The Return

Something, something, COVID-19 denial, I am a sudden epidemiologist who reads at a 6th grade level and I saw on the internet that the vaccine is Satanic mind control mark of the beast end times, masks are a tool to tyrannize and oppress and pacify, and the numbers are all wrong, and what happened to the flu this year, and if masks work why distance, and if distance works why masks? Don't even get me started on the election. Hoo boy, do you have hours to lose, to educate yourself?

It is rainy and a windy 37 degrees here in the nexus of my universe and there are three boys, my boys, crouching in this living room and all of us meditating on the reality of our screens. They've been back home for a while now, early November, and the shock of their nearness, their presence in my home that they'd previously mostly known during the summer, in the dim of the year, is a thing of wonder. It's fulfillment and despair and choked silent weeping as you make dinner because of the goodness and rightness and wholeness of it all.  

Something, something, raising children is so soft today because I can't beat the living shit out of them and they exist and grow in an environment that is safer and less traumatic than my childhood and for this they are weaker and of less substance than I and did I mention that problem alcoholism is just fine as the model for your adult life with children? It's science, and religion, and the truth. 

Uly-bear, apropos of nothing, decided to draw this scene which he described as a graveyard where the person alive was in despair. All this he narrated with a smile, an innocence that burned, as if he could never really know the true sadness of death because he's yet to experience it on the root level. 

Don't mind me, I'm into the weeds on this one.

Something, something if homeless people wanted to work they'd find work but they don't and so I won't give them any of my hard earned money that I earn at my work which is stressful and busy and I have to prove, and prove again, my worth, my life to the company/my boss/shareholders and please press the gun of my financial debt into my skull a little harder so that I may find yet a lower place of groveling in the work worship, to abase myself more for money or position or status or whatever employment god I choose to deify.

All sense of propriety and ethical professionalism have exited the stage of the work comedy and this past few weeks I've devoted hefty chunks of company time to the pursuits of elevation, creative indulgence, and formless drifting stares out of the winter window at falling snow and the hope of birds in the frame and a shameless gaming on a miraculously unblocked site for school-aged children. I crafted these three, these gifts, for my sons, each piece informing the creation of the other and each again a small perception of who I believe these human animals so dear to me, to be in this world. The works are rendered poorly, and all I can focus on is their imperfections and they're one of those smarmingly saccharine tchotchkes of child/young adult hood that one hopes they cling to and port with them the places they will go, perhaps hanging them up, perhaps in packing, or in a well-meaning pile for the non-event of their hanging.  I suppose it won't matter, in the end, even if these creations get shit-canned at some point, and one hopes it will be the memory of the effort that will inform their future selves. Who knows? I'm definitely not going to be around long enough to know, I'm sure.

This is the night of their finally completed arrival. I messaged my friends Nick and Dan that this was perfection, and I maintain it was one of the grandest peaks of my life to have these two smelly teen boys crowding my space. Uly loves them, their more attuned age, their energy. Even now, as they gaze screenward at games he hovers and watches, hovers and watches. I should yell at them to stop, to go do something else, to interact with the "real world" but I won't and so I'll let it go on and watch these watchers. It's pretty good, these scenes and prompts marveling at luck in how the world rolls along.

The view here is nice, you should join me.  

 

No Title

The air here is tight and mind is moving. A man walks by in the street, smoking a cigarette and here I am under the cruel magnification of the window pane as the sun blasts in her meridian. The cafe is a bestiary filled with all manner of species. Below, on the walk here, I passed one of two known bus stops in town. It, the bus stop, is a scene of constant evolution and its current iteration is one of higher than usual entropy. There is a broken Sobe bottle, a bed sheet, and three cigars stubbed in rude lingams in the center of each seat. A story happened here.

