The NY Times on-line - I'm going to town blogging this stuff, I think absinthe is fascinating... hehe- vicarious pleasures...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/arts/12conn.html

Norman Mailer, Towering Writer With Matching Ego, Dies at 84 ,New York Times Arts section.
by Charles McGrath
"Mailer was a prodigious drinker and drug taker, a womanizer, a devoted family man, a would-be politician who ran for mayor of New York, a hipster existentialist, an antiwar protester, an opponent of women’s liberation and an all-purpose feuder and short-fused brawler, who with the slightest provocation would happily engage in head-butting, arm-wrestling and random punch-throwing. Boxing obsessed him and inspired some of his best writing. Any time he met a critic or a reviewer, even a friendly one, he would put up his fists and drop into a crouch. "

Gore Vidal, with whom he frequently wrangled, once wrote: “Mailer is forever shouting at us that he is about to tell us something we must know or has just told us something revelatory and we failed to hear him or that he will, God grant his poor abused brain and body just one more chance, get through to us so that we will know. Each time he speaks he must become more bold, more loud, put on brighter motley and shake more foolish bells. Yet of all my contemporaries I retain the greatest affection for Norman as a force and as an artist. He is a man whose faults, though many, add to rather than subtract from the sum of his natural achievements.”

Ten years ago today bathed in a fevered sweat. Ten years ago today my nerves, questionable.

Today I sit next to a girl who epitomizes my supreme self-absorption ten years ago. Maybe that's entirely judgmental. I'm guilty of that on occasion as well. But the difference is that maybe she can get away with it longer than I did. I have just come to see that kind of self-absorption as a lonely place. Kind of like Plato's friends who sit watching the shadows on the wall... Depite what anyone can say about me, anyone who's spent a great deal of time with me over the last ten years knows I am not the same person I was then. The theory about the electrons changing, the cells migrating. Those details are amenable to science. I don't know if I know more than I knew back then. Maybe I do in that I know that I know less than I think I do. Thank you, Confucius.

The goal is to be more humble. Less me. The goal the last five years have been to be less me. Less the type of person that lingers which perhaps need not. It's not the Body Artist. This is not a tale of asceticism. Maybe that works for the Jains or the Opus Dei but not for this cat. I have a low threshold for pain. Ten years of reality, except for dreams. Life is but a dream when you're clean. At least, it can be I've found. I remember waking up one Sunday morning, as I have for a couple years as far back as I can remember and going to a meeting club and there were all my friends sitting in their chairs, some beaming, some reflective, some sleepy-eyed. But they surrounded me.

There was a man I'll never forget as long as I live named Richard Watkins who went to the Sacred Heart Church in North Omaha who gave me a post-it note with the inscription "Isaiah 43:4" on it. Nothing else, no real explanation. But it was there, and why I remember that above all else, I can only explain by my experience over the last ten years in light of that one phrase, "Since thou hast been precious in my sight, and honourable, and I have loved thee; therefore will I give men for thee, and peoples for thy life." I remembered that around 3 years or so. I would have been 24-years old and it would have been six years since the day that Richard gave me that slip of paper. It took my breath away to think of that. Waking up from a dream only to find that my life was but a dream.

I think I've tapped out most of the nay-saying people from my life who would judge me for who I am. I wondered recently if that didn't mean that I was a better judge of character. That the people surrounding me for the purpose of having a weaker person latching on to a stronger one, the old threadbare idea of having someone around that's lower than you, all that seems to be gone now. And never need return. That awful ache in the heart of low men... that sad loneliness becoming a rocketing into the fourth dimension of existence.

While reading the book Kaddish by Leon Weltseltier about both the history and origins of "The Mourner's Kaddish" I came across the prayer, which I had never heard nor seen before, but found a copy of obviously built from the ground up from Hebrew. Apparently, it was originally composed in Aramaic both for Rabbinical and for those who wish to exhalt God for the purpose of protecting loved ones after their time of death... It seems a beautiful prayer and though I do not know the Hebrew, I was still touched by Mr. Weltseltier's meticulous study of this prayer, according to him, was to attempt to connect, understand and have a new relationship with this prayer.

Exalted and sanctified is God's great name.
in the world which He has created according to His will
and may He establish His kingdom
may his salvation blossom and his anointed near.
in your lifetime and your days
and in the lifetimes of all the House of Israel
speedily and soon; and say, Amen.

May His great name be blessed
forever and to all eternity.
Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted,
extolled and honored, elevated and lauded
be the Name of the Holy One, blessed be He
beyond (far beyond) all the blessings
and hymns, praises and consolations
that are spoken in the world; and say, Amen.

* * * * * * * * * * *

{The half kaddish ends here.
Here the "complete kaddish" includes:}

* * * * * * * * * * *
Let them be accepted: the prayers and supplications
of the entire House of Israel
before their Father in Heaven; and say, Amen.

{Here the "kaddish of the rabbis" includes: }

Upon Israel and its rabbis and their students
and upon all their student's students
and upon all those who engage in the Torah
here and in all other places
may they and you have much peace
grace and kindness and mercy and long life
and plentiful nourishment and salvation
from before their Father in Heaven [and Earth];
and say, Amen.

{All variants but the half kaddish conclude:}

May there be much peace from Heaven,
[and] [good] life
and satiety, and salvation, and comfort, and saving
and healing and redemption and forgiveness and atonement
and relief and deliveranced
for us and for all His people Israel; and say, Amen.

He who makes peace in His heights
may He [in his mercy] make peace upon us
and upon all [his nation] Israel; and say, Amen.
in the world which will be renewed
and He will give life to the dead
and raise them to eternal life
and rebuild the city of Jerusalem
and establish his temple within
removing foreign worship from the earth
and the Heavenly service shall return
and the Holy One, blessed is He
in his kingship and splendour ...

I really don't know where I was when I took this picture. I have to guess that it had to have been somewhere in Alabama. The second day of my trip down south, which was a Sunday and Sunday is now my day of great spiritual banking. Find empty places and drinking in spiritual food there... I love the spiritual light of this picture, because it's the refracting of the sunlight through the marks on the windshield, but I was moved by the wide expanse of sky and road. You see the broad sweep of this stretch of highway and those spirits seeming to rise up from the erth, good, clean happy spirits.

There was an old photograph our family had of when this priest and nun from the parish we belonged to came to our house and ate Sunday dinner with us. There was an inexplicable mark that appeared on that picture. It vaguely resembled a dove-shape and my point in bringing up this is there is the proposition that the Spirit of the Universe is either everything or else it is nothing. Either the photograph captures the rapture and deep well-being I was feeling at the moment or it is a picture took from the road where the dirt and grime of the windshield has gathered. Either it IS a figment of the imagination, one that is fired, or else it is the cold soul of a being grounded in the mathematics of reality. Either you can calculate what is happening in the present moment and explain away all the magic of it, or you can let thoughts run wild in amazement of what is happening and what kinds of things it may be promising for the future.


This is some place between Memphis Tennessee and Oxford, Mississippi... I'm listening to blues music at this point, Muddy Waters, Bobby Bland, Howlin Wolf. Elmore James. And Muddy is really the only one from Mississppi but I'm feeling that deep mysticism that comes from being in that place. I think of Twain's Jim running for his life, trying to find his way up to free territory for black slaves, and that song "Hellhound on My Trail" by Robert Johnson running through my mind, that haunting line about "blues falling down like hail" and I see the sunrise, likely when most of the slaves along the railroad had to find a place to hide, deep with the evergreens so noone could find them... There was a hellhound on my trail and it was the fear I had of my self.... the fear that maybe I was running from my self again, that I was going farther and farther away from myself. Etheridge Knight had that line about how he almost kicked it with kinfolk, how he'd almost caught up with himself... I'll never know why the darkest of notions hit me the same way, they puzzle me the deepest. But this is a beautiful portrait of how God wakes up the world. Within a half-hour, I was overwhelmed by the light of day and I would hit pockets of road where I could almost not see anything at all, the rays of sunlight were so bright and penetrating.

I heard the bit on Bob Dylan again today and John Hiatt talked about "All Along the Watchtower" being a reflection of Dylan on the Book Of Isaiah. Now I have to go back and read the Book of Isaiah, because while they played that song, with some kind of spiritual overlay, suddenly that song takes on a whole new meaning for me. Then I see it as an attempt for a deeply troubled but determined man (Dylan) trying to grapple with the message of the divine.
And this guy trying to remain ever introspective on the meanings of texts written down for the purpose of mankind, and what these stories can ultimately teach us about ourselves, about our connection with this whole other dimension of reality, the dimension we sense strongly is there, but have little scientific proof of actually encountering.

I couldn't help myself, looking out at the world through windows moving 75 mph... sometimes the going was slower, amore plodding gait, other times, it sped up wildly, profusely. I must have been somewhere outside of Columbia Missouri because the shadows had begun to fall, it is a late afternoon photograph taken on October 21st... the trees and fields are still lush, green but you can see little flairs of color in there as well. It was the beginning into the descent of night, the darkest night of the soul, the unholy hour, or maybe it was just another afternoon in fall, where the heart beats differently because the going is neither rough nor tidy.

