About writing, about drying out, about rotting

Each day here is more of a season I am creating. Autumn internal. As a mature adult,I have been - and continue in the flesh to be - a remorseless Dionysian. Show me purity and my first impulse is to pull it up, show it the soil on its roots, make some new soil. There are many people who have me in their lives for just that need - a steady, quiet, irrevocably innocent corruption.

I quit drinking two weeks ago, committed myself to a year of alcohol related sobriety. I love revelry. I have a taste for wine, beer and whiskey. I embrace darknesses and I loathe the concept of abstinence of any kind. The totality. Two reasons Have led to this decision then. I have been blacking out - something embarrassing to admit - more and more frequently at lesser and lesser thresholds. Waking to nulled debauchery, good and bad, is too much darkness for me, or maybe too specific a kind of darkness. I have had some remarkable experiences and done some shameful things that I do not recall.

All this that I have talked about so far are adult experiences. I take joy in challenging purities but there is the other half of my life, the stable external, the sweet Apollonian faces of my young boys and the naive huntress in my daughter. That part of my life shows me that some purity must mature. I must over the course of husbanding them to adulthood, guide them to a maturity of complexity and paradox, but I cannot force it. Cannot push it on them with my actions.

So I back off and internalize. I nurture the introvert in a quiet bed of fiery autumn leaves.

That this coincides with autumn helps

That i had begun, without intent, to read poetry helps

That the woman in my bed is a brandished fire I must nurture and appropriate at arms length helps

And as my mouth goes mute and the impresario withers, my third eyes opening slowly and aged.

I am committing verse to memory and reciting aloud to myself while I work in nature and in public. 

I am writing a novel - wading into a dark and mad sea. I had been fleshing out a play, a surreal morality farce set in the exhaust of the civil war, but caught tied up in themes and characters. Like a doomed general I was plotting and strategizing and mapping while William Tecumseh Sherman - not even appearing - marched straight and through and overwhelmed with daemonic strength. The play was lost and I was left to wrestle with him. 

Sherman is of course famous for or infamous for burning a mile wide path from Atlanta to the Atlantic. An act of what he called Total warfare. He was Lincoln's avenging angel, killing first borns and salting the earth for the righteous cause of the union. Total warfare because he recognized the enlightenment idea that the governed are ruled over only at their own consent. A nation at war does so only with the collaboration of its populace. 

There is an episode of Star Trek where two planets wage war by computer proxy and though the citizenry are subject to randomized casualties, the horror and destruction are bypassed. This is rather a topsy turkey version of our convention of waging war on others by remote mechanical proxy. The bold Captain Kirk called for a total war and for an experience of horror and consequence. I find myself agreeing with this despite a developed sense of pacifism. I see the most effective deterrent to mass human violence is the horror specific to it. Now, we neither see nor feel the violence we inflict and so commit to it at our leisure. How do we release ourselves of casual violence so addictive that even our language of peace is infested with it?

So shook, i commit to my novel, tied by this tortuous link to a tether held by a man who is not even a character in a derelict play. I have found the secret. We must give up some things that we love and are committed to. We must give up decency and morality to commit to war. We must become destroyers. We must give up causes and interests to commit to peace. It cannot come with our security and luxury intact, nor with our force to power cohesive. We must give up comfort and nurture to commit to love. Because all violence is related so is all peace. 

The secret to writing that I have found is to move straight ahead without thought or pause. To write horribly and incoherent. to forget characters' names and develop nothing. To not step out of time but cease to consider it. To carve a swath wide and merciless with bull feet raging. I have turned the ritual madness and ecstasy inward toward the page and given it up so that I may cultivate cool and brightness. My children, my wife get an even-headed man, head of house and bringer of fortune and grace. Me - I get a fecundating compost of maenads and minotaur and tree roots. I get to make up a man a subject him to a total collapse of love as cognitive dissonance, to abandon, to spiritual ecstasy, hedonism and immeasurable violence, immerse him in a mad ocean and wash him up on a strange and hostile shore - a reborn human.

I saw Bill Callahan twice this weekend, right up front. He opened with White Light/White Heat. He closed with this song - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F44qDHAMw2M

A classroom of kindergarteners was murdered today

Tragedy is a word I've heard a lot today. Its not a very powerful word, comes standard in news broadcasts and political recognitions. Aside from its acquired vulgarity, it is an individual experience, as I understand it. There were twenty eight tragedies dealt quickly and countless following that. I am searching for a word, something that indicates the ragged gash that was torn.
An anguish. A cluster of anguishes.
I sobbed all day, the newsman reporting over the radio sobbed, the policeman in charge sobbed, the president addressing the nation did too. The sobs were an admission that it does not matter. It does not matter that the president stopped leading the world to recognize a local horror. It does not matter that the policemen were securing schools across the state and securing warrants. It does not matter that a reporter pried for details to deliver up to the minute about an event that was finished. It does not matter that a man's heart was broken for hearing it.
It does not matter because it is done. A roomful of the most magical brightness and promise has been snubbed out by one person who must surely have lost all that and been in so much pain. I hope that the poor young man gets to a heaven where each of his victims come to him to forgive him before they all melt back to the infinite.

