slink to the shadows of the back room, sipping their oolongs and nibbling dried scones like the rats down at the pier.
In the front room by the portrait window, huddled in overstuffed chairs with their feet propped on footstools, the silver-hairs click their knitting needles and unravel infinite balls of yarn. I sneak down the back hallway towards the store room, riddled with crates of tea. There’s a cracked cellar door leading to the basement, where century old wine casks lay broken amid the cobwebs and dirt floor, the stains of their contents still discernable on floor, or is that blood? In the center sits a small round table with the melted stub of a candle where the tea shop owner escapes from the bustle of the shop to read through his wife’s diary.
I leave through the coal chute and head further inland. Dogs bark all over town, lunging into the dark but snapping back in mid-leap as they reach the end of their leashes. Dark clouds roll in, electricity in the air, green skies ready to hatch. Children on their bikes pedal hard for the hill from which to watch the storm pass. One giant lightning rod, that hill. They don’t know the danger in which they put themselves. Twelve years ago Sally was struck and lived, followed by her prolonged hospital stay with her fried nerves, muscle twitches, blackouts. People plied her for visions embellished on her through the lightning bolt. She waited for supersensory abilities, but no such magic came. She told them that the rare honor of being struck by lightning and living was like a steel rod being pounded from the crown of her skull through her spine and out through her heel bone, and that was all, yet people still asked her if she could pass on a message to their dead mothers, what day of the year they should plan for their wedding to ensure a lasting marriage, or where they could find their car keys. In frustration she started to make up answers. She was right almost every time.
Saturday, April 03, 2010
Abuse the Brain, Hobble the Mind
My mind is hobbled. Why must I jam pointed objects into my brain all of the time? Why do I throw old blankets over it and kick it around? Why douse it in alcohol, prescription drugs, late-night TV, and then set it on fire?
My mind is my adversary. It wields too much power over me, too easily breaks me into submission. I hate the shadow it casts over every sunny spot in which I pause to stand awhile. It bickers constantly with me and won’t listen to reason, and I believe that if I dull it, life will be easier. Easier to live, yes, because it was so incapacitating to have these obsessions, these glaringly bright epiphanies shooting off like firecrackers, that…okay, just shut up now. Let’s not get into all that. Best not entertain these thoughts because then they will become encouraged and verified, they will gain confidence and think they can just butt in any old time they want when all I really want is a little peace and quiet.
So I manage to dampen it, tamp it down. Drink does not help really, let’s be honest. While it gives me a vacation from my mind, it also opens floodgates of feelings, something I’m told are “emotions,” and now I have to deal with a whole new sensation. This liberation is too hard to shake off when the drunkenness wears off.
So with the abuses of the brain -- a smidgeon of serotonin uptake inhibitors here, a dose of neurotransmitter suppressors to the limbic system there -- I end up with a brain that barely limps along, and when I want to put my full weight on it, it can’t hold up. Today is one of those days. I awake from a ten hour sleep and find that it is impossible to get out of bed.
I know what you’re thinking, but keep your clinician to yourself; I’m not particularly sad. It is much more physical than that. It has less to do with the mind and more to do with the brain, like I said, before, that time with the metaphor, that thingy...well you get the picture. It don’t work.
I call in sick to work, barely make it out of the bed to the sofa. The sun has spilled light all over the living room floor. Have to clean that up later, but for now, I want to watch out the window for a while. Two boys are running across the park with red plastic sleds in hand, heading for the snow covered hill. Their names? Let’s see; Dan Blom and Edward Jowicke. They skipped school and run with so much energy for the top of the hill. They know when they slide down and get to the bottom, they’ll get detention, but who cares? It’s worth it. Look at them go, bouncing over bumps, the scrape of packed snow speeding under them, their laughter traveling across the snow even while they slide down to their demise, but it was fun for a while. So what if they get locked away in a detention room? As soon as the principal turns her back, they will make another escape.
My mind is my adversary. It wields too much power over me, too easily breaks me into submission. I hate the shadow it casts over every sunny spot in which I pause to stand awhile. It bickers constantly with me and won’t listen to reason, and I believe that if I dull it, life will be easier. Easier to live, yes, because it was so incapacitating to have these obsessions, these glaringly bright epiphanies shooting off like firecrackers, that…okay, just shut up now. Let’s not get into all that. Best not entertain these thoughts because then they will become encouraged and verified, they will gain confidence and think they can just butt in any old time they want when all I really want is a little peace and quiet.
So I manage to dampen it, tamp it down. Drink does not help really, let’s be honest. While it gives me a vacation from my mind, it also opens floodgates of feelings, something I’m told are “emotions,” and now I have to deal with a whole new sensation. This liberation is too hard to shake off when the drunkenness wears off.
So with the abuses of the brain -- a smidgeon of serotonin uptake inhibitors here, a dose of neurotransmitter suppressors to the limbic system there -- I end up with a brain that barely limps along, and when I want to put my full weight on it, it can’t hold up. Today is one of those days. I awake from a ten hour sleep and find that it is impossible to get out of bed.
I know what you’re thinking, but keep your clinician to yourself; I’m not particularly sad. It is much more physical than that. It has less to do with the mind and more to do with the brain, like I said, before, that time with the metaphor, that thingy...well you get the picture. It don’t work.