Oklahoma. The Weigh Station.



I'm not sure what kind of monster writes about his family. There's so many dynamics to it. You go into it thinking that you might be a monster or they will be moved, elated, flattered. You're never sure where to begin or how roughly you should trod. Whether it's not better to just carry the proverbial big stick. I do it now (I think) because I have admiration for my family. This is not a method to establish personal denouement. That's what therapy is for. Or Augusten Burroughs novels. No, this is to illuminate, glorify a family which was born best out of the threads which are woven into the flags of the American Dream. I begin with a photograph which sits on my desk. Easter it must have been. Somewhere around either 1982 or 1983. Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Outside of Tulsa. A brown clay brick house in which we lived. (Street name?) My other to the left, in a white business-style blouse with a blue tied ribbon next to my grandmother wearing her signature white coat and her pink-rimmed glasses, smiling wide for the camera. Proud to be with her grandchildren, her daughter-in-law. I was still Master Greg Schoonmaker, still shorter than my sister and still blaringly blonde. My sister, her hair cut short but a white barrett on the side, a navy blue dress. One purple ribbon in the middle and white tights to cover her legs, white shoes. Navy blue was the fare of the day. It must have been Easter, would have been my guess. My grandmother's favorite holiday, and usually right around the time when she would have been able to come see us all.



Oklahoma was always barren, the grass on the front lawn, a parched brown, leading me to belive it could have also been Christmas... a logical guess but in Oklahoma, one never knows. My mother remembered there being dust stroms off in the distance that you could see from the back of the house. Oklahoma is naturally, a mystic place, not often given much creedence as a place to tour or visit, because of its sometimes gaping holes of sky and wide scopes of land. If you're looking for some place which will help you meditate contemplatively on the nature of oblivion, then you've gone to the right place in Oklahoma. I don't remember much of it, except for a time when a tornado watch was threatening. Me & the Ritter kids from down the street were playing and the wind picked up and just as quicky died down. The sky turned yellow, then green. Green. No lie at all and thick rolls of cloud had formed in the sky. Fishermen, farmers and weathermen like to refer to them as mackerel scales and are approproraitely named. It's worse when the sky is green because it's reminsicent of The Emerald City in Oz, where you go when the tornadoes come and pick you up and throw you from this earth.

Beginning. We were a flourish. A family who flourished. Mostly. Until the great becoming. That was my part. Everything else was not a mess. Not until a few years later. But by then things had cracked opened. For us. We were a flourishing family. Everyone except for me. I was so consumed by the fact that the veneer was about to lift. Parents have so many expectations. And siblings too, but not nearly as much. The veneer was about to lift one way or another. Even if I weasn't around to witness it. Especially if I didn't tell anyone where I was going. Or how I planned to arrive there. Or not arrive. There would have been no arrival. Only a passing. And the thin veil which covered us for so many years was not going be a bridal veil. That would come much, much later. I could tell that story but I try not dwell on current events. Not knowing their significance. That particular story is simply not allowed to be told yet.

As a family, we have always reserved the right to withhold information from outsiders. From each other. My father began many sentences, "I haven't told your mother yet---" but he certainly meant well. It was for protection. It was to reduce anxiety. He would be eating peanuts from a porcelain bowl. He chewed awkwardly, a result of dental work from years back. He had formed habits during that time, that he should be careful about the manner in which he ate certain foods. Peanuts were at the top of the list. As he chewed, carefully, he would begin to divulge the top secret information, classified until further notice. Usually, it entailed a business trip, upcoming. He withheld the information in order to be sensitive to my mother's fear of being alone. In an empty house. With large bay windows. Which overlooked a large pond where alligators could live. With only the knowledge of a floor plan. The garage door couldn't open fast enough. With a fear that crept when she watched suspenseful movies, television. Her television nightmares. Her striking my father in her sleep. Her dangerous dreams. So he told her nothing until it was too late. The flights were booked. The itineraries printed. They were in bold, like decrees. She would make clucking noises, she would pull back her lower lip. If that's how it had to be, what further could she protest. So he ate his peanuts. He watched sports. Espn. Mad Money on MSNBC, the thick-headed bald men with the power ties and New York facial tics. The swagger of men who loved to talk about the power of stocks, the movement of the ticker. The Kabbalah of monetary destiny.

I decided that everyday should be a day of new birth, every season a respresentation of the cycle of life and death... here there is both living and dying.... being born into the world like new sprouts of leaves thirsty for the water and sunshine that showers upon this earth, and there is the withering away of the trees and the grass in fall to remind us that everything must perish... this universe it doesn't immaculately care... but there will always be the promise of a new beginning, a radiance unforseen when all seems to have been laid to waste. It's never too late to begin your life again. Sometimes you have laid a good foundation for it, but it begins in the morning when you get up and crawl out of bed like the Leo Kottke song. And just like Curly said in the Money Pit, if the foundation is good then everything else can be fixed. Good days and many blessings to all our fellow travellers out there, today's a good day to be human, that's the least we can expect and the greatest we could have hoped for.

The only true currency in this bankrupt world... is what you share with someone else when you're uncool. -Lester Bangs, Almost Famous

Just remember what old Jack Burton does when the earth quakes, the poison arrows fall from the sky, and the pillars of Heaven shake. Yeah, Jack Burton just looks that big old storm right in the eye and says, "Give me your best shot. I can take it." -Jack Burton, Big Trouble in Little China

I go back to this poem time & time again, one of the most beautiful prayers I've ever seen anyone write that didn't get canonized. People should make laminated bookmarks or frame pictures of it. Naturally number one stands out in my mind, and could pretty much stand alone by itself,
John Berryman:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=178869

We went to see Regina Spektor last night at Sokol and I would have to say the crowd was unruly. I joked with a girl in the audience about how I could very easily bulldoze my way to the front, since most of the crowd were females. Females with drunk boyfriends lurking toward the back near the bar. I don't think I really noticed any of this at first because I was really apprehensive about seeing her perform, but somewhere in the middle of probably her fourth or fifth song she asked the audience if they could keep it down, "I'm not lip syncing you know." I think she was right to ask that to some extent, as she is not the type of artist that you can just sort of listen to while you're catching up on Sports Center highlights... not in the least. Sokol always seems perfect for shows like hers because of the intimate vibe that comes from being in that old building, with its long history of elegant music acts. It was no different for her if people would have been able to get over themselves and their obvious self-absorption. The woman sits down and begins playing the piano as if she were just messing around in her parlor. She flitters out sweet melodies from the stage and bats her eyelashes, sometimes, as Brooke pointed out to me, having her eyes lightly shut as she plays each note and sings each lift and octave... I was familiar with a few of her songs but not all, so I could keep the objectivity I needed to truly appreciate that here was talent, here was a presence that pulled us all in. Just focusing on the lyrics, I'd here lines that rang with a graceful truth... then on a few songs, I'd find her telling kitschy (her own oft-used word) and sometimes gentle stories no doubt about personalities or situations she had known throughout her still short life. Graceful was how I would describe her if I had to use only a word. Full of gentle lightness and being, radiating out from that tender muscle that seems to beam from her ribcage is the closest sentence I could use to frame her essence...

I want to sing to you my love
My only love and happiness
Don't be so blue so blue my love
This too shall pass this too shall pass

But tell me, what have I done to deserve you?
Must have done something cause that's how it works
Must have been kind to kittens and birds,
In a previous life must have thought happy thoughts...

I found myself with tears of joy, leaping inside when she would work out a refrain, how she had found those phrases which it seems so many solid songwriters are able to bracket as the words they most want to be remembered by... word they long to fill the air with.

I couldn't help it, thinking that here is a new shining star, coming from somewhere East, I know that part of her descent is Russian/ Eastern European and that this woman has the power to influence another age if she chooses, endless troupes of lovestruck teenagers or twenty-somethings, idealists yearning for love or the capacity or the wherewithal to understand or care about love... for me, I watched my own lover's expressions intermittently throughout the show, watched as she perked up at certain songs, mumbled the words to others, expressed joy, sorrow, wonder, hope, love. The last of all being the greatest. The greatest of all being love.

And with that I leave you with some thoughts to share, courtesy of Miss Regina Spektor,

Samson came to my bed
Told me that my hair was red
Told me I was beautiful and
Came into my bed
Oh I cut his hair myself one night
A pair of dull scissors in the yellow light
And he told me that I'd done alright
And kissed me till the morning light
The morning light
And kissed me till the morning light.

Brooke tells me this song reminds her of me,  and ofttimes I haven't the foggiest
idea of what people are seeing.   More and more,  I'm focused on how I'm trying to
live my life to the best of my ability rather than how people see what I do.
But this idea of Samson strikes me this time, as I am a person trying to stand,
trying to be the rock,  and along comes this woman who is so wonderful and complete
and she's Delilah,  al she wants to do is cut my hair to expose the beauty within me,
and to see me pure, as I am,  but if she cuts my hair,  it renders me vulnerable.
I don't know.   Why doe sthe Bible keep coming back to me?  The Old Testament and its
stories.  Sometimes even the New Testamnt, stories about Jesus.  

