The Wide Wide River of Regret 

You wake to find yourself adrift in a boat, floating on a river, heading out to sea, and then you realize the boat is a coffin, and it's yours, because you're dead.

Funny things happen in your brain while you drift out to sea in your own coffin.

"Did I leave the stove on?" "What was I wearing?" "Did I tell her that I loved her, enough?"

"Did I love the right ones?"

It's a wide wide river of regret, and you are floating in it, for a while. Your self-pity is warmly comforting: "Why me? Why now? Why so soon?" Second-guessing helps you pass the time: "I should have worn more sunscreen." "I should have driven slower." "I should have enjoyed that German chocolate cake."

Very few of these regrets are actually yours. You've inherited the idea of them, residue from some life you believed you were supposed to have lived, learned from TV and movies and from not knowing yourself well enough. You sail through this clutter, this Sargasso Sea of fabricated desires, bumping up against them with hollow thuds, till finally your boat hits something softer:

"I wish I'd been braver."

"I wish I understood that people cared about me, and let them."

"I wish I'd found something to care about more than myself."

The boat floats on toward the sea. There's no steering it. There's no stopping it.

One morning, you wake. You've rounded a bend, and the sun hits you right in your dead face. Everything is bright and clear, and you can't remember anything. You can't remember who you are. You don't recall where you came from. You watch the birds flying low over the river with great clarity, but you no longer remember yourself as the one who lived in that house, the one who went to that job, the one who loved that woman, the one who hoped for … whatever you hoped for.

Now you're just the man floating in the coffin on the river, on the way out to sea. You've finally arrived, in death, at yourself; and it's wonderful. 

Santa 101: An Introduction to Santa 

The course will cover:

• Present wrapping
• Chimney climbing
• Reindeer harnessing
• Advanced sledding
• Elf management
• Talking to toddlers
• Shipping, receiving, and logistics
• English composition
• Cookie eating
• International tax law
• Ho ho hoing 

Voodoo 

This entry is not currently available.

Clatter 

Clatter. Noun. Aural clutter.

Read more from The Urban Sherpa Dictionary ->

All Souls 

I'm already frightened, at 8AM, of how the day is over and spent and squandered: I can see all the tasks I'm hoping to complete and whether I complete them or not, the day is over, and I haven't really gotten any closer to anything.

They say time is, in some ways, totally subjective: it's just a rule by which the human mind must apprehend the world. (Without a beholder to count it off, does time have any meaning at all?) Maybe we hear seconds ticking from the moment we first hear our heartbeat. Or maybe we don't hear the seconds till we understand that our allotted heartbeats are finite?

Maybe you need a soul in order to perceive time. Maybe the ability to perceive time is the definition of a soul—what sets us apart from the the beasts, etc. And the afterlife is full of spirits, not souls: they can spend forever in the afterlife, because only a creature without time can spend a forever.

Do you need a soul to remember? Do you need time? Ghost have trouble remembering: they haunt a place but can't remember why. Even the elderly, as they get closer to becoming ghosts, have trouble remembering. The events of their lives still have significance, but they fall off the timeline, without order. It's like our lives are necklaces, and each event is a pearl, and time is the string that holds them together: when we die, it's a cascade of pearls, but no order, no sequence of this following from this following from this; and without causality there's no will, and without will, we're just a pile of pearls, and no necklace.

Multiple Email Personality Disorder 

Multiple Email Personality Disorder. Noun. A condition in which a person with more than one email address—e.g., a work email and a personal email—continues to send messages from the less appropriate address, often resulting in confusion, embarrassment, and spam-filtering.

Read more from The Urban Sherpa Dictionary ->

Bride of Frankenstein 

During the sex scandal, the Bride of Frankenstein stood by her man, silent and strong.

The Under-the-Bed Monster 

Harrison's fear of the Under-the-Bed Monster was strong, but even stronger was his fear that his bossy sister would find out and tease him about it, so he didn't say anything, even when it was obvious the monster was under there. Even when he could hear it snoring. Even when he could see its two furry feet sticking out from underneath the bed.

"I know you're down there," he called out.

"No, I'm not," answered a voice from under the bed. "There's no one down here."

It wasn't very reassuring.

In school they were working on adding numbers, and Harrison practiced to get his mind off the monster. "One plus one is two. Two plus two is four. Four plus four is—." He couldn't remember what four plus four was.

"Twelve," called out the voice from under the bed.

"No it's not," Harrison argued. He counted on his fingers. "It's eight. Just like how many big hairy ugly monster toes you have."

And while Harrison was distracted with the counting, the monster crawled out from under the bed, and ate him.

Poseidon's Net 

(This story appears in the Spring 2013 issue of Rose & Thorn Journal.)

Swastikas in the Window 

While walking the dog today, I found a house decorated with swastikas. I saw them from half a block away, painted onto the window fixtures.

"That's brave," I said to my dog, who wagged his tail in agreement.

Big black angular spiders: four legs spinning webs of connotation across each window.

A few steps closer and I saw, in addition to the swastikas, a few Buddha sculptures and paintings on the wall. This wasn't a bad taste Nazi shrine; it was a bad taste Buddhist shrine, and its designers had either been ignorant of how people would react or had decided to fly their swastikas in the face of it.

The dog and I wanted to know more.

As we approached the house, the dog and I started imagining secret KKK gatherings at buildings disguised as Buddhist temples, decorated with iconography of peace and love on the outside, and on the inside spreading poison and hate and fear.

Then the dog and I started to imagine that these angry men from the KKK (in our minds, they were always men, married to submissive women)—these men, after weeks of sitting inside their counterfeit Buddhist temple but staring into the genuine countenance of the very real Buddha statues—some of these men start to feel a stirring within themselves, a growing awareness that there might be another way, other than hate. The dog and I imagine that for some of these angry fearful men, the facade of Buddhism is cracking their foundation of hate.

These men meet in secret one night, after their hate meeting. They want to try meditation. They don't know what to do, but they sit in quiet and in the loudness of their own thoughts, till without warning, one of them exhales and starts to sob. It shakes his body, an almost-seizure of so much trapped feeling finally breaking free. Another man reaches a hand to his shoulder to console him, and the sob spreads to this man, too, like contagion, so within a minute, every one of them is either crying or choking it back.

"This is what meditation is?" they laugh, later.

Before long, the KKK chapter disbands, like the way a family drifts apart after the death of a patriarch: its patriarch was hate, and it got sick with the cancer of compassion, and it never recovered. The men who'd tried to learn meditation stayed at it, some of them: having felt a sprout of goodness, they wanted it to grow. But they were still afraid, still convinced they didn't know enough, and eventually that group split up, too, each going his own way.

As the dog and I approached the house, we wondered how long before a co-opted image could be washed clean and reclaimed by its original meaning, and we think how meaning is a palimpsest, layer upon layer, growing thicker, burying its own histories, but there's never any going back, to more innocent times, or any other kind either.

The Fibonacci Forest 

When she was one year old, to celebrate, her mother, the botanist, planted her a tree; and when she turned two, they planted another; and when she turned three, her father, the mathematician, switched them into another tradition—a Fibonacci sequence of trees: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and so on, so by age thirteen, they planted her 233 trees, and by twenty, when her father was already gone, she and her mother planted 6,765 trees.

