Joyful to Hear (by Mila) · Looking @ Entries

the importance of being there (Entry)

2011-11-17T00:05:56Z

An anarchist protests for "Revolution" high atop the 1stBank sign in front of the bank’s offices in Denver, Colorado.

Why is physical presence important to a protest movement?

Because, for all its immediacy and interconnectedness, social media, the internet, the realm of ideas… is a dark and distant place. No moving pictures for the camera, no faces and voices that call out to us from the television glass, no human touch to move the writers’ heart to write words that move our own.

This place where ideas live is still too impenetrable by the nightly news, still too far removed from the lives of those who could most benefit from them, still too new to have wholly won our trust, and so it remains in a corner, easily ignored, easily forgotten.

But you can’t forget the man yelling out with his voice of freedom here on the streets where you walk. His voice rings in your ears. His words take up residence somewhere in that mass of thoughts you think each day. You can glorify him or vilify him, and you can even try to ignore him: but he is undeniably there, and his presence disturbs your peace.

losing (and gaining) a hero (Entry)

2011-10-06T11:37:53Z

The keynote auditorium was dark, barely lit, and empty. No guards at the door, nobody milling about inside. I’d walked right in (to this day I don’t remember how I got into Javitz Center so early, but the doors were unlocked and nobody was around to guard them), picked out a seat directly behind the VIP rows, and sat in the dimness reading the Macworld Expo brochure, deciding what to do that day.

I wasn’t paying attention, so when somebody tapped me on the shoulder from behind, I jumped. And when I looked up, there he was. He smiled, kindly, introduced himself, asked me my name, and asked me, as if he was actually giving me the choice, “Would you mind stepping out for a while? We need to run through the keynote before people start arriving.”

I didn’t know what to say. I nodded, collected my bag and belongings, and stood up. “Sure,” I told him, and started to walk back down the dark aisle toward the exit.

“Please don’t tell anyone about this,” he said, again smiling broadly, “or we’ll have people trying to sneak in early all the time.”

I kept walking, maybe ten feet, and I turned around once more. I looked Steve Jobs in the eye and said, with pure and unadulterated sincerity, “Thank you.”

Yesterday, I lost one of my heroes.

When I was young – I had a hard time figuring out who my heroes were. I wouldn’t let them off for being human. My heroes needed to live superhuman lives and show off no faults. I wouldn’t let them be alcoholics, or drug users or criminals, even if the crazy life they led helped them create with such amazing honesty.

And until yesterday, had someone asked me, “Who are your heroes?”, well – I still would’ve fumbled looking for an answer. But as I learned of Steve Job’s death via Twitter – I didn’t believe the news at first – as my timeline and most of my immediate world filled with memories and gratitude for him, it crystallized for me. My heroes are those whose actions inspire me not to become like them, but to become even more awesomely myself – whose life encourages me to dig deeper for what I can offer, what I can give, what I can do, and not out of ego or pride, but out of pure expression of this being I call me.

Steve Jobs – encouraging us to Think Different, speaking to the crazy ones among us, and yes, I’ve always felt like I see the world a little askew, told me it was not only okay to be a little crazy, to think we could change world, but he also told me – and he showed me – that it’s possible.

Undoubtedly Apple is a confederation of geniuses, of dreamers and of people who don’t settle for anything less than profound, but it is a place created, formed, shaped by his vision, and he brought together the best he could find to make technology beautiful and human. To make people the most important technology.

So many of my potential heroes, too, were artists, and so I gave them the rough treatment. It wasn’t enough for me for an artist to create powerful art; their life needed to be art as well, and without blemish.

But none of us is perfect. None of us is without blemish. There will be people who talk about dark sides of any hero, Steve Jobs included. So now I’ve redefined what an artist is – to me: An artist imagines, and is driven by that imagination to create no matter what the world says, and an artist’s creation inspires our imagination.

Yesterday, the world lost a profound artist, someone who touched almost every aspect of modern life for a vast portion of the world, and I lost a hero. But I also gained one.

Goodbye, Steve. Thank you so, so much.

I’d seen him in person once more (outside of keynotes and random glimpses of him milling about the show floor) at a Macworld. He’d arrived at the front entrance with a small entourage in tow, without his badge. The security guard stopped him and told him nobody would be admitted without a show badge.

