I don’t live in the desert anymore, and that sucks.  But I do live in a nice drinking town with a drinking problem, that drinks.  And booze is cheap.  So there’s that.

And this.  And this.

There’s been a lot of life between my last post and now.  ”Walking Far from Home” was the anthem for most of it, for me.  (Led Zeppelin’s “Ramble On” was the anthem of last year’s holiday.)  To try to pick a place other than the start to begin is a little absurd, because there are so many places, so many little details.

There was New Mexico with Hannah. I picked her up on a Wednesday night and let her go the following Tuesday.  In between we drove 1600 miles, ate at a diner in Flagstaff where the waiter shirked her on coffee.  We stayed in Santa Fe, at a Motel 6 I was familiar with, walked around town and through bookstores, through art galleries.  You wouldn’t think there was more than one seven foot tall wood-carving of an eagle in New Mexico, but there are at least two.  We got a pint of Jim Beam from a gas station because there was nowhere to drink–it was Thanksgiving, and shared it in bed in that weak lamplight from beside the bed.  We went to Taos and I got a tattoo.  We ate good New Mexican food, and better Mexican food in Chimayo, where a man at the gates of the church stopped us on entering and exiting, fed us pinyon nuts with chile powder from his hand.  He talked to us about the brotherhood of Jesus, how we were all of one vine.  He asked us if we were married.  We had a good light about us, he said.  There was the land, more than anything, stretching out in front of us, mountains rising in the distance like bright teeth.  There were birds and dogs in trucks and there was bourbon of many kinds.  One good meal a day.  I guess I lied before.  More than anything there was her.  There were the first moments at the airport when I couldn’t hold myself back and had to kiss her, a little brash, to have it done because I was afraid, I guess.  Her voice in the car so much clearer than on the phone, so smooth and cool.  I don’t know what either of us expected but I think that we both got more than that.

The intervening time was the end of teaching my first quarter, flying home.  Snow and hunting, setting traps for coyotes and fox.  There was a gun store with a Civil War era dragoon’s pistol, drinking at a bar with my father and having him talk about going to New Orleans just after Katrina to help.  Potshots were taken at him from the Superdome.  Dinners with momma and the family, watching Firefly after Christmas with them.  Getting a couple suit jackets and upgrading myself “from Drugstore to Dynasty Cowboy”.  And then flying to New Orleans to be with Hannah again.

And that.  My memory is horrible, and yet I remember so much about my time there.  Last night before I fell asleep I played back everything, went day by day, and only made it to day two before I slept.  Landing, walking out and taking my first taxi into the city.  The place is flat and somehow alien–the air thicker, palm trees out of place for me, and the city both smaller and bigger than I imagined. I was greeted by Bloody Marys spicier than most food I’ve ever eaten, immediately whisked into a casino (my first) and given some Wild Turkey.  All this by Hannah’s ex-boss turned friend in high places.  We drove out to the house at which we were staying–an old, small plantation house on Race and Religious, replete with slave quarters that locked from the outside (in which Hannah and I stayed).  There was so damn much.  It took forever for Hannah to land that night, and I remember getting into the backseat with her and just touching her hair and looking at her, holding her hand.  We spent nearly half our time in New Orleans in the slave quarters, in bed or drinking coffee or bourbon in preparation for going into the French Quarter or the Garden District.  Bar after bar, some spinning, some stationary.  We listened to blues bands and brass bands and there were fireworks at night and cool, almost-raining hours outside when no one was looking.  We lasted on bits of bread and cheese and grapes, more on the coffee and bourbon, and ate dinner with her ex-boss and friends, big meals, four courses or more, gumbo and oysters and lamb shanks and ridiculous things like that.  The meals I enjoyed most were with her alone, a hunt at 1:00AM for a grilled cheese sandwich that led us from the District to the Quarter and back, shrimp po boys in Bywater, catfish on our own, the last night, in a bar with dogs.  A homeless man named Otis talked with us for half an hour about living in New Orleans, about Katrina, about devilment and about how lucky I was to be standing beside such a woman.  Hannah bought him a few beers at the convenience store–he’d been kicked out of the bar up the street years ago.  Added up there were hours just raking my hands through her hair, cupping her face in my hands, smiling or grinning or being deadly serious because we were going so damn fast.  Plastic cups of Maker’s in our hands at Howling Wolf, leaning in, she said something to me that I caught over the sound of the band.   The night I was supposed to leave she walked through the airport security line with me and when they stopped her and told her to leave I stopped her, too, and like that first moment at the airport in California I rushed, said I loved her and kissed her, and went on.  And then, because it was New Orleans, and because it was with her and it was so perfect, I stayed a while longer.

