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.

NO BOOZE LIVE BLOGGING LENT, Episode 2

17MAR2019 

We went to the mountains and me in a chemical haze. A drove. There was hiking and Uly remembered a dog on a sled from our previous visit on the trail. Then there was skiing and sledding and the requisite meltdown upon learning of the need to leave. We journeyed home to a dinner that I can't quite place at this remove save to know that it was good and filling and nutritious and all the doing of A. I had tutored PTSD guy but even that reality failed to blunt the crest of goodness that the day held. Later there was reading and untroubled sleep.

20MAR2019 - Vernal Equinox

Two weeks sans drink.

21MAR2019

I made a trek into Eagle River to meet with a doctor who has previously roto-rootered my colon. The way in, after a trip to the gym and some Taco Bell breakfast, was a blaze of Bach cellos reaching up my spine and ripping chunks of shivers from my temporal lobes. I arrived 30 minutes early.

The doctor is a specialist, liver, GI tract. He wears an orange-ish salmony colored shirt and a pinkish tie in a loose half Windsor that dangles undisciplinedly from his top button, as if he has loosened the noose for comfort. His shoes are similar to mine, calf leather, brogue-like. Creased slacks complete the look. His hands are meaty and soft, the way I remember my old man's being. In a different light, we could be almost contemporaries, him in his late 40s, early 50s, and me stolidly plowing through what is my own middle age. 

The exam room is spare, thankfully, denuded of those posters of the human frame with layers peeled away and artistic renditions of all the grotesque and hidden abnormalities a body can hide, at great length, until they gather the needed resources for a final assault. I feel good, my blood pressure's down, yet I pace the 10 by 5 room like an animal shelter inmate.

We, the doctor and I, chat benignly about all the things that are likely wrong with me. I minimize, defer, unwilling to change behaviors. He can see this and I freely admit this is my tack. Tests are ordered, blood, CT scans, and schedules made to review/interp the reconnaissance. 

I'm probably fine and would be wholly ignorant of my situation and possessed of the ego-less drive to hurry up and drop dead at 55 if I'm lucky were it not for diagnostic procedures and all the concomitant mental energy devoted to knowing just enough to be anxious about the non-consensual and absurd machinery of my life cycle. Fuck modern medicine. 

The drive back is sublime.

23MAR2019

HIPAA violations up in this bitch like a mother. I can't imagine anyone would want my white cell count, but hey, look at that badass AST level. Fuck yeah within normal limits. 

I went to the doc this morning again. It's absolute horseshit. I biked down under overcast battleship skies and chilled air with grimy puddles in the gutters and sad effigies of snowbanks crusted in gravel and filth. After the doc, I walked to the cafe and as I crossed the road to my ultimate destination, there was a woman holding her baby with a toddler in tow coming across the street in the opposite direction. The child saw me and smiled, waved, her wispy hair a cyclone in the street's backwash. I waved back, swamped with all manner of emotive chemicals.

This morning I awoke in a decent-ish mood but this quickly turned as the realities that I've been tamping down encroached - packing for AWP, the terror/anxiety of kissing Uly and A goodbye as they prep to ascend to cruising altitude, the uncertainties of condominium pools, rattlesnakes, scorpions, et al. in a nightmare scape Arizona of my imagining all conspiring to murder this boy in his beautiful curiosity and nascent independence. Christ is he a magnificent aberration.

They leave in 8 hours.

NO BOOZE LIVE BLOGGING LENT, Episode 1

This isn't really a live blog, more like a, I scribbled some shit down as it happened or in retrospect or maybe some crazed and meaningless sludge from my sleeping subconsciousness that I've plastered the digital walls with prior to and during my Lenten pilgrimage this year.


Weekend prior to Lent, 28FEB - 02MAR2019

06MAR2019 - Ash Wednesday

Mardi Gras had come and gone and I went to work, early-ish and hungover properly to struggle through the hours before it was time for one last pre-Mass debauch with A at the Moosehead as we'd not gone in previous to alert the staff (Sarah, Kelsey, Carol) that we were abstaining from our usual Wednesday night hockey pints and Sunday NASCAR vroom vroom day liquoring and not to worry. We sucked down pints like arrant and sunburned tropical sailors. Mass was scheduled for 7PM but Uly got too squirrelly and we had to repair home for tea et al. before the long slow dryness of this year's purgatorial Lenten progression from sinner to penitent to forgiven.