As for the living, we remain. Twenty sets of limbless parents with impossible tomorrows. Classrooms full of miraculous brightnesses tarnished. Teachers returning to do what they do not know. A community grappling with shameful relief and clumsy support. Policemen searching cause for reasonlessness, seeking to punish a ghost. Politicians, perhaps honestly, expressing empathies doomed to course policy scufflings.  And even the killer, someone must have loved him and if not, someone surly should have.

A man across the nation, trying to bypass the bromides of sympathy, trying to find scope of an event that has affected him but that he cannot affect. A common man sharing common feelings. Trying to stop sobbing for a blip of horrors amongst horrors, knocking together a crude assemblage of words for what?

I have a message, and it is not mine but it is in my own words:  With compassion, you cannot know a person without loving them. It is our reason in this world, to seek that compassion always, to strive. And it is also our duty, good people, to strive to be more easily loved, but mostly to endeavor to love those who do not or maybe can not.

What do you want from me? I'm the fucking God Of Spring

I am
 striding through ages, feet stalk and root into the fetid loam, wading upon death, fungal toes mingle worm and slug; legs column and sweat and bend at the knees to trample, buttocks shits out richness, ass quivers with effluent, cock runs wet with lust as a sword with blood, each testicle an army the hips thrust on every woman and man, navel plumbs the mysteries of Saturnine belly, rumbling and roaring in spiraling viscera spilling out as labyrinth, augured by melancholic spleen and sanguine heart, lungs bellowing with laughter at the trifles; ribs hold the whole of creation crack from within like thunder from two shoulders - orbiting planets from which two arms of lightning reach hands each in greedy possession of the earth and the sky. And my head is the head happily split like a melon by the ritual clubs of the sons of men

I am
A trifle
We are everyone
Gods beyond time
Fingers in the current of the present

recipe

I can make a perfect omelet
perfect just for late morning
brunch alone and a cup
of coffee and a newspaper

three fresh eggs set aside
fry some bacon hot,
garlic, onion in the grease
perhaps red bell pepper

chop some greens chop
the bacon too, chop
everything so far in fact
plus three fat slices of cheddar

Now heat a pan more than
you think, less than too much -
olive oil and only just enough
to be too much unsalted butter

lightly scrambled, eggs.
cheese. bacon. garliconionredpepper
greens and give it some space
to let it be is always better

roll it over and note the mess
you have made, its great - just
roll it again then let it sit for a
bit on a plate, a dash of black pepper

take a breath take a dollop
of sour cream and sit down
coffee at right hand fork at left and enjoy
the perfection you've prepared

A rare vent

Lately, when people ask me whats going on, I don't really have much to say. The days are slippery and the only action I have to refer to is work, constant and insufferable. I don't do much else. Lately.

I work in a field that is somehow filled with people devoted in a singular way to working away their lives.  I suppose there is some nobility in that, but I don't really see it and I really resent having that paradigm imposed upon me. Maybe they are doing what they love. Doesn't really seem like that type of career.

I am not doing what I love. Not really. That kind of feels like a class based luxury.

(What do I love to do?) I am maintaining corporate properties throughout the greater Bay area - Mall Stores, Banks, Extended Stay hotels.  Some observations involving gross generalizations:

Capitalism is not an efficient system, or a system that seeks efficiency, contrary to some economic theories. I am a rotating cog in the wheel of this machine, the wrench who works where pointed. We have a guy in South Bay and I live in Richmond. Why are we working in each other's neighborhoods on the same day? Why are we employed at all. It cannot be more efficient to contract a company that contracts my company in Orange County (a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a New York City Company) that sends me to greater points of sitting in traffic for hours to charge $100 an hour to change light bulbs. Think of the local handy-people who would love to be called for that for half the price, a tenth of the drive and none of the overhead. Maybe its a hassle for stores or districts to field their own work, but it is certainly doesn't seem viable and efficient to cover all that bureaucracy and overhead. Also, we are using fax machine as our primary source of communication. How is that technology still alive?

