Chaff

"Take it easy, and if it's easy take it twice."

2007-04-14T14:35:00.000-07:00

I won't be posting on this blog in the foreseeable future, so there's really no point in checking it. No internet at farm, and no inclination anyway.

Thanks for reading.

William

Why is a policeman?

2007-04-05T11:58:00.000-07:00

I am a hack.

However, I am a hack that has turned in a more or less complete manuscript to my editor.

Little by little, bits of my humanity are returning to me.

That is all.

Oh, and Galen, if you were a true friend, you would have sent lawyers, guns, and money, and you know it.

Splendid Isolation

2007-03-28T09:05:00.000-07:00

I'm locking myself into an undisclosed Central Valley Hotel Room until Sunday. I'll be out of contact.

You've Been a Good Old Wagon, But You Done Broke Down

2007-03-26T12:10:00.000-07:00

I am so very tired of being William. I'd like to resign.

For Sale: One William, 1980, usual wear and tear. White body, brown trim. Tends to die in idle, but good at high speeds. Just rebuilt the teeth. Needs new glasses.

Make me an offer.

You have not said too much

2007-03-21T21:03:00.000-07:00

"We say 'far away'; the Zulu has a sentence word instead that means: 'where one cries mother I am lost.' And the Fuegian surpasses our analytical wisdom with a sentence word of seven syllables that literally means: 'they look at each other, each waiting for the other to offer to do that which both desire but neither wishes to do.'"

and

"The world that appears to you in this way is unreliable, for it appears always new to you, and you cannot take it by its word. It lacks density, for all in it permeates all else. It lacks duration, for it comes even when not called and vanishes when you cling to it. It cannot be surveyed: if you try to make it surveyable, you lose it. It comes--comes to fetch you--and if it does not reach you or encounter you it vanishes, but comes again, transformed. It does not stand outside you, it touches your ground; and if you say 'soul of my soul' you have not said too much. But beware trying to transpose it into your soul--that way you destroy it. It is your present; you have only a present only insofar as you have it; and you can make it into an object for you and experience and use it--you must do that again and again--and then you have no present any more. Between you and it there is a reciprocity of giving: you say You to it and give yourself to it; it says You to you and gives itself to you. You cannot come to an understanding about it with others; you are lonely with it; but it teaches you to encounter others and stand your ground in such encounters; and through the grace of its advents and the melancholy of its departures it leads you to that You in which the lines of relation, though parallel, intersect. It does not help you to survive. It only helps you to have intimations of eternity."

--Martin Buber

I hate California

2007-03-17T19:11:00.000-07:00

Me: Happy St. Patrick's Day!
Pub customer: Please. It should be 'Happy Genocide Day.' I mean, he liked wiped out an entire race. I can't believe people celebrate this murderer.
Me (in my head): I don't hit women. I don't hit women. I don't hit women.

Volta

2007-03-15T18:09:00.000-07:00

I was making a frightened rabbit's run out of the valley, rattling down small roads through the desolate miles, northward. My first exploration of the lower San Joaquin Valley, the arable lands of Fresno and Tulare counties, had ended in disaster. I thought the Sacramento River Valley had shown me horrors sufficient to my task, that I was now inured to the spiritual torpor induced by miles and miles of monoculture. I had witnessed the mass melon grave. I'd seen pickers resting under the machinery, the only shade for miles. I thought I was ready.

But in the citrus groves extending from Lindsey north to Exider, and then on every side of Reedley, Orosi, Sanger, and Selma, I encountered a new terror. Every orange on every tree spoke to me of its destination, and I traveled with them through time and space. I was driving down pale dry orchard roads but I was also an invisible attendant to every breakfast table across the country. The cataract roar of millions of glasses filling with juice, the shriek of every spiral torn peel, the thunderous applause of teeth against pulp--the hive sound of that simultaneity increased with the hailstone clatter of unpicked oranges falling against the hard lifeless ground. In searching for the edges of bounty, and I stumbled unwittingly into bounty's core. Flee! I pointed the car west and threw up clouds of dust to obscure my retreat. Mercifully, the citrus groves eventually gave up the chase, but instead of their terrible globular monotony, I had driven into a dust-riven hard plain of emptiness, a peach pit pressed flat. The only break in the agriculture of the apocalypse was the smell of molasses and manure from innumerable dairies of Holstein milk and misery. Land o' lakes my sweaty ass.

The towns along Colorado Road remain a blur, San Joaquin, Tranquility, Helm, Ingle. Signs began to appear shortly after for Mendota, the Cantelope Center of the World. What I needed was a thriving little downtown with a dark bar staffed by a pretty woman with a community college education, a kid or two, and a piece-of-shit ex-husband in Madera, but the sewage disposal centers along the Fresno Slough augured poorly. Mendota may be a nice town, but I saw only the paralytic immobility of its streets, the invalid stare of boarded-up shops and the usual broken-window ruin agribusiness brings to its devotee cities and sped past towards Firebaugh. No hope there either. I took Avenue 7 ½ towards the Buttonwillow Drain on a whim, crossed it, despaired, and backtracked to Highway 33 north a broken man.

I turned off 33 onto Volta Road to avoid Interstate 5 and crossed a road named Badger Flat. If I could make it to the Past Time Club in Gustine, I'd be home safe. Not that there was any escape. The valley may be the fuel of this ugly civilization, but the Cities of Enlightenment along the San Francisco Bay are the engines, and their self-righteous bubble life is only made possible by the heedless predation of rural places. Broken, I thought, every god damned thing under the sun is broken.

No bigger than a flea on the enormous dachshund of the valley--only four small blocks by three-- with roads of an ancient pavement covered over with sand, Volta, Unincorporated, arrested my deranged flight effortlessly. This place, I thought, breathes its own air. A gang of little brown boys rode bicycles lazily down the empty streets, steering one-handed around potholes and chickens. The setting sun made everything bigger and slower to leave the senses. In the yards of houses variously upkept grazed goats and an occasional head of cattle or two. Nobody's chickens ranged everywhere and roosted in old cars resting on cinder blocks. Cats with speakeasy attitudes strutted from slanting light to long-shadow. The boys rode by again, taking no heed of me, shouting to one another in English and Spanish.

Time, it is said, has stopped in a place like this. The sentiment has always bothered me, but I hadn't, until that lazy dusk in Volta, thought it through. Time, it seems, rather than measured in hours, days, or years, has come to be measured by material goods, the implication being that contemporaneity, and therefore relevance, is a luxury item, a marker of class. These old Chevrolets and Buicks still run, these old individual houses still sheltered, and a well made thing, be it wall or saw, should last a century or more. Agriculture itself is something civilization places behind it. What a clever way to ignore entire places and peoples, to place them outside of time itself. But what an impoverishment of currency, to find it only in the infant tantrums of new technologies and fashions.

From where I was leaning, Volta looked like it was on the cutting edge. It was the animals, naturally, and the humbleness of its size. Were Volta incorporated, laws would prevent the residents from keeping a goat or two in their back yard. But animals are a great benefit to the poor, and by the poor I mean mankind, for it is only in the necessity for food, clothing, company, and vocation commonly called poverty that we are known to one another. Should the oil run out, should this luxuriant civilization wreck upon that or any other iceberg, we'll bring the animals back into our lives. For their meat, their milk, their fur, wool, and hides, for their bones, for their warmth, company, and for the unique, unspeakable knowledge of ourselves found in their eyes. They provide for our every necessity, and we owe to them the greater portion of what we call human. It is a comfort to me, the odds that they will return to us, though we scarce deserve them.

Overheard in My Head

2007-03-15T17:18:00.000-07:00

"Why should I name a car? When it dies I ain't burying it."

Red Cat 'Till I Die

2007-03-12T22:56:00.000-07:00

Hungover, my hands still crusted with whole-wheat, never bleached, never bromated lasagna pasta, helping my second oldest friend move up a flight of stairs, and realizing the toothache I'd been entertaining for a week thought himself family, I endured the schlep and emerged mucky-eyed as any infant in the mid-afternoon. I showered, napped in same state, and woke a poor dice throw later refreshed and ready to be defiant if the circumstances arose.

I bought an album about a red cat in the thirties who befriended Lefty Mouse and Rev. Tom Toad. They went around agitating for the unions and the workin' man. Cat's name was Buddy.

One cat. One vote. And one beer.

Bartender!

Sometimes one wakes and realizes he's been brought by misery or accident near the solution and he's got to stumble to conquer.

I knew that Pegasus was the wrong book store. Black Oak was the right one. Moe's is a Sabbath of his own. He needs not me nor me him in such ciphering.

There were poets reading at Black Oak. I could have easily replaced the Byatt I lost when I lost my bag-but that dogged my hurtin head and I can usually read a map all right. A bald man tall and a cute blond small. They'd workshopped together. I felt like the usual asshole and as usual didn't care. I resolved to find a new way to read outloud.

For months I've been looking for a cheap edition of Tristam Shandy. Gold gilt three foot tall faux-hide bound edition for twenty five dollars. Nothin doin. But the introduction was by Christopher Morely.

I have a 1918 crush on the man.

After a brief and perfunctory sojourn into the Judaica section I looked in the M's for Morely hisself and found a signed edition of John Misletoe. I bought it anyway.

"The old mulberry by the ruined arch, the prostrate mock-orange tree below the cricket shed, the tall pines by Chase Hall, the feathery clumps of of pampas grass, the copper beeches, the fallen flukes of mapleseeds, all such became a part of one's innocence. In spring there was the constant drowsy whirr of the big lawnmower, drawn by a horse who wore huge leather slippers on his feet to spare the sod. Nor he, nore the rhododendrons, nor anything else in that perfect picture were in vain. One had an idea of peace. It would not be until many years later one might divine an almost ominous loveliness in some lights and shades. Under the copper beeches , in Pennsylvania's reckless sun, there is a lustred shimmer that knows no argument...rambling in thos groves you will sometimes be aware that the woodlands of Penn have never been wholly won back from the wilderness. Whatever that visitor may have said, those are not the tame trees of "an English nobleman's park," they are still forest timber, and sometimes the voice they whisper is not of Penn but of Pan. "

I read this and more in Triple Rock until a clandestine and nascent cold unveiled itself in a trumpet sound of abundant and clear mucas. I found the path, but had broken the brush such that any and all could follow.

Nah. You don't know Hank Williams like I did.

2007-03-12T20:20:00.000-07:00

There is a little red arrowish dog who swims through the low air in our pseudo-adobe apartment complex. His owner is a sway-backed skinny brunette with an old Beemer adorned with a bumper sticker that says "Bio-fuel for the Revolution."

This warm hurtful morning I let my cat, the Cat-a-Push, out into the concrete yard he has grown into and owned against a mighty Red-Tailed-Siamese Resistance.

Leaving my citadel among citadels I ran across the dog-thing lapping up the inches towards our slinky hero and the Pushkin, 'ero of ages, ribboned under my door and inside.

Sway-backed girlie's boy-thing: "I would have thought the dog would have been more scared than the cat."

Me: "My cat isn't scared. He just hates to get his hands dirty."

Greatnesse a period hath, but hath no station.

2007-02-27T11:33:00.000-08:00

"At every stroake his brazen finnes do take,
More circles in the broken seas they make
then cannoons voices, when the aire they teare:
His ribs are pillars, and his high arch'd roofe
of barke that blunts best steele, is thunder-proofe:
Swimme in him swallow'd Dolphins, without feare,
and feele no sides, as if his vast wombe were
Some Inland sea, and ever as hee went
Hee spouted rivers up, as if he ment
To joyne our seas, with seas above the firmament."

