The Urban Sherpa

Unpacking Home

Christopher DeWan — Thu, 03 May 2012 21:11:00 -0500

Since moving to Pasadena, I've been in a sort of haze. Maybe since the weather's been mostly cloudy so have I. Maybe the dust, taken to flight from dragging and arranging so much furniture, has been mucking up my brain. Maybe I'm exhausted from all the packing: wrapping up one's memories, boxing them, carrying them and hoping they won't break, and then trying to arrange them into a new place, where they don't yet belong. Trying to find new places for old things takes a toll.

Maybe it's all the latent hope, the potential energy of the bare white walls, the empty cabinets, the unfurnished floors, all the imagining of all the possible future lives that I'll live here.

At what point does the new place become home? Is it gradual, as it's seasoned with our experiences? Or does it happen because we invoke that magic word, "Home," like an incantation, a spell of slow teleportation and wishes-come-true?

Still lots more to unpack....

Reckoning

Christopher DeWan — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 21:11:00 -0500

The first quarter of the year has gone by and I haven't spent much attention on my blog. If you're a reader (thank you), please don't be alarmed: I've spent my attention on a lot of things—hopefully interesting things.¹ Since the blog has always been a forum for me to experiment and play and puzzle out the ways in which I'm colliding with the world, I want to reassure you (and myself): I'm still experimenting, and playing, and puzzling. I've been busy, creative, and curious: exactly the way I want always to be.

I think of this blog as a sort of scrapbook where I can experiment with ways of reckoning with my confusions about the world. Sometimes, when I'm not writing, it's because I'm too overwhelmed with those confusions: they feel beyond my reckoning. But other times (like now), it's simply that those reckonings have found other outlets. And thank god, because, as much as I love writing this blog, ... it's just a blog; and it's nice sometimes to think that the sum of my life's work will include more than a pile of pixels on a screen.

I think often about something that novelist Zadie Smith said in an interview for The Literateur:

"It’s not a genre: 'experimental fiction'." The kind of experimental writer I care about is not the kind who sits down intending to write ‘experimentally’ so he can be part of some hipster crowd. DFW wrote the only way he knew how to, which was irreducibly strange. There are as many fraudulent ‘experimental’ writers as there are fraudulent ‘literary writers’. DFW was not a fraud. Kafka wasn’t intending ‘experiment’ as a kind of brand, nor was Beckett. Nor was Djuna Barnes. They were intending to be truthful to their own conceptions of the world, and it happened that their truths were rigorous, painful and difficult.

It's the same, I think, with life more generally: it's not a genre, "experimental living." We do what we can to carve out days that feel true and honest to our understanding of things. We continue to challenge our assumptions and try to steer toward experiences that will help us grow, without wounding us. And sometimes, often, we write about it.

1. Specifically, I've been hard at work writing two teleplays, revising a screenplay, designing two classes for the upcomg spring and fall, and helping to create two new web properties that I think will make the crowded Internet a little bit of a better place. Good times.²

2. Truth be told, I haven't made much headway on revising that screenplay.

Aesop Wasn't a Drinker

Christopher DeWan — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 22:11:00 -0500

Slowest and steadiest avoids the race. You can find him at the bar.

Sleeper, Awake

Christopher DeWan — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:11:00 -0500

Last night, I dreamt that I lay in bed, disappointed that I wasn't asleep, dreaming.

Greek Tragicomedy

Christopher DeWan — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 22:11:00 -0500

Aeschylus was offered the screenwriting job because producers misread Agamemnon as Armageddon, and his fear of their inevitable discovery kept him from doing his best work during the rewrite of the Transformers sequel.

Midlife Crisis

Christopher DeWan — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 22:11:00 -0500

“Midlife crisis for a writer is when he's tempted to give up his style for a younger, faster, prettier style, because the one with whom he's built a lifelong relationship now makes him feel tired, unaccomplished, and old.

The Kitchen

Christopher DeWan — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:11:00 -0500

My apartment is like other apartments: it has a bed; a table; a sofa; shelves for books; a few houseplants; one door in and out, seldom used; and a kitchen.

The kitchen is an odd limb, jutting out from the rest of the studio at an angle, not at all roomy and not quite cramped. It's a size to which I've grown accustomed, packed exactingly: this stack of pots fit here, this stack of plates here, this shelf for oils, this shelf for spices.

The kitchen rivals the bed as the most used part of the apartment, and most loved; and if, as they say, scent is the best conveyor of memory, then the kitchen is where the most memories are made.

People walking through the door turn immediately toward the kitchen. "Mmmm, what are you cooking?"

There's something on the stove right now, a cast iron pot with years of accumulated seasoning soaked into its skin that infuses every new food it touches. The pot gurgles and burbles with curry powder and coconut milk, so the neighbors get envious and confused: "What country am I in?"