She dreamt of living to a hundred, in a forest so thick no one could even climb through it, because by then trees would beget more trees; and this act, which had started as an act of will by her family—an effort to share her birthday with nature, but also to control nature, as a patron does—would be subsumed by nature itself: the forest growing more forest so it'd be impossible to tell which parts of nature were hers and which belonged to nature itself. In one sense, the woods were hers entirely, existed because of her; and in another sense, she knew they would continue long after she herself was gone and forgotten, and this made her happy and it made her sad.

"This is my tree. This is my first tree." All the subsequent trees were planted in a widening circle around that first one, so the youngest trees were at the outside, and the forest grew taller and older toward the center. When she turned twenty, and her oldest tree turned nineteen, she built her house in the canopy of that tree, and the house grew higher and farther from the ground each year; and when she turned twenty-five and was already surrounded by thousands of trees, she fell in love and married; and when she turned thirty she had her first child, and she and her husband started a new circle of trees at the edge of her forest, so her daughter's forest grew to mingle with her own like the way the daughter herself grew—adjacent and sometimes intermingled, but distinct, too, and pushing out in her own directions. A few years later, they started a new forest for her son, at the opposite corner, and finally four children in all, each one with a forest growing higher and wider, canopies intertwined, and houses on the highest points of all of them: they grew farther apart, and higher, too, till they forgot the look of the ground and each other, and remembered only the trees.

Breadcrumb Trail 

I was out walking the dog. He's a shelter dog, a little skittish, doesn't like if we wander too far from home, I guess because he's scared I'll leave him out there. He likes to cover his fear with the illusion of sniffing, and he looks at me sometimes to say, "I want to run up ahead, I really do, but it's really important I do this sniffing first."

Walking with him is a slow leapfrog, driveway to driveway to driveway to driveway. We wander through corners of the neighborhood I've never seen, a different path every day, so he gets comfortable and so I don't get too bored.

That's how we found the path that ran between two houses, and back up into the woods, narrow but clearly marked, and littered with breadcrumbs. The dog, uncharacteristically brave, charged right up, chomping down the breadcrumbs as he went.

At the end of the trail, we found a quaint house with a picket fence, and a woman and her Pomeranian in the front yard. She laughed when she saw us: "I was leaving those breadcrumbs for the birds."

The dogs played in the front yard and the woman, named Marie, offered me a hot chocolate. We talked a while, smiling and admiring our dogs and our good luck running into each other.

The cottage became a regular stop for me and my dog: each day, Marie greeted us with hospitality and friendship—and before long, I fell in love with her. I and my puppy moved into the cottage, where she treated us with respect and love, holding us captive with it, like the witch that she is, never letting us escape, so we were never seen by our friends again.

The Lost City 

The architect was busy drafting plans—measuring out smooth assured strokes till the building became clearer in her mind. It was different than other buildings: for each room above ground, there was another crawling underground, so the building sprawled higher, wider, and downward, too—a network of underground towers, spiral stairs, bridges. She was creating an underground city—not tunnels and caverns but a fully realized metropolis, such that excavating it later, hundreds of years from now, would reveal it as if it had once been above ground—the spires and cathedral tops would be the only hint, above ground, of what lay beneath.

She was building a lost city, from scratch.

How to Make an American Omelette 

“ You can't make an American omelette without breaking some Middle Eastern eggs.

Golem 

or, Mixed Metaphors of Dissociation, pt. 1

The trouble is, I don't feel like myself, and when that happens, I don't really know what I should do, because how can I do anything if I don't even feel like me?

I don't feel like myself. In the morning, my alarm goes off, and someone swings his legs out of bed; his feet touch the floor. He walks to my kitchen, makes coffee, drinks it. This person arrives at all of my appointments promptly. He speaks my words. He goes about all my business. But this person isn't me. He isn't thinking my thoughts. He isn't breathing my air.

This person, he feels it too—estranged. He goes on long walks, as if he's looking for something. He follows winding mountain trails, the steepest he can find, and when he finds them, he runs, hard as he can. "What are you running from?"

He's trying to stir his heart.

He runs till there's pain in his legs, his lungs, his chest; he can't get enough air. He thinks the pain is a gateway and if he can cross the threshold, then either he'll be dead or he'll be alive. Either option is preferable—so he runs.

But at the end of running, nothing has come true: he's sweaty, tired, and the same.

This person is not me. I know this because at night, when I turn off the lights and lie in bed staring into the dark, I take stock and think how it's as if the day never happened.

The ceiling fan spins round and round and round.

I think my bed is like a small sailboat in deep ocean, and there's no current and there's no wind, and I'm feeling the rocking of the waves and wondering what they're trying to tell me. Boats pass by sometimes on the horizon, and I wave at them as they go, but I don't know if they see me.

Work 

Sometimes when I think about how I'm drifting apart from all my friends, I realize that I was never really that close to my friends. We had time together, spent at bars or baseball games or movies or work—mostly work, because work allowed us to feel like we had a common purpose. It was good to rally around more than just ourselves.

I like these people, my friends, with or without work. But without work, what is there to talk about? We pass the time talking about whatever else we have in common, which it turns out is mostly our mutual admiration, and yesterday.

When I'm feeling lonely, sometimes I think the solution is to do more work.

Mysterious Ways 

“ God never burns a bridge without smashing a window.

I Owe My Soul 

“ Another day, another dolor.

Failed Travel Book Titles 

Let's Go Troposphere.
The Rough Guide to the Côte d'azur.
Frommer's Mogadishu.
Lonely Planet Costco.
Alabama for Dummies.
Rick Steve's Your Mom Through the Back Door.
Time Out Bikini Atoll.
The Jersey Turnpike on $5 a Day.

Weak and Fruitless Words 

“ I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

No one wants to say it exactly, but September 11 has become a holiday in the United States—a sort of New Year's wrapped in Memorial Day, a chance for righteous indignation and self-aggrandizement: the day we all meant something, on account of the spilling of sacred (read: American) blood, valued so much higher than other kinds. (So much higher, than, for instance, the civilian deaths in Iraq since the U.S. Invasion.)

On this anniversary day, ten years since those attacks, we're giving pause to consider how things have changed over the decade, a decade during which "safety" and "security" justified turning America's enormous economic engine away from its own people—people who are now poorer, with fewer opportunities, and are less safe and less secure than they were a decade ago.

At tonight's memorial service, George W. Bush, the man most responsible for those changes (though his successor has done his part to ensure their continuance) read the passage above, originally spoken by Abraham Lincoln after the Civil War, citing as consolation the fact that the deceased gave their lives in order to save the Republic.

If we're to honor the 2,977 killed on September 11 by saving the Republic, then I say let's get to it, because these past ten years have been spent in the wrong direction.

Sigh 

At the end of a vacation in the mountains, you return home: your water bottle is collapsed from the change in air pressure, and when you open it, it lets out a sad sigh.

You know how it feels.

Dog Poop 

It's dark black and still warm, but firm: it holds together well when you pick it up. I know because I pick it up, often, with little orange baggies that make it look like hazmat, which it sort of is.

*     *     *

One is a little spry dog, part spaniel. When she cocks her head to the side, she looks smarter and more curious than she actually is. She seems confused about her own dogness. She pulls on the leash tirelessly, chasing invisible smells. She likes to lead.

*     *     *

The flies swarm the poop from the moment it hits the ground. Where do they come from? Fat black flies with red eyes. Sometimes I catch them in the plastic bag. It's a hot day.