--John Donne

The Swedes eat them with dill

2007-02-22T17:06:00.000-08:00

We arrived in Knight's Landing ravenous. The taco truck parked in empty lot of a defunct auto shop lured us in with a siren scent of carnitas, carne asada, and baracoa tacos and we circled our prey like wolves. A couple plates of cornmeal, beef, pork, salsa, and some lime soda later, we looked around with human intelligence once more. Across the bending highway stood a dilapidated building that resembled an enormous shed. We could see a sign for live crayfish on one door. The gate to the high fence that surrounded that section of the building was padlocked, but a few windows were exposed along other walls. Through the dark, warped grime of ancient glass we could detect a pool table, a room with tables bristling with the legs of overturned chairs, and a long bar. A fallen sign read: BIKERS WELCOME. This bait shop turned highway and river bar had obviously been closed for some time, and I wondered what this modest crypt of good times meant to its merchandise. The crawfish. The crawdad. The crayfish. I wrote:

The crayfish rejoice. The gaoler, the wolf of the rivers, the tyrant has fallen! They raise their claws above the water and clap them together—commemorating each anniversary of the bankruptcy, death, or act of crayfish god that padlocked the doors of this fisherman’s hole. But not all. Members of a small society of crayfish paint themselves darker with the river mud, believing that if the ogre has no use for them, he is likely to—unthinkingly, clumsily, with poison—annihilate them in passing. They are organized. They have a newsletter and hold fund-raisers. Meanwhile, the building contemplates theology. Cremation, burial, annihilation, reincarnation? Spiders lawyer its demise. The windows swell and muddy with age. The bait shop slowly acquiesces to its architecture a mile away from the river that runs through Knight’s Landing, California.

A crawdad is a cipher for human sympathies. The heavy enormity of his claws prefigure the beseeching hands of Rodin's burghers, while he himself is as small as a doll. Crawdads are the peasantry of river, creek, and delta, always bowing, permanent supplicants. His eyes are bright with the desperate cunning of the scavenger, cowering furtive in mud or crevice from his scaled predators, but striking with murderous precision from these selfsame alleys when weaker fish idle by. He wallows gluttonously in orange edible beds of salmon roe. Crawdads cram themselves by the hundreds into the fisherman's traps, drawn by individual avarice into collective indenture. Served in a plated heap or steel bucket, how like a red vision of man debased. The instinctive loathing for the humunculous fires the zeal of our semi-cannibalism. We tear the crawdad in half, prize the tender meat from their tails and devour it, then we suck out the guts and shatter the claws. The melted butter speaks of luxury, of pillows and silk, the hot sauce to the fires of lust pain and fear that drive us on to the next crawdad, and the next, until finally there is naught but shards of exoskeleton--the masks of comedy and tragedy mingled now inexorably, the mirror broken.

--EOB

Hedgehog Recipes

2007-02-15T18:37:00.000-08:00

How I make Hedgehogs

Or, feed a hedgehog on medicinal herbs, nuts, and berries. They will take parts of the medicine into their flesh. After the hedgehog is grown, cure it in a bottle of whiskey, and cut off small portions when feeling unwell.

Or, do as the Romans did, encase the hedgehog in plaster and bake at a high heat. After it is done, smash the plaster. The force will shatter the bones and spines of the hedgehog and leave only the meat, which you then pick out.

Yum!

I met a hedgehog in Kilkenny. Olga was napping in a hostel and I took a walk along the stone walls and around the river of the haunts of my ancestors. We're rolling hill people. It was just before dusk and I was perhaps a half mile out of town. I heard a rustling, spotted the spiny devil nosing out grubs in a pile of leaves, and slowly, oh so slowly, walked closer to it until I could almost touch it. I looked at the hedgehog until it was too dark to see.

Oh, I do try to be good

2007-02-15T12:05:00.000-08:00

W: Hello Mathias.
M: Hey there, William. Big Guinness?
W: No, I'm on a beer diet.
M: Oh... OK, two big Guinness?
W:... No, I'm on a diet from beer, not of beer.
M: Oh.

I'm the world's leading authority on canned beans

2007-02-14T12:09:00.000-08:00

This is my favorite food blog-of the three I read. I don't think I've ever done the 'look at this blog' thing on my own, but now I feel like it.

Something in Season

It's a sweet Valentine's rumination about his differences in the kitchen with his wife. It references a NY Times article about Alpha cooks and Beta wives. The blog's take on it charming, but the article itself, though often funny, assumes that Alpha cooks are always male, though in fact I find the whole division of the world into Alphas and Betas if anything more annoying than assumptions about men and women. What do little fish have to do with anything anyway?

What Something in Season doesn't recognize in his zeal to be a better husband, is that his differences with his wife are one of taste- i.e. butter or not. But the article was focused more on technique, i.e. you don't know how to cut an onion- get out.

I've banished Olga from the kitchen *when I am cooking* for a couple of reasons. The first being her tendency to tell me not to do things, like add wine, or sage, or citris, or cheese, or any number of things to something I am making. When I am making something I carry with me some taste-vision of what it will be when I am done, and I poke at it until it gets there. Sure, it is edible or even tasty before then, but that dish is not the one I am making. Plus, as I am a total amatuer in the kitchen, to be told that I am about to ruin a dish hits home. After all, she might be right. It's dispiriting. I want to make something beautiful and the least thing can ruin my ability to believe myself capaple of it. We talked about this and she is better about doing that and I am better about letting it get to me. The other reason is simple. Sometimes my ambition is so outsized that it takes every teaspoon of my attention to keep my eye on all four burners, two cutting boards, the grill, and the oven, with a sprinkling left over for what is marinating or chilling in the fridge. At these times, I can barely stand myself in the kitchen with me and am likely to spin around and sprint out to the grill with my beet-stained knife still in my hands. And empty kitchen, then, is a kitchen without loved ones finding themselves turned into a knife rack.

Olga is actually a great cook, and I love it when she decides to make something. This is rare mostly because she works and I am home. If she's in lab until 8:30, and I've been home all day, I really ought to have something for her to eat. She makes things I do not, mainly because my cooking is pretentious and she cooks things her family makes. Her method is better because it is repeatable and usually I've forgotten whatever feast I made within a week (if not a day). Though I am working on repeatability. This is last year's menu.

Oysters on the halfshell with chiles and sea salt

A salad of pea sprouts, radiccio, and baby greens with radishes, pears and
bulgarian feta

A broth (from beet and radish greens, pear cores and skins, half an orange, and
tuna fat) served with whole garlic cloves and a quail egg.

Roasted baby red and golden beets with roasted pears, walnuts, and red pepper

Bluefin Tuna tartar with fresh squeezed citrus, slivered radishes, salt, and
pepper, garnished with the raw yoke of a quail egg.

Hedgehog and wild Chantrelle mushrooms sauteed in rosemary, olive oil, and
citrus.

(pause)

Vanilla ice cream with raspberries and a drizzle of ten year old muscato.

**

This year's menu will follow, once I know what it will be. I think I might need a clay pot.

Parsimony & Parallax

2007-02-10T11:16:00.000-08:00

The pub was full last night, despite the rain, or maybe somewhat because the rain was pleasant and civilized. I stood out in it staring up at the street-light nothing of the sky and let the coolness into my nerves three times, and each one like a small eternity. It was a needed rain, which is rare along the bay, and time stretched as it did owing to an intense and universal gratitude.

The tables were full of people playing chess and scrabble, old friends uniting, and in back a man was doling out free wine. I had to work to keep up, and that feeling too, was a prodigal's return.

And as I poured and washed and walked around looking for glasses, my mind found a new window into itself, and I started listing, simply listing, all the things that I have done, where I have been, and item by item produced an aggregate vision of a being that was strange to me.

I have been to Prague. My fastest mile was 4:33. I've been homeless. I lived for a while off one meal a day, that meal provided by a professor. I've written and lost two awful novels. I broke my own horse, Whiskey, at age 14. I rode trains when I was a boy. Those tracks are torn out now. I dropped out of highschool. I have an ulcer. I was an editor at a publishing company for a while. I really was. I've been in jail. Can you believe the wife I have? How'd that happen? During college I went to New York almost twice every year. I'm friends with actors and professors and activists and artists and writers and other makers of things. I spent a year traveling with a photographer through California's central valley talking to farmers and hunters and fishers and beekeepers and jam makers. We're turning that into a book. I sang in our Methodist church choir. I can cook a little. For two months I played chess every night at 4am with a homeless man who came into the gas station where I worked. We had to take cold showers for months at a time when I was little because we couldn't afford propane. I saw my first orange tree only four years ago in Santa Clara. My wife and I sang 'On the Street where You Live' with an old Irish guy, and his wife, who shared a birthday, and their friends, who were Murphys, in Dick Mack's in Dingle on our honeymoon. I planted a vineyard. I'm building a winery. I have a little sister in Boston. My wife is going to be a science writer. I read a lot of books. I'm going out to breakfast at Cafe Ina with my wife. We know the owners a little.

Isn't that interesting? I don't know what any of it means, save that this listing became a litany of sorts and I like myself a little more for it.

Olga re: Tom Waits

2007-02-08T16:53:00.000-08:00

(In response to the Tom Waits version of 'Goodnight Irene' in which three or four of him take drunken pot-shots at the melody)

"He sounds like cats. They don't call him Tom for nothing."

Habits

2007-02-07T18:38:00.000-08:00

I am incapable of forming habits. While in the main this has preserved me from sloth, addiction, and golf, I am now realizing that it has also held me back. All I want to do now, to add bodies daily to the bonfire of my prose, to acquire Russian beyond the proficiency of an angry drunk, to send arrows of my work out into the world and see where they stick, to maintain my body and my home so that I am ashamed of neither, more or less require ritual and routine.

Shit- I need to throw in some laundry.

But instead I am thrown into a punji pit of energy, lethargy, inspiration, forgetfulness, distraction and self destruction.

So I'm attempting to acquire some bad habits. If I can succeed in making a bad habit, then perhaps I will be able to make some good habits as well. At this point, I'll take the exchange. Gotta go have a cigaratte. Any ideas for other bad habits I can try out?

**

Quotes:

(Of the voice of Tom Waits) "It sounds like a squeaky mattress but three octaves lower." --Olga Kuchment (my wife!)

and

"It looks like someone's garden shat in your fridge!" --Anna Neher

**

It has been a sweet day of pure solitude- the first I have had in some time, and I have used it well. I cooked some, read some, wrote a lot, and received a beautiful email from a dear friend. If this continues, I'll have Edges of Bounty polished off by the weekend, and will then start submitting chapters to magazines and will also start the edibilist food blog.

Now the food blog could be used in a few ways. I'd like to see how popular it could be- some of these food blogs have over 10,000 hits a day-and a few probably have many, many more. It would be a great way to promote the book, and the idea of the book.

Option 1: z'all about me!
If I write the blog all on my own, it has promotes my writing, which might (who knows?) lead to a regular column at some magazine or newspaper, and establishes some kind of brand ownership if there is any interest or use to the world for edibilism. I.e. If the idea does well, I do well. On the other hand, my posting ethic and the unevenness of the give-a-shit of my writing could be a bullet in the head of the whole she-bang.

Option 2: with our powers combined, we are...
If I form a small cadre of writers and set a fairly loose set of standards for the blog, then I create an instant community that might prove to be a model for other places, or at least create the illusion that the idea has some legs. I also increase (in theory) the frequency of posts. Probably it would also be possible to organize the posts by author, so if anyone liked a writers work especially, they could filter for that writer alone. If any of these other writers have opportunities to write for magazines or papers, all the better for everyone. Possible con? The intent and form of the blog becomes muddied and the edibilist idea is lost.

Option 3: edibilist, inc.
If I use the edibilist blog as a way to gather the broadest number of voices to the idea, then I'd be able to use it as a sort of food writing best of, which would win me a nice spot in the food blog world, and invite edibilist-ish stories from readers-I'd make the blog more like a magazine, essentially. Then I'd be able to maintain editorial authority and daily post duties, but also have the opportunity to sink the edibilist idea into as many minds as possible for when the book comes out. Cons are obvious: the hassle (see the fluxuation of my give-a-shit x10) and the quality over all of the writing is likely to go down. Also, it would take a great deal more energy to start, and a great deal more web design, etc knowledge than I currently posses.

So, what's an ambitious young man who wants to do right by his book to do?

Dress to Impress at the Monterey Market

2007-02-07T10:50:00.000-08:00

I remembered yesterday, as part of a small breakthrough in my Edges of Bounty book, that I actually love food. I love fresh vegetables. Strange-looking cabbage, parsnips, and turnips. I'd yet to eat a blood orange this season. I remembered that I know something about food, and that I enjoy preparing it and feeding it to people. Just holding a beet grimed with dirt and sand is an event. Was that what I was thinking when I thought up this book after all? Where had that inspiration been?

So I packed up my computer and went to the Monterey Market. I was wearing this brown suit jacket that lends me much more style and respectability than I deserve or can rightly bear. I believe I could be naked under it and still get a window seat at the best restaurants.