Extended stay hotels are the most lifeless depressing places in the developed world. Really. Yes, more than abject poverty. Do yourself a favor and do not notice how many of them there are. They maintain two types of employees: the self-important martinet who must have a degree in hotel management and probably imagines they are on a track to something more important, but will make no better than bottom level corporate, and the junior college dropout with all the curiosity of an earthworm. Primarily the former, but they both could care less about the needs and desires of their customers (who are generally luckless miscreants or victims of some specific personal disaster). These are the people who I would fear in fascist states. If you work at an extended stay, or are related to someone who does, I am sorry.

There are two types of malls in the world. Rich Malls and Poor Malls. They are quite different in layout, store variety, food court, smell, employees and patronage. But under the two categories, they are all exactly the same. I can find my way around a mall immediately on entry. The french store employees are snooty and rude, the "natural" cosmetic store employees are generally pretty and mild, and the other cosmetic store girls are always having a party. Radio Shacks are staffed by affably awkward guys. I don't quite get the shoe stores.

Oddly enough, I prefer banks. But I have learned that office folks have a different understanding of labor than I do. They are always surprised by how much I accomplish and how quickly. I believe that is because they do not actually work very much, have many impromptu breaks and conversations and very rarely labor. 

I think I have that out of my system.

Well, I was the Chappy

And I probably took it too seriously and not seriously enough. Not sure for whom - but that's my impression. I'm totally fine with that self -assessment.
I started by thinking about where I was  going and who would be there - the redwoods with a bunch of UU's. I am not a UU. UU's are interesting folk. It would be difficult to make many generalizations but there are definitely some broad impressions that I wont make here. UU's in the woods. The woods are gentle sentinels of a medium permanency and a solid hint of decay.

Day 1 - I have to do opening circle? Oh crud I forgot about that! Public speaking, round one, in the round, unprepared. You try it.
Day 2 -Well, work with what's on hand. Take comfort in trees' place of primacy in my personal metaphysicilology. Trees, each growing as it grows in its place and time, each its own potential perfection reached as each is able. As we should aspire.
Day 3 - And then they bend down and die, as we all do. What terror - we walk around on decay and consumption, we squander life on trivialities and avoid death like public speaking. To what end? What will be a reason in three or four generations, or planetary generations, galactic. I bet it doesn't even matter - shiver. The horror is our true place and mystery. What do we do with that? How the hell should I know, but we are not served by ignoring it.
I did a memorial service that day. It was easy to prepare for, as I recalled my grandmother's service from two weeks prior, at which I spoke briefly. I said similar things. I don't mean that flippantly.
That day was emotionally exhausting
Day 4 - Carnival - I take that meaning to heart. Speak on non-sense, as nonsensically as the attendants might tolerate. I would have produced some dada had I the moxy. Revel in the new moon, warm lodge, general feeling of abandon, and what I am going to just refer to here as a mythic. Self made Bull mask is well served and served well.
Day 5 - I missed service. Heard it was good. Dammit, had been laying in bed rewriting the entire thing and time got away from me.
Day 6 - Closing circle. Well prepared with new service from day before. Might have figured something out about Liberal UU and Faith. The word makes them uncomfortable but they have it. Its the response to the solitude of individuality, to the the awe and terror of indifferent nature, to the absurdity of things that is either comedy or tragedy. Faith that our actions matter. We are more than digestors, procreators and consumers. We are actors in a drama that may have no other audience than us, but us is enough and what we do matters and we know what to do. We do the best we can. Sometimes how is muddled but the what is pretty clear. Faith that we can do good and that it matters.

So that was that. I got all my books back - hopefully with some interesting notes.
I heard a podcast today that I thought did a much better job of everything except corporeally being in Mendocino at the appropriate time. I cant figure out how to link it up but its worth a listen. Its a speaker from the Personal Theology lectures held at UUCB (swear I'm not UU) from back in 2010. The speaker is Sam Keen and the title of the lecture was Elemental Sacred Emotions. I agree with every single word he said and would have said them if I could.