11MAR2019

Today I decided to go to the gym after seeming to catch up on all the sleep I've ever missed. The sleep without booze was my biggest fear for this Lenten season. I've abstained before, sure, but recently it's been a daily encounter on the field of substance use with my favored weighted blanket of alteration. In its absence, I've been supplementing with tea and smoke and edibles and it's been a bit of an amelioration to the longing for that which is forbidden but not something I'm altogether okay with in its execution. Questions arise, in this state, about my long term drinking's feasibility with respect to liver enzymes and an already scarred and fatty liver and all the health rot my provider parrots ad nauseum. Almost as if she doesn't get that I've got to get through the next 12 hours with a minimum of suicidal ideation and what happens to this frame when I'm 60 takes a backseat to my continued churning into the present. Why don't more folks understand this?

Notes: 
1. Dreams are absolutely insane and memorable and nearly always nightmare.
2. Two older middle aged white dudes wearing MAGA hats and holding a Corgi puppy named Thor stock up on copious amounts of weed of a 1030 Monday morning at the shop where all the cute lady shoptenders know the puppy and benignly look away at the red ribbon of these dudes' political leanings. What a world.
3. Yesterday, did it even happen?

12MAR2019

Flight and lodging logistical horseshit with train and plane timetables and scheduling and all the inane horseshit borne from a lack of a truly integrated public transport system. Like, why in the fuck can't I just get on A train and have it ferry me to AWP. A, as in a singular, fucking TRAIN. This can't be that difficult.

Sober sleeping. Wouldn't recommend it.

The problem as I've come to understand it, and I've not read so many substance use narratives but I've asked around enough to the shades who dip into escape's gravity well, is the inimitable boredom of quotidian horseshit. Wake up, dress, work, small talk, moil, drudgery, small talk, home, dinner, diversion, wait to sleep. It's absolute bullshit. Why go through that with full on pain and reality? It's like speed running a video game on legendary difficulty. Dial it back to merely hero and you can actually get some enjoyment out of all the PvP and NPC content. Hell, download yourself a bottle and really amp up the fun buff of your living stats. Sure, I could revel in the utter terror/goodness of watching Uly and A play Chinese checkers while stone cold but why do that when I could do the same twisted? Makes little sense. 2 weeks until the oasis of AWP.

14MAR2019

Blustery day. Proto-spring. Waxwings are about and furiously chittering as they lap from pools of snow and ice melt. Self-worth plummeting; sense of fraud rising. Libido is trash. So many hours to fill.

16MAR2019

Saturday. Loneliest of all days of the week. Normally, I'd wait until noon and amble to the Moosehead for socialization by proxy with all the old drunkards there backslapping and guffawing and pull tabbing and sportsing and bell ringing and all the chintzy and low-rent sparkle-light thrills of the poor. Bottles of top shelf whisky never touched, gathering dust. I'm in the cafe right now, perusing the drama of flesh. I'm aware that Lent is supposed to be a spiritual journey and that none among us can shoulder it alone and therefore the need for supplication to the divine in our period of bodily abjuration but this is missing on the current Lenten adventure. Probably accounts for the difficulty level. Team Sleep, the soundtrack. 

The cafe is all bougie white folks while outside in the hallway a team of Southeast Asian ladies janitor the facilities, stony faced, enduring.

I've been reading Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad. I do recommend.

I Unabashedly Am Ecstatic about Patrick Stump's Vocalizations

Ain't gonna lie, Stump really kills me. Maybe I'm perpetually 12, as A messaged me this glorious pre-spring crispy day but maybe I'm just possessed of a poor taste. Analysis of anything withholding, I'll let you think of that one what you will.

Last night (several nights removed now) I ate spicy kukkik with chicken from the local Pho and Thai place native to the burg. The fallout (get it?) from that has yet to be endured, but as I finished, the bliss-agony of the inflamed broth was wholly worth it. I keep going on, doing things to this body, dulling its newness, down into decay. I'll miss it when I'm gone, but there is solace in that reality as well.