Napping Father

I remember watching my father sleep
his mouth open, sometimes, during
what for me was apocalypse, great battles
in my mind, and he would flinch sometimes,
open his eyes, that moment of recognition,
then fade, surrender back into sleep again.

I would think this great man has lived
a hundred years through me, and has whittled
it all down to how or if you can sleep through anything,
despite all the tragedy or infirmity, that though
it be fitful, you must sleep, you must give that to yourself
in order to carry on with the rest of our nonsense.

But for me, I would be nerves on the outside of my skin,
and there is this pillar, the strength of all the world,
and if you asked him, he'd laugh, maybe roll his eyes,
which would tell you it wasn't really like that, that the sleep
was really something like exhaustion, it was about surrender
by default because you can't raise your fists to the world everyday.

when the real comfort is in knowing that
all things are in order for a man, no matter what this world
gives us, no matter where we're punched, that you live
with the choices you've make, and you protect them,
if only by trusting that someone you love can watch
you fall asleep and feel like the world isn't ending,
that it's okay to sleep in this place he's made for you.

"it's interesting how you sometimes have to leave home before you can ask difficult questions, how the questions never come up in the room you grew up in, in the town you were born. it's funny how you can't ask difficult questions in a familiar place, hiw you have tostand back a few feet and see things in a new way before you realize nothing that is happening to you is normal. it is rather odd, isn't it, our eyes in our heads, our hands with five fingers, the capacity to understand beauty, to feel love, to feel pain." -Donald Miller, from Through Painted Deserts


But Love makes us do things that defy reason, it can really set us through the wheel, it can make us want to do things we would have no account for in doing... why would you want to deprive yourself of the chance to be happy? Is because of the need to fight, regardless. Void of anything you ask or beg of anyone else, or whether your wishes are granted, there is still that need to fight. Because it's in your nature. Resisting the dying of the light. But the fight alone proves that we have not given up on our ideals. Fighting alone can prove the you still very much want to devour all that now occurs.

links for eliza griswold's poems whom I read and was struck by their direct relationship and voice and tone to present circumstances

http://www.hds.harvard.edu/news/bulletin_mag/articles/35-23_griswold.html
http://www.versedaily.org/wisdomteeth.shtml
http://www.smallspiralnotebook.com/bookreviews/2007/05/wideawake_field_by_eliza_grisw.shtml
http://www.poems.com/poem.php?date=13664

3 October. I began my day with fear. It is my lot. I think there are days when I am spared of that. I am sure I have had those mornings. But I have made much of the practice of talking to it. It's like the grumpy neighbor that you must deal with on the way to the car, on the way to work, before you can get back to the daily business. It is that unnamble thing that I must overcome each day when it elects to appear. Maybe all of us have it because it is our cross to bear in being human. Maybe you have palsy in your right leg, maybe you have a bum hip or a terrible pain in your back. I'm never sure, but knowing that fear is my enemy. A growly grouchy neighbor, growing weeds next door. Drinking beer at six am and talking to his wife at the top of the lungs through the screen. At any rate, I prayed that the fear be removed. I prayed long and hard that the fear be removed and it was. I stood at attention waiting for a power greater than me to grant me some kind of solace... some answer that would allow me to not be gripped by the fear. When I know the hand of that something other has intervened, I know it. I still think of the long windy arguments of Hume, the rebuttals of Russell... but I side with Heidegger, Nishida, Emerson...just less fiery, wanting to be placated by the power of Now.

http://www.poetseers.org/contemporary_poets/poet_laureates/robert_hass/robert_hass_poems/meditations_at_lagunitas/

"For at the precise moment that the residents of the town started to panic, their thoughts were wholly fixed on the ones they longed to meet again. Their egoism of love made them immune to the general distress..." Albert Camus, The Plague.

Before his automobile drove into a tree dashing out his life forever, Camus wrote these lines in the middle of a study of the human experience/catastrophe. That peering insight into the human psyche, that no matter where we are, what we are going through, the thing that can drive us, save us from the pittances of inevitable ruin, is the vestiges of our spirit. Our spirit's capacity to reach out beyond ourselves to those who are "other" to us. The people whom we hold sacred, that no disease, malady or palsy can truly erase. Whether or not that tendency is inherent only in humans seems an unineteresting question, but that fact that it exists seems to be a point of marvel. It seems to me that to Camus and perhaps to people of similar temperament, that love itself, whether it be romantic or platonic really need not matter, can drive the human spirit. That desire to overcome suffering if nothing else to meet the ones we love again at the very least, for one last time, is a profound gift that has been bestowed us.

The Hindus or Buddhists say that this "attachment" is the root all human suffering however, that the sooner we can train our minds to attach less, or to try to root out that desire, that attachment, that therein we will begin to discover the beginnings of happiness. Admittedly, the Hindus and the Buddhists sometimes tend to take the stuffing out of the turkey, metaphorically speaking. They take away all that often inspires us Western folk. How we seek to take all that allows us to feel human and maximize those feelings, emotions, sentiments. Sometimes it's as if the Eastern thinkers have already dismissed that as the langishing on the fat, the very thing which ties us down---petty sentiment for weak-minded fools. And certainly, this can't be so , probably isn;t so. But if you were raised reading Western literature, you're drenched in these ideals, probably laid down by someone like Plutarch or even Shakespeare in his sonnets, that love is a lofty go, love allows us to reach outside ourselves and create connections, while the Buddhists have us questioning whether connections can exist if the self simply does not. And if the self does not exist, then how can connections exist between two identical selves that do not exist... Fiddlesticks. Mu. And sucks to your ass-mar. I refuse to believe that way, even though that sick part of my intellect wants to say, ahh learned much you have if you can this accept. I still side with the Romantics who might say that love of others helps our intellect rise into regions of heavenly thought. Love of others is like that of constant prayer to the divine. And such prayer could only be helpful to the soul... Weak reasoning? Maybe if you are a cold calculating rationalist. And maybe I'm giving up my opinion of rationalists. Let the gloves come off like a prom dress I guess.

writ.
It should be noted that the poem
came before the poet,
somewhere in the public registry.
They should place asterisks, write
in felt-tipped pens, or exchange fiction
for bold-faced, or italicized facts
in encyclopedias, not only to be streamlined
into the philosopher’s endless jabber,
but plain wisdom, like the sand bars,
or the egret or the daffodil, the stalagmite
maybe or your grandmother’s canned
beets, swirling in a sour sauce.
The message, likely, has been in stones,
predating the hieroglyph or the rune,
it has been reinvented with each set sun,
or eroded with the brine & granite.
It has staggered down the cobblestone rows,
black blood scabbed on its lips,
while the maggot preserved it through
the straights of plague, avarice
& brides undeserving of its love, & still
besmirched by the jewels which
might have stained it to gold worth
less than the leather of a pauper.
You that own its veins, never ask
to cauterize your wounds: your blood holds firm,
and you should be awake when
your messenger arrives with the mail,
you should startle at the code of the letters
In its address, the sound of it slipping through
the slot; you should hold all incoming calls.
Draw the blinds, wrap a drape around your bones,
and beat eggs & butter in celebration of its arrival.
Don’t be afraid to wander outside the city walls,
buy horses, the prize, thrifty ones, born to flight,
or a gondola with demons to its bow, a pack of dogs,
Don’t even be afraid to take the tarp to the inlet
off the mainland, forgo the pallbearers,
your disappearance may go unnoticed for weeks,
Maybe you will not need the ferryman,
or warm clothes, sweaters & mysterious cloaks:
go where the message drags you— if you’re lucky
enough you will find her naked & amnesiac,
her breast swelled out for the torso.
Her lips longing for medicine, her wrists
poised for the wrench of your bloodletting.
You will know it as a throng, a hum
through your nerves, like the scorpio unmooned,
Like a sting through your heart,
It will not relent: it will remain with you
through your molting, through the cancer of seasons;
It is rising through you, even as her loins may offend,
You have chosen to love her nonetheless,
because you are greedier than the hotel bill
might suggest, more savage than when the maids
come to clean, when you’ve broken her hips
because she asked you to, you will grab her hair
and flail between her thighs until the lights
explode from the tone of her passion.
It is like that when you have reached her hemisphere.
It is even unlike the sexy mysteries of the moon.
Somehow, you should have known that the message
was speaking to you coming out of the womb,
stretching your mother’s loins, hungry
for the basting of light, the sterling sound of the world,
The angry or curious voices colliding
with the novelty of anything but your own heartbeat;
your message was first heard in that heartbeat,
The same sounds as your body coming into itself,
It was the persuasion that you move into the electricity
of all that breathes, joining the conversation
of so many other voices, as whales, as the sea,
as the lightning, and moons, all dreaming with you,
amid the ceremonies for the dead, the script
of scrolls which will edge you through the nightmare.
The physical terror of walking on your feet,
The stark horror that the mortician will clean the blood
from the flesh of your extinguished skin.
After the rage of your extinguished skin.
There is a theme in the incredible message
that the poem came before the poet is a relief,
like the jolt of an airline, the ambuscade of winter,
like the air raid of sleep, the burn of holy wine,
Like the horizontal of a swan dive, the first cut & scar,
That we overlap with the race of the poem to its death,
that we are the skin & stink of this incredible message,
It is an exchange of breath with that unnamable thing.