San Francisco is as beautiful and strange as you’ve heard.  The hills, though, are steeper.  Parking is insane.  The Chauffeur said he may move their once we’re done with our MFAs.

I had a meeting in LA last week.  I’ll repeat that for the distracted–I had a meeting in LA.  What a ridiculous thing for me to say, but true.  I went and got myself thoroughly attached to the soon-to-launch Los Angeles Review of Books as some kind of Blue-Collar Editor, something like that.  Basically I’ll be focusing on books about the sort of people I grew up with.  I feel that’s only fitting.  A few days after that, CRATE, UCR’s grad magazine, had it’s second meeting.  You recall I’m Editor-in-Chief.  You should submit something.  Then, a few days after that, I had my second meeting with one of our professors about my thesis, the third book.  This is all hush-hush, and completely unofficial, but he’s got agent friends, and he sent some pages around to them.  They like it.  The professor told me it’s not quite ready yet, but will work with me until it is.  We estimate by spring I’ll be able to shop it around for real.  This is the same prof who landed another student an agent already this quarter.  I anticipated good things from him, but not that good.

There’s been some shit, too.  Halloween blew up.  A friend of mine is in a rough way and there’s not much I can do for her.  A while ago I went to see her.  She lives south a ways, far out in the country.  A horse bit me while I was there.  She didn’t do much but cry on my shoulder.  All that had me pretty wore out for a while, and other things, too.

Teaching keeps me busy.  My students are getting better, and some are great already.  I’ve only got one more class to teach, and one of the students suggested I bring in coffee and donuts.  Another suggested they make me a statue.

Next is New Mexico.  I’m picking up Hannah at the airport and we’re hitting I-40 headed east for Taos, where we’ll eat and drink and explore and I’ll be getting a tattoo.  With any luck the whole process will be caught on video, and I’ll be doing a bit with it for the LARB.  Will let you know about that.  I’m sure it’ll be months before I’m back here again, as usual.  Sooner if something gets published.  I love spreading my good cheer.

I’ve been writing a lot of emails, and thinking about them in the sense of correspondence–that is, something that could someday be seen by others.  Letters that people will file away with notes on my books and rough drafts and scraps of paper.  In them I find my philosophy becoming quite solid and my stance firm.  The world is going to get worse or less worse.  There is no better.  You may not even call it less worse.  You would just scale the evil down.  To me we’re either screaming toward a bloody end the whole lot of us or there’ll be a minor armageddon, an apocalyptic hiccup, and, say, the world will be halved.  And for a time the world will be “less worse” because there’ll be fewer of us to do evil.  But, it’s just occurred to me, that doesn’t make sense either.  You have to assume we all die in even portions, the good and the bad.  And ultimately the world doesn’t care for numbers–the world doesn’t care at all.  It’s us, and our percentages stand.

I am a riot at parties.

I’ve been back in Riverside for more than a month.  I’ve started teaching.  I’ve been kept busy.  The past two days the mornings have started off thick gray and hazy and when the California sun finally burns through the sky remains gray, a drop of blue in a bucket of neutral.  It’s the marine layer, I think, though I’ve never known it to reach so far inland.  It’s as though a sheet of waxpaper has been thrown over the world and we view the sun through the blear.  I live at the edge of town now, the foot of the Box Spring Mountains.  The glow of the city is a little weaker and there are stars, sometimes.  At night you hear coyotes.

The fourth book isn’t ready to be written just yet, so in the meantime I’ve been rewriting the first.  I don’t know that it’ll ever see the light of day, but I’m okay with that.  The third book makes a fine first.  I sent a slew of submissions out a few weeks ago, short stories and the novella from spring.  There’s a publishing house called Switchgrass that puts out exclusively Midwestern content–either by author or writing.  After I get word from a professor or two I may send the third book out as soon as December, right around when I plan to start on the fourth.

Hard to believe it’s been more than a year.  I was talking with the Chauffeur last night and we were both mildly scared at how fast our lives are moving, and knowing that will only speed up.  A year means less, I guess, but it still holds the same number of moments.  There’s a lot of odd math in this post.  It’s going to be a better year, though.  I know it is.  It may even be a good one.  I guess I’m just reluctant to close the calendar on some things.  As fast as my life has been going, that’s how fast yours is, too.  All that time has passed for you.  All that time I haven’t been in.

