“I see myself staunching wounds. All the pages of all my books going into a great hole in people and slowing the loss of blood.”

Talking with an old friend about art.  Her philosophy came up, and mine, and my place in the world through art.  That’s what I came up with.  I don’t really think about myself in that capacity, because I’m not important in that way.  My words are.

Class has been tough this quarter.  Life has been tough.  The writing, as always, has been good.  I’m coming up on the end of this book and whenever I do that, in my experience, I get a little nervous.  No reason in particular, really.  It’s the same with starting a book.  Anyway.  I’m about 30,ooo words away from the end, maybe a little more.  It’s a treat to hold cards to your chest and finally get to lay them down.  The writing comes fast and somewhat easy, lately.  I should be finished in a few months.

Was laid out for the last week or so, sick.  Had a good and ridiculous time bar-hopping the weekend before that.  The places life takes me, sometimes.  The Antagonist came for a visit, on her way to Australia.  She cooked for me, we drank, we watched movies, we wrote.  She changed the alarm on her phone to a recording of me singing the beginning of Tom Waits’ “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis”. Went to LAX for the 8th(?) time.  I’m now going steady with the 105.  Bought her a promise ring and everything.

May have some good news for you next time.  Meanwhile, I enjoyed the vlog thing, so, requests?

You wonder if you have something good to say, something better than usual because you’ve been quiet.  Time passes and the burden grows.  After a while it becomes hard to say anything at all.  Partly I’m silent because I think it’s the better course of action.  I don’t know if what I want to say would be said if things were different.  I want to share parts of my life with you because I know and adore most of you.  But whether or not it is applicable here–and you’ve convinced me, it is– will it cause harm?  I don’t know.  And so I take pause.

It’s been warm here, as always, and stepping off the plane weeks ago was almost laughable, it was so hot.  Noel drove me out of LA and I don’t know if I can convey the dread and resignation I felt at the sight of the yellowy sky and the dirty street signs.  We passed two signs for a tattoo expo and the ad pictured a busty woman with no tattoos and I laughed at that, at how false it was.  I’m no longer surprised that I don’t mind cities like I used to, living in this one and being in LA and in Portland.  Columbus was beautiful, snow-covered and deadly cold.  The people were wild and a kid tried to fight me and I stood right in front of him staring and telling him to remember who I was.  Minutes later he threw a chunk of pavement through the window of the house and I got cut a little on the glass and Christ, how alive that night was.  Ushering people out and hiding the contraband and the moment when she was caught up in the rush to leave and there was such a pull in her eyes and it may have been too perfect to happen but our hands met as she backed away.  Days later I found her on the street in the cold and she took me to a bar and we talked for hours.  And just a handful of hours before I had to leave she called and said she was coming, and she found me, and we sat before the fireplace and eventually we moved to the couch and laid down and for an hour I wanted to kiss her and could only brush our cheeks together.  We fell asleep and woke each other up a few times and finally I kissed her, and eventually we slept again.  I regret that I didn’t tell her to warm her car up before going.  I regret not having those few minutes and what they might have held.

And then here, in the dark, with storms approaching and lined up for the week.  Gray skies look so much worse out here.    New laptop because the old broke, money I don’t have spent on something I have to have.  I wrote a prose poem that went away from where I wanted but I think is good.  Too close to really write about it, now.  Though I want to, and I think she deserves it.  65k into the third novel.  40k or so to go. 2,213 miles from where I want to be.  Less if she drives out to meet me, again.  A little gesture, a little kindness.  I haven’t been exposed to something like that in a long time.

Well, there you go, dammit.  I managed to shut up about myself for a couple posts, at least.

Edit:  Wasn’t quite clear enough re: kindness.  A great many people are good to me, and there are a few I probably don’t appreciate enough.  I meant a particular brand and a particular reception of kindness.

I’ve thought a time or two about quitting this.  I don’t need to sing to you, to string words together that aren’t half as good as what I could put down elsewhere, to tell you the story of my life as though its saying was worth the breath.  I don’t know that it is.  I don’t know that it ever was.  There are plenty of others who do it better than I.  My mind has never been focused that way.  Time is better spent elsewhere.

