More Trouble With The Obvious

Catching Up With Jose

2011-09-05T08:50:00.007-04:00

There are two principles in Land Surveying that seem to contradict one another. And of course, as these serendipities go, they are two of the fundamental principles of the property surveyor.

1) Every measurement contains error. Or: No measurement is exact.

No matter how close you think you may be, you can always get closer. Pull a tape down a piece of wood and tell me the number. Pull it again. (Measure twice cut once?) Bounce a laser off the back wall and give me a distance. Turn an angle with a transit. The number you obtain will contain random errors. Tell me you can measure a piece of wood exactly and I will tell you that you can probably measure a piece of wood adequately. No matter how close you think you are, the temperature may be introducing sag in your tape. The standard steel tape, if it is correctly calibrated, is calibrated for a temperature of 68 degrees F at a tension of 15lbs. Chances are the tape you are using has not even been calibrated. Chances are you're not even using a steel tape. What's the distance? Twelve feet? Twelve feet four tenths? Twelve feet forty-four hundredths? Twelve feet four hundred forty two thousandths? The number can always get a little closer to what we might call the "true value." In adjustment computations--the art of adjusting measurements in accordance with the rules of statistics and probability to find what we might call "probable fit"--we say that the "true value" is never known. Only approximated.

2) There is no error in an original measurement that created the property line.

This was enacted by statute in the Land Act of 1805, which decreed that all of the original lines and distances in a survey are correct, and that no error exists in the original survey. Obviously, if you give this any thought, it makes sense, lest future surveys continually correct the error that will ALWAYS exist in the original survey. (See principle one.)

Hereupon we build all other principles of property surveying. We cannot get it exactly right, so we must enact legislation that decrees that on the original survey we got it exactly right. (Of course, any survey that comes after the original survey, the retracement surveys, are up for attack, which is exactly why surveyors the world over are generally grumpy and pissed off.)

This all brings to mind for me the great G.K. Chesterton's rather puzzling synopsis of things seen and unseen: The real problem with the world is not that it is reasonable, nor that it is unreasonable. The real problem with the world is that it is almost reasonable, but not quite. It is this--what Chesterton calls the "silent swerving" at the last minute--that is the unnerving thing about the rational world. The earth is very nearly a perfect sphere, but not quite. (It bulges 27 miles at the equator. Twenty-seven miles out of 7,900, which is pretty close.) The earth completes one revolution of the sun in a period of a year. Well, 365.2564 days: almost an exact year. Which of course introduces all sorts of problems regarding time. A sidereal day, for instance, or the time it takes for the earth to spin around once, turns out to be 3 minutes and 56 seconds shorter than a solar day, or the interval between two successive transits of the sun over the same meridian. (Which, if taken yet another step with regards to determining geographic position on the earth in the actual observance of the sun, introduces the problem of mean solar time and apparent solar time, giving rise to a beautiful correction called the equation of time.)

So that when I, several weeks ago--actually one week prior to the day when I spent the weekend with some friends in block 604 of the Rockbridge County Jail for drinking and driving (a charge I incurred back in March after a marvelous day on the river)--found a bottle of bourbon placed almost serendipitously on my porch, I took one step back out from under the porch roof and searched for concentric circles that I felt certain were at that moment dissipating into the shadowy clouds. I found Maker's Mark stuffed down in a gift bag with a box of six glasses and a letter. The glasses were of nice shape and size for bourbon on the rocks and three of them had been removed. The letter informed me that the missing glasses, lacking only the whiskey, belonged to the sender. My rather pedestrian pallet rates Maker's highly on the shelf of bourbon whiskeys, wedged in quality (though not in price) between the likes of Knob Creek and Woodford Reserve. I even enjoyed a glass, rocks, bourbon, while I read the letter and, to at least some small degree, traced the overlapping patterns of our lives that must always disappear ("like all good things, the best things") into mystery.

While You Were Gone

2011-05-29T13:15:00.002-04:00

I've returned to a book that Melissa picked up several years ago. I've been reading from it. And I like the way it ends. Not clean and tidy, but resolved enough to move on.

"My wish that they move away will, apparently, not be granted.

But perhaps this is all to the good. Perhaps it's best to live with the possibility that around any corner, at any time, may come the person who reminds you of your own capacity to surprise yourself, to put at risk everything that's dear to you. Who reminds you of the distances we have to bridge to begin to know anything about one another. Who reminds you that what seems to be--even about yourself--may not be. That like him, you need to be forgiven."

At one point in my life I would have talked about the rhythm of this paragraph, how much like music it is. How parallel structure is so beautifully employed and stretched and honed down to the period at the end. But today I read it and quote it here because it feels, in a rather simple-minded way, honest. I often tell myself, as well, that it is all to the good.

The Formative Years: An Apology

2011-02-05T12:00:00.012-05:00

BACKGROUND
It was brought to my attention last evening, while standing around with a small group of friends--within a larger group of strangers--that my high school years were a bit peculiar. I was a little rambunctious and spent a lot of time scrambling around searching for something in the rubble. Some sign of God, perhaps, or some such suitably unspeakable bootprint in the fallen bauble of the nineteen eighties. Then I moved to Lynchburg, and for whatever reason, here in the Burg people tend to take an odd sort of pride in their high school alma mater. I work in a building where half of everyone went to high school together. Have known each other a long time. Have deep and abiding memories of getting hammered and having sex with each other. And they talk about it. And it's weird. So inevitably, at some point in the course of polite conversation, the question arises: "So, Joe, where'd you go to school?" Meaning, of course, high school.

Now, unless the conversation explicitly dictates that I name my high school, I'll generally say Lynchburg College and hope to glance the direction of the eye away from the younger, more turbulent years and spotlight the more modest and well-dressed stages of my life. Forgive me, it's psychologically complicated. But often, in these odd social situations, I can't escape the question--as I said, high school is an important stage of development and high school in the Burg says a hell of a lot about who you are as a person--and I've taken to saying: "I went to school mostly up in D.C." Meaning, of course, I went to school up in the Metropolis away from Lynchburg and please don't bother me anymore about this question. Most of the time this works. So much so, in fact, that I haven't bothered to think about the answer much at all anymore.

Until last evening, when the issue was pressed a little further and my line--"mostly up in DC"--suddenly didn't make any sense. Anne kind of looked at me. "When did you move here?" Well, I did go to Brookville. Trish looked at me: "Didn't you go to LCA?" Well, yeah, I went there too. Anne got a confused look. "So you spent two years of high school here in Lynchburg but went to school mostly in D.C.?" Well, I spent three years in school away from here and two years here. So yes, mostly in D.C. Kelly attempted to come to my rescue: "Your formative years were not spent in Lynchburg." I took a big swig of Flying Dog ale, but the conversation didn't go away. Anne finally said, "Why are you making this so complicated?"

And of course I had no neat, simple, conversational answer. I suppose I might have said, To keep it from being complicated, but that probably wouldn't have made any sense either. So for the benefit of those who would genuinely like to know where I attended high school--and these people apparently do exist--I present my curriculum vitae, and trust that I will once again be welcomed at establishments serving only those patrons of orange, blue, and glass.

CURRICULUM VITAE
Lanham Christian School. (Also known as L.C.S., this academy should not be confused with L.C.A., another Christian school here in the Burg that gives birth to all sorts of illiterate Liberty students and of which it is perhaps best if you remove all affiliation from your docket.) I successfully attended my full ninth grade year at L.C.S., though upon returning later in my high school career I was expelled for some words I wrote in a notebook. The words were apparently quite powerful and I consider this experience perhaps the most telling and influential of my high school lessons. It was, for all intents and purposes, my graduation from high school.

Eleanor Roosevelt High School. I began my sophomore year at ERHS, a Science and Technology school outside my district, because I was apparently interested in learning Russian, and ERHS happened to be the only school in the area that taught Russian. So the administration accepted me and I attended for a semester or so. Fortunately for my adolescent development, ERHS turned out to be extremely large, thousands of students, and there existed no practical way to keep up with everyone. So I joined the marginally intelligent half of the student body (I'll let you decided whether the adverb "marginally" is being used with a negative or positive connotation), and we essentially, as a large group, strolled in the front door and out the back. This half of the population learned to wile away the long scholastic hours riding the metro into D.C., tripping out on LSD and wandering around Georgetown in combat boots. These were perhaps the most enjoyable days of my high school career. (Shh, don't tell your students.) Without a care of the future, with very little accountability, we would sit on the steps where the Exorcist was filmed--the tall narrow set of stairs leading up to the dark room in which the girl's head spun completely around; the stairs, in fact, down which the priest was hurled by the demon--and read On The Road, aloud, to each other. We had no idea what we were reading, but we liked the sounds and the shape of our mouths over the words.

Until two girls talked me into stealing my father's Starcraft conversion van and driving across the country. Which I did. They made up stories about abusive parents and angry mothers and I drove them away. Searching for bootprints. Searching for some sort of clue. As if Freedom was not quite enough, in itself. Searching for something out of place in the landscape. Some piece of evidence that God left behind. I never returned to ERHS.

Instead, I was arrested in Hollywood and charged with Grand Theft Auto (charges my father later dropped), where I went through a very brief, intense course of study in a Juvenile Detention Home in downtown Hollywood. They kept photo albums, in this home, of pictures taken of run-away children who were finally found. Their bodies, I mean. Mangled. Beaten. Torn apart by the evil of this world. Children. The pictures were the most gruesome pictures I have ever seen and I have never forgotten them. The old black man who was showing me the photo album snapped it shut and looked at me. "Go home," he said. And when my father showed up to take me home, I went.

Capital Christian Academy. It was all but impossible to walk away from C.C.A. So I began writing. Fantasy, mostly. Stories of imprisoned students fighting back against the overbearing arm of Authority. Poems about nothing. About searching for nothing. About finding nothing. My stories often took on a brutal and violent air, and there's a sense in me now, these many years later, that I was angry about those pictures. When you are young, forming, so much is impossible to express. Your facilities are perhaps incapable of articulating the kind of brutality the world so freely dishes out. If I traveled west in some sort of existential journey of a spiritual nature, what I returned with was evidence that the hand of God is a hateful, wrathful hand and the miracles in the sand of this planet are terrible miracles of destruction. My battle against this unseen God could only get more gruesome. So I left my words in a notebook on the bleachers of C.C.A. and I traveled north to a town I thought must surely hold some answers. Mystic, Connecticut.

We arrived in the early morning and I sat on a pier with my feet hanging off the edge and I stared out across the water. The friends traveling with me were silly and happy. I felt none of their joy. I felt only the slow slight movement of the pier and the unspeakable abyss of the ocean under my dangling feet. Where is this thing to which I run, which has no name, I may have said but did not. I only sat there sullenly in the damp gray air. We're leaving, I said. And got up to go. Someone flicked a cigarette into the ocean. "We just got here, man." Train's leaving with or without you, I said, and I left Mystic. Somewhere in New York City, in some tight dark tunnel, with my good friend driving so that I could doze in a sort of dreamy haze, the mirror on the passenger side of the van smacked the open door of an electrical cabinet and I was jarred awake.

The judge fined me $50 for driving without a license.

Hereford High School. I couldn't stay at home. I was agitated and confused. I looked over one night while climbing out the second-story window and someone was watching me go. I went to live with my Uncle and his family above Baltimore and attended the local high school. Nothing can be dispensed with. The students thought I was a narc sent to break up a big drug ring. Nothing can be deleted or left out. I had no motivation or passion for the silly tinkerings of public education. Tidbits and parcels that seemed wholly empty and without purpose. I quit school and worked full time at a local plant nursery. Potting plants, pulling orders together on the flatbed behind the tractor, getting my hands dirty in the greenhouse. I made $3.10 an hour. Searching for a seam in the fabric. Searching for the imperfections. But they are hidden from us. The places where the stories connect. They are not visible. So everything is necessary.

Joe Gibb's Youth for Tomorrow. I was accepted into a boy's home down in Gainsville, Virginia. At the time, the home sat in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by miles of pasture. It was plush and comfortable and Dexter Manley, a football player for the Redskins, would show up and join us for breakfast. I wasn't entirely sure what I was supposed to be doing. What I was supposed to be omitting. Or adding. My roommate showed me the scar from a knife wound. He was stabbed in the stomach and the knife went in a long way. How do we know that the world will continue standing if we remove this block, or that block, or this act or that one? The stitches are all of them hidden from us. But even here, I could not escape the classroom. Half of every day was spent at a desk in a classroom doing worksheets and taking tests. Always tests. The other half of the day we would pick up rocks from the fields. Mow the grass. Trim the hedges. Dig up stumps. Useful, beneficial tasks. Tasks that made sense. Hard work. I slept on the floor in my room to remind myself that not every bed is soft. And beyond the days, I later read in the endless music of Wallace Stevens, beyond the slow-foot litters of the nights, the actual, universal strength, without a word of rhetoric--there it is.

I had to leave Youth for Tomorrow. They spoke poorly of my father and they didn't even know him. I couldn't trust them. Couldn't trust what they were telling me. They assumed to know me because of a few psychological tests that I had learned to take. They assumed because of certain questions I had answered that I was this kind of person with these kinds of problems. And they were wrong. I was looking for something that has no name. That cannot be named. Or bought. Or seen. I played them as much as they me. I walked away and away across miles of fields in combat boots that had grown too small. I left my notebook of scribbles on the desk of my room. My test, I may have said, though of course I did not. I knew only to leave it behind. A calling card of where I had been. My feet hurt but I had a phone number and someone was waiting.

Walkersville Christian School / People's Supply. I studied from home after my father allowed me to return. Some sort of correspondence course based out of Pennsylvania. We visited the farm and shook hands with the designer of the curriculum and then I mailed my tests and papers to his house. Somehow he determined whether I passed or failed. I wanted to work and my father helped out with a job. People's Supply managed by a man named Oris Basinger. I remember his name because he was perhaps the first person in my life to take me seriously. He had work that needed to get done and I did it. I was making $5.50 an hour--a fortune!--working in the basement of a hardware store. I played with power tools, unpacked boxes of hardware, priced and shelved the stock, and enjoyed myself. I mostly worked alone and Oris respected my space. I studied on my own the other half of the day and took my studies, as far as I recall, seriously. I remember peace, a sort of organic consolation--

the complete society of the spirit when it is alone--

and I began to feel the truth. Or perhaps that is too strong. Perhaps only looking back now I can point to that time, to that period, and say Here, here I began to understand. That it is not so much the bootprint in the Nevada desert that is important. The piece of bone dusty in the trail. Not so much the railway station where the crying lover kisses her soldier goodbye. Not so much the pottery shards that link these people to this place. Not so much the broken down van in the bitter cold of Missouri and two young girls scared for the first time in their lives. But the notebook that stays behind when I leave.

Lanham Christian School (part II). I returned to school at the beginning of my junior year. As I apparently had no terminal problems on my previous stint, L.C.S. welcomed me (and the money my parents paid them) back. If I could have presented to them my final thesis I may have said, I am here because of a certain story. A tale wherein we are all, in our own tales, enjoined. All such smaller tales mirror the shape of the larger, but however hard you look and for however long you search, you will never find the seams. You will never know what must be added or omitted. We do because we must and that is all we can do.

In those final days of my education I wrote nearly every day, scrawling nonsense in a binder. I stormed through the halls in my stories, shooting teachers and jumping through windows. I traveled the world beyond the days, springing teenagers from a strength beyond the indifferent sound of these words. Their mangled bodies alive on the page, driving with wind-cracked whips the chariot of their youth through the incomplete and tragic tales of their lives. And lightening. Don't forget lightening.

When the administration found the notebook they expelled me, but it didn't really matter. I was finished. My high school thesis was complete. My father read through the words and then went before the board and argued my case. My father. He's fifteen, he said. He's writing words on a page. Let him. They expelled me and my father came to me with the news. You shook them up, he said. And I swear he was smirking.

The Lynchburg Years. The rest is, as they say, history. I attended school in Lynchburg to get a diploma. That is all. I was a model student. High grades. Stellar behavior. I did no administrative wrongs. I traveled to no distant lands. I kept my musings and notebooks to myself. And yet L.C.A. still informed my father, after my first year, that I was no longer welcome. That I simply didn't fit in. By then, of course, we could joke about such things, and I graduated the next year from Brookville High School.

THE VERY END
To say more than human things with human voice, that cannot be. And I still sometimes find myself kicking in the sand along the beaches of the New River Gorge, camping alone out of a boat, scanning the landscape for something unforeseen. Something out of place. Something untrue. But there is more to doing then simply searching, and I can easily and gratefully return home at journey's end. An old house half broken down. An imperfect family. A smile. The bootprints, the doll broken in the yard made of dirt, the safety pins punched through her ears, these are the world as we know it. The world made of flower and blood and steel. But they mean nothing--less than nothing--unless they are woven into a tale. It has become at long last the story that I seek. And the seams that stitch our tales together. And the places we have been and the horror and beauty to which we bear witness. What can be omitted? At what cost? Is not everything imaginable necessary? The tormented mothers the world over? My scrambled daughter? Who am I to say that this or that ought not be. I cannot. Neither can I bear witness to that which has no name. I am but a man. I am here because of a certain story. That is all I know.