Cooking for other people is better than cooking for yourself. When I eat something I've cooked, there are no surprises, only the possibility of disappointment. But when I pass a bowl to someone else, I get to watch their face flicker with delight as they turn the corner from one flavor to the next.

The joy of sharing food is at least equal to the joy of eating it.

My kitchen, like most of my apartment, doesn't have room for a second person: there's no way to make space for them and also move around in the ways to which I've grown accustomed: chopping this, blanching that, tossing in a dash of spice, flurry with garnish. So I ladle out my soup into small containers and put it in the freezer, where it will lose some high points of flavor but will sustain me, in a slightly better than the merest possible way, for weeks to come.

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventure

Christopher DeWan — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 22:11:00 -0500

14 February

I've finally done it! After years of wanting to escape the bounds of civilization, I've sold my house and everything in it, traded the bourgeois trappings of luxury for a small cutter sailboat and a dream—and now I'm ready to leave this old, cluttered, tedious life behind for one of adventure.

I've never forgotten those uncharted archipelagos where we anchored during my Navy days; I have every confidence I'll be able to find them within a few hours of departing port in Princeville.

Goodbye, old world! Welcome, unknown!

26 February

The winds blustery and the waves unpredictable, but how good it feels to be tested against the unmerciful ocean, one man versus the brute force of Nature! Waves easily three times the height of my boat's mast, tossing us aloft and every which way, the sting of salt water in my eyes, reminding me I'm alive—so alive! I have little interest in coming into port. But anchor I must, to purchase the supplies and rations that are to last me throughout the entire rest of my days. Three days in this tropic port and then I disappear from civilization forever.

1 March

In the hour before dawn and under cover of darkness, I hoisted my sail and slipped back onto the open ocean. Everything was still and calm and quiet, and the moon beckoned me on.

True to my memory, I found the islands! I found them, right where I'd left them, all those years ago: a small and secreted paradise. For now I've anchored in a lagoon: I'll spend the next few days scouting the terrain, because what are a few days compared to the rest of time I intend to spend here, in beautiful serene isolation, with the peace and quiet of my own pulse and the murmur of the tides?

3 March

It's all better than I imagined: a clean, airy cave just a hundred yards from the beach, with a spring of fresh drinking water; a cove bountiful with fish; and the whole island blessed in a range of edible vegetation—berries and nuts and coconut galore, and bamboo of all sizes, which will allow me to fashion a vast array of useful objects.

How many men, stranded on such a deserted island, would dream of ways to escape from it? But here, now—this is my dream: to be stranded on this island, like Adam's son, and never to leave.

I'm so convinced of the rightness of it that I've committed a decisive act which many would call rash, but which for me is simply a ritual affirmation of my course of action: I've lit up my cutter in a glorious bonfire, putting into action the old idiom: I've burned my boat. There is no going back.

4 March

Today I lived purely, like the savages of old: I've caught fish with my own hands, hung them out to smoke over a fire, swum naked in the warm ocean, and even begun carving an old log into a sort of decorative totem pole, where I intend to sculpt frightening visages, such which would scare off any passersby, except the possibility of passersby is so ridiculous, here, in Paradise.

5 March

Fate is improbably cruel, for earlier today washed ashore a wounded vessel out of Honolulu, a fishing boat with a great gaping hole in its hull, and its crew of survivors is now cluttering up my perfectly serene island. The ship was named The Minnow, and seems to have been piloted by two bungling clowns: a fat man whom the others call, simply, Skipper, and his man-child first mate Gilligan.

For now I have no choice to but maintain my presence in secret, and hope they quickly find some small competence to fetch themselves off of my island.

8 March

How can it be that these insufferable buffoons are still here, tripping over one another? If they'd landed anywhere else in the universe, they'd surely have perished by now, eaten by whatever indigenous predator, or perhaps poisoned themselves on local flora, or simply lit themselves on fire in sheer incompetence, then drowned while trying to put out the flames. But, here on my island paradise, they seem able to blunder without consequence, and they're no closer to rescuing themselves than the day they arrived.

Tonight, I will dress as a cannibal, sneak into camp, to repair their radio and make a survey of the damage to their boat. These seven hapless castaways must go, even if I have to mend their boat myself.

9 March

Woe is me: their vessel, The Minnow, is damaged beyond repair; and these hapless stock characters are to be my mates here in Eden, till my hand or Fate's conceives of another alternative. One can only hope that their incessant scheming will arrive them at a happy escape, and soon.

January 1

Christopher DeWan — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 22:11:00 -0500

January 1 is a heckuva day for spring cleaning.