This cafe is full of beautiful women in various modes of conduct. Good Christ, send help. Last night, we made home pizza and I sat on the barstool at my kitchen island and watched A draw out the piping discs and rest them on boards and a rack and then she took up the copper accented and wooden handled pizza slicer that her parents bought us and she hacked through the crusty bread and molten toppings steaming up and up and up and I loved her more in that image than maybe ever before and she asked why I was looking at her like I was. The spell crashed.

 

I walked downtown today on a bad Achilles tendon (Christ is that older woman statuesque. I'm in a real time PVP art museum.). This morning I cranked up Dax Riggs and I saw one of the pictures of my old man and Mom on the wall in our trailer in Mississippi and the music truly grooved with that scene. Mystical and dark, Satanic, Mom would have called him, solely for the titles of his songs (Cassie Eats Cockroaches, Demon Tied to a Chair in my Brain, Living is Suicide, et al.) and various groups with whom he's been frontman (Acid Bath, Agents of Oblivion, Deadboy and the Elephantmen, etc.). There was a connection to a place, phantom I know, that infuses yet my crippled psyche, a vision of a vast river and wetlands and rot and completely divorced from the frigid sterility of the mountains.

Today I also prayed the rosary for the first time in a while. Joyful Mysteries, not necessarily my faves, but ones that focused me on the hyperperturbing nature of parenthood. I feel like there are things that I continually learn anew, in terrible and intimate ways. I could picture the surge of relief as Mary rushes to embrace the pre-teen Jesus on the steps of the temple. The other day my IRL bro posted a link about a possible extinction level asteroid strike at the end of this year and my brain went to the place where would I kill Uly and spare him the agony of obliquely starving in a post-human world or would I strive The Road fashion and shoulder on into the ashy dark of his being alive, in the current instant, in the obscene hope that he would survive, somehow. 

Like my friend Nick says, "The trouble is being a writer."

Pon, Pon, Pon-pon-pon

Been listening to a lot of J-Pop lately and I've got to say, it's akin to immersing yourself in a GameCube, or perhaps the even more retro-ly Sega Genesis platform, Sonic the Hedgehog title. Just the other day I was in the bathroom, cleaning for the advent of A's parents, brandishing my spritzer bottle of organically formed cleaning solvent as I danced, manically and with great joy, blasting the counter tops as if with a pistol and jigging wildly to the strains of Kyary Pamyu Pamyu's absolutely infectious track "CANDY CANDY". I described it to my text bros as being in a real life video game but the level that was the fast one. Later, I'd watch the YouTube vid and the coronal mass ejection of cute Japanese women in absolutely baroque and garish costumage dancing and singing in their saccharine altos blew me the fuck away.

There's this little dude at work who resembles a gnome but a clownish one, one that would mistakenly dig up your radishes and apologize with a catch phrase, after which the studio audience would laugh. (A befuddled glance at the unearthed roots then pan to the camera, slack-jawed.) "Why that's just sour grapes!" (Applause and laughter followed by a contented group sigh.) This guy was carrying around a Japanese-English dictionary the other day and presented it to me and I was all, "Get that shit away from me. I ain't tryin' to be no otaku bitch." He laughed, a high pitched, disturbing staccato before mumbling something in gnomish and wandering away. I swear it was a fairy tale, IS a fairy tale, one at which I am continually amazed. More on that later maybe. Here's a cat with a field expedient rain cover lashed to his dome. HE IS LOVING IT. (SWEETY SWEETY GUMMU DROP. CHEWING CHEWING CHEWING CHEWING CHEWING. SO CANDY LIKE, CANDY LIKE, 'quack, quack, quack'.)

I've been wholesomely surprised at the high quality content of the memes the Trump presidency has generated on the tubes. I heard/read something the other day about how D.T. is the first president to understand the internet and virality, not in a studied way, but in a creature rolling around in the shit of his home environment, born to him from God, an instinctual way. It's been a great ride, one that can't last. Grab your memes while you can, even the ones that make no apparent sense to the uninitiated.(PON, PON, PON-PON-PON!)