This is one I knew I needed to come back to...the memory of the person about whom I wrote this has faded, but the essence of what this poem represents is still fresh today... how fresh it seems now with the is being what it is... even then, the end was always seeming to justify the means... do we give up comfort in to grow with the possibilities of the sometimes messy unknown... I don't know, I've thought always the poem answered that in a way that I found acceptable.

After Coltrane.
I just want to talk about you,
Said Coltrane to this evening,
The same where we have not met
And I am miles down roads
Which you have not seen
Nor heard this same absence
Which neither stars nor jazzmen
Can tell you how to fill.
And how their music stops between
Breaths and taps on the snare
For moments while I write, waiting
And chaos even from their lips
Is sweating and uncertain but carrying
Each crescendo and major lift,
Into sharp valleys where the horns say, move:
Tell her how you talk to her even when
Her sweat and smell can't soak
Your blankets, even when my music
Drifts into your walls after she has whimpered
Through your kisses and you have strained
To feel more like each other, have sought
Out the fallen vibe at the end of the boom
Where the boys all clap and you nod
Your head at their praise; but the back
Stage is lonely when you leave
on the plane next morning and she's not waiting
at the hotel room in a robe or an after
dinner gown with a glass of ice.
Tell her how the cab man can't give
You fare for her place and how you frown
When he pulls up at a club so full of late
Niters, clicking their ice and smiling
Broad out of their wet tongues and you can't
Get the literary crowd to talk about art
And how she pauses when she's seen the light
Tickling off umbrellas, through the leaves;
Off the awnings of the café where you kiss
Her neck and laugh like when you watched
The trains through the windshield, the mist
Forming after you took her heavy among the evergreens
While Cannonball's horns lit up the dash
And the whole gig being apocryphal
Like all endings of meanings are:
The same as forgetting to mention
Just how much you want to talk about her
With the evening, and every stranger reminds you
That they don't know you, they don't know about jazz
Or how you can read the omniscient stars.
I'm sure she's a wonderful girl, the evening said
Uncomfortably and if I were young like you
And knew your girl, I'd put down my books
And papers, and get back to the static of her nearness
I'd forget your homage to miles and jazz
And studying your art of reading the night sky
I'd get back to that place of her first music,
Just to tell her how much you want to talk about her

5.2.2007The funeral for my grandmother was last Wednesday, a week ago, April 25, and what a beautiful experience that was- and quite difficult to justify within the scope of words. My father asked me the morning I arrived in Albany if I would like to say a few words at her funeral mass. I was honored to do so, as herein I had been writing several things in terms of memories and reflections about what she meant to me. How many times she had been present in my life. So it seemed a relatively easy task for me, even if it was not under the circumstances for which I wanted to deliver such lines. But I knew she would have delighted in that. So even waking that morning, I found that I had developed a sore throat where my voice faltered often. That much discouraged me from the task but I still fought that impulse to flee from saying a few words. Even so, the eulogy was not the highlight of the funeral proceedings, but rather the vigil mass and the funeral mass that was said, was in a large attendance. From my aunt and uncle to the entire side of the Piurek family, dozens and dozens of relatives showed up to pay their last respects. I couldn't have been prouder of her at that moment, realizing how much she affected the lives of those around her. That was an honorable tribute to her life. Even the paperboy showed up, or so some of my Dad's friends who would have known her when they were younger as my father's Mom. It's a smaller town than I think we can give it credit for when so many people truly know one another.I had an incredibel time getting reacquainted with "long lost" relatives. In a lot of ways, my family was the pack of long lost relatives. They've been in the surrounding areas the whole time while we were the ones who left.

4.21.07My grandmother passed away early this morning, 3:30 Am from what my father said. I don't know how much I had gotten here but she had been in a Hospice care center since Wednesday, if I'm getting my dates correct. That's one thing that she bestowed on all of us, which might have always been one of the more impressive character traits: she never forgot a birthday or an anniversary. What might have been mistaken as an overvigilance was truly her charm as a human being, whether she wrote down people's birthdays or simply remembered them, though it was probably a mixture of both. She called my father to remind him of such things probably to his ire at times. You couldn't slip one past her, it just didn't happen very often. That was her way of being on the firing line of life, of keeping in touch with the reality around her. What a wonderful thing she had taught me. She continued to send me birthday cards, even up until this last year. I'm now thirty years old. That was the down side of her getting old, probably even to her, the inability to keep up with that. In that way, nature was kind to her, in affording her only a narrow berth of confusion. I am mostly saddened by those thoughts, the idea of her losing track of the time in the nursing home, going to bed in the afternoon because she thought it was nighttime. This from a woman who kept a tight calendar, who wanted to ensure that her bills were paid on time, that she made it to a voting booth on election day, if she could help out a given charity that she thought warranted her cause, she would make sure to give them what she thought she could spare, and by all accounts, she wanted the birthday, Christmas, Easter, Valentine's Day, Halloween cards, ( god that list she would have had tgo keep a list for that) all of them sent out on time so they would reach us before hand. I'm so grateful that my mother taught me to write thank you notes, however belated. Simply because I learned to send her notes back, to try to update her as best I could on what was happening with me. Some of my life became muddled, unsure, not really wanting to upset or concern or confuse her. There were just things happening to me and facets of my life that I didn't really understand yet. Things that I don't entirely know if I can understand even to this day. I look at her life, and I don't think it was spoiled in the least. My grandmother who cared about the little things, she just wanted you to know that she recognized you, that you were imprtant to her, if no other. If I have any regret in my life, it continues to be my distance from my family, the great barrier that I have left in place unintentionally. Lately, I have been asking if it needed to be there, if it's meant to stay in place. The passing of a truly great person from my life pains me in this way. How I could have been closer, how I wanted to be, so we could all enjoy ourselves as family again, or even just more often than t has been. It's a question I need to work with, to wrestle in the impending days. It just that I will miss her from my life, miss what she represented, that certainty that someone care, had left the light on, that someone would have a card for you at your birthday, that someone would tell you a story before you went to bed, that she remember what kind of desserts you liked, what you liked to drink, who your favortie team was, and on and on, Goodbye Nanny Laura, we hope you finally receive the love you gave this world..4.19.07I'd like to not dwell on the fact that I lost a day of notes that I had written down, because that makes me upset. I don't want to feel upset and I guess most people don't - that I'm not alone in that endeavor. Basically, where the attraction to drugs and drinking came from. Even so, I have had to go with this feeling, and listen to the advice of people who have had more experience with the dying of someone I care about... just in the same fact that that kind of experience gives me the language I need to move forward with the process...it's just been novel trying to sort through the memory of how her life impacted me, how our lives intersected over the years... how joyful she would be to see us, to tell us something that she had learned... all those years of stories about Tracy Schoonmaker, like she was so proud to be a part of our family, of continuing to bear our name. How she would talk to strangers on a plane,

4.16.07It has now been almost one week since we found my grandmother. This is my homage to her. Something I couldn't muster up in my younger years. I don't say that type of thing to beat myself up, just to be honest. Most people can be objective about their teenage years. In that that was what they were. I know that the fire erupted over a pittance, inflexibility, unwillingness to change. I was stubborn when I was young, and that stubbornness has followed me into my later years, but I am getting tired of the fight. Tired of arguing with family members, I don;t care about being right as much anymore. I find myself having that impulse, but there's a lot on which I bank the fact that I have gotten myself into the situation I'm in and perhaps had I heeded warnings earlier, I might have avoided the trouble, and consequently, some of the embarrassment. What was meant to be was meant to be however. Even so, I think today my grandmother would rather keep the past in the past.I couldn't help but think some of the fire & rescue men were angels indeed, shuffling around in her room, puzzled at how a woman my grandmother's age could even have made it as far as she did. She has histories, it seems, and there was no doubt about her needing to go to the emergency room...My grandmother did give you a kiss and a hug. It was gentle, not a big hug or anything like that, mild, but it was sincere, intended. She'd ask you for a hug too from time to time, but now looking back, I'm not sure if she came from a family that often expressed emotions with great comfort. We were Polish through and through, and if I've known anything about Polish families, it might be that they are somewhat reserved. But the love that is shared is deeply felt, in terms of understanding of loved ones, gratitude, honor. At least, that's how I've always read it. Fondness can be read more easily than familial love, but a strong bond does exist between family members. That alone would be interesting to try to study.Nanny Laura is proud of her Polish heritage, through and through. On this last trip, my father told me about how she could speak a little Polish but more than that, understood the language even better. I have a trickle of memory that she might have been able to add a little Polish to conversations with my Aunt Julia, who was from what I know, considerably older than Nanny Laura. This would have been when I was very young though before I was ten. So probably 20-25 years ago. Mostly, I would wonder how much my grandmother would recognize if she could hear someone who spoke in the same patterns as her sisters did. My father said he was unable or did not attempt to trace any of the Puirek lineage in Poland but that it is a high probability that there are distant cousins in some parts of Poland. My uncle Ziggy is the only remaining relative on that side of the family. But there was Julia, Bertha, Elmer (Lefty), Ziggy, Pete, Anne, Eleanore, that I can think of now. It seems strange that I should only now try to compile this kind of family history, which is really my own personal family history, but the truth is, when my father, mother and sister moved to Nebraska in 1988, our visits to New York became less and less. Therefore, our ties to the family got weaker as well, sadly. As time passed, the relatives on that side of the family died as is naturally the case. In addition, once my grandfather Eddie died in 1991, that side of his family would have weakened as well, as we, as children knew them only from afar. My grandmother, Alice, had closest ties to certain sides of her family, a lot of which have also passed on in the last few years. I have realized much too late that those people's lives and experiences are and were the last remnants of the old world from which they came. They were what was left of the unified theory of the world as we know it.They embody a strong family but not one without faults. Not one without divide ir resentment, discontent among members. It seems at times it was enough to keep each from speaking to one another, if only for just a little while.

