Narragansett Beer, from Latrobe, PA

I should have been born a 45-year-old electrician, if I may extend our conversation into the stereotypical. In many social ways, I feel kinship with traditional blue-collar folk, even though there is nothing in my life that colors my collar that way.

With beer, of which I like many, I love Narragansett. Made on honor, Sold on Merit. And now from Latrobe, PA--qu'est ce c'est? This would explain the recent advertising blitz for a beer whose previous total advertising comprised ancient signs on ancient bars in Rhode Island, Southeastern Massachusetts, and the Cape. But the experience is the same: big cans, old label, LAGER in all caps like that's a vital distinction. And the beer, completely the same. I'm not so stereotypically blue-collar that I abhor change--if the makers of Rolling Rock are promoting this gem, hooray. I'd love to find it more places. And I'd love for it to take over ghastly PBR on the taps.

Why mention this within this blog? I know I am taken with some element of the language of this beer. It appeals to my love of dead authors, I suppose. It draws me to a people I usually read about, and sometimes want to be. It reminds me how silly I am, although aware of this.

Not a Thing

Not a thing to say. No: a habit not to say. Things come and others go, but habits are harder in their subtle clothes, a familiar friend actually sent to kill you.

Cohere

What brings the unexpected together? Surely the comprehensive boredom of the expected unites unexplained worlds in an equal and opposite reaction to its own horribleness. The expected, despite its numerous flaws, is predictable.

Things fall apart, first Yeats, then Achebe, then others have said, but the physics behind this have been in effect far longer: our penchant for breaking from routine and heading into imminent disaster is so ingrained in our humanity that it must have existed longer than verbal language.

We fuck up one world because we can't stand that we have only taken one world. We have ourselves to blame, and this is why we are empowered to mess it all up for the sake of becoming more than ourselves. Forests that burn come back stronger from their own ashes. Should souls be any different?

It was Tuesday

Curves and arrows, beauty to bleed for. A stolen book of nice lines replaced, a lovely meat amid cholesterolic arteries, throughways that pulse with excitement and go sterile with misuse. Hatred has its uses here. So does dreaming, the hair of the psyche.

When a Finnish president wins a Nobel, do bloodways run furious, or do we wait for a dog food commercial to laugh? There is no we here.

But there is here: The only wrong part of us is uselessness. To be useless is not to ignore God, it's to ignore our wiring, a much more tragic circumstance. God thrives on being the underdog, and veins are real besides.

Does God live in our pipes? Only as a blockage--if not, we do not generally live with this knowledge or act accordingly. But put some strain of the heart, and it's Oh God aplenty. What a crutch.

I do not care for crutches. I suffer financially in private, I yearn upon the night, I call for God only when my grandmother mutters next to me in her church. I have suffered and it has been alone. Otherwise it is not true suffering, no?

To suffer with others is an inconvenience. True suffering is to have joy alone. It's amusing how much quantity affects the circumstance. It's terrifying to think that

this just happened, like a ponytail expanding in the wind that wasn't planned, or

a cancer ceasing growth because
it was
Tuesday.

Dilatory Days

That's better as a phrase than Salad Days, no? Of all we have to thank Shakespeare for, I completely despise him for that combination of words. There is no real reason for my disgust. I like salad. I enjoy days. I find the combination unequal to its meaning.

Dilatory Days, that's something I can stand behind. When I get around to standing behind things, or for things, or on things, or even occasionally by things. Now I procrastinate, of course, but only in the habitual sense, not the intentional sense. I'd most enjoy the time to write Are Go posts all day and of course all damn night. Writing about language is my backgammon, my mojito, my devil with a blue dress. Cicero would likely put me with the Greeklings (his term), those who write about doing something instead of doing it. Fine, fair enough. But I still have my voice. I'm waiting for that comeback, Marcus Tullius...what, Roman mob got your tongue?

This is a minor post on a tiny blog. Its purpose is to resuscitate interest in my uncommon words, to leave a fingerprint in martian soil, you know, just in case lives to come that are beyond our language will know that we tried.