*     *     *

The second dog is an old limping dog, part lab, with a lump coming out of her belly like a sidecar. She moves with what appears to be dignity, though in fact it's slowness induced by advanced arthritis. When this rickety dog poops, she can't stay squatted for very long, so she stands up and begins a wander, dropping lumps of turd every foot or so till she's finished.

*     *     *

Sometimes, especially at night, especially on a rainy night, sometimes, not too often, I won't pick up the poop. I lean over with the orange plastic bag in my hand and maybe even pick up a leaf, but not the poop. Under cover of dark and rain, I leave the poop behind, sometimes.

*     *     *

Walking the two dogs: the young one tugging forward, the old one dragging behind, me in the middle, a leash in each hand, getting pulled apart slightly, like Jesus.

*     *     *

The houses all have fences and the fences all have signs: "Beware of Dog." Behind each fence there's an angry dog barking. I imagine inside each house there's an angry owner.

*     *     *

The dogs won't stop sniffing at a patch of grass. It's dog poop. Someone left it behind—maybe someone walking their dog at night, in the rain. Sometimes I don't notice and I step in it. Sometimes one of the dogs will eat it and foul her breath for the rest of the day. Sometimes I stoop over and catch it into one of my plastic orange bags, and throw it in the trash.  

Clunkity 

If my heart were an engine
I’d take it to a mechanic and say,
“It’s not right.”
Then I'd make the clunkity clunkity sounds
So he’d understand what was wrong
But this would just embarrass him.
“It doesn’t go like it used to.
Can you fix it?”
He’d ask,
“Do you have insurance?”
And that would be the end of that.

Fundamental Particle 

These were the same scientists who spent their days looking at invisible things—neutrinos and quarks and electrical charge—the same people who were searching for what they'd agreed to call the "God particle"—yet somehow it slipped their minds that they spent their days trafficking in miracles, because they'd grown to take for granted, first of all, that math is a miracle.

So they were confused and speechless when the first set of images came back from their atom-smashing: they thought it was a mistake. One even laughed out loud: "That looks exactly like Markarian's Chain." She'd done graduate work in astrophysics. "It's a set of galaxies in the Virgo Supercluster."

As they compared the other images, the feeling in the room grew from uncanny to worse. Everything looked like something else. The scientists had been seeking the smallest particles in existence, and it turned out each of them was a scale replica of the largest. Zooming in to look at the atom, they'd found a literal complete universe inside, made up of stars and galaxies and nebulae and quasars, all drifting apart; ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny; and a photon was no different from a supernova. These were measured people, forced to conclude that everything they knew was but one layer tucked inside many: zoom in or zoom out, there was no difference, only collisions and explosions and beginnings and ends, and people looking outward and people looking in; and this was the God Particle, after all.

The House of Doors 

Though the boy was scared and knew better than to enter the old house, his sister was curious and brazen and never did admit her fear (which made her a sometimes difficult playmate). "It looks like no one's been through this door in years!," and she charged off into the darkness. The boy followed reluctantly behind, hoping there wouldn't be too many cobwebs.

Instead of an empty house, they found an old man seated at a wooden table that he'd already set with three tall steaming mugs. "Well there you are," he smiled, not at all surprised to see them. "Would you like some hot chocolate?"

The boy blinked while his eyes adjusted. "Nobody drinks hot chocolate in the summertime." But his sister was already climbing into the high wooden chair toward the mug.

"Some people like hot chocolate in the summertime," the old man said. "In fact, if it's summertime here, that means it's wintertime somewhere else. I suppose everything is in fashion, somewhere."

The girl, who was often told at school that she was very unfashionable, got curious about these other places where unfashionable things were in fashion. She sniffed at her hot chocolate. "What's on top?" she asked. "Whipped cream?"

The old man chuckled. "It does look like whipped cream, doesn't it? On each cup of hot chocolate, I put a dollop of cumulus cloud, fresh from the sky. And this is very special chocolate, given to me by the ancient Aztecs. I travel a lot, and I like to bring back souvenirs."

The boy joined them at the table. "I've never seen an ancient Aztec."

"Of course not," said the girl, pushing up her glasses. "They're ancient. They all died a very long time ago."

The old man nodded. "But that doesn't mean you can't meet them."

"My name is Clarissa," the girl announced, suddenly aware of her manners. "And this is my brother Finley. He's shy."

"I'm not shy," said Finley. "I'm just cautious! Sorry we barged in your door. We thought this house was empty."

"Not at all. I was expecting you. My front door is always open to you. But if you're going to be a guest in my house, then I'm going to have to ask you to be more careful about charging through the other doors."

The children noticed then that the old man's little house was full of doors, but not the kind of doors that one finds in normal houses. The doors in the old man's house were all in the wrong places: some were in the middle of the wall; some were on the ceiling. There was a door set into the stairs and a door set into the sofa. There was even a big knob set into the kitchen table, and the girl realized suddenly that the table was a door. Some of the doors were square and some were round and some were wood and some were metal; some had elaborate handles and knockers and peepholes, and one had a big metal wheel that sealed it shut, and some were just normal unassuming doors. But the doors filled up the house, and they were all closed.

And a metal loop tied to the old man's waist held hundreds of keys that clattered and jangled whenever he moved.

The old man looked at his enormous watch, and stood up. "Please drink your hot chocolate. We have quite a day ahead of us, and I don't know when we'll have time for another snack."

Bedtime Stories, circa 2020 

“ Daddy, tell us what it was like when gas was only $4 a gallon and the U.S. was a superpower.

Kill Switch 

or, Computer Head, Pt. 2

I feel inside-out tired and I'm not clear why, but I want to blame it on "Internet fatigue." I want to blame "Internet fatigue" for why I haven't been writing, or even really interested in writing, though I'm not entirely clear how the one is related to the other, and I won't be clear till I actually manage to write about it, to learn what I'm thinking.

Let's say this: the Internet—by which I mean the incessant clicking and refreshing of 2-5 social media websites and 10-20 news sites—has me so completely saturated (over-saturated) in information. In text. In stories.

Every news headline, every status update, is a story: it implies a deeper narrative, ensembles of characters, A and B and C plots, rising action, conflict. It's exhausting. When I'm so gluttonously full on these "stories," there's precious little room left—in my brain, in the universe—for more stories, let alone creating them.

But it's worse than that: it's not just a problem of quantity. I realize now what's probably been obvious to everyone else: these "stories" with which I'm constantly feeding my brain, from the streaming cascade of news feeds—these are shallow stories. My experience of them is not at all deep: it's mostly trivial—as befits the time I give to them. Any real depth of understanding that's to be gleaned from these stories will come from the devotion of substantial, thoughtful time—the one thing I don't (can't?) give, because the endless supply of new stories are always pushing out the old ones. ("Old" equals one hour ago, ten emails ago, three tweets ago, etc.)

In the Skinner Box of data, you can pull the virtual lever as often as you want, and fatten yourself on information. But is it nourishing? Why am I getting hungrier instead of more filled?

So I find myself dreaming a dream that I hear is common to more and more people today, a Luddite's dream of old-fashioned, hard-working quiet. I dream of unplugging. I dream of kill switches and EMP explosions, and replacing the social graph with spider webs and constellations, dream of deep forests inside inaccessible fracted canyons, shielded from radio waves, miles from advertising. I long for a quiet so thick that the only "news" to break its silence will come from the people I know, from my own perceptions of the world, and from whatever revelations are offered up in my dreams—a savage silence.