I call in sick to work, barely make it out of the bed to the sofa. The sun has spilled light all over the living room floor. Have to clean that up later, but for now, I want to watch out the window for a while. Two boys are running across the park with red plastic sleds in hand, heading for the snow covered hill. Their names? Let’s see; Dan Blom and Edward Jowicke. They skipped school and run with so much energy for the top of the hill. They know when they slide down and get to the bottom, they’ll get detention, but who cares? It’s worth it. Look at them go, bouncing over bumps, the scrape of packed snow speeding under them, their laughter traveling across the snow even while they slide down to their demise, but it was fun for a while. So what if they get locked away in a detention room? As soon as the principal turns her back, they will make another escape.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Hidden Doorways
photo by frogmuseum2
After he bought a 1920’s Cape Code style home, he felt impelled to install hidden doors, miniature windows looking onto bonsai gardens, figurines of elves and gnomes perched in the many nooks and crannies particular to older homes. Things fantastical, mythical, or just a little kooky. He remembered a visit to his aunt’s house once as a child, with overgrown apple trees crowding the windows with their limbs. Looking out the kitchen window, he could see a wiry bird’s nest on the crook of a branch, with a half eggshell and a rubbery looking chick popping its head out. He stared and stared, but the chick never moved. “It’s fake, isn’t it?” he asked doubtfully. “Oh no,” his aunt said. “It’s real. See, he just blinked.” His older cousins backed up her story. “Oh, it’s real alright,” they snickered. He checked on the baby chick every morning to see if it had moved yet, until finally his brother said “Don’t be a dumbass, its rubber. Can’t you see that?” But his aunt immediately came to his defense, “Oh no. It’s real. See, it moved its wing,” and she winked at him, as though the fact that it was real was their little secret.
On the last day of their visit, he was watching the chick from the window and said to his aunt, “The momma bird never shows up to feed it. It’s going to die.” She sat him on her lap and said, “I’m sorry, honey, but it’s not real. It’s a tree ornament that I put up there in the Spring.” It wasn’t until after she fessed up that he finally saw it move. Everybody laughed at him.
He wanted to put something at the base of the giant elm tree by his driveway. Maybe a tiny wooden door in the trunk, and a white picket fence. He wanted to plant ivy at the side of the house so that it would crawl up the chimney brick, and he could lodge elves in the brambles, peeking their heads out of the leaves. Maybe in the guestroom, in that little cupboard door cut into the outer wall to get at the insulation, he could place a hand-bound journal written by a made-up child that lived in the room twenty years ago, documenting all of the weird creatures that come out of hiding during the night. Now, all he needed was a nephew or niece to make it real.
After he bought a 1920’s Cape Code style home, he felt impelled to install hidden doors, miniature windows looking onto bonsai gardens, figurines of elves and gnomes perched in the many nooks and crannies particular to older homes. Things fantastical, mythical, or just a little kooky. He remembered a visit to his aunt’s house once as a child, with overgrown apple trees crowding the windows with their limbs. Looking out the kitchen window, he could see a wiry bird’s nest on the crook of a branch, with a half eggshell and a rubbery looking chick popping its head out. He stared and stared, but the chick never moved. “It’s fake, isn’t it?” he asked doubtfully. “Oh no,” his aunt said. “It’s real. See, he just blinked.” His older cousins backed up her story. “Oh, it’s real alright,” they snickered. He checked on the baby chick every morning to see if it had moved yet, until finally his brother said “Don’t be a dumbass, its rubber. Can’t you see that?” But his aunt immediately came to his defense, “Oh no. It’s real. See, it moved its wing,” and she winked at him, as though the fact that it was real was their little secret.On the last day of their visit, he was watching the chick from the window and said to his aunt, “The momma bird never shows up to feed it. It’s going to die.” She sat him on her lap and said, “I’m sorry, honey, but it’s not real. It’s a tree ornament that I put up there in the Spring.” It wasn’t until after she fessed up that he finally saw it move. Everybody laughed at him.
He wanted to put something at the base of the giant elm tree by his driveway. Maybe a tiny wooden door in the trunk, and a white picket fence. He wanted to plant ivy at the side of the house so that it would crawl up the chimney brick, and he could lodge elves in the brambles, peeking their heads out of the leaves. Maybe in the guestroom, in that little cupboard door cut into the outer wall to get at the insulation, he could place a hand-bound journal written by a made-up child that lived in the room twenty years ago, documenting all of the weird creatures that come out of hiding during the night. Now, all he needed was a nephew or niece to make it real.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
"The Book Thief," by Markus Zusak
I finished “The Book Thief,” by Markus Zusak, and immediately started reading it again. When I come across a book that achieves something unusual, I like to read it twice: once as a reader, and second as a writer. That second reading allows me to try to see how he does it, not that this will reveal all of the young Aussie’s tricks.
What is unusual about this book? The first thing: you wouldn’t expect a book narrated by Death himself, about Nazi Germany and a foster girl’s family hiding a Jew in their basement, to capture so much beauty. The dichotomy of humankind, the capability for both brute ferocity and tenderness all within one species, in one country, in one city during an infamous moment of time…well, it even makes Death take notice: “I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race—that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.”
