First Blanket

A few weeks ago, my friend D dropped by the house when I was at work and delivered a cache of books. Likely his aim was to buoy my literary spirits, a sort of life preserver in the intellectual sludge that is contemporary "literature". (If you doubt the truly garbage nature of what currently passes for short stories as an art form, look no further than what graced The New Yorker's fiction pages for the week of 10 November 2019.) He, D, as he usually does, blew me out of the water with his offerings, not least of all this story collection by Donald Ray Pollock. It's the real deal, delivering punch after punch after punch, much like a Hubert Selby Jr. or a Henry Rollins in terms of horror displayed on the page. It encouraged. It brutalized. It gave one the idea that gritty stories still have a place in the world, despite all the Yiyun Li or Weike Wang or Tessa Hadley or Oates-level droning and uninteresting useless wastes of 6000 words. No, these stories had life, hard, messy, beautiful life, the kind that makes you want to put fists through panes of plate glass. That it was published as recently as the late aughts was a thing to give a motherfucker hope. 

Here's Uly on Halloween night, not even in need of a coat. Felicia claimed that as a child she never remembered a trick or treating without a snowsuit, a sentiment I've heard voiced by several Valley residents. The point, I suppose, is this year's weather has been atrocious. The summer was dry and record hot, with wildfires and terrible air quality, with memes admonishing folks not to complain about the temps in mid-August as there would be blizzard conditions in 6 weeks. While that may have been the past norm, things are different. Just as recently as last week, a cousin of mine posted a temperature comparison between Biloxi, MS and Anchorage wherein the southern city's daytime high was some degrees cooler than A-town. It was a record, besting a century's worth of temperatures, the coldest since data began to be collected. Biloxi was sub-freezing, Anchorage still hosted liquid puddles. Strange things are afoot, no doubt, and the chaotic nature of complex systems will continue to surprise us, but there is little room to debate that things are not what they should be, or, at least, not what we are accustomed to, especially those of us on such pitifully short timelines who are able to pinpoint such differences between the current reality and our foggy memories.

The snow finally arrived, just today. Uly saw it first. He looked up from the Diego Rivera puzzle, "The Flower Carrier", we were trying to assemble and declared, "It's snowing," with all proper and right amazement. A came back from dance and a piano job and we chatted with Gavin who was home alone playing Minecraft while his brother was being transported to a school orchestra concert in Wilmington, some hour-ish away from home. We talked about an art project Uly and I had worked on, and how to produce obsidian in the blocky digital world, and school. Later, I walked to the bar in the snow while listening to shoegaze-y tunes delivered to me via cell data. There was a massive flock of starlings in the neighborhood downtown, the largest I'd seen this year, and they flitted about in the falling snow like dark Euclidean murmurations in a vast 4-D volume, perching and flying, perching and flying, ultimately old and restless. Later still, at the bar, I watched a smaller offshoot of what I imagine the same flock dance around the bushes and trees across the street from the bar. They did not stay long, and as they departed, their wings flapped incessantly, bearing them off elsewhere, their receding form like television static in the grey sky. 

Here's is a pic of where Nick has recently stayed. It's a sky completely void of cloud, immensely blue, incapably fragile, as if it could just shuck itself from the earth at any moment. Earlier, I watched a woman hold her child, perhaps an 18 month old, and wildly kiss her before strapping her into the back of an idling SUV. This week at work, I listened to a student who I'd known for all of five seconds divulge to me the highlights of the student's life's trauma reel, a vast sewer of unbelievable events but ones that happened regardless. The student had been through things no one should endure, and yet, this person was here with me, telling the story, relaying the information, asking for help. I told the student of the innate strength and resilience of which we are capable, of which the student had displayed, was displaying, in trying to alter the future for something better, something real. Who knows if anyone will succeed? There is today. There is the snow yet. It is still falling. There is Uly's art project. There is music. There is writing. There is a young man playing video games, another performing in an orchestra. A grown man shouldn't cry this much.

Autumnal Equinox

This past equinox we went down to the river. As mentioned previously, the river is a special place for us, to be visited on all the high holy days of the year and for remembrances. The river had changed to its winter channel, nearer the far bank where it would stay until spring and early summer snow melt brought it back to the near bank. I've written about the river many times, but somehow, such a psychic icon in my real life, I've been unable to write it into anything fictive. Seems odd, especially in light of all the other things that make it into the unpublishable manuscripts that sit unread in my cloud storage - sex, substance use, all the characters that populate this town, my history, the future, the past, work, malaise, relationships, mental health, society, friends, family, women. Nothing escapes, yet the river has yet to make an appearance. Puzzling.