Minatory Song

When I rip down this wall, you will fall.

The age of smugness ends tonight. I am the finisher of your epoch. I will not so much destroy you as I will atomize your existence. You will not so much regret the things you've done as you will feel sorrow for the stories your family will tell about your demise after you're gone.

Tick tock, click clock, your luck is fucked.

These threats are not idle or even exaggerated. There is a way that quiet people explode with an aggrevation only understood on a scientific scale. Souls expand and contract in equal ways over the course of a lifetime. Some fluxuate on minute intervals. Some change with the moon cycles. I've been holding this for my life, and the reaction will alter it permanently.

I'm not writing this to warn you. You already know I'm coming for you. These words are like the word Ambulance written on an ambulance. I just want you to know your power and influence: as your life gets worse, the world gets better. Now.

You Change All the Lead [Sadness of a friend]

Sadness of a friend, no isolation is so external.
To be so far, to share the same infinitive sky.
A life
of parentheses disengages,
leaving a single period on a white sheet.

This ink, this blood, these images
among concomitant friends and beautiful horizons,
echoes in my intellect, one body movement from a far lake or, less easily,
a flashlight against a daylit night sky.
These stars are different down here. Everything is different,
what this is, and what this is not.

A hug from the near-dead, a picture of the forgotten,
a richly colored sky on the day we are born.
A compliment from a stranger, a tree branch in reach,
so changes the sadness, so changes the friendship.

Untouched skin, unwatched planets, the core of Gaea's pubis
from which smooth and wondrous paths venture out
before calling back in the grammar of ancients.

My pulse fuels this constant fire, an approaching blaze.
My ink learns. My church burns.
Do you? Light as the biggest cloud, thick as a moan.
With an indication of all existence, you connect with me,
A single, perfect lily placed deep, deep, within my now perfect soul.

Etymologitastic: Caterpillar

So. I was recently called out for laziness with words. A good friend of mine writes an English language newsletter published for writers that do not use it as a first language. She has a splendid section devoted to etymology. I decided to be her inspiration: "Hey, what's the story with 'nick of time'?" "Hey, what's the origin of 'state of the art'?" "Yo, what's the story with 'checkers'?" In her splendid way, she informed me of Google. So.

Time for my own work on my own interests in this area. Still lazily, here's my first go. Completely from one entry from Google.

So:

Latin *catta pilosa means "hairy cat." "Catta" gives us modern English "cat" and "pilosus" is from "pilus" hair, giving us pile in carpets. That caterpillars should resemble cats in any way may be surprising, but note other names used to describe them - "pussmoth" and "woolly bear." (English Etymologies)

First

Every new writing should be like the first run. The activities, both core to our identity as living beings, should share in the same endorphins, that same exhiliration of doing it again after a tragic pause. That same welcome pain. That slowness. That assessment, after months of avoidance, of what is wrong in our lives.

Despite my earlier words, a difference: one is for ourselves, the other for the widest possible audience. Strangely, it's the latter through which we are more selfish, less important, and completely human.

In sickness

We appreciate the usefulness of the right words when we face unspeakable circumstances. Can't you feel your brain actually demanding blood from the body as you reach for the combination of ideas to communicate? We witness internal movement and chemistry as we assemble kernels into attempted wholes. The hospital: so much time, such faceless tsunamic emotion, and only the squeak of a nearby door to identify with. We need words to share this, and we have none of enough worth. That's not irony, that is the validation of human experience over vicarious hell.

Despite their darkness, shadows only exist because of light. What a twisted, ill-fated, and common marriage.

Abulia

I am without will to sustain a heavy thought stream, to manage the flow of a current. When we feel the power of flow within us and we do nothing with it but push it away from our center, are we better than a toilet? Ah ha, that old trick--turn my personal flaws into a shared discussion of misery, blame, and commiseration. Weaker than this coffee I'm drinking in some kind of attempt to rekindle a former me.

