Invasive Weed Counter-Insurgency and Other Insanities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Inexorable Tourist Menace Is Upon Us

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summer Solstice, D plus 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quaking Aspens, Failed Chicks

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

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

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

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

May 20th, 2019.

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

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

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

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

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

Christ does it all hurt deliciously.

Springtime Depression and a Thickset Woman in an MLP Onesie

Joke's on you, bronies, the title was based on a scene I saw and did not photograph in my local cafe and designed only to hit search algorithms for clicks from your horde of slavering basement dwellers. Your friendship is magic bullshit can take a hike. Shower already and stop fapping to rule 34'd children's cartoons, you filthy troglodytes. 

Here's the memorial to Doris at the Moosehead. If you squint, you can see her hat in the back on the touchscreen for amusement only video game crouching at the end of the bar. I've been thinking a lot about death and this stupid body I'm housing and how I'm doing many things to shorten its timeframe but am somehow unperturbed by this. There may be a message in that but I am at a loss to know what that would look like.

We took in Captain Cat some years ago (2? 3? The speeding never stops, never stops.). He's a testament to the gritty and foolish persistence of life in the face of ultimate absurdity. A true Sisyphean hero of the Camus variety, struggling uselessly up that slope into nothing. I'm glad he's found a relatively easy place to shoulder on toward death.

Christ, am I becoming a fat bastard. Ulybear was sick recently; a stomach bug laid him somewhat low. Myself too, although with none of the youthful resilience of being able to jump around for hours then crashing into a heap on the sofa in a languid mid-morning haze of recuperation. As he laid on me, we talked about the window to the outside scene, the mountain, the budding trees, youtube videos. I'm the age now that my old man was when I was born, roughly, and all I can think about is that countdown timer that will snatch me from this grand boy, my youngest. Maybe we'll be able to have beers together. Maybe not.

The chickadees have inhabited the birdhouse for a second consecutive year. I don't know if it's the same pair, but like to think that way. At work, I found a bird nest, possibly a magpie's, and now it lives in my office. It is broken, suffering a fall from a security light, but would still work if the birds had returned. This ruin will fade, much like our own fantasies of stability and future. 

Sanity seems fleeting. Beach House. Jesus. You ever wonder about those people who say things like "No bad days" or some such? Must be a treat.

Alleiluia, Alleluia, Alleluia

The women went down, found the tomb empty; or so the story goes. 

We went to mass under a crumpled aluminum sky (not the one pictured here but maybe more on that later). The place was packed, natch, with all of the faces of the faithful and the ripe young fleshes of men and women alike in their fineries and all the olds and the crusteds stolidly in attendance and the children, impish, among the pews and howling unimportunely. Uly asked about the elevated crucifix and remembered that image from the story we told him at Good Friday's dinner table about Christ's Passion. Later, we dined on brunch at Klondike Mike's - omelettes to order, biscuits and gravy, cornbeef hash, home fries, sausage, fruit, beer, hockey. The "chef" was a young man in a RVCA hat on his last cooking gig in Alaska, on his way to greener pastures at a potato chip factory in Ohio. All to think about was absurd impermanence and biological decay. 

On Friday, I learned that one of the Moosehead regulars, a woman who had signed on as witness to A's and my union, had perished. Doris would sit at the end of the bar and drink Miller Lites in between cigarettes and playing pulltabs. Her native face drooped and sagged like viscous putty as she ripped open the gambling tickets, the losers she piled into a basket on the bar surface before her. Her husband, Lon, white, equally wizened, sometimes drank iced tea and othertimes beer with their smokes, Winstons. We went to get beers at the store later and A went in as Uly and I waited in the car and listened to The Cardigans. When she came back, she said she had run into Carol, the other witness to our marriage and barkeep at the Moosehead. Carol was with her grandson and when A gave condolences, Carol reportedly said it was all for the best and that now, Doris was in a place where she could finally breathe again.

I'm in this motherfucking cafe, this fucking hell of a fucking place, crying like a bitch.

Biked into town for a beer recharge for A and a little alone time for me on a blustery Easter afternoon. Earlier, we had tie-dyed shirts with the leftover homemade egg dye A and Uly alchemized. The wind was brutal, magnificent. We had poked about at the last year's decay of our flowerbeds and tried to piece together what had been spared last year's culling and what had been introduced, new. Uly cut at the shooting grass with his child's scissors. The fat orange cat huddled by an exhaust vent. We discovered two starts of baneberry that must be dispatched another season. The cranberry stalks bore sign of summer sproutings. Now, it's this, and writing here, and another uselessly entropizing plunge into nothingness and the begged for storage of memories of a day wherein the baptismal renewal of Father Joseph's slinging hit my own and Uly's head and there was much experience and the sky remained and the earth persisted and this fiction keeps rolling on, rolling on, rolling. 

Do I reject Satan and all his works and all his empty promises? I do reject them. 

