Hey, Hey!

Here's a collection of depressing things I've found on a recent trip to Bishop's Attic, and maybe some commentary. 

When you witness heartbreak in the real world, what does that look like for you? Has the child died? Is this Raymond Carver? Is this Hemingway? The child has died, regardless, in theory or experiment, for this item has made its way to this image. What is the baby's name? Who did she look like? What is her (possibly inextant) arc? There are billions of heartbreaks flowering all around us.

Absolute insanity in any direction, a blanket of non-stop wondrous living, pushing into the right void of nothingness existence in a moment that cannot be replicated. And the sound, sound, sound of it hammering, concordant, disconcordant, at times harmony, at others noise. There is a portion of us that pushes against the false reality and gives the briefest moments of smeared clarity that also cannot be fully resolved. Look at this little girl's face. Feel every instant of her being. Joy.

This life, my life, has been a spectacular spiraling about things that keep surprising me. As if I'm some idiot continually reminded of the shit that's happening outside my window. It's as if you live in a haunted house but become acquaintanced to the ghosts. You get to know shaky drawer Beth who rattles the silverware, Moany Pete who can't shut up about his heartbreak, Cold Area Maver who you just put on a blanket and sit with.

50 years only to end up in a thrift store. Who would buy this? Who could drink from such goblets? Me. Imagine sucking down the lifeforce of 50 years of co-being. Imitative magic in the extreme. Parrot the thing you wish to happen. I left the set on the shelf as a faded ghoul in the rear of the thrift store hacked and hacked at some catarrh. Later, I would go to the bar.

Uly and I engaged in the old, the ancient, the creation of magic amulets and medallions, the genesis of coins, of numismatics, of record keeping, of bureaucracy, of grain, of slaves, of property. He's a quick study, the lad, and he knows things writ deep in the nature of his soul. These things we inhered with special portent, in the hopes that they might see the sun through to another passing, another moment, another everything.

Don't be so hard on yourself.

 

Howl.

Evidence of a kill, possibly by an American Kestrel. 

Not from Ginsburg, but from Alexandra Savior, who I've recently discovered in my ever expanding circle of shit that I'm into. I've been listening to a lot of Indie/Folk lady singers belting out their heartbreaks and melancholic misadventures with their wavering throats in tones like pink lemonade to steal a lyric from another of Ms. Savior's jams. Who knows whence came this re-education, but as I was saying to my special lady earlier, I should have known something was in the works as I had been the alone twink 17 year old boy with tears in his eyes who embarrassedly and with much self-consciousness crooned along, badly, word for word, with Sarah McLachlan's "Adia".

See the swag, the drip, the absolute candy paint bling recently copped from Faerie magazine's merch portal. You can find them under the "Witchy" tab on their site which hails to contain "all things witchy!" This also says something about the current rabbit trail from which I send out these inconsistent updates. I remember, it being the apropos time of year upcoming, how much my mother detested the thought of witchcraft and the unbearable stench of anything pagan let alone Satanist. When we were kids we never dressed up for All Hallows, even going so far as to turn off home lights and ignore the knocks of the bravest trick or treaters to haul up onto a darkened trailer porch in rural Mississippi for treats for the fear on my mother's part that even a dalliance, a bit of fun, an opening to evil could lead to a slippery slope of idolatry and sin, the loss of our collective and delicate souls to the foul machinery of the Devil's workshop. That probably says something about me too, but I'm ill-equipped to say what as I'm all I've got to analyze the situation.

A rare internet sighting of a Dighiera in the wild, seen socializing with wise folk.

I turned 40 recently. I certainly wouldn't proselytize the greatness of simply existing in the world for its own sake, by any means, but this past birthday was the easiest one yet. I spent my celebration day alone, twisted, wandering around town, completely adrift, my special lady having abandoned me for her summer hiatus in the lower 48. I ended up at the bar, natch, and can't remember much about the particulars of it - what I ate, drank, heard. It was, as many current days have become, a seemingly endless cinemascope of a man performing bizarre Skinnerian behavioral loops. Hypotheses: Given "a", subject will wake, look at a screen, rise, dress, walk to a cafe, drink coffee, write, walk to a bar, read Virginia Woolf. Given "b", subject will wake, look at a screen, rise, dress, drive to an office, look at a screen, drive home, drink. Put that on repeat and the edges start to blur. It's reasonable to accept that some of the details are lost but that, on balance, I feel the days are "good". Likely, disaster is just around the bend.

