Longing for Death

I recently watched a video of Gavin at an orchestra concert. Since he's been into the middle school thing he's doing, he wanted to be a part of the orchestra. He has since he was in elementary school. Chose it even. Wanted to be in the strings. After some kind of deliberation, he went with violin. The video I saw was him in his concert garb: black slacks and white button down shirt. He was up there on the stage where I was not and he played with the utmost professionalism. Serious. Intent. Beautiful.

I don't smile in pictures anymore. If you've got a head on you, you'll know why. Here's one of me and Uly-Bear. He's adorable. He's laughing. He's in his PJs. He's not yet realized the absolute magnitude of life.

I was in the store the other day. I was with one of the SpEd people I work with (for the final time as I've secured employment elsewhere) and I told the guy that as he browsed the DVD rack that I'd be out and about, looking at girlies and such. I left him in Electronics and went out to the flower section. I have a powerful love of cut flowers and I was mulling taking a batch home for A. I saw this one with two faces. I'd never seen one like that before and the Janusian nature of the bud spelled me. How had God made such? How had I witnessed thus? Why the fuck was I the only cogent being in the store snapping photos of this miracle? 

A and I went out to lunch the other day. We frequented a Mexican place in Wasilla that I liked for pre-work beers and we had a wonderful time there. We fed our boy beans and rice and tamales and pico de gallo. There's something about him that makes all sorts of tumblers fall into place. I've been such a bad father to my other sons. I've fucked up so many things. I've overlooked Kiernan, my middle child. In all honesty I've ignored them all and continue to ignore them in all sorts of ways: writing, work, life, selfish shit, drinking, anything else. 

I wish, for once, that I was good. 

I Cause Scenes

ODB, now on display in our dining room.

We sat, my oldest two boys (a distinction I've had to make since Uly came that has not ceased to...perturb) and I, in the Silver Gulch in the Ted Stevens International Airport and awaited a delayed Delta connection to Sea-Tac. It was their last few ticks in Alaska and they were playing Legos on the table while I drank beer and wrote in my notebook. The entirety of the world was so fucked up that I could barely function. There were all these things happening and none of it made sense. Jet travel?  Biological functions? Barley fermentation? Custody agreements? Massive organizational structures? Electronic pulses jetting through fiber optic cables to places I couldn't imagine?

I couldn't get over the fact that just a few hours prior I had kissed my infant boy on his fat cheeks and squeezed his face and tried to transmit all that interior love I felt for him into his tiny mind because I feared that might be the last time I ever saw him. He smiled and I left him with his mother.

Outside the bar windows, I watched jets and luggage ramp crews and ramp crew managers and fueling trucks and airline food employees and miles of tarmac. Inside, I saw tourists and people and myself and my sons and forward moving organic sacks that told themselves they knew what they were doing. All I knew was that I was about to get on a plane and eat some Xanax and drink some of the Jim Beam singles in my carry-on and fade into a pharmacological ether as giant aluminum cylinders ferried me across the continent. 

It was going to be a journey.

When I transplanted this, the tree was approximately 18 inches tall.

After the flights, Felicia picked us up from RDU. I was seriously altered and she drove, quite graciously, the way back to her house where I would be staying with the boys for a week. After a stop at a local and well known roadside pit, I emerged with a tall boy of Milwaukee's Best in a brown paper bag. Back on the road, Felicia and I conversed as she drove the rest of the way into Jacksonville. The subject of the coming school year was broached and I said, "Fuck it, let's go get some school supplies." We arrived at the J-ville Target, store number 1226, and entered. We found the school supplies aisle where I squatted on my haunches and began issuing value shopping instructions to the boys. An excerpt:

Me (to G): Hey, why the fuck you gonna get some big ass lunch box that's motherfucking useless without the the lunch compartment that can at least, AT LEAST, hold some Tupperware or some shit for your lunch?

G: Well, it's big...
Me: Yeah, for what? Look at that shit. It's big in all the wrong places. Don't do shit for storing food. Also, got some huge-ass stuff you don't need. It's all terrible.
G: I don't know.
Me: Use your head, kid. Come on, son.
G: (Goes away to survey better options.)