[Religion is acquaintance with deep longing.]

But this quiet is so far away, and getting there seems so effortful, and it's so much easier just to hop online, to hit refresh, to feel connected, and to consume, and consume.

I would like to be 

I would like to be
the runaway train that you
throw yourself under.

3 Psalms 

I Forget to Admire Your Wonder

I forget to admire your wonder,
though everywhere you leave clues:
the birdsong;
the setting sunlight scattered on the needles of that heaven-reaching pine;
the cool breeze just barely breathing on my arm;
the full warmth of love.

How can I look into the eyes of another, and not be humbled?
Every ocean I feel inside me,
its eddies and currents,
its storms and its monsters and unplumbable depths—
These exist in everyone.

And I forget to see, because I'm infatuated with myself.

I want to ask you: please help me always to notice your wonders;
but even asking feels wrong:
You've given them all already, to all of us, freely, without bidding.

Let me be generous like you.
 

The Birds Never Ask

The birds never ask, How should I live my life?
Which way should I fly?

Every morning I wake to doubt, and every night I sleep in it.
This is my one life. Am I living it rightly?
Am I walking with right grace?

In asking the question, the answer is revealed:

The birds never ask, How should I live my life?
Which way should I fly?

Let me be more like a river,
Forceful and right.
And when I come to a fork,
And might go this way or that,
I will always go the right way,

because it will be the way I will have gone.

 

If Only the Wind Were Louder

If only the wind were louder,
or the cascade of water trickling onto rocks;
if only I could hear the slow groan of trees,
the soft breathing of earth,
the ringing bells of sunshine as it flickers through the leaves;

if only I could hear the wistful stories of old men;
hear the quick breath of the mother clutching her child;
faraway thunders and faraway birds;
and if the jostling needs and hungers and hopes of every outstretched hand
made a gentle hum,
and I only listen,

then for that moment, it would drown out the din of my desires,
and light would be enough.

Ennuicon 

I want to trademark this smiley: the colon with the question-mark-mouth. The sad, wistful, absurdist smile.

:?^TM

Social Anorexia 

social anorexia. Noun. An emotional disorder characterized by the pathological fear of becoming socially fat. The social anorexic has a distorted self image such that, regardless of actual social stature, he or she feels the need to starve, socially, to avoid potential rejections.

Read more from The Urban Sherpa Dictionary ->

Mixed-Media Autobiography 

or, Little Yellow Envelope, pt. 2

In the top left drawer of the things I keep, there's a little yellow envelope, and it moves with me from city to city to city. It's full of old photos and notes, relics of questionably overrated sentimental value.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First, its contents1: maybe forty photos of maybe twenty people, and maybe ten of those photos are of me2. Maybe ten postcards, of which five or six are inscribed (sent to me) and the others unused (purchased by me). A few scraps of paper—scribbled notes, a page from a tear-off calendar, a Simpsons horoscope. A black feather. A gray rock.

Each of these objects is the surviving symbol of some story from my past, such that I've assumed that this envelope is my mixed-media autobiography.

I don't look in the envelope much: I've come to take its value for granted. But recently, I had reason to spill its contents out onto my bed and flip through it all, looking for something (a clue, probably—always a clue: some indication from the past as to why the present is the way it is, etc.). I was surprised by what I found inside.

This wasn't my autobiography.

("This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife.")

("You are not your fucking khakis.")

This was a photo collection of people—of, let's face it, kids—from a long time ago, mostly playing at being grown-ups, testing it out; looking beautiful and fresh-skinned and so milk-fed on optimism that their own character—their own unique signs of hardness and how they would overcome their own unique difficulties—hadn't yet shown through the baby fat.

And by "they," mostly I mean "me."

Then, sorting through this splay of pictures—beautiful young women and the notes they'd written to me, notes which said or at least implied that they loved me, once—and I realize with terrible disappointment that maybe this is why I keep this envelope: hard evidence of having been loved—kept as proof of one thing that can't be proven by objects, can't be proven by them any more than it can be fixed in time—love, frozen like in a photo and then stuffed into a dingy envelope—love, which can't live inside an envelope any more than a plant or a child or my own self could live in there—love, which we might sometimes seek out there, or, after a moment of wisdom or wounding, in there, but almost never looking for it where it might actually be found, which is: right here.

And I see now: I don't need this little yellow envelope anymore. It's not even mine.

1. Also detailed, with different intent, here.

2. There are actually surprisingly few surviving photos of me, in no small part because, when I was a teenager, I exacted a purge on my parents' photo collections, destroying every unflattering- (and fat!-) looking photo of myself. It was an almost totalitarian act of image control, such that my mother actually stowed the surviving photos into hiding till a more temperate time.

Floating on the River 

You're in your house. It's not big or ostentatious, but it's comfortable and cozy and it feels like yours. You've lived there a little while: you have some agreeable furniture, some wall hangings, a few houseplants, a small collection of coffee mugs that make you a little happy each morning. It's a place where you've coalesced many of these sorts of things—objects that make you a little bit happy.

You like your house. You feel comfortable in it—so much so that you often forget that it sits in the middle of vast river, and it's slowly floating downstream.

You drift down this river, through rough patches and slow meandering bends. Sometimes you stare out the window at the trees on the muddy banks. Sometimes you look at an egret perched on a mooring.

You can't steer your house against the stream, but you do give it a push now and then, to avoid a rock or to pull closer to passing flotsam.

Or people.

Sometimes people drift by on the river. There was a man in a rowboat who wanted to talk to you about salvation. There was a swimmer you rescued from drowning, and took in briefly till he recovered and swam on his way. There's the family on the barge, who sometimes passes you on the river and sometimes you pass them. "Your boys are getting tall," you say. "We baked some muffins," they say. "Do you want some?"

Now and then, not too often, you come upon another house drifting downstream at the same pace. Its window is just across from yours, and you engage in conversation. "Would you like a cup of coffee?" "No, thank you. I'm more of a tea drinker." You start talking, sharing with each other while you drift side by side, and everything feels a little lighter, a little easier.

Eventually, you decide to lash your two houses together and float down the river as one, for a while.

Sunday Drive 

The sun is high and hot and it hasn't rained in weeks. The air is full of pollen that's almost willful in its atmospheric meandering. It's Sunday or maybe Monday or Tuesday. It doesn't matter what day.

You're driving. The sun lingered so long on the vinyl steering wheel that it's hot to touch, so you steer with your fingertips and hope some relief will arrive through the wind in the window.

It's a section of town like so many sections of town—a Mexican section, a poor section, teeming with life like you never see in the white neighborhoods with their lawns, so it makes you wonder if Mexican people are just teeming with more life than white people, or if wealth is a kind of stifling, or if the fervor of the people in the poor parts of town always comes from desperation. You stop at a traffic light and hear music coming from a storefront church. "Iglesia del Dios," the sign says, and you have enough Spanish to wonder if there are other kinds of churches than the ones of God. Next to the church is a carnicero, and a musty meat smell wafts thickly to you where you sit. For some reason, you think of a deli you used to visit with your mother when you were a kid, where thick slabs of salty meat hung by strings from the ceiling, and the salamis were indistinguishable from the pepperonis, and you wonder now in retrospect if that isn't always the way of things, a confusing of crucial distinctions and trivial ones.

The traffic light changes and you crawl your car through the crowd of bodies that inches along the crosswalk. A man walks beside your car, inches from the window, and you nod at him, to be polite. But he doesn't nod back.