There's snow in the Talkeetnas, the Chugach. COVID numbers are through the state's roof but, as the barista implicitly informed me recently, the pandemic was, in fact, over. I agreed. So do the hoi polloi of the cafe, me one of their ilk, sitting around in the public spaces of others, wantonly breathing particulate clouds around us, perforating each other's bubbles. I had a cousin die of the disease recently. She worked in the hospitality industry, restaurants specifically, in the deepest south you can probably go in this country. Thinking about her situation - an intubation, sedation, improving function, being woken up, trying to learn how to eat again, then a rapid decline into eventual death, is all abstract, like some kind of impressionist view of how shitty it is to die choking on your own fluids. Yet here we are, all doing our thing. You can't think about it too much.

Cafe Mind, Mind Cafe

Today I arose at a hefty 10 AM after lying in bed for more than an hour, staring out the window, at the screen, scrolling the tubes, watching the spectacle. After waking, I finished the cherry cider leftover from the night before, a nice, 6 oz. lift to what had all the trappings of a perfect Sunday morning, minus the availability of the Eucharist (my own fault, really). Instead of the liturgy, I repaired to the cafe, my seeming church, its congregants my brothers in faith, these days. There are all manner of folk here and only the old men come in, much like myself, for their soups and coffees alone. There is a boy who resembles the fat kid from Stranger Things on an awkward and seeming first date with a young lady. They make small talk and fumble with their cups. There are families, whole scores of people, with babies and children eating tiny portions of grilled cheeses. Old ladies consort in the corner. People stab plastic straws into disposable cups with a prurient urgency. Lana Del Rey is fucking slaying me and I'm close to sobs. Holy God, send a little help to your scribe down here.

Yesterday I was in the cafe solely for reading. I had been writing a truly insane piece of journalism that will never see publication (but that's okay) but put the juice on hold for the day in order to scratch around through a collection of thoughts from various authors. Continuing my education, as it were, refreshing the knowledge I'd forgotten. I stopped after each section in each book to "rest my eyes" as my mother would implore me if I video gamed too long. The cafe was a bustling oasis of warmth and I had just finished a story by Laura Van Den Berg (Volcano House) where the protagonist's twin sister fell victim to a mass shooting. I began to dwell on the absurdity of this, the logistics, the tactics, the possibilities of a man (white, mid-twenties) prepping in the nearby bathroom to gun us all to hell (the delicate click of rounds into magazines). I arose to investigate, found no shooter. Pro-gun Trump guy was in the cafe and I considered the lack of public violence in my town. How would one go about such an endeavor? Remember basic Marine training. Begin planning. Arrange recon. Make recon. Complete plan. The thing I can't remember unless I google (Its acronym's placeholder being an I). Supervise. What was I doing if not making said reconnaissance? I studied the layout of the cafe, the patrons, the curiosity of mass shootings happening in mostly open venues like supermarkets and malls. Here, we were/are target dense, few exits, choke points for bodies, literal fish in a barrel. Why hadn't the imagined guy from the bathroom come in blasting? Which corner would he take first? What child could I steamroll to escape? The thought of a hand grenade rattling around in the small nook. A possible incendiary device, maybe more. The pop pop pop of 556 rounds into puffy coats and bodies. The baristas flooding out through the kitchen in back. Maybe a surprise? Maybe Pro-gun Trump guy engages the target with a concealed pistol? Maybe an "allahu akbar" prior to a clean and final light? Rest your eyes, Benjamin. 