The Wide Wide River of Regret

Christopher DeWan — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 22:11:00 -0500

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 enjoyed that German chocolate cake." "I should have driven slower." "I should have driven faster." "I should have gone out drinking and dancing every single night, instead of staying home every single night."

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 gone to prom."

"I wish I'd been braver."

"Why did I talk so much about that needy man living on the street, and do nothing? He went missing and I never helped him."

"After losing that fight in second grade, why didn't I fight the boy again, instead of retreating into my bedroom for the next ten years?"

"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

Christopher DeWan — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 22:11:00 -0500

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

Christopher DeWan — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 22:11:00 -0500

You walk into your daughter's room. You wouldn't do this normally. You try very hard to respect her privacy, even when this sometimes causes you to wonder if you're being a bad or neglectful parent. The fact that you wonder means that you probably are not a bad or neglectful parent. But everyone has better days and worse days.

Her alarm clock is going off and she's nowhere to be found, so you walk into her room, and that's when you see them, lying on her desk: two little dolls. Voodoo dolls of you and your wife.

"Maybe it's an art project," Janine says, when you tell her about it that night. "She's always been a kind of strange girl."

The next day, while your daughter's at school, you sneak back into her room to have another look. But her desk is empty. You open the drawers and look through, careful not to make a sound, even though no one's home. But you don't see them. You open her dresser, filled with underwear that looks too lacy to belong to your little girl. You feel guilty looking through her things, and nervous, too. "Dad," she'd say, "what are you doing?" And you're not sure what you'd answer.

As you reach for the comforter, to look under the bed, your phone rings and you nearly have a heart attack.

"Hey. What's up?"

Janine says she's got a splitting migraine, came on suddenly. She's on her way home.

"I'll have a cold compress ready for you. That helps a little, right?"

Janine's firm depends on her and she likes that, which means she works long days and then brings work home with her, too. Your own consulting business has been slow lately. You're starting to find it's more satisfying to weed the garden and to cook elaborate meals than to power on your computer and try to drum up new work. You're making a chicken stew when Janine comes through the front door, colorless and weak. Before you can ask how she is, she throws up on the foyer rug.

"Go to bed, I'll clean it up."

Your daughter comes home an hour later. "Eww, what are you cooking?"

"It's chicken stew. You like chicken stew."

"I'm vegetarian!"

You had no idea your daughter was vegetarian. "Tell you what: I'll take the chicken out."

"Gross!"

You don't know how to ask your daughter if she's playing with voodoo dolls. You're not even sure "playing" is the operative verb.

"Honey, can I talk to you about — ?"

But she's already gone upstairs to her room and closed her door. You think back, for some reason, to the day you brought her home from the hospital. She'd been born premature and even when she was released, she seemed just impossibly small—a miniature person made to scale to fit almost in your palm. Her head was a bit lop-sided, so the hospital offered instructions on how to massage it into shape. They were vague on how much pressure to apply, so that, on some days, you wonder if maybe you still see a misshapen bulge in her scalp, and on other days you look for signs that your too-rough handling might have led to brain damage.

You slurp down a bowl of chicken stew while playing solitaire, then check on your wife. She's asleep, snoring quietly, with a spot of what looks like blood on the pillow, beside her ear. "Honey?" you whisper. She doesn't stir, but she gives a sleeping sigh you take to mean she's alright.

The dolls were made of sticks bound together with wire, and dressed in what might have been old Barbie clothes. What makes a voodoo doll a voodoo doll? You touch your head, feeling for signs of pinpricks. Then you touch the rest of your body. You're flaccid, but you don't know if that's black magic or just the normal kind.

To pour so much hope into one's child: it's almost unfair, isn't it, to them, to ask them to be the flimsy vessel of so much expectation? We want all the things for our children that we never had, which means we're asking them to succeed where we ourselves have failed. Why can't we just simply love?

You knock on your daughter's door. "Can I come in?"

"OK."

She's on her bed doing what looks like homework. "You know your mom's sick, right?"

"What's wrong with her?"

"Some kind of headache."

"Is it bad?"

"Yeah, it's bad."

Your daughter pauses at this information, but gives no indication whether she herself has driven a hatpin into her own mother's brain.

"What are you working on?" you ask, when you notice the paper you assumed to be algebra is actually filled with unreadable symbols.

"It's cool, it's like a secret code." She shows you the paper.

"Can you tell me what it says?"

"No, silly, then it wouldn't be secret."

"Hey," you say, glancing at her school bag. "That's not a cigarette lighter, is it?"

"Where? What do you mean?" she asks, scooping up her bag.

"You're not smoking, are you?"

"No!"

You look at her, this little creature. You recognized her, you think, when she was three, when she was seven. She seemed like someone who could be a daughter of yours.

