Kronski.blogspot.com

2008-03-29T13:04:00.000-07:00

This next Mog review is for the wonderful new record from The Felice Brothers, a real life group of brothers that traverse the country, live and record in an old school bus.

Originally appeared on Mog's main page and on the following post:

http://mog.com/Kronski/blog_post/146207

he Felice Brothers

The Felice Brothers

When you first hear an artist, the first dozen or so times you spin the record, or hit that big pillow of a play button in I-Tunes, or press the metallic gun metal grey button on your old cassette boom box, and you hear the gears engage, the tape sliding across that little tab of felt, the first few notes for a new band are always crucial. All the piles and gigabytes of music that sit un-listened to, if there’s one wrong note, it’s judged once and then tossed aside.

So this first time that I listened to the Felice Brothers’ second album, Tonight at the Arizona, it was through thirty-second sound samples where I tried to figure out what the rest of the record sounded like. The record cover had all five of them, but I only heard one, and my brain had to piece together what else might come up after the thirty seconds ended. What sort of burst of notes clustered together as melody might rise to the surface like some sort of bruise?

And what came out to me, almost instantly, was Bob Dylan.

Not the imitation Bob Dylan, not an actor in that Todd Haynes film, but someone going to that area around upstate NY, or the Catskills, someone very close to him just before the motorcycle crash, the time before John Wesley Harding and New Morning, his voice bringing the spirit of The Band and Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and The Pogues, all of this murky water turned up for me in bite sized thirty second clips.

And while some of the songs crept up in my dreams, it took seeing them live to really bring home that it was a family at work.

I had this on my mind when I walked into the Roseland Theater here in Portland the other night, and was surprised at not seeing one guy on stage, but five. The first one I noticed was the drummer, who introduced the band the way an older brother would, with a bit of a mocking tone, and ready to fight if needed. He introduced the singer who didn’t look like Dylan, didn’t have that harmonica welded onto his chest. The singer looked like he was about twelve and one of those runaway scamps from the Beat Generation. There was another brother who played a Hammond organ, well not a real Hammond organ, but a modern keyboard set to the setting of a Hammond organ.

They are all in their early twenties, these guys, all of them real-life brothers, and they remind me of the kind of guys that hung out in the photo lab at my university until long after dark, smelling of incense and the funny fixer or developer fluid that sticks to your skin for hours afterwards.

The more the songs sat with me, the more I realized that this was the music of hobos, street people, transients, vagrants, the big bally-hooed travelers on the back of a pick up criss-crossing the country with Keruoac narrating. With their lungs dipped in whiskey, the brothers brought the house down in my mind as together arm in arm, they swung around the loose work of the Pogues ala If I Should fall from Grace with God. And the whole time that Hammond organ going, creating a spine around the music.

For the songs on The Felice Brothers are brave songs, with wide brush strokes, wide in the mind because they hold the kernels of the American Revolution, from the Carpetbaggers and Beats to the Anarchists. Because in their voices are the voices of artists and poets and they know that by singing these songs in this register they are digging up the tenth grade literary canon. From Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, to the lazy way Walt Whitman smoked a cigarette on the last day of Spring, they capture that new found wonder and enlightenment. It made me think of the teenage kicks of Jack and Neal Cassidy burning down the road, of Dean Moriarity’s bandages coming loose and stained with dirt and nicotine and the never ending ribbon of road and that bulge of raw land.

A band that’s willing to create splashes of song, pocketed in between rousing choruses of death and eternity and when they do break out into song on stage as they do on this, their third album, they sound like five people standing in a dark alley, dancing and drinking, on a hot afternoon, and pretty soon everyone in the neighborhood is singing along, and the melody gets loud and strong, and the bleeding gums of Dixieland comes up, and it all happens so succinctly, and none of it is overdone.

Because on this self-entitled album we get a taste of all their styles, the vaudevillian melodies, the stories of dead junkies, old flophouses, heroin reference dropped in as casually as the sound of empty whiskey bottles hitting the floor. Each of them have their own style, one bringing in the W.C. Fields charismatic drunk act, another brother, the one who sings on “Don’t Wake the Scarecrow,” plays it straight, offering up a doomed street romance cut short by heroin.

For this is a record to live in, to try on, inhabit like the walls of an old house, and there’s always that one hallway that’s empty for most of the afternoon, but come night there is a party, and we bear witness to the enormity of it, and later there’ll be one person left, sitting on the front steps listening to the silence and tasting all that forgotten perfume.

“The Murder of Mistletoe” relies just as much on negative space, the sound of a piano in an empty hall, or maybe a street corner, this is music that takes time to fully reach you, as you have to row out to it, and each time you visit you hear something else bubble up to the surface.

They are all singers, and at least two of them are songwriters, and whenever one of them sings, I think it’s the drummer singer, I swear, he pronounces words the same as Dylan, the way Dylan pronounced War in “Masters of War,” letting out the raw “aw” sound and catching back in the throat like a boomerang, and in so doing, uncovers the journeys Guthrie and Dylan did, passing the torch from one to another, walking together at dusk in the Catskills on a railroad track.

“Love Me Tenderly” has the echo back draft of jazz filtered through Dylan, Miles, and Monk, until we can see thirty years of the musical notation blur under the influence of their pond.

By the end of the record, we are introduced to all of the brothers, so it all feels like one big introduction. For on The Felice Brothers, they all sit down on the rails, take their shoes off, and fall into the School Bus they live in, travel in and record in. There’s a picture I’ve seen of the younger brother singing into the microphone on a stand in the bus, their recording studio and their home. It’s covered in graffiti and never swept.

I can imagine that outside of the picture’s frame, there’s probably old Olympia pop tops in there, wind up clocks, and cigarette butts, old suits, and we can hear the one inch reel to reel tape flapping when the song finishes.

And that last song probably sounds like Tom Waits having more whiskey with Shane McGowan, and overhead Dylan is in the night sky, looking down on the proceedings sent from whatever abandoned old baseball stadium he plays in on his never ending tour.

And the brothers Felice are tired after listening to the playback, and they finish the last of the mulligan stew, put out the fire, climb back into the van, sleep close to the guitars and wash boards. And when the record’s done they hope the people that will listen to it will feel the way they do now, that underneath the stars in some nowhere town in the American Southwest, a long way away from home and all of it’s twisted Americana, is the sound of a family making music.

“Radio Songs” sounds like that, an epitaph that brings in Zydeco influences on this barnstorming sing along that acts as a mediation on the power of family and loved ones, albeit one enjoyed in a I-hope-tonight-never-ends-sort-of-way.
“Please don’t you ever die, you ever die, you ever die, moved me all of my life, all of my life, all of my life, all my radio songs, radio songs, radio songs.”

And after that who wouldn’t want to turn around and watch it all unfold all over again from track one? Like the best moments in life, the songs on The Felice Brothers are like fourteen different snapshots of time in a person’s life, sometimes it’s you and sometimes it's not, but it’s always sad and beautiful and mischievous and alive.

The End of Silence, for now.

2008-03-29T12:48:00.000-07:00

If you've wondered where I've hung my be-spectacled head lately, its been on Mog ,
an online music community made up of ex music journalistas who now rabbit on about music like their lives depend on it, which, in a way it does.

This review of Mike Doughty's appalling Golden Delicious originally appeared on MOG's main page and under the following URL.

http://mog.com/Kronski/blog_post/144139

Mike Doughty, journeyman, skeletal poet, former member of Soul Coughing.

More on that journey later, but for now let me say how much the failure of his latest record, Golden Delicious, released on Dave Matthews’s ATO record label, stems from the first impression gained when we look at his arched eyebrow and that sepia toned shot of him and a golden delicious apple.

His MySpace caption says of Golden Delicious, “An Apple, an Album.”

Why Golden Delicious? Why an album named after a fucking apple?

"Drinking in My Dreams," a track from the sessions of his previous album (the comparably wonderful Haughty Melodic), implies that a former alcoholic can still feel his phantom limb beating underneath the stained sheets of what can surely be a golden delicious morning. So maybe he’s been sober for awhile, and with this record, this arrival of success — for all of Dave Matthews' fans will find a lot to like here, such as the overly repetitive melodies — means the arrival of eloquent set pieces that often take a turn for the worse. Such as when Doughty, midway through "I Just Want the Girl in the Blue Dress to Keep on Dancing," abandons the melody and goes straight for the mind-numbing choruses.

What starts out as a needed diversion, what could have been an opportunity to explore his inner longings, instead becomes what is wrong with every track on this record. Instead of getting to the root of his demons, or railing against Los Angeles, he instead finds a sing-song sound with which to sledgehammer the very promising melody into the listener’s head in the worst way possible.

"Da domb da domb dom dom, da domb da domb dom. Da domb da domb dom dom, da domb da domb dom."

Why does a man who published a book of poetry, Slanky, beloved of the New York Times, a participant in that grand old literary experiment known as McSweeney’s (one of Doughty’s earlier songs appeared on a compilation that accompanied said literary journal), a man with such a great capacity for language ... do this to himself?

Perhaps Doughty is just another accomplished artist who finally realized that it’s easier to pump sunshine and cliché through the skeletons of his troubled past then to use these same skeletons to explore further the depths of his demons. I liked him a lot better when he built up and got lost in the canvas he strung around the beats back in his Soul Coughing Days.

For New Yorker Mike Doughty, oddly enough, Los Angeles was his muse, his foil. The sick pock-marked city, with its boils and ills and fever-dreams, became a canvas, something to lie next to, a place to be polluted by, a place for him to rail against. Los Angeles was a live-in metaphor that he explored both on Soul Coughing records and on "No Peace, Los Angeles" on his solo debut, Skittish. And while stability, sobriety and life on an even keel is most certainly preferable to an unstable life pitted against the demon cellar of the biggest cities on either coast, it most certainly does not make for a very compelling listen here.

Maybe I am not the intended listener for Golden Delicious, and who am I to deny the process by which self-respecting artists turn into coffee-shop schlock? For I can see the display now, Mike and the golden delicious apple, advertising at a nationwide coffee chain near you, placed strategically right next to piles of overpriced fair trade Guatemalan coffee beans. Hey, at least he’s happy.

It's an evolution of sorts for Doughty, then, from back in the days of the first Soul Coughing record, Ruby Vroom; the recording and eventual blooming of solo debut Skittish; through to the end of Soul Coughing with El Oso; the well-elaborated-upon melodies of his solo breakthrough, the far superior Haughty Melodic; and now this supposed Golden Delicious, this blatant grab at fame.

Perhaps I can offer a cruel yet effective solution to Doughty. Maybe he should take his own advice, as he does in one track, and “put on the sauce/ put it on the sauce” — that is, go back to drinking, and repeat it as often as these choruses do on Golden Delicious.

The truly sad thing is how this once-talented dynamo sells out in such an unspectacular fashion. I would rather see him in a belly shirt, shaking his ass on stage in a Gap ad then to let his music fall so flat, so fast. For all of its overcookedness, Golden Delicious leaves us with the impression of a blatant and intentional leap off of the cliff of genuine artistry.

2007: The Music Issue

2008-01-04T17:34:00.000-08:00

So better late than never right? So what if 2008 has already risen from the depths of our imagination. Winter break is quickly coming to its conclusion, so quit with the throat clearing will you and onto the music.

Two Thousand and Seven was an interesting year for me musically and otherwise. It was the first year that I began to feel the vacuum between my musical interests and the interests of the taste makers. Who are these taste makers that I speak of? Why they are the very taste makers on the web that dictate which music should be given the right amount of focus and which music should be what Paul Westerberg from the Replacements once said "Judge once and then tossed aside." (from the 1988 album Don't Tell a Soul for those who are keeping track.)

So I give to you not a top ten list of trendy music selections, ones that haven't already been shoved down the throats of thousands of readers (I'm looking your way pitchfork!) but have brought me a tremendous amount of pleasure during a most pleasurable year.

In no particular order:

1. Radiohead - In Rainbows

Ok, so this guy makes a point of not going the trendy way and what does he start out with? An album that almost everyone could agree on for having a place in anyone's top ten list.

But there is method in my madness, for this is Radiohead's most enjoyable record, that's right, pleasurable, since OK Computer. That doesn't mean that it had the same weight as said record. Listen to the melodies, on all but a few tracks (I still can't get through the entirety of the opening track 15 step, for example) and you will agree. From start to finish my favorite record of 2007, and the way it arrived, via a sudden announcement on their website. 'The Record is Done and it's coming out in ten days' Made this listener happier than when he heard OK Computer for the first time. And to feel that excitement at 35 about a record, both at the announcement and the sheer joy that is listening to it, was wonderful.

2. Dinosaur Jr. - Beyond

Having been a fan of J. Mascis for over fifteen years by no means diluted my own appreciation of this record. I was skeptical when the band announced they were reforming, complete with Murph and Lou Barlow. And the record itself, probably their best since Green Mind, maybe even better, full of soaring angst set to Dinosaur's roaring howl, and it sounds more palatable than their earlier records.

3. The National - Boxer

Readers of this blog will no doubt remember my lusting over the group's previous effort, Alligator and while Boxer is a different beast all together, full of mid tempo mediations on the excesses of love and the things we run to when the love goes wrong, it was just as compelling at the end of the year as it was last Spring, when it was initially released.

4. The Shout Out Louds - Our Ill Willis

The Pop Record. The one that I could not let go of until I wrenched every ounce of melody and fun out of. this record took me back to Head on the Door-era Cure, the kind of music that makes one want to abandon all of the responsibility and seriousness of being an adult and sit in a dank room all day and listen to records such as this one. The aural equivalent of hot fudge sundaes everyday.

5. Band of Horses - Cease to Begin

The Hometown Slugger. As impressed as I was with Ben Bridwell and Co.'s previous record, Everything all the Time, I was not prepared for this one to crawl up inside my brain and take residence the way it did. Mr. Bridwell has made a more mature album than his debut, one that shows a return home, from Seattle back to Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina. The slower songs on this record are the strongest songs he's recorded to date. And listening to their lazy South Carolina evenings sound, like all you have to do is close your eyes and listen to the cicadas lull you to sleep. A record that could have only come from the South, but one that didn't hit you over the head with its sense of place. The most comfortable record of 2007.

6. Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

The Swarthy Gangster. Hopes were high for Spoon's sixth record, after 2005's Gimme Fiction
expectations had grown to a fever pitch. Not surprisingly, Spoon returned to the experimentation of Kill the Moonlight, for one of the highlights of the year. Strange, infectious pop that bends over itself like the musical equivalent of a mobius strip. Layers of instruments rise up and grab the listener, then return to the soup, a record that uses negative space as much as positive space yet still retains its pop sensibility. A record where studio talk back, thick soupy bass lines, and crisp sharp vocals as starchy as the collars that don lead singer's Britt Daniel's fitted shirts all act as instruments that throw the listener to the other side of the room.

7. Okkervill River - The Stage Names

The Summer Fling. Things that I will forever now associate with Summer: Padgett Powell's novel Edisto, Tacoma, WA. Add The Stage Names to that list. All of them were there with me, as I explored the bike-able and not so bike-able regions of Tacoma. Stopping for Beers in the afternoon after class, reading out in the sun, Okkervill river was with me throughout. There's a world weary feeling that accompanies the look back in wonder at what a mess the narrator has made of his life, with lovely turns of phrases and novelistic embellishments.

8. Ryan Adams - Easy Tiger

The Prodigal Son. Musicians have multiple lives, especially American ones, who over said that their were no second acts in American lives? Mr. Adams bucks that trend. I was a huge Whiskeytown fan, but after his first excellent solo album, Ryan had a tendency to lose credibility by putting out everything he ever recorded. Releasing three albums in 2005 was a bit much, especially after the particularly excellent two disc Cold Roses. So it was easy to write this one off as another exercise in self-indulgence. But he came back in a big way for me in 2007 with a record that never really left me since its release this past summer.

Alt-Country finger picking, Grateful Dead inspired vocals, a duet with Sheryl Crow, it could have gone wrong in so many places, but in many ways this was his finest record in a number of years and the fans rejoiced. Now if he can only keep off the heroin.....

9. Rogue Wave - Asleep at Heaven's Gate

The Scrappy Welterweight. I don't think I've seen this one any other year end top ten list. When I clicked on the most played songs on my i-tunes, almost every track from Asleep at Heaven's Gate appears. And while I heard more substantive records this year, it was Rogue Wave that took the prize for most addictive. (although the Shout Out Louds did give them a run for their money)

The band evidently went through hell getting this one produced, with numerous deaths in the family, a kidney transplant for one of the band members, and the scars of collective ennui is evident on every meticulously produced track. So many suprises in between the frets and percussive blips on this record. One whose face seems to change with each listen, according to mood. It come across as triumphant, depressive, meditative, a schizophrenic record, to be sure, but one of the most rewarding records of the year.

10. Wilco - Sky Blue Sky

The Sleeping Giant.A lot of people were disappointed with this record, but for the life of me I can't see it. Granted, the tempo was slowed down a bit, so many dubbed this one Easy Listening, which is ridiculous, given the presence of new guitarist Nels Cline. A sublime bucolic record written after a period of serious strife in the life of singer Jeff Tweedy. A triumphant deceleration of love and freedom, and one that accompanies the arrival of Spring in a heartbreakingly elegant way.

Beloved Singles:

Willie Nelson - Songbird

Without a doubt, my favorite song of 2007. Even though it was released in late 2006, I didnt get around to listening to it until this year. All the ingredients of a fine Nelson ballad is here. Cry in your beer earnestness, tasteful arrangements (in this case provided by Ryan Adams and the Cardinals), and a blistering guitar solo at the end. What more could you want or need? Oh and did I mention its a cover of probably the greatest Fleetwood Mac song?

Bon Iver - Skinny Love

Bruce Springsteen - Girls in their Summer Clothes

Buffalo Tom - Bottom of the Rail

The Acorn - Hold Your Breath

Ryan Adams - Two Hearts

Dinosaur Jr. - Crumble

Super Furry Animals - Show Your Hand

Insomnia on Halloween

2007-10-31T07:52:00.001-07:00

What a marvellous morning to be a zombie.
At work but not physcially grounded
not feeling the weight of the world underneath one's shoes
Driving across statelines in the fog
Cars backed upall the way down the line
Reminds you of being awake
a static, a know-it-all third person narrator
so aware of what's around him
that they can hear the sounds of stomach juices
digesting the lunchtime sandwich
hear the cries inside the child who cannot speak yet
from the new parents across the street
the moments fifteen years ago when he had similar troubles
Nation of Islam creationists
adverts for pain medication
educational movies without audiences
a soundtrack for those that are not watching but listening.
then Spanish language where every other word makes sense
Words chopped up and served warm
Until the morning comes thirty minutes later
and you turn around
do it again

Curtain Closes

2007-08-25T11:13:00.001-07:00

The bright innards of an orange, the pulp between one’s teeth when they bite into an orange that’s been in the fridge all day, a respite on a hot day, reading to one’s content, read all day if you want to.

Hop on your bike, and ride, go back and forth to Tacoma, look forward to reading what’s written on a billboard with Uncle Sam’s Picture on it patriotic diatribes on the highway, reminding me of the rhetoric of the bald eagle on the Muppets. Health Provider Funded bike rides. Walking home from a bar on a hot summer night, the air cool and sweet and leading you through another morning of coffee and writing and reading from a bright computer screen. Clean shiny and new.

Seeing local bands for five bucks, bands who you’ve never heard before, never had the time recently until now.

The idea that summer lives on forever somewhere inside of us. Stay a little longer on the patio, look out at the beach, a different locale in each place you go, but always the beach.

Caliban, a scullery of crab, a man covered in barnacles clings to his bottle of booze, precious companion, and crawls up and out of the trap door in the stage, Shakespeare, modeled after the original theater, for this is The Tempest, in Ashland, and its hot, but never in the outdoor theater.

So the curtain begins its descent on Summer, and the regimented schedules of school return, the dank smell of Fall, and the rains that follow it, the burnt dust school smells, the pencil shaving and leather smell of the first day of school, strange fashions, new angular haircuts, picture day.

And somewhere in summer the idea that one doesn’t have to grow old necessarily, get old and boring, never hop in and swim on a hot fourth of July in a river that’s almost too polluted to swim in, treading water and staying afloat, the brown green water a dipping moving horizontal, to not be too old and serious that we cant run out to a freezing cold Pacific coast, feel numb in the toes, lift up your shorts so you don’t get too wet. No too old to pick shells all day in the sunshine.

Losing My Religion

2007-08-05T11:02:00.000-07:00

Listening to REM at the end of another school year as a teacher is an odd prospect. Firstly, the music is different than when you were on the other side. Instead of a teenager struggling with identity,possibly suicide, and the inability to find even the most rudimentary of dates, you are now supposedly an adult professional, one who now listens to this music to remember what it was like to be a teenager.

Once you are that teenager (or at least feel it swimming through your bones like the floaters that pass by like buoys on a choppy channel) you can remember with utmost clarity the daily struggles you went through. And no one brings it home like REM circa '90.

Because as much as I write this from the point of view of the hidden narrator, where I write generally about what happened, instead of delving into the specific events. Maybe that's what music is for.

But I can't think about REM and High School without thinking about David. I knew him as a talented theater student, actor, writer, and to a lesser degree, an amply skilled mathematician and scientist. But David wanted to be an actor.

And like the archetypal private school parents (and this did happen at an archetypal private High School) they wanted more than just another actor, they wanted him to carry on in their footsteps, notably in the fields of math and science.

David's favorite band was REM, it was 1990, and it seemed like the whole school was into at least one REM album at the time.

I left that school junior year and moved to a bigger public school. Most of David's friends graduated, leaving just himself to follow around, and the shadows of last years companions.

One day I was walking to class when I ran into someone I knew back at the private school I had recently attended. She told me about David, and I had to sit down. When the janitors showed up for work that morning, they found David's body on the basketball court, his brains scattered a few feet in front of him.

REM's "Losing My Religion" was the next song I listened to, and for me it seemed so appropriate that it was the first song I heard after the news. Sitting in my brown Toyota with the left door smashed smoking a cigarette, I thought about all the times I saw David perform on stage, or dissect literature, all with a outlook on life that was rarely found in a teenager.

It was one of those moments that you know will be with you forever, and while on one hand the memory goes hand in hand with misery, nevertheless its a genuine moment where the music perfectly accompanies a turning point in your life.

So back to my original point, that by listening to music (it is ovlerwhelming to ones favor to be a High School teacher) and to play this music to High School students and have them not connect the emotions they feel to the songs you play in particular. To them its more of a relic, a time in your life doesn't match with a time in their life, or if it does, the soundtrack is probably not the same.

But now that I think about it, listening to South Central Rain every morning when I was in High School, noone in my grade had ever heard the song before, and neither had the teachers, which brings me back to the always original thesis. That there exists a kind of musical solipsism, for only the ones who had the original memories with the original songs, these are vacuum sealed into a time, and although you may, years later unearth said piece of music or said picture of you and your prom date looking electrified by all the things that were coming at you at once. You can only have one time in your life when the whole cosmodemonic rigmarole turns around enough to where all the pieces fit.

And when you find that moment in time, an album a song that describes the way you are feeling right then and there. Hold onto it, savor it. Because pretty soon a middle aged version of yourself will attempt to relive that feeling, say in 1995 with Pulp's Different Class and you were jumping up and down on the bed, trying to stay 23 forever

The Summer

2007-07-11T22:23:00.000-07:00

If I were Harold Bloom, one of many protagonists from James Joyce's Ulysses, I'd detail every encounter, every stained hand, or maybe account for those receipts I throw out in my laundry. And as much as I believe that the most beautiful moments in life can happen in little moments such as these, I have, by nature of the form of this publication, this being an online function, which dictates small and concise reports from a particular state of mind, objects, breathing and inanimate, all of these things are more relevant than what some authors might deem mundane.

But this is not that story.

I read that in a short story once, its the tried and tested method of leading a reader down a hole, a passageway, one in which eventually is barricaded by the author, so that the reader, if she were a sheep, wouldn't run out of the wrong gate. But it is late, and this introduction is far too long, it reeks of older literature which does not mimic the syntax of the current mode.

Summer, a time which all teachers look forward to, the calendar year appropriately adjusted so that Summer previously occupies chambers formerly inhabited by Christmas.

But the idea of Summer has been co-opted by classes that truly feast on the marrow of the creative spirit, and that I would find to be complimentary to the courses I am enrolled in.

The teachers droll on and on, and while the content is useful, it would be more suited to a manual that I was required to read and then tested on later preferably posthumously, the human component deemed unnecessary.

But I am living, at the moment, not in my adopted home of Portland,OR but in Tacoma, WA. Firstly let me say that for the record, I like Tacoma, Washington, its quaint, there are views-a-plenty, streets that only the cruelest drafter could bore, and even though the people are really nice, and despite all of this, well, I miss my home.

I feel like Summer as a concept, as a thing has been put on hold. The writing waits to be judged added to the way a prisoner on a hunger strike squires and builds up meals, or the way a vacation rental acquires newspapers, steadily and with great cost.

I am living with people who are fifteen years younger than I. To say we have a different perspective is to make a great understatement. But still, despite all of this I am having a wonderful time.

I have read two books that have spun the top that is my brain this summer, one is a new discovery in the name of Padgett Powell, deemed enfante terrible, by the press, but he did create a most memorable account of growing up in the Antebellum south, specifically in Edisto, South Carolina, a place which I can say I have experiences which not only match up to his, but he paints a portrait that I just want to saddle up and live in.

So Padgett Powell's Edisto and David Gates's Jernigan in which he creates one of the greatest anti-heroes in Western Literature. With the mind of a scholar tethered to an alcoholic's mental electrical system, Jernigan has the mind of a steel trap with the internal terrain of self loathing.

I hope to write more when I return next week. despite a vacation where we will see lots of blue sky, sandy beaches and one of the best performing Shakespeare troupes in the galaxy, as found in Ashland.

Enjoy that marrow of life I talked about earlier, and have an intelligent conversation, if not to act as a counter-weight to my own daily torture as just to have an intelligent conversation, for the mere joy of it.

Wishfully, (no, not really)

Peter Jernigan

The Desire to be Heard

2007-05-14T15:44:00.000-07:00

Its that time of day. The days experience catching up with yesterdays exercise. the sleep that didn't come when I woke up, my throat on fire, my legs burning. Sweat in the bedroom. A feeling that all was not all together well.

The time it takes for me to catch up, maybe tonight Ill sink down into the couch and live with small animals, pets scurrying by, swinging their paws at one another.

Left to be understood, lets strip the context from everything, so we see things as all inter-connected, the hallway at the Russell House. Why do I miss my old world so much?

Why is so much of who I am now is wrapped up in who I was back then? If I were to go back, to return, nothing would be the same. All times changed, people dead or in the ground, lost in themselves or in other people.

Why is it this way, why is the world mysteriously underneath something [else. We pick up an object, a bottle of water, and underneath it lives the collective experience with that object. It's never too far away from us, slipping through our hands the way water does. and then its down the drain, and there's no use chasing water, because it all falls away.

There are multiple levels of what may be called reality. Multiple reasons why we get up in the morning. And strange how on the way to work this morning the light was that contained in the middle of the afternoon, not at six thirty in the morning.

A drive on the way, lack of moisture in my bones, dry my head swimming in the morning fog that burned off long ago.

The soul of an artist, but one who cowers in response to criticism. If we have to congratulate ourselves, we are all done for.

I left my manuscript behind, didn't email it to myself this morning, now one day behind.

If I could, I'd bottle all the advice Ive ever been given and swallow some of it and spit the rest out.

This then, this ranting writing on a wall, not shared, but lived in, like dungarees, like chorded slacks with all of the grooves worn smooth, so it feels more like felt.

Walking in these pants is like wearing drapes, like whatever is between your legs is a stage, and with each step you unveil whats between the lines, the chords in the slacks, the performances gone unremarked.

Its hard to know how we are doing when everyone keeps walking away.

This desire to be heard, to write something down, a record, moment to moment of history, why the obsession? Why can't I just die and be content only with those I've touched on the past? Why do I want a future? Why do I want my name to be written in a tiny font, on the cover of a small volume of a novel, tucked away at the back of the store, after not selling a single copy. Why is it why do I feel the need. Why I cant just fade away, to be forgotten.

Is all of this for myself, or is any of it for the benefit of other people? Grease the wheel of thought. Things have a tenuous relationship with gravity. I have a fleeting relationship with reality. It leaves me alone during the strangest times. Who and with what person?

Over and out.

Grindhouse

2007-04-09T09:12:00.000-07:00

Janet and I went to see Grindhouse last night.

We only made it through half of it, because of an incident that arose right in front of us, and fully engulfed the majority of the evening.