I go back to work tomorrow. Not excited about that one. I suppose its necessary as I've worn out my welcome at home and everyone needs a break. This "vacation" of mine has been, like all things, a mental odyssey. Another family through the door, vacantly looking around before selecting a table. A child in bib snow pants (mauve?) runs about smiling like everything, the world, life, is okay. The beauty of the young is so grand, in that they are ignorant of all the ways the earth will destroy them. Yesterday (Friday?) I watched a short-eared owl coast above the Matanuska river before plunging, presumably for prey, into the reverse slope of a nearby rise in elevation. Everyone is speaking wordlessly, replaced by the music making a circuit of my ears which in turn is equally as meaningless/ful. Ah, fuck it.

I suspect I should get in this balloon and motor.

Mind Cafe, Cafe Mind

In the dark (brilliant, dazzling) temple of the cafe where there sits a family of seemingly Nordic stock enjoying the hard-earned labors of the man and woman (man sits with his hood raised) among the children dressed as ragged scamps (one, a boy possibly, doffing a red and feathered felt fedora prior to repast). They are curious. Recently I read the story of a prehistoric mass grave unearthed and examined in Europe somewhere (the Baltic states? the Balkans?).  A collection of skeletons unceremoniously dumped in a pile in a shallow grave all of which bore the evidence of disastrous head trauma, aged 2 to old, and only a few of which were related genetically. The scientists speculated as to what had happened, what led these bound victims to their brainings, but if you pay attention to this family over here, you already know. A massive, ugly truth from the deep unrecorded.

A barista delivering a meal passed within arms length. I chuckled about that. Last night A and I finished a movie, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, which is, as far as I could ascertain, largely themed around the armature narrative of the unknowable other. (Jesus, will you ever shut up about that?) It was good, infuriatingly so, the way decent works of Art are supposed to elicit outrage. Of course I wanted to argue with A about it but she would have none. There is an ancient man, a gnome by rights, who frequents the cafe in the same way as I. The baristas know him, his usual, and I even saw one of the prettier ones, one who works here no longer, hug him once. He sits and watches and I rarely see him speak. Is he a widower? He is always solo, save for that legendary scene where, over bibles and notebooks, the blonde woman a quarter his seeming age asked for a hug and received one (avuncular, well-meaning, rightly-intentioned, no hint of filth). Fuck I hope she's doing well, wherever she is.

The other day at work, I consoled (one wishes), a young lady from the village about a recent test result that had not gone in the intended direction. She was upset (it seemed) at not having performed on a metric that others had impressed upon her as important. She'd called to see if it were appropriate to visit my office at the oddness of the hour and I said yes, natch. She asked on the test results' seeming import and I explained that, while I understood her concern, to not bother with feeling shame, or bad, or negative as the test was an absolute falsehood. I tried to inform her of testing's inherent bias and of things cultural and societal that had conspired such that she'd never reach the hoped for goal and as such pining about missing the mark was a waste of energy. Can you imagine the roles reversed? Can you imagine yourself hunting seals and being graded on your performance adversely and then feeling poorly because strangers might be disappointed at your failure? Absurd. Insane. Possibly unethical. Definitely wrong. She left after a quick chat and her eyes smiled but I don't know if it was genuine as she was wearing a mask for the duration of our visit. Bizarre. Wonderful. I cried after, about the futility, the hopelessness, the implicit consent with all the things that conspired to make her feel bad that her score decreased. 

White guy in dreads across the cafe, near where the paleolithic massacre victims had sit. I've been flogging the beast of race in these posts lately, mostly thoughts about whiteness. I don't know what I'm saying and I have no agenda. I don't even have a cogent position as you have seen. It's like hearing an idiot's blather. Yet it won't leave my mind unless the trepanning here. Earlier today I learned that Trump was set to launch his own social media platform. Other things I learned from the news recently was that a man killed a six year old girl, shot twice in the chest after spilling some water. Some guy killed a bunch of Atlantan Asian people the other day. The same student I spoke to about her test results had previously taught me the Yup'ik word for caribou. I described my life to Nick and Dan as a "series of potions" and I think that's pretty accurate for us all. When challenged about the grandiosity of a woman's armpit aroma this morning, I maintained that it was definitely top ten in odors. (You're making up that part.) A young blonde woman is eating a pumpkin roll in front of me. I mean, if you can't see the species connections here, I'm not sure I can paint a clearer picture. 