We who congregated around the scene could tell he was upset about it, but he quietly told the guard his name, and that he was the CEO of Apple. The guard had none of it and stood firm. Steve – in his black turtleneck and blue jeans, asked a few members of his entourage to vouch for him, but the security guard just radioed his supervisor.

And in a few minutes, out walked a supervisor, who again repeated the policy. Steve – already standing up straight and tall, looked the supervisor in the eye and spoke – clearly enough for the gathered crowd to hear:

“Do you know who I am? I’m Steven Fucking Jobs!”

And with that, Steven Fucking Jobs walked past the guards and into Javitz Center just like he owned the place.

in memoriam

Steve Jobs, artist, hero

1955-2011

bonfire of the exes (Entry)

2011-09-06T00:51:57Z

Marten Melville Miller, known by his housemates, his three exes (and how lucky, say his friends, to live with three lovely women who love him – loved me, he corrects), alternately as 3M and by extension the nickname on the note that lies under a half-drunk glass of water still wet with condensation there on his wood kitchen table, stands slowly sipping his coffee with a splash of half-and-half and a spoon of sugar, reading Sage’s hurried scribble:

Hey Post-it® Boy,

Can you try to get home at an earlier time of night? I worry, it keeps me up, and then I can hear everything bumping and thumping around here, especially when you get home. It keeps me up all night, and if I don’t get enough sleep that messes up my yoga. And that messes up my whole day. So please, don’t stay out so late?

Thanks, Sage

She even wrote in the little registered symbol, got it right, no TM or © on this thing. It’s not even really a Post-It Note she wrote on, though, it’s a random generic sticky note from a massive pack he bought at CVS or Rite-Aid a few years back. But the nickname, that was Ali’s idea following a very brief dalliance with calling him 3M. His other exes, they took a while to warm up to it, but now the name was stuck fast – and unlike the notes themselves, it wouldn’t come off. He’d gotten used to it, the boy who was stuck fast to his past three exes.

Marten settles into the chair, unsticking and re-applying the note to the arm of his shirt so he’ll remember it when he leaves the room; he picks up today’s copy of the Boston Globe and sorts through to the job ads, folds the paper back on itself and tosses all the unneeded sections of the paper over to the other end of the kitchen table. The house creaks and a few cars slowly pass by on the street outside, their low mmmm the loudest sound of the late morning. Marten sits in a pair of green flannel plaid pajama pants and a t-shirt picked up from his once-worn pile. He sits on a wooden chair at a wooden table, old and so heavily scratched and abraded that the paint looks like a fine, uneven dusting of blue eggshell powder, and when he shifts his chair back to reach for more coffee, its wood legs scrape at the hardwood floor – in sore need of a new finish – with a petulant grunt. The morning sun, no longer gold, defines every shadow and reflects sharply and starkly white off the painted surfaces of the counter and the cabinets. No need to turn on the kitchen light this morning.

He turns his attention back to the paper and scans the headings for something he wants to do. Job listings in the paper, a sort of antiquated concept but it gives him satisfaction to see the red marker circles tangible and bright on newsprint. And it’s an excuse for a morning ritual: check the kitchen for notes, have a bit of coffee and oatmeal, inspect the trash and take it out if he needs to, look for jobs in the paper. And then a hot shower, a shave and into his bedroom office to plug into that world he can’t touch, where he’ll keep looking for work in the modern ways, check email, try to write.

How long has it been since they laid him off? Almost 9 months. Long enough to conceive and bear a child. The phone chirps over in the corner, someone else answers it on the second ring. Ali must be awake. He’s been out of full-time work for longer than it took for his parents to make him. He thinks about that, his eyes still running unfocused over the narrow columns of microscopic text set in the classifieds. The first couple months his savings kept him afloat, but after that it was Kaylee who saved him, Kaylee with her editor’s job at a publishing office downtown – I’ll slip your first book into the rush pile, she’d joke, as if it were that easy – who with great maternal care offered to help pay his rent and bills in the interim until he found gainful employment. He tries to do the math in his head, the rent is easy, but the other bills: too many variables, and groceries, and transportation here and there. He gives up and swallows down his totally incorrect number with another swig of coffee. He circles another opening with his bright red Sharpie marker, nothing much, just a register boy at a thrift shop down the street.