And for this reason I often find myself saying, "I went to school mostly up in D.C."

Nazim Hikmet

2011-01-22T12:25:00.005-05:00

Nazim Hikmet (Turkish poet 1903-1961), spent some 15 years in prison for his political views. He wrote some poetry. Here's a piece dated February 1948:

On Living
I
Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example--
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people--
even for people whose faces you've never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees--
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

II
Let's say we're seriously ill, need surgery--
which is to say we might not get up
from the white table.
Even though it's impossible not to feel sad
about going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out the window to see if it's raining,
or wait anxiously
for the latest newscast...
Let's say we're at the front--
for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
we might fall on our face, dead.
We'll know this with a curious anger,
but we'll still worry ourselves to death
about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
before the iron doors will open.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind--
I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.

III
This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet--
I mean THIS, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch black space...
You must grieve for this right now
--you have to feel this sorrow now--
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say "I lived."

Professional Notes: Chaining the Land

2010-08-28T09:47:00.010-04:00

Smith Mountain, when you’re driving beside the length of it, is a long mountain. With a summit elevation of 1,900 feet, it’s not a high mountain, even by Virginia standards, but for those of us who entered the profession of land surveying to get outside, to spend our days trudging through the woods searching for lost corners, to piece puzzling chunks of geometry together, Smith Mountain had all the makings of a good boundary survey.

There were overlaps and gaps, one of which ran the boundary line through the backside of a half-million dollar house overlooking Smith Mountain Lake. There were old country roads running beside open fields tended by old country farmers, places we heard stories of murder and intrigue and saw the creek were a woman once drowned her newborn baby. There were buried monuments and places where old buildings once stood and at least one old hunting lodge with a mirror still hanging from the wall and clothes still molding in the wardrobe. We stepped carefully across the rotten floorboards. There were unfriendly landowners suspicious of our presence who stared us down as we drove by. There were long walks back to the truck at the end of the day and then the length of the mountain, and our heads thrown back at the surprise of it.

For the better part of three weeks we enjoyed this mountain, digging up the concrete monuments set more than half a century ago, hearing the stories, scratching around for copper plugs driven into rock outcrops, unraveling the beauty and mystery that come from 90,000 feet of boundary. I promised the surveyor to whom I answer that after this job, I would sit dutifully back in my cubicle and not go outside for a year. Just let me out for this one. This is my kind of boundary. And this: being able to hold in the back of our minds the notion of a conservation easement, the notion that we were surveying this land to protect it for public use.

So when Governor Tim Kaine--yes, Governor Tim Kaine was still manning the helm back then--made the official announcement at an annual AEP shareholder’s meeting on April 21, and the easement of 5,000 acres became public, we smiled along with him, as did, perhaps, the old country farmers on the gravel roads, and the old timers eating breakfast at Blairs Country Store, and anyone who knows the mountain and her stories as well as they do. This survey then would not be the last chance to see the mountain unspoiled. And for those of us who treasure public lands, who understand the value of setting aside and protecting a portion of what we own for the aesthetic and recreational enjoyment of the Public, the Smith Mountain Conservation Easement is like a gift. And being able to run the boundary and put it back together might be likened to wrapping the gift and presenting it to anyone who will step out onto the land and enjoy it.

The Letter Writer

2010-08-27T00:36:00.002-04:00

There was a time I wrote letters with decent frequency. I used to be so tidy! Decisively not emails. Letters that were sometimes—not often due to my propensity for editing—but sometimes written in pen on college ruled paper. Downtown. Beneath the yellow lights on the courthouse steps. Stuffed into large yellow envelopes and hand addressed.

Y.Lenips—an artist’s artist—would write on blank white paper without lines because he preferred ink and thought the natural bend of the written sentence when unencumbered by artificial rulers offered an aesthetic that was not unlike the natural roll and dip of the earth. As if reading a letter might somehow be compared to taking a walk across an open meadow when the grass gets tall in early autumn and the ponds turn over and the air thickens and the river starts to turn green.

(Richard Hugo would argue there is no need to create the entire world before inhabiting it with people. Write on lined paper, for god’s sake. With a pencil. And cross out mistakes violently. Y.Lenips was more concerned with creating the entire world than inhabiting the world with people.)

We would even send directions with our letters. Instructions for how to read them. At least two beers away from the center of the bar. Best in a dark corner. Take a walk down a city street at night and read aloud. One paragraph at a time, please. Record page two and play back while driving at night. Stupid stuff that never got followed, except maybe one Christmas Eve when I drove my car up 501 toward Big Island at night—sweeping around that final bend down toward the river and watching the approaching lights of the factory get closer and fuller through the trees—listening to myself read Lawrence Raab underneath spooky keyboard noises floating from my car speakers. The river black and still beside me. But I was following my own instructions and reading my own letter.

The only way to make art, Miles Davis said, is to forget what is unimportant.

Y.Lenips sent the grand finale, which was a letter on some sort of foam board cut into jigsaw pieces and mailed to three different people. Three people taking part in a little writing circle that came about after an assignment in grad school into which I naturally invited several letter writers. The series of papers becoming a series of letters. The professor said he’d play along once he had time. Like after he retired. Time. I might respond to this, he wrote back, once I'm done teaching. We had to meet and put the grand finale Lenips letter together before we could even read it. Which of course brought the whole circle to a grinding halt. I passed the class.

Which was genius, on his part. Genius. Later, teaching a class on MEDIA LITERACY, I thought about that puzzle, and how to assign such a task to a room full of people who hated me. But then why? Instead I turned in my keys and drove to the mountains and sat down beside the river.

Back in the day, I even mailed those letters with a stamp. Through the mail.

The elevator, at first, seemed merely helpful, and the high-rise splendid against the night sky—what you could see of it. Recordings allow us to hear a few elevating strains from the “Ode to Joy” several times a day, the genius long ago beat out of it.

How often I write letters now is a question of time. How much or how little. Time. It takes time to write and mail a letter. Far quicker to email, which will be written, read, and zapped out of existence before the thought can even be said to stand up on the page. Time.

And those miracles of modern electronics that have allowed us to communicate quickly, easily, cheaply, gracelessly with every part of the world permit us to do so in private and in every remove from face to face. Air travel is comfortable, affordable, and swift and enables us to ignore geography, just as we ignore climate, because we have HVAC and, in addition, can purchase terrible tomatoes any season of the year from stores that are open all night.

All night. And the others—the several who wrote and responded—the several who took the time, had the time, they all moved away. Their times had come. No more time for that. They left their wives, their apartments, their jobs. They migrated like zombies to the next station. North. West. Gone. A blessing, perhaps, but no forwarding addresses. No contact information. Chasing dreams held by ships on distant horizons. No goodbyes. Getting away from this puzzle. This headache. This town.

I saw one of the letter writers once at a funeral and his hair was long and he nodded his head. It was a funeral for someone we loved. Nothing was said.

Community

2010-08-22T07:52:00.004-04:00

Today I take the boys out--Jeremiah & Ezra--for one last excursion before the start of school. To the water, since it will be about 90 degrees and since they've both assured me that whatever we do, they would like to leap from great heights. Thunderstorms are expected. Tomorrow Jeremiah starts high school. Ezra enters his final year of middle school. And my mind returns to Madison and Kacey, who used to be almost inseparable, my daughter and her best friend--having grown up as next door neighbors--drifting apart when they began high school. They began--as teenagers often do--running with different groups and moving in different directions. Before long Kacey was no longer coming around, though of course I sometimes pass her when picking up Jeremiah, her brother. "Kacey!" I say. "Hi Joe," she says.

And then comes the parade of faces now gone, as if somehow I have made my home in a train depot, destined to watch as people come and go. And I am reminded of how ambulatory we have become: this globetrotting generation of people. And how little, comparatively speaking, family and community now mean. Now we go where our careers take us, carve out our initials on the tree of history, visit our parents, if they're lucky, a few times a year. Our encounters with one another are brief, squeezed in between this and that.

So we will go to the mountains, we three. We will scramble to find cover when the thunderstorms come. We will leap from high places. We will return this evening tired and amazed and perhaps finish with a shared meal. And then we will strike out tomorrow across another year of middle school, across our first year of high school, across the weekday job we may or may not enjoy, across the sad and secret chambers of the human heart.

Returning Home

2010-08-07T07:29:00.002-04:00

My brother-in-law finds my solo trips to West Virginia slightly irresponsible. He doesn't use that word--irresponsible--but he sharpens the pencil of his questions into the shape of an accusation. Alone? Days on the river? What if...? And I've heard this accusation before.

The assumption being that my roles as a "husband" and "father"--the responsibility of holding these social positions--warrant greater care than I might show stomping around in DELIVERANCE country. I am risking too much. Sticking my thumb out and hopping into trucks with strangers. Spending four nights sleeping beside the river in the New River Gorge. Puttering into the backcountry in my smoking Honda. Running whitewater alone. I might as well be riding a motorcycle without a helmet.

And he's probably right. I'm sure I could alleviate some risk and assume a more responsible position. I'm sure we all could, to varying degrees. And the trend, in our modern American lives more and more governed by statistical calculations for insurance companies, tends toward less and less risk. We have warnings about the sun and the rain and the wind, warnings about the paint on our walls and the chemicals in our food and the poison in the air, about the dangers of not washing our hands or washing our skin too much, and we're living long, healthy lives in our little boxes pumped full of bought air. Our children wear helmets and elbow pads and get their vaccinations at twelve weeks old. And this is good. This is good. We're living longer.

I met a kid last weekend. A young kid already leathered from the sun, smoking a cigarette, covered in fading tattoos, missing a front tooth, hiding a comfortable smile behind a knappy beard. He was oaring a stern rig for ACE rafting with three young children sitting on a thwart in front of him, facing him, watching him oar.

(NOTE THE DIFFERENCE: You oar a boat with two oars and oar locks in much the same way you oar a row boat. You paddle a boat with either a single or double bladed paddle that is NOT attached to the boat. Think kayak or canoe and do NOT confuse the two. Do NOT call my paddle an oar.)

The young children were in awe of this ropey muscled weirdo. He told me he was trying to get some people together for a canoe trip up north. He saw my canoe and the gear and my sunburned shoulders and I told him that yes, I had hopped on the river up at Hinton and come the last fifty miles by boat over the last five days. He asked if I wanted in. He wants to paddle the entire length of the Northern Forest Canoe Trail. From New York to Maine. It's calling him. He thinks he can do it in the month of September. 740 miles of interconnected waterways. 55 miles of portage. And I did want in. I can't do it right yet, but I do want in. "I just like to paddle," he said. "I'll paddle 100 miles in a week for work, get a few days off, and paddle another fifty miles. It's just as close as I can get to heaven. Doing this right here." He'll be sorry one day with skin cancer, lung cancer, uninsured or stuffed under a rock on some remote river in Canada. But for now he's in heaven.

I took off the river beside him and he came over to me and shook my hand. Told me his name. Put his other hand on my shoulder. And I understood what he meant in much the same way that I understand what Sigismund meant we he wrote, "I am the Roman emperor, and I am above grammar." Then we both lugged our respective rigs full of coolers and gear and boats up the 75 steps of Cunard, one step at a time, four trips for me, breathing heavy and sweating and cursing.

Melissa, the woman for whom I would stop breathing, here at home in central Virginia, has been working with Alzheimer patients over at a local facility. There is a man living there in his early sixties. So young for his life to be, for all intents and purposes, over. He wanders the halls with his head cocked sideways and rubs his hands over things. He never speaks. And I find myself--having returned safely (whew!) from West Virginia and lying in bed beside Melissa like a giddy child listening to stories that are both happy and sad--find myself hoping that he didn't spend his first sixty years barricading himself against the plague, only to find the plague had been dancing in his castle beside him all along.

Words Words Words

2010-04-08T08:45:00.002-04:00

I haven't written on this page in a while. Suddenly, a written log for an unseen readership strikes me as silly & stupid. Writing itself sometimes seems silly & stupid. To think I spent so many years wrestling with a bunch of words just to tell you about the scattered highlighters under the computer monitor. Pink & Orange highlighters. The things I am NOT doing. Or the way the black mug filled with pens and nails looks handmade on a pottery wheel with its circular scars and casts a shadow onto the picture of a woman named Melissa. The woman with beautiful skin. The woman I've been with for almost twenty years. The mother of my children.

Or the way you wake up one day, years older, to find that your father is not perfect. That he gets angry. That he once hit a man with a pipe wrench and nearly killed him. To find that God doesn't really answer prayers. That God, in whatever form he might take, doesn't seem to care. To find that you really are completely alone in the world. To find that your husband has fallen in love with another man. To find that your wife has fallen in love with the tooth fairy.

Writing seems especially silly when life itself--the real actions that make up the day to day: the getting out of bed, the waiting in line at the grocery store--suddenly rears up from where it's been lying dormant half-buried in sewage and gets in the way of the metalife, the writing, the imaginary life psuedo-concerned with the life. There's also a yellow post-it note dated August 1998. From Carolyn. "Saw this and thought of you," she wrote. "I know the right situation will happen!" A sweet message that I've kept for many years. I might add that the post-it note is crumpled and about to be thrown away. I might add that I'm still waiting for the right situation. I might add that I believe now Carolyn's note was stuck to the inside of a Klimt card that I know Melissa loved. The Kiss. The intertwining patterns of lovers come together for a kiss. I might add that I threw the card away so as not to remind me of how much I loved her. But that would be moving into fiction. I might be fictionalizing a few characters, a few events. Turning this into that. Creating something in my head that doesn't exist. Or I should say exists only in my head.

In part, I suppose, I've come to realize how much of a cynic I am. How sour I spin the events of the real world. I've come to recognize that everything I write tends, like the tongue, to return to the sore tooth. The tooth that bothers me. And I get tired of feeling that rot. Digging the tip of my tongue like an ice pick up into the soft black hole of a rotten tooth. Tired of working out where all the misplaced pieces of the puzzle need to fit. So I write fiction.

My chest filled with rocks pinning me to the bed crushing the breath out of me and you rolled over into the crook of my shoulder and admitted that he drove you crazy. He makes me crazy, you said. Crying. Holding me. My hand paused in the air above your back. He makes me crazy. I had known for days and still, hearing you finally say it. Something came up my throat. After everything I've done. I pulled away from you and sat on the edge of the bed and stared out at the darkness. The cold black night that had now sucked everything I believed in away. So this is how it ends.

And I wake up at night, some nights, late, thinking about these people in my head fighting for their emotional lives, wandering the dark streets of their imaginary cities, taking sleeping pills to keep the bottomless hurt at bay, picking their way across the wastelands of their lives, alone, without point or purpose. Mindless. And I am made sad for them. And I want to return to real life, where none of this is happening.

So I haven't written on this page in a while.

Spring

2010-04-07T13:05:00.003-04:00

And as if overnight the grass turned green. The world got bright and clear. The sun came out and the air warmed to an almost balmy eighty degrees. Saturday afternoon several weeks ago Melissa and I walked with Ezra and Nora down through the scrub trees that line both sides of the asphalt trail of Percival's Island, walked in our shorts and t-shirts. We both got warm. Hands sweaty from holding each other so tightly. We've been doing that, she and I, holding on for dear life. Nora skated around us. Orbiting. Ezra bounced a soccer ball with his feet, hands, head.

I can't recall a spring that has ever sprung so sweet. Or looked so bright & green. I can't recall ever wanting so badly the cold & snow to be gone.

Abstract Ramblings of a Madman

2010-03-12T16:35:00.001-05:00

I can't sleep certain nights. My insides roil as if trying to digest something that won't go down. A fat square block of something raw. I listen to the churn of my guts and wonder how Melissa can sleep through the noise. She sleeps easily and deeply. She is emotionally strong. Lost and rolling away where I cannot find her. My breathing feels like sobbing. I woke up for almost an entire week at 2:09. Every night finally sitting up on the edge of the bed and staring out the dark window at the dark night. Somehow these days you have got to get by. I was, as some might say, re-evaluating my priorities. Or perhaps determining their relative worth. As in: how important is this woman sleeping beside me? How important am I to her? Or the family we have together? As in: how important is this Company to whom I give so much time on a weekly basis? I mean: I would rather wander the country and sleep beside the water then slave away for the so-called American Dream. I mean: Fuck the American Dream. And the gelded horse it rode in on. I care nothing for any of this.

And yet I live the way that I live because I took a particular commitment. And took it seriously. Because I loved a particular woman.