"Excuse me," she says, reaching awkwardly around my torso towards a ruby red grapefruit and never taking her eyes from mine. Why is this beautiful Italian woman looking at me like this? Do I shove her down and run away? Instead, I turn a little beety and try to mind my own business. Those meyer lemons look great. She follows me but I ignore her. Are those mangos ripe? I set my hands on a few mangos, squeezing them gently, careful not to bruise them. They're not quite ready-- Hey! Why am I blushing? Gah! She's looking at me again. Can't a man fondle a mango without some over-heated continental presuming adultry? I begin grabbing all my purchases with my ringed hand.

Once in the store proper, she is more subtle. We're a couple bins apart rather than reaching towards the same papaya. Then, near the savoy cabbage, she makes her move. Our carts had idled side by side while I bagged some brussel sprouts and when I returned
she has taken my cart by accident and is walking away. I'm about to say something when she pauses and looks over her shoulder to see if I noticed the switch.

"I think that's my cart."
"Oh? Oh it is. I don't know what I was thinking."
"Is this your butter lettuce?"
"Yes!" she says, touching my arm before taking the head of lettuce from me.

I back-tracked after that and stared at the fresh herbs for a while while she made her way down the apple aisle, and then the mushrooms. At check out, she was in the shortest line but I chose a longer one because I am not immune to pretty women. As she walked out she caught my eye again and winked.

The last several trips to the market I've had lesser and by no means propositional encounters, but I always wind up talking to some woman or another. --How do you tell if a melon is ripe? --Well, it depends on the type... or --Will you hold my place in line? You have everything I forgot I needed.

Living with Grits. Part one of an on-going series.

2007-02-07T10:14:00.000-08:00

The Grits Omelette

It must be some violation of human decency to prepare a meal perfectly for two with no leftovers. In the realm of possibility, I will grant, but in the domain of perverts, freaks, fiends and slaves to abominable habits. So when Olga demands grits, we have more than we can eat in one sitting and they turn cold and hard in the refridgerator so that to be eaten again they must be sliced and fried or baked.

But that is dull. They could be used in a stir-fry in the same manner as tofu, I guess, or...

And so the grits omelette was born. Take cold, diced grits and fry them with some oil and onions and I like shredded carrots for color. The trick-because there must always be a trick-is to let them fry for a good long time, letting all the flavors invade every soppy pore of your bits of grits. Then throw in your whisked eggs. I've been adding a teaspoon or more of mayonaisse to the eggs to good effect. KEEP THE HEAT MEDIUM TO LOW you impatient gets. Never rush an omelette. Honestly, I know you people. You don't have anything better to do. Add your shredded cheese. I've good luck with gouda. Do the folding flipping bit and then serve it with some sour cream and/or hot sauce. I've made it thrice in the last 24 hours and it plumps and pleases.

Sleepers Awake on the Precipice

2007-02-05T18:36:00.000-08:00

"The moon's astonished mug stares in at her window. Sad, ghostly herds wander down the blue courses of heaven. The air tastes of comfortable, tired clockes and the gingery sleep of old houses. In the lives of wells and orchards and ruined fences there is a strange quickening--almost as though the history of what is seperate from the knowledge of men, were merged, in some hidden manner, and by an agency as mysterious as that of sea and wind and stone, in a fiery river whose one bank is life and whose other bank is not death. The most beautiful and desolate thing in the world is a country village at night. Every sounds should be the gentle conspiring of angels ; the steeple of a church, it is the up-stretching pinky of some forgotten queen; this hillside, a cluster of brown deer awaiting only the horn of a terrible huntsman to set them down lanes where positions of black stars hurry. Given a voice, this village would say: Nothing can alarm God. Given feet to walk, it would go where the most pitiful cry moves the sternest heart. So still is this wonder; so without change is the grandeur of a leaf-O Father the bell-brooding streets of this dear and horrible place..."

I've chosen this passage for its lyricism, but it is neither typical nor atypical of the novel. It steals words and styles from noir detectives, polemicists, poets, pornographers, absurdists, prayer books, surrealists, and sea adventures, loads the prose into a shotgun and fires the bits into the pages. Here's a more or less random sample of other text.

"Then be thankful she acts grown up about it. I was expecting her to take it pretty hard. I wish you didn't feel it necessary to drink a quart of whiskey before breakfast everyday, Haz."--But is she being grown up about it, Tom? Oh that's just a habit."--"What do you mean? I must say it's one hell of an expensive habit."--Well, for one thing, she hasn't cried...not even once. I have to get a little fun out of life."--"What good would crying do her? Besides, how do you know she hasn't? She's been off alone enough to have cried it all out of her system. I should fun you with a baseball bat."--"I'd know if she had. She's just sort of all tense and knotted up. Keep Freud out of this."

DARK WING
S CARRY O
FF THE SKY

Gee the girls were pretty. In the grove where the stranger lay, his throat slit from ear to ear--I'd heard about it, of course, how the girls would suddenly turn into clouds and trees and rabbits etc. But Plusis--Well, perhaps Plusis just wasn't too quick in the head-such a lovely one too...golden hair and the bluest eyes...Plusis well off first base and just rounding second when--
Plusis, I'm ashamed of you... a poor innocent tree...
But how the hell am I going to get out of here!
It was a pretty delicate operation.
You'd naturally think something like that would be enough for anybody. But not our Plusis! The next an extremely nifty brunette and I could almost hear him saying to himself Boy here is some really hot stuff. And he was right--I have never see a finer bonfire...

THE WISHES OF THE MAJESTIC ONE

It was all of three months after the accident. That day I sat with my enemy on a wooden bench near the Tree of Sorrow. His skin was the color of a carrot's liver. The weather was all over everything and we talked loudly to drown out the sound the elves made as they ran over the counters where the wind had his coughsyrup in big jars of leaves and the dreams of little birds.
"How did you lose you eye?" he asked timidly.
"It was gouged out while I was building a city."
We watched a ligenna swim past in the cold grey lake.
"She can't be more than a thousand miles out," he said deliberately. "I don't remember ever seeing one so far inshore before."
I nodded. "It has my whole sympathy," I said.
Rain. I regretted that I had not bothered to dress. Frightening--wet branches against your hide. Too fish near.
"What's it made of?" he demanded suddenly-- "glass?"
I told him it wasn't.
We--"What then! Speak up, man!"--watched two ancient hags uncouple a chapel from a ten-ton truck. Their faces had grown over their eyes.
I knelt at the altar. A comic book had been places squarely between seven orange candles.
"What then? If not glass--speak, man, for the love of God!"
I told him I was not at liberty to tell him. He sank his teeth into his wrist and started to drink as fast as ever he could.
The best cure for insomnia is to sleep with all the windows open.

wnttlfaciomeo

2007-02-04T20:54:00.000-08:00

One of the narrators of the book I am re-reading has invented a clever device. He has a patent and everything-he's just looking for some start-up capital to build and distribute the item. It's a small machine made of a special light weight lead that whirrs softly. After a time, the whirring stops and it raises and waves a white flag. It is called a WNTTLFACIOMEO, which is an acronym for Why Not Try To Live For A Change Instead Of Murdering Each Other.

2007-02-03T12:07:00.000-08:00

The leaves outside my window of a thorny bush into which I regularly empty my mop bucket full of olive oil, shoe dirt, beer, the slug trails left by dropped slices of avocado, and bleach are curved, cupped like hands to receive the light of the sun. The paper of the leaves are made to burn like lanterns. They collect light like taxmen.

The light speeds them towards seed then redeems them. This is the merchandise of redemption.

I almost let noon pass before having a drink. Then I caught myself.

The backsides of our apartments are old-earth flat. The walls are an adobe brown that seems hard and white when in full sun but mottled like the face of the moon. The sun on the building is as the sun on a sword.

A thorn bush that scratches my window is making lanterns of its leaves. The bush is hateful to me, but I see that in this moment, seen from the dark place in which I sit, it is beautiful. When I wash the floors of my kitchen I take great pleasure in pouring the black alchemy of exhausted bleach water into it. The bush will not die. The inherited rosebush in back is turning into its own husk. A lesson, perhaps. My desire to set a boot on the throat of my own evil does not nourish the good. Perhaps that is how we know evil. Evil is that which will not die.

The leaves collect light like taxmen.

A taxman is a New Testament truth to me. He comes to the door, snarling like a dog, a ruined soul branded by the distant, indifferent Romans. His stink confounded luxury and sweat. No one told Christ that he could not raise the dead. Indeed, it was demanded of him and he performed the feat casually on his way to other places. He invited only disapproval when he staunched the stoning of Magdalene.

But Zacchaeus was a wee little man and a wee little man was he. He climbed up in a sycamore tree to see what he could see.

Redeeming the taxman was the unthinkable. And how odd, that the foundation of the discontent that shaped our nation was themed thus: not that we paid a taxman. That we paid someone else's taxman. Democracy has, apparently, redeemed the beast, and taken him, somehow, from us, by bringing him back into the fold-or by leading us to him.

There is honey in the scent of the fig tree.

There is honey in the scent of the fig tree.

When a child-- in childhood-- in the wilderness of youth--

I was a child. I fashioned boats from leaves. The cupping they performed for the sun made of them, in death, vessels impervious to water. I took seeds of wheat and promoted them to captain and crew. They sailed the round moss-islanded waters of our horse tank. The only solid land was a two by four thrown in so the occasional squirrel or raccon would not drown. I stoned the ships until they sank. Dried parchment-white gourds, halved, were superior ships to leaves. They would bear a twig mast and I lashed oak leaves to the twig, though the innovation was more sculpture than sail. Cottonwood leaves sailed better than any other leaf, and pleased with the elegance of their fatness. These ships might survive for half an hour or more.

There is a Merwin poem that begins: I have been cruel to a fat pigeon. I will give you the poem whole.

I have been cruel to a fat pigeon
Because he would not fly
All he wanted was to live like a friendly old man

He had let himself become a wreck filthy and confiding
Wild for his food beating the cat off the garbage
Ignoring his mate perpetually snotty at the beak
Smelling waddling having to be
Carried up the ladder at night content

Fly I said throwing him into the air
But he would drop and run back expecting to be fed
I said it again and again throwing him up
As he got worse
He let himself be picked up every time
Until I found him in the dovecote dead
Of the needless efforts

So that is what I am

Pondering his eye that could not
Conceive that I was a creature to run from

I who have always believed too much in words

—W. S. Merwin

The sun has not gone away as I thought it would. I believed it would dry up as soon as my little letters appeared on the screen. Vanity of vanities.

What then am I? A leaf to the sun a bell a hand a curled tongue? The sun is on me as the sun is on a sword. But is it peace or resignation that inevitability satisfies?

Offline

2007-01-25T10:18:00.000-08:00

I won't be available via email for a while. I am taking time off from the internet. If you need to talk to me, call.

2007-01-24T20:51:00.000-08:00

It is useful to look coldly on the bulk of my failures, to keep vigil over it, and listen to it sleep. A failure forgiven slumbers or pretends to sleep, and grows heavy and ripe with time. A peaceful vigil and suggestive of some awesome mystery. Then the nattering thin forms of my unforgiven failures, perched with their whole body tittering on empty bookshelves, numerous.

It is presumptuous, even, to think of having failed. What right, after all, to contemplate other possibilities?

Wisdom is a rock thrown by god. Spare the rod, spoil the child. That lunatics are so rarely blissful is evidence that madness is a kind of knowledge, not its opposite. But I am avoiding autobiography and I have promised myself a cessation of cowardice.

An exchange I cannot forget: in my first year of writing, before my voice had even broken, I was drunk with the--or poisoned by a--or smothered with the pliability of a linguistic world, and in the ecstacy of that dying, thought my relationship with words and ideas was one of ease. A fellow student, I forget all else about the speaker, said this to me after having read a passage I was proud of.

"Wow. Writing must be really difficult for you."

I was stunned. Not at what may have been mere criticism, but at the truth of the insight. There is nothing of ease in me. Language goes begging here.

All save three of these words have added themselves to the sleeping bulk of my failures.
The moments of cowardness, of expediency, or, most hateful of all, cleverness, are centipedes in this cavern of letters.

When fate lifted me up--when I was asked to apply my prayer language to quotidian tasks, to tasks that may have some use, I was fearful. Would my words become thin through use? Would I learn to ape ease? Fears have proven true. I mumble when I should shout. The stress is all wrong. I sound like a foreigner.