Zusak sums up what the book will be about on the fifth page:
“It’s just a small story really, about, among other things:
* A girl
* Some words
* An accordionist
* Some fanatical Germans
*A Jewish fist fighter
*And quite a lot of thievery”
The girl is a nine-year-old foster child named Liesel, given up by her Communist mother to stay with a couple in a small town outside Munich. Her younger brother dies on the train, and it is during her brother’s burial that she steals her first book, “The Grave Digger’s Handbook.” She doesn't even know how to read yet, but she senses the power of books and how they will hold the key to what is happening to her.
Her foster mother is a squat, harsh woman with a penchant for swearing, who holds within her a combination of both cruelty and love, in keeping with the book’s theme. Her foster father, however, is all kindness, spreading a quiet calm around him. “When he turned the light on in the small, callous washroom that night, Liesel observed the strangeness of her foster father’s eyes. They were made of kindness, and silver. Like soft silver, melting. Liesel, upon seeing those eyes, understood that Hans Hubermann was worth a lot.”
He sits up with her after she awakens from nightmares, and at her request, teaches her to read with her first stolen book, “The Gravediggers Handbook.” With her faithful friend Rudy—a boy that always tries to negotiate a kiss from her—she goes on to steal several other books from the unlikely sanctuary of the Mayor’s personal library. It is not until after her foster parents hide a runaway Jew in their basement that words break free from their books and become a tool in her hands for capturing and understanding the world around her.
She tries to bring to him the beauty of the outside world. “The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it’s stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun is like a yellow hole…” As Death describes it, “The words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like the rain.”
The aware reader will also notice the concentric circles of what is going on here, the matryoshka dolls each tucked one within the other. While Leisel is discovering the power of words, so too is the author, in this rare experience of writing a book that would soon capture the world’s attention. Zusak’s short, staccato rhythm of words might first distract the reader, but after about ten pages, I began feeling the effect. Short blasts, like gunshots, but impactful:
“That last time.
That red sky…
How does a book thief end up kneeling and howling and flanked by a man-made heap of ridiculous, greasy, cooked up rubble?
Years earlier, the start was snow.
The time had come. For one.
***A SPECTACULARLY TRAGIC MOMENT***
A train was moving quickly.
It was packed with humans.
A six-year-old boy died in the third carriage.”
It was during my second reading of the book that I could truly appreciate the care with which Zusak rewrote the later drafts of his novel, with that omniscient knowledge of all that would come later and weaving it into the story. He excuses this prescience with the vehicle of Death as narrator. For many readers, this broken timeline may be confusing and frustrating, but for others it will add another layer of meaning to the text. Poignant, bitter sweet scenes colored with the knowledge of what will come.
What is unusual about this book? The first thing: you wouldn’t expect a book narrated by Death himself, about Nazi Germany and a foster girl’s family hiding a Jew in their basement, to capture so much beauty. The dichotomy of humankind, the capability for both brute ferocity and tenderness all within one species, in one country, in one city during an infamous moment of time…well, it even makes Death take notice: “I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race—that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.”
Zusak sums up what the book will be about on the fifth page:
“It’s just a small story really, about, among other things:
* A girl
* Some words
* An accordionist
* Some fanatical Germans
*A Jewish fist fighter
*And quite a lot of thievery”
The girl is a nine-year-old foster child named Liesel, given up by her Communist mother to stay with a couple in a small town outside Munich. Her younger brother dies on the train, and it is during her brother’s burial that she steals her first book, “The Grave Digger’s Handbook.” She doesn't even know how to read yet, but she senses the power of books and how they will hold the key to what is happening to her.
Her foster mother is a squat, harsh woman with a penchant for swearing, who holds within her a combination of both cruelty and love, in keeping with the book’s theme. Her foster father, however, is all kindness, spreading a quiet calm around him. “When he turned the light on in the small, callous washroom that night, Liesel observed the strangeness of her foster father’s eyes. They were made of kindness, and silver. Like soft silver, melting. Liesel, upon seeing those eyes, understood that Hans Hubermann was worth a lot.”
He sits up with her after she awakens from nightmares, and at her request, teaches her to read with her first stolen book, “The Gravediggers Handbook.” With her faithful friend Rudy—a boy that always tries to negotiate a kiss from her—she goes on to steal several other books from the unlikely sanctuary of the Mayor’s personal library. It is not until after her foster parents hide a runaway Jew in their basement that words break free from their books and become a tool in her hands for capturing and understanding the world around her.
She tries to bring to him the beauty of the outside world. “The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it’s stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun is like a yellow hole…” As Death describes it, “The words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like the rain.”
The aware reader will also notice the concentric circles of what is going on here, the matryoshka dolls each tucked one within the other. While Leisel is discovering the power of words, so too is the author, in this rare experience of writing a book that would soon capture the world’s attention. Zusak’s short, staccato rhythm of words might first distract the reader, but after about ten pages, I began feeling the effect. Short blasts, like gunshots, but impactful:
“That last time.
That red sky…
How does a book thief end up kneeling and howling and flanked by a man-made heap of ridiculous, greasy, cooked up rubble?
Years earlier, the start was snow.
The time had come. For one.
***A SPECTACULARLY TRAGIC MOMENT***
A train was moving quickly.
It was packed with humans.