K: (Comes up to where I'm squatting.) What about this? (Shows a collection of individual subject notebooks.)
Me: How much?
K: 15 dollars.
Me: Holy shit, 15 dollars? Go find some motherfucking shit ain't so expensive. 15 dollars. Get the fuck outta here.
K: (Goes and finds a pack of notebooks that are $4 dollars total that fulfills his school requirement. He returns and holds them out to me.)
Me: (Takes package.) Holy motherfucking shit. $4 dollars. See that? You saved 11 motherfucking dollars when you shop around. Look at that shit. Think about all the shit you could buy with 11 motherfucking dollars.

Target Employee: (Arrives nicely, with concern.) Sir, we've had some complaints about you from this section.

Me: (Still squatting.) Ah, okay, that's alright. Sorry. 

Stranger: (Has been hovering and comes around the corner. Looks at me.)
Me: (Gives double thumbs up to stranger with no comment.)

Stranger: (Proceeds to enumerate all the reasons why I'm a terrible father and inform me it's men like me who talk to their children like I am who are the reason that she doesn't talk to her father anymore and why Felicia shouldn't be with me because she deserves better.) 
Felicia: I'm not with him.
Stranger's Mom: (Arrives from aisle whence the Stranger came.) Children are a gift.

Me: (Continuing thumbs up until the Strangers and employee leave. Collect the boys' supplies and proceed to the checkout where I pay for the items so shopped for.)

The Sandridge Diner bar where I'm spending most of my North Carolina nights.

There used to be a chain, now bankrupt or otherwise defunct, of Southern grocery stores named "Delchamps", pronounced with all the consonants in a wholly American way and not in the way you'd imagine with a slurring of the "ch" or lack of "s" as a Frenchman might. I remember the place for several reasons, not least of which was my old man's affinity for the store. I especially remember him liking the deli section where he would order hyper-thin sliced sandwich meats that, according to him, almost melted in your mouth. This is especially memorable to me as I also remember the awfulness of his teeth and dental health/hygiene in general.

One day, and I'm sure I'm conflating memories as the brain is wont to do, I remember the weather as summer hot, and he was wearing a neck brace (the old, soft kind that resemble the neck pillows one finds in airport shops around the world) due to a work injury that, he later learned, had fractured several of his cervical vertebrae. I remember him hating the thing because it made him sweaty and overtly labeled him (not that he ever admitted this) as someone who was "disabled". In any event, we were in the store, shopping and he brought out a cigarette and began to smoke inside because it was too bothersome to go outside in the heat to smoke while he was in the middle of shopping. There he was, smoking, in his neck brace, with me watching him, as an employee informed him smoking was not allowed in the store.

The old man looked at him with a face that made me afraid for the employee's safety. The old man maintained eye contact with the employee, removed the half smoked cigarette from his lips, dropped it to the floor tiles, and ground out the butt with his shoe.

One of the boys' last summer days in Alaska.

The grand adventure of the boys' summer was suggested by Gavin. 

Their grandmother had bought them new bicycles and I had, myself, purchased a new bicycle from the going out of business Sports Authority. Unprompted, Gavin said we should bike out to Butte, climb the landform for which the town is named, and bike back. It's 7.5 miles from my house, one way, to Butte and the climb itself gains an elevation of 880 feet over a mile-ish long trail. They loaded up on breakfast and we headed out into a grey sky-ed day. 

The trail ran along the Matanuska river, which was up due to seasonal rains, and we took a moment to observe her passing. We stayed there a bit too long, watching the long roiling greyness of the water, and the boys got antsy. I knew it was time to go but before leaving, I asked them if they knew how many bike rides my dad had gone on with me. They both answered "zero".

We arrived at the butte, hiked up, and descended again to bike to a local convenience mart. I told the boys to select a sugary drink, a fatty snack, and water to refuel themselves. They selected Gatorade, roasted cashews, and a giant bottle of water. I paid and followed them out into the parking lot where they ate and drank while sitting on yellow parking bumpers. After they finished, we biked to Klondike Mike's in Palmer, a local bar, where I had beers and instructed the boys in geometry and physics and life things as they played games of pool and slurped at Shirley Temples. There was a man there, younger than I, who watched us with an expression on his face of almost envy or maybe regret, or some other amalgam of feelings about which I didn't inquire.

Out of coins for pool, groins on fire from saddle soreness, muscles achy, me a little drunk and the boys nearly exhausted, we mounted up our rides and headed for home.

