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.

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.