There's the problem right there--celebrating my past as a victory, a preferred state. A roach about to be flattened doesn't reminisce about safer days, it runs for life. Terribly sad it is to wait until moments of weakness and boredom to feel best about that cliche we call written life.

When will the logjam shatter? When will nature reclaim its beast within my unforgiving chambers? Answer: When I stop waiting for gravity and the passive world to act on me and I become subject in my own sentence.

Hibernaculum

A leg, a breeze, or something hackneyed, a chirp, a leg in the breeze. We wait months for this moment of rebirth, of spring's return from the dead, and it comes not with circumstance, but with accidental intent. The first community boaters of the year are on the Charles River, and it hits, that spring has been with us for a week and a half. A birthday gift that arrives late, a nice memory we think actually happened.

That's the trick of the season, though: spring never died at all. It just found a place to settle down, take a rest, and show up like a lost child who wasn't lost at all, just playing hide-and-seek.

And we, the victims of this prank? We're pissed off and we're angry and we're embarrassed that we fell for it again. Then, as an innocent leg passes on a dangerous breeze as a lovely devil chirps, we're thankful to live through a horrible season of silence so that the next, the joy of words, awakes.

Rodomontade

"In 1990 mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which operates America's unmanned interplanetary space probes, noticed something odd happen to a Jupiter-bound craft, Galileo. As it was flung around the Earth in what is known as a slingshot manoeuvre, Galileo picked up more velocity than expected. Not much. Four millimetres a second, to be precise."--"Wanted: Einstein Jr," The Economist

The article went on to note that some scientists that monitored JPL's other unmanned craft, regardless of mission, are reporting the same phenomenon--a slight change in speed, unexplained by gravity, inertia, or any of the known forces of the universe. A craft should be going at X speed, and something, some thing, it knocks what was once perfection and predictability subtly out of place. Just like Einstein did to Newton, and Newton did to the Bible. Who will do this to Einstein and his physics?

Four millimeters, whether faster or slower, matters. But my thoughts are more terrestrial, as children are ever more a part of a once-solo life, and thoughts of the next one to come will surely make time much more of a challenging thing than a incidental no thing. Will I notice seconds that are wasted, or minutes that expire without a connection to my kin?

My dad is the one who brought me back to earth, from a recent visit we had. Words with my father, a means of transportation, takes me back just a bit, back to times when time just was a space between other things. It felt nice to remember not being beholden to time, and appreciating that now, for fleeting moments only, can I waste moments without consequence.

My dad has gone home. The past returns, the future is very near. And as my past becomes intertwined with fog and falsity, I'm reminded of words I am sure to write some time in my seventy-sixth year:

I close every time you open,
opening only as you close.
It is this, much more than years, that has aged me.
This is a consequence of being sublunar.

At this point, those like me (there are too many)
have endured extortion for years and,
life-sentence prisoners starting to enjoy the attention of a beating,
we’re beginning to understand our crimes.

But just as the energy is exhausted.
What a horrible machine we are,
this sophisticated, cruel design assembled on the cheap,
unable to handle full occupancy and a full tank.
Loaded up, it doesn’t go far; filled with fuel, unshared elevation.
And so, life: enough to go halfway with some one for an adequate ride.
Enough. Thank the world for epiphantic instants (there are too few)
when consequences aren’t ignored, but embraced and brought along.
Gas it up, seat the world, it all burns.
What a ride

Ha: Would I have explained this fifty years ago?
Obscurity used to be so cool.
At a certain point, though, brilliance is a waste of time.
Or too tiring? At least to this thief.
I stole my own wisdom years ago, and now I reach back for my summer.
How real is any season from the past?
I’m too evolutionarily beautiful to care,
content that the world celebrates my beaux-zeaux art
in unanimous silence

just like my greatest day at the end of a millennium
when NASA put my initials on Mars.