A six-year-old boy died in the third carriage.”
It was during my second reading of the book that I could truly appreciate the care with which Zusak rewrote the later drafts of his novel, with that omniscient knowledge of all that would come later and weaving it into the story. He excuses this prescience with the vehicle of Death as narrator. For many readers, this broken timeline may be confusing and frustrating, but for others it will add another layer of meaning to the text. Poignant, bitter sweet scenes colored with the knowledge of what will come.
Before each part or chapter, it is like Zusak shares with us his outline:
“PART EIGHT
The word shaker
Featuring:
dominos and darkness—the thought of
rudy naked—punishment—a promise keeper’s
wife—a collector—the bread eaters—
a candle in the trees—a hidden sketchbook—
and the anarchist’s suite collection”
Humans are capable of great beauty and brutality. So too are words. On one hand, words are used by Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” to spread the Nazi propaganda, while on the other, Liesel’s stolen books provide her with grateful escape. In the Mayor’s library, she sits among a pile of “the lovely books and their manicured titles. It brewed in her as she eyed the pages full to the brim of their bellies with paragraphs and words.
You bastards, she thought.
You lovely bastards.
Don’t make me happy. Please, don’t fill me up and let me think that something good can come of any of this.”
She comes to learn, as she starts to write down her own experience in a notebook that she will title “The Book Thief,” that words are not meant to make the world beautiful or ugly. “I have hated the words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.”
Those are Liesel’s words, but they are also Zusak’s. In an interview with the author, he explains how the book is about trying to find beautiful moments in an ugly time. Inspired by a family story about a German boy giving a piece of bread to an old Jew being marched through the town, he explains, “On one hand, you've got pure beauty, which is the boy giving the bread, and on the other you've got pure destruction, which is the soldier whipping the old man for taking the bread. You put those two things together, and you've got humans."
“PART EIGHT
The word shaker
Featuring:
dominos and darkness—the thought of
rudy naked—punishment—a promise keeper’s
wife—a collector—the bread eaters—
a candle in the trees—a hidden sketchbook—
and the anarchist’s suite collection”
Humans are capable of great beauty and brutality. So too are words. On one hand, words are used by Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” to spread the Nazi propaganda, while on the other, Liesel’s stolen books provide her with grateful escape. In the Mayor’s library, she sits among a pile of “the lovely books and their manicured titles. It brewed in her as she eyed the pages full to the brim of their bellies with paragraphs and words.
You bastards, she thought.
You lovely bastards.
Don’t make me happy. Please, don’t fill me up and let me think that something good can come of any of this.”
She comes to learn, as she starts to write down her own experience in a notebook that she will title “The Book Thief,” that words are not meant to make the world beautiful or ugly. “I have hated the words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.”
Those are Liesel’s words, but they are also Zusak’s. In an interview with the author, he explains how the book is about trying to find beautiful moments in an ugly time. Inspired by a family story about a German boy giving a piece of bread to an old Jew being marched through the town, he explains, “On one hand, you've got pure beauty, which is the boy giving the bread, and on the other you've got pure destruction, which is the soldier whipping the old man for taking the bread. You put those two things together, and you've got humans."
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Eleven Years Ago Today
Every now and then, I’ll think I’ll post a past entry from my journals – one, five, ten years ago to the day. Like this entry, March 11th, 1999:
I am so good at deleting, better than at writing. I just wrote several lines about a coworker, then turned back and deleted them because it was so much telling. I realized that a true writer would have painted a picture of this person and let the reader make judgments like "he was awkward in social situations." Why not write the scene of him standing at the foot of my cube, looking over my papers, standing with that poker face of his, not revealing a thought or expression, just a stone wall face with the sharp cut of his nose and standing there like a guard before the gate.
Where's the creativity, hiding back there in the shack at the far end of a field gone fallow? Back when I was ten or twelve, my friend and I would run out across the tall grass to a wooden shack. Pull dead weeds and sticks and stuff them into a coffee can, then strike a match and watch it burn. The smell of burning grass, the sudden crackle of the flames, the smoke chugging out of the can like the smoke stack from a steam engine. In the shack we would find wrinkled clippings of naked women from Playboy magazine, the clippings handled so many times by grubby adolescent fingers that it'd grown soft, almost like cloth. Out there we also stashed away the compass and hunting knife that I stole from my dad’s top dresser drawer.
I pause, stare into the art prints on the walls of my den, music softly playing, the flickering of the candle on the desk, staring off into space and realizing that theme and meaning in a story must be drawn between the actions, must be plucked from the observances and the events, and I look off into all the shapes around me and try to depict the patterns, and wonder if any can really be drawn, wonder what truths I can really claim to see. I realize after a while that it is a waste of time. Why try to write, when I know that I don't have any truths for my readers. Perhaps that's why I don't have any readers. The act of writing has become merely masturbation, a self-absorbed indulgence of my sensibilities.
Bang! The starting pistol goes off and I launch myself out across the field, past the shack and over the smooth waters of the pond and up into the air above the woods. Then dive down into the dirt and the grubs and the Indian burial stones trod on by the tennis shoes of boys out to find beer cans in the weeds. I drank beer out in the woods until I was thrilled with liquor and stars, wavering in the rings of friends, crushing cans and tossing them away and grabbing another. Then off into the night in our cars, creeping down quiet suburban streets, past the darkened houses where the girls we loved slept.