And as if unaware how these things suddenly happen: all of my commitments and obligations came into question. As if the so-called IRONIC POSTURE of a sudden came to life and everything turned upside down. I suppose this sort of thing happens all the time. And then for several nights I came crashing awake at 3:00. And then 3:34. I would lay awake for hours. I took long walks through the city streets. I dreamt, oddly enough and in a strange deviation from character, of vampires who melted my heart and got between my legs only to kill me. Or the scarecrow who spit fire while Melissa disappeared down an endless elevator.

I've worked 40 hours in three weeks. Because, perhaps, I'm emotionally sensitive. Fragile. Because, perhaps, I am not used to modern life. How everyone is everywhere. Because, perhaps, there are things we do not talk about. There are things we do not name.

So we move on. Or we do not. And we are made stronger because of our struggles. Or we become another American statistic. And in the end: who cares?

Who cares?

The Triggering Town

2010-03-03T18:15:00.001-05:00

The Triggering Town is a slender 109 page book written by the twentieth century Midwestern American poet, Richard Hugo. Containing some of his lectures and essays on writing, this book ought to be a fixture on the desk of every aspiring writer. Not because aspiring writers need volumes of books ON WRITING--which they do not--but because aspiring writers occasionally need to hear simple, nuts and bolts things like: "Think small. If you have a big mind, that will show itself. If you can't think small, try philosophy or social criticism." Chapter five, in fact (out of nine chapters, or essays, or lectures), is called just that: "Nuts and Bolts."

Richard Hugo was a poet so his vocabulary tends to lean toward, well, POETRY and the POET. But any conscious writer cultivating her skill, even if that skill involves a cultivation of more PROSE than POETRY, would do well to memorize Hugo's book.

The general idea behind the triggering town is this: As a poet (and of course we know to read POET as any CONSCIOUS human being struggling to write meaningful sentences) the subject that "gets you going," so to speak, the "initiating" subject that gets you writing, is NOT, in fact, the subject of the piece. It can't be. Your relationship, as a poet, is not with the subject that gets you going but with the WORDS triggered by the subject. Your subject may be the Spring Flowers Blossoming on the Front Lawn, but that is merely the triggering event that gets you to sit down at your computer and write. The REAL subject, the subject you will hopefully (BUT NOT ALWAYS!) discover through the writing of the piece, may or may not have anything at all to do with the Spring Flowers Blossoming on the Front Lawn.

Confused? Good. As a Writer (with a capital W), you've got to give up any notions that you're sitting down to "communicate." If you want to "communicate," write an Email or pick up your cell phone. Hugo: "To write a poem you must have a streak of arrogance--not in real life I hope. In real life try to be nice. It will save you a hell of a lot of trouble and give you more time to write." The question becomes:

How do you get off the subject? The triggering subject. The subject that initiates the poem. How do you LEAVE that subject and move on to your TRUE subject?

Well, there are all sorts of ways to jump the tracks, one of them being Hugo's idea of a TOWN. An imaginary town, of course, that you are unfamiliar with. You can, of this town, make any assumption you'd like to make, which may allow you to feel, at certain times, in the sorts of ways that allow you to PLAY with the feelings you're feeling. If you imagine your OWN town--if I imagine Lynchburg, for instance--I can't PLAY as freely in the imagination because here I am, grounded in it. Once you learn to imagine your town--your constantly changing town--you can start from this place anytime you'd like, go wherever you want with the words, and have constructed in your imagination your very own Triggering Town.

I'm not saying Hugo's book is a book you skim through and throw into the recycle bin. I've been reading it since 1997, at the suggestion of Talvikki Ansel, a poet who at one time lived in Charlottesville. So you might want to get going on it as soon as possible, remembering Hugo's opening words: "You'll never be a poet until you realize that everything I say today and this quarter is wrong."

Approaching Young Couples

2010-02-19T14:37:00.004-05:00

An Old Girlfriend I still know and love revisited a poem in a recent post. And today, in between sitting in the cubicle deciphering buildings from tennis courts in some high altitude aerial photography, attending my daughter's graduation at the detention center, rearranging and recognizing again the importance of this Old Girlfriend in the mundane plod of an ordinary life, and sorting out the nature of a particular love/hate relationship I've got with alcohol, I am reading the poetry of another old friend. The poem is "Watching Young Couples with an Old Girlfriend on Sunday Morning." Make sure, at some point, either before or after reading this poem, that you click the above link and read "Over Time," listening for the echoes.

How mild these young men seem to me now
with their baggy shorts and clouds of musk,
as if younger brothers of the women they escort
in tight black leather, bangs and tattoos,
cute little toughies, so Louise Brooks annealed

in MTV, headed off for huevos rancheros
and the Sunday Times at some chic, crowded dive.
I don't recall it at all this way, do you?
How sweetly complected and confident they look,
their faces unclouded by the rages

and abandoned, tearful couplings of the night before,
the drunkenness, beast savor and remorse.
Or do I recoil from their youthfulness and health?
Oh, not recoil, just fail to see ourselves.
And yet, this tenderness between us that remains

was mortared first with a darkness that got loose, a frenzy,
we still, we still refuse to name.

Learning To Write (PT. 3-ish)

2010-02-07T01:05:00.005-05:00

Dear ____,

Here is what I know: I know that reading good stories and poems together, out loud, allows children the space to think carefully about the material. With help. Someone is helping them focus. They need that. They need help focusing their attention and going after the meanings of sentences. They generally handle about forty-five minutes of reading with—definitely—free range to insert their own comments and “interpretive remarks.” Some of their remarks, as I’m sure you know, are quite perceptive. The children frequently draw or write or doodle while I read, some of them sit around the table and stare at me, apparently intent on the shape of my lips running over the words. We sit around two folding tables and there are nine of us. The wooden chairs squeak on the rickety legs. We leave the lights off and get a kick out of the subtle shifts of atmospheric light from day to day. Heavily overcast days we do not read much. (I once accidentally cut the light on, which I will never do again).

One problem I’ve come across with their appreciation of poetry is that they can’t read it fluently like a “literate” adult—I mean one who reads easy and well—but stumble their way through the lines such that I like to make sure I read the poem both before and after they read it, so its impression on them is not sensually disarmed or sterilized. I have them practicing on one poem, “The Naming of Parts” by Henry Reed, but I don’t imagine they’ll enjoy reading it until they can read it fluently. And we’re all sort of losing interest in the “easing of the spring” and the “piling swivel.” Some of them, of course, are already quoting lines from it. (Yes, I’ve toyed with the idea of having them memorize it, though I want to emphasize the pleasure of READING—oh my god an objective—that it’s not the QUOTING I’m interested in but the FLUENCY). So we periodically read “The Naming of Parts” together (not every class, of course, and these days not very often), and their reading improves and they start to talk about the parts of a gun and the fact that there is a conversation going on and, for some reason, there are words referring to a garden and bees. One student has been using lists (as if copying the larger structure of the poem) to organize the rhetorical movements of his own writing. I’m not yet certain why he’s telling me the steps of cleaning a barn and why he insists on calling a water balloon fight the “Bloodiest War Ever,” (I’ve toyed with the notion that he’s playing with IRONY, but I wouldn’t dare tell him that and) regardless, he is most certainly writing about it. Pages and pages that include outlines and rough drafts. His name is T____ and the other boys pick on him for the way he calls everything “different.”

“That’s different,” he’ll say after hearing me read “Wild Horses,” by Rick Bass. And the other boys will heave gasps of air and roll their eyes back in their heads and mutter the words, “Different, different, different, always different.” T____ crinkles his cheeks up under his glasses for a second or two and might even turn away his face, but he proclaims it again, just as loudly, after the next reading, “That’s different.”

Recently his mother wondered aloud to me how T____ was doing. I didn’t understand the question and she explained he’s not very good at organizing his ideas on the page and she knows he’ll have to write some “real” papers at some point down the line. Not in this class, apparently, which isn’t quite “serious” enough. “He’s only now starting to write scenes,” I said. Sentences, I meant to say, but couldn’t bring myself to be honest with her and I grow weary of having to justify myself to myself. I imagine his mother screaming: “Then WORK on his DAMN SENTENCES!” And I am, though the results may not be quantifiable and his “success” may not be immediately measurable. He must learn to change or to let go or to stop; he must learn to listen; he must learn to take care with his words; all of which will come if those of us around him do the same.

Objectives and Underpinnings

2010-02-06T00:10:00.003-05:00

Dear ____,

If a man writes a little every day . . . he may be practicing in order to get at his subject. If his subject is, say, a mood, an integration, and if his representation is faint or obscure, and if he practices in order to overcome his faintness or obscurity, what he really does is to bring, or try to bring, his subject into that degree of focus at which he sees it, for a moment, as it is . . .
— Wallace Stevens

The target categories known as the “learning” and “measurement” objectives—the objectives toward which I am herding this class—can be found on page five of the NOTE TO STUDENTS. [Editor's note: page five? This was middle school. You think those children made it to page five? Ha!] They are semi-important and full of common sense and the list could probably continue for several pages. It may go without saying that the most important things I can do as a teacher will never involve “measurement.” This is not a very popular notion with administrators because it makes for fuzzy files, but education ought not be organized for the benefit of administrators. The teachers I have spoken with—the real teachers—agree that grades and tests are a waste of time. By real teachers I mean, of course, those teachers who read and write. Anyone who does not read and write ought not be teaching language. Again, common sense.

In attempting, for the current Study, to burrow my way down to the core of my “Creative Writing Curriculum,” I must say that I’ve not found anything in history to lend much support to our current system. I have been given, time and again, advice on the curriculum packages (and several curriculum packages in their awesome Entirety) designed for Middle and High School Language Arts, but these curriculums are not a model I wish to emulate. I do not mean to be so bold in that first proposition—I’ve only in the past year begun a reading of the history of American Public Education—but the conclusion is so easy to see I’d be lying not to come right out and say it. Our current educational system isn’t working and our teachers are standing around waiting for it to implode. Whether it be “child-centered” or “test-centered” or “problem (objective)-centered” or “project centered,” it’s not working. (I worked with a federally-funded summer program and found the ensuing fiasco almost unbearable. As “curriculum facilitators,” we found ourselves so swamped in paperwork the children of the program ceased to matter.) But if I were to guess, after several years spent at Lynchburg College and several years spent raising children and several years spent fooling around in the American economy (to no avail, financially speaking) and looking, with some persistence, for what’s important, I would probably propose an approach much like Neil Postman’s numerous approaches, an approach that is “idea-centered” and “coherence-centered.” This would be an approach that utilizes real books (by reading them and talking about them), not technological constructions set up to “introduce” students to real books by having them fill in blanks and talk about sentences that have no context. Children are not stupid. They understand as much as we allow them to. My main object is to slow down. This approach—the one I am searching for by teaching—is grounded in the history of the human race, the continuity of human enterprise. I read them the beginning of Hendrik van Loon’s Story of Mankind.

We live under the shadow of a gigantic question mark.
Who are we?
Where do we come from?
Whither are we bound?
Slowly, but with persistent courage, we have been pushing this question mark further and further towards that distant line, beyond the horizon, where we hope to find our answer.
We have not gone very far.

Don’t misunderstand me. I do not mean to say that we will “study” a list of ideas (say, run through E. D. Hirsh’s indispensable list of however many cultural tidbits, or outline the great theories of critical interpretation). I mean to say that we will begin working, however we can, on tapping into The Great Conversation: the great stream of ideas that brought us to where we are. (Jacob Bronowski, in the seventies, called it The Ascent of Man.) Writing is a way of sidling up next to the words at the heart of this conversation and not only reading, enjoying, and understanding them, but adding to them and taking away. There is no particular age requirement for gaining access to this conversation, though formal schooling has tricked us into believing such garbage. There are no competency exams. Neither does the conversation have to be far out at the reaches of human understanding, held in the palms of atomized specialists, Media Giants, or analytic philosophers. This too, shall pass. Yes, even as children, the conversation swirls around us. I think (to qualify and couch my next proposition), that ALL education holds this ultimate goal as self evident, this Access to the Conversation. But I don’t think it’s all that self evident anymore, and I don’t think our formal curriculums are helping. (As I previously mentioned, I was given two boxes of McDougal, Littell “Resource Files” to help prepare myself for the course. They are hurting our children.) Have we gotten lost in the massive bureaucracy of technology, the “technique” Jaques Ellul warns us against? Or is it, as Mr. John Gatto suspects, more sinister and conscious (having to do with anaesthetizing the general population to “hold down the ranks”)?

I won’t venture an answer here, though I imagine the answer to lie somewhere in between these two notions as a product of the capitalistic worldview. Writing is not merely an exploration of the subjective mind—the author’s mind (which comes and goes)—but is an exploration of a mind engaged in a conversation with other minds: The Human Mind. “This is part of what it means to be human,” writes Wendell Berry. That we listen to the ideas and works of our ancestors and that we respond to them. Everyone is invited to the table, regardless of what the political or economic landscape looks like. The real dinner has very little to do with current events and, looking back, some of the oddest people from the dirtiest alleys of our history have listened and talked at the table. Writing is a unique technology wherein a timeless conversation is not only possible, but present and alive among us. It has been called The Great Conversation, this is what I mean by the continuity of human enterprise.

But I’m not sure how best to introduce children to this conversation. So I spent some time on this first day of class telling them this, on the first day when I had their deepest attention and they were most scared of me. (I included a handout with that talk so we could point back to the page whenever we needed to remind ourselves of The Great Conversation.) Of course, as you ought to know by now, part of what I’m doing in the teaching of this class is searching. (The logic of my thinking is hopelessly postmodern—meaning I have no idea how it works—and the paradigm of a teacher searching among the ruins of his scattered ideas about the world to discover why he’s teaching is a paradigm I seem to repeat subject after subject, year after year. As I know you know, Mr. A___.) I am struggling to search honestly for my own children’s sake; I don’t want them to think like Typical American Consumers. Those who have glazed over. My own children and Melissa and the many simple books of John Holt have revealed a number of basic things. And so we began the class.

Learning To Write

2010-02-03T00:34:00.006-05:00

Once upon a time—and believe me, that time gets further and further away—I thought about teaching. Teaching English, mainly, specifically writing, reading, semantics: that sort of thing. I even made several half-hearted attempts at teaching and almost all of them ended in a nasty mess. Sometimes, when I get bored with maps, when I drink too much or take long walks through the city, I return to the idea with vigorous romantic notions. I try to piece together what went wrong. I review some of the words I constructed—painstakingly, some of them—for middle school, high school, bonehead college classes. I reflect on a recent exchange with a friend who has, at the age of 32, returned to school for a second degree. The University of West Virginia has required that he take English 102, again (apparently, his first go around he was, in his words, “pretty good at football”). So he requested my thoughts on his first paper and I wrote: “Very few sentences really crackle. Nothing stands up on the page and declares itself. There's little that makes me want to keep reading. At the same time, I'm sure your essay fits quite well into the assignment.”

He replied that my expectations were way too high and his professor loved the paper.

Well. Alright then. I suppose that works out well for him, provided his goal hovers down around the level of keeping his professors happy. But doesn't writing, and writing well, mean anything?

Then there was the time I asked an English 100 class—these are the students who couldn't quite hang with English 102 and but yet the college still wanted their money—what they wanted to do with the class. Their decision? Go home and receive A’s. I may have slumped down under the chalkboard and never revived.

In graduate school, I once taught a middle school writing class without grades. We called it a kind of “experiment” and the kids were mostly home-schooled anyway, so the administrative gobble-de-gook was, at least initially kept to a minimum. Nonetheless the students enjoyed it for their own variety of reasons, I’m guessing primarily because the coercive force that enables a teacher to bend the students to a particular will was removed and the students could, essentially, do anything they wanted. The parents, for the most part, thought the whole thing a waste of time. I turned the class into a sort of independent study and wrote my advisor, from time to time, who seemed to find the whole thing amusing.

I present, in the next several posts and for reasons I do not understand, some of those letters.

A Thousand Words

2010-01-29T15:40:00.020-05:00

Around a year or so ago I paid a short visit to a chemical plant on the more eastern side of Virginia. The weather was pleasant, as I recall--pleasant for January, anyway--and a rather large chemical plant was moving between some rather large hands. We were commissioned to survey the plant for insurance purposes and, as I recall, I wrote a web log about some vague impressions of the place and sort of salted the impressions with a few words from a recent book my mother-in-law had sent me. I am tired of the fellowship of words, the abundance of tradition...

And but so as time would have it, and after considering the maps Team Nichols--there are four of us lining the proverbial assembly belt of Team Nichols, including Nichols himself (the rather large and officious land surveyor who in general hunts down the work, drinks a bit, makes the difficult decisions, and signs the plats)--has generated over the course of two thousand nine, that particular job-visit-map-psalm was probably the most interesting-exciting-enjoyable-provocative of the entire year. The rest, as Ezra Pound might say, is dross.