21 weeks: formation

She's next to me, most of her asleep except for our baby, who for the first time I feel moving against the contours of my hand. Like any fool I assume the pre-infant knows that I am his father and that he is reaching out to me, or pressing into me for comfort. Maybe he is trying to kick me away from his peace, or protect his living incubator, his mother.

This moment is happening and I have no answers. No answers: the title of the journey that is starting. As we buy a crib and talk to friends about names and fight over something nonexistent because hormones and antihormones flare up like epic Greek conflicts, the reality of what her belly means affects me more each day, each waking night. And there are no answers. What will his laugh sound like? What will make him laugh? Which play will become his favorite? What stupidity will he learn from? Which women and men will bring him joy, and which suffering? Will he embrace one of our many cultures, or go his own way? Will he, in times of need, go to his mother, his father, both, or an empty neither? Who will his heroes be? Who will change the course of his life? Are they people I know? Is it she? Is it me? Or is it someone I will never know?

To owe gratitude without being able to repay it: may that be the harshest pain I need know in this lifetime. My person has left this earth, and did so prematurely (he was for so long 12 years older than me, but now it is less). I know my pain. May life work out in such a way that I never know my dad's pain for the same loss.

7w2d: Flicker

His heart, I saw it flicker. Seeing a heart beat without sound is how things go in early gestation. I didn't even notice until afterwards, when so much is obvious. The ultrasound imaging, so cloudy, such a Rorschach test with guidance. But when the lens discovered that cavern of life amid so much gray, and the enormous centimeter within, our lives changed, predictably and wonderfully. There he was, real and protected and visibly alive, a flickering pulse lighting the screen and everything inside me.

Though he was seven weeks and two days into existence, I was created that day. On this first day of a new world, I have such hopes to never miss a thing, and be ready with the words to somehow capture observations, weaknesses, exaggerations, hopes, tears, silliness, and wonder at this common miracle, this uncommon joy, this unique and universal sense of creation and the responsibility that carries.

What wild ecstacy? I react on pee

Living with a talented six-year-old is a recursive indulgence. Brandon, he's my son, he picks up language with surprising skill--surprising for me, anyway, this being my first go-around living with and raising a developing mind. He is, in most ways, a regular 21st Century boy: likes Power Rangers S.P.D. and attention from his older brother, can be selfish with his toys and selfless with his love, is lost in catatonia during shows, snapping out precisely as the first commercial begins its whorish song.

He doesn't think about it, and ay, that's the Hub. He doesn't know that he continues to pick up new words, abstract ideas like imagination and responsibility, technical terms like detach and meditate, perfectly placed verbs that outrebound the basics of prepositions.

This morning: "Mommy, Stephan tickled me, I peed! I peed! I didn't mean to--he tickled, so I react on pee." One can try to teach this, but it won't work. There is a capacity here with context that will continue to build on itself. Vocabularly increase plus contextual expansion is a forming universe.

Is he John Keats reborn? Is he just another kid? Either way, on a blizzardic day where leaving is no option and the denizens of our homes are too loud for thoughtful odes, I can't imagine a better conceit.

Hear the joke now

No one tells a story like a Trinidadian. There is a skill at work when one in the group gets things started with a key phrase, signifying something new is about to be shared. The room never gets quiet, the group never fully stops talking, but the attention, even if partial, goes to the speaker. Sometimes the interest is keen, sometimes the spite is evident, but never does anyone leave. It's on.

The oral traditions of poetry are clearly in motion. A rousing call turns microscopically aural in a turn of a phrase: absolute intonation incantation, and always an occasional silence to allow the others to comment, very much like your vision of a new testament church service, that same passion and shared focus, just irreverently so. Changes in pitch complement not just brilliant language colors, but the props of the play--a suck-tooth, a whoo-whee, a well boy, and dozens of onomatopeiac accents. Understanding dialect is not an issue for stories that hit us in a core many of us don't visit or even knowledge.