Peep this, these guys who were sitting off to the right of us were really being quite obnoxious, yelling at the screen, obviously very drunk, talking throughout the movie. When people told them to shush, they made fun of them, then the environment grew more hostile, until I joined the chorus that told them, rather loudly and with more authority to "shut the f%%% up!"

Things continued to grow more hostile between the crowd and this bunch of hooligans. Apparently those who acted properly didnt know how to enjoy this film, because it is a grindhouse film. The propietor came out and spoke to them, but they continued to state their case that the creators of this film had intended the film to be enjoyed in this particular fashion.

At this point Janet and I stand up, and Janet says, "That's it, we're leaving" When one of the guys said "We'll see you outside" to which I replied "Oh yeah?" i didn’t mean it for it to come out this way, but when the adrenaline is pumping, it kind of takes over.

So we go out to the lobby, and the guys follows us and one them tries to get us to take $20.00 to leave instead of getting refund form the theatre. We tell him we don't want his money and that his behavior was inapropriate. He insists that grindhouse movies are meant to be watched this way, continues to to try to make me take his maney and then shoved me right in the middle of the lobby. I tell him I don’t want to fight, and about how just because its a grindhouse film, etc. I finally leave, waiting for Janet immediately outside. (Janet was in the process of getting a refund from the cashier.) Then this same guy comes flying out, with a 20 dollar bill, waving it in front of my face, saying, "I'll give you this as your refund, Quentin Tarantino intended this for..." I back up repeatedly saying, "I don't want your money, I don't want to fight, I just want to go home." He pulls back and cocks me right above my left eye. My guard was already up, and I fell to the ground, and the guy leaned over me and kept punching/wailing on my head. Janet comes running out, screaming and yelling "Get off of him! What are you doing? Are you crazy?", and hits the guy in the face with her purse. Then the dufus's friend steps in, and breaks it up, luckily before the guy could have a go at Janet.

The two dudes leave as we go inside, wondering what the hell just happened.

The cops finally showed up after two phone calls and twenty minutes later. The guy who hit me was still standing around the corner of the theatre outside.

The cops hauled him away in a squad car, and I have to call the DA's office on Wednesday to press charges.

Needless to say, we didn’t finish the film.

Spring Break at Cape Kiwanda

2007-04-07T08:51:00.000-07:00

The sun came out on the day we arrived, two people looking for the respite between the sun and the clouds. We pulled into Pacific City via the long way around, coming at it where the ocean was on our left, the big haystack rock looming over the proceedings.

Hotel right across the street.

Across the street from the hotel, right on the beach was the Pelican Brewery.
It was three hours until check in time, so we grabbed a beer and headed outside.

Rapture, the thrust of the day without schedules, deadlines, or class bells.

After lunch we went hiking up on this bluff, where you could see caves, open mouths thunderclaps of waves echoing through the portals of darkness and water. Emerald slime, and salt, the roots of trees at the top of the bluff, running down a mountain of sand, sand collecting in your rolled up jeans because you thought it would be too cold for shorts.

Driving down Highway 101 in search of supplies, the sunroof open, Pavement on the stereo, youth felt close, closer than the watchband on my arm.

Too much food, sun and open free time...

The sleep came gradually then all of a sudden, and in the middle of a Deadliest Catch marathon.

Capping off the week with Kayaking, making me feel small but proud in this world, content to drift in the wake left behind by bigger, more ostentatious boats.

The Quiet Before the Storm

2007-03-16T09:55:00.000-07:00

All the greatest things in life come down to deadlines. If its worth doing, worth pursuing, then it will probably have a somewhat firm deadline attached to it.

The end of term flew in and out, without too many passengers say stranded at JFK.

Most of the week was standardized tests, and the pressure these students face is unimaginable. I suppose standardized tests have been high-stakes for awhile now, but then what? Once they pass the WASL in tenth grade, where do we go from here?

The answer is, quite resoundly, we don't care. It's a benchmark system. Trying to teach students to express themselves clearly is difficult in a world of standardized tests.

A new term came into town, savvy and sophisticated, if early journals are any indication.

Next week is more standardized testing, but today is a regular day. The in between days are the most important. We're in between areas, gasping for breath.

All this while trying to write, I must be mad. I've been reading Death of a Salesman again, research for my book, wherein the protagonist plays the part of Willy Loman in a High School play.

Each night I work on this I have vivid dreams, where areas and people are blended, like the United States in a grafted cross-stitch. My wife just finished her work sample, and is one step closer to being a licensed teacher. I remember the time.

Work doesn't want to acknowledge the fact I have a Video Department. Now I know how the Quebecois feel.

Its SxSw in Austin right now, thousands of bands and discovery. Youth, a concept I know well, but am distanced from. Too tall to ride that ride.

The new Wilco record, Sky Blue Sky, seems to anticipate the Summer. Languid, hot and free. The new patio, writing, reading paperback books until my hands sweat. Battling the Sleestacks in the backyard.

Rode the bicycle the other day. There's something magical about being on a bike path and having a river on your left and an airplane landing on the right. My Dad got his pilot's license. Perhaps someday, I'll bike to the airport to meet him there.

Creative time, ha. Yeah, how does he do it? Squandered time everyday. Working on a novel is continuous, always trying out new ways of doing something.

All for now,

Kronski

School Prayer and the Mountain Goats

2007-03-05T18:46:00.000-08:00

Things happen to us, and because of the amount of space between the two of them, Tom Spanbauer would call it propinquity, we can't help
but meld them together.

What does School Prayer have to do withthe Mountain Goats? How can the concept of School Prayer and all of the free speech issues it brings up be linked up, connected, referred to indirectly in the same
sentence as John Darnielle ofthe Mountain Goats? Just what is the
connection exactly?

We can start with the most logical choice first. John Darnielle is a huge Death Metal Fan, on his blog Last Plane to Jakarta, John wrote thirty poems about Death Metal. So we can take that as an anathema to Christianity. The people punished for a morning group prayer meeting at the High School I teach were Christians, and this happened to coincide with the weekend that I got to see John Darnielle's band the Mountain Goats play live at the Doug Fir Lounge here in Portland, thereby making me groggy on the morning that students were at it again, attempting a morning prayer meeting, after their story was plastered all over the local news.

One of the greatest thrills of being a music fan, nay being a human
being is discovering worlds within worlds. Webs of connotation and
expression that live underneath concepts that exist despite one's lack
of knowledge of these said webs.

Since I first heard their named mentioned in music circles, the
Mountain Goats have intrigued me on namesake alone. It took me some
time to discover their albums released on their 4AD label, and when I
did I was richly rewarded.

Call it a slow conversion process. I acquired 'We Shall All Be Healed'
and read many interviews in which the word 'narrative' was applied
liberally to the man. The lyrics were unintelligible to me, but the
music was infectious.

It took the 2005 release of 'Sunset Tree' to make me wake up and hear
the stories he described. I was a tad disappointed in last year's 'Get
Lonely' record, but the 'Sunset Tree' never really left my mind.

It wasn't until last night that I became a converted Mountain Goats
Fan. In the weeks leading up to the show, I pulled out their records,
I listened with a firmer ear, I digested stories with shadowy
overtones. I read his reactions to Jazz records, downloaded Bill
Evans's 'Moonbeams' on his recommendation.

And then last night. The stories, the songs, the way in which he
played, with absolute radiant joy. His whole face lit up, his stories
were weired, semi-personal and semi-fictitious.

One of the songs, they played it towards the end of their set, I was
the only one who didn't know every word, who didn't sing every word out
loud and clear, much to John's insistence.

And now Monday I come back to work and its school prayer and controversy, and even though I side with the Administration on this
one, I still can't help but think about free speech, and what I
spectacle they made of it.

I am a convert to the mythically dark world of John Darnielle and the
Mountain Goats, and I found it without having it waved in front of me,
And while I may have risked feeling groggy the next day, It did not direct me to the path the prayer group took. My visit to musical nirvana was purely based on a love of music and maybe the telling of a good story.

All this time John and his band have played Portland time and time
again since I moved here, each time with different stories, to different crowd shout
outs. And now that I can see his full catalog in perspective, and I
can see how much the man has written, and how increasingly
sophisticated that writing has become. I can now marvel at the way it sat
in the back of my brain, never unraveled or opened, in the corner the
surface barely scratched.

And that praying, and the gaudiness of it, the free speech issue that
isn't there. I see it all in a new light, through the eyes of a Death
Metal fan.

Thank you John, thank you so much.

Mountain Goats - Woke Up New

Yesterday - Teacher Dispatch II

2007-02-23T05:57:00.000-08:00

Wednesday was great, productive even. Thursday started out great.

I'm at my desk and it's early, checking email, swigging coffee. I get the email.

The kind of email that makes the walls touch your elbows, an email that turns your world into a goldfish bowl, bent around the edges, nothing else on your horizon.

In short, the video announcements I've worked so hard to curate, the team training, the proposals for equipment, all of that called into question.

Five utterances of the same word. An Andrew Dice Clay Concert, on the air for all staff, students, educational aids, janitorial staff, security,everyone.

That expletive, the five instances of the same fucking expletive, the person who said it, the host is gone for who knows how long. But the Announcements have a more distinct, mature face, and its mine.

One would think with my flare for the dramatic, and my tendency towards hyperbole, that I would welcome this kind of attention. But I don't. I hate their judgment, I can feel it, floating around my mind like a fever, and while most are supportive there is so much silence from so many others.

The bottom line, I didn't do it, it wasn't my fault, but it was.

So a videotaped mea culpa for all to see. Take ownership and bring it to the masses.

I know this will all blow over in a few days, but for now I want back to where I was behind the scenes, making my moves, shaking the waves underground.

Teaching Disptach

2007-02-20T10:39:00.000-08:00

It's not a snow day.

It's the day after a four-day weekend. It's a sweaty late morning, and I've just finished my lunch. There's a feeing that teachers get, right before a tough class, where one ponders the mood and temperment of the students on a given particular day.

Will they be rambunctious after the weekend or not? Is it a high volume energy drink day or not?

It's always hard to say, especially after a four-day weekend.

A co-worker shaved his moustache. He still strokes his chin like he still has hair there.

Visualize a new bumper sticker.

Has hair there.

The writing stalled and died this weekend. I spent a part of a morning taking things away, but not adding any new information. Not a phrase, not a new word. Nothing.

Something hit me yesterday, when I awoke, that I felt, maybe for the first time in 2007, fully rested and refreshed. Maybe it had something to do with the sky light and the slate grey sky?

Sometimes words come to me in waves, humming thrones like bees well up in my blood, urging the synapses in my brain to talk to the fingers already, and see if we can't do something about this 'lack of writing thing'

Oh, and Michael Chabon is writing a serialized novel within the splashy colored confines of the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

All for Now

Snow Days

2007-01-18T06:27:00.000-08:00

The front steps, and the stretch of road that lies in front of it has become a barometer of sorts, an area that usually does not get that much attention.

For the past three days now, school has been closed, and those that live in the designated vacation zones know that this means building any variety of snowman (seen yesterday, snow water buffalo, in the downward facing dog yoga position, it almost took my breath away) and snow angels.

It takes longer to walk places, driving in snow, is for me an alien concept, strange the way the ground is so unreliable, and can suddenly without notice slip underneath you, and jiggle you out of your safety zone.

All of this insulation, makes one want to be outside, then inside again. We've seen a few movies, strange hidden beasts from ten years ago. Sean Penn with perfect brown hair. Gary Oldman when he was rail thin, like a drunken Sid Vicious. Ed Harris with hair, who would have thought?

State of Grace did have some issues that it really never quite overcame, development time on a bust that never really happened, and that the audience knew would never happen, so the whole thing turns into a meditation on friendship, but couldn't we have done this in a more direct way?

Sometimes when I am tired, movies are a chore, and I find my eyes continually drift to the time remaining display on the DVD player.

This overall vague notion of the future, one that is controlled by mother nature, brings us back to man's earliest incarnations, reminding us just who is in charge.

The Best Albums of 2006: Kronski Weighs In

2006-12-26T07:46:00.000-08:00

In between the glut of the holiday festivities, and reading the endless ‘best of lists’ that appear during this time of year, I thought it only fitting that I too throw my hat into the ring, after so many days of leisure and consumption.

The Best Albums of 2006

1. The Hold Steady – Boys and Girls in America

A funny thing happened at the end of the year. My parents, en route to Christmas HQ, listened to Kerouac’s On the Road in audio book format. The subject got us talking about Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, and the whole time all I could hear was the snaggletooth riffs provided by The Hold Steady.

My Dad said at one point, “Kerouac uses the word ‘sad’ so often” which cued, in my mind the opening line to the greatest opening track of 2006, Stuck Between Stations.

“There are times when I think that Sal Paradise was right, Boys and Girls in America have such a sad time together.”

Pitchfork called it similar to Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker in that we see the viewpoint of America from the downtrodden and the marginalized. Life through the dirt-encrusted lenses of lonely drug addicts yearning for the last fix to be as good as That First Night,(track four) might not make for the most uplifting of subject matter, but the passion and the intensity that Craig Finn frames the characters and the situations they find themselves in is just as heartbreaking as those who have appeared in the American Cannon of tragic figures, think all of Kerouac’s angelic angst, Holden Caulfield, even The Great Gatsby,and with it the rise of youth and how to cope has always been up for reconsideration. Thanks to Boys and Girls in America, The Hold Steady manages to revisit that sense in 2006.

2. Guillemots – Through the Window Pane

The best records don’t maintain a consistent form or shape. They morph and change considering our mood at the time. I can’t think of another act more capable of pulling off the sonic alchemy than Britain’s The Guillemots (which I believe is a type of bird) manage on their first full length. Their first single, Trains to Brazil, takes the listener back to the world of a stuffy British primary school, and takes the listener as far into the song, so that we are sitting at our desks, in front of a classroom, looking at the teachers as “Erroneous Fools” as the song describes them. We feel the need to appreciate our lives, and to maintain that jubilant sense of childhood everyday as adults.

“Can’t we live and be grateful we’re here, see it could be you, tomorrow next year.”

What follows is an amazing foray into Jazz that is displayed throughout the album. The group has a varied background, some from the UK, and some from Brazil.

Lead singer Fyfe Dangerfield displays an impressive range, often times channeling the ghost of Freddie Mercury at his mercurial best, other times sounding like Tim Booth on Helium. One of the most consistent releases of the year.

3. The Format – Dog Problems

Ah, the halcyon days of summer. Temperatures in Portland reached 103 one day. Walking back from eating at a French restaurant downtown, I ran my hand on the walls, and I could feel the heat from it, like a hot plate. And there was no greater soundtrack to the sound of heat, the guilty pleasures of lemonade on a hot day. The Format’s second record was largely ignored, despite it being on Saddle Creek Records, and containing some of the most heartfelt, cathartic songs of the year.

I always break out records by Jellyfish and Fountains of Wayne in the summer. Power pop works best during the months where free time is in abundance, and I can listen to songs that give me a powerful sugar rush. Songs like Oceans, Pick Me Up, Dead End Song, brought me back to years when I had less on my plate responsibility-wise.

These songs made me wish I was eighteen again. Power pop shot through with the experience of someone who’s known true heartbreak.

4.Band of Horses – Everything all the Time

The first time you hear this record, all you can do is make comparisons. “Hey that sounds like My Morning Jacket meets Supertramp.” You are stuck on the comparison treadmill, and yet you keep playing it anyway.

Eventually the songs dig into your brain so deep that you’re left wondering why someone didn’t stumble onto this formula earlier. Seattle’s Band of Horses create melodies that are instantly memorable while somehow remaining edgy and true to their cause.

A perfect example of how a well-produced record doesn’t have to be bland or generic.

5. Twilight Singers – Powder Burns

Or Greg Dulli kicks Cocaine while experiencing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina while recording the album in New Orleans. Every song is an epic narrative of the steps he took away from Cocaine, with literal snorts appearing embedded within the songs. (see Forty Dollars) What’s amazing is how triumphant Dulli is after re-discovering his love for music. It seems that the Dulli is firing on all eight cylinders of his musical mind, as he effortlessly revisits the greatest chapters of his work with the Afghan Whigs and rediscovering his love for R & B all framed within a story arc that involves post-Katrina New Orleans.

The lyrics have to do with living on your own, without the aid of a master. No more so is this present than in one of the album’s better tracks, Bonnie Brae. Apparently about a realization while walking through New Orleans, he had a revelation on a street named Bonnie Brae.

“There was a rapture, so I can never see you anymore” In this lyric, he described not only the new life afforded to him post Cocaine, but the emotional landscape damaged by Katrina, both mentally and physically, two storms has changed this man’s outlook, and we are left the better for it.

6. Neko Case – Fox Confessor Brings the Flood

Never underestimate the power of the sleeper hit. Neko Case brings her haunting voice and accompanying songwriting to a level that makes it impossible to not get swept up in. How anyone can make music this dangerous and yet sound accessible is one of life’s small wonders.

7. Bob Dylan – Modern Times

2006 brought a varied collection of comebacks, with mostly disappointing results. Bob Dylan’s Modern Times is a record that paradoxically becomes more esoteric the more one attempt to understand it. The shifting narratives jar the listener a bit, but I can’t remember when Dylan sounded so comfortable while delivering one of his strangest records yet, and even with the distance that these narratives provide, we as listeners feel nevertheless drawn in, and in the end we see them for the distinct characters that they are.

8.The Decemberists – Crane Wife

This may feel like a safe bet on one of the strangest major-label debuts in recent memory. (Where exactly in the contract does it stipulate that they can have a twelve minute mini-opera on the second track, without any sort of a single?) Portland, Oregon’s The Decemberists move into the new digs of a fully-realized sound, while eschewing the overwrought verbosity from previous releases and focusing instead on the melodies. In the process they try on every genre possible to them and emerge successful.

9. M. Ward – Post War

M. Ward always seems to have a place in my heart. Maybe it’s the voice of experience, the raspy old man voice from a man four years my senior. The melodies are instantly recognizable, as it seems that each song has already been created somewhere in the subconscious of the listener’s childhood and M. Ward reaches through the speakers tand exploits these feelings, and there’s something magical in the fleshed-out sound of Matt playing with a full band.

10.Early Day Miners – Offshore

The darkest of horses run through the night, taking up space in one’s mind while at rest, and each time I played this in my car, or at home, I felt like I was turning another side of myself over, surrendering to these night visions, apocalyptic triptychs that reflect on many of favorite acts of the past (see Spiritualized, Galaxie 500, Velvet Underground) while taking these conceits illustrated so well in the past and breathing new life into them. With its short length is almost more of an EP than a full length, but it wouldn’t be my best albums of the year list without it.

The People We Used to be and the People We’re Not

2006-10-10T10:41:00.000-07:00

All my days start with waking
From some insurmountable place
The top of a tree in my old neighborhood
A Plantation house in the south, standing on the roof
Looking down at the streets I don’t recall anymore
Seeing myself as the younger man
I no longer relate to
Drop me off in my old town
The streets not the way I remember them
One bleeds into another, into the next
A memory here, a misplaced footing here
A romantic embarrassment, the place I called home
Now inhabited by strangers who beat the walls senseless
And roam the streets
Looking for the maps
To places that don’t exist like they were
The people we used to be and the people we’re not
It’s the same everywhere and nowhere about.

The Winnebago of Responsibility

2006-10-06T12:44:00.000-07:00

Wait, wait. I can’t wait anymore.
Can’t cut it back once it’s overgrown
Swimming in the stereo sound I know it’s over
The tender years of fast cars
Late last summer on the wet road
The all day rain and the warm feeling underneath the car
Telling you there’s a beast in there somewhere
Underneath the asphalt
The twenty five year old
Sticks to your jaw, to rev up the accelerator
Hangover sticking to spine
Tell yourself you’re still young
While the Winnebago of responsibility appears in the rear view
Flip-up Sunglasses Zinc Oxide
Bumping your rear bumper, honking its horn
Sticking out a plaid sleeve from the side window
Maturity flipping you off
Forcing you into the buttoned-up meeting
That is the rest of your life

The Night Watchman

2006-10-02T13:02:00.000-07:00

Waking up to the cold deep inside
My consciousness floating over pits of despair
Looking down at who I was before
And where I am headed today
Cup of steam in my hand
Warm at the bus stop if I can lean in
Staring down at the liquor bottles from the night before
I wonder what he was thinking, sitting here before dawn
Just a few hours before me
Waiting for the day to come, another day and another bottle
Begging for change on the street
Keeping watch over the evening
I come here each morning, and watch the remnants
Get blown away by the wind
St. Ides,
St. Ides and cigarettes
Still warm with breath
I take a hit from my cup of steam
And observe the start of a new day

Teaching Kids to Take Photographs

2006-09-29T10:36:00.000-07:00

Teaching kids to take photographs
When you're not really sure yourself
It’s more a way of looking at things.
Cradling images in your hand
Feeling the weight of a frame
A picture at the beach when you were young
Hair dappling across your forehead
Sticky from the saltwater
A towel draped around your neck
Looking into the camera

Take that moment, let it sit there with you
Decode its meaning
Feel the result in your gut
Reactions and emotions are all we have
Let’s use them as tools
To write a treatise
On why we’re alive

In the Shrouds of Mourning

2006-09-21T12:44:00.000-07:00

In the shrouds of morning, when sleep still clings to you
Do you dream in your waking hours?
Do you see the visions swept across highways?
The steering wheel like a scythe
Music playing, flashing illustrations on the windshield
Driving through the muddy grooves of battlefields
A nickelodeon in your head
Seeing time as something more dimensional
Stretching across years, tears and rain filling up highways
Drowning in rain and memories
Bleared lenses, eyelids wet
Blink one minute longer
Drift off into the oncoming lane
See the headlights on an S10 Pickup
Leave this world on a slanted plane.

The Old Wood

2006-09-21T10:54:00.000-07:00

To be alone must a great thing make
The only one alive
On an empty ship
Staring into the grains of wood
On the hull
It slouches one way, heeling with the ship
Leaning over, sides creak
Getting a side view of the grains
Make a statue with its grace
Chisel out a face for yourself
Live amongst the old wood
Read its history
Count the rings in the knots
Think about the faded men’s faces
As they died
Think about the old wood
And the people it left behind.

Kayaking on the Obediah River

2006-09-19T13:07:00.000-07:00

Feeling nothing behind as you dip paddle into river
Up to cows on the bank looking at you for answers
You silently let them down, paddling onward
Past wooden shipwrecks
And Irish skeletons
Feeling the wake from gliding water-skiers
It hits you a few minutes later
Like the morning after a fight
The first day of winter
Maybe we are all like this
Not feeling consequences until years later
A commercial on TV in an empty hotel room
An extra blanket
On a train
The empty car echoing back
The voices of those
We’ve left behind

The Last Eucalyptus Tablet

2006-09-10T20:44:00.000-07:00

Etching out a living for himself, the illustrious doctor no longer sat in his director chair, his megaphone faded from years of swearing into it. He was out of lozenges, the ones with the eucalyptus leaves embedded into each pellet, he felt the empty paper in the tube and sat back with amazement as he watched his show come to an end.

The circus would never be the same without him, the dancers wouldnt have the same pluck, no matter where they went, and the owner chewed on his wet cigar and huffed a gigantic sigh of relief.

The giraffes in the back tilted their necks slightly, scooted to the back of the tent, sensing a storm out on the plains.

The doctor lifted up his megaphone one last time, took a large swig of whiskey, used his hankerchief to soak up the sweat from his back, coughed three times, stood up and announced the start of the show for the last time.

On Monday the theatre was closed, a dog-eared flyer telling passers-by of the death of an institution.

And on the last day...

2006-08-31T12:07:00.000-07:00

One the last day of the work week Allen thumbed through the progress reports that littered his desk, took a long pull on the silver coffee thermos that always left a few drops on his upper lip, picked up the phone, beveled illuminated button indicating message.

Punching in the numbers without thinking about it, looking at his library on his shelf, the self-help books, 'finding your hidden voice', 'knowing the real you' and realized that he never really knew who he was, his reverie was broken by the tone of voice on the person who left the message, a desperate, frantic voice. Not a student, too mature for that, not a parent, the tone of voice was wrong. Sounded like an old lover. He took another look at his bookshelf.

Channeling the feelings of the last school year, being stripped from power, embarrassed by his own ideas, the position of department head eliminated this year, at the end of this school week, must have fought to hard. He remembered the advert of his youth, 'never let them see you sweat'

But this voice, startling in its tone, its nakedness, talking about moments five years prior, apologies about missing the date, and the reasons why, and he hung up mid-message, and pulled out a dog-eared journal from his bookshelf.

He looked through the entries, from student teaching, and he saw himself built up gradually, as the pages turned, and making a slow about-face towards the end of the same volume.

He shut this book, slammed the doors that hung from above down, making a huge crashing sound, interrupting the silent lunches of co-workers, spectacles dangling on the end of noses, looking up for a moment before he walked out of the planning room.

WordPress

2006-08-30T07:22:00.000-07:00

Maybe now would be a good time to unveil my latest site. It's simple, nothing too fancy, not an overly-ostentatious candy dish that mocks from its regal distance.

This is a poetry site, one where I write little snippets, kernels of thought.

School started again, earlier than I thought, the last few days flew by, stacked on top of each other. Let's take it back to another year, turn back the clock into the future. Go further this time.

http://kronski.wordpress.com

Push yourself out of your comfort zone. Don't be content with just getting by. Unless that is your thing, getting by.

One last trip to the desert before we go into battle. Lets be like Romans, spending all of our times fighting battles in far away lands. Make those far away lands be our minds.

Keep it inside.

Are We Rolling? The Meters Say We're Rolling

2006-08-07T10:13:00.000-07:00

Dusting off the microphone and tablet, entering data for the first time in awhile. The Hottest Day of the Year Ride, writing lessons, lets all go for beers after the ride is over. Get into arguments with neighbors about trimmed limbs. Say it over and over to yourself until the words bend and twist, and you can't recognize it as English Anymore.

Trimmed Limbs
Trimmed Limbs

Not changing gears before ascending pedestrian bridges, little pods of transit, like in the future of the 1950s, like flying cars and robots that glug and churn, spitting out data on a white sheet of paper, like all the future is little white paper, scrawled with unintelliglbe inscriptions.

Peridontal Gum Disease. The highlighted letters tell you it might mean tooth loss, but not if you follow these few, simple rules:

Never trust technology. Conduct all meetings in secrecy, never rely on who you are when you are asleep or half awake.

Don't post blog postings until you have a clear-cut idea of what you want to say.

Recipes for disaster:
One parched lawn
Fireworks
Organic chacrcoal that spits embers
Orange tape and wooden stakes
Someday, as a society we will all eat nothing but cous-cous

Ginger Bread Cookies in an Easy Bake Oven

2006-07-22T10:08:00.000-07:00

It's the hottest day of the year. The inside of the house is sagging, walls are sweating, sleep comes in furious bursts, cats sprawled out on floors, soaking in the cool surfaces cooled by the soil. Dreams are feverish, Bridge on the River Qwai, Pierce Broson's character from "The Matador" begging you to be his friend.

Feet dangling in the water, so hot, that heat doesnt register in your head, its in your gut, weighing down your torso as you breathe in the swampy air. Streets are deserted, fans empty on the aisles of the local grocery store.

We are gingerbread cookies in an easy bake oven, it messes with your mind, hallucinations, I am sleeping on a bed of ice cream sandwhiches, listening to Lambchop's new record, Damaged and listening to Kurt Wagner's genlte vocals, and the complex string arrangements, you look around at the world, and its turned on its ear, and the ceiling fans whir continuously, and we keep this up until the heat wave subsides, but for now, Ill take my chamber music with subdued lyrics, a visit from the parents, and the elusive beast known as air conditioning.

The Accident on Ramsey

2006-07-12T11:11:00.000-07:00

The road to Ramsey turns suddenly to the left, disappearing behind the bleak skyline of lower Bradford Street. If it seems accidental that I am here at this moment, when two cars collide, then you are right, for there is a reason why I stand here, and collect my thoughts, take the last puff on my cigarette, wipe off the lipstick tracers, a previously agreed upon reason de etre, that makes my stay valid, necessary, even required.

