through small windows

i hope that you remember to forget

2010-04-22T19:57:00.002-04:00

'one is pleased to see the bugs die in a fire even though one's house is burned down.'

-- kim il-sung

seeing other people

2010-01-15T07:25:00.000-05:00

we used to be friends, remember?

in which blogging resumes

2009-12-30T06:33:00.003-05:00

i want to pay more attention to this space, as here i find a vital emotional record of a few important years (though not as much, of course, this current dying one)-- my hiatus having to do with the fact that i've been working, snowed under by adult responsibility such as it is, and time got away from me. it's not the sort of work i've ever wanted to do. not dedication to a creative project. but i've never really dedicated myself to anything like this, not even the honours thesis. desire, yes, but never discipline.

i think that whole thing would have been less stressful if i had actually dedicated myself to it rather than fitting it in in pieces on the margins of spring. gave up a season rather than embraced one and tried to shape its edges. i spent time with people, lots of time. but i wrote about them. now i have even less time overall and have to squeeze this whole question into the margins of margins, my time for myself having become marginalised: where then to strike the balance between dedication the creative life and the social, when the people are more interesting than anything i could invent?

so dark after dark

2009-12-28T19:53:00.002-05:00

'i miss everyone. i can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that's odd, isn't it, because i was home, all the time. what on earth are we to make of that?'

-- david foster wallace, the broom of the system

nothing to be frightened of

2009-09-22T20:20:00.003-04:00

i haven't blogged of late, not that there's an audience. i suppose i pictured this blog as the spot that hypothetical person from my past could catch up on a little bit of my emotional condition; if this is the case and you are that person (and i am often that person myself), recent blankness should be considered a message and not a defect.

twitter makes it easier, that being both a method of cheating and an implied honest point. i tweet plenty, one-line observations that sometimes echo the sort of thing i would have written out here in long form. laziness, perhaps-- or a symptom of the compression of time guilty full-time, benefited employment brings to the constitutionally bookish and contemplative personality during a recession. i work, and if i can gain bits of respite through experiencing tiny, convenient moments of other lives, and sharing mine. twitter works for this, and i've gone and purchased a blackberry. i text like a teenage girl: it's convenient and it's possible. of course i'd rather write letters, but last time i tried that the letter was overly long, in six (or i suppose seven) parts, and labeled an honours thesis.

that thesis of course suffered three afflictions: it was terrible as art, it was unpublishable as writing, and it was unsendable as the letter it claimed to be. i'm also sure it ruined my health somewhat. i joked back in the spring about filling out a questionnaire for the honours program and how i actually wrote, in answer to a question about possible challenges or dangers i would be presented with by my thesis, something like 'emotional damage from delving too deeply into the past'.

i won't pretend i sacrificed my health for my 'art', but rather lay out what actually happened: my nervous tendency was allowed to flourish for so long both on academic deadline and the deathly feeling of knowing that with the end of school i was going to be separated soonly from some of my favourite people, much in the same way i was four years previous. and four years previous was the time i was writing about.

so i relived one of those as another one was approaching. good plan, me. and the nervousness never went away. so, despite living with laura, which is going great by the way, i'm lonely. i have nightmares, bad ones, and i shake more than would be considered normal. other things. symptoms of a constant crisis or continental emergency.

there was something to look forward to when i lost monica, high school, and home. it was the same sort of massive shift i'm going through now-- the difference is that last time i had sort of a weird summer and hit fall running with college and the romance/extended emotional masochism spree that will probably at least partially define my life. fuck, that was living. now i work in the finance sector and october approaches with almost nothing to offer except a tax extension deadline and a series of empty anniversaries commemorating the myriad strange heartbreaks of my eighteenth and nineteenth years. i had a series of exciting falls and springs. through 2008 this held, but this year a spring that almost killed me extended into a summer of mixed blessings now extends into a fall where all the cultural associations of autumn and death are a bit more visceral, let's say, than i have yet known.

this is to say: i feel my youth slipping away and find myself no longer thinking long, long thoughts.

where i am now was the time i was waiting for, the holding pattern where i would hold a job and write in my spare time, send out manuscripts with a certain carelessness, and hope something went right. not towards a writing career, even, but because that was always the plan. i'm not doing it yet. i still may. i want to need to.

feu marche avec moi

2009-08-23T21:32:00.003-04:00

i'm in the living room watching twin peaks: fire walk with me. laura comes in.

laura: what's this you're watching?

me: a movie where ray wise kills women.

laura: so, nonfiction?

devil's work day

2009-08-15T10:57:00.004-04:00

'the life that went on in them seemed to me made up of evasions and negations . . . this guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. people's speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. the people asleep in those houses, i thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark. the growing piles of ashes and cinders in the back yards were the only evidence that the wasteful, consuming process of life went on at all.'

-- willa cather, my ántonia

the best of tweets, vol. 2

2009-08-01T12:45:00.001-04:00

see volume 1.

i have again produced, as a product of tedium, narcissism, and guilt at not updating this blog more often, a collection of short utterances (chronologically unkempt) for those too cool (or not cool enough) to follow my doings on twitter. please to enjoy:

How crazy and dishevelled did I just look on my morning bank deposit excursion? The answer is: moderately crazy and dishevelled.

@emmiesaur My kitchen wants to apologise for trying to kill you last night. It doesn't have a Twitter, so I am passing along the message.

You're LARPing right now, aren't you? You've surreptitiously added me to your LARP.

@WickedlyElphie Wonder if Princess Backslash is related to Queen Underscore, who rules over the realm of not knowing what an underscore is.

Current reading: http://bit.ly/3FmAH The content says interesting story of 1980's China, the cover says free government sheep for everyone.

Tonight: To @emmiesaur 's for a movie about cars and the people who love stealing them. I think it's called Gone in One Minute.

@indiehearts You should have gone to RadioLean-To. They pay less on structural upkeep and pass the savings on to you.

Watching Howl's Moving Castle at Alli's. I have no idea what's going on or whether Allen Ginsberg is involved.

Tichborne's 'Elegy' is sort of like the sixteenth century version of Daniel Powter's 'Bad Day'.

Joseph H. Smith, I can't stand Orrin Hatch. #sotoshow #sotomayor

Laura got a decorative bird wall hanging dealie that is now near my desk, as if to say 'this is where the Twitter nonsense takes place.'

I'm going to do Sotomayor one better and suggest that we just stop letting white people make decisions, period.

Fruit paste is a thing. Food can be called 'paste' and still be okay.

Oh, fuck James K. Polk.

Now I think is a good time to listen to Mary Timony solo demos by the ocean.

Sometimes I get excited. About PREFIXES.

'That's 1666. Good fire. Good plague that year too.' -- Dr. Baker, as told by Britt.

'Cold Harbor. June 3rd. I got worried for a bit but I came out of it okay after all.' #alternatehistory

I'd like to see an increase in the usage of the term 'hydrarchy', please.

I still believe in the saving power of early Madonna singles.

It's okay, that's not Mothra. It's just Moth.

The college finally sent the little sticker for my diploma: going to miss my homemade 'Summa Cum Laude' pink Post-It. All things must pass.

The Good, the Bad and the Snuggie #failedwesterns

Relaxing post-work unwinding by the ocean today. DIdn't get any Proust read, but there was some awesome haze.

Laura: 'I feel like the Burger King king would be a Decepticon.'

The road to hell is paved with good intentions; also little bricks with fire pictograms and some arrows pointing you in the right direction.

I inherited this little blue book from my step-uncle-in-law-- The Second Amendment Primer. It's like a creepy NRA bible.

Emmie: 'George Foreman! That fucker, I want his oven.'

New self-help book, as planned in a conversation last night: 'How To Find Your Lesbian Superpower'

My Lesbian Superpower involves A/V cables and is not fully developed at this time.

In Psychology Department, rat studies YOU.

Dear Guy Pushing a Lawnmower Down the Middle of the Street: Thank you. The pavement was getting out of control after all that rain.

I want a place with an upstairs so I can hear an old radio playing upstairs.

Met Lindsay at the fireworks. Drunk woman behind us kept screaming 'Good works!' I'd like to see some fireworks justified by faith alone.

@AKGovSarahPalin I have to applaud you for being able to admit that it's best for Alaska's progress to not have Sarah Palin as governor.

You thought all your ducks were in a row. All your ducks were in a row, but then the office lost one of your ducks.

Yes, I'd love one of those 'bottled waters' I've heard so much about. A banned delicacy in Australia, don't you know.

There's a really tweaky guy here negotiating a drug deal by phone. He is not as stealthy as he thinks he is.

The room behind me in the new picture got flipped. That is our apartment in the alternate universe where William Bell lives.

Beagle! We got a beagle in the hallway. Beagle.

Found a notebook estranged from its owner. One of the first pages has the following, surrounded by white space: 'Don't Give Advice.'

I am certain all those Marine Corps veterans on the highway appreciated my Hawaiian sovereignty bumper sticker this lovely Fourth of July.

We were like Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks on that motherfucker.

I heard that one of the little dogs next door is named Arthur. I hope the other two are Jenny and Lancelot.

I hope isolated thunderstorms will choose Salem. It's hard not to take it personally when they don't.

Watching Gone Baby Gone and rocking the bass guitar with partial competence.

Overheard: 'We have to tape-record every moment of our lives just to remember the jokes.'

It is he, the venomous pirate Sword Van Hook.

I speak proficient Vonlenska, but only in the summer.

The lesson of tonight, I think, is that this television can't handle Björk without frequent volume adjustments.

My kingdom for a front porch and a thunderstorm.

Those Pure Michigan commercials are driving me completely bitchcakes. I don't need Tim Allen's voice in my home.

Every time I see an ad for Gran Torino I imagine Eastwood as Christian Bale's Batman grown old and poor, defending his lawn with a shotgun.

Actual dream I had: @indiehearts and I are vigilante crimefighters in Wichita. We take on 'The Kansas Mafia.'

I don't believe in standardised tests. Then again, I don't imagine standardised tests believe in me either.

Dear Associates: The sound you hear coming from my pants pocket is ten dollars in quarters. As you were.

@emmiesaur Later, more reasoned call on best part of tonight: James Earl Jones destroying ancient evil with explosives?

Yul Brynner co-starred with William Shatner in a film version of The Brothers Karamazov? That must be either the best or worst movie ever.

I was just told that, due to the paperclip collection, I am like Bert from Sesame Street. Accurate?

The Awful Rowing Toward Job.

'Rain' trending on Twitter: perhaps the first step of Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital becoming reality?

Forget Flag Day-- I'm celebrating the eighth day of the Vestalia.

There's a car outside the apartment that contains a box of decorative boxes.

Going for a little walk listening to Bon Iver, which right now feels like the audio version of James Agee describing Emma Woods.

I think I'll harm myself if I ever so much as see a Cracker Barrel again.

Trying to find an appropriate Dora the Explorer product as a gift for Laura's nativist father.

This Twitter is famous, you know. They read one of its tweets on the C-SPAN.

@cspanwj The entire concept of the 'Terrorism List' rests on ludicrous sabre-rattling and is useless for productive diplomacy.

Napped a bit. Had a dream about overly precious T.H. White as an American high school student. Yes, he had an owl.

Chewbacca would probably be a libertarian.

Yes, New Hampshire driver. Go ahead and put your hair in a ponytail. It's only a highway.

Peanut butter pomegranate jelly time, peanut butter pomegranate jelly time.

Joke of the day, one Uncle Dennis has been telling for years. Q: Why did the monkey fall from the tree? A: Because it was dead.

Those Pep Boys commercials where the little cartoon guys are dressed like sailors freak me the fuck out.

On Memorial Day in America, we honour fallen soldiers with cookouts, drinking, and car accidents (order suggested but not mandatory).

Sealing envelopes. Sealing envelopes like a Coelacanth. Like a Coelacanth working in an office.

Thinking about that weird Georges Bataille novella where they see some Nazis then have sex near a cemetery. You know the one.

Mom to daughter, heard at store: 'I'm a little upset because you're slow, you're indecisive, and now I know you're gonna starve to death.'

It has to be the vibrant green paper. Not the regular green. The regular green is DEAD green.

Dear World: I insist that you start using 'Inigo Montoya' as a verb. I await your compliance.

@NicoleCristelli I would watch it. And write implausible fan fiction?