The story itself? Almost irrelevent to the joy of communication, the community of memory and purpose. I fear describing this too much from the side, but I also refuse to try to transcribe the moment. How quickly nice stories can rub us the wrong way; a journalist of different cultures toes lines of characteristics that too often spoil the point: as my beloved poetry professor William Kloefkorn said as only he can say, no guts, no sausage.

Obsession

Though I live within words, I'm always there as an outsider. I've so rarely had that moment, a one true moment of literary ecstasy. This frustrates me terribly, because I expect inspiration and life-changing events from what I read, and it doesn't play out. My life has changed in cataclysmic ways, though, and I have had those moments accompanied with music. Please enjoy one account from February 2005 that captures that. I include it here in hopes of jump-starting my soul to activate from words, to make love with what I see the way I have heard such perfect and horrible and changing chords and choruses that carried me in my occasional moments of quiet destruction.

Listening to the same songs over and over, I get that from my mom. I remember her playing “I’m Just a Gigolo” by David Lee Roth so many times that I would wake up humming the chorus. (Don’t hold the song choice against her—your moms loved that song too.) It wasn’t my favorite song, what with the strange words I didn’t understand; I was still trying to figure out what a casbah and Der Kommissar meant, let alone this “gigolo” thing. But I never minded it—I loved seeing my mom so taken with a song that it made her smile every time she played it. Maybe that’s the first time I understood music as some kind of escape.

I listen to the same songs all the time. I wore out my CD player listening to “Dig for Fire” when I spilled my confused heart onto paper at age 18, writing a letter I never intended to send. Or before cross-country races, I’d play some truly pathetic songs on repeat—I’m talking things like “Ain’t Nothin’ Gonna Break My Stride” over and over, okay? I tell you this not because I don’t get embarrassed—I assure you I am Loverboy-red as I write this—but so you trust me that you’re getting an honest piece of writing from me.

I always have honed in on certain songs and played them so many times in a row. I don’t do it because I’m trying to learn the lyrics or how to play air drums to the song, or even because I want to. I guess there’s some kind of comfort with it, boring as it is, so it just happens without me thinking about it. And while I certainly pick better songs these days, I’ve found that I revisit songs much more so now than I used to, which surprises me. It seems like a teenage thing to do, playing on repeat. Maybe it’s that I now listen to most of my music through iTunes, which given the fact I use the built-in speakers must horrify all lovers of music.

I think it’s the ease of repeating songs that has made this habit worse. I’m aware that I do this now more than I used to because of this horrible data field on the interface called “Play Count,” which lists the number of times you play each song. Where I once overlistened to anything without compunction, I must say that seeing 48 plays of “Hey Ya!” doesn’t make me feel particularly cool. To be fair to me, I can tell you that 46 of the listens were before that song started appearing on every awards show commercial in the world.

This Play Count started fascinating me, though, as I thought about not just what I listened to so much, but why. Is it the pretty sounds of The Flaming Lips' “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” that generated 78 listens, or do the words, eccentric as they are, just inspire some part of my life? What about tripe like 311’s “Amber” or Elefant’s “Misfit,” to which I’ve given 47 listens each? Does the easy stuff help me as I work on my computer? These large play counts may be less an indication of what I like and more a practical effort—these songs help me get stuff done, not so much an escape as an aid through what I’m not escaping.

Even with all of this on my mind, I’m shocked at what’s happened to me in the last month, when Interpol and Antics entered my life. I’m always a bit behind what others are doing; do you know anyone else who doesn’t have a cell phone? So, I didn’t start listening as this album came out, even though several friends had it and loved it. One friend let me borrow the CD right away, but after importing the songs, I proceeded to listen to Modest Mouse some more (92 listens of all songs to this point, and so many more for “The World At Large”—talk about a literal interpretation of “I know that starting over’s not what life is about, but my thoughts were so loud I couldn’t hear my mouth”...okay, so I’m still not particularly cool).