When the guy backs up from off of Ramsey, he’s talking on his cell phone, way too into the conversation for his own good. He’s trying to save a relationship that has died, you can see it in his stature, the way he slumps forward in his Subaru Forrester. He’s holding on to it, trying to reargue a point that has already been rendered moot. He is exasperated, he doesn’t notice, that just a few feet away, a black Escalade, twinkling in the sun, faded pixie dust, the gleam in the diamonds reflecting off the windshield. The driver of the Escalade is clueless as well, a rich kid, took off in his father’s Cadillac, he’s speeding and angry, and looks past the endless lines on Ramsey, he’s looking far down, looking through the shallow end of the swimming pool when he was four. He’s thinking how much the in-between time of adolescence sucks. He’s thinking about how he’d like to go back and do it over again.
And he might just get his chance, for the Escalade, with the boy driving, his mind way beyond the here and now rams into the side of the Subaru in its fourteenth attempt to parallel park into this window of a parking space on Ramsey, so from above it looks like a connected circuit, Escalade connected to the left hand side rear of the Subaru, traffic lights carrying on like nothing happened, a couple at a restaurant oblivious to the threat of food poisoning.

And the two men, these two disconnected men that now find themselves quite literally connected, at the hip, both of their minds still far off. The guy arguing with his girlfriend. He looks at the cell phone that reads ‘call ended.’ The young kid, still looks outside himself, beyond Ramsey, this is further proof that the adult world is out to fuck you over. And who is this asshole anyway?
And me, this humble narrator comes out smoking a cigarette, pretending like I just walked up, like I haven’t been watching the whole time.

What the fuck do you want? They are suspicious, and they have every right to be. I hold out the cell phone that radiates warmth.

--We got ‘em already. Their eyes point downward, they are embarrassed at the offer of help.

--Oh no, your cell phones wont work here,

--Go ahead and try, they won’t work here.

--So why does yours work?

So kids were never skilled at Grammar.

--Just use it ok.

And without even dialing anything, the first guy calls his girlfriend. The phone knows who to call, without any input, it senses it. After five minutes of mumbling, the guy stands over by the tree, the pissed off kid looks at me perplexed, or maybe looks through me is the better term. Thousand yard stare.

First guy comes back up. His face is calm, maybe for the first time this year. He looks comforted. He speaks slowly, and with purpose. He has all the time in the world.

--Hey thanks.

No problem. The great weightlifting.

The kid is pissed off. Like, hey what about my vehicle, whose going to call the cops? And I say no one is going to call the cops, because we don’t need to.

The kid starts swearing, flashing wanna-be gang signs, like kids do, he spits on the ground, his skinny red face like a chiseled cobra.

His speech becomes garbled, just one obscenity after another. It blends together, and in the heat, and the calm demeanor of the older gentlemen, the air slows down, sending a leaf, a brilliant colored leaf down on to the boy’s foot. He stops for a moment, His hands open up to pick up the leaf. He walks over and gives it to me.

--Go ahead, use the phone.

He stops for a moment, like he’s about to unload again, fuck the world.

--Just use the phone.

And he goes over to the bush, he slides his foot over the storm grate, and says ‘yeah’ a lot, and there are periods of silence where he looks like he’s going to cry, but he doesn’t and after a few minutes he puts down the phone and walks over to me.
The phone is open, the red stop sign of ‘Call Ended’ again, but on the screen where it usually says the number, it has a name that has been programmed into the phone. The name contains two genders, like if you were to concatenate male and female and turn it into a nonsense word.

Sheiladaan

They both calmly thank me and walk away. They don’t get into their cars, the cops never come by, and the rest of the day only the empty sounds of birds is heard on Ramsey.

In the morning the cars are absent, and so are the shards of glass that was proof of the crash. The tire marks are gone, and left in its place is the butt from my cigarette, and an old rotary telephone, where you put your fingers in one hole and slide it to the left, hear the recoil as it dials, pulses over the receiver over the din of traffic on Ramsey the next day. I walk up to the receiver, and hearing nothing, I put the phone down and walk away. And all that I can hear as I walk away is the distant ringing, that sound of a little hammer hitting the bell in the phone out on Ramsey, when two men, ready to give up on everything, walked home, leaving their cars behind on a hot day in June in Los Angeles.

Choked up on the Great Plains

2006-07-12T11:02:00.000-07:00

Note: Here's a snippet of something I'm working on that didn't end up going anywhere. In trying to forge a novel together, I end up going to places that end right there at the end of the scene, the following are some of the results.

Whether it was the sun choking his thoughts, or not, he was unsure, but the azure skies didn’t hit him the way it used to, and the plains reflected a strange undercurrent, an energy that would leap up towards the pit of his stomach at odd intervals.

Instead of waking at dawn, he would sleep in for as long as his back could stand it, and he wasn’t bound up with the same energy anymore, the rubber band that controlled his behavior had retired, and now he was slithering all over the place. Unemployment was liberating, as he still had a few options to settle into, future skins to select, but recently he felt all that leave his system, like a fever the depression came, the sadness in everyday objects, no longer exalted by sunsets or the sight of the plains at daybreak.

Coming Back Down on the Other Side of the Mountain

2006-06-21T10:49:00.000-07:00

-If we were to take the long way home, where would it take us?

Taking the long way home is a forgotten art, as we don't seem to have the time these days to do it. Also known as the "scenic route", it allows the child in us to linger in the joy of getting there, to revel in the spirit of the in-between.

And so we did it, standing in line at the train station, baby in hand, hearing the gurgling noises, and the announcement that came like the arrival of a train, we will drive!

And onward we went northbound, free from schools, driving away from warm weather and pets, and into another realm. Switching from enormous Tibetan palace to run-down hotel in Belltown, Seattle is a mess of contradictions. Frightening one moment, inspiring the next.

Time with Family, time with friends, free time to admire the foliage falling down on you as you sit out at night in front of a fire in June..

Coming back home to normalcy, but a new sense of normalcy, free time, sunny skies, sleeping in late, catching up on reading and sleeping, filling your life with books, words, people and fur...

It Seems Like Only Yesterday

2006-05-30T13:42:00.000-07:00

Coming back to work after a three-day weekend. Funny how things change. Thought about the previous job earlier today. How I would show up in the mornring, and my largest contribution to the workplace was making the coffee. Talking for hours about American Culture with my Ukrainian boss. Sending out emails, clarifying statements, writing papers, placing all of my ducks in a row for school.

Showing up on the morning of Memorial Day, bus on a holiday schedule, to a dark office. Turn up the music, take the cordless phone into the server room and stare out at the free people down at Pioneer Square. Always tired in that air, always stifled.

Having to dial the same 24 numbers eight times per day, once per hour, 120 times per week, until you recited them in your sleep.

Two years later, waking late, coffee, writing, lesson plans, pets, laundry.

Sometimes I miss the private sector, but never on a three day weekend.

Senior Skip Day

2006-05-26T13:32:00.000-07:00

What has become of this blog, is it nothing but dispatches from a technology teacher at a suburban high school in Southwest Washington? Hey now there's an idea.

So today is senior skip day, and with it comes with the anticipation of a three day weekend, and all the alluring promises that it brings. The static in the air is palpable, the staff let down their guards, movies, video clips, music played in the classroom, people let down their hair. Students either work or stare out the window. Either way its here, the three day weekend, put off by only a few minutes, the last few minutes of the day spent in the last period of the week, and when they come back on Tuesday the weather will be back to normal, and the teachers will have grins on their faces the size of Gilbralter.

"It's called promoting your curriculum."

Nothing is Random, Everything Has Purpose

2006-05-24T12:44:00.000-07:00

For a little fun in class today, I wrote the above statement on the board. It has nothing to do with Web Design, but I thought it was important. I wrote the statement on the board, in big, brown letters, peppered with streaks of blue to give it that chocolate cake look to it, just to start the class off on a philosophical slant.

I called for the students' attention once the bell rang, and began to speak of why I think this large statement written behind me.

I told them that I had heard the word "random" for the upteenth time and that I needed to follow that up with a statement of my own. If so many things, were "random" in the eyes of the students, then wouldn't their reality be something that forever happens to them, instead of the other way around?

I stopped for a moment, before writing this, and even when I was in the middle of drawing the circle in the "r" I felt that maybe I had made a mistake. "What does this have to do with Web Design?" I asked myself. But the more I looked at it, and my overall job as a teacher, the more I realized that I had to do this. If it was important enough for me to stop and even consider the change, then it needed to happen.

Most students understood what I said, many pulled up every example they could think of.

"What is my purpose in life"

"Your purpose in life is to create beauty and find love"

I don't know if they will view Web Design the same after today.

the rest of us went home angry

2006-05-10T16:05:00.000-07:00

Drive By Truckers & Son Volt and slicing open my finger and bleeding all over my shoes, jeans.

Visiting other classes that teach similar subjects. More writers group action!

Driving down to Ashland,OR to spend a final weekend (for awhile) with a friend. It's that time of year. The students are rearing to go, they are almost off of their leash, the sun has returned, the skies are clear, and everywhere the sound and smells of fresh cut grass.

Hearing Rick Moody's short story, Albertine on the Ipod. Being sucked into stories again.

The itching of sutured bandages. The prose of Poe Ballantine, reading Guided by Voices Biography, eating Mexican food in the sun.

Heart Cooks Brain

Wedding Anniversary coming up.

The cat ate the cream, and James Joyce's Ulysses will never be finished. Maybe I'll never know what happens to Bloom, his kidney and the cat.

American Pretension is back!

Next year's teaching assignment is in: Digital Photography and Video.

Thoughts of swimming to go with our new kayaks. Summer bearing down on all of us, and we'll all squirm until June.

Lots of shows, family visits, forever it will be this way, the start of Summer, the celebration of Marriage. The sun beating down on my neck as I drive, drive drive..

Wordstock

2006-04-23T22:02:00.000-07:00

Picture by James Gill

New Dangerous Writing group? Praise from Poe Ballantine? It can only mean one thing. Wordstock.

Here's a picture, mid-ceremony...

Kronski

My Monster

2006-04-23T14:44:00.000-07:00

I wrote this for Wordstock this weekend, but didn't hear back from them regarding this entry, so I decided to put it on here, timeliness considered.

I attended various workshops and readings, and returned feeling empowered, if not a little woozy.

I shot straight up in bed. It was the first time I had done that since childhood and it was the first night I slept alone after my husband left me. I dreamt of a large man, wearing a too small bear suit. We were at a Barbeque and I walked away to pee, staring up at the stars, and when I turned around, there he was, squatting underneath the bushes, chicken on a skewer.

He began to dance by himself, swaying in the night breeze. His stance was stooped, pointing downward, and when he spoke the softest, deepest voice came out. The mask was unfamiliar, and had big, exaggerated domes for eyes, the buttons moving of their own accord, the nose interrupting the flow of fur that started at his feet. The shoulders were too tight, and had holes from where he had worn this outfit before. He spoke quite elegantly, and I thought of him as my beast, even going so far as to caress his furry arm, held in place by the layers of frayed duct tape underneath the worn fur suit. The fur was the color of an aged orangutan.

Agreeing to dance with him, still a little frightened, but vaguely thrilled, I looked up at his face, and saw a patch of hair behind his mask. When I reached out to grab it, his docile face became rabid, smooth lines became angular, and he began chasing me around the outskirts of the party, while my friends stared restlessly at the empty keg with grave disappointment. I made it ‘round the side of the house, and straight through the hedges out into the street, running as streets became more unfamiliar, twisting and turning into desolate avenues and freeways. They took on visages of streets Id known when I was married to my husband in New Mexico, and at night we’d go jogging down the streets. I saw him there, across the street, wandering into a convenience store. It was all white neon when I walked inside and was greeted by the Lawrence Welk music on the PA system.

“Clean up on Aisle Four”, the voice said, even though it was a tiny convenience store, and as I reached for the ice cream bar at the bottom of the cooler, sliding back the door and gazing into the pool, pulling out the biggest goldfish of the bunch, I dived in after seeing the blur of orange fur towards my back.
Swimming alone, the light from the convenience store fading away, I became awash in a teal-blue light, whose light source was unknown.

Breathing became difficult, and finally not an issue, for the monster was right there with me, and docile once again. His eyes now commanded by something stronger, he took off his mask, revealing the face of my ex- husband, crying, looking into my eyes and telling me, plainly, that there was no going home, that I was on my own, and how my love for him made him a monster.

Coffee House Stories, Volume Two

2006-04-08T11:19:00.000-07:00

Chronicling the Events, sketchpads, over-heard coversations, and revelations at the Twin Cinema Coffee Shop, in Chapel-Hill, North Carolina.

Ripped Page from a journal, found at closing time, on January 12th, 2003.

Coach whips, lollypops and Caterwauls, the visions on my pad today are of a more supernatural nature, coming off of a twelve hour sketching binge, where my only concern was not jumping out of my skin eternally crawling over the canvas. I figured if I could only keep up this pace, I might have enough sketches for the upcoming show.

Feeling restless about my work, like I may be stuck in a rut. The rat race in my brain keeps producing the same responses to stimuli. Perhaps a painful event might help.

That’s the inherent nature of art and pain, how you don’t want pain, none of us do, but that to truly create art, it must come from painful experiences, or at least reflecting on them.

But much of my painful past experiences have taken place years ago, or perhaps I’ve been too detached as an artist for awhile, and I need to get back into the swing of things. The nature of love is to feel pain, I hear this, and I know this, but at the same time the responses I get to my own pain, my own genuine feelings differ from that, until I feel that I am cycling in the same direction, with the same amount of force on each stroke.

Thought about Melissa again, despite what happened between us, the truth lingering above me, like an idea that won’t translate into an image.

What is it with my quest for the perfect picture, one that explains how I feel everyday?
Perhaps my own expressions are fruitless?

I wish I had more answers. Other artists have answers; they don’t draw puzzles, but solutions to the puzzles in their own heads. Sometimes I feel like I’m trapped, without any way to get out.

I called home today, leaving a voicemail message for my parents. Haven’t spoke to them in months. I get into these periods where it’s just the work, and nothing else. The sound of brush on canvas and the loud music, as my parents try to get through over and over again, it must be fucking maddening, having a son like me. Not that I would want to be anyone else.

I think I’ll tear this up, there’s too much incriminating evidence on this page, stinking of three day sketch binges and the notion that its all been done before.

Coffee House Stories

2006-04-08T10:43:00.000-07:00

Chronicling the Events, sketchpads, over-heard coversations, and revelations at the Twin Cinema Coffee Shop, in Chapel-Hill, North Carolina.

Volume One: Barbara Knightly and the Untimely Arrival of Truth

Sitting on the porch, staring out at the considerable rainfall, it’s easy to see the whole thing in perspective. It’s on days like this, when the sky opens up and drenches the ground that gives us pause, reason to stop and sit here on the porch, replaying each scene, rewinding the scene and watching it in slow-motion.

I’m surrounded by dark skies, and I can see the burned cotton sending the misty rain down on me. Thinking back to why I feel this way, hollowed out, and confused beyond reason. Emotions don’t apply right now, they're too large, looming concepts, loss and love and how it all came out all at once.

I see her face, framed by her arm and the cup of coffee. Her face is paralyzed in fear, face locked in a grimace. She cries softly and thoroughly. I’m speechless. It’s beautiful to see her cry like this, just let everything out, years of doubting, now it’s over and were free to move on.

It’s my turn to talk, and where to begin? How to chronologically go through all the issues? How can I turn the phrases to represent all the ways I feel about this? Will words do them justice?

So I start from the beginning, telling her how in the beginning everything was smooth and satisfying, and how slowly, over time I fell out of love, with the lingering idea that she was cheating on me. I chose this way to disclose the way I felt, because it addresses the main issue, without sacrificing my own position.

She spent so much time constructing this façade, justifying it the whole time, convinced that what she was doing was appropriate, even encouraged. And now, it was time to let it go, in one frank wave, in public.

Building, Rebuilding, it's Spring Break

2006-04-04T10:48:00.000-07:00

It's Spring Break for Washington Schools.

Time to rip up the carpet, install new stuff.

Turn your house upside-down and then back again.

Ride you bike all over town, soaking up the sun, even if for a few hours.

Write in the morning, the afternoon and the early evening.

See friends more often.

Listen to music...

Listening to:

Destroyer: Destroyer's Rubies

Yeah Yeah Yeah's: Show Your Bones

The Hold Steady: Almost Killed Me

The Fall: This Nation's Saving Grace

Twilight Singers: Powder Burns

Watching:

Inside Man

Ice Harvest

A History of Violence

Sopranos, Season Six

Reading:

Zadie Smith: White Teeth

McSweeneys: Quarterly No. 18

Liar, Liar House on Fire

2006-03-25T11:47:00.000-08:00

The Castles

2006-03-25T11:34:00.000-08:00

I found this piece earlier today, while looking through the archives. I hadn't put it up anywhere before, and the piece is quite long, and is my attempt at a fictional piece of music journalism.

And it struck me all of a sudden, like a flash from above, that all of my idols were in their own way insane, cast out from the inclusive rings like those nestled in the inner circles of ripples, wandering out from inside the inner circles of power, wealth and influence.

Was it my own goal then, to ferret out who were the leaders, were they just the outsiders?

Did they not see that the roles had been reversed, switched somehow while the lights were out?

We were certainly taught that from an early age, and I think that’s why we ended up doing what we did when we did it.

Our parents certainly didn’t think us capable of changing the world. And I realize, as I sit here with this drink in hand talking to you at the bar were about to play tonight that they wouldn’t have agreed even if they were still alive. They would have found the whole thing foolish, this rock and roll business.

So in a way, when Derrick and I rebelled, it was for a cause that we thought was ultimately that thing that was worth dying for, that of ultimate creativity.

We're talking to the leader of the Castles, a media powerhouse that grabbed hold of the attention of the rock world in 2005, with the release of what is sure to be the album of 2005 and the first novel, which has been commissioned into a film by Focus Features, as the documentary of a fictional rock star which mirrors lead singer Thad Thompson and his brother Derrick.

In the pages of The Guardian takes Control, Thad and Derrick inject many of the daily insights of their lives spent in an critically-acclaimed yet not financially solvent rock band, chronicling the daily sojourn from city to city while holding down a day job.

A major turning point for the band was the recent deaths of both their mother and father within a four-month period last September.

We sat with Thad on the occasion of the Castles sold out gig at the Forum last February.

There really wasn’t a venue for us, so we created one.

Early 1980’s, West Columbia, SC

Thad and Derrick grew up just across the river from the budding metropolis and state capitol, Columbia, South Carolina.

Thad: Growing up in a place like West Columbia in the 1980s wasn’t the sort of place we wanted to grow up. Our father was a Classical Studies Professor who didn’t what his two sons exposed to the pretension of academia. So we lived just outside the city, so Derrick and I could both experience a rural upbringing. It was bullshit, really, because we were sneaking off to all of these shows from the college local bands in Columbia, and we knew all the bouncers names by the time we were 17.

We were always taught to have our own fun, away from the tempting specter of the television.

Thad remembers his mother bringing one home that shed won at the church raffle.

She just came in with this TV, a black and white one that probably only received three channels when you had the piece of plastic wedged inside of it just so. And my dad comes home from work, and both Derrick and I glued to it, watching Spiderman, or some crap, and my dad rips it from the wall, and asks us to follow him. He hacked it to pieces and asked us to make it into something useful and write about it.

We filled it full of Carolina Red Clay; you know the stuff that covers every inch of the state. And when the rains came, it turned into this crazy red pool of mud that we called the holy pit, like it was our little Egypt to make little Sphinxes inside of it, then we’d cover it up and leave the glass pane over it, preserving it until the next door neighbors found it and blew it to shreds with bottle rockets.

So was it what you would call an idyllic childhood, from certain perspectives, it certainly could appear that way?

It was but we didn’t realize it at the time. Like we always thought everyone made their own fun, but then, as we got older and we went to school, we discovered that all the other kids watched TV all the time, like that was all they did.

But at the time we wanted to be normal. I wish I could lie to you and say, “well yeah, it was ideal, because we wanted to create so it was distraction free” that’s not to say we didn’t like the privacy and in the end it was for the best, but at the time it was horrible, we just wanted to watch TV and fuck around like other kids.

While we’re on the subject of your childhood, you seem to focus much of the bulk of your material on the darkening image of your parents.

It was a lot of pressure, and there were a lot of changes that hit us all at once. But we used this primarily as a way to get further into the music. It was all we knew how to do, so we delved further into it, not knowing anything else.

Having your brother there, I mean that’s whats important when you go through something like this, you have your brother right there to bounce ideas off of.

But when Mom died, and the whole period of time that led up to that, I think we would have been lost if it weren’t for the presence of the other, without him, I wouldn’t be here now.

Like on “fading out”, that was one of those songs that happened right in the middle of that. There was a moment, I was standing in the doorway, trying to come up with the next lyric, and I looked out the window for the first time in a long time, and I was surprised at how much color was stripped out of view out of the window, and I stood back a bit, and wondered how long had it been since I just stared out the window, and how my mom’s death affected the way I viewed something as simple as a sunset.

Thad goes quiet her for awhile, staring at the menu posted above the bar. He’s quiet for awhile as my line of questioning changes to his writing technique, and how he comes up with the ideas in his first novel, and how was the collaborative process in doing so.

The way it goes is once you have a set amount of freedom to do creatively what you want to do, the rest of it is just pure planning. My brother and I have worked exclusively with each other over the past twenty years or so, and the process has become automatic to the point where its almost like breathing, we don’t think much about it, but we have always been this way, gentle in our ability to create, its ingrained into who we are.

It’s like when we were working on the novel, and we wrote the whole thing in our tiny apartment in Williamsburg, that’s in Brooklyn. And we wrote it in shifts, on this old typewriter my granddad used to write for the New York Post on, and it was such a great way of doing it, one writing while the other edited. One would edit what the other just wrote and then we’d switch places.

The whole process is similar to the way we write songs, brainstorming with ideas and melody.

I’ll read you a sample from The Guardian Takes Control

If you took everything that has ever been said to you with a grain of salt you wouldn’t believe in anything. Think about it, put the book down, walk away from this idea and think it over for awhile.

While you are in the bathtub, think back to that first heartbreak, when your heart felt bruised for the first time. Think about that far away feeling you had to inhabit in order to sustain your own happiness.

Now imagine if you lived every day of your life this way. Imagine what would happen if you put off the inevitable reality long enough to seriously jeopardize your own idea of reality. What if that concept were re-defined to a point where ‘reality’ didn’t really exist at all.

Now take yourself back fifteen years into the more idyllic times of your life, think back to where life becomes fuzzy, where memory and melody blend together and you cant recall if it actually happened to you or if you dreamt it all along. This is the realm that I inhabited at the Reynolds Boy School in 1980, the summer after my parents split up and four months before my father drifted back into my life. Think about this long and hard. Think about the earliest pencil hallway smell of your earliest school memory. Then add a few years to that. Because at eight years old, I could remember everything about that place, including the silence I would turn into music whenever the nurses feet rapt in unison to the machinations of the system, clacking confident and continuous.

The summer of 1980 is still fresh in my mind, the tears in my eyes looking out on the flooded streets of Brooklyn. Overcast day, so hot and humid it commanded the rain to pellet down upon us in little needles that stung my eyes when they pressed hard on my light blue blazer and sternly informed me where I was going.

So if you look at that and try to pick out what is fact and what is fiction, youll go crazy. I’ve weaved enough in there to examine in my own head that summer. But distance, time and family have a way of distorting the image, especially after that disastrous summer in rehab when I was fourteen.

And so, in what seemed like lifetimes ago, there existed a time in your mind where the familial break was so intense that warranted a certain hazing over certain events that resulted in an eventual break from reality itself. When you couldn’t distinguish the two anymore, they sent you away, six years after being sent away the first time.

But this time, it was harder. And standing outside of the cathedral like clinic on that chilly Rochester morning meant that you spent the night crying, your skin still humming from the car ride, you faced the stoic faces, and the admitted glances of degradation the way a convicted man walks the last mile after a lifetime of difficult miles.

They were kind to you in ways that noone was up to this point, the nurses sternly disapproved of your behavior, most certainly, but they took you in when no one believed in you, not after what you had done.

Your father upon coming home from another date, angry and drunk found you in bed, asleep with one of his own bottles, cradling it despite the vomit that trickled out of your mouth, as you tried to laugh it off, but howled with tears when you woke up and felt sore all over. You did this nightly, and would rise and shower before your father came home. But when he returned home that one night to a son cradling his last whiskey bottle, well that was when he had enough.

Your younger brother was still asleep and at the age when the toxic thing elders do, whether it be the vagaries of sexual activity and masturbation, or the silent confessions of addiction, are oblivious and are gauzed over like so many broken families in the neighborhood.

Again, its all bullshit, isn’t it? You read into it what you want to read, here’s another bit I like.

Standing outside, in the numbing cold, a red axe stubbornly buried into a tree stump. Your father yelled at you only a few minutes ago, and your hands are raw and cold in the backyard without any gloves. You finally manage to get the axe out and chop the first piece, but on the second slab of wood you miss the chunk of wood and fall forward onto the spine of the axe, chipping your tooth. You feel the warm blood on your hands as if warmed by something more benign. Drops of blood begin to form on the snow and stump below you, looking up into the grey sky for answers, you want to crawl inside the warmth of the neighbors home, and you dream of having them as your parents, so kind are they to the neighbor boy, about your age.

Excerpt from "Love and Other Aquatic Creatures"

2006-03-25T11:31:00.000-08:00

I sat in that cottage for hours, on the hard bed in the sparse room with only a picture of the Outer Banks, a long empty coastline that looks like the tail end of nowhere. Looking out at the creek, I studied every eddy, every rush and wash of water, spilling over the creek as it eventually did flood. The process was not unlike watching my own life come unglued from a distant vantage point, watching it slide off out of its container, like the love that came from her that caused me to drive way, like it always did.

Excerpt from "Errant times at the Java House"

2006-03-25T11:29:00.000-08:00

“We’ve got enough to worry about around here without you going ape shit on me!”

He held the room’s attention, and its accompanying patrons, who ducked out under the covers of responsibility on that Friday, just stepped out for a quick coffee. They are all paused, mid-sentence, with biscotti in hand, ruby glasses perched over craned noses. Eyes locked at each other.

What have I been doing?

2006-03-18T07:18:00.000-08:00

Where have I been since the last time?

Rifling through papers on my desk, listening to the shift in the room when I answered an unknown question. Reflecting on the nature of vehicles and physics at 6:45 in the morning. Attempting cross country skiing, and finding the balance in it.

The writing has continued at a glacial pace, with work leaning towards the autobiographical. So much navel-staring and contemplation. Waiting for the snap of spring, waiting out the last of the rains in May and early June, until I hit that one day of June 16, when the school doors swing open, and Alice Cooper's "School's out for summer" can be heard in every Camaro peeling out of the parking lot.

Thinking back a bit, to back when I was the age of some of my students when I try to figure out why certain students won't follow through. They get so close, 75% of the way through and then fade out, disappearing on the last day of class, never to be seen again.

Driftless in the open sea, tormented by some unknown faction, parental, animal or mineral.

Light in the morning on the way into work, feeling lighter, breathing easier.

Coming home to a home, and not an under-furnished apartment.

Shaving and noticing the grey-white silvery hairs march onward, gaining new ground each day, garrisons multiplying and dividing.

Watching older friends change patterns, set fire to objects, throw out shirts eaten away by battery acid.

At work, the beginning of the last term, the last run around the track before we let out a colossal collective sigh, and turn towards the sun, climbing higher up the hills on our bicycles, rushing down and tasting the dewey summer air, like we never left high school.

The Light in the House

2006-03-04T11:43:00.000-08:00

Standing on the edge of the property, at two in the morning I wonder why that light is on, and why its the color of a million shameless nights.

I stop at this spot in the middle of the night, restless sleep drove me here, pushing away the branches in the yard not mowed since late summer, and I stare at that house.

I wonder if anyone is awake, and if they are, what are they thinking? Do they walk the four foot space in front of the window, a shadow oscillating like a airgun target a fairground, taunting onlookers, begging them to look, to question why is there a figure in the window at two in the morning?

And why do you look, why aren't you asleep with the rest of the world? Is this distant rendezvous pure coincdence, a dream that sticks with you the rest of the next day, with the window shade up the next morning, the house dark during the day and at night a beacon of question, a curiosity that will never be resolved, but in dreams, when the shade rises up, and we look into the horrors of our days.

Excerpt from "New York Dolls and Rifles"

2006-02-25T10:32:00.000-08:00

I took four of them, and put on “Heroin” by the Velvet Underground, and sat in the bathtub, filling it with warm water. Submerging myself, I watched the water level dance in front of me, listening to Lou Reed's wail, dragging me under the water level. Opening my eyes underneath the water, I can hear the bass lines reverberate as the lightsoftens. For a few minutes I can hear the song perfectly, my ear canal soaking up not only the water, but all that dissonance as I floated up out of the tub, and rubbed my face against the glass of the mirror, arms and legs floating at the top of a large water cooler, up inside the one in the view from the window, lying there, waiting for the darkness to envelop me, hearing the cacophony of sound take me under its wing, the whole band there around me: Lou Reed, Moe Tucker, John Cale and Warhol too.