Feet don't fail me now.

NO BOOZE LIVE BLOGGING LENT, Holy Week Episode

14APR-20APR2019 - Holy Week

Palm Sunday

Spy Wednesday

Maundy Thursday

Good Friday

Holy Saturday

Eastertide is almost upon us. The cafe hums. My sanity feels tenuous at best and this, all this reality, seems too much to bear. Things are shaky. I spent some time at the bar yesterday, watching hockey and holding Uly on my lap while we listened to the jukebox and I low-key wept at that goodness. Later, we went home where A made falafel sandwiches and tabouli salad and we ate olives and dolma with our greasy fingers as the world melted outside.

Every day is a question of whether or not things can persist.

NO BOOZE LIVE BLOGGING LENT, Penultimate Episode

08APR-13APR2019 - Week 5

Sitting in the cafe and waiting for the funicular of this chocolate to take me to elevation. I've been thinking a lot lately about death and human history and Jesus Christ, watching people eat things is terrible absurd and infuriating in this miasma of funk cafe nightmare with photographs of birds on the walls and this woman flicking muffin crumbs from her fingers with her ape hands is fucking disconcerting in the utmost right now. There is the barista with the black hair, long, curled up on her skull like rodentia homes and the other one, the Catholic, blonde, with the Marian medallion and the crumb woman is blonde also and there too is an older man, Cenobite-like, wearing sunglasses as he eats a breakfast burrito with sour cream. Insanity. Every direction. Send help.

Playoff hockey started this week. What a grand time to be alive. Lord Stanley's cup has been around for 100 years and it's the determination of men to put knives on their feet and a club in their hands and venture out onto the ice to engage in combat that really puts the hooks in me. I can't, as I think I've noted before, even roller skate and these actors on their frozen stage is drama of the highest order. We repaired to the bar yesterday in our failure and watched the contestants engage and there was a dog and Guy Fieri on the other tube and no one in the place judged us for our lapse in abstention and later, there was ramen shrimp and movies with Julianne Moore and much crying about beauty in the face of absurd violence that is, seemingly, the default condition of our hilariously maladaptive race.

I am supposed to go to confession this afternoon but heartily doubt that I'll make it. At AWP, I was speaking with a woman about our shared and bad Catholicity and we were unperturbed by this somehow, relishing almost in the assurance of God's graces that we'd somehow make it out okay if the afterlife is what it has been said to be. 

I worry a lot about dying. Not about the fact of it looming, but the terror beforehand, the drop from altitude, the catastrophe that necessitates a grueling slog into the tomb, the fear of holding your children close and lying to them in the run up to non-existence. Sometimes, I wish I could get out of my own head.

I've been writing, natch, futilely and forward into nothing that matters. Each time I try to explain this to someone else I embrace frustration. I'm 37 and I'll never be on any list of anyone under a certain age as a writer and this reality is much like the muffin eating woman above in her vexation. Again, maybe I'm just insane or, at the least, vastly in-equipped for life's current projection.

There's that funicular. Vaya con dios, hombres. 

NO BOOZE LIVE BLOGGING LENT, Episode 3

01APR2019 - April Fool's Day

Crazed notes found on the northbound Cascades train that was the third leg of my journey home. Seemed appropriate for the "{PIC}" designator I had inserted into the text as a reminder of where I was going with this. I couldn't decide if this was a novel outline or, as Nick put it, "a life plan". Either way, it's one of those things that you find that are the briefest of cigarette pulls of illumination of a face in an otherwise gloomy alleyway, as if you could see everything of the smoker's existence in that one flash, time present, past, future. For myself, I couldn't decide whether the script was tragic or comedic or scornful or empathetic. In that way, I suppose, that author had at once failed and succeeded in engaging his reader. The train conductor ignored the open sheet yet picked up the slim rectangular and yellow boarding pass left by a departed passenger on the seat next as he passed among his rounds. Something, something metaphor.

02APR-07APR2019 - Week 4

The return to work and Lenten sobriety was a welcome embrace after the near psychotic break feared and barely held at bay from the failed assault into Portland. The first day I was on benzo-flight stress-exhaustion hangover autopilot of disagreement. Sleep that night was less than ideal and in the morning of the second day, after A took Uly to daycare, I lay awake in the silent house and listened to my guts churn and roil (borborygmi, for Dan if he's reading), a disgustingly present memento mori. I rose and biked down to the cafe where there were the open carrying veterans at their morning coffees and the advance scouts of the tourist season crowding up the aisles where I must walk.

Later, A and I would have a conversation about our differences in opinion about the tourist pilot fishes. Agree to disagree indeed. I thought about cursing their journey, pointing out their sins, and wishing them ill, cancerous lesions, heartbreak, malaise, suffering of the highest order, yet I refrained. Probably should go to confession about that regardless of my withholding those invections.