We took in a dog for the low, low price of 300 bucks. He's a rescue, 3 years old English Cocker Spaniel named Scooby who's a complete baby who got himself so amped up this morning, simply by the fact that Andrea was alive, he anxiety shit all over the carpet. Uly loves him, of course, but I can't help and think of the eventual future where the Scoobster dies and Uly has his heart broken for real, for the first time. It reminds me of all the pets that have come before and now occupy real estate in my mind. That in itself, is a complete mindfuck, that these previous creatures take up at least one neuron each as a word, and many, many more in the form of the connections they imprinted on my brain. Being a sentient, long lived animal is truly its own special kind of hell.

The cat, both cats actually, have somewhat taken to Scoob, with this fat bastard rubbing his face against him on the first day. He's only swatted at him once, and that when Scooby got too far into his personal bubble as Captain was trying to walk across the living room. The animals, the whole house, churns along in a kind of harmony, the kind of Americana that haunts you, will continue to haunt you, long after a slide into senility, and the terrible awareness that all this comfort is predicated on the misery of many, many millions of other beings is monolithic and I'm reminded of the hidden track on the Tool album "Opiate" where Maynard is screaming, "Life, feeds on life, feeds on life, feeds on life!" 

Here is Uly in the crate we got along with Scoob and it brings to mind the Porno for Pyros song "Pets". I have a similar image of Gavin in a crate with Rommel at around the same age. I couldn't find it in the Zuck-machine but I know its on there somewhere. Currently, the image resides on a coffee mug, one I used this morning, that was a present from the boys this past Christmas (?) or perhaps the one before. My world is full of things like that from them, the two oldest, and these things dot my home and work like thorns - a plasticine award declaring me the "Number One Dad" from Kiernan, an envelope with Gavin's script addressed to "The greatest father a kid could have", their increasingly mature school portraits on the front of my refrigerator. I've heard people wish for their children to stay little, but the older mine get, the more brutal this life becomes, and I somehow become more okay with it, as if its arrest would be the worst punishment of all.  

I've seen a lot in the news lately about Greta Thunberg and her impassioned rhetoric RE: world leaders and their dithering on climate change. I've said this before somewhere too, but the looming climate situation is one that I have ceased to follow. Part of that is mental health related and part of it is the knowledge that me, in my limited capacity, can do very little to change things, especially things on a macro scale. Even in the micro I'm pitifully ineffective. For example, I took a picture of this bag, with the express intent of putting here, taking up digital space, whose storage and dissemination will require an untold amount of resources, all to remind folks that they can do little actions like not litter, or pick up trash they find. Yet I, who thought all these things, did not take the bag because the nearest trash can was out of my way, I was walking, and I had no PPE with which to grab it. When will I stop being a piece of shit? The answer, as we all know, is never.

There is snow in the mountains. The weather has been rainy. I completed a draft of stories about ancient philosophers grappling with modern problems. I am filled with an irrational and absurd hope, not just for me, but for us all, even though I know things do not change, will never change, and yet there will always, always, be many of us who carry the fire, as McCarthy so wonderfully says in No Country for Old Men. 

Aight, Imma head out.

Taqriir ASayf Athaalith

We went berry picking in Hatcher Pass for one of the last hikes we'd do when K was here for the summer. There were other pickers and hikers there and the trail was mucky in some places and we passed by a rock covered stream which could be heard from beyond the boulders hiding it. Off trail, there were massive, industrial sized blueberries of the high bush variety and we filled our containers, netting a full 2 pounds of the fruit. Later, K and A would render some of the fruit into a pie for my birthday. 

During the trip, Ulybear lost his stick that I'd carved and lacquered for him and I went down the trail, alone, looking for it. I found it amongst some crow berry bushes, glinting in the sun. When I returned with the stick to where the others were foraging, K asked me how I'd found it so easily when he and A had been unable to do so. I replied that I was good at finding things when I wanted to. The pie forged from the berries we picked would prove to be a tart, delicious thing, much like the mountains whence it came.

I've found a lot of things in this experience, most of them bad. There are, however, some good things out in this world, and I have to believe this, because otherwise it's the big shutdown.