Life Attacks

Owing to this being the penultimate weekend I'll spend with the boys in Alaska, here's a collection of pictures that encapsulates the summer I've had with them so far. I fly back with them to North Carolina in a week and a half and spend a week at their place, winding down the summer and prepping for the coming school year. For sure while I'm there, I'll work up a powerful substance haze and hammer out some words for the Russian bots who frequent the site here. For now though, just the pictures of them in various spots and engaged in the goings on we've experienced.

I hate myself and I want to die.

It Hurts to Live

The past few months have been the epitome of mind fuck. 

There was the strange occurrence of A's middle of the night labor during a major earthquake while in a tub full of muck with a non-compliant cervix and an unexpected hospital visit wherein a healthy boy was squirted into the world after a mere 30 minutes of pushing (the child, named Ulysses, accrued many years to my life by dint of his fetal heart rate monitor alone). Then came the equally strange carting home of placenta in a Ziploc bio-hazard bag where it stood in the freezer (atop bricks of salmon steaks and pre-made, frozen meals) until A and I took it to the river for burial in the still frozen stream bed (we planted it, using a clam shovel, in a channel to be swamped with spring meltwater, and covered the spot with large rocks to ward off any opportunistic dogs in the meantime). Then followed the equilibrizing of the home in light of Uly's appearance (still not accomplished, never to be completely so, but dampening in its amplitude). Then came the trip to show him to his brothers.

The trip was, by any metric, a dalliance with exhaustion. 

There was the air travel, the Xanax, the airport beers, the staying in your ex-wife's house (to save on hotel fare and be next to your other children who already live there), the Masses (Good Friday, Easter Vigil), the train depots, the walking, the touristy things [monuments (Washington, Lincoln, Korean, Vietnam, and Second World wars, White House)], the museums (National Gallery, Aerospace, a sculpture garden), the mad gatherings of populace in the opulent spectacle of the nation's capital (itself a ripoff of the Roman Republic/Empire's largess, strangely fitting for the current geopolitical climate), the Art [all of it mind blowing (most memorable were Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance, Van Eyck's Annunciation, a gallery filled with Rembrandts, some Rubens, a DaVinci, Rodin's Burghers of Calais) in that other hands, now skeletonized, had at one time served as conduit for a still extant, if slippery, muse], the space age implements of the ultimate trade (in particular, a discontinued Soviet, two-stage, solid propellant rocket topped with three dummy thermonuclear warheads that obliterated my capacity for cognition with its implications), the meal from an Indian food truck eaten while squatting in a windy public park (chicken tikka masala, curried dal, chana masala - I was shorted on the naan), the cherry blossoms, the Asians taking cellphone pics of everything, the homeless and deranged black man panhandling in a non-conventional fashion (sitting on cardboard atop a heating vent and shouting, without pause at the passers-by, "Dollar? Change? Fuck you then!"), the walking 25 miles in 2.5 days, the metro, and the people, oh Lord, the people. 

The new year saw me begin work on the first draft of a new novel.

For my writer friends out there (especially those in pursuit of loose, baggy monsters of their own), you know how much of a disconnect from reality this can be. Yes, we've all read about characters and stories developing in their own right and, in no small part, out of the author's control but there's something about it (the delving into a wholly other personality and life, even if that life is invented, and mucking around for some sort of arrow pointing towards universal human experience) that is... unsettling. You tend to lose focus on the hard edges of your own life. Things [mundanities like showering or household chores or eating (for me at least, I imagine the list changes for others)] go out of the window. It's a futile exercise, an absurd one, but one you can't quit, not yet, because in the past week you got an encouraging rejection from a well respected (if unread by hoi polloi) journal and you think that if you just tried harder (Why couldn't you do that in either of your two marriages?) that the next time, this time, will be the breakout. 

My grandfather turned 99 yesterday. 

I messaged a friend of mine about it and we marveled at the sheer amount of change he must have seen in his lifetime. I remarked that I couldn't imagine that span of experience [Grandpa is roughly three times my age and how he's not gone insane at the magnitude of the world he's watched, I can't understand (I feel on the cusp of a mental breakdown while standing in the self-checkout line at the grocery store)] and my friend agreed.To quote him, "That was milkman, horse, etc. days," in reference to the range of difference. I can't help but wonder what he thinks, if anything, about the nature of man, or life in general, or all the seed he's dispersed into the world, sprent, like dust, seed that keeps self-iterating (Uly being his most recent capsule) and what, again if anything, he thinks that means. I doubt I'll ever get the chance to ask him and most likely the next time I see him in the flesh, he'll be composed for interment, boxed up, ready for shipment into the earth, gone, and all of us awaiting the same.