Paperclips are staples for people afraid of commitment.

I'd like to see a resurgence in the use of the word 'wield.' Get on that.

Pondering the spectrum of improbable outcomes. There's a little Judy Tenuta in my head. 'It could happen,' she insists.

Forget penny dreadful. This is Sacagawea dollar dreadful.

my heart is like a wheel this time

2009-07-03T11:50:00.002-04:00

i've made more than a few enemies by commenting on how much i've been enjoying the great non-sun summer of 2009, how i have voted no on proposition sun and welcomed the rain and the thunder and the grey. the air conditioner is still in the basement. the windows are open and when the sun peeks though there is verdancy without heat, like we're cheating the season. i am fine with all of this, with holding off 80s and 90s, keeping it summer without keeping it hot. i know we're transitioning back into reasonable, seasonable temperatures, but it's been a fine ride.

especially the fine ride i took in the evening of yesterday, so as to enjoy one more grey misty springlike moment, even in july. it was a nostalgia drive of sorts, even though the coastal road i took did not correspond to and was actually in almost the exact opposite direction of the place i was thinking about as i drove. same ocean, same music. close enough.

sideshow by the seashore

2009-06-28T12:05:00.008-04:00

the temperature dropped rapidly in the evening hours of that fine yesterday, creating a billowing, rolling fog off the water. i brought laura down to the park on the cove for the air and the view-- the power plant was so obscured it was as though nothing was there. the park akin to being inside a low-level cloud, and in the distance on the water the sound of either a lost boat or traffic across the cove. we could only imagine what it must have been like at the willows, or forest river. here be pictures:

the fog rolling. over the seawall in white puffs, through the chain-link fences like the breath of meteorology.

later, as the capstone to movie night, down to the water to investigate the fireworks we seem to hear almost nightly, regardless of season. we live here and get locked into the routine of hearing, of wondering, and of not bothering to look much into it. visitors change that. thence to the sand, where the fog had lifted and the tide gone out, leaving stagnant pools and the muddy, impassable expanse to beverly. it turns out, at least last night, the fireworks are the work of one man, a sketchy guy who sulked away sketchily upon our approach. he left a paper bag and a neat row of boxes. next time, rosie said, we should go down and catch him before he's fired off all of his ordinance. cheer him on. we could hear you from the street, we'll say. why do you do this?

daughter in the house of fools

2009-06-09T09:44:00.003-04:00

'the book was very right, of course, so long as everyone started living by it at the same time.'

-- aleksandr solzhenitsyn, cancer ward

*

when i was ten, i thought my brother was god
he'd lie in bed and turn out the light with a fishing rod
i learned the names of all his football team
and i still remembered them when i was nineteen

strange the things that i remember still
shouts from the playground when i was home and ill
my sister taught me all that she learned there
when we grew up, we said, we'd share a flat somewhere

when i was seventeen, london meant oxford street

where i grew up, there were no factories
there was a school and shops and some fields and trees
rows of houses one by one appeared
i was born in one and lived there for eighteen years

then when i was nineteen, i thought the humber would be
the gateway from my little world into the real world
but, there is no real world
we live side by side, and sometimes collide

when i was seventeen, london meant oxford street

it was a little world
i grew up in a little world

-- everything but the girl, 'oxford street'

can you tell me one thing

2009-05-19T23:01:00.002-04:00

'in fact he was carried away by that mania of the storyteller, who never knows which stories are more beautiful--the ones that really happened and the evocation of which recalls a whole flow of hours past, of petty emotions, boredom, happiness, insecurity, vanity, and self-disgust, or those which are invented, and in which he cuts out a main pattern, and everything seems easy, then begins to vary it as he realizes more and more that he is describing again things that had happened or been understood in lived reality.

cosimo was still at the age when the desire to tell stories makes one want to live more, thinking one has not done enough living to recount, and so off he would go . . . and tell the folk of ombrosa new stories, which originally true, became, as he told them, invented, and from invented, true.'

-- italo calvino, the baron in the trees

books i've read: academic year 2008-09

2009-05-19T22:53:00.002-04:00

an ongoing series:
summer 2005 , 05-06 academic year, summer 2006, 06-07 academic year, summer 2007, 07-08 academic year, summer 2008.

i'll have to come up with a new method of spacing out these lists now that school is over. or just discontinue it, because, well.

Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Future of America – Thomas Fleming [re-read]
Siddhartha – Hermann Hesse [re-read]
Savage Breast: One Man’s Search for the Goddess – Tim Ward
Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler
The Devils – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism – Mary Daly
Nature – Ralph Waldo Emerson
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers – Henry David Thoreau
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne [re-read]
Billy Budd, Sailor: (An Inside Narrative) – Herman Melville
Bee Season – Myla Goldberg [re-read]
The Cossacks – Leo Tolstoy
The Rainbow Stories – William T. Vollmann [re-read]
Beautiful Losers – Leonard Cohen [re-read]
The Wordy Shipmates – Sarah Vowell
The Rifles – William T. Vollmann
Olinger Stories – John Updike
White Niggers of America – Pierre Valliéres
Nightwood – Djuna Barnes
Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Blue of Noon – Georges Bataille [re-read]
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway [re-read]
Omensetter’s Luck – William H. Gass [re-read]
When Red is Black – Qiu Xiaolong
Continental Drift – Russell Banks
How the Reformation Happened – Hilaire Belloc
Red Azalea – Anchee Min [re-read]
Nana - Émile Zola
More Pricks Than Kicks – Samuel Beckett
Rabbit At Rest – John Updike
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto – Chuck Klosterman
Rabbit Remembered – John Updike
The Kingdom of God is Within You – Leo Tolstoy
Cancer Ward – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Children’s Hospital – Chris Adrian
Independent People - Halldór Laxness
I’m Not the Only One – George Galloway [re-read]
The Ice-Shirt – William T. Vollmann
Watch the North Wind Rise – Robert Graves
I Was Told There’d Be Cake: Essays – Sloane Crosley
Dynamics of Faith – Paul Tillich
Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible – Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet [re-read]
Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China’s Peasants – Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao
1984 – George Orwell [re-read]
The Seven Storey Mountain – Thomas Merton
The Torturer’s Apprentice: Stories – John Biguenet
The Complete Persepolis – Marjane Satrapi
Tristan – Gottfried von Strassburg
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
The Sorrow of War – Bao Ninh
Naples ’44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy – Norman Lewis
Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut [re-read]
Iodine – Haven Kimmel
Raids on the Unspeakable – Thomas Merton
Le Morte D’Arthur – Thomas Malory
Promised the Moon: The Untold Story of the First Women in the Space Race – Stephanie Nolen
The Atom Station – Halldor Laxness
The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
The Hour of the Bell – Harry Mark Petrakis
Continental Drift – Russell Banks [re-read]
Idylls of the King – Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Uses of Haiti – Paul Farmer
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys [re-read]
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court – Mark Twain
A Moveable Feast – Ernest Hemingway [re-read]
The Once and Future King – T.H. White
Beautiful Losers – Leonard Cohen [re-read]
The Black Jacobins – C.L.R. James
Shepherds of Shadows – Harry Mark Petrakis
The Passion – Jeanette Winterson [re-read]
Liars and Saints – Maile Meloy
A Family Daughter – Maile Meloy
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson – Camille Paglia
Death in Midsummer and Other Stories – Yukio Mishima
Death of a Red Heroine – Qiu Xiaolong
The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804-1920 – Charles and Barbara Jelavich

the best of tweets, vol. 1

2009-05-13T19:51:00.003-04:00

i have produced, as a product of tedium, narcissism, and guilt at not updating this blog more often, a collection of short utterances (chronologically unkempt) for those too cool (or not cool enough) to follow my doings on twitter. please to enjoy:

@AKGovSarahPalin Sure, remain all smug with those ethics complaint dismissals. Polar bears are organising against you even as we tweet.

Read your Mencius.

#Fringe prediction: Gene comes to terms with his Vicodin abuse, goes to bovine mental hospital.

I also like my history notes because of lines like this: 'PM Deligiannis mobilises Greek army and attacks Ottoman Empire, gets served.'

Does this #tweemyjobs thing have anything to do with working for a revived Sarah Records? If not, I am not interested.

The National Brain Tumor Society almost sounds pro-tumour. I mean, the National Rifle Association isn't a support group for gunshot victims.

Driving behind a truck carrying something called 'Icynene,' kept thinking it said 'Ice-nine.' Kept thinking no, no. This is a bad idea.

World: please cease all usage of the phrase 'rugged individualism.' Thanks!

Lessons learned from Sabrina the Teenage Witch: true beauty is on the inside, be careful what you wish for, 'Russia probably will collapse.'

I can't stand grown men who refer to their friends as 'buddies' and talk about professional wrestling with such...gusto.

Topics covered tonight: Melville's sexuality, pipe wrench fights, the oddity of a barber shop called 'Killy's,' Sylvia Plath, and faeries.

No love for Denise Crosby, Family Guy?

Two minutes of Fox News: an OH NO OBAMA COZYING UP TO CASTRO story and a commercial for Total. This channel exists to scare old people.

I wrote in 'Anti-Zombie Civil Service Brigade' on a survey of what community service I would volunteer for.

I got Laura so into Fringe that when she hears John Noble speaking with his normal accent she calls him 'New Zealand Walter.'

@NicoleCristelli Started looking into pirate schools. We should have started the search a while ago. They want so many extracurriculars.

Comment I made in Arthurian Literature:'Neil Gaiman's "Chivalry" reads like something Steven Millhauser would write if he ran out of ideas.'

In class that Twain book was described as 'a permanent smile burning to death.' You know, like if somebody set the Cheshire Cat on fire.

No one on Jeopardy knew what 'deus vult' means.

Just for the record, I spent the morning quoting Philip Larkin at confused freshmen and musing on an independent Hawaiian queendom.

As Meat Loaf gets older, his resemblance to Neil Young approaches 100%.

Partaking of the devil's ham.

I keep hearing about angry populism. Grand. Let's codify it, harness it, shall we? We need Ignatius Donnelly up in this motherfucker. #AIG

Okay, T.H. White: it's fine that you spell the queen's name as 'Guenever,' but she still can't be 'Jenny' for short. It doesn't work.

As a tribute to Genevieve, I want to bring back the expression 'on the horn' to the workplace.

MySpace became self-aware at 6:36 P.M. today, sending me an e-mail with the subject 'Hey Matt, did you watch The Simpsons last night?'

@NicoleCristelli So, Angkor Wat Barbie? Pretty awesome.

Laura bought a Star Trek action figure (new Spock) which features a creepy severed 'interchangeable Vulcan salute hand.'

I think I would love the Caucasus in the morning.

Bitesize Nicktoon nostalgia: a sad crying clown in an iron lung, Wheezin' Ed, Tommy in the dead letter office, MR. SENSIBLE.

I have rarely cared less about a fictional ship.

Conficker will give your computer Sphaeropsis blight and cause your sister to carouse with botanical illustrators of questionable character.