I pause. When I write, I write for myself. My children play outside the door to the den, trying to draw me out to play, but I am playing here, in the space just above the keyboard, where my fingers dip and weave through the air like a dressmaker or a potter or the baker kneading his dough. It was something in the beauty of the words all scattered across the screen, forming shapes by the paragraph breaks and the curve of the letter "c". The languor of the dipping letters and the crossed T’s like a lifeline on the palm of one who had died too young.
I am so good at deleting, better than at writing. I just wrote several lines about a coworker, then turned back and deleted them because it was so much telling. I realized that a true writer would have painted a picture of this person and let the reader make judgments like "he was awkward in social situations." Why not write the scene of him standing at the foot of my cube, looking over my papers, standing with that poker face of his, not revealing a thought or expression, just a stone wall face with the sharp cut of his nose and standing there like a guard before the gate.
Where's the creativity, hiding back there in the shack at the far end of a field gone fallow? Back when I was ten or twelve, my friend and I would run out across the tall grass to a wooden shack. Pull dead weeds and sticks and stuff them into a coffee can, then strike a match and watch it burn. The smell of burning grass, the sudden crackle of the flames, the smoke chugging out of the can like the smoke stack from a steam engine. In the shack we would find wrinkled clippings of naked women from Playboy magazine, the clippings handled so many times by grubby adolescent fingers that it'd grown soft, almost like cloth. Out there we also stashed away the compass and hunting knife that I stole from my dad’s top dresser drawer.
I pause, stare into the art prints on the walls of my den, music softly playing, the flickering of the candle on the desk, staring off into space and realizing that theme and meaning in a story must be drawn between the actions, must be plucked from the observances and the events, and I look off into all the shapes around me and try to depict the patterns, and wonder if any can really be drawn, wonder what truths I can really claim to see. I realize after a while that it is a waste of time. Why try to write, when I know that I don't have any truths for my readers. Perhaps that's why I don't have any readers. The act of writing has become merely masturbation, a self-absorbed indulgence of my sensibilities.
Bang! The starting pistol goes off and I launch myself out across the field, past the shack and over the smooth waters of the pond and up into the air above the woods. Then dive down into the dirt and the grubs and the Indian burial stones trod on by the tennis shoes of boys out to find beer cans in the weeds. I drank beer out in the woods until I was thrilled with liquor and stars, wavering in the rings of friends, crushing cans and tossing them away and grabbing another. Then off into the night in our cars, creeping down quiet suburban streets, past the darkened houses where the girls we loved slept.
I pause. When I write, I write for myself. My children play outside the door to the den, trying to draw me out to play, but I am playing here, in the space just above the keyboard, where my fingers dip and weave through the air like a dressmaker or a potter or the baker kneading his dough. It was something in the beauty of the words all scattered across the screen, forming shapes by the paragraph breaks and the curve of the letter "c". The languor of the dipping letters and the crossed T’s like a lifeline on the palm of one who had died too young.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Conversations with a Dead Dad
Forget about it, Son. Forget about work and all the meetings there. Forget about the re-orgs and what your employees think of you. Forget about the newspaper this morning, and headlines of earthquakes and tsunamis, of political lambasting and financial collapse. Come on over, come here to me. We’ll rest up a bit. Breathe deep, calm yourself. Look at how the sun melts the snow. It almost smells like Spring, doesn’t it? Your favorite season, I remember. It’s not here yet, though. There will be plenty of winter nights to light a fire. You remember how I always put on too many logs, and your mom would complain how hot it was? Nothing is more nostalgic for you than the smell of wood smoke. But those days weren’t without their stress either. Even hearing my voice again makes you nervous. It’s ironic that I should be the one to comfort you now, when back then I was anything but. Even now, when you hear that voice filling you with self doubt, it’s my voice. When you think your ideas are stupid, it’s me that shoots them down even before you utter them. But forget about that now, son. Forget about the jolt of fear when your school bus would drop you off and you would see my car in the driveway, home early from work. Forget about the sound of my raised voice calling out for you when I found something you broke. Forget about my temper. Come on over, come here to me now. Breathe deep. Calm yourself. See the sun. Hear the wind in the trees. Smell Spring just around the corner.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Ghost of the Bayou
photo by quizz....
Dive down into the abyss. The swamp. The bog. Light plays beneath the mire, even in the deep hours of night. The illumination is Sally, the ghost of the bayou, killed and dumped here by a man hiding his crimes in the remotest of locations. Only, her spirit turns his grim playground into something wonderful, a place of beauty. Bayou Sally is not a spirit of anguish but one of celebration, a soul turned joyous for this conversion by a murderer to her true spirit, set free in this part of the land so teaming with life. She sings. She dances in the eddies of water, lounges upon the backs of alligators, wears snakes around her neck. Wild orchids are tiaras in her hair.
The killer returns to deposit another body. This next spirit is more of what one might expect - forlorn and tortured, wailing throughout the night at the brutal interruption to her life. Bayou Sally looks upon her with distaste, anger at the disruption to her home, and drives her out. If the killer insists upon bringing her more visitors, then she must persuade him to find suitable victims to fill out her court; to entertain her, love her, dress her in palm fronds and place irises in her hair.
