Supine to the Motor

One year my beauties. One year my darling. One year, lover. One rotation, foul. One mean spin. One more go. Thank you darlin’. Thank you lover. Thank you foul beast of burden. Thank you angry Lord. Thank you my beauties. Thank you glorious, rotating foul ceaseless bitch. Supine to the motor.

And here we go. Go go go > > >

Pilot was a fagot

“Because he was a fagot!”
Maybe Grandma had a point. We somehow got onto a Jesus discussion at the Christmas table and Angie asked why they killed Jesus. They.
“You know, he suffered under the Pontius Pilot.” I was quoting verse.
Then Grandma answered, “because he was a fagot!” I assume she meant Pilot but who knows, she voiced her opinion and concern. That was enough. No one challenged the point.
The boy was in the adjacent room slamming a talking car into the wall. It blurted out an indiscernible blabber rhythmically with each collision. This was amusing to the boy. The designer got it right – SLAM (slight pause) CRACKLE BABBLE. Slam Crackle Babble is the language of boys. I started laughing, they thought I was laughing at the ‘fagot’ blurt. They.
Grannie was bored and that was that. “I hate this town.”
That’s more like it, I thought. I watched her, nodding my head in agreement.
“You never see anyone on the streets. Just watch out there during the day, you’ll see. Nothin’”
“Oh, you miss the shootings and robberies on the streets then,” Dad (her son) says.
“I don’t care, it was alive. This place, pardon my French, sucks.”
She was expressing and speaking to me specifically because we were engaged in conversation and I was asking. It was her experience and she felt good expressing it.
“She’s got early onset Alzheimer’s,” Laura whispers as if in explanation of the digression.
“We gotta get you outta here or buy you a gun or something.” That’s seems to be my standard answer – get a gun. No one ever laughs but I still say it.
“Pilot was a fagot,” I tell my brother while he watches the kids play. He ignores me.

So this is Christmas. Lennon, that brilliant bastard, maybe even that particular line, set up the tone for my entire generation. Then some damn fool shot him in the back. Some other stuff happened then Cobain blew his own face off with a shotgun. That brings us to now. I could be shallow. I know it’s a response to the plastic materials from Singapore invading my hypereality scattered about the hardwood fields of play. I decided to drink wine and be merry even though the stress of being the least wealthy in the room was piercing my frontal lobe. They ask questions about my well being wearing sad expressions – eyes averting to the floor. No way to win it. Grandma had something to express so I thought we should talk:

“What year were you born Me-Ma?”
“Huh?”
“What year were you born?”
“Nineteen Twenty Five.”
Jesus H Christ. “Wow, that makes you eighty two.”
“I don’t know Danny, I stopped counting years ago.”
“And you were born here?” (In the U.S., she’s pureblood Italian)
“My Brother was two when we came here.”
“And he’s older than you?”
“He’s the oldest and I’m the youngest. But Danny, you should have met my mother, she was a pip. She didn’t take nothin’ from no one. This one time my father brought back a broom and the handle broke and she went right back to the hardware store and demanded a new one. She couldn’t speak a lick of English but she knew she was gonna get a new one. You know what happened Danny? That man wouldn’t give her one so she took the broken handle and smashed the rest of them. Broke all the other handles on the brooms. She was no dummy,” Grandma says, laughing into an emphysema coughing fit.
“Sounds like my kind of girl.”
“Oh Danny, you would have loved her. She - was - a - pip. Imagine her telling this to a judge and remember she didn’t speak much English at all.”
“And your parents spoke English?”
“No. They spoke to us in Italian growing up. Everything was in Italian.”
“So you understand Italian?”
I spoke some Italian words but she didn’t recognize them. I had an awful accent and she was used to dialect no doubt. “And where did you learn English?”
“What do you mean? I learned it here.” She meant Newark. She was born, raised, married, divorced, lived in Newark New Jersey her entire life. Went to Vegas twice and that was it. The rest of her days were in Newark.
“Grandma, we gotta talk more.”
“You like this stuff Danny. Every time you’re here you want to hear about this stuff.” Which isn’t exactly true but I wish I asked more fervently and earlier.
It was time to unwrap gifts so we attended to it. I knew I’d be back and soon. Grandma needed me and I needed her, had to figure out the reason for all my hair and buffoonish charisma and she had to escape the boredom of the new house and the madness that ensues.

Plus it was Christmas, however stupid, and a long line of bold and brave people brought it to me and me to it. And the kids were learning in rapid succession. I reached for more wine.

Sum Tactonics (Part 3)

All my hair was gone. At one point I just noticed it. My lover remained smooth and scaly but for me, where the mammalian façade was such a remarkable quality to my naked body the change required adjustment. She never mentioned it but on occasion I would catch her looking at me oddly as if I were new and unfamiliar. And then I’d see one, a dark black hair on the pillow. Without discussion I would, or she would, brush it away and sooner than later it would be swept up and gone.

We mostly attended to the bump and I became protective of her breasts, touching and teasing them more and wrapping them at night and cupping them when we made love as if they were the very source of it. I would wake and cup them for fear they would freeze and I would love her and the bump made me love her more and the change excited a change in me. She loved me, except for that glance of confusion I would catch at my own shifting body and the changes in scent which were stilled with the cold, she loved me. This pleased her (the love), I knew, because she slept deeply and more soundly than before. Since I wanted to be close and it was required of us due to the lack of heat I began gardening around the home. The plants required heat lamps and the lamps were all together pleasant to work with except when they scarred the scales which subsequently flaked off revealing a type of soft membrane, hypersensitive to any stimuli. Society too would notice the membrane and some would visibly revile in expression to accommodate the feeling. What was expected was proper bandaging and masking of the wound as to keep any anxiety of infection at bay. Not that there was any infection more dangerous now that we were changed. Collectively, I think, we had reached a limit or the limit had reached us. Enough was unpleasant through the change so why call attention to anything more? Plus seclusion was becoming more difficult given the rapid decline of heat so it made practical sense to be aware of illness and infection given our close quarters and frequent interactions. Still, I loved the gardening despite the charred scales and continued. When the vines had grown to encompass the north wall and the African violets blossomed we had entered into each other so thoroughly that, if it wasn’t for raw practicality, I would swear we could have survived the outdoors as if our blood was still warm and pumping through a four chambered heart.

Sunday

Winter came on slow. Then it was here. The colors were gone replaced by the gray drone sky and the ceaseless frozen draw of the lake. The bills kept piling on and the birds moved to the far building escaping the pigeon guards. I was with those bastards, felt the pins slowly sticking up through the floor, but there was nowhere to go so I piled on more blankets and looked for signs. They came. The signs agitated me so I took Z’s car for a spin to get away for a spell. I wasn’t even out of the lot when some kids threw a bunch of snowballs at the car as I sat for the light to turn. These balls had rocks in ‘em though. Usually I’d support the disruption but the rocks pissed me off so I slammed it into park, got out and gave chase. The kids didn’t budge and I knew it was trouble but I approached anyway like a mad bear. I was met with a dull thud to the clavicle. When I came to, my left arm was limp, the car in idle and the kids gone. Some bear. The blow somehow broke the skin but left the clavicle intact. It wouldn’t have made a difference anyway since the insurance ran out a few months back. I got back in the car and drove with my good arm. I let the skin bleed and scab to the T, fuck it. I drove south in search of wild turkey and dreamed of California, a gun, and a new perspective.

Sum Tactonics (Part 2)

O \(ˈ)ō\. A sound appeared . It was a loud and sustained buzzing like an idling jet plane that continued without reprieve. It arrived one morning like a break in the clouds and replaced the silence. Over time silence came to mean that sound and the silence penetrated cities, towns, homes and walls with equal force and equal timbre, traveling efficiently over miles like a whale call.

About three weeks had passed when I noticed my lover’s soft and scaly tummy begin to bump and I knew it was a child. I knew it was because I had dreamed of it and because I wanted it to be. Inside her scaled skeletal leather exterior frame a child was growing. This wasn’t mentioned except through the attention we gave her soft belly and the focus which shifted from our external ferocity and meaty diet to the bump and the possibility of repeating her fallow eyes and slender hips in a new being. We didn’t speak over the silence but a joy crept in which cloaked our movements and slowed our anger and stilled my questions and tamped her sadness. As days passed to weeks we behaved more like the creatures we ate than dutifully private reptilian citizens. The neighbors knew our joy because we danced it over the bone dry chill and spied their movements for signs of the little one and bated our desire to scoop it up and study its behaviors and consume it whole for the knowledge it sustained. And still we didn’t speak of it and made love in the night when it was coldest, exchanging all our hapless bodies would allow.

Sum Tactonics (Part 1)

There we were. Sly bodies tangled up like snakes, pale and soft and cold. Without a decent mind we’d be dead in a short night but as it was we held on through the worst of it by piling on blankets and making love so close and so long we shared heat with perfect efficiency. I must have told her ‘I Love you’ a thousand times and I didn’t care to hear it back. This was it. We were lucky to be alive. I was lucky to be in Love.

