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2007-08-09T21:27:00.000-07:00

So I've obviously been dragging ass with this site for a long time now. It's too bad; back in the day, a couple of years ago, I was full of commentary. Not so much anymore. These days, it almost never occurs to me to update, and when I do think about it I just feel guilty. And life's too short to feel guilty about a website. So this is farewell . . . for now.

Some of the reasons why Ipecac Aperitif has fallen by the wayside:

1. I hate the new "improved" version of Blogger, which streamlines/dumbs down the whole process so that few of the idiosyncratic details I once employed are still available.

2. I've been working on a four-year-old Mac, which is so slow (despite DSL) that trying to upload images from my camera is virtually impossible, let alone putting any of them on the site. That would be why I haven't updated Baby Pictures in more than a year.

3. I haven't been writing as much in general since I became a teacher/dad, and I'm about to become more of both.

3A. School starts next Wednesday and I'm back in high school after three years away, back in public education after two years in the tender care of a well-funded private school, back to classes of 30 kids instead of 16, back to a state-mandated textbook and one prep period a day instead of three, back to having to lock everything up and write referrals because I'm teaching kids who haven't had enough adults model empathy and intellectual curiosity for them. Got a beautiful classroom, and I get to teach drama for the first time in my life, and I think it'll be a good year; but it's bound to require a lot of work, a lot of time and a lot of energy. Teaching always does.

3B. Then there's parenthood. Genevieve is three and way more than a handful. Not in a bouncing-off-the-walls, destroying-everything, constantly-throwing-tantrums kind of way; more like in a not-being-able-to-be-parted-from-us-for-more-than-three-seconds, play-with-me-endlessly kind of way. The cute way. But relentlessly so. Guilt about neglecting this website can't compare to guilt over wanting to find the OFF switch on my daughter so I can have an uninterrupted conversation or a moment of intimacy with my wife. Cos, you know, she won't be three forever; she won't adore us forever; if we miss this it won't come back, and she's an actual person, not a concept, someone who'll bear deep psychological scars if we get selfish and ignore her because we're not in the mood for joyous innocence. Now take that and add a newborn girl, someone whose complete and utter neediness will make Genevieve look like Ayn Rand. Oh the love. Oh the exhaustion. Oh the demise of adult leisure time.

4. Even without 3A and 3B, I'd be backing away from the Internet. It's a solitary activity, however interconnected with the whole world it may be. Solitary and sedentary. That's easy for me; I've been doing that all my life, intellectual only child that I am. But apparently I want something more, or I wouldn't have structured my life the way I have. The trend seems to be away from the conceptual, toward the real -- though never absolutely, because there are no absolutes and besides reality is just a concept and what if the Matrix was a documentary and everything but me is an illusion designed to keep me docile while sentient viruses use my semiconscious body as an energy source? So there's that. Yeah, I'll keep frequenting the sites of my friends, a couple of saucy political weblogs, Homestar Runner and the Kingdom of Loathing, though probably less often than before. I'm looking for balance. Trying to feel less crazy. Letting go of some juvenile obsessions. Learning how not to live entirely in my brain.

Footnote to #s 1 and 2: I recently bought a new (cheap) PC, my first foray out of the Mac ghetto; it's a lot faster, and once I get my bearings I'll see about finding an alternative to the lameness of Blogger. It's time for new digs and a new name.

Those of you Faithful Readers whom I count among my friends will get an e-mail update when the new digs have been established; likewise, you'll get pictures etc. when the new baby arrives in October. If you're unsure of your friend status, feel free to drop me a line and let me know you'd like to be notified. I'll also post a link to the new site here, once it's up and running. Don't hold your breath, though. It might be a while.

Before I go, here are some recommendations of stuff I've enjoyed recently:

For all of you grammar nerds out there, the page of unnecessary quotation marks, and for all of you savage misanthropes, the page of passive-aggressive notes.

For fans of juvenile halfway-incomprehensible garage-rock humor, here's my favorite new band. My favorite track is "Good Girl Yes, Bad Girl No".

For those who have yet to accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior: The God Hatch.

For those who appreciate Rube Goldberg cleverness, a marble machine that almost makes me want to buy a Honda.

For those ready to tackle a sublimely creepy, subversively funny, disturbingly erotic, overwhelmingly complex, totally original novel, I highly recommend the astonishing House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.

For those who either don't have an allergy to Michael Moore or are willing to consider the possibility of overcoming it, go see Sicko. He's not in it much; it's not obnoxious; it made me laugh and cry and grit my teeth in anger.

Okay, that's it for now. Um...yeah. I should end with a joke. Some of you -- those of you who knew Jared Gutekunst -- already know this one.

What's yellow and bumpy and swims in the ocean?

Moby Corn.

Adieu.

2007-07-05T22:08:00.000-07:00

Bong hits 4 Jesus. Bong hits 4 Jesus. Bong hits, bong hits, bong hits 4 Jesus.* What does that even mean?

A) Jesus is sick and he needs medical marijuana. Donations would be appreciated.
B) Jesus is dead and that's sad and we should all smoke a bowl in his honor.
C) Smoking pot is highly recommended, and it comes with a free bonus: Jesus.
D) Bong hits are in fact beings who support the political/religious success of Jesus.
E) Someone named Bong is engaged in hitting, which he does on behalf of Jesus.
F) I like raising my middle finger, but I don't quite know what to do with it once it's up there. Also, I can't spell the word "for".

Yeah, so it's not just the unfettered free speech of the KKK and Jerry Falwell that we liberals have to defend, it's yutzes like this kid. It's not just offensive speech we have to allow, it's clumsy cheekiness like that of Mr. Frederick. What he did was rude and unimaginative, but no more so than the blatherings of Michael Savage or Ann Coulter.

[* By the way, the page I referenced for this story was on Wikipedia. A whole lot of people give Wikipedia shit, because it's so easy to do when you don't have a full picture of how it actually works. Read this.]

Anyway, last week my local latte-liberal daily ran an editorial in support of First Amendment rights, and received this response from a man in Santa Rosa named Michael Flanagan:

Your editorial, "Taking a hit", promotes free speech rights for children under 18 and supports the child with the banner "Bong hits 4 Jesus." Why?

It is often stated that with freedoms come responsibility. Certainly many American have taken on that responsibility and courageously died in wars defending our freedoms, and free speech is foremost of all the freedoms that we hold dear. Are children under the age of 18 ready to assume the responsibility that comes with free speech? Are we parents to give our teenagers a carte blanche to do and say whatever they wish? Part of our job as parents is to guide our children down the proper path, and that includes teaching them what is appropriate to say.

I'd be interested to know how active and influential the parents of "Bong hits 4 Jesus" were in leading their teenager down the proper path, though in this day and age, some parents think that dope and bong hits are the proper path.

I snorted so loudly upon reading this that Marla suggested I go write a reply. I did, and it appeared in the paper this week. I wrote:

Letter writer Michael Flanagan of Santa Rosa is to be commended for his thoughtful rebuttal Friday to your editorial concerning the "Bong hits 4 Jesus" kid. As he points out, many Americans have died to defend our right to free speech; clearly, they have thereby demonstrated the responsibility to exercise that right, although their deaths do present some logistical difficulties.

But those were adults. Those under the age of 18 have not made such a sacrifice and should not be trusted to speak their minds without the approval of their elders.

As everyone knows, with the arrival of one's 18th birthday comes a sudden metamorphosis into a being of maturity and wisdom -- one who knows, without being told, what is "appropriate to say." Flanagan, who was lucky enough to have been guided down "the proper path", knows that appropriate speech is limited to that which offends no one.

Surely, that is what our brave soldiers have fought and died for.

2007-06-22T21:09:00.000-07:00

Today we had an ultrasound done and got to see some foetal porn. They sent us home with two wide-open crotch shots and a face silhouetted in silver static. Nose at the same slope as Genevieve's. The crashing, sucking thunder of a four-chambered heart, visible on the monitor, quivering like a jellyfish. All systems go.

A little girl.

Girl on film. Girl in my lap. Woman on the table. Female dog at home in the livingroom. House full of estrogen and me, still, with the one and only Y chromosome. Why? It's always been this way. I am most at ease in a room full of females, most myself. I must admit I wanted a son, as I did the first time around, only more so since this will be my last child. Sake of variety, and also my greater familiarity with the experience of being a guy. Would have been nice. But being the father of a little girl is pretty freaking awesome, so it's all good.

It's those dowries that are going to kill me. I'd better start investing in goats and oxen.

2007-05-22T12:57:00.000-07:00

. . . well, no. Not really. Not yet.

And yet, as the sign in my classroom says, "Create the change you want to see." Or see the change you want to create.

2007-05-20T22:28:00.000-07:00

Three weeks left of school. Early mornings and late nights, driving in the dark, working, grading papers, gliding down toward the valley of summer on a wave that crests at graduation day. Between now and then I will be completely in the teaching zone and almost certainly not posting here.

Then comes summer. Things will change this summer. I'm going to get some sleep, I'm going to find a job, I'm going to have time to be with my family, I'm going to have time to write more often. I need to write more. Too much of my writing lately has been private, often in the manner of an exorcism. I have an idea for a children's book that I'd like to write, inspired by the way that Genevieve craves story and the way I've learned to improvise plots on the fly. I want to get a good recording of my music, perhaps out at Nonesuch where I used to go to school. Down in the redwoods by the little creek on a low wooden platform, long beams of sunlight in the fragrant shade, me and my guitar and the water and some really fine audio.

That's a summer project. Then there's figuring out how to approach this teaching gig differently, so that it doesn't overwhelm me and prompt me to react with self-sabotaging behavior. I love teaching. It's what I want to do. This year, for reasons that still are far from clear to me, teaching was hell. It was good too, educational, worth my time — still hell.

My brain is a fascinating apparatus that works beautifully in many ways, but there are flaws in the design. Some people have a high-maintenance body: the morbidly obese, say, or the gravely ill. I have a low-maintenance body — eat or don't eat whatever I want, whenever I want, stay slender regardless of exercise — but a high-maintenance mind. Much energy is expended hauling it out of ditches. Major construction is now underway on the neural infrastructure, however; look for significant repairs to be made this summer.

This summer. Two weeks from now, the day after I return from whitewater rafting with my 8th graders, Genevieve will turn 3. The number of magic wishes. She's incredible and I can't wait to be with her all day, every day, for weeks at a time. I can't keep up with all the wild invention of her speech. I want to remember everything, but it floods past me like tall grass in a high wind.

She's making up her own stories now, deep into roleplaying, weaving in her latest threads of culture. Her current top picks for the daily Post-Nap Video Hour With Papa are Kiki's Delivery Service, Wallace and Gromit, and a National Geographic special on Siberian tigers. (She is frequently a tiger these days. Her birthday party invitations show a growling tiger cub in a party hat. Genevieve often comes to the table as a ferocious tiger who masticates her protein with what the video narrator soberly intones are "jaws so massive, they can crack the spine of a wild boar with a single bite.") She likes to read a book I just brought home from the library book sale, an old Scholastic from 1967 called Animal Doctors: What Do They Do? This is, like, the ideal book for Genevieve, who was already passionately interested in veterinary medicine. Her favorite song is still "She'll Be Comin' 'Round The Mountain", a number that never fails to make her shake her booty round the room.

On Mother's Day we visited a goat farm. Genevieve got to pet a baby goat that had been born that morning, and we watched the goats get milked. Oh My God.

Marla's belly is growing; there is a noticeable pooch of belly, and when I put my hand on the pooch there's something resilient inside, a firm-walled womb in there.

The themes of Genevieve's play these days are three: Birth, Death and Pain. Does that sound grim? Not to me, but then I think it's less grim to engage with those subjects than it is to avoid them.

Games we play over and over these days:

Hatching From An Egg. Evvy gets under some blankets and I go walking loudly through the jungle. "Oh my goodness, what's this? It appears to be an egg. I wonder what kind of creature is going to hatch out of this egg. I guess I'll just have to wait and see. Oh! I see a crack! There's an eye peeking out..." and so forth until she reveals herself to be a baby crocodile, or horse, or kitten. This game must be repeated immediately, mere seconds after the revelation.

Checked By A Doctor. An animal needs to be checked. That animal may be stuffed, or it may be Evvy, or it may be me. But one way or another, someone's getting checked by someone else. The symptoms will be described. Tools will be applied with care to the affected area. At some point, a band-aid will be employed. Medicine will be made available. The patient will be urged to rest and avoid lifting heavy objects for a couple of days.

CPR.
Evvy: I'm not breeving!
Papa: OH NO! Call 911, run and get help! You, stay here and help me get her on her back. You're going to be okay, miss. Can you breathe?
Evvy: No-I-can't-breeve-I'm-not-breeving.
Papa (pressing down on her ribcage): One, two, three, four, five. (Pause. Papa presses his ear to her chest.) OH NO! We've lost the pulse! Where the hell is that ambulance? Hang in there, miss. (More chest presses, more counting. Papa blows into her mouth.) Come on, fight! Fight! I'm not going to lose you, dammit! Thank god, here are those . . . things that you rub together and make some electricity, and it, like, shocks your heart into beating again. I forget what they're called. But I have some of them, and I'm building up the charge. Okay, here I go. Clear! (Papa puts those imaginary whatever-those-things-are on Evvy's chest.) Thoomp. Are you breathing now?
Evvy: Yeah. No, no I'm not breeving still.
Papa: Clear! Thoomp. There, now your heart is beating. Now you are coming back to life. Now you will start to cough, and sit up, and say it is all better. And everyone will cheer.

Evvy's Delivery Service. Evvy is pregnant. Something is bulging underneath her shirt, and it must be a baby that's ready to come out. Is she going to do it at the hospital or at home? Will it be a vaginal or a C-section birth? Is it a breech baby? All of these questions are considered, and then the baby is born. It gets a bath, a towel dries it off, and then the mama gets to hold it and give it boobah. (Evvy herself has been off the boobah for months now, and is sleeping by herself for most if not all of the night. During sleep is the only time she still wears diapers. She is a Big Girl Now, and when she turns 3 in a couple of weeks, she will get to try some gum for the first time.)

Dying. Sometimes, people die. And animals die. That's just how it is. Plants die, too. Everything gets born and everything dies. It's okay to die, just like it's okay to get born. You can't really do anything about either one. When it's time to get here, you get here. When it's time to leave, you leave. In between, you get to make all kinds of decisions, like: cremation or burial? What color is the urn or casket? Where will the remains be returned to the earth? What will people say at the funeral? Genevieve isn't thinking about much of that yet, but she's well on her way to forming her own totally healthy fascination with the riddle of death. Sometimes Papa has to get buried. Sometimes a cherry tree grows on top of him.

2007-04-24T22:10:00.000-07:00

OK. If I don't post sometime in the next hour or so, I will have officially neglected this Algonquin-Round-Table-of-One for more than a month. And that Just Won't Do.

Why have I been away? Combo platter. Hardcore teaching entrée with heaping sides of stupid goddamned depression, exhaustion, lack of inspiration and reprioritization of "free time". And the few times I've sat down to write something, all I can think of is that combo platter, so then I think better of it and go read the latest XKCD.

Anyway: for those of you who have not yet heard the Exciting News...

...come early October, Genevieve is going to become a big sister.

It's official: Marla is pregnant. We got the ultrasound photos today, but the real proof came a couple of weeks ago when she felt compelled to drink sauerkraut juice straight from the jar. You just can't fake that kind of thing.

So yeah, Baby #2 is on the way, which is cool and exciting and scary. I'm looking for a teaching job for next year, and I will get one because I'm good enough and smart enough and, um, the tip jar at Open Mic Night won't quite cut it with TWO KIDS to support. Woo hoo! If love itself were both edible and capable of generating electricity, I'd already be set. Such is, regrettably, not the case.

I'm pretty sure we're going to determine gender in advance this time, simply because this is the last kid either of us wants to have and there's something to be said for variety of experience. We already know what it's like to be surprised on Birth Day; now we can find out what it's like to know in advance. We'll keep it a secret from the rest of the world, though, so that we don't get inundated with pink or blue.

So there's that.

It's the fourth quarter; I have five weeks left of classes, and then a four-day whitewater rafting trip with my eighth grade students, and then graduation. It's poetry season. I know what I'm doing, I'm totally into it, and bizarrely, so are my students. I gave them the customary spiel: "How many of you really love poetry? Raise your hand if you read poetry on your own, not for a school assignment but because you really love it. Okay, a few of you. Now raise your hand if you listen to music. Keep it raised if the music has words. Keep it raised if this music is important to you. Guess what? You really love poetry."

Then we made a list of our favorite poets on the board. Here's what the 11-14 year olds in my neck of the woods are listening to these days:

Cake
The Dead Milkmen
The Dead Kennedys
Nirvana
The Sex Pistols
Joni Mitchell
Jimi Hendrix
Guns 'n' Roses
Cheap Trick
Journey
Snow Patrol
Linkin Park
Snoop Dogg
Tori Amos
Blue October
Santana
The Arctic Monkeys
10,000 Maniacs
Sheryl Crow
Maroon 5
AFI
Mahari
The Rolling Stones
Green Day
Christina Aguilera
Queen
The Hush Sound
Bob Marley
Elton John
Pink Floyd
Jimmy Buffett
Bob Dylan
Jack Johnson
The Who
Suzanne Vega
America
The Jackson 5
The Police
Breaking Benjamin
Death Cab For Cutie
The Postal Service
Billy Talent
Operation Ivy
Nerve Agents
Smashing Pumpkins
E40
Tom Waits (OK, this one's mine)
The Beatles
Tupac Shakur
Gwen Stefani
Sublime
Hello Goodbye
OK Go
Presidents of the United States of America
Amy Winehouse
Counting Crows
Biggie Smalls
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Reel Big Fish
The Alec-tric 5
The Ramones
The Pixies
The Sofa Kings
Modest Mouse
Jewel
Nelly Furtado
Led Zeppelin
The Alan Parsons Project

Nicely eclectic, I'd say. Fairly good taste all round, although Linkin Park...well, I'll say no more. But yeah, not too bad for tweens. So now everyone's getting a turn to bring in a favorite song and play it in class while we all look at the lyrics; then we deconstruct it. Assonance, consonance, metaphor, internal rhyme, meter, imagery, theme, thesis. Good stuff. I kicked things off with Edwin Arlington Robinson's poem "Richard Cory", followed by the updated version written and performed by Paul Simon with Art Garfunkel.

For a further update, check out the super-hi-tech Richard Cory Interactive Adventure.

And then there's the Bertolt Brecht RPG, which is perfect for kids' parties.

While we're being like that, "that" being a degeneration into disturbing linkage as a form of anticlimactic denouement, it may be comforting to know that God is A-OK with buggery.

He's probably not OK with Nazi leprechauns, though. At least, I really hope he's not.

Um, I can't think of a good segue into this one. Which, if you're cool enough to appreciate it, is itself a really hip segue. And now, all things squid.

2007-03-24T16:59:00.000-07:00

Awright, awright a'ready! Here I am: rock you like a hurricane.

Is what, you know, I'm going to do. Eventually. When I'm ready.

Last week was the four-year anniversary of the war in Iraq. The war has now lasted half as long as my marriage. I went to a gathering in the plaza downtown on Monday evening.

We stood in a big circle as dusk fell, and some of us came forward into the circle to say or sing something. I stepped in and said:

Thank you for coming here. I find it helpful to come to gatherings like this, because they help to remind me that I'm not alone in how I feel about this war. The tide of public sentiment has shifted in our direction, but it has taken too much time, moved too slowly, cost too many lives.

Four years ago, I was part of the largest anti-war protest in history. Somewhere between six and thirty million people worldwide took to the streets on the same day to send a clear, unified, unmistakable message of disapproval from the world community. I was in San Francisco, and I heard Martin Sheen speak. He said: "None of us can stop this war. There is only one guy that can do that, and he lives in the White House."

Of course he was right, and as we know, that guy didn't so much as twitch in the face of this unprecedented level of dissent. He just didn't care. We had no guns, money or oil, so we were not part of his equation. The will of the people is unimportant to him. He is the decider, a deeply insecure man who, like many children of aristocrats, is terrified of being rendered powerless. He has been taught never to show weakness, and to him that means never flinching, never wavering, never giving in. He will not listen to us.

I understood that four years ago, and something in me died. We've been lucky in that we've never before had to deal with a president as bad as this one. But democracy will be challenged eventually; like children, the leaders of the world will keep pushing the boundaries of our tolerance, checking to see if we really mean what we say. When democracy is challenged, we defend it or it dies. George W. Bush is the bully who says: No, I won't stop. Make me. Go ahead. What are you going to do about it? Stop talking and make me.

Gatherings like this can only be the beginning of something else, a shot in the arm to provide the energy to get the real work done. Do we really want to stop the war? What are we prepared to do? Do we believe that voting is enough — do we believe that our votes matter? Or is there something more that must be done?

I don't know the answer, and I don't believe the best answer can be a monologue. No one person can know the will of the people. But I know that people are dying because of the man in charge of this country; I know that their deaths are horrible and unnecessary and spawn further deaths, further violence. I know that the killing can and will be stopped; the only question is when. The only question is how long we will allow it to continue before we can stand it no longer. When we are resolved to end the reign of George W. Bush by trial and impeachment, the war will be over. When our actions bring about the justice that we know in our hearts has been denied, we will have moved beyond protest and into revolution.

Revolution is not a dirty word. It is the foundation of this country, but it is no antique; it is our birthright, and was long before the United States were formed. The overthrow of tyranny is not a privilege. It is a responsibility — difficult, dangerous, essential, and immediate. It is upon us now. Let us seize it.

2007-03-04T15:09:00.000-08:00

It's still burning in my mind. I watched it three or four days ago, and I can't stop thinking about it. Art can be great for lots of different reasons, but my favorite reason is that it sometimes redefines the boundaries of your awareness. So much of the way we change is invisible, unmeasurable, which is good, but still there is a sense of loss I feel at how much I've forgotten. And a hard, beautiful, painful, exquisite pleasure/regret when memory stutters out punctuation on the page of my brain.

Memory is not just the record of your experience. Memory is notoriously unreliable, and that is because it is a story, fiction, which is not to say false. Awareness is subjectivity. I think, therefore I am not you. And yet when you show me something I've never seen, I recognize it. Why is that?

The film is George Washington. Don't ask any questions, just put it in your queue or rent it at the local store, or even buy it sight unseen, because it's that good. I'll reimburse you immediately if you feel your money was wasted.