Last night I did the right thing.  I didn’t before, and that cost me.  I didn’t know that it would and maybe it shouldn’t have, but that’s not the point.  I did the right thing last night.  It was not a transformative experience.  It was hard in a dull way.  But that’s probably how it should be.  If it were an easy thing everyone would do it, and looking outside you can see that isn’t what’s happening.  I wasn’t relieved when it was over.  I wasn’t happy or proud.

I feel as stony as my friends joke that I am.  I don’t feel bad.  I don’t feel particularly good.  I feel pulled in different directions but all of them are away.  I feel encumbered.  I want to be rid of things.  What I want leaves and what I have is unimportant.  I want to wear my soul thin from walking.  I want to barely feel myself except in the thinnest boundaries; my skin against the wind, my feet against the ground, my eyes against the sun.  I want to open my mouth wide and forget how to speak.  I want to invent a language with no verbs.  I want to stand so still I become a monument.

This was never meant to be such a diary as it became.  It was supposed to have a tinge of that, but mainly to be about writing.  I’ll be trying to refocus.  Will discuss John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing and talk about music, playlists, and their influence on my writing next time.

It’s not that I’m numb or disconnected.  I’m where I want to be, given my means.  This is what I wanted.  I come alive on the page and otherwise I’m not invested.  My heart rests.  But that’s not true.  Broken up into these pieces, there are phases, moments, quadrants, in which I literally shake.  I feel so strongly about some things these days.  I’m up against a wall with one part of my life and with the others I grab at the thin air.  I feel surrounded by absurdity, by irony, by things so abstract I can’t discern any meaning and I see people relishing in them.  I’ve been rededicating myself.  I found myself searching for a kind of morality in Ohio and here I see its opposition.  I know what not to be.  I know where I stand and I know what’s below me.  We all walk on the bones of the dead.  It’s not something I’ll forget.

My field of vision narrows.  My interests dwindle.  I love the writing I’m doing.  I’m trying to read Notes from the Underground and I struggle because it’s so self-indulgent.  If it’s not a story of sacrifice and toil I am repulsed.  This is my Metamorphosis, except I wake up in bed to find myself a bitter old man.  But it’s good that some people write about other things, about themselves like I am now, about tripe like “the boundary between public and private”.  If everyone wrote something of moral import I’d have a much harder time getting noticed.

I’m trying to become more moral.  To live the way I write.  It’s a code I believe, it’s just not something I’ve been able to follow yet.  I find myself becoming a little harder again.  I don’t blame God for anything anymore.  I find myself becoming more religious.  I’ve asked him for something twice, recently, and I won’t deny it was selfish.  But I haven’t been confronted with anything I wanted that deeply in so long.  Ten years.  He didn’t grant me my wish and neither did the stars, and what does that mean?  That the alternative is better, I hope.  Not that it’s His plan, and He had it ordained this way, but that the compromise is too costly.

I feel best when I’m my own master, and I feel better knowing there’s nothing to lay blame on but myself.  I’m taking that weight.  The weight of the future, of the distance.   I have an idea of what’s to come.  The end isn’t clear but the path is worth it.  She’s worth it.  She and California, the distance to and from, the miles to Ohio.  When we started talking she had a path of her own, a long trip, and she told me she’d be better for me for having taken it.  It’s coming true of me, too.  I want to wear my bootsoles thin walking to her.  And if she’s not there I can still say I’ve gone those thousands of miles.

So, in an odd way I’ve been trying to teach myself how to be a man.  I don’t think I am one yet.  Occasionally someone will describe me as such, and I take it as a compliment.  But I’m bothered by my complacency, and if a real man is anything, complacent isn’t it.  I was on a balcony at school the other day and I saw a guy take a seat on some steps, peel open a pack of cigarettes, and let the wrapper drift away.  I wanted to yell at him, but I didn’t.  I thought, have I been blameless on this front?  Have I littered, or let friends litter?  And, yes, of course I have.  So it would be hypocritical to call him out on it.  But that’s not right, is it?  Your moral standing should not give you pause when you see an injustice.  It’s a luxury, hypocrisy.  We happy middle-class, we’re able to stay our action with political correctness, with our own position, and that shouldn’t be so.

