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."

Fuck Everything

Been spending a lot of my free time these days getting stratospheric and staring out the window at the scenery. The birch tree in the front yard is transcendent. Beyond, rows of slanting houses tilt into the earth like absurd phantoms. The mountain that crowds the horizon is another reality entire to itself. The wine in my fist is sustaining on a level I don't believe possible. Birds arrive on evening missions to the feeders, mostly solitary, and spend their time gathering seeds from the spillage on the melting ground. The sky changes; sometimes there is a breeze, sometimes clouds. I watch the evening pinken, then dim, then pour myself the final abuse of that day's mini-bender. I'm going to be dead soon enough.

Last week there was a food truck/vintage shop festival at the fairgrounds. A and I visited with her parents who were in town for the week. I strengthened my morning coffee with vodka and we advanced to the grounds and perused the displays. I found a truck that hailed from my birth neck of the woods and ate a shrimp and catfish po-boy with fried okra as a side. It was delicious - fried perfectly and seasoned with just enough spice that the addition of Tabasco only heightened the flavors of the seafood and balanced the mayo-tomato-lettuce combo. The bread was the right consistency of toothy and fresh. As I ate, relishing, the meal made me think about my dead parents and what they might make of me being in Palmer, AK eating such fare. What might they have thought about having Uly as a member of their number? What about G and K who they likewise did not meet? 

I dyed eggs with Ulybear and fam this past Friday when I'd taken a personal day from work. It was A's parents' last day with us and they were soon to be flying back to MN. We did the usual stuff: put names on the shells, drew designs, dunked the eggs. While the grandparents had a time with Uly and his cuteness, I was drawn into my own interiority of previous, egg dyeing memory-scapes where G was younger and wearing one of my old, white t-shirts stained with dye, hands to match, holding up his creation in a photo I keep somewhere. There was G and K with friends in a similarly messy outing where they'd spent the day gorging on kid-friendly snacks and playing before the egg coloring finale. The scene congealed of a time they went to a secret proselytizing "egg hunt" where they sat through a non-denominational, feel good-ey, Christianity-lite service before being set loose to gather eggs "hidden" on a patch of astroturf at the Menard Sports Center. Of these things I said nothing.

Here's K at a soccer game I didn't attend. He's in the black kit, positioning himself, edging out that other kid and anticipating the drop of the shadowed ball that hangs just out of frame. Judging from the motion of the photo, he's going to get the first touch and ensuing advantage in maneuvering up the field. I received the photo - along with others of report card info and goalie work - on a Thursday morning while I was busy with a field trip with my students to the local recycling center. I scrolled through the photos as the pupils labored through a presentation on waste reduction. It would be four more hours before I was safely drinking secret beers at my local bar then on to home where I'd continue until it was time for window staring and the hoped for/anticipated nightly fade out. 

Fuck everything. 

Brain Problems

Here's a report:

The other day, I found myself out in the driveway, shoveling snow. This shouldn't be that bizarre an occurrence considering my locale, but the past two years have been shit with respect to snowfall and I've lived in places where snow removal has been someone else's responsibility. With the securing of a mortgage (via transferring my balls into the bank's vise), I've been granted the task of clearing said mortgage's driveway. Not to imply that I dislike the work. Indeed, I find the chore invigorating - outside, in the cold, laboring with a definite endpoint - and at the conclusion of which I can indicate palpable evidence of something useful having been accomplished. The driveway was snowy; now it is clear. I did that. Proceed to drink beer in triumph.

In any event, I was out, shoveling and after I'd done the required work, I heard a mewling from beneath the porch. A long haired, orange cat appeared, rangy, ugly, obviously street-worn with frost-bitten ears and matted fur. I promptly told the cat to fuck off, that we weren't doling out charity, and entered the house. The cat apparently took this as encouragement and hopped up to the porch in order to eat the spilled bird seed from my feeders and to lap at the melting snow on my porch boards. He then proceeded to mewl and cry at the door, going so far as to jump onto the bench and peer into my kitchen as if he'd been freshly turned out of the house for the day and was unhappy with that reality. 