You push free of the crowd, and now around the bend, your car is pointed straight toward the sun. Everything's backlit in a beautiful blinding flare, and again you see the pollen hanging in the air like lazy will-o'-the-wisps, silhouetted, slow motion, frozen.

There's a thump under your car and you know you've hit something: it rattles around in the wheel well before jerking itself free. In the rearview mirror, you see what looks like a small sun dress discarded in the street. A few blocks later you realize the dress wasn't empty. The next three traffic lights all say "No turns," and by the fourth light, you notice you don't feel a thing. You're not frightened or urgent or panicked or angry. It's like you weren't there. You don't know what happened, and even if you knew, it's too late to undo whatever's done.

The music on the radio changes. You're already in a nicer part of town, where trees alongside the road cool the air, and ahead of you, it's one green light after another, far as you can see, all the way to the horizon. So you drive.

Twining / Untwining 

This is a sad way of these things:

Two people—intertwined, enjoying each other's uniqueness, specialness, the warmth of their mutual fit, the way her head nestles into his shoulder, their mingling of hair on the pillow, the inevitableness of it, the inescapableness of it, the feeling of completeness, the melting—will, later, moving apart from each other, feeling again the cold and the loneliness, the hardening harshness, feel then a series of resentments:

"How could you leave?" "How can you live without me?" "How can you expect me to live without you?"

And then, realizing that life really does go on:

"How could you have tricked me into thinking I needed you in the first place?"

Lover. Beloved. Dupe. Alone.

Then again, and again, and again—and again, eager for the next intertwining.

(See also: Ravel / Unravel.)

We which are alive 

“Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord.

My guess is, the Rapture really will come on Saturday. We'll all of us be deemed unworthy, and life on Earth will go on as if nothing had happened.

A Steady Hand 

(Reprinted from Printer's Devils / Writer's Church)

I recently watched Werner Herzog's documentary, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about Paleolithic art discovered inside Chauvet Cave in Southern France. The paintings offer plenty of mysteries and no sure answers, most of all, Why? Why would Ice Age hunter-gatherers take time out of their short, violent lives to crawl into a dark, uninhabited cave, in order to cover the walls with graceful, colorful line drawings of horses, lions, and bulls over a period spanning roughly five thousand years?

One thing that strikes me unforgettably about these paintings is how assured the brushstrokes are. These aren't idle doodles; they show no signs of doubt; and whether we ever learn why the artists made these paintings, it seems certain the answer was clear at least to the painters themselves.

In the film, an archeologist talks about meeting an aboriginal man in Australia who is touching up a set of cave paintings. "Why do you paint?" the archeologist asks.

"I am not painting," the man answers. "The hand of the spirit is painting."

Quitting 

Every day lately, I wonder if I need to quit caffeine. Every day, I feel one cup shy of a nervous breakdown, like the tiniest overpour might overwhelm my fragments of peace of mind. I'm not even clear why: the normal pressures that make up my life—the job worries and the art angst, the money shortages, the girl troubles, the social anxieties—these are so common to me by now that it'd be wrong to call them stressors upon my life: more accurately, they are my life. 

In fact, I've come to realize: the things that I sometimes think of as "stressors" are exactly the things that I choose for myself, to keep my life from becoming mind-numbingly boring. If I really had the peaceful life that I sometimes pretend to want, then I'd almost certainly have to hang myself. Or, more accurately, I'd commit the smaller suicides that have become the recurring themes of my life's history: I'd change my city, quit my job, end my relationship, neglect my bills, drive out of town, write poems, kin with nature, and then come back—tanned and kissed by freedom, and safely now distant from the stability I, in equal parts, crave and dread.

Is life this complicated for other people?, I sometimes wonder: the consternations, perplexations, machinations, the planning and replanning, so much systematic constructing and deconstructing and destructing. Maybe it is.

[Is life this complicated for ants? Maybe it is.]

And while my pot of coffee is brewing, I realize, too: the only way that I've learned to get by in the world is not to live in it, but rather to live parallel, beside it, at arm's length, able to pluck and reach from its passing conveyer belt like it's a cafeteria, but being sure not to getting caught up in it, tangled and dragged, and certainly being sure to avoid stepping on.

Spite 

spite. Noun. The desire to spit.

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Zeno's Other Paradox 

The more that the philosopher Zeno pondered how to get close to people, the farther he moved from his target.

The Labyrinth, Part 1 

There was a monster.

There was a horrible monster.

A long time ago, there was a horrible monster.

A long time ago, in a kingdom called Crete, there was a horrible monster.

A long time ago, in a kingdom called Crete, there was a horrible monster, half man and half bull.

A long time ago, in a kingdom called Crete, there was a horrible monster, half man and half bull, and the king had him imprisoned inside a deep maze, called the Labyrinth.

The monster was called The Minotaur.

But his name was Asterion.

A long time ago, in a kingdom called Crete, there was a Minotaur, and the king had him imprisoned inside a Labyrinth, where he wandered, hungry, savage, and alone.

Every year, the king required seven men and seven women to enter the Labyrinth, and none of them ever returned.

Every year, the king required seven men and seven women to enter the Labyrinth, where they almost certainly died.

Every year, the king decided, rather than kill the monster, to feed it seven innocent men and seven innocent women.

The monster's name was Asterion—which was also the name of the king's father.

So, this story is more complicated than it might at first appear....

Autocompete 

autocompete. Noun. The process, after receiving a message with a misspelled word, of sending a response that contains the corrected spelling of that word, without ever explicitly calling out the original sender's mistake.

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Rebound congestion 

rebound congestion. Noun. The traffic jam caused when drivers exit the freeway in favor of local roads, to avoid the traffic jam.

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Wispy, Slightly Musty 

Nostalgia is just pessimism in a vintage dress.

Tzniut  

I don't really like getting my hair cut, but that's okay, because the man who cuts my hair doesn't really cut hair, and by the measure of some people and by the measure of God, he's not even a man. He's a wigmaker. He makes wigs for married Orthodox Jewish women, who, according to dat Moshe, are not allowed to show their hair. He makes sheitel, hair meant for covering hair, hair for women whose hair is not allowed to be seen. Only their husbands may see their hair—their husbands, and God, and the man who cuts my hair, who is not a man because he himself has a husband. The man who cuts my hair and has a husband makes hair for the women that looks like their own hair. He makes their hair to look like the hair that only the husband can see, and he makes it perfectly, so that they can be modest, and so they may walk humbly with God.

Reconstruction of the Fables 

A Side

If you're of a certain age, then you maybe noticed the anniversary this week of Kurt Cobain's death. You may have put on an old Nirvana record, or thought about where you were, what car you were driving, that summer that "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was playing on every radio station, nonstop.

If you did this, you were probably thinking of "Back Then" and comparing it, at least a little bit, to "Now."

Music, we all know, can induce a kind of time travel; and some music in particular—music that gets at you when you're still young and permeable—it gets in your bloodstream and it never leaves. It becomes somehow a part of you, so it's not even relevant to ask if this music is "good" or "bad"; and when you hear it, it's like a kind of regression hypnosis that carries you back to a more hopeful, more formative, more perfect time.

Another Side

R.E.M. released their third studio album, Fables of the Reconstruction, in 1985, when I was in ninth grade, and I swallowed it whole. I freebased that record and it went straight into my bloodstream. I don't know if it's good or bad.