I'm a fan of thinking that this reality is a simulation one, one that other, probably simulated in their own right, beings created and I'm growing strangely okay with this. Like, yeah, none of this matters but at least I can do a thing for a consciousness that thinks the thing I did matters, even if I fully believe it doesn't and it, the action, is illusory in the grand scheme of everything. 

This past week we had a graduation of students at work and the biggest compliment I got was from a former student of mine who introduced her son and significant others to me as "the coolest guy on campus" and the one who she "would go into his office and say I want to burn this whole fucking place down". During the commencement ceremony, I had wanted to weep with hope and pride, but forced myself not to because none of them needed to see that.

K went home to NC this past week. He didn't want to stick around for the fair because his brother had gone on before him and, through a teary conversation we'd had, he told me that he didn't want to go because he'd miss all the things he'd normally do if G were around. We went to the airport, Tuesday, a terrible day for flight, and we went through the song and dance of check in and security and handing him over to airline personnel . When he went to board, a pencil skirt uniformed gate agent asked if he'd like a final hug and he came to me and I held him and all I could manage was "Be good" before he loped off, down the skybridge, gone. I drove home, alone, and proceeded to drink a copious amount of liquor in my sadness and woke to a text from him - "I made it home." Sometimes, you think today is the day.

The north is burning. I took this picture on the drive back home from K's departure. The smoke is thick and choking and the mountains are obscured in the fires' grenade pop. I can't think too much about the future, as I've mentioned earlier, but the gut feeling that I have is one of despair tinged with resilience. I've thought about trying to explain this dichotomous feeling to others in my "real" surface-level life, but have quailed because of the awkwardness that the conversation would engender. I saw a Vice article (not linked because fuck them) recently about "How Millennials Use Weird Memes To Cope With Their World" or some shit and it was pretty true. I liken it to a sort of Gotterdammerung, a last laugh, a gallows humor but collective in nature. Everything is dark yet the thought remains that "I" might make it, into whatever "it" turns out to be. 

We went to the fair yesterday. Uly likes the truck ride and the train, but when he went with A on the "Fun Slide" I stood at the bottom and watched their descent. He was good on the way up, the previous year he had called the ride "fun" but as I watched him swoosh down, I saw his face turn to terror on the first bump, then grow increasingly awful before the bottom where he burst into tears and fright. A picked him up and consoled him, child to mother's breast, and he was a long time in calming, the way I remember being the time that I ran into the freshly mopped kitchen and fell, chin to the tiles, and wrecked my face, my own mother holding me in the same manner. 

Maybe today is the day. 

On RTJ's third album they rap about... things. It's inspiring? Killer Mike has lines, "I sip a fifth of the whisk, I smoke a dub in the tub, then I will split both my wrists." Uly bear made this collection of words. That "DAD" made it into the mix was grand. He had his first day of preschool today. Gavin had his first of high school. K had his first day of middle school by himself. There is no universe where this is okay. 

Summer Report, Athanie

Yeeeeeeeeet.

Josh Homme, frontman of QOTSA sings the lyric "I'm much older than I thought I'd be." on the track Feet Don't Fail Me. The cafe this morning is filled with a mix of the young and the middle aged, women in their late adolescences contrasted with the older, turquoise-ring-wearing lady on her smart phone who has recently completed a daycare interview with another woman, now departed and lily white skinned, who sported rastafarian dreadlocks. At the end of the interview, the two hugged. One of the thin young women across the cafe is wearing athletic gear that resembles a second skin and I wonder if she knows or has any idea she'll get to the place of the ring-wearing woman in her blousy yoga wear and thick fingers. They already have similar sandals. 

I abandoned a story this morning. Word count: 5936. That pushed my total word count for all my pieces, both published and non, to over 600K and is the ninth story I've completed this year (Of course I keep track of these things.). This shouldn't be taken as an entreaty for compliments, more as evidence that I'm a fool for continuing to roll that boulder up the hill and that I could have taken up a much more acceptable filling of time, like golf, or recreational team sports. I suppose, much like the journals that I keep, that if nothing else these digital papers can be left to my boys, so that they could, at some hoped for point in the future, peer into the well of my brain and perhaps have some insight into the kind of mind that was responsible, in part, for preparing them for the world and offer some kind of continuing instruction even after I'm no longer around. More likely, they'll never look at these things and most of the information's assembly will have been a useless contribution to the universe's total entropy. I suppose we've got to get to that heat death eventually.  