A student killed themselves this past week. There are any number of reasons why one may take this course. I had to inform a friend of theirs via phone and the other student was literally speechless. I informed the student that they would likely receive many calls, cloyingly so, inquiring about their well being with the undercurrent of fear that this still living student might be pushed to flip the same switch as the deceased not necessarily out of an overburdening sense of another's life but that too many student suicides would cause inquiry and, as we know, inquiry into government contracts is never a good thing for corporate. I allowed the student could opt out of answering our number but that if the student wished to speak to me my office number rings out to my cell so anytime I was available. The student thanked me and I left them their space and own tumbling through the void. Hopefully, the message arrived intact.

There are ladies the next table over praying nonsensically over their food. Three women, different generations, all white giving thanks for their late lunch. Absurdity planes away in every direction. This morning on a pornography streaming site I saw, in the comments, the two top rated comments on a ridiculously gonzo scenario'd video were from what were likely two men. One poster, DannyDevito4206969, lamented life's pointlessness in the face of crushing loneliness and repetition and that the video was not even arousing due to the cyclical nature of suffering alone in the world. Other posters replied, encouraging this anonymous soul to maintain, maintain. Later on in the comment stream, Lay's Potato Chips delivered a text ad imploring the online fappers to satisfy their snack hankerings with their brand. I suppose meaning is where you find it.

The world is doomed, as it perpetually has been, but sometimes you get good news. A friend visits. You find a penny heads up on the biking trail. You fall in love farther than you had been. An eagle alit in a tree regards you. A billion little miracles flood your life at any moment leaving you in profound befuddlement. You slow dance with a cat to Lana Del Rey then weep for a young person now gone. Anything will happen.

The air here is tight and mind is moving.

One Spin Round

For A's birthday, we camped along Eklutna Lake. While there, we did all the usual birthday things and spent a lot of time tuned out and observing the trees. A quartet of Stellar's jays patrolled the campground regularly and stopped by on one of the afternoon to scavenge and help themselves to the dog's water before flitting off to the spruce beetle afflicted trees dotted around our site. One of the birds perched on the picnic table bench and spied me with a fervid eye before taking off again. Later, I walked to the camp host's site for firewood and in the afternoon magic I heard a light chittering in the undergrowth and stopped to investigate. A vole showed herself to me and darted away and I had the thought that these two experiences were belated birthday presents for myself alone and could only be retold later in word form and how so much would be lost in the telling. As is necessary, the narrative always fails but you tell it anyway.

During the camp, we three and the Scoob descended to the beach for exploration and to build a birthday shrine for A. She camped a ways up the beach so that Uly and I could construct the monument. As we worked, I instructed Uly in the first and most important maxim of creation: "It's okay to steal". He would not remember this lesson when quizzed him later but I suppose that's for the best. Complete in far less than the 8 hours I predicted, the driftwood tee-pee and small beach rock cairn complex was ready for display. A said she loved it, but you know how people can lie. I suppose I'll have to take her at her word, if simply to keep the peace in the house. Later, there would be more fire and roasted potatoes and a whiskey filtered vigil before the flames and the unanswerable questions regarding the enmeshment of human consciousness and fire and lifespans and time's inexorable nature that could only be addressed by the application of even yet larger quantities of ethanol. I guess some things will be forever mysteries, certainly in this brain, at least.

I have, as an adult anyway and as I'm convinced many of you do as well, come to dread the marking of another year. I always imagined I'd be dead by now and am a card carrying fraud in that I continue to live like a fool. This year was little different. I spent my birthday free from work and wandering around town in a haze before visiting the communal garden. I stopped at the cafe for iced coffee and writing and later still, I would head to the bar for beer and hockey prior to a return home. If I'm honest, it was no different than any other day off I've had in recent memory with the exception that I was now digesting the reality that another year had gone. It seems stupid to persist, and yet I stupidly remain goaded on by the absurd will to survive and the equally bizarre notion that shit does, in fact, matter. A said to me while we were camping the new and terrifying idea that 39 was actually your 40th year of life. I am not okay with this revelation but I suppose everyone must play their part in the production. 