The following morning everyone looked reptilian. The neighbors passed their child through the freezing air with flickering tongues, scaled skin and yellow eyes. The vehicles cranked with frozen emotionless squeals over dry ice and smoky cold waterways. They made it out, most of them, to the schools and daycares and offices with predictable calm and order; wives and mothers flicking tongues over frozen, dry, clear, precision air on to the scaled skin cheeks of children and reptile husbands and lovers. Very few of them, if any, in sum, were lonely. Some were dead. I had made it one more night and she whom I loved made it one more night and it felt like every night coming would be draught with the same utterly ordinary urgency. I made note of the urgency. My lover did not. So I kept the thought of the urgency to myself and looked for clues to determine if what I had experienced was illusion or delusion or hyperactive psyche. But I kept the looking to myself until enough time and distraction went by that it passed for an ordinary part of my person, just as the cold became, without event, an ordinary reality of our passing. More died, but more always had died, so the urgency, even in death, was familiar and ordinary. As reptiles we didn’t weep for the dead, instead we contracted and slithered and entangled ourselves which helped preserve our time in the cold that crept each day closer to absolute zero. And all of this happened without conversation or acknowledgment or circumstance. It simply was the way we were. It was society. Different than what we had been but altogether civil and polite and living as one unit, better than chaos and abandon and the alternative which we saw played out in fantasy on television screens in heated halls and parlors. Only the heat would preserve us, and food and water, but the heat was the corner stone and the best heat was found between the warm thighs of a lover. Love was action and action belief. I believed and she simply was better than belief. But I believed because it occurred to me to do so and this was better than active disbelief and far better than despair. So I believed and continued to remain in love and love remained with me and she never questioned it and we stayed warm to our daily delight and surprise and I continued to withhold my questions and she continued to be and we made love when I asked her to and when she slithered about me and when there was no reason not to.

gone gone

“Who does that?” She was pissed.
“It’s not real,” but I was confused.
“Total disrespect.” I felt awful, used, naked and ashamed. But I stood up and faced it.
What a fuckin’ experiment to reveal it all, live time in words across the web. I felt pretty sure no one would care about it, probably forever but maybe in some years if I kept at it and if it was relevant and if it was art or turned out to be art. Still, I felt ulcerous and queer and gangly.
“But it’s not real,” I repeated. And it’s not or at least that is how I think of it. It’s an experiment in reality, like a snowglobe or that Jim Carrey movie where he figures out his constructed reality and busts out after the clues don’t add up. But this is different because I put myself in it, so I know and I control it, somewhat, except for the raw thoughts, those are just risk. I told T this and he sent me home with a pile of Japanese Anime – I found it gross and violent and overly sexualized and somewhat boring. I never got anime, the “ghost in the machine” n such. Salami gave me some a while back and be damned if I couldn’t figure out the allure. Cartoons in general. I assumed it was my problem, that I was missing the code. I blamed my philosophy education. Philosophy will fuck a man up, make him lose all perspective. Then again, it does the opposite to some. What’s the use, I thought, so I took T’s pile home and decided to project it constantly until something clicked. After three days I called him up to report the progress or lack thereof. He was laid up, on pills from a disaster at the dentist. Apparently African Americans have extra long molar roots and the Doc had to dig ‘em out for two hours. He sounded relaxed at least. We had a short conversation about the anime when something clicked – all that sex and violence was like a fantasy, it’s a mixture of thoughts and dreams and reality wrapped in line drawings and mock motion. It made sense, had the power to trigger undeveloped or base things, sort of like a hypo-real and/or hyper-real fantasy. Like pouring the mold out the head of common man. I turned the projections off and decided to sit on that for a while and look again in a few weeks. The sexual images stuck with me the longest. Sex is better than violence.
I thought I’d better write about it. That this blog and what it reveals was/is a year long event to end on January first. I could look back at it like a mirror and use it like a mirror to reflect light and ideas across time. It’s also a hammer, but the musical kind, one that strikes strings like a mallet or bone. You may not like the tunes but there IS music and it holds a power. I wanted to hear it first. So in response I found a program that would do just that. I downloaded it, installed it and opened the blog, all 60,000 some words of published and unpublished stuff. But it loaded as gibberish and played in a melodic brief so beautiful I recorded it with the microphone on the adjacent studio tower before closing down. It’s the first and only time I had done so. Later I found that the program corrupted the file irreparably. The blog and all its subtle confusion, side notes and unpublished briefs were gone for good. What’s more, the computer was backing up at the very moment this happened and the backup file recorded as the corrupt one. It is gone. What remains is a short distorted audible sequence which itself disappeared while converting from native to editable format. It too, is gone. Everything else is live and lived and yours. The rest is pure fiction.

Hawks n' Crows

Have I left polite society? How many friends do I know who will walk away or take sides or get even remotely close to base and honest things? Like grunting animals when the den is felled and exposed, redacted and queer to the influence of the mother. When there is not a leader among us, the tension spreads and when the tension spreads men will curse neighbors for saving scraps or storing them or devouring them or for failing to share. Separate wheat from chafe and each will not recognize the other, each grown in the same sifty fields, content to point out the reasons for his own hideous demise. That man will be an example for the petty and the weak. The rest will not care.
…
“I don’t envy your life,” says M Cavot.
Not much I could say to that. “Oh?.”
“I enjoy my kids too much.”
“Of course. I enjoy your kids too much.” But the reason to make the distinction seemed odd. What of the belief in that still small voice or guidance or courage but then again maybe everyone follows it to some extent. Which wouldn’t bother me. It always seemed a precious thing to be human, of all things to be. Many billion still small voices is still smaller than many trillion plankton or the countless sands or lunar dust or chess combinations. Plenty of room for fancy. I wondered if it was arrogant or insane to follow unclear dreams or to describe them as voices or visions. I thought everyone wanted fiction, it helps clarify the living.
“Well, whatever, we had a good time.”
“You playing world of warcraft?” I ask half mocking because I knew he was.
“You think nicotine is addicting. This thing is worse.” He adds in a lower voice as if imparting a secret.
“Right. Pure escape from boredom that doesn’t involve mindless staring. At least you’re punching keys.”
“I know it.” He adds in that same low breath clearly distracted by the game.
“OK, I’ll let you get back to it.” Adding ‘I love you’ in my mind as we are not the kind to say it or at least that wasn’t the habit. I know the final step will include speaking those things.
…
“We won,” says AG.
“I suppose if anyone can tell, it’s you.” We were discussing politeness and feminism and the reaction I had to a recent grad show – beautiful but stale. Well, not stale but safe. Everyone loved it which tells me something, namely that it doesn’t challenge anyone so for me, what’s the use. I told AG this. She responded favorably. I wasn’t a threat and that’s the way she likes her men but with sincerity. I didn’t want to be a threat anyway, so we enjoy each other.
“You should have spoken up,” AG adds.
I let a huff of air escape through my nostrils.
“Enough was said.”
“Do you still feel like a foreigner?” She’s an expat from Europe, still with enough of an accent to call her experience of America into question.
“Always,” she answers.
“Always,” I repeat. “I think that is how you can survive this place.” “Very few here can claim such a perspective.” This animates our conversation because it’s true and it flatters her strengths. Still I said it sincerely. We get back to the impolite thing.
“I mean when I look at her stuff I think of Marina Ambrovic and I think she missed the opportunity.” I was attempting to make the connection that a sheltered American girl from suburban New England perhaps lacks the engagement necessary to roil anything but polite applause. Like a Josh Groban concert. Still I liked them too. I wished they were mine. That’s when AG added the polite line.
“Well, these are more polite.” It’s true, I wondered if that made sense. I felt gruff.
“That’s a good point.” I wonder if I’m just used to scrapping, that I miss too much in through the heat of my skin, always boiling.
“Where’s the new form?” I ask because it’s my thing now. I want to see work stretched to an undeniable new form and full of youth and something real, not just studied.
“It was a good show but you should have asked about that and see what HER answer was.” “I was watching a film with my daughter and it was pretty much all sex and motorcycles and she was really embarrassed to be watching it in front of her mom and dad even though they’re both artists.” She switched to the third person for identity and I made a note of it.
“Really?”, I grunted again through my nose. She obviously loved her kid.
“It was a wonderful movie. We didn’t care but she did.” I understood because we all come from that same roiling catholic repression. It takes bold action to squash the cage. Most can’t survive it. They say the first seven years of life will define a man’s thinking. That is what the church will do to a youth before he even formulates a question. It fails but in a sense, it succeeds in taking hold of what a mind will struggle against. Even Warhol spent his days deflecting the Catholic question. I understand that sweet bastard more every day. Why else would one be so focused on boredom or violence or mindless pop idolatry? I feel certain to meet him in hell. Also, I’m sure he’s not gay and that he believes in love. The beautiful protestant American century just squashed that possibility out of him. What an honest being.
The rest of the conversation was pleasantries. We ended in talk about trauma and getting in on AthruZ’s train. But more about that later.

Decisionals

There I was in court for the second time in as many months. This time it wasn’t me, thank god. The last time I stood in court was for a near fist fight I had with an overzealous cop named Bambi who thought it was right and good to give me a ticket for not having a light on my bicycle. I was doing my civic duty and cycling to the bar instead of wielding a deadly vehicular weapon. I told her so. She was unimpressed. After engaging in a little semantic dance, she called another car and had mock conversations with the other troopers (one mustachioed like a villain in a western flick) before releasing me with the ticket, hand on pistol. I shot the western fellow a challenging glance and walked my bike home like a listless hobo. As usual my belligerence accomplished nothing but I fought the ticket anyway and the judge saw it my way. Go figure. The current engagement was for a friend. She needed it and I felt obliged. She walked away with a reprimand and a fine after a second DUI offense, unheard of. I have good luck with the courts if not enforcement. That night we got good and drunk to celebrate. I drove.

When I got home I felt a crushing depression for missing _ _ _ _. It slowly ate away at my heart and mind until I caved and sent a message. No response. It had been four days since I contacted her last and that wasn’t exactly a pleasant encounter. Poor girl had to be hurting and so was I so I caved further and sent a few more texts. No response. Typical. Then I got desperate and sent a whole bunch of messages and called about five times and emailed and finally called her family for news (there was a small chance she had overdosed or some other bullshit). She was fine. I felt like a prick and she got what she needed – to know that her absence caused me a bunch of hurt. After a few days it was clear she wasn’t going to call. I was as good as dead, again. On the practical end, she still had my shit though and something had to be done about that. Loyalty with lovers is fucked up. Amazing we survive it at all.