Today I arose at a strange hour after troubled dreams of love and love unrequited and death and absurdity and music and terror and terror and terror. I had the day free from PTSD guy and I decided to get fucking busy. A went downtown to work and for a "meeting" and Uly and I motored for home improvement digs and yardwork things and it bore us to Wasilla proper which was right trash as she is wont to be. I saw a former student at the Lowes where we stopped for potted crotons and ficus and South African succulents. He, the student, lamented the waste of his life Job Corps had been. I refrained from indicating his common denominator in that waste. Uly said hello. We shopped.

At home there was, sans A, activity. I repotted and potted plants and rearranged and thoroughly peeved the kitties. Then came a garage tidying. Car detailing. A car wash about which Uly said, "I'm going to have to tell Mama about this!". Police call. Hanging basket seeding. A returned and we ambled to a garage sale, defunct in the chill wind of April and turning breakup skies of gray and blue and gray and blue and white and eagles thermaling over the roadway in pursuit of food or mates or both. Back home, we cobbled pizzas (With kale. Wait, kale?) and ate and read stories. Uly went to bed. A persisted some venture, yet retreated and left me and the fat orange bastard cat to our mountain without and the tunes within and the tubes withal. Blame naught. Lean in. 

I have failed in my Lenten aspirations. 

A-W-P

24MAR-31MAR2019

Oh my God I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee.

A and Uly left for PHX after a dinner of Mexer food and a solitary beer each for A and I before the airport then I drove back in the rain without them and listened to Dwight and sang along sadly and then got faded as hell on a little vodka and played video games and was alone. It was good.

Cruising altitude on the way back home, somewhere over the Pacific and I am a messy wreck of a psyche. I saw a man follow around his daughter in the terminal at SEATAC and on the train up from Portland there was a woman with her son, maybe 5, 6, and the way she loved him in those three hours of train travel made me know that he was ruined forever. Fuck all that. Here are some photos from AWP.

Street art, of a type, from the commissioned to the graffito. A large part of me is shifting, internally, on the nature of art and what that means and the awful terror that you get when you see something old, even if its shitty, but a shitty-ish thing that human hands wrought and yet persisted. Today, in the PDX Amtrak station there was a display of shit dug up from a century ago during a recent-ish renovation of the station and it was trash, all of it, broken bottles and ceramic toys and bones and metallic pieces of offal much abused by oxidation and it was the same as a 5th century BCE curved bronze and early Attic scraper that ancient and uselessly dead athletes used to rip the grime of their labor from their skins after their contests that I observed as part of a "collection" in the Portland Art Museum. I felt very afraid and on the border of disassociative most of my time in PDX.

AWP itself was a terror. Filled with what I'd heard was 12K shuffling souls (mine included) in a convention center wholly grotesque and itself on the verge of a cataclysmic geologic event that would usher in its own destruction and NO-ONE seemed to be aware that we were all that Kurtzian invertebrate sliding, slithering along the edge of a straight razor. I believed, as fervently as I ever have anything (love, God, beauty, women, liquor) that irony was a thing not in anyone's wheelhouse who had bothered to attend the conference.

 
Outside the local church. A and I tried to get in but the doors were locked. I picked a bloom and walked about the streets of Portland.This was where a Mary should have stood, her outstretched arms welcoming. Later, we encountered many homeless and the evidence of their passings. Later still, when A was not with me, the homeless would not bother to ask for alms. Sometimes, this world. This fucking timeline.

 

There are many words to describe the time, hell, all of my times, in all aspects of my lives, as if I were some DFW chronicler but I prefer to go the Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra route and speak in ill informed metaphors. This does not bode well for the writing career, it seems, wherein editors require more exposition, more spoonfeeding to "engage the reader". I am rambling. The bunnies were from the PDX museum of art and they were terrifying, but not nearly as much as the other things I beheld there. A darkened closet of childhood. A night I spent at an aunt's house, my mother's fraternal twin, where there was a ventriloquist dummy in the closet whose room (my cousin's, Wesley's or Alex's, or maybe they shared a room?) in which I was supposed to sleep. Dead people and dead people and dead people and the funerary marble portraits of accusing eyed man and daughter who were immortalized and judging forever as I looked at the man's curly beard and the woman's hand uplifted and gesturing and the Roman epitaph of a man to his wife and myriad portraits of Marian visions with children in a love I'll never know, at least from my end.

Guys, I may be losing it. My sanity feels very fragile. The Sneaker Pimps are not assisting.

Jonah, when instructed by the Lord to go and prophesy against the city of Nineveh said, "Nope on that, Yahweh" and fled from God and went on to be eaten and regurgitated by leviathan and then had an unfortunate interaction with a gourd before relenting and doing as God had said and then, when the Ninevites repented only a day into his prophesy, he was bereft. 

30000 feet plus. Here's hoping this gourd of a vehicle doesn't wither and die as the shade of my homecoming. 

Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison, Kyrie Eleison. 

Back to the grind.