4.15.07Not much changed between yesterday and today according to my father. Now I'm back on the phone with them, thinking more about it. How my father sometimes leaves things out (on purpose) but maybe also because he doesn't like to give disinformation. I've got to go back to work tomorrow and am realizing how much I don't seem to have been put on this earth for the purpose of working away at a job all day... not when I have these matters of the heart to deal with but then again, I feel like I learned something valuable over this weekend. Was I meant to be there for some reason, so it could tell me something about what I'm made of, literally, because when you watch family memebers go through their own personal battles, it tells you a lot about who you are, where you come from... it seems like my Nanny Laura was criticized for being "sickly" or weak but in reality she was a tough cookie for pain, a tougher woman for illness. She may have had ailments that came but she survived them. And considering what children had to fight in the late 19-teens and twenties and the little availability for medicine, it seems a miracle that they ever survived their childhood. My grandmother was born in 1916. I will always remember that date. My other grandmother is younger but not by much. She was born in 1918. Amazing to think that they have spanned that many decades. And with them goes the memory of the old country. Of this much I am ashamed. That I haven't had more time to write down stories. Not necessarily stories but as much as could be known. Nanny Laura might have forgotten more than I ever remembered about things she told me. She often wanted to let me known what my Papa James, her husband, my grandfather was like. Stories about Papa James, about when we were tiny babies and Papa James would hold us. Her mission in life was to remember, to transmit, and often to bridge the gap between the past and the present. She tried, and sometimes, I am ashamed to admit, I turned off that curiosity, I guarded myself from that kind of nostalgia. Today I yearn for it, I find it fascinating... she is fascinated. I don't know if she'll ever regain that fascination, that wonder, that earnestness of learning new things, forming opinions... her days are no longer young ones. Her heart slower than it used to be, her body losing its immunity to even the slightest infraction. This is how it becomes in the latter years. I have to pray for God's blessing, pray for his peace to come upon her, pray for quiet, for guidance whether it be in continuing on this plain or over into the next... I have to prepare myself for that...to continue no longer as it had been but in a new way...

4.14.07. I'd like to say I've never embarked on family history due to reasons of privacy but that would, in fact, be a lie. Not a cold lie, because any attempt I've had to be authoritative usually ends up with me simply being a bit skittish about revealing facts about my family. I just came home from Florida where my father's mother, my grandmother got suddenly very sick with an onset of pneumonia. When we arrived at the nursing home where she's been staying the last seven or eight months, October 2006, she was running a fever of 103.7, respirations were somewhere in the thirties and her blood pressure was peaking above 200 diastolic... so naturally we grabbed the nurse on duty and had her call the doctor to authorize a trip to the ER for closer examination. Fours hours later, she was admitted to the local hospital, then subsequently sent to the Critical Care Unit for closer monitring... my father thought she would not make it and of course, I wouldn't call her status in the clear yet, but I felt more relieved at whteher or not she would pull through...The hope is and no longer can be live or die, instead what the divine wills it... instead whther they are comfortable, whether she suffers, whether she can have some peace in her final days, however many they may be...

September 20 2007
To be sure, there's been more over the last year but how should one begin but by beginning again. The needle. Dropping the needle. Hearing those first few seconds of crackling vinyl bouncing up and down. Perhaps the greatest sound in the world, along with a mandolin, or a woman sliding out of her underwear. Inremittent moans, sighs, the sound of a congregation saying amen. The wheels of the car go round & round all through the town. I've never left. But I did hink back at some point over the last year and realized that Kesey had once talked about the prevalent importance of experience over the written language that without experience, the power of language becomes hollow. So it has been an experience to draw upon the last year or so. Walking blind.

July 28 2007
The Architect
They say he did not speak the language of people. It was mysterious but soothing to the ear like when you have a lover, trying hard to focus on the meaning, maybe the context but getting wrapped in the revelry of the sounds, the tones, moving up and down, around you. I’ve tried to chronicle as much of this life, as is my calling to bear witness. The haunting it undergoes into the veins of my consciousness, sometimes it dulls into a steady telling of the facts, an oracle in the morning, wet with dew, naked, on the mountain, reflexive. A bending back into the rhythm of what we used to know of as profundity.

January 21 2007
1.
Pax delivers himself from evil, only to plunge head on into snowy traffic. Pax creates a new vestige for anger. This lingering on anger only created an aloneness marked by a new-found sadness. All the people who used to call and inquire no longer doing so. When all else has failed....still you are left with yourself... The question is "what else, what else are you left with?" Could that aloneness ever be truly a vacuum? I remember getting sober back when and thinking about that statement, "nature abhors a vacuum," and immediately, feeling a creeping fear within myself that the black hole which would form within me would likely grow until I was entirely consumed. What a dark, dower thought but still I could not deny that something within me, felt like I was going to starve...

2.
I’ve told myself several times in the last few years
that I can’t write like that, visualizing placing
a ladder against a great white wall, and looking up
at a grand buttress, the planks of a building,
and it’s not that unfamiliar to me what is done
with the brushes, the strokes, the vision, or maybe
just my certainty that the job needs to be done—
that ladder, that raggedy, shaky, paint-splattered
ladder, so flimsy there in space: what if the wind
came in hard from the north while I was up in the eaves,
while I’m being so careful to perform, to patch
the words so you will love them, so you will
wrap your lips around them like the girls who
have loved me, or a popsicle late nights before bed,
or a blanket while you read the last pages of a horror story,
filling in the images we sew in our hearts, and
suddenly, it’s not the wind keeping me from the ladder,
it’s that I’m sleeping on the couch, below the ladder,
my eyes burning & chilling every time I regain
consciousness, how large the ladder looks, how
far apart the steps seem to be, how long the strides,
how many stairs edging their way to eternity—
surely, my breath will run out before the top, or
like sisyphus, I will reach my place, the grand place
of my oratory, of my masterpiece, only to fall
back down, to have return to earth again, only to
feel hope vanish, going down again, back to
the place where I was born, where I seem destined,
to hold a brush with workman’s hands, the kind
who does this work for skill, to eat, etches crude
drawings, dull scrawls on the walls of the world,
who knows not what he thinks, does not dine
in the halls of tradition, is a man without a country,
with destiny, will lean on the earth until gravity
bends him, until he returns to the earth—
what keeps me going back to the ladder is that
the view from the top is as inspiring as the view
from the bottom, that sometimes the ladder
is a catwalk, a bridge between seasons,
a place where I can reflect on where I’ve been
and where I’m headed, through field or stream,
whether the next step I’m considering will plunge
me deep into a rabbit hole, or whether I will
submerge from the forest untouched, and sanctified.
If I chose to write, if I thrust out my view,
I can still decide where to place the ladder,
when and how often I want to carry it with me,
it’s significance, if it indeed exists, or just lingers
as a harrowing or hopeful image in mind.
Whether to lean on the ladder, or stow it in the garage
for safe keeping, a sunny day, when it’s time
to paint the house I’ve been building, regardless,
in spite of myself, and whatever I’ve been fed that morning.

6 Feb 2007
The betrayal was not in the words, but in the omission, a blotting out of names, an interstate, a torrent of names, he was saying though he did not hope to reveal he knew her, or anyone for that matter. I’m watching myself finally do this, sort of recklessly, it is in the phone records. She can read the phone records. She pays the bill and yet, he may need to put an end to such an arrangement, for his own peace of mind, his desire to be purged of all guilt. He loved her, but had fallen out of love, and there was nothing he could do to bring himself back into the fold. When it is done, it is done. So he believed again.