Later that night at the bar I met a girl. I told her I liked her so we made out near the toilets. It was one of those strange nights where many women showed interest. I must have showed the hurt. I felt vulnerable and I was. Chics dig that. They also like assholes, especially ones that’ll go down on them the first date. I planned on doing that with this beauty except the drinks added up to the spins and I puked out the car window on the way to her place. Once there we smoked a bowl which made the situation critical so I had her drive me home and puked in the bushes in front of the building through the harsh light of her Honda headlamps before heading in. I told her it was a sign. The next six hours I slept slung over the public toilet working up food from two days prior; rock star style. I would’ve puked up my asshole if it wasn’t attached. There was nothing fun about it. I even thought of calling an ambulance then recalled the acute depression episode and decided death would be preferable. It took a full 48 hours to be back to 85% capacity. It felt like a premonition, like God was saying “you will die alone in disgrace. And your lesson will be, accept it, for I am lord.” The lord speaks to me through disgrace; a voice of disreason clouded by the knowledge that it was planted there by my ancestry before choice and before free will. Now he taunts me with unreasonable clarity and love for my enemy at the most dire of moments when hatred would serve me far better. Those who the Lord loves most, he tortures. He plants a perfect bitter seed of truth deeper than flesh. I pitied Saint Sebastian. Heaven is a vat of shit for martyrs and common men, a florid dish of perfect disease. I struggled not to call my wife for how much I understood, how much I loved her. I saw my reflection in the puke; it bent up through the white porcelain which made me dizzy and racked my dirty mind with pain. I felt sorry for God and the job he had with this filthy lot. Then I sat it out as in a truce, my body in pain, grateful it wasn’t my mind. A diseased body is far easier than a diseased mind.

I called the girl three days later to apologize. Apparently it wasn’t so offensive because she came over immediately and fucked me. I was terrible, racked with pain and guilt over my _ _ _ _. Very little of it made sense. I told her how I felt before I put it in, told her I didn’t want to, showed her it was limp and unimpressive. Yet somehow from the gloom it rose, I put it in, worked her and fell sound asleep. The lord stayed silent and I knew I’d leave her too, maybe soon, maybe in a year. It was too soon to tell and I far too stupid to stop it.

Cocks On a Roost

_ _ _ _ showed up unannounced at the studio door after three days and a series of attempts at contact. I let her in after some protest, fucked her and sent her home with no promises. There’s nothing like rejection to get a woman excited. I thought, “I’m an asshole”, but at least I’m honest. She was extra wet between her legs and it felt relieving to be wanted and inside her. As this occurred I felt the flickering desire for my wife die down to a dark chilling ember and wondered how long it can hold even though I already knew the answer. Every woman must know this, that in the hearts of men our lovers haunt us and can linger for lifetimes. Cheaters, like bumblers, share a different plight but the haunting remains, a disease of the heart or mind or both. These truths are complex and I know them now like I know the lay of the land; essentially blind to the satellite view when traversing it except through plots to highest ground and clues from celestial bodies.

Full of myself and my triumphant cock I pranced around the following morning like a jubilant fawn. I thought, this was the breakthrough; this is what I needed; to know what I want, say what I mean and mean what I say. This was the final piece I was looking for, an end and a new beginning. I was the man again and this wasn’t gonna change anytime soon. Behave or be gone. My way goes. Confront it, anyone, with all the tricks and tools of my trade. Make it useful. Make it sing. Make love. Awaken to power and use it well and good and fierce as a bull and as graceful as a loon. All diplomatic unrest awash by the complete acceptance of poverty and the realized dream of godly love and earthly filth. Accept it all. Weep and be let down and live broken and better in triumphant accord. Like a child. With resolve.

When I returned home from work that evening, after hitching a ride across town from a friend who, by all indications, only tolerated the favor, I found the studio door shut and the key non functional. I knew but didn’t want to believe it for a moment. My studio lock had been changed due to back rent owed. I wrestled with it for awhile and realized this was indeed the case; locked out of my home and workspace through brazen arrogance and ingenious stupidity. From the neighbor’s studio, I made the necessary calls, paid the bill to the best of my abilities and looked forward to some days of rationing and further humility. Some cock; with no coop to roost. I noticed the rails were busy with cars filled with scrap metal as I spoke with Sterz about the boy and recent choices that left him alienated from his family. He’s an artist, what else is new. The boy started school recently and the series of social tests and integrations have begun. They’re gonna need help and friendship and conversation and celebration and discipline and love. I would too. We spoke for a few hours until the burly locksmith and the kindly superintendant showed up. The repo man couldn’t look me in the eye as I bore into him with kindness and acceptance. I understand duty and work and hold no ill but I can’t respect a man who doesn’t lock a stare while speaking or acting his role. I exchanged a check for passage and rested easy that night in meek brutishness watching the full moon rise to the east through the camera’s electronic viewfinder. I looked around at what was left of my stuff and realized I could let it all go, I didn’t need any of it, not the old negatives or the laptop or the cameras or the clothing or books or bike or any of it. As a celebration I searched online for some decent porn, couples who appeared to be in love with no violence and minimal anal, jerked off and fell into a deep and restful sleep.

hallow's eve. halloween.

The laptop is my torch. It replaces big lands of the west, kicking up dust in bland blinding cloudless form. Darkness settles down and up and down from the studio window in the fallout of the train yard steady with it holding failures and empty threats and raw footage of hope and letters to lovers and queer stories of boys looking for love as desperate and honest as bandits. The biggest lesson is that this is possible. Sweet poverty. Love poverty and water thickens. Give away what can’t be kept and walk light with what comes. Ask for nothing, receive nothing. Make what is true what to the birds is true. Accept the dirty boundless mean of flat borders and electronic blue. And write it all down, prose and poems and stupidity like laughter. The lord they say will come and scoop it up, use what is given, ask for nothing, speak.

One year ago tonight I met my lover and one year since that night I leave her.

Confessionals 2 (to be removed after one week)

The hot screen hits me like a bag of nails. Like a boy in Mexico who murdered his family by revolver and shipped his psyche off the human scale. That damnable human scale, the one that keeps even the faintest of deceit held to solid ground. Confessionals number 2.

I can ask directly, what goes through a man’s mind? What compels action? Despair compels it. The most noble and heinous acts arise from this neutrality. One is celebrated and the other is punished while both get immortalized. Even Marilyn Robinson knows that the hidden story is the moral tension that arises, even from banal acts, in the secret parts of consciousness. The rest is a dream. The "Darlin’, I love you", like a mantra built into spirit however unwelcome at times. The shaky hatred of fathers is in there too like a poem, even a sappy one. One line after the next like a sunrise before the boy awakes and the dream becomes the struggle again. Like the damnable change at the ordered and predictable turn of planets. Get your guns boys, firm your resolve because we ARE going to land and point toward our enemies and end them before they seize our land, bringing history with it and, once more, action. Science applied to these emotions doesn’t help but it also doesn’t hurt.

V-daddy in the back of his mind writes a book in his uncannily ordered way. It’s about common and popular myths that a public seizes and believes and sells which are built upon no reasonable science, even after studies and good practice and good thought have proved it beyond a doubt to be of no consequence. Like vitamin C doing anything to prevent a common cold. The advice is found in travel guides, in grocery stores, in doctors’ offices, in the goodly advice of mothers and grandmothers and nurses and well wishers despite carefully constructed and detailed studies that prove it a myth. Or, say, the beneficial effects of pomegranate juice, or that coffee increases risk of breast cancer or any myriad of notions that reasonably have been studied and shown to be myth. It says, we have a need to believe there is control. Recently I saw a published study, or more accurately I heard a summarized news report of a study that conclusively showed no life prolonging effects of positive thinking in cancer patients. On average, according to the report, people who think and live well and those who suffer curmudgeonly through terminal cancer die at the same rate and, on average, at the same time. It doesn’t however assess quality of life and living excellent because, I believe, there is yet to be a convincing measure of this. My grandfather died a frightened man, loathing his place in society, his family legacy and his final days in the VA hospital. I had no good words for him although he grabbed my hand and wept for an answer. My grandmother died with her family near, my mother too ill to watch it as she breathed her last when her lungs finally failed. I couldn’t help although I wanted to. I remember seeing her for the last time on Easter Sunday for a short visit as we all shuffled off to my uncle’s for the last time as a family. In wealthy families, poverty is a scorn and akin to stupidity or helplessness. The plans are fixed and distributed via unspoken lines and the events unfold like tests to be overcome. Most of it is not lived, or, more accurately, the experience of the poor is that the event is not lived. Finality is wisdom.

Confessionals due. The hardest and most painful loss of my young life, getting younger by the moment, if it has not been demonstrably and painfully clear over these past 10 months has been the loss of my wife. Knowing so, it continues to be pointed out that one (that is, I) must not harbor these things. Clear them away, move on and ahead, wisdom follows. How sad a reminiscer and how stupid a man and weak a soul that would not live what sound reasoning and time and health have awarded. But still life continues, the work and exploration continue, good food is eaten, good friends shared, good love shared and it is not unlike me to audibly exclaim, “I love life”, as a reminder that the excellent things experienced are profoundly worthwhile and the fact that pain follows and a need arises to express the thing and connect in visions or words or thoughts or feelings exists and that I stand on the clumsily successful actions of my predecessors and enjoy an education and mind and heart and brazen arrogance to exclaim it. Still, in times of crisis, in the dull thud of chemical neurosis and the clinical reality of depression and panic I think of suicide. The hardest time was just after the news that my wife, whom I love, announced, through insistent inquiry, that she was in love with another and was willing to abandon any hope of reconciliation while consummating that new love in my former home and among the company of my former friends. I begged at first in my heart and then in words and then fell ill. I could barely move and every morning and evening was darker and shakier and full of horror. I tried all I could; even immediate dating to relieve the reality but the despair was thicker than blood and I fell more ill until it became clear that the wrenching reality of it would not end and I did what all medical advice would indicate I do and reported to the emergency room after many weeks of agony and all friends and discussion were exhausted and the need for some relief was necessary or the blade would fall and I would see a plan through to end myself, over a woman and a damnable introspective heart and overactive mind. The usual routes of speaking to the clinicians had failed, resulting in a 3 week wait to see a psychiatrist as was indicated by the reported symptoms. But I knew it was acute and I knew I would do it or I would do what I did and use my head and follow the advice of countless suicide prevention websites and pamphlets and clinical advice and seek immediate help. So I did this and called good friends in Jersey to report the action as my last resort to fleeing town or sanity or life. Eric, understanding bi-polar madness and empathizing with depression, drove me to the hospital and waited while I paced in fear and horror for the attendant to take my information and failing mind into the helping hands of the medical community. What I got instead was involuntary restraint, stripped of my shoes and belongings and moved in an ambulance across town to a psyche ward of a neighboring hospital where I was placed in a room to wait alone for hours on cold vinyl furniture and linoleum flooring. The attending doctor eventually interviewed me, determined there was nothing they could do and released me. The shoes and belongings were returned. I was escorted to the exit and set free into the dark cold of night. I called a friend, who picked me up and saw me though the rest of it on her couch in stunned terror. I still get bills from the various departments, doctors, and hospitals including the ambulance company. The friend doesn’t speak to me anymore. This all happened during the month directly preceding the completion of the visual component of my thesis work, the entire reason we had moved to this place and the focus of my study for the preceding two years.