By that evening the cat was inside, perched in my lap; by today I've settled on his name as "Captain Lawrence Edward Grace 'Titus' Oates", of the famously doomed Terra Nova Expedition. He's ill-tempered with the other cat, drinks from the toilet, puked on the living room floor, is gross in general, and prefers my company. 

Of course I like him.

I went skiing with A and Uly a week or so ago on Saturday. I don't remember exactly. Alcohol is a hell of a drug. 

In any event, we went out to the old train tracks that snake down the Matanuska river. The tracks are out of commission and run all the way to Sutton, almost 20 miles away, and we headed out into the day in the mid-noon hour finding it beyond magnificent. The snow was ground down by boots and paws and our skis hissed over the already laid imprints. I bid them go ahead and stayed to myself, going slowly and looking for birds.

We went about a mile out then turned back, just before an area where there is a massive and on-going earth slump as the river takes its toll on the bluff. The trail is passable there, but we mostly always turn back at that point as we worry about Uly's (and our own) safety. Returning, I let A take the lead again and told her not to wait for me. She skied on and left me to my thoughts. The river below shushed. My skis murmured in their traces. My breath came in rhythmic rushes. For a moment, things were okay.

A and Uly stopped for me at an overlook near the trail head. A bald eagle coasted over us, descending, until he perched on the snow pack near the stream of rushing water in the riverbed below. We left.

Uly turned a year. He walks now. He's got his own shitter now and has used it twice. Just this morning, he was fussy and yawning and I asked him if he wanted to go take a nap and he nodded his head and said, "ya," before he started down the hallway, without me, toward his bedroom. I followed him back and he crawled into his bed. After I covered him up, I told him I was going to leave him and he should sleep well and long. He nodded again and I left him. Within ten minutes he was out, like a light, as the Old Man would have said.

I returned to the living room, where I had been listening to Pandora. A, who had been at the store, returned but soon departed again to ski solo. Now it's only me, alone, sipping beer and listening to hip hop.

Something about that seems so right.

Work starts again tomorrow. 

I recently saw a facebook article from Cormac McCarthy wherein he gave an interview talking about how the 9-5 workday (I'm interpolating lots here as I only read the headline) is the death of creativity and that's why he's eschewed such a lifestyle. Can't say that I disagree there. Tomorrow will dawn and I'll arise and go to teach children (yes children) how to write resumes and set goals and compose cover letters so that they too might enjoy full employment as that is the endpoint of our current and collective economic delusion. 

What of the cat's example? 

What of the eagle's? 

What of Uly's?

I'll leave with a line from The Weeknd's newest music vid, "All I wanna do is make money and make dope shit."

Kill me.

*\(-@-)/* ~Kawaii~ [^*_*^]

I recently spent a week in a Hawai'ian island paradise hellscape.

While there, I experienced things that were beyond all right reckoning. Chief of all absurdities were the tourists (of which I was one) who seemed to wander about, devoid of observable purpose, zombie-like, and in need of scripted activities or tours to keep their minds occupied. They seemed ill at ease near the jungle, or on the seashore, or in any of the locals’ shops. Many of them engaged in behaviors that seemed to placate by way of familiarity: eating dairy ice cream in a locale where shave ice was the preferred chilled treat, obscuring authentic food trucks in favor of more outlandishly priced “gourmet” restaurants, or lounging (fretfully) at the beach where they seemed to wholly misunderstand the concepts of “tropical” and “beach”. It was odd to see - stressed biotic computers who’d purchased an expensive voyage to a place that was purported to be relaxing yet failing to evidence proof of the island’s endemic soothing effects. Despite their unease, I felt certain that, if asked, most would have quailed at the suggestion of overindulgence in pharmacological venues to calm their nerves. 