Apparently buying the coconut chicken product I am about to enjoy implies joining a 'Chicken Revolution.' When do we storm the embassy?

people and things my honours thesis talks about i bet other such documents do not

2009-05-06T15:27:00.004-04:00

tammy ealom, the quiverfull movement, the poetry of mao zedong, whether gandhi or william penn would win in a fight, clouds that look like asia minor seen from orbit, mary lease, björk (in the same sentence as john donne), the toast of europe, sunsara taylor, sex and international maritime law, medieval proverbs, john vanderslice, the war of the worlds, and green apples.

yeah, time's the great destroyer

2009-05-06T13:17:00.003-04:00

graduating. it's going to be difficult to get used to this: the rhythms of each year for as far back as i have conscious memory have been determined by the academic year. i resent this and cling to it at the same time. then the current season. forgive my emo moments as i mourn past springs. i guess just that one.

cherry blossoms are out. you know how much i love those. i'll talk about something else:

i got another used book with an interesting inscription, though this time it's actually a piece of paper folded up inside the front cover. sort of an ornamental piece, too, inside this copy of qiu xiaolong's death of a red heroine. it reads, thusly (all spelling errors in the original):

hold fast to dreams
for if dreams flop
life is a boal of rice crispies
without the pop

by Jill
and some somewhat
less well known auther
named
Langston Hughes

Dear Jill, I was on the plain from Punta Cana
and practicing ciligraphy. I couldn't think of any
other poem except yours
love Nancy

awkward juxtapositions meet blogging

2009-04-19T14:07:00.003-04:00

i managed to get out for a while and went to used book superstore in danvers with laura. people had recommended the place to us, but we hadn't had a chance to actually go there, and i hadn't bought books in a while due to the austerity measure called OH MY GOD I'M GRADUATING NEXT MONTH.

anyway.

i found some good stuff: william h. gass, cloudsplitter, aung san suu kyi, maxine hong kingston's the woman warrior: memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts. the hardcover of maile meloy's a family daughter i used to see in the window of cornerstone books back when they were new.

i even continued my quest to gather as many varied religious texts as possible by snapping up a copy of the book of mormon, which is sort of like twilight in that it has mormon social values but unlike twilight in that it doesn't have any vampires. it's brand new and has suggested reading highlighted by friendly brainwashers along with beautiful coloured plates of jesus, jesus visiting the americas, and joseph smith. laura said she's not sure if she wants it in the house, but i made sure to balance it out by also picking up mary daly's beyond god the father: toward a philosophy of women's liberation. so it's okay.

i also got a copy of joan didion's book-length essay salvador which came with a puzzling inscription:

Merry Christmas 1983
to Jim
love Andy

You're supposed to read this
on Christmas night in bed
after making the bed with
your new flannel sheets.

this, of course, on the inside cover of a book whose review blurb on the opposite side reads 'joan didion brings this insanely violent world to life so that it ends up invading our flesh...'

i wonder what i'll find next time.

our great spring victory

2009-04-12T09:07:00.001-04:00

so i'm in full-on, get everything done to finish school crisis mode. i'll get through this the way i always have: long periods of panic, long periods of hard work, and longer periods of lying quite still in a darkened room listening to shoegaze.

future sightings

2009-04-02T22:21:00.002-04:00

'i tell her that maps used to end, the world had edges and no one knew what was past them. i tell her she and i are standing on such an edge; all the rest of the map is blank parchment, and one sentence. beyond this point: monsters.'

-- haven kimmel, iodine

winks & kisses

2009-03-24T22:28:00.001-04:00

i still like this. i'm glad i wrote it.

here in pleasantville

2009-03-21T14:50:00.001-04:00

'as i get older, and nearer growing up, i often sit wondering here, and think how unfortunate it is for me that i can't reconcile you to home better than i am able to do. i don't know what other girls know. i can't play to you, or sing to you. i can't talk to you so as to lighten your mind, for i never see any amusing sights or read any amusing books that it would be a pleasure or a relief to you to talk about when you are tired.'

-- charles dickens, hard times

intervention

2009-03-19T19:31:00.005-04:00

i want to get a call in the middle of the night. i want to answer that call and find i'm wanted, needed, and to scramble to get clothes together. i want to wonder for a moment how long i'll have to wear those clothes but banish that thought as irrelevant so i can focus on getting to the car. i want to curse the engine, the keys, and the clock, time itself, for not going, turning, passing faster. i want to drive safely and alertly, but with haste, and i want to let other thoughts flit across my consciousness because there's no sense dwelling on the situation just ahead, any thoughts at all-- huguenots, the ralliement créditiste du québec, john dryden, the labrys, cinnamon, the anachronistic marxist flag of angola, pink post-it notes, visual field screening, jean rhys. i want to make sure (at stop lights) that i brought bottled water, then i want to feel thirsty. i want to tell myself that it doesn't make sense to waste limited resources now, and it's probably just nerves anyhow, but secretly keep a mental checklist for signs of dehydration from that point onward. i want it not to be serious, but to be appreciated for having tried. i want it to be night into morning and i want to belong somewhere through the alchemy of the event, for all involved to be bound in it and to it, into tomorrow.

quiver

2009-03-18T10:51:00.003-04:00

mildly entertaining diversion

2009-03-17T22:37:00.002-04:00

http://www.twitter.com/annus_mirabilis

should we talk about the government

2009-03-09T19:53:00.006-04:00

carlea (looking at women's leadership conference pamphlet): i don't get how they mix being green with feminism.

me: ecofeminism. it's a thing.

carlea: they should just call it the vermont happy conference.

cyclone's vernal retreat

2009-03-09T19:50:00.001-04:00

yes. let's have one more snowstorm, one more day and night where we wearily congregate in warm places and talk about slick roads and shovelling. let's watch it fall one more time and appreciate our interior spaces.

you know i'll take you there

2009-03-08T14:45:00.004-04:00

my car crests the big hill by the lutheran church in salem at or around three in the morning, mid-november. emmie and i are driving with the windows open despite the cold, or maybe because of it— there is spastic sitting-dancing, music blaring, singing: ‘when you call my name, it’s like a little prayer…’

i have a lot of memories like this, because ‘like a prayer’ happens to be among the songs of my life and, if not many others feel the same way, those who do gravitate to me as good friends. sometimes, they need a ride, and will readily sing-scream with me in the manner of the insane, the possessed, the blessed.

*
‘like a prayer’ was, and remains, the center of an experience i had that, while logically explicable, is my only brush with transcendence that stuck. in late nights of my youth, i tuned the archaic radio set into the recess of my headboard to a dance music station. my head was just below the speaker, and i would thrash it from side to side with the beat, tiring myself at last; occasionally i went beyond this mechanical purpose to actually enter into a song. there seemed to be a pretty regular playlist, so i got to know a few songs very well (this is before i owned any recorded music), to the point where i could reproduce them in my head when the power went out (which always seemed more frequent and catastrophic in childhood) or when i wanted a distraction in school. this accounts for my encyclopedic knowledge of mid-90's hip-hop singles, if you're keeping score at home.

one night, in drowsy half-sleep, the opening of ‘like a prayer’— orchestral, churchlike, everything serious but with a hint of the personal that makes you think that this is part of the officially sanctioned Big Thing but that it is meant for you— brought me back up. i was on automatic recitation, channelling the songwriter. this is what happened: i sang along, knowing every word and being able to visualise words and lines ahead just as singers do, even though it was the first time i had ever heard the song. i surprised myself even as I did it, trying to find an explanation as i teared up on ‘no end and no beginning,’ touched that the radio, with my help, was bringing that fleck of ephemeral beauty into the dark world.

it must have been playing before that night, of course. it seeped into by brain as i slept. ‘like a prayer’ was sponging out old memories, or filling in unused space— one intense night, or a string of them, in which it must have been producing the most beautiful dreams i don’t remember having.

there i was, an impressionable pre-catholic, not yet in enough to comprehend the faith, let alone reject it (although that would come later). i realise now that the theological engine driving me those nights was more akin to that which is familiar to me now— anything that sounds angelic must be angels, anything that means something means everything. these are signs, provided for you, wherever you may find them. madonna may very well have been the actual queen of heaven of my french-canadian grandfather’s favourite prayer, ‘hail, holy queen,’ which my uncle recited at his funeral in after years. the song carried me into sleep, and each word became embedded into me night after night as the song entered regular rotation, or as i modified my sleeping patterns to be awake around the time it played every night.

these are not point-by-point observations on the song’s lyrical precedent for heterodoxy. the message of the song, taken on its own, is that sex is the closest thing to authentic religious ecstasy. this is likely the best systematic theology humanity has ever come up with up to this point, or is likely to in the future, despite what sex-phobic religious will tell you. but my idea at the time was that religious things were not to be discussed lightly and on that everyone was copacetic. there was an amicable agreement at regions above and nothing would filter down that was not God’s truth. therefore, any discussion of religion was received wisdom, or what they used to call a revelation. ‘like a prayer’ was a prayer, and the sexual subtext (or, if you will, text) present was irrelevant in what i took away from the song.

so i learned to take my religion where i could get it. this took years of reactionary attitudes and sexual guilt before it sunk in, even though i should have known it when the madonna first visited me in my bedroom all those years ago. i still want that transcendent moment, but not necessarily for the eerie autosuggestion, but for a manifest identification with a creation. musical, literary, otherwise— i want to enjoy something that i could have made myself to the point where it feels as though i create it simultaneously with my first witness of it. that it was meant for me because it testifies to my condition— that my name is being called. we all build our own vocabulary of what attracts us as well as what ails us, but the interactions necessary for that to come about, the common points of culture we rally around, the moments we share and need others for— your voice can take me there.

till the easter bunny comes our way

2009-03-06T15:52:00.004-05:00

amy and i are talking about good friday, since she's trying to give up men for lent (her mother would rather she gave up drinking) and i find it all a wonderful bit of cognitive dissonance, considering church sexual teachings. anyway.

'my grandmother is crazy about it,' amy says. 'at her house you can't speak between noon and three o'clock. she sits there and prays. we'd have school off that day and it sucked because we would have to stay at her house and we couldn't even watch a movie or something. "you don't watch tv. you sit there and pray and think about jesus up there on the cross giving it all for you!" i'm like, yeah, i recognise that, but three hours? ten minutes, yeah. i get it.'

'christ our lord appreciates your support,' i say.

'he does,' amy replies. decisively.

my soul, she cried

2009-03-02T17:13:00.004-05:00

ellen and her husband loved children, but they only had one of their own-- his name was adam, and he had a strange blocky head that sort of resembled that of the boy in the hands resist him. ellen is, as i recall, dottie's daughter, which makes her related somehow to julie, my closest childhood friend. dottie lived in our neighbourhood and let us use her pool in the summers when i was growing up, and it was during this time we often ended up playing with adam or being supervised by ellen.

i remember one particular afternoon, although there was probably a whole series of them, of wavy green grass and blue skies, but on the one i remember julie, adam, ellen and i were lying in sort of a spoke pattern in the back yard of my parents' house. we were talking about ellen's new baby: if it would be a boy or a girl, how big she was going to get (she was just starting to show), what she would call it, and when it would be old enough to come and play in the pool with us. she explained the whole thing in calm, teacherly language (she may actually be a teacher, i'm not sure), but i remember being able to hear the excitement in her voice as she talked about the coming addition to her family.

then i remember seeing ellen and adam a lot less over the next few months, and it must have been sometime during the next summer that i was lying down around the same spot and it suddenly occurred to me that the baby and ellen should have been separate entities by now, and that i should have met her. in my mind, the baby was a girl. i didn't think to ask my parents about it, but i knew that something had gone wrong. in after years i realised that she must have miscarried, and i was informed by my parents recently that exactly that had happened, and a few more times since. ellen couldn't carry another child, and even lost twins at one point, a devastation for her that i cannot begin to imagine.

'that poor girl,' my mother said.

the image of that afternoon, of that hopeful young woman looking forward to the birth of her second child, stays with me today.

so irrigate your heart

2009-02-27T20:15:00.003-05:00

warmer today. taste of spring. walked down by the water and looked at antique books. the last time i could take a walk comfortably it was the last warmth of october-- today felt just like those days. looked like them, too: stripped trees and crisp, skittering brown leaves that survived the winter in gutters and between stubborn, clinging patches of soiled city ice. the main difference is that, though the temperature is the same, the air carries a promise, however frustratingly distant, of spring and winter's end. the water is a more intense blue and cloud formations march across the sky with rainy purpose.

elsewhere, becky experienced a day more or less like mine, or at least i'd like to think so. on facebook, where the voices of a generation speak without a conversation, she suggested everyone listen to at war with the mystics and take a walk outside.

you won't be laughing when you hear how this one ends

2009-02-20T08:15:00.003-05:00

'and i asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.'

-- kurt vonnegut, slaughterhouse-five

we can do some wrecking here

2009-02-15T10:40:00.004-05:00

you write carefully
sentence after sentence
to make your meaning clear
the meaning is
that you are dead
dead with hope
dead with spring
dead with the blurred hummingbird
dead with the longing
to shine again
in details of the past

-- leonard cohen, 'your death'

'it wasn't until he was about to die that for one moment he opened his eyes. o govinda, he sighed, the rain never stops, the dream never ends, maybe we screwed it all up. and he was gone.'

-- natasza goerke, 'siddhartha'

i need a way to measure the distance

2009-02-01T10:24:00.002-05:00

'i suppose most men would say, where has the time gone? but not me; i know where it has gone. ask any exile. he will tell you where the time has gone.'