Well, nevermind the miscellany.  I had some things to link you to, but I’ve forgotten them or didn’t save them.  Down the pike I think I’ll try to remember all the books I read this year (not many), as a lot of litblogs are doing that sort of thing.

You’ll note at right that I’ve linked to My Soul is a Butterfly, another one of those lovely, soulful blogs.  Hannah’s writing drips with the stuff of existence.  Also, I went and got a Twitter account, for god knows what reason.  You can find it here.  That’s it for today.

*I don’t know why you’d ask a rocket scientist to do that.

I walk a lot here.  I walk about two miles to the grocery for a few pieces of fruit and some bread and my housemates laugh when I come in and see the bags.  Gone for two hours for $10 worth of food.  I guess my time just isn’t worth much these days.  I have a lot of it and I have a lot to kill.

I’m so far in my head these days.  I write a lot, drink a lot of coffee.  My sleep suffers a little from that but when I wake up in the middle of the night it’s no inconvenience.  The quarter is nearly over and I have most of my work done.  Finish off a short story and a paper and I’ve got a while to do nothing, to prep for my reading and write more.  That’s what life is out here.  I thought I’d be okay with that, and largely I am, but I never gave it a thought that I’d be pulled so powerfully away.  At first she was supposed to be with me, a little magically.  We’d be living with Viking in the condo and laying out together or maybe trying to grill, or whatever, just living together.  Seeing what sort of a home we make.  When that didn’t come together it was that there was nothing, that I was supposed to forget, or to put her away.  Now we’re somewhere in the middle of that.  Thousands of miles away, across time zones and weather patterns.  But together, in our way, and happier for it.

I find myself writing as an escape, as much as anything.  It’s not suffering for it, but it is a distinct impetus.  I’m living in wait, trying not to count the days.  There are a lot of them.  I daydream of gray skies in a new city.  That should surprise you.  But I know that’s where I’ll find her.  Whether I come to her or she to me, it’ll be a new city, one I’ve never lived in, one that has rain.

I wrote a poem about a year ago that I put up for workshop a few weeks back, and I’ve been revising it and really considering its heart.  The whole premise is that I meet people, women, and fall in love with them, and what I remember and think of more than anything is the architecture of our relationship.  I think of the buildings we saw, the spaces we were in, what we sat on and what we drove through.  I’m not sure why that is.  It strikes me as something very masculine–not manly, but rather inherently male.  It may seem less romantic but when I think of her and what might be it’s a place that I may bring her, a home I can try to make again, streets that we can walk down.

I missed you powerfully last night.  It was a good night, fun, and even through that I wanted you.  I looked away often, up to the stars, sat back and listened for the things that they didn’t hear, things that even I didn’t hear; the sound of your voice, the passing of time.

Good Halloween party, that.  Chauffeur and I shonked the competition at flip-cup and beer pong.  We went to the party as each other, which was a good laugh for the few people that were familiar with us.  I donned  a pair of fairy wings for part of the evening.  At some point before I bedded down with a laundry bag as a pillow, next to a girl nicknamed Armyfuck, Chauffeur and I managed to switch back into our own clothes.  Neither of us remembers how this happened.  It’s the great mystery of the evening.  The next morning we bailed a bit early and got breakfast at this great joint called Flo’s.  Come’a the pancakes.  Sometimes this place ain’t so bad.  Then you come home like I did today to a parking ticket and an overdue fee on a book.

Soon, I promise, a writing post.  You pick the topic:  1. On the muses, or 2. On how I write in two completely distinct voices depending upon whether it’s a short story or one of my novels.  Pick the first one, please.

Hovering under 39k on AAM.  Started writing a new short story tentatively titled “Anhedonia”.

Oh, hell, I didn’t tell you, did I?  I was invited by the good folks at The Splinter Generation to read “My Wakeup” at Avenue 50 in LA.  December 16th, 7-9PM.  Mark your calendars.  I’ve got a practice reading tomorrow in class.  Wish me luck.