After Coltrane

I just want to talk about you,
Said Coltrane to this evening,
The same where we have not met
And I am miles down roads
Which you have not seen
Nor heard this same absence
Which neither stars nor jazzmen
Can tell you how to fill.
And how their music stops between
Breaths and taps on the snare
For moments while I write, waiting
And chaos even from their lips
Is sweating and uncertain but carrying
Each crescendo and major lift,
Into sharp valleys where john says, move:
Tell her how you talk to her even when
Her sweat and smell can’t soak
Your blankets, even when my music
Drifts into your walls after she has whimpered
Through your kisses and you have strained
To feel more like each other, have sought
Out the fallen vibe at the end of the boom
Where the boys all clap and you nod
Your head at their praise; but the back
Stage is lonely when you leave
on the plane next morning and she’s not waiting
at the hotel room in a robe or an after
dinner gown with a glass of ice.
Tell her how the cab man can’t give
You fare for her place and how you frown
When he pulls up at a club so full of late
Niters, clicking their ice and smiling
Broad out of their wet tongues and you can’t
Get the literary crowd to talk about her art
And how she pauses when she’s seen the light
Tickling off umbrellas, through the leaves;
Off the awnings of the café where you kiss
Her neck and laugh like when you watched
The trains through the windshield, the mist
Forming after you took her heavy among the evergreens
While Cannonball’s horns lit up the dash
And the whole gig being apocryphal
Like all endings of meanings are:
The same as forgetting to mention
Just how much you want to talk about her
With the evening, and every stranger reminds you
That they don’t know you, they don’t know about jazz
Or how you can read the omniscient stars.


I’m sure she’s a wonderful girl, the evening said
Uncomfortably and if I were young like you
And knew your girl, I’d put down my books
And papers, and get back to the static of her nearness
I’d forget your homage to miles and jazz
And studying your art of reading the night sky
I’d get back to that place of her first music,
Just to tell her how much you want to talk about her.

How will it be when I am old & destitute
After the social security well has evaporated
And my back has definitely gone to the tank
And maybe I still have a little old wife stirring about

Will we able to tell each other that we love one another
or will she say it in a kind of montone,
matter-of-fact way as if it were an afterthought;
just another comment about the need for rain.

Will it rain so often that I'll forget what state I live in,
& have to confer with my mail to remember my zip code
How will it be when I so close to the end,
will I sleep with one eye open, afraid to shut them both for eternity.

You know, it can be seen from both sides, maybe
that dying before your time, as the euphemism goes,
might not be so tragic, since certain folks, struck dead
by aneurysms or blood clots, whiskey, do not suffer.

Or maybe they suffer but they did not wake up one day
knowing that this could be their last day, the ill-fated ones,
without disease, and it just happens to them: an accident,
or a freak change in their system, and they drop cold.

But when you have lived a long time, and know that if you
make it up there, seventy, eighty, say, you are cheating
that dark maiden, man, and you know it could come
for you any day. So you can be happy all you want,

You deserve it after all, you are cheating fate, but
maybe also you have this itch in the back of your mind,
a longing, something you didn't notice years ago,
but it's like hey, get it over with, if you're going to do it,

I mean, can't we just know, like a doctor's prognosis, or a
prophecy from some mean witch glass looker:
you will die on June 13 this year, you will be standing
in your parlor, or your garden, at 2 in the afternoon,

You'll look at the sky, it will be ninety-three degrees, unseasonably
warm, and the old ticker will stop for a second, start again,
etc. etc. but you'll be rushed to the hospital, and
within three days, that will be all you have written.

Maybe there's a reason why the gods don't want you to know
all that, to placate your fear, maybe, so I guess I just
want a little heads up, not so I can slack off for the
rest of the days, knowing where I'm headed and who cares,

But just a picture you want to see every so often to make
you grateful for all the good in life, to maybe offset
all the pits & drams too, so maybe some of the junk you
get dealt becomes less murky and honorable or dignified.

I have been watching the documentary on Charles Bukowski, and maybe most in awe of the sheer desire to write. "My light is dwindling now" he said later in the film, but the question seemed to be, "did the light ever entirely shine. Some poets seem to radiate an outward being but Bukowski, instead, was a lone 60-watt light bulb in the universe. Out of which came something tremendous and terrible and vast. The ramblings of a madman, and yet one who died of leukemia like so many others before him. I don't care to venture whether he stands in the realm of heaven or hell, wther he's in a better pace now then he dwelt on earth. I didn't know him personally, and I don't think he would approved of me, necessarily, or who in fact, he did approve of, what vestage of livelihood would have made him satisfied except maybe his own.
The message that appears from him from the little I've read of his work, how you cannot really trust the happiness of the good things of the world. If nothing else, I can't help but thank him for his honesty, though I want to believe that the world has some much more beautiful purpose than not trusting in goodness. Not trusting that the bluebird in your heart should be allowed to sing. More than anything, the writing of Bukowski makes me want to react to it. As if it's a monologue of that old guy who pisses and moans the world away in the blink of an eye. React to him, but on any given day, my own reaction would be different. Some days, I'd want to shy away from those words, from that sentiment, which is both morose and sublime, a hard liner for the truths that school children shouldn't yet get exposed to, or should they?
I remember reading Sex Drugs and Rock N Roll by Eric Bogosian my senior year of high school. My teacher had left it among her stacks and stacks of books she kept in her treasury at the back of the classroom. And I read it of course because it was everything that brought me joy in those days, and I saw the glamor of it as the epitome of all that life could pretend to be. I read Junky by William S Burroughs a year later, then convalescing at home after getting out of rehab for the first time. Eighteen years old, a dismal future lurking somewhere out of my reach. I don't remember when I first read Bukowski but I must have been in my early twenties, after I had read On the Road, after Franny and Zooey, even after Milton, Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson and Aldous Huxley. So it was in mind that here is a man who figures he's got the whole establishment figured out. Here's a guy who just will not budge. And it seems to me, that he never really budged, not until it was far past the call for pleasantries. And does this kind of life preclude or propel the existence of pain? How can you judge a man like that? Because it seems he may have been an incredible writer, chronicling human pain and human folly all at once.
I don't know if maybe it's just a sliver of envy. Envy, a deadly sin. Knowing that others are getting away with something like avoiding work for years and years. Heavy drinking. The utter attention to whim, acting on the first pretense, and being able to nail it down in a language that practically everbody can understand. There, right in your face, in a voice so plain as if he's sitting next to you in a bar, maybe or on a bench, or right there on the couch next to you. On the bus riding downtown or just to meet a friend. But all the words are written, typed out and pounded into a neat form. His own form. A form I like to get to but am having such a hard time of these days. That crisp sentence that every writer needs to validate his hunger for meaningful verse. He's not a man you can speaak about once and dismiss. He's a small lamppost in the middle of the unbeautiful city, with a 60-watt bulb, speaking softly but you cannot help listening to what he's saying.

I feel that yesterday, in commenting on The Squid & the Whale, I was more harsh than I can admit right now. I can admit that I knew I was being harsh even as I was writing that whole quip. But I won't retract. Instead, I can return to the subject for a second pass. Bernard, the Jeff Daniels character in the movie is a compelling subject in human loneliness. I said before that I could relate with him, and I think that's what sells me on this movie. At first, I thought it was funny but eventually, I just thought him sad, weak. The effect of this character mirrors that of Sean Penn in HurlyBurly and certainly Royal Tannenbaum. The arrogant, the decadent and the self-deficient. The fact that his children mimick him, that they take on his turns of phrases, and his mannerisms are a very powerful cause for thought. When most people can consider how much they have taken from their parents. Their temperament, their opinions, beliefs. What we hold sacred as truth, as definitive reality. Walt- who becomes a liar stopped in his tracks, matched by his girlfriend who actually reads Kafka's Metamorpheses at his suggestion, then cannot have any kind of lively conversation with him (because he hasn't read the story), only throws the words back at her in emptiness. I'm not entirely up to this tonight... I have other things on my brain, not the least of which is spring sprung, and the sometimes unholy consequences thereof...

...if'n you don't know by now...
The only thing I could really report within the last week was my viewing of The Squid & the Whale. A movie for which I had high hopes, only because I knew it didn't really get anywhere with the Oscars. Not like the heavy hitters, Crash, Syriana, Capote, Walk the Line, Brokeback.
So I saw this movie with the anxiety that it might be that sleeper hit that made it through the cracks. But instead, I came away feeling as if here was another movie that I could have left on the shelf. Maybe that's too much of a gut reaction. But I watch a lot of the HBO series with their no holds barred approach to the modern questions of interpersonal ethics, and I wonder how much of the dialogue is meant to be commentary, and how much of the remainder is nothing but intellectual shock manipulation. Like people need to see parents explaining to their children why they had an affair, and then blaming themselves for the dissolution of their children's behavior.
I mean, okay, we get it. Society is forever a continuing anecdote for human being's unceasing ability to behave poorly. And maybe the documenting thereof is healthy. Parents, in a general sense, have certainly begun to allow their children free rein with how to act in the name of "learning themselves." The youngest of the pair was Frank at age ten-eleven, completely unravelling from the effects of his mother and father constantly using each other and their children in unsavory attempts to get back at each other.
I know there are men out there as cold and self-serving as Jeff Daniels' Bernard. Maybe that's what unsettles me entirely about his character. Mostly since I think men like that are ridiculous, and Noah Baumberg said in his "commentary" that he intended for that character to be unwavering in his rigid arrogance. You want him to relent in some way. Maybe see it from someone else's perspective. But everything makes sense only if and when he agrees with them.
God, I guess every guy I've ever known has gone through that phase of his life, usally around age twenty-one until twenty-four or thirty-five-ish... haha myself included. Where he (or I) couldn't help but to impose my viewpoint on everyone around me. And anyone who disagrees is a Philistine. I couldn't help to relate and maybe that's what makes Daniels' portrayal so brilliant, but at the same time, and maybe this where he lost the Oscar, you can't bring yourself to like him in any way. I felt myself repeatedly disappointed by this man in his unfailing need to serve himself, and consequently, warp his oldest son, you can almost sense that hammer falling repeatedly as he shapes a clone in his liking. So is this a way of saying, folks this is not the way to do things? And isn't that the liberal stance on child rearing. Lead by poor example if you must, just for the sake of showing your children how not to live. Only the children who attempt to avoid following in their parents footsteps only fail to find the tread that's never been posited before them.
I only had that experience for a few years in my own life. Maybe the fact that my parents were mostly not open, until maybe the last two years or so, keeps me from "appreciating" this movie as a "worthwhile, must-see" type of movie. If you didn't see it, haven't see it, don't worry too utterly much. It has the ring of a Royal Tannenbaums type production and the characters are in fact, drawn thoroughly and probably realized even beyond the script. It's just that they don't meet in the right places at the middle to give you any good feeling about any of them, except a sorry feeling for anyone whose lives they should happen to touch. At least, Royal Tannenbaums managed to be funny to the point where we could make jokes about them after the show-glow had worn off. Here, I think we mostly marvel at how pathetic they have allowed themselves to be toward each other. How afoul they've run from their own briefly-lived intentions. But take that with a grain of salt. I've just recently seen Jarhead and Capote, two efforts that hit their mark with an almost senior precision. Two movies that managed exactly what they set out for, and no one could ask for anything else from. Maybe I'll watch Squid & the Whale again someday from a different perspective and gaiin that appreciation I desired. Until then, it's just another pretensious effort which will probably drift into video store obscurity.