A Month of Mondays

2006-02-22T19:02:00.000-08:00

I used to wake up with ideas, mantras that marched through my head throughout the night.

Sometimes writing is to me like a mirror in the desert. I can see the mirror, but I have trouble seeing what I am looking at.

In the desert, everything exists in a vacuum. It’s impossible to quantify anything in it, as borders are awash in sand, and the lack of water means I can never visit for very long, before I’m awake and sweating in bed.

Getting up first thing in the morning, when its still dark out, the prayers, meditation and silent drumming in my head that drags me telepathically to coffee, the gravity and lack of grace as I prepare breakfast, a series of button-pressing that yields reheated food from the freezer. I think I have to open some sort of box in order to get there.

I kiss my wife goodbye, a pair of lips in the darkness, not connected to anything but the scratchy voice that reminds me of the love I have.

It’s a straight walk to the door, and with that comes the first actual thoughts of the day, of deadlines, excuses and expectations. It’s sometime after this when I drift off, the drive to work so familiar as not to warrant too much interest. It’s autopilot with my favorite soundtrack.

It’s still dark when I get to school, the brick stretched out across half a city block, rising up out of the wet tarmac, declaring itself with a shade darker than the clouds that stick around until well after nine am, when I stare out at it out of a small porthole in my second period class.

I don’t see genuine daylight until I leave most days, it heals after its too late, and I head home, scatter-brained into coming back on different day. I might live through two days until tomorrow, will see what tonight brings.

"Goodbye"

2006-02-21T20:05:00.000-08:00

"And I feel so damned nostalgic everytime I think about those times. I forget how it began that I wouldnt recognize you on the line. And I start to feel so guilty, goddamned it I swear to you I tried, to place between the distances before I left without saying goodbye."

The lyrics are from a song I can relate to now, as it seems all the friends relationships you counted on as foundations. Relationships where you knew they were going to last forever. You spent time making plans in the back of your mind for all of us to celebrate, the way we did for mine.

And then, a few years later, when it all goes away suddenly, and without warning, we're left with the underlying feelings we had about the world before they ever got together.

And while it strengthens your own relationship, staying strong despite everything that's going on around us, you can't help but feel damn sorry for your closest friend(s) as they attempt
to piece back together the life of who they were before they met this person.

So you spend time, like you did before you were married, and time flowed on like beers just before night, sitting out on the porch with your roomate that summer watching the sun go down. Not much was said, but you were both hoping, that the way you shared time with one another, that it would continue, even with our siginificant others.

But there's a ghost inhabiting our talks, walking through the woods with the ghost of the ex- girlfriend looming large overhead.

Songs take on new meaning, and all around theres that reminder that its so easy to be alone in the world, easy to be angry and bitter, and sometimes its just really hard to be alone, with ghots gnawing at you, memories taking you back to places you don't want to go, with people you no longer care about.

Excerpt from Love and Other Aquatic Creatures

2006-02-14T19:15:00.000-08:00

There’s a kind sweet sense of emptiness on the water, listening to the tides wash up, tickling the coast line as gulls and couples walk arm in arm. Looking out at the ships in the Atlantic, I couldn’t help but think there was a way out of this, wandering from town to town just long enough to settle in one place, meet someone and then promptly move away before it became too
much.

Staring into the baby alligator tanks at the Aquarium, I’m with a woman I met only a few hours ago while sitting in a coffee shop.

“I think they’re like children, bobbing in a lake, vying for Mom and Dad’s Attention”

She let her eyes wander to the back of the tank when she said lines like that, and I felt a certain element only found in my favorite movies: of man and woman bonding over small aquatic creatures.

The Distance of Advice

2006-02-01T20:31:00.000-08:00

http://www.nwdrizzle.com/

One of the more interesting experiences of my life thus far.

Lower Extremities

2006-01-28T07:53:00.000-08:00

Slot machines spit out glittery tokens,
Reverberating in the air-conditioned afternoon,
They pump in artificial air here,
Blows past my corduroy pants, worn for the occasion
Of the last conference of doctors
Specializing in lower extremities
Cold winds at night on the strip
Empty bottles on the floor
The flight out the next day
The condensation on the wing
The ice in my heart as I write this
On the occasion of my last flight
Before I return
To a New Mexico I’ve never known
In the air above
Its snowy banks and reddish clay
For how long I’ve lived like this I cannot say
But the wind carries me home,
Death comes at the loneliest hour
And at the end of my life
The lower extremities that I know so well
Will fail me in the last row on the last flight out of Vegas
In the year of our lord 2005.

Alfonso Segundo and "El Bocho"

2006-01-21T12:28:00.000-08:00

Nat introduced the target like a used car salesman.

“Staring from the left, we have Alfonso Segundo or Alfonso “The Second” if we’re speaking to an exclusively Anglo audience.”

He was speaking to his assistant on the grounds of a hidden terrorist prison camp in the sweaty confines of South Florida.

“Now this guy, he’s got some balls. He embezzled money that Reagan had left over for the Contras, money he siphoned into an off-shore account. He surfaced in Asuncion a few years later, and the moment the trace connected with our boys in Miami, he was ours. Fred thinks this guy could rock the Prime Time news shows, maybe even Meet the Press if we can spring him."

Walking through rows of human cages, with men in orange suits awaiting trial or already convicted, they made their way down to the end of the line, into another corridor of fences. After the third guard accepted another fresh one hundred dollar bill, he closed the gate and admitted the two men into the inner sanctum, reserved for the more despicable criminals and reprobates.

The last guard stood in the immediate center of the cell, which served as a reception area for the last section, the same one that held “El Segundo”.

Nat reached out to the guard, burnt in the sun like the stocky hams that swung like prisoners on the gallows from the market in Alfonso's native Madrid, with a photo and accompanying paperwork, detailing the crimes and sideburns of Alfonso, with four one hundred dollar bills tucked to the underside of the photo, connected by a rubber band.

The eight by ten glossy reflected off of the guard’s Aviator sunglasses, refusing to let in even a scrap of light. The guard stared at the picture and dropped the money as if it was a worthless receipt. His mustache twitched for a moment, anticipating the conflict.

Nat sat down on the lone bench in the tank, adjusting his suit slightly as he stared up at the face of the man who prevented his latest Terrorist superstar from entering the country, even with the customary bribes and detailed paperwork.

“Even with your dirty money and fake bullshit forms, Alfonso still isn’t innocent.”

The guard just stood there, baking in the sun. His tanned forarms guarding the fence behind him, flanked on either side by the presence of two armed guardsman. This guy was the leader, and he didn’t need to carry a weapon.

Nat was troubled by this, but never let it show, for when he was down in the pits, it was better to keep you wits about you, and not lose hope.

Forty million people turned in each week to the shows that Nat’s bosses produced, and he’d be damned if he was going to let some morally upright bureaucrat change that.

“Bribes don’t just come from me your honor; they come from a higher source.”

Nat gesticulated with his index finger to the tower that was ensconced in barbed wire. “There’s no sense in acting like this is the first time you and I have conducted business in this way.”

“Senor, there is no way that I can stare down footage of Alfonso Segundo exchanging half a billion dollars worth of dirty money in Asuncion, a government which I needn’t remind you couldn’t afford a police force to hold back the bloodiest revolution since the country’s recent release from the stranglehold of the last piece of shit dictator that came in full of false promises.”

Nat was getting fidgety. There was no speaking to him, this prick, and he knew that he would have to call up a favor from someone who spoke in clipped speech over forbidden phone lines, a person capable of canceling someone’s life in a matter of syllables. It was time to call in El Bocho.

Twilight on the Oregon Coast

2006-01-14T09:53:00.000-08:00

A temperate scene, vague memories of the parsed sky, looking up from the forest floor, at the spaces in between branches, where the sky peeks through before the clouds come.

You stand up, moving slowly back to the house that overlooks the ocean.

Back at the house, you move through each room, feeling the life that has lived there. You try to grab hold of some recollection of what happened in this room, the times shared in that bed, whose imprint can still be seen on the floor.

A gust of wind passes above, and you feel the weight of the loss, right at that moment, like you were too stunned to admit to it before.

And there it is, a small Buddha statue still propped up on the stool in the kitchen, where you now sit, staring out at the sea. With its diurnal nature, you feed off of the energy provided when the tide goes out, then in.

You can see why people move out here, abandon life in the cities, and find solace and peace by the ocean.

But winters were always hard, but this winter will be brutal. Vodka seems to go well with this, ice and Vodka, white walls, listening to the twinkling of the ice cubes.

You feel like a ghost, all throughout this week when she left, still noticing the mark on the wall where your wedding picture once sat, comfortable and secure.

It’s not all bad. There’s a typewriter on your desk (one of the only items of furniture still left in the home) and inside of it is a sheet of ivory paper with fourteen words that describe the way you feel.

Feb. 14th

2006-01-07T08:11:00.000-08:00

Christmas and New Years seemed extra festive (if that's even possible, with an almost forced, heavy-handed nature that requires one to be festive.) with the Drive by Truckers posting a free downloadable track off of their forthcoming record, A Blessing and a Curse due out in April.

The track, Feb. 14th, tinkers with the Trucker's traditional sound, eschewing the usual three guitar stomp, and attempts a ballad in the vein of The Replacements, circa Pleased to Meet Me.

In fact, the references to the Replacements are numerous. Not only does Pleased to Meet Me contain "Valentine", but the Replacements former manager, Peter Jesperson, works at the same record label, New West, that will release A Blessing and a Curse.

The band are taking an unusual stance on file-sharing, this time encouraging bloggers and the like to spread it like a wildfire. Let it be done, and let there be rock!

Drive By Truckers - Feb. 14th

Saturday Snippet

2006-01-07T08:06:00.000-08:00

Excerpt from The Need to Do Laundry

And now, as the follicles produce silvery stabs of age, the worn out jeans from the nights when we were invisible, out with the boys and laughs and come-hither glances from women. But we are older now, and wiser, and we look at the foolishness of our past and the steady nature of the future, and we can remember when, we were inexperienced, unloved and unkempt.

Early January

2006-01-05T18:20:00.001-08:00

I wanted to start earlier, right before the New Year hit, or while it was still taking place. Revelers in the streets of New York City would have their funny little glasses on, waiting for that illuminated ball to perform its anticlimactic act, and I would chronicle it in blog form.

But that didn't happen. I almost got a piece published, until the editor saw it in my blog -this same blog that lies before you- while he was doing research for the same, said piece. Because of this, my days of posting complete pieces are over. (I sent him something completely new, and from scratch.)

The feeling of having to start fresh left me startled. I realized that almost all of my good pieces (save for the two shipwrecked novels-in-progress that haven't been rescued yet) exist here in this blog for the world to see.

I had thought, in good faith, that this was the best way to showcase my work to my constituency. In the process, I had whittled my garrison of tales down to almost nothing. It was exciting and depressing all at the same time.

It’s like this. I write these pieces for myself, but I really enjoy writing them when I know someone I know will be reading them, preferably in the immediate future. Take that away, and I am not left with the same passions I had before, and left uncertain as to the possibility that anyone beyond a disgruntled editor will view my verbose proceedings.

It's a conundrum I'm bound to figure out over time. Until then, this blog will focus more on the musical side, the brief and very brief remarks, notes, scribbles and testaments of faith that one day all of this will be for the best.

Regards,

Adam Strong
kronski.com

2005-12-17T07:57:00.000-08:00

Year End Music Issue 2005

Albums

National – Alligator

Through thick and thin, this weird little slab of Green and Black accompanied me on each stage of 2005. Initially I was disappointed, as I had viewed the National as a terrific singles band, without ever pulling off the big album.

Well they managed it with Alligator, as repeat listens cemented the dark crevices into my life, early in the morning, or the last song at night, this album seems to have a mood for every emotion, and the songs sound different each time you play them, evolving and maturing like wine.

The album opens with a lyric that sets the stage for the delicate paranoia that’s riddled with the trappings of fame that have yet to occur. “I think this place is full of spies, I think they’re onto me.”

There are phrases hear that stand alone, so much that songs are know more for poignant one-liners that define the song and the mood.

Turning from Paranoia to narcissism on a dime, often in a single chord change, the songs morph and change, coming across like a complex person on a fuzzy night. These songs are dark, twisted little ditties, riddled with sexual hang-ups that are barely mentioned from the constantly opening and closing of doors that reveal one tidbit of information in one moment while pushing them away the next, holding the audience just far enough away to warrant fascination.

“With that warm water in my head, all I see is black and white and red.”

“I’m living in the targets shoe” Matt Beringer writes lyrics that inhabit worlds, that border on the ridiculous but manage to pull the whole thing off like a melodramatic French New Wave film.

There’s a bruised ego at work, undulating themes of grandiose statements about self mixed in with self-effacing riffs culminating in the rage-filled finale of “Abel”, which consists of a screaming refrain “My mind’s not right, my mind’s not right”.

This ego flexes his muscles in the mirror of a dingy backstage dressing room the band would play throughout the year, constantly on the verge of full-blown success. And they have the chops, like the Stone Roses did in the late 1980s, possessing a diabolical sense of talent with a sense of self determination that borders on the maniacal. They are aware of the powers, and of their ability to conjure these worlds, and they revel in it.

In “All the Wine”, Berringer’s lyrics taunt and flaunt, exposing the ridiculously large ego he totes throughout the song’s three minute duration. “I’m put together beautifully, big wet bottle in my fist, big red rose in my teeth, I’m a perfect piece of ass, like every Californian.”

This balance, of confidence and derision, passion and indifference followed me everywhere, through the dark corners and locked doors of my life in 2005, finally tucking me in at night, “all safe and sound, all safe and sound, I wont let the psychos around.”

My Morning Jacket – Z

It’s clear to the listener at the start of the record just how much the band dynamic has changed. Keyboards provide a down tempo reggae feel, swishing of the synthesizers offering company to the reverb honey of Jim James’s voice.

Elements of gospel masked as background vocals on the opening track is just one of the elements of freedom in this record, as the band sounds fresh and rejuvenated exploring the other side of their southern roots. (Soul, R&B and Gospel.)

“Religion should appeal to the hearts of the young, who are you, what have you become?”

There’s a chip on their shoulder this time, as if comforting someone in a time of need, and when the guitars come, loud and crunchy they seem to offer salvation in the way that the lyrics simultaneously search for meaning in religion, as in the tracks “Gideon” & “What a Wonderful Man” illustrate, questioning the ideas behind these archetypal figures, feeling spiritual without being preachy or overtly religious. It’s a firm balance, making a gospel tinged record that questions the very nature of belief, but My Morning Jacket’s themes were always murky.

Channeling the Who’s “Baba O Reily”, and the usual Neil Young references, the band seems to be fully matured, switching easily from tender ballad to four on the floor rockers, all in the same song. The compositions are shorter but tighter, filling in the gaps with gobs of sticky wet guitars, that come at you from all angels, daring you to sing the falsetto in “What a Wonderful Man” in the car, waiting for the moral tale in “Off the Record”, and I felt like playing air guitar in the car, crossing the bridge and I did.

“Anytime” doesn’t waste any time in bringing out the guitars, and runs on its own momentum, resembling a freight train heading straight for a brick wall, crashing through it, revealing one of My Morning Jacket’s more direct songs, lamenting a lack of communication and a sense that it’s too late to fix.

The whole album clocks buy without one being aware of time elapsing in the process. Seeing them live only reenergized my love of this band, especially when the roadie handed Jim James the Flying V guitar from off stage and you knew it was time to go to church with spirituality questioned, felt by everyone there, our own religion of rock and roll.

Aimee Mann – The Forgotten Arm

An album with a surprising amount of staying power, Aimee Mann‘s “Forgotten Arm” tells the tale of a boxer and his lover, and their many tribulations as they struggle with heroin addiction. If it sounds too calculated for pop music, and seems more suited to a novel, its only because you know going into this one that it’s a concept album. Reviews speak of the plot before they even speak of the music. That said, its pretty difficult to gauge the quality of transitions as the songs seem to organically stem from the characters themselves, making the listener unaware of the characters motivations, at least on the first few listens.

In my opinion this her best album ever, as each song builds not only the characters troubles with the law and smack, but builds the listener engagement, and by the time “Clean up for Christmas” comes along, we’ve got a little tear in our eye, as we look back on the plot and characters met and we applaud Mann for creating a such a compelling album.

Spoon – Gimme Fiction

The ever-evolving Spoon beefs up their resume with this their fifth album. More strident than their predecessor “Kill the Moonlight”, it features white hot stabs of funk and rock.

Songs like “I turn my camera on” and “Sister Jack” sound frustratingly similar at first, until one looks under the melodic hood, and spies the loose wires and burning oil in their machine that sputters, jerks and slinks inward on itself, reversing the opinion with each lesson. There are conventional moments, like in “The Two sides of Monsieur Valentine” that resemble “Taxman”-era Beatles, and other songs, like “Camera” that flaunt the histrionics of Prince, a fantastic, eclectic affair.

Bloc Party – Silent Alarm

The first time you hear this record, you can’t help but see past the Blur comparisons. Once that’s achieved, you see how these guys are the real deal. There was a lot of bands in 2005 aping the 80’s New Wave sound, but Bloc Party inject their own brand of energy, punk and dance into an infectious combination of songs that defy convention and offer new twists and turns onto a map that frustratingly looks back to recycled riffs instead of reaching out to the chaos just enough to keep it interesting like these guys do.

Supergrass – Road to Rouen

They say great music comes out of times of sadness, and this record is no exception. Although the band never mentioned it, this record reeks of divorce, and band in-fighting. There’s a heavy weight on the band’s sound, its most mature record to date.

While other bands of their era would have broken up, or turned their melancholy into one of an almost lugubrious nature, Supergrass revel in the sadness, painting up situations from different points of view in the fading relationship, as the listener gets the feeling that something is slowly ending, and by the end of the record, the band will be no more.

I really hope this isn’t true. As I haven’t read any press to the contrary, I can assume they will carry on making great records, handling pain and strife through songs while still looking back on the shoulders of their pasts, notably their 1997 effort, In it for the Money.

Mountain Goats – The Sunset Tree

The Mountain Goats are an acquired taste. It’s the voice that gets to you, sounding like a hopeless child at first whining about life.

Until you notice how he turns a phrase, or describes so succinctly an experience you had when you were seventeen, playing video games, drinking scotch and wondering exactly how you will make it out of your parent’s house. This is all over the opening track, “This Year” and in 2005 this year meant student teaching, first year teaching, and looking back on years past.

Instead of writing from a fictitious angle, John Darnielle instead reflects on his own upbringing and brings a startlingly honest record filled with retellings of a painful youth.

Wondrously rendered by producer John Vanderslice, this became my record to write to, and to imagine a parallel universe where my life didn’t turn out so great.

Ryan Adams - Cold Roses/ Jacksonville City Nights/29

None of these albums alone merited placement in the list on their own, but culled together, and looked at as the total output for one calendar year, its impressive that Adams was able to create this much compelling material after being in what most people would agree has been a creative slump since the release of “Heartbreaker” in 2000.

“Cold Roses” is probably the best of the bunch, taking in hints of the Grateful Dead and moments of clarity from “Heartbreaker”. It’s the sound of Adams finding himself in a band again, and sounding all the wiser for it.

“Jacksonville City Nights” is his homage to his alt. country days, and he sounds quite like idol Gram Parsons on these songs. The duet with Norah Jones actually works, turning what could have been a cheese ball rendering of a ballad into a touching tale of lost love.

“29” sounds ridiculously self-indulgent, writing a story song for each year of his twenties. In what is supposed to read like a Tropic of Capricorn, Adams instead turns these into thoughtful reflections on his youth.

A surprising turn of events then.

Okkervill River – Black Sheep Boy / Down the River of Golden Dreams

There’s no getting around it, these albums polarize people, you either love one or the other, and the lead singer doesn’t take the time to serenade you, he just launches into his songs with bravura and verve, switching parts paranoia and wailing.

There are great songs on here and not so great songs, and even though half the time I’m not in the mood and the other half I find it invigorating, somehow the year didn’t seem complete without either of them.

For the record, I’m leading towards “Down the River..” as my favorite. “Black Sheep Boy”, while the better produced of the two came out this year and frequently occupies space in my mind.

Rosebuds – Birds Make Good Neighbors

There’s no doubt in my mind, “The Lover’s rights” is the best single of 2005, bar none. Coming across like the best works of Lloyd Cole and the Lilac Time, it’s all bouncy shimmering beauty that sounds timeless, like the best Galaxie 500 record, “On Fire”.

The record is all over the place sonically, and its creators are a husband and wife duo from North Carolina. I wasn’t as taken with them on their first record, The Rosebuds Make Out!, but this one nailed it for me, and too many jaw-dropping pop moments to mention.

The Hold Steady – Separation Sunday

One I didn’t want to like. This is one of those records that gets under your skin like a virus. The lyrics are about down and out skaters and gutter punks in Minneapolis, and the lyrics tell tales about violence, drug overdoses and bad sex. But the classic rock riffs worthy of the best Georgia Satellites songs make me think otherwise.

I found myself singing along to tracks like “Banging Camp” and “Your little Hood Rat Friend” as if I was one of them, living in the dark alleys of Minneaplis with my guitar, scruffy dog on a chain, and a raging case of the fever from “Separation Sunday”.

Honorable Mentions

Doves – Some Cities

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy & Matt Sweeney – Superwolf

Ben Folds – Songs for Silverman

Eels- Blinking Lights and other revelations

Wilco – Kicking Television Live in Chicago
Ray LaMontagne - Trouble

Singles

Michael Doughty – “Drinking in my dreams”

Rosebuds – “The Lovers Rights”

Josh Rouse – “My Love has Gone”

Iron and Wine & Calexico – “In the Reins”

Iron and Wine – “Woman King”

Idlewild – “Love Steals us from Loneliness”

Gorillaz – “Dirty Harry”

Foo Fighters – “DOA”

Ben Folds – “Late”

Decemberists – “Sixteen Military Wives”

Death Cab for Cutie – “Marching Bands of Manhattan”

Common – “The Corner”

Andrew Bird – “Sovay”

Cat Power – “The Greatest”

The Cardigans – “Good Morning Joan”

Bob Mould –“Paralysed”

Big Star – “Turn my back on the sun”

Marah – “Walt Whitman Bridge”

Thirsties- “Case Misbehavior”

Topanga Canyon

2005-12-10T09:18:00.000-08:00

For rock star Colton Smith, it’s like the past, or his vision of it, was a continually evolving parade that never closed for the weekend, only to move on someplace else shortly the next day. For the reticent recluse who spent most of his time these days hidden away in Topanga canyon, his view of the world continually shifted, as to his direction in a forgotten time cloistered away where everything around him stunk of the patchouli-drenched late 1960’s.

His band the broilers had enjoyed hits steadily throughout the 1960s, played mostly on AM radio, squawked three-chord bar chords that made hairy people raise their fists into the air and make a devil sign, the forefinger and pinkie extended out, the thumb ready for some serious hitchhiking. But he hadn’t had a hit in years, and there was talk of a reunion by some of the band members that actually went further out into pop culture to discover there was a whole different world out there then the one in Topanga Canyon.

The moist, burned out joint in the ashtray, the felt posters emblazoned with reflective stripes, all added to the Brian Wilson décor. He still had a sunken living room, and he had mirrors on the ceilings.

At night, when the lights dimmed to all but the faintest glow above the rooftops, Colton would go out to the porch – afforded to him by the string of minor hits that turned him into a minor celebrity almost overnight – kick back in his big easy chair, and rock, listening to the wails of the coyotes that sounded like vampires preying on those alive, squandered between the boulders and craggy inlets that dotted the canyon.

At this time of night, the light fading, standing up and stretching, he would go in search of his prey, the silver hairs in his mane becoming more illuminated as the evening wore on, waiting for the eventual emergence of the moon, whose arrival triggered additional organic rhythms to change, diurnal churnings that led him to further flights of distortion and monstrosity.

Its not that his entire face changed, or that he grew hair everywhere, for he was already quite hairy to begin with, but that his presence took on a far more menacing weight than before the moon crept up and burned off what few clouds remained after dark.

And the hunt always made him feel better, more secure at his role in this environment. In the bushes, silver moonlight drifted down upon the shadows, emanating sounds that brushed past his whiskers that now protruded six inches off of his face, he looked up at the moon and its crevices, valleys and rock, it was like staring into a refection, with the ball of rock in the sky in the middle of millions of tiny needles.

He felt that significant, a man with a deeper connection to the canyon, the thrill of a night’s feeding, the hatred locked in his heart all day, the rage turned to the natural urges of hunger and desire.

The first deer that night barely made a sound when he quietly took its life from him, feeding on the carcass several meters away from the Safeway parking lot, at the edge of the canyon, and acting as a portal from which he could safely store the bones of the victims.

Because if they ever found the remains, ones scattered in ash cans, display tables, barrels of oil from fast-food restaurants, the discoverer would know true horror, not in a phantasmagorical way, or in the gothic writings of Graham Stoker, but they would see what man was capable of, and during one summer of 1989, when the wildlife had migrated, and the chill of a summer night left Colton needing a good feed, for not even rare steak tartar could satiate the beast in side him, the daily hunger pangs disturbing sleep, putting off the band practice. But they never knew, until the victims would have to become human, because feeding becomes the most important thing when its taken away.

The authorities were unaccustomed to finding human remains anywhere around Topanga Canyon, and so Deputy Dan Falchick found himself baffled at the state of the remains found tied up in cheesecloth at the base of a canyon. And while initial beliefs yielded the usual suspects, Satan worshippers, cultists, serial killers, there was a chilling accuracy to the remains that spoke of something more organic, something closer to the primal needs of man coupled with the rabid accuracy of nature.

Melvin Hamlish and the Untimely Arrival of Puberty

2005-12-04T18:48:00.000-08:00

At the start of the last school year, Melvin Hamlish spent most of his days glued to the cathode rays in the monitors in that last computer lab down in Denley Hall.

The days were short there; hours spent accessing the latest updates from his mother who was still employed by the Foreign Service and currently occupying a small shack at the edge of the North African Desert in Tunis, the capital city of Tunisia.

Melvin knew little of this North African country before he mother was stationed there, and despite the long hours, the sheer volume of distance the two of them were forced to share, the exorbitant hazard pay did much to make the whole effort worthwhile, while Melvin’s father was consistently on the edge of one mental breakdown or another.

In typical fashion, Melvin’s older sister Carrie spent the bulk of her time taking advantage of her mother’s absence and speeding her cherry red 2001 Volkswagon Bug through the extended parking lot at school, jetting off to the exotic locales of Taco Bell parking lots while Melvin sat in the rear of the computer lab and hoped for another update.

It was on an afternoon such as this that he discovered a hidden part of his mother that he struck him as rather odd.

The tones of her emails had lightened in the most recent transmittals, and he in his adolescent mind could not see how her mood could have lightened by anything else than some sort of extra-martial affair.

The scenes in his head while disturbing, did display a penchant for fantasy, and reflected the imagination of a boy who dreamed his life away at the back of the computer lab.

The instructor, Mr. Larson, was a wiry man, constantly animated, and possessed an ill-fitting mustache that highlighted his torpid stature by gently announcing itself; the way a goiter does on an unexpected first date.

He’d talk to Melvin, mainly about the amount of time he spent in the rooms on those particularly hot May afternoons.

At this same time, Carrie would be slugging Diet Coke out of a warm 20 oz bottle while waiting for a boyfriend to step out of a neighbors house with the right amount of required speed necessary to fulfill the requirements of a until a few hours ago forgotten assignment of a fifteen page research paper, the results of which would all but guarantee an early admission into Stanford, the ticket out of the emotionally frigid New England tundra, leapfrogging her into the more culturally aware (or so she thought) and altogether more happening digs of the West Coast, where vapid wayward youths had sowed their own breed of defiance for decades, hatching plans while undoing bra straps waiting, camping overnight even, for the early-morning release of Kiss Tickets from a Milwaukee mall parking lot.

And at this same time, Gary Hamlish, a steadily employed auditor ticked time away working for the local school district in a newly-refurbished office that closely resembled the sterile environs of the more fervent global corporations from which Gary had recently managed to exorcize himself from the pained memories of employment at said corporate job.

Only on this afternoon, instead of performing his usual task of waiting for an Email from Cecily, had instead arranged a rendezvous of sorts. For weeks now, to combat the increasing need for companionship in the wake of his wife all but symbolically leaving her whole family for the arid local of the North African Desert, had repeatedly put his toe into the lukewarm waters of infidelity, for which he was not suited.