Riverside is domed in.  The sky a textureless wall, the lamp upset and shining.  And we are all drunk on the lotus, watching from our backs as if the wall might change, the lamp blink out.

My favorite Team Sleep song, Blvd. Nights.  It was my ringtone for a long time, a clarion, meant it was time to get up, time to move, to go to work, to whatever.  Winters were a big deal at the Cottage, too.  The house was very shoddily built.  I miss days wrapped in white, blankets and walls and the snow outside.

Being in southern California, I avoid these things.  Riverside has a long season that fitfully replicates fall tree by tree, rains on occasion.  There’s snow on the mountains for several months.  I’m about to go back to that.  I was ready for it when I saw a tree across the street from my father’s house begin to turn.  Running outside town earlier this week the trees along Rt. 29 were falling, yellow, and the sky had gone cloudy and cold.  I worry that I’ve eaten the lotus, like I said I wouldn’t.  Falling asleep in the California sun sounds wonderful.  I’ll be in a new house, with my best friend of the time, and I’ll have money.  I got a TAship.  No more scrounging for food, doing without new music. Holding off on books. There’s a girl there I’d like to spoil. I don’t know if she’ll let me. We had evenings of absinthe and pie before I left, platonic, and of course 2,000 miles away things get romantic.  I’m not counting on anything for my return.  I and California seem to be prone to failure in that regard.

I miss houses. Places. I miss the condo where I had some of the darkest times of my life. I could live in California forever and it will always be those tall palms against the sky, enclosed by the complex. Their sound at night, and the freeway, and the pool. Sleeping on the floor. I miss the sound of my bare feet on the kitchen tile. I miss turkey on wheat with mustard, ramen with sesame oil. Walking out of the kitchen to the little back patio and hoping for the rainbow I saw the first morning I spent there.  What an experiment this has been.

This is a cathartic exercise for me tonight, so forgive me if I go a little long.  Have some more good music:

Skip to about 1:15 or so for the actual music. Though the beginning is cute. That’s Richmond Fontaine, a band out of Portland, like most good bands these days. The lead singer writes books, apparently.

I’m feeling my age lately. When I hurt something I tend to hurt multiple things, so I’ve hurt my leg and wrist, now maybe my knee, too. And I’ve been thinking about what happens after this year. Not hard, but thinking. Where to go. What to do. At some point does my life have to come to heel to expectation? I don’t think so, but you hear it enough from people around you, you begin to wonder. Again, not hard. I don’t owe anyone a stable job and income. I’m perfectly content with feeding myself and keeping myself sheltered, and that does not take a lot of money. Nebraska has a strong economy, among the wreck that is America. And I want to go there badly.

I’ve been thinking about being a writer as part of my personality. I had a long conversation with an Evangelical who knew me back when I was the same, and I didn’t set him straight. I wanted to see what he’d say when he felt he was with a kindred spirit. Quite Beckian. But that’s not the point. It was easy enough to talk with him, and even argue, from his point of view, veering left when I felt I could. I might have made him doubt just a little that Obama is Muslim. Anyway. I think of this as being part and parcel with writing, being able to insert myself into a mindset that is not my own. Obviously, I guess, when I put it that way. I’m writing the sequel to My Wakeup, and it is incredibly easy to slip into the head of this hollowed out war veteran. All characters have parts of you in them, but the emptiness I feel when writing him is not mine, it’s his. It’s pretty wild.

The year went by fast. A bad year. Some calendars of my own say it’s not quite over.  But close. I’m still struggling with this whole being good thing.  Sometimes I am, sometimes not. I guess that’s okay. Lately I’ve been on the brink of apathy, and that’s not okay. But a month or two off might do me some good.  The Antagonist suggested I get “In Sleep” tattooed on me someplace. I’m not quite there yet, that low, that tired. I’ll leave you with the quote that inspired it, though, because it’s so brilliant.

From A Farewell to Arms:

“I had hoped for something more.”
“Defeat?”
“No. Something more.”
“There isn’t anything more. Except victory. It may be worse.”
“I hoped for a long time for victory.”
“Me too.”
“Now I don’t know.”
“It has to be one or the other.”
“I don’t believe in defeat. Though it may be better.”
“What do you believe in?”

“In sleep.” I said.

Go to Fuck Yeah, Hemingway, for more.