A few things weighed on mind the last couple days. The last of which--today--came up from a magazine my girlfriend bought at the store, the latest copy of The Nation which had the article on the controvresy over My Name is Rachel Corrie. This is a play about a girl who had gotten crushed by a bulldozer operated by soldiers in the Israeli Army. It seemed strange that they had composed a play using her emails, journal entries because the play seems like such a strange forum for such an incident as this. Apparently, the play has been produced in London and has had a great deal of circulation there, but has been posponed "indefinitely" in New York. If anyone wants to know the full story about this girl, they can either google cahiers de corey or simply go to racehlswords.com. What lies there is a memorialization to a girl, I mean 23-years old woman, who had an adamant belief about what she was doing, and a strong desire to make a difference in a way that so few people get to. I mean, I went to college, and occasionally attended conferences and forums about peace and justice in the world, but ultimately, I have always felt like I fell short in the arena of actively contributing to the injustices of the world.
I often felt as if there was little I could do, or else, was only participating in the most passive ways to situations abroad or at home. I certainly never joined Habitat for Humanity and only signed a petition or two for Amnesty Interntl, and then received pamphlets ever after regarding symposiums or conferences which I never found an interest to attend. I thought it cold and calculating if I ever did. Depressing. Reactionary. Simply didn't want to be deemed a prostylitizer or something along those lines.
I just went to the rachelswords website and was inspired ? by what I found there. Mostly because there is a girl who's way up there on the Maslow hierarchy or Erikson's eight stages of development. This is a girl who must of been heavily exposed to Gandhi-like ideas, and she just stayed there, lived there most of her short life. That she wanted to be dance around to Pat Benetar and have boyfriends, etc. but that the kind of world that the people in the Middle East have to live in just simply needs to change. That the injustice should stop. There's a well there and I think people realize that. It's not that she died in vain. But that she died with a whole legacy untold of yet. Why? Because so many people die in similar causes and go unsung, and they are the dispossessed, and are so because they recognize so many who are similarly dispossessed. Just that simple recognition in a human being. realizing the simple, innumerable freedoms they have, and that there are so many who go without, only because they were born into families, into whole other worlds than our own. I don't think a girl like this wants to curse the world she is born into, but simply wants to see that this world, this planet is an equal opportunity lender. I think she sees the world from a wholly different perspective than what we are used to, the angle we're slinging.
I guess I got more interested in the Israel-Palestine situation as a result of a convergence of a few different news items. I am not a political person, but I subscribed to Harpers in college, mostly as a trickle down from reading it for the essay form. I loved the essay form, and still do, simply because it allows us to explore our beliefs about the information we gather through the world. In any case, to say I'm not political may be a bit misinformed. Some of us just don't delve that deeply into the world of politics as others. Yet, I found myself experiencing a deep sense of reverence upon my last couple trips to Washington DC, that there could actually still be something sacred about the constructs of government. At any rate, no more digression...
The Israeli-Palestine problem continues to be an elusive matter for me. I have done my best to read up on the matter, the major players, why the Gaza seems to be the cause of years of dispute? Being from the United States, in the modern era, a disenfranchised Catholic, despite twelve years (including college) of religious background, I am at pains to understand the importance of the occupation of land. The Jews against the Muslims, the Muslims against the Jews, and basically we don't want you in our backyard. Same as the Hazaras and the Pushtans in Afghanistans... Correct me if I am wrong, but this goes back to David and Goliath in a sense, does it not? Or even whether Abraham was the father of all human civilzation.
My point earlier, the United States, despite the childhood admission of the allegiance to the flag, has no sense of allegiance that's worth dying over. Or at least that's what we tell ourselves. Sure, we're Yankee fans, Red Sox fans, Broncos, Raiders, Nascar fanatics, maybe even Cadillac men and women, occasionally feminsts and vegetarians. We express our individualities, and even proclaimn ouselves as white supremacists, Christian coelites or abortion/pro-rights activists. We get behind causes or teams, but most of us don't need to fight over land. We're not constantly having to move every five days because the border has changed. Since it became an annexation in 1845, Texas is pretty much the Texas it was back then. Better yet, and more precisely, San Antonio is pretty much going to stay San Antonio for the next couple of months.
And not a gun will need to be drawn to keep that a constant. We in Omaha do think a little different, at least the papers allow us to. Because there are small towns in the surrounding areas that are in jeopardy to be annexed by the great city metro proper. There may be some pissing and ranting about that. The towns may get a little feisty at council meetings and folks get upset, but car bombs aren't going off. The national guard is not coming in on this one. They argue in side, loudly but by definition, peacefully.
Then, you have Hamas, with their green flags and their chanting and parading. People are firing weapons into the sky for celebration. We don't get it, because it's just not how business is done in America. But there's simply a need to break down that veil of ignorance, the shroud of awareness. That this is a big big world we're in outside of what we're usually moaning and groaning about. It would just be nice to open that dialogue a little more often, and keep that line to the outside world humming just a little more frequently. I work for an international company with clients who move and operate throughout the globe. They travel in and through areas which should be of concern. While they're in the job, they may be acutely aware of such things. They know it has happened, that it could happen that they are rendered helpless against the elements of hostile regimes. But it is never entirely the American's concern because they have a sense of destiny in which bad things happen to civilized people. They want the seat on the airplane closest to the front. They want the low-fat meal on the plane. They want the exit row to afford more leg room. They expect that "you can just make that happen." "Are we all finished here?" "Are we good now?" Israel Palestine , the Iraqi insurgence is just something you read about in USA Today in the airport or in the break room. It may even make it to your couch as you watch the evening news over meatloaf. It is a situation, an occurrence. Unless you can break it down, unless there's people involved. Not people like you and me, no, they're lives are hanging in the balance. They may work for a living, but not if they're homes are uprooted, their lives overturned, inconvenienced, placed in a state of shock and realignment.
They are like you and me, in every respect, except for out of what bodies they were born, onto which earth they fell. We could say, tough break. Which is what would be most easy to say, Wec ould just change the channel. We could completely shut it off, forget about it. Relax with our thoughts or the new Julia Louise Dreyfus comedy coming out. That fucked up Bill Paxton show on HBO about the Mormon family with three wives. My thinking is just this-- there's just not enough drive to stay plugged in to realities of the world. If nothing else, just knowing whats happening beyond your front porch, beyonf the city limits, out there, over yonder, across those two big ass oceans, in those continents that outnumber us 4 billion to less than 1 billion. It was the cradle of civilization until we just into a few ships and tried to sail around the world. Then we got stuck here. And we've been stuck here ever since.