K turned 13 this week. Just this morning I was reading a book to Uly that had been marked in the front cover as being "To Adam from mom and dad. 1996" and I did the incorrect math that the book was at least 14 years old before I corrected to add the extra decade I'd left off. That's a thing I've taken to more and more - the dilation of time and the laughable notion that all of my children's births were "just the other day" and that only a few days prior to that, I'd been a boy myself. It's an insane notion that I carry around four decades of experiential bullshit in my dome but it's a true one, nonetheless. I've been lucky, no lie, and here's hoping the streak continues.

In My Head

You can see, as the Onion puts it, we here in Palmer are well into stage 4 of pretending corona virus is over. I, too, am fully on board with doing my economic duty and patronizing the Moosehead near daily. Two drinks, Space Dust and Fireball, a decent tip, and a goodbye to Sarah or Meg or Amy, and I'm out the door again. I sit away from the bar, no mask, and read and write, and watch some sportsball, and scroll my phone. Completely unnecessary. I could easily and more cheaply sit on my sofa, where I spend most of my waking "telework" time, and drink beer. Yet I persist in this gathering and potential infection vector nexus. Lately, it's been one of the sole comforts of getting increasingly decrepit and nearer death - watching and listening to the patrons, the people passing in the street, the lack of tourists, the rugged profiles on the horizon, the gulls, the ravens. Will I get COVID? Have I already had it? Can I get it a second time? Will I have to be hooked to a ventilator as I slowly drown in my own fluids? Who knows, and in some way, none of those questions are answerable, valid, or reliable.

Our town had a protest/vigil in support of the BLM movement. It was organized by a teen girl who felt the need to do something, anything, as Malcolm X wished, "to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth." So she invited some BLM folks from Anchorage to speak to a peaceful crowd of about 1700, mostly comprised of valley residents. After that, the group had a walk about town armed with signs and slogans. There was, of course, the ammosexual pearl grasping on the internets prior to the march, with a local state house representative going to the tubes to call for 2A fetishists to also congregate near local downtown businesses to "keep an eye on things". I didn't attend because A and I didn't want Uly to be in a place where things could go awry. Later, I biked downtown for the bar some hours after the event ended to find yet still knots of people aggregated on intersection corners ingesting honks of encouragement from folks of all stereotypes. A truck, much abused, aged, and bed-less rolled by with a sign "solidarity" in black sharpie taped to the rollbar, its driver a spindly white man with a greasy nest for hair. The fire engine hooted its approval. An Alaska Native woman held a sign that read, "Inupiaqs for BLM". Later, I found this rock left behind on a picnic table next to the community garden beds. A few days later, the rock was gone, either by malice or some more benign motivation. 

Yesterday I walked home after Friday Fling. It was the first of the year as the assholes who are in charge also canceled Colony Days this year, the traditional beginning of our weekly food and vendor walkabout. A and Uly and I masked and hand sanitizered up and partook. Most of the folks weren't wearing masks. We made two circuits before Uly decided he wanted a hot link from the Cajun tent while A got a beef bowl and steamed buns - a custard and a red bean paste. I repaired to the bar for after dinner drinks, A and Uly to home. On the walk back, my mind brimmed with absurdities - a Reese's Pieces box in front of the Dairy Queen, the concrete apron at the base of the homeless infested woods where the past week I'd seen a man passed out at 11AM of a weekday, the overcast sky, the empty creamer jug in the ditch, the quaint park I walk through and at which I always feel a sort of sentimental depression at its disuse, the quiet neighborhood that hosts a house with a political style sign advocating for "MEGA GUILLOTINE 2020", the grass concavities of a cow moose and two of her calves' sleepover, my neighborhood where a group of children I'd seen earlier playing in an inflatable plastic pool had left a pile of empty ice pop wrappers in the grass across the street, then, most ultimate of all these mysteries, home.