I had a birthday this past week. I spent the day at work and the only person I told was a former student of mine who came to visit me in my office during her time between college finals. When informed of my age, she said with her joking and distinctly Yu'pik lilt, "That's almost 40. You're so old." She drew out the "so" the way Native Alaskans do when they want to really emphasize their point. Later on in the week, one of my older co-workers saw me in passing in a hall and asked how my day was going and addressed me as "young man". Perspective, I suppose, but the thought that I am simultaneously both those things is no little pause for existential terror. 

I attended a small and semi-impromptu concert for a hip-hop and classical harpist duo that I've seen before here in town. I went after work, after a few Moosehead beers, and took the remaining summer boy. First there were opening acts of these local guys pictured here. I stood so that K could sit and watch and I thought a lot about how my parents had never taken me to things like this, not in a blaming way, but in a "my child is experiencing things I was not privy to" way, much the same as I have in my progression to the current state. It's a strange thing to think about, the linear movement of time, and I am reminded of a story my mother told me about her schooling, in that girls were not allowed to attend Algebra classes in her high school (coincidentally the same one that I graduated from) because they "wouldn't need it" and how my father barely completed high school himself, likely because he would have, had he attended today, been labeled as having "Oppositional Defiant Disorder" and been medded up to the gills. Now, here I sit in this weekday morning cafe with a graduate degree, a homeowner, massively in debt, victim to an inexorable and cyclic dysthymia, a veritable paragon of the middle class, a vast confirmation of the rightness of the American Dream.  

The harpist and rapper performed their set. There were complimentary snacks - cookies in non-recyclable plastic packaging and bottled waters for the two score folks in attendance, almost all of them white. There was also kombucha from the local kombuchery and the logistical chains that conspired to bring us all into that space was a monolith in my brain. I became, under the harp strings' popping and the synth accompaniment to the rapper's lyricism, obsessed with the idea of the far past simultaneously together with the unseen future and the need to connect with other apes that has persisted, will persist, for as long as any two of us, collectively, remain alive. I held Uly and swayed to the beat, crying behind my sunglasses. 

Summer Report NUMERO UNO

This summer's visit was truncated for my oldest, pictured here on the close end of the sofa. He doesn't know shit, won't know shit, for some time, maybe not even ever. I went on a bike ride downtown today with the remaining two. Uly wanted to bike through the neighborhood and did so, until we got to the intersection where he was to be ensconced in the bike trailer for the lion's share of the trip to the mid-morning Saturday cafe. We, K and I, crossed before Ulybear and he became spooked at the approach of our neighborhood mail truck. He stood across from us on the asphalt, his face a screaming terror. I yelled at K to take my bike and I ran back to get him. I scooped Uly up, his legs gripping my torso and him fright crying until he finally subsided into calm. He hugged me and had no idea that on the trip to the intersection I had watched him grandly smiling as he biked with his brother and my heart broke and I wept, wept at his joy.

As the last hurrah of the short summer, A graciously reserved for us one of the yurts at the Eagle River Nature Center. We hiked in with all our supplies for an overnight in said yurt by the rushing and churning and ever changing Eagle River. A bear went through camp. I ate some questionable things and went on a hike with the boys wherein we spoke of machine guns and combat tactics I'd learned as a foolish young man and myriad other things. We arrived at a bend in the river and sat for a bit amongst the mosquitoes and flies and the inexorable river. On the way back things got very Alice in Wonderland and I spent the next few hours in a kaleidoscope where I completed a flora collage with Uly and watched the river and we threw hatchets and chopped wood and attempted to pump freshwater from the river with a faulty filter and played cards and motherfucker do I hope, with all of the urgency of being, a live sentient being, on this planet that I made an impression on these boys, these sweet and stupid and ignorant and beautiful boys, that they could someday impart to whomever they decide to fuck with.