All joy for me is gone in trying to write the serious, the Artistic. I could bemoan the loss of "meaning" in the meme age but that's vanity. In its absence, I've begun watercoloring again. The result has been absurd, grotesque, poorly executed, but cathartic in a way that slamming out 1000 words used to be but is no longer. In a similar way, reading has become extinct. So many monkeys, so many typewriters. Useless.

Uly turned three on Thursday last. (CRAZY PARTY NIGHT, PARTY NIGHT *musical score* HALLOWEEN, CRAZY PARTY NIGHT.)

Please, God, kill me.

Right Mix

This past year I completed a memoir, among other things. Now, memoirs are absolute garbage for the most part and this manuscript of mine is rife with pettiness and obscenity, a brazen open-laying of my current and past life for gawkers to behold. It's absolutely stuffed with all manner of illegal and unethical behavior and a fairly good amount of the time I wax stupid about the amount of drugs I'm currently metabolizing. The glorification of flesh and all its abuses is a key theme, a stabbing toward the Gonzo, a vault at making a beast of oneself. Oh man am I high right now.

I won't post more text, or any of it here, on the offball chance that one day someone might like to publish it for real, but if you know me at all, you can simply imagine. 

This year also saw many changes. No, that's incorrect. (Wait, you said you weren't going to do an year end post. Okay, fine. I won't.) I thought I had maybe had something to say but that was vanity. Here's a list of thoughts I had in addition to that previous sentence as I was considering what to dash off for the tubes. 

1. Plate tectonics, the earth's core, the magnetosphere, Mars's magnetosphere, Venus's magnetosphere, rate of atmosphere loss on Venus due to lack of an active magnetic field pulsed out into the solar wind from the dark belly of our sister planet

2. The Best American Short Stories 2018, trash, Raymond Carver, Miranda July, "Cat Person", Wordsworthing, Nick, Dan

3. Fermentation, especially those first fuckers who stumbled into booze and must have believed themselves to being their own god for such a creation. Civilization as an extension of such a basic idea. Fuck the wheel, without fermentation you'd never get out of caves and Art, certainly, would stand no chance of arriving.

4. Watering plants

5. Wanting to do a piece about the earthquake but remembering that Murakami already took the nifty "After the Quake" as a title. Man, fuck.

Government Peak

The route.

The objective. 

 The approach.

The view. 

 The crew.

The stalling point. 

The descent.

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.

It Hurts a Little Bit

Hey, take a look at this idiot.

I went to my friend D's book launch the other day. He had asked me to do the honor of interviewing him at a local bookstore about his novel and writing process and I had, of course, agreed to do so. After work, I drove into the city, through the spring rain during which I was dazzled by the sight of an eagle, fish in its talons, cruising over the roadbed, on its way home for dinner. Once arrived, the scene was grand - small urban coffee shop vibe with Mexican inspired tapas and beer on tap or in cans. D was on the small elevated stage, signing books. The place was packed, young and old, with friends of D's and those of his son who's no longer bodily among us. Soon, the event's hour came and I joined D on the stage. I felt a total fraud, sitting up there with him and asking questions about his book and recent run of publishing success. After the Q&A, D read a chapter from the novel and I watched him, reading in his characteristic way, the same way I read his words in my head, in his voice. There was something to it, and I stood at the back, taking in the reality that doing such a thing was possible. The reading concluded, I retired to one of the only two seats left available to guzzle beer and people watch, overcome with the deep knowledge of eventual death, but not in a necessarily bad way. The event ended and I drove home to my quiet town, my sleeping house, to sit with myself for a while. 

At work I got a promotion of sorts. The new jam is titled "Career Counselor" and I'm supposed to advise students about their career path and how they can be successful in the workplace (laughable, I know, given my highly non-linear track myself). What I really end up doing is inputting student's time off requests and providing haphazard, at best, mental health counseling that runs the gamut of topics - grief, stress, relationships, substance abuse, crushing existentialism (also laughable due to my inability to grapple successfully with those issues). It's a pretty good deal. I have my own office. I come and go much as I please. I'm generally left alone unless the world is burning down for one of the students. I don't have to put on the song and dance fuckery of entertaining/managing a classroom full of disaffected, low socioeconomic adolescents who would rather be just about anywhere else committing all manner of abuses of the flesh. It's a thing to watch them and to realize that I'm in the pull of a temporal black hole, approaching the event horizon, and speeding farther and farther away from where they are now and where I once was and that soon I will cross that boundary (or may have already). It's a hell of a thing.