I know I recently rhapsodized about Junebug, so this doesn't seem like a new thing, but it is. Junebug is a very good movie. Very, very good. George Washington is something else. I've never seen anything like it. I am fiercely opposed to any attempt to summarize it. I don't want it to become anything other than what it already is. It popped like a firework in my brain, and I want you to have that experience, too.

If you need anything further, I refer you to Roger Ebert's review, which does it about as much justice as any verbal description could, which is to say virtually none. By the way, when you watch it, be sure to check out the extras and catch the short film A Day With The Boys by Clu Gulager, which was one of the inspirations for George Washington. You'll never see it anywhere else, and it's amazing, hallucinatory, brilliant. There are some things that words can't do.

2007-03-01T21:33:00.000-08:00

Crazy, crazy world. Crazy, crazy times.
Crazy, crazy world. Crazy, crazy times.
Hang up your chair to better sleep,
Clear the floor to dance.
Sweep the rug into the fireplace.

I don't even know what to say. It's complicated. I find myself saying that to the students, urgently: that people are complicated, that when they write their stories they should complicate the central figure to make him, or her, seem more real. Real people have all kinds of crazy shit running through their heads (I don't say this part to the kids). Some of us have dangerously crazy shit and are in positions of great power, and choose to send thousands to their death in a vain attempt to satisfy some macho crotch-itch. (I don't have anyone particular in mind when I say that; I'm just sayin'.) Some of us have crazy shit that wouldn't be so dangerous if we didn't deny its existence so vigorously. Some of us have crazy shit that overflows despite our best efforts and, um, complicates things.

I find myself in a profoundly complicated and contradictory state of mind lately, a state of mind nearly incapable of self-definition, a weird blend of everything's-fine and dread. It's hard to tell what's real sometimes. That's never been easy for me, actually; I'm frequently brought up short by the realization of how inaccurately I perceive reality. When one's emotional state literally shifts with the weather, it's difficult -- and dangerous -- to believe the assumptions of one's own mind.

But everything's fine. And that's reality, too. Things keep changing, and you move into the changes as best you can, and if the moment you're in isn't one you enjoy, that's okay; it's about to change. If you're euphoric, don't get attached to it. You're in control. You have no control. Accentuate the positive. Acknowledge the darkness. Deal with your shit. Don't dwell on your shit. You fucked up. You're a good person.

My friend Kumar Lewis died about a year ago, and I'll be going to the ceremony a month from now. We both played the lead, Eugene, in a dual-cast high school production of Brighton Beach Memoirs. We weren't deep friends and I never got to know him particularly well, but there was a lot of camaraderie between us, and I liked him. He had a generous heart, and this kind of goofy, naive, pseudosuave, self-deprecating, easygoing manner that was both annoying and totally charming. I'm sorry that he died.

I haven't been able to bring myself to start looking for a job yet, but I know that I need to. Soon. Things are complicated. That's okay, though, because -- well, it's complicated. But let's just say that life decides to shower you with a shitstorm; it has been known to happen. What do you do? I don't know what you do. What I do is go crazy, and do my best to ride the craziness instead of letting it ride me.

I'm so tired. I've been staying up every night writing, crashing into sleep and out of it too early in the morning. Somehow I can't seem to stop.

It turns out that the book my eighth graders just read has a sex scene in chapter 15 that I overlooked. It's sweet and specific and brief, and not a particularly important event in terms of the plot. Some of the kids were a bit shocked when they discovered it, and when word spread, they had about fifteen minutes of reading and giggling. Then we all moved on. Until a mother found out...

Tune in next week for the next episode of: Felix Helix, Purveyor of Prurient Pornography to Pious Pipsqueaks!

Peace.

2007-02-11T14:30:00.000-08:00

My first exposure to the term came in college, in the words of a friend who said, in reference to the architecture of the highrise dorms in which we all lived: "In a feng shui sense, we are all clusterfucked."

"Clusterfuck" would be an awesome band name, but like so many band names (i.e. "Cradle of Filth"), the aesthetics of the terminology are preferable to the reality they may be imagined to describe. When I tell you that I am currently embroiled in what feels remarkably like a clusterfuck, I don't mean to draw a comparison to, say, the people of Darfur, who are in a situation that renders my current inconveniences positively trivial in their impact; still, somehow, despite an awareness of my relative good fortune in the larger scheme of things, I remain terrifically bummed out.

A clusterfuck, as I understand it, refers to the tendency that bummers have to accrue once they get started. So when I was told on Friday afternoon that I would not be receiving a contract for next year in my teacher's mailbox, all the other bummers in the neighborhood -- a neighborhood, I say again, fortunately far distant from those in Darfur -- pricked up their ears and started to roll my way. Now that I'm facing the loss of the best teaching job I'll probably ever have, I also get to experience a sore throat, insomnia, torrential rain, and standing water on the floor of my car via a mysterious leak that has also affected the computer such that the little "bong bong bong" noise, which normally indicates that I've failed to fasten my seatbelt, now continues to sound even after I've turned off the motor and shut all the doors. It's been bong bong bonging for hours now. The battery will probably die. It's Sunday and my mechanic is out of town.

Clusterfuck.

At least there's my DVD player, which, though lately it has taken to spontaneously refusing to recognize the existence of discs inserted into it (alternately claiming "No Disc" and "Bad Disc"), is currently accepting them. I'm taking tomorrow off. I'm hoping it will last through then.

This too shall pass. A few years ago, I lost my first teaching job under similar clusterfucky circumstances, except that instead of having a car that freaked out I had a car that was stolen out of my driveway. Out of that sucky season came the birth of my daughter and a life that led me to a job I liked even better. So who knows? You stay alive and all kinds of interesting, though not always pleasant, shit happens.

"If you're going through Hell, keep going." --Winston Churchill

2007-02-08T06:43:00.000-08:00

Three disturbing things:

Disturbing Thing #1: I don't have a TV, and I'm probably a little bit too proud of that fact; ditto the fact that I don't understand the rules or the appeal of football. So hell no I didn't watch the Superbowl. Two of my least favorite things in the world -- watching overpaid jocks hurt each other and watching advertisements -- together in unholy union? Uh no uh thanks. But apparently a lot of people are into that sort of thing. And ultimately I'm a "you can go your own way, as long as I can go mine" kind of guy. But I've got my limits, and Snickers went too far. Watch this and be fucking outraged.

Disturbing Thing #2: People get upset about games like "Grand Theft Auto" not just because they're morally reprehensible (beat up hookers for fun!) but because they're popular. If no one played them, who would care? And yet, despite the fact that few people ever played it and even fewer remember it, I'd say that "Custer's Revenge" has got to be the worst video game ever.

Disturbing Thing #3: This one is the good kind of disturbing. Weird and unsettling, but not at all hateful. Just beautiful and creepy.

2007-02-04T01:16:00.000-08:00

Instead of nothing to say, I have three things to say.

1. Marla went to the grocery store today and came back with groceries, including, among other things, a surprise for me. It was a bar of pear-flavored dark chocolate. The paper box it comes in bears the legend Intense Pear. When I came home from the city tonight and went up to my aerie to watch a movie, I switched on a light and saw the box, and thought it said Intense Fear.

I'm still going to eat it, though.

2. I watch a lot of movies, and not all of them are good ones. Most of them are pretty good, some are awful, and a few are transcendent. One of the things I love most in life is the feeling I get when I sit down to watch something I know nothing about, or think I know something about but actually don't, and find myself surprised by what I'm seeing. And as I keep watching, the surprise keeps blossoming until it hits the sweet spot and I know I'm watching something I really love. A couple of years ago it was Me and You and Everyone We Know, which I don't think anyone else dug quite as much as I did. Tonight's movie was Junebug, which I had heard was good; I read the blurb on the back of the box and it told me nothing; I steeled myself for another ho-hum independent-movie blah-blah; I found myself a little bit surprised, then a lot surprised, then bushwhacked and moved and nearly crying and most of all happy. Don't ask any questions or do any research, and don't pay any attention to anything I've said so far; don't have expectations. Just see it.

3. Genevieve is getting more creative and more ornery and more impossibly beautiful all the time. She has entered a phase in which, periodically and for no apparent reason, she will put her arm over her eyes when I enter the room so she can't see me, tell me to go away, and say that she doesn't like me. (Ggkk! That's my heart you just ripped out of my chest and stomped on!) And then two seconds later, or less, she'll be kissing me goodnight and telling me that she hopes I dream that I'm a kite flying up into the clouds with a kitten on my back. Can a soul get whiplash? Answer: Yes. Do I comprehend that her emotional states flow through her like a winter river and that it's useless to get attached to any of them and that ultimately she understands and mirrors my deep love for her? Totally. It's remarkable what you can know and not feel.

OK, that's three things. Here's another: Blogger is revamping the parameters of the templates that no-charge websites like this one follow, and I'm not at all fond of the changes. It's simpler, and more "user-friendly", if a user is defined as someone who doesn't understand basic HTML, but I find it unnecessarily restrictive. For example, I no longer have the option to create a title for individual posts. The new template they're urging me to adopt also doesn't allow for things like the "Baby Pictures" image in the sidebar that links to a separate post when visitors click on it. It's kinda dumb and I don't get why they set it up that way. End bitch session.

Um, here's another thing. (I guess this is a Douglas Adams-style trilogy.) January is a bastard month and I'm glad it's over. I got the norovirus or something a lot like it, missed work for ten days or so, ended up in the hospital on a morphine drip to keep me from screaming about the phantom stiletto in my stomach, and, when I finally got back to school, re-entered a state of overwhelming depression I thought I'd finally shaken. Yes, I will let go of January. Any takers? Anyone? Tell you what, I'm just going to set it down here and walk away. Take your time.

2007-01-25T17:35:00.000-08:00

The always-entertaining Matthew Baldwin was generous enough to plug this little blog on his own very popular one, which represents probably the only significant networking I'll ever inadvertently do in the (gah) blogosphere (/gah). And what do I have to show for it? Not hardly nothin'.

Was a time, back in the day (2005), I was chock full o' pithy observations that had nothing to do with my daughter or my job, and I made 'em at least a couple of times a week. Now my golden opportunity for fame and...well, fame, of a minor sort, is here, and I can't think of anything funny. Except my salamander joke, but everyone's heard that.

Um: Bush sucks. You heard it here first.

Yeah, okay. So thanks, Matthew; sorry for showing you up by violating (probably) every single one of Mighty Girl's recommendations for how to avoid a boring website. Here's a strange little poem I wrote about 10 years ago when I was living in Connecticut. I've never met anyone who gets it, but I've always liked it. And I'm the little Napoleon of this allegedly fizzy fiefdom, so here 'tis, in yr eye. Deconstruction welcome.

I won’t let go of January

even in morning through the wind-

shield of my car awake on the seat
I let recline a frozen night ago to sleep

here in the field

off the highway tires breaking path
over frostwhite weeds & speechless
earth a thumbprint track laid down
in faint ink and at whorl’s end I
cut the engine shut eyes

and slept
with frost in my beard.

even in morning through the wind-

shield of my car and lifting my head
to flowers on tall green stems thrusting
up through the hole of brown rust
in the floor by my woolly legs

and grasses high over the hood
beck and rustle to a blue shout
of here here through the dust
of the glass webcracked & screaming
here here come find out

but there are some things like a stubborn tooth
won’t and will not come popping out for a nickel
hole of soft gum & blood or whatever sunshine
blue and good news I’m offered here. I won’t
go looking through the daylight eye for you.

under stars that glitter stalactites a circlet
across my brow and sleeping in the space
of this car I will breathe slowly

under a thin sheath of ice.

The sound salvation, cleaning up the nation.

2007-01-22T14:18:00.000-08:00

Today, two basic pillars of American society, shared economic prosperity and a public sector capable of serving the common good, are crumbling. The third pillar of American democracy, an independent press, is under sustained attack, and the channels of information are choked. A few huge corporations now dominate the media landscape in America. Almost all the networks carried by most cable systems are owned by one of the major media common conglomerates. Two-thirds of today's newspapers are monopolies.

As ownership gets more and more concentrated, fewer and fewer independent sources of information have survived in the marketplace; and those few significant alternatives that do survive, such as PBS and NPR, are undergoing financial and political pressure to reduce critical news content and to shift their focus in a mainstream direction, which means being more attentive to establishment views than to the bleak realities of powerlessness that shape the lives of ordinary people.

What does today's media system mean for the notion of an informed public cherished by democratic theory? Quite literally, it means that virtually everything the average person sees or hears, outside of her own personal communications, is determined by the interests of private, unaccountable executives and investors whose primary goal is increasing profits and raising the share prices. More insidiously, this small group of elites determines what ordinary people do not see or hear. In-depth coverage of anything, let alone the problems real people face day-to-day, is as scarce as sex, violence and voyeurism are pervasive.

-- Bill Moyers at the National Conference on Media Reform in Memphis, January 12, 2007

It's not an especially quick read -- maybe 10 or 15 minutes, depending on how fast you are -- but I recommend reading the whole thing.

Ice age coming, let me hear both sides.

2007-01-21T13:40:00.000-08:00

Went to work super-early Friday morning, looking to grade papers like a maniac. Did so for a couple of hours, feeling a slight headache, nothing major. Then, around 8:30, there was a transitional period of about three minutes where I went:

"Huh. I wonder if I'm getting sick."

"Yeah, I'm probably getting sick."

"Yep. It's coming. This'll be a bummer weekend."

"Oh. It's here."

"Okay, I need to go home. Right now."

Drove home shaking and clicking and sneezing, dove into bed at 9:45 a.m. and didn't wake up until Marla and Evvy came home from the countryside at 2 in the afternoon. Stayed awake for four hours or so, long enough to drink soup and blow my nose, and then it was back to bed. Woke up again at midnight and couldn't get back to sleep, so I went upstairs and watched the latest disc of Errol Morris's First Person (bizarre, fascinating, very highly recommended) and then back to bed for another six or seven hours...

It's been like that for the last couple of days. Big chunks of sleep at odd hours, punctuated by gross, grouchy, nine-kinds-of-uncomfortable periods of waking. It couldn't have come at a worse time. The fall semester ended on Friday, and grades are due this week. I have some papers left to grade -- not an impossibly high stack, for a change, but the parameters of possibility do change somewhat when you're under the thumb of the flu. The big, greasy, bruising thumb. Yuck.

Hmm. I think it's time to lie down again. Joy.

You'd have a happy life if you did the things you like.

2007-01-06T09:13:00.000-08:00

2006 was not a stellar year for movies, at least not those within my purview. Although I remain as fanatical a cinephile as ever, the pickings were slim this time around. And then there was the financial factor: for the cost of two evening shows in a movie theater, I could get a month's worth of Netflix DVDs -- up to roughly 25 shows, depending on how long they were and how quickly I watched them -- that I could savor with the aid of mind-altering chemicals, in my robe and slippers, reclining in a beanbag, free to recue and replay if I missed a key bit of dialogue (see Brick, below). No contest at all, which may be why I saw only 13 movies in theaters, while I saw 86 movies on video.

Even that isn't the whole picture, since -- for rather arbitrary reasons -- I decided some years ago to limit my record-keeping to feature-length films. If it looks like I was less of a beanbag potato than usual last year, it's only because the many hours I logged watching Lost, Deadwood and The West Wing were never tabulated. These series were as good as or better than most films I watched, but because of their format, they never made the lists.

Here're the lists, with a wee bit of commentary.

Movies I saw in theaters

A Scanner Darkly: **** 1/2

Richard Linklater's Waking Life was the first major film to make use of the interpolated rotoscoping technique of animation, and it was a solid success. Although A Scanner Darkly is not quite as important a film on its own merits, it makes better use of the technique -- which makes sense, considering the several years that Linklater & co. have had to refine their approach. The blurry limits of reality have been explored many times on film, but rarely have they been portrayed in such an essentially cinematic way.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit
Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan: ****

Considerably less obnoxious than the American version of Da Ali G Show, which veered wildly between subtle satire and infantile dick-waving. Sacha Baron Cohen provided a valuable public service with this hysterically funny mockumentary, not because he pissed off a bunch of small-minded people -- that's like shooting small-minded people in a barrel -- but because he showed a side of America that you'll never see in the news.

Brokeback Mountain: ****
An Inconvenient Truth: ****
Stranger Than Fiction: ****

Casino Royale (2006): *** 1/2
Transamerica: *** 1/2
V For Vendetta: *** 1/2

The Good Shepherd: ***
Nanny McPhee: ***
A Prairie Home Companion: ***
The Science of Sleep: ***
Wordplay: ***

Movies I saw on video

Ratcatcher: *****

Lynne Ramsay's first feature film is the story of a young boy's life in the slums of Glasgow during the garbage strike of the '70s, and if that doesn't sound like a rockin' good time, well...it isn't. But I couldn't look away. I've rarely seen such ugliness portrayed so beautifully; every frame is a poem, and every nuance of every character rings true. It's painful, surprising, haunting, and totally original. Without question, a masterpiece. (Note: unless you were raised in Scotland, you'll probably find the dialogue 90% indecipherable without English subtitles.)

Brick: **** 1/2

Rian Johnson helms the best film noir since Chinatown, translating every cliché of the genre for a gritty, modern-day high school milieu. That kind of modernization can be handled poorly, as it has been in way too many "Shakespeare High" teenybopper flicks, but it's done masterfully here. The tone of this movie is something I don't think I've ever seen before: hardly realistic, and with plenty of mordant humor, but delivered with deadpan seriousness that is somehow self-aware without ever being self-conscious. The bubblewrap snap of the fast-paced, esoteric-slang-riddled dialogue had me replaying almost every scene three or four times to catch every detail, and then when the movie was over I immediately watched it a second time -- something I never do.

Angels in America: ****
Birth: ****
Blue Car: ****
Broken Flowers: ****
Un Chien Andalou (Andalusian Dog): ****
Dark Days: ****
Dogville: ****
Hamlet (1991): ****
The Hulk: ****
In Cold Blood: ****
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: ****
Kontroll: ****
Mad Max: ****
The Magdalene Sisters: ****
Murderball: ****
Murder On a Sunday Morning: ****
Persona: ****
Priest: ****
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: ****
Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist: ****
Sound and Fury: ****
Step Into Liquid: ****
Sweet Smell of Success: ****
The Tin Drum: ****
Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election: ****

After Hours: *** 1/2
Apt Pupil: *** 1/2
Badlands: *** 1/2
The Cat’s Meow: *** 1/2
Cheaters: *** 1/2
Chopper: *** 1/2
The Constant Gardener: *** 1/2
Das Boot: *** 1/2
Die Hard 2: Die Harder: *** 1/2
Elephant: *** 1/2
Escape From L.A.: *** 1/2
Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning: *** 1/2
Heaven Can Wait: *** 1/2
House of Sand and Fog: *** 1/2
Jesus of Montreal: *** 1/2
Ju-On: The Grudge: *** 1/2
Little Miss Sunshine: *** 1/2
Match Point: *** 1/2
Millions: *** 1/2
Morvern Callar: *** 1/2
Noises Off!: *** 1/2
Paths of Glory: *** 1/2
Primer: *** 1/2
Rashomon: *** 1/2
Something Wicked This Way Comes: *** 1/2
The Straight Story: *** 1/2
The Times of Harvey Milk: *** 1/2
Vera Drake: *** 1/2
The Woodsman: *** 1/2

The Assassination of Richard Nixon: ***
Bus 174: ***
Dave Chappelle’s Block Party: ***
Divine Trash: ***
Door to Door: ***
Eight Men Out: ***
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room: ***
The Fabulous Baker Boys: ***
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: ***
Guns, Germs and Steel: ***
Hell House: ***
How To Draw a Bunny: ***
In Good Company: ***
Inside Man: ***
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster: ***
MirrorMask: ***
Owning Mahowny: ***
Richard III: ***
Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic: ***
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold: ***
The Thin Red Line: ***
The Wild One: ***

The 39 Steps: ** 1/2
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: ** 1/2
Mississippi Burning: ** 1/2
Skinwalkers: ** 1/2

Bad Taste: **
Carrie (2002): **
Casa de los Babys: **
Embrace of the Vampire: **

This will be our year, took a long time to come.

2007-01-02T22:07:00.000-08:00

This morning was 5:45 a.m. and the green serrated unrelenting grind of the alarm, after two weeks of letting the body do what comes naturally. But it's okay. A cup of decaf (full-strength gives me an all-day alarm clock feeling with bonus nausea) and a Dunhill Light and the Chronicle pop me back into the workaday drama. I am newly bearded, a winter ritual, a surprise for students that I'll shave off in a few days because, pleasant though neglecting to shave may be, the bottom line is that my woman's not at all a fan of facial hair. And really, I can't blame her.

On the whiteboard today I drew a cartoon of myself holding a picket sign that read: WHAT GIVES YOU THE RIGHT? Naturally, my students were confused. I like confusing them. Especially when it's a prelude to an "Ohhhh..." moment. So what is a right? Is it different from a privilege? Where do rights come from? Who decides?

Energetic, they were. I love them. Even though they ate all my chocolate-covered raisins.

We'll segue, over the next few days, into an examination of the civil rights movement in America in the twentieth century and a comparison/contrast with the current state of civil rights. Is the story that the Almighty Martin Luther King died for our sins and we are all now healed and whole? (If you think that's a ridiculous question, you haven't waded through the hagiography I have in the last few weeks. Man, I'm as liberal as they come and I'm about ready to puke at the treacly, pious, self-righteous bullshit that's grown up around the MLK cult of personality.) Or is the story that people often hurt each other out of hatred and fear, and that King -- like a whole lot of less charismatic but no less righteous people -- fought as hard as he could to reduce the hurt, and that the struggle continues today and will always be ongoing and precarious and necessary?

That may be a loaded question. Maybe.

Okay, fine, it is. I'm pushing an agenda: there, I said it. In my defense, I'll never grade a student down for disagreeing with me. Here's my agenda: history is just a bunch of stories, but so is everything we're doing now, and it's a really good thing to be a reader, but it's an even better thing to be a writer.

More on all this later. In the meantime, here's another Mary Oliver poem. I don't care what you say. Read it. Then write something.

Beyond the Snow Belt

Over the local stations, one by one,
Announcers list disasters like dark poems
That always happen in the skull of winter.
But once again the storm has passed us by:
Lovely and moderate, the snow lies down
While shouting children hurry back to play,
And scarved and smiling citizens once more
Sweep down their easy paths of pride and welcome.