-- john biguenet, the torturer's apprentice

i'm digging for fire

2009-01-29T12:45:00.003-05:00

'this sort of thing cannot make anybody happy, but it is a way of saying: "i wish you were happy."'

-- thomas merton, the seven storey mountain

tell me your name, i say, but keep it a secret

2009-01-17T20:11:00.002-05:00

at some point in the past, i think it was sometime between the night i braved the cold to walk catherine back to her apartment from work (this was back when she lived down by the water in a tall, narrow apartment building with the steep stairways of a citadel) so we could catch up, admire the way she and her roommate had arranged their books in ceiling-hugging shelves, and watch lost in translation and the day i walked there to meet her and we watched the dueling birds with alternately red and black beaks, i made a bargain with myself, trading away my happiness and depression in exchange for a deadened, but stable, holding pattern of emotion that has since kept me mostly amiable and occasionally prone to flights of excitement, but within which i haven't been as happy as i feel i could be. but i haven't killed myself either.

i used to say she did it to me, that that meteoric relationship we had and the torturous friendship that followed and dissipated burned me out, that i exposed every emotional nerve i had and was cauterised-- my days as an emotional live wire, the only way i could describe what went on. as emo as it sounds, the thought that i haven't been able to feel properly has occupied me since. what followed was that awkward night and the weeks after with the one i still won't name, a couple of forays with younger women in my role as the worst first boyfriend ever, the first ending with an annoyed girl who was just looking for a good summer fling-- i laughed when she broke up with me, knowing that i'd driven her to it but unable to feel what was happening as deeply as i should have. that wasn't love and never pretended it, so one could argue my reaction (the laughter followed by a couple of days of mope and everything but the girl's baby the stars shine bright) was about right, but i am not the sort of person who responds in such a measured, calm way unless something else is wrong. the second, well, we all know i still feel guilty about that. at least i managed to apologise, for whatever it was worth. so do i date my emotional mostly-death to the beginning of the four-year period that is now coming to an end?

maybe this is true, that it actually results to that period rather than the later one i was talking about above, but what isn't true is that it was somehow catherine's fault. what i did, whenever i did it, was make that subconscious deal, the one that she herself refused to keep making with herself when she flushed her generic prozac and became another person, only i did it without medication. i did it to myself. like in the radiohead song. that's why it really hurts.

kaleigh had that lyric in her instant messenger outgoing message almost constantly for a time; it must have meant something to her, but i could never figure out what. that is the consequence of online profiles, that we live under the illusion of knowing everyone better than we really do. when that shatters against reality, we feel the loss as acute, forgetting that we were only reminded that we were looking for returns on an investment we didn't make. there was no material loss, only the hollow feeling that we should have gotten in sooner. then a hollower feeling that we are commodifying our friendships; that, if we didn't think about things so much, none of this would ever have been a problem.

that's the sort of sadness i trade in now-- theoretical. mourning for what might have been, but only when 'might' implies the loosest probability. 'maybe life is a process of trading hopes for memories,' william t. vollmann wrote in the rifles. what do you remember? the way in which your hopes were fulfilled, partially or fully? or are your memories made up of the hopes themselves, long past their expiration dates?

so it comes back to this: i once had a dream. i was terrified of distances. what woke me in the middle of the night after my parents bedded me down in my sky blue room with stories of romulans and a glass of pepsi and my bright yellow lamp was the image of my consciousness standing on one part of a vast plane and some sort of necessary objective some sort of distance away in some sort of direction. the sky was a giant clock and i did not know where to begin. to this image i awoke night after night, cold sweat after scream, with this moral: anything that takes a long time to do is terrifying.

the spectrum of possible outcomes

2009-01-14T09:57:00.003-05:00

as my final semester begins, i'll be drawing up lists of things to worry about, checking things off, and trying to calm myself. everything always gets done has always been my late-semester mantra, and it has always come true. as it'll all be ending, i imagine i'll have that phrase on my lips for months instead of just those last few weeks.

what happens afterwards is that frightening Future thing, which i've seen work out for some people but not others. i'm not as pessimistic about it as i should be, this being a one-step-at-a-time sort of situation, but i know i'm not heading anywhere particularly glamourous. assuming i can get by, there's the taste for simple pleasures. yesterday i realised that the way my schedule breaks down i'll have almost all day friday open, week after week. when spring comes i want to spend that time down by the water at forest river park. i want to find a pleasant spot and listen alternately to the water and 'a burial at sea.' i want to re-read fathers and crows and beautiful losers and convince myself that, internally, everything will be okay.

they'll just say you were never here

2009-01-08T12:54:00.002-05:00

q: what do you call a palestinian mass grave?

a: israel.

-- dennis perrin

note from home

2008-12-30T12:37:00.006-05:00

on christmas we visit julie's grandmother, her sight failing deep into her ninety-first year. 'i haven't read a book since march,' she says, 'but it doesn't make me cry anymore.' her father had been a printmaker and she has been around books her whole life. her basement, as i remember from my own youth, is a landscape of boxed-up, over-read science fiction. the refrigerator in the kitchen where these visits always take place is still plastered with yellowed index cards upon which handwritten quotations from her favourites have been imprinted since long before i was born. 'the earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in,' said robert heinlein; says the card.

'how can you get used to that?' my sister asks.

'you can get used to anything,' she replies. 'you get used to hanging if you hang long enough.'

christmas

2008-12-25T10:28:00.002-05:00

'hark! midnight from the church tower vibrates through the frosty air. i look out on the brilliant heaven, and see a milky way of powdery splendour wandering through it, and clusters and knots of stars and planets shining serenely in the blue frosty spaces; and the armed apparition of orion, his spear pointing away into immeasurable space, gleaming overhead; and the familiar constellation of the plough dipping down into the west; and i think when i go in again that there is one christmas the less between me and my grave.'

-- alexander smith, 'christmas' (ft. christian imperialism interlude), 1863.

you'll understand that parenthetical bit if/when you read it, but it's still quite good, imbued with meditative seasonal consciousness and a well-developed sense of memory. also: milton.

sun up running for home

2008-12-22T21:36:00.001-05:00

'no matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong-- you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depths we are about to fall into.'

-- john updike, rabbit remembered

honestly

2008-12-15T20:02:00.003-05:00

okay, so this was amazing and easily the best international incident involving footwear since they ousted fucking khrushchev.

(the more you know)

and he takes and he takes and he takes

2008-12-12T08:23:00.001-05:00

'in just such a gehenna of links, i forged my vocation.'

-- samuel beckett, more pricks than kicks

we rarely find the time to see each other in the eyes

2008-12-03T20:02:00.003-05:00

the last few nights and all the rest of this week and next week i have been and am going out at night to deliver course evaluations to evening graduate courses at the college. this is giving me some perspective on facilities and times of day, because by the time these things begin at 4:30, this time of year, it is darkening or dark. by 7:30 or eight, when the business is concluded, it is universally dark and cold like the winter it is already becoming. there are still people in these places at that time of night, and not only students. i keep lingering a second or two too often to see if i can find anyone i know at one of the tables in those forlorn about-to-close pseudo-cafes, just to say hello and sit down and talk, bringing the unexpected to the night for both of us. it hasn't been possible yet.

but there are these places, well-lit and with available computes and wide staircases and food. they serve some of our essential needs and are invitingly coloured, artificially homey without looking anything like home. an illusion, but a concrete one; one to get behind when you need a place to sit for a while, waiting for a ride or reading a book. aren't these places wonderful in their way? we give so much of our conscious lives to this institution by spending any time here, and come to almost live in whatever nooks we carve out for ourselves between our responsibilities in its halls.

probably the worst part about it is the resounding artifice of it, always lurking one thought away from your thin rationalised comfort. we find ourselves at the northern frontier of this american boswash megalopolis, on the sea at the top of the northeast corridor. does anyone think of this from the perspective of first things, determining whether it could even remotely be considered natural or sustainable to live the way we do? such a critique is unwelcome. we talk of sprawling city after city along the coast, the development and people drawn together by what? modern construction eliminates meaningful differences in geography, and the people have nothing in common besides a trapped instinct, a sensation that in some way, somewhere someplace sometime it isn't like this-- there's something wrong with this life and always has been.

in the winter the darkness takes over the evening hours of contemplation before we have a chance to use them, because all of our better instincts drive us out of boxes we live in to other boxes or outside places providing perspective and distance. there's something to be said about being on the north of the urban on-and-on, something about driving right up to the placid cove on the way home, something about being able to at least claim with some legitimacy that you're looking in the other direction. then there's a more important something about paralysis-- you won't go down to the waterfront because the darkness could hide danger, a perfectly capable, rape-able situation, just like any other place you want to go when the night is dark and thoughts are long, long thoughts. so you're driven home, or to endless destination-free driving, burning fossil fuels and wasting effort. we revolve in the darkness of our own minds, going nowhere physically or mentally as the whole mess of it hums along. for now. it's a wonder that we're afraid of those other people that may harm us more than what we do to ourselves, or at least it seems to be on nights like this.

the weather's fine and i feel so-so, so

2008-11-25T07:04:00.001-05:00

The analysis indicates that the author of http://throughsmallwindows.blogspot.com is of the type:

INTP - The Thinkers

The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

you be the judge. via typealyzer.

don't stop now

2008-11-15T21:43:00.003-05:00

it gets dark so early that if i wake up after sunrise the sun is a stale green traffic light-- the day is artificially short because i can't trust when it started and night seems like it could fall at any moment. today in particular the humidity kept things languid and hazy, clogged with laboured metaphors. and i had made the mistake of waking up too late. the one spot of clarity was mid-afternoon and the bells at the russian orthodox church, more audible because the windows were open. they were playing every serious song at once so that they all blended together and cut through the soupy air and scattered raindrops to deprive my doubts of a breeding ground, but only for a moment.

although you know where you'll land, you're always pushing harder

2008-11-12T20:34:00.004-05:00

'the miseries that people suffer through their particular abnormalities of temperament are visible on the surface: the deeper design is that of the human misery and bondage which is universal. in normal lives this misery is mostly concealed; often, what is most wretched of all, concealed from the sufferer more effectively than from the observer. the sick man does not know what is wrong with him; he partly wants to know, and mostly wants to conceal the knowledge from himself. in the puritan morality that i remember, it was tacitly assumed that if one was thrifty, enterprising, intelligent, practical and prudent in not violating social conventions, one ought to have a happy and "successful" life. failure was due to some weakness or perversity peculiar to the individual; but the decent man need have no nightmares. it is now rather more common to assume that all individual misery is the fault of "society," and is remdiable by alterations from without. fundamentally the two philosophies, however different they may appear in operation, are the same. it seems to me that all of us, so far as we attach ourselves to created objects and surrender our wills to temporal ends, are eaten by the same worm.'

-- t.s. eliot, introduction to nightwood by djuna barnes.

armistice day

2008-11-11T13:33:00.001-05:00

'we are down to one veteran, we're down to john babcock, he's a hundred and eight years old. we're on the razor's edge, i think, of lived memory, and are about to fall into history.'

-- tim cook, author of shock troops: canadians fighting the great war, 1917-1918, overheard on radio noon montreal.

national politics

2008-11-05T20:29:00.002-05:00

'i do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. i would not lead you into the promised land if i could, because if i lead you in, some one else would lead you out. you must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition.'