You Can't Have It All (but you can have quite a lot)

My Daughter woke up crying this morning about five - maybe a nightmare. I had spent the evening prior with a bottle of wine attempting to revivify old vital fluids, so it was not the most welcome. It was redundant however. The wine had failed and I was already awake nursing the anxiety attack i went to bed with. We had our morning together. The anxiety was about my inability, so far, to find purchase in the material world, and to secure for my family their place and safety in it. There is a part of me that sees farther than that, that knows security is as illusory as survival is luck. But a broad perspective does not feed mouths. It was a growing anxiety as I realized I had to do something to make my day move foreword somehow toward something but could not grasp - grasping as I was - what I could do. So, without direction we started our day. It is astonishing how a two year old can focus you to the moment. The moment does not feed mouths either, but it keeps you going.  Thank you my toddling little beacon of light My sister called me early into that day. She sounded quite down as she often does and I am glad I did not make a crack about that. She was calling me because my mother was unable. My grandmother had died; my mother was shrouded in grief. Thank you kid sister for your compassion and bravery. Eventually I spoke with my mom. My grandmother, who had suffered a stroke a bit over a year ago, had run a bath and gone unconscious with the water running and had drowned. My grandfather found her. My mother expressed concern for my youngest brother who is finishing his last month of college and lives alone. You all, my mom said, have people who love you for support and he is all alone. I offered to finish making calls to siblings and did so. Everyone loves each other. Everyone seems to be feeling the current of the inevitable and the helplessness to help each other. I am grieving in such a subtle way I barely apprehend. My grandmother is gone. She was fortunate to have lived so flu and long and to have made such a big and loving family. I have been fortunate to have had all my grandparents with me into my thirties, to know my children in their first decade. I am being visited by memories and by my slight perception of her as a being. She danced on couches with my mom singing "step in time", she accompanied my grandfather on missions and trips all around the world, she took me up to her sewing room at every visit to see her magnificent quilts and jars of buttons and water colors and stained glass and whatever else she was tackling with the effortlessness of a savant, she played cards at the table andante on walks in the woods and had a little mountain garden and knew the frogs that would come out of the frost each year. She was the wry and round little (5'1") grandma with the drawer of sweets. The subtle feminine play and creation to my grandfather's masculine godhead. We write our own myths with our own inhabitations I am worried about my grandfather. They were married for over sixty-five years. I will not see him until the funeral and I fear he will be a different person. I fear he will not remain much longer. He has had his life as well, so that is my fear. I worry about my mom, the baby of the family and the black sheep, losing her mother, one leg from under her and my little sixteen year old sister trying to shoulder that. and my brothers and I wanting to be what we all imagine we should be, the steady bind, beside our own grief, support for everyone, not from machismo, but from love that everyone should be able to actually have their experience with abandon over the safety of a love. So not machismo, but the hubris that we can handle it so that others don't have to. Thank you my daughter again and my wife for going on a bike ride with me because I don't know what could have been better. Thank you wife for the poem - You Can't Have It All
by Barbara Ras
But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back. You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August, you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love, though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys until you realize foam's twin is blood. You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs, so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind, glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness, never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you all roads narrow at the border. You can speak a foreign language, sometimes, and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead, but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts, for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream, the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand. You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed, at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise. You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump, how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards, until you learn about love, about sweet surrender, and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you, you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept. There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's, it will always whisper, you can't have it all, but there is this. In the scheme of the world the loss of a grandparent is not so much, and it is a gift that it is not, because I am not in a wailing tomb of despair. I am seeing the little lens that I have of this one life in my life and the magnificence of it and I am seeing in the little lens of my loss, the great losses of others and can shed that love on them. There is not so much to grieve for me - a well lived life, long and full of losses and regrets and love and creation and many many people to grieve her. Thats quite a lot from our meagre grant of time Thank you grandma for being the only person you could have been. It was pretty amazing Also, she loved John Denver. i have been listening to that all day and also rediscovered eels album I lost in the fire.

family camp 2012, prologue

Going to only one week of camp this year. Just too damn expensive.
Volunteering for rate as always. This year rather than sanitation engineer, I will be chaplain.
That's right. I don't even really believe it myself - a chaplaincy.

Will I endeavor to illuminate the grandeur ever present, with the redwoods as my backdrop, the soil as my pulpit, the sky my sermon? Will I share my personal feelings of a constructive nihilism - a shaky and lonely place of wonder? Will I mostly silent, guide each through their own reveries on anything that seeks reverence.

Any of those will honestly suffice compared to the likely stiff and board probability I will present. The monosyllabic and slightly pedantic and likely condescending thing of me I will present.
That is my fear I guess. I hope not

I hope I can offer myself unique and shepherd each attendant which the least intrusion to their new days.