It’s not running a company, certainly not the $100K he’d made just a few years ago as a tech wizard. He has a mind for that sort of thing: inquisitive, creative. He sees the big picture and memorizes only the strangest of strange details. They loved him for that sort of creativity, not just his colleagues, but his exes too. His world is all well-used, bumped and scraped, odd angles, long ways around and leaps of faith, but it is beautiful to him, and when he opens his mouth to share it, they fall in love with the world inside his head.

His coffee mug is nearly empty again. He smiles, you’re not enough, are you? I can make more, but is there ever enough?

Ali skids into the kitchen from the stairs in nothing but sandals and a turquoise thong, sliding right into a sunbeam. She stretches up into it like a cat. Her body. He watches her stretch and curl in, he watches her breasts pull back and flatten tight and tiny as she arches upward; he watches her breasts swell into the petite shape of ripe pears, as she relaxes forward and wraps herself around herself. She smiles askew at him through blonde hair that falls over her face like a veil, she knows he’s looking, likes that he’s looking, and then she walks over to the counter (slides over, really), and he watches her. He can’t help but watch her in that nothing but a thong that she’s wearing, which is his fault, because she used to bound out naked from head to toe, not a lick of clothing on, and he asked her to wear something when she was wandering around the house in the middle of the day. He wonders why her body, why she, in a thong or a short white tee, or in any amount of clothing, hypnotizes him while he can keep himself from staring when she enters a room au naturale.

She fills a mug with the last of the coffee and gulps half the mug – black – in one go. “See anything you like?” She motions toward the job listings, but she’s smirking like a cat caught playing in the chicken pen.

Marten shakes his head half-yes half-no, a sort of X-shaped motion that means maybe?, and Ali’s standing so closely next to him he can feel all that sunshine she just sucked up radiating off her body. It drives him crazy. She drives him crazy. He drives her crazy, and maybe that’s all crazy but that’s why he split it off with her, why he took her back in after the Big Fight and told her: we’re friends just friends and you’ll have to pay rent and please no other men in the house for a while. He notices in her other hand one of his Bukowski novels. Her fingers obscure the title but from the cover it looks like Women.

“Is that what you’re reading lately? Mine, isn’t it?”

She giggles and puts her hand on the back of Marten’s neck. “Yeah, not last night, though. I was busy,” she answers, “but you probably heard.”

He heard.

She leans over beside him, her – oh with her they were either tits or boobs – her boobs pointing out and indicting Bukowski now resting half-on the table within reach of Marten’s right hand, half-off the corner and pressing its pages in a rectangle of thin lines into Ali’s thigh, and she reads the note from Sage. Ali growls. “She’s putting her own stuff on you again, huh?”

Marten laughs. This happens – every one of them with their occasional bristling protectiveness of him – an interim alliance between the two of them because he’s her ex. Marten says “I could be a little quieter when I get home. And you,” he teases, “could be a little quieter when you are home.”

It is too natural a thing, now, to reach around her waist and hug her, to feel the underside of her boobs mussing up his already morning-tousled hair and so he does. And it is almost too natural a thing to trace the gentle hollows on her pale olive skin with the very ends of his fingers, to turn her breath deep and hungry with the least brush as he had so often in the past – her weakness around him, his light and rakish touch – but he doesn’t, and she skips so-almost-naked back to the sink and sets her dirty mug on the counter where the dirty dishes go.

“I’m going to lay in the backyard for a bit.” she tells him, kissing the top of his head, and she grabs his Bukowski back off the kitchen table and is gone.

Marten sips the dregs of his coffee and circles another listing.

He can hear Ali singing happily in the backyard. An email from Kaylee has him in the kitchen again:

Yo, PIB:

The tub in the 1st floor bathroom is a wreck. There’s a bunch of hair in the shower drain and it looks like yours. Can you clean it up before I get home? I could barely stand to take a shower this morning.

Also, can you make sure to wipe up the counter where the dirty dishes go more often? There’s something light brown that’s sticky on there and that’s so gross. Probably attracts flies and we’ll all get sick with salmonella. We just need to be better about keeping the kitchen sanitary. Please don’t let it get like that again.