But my sins against language, my liturgical lapses, are of no consquence. Another dying, another death. What part does fear play in resignation?

I taught myself fearlessness early on. It's a trick like any other, like juggling. I can tell fortunes with a deck of playing cards. As a five year old I had climbed a neighbor's shed only to be paralyzed by the height. Hours later the neighbor returned, plucked me like a kitten off the roof, and delivered me unto my mother. I was furious. The next day my mother found me atop a fence post, perhaps four feet above the earth, staring the distance down. When asked after my purpose, I replied: "I'm learning not to be scared of heights." Mom laughed and told me it didn't work like that.

But it does. I'd go out like Icarus if I had wings.

The brave pretend that the bullets do not hurt. The bitterness of losing fear must acknowledge the hurt, and a nostaligia for human pretence.

All the failures hurt. Nothing is forgiven. Our worth is less than a single ounce of our strength. What good has come of any of it? Goodness is a word I should not invoke. I am only allowed to speak of knowable things. Bottle. Necklace. Ribbon. Book. Shell. Bowl. Map. Frame. Bowl. Window. Glass. Doornob. Hands and a face. Hands and a face.

And I'm not the first to cry in my bed or in my beer

2007-01-17T21:44:00.000-08:00

"I think because our zealots subscribe to the conversion myth, they can only experience virtuousness as difference. They do not really want to enlist or persuade-- they want to maintain difference. I am not the first to note their contempt for the art of suasion. Certainly they are not open to other points of view. If it is true that the shaping impusle behind all the stylized language and all this pietistic behavior is the desire to maintain social distinctions, then the moral high ground that in other generations was held by actual reformers, activists, and organizers trying to provoke debate and build consensus, is now held by people with no such intentions, no notion of what progress would be, no impulse to test their ideas against public reaction as people who do not to accomplish reform. It is my bitter thought that they may have made a fetish of responsibility, a fetish of concern, of indignation."

--Marilynne Robinson

Summing up what I have felt about many people and places of late. Special thanks to Ms. Neher for providing the book.

Lie to Me

2006-12-25T13:42:00.000-08:00

First, an explication of the loot:

One newsboy hat-gray.

Two shirts, a light blue lined button up and a dark brown pullover, from my sister, who helpfully explained that they could be worn together. My lil' sis thinks I'm a slob and tries to help me as gently as she is able. Her taste is good. I've loved all her gifts.

Some much needed cash from my very perceptive mother, a metal flashlight, and a box of Queen Anne chocolate covered cherries, which is my favorite candy because it was my grandfather's favorite candy, and I had to weasel it out from under his bed, or from the box where he kept his Ruger, or behind the cuckoo clock where he also kept the menthalated cough drops. I can't eat them at present, because my teeth have turned on me this season.

Two cd's-including the new Tom Waits set: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards, and the new Jack White zombie-rock project: Raconteurs, also from my sister, who actually rocks pretty damn hard when the occasion calls for it.

A three in one clothes brush. This clothes brush is made from solid beechwood, with boar bristles fro the brush. The other side of the brush is a lint remover, and the handle doubles as a shoe horn.

I had asked for a truly fine knife, after a dapper sort of chap inquiring at the pub about pipes mentioned in passing that he had just sharpened his. The tone of his voice and the mesmerized look in his eye was convincing. This is really what I needed, and all I asked for, other than the perpetually thwarted request for a motorcycle, and I was fairly certain Mom would come through.

Instead, I got a fancy metal briefcase. I didn't mind. The briefcase was charming, and somehow fit the newsie hat perched atop my head. The name on the case, and these things are important, was BergHOFF and sounded familiar-not to mention German. It was heavy.

I stood up to walk importantly about with my new briefcase when I heard a chorus of "open it!" Ok, I thought. False bottom. Spy gear. A half suffocated ferret. Sixteen "TRollex" watches. I moved both combinations to triple zeros and popped the hinges. The top swung open and revealed an entire kitchen set of beautiful forged steel. Mom had gotten me a briefcase full of German knives, including a sharpener, and a magnatic wall rack where they can hang. I'm fairly certain I giggled while I picked up my cleaver, or rather, Hackmesser.

Now, these are not the knives of lifetime. Not a hand-forged Japanese laminated santoku knife that will outlive my children's children and hums like fine crystal or Viennese castrato when air moves over the blade. But I'm too young for such an object anyway. It would be wasted on me. I'd, no doubt, use it to open one of Pushkin's bags of cat food and Masaharu Morimoto would weep with shame.

I have a briefcase full of very sharp knives. That's a nice feeling. If only they'd given them to me before I made Christmas dinner using nothing but a dull three inch paring knife.

No whatley no urania

2006-12-25T10:13:00.000-08:00

foot, or in a troop of horse or dragoons?
N. B. Noncommissioned officers

You shall not complain for want of accounts
from Mr. Grevenkop, who will
confess, there is no
great variety in your present manner of life, yet
What is the common revenue
of the electorate,
one year with another?

***

The golden age of spam poetry
is well past us. I wish, two years ago,
that I had made a record of some of my favorites.
Someone, somewhere, has obviously
done this work-the internet being
what it is, and people, what they are,
but still, I wish
it had been me.

This is a more experimental period,
which is ok, but can a
classic age last only two years?

What next?

It's Christmas.
There may be more relevant posts to come.
We haven't opened our presents yet.
The ham is glazed.

It is nearly time. Horse-riding isn't
out of the question.

Jig--itty-jig

2006-12-19T01:08:00.000-08:00

The plane leaves in three hours. Neither of us have slept, unless you count dear Olga's present nap in the bathroom, which I don't. I can't imagine it would be very restful.

To Lawrence! Masha's place and the Free State brewery. Friends, family, and the studied attention of a landscape whose love was so hard won.

I'll be in touch. But now we have to figure out how to pack this olive oil.

Old Yosemite Rant, Part the First.

2006-12-11T12:34:00.000-08:00

Yosemite! It's a Native American word for 'deep grass valley.' Only the barest mention of the now vanished Ahwahneechee tribe that were driven out by soldiers defending the gold rush can be discovered in the park literature. On the parks website, the luxurious Ahwahnee(R) hotel is given more prose than the people that gave it its name.

Yosemite haunted Scott and I as we traveled the central valley. Four highways in the valley lead to Yosemite, and we visited roadside stands on each one. Neither of us had ever been there. As a reward for nearly finishing my manuscript, Olga and I rented a cabin and went to see something of this national treasure.

The land leading up to the 'entrance' to the valley is striking in itself. The foothills leap around the patient, winding roads, and the Stanislaus National Forest is everything you'd like a pine and oak forest to be.

Everything changes when you approach the entrance to the park and wait in a long line of cars to pay the funny-hat wearing ranger in order to be allowed the privilege to witness a monument to geology conscripted into serving the U.S. Government. I felt immediately ill at ease. I was entering a place where my every movement would be limited and monitored by staff paid and trained to view visitors and criminals as one and the same being. The list of my potential crimes? Swimming in mountains pools (where I, or family members, would be charged for my rescue) straying off the trail, eating any of the edible plants, and shitting in the woods.

Now, I am not reactionary, nor overly stupid, despite my Thanksgiving breakfast of Wingwalker Amber Ale. I know that the park and its authorities deal with an excess of people. One man shitting in the woods is not a problem, but thirty thousand families of four every day is. But therein lies the paradox. By making Yosemite an American brand name-i.e. A National Park, it ensured that the place would be forced to endure heavier traffic-by several orders of magnitude-than the surrounding national forest, where you are encouraged to do all of the above, including hunting and fishing. As a result, the Valley they sought to preserve is a network of parking lots and generic, soulless park employee housing. Visiting Yosemite is participating in the industrialization of Nature.

I looked up into the sheer granite cliffs and held back tears. It was beauty incomprehensible. I looked at the valley itself and wanted to vomit.

The main threats to Yosemite valley were not human, but industrial. Had this not been set aside as a national park, a small town would have evolved in the valley, occupying roughly the same space the ranger housing does today. Legislation could have simply prevented logging and strip mining and let people live there however they might otherwise.

The Return of No-Fun Boy

2006-12-11T03:58:00.000-08:00

Dear Diary,

Miserable day.

The title above is not self proclaimed. It is something my first girlfriend used to call me when, during an evening devoted to meaningless social pleasure, I derailed ease and grace if not just by my sullen presence, through malevolent intent. I see now that what she, and most others, crave from friends gathering in the public sphere is a low-intensity babbling that functions some what like a drug. I used to make a habit of getting in-between junkies and their inebrients, and the results were as sour as you'd expect.

Now, here I am, unable to sleep at an ungodly hour when I can't even purchase the drugs that might ease my burdens. The Hotsy Totsy opens at six. I pray that I am not still awake with these thoughts then.

G flatters me by saying that there is no small talk with me. I thought she was being generous in that appraisal, as I have spent the last six years cultivating a somewhat aggressively social public persona. Probably my 'transformation' had more to do with the generosity of my companions than my self-perceived charms. This year, however, has done a great deal to undo what half-assed intentions I once had. I bought off my anger, my distance, my essential awkwardness, with loud laughter and lots of drinks, I romanced it like a visiting friend, but I don't drink the way that I used to and I think it's gotten wise. Obviously it will be around longer than any one else, unless I die as early as my dreams profess, so I should, as a bit of tactics, come to terms with it.

I'm afraid also that I have bored to distraction the one friend I've been discussing this with, and set the terms of our friendship too strangely. That just the sort of thing no-fun boy would do.

The Headache Medicine

2006-12-09T09:23:00.001-08:00

Can we doubt that Excerdrin is the pinnacle of human achievement, the knoweldge ark of all that is worthwhile about the human struggle to harness our environment and make of chaos and grander, more beautiful thing?

No, we cannot.

update

2006-11-11T01:58:00.000-08:00

Olga got home. We've decided to rent a car. I'm outta here. I may not come back.

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, while he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.

2006-11-10T17:38:00.000-08:00

--Ali bin Abi Talib

Thanks to one and all, including gentle spambot, for taking the time to comment.

Olga and I were to take a trip to Yosemite this weekend. I had booked a cabin in the woods. I was all set to drive out on a few hours sleep, and be on a mountain side well before noon tomorrow.

But, when I got home, I found a message from Olga. She drove out to Pt. Reyes today and says the car is having trouble. And that we might not be able to go. Returned calls go unanswered, but her reception is very poor out that way.

I have never seen Yosemite. Seeing said sight was to be our reward for the valley trip.

Nothing to do now, though, but go to work.

Please Take Our Survey

2006-11-04T22:57:00.000-08:00

So, you Two, You Proud, You Readers of this blog.

Are the Edges of Bounty excerpts welcome, or long pieces of prose that doesn't tell you anything about me and that no one reads?

Your comments will better help the staff here at Chaff better serve you.

Red, White, and Roan

2006-11-03T16:45:00.000-08:00

During the tenderest of my childhood years, my mom milked cows at a local dairy. The small herd of Holstein heifers were milked twice daily, once at four in the morning, and again at four in the afternoon. This was only one of her three jobs, in addition to a paper route, and so very often when her alarm screeched at three in the morning, though it shook the house, and though it rested on the coffee table next to the couch where she slept, she did not hear it. I, an ethereal sleeper until I discovered alcohol much later in life, would ascend the concrete stairs from the basement where I slept, turn off the hateful alarm, and whisper Mom, whereupon she would wake up with a start and ask me what was wrong.

It pleased us both that she would occasionally take me with her to work, where my chief duty was to bring the milch cows in from the barn and fields where it seemed like they did nothing but eat and wait to be milked. The ladies knew the routine and enjoyed the relief that milking brings so that usually just the appearance of a shouting five year old boy in the four o'clock dark was enough to set them into lines along well-worn paths to the milk barn where my mom was waiting in a wet concrete pit surrounded by twenty gallon glass milking jars. Sometimes one of the heifers needed to rebel, and I had to chase her around the barn, shouting, waving my stick, and trying to anticipate her next move until she gave up and trotted up late to the barn. I also bottle fed the calves, but found this to be difficult, sticky work. A calf is a terribly irrational creature that refuses to hold still and will lick anything, including and perhaps especially five year old boys.