I sit here, at home, surrounded by books. Sometimes (lots of the time really), I find myself in a state of wonder at how things have shaken out for me. I'm a skinny white kid from southern Mississippi who grew up in a trailer and somehow I've managed to never work, not really, a day in my life. By rights I should have been a day laborer, gone to prison, been hooked on methamphetamine, trailer park denizen, domestic violence champ, Bud Light swiller, serial bum, homeless, any of the futures that I know could have existed out there. Yet I reside in relative ease and comfort, watching my youngest play with a Melissa and Doug play pizza set as I listen to streaming Lofi beats and watch the world outside turn green once more. I spend my days writing away at things, at whatever shape my life has occupied. Nights I'm currently enthralled with ice hockey even though I've never been in ice skates and have only attempted, once, those of the roller variety. I've somehow managed to get married, three times even. I'm going to have a novel published this year. The entirety of my existence is a mystery, one unsolvable, and I'm drawn to the line from Blood Meridian when the kid spends a night with the hermit in the desert when the old man imparts this wisdom to him.

 "A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with."   

Winter-Fueled Self-Recriminations

Ulybear turned two a week ago. I know how I should feel about that (joyful, proud, excited, etc.), but I can't say that I fall into that realm. For true, I am all of those things, as another orbit around the sun has made him more robust and engaging and hardier and less likely to die from something as insidious as SIDS but there's all the baggage that goes along with having him become the individual he has always been and the reality that, truth be told, I'm far, far more lenient with him than I have been my older boys. I'm nicer to him. I always say please and thank you. I give him many more choices in things. Very few, if any, knife hands get thrown his way. I have yet to, as I once did with Gavin, force him to hold a heavy stone over his head and run around a house, shouting apologies, in penance for some now forgotten transgression. I'll likely never upend the chest of drawers, much like I did with Kiernan, and strew his clothes about the floor because he's not cleaned his room to the ordered specifications in the required time. 

It's strange to me to watch (my parental progression, I mean) and I get the feeling, unfactcheckable due to mortality, that my old man had the same type conundrum with my development. That smacks of hubris in the extreme but I feel it's a valid thing to explore. I was seven and nine years removed from my brothers and I know, both through their telling and my old man's own confession, that I had it far easier than both of my elder brothers. I can remember, out of context, speaking with my brother, the middle child of us three, about how I'd had it soft because "Pop could lay on a whipping in his thirties" a decade of his to which I was little privy and memory experience of which I had none. 

Uly on the left.

We went up to the mountains the other day for some skiing. The day was magnificent: clear, cold, new snow - the first in what seemed quite a while, and no wind. On the way in I noted the sledding hill in a rueful manner. Otherwise, I was stricken with the place, especially the seasonal attitude of the day and the sound of the snow underfoot and the crisp surface crust of the previously drifted dunes that crunched beneath my weight but held Uly's as he and I ambled about the area while A skied solo. Uly tired, and I booted off some snow from a picnic table seat so he could rest there. We, Uly and I, sat on that bench and watched the turn of the earth and the orb of sun in the sky and listened to the sound of the woods and we were quiet as we waited the final bit for his mother to return. After, we descended and resumed our normal lives once more.

We went down the Lower 48 way this Christmastide. I met the boys in MSP and we copped a cheap motel a bit down the road. There were only two beds and the elevator was sketch af but the television worked and so did the ice machine and refrigerator and we all cobbled ourselves into the room for a single night's rest before the trip out to Winona where Uly and A stayed with my newly minted in-laws. The weather was brutal - polar vortex cold and unseasonable temps. Morning after, we drove back, listening to the newest QOTSA album and grooving furiously to the tracks. 