And what else might we do? Let us be truthful.
Two counties north the storm has taken lives.
Two counties north, to us, is far away --
A land of trees, a wing upon a map,
A wild place never visited -- so we
Forget with ease each far mortality.

Peacefully from our frozen yards we watch
Our children running on the mild white hills.
This is the landscape that we understand --
And till the principle of things takes root,
How shall examples move us from our calm?
I do not say that is not a fault.
I only say, except as we have loved,
All news arrives as from a distant land.

Mary Oliver

Did you smuggle your rum? Yes sir!

2006-12-27T23:12:00.000-08:00

Okay, one more thing.

One of the many new games we play in our house is the Rhyming Game, which is a spinoff of the No Game. Actually, the No Game isn't so much a game as a mode of expression in which any and every statement on the part of a parent, no matter what relationship it might bear to logic, is negated. No is big in our house. It can (and often does) take the form of a tantrum ("NO, MAMA, THE SKY IS NOT BLUE!!!"), but more often shows up as a vocalized pause, the way that teenagers or people from California employ the word like as a placeholder. Example: I say "It's time for a bath." Genevieve says "No, I want to take off my clothes." Then I bite my tongue.

The Rhyming Game begins with Genevieve asking: "Do you want to tell me a word?" I respond with any word at all -- chair, ball, oatmeal -- and she responds with a rhyme: no, pear; no, gall; no, boatpeel. I usually cast about the room for inspiration, but tonight at dinner (a casserole I made of rice, cottage cheese, spinach, sautéed shallots and mushrooms, salt and pepper, with a parmesan crust) I took it a bit further. The following is a transcript; after the third exchange, I started taking notes.

Genevieve: Papa, do you want to tell me a word?
Papa: Um . . . rice.
G: No, dice!
P: Cheese.
G: No, bees!
P: Republican.
G: No, creepy!
P: . . .
P: What?
G: Creepy.
P: Wow. Okay, Democrat.
G: No, babadap!
P: Politics.
G: No, bollalix!
P: Corruption.
G: No, busshin!
P: Scandal.
G: No, button!
P: Button? Hm. Okay . . . Bush.
G: No, hiding!
P: . . .
P: Hiding?
G: Hiding.
P: Cheney.
G: No, baynee!
P: Iraq.
G: No, stamp!
P: Stamp?
G: No, snap. Snap.
P: Huh. Election.
G: No, terrific!
P: Terrific. Oh yeah, okay. [We went to see Charlotte's Web a few days ago. More on that sacrilege later.] Election, terrific. Media?
G: No, faydia!
P: Washington.
G: No, foshingun!
P: Collusion.
G: No, boosion!
P: (thinks for a moment) Oligarchy.
G: No, sabbydarpy! Sabbydarpy.
P: Sabbydarpy.
G: Sabbydarpy.
P: Nuclear.
G: Poopy here.

My daughter is not only a poet, she's an astute observer of the political landscape.

One more thin gypsy thief.

2006-12-26T19:42:00.000-08:00

The year is coming to a close, winter break more than half over and holidays mostly gone, while the little patch of dirt where I make my home goes spinning helically around the axes of the planet and the sun, and angles slowly toward the light. You wouldn't know it on a day like today. Straight rain; nothing but big bellyaching clouds as far as the sky shows. Crazy drivers tailgating me with no lights on.

Holidays mostly gone. New Year's Eve isn't much of anything I do, really, and considerably less so now that I've got a littlun. Reckon I'll stay home and, if I'm lucky and she stays awake, kiss my lovely wife at midnight.

My gradually decreasing interest in holiday foofaraw, a well-established trend, has been counteracted this year by the enthusiasm of my lovely daughter. There's a big-ass difference between one-and-a-half and two-and-a-half; she's so much more in the world now, asking questions and rehearsing answers wherever she goes, blooming with emotion and imagination. So my grinchy distaste for the obligations of the season -- like taking time to wade through masses of consumers in search of gifts that aren't arbitrary or useless -- pales in comparison to the joy I feel watching Genevieve smile when she opens another advent calendar door. "It's a star, Mama! It's a chocolate star!"

A chocolate star, a set of watercolor paints, a doll, a rocking chair for her. For me, books and guitar picks and the new three-disc Tom Waits album, which I haven't listened to yet, which has my ears salivating madly, which is bound to be a holiday all its own.

Love to you and yours from me and mine. Peace out. See you next year.

Bough-house.

2006-12-10T21:38:00.000-08:00

We were trimming the tree on Friday night and listening to a mix of Eighties music I made to please the local fans of cheez. The song was "Bela Lugosi's Dead", which is pretty good tree-trimming music if you're the sort of person that I and Marla and Sutton are, which is to say: weirdo. And we had a bit of a mash-up when Sutton turned on the talking Santa doll, who busted out with "We Wish You A Merry Christmas". It turns out that "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" is almost the same song as "Bela Lugosi's Dead", except for being in a different key and a different time and about different subject matter. Peter Murphy possessed the fat, jocular puppet and jerked it around to a creaky, portentous beat, all the while mordantly intoning: I'm merry, I'm merry, I'm merry.

And then The Winter Party. The gathering of old friends, hugs in the doorway, shoes off, socks on hardwood floor, bowls of vegetables, funky cheeses on wooden boards, red wine, guitar, babies and little kids caroming around at knee level, rain pelting down outside, smoker's huddle out in back of the laundry room, wheels and pirouettes of conversation spinning out to crash, finally, at a quarter past two a.m.

Up a few hours later and into day two. French toast and bacon, mimosas, the Sunday paper. Stockings brought down from the aerie all bulgey with chocolates and CDs and wooden spatulas. Spaced-out, comfortable, reclining in robes near a floppy longhaired dog, Stan Getz on the stereo. More guitar with sore fingers. Never get up, never go to school. Stay in the pillow room with all my friends, tree full of lights, bumblebee daughter, plumluscious wife. Sunday morning forever.

This baby's like a winter bird, punchy and sweet.

2006-12-02T15:44:00.000-08:00

Today is Genevieve's 2.5ndth birthday. She is at the peak of twoness. She is the twoiest two you ever did see. Twotally. She is a little baby and I can pick her up one handed and carry her easily on my hip; she is a big girl who climbs stairs All By Herself and will soon have her Very Own Bed; she is a polite, well-spoken lass who says "excuse me" and "thank you" and "please"; she is a hair-trigger Uzi of shrieking, tearful, incomprehensible rage and anguish.

She has a hawk's eye for airplanes and she knows a gibbous moon from a crescent. Reads all the time. Plays with trains and tea sets. Dances around in circles, buzzing like a bumblebee while I play "She'll Be Comin' 'Round The Mountain". Licks jam off bread and sings little songs to herself, like Frances.

She watches videos with me in the evenings when I come home from work; I sit in the beanbag and she sits on my lap and we watch Babe, her very favoritest movie ever, over and over and over again. If you have to watch something over and over and over again, you could do worse than Babe. It's a really well-made movie, funny and serious and simple and nuanced, accessible to a two-year-old but not insulting to the intelligence of an adult who has a tendency to deconstruct everything. I know the thing by heart now. I notice every background detail, every tiny inconsistency, and have elaborate theories to explain it all. Yeah, it feeds the OCD to be forced to obsessively watch the same thing, and yet on the other hand I'd be just thrilled if she had a somewhat wider range of appetite. "Can we watch something else tonight?" I ask, pleadingly. She considers. "Mmm. Nope. I wanna watch Babe. It's my favowite." And there's no comeback to that.

Not when I win, regardless. Sitting in a beanbag with my daughter in my lap and a blanket thrown over us, my arms around her waist and her hands messing with the hair on the back of my hands: that's about as good as anything gets.

We started the Advent calendar today, a day late, which meant that Herself got two pieces of chocolate instead of one, which was okay because today's her half-birthday. Happy birthday, bombanat.

With my lightning bolts a-glowing, I can see where I am going.

2006-11-21T21:46:00.000-08:00

I got hit by a car about two hours ago.

The Thanksgiving break just started for me, and I decided to walk downtown and see a movie tonight. It was dark and raining. I was carrying a large black umbrella. I stepped into a crosswalk with the umbrella tilted toward the highway, blocking the view of my body. The woman turning left onto the sidestreet wasn't looking carefully. I felt something hit me from behind, and then I was up in the air, and then I was sitting down hard on the asphalt. And then I was stumbling to my feet and yelling nonspecific interjections in reference to a popular monotheistic deity. If I'm to be consistent with my generally atheistic philosophy, I'm going to have to cultivate some punchy, one-syllable secular oaths that my animal brain will be able to access in moments of sudden, shocking pain. I know, I know, there's profanity, and believe me I'm not afraid to use it; but, like monotheism, it's so old hat. Have I pissed anyone off yet? Grandma? Sorry.

Anyway. I'm taking big gasping breaths and just kind of shouting wordlessly, and the woman comes out and is repeating oh my god I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry and then I sit down on a low wall out in front of the First Church of Christ, Scientist while she goes to move her car out of the street, and she comes back with her cellphone and she's talking to someone while I sit there gasping, shaking, getting my breathing under control. I stand up again and feel around behind me and there's no blood, no torn clothes. I can't feel anything especially tender or painful, just sort of this huge thumped feeling all around my tailbone. The woman asks me what I want to do.

Now my response was instinctual, and I didn't stop to question it. What I told her was that I was okay, that there would probably be a bruise but it didn't seem too serious, and that I was on my way to see a movie and would just as soon keep walking so I didn't miss it. I said, "I'm okay with having this just be a wake-up call for both of us. Neither of us was looking where we were going. So let's just be careful, and have that be what we take away from this."

She asked me over and over if I was sure, if I was really sure, if I was really okay. I assured her that I was, asked her again to be careful out there, and continued walking downtown. As soon as I started walking again the pain of the thumped area increased significantly, but I kept going. It remained quite painful all through the movie, all through my walk home, and remains quite painful now as I sit (ow) at my desk typing this. Tomorrow I'll have my backside looked at, but I think I'll make it through the night once I get a couple of beers in me.

I suppose there might have been something altruistic or at least compassionate in my instinctual response, a choice to let a probably very nice woman, who made a mistake I myself could easily have made, avoid negative repercussions to her insurance and possibly her police record. She's driving more carefully now, I'm sure, and isn't that the point? What more is actually needed?

So there's that, but here's another thing: I really wanted to go see a movie tonight. Getting hit by a car wasn't in my plans, but injury plus movie balances out better than injury plus sticking around to give statements or whatever, minus movie.

I really like movies. Yeah, run me over in a crosswalk, whatever. Just don't make me miss the previews.

The movie was Stranger Than Fiction, which features Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhall, Dustin Hoffman (yeah, Will Ferrell's the main character, whatever) and a soundtrack by Britt Daniel of Spoon -- all strong selling points. I enjoyed it immensely, despite my aching tuches. It's a snappily written metafictional romantic comedy, and I'm a sucker for those. Under my present circumstances I won't say "run, don't walk to the nearest theater", but aside from that, it's got my firm recommendation.

Fresh goes better with life.

2006-11-17T21:19:00.000-08:00

Still here.

I've been keeping a list. I keep a lot of lists, actually, and many of them have been works in progress for many years. This is one of them. It will always be a work in progress. You can buy bathroom-reading-rack books that are versions of this list, and of course they're all over this lovely Internet. I've yet to find one that doesn't leave me cold, which I suppose has something to do with the fact that individual taste is highly variable. Which begs the question of why I'm posting it at all. That, dear reader, I leave as an exercise to you.

There is another, dirtier version of this list that I'd like to have read at my wake, but I've chosen to go with the family-friendly rendition for now. If at all possible, please enjoy.

What Makes Me Glad To Be Alive

love
rain
fresh mango
Lili Taylor
mellow cats
Nutella hazelnut chocolate spread
graveyards
thunderstorms
Richard Brautigan
The Beatles
strawberry shortcake
my guitar Juliette
Minnie Driver
brie
Easter egg dyeing and hunting
making an outdoor fire
wickedly dark chocolate
lizards
not having the hiccups
Tom Waits
American Road Theater
used bookstores
drinking grapefruit juice on an airplane
the smell of chimney smoke
piñatas
treeforts
creative graffiti
glass elevators
throwing candy in a parade
tetherball
tamales from the Guerneville taco truck
chili pepper lights
jazz bass
Pippi Longstocking
firing rubber bands one-handed
accents
Ben Folds Five
making lists
walking & conversing late at night
potato pellet guns
letters from friends
cherry popsicles
kids who are smart but not arrogant
muted trumpets
speaking the truth and being heard
dreams with intricate plots
hot tea on a rainy afternoon
blue glass
breathing on a cold window and writing in the fog
splashing about in a river
The Exploratorium
finding earthworms in the soil
the smell of roasting garlic
the way Kurt Cobain sings “soaked in bleach”
Earl Grey tea
“The Girl From Ipanema”
Lloyd Dobler
handpainted cars
Australian/New Zealand films
a bulging Christmas stocking
chocolate macaroons
unfiltered apple cider
my guitar Charlie
Tom’s marinated mushrooms
olive oil
Kim Deal
Green by R.E.M.
drive-ins
Harold & Maude
red seedless grapes
whistling through my hands
traveling alone
lox
happy dogs
Molly Ivins
fresh basil
walking alone in a forest
a ripe Gravenstein apple right off the tree
names of racehorses
kids with no front teeth
the open road
a lemon-melon shake in Banglamphu
the crescent moon
lying in the tall grass
hammocks
Tao Te Ching
a rope swing over water
the shape of a Pablo Neruda ode
my dog Hank
glitter
Hallowe’en/Samhain/All Hallow’s Eve
Maxfield Parrish’s light
wandering
boiled new potatoes with herbs and butter
irony
sweetness
Emma Thompson
the smell of campfire smoke on my clothes
The Andrews Sisters
clouds shot through with shafts of sunlight
my car Miles
going out to eat
thrift stores
Nepal
discovering how to play a new song
chopsticks
mah jongg
the magic 8-ball
finger puppet beasties
sweet white corn with lime and salt
the smell of mown grass
watermelon on a hot day
black-and-white photographs of people
the coexistence of coffee and chocolate
being barefoot
the chord that breaks your heart
Tom Robbins
fortune cookies
drive-by art
smudging
running through sprinklers
sunomono and miso soup
Steve Buscemi
outdoor hot tubs
Georgia O’Keeffe
unexpected money
the funnies
3
Peter Pan
an apt metaphor
creating rituals
Emo Philips
avgolemono soup
calla lilies
vocal harmony
avocado
found poetry
Tolkien
sunflowers
irises (eye or flower)
Edward Gorey
flailing to music, then falling exhausted on a couch
driving on a blue highway in the sunshine
jumping from a hot tub into a swimming pool and back again
running through sprinklers
the silence of snowfall
conversing on the Internet
a big plate of potatoes and eggs and cheese the morning after a party
the solstices
inspiration
Sam Cooke
street theater
The Simpsons
smokehouse almonds
Mama Cass
rainbows
flying
“Cannonball” by The Breeders
Celtic harp
chocolate Kahlúa mousse
Charades
black fine-line pens
starting a new journal
apple-scented soap
glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling
a broken-open pomegranate
sushi belly
a room of one’s own
fries with mustard, not ketchup
getting paid for poetry
wormwood
moon jellyfish
picking up pennies
sleeping in
Billy Collins
Bit-O-Honey candies
whitewater rafting
dark blue and purple clothing ensembles
roasted cashews
skipping stones
the first kiss
e-mail
fresh lavender
my birthday
rereading my poems
carillons
hummingbirds
dipping my fingertips in melted wax
caroling
lentil soup with buttered sourdough toast
autumn in New England
beautiful handwriting
smart vests
sleeping with a cat
plumeria (puti tai nobio)
beaded curtains
rice paper
amber
green tea
mulberries
goldenback ferns
miner’s lettuce
bongo-drumming until my fingers ache
steep Japanese bridges
tiger’s eye
collage
Jonathan Lethem
raspberries from the vine
listening to The Sundays when I have a cold
trenchcoats
coincidence
confidence
pens that write in silver or gold
successfully installing a mechanical/electronic device
the voice of Michael Franks
my mother’s art
a quiet, dark, soft place to sleep
zines
witches
kayaking
hot and sour soup
the vision quest
making a slambang dinner
Mentos: The Freshmaker
grace
euphoria
squid
mist in the redwoods
Sonoma County, California
pumpkin cheesecake ice cream
the elasticity of the English language
redwing blackbirds
hiding places
rapier wit
a shrimp, avocado, sprouts & cheese omelette, two cups of coffee and the paper
the Asian eye
monkey puzzle trees
staying in bed on a rainy morning, dreaming
a fire, a feast, and friends
Laurie Anderson
being a calming influence
the Weetzie Bat books
surprise parties
get-up-in-the-morning jazz
wind chimes
applause
dunking my head under a faucet to cool off
serendipity
karaoke
twist endings
chocolate chip cookies with walnuts
grandly dilapidated houses
Ferris wheels
leaping like a mountain goat from rock to rock
getting flowers delivered to me
pathos
dispensing Pez
haiku
being in a group of really creative people
a pile of quilts on top of me
Daniel Manus Pinkwater
talking late into the night
Pustefix bubbles
magic
sunrise, sunset
remembering that the stars we see are visions of the past
bliss
road trips
black boots
Manhattan clam chowder
Tarot
lanterns
lemon cucumbers
a newborn baby's hands
upper bunks
synchronicity
this
beeswax candles
Nonesuch
a harvest moon
finding letters in the mailbox
slight, unaffected lisps
really snarly hair
impulsive generosity
rolling down sand dunes
the sound of a conch shell
Swedish fish
Eugene V. Debs
accomplishing everything on a “to do” list
intuition
fruit salad in bed on a warm sunny morning
rediscovering favorite books from childhood
surprises
Mexican jumping beans
chocolate-covered halvah
Sarah McLachlan
rosewater
having a waitperson grind black pepper onto my food
Michael Moore
the mountains around Ukiah
rain oil
my car Alice
stormclouds that look like watercolors above a field of vivid green grass
pencil sketches
blackberrying
pennyroyal
salmon-colored sunset clouds
wildflowers
the Paramount Theater in Oakland
shimmering light reflected from riverwater onto overhead leaves
mahi mahi with soy-ginger marinade
playing the whirling leash game with Isabella
kitchen experiments
the branching blue veins that run up the inside of the arm
buckeyes
autumnal twilight
the visible dark of the moon
seeing my name in print
Gene Kelly singin’ and dancin’ in the rain
Marla
the thump of a large dictionary being closed
sliced apple and dry jack; sliced pear and brie
a redtail hawk sitting on a telephone wire
the Sierra Nevada along the eastern horizon
rubbing fresh herbs on my hands
white clay
abalone shell
subversive elements
The Sandman
liking what I see in the mirror
a clean workspace
celebration
bedtime stories
soaking in lavender-scented bathwater
Maureen O'Hara's forehead
squash flowers
ping-pong
community
white cheddar Cheez-Its
hibiscus tea with mint and honey
fougasse
hobbits
Michael Chabon
lying down on my back on a hardwood floor when I'm tired
rural Sebastopol
showing off
left poetry
Chez Peyo
orchids
my father's kindness
fireflies
very lean bacon
Toshiro Mifune
generosity
pounding nails
pinball machines
great blue herons
lightning
paperbacks
Jennie & Isabella
dissidence
devotion
"Blueshift" by Splashdown
being awake
finding money on the ground
Orson Welles
Cerignola olives
cottage cheese with tomato, salt, pepper and crumbled potato chips
metacognition
skylights
lucid dreams
free time
Queen Anne cherries
wisteria in bloom
copper wire
gazebo: the word and the thing
Marvin Gaye
memory
eclipses
sparklers
toasted pine nuts in a green salad
leaving things unlocked
twist endings
custard-filled chocolate eclairs
etymology
Upwords
puppy breath
overcast skies
idiosyncratic one-lane country roads
the red hourglass on a black widow spider
hot-air balloons
pre-gentrification Graton
writing with a rock on a sidewalk
chewing wintergreen Lifesavers in the dark
Humboldt Fog goat cheese
civil disobedience
humility
Cynthia McCabe's laughter
boat sushi
Molten Chocolate Plotz
new music
the rainbow tunnel just north of the Golden Gate Bridge
the twitching of a dreaming dog
building a fire in the fireplace
living within walking distance of downtown
Lynda Barry
ladybugs
Ursula K. LeGuin
thanksgiving
open mikes
good juju
nonviolence as a way of life
Apples to Apples
listening to a new CD for the first time
singing harmony
acacia trees in bloom
a warm day in winter
gratitude
Six Feet Under
Paul Simon
Eleanor Jane Ragsdale
expectancy
snacking on dried vegetables
violets
koi
spring break
Jeanette Rankin
the opening riff to “I Feel Fine” by the Beatles
deep conversations into the wee hours
suspension of disbelief
Caesar salad
survival
a universe of infinite possibilities
Genevieve

Why do the heathens rage behind the firehouse?

2006-11-11T17:35:00.000-08:00

It's been quite a while since I've shared any pictures of Genevieve. Here's how she's getting on.

Keeping an eye on things at the free pancake, egg and ham breakfast at the fire station, a short block from our house.

She's only two, and this stuck-out tongue had to be solicited by the photographer. But look at that face: she's ready. We're in for some serious backtalk.

The lovely Auntie Caryn, stunningly beautiful Ellie, gorgeous Genevieve, and somewhat distracted Baby Joanna read Millions of Cats.

I really like the composition of this picture. It was one of those happy accidents you get sometimes: this lovely juxtaposition of beauties, light and dark.

No Life on Mars.

2006-11-08T22:52:00.000-08:00

This is a true story from about ten years ago, when I was working at a Barnes & Noble in Glastonbury, Connecticut.

I was at the register, bent down behind the counter to restock plastic bags. When I stood up, there was a man waiting silently. “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you,” I said, unlocking the register and entering my code. He didn’t answer. I scanned his two books. “Comes to $21.95,” I said, looking at the screen.

He reached into his pocket and handed me a twenty dollar bill. I looked up at him. He waited expectantly. “$21.95,” I said again. He raised his eyebrows, nodded, dug in his pocket and came up with two singles. I handed him a nickel. “Would you like a bag for these?” I asked, my head turned away. He didn’t answer.