Balance, Balance, Balance

The cafe is a vast and sobering place. Lunch press is upon the baristas caroming behind the counter to espresso, pasta, soup, chatter, receipt tape, orders up, mania broadcast from every cornice. There are folks here, all white, hugging and laughing and, before I juiced into the prog jazz station recommended for me by an A.I., conversing about the economy and recovery and COVID related things. Across from me at the shared long table, is a man whose laptop declaims loudly his a: being a gun owner and b: that he is stolidly pro-Trump. The women, one of them is probably Eowyn Ivey, all wearing the uniform of the white: yoga pants/leggings, puffy Northface coats, children in tow. Earlier, in the library, there was a woman, in the uniform of the day, with four children, only one of which was school age whose youngest daughter supplicated, pulling at mom's coat pocket flap with a keening "unnhhh, unnhh" for a full three minutes before her mother dismissed her with, "One minute, honey." I was in line behind her and imagined all the implications of the scene before me, all 4 billion years of it, the absurd machinery. Who are these people? Why can't they get out of my head? Why can't I get out of my own?

Later, I went to the grocery store and spoke only in memes, aloud, to the patrons attempting to shop alongside me. I spent 80 USD to purchase items to make po'boys. I laughed in the check out line as I relayed this amount to Uly. When he didn't appreciate the hypocrisy, I enjoined him to chuckle, in the vein of Foghorn Leghorn, as "It's a joke son, you're supposed to laugh." I have the feeling that I'm going to be the old man in the home who speaks in crude and unrecognizable snippets of a lifetime of exposure to a culture that refuses right understanding and all cogent analysis. (Can you imagine explaining your daily life to an extra-terrestrial?) I imagine the long suffering CNAs doomed to cater to my needs as eye-rolling goddesses. How can one study a thing without the trappings of its infection? Maybe that's where the writing comes in, a kind of barely-maintaining-sanity-life preserver, a consciousness Mae West inflatable. Maybe the point is to become so cryptic and esoteric that one eschews ciphering, to write oneself into a nice solipsistic dreamscape from which awakening is unable and undesired? 

The older I get, the more I seemingly understand, as much as anyone understands anything, the flow of the jazz tunes that the machines suggested I hear. I've been in the nerve for a while now, long enough feel profoundly revolutionized yet not long enough to begin to question my initial assumptions, a dangerous juncture. I might say any number of asinine things at any second, outing myself as a fraud, a neophyte, an idiot. I wonder if the Trump sticker guy has these thoughts. Maybe I should ask him over a heteronormative and totally not homosex beer that I know, at least for myself, is going to happen later? We could talk shop, discuss the nation, engage my fellow patriot. The fictions we collectively suckle are delightful indeed. Wait, hold up, I just glanced over at my man's next to me (not the Trump dude) screen and found he was reading the story of Jesus's encounter with the famed (infamous?) tax collector sitting in a sycamore. I'm surrounded. I'm terrified. I'm in love. Man, is this track screaming. I need to displace, to reload.

The new pos is engaged with an enemy in the form of a white man, bearded, 30s, wearing a hoodie, who is roundly expounding about the military-industrial complex to a table of similarly raced folks, both apparent men and women. Oh, he's going hard at it, talking, talking, talking, declarative in extremis (What is it, exactly, that I think I'm fucking doing right now?). A woman at the hand-gesturing instructor stretched her back, twisting against the chair in left and right arcs and revealed she had, no doubt during the course of this very morning's shower, shaved her armpits bare. The light fixture over the table's head has one blown fluorescent bulb, the kind that, when introduced a while ago would destroy the incandescent bulb market and was seen, by some, as anathema to lighted structures. The walls of the cafe are decked in new watercolors and ink at obscene prices. I am beset by words, by lies, and the more I see them, the more I hate lies, as Captain Willard would say.

