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.

This Town Do Feel Mine

The other day I decided to bike around town. Nothing out of the ordinary there, but the face of the burg struck me as it sometimes does. Holy shit, I live here. I sometimes think that a purer distillation of Americana doesn't exist, that I've hit the main nerve, the wet dream of so many conservative folks who fervently desire to "Make America Great Again" or to descend into a time before, as my Old Man put it, the country "was going to hell in a hand basket". I'm not sure exactly when this was supposed to have begun, as it seemed to be an ongoing process, but I believe it was sometime around when hippies started showing up in large enough numbers to report.

I found a bracelet of Gavin's in one of my cabinets. It was broken and I repaired it with an improvised fastening device fashioned from a repurposed hair tie. I've taken to wearing it around for some reason, at all times, work, home, wherever. He turned 13 over the weekend and I'm not certain he'll want to wear it when I see him again this summer. Something about that seems fitting but also worthy of despair.

I got hella roasted on my bike ride, humorously enough, nearby my work. I then watched people falling out of the sky and wondered at them. One of the parachutists trailed an American flag behind its person while the jumping partner cut furious arcs through the overhead gray. Their bodies descended without incident and I remounted my ride to repair to the bar where I observed the wonders pictured above. The barkeep, Sarah, was grandly engaging and the words issuing from my face sounded foreign. There was little to do save watch the hockey game. It was a strange journey.

I biked around, visiting my local playgrounds. I didn't tarry as I was solo and my appearance was extreme sketch at best. The parks are places where Gavin, Kiernan, and I have spent time and the realization, never far removed, that that window of existence is fast closing encroached. I snapped photos, wishing to record the scenes for reasons tinged with nostalgia and wistfulness, two mind states I regularly admonish myself for harboring - the reality of impermanence demands I do so, but the emotive, ape parts of my brain hold memories of the times in those parks as highly relevant. It's an odd dichotomy.

Later, I sat lotus on a picnic table situated on the concrete park abutting the train depot in town. I faced away from our iconic water tower and studied the storefronts of the main drag, Alaska Street. The wind had arisen while I was in the bar and it tugged my hair, my beard. There was no one on the street and cars, such that they were, passed with abandon. I was there quite some time, watching. A man approached, he and his dog, and inquired should I like to smoke a bowl with him. I declined, with gratitude, and he left me to my thoughts. Later, I saw him underneath some birch trees nearby the depot with all his kit - bike, pack, dog, self - and the nature of this town's characters imposed itself upon me. There are rafts of suchlike people, all living their own crazed realities. It's something to think about.

A arrived with Uly in tow and we all headed out to the recycling collection center who was lately celebrating its 20th anniversary. Some students of mine had been steamrolled into prepping/carrying out the food/security for the gig. I was grandly altered by this point and several of the students admitted to not recognizing me until I had spoken to them. There were hors d'oeuvre of a fashion and pastries and other things on which to nibble and we took these to the collection bay where we watched local artists perform. There was an aged lady barbershop quartet and their voices betrayed none of the creeping ruin of their frames. They sang a few numbers. Tables were roundly thumped in appreciation. The other members of the audience seemed not to care much and so profanity was also employed. The singers concluded and we left to explore the grounds and socialize. The students seemed strangely mystified that I could exist outside the narrow confines of my work and it was good to show them a measure of quirk, to show that staff people aren't all robots, touting the DOL line of "work, work, work...". I like to think it did them some mental favors. 

A shuttled us back to the bar and my bicycle. I told her about the guy at the depot. We talked about the barbershop quartet. I went on about my students telling anecdotes, hopefully of the funny variety. We sat there in our bar, with our boy, in our town and I was swamped by the most attachment I've ever felt for an area, almost like nothing bad could happen here, even though I know this to be untrue as Palmer has all the problems anywhere else has - substance abuse, domestic violence, theft, corruption, teen murder even fails to escape us. Much like the parks' relationship to impermanence, it's an odd interbeing. The place is perfect. The place is simultaneously flawed. It's home.  

Here's the street where I live. I feel fairly certain I've posted a similar type photo before, but this one always jars. There is not one, but two massive intrusions of rock, just sitting there on display. This is Matanuska Peak, the west face, and I see it daily on the short commute to work. I leave home and there it is. I turn 90 degrees right from this view and there lies Pioneer Peak, showing off its north face, massive craggy rock garbed with rags of snow. The tourists have arrived for the season and, weather permitting, they without fail snap selfies or take panoramas for posting on social media no doubt. I hope I never reach the point of acclimating to the views. I somehow doubt I will. 