Unfortunately, as these things go, the map (or PLAT, in technical parlance), was drawn up for lending-insuring-banking-legal-purposes--as I said--and so in all probability the "deliverable"--as the company for which Team Nichols works in all serious stupidity calls our finished products, deliverables, (this one happens to be five pages of artfully drawn representation arranged on 22x34 inch paper)--will remain unrecorded, will in fact collect dust in the drawer of some talking head, somewhere in the territory of North America, buried in a stack of like art on the twenty-something-ish floor of some dreadfully ugly skyscraper, unappreciated and unnoticed until such a time as someone decides to find fault with one or more of the obscure steam pipe easements on a little factory in the sticks of Virginia, at which point the plat will be resurrected and all notes will be scrutinized and all boundary calls will be recomputed and all involved parties will once again be dragged to the table for more safety orientations.

REGARDLESS, the point remains that these little maps are, outside the profession itself, under appreciated. I mean, two young men lived away from home for three weeks and put up not only with swampy low altitude wetlands, but with the not-entirely-democratic regime of the chemical plant in order to collect the necessary data to render this image. On a flat piece of paper. To scale. Two men. Thirty years ago it would have taken at least a dozen men several months to get the distances to the nearest foot. One might even say the men put up with a totalitarian regime to enable the construction of something (and here we're going to get a little spacey and probably go off the philosophical deep end)

--to enable the construction of something that is most certainly NOT the territory it represents (we're not constructing a duplicate chemical plant or even a model of a chemical plant), and but yet the construction of something that has a similar structure to the territory. Somehow. On a flat piece of paper. To scale (meaning of course that any distance measured between two objects on the piece of paper will have a direct and predictable correlation to the physical distance between the two "real world" objects being referenced). In many respects what we're doing, as mapmakers, is showing the relative positions of things in space to such detail that we are actually creating a surrogate of space. (The lenders and lawyers don't have to physically visit the plant to have a fairly good idea of what they are purchasing.) I mean, everything is somewhere, and everything, regardless of characteristics the thing may or may not share with every other thing, everything shares relative location in the 3-dimensional field of experience.

Not to mention the poor CAD Technician who sat up late at least once--perhaps with bourbon to ease his parched throat and perhaps more than once--in the back corner of a dimly lit office crunching numbers to finalize one of the many drafts for the team of lawyers and lenders. To ensure the symbols and lines and notes of exclusion and caveats on all five pieces of paper accurately represented the structure of this particular arrangement of things. And of course accurately and with utmost precision to ensure the asses of all involved parties got covered.

So, in honor of an anniversary, of sorts, I am presenting the faithful reader with an image of the image. Knowing--trusting, perhaps--that the "first and last frontier of communication," as the map has been called, will continue to be enjoyed, perhaps, beyond the realm of the mere buying and selling of the marketplace. As a form of communication, maybe, in and of itself.

Possible Destinations on a Thursday Afternoon

2010-01-21T13:30:00.002-05:00

Thursday afternoon.

I'm eating chili with jalapenos and shredded cheese from the deli up the road and I'm sitting here in my cubicle. Confined to the cubicle. I'm listening to a band called The Album Leaf, an easy collection of sculptures on an album called The Enchanted Hill. We renewed our CPR certifications this morning, and the volunteer teachers were not so good. I'm possibly more dangerous for the fallen then I was before I re-certified.

A 3-dimensional topographic model of Everest looms over me, and from time to time I try to will myself down between the western ridges of Everest and Nuptse to a big field of ice and snow called the Western Cwm. I have no desire to climb Mount Everest--don't hear me wrong--but I wouldn't mind sitting for a day or two in the shadow of what a group of early French climbers of Everest called The Valley of Silence. I don't know why this particular inhospitable spot appeals to me. But it does. Just to be there for a while. Close my eyes, maybe, at like 21,000 feet and listen to distant sounds of avalaches coming off the ridges that tower--still tower, even at 21,000 feet--thousands of feet on either side of the cwm. No birds. No insects. No animals. No people (even though that might be difficult to pull off, realistically). Very little sound at all unless the wind is howling through the valley. The sound of the ice and snow cracking and falling. Many people find the Western Cwm spooky and unsettling, as if perhaps they had wandered a little too far into unwelcome territory.

Unfortunately, to reach the Wester Cwm I'd not only have to acclimate to elevation--which can take a little while--but pay the price of admission to Everest (somewhere around ten grand just for the permit) and cross the Khumba Icefall (Russian Roulette on slowly toppling ice cubes the size of houses). All of which mean that the Western Cwm is, for me, pretty much unaffordable.

But the digital model hangs above me on the cubicle wall and sometimes, eating lunch or glancing away from AutoCAD, I let my mind wander out beyond the confines of the cubicle, out to that which is only vaguely possible.

This Old House

2010-01-13T23:44:00.001-05:00

So apparently it was a bad time to start a major wall overhaul in the living room. The walls are plaster, cracked from years of settling and badly in need of patching and paint. And being the only room that we've never scraped, the green wallpaper from 1925 still hangs under many layers of paint and paper and glue. I'm certain the wallpaper looked sporty many, many years ago, but now, after you scrape your way down through the layers, it's a faded mush of brown dust.

But the time had come and smooth walls with fresh paint were needed not only in that oversized room, but throughout the entire house. Unfortunately, with me, nothing is simple. Unfortunately in a house full of people, nothing is simple. First of all there's a lot of shit in the way. Bookshelves full of books, for instance. Secondly I've got to scrape and caulk and spackle and sand until the walls turn to marble. I've got these tendencies toward perfectionism, tendencies that don't go well with a crappy old house. And these walls are old and these walls are plaster. Eventually, my walls will look good, but it can take quite a while.

And no one is in the mood for quite a while.

And then Morgan blinks on and off in Richmond and things are not so good. Just when you think things are good and your 18 year old is starting to think straight, suddenly they're not, and she's not, and you're not. Melissa feels the job hunt and financial pressure of kids getting older and the looming NCLEX test in February and then on top of everything she gets caught fielding calls from Morgan at, say, one in the morning. Morgan, claiming she's heading off to live on the streets. Melissa crawls into bed this evening at 8:30 with a stomach ache. Buries herself in blankets. And then Ezra wants a gun. Badly. I've told him we'll take the safety course and head up to a friend's in Nelson County to shoot. But that takes time. He wants a gun pretty quick and suddenly I'm not so sure a gun is exactly what we need around here. And then Brandy, Melissa' s old lap cat that likes to pee on everything, succumbs to old age and wastes away to nothing. She--the cat who at one point was put on a diet by our local vet.--has apparently lost interest in food.

Meanwhile I'm scraping and sanding away at the never ending wallpaper field of the ceiling, taking Brasso to the radiator fixtures, accenting the essential industrial quality of the hunks of metal in every room of the house by spray painting the radiators chrome, trying to whistle with everything covered in plastic and the house taking on the feel of ground zero.

Good timing, genius.

Odds & Ends

2010-01-11T16:30:00.002-05:00

Work is mostly made up of long boring stretches in between erratic moments of uneasy satisfaction. In general the satisfying aspects of my job come on days when I'm outside. In the field, we call it. Most of the time I'm not outside. Most of the time I'm fiddling with I-tunes and playing online poker.

---

So I present things overheard in the course of a morning in the early days of twenty-ten, finding myself in the middle of one of those long boring stretches at the coffee pot, finding myself among working stiffs in the hallway trying only to get by and not yawn so much, finding myself humming at the urinal, suddenly not alone, between the walls of an as-yet-unmentioned-firm in the greater L-burg arena where I spend so much of my time doing so little.

Things overheard or read, that is.

---

The AM will become M in the sanitary schedule.

What you would know, if only you knew more.

Don't know if this is considered high. It's cold up here!

Remember the manhole on the hill is four feet southeast of its actual location.

We're not going to make money but we're going to work and we're going to do a good job.

Person A: "Just so you know, it was not scanned in, there was not a plot file, and the file number on the drawing refers to a different drawing."
Person B: "So you had trouble finding it?"
Person A: "I found no information in the project or land folders referencing that this work should be billed under this number or that this work should even be done."
Person B: "So it was a pain in the ass."

He asked me how far we would travel. I told him we would mobilize. I told him we'll go anywhere. At this point I don't care.

I got some land surveying to do if you guys want to work for free.

That's his New Year's Resolution: to start coming to work more often.

The weather is about right. Ducks and geese are also in the neighborhood. In case you're interested 620,000 men died in the civil war.

After processing the additional topography for the water tank area, it has come to my attention that the property line information and right of way information are not anywhere near where they need to be.

If you say EC shop, you may be asked if you are talking about the shop that was the old Carpenter Shop or the shop that is now Mo's Shop (where Mo works).

I'm trying to stimulate the economy all by myself.

---

And then I went home for lunch and looked forward to more of the same.

Virginia Trails

2010-01-10T08:45:00.000-05:00

Things around this house feel ON THE VERGE. Uncertain. The children crying on the stairs. The mother of the nightingales lost in introspective chaos. As if we've all of us got these hair trigger lashings held at bay by some cellular membrane that is stretched to the point of ripping. As if we're all of us ready to GO OFF. As if the whole nuclear family thing will in a few nanoseconds blow apart and that won't, necessarily, be a thing we mourn the loss of. As if we're all of us out here in the lashing wind on Rocky Row and it isn't me alone trying to make my way to the Saddle Gap Trail along the icy ridge.

In a good way.

I'm nursing my ankle, which has been flaring up I suppose due to the numerous times it's been twisted, and leaning a little too heavily on my poles. I figure a twisted ankle four miles from the car up in the ice is probably not a good thing. Or at least: is probably the makings of an Epic Adventure. The wind chill this morning is somewhere around three degrees Fahrenheit and when I stepped up onto the ridge I did an about face and quickly retreated back off the ridge to add a few more layers of clothing. I hadn't brought any covering for my face, which was a serious mistake. A mistake that required me finally to give up the ridge. To turn around and backtrack. To accept defeat and not finish the loop as planned.

Virginia has 3,159,450 acres of public lands available for outdoor recreation. Across these lands there are an estimated 5,167 miles of foot trails, which include famous trails like the Appalachian Trail and the Virginia Creeper, and some not so famous trails like the Lick Branch Trail which features 28 stream crossings in less than three miles. Our highest trail is the Mount Roger's Spur Trail, at an elevation of 5,729 feet. Our lowest trail is predictably down on the coast in Hampton: The Grandview Preserve Trail with an elevation of eight feet.

Two of the nation's 156 National Forests are in Virginia: Jefferson and George Washington (with a total of 1,765,311 acres). The national forests are under the management of the United States Forest Service, which is a branch of the Department of Agriculture. Since its inception in 1905 (under President Theodore Roosevelt) the USFS has been a rather controversial organization, at least in part due to the vision of Gifford Pinchot, the agency's first chief of staff. Pinchot is considered by many the founder of professional forestry, and he thought that to make the national forests beneficial for the public "the people themselves must make clear how they want them run." Of course anytime you get the people themselves involved, you're going to introduce all six sides of the coin.

Regardless, Melissa's classroom work is done and she pokes around for work, studies for the test. She doesn't like the cold and sleeps in a hoody with the hood pulled up. Madison reminds me she'll be eligible for her Learner's License in a few weeks. She and Hannah giggle about the fact that this upcoming summer they will achieve Ultimate Freedom. Ezra comes home having stayed up all night at a birthday party and gets down about the cold and the fact that we really don't have formal, sit down meals in this family. He appears to be getting sick and losing his voice. Nora is none too excited about her visit with Dr. L---- next week. The room is full of rainbows and he's too excited all the time. And fifteen minutes from home I can be in the Jefferson or the George Washington, where even on the coldest day of the year the views from the top are spectacular, and the walk provides the necessary warm harmonious glow of mind and body.

New Year: 2010

2010-01-03T09:31:00.007-05:00

I ushered in the new year asleep. Jim Harrison's Sundog got crinkled up under me when I rolled over onto the book. The light beside the bed was still on at 1:20 when I woke up. I had missed the start of the new year.

I did celebrate earlier in the night--the passing of time, my cynical sister says with a sneer, why does the passing of time require a celebration?--with whiskey sours and the movie Babel, alone on the couch with the cats, a movie that seemed somehow appropriate, like a quick succession of unfortunate events. The family was still in Maryland. I spread goat cheese on flatbread crackers and topped them with an jalapeno. I sipped whiskey. I waited for Melissa to return.

And even earlier--like Tuesday and Wednesday--I celebrated with several long walks. On one of them I hiked up to Piney Ridge above Glasgow with fifty pounds. My reasons for carrying so much weight were excuses. I wanted to see if I could still hike with weight. I wanted to see how much crap I could shove down into my pack. But there was also the possibility that I might have to spend the night up there in the snow and I didn't want to be without a tent, warm clothes, sleeping bag, stove, fuel, plenty of food, books, shovel, light--you get the idea--I've become a bit of a lightweight when it comes to remaining comfortable. Warmth facilitates sleep. No more rolling up in a sheet and sleeping on the asphalt. In the end, of course, I was able to make the return trip in one day, and even with the weight I arrived back at my car just before dark. No problems except for the slight pain across the shoulders.

I considered the guilt that has turned my life's actions into a maze of hot stove tops. I considered how to deal with some of that guilt and wondered if I might start by simply eliminating the entire notion of right and wrong. Look for some other criterion for judging the morality of actions.

I humped along the ridge until I could handle the cold no longer and then turned around and headed down. Instead of using the switchbacks, I slid straight down the mountain.

Sound Byte

2009-12-29T09:52:00.000-05:00

So I take a good look at a drip and I says, Drip? You have someting commons with I. I says. And he gyrate his head, as you might be trickin, impossible slow toward me own. Like to lock the closer corner of his black eye on mean. All runny eyed. And even wit a-wind pickin up acrost awide desert and even wit a tattered shirt strung blowin on a bee line betwixt his tent and me own, I stay affixed on his gaze. Rotating on me own. And wit a sand and meal and burnin hell to pay, I says: What be dis good news, man? Because I know not amore wit a lastin oblivion.

Hell With a River Through It: PART II

2009-12-22T22:11:00.004-05:00

INTRO: Christmas time, and I'm cleaning out my EDIT box. Surprise surprise.

My BLOG EDIT box. The box (PAGE might be a more appropriate metaphor) with all the unposted sentences I began this year for the imaginary audience of blog readers. Unposted sentences. Melissa pretends the blog is her public brain. Thinking out loud. Sentences I began but didn't finish. I pretend the blog is a way of communicating with Melissa. Pieces of pieces. Or with the perfect insomniac reading James Joyce and struggling to fit every word into some sort of meaningful sense. KAFKA: The meaning of life is that it ends. I quit my life to be with her. Thoughts that go nowhere. Or maybe started my life. Except not quite. I'm going to clean them up anyway, the sentences, the box, the page, the brain, for the purpose of deleting the stragglers or perhaps proceeding further with them or perhaps simply noting them and moving on to greener pastures. To cleaner thoughts. To a better me.

HA! We've been married almost twenty years. Seriously.

SETTING: I'm home alone right now, which is rare. I sort of cherish sitting alone in the quiet cold with the lights flickering drinking bourbon and communicating with an imaginary audience via a computer screen. I prefer MICROSOFT WORD. My father still prefers WordPerfect. Our children will never own a typewriter. Quite a few people live in this house. Not much respect for private space, either. All of us children. Sheer chaos. Here's the introduction I failed to give. Or maybe I posted it elsewhere. I can't recall.

Me here. Failed English teacher. Non-smoker. Thirty pounds overweight. Balding. Not only broke but $30,000 U.S. in the hole for thinking the leaning and overzealous tendency toward reading/writing lent itself most naturally toward a life of tortured pedagogy teaching Darles Chickens in the Virginia Public School System, the teaching of which, I've since learned, has absolutely nothing to do with reading and writing and almost everything to do with the scientific management of a mass population. So now I'm approximately thirty-six years old, I construct CAD maps for a local engineering firm in an 8X6 beige cubicle, I remind folks on the other end of the speakerphone who sit, quite possibly, eight feet away from me that I never was, nor am I currently in the business of correcting grammar—write your own damn sentence however you want, thank you very much—there's the off chance that I drink too much bourbon at a place called Jazz Street Grill, the establishment of which built a deck, two years ago, that juts out into the trees and remains empty for most of the afternoon enabling one who can leave work at work to sit in relative peace with large books kind of lost in the Blue Ridge sipping Maker’s Mark, I've got nothing even resembling the how can I say it capitalist virility that apparently gives my long lost companions—the ants from the Aesop tale scratching their heads wondering why I’m still living in this wrecked turn of the century house with children! children! in a bad part of town this many years after that much money for school trading lawn mowers away for canoes and rubbing my legs together like a grasshopper while summer slips away—the gumption to go forth into the world and make lots of money and do lots of fun things, and I am wide-awake-aware, almost to a debilitating psychedelic degree, that we not only do a shitpile of measuring during any given day, but that every human measurement contains error.