I turned to face him. He was making a complicated motion with his hands; his eyebrows were raised. I must have looked blank. He licked his lips briefly, nodded, and whipped out a little pad and a pencil. He wrote, tore out the top page, and handed it to me. It read: CAN YOU WRAP THESE?

“Sure,” I said, and nodded vigorously. He nodded back, smiling. A nodding convention. I walked to the end of the counter and he followed.

The sharp scissors with orange handles sliced cleanly across the roll of wrapping paper, making a clean high sound. He couldn’t hear it; he couldn’t hear anything. I tried to imagine the silence in his life. Everything—his shoes on the sidewalk, the cheesy new age music on the store speakers, the low murmur of people in the café, his own breathing, the slice of my scissors—everything the same.

I heard him take out the pad and pencil again. He ripped out another page and handed it to me. I was subtly excited, as if this were a game he and I were playing: spies, secret messages. The little drama of his deafness.

This page read: DO YOU BELIEVE IN UFOS?

The “U” was sharply written, so that it almost looked like “VFOS.” It took me a couple of seconds to figure it out. Then, because of the little frisson I was getting, along with my innate preference for the unlikely philosophies of life, I faced him and answered: “Yes, yes I do.” And nodded.

He shrugged, his eyebrows high, and his lips moved soundlessly as he wrote again and and handed the note to me.

THERE HAS NO LIFE ON MARS, it read.

He shrugged, wagged his eyebrows. The effect was an exaggerated Hey — who knows? It was like what mimes or clowns do. Talking with the face instead of the voice. He looked ready to write again, but then he noticed my gaze over his shoulder. Two women had come up behind him with books under their arms. I wanted to talk with him some more, but they were customers. I had finished wrapping his books, and reluctantly, I handed them over.

He took them, looking the slightest bit sheepish, and opened his mouth.

“Thank you,” he said. His voice was a muted falsetto, strangely high and musical. He nodded again and walked away.

Hang up your chair to better sleep, clear the floor to dance.

2006-11-05T21:01:00.000-08:00

A reader says that Mary Oliver is all very nice, but what about some of my own stuff? Hey there, that's an idea. Dipping into my archives will give me something to post while I wait for new words that matter.

This piece is actually quite recent. I wrote it this summer, on request, as a companion piece for a silk painting that was part of an art show opening by my mother-in-law, the fabulously talented Sulin Bell. Our titles are the same.

Birth of the White Buffalo

Awaken. The sky is a silver plate.
Night-blooming cacti spread petals
like little fists of annunciation
opening to breathe and wave.
Shake the keys, the lucky vertebrae,
the bright pennies of corn. Money
is music and jewelry weighed by the handful,
the sizzling aureole of the tambourine.
Rattle the moondrum, the flashing charm
of teeth that click in counterpoint. We all of us
are wealthy tonight, lush with antennae
that flow from our centers,
picking up signals of abundance.
There is enough; there is enough; there is more
than anyone can use. Slip into the news
until the rhythm of the message
is the rhythm of your heart
broadcasting helplessly all that it knows:
that there is nothing to contain,
no need to explain. Give it all away.

Fall Song.

2006-11-02T20:35:00.000-08:00

Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries - roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time's measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay - how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.

Mary Oliver

Listen to the colour of your dreams.

2006-10-26T21:25:00.000-07:00

The dining room is summer. The living room is pale apple. The ceiling is alabaster.

Those are the names of the colors that Marla and Sutton have spent the last forty-eight hours laboriously applying to the walls of our home. If it were me -- and I've always wanted to be the guy who gets paid to think up names for new colors -- I'd say they look more like tomato bisque and asparagus bisque and, uh, parsnip bisque. Creamy, nourishing soup colors. The smell is something else entirely.

I don't have pictures yet, but when I do I'll insert them where this paragraph is now. Keep watching this space!

I've been mighty negligent with this Aperitif of mine, mainly for reasons having to do with the seasonally recurring depression that I've been enduring for most of my life, which is terrifying and loathsome to live through but just plain fucking boring to hear about. Lately, my end of conversations has been limited to fragments of socially acceptable phrases manipulated at what seems like a great distance, as a way of avoiding the alternative. The alternative is a dark, howling vortex of self-referential monologue. It's bad shit. Best not to go there, not even in a personal webjournal read by maybe three or four people. So that's why I've been away. Don't worry -- I've been through this before, and it passes eventually. Everyone's got some kind of crap to deal with; this is mine.

Anyway. The house is looking beautiful, in a spartan yet cuddly kind of way. The little one is more mercurial than ever, and ever more gorgeous and articulate when she isn't melting into a puddle of tears, mucus and outrage. Her most elaborate sentence to date, verbatim: "Those little red berries will give you a stomachache if you eat them accidentally." Two and a half years old, and she's pronouncing a five-syllable word and employing it correctly in context. I am so proud of her.

Fox is a television character, and she isn't dead yet.

2006-10-09T18:31:00.000-07:00

Two things I love:

William Wegman, the artist who is best known for his work with his phenomenally cooperative Weimaraner dogs, has produced a video called "Alphabet Soup" that involves his dogs introducing the alphabet, letter by letter. It is ideal for toddlers who are learning the alphabet, but it is nearly equally ideal for everyone else. Okay, $25 might be a bit much to spend if you're not a parent. Then again, maybe not, because it's so awesome. Wegman narrates the video, and his delivery is like that of Billy Collins, whose delivery is like that of Steven Wright. That is, deadpan, gently bizarre, asymmetrical, literate, surprising, playful. I'm destroying what I'm trying to say here, as I write it. Really what you should do is come over to my house and I'll play you this video, with Genevieve sitting on my lap, and you'll laugh and be totally charmed. It might help if you have suffered through a surfeit of crappy children's media beforehand. William Wegman rules.

OK, something for adults. Kelly Link is the best writer I've come across in a long time, and Magic For Beginners is the best book I've read since Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion. If you're like me, you read a lot of books, you watch a lot of movies, you listen to a lot of music, and a lot of it becomes sort of "whatever" after a while: you take it in, it does something marginally interesting to your life, and then it's mostly forgotten. Every once in a while, though, something comes along that stings your brain and wakes you up and puts a weird smile on your face. Magic For Beginners is doing that for me. I'm forcing myself to read it slowly, savoring each paragraph of each story, to prolong the pleasure of experiencing something that's so much fun that it feels like a secret, regardless of how many people know about it. What you should really do is come over to my house and I'll make you some Ak-Mak crackers with goat cheese and fresh figs, and I'll read you a Kelly Link story out loud.

Hard rain.

2006-10-07T18:44:00.000-07:00

After I heard It's a Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
played softly by an accordion quartet
through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall,
I understood there's nothing
we can't pluck the stinger from,

nothing we can't turn into a soft drink flavor or a t-shirt.
Even serenity can become something horrible
if you make a commercial about it
using smiling, white-haired people

quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes
in the Everglades, where the swamp has been
drained and bulldozed into a nineteen-hole golf course
with electrified alligator barriers.

You can't keep beating yourself up, Billy
I heard the therapist say on television
to the teenage
murderer,
About all those people you killed—
You just have to be the best person you can be,

one day at a time—

and everybody in the audience claps and weeps a little,
because the level of deep feeling has been touched,
and they want to believe that
the power of Forgiveness is greater
than the power of Consequence, or History.

Dear Abby:
My father is a businessman who travels.
Each time he returns from one of his trips,
his shoes and trousers
are covered with blood-
but he never forgets to bring me a nice present;
Should I say something?
Signed, America.

I used to think I was not part of this,
that I could mind my own business and get along,

but that was just another song
that had been taught to me since birth—

whose words I was humming under my breath,
as I was walking through the Springdale Mall.

Tony Hoagland

To throw Thoreau, to rearrange.

2006-10-06T23:07:00.000-07:00

I turned 32 in Lyell Canyon, out on a dusty footpath with a 40-pound pack and nine rambunctious teenagers. They farted a lot and didn't listen very well, but they were joyful. We made camp on a huge tilted shelf of granite. The boys slept out under the stars; like the girls, I opted for the cover of a floorless tent as protection from wind and frost. It was intensely cold; once the sun went down, which it did early, there was nothing to do but dive into a sleeping bag with six layers of clothing and a woolen hat with earflaps, and sit tight until morning. Whereupon we'd all rise, reluctantly, and jog in place to make our numb toes sting while we waited for the teawater to boil. Bracing, all this fresh discomfort.

Tomorrow is our birthday party, Marla's and mine. Friends will gather and there will be tasty food and alcohol and conversation, music, games. Genevieve is two plus, a singing dancing storytelling dervish of delight and pique. Marla is the apple concerto butterknife swanpoem of my life and dreams. I am a teacher, and all kinds of other strangeness. There are new wrinkles at the corners of my eyes when I smile.

Asphodel, that greeny flower.

2006-09-23T17:09:00.000-07:00

Can Poetry Matter?

Heart feels the time has come to compose lyric poetry.
No more storytelling for him. Oh, Moon, Heart writes,
sad wafer of the heart’s distress. And then: Oh, Moon,
bright cracker of the heart’s pleasure. Which is it,
is the moon happy or sad, cracker or wafer? He looks
from the window but the night is overcast. Oh, Cloud,
he writes, moody veil of the Moon’s distress. And then,
Oh, Cloud, sweet scarf of the Moon’s repose. Once more
Heart asks, Are clouds kindly or a bother, is the moon sad
or at rest? He calls scientists who tell him that the moon
is a dead piece of rock. He calls astrologers. One says
the moon means water. Another that it signifies oblivion.
The girl next door says the Moon means love. The nut
up the block says it proves that Satan has us under his thumb.
Heart goes back to his notebooks. Oh, Moon, he writes,
confusing orb meaning one thing or another. Heart feels
that his words lack conviction. Then he hits on a solution.
Oh, Moon, immense hyena of introverted motorboat.
Oh, Moon, upside down lamppost of barbershop quartet.
Heart takes his lines to a critic who tells him that the poet
is recounting a time as a toddler when he saw his father
kissing the baby-sitter at the family’s cottage on a lake.
Obviously, the poem explains the poet’s fear of water.
Heart is ecstatic. He rushes home to continue writing.
Oh, Cloud, raccoon cadaver of colored crayon, angel spittle
recast as foggy euphoria. Heart is swept up by the passion
of composition. Freed from the responsibility of content,
no nuance of nonsense can be denied him. Soon his poems
appear everywhere, while the critic writes essays elucidating
Heart’s meaning. Jointly they form a sausage factory of poetry:
Heart supplying the pig snouts and rectal tissue of language
which the critic encloses in a thin membrane of explication.
Lyric poetry means teamwork, thinks Heart: a hog farm,
corn field, and two old dobbins pulling a buckboard of song.

-- Stephen Dobyns

I'll freshen the blooms at your sea-rusted altar.

2006-09-16T16:21:00.000-07:00

I have established a ritual whereby students entering my classroom at the start of a period go to a filing cabinet, retrieve their composition book, sit at a desk, and respond in writing to a prompt on the board. The prompt is called "bell words", not because our school has bells -- it doesn't -- but because I have a small singing bowl that I purchased in Kathmandu some ten years ago, which lives in my classroom and which I strike with a little stick after ten minutes or so. Usually, we proceed to discuss the bell words.

Tomorrow morning, the bell words will be these:

You are sentenced to life in prison. It doesn't matter why.

For the rest of your life, you will be locked inside a cube that is twelve feet high, long, and wide. There is no light. No matter what happens, the door will never open. Once every eight hours, a slot will open in the wall and food will come through -- just enough to keep you alive.

You will never escape.

What are you going to do?

I try to make the bell words difficult to answer. The responses are not graded, though the students don't know that; I come around with a little stamp and mark their entries after about five minutes, so they think I'm keeping track of something. I'm not. The purpose is the struggle, which is so subjective and particular as to make formal assessment -- in my humble opinion -- rather inappropriate.

Tomorrow's puzzler has tendrils that intertwine with other vines I'm planting for the year. In the long term, we're looking at speculative fictions that postulate a number of grim scenarios for human society: first Golding's Lord of the Flies, then Orwell's 1984, and finally Murphy's The City, Not Long After (which is the one you probably haven't heard of, and should by all means read.) People are intensely, deliberately cruel to each other in these books, as indeed they are in real life; and alternatives to (and resistances against) cruelty exist as well, or neither books nor life would be worth the trouble.

Cruelty is unpleasant to contemplate, and the temptation to ignore its existence can be very seductive. Why focus on all that negativity? What does it really have to do with me, anyway? I am teaching children whose lives are, by and large, blessed with good fortune and gentle circumstance -- smart, mostly kind young people whose understanding of suffering and deprivation is about a millimeter thick. I do not begrudge them their blessings, although I wish that more people in the world shared them. I do not believe they need to feel guilt about anything except for their own deliberate acts of cruelty. I do, however, feel obliged to invite them to contemplate the malice of which people -- all people -- are capable. Some people ignore the presence of cruelty because they are afraid to draw attention to themselves, and a few -- a fortunate few -- ignore it because they are insulated from it. If it isn't brought to their attention, they'll never know it's there.

That's my job. Bringing attention.

So, kids: let's imagine for a moment that all of your safety has been stripped away. You are alone. You have nothing. No help is coming. What would you do?

There is no right or wrong answer to that question, just as there is no right or wrong response to torture. You do what you must to survive.

Another, less intense reason for tomorrow's bell words is that I want to move the discussion toward the nature of my classroom's ethos. The view of schools as containment facilities, internment camps for not-fully-human beings, is nothing new; lord knows I felt it when I first tasted public education. (I have a distinct memory of sitting in Bob "Big" Diehl's keyboarding class as a high school freshman, producing green characters on a black screen, typing over and over a line from Peter Gabriel's Wallflower: They put you in a box so you can't get heard...) But that's not what I want for my students. There are alternatives to cruelty. Moreover, there are alternatives to boredom, and even alternatives to escape. Because sometimes you can't escape your circumstances. Sometimes, you can't avoid what's in front of you. And what are you going to do when that happens?

Pay attention. Pay attention. Pay attention.

Stop trying to escape. Stop trying to be somewhere else. Be here now, even if here looks like hell and now feels like forever. Be present.

I wrote a statement of principles for my classroom last night, and by the end of the day tomorrow, my students will do one of two things: write a statement of agreement with the principles, or write an explanation of why they cannot or will not agree with them. Either is acceptable.

The principles:

In this class, we do not ignore each other.

In this class, we do not hide from each other.

In this class, we give each other our full attention.

We are kind and helpful to all people in this room, including ourselves.

We are not here to wait until something interesting happens.

We are not here to indulge in boredom and passivity.

We are not here to avoid our present circumstances.

We do not concern ourselves what is going to happen later.

We bring all our energy and attention to what is happening now.

Our search is for those moments and situations in which we are most alive.

You're a ward of the state, she's a screaming suffragette.

2006-09-03T16:42:00.000-07:00

I happen to believe that a lot of scientific and rational premises are irrational to begin with -- that the work of much science and academic inquiry is, deep down, merely the elaborate justification of desire, bias, whim, and glory. I sense that to some extent the rational "thinking" areas of our brains are super-rationalization engines. They provide us with means and justifications for our more animal impulses. They allow us to justify them to both ourselves and then, when that has been accomplished, to others.

-- David Byrne

Yay desire! Yay bias, whim, and glory!

I'm sticking with my story, which is that it's all a bunch of stories. People condition themselves to believe that a few of the stories are true and the rest are not to be taken seriously, which is sad, because actually they're all true and none of them should be taken seriously. According to my story, that is. And here we go round the mulberry bush of subjectivity, and oh isn't it scary that you can't actually get a permanent fix on the true nature of anything? Depends. Are you into scary stories?

Here's a story I like. Not scary. Except for the fact that I'm going to Hell for reading it.

And then there's this,

which needs no justification, elaborate or otherwise. Go Scott Wade!

Gonna open me up a black gold vein.

2006-08-25T21:57:00.000-07:00

So it's been two weeks since I posted. What of it?

Now that we've got that out of the way, let me say this. No, actually, let Steve say this on my behalf. The following items, people and concepts are officially On Notice:

No further comment should be necessary. If for some bizarre reason you feel that no further comment should not be necessary, you can go here to do your whining.

Yeah.

So I've got this weekend and then school starts on Monday. After two weeks of cheek-by-jowl meetings and virtually no time to sit in my room and plan curriculum, my mental state is 85% high-velocity panic, 10% eye-of-the-storm calm, and 5% reedy, hysterical laughter. At this point, I'm relying on centrifugal force to keep all my shingles flying in a formation that resembles some sort of structure.

Speaking of scary school things, read this. I'm on the fence with this one. Intellectually, I'm a gung-ho First Amendment believer, but my gut is singing a different tune here. I think expulsion was overdoing it, but suspension -- and counseling -- would have been entirely appropriate. So much depends upon context; what you say or write matters differently depending on where and when you express it, how you introduce it, what your intention is. I'm an enthusiastic consumer of transgressive art; I think censorship and paranoia are insidious and far more dangerous than fantasy. I think the proper response to bad art is good art. I think if you are testing boundaries, you'd better leave a channel open for dialogue -- or be prepared for a backlash. I think I don't know what I think, really, but I'd like to hear what you think.

Monday. Bright and early. Welcome to English, lads and lassies.

You can't raise a baby on motor oil.

2006-08-11T18:07:00.000-07:00

Yes indeed: holy shit: this might actually be the best thing ever.

So There's That. (One of the finest say-nothing verbal placeholders, much better than "uh"; thanks again, Signal Station.) Now This: Not Fooling Anybody, an Ontario-heavy but nonetheless intermittently amusing documentation of the ... of the something-or-other phenomenon whereby stuff occurs with regard to urbanized interchangeability or the lack thereof? And it's ... ironical? I think it's bad form to register an actual emotional response to this website, but whatever. I "enjoyed" in particular Master Donut (you wanna trick? I'll bring it to ya), Back In The Day Soul Food, and Gilstrap Chiropractic. Even better than any of this is Satan's Laundromat, which casts a less specifically snarky net and dredges up a more tantalizing collage.

Okay. So here's my next question: how can I post mp3s on this site? I know how to do images...

...but I haven't figured out how to integrate sound files yet. My recording session, though enjoyable in the moment, yielded relatively little edible fruit. Or audible fruit. Or awkward metaphorical snag. It was the cicadas, man; it's hard to get into the mellow acoustical lullaby groove with an obnoxious coleopteraic monotone over your shoulder. Nevertheless, just in case I'm hit by a bus next week, I feel compelled to share the couple of relatively successful takes we gleaned with all y'all. If, that is, someone can tell me how I might do such a thing.

Techies, I await your gracious benevolence.

You ain't foolin' nobody with the lights out!

2006-08-01T21:33:00.000-07:00

Hail seizure, August, us.

Suddenly only a couple of weeks left of the summer vacation, since "faculty workweeks" start mid-August for me. Marla and I celebrate seven years of darn-good marriage next week, and then it's back to the other half of my brain.

And our birthdays are coming up in a couple of months, as well. Like last year, I'll be up in Yosemite with my eighth graders on the actual days of our births, so we'll have to postpone the party until early October. And, also like last year, we'll have to continue to abandon our tradition of extravagantly detailed invitations. In our pre-parental heyday, we had a string of several years where our invitations took the form of calligraphed, individually designed cootie-catchers, or elaborate ransom notes, or (our best effort ever) boxes of Crackerjacks with redesigned Nutrition Facts labels containing dates and times, etc. No time for such shenanigans anymore; these days it's just ye olde Evite.

But I found this in my archives recently: a first attempt at an invitation from years past, via a series of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons. I'm still rather fond of this original desecration (especially panels 2, 5 and 6), though Marla vetoed it on account of gratuitous gallows humor and we eventually went with a less edgy version. Probably a good idea, all things considered. Unless you have really really good eyes, you'll want to click on the image and then click the enlarged image to enlarge it again.

And Bill Watterson, wherever you are: sorry, man. For what it's worth, we didn't make any money off of this, although we did get a few presents.

Like a boxer throat-punching a waffle.

2006-07-26T14:52:00.000-07:00

Some things I'm into:

Anthropomorphism at its finest, scriven by one of my very favorite essayists.

The Arcade Fire. You needn't know anything about them to dig this gorgeous website, but if that's the case then holy hell, man, are you in for a lucky surprise. I've got a big, big crush on this band. I want to ask them to ditch the prom with me and go wander the tops of multilevel parking lots at midnight.

Reading Roger Ebert trash M. Night Shamalayayalmananalamanadan's "Lady In The Water". I know it's generally not a good idea to enjoy the badmouthing of a work of art you haven't seen and don't intend to see -- that's generally the bailiwick of social conservatives, of whom I am most assuredly not one -- but come on. Narf? When the word you invent to designate a supernatural babe who lives in water happens to be the same word used as an all-purpose interjection by a mentally retarded cartoon mouse, it's time to think about taking down the shingle.

The man on the street might just as well be.

2006-07-19T23:14:00.000-07:00

Today at dinner.

Genevieve: (casually dictatorial tone) Papa hide under table!

Papa: (just sat down to dinner) Not gonna happen.

G: (dewy-eyelash cute little bunny wabbit superpolite voice) Papa hide under table.

P: Hmm...no, not gonna happen.

G: (threatening tone) Papa hide under table!

P: Not gonna happen.

G: Papa hide under table?

P: Not gonna happen.

G: (as if calling to someone in the next room) Paaaaapa! Hide under TABLE.

P: Not gonna happen.

G: Papa. Hide, inside, head!

P: Hmm. Papa already does that.

Mama: Yeah, and Papa doesn't need any encouragement.

So there's that. But we'd just come back from our seventh swim lesson, and Genevieve continues to be the class prodigy. Queen Kixalot, usually the one girl with five or so boy babies, and she's the only one who (after the first couple of days, which is how long it took her to suss out the situation) joyfully agrees to be dunked completely underwater, again and again, while the tearstained boys look on nervously and their parents with envious admiration. Okay, I may be overstating the case a little. I'm obscenely, indecently proud of her.

So it's not all cerebral these days. The two of us took a walk downtown the other day so that Mama could take some space (Taking Some Space is a concept we've recently introduced, a bridge into making the inevitable "time-outs" positive rather than punitive) and, after checking out the music store and the bookstore and the farmer's market, we trucked on out to the local gym and took a look around. I'm thinking of joining.