Decorative Sword

Dad calls. I answer. “Hey, Danny, listen, I got a decorative sword.”

“What?”

“Ever since I can remember, I mean ever since I could remember, I’ve wanted a decorative sword.” This reported with enthusiasm in thick Jersey accent.

“Oh, ok.” In all the years I’ve known the man I can’t recall a single instance of discussion about a decorative sword. “Where’d you get it?”

“Sometimes I just leave the TV on to the home shopping station. You know, when I’m dozing off. Most of what they got on the TV there is real crap but every once and awhile there’s somethin’. Then they put on this sword and I thought, this is the one for me.”

Jesus. “Oh, ok.”

“It has like an ivory handle and the blade is like the Washington monument but really nicely done. They do the fine etching work with laser. I thought, if there ever was a decorative sword for me this is it.” “I’ve always wanted a decorative sword but never really found the right one for me but this is the one.”

The word ‘sword’ is always preceded by a ‘decorative’ indicating safety has been considered.

“Ok.”

“It comes with a 500 piece cutlery set. I really didn’t want the cutlery but I had to take it with the package.”

“Seriously? What are you gonna do with ‘em?”

“I put ‘em in the trunk.” “I’m just gonna give ‘em away.” “You know the Saturn’s got 280,000 miles on it now, I think I can get another 100,000 out of it.”

“You know, I’m not sure it’s legal to drive around with that many knives in your trunk. You might want to at least check about that.”

“Well, I really don’t have any other place to put them right now Danny.”

“Ok. Well, I gotta go, I’m right in the middle of something here. Congratulations on the sword. Maybe you can kill some Ninjas with it.”

“Yea right. No, this one is just decorative.”

“Yea, I know, It’s a joke.”

“I know,” Dad answers in half-mocked laughter.

“Ok, I’ll talk to you later then. Thanks for calling.”

“Bye bye.”

“Bye.”

I look over and _ _ _ _’s asleep with the dog. She looks fierce, like a sleeping samurai and the dog looks mangy. We’re nestled in at the lake house, the new one, a little cottage place up the road from the lake front. It all sort of unfurled this way, so instead of sleeping at the studio we’re getting soft under the good fortune of family property. I’m up now, the television like a block of cinder, and listening to the woman across the lawn to the back lose her shit. “I don’t give a fuck. That’s my kid. Maybe you should tell your girlfriend…” All of this through tears and weeping and the battle cries of domestic foulness. Poor girl. I felt sick from fast food burritos so I jammed a finger in and puked it up like it was a routine piss. Standing at the mirror my face looked older, eyes dark and the scruff had turned to a beard. I sat there scratching it, forcing a smile on and off. It was a hot night, some 65 degrees in late October, nearly unheard of. I pop a beer, _ _ _ _ still asleep on the couch.
I look down at the yellow manila envelope. An entire year and there they are, separation papers, not even divorce. What is there to do really? Suck it up and live it. Any pain over the thing is wasted. I have the answers. Move on. Nearly all the friends have moved on, most I don’t even hear from anymore. Some have clearly taken sides, a whole shit storm of abandonment. Not even granted release. The fucked up thing is that I see both sides. I can understand their choices. I can understand hers, even from the beginning. I can see her actions as relationship suicide, I can see mine as indecisive. I can see a whole mess of others who never really live their thing. Success for me now is survival and laughter and good love, the kind that weeps.

Eddie 3

Mack

Birds of Prey

A hawk perched on a stop sign at the head of the cul-de-sac flanked by the orange cones of a construction zone. I was a stranger in a borrowed Cadillac, obviously a visitor and the residents made note of it. Posts and fences and high tension wires gave the birds of prey an altered landscape and the suburbs yet another constructed reality. The neighbors spent the weekend tending lawn tossing glances at the new visitors making note of how I walked the dog leash-less and stood center street to watch the rhythm of machines graze the conquered land. I recalled the chores I did as a child. Weekends didn’t begin until the room was cleaned, the house dusted and vacuumed and, in the fall, the wood split and chopped. There were three of us to tend the latter, the boys to the wood during the season and my sister to extra house duty. Loading the station wagon five to ten loads with swamp oak and scrap wood, occasionally the cops would question the legality of it, our home planted firmly within the greater New York area where the land was either owned by others or swampy flood plain. That is, the places that were not yet mall lots and golf courses. It was hard to explore it as a wild place although in hind sight I could see it was. Humans scattered it like wolves and our trashy little borough had its fair share of failures and dramas from the flooded river banks up the mountain through to the neighbor’s secret glue sniffing habit as his wife battled the family with concealed bi-polar rage. He would eventually lose his job and mind and fall homeless sleeping for a spell in a shed behind my mother’s long since functional pool which fell dead and unmaintained a year or two before my father left embattled, as he was, with steady layoffs and other emasculating gestures of corporate strategies in the nearby cosmopolitan metropolis of Newark, there in the shadows of its glorious neighbor. Not before however my sister and I took a number of beatings for our collective failures as my brother escaped through study and general good behavior to Syracuse University with his early interest in computer technology. I chased girls and fell prey to my emotional sensitivities while maintaining a steady flow of personal drama including early bar fights and a series of near arrests. I did however have enough sense, usually at the final moment, to avoid total collapse with strategic observation of successful avoidance. And when the courts did become involved I stood my ground in clean dress and a prayer that next time I would avoid the foul. But I knew, as surely as I had seen the suburban wars around me unfurl, that I would have to fight my way out. Mostly because I couldn’t let my friends go, who also had to fight their way out, despite my uncles advice to leave them behind as I gained degrees and wisdom and facts confirming suspicions of an altered landscape just below the surface of the plane I learned to navigate in those early years.

Agamemnon Burger

Big B calls from Oregon. This is maybe the tenth time he's called in the past week but each time it's been a bad time or maybe I just didn't want to talk about the weather. It's been on my mind, call Big B, but before I do he calls again. I answer, "Hey B, how are you?" "Hi Daniel. So how's the weather? How's the weather there in Rochester?" I tell him. "How are things with you?" I ask. "How's church?" I remembered about his church deal after he belted the bitch at work, who subsequently took him to court and sent him low and soul searching. "Oh, I'm through my anger management classes now. I still go to church." "Yea, I remember that was going well for you." "Yea." It sounded like he was depressed again. I thought of probing for some answers but instead kept it light, I couldn't get into it anyway. I stood, arms crossed, watching the boy play with legos as I spoke. I could tell he was eavesdropping. There's a standing policy with the boy to use normal adult language but explain the consequences if the boy chose to use such language. There is also a policy of justice so poor behavior doesn't go unchecked. It's changed his Papa as much as it has shaped him.

I catch the date, September 10. 6 years ago, 2001, I was asleep in Wyoming with my betrothed in a little cottage house scheduled to be married in 13 days. Everyone knows what happens the next morning by now. I had fierce beliefs then, they're still fierce but somehow more practical. At least in theory. I still think that youth and the beliefs of the impossible are essential to life.

I felt depressed. "Well, OK B, stay in touch. I'll make it out there sooner than later." We exchange goodbyes. I think of him, out there, probably like he thinks of me, out there. I could tell he wants some beers with the boys. I think of Jennifer and wonder where she is. That was my first real trip to the mountains, Big Sky, Montana. Where I first met Big B. The place where I learned to move forward and cover ground. To see all those views propelled by single human power. Over mountain passes, these are some of the strongest memories I have, Jennifer and making love on the pool table in drunken fits of escapology, climbing Lone peak by moonlight and the pure terror of what life could have been and the traps I felt I escaped. Waking through frost in August or freak storms that drop inches of snow and melt by midday. I left that place in the fog just after watching the OJ verdict delivered (lost ten bucks to that fuckin' killer), drove down to the valley and as I did watched the chip in the windshield slowly crack and spread from the upper driver's side, down and over the entire expanse. The remainder of the trip included a glare from that crack especially in the morning, driving east into the sun with two frightened cats on my lap.

_ _ _ _ sends a text, "I gotta take the dog to the vet. Wanna come?" I text back, "ok". I was out of the apartment early and had her car. "I'm almost done here. Call after." ":)" The dog had fleas. The doc poked her with inoculations, sold flea meds, collected fees and we left to find some food. Rochester, home of such fine cuisine as the garbage plate, a disaster of slop, we found a similar mess, got take out and looked for a park where the dogs could run and we could ponder our mess. No park but we did find a church with a fine wide soccer field next to it. We stop, the dogs jump out and immediately scattered the resident geese to boisterous protest. The dog is kind of an asshole, not that he chooses to be, to be fair. We leave him to it and sit at the little cloister under a headless statue of the virgin. Vandals must have beheaded and smashed her fingers. I appreciate that they left it, broken as it was. I sucked down the slop and ran the field like I meant it. The dogs followed now that the geese were appropriately quarantined to center pond, beyond the reach of convenient harassment. No sign of the missing parts anywhere on the grounds. I felt compelled to at least look, it was catholic. The poverty of our heritage, drenched as it is in wealth and scandal and the most stunning art, the kind that keeps me looking. That bitter fucker, we'll be in bed together someday. Life is too short not to feel the soft earth near, the dark soil of heritage.