ACT ONE: So I have one I might call friend who teaches and probably disagrees with me. And then he drank his like fourth pint of 90minute IPA in a row several months back--easy, I may have said, that ain't Coors Light, but probably not--on a rare visit to the big city of L-burg, and then slumped over the bar, half rising to point his finger at me and say: "What do I tell you. You're married twenty years. I got nothing to say. Why do you want to talk to me." I felt like he was saying: "Why don't you write about someone who actually does something?" And I got home, somehow, puzzled by the thought he could not finish, and wrote the words of Jim Harrison: "Once you get truly out of the circle of your acquaintances, and away from those who bear your professional likeness, you perceive again the mystery of personality." Although we were close, once, fellow travelers through the literary world of graduate school in English, and although I do not like the thought of people drifting further and further away, we have not yet finished whatever conversation we were trying to have.

Or the month of May--May 13, 2009, when I smoked my last cigarette--when I paid too much money--thirty dollars!--to enter the Botanical Gardens in Richmond and watch OLD CROW MEDICINE SHOW hammer out a ruckus. They were a bit of a mess, which, as someone reminded me, tends to come with fame and fortune. Few are those whose art can withstand the onslaught of American media.

The sound, as so often happens with unnaturally loud amplification, was muddy and underwater. Pour that on, Doc, with the bourbon we snuck in tucked down in our lawnchairs and the bourbon the band was drinking between songs and the songs became difficult to distinguish. One long hammer rolling around on their wagon wheel. In the end I recall leaning way back in my chair and hearing a lot of noise. In the end, I suppose, I was thankful my friends were there to help me navigate the garden. I'd probably still be there today, wandering between the azaleas, were it not for their kindness. But then, bluegrass music invites a kind of carnival, an idea we've not managed to hold onto. No more Johnny Appleseeds roam the countryside bringing the fermented sweetness of applejack, the promise of at least one more good humdinger of a year. (Which, if you'll recall, even PLATO recommends at the festival of the wine god. And then Horace: "No poems can please long, nor live, which are written by water-drinkers.")

Instead, we protestant 21st century Americans box everything up into compartments, eat fake butter, fake sugar, and frown with heavy frowns upon people like Jim Harrison, that strangely physical man living up in the Northern Peninsula who once said that animals were the only thing that really kept humans human. He also said (from behind a billowing cloud of Havana smoke): "The deepest feeling of all is that there should be more."

And the 21st century American crowd obliged with too much Johnny Appleseed and some wild dancing on a narrow wall, some of which I remember.

Which reminds me, in full or in part, of the town of Thurmond, West Virginia, which sort of built up around the mouths of Arbuckle and Dunloup Creeks, on both sides of the New River. Captain Thurmond, a rather hard-nosed Baptist businessman, contributed his 75 acres of land, ferry services, and rental houses to the Northside of the river; while William McKell (a powerful landowner with some 25,000 acres and strong opinions) contributed to the seedy activities of the Southside. The notorious Dunglen Hotel, along with the orbiting satellites of lesser saloons and "houses of ill repute," sprung up on McKell's Southside of the river, apparently in direct contrast to the strict liquor laws set up by the Captain on the North. And of course there are now the colorful Appalachian stories of big business deals, fine liquor, and cold-blooded murder to come from the Dunglen Hotel. These are the stories that drew me to Thurmond: the story of a high stakes poker game that lasted, day and night, for 14 years. The story of the Southside mayor who fined the dead man $81 for being shot in his town, and promptly collected the $81 from the dead man's pocket. The warning not to cross the pedestrian bridge over Dunloup Creek at night with a lit cigarette or a lantern because some drunk rabblerouser with a pistol would surely aim to put out the light. The stories that caused the Oak Hill preacher to proclaim that the only difference between Thurmond and hell was that a river ran through Thurmond.

ACT TWO: But only you should be dwelling in your brain, I responded (but didn't post) to a distant sister of mine. No doubt about it. Despite that the whole self-conscious-talking-to-yourself-dwelling in the brain is kind of weird and recent, socially speaking. And but so we spend bunches of time alone now, here in the age of mass printed literacy, even and maybe especially in the various crowded venues we frequent: learning to be alone in a crowded marathon of thousands. (Oftentimes drunk and alone in a crowd of Johnny Appleseed thousands.) In part because we read. Silently. To ourselves. Resulting in a sort of development of self-as-separate-entity. And we live in crowded cities. Often we deal with the minor and major catastrophes now in ways that might be construed as being "completely alone," except maybe for the borrowed, stolen, enmeshed words and actions we've somehow gleaned from others. [Directly borrowed from said blog.] Is that somehow wrong that we tend as individuals to be more individualistic? Maybe, if the social plant doesn't get water. I don't know. Certainly our modes of dealing are different from the communities of the past, which may have looked more like "communities" in the traditional, oral sense of the word. Back when you asked someone how they were doing and they replied: "It's raining."

But I pause and begin again, as I so often begin these days, with water. Forgive my insistence on the image, but seasonal changes of temperature have begun--at least in the few years I was allowed to work outside--to intrigue me. The body can be trained, in a variety of ways, to acclimate to the harshest conditions. (Take colder showers, for instance. Keep the thermostat around sixty. Walk through the house naked and wet.) And we cannot forget, however far from our stories we wander, that even while the earth was void (or, if you prefer, when the universe measured little more than a few feet across, back on that first day, billions and billions of degrees hot, and empty of atoms or molecules) the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Water came shortly, it seems, in the rapid cooling of time and space, after our universe received the initial permission to begin. A few specks of hydrogen clustered tenaciously with a speck of oxygen to create the compound that has been called the matrix of life. “The story of life on Earth,” someone wrote, “is a story of life at sea.” Apparently we are members of an anomalous species, having chosen, like some eccentric uncle of the animal kingdom, to dwell on land.

(Which is ultimately what I hear lurking behind your post.

A missing sense of community, for better or worse. Almost a finger pointing toward the rest of the world for not being sensitive enough to the death of your brother, which may well be warranted. An awkward silence, which may or may not really be all that awkward. I mean, there are certain semantic environments where it is perfectly acceptable to say: "Wanna hear about my dead brother?" Or maybe: "Wanna hear about rain?" And the Food Lion cash register or a first date may not be that environment. Does this somehow promote an awkward hole? Maybe.

But then I'm left wondering if the hole feels awkward because there seems to be less and less of those so-called "social rules," and I get the sense we live in an age where we can almost say anything, anytime. Maybe not necessarily over dinner, but then there are many things I wouldn't bring up over dinner. There are many things I wouldn't bring up with the cashier at Food Lion. And there are things, perhaps, lurking amongst the deepest feelings of all, that I wouldn't bring up with Melissa.)

I read once, probably in a terrible book, that in order for your life to be worth living you must face down the demons of horrible, scorching regret. You must also manage to come out on top or your life will be ruined.

CLOSING: So then I turned thirty-seven and Jazz Street Grill got shut down for delinquent taxes and I got moved into a bigger cubicle. The Maker's Mark I keep above the stove. I continue to be a non-smoker. Our I.T. guy at work thinks public education needs to be privatized. I still kind of miss the psychedelic experience and I learned, recently, that a human snore can reach 69 decibels. Melissa said last week that our relationship was hanging by a yarn.

Merry Christmas.

Snapshots

2009-10-25T09:31:00.014-04:00

Gauley Season is over and here I am, kind of slumped, though only a little and sort of in a good, exhausted way. Boating is boating and while it does warm my insides, it's just boating. Like driving down a twisty mountain road except the road is made of water and a geological event has recently scattered rocks all along the travel lane. The icy waters no longer appeal the way they once did. When winter comes I want to stay dry. So I spent the weekend doing very little.

I responded halfheartedly with a cumbersome letter to an ad in Charlottesville that read: "Wanted: Thinking Renaissance Blue Collar Worker." In the tradition of Shakespeare and Dick Van Dyke. The position was filled. They wanted a chimney sweep. Kim wrote back: "Your resume and letter had that je ne sais quoi quality I look for, so I will keep it on file." And who knows? I may have taken the pay cut and started sweeping chimneys. Their loss.

Melissa and I took a rainy afternoon drive out to Barnes & Nobel where we sipped coffee, perused expensive magazines, and watched people. We wagered the young couple beside us texting on separate cell phones sprinting in opposite directions who left the infant crying in a car seat under the table weren't in it for the long haul. If they are under 24--and they looked under 24--their chances of surviving marriage are somewhere around 15%. We wondered aloud to each other how we've made it thus far and decided it takes a bit of luck and some thick skin and some dogged persistence. We pretty much started off on all the statistical wrong feet and so far--knock on some pretty thick wood--we've managed to stand in that paper thin percentile and sort of uplift the middle finger to Melissa's friends who took bets concerning our survival.

August Kleinzahler--my favorite San Fransisco poet--writes about living under a wharf in Alaska in this month's issue of BELIEVER. He had occasional conversations with a stern cleric about T.S. Elliot. "The stern cleric inform[ed] me that I was going to hell because 1) I didn't believe there was a hell, or a God either; and 2) because I was a Jew, which was even worse than being a Catholic or a Protestant, who were also on the road to perdition. Furthermore, even though I may have been hitherto a reasonably well-behaved young man, or at least one without a criminal record, I was no damn good, regardless, because, not believing in divine retribution or hell, I'd eventually come to the conclusion that since nothing was stopping me from larceny, rape, and worse, I'd realize, Why the hell not? and get down to business."

The Man From the Bush, people from Nelson, British Columbia called Sam Brown. The Rolling Stone article I read, shortly after reading Kleinzahler's musings about the bygone era when one could still meet a schizophrenic cat named Baby Teapot, called him "The Ultimate Outdoorsman."

(Now, there are some pretty rugged folks here in the survey department, or perhaps in the profession of Land Surveying in general--I mean, there are some pretty rugged U.S. Forest Service Boundaries here in Virginia--that might challenge Jesse Hyde on this point, but there's nothing horribly wrong with a touch of hyperbole, now and again.)

But while maybe not the ULTIMATE outdoorsman, Sammy apparently grew up off the grid fifty miles from the nearest town, surfed, became a bit of a mountain biking extraordinaire--gaining some cultish notoriety for his use of the "Disconstructed Wheel," a giant hamster wheel for a bike that rolled on a narrow rail 10' off the ground and was, according to all but two people in the world, impossible to ride--lived on his own out of a Land Cruiser when he was 13, learned to fly a helicopter and got into heli-logging, which, as the name implies, involves logging with a helicopter, all of which coalesced, as fate would have it--his spirit of adventure and odd assortment of skills and general pot smoking culture of the famed Kootenays (estimated these days at a $7 billion-a-year industry, Holy Smoke, by the by)--into the lucrative business of smuggling first rate B.C. Bud across the border.

"Wow," I said as Melissa handed me the article, "sounds like my kind of guy."

"Yeah," she said. "Well he's dead."

Some days after being busted in a fairly big swap (transporting 350lbs of weed by helicopter into the US), a deal in which it's estimated he'd have probably carried home $40,000 for one night of work, he was found hanging by the neck in his prison cell. I'm left--from my rather restricted and responsible side of the fence--to stare down at the table with a disapproving headshake for people who take what might be called Ultimate Freedom and end it at the end of a short rope.

And after burning some dead branches with Ezra, washing the West Virginia mud off the van, there was David Bazan: who came stumbling across Itunes yesterday with the album Curse Your Branches, and who spoke with urgency enough that I found myself listening for most of today. I don't really like his voice, his melodies are monotone and sort of bland, and his music isn't all that great. But his lyrics can be found here. And they are something.

Some thing.

Goodbye To A Honda

2009-10-22T07:33:00.011-04:00

I recall a time in my life--round about maybe 15 when I was busy sneaking out at night with my father's station wagon, somewhere around 22 years ago--when I seriously thought that, despite my inexperience and young age, my driving skills warranted a valid driver's license. During one of these excursions I made it all the way across the country in a van, never once getting caught for any sort of moving violation. And I was good to go, in much the same way, I'm certain, that every teenager--including my 15 year old daughter--thinks they are good to go.

And so but then, one week ago tonight, standing in the middle of Ward's Road in the rain, staring in disbelief at the scrunched front end of my 1993 Honda Accord, listening to this 17 year old kid try to explain why his Ford Explorer couldn't make the turn on the wet asphalt, I found myself wondering whether 16 years old might not be a little too young for a license. He didn't know his insurance carrier. He didn't know where to tow the car. He didn't know the answer to a single question--Do you have a towing preference?--without first consulting his cell phone. And yet here he was, blocking traffic for as far as I could see, pacing back and forth on the phone, stopping to shake his head at the wayward Explorer, waiting for answers from cellular space. I sent Ezra out of the rain and into the Apple Market for hot chocolate and the rest of us--several police officers, the guy in the tow truck waiting for $165, and myself--stood around in the rain and waited for his mother to drive out to the scene. She had the insurance card. She could pay the tow fee. She had some answers about where to take the vehicle. She took one look at the wrecker and said: "Who called him? That's not my tow truck. I use Sandy." She looked at my car crunched up next to the Explorer and asked: "How did that car get there?" I felt the cop next to me roll his eyes.

His Ford Explorer had apparently hydroplaned while trying to make a turn, spun around twice, jumped a concrete median strip, and probably totaled my Honda. (The jury/adjuster is still out on the amount, but the front end is jacked and I doubt it can be repaired for less than $2,000.) He's lucky he didn't flip on the median: he hit it sideways. Ezra and I were sitting at a stoplight on our merry way to goodwill to drop off two bags of clothes when Marcus came crashing into us. Wes' Muffler had that very day hooked up my exhaust system--fixed some leaks, replaced the muffler, tightened up the pipes--which I kept glancing at as if in mourning. See that muffler? It's shiny. It's brand new. No one was the least bit injured, but I was a little peeved. $2,000 will probably total the Honda. 265,000 miles. Only now getting broken in. Purring like a kitten. Spinning like a top. Slow down. It's raining. The asphalt is wet. I probably won't find another car like her for $2,000. I stood next to the kid and we looked at our respective damage. His Explorer sustained a bit more and I felt myself sort of gloating in a kind of misplaced sense of justice. That's a bummer, I said. Yeah, he mumbled. I'm sorry.

And there I was: the adult wanting to smack the kid's hand for driving too fast in the rain. To slide my foot around on the asphalt and point out that my foot slides a little EASIER because it's WET. The adult wondering if, after all, sixteen years old isn't too young to be making such decisions. The adult reminding himself that this kid has no idea the amount of red tape and headache he just caused me. "No big deal," I said. And it really wasn't. "Happens all the time," I said. And it really does. "The car was a piece of shit anyway." And though it really wasn't, it can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

Fatal Interruption

2009-10-20T21:55:00.005-04:00

I chanced upon a quiet moment with Melissa and began reading aloud from what appeared to be an interesting essay by Richard Rodriguez on the twilight of the American newspaper--the introductory anecdote concerned a ninety-six year old scholar who learned to read in a one-room schoolhouse with the Chicago Tribune--but Ezra dropped a glass in the kitchen and the moment was fatally interrupted. Quite possibly the essay will not be read aloud, as if the universe simply didn't want that to happen.

The Return of the Cube

2009-10-19T21:05:00.009-04:00

Ezra is solving the Rubik's Cube. He's had a sick day--flu symptoms, unfortunately--and he's been watching a little Asian fellow on a DVD who has been playing with a Rubik's Cube for many, many years. The little Asian fellow is apparently a Rubik's Cube Ninja. You can tell this not only by how quickly he can solve the cube but by his first suggestion: detach one of the EDGE pieces (if you detach a CORNER piece before an edge piece you'll break the inner workings), and lubricate the inside of the cube. You'll get a faster, smoother spin. I was intrigued.

He was joined on the video by a pretty girl in a short skirt--a very short skirt--who, at the beginning of the video, was ostensibly ignorant to the way's of Rubik. "I've always wondered how to solve one of these things," she says to the camera. Of course, by the end of the video she is spinning the cube like a top and solving it quickly with the reassuring line: "I didn't realize it was so easy." They are also joined by a magician--there are a few brief shaky clips of him levitating tables and conjuring cards from a stack--with a spooky smile wearing a Hawaiian shirt. The magician has apparently reached the level of Cube Master and can not only solve the cube in record time but can also take a scrambled cube, toss it into the air, and with a quick flutter of a catch present to the camera a solved cube. "That," he assures us, "is magic." In other words, not legal in the realm of cubic competition, and not covered in the video.