It's true, I have spent and continue to spend the vast majority of my life in a sedentary position. My body appears to be in rather good health, but it's no thanks to the rest of me. I'm not a very active fellow. I've always been slender, not to say emaciated; a lot of that is metabolism, but it also has to do with my avoidance of vigorous exercise in favor of vigorous reading and writing. I am capable of becoming much stronger, physically, than I am now, not to mention more balanced. Which is the really important thing. I could stand to grow in a different direction.

We'll see. I have a lifetime of prejudice and fear of pain to dissuade me. I don't have anything like a goal, just a feeling that it's time to start doing something active with my body on a regular basis. There was a time, a couple of years back, when I went running around the block in a sweatsuit every morning, real early in the fog. It wasn't easy, but I got into the groove and I could have kept going a long time. But there was some circumstantial shift in my life -- I can't even remember what it was, it might have been a change in work schedule or a vacation or something like that -- and it was so easy to drop it and not pick it up again. My mind is very good at being very sneaky about avoiding the things that seem too hard.

Anyway, regardless of how all that turns out, it's a good summer. G and I are connecting on a deeper level than we have before. We have more of a relationship, now that I'm home most days and can be with her completely, rather than with one foot out the door. We go down to get the paper in the morning, and usually eat a couple of blackberries off the bush at the end of the driveway. I hold her inside my robe, bundled up next to my skin, so she won't get cold.

If I could have a second skin, I'd probably dress up in you.

2006-07-17T15:38:00.000-07:00

Hi. C'est July. Ninety-something and the same blue sky. Sketches of the young and dispossessed are taped to the wall below the window; box fan stirs air like the teenage clerk in the stationery store who couldn't possibly but has to anyway.

I've been working. Thirty-one: time to get things done. The silent schoolyard, the bare dusty counters, lukewarm water from the fountain. My air-conditioned room, still naked despite the posters I've hung. Boxes of paper disemboweled and arranged buffet-style on desks.

What am I going to do? Some general ideas; nothing specific except what I'll recycle from the last three years in the field. I want to teach media literacy, but I don't really know what that is. Vague notions about identifying bias, seeing through the spin. Nothing practical. What I need to know is what the students will be asked to do, and why, and how I'll determine what they understand. That's the real work of teaching, the really hard grunt-labor. You've got to get that or it's all prettiness and empty empathy. (At the same time: if that's all you have, you might as well be in the military.) I would happily just sit around and talk to teenagers for nine months with no agenda other than honesty and curiosity, and it would undoubtedly be a valuable experience, but they wouldn't pay me for it. There it is.

Truth is, I like having something specific to do. Everyone does. Little manageable tasks all in a row. Growth, etc. It's not wrong. But then there's my tendency to drift and dream and lose track of -- or interest in -- the logistics of social obligation. My OCD is probably just a way of coping with the fact that I'm tethered to reality until I die or go permanently crazy. If I can't get lost in the ether, I might as well get lost in specifics.

Not that being found is such a bad thing. It can be the best thing. It all depends on who's finding you, and why.

Okay. Two things.

First thing: I know and care precisely nothing about anything having to do with organized sports of any kind. You know how homophobes feel about hardcore gay porn? That's how I feel about the NFL. It's just -- dude, let's not even talk about it. Done with preamble! Now you know that I have no idea who Frank Ribery is, except that Wes wrote about him and I, uh ... I, like ... I enjoyed it. Snurk. But I'm not gay!

Second thing: Nor do I have this guy's hair. Man, if you can find a way to cheat on your fiancée looking like that -- more power to you, dude.

Any morning.

2006-07-14T23:41:00.000-07:00

Just lying on the couch and being happy.
Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head.
Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has
so much to do in the world.

People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can’t
monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget.
When dawn flows over the hedge you can
get up and act busy.

Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven
left lying around, can be picked up and saved.
People won’t even see that you have them,
they are so light and easy to hide.

Later in the day you can act like the others.
You can shake your head. You can frown.

William Stafford

What a waste of gunpowder and sky.

2006-07-04T19:13:00.000-07:00

That's my traditional Independence Day website post title, a snippet from the Aimee Mann song "Fourth of July". I seem to be less and less enamored of holidays in general as the years go by. Celebration is good, but I like it organic and unscripted. I love my country, but flags and explosions are not my preferred vehicles for expressing that love. I'll stay indoors tonight with season five of The West Wing, holding and soothing my terrified dog, leaving the drunken drivers to crash into each other without interference from me.

This afternoon I was up on a mountain in Armstrong Redwoods State Reserve, which is as much of a church as I'll ever need, with a really nice man named Duncan who hosts the local open mic that I frequent. He's an electrical engineer and audio wizard by day, and he had generously offered to record me playing some music. So we set up in a secluded spot under the trees, using an amazing battery-powered sound system he made, and I played a bunch of tunes: two lullabies I wrote for Genevieve, some Paul Simon and Beatles and Woody Guthrie and -- because I couldn't very well not -- "Fourth of July". As soon as I'm able, I'll set up some mp3 links here so that y'all can hear them, if you like.

It's summer. My daughter is two and full of drama: beautiful, annoying, clever, whiny, joyful, overwrought, curious, fragile, tenacious. My wife is patient, compassionate, gorgeous, clear as a bell. I am what I am.

Ipecac Aperitif seems to be running out of steam and I don't exactly know why. The inspiration to post here is rather rare; I feel like I don't have much to say that's new or interesting. I know enough about creative cycles not to give up on it entirely; there's always an ebb and flow, and all you can do is keep the door open. There's no obligation. I don't spend much time in webland these days; my focus has shifted elsewhere. So be it.

I'll keep coming back. Someday I'll be witty and provocative again. All is well and all is well and all manner of things shall be well.

Always Fear City's finest follow right behind.

2006-07-01T15:07:00.000-07:00

You know my adorable daughter? The one I frequently write about (well, as frequently as I write about anything) in glowing terms? Well: I love her. I say that as a preface. Now this: she's a whiny, inconsolable wreck today. When she's not weeping over trifles, she's making demands. She's obnoxious, manipulative, insecure, petty, self-centered, and...um...two.

Yeah. She's not the only one who woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.

It was a ray gun, and it was 1981.

2006-06-26T14:01:00.000-07:00

Last week I spent five ghastly days in Rocklin, California, holed up in a Days Inn motel room watching really bad TV. It's been a long time since I watched really bad TV, let alone five days of it. OH MY GOD. Why would anyone drink a diarrhea slurpee for five days straight? Why? I'll tell you why. Because it was 105 in the shade outside, and because in Rocklin there are only three things: strip malls, housing developments, and roads connecting the two. When I say that there are only three things, I mean that literally. There aren't even curbs. The housing developments are all courts and cul-de-sacs with no curbs anywhere, a design that streamlines the process of getting residents to their own driveways and repudiates everyone else. There are no parks, no movie theaters, no bookstores. The only trees are spindly one-year-old transplants tied to wooden stakes. Vast parking lots stretch for flat black acres, baking in the sun. You are either at work, or you are eating fast food, or you are picking up a DVD at Blockbuster, or you are home. And if you're not in one of these places, you'd better be traveling from one to another as fast as you can.

I was in "town" because of a teaching workshop that my employer paid for. It was okay. Nothing wowed me, but I picked up a few good tricks; mostly it was familiar, common-sense pedagogy dressed up in cornball clothing. They could have done it in two or three days, but stretched it to five. Whatever. Hey, I learned to juggle scarves; that's something.

The workshop itself took up only about six hours a day, so most of the time was free time. Not that there was much to do with it. And I did try. Honestly. My characterization of Rocklin is based on solid research, starting from two locations -- the gymnasium where the workshop was held, and my motel room -- and spiraling out as far as I dared, my dread growing with each widening of the gyre. Surely there must be something else . . . surely all these people can't bear to live in such an unrelenting wasteland . . . But there was nothing. So eventually I'd reverse tracks and return to the air-conditioned sanctuary of my room, where the television flickered endlessly, impassively.

I also read a lot, particularly Orwell's 1984. I'm teaching it to my eighth graders next year, along with Golding's Lord of the Flies, as part of a media literacy/critical thinking curriculum that currently exists only in vague theory in my brain. I hadn't read 1984 before, but I could hardly have chosen a more appropriate text for my environment. Horrifying, methodical, pitiless, inescapable, and worst of all, relevant. Written more than half a century ago, its timeliness is almost unbearable. I'm going to be scarring these teenagers for life by making them read this thing. But there are worse things than scars.

Then finally I fled Rocklin for the Pacific coast, where my family was bunking down in a couple of houses near Bodega Bay in celebration of my father-in-law's 70th birthday. A big contingent of New York relatives were there, laughing and kvetching and whining and stomping around and drinking heroically and creating enormous fabulous complicated meals and watching bad TV and wrestling and talking talking talking about everything under the sun.

And now at last I'm back home, in my own real room, more trees than buildings outside my window. The relief is overwhelming. Tomorrow I have no obligations. I will do only that which brings me joy and restores my sanity. I will lie in the grass, in the shade, and watch Genevieve frolic in her blue plastic wading pool. I will sleep in my own bed. I will play guitar on the porch after dark, quietly.

Ice on my fingers, on my toes, and on my toys.

2006-06-14T23:51:00.000-07:00

School's out. No it isn't.

I'm still going in every day, answering email and meeting with colleagues and packing up my room. (For once, I'm just moving to another location on campus, as opposed to back home until I find another campus.) It needs to be done, it's important, it's real adult professional stuff, it engages my intellect and it's good for me in a thousand ways, but I am ready to be done. I realize I'm getting zero sympathy here from the 99% of employed adults who have to make do with two measly weeks a year, and I feel for you all. Really, I do. It's stupid that three months of vacation isn't a constitutional right for everyone; it's stupid that what we all agree is healthy and fair and sane for children and adolescents is made unavailable to most adults. Greed is the only reason. Greed expressed as a pathalogically paranoid competitive streak made social imperative by an emotionally stunted plutocracy, not to put too fine a point on it.

Point is, I feel whatever's the opposite of shame about taking a few months off to be with my family and watch my daughter grow up, instead of heading off to work before she's awake and coming back a couple of hours before she goes to sleep. Oh yeah, and there's my wife, too, who is, in addition to being gorgeous and hardworking, someone I don't see nearly as often I'd like.

Genevieve recently recited the entire alphabet. Her only slip-up was saying "K" twice instead of "J K", but damn: two years and ten days old. She can count up to about sixteen or so before she starts repeating herself. She draws circles with squiggly lines attached and calls them "balllloooooooooons". Although her verbs aren't as plentiful as her nouns and she's only beginning to flirt with tenses, she often speaks in complete sentences: Papa, more juice please. Thank you for ice cream, you're welcome. Birds eat worms. Garbage truck picks up trash cans, empty trash cans, more trash please. Crickets: little tiny BUGS!

She's highly advanced.

I'm all verklempt just thinking about her, tearing up over here, and this is from a guy who almost never cries. Not a macho thing, a biological one. I don't know why, I'm emotionally about as open as it gets, but I don't cry. But my daughter gets me all misty-eyed.

Uh . . . yeah. So none of this is particularly entertaining or clever or even interesting, probably, like a good website should be. Is this what happens in my thirties? I turn into a sappy, boring-ass teacher/father/noodler with nothing to say that anyone beyond his immediate family could possibly give two rat turds about? Yeah . . . guess so.

Maybe if I could get started with my freaking SUMMER VACATION that is, like, the whole reason to be a teacher in the first place, I could write something sharp. Till then, it's whiny, sappy grown-up blather. Enjoy.

It starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes and aeroplanes.

2006-06-08T23:23:00.000-07:00

There are some people I know and love who probably would not go to see An Inconvenient Truth unless they were hamstrung and straitjacketed to a theater seat with their eyelids forced open à la Anthony Burgess (or was it only Stanley Kubrick?). Since I'm not really into the whole enlightenment-by-force V For Vendetta thing, that's an unlikely scenario. Alas, I'll have to rely on my winning personality to convince the wary to overcome their wariness. That, and bribery.

So here goes.

Please go see An Inconvenient Truth. Find the nearest theater, find some time in your busy schedule, and go see it. Bring whatever skepticism you've got, and bring as open a mind as you can muster. After you've seen the movie and it's had a little while to sink in, decide for yourself whether or not it was worth the time and money you spent on it. If the answer is no, write to me and I will refund the cost of your ticket.

Seriously.

It's a hugely important film, and it's also really interesting to watch. Not what you'd call fun, but not really a downer either. Scary, yeah. Terrifying. But the situation is only dire, not hopeless. If it were hopeless, there'd be no point in seeing the movie. The urgency I feel after having seen it concerns how much there is to be done, and how little time is left to do it in.

I've always been rather "enh" about Al Gore. I have a lot more respect for him after seeing AIT; he's intelligent, well-informed, and able to explain complex realities without being incomprehensible or condescending. Of course it takes someone with his name recognition to get a movie of this kind watched by lots of people, and of course a lot of people are just as curious about the man as they are about the subject at hand; nevertheless, I wish the informative segments hadn't been interrupted by slo-mo photo-montages of childhood pictures with voiceovers by Gore talking about the milestones in his life. It's not that I think any of it is insincere or forced, it's just that it's not necessary. For me. I'd much rather focus entirely on the science. Gore's delivery of that is compelling enough.

After (or before) you've seen it, check out the carbon calculator at climatecrisis.net. I'm running just a little over half of the 15,000 pounds of carbon dioxide that the average American produces; not bad, but there's a lot I can do to improve my status.

Although Gore gets in a few well-placed, well-deserved critical remarks about the (frequently Republican) powers that be, this is not a political issue, and he knows that and emphasizes it. It's not about taking sides in any ideological battle. There are simply the facts, which can be denied -- as anything can if you try hard enough -- but which cannot be refuted. We will either summon the will to solve the problem we have created, or we will not. If we do not, we will die on a scale unprecedented in human history, and we will take most of the living things on this planet with us. And it will happen within our lifetimes. We have ten years -- maybe a little more, maybe a little less -- to turn things around; after that, we start circling the drain. I wish this was wild-eyed enviro-hippie paranoid exaggeration. It's not. It's real, and it's happening right now.

See the movie. Do your own research. Get informed, find out what you can do, and start doing it.

Just like when two fireflies fluoresce.

2006-06-06T22:59:00.000-07:00

All kinds of summer thunder shaking down the sky for loose change.

Tomorrow is graduation day. A morning ceremony. These 41 new adolescents I've known nearly as well as family since September are saying goodbye, lifting off into the wind like dandelion spores. High school next, then college. Then brilliant careers.

I spent four days with them last week down by the American River, south fork, camping and rafting down icy white water in the warm sun. Playing tournaments of Speed and playing Beatles songs and keeping a group of young male fartsmiths in check at night; telling a ghost story around the campfire, and later, after the kids were asleep, sharing a Nalgene bottle of illicit white wine with the other teachers and composing awards in a composition book by flickering firelight. Unshaven, sunburnt and mosquito-bit. Crickets at night, and flatulence, and smothered oaths. Stars and legends and confessions, apologies, thanks.

Back from the rafting trip and bangsmack into Genevieve's second birthday, replete with balloons (or, as Evvy pronounces them, "ballleeeuuuns") and cake and little people. She is so frickin' amazing, metamorphosizing so rapidly that four days away from her brings me to total astonishment when I see her next. She is so articulate, so polite and so good-natured. So full of joy and laughter. There is nothing in the world better than being her dad.

Today is Anh's birthday. Happy birthday, Anh!

I am weary, grateful, ready to be done with school for a while. My students, my beloved, difficult, brilliant students, won't stay and shouldn't stay; I let them go every year, and I'm heartbroken and relieved at the same time. Fortunately, my own little girl is close at hand. I haven't seen enough of her this year. I'm going to be staying home for a while, taking her out to the park and the beach and maybe even the zoo. Staying close. Drinking in her beauty.

House on a red cliff.

2006-05-27T00:01:00.000-07:00

There is no mirror in Mirissa
the sea is in the leaves
the waves are in the palms
old languages in the arms
of the casuarina pine
parampara
parampara, from
generation to generation

The flamboyant a grandfather planted
having lived through fire
lifts itself over the roof
unframed
the house an open net
where the night concentrates
on a breath
on a step
a thing or gesture
we cannot be attached to

The long, the short, the difficult minutes
of night
where even in darkness
there is no horizon without a tree
just a boat's light in the leaves
Last footstep before formlessness

Michael Ondaatje

I'm Martin Sheen, I'm Steve McQueen, I'm Jimmy Dean.

2006-05-22T23:48:00.000-07:00

Down the sidewalk in the smoky cricket dark,
boots tied loosely and a full moon bang on the money
above the trees, trademarking the metaphors of night,
cool night in late spring speaking fluid incessant haiku
in all the familiar tongues of memory: this moment,
these moments, atoms of creekwater
thoughtlessly renewed in the storm drains,
the borders of my skin dying silently,
becoming a different story, and I
listen with my mouth to it; I am not on the money,
not yet this moon, I am talking up the effortless world
in the painted glove of my speech,
muddying the silent water with thumbs of language
and, knowing this, know also
what spring will keep doing anyway
and am not afraid.

Everybody's apple pie, even the man next door can sing.

2006-05-18T22:40:00.000-07:00

So graduation is approaching and things are getting intense. I'm advising the production by eighth grade graduates-to-be of a literary magazine called Endless Thoughts -- a somewhat overwrought title, I feel, but a tradition -- which is due to go to the printer on Monday, and students are scrambling to raise the thousand and change we need for our modest run, type in the accepted poems and stories and place them with art, artfully, on digital pages, and deliver it all on time by the end of school tomorrow. My students are phenomenal. At the same time they're doing this, six of them will be competing tomorrow in the Poetry Out Loud school semifinals, reciting poems from memory in three rounds. One eighth and one seventh grader will advance to the finals; everyone in both grades will take a bus trip to Berkeley next Wednesday to cheer them on. And the week after that we're all going on a four-day whitewater rafting trip on the south fork of the American River.

Intense, all the emotion and activity, the great drama. That's what I really love about this job: teaching has a much better narrative structure than most lines of employment. Each year has a beginning and an end, and characters undergo profound transformation in their waltz from plot point to plot point along the way. Introduction, body, conclusion. Variations on themes, archetypes. Revision, refinement. New edition every year.

I come five hundred miles just to see a halo.

2006-05-07T14:08:00.001-07:00

From a comment on my previous post, regarding Beverly Cleary's recent 90th birthday:

I introduced the Ramona books to my stepdaughters when Anna was six, and she got hooked. They were the first long chapter books that she read mostly by herself, and the first series that she really fell in love with. I still remember how upset she got when G. told her she had to stop reading and go to sleep--even though we knew how cranky she'd be in the morning if she didn't sleep enough, we still cheered privately afterwards.

I think the Cleary article really nails it. Though I wouldn't have been able to articulate it at the time, what I dug so much about those books when I first read them was how honest her characterizations were. There was nothing precious about Ramona or Beezus or, heck, even Ralph the talking mouse. Yeah, they were cute and funny, but they earned their cuteness legitimately, the way my daughter does. A kid can be manipulative and fearful and confused and awkward and angry and whiny and egotistical, and also be wonderful and charming and smart and beautiful and cute. Beverly Cleary got that, and she cared enough to get the details right.

Genevieve isn't quite ready for Ramona -- she's turning two in less than a month -- but she's an avid reader. (She's an even avider? more avid? watcher of videos, but I'm not as proud of that.) She's got almost as many books as she does stuffed animals, if you can believe it. Her newest obsession is Go, Dog. Go!, which I only kind of liked when I was little, but which I love now. Maybe because it's squarely in Genevieve's ZPD. She has recently begun to form sentences, sometimes complete ones of about three to five words, which happens to be the level at which Go, Dog. Go! is written. Simple one and two-syllable words, most of which she already knows, introduced gradually and building on each other as they go. Dog. Big dog, little dog. One little dog going in. Three big dogs going out.

I'm encouraging her to read by herself, scaffolding and supplementing as necessary. She doesn't need much encouragement. Of course, she augments the simple text with observations about the art, as well; she's particularly interested in the two dogs whose cars have crashed into each other, the angry red one wagging his finger at the flummoxed blue one. (No, dog! No, dog! No crash car!) And also the preclimactic moment when all the dogs have driven really fast to the big tree and are going up the ladder, a moment full of urgent questions that papa reads in a very excited voice. (Why? Why are the dogs going up the tree? What are they going to do next? What is their purpose, and what their destiny? Whither, o dogs?)

Which is why, earlier today as we were driving back from visiting Kevin and Caryn and Ellie and Oliverdog and baby Joanna in Mountain View, Genevieve was loudly repeating: "No crash car! Why? WHY?"

Sitting in a sycamore in St. John's woods, soaking day-old bread in kerosene.

2006-05-03T20:51:00.000-07:00

Right. I know it's been a while. I've been hecka-knackered these days, the job consuming most of my brain and family consuming most of what's left, with the occasional breakout guitar solo down at the local open mic. It's likely to remain this way for another month, until school ends. Then I'll get a good night's sleep, wake up refreshed, and begin to tackle the hundreds of projects and social engagements I haven't had time for since September.

But the sun is out, the weather is shamelessly beautiful, I'm in good spirits, and yeah. That's enough.

So, four things:

1. Stephen Colbert has been awesome for a long time, but his speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner makes him damn near heroic in my book. The huevos on this guy. I just watched Uncovered, a must-see movie if you haven't already, and had to endure the repeated sight of George W. Bush's condescending smirk. If only for a few moments, Stephen Colbert wiped the smirk off that asswipe's face, and that alone is a feat worth celebrating. Plus, he's funny as hell.

2. NSFW: some oddly amusing, poorly translated X Files cartoon porn. It'll be the interesting file.

3. Speaking of awkward blasts from the past, I'm absurdly proud to say that I successfully completed Thy Dungeonman. It made me all nostalgic for my old Commodore 64. Kind of. But not really.

4. I'm way tardy on this, but: Happy Birthday, Beverly Cleary. Ninety? Really?

Stranded starfish have no place to hide.

2006-04-18T20:50:00.000-07:00

Saturday morning in the living room, sunlit at last.

Evvy's Easter basket, being constructed the night before.

Sunday morning, just woke up....

...and oh my goodness, there's a basket!

With a stuffed bunny in it!

And bubbles...

...and sunglasses...

...and a chocolate bunny too!

Judging from picturebooks, apparently Heaven is a partly cloudy place.

2006-04-12T22:56:00.000-07:00

Herewith, a variety show.