I took G back to the airport a scant 3-ish weeks after his arrival and, due to the awful nature of his flight time, we went to stay in A-town at the Qupqugiaq Inn, known on the internet for being home to cheap lodging with the added bonus of also being a haven for for bedbugs. We checked in with the concierge, a young woman with a forgettable name and an utterly defeated face, who showed us to our room at the end of a hallway carpeted with ancient and strangely patterned low pile industrial grade covering that looked at one point to have been improperly dried after a plumbing mishap. The corridor fairly reeked of reefer and the walls were set close and bore the evidence of the passing of many bodies. The room was quaint, the deadbolt out of commission, the door jamb victim to many previous and ill-repaired break-ins. My oldest and I repaired to the patio section - a pop-up canopied area in the parking lot, complete with rickety chairs and tables - with drinks secreted away in traveler mugs, him ginger ale and me a forbidden vodka. We watched the by the week renters arrive after their day's labors and my oldest and I spoke of many things about his future, living wages, employment and educational options, living arrangements, a grand unspooling that I hope yet to be witness to while at the same time having no real expectation of living long enough to see the things we parsed. Later would see the early morning airport in all her badness and a pisswarm beer back in the inn and a nap and then I'd return to work in the empty cab of my ride.

Sometimes, a small and childish part of me wishes the world were simpler and I could be like this vehicle's owner, or at least be like the persona this owner projects onto the world. I mean, how nice would it be to know my place in life as well as this guy seemingly does? I can't even imagine the lack of self-doubt, the missing sense of sham-hood, the absence of one's lurking fraudulence, the sheer confidence that all one is doing is good and right and capital "t" true. 

In any event, the summer churns on. We made tie-dyed shirts yesterday, one for G in his absence, then K and I biked to town for pool and NASCAR and communal vegetable harvesting then back home for pizza and Hot Pockets and drinks and old episodes of Chopped and The Great British Baking Show and a hostile email to my state Senator about the budget then oblivion sleep. Today is gray. Sad tunes pump out of my computer. I write on.

Invasive Weed Counter-Insurgency and Other Insanities

Two weekends ago Andrea and the boys and I trooped downtown to assist with a local endeavor to help stem the ever burgeoning crop of bird vetch that is encroaching our public spaces here in town. The vetch, an invasive species introduced locally in an effort to provide a hardy feed stock for ruminants, used to only be on the other side of Arctic Avenue but has spread, as it is wont, to choke out the derelict train tracks where, otherwise, native fireweed would bloom. In an ironic turn, livestock don't even like the stuff. If the information presented to us by the organizers of the weed-pull is accurate, something like 2400 seeds can be produced by a single plant. Biology's fecundity is a hell of a thing.

The event was sponsored by Conoco Phillips, Alaska's Oil and Gas Company, and they had graciously provided reams and reams of industrial grade plastic bags in which to house the vetch once uprooted. A platoon of well meaning citizens, myself and family included, descended upon the weeds, bags in hand, and began to stuff them. Once completed, we stacked the bags with our catch to await hauling to the landfill for disposal. Something like 100s of bags were transported to the dump, taken in shifts, in the back of the chief organizer's older model pick up truck (Toyota?). We were only out with the weeds two hours, but we alone accounted for 33 bags of the quarry. Then came the raffle.

I've seen somewhere with G and K that the amount of water to produce a single, reusable cotton bag borders on 700 gallons and that the minimum uses for said bag reaches into the 5 digits before it becomes more sustainable than its plastic counterpart. The boys asked me about this and I attempted to explain the logistical chain of acquiring one of these fabric bags and how, it's likely, someone arrived at this figure. The raffle, such as it was for the few who attended the invasive weed removal, was chock full of t-shirts, gratis, and other items like gift certificates and free tours of farms and state fair tickets and sundry other items to incentive-ize the endeavor. I was grounding after a substantially altered weed pulling experience wherein the boys and I had talked about the absurdity of counterinsurgency operations and the inevitability of the vetch's resurgence despite our efforts. I don't know if they made the connection I wanted them to see, but such is parenting. 

Recently, our governor, who was elected on the backs of greedy fools who clamored for a 3K plus PFD (Bring up the idea of universal basic income with any of his voters and they'll be aghast at the concept.), endorsed a budget that eliminated funding for the Arts Council here in Alaska, making us the only state in the union without such a body. Hell, even Mississippi is doing better than us in that department. I'm not too worried, though, as the creative impulse is a thing that can never be squelched, regardless of how hard The Man and his cronies may want it to be. Someone is always going to be around who is willing and able to paint cave walls. 