I sat down with Ezra, borrowed his Rubik's Cube, and worked my way through the eight steps. Occasionally, Ezra would correct my faulty turns and the cubic geek guiding me through the solution would encourage me to pause the DVD and practice the previous step until I had it mastered. I paused the DVD a few times and tried to get the cube back to where I had it before I scrambled one of my turns. Several times I simply had to start all over. I hadn't turned a Rubik's Cube in years--perhaps twenty-five--and of course the algorithms for the solution have gone off the charts.

However, there are still the simple five algorithms (and their corresponding functions) that enable you to solve the cube (IE: R, U, R1, U, R, U2, F, R1, F1). But that's just the beginning. Memorize some two hundred algorithms (and their corresponding functions) and you can solve the cube from any position in as little as 12 seconds. They call it, creatively: Speed Solving. Memorize several hundred MORE algorithms and you can solve the cube from any position blindfolded. (Some code of cube conduct allows you to study the cube's scrambled position before you put the cube behind your back, twist it a few times, and present the unscrambled masterpiece. Solving the cube blindfolded WITHOUT seeing the scrambled pattern of the cube apparently still falls into the realm of Magic.) The DVD came packed with PDF documents full of strings of code (and their corresponding functions) and I was encouraged to memorize algorithms 1-26 first because of the frequency of these positions. Some of the more challenging solutions--studies, perhaps--included solving the cube with the least number of turns, or solving first all the corner pieces and then all the edge pieces, or alternating two opposing pieces at a time.

At some point in this enlightenment the pretty girl in the short skirt came back onto the scene nimbly twisting a cube back together and assuring me that she had no idea the solution to the whole mystery was so easy. I was fairly content to finally get the thing solved with the initial five algorithms (reading them off Ezra's cheat sheet). Ezra also seems content to have memorized the initial five, although I did catch him popping off an edge piece with a can of WD40 at the ready.

Autumn: John Graves

2009-10-15T09:48:00.003-04:00

Here on the first cold spell of autumn--50 degrees this morning with the kicking on of the boiler, the time of year Melissa and I snuggle exceptionally close to stay warm--I present one paragraph from the marvelous pen of John Graves, one of America's good ones (author of the what-will-eventually-be-a-classic GOODBYE TO A RIVER), tacked to the cubicle wall beneath the Syndicated article concerning Mother Teresa's feelings of abandonment. This paragraph is worth money on many levels. Enjoy.

"Change. Autumn. Maybe--certainly--there was melancholy in it, but it was a good melancholy. I've never been partial to the places where the four seasons are one. If the sun shines all year long at La Jolla, and the water says warm enough for swimming over rocks that wave moss like green long hair, that is pleasant, but not much else. Sunshine and warm water seem to me to have full meaning only when they come after winter's bite; green is not so green if it doesn't follow the months of brown and gray. And the scheduled inevitable death of green caries its own exhileration; in that change is the promise of all the rebirths to come, and the deaths, too. In it is the only real unchangingness, solidity, and in the alternation of bite and caress, of fat and lean, of song and silence, is the reward and punishment that life has always been, and the punishment itself becomes good, maybe because it promises reward, maybe because after much honey the puckering acid of acorns tastes right. Without the year's changes, for me, there is little morality."

On Nothing

2009-09-24T12:26:00.008-04:00

Blog.

I spend months at the computer without blogging. Without skipping the click over to Melissa's words. Barely moving. Hibernating in West Virginia. Some might say tunnel vision with the warm water. Some might say Death by CAD. Points and lines and arcs. Pointless lines and arcs. And but yet there is no direction. There is no real purpose other than the bills paid for to keep on plodding along in these pointless lines and arcs. Connecting the dots. Breaking the lines. Reconnecting. Doing what I am told by those who have bought me. Or caught me. Growing weary of waking and sleeping. And the water stays warm. And I attend a meeting: CAD STANDARDS. These will be updated quarterly.

And this is living. This is riveting.

Hell With A River Through It: PART ONE

2009-06-15T21:43:00.021-04:00

ONE
As it so happens when one lives in an old house with lots of children, when one seems quite unable to manage so much LIFE--so many people and things and events peppered with leaking gas hoses and PSPs that won't accept digital photos and peeling plaster and somehow not enough of the capitalist virility or perhaps too much of the grasshopper mentality and not enough ANT to make a decent go in the world--when one pecks daily in an 8X6 beige cage for the apparent sole purpose of making several upper level executives with a boatload of capitalist virility eggs enough to fill their basket: well, as it so happens, I had to get away from the big booming town of L-burg. Out past the stadium lights and the disappointed woman I live with and the unhappy children and the coworkers who think I am certifiably insane: even life in a relatively small, easy-going town can drive one stork raven mad.

So I took off. I packed up old faithful--a red, well-outfitted despite the crack in the plaster Old Town canoe that I bought used some ten years ago--borrowed what appeared to be a semi-trail-worthy "full-suspension" mountain bike, tied everything to the top of my car, and drove over the Allegheny Mountains into West Virginia. Interstate 64 West, all by itself, winding up through the hills, is enough road to make everything better. My goals, if you can describe what may at least partially drive me as goals, were simple: A) find space enough to shake myself free of the funk, and B) exhaust myself. I didn't allow for company, and I don't believe in what Douglas Coupland calls "Bought Experiences": those experiences that come shaped as either a package deal, wrapped in celophane for a rock bottom price to a select few, or the flocking along with the trust funded herd to the latest outdoor event/race/festival. The herd mentality has, in recent years, pushed me further and further away from what has become the rather popular and commercialized sport of kayaking (which, as fate would have it, I thoroughly enjoy).

Walker Percy, in a wonderful essay by the same title, called this weird byproduct of living in the modern world the "Loss of the Creature." Anything we attempt to explore or discover has already been long neatly packaged and sold to us, often without our knowledge . . . So, he writes, to visit the Grand Canyon (which, as you'll recall, was stumbled upon by Garcia Lopez de Cardenas round about 1540 after hacking for weeks through the mesquite), we now book a flight, stay at the Bright Angel Lodge, pay for a donkey ride, snap hundreds of photos, etc., and experience the canyon only as part of a larger "symbolic complex" that has already been processed by others. (Wow, we might say, that looks even better than I imagined!) In short, we participate in the prescribed activities that will forever keep us from really seeing the Grand Canyon as we might if, say, while cutting through the mesquite in 1540, we had simply stumbled upon the grandeur of the scene, spread out beneath our machete. Instead of taking a bike to the top of the mountain and riding downhill, we sign up for classes and join the social club and go SHOPPING. Or, as Faulkner explored in The Bear: How do we get away from the watch and compass, get down on our hands and knees, and go after that bear that defies all description? I might as well warn you: if you dwell on Percy's essay for too long it gets kind of depressing, but it's an interesting read.

So I took off Friday night to chase a miniature version of the Creature--perhaps a mink or a ferret--following a "quick" after-work paddle with the boys from the office that put me on the road sometime after dark. My destination was somewhere in the upper New River Gorge area for some paddling. I figured I'd set my own shuttle with the borrowed bike, spend the night on the river, and maybe hike up into some hollows for some good old fashioned exploring. So I hit the road Friday night and, after crashing for a few hours at the West Virginia rest stop, woke up Saturday morning in a place called Thurmond, West Virginia.

At one point in the colorful history of the New River Gorge, Thurmond was one of the booming rail towns along the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway. The town was known as a place for a good time, be those times legal or illegal, be the consequences rewarding or deadly. This became my takeout: the place I parked the car after hiding my canoe sixteen miles upriver across from a town called Prince. The idea was simple and elegant: park the car at Thurmond, ride the bike up a dirt road connecting the two towns, a dirt road I had noticed on a quad sheet, chain the bike to a tree in the woods, then paddle the canoe back downriver to Thurmond, where my car was waiting. No companions, no reliance on shuttles or phone calls, no packaged fun, no fanfare or anyone to keep happy: just me and the river and the West Virginia mountains. The idea was foolproof.

Running On Empty

2009-05-26T22:51:00.004-04:00

I ran tonight with my twelve year old son--something I haven't done in a while--and I have to say I kept up with him for perhaps the first half mile. And then he pulled away into the dark. When I finally returned from our standard route, he was sitting on the porch waiting for me and I thought, This is how it starts.

Girlfriend in a Coma

2009-05-25T10:11:00.003-04:00

In Douglas Coupland's novel, Girlfriend in a Coma, Karen, at the age of 17, schlumps down into a coma in 1979 and re-emerges seventeen years later, in 1997. Granted, her circle of friends is a bit older--and with that the responsibilities of their individual lives have changed--but her assessment of the change in societal feel is interesting:

"There's a hardness I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life's so serious now. Maybe it's just because I'm with an older gang now. . . I mean, nobody even has hobbies these days. Not that I can see. Husbands and wives both work. Kids are farmed out to schools and video games. Nobody seems to be able to endure simply being by themselves, either--but at the same time they're isolated. People work much more, only to go home and surf the Internet and send e-mail rather than calling or writing a note or visiting each other. They work, watch TV, and sleep. I see these things. The whole world is only about work: work work work get get get . . . racing ahead . . . getting sacked from work . . . going online . . . knowing computer languages . . . winning contracts . . . People are frazzled and angry, desperate about money, and, at best, indifferent about the future."

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

2009-05-24T14:21:00.005-04:00

I'm going through piles of folders full of papers. Old poems, clips from my occasional and random pieces of published nonsense, short stories, essays, stupid pretentious shit on James Joyce. In Search of Stephen Dedalus: A Portrait of a Reader. The scattered pieces of a failed literary zine, SKWID, we struggled to start at LC., complete with some mailed-in submissions. (From New Orleans: "I never said that I thought I was good at writing but I said sex. I was good at sex." From Lynchburg: "Deft hands molded his flaccid impotence." Could we think of anything but sex? Perhaps we should have concentrated our efforts on a porn mag.) A handwritten copy that I apparently wrote of Christopher Smart's writings from the insane asylum considering his cat, Jeoffrey.

For I will consider my cat Jeoffrey.
For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.

On and on. Why did I write this out in longhand? The photocopy is also included. Pages. Stacks of rambunctious poems, including one by Adrian C. Lewis that includes this immortal line:

F*U*C*K the L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E poets.

A respectable stack of struggles to write and perhaps attempt to understand the English Haiku studies of the imagist poets of the early twentieth century, among them one that isn't too bad:

A Haiku Turned Inside Out
Water respects what it sees
Atop the napkin
Trees from yesterday's bagel.

Poems scrawled on torn sheets of paper, yellowed now with the black ink fading into purple. Letters never sent. Letters never answered. Poems upon which I commented and then never returned to the sender. I apologize. On one poem, called "The Preacher's Wife, New Mexico," I wrote: "She had latitude hanging herself by the piano." But in the poem there is no hanging; there is no piano. There is, however, a poker game, a cowboy, a preacher, and a knife. A list of August Kleinzahler's fifty-two favorite words or phrases, which became one of his assignments in a workshop he gave. "Tape them to the wall beside your typewriter," he advised. James Joyce suggested the same thing, many years before. Note the repetition of words in the first section of Portrait. (Kleinzahler's fifty-two words later made their way into a poem called 52 pickup, which won some magazine's award for being the worst poem published in 1998.) No surprise at this curious aspect.

On and on and I wonder now how I had that much time. Some of them woke up forgetting. When some of them woke up we'd already forgotten them for a long time. Or where all the energy went? And I think about taking the whole stack into the backyard and lighting a match, snuffing out the previous life in a quiet puff of smoke. But I won't. The difference is not the road, but how the road feels under your feet. That crazy poet is still inside me, somewhere. And I suspect I will eventually enjoy another grey Sunday of going through these folders full of pages. So I'll put them back for another day. Besides, I found what I was looking for.

Not Drowning, Waving

2009-05-24T13:03:00.002-04:00

There are at least two ways to drown in water. The first and also the simplest, by which I mean to say the cleanest or most given to full recovery, is the so-called dry drowning. Dry drownings occur when the epiglottis (the flap valve covering the windpipe) goes into spasm (due, of course, to panic and nerves and the freaked-out brain being without air for too long) and the automatic nervous system slams the door shut like an angry child. So when the involuntary reflex causes the swimmer to gasp desperately for air, no water goes down the windpipe. Survivors of dry drownings (pulled out of the water twenty or even thirty minutes after "going down" for the last time) are often fine and suffer no further medical complications. Some even talk of the experience winsomely, remembering the euphoric panorama of their lives passing before their detached eyes with a dreamy slowness. "In this sense," writes Dr. John Rugge in The Complete Wilderness Paddler, "dry drowning carries a good prognosis."

The second, most common sort of drowning--nine out of ten occurrences--is the wet drowning. Wet drownings occur when the poor swimmer holds her breath for as long as possible, fighting against the involuntary reflexes of the brain until the so-called "lower control centers" take over, at which point the swimmer heaves a series of desperate, oxygen-seeking gasps and gets nothing but water down the windpipe. William Nealy calls this "aspirating half the river." The good doctor Rugge prefers the term "inspiring." These are deep gasps and, unfortunately, fill the lungs with water. From the lungs the water is quickly absorbed into the bloodstream, resulting in a tremendous overload to the circulatory system. Red blood cells burst, serum salts are thrown into disequilibrium, and the heart often suffers ventricular fibrillation. The hemoglobin of these broken red cells can also clog the kidneys, and the electrolyte disorder can cause cerebral damage (not to mention the obvious lack of oxygen, contributing, I would imagine, to what the gentle writers call "cerebral changes.") As if this were not quite enough, the victim may show signs of full recovery only to die hours later. Dr. Rugge writes: "No one finds wet drowning pleasant."

Thankfully, while checking out the Zac Brown Band at Friday Cheers in Richmond several days ago, I had only a dry drowning in the crowd of several thousand people. By the time I escaped out the edge of the pulsing throng, snuck down into the shadows, hiked across the canal bridge, and found a bench under the dark cover of a eucalyptus from which I could not only hear the band but also read in the dim light of a walkway lamp, I was on my way to full recovery. As it turns out, I was apparently in the make-out section of the concert and had to therefore put up with couples on either side of me rolling around in the mulch, but at least I could breathe.

May?

2009-05-16T09:24:00.009-04:00

So I've managed to survive at least this far into the new year--midway through May--and the rain has been falling enough to get water up in the various waterways around Virginia and with the sun peeking through the clouds enough to warm the air at least a few degrees we can play the currents with a touch more freedom and take the seventeen foot canoe into the bigger holes and through the tighter lines between the rocks and swim without fear of hypothermia and spend more time in the water drinking cheap beer and wrestling each other free from the strainers and boulder jumbles, where even the work with ropes--the mechanical advantage necessary to pull a canoe full of water from a tree--and teetering recoveries seem light,

joyous even,

compared to the day to day work amongst the engineers, sipping their juice boxes and gaping with open mouths at my almost complete lack of interest.

And little league baseball which can be nothing but the embodiment of spring.

And camping with Ezra.

And true to his word, some organized administrator from last year's photography exhibition sent me an application form and I suppose I'll run off a few prints from the clogged and redundant archives of my own personal Picasso museum and pay the thirty dollar entry fee and see what comes. As if the rain were brain-colored. As if the leafy green explosion signified some meaning about to come my way. As if the greatest problem with the world comes down to how we can go on living in it and but yet be unable to really change anything about it, fluttering along as we are atop the surface of things and pretending that everything is okay, that AutoCad2009 is working perfectly well in this particular beige cubicle on this particular dinky machine without enough memory to run itunes and CAD at the same time, that my daughter has turned out okay--really, really--and while we don't know exactly where she is

there is a style here that is very interesting. A certain hint of color in the brain-colored rain hitting the oil on the asphalt. A certain release in swimming the entire rapid, from top to bottom, and slamming every rock on the way down, of crawling into your cubicle the next day perhaps late enough to hear people whispering, engineers ogling your swollen knee, black eye, broken nose, the cracked ear where you fell out of the car brain drunk or found your first bar fight in a tiny town in Maryland called Friendsville--no, seriously, Friendsville--complete with bottles broken over skulls and pool sticks in the eye and mass of bodies surfing on a river of beer spilling out into the street and blood wiped off onto dirty jeans and cops with guns pulled; a certain release in the computer that only grudgingly grinds along and the Virginia inspection sticker months late and the boat stapled to the car ready to drop everything in a moment's notice and the house beyond repair falling down around you and too many kids and no money for to clean things up and all around you in the warm air and water the sweet green ejaculation of spring.

Ah, May.

Music

2009-03-26T21:23:00.000-04:00

Entry: And then music returned in the form of a guitar. Strange, to hear the rattle and hum of strings again.

On MFAs.