At the end of the shift, the dairyman would come down to the milking barn and ask me how my girlfriends were, a question that I found both condescending and uncouth. Condescending because I was one of those precocious children who found in nearly every question an exasperating denial of my truth worth and abilities, and uncouth because it seemed like all you had to do was climb an apple tree with a neighbor girl and suddenly she thought she was engaged, and lost interest in the higher branches. Then the dairyman would fill up a five gallon glass jar of fresh milk for us to take home, give us a wheel of cheddar cheese wrapped in red wax, and sometimes frozen paper packets of ground beef. I watched the cream rise into a soft crust at the top of the jar as it sat in my lap on the ride home. If the milking went quickly enough, there would be time to pour out a glass of milk, my arms shaking to control the jar, and spoon out thick dollops of cream before the bus picked me up for school, where nothing of any interest ever happened to me.

And so, when Scott and I pulled into the driveway of Stuart and and Emily Rowe, owners of a famous herd of Milking Shorthorns near Dixon, I was wary with memory. I had not been to a dairy since I was ten years old.

--EOB

Should, Should Not

2006-10-31T20:29:00.000-08:00

A man should not love the moon.
An ax should not lose weight in his hand.
His garden should smell of rotting apples
And grow a fair amount of nettles.
Aman when he talks should not us words that are dear to him,
Or split open a seed to find out what is inside it.
He should not drop a crumb of bread, or spit in the fire
(So at least I was taught in Lithuania).
When he climbs marble steps
He may, that boor, try to chip them with with his boot
As a reminder that the steps will not last forever.

C. Milosz

Red Lung

2006-10-25T11:47:00.000-07:00

Red Lung (n) A lung condition most commonly found in Indian, Thai, and Latin American kitchens caused by the prolonged inhalations of the gas released by hot peppers when cooked. Symptoms include shortness of breath and spicy expectoration.

In other news, does anyone have a Balderdash game? That's a good time.

The Blessing of the Animals

2006-10-18T21:36:00.000-07:00

The opossums are not killing the tom cats at the farm, despite my mother's theories. Owls. Bobcats. Coyotes. Motherfucking mountain lions. But not opossums.

These opossums are changed, she says, remember that they killed the chickens.

There were no witnesss to this crime, but mom is convinced it happened. It might have. It's almost a crime not to kill chickens, really. They are asking for it.

In other news, Mom took Billy Bad-Ass, our stray goat, to the Epsicopal Church she attends along with a lop rabbit named Bouncy Butt on the day reserved for the blessings of the animals. She just put his front feet onto the back of the Durango and then pushed him in and closed the hatch. He's a very bright goat.

An old woman was observing the line of dogs ready to receive the blessing with holy water (cats, somehow, aren't nearly as common) in which Billy was included. She tottled over to Billy, came within two feet of him, and then said:

"That's not a dog at all, is it?"

I haven't left California yet, but I really don't miss it at all.

The Egret Palace

2006-10-18T08:50:00.000-07:00

Scott got out of the car and waded into the tomatoes with his camera. I lounged in the shade with my notebook and pondered the scene. It took me nearly a minute to discern the wave of cacophonous jungle sounds coming from the trees behind me, to awaken to the world around me. I walked down the road to be nearer the sound, my steps instinctively careful and quiet. The solid windbreak broke, and I tucked my head into the gap. Tall eucalyptus trees were widely spaced throughout the clearing, providing an almost unbroken canopy of thin leaves. The noise increased. I took one step into the glen and set off an tornado of small white dragons. Six dozen egrets resettled at the very top tufts of the trees and pretended not to look at me. I retreated.

I was a little giddy when Scott returned, squatted by the open trunk of my car, and began to change his film.

“You ready for some fast shooting?” I asked him.

We approached the clearing. The birds were less nervous now. The whirlwind I saw failed to form, but the sky was filled with criss-crossing streaks of white. Further into the grounds, the earth was white and powdery from the effluent excretions of the avian court. We noticed the litter of eggshells among the shit-caked eucalyptus leaves and the general cacophony became more targeted and personal. Egrets flew towards us, their wings slicing the air near our heads. We looked more closely at the trees and saw a host of rough nests in low branches. Clumsy half-fledged egrets ran from us.

“This is a special place,” Scott said, “We shouldn't be here.”

“I think that there is a body of water further on,” I said, “Maybe we can skirt around to the left.”

Along the left side of the citadel an alfalfa field endured the gossamer attentions of a butterfly horde. They flew like pieces of burnt paper. Half were the color of egg shell, the other half were yellow as an egg yoke. A deeply rutted farm road wound around the trees. Firewood and brush were piled separately along side the road at regular intervals. We found another gap in the ring of eucalyptus and climbed a brief acclivity. A lagoon covered in green moss and crowded with trees waited there for us. We crept on our hands and knees closer to the water. A quick-eyed pair of ducks spotted us and flew low and fat across our vision, resettling with some noise not far away.. A downy feather fell onto the water and the wind helped it walk across the moss towards us. It crossed the entire pond in this manner. The branches of the trees were all stained white and shook with the restlessness of the egrets. The birds relieved themselves into the water with loud plops. I don't know how long we sat there. What are watches to wilderness?

We left our perch and continued to follow the ring of trees. Around the bend the familiar site of a working farm yard jarred strangely with the nearby jungle. Prefabricated tin sheds and large tractors sat outside a barely visible single-story house. A huge metal pipe crawled out of the water and into the yard. A small dock became visible along the far edge of the pond, and the path we followed led to wooden bridge overgrown with some kind of flowering vine. The bridge led to a small island. Posted at the foot of the bridge was a sign.

No Fishing from Bridge
$3.00 Fine

--From EOB, obviously

Like Sharks on Bloody Meat

2006-10-01T02:03:00.000-07:00

"The bees have what's called a honey gut. That's where they store the nectar they get from flowers, and it causes an enzymatic change, turning it into honey." While saying this, Harold casually plucked one of the now ubiquitous bees out of the air with one hand and ripped it partially in half. Suspended between both halves of the bee hung a small jewel of honey. "That's the honey gut. That's pure honey in there." And then Harold grabbed the gut with one finger, discarded the rest of the bee, and scooped it into his mouth. "Mmm."

Scott was changing film and didn't quite see the extraordinary event clearly.

"Did Harold just catch a bee out of the air?" He asked, hurrying over to where we stood.

"Yes, and pulled it apart to show us the honey gut."

"Can you do that again, Harold?"

"Sure." And with equal ease, he snatched another bee from its innocent flight and, as if he was untying a knot, pulled both ends of the bee away from one another until the honey gut hung full and fat as a tick between them, catching the sun, burning with light. This one found its way into Scott's mouth.

"Mmm. That's honey," he said.

What is the life of a bee worth? I wondered. The management of the a hive and the health of the queen—the only necessary personality—depends on sheer numbers. One bee, or two bees, or three bees, is of no value. The hive requires hundreds of workers and drones to ensure that enough honey is stored to last the long, cold, virginal winter, and that the queen is nourished long enough to produce an heir. Every action taken by a beekeeper is communal, save for adding a queen to an abandoned or infertile colony. Centuries away and thousands of miles distant from any monarchy, I was suddenly swept up into a Homeric drama, where a hundred thousand nameless souls could and would perish in defense or attack of Helen's bedroom whimsy. And who was this standing next to me- Harold no longer, but Zeus, looming over each buzzing city-state with total, if benevolent, power. The singular defense of the bee is an instrument its undoing. She may sting once, then die. The beehive, a civilization of dizzy grandeur, an archive of eternal spring, is constructed piecemeal of endless tragedy. Here they are, I thought, breaking though the invisible trade-lines between many hives and the barbaric, floral beyond, here are the Greeks.

From "Like Sharks on Bloody Meat" from EOB

Hunger

2006-09-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

Scott and I play another game in the valley, a reading game. Whether on the road, or walking through a friendly stretch of land, our eyes interrogate the earth and its inhabitants for coded information. What has been touched, and why, or what left conspicuously untouched. What is the scale of things, what touched by machines or by hand, what an accident. This game, the single rule of which is that the landscape is legible, has revealed much to us, and directed us to the people, farms, ranches, and questions that made this journey possible. On the edge of Ramon's acre grew a kind of living fence of broad green paddle cactus. Cactus, because it can and will grow without water, is at worst a weed, I thought, or at best, decorative. The branches reached uneven heights and the top and sides of each paddle were heavily scarred-clear evidence of human knife work, of harvest.

“What's this?” I asked.

“I'll show you,” Ramon said, and unfolded his pocket knife. He carefully inspected the paddles, explaining his actions as he went along. This is too big, he'd say, or this is too small. “What you want is these soft bright green paddles, like this one,” Ramon cut off a pliant paddle at its base, deftly shaved the fur-like thorns off the face and edges of the plant, and cut Scott and me each a thin, glistening slice.

“They're just like green beans,” he said, and Scott and I put the oozing, gelatinous slices in our mouth and began to chew and make noises. They were nothing like green beans, but they were refreshingly sour, and we both reached for another slice. The curiosity was pleasant, and the taste and texture not unpleasant: more data was needed. I began to get a sense for their virtues, and imagined sauteeing them quick and hot with sliced serrano peppers and strips of skirt steak, or pureeing them and adding them to a soup of pinto beans and ham hock.

“What do you make with them?” Scott inquired, on a similar train of thought. Ramon seemed a bit lost by the question and talked about omelets and frying them in pans with the vagueness of a man who has been banned from the kitchen for several decades. This was our first encounter with the half-wild, half-cultivated nopales cactus. We would meet it again.

“Where does it grow?” I asked, wondering rather forlornly if it could survive a Kansas winter and ugly up a couple of hedge-apple cluttered ditches on my land back home, but Ramon's answer surprised me.

“It grows,” he said with unwavering eyes on mine, “wherever people are hungry.”

From EOB:AEV

overheard in albany

2006-09-26T16:01:00.000-07:00

"She's the most common raptor in Africa! It's not like she's special."

Sunnyside Cafe, 10 a.m.

He wishes to join again, an unreasonable speech out of context

2006-09-14T18:54:00.000-07:00

A,

Oppen's work strikes me, but I cannot say that it inspires love in me. Mostly,
I think, because such love would be unnecessary to his vision, running
dangerously close to antithetical--his world is wholly founded on a physics of
the conditional...

Firstly, he loathes the past tense, working out the patient puzzle of existence
through a series of affirmations: "There are things/we live among..." "The
emotions are engaged... This is, therefore, the language of New York". You can
count on one hand how often he uses the round vowels and extra consonants of
the past tense, and when he is compelled to do so, he quickly moves the
introduction of the past to a continuation of the present--either moving
forward to now, or taking now backwards to then, or he introduces a
conditional- could, may, if/then propositions... he seems to admit nothing but
an immediate sense of Time but an infinite, though often interchangable,
conception of space.

This style becomes a wholly new way of viewing the world when combined with his
avoidance of imagery, creating, instead, a kind of rhetorical moment that
posseses all the coherence of the image, or metaphor, but exists only in the
unique potentiality of language... "The bright light of shipwreck." "It is not
the wild glare/Of the world even that one dies in."

Or, in one of my favorites, one that brings me closest to what I would call
love:

Because the known and the unknown
Touch.

One witnesses--.
It is ennobling
If one thinks so.

If to know is noble

It is ennobling.

***

What sort of poetry is this? It is the style of the pedant transfigured by the
rapture and humility of the poet-- expository, phenomenological, but ever on
the edge of freedom, and often transfigured into it, and never without
yearning... but for what? (One a side note, the ease with which he uses the
words of others in his spare poetry, either quotes from authors or friends and
loved ones, moves him even further into a kind of poetry as essay...)

It is probably not surprising that a poet possesed by an inescapable present
and the mineral despair of matter itself would sieze on a numerical method of
inquiry, a dialectic between one and many, between a lost tribal past, who
"were credulous/Their things shown in the forest" and the city, New York, of
course.

Or war. Only Crusoe attains singularity-tho it is denied, in the end, by
civilization's rescue-and he, even, is not a man, but an idea.

More than any poet I've read, Oppen has confronted openly-and despairingly-the
metaphysics of modern life-which is no longer metaphysics...