-- eugene v. debs, 1910.

look, if obama were half the things people who like him think he is, he wouldn't have had a chance of being elected. if he were half the things people who don't like him say he is, i, as an 'anti-american' (read: anti-imperialist) socialist would have voted for him. either way, the truth is that obama, while seeming like a step in the right (or, in this case, left) direction, and thus GOOD (or at least BETTER) isn't leading any of us anywhere new, not to the great amorphous 'change' we've heard about in the last two years or towards that better world our lost generation thinks is right around the corner. campaign promises are almost by definition not practicable, not that he ever had an intention of doing any of the good stuff in the first place.

i'm sure he'll be a 'great president' by the distinctly american definition of that term. he's made for it. he has the demeanor, cultish support, and an uncritical movement behind him. 'great presidents' do lots of bad shit, and obama isn't going to be any different. you'll get imperialism and war with a more rational face instead of that crazy old man from arizona-- and it will not be kinder or gentler, despite what you'll read. that was the essence of your 'choice' yesterday-- a choice between appearances and an appearance of choice. being so open about ruling the fucking world was getting to be distasteful.

i emphasise the 'uncritical' aspect-- liberals will line up behind everything he does for two reasons: it's their turn after years of republican rule, and lesser evilism. every time obama disappoints, every time he comes up short next to the messianic image they have of him now, it's the old trick through which the two-party system reinforces itself. what, you would rather have the republicans in charge?

this is the reason nothing ever changes, because people with good minds, as saccharinely utopian as they can sometimes be, habitually buy into the system and pull the level for the big D. once you do that, you throw out any influence. 'yes we can' carries on to election night; after that, it's more of a suppressed 'well, what are you going to do about it?'

a lot of people, especially the younger ones, and many of the ones i know, voted for obama because he was more in the direction that they want the country to go. long-term, every vote from the left that supports the democrats is a vote against our principles, no matter which particular left wing you find yourself on. do not forget that they are at best a centrist party, and usually a right-wing one. honour among our rulers will win out, and for every symbolic move that supposedly helps the common folks the democrats supposedly are fighting for, there will be insurmountable opposition from those darn republicans, or so the story will go. remember how the republicans, at the height of their congressional and executive power just years ago, would constantly blame the pathetic minority democrats for stopping their social agenda? shadow games for the base, and the dems done do it as well. get ready for nail-biting almost measures on energy policy and polarising social issues. elect more and better democrats next time around! only an increased hegemony will really get us moving!

read:

'. . . it's all rearranging deck chairs on the corporate ship of state, resulting in an ever-so-subtle shift to a slightly less unjust social system, if only through somewhat less willingness to sell off the government to the highest bidders. And there will be a slightly better chance of not exacerbating the crimes of the Bush administration. But those crimes aren't going to be repudiated, let alone prosecuted.

Iraq will remain a tactical mistake, instead of a grossly immoral abuse of national power. We'll still have "debates" about what sorts of torture we should and shouldn't be subjecting people to. Needless to say an Obama administration isn't going to be interested in giving back expanded executive powers to spy on Americans without judicial oversight, or to otherwise ignore the law when it considers doing so convenient (after all, it will be doing so for good purposes).

There will still be 2.5 million Americans in prison, we'll still be fighting a ferociously idiotic and immoral "war" on drugs . . . and there will be 10,000 editorials about how Obama must take this opportunity to "heal" the "partisan divide" in the nation (translation: Allow the rampant political criminality of the last eight years to go completely uninvestigated).'

additionally: capitalism's status quo rolls right along, and the collapse of that wonderful economic system worldwide only means more war and more suffering.

will it ever not be so? the thread running through all of this, the tie that binds the people i'm talking about above, is that fundamental belief in america and our supposed ability for redemption. christian nation. we have to get america on the right track, the flaw in that being the assumption that we were ever on it. the redemption narrative doesn't go away, and link that to christ's refusal to challenge the state (caesar getting what is rendered to him) and you aren't going to (and don't) see many americans putting much thought into the way we choose our leaders and the way we let those people lead. oh, sweet jesus, make us new again. just not too new.

you're not going to question the system at a root-seeking, fundamental, radical (oh, how we hate that word) level if you still believe in the country, because it is our tendency to believe in that which is and that which has been-- two parties has 'worked' for this long, and there is no other way to do it. but, as leonard cohen put it, 'everything can be different, any old different.' electoral politics isn't going to get you there (here's my soundbite: when you vote for a lesser evil, you're still voting for evil), and any revolution as we've known them will be saturated by the same opportunism and murderousness. so i'm not advocating for that either. this country? we'd fuck it up worse than most, trust me. the only thing i can advocate, seeing no way out, is this: let's have some thought. a little thought won't go a long way, but maybe a lot of thought will go a little. as you can imagine, i'm not hopeful.

obama, in the minds of many and the media, to look at what the ongoing narrative has been, represents america finally redeeming herself for her sins of the past. obama is a symbol for what they would have us believe, and his victory only ensures that we'll keep on sinning and sinning big, only with less visibility. we've convinced ourselves that we just voted out the people who do the bad things. so we're in this pretty fucking deep. we were born into this. if we grew up last night, it wasn't an equitable moral maturity we reached so much as it was/is a smiling executive monstrousness, demagogic (that not being anything new) and cordial.

so next time, read your mencius: 'to try to achieve anything is like digging a well. you can dig a hole nine fathoms deep, but if you fail to reach the source of water, it is just an abandoned well.'

state politics

2008-11-05T20:27:00.001-05:00

hillary: 'i was expecting to wake up this morning to the sight of a bunch of stoned greyhounds stumbling around trying to find real jobs.'

me: '...so they can pay income tax.'

obstacle 1

2008-11-03T07:17:00.003-05:00

when britt and i were working on friday and hoping for what seemed like the inevitable early closing (it having been halloween), a very confused man called. he wanted to know how he could become 'matriculated' into the graduate school without completing his graduate school application. 'that's insane,' britt said in so many words. 'to be matriculated your application needs to be completed and processed and approved.'

'you don't understand,' he said. 'i'm matriculated into the school, but not the graduate school. i thought i was matriculated into both, but i just realised i wasn't. your verbology is confusing.'

for those of you playing along at home, no such state of enrollment exists.

'does he mean he's taking classes as a non-degree student?' i asked britt as she cupped the phone for a silencing effect. that would make some sense, even if he had the 'verbology' all off. he wasn't, and was told that he needed to, you know, finish applying and be accepted, because words have meanings.

later we told anne about it and his strange assessment of the matriculation situation.

'he says he's enrolled in the school but not in the graduate school,' britt said.

'yeah, sure he is.'

like an hourglass glued to the table

2008-11-02T22:21:00.002-05:00

last night i actually changed the clocks at 2 a.m., and so got to live that government-mandated hour of time travel they made that pete & pete episode about. midnight-morning darkness of early november, because the year's end is the start of something, 'the holidays.' they're already setting up christmas displays and snow is discussed. aside from the chill of the house at night, darkness inside is unseasonal, unaffiliated. tell me what time of year it is if i refuse to contextualise each moment. it was two and then it was one, because we can do that.

emmie and kate stayed over halloween night after their 'carousing' downtown. when i stepped out on the street to find them after emmie called and said they were on their way, i stood on a forlorn, empty street with the dry leaves and the wind. this meant something to me, whatever it was, but i doubt i got it across to anyone else that night. maybe it would have made sense if i could have. i look through the address book on my cell phone and see almost no one to whom i could make a welcome call. that comes on slowly, doesn't it?

i had what sarah vowell would call a 'conversational mount st. helens' evening because i haven't been with a group in so long. it's indulgent, and i needed it. it's nice to think that it's possible to overcome distances and maintain friendships, which is the thought i have every time i see kelly and that i'll have now about kate, who will hopefully come back to see emmie and continue to care enough to invite me to explain myself when i bring up something in passing that she hasn't heard of before.

kelly herself pulled a deus ex machina this evening and drove up from bridgewater. she came here with emmie and made today okay.

and that's why you stay at home

2008-10-31T21:10:00.003-04:00

this empty street, this sky to blandness scoured,
this air, a little indistinct with autumn
like a reflection, constitute the present --
a time traditionally soured,
a time unrecommended by event.

but equally they make up something else:
this is the future furthest childhood saw
between long houses, under travelling skies,
heard in contending bells --
an air lambent with adult enterprise,

and on another day will be the past,
a valley cropped up by fat neglected chances
that we insensately forbore to fleece.
on this we blame our last
threadbare perspectives, seasonal decrease.

-- philip larkin, 'triple time'

friday night moment of ecstatic religious / indie rock experience

2008-10-24T19:23:00.005-04:00

yes, i do
feel the need for all those tools of sound
'cause without song we’ll lose our sight of god
(not the god that tells them they're all blessed).

-- norfolk & western, 'at dawn or after dusk'

exhibit a:

jeff mangum - oh sister [live]

if you've known me for any length of time, it's likely i've attempted to convert you to neutral milk hotel obsession, the secular religion which has grasped me since just about the time it was too late to be into them while they were still around. videos like this, along of course with the studio recordings, are really all we have left, except when mangum goes and makes appearances like this, adding his trademark wail and joining in the chorus of elf power's 'the arrow flies close,' one of the best non-neutral milk hotel things to ever come out of the elephant six collective.

anyway, if you've still managed to avoid listening to this stuff, the feeling i had when i saw the video above (which had somehow eluded me, though i do know the song even though it wasn't on the album, as he says) was that a close viewing with an eye to how intense a performance it is could make a convert out of someone. i got/get chills. audio alone does it, and always has for me, but the rarefied quality of a video like this, shot at an enchanted turn of the year, by someone who maybe also caught the fantastic focus and intensity coming out of that face. the only way i've ever been able to describe it is as following: this man is channeling something.

'gardenhead/leave me alone' is still my favourite song ever. you take the normal indie jargon about 'songs that saved your life'-- this is true. an anonymous guestbook comment on my old website--way back before i'd even met elizabeth, and that seems like a real fucking long time ago--directed me to in the aeroplane over the sea, which, i am not exaggerating, defines and enriches life. on avery island helped me to contextualise the turbulence of the turbulent years. i listen to 'everything is' every fall and 'wood guitar' every summer. during downtime at practice or before shows, while brendan was still in the band, we tried to collaborate on 'king of carrot flowers part 1' and 'in the aeroplane over the sea,' and i don't think i ever sat down with my drum set without playing through 'naomi' at least a couple of times. i learned 'engine' on bass and still sing 'two-headed boy part 2' whenever i feel like dying.

i become the again-astounded fourteen year-old who has just reached a singularity of emotion when i try to talk about this. i can't expect these (and the many other) defining experiences to translate into other lives, but if you appreciate the sort of thing that can impact someone in such a way, or just like good music, here is something to look into.

politics (condensed)

2008-10-16T14:49:00.003-04:00

i do believe that's happening one way or t'other, my friend.

underachievers please try harder

2008-10-12T23:20:00.002-04:00

'i was speaking exactly like a person who is in a boat being carried along by wind and waves and who when asked the most important and vital question, "where should i steer?" avoids answering by saying, "we are being carried somewhere."'

-- leo tolstoy, a confession

fill up the room

2008-10-08T22:06:00.003-04:00

The Ark you're building
in your yard
Will you let me on
Will you let me off
Don't you think
we all should study Etiquette
before we study Magic

-- Leonard Cohen

into your machine

2008-10-07T21:31:00.004-04:00

this is an autumn night
in america
with athletic fields and floodlights
football, lit-up porches, and half a moon.

democracy is at work
that is what you call it
a force greater than your neighbourhoods
preserving your lifestyle
making you think
you have plenty of time.

days were golden

2008-10-03T18:21:00.005-04:00

matutina cognitio

2008-10-01T20:12:00.000-04:00

'from such as this, have i drawn joy and knowledge. in such as this, have i found and beheld myself. i will speak to it. it can speak again. it can yield me thought already formed and alive.'

-- ralph waldo emerson, nature

morning knowledge.

i've been rising earlier recently, trying to get in touch with something that chilly autumn mornings of the past knew-- something of a creativity that was supposed to materialise back in the days when my father had to get me up before six every morning. waking up was kin to morning darkness instead of to the dawn, and it meant that even if i didn't actually watch the sunrise from a preferred vantage point, at least i could apprehend with the rising of my own consciousness the glow, then the light, then the day.

day comes. the glow and the light brighten with the advance of time. what i must let go of is the analysis. the glow and the light and the day are not fully enjoyed unless i begin to conceive of them as spectacular outgrowths of each other, unexpected. a birthing miracle happening continuously every morning. it is dark and will always be so until the sea change of the glow. the world is glow and lightens. the light lasts and must be expended into a new phenomenon that we assign a number and appointments to. place it in a book of other names and it is commonplace, teeming millions of them having passed already, more in the future, we are certain enough. 'days are where we live,' says larkin. true enough, but morning in its stages, i am convinced at least for the moment, is where life most nearly approaches meaning.

so when i awake to the empty enchanted house, grown cold with the windows left open overnight, i tip open a book and i don't look for the brightening, but for continuation of the darkness. in my error, i find the light.

they had the ring of something true

2008-09-28T16:50:00.002-04:00

‘all our lives want a suitable background.’