There’s an idea I came across while rereading The Crossing.  Briefly: if evil was not rewarded by the world, then people wouldn’t engage in it.  Since there is evil, it is rewarded.  Good, then, in its purest form, exists in spite of any recompense.  I have a hard time believing in altruism despite its popularity, but when expressed in such a way, I think I can understand it.  Good becomes work, rather than some ideal.  I can understand a world in which that’s how we’ve survived.  I guess it’s not a very cheery idea, but it fits into my worldview rather perfectly.  I can apply it to my life lately without flaw.

I led you in thinking this was gonna be fun, didn’t I? Senseless title, uncharacteristically upbeat song. A lot of drama since coming home, family and otherwise.  Good things though, too.  Threw a pool party that put everything I’ve seen in California to shame. Got through two major revisions of the third book–cut almost forty pages from it, tentatively.  Been working on ideas for CRATE; combing through submissions for Phantom Seed, another litmag I got attached to; and started working in a low capacity for the Los Angeles Review of Books, an endeavor that’s going to be damn huge when it launches.  So, yeah, don’t expect much out of me on here.  I’ll keep you abreast of everything else I’m doing.

Until I publish something new.

I had some intentions of writing about my life of late.  Suffice to say I’m very busy, five-day weekends exhausting me as much as the weekdays.  Odd thoughts about feeling adjusted to living here, about putting things on pause while I go home to Ohio.  Went to a barbecue in Irvine for Memorial Day*.  Irvine is a strange, strange town.  The apartment complex had stores and a coffee shop inside, a pool, grills, a fountain…odd.  Lying on the grass I thought about how, even being acclimated, I still find it strange to live here, to be here.  I thought things would be very different.  My life, California itself, Riverside.  The journey is half over.  I get the feeling, though, that what’s to come is going to be the meat of it.

*My eternal gratitude to all who serve.

Back to reverse-chronological order.  The day before that was drunken shenanigans: bush pizza, a puppy with the middle name of Queequeg, an Indian working at Rite-Aid who got my last name right.  My memory fades beyond that, but more whiskey, writing, readings, etc.  Strange dreams, lately.  Saw the dark side of the moon from the Pacific, and it was green and covered in lakes, hanging in a purple sky.  Another dream involved nukes, aliens, tornadoes.

Finished the novella.  Will start editing after workshop this Wednesday.  Starting a short story set on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona.  A poet classmate told me today that he was talking about me to some of the undergrads, myth-like, about my productivity.  He said “he writes like several thousand words a month”, something like that, and they were impressed.  I had to let him know he low-balled it by quite a lot.  Looking back on my time here so far…it is impressive.  A novel, a novella, two short stories, many poems, and a scholarly paper.  All in ten months.  Something like 134,000 words (450+ pages, I think).  Helps to have nothing else you want to do.

Tomorrow I go to the Salton Sea with that group of poets.  Our project is called Mapping the Desert,  and the more I think about it the more fitting it becomes for me.  We were in workshop with local artists a week or two ago, and the question was asked, “what does the desert mean for you?” and I wasn’t sure.  I know I love its beauty, its desolation.  But aside from that being my aesthetic, I don’t know why, and I don’t really know what it means.  Solitude, I suppose.  In part.  Its mythos.  I’ve lived here long enough to see the seasons swing back–what seasons these are– to see the hills turn back to brown, the ground dry out.  I guess what’s happening is that, while this isn’t home, it is where I live.  I’m used to it.  I will leave here taking some of it.  Which is good, because the place surely has some of me.

Eager to be home.  Eager to move on.  To write more.  Might rewrite the first novel (I know I talk about that all the time).  May be the thing to do, though.  The next novel isn’t nearly ready yet, won’t be by the time I’m done editing the third.

Been thinking of writing an essay about our generation and the apocalypse.  To put it simply.  Something to look into.  Louise Erdrich wrote about how, roughly, the whites write always about losing America, losing land.  It’s true of me.  True of a lot of us.  Maybe because we don’t have anywhere else to go.  Down, or away.  Not that I think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

I’m very proud to be published alongside the likes of Dixie Salazar, Frank X. Gaspar, and am particularly proud to share a publication with Ricardo Zamorano Baez, a classmate of mine who is a phenomenal poet and, it would seem, an excellent writer as well.  Also in this issue is a short story by Robin Russin, a professor at UCR who is an all-around great guy.  I’m extremely happy with this, and will be reading from my excerpt in Long Beach tomorrow morning.

As an aside– things have been busy lately, but I fully intend to bring you all up to speed on my life as soon as I get a moment’s pause.