The February 21st Post may have been a little harsh... the whole revolution for the sake of revolution seems like a misplayed scenario. What do I do every day after all? I put people on planes. Take them off planes. Put them in overly priced hotels. Take them out of those hotels. Place them in seats. Make sure it's an aisle or your ass gets chewed off. Give them a car I couldn't afford to drive to wheel around in for a couple of days. Get them home to their wives. OR cats. Sometimes I can't get them home fast enough. Sometimes I want to tell them to go to hell, put on a plane to Bangladesh, maybe then they'll shut up. Sometimes I can't stand it. I went to college too. I just didn't master in business. Instead, I'm stuck with a crappy English degree. A lot of knowledge about the Romantic poets. Coleridge's dilaudinum habit. His tuberculosis. Etheridge Knight, Mass Media & Modern Culture. Reflections on the gender politics of the Gillette razor. I realize I was a person once. Maybe people even regarded me in a such a manner. I fight the powers that be, occasionally, but often lose. It's a tug-of-war throughout the week. My bosses--- there are two of them--- and they rarely come over and talk to me, haven't caught on to the fact that I can be downright argumentative in certain circumstances. I can't always get a grasp on what people are asking for, or what they're up to anyhow. So, I disagree with them. I think they're being childish or rude. Sometimes they are, but I've learn that big business motto, that the customer is always right. You're not supposed to argue period. My roommate tells me I have to learn to not give a f*#@k , something which only makes vague sense to me. What am I supposed to develop an indifference toward. Other people's words, their commands. What if you just don't know how to do what they're asking? What if you've entirely lost them in the syntax? There I go, being argumentative again. Just don't be a s:%thead and I'll mostly get along with you.
But it's not a winning attitude I've taken on. I've resorted to reading Buddhist reflections on Anger and Peaceful Acceptance. There seems to be great pain involved in that level of acceptance. Of giving up what you have learned or have interpreted for the truth, for some other plan that has been mapped out. People are getting away with that on a constant basis, I think. Just not giving in to the madness. Not taking it personally. Letting go of the self to discover the self, as priest I knew once said. It's the kind of thing so many people can give advice about, but yet so difficult to put into practice. Especially when you're not disposed to it. I love my old man dearly, but I learned a lot of behavior from practicing what he does, just blows an absolute gasket sometimes, cuts you up from the underside with a snide remark. It's in the genes, they say. Maybe. But there has to be a way to break the cycle.
I've taken to blogging this evening because I thought maybe it might make a difference, this cynicism that's grown into me like a cyst. That you shouldn't let people cut you up. I still don't think you should but how many people have I known and heard say how when you react, you let them win. It's never felt like a win just by being passive. They don't seem satisfied. I've even had people say, "are you still THERE?" which seems to suggest that they are attempting to drive me away, or rock me down to their level, where I say, son, you bet I'm still here, and by god, I'm entitled to be. Like that declaration alone will validate my existence. What a cobweb.
I'm going to work on it, because my former MO was to whimper and cry and overmedicate myself when I got home by playing video games all night in my room. Blotto myself. Rock the brain into a coma. But that doesn't work for me. Great, if it works for you. It's always been more in order to channel all this crap. Welcome to this Channel, thank you all, I'll be in town all week!

entropy.

Such as dancing the tarantella
With your lover and tripping
Over your heels which
Smash her birthday gift;
Or feeling the terse breeze
Of an electric fan
And mistaking the shadows
For an evening under
A Managua heat & gunfire;
Such as misnaming your firstborn
For the Cuban general
Last castrated by Communist sympathizers;
Or such as, losing enough grace
So as to drag the electric
Fan with you into the bathtub;
Or your wish to remove
Your mirrors from the premises &
Biting your lip at the urge to
Give practice lectures to
the stranger watching from the walls.
Or such as this sleeplessness again,
Which wakes the neighbors,
All the windows propped open,
Because you are freezing anyway;
Thirteen below, the weatherman
Shivered and smiled saying this;
He wears a suit and tie that you
Decided you could not afford purchasing.
Such as the clock ignoring
Your need for a fresh start,
The savage children who will
Eat you alive again.

Such as rubbing your forehead,
Palms sweaty, tremorous, condensation
On the martini glass, and you
Wouldn’t be doing this again,
If you could afford paying back the loans.
Such as abandoning your car in traffic,
Dry-heaving in the bushes,
While drivers gawk at the red light.

Such as explaining your unbalance
To the psychiatrist, covering
Your ears to drown out the nonsense
Of the last few months which the death
Of a loved one might explain.
Such as the grey shapes above your
Closet or just outside your window,
Which are ghosts of your procrastination,
Which are thank-you letters unsent.
Which is ruthlessly needling you,
Wishing for a cocktail to guide
Through the evening news, which is
The man at work always inviting
You to happy hour across town.
Which has medical advice for the remedy,
And whose name you keep changing,
Which is costing you your wages,
Which you have never pegged w/ your finger.
Which is the drawn bow of your
Everyday panic, which in your mind,
Has drawn you indoors, placing
A peephole so you know who is calling,
With your caller id you feel safer,
Which has you worthlessly attending
To menial labor, so its summons
Won’t rap so loud, you ignore its
Knowing insinuations, its vicious poetry
Working on your last nerve
This side of you raging through the city
Blood pouring from your ravaged heart.

what are we doing revolution-wise?
or is the goal to go zig-zagging into the anonymous dream?
are we waiting for walk the line to arrive on DVD,
live our quiet lives vicariously through an actor playing a legend?
are we waiting for the next super bowl, keeping drinks on ice
and a pantry full of salsa and tortilla chips?
what have you done revolution-wise? other than telling the boss
to stick it, stuff your pockets full of lotto tickets,
and clench your fist while shuffling into the unemployment office?
last I checked, we got a curveball in the white house,
been there for the greater part of the decade, writing his own laws,
signing his own tickets, while his buddies get rich, richer
and the oil fields over there get hot, hot, hotter from the rising fires
and the academics get brainier, the drunks get drunker
and the methheads get empty in the head, in the skin, in the teeth,
you would think there would be someone raging at that,
some wild-haired gent or lass just seething at the audacity of all that:
fill in your blanks, folks, when was the last time the stars
danced for you, when you could get outside of the nine-to-five,
banned food day, boycotted happy hour at the seventh heaven
or drudged up a charity fund to get some of the negativity, the cobwebs
out of your just-trying-to-make-it-to-four-thirty frame-of-mind
it doesn't have to be cranky, you don't have to smash equipment,
but necessary, don't you think, called-for wouldn't you say?
let's not forget how we might get revolution-wise, open up the conversation,
breathe the real air, not the kind that's blowing by on the tv screen,
where we're captive, strapped to the chair, our eyes held open
by steel wires, where we're screaming inside, our mouths sealed shut,
alone, thinking, getting it, with no one to tell, with every chance to forget,
because we think we're dreaming after all, anonymously dreaming,
of being on film, changed and beautiful, wishing we could act revolution-wise.

Listening to a little Vic Chesnutt tonight but I've been meaning to start this thing for whatever it's worth...
in no particular order...

Field Work in Ash & Blue

I left all my thoughts on Leavenworth Street
That lazy avenue always crying under the wet tarp:
For its anonymity, for the cracked-up eyes lingering
on its curbstones, which wonder where you've been lately
and who you're fucking at night while your children sleep;

that name synonymous with jails and private card games:
a legacy for the hustle, food stamps and warm dry gin,
But that was only where it began, the fat artery out of which
Blood then & now had been flowing: not blood for the nightly
news or the photos on the inner lining of the wraps, but
the scuffle just down the side streets, under dark awnings
and yards of cardboard glass, to be hidden from the neighbors
But known like the cheat in a spread: not a dime that drops
there is worth its keep, yet I dared nightly to dream
while my engine idled in the sad corners of its parking lots.

I held a fare uptown with a woman who danced for men
for twenty-five years, every night, I carried her twenty blocks
east and four south, and she spread her hair along the backseat,
as if somehow that would break the mystery of her shroud
as if men must live through such seductions to keep their namesake,
and survive the smoke as it curls from lips, and smile but look
the other way, no matter how lonely they've become
by the end of the day, no matter what the cost of the bear & bait,
as if anyone could fend off her silky advances & flip down the nightshade,
then slide away to sleep with clockstroke & cool antacid.

I seemed to be outlasting all the wretches, for no other reason
than to scratch together a few dimes, run back to the garage
to punch my card & rendevous to my nearest base of asylum,
without any kin to take me, the last remaining namesake this end
of the Missouri River, with the want of a nail for my kingdom lost,
just a witness in this field of spinning ash & blue, skinless around
the scalp & faceless like so many of these corners, long shots
to a ticket elsewhere, stunned in the midst of the anonymity
of every stranger and their crazed introductions, their demands,
their alibis, their aliases and wigs: beneath their cover, I am offered
these in confidence, should I contact someone who shouldn't hear the news.

In this vein, I took it all in stride, a nightly parade through this
cowering alley, old Leavenworth, ashen in winter, muddied by spring,
so that with summer, I left all my thoughts in the bus stations,
in the alleys, and at the girlie bars, in the fag dens, with the marquis'
with the spinsters, with this street and all its drinking buddies,
with its poker friends, its bartenders, its bookies, its shrinks,
with its Indian chiefs, all pass off and left in the notebooks, painted
lily white, all new and fresh on the clapboards, a new print for its sheets,
lying in a dress of satin, glimmer and found clean like so many other
passing streets, in other seasons, towns of intrigue, fools who wander
from the painful strain of hidden mistakes, streets washed over by ash & blue.

I really have to rework some of the images on this one, never one of my stronger pieces.
There's stuff I like about it but ahh, whatver. I can always improve of some of these pieces.
I don't hang out on Leavenworth Street in Omaha, NE very much anymore.
I don't have the time nor the wherewithal. I guess it's probably no worse than Broadway
in Council Bluffs, and a far cry from the Bowery in New York, or other places I've been in Baltimore or DC, but it's worth a nod. I'm always game for hearing about the places that never sleep, like the Strip in Vegas ir whathaveyou.