-- henry david thoreau, a week on the concord and merrimack rivers

here come the warm jets

2008-09-22T14:11:00.002-04:00

'you remind me of a man who is surprised that one spark could blow up a gunpowder magazine.'

-- fyodor dostoyevsky, the devils

no structured narrative, no neat story-line to explain

2008-09-21T11:32:00.000-04:00

the shapes we make

2008-09-19T20:47:00.003-04:00

when our geology professor asked if refraction in water was a protection device installed by the 'wishing well fairy' to prevent theft, hillary and i said yes, because we have a sense of wonder.

how it feels to be something on

2008-09-16T21:49:00.002-04:00

'i didn't suspect the pettiness of my dream. i believed that i had conceived the vastest dream of my generation: i wanted to be a magician. that was my idea of glory. here is a plea based on my whole experience: do not be a magician, be magic.'

-- leonard cohen, beautiful losers

an observation

2008-09-16T21:42:00.001-04:00

today's society is where satire goes to die.

stretch out and wait

2008-09-16T21:28:00.005-04:00

monday was hot and windy, what we'll all hope was the last breath of summer. i sat under a tree with pink lemonade reading dostoyevsky. tuesday, fall-like; you could almost see the leaves just almost beginning to change. walking to school today the thought i tell myself i'll stop having every year popped up-- what spring will be like. it's going to be a long winter if i'm already thinking about the leaves coming back when they haven't even left yet.

that's how every winter is, though, and in the changing of the seasons i'll find yet another thing i can't unmoor myself from. i'll drive through salem and find the familiarity comforting while somewhere in the back of my mind a certain rage rages on that i'm not somewhere else. that conflict isn't going away anytime soon.

here's premature winter for you: this afternoon in a nearly empty parking lot with the lightly attended roar of fall sports in the background. it's easier in the colder months to imagine someone at a distance thinking about you just as you're thinking of them. why is that? there's more time to think because there's less to do, there's more desire to be close because it's colder, there's more need for others because it's lonely. so in a moment like that, when there's nothing to do but cross pavement and there's almost a slight chill in the air, a light trance can take hold and almost convince you just as you were convinced last december that any day now they'll all walk right back into your life, wondering what on earth stopped them from doing it sooner.

good news for people who love bad news

2008-09-12T19:02:00.002-04:00

'i'm not against anyone fastening their life to an event of some significance and that way making themselves significant. god knows, we need what footholds we can find on the glass mountain of our existence. trouble is, you climb and climb, and around middle age, you discover you have spent all the time in the same spot. you thought you were going to be somebody until you slip down into the nobody that you are. i'm telling you because i know.'

-- jeanette winterson, 'atlantic crossing'

living with the devil

2008-09-07T15:39:00.002-04:00

'"'look, alyoshka" — smoke got into the baptist's eyes as shukhov pushed his outstretched hand aside — "i'm not against god, see. i'm quite ready to believe in god. but i just don't believe in heaven and hell. why do you think everybody deserves either heaven or hell? what sort of idiots do you take us for? that's what i don't like."'

-- aleksandr solzhenitsyn, one day in the life of ivan denisovich

god save the village green

2008-09-01T17:59:00.004-04:00

another fake labour day spells september, spells the end of summer already, a few long weeks from the equinox. we are left grasping at the first threads of 'what now?', hoping something tangible will reveal itself so that we can get a look before we have to feel, but we forget once again that the future does not come on in pieces: it arrives whole with arresting events, developments, decisions.

i sit outside and feel a cool evening breeze that in temperature does not prefigure the autumn air to come but, to me, internally, can mean nothing but. i watched and felt the temperature rise these past few days that should have been cooling-- at one point last week the cool-down had felt so permanent that i even put together my annual fall mix cd lest i be caught on my lengthened daily commute without a fresh one, but such certainties are those of the inexperienced and willfully obtuse.

try this, though: fall has been interesting before and will be interesting again, 'interesting' here being meant with the same connotation as the old curse about living in interesting times. that is the certainty of someone who knows.

ask one of these trees. they've seen me sit in this spot before, though perhaps not this early when they were this green, but to the quick i know they can read my thoughts and must spend night sighing knowingly to each other about me and everyone else-- 'why do they live and move in such circles,' they must think. 'they don't have to.'

books i've read: summer 2008

2008-09-01T17:52:00.002-04:00

an ongoing series:
summer 2005 , 05-06 academic year, summer 2006, 06-07 academic year, summer 2007, 07-08 academic year.

Germinal - Émile Zola
Murphy – Samuel Beckett
Hiroshima – John Hersey [re-read]
Guide to Kulchur – Ezra Pound
Watt – Samuel Beckett
Name All the Animals – Alison Smith
The Conquest of Gaul (Penguin Classics) – Julius Caesar
After Henry – Joan Didion
Rebels: The Irish Rising of 1916 – Peter de Rosa
Mercier and Camier – Samuel Beckett
The Solace of Leaving Early – Haven Kimmel [re-read]
Something Rising (Light and Swift) – Haven Kimmel [re-read]
The Used World – Haven Kimmel
Kitchen – Banana Yoshimoto
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West – Cormac McCarthy [re-read]
A History of Christian Thought – Paul Tillich
Witchcraft and Quakerism: A Study In Social History – Amelia Mott Gummere
Rabbit Is Rich – John Updike
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov [re-read]
Ann the Word – Richard Francis [re-read]
Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
The Shaker Experience in America – Stephen J. Stein
L’Assommoir - Émile Zola
Adam, Eve, and the Serpent – Elaine Pagels [re-read]
Katherine – Anchee Min
The Stranger – Albert Camus
The Atlas – William T. Vollmann
Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings of the Continuing War Against Women – Andrea Dworkin
The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East – Robert Fisk
The Gathering – Anne Enright
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Trial – Franz Kafka [re-read]
Farewells to Plasma: Stories – Natasza Goerke

you get route 2 between concord and lexington

2008-08-26T22:44:00.010-04:00

at some point in the recent past i was able to make peace with my love of driving. something about velocity and music hits me in just the right way and always has: ágætis byrjun in ninety degree streaming wind through all of the open windows late night/early morning on the empty loop connector as i got sasha up as fast as she would go. one of my fondest memories. never squared with the guilt i always felt about the act, which dovetails with another fond memory, though this one more bittersweet, of driving christine home after syriana and wondering how many people over how many anywheres died for each drop of fuel we were using. paralysis is what it was. in the final analysis, maybe i realise now, there's nothing to be done about it, living in a society with infrastructure done this way; and there's even less to do about the inhuman mechanisms by which it is all made possible. hope for the bad end we deserve.

one of the last times i got to see catherine i went with her to some crazy store in beverly she remembered from her youth so she could look for jewelry, a sort it turned out they no longer carried. she drove (now that i think about it, i've never driven her anywhere) in what was then her new car and gushed about the peace of mind her new acquisition was relaying to her. she used to drive her mother's grand cherokee when she had to drive us places back in the day, and i suspect that she had the same aversion to the act of driving i did, preferring her bike. infinitely.

she changed a lot in the interim, and i remember the nameless horror i felt on that day when she talked about driving around and around to clear her mind, no clear destination in mind, and filling up whenever she wanted to, because at the moment she could afford gas prices wherever they were-- and the nameless horror of another day, before that, where she talked about working for exxon as a petroleum geologist, trying to find the last of it, in all seriousness. it was a deathly, dead-butterflies-in-a-whirlwind, deep stomach horror that comes along nameless and unbidden, which some associate with the identification of a moral wrong. but where was the wrong, when nothing can be changed? there's an answer to that, and my stomach had it at the moment, but the point today is that i can't name it anymore.

and if i could, the recognition would be wasted because i am just as culpable. as soon as i was legally allowed to, i started driving to school, a route which was easily walkable and also a detour of minor minutes to my father on his morning drive out of town to work. he used to drop me off after i stopped taking the bus. but i drove there and home every day, sometimes making myself useful by providing rides to megan, who lived far from the school. a lot of the time instead of driving home alone i drove to other places of not much use alone: to the highway (almost) and back alone, for the road and the trees; to new hampshire, alone, for borders, the complete stories of franz kafka, and awkward, dreamlike conversation with the clerk about 'the hunter gracchus'; and alone to wherever else i used to go to think the long, long thoughts longfellow famously ascribed to youth.

in all that thinking i never came to the moral quandary that was haunting me as i belted out the dresden dolls on a thunderstormy evening drive to whole foods just a couple of weeks ago (26 days in july it rained, they said at the office), even though the answer, though not always the questions, terms, or conditions, would have been right in front of me if i had taken the clerk at borders up on her suggestion to read kafka's 'gracchus' closely, as i did just as i reached over to the small library i keep closest to my desk to check my spelling of his name:

'"i think not," said the hunter with a smile, and, to excuse himself, he laid his hand on the burgomaster's knee. "i am here, more than that i do not know, further than that i cannot go. my ship has no rudder, and it is driven by the wind that blows in the undermost regions of death."'

we all ascribe mythical status to the remembered statements of the shades of people from our past but, genuinely, that woman was a motherfucking prophet.

we have conversations

2008-08-26T22:42:00.001-04:00

me: 'i'm becoming such a nihilist, have you noticed?"

laura: 'meh, whatever.'

what is religion and of what does its essence consist?

2008-08-21T11:05:00.003-04:00

'maybe god is in the universe the way salt is in the ocean, giving it a taste.'

-- john updike, rabbit is rich

'"finitude," he wrote, "is the contradiction of the infinite, or anything which is subject to the laws of entropy, decay, and extinction. and for us, for human beings, i would include in the definition a consciousness of the perishing of each moment of existence. or, more simply: the demand made upon us, as a species, at every moment, to choose one thing instead of another. we might imagine that we are on a boat, and that the prow of the boat penetrating the water is the choice made, or the present thing, and that the wake following the boat is what is not chosen, the absent thing: tiny wave upon wave, a body growing wider and wider, finally dissolving into the universe in ways we cannot fully perceive. what is present is finite; what is absent is infinite." he crossed it out.'

-- haven kimmel, the solace of leaving early

put your hand over the side of the boat
and what do you feel?

-- kate bush, 'a coral room'

old path white clouds

2008-08-20T23:25:00.004-04:00

laura bought a fuzzy buddha.

i'd like to see you when all of these angry days blow away

2008-08-18T10:46:00.002-04:00

'there are so few people given us to love. i want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. especially at nineteen. and if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. there are so few people given us to love and they all stick.'

-- anne enright, the gathering

my heart's outstanding bills

2008-08-17T11:59:00.011-04:00

recently i went back to dracut (i need to stop the annoying habit of calling it 'home,' as i now live in a leased apartment which i rarely leave) to finish clearing up my old room, and a need to calm down after what proved to be a rather unsettling experience and an obsessive desire to make a list resulted in this:

a complete list of items salvaged from various quarters of the bedroom of my youth and teenage years, examined, kept, and placed into two small white copy paper boxes to live on the top of my old closet

- phantasy star online soundtrack cd.

- christmas ultimate parody 16, a collection of parody christmas songs and comedy sketches, compiled and burned by matt when we were in 8th grade, named after dragonball z: ultimate battle 22 for playstation, which i'd recently acquired a working import version of.

- polaroid joycam photos of the last day of 7th grade (loose), including george walking an invisible dog, george hanging from a light fixture, kyle and krystal screaming at each other in front of a stereo in the music room, and the entire music class re-enacting the 'bohemian rhapsody' scene from wayne's world with classroom desks in car formation.

- polariod joycam photos (in box) of the last day of 9th grade, when kyle, megan, matt, orso, justin, kaleigh and myself went to the brettcave, otherwise known as brett's basement room. jedi outcast ozma, and vanilla coke ensued.

- weezer ticket-- 21 july 2002 in mansfield: went with kyle, kaleigh, alli.

- white t-shirt written on in multicoloured marker (never washed, never worn) from the last days of 9th grade spanish, part of an assignment in which we made spanish-themed t-shirts (which went awry)-- i wrote 'crimex: el reloj mafia' (crimex: the clock mafia, spanish) in large letters, and heather wrote 'vivi, la heather' and 's'agapo [heart] heather' (i love you, love heather, greek).

- official new york-penn league baseball-- game ball from a lowell spinners game.