Bjorn-Lass

When changes fail there is a kennel in NJ on the banks of the Passaic River not too far from the confluence of 3 major interstate roadways and about a 30 mile distance from New York City where I go to rest. It’s a place where change is measured in life spans. It moves at a steady rhythm and largely to the pace of the creatures it houses. At the kennel, on any given day, there are boarding dogs coming and going, fluctuating with the months and seasons. The summer is busiest as vacationers travel to the shore or further on and leave the family dog to our care. The winter is slow and, much like the wild creatures living within the kennel’s borders, we make preparations for the coming season by stocking and storing the bounty of the summer.

At the kennel, communication is kept direct and simple. Instructions and business transactions are written by hand in pen on scraps paper and the tools in use are primitive; shovel, hoe, pitchfork, metal bowls, palettes, water, everything in a constant state of reuse, all serving a direct purpose. There are at any one time fifteen to thirty pure bred Norwegian Elkhounds, two to ten humans, thirty or so chickens, three goats, two or three horses, four ducks, five or more cats, twelve fish, one apiary, three bullfrogs and a variety of wild critters who come from the surrounding forests and swamps to glean for scraps of spilled food and the occasional chicken stolen by a transient fox or hawk. In this place it is impossible to forget the land and our animal nature upon it. There are no days off, every animal, every day, needs care. The work requires a strong back and a humble heart. The animals eat, get sick, shit, on occasion fight or escape, break bones, get frightened, desire comfort, need all variety of domestic oversight. All of which must be attended to prudently, in a direct manner, with calm. All days at the kennel pass with equal importance from Christmas morning to the heat and humidity of August to the rainy days of March. Most who get to know this place return to it. Those who choose to skirt the periphery remain outsiders, although the invitation to enter is extended indefinitely. The dirt here receives the low and revered in the same manner, from a deceased goat to a house dog to a elderly human, all are laid to rest with due respect, all while work continues to meet the daily needs of those who’ve come. The work is honest because it must be, necessarily so. The kennel is my dirt floor.

3

Out the studio window, on view of the train yard, over the occasional sound of cars clashing along the lengths of rail, about a thousand gulls sleep on the roof of the school bus repair facility. When the cars screech so do a few of the birds in protest. They arrange themselves evenly spaced along the expanse. They showed up a few days ago, triggered, I believe, by a change in the weather.

Earlier today I saw a man laid out on in the intersection with his bike mangled and onlookers awaiting ambulance response. I put the van in park, opened the door and resisted the urge to do anything. Some off duty official was already on the scene. The man was squirming in pain. Onlookers urged him not to move presumably for fear of spinal injury. It was dark. The man likely ran through the light while riding along the sidewalk and got struck. I keep thinking, I should have gone to reassure him, no one was doing that. I backtracked and drove away instead. That unknown person is the most significant man I've encountered all month.

A week ago I was working in the studio when lightening hit outside the studio window. A deafening boom filled the room. I was stunned with blindness like a punch to the jaw. When I came to I stared out the east window and thought of home. If I had the choice I would travel east, pass home, completely circle the globe and return again from the west.

Prose and Poems

I call myself arrogant but I know it’s not true. It’s hard for me to even hold a grudge for an extended period. After a while, I see both views and understand and empathize with my aggressor or assailant or betrayer or victim. The problem is, with humans, you can never really know the experience of the other. Understanding may not help. It usually doesn’t. Know yourself, know what you want, act on this, stay focused. It’s all the makings of a good consumer, it is capital culture, knowing what you want and seeking out the means to that consumption. Time is the most costly and time is what often is needed most. To slip past danger with restraint and reason. With less.

Yellowstone burnt over in ‘88. The fires razed nearly three quarters of the forest and grasslands in that already hostile environment. I arrived after that for the first time. Before I had traveled there I hadn’t really considered it a destination. A break from the cyclical dronery of suburban squalor was more on my mind than a dormant volcano. I got both. Yellowstone is a bit in spirit like eastern Canada; there’re some wild things by way of tourism but the really outstanding places require exiting the vehicle and traversing land on foot. Rivulet’s and waterways and old stone and deep pools. Yellowstone can easily find your limits and test them. For example, a trek across the pitchstone plateau requires strategic water rationing. A few wrong decisions and you could perish in a few hours or a few days, in either case, a relatively short period of time. Moments then become acute and preparations essential. There’s no glamour in it, the challenge is against your own body and its corporeal limits and by extension really, death. Because death can come in an instant or over a day or a few days in a world where your safety is not a valued concern. You are out there, alone, or maybe with a friend and pass from the world as it is comfortable and connected and fast and instead into to the vulnerability of it. So I got used to vulnerability except that political death is far more violent a death and far more slow, and lessons of the land are useless to the dumb ass brawlers of NY State. These are no metro sexual pansies on the streets, they’re beasts hunting other beasts in vast droves of unemployment. The kind that on occasion will overrun police on foot patrol in order to score a Glock. I think of this and then the quiet life of obedience or the boredom of safety or the wretched possibility of failure. So everyday a story. Most days a failure. Rip a new asshole for the Romantics. Run away, make it yours and tie it up, bound to earth like a rotten bone. Your rotten bone.

The vast majority of stories go untold. There are more I’d like to tell here and now, more of the real thing, as it happens but as it is there are good reasons for silence. And some have counseled the best of reasons. They have stories too. Still, soon, relatively soon they’ll come out from the crust like hordes of marching insects.

Asian Marketing

All good stories start with a tragedy. It could be a small one or a peripheral one but you’ll find it there, the event that put bodies in motion. What makes a story truly tragic and/or terrible is if the motion produces unredeemable disaster and/or a dullard heroine. I like the sound of that, a dullard heroine, tragic.

The pills made me nauseous so I made myself puke around 3AM by shoving a finger to the back and fondling the soft palate. Up came the burger and rings from hours before still largely undigested. Maybe it was the food. More likely I was sick with worry. Down to the wire, no reliable jobs surface and money tight, to the point of necessitating a change, an immediate one. No real worries except that no job makes a whole bunch of shit difficult. Not the least of which is, where to lay ones head and possibly, where to lay ones girlfriends head? No matter, what’s another year of this in the long run, probably divine guidance. Maybe not the pills n shit but what the hell, if it relieves pain for a short time why not? It’s not like they make me lazy, matter of fact it’s the opposite, they provide relief well into the early morning hours when the machine hums with connective blips and rumbles in electronic accord, storing and shifting, compiling and stacking. Please forgive these words, their blatant poetics, they come out that way. It’s the way I sort of think, backwards, as if the sentence is being constructed like a baseball in flight, so by the time it reaches the batter the thing has twisted around so many times that only a hope keeps it intact, each time a fear that it’ll be batted out of the park like drunken swine. See what I mean?

Bah! No worries, more prayers, a different approach, another one, hours, days, wasted. It’s almost as if success requires a cross but probably not. I keep thinking, I should have left here a long time ago or I should have never come. Like Tommy say, “misery’s the river of the world” and/or “the world is kept alive by bestial acts.” Sure there’s good advice but most of it isn’t real. Take the lessons of the poor, when poor. Fuck. Refreshment, young coconut juice:

FRUITA with meat. FRUITA is a mouthwatering avalanche of flavor that will quench any type of thirst. By selecting only the choicest of fruits and picking them at the pinnacle of ripeness, nothing but the best is ever put in our drinks. That’s why we say. “when you want fresh and delicious, nothing satisfies you like a FRUITA”. Product Name: Coconut Juice. Ingredients: Young coconut juice, Sugar, Young coconut pulp.

hypoPalliasse

eVeryday a board meeting, a drawing board, a paddle, a tool, a palette, a rusted nail, a stool, a heap, a plastic toy, electronics, a magazine, entertainment, a dullard reflex, a musical, a mansion, a box, a babe, a hairy guy, a meddlesome cop, an overweight rogue, a depressed wife, a good friend, a horse, a Samaritan, a vagrant, a bastard, a lover, a mortgage, a fucking cardboard box, everyday something new, something more, something overwhelming, delicious poultry, a glass bead, a concrete block, everyday something a little bit more toward an itch and toward the relief of that itch, everyday exhausted and completely satiated and sane under hot, dry Western silt or icy Southern seas or Eastern florae or Northern loose sealed permafrost thin veiled sun. Everyday slumped in a fine leather saddle. A glorious thing.

Splendid, Part 4

I saw long lines of men falling over from disease and sickness, hordes of starving people who somehow failed at collective preservation falling by the second. I saw Laotian mothers and fathers caught in between conflicts, felled, as children watched in knowing predisposed silence in the water logged rice fields, shirtless, short and knotted from labor. I saw weeping troglodytes from the American suburbs as their devices failed and images could no longer sustain illusion as mud swallowed their gear and bodies and whimpering. I watched on as the waves on the shore lapped over fields of jellyfish flopping from the heat of the sea while sullen Tsunami survivors scraped the poison of the things from their fleshy ankles and elbows and genitals with long strips of palm which also cut like paper, thin and veiled and precise. I watched as angry Grackles tore at each other in swarms over the heat of diesel engines along the embankments of major freeways, smoking under a hot noon sun while drivers swayed and swatted at them from cabs and stacks of spilled cargo behind dessert masks, some exhausted and weak, coughing in the dust, some half cooked, slumped and smeared against the soft asphalt and gooey radials. Then I awoke. I got up and mindlessly set about a series of memorized gestures and tasks like cleaning teeth and wiping ass, and went to meet the boys who were out at the grounds making final preps for the opening which by the looks of the weather would not be well attended.