Gary was at heart a loyal man, lover and friend. To betray Cecilia like that (unbeknownst to him at the time, Cecilia had herself managed to entwine herself into the arms of a particularly libidinous European gentlemen, who worked at the French Embassy in Tunis) was unthinkable as it was unimaginable, as immediately offensive to him as the cut of the wrong color tweed with his new khaki pants which at this moment he had spilled mustard from a reheated knish acquired at the deli on the way home from the office during the previous evening.

As repulsive as infidelity was, in Gary’s case it was almost certainly bound to happen at one time or another, as the recently hired secretary had an almost death wish like desire to sabotage and sublimate her own feelings at a rate faster than the numerous failings of Gary’s own sexual advances ( as they were always misread, too late, and lacked the necessary grace and discretion the paramours of men ten years his seniors most certainly had perfected at this point in the hum drum existence of experienced auditors.) could manage.

Still the magnetics of attraction meant that before long the two would accidentally (intentionally on the part of Claire, the would be participant in said illicit affair into which he had been placing his largest toe into the proverbial Epsom Salts of displaced aggression) be paired together to analyze and adequately allocate funds to the essential purchases of the myriad of departments and sub-departments found in the New Cannan School District, a highly-regarded district that represented the hundreds of thousands of dollars invested into the spit shined polish of the various Mercedes Benz’s, Aston Martins, and pinnacled Jaguars that decorated their subdivision like Roman Statues, the very symbol of wealth and power immortalized in solid pewter.

And as the long hours turned into evenings over coffee, slowly mutating into lavish dinners paid for, unbeknownst to the taxpayers that pumped their money into the local budget of the New Canaan school district, so did the romantic intensions of the persons involved in what was becoming the illicit affair that Gary wasn’t sure he could pull off, but the same one that he nevertheless found himself ensared in.

So Gary and Claire, an out-of-key rhyming scheme of a couple if ever there was one, were having an affair, one dished out over the plates, cloth napkins and balance sheets containing software upgrades for the same one Melvin Hamlish received the news, rather bluntly one troubled morning, in which he had dropped the entire contents of his trapper keeper on the bus, and in the subsequent melee, had inadvertently misplaced the necklace that his mother had given him, a fist and a star, representing not only the most powerful Arab interest party in Tunisia, but a symbol of creativity in the face of oppression that expressed their own similar world views, that his mother was not due back any time soon, that her stay had been extended indefinitely until further notice, but that, as Cecilia had quite elegantly said in her email, that he should “not be expecting your loving mother home anytime before the timely arrival of the late summer of 2009.

National Novel Writing Month Winner

2005-11-25T14:33:00.000-08:00

I usually do not post personal information, but this one was too juicy not to share.

Back East for the Thanksgiving Holiday, I completed the task of writing a 50,000 word novel in just under thirty days (twenty four to be exact) yesterday on the occasion of my thirty-third birthday. It's an unruly mess of a child, but it's a book all the same. Believe in the Unreal is a big, wet kiss to the South and a love of music that affects everything I do. It's about inspiration, and the forces that control the creative endeavors that we choose to pursue.

"Believe in the Unreal" Excerpt Three -- Jazz

2005-11-18T22:25:00.000-08:00

Art was wrapped up in recording his first album, so much that he hardly thought about Deb anymore, his thoughts mainly thinking of the minutae of recording an album, and his thoughts these days drifted towards home, and the once towering figures of Mother and Father.

His upbringing and on a larger scale, his mother and father had been notably absent for years now, ever since he dropped out of college.

The rural Tennesee home came back to him, as he settled into the studio for another evening. He remembered his mothers yellow dress, and thoughts came to him quickly and frantic.

There was, he discovered while tuning his guitar, a certain sadness that crept over him whenever his thoughts drifted back in time long enough to register the time spent apart from looming figures of Mother and Father.

He’d said “Dada” first, before Mama, which was strange now because he barely thought of both of them. They were still in the mountains, stern faces blankly staring into the light of the television, seated on the same couch Art did for years, until he found the secret fantasies that lingered among the fretboard of his first Sears guitar that his father had purchased for him on the occasion of this twelfth birthday.

His father was in the garage prying loose a screw rusted solid to his old bicycle. On a vice the bike frame sat, until a large scream came from the kitchen. The bike slid to the ground, my father jumped to the scene in the kitchen while Art, a million miles away plucked the vinyl strings on his guitar.

A snake had crawled in to the kitchen and had bit Gladys square on the arm. She’d passed out from the fear, and when Art wandered into the room from his bedroom he saw the site of his father cradlind an unconscious mother.

“What the hell were you doing in there?” He demanded, his face a strained expression of rage and desperate recognition.

“Playing guitar. What.” Art stopped dead in his tracks, and let out a yelp, he had seen the two incisions in his mothers arm.

“Don’t be such a sissy, your mother was bitten by a snake.”

Art ran out of the room, tears streaming down his cheeks. He locked his door and cried for an hour before falling asleep. He always slept when he felt this stress. Sleep had a way of comforting him in a way that came on holistically, enveloping the boy right down to his hush puppies.

His father banged on the door, demanding that his son come out. He heard, from a far away dream the insistent demands of his father, but he lay there paralyzed.

When he did wake up the house was empty, and on the floor lay the three drops of blood shed from the snake incident. He sat on the floor, sucked his thumb and cried.

He remembered this moment, sitting on the floor, uncertain of when his parents would return home or if they would. Unsure of when the pain would end, or even the uncertainty of it, for years later. It was a moment that haunted him throughout his life.

At the moment though, the Producer and Drummer stood over Art’s limp reposed torso that squirmed along the edges of the sole loveseat in the green room.

“Time to go boss, we’re done for the night.”

Stumbling to get up, he struggled for comprehension for a location, a reference.

He needed home now, more than when he was desperate. He would make this album, go home to mom and dad (if they would still see him) and fly to Houston to get Deb back. He made up his mind right there, and the producer and drummer stood there speechless, unaware of the vision they had just interrupted.

Meanwhile Deb worked days at the firm, and lunches spent in the record store, browsing through the blues and gospel sections. She would go here, for quite literally inspiration. She would slip on headphones and look past the nine to five existence shed shelled out for herself, beyond the drab hourly desire to hop on a boat across the delta from where she lived and visit the tiny studio.

She wanted to be a DJ. She had begun staying up later and later, to hear the song that reminded her of the man she loved and subsequently left. In the process, she discovered the healing factor of Jazz, how a sly saxophone could cover ones blues like honey, soaking up all that pain and bitterness. In Jazz she found that all of her hollowed-out feelings were really assets from which she could pour the redemption in a litter stouter each time.

Crossing the delta in a large gondola, across the river styx of revelation to the other side, where the transmitter and studio lay.

She would try out for the empty three to six am slot, forgoing her office job, and slipping into something all together more alluring.

In her dreams she would sneak over to the other side of creativity, into the realm of imagination, smoky jazz clubs, guys with all the answers, operating at all angles, stretching out further into the marshes, looking out past the bayou, into the thickets where crocodiles swam wild, freed from the boundaries of civilization.

People spoke differently, from the civil war, hearts bled onto cheap manuscripts, in the back of cars, with candles. She heard country music, the lull of the poplar trees, and gumbo, smoked fishes, meats and craw daddies. She heard Zydeco.

She saw visions of bombed out southern railroads, abandoned images of pretty waifish girls, plum trees sweetly filled with nectar that rolled off of her tongue like the piano works of Mccoy Tyner. She saw all these things that rolled out of Billie Holiday’s voice, silky smooth, hiding the heroin addiction, like we all hid things, like she hid him, and he hid her and there was a larger force responsible for the Jazz but she didn’t know who it was, this grand conductor making things happen pulling strings, making her try out to be a Jazz DJ from three to six when she knew so little of jazz in the first place, learning a little bit more each night, her education in depression, junkie saxophonists, John Coltrane’s mythical withdrawal from drugs and ascension to god. It was all there in her dreams waiting for her to unlock it.

The radio squawked at her in the morning, fresh from three hours of jazz.

It was time to quit her day job.

"Believe in the Unreal" Excerpt pt. 2

2005-11-18T22:08:00.000-08:00

This was written before my novel actually found a plot, by means o f trip to New Orleans in 1998, with Whiskeytown's Stranger's Almanac a constant companion.

Its' an attempt at a fictionalized (somtimes extremely) memoir that left room for improvement and progress.

----------------------------------

I’m standing inside my apartment, on the 12^th of May 2003., seeing how this moment led to the next like the decaying footprints from last monsoon season that still hang in the now dried mud of the garden.

My wife has just left, (for the weekend) and I have an inclination to walk down the street to the gym. It’s a nice day, so I waltz down there, in that innocent, doe-eyed way that people do when they’re in love and cant believe that their life is about to become unwound again.

I see her, still in town, in Portland, when she’s supposed to be in Bend visiting relatives. I’m about to say hi until I see him and the way that they kiss, lock lips, and the way their eyes focus in on each others corneas, not afraid to hide anything.

They’ve been sleeping together. She gave me that look when we were first together, in the biblical sense of the word.

Standing there, holding flowers just bought from the florists next door. Standing there feeling like the biggest chump. I duck into the nearby alley. And I feel the whole thing unwinding like it did that day with the Yogi.

And that’s why this is chapter one, because after that moment, it was like I could never believe in anything again. Because if I did believe, something would come along and destroy my image. My paradigm smasher would come the moment I thought I was being too paranoid, discounting any sense of faith.

I started this novel because I had the question: “How can we believe in the unreal?” Must we always start out believing that things will be perfect only to see them drift away the way relationships do?

The way my first period class, at the beginning of the school year behaves perfectly, and I believe in the power of teaching, and pat myself on the back upon returning from school, having warm thoughts about student achievement and the great job I’m doing, only to have it unravel before the next few weeks. Unwinding over the hoops, ladders, slings and arrows of the next sixteen weeks before the trimester ends and a new class emerges; ready to do the whole thing over again.

The way that a new mother in law is perfect, and your image is perfect in their eyes, until they catch you with a cigarette at a long party on a gorgeous summer evening on a beach, after dancing and mojitos.

You’re standing there, feet still in sand, and the whole thing comes apart. Relations won’t quite be the same after that; there isn’t really a way to go back. The impression has been destroyed, like a china plate at a Greek Ouzo Bacchanal.

I’m trying something new here, an attempted belief in the power of fiction. In trying to write a novel about an imaginary character that sees the same thing becoming unwound, but not at such an immediate and intense degree. Will reality itself come apart in my attempt to exorcise myself from the character I’ve created?

Because the character is not me, really it isn’t. It’s someone who falls in love harder than I do. He stumbles and falls at greater frequencies than I do. His mistakes are catastrophic while mine are merely annoying.

My (and I mean the person writing this, for the person is not me and I am not the person) belief in the Unreal is dependent upon my character’s belief in the unreal. Of living life for a whole year, day to day, three hundred and sixty five days of them in an attempt for just one year to belief in the unbelievable potential of man for just one year, keep a straight face for that long. Granted my days and years will alter somewhat, offering an uncomfortable trip through the back pages of the characters mind. It’ll be like yearbook day, only harder and it will last for hundreds of pages.

It won’t be easy, but we’ll get started, right away in the present. We won’t start on January 1^st, but on the fist of November on the day after Halloween.

November 1^st – The day after Halloween

All Hallow’s eve has bestowed upon the soggy crags of the Pacific Northwest a torrent of rainfall. Highway tracks are gutters of bountiful water, and I spray around heading north on highway 205, gunning my white shark (with all appropriate apologies to the late Hunter S. Thompson) all the way into Vancovuer.

With daylight savings time ending, I can believe in that, in the improbable beginning chapter of this my first official novel (second if we include that one about the fish and the microscope and the concurrent invention of the telegraph while Samuel Gompers yelled about getting his wooden teeth back from the grave of George Washington, and how grave robbing isn’t going to sell any books, but wasn’t that kind of half the point?) in the unabashed glories of Daylight Savings Time: An extra hour of sleep, a lighter morning.

There’s something in the sky that reminds my paranoid side that this is morning, and the strange vibes crossing the border gives me is no different this morning. And the radio clucks on about Bush’s new appointee and it all gets lost in the miasma of rain, and journalistic embellishments.

And even though my deadline for believing in the unreal started last night at midnight, I couldn’t help but believe in the power of Halloween as well, even if the premise was weak and ill-observed.

But on the way to work this morning I can believe in Daylight savings time, and in the opposites. Maybe this marathon of faith and radiant positivity is all about spin. It works for politicians after all. I hear them on my radio, making excuses, shifting blames and passing the buck. They make it look so easy, I’m sure I could do it for myself.

The day passes with little flair, witnessing the slow unraveling of that class that used to be so good, believing in the power of my peers while witnessing their simultaneous meltdowns. Ok, I’ve found another belief I can believe in, my own naïve notions. Even though I see these notions destroyed everyday, I can believe in the destruction of these incomplete notions, founded only be text books and novels, not yet practices, tested and approved in the arena of the real world.

And most of all I believe in lunch!! It comes after two classes, two classes that feel like hammers on your brain when you are a little dehydrated.

I flirt with the occasional teacher, extending out my fantasies. Hey, I can believe in that.

But I’m turning this, my debut novel into a sort of reality-based televisual feast, instead of a stern belief that the world is not inherently evil, but good. Not rotten to the core, but golden in its innocence, even if the outer-layer of it is contemptible.

“When we come back from a commercial break.”

2005-11-06T15:08:00.000-08:00

Author's Note: I'm in the process of sorting though what may be the biggest written mess of the new century. Below is an excerpt that may or may not be historically accurate.

November 2nd, 1995.

I press the illuminated button called "VTR" that activates the commercial feed tape roll. The lights on the set dim and I am at the control board, making all the things happen.

As is usually the case, I am on way too much caffeine. Crouched in front of the video switcher, I stare into the monitor, waiting for that moment to restart the live feed. I have a sheet to my right that tells me when we come back from break.

The talent is getting warmed up now, adding powder to distinguished noses, rouge to hollowed-out check bones.

When the lights are up and illuminated, they resemble skulls lit up by lightening, ready for the cue from me, and when I'm not on the verge of laughing, I get it right.

I still can't believe I ended up here, immediately after college. I'm the overnight guy here at this little ABC affiliate in Charleston, SC. The sports guy comes in with a wet cigar and berates me for my timing from the last package of the night. He does this after the news cast has ended, and the talent (three of them if you include the weather man, who doubles as sports and current affairs coordinator.)has left for the evening.

The guy who taught me most of what I know is a real TV aficionado. I know this because when I was shadowing him (interesting term used to describe one night shift guy watching another night shift guy) the way he would watch TV showed his undying dedication to it as a medium. His face would relax a little bit, and he would sit back, taking in each frame of video (there are two frames for every one second of video that you see, scary to know that each second is split into polar extremities of good and evil eh?) and savoring each transition and right-on-the-money cut.

He’s always on the verge of saying "I love this stuff.” He's a devout prince fan.

He's not as fun as Jimmy, the morning guy. He performs his act (very few master control operators actually perform their job, they let the job perform a number on them, knocking out posture and accuracy of sight.) like a conjurer. He fondles the switches on the board like Hendrix at Altamont. This guy is always “rocking and rolling”.

He always ate Hardee’s breakfast biscuits, the deluxe ones with the spicy sausage interspersed with American cheese, and he savored it as much as Damon savored each frame of video.

Jimmy worked the Saturday morning shift, watching cartoons and infomercials. He was a family man, and he’d watch the same programming his family did.

He was a magician, sitting at the board like an organist, an organist of bones.

But I digress. After the 10:00 news, the night would settle down, and I’d let the automated show picker reach out its robotic arm and pluck another video cassette out of the slot, like the union stock yards in Chicago, watching video cassettes plucked from their ranks like pigs ready for the slaughter.

If I was on enough caffeine, I wouldn’t let the sports guy get to me, tapping his cigar, talking about games and teams I had little interest in.

But I did not lose faith in Television. There were times, when after working a shift, I would come home (at 6:30) and crack a beer to WKRP in Cincinnati, staring at it in my one bedroom shack. No really, it was a one bedroom shack, a bedroom with four walls and an ineffective space heater.

The TV had wood paneling. I picked it off of the street just a few months earlier, prior to moving in. Staring at it was like calling up memories from childhood, and I reveled in it, despite my flaming hatred for the commercial pabulum of currently I was currently doing or performing, depending on the mood I was in when you asked me.

Periodically I would get called into the General Manager's office, himself a radio DJ of an oldies stati50s He had that 50s radio voice, like the DJ in Grease. DJ’s in his days were beacons of positivity, and he took the same aesthetic into dealing with people.

This was almost always bad. Whenever I’d miss a commercial spot, I’d hear about it. If I missed a commercial, forgot to air it, aired the wrong one, an email would be sent to the traffic coordinator who would use this data to talk to the client, who was steaming mad, because his phone sex ad didn’t air at 4:35AM like it was supposed to.

So in that pleasant radio voice, he’s scold me for missing another ad, locking myself out of the building while out on a smoke break, for locking myself out of the station, wandering outside until the first morning news person arrived at 4am, freezing wondering if that’s what failure felt like, cold and stinging.

”We need to find out why you’re having trouble concentrating.”

Trouble concentrating? Gee, I wonder why, maybe it was the hours, or that sinking feeling I got whenever Roy, the other overnight guy walked in.

To him, television was his lover, a constant companion that he’d highlight with his favorite “rolling tape” saying.

”Looks like I’ll have to roll tape on this”

He’d say that staring at a half-naked buxom woman, selling car insurance. He’d say it when, during “Maximum Exposure” a Bull lanced the torso of an infamous Matador.

He’d say it during “Politically Incorrect”, when Bill Maher would insult Jesse Helms for the twelfth time that season.

I ran into him at a bar years later. He stared at a TV in the bar too, and he looked exactly the same. I was working at a different TV station, public this time, and I saw the whites of his eyes go hollow for a few minutes, seeing how one person moved on while he stayed in the same place, rolling tape on each employee who walked through the doors.

At night on smoke breaks, looking out at the TV towers, I thought of how few people witnessed the work that I did, until I made a mistake. My profession was like so many others in those days, of a subservient role that was barely noticed until all hell broke loose.

There was another guy, Steve, who slept at the station. He wasn’t a workaholic, just lonely I guess.

The first time I saw it, it was a window into a world of loneliness I’d never witnessed before.

I periodically took walks into people’s office, sat back in office chairs, reclined looking at the pictures of unfamiliar family vacations. There’s the fish that Dave’s boy caught last year in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. There’s another fishing shot taken at Fawley Beach.

Walking down the hall, my heart dropped dead to the floor when I saw the shadow of a figure walking across the blue shadow made by the TV in the lobby. It was always on, letting the visitors see the result of all the branding and scheduling the corporate office had made.

Looking just past the TV to the couch, I made out the figure of one of the cameramen. Not working, not sleeping, and just staring out at the TV, the same channel he contributed to.

I managed a nervous “Hi” when I walked past. He seemed comfortable with the idea that I was there, and he barely even flinched. I stopped taking walks after that point.

And rolling tape on another promo reel back in the control room, I found a new found respect for my own loneliness. Now sure I was single, twenty two and not much going to write about love wise. But I had friends to spend time with. On nights off Id have friends over to shave the ice off of my not too often defrosted freezer. We’d drink beer and watch TV, listen to music, talk about wave form monitors, cathode rays and dead-end jobs that would castrate men like Roy and leave them without a guide, light or love.

I had a new found respect for the depths of solitude. And I turned the satellite to MTV2, watching the video for Superdrag’s “Destination Ursula Major”.

I needed a job that made more of a difference, that more people bore witness to. I needed to be applauded, lauded and not chastised.

Respect and jobs done with consideration for the rubrics of quality and frequency were a few years off, but I still regarded Television with high esteem.

I quit the job just after two months. The schedule changed me a little bit more each day. I believe in myself more than ever, and I knew there was a better job out there, one that paid more than five dollars per hour.

Still throughout it, I believed in friends. Back when I needed them most. They may not have always led me to the right places in this world, but they did give me everything they had when I felt like I was watching myself watch my life on Television, editing the same roll for the next ten to fifteen years.

It wasn’t going to happen, not with my fundamental beliefs in the Unreal, the possibility that I might one day find my own happiness in places where my work was visible to all just by the cut of my jib or the way that my laconic wit would roll out of my after a few drinks on my evening off.

It was all a matter of degrees.

Karaoke Night At the Old Ships Mate

2005-10-29T08:26:00.000-07:00

Its always desperate at this time of night, right before the start of the singing, when the host is drumming up support for what purports to be an evening filled with laudable yet irritating renditions of secretarian standards.

She's pleasantly elegant, almost out of place at the Ship's Mate. It's like a transplant from England, only its in Multomah Village, the floors have been stripped bare from the asbestos removal, but a few Louis and Clark students call it home, and the faculty meets here a few times each month to kvetch about improper renderings of narratives, mull over implausible plot lines, and bitch about insipid prose.

The bar staff is comforting in its brusqueness, warm in the way only family can get away with being that rude.
Dr. Pauley is the first one up, and soon after the aggressive chord changes of "American Idiot" is piped over the incapable soundsystem, her shoes come off, bright silver buckles kicked off, sliding underneath the skeletal pool tables.

Dr. Pauley does a faithful job, cackling in between verses. There's a face she holds, if just for a moment that speaks volumes.
"I'm up here, and this song for me, is not only a stab at the current administration, but for this cathartic moment that can only come after a hectic week. On Friday I can meet my colleagues, kick off my bright silver buckles, and thrash wholeheartedly to a song many of my students play as they consult their MLA manuals and try to find an outlet for the currents of electricity surging through their fevered minds.

Or maybe I say that. Because when she looks at me that way. And because I'm on my third I falsely interpret this as a come on, even though its not, its her getting lost in the moment, having a laugh, so for a moment she can forget about the fact that she continually undermines her desire to break out on her own, move out to the Andes, hiking and wandering amongst the old Mayan ruins.

She doesn't want to be in a sunless room, going over the finer points of Bartholemy to students so assuredly convinced of their own brilliance that they cant see passed the fact that life is always transparent, always has been. Anyone can put thoughts to paper. But Dr. Pauley, when she writes (I know because I've snuck into her study at dinner parties, in between lulls of conversation, while I'm supposed to be in the bathroom.) she conjures up the primitive yearnings in nature, connects the primordial energy into something more palpable. It's abstract, serious and deathly funny.

The song ends and with it the radiance the stage took while she occupied it. I'm realizing the feelings I have for her, and I have to step out of this realm for a moment, going down the street, looking at the glimmering reflection of the frost on the road.

Its like standing in the middle of an old coastal village, weather-beaten and impromptu. No matter what time of year I stand here, I always feel like I'm the only one alive, at the end of a long raw patch of land, waiting for the moon to carry me away.

She's standing behind me. I can feel her breath behind me, and the warm laugh that's about to come rolling out of her.

"Couldn't stand the singing?"

I turn around and envelop her, standing with arms around each other, we embrace and sink into a plush kiss. We both know we can't do this, Her husband seated in front of a bowl of mixed nuts one hundred feet away, and yet the racing of my heart, its pounding out all the thoughts that tell me otherwise. To run away, to stop now before it turns into something ugly. Stop and just savor the moment when it was all subtlety and innuendo.

But I cant. The longer we stand there, the more I'm keenly aware that her husband could walk out at any second. For me, the risk is comparatively minimal. I'm divorced. She is still married.

We stand there, submerged under the spell of the Multnomah Village moon, wondering when the moment will end, and we'll be back to watching the other faculty members sing lonely Neil Diamond covers.

It might be our last chance, if we didn't know any better.

Charlie Rose and the Dreams of Narcissus

2005-10-22T12:17:00.000-07:00

On my couch the other night watching another chat show on PBS, I noticed something. Beyond the instant recognition of the subject matter, I detected a distinct feeling that not only had I been here before, but that I was somehow a part of the show I was watching.

I'm being interviewed on Charlie Rose for my latest movie, noted for the candidness in which I approached the rather delicate subject matter of the increasing role of the underclass in America. I somehow managed to convince the right person that I was interesting enough to at least pique the interest of a bonafide psychopath. Have you seen the Charlie Rose Show lately, do you know how off putting he can be?

He failed to ask me how the underclass somehow referred directly to my boyhood experiences of having milk sprayed into my face by way of a twisty straw, or how the underclass in America, and the way it was being misrepresented was actually represented in my film by my lack of appearance on any Homecoming Court roster at my High School.

None of these examples seemed to face Charlie at all, and I nervously sipped my water while he delicately praised me for "Addressing the elephant in the room", even though the real elephant in the room was how I had revealed all sorts of embarrassing information about my childhood in a ham-handed documentary that was turned down at the Hackensack Film Festival.

But back to my dream. It is a dream of course, how often could I expect to appear on the Charlie Rose show in real life? I'm sitting in the leather chair that makes up the set that hasn't changed since 1978. The same austere round table, chair and nondescript menacing wood paneled background.

If I failed to mention this earlier I apologize. I am naked, sitting in front of someone who not only does not take notice of my nudity, but does not expose me for the charade that I actually am.

"A scathing diatribe against the rampant consumerism of Western Culture in the 21st century, Alan Clarke's powerful documentary peels back the levels of hypocrisy and reveals to the audience the fraudulent double-standard perpetrated on the American underclass, the wedgie scene at the end of Act One, where did that come from?"

I can't hear my response. It's buried beneath canned laughter whose whereabouts are unknown.

Looking out into the window when I awake, I see the pattern of the figure and the ghostly after-affects of the swaying empty branches, reflecting movement that is now offscreen.

The white horse gallops through the barren woods, shaking off the cold. Steam emanates from its nostrils, reminding me of the smoke from the revolver the night before. There's a close-up of his head wound, lying in the swamp, staring up at me until the white is bleached out.

I lean over to the projector and switch it off, returning to my seat in Mr. Pauley's seventh-grade science class.

"Kevin, could you tell us why a fracture in the right femur, could be undectected, as a hairline fracture for up to several months?"

The light is still on me, projecting a shadow onto the white screen.

In it I can see Marlon Brando in The Wild One revving his motorcycle and daring anyone within an eyeshot to take in all that raw masculinity and ask him an Algebra question. The camera pushes in as he removes his sunglasses. He's demanding something. His gang stands behind him, sternly framed in the shot.

I'm in college watching a sixteen millimeter film at the Nikelodean theatre. My friends are setting fire to the seat in front of me, and the free jazz on screen moves in the same pattern as the cinematographer, who runs up and down staircases, through alleys, houses and streets.

My cat has been dyed white, and is parched. She laps up water faster than that of a canoer who must bail out his vessel before he swallowed up by the dark brime beneath him.

My wife doesn't seem to notice either when we pick her (the cat) up from our Turkish friends house. I know the real secret. That they've used her for some sort of ritual. Even though this makes no sense, and there's an inherent misunderstanding of cultures that I am keenly aware of. I can help but be a bit ashamed as I wake up to find the lower wall of my mouth tight, wired shut and swollen.

A shave is painful leaving my face splotchy and red. As I leave for work, stepping out of my house onto the icy steps, I can't help but notice the smell that the fire left when it finished consuming my entire block. It's the smell of burning tires, even though the rain has come in overnight, flooding the streets. Gondolas decked out in tar, sand paper and roofing tile traverse the vicsous streets teeming with squid, electric eels and lamprey.

The feeding is almost done when I arrive, ready to dive into the inky river, replete with glowing starfish.

Chicago,John Prine and Warm Bars

2005-10-15T11:42:00.000-07:00

The street leading down to Joe’s place was iced over, to the point where traversing it was barely worth the effort, if not for the glowing warmth of the neon sign outside Joes place, well, I wouldn’t be here now.

Once Inside I could rub my hand across the smoky wood of the bar, and stare into the ancient mirror that seem to house as many lost souls and sacred demons as I did right now.

But that would be a few hours from now, where’d I be snug leaning against the bar, swaying to whatever tune would be on the jukebox: Something single, solitary and empowering, in a spiritual way that made me feel wonderfully happy to be sad and alone. It’s one of those single guy moments when you’re just glad to be alive, and someplace familiar.

But out on the street, walking across the ice was difficult. The ice came early this year, late October. The sky wore a jaundiced pallor, as the level of forbearance grew in each passing of subsequent panels of iced-over concrete like frosting on an unwanted birthday cake.

I thought about a lot on that trip to the bar. Firstly, the very fact that I was willing to traipse through all that ice and snow meant that I needed the comforting feeling of home that I wasn’t getting at home, currently a dilapidated hollow box of an apartment, slumming it on the eastern side of Chicago.