After the weed pulling, we went to a strawberry festival at Pyrah's farm. Admission was 5 bucks a head and we labored about the farm grounds on which the festival was held under the overlook of the looming Talkeetna mountains. It was truly a grand time, one wherein I harvested kohlrabi and kale, collards and radishes, while the others of my party amused themselves with the diversions provided - forced air inflated plastic, pedaled carts, chickens, a calf. When I rejoined them, A and I took Uly to a vinyl sided swimming pool filled with feed corn so that he could play in the grains. He shoveled and dumped, shoveled and dumped, and the mystery of agriculture shook me, as it always does. I mean, people are dropping spaceships on fucking asteroids because of corn. 

I find myself increasingly unable to reconcile the world and its implications.

The Weeknd, on his track "Privilege", documents his recovery process after a failed love in that he'll "Drink the pain away" and be "back to his old ways" and that he's got "two red pills to take the blues away". Who knows if any of this makes sense?

The Inexorable Tourist Menace Is Upon Us

Summer in Alaska, like many places, sees the arrival of vast swathes of tourists engaged, as they are elsewhere, in a great orgy of entitlement, selfishness, and general ineptitude. When I used to give an "importance of the tourism industry to AK's economy" presentation in the classroom, I instructed the students that, per the AKDOC, for the summer of 2014, something north of like, 2 million mostly white and older people visited the state and dumped an approximate 4 billion dollars into the state's economy. While we are instructed to love our neighbor and give aid to the sojourner, my God, do I hate them, wandering around in North Face windbreakers and REI meshy hats with slack jaws, clutching their information guides and ruining the local establishments by dint of their presence alone. Here, where I write from my remote office at the Moosehead and in front of which I snapped a picture yesterday of this Albertan monstrosity, I would lay money that during my time here, a bevy of four of these visitors will shuffle in, inquire if there is food and finding there is none, not even have the common courtesy to order beers (the absolute cheapest in town) anyway before departing a door down to Klondike's for the fare offered there. Pathetic. 

Yesterday also saw us hiking in the Talkeetnas, April bowl in Hatcher Pass, one side of the road sloping down, westward facing out onto the vastness of the Susitna river basin, the other leading down into the Matanuska river valley of our home. It was me, the boys, Uly and A, trucking up switchbacks to the crest of the bowl. I had the fear in a bad way, and my mind was a cavalcade of irrational thoughts and images - Uly tumbling in a ragged mass down the slope, the rounded back of my oldest bobbing in the frigid waters of the bowl's pond, an earthquake landsliding us all into oblivion, K screaming in terror as a blast of meteor impact in the valley below reaches us with its scorch. Unnerving sights and sounds, all assaulting my mind's eye.

At work, I've been tasked with leading a "success skills" group for the students. It's a thinly veiled and mostly mandated class for anger management and I was recommended to lead this class by its previous instructor on the notion that she believed me to have "really good boundaries". The universe is archly ironic in her narrative, indeed. Anyway, the material of the course is not bad and while it centers on anger, it's really about the skills of emotion management for all of the turgid murk lounging in each of our souls. On the mountain, I had to employ these self-same skills to maintain, to persist. I only once flared up at the backpack for failing to disclose its final Clif bar that was the snack for the hike's final event pre-descent, calling it a cocksucking motherfucker, as I could hear the Mylar crinkling in the bag yet could not blindly procure it. A came close and hugged me, knowing of my fear as we'd discussed it on the ascent. The wind coursed across the bowl. The boys ate perched on a boulder. I could not bear the views from the bowl's rim of the valleys below.

On the driving descent back home, A and I talked about the experience in the front seat while in the back the boys tooled about the internet in their new and flashy phones. I related to her that, in the parlance of the success skills class, my anxiety about the hike reached a nine of ten when all three of my boys stood near the skyline of the ridge, the drop of which I was unable to approach but which she had assured me was smooth and not cliff-like. I spoke with the boys on the drive back about the necessity of doing uncomfortable things in life, and that while the hike and drive up to the trailhead had been agony for me, I did them anyway, and of the importance of taking the beach, whatever that sand happens to resemble. Who knows if they understood, but it reminded me of the lasting advice my father gave me as a young adult which was that since I was going to join the Marines, I needed to, "Stop being such a pussy."