When I arrived the dawn had not yet come. I popped a beer and sat a distance away looking at the piece, straining to make out even a vague video image. Eric and I sat in silence as the night approached. Sterz remained standing, circling the grounds, slowly dragging his paralyzed right foot sideways over the uneven sod. As dusk arrived, the piece began to take shape. Pulses of movement faded into view until the whole thing was dancing sails, alive with movement behind a turbid veil of mist and drizzle, the fountain below adding the sound. I walked to the edge of the hill looking down across the landscape and settled back on the piece. Sterz approached, tossed his cane and gave a tight embrace with his head buried in my chest. He was pleased, this was success, it worked. Maybe twenty or so visitors came that night, most of them passing by on their way to and from university buildings or simply on a stroll across the grounds. We settled in to the nook near the back entrance of the building and sipped on beers and wine in shelter from the drizzle. Some moments pass and I break the silence, “This place has ghosts, there’s something here, there’s energy here.” I recalled my dream. Sterz says in his slow and ordered way, “I saw my son here before he was born. I was riding my bike, I remember it clearly, when I looked up and had a vision of him standing in Khaki shorts near a forest. Heather, of course, blew it off but I remember it clearly.” I smiled and let a knowing grunt of air escape my nostrils. “Yea?” “Yes,” he replied as he dug in the pocket of his jean jacket to get his wallet, popped it open and there was Calder against a tree in Kahki shorts, a picture he had taken within the month. Not but an hour ago he had showed it to old friends who came to visit when he recalled the vision. I grunt again and nod in solidarity and sip my beer. Eric looks over, nodding as well, “this is my favorite piece I think. This is a really beautiful.” Eric has installed a bunch of them from New York to Miami and back. “Thank you,” he responds. I round the bend to take a piss but get distracted by the toad hopping delightful along the cool damp concrete. Places where amphibians thrive feel right. It felt balanced.

I wished Sara was there and before her Alicia, I ached for it. I allowed this transgress and felt the absence hug my ribs as I stood pissing against the dark wall of the museum. My heart became heavy and I blamed the spirits. I smiled to fight it. On the way home we stopped at the Irish pub and I made paper roses for the girls and a couple of guys who seemed like they deserved it more. I order a plate of sweet potato fries which despite being on the menu actually offends the barkeep. The Irish are strange folks I thought and laugh to myself. Mack calls the Italian and the Irish “the niggers of Europe.” I laugh ‘cause it’s true, that’s the thing about stereotypes and because I’m Italian and because Mack feels comfortable enough to say such things. A few drinks and some well made roses in I get to talking to the girls at the end of the bar. I think they came with a couple of dudes but fuck it, I had a broken heart due to the over indulgent spirits and needed to talk to a woman to dispel the madness. Plus the dudes were dumb enough to leave them sitting there. “So what are you guys doing here?”, the more attractive girl sitting closest to me asks. I point to Sterz, “this man is an artist and we just installed his work at the Tang. This was opening night.” “Really!” she responds with mock enthusiasm. They were clearly unimpressed, not art lovers. “What are you doing here?" I ask. I’m a representative from Xerox and doing my usual rounds, my sister brought me here. She points to the girl next to her. “I gotta look out for her, that’s my job,” her sister adds. “How do you make those roses?” They like the roses. I laugh and think of Ellen. I think of her laugh and the viscosity of her cunt nectar, I was addicted to it, then look up still wearing a smirk and address the question, “I learned it from an Irish bartender in Jersey.” The thought of it made me think of sugary green shots with Everclear or some nasty shit delivered by girls in belly shirts and tight cutoff jean shorts. "Wanna learn?" They look eager. "Here, grab a bev nap." We begin the rose lesson which is going well until the sister’s guy returns and kind of ruins the vibe. “So what are you guys doing here?” She asks the question again, being drunk and short of memory and a little bit taken with the attention. I ask Sterz for a card and hand it to her. “What’s this?” she says intending to be feisty and flirty but it comes out as crass. She continues, “I’m supposed to go to this website and find stuff out?” I imagine her in Xerox marketing meetings barking at the new trainees, sorority girls recruited through ties to business, connections made generations prior. Sterz reaches back and snaps the card away which produces a rolling laugh among the boys. She gives it another go in attempts to save the conversation, “I just mean what am I supposed to do with that?” Sterz’ card is simple, just the website. It comes off as more crass even though the poor girl clearly wanted to restore the peace. “And what am I supposed to do with this?” She looks at her poorly constructed rose, the result of the lesson which I never got to finish. “I dunno, maybe you could Xerox it,” I quip with a smile and leave to have a smoke.

When I return, the girls are gone and the boys are sipping down the bottom third of a mug. We settle up and return to camp Community Court, spirits continuing to swoop and dive at my memory like owls hunting rodents. Sara sends a text in the early morning hours, it reads – Goodnight baby, I love you. It feels good, like a cloak as I fall into a restless sleep.

Splendid, Part 3

Umbrellas. It was my first thought and last on the equipment issue. Umbrellas have the right shape and really don’t interfere with the aesthetic. Preferably we’d get assistants to hold the umbrellas if and when the rain came. Eric mentioned Yost was in town, Yost is an organizer and would definitely be connected to the artists if anyone was. We called him on the issue but needed a backup plan just in case. This was the day of the event and the summer so who knows if anyone would be around. Sterz and I go to find the right umbrellas, he mentions black and golf. We need the things to cover a rather wide distance and be durable enough to handle a moderate wind if staked properly. We head out.

The cell phone rings. It’s Mack. I answer, “Mack, Tell me you’re in Tennessee?” Mack had a family reunion in Tennessee, southern black folk style catered deal, something like a couple hundred people. He’s broke and generally not a traveler so even 3 days away is a stress factory for him. He almost didn’t go, right down to the wire so I was eager to hear the answer. “Dude, I’m never taking Greyhound again.” Shit, he took a bus. “I could have warned you, it’d have probably been cheaper if you rented a car.” But I knew he didn’t drive much and the city is in his blood and all that distance is scary especially when entering the South, especially if you’re black (or so I’ve been told), whether it’s justified or not. “It took us 26 hours to get here after the bus got a flat. We were in the fucking hills of Kentucky when the thing blew out. Adrian and I got out, smoked a blunt and waited for like six hours for another bus to come. Fuck that.” In the same breath you could hear the excitement. That is what travel is, good stories both horrific and glorious. “Now that we’re here, it’s awesome. You wouldn’t believe what they got here. Everything you could imagine. I’m about to head into this store where they sell JUST KNIVES and SWORDS. It’s like the size of a Walmart. And later I’m going to this go-cart track with TEN MILES of track, TEN MILES.” “Jesus,” I respond. I just wanted to listen, I’ve never heard Mack this excited, he was like a kid in a candy shop. “I just came out of this place where they had a confederate flag, lemme see, it said, the ‘South in my blood, a Yankee in my cud’ or something like that, I couldn’t believe it, it was so prejudice, I had to take a picture. The guy was like, ‘Where are you from?’ (for this Mack puts on a southern drawl) and I said ‘New York’ and he was like, ‘you’re a long way from home?’” “Damn,” I respond between breaths. “Yea, he turned out to be a nice guy but I couldn’t believe this thing. I got a picture so I’ll show you in a few days. I couldn’t believe it.” “How’s the family?” “Oh my god, there’s something like two hundred and forty people here, its unreal. The whole thing’s catered but you should see the amount of food just for our family, like huge vats of ribs and what not. It’s kind of awesome to think about it, that all these people are related to me.” I started thinking about my family reunions and the general lack of them and how even if there was one it would be based on the top bracket income folks n shit so it doesn’t happen or it gets to be too much trouble for the family that hosts. “It must be awesome.” “It is,” Mack says with a pause for reflection then gets right back to present. “I’m gonna get going into this shop but I’ll give you a call in a few days and show you shit. I gotta work this greyhound deal out, there’s no way I’m getting back on a bus. They’re insane, I can’t believe anyone would pay for a service like that.” “Next time we’ll drive. Hell, I’ll drive,” I say. “Yea, we gotta take a long weekend and drive down here soon.” “Stay an extra day or two if you can.” “I’ll see.” “Alright, go buy a gay blade.” I always use this gay blade line thinking myself so clever. Mack digs for a response, “I’ll look, I think they keep those in the basement.” We hang up and I see that Sterz has been waiting patiently. He adds, “This is so gay,” with a smile and and bit of a laugh because we were certain to succeed in the hunt for black umbrellas and because we were out of Rochester and because we were having an adventure. First stop, Targét. Last stop, Targét. We found exactly what was needed after only a few rounds and some directions from a hot chic.

Splendid, Part 2

Eric’s an excellent assistant. He’s also the vessel for a plethora of bizarre behavior and copious drug intake, seasonal. He’ll troubleshoot a difficult software issue or suggest an unseen elegance to a persistent problem only to drop the HD camera because he forgets to check the safety lock. Stuff like that. It’s the square one phenomenon. Worktime celebration is a veritable roller coaster but mostly good so we power on together because, well, is none of us perfect. For example, Sterz can barely go a meal without a special request or return of an item or entree. He’s focused on his palette to a degree unmatched in other humans. If the wings are too mild, they go back, if the eggs are dry, the Maitre de is notified, if the drink is sloppy or weak the barkeep is shamed. Also, each and all sauce and spice must be delivered at four to five times the house standard, nay the house maximum, and this is usual practice. It is simply what ought to be expected when dining with the Sterz. So Eric has some wiggle room, plus he’s twenty years younger and a learning curve is applied and tolerated. In this spirit, after the first day’s work we go for drink and end up with a six pack back at the Saratoga Community Court Motel, a real shithole who’s only redeeming quality is location. Eric, however, buys a bottle of cheap whiskey to augment the beers, drinks three quarters of the damn thing by midnight and busts out his cell phone to ‘make some calls’ and text madly. I don’t say a word, just observe and answer questions by raising eyebrows and nodding repeatedly with pursed lips in a gesture of acknowledgment. Like I say, he shoots straight for the most part, even in debauchery. This is a guy who actually made the call before proceeding on his drunkest night ever. It was shortly after my separation when I believed all marital problem shit was going to smooth over with a few prayers to Jesus when I alternatively crashed at his place to avoid the isolation and shame of the cold cushionless studio floor. He was dealing with unruly roommates and various woman problems so we headed to the local hipster dive where he announced, “I’m going to get more drunk than I’ve ever been in my entire life.” “OK,” I reply with the raised eyebrow, pursed lips and a nod. And this he did, downed some six strong long island iced teas and a few shots in record time. I literally had to carry him out of the place due to failed motor capacity and blindness. Once back at the apartment I waited two hours with him in the car for his girl to show up because I feared he would choke on vomit. He survived and I give him credit for calling it. This night, he paced the drinking so I wasn’t too worried about a repeat.