2009-02-04T20:37:00.002-05:00

Actually, I'm not going to waste a bunch of time ranting against the MFA. I'm going to let Ms. Clementson do it. CLICK HERE. (And then click around for some other interesting archives from MOBY LIVES! Even though MOBY appears to have died some two years ago...)

Will You Destroy All My Papers?

2009-02-03T13:41:00.020-05:00

ONE.

No, really. John Donne with suicidal tendencies. Donne the Metaphysical Poet who wrote all those dreadful religious sonnets (I'm an English major here and you'll have to bear with my sarcasm: I recognize that very few people have had the privilege of actually teasing out the formal intricacies of Rev. Donne--

I mean, why would you if you did not have to?--

and few people probably even know that Batter my heart three-personed God was NOT, in fact, written my King Solomon of the ancient Hebrews but by an ordained minister in the seventeenth century). Anyway.

I'm reading a chapter right now (yes, sitting in this cramped beige cubicle decidedly NOT working on whatever it is I OUGHT to be) on suicide notes. The chapter is titled: "Take Out the Amber, Put Out The Lamp." And I can imagine George Herbert stepping into Donne's flat--Hey, John, you mind taking a look at these Easter Wings?--and finding the note: "BE CAREFUL. CYANIDE GAS IS IN THE BATHROOM. CALL THE ALCHEMIST. P.S. Do you mind burning that handful of unfinished sonnets?"

Whoops.

I keep tacked beside me (to the left of my dual flat screen monitors--the better to see an image of an image of the world on--and then left again of a color print from some glossy magazine of Tommy Hilleke's bright orange boat dropping over an eighty-foot waterfall in Oregon, an ad for the boat, it turns out) a headline from The Associated Press published shortly after her death: "Mother Teresa Felt Abandoned By God." I find myself not quite able to process this piece of information. Issues of fairness and love surface. Issues that come out sounding like: "Who does this God think he is, anyway?" No wonder I feel so abandoned. My faith isn't even a modicum of the faith M.T. probably had. From a series of letters written in the 1950's & 60's to her spiritual directors: "I am told that God lives in me--and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul." Mother Teresa? What sort of a fighting chance at faith do I really have if Mother TERESA felt that "heaven was closed from all sides"? What sort of a fighting chance at living without suicide?

The death of David Foster Wallace hit me in a similar, though literary way, several years later. Wallace, who I considered one of the brightest of the bright (in terms of fooling around with English words), hung himself not too long ago. I quote Wallace as he stood on the deck of the Zenith, a luxury cruise ship owned by Celebrity Cruises, INC., for Harper's Magazine:

There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that is unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: on board the Nadir [Wallace couldn't help but rechristen a ship called the ZENITH for the essay]--especially at night, when all the ship's structured fun and reassurances and gaiety-noise ceased--I felt despair. The word's overused and banalified now, DESPAIR, but it's a serious word, and I'm using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture--a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It's maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it's not these things, quite. It's more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I'm small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It's wanting to jump overboard.

I didn't care at all for the news that DFW hung himself. We had a kind of brotherhood, he and I, somehow, even though I'd never met him, even if it was simply the brotherhood of footnotes and experimental line breaks with abstract leaps in prose. (I'll admit, I love footnotes, even though they drive people absolutely crazy. [AND ME! Crazy, that is. Footnotes.] Nonetheless I'll write what can feel like an entire chapter within a chapter in a footnote. It keeps me on my toes. Lets me wander. Keeps me awake and conscious of where I am in the onion. Kept the professors who used to have to read my drivel from actually READING my drivel.) Again: how can I be expected to carry on if far greater minds cannot? Here's another note written by some nameless sop whose only claim to fame came from the mess he left behind:

Dear Dear Betty

Oh how I love you but I am not fit to be your husband or live. I have just gotten the most Deadly Poison there is & When you read this letter I will be gone thank God. I am giving Peggy [their dog] to the Landlady to keep for you and one Dollar to feed her to Thursday & also just Paid the room Thursday [sic]. The receipt is enclosed.

Not that DFW left any kind of explanation, except, I suppose, the explanation of his work, which, Robert Olmstead once told me, will kill any writer if she takes it seriously enough to really write. But the attention to detail in this particular suicide note is touching. The receipt is enclosed. I've paid us up through Thursday. Hemmingway used a shotgun. Have you thought about your note? Ms. Plath stuck her head in the oven. Virginia Woolf loaded her pockets with heavy stones and walked into the river. Woolf also left a note for her lover:

Dearest,

I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. No one could have done more than you have done. Please believe that. . .

And then there are the sad, beautiful stories from Louis de Bernieres' marvelous essay, "Legends of the Fall." This is not to be confused with Jim Harrison's coming-of-age-with-the-grizzly-in-the-soul novella. (Which is also marvelous.) No. But for the record I recommend reading all the fiction of Jim Harrison

(don't bother with his poetry or his sporting or literary essays: he is a far better storyteller than he is an essayist--although I must admit I enjoy some of his essays for Field and Stream and I [secretly] relish some of his essays on FOOD [he is not a small fellow, but small portions are for small and inactive people]; as for his poetry, may it never cross your path)

and at least "Legends of the Fall" by Louis de Bernieres. This is the little travel piece concerned with the most famous suicide spot in England: Beachy Head. Apparently, people have been leaping to their deaths from Beachy Head for centuries, not to mention sneaking up for a peak into the great abyss.

TWO.
Back when I flirted with teaching, before I knew better, before I had lost any illusion I may have once held about life and love, before I had come to realize that every human being has known or will know times of abject despair, before I had read that 1 out of 10 high school students will go so far as to create a plan for taking their own life, this would be one of the essays with which I may have begun the semester. With the middle school kids I had to read the words aloud with them, word by word, sentence by sentence, as I did almost every essay, because they liked to talk beyond the sentences and because I loved to hear the language out loud and because I really did enjoy the questions they came up with.

In winter the waves are so ferocious that they can hurl rocks over the seawalls of nearby towns. Meanwhile, up on the cliff, you can lean your whole weight against the salty wind in perfect security, if you can stand the blur of tears.

Later, teaching high school seniors (this was media arts, not English, and I still have no idea why high school seniors need to be taught "media arts,"), and because I found most of the essays scattered about the classroom or stuffed into the trashcan by the door, and because the administration did not appreciate me spending the entire class period reading "The Case Against Babies" or "The Reader in Exile" to the students

("Mr. Schuppe, it seems as though you might be spending your time a little more wisely. Why don't you show them a movie?")

I stopped dispersing them. Of course, I still continued to use the copy machine and still continue, even now, to pass out the impressive stack of essays I accumulated, but now I pass them out to the people I work with and find them discarded on empty desks or stuffed into trashcans about the office. Recently, I got excited over Wendel Berry's "Faustian Economics," an interesting look at the way some of us might view economic growth as being, kind of like, limitless, as in, extending on forever and ever, and ran off a few copies in the breakroom when no one was looking. One fellow looked at me and said: "Why don't you stick with one thing?"

Huh?

I also managed, at the high school, to compile a few collections of essays into notebooks which I finally gave away to several students (the ones who wanted them) before I turned in my key and walked out for the last time.

And but so by the time I managed to get squeezed through the gormless adjuct thing at Liberty University I found that the students simply wanted to know what would be on the quiz or test and I wrote across the board: "I have never felt this anywhere else, even when dropping large waterfalls or when dangling from a research building in Charlottesville: this beautiful essay openly invites you to die."

And they read. Or they took them home before discarding them.

THREE.
Oddly enough, a postcard from Beachy Head is also pinned to my cubicle wall. It's from my mother addressed to my seventeen year old daughter, from a time that feels long ago when things were easier and simpler and Bernieres' essay was nothing more than a beautiful glimpse over a terrifying edge:

Morgan,

Check this cliff out--It is 400 feet straight down--kind of scary--even to Poppy, because the ground is very crumbly.

"Miserableness," Graham Greene once wrote, "is like a small germ I've had inside me as long as I can remember. And sometimes it starts wriggling."

I have felt that wriggle. In fact, it comes and goes. I have looked out at the long dark tunnel that is the rest of my life and seen how easily the carousel becomes a pointless, endless charade; how easily the hand you shake turns into a flabby worm; how easily the doorknob becomes a piece of cold, indifferent steel and the only emotion left is nausea. Our fragile minds can take only so much before they want nothing but to sleep.

And I have seen the sky turn almost black with the traces and wings of broken hearts, and the narrow tunnel all the way to the sun ink over but for the promise held out by the bridge that runs over the New River Gorge--nine hundred feet above one of the most beautiful rivers I've ever seen, three hours west of my house--and somehow I have managed to wait out the storm. Every time. Like those who turned back from Mount Mihara. Like the canyon voyage endured with your head in a vice. Like the absent voice Mother Teresa longed to hear. Like the child who leapt from the top deck of the carnival cruise. Like the salty wind that you can lean your whole body against, if you stand the blur of tears. The sorrow will end, we tell ourselves, over and over. The sorrow will end.

But it doesn't. Not for everyone. And we must, eventually, learn to live with that, too.

If there is any encouragement to be salvaged from all this tragedy, Bernieres concludes, it might be teased from the tale of a woman who went to Beachy Head in order to make her quietus. She had never been a drinker, but she knocked back half a bottle of gin for the sake of Dutch courage. Not long afterward she was arrested and fined for being drunk and disorderly, having decided while under the influence that life was marvelous after all.

2009-02-02T22:11:00.001-05:00

John Donne, of all people, once wrote the following:

"Whensoever any affliction assails me, methinks I have the keys of my prison in mine own hand, and no remedy presents itself so soon to my heart as mine own sword."

Bowling for Junior Achievement

2009-02-01T22:03:00.004-05:00

So I bowled yesterday for the first time in many, many years. We had a few teams from work bowling for the annual Junior Achievement fundraiser and I ended up as a fill-in. Kind of weird, considering I was filling in due to layoffs last week. No one wants to bowl for a company that just gave them the axe. And of course the bowling alley has gotten weird since I've been away. What with a kind of spinning neon glow and black light bulbs every few feet and strange patterns crawling slowly along the walls: it felt like a flashback or some early nineties rave.

The pencil scorecards are gone as well. Scores get maintained automatically by the computer. Less cheating that way, I suppose. (And Lord knows I needed the help of the misplaced line on the scorecard.) The price has changed, of course. Significantly, from what I recall. Wasn't bowling at one point called "Blue Collar Golf?" A pitcher of beer is now ten bucks. Cheap beer, too. Semi-nasty. One game would have been almost six dollars, had we been paying. A regular in there said he brings his kids and they get the "family special:" sixty-three dollars for two hours of bowling. Sixty-three bucks? I mean, it was fun and everything, but not THAT fun.

So after throwing my bright orange ball down the waxed lane for three hours (and reaching a high score of 159), I ended up in a bar discussing the death penalty with our IT guy. Not smart. Apparently it's not such a good thing to stumble into the house a bit late (well, 7:00 late) and a bit tipsy, when I was supposedly stepping out for a few frames of bowling many hours before. You'd think in seventeen years of marriage I would have learned something, but here we are again: everyone angry with me for my sordid crimes against humanity.

So much for Junior Achievement.

The Rush And The Push

2009-01-25T09:30:00.002-05:00

I am impatient. Ready for the next phase. Eager to be alone with Melissa. Decidedly not content. Paranoid and hair-trigger. Swelling around the middle. Angry. Weary of the ignorance that lords over me. The ignorance pissing on me from above. Hurling myself against the violent order which (if you append a nickle's worth of sense to Wallace Stevens) is also the old order. Why does everyone want to argue with me, even when I'm not playing their game, even when I agree with their propositions, even when I am ready to be left alone? Why must I be so impatient with the zombies that stumble around me, smacking their bloody lips, already dead?

In Preparation

2009-01-21T22:54:00.003-05:00

Tomorrow we head to Richmond, Melissa and I, to visit with the "team." To attend to Morgan. To shuttle her into Richmond for another doctor's appointment.

Tonight I peruse a book on Wallace Stevens--Life as Poetry--and read from a letter he wrote to his daughter. "My own stubbornness and taciturn eras are straight out of Holland and I cannot change them any more than I can take off my skin. But I never hesitate to seek to undo any damage I may have done."

I am left to hope that the damage I have done to my children is even reparable.

On the Changing Tide

2009-01-20T21:59:00.006-05:00

We stopped goofing off at work today long enough to watch a halting live feed of the inaugural speech projected onto the wall of a conference room from a laptop. Apparently, any television sets the company may have had in the past have been thrown out. Fewer video cassette tapes to rewind, therefore. So we got the audio speech and background circumstance and then, in big screen format on the wall, the video came across as a jerking series of mangled still shots. And I rather enjoyed the sudden technological backfire, as I sipped Brunswick Stew from a Styrofoam cup and probably poisoned myself. And the Chief Justice's mis-wording of the Constitutional oath. And the reminder that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.

But as I wandered back to my beige cubicle twenty-five minutes later to connect another few hundred dots, I was struck not by the timing and rhythm of his speech (which far surpassed the "praise song poem" thing that followed), or by the darker tone that seemed to mirror an "oath taken amidst raging storms," or even by his remembrance of a story and some lines from the life of a common LAND SURVEYOR. I was struck, as I am struck again after reading it, by the same voice that called me to put a check by his name in the voting booth: a voice that reaches out for reconciliation, a voice that is at least trying to find common ground enough for us to meet and listen. The stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. A bridge, Marge Piercy called it. A blacklight rainbow arching out of your skull. And an invitation. Our new President is nothing if he is not all inclusive. And I have been invited. Me, who finds politics about as interesting as being dead.

But it's not easy to meet under such circumstances. Not for all of us. (You can't live on a bridge. You can't plant potatoes.) Especially when I am so certain that I have the Truth. So certain that the Truth with a capital T is the only Truth, even if that Truth is something as simple as: Politics is The Definition of a Total Waste of Time. Convinced that the assumptions through which I have lived for an entire life are assumptions that have grown through the centuries in the right direction. Plants grow toward light. Trees grow upward toward the sun. The human race progresses. Even though I also know that the chances are good--are GREAT, in fact--that somewhere along the way the assumptions I hold to be self-evident were poisoned. By human "greed and irresponsibility on the part of some," yes, "but also our collective failure to make hard choices." And so I end up stomping around my room angrily, building up higher defenses, refusing to even LISTEN, and allowing the poisoned assumptions through which I see the world to eat away at my soul.

Enter the Art of Christian Doubt (the handmaiden of faith), even while it drives me insane. The Christians seem to have nailed it here: the unhappy union of doubt and faith. Enlarge the part that believes behind a natural hedge against certainty: doubt. Guard against fanaticism and dogma while working out an impossible salvation. Enlarge the part that believes by digging up those unexamined assumptions. Save yourself by sacrificing yourself. I mean, take one look at the central event in Christian History. "By perceiving ourselves as part of the river," some president of one of them foreign countries once wrote, "we take responsibility for the whole river." And remember (from behind the hedge against certainty) that the second you cry Eureka!, you will be wrong. To the poet in me this is beyond beautiful, this is impossible.

And but so I have been invited. And while I may not be able to plant potatoes on this bridge, it can be nice, Ms. Piercy claims, for comings and goings. For long views and quiet talks. And here we have a President who is at least pretending to be interested in this conversation, in this meeting. Given time, the political arena may even become a place, in the stormy weathers of life, where I now and again like to be.

But I doubt it.

Attending the Party After 35

2009-01-18T10:07:00.002-05:00

Melissa and I spent a few hours drinking at a local watering hole last night. A few too many hours. The band made too much noise and played horrible top40 covers and prevented any sort of conversation. I felt about 15 years too late for the scene. Twenty pounds overweight. And sagging in my skin. Some kid offered me a glass bowl for $25. Then he laughed as if he were making a private joke for he and his stoned circle of friends. Watch me shock this old dude. Outside, it was bitterly cold. Inside, children got drunk and pawed each other and made noise. And I was reminded, for some reason, of what The Great One calls the "everlastingly honest poetry of graffiti" drawn in the public toilets of the world. And I found myself wishing it were easier to read the sad tales of youth. Wishing it were easier to listen intently and take them seriously.

Some Psalms of Rice & The Chemical Plant

2009-01-16T19:23:00.012-05:00

On Wednesday I ran away from home for a few days to a place called Hopewell, a factory town somewhere outside of Petersburg, VA, in order to drive through a Chemical Plant and make sure I had the road names and materials right--

verily, this is a large chemical plant that feels a lot like a totalitarian regime--

the police were murderers, the cab drivers were thieves, and everywhere were posters of the dictator's face under the phrase, President For Life--

complete with concrete roads that have names and twist through four hundred acres of chemical tanks and pipes carrying who-knows-what from who-knows-where and perimeter guards who will search you if necessary to make sure you're not carrying a cell phone or matches or maybe stealing the secret ingredient for evildoers who walk among us and speak our tongue--

on a map that I am creating for some lawyers and bankers who will, eventually, insure this piece of property. Excuse me, I wanted to say. Excuse me, we're here for insurance purposes. In which case they would have rolled out the red carpet. Apparently a larger company somewhere in the world has decided to buy not just this factory (which, as I said, is about 400 acres), but thirty-six others just like it.