Aaand one last thing.  00:50-1:22 and 3:16-3:27 of this video.  Killer.

It was almost ten years ago that I fell in love with a girl who cannot be overstated in my life.  I don’t remember how exactly things came about–I don’t recall any seduction.  I remember sitting on the sidewalk with the sun beginning to set, thinking about God, and her, and hoping she’d come outside.  And she did.  From then on, for a good two years, she was what I thought about, straight, solid.  There wasn’t much else.  She was my first, an early first, depending on who you talk to.  The second time we made love it was to this song, on repeat.  I had just turned sixteen.  The stereo was this modern-looking thing, all gray with blue lights.  I think I remember how she felt now better than I did a few years ago.

She was pretty hard on me.  Broke my heart.  I was who I was then, and that was considerably weaker than I am now.  But she set me on this path, and I wouldn’t change any of it.  Still getting roughed up from time to time.  But I guess I grew an appreciation for that, too.  Writing fuel.

She sent me a letter last night, apologizing for everything.  It was sort of shocking, bewildering, and completely plain.  This was the sort of thing that happened in movies, you know?  Girl of your dreams, the first girl you put away in that hallowed part of your mind or heart, comes to you and says, “I did you wrong”.  I wasn’t sure what to say to that.  So I told her I accepted, wasn’t even really sure she needed to apologize, given who I am now.  Where would I be if she had treated me differently?  Who would I be?  Husband to her, father to three, first kid aged six?  What a difference.  And I’m not knocking that, either.  Lord, but I loved her.  That could have been a great way to live.  But it’s not what happened.  I didn’t repeat a generation, didn’t become my father–though I am becoming him in many ways.  You all know where I am now.

It’s life, yeah?  You do things that make you who you are and make other people and you don’t realize until later, long after things have sealed, the mortar has dried.  What do you say to that?  I don’t think you say anything at all.  You smile a little sadly, maybe you shake a hand or offer a hug.  And then you move on.

Two nights ago I went out with Chauffeur (one word, goes with his nickname for me) and a girl to a supposed dive downtown.  We had burgers and beer, had a shot to celebrate the girl’s birthday, and went across the street to check out another bar, a little closer to an actual dive.  As we walked in a fellow playing pool turned and put his hand in the air and I high-fived him and shook.  As we waited on our beers he pointed at the three of us and the bartender wouldn’t take our money.   We drank and went out to the back to let Chauffeur smoke and watched this half-pint latina with a lot of metal in her face rap very, very poorly in front of a camera.  (Riverside, side, side, on the mike, mike, mike…ad nauseam.)  We went back in for a while and met Joe, our drunken benefactor, play pool with one hand–his non-dominant.  He’s apparently some sort of drunken savant, because he was sinking shots pretty consistently.  I followed Chauffeur back out for another smoke and we were making fun of the rapper when we realized she was still at it, still saying mike, mike.  We dove behind a brick wall and laughed for a good five minutes.  When we went back in Joe decided to give us a tour of downtown and we followed him directly next door to a gay bar where he bought us more drinks.  We moved on, discussed random things.  Chauffeur and I wandered off briefly to look at a war memorial and I remember telling him that I write because I didn’t serve, and that’s mostly right.  I wouldn’t feel like I have to write if I served.  It was a good night, maybe the most fun I’ve had since I’ve been here.

Yesterday I moved everything out of the apartment and into the new house.  I don’t know how to feel about that.  I should feel good to be shut of it, because truly little good happened there.  And this, here, is all new.  As fresh as can be without a bout of amnesia.  But I couldn’t help but feel like I was giving some things up.  Signing off on memories, devaluing them.  I don’t like that.