Perhaps I've said this all before. Perhaps you're growing bored with the same shtick, the same bringing it back around to writing, but as I've likely quoted somewhere else on here (I have been grinding these out for no-one for the past 12 years), Richard Rodriguez said once that, "We are all circling our own obsessions." I suppose the point I was trying to make, keep trying to make, is that life is this bizarre swirl and for some reason, I keep trying to make sense of it with squiggles and jots, tittles and lines, and failing. Just Monday I received a rejection from the Southeast Review. This morning I queried literary agents about these insane manuscripts I keep producing. Does any of this matter? Objectively, no, but you get up and you get going, up that beach, regardless the cost.

Facebook told me that, two years ago yesterday, I had taken a similar picture of these three in the summertime hammock. Tourists, two of them anyway, in their own right, crowd this space of mine. I decided to recreate the scene, post-hike. They're huge. Please, make it stop. There is no stopping.

Summer Solstice, D plus 1

I've been seeing a lot of post on social media lately about the inevitability of civilization's collapse, mostly due to climate change, and the world to come wherein the rich are miraculously saved due to their wealth and the hoi polloi masses are resigned to a post apocalyptic ruin of strife and misery. The doomsayers have put me in mind of our species as a whole, in that we have always feared the looming future (each of our deaths most of all) associated with the perceived threat at the gate, the annihilation of everyone - God, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Huns, Goths, Black Death, Moors, Nazis, Commies, Swine Flu, Aliens, Terrorism, Judgment Day. Consciousness seems to mandate that we perseverate on our destruction.

I went for a walk today. I visited the town garden, food from which would go to aid the seniors at the local old folks' home up the street. I sat on a wooden bench inlaid with a mosaic of tiles that spelled "ART". There were some tourists there, a group of three women, discussing the flora with respect to the region of their own living. I went behind the row of trees to where, only two weeks prior, there had been a bevy of fledging magpies perched in the trees, all fat and short tailed and bushy still in their down. The birds made lots of noise at A and Uly and I and one of the parents came to deliver to one of the chicks a cracker gleaned from somewhere. The newly flown birds had gone and none of their number were about. I went to the bar for beers.

A former student messaged me recently to ask about a new and fast moving relationship and I tried to go through some things with her about self-worth and critical thinking and boundaries and trust. All things I've miraculously failed with in my own life. I tried to tell her the importance of maintaining in this life, and the ridiculous knowledge that her ancestors had persisted in a frozen waste for millennia with only the help of stone age technology and the wisdom of fire and that she was imminently strong and capable. Truly, I hope those words, the same that I tell all my students, will enkindle some sort of magic flame inside them and they, despite their varied and traumatic pasts, will be okay, as much as any of us are.

This morning I went to the cafe and felt on the precipice of a mental breakdown. It was almost as if I felt like the real me was a prisoner inside my skull and I needed a hasty exit, like a pupa grown too large for its chrysalis, to split open and emerge into some new, higher ordered thing. I walked more and found this note binding the trees. I can't explain how grand this is, and if you can't glean that for yourself, I'm afraid you're outside of my light cone and all information I have will never reach you and vice versa. I've come to this realization a lot lately and the loneliness of it fills me up in a way that I hope you, too, can also understand even if my photons can't ever reach you.

I walked home in a wood, the path of which had been manufactured by machines. There were mosquitoes about and if I walked quickly enough they were unmolesting. I, by degrees, found myself in a rolling meadow of partially mown grass where I stumbled through an ambush of nettles that burned the exposed skin of my sandalled feet and shorts wearing legs. Finding the path again, it was strewn with cottonwood fluff, a blizzard in June, and so much information blanketing the ground. The internet tells me that the internet itself houses 1200 petabytes of data. Paltry when in comparison to this life stuff, all swamping the planet. Moving forward, I made for home.

Home. Respite. Solace. I sat in the hammock and smelled the rank acridity of my unwashed being. There were flies visiting the grass flowers of our uncut lawn. A butterfly flitted toward a bush. In the street there were dogs and a woman and children. A triad of bike pedaling children, two girls, one boy, headed home, the boy with a plastic bag dangling from his left handlebar. Inside the house Captain mewled for release. The sky overhead cleared, clouded, cleared. Lilacs clouded the breeze's aroma. I watched a solitary cottonwood seed drift down, into the grass, where it clung to a seeding stalk, a scant inches from the earth below, the rest of its cousins yet coasting on the wind.