R.E.M. hadn't quite become rock stars yet: lead singer Michael Stipe was still mumbling incoherent lyrics and dropping acid; Peter Buck only knew a couple chords; but the sound on this record was thick and lush and humid and magical, like the Deep South it invoked in its title. I remember feeling paralyzed by the opening guitar in the album's first track (appropriately named "Feeling Gravity's Pull"), looking for layers of hidden meaning in the quiet guitar intro of "Life and How to Live It," and just riding this whole record like it was a wave carrying me to a place I'd always belonged, but never known existed.

Playing this album earlier today, beginning to end, I disappeared: I time-traveled, replaced for an hour by the strange, inquisitive, awkward boy that I was back then.

"Back then," it turns out, isn't so different from "Now"....

Dysdysphoria 

dysdysphoria. Noun. The unsettling feeling of having misplaced your malaise.

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Peanut Butter and Fizzy Water 

More thoughts on the Apocalypse

The weird, sad fact is, I want nothing more than I want the Apocalypse. The end of all things means the end of obligations, failures, and future disappointments. No further payments will be remitted. I won't need to match my socks, and I can eat peanut butter and chocolate for as many consecutive meals as I want.

After people, there's no one left to dislike you.

I can see now that I've been gradually transforming my apartment into an austere bomb shelter (with thin walls and lots of windows, useless against actual bombs): a stockpile of canned beans, fizzy water, wine, and still-unread books just waiting till I have some free time. And what is the Apocalypse, if not a sudden excess of free time? "Finally, some peace and quiet!"

It's only now it occurs to me that I've been making a few probably-erronious assumptions:

1. That I will continue to exist after the Apocalypse (thereby to enjoy my stockpile of beans, books, and time); and
2. My obligations will not. I've been assuming that the Horsemen of the Apocalypse will round up the creditors first and the debtors later

—but since the extant literature gives us plenty of reason to believe the Apocalypse is more bad than good, I suppose it's better to assume that when the end comes, there won't be a whole lot of free reading time (nor light in which to do it); and now it seems completely possible that the bills will continue to arrive in the mail long after the sun has flared out. Death and taxes, they say, and student loans, too.

So, this revelation: the Apocalypse won't be the spa vacation I'd imagined.

The Architect 

We noticed it gradually at first. A few people here and there started talking about it. Then it caught on and everyone was noticing: somehow we'd all started to share the same dream.

We would drift off to sleep and enter a fantastic world, and somewhere in that world, everyone else was dreaming it too.

So our lives became split between two worlds: the world where we were awake and worked and kept our families, and the world where we lived while we slept, a world where we were able to start over and make fresh choices and try things anew.

It's easy to understand why people started spending so much time in the dream world, while their real lives slipped farther and farther out of mind. We invaded this new world like explorers: all of it was waiting to be discovered. It was exciting and it made us feel alive again.

And before long, people started to wonder about the one who had designed this world, and how it came that we all collectively entered it in our dreams. We called this person the Architect, and more even than we wanted to sleep, we wanted to find this person, and have all of our questions answered....

Apocalypse Now 

MP3 audio track

After a while we started to wonder if the apocalypse wasn't going to happen all at once, like we'd always imagined, but rather gradually—so slowly that we'd barely even notice. And then of course we started to wonder if it was already happening: sometimes it sure seemed like it was.

Then this idea: what if it had already happened and was over?

Since we'd always laughed at those religious doomsday theories like "the Rapture," we also assumed that if the Rapture actually happened, then of course we'd be among those left behind—but till now, we'd never considered that maybe all of us were left behind.

Maybe the world had ended already, and every single last person on earth was deemed unfit to enter Heaven.

Maybe the world had ended already, and no one had particularly noticed.

We started trying to guess when it might have happened. "Hitler!" "The A-bomb!" "Martin Luther!" "The Crucifixion!"

But the fact was, it was impossible to guess. Maybe apocalypse is all we've ever known—so how could we possibly recognize it? Maybe apocalypse came and went before we ever had a chance to see it, or record its signs—maybe back when people first learned to write, or learned to speak, or learned to dream. Maybe it happened as soon as Adam and Eve ate that fruit. Maybe God tossed us out of Eden the same way we toss out a baking sheet of burnt cookies: a failed batch, easy to replace, quickly forgotten. The smoke clears and you start over and you move on. And maybe that's all we ever were.

Backpacking to Nowhere 

or, Emergency Preparedness, pt. 2

Maybe it's because I'm back in California, or maybe because of the recent Japanese quake and tsunami, or maybe because there are only a countable number of months between now and the end of that Mayan calendar—or maybe it's because it's the job of all news media to incite me into a mad panic—but I have been completely distractedly preoccupied with a sense of impending disaster. Everywhere I go now, I wonder: what if the earthquake hits now? I drive on freeways and wonder if the road will continue to hold up underneath me; I look out at the distant Los Angeles skyline and wonder if I'll see it sway and break. The rumbles of passing planes or trucks sound, to me, tectonic. I'm having trouble sleeping.

The feeling reminds me of those months after September 11: it's a Chicken Little "sky-is-falling" feeling. The sense back then was that planes might crash and buildings might fall on a scale we hadn't previously imagined; and now it's a looming awareness that the earth might shake harder and the waves might roll higher; but the general form of the feeling is this: there is a certain amount of stability which I am used to being able to take for granted, and now I can't; and it turns out maybe I need to be able to assume a certain amount of stability if I want to sleep or plan for my future or function in the world in any sort of way.

But the most confusing thing about this feeling is that, since I can't persuade myself that disaster won't come—I can't rationally explain that there won't be an earthquake, etc.—instead I start to believe the only relief will be when the earthquake does come. When the disaster strikes, then the tension that's been building up in me will be relieved, just like the tension building up in the tectonic plates will be relieved. The changes this disaster will bring will be unpredictable and maybe catastrophic, but at least they'll be here, now, instead of looming in the unseeable future, and transformed from vague fear into solvable problems. Disaster offers, if nothing else, relief from ambiguous worry, and finally a clarity of focus: can I survive? Can I help my friends and loved ones to survive?¹

How calming the arrival of actual disaster will be.

Till then, the best I can do is fill this backpack with emergency supplies: water, nonperishable food, flashlight, batteries, cellphone charger… The list goes on. I'm packing for a trip I hope never to take, a trip to nowhere in particular, itinerary unknown.²

1. The funniest joke I've heard recently was a friend telling me she'd put together an earthquake safety kit: "It's a month's supply of wine and chocolate." Then I realized she wasn't joking.

2. Contingency plans, like insurance and aesthetic minimalism, are a luxury of the bourgeoisie.

What I Wish They'd Said at My Graduation 

“Stop being scared that you won't live up to your potential. You won't. So being scared is no help.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb 

And just like that, nuclear fear is back in vogue.

You wouldn't think it was the sort of thing that would be prone to fashion, but I think it's true that nuclear fear hasn't been much on people's minds. Not like back when. I remember as a kid being pretty certain that nuclear death was imminent: I knew about ducking under the desk, about iodine pills. My demise from thermonuclear heat or from radiation poisoning felt like a foregone conclusion. And it wasn't just me. Sometimes my friends and I would lie on our backs, look up at the clouds, and fantasize about our future nuclear death.

Maybe this was because we grew up next to a nuclear power plant, and those clouds were spewing directly out of the cooling towers.