THIRTY-SIX OTHERS.

And nobody wants to actually physically in their real bodies go down there. Even the air becomes deep and close and resonant with implication.

Psalm 207: Lord, I am not ready to be so blown away. My orange trees dont fruit because rats eat their flowers and my heart is food for the air.

This is a company with substantial means--with some major purchasing power--and the idea behind the survey is this: the bank handing out the loans and the insurance company protecting said loans both want to know what they are buying and/or insuring. They want to have at least a rough sketch of what happens on this piece of property. So for surveys like this (complete with a title search and correlated easement maps etc.) we try to be as thorough and accurate as possible. We're tour guides for four hundred acres of this:

which means we can only get so thorough, because we're a group of guys who basically do what we do so we can run around in the woods all day. And but so after sitting through three hours of safety meetings

(these meetings are one on two, which means NO SLEEPING your senses are going to be assaulted every change will be sudden don't look at the zombies keep checking the boxes as I read imperative sentences off the list that you will obey)

and being warned of the possibility of losing my house and my job and my wife (hmmm, no mention of kids, which may have had a certain appeal) if I don't have written permission to travel from area to area or I so much as THINK about smoking a cigarette--

"Hey," I said, "I quit. I mean, I only smoke when I get really hammered on Alabama High-Test. Which is only about four days a week. And that gets old because everyday I wake with a sword in my head so bright I can shave in it."

The pasty-white 300lb safety director did not blink. "You are also required to wear steel-toed boots, hard hats, and safety goggles at all times while inside the perimeter of the fence. Did you bring these items? Did you even read the packet we sent your office?" The safety director himself was indeed wearing his hard hat and safety goggles, which seemed a little strange as we were sitting in a plush conference room across a wide expanse of mahogany table.

"No," I said while my companion on the trip beside me said: "Yes." I kicked him under the table and the safety director looked at me without blinking. I felt that perhaps we were failing our interview and would never be admitted into the underworld.

"This is serious business, gentlemen," he said. "We've got chemicals here that are bad bad bad. ________ [fill in the blank with some nasty concoction necessary for the manufacturing of rubber to make the tires beneath your car], for instance, needs only the surface area on your skin the size of a golf ball to kill you." I wondered, vaguely, what that sort of death would be like, and imagined melting into a puddle of black goo. Psalm 178: So the sheep end up owning the kingdom and therefore clearly the sheep are the winners. And the goats? They will eat even the book.

Having lived so long under tyranny, Terry, our environmental contact who lived on the back 50 of the plant, wore a blank mask of a face. Except for his eyes, which looked the size of flying saucers behind his prescription goggles. He's been at the plant since 1973 and dealing with us he seemed about as relaxed as a pistol. "Where is it," he asked after our escort had dropped us off inside his yellowed, cinder block building, after we'd been issued goggles and boots and clean white hard hats that proclaimed to the underworld: VISITOR, "that you want to go?" And is there ever any GOING BACK?

"All over. I mean, I need to get some road names and annotate a few power lines and check on some material stockpiles and snap some photos. Stupid stuff for the tabloids and--ultimately, Terry, if I can get my hands on some biological weapons. . ."

"You can't." Psalm 176: When I am appalled by colossal artifice the sad word is my fellow laborer.

"It must be difficult to work in a place," I said, "that fights you every step of the way. I mean, I've done nothing wrong and yet feel constantly guilty." The elite serial killers are among us, I wanted to say but didn't, because I was talking to my companion, with each molecular purpose bent toward judgment--JUSTICE!--ready to condemn even those they love to an eternal torment because THAT IS THE WAY of justice. I shook my head and turned to look out a dirty, barred window, barely able to make out the sludge pit Terry must monitor day in, day out. For years I was a chef on the Lord's battlefield, and how strange it all seems to me now. Psalm 182: I came seeking honey but found the hive deserted and maggots eating the orphaned larvae. It was a biblical image of the overly sensual in hell.

"It's not bad once you get used to it," he said. And I was almost certain that Terry was right. Psalm 163: Soon I won't be able to think for myself. I will only hear and obey the voices. I was ready to leave, as if I had found the full prophecy and it had indeed predicted everything but itself.

What a gas!

Psalm 184: And the godless are as forgotten as flies though they make a noise like the sea. Selah.

The Gift(s)

2009-01-13T22:50:00.005-05:00

I received several gifts this evening and thought maybe I ought to comment on them. I don't know why, except that I was reminded--which turns out to be the second gift--that this blog even exists. Whoa. I forget about things like this. Blogging and "web forums" and this whole high-tech communication schematic. Someone had read a previous post on THIS blog. (And I about shit myself.) Someone had actually gleaned something of VALUE from the blog. Had gleaned the name of a writer. A book name. Had begun READING THE BOOK.

The whole experience unnerved me.

The first gift came wrapped in gold paper and turned out to be a leftover couple books from Christmas. Wonderful books arriving, in my opinion, just on time: after the dust of the holidays has settled and the family has gone home--or I have returned--and the last of the expensive Scotch has been drained. Not one, but TWO collections of Stan Rice, the poet. The final two collections of poetry before he died. I was ignorant of their existence, which made their arrival so sweet. They are slender, hardback volumes, and I nearly cried upon seeing them. (Again, I'm not sure why. His poetry is weird and not always good. But we go back, Stan and I, to an earlier time in my life when I was a chef on the Lord's battlefield, making mincemeat of the unknowable.

The first volume, RED TO THE RIND, was published in 2002, before he died. Ostensibly this was his "last published book." The second, FALSE PROPHET, has a 2003 date, and was written, according to the "editor," in August of 2001. One year later, in August 2002, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor, which killed him in December of the same year. I find this intriguing as I begin flipping through the book, in which he continues the Psalms, beginning with Psalm 151. "Lord," he writes in the first line of the first poem, "hear me out." Even the poor sap who had to write the flap on the dust cover notices this and writes, "Rice has written a profound farewell." Which may or may not be true, but who cares.

How can you ignore an intelligence that assaults you with 61 Psalms? Who, according to the poor sap on the cover, "Picks up where the Bible leaves off?" Who, nonetheless, titles his work: FALSE PROPHET.

I begin...

Estimated Error

2008-11-19T21:13:00.004-05:00

So it's been a while since I've written anything, which probably has more to do with my current bucket of problems

(network adjustment of a waterline topo using both GPS vectors AND conventional traverse type-smut--which ought to be simple but it's not--bunches of children with their faces to the wind and not, as perhaps they occasionally ought, their faces to the frontier, an old house that is leaking through every sieve and threatening to fall flat ass down to the ground, and a decent relationship that needs a little space to breathe)

than with any lack of desire to straighten out the crooked pieces of my well-timed life. ALL in the TIMING. So tonight, with Melissa gone to hear poetry and the children sushed in their rooms and (hopefully) curling up with a book under the covers and dozing off, I'm left alone with a glass of bourbon and the clanking radiators and a face that continues to get older. Time was, I'd spend about every free moment hammering out sentences. Making circles with syllables. Making sense out of certain nonsensical relationships around me. But now my brain seems unable to handle fooling around with the language, unable to bend straight fooling around with anything that might get misconstued as something it's not. And who is left, anyway, to read the garble?

I'd just as soon run through a few more math problems. At least most of them end with an answer.

Wild and Wonderful

2008-10-06T20:10:00.003-04:00

So I realized I couldn't handle normal life again and took off to West Virginia (what else can I do?) and found myself on the Gauley River in between and around two nights in the cold green hills of a soggy bottom. The camping was chill. Cold, actually, and wet with heavy dew, so I stuffed a fleece blanket down into my bag--which used to be a ten or fifteen degree bag but has lost all loft in the fifteen years I've been taking it into the woods and now essentially helps keep the mosquitoes off in the summer--and curled up into a blissful ball. We stood late around the fire and listened to some old men from Kentucky crack political jokes. We talked to some of the regulars we hadn't seen since last year. And then we paddled a SHREDDER, which is essentially a cataraft without any sort of aluminum framing and with a bit of an attitude--highly manueverable and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound--and we only wiped out a few times. Leisure Sport Photography, of course, was waiting there beneath their sunshade for the first crash which left me, after a particularly impressive swan dive into the meat of Pillow Rapid, with a small kiss on my right cheek. And then, as if that was not quite impressive enough, we flipped in the first drop of Lost Paddle and scrambled onto the upside-down raft to ride out the second and third drops of the rapid. So of course my land-loving friends can now point to my face as a living example of how dangerous whitewater paddling can be, and my land-loving friends can still be almost completely wrong.

Sunday afternoon, exhausted and congratulating each other on another good Gauley weekend--only two more weekends left!--my paddling buddy Joe (yeah, we're the easy pair to remember on the river: Joe and Joe) took off on his motorcycle, leaving me with a carload of funky socks and a pile of wet neoprene and a rack full of boats. "Um," he said through his helmet before leaving me in a cloud of dry dust, "Just drop all that crap at my house. Thanks."

No problem.

FREE SHIT!

2008-09-25T19:20:00.005-04:00

Gauley Fest, 2008, American Whitewater's annual fundraiser, left me drunk. I drove up the evening of the festival only because I had formerly agreed to take someone down the river the next day--Sunday--to "show them the lines" on some of the bigger rapids. I figured it would be difficult to wake up Sunday morning, drive 3.5 hours to the river, and be there by 9:00am. I'm no longer a graceful early riser. To be honest, I wasn't even planning on attending the festival, but there I was, standing like a lost puppy among the throng of drunks, watching vendors stand atop RVs and throw free shit into the crowd. This is the paddling community? A bunch of yahoos hypnotized to the point of drooling on themselves ogling a bunch of new shit with fifteen credit cards hanging from sporty designer pockets? I did at least wake up in a sleeping bag beside my car after saying to hell with it and gathering up all the free beer my stomach could hold. And then some. In the parking lot beside my car. To the sound of my phone ringing. Cozy down in my sporty 10 degree synthetic-filled home away from home. My paddling buddy for the day informed me that they were going to go ahead and set shuttle. While they wait for me. Apparently he's an early riser. He apologized for waking me. Is it Sunday? I asked. He was excited. The Upper Gauley. Are we paddling today? Why are you calling me at seven o'clock? I didn't feel much like paddling after spending most of the night wandering around the festival grounds kicking the tires of Monster RVs, drowning out the screaming vendors and their drooling lemmings. But I did come away with at least one sticker--which got lost somewhere between the festival, the river, and home--a CD of music put out by Teva (yes, the footwear company with the motto: "Go. Do. Be."), a small, plastic cylinder with a rubber gasket for keeping a bowl dry on the river, several beer cozies, and the weary sense of exhaustion that comes the morning after a mildly traumatic car accident.

Oh, and if you ever see me sporting a single piece of new paddling gear, shoot me. And then ask me what kind of DEAL I got on it.

Death in the Family

2008-09-16T17:40:00.005-04:00

No games tonight. Not that I know of. No baseball, anyway. Maybe a track meet, but no fall ball. No meetings or events. And no fights either, with Melissa or the children. All is calm on the home front. Maybe? I never really know. Not until I arrive. But so far there is nothing but empty space in front of me. Nothing to do but return to the broken box of a house after another day in the 8X6 cubicle and think about the death of David Foster Wallace. Leave the square cinder block box of Hurt & Proffitt and walk across the flat black parking lot and drive the few blocks to another box. Drink a beer even, despite my attempt to cut back, slightly, so that the meaty chunk around my middle doesn't become an issue with fitting into my compact car. Probably one of the better writers of our current literary administration. David Foster Wallace. Probably one of the smarter writers. Paradoxically succinct and rambling and in your face all in the same breath. Just philosophical enough to go flying off the deep end of his sentences. Not stupid enough to stay too long in the stratosphere. And then he hangs himself, and the rest of us are left to plod along under the gloomy umbrella of his achievements, despite the fact that some of us hold suicide at bay with the microthin fiber of a thought that there are intelligent people out there who continue to exist. If THEY can continue, so can I. And now this, knowing that if he couldn't figure it out, if he couldn't work out the bleak angst that is much of living, what chance do the rest of us have, the mere mortals left here to plod along in his footsteps?

You've Got Mail

2008-09-10T17:47:00.006-04:00

So it comes to this. The envelope. The one he’s got to run the tip of his tongue over to seal, purchase passage through the United States Postal Service. This, in the era of email and instant messaging. The glass jar holds plastic trinkets off to the corner of the desk beside a style manual, dictionary, and book on word origins. But that doesn’t matter. Not anymore. Used to be, come evening, only the words mattered.

Begin with a glimpse of the political world, tacked to the wall above the desk, tacked atop a thin layer of Masonite, to be precise, on which is painted an abstract rendering of rape, with lots of red to the right of center emerging from the mouth of a prominent right angle giving way to the vaguest hint, on the far left, of a human form: disturbing enough, let us say, for him to cover the image with a two dimensional mapping of the political world.

Incense burns in the clay pot.

Not much of a world, really, to imagine so many people like him crawling around on it. What did that smart ass physicist say? “This may not be the best of all possible worlds but it may turn out to be the simplest.” Or something like that. But then: rendering the whole eight thousand mile diameter of it onto a sheet of paper small enough to roll up and hold delicately under arm walking down the street whistling Dixie, now that’s the shit. That’s what this story’s about. Not the world, per say, but our rendering of the world. Walking around on the earth and digging up irons and saying, "This. This marks the edge of your boundary."

He leans back in the leather chair and folds his hands across his belly, punching out a little since he hit thirty and started drinking lots of beer. And he'll mail the letter because the greatest pleasure in life has become getting and receiving mail.

The Spirit of Ambition

2008-09-06T11:00:00.003-04:00

Art in Lynchburg struggles to gain some kind of footing. This is a good thing, right? Elevate the artist, jail the politicians and bankers and land developers?

I try to support the locals, but can't help feeling like they're just fooling around. As if maybe we've all gotten a little silly over the years. Nonetheless we attended several shows last night.

In the Academy, the well-dressed Boonsboro crowd stood gazing down their long noses for pieces that might match their sofas. Photographs hung squarely on the walls at the appropriate height with $2000 price tags and several seemingly misplaced awards. We struggled to keep Nora from running her blackened hands down the white sheen of the room. Everything clean and bright. She and Ezra climbed stone walls and jumped fences all the way up the street from 9th and Jefferson, where we parked for "First Friday," hoping to maybe catch the Trolley or bump into my sister, who was drinking beer somewhere in the city. I couldn't help remembering the Miles Davis poem by Lawrence Raab. The only way to make art, Miles Davis said, is to forget what is unimportant. There were bottles of wine and strawberries and we kept telling the children to keep their hands to themselves. I was sizing up the photos with an eye toward entering the competition next year.

The kids down the street set up shop in an old fire station and raised political hell through the mediums. An ax wedged in a log. An American Flag with the handwritten tag, "Made In China." The obligatory cool room with 1950's chairs and a TV running through a series of shapes growing like erections over a soundtrack I couldn't hear. Burned CDs melted together on a keyboard that a young man in a tie-dyed shirt would occasional bang on. Ropes hung in an empty elevator shaft over a small round table with an empty candelabra illuminated by a spotlight. A vendor with the Atomic Man on his shirt willing to draw your caricature for ten bucks. Nora felt more at home in the station, where the paintings took on the character of graffiti. Some sort of ambient electronic music played on in the corner. It was refreshing and slightly dark and clusters of people dressed in black smoked cigarettes and talked excitedly.

I felt old and almost, but not quite, out of place. And then I remembered that the struggle continues, and that many of these artists will go on to wrestle with the ways in which we come to recognize a significant idea when it arrives. The ways of getting into and then getting around within the Imagination. Ezra Pound suggested that what we love remains and the rest is dross.

Dross.

As in, if you don't love it, or come to love it rather quickly, step away. Which of course doesn't feel quite right. And sometimes when we talk about art we mean it. Sometimes we're just fooling around. But I found myself wanting something far simpler. Mark Lang's Janitor, for instance, standing among the corridors of the museum, cleaning the floors.

The poem that knows too quickly what's important will disappoint us.

So on first impression, I sensed that much of what I saw in the fire station was created by a bunch of weirdos on drugs. But what better way to enter the world of the imagination than to focus on the play rather then the relative moral value of individual pieces. It's not the pieces that matter, just yet, but the spirit of ambition and the staying power of moral support. Over the years, I suppose, if we continue to plod through the sludge, the beautiful will come to us,

As it may to one who has worked hard enough to be ready for it.