"These things at the limits of reason, nothing at the limits of dream, the
dream merely ends, by this we know it is the real

That we confront"

The dream is almost a condition of poetry, historically, a drug, an opiate that
transfigures the mundane into the sacred--this poetic mode Oppen shuns,
choosing instead an unyeilding sobriety and a present world that never goes
away. The future is only glimpsed in women and children-and not in them
personally, but in the fact of them. He uses poetry not to make the world go
away, or to bring down bits of heaven, but to crowd us with it, to examine
it... convinced that we are our civilization, and we are not now what we were,
and that "We will produce no sane man again."

Thank you very much for lending him to me. I need to start finding books of
my own of his; I feel like I've dipped into the middle of profound chess match,
but I don't know the opening, nor who wins. I feel, also, that his language is
good for me, as sobriety is rarely as tempting as drunkenness.

2006-09-14T18:22:00.000-07:00

Ten Top Trivia Tips about William!

William can turn his stomach inside out!
In a pinch, the skin from a shark can be used as william!
If you keep a goldfish in a dark room, it will eventually turn into william.
To check whether william is safe to eat, drop him in a bowl of water; rotten william will sink, and fresh william will float.
Czar Paul I banished william to Siberia for marching out of step.
William is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature.
US gold coins used to say 'In william we trust'.
William can sleep for three and a half years.
While performing her duties as queen, Cleopatra sometimes dressed up as william!
William is worth his weight in gold - literally!

Dear Statisticians,

2006-09-13T20:35:00.000-07:00

The fact that a global increase in food poduction leads to famine in certain areas is not 'paradoxical.' The reason for this is simple: the world doesn't exist everywhere at once. This is a good axiom in all your many dealings.

Thank you for your time,

Wm

The Bearer of Strange Melons

2006-09-06T17:16:00.000-07:00

Mike walked quickly and nudged melons around with his feet, apparently appraising ripeness through his boots. Two of the three types of melons he planted had failed. September had been unusually cool and they hadn’t received the proper sun and heat to ripen. He scooped an emissary of the first crop, cut out an elegant slice from it with a knife I never saw him unsheathe, and handed the white slice to me. Then he did the same for Scott. My thirst drank greedily of the juice gushing from the melon’s flesh and I devoured my slice with pleasure and haste. Mike, however, cut himself a transparently thin piece, spat, and tossed the open melon back into the patch without ceremony or a second glance. Chagrined, Scott and I realized that we had just enjoyed a worthless, no-account, failure of a melon, a melon undeserving of the name, a melon beneath contempt.

“I can’t sell anything from this crop,” he said, and hopped nimbly between rows to another variety. The second melon was more promising. Mike dispatched three slices with samurai speed and indifference and a ripe melon scent bullied the air around us. Scott and I reached hurriedly for our share. The flesh was orange and glistening. ‘Better’, Mike grunted, and then dropped the melon and moved on. I lingered some, savoring the sweet fullness, its sensual pliancy. It was not the best melon I had ever eaten, but it compared. This was a melon I would have rhapsodized had I fetched it for my breakfast table, and yet this man, who was no snob and proud of his farm’s ability to provide for his family, would not, could not sell it. What did he know that I didn’t? Did melons actually get that much better?

Mike was cradling a large, strange object and grinning loudly. I broke my reverie and hurried over to see what he had found. It was a fearsome object, and ugly. Its shell was several shades of green and covered with smooth bumps, obviously the victim of some wretched disease. Mike parted the amphibious skin of the melon like Moses parted the waters-it was as if this melon begged for the knife. He told us it was a Piel de Sapo, a Spanish variety whose name translates as Skin of a Frog. Once open, the melon was no longer ugly. Its flesh glistened like melting snow, weeping tears over its own perfection. The flavor was a cathedral and a liqueur. What did this mean? How had I lived twenty-five years and never been given so sweet a gift? We do not eat real food, I thought, we do not eat real food. So staggered was I by this mortifying ecstasy, that I could not stop Mike from letting this melon—this Aphrodite—drop back into the patch from which it sprung. Scott too, in mute horror, watched the melon fall.

“We’ll let the chickens have it. There’s nothing they like better than melon seeds.”

-From Edges of Bounty: Adventures in the Edible Valley

This ain't my first rodeo

2006-09-01T18:31:00.000-07:00

Overheard in Albany

“It’s not bad manners, it’s just good beer. That’s what my mom always said. My mom was the shuffle-board champion of Oregon. She was ambidextrous. Just like rodeo boys, or jockeys. All ambidextrous.”

In Australia:
“You’re a yankee”
“I’ll yank you across this counter. If it wasn’t for yankees you’d all be walking around with a swashtika up your asses.” “This ain’t my first rodeo.”

I work every day. For Schwartzena… what’s his name? “Schwartzaneger? “Yeah, Swat’s-a-nigger’ that’s the guy.

Pineapple

2006-08-30T10:01:00.000-07:00

You get the feeling that
not much makes her happy.
And not much makes her sad.

But a lot of things
make her tired.
And a lot of things
make her laugh.

--Scott Squire, Iselton, CA.

He said this of our waitress at Pineapple, the old chinese restaurant in old Chinatown in Isleton, the night before we met Steve our Salmon fishing guide. She told us a couple stories, one about a group of fishermen who caught their limit early and brought the catch to her, saying they didn't want to stop fishing yet. They never came back, so she fed them to her family. And her family, oy! She has a little brother who refuses to marry his girlfriend because he doesn't want to move out. Our waitress has been taking care of him for forty years.

Scott and I vowed to bring her some fish if we caught any, and ask her to steam them for us. We stayed over night in a hotel above the towns loudest bar, and Scott spent most of it wrestling with window that the wind tapped against our wall.

We didn't catch any fish but I did glean some ripe pears from the Ryde Hotel golf course-that's a bad day of fishing.

To a Sinister Potato

2006-08-17T14:12:00.000-07:00

O vast earth-apple, waiting to be fried,
Of all life's starers the most many-eyed,
What furtive purpose hatched you long ago
In Indiana or in Idaho?

In Indiana and in Idaho
Snug underground, the great potatoes grow,
Puffed up with secret paranoias unguessed
By all the duped and starch-fed Middle West.

Like coiled-up springs or like a will-to-power,
The fat and earthy lurkers bide their hour,
The silent watchers of our raucous show
In Indiana or in Idaho.

"They think us dull, a food and not a flower.
Wait! We'll outshine all roses in our hour.
Not wholesomeness by mania swells us so
In Indiana and in Idaho.

"In each Kiwanis Club on every plate,
So bland and health exuding do we wait
That Indiana never, never knows
How much we envy stars and hate the rose."

Some doom will strike (as all potatoes know)
When-once too often mashed in Idaho-
From its cocoon the drabbest of earth's powers
Rises and is a star.
And shines.
And lours."

Peter Viereck

Lemongrass Rye

2006-07-25T07:39:00.000-07:00

The body’s labor allows the detached mind a certain buoyancy. The mind cannot forget the usefulness of its slightest fantasy, and the succor it brings the toiling body. These fantasies, once endowed with purpose, even if anodyne in nature, gradually gain weight and meaning beyond what their architecture may bear, and so the mind flies on, looking for a studier frame on which to hang its gathering ornaments of meaning, and suddenly lamp goes out, it’s time for dinner, and a whole section of vines, pruned and staked, stands at attention behind you.

I cannot write on a full stomach. I skip dinner, if I am steady and strong, and play stork to the day’s newborn fantasies-although, very often, though carelessness, gin, or malice, the bundles are delivered to the wrong house, and the ewe nurses, with fearful love, the crocodile. The heaviness of birth is matched only by the lightness of the courier’s wings, and the raindrop comedy goes on and on, propelled by thunderclap applause.

But Suzanne came a day early, pulling up in her Budget truck between two cloudbursts as I was flipping venison burgers off the grill, carrying, bless her, two growlers of Free State beer. The next morning Kansas was moving under four wheels away from us as we climbed the plains. My life of nourishing solitude, muscled contemplation, and a peace as complete as the ringing of a bell, was over. Life on the road is an exegesis of landscape, and I took solace in the psalms of that good book-the pleading of the plains, the vengeance of the mountains, the repentance of the desert. My body was restless, and saw Bathsheba in every farm, but its petitions were in vain-its bondage complete. We moved westward- extending the sunsets by a half an hour, taking the prairie schooner road on down to Santa Fe.

Ask, and Ye Shall Receive

2006-07-10T21:09:00.000-07:00

I am a forgetfulness engine, and women, when they become mine, discover new depths to their sleep. I carry a perfume of oblivion about me; it is not surprising how regularly I forget swallows. And then there they are, as unlooked for as waking.

As Steve taught me how to fish for black bass in the Sacramento River Delta, along a dike made of discarded concrete upon which a feral fig tree, of dubious bird-dropt origin, towered over us, swallows performed their inexplicable acrobatics, combining the prolificacy and activity of insects with the soft-bodied vigor of the higher, heavier creatures. Their movement is grace and form without delicacy. Speed and sharpness are their sole commandments, and their piety never flags. Watching the swallows tie intricate, nautical knots in the air around our boat, I recalled my first meeting with them, as a child, in Mentor, Kansas. I was the fastest, highest jumping, and most agile child on earth, (it was a burden, but I think I carried it well) but all I had to do was look skyward to know the peace of humility. There existed something higher, animals that lived in a universe of agility and power barely even perceptible to me. In the evening the swallows were most active, and I would stand in the empty playground of the abandoned school my mother, aunts and uncle had attended, and watch them until dark, when they were not shamed by the appearance of their sisters, the stars. They wear tailed blue tuxedos, and they are my favorite birds.

I began to imagine a pair of swallows making a mud-cobbled nest in our nearly unused barn at the farm, and then I began to imagine two pairs. Swallows have a morality as progressive as their flight. They fall in and out of love as they fall in and out of the air, but they marry for life, and males often raise broods sired by another--though just as often they don’t. Widows may remarry. Widowers die alone.

I forgot my wish soon after it was conceived, until one evening last week, I happened to take my book outside and found myself reading on a bench facing the corral and barn. There they were, two pair of swallows, terrorizing the insects and in great spirits. Setting my book down, I hopped the fence and stepped into the barn. Hugging the rafter nearest the hatch leading to the loft, a neat little mud nest.

Other wishes are being fulfilled. Two days after lamenting with my mother an absence of toads, I was called upon to rescue one from a pair of feral kittens hypnotized by her pleasant, hopping gait. Later that day, the smallest box turtle I have ever seen was found toiling under the peonies--a wish anticipated.

I asked for visions, and was sent the white weasel, that lives in the pile of bricks near the vineyard--all that remains of the pillared white house that burned down a year before my birth. When I explore the country-side, I see ghosts in overalls carrying water or sacks of seed along weed conquered sandstone walls towards a house that hasn’t had a roof in fifty years.

How else can I be blessed? How many other gifts can I carry? But then, this weekend when my sister visited, she changed the stereo from my standard classical station, (they seem to have lost the announcer whose pronunciation I was in love with anyway-the one who never gave her name and played Shostakovich with obsessive regularity) switched to A.M. and suddenly a station out of Wichita came through, carrying bags and bags of static and loud brrs and pops, that plays only old country music. I’m listening to it now. When I began this, Loretta Lynn was singing “Don’t Come Home from Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Your Mind)” and now Johnny Cash is singing “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town.” I always wanted a reason to listen to A.M. On commercial breaks an announcer updates me on wheat, beef, porkbelly, and soybean futures.

My wish for a pretty waitress in Salina? Still rather grotesquely unfulfilled.

"Could be holdin' you tonight... could stop doin wrong and start doin' right. You don't care what I think. Think I'll just stay here and drink...."

Sunset in the Vineyard with Jethro

2006-07-10T08:03:00.000-07:00

Moths and Vinegar

2006-07-06T19:36:00.000-07:00

Debbe's moldy cheese was gathering the weeks in a closed porch behind her house that also served as a workshop. The handle of her hammer had grown a knot of wax halfway towards its head, where a small woman would most comfortably grasp it after working with her beehives. She cut us each a slice of the aged cheese. Its sharp, dry, goaty flavor made us thirsty, and we moved inside.

Mead was fermenting in several twenty gallon bottles underneath her kitchen table, each bottle fitted with an intricate bit of tubing fitted into the top that relieved the pressure. She counseled us to hush.

“They talk to me. Shhh and you can hear them.”

A few long moments of expectant silence passed, and then the mead found its voice.