A Ski, A Walk, A Funeral

Skiing up Archangel road the Monday before last, I was the poster child for unpreparedness in the wild: I ventured out alone; no one knew where I was; my phone was without service; the new snow was damp and the temperatures had been warm-ish previously; I was traversing a known avalanche area; I had no food, water, change of clothes, rain gear, shelter, nor fire starter on my person; the road up to Hatcher Pass (up which I'd foolishly driven) was un-plowed and un-sanded and likely to be so for quite some time.

Once on the trail, an ominous fog filled the valley and the sky turned a humid overcast, one that suggested rain instead of new snow, a disastrous turn for me thermally. Animal tracks littered the ground, the most recognizable were of snowed over moose imprints. The beast(s) had used the road much as I was, moving up (or down), not crossing like all of the other tracks which ran perpendicular to the roadbed. The feeling that I was accompanied by large and unseen creatures began to crowd the trail as I skied. Noises from my person gave me pause and I tended an ear to the surrounding brush only to find the silence of the swishing river some distance away. The fantasy that I was the sole human being in a large volume of space was easy to indulge.

I thought a lot about death.

Monday past my special lady, who is ripe with child, had the day off with me, the first in what seemed like quite a stretch. We woke up, made breakfast together (eggs, pancakes, bananas, and syrup), before driving down to the Matanuska river where we went on a walk to, among other things, scout out a place for our son's placental burial.

The snow was crisp, in those little frozen balls it makes, and not the flakey variety. The noise we raised as we descended onto the covered river stones and walked along the stream bed was a thing that you believe certain to be on the highlight reel of your life as you lay dying in some hospital bed or on the scene of some horrible accident. We crunched along, she and I, when we saw a raven come to light on the ground about a bow shot away. We investigated and the raven flew off, cawing. We found the bird to have been at some mysterious foraging, the object of which was not discernible to us. We returned home.

After, I went for a separate walk to meditate on the Joyous Mysteries. During the journey, I slipped and fell and the impact jarred throughout my body, then and afterward even. I made my way, feeling that corporeality, as I stood at a grave and talked to an old lady. I cleaned her headstone of a fresh, wet snow and told her about the change of seasons and of lives.

Later still, I went out to the alehouse to watch the football game. I drank beer and ate quesadillas, with relish and gusto and all manner of fevered existence, before returning home again and eventually to bed. I read for a bit, Dostoevsky's The Idiot, before reaching over to quench the light. My arm was over my lady and with my hand on her belly the in utero movements of our child reached me. I imagined him there as he slept or played or danced or fought.

I thought about his coming birth and all its . . . vicissitudes.

Tuesday I dressed formally. A mentor of mine (a beautiful man I'd like to call my friend) had endured the final (yet never ending) loss of his son. Gussied such, I set out. The day was wintry, cold, with a sky of promising snow. A few flurries dusted the streets as I drove to my local cafe. I needed to load up on coffee before the Mass and the beauty of that short trip struck me. Various birds arced through the sky. A raven sat on a light pole. Music blared from the van's speakers. The sky, a harsh metallic hue, promised nothing but pain. I found myself shouting at everything. I parked and went in.

The cafe was filled with Marines, one of whom walked with a cane and had a jacket that heralded him as a member of a unit involved in the Marine Corps battle of the Chosin Reservoir. They were lately celebrating the 240th birth of the Corps. They were boisterous. Loud. Glad handing. Semper Fi-ing. I sat and had coffee and advanced work on a story, one about a mass shooter styled on a person I'd known during my own enlistment in that storied organization, until it was time to leave for the service.

Snow fell. The Mass was prayed. The sky broke and the sun cast light through the stained glass, coloring the kneeling faithful. Eucharist was received. The priest blessed us and bade us go forth. I hugged my friend and said I was sorry.

On the road for home, I wept, filled with thoughts.