With a little scrubbing and some bleach, Marten finishes cleaning the sticky residue (to which Ali’s morning mug had stubbornly stuck) and turns his attention to some of the glasses in the sink. Sunlight no longer pours in like a torrent from the east but now it peeks in past the southern eaves just far enough into the room to hold up a single glass in the light and watch it refract and reflect. A shard of sunlight bends through the glass, striking him in the eye; when the glass lands in the sink, by some miracle it doesn’t break. It just skitters around in the shallow dirty water. He wonders how many single glasses, washed by his hands, spotless and shining, would pay back Kaylee’s kindness, and he decides there’s a number that could erase his debt in dollars, but none that could actually repay her.

He’d told her he was leaving because he needed to do his own thing for a while, figure out who he was – certainly not an untruth, but not everything. She didn’t know he’d left her five years ago because of a water glass – so very much like this one. Because of a girl he’d worked with for a few years, because they were eating dinner at a fancy restaurant, laughing, because he felt alive and he wanted to touch her in ways he wasn’t allowed, he wanted to feel things that to feel around Kaylee were too rough and intimidating, because he was flushed and this girl made him want, but mostly because she reached for her water glass and he reached for her hand and when they touched – yes it was a dry winter day and they were both wearing wool – cliché struck unexpectedly and they felt a spark. A static shock, to be fair, but to him, so feverish with what seemed more than lust but no not quite love, it made the fantasy quite real. Her eyes locked with his and her mouth pouted so slightly, her cheeks flared red and he felt his cheeks flare red and warm with her gaze and all the blood in him raced to his hard-beating heart. He was awake, and alive, and so was the fact that he wanted to rush off into that fine establishment’s bathroom and do terrible and naughty and disallowed things with this girl that wasn’t his girl (although she was, right then and there, but she was not Kaylee).

And he pulled back his hand into his lap, looked down at his dinner, and he mumbled for a promise they’d built on a moment of erupting desire. He said, “I’m sorry,” and she nodded, not angry, just sad and slipping into the low, listless pool of her own unused endorphins, a doldrum, the dysmorphia of months of flirtation and mutually actuating attraction giving way to a shared recognition that it would come to nothing. He mumbled, “I’m sorry,” and after dinner, without dessert, he paid and they left and parted, and Marten went home to Kaylee, told her that he needed to move up to Boston alone, that he needed to be on his own for a little bit, because it’d been so long since he’d really lived on his own, in his own place, seeking himself.

He told her maybe she could come up after a few months. He told her many things, and she cried at him and yelled at him and hit him in her sadness and finally collapsed against him, but he didn’t tell her about the water glass. He couldn’t, because it just seemed hurtful then, and especially now, when they’d gone through the stages, now that he’d invited her to rent a room when she moved up here for that job, now that a few years had passed living here and they had settled down easily – there was love, yes, but now when she touched him, it wasn’t like Ali’s touch. It was warm and present and without ownership, without yearning, a mother’s touch, a friend’s touch: a sense they’d shared a foxhole together in a battle and survived somehow, a sense that yes we’ve been there, yes we won’t be there again but yes yes we’ll always have Paris. Was that maybe what they’d born and raised these last five years? Something better than what they’d left behind?

The last glass clean and sparkling and in the drying rack in the final rays of direct sunlight in the kitchen, Marten looks out at Ali half-asleep with a book over her face, butt-naked in the backyard and he wonders if they’ll end up that way too, if Ali’s touch will cease to burn his skin and someday fail to turn his thoughts into knots. He’s not sure he wants that with her. He’s not sure he ever wants the sort of love he feels for Ali to be easy.

Hair in the bathroom drain? – so not his fault.

Evening arrives at the House of Marten’s Exes; Ali dresses herself in black and flits off to the nightclub down near the Ritz where she’ll work until 2:30 a.m. before taking a cab home, still making a hefty untaxed profit for herself. Perhaps tonight she’ll bring home a boy, but it’s Wednesday, and he knows her rhythms.