“Gung-gu-glunk?” It inquired, the sound echoing bright and round off the sides of the plastic bottle. Debbe was giddy as a new mother at her mead’s performance. In order to find “the good one,” she had to tip each bottle over and pour out a taste, often swirling with bits of wax. Scott and I each had a canning jar from which to drink, and sampled most of the bottles along with Debbe. Each batch shared an alcoholic strength, but the flavor, thickness, and shade of amber varied greatly. The alcohol went immediately to our heads, clandestinely preparing us for a transformational experience. Finally, she came upon the object of her search. As soon as the liquid conformed to the shape of our jars, we could tell that this mead wore a different cloth than its brothers that it was a drink as fair as Joseph. The liquid shined like polished mahogany. A delicate froth burst audibly on the surface, releasing a rich, yeasty scent. Scott and I raised the jars to our lips with reverence and sipped. An autumnal flavor emerged, as if the honey we had always known and loved was but a child—this was a taste still unquestionably honey, but aged and hoary, a honey with wisdom and forbearance, but delicate as an old man’s bones or the powder on a moth’s wings. Debbe, oblivious to us, gazed at her creation with an admiration softened by the fondness that often accompanies friends of long-standing.

“It’s in its second fermentation,” she informed us, and then moved some papers around on her table so that we would have a place to sit down.

--From the forthcoming Edges of Bounty: Adventures in the Edible Valley

His Fifty Years of Exile

2006-07-05T20:43:00.000-07:00

"A hermitage in the forest is the refuge of the narrow-minded misanthrope; a hammock on the ocean is asylum for the generous distressed. The ocean brims with natural griefs and tragedies; an into that watery immensity, man's private grief is lost like a drop."

--Melville

The Author, Having Outgrown His Only Suit (with Little Sister)

2006-07-04T14:22:00.001-07:00

Grisette

2006-07-03T20:44:00.000-07:00

Nightly, my mother drives into Salina to feed medicine to a mentally disabled woman named Helen. Helen lives in the basement of an old two story home that has been cut up into apartments whose tenants the State has decided are not able to care for themselves. Upstairs from Helen, lives a girl named Nicole with her four year old daughter, Abby. Nicole is diagnosed bipolar, which she well may be, but, primarily, she’s an old fashioned tramp. Her little girl (she has three other children who each live with a different daddy), though four years old and obviously bright, is still in diapers. Nicole’s psychiatrist, although aware that she is very probably an unfit mother, believes that her behavior is better when her daughter is with her, and so muddies every attempt to place Abby with Abby’s father. Often Nicole calls mom to demand that she baby sit Abby because of a pressing doctor’s appointment for one of her various imagined illnesses, only to arrive at the same time as an eighteen year old boy on an Asian motorcycle who intends to take Nicole to the lake. Nicole is small, fair skinned with dark hair and violent, mistrustful eyes, attractive, and a year younger than me.

Three days ago, Nicole called to say that she had captured a baby robin. It had broken one of its legs, and had been wandering around the yard. Mom, naturally, rushed to the scene. Nicole, cleverly using two milk crates of different sizes, one red and the other black, had fashioned a cage for the young bird. Mom brought it home and I gathered grasses and food and water dishes to make the bird’s stay more comfortable, more… likely to sustain such fragile life. The little robin was mostly fledged, vigorous, and, to me, obviously female. I named her Grisette. We loosely bandaged Grisette’s leg and fed her a mixture of hard boiled egg and mulberries. In order to keep her away from the cats, we ran a chain through the bottom of the cage to the top, then, utilizing my still intact tree climbing abilities, conscripted a tree branch as a pulley and hoisted her hospital well into the air.

Grisette was alive the next morning and rasping out curses like a young crow to the strange new galaxy surrounding her. According to my research the night before, she required worms and insects. Immediately, I found an inchworm, fallen providentially into the water tank outside my trailer. Before one of our new goldfish could devour it, I rescued it, and, pouting, showed the charming creature to mom. Both of us agreed that an inch worm’s manner of movement is too inventive, yet awkward, for us to condemn it, let alone perform the ritual slaughter, moreover, it was a pleasing lime green color. It is said that one is not allowed to show more compassion than God, but I did not mention this to my mother. We decided that an earthworm could be fed to the little bird with the least amount of guilt, and probed places all over the farm in our search. We turned up a grub in Roe’s wheat field, and, after much debate, attempted to feed it to Grisette. The grub turned out to be too large, and since cutting it up was out of the question, the little monster was spared. There was but one half-solution. I walked shirtless out into the trees and, shuddering, let the mosquitoes come to me. Within five minutes I had collected a bloody table spoon of mosquito corpses which we mixed into the egg and mulberry mixture. We lowered Grisette’s hospital to the ground four times a day, and mom held her while I pinched food into the pliant maw of her long thin beak.

This morning, Grisette broke free.

Mom had unwisely decided to feed our ward on her own, and when she separated the crates, Grisette heroically flew into the trees of our north pasture. She still flew very low, and struggled to find purchase on the branches, but she was gone and not to be recaptured. After this confession, I saw that mom had half-hoisted up the crate and turned one 90 degrees so that, if she wanted, Grisette could return to our care.

The melancholy of the open cage, hoisted in the air with a chain, but only halfway, swinging in empty and meaningless welcome, has stayed with me all day.

What Happens to Boys Instead of the Giggles

2006-07-01T20:56:00.000-07:00

Sarah,

Have fun at the pub, bitch. The extent of my social life is telling the clerk I've got the two pennies to make even change for my pack of starbursts. I can't even get a second glance from the underage skanks buying twelve packs of 3.2. Coors at the Kwik Shop. The only thing of-age about these girls is their cold sores.

Swat a monster mosquito for you? These damn things are so built that if you got one in a strapless dress she'd be prom queen. One guy trapped one underneath the hood of his 78 Pinto and is out every night drag racing the El Caminos downtown. Three of the top Tour de France riders now disqualified? It's not the doping; they're actually mosquitos.

This is the comment I left Galen on his blog. I imagine it will leave him properly chastened.

**

Wait. Don't run...

We're here to help you. You see, we know that these very annoying, seemingly endless, and completely incosequential quiz postings are a MOTHERFUCKING CRY FOR HELP. Now, now, you know that denial is the first stage, then comes resentment, and then acceptance. Galen, you have a problem. And that's ok. We're all human. We're not all shamefully addicted to meaningless internet quizes, trying to validate our pathetic existence by allowing a computer program designed by a 13 year old girl named Brandi to tell us what kind of unicorn we are, like you, but we all have our problems. Mine is this condescending tone. It's the biscuits to my gravy. But this isn't about me. This is about you, and the juvenile, simpering, emotionally masterbatory habit you've developed for telling us what color your inner kitten is: "Pink with baby-blue tips." As interesting as that is, are there perhaps better ways of communicating, are there not? I thought so. See, we're making progress already.

Now cut it out or this intervention will turn into inter-nal bleeding. Ow! My wit's so sharp I got razor burn!

**

Hm. Maybe this solitary life is getting to me.

w.

Meteorology

2006-06-28T18:28:00.000-07:00

The Storm

Like a wish fulfilled, but unwanted, the clouds appeared in the northern edge of the sky just as the mid-day temperature peaked. With symphonic patience, the clouds darkened, grew tall, dark, until finally, in the distance, the ogre could be heard to roar in his cave. The ground winds blew steadily against the storm, heavy with the hot breath of the southern deserts. Within an hour from the first humble appearance of the cloud, all was dark, and the air slept where it stood.

The Horses

Johnny, my mother’s old cutting horse, is buried in the vineyard. An evening thunderstorm caught him there but two weeks ago. Mom heard the bolt of lightening that killed him, and when she found him, moved the earth over his body. As the thunderhead’s tentacles reached towards us, we left off our planting of Orange Muscat, threw our tools in the truck, and I drove out to where the horses grazed-the farthest corner of the field. A loaf of day-old raisin bread, packed for just such a purpose, was used to lure the horses homeward. After Mom showed them a slice and hopped back in, I urged the truck forward and the horses ran after me in a beautiful, electric, cacophonous line. I watched them in the rear view as I drove under trees, along fences, and through the field until they were stored near the barn, munching happily on their raisin bread, safe from the lightening that my mother is certain hunts them.

Waiting

The storm behaved like a chained dog. The thunder was ceaseless, and flash lightening blinked regularly through sky, but no rain came as a gift to the earth, no winds threatened the buildings and trees. I switched the flat tire on the car with a fresh tire and Mom had the boys take the laundry off the line. I loitered by the truck and listened to Finlandia on the radio, matching the swells and torment of the music to the humble movements of the ducks, chickens, and goats. Every living thing waited for the chain to break, and the dog to be upon us.

The Mulberry Tree

On the west edge of the vineyard grows an enormous mulberry tree. As I drove out to retrieve our grazing horses, the truck brushed one of its branches, creating a minor shower of ripe berries. I recalled this half-forgotten scene as I paced impatiently underneath an angry, impotent sky. Also in the west, the storm could be seen in action, sweeping earthward in strong dark streaks of rain. Coffee tin in hand, I left the house and walked out to the vineyard, through the vines, and to the border of our land. Every third berry was ripe, and the tree towered twenty feet over me. To harvest the mulberries, I had only to touch the small fruit once, and the stem broke, toppling it into my tin. Swallows fought the winds high above the ground. Cicadas, lured by the darkness spread by the clouds, came out to sing early. Lightening bugs flew low and mimicked the violence of the storm gently in the grasses. All of my fingers, save both pinkies, were stained purple by the time I had gathered half a tin of mulberries. Another wind arrived, cool and urgent from the west: the rain’s herald. I heard the downpour march across our neighbor’s fresh cut wheat field and then it swallowed me. The swallows took refuge in trees. The lightening bugs turned out their lights. The cicadas ground out their song like a cigarette. And I, with a lunatic grin, ran towards the house with my half-filled coffee tin of mulberries, leaping over the electric fence, dodging the drinking vines, arriving drenched and giddy at the trailer. Dripping, I stood inside the trailer with the door open, and breathed enormously the smell of the earth opening to the sky, the coolness of their ardor, enjoying, one at a time, the mulberries.

Sunset

When the trees have not their leaves, the sunset can be viewed with pleasure from anywhere on the farm. However, in the summer, I must leave the hill on which the trailers, sheds, outbuildings and barn stand, all shaded by elms and osage orange and cottonwoods, and venture out to the vineyard. The day’s first storm was brief, and had moved on by the time the sun began its death walk. A distant western cloudbank wrapped the sun in royal purple and sent out a crown of rays: a perfect hosanna. To the south, another cloud bank hovered in grotesque majesty, the lowest fists of it caught the sunlight and burning a peach fire. The rest of the cloud, visibly stroked by fingers of wind, was dark to the edges of indigo. After the sun had gone silent, the cloud was the color of coal, and I stood in the field beneath it, small as plankton drawn up towards the whale.

Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters

2006-06-26T20:40:00.000-07:00

This is a retreat. That must be squarely faced. In spring, I have been busy as spring, it is true, but summer has cruelly called and the question must be answered. Whither the fruits? Have I grown wilder, hopped cloven feet to the mountain top to rain my rank goat-piss over hill and dale, or have I become as unbodied as steam from life’s kettle?

My prose then, at present, in issue and intent, is autobiographical. I am near the end of my first full day at the farm. The cicadas are well into night’s warning. The day’s labor has been the easy construction of a consciously flimsy (and therefore mobile) electric fence, so that the horses may graze our vineyard’s edges. Mom is playing Florence Nightingale tearing up sheets into thin strips outside. The thin strips will then be tied at intervals between the electric fence posts. It is a persistent but necessary warning to our horses. Pause-- while I join her.

She is using the chore as an instructional activity for her two autistic wards, Reece and Tony, and so I may continue this resigned explication of my circumstances, fears, ideas, and doubts, limited, thankfully, by geography (2046 E. Farrelley Rd) and time (today).