She sings into his ear, and fevered visions crowd his mind. Over the next several months, he brings her two youths to play with her the games of her childhood, then an elderly aunt to knit her shawls of ivy and vine, then two ladies in waiting to serve her, and a young man to fawn over her. There's one place left at her table, she decides, and she needs a soul to match hers: strong and virile, cruel with passion and devoted to her happiness, and it is with this last persuasion that Bayou Sally turns from princess to queen, arm looped in the arm of her husband, as the killer takes his last victim.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Flavors of Crazy
She was crazy. Utterly nuts. I knew even before I had officially met her. I could tell when I first saw her behind a booth at a software conference in Las Vegas. She was one of those six foot tall, leggy women in a tight tee-shirt of a software vendor, as though she was one of the programmers, peddling a handful of flyers to the throngs of computer geeks. Black hair all tangled up in a bird’s nest, and these little black eyes like pebbles in her face. I sensed it right away; she was a bipolar carnival perched atop her high heels. For some reason I had always been drawn to the crazy ones. Later that night at the conference party I saw her again, only this time the roles were reversed and she was the target audience, with the computer geeks marketing their come-on lines and clumsy attempts at flirtation. After a few gin and tonics, I felt a need to assert myself as the alpha male of this inferior gene pool and took my shot. She ended up bar hopping with me and one of my coworkers, even though she didn’t drink. Mixed poorly with her meds, I figured, but she had no problem watching me drink for eight hours, and then followed me back to my hotel room.
Only flashes of memory, like some “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” montage, the silhouette of beauty that turned monstrous in too direct of lighting, the fuzziness of alcohol giving way to flashes of lucidity, disorientation, regret. Were those wrinkles and scars in the dark, or did the alcohol send me off into some kind of delirium? Who was this wrapped in the bed sheets the next morning? She quickly got ready in the bathroom and left, leaving a lipstick message on my mirror “Bye Sweetheart” with a heart drawn underneath. That was my first clue that she had a flair for the dramatic.
I was too hung over to attend that day’s conference sessions, but she had the vendor floor to work. She called me later that afternoon and came by the hotel lobby to talk, saying she didn’t want me to think this was a regular occurrence for her, that she was recently divorced and going through some stuff, and that there were no expectations, but she thought I was somebody special and sweet. Some shit like that. We hugged when she left and exchanged business cards.
The next week at work, I got a package mailed to me. It was a vintage Batman lunchbox (must have been something I said during my drunken binge), filled with Halloween themed decorations: orange and black tissue paper, confetti in the shape of pumpkins and black cats, a CD of Halloween songs like “Monster Mash” and “Werewolves of London.” There were homemade cookies, and stickers of ghouls and goblins on the inside of the lunchbox. I got razzed by the guys in the office, but it made me smile. I thanked her in an email, and she responded that she just happened to be in town for a vendor exhibit next week, so we could go on a real date if I was interested. I thought “Sure. Why not?” I resisted offering her to stay at my place, and found out which hotel she would be staying at.
I should have suspected something was not right when her hotel was nowhere near the convention center. She said she needed to find one with an oven. I found out why when I picked her up. She had baked me three dozen cookies. She apologized for how many there were, but she wasn’t sure if I’d prefer the chocolate cookies with white chocolate chips, or the traditional chocolate chip cookies with walnuts. I usually don’t go for nuts, but it looked like tonight I would be stuck with one that night.
I’ll skip describing for you the obligatory dinner, or how despite all of the warning signs I was still attracted to her, and that if she lived halfway across the country, I couldn’t really be in that much danger, could I? Instead, let’s jump ahead to the post-sex pillow talk at my place.
She had been bulimic at one point in her teenage years, then an obese binge eater, and now she had some sort of band wrapped around her stomach that had turned her skinny. The skin hung off her bones like an old blanket, in places. There were scars on the insides of her thighs where excess skin had been removed. Jesus Christ, what was I thinking? Why didn’t I go after a nice normal girl, like Christine’s friend, the geeky one with horn rimmed 60’s glasses, but kind of cute and funny? But in a moment, even this unhinged woman would be rejecting me.
After she told me about her bulimia, did I offer her a hug? I thought; okay, this just happens to be her flavor of crazy, compared to all of the other flavors out there, including my own. I clinically listened, nodded my head much like I imagined a therapist would do, and stayed at a safe distance. But she needed more. A sad sympathetic face and a tilt of the head. A hug. An “awww, come here you,” with arms held out.
When I missed my cue, she turned on me. Accusations flew. Why did I seem so stand-offish, now? Why didn’t I show more emotion? I tried to cover with stories of my own scarred childhood, an emotionally distant father, and how maybe I was unconsciously trying to become like him; a rock, an island. Why did I always conjure up Simon and Garfunkel lyrics when a woman put me on the defensive? It didn’t have much effect on her though, and she went on bitterly about the flat-lined men in her life, making me feel increasingly guilty until I felt like I was in some long term relationship when this was ONLY DAY THREE with this person.
Then I found my honesty and spoke up, “No I am not comfortable with you spending the night, and yes I think you’re a little bit crazy for baking me a batch of three-dozen cookies and sending a Halloween box to my work, and yes I think it would be a good idea if I drove you back to your hotel room right now!”