But lately you're not sure.

"You hungry? You want a grilled cheese?"

She shakes her head and goes back to her coding.

While you're washing the dishes, you get a nosebleed. You watch the blood as it falls into the dishwater: the drops are slow to disperse. They just hang there, between the suds and the enamel, floating wispy globes. So slowly, they turn into little red clouds, little sanguine genies offering you a chance to make a wish—but do it quick, before they thin and disappear forever. You watch your own blood floating in the sink, fading. There are so many things you could wish for. So many things.

Clatter

Christopher DeWan — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 22:11:00 -0500

Clatter. Noun. Aural clutter.

All Souls

Christopher DeWan — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 21:11:00 -0500

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

Christopher DeWan — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 21:11:00 -0500

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.

Bride of Frankenstein

Christopher DeWan — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 21:11:00 -0500

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

The Under-the-Bed Monster

Christopher DeWan — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 21:11:00 -0500

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

Christopher DeWan — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 21:11:00 -0500

She comes back to our apartment doused in salt water, kelp in her hair. "Where've you been?" I ask.

"Out. With friends. At a movie."

She makes a line for the bedroom and closes the door before I can say a word.

I'm a good husband, I think. I'm a good listener. I'm sympathetic to her mood swings. I'm a decent cook. I'm kind.

My wife is having an affair with Poseidon, and I don't know what to do.

The silences in our relationship used to be rich with understanding, but lately they're unfilled moments strained with boredom or loss.

A painful irony: I introduced her to Poseidon, during a getaway vacation. I met him, and his then-girlfriend, while sea kayaking, and invited them to join us for dinner. He spent the night slurping oysters and seducing my wife, while I got a little sick on what I imagine was a dash of mercury poisoning.

I could feel her drifting away along a powerful current. I scheduled a movie night for us, French New Wave. I made my chicken marsala recipe. But she called at 7pm to say she'd be working late, and came home after midnight smelling of sea moss.

A week later I found a fish net in the car.

I knew what was going on but I didn't know how to talk to her about it. If you can't talk to your lover about the loss of love, then does it mean the love is already gone?

So I got it in my head I was going to kill Poseidon. I didn't know how or even how to find him. I drove drunk out to the end of the pier and started pissing in the ocean, and it was very gratifying till a police officer told me to move along and stay away from the pier for a while.

That night, I found her sitting in the dark, in the living room, tooting a conch shell like a sad trumpet.

"Are you having an affair?" I asked her without preamble.

"I've been very sad," she answered. "So unexpectedly sad."

"About us?"

"About me. About the way I turned out. About the way I didn't turn out." She put the conch shell on the mantlepiece and held me. "I appreciate you very much." I slapped her across the face so blood came out her nose. "I didn't know you could hit that hard," she said. "I didn't know you could hit."

Tonight, I went out to the bay and watched the moon for hours, listened to the waves come and go and come and go. Nothing that I thought was important seemed important. The waves were whispers, and the ripples in the sand called me out and into the bay. The water was black and cold, and when the waves came in and stirred up the sand and tossed me around, it was impossible to tell which way to the shore, which way was up or down even, and then I only knew two things for certain: the tangle of kelp around my feet, and the riptide, pulling me relentlessly away into something deep and enormous.

Swastikas in the Window

Christopher DeWan — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 21:11:00 -0500

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

Christopher DeWan — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 21:11:00 -0500

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 it 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 direction. A few years later, they started a new forest for her son, at the opposite corner, and finally four children in all, and 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, but higher, too, till they forgot the look of the ground and each other, and remembered only the trees.

Breadcrumb Trail

Christopher DeWan — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 21:11:00 -0500

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

Christopher DeWan — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 21:11:00 -0500

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

Christopher DeWan — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 21:11:00 -0500

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

Golem

Christopher DeWan — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 21:11:00 -0500

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

Christopher DeWan — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 21:11:00 -0500

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

Christopher DeWan — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 21:11:00 -0500

“ God never burns a bridge without smashing a window.

I Owe My Soul

Christopher DeWan — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 21:11:00 -0500

“ Another day, another dolor.

Failed Travel Book Titles

Christopher DeWan — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 21:11:00 -0500

Let's Go Troposphere.
The Rough Guide to the Côte d'azur.
Frommer's Mogadishu.
Lonely Planet Costco.
Rick Steve's Your Mom Through the Back Door.
Alabama for Dummies.
Time Out Bikini Atoll.
Streetwise Map of the Mall of America.
The Unofficial Guide to the Jersey Turnpike.

Weak and Fruitless Words

Christopher DeWan — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 21:11:00 -0500

“ 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

Christopher DeWan — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 21:11:00 -0500

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.