For privacy, Eric heads to the car as not to bother Sterz already lounged out for the night intent on the food network programs. A few hours pass and you can still hear the boy yapping away. No sense to it really, if he was keeping us awake, he was keeping others awake. There was some type of commotion, laughter, broken English being spoken when we hear the car start. “Thank you, Thank you,” Eric says. “Where you from?” “New Jersey, no kiddin’, me too. Way small world, way small world.” It was a classic bit, including the Jersey standard of asking “what exit?” to refer to home or travel and full discussion of traffic and gas prices on the turnpike and/or parkway on the way out of town. So classic in fact that Sterz and I laugh audibly.

A short time later Eric pokes his head in the room. It’s dark except for the pale television flicker. “I’m going to drive around a while to charge up my mom’s battery,” then promptly closes the door without waiting for reply. He had just received a jump from a late arriving traveler which became necessary because he sat talking on his charging cell phone in the car with the parking lights on while listening to the radio for the two hours prior to his announcement. We had driven his car down (which was actually his mother’s car) because it had the necessary room to accommodate three along with equipment and the van was a lot less comfortable. This plan he had for driving around sounded like a bad idea especially since he currently was driving on a suspended license and well beyond the legal alcohol limit AND all the display equipment for the piece was currently in the trunk of the car. Sterz promptly struggled out of bed, swung open the door to a flood of light from the headlamps on his naked body, “I’d prefer if you didn’t drive around. The equipment.” To which Eric responds, “oh yea, that’s right, OK, I’ll just let it run for a while here and hang out here.” And that’s what he did. Sterz and I traded jokes about him getting a DUI right there in the parking lot before nodding off. Hell, with Eric’s frequent lapse of common sense and the clear disturbance already caused we gave it a 50/50 chance he’d be hauled in by morning. I awoke about 4:30AM to the intermittent hum of the cooling fan, got up and turned the car off myself as he slept soundly slouched over the wheel like a slain gangster.

The next morning we swap Eric to a bed, let him sleep it off and return to the installation grounds to inspect the piece for weather damage. If all was well, Eric would be right as rain by show time and even if not, he’s never shirked work for a hangover.

Splendid, Part 1

We arrive midday in Saratoga at the Tang Museum to an overcast sky and a general confusion by the staff about the needs of an outdoor installation artist. This is typical. In precise and direct language Sterz repeats his needs and before long we are ready to prep the grounds for setup. The rain is the most difficult part but not impossible which requires a necessary solution, how to protect the electronics, three projectors and DVDs, from moisture in the elements or the piece can’t run. No panic, just a sustained effort in audible banter about what may work. We needed supplies anyway so head to the home depot to get them and seek solutions. Plastic was the first choice but I loathe synthetics unless necessary for electronic display and even then it’s an aesthetic or presence problem. We looked at plastic bins, lids, drains and flashings to cover the sizes necessary. After sweeping the entire store, Sterz, Eric and I make off with the necessities but without equipment cover. We have a day to solve it.

Back at the grounds, in a light drizzle, we hammer the copper stakes down with some difficulty into the shallow shale and limestone soil and erect the sails for projection when the cellphone rings. “Unknown Call,” which could mean mom or creditors. I answer. “Dan.” It’s mom. “Hi mom. I’m in Saratoga at the moment installing a Sterz piece in the most beautiful surroundings. There’s baby Ducks walking all through our work, fearless little guys, you would love it.” There were actually two families of Ducks from the pond below who were unfazed by our pounding and sort of swarmed around our work site to look on and check out the action. It was magic and I couldn’t think of anyone more excellent to share it with. “Oh, I need something like that right now.” She’s crying and I could hear it. My heart dropped. “What’s wrong mom?” “There’s an explosion in New York and I’m just worried. Peter lives in midtown now now and I never know where you are and.” I interrupt, “what are they saying?” “Nothing conclusive yet, I just worry and,” she sniffles a bit which drops my heart. A man can take torture and divorce and all sorts of abuse but a mother crying sets off a whole flood of chemistry. I listen. “Nothing’s conclusive, they’re saying it’s a steam pipe but no one knows if it’s terrorism or if anyone got hurt. No one is saying.” She says this in a level headed sort of way, nothing hysterical but still the tears get to me. I tell the boys, who look concerned but continue working. Mom’s struggled with a whole bunch of life changes and the reality of life in the greater NYC area is tense. For most people it is tense. So tense in fact that even the liberal bastards like me won’t tolerate another single incident that’ll bring the house down and make my mother cry for Christ’s sake. That’s the deal in my heart now, come and help and be a part of making something better or don’t come. Especially don’t come to destroy shit. Same goes for US policy, don’t send out bombs to wreck shit unless you are absolutely sure that it’s surgical. Fighting cancer is a reality so I gotta keep lines open, even for military. “Well, keep me informed and I’ll call back at the hotel.” “I’ll probably not know much more because they’re not saying anything but I’ll call if so. But I called to let you know that I sent a check out. It’s not much but it’ll help you get through the summer.” My heart drops lower. I need it. “Thank you. I’ll look for it.” It’s well past the age where I can comfortably ask for help from family but my Mother always knows. The last check I never cashed but this one I’m going to need. I’m stunned. She’s crying as much because of the descriptions of our days work as for the anxiety over potential violence in the city. Her actions are awash with goodness. “OK, I’ll call if I hear anything.” “Ok. I love you.” And I head back to the task at hand which produced a fine blister on my right pointer finger.

Later I ask Sterz what he was thinking. He replies, “I was thinking, the terrorists have to be the best terrorists they can be, the ducks have to be the best ducks they can be and I have to be the best artist I can be. So I continue working.” They are good words. We move back to problem solving mode and go find a good bar.

lions at a feast

Perched on stools near the end of the bar Sterz and the boy devour an order of Buffalo wings. It's a sight straight out of the Serengeti, two beasts focused on the fresh kill, sauce and scraps all over, lions satiating a roiling hunger. I watch it like a nature film until Sterz grunts for me to join in. I'm not hungry but accept anyway as not to disturb the feast. I pour more beer. The boy eats well for once and doesn’t require any encouragement; Sterz notices too and encourages him in turn. “I’m proud of you.” “Why Papa?” “Because you ate well tonight.” The boy takes another bite. They both look pleased.

Just beyond the feast three men ordered pitchers of beers raucously and a fourth sits a bit to the side looking forlorn but putting a good face on. Sterz gleaned from their conversation prior that the fourth was a son and brother of the others and heading back to Iraq for a second tour of duty in a few days, this was their farewell celebration. When we first entered the bar, the boy immediately ran to make friends with the guys at the video machines while we sat at the center island where we could keep an eye on him. We moved to the bar proper after feeling swarmed and annoyed at the volume and stupidity of the conversation. It was early evening, much too soon for horse shit. The bartender, a gorgeous young woman wearing a low cut red number whose hair lifted with cinematic elegance each time the door opened was also visibly annoyed with the noise. It was better to sit and watch her anyway. The guys causing the raucous clearly didn’t frequent the bar. They were behaving as they would in their neighborhood and made no apologies about how they did things, a point I wouldn’t normally protest except for the honored guest’s demeanor which projected a competency his family hadn’t ever learned. “No. No man, fuck her, let the bitch wait. She gonna act up, let her wait!” One brother says to the other loud enough for the whole bar to hear. They suggest moving the party elsewhere. The father responds. “Hell no, I ain’t going there, there ain’t no females there.” Again, for all the bar to hear. Two of the guys are on cell phones talking loudly and the father is talking over them. It’s nearly impossible to determine who is talking to whom. They take frequent trips in and out of the bar and the whole mess seems unorganized. They’re waiting for the women to show up. The soldier waits quietly and patiently then disappears to the restroom while the others order another round. He returns some time later. There’s a cadence to the speech that makes it hard to follow despite the volume. A few years back I’d have felt embarrassed for them or pissed at the artless babble but now I just watch. I feel for the soldier and the distance that his discipline has rendered. The others seem oblivious to it, but he doesn’t. It’s visible in his expression and the false smile he dons for their humor. Between drinks the soldier stares into a glass of water or scans the television screens feigning interest in the scores. As the father gets more drunk he paces and shakes his head in bursts of laughter before settling back at his stool, an uncomfortable distance from his son to the left. Over the course of the evening Sterz and I observe this without discussing it much. If the soldier survives his next deployment and I assume he will, the real battle will be coming home again to a world which can’t really celebrate his changes or worse, doesn’t want to.