Home. Evening. A was in the back, getting Uly to sleep. I sat out front and watched the sky and the birch and the pussy willow and the mountain (Pioneer Peak, ill-pictured here if at all discernible). Much like my earlier engagement with the bar, it has been and continues to be a strange journey.

Mountain Hop

We went for a hike in the mountains the other day. It was transformative. We didn't go far, nor high, nor was the route technical or in any way difficult, but the hike changed us, in the way it always does. We took a previously unexplored trail and wound up in a mostly neglected cirque where there was evidence of an abandoned mining op and the remains of a rodent (skull, scapulae, fur) and hikers on the ridge above with their dogs and the quiet that reigns up there and water and rock and sky. It was me, my special lady, and my three sons.

It's summer vacation here. I've got the eldest two for a month and a half and its awful in the way that it always is. We have to cram in a year's worth of work into that time and it's not easy. The other day I spent an hour and a half with Kiernan wherein we did some serious psychological work to get to the root of why the sight of a blue painted house on the corner that was visible from the breakfast table conspired to make him cry (turns out a shit-talking ex-friend lived in a similarly colored house and that image brought up painful memories). Before that I parsed out all the reasons my oldest didn't want to play soccer here (a sport he loves), then we relayed that info to his mother (not ideal). It's terrible to watch them grow like this but all the while wondrous.

Watching my youngest with his two older brothers is something altogether destroying. Uly shines to his brothers right away, engaging with them in a way he doesn't do with A and me, emulating them more fully, opening up more, observing, learning. He mimics what they do and enjoys their company differently than he does with his mother and me. He's taken to seeking out his brothers in the morning instead of solely needing his mother for the morning's entertainment. They all jive together, incomprehensibly, beautifully. It's more than I can take. 

We biked down to the river today. She was up, magnificently, higher than I'd ever seen. We went to the bridge and watched the roiling current eddy and gyre and crest the rocks where we normally could have descended and walked. The water rushed along, carrying with it the various driftwood parcels that swam on its movement. Gavin and Kiernan chucked rocks, larger and larger, into the brown torrent to see how large a splash they could produce. The youngest I watched with an unhealthy dose of paranoia, fearful that he might fall into the tumult below the bridge, thinking all the while that they, all three of them, were like the river, untameable, frightening, capable of being observed only. 

In the words of my friend Nick, "I don't know why living exists when you just want to die."

In Which a Reticence is Shattered

The inherent capitalist in all of us.

My boy turned seven this past May and it's been an insanely stupid and timorous emotional ride as I've watched him through his larval stage. He's at the point where the descriptor 'boy' seems fitting and I see him running about and going on his mind's adventures and kicking soccer balls and hefting sticks and finding out the true nature of his physical form and it all just fills me up with the most intense longing and pride and joy and despair. He's free in a way that I'll never be again and was too puerile to recognize when it was I who was at that critical juncture of my life. It makes a body sad to comprehend the nature of your life and the long, slow slide into senescence. 

I've taken up running again, as is my custom in the summer when the vanity of the beach calls one to parade sans shirt. In the mornings, I haul myself from the rack and stumble, sleep-eyed through the house's dawn gloaming and spill myself out into the new day's chill. It sucks. I'm stiff. I'm tired. My lungs aren't open and my hamstrings scream as I reach down toward my toes, only reaching them after some effort and I realize with ever sharpening clarity that I'm shackled to a body that's dying.

It's a hell of a thing.

Personal Shit About Which No One Could Give a Fuck

I like to imagine that one day, this image will be reviled and revered as a silent moment where the brutal dictator that ordered mass executions was caught, unawares and all too human.

Holy Goddamn, my boy is six.

Still lets me put pitchers uh her on da internets.

It's a derpy derp world.

I've been a little vague on the personal front lately with all the goddamn comics (more of which are to come and to bore you with facebook linkage) but shit has been busy. Like a motherfucker. Did I tell all y'all that I got into the MFA for creative writing program and now I have to do things like think critically about literature and read things and write things that people will critique and that I'll cry about? Cause all that shit happened. 

Insane. Writers. People who write down words, sentences, lies upon lies upon falsehoods that build up into novels and then we all buy it and hate it because it cuts too close to home. How do you know a book is good? No one has an answer to that, because none of them are. If people were a little more self aware and reflective upon their shitty condition, the world wouldn't see a need for novelists. If we could look shit in the face and tell it we love it because it is us, there'd be no space for 'em.

Lately I've taken to a more Southern bent to my speaking. Hell if I know about any a that mess.