It was one of those moments where I wished I was in front of a piano, which always made more sense. My emotions could just run out on the ivories, launch out at all angles of the bar, reflected back at me from the stained cherry wood shelves that mounted the mirror, that drenched in the suffused smoke and warmth of the place.

The microphone felt squeamish the first time my lip accidentally grazed it, during that open mic night when I made the decision, right then and there that the piano and the succeeding series of bars that housed them, would be my traveling sense of home.

Throughout all the boroughs of Chicago, there wasn’t another place that gave me the same rush of emotions, even sitting at the bar alone, swaying to Tom Waits, Jeff Buckley, Leonard Cohen, John Prine, or whatever cracked soul leapt out of the fluorescent confines of the jukebox and wrapped my heart in adoration more than the whiskey that flowed through my blood.

But tonight on the way over to Joe’s, I found a locket, entombed in one inch of snow. A rosary encased in glass, with a fragrant picture of a woman I had once known. In the supermarkets, bars, back alleys or bookstore, at some point I had encountered her.

I may have even written a song about her. And as much as I tried to get it out of my mind, I couldn’t leave it behind without trying to free it from the icy confines of its captor.

I reached into my pocket, and placed my house key between the two knuckles of my right hand. I made numerous stabbing motions before I cracked it, freeing the locket from the ice with a swift kick of my boot heel.

I brushed off the snow and ice, and read the inscription on the back.

I had known her more than once, for a year when I first arrived. I had forgotten about her, until I caught the last letter of the engraving on the back.

Sam, with her curly brown hair, scrubbed the misery out of my brain like a healing brillo pad, taking out the cynicism, empowering my playing.

We didn’t last longer than two weeks, and since then I’d managed to completely forget about her.

I’m in the bar, staring into the locket, and crying salty tears into an empty glass, wondering where she is now, and if she's had any thoughts about me, and the song that lives somewhere between the remnants of our affair and the layers of ice on the east side of Chicago.

Lenny, Van and the Van Hundrith Brothers

2005-10-06T20:32:00.000-07:00

He'd be a poet then, and let every note wring out the truth that befalls even the darkest Burgundy spill, though not as badly as a merlot.

He was hearing this conversation as he heard most things, seated elegently, poised between the iron sharp angles of the olive table cloth. It matched the sag in his hair, the way the bangs seemed to emulate the balancing act the table cloth played, as it settled into the beginnings of a raucous evening.

Seated at the bar were two old school chums,Robert Patrick Sullivan and Van Grady Sharboneau. Van had squandered his fathers fortune into a chain store empire of punk barbershops, and made a lot of money doing it, even if half of it did go off to pay the child support for the three kids sheltered away up at Hammond, until the first thaw came in, and the kids ran around the town touching their silvery moneyd elbows into the flatbush back alleys of rural Lordstown.

He thought about the squandering, Lenny did, and he sat as his childhood friends boasted and bragged of bedazzling sentimentality, weaving it thick like cotton candy on a the tepid edge of a blade.

His thoughts trailed off during these sessions, as he often did. He would slip away in the middle of dinner, while sitting at the Bistro on this February evening. His thoughts would turn to his own creative ideas, ones that only came to him after the third glass of merlot, after Van would spill his, and chuckle at the angle the waiter would attack the stain, with a dozen starched white napkins. Spread out like a bloody piece of oragami, they would get a big kick out of it, while Lenny sipped his and entertained thoughts of what he was going to do now that the divorce papers had been signed.

Hed be a poet, then if she'll have me and make the morning run into Anchorage, if Ihe could find his way back to Montana. He'd take the railroad and guitar and just get out. Play, move around, love women who struggle, make babies and live in a log cabin along the banks of a defrosted river, run warm with heat, love and the knowledge that awaits like the first frost that come and destroys all of yer crops.

But the voice changed, and Robert piped in.

Lenny regained composure, he was at his local, afterall. The first frost had arrived, and the daughters were home from school This was his chance to get out and see more, alone and free, moving though the long stretched cabins of the Combine train, sleek in the way it came out of the tunnel roaring at 85 mph.

Hed sit on the dining car composing sesistans while dreaming of bedding the single rich women of the gentry. They'd voyage down from Canada each winter. Too cold for the rich, theyd say over conversation.

But Lenny was still at the bar, listening to Van go on about how much hipsters would pay for a straight razor shave.

Jesus the Mexican Boy

2005-09-23T13:34:00.000-07:00

The turn off on Interstate 40 right before the state line should have warned them of the inhabitants. The way that the sign, intended to display bountiful amenities, instead featured a winking pig dated somewhere in the middle of the 1930s if Amos was correct.

He’d pull off anyway. He needed a piss and rest and figured this was a good enough stop. A temporary stop over, to stretch his legs.

He found solace in the back of empty highway exits, and felt freedom in the lack of personal objects and the sheer amount of high desert sprawl, a spidery concoction of thorns placed just so against the empty tapestry of beach sand.

It was like the dead days of Hollywood out here, like things had never changed. He was born in Portland, but spent the most of his life trying to get out, living behind the flaws in a roadside diner, squeezing out the state’s dying past.

He had a Masters degree in History, yet to look at him Amos look like he just walked in off of the train yard. His beard was more of a permanent stain than stubble, and he foraged around in the dust left by fifteen years of scouting.

At night in the solace of hotels in which he was the sole inhabitant, he wrote what was an ongoing series of treacherous tales. His characters were drifters like the one he tried to be, yet with a more authentic background.

Sons of dude ranchers, lost in a search for a big city life of fidelity, and gamblers on the run from the local chain gang were his royal subjects.

If given the right amount of time between speeches at local community colleges, he could make a run last anywhere between two and six weeks, for he was capable and often did teach history to various schools, both as substitute and visiting expert to those who didn’t know any better. An unlike many of his fellow educators, he didn’t get into education for the kids sake, but as a way to keep his lifestyle going.

Always driving –the search of an anonymous life kept him alive and moving through shanty towns and scuttlebutt towns that were once bordellos, brothels and diamond mines, but now sat dusty, sacred and alone-- always in search of the perfect backdrop in which he could place his characters in front of.

His father passed just last year, but he didn’t attend the funeral. To go back would be to realign his present self with the history of flagrant disregard of his family. He couldn’t just go back, not the way he was right now. There’d be too much to get in the way before he could honestly grieve.

So he kept it up until he reached Miskaowie. It lay clear on the other side of a dirt road off of a feeder road to I40, right by the Idaho border. After the dirt road drifted out of existence like an old memory of prep school, he came upon a church, after wandering for hours looking at the distant shadow of a steeple.

1902. That was the last time someone was here. There weren’t any footprints and sign of any kind until he saw the candles.

Lit up like a Catholic Birth it was, as the interior of the church was vaguely Mexican. Incantations were written in Latin and Spanish.

At the back of the church, by the last pew he overturned the last Bible, intrigued by the gold leaf propped out of the spine. Exhausted from the drive and the news from back home that came via his post office box in La Grande, he sat down, took off his dusty cap and read the faded inscription on the gold leaf inlay.

Marylou,

I’m real sorry I couldn’t speak to you in person. Yer ma said you’d gone for the day, feeding the men at the mine. The cavalry came out to our Miskie, saying if we was going to join up now we’d best do it. We talked about this day when it happened, but I never thought. I didn’t want it this way.

Maybe I’m too late and you’ve fallen in love with a guy who leaves, and that’s the way it will be.

I’ll try to make it back someday, to visit you. Grammie’s got little Nathan and she’s real sorry you couldn’tve been there to see for yerself how proud she was of me, with a metal lapel pin to wear and the pony they’ve got me on. It’s a real opportunity to provide for you and the baby. I’ll be stationed in La Grande, getting the word out about the cause. Maybe someday I'll come back.

Love Always,

Daryl

Amos closed the book cautiously, slid it underneath the pew, stretched out on it, and fell asleep.

When he awoke hours later, most of the candles had gone out, and in their places the sullen faces of a hundred Mexican boys. As he staggered up and off of the pew, the boys’ hands reached out to Amos, who was now visibly weeping.

One of their own had died, and the boys, whose whereabouts were still uncertain, took Amos to a burial ceremony two hundred meters from the church. He drank something out of a hollowed out cactus, as the leader, who wore a coyote skin cloth around his torso, twirled around with a bloody spear.

The corpse of the coyote lay in the center of the pit, surrounded by what looked like one hundred tea lights.

The second in command (he had blood tracks on his face, and wore the blood of the animal across his face, covering one half like a crescent moon.) came from behind, and hoisted up the carcass revealing a series of wood planks, which must have contained the remnants of their leader.

The chants warped Amos's head, the swirling lights becoming blurs and the cacophony of voices were difficult to discern from the chanting, which filled his head, ringing out, growing in stature with each successive round of cactus water and singing.

By the morning the boys were gone, the pit covered, and the gold leaf still tucked inside the last bible in the final pew, in the abandoned, dark church.

Snap Out of It!!!

2005-09-18T22:10:00.000-07:00

Snap Out of It!!!

It started as a moment and ended as one too, but instead of having felt good about the situation and its intoxicant inhabitants, I chose to dwell on the less saggy parts of the day, and as a result I puked almost instantly at the thought that living alone took after being divorced after sixteen weeks of marriage.

It took place, like most things, over a course of a number of years at which certain times I referred to them, the years as utterly unforgettable and possibly happy, If I was ever capable of feeling that strongly before.

And I knew that up until this point in my life... Ooh, this gets a bit sticky. I’m speaking in the past now to someone whose now quite young.

I’m sorry if I fooled you with my formalities. (Forever beats against more appreciating beasts to the general time continuum we have and how its ultimately a counter-part as to how we currently feel, at least this month in Quarantine Illustrated.

But after all of that, I knew I still loved him, even if his friendship was always far away, and during the past few months anyway, was always in another time zone when I had the thoughts that absolutely required a phone call at 3AM.

Because everyone had to know how you felt that night, when you saw the Lord demonstrated like that. But not in a sermon, not in the unnecessarily rigid environment of the Lutheran church but in the living room in 1978, that’s what still made him believe in love. It was the nostalgia of remembering a time when Love and Crushes still meant something, and how the sting of a crush could resonate days afterward.

These were things worth mentioning at the end of the day. At night he would light cigars out on the patio staring out at the humidity rising against the cold bay, and he’d catch the ribbon of wind that blocked out the oncoming sunlight, and made him realize how much he had missed the things that made him who he was, happy to live at that level, but embarrassed by it, in the worst sense.

All he saw was suffering all around him, yet of all he knew were prosperous and their hearts filled with the luxurious golden yarns of comfort.

His touch,and his congruent use of speech was, in itself a way of admission. To truly obtain the lease, and free the big man as a sort of beholder, a guard to the great gig in the sky, he must purge the feelings contained within the cool waters of his swim on each subsequent evening.

More often than not it was just what the doctor ordered; the golden ticket that brought us all home like kids, pretending to be adults in the Hospital, when their kid sister is dying.

You don’t really know until you’re outside Julian’s at 3AM, out of your mind on whatever is going 'round. Because for years its not about WHAT, but WHY that matters around these circles, even if people will feel the wrath, and repose, downplay the dread to their students, and eventually children.

Why make one miserable when you infect thousands?

It’s like PR, the way in which spreads like a disease, though you couldn’t see the infection through the calluses of addiction. The way you live through lightning and agree to talk about it on TV afterwards.

Lefty's Grey Canoe

2005-09-15T18:36:00.000-07:00

Dashing out of the rain, from the café in your white Mary-Tyler-Moore outfit was the slow, fading crescendo I’d hoped for one day when I was younger, but when heartbreak came, it came with a rushing feeling that hurtling towards me was this feeling of dread, happy emptiness. I felt the camera pan back, like in a movie.

I stared at my bacon and eggs and tapped my folded up newspaper on the chair.

It was two o’ clock already, and she’d left me in the afternoon, with cold eggs, bacon and the sense that I had nowhere to go. As to her destination, well, I think I had a pretty good idea.

Shed been screwing Lefty now for well over a year, and you could see the look all over the guys puss.

Like powdered sugar on a French toast face this guy. Evident in the way death is subtle.
Strutting all over town, in the middle of the day just like that.

How bout it?

Flaunts it in my face at work all the time. He’s top man on the take. He's bought a brand new grey canoe, by Old Town, the same ones the yuppies from Maine trot in when they come a little too far south in the summer time.

Hes the only agent on the take period, so its real out in the open when he's paddling with my girl on those moonlit evenings. I stayed at home, pounding out my fears on a Smith Corona, wondering whether or not this "Soft Touch" I seem to have is gonna screw me out of the take, and mabye even my girl. This is before.

“Bit of the top of the pile this week, Jimmy. I’ll give something to the cops personal like.”

I’m standing there, pretending like I could give a rat’s ass. He’s making the whole transaction completely obvious, and when Carl finds out about this, he’ll be on the first boat to Tuna Town, underneath by the docks, the shark’sll make chum out of him., the rat.

I’d been separated from Sophie for a good six years when I met dollface out in the square one day while I was making the collections.

Im out at the pier, and she's dropping a care package to her old lady. She's a widow, and she paints these adorable little watercolors.

Im there again a few months later when I see her eyes meet Lefty in his big grey canoe. I know hes on the take, and the civies'd be real miffed if they knew one of theres was on a take so I dont say nothing, but I feel the jealous pangs like Im Cyrano de Bergerac or something.

He's got the stand up job and I'm looking back and wondering if it didn't all start years ago.

And on the night before Sophie left I bought an empty journal, a way to make notes on my manuscript.

I hadn’t thought of becoming a writer, really. It all just sort of happened, the way that you fall a certain way when you get hit in the chest with a pillowcase full of bricks. If and when the cards came down, there was little chance of me leaving anything else behind when I finally left the whole mortal coil years from now. I figured I’d give it a shot.

And ever since Sophie, I’d be up in the ‘crows nest’ – a little half-attic that my brother in law built back before, when I was married. Carmen’s brother Carmine built it.

He was going to leave the city, Carmine and he built half-attics all throughout the north eastern coast of New Jersey.

We were in the country version of the mafia, Carmine and me. We was wanna-bes, you know, prep-school gangsters who got away with more stuff because we were out here in the middle of nowhere, holding up bait and tackle shops, truckers with crates of beer, stuff like that.

See you had to be a real pro to lift the stuff coming into Newark, but up here in Paulston, on the New Jersey Shore it was a gold mine back then.

I could step into any grain silo east of West Orange and come out of there making some hillbilly piss his pants with a fist full of Farm subsidies. When Reagan cut subsidies even further, we felt a little guilty, but there was always something literary in our crime, that’s probably why I found myself writing.

I wrote all night after some of our big scores, up all night on coke. My writing was frenzied, morally ambivalent and impenetrable, I detected a certain immortal spirit, a foolish child who thought he was impervious to any physical violence.

Were in the middle of shit fields, and cattle ranchers, do you really think anyone’s going to go after a violent offender in the country. All of the cops were family from way back.

The corruption tied the mob together with us in the late 1980s, and I got out of the Coke and stolen bicycles angle and got into writing. Well that and cooked Real-Estate- Speculation, but my money’s now wrapped in a cocoon of paperwork and bureaucracy anyway what does it matter.

Those Enron guys had it right though.

My thoughts come back to her though, walking out in the rain in the middle of lunch, breakfast, whatever. Right there on Park Avenue.

When she walked out, it was the last dance.

No one comes around anymore to visit me. I’m living in a Retirement community years later, writing too many TV situations for Colombo. I’m drinking Yuban coffee in a large tubs that I can turn into ashtrays. My criminal status is defunct.

It comes and goes, and we never know how long it lasts, but we keep trying, even though we don’t know why.

Guided By Stewart

2005-09-02T08:50:00.000-07:00

Cold hands touching my face
Don’t hide - the snake can see you
Old friends you might not remember
Fading away from you

These faithful words emanated from a scratchy piece of vinyl, weighted down by a copper penny in its fidelity. Guided by Voices "Bee Thousand" is one of those seminal records, where one can place their exact whereabouts, setting our chronometers to the wistful days of 1994. Summer exactly; living in a dilapidated green house with four other distinguished gentlemen, it was never far from our heavy rotations.

Walking from room to room, from Kris's wood-paneled fish tank room, to Steve's journalistic dwelling reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson's office, "Bee Thousand" and its sycophantic admirers could be found at every party, nestled by the stereo like thousands of children, waiting for the latest radio episode of The Green Hornet.

But it was The Gold Heart Mountaintop Queen Directory that really hit home. If asked, we could have all recited the song verbatim, culminating in the ultimate tribute, Guided By Stewart.

Stewart, a local legend made famous by the sheer audacity of personality that resulted whenever he entered the room, had received the ultimate birthday present, namely being awarded the distinction of lead singer of a Guided by Voices Tribute Band.

The band members worked hard trying to emulate the oscillating time signature on a batch of four or five songs. To be performed at a local party of which no one can actually remember, Stewart took the "stage" (Really a shag-carpeted cleared area in the front room of Stewart's house, with a gaudy orange Garfield clock staring down on the proceedings.)

And while some would say on the subsequent performances the band were to make in the years that followed, that Hot Freaks was their best song, replete with Bob Pollard "kicks", I'd place my money on The Gold Heart Mountaintop Queen Directory.

Old friends you might not remember
Fading away from you

Surrounded by forty of our closest friends, we'd sway to the song, drunkenly slobbering out the chorus, while wrapping our arms around each other.

It was as if we could look though a portal into another dimension, where we'd already moved on, moved away, and settled down to a world where Guided By Stewart no longer performed. And in the sway of that chorus (the whole song is really one long chorus) we found solace in ourselves at a time when loyalty and love were strange, elevated concepts that we reserved for evenings surrounded by friends and Guided by Stewart.

Ten years later I'm singing along to Guided By Voices playing the song for one last time (on the Guided By Voices Farewell Tour) and wondering how in the hell I grew up so fast.

Engaged and in Graduate School, the song did not fail me, and I felt the rush of emotions that came from the memory of all of us dancing together to the song that brought solace to all of us at a time when we most needed it.

The Guided by Voices farewell show in Portland was a farewell to a period of my life, where music was a constant companion, and I wandered around the country in search of myself. Ten years on and all the wiser, I can't help but think of Guided by Stewart and how, however awkward it was, represented all of us in our quest for love and personal expression.

2005-08-27T23:01:00.000-07:00

I dropped out of high school yesterday, god what bullshit!

It took all but three hours to separate myself from that school.

In one way its disugsting, in one ways its prophetic.

Because I was tossed aside from the beginning , so I aint gonna change none now.

Its hard to talk about, if you really want to know.

The whole thing, just kind of exploded sixteen months ago.

"Ok, but this aint gonna end up in some kind of magazine, now will it?"

Its easier than you think.

The first cut, the first time in a limosine, is key. I remember my dad had this river boat that he'd take me out every once in a while. He had already thought we were gone, but this Riverboat spent enough time in his craw to matter somehow.

I resurected the fucker almost eighteen months ago, and without warning, he flashed his blade.

I found myself in the middle of work camp again, due to the injury and all. I had so many people to blaim, but it was, at the end of the day irrelevent.

Go wherever you can, because your alive without a knife, and damn, you might as well be without one, because, in all honesty, youll probably spend more time alive.

I lit a smoke around this time.

You know, if you still want it.

Gladys, taking inventory of her personal life, goes back to her husband, if only for the challenge.

2005-08-26T15:04:00.000-07:00

In the march, slowly, like a well-kept caterpillar, it came. The feeling that he'd been waiting for, right on cue.

they'd spent the better half of an evening going back and forth in there. His stand on a recent decision made that hadn't taken him into consideration lasted its intended forty-five minutes. And stalled by a last minute conversion tactic from Bob that had Gladys on the ropes, they had made the decision to give it another chance.

Bob and Gladys had been married for thirty five years in a marriage of what one could call convenience. Bob took his afternoons and evenings in front of the television set, in between naps and occasional banter between the ever-present Golf game and his own righteous set definition of a "handicap".

In this Gladys, now forced to do something, anything than watch her husband grow older and for her own physiological needs felt the leftover energy that comes from the half-energy that shed receive for closing another sale at work. Donn's Chevrolet, out there on Route 131, salesperson of the month for the past seven and a half months.

Gladys found in Selling the challenge she used to face from Bob, who had now taken permanent residence in front of this leather recliner. "59 and dead already." Gladys had commented frequently

Gladys made the sudden decision, after splitting up-- (they still called it a "separation" even though for Gladys it was more of "a hit or miss kind of a thing."
--twice, to give the man another chance, if not given another chance, wouldn't Bob respond well to the new acupuncture treatment? She'd talk to herself in the kitchen on those evenings, yapping at her reflection in the toaster oven.

"Your a good Midwestern woman, Gladys, and I want you to stay that way."

Her boss that said that the day before, and she knew all too well how her recent "forays" into modern medicine was not appreciated in the upper-middle-class section of Indianapolis.

Even still, she managed to con her way out of most evenings spent with Bob, and was now dating a local writer, 32 years old.

Now Gladys knew what she was doing. She might let you think otherwise, with her upbringing, faith and the homemade waffles on Sunday that brought with it the fortitude and the back-breaking regimen of Protestant Work Ethic, but inside fired the stirring soul of someone who for two years was a hippy in college, before she found the lord again.

So seeing Tim in the evenings, they'd read to each other. From Gladys's side of the table came the latest in Shiatzu, Massage, Acupunture, or herbal medicinals that she recently starting selling on the internet, secretly pocketing a small fortune in small currencies no one would ever see. Tim read excerpts from his upcoming novel (An obvious allusion to the proclivities in his own recent life, and he upped the amount of words that were older than he was. It was a good fit, and he even knew about Bob, and the increasing amount of hunting shows he would watch, vexed by Glady's all to late returns as of late.

Bob had taken to spending the night in the kitchen recently, setting his briefcase from his job as an insurance adjuster down on the kitchen table, reading the note from Gladys, in her sweet, caring penmanship. He thought she was at a new writers workshop, seeing the flyers in her purse one night, he read the guest list and decided to pay the book group an unexpected visit.

Vancouver, WA 1978

2005-08-25T21:49:00.000-07:00

Growing up on the outer banks of the Columbia River yielded all the boredom that one would expect from a shallow sixteen-year-old student going to a shithole of a school that is Gracie.

Gracie High was located on the banks of the Columbia River (as I mentioned earlier in this paper, because I'm filling up space here, even while I'm writing this paper, cute eh?)and not too far from the Paramount Nuclear Plant. My Dad would take me fishing on the weekends, and I'd stare out across the river at Portland and wish I was there, living another life in a town that was actually somewhere.

Not that Vancouver, Washington wasn't somewhere. It was, but only when you compared it to Portland. Without Portland, Vancouver didn't have an identity, just a suburb thank you very much.

My parents would say they moved to Vancouver for the tax breaks, but I saw the disappointment in my Dad's eyes when my Mom took that big job on Mill Plain. I saw the lights go out in his eyes that night. Evident in the way he sat out in his workshop room out passed the garage.

He threw darts until well after I was sent off to bed that night. I think I heard yelling the next day.

We were happy, I guess, though I never could believe that he was truly happy.

Hed have this far-away look in his eye on the river, looking out across the river, at the airport, watching the planes take off and land.

We could have lived in Battleground, Ridgefield or any of the other cheaper places, but dad took Vancouver and the tantalizing tease of Portland in its proximity.

My mom mentioned something about a old girlfriend in Portland. The guys at the bait shop up in Ridgefield where we'd go and get our bait on Sundays used to tease me about my "other Mommy" but I paid them no mind, my dad always says they were full of shit.

The day he left, my mom came home from work and found me reading the note, trembling as she tore off down Mill Plain in search of wherever and whoever he left her for.

I traveled into Portland a few times, in search of him. I've heard he's downtown working at an ad agency, with a wife and kids. He doesn't talk about us much anymore.

My new Dad's a lot more boring. He's at the plant while my Mom orders him around and makes all the decisions. I still call him Tom, which pisses him off to no end.

There are lots of things I miss about my real Dad, but one of the things that drives me crazy, you know keeping you up at night, when he's all I can think about is how much of a philosopher he was sitting out on that water, tugging on a beer. He'd just stare out into the Gorge and dream.

He gave me the courage to apply for Evergreen, shit to get out of Vancouver all together. I couldn't help but feel responsible the day he died. The news didn't come like it had come to my friends who'd had loved ones die, because I had to hear it second hand.

Working on my first sculpture at Evergreen, in the Hollandale Tunnel, smoking after a break, when Tamara ran out of the kiln room to tell me what happened.

It was almost dark when I hitched a ride home with my sketchbook and a vague feeling that I had done this before.

Castle Donnington, Heavy Metal and the Rousing Fists When Molly Hatchet took the Stage.

2005-08-20T09:20:00.000-07:00

Blag and Stig had already ripped open the case of Stella by the time I got there. Not to be outdone, they were halfway through the case and were harassing the punters, trying to shake down enough cash to spend on poorly-made tshirts.

Gary Newman had been on for two hours now, and the boys were raging. Being the sole diplomat of the group, I marched over to the oncoming fracass and attempted a vague intervention.

"Oi, was all this then?"

"Oh, Racks, we were havin' a bit of fun with this punter with the Skynard shirt."

"And wos wrong wit a bit o Skynard then, Ill pot on 'Sweet Home Alabama' from time to time."

"Oh ay, but dere not Molly Hatchet, now are they?"

"Nobody's as good as Molly Hatchet mate, they were the fookin originals weren't they? But you cant shake down the punter by the cut of his fookin tshirt now caen ya?"

"Racks mate, how de fook are we gonna get the scratch for de new Hatchet shirts? By taking them off of some cunt with a Skynard shirt, that's how."

"Boys, boys, lets calm de fook down and have a few bevvies, I got me packet from the Minister last night, lets have a go at it."

"Oi, punter, get that shirt off of yous then, its our fookin rag to wipe the lager from me chins"

"In your case Stig, there are multiple chins."

"Aren't you the brave bastard, Racks?"

And it went on this way for the rest of the afternoon. By half eleven we had seen Slipknot, MudVayne, Anthrax, Megadeath and ending with the fookin crescendo that was Molly Hatchet (Stig and Blag burrowed their way up front, bruising the skin of a few punters.)

I was late for my third shift, working the twelve hour shift on the pile driver. On me lunch break, I took out The Sun, and revisited the faces of Blag and Stig from the night before. They'd been arrested, booked and the writer had the fookin nerve to call them "Hooligans". Theyd bashed twelve punters by the end of the show, hospitializing seven of them.

They was always that way when I wasn't around. Still, Castle Donnington was still the best metal festival of the year, and well worth the rat in my brain the next day (night) at work.

Where I'm Coming From, with Sun and Promise

2005-08-11T10:25:00.000-07:00

Sleeping off the majority of the night before didn't leave him feeling clean and fresh, like he expected to feel today.

He set off on his white Azuki bicycle, with dented pedals and toe baskets. Coasting down the hills of NE Portland, his thoughts lay in the nebulous future of the next school year.

Arriving at school less than an hour later -- after grunting and panting over hills, bridges and lacadasical drivers who stood in the middle of the bike lanes downtown. Looking up at the skyscrapers, they'd marvel at the heights while not noticing the bespectacled cyclist that laboriously approached -- he pulled into his Scottish Literature class ready to discuss the panglossian blur of fiction and reality. They had just discussed the merits of Gray'sLanarkand were currently devouring Welsh's The Acid House. The man was spot-on in the dialogue department, but did not have the stuff of the masters.

Even though hed spent more time laughing lately, mostly due to a sister and brother-in-law who recently gave birth to their first, a new job was to start next week, and the paperwork was piling up: Certification, transcript requests, his desk piled high with items tossed asunder since last summer and beyond.

But for now he'd take the hint of Fall in the rides home, the azure in the crisp air, sailing down the East Bank Esplanade, the enormity of downtown unveiling itself to him as a trusted ally.

In town he had found himself, nursed his way back home, to the wife who love him, the cats who coated his life in fur, and the promise of tomorrow.

For now at least, it was enough.

What It Takes to Produce Fire, Out There.

2005-08-02T21:06:00.000-07:00

They told me of a tribe that lives out there, beyond the reach of electricity or phones, where the limits of society are stretched.

They live in the reservation where lawlessness is the poison that everyone drinks.

They told me of this one time, when a guy shot himself, literally in the foot.

He'd been drinking for hours, and got into a state often referred to as "total inebriation". He was chasing the ghost of former lovers who left track-marks on his wrists as deciduous as the chemical whom he embraced everyday upon waking. The power struggle got to be too much, so one night in a bender of hallucinations he caught the twitching of his right vein in the distance of his vision and he grabbed the first thing he saw, his side arm.