Wednesday she’s high on the promise of the world and she loves and loves and loves. Thursday, she comes home with all her tips and a dim, dim view of the male of the species. Friday, she falls in lust and it lasts the whole night long, and by Saturday she’s found her freedom again. Sunday and Monday she sleeps in, so she’ll be awake for her weekly rebirth on Tuesday.

Kaylee returns shortly after six. She smiles, asks about Marten’s job search, inspects the kitchen – especially the counters – and the bathroom with the gruff demeanor of an officer. She doesn’t thank him, but she looks satisfied, makes herself a salad and absconds to her room, to her phone and to her long-distance love.

Sage comes in the door at nearly ten, her arms filled haphazardly with stacks of books and paper. Marten moves to help her but she – tall as he is and eye to eye – waves him off. “I got it,” she says, and shuffles into her room without dropping a single sheet. Back from the library, back from hours of hiding her head in back-room reading nooks and thickly bound old books. Marten knocks on her door gently and she responds, “yeah?” without opening it. She’s probably changing, he thinks, and briefly he remembers how often she used to change right in front of him. He remembers not with emotion or wistfulness but rather: oh yes, and that happened, and these are the ways we did things then versus these are the ways we do things now. Just noticing, noting, writing a mental note on a mental Post-It.

He apologizes for getting in so late last night and tells her he’ll try not to stay out so late in the future. He knows it’s a hybrid truth; that yes he will certainly try to get home sooner when he thinks of it and things are going in a way that makes that possible, but no he doesn’t always want to come home so early; no he sometimes has reasons to stay out as late as he does. He wishes the stairs to the second floor didn’t pass right up through her room, didn’t cut a sharp-angled creaky and thumping wedge out of Sage’s ceiling, right up above her bed, but it does.

She avoids him most of the time. If he’s home when she gets back, she makes as little small talk as she can and takes the fastest path to her room. He’s talking to her through the door, and her responses are muffled as if she’s pulling a sweatshirt up over her head. She leaves in the morning before he wakes up. Most of the time it’s those yellow sticky notes left on the table or on the fridge or if it’s something really important on the swung-open door at the bottom of the stairs to the second floor. That’s how she talks to him.

He doesn’t begrudge it. Sometimes he sees in her eyes that she’s scared. Not so much of him, maybe somewhat of him, somewhat of the depression and insecurity that tore them apart, somewhat of his uncharacteristic inability to communicate what he wanted, so all she understood is that he wanted time, time, time and reassurance and all these little things to settle in his mind that she loved him, that she wanted him, and all she could do was retreat into her work – hole herself up behind closed doors and computer keyboards and densely written books because her degree was the only sure thing in her world and it wanted to engulf her too, to swallow her up in a slavish devotion to her dissertation and doctoral doings, but she was more okay with that than being lost in her love for Marten, because she understood books, she understood what she needed to do to pass through the maw of her degree and emerge at the other side. She understood that she had set herself on a path she didn’t love but she felt more safe surrendering to what they expected of her than giving herself over to the unsure, to Marten, who loved her but was too much, far too much, and so finally she told him it was over and that she’d fallen out of love with him and none of it remained; and she’d sent him away.

He appreciated that, even if he understood it was a half-lie to help her sleep, because it was better than being told ‘I never loved you,’ which is what his first serious, long-term ex told him after four years, because that was a lie that hurt. It still hurt. It all hurts, the ones he’d let go, the ones who’d let him go. It hurts because he can’t help but assume the problem is him. It is his failing that led to the end of each of these relationships, and here, with these three, it’s a strange burden and an uneasy peace but it presents something of an opportunity to be the Marten he could have been – fucking should have been – his penance, of sorts, for all the mistakes and missteps he’s made.

And they don’t know that because he’s never going to telegraph himself. They act out their fantasies and hopes and fears and psychoses around him, and he watches it, he watches himself and sees when his heart seizes or he is caught on a thick line of melancholy. He turns his anger not outward, not inward, but sideways into his writing. He’s just as encrusted by the grime and grit of their pasts as they are, but he chooses instead to look at himself in their reflection, to give himself over for a while to the man they need him to be.

She says something through the door, from her place of safety, asking where he’d gone last night. I worry, she says, and that’s the only remaining evidence of her love that she’ll ever let on.

He’d gone out with a friend of a friend he’d met