- who were the pharaohs?: a history of their names with a list of cartouches by stephen quirke.

- soul calibur promo poster.

- final fantasy anthology: official strategy guide.

- 'the fan': an ink drawing of kyle, wearing a tal bachman shirt, with his characteristic expression, circa grade seven. folded notebook paper, signed by the artist, matt.

- r.e.m. holiday single from 2000 (33 1/3):
1. christmas time (is here again)
2. hastings and main
3. take seven

- computer printout of a picture of sasha bell from the original promo material for the finishing school, her first solo album.

- mst3k fan club welcome pack (white folder).

- a list entitled 'fox's next fall lineup' by myself and matt, listing alternate names of popular shows for comedic effect, including 'family die: the tragic two-parter.' circa 7th grade.

- faux-stained glass window hanging of a guardian angel with two children on a bridge.

- environmental school journal - 'may 11-15, 1998'

- westboro baptist church flyer: 'englesby school is a homo-fascist regime.' printed out to show around school to gather interest for the counter-protest, which massively outnumbered said religious crazyfolk.

- graduation hat/tassels.

- notebook (blue) with only three pages written on. titles are:
1. 'what is important' (3 july 2003)
2. 'people that (who?) matter' (undated)
3. 'what is important to me' (23 august 2003)

- the phantom tollbooth

- the little webster dictionary, bought from courtney for three dollars, grade 4.

- small icelandic tabloid magazine.

- salem state college orientation button (my name in red).

- small green camouflage pouch (empty).

- silver mini-maglite (broken).

- extra key to blue trunk.

- illin' mathematicians '04 sticker.

- mrs. mccabe's card, with her e-mail address written on it.

- derrick thomas football card, from phil.

- democratic socialists of america membership card (expired december 2005). card arrived initially with the '5' handwritten over a 4, since they evidently had cards left over from the previous year.

- small yellow umbrella, as for cocktails. this has something to do with monica.

- high school student identification cards (4). kaleigh was collecting everyone's old ones and i guess i never got around to giving her mine.

- photograph dated 30 january 2002, taken by rosette. her brother's wild squirrel on top of her refrigerator.

- amnesty international sticker.

- galaxie 500 copenhagen cd insert, 'come ride the fiery breeze of galaxie 500.'

- lipton green tea with citrus bottle from quebec-- 'thé vert aux agrumes.'

- ms-07 gouf sd action figure.

- weezer bboard name tags (laminated) from aforementioned show, with my forum name (enjoy jojo), used by virtual users to identify each other at the concert. we ran into a small group and had an awkward conversation. kaleigh thought she saw one other person (recognised her from her picture) a few rows up from us during the show.

- homer simpson church key.

- greek bracelet from an elementary school era birthday party at cassie's.

- seating tag from the prom i attended (25 may 2006).

- hush records sticker.

- fake love letter from me to bethany by katie, with bethany's name spelled incorrectly.

- invitation to nickie's 16th birthday party, 23 june 2003.

- women who rock magazine, september/october 2003-- meg white on cover.

- 'vote alli for class of 2005 vice president' stickers.

- imitation beanie baby frog.

- collection of 'super dog' comics (a hot dog who battles other, more criminal foods) i drew in 2nd grade in a folder with a hot rod on the cover ($1.00, school store).

- elementary school yearbooks. each year there was a theme:
1994 - golden apple
1995 - fish for knowledge
1996 - fly into memories
1997 - through the doors
1998 - going out in style
1999 - unlock the mystery of "99"

- plastic musket pistol (black).

- 'maple the bear' beanie baby (complete with canadian flag).

- great illustrated classics: the prince and the pauper and the time machine.

- 8th grade class picture in small poster tube.

- english leather wallet (brown).

- yoda action figure.

- the telegraph company distribution sampler number 1 cd.

- junior high yearbook: there had been a page of pictures missing, so they were handed out on the other side of the building on the last day. next, the building was locked and we were left outside to gather signatures, wait for the bus to come, or run away.

- final fantasy vii original soundtrack.

- thesaurus musicarum: the pitchfork year in music, 2003.

- 'ace bandit records' bumper sticker concept design.

- high school yearbook with separate autograph insert including messages like 'stay deep, brother' (kaleigh) and many others, some now illegible. i started reading monica's, cried, and stopped. i know why i saved this for last.

dream my dreams in cylindrical sound

2008-08-13T22:34:00.000-04:00

'if it wasn't statistics we got, it was advice. RAF officers coaxed journalists on how to don their gas masks. they advised us to use the "buddy-buddy" system, whereby you helped your fellow scribe to fit the filter onto his mask but ensured your own was fitted first -- while your colleague presumably suffocated to death. the whole wretched business involved "hunkering down" -- a phrase a suspect the military got from the press -- while gallons of saddam's vile cocktail clouded around us. a visit to the french foreign legion -- red wine in the desert seemed a lot more sensible than a british ration of lukewarm water -- convinced me that there were simpler methods of avoiding chemical extinction. a british member of the legion's second infantry regiment from the east end of london told me that his unit -- battle honours included the marne -- had its own unique operational instructions. "basically," he said, "when there's a red gas alert, someone blows a whistle and we all pile on our lorries and drive like fuck out of the area."'

-- robert fisk, the great war for civilisation

the move: an epic [IV]

2008-08-09T13:22:00.003-04:00

gone.

room on fire

2008-08-08T23:16:00.002-04:00

your eyes are burning holes through me
i'm gasoline
i'm burning clean

-- r.e.m., 'electrolite'

if life is a fire, the 'vital spark' i call my body heat in those inner dialogues with myself, then at our most conscious moments we should be a pure flame, burning clean. the 'vital spark' thing is something i started saying under my breath some years ago when i realised anytime between october and april i'd get cold even in a decently heated place if i sat still for too long, and i was rarely in a decently heated place. so i took a lot of hot showers to replenish the vital spark, or curled up under a thick blanket and shut myself off to the outside world so that i could be warm. it was one or the other. a lot of it was a function of being alone most of the time-- having someone else in close proximity certainly helps quite a bit. it got to the point where, and this is either sad or as fond a winter memory as one can craft when alone on a long, cold night, anytime i had to go out to shovel during a snowstorm i'd load up on vodka first so the snowflakes would be even more swirly dancey against the black sky and yellowy glare of streetlights.

'electrolite' as a song has a lot of good ideas. putting the twentieth century to sleep: who could disagree with that? put it in an upstairs bedroom to think about what it has done, dreaming the way i have recently of every regretful thing. the ceiling below the room would sag and run with blood, because something like the past century can't be contained, no matter what the optimism quotient. sleep is not a cure-all, because not all dreams are not nightmares. not that anything i've done compares, but the point is obliquely made.

so the ideal is out of reach, by definition. our flame is never clean, but the fire itself could be considered to have a purifying effect. by adding more to it, trying to leave something more for your memory instead of brooding so on what has already taken place, the flame of continuing life perhaps cleanses some of the past as you make new mistakes to sully your flame is you move into the future. but at least they're not the same old things, even if they are. differences in degree or specifics but not in kind-- still differences. more regrets, but not precisely the same regrets. that's about as clean as we get.

i came to burn leaves

2008-08-08T12:53:00.003-04:00

cooler temperatures and the yellow leaves i found on my windshield this morning could almost lull one into a false sense of autumn, counteracted by the thunderless flashes over the water that woke laura up last night. there's still some summer to go.

what's the story

2008-08-06T17:27:00.001-04:00

'what is life but a series of inspired follies? the difficulty is to find them to do. never lose a chance: it doesn't come everyday.'

-- george bernard shaw, pygmalion

there are stars above you

2008-08-04T09:46:00.000-04:00

'god knows. maybe he doesn't.'

-- sylvia plath, journals

the move: an epic [III]

2008-08-03T23:43:00.002-04:00

keep going.

sunday. the living room is the last basically uncompleted room, and also the most complicated in terms of what we want to do with it. the plan is to set up a sort of office area behind japanese-style screens, with the tv out in the middle part of the room across from the sleeper love-seat my parents are bringing down next weekend. i arranged it roughly that way today, with certain obvious parts missing. i set my ibook up in the kitchen and dug out my computer speakers so that i could run them into the living room and listen to cbc podcasts of a 1998 special on educational theory. the bookcases are bare and one that we still should buy is missing, the screens have yet to be found, the love-seat is a week off, and i didn't want to populate the tv stand with dvds at this early date, in case things change. i await her response. (later: she likes it!)

i tracked thunderstorms on my pilfered internet connection today-- small bands of them passed through, causing momentary downpours and the intermittent booming in the distance that is my favourite aspect of the season. being right by the water as we are means we catch this kind of storm last, and someday when the band is wider and more severe i'll walk down to the beach and watch its progress out to sea. i mentioned as much to my father yesterday. he said he was jealous of us for living so close to the beach (even though it is only a 'beach' in the academic sense) for that very reason. he was looking at the power plant and saying he wanted to see something hit the electrical wires. as we walked down to the beach, laura was describing to my parents how this one spot between the crosswalk and the concrete path around the little bay is the best because for a few seconds at a regular pace, you can't see the power plant. you could stop right there and pretend it doesn't exist.

we finished decorating our 'old world' kitchen with seventeenth century cartographic prints, the framed renaissance nativity painting laura bought me, and a couple of complementary indie rock posters (secret shine and andrea maxand) that matched the colour scheme.

anna stopped in to visit. i count her the first official guest, since my family was helping with the move and can't really be considered to have been in the house in that capacity. next time. i have this idea, and laura told anna about this, as i told emmie, that this place is big enough and we're of the temperament that we could be the place that friends stay overnight at. i'm not thinking wild parties, because we don't do much with large groups anyway, but there's definitely some appeal in sometimes staying up late with friends and not having to part while it's still dark: there's a place for them to sleep and an inviting kitchen. i guess for me this goes back to the dorms and staying late in each other's rooms, which after knowing christine was further fuel for my love of late-night discourse, when the hours start to blur and you get drunk on tired. we'd watch movies in the strange room that will soon have both chinese propaganda posters and at least one of audrey hepburn. i love us.

the move: an epic [II]

2008-08-02T23:07:00.000-04:00

go.

moving made great strides today, with almost all major furniture items (and everything that's mine) entering the house in the afternoon. no freaking out on my part. our new kitchen table is the one that sat in my parents' kitchen for most of my life, before they remodeled it, and the memories flow on. it also doesn't help that when i came by at 6:30 this morning to start moving things over, the salt air and musk of the empty place reminded me of our old cottage on the cape, since sold. my father thought so too, and he used to go there every summer.

it's typical, a 1950's family who got a little something in postwar america, thinking they owned the world, or at least the world owed them. so they grabbed up whatever luxuries they could. it's not that we don't do the same now, but placing the phenomenon so long ago with the dead makes categorisation and judgement all the easier. laura and i have our spot of comparative luxury, and the first thing we notice this night, aside from the charmingly slanted floors, is how much better this bedroom is than geneva street, or my old place before it: no noisy street, no abused dog barking next door, air conditioning. we put up the great wave off kanagawa over the bed, which i've always wanted in a bedroom, and laura says the colours match up fine.

i'm particularly fascinated by my small brookstone white noise machine. i originally found this thing in my grandmother's house after she died-- my father said i could keep it. i used it in high school, keeping it next to my bed on the stream setting and imagining i was on a boat on some bubbling river somewhere, soothed by the sounds of the water and liberated from adolescent cares. silly now, i know, but it can be relaxing. i like the look of its grey against the deep brown wood of the table, so i left it out there. it'll need new batteries.

there's an unsecured wireless network in the neighbourhood. we've become comfortable very quickly.

the move: an epic [I]

2008-08-01T18:36:00.005-04:00

first of the month.

laura and i went down to pick up the keys and lease from janet this morning. we had time to check in on the place before work: the kitchen is smaller than we remember, the living room bigger. the bedroom's floor is slightly uneven, which may or may not cause problems. there is more closet space than we had expected, or at least than i had remembered. also available was the opportunity to sift through what the previous tenant left, which ranges from the incredibly useful (a bureau) to the expected (some final refrigerated items that probably weren't worth taking along when he left yesterday) to the downright unusual (a collection of wendy's barbecue sauce containers and an envelope of photographs from 2005).