A Summer's Trip (Part 3)

26 Aug

RDU. 8AM. Irish coffee. Watching Trump get demolished on CNN by some diminutive journo from Univision. Totally fuzzy & spaced... Sitting @ an upscale-ish airport restau-bar next to an older lady on her 2nd bloody Mary. She gives no fucks. Man down the bar eating. Here we go. Sonder in full effect here. There were fucking birds in the terminal. Sparrows in the drinking fountain. They refused a picture. Now I'm doing this instead of novella writing...

This is your life. Your true life. The fuck away from everything...

Glorious Mysteries today. Always a good day to fly with those.

Carlos, the slight barkeep @ this oyster bar fucking enigma in RDU, just comes up & says, "You thinking too hard." Then he goes away & says comes back & says, "You know, in Spanish we have a saying 'If the problem has a solution why you worry @ it and,'" he pauses, "'If the problem has no solution why you worry @ it.'" & laughs. I concurred.

People in business suits. Who the fuck flies in this? What kind of world do I inhabit? Eating scrambled eggs in a business suit?...

Jesus. Woke somewhere over flyover country & have no idea how things happened thus... Paul Blart is on the inflight movie again. Nothing but clouds out the window. I had a package of pretzels to augment the cookies I ate earlier. Desperately need real food. May not make this trip intact.

Turbulence. A is crying. Very upset. I crossed myself & am strangely unworried @ any of it. We'll make it. I know we will. I feel badly for her but there's nothing to be done.

27 Aug

Made it back home after a day flight into A-town @ an angrily consumed & shitty cheeseburger from the "Runway Grill" in SeaTac that was minded by nary a person of whose ethnicity would indicate their actually eating such fare. Angry flight & drive home...

Woke this morning, not to the neighbors fighting for they were evicted during our trip, but to the sound of heavy rain & a peal of thunder. Water already in the streets last night. Chilly. Autumn. It's here. The summer's long gone during our absence & the boys are too...

...@ Vagabond's again & this weight of shit makes one feel like an impotently raging animal set up for slaughter. That look on the cow's face as they slit her throat & she realizes that shit just got real. Times like this make you realize how selfish you are. I'd trade every other swinging dick in this place just to have the boys staying w/ me. Every single one...

Was pissy all day but actually just needed to eat a real-ish meal. Soup & pasta & a hunk of bread from Vagabond's & that seemed to be the trick. Then we went to the ultrasound appt. where the tech was amused that I was so worried @ the actual health & normality of the fetus. No cleft lip, normal brain cavities, 4 chambered heart, 3 vesseled umbilical connecting to the liver, 2 kidneys, 1 stomach, 1 bladder, 10 toes & fingers, intact nasal bone.

I drove to work. The fireweed cotton is blowing. The temp is def. autumn & the wind is thrashing. I've traded sandals for boots & shorts for jeans. Winter's coming, no doubt.

It's a boy. I have 3 sons.

28 Aug

Frost on the railing @ work.

Summer's fucking over.

Done.


That's it. That's the trip. I'll end with a line I misremember from a Henry Rollins book where he's describing performing for an audience (I think it's a spoken word piece he's relating and not his punk frontman gig) and he says, "Now I'm shooting myself in the face!"

A Summer's Trip (Part 2)

18 Aug

Fel is 34.

I am in Francis' house for the 1st time in 4 years.

We toured Vicksburg today. So many dead. Such wonders. Also viewed a Natchez trace Indian mound. Then on to Francis. Drank beers. 1/2 bottle wine. Reminisced. I don't know @ what.

I DON'T KNOW @ ANYTHING...

Maybe I'm an all around bad person.

19 Aug

Fresh new super thin pen. Crisp. Maybe I've turned a corner. Woke up this morning @ 5 AM...

Then we went to Mass where an Indian priest celebrated & on the way out a nice man shook my hand & said he was glad I brought my "family" in to Mass. Bizarre. Outside a solitary mourning dove was alit on the powerline near where I parked. The dove seemed to watch us as we left & I took this to be an auspicious omen for the day's prospects. We came back to coffee & biscuits & all sorts of awkward convos while sitting on things...Francis asked me if we'd get married eventually. I told him no.

On Francis' porch, it's raining steadily; earlier there was thunder. I have no idea what I'm doing here... 

21 Aug

2:19 AM @ a rest stop in GA after A decided we should drive straight through instead of camping because a: we got a late start & b: was lightning & raining as fuck outside B-ham.