My childhood home was within siren distance of the Limerick Nuclear Generating Station, the only power plant to share the design of the much better-known Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant, site of the worst nuclear accident in United States history. Limerick's two cooling towers and their two plumes of vapor were a fixture of our childhood landscape: they rose up out of the surrounding farmland to make up the entirety of our skyline. They helped us, in disoriented moments, to discern east from west; the clouds told us which way the wind was blowing; and on a dark night, the looming towers would blot out two hyperbolic patches of stars from the sky. They stood 200 meters high and cast a shadow over my entire adolescence.

Once a month, the sirens would rip through our community, a test of the emergency response system, which also served to remind us of our fear, in case it had faded. (It never really faded.) The sirens were mounted on the tops of telephone poles and radio towers, and they revolved to push their alarm as far as possible in all directions, so that from a stationary point on the ground, the sound seemed to warble, closer and then farther away. We'd stop whatever we were doing, look around: was this a drill? Was there really an accident? Since the grownups kept going about their business, oblivious to the alarm just like they'd been oblivious to our playground squealing, we got back to it. When we were older, we learned these drills happened at consistent times—Mondays, 3pm—so when the sirens went off we'd check a clock, and as long as it was mid- to late-afternoon, we'd just go about our business. But also always wondering: what if it were a real accident? What if an accident happened on a Monday at 3pm?

I never actually learned what to do in the event of a real accident, or how we were supposed to react if we heard those sirens on a Tuesday, or a Wednesday, or in the middle of the night. (I doubted anyone would hear them at all in the middle of the night.) I seem to remember we were supposed to drive to the mall—and since that was what we wanted to do most the time, anyway, I learned not to worry as much about our impending nuclear disaster. The regular repetition of that revolving siren, and its complete and total lack of impact on our daily routines, convinced me that there was no real danger; and in my mind, the appropriate response to nuclear disaster became: shop at the mall.

I moved away, far from the long shadow of the Limerick Generating Station, and I mostly forgot about nuclear fear. But I think the fear would have faded on its own, even if I'd stayed. You can't be scared all the time. As a kid you can, maybe. But we're adults now, and we don't have time for that sort of thing.

A Pacific Gyre 

MP3 audio track

All these days of not writing. It makes me wonder what's going on—what's wrong. But it doesn't make me wonder enough to write about it. "It's just a phase," friends tell me. But the only way you can say with any assurance that something is "just a phase" is after it's over, and you've moved into a new phase. If it's never over, then it's not a phase at all. It's the new you.

Or, if it is a phase, it's the last phase. 

So, this  "phase": sleeping late, cooking, eating, napping, watering the garden, weeding the garden, showering, shopping, hiking, dreaming, and not writing.

[What we spend our time doing is more indicative of what we want than what we spend our time dreaming.]

I've heard that sometimes a plastic Coke bottle will find its way to the ocean, and the currents carry it away, so it starts in, say, San Francisco, and gets carried down the coast below Mexico and then all the way across the Pacific, bobbing around in the Philippines, and then swept into another current out to the Indian Ocean, before eventually washing up on shore in, say, Madagascar, where the letters of the label, written in English, would be impossible to read even if they weren't sun-bleached and salt-stained from the long journey, because the bottle had arrived in a foreign land after a great adventure. But then another bottle, drifting out to sea from the exact same spot, will get stuck in a dead zone between currents and never go any farther, but just bob up and down while the world spins underneath it; and other trash begins to gather nearby, and stay there, gradually building a whole continent of floating plastics, unwanted, ungrounded, without direction, and powerless ever to move out of that single spot.

And never requires washing 

Self-loathing is just vanity dressed in a black hoodie.

Private Conversation 

I think I need to go shopping but I don't need to go shopping.

There's a part of my brain that says, "You're out of cereal! You need to get breakfast cereal."

It's true that I did finish a bag of cereal this morning. (My cereal comes in bags. Don't get hung up on this.) But there's also still other cereal in there—a different kind, but plenty to get me through tomorrow, and probably the next day, too. So my brain needs to chill the fuck out.

"You need to chill the fuck out," I tell my brain.

My brain says, "You were going to buy white pepper today and you didn't. You need white pepper!"

"Nobody needs white pepper."

Earlier today there was a part of my brain that said I needed garden soil, so I stopped what I was doing, drove to Home Depot, and I bought six cubic yards of garden soil. While I stood in line, my brain chirped, "Perlite!", so I bought a bag of perlite.

I spend more time and money buying dirt than I ever imagined I would.

When I got back home, my brain said, "You need a hoe."

Another part of my brain is fixated on a smell in my apartment. "Does it smell like garbage in here?" Maybe it does smell a little like garbage. I can't tell. "You should take the trash out!", this part of my brain screams. But the trash bag is empty, and anyway, I'm not really sure it even smells. "Let's say it does smell a tiny bit like garbage—and I'm not saying it does—but if it does, that's not the worst thing in the world."

"Oh yeah? What is the worst thing in the world?"

I consider this for a moment, then realize it's even more distracting than taking out the trash.

"That woman is coming over!" I'm not sure which part of my brain screams this at me—quite possibly more than one of them. "You should straighten up!" "You should make the bed!" "You should floss!" "You should definitely take out the garbage!"

"I should floss?"

"Well, the ones you want to keep..." my brain mumbles back, a sheepish aphorism.

There's another part of my brain, thinks it would be a good idea to go for a walk. "You know, work off some of that tension."

"What tension?" I ask. But we all know the answer to that question: my brain and its screaming is beginning to stress me out. Maybe I will go for a walk. While I'm out, I can even pick up some breakfast cereal. Maybe some dirt.

Schadenfüße 

 Schadenfüße. Noun. The sadness of discovering a hole in your favorite socks.

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White Noise 

Last night, I fell asleep with the white noise machine set to play "Gentle Rain," even though outside there really was gentle rain. The real rain noise was almost indistinguishable from the artificial one, but in the end, I decided the real sound would be too unpredictable, so I turned the volume up on the machine, till the sound of the gentle rain was completely drowned in the sound of gentle rain.

At breakfast, I had to pick between a rough-looking organic apple and a shiny symmetrical one, glistening with wax—and that's when I realized: reality is too real. We can't handle reality; or if we can, we prefer not to. Reality is uneven: it's juicy but it's bruised. What we want, or seem to want more and more, is something other than real—a little more than, and a little less. Something maybe 80% real, to protect us from the unpleasant 20%.

[Reality can be "augmented" as much by what's taken away as what's added.]

A shiny plump apple that looks exactly like we think an apple should, and has no taste whatsoever. The looped sounds of a dry rainstorm, and your feet never get wet. An airbrushed magazine model, never has a grumpy day. Boneless chicken breasts, resemble tofu more than poultry. A fast food hamburger, soy-enriched, salt-soaked, pre-digested, and its relation to an actual hamburger distant and probably illegitimate.

One reason we prefer familiar brands is their consistent uniformity: they take a kind of stress out of decision-making. Starbucks might not make the best coffee, but you know exactly what you'll get—and it'll be better than the liquid dirt that you might get served at the Mom and Pop cafe. Brands help people manage their personal risk (even when that "risk" is no greater than a bad cup of coffee).

And mass production in general has required the removal of unevenness and unpredictability from its results. Now, so many generations deep into industrialism—so long that we've lost the cultural wisdom of other modes of production—we've become averse to anomalies, differences, unpredictability, randomness.

[White noise machines, by design, exist to protect us from anomalous sound.]