He fired before he discovered to whom the leg belonged, and he spent the night staring out at the desert wishing his rage had a connection, a face, and a destination to rest after venting.

The emptiness called out to him in the middle of the concrete establishment, and not even a full bottle of whiskey could cure him.

He took the truck, and forced his way, via his double-barreled shotgun into the nearest emergency room just outside Santa Fe.

It was daybreak when they helped him, and one hour later when the authorities arrived.

Its one thing to not have insurance, it’s another to not even live in an official country.

He said that the only thing that killed the pain was the understanding of the warden, who showed him pictures of her two lost boys that disappeared four years prior.

I guess everyone hurts, and everyone's cure can be a simple as a bottle and as complicated as an ideology.

On the Precipice, Stewart Finds a Home

2005-07-29T09:39:00.000-07:00

The years in art school did little to settle the outrageous wanderlust that lay in Stewart, between the settled crevices of time-honored repetition and the soul-crushing exposure of mass criticism. Art School, in many ways had shown to him the cruel analytical nature of the world, though a fiery keyhole. It was just a glimpse, but the heat generated off of the toxic emotions affected him on a level he was all too conscious of.

Uncle Andy, as Stewart used to refer to his old babysitter, was the only family member at his exhibitions and he'd speak with him candidly, behind jutting bronze statues that all too metaphorically spoke volumes regarding the fathomable distance between them.

Andy and Stewart sipped their cocktails, wondering when the time was right to apologize for each's own behavior.

Andy for "corrupting" Stewart, by showing him a world he could never really be a part of. For Stewart it was running away, leaving Andy with the burden and the job of explaining to Mr. and Mrs. Kunderman (because they both still referred to them as the Kundermans, despite the strict biological ties that existed.) that Stewart ran away, to pursue the sort of career that Andy knew he was capable.

They stood there, eyes fixed on the surrounding artwork, halfway mocking the overall lack of possibility that someone might come along and break this trance they seemed to have found themselves in.

Word came by way of Mr. Smithe, Stewart's Art teacher and lone cheerleader in the vast and discouraging halls of Hamberg Hall.

"Stewart's shown a lot of promise during the past two terms, we'll see if it translates into a sale. Good Evening."

He brushed passed with slithery grace, onto the next student, to heap false praises upon.

Hamberg Hall, with it's surrounding annexes, resembled a high-ceillinged sarcoughagus, an inordinately large mausoleum where students walked with hands behind their backs, letting the hollow clacks of their footwear ring out, reflecting the dignity with which they placed on the establishment.

Students would walk through the halls and look back on the struggle to get in, proving a point enough to impress Mr. Smithe and his pack of ravenous Huns. They would get ideas this way, alone in the marbled hall, feeling the rise in sound, falling back down upon them, casting sonorous reverb until the vibrations created sparks inside cerebellums, and they'd calmly walk down the line, breezing passed the Ornithology wing, (a haven for bird-like people, literally, for their body types resembled overgrown sparrows)through to the individual drawing rooms.

One had to continuously prove oneself in order to maintain a residency at the school, and students were constantly dropping out, making last minute pilgrimages to Amsterdam, The Hague, walk-abouts in Australia, sport fishing in Cuba, anything but face the notion that their time was up, and the whole notion of 'talent' at least as far as they were concerned was an elaborate lie strung together with lace, wire and a vast hallway of emptiness.

The sound of the clacking hit Stewart as the ice cubes in his drink clanked as he put his hand on Andy's shoulder, put his head down, and apologized.

"Look, I'm not going to stare at the piece of shit works of my peers all night and pretend that this silence between us doesn't mean anything. I know I ran away and left you with the job of explaining this to "The Kundermans". I know that getting into this place probably wouldn't have happened if you hadn'tve been there all along. I know all that, and I'm sorry."

He held that gaze out for several minutes, until Andy, whose eyes began to tear up, bit his lower lip, lifted his eyes from the rotund copper statue he'd pretended to stare at for what seemed to him like an eternity, and gathered a response.

"It. It was me who showed you another way to live. I didn't want my own lifestyle to dictate yours, I just knew you had these talents, and it may not have been the most appropriate time for this, but your here now, the Kundermans are nowhere to be found, they left you afterall."

He stared up at the tribute to Miro as mobile, and stood on this last point as if on a precipice.

"Running away was a slap to my face, and I'm not going to pretend that it didn't make me regret everything I showed you, it felt fucking ungrateful at the time. But now, after everything, seeing you here with all of your determination just makes me grateful that you’re here, and at Hamberg Hall, one of the best Art Schools on the East Coast!"

Andy didn't know that Stewart was on the way out. He'd started out efficiently enough, creating proficient recreations of classic still life arrangements like the light bulb on a steel-brushed table, but painting, especially vague recreations of inanimate objects, he found demeaning. He'd had visions of self-written operas, of buckets of red paint swimming on mtoherly hips, hourglass shapes pressed against the paint, and rolling on the canvas;fleshy rollers on bone-white canvases. He pictured screaming rage and spit. He wanted canvases to look like entrails turned inside-out, illuminating the rage found in digestive tracts. He wanted the ugliest parts of science to be mixed with a thrashing humanity.

But recreating light bulb arrangements wasn't in the cards. As much as his professors would lecture on about 'learning to walk before learning how to fly', a metaphor he came to detest and after waking from dreams of larvae ripped apart to make a point on the machinations of nature, and how mixing them can be deadly one morning he had been given an ultimatum: to either faithfully follow the trajectory of their curriculum, or leave, and find solace in the gritty poverty of the East Village.

The sinking feeling that the gig was up came to him as he was basking the glow of reconciliation with Andy. Around the statues, mobiles and panoramas of Hamberg Hall, they now laughed, Andy's arm over Stewarts.

Out of the Jungle lies Dr. Livingston

2005-07-21T20:48:00.000-07:00

I called it an idea that never could exist on the Internet.

James had reached central access to the central nervous system, and for now he'd focus on the heaps of joy he might heap upon himself.

But he carried on never the less, with pride in his top drawer, and the wringed-out-out panties disguised a clever ruse at the bottom of the drawer circling around it, becoming organic when handed over, it felt like the start of some deciduous tree branch, and it sat there, until he thrashed himself twenty times for feeling that way, and letting the rest of the world creep on into his own, by way of a book that would project, with a 15 watt light bulb, the truth his entrails read when magnified and reading out to its audience with a menu of forgotten lies that were to only be aired out at this time, as it was, afterall only fit to declare proper at the hour and the time spent within its walls, sleeping in the hanger with a notepad, fire and the vague attempt that anything in this direction has to be better than what came to him when it was written. If you could've known that..

He was looking for the kind of recognition in his own mind that one would find while alone in a library, and finding a velvet edition of a collection which seems oddly familiar, a framed once flashed before him, back when the time had spent hours with him , and the chill of winters past seemed enough of a reason to celebrate."

Al and Pauline Kunderman, 1973

2005-07-13T17:49:00.000-07:00

Safely back in the US after a month spent traveling in Europe, The Kundermans settled in nicely after the four day after-effects of a nine hour time differential settled down in their sleep to the point where Al didn't wake at five am wondering which lightbulb to replace in the nursery.

Three and a half weeks into their honeymoon, The Kundermans, Al and Pauline were nestled in Lake Geneva when word came that Pauline was late on her period and her boobs hurt.

The Kundermans knew somehow that the spare bedroom in the rear of the home was to be a nursery, they just weren't exactly sure when it would actually be used as a nursery instead of a makeshift office for Al, who wrote early on Sunday mornings, after devouring the local newspaper.

Al was an insominac of the highest order, and he'd wake at the moment the newspaper hit the front doorstep.

It was February 26th, 1973. The Watergate hearings were on the Television all summer long, and Al sat in his favorite chair, coming up with short, rhythmic ways of illustrating the hope he felt for the remainder of the 1970s. A man who chose to live in denial from the constant coverage used it as a way that the Republican Party needed a new boy, as ballsy as Nixon, but with enough bravura and connections to get away with the dirt that would certainly be involved in the clean up of the moral schism that had recently crumbled away.

He was never much of a Ford guy either, the guys at work needling him at the obvious lack of staying power Gerald Ford held as successor to a defrocked Nixon.

These were the thoughts that interfered with his poetry when little Stewart was born.

Pauline came into the hallway on a warm Spring evening, her head soaked with perspiration, her eyes far aware. Al had read a description that matched this scenario perfectly in one of his History books he'd consult nightly. "A thousand yard Stare"

Stewart was raised on the outskirts of Los Angeles County in the early morning of May, 1973.

Al came home after the baby was born and Pauline was still at the hospital. Shed need to stay overnight, and Al came home to get dinner and collect a few of her things.

It was the first time he'd been home this early on a weekday in years. And in one isolated moment, Al looked in the mirror and realized suddenly that he was still chasing his childhood, and that twelve years of bachelor hood had laid claim to much of his robust, thick head of hair and much of his inner chutzpah, which he'd attributed to the often-castrating decision of middle management.

Al didn't stick around long enough to complete the picture. Four years after Stewart was born, Al left leaving Pauline a sizable income. Al had avoided the shame that was sure to come at work for a middle-management guy to abandon his family, so he paid Pauline half of his salary up front. He took the rest and spent in on a modest cottage with a view of Laurel Canyon.

Pauline, left with a sizable income considering the time she spent at University (two years on a secretarial binge, meant for better things, but knew that Al had a lasting career, hell he'd made it to middle management on the strengths of his design skills as a skilled engineer. He'd sweated out his dues on the ground floor and now he was literally coasting on a scaffolding that he had designed. There was nothing left to do but leave.

he'd vowed to be a supportive, loving father, even if he never really got the chance to do so.

Pauline, with Stewart in daycare all day (she to had her little share of lies.) Stewart was cared for by a woman named Daphne Gauphine, who was under the impression that Pauline was a high-powered career woman.

In the meantime, Pauline spent her daytimes sheltered by the comfort that Al's paycheck bought her and decided one day while cleaning to curtains to become a drug addict.

It didn't happen overnight, all of a sudden, but just as quickly she found herself in the throes of addiction to a packet of pills that came in rows of yellow, like the petunias shed had in her garden before the window shade to her bedroom came down in the morning and stayed that way until the reflection of light from the house-lamps reflected on the overgrowing grass.

In the wake of all this, Stewart was raised in the shadows of all this, by Daphne, and her boyfriend Nick had a "on the level" art job, although in all reality, he painted nudes and occasionally picked up strange men and brought them back to the studio while Stewart and Daphne baked cookies for the rest of the Unitarian Church on Elm Street.

El Segundo

2005-06-28T02:13:00.000-07:00

The port city of Marseille is a sweltering pit of despair compared to the relative comfort of Spain.

The last few days in Barcelona was an end. El Born, Parque de Guello and the extravagance of Gaudi. Just when I was becoming familiar with Spanish, and they go and change the lights on me while asleep, crawling through the muggy air. My dreams are no longer in English, and are ten times more visual then they were before.

The keyboard on a French keyboard is different. One has to shift and hit another key to get a period. The Q and the A are switched around, perhaps having to do linguistically with the alveolar sounds, or it could just be a convenient practice that fits in nicely with the language. Either way, keying on this thing is to cut fish with boxing gloves on.

The train ride was my last gasp of Spanish air, enjoying a bocadillo and a chilled can of Mahou beer. I spoke Spanish for perhaps the last time on this trip.

French for me is difficult, as my French is almost non- existent, yet vital for respect. It's funny; I’d get more respect as a slow Spaniard then as an American.

It's sweltering, and I am reminded of the heat present in Camus' the Stranger. Reminded even further when I think back to teaching it earlier in the school year. Discussing existentialism to 17 year-olds and they not understanding the overall theme of the work is kind of pointless. Without the key understanding of the Existential ideals presented in the work, apart from a somewhat consistent character study what else is there?

An American in Marseille who is tired, sweltering in her dirty ancient apartment. Too many rules to follow, so she stays inside most of the time practising her French by watching documentaries on Canal 5.

It's a great summer to be in Europe; and many things awaiting me when we return home. So many unanswered questions: Where will I teach, how will I do; will I still insist on too many words mashed into too many identities?

Mañana in España, mañana proximo

2005-06-20T14:31:00.000-07:00

You´ve probably heard about them, the chain of hotels that wrap a sheer strip of lace across the mountanous Spanish countryside. The Parador hotel chain offers up sincere luxury-- a place where one can read an inscrutable David Foster Wallace text while admiring the scenery in Toledo from atop the generous viewpoint.

Even stranger is the sheer amount of Americans that frequent this establishment, no doubt sons and daughters of the destinguished elite.

Even so my stay was one dappled in the sweet honey of luxury. One day here and already I feel rejuvinated, like a Spanish caballero. The kind of relaxation that can only be bought. We´re driving in a rented Mercedes -- a four-door hatchback which navigates through the barren olive fields of Andalucia well enough not to notice the glaring looks from the oncoming traffic.

The Spaniards are an incredible lot. They always seem to find the time to stop and have a caña, even if that time is in the middle of the afternoon.

My wife and I feel like imposters, travelling through this hot country with all the elan and panache of a visiting group of dignitaries from places unknown. She speaks a bit of French, and I a bit of Spanish, so between the two of us we manage to patch together a sort of piece-meal language, borrowing from our own patchwork frameworks.

Do I feel reborn? Of course I do, how could I not with James Joyce and the aforementioned David Foster Wallace as my compact compatriots. I´m never alone as long as the free tapas come gratis with a caña or jarra, depending on my mood.

My thoughts turn towards America, and my life there, from time to time, mostly at night, when the sleep comes well earned, and full of spices, like the chorizo autentico de Andalucia.

These thoughts of my home place, they are present, but tend to hover over me like the feeling after a day´s travels in a cafe´, tapas, or cervezeria.

The way of life, the jovial desire to let everything go. The certain vivre, gusto whatever you call it, that I somehow forgot I had somewhere along the line. My Spanish makes me wish I had ten more lifetimes.

It´s late here, the sun has long ago shut down for the night, and the prowlers are loose on the streets of Grenada, and the Alhambra beckons from atop another mountian side, egging me on, making me more grounded, young and boisterous than I ever was.

Buen Provecho Señores y Señoras.

Arbusto en Catalan

The unofficial memoir of Stewart J. Kunderman

2005-06-10T07:06:00.000-07:00

In order to alleviate this feeling that you have Stewart, you must, in a way, start from the beginning—the baseline of who you were before you started feeling this way. To let all the little failures thus far plague you to the point where you are awake at half five in the morning, letting these unresolved issues come out of the filing cabinet in your head, and flip through the file, even opening a specific one over and over again, staring at the raw data present, this isn’t going to fill one with the necessary sense of efficacy needed to handle this particular position in life.

“To put it simply, the profession you’ve chose doesn’t take to kindly to weakness on a personal level, it was never meant to. To become an English teacher and a writer concurrently is not only difficult, it’s impossible. You couldn’t join the army and become a sergeant at the same time could you? Of course not. You’ll need to make a tough decision, one will suffer, that has always been the case.”

I thought about a lot of things on the way home from Professor Gladney’s office that afternoon, one of which was the main catalyst for the pounding in my brain that resounded failure clear across the chest cavity.

I internalize things, always have. When I lost my virginity, I threw up stale Meister Brau beer all over the interior of a Caprice Classic. When I was first accepted into the teaching program, I collapsed after experiencing a sensation not unlike having your chest stepped upon by a crazed, jack-booted fascist.

So dropping out of Graduate School so far, had compounded in my stomach, and it needed a way to get out. This could get disgusting. Failure is rife with bodily fluids.

I had been up until five this morning, banging away on a new draft of my continuously morphing first novel. Self-Doubt had plagued this particular round to the point where it spent most of the time tucked away in a secluded cedar drawer, in the upstairs of the shabbily rented apartment above the international building. Time shifted, and for a moment I felt twenty again. For a moment I inhabited the body I lived in when I was twenty, and it came with all of the wheezing, the rattling cage of a brain I possessed along with an adroit sense of word choice.

Thinking on that for awhile still standing outside of Professor Gladney’s office, I stared at a poster for a study abroad opportunity lacquered to one of the reoccurring posts that dotted campus like mini police boxes, like the Tardis.

Dr. Who references had a way of sneaking up on me, as removed as it was from the situation, it gave me time to take in the information he presented to me as a realistic challenge, one that Gladney may have never dealt with. He might have just gone through life mastering challenge after challenge, never halting due to resentment on his own, albeit more driven, educated self.

Olympic athletes train hard, rising at five am to a colon-cleansing breakfast of soy powder and raw drive. Failed graduate students wake up at five the following morning, sip coffee and stare at the black and white checkerboard flooring in the kitchen wondering where it all went wrong.

My little upstairs apartment felt the weight on what happened yesterday. Making my way back last night was riddled with catatonic stops, at the bridge I sat watching the sun come down, and at the groups of undergraduates creeping across campus. Walking closely together, their energy seemed to coalesce at a certain physical point, and I felt a desire to go back and do it all over again, angry at myself for the time I had wasted.

But I was nothing if not of a survivor, so I went into the campus bookstore and was hired on immediately as a buyer, the proprietor impressed with my fetching combination of education and experience. So my inevitable breakdown would not be visiting then.

Walking back from this surprise success, I took the scenic route, and periodically stopped at reminisced about my first time on campus. I’ve been here for twelve years here, between pick up degrees and temporary assignments working in every sordid nook and cranny here. I’d sold rancid pizza as a freshman, pushed mountains of paperwork for the registrar my sophomore year, took a year abroad working in an Irish Pub my Junior year (another day I’ll tell, too many leather clad motorcycle jackets, pork pies, heart-stealing redheads and sadness) and went on a spiritual journey my senior year. Thinking that I’d never return to university, I signed up for a campus marketing career which had me visit every University Campus within a three state radius. It was my job to pump the students full of enthusiasm, so they’d have enough of it left when they signed on the dotted line, got the tshirt, gaudy pink coffee mug, delicate bear that fell apart two days later, or any number of throw away sacrifices to the altar of undergraduate first-time credit card reception.

My deal with the devil now clearly accomplished, I returned for graduate work and hid out in the library, working as a shelver and clerk for the remaining two years of graduate school. When the time came to return to graduate school, this time as an educator, I held out on employment, spending most of my days as a student teacher outside of the University system.

James Monroe High School lies on a two hundred mile peninsula just south of Oxnard, CA. It’s somehow strangely inner-city, as students from far away as Los Angeles are bussed in due to a slick combination of budget shortfalls and No Child Left Behind.

It’s some would say eclectic mix of students meant that I dealt with severe behavioral issues almost every day. What was even stranger was how closely their behavioral issues mirrored mine, albeit in a more violently reactionary way.

I loved these kids for the way they expressed themselves, the way they would just come out and say whatever was on their mind. As a stark contrast to the Academic world, where professors offered semester-long courses disguised as answers to how much your work resembled that of a petulant child and that you really shouldn’t think about becoming a writer.

These guys shouted out answers. If they felt like shit they’d say it, using the same nomenclature. For the first three months, I wrote referrals daily, and felt the burning heat of a thousand suns each time I taught a lesson.

At the same time, I had started work on my first novel. “The Graber Tapes” It was about a radio DJ in the 1970’s, living in Big Sur. I took too many liberties in borrowing from Play Misty for Me and it showed. What it lacked in originality it made up for in the ridiculous, as plot structures would come from the most contrived sources: Midnight callers would end up driving off of cliffs in cars manufactured by the father of the DJ, Michael Graber,-- a character’s name that could have only been formed out of the fires of 1970s police detective shows, like Banna or Mannix—which led to a high stakes lawsuit, after which Michael Graber would be forced to track down his father, a retired soap-opera star hiding out in the hills of Laguna Beach, CA. What made things worse than the lack of actual hills in Laguna Beach, CA was the way in which these plot structures would come, immediate. At the end of it all it read like a bad headache. And while I was still certain that there was something left of the scrap heap of “The Graber Tapes”, my teaching career was suffering.

When one is ensnarled in the business of writing a bad, yet engrossing novel, or writing any sort of novel, everything else suffers. I awoke forcefully most mornings, ripped from dreams of literary grandeur to the glaring reality that I had just completed two and a half drunken half-awake hours of sleep and I had my University Supervisor visiting my classroom that day, expecting detailed lesson plans, expectations, and a post class interview that always left me feeling hollow.

So, as stories like this often go, I was forced to make a decision. And being the sort of slight maniac who systematically makes the wrong choices, I chose the novel. With subplots worthy of One Life To Live, I spent the rest of the school year on the Graber Tapes and watched from a luxurious distance the slow, submerging death of my teaching career.

Standing in front of thirty students throwing paper airplanes and realizing that you just came to after falling asleep in the middle of a lecture is one the way to go down in the hallowed halls of history of educational fuck ups.

Groggy after my rude awakening, I eyed the furrowed brow and enraged pupils of my principal who, after a series of dramatic lines that had to have been scripted previously, promptly called my cooperating teacher into the room, and after a few rapid-fire one liners I couldn’t help but inject for dignity’s sake, I was on my way out of the building.

New Coat of Paint

2005-06-05T09:26:00.000-07:00

"It's like a movie, or a Tom Waits song I once knew."

She says this to me over drinks, at our local bar, The Refectory.

It's a place where conversations takes a back seat to the swarm of business-driven chatter that frequents this place like an old drunk, shouting out daily profit expectations like pernicious cat calls, speaking out about shitty bosses, denied advancements, and the eventual feeling that someone will come and whisk them away from their careers, placing them in the ivory towers of upper management.

We're in the corner though, where the din of yapping is relatively low-key.

"Grapefruit Moon?"

"New Coat of Paint"

Listening to it now, it's playing in my brain now, reminding me of that second year of college, when I lived upstairs from an international buidling, and I'd watch the students smoke cigarettes, look up at me looking down at them, feeling like the odd man out at the UN building.

I worked at the University Library, a cavernous affair, built underground with seven floors drilled into the subterranean limestone. I'd get back late at night after hours of cataloguing volumes of microfishe, and I'd stare into the reflecting pool at night, while "New Coat of Paint" echoed in the recesses of my brain. I could hear the rasp in Tom's voice, and it took me back there, but now I was staring at Stacy, knowing that one of us would have to break the silence.

"I'm moving to Paris, next year, and I dont expect to be back for at least two years."

Up early, awake and spry

2005-06-05T09:03:00.000-07:00

Thoughts bubble to the surface: An employer is trying to get your number, but your'e too submerged for him to hear you. Go on, try, and hear the gargled mess that is the result.

"Five Oh Three, Nine Seven Four," And it all comes out with too much reverb.

A forest of bamboo trees lies in between you and your new wife, and you have to navigate through this with little but your own experience of bamboo, which is limited to a smattering of overly-produced kung fu movies that diguised themselves appropriately as art, and the knowledge that the plant is a menace.

Next you find yourself on top of a chair, being held by four large men, all of them relatives. You try to act like you've got it all together and that this will all be over in a few seconds.

Your'e next to the cloud factory when they drop you, falling through miles of bamboo, teaching strategies, students hurling obscenities at you.

Your'e in Spain on your honeymoon, and the heat a paltry 113 degrees farenheit as you stare out at the Terazza, and the azure sea beyond it, the sky, land and sea has been burned.

You awake covered in sweat, newly-married and nowhere near close to a teaching job next year.

But the bamboo is nowhere to be found....

It's from a student you had, but he's graduated by now, and still at his job operating on Cats and Dogs. He's cleaning out a cage, scrubbing the corrugated steel floor of a cage while you walk down the street at night, listening for the howl of a local band playing in their basement.

Old friends have been in town all week, and now they've gone home.

Your family left days ago, but you have a new family to start.

It's the beginning of summer and the heat is on, literally, it just turned on in your house as you sit at your laptop, and tug at dry coffee. The chapped lips sip the befuddled brew, that dribbles down your chin as you finish your post on blogger, sigh and hit the bright orange 'submit' button. In more ways than one this week, you have.

I am in the beginning, It will never end

2005-05-30T23:22:00.000-07:00

It was the beginning, standing there in front of one hundred and twenty nervous people, strung out with their arms aching as the camera waited for the light to get just right, for the balance of reciprocity to align itself with light in his eyes.

The nuptials came with a hint of Buddhism. He found that marriage fit him well, and that the day after, the ring cemented his love in a way that launched it from the grey area mid-stomach area of eternity up through the esophagus and to the point where romance fit in, and lodged permanently somewhere in the upper hippo-campus.

He felt grounded, in the way that electrical systems in Hollywood harlots' homes are, so rarely trimmed, but checked-up on enough to base a more innocent option to that which is uniformly felt.

He felt grand in the hot tub on that day, looking down through the Portland streets, and feeling the warmth that started in his solar- plexus, and on through the lower level of sky than hung with high ceilings, twelve, fifteen feet above the latest high point.

In moments of his greatest happiness, he had an urge to let it all go, by letting it run out through his mind, letting it go, through the stars, without anyone but his own happiness.

She came out in the general sense of the word.

Her warm, soft skin continued to provide an everlasting architecture that proceeded to lead him to believe that his life had taken a permanent supportive route, and that by some sort of unimaginable being, he was happy, loved, and understood.

Diggs's Oil Rig

2005-05-14T11:53:00.000-07:00

He had worked the rigs for six months before he laid his eyes on Marlene Specter, and the grisly frame she inhabited. Her shift started a few hours into Diggs’s, and he’d spy on her from across the lunch room. His ham sandwich hanging out of the confines of the wax paper. Conversations were muted at this point in the day.

The shift workers worked a beastly schedule, four months on a rig, out in the Gulf of Mexico. Four months of isolated stretches of time, interrupted only occasionally by the two week breaks at the end of each stretch. Drunk in any number of Mexican towns, sunlit mornings biting into the juicy pulps of oranges, rekindling fires, banging out treatises on typewriters, boarding houses full of strangers that didn’t ask for favors, characteristics forgotten when they took the little dinghy out onto that lonely phallic symbol on the flat shallow waters of the Gulf.

Two weeks into a bustling four month stint, Diggs sees her outside, during one of those midmornings where one cant help but admire the perspective the job offered, the continuity of it all: Sun up in the morning, blindlingly announcing itself, retreating downward below the horizon line, dinner, a prayer and a quick nip off the flask underneath the mattress, a cough, snort and the slow, drifting feeling where the sleep comes.

She’s installing a flat drill head on the main master compressor. This is the heart of each rig, secretly beating, while the collector takes all the credit. For hundreds of years wars have been fought over this sludgy muck, families fortunes squandered, entire nations at war, it’s the fabric of our existence, its what put the industrial into the industrial revolution. It’s the great equalizer, and in the hands of a miserable few, counting down the days until the next boat comes by off to the other country, barbed-wire cactus blossoms, mid morning siestas and corn tortillas heated in clay pots.

On this morning, installing the drill head, he hears her curse, and the ballistic fall out that comes out afterwards. They exchange hostile glances, great leap forwards in communication for this lot. They’d sit next to each other the following day, at dinner, when he was finally curious enough to sit down, cough and collect the basic necessities:

“How long you out?”

“You gotta name?”

“What are you running from?”

Diggs didn’t ask the last question. He’d wanted to, even planned out how it was going to come out, like he knew the answer all along, just checking to see if she was game, if she wanted what he had wanted each night, staring up at the bunk, scrawling out a vague portrait of her, metal shavings flecked downward, irritating his skin, preventing sleep from dragging him across the seas and into a nocturnal reverie.

He asked the first two though, and Delilah answered, seemingly surprised that a man had sat down this quickly. She guessed it would take another week at least, to have one of these silent brutes sit down and make the basic knowledge collection, to warn the others.

“She’s a dike. Why she’s on this rig is beyond me, but she’s trouble”

“Made a mess in town, I hear, knocked someone out, there’s a child alone”

But Diggs just sat there, taking in the responses, surprised at the simple results.

“I’m from Montana originally, I drove all night two weeks back, Tim told me about the rig, and the money, and the time.” “I’ve got a lot of thinking to do, divorced three months ago, kid’s with him, in Nevada, horrible place, dry, no water.’

The way she answered made Diggs think back to his high school sweetheart, and the matted clump her hair would become when shed wear his bike helmet, and he could feel her heart through her T-shirt, blinding down the road, skid marks on the road.

There was a way in which she’d use her fork, that showed she didn’t need anybody, and because of that, Diggs felt like he needed her. It was the way it went, those who need are not needed, and those that needn’t worry about being needed, well, they’re the ones who are needed.