During the tense car ride to her hotel, she informed me that she would be flying out immediately, that there was no conference and that she had spent all of this money just to come see me, but good riddance to me. When I got back home, I sighed a breath of relief. Okay, brush my teeth: two times. Shower: two times. Wash the bed sheets: three times. She was almost erased, except the cookies hung around for another week. She made damn good cookies.
Postscript: She mailed two CD’s shortly afterwards. One was a forty-five minute burned monolog of how angry and hurt she was. Odd that she felt the need to capture this in a recording rather than an email or letter. Also odd how she somehow looped around from a tirade about that night and how cruel I was, to an introspection of her self-worth, to how I was so wonderful and caring on that first night when I was drunk at the convention, to eventually how I showed characteristics of an innocent, sensitive side that she would miss. I thought about posting it on YouTube. The other CD contained every possible cover of the song, “I am a Rock.” She was clever; I had to give her that.
Only flashes of memory, like some “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” montage, the silhouette of beauty that turned monstrous in too direct of lighting, the fuzziness of alcohol giving way to flashes of lucidity, disorientation, regret. Were those wrinkles and scars in the dark, or did the alcohol send me off into some kind of delirium? Who was this wrapped in the bed sheets the next morning? She quickly got ready in the bathroom and left, leaving a lipstick message on my mirror “Bye Sweetheart” with a heart drawn underneath. That was my first clue that she had a flair for the dramatic.
I was too hung over to attend that day’s conference sessions, but she had the vendor floor to work. She called me later that afternoon and came by the hotel lobby to talk, saying she didn’t want me to think this was a regular occurrence for her, that she was recently divorced and going through some stuff, and that there were no expectations, but she thought I was somebody special and sweet. Some shit like that. We hugged when she left and exchanged business cards.
The next week at work, I got a package mailed to me. It was a vintage Batman lunchbox (must have been something I said during my drunken binge), filled with Halloween themed decorations: orange and black tissue paper, confetti in the shape of pumpkins and black cats, a CD of Halloween songs like “Monster Mash” and “Werewolves of London.” There were homemade cookies, and stickers of ghouls and goblins on the inside of the lunchbox. I got razzed by the guys in the office, but it made me smile. I thanked her in an email, and she responded that she just happened to be in town for a vendor exhibit next week, so we could go on a real date if I was interested. I thought “Sure. Why not?” I resisted offering her to stay at my place, and found out which hotel she would be staying at.
I should have suspected something was not right when her hotel was nowhere near the convention center. She said she needed to find one with an oven. I found out why when I picked her up. She had baked me three dozen cookies. She apologized for how many there were, but she wasn’t sure if I’d prefer the chocolate cookies with white chocolate chips, or the traditional chocolate chip cookies with walnuts. I usually don’t go for nuts, but it looked like tonight I would be stuck with one that night.
I’ll skip describing for you the obligatory dinner, or how despite all of the warning signs I was still attracted to her, and that if she lived halfway across the country, I couldn’t really be in that much danger, could I? Instead, let’s jump ahead to the post-sex pillow talk at my place.
She had been bulimic at one point in her teenage years, then an obese binge eater, and now she had some sort of band wrapped around her stomach that had turned her skinny. The skin hung off her bones like an old blanket, in places. There were scars on the insides of her thighs where excess skin had been removed. Jesus Christ, what was I thinking? Why didn’t I go after a nice normal girl, like Christine’s friend, the geeky one with horn rimmed 60’s glasses, but kind of cute and funny? But in a moment, even this unhinged woman would be rejecting me.
After she told me about her bulimia, did I offer her a hug? I thought; okay, this just happens to be her flavor of crazy, compared to all of the other flavors out there, including my own. I clinically listened, nodded my head much like I imagined a therapist would do, and stayed at a safe distance. But she needed more. A sad sympathetic face and a tilt of the head. A hug. An “awww, come here you,” with arms held out.
When I missed my cue, she turned on me. Accusations flew. Why did I seem so stand-offish, now? Why didn’t I show more emotion? I tried to cover with stories of my own scarred childhood, an emotionally distant father, and how maybe I was unconsciously trying to become like him; a rock, an island. Why did I always conjure up Simon and Garfunkel lyrics when a woman put me on the defensive? It didn’t have much effect on her though, and she went on bitterly about the flat-lined men in her life, making me feel increasingly guilty until I felt like I was in some long term relationship when this was ONLY DAY THREE with this person.
Then I found my honesty and spoke up, “No I am not comfortable with you spending the night, and yes I think you’re a little bit crazy for baking me a batch of three-dozen cookies and sending a Halloween box to my work, and yes I think it would be a good idea if I drove you back to your hotel room right now!”
During the tense car ride to her hotel, she informed me that she would be flying out immediately, that there was no conference and that she had spent all of this money just to come see me, but good riddance to me. When I got back home, I sighed a breath of relief. Okay, brush my teeth: two times. Shower: two times. Wash the bed sheets: three times. She was almost erased, except the cookies hung around for another week. She made damn good cookies.