This morning saw us in Baton Rouge while now it's the East side of Atlanta. Bizarre world. Took A & the boys to see Grandpa & fuck he's so old. He had 3 pictures of on his tray next to his tab chair: Tabitha, the Sacred Heart, & Pope Francis. He can't hear & must be shouted @ & can't remember doing things that he's just done & though he said he knew me, I have my doubts. Showed off A & the boys, had coffee, left.

So tired but so much happened today. This morning I felt the baby kick. The afternoon we stood on Biloxi beach. Later still Mom's grave under a thunderous sky & spits of rain. The abandoned trailer park too. The old house. So many things.

Tired. Punchy. Need sleep.

21 Aug (cont.)

Woke after 3 ish hours of bad driver seat sleep to head out again. Was so tired by 730 had to pull over & sleep in a DD parking lot before loading up on coffee again. Saw the day birth as I crossed the GA/SC border. Then it was grinding up the interstates looking @ nothing & feeling nothing but that road fatigue & a foreboding @ what lay @ the end of the road.

Now I'm here & A is here. I told her I'm just compressing all this shit down to where I don't have to feel or think anything. Upon arrival the boys immediately reverted to shit-head mode of the magnitude not seen during their time w/ me...

In Fel's house. So clean...Things are different now: new sofa, table, TV, game systems, sideboard, organizational furniture. Some things remain: pictures, books, little residue of my time here. How did I ever think that could maintain? Foolishness...

Christ have mercy on us all.

@ the diner now. Who knows how I'm even operating. Ate @ the Icehouse Waterfront place in Swansboro after a drive in a torrent. Had a beer while the children each spilled their waters w/in 15 seconds of the other. Then I ate fish tacos & now it's Jack in the diner for some reason. Talked to Fel & told her @ the boys plunging maturity since being back. She says, "that'll happen"...

Act of Contrition...

22 Aug

...I had been texting Nick & Dan. Dan finds himself in a cigar bar in Florida somewhere and drinking Macallan Whiskey & Presidente beers & having extremely girthy cigars & feeling shitty about his dog's cancer. Nick is god knows where but was (apparently) being moved by a passage of text that highlighted pimples & bad breath during sex...

Went to confession & Mass. The boys enjoyed it. Beach. Shark teeth...

I am so gone.

23 Aug

...Went to Wilmington where A cried on Water St. in front of a passing fuel tanker whose point of origin was somewhere in Panama. Brown guys on the decks aft were taking videos & pictures w/ their phones...She felt better after & we went to the Aquarium @ Fort Foster & saw all manner of life: an eagle, alligators, fish, jellies. Magnificent really.

Ate @ a brewery: pulled pork w/ slaw & potato salad. On the drive home we listened to sad music & had 100% truth time Q & A. As the sun set & the sky dimmed I told the boys, "well, we had a hell of a summer didn't we?" I wanted to say more but my throat choked up so I didn't.

Tomorrow is school. Tomorrow is real life. Tomorrow I fade into the background again. 

24 Aug

Holy fuck. Aboard MCB Camp Lejeune again. BIZARRO UNIVERSE. Difficult to believe I ever had any sort of association w/ this place. A is here & we are people watching everyone. A table of Lts eats Panda Express. A turns to me & says "I can't believe you ever did this" I say I can't either & it's weird to me that we'd had the same thought @ the same time. We're like an island of civilian nastiness amongst all these hard chargers. Unbelievable, all of it... Fel is coming by later so we can discuss the future. What the fuck is going on in my life...

Tonight I taught K how to make box mac & cheese. I couldn't go through w/ it. I broke down & had to go outside & fucking weep. I came back & had dinner w/ Aaron & Fel & they talked @ what they were thankful for that day & what they'd done this summer. They (the boys) mentioned none of the things they did w/ me...

25 Aug

...Spending the last night in Raleigh currently @ a tapas place called Humble Pie where I'm drinking beer from Kinston & eating smashed avocados & peas on toast. Left the boys after a school lunch period w/ them wherein A smuggled in Subway for them to eat. While we waited for them to file, convict style & silent, to the cafeteria I was engaged by a boy, Gavin's friend, who said he was named after one of the buffoons from "Duck Dynasty". And Fel thinks there's nothing wrong w/ the area where they live. Duck Dynasty. Good Christ it's hard not to judge these motherfuckers...

Now it's olives & fried oysters & white wine & living the Jim Harrison lifestyle to the fucking hilt. Fucking Hemingway's ghost up in this...