i made a closer study of these items when i came back after work alone and post-grocery, throwing away all that was not useful and stocking the place with non-edible essentials. the cabinets are high, with many shelves that will likely not be utilised for kitchen purposes, and laura has given me permission to stock them with books when the time comes. it will probably be necessary. sifting through the dregs of this other life, i probably had some thoughts, but i can't remember them only a few hours later, and they probably aren't worth repeating if it were even possible. it's no good to over-sentimentalise this; that's one of the things that gets me in trouble. i mean, come on, i remember when we toured the place. dude used t-shirts for rugs.

see, my focus these few harrowing days is to prevent myself from utterly freaking out, as i did the last two times i moved. the first, from central to hathorne st. with liz, was mainly due to uncertainty and poorly-timed thunderstorms. the last, out of liz's, was primarily uncertainty as well. sprinkle a dash of excess heat-- make it several handfuls, actually -- and no good will come of it on my end. i say this time it will be easier, less of a mess, all of my things pre-packed and in storage. i owe it to laura. i'm strange and nervous, but i get too strange and nervous on those days, and it makes both of us worry. i focus on a few particular points in the near future, just as laura does: she can't wait to organise the kitchen, i can't wait to organise my books. i want another small black bookcase like the one in storage now. place them side to side: one fiction, the other my eclectic range of religious books, some generally recognised, others more my own personal scripture: the shaking quakers, english bibles, tolstoy, manseau and sharlet, jessamyn west, elaine pagels, the qur'an, joan of arc, thoreau. haven kimmel.

my drive over, by the longest and easiest route, was uncomfortable only because of the heat, but the drive back (by a more likely sequence of streets and turns) highlighted one of the greatest drawbacks of our choice to live deeper in downtown driving hell. i realised quickly that i had picked the worst hour (rush) and the only way things could possibly be worse would be if i were to turn on the radio and the worst music (also, incidentally, rush) was playing. i made it through after waiting for many lights, many pedestrians, and many people who clearly didn't know how the fuck to drive (even in comparison to myself). if i made it through that i'll probably do just fine in the future.

i'm still reading vollmann's the atlas, with what i have left of andrea dworkin's life and death on deck. i'm still waiting for robert fisk's the great war for civilisation in the mail, but i can't put away my sudden urge to pick up medieval people by eileen power again. listen to some helium, get some pictures of castles in your head, and you're right back there to the medievalism you thought that joan of arc paper beat out of you. maybe it's bodo, the simple life of a peasant, but 'simple' usually also means hard work. it's like that with the move as well. items go from place A to place B, which is simple enough, but the how and the when are the problem. i keep listening to 'there there' like it's autumn already. time needs to slow down, but the need to get it all done speeds things up.

we'll actually start sleeping there tomorrow night. a list of the new surroundings: salem common, collins cove, a russian orthodox church. a cannon. an apparent lack of CHILDREN. one of the maintenance guys listed on our lease is named FABIO. while i was there i made the place ours a little, put tiny pieces of paper with our names printed on them on the small locked mailbox for our unit. early to rise tomorrow, and no internet till comcast comes on wednesday. moving on.

every day is comfortable somehow

2008-07-31T10:05:00.007-04:00

all the time we spent in bed
counting miles before we set
fall in love and fall apart
things will end before they start

sleeping on lake michigan
factories and marching bands
lose our clothes in summertime
lose ourselves to lose our minds
in the summer heat, i might

-- sufjan stevens, 'holland'

'for a moment he vaguely remembered those summers that adolescents have, when they think they are about to irrevocably change.'

-- william t. vollmann, 'the atlas'

at the end of july i'm thinking about the way i was living a year ago today, or two years before that. the changes happen, but they come on slowly, imperceptibly; your life changes before your eyes like the moment the sky becomes the night sky officially, taking on black. you never see it even though you promise yourself you'll look harder the next time the sun sets, and night after night you start to forget, until you don't know why you cared in the first place. flux happens, just as it always did, life as a river, but it's no longer your focus.

no lucifer

2008-07-26T16:56:00.003-04:00

dracut is a place where i made a lot of stupid, life-altering, friendship-ruining mistakes connected, directly or indirectly, to youth, ignorance, or inexperience. in other words, it's the place i grew up. i always have mixed emotions about going back, as evidenced by probably nearly half of this blog's content, if not more. see here, for example. catherine used to call it 'dracutting' when i went home for a weekend during freshman year, as if it were a kindly jaunt, but with a subtext of self-mutilation. in my creative writing non-fiction class last semester, i wrote a piece that included a bit of a rhapsody on this issue, based on a particular post from here that got a great response from those of similar age.

all of which means i spend a lot of time wondering if the people i see when i go back (when i see people) see it the same way as i do when they have similar feelings. and i spend a lot of time wondering about this peculiar aspect of myself that wants to back out right before longed-for situations. i'll really want to see someone but have nothing to say when the moment actually comes, even though i've been depressed about not seeing them for such an inappropriately long time beforehand. i've always been like this; i've always been vexed by it. how i'm almost scared to head dracutward for emmie's party tomorrow because i don't want to drive through the unfamiliar overdeveloped outskirts and make the requisite stop at my parents' and have to see a room full of relics of that past life, especially now that laura and i are racing through time towards the little place by the water, our imagination made brick. a week from today the move begins, and a visit to the past is last on my list of things to pack.

but there's plenty to be said for the spontaneity i've been missing out on all these years, and if i can let my analytical self go for a few hours i'll happily alight out of salem in sasha towards the friends i should have had all along and a town devoid of negative associations, since i don't have to live there anymore.

didyouseeterminatortwo@guysistillreallylikethatmovie.com

2008-07-22T14:18:00.003-04:00

every time i get around to checking a month or so's backlog of unread dinosaur comics, it's like a breath of spring 2006, a feeling which is the very definition of sawesome. maybe that's why i save them for such large doses.

i believe in yesterday

2008-07-21T18:45:00.002-04:00

'you want me to talk about myself, right? let me tell you what "self" means to me. the self, myself, the self as i see it, is composed mainly of selected memories from my history. i am not what i am doing now. i am what i have done, and the edited version of my past seems more real to me than what i am at this moment. i don't know who or what i really am. the present is fleeting and intangible. no one in china wants to talk about his past, because nobody wants to paint his face black. our past is not a flattering picture, and no one wants to look at it for long. yet what we were is fixed and final. it is the basis for predictions of what will be in the future. to tell you the truth, i identify with what no longer exists more than with what actually is.'

-- anchee min, katherine

all the feelings that broke through that door just didn't seem to be too real

2008-07-20T17:22:00.004-04:00

'...the reason we love eden is that we've been expelled from it.'

-- william t. vollmann, the rifles

i wrote this a couple of years ago, and parts of it are universally relevant, i'd like to think, even though it no longer applies to my own situation. i don't get that kind of lonely anymore. my lonely now is an entirely different sort which i describe often, that of bonds forged and lost; also, the more tragic: bonds imagined and never created.

i had a long dream this afternoon which can best be described as an alternative reality nightmare. everything about the setting was different, and it died upon my waking. people and places, vividly rendered, old friends, fading with the reminder that they were never bright in the first place. never real. and what is real fades similarly, which is why i was originally driven to sleep today in the first place.

see, i've been poking at expelled from eden: a william t. vollmann reader and i came across a selection from his book thirteen stories and thirteen epitaphs entitled 'the ghost of magnetism.' i only got as far as the editor's introduction, where, introducing the piece as essentially vollmann's description of a farewell party his friends threw for him, it is described as:

one of the most startling displays in all of vollmann's work of his remarkable powers of memory, 'ghost' simultaneously evokes his tragic awareness of the limits of memory and art. thus even as we witness vollmann's furious effort to give expression (and hence preserve) these precious shards of 'memory flesh' before he forgets them, we recognize he already senses that even his own remarkable powers as an artist are helpless to counter the forces of change and loss-- that everything is already rushing away from him and slipping into the dark emptiness of the undifferentiated past (mccaffery 39-40).

and suddenly, despite the fact that no one was around, i vocalised the following: 'i'm so not ready for this.' sleep instead, even though i haven't had any restful sleep in weeks, such are the dreams. better those than a much stronger authorial voice than my own reminding me of what i already know, the way you get upset when you're already upset and someone tells you to do something you already know you have to do. but in this case the point is there's nothing you can do, and i suppose we all want to be told otherwise. you could argue that there's beauty in the trying. maybe that's all art is.

the world of my dreams, with the neighbourhood i lived in and the friends i had, the place we all spent time together and the five years later when everyone had moved on, all of that faded, just as real life fades-- just as the post i mentioned earlier is merely a dispatch from a time i spent long evenings on the porch in dracut trying to sort out my post-nicole life, listening to a lot of everything but the girl and terrified of the loneliness of sleep, even if i wasn't fully willing to admit it then. i am now, but that will pass as well.

last friday

2008-07-15T09:00:00.002-04:00

'righteous. wait a second, righteous? i apparently became a surfer just now.'

-- genevieve

'alright, dude. shake it easy.'

-- genevieve, moments later.

dreams i can't control

2008-07-12T17:25:00.004-04:00

believe this for a second, young believer: every time you sleep it's winter and every time you dream it's christmas. you sort through the bedroom closet of your youth for long-lost articles you never owned, and there's a long drive in the snow and dark ahead towards a place you'll never get to. people are waiting for you, and morning never comes.

i am an american aquarium drinker

2008-07-03T14:04:00.003-04:00

enchanted in recent days and weeks by flashes and booms of passing thunderheads, wishing only that they'd hang overhead a bit longer. grass is always greener, sky could always be darker, the mornings more grey, more foreboding. but this is more than last year, when even fifteen minutes of thunder around this time would send lizzie and i out on to the deck back at the old place with some level of wonder. the wind could always be more turbulent, doing some actual damage rather than the suggested damage of severe thunderstorm warnings that never seems to happen. or when you almost think it actually will, like the short storm that picked up late evening the other day, jets of cooler air, refreshing, in through the windows of the upper storeys.

other than that, early july heat of strengthening summer, caesar's month. warm wind carrying firecracker celebration of the botched republic.

with your telescope eyes

2008-07-02T21:49:00.003-04:00

genève

2008-07-02T09:45:00.001-04:00

i'm living with laura on geneva street. like her, i hate the man next door and believe he and his seed should be wiped from this earth.

those furious affections followed you

2008-06-30T15:25:00.001-04:00

'i'm pretty sure it was her who killed my imagination.'

-- kayleigh, on a sixth grade teacher. nonchalantly.

a variety of stories on that theme

2008-06-24T14:10:00.004-04:00

'. . . and that the records of past Dispensations, and their revelations, can be understood and interpreted aright only by means of a present living revelation; we therefore feel ourselves untrammeled by the letter of yesterday, and write and express our views in accordance with the increasing light of to-day. . .'

-- shakers compendium, august, 1858.

coming and going on easy terms

2008-06-23T21:02:00.004-04:00

this is going to seem like simple adolescent philosophy-- the loosest definition of each of those words.

so, maybe it's not worth overthinking any of this. people go, and it's best to let them. you can't change any of it, and any effort you make to get someone to stay or make someone go more quickly is undue meddling in the infinite now of moments you can enjoy while they are there. i forget that too often, seeking for a sort of personal sustainability that should not need to exist for happiness to flourish. happiness does not need weeks of sunshine and a constantly soaked root to finally have a chance to peek out, just when it seems safe; i should finally expand my understanding of completed past events as worthwhile, even though they are no longer here, to enjoying the fleeting, the eternity contained in the now. now, in the deep and down, says old jimmy eat world that was such a comfort in high school. think about that for a second. clarity, like the name of the album. today has depth.

maren knocks off in a few words of action so much of my past thinking: life is too short, people go away, and the last thing we want to do is cry.... so that is why we are celebrating and having a kick ass time!! for a moment it seems like ignoring a problem; the next, living.

lolpossum

2008-06-23T14:39:00.003-04:00

my first lolwhatever effort, using kayleigh's photo of the possum which graced the trash the day i was moving:

of course everyone goes crazy over such and such and such

2008-06-22T19:06:00.002-04:00

two excerpts:

'"the world," he tells his son, "is full of people who never knew what hit 'em, their lives are over before they wake up."'

--

'history. the more of it you have the more you have to live it. after a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.'

-- john updike, rabbit is rich