1. Never watched his show, but props to Bill Nye the Science Guy for inadvertently pissing off some dogmatists at a recent lecture by daring to point out that the geocentric view of creation presented in the Bible may perhaps be overripe for revision. Folks, disbelief is meant to be suspended, not incinerated. Everything that lives gets revised, so if you believe in a living God, then have the courage to consider Him from a new angle every once in a while. Preferably more often than once every two thousand years. Jesus Christ.

2. Because it's necessary, someone made an alphabetized list of every Dr. Seuss character. Thanks for the tip, Tanglebones.

3. This is quite possibly the funniest Engrish ever, and it just goes on and on and on.

4. Tom Petty is pure evil.

5. The Amazing Erotic Adventures of Georgina Bush, a choose-your-own-adventure for the freedom-hating set.

6. I turned vegan for about ninety seconds after watching The Meatrix.

7. I am not a comics geek by any stretch of the imagination, but when I read Watchmen I was floored in a way that I've rarely been by pictureless fiction. As far as I'm concerned, it is one of the seminal works of literature of the twentieth century, and anyone who dares to consider herself or himself an intellectual had better make reading it a priority. That pitch made, I'll admit that I haven't yet taken in any of the rest of Alan Moore's oeuvre, nor have I yet seen V For Vendetta. But I found this interview with Mr. Moore very interesting. (Thanks again, TB.) His philosophical rigor and deliberate lack of interest in other people's opinions of him remind me of many of my favorite geekazoidinal friends.

8. All right, enough. It's a rainy Wednesday night. Clearly...

Beautiful girl.

2006-04-12T06:16:00.000-07:00

I was trying to think of a clever pop-cultural connection to make for today's post, but the only song I know that involves the word "Joanna" is that terrible song by Toto that goes "Now she's gone, and I have to say...doo doo, doo doo, doo doo! Need you all the way...doo doo, doo doo, doo doo." You're welcome for that entirely non-psychedelic flashback. And then there's Faith, which -- because of my firmly secular background -- only summons the memory of that horrible George Michael song that goes "Bay-behhh!! I want to touch your body! You know not everybody! Has got a body like youuuu!" You're welcome for, yeah. The same.

See what I mean? Awful. And yet the name Joanna Faith Ragsdale is unquestionably lovely, and so is the little one to whom it's attached. The second daughter of my dear friends Kevin and Caryn was born two days ago, and from all accounts (well, one -- her proud papa's) she's healthy and relatively happy, given her recent involuntary exodus from the Best Place Ever.

She joins her older sister Ellie (human) and brother Oliver (canine) in a family of largehearted, smart, funny, good-looking Ragsdale-Bourrillions that I am lucky to know. Multifarious blessings, little Joanna, on you and yours. I look forward to getting to know you better in the years to come.

They put a spell on me.

2006-04-02T12:18:00.000-07:00

My First Spelling Bee Ever occurred last night, and it was both humbling and gratifying. To get into the First Annual All-Ages Sonoma County Spelling Bee I had to take a test online (and retake, for a fee, as many times as I cared to) and have one of the top 20 scores by the deadline. Did that. Saturday night, April the first, me and my posse head down to the Vets' Building, just a couple of blocks away from my hizzy. We detoured by the sushi restaurant so I could fill my mouth with hamachi poke and miso -- brain food! -- and then hit the spot.

Maybe for the Second Annual they'll find another location, or some kind of solution to the terrible acoustics of that space; every word echoed like a handball, and when young kids in the audience ran around screeching, the cacophony was ... well, cacophonous. Now see, why couldn't I have gotten a word like that? I can spell cacophonous. Cacophonous cacophonous cacophonous.

Yeah, I'm a little bitter. No, not bitter! Humble! Yes, humbling it was, for I didn't make it past the fourth word. The third, if you want to get technical, because the first word they gave us was "cerenoogelschmerz", which refers to a pain you get from rubbing your hands against your head, and which is totally not a real word because they made it up. April Fool!

So I spelled "immortal" and "incapable" correctly, but then I biffed it on "bouillon". I put an extra i after the double l and spelled it "bouillion". My French-Canadian grandfather would be ashamed of me. Oh well. On the upside, the people at my table won a prize for being the best cheerleaders in the room. They made a big yellow and black striped bee out of construction paper and glued it to a yardstick, and my daughter dressed in yellow and black and had a yellow crown and a yellow scarf. Hurrah! Ice cream gift certificates! So gratifying to have the best supporters in the room.

To be sure, "bouillion" snagged more than half of the contestants; I can take some solace in the fact that I wasn't the only dummy. This mass exodus brought a rather abrupt end to round one, in which contestants had to write the words on a pad of paper. In round two, the survivors had to recite the words orally. I sat there writing each word down on my now obsolete pad, gnashing my teeth over how easy all these other words were.

Pavilion masquerade. Rococo martyr. Erroneous zucchini, luscious crustacean, erroneous larceny whetstone. Buoyant assassin symmetry, indefatigable carrion guillotine, empyrean chrysanthemum silhouette. Charlatan paroxysm soliloquy.

In the final heat between Jessica Coleman and Dr. Norman Zucker, the words got really intense: "opprobrious", "anhydrous", "archizoic", "dactylion". Dr. Zucker finally won the day by correctly spelling "anemology". He had a beard but no mustache. I would not feel comfortable going to a doctor who had a beard but no mustache, but that's just me and I'm sure he has many satisfied clients. Ahem. Good show, Doc. I'll get you next year.

Roosevelt dime in a bucket of rain.

2006-03-28T22:22:00.000-08:00

Ever have one of those days?

I am experiencing near-total spiritual paralysis. I feel like a supermarket peach that has been prodded by a hundred thumbs and now hangs loosely in its skin, a bag of bruised juice going slowly brown. If the music of that last sentence makes my situation sound somehow lovely, well, that's how I keep my nose above water: finding music wherever I can. Finding the words. They're slow in coming today.

When I was adolescent, I made a conscious choice to resist faith. I saw how much of the sickness in this world comes about because of people who are certain that what they believe is true, and it seemed to me at the time that faith was another word for blindness. I did not want to believe in anything so wholeheartedly that I stopped considering alternatives. I did not want to be blind. I wanted to stay free. So I made a choice to keep doubting everything I felt, to always be willing to accept the possibility that I was wrong.

I knew this way of being came at a price. It does. Right now, for example, I am as low as I've been in years, and there is no rock of faith to cling to. It's really fucking hard. The hardest part of it is that blindness comes anyway, whether faith-based or shock-based. You reach your personal limit of pain and your body kicks in with the grace of the last ditch: stop feeling. It's temporary. You can't live in that place for long. But sometimes, that's the address on the door outside.

And then?

Oh, that's what is worth living for. I guess if there's any faith I'm prepared to accept, it's the obnoxious sacrament of patience. The rusty cliché of sunrise. It helps to be humble. Endure long enough and a new day will begin, and you'll have the wonderful, terrible opportunity to start all over again.

It's not the same. Never the same. Sometimes it's similar enough to fool you, but you're always a little different, no matter how long it takes. The whole thing is absurd, all these sandcastles, your proud little life. Do it anyway. Build new structures. Accept that you'll lose them with the next tide. Know that you'll forget every bit of wisdom you ever learned. Keep learning anyway. The residue will build with each cycle. Imperceptibly, you'll change. Over and over.

You find the words. You keep listening for music.

R.I.P.

2006-03-23T18:46:00.000-08:00

I have been exhausted and overwhelmed by work for a while now, and my emotional landscape is treacherously rocky. When I heard that Kumar Lewis was murdered in Kenya last week, it hit me hard, really hard, despite the fact that I haven't thought about Kumar more than twice in the last 14 years.

Most of what I have to say has been said already by Wes, with more eloquence than I could muster at this point. Just substitute "Brighton Beach Memoirs" for "Pippin", and that's me too. Kumar was such a generous man. I didn't know him well. I love him. I miss him.

Come on papa, don't fear the diaper.

2006-03-17T20:42:00.000-08:00

There are few things in this world that are more disgusting than poop in a vagina.

That's really all they need to show in "health education" classes in high school. Forget the moralizing. Don't bother with ethical debates. You want to stop teenagers from having sex without birth control? Just show them a video of a toddler's vagina with poop in it.

"You see this? Huh? STILL WANNA FOOL AROUND?!?"

Perhaps only the intensity of disgust that such an image must surely provoke (and no, I have no plans to add a snapshot to the Baby Pictures file) can indicate the intensity of love I feel for my little girl. When I tell you that the joy of being Genevieve's father makes the experience of cleaning up that kind of mess totally acceptable, you may begin to have some inkling of just how besotted I am.

This morning she came up with a new joke. So far she has three. Her first joke was "Papa: bah! Mommy: bah! Jennydog: bah!" and so on. Her second joke was "Sit -- boom!" Both of those jokes make her laugh hysterically, which is enough to make me laugh despite the fact that I don't understand what makes them funny. But her third joke is the best. This morning, she began saying "Baffle me! Baffle me! BAFFLE ME!!!" and laughing so hard she fell over.

My daughter is a genius. Baffling, to be sure, as most geniuses are. She enjoyed the corned beef and potatoes we ate for dinner tonight, enjoyed shouting "ICKY BEER!" and pointing at my Guinness, enjoyed the look on my face when I opened her diaper later on, enjoyed her bath, enjoyed running around naked afterward, enjoyed having lotion rubbed on her "Leegs! Belly! Back!", enjoyed putting on her pajama pants by herself, enjoyed counting to twelve on her fingers (I told you she was a genius), enjoyed demanding boobah from you-know-who and smirking over her shoulder as I left the room. So much joy. So much wild intellect.

Happy SPD. Erin . . . seriously, dude, just go bragh or something.

Take a wrinkled raisin, and do with it what you will.

2006-03-13T18:03:00.000-08:00

Longtime readers of this

Wait. Stop. I'm not going to do it again. I was just about to use that odious word because it's there and it's one syllable and nothing else comes as readily to mind. But dammit, sometimes you've got to take a stand and say no more. No more lazy half-assed abbreviations of terms that were spiritless to begin with. Not here. This is not a weblog, and it sure as hell ain't a blog, whatever my URL may say. I'll take a tip from the illustrious Neil Gaiman and call it a journal for now, although a quick glance at the dates of the last few entries will show that my level of writerly discipline is hardly du jour. I await inspiration from the Muse, or from one of my readers, as to a better alternative. Meantime . . .

Longtime readers of this journal may remember an entry I made once about my strange next-door neighbor, the obsessive-compulsive one who likes to water the street in front of his house when it's raining. Something about the rain brings out his OCD. Maybe it's a competitive thing, like he's afraid the rain will wash away debris before he gets a chance to. Anyway, he's out there again, this time in his back yard. It's freezing outside, night is falling, it's raining buckets, I'm shaking with cold and grumpiness as I race up the stairs to my front door; as I approach, I see over the fence that Mr. OCD is out in his back yard, which is composed entirely of gravel, raking it into what I'm sure is intended to be immaculate evenness. In the dark. In the cold. In the rain. In a soaking wet sweatshirt and a baseball cap. (Yes, and pants.)

That was half an hour ago, and he's still out there. It's a very small yard. Let me go check.

Yep. Still there. Still raking.

I guess we all have our addictions.

Speaking of journals, when you're done reading Neil's, check out Last Plane to Jakarta, the journal of the amazing John Darnielle (aka The Mountain Goats). Not only is he the most laceratingly brilliant songwriter since Elvis Costello lost his touch, but he's a darn good bl

a darn good journal...ist.

A day comes.

2006-03-09T21:06:00.000-08:00

A day comes
when the mouth grows tired
of saying "I."

Yet it is occupied
still by a self which must speak.
Which still desires,
is curious.
Which believes it also has a right.

What to do?
The tongue consults with the teeth
it knows will survive
both mouth and self.

Which grin -- it is their natural pose --
and say nothing.

Jane Hirshfield

We made love like a pair of black wizards.

2006-03-06T20:13:00.000-08:00

Well, I biffed it this year with the Oscar predictions. I was so sure Brokeback Mountain would sweep! Alas, no. Crash was a good film, but sometimes didactic -- I couldn't quite get away from the awareness that this was an "issue movie" with characters that said and did what was required to get a particular point across. Brokeback, while not the best movie of the year by any means, was considerably more subtle and more deeply observed. Oh well.

I came away from last night with six correct predictions, which wasn't enough to win the pool. Two faithful readers, Jemaleddin and Anh, are in a tie for first place with seven correct predictions each. Whoever breaks the tie by being the first to answer the following question will win a bar of gourmet chocolate wrapped in a custom-written poem. Here's the question:

Which comedy, released the year of the John F. Kennedy assassination, includes a cameo from a legend of silent films who was known for his poker face?

She's making me feel like I've never been born.

2006-03-01T20:25:00.000-08:00

I took myself out for oysters and onion soup, and then played the open mic at the local coffeehouse. Kev has loaned me his copy of the Complete Beatles Chordbook, and I've been wildly happily learning songs right and left. Tonight I played "Baby's In Black" and "She Said She Said" (deeply satisfying three-chord rockouts -- love that A7), and closed with "Julia". I was awesome. I'm just sayin' it, it's true. I busted out three killer songs tonight and I got applause, and let me tell you, that stuff is nice. Still not as nice as the music, though.

Here's the first paragraph of a story I'm working on now:

In a country far away to the north, beyond the dim blue mountains that are higher than they look and stretch farther than they seem, like the sky, and that, like the sky, no one has ever crossed except the birds; on the other side of the dim blue mountains that, unlike most mountains, remain dim and blue even when you are close to them, down in a wide, dusty valley like a floor that has never been swept, a farmer named Peter lived alone in his weed-choked fields.

Flowers blooming on the hills, dragonflies and daffodils.

2006-02-26T00:37:00.000-08:00

So perhaps I should mention that the possum is gone, thanks to the handy intervention of a man who does caretaking work for my father-in-law. Greg did what I could not, reached in and yanked the sucker out no problem, and charged us about one-fifteenth of what Animal Abatement would have. Greg: you rock. You totally rock, man. Thank you.

Also totally rocking was Cynthia's birthday party tonight, featuring a bunch of my favorite people in the world and some fairly hysterical video karaoke.

And earlier today, taking my gorgeous daughter to the superplayground in Libby Park: that rocked as well. (I sense a theme of some kind.) Feeding the ducks, swinging and sliding, staring and smiling at other small people. Using so many words with such purpose. She thrills my heart. I love the language I was born into, I've always been drawn to the beauty and versatility of words, so watching her discover new ways to speak her mind is . . . an experience I can't even describe. There aren't any superlatives or juicy adjectives that can explain it sufficiently. If you are a parent, you know what I'm talking about. Maybe.

I don't know about you, but I forgot what it was like to be 1.75 years old. I don't have any memories from then, come to think of it, which is too bad. On the other hand, I get to see it all happen again now with Genevieve. From the outside, with a wider scope to see through. Something forgotten reblooms in the back of the mind when I look at her and watch the emotions playing on her face, the feather-flash of understanding in her eyes as she watches me back.

Sigh. Okay, this is one of those "Felix's life" posts in the "baby swoonage" subcategory, as opposed to one of the political ones, or one that's chock-full of the linky linky love, or some psychedelic stream-of-consciousness rant of the kind I have occasionally been known to deliver. It's late and I should go to bed. But I have to come up with a title for this post. Ah. There we go.

Krishna, we're going to need wood for a mold!

2006-02-22T20:46:00.000-08:00

"They want to know whether Muslims are extremists or not. Death to them and to their newspapers."

It's a cartoon! A cartoon!

Is it just me, or does this whole Muhammad cartoon apoplexy smell more than a little of the whole "war against Christmas" crap?

To wit, a trumped-up straw man raised aloft by religious power brokers and eagerly torched by masses of devout, reactionary plebes. Further confirmation of the dangers of absolute faith.

Might it be relevant at this point to point out that the creators of South Park aired an episode about five years ago featuring the Super Best Friends League of Crime-Fighting Religious Icons, which included Mohammed, "the Muslim prophet with the powers of flame" -- visually represented and everything -- and no one got killed by angry mobs?

Might that not suggest that the current reaction to a not-very-sophisticated form of satire has less to do with the blasphemy itself than with the agenda of a few opportunistic imams?

Fucking tribalism. Fucking us versus them. Fucking football games. Fucking white hats and black hats. Fucking with-us-or-against-us bullshit. Is this not the oldest, tiredest, tritest, saddest, most ignorant crap ever? Is this not the same old stupid fucking rerun of history?

Dude. Seriously. Enough with God. Enough with Allah. It's a bunch of stories. We are all people, here on this tremendously unlikely planet spinning through endless cold space, telling each other stories around the campfire to take our minds off the eternity all around us. The thing is, the eternity will still be there regardless of what stories we tell. The stories aren't going to affect anything except our own experience. So why not acknowledge that fact, embrace it, and tell the best stories we can while the fire is still burning?

Behind the boathouse, I'll show you my dark secret.

2006-02-20T14:31:00.000-08:00

WARNING: this entry is not for the faint of stomach. It's an entirely selfish attempt at catharsis and it's really, really gross. You might want to just scroll down to the picture at the end.

At first we thought it was a poopy diaper that had fallen behind a couch or under the bed, but it wasn't that; it wasn't the contents of any of our wastebaskets; it wasn't something Jennie had dragged in from outside. But the horrible smell lingered, and finally I knew what it was. I didn't want to be right, so I called our tenant in the downstairs studio to check: did she smell something horrible, too? I knew she'd say yes, and she did, and that was that.

Dead possum under the house.

Marla, woman of superhuman endurance, regularly performs mighty feats that would make me buckle: she wrangles the baby 24/7, endures shrieking tantrums, cleans and cooks and cleans again, gets up to breastfeed at 3 a.m., keeps up with friends and family, runs errands, handles secretarial affairs for her father's real estate ventures, and does it all without compromising her calm, sunny Weltanschauung. My responsibilities are relatively few: I teach, I take out the garbage, and I try to keep a civil tongue in my mouth. If something needs to be done around the house, chances are, Marla's on it.

But disposing of dead possums is my job.

I've done this once before. It was a ghastly experience -- like, I'm talking PTSD ghastly. Some experiences never leave you, however much you wish they would. And I could describe in detail what it's like to handle a rotting corpse that comes apart in soft pieces, writhing with maggots, when you pick it up -- see? I just did -- but reading about it, imagining it, is nothing like experiencing it.

Anyway, this time I knew what I was in for beforehand, which only made it harder. Our house is built into the side of a hill; in the studio on the ground floor, where our tenant lives, there is a locked cabinet-sized door halfway up the wall that opens onto the space underneath the house. I opened the door, hoisted myself up, and crawled in with a bandanna tied over my mouth and nose, armed with white plastic trash bags and a flashlight.

I crouched and squeezed my way between pipes and vents and beams, crawling on hands and knees. I aimed the flashlight methodically in all directions before I made a move, hoping to spot the carcass from a distance, praying I wouldn't brush up against it unexpectedly. The first possum to die under our house had chosen to crawl under a sheet of dusty black plastic; there were yards of this stuff everywhere, and I lifted it gingerly as I went, expecting at any moment to lift the lid on a puddle of rodent goulash. No such luck. I went around the whole place twice and couldn't find a thing. There were a few areas, up where the bottom of the house met the hill, that I couldn't reach; I hoped to god it hadn't gone up there.

I steeled myself for a final search. I had been cupping a hand over the bandanna over my nose as I went, but now, in defiance of every instinct, I opened my nostrils wide and tried to follow the scent of putrefying flesh. Move toward the stench, my mind told my body. No, really. Trust me. This is what we want.

But it wasn't as easy as that; the reek of death was everywhere. A third careful circuit turned up nothing. I was about ready to give up and head back out into the fresh air -- okay, way more than ready -- when, just as my hand reached out for the door, I saw, on the dull silver wall of a heating vent, a line of black, ichorous fluid . . .

I turned my flashlight toward the vent and followed the line up . . . to discover, between the curve of the vent and a mass of exposed pink insulation, the gray snout and long yellow teeth of a very fat, very very dead possum.

After I took a couple of minutes to get my gag reflex under control, I investigated further and determined that the possum, before dying, had scrabbled its way up the side of an insulation-covered vent (tearing most of the insulation away) and into a cozy pocket right underneath the floorboards of our living room. It's a little difficult to describe, but basically this pocket was almost exactly possum-sized; floorboards above, two large vents side by side below, a possum-width opening at one end where it had crawled in, and a concrete wall at the other end. At the bottom of the pocket was a gap of an inch or so, just big enough for the creature to poke its snout through and drool blood as it died.

I went and got a hoe. Too big to fit through the hole. Got a spade. Small enough, but too small to do anything more than poke the thing. Got an apple-picker -- a wire cage on a stick, open at the top with a set of claw-shaped wires. This managed to lift one side of the possum momentarily, catch on its skin and rip it open -- yep, maggots -- but that was it.

If I wanted this possum to come out the way it went in, there was only one way: I'd have to reach in with my hands and lift it out. Toward myself.

And I've got balls the size of watermelons, but that. Was not. Going to happen.

So I called it a day, went upstairs, took a long, hot shower, and called Animal Abatement. Unfortunately, this experience took place on Saturday afternoon of a holiday weekend; today's Monday, Presidents' Day. So this weekend -- during which we've been entertaining a lot of guests -- we've had to endure the horrible, horrible smell of rotting possum in our house, which gets more intense when we turn up the heat (since the corpse is resting on a heating vent), which we have to do because the weather is the coldest it's been here in 103 years.

So yeah. That's some of what I've been doing lately.

Okay, no more grossness. Take a deep, clean, sanitary breath. Look at this beautiful picture of my daughter, and be happy.

Aqualapping, everything is crushing me.

2006-02-09T18:09:00.000-08:00

Thanks to a setup graciously provided by Matt Baldwin at Defective Yeti, I invite you now to participate in the 2006 Ipecac Aperitif Oscar betting pool.

For the purposes of this contest, I've pared down the 24 categories recognized by the Academy to a more manageable 13. In the unlikely event of a tie, I'll come up with a really obscure movie trivia question to determine the winner.

And what does the winner win?

Well, if the winner happens to reside in Sonoma County, California, I'll pony up some tickets to a local cinema. If the winner is located elsewhere, I'll send a bar of yummy gourmet chocolate through the mail, along with an original artisan-crafted poem by yours truly, written to order. Fair enough?

The deadline is high noon on Sunday, March 5, so get votin'!

I know this world is killing you.