Then, it was just right. Interpol crashed into my world. It might have been a Tuesday or a Saturday, possibly in the day but more likely at night. Was I sad? Was I distracted? I don’t remember anything specific, not until I took the time, why I don’t know, to take in the album’s second track, “Evil.” At this point I stepped away from my life—but not to escape. I stepped away from my life to leap back into myself. If you’re honest with yourself, you know we all detach at times. But me, I was adrift, and I didn’t even realize it until I landed.

I’m a person who has listened to songs repetitively my whole life, but I have never been taken like this, not by an album, not by one song. I can’t stop listening to the album, to “Evil.” I can’t stop and I don’t want to stop. I listen at work when I’m busy, I play it in my head on the way home, I take it in at night as I close my eyes after a night on my computer, desperate to give my eyes a break, grateful to open up my blanketed insides one last time. Not so much repetitive as recursive. Or obsessive.

It’s with me so deeply right now that I may someday look back and be concerned. But now, I accept its necessity in my life and its strange relevance to what seems to be an ordinary life: mine. They talk directly to Rosemary and Sandy, but this song is me singing to…someone. Myself? You? Do I even know anymore? Can I be that honest? In a sky full of distant lights, can I reach up to grab the one that no one else sees igniting?

I must be building up to something, or maybe I’m being shown that I’m already there. The past tense world we fall into sometimes has shattered with this infinitive pulse, these dark notes and these simple truths. What does it mean to be evil? Is the world so black and white if everyone says it is, even if you know better? If those around you say something is wrong, who are we to say it is right? And how do those guitars so completely absorb and excite me, a first-time energy repeated forever?

I’ve put off writing this article for so long. Sometimes we distract ourselves when we’re afraid of what we might find. But I’m not afraid. I feel new, like I’m experiencing a first kiss, but with an adult’s ability to understand its significance, then ignore all that to taste the purity. We all know music can be an escape. But sometimes, if we let it, it brings us back to who we are. I am both contestant and audience of my own show. I am a dog, loyal to what I’m told but driven by instinct, and I am owner, taking his dog out so he can find the local news. We are all walking contradictions—we just realize it at different times. Maybe it’s just most of us. Maybe it’s just me. Those that don’t realize it: they are probably happy all of their lives.

Do I make sense to you? When deep into an obsession, we don’t always care about others, but I want you to understand who I am right now. This is my time to not sleep, to not eat, to go about my day in a daze—not to find who I am, but to let myself be found. If you don’t know me better from this, how can it end? Or do I really want you to know me this way? I’m honest with myself—that doesn’t mean I’m always brave about it. I’ve been so honest with you. Is it because I can’t be honest with myself? I will stop listening some day, when I am someone different and less complicated. But not now.

In a soul with this many complications, do you understand why I can listen one thousand times to something so intensely, beautifully, completely, and weightlessly simple?

Hey wait.
Great smile.

Yes.

This piece originally published in Some Other Magazine.

Macroscian

Macrosian is a mysterious word. It's so intentional and so unknown. I'm sorry I've only recently come across it.

Chair too stiff,
lights too bright,
slowly becoming mole people

Not-bad people
turned to not good,
assholes have vampire influence.

I miss the sun,
I miss cute girls,
I'm right downtown but still alone in a world.

Getting fat,
not from home cooking,
offices not in the Bible.
I'm no longer feeling vital
This life is no longer right
Maybe it was never right
But my goals weren't so white,
My teeth are still white,
but no one's seen them in months.


1. One casting a long shadow.

2. One who inhabits polar regions.

3. Me, always.

10 minutes

Plenty of time to write, really. Dr. Williams built his lifetime body in between delivering bodies from bodies. If not time consuming, applaud WCW for working his beatuiful works amid biological distraction. Many of us put our creativity and energy into the reasons not to write rather than typing some damn words. Worst decision I ever made was moving off of paper and into cyberia. Can cantos come between e-mail updates and the urge to post our face to strangers?

10 minutes before they arrive, before I am left and go become that. Do I really need more time? Not when I have been suffering with internal pleading for this peripateia, this relative abundance of peace, this declaration of intense and wondrous and tragically brief quiet.