Tomorrow is father's day. My old man's been dead for 16, 17 years? That I can't remember unless I devote serious mental computation to derive the date speaks volumes about my character. Either way, he's been gone a while. I'm glad he's not around to see the news about the country today, for obvious reasons. He'd have been 78 this year and I can't imagine him that old, all dried up, fragile, already the picture of death he looked in his casket when I saw him last. The things I remember about him are probably universal to many other sons out there but certain things stand out - his insane grip strength, the softness of his hands, his ability to accurately set the gap of a spark plug with his thumbnail's width, how he ate aspirin by the handful, 24 at a time, after a workday, his stale cigarette smoke odor, all his missing front teeth, the subcutaneous cysts on his neck, how his favorite flowers were gladioli, the time that, during a spanking, I told him I hated him and he sat me down at the kitchen table with a pencil and paper and his hard voice ordering me to write out "I hate my daddy" 100 times and I couldn't finish the first line, and countless other ways, too numerous to list here. I find it funny how I carry him around with me still, both mentally and physically - his ashes ensconced in an earthenware vase on my kitchen counter behind the sink and next to the compost pot and Dieffenbachia. I've tried to write him into fiction, failed. It's probably for the best.   

Don't Get Captured

The day before yesterday, I went for a walk in the Memorial Day rain. I'd had to flee facebook as everyone there was reminding me of how exactly I should celebrate the day and whom to thank and the differences between Memorial and Veteran's Day and to thank our current troops for their sacrifice and to certainly not to think about how, every day, the U.S. goes to great expense in personnel, equipment, fuel, and ordnance to "protect American interests" around the globe. I sometimes wonder about days like that and the message-peddling by seemingly well meaning folks who are by proxy spreading the establishment's long-standing and absurd propaganda of American exceptionalism and I can't quite understand how there apparently is, among the peddlers, no realization that, when in power, every nation-state since forever promotes and has promoted this idea and it's nothing new and it's every bit as absurd as promulgating "Mongol exceptionalism", or "Aztec exceptionalism", or "Tudor exceptionalism", or, gasp, "Arab exceptionalism". 

I see from my phone that the U.S. has topped 100K deaths related to COVID-19. Regardless of your thoughts on the matter of masks, and quarantines, and shelter-in-place, and people's rights to do things, and the economy, you have to acknowledge that this is a large number. For comparison, total casualties at Gettysburg for both Union and Confederate ran around a half of that number and was such an extreme loss over a three day period that Lincoln had to train his ass up to the battlefield and, in passage, write one of the most iconic speeches of American history in order to respond to the carnage. It's truly amazing, not in a percentage wise mindset with respect to total population, but in a sheer size aspect. In Alaska, the state population is 700K+, so if the losses were localized in the state, that's one in seven folks. Here, at the Moosehead where I type, we could be down one person of the seven sitting at the bar, and given the demographic/lifestyles of these patrons who are spending their glorious afternoons, myself included, revving up into the nightly oblivion, to reasonably expect, 1 to 7 ratio wise, to lose Paul, or Jay, or Sam, or me. Or, since a virus doesn't know shit all about numbers, all of us could go.

Henry Rollins once wrote, "Natural disasters are not enough. You need it to happen to you." When I first read this line it struck me as necessary to keep, like a mantra or prayer, a grand petition to some higher conscioussed being for implementation among us down here in the muck. It's a terrible idea, one that people pale from, the welcoming of unbearable suffering in order to grow/change/whatever. But it's a true one too, a failingly true one. It brings to one's mind people like climate change deniers who have had their homes destroyed by, you know, the effects of climate change, who fail to acknowledge the idea that our individual actions have collective consequences that can lead to our individual misery. The thought doesn't sink in because what happened to them, what happens to us all, is a tragedy, an act of God, something that no-one could have predicted. The sentences fail to deliver on their premise and it hilariously punctuates the theory that, several million years ago, our primate ancestors only had the capability to attend to how many figs were in any given area of tree cover or the overweening urge to squabble among rivals for territory and breeding access. 