2006-02-08T22:38:00.000-08:00

Hey, coffee-drinkers: do your mouths taste all retro like this all the time? Do your mouths always taste like college? This taste is making me want a cigarette, and a beer in a can, and a bonghit, and a big poster of Elvis Costello and another of Susan B. Anthony, and an asymmetrical haircut, and a romanticized view of the working class, and a secret All My Children addiction that, embarrassingly, actually influences how I schedule classes.

Not for the first or even twentieth time, I am right smack back in twitchy little stalker love with Mimi Smartypants.

Nothing else would fit right, or seem so directly applied.

2006-02-08T22:27:00.000-08:00

Recognizing the fact that I am just about as novice as it gets in this area, and thus liable to be painfully obvious, I must say, having just watched it, that Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is the gayest movie ever.

Nobody knows the stubble I've seen.

2006-02-05T13:20:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I laid down some blasphemy on all y'all, so here it is, in four parts.

1. With all conceivable respect to gay men and cowboys (not to mention manufacturers of pudding), I defy you not to be amused by Brokeback to the Future.

2. Lisa Carver (née Lisa Suckdog) has a website called Rollerderby that is worth a gander.

3. You will definitely go to Hell, or at least a bowling alley, if you, um, "mess" with the Jesus.

4. And finally: Hagrid molested me.

Put pepper in my coffee, I forgot to bark on command.

2006-02-02T21:35:00.000-08:00

Today is Genevieve's 20-month birthday.

She has recently ascended to a new level of brilliance that almost frightens us. It's a level that sometimes keeps her from going to sleep at night, because she's so turned on by her new ability to describe the world around her that she can't bear to stop. Colors: Geen. Boo. Wad. Lalo. Numbers: Wun? Too? Fee? Wun? Five? It's time to say good night to Papa: Bye-bye! Bye-bye!

Octopus. Truck. Airplane. Knee. Ball. Ice cream. Fax. She picks up the phone, or sometimes a calculator, and dials Timbuktu. "Allo? Allo?"

The slightest unintended brush against another object triggers an elaborate "owie" psychodrama involving real tears, kisses on the point of contact, and a detailed replay of the accident. Any attempt that Marla and I make to kiss or hug each other causes much consternation, of the "You might be hurting Mama/You're definitely diverting Mama's attention away from me" variety.

"NO!" It means more than you might think. It's very complicated.

Her smile is ... no, not dazzling. She's not a Mary-Kate or a JonBenet, thank betsy. It's ... swoony? Is that a word? Plotzical, maybe? Whatever the perfect adjective might be, it describes a phenomenon that has the power to sweep away all the circumstances of the moment and leave me utterly defenseless. Whatever else was going on becomes suddenly irrelevant. I am mush.

And it can vanish as quickly as it appears, Barbados to Reykjavik in 0.002 seconds, mercury shaking the glass tube with the speed of its descent. All is woe, and the sun will never shine again, never! Never! The emotion is so intense and so sincere that I can barely remember how easily it will change again, as soon as I gather my wits enough to point out something new and interesting.

Because no matter how happy or enraged or ecstatic or lachrymose she may be, nothing is stronger than the power of curiosity. Nothing can withstand the need to answer the question: "Genevieve, what's this?"

Happy birthday, squeevil.

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone

2006-01-28T14:14:00.000-08:00

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough
to truly consecrate the hour.
I am much too small in this world, yet not small enough
to be to you just object and thing,
dark and smart.
I want my free will and want it accompanying
the path which leads to action;
and want during times that beg questions,
where something is up,
to be among those in the know,
or else be alone.

I want to mirror your image to its fullest perfection,
never be blind or too old
to uphold your weighty wavering reflection.
I want to unfold.
Nowhere I wish to stay crooked, bent;
for there I would be dishonest, untrue.
I want my conscience to be
true before you;
want to describe myself like a picture I observed
for a long time, one close up,
like a new word I learned and embraced,
like the everyday jug,
like my mother's face,
like a ship that carried me along
-- Rainer Maria Rilke
(Translated by Annemarie S. Kidder)

If you're not mine, one less is nine.

2006-01-26T22:43:00.000-08:00

I've turned a corner of sorts. It happened all at once, like a butterball turkey ejected at high speed out the back door of a jackknifed semi refrigerator truck barrelling down I-80 in a midwinter high Sierra snowstorm and smashing through the windshield of a compact sedan with a transmission fluid leak. Not really, but wasn't that sentence an adventure?

Anyway. Cold turkeys aside, I realized that I have options. I'm capable of making choices. Now maybe that's an illusion and it's all predestined, in which case the wise thing to do is not to get too attached to expectations, but until I get whacked upside the head with the rattan cane of the Great Zen Master in the Sky, I'll go on ahead with this lovely dream in which I have some say over the nature of my experience.

I've been in a funk. The funk has two levels. One is a level at which I've been operating more or less my whole life, a level which is never entirely devoid of darkness; the other level lies within the particular swing of the seasons, especially winter. Winter is always hard. Darkness finds excuses to seep through. Wherever you're weak, the cold water finds a path, gets down in to where you breathe and changes the tenor of your speech. Oh well.

For whatever reason, I got a wake-up call and was able to hear it. It was nothing new, just a reminder of what I've always known: that whatever my circumstances may be, I have the ability to choose how I will respond. Surrender is my prerogative. I can surrender to optimism as surely as anything else, if that's what I want. Not just an idea. Practice. Exertion. An expenditure of energy that we quantify vaguely as soul force.

All the circumstances of my life coming to bear. My eye surgery. (Gee, what metaphorical significance might that carry?) Teaching the legacy of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Fishing for the deep thread between my wife and I. Autonomy: the self-directed expression of conscious, focused desire.

What is it that you actually want?

What are you actually doing to make it happen?

This is not a guilt trip. Don't get defensive. Be open. Be empty. Listen. There is no authority, no one you have to please. These are pixels on a screen, arranged in a configuration that resembles a series of sigils that represents a configuration of sounds that indicates an assemblage of linguistic significance, and you take whatever the hell you want from all of that: confusion, inkling, transcendent realization, boredom. I don't know. It's none of my business. I have no business. You're in control here. No one is making you read this. If you can make that decision, why not any other?

What if?

OK.

Point to point, point observation, children carry reservations.

2006-01-17T21:35:00.000-08:00

Scenes from the Children's Discovery Museum last weekend:

Would you, could you, in a Dr. Seuss-themed play structure?

Exploring the physics of plastic balls in soapy water with Ellie Ragsdale.

Tea for one, and one for tea.

It's mama and papa and mama and Genevieve and papa and Genevieve and mama and mama and Genevieve and papa and Genevieve!

Find the line, find the shape through the grain.

2006-01-13T09:16:00.000-08:00

Sometime, if I'm feeling particularly spiteful toward you, I'll describe in detail what it's like to get Lasik eye surgery. But for now, because I love you, I'll just say that it appears to have been successful (though the surgeon said it was the hardest one he'd ever done). I'm typing this without glasses and I can see reasonably well, although it's like someone smeared Vaseline over the lenses of my eyes. So I'm pretending that I'm in a really bad porno flick. One with no sex in it, or even bow-chicka-wow music.

I have a little bottle of artificial tears in my shirt pocket, which I am to apply whenever I feel dry or itchy in the eye region. The term "artificial tears" has a nice poetic resonance for me.

So I'm not wearing glasses anymore, although I did get a cool pair of wraparound Bono shades that I'm supposed to wear to bed for the next four days or so, so that I don't accidentally rub my eyes in my sleep. That's the big no-no: no rubbing the eyes! And no driving for a couple of days. We're heading down to Mountain View in an hour or two to spend a couple of nights with our supercool Ragsdale-Bourrillion friends, and Marla, who loves to drive anyway, is trying (and failing) not to gloat over the fact that she gets to drive the whole time.

Eye eye eye eye, canta y no llores.

All the other options held before me are growing increasingly unclear.

2006-01-09T18:55:00.000-08:00

I'm fond of glasses in many ways, really I am. It's the dependency upon them that wears thin. Some spectacle-wearers can take them or leave them, but I'm so myopic that I'm helpless without them -- can't see farther than six inches from the end of my nose with any clarity.

Which is a royal pain when they get dusty, stained, scratched, bent, or broken, as they inevitably will. Losing tiny nuts and screws is tricky when it happens in the midst of the working day. If I'm lucky enough to find the nut and screw after it falls on the floor -- tricky at the best of times, and especially tricky when I, ahem, don't have my glasses on -- and I'm lucky enough to have my glasses repair kit with me, I still have to summon the fine motor skills necessary to replace the tiny nut and screw with a tiny screwdriver. Without my glasses on. While everything else gets put on hold.

Enough of that. My specs have influenced my style for nearly 20 years now, but they also put a crimp in it. I've been renting my eyes since I was 12 years old, and it's time to put a down payment on peepers of my own.

In the neighborhood of four grand, it's going to be. And since it's elective surgery, I'm paying out of pocket. So I'll be paying for a while. But it's worth it to me if I can have 15 to 20 years of clear sight, before I go presbyopic like everybody does. (The prefix presby- means old. Does that mean that Presbyterians believe in old people?)

You can go here to read a poem of mine that was just published in The Dickens, which has some interesting resonance with my forthcoming surgery, despite the fact that I wrote it nearly nine years ago. My optometrist looked at me strangely after he read it.

She's filing her nails while they're dragging the lake.

2006-01-07T12:10:00.000-08:00

First of all
New baby pictures! Scroll down and tap that green button on the left.

And then
I'm going in for Lasik eye surgery on Thursday the 12th.

Consequently
Oodles of green noodles make blue poodles jump der shtroodle.

However
I recently taught myself to play "Jacob Marley's Chain" by Aimee Mann, except for a couple chords in the middle that I can't get quite right but close enough to fudge.

Moreover
Grew a beard for the winter break. Shaved it off last night.

Additionally
The executive branch of the federal government is a phalanx of con men and fascists.

And finally
Happy new year.

Just as permanent as painting in the iron age.

2006-01-05T21:16:00.000-08:00

And now, the epitome of lazy blogging. Here comes lazy blogging that took real work to accomplish. Serious, long-term work. Yet lazy: so very, very lazy.

I'm talking about the carbuncular excrescence of my obsessive-compulsive ritual in re movies. I'm talking about the list of every movie I've ever seen in my life, which I've just updated for the new year. I'm talking about the 2005 movie roundup.

Last year I watched a total of 152 movies, which means that I was watching a movie an average of four out of every ten days. If we calculate the average length of a movie to be two hours (perhaps a bit generous, but I saw my share of epics), then I spent the equivalent of roughly twelve and a half days of round-the-clock movie-watching. I guess that doesn't sound so impressive. Oh well. I do have the ragged vestiges of a life, after all. But it's a life with plenty of room in it for the cinema.

I'm too busy watching movies to go into great detail about what I thought of them, but I did take time to rate what I saw on a scale of five stars (classic) to half a star (utterly putrid). I've added links on the left-hand side to my lists of films I saw in the theater and films I saw on video, organized by rating and alphabetically. But for those who want the highlights, herewith I present my overall top ten in both categories.

[Be advised that the timeline of these lists is reflective solely of my personal experience; many of the movies in my video list were shown in theaters in 2005, but I didn't get around to seeing them there. Likewise, some of the movies in my theater list were shown in 2004 as well as 2005. Like you care about that, or any of this. Wank, wank, wiggedy wiggedy wank. Here we go.]

Top Ten Movies I Saw In Theaters Last Year, In Descending Order:

Sideways
Robots
Batman Begins
Kung Fu Hustle
Capote
Howl's Moving Castle
Serenity
The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
Genesis
Corpse Bride

Top Ten Movies I Saw On Video Last Year, In Descending Order:

Me and You and Everyone We Know
The Barbarian Invasions
In the Heat of the Night
The Machinist
My Life as a Dog
Maria Full of Grace
The Wild Bunch
Lawrence of Arabia
La Dolce Vita
M

Worst Movie I Saw In Theaters:

Wedding Crashers

Worst Movie I Saw On Video:

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians

I once kicked a French chicken in the stomach.

2005-12-30T20:46:00.000-08:00

It said "Oeuf!"

Joke stolen fron Jonathan Safran Foer.

More lazy blogging. It's been a while since I posted pictures of my little Bubastis, so here are three.

From left to right: Auntie Sutton, Herself, Papa, and Shasta enjoying storytime at the winter party.

Here's the Squamous grooving on her new BIG RED BALL with Grandpa Tom.

Too many places to go to limit herself to one direction, it would seem.

My lands, how I love her.

Lazy flies are hovering about.

2005-12-29T00:22:00.000-08:00

Lazy blogging, courtesy of This Modern World:

Four jobs you’ve had in your life: [Ed. note: chronological order] video retail clerk; alternative weekly newspaper journalist; data entry temp; English teacher

Four movies you could watch over and over: [Ed. note: far, far from comprehensive or definitive] Harold and Maude; The Silence of the Lambs; Fight Club; Flirting

Four places you’ve lived: Graton, California; Sebastopol, California; Peoria, Illinois; Willimantic, Connecticut

Four TV shows you love to watch: [Ed. note: on DVD, dahling -- I'm far too sophisticated for cable] Firefly; Lost; Six Feet Under; The West Wing

Four places you’ve been on vacation: Nepal; Thailand; Kaua'i; Elk

Four websites you visit daily: [Ed. note: daily? No. Far too busy. But the most frequent ones...] Born on the 5th of July; Mimi Smartypants; Homestar Runner; The Kingdom of Loathing

Four of your favorite foods: Mexican mango; basil, tomato, fresh mozzarella and olive oil; French fries with Dijon mustard; green curry with prawns

Four places you’d rather be: Kathmandu, Nepal; Mae Hong Son, Thailand; on the Green Tortoise heading south from Portland, Oregon; in the Tactile Dome at the Exploratorium, San Francisco

Four albums you can’t live without: [Ed. note: see Ed. note for movies] Blue Valentine, Tom Waits; Swordfishtrombones, Tom Waits; Rain Dogs, Tom Waits; Revolver, The Beatles

Next four tagged: Wes, Scot, Rich, Amanda & Michael. You’re it.

A mare. Egrets. Moose.

2005-12-24T23:42:00.000-08:00

According to a Texas history professor whose parents apparently liked pasta a whole lot, "a new Gallup poll reports that this year the average shopper planned to spend more than $700 on gifts."

That's the average?!?

Gotta wonder, if the percentage of U.S. citizens living in poverty is somewhere around 12.5 percent -- meaning that one in eight people in this country can't afford basic necessities -- just how that average was calculated.

I mean, I'm doing okay financially. Petit bourgeois, more or less. Not much padding, but we get by. And I'm not spending anywhere near $700 on gifts. Can't afford it, don't want to spend the time, and no one I care about needs more crap anyway. So who are these average folks with seven small to blow on trinkets?

Sometimes the capitalistic orgy of Christmas -- which has no more to do with Christ than 90% of Christianity does -- seems sexual to me. You know, a big frenzy of gratuitous giving and taking. People getting all lathered up over illusions. But then other times it seems more like a drug thing, like there's a desperate, out-of-control edge to it: production, consumption, production, consumption. I made this. Now buy it. Buy three. Buy one for everyone you know. It's your duty. Do it or you're out of the game, a traitor, a failure, unloved.

I mostly opted out this year, though I was wishy-washy as always. And I'm okay with that. I'd much rather be wishy-washy than a fanatic. So I bought some smallish stuff for some people I loved, stuff that was neither inappropriate nor especially remarkable, and I got some stuff that I mostly liked, but I can't remember who gave me what. It just doesn't matter.

I enjoy giving and receiving gifts, especially when they are unexpected. On my eleventh birthday, my father gave me a book that has been in our family for four generations, signed by Mark Twain. Now that was a gift. It didn't have to come on my birthday. I didn't expect anything comparable when the next birthday came around.

The rituals that matter are unique, momentary, and stamped with the hoof of the heart. To give or receive a real gift, to do it truly, is to surrender. You know, an act of love. Without that, the exchange is hollow.

So commit acts of love. How doesn't especially matter. Whether it's an object or an idea or your body or your listening or whatever, give and receive with grace. Expect nothing. Give all that you can stand, but only if it matters, only if you're paying attention. If you're not, if it doesn't matter, then don't. Stop. Let yourself be silent. There is no duty here.

If it matters, do it.

If it's fun and it doesn't hurt anyone, do it.

If not, toss it in the trash.

Merry Christmas.

The men in the gabardine suits, and their goddamned bowties.

2005-12-22T19:41:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of This Modern World. I'm not entirely sure I agree, though. The classic "is he evil or just stupid?" riddle may be on its way to obsolescence; it's kind of hard to call a man stupid if he keeps getting away with it, over and over. Nixon may have been smarter, or he may just have been more discreet. He actually went to the trouble of covering up crimes after committing them. Bush just says "Fuck all y'all, I'm-a keep tapping your phones too! National security, guys, end of fuckin' story. And New York Times, you know what we do to snitches up in this piece. Watch your back, crackers."

And yet, oddly enough, no one's impeaching this dookie-smear. Hmm. Stupid like a fox.

You're the bedtime story, the one that keeps the curtains closed.

2005-12-19T21:04:00.000-08:00

OK, it's official: I am a hard-core addict. My drug of choice -- nay, necessity -- is Lost.

Oh children, do not do as I have done. Not, that is, if you are not prepared to give up as much of your life as is necessary to keep watching this show. I'm fortunate not to have the ability to watch TV, which means that I only get to watch TV shows when they come out on DVD, which means that I get to watch the entire first season at a single stretch, without commercials. And thank Gertrude I stumbled upon it at the beginning of winter break, or I'd either be taking sick days or coming to work haggard every morning from lack of sleep.

I wasn't expecting to be so involved. My previous exposure to the work of J.J. Abrams was Alias, which I stopped watching after a few episodes because a), Jennifer Garner has the emotional range of a kumquat and b), come on already with the gratuitous diva-licious costume changes. Not television's finest hours. Lost is different. Though it has its share of mainstream TV tropes and clichés, it uses our familiarity with them to subvert expectations -- not always, but enough to keep me guessing. There is enough detail and continuity to allow me to suspend my disbelief, and just the right balance of revelation and suspense to keep me hungry for more without feeling cheated along the way.

It's been raining, and all three of us are in different stages of the same cold. Marla and I work tag-team, taking turns wrangling the baby downstairs while the other watches the next episode up in the aerie. I am so loving this daughter of mine and the time I get to spend with her now, watching her little self flap its stubby wings. I am Rascal Dad. Tonight I fed her at the dinner table, pasting short strands of linguine to both our noses and demonstrating how to eat them off.

We hold shrieking contests, tickling sessions, hide and seek with pillows. I eat her feet over and over again. I hoist her up on my shoulders and she smacks my head, and I grab her minuscule tuchis, which makes her screech and convulse with laughter. I use a scarf to drag her across the hardwood floor in the laundry basket. I hold her and rock her and moan along sympathetically when she bonks her head on the doorframe after running around like a wild thing. She brings me book after book, climbing in my lap to sit and turn the pages. She says "apple" and "dress" and my favorite, "papa".

And after a while, mama comes downstairs again going "Whoa. Dude. Just -- whoa." And it's my turn to go upstairs and get lost for another forty minutes or so.

Nice balance, really.

I swore you off but you climbed back on.

2005-12-16T15:11:00.000-08:00

Those who remember history and are sufficiently ruthless will be delighted to repeat it:

WASHINGTON - A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn’t know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.

A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period.

“This is incredible,” [says] group member Rich Hersh. “It’s an example of paranoia by our government,” he says. “We’re not doing anything illegal.”

The Defense Department document is the first inside look at how the U.S. military has stepped up intelligence collection inside this country since 9/11, which now includes the monitoring of peaceful anti-war and counter-military recruitment groups.

One DOD briefing document stamped “secret” concludes: “[W]e have noted increased communication and encouragement between protest groups using the [I]nternet,” but no “significant connection” between incidents, such as “reoccurring instigators at protests” or “vehicle descriptions.”

The increased monitoring disturbs some military observers.

“It means that they’re actually collecting information about who’s at those protests, the descriptions of vehicles at those protests,” says Arkin. “On the domestic level, this is unprecedented.”

Full story here.

Uh, I mean, happy holidays.

Goddamned greater reality. Why does it always have to be so fucked up and bleak? It's the usual December here at home, dark weather and spangly lights and cold and heat and tables full of food, red wine, mistletoe in doorways. School let out today and I'm home with a head full of snot, on the mend with low energy and high spirits. So it goes. A fortunate son of the northwestern middle class, raising a glass.

I think that the fact that Clinton was impeached raises the bar as far as impeaching Bush: two traumas in a row is really not good for the country, and even though my reluctance to go through a second impeachment benefits the very Republicans who needlessly inflicted the first on us, I don't care. It's bad for the country, and that matters most.

But I have a high bar, not a nonexistent one. And for a President to order violations of the law meets my criteria for impeachment.

Four teachers, including myself, went out to breakfast this morning with the eighth grade students, or those who showed up for what was an entirely non-academic half-day. Then we came back and watched part of The Producers (the 1968 version) in my room, or played basketball in the gym, or put last-minute finishing touches on a Photoshop project we've been doing. And I got lots of presents from generous parents. Five bottles of wine, all told. Out of there by noon, home to put on pajamas and bathrobe and slippers.

We must not don the blinders and think America is always, without fail, the land of the perky and the free and the benevolent. Horrific torture is very much a part of who we are, right now. Deny it at your peril. Accept it at your deep discontent.

Ladies and gentlemen, read Mark Morford. This is real, and must not be ignored because it's painful or distant.

I also can't ignore what looks like a relatively peaceful and, by American standards, off-the-charts popular election in Iraq, although let's not break out the fine champanya quite yet:

"Nothing will be easy. It will take a long time just to name a government. We need electricity badly. It makes our life so difficult," said Salaam Ali, 35, a store owner who voted for the Islamist Shi'ite list now dominating power.

The polls put 69-year-old Jassim Saleh in an idealistic mood after he voted for Sunni Arab politicians seeking to regain influence after their minority sect boycotted the January poll.

"All Iraqis will win the election. Iraq will be stable and secure," he said.

Optimism was also the mood among pensioners taking a lazy walk as a U.S. Bradley Fighting Vehicle roared by and policemen clutching AK-47 assault rifles sped by in pickup trucks.