I was recently taken with the fantasy of using Uncle Joe's stimmy money to partake in a Greyhound bus tour of the Michigan wilds. Jesus Christ guys, I just took out my earbuds to go get a birch beer with ice and heard mil-ind complex guy say "For a minute there I thought you said 'game theory' and I was all 'eeeeeee' because it seems complex but it's really based on simple principles." (Legit LOLs here in the cafe as I type.) Anyway, I wanted peruse the highways, in Poe Ballantine fashion, of the upper Midwest, logging country as I understand it according to Papa Hem, and meet a kindly old man named Bert who would teach me to hunt and fish the land in a way my father never did. We would wear mackinaw coats and hunting caps with ear flaps and stroll the wood with our shotguns, looking for pheasants. Bert would be the kind of person who had never heard the construct "cancel culture". He would be solidly anti-hippie, but would, for reasons unknown to himself, take a liking to my long hair and ratty beard. He would have vague libertarian notions of national governance. Evenings, we'd sit by his cabin's glass-doored woodstove and stare into the fire without words, sharing warm whiskies, before a shuffle off to sleep. A completely absurd scene, surreal really, one that lives in my mind, like this cafe, like the baristas, like the Trump guy, like Zaccheus, like the military industrial complex, like this music, like everything else.

Jesus, these are words. 

Magic, Magic, Magic

Earlier today, the barista stopped me before I ordered and said "Don't take this the wrong way, but I was watching a documentary about a cult and you look like you belong to it. Hold on, let me show you." Then she proceeded to scroll her phone's images to display a shot of a  group of African men in orange jumpers, much like the thermal garment I wore. We then had a good laugh, mine altered, hers seemingly genuine. It's not the first time these young women have said something about the meat face and aura I project. Previously, I'd been informed that, from among the patronage, the group of early and mid-20s caffeine dealers (all white, many Christian) had decided that I was the one most likely to be/become a serial killer. It's nice to be seen, by anyone, much less a troop of attractive, young and unattainable folk even if it is not in the kindest light.

Speaking of the cafe, I took it on myself to visit for a prolonged stay, the first time since COVID numbers in the valley took a significant leap back in October of last year. The place is every bit as mysterious, as casually strange as it has been with only the sporadic mask sighting, a kind of looking glass back into pre-COVID days when people had the sheer temerity to gather indoors in large numbers of souls not in their circle in order to breathe on each other. A woman passed so close I could smell her perfume, and I had the insight that it was a divine thing, the smelling of people not your own and likely, I imagine at least for myself, to go away for the most part on a large scale just because COVID. Speaking of, numbers are down, statewide, from their obscene peaks around solstice-tide and so I sit in this magical spaceship cabin with my fellow passengers - to be awed by their separateness. If only there were some way to reach them, to communicate an experience, yet not one is reading a book. A bizarre let down from the species.

At work lately, students have been returning in fits and starts - subject to the whims of a fanatical bureaucracy and the order by fiat mentality of all the most oppressing machines. That I'm a tool of institutional racism is a fact that never fails to present itself. The Department of Labor needs civilized, meek, conflict-resolutionized, and anger-managed facile drones for the work force. At work the mechanism seeks to take the Native out of the Native; the sufficiently un-white, un-western must be whitened and westernized, else they will be unable to get and maintain a job "outside of the village". This and sentiments like these ring from the dorm mezzanines and the classroom walls, the institutional hallways and in the communal dining hall. My role in the beast is finely tuned, one for which a body must have the thinnest veneer of empathy to execute, and must be an organism attuned to the jazz sax wailings of a student's potential employment in Q4 lest the company performance rating take a hit, and one where a person must bow to the bottom line of and apparent student success, but who must also must carry around with them the family mysteries of hundreds of individuals, all piping similar melodies of the cruelties that brought them to us. What a world.