As I said, odd.    

Aboard the island I felt quite the foreigner for even being alive and imposing my consciousness on that place. The sham feeling persisted, was highlighted even, during interactions with the locals. The hotel lobby had a bar in which I spent some time (natch) and in that bar was a nice barkeep named Chris whose skin was the color of coconut shells. The ones available in supermarkets, not right off the tree. You know, the ones that fall on cartoon characters’ domes. In another part of the country, I’d have considered him Latino, but on the island I made him to be Native Hawai’ian (Hawai’ian Native?). He was good at his job, a conversationalist, impeccable drink maker, and possessed of the most important quality for a barkeep – knowing when to hold peace and let patrons mull the world.

Towards the last night I was there, I engaged with Chris over gins and tonics, and we discussed the nature of the island and how it’s changed. Chris said that until about 10 years ago (sweet Jesus that was 2006) the island had been a sleepy idyll, eschewed by many for the pleasures of Maui. Then, development took off and left the infrastructure behind. We talked of economics, and our children, and our histories, and how he’d been fortunate enough to buy a house and keep it. We chatted for a while, as other patrons came for “to go” Mai-Tais in plastic, lidded cups, and at the end of my rationed, public drinking time, he stood me two of my G&Ts and wished me a good trip home.

Outside of my already established interpersonal relationships, it was the most human interaction I experienced on the island.

At the resort, I continually felt the weight of what seemed to be the entire simulation universe. This feeling was magnified, especially when reflected in the constant undulations of the resort’s pool’s surface. I kept thinking that the waves and their propagation could explain something about the deeper nature of the physical world and were somehow analogous to the early mysteries of cosmology that resulted in the formation of the observable space around us. The phrase “localized space-time distortions” (as if I know fuck all about quantum anything) sounded nice and spooky, so I went with that and felt quite clever.

As I sat, drinking, and baking in the sun, and watching K figure out how to operate a snorkel we'd found in a bag on another pool deck (the bag was marked as being free to a good home), this line of thinking persisted. Despite the mental energy I was devoting to a topic I'd never understand and much like my vacation on the island, these thoughts too were shams, and only existed in my fallible brain because I’ve taken to ingesting things and watching way out of my depth lectures on YouTube as a form of entertainment after my small family goes to bed without me.

You could think it strange, but it's a good way to fill the time when you're alone and trying not to think about your impending death.

While we vacationed in our sham paradise, my friend, D, had an anniversary service for his son, whose funeral mass I attended. Since that heartache, he'd erected a memorial bench on a trail in Eagle River and the event was a trek out to the bench to honor the memory of one gone too soon. I'd been invited to go, via Facebook, but had to decline owing to the Kaua'i trip. In the aftermath of the service, when photo evidence appeared online, I studied the image in the suite where we were incomprehensibly staying. There, in the breeze of the tropic afternoon, was a snow-bracketed and candle-lined bench and I regretted, wholly, not being able to be there for him, or to light a Marian or St. Jude (one of my favorite saints) candle, or to pray in silence with those gathered at the site. My absence from something so concrete as the memorial shifted my perceptions of the island's irrealism into previously unattained levels and the desperate wish to return home seized me with fury.

When the trip was over and we safely arrived in Alaska, a visit to the mailbox found a package containing a Christmas present from D (a book about writers and drinking, obvi) with a personalized encouragement handwritten on the title page. Later, I sent a thank you email expressing my inability to return such a thoughtful gift and received such a kind response that it made me wonder how I'd been so fortunate to know, much less befriend, such a man. His simple act of continuing to exist seemed a massive refutation of all the vacation's apparent falsehoods, a grounding, a vast, calming effect in a world where air travel and resorts and spa visits and lu'aus and shell leis fill our collective brains as something to be sought after and procured, all while abhorring the question of why those such things are desired in the first place.     

{A beautiful, warped, and incomplete family, smiling in a place beyond comprehension.}

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.