We've wrapped ourselves in a kind of idealism: we want "perfect" apples, perfect women, perfect rain. And for that, we sacrifice a kind of romanticism, because by "perfect," we don't mean the best, but only the most unflawed—the least unique. We drown out life with the sound of life.

Caption from an As-Yet Undrawn Cartoon 

“ You think that's bad? I keep making Devil's Tower out of my morning coffee.

Happy Valentine's Day 

The woman at the store said, "Did you wish your mother a happy Valentine's Day?" I said, "Is that something I should do on Valentine's Day?" She said, "Don't you love your mother?" I said, "Yeah I love my mother."

Stupor Bowl 

Let's face it: sports fans are partisan hacks. Rooting for the "local" team no doubt had some evolutionary value during periods of tribal feuding; but now, when I can change cities several times in a day, cheering for one team over another—because I grew up in that town? because I went to school there for a few years?—it's kind of childish, isn't it?

Maybe that's why it's so fun.

But maybe that's also why the Super Bowl is so universally exciting: exactly because almost no one cares about these two teams. (The combined populations of Green Bay and Pittsburgh would, together, make a city of about 400,000—smaller than Cleveland, and one-fifth the size of Brooklyn.) The last couple weeks have eliminated all but two local teams, and now the rest of us are finally freed to watch football in a mostly non-partisan way, admiring the elegance and brutality of the human spirit without really giving a shit who wins. So, finally a chance to focus on what really matters: beer, nachos, and advertising.

New #2 

Or, Lantern Festival

Toward the end of December, a friend and I were talking about the best ways to ring in the New Year, and we decided to burn up our old journals. It would be rich with symbolism and pretty to look at.

As homemade rituals go, it wasn't half bad.

[When you consider it one of your hobbies to reject as many assumptions as possible, or at least to call them into question, then holidays—rites of meaning based mostly on habituated, antiquated, but comforting tradition—can be kind of a bummer. The old rites fail to provide comfort as soon as you acknowledge them as silly and arbitrary; any new rite you invent is even more likely to be silly and arbitrary; and anymore, for me, the most comforting thing to do on a holiday is to stay at home and ignore it....]

Trouble was, my friend and I were both house-sitting around New Year. That meant we didn't have many old journals. We also had a cautious reluctance to start a big fire in someone else's house: of all the possible ways to begin the New Year, burning down a friend's home had to be one of the less auspicious.

So imagine my joyful surprise when I arrived at my Brooklyn apartment and discovered about twenty old hand-scribbled notebooks, on Chinese New Year.

Happy Lantern Festival, everyone....

My Kingdom for a Grow Lamp 

So the weirdest thing happened and I'm going to try to explain it to you. I woke up. No, let me start over. Last night I set my alarm for 6am, which because I lead a charmed life is unusually early for me; and whenever I have to wake up unusually early I tend not to sleep at all probably out of fear I'll oversleep. Undersleeping circumvents the oversleeping problem, except now and then when I'll finally drift off just a little before the alarm is set to go off and out of exhaustion I'll sleep through it.

[I made a New Years resolution to use fewer superfluous commas but I worry now it's making this harder to read. If you agree, then let me know, and I'll upload a revision that's restocked full of all the optional/excluded commas and we can pretend this experiment never happened. Now that I think about it, maybe that was last year's resolution. Where was I?]

I wake up before the alarm and I look at my watch and it's five minutes before 3am, and in that half-awake 3am "hypnagogic" state, I think "FML"—not a phrase I use in my waking life, but apparently my subconscious is fond of it. My subconscious says it "eff em ell" instead of pronouncing the unabbreviated words, and my conscious brain voices a little disappointment: "Really? 'FML'? So common." The conscious mind is so judgmental. After that, my conscious brain and my subconscious brain and I all roll over and try to go back to sleep. Five minutes later my alarm starts screaming at me and I look at it and sure enough, it's 6am; and I start to think "eff em ell" but by now my conscious brain is stirring and sort of censors my "eff em ell" sentiment and replaces it with "Where am I?!?" Outside the window there's snow everywhere and I think, "Oh, I'm in Canada; no, I'm in Florida; no." I'm confused. I'm actually in my old Brooklyn apartment with a watch still set to California time and so disoriented that I can't tell Canada from Florida; and it's dark and I'm tired and overnight a few more inches of snow had piled onto the already 19 (disputed) inches that were already on the ground. And I trek out into it for the work-related adventure that has brought me back to this city in the first place, a couple days ago.

Now it's 4:30pm (neé 1:30pm PST) and my body isn't quite sure how to proceed with what's left of the day. It's times like this I think, "My kingdom for a grow lamp," because I assume they cure all kinds of tiredness. I'm not sure why I assume this, except that it's so rare one sees a tired-looking plant. Then I remember ALL fluorescent bulbs act as grow lamps (did you know this?) and I don't find fluorescent lighting to be very relaxing much at all. I don't have much of a kingdom anyway, so I don't mind the universe rejecting my kingdom/grow lamp barter.

[Some things which for me result in invariable headaches: too little caffeine, any amount of bleu cheese, more than a glass of heavy-bodied red wine, some soy sauces, an excessive amount of caffeine, and not enough sleep. Where was I?]

Holding Pattern 

Dude next to me on the plane has more little bags and baskets and kits and accessories than the parents traveling with children. I offer to hold his juice while he stows his things.

He sits and finishes the juice. Then he unwraps a breakfast burrito, a big one, thicker than my arm, and eats it pretty much relentlessly. As soon as he finishes, he crumbles the wrapper and tucks it back into the bag. He pulls out a granola bar. By this time he finishes, they've come through the cabin with snacks, and he picks up a coffee, another juice, a water, and a bag of cookies. When this is finished, he reaches into his bag and pulls out a pound cake. A pound cake. A pound cake. He does not eat the whole pound cake; but he does eat half of the pound cake.

We've been in the air three hours and he hasn't stopped eating.

He's not a big man.

I feel like people must have felt when they saw that Japanese hot dog eater the first time: awed, and frightened.

I learned the other day the stomach has a capacity about 30 oz, and four times that will rupture it. I suddenly wonder what this rupture looks like to an outsider. I wonder what it will smell like. I wonder if there's a point at which my vague concern for this adjacent stranger will cause me to cross the bounds of politeness and ask him, "What the fuck? Are you OK?", and I realize there probably isn't.

New 

You wake and your eyes adjust to the sun shining in the window. You draw a breath and the air is as fresh as you can remember, and you wonder if the air is different than it was yesterday: you wonder if, while you slept, new air rolled down from the mountains and pushed the old air out to sea.

A clock ticking is the only sign that time is moving at all.

You step out of bed and you go to the kitchen. It looks different, like someone brightened the paint, like the ceilings are a few inches higher, and you wonder if this isn't your house at all. But it is your house. It is, but it changed while you were sleeping. It cleaned itself up, started over, reset; and so many of the traces of the life you were busy having in it, before—they've been carried away like the litter of last night's party.

It's a new year.

You sit down at your table, squinting at the brightness of the unstained tablecloth, a quickening in your heart: a fresh start. Your hands hover over the table without touching, and they're shaking with fear and you can't quite breathe, because how long will it be before you spill something, stain something, and everything that's new feels old again, and this all becomes another gift you've squandered?—so you hold your hands over the table without touching and you try to enjoy this, this freshness in this time between times, this opportunity between opportunities, this new air.