The assholes in charge cancelled the State Fair, the Scottish Highland games, etc. etc. I fume impotently at these decisions yet I can also acknowledge it is probably for the best. The lack of summer entertainment is a trade off, I suppose a small sacrifice, for the possibility of societal change RE: work schedules, the mass realization of the absurdity of the 40 hour work week, and, hearteningly, the raft of actual consequences for people like that lady who called the cops on a black man in Central Park after he asked her to leash her dog, and the actions being taken against the four Minneapolis police officers who killed a black man in broad daylight, and the gunning down of a black man in Georgia as he went for a run. That it took legions of people on social media to post and repost and repost and mob streets and repost still until enough people across the country got so pissed that, "hey, we live in a police state", and to demand that something, anything be done is awful, true. Yet it's also a reason, for me, for hope, for a grand shouldering on into the bullshit, the everyday garbage, the moiling away for nothing, the quotidian horsecock of life, the never-ending nascent apocalypse and abyss.  

brb, biking.

Kill Ya Masters

The other day I was at the Fred Meyer liquor store value buying trash vodka because, COVID, you know? While I was in line everyone held to the social distancing "norms" but at the register curious things were happening. There was a lady, older, maybe 50 buying garbage beer and a pint of 90 proof peppermint schnapps and having an animated conversation with the other register customer who seemed like he was an acquaintance the lady had not seen in some time. The lady wore shorts, flip-flops, a mask, blue nitrile gloves, and had her phone in her hand while she paid with cash for which she received change with the other. Later, as I was exiting the liquor store the same lady was at the self-checkout, purchasing the rest of her items that she had not brought with her into the liquor store. I went home, got faded, and puzzled over this woman and her life and the merest fraction of it that I had observed.

Here's a mask I found while out walking the other day. It's on a path that is destined to be an elevated and paved walk/bikeway that runs parallel to the Glenn here in town. I have since been back to this location and found the mask absent, to places unknown. I've been thinking a lot about the apocalyptic, Revelations nature my mother would have framed to the current reality. More so, especially in light of Mother's Day, and I'm glad she's gone, been gone some time. I carry her around with me always, thinking about how the neighbor who throws his cigarette butts over his privacy fence into my garden beds as someone she would label as "white trash" but knowing that if he were any other color she'd have called him a "nigger" at worst or a "creole" at best. It's funny how the past coils around you and stings your mind. I am reminded of not being able to eat a dinner of spaghetti as a child because I watched an Ethiopian famine aid commercial. She'd lauded my empathy, if memory serves. I try to think about her and how she'd bracket the world in 2020 with all the writing on the wall as it always has been - famine, war, pestilence, death.

Simon Hanselmann has a new comic collection out. It's titled "Bad Gateway" and can be found, if in stock, at the store and it is fabulous. Owl has moved out, shit's getting real, employment might be a necessity. The above photo is from the penultimate newest collection titled "Amsterdam". It's so good, watching someone out in the world doing a thing at which they are passionate and capable and truthful, and to watch real, even if shitty characters, live out their lives in a different dimension than my own. My god, is it great to feel what Mogg feels when betrayed, what Megg's motivations are given her mental health history, what Werewolf Jones's cravings are RE: his awful need to blot out reality. They, the characters, are terrible and that is the idea maybe, that we too are equally complicit in that vast reservoir of terribleness, in each our own way, in that we can step back and reflect on how we are all trash, all of us, and in need of serious mending.  

We, and by we I mean A, bought Uly a butterfly kit to while away his time during the quarantine/shelter in place. They're the painted lady variety and the facility whence they came was located in North Carolina. These butterflies apparently migrate to AK and can over summer here to do various butterfly things. They only live a year and the first one popped out of its chrysalis just today, a grotesque and magnificent metamorphosis from the crawling grub it was when we unboxed the kit. Butterflies have been around since literally forever and watching its coiled and extruding proboscis unsettled, the stuff of interdimensional nightmares, yet fascinating in all its horror. This was life. I was afraid. Disgusted. Enthralled. Impassioned enough to write about it. As one should be, I suppose.