In the evening the owner of the house, another grad student, took me out to a coffeeshop downtown on the back of his scooter.  I got some writing done.  And today I went back to the apartment to clean it and I was struck again with the knowledge that I am leaving one of two places that I’ve known her.  I stared at that damn futon and at the couch and the pool and the lounge chair as if I could place them more firmly into my memory.  But they’re already relics.  Already cherished in their way.  Walking back home I was taken by the smell of the orange trees and I stood at the intersection of Canyon Crest and MLK, standing in the thin shadow of the lightpole, this song came on:

I watched a woman pull up to the light in a rusted truck, watched her look at me.  She was beautiful, and it was a romantic contrast.  When I crossed I glanced her way again and she locked eyes with me and I passed on and I thought about the few times a woman has touched me out here.  A hand on my shoulder, arm around my waist.  I thought about reservoirs, literal and figurative.  I thought of how quickly my reservoir dries out here, how soon a night like Wednesday can fade.  It’s not a matter of whether or not I can make it.  I know I can.  It’s whether or not I come out the other side having gained ground, rather than lost it.  I haven’t regretted the way I’ve spent my life so far, and I’d hate to start now.

Name your five most character-building memories.  Your five happiest.  Top five kisses.  Your desert island albums and books.  I know mine, I think.

Last Thursday a good friend of mine flew in from out of state and stayed with me until Monday evening.  Old readers will know her as the Antagonist.  The moment we got in from the airport we set her things down and watched Casablanca, a favorite of ours.  The next morning we went to the grocery store and she made dinner and I invited over a friend from the MFA program, who will probably figure into things enough that I may as well assign him a ridiculous blog-codename.  When I figure out what they call his hat I’ll name him that, I guess.  Anyway.  We drank, watched Dr. Strangelove.  Drank some more, had a few more friends over.  It was a good evening.

Saturday we stayed in and watched M*A*S*H and a backlog of The Colbert Report.  She cooked this killer meat dish.  Sunday was the Mojave, which kicked our asses in one way or another.  Routine scratching of the eye, dehydration.  The muffler clamp on my Cav rusted through and snapped while we were trying to see some lava cones, and that was a pisser.  We made a fire and set up the tent outside of the Hole-in-the-Wall canyons, sat around feeding the flames and watching the stars come out.  We’d gone on a short roadtrip in January and had a great time, and this was a bit disappointing.  She came out here as therapy for myself and for her, and it doesn’t seem like we managed to fill each other’s tanks like we expected.  We commiserated, we stood-in.  Maybe we were one of the 13 steps for each other.

Monday, driving her back to LAX, we riffed off an episode of The Office and went back and forth asking desert island questions, and eventually we got to the memory ones.  That was a little cathartic, I think.  Realizing where things fit, what’s shaped us.  I’m realizing just how long life is, and how much of it I’ve lived.  I’m happy about where I am as a person but I’m not happy about where I am.  Maybe it’s important that I run myself aground against a place, that I come to realize not everywhere is home.  Place is important to me as a person and a writer.  Finding a place that’s a source of conflict is just a new experience.  Not an enjoyable one, but one I can learn from, maybe.

My short story is up on Splinter Generation. An early review from a friend calls it “The Big Two-Hearted River of the Iraq Generation.”  I expect “sensational” and “spellbinding” to come soon.  In all seriousness, it’s been a good experience working with the editors at Splinter and I fully recommend submitting to them.  Thanks, guys.  And thanks to the folks who’ve already read it.

In other writing news, the novel is dragging because of classes, and I’m sort’ve pissed about that.  Broke the 30k mark two days ago, but I’m only getting about 1000 words a week.

In other, other news, here’s a short roundup of articles from the depths of the litblogs:

An interview with Margaret Atwood over at Jacket Copy.  I don’t like Atwood’s writing much, but I respect a lot of her views.  She talks blogging, science, and writing sex.

An interview with Sherman Alexie. He also talks some sex, re-attacks the Kindle, and discusses the state of technology on reservation grounds.

For viewers of Californication, The Rumpus has an article that lambasts the lack of literature on the show.  Also, apparently, the big book in the show, God Hates Us All, has been ghostwritten by…someone.  You can check out the first chunk at Amazon.  It’s atrocious.

Finally, John Crace condenses Blood Meridian into a misread and misguided eight minute sneer. I wonder if he actually had to read the book in eight minutes as well, or if he, well, fill in the blank.