LIVING. FUCK YEAH.

Life is an excruciating beauty...

Almost wept again in the cafeteria w/ the boys as I left...I told Kiernan "I'll talk to you soon" but I didn't hug or kiss either of them for fear of embarrassment on their part. I'll not see them again until Christmas.

You drink. You mourn. You indulge. You never forget.

A Summer's Trip (Part 1)

In opposition to all the great spiritual stories wherein the protagonist begins his journey in the lowly plain and ascends to the mountains (the better to commune with the gods it is generally assumed/revealed) this journey's genesis is near higher ground. Following are excerpts from journal entries (rendered as truthfully as I could make them) along the way and that are hopefully relevant to the images at hand. (NOTE: The @ symbol can represent the concept "at" or "about" or "around" in the text.)

04 Aug

@ the cabin on Eklutna lake w/ A and the boys on their last week in AK. Last night Nick came over & we drank Rye bourbon in his van & talked @ the world & women & love.

I walked 10 miles today. Talked to God.

Lived.

campfire, rushing stream, quiet, leaves, cabin A next to me as I write, the boys writing in their notebooks. I split wood & sawed logs. Shouted @ the lake. Took pictures.

Lived fucking furiously.

05 Aug

Optimum human experience today. Hiked up Bold Ridge trail where I currently sit on the mat of bushes & lichen above the treeline. There are crow and blueberries @ mountains ringing the ridgeline while below sits the turquoise lake...Gavin is glassing the neighboring mtn sides, while K sits near a reclining A. He's eating blueberries while she naps...The wind is here. The stubbly coral-esque lichen is here. Sky. God. Mtn. Water. We saw evidence of bears: scat, an aged paw print, gouge marks in a tree where a black bear had climbed.

Fucking furiously.

11 Aug

Went to Mass @ the Basilica & walked around it after. Hard not to believe God is in those places. It's like mountaintops. Then we went to the Walker Art Museum & went through an exhibit on International Pop art. BIZARRE. After, we drove to wisconsin & watched a theatre dance rehearsal where Jen had choreographed something to the tune of the movie Black Swan & it was excellent.

EXCELLENT & BIZARRE.

After we went to pub burgers & fries & beers of the region & A had vegetarian gnocchi that was amazing. Then we walked along the (across kind of) St. Croix river & we saw bats feeding along the water line & kayak fishermen @ sunset. Beautiful. Amazing. Almost indescribable.

Furious.

12 Aug

...in a huge house w/ their two daughters (M, 1 & V, 3). The girls love the boys such that V came out @ bedtime and asked "will you sleep w/ me?" I told the boys they'd not encounter that again. They were baffled. Drank beer. Went to an outdoor music thing in "Berne" (a make believe locale, presumably @ a church in the middle of a cornfield) to hear black people play live music for the whites. Don't know what that says @ anything. Drank more beer. A drove.

I am fucking untethered here.

Corn country. Soybeans. Fallow. That is all there is. Rolling farmland. Nothing. Nothing. Peace.

13 Aug

I am an alien in this world & these people are aliens in mine.

I watched a farm hand dip cow shit covered udders in iodine today before hooking them up to the electric vacuum milking machine.

The boys picked sweet corn straight from the field...

There is nothing but corn all around.

The cows wear collars w/ RFID chips...

You could get captivated by this life, sure. The compulsion to go native is there, everywhere, but w/ it the shade of knowing you'd never commit, not fully, & so fail because you don't believe in it.

14 Aug

Back to Kasson where I was in a shit mood. We went to a creek w/ a small limestone cliff and small trout in the stream. Hot. 90 degrees plus. 60% humidity. We went to a water park where I left the boys to the womens' care & walked to downtown where I purchased a pint of bourbon for some reason. Back through the town. Pure Americana. Stock footage for an ironic documentary @ the death of middle America.

15 Aug

Camping along the Mississippi in norhtern Illinois. Finished revising (NAME) last night over a pint of bourbon. Sober today & smelly like travel already. Stopped in IA to attend stations of the cross @ St. Donatus today & I got a picture of a hand carved pieta in a chapel up on the bluff. We maybe went 300 miles today.

17 Aug

K is 8. A is 34.

In Memphis ate cajun food (fried gator and fried crawfish w/ a side of collard greens) what is happening to me? So hot. Tomorrow is the delta & Baton Rouge. Lord save us. We may just make it to civ.