"The elections will bring Sunnis and Shi'ites together. We will have justice," said Talib Mohammed. "I want to thank George Bush for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Now we have elections."

Some in the group said the U.S. troops who ousted Saddam in April 2003 had outstayed their welcome, glossing over fears that a hasty U.S. pullout could lead to civil war and more carnage.

"There will be no tears if the Americans leave," said Mohammed Fadil.

No tears apart from the ones already being shed, the ongoing anguish of the tens -- hundreds? -- of thousands of people whose lives have been changed forever by injuries, psychological damage, and/or the violent loss of loved ones, property, human rights ... all brought about by this war. Just those tears.

Was it all worth it? Was it? Saddam is in a courtroom instead of a palace, and that's a good thing. There has been what appears to be a free and fair election where once there was a dictatorship, and that's a good thing. The cost of these good things has been, is, mind-bogglingly enormous. Was it worth it?

If it was, should we ever stop paying it? Should we keep waging war and sacrificing human lives, without ceasing, until all the dictators and are dethroned and democracy flourishes everywhere? Why be selective, if our cause is just and necessary? Do we not have an obligation?

If it wasn't worth it ... then we need to stop, now, before we dig our hole of karmic debt any deeper.

Okay, here's something funny: pandas are stupid.

To a terrorist.

2005-12-05T20:43:00.000-08:00

For the historical ache, the ache passed down
which finds its circumstance and becomes
the present ache, I offer this poem

without hope, knowing there's nothing,
not even revenge, which alleviates
a life like yours. I offer it as one

might offer his father's ashes
to the wind, a gesture
when there's nothing else to do.

Still, I must say to you:
I hate your good reasons.
I hate the hatefullness that makes you fall

in love with death, your own included.
Perhaps you're hating me now,
I who own my own house

and live in a country so muscular,
so smug, it thinks its terror is meant
only to mean well, and to protect.

Christ turned his singular cheek,
one man's holiness another's absurdity.
Like you, the rest of us obey the sting,

the surge. I'm just speaking out loud
to cancel my silence. Consider it an old impulse,
doomed to become mere words.

The first poet probably spoke to thunder
and, for a while, believed
thunder had an ear and a choice.

— Stephen Dunn

A million blackbirds looking like one.

2005-11-26T15:10:00.000-08:00

Item: Well, it looks like The Dickens, a fine annual litmag that unfortunately has no website, is going to publish another of my poems. Hurrah! I haven't written much of consequence for a while, but it's still nice to be recognized, even for old work. The poem they accepted this year, "Oculomotor", is one that I've always really liked, so I'm glad it's finally going to see print.

Item:Thanksgiving was tryptophantastic, a gathering of many layers of families and friends in our living room eating succulent comfort food and playing with small, diapered people. And the day before Thanksgiving, Kev was able to make it up in time to hit the open mic night at Coffee Catz with me. We were the last two performers of the night and the crowd was down to about six people, but it was still a blast. Kev rocked the hizzy into a folk-rock tizzy. I wasn't too bad myself.

Item:The wildly popular sport of decorating the face of a person who has passed out from drinking too much alcohol is not usually my thing, since the decorations tend to be rather unimaginative variations on the same theme, but I liked this one more than most. I actually wouldn't mind if I woke up one morning with a face like that.

Item:When you have a moment, stroll around the grounds of the Maybe Logic Academy and take in a lecture by Robert Anton Wilson. Information is surprise.

Before you learn how to rock, you learn to rollerskate.

2005-11-19T16:17:00.000-08:00

1. Of the 50 things the BBC constituency believes I should eat before I die, the items I have yet to try are:

Moreton Bay Bugs
Alligator
Kangaroo
Venison
Guinea pig
Barramundi
Reindeer
Australian meat pie
Durian fruit
Tapask
Haggis
Cornish pasty

2. Dick Cheney is now seven points less popular than beating children.

3. Playskool Homeland Security in action.

4. Defend the Brewery!

5. Only a traitor
undresses his metaphors
as if they were whores.

John Darnielle, you are my hero.

6. There's a point here somewhere, I'm sure of it.

7. Finally, this is just about the scariest thing I've ever seen.

And I will say this at the risk of falling from favor.

2005-11-14T22:47:00.000-08:00

Twelve years ago tonight, life almost ended for me.

But it didn't. And I'm still here.

When the temperature falls and the night comes early, people stay indoors to keep warm and turn on all the lights against the darkness. Winter can be hard. You survive if you stay together.

I light a candle of my own every year on this night. It's dark outside but I'm still here, still alive. Tonight I look back on twelve years since the nadir. On everything I would have missed if I had died. There is so much -- so much I had no way of knowing was possible.

I give thanks for my family and my friends, the people who care about me, the people who worked to keep me alive. I am so fortunate, and so grateful.

Those flowers bloom where you have placed them.

2005-11-12T16:47:00.000-08:00

This is sort of related to what I posted yesterday.

I take part in a reader-response feature at the Press Democrat, the local daily, where they e-mail me questions from time to time and if I respond in time, they might publish me in the paper. Yesterday, they sent me this prompt:

Conservative talk-show host Bill O'Reilly has angered San Francisco by suggesting the city doesn't deserve military protection in case of a terrorist attack because it voted to oppose military recruitment in its public schools.

Do you think the city's voters have the right to discourage military recruitment when they benefit from federal protection?

This was my response:

The job of soldiers is to protect all Americans, not just the ones with whom they agree. In our military, service is not a quid pro quo arrangement — that's what distinguishes it from organized crime. Perhaps if we weren't squandering thousands of lives in an unnecessary, interminable war, the military wouldn't need to resort to selling itself to impressionable teenagers.

They chose not to print any of the responses because "the story did not develop as we anticipated", so they said. I don't know what that means, exactly. But I have a blog, so ...

That's where the beach was, that's where the sea.

2005-11-11T17:09:00.000-08:00

Today is Veterans' Day, and I don't have to work because my country has set aside this day to honor the people who fought to protect our freedoms. (Not fought and died to protect -- that's Memorial Day.) It would be good of me to thank them.

I'm having a hard time with that, though.

I'm thinking today about how no politician in his or her right mind ever says anything against soldiers. That's a no-brainer. Hawk or dove, peacenik or warmonger, there's just no downside to saluting our brave men and women in combat. And because it's so easy, because it's a no-brainer, it's got me thinking. I'm going to risk being offensive here, and I hope you'll stick around anyway.

Murder is bad. Really bad. Get drunk and go driving and kill a kid, that's bad too -- that's vehicular manslaughter and you'll spend time in prison -- but it's not the same as murder, not quite as bad as murder, because murder involves malice aforethought. A murderer is someone in full possession of her or his faculties for reasoning who deliberately decides to kill someone else. Those are the people we execute on Death Row, and that, I do believe, is chapter one of the irony textbook.

Certain people pose a threat to society, and for the greater good must be removed from it. I agree with that completely. That's what jails are for. Jails exist so that we don't need to kill dangerous people. Sort of the equivalent of a long-term (or permanent) time-out, rather than a spanking.

As far as I can see, the ONLY time it is morally defensible to kill another human being is in a situation of immediate and dire self-defense. (And let's not talk abortion right now -- save that for another day.) It is OK to defend your right to stay alive if someone else is trying to kill you. Killing another person should be an action of last resort, taken only when no other option is possible.

With me so far?

Now. When we move outward from a personal level to a communal level, we have to consider the possible need to defend a community against aggressors. If the Visigoths are coming to rape, kill, pillage and burn your huts, and diplomacy is not an option, then you take up arms and do your best to stop them -- or you die. Again: defensible. Horrible, horrifying, but defensible.

What if the Visigoths are coming to r, k, p & b the decent folks in the next village, who are still recovering from the last raid and don't have enough wherewithal to defend themselves? You might decide that's none of your business, but eventually it will become your business when the next village is obliterated and the Visigoths set their sights elsewhere. So if you're smart, you take up arms and do your best to stop them.

The two key elements in all of these scenarios are necessity and defense. If you initiate violence, or if you participate in violence that is unnecessary, you are in the wrong. You are the murderer rather than the victim. Engaging in violence is defensible only when it is defensive and imperative. There has to be no viable alternative that will prevent violence being done unto you.

Still with me?

Now, to my point. We honor soldiers because we believe that they are engaged in the horrible, horrifying, but defensible work of keeping our country safe. Their task is to defend when necessary. That is, indeed, an honorable and essential task that must be undertaken.

But:

When soldiers engage in violence for reasons other than that, they are behaving indefensibly and dishonorably. And, all too often, that is the case with the soldiers of the United States military.

I do not celebrate such behavior.

I know that many good and decent people serve in our military, many of them believing they are doing something that is right and necessary. But they're not. And however good and decent they may be, the crime they are committing is still a crime. It is the worst crime: the deliberate, conscious, unnecessary killing of other human beings.

I feel sympathy for good people who have believed in lies and found themselves trapped in Hell. I honor the good intentions of the people who wanted only to protect their homeland against danger, who were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice of their own lives to keep others safe. I have the deepest respect for those intentions; I can only hope I would be so brave. I am glad for the soldiers who have survived armed conflict and come home safely, although of course many who come home are deeply wounded -- and for them I feel sorrow, as well.

That they would have given their lives for their country, had it been a necessary sacrifice: that I honor. For that I feel gratitude.

But for what they've actually done, actually, in the real world? No. I cannot thank them for that.

You don't thank a victim. You don't thank someone who's been abused for their harrowing experience. You listen, you try to understand what they've endured, you find some way to help them come back to a place of peace.

Not all were victims, of course. Some were aggressors. Some knew that what they were doing was unnecessary, and they did it anyway. That's malice aforethought. That's murder. And murderers -- whether they be overzealous generals, callous footsoldiers, or greed-crazed sociopaths in the executive office -- belong in jail. Where they can do no more harm to anyone who cares to live in peace.

Welcome to the desert of the real.

2005-11-09T20:35:00.000-08:00

First quarter has ended. The verdict:

One F. No Ds. Two Cs. Ten Bs. Twenty-eight As.

I swear to Kali, I'm not being a pansy here. I can wear the skull necklace, oh yes I can, no matter how well-heeled the temperamental boots of these Wine Country parents may be. It's just the truth. Two-thirds of my students deserve an A for their work, and I've never seen the like.

So now begins Chapter Two, and I'm exhausted from grading and rain and baby and beer and all, and I have only a glimmer of a clue about what I'm going to do next, but it's OK. I think I'm going to make them interview each other and write biographies, and read LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea, and explore the Hero's Journey, and and bloody and.

Tomorrow I'll show them a clip from Lawrence of Arabia, the bit where, after crossing the uncrossable desert, Lawrence discovers that a man has been left behind. And he decides to go back to get him. And Mr. Arab Guy says something like "You fool, he's already dead, it is written." But Larry goes back anyway, and gets him, and brings him back alive, and staggers off his camel, and says: "Nothing is written."

Nothing is written.

And now, children, consider the desert. An endless plane of blinding white. Very clean, and much larger than you are. And here you are at this tiny oasis, which is your mind, your experience. And it is time to take a journey. Nothing is written. Yet. There is no beating infinity, of course not, but defeat is similarly impossible. You have only two choices: to stay where you are, safely in your oasis, doing nothing, and die someday, probably of boredom. Or: to venture out across this vast paper dancefloor, and make all the mistakes you have the guts to risk -- don't worry, there's plenty of room -- and flounder occasionally into a moment of grace.

Because? Because because because because because. Because of the wonderful things.

To see what she could see.

2005-11-04T16:34:00.000-08:00

And now, by popular demand (OK, by a request from Lyz -- twist my arm, lady!) here are pictures of Genevieve in her bear suit last Monday. She only trick-or-treated at two houses, our neighbors on either side, before she was done for the night; not too shabby, given that she was 17 months less two days at the time.

For poop! For poop!

2005-11-04T10:39:00.000-08:00

We've still got a couple of months to go, but as of this writing, Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know is the best movie of the year in my book. Wouldn't have guessed. My previous experience with Ms. July was her spoken-word album The Binet-Simon Test, gifted to me by the folks at SignalStation. It's interesting, creative, unpleasant, somewhat pedantically intense stuff that's worth listening to once, or maybe twice, but probably not more than that. But wow, this movie -- totally awesome. Made my mind bloom with possibilities. Rare and beautiful and really funny.

I watched it last night in spite of the intermittent super-gnarly headaches I got from my glasses, which broke earlier this week (second time within a month). "Intermittent super-gnarly headaches. Boom." Now repeat that five or six times. Isn't that fun? Anyway, I haven't been able to work for the last couple of days. I've been wishing I was a bear or a dog or something, a scent-oriented creature. But no. 10 or 20 minutes of vision at a stretch before the pain gets unbearable, then 30 minutes lying down with an eyepillow. Ick ack uck No.

The part I need (a new stem on the left side) should be coming in today. I hope.

I want laser eye surgery for Christmas.

You're just a buffet, you're a vegetable.

2005-10-30T19:37:00.000-08:00

As a child, my lovely wife rebelled against the groovy vibrations of her hippie upbringing by developing a taste for white flour, refined sugar, and all the other disgustingly mainstream-American grocery staples. Now that she's a parent herself, the karma is of course on the other foot; nothing like having a child of your own to put things in perspective. She tries her best to keep Genevieve's diet healthful, although G is already showing a pronounced distaste for vegetables -- tomorrow we'll be making fruit smoothies with kale mixed into them, in a desperate attempt to get some iron into her. But Marla herself still has a fondness for white bread, French's yellow mustard and McDonald's that I'm proud -- OK, smug -- to say I do not share.

Our differences in taste extend into the bathroom. I'm a Tom's of Maine man. Marla prefers Crest, despite my attempts to guilt-trip her with tales of Procter & Gamble's experiments on animals. But I was horrified for a very different reason when she brought home the latest tube. As someone whose life and livelihood are threaded with a deep love for the English language, I was utterly appalled at the label that read "Whitening Expressions Extreme Herbal Mint". I mean, I hardly know where to begin. I look at that and my brain just starts sputtering with six different flavors of indignation.

Whitening Expressions Extreme Herbal Mint. What the! How can! But I! Of all!

In other news, my friend Tim and I made jackamalanterns last night. Here are the two I made, before and after dark.

Eyes the color of candy, lies to cover the handicap.

2005-10-29T16:43:00.000-07:00

"I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors."
— George H. W. Bush, 1999

"I think if the allegation is true, to reveal the identity of an undercover CIA operative — it's abhorrent, and it should be a crime, and it is a crime."
— Former Republican National Committee Chair Ed Gillespie, 2003

And if the only way to nail Capone is for tax evasion, then go for it. I'm sorry for what happened to Valerie Plame, and the indictment is well-deserved, but treason pales in comparison to the real crime here.

It's a rhetorical question for anyone who's been paying attention, of course. The ends justify the means for this administration, even when the means are tens of thousands of corpses (if you bother to count all those civilians, that is).

One of my dads recently expressed the opinion that what with Scooter Libby, Harriet Miers and Hurricane Katrina, "the pendulum is starting to swing in the other direction". I'd like to believe that. But Christ on a crooked crutch, folks -- if the malignancy of the Bush administration wasn't obvious enough a year ago, why should these new developments make a difference?

She don't use butter, and she don't use cheese.

2005-10-27T21:38:00.000-07:00

I have no idea what I'm going to write next.

I'm improvising. Freestyle. A cold October wind is blowing over my face. I'm sitting on a sand dune at a beach I don't know the name of, after dark. Salt. Pacific. Improvisation. Capitalized initials. Ignition. Turning the key. Stuttering into first. Coughing nicotine magic grinding into gear that isn't pretty but gets you there without revision. Only a vision. The dirty sheet flapping at the shins, a bottlecap rusted and flicked into the brusque fuckstick hallucinogenic dawn. This is a dream. I was never here. Observers gliding past on synaptic grease, swallowing response without pause, tonguing the switches of a languid machine that promises suck unending, fluid drip of sympathy nurturing the pale search engine forward down on gelid knees where the mudsluice lingers I cannot, will not push the fascist period point home to a blind landing field where we all pause and reconsider our what? Our what? What? Someone is shouting in my ear. There are many reasons why I should not continue. Many carefully considered reasons why there is no one who will ever listen. Many hypothetical shells of syntax that are crushed every night by the surge of schizofractal butterflied dragonwings splayed open on the cartwheel. Our lovely syllables. Pulsing in three-thirteen time, a patient hesitation. Spitting out fragments of wing. Collage of broken flight. Gears need spokes. All the pieces coalescing again around a dumb hub, every particle of your wasted youth sanding down the slope of angry glass, someone who wouldn't listen to the sound of his own name and became instead whatever else. This is love. This is bath. This is surrender.

eyeball underwater

Pictures from the pumpkin patch.

2005-10-25T19:56:00.000-07:00

The weather changes about halfway between your house and mine.

2005-10-22T16:44:00.000-07:00

Three things:

1. We had lunch at a Mexican restaurant today, and I decided to be adventurous and try something new. I had the birria de chivo, which BabelFish claims means "birria of I inform" but actually has more to do with pot-roasted goat meat. Ever have goat? I have. It's greasy, gamy, gelatinous, and full of fascinating bone chips that add a special "surprise" element to the eating process. ¡Vamos al menudo! (BabelFish translation: "we go to the slight one".)

2. I will now share with you the horrible song that has been running through my head, inexplicably, all day long. Cue Peter Cetera:

Iee-yammaman
Hoowillfight foryer onnah!
I'll be the heeeerow that you're dreamin' uuh-uv!
Gunnaliv fo-ureva-ah!!
Knowin' toogeh-thuh thatawee
Didit awul fo' the gloooreee of luuuvv!!!!!!

3. I don't know why I'm even writing this (okay, yes I do) when I have more than 200 projects to grade this weekend. I set myself up. I created a book report unit where each student had to do 70 points' worth of assignments by a deadline, and in order to make it to 70 points most of them had to do between four and seven things, and of course they all turned them in at the last possible minute, so now I'm swamped. And the quarter ends in two weeks. And everyone wants to know what their grade is, but if I tell them now it won't reflect the massive amount of work I haven't graded yet, which means I'd be a fool to tell them, because whatever they've got now may change drastically by the time I finish this monster.

So yeah. Life of a Chicago-haunted, goat-sucking English teacher with bad habits. Like blogging and watching Six Feet Under with the wife instead of wading through stacks of adolescent brilliance. (And it is brilliant, most of it. That helps. These kids are amazing.)

¡Vamos a la tarea!

You'll be the big cheese on that orbiting rondel.

2005-10-17T18:35:00.000-07:00

Genevieve has developed a charming obsession with the moon. Or "mooooOOOOoooo," as she calls it, which is different from "mmmmmOOOO" (that's what a cow says) and "mmmOH", which is her version of the sacred syllable om.

Usually three to five times per evening, she'll get a wild look in her eyes and point out the window. "MooooOOOOoooo!" she'll say. Then we go out into the evening and look around for the moon. It's disconcerting when we can't find it because it hasn't risen yet. Tonight's payoff was worth the wait: a smoldering coin of pumpkin and brown sugar simmering above the Sierra Nevada. OoooOOOOoooo. I'm a little nervous about two weeks from now, when the new moon comes around. I'm not sure that I'll be able to explain its apparent absence to her satisfaction.

Entries in Genevieve's lexicon:

• what a cow says
• what a cat, dog, fish, horse, goat, pig, mouse, hippopotamus and lizard say
• what a car says
• moon
• down
• maMAmAAMAmAMmamamMAMAMA
• off
• no
• noNOnoNOnoNOnoNONONONONO
• yeah
• sign language for "more", "all done" and "light"
• boobah (what mama's got that papa will never have)
• yummyyummy

The rusty gears of morning, and faceless, busy phones.

2005-10-13T19:50:00.000-07:00

Last night I surprised myself. I stopped in at a local caffeine parlor on the way home from work and discovered an open mic night in full swing. There was a geezer with a slightly out-of-tune guitar playing the Woody Guthrie songbook. It looked like so much fun that I decided spontaneously to join in. I started with the Woody Guthrie song I know how to play, "Ingrid Bergman", posthumously recorded by Billy Bragg, which also happens to be my daughter's favorite song.

(My daughter. This is her. In Hawaii about a month ago. On a pool table in our beachside house, in her party dress. Take whatever "oh she's so binkery" reaction you may have, multiply it by 919,281,836 billion billion squidrillionillion, and that's me.)

Then I played one of my two political songs, "Star Wars", and then the first lullaby I wrote for Genevieve, before she was born, "Ship of Stars". I played pretty well, despite stage fright, and was well received. A gentleman urged me to submit my songs to the International Songwriting Competition, advising haste, as the deadline for submissions is tomorrow. The potential prizes are considerable, as is the honor of merely being listened to by such luminaries as Tom Waits, Loretta Lynn, Macy Gray, Amy Ray, Steve Vai and The Donnas. It costs, but what the heck. I'm entering "Star Wars" and "Ship of Stars", and if I don't win then I'll consider the entry fee to be payment for a most enjoyable evening out.

I'm thirtysomething now. I've been so many years already, each one swallowed by the next, bearing the full belly of my past as I go on masticating the present, trying to pace myself to match the speed of my digestive system.

Vocationally centered, now, in a way I've never been before. So much of me goes into being a teacher. It's exhilarating, exhausting, revitalizing, transformative. Amazing. These are not the adjectives you expect to hear from a teacher. I'm wary of boring people or coming off saccharine; it's hard for me to see myself from the outside, and I rarely know what other people are thinking. So I'm constantly checking the reception I get. Is this okay? Can I broadcast my joy? Does anyone care to hear it? Should that matter? Where is the balance?

I am so happy. Am I allowed to say that in public?

Yesterday I started class by passing around a canvas bag and opening it just wide enough for each student to poke their nose in and take a couple of deep breaths. Then I asked them to write for three minutes, without letting the editorial mind get in the way, whatever associations they had with the smell. It was a bag full of ripe Gravenstein apples I'd picked off a tree the day before, reeking of fall.

We're writing children's books now. We're going to write and illustrate and self-publish them, and read them to the first and second graders here at school, and then donate them to another school in the neighborhood.

Last week the school garden hosted a harvest fair with grilled corn and grape juice pressed on the spot and baskets of heirloom tomatoes for fifty cents and Indian-corn necklaces and me hunkering down in the dirt with the fifth-grade teacher strumming Beatles songs while a nine-year-old boy accompanied us on violin.

It's like that, this job: an ecstatic run-on sentence.