This morning I set to work (as one sets to work on dessert, workmanlike but with distinct pleasure) on one story and one novella, bound together between two tattered covers the shade of yellow that so wishes it were brown, by J.D. Salinger, both from the narrative perspective of Buddy Glass, and both concerning his elder brother, Seymour Glass, a character possessed since childhood with the kind of effortless spiritual and poetic gifts that ensure that his premature suicide and spoonful of mature work become more important to his heirs than their own shamefully long-lived and long-winded lives. Seymour Glass is, second hand, that type of child whose gifts are so immediate and irreconcilable, and whose sensitivity is so complete, that he is less a human being than a lesson in fate. But what is to be learned from fate? And so goes on the relentless scab picking that inspires so much of human thought. I set the completed book down an hour ago, and it is responsible for this brief tongue loosening.

The careful reader will detect, even in the reader’s own invocation, that this missive relies heavily on Salinger for its measured, self-examining tone. Reading is so essential to me because I can borrow the voice of another when I (so frequently) lose my own.

On every blank page a bush burns but is not consumed by its burning. My impulse to write has always been, and is now confessedly, religious.—But just now, in my attempt to face the bush boldly and quit the manners of stuttering Moses, I take my stumped tongue and run blue-faced through the desert, stuttering Moses, defeated, triumphant, again. The burlesque slavery-house of Egypt is extant on every page as well.

The Salinger belongs to Dalyn, and was tossed in with my effects (three pairs of boxer shorts, five pairs of socks, three shirts, two undershirts, the usual hygene items, the collected short storied of Isaac Bashevis Singer-whose last name, I just now realized, has always, until now, called to mind the sewing machine, and never the verb-, Melville’s Israel Potter, and a collection of translated songs from the Baul, an ecstatic tradition of mystics in rural India. “Poison and ambrosia/of the immortal life/are one and the same/ thing to him./He is dead/while wholly living.” Familiar, but nourishing material. Also, two erratically filled and quite mangled notebooks, the favorite of which suffered the ignoble fate of being left to drown in an ice chest, rescued only after sever disfigurement by my wife.) because the night before I left, we had a lengthy (drawn out somewhat taffy-like owing to the quantity of wine consumed) argument over it. Absurd, you might say, that I argued so strenuously about a book I had not yet read (absurd, yet familiar to those truly close to me) but in this case, I, even after reading the book in question, am certain I was correct. The argument? I suggested that Salinger’s writing could be understood and appreciated as literature. Dalyn, perceiving some unnamed but probably existent slight in my application of the word literature, became incensed, and insisted, although without the metaphysical precision, that Salinger’s words were inscribed in fire on the throne of creation, before creation, and were revealed in their perfection, beyond time and human reason, to her at a moment of divine choosing in her youth. Well, Salinger is certainly literature, and what is more, is literary, which is to say, engaged very knowingly and transparently in a process of story and truth-telling that is bound and freed by its conventions.

Who among us do not grow fond of our chains?

Apparently, me. I ought to shut up and give in to my jailer.

Okay!

2006-05-18T20:00:00.000-07:00

Dear Longs Drugstore,

While I admire your efforts to employ the mentally handicapped, I question to wisdom of promoting them to managment. Is it because they are the only employees that will smile at a customer? Or perhaps because they have seniority? I suggest treating your surly teenagers better. If you leave a twelve pack of Natty Light by an unlocked backdoor every Friday, I am certain your turnover rate will drastically decrease.

Sincerely,

William

**

A conversation between two of the aforementioned managers at Longs:

"Hey Keith! Did you do the register for me?"

"What?"

"Hey Keith! Did you do the register for me?"

"Was I supposed to do the register for you?"

"I asked you to do the register for me."

"Okay! I'll go do the register for you."

"Thanks! I asked you to do the register for me."

Scene.

Champagne Mangos: Fifty-Nine Cents Each

2006-05-03T19:16:00.000-07:00

I’m waiting for the market to crash. The man who rang up my mustard greens was adamant but playful in his prognostication. He was a child’s tutorial in the human figure-a precise overlapping of ovals and not a hair on his head. Money was on his mind. A woman and her two children, of the olive skinned and dark eyed races, had passed through his court before me. The boy must have taken the power of her speech, and the girl the sight in her eyes, for her gaze was without seeing and her mouth a closed purse. The boy spoke well and with purpose-the girl’s eyes suggested they saw more than you could understand. The clerk announced the total of their purchases and mother mutely handed over a twenty.

“Why do you love money so much?” The boy demanded of the clerk.
“Money! Money! Money!” he cackled, “It’s not the cure for everything-but it would cure me,” and then he reached towards the mother with a palm full of change. The boy jumped for it and the mother grabbed the change and quickly stuffed it into her purse.
“Gimme the change!” insisted the boy, and then, assaying to reason with his mother, quipped, “Change is good for you.” The mother and her children moved towards the exit, the boy trying to carrying one of the sacks the mother refusing, as if to say, ‘you’ve taken enough.’

“If they only knew what the future held for them, these kids wouldn’t be so cheerful,” said the clerk, now rueful, as he punched the codes for my produce into his register.
“We are all lucky not to know what the future holds,” I said, always willing to side with a child against an adult.
“But these kids…” and he nodded his head back in forth in the manner of someone juggling numbers. I assumed he’d invoke the old age of these children, 2060 or thereabouts, when the oil famine has taken a few billion lives and rising oceans have buried this and other cities.

“Tomorrow. Tomorrow the stock market will crash and then we’re in trouble. Depression, recession, unemployment, all of it. You follow the market? No? Well, let me tell you something, and then you’ll know more than most of those yahoos. The news won’t tell you this-they’ll make up some esoteric explanation. You see, it’s part of a 19 year cycle, in which there is a year cycle, and in each year cycle, there are three more four month cycles, this year, back in September 12th the market made a sharp jump-up five levels- and on January 9th it climbed another level higher. But now, starting tomorrow, and ending May 12th, the market’s going to come down with four times the force that it went up. 1929. 1987. All over again.”

“Well, now you’ve given me something to look forward to. Thanks.” With that, I strode light-stepped into the street, giddy at his proclamation in its incontestable mathematical foundation, a nurse-maid to Chaos and a despiser of wealth with a reason to get up in the morning.

The Call of the Wild

2006-04-19T16:59:00.000-07:00

A woman is the howl of a wolf. O to be the throat from which is torn such a song! For a wolf lives wholly in his howl. A hound-in the fist of the leash upon his collar.

The women hunt in packs, dense and electric as balloons. And O to be the fist that lets them go. Floating over watchful houses. Distant as a wolf’s red cry.

Good Morning America, How Are You?

2006-04-19T13:55:00.000-07:00

(an unwanted column)

Rather than fly or drive, I boarded an east-bound train. I was leaving California behind for a while, rolling on home to tend a young vineyard on the land where I grew up in Saline County Kansas. I took the train because I want a slower brand of living, because in my heart I know that traveling a mile above the earth while sitting in a seat designed by Mengele next to an obese sales representative for a syringe factory is lunacy, and because I wanted to interrogate the western landscape-make it give up its secrets.

As the California Zephyr chug-a-lugged from town to town, one difference between following old rails and driving the four lane interstate highway was immediately apparent-no businesses were designed to cater to us. On the interstate, each exit is a corporate shipwreck encrusted with barnacle-like gas stations, fast food joints, and budget hotels. Often these conveniences exist as islands of their own, without even the name of a town to add color to our journey. We cannot wholly escape the terrifying beauty and chaotic variety of America in a car, but somehow four lanes of traffic hurtling through space at seventy miles per hour dominate the horizon. The sameness of modern human civilization inures us to the majestic sweep of creation, and the miles are just notches on a playboy’s bedpost. It is a black mark against humanity that gawking at mountains, canyons, rivers, buttes, deserts, and prairies has not cost a greater number of lives.

There isn’t a lot of wealth in the railroad business these days, so our little passenger train was forced to share the tracks with freight trains, rolling over meek as a kitten as those sooty, graffiti-tagged tomcats strutted by. The little towns we moved through were all freight train towns, having hedged their bets for prosperity on having their place on the line. A partial list of the resources and goods provided, past of present, by these pastoral pit-stops runs thus: water, hydroelectric power, lumber, coal, peaches, pears, apricots, cherries, “minerals”, uranium, cantaloupes, watermelons, steel, copper, cattle, wheat, sheep, corn, ice, and nuclear weapons. The Vulcan coal mine near New Castle, Colorado blew up for the second time in 1913. Beneath the mountain, the mine is still on fire.

Prosperity and contentment are not the lot of these freight train towns. Many are ghost towns, and the spectre of death hovers over most of the others. They had the advantages of natural resources and lines of commerce, so what went wrong?

The railroad often runs along the edge of what was once downtown and is now merely what remains of the town. Any profits that a nearby highway might provide are invisible here, and at any rate the McDonald’s and the Shell station at best provide minimum wage employment for a handful of residents. The real money is sent far, far away. Similarly, whatever resources these towns might provide, the primary benefits are shipped down the line.

The depravity, despair, and depression so often associated with rural America are generally explained in blameless terms. Who can resist the glitz and glamour of the big city? Technological innovation leads to increased urbanization. History! Zeitgeist! Progress! The strength of the Nation! All these explanations imply that the use and subsequent emptying of our small places is something that happened naturally and irrevocably-like the displacement of the Native Americans. But the exploitation of that realm in which humanity directly encounters the natural world—rural America—is not something that happened, it is something that was done with full knowledge, intent, and at great profit-like the displacement of the Native Americans.

During my train ride, the West gave up a few secrets. I heard a tale of sound and fury, but signifying something. I heard the roar of untold millions feasting out of rural America’s trough. I saw the gluttony of modern life gut its places of natural riches, then throw them aside. I heard the rattle of chains and slavery. Resource theft and exploitation is not limited to the second and third world. It is happening throughout rural America today. Distant fat-cats and global lines of commerce exult in their power and wealth, while the country-side that provides it withers and dies. For a tour, next time you travel, just take the train.

Tax Day

2006-04-17T18:36:00.000-07:00

Today the circumstances of my routine were unexpectedly altered. In the afternoon I take manila envelopes to the post office. Within these envelopes are other envelopes with my name and address written on them. The first envelope carries a story to a journal and the second carries it back to me after several months. My stories are never published. A metal paper clip preserves the order and integrity of the pages. When I open the envelopes that come back to me and retrieve the rejected story, the paper clip is rarely disturbed, and so I assume that my work is often not read past the first page. Twice I have received hand-written and solicitous letters in addition to my returned story. The lines at the post office are usually short and composed of retirees, housewives, and other strange people who do not work. The other people waiting in line carry packages. I carry envelopes. The employees of the postal service loathe all of us with the indifference of Christ. Today the line was long, although I was, as usual, the only young man in the company. Other young men, I am convinced, live like sparrows. Everyone in line was carrying an envelope similar to mine. Lively and familiar conversations were being carried on by strangers all around me. When I arrived at the end of the line an elderly woman with a large necklace strung with plastic purple beads shouted “Here comes another one!” and most of the other people waiting laughed and nodded to me knowingly. A sharp panic took shape within my confusion. What if these people were all writers? I see in other writers a grotesque menagerie of every inadequacy and vice that dooms me to charlatanism and inconsequence; I cannot bear them. I can only bear myself but gently. My fear, however, was soon soothed- the conversations around me were thoughtful and wry, filled with genuine laughter and edged with sadness. Everyone was talking about money. As I moved through the line the whole range of human emotion bloomed around me like flowers or fire. The commonality of men and women were a tapestry around me because it was tax day. Food no longer binds us to the table, what we read and who we vote for set us apart, family is a crown of thorns. Money alone brings us together, money alone can cause an entire line of people to speak openly about their lives and joke with nameless neighbors, money alone reminds us that we are human. I do not earn enough to file my taxes and was thus was excluded from this ritual, though the others included me tacitly. I eventually gave two dollars and nineteen cents to the hate-filled postal employee and sent my thin stories on to their piteous fate. Then I came home and began to write this. Spring is here and it belongs to accountants.

Grapeshot

2006-03-12T19:35:00.000-08:00

The tin can which houses me is a rain drum, and so I keep one eye on the stove and the other on the boiling skies. This very morning, the crows brought in a green dawn to wake me, and hail. All my books danced off the table. The air was the color of juniper needles and pale berries swung from the evergreen air. The roar inside my little tin fortress compelled me weather-ward. Again, I bore lonely witness to god’s inclemency. Even the ducks had found shelter in an old tea-kettle. No hailstone found my flesh though I stood stone still. In fifteen minutes it had passed. An hour later the storm tipped over church spires in Lawrence, Kansas and I was asleep.