At the bar, the boy returns to his new friends in the back and another drunk stumbles in and sits where the boy had been. “I’m gay.” I look up and he’s looking right at me. “How’s that going for you?” “I just want to be loved,” he adds swaying a bit from drunkenness. “Don’t we all.” “Well I’m straight but it hasn’t exactly been easy in that department for what it’s worth.” Sterz adds in, “I’m bi. I just haven’t found the right lover yet.” The man reaches out and grabs Sterz’ hand and he allows it. I look to Sterz, “I can watch the boy if ever you want to explore some possibilities.” “Um, Can you watch him tonight?” he quips with a smirk. We laugh. “Sure, why the hell not.” It’s pride week in Rochester so we’ve been getting a fair amount of come-ons from men. I imagine most of our haunts assume Sterz and I are a couple, it’s always just us, occasionally with the boy and I’m usually attending to him in some way like patiently holding the door while scanning the floor for dangers, helping him onto barstools or picking him up from a fall when we’re drinking the hard stuff. Plus my whole look is ambiguous, shaved head, sandals, toned from exercise, plain white t-shirts, fashionable jeans, approachable. Fags and women like it, straight guys don’t. Fuck ‘em. But after a nice start to an interesting conversation, the guy starts talking and ruins any small window of opportunity with a lame ass story about kids after he makes the connection that Sterz is the father of the only 5 year old in the bar. He leaves after a few more lame attempts. A second drunk fills the spot but this one’s silent. A bar back approaches. “Is that your son in back?” He’s looking at me, not because he thinks I’m the boy’s father rather because it’s easier to talk to me than to the cripple. I look to Sterz to answer which is my usual procedure. He answers, “Yup.” “It’s just that it’s getting late and usually we don’t allow kids in here after nine but I’ll keep an eye on him. Those guys back there get to drinking and cussing and like to fight one another so usually it’s not good for kids to be back there after nine. But I'll keep an eye on him for you,” he repeats from nervousness. I sit unfazed and pour the rest of the pitcher. Sterz nods to the bar back who looks a bit nervous about having offended him. We sip the beer for a moment in thought until he leaves. I look to Sterz, he nods, “Go get him.” We finish our beers and leave, the boy exchanging goodbyes with his new friends on the way out past the center island where the soldier sits sober among his drunken family.

confessionals 1 - passivity is a knife

“Babe!” I look up from my drink at Sara across the patio table. It’s late and we’re eating a slice of pizza under a perfect sky. The night is cool, for the first time in days. “You don’t love me anymore,” she says with half mocked exclamation. “C’mon, that’s not true. You know what I’m doing; Thinking.” Stories bubbled by and I wasn’t writing them down. Or more accurately, specific phrases passed through consciousness and I felt anxiety about losing them. I just sat there remembering. “Baaaaabe!” She repeats. I smile. She knows better but this is our game. Goose (Dick Balls) is with us. He finds a rat and goes after it, up the nearby stairs, through the railing post and runs out of leash so he just kind of dangles there by his neck, Sara attends to it and I’m left thinking.

A few weeks back I slapped her across the cheek and bloodied her lip. I didn’t even know until the next day and then I felt embarrassed and ashamed. Sort of. It’s our agreement to hit each other, actually it’s probably the reason why we’re still dating. The idea is, we get drunk and hit each other in public. Hard. She initiated the behavior and I liked it. It worked well in the beginning when everything was new and I honestly believed these were my last days of life, might as well feel it. Seemed a perfectly natural response to life in Rochester. It worked except for the occasions when we’d show up at a friend’s place and shit went down. We didn’t get invited back very often except to the bikers’ place, no problems there. As long as we awoke and left sometime the next day and even then we never really put it to the test. These were the early days when she couldn’t get enough sex or danger. That was our path to love I suppose, which seemed a better bet than my former attempts which included unnatural anxieties, unrealizable dreams and extended courting. Yuppie dating just plain doesn’t work for beasts and we’re beasts. Most of us are, if not all. Agreements are all that is necessary and this we had. Somehow our agreement faded as Sara’s sobriety increased. The courts have this affect on anarchists but that’s another story.

Once, while living in Wyoming, shortly after my nows faded and debunk marriage began, I was left by my wife to transport our belongings across town to a new apartment solo. She had been out of town for a performance and decided to stay some extra days in Utah after. I was far too permissive and there were no agreements so that’s what happened. When she finally did get back to town she immediately fell into a depression about the move and clammed up, no discussion, no explanation, no sex. The kind of depression that clearly has a source but isn’t processed as such. The kind of depression where no resolutions are possible. She has this type of depression, the unaccountable kind and I felt, at the time, that I did too with additional doses of pureform anxiety. My response to this perceived injustice, after many similar like it, was to trash the place like a brutish cyclone. I piled everything high in the center of the open studio and poured our good white wine all over it. Most of ‘it’ was books, my books. I wanted to slap her but didn’t, no agreement, so I hit myself instead, nasty surgical jabs to the jaw and torso. I had no clue what I intended to accomplish but it’s safe to say that ‘plans’ were not a part of the process. There were tears of frustration, the psychologist was called, who arrived promptly to the vision of me cowering in the tub with hands on temples and the whole damn place smelling like stale chardonnay. In small towns word gets out and rightly so. She left for a week and I felt ten times worse. The whole event left me so traumatized that I decided never to trash property again. I apologized to her and dealt with my shit, moved on. It’s likely the most shameful moment of my life. I learned then that no one human is ever right. I try to keep this in mind while tossing insults. Clearly something was justified, it just wasn’t this. Goal not accomplished, damage done. It probably should have ended there but we were married and I was entirely committed, faults and all. It never happened again nor will it. When we busted up for good she cited this as an excuse to kick me out and keep me out. I honored it but I know it was simply a device she used to mask her affair. I’ve often thought, I should have beaten the shit out of her, but again, no agreement. Can’t accomplish much without agreements. Passivity is a knife.

Rochestarians

“Excuse Me.” The man walking past looks up from his thoughts in his desert fatigues passing at a decent clip through the airport. “Thank you.” She’s an attractive blonde and has the look of a mother in her late twenties. He nods and walks on. I heard, lounged next to the monitor repeating CNN headlines, and look up to assess the scene. There’s a lot of soldiers here I noticed upon deplaning. Now being a Northerner, a New Yorker, liberal and against the war, I’m tempted to pass judgment, maybe huff to myself, send a text or two with veiled comments about my freedom and theirs. Rather, for the moment, I choke back the desire to weep. Some liberal. I was glad she said something. I watched the soldiers pass for a while. So this is Texas. They’re right, everything’s huge and the flight here was longer than expected as we flew far west and back toward Dallas to avoid the storm heads. The flooding was visible. The land bloated. I managed a few conversations, mostly on the sheer size of the airport and the distance between gates lugging bags. I had three hours between flights and really didn’t mind. I was glad for the conversation.

The three hours turned to six after boarding the final flight and prompt deplaning when some kids clogged the toilet irreparably before we even left the tarmac. We moved to another gate and I sat with the Rochesterians waiting to go home. They are plump and snacking with pleated pants and faded Polo’s. The women gew out with faded winter flesh. We are, by all accounts, a most diverse lot, Asian, Caucasian, African, black, brown, white, mixed. They feel distant. They wear frowns. There’s at least three children in view. They too wear frowns but also bounce and frolic. I smile at the children especially at the chubby one who prodigiously walk and hops on his toes and heals between giggles and crawls over the faux leather seating.

When finally we board the plane I’m ready to be home. We’re ready to be home. The airport pizza gave me gas and I squirmed uncomfortably the entire ride. When we touched down it was midnight and I was strangely awake despite the nearly twenty hour travel day so Sara and I head directly for the bar. The city looks dirty and the bar dangerous. These aren’t mountain yuppies and by the looks of the crowd they are glad it’s Friday night. We smoke a few cigs and kiss before heading to the North end bars. The dog in the car continues yapping at all the passers-by and at the bouncer who started yapping back when we pulled up. I warned him he wouldn’t quite if provoked and he didn’t.

It wasn’t but a drink in at that North end bar before some dudes get into it. “I’m talking about 30 million WHITE babies being murdered every year.” I look around. We’re all white so he felt the privilege. The dude he’s arguing with is noticeably larger and both are drunk. “If god wanted you to suck dick he’d have written it in his word but it’s not there. That gay shit is depravity against god.” The man protests and they are toe to toe now. I wish I could say this one was fiction, that it doesn’t actually go down like this but it does. This is us, I keep thinking. Just a tiny splattering. I look over at Sara who raises her eyebrows back. She’s a player, I think. She’s survived this shit and dumb ass brothers and all sorts of judgments flailing about. If I were to step up and throw down I know two things would happen. One, it would accomplish nothing and two, Sara would play the situation. She always plays the situation. For this I am both grateful and wary. 2PM rolled by, the bar closed, the men quit their bickering and we drove back to the apartment and made love. It’s home by I keep thinking, I’m not sure for how long.

in re: Vegas

what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas...

joy

The first thing that I noticed in Arizona was not the local culture. By local culture I mean impatient liberal responses to burning questions of our day like how much gas an SUV consumes, and, if it’s rude or not to text message, and, why weed should be legal. These conversations begin timidly at first and then quickly devolve into major posturing. “You’re gonna think I’m nuts.” This is the driver of the shuttle North from Phoenix up Interstate 17 150 miles to Flagstaff, a retired man with a trim peppered beard, looking younger than his years. (A fact of which he was proud because he told me his age, 61, though I didn’t ask.) His phishing proved me a non-threat so he shared some of his liberal views. “You’re gonna think I’m nuts, but I think they should stop everything for an entire year. No new laws, no new legislation, no elections, no policing the world, no more building, no more roads, no new cars, if you need a new car you have to buy a used one. Just take an entire year to think about it and take stock of what we got.” He was right, I thought he was nuts, but it seemed a sound plan. When I hear such plans in the wide open country while simultaneously awestruck by the utter raw beauty of it, even in the 110 degree heat, I think, “The world is good. People care. I’ll just stay here. I can just stay here.” The thought felt so conscious I told him so, “maybe I’ll fall in love with the place and stay.” “Many people do,” he responds. Then I thought of a boy I saw on that ten mile walk to the lake I made a week back when anger hit my blood and nearly unloaded. The boy walked lazily between loiterers and panhandlers along the ghetto plaza with a half eaten fast food burger and a jug of water. When done he tossed the whole mess right there on the street, no bones. No one raised a concern, not even from the nearby homeowner scraping paint from his railing. That boy lives on those streets, navigates them, had to learn and live through them. His immediate utopia, omitting the transgress, evidenced by his piers navigating those same streets would likely be immediate procurement of gas consuming SUV supped to the nines, and a fat wallet permitting free roaming access through the social stratum, the local one, familiar ones, those streets, and maybe Atlanta where his sister took him once by plane when he was eight. In the west, movement is enough, burn down the rest save for the gear shops. Nope, no chance the drivers plans’ll go down; he’s outnumbered by the poor in distant cities never mind the economic elite polluting the wilderness with subdivisions. One can dream. But before all that, before I make judgments and notice the brown skinned people, the Navajos or the sun baked burnouts, I notice that the people here are kind. Here, there exists a genuine and sustained attitude of service to fellow man. It alters ones approach. And as I saw my friend for the first time in over six years, we embrace, I smile huge and tell him without reservation, and with honest sincerity, “Brother, I must tell you, I feel… joy.”