Possibly, Maybe

I'm sitting in the Gorsuch Commons at UAA where I've just appropriated some food from the chow hall - think prison grade biscuits and gravy and you're getting close to the fare. The boys are here with me on their summer visitation and the entirety of the world is something, much like this image of a flower I captured some weeks ago, altogether unrecognizable in its mystery. Who can say what events conspired to create such as this? The impossibility of it is something on the magnitude of miraculous, similar to the "ordinary, every day goings on" as a wonderful poet associate of mine once wrote in a book of hers. Who can say what will come next? Lottery or car crash indeed. There's no telling what the next 24 hours might hold but, if judging from the previous, there will be all manner of activity. Flurried, harried, rushing, full of sound and fury.

The other day I went on a longish walk around my town. I had all the usual accompaniments: bag, pint of bourbon, notebook, pen, phone, nameless guilt, existential dread, an awful reverence for the Almighty God. My wanderings took me to a local cemetery and I went and sat in the corner while I considered the impermanence of all things and wondered about the aged and near death and the specific kindnesses and meanness and inevitability that seems to ferment in those folk. I sat for awhile with the deceased and felt terribly at one with them along with a shamefulness of my still living, as if I were a charlatan, tricking the universe into allowing me to exist while all these had gone on before. Taking the bourbon for strength, I went and squatted next to Felicia's grandmother's gravestone (not pictured) and told her about things as they were and what had happened in the world since she'd died and how I was thankful for all the things she did for me and the boys while she was among the living. The conversation left me uneasy but in a good way and, as I was leaving, I saw an old native couple placing American flags on the grave of a veteran. They left and I inspected the stone, a Marine who'd died some twenty years ago, corporal, "Semper Fi", I supposed. I had more bourbon and went out and about my walk.

I watched a movie (documentary of sorts) once where the grizzled avatar of Jim Harrison said that he wanted to be reincarnated as a tree and have birds live in him. That sticks with me for some reason that I can't define. There's a beauty to it, an innate thing, the ineffable desire Jim had to have birds live in him that was a beautiful thing. Then I find this tree out in the wild, living and being and twisting to the approximate tune of a cosine wave. You can't ever know what you're doing, I think, you can only move in a forward direction. And at that beautifully fast. At that orgastic pace that Fitzgerald talks about.

Yesterday we spent the day wandering around, me teaching these two about various things. I would listify them but perhaps that is growing tedious. Suffice to say we talked about serious shit. We went to campus, where we still are, and had a nostalgia trip of sorts, or maybe just I did wherein I relived the birthing and rearing and life that I've had with them and all the places we've gone and things we've seen that they've likely forgotten but I haven't. Today, back in the Commons building, a friend of mine and I recounted stories about our fathers' hands and how we remembered them while the boys foraged outside, busy in the naturalistic pursuit of finding and naming local species of plants. Another friend joined us and we talked about the universality of human experience and capital "A" art and what it means to be human beings on this planet. The boys came back and showed us their findings, an alpine forget-me-not and arctic daisy, and we impressed upon them the necessity of living furiously and without pause, in the very fabric of your being.

 

We went to the library at half hour to closing time. The boys were floored by the movement of the Foucault pendulum. They wanted to see it from the top floor and watch its orbital tracings and glory in its mystery, much in the same way that I had viewed in the flower from the previous image. We ascended the steps to do so and as they observed it, they spoke in hushed tones, as ones who view something holy and altogether unknown. On the re-drive into Anchorage the next day, Gavin asked about how planetary bodies receive their rotational motion and I told him some long and likely incorrect explanation about gravitational accretion and angular momentum. After the pendulum, we went into the oversized section and sat on the floor reading, reading, reading, and learning about all the things in this world that we'd never really and truly understand.

You live and you do things and things happen to you and you can't even begin to understand them, only to relate those beautiful things to the ones you make and to the dead and sometimes, if you're lucky, to others that come after who aren't yours in any sense. I watched my friend Dan defend his thesis today. The day before yesterday I was in a park with the genetrix of my unborn child while my other children, those from a different mother, climbed hills and explored forest paths. Today I celebrated the miracle of the Eucharist with my boys before I bought them rosary beads.

You can't get away from it. It's here. It's all right here. All of it.


It's too much. It's far, far too much.