RTJ have a new album forthcoming and the two new singles available that I've found, "Ooh La La" and "Yankee and the Brave", are hardcore worth it. They rap about an apocalypse that won't happen, an uprising of the down-trodden, a revolution to invert the reins-controllers and the have-nots. It's great stuff, inspiring and idealistic in scope, a great crying out against the vast corrupt powers of old and evil as Hunter S. would say. It's definitely a message around which one could congregate and perhaps figuratively storm the bulwarks of all the shitty and the bad in this nation. I listen to it and know that the kind of mass anarchism Killer Mike and El-P advocate won't happen, but isn't it pretty to think so. So I take my value trash vodka and go home and write this for you all, in the hope that maybe you can go find something new that you had not known previously and dive into something headlong that maybe might not be your jam but only because you don't know it yet. Good luck out there.

COVID-19 INSANITY

With the advent of my work's absolutely farcical "telework" shenanigans that the corporate drones have cooked up to justify the DOL paying our absolutely obscene salaries while their employees essentially have snow-days from actually showing up to work, I've been taking to long walks to cure the mind and refresh the spirit during the hysterical national nightmare that is COVID-19. It's been a heartening time and I try to get out for an hour or so each day and I've been disappointed in the lack of treasures that I've found. The spring is thawing and items are beginning to rebirth from their frozen wombs and present themselves to the world once more yet I'd not cached a find worthy of note. Then, Saturday came and I was rewarded with the gem below.

I was tooling down Evergreen in a serious alter and listening to shoegaze on my Spotify and it was the most right and just soundtrack to everything - gray sky, spotty patches of dim sunlight, gutter water moving in a capillarian sludge underneath an icy skin, other extrusions of yet to be melted ice like molten glass arrested in mid pour, the trash, the trash, the trash, half exposed newspapers in plasticine wrappers, the cars pouring by in the street at a much reduced rate, the general deadness of a town, much like everyone else's, in the midst of a shutdown. It was likely shed by the insane man who wanders town and smokes weed from a huge glass pipe on the bench outside the Moosehead and it reminded me of a younger time, one filled with a ridiculous patriotism, merged with the current, seeming endless panic that reappears anew, yet in a different avatar each year - Ebola, housing crash, Great Recession, the, holy shit, 19 year war with Afghanis, shelves denuded of paper and cleaning products, climate change, runs on meat, eggs, milk, cheese, SARS, swine flu, the general, interminable, group paranoia quelled momentarily by a new distraction or ever more dire catastrophe. It's something, being alive that is, in the current era, but then again that's true for each Ecclesiastical, in the Biblical sense, time frame. 

On today's walk I found this chit along the path that runs behind the high school. It's torn from a spiral notebook and written in what looks like a middle school girl's block print. I folded the paper and secreted it in my coat and resumed my walk. The air outside was rank with the odor of spring, a smell that reminds me of when I was a young boy and I visited one of my father's worksites and there was a large excavation that had filled with rainwater and the sides were a viscous mud. It was springtime then too, and I didn't spend long at the site yet the memory persists. I've smelt similar odors on farmyards and in the plains states rich with grain and livestock. I remember the old man describing it as "sour" when I asked him what it was. Everyone connected with that site, except for me, is likely dead and the thought that the memory only resides in one remaining mind is disturbing, for obvious reasons. This paper affected me likewise, in that this jejune and unfinished start to a narrative only existed in one other mind, one other cluster of neurons, of someone wholly alien to me and this reality made me weep at the importance of my finding it and of Art and the immortal desire to be remembered, if only for a time.

I'm certain I've got corona'd.