I was a fool I am a fool I have been fooled

Books. I love books.
I have been reading books for thirty years. I like the way they look on shelves. I like the smell. i like the feel. ( I hate dust covers). I started young, engaging Peanuts Encyclopedias in preschool, off in the corner and forgotten. I read the real encyclopedia en toto - 1963 Britannica. I was a devourer of books. Books are holy. A good book, a really good book is as important to me as any Bible and just as sacrosanct but when I read them I destroy them, broken spines and dog-ears. They are not relics, but the living Word. Books!
I keep them on my shelf. I am not so nearly omnivorous as a younger me was, but they are there. Books are patient. I haven't read most of them but they are there waiting, and I'll flip one open sometime and read and make a serious and non-binding commitment to keep that one around. I have not paid for many of them, and when I have its second hand. Books seek me out but I am not possessive of them, come over and talk and ill give you a couple you might like.
The great books raised me, fathered me. To be a man and then to be human I read Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Miller, London, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Heller, Nabokov, Laozi, Euripides, Dostoyevski, Steinbek, Marquez, Spark, Roth, Vonnegut, Mushima, de Saint-Exupéry, Murakami. I read Mann, Conrad, Whitman, Atwood, Baudelair, Blake, Valery, Sebald, Bellow, Lawrence, Durell, Murakami. And not just read, not just enjoyed, or critiqued. I have believed them! What is shown not what is said. Starting with the Bible and working foreword then back again to Homer, I have held books as volumes of truth - literate art.



"Reading is absurd, isn’t it? Page after page of symbols. Voices in our heads that aren’t our own. Why persist? We may read for entertainment, to pass the time, to visit other worlds, to expand our sense of what is possible. We hunt for treasure, rarely satisfied, but seeking new things to which we can aspire, clues and answers to what our lives are meant to be. At best, perhaps, we read to challenge ourselves and to be changed." Chris Dodge 2005 Utne Reader.

Let me tell you something about all that reading I have done. It has seriously fucked up my life.





This dawned on me as I was watching television. Why am I watching this, I asked myself. Then I answered: I am watching an imagined form wherein nobody is working, or paying bills, or standing in lines to windows that redirect them to other windows. Television and Film - multi sensory expansion on the basic story. Yes, people in stories do have jobs and often struggle with the banalities of life, but they are not engaged in those when we read or watch them, and they are struggling with the banality itself rather than the actual banal processes of life. What wonders that does for these characters. It frees up their time and energy to struggle with the bigger questions or to protagonize against the banalities, or to totally engage their emotions on love,hate, futility, confusion, grandeur, etc.
If you are an astute reader you are ahead of me already. It seems that I have let myself believe that that is how life truly is. Obviously we can ignore that humming truth and live in the sphere of the mundane and vulgar like the other schmucks, but why - when the truth is right there so rich and pure? And what if the truth is a painful burden. It is the burden of the privileged, the illuminated!
I tell you that way is rule the way of the privileged. The privileged patricians and madmen. The real burden is the common one, unshedable and insufferable.







“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken"



And I don't even buy this, even as I type it. No matter how much life shows otherwise. No matter how often the things I have let myself believe make my life and relationships untenable, I still won't let go.
Thank you books. I wish I could quit you.

Life of Birds, random thoughts.

Gyokei Mochizuki




Birds fly.
Who has not dreamed this or wondered? What is shared in us that marvels at this potentiality we divested ourselves of so many millions of years ago. There were birds and there were mammals, and we have mostly gone our separate ways. We on the mundane ground, rational and plodding. They, in the heavens, climbing, soaring, diving, gliding.
The birds have an entire other force of nature to deal with, one that affects us only mundanely or in extremes. The cost to them is high. The must have hollow bones and feathers, must always maintain the flight systems - pruning, and most importantly must somehow strike balance between the energy needed to lose the earth and the weigh limits of doing so.
They do pay that cost and they are successful.

We live on a razor's edge of cost and benefit. I have always considered that 'the dismal science' was a suitable epithet for economics. Economists were pecuniary men struggling to understand and measure the ghost in the machine of our own making. Then there are economic philosophers reducing our experience to supply and demand, labor and production. Perhaps their limitation, or more likely my limitation, is assuming economics is a human driven affair.

There is much science lately on the connections between low caloric intake and longevity. Low calorie diet seems to blocks the enzymes that enhance cell death during metabolic stress. Cells, like engines, acquire energy by oxidizing fuels. It follows, somewhat, that a higher rate of consumption, through a complex system over time, will wear more quickly than a lower rate.

There is much debate over clean fuels and green energy. The reality is, if we wish to move fast and far, to fly and drive around, to lay wires and roads, then we will consume - burn and exhaust, like any engine. No amount of efficiency will eliminate that truth.

I am not saying we should not seek life and health, nor should we run rampant over the earth with our magnificent machines. I am only saying that we should know that everything, every movement, comes with cost. Then we will be able to measure the costs. We can be rapacious adventuring economists, we can be technologically wise economists. We can be glorious flying economists, we can be gentle restrained economists.





We will pass
birds will fly
the sun will burn












Anther opinion: I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.


Jack London