Once in Winona, the boys, refueled by a night's sleep and despite the chill, availed themselves of the local sledding venues (not ideal but shouldered through regardless) and I watched those boys slide down the frigid and brush covered hills as A's father shoved them and followed after and the cold and the time and the fleeting nature of their childhoods came hurtling down with them into the pit that is me and I watched them go, run after run, yelling and laughing, until it was time, all too quick in coming, to head inside to warm up.

Maybe I'm just repeating myself here as I've said all these things, I know, before but I once heard a wise man say that we, as writers, are "all circling our own obsessions".

Autumn Hells

The other day I was out for a stroll, pre-snow. A's family was in town and the valley was in full autumn, gorgeously red and gold and brown and possessed of a certain mustiness that heralds the winter and can be likened to a berry-sort of goodness folded into a kind of muskegg and arboreal decay just before the freeze arrives and arrests most things organic prior to the spring major thawing. A's mom and dad copped a place at a bed and breakfast with full frontal view of Pioneer Peak. The vista granduered and the climate was frisky. All the elements were in place for an adventure. I availed.

This year's holiday time features a few things I dislike. There is air travel, first and foremost. Then there is hospitality-ing and guesting and Christmas partying (both of the corporate and familial variety) and a general feeling that all this merry making could be better served doing anything else. (I could finish the weird novella draft re-write. I could watch some football. I could get a new short story done before the new year as was my end of 2017 goal. I could get out there and do anything else life related that wasn't wasting time.)

Recently, I fell and broke some bones of the rib-cage variety. I was in the shower. The bathroom Defensive Coordinator called a two-gap blitz and came with the linebacker combo of Slippery Shower (TCU) and Indestructible Commode (THE Ohio State University). I was in the pocket. I turned to avoid the rush and was shoestring grabbed by Slippery Shower as Indestructible Commode plowed into my midsection. After the play I was up and calling signals, but the Head Coach (A), came in to call a time out. I finished the drive and was good to play, but had to go out of the game, not on IR, but not starting either.

It's been six weeks and I'm still not 100 percent.

The Real Me

A and Uly gathering blueberries in Hatcher Pass.

"Get me off of this; I need confidence in myself," The Weeknd balefully implores of his newfound lover on the track "Wicked Games". Good Lord can I connect to that sentiment, especially in the wake of the autumn's advent and the crushing apathy that is work and the never ending heartbreak that is shepherding children into this world only to have them go before you onto this stage and render every ounce of the love you pour into them to an unused lard that sits neglected and turns rancid on the kitchen counter of their lives. Sometimes I feel that, if I had enough of that confidence that The Weeknd desires, I could believe the direction my life flowed was good and true and not illusory and fleeting and ultimately false. 

Today we went, with A's mother and auntie and Uly, to the oomingmak farm that resides in Palmer, just up the road here. We walked around the premises and had a tour from a super nice woman named Grayson (?) and saw the beasts and learned about the farm's operation and qiviut gathering schedule and processing. The tour guide let Ulybear feed some of the calves (weighing in at close to two hundo) with a branch affixed with dead leaves. The animals' eyes rolled and the calves called in the manner of bovines and I had the intense desire to face down these beasts on the iced over tundra armed with only a flint-tipped birch spear and draped in stinking hides, screaming into a sub-zero whiteness. I know I'd die in such a scenario. 

We went to the fair this year, as always. It seems that, as I get older, the fair gets more magical as if I were slipping, temporally, into an adolescence that I never experienced for real (as real as this simulation universe can attain). Uly and A and I had all manner of fair food (fried pickles and pretzels with cheese and fried peanut potatoes with real bacon bit infused mayonnaise) in addition to many beers (Uly abstained from the brew). There was all the human noise there and the farm animals and Capuchin monkeys riding border collies and different reptiles in an exhibit and a woman on a mobility scooter motoring down the pathway with an obese grandson huffing along behind at a trot petitioning his grams to slow down and it was a different world altogether, as it is. I wondered about all those souls in that company and how they maintained with their own specific set of life attacks. 

The leaves are turning and falling down and it is at once beautiful and metaphoric and heart-fucking-sundering but in the best of possible ways.