Quaking Aspens, Failed Chicks

This afternoon I sat in my living room and watched the quaking aspen outside my window. Facebook reminded me this morning that I've been a homeowner three years, and the thought that I was now ten percent owner of the structure gave me pause. I suppose if you rationed it out, that would be equivalent to one of the bathrooms or maybe the front porch. The bank owns the rest and I'll likely never stay long enough, either in it or alive, to be full owner. The lifestyle choices you make, I suppose.

A has been out of town with Uly for the past week, due to be out another two and I've had to fend for myself. It's been a strange trip, one in which the substances have flowed and my consciousness has become seriously altered, my body victim to those changes in the long run, like some Dune universe guild navigator given over to the spice gas chambers' enhancement. The things around me that I notice, self included, seem in their infirmity to not exist in any objective manner. The simulation reality persists, and fake or not, it's the best jam I've got. So the groove maintains.

After I completed the chores I'd set for myself today - laundry, dishes, weeding my home garden, bed made, package sent, lawn weed whacked, plants watered, floor swept, cats fed - I biked to town in the fade of a serious elevation. On the way, in my neighborhood, was a bearded man mowing his lawn while cradling his toddler, a girl who watched his workings with a great seriousness. I ventured on to the community garden and weeded the patch for which I had obligated, then biked on to the arboretum, past a couples' tennis match and tree swallows acrobatting in the overhead grey. The arboretum isn't under new management as I had feared, and a recently expanded easement offered access to the familiar arboretum sign that had been uprooted from its previous location. There was a candy wrapper from the recent Colony Days parade near the lilacs and I took this with me on my walk through the trees only to deposit it in the city offered trash can in the new parking lot.

The chickadees laid a clutch in our birdhouse the second year running. I don't know if they are the same birds as last year, but I was anticipating hearing the brood grow in body and instruction, their parents piping out the "dee dee dee dee" staccato that I took to be the chickadee word for food when the parents returned to the nest. The adults had abandoned the house after the chicks inside had been silent for some time. Yesterday, I opened the birdhouse and cleaned out the nest. This year's birds had outdone the last year's construction and the nest was a four inch high brick of mixed bedding, mostly lichen, with a deeply recessed hollow where the eggs had lain. The chicks there were shriveled raisins of bodies, wings splayed and face down. I wept like a bitch.

May 20th, 2019.

The first boy I generated into this world turned 14 on the day of this post's title. I've been tardy in posting this as the usual slump of depression around his birthday has tolled across the clockspace of my head. I called him on the day, vidchat, and he answered in an unseemly location. I bid him bon chance and later, called back on a different day to find him en route with his bros, in the back of a minivan, to some swimming pool based venue. Motherfucker did he look beautiful, all burgeoning man and squaring jaw, his hair pulled back and thickly glorious. I killed the call on the quick so as not to impose. He presumably had a rad time. 

The day prior to his birthday I biked loiteringly around town. There was no objective, no mission. The day was fantastically summer, clear and windy, the insects were about and I paused by some communal roses and snapped this. I think often about the flowering of plants, their (plants, that is) history, the altogether unsure future of pollen based reproduction and the unguaranteed persistence of their evolution. I mean, shit, plants fucking flowered, man! 160 million-ish years of perseverance. Jesus.  

I was mega lifted for the bike-venture and found myself tooling up and down the old haunts of the river by the elementary schools near the old apartment. I used to amble regularly there, alongside the river bluffs and was surprised, stupidly, to find erosion had taken her toll on the well remembered outlook. Sitting down in the grass like a hobo, past the concrete barriers, I found this petition spraypainted on the defilade from the main trail. Who knows the outcome of this request? Mysteries.

Facing the river, I found her all the iterations of deity that she rightly was. It's said that Narcissus was borne of a river god and a nymph, Liriope, raped by said god. Looking into the deepness of the flowing, from the remove of the bluff, I could almost see all the chaotic surge of the river that would precipitate the creation of such a myth. Narcissus would himself go to perish under the spell of water and another, different goddess irked at him. We're a record on repeat.

I finished ("finished") a story this morning, 28th May. The other day I was in the arboretum where someone had sawed spruce trees into seats and this happy crab graced one of the chairs. The absurdity of stories is something never far from me. The crab bears witness, the tree rings too. My own constructed things, organic and written, flail about in selfsame record. The destructed sign and garden bed of the arboretum entrance was a shambles, evidence of some new owners perhaps, all folks unknown and churning, much the same as I. 

Christ does it all hurt deliciously.