Postscript: She mailed two CD’s shortly afterwards. One was a forty-five minute burned monolog of how angry and hurt she was. Odd that she felt the need to capture this in a recording rather than an email or letter. Also odd how she somehow looped around from a tirade about that night and how cruel I was, to an introspection of her self-worth, to how I was so wonderful and caring on that first night when I was drunk at the convention, to eventually how I showed characteristics of an innocent, sensitive side that she would miss. I thought about posting it on YouTube. The other CD contained every possible cover of the song, “I am a Rock.” She was clever; I had to give her that.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Expeditions in the Cold
Arctic air slid down off the iron range and pooled around the Twin Cities. Each morning I woke up with my steaming pot of coffee and turned on the radio to hear the latest temps: -19 degrees, with a high of -5 planned for later in the day. It was warm inside, the furnace almost never turning off. I went down to check on it, touching one of its aluminum vents, and quickly drew back my singed fingertip. At least if I burned down the house, I would be warmed in its glow until the fire died out, and who cares what happens after that? The wind chill would carry me off to someplace else.
In the evenings, I drank brandy and escaped this place altogether. From my den, with snifter in hand and a few good books spread around my lazy-boy, I could dip in and out of various novels that had somehow escaped me in my youth; “Treasure Island,” “A Wrinkle in Time.” Sometimes Jung would interpret the symbols of my dreams. When I really stretched out these nights, I picked up my pen and that handmade little notebook my sister had given me years ago. I wrote down the string of words that came from who knows where, telling me things that I always had trouble understanding. If I was lucky, the ink would dry quickly enough to freeze the feeling to be deciphered later, but more often than not the dry air evaporated all essence from the ink so that I was left with a bunch of unintelligible scribbles.
Huh. Interesting. Something is forcing me to remain here writing. I keep trying to go on the internet but get failure messages, pages that can’t be found, proxies that can’t be bypassed. This is good; I’m excited about this news. Somebody is sabotaging me. At least something out there is listening, a paramour of the other side blitzing my motherboard, sending binary critters to rewire my router to guide me down a different route--to here: another empty page, but with words poised at the ready.
The cold even gets to me here, in a room puckered dry from a space heater. I make believe this cold comes from arctic winds howling around a science outpost, a circle of tents huddled on ice-flats at the tip of the world. We are beyond the rim of the sun’s route. There is hardly any sign of life on these stretches of ice, and I would never have realized, without having been here, that this also results in a lack of death. I have always mourned the lack of death; it leaves nothing for contrast. We have come in search of oil, at least that is the mission of the team that has allowed me to tag along to report on their progress. I come in search of something completely different, something captured in oracular visions, in hieroglyphs that modern words can’t translate, and by a side of myself I let few people see. It is only within the arctic circle that I feel safe enough to explore it further.
That is, until the brandy runs out, and the candle sputters down, and I fall asleep in the chair. I wake to the radio forecast: a warming trend is on the way. Finally. I wonder what a thaw will bring.
In the evenings, I drank brandy and escaped this place altogether. From my den, with snifter in hand and a few good books spread around my lazy-boy, I could dip in and out of various novels that had somehow escaped me in my youth; “Treasure Island,” “A Wrinkle in Time.” Sometimes Jung would interpret the symbols of my dreams. When I really stretched out these nights, I picked up my pen and that handmade little notebook my sister had given me years ago. I wrote down the string of words that came from who knows where, telling me things that I always had trouble understanding. If I was lucky, the ink would dry quickly enough to freeze the feeling to be deciphered later, but more often than not the dry air evaporated all essence from the ink so that I was left with a bunch of unintelligible scribbles.
Huh. Interesting. Something is forcing me to remain here writing. I keep trying to go on the internet but get failure messages, pages that can’t be found, proxies that can’t be bypassed. This is good; I’m excited about this news. Somebody is sabotaging me. At least something out there is listening, a paramour of the other side blitzing my motherboard, sending binary critters to rewire my router to guide me down a different route--to here: another empty page, but with words poised at the ready.
The cold even gets to me here, in a room puckered dry from a space heater. I make believe this cold comes from arctic winds howling around a science outpost, a circle of tents huddled on ice-flats at the tip of the world. We are beyond the rim of the sun’s route. There is hardly any sign of life on these stretches of ice, and I would never have realized, without having been here, that this also results in a lack of death. I have always mourned the lack of death; it leaves nothing for contrast. We have come in search of oil, at least that is the mission of the team that has allowed me to tag along to report on their progress. I come in search of something completely different, something captured in oracular visions, in hieroglyphs that modern words can’t translate, and by a side of myself I let few people see. It is only within the arctic circle that I feel safe enough to explore it further.
That is, until the brandy runs out, and the candle sputters down, and I fall asleep in the chair. I wake to the radio forecast: a warming trend is on the way. Finally. I wonder what a thaw will bring.
Sunday, January 03, 2010
Beware the Jabberwock
artwork by: Teodoratan
Hear these somnulary baby gurgles in linen wraps. Dry docked night suspended in evervescent crushed velvet. The dredger stalled in Oakley swamp in the bulge of bioforge greenmunge. The lily blooms have bereft our noonside gardens, trilled to naughtingshire brambles and den. We cleaned the glen of all woodland sea nymphs and glypheril. These dragwired fairies of the crescendo moon, guilty of the lurid pose and pansy musk, expunge the triple goading of flesh and blood and bone.
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