The equinox is trending and it shows - water in the streets, slush in the gutter, the scrubby cottonwoods on the walk downtown birthing just beginning to green nodes of leaves, vast labile moods from despair to euphoria. I haven't written anything coherent in months, almost a year. I've tried to corner ideas, snare them, but all of the things I write sound banal, corrupt, greedy, and, worst of all, repetitive. Topics abound that I wish to broach but the words look like idiots on the page, myself the idiot king puppeteer. A sentence appears yet one does not follow. The thought of submitting a story to a magazine sits obscenely gesturing at passersby. The prospect that graduate debt was a waste in both time and energy, at least in terms of creative ability and proliferation, looms.

  Ah, time for the bar and pint rim paredolia after some prolonged absence.

If Only

Today was an exercise, as all true days are. Get up, get nourished, ingest potions, armor up and get out the door, get experience, try to swagger through the buffs and debuffs of your most recently saved campaign. I'd the day off from work due it being the new year and the morning was a divinity of light and sun and the cat on the windowsill and a card that Ulybear and I made for his godmother, T, in thanks that she sent us a greeting and update on the necessary beauties of her own compartmentalized being. Once accomplished, I sat on the sofa and watched the mountain grow and mutate in the cresting sun. A went to the store and I put on music and slow swayed around my living room ingesting all of the beauty-terror of the day and my being in it. That has nothing to do with the Scoob here in his Christmas regalia but there he sits like some obese and profane satrap lavished by concubines and born along the yuletide snow drifts in an immense palimpsest born aloft on the shoulders of slaves of many races. It, the photo, is simply another mote in the ever growing gyre of absurdities in which we, all of us, swim.

Christmas happened, is happening, depending who you ask and we had the day ensconced in the living room, unwrapping gifts from locales near and far, myself with the added task of police calling the yard of waste generated by unboxing and unwrapping. Even with recycling, you fail to not make a substantive amount of trash but we persist in these rituals as they are older than memory can recall, developed at a time before which writing could chronicle. The weather is cold, it is dark, the spring may not come, I've been stuck in this motherfucking cave for a moon and unless we, as a tribe, make some diversion and spread goodwill then I swear I'm going to jab this antler tipped spear into someone, anyone, maybe even myself. My mind is prone to flights of idiocy, true, but I spend a fair amount of time trying to grind out what appears to be an inherent meaning between myself, the past, ancestors, my children, the stupidly unknowable future. Here is one of the nuggets, a high resolution raven blasted onto a canvas, courtesy of my two oldest. It attains primacy on the cave wall here, with others of its ilk, an important addition to the miracle of birds. Future archaeologists will ponder the meaning of this room of the cave. Did we venerate the birds because we believed them to be deities that would ensure the sun's return? What other evidence in the surrounding sediment layers support this hypothesis? 

My special lady got me a horse for Christmas. It's beautiful. I love it. The plan is to take it to work and elevate it for all to see who should come visit my work cave. I've become obsessed by horses, have been for some time now. Just the other day, I sent a text to one of my dearest friends, J, who is herself a horse person, that read "I petted horses yesterday. That was god." The occasion to send such a text was Uly, myself, and A going to a horse farm event for Halloween and I remember the exact horse - a buckskin quarter horse whose name escapes this faulty tub of neurochemicals - and I looked into her eyes, into that strange ungulate space, back down into the history of it, of us conjoined together, our species as rivals, then theirs as food, then their impressment into the service of humans, now, largely, their role as pets and recreation. As I looked into this creature, and into myself, I was stricken by the remembered line from Blood Meridian "and everywhere... horses lay screaming" as the most horrific in a passage rife with violence, human massacre, scalping, evisceration, and unconsented and sometimes necrophilic sodomy.

We went to the arboretum today and I stood in a snowglobe of crystalline shards and columnar light fracturing with the mountains hoving up like sea beasts on the horizon and the diamond particulate fluttering through the air in the cold and the vast mystery of the trees and the unquestioned existence of sprites in the wood albeit in diminished magic due to the nature of their institutionalization and the vermiculite tracings of voles in the snow exposed by wind and melt and the vast clear overhead bell of sky and the pop of snow underfoot. Perfection, save the absence of the two oldest due to positive COVID tests and exposure on their end. What a world. 

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.