Diggs knew the way it went, and spent the rest of the week polishing off his portrait above his bunk, Holding the shavings, placing them into a small pill bottle.

Remembering Nirvana

2005-05-05T08:22:00.000-07:00

Dirty chuck taylors scrape across floors, kick ashtrays.
Burned out amplifiers, dirty jokes, feedback galore.
Lead singer's fried vocal chords sound like Mudhoney.
We were all famous for a moment it seemed.
A frail little man on my tv screen.
In scorched denim and shaggy green cardigan.
It seems timeless, and when the gunfire cracked.
On that empty day in Seattle.
When we all felt it go away, like the reality we were trying to put off
Came roaring back.
The image became a loop,
When he died they played it for two weeks straight.
We stayed up late, talking about the end.
It was the beginning, of let downs, disappointments
and hints of left behind adulthood.
In the rain they lit candles, cried and comforted.
He was the first, the first one we'd see go.
Losing a little bit of ourselves.

A Story in Ten Minutes, Five.

2005-05-03T12:35:00.000-07:00

Read with a dry, scratchy mouth on a warm day in the garden of Roosevelt High School, Tuesday May 3rd, 2005.

It's straight off the top of my head, so pardon any inconsistencies.

A Fever Pitch Reached Ad Infinitum

2005-04-24T23:46:00.000-07:00

The crackerbox, turned upside-down and sprouted wings.
Spun around unwinding itself, revealing the panoramic blur.
The room was static electrified, dry, dead and in mourning,
Licking time around the clock up through the salivating doorway.

Pampered regally, I vomited cold blood.

I dreamed the violent bruise cooled my fevered brain.
Envelopes flapped to the beat of the removed, clockwork heart.
The heat from the flesh pots, wearing a mask of pain, relieved me,
Knowing the truth, the blinds rolled up like a rolodex.

The crackerbox spun, keeled over, sputtered and died.

Arrival in Charlotte, Three Days Later

2005-04-17T22:14:00.000-07:00

Secured in a blanket at three in the morning is no way for a man to spend his time. Watching the reruns drift pass with a regretful pacing. The hits come harder now, at this time of night, being as all things are, upside-down and belligerently drifting into the barely-lit borders of the other room.

Somewhere is the newspaper where I can forget the news at three in the morning, and forget about death for long enough to stretch out passed the four walls, wander out inside of it all slouching over time like an old disc jockey. It keeps me from finally losing it all among the scrap heaps of bulletins that act as a bizarre counterpoint to the out put in the other room, I'm in the kitchen, eating a sandwich when the phone rings the next morning.

I'm full of hope at the arrival of the ringing, but I can already fill the chilly disappointment when the deal has gone south, and I can leave the couch on the shag carpet, step outside, cross the street and pick a comfortable view for when the tide comes and washes us away, on the rain-slicked heels of my arrival in Charlotte.

Gaitlin Hall is where the low money makers sell there wares, quickly, astutely and without the caffeine come-down. Four of them now, down the hall of the convention center I find myself in. The coffee is a bitter concern, subduing the awkward family visit, having been spared the awkward explanation of the scientific world: how kids are made and wives raised by greyhounds are as rare as radiance in a mock trial.

Naked In North Carolina

2005-04-02T22:22:00.000-08:00

My familys farm somehow continues to produce enough uncut tobacco to provide my parents, Marvin and Patrice, with enough revenue to keep their modest three bedroom farm on the outskirts of Asheville, NC in enough repair to provide for a precocious son, myself, having being provided the schooling for such a career as was betrothed to me at such an occasion as my 45th birthday, spent on a particularly unaccustomed stretch of highway, which provided me with a plethora of opportunities for me to humiliate myself slowly, as someone would in choosing just the right moment to declare publicly, that one is homosexual.

Back In 1979, people knew a little less, but thought they knew more, at least in the moral fortitude department. Then came Reagan, and for more than fifteen minutes, Americans once again took pride in the national trouncing we not only provided gratis to the Russian Hockey team, but to the Iranian nationals to whom we were less than gracious. At the dawn of this still undeclared decade, are the times when we try to find solace in the familiarity of the open road, wandering through life's woes and cradling the familiar stretches of road that have supported my trip each year to this remote spot in North Carolina.

I come to visit each spring, casting off my pile of papers to grade. I head off down route 93, watching the slow encroachment of the poplar trees. Soon the pines reinvent themselves as poplars the closer I get towards the mountains. It always starts raining at around the same time, outside Warrenton. The leaves, bearing their heavy pools of rainfall, hang down; droopily look at me from their perched heights. In them I can almost see my reflection, blotted out by the swab of the windshield wipers and resentment measured out in tiny doses throughout the years, as I floundered through school after school, always scrawling my way back here, to this spot, outside Warrenton.

The road to Bat Cave is marked with hairpin turns and lush green stretches of bombastic elevation. The combination in the canopy of leaves and the crisp mountain air is refreshing, and my mood begins to pick up. After a hectic past few years, the moths no longer gather at my doorstep, and instead leave intricately wrapped gifts of silk-spun baskets illuminated by distant candles of the neighbors porch. In the evening, when the full of the moon is cast and we're making love out in the pool, the light staring up at the water, like an electric owl, beaming out the local news.

We ly there, our heads partially submerged, entangled within one another, and staring up a the pin cushioned night sky. We watch the moon flicker like a nickelodean and we float onward towards the inevitable dawn, that always catches us by surprise.

Tara is a ceramics major whom I met just last term, while teaching night classes at the local community college. It was my side gig; a job that kept my summers full of awkwardly placed words, solitary trips to the Congaree River, and overflowing pages of my latest novel. I met her in the American Lit class that I teach on Wednesdays, in the annex of the Shaftsbury wing, a donation from a recently defrocked local politician, donated during a boom time, when his pockets were as full of money as his head was of whiskey.

Tara took to the transcendentalists with a religious like fervor. She was the only student in my class who seemed to understand the subject matter, and I rewarded her with long walks after class through the dimly lit passageways that crisscrossed the rotund eyesore that was the library of the main campus. It was on these walks that we forged our friendship, a relationship that eventually grew into something more when wed had enough of talking and decided, rather haphazardly, to up the ante in a nearby set of bushes.

The waterlogged engine of my 64 Mustang rattles her way through the lolling hills of Bat Cave, down through Raleigh and hugs the coast as we, my Mustang and I, sail through Wilmington finally heading west.

It's only a short jaunt to Barlow, a speck of a town inhabited by only a hundred people or so, right on the central border of South Carolina. My parents have lived there for nigh on forty years. They sell much of their crop up in Winston Salem, periodically leaving their farm behind for a few days out of each month. In many ways their trips to Winston Salem act as mini vacations, as pejoratively sad as that sounds. By the looks of things, and the lack of cars in the driveway as I pull up, it looks like they are on one of those vacations.

I turn off the ignition, and bask in the silence of the afternoon. The air is still, like everything has momentarily been put on hold. I often feel that way when I come home --that all of the frantic scramblings and cover ups of my current life outside freeze in between motions-- and I'm left with the buzz of the locusts. I get so relaxed, that I drift off to sleep. When I wake up several hours later to a stiff back and notice it's already dark out, I pull out my duffel bag from the back seat, roll the top up on the Mustang, and sit out on the front porch, my thoughts coming back magnetically to my brain, bubbling up to the surface like an unused lava lamp.

Spring Break - R.I.P.

2005-03-28T10:08:00.000-08:00

Sloshing through the rain on the last days of Spring Break, hours before you were due in front of a classroom filled with cantankerous sixteen year olds, you came to a realization that time—with all of the moments in life that seem to last forever—has a way of creeping up on you.

The sleepy town of Seaside is where we ended up on the last weekend of the break, amidst the surly population that seemed content with the bleak grey views booth seats afforded in overly priced seafood restaurants on the main strip of town. The skies bled white with rain throughout the duration of our stay, but one morning I went for a quiet walk on an inlet, looking out at the pounding surf across the eerily calm inlet pond in front of me. In the distance I could see older couples slowly sauntering against the oncoming wind. The beach felt wonderfully lonely, with a palpable salty chill in the air, and my coffee went down well as I imagined an eventual life spent in front of this undulating, churning sea. I feel vindicated in front of an ocean, and humbled by the lack of people and sunshine. The vague feeling of dread washes away after the first few steps, and you mildly surmise your existence in all of this change.

One week at home, with books and words, did not yield the poetic bounty that I was anticipating. I read Rex Pickett’s Sideways in just over two days, and was reminded how much a book that some could view as “fluff” is actually a beautifully moving treatise to friendship, and how part of the maturation process is eventually shedding much of the self destructive behavior featured in one’s late teens and early twenties. I am currently in the middle of Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, which is so far proving to be a dazzling chronicle of a Greek family fleeing Smyrna, Greece to Detroit in 1922. The fact that the narrator is a hermaphrodite yields some interesting narrative perspectives, adding much cinematic flair to the adventurous read, similar in scope to Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

As for my literary progress, little ground was covered despite my time spent in coffee shops, attempting to correct the lack of material. I did manage to spool out a fourteen page story about a young man who escapes the stuffy confines of the Southeastern United States for the stormy anonymousness of the Pacific Northwest, specifically Port Angeles.

I may eventually push morsels of the tale online, but much of it is better suited to the sleeping blanket of the printed word.

Having the entire week off felt strange, especially with the perpetual rain as an hourly companion, but I made the most of it by lying low, reading, writing and contemplating the nature of getting a teaching job over the summer.

Music was perused, analyzed, digested and finally discarded during the break, here being the prime targets of my listening:

1. Decemberists – Picaresque

2. Andrew Bird – Andrew Bird and the mysterious production of eggs

3. Buena Vista Social Club

4. Antony and the Johsons – I am a bird now
No Image Available
5. Bellwether – Six and seven

6. The Bravery – S/t

7. Doves – Some Cities

8. Kaiser Chiefs – Employment
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9. Mountain Goats – The sunset tree

10. Thievery Corporation – Cosmic game

Standing in line for Pac Man

2005-03-16T11:39:00.000-08:00

Looking back through the folds of time, through the awkward years, cruising passed the weighted memories that trigger the deeper reflections, lie the core memories, the hard facts: where you lived, the people you lived with, the people you loved.

The nineteen eighties seems like such a long time ago by comparison, it’s as if I were in the eighties talking about how important the sixties were. I am that age now, and eighties fashion statements are once again in vogue. It’s amazing to realize now, after joining the ranks of the work force, getting passed the layoffs and the disappointments, the let downs that I didn’t make forty thousand dollars a year when the dot com revolution was in full swing, and you could mine for gold, using the grand tool metal detector. It’s hard to think now, imagine that there was a time when I played carefree without care, or worry, even if I didn’t know it at the time.

But before college, before high school, before junior high school, there were the elementary days, before popularity contests, struggles with bullies, there existed a time when days lasted long, hours seemed like days. And the hum of the Atari 2600, though it felt like an empty box provided hours of entertainment, following the exploits of an eight bit man magnified by the RGB tubes of our new television set, set in wood.

Sitting on the couch when we got cable television, on that first day. Pressing buttons that sounded like the slap that your attention span would take as you made your way through the twenty, thirty forty channels. As you grew older, the amount of channels grew larger, the box grew and matured with the technology as you had your growth spurt, grew tiny hairs on your chin, crashed into the garbage cans while you practices parallel parking with your dad.

“No, to the left, the left! That’s the right.” He’d laugh after that, a full, bellowed laugh that caught you off guard, Dad wasn’t supposed to have a laugh like this, a laugh that said “your taking your life too seriously”.

And afterwards, flipping through the channels, on the new LED remote control. You didn’t have to worry about that cord anymore, no. Watching MTV all day when you were sick was like a gateway to your life would be like five years in the future. You could see yourself as a new wave weirdo in college, even though you couldn’t handle it. You could see yourself being ironic, wasting your life away, because everyone knew you could do so much better.

And you did do that, between mowing the lawn, between the silent talks at the dinner table, waiting for your little sister to spill the milk, while your parents spoke in tongues about things that didn’t matter to you. It was important for these things to happen, but not to you, not here not at age 14 when there was a huge, dark world of responsibility, where you couldn’t ride your skateboard off of a slight embankment, you couldn’t swing really high in that leather seat until the pink horizon line was looming below you, you were so high in the air you were higher than the horizon line, and you could see the houses way off in the distance, see adults living their lives, probably speaking in more tongues you couldn’t understand, but while you were in the air, before the prickle of grass tickled your ankle and you tumbled delightfully to the ground.

There was no pain then, in the air, you didn’t ever want to come down, and you spent hours flinging yourself in the air, waiting for the release to come, for your mom to come calling. You’d just moved there, and Miami was like a giant carnival ride, scary, unfamiliar and occasionally quite nauseating.

When the report card came, and you were found out, they discovered that you spent most days drifting off to that hot, enormous world of your own imagination, staring at the creative posters in the classroom until they flowed, had motion, and you weren’t just looking at a picture, but at a real life moorage, and you were on the boat in the virgin islands, talking about how you’d one day make it when the teacher called on you, and you didn’t know the first thing about phylums. At night you’d sob over your inability to memorize all of the classifications, you knew you’d let people down, youd have already let someone down, when you failed like that.

But you push those out of your mind, gently, like the way you’d start the swing up, start that motion up all over again, watching the tops of houses bob up and down, in tune to the soundtrack that was always playing in your head.

That chrome colored boombox, with the one speaker, that seemed so large, like it would envelop the whole thing, and the grey led display.

“I hear the secrets that you keep, when your talking in your sleep” And the bass in that song, the bass guitarist, he must have really known what he was doing to the teenagers, that meshed so perfectly with the synthesizers that sounded so otherworldly, so beyond sci fi, like the future was already hear, and we were living it, taping the Top 40 radio show, playing air guitar and not having any shame in the world.

You amused yourself for hours in this way, dreaming up the stories that would take place around these songs. You’d create imaginary rock bands on paper, you named groups, albums, career trajectories, you stayed up until two am, drawing the panels of your comic book, with illustrations so dark, everything was black and white, with very little grey or shading.

You lived in that world, which peaked on the swing, up in the air, when you were on your bike, sailing through the neighborhood, that ever present highway right there, a highway with dense underbrush, and the wind was always cool, and December felt cold even if it was only 68 degrees.

Dolphins games gave you a ticket into a whole nother world; feathered haircuts, mullets, and beards everywhere the eye could see. You’d talk down there in your seat, with all the adults standing up, looking at the wrinkled creases in the Sergio Valentis jeans.

You don’t feel so young anymore when you look back on this one moment, at one of history’s greatest football games. And when you saw the game on TV, at the gym twenty three years later, and the players were all there, you thought back to the Topps football cards, placed neatly, with care, in your notebook, the red one that used to house the Dungeon and Dragon modules. That brought you back, to when you reached your peak, every other day on the swing, and the rush of air as you got there, gradually swinging, swinging towards the pink sky that was growing darker every year. Every year, it felt a little out of place, and you grew older and burrowed, in the fichus tree down the street, had miniature air raids while he played bad metal like Judas Priest.

Everyone had a pool, with green algae on the screens. Plants were everywhere, and drugs too, but we were too young. The jokes were everywhere. “It’s always snowing in Miami”, you grew older and realized that the two cars stopped together, handing over the briefcase wasn’t a government sponsored thing, no siree.

Riding your bike, towards the arcade, to that strange Interzone where teenagers and little kids like you co mingled. But you never would last long. There was something sinister in the way that the fluorescents would shine on teen’s faces, making them look ghostly and empty.

And it was empty, it was hailed as a phenomenon, video games, arcade games, people were standing in line to play Pac Man. Standing in line, can you imagine that?

But you never did, because your days were spent outside, kicking a soccer ball around until dark, when you’d take one last swing, one last look out across the rooftops to the fading sun, the twilight of your carefree days. There’d be rougher times ahead, puberty, the awkward years, when you weren’t a cute little kid, and you weren’t anywhere close to being an adult. You’d try on many roles since then, most of them insincere, but years later, now, sitting here it’s only then you realize how that little smell of the grass, the dirt on your shins, the mosquito sound as they flew off, and the day leaving, the night arriving, and the pink turning to dark where a few miles away ghosts lined up infront of flashing lights to play a game where a yellow man ate white pellets and chased skirts made of ones and zeroes.

Trapped Inside the Machine, or Burnout Rings True like an Echo

2005-03-12T09:54:00.000-08:00

Feedback melts the good intentions
The labor of love looped back upon itself
Setting the whole contraption into motion
The self doubt wells up and is suppressed
Your thoughts only travel half way
But often soar, knocking one out of the ballpark
The others are left behind
Trapped in the lifelong
Cage of bad ideas
Lost potential
And things that should have but never happened

In dreams we see the machinery
The cogs, wheels,grinders and toil
Dissecting the mistakes
Their voices bubbling up to the surface

You never seem to get it right anymore
Can't keep your mind off of the rolling sea
And the trailer you lived in when you were free

When dogs roamed the sand and brought you sticks filled with saliva
And free time made your mornings limitless and tall
In the evening you'd let the water come up to your ankles
Before you took that last deep breath
Headed under, where things were twisted contorted and green
Tiny bubbles led the way to the garden gate
And things unsightly seen.

Come join me in the tundra, and forget the battery

2005-02-28T09:56:00.000-08:00

Oh won’t you come with me, across the tundra to the other side? Will you help me build the next life here? It’s bright in the morning, and in the evening you burrow down in your thermal sleeping bag. You fall slowly, while your skin numbs up, you dream of yetis, dragons and bloody Laplanders that set the stage for Santa Claus.

I think of you now, when I’m falling off to sleep. I literally fall off a cliff each time I close my eyes. My arm, when it’s asleep, becomes a substitute for your hand, pulling the hair out of my face, when it’s the afternoon and I can’t bear to unlatch the hatch, secure the helmet, and venture out onto all that white death.

It’s comforting to get your letters. They come by helicopter drop. I don’t even see the person delivering the cargo. I know you’re there, at home drinking peach pear tea, waiting for the doorbell to announce the arrival of the delivered stranger. It only feels like betrayal the first time you’re with him, feeling out the depth and breadth of his waning affections. He’ll be gone in an hour, and you’ll lie on the floor, wrapped in a blanket and write me a letter, using the fading passion from the departed affair, that six foot bearded gentlemen you eyed at the gym, and told him, with a half-cocked nod of the head, that yes, you’ll be available for an hour, if you can spare it, right after I get home. Follow me, in the green bug, you’ll say, in your aloof manner.

Sometimes I can’t sleep and I'll turn on the bunker's little stove, and rock back and forth like I used to in the grand room in our house on battery, right in the bay, Charleston. Your heels would clack on the old cobblestone, and the misty air of the morning would chase us after one of those all night parties where we’d take leave, and hurriedly wind our way back through the squares, passed the towering mansions, breezily see the cannons and the iron balls in our peripheries before we inhaled each other. Sitting in front of that fire place in the main room you’d read Dylan Thomas in the grass afterwards, which would propel me back to where we met, that afternoon, in the winter time one hundred miles away, when we caught each other out in the snow, and that look you gave me let me know I’d have you until I returned once again to the tundra.

Runners

2005-02-11T15:47:00.000-08:00

I'm on a small vessel, going nowhere slowly. It's been thirteen days since I last saw land. The vessel ain't much, a rusty main and winches gummed up with salt, so that reeling in the main sail is all but impossible. The men are beginning to have hallucinations. It takes time out of my work to get them from the side of the bow.

The hallucinations come from not seeing land for too long. I've been there myself, staring out into all that blue. After awhile a shadow, hell anything can make you see somthing. Your mind fills in what your eyes don't see. The food's all but spoiled, we lost our refrigeration a few weeks back. The maps were tossed off deck one night when we still had rum. The men don't say much these days, and when they do, you know somebody is going down, and I'll see the body drifting in the water the next day, with that paralyzed look on their face.

I no longer worry about mutiny. I'm not even in charge of this ship anymore. When it's been this long, the elements take over a man's mind, and all authority is rendered moot. I've been on enough of these things to know it comes down to the man with the toughest constitution, he'll be in the remaining four when we bring this thing back to the cape. Carrying the cargo that we do, we have to keep armed and awake. We loaded the cargo underneath the floor boards down in the cabin. We've been waiting for the pick up for a few weeks now, and after two more weeks we can claim ten percent of it as our own, even though we've consumed more than that, and I don't even know if there is any left.

I saw Johnson on it the other day, rifle slung around his arm. He was picking at his arm, at a scab that lay there black with infection. I hit him with the butt of my rifle, to see how jacked up he was, and he growled at me, with eyes that already had found me dead.

The radio's fucked, so there's no way of knowing if the whole thing has been called off. All we have left is a little acoustic guitar, rancid rations and a calendar that has become the focus of our days and our nights.

We sleep in shifts, two or three hours at a time. Day detail is the worst. You get sweat in your eyes, because of the heat, and you never know when one of your crew will lose it, start shaking, screaming, talking about moving, about movement. Fights usually break out at this point, and someone has to stop the guy from losing it before he gets killed. Acting out is not tolerated here.

It's been months since I've been on land for any long period of time. This being my what,fourth, fifth mission? I don't really have a steady woman, or home. On my off time I got out west, anywhere really, rent a ranch for a month, sleep, shoot some and forget about the rest of the year when the concept of leisure just doesn't exist. The sun makese everything shiny. Your forehead, the occasional pieces of glass, visible from the horizon back when a few miles back, when we broke a starboard porthole. We wear are sunglasses all the time, so that our world is permanently tinted. The drinking water is warm, tepid at the coldest times at night, when the temperature is a balmy eighty two degrees.

On the sixteenth day a boat is visible from the horizon. This is big news around here,and the men sit around and guess as to whom the shadow belongs. They take their rifles out and aim at the figure, moving slowly, it's hard to tell, with the occasional swells we get out here from activity miles away.

"I hope it's them"

"I hope so too, so we get off. I'm done."

I've never admitted it to another soul, but its true. Years in the smuggling business can make a man paranoid, even for someone like me, everyone's armed and for all you know your boss is out to kill you. I've seen it happen before, whole missions can be set ups, and I have a feeling that is the case here, right now.

"Go down there, and check underneath the floor boards, and see if there's any left to sell."

His footsteps disappear down in the cabin, and I hear the latch go, then the footsteps running back up. "There's enough for you, and me, and whoever is on that boat that needs to die."

It's Just Jim and me then, the rest will be told there's plenty to sell, that we've done a good job. They are so cracked, they'd come back to watch their families hang at this point.

"Boys, get moving, we've got company"

The shadow has grown larger on the horizon. We can make out the front, its a boat, a
cigarette one, blue teal, and we can see the shine left by the new chrome. I think we're in business.

Then the motor goes on, had it just been sitting there? Through the binoculars I can make out a set of rifles. There's familiarity there, in the way the motor races, like it's my boss and this is my last mission. We've been pirates for too long. The last few missons,they didn't go over to well.

"Let's play it cool boys, it's them, play it real calm like. Forrest! Calm! put the fucking gun's down!"

they're antsy, their fingers are sweaty. The boat is in clear view now, the upturned bow is planing on a small wave, and we can see the neck of the shift, as it sways through the surf. Two men stand on top, with goatees and sunglasses. They look pretty mean, but not the boss, not the boss.

It's them, the people whose coke we've all but consumed. They'll be pissed, right before their dead.

One of my boys up at the bow, his leg starts twitching like he's nervous.

"Forrest, what's wrong."

"The merchandise, is there any left?"

"there's plenty left, I brought extra that y'all didn't know about"

"Oh yeah?"

"How long have I been running these?"

"long time"

"Allright then, just be cool till they come aboard"

There's a seagull overhead now, his cawing is bleeding into the sound of the boat headed our way. What's he doing out this far?

It's fitting, this sitting

2005-02-03T09:14:00.000-08:00

It’s fitting, this sitting
In yesterday’s clothes,
Listening to the sterile music of the dishwasher
The flood goes on behind me, yet off to the side
There’s a bruised glow to the room as I type
Growing fuller, deeper and wider
A hesitation in the way my fingers hit keys
And I want to go back and do it all over again
Hit bat to ground, fist to chest and hollering sound
But it’s past, already recorded
And I don’t know how much of me is left
Of the rest of the mess
From yesterday’s waking wake.

Student Teacher Dispatch

2005-01-26T09:09:00.000-08:00

I stood there, in the empty classroom, fingering a pumpkin. The replica had a top that when lifted, revealed the emptiness inside. What one could store in there, god only knows, but it would become a strong metaphor for my career.

See, every once in awhile I would pick it up, expecting to find something inside. As if all the months of the collective changes in students would yield something inside this pumpkin replica painted with care by someone a few years ago, who really cared about my cooperating teacher, whose room was the setting for these scenes we were to have.

That student, who years ago expected K to look on it for years, but by now most assuredly would have forgotten who it was that gave her this empty pumpkin. And despite knowing this much about the little tchotchki, I nevertheless would open it almost daily, expecting something in it to change. Knowing my students, they’d probably put gum, or spit, or rotten food in it, but I kept looking anyway.

Discussions were hit or miss those days. Some days they’d chomp at the bit, yammering on for hours over a simple writing or discussion prompt. But other days I'd feel the cold chill of their indifference. That is to say, the hollow sound that follows the response of thirty eight students staring back at one with blank faces was what reminded me of the “tabla rossa” teachers used to refer to students as. These blank slates would then be filled with knowledge.

It was at times such as this that I felt like walking into the middle of the room and dying right in front of them. I wanted a great tragedy to fall not on the students, but to have a dynamo of an experience right in the middle of the classroom: a heart attach, a junked telescope, a trashed satellite. I wanted space debris to land in the middle of the classroom and to have it smolder away. I wanted them to have indifferent looks when the proletariat of Mars marched down off of his throne, down the rectangular auburn chute to greet the classroom as ambassador for another world. I wanted him to look into the empty pumpkin and plonk down an amulet without me knowing about it, so the next time I would open it I would find it there and the kids would go on looking indifferent, and I could be whisked away to the ship, exploring the nether regions of the galaxy, while the drool would still be collecting on top of their desks, next to the carving “AC/DC” or some such heavy metal band that is named after a retired airship, electrical currents, or nonsensical nomenclature.

I had faith in my students on most days. I’d make my lesson plans loose and lean, with plenty of “wiggle room.” Sometimes society harps on a certain phrase, and our minds are so in need of a new saying that they’ll pick up on it for a week, or a year. At this point in history, the history of the ongoing 21^st century, “Wiggle Room” was that term. Condoleezza Rice used it at her confirmation hearing, and I thought how fitting. But I was having this thought in the middle of class, and I was kicking my heals against the desk and my cooperating teacher was staring at me, so I stood up suddenly, closing my copy of Fahrenheit 451 with a snap and bolting to the front of the room.

“Who can tell me what the news coverage in 451 reminds them of today?” Empty faces, no wonder we reelected that slack-jawed yokel. Concentrate; if their not getting it, it’s your fault, your not engaging them enough. Focus on the background knowledge, nip all disciplinary discretions in the bud, and don’t forget to utilize those higher-level thinking skills.

“How about America’s Most Wanted or Cops?” I press on. I know why I go to the pumpkin everyday. It’s in the verification that nothing is there that refreshes me as it reassures. It’s letting me know that it’s never been full, of anything. I can tell just by the smell of the hollow recess. It’s been painted with care, but ultimately, it will just sit there until a student has an outburst, and destroys it accidentally.

“Now this book, this book I really enjoyed.” The kid with the Mohawk is pointing at a copy of The Things They Carried. “It was like the only book I’d read in four years when I read it. And these guys, they didn’t just carry the guns, like on the cover, but the thoughts they carried with them, you know.”

It’s in a dream, the way it comes out of him. In recognizing this kindred spirit, maybe he’s finally trusting in me to express how he doesn’t like the current book, about World War I, but he did like this one, maybe in his own way, he’s saying he’s sorry, don’t take it personally, but I just don’t like it. He goes right back to his seat and behaves the same way he always does, speaking profanely and profusely, at chugging intervals, the way one would chug milk on the morning of their 17^th birthday, their tattered flannel pajamas accentuating the newly cut Mohawk.

They sing songs by The Clash. The first time I heard it I jumped in my boots. It feels good, knowing that while they may be losing everything they can educationally-- the knowledge of the day slipping out with every fall and burn of their skateboarding that afternoon or maybe it’s lost in the fog that looms over the school at three pm-- that they still had time for the classics.

There’s something profound in the interaction that occurs sometimes. And that’s when I realize how young I am and how young I can be for a long time, if I just let my belief hang suspended, and keep believing in the empty shell of the pumpkin, because it will always be there, reassurance that things don’t change, that people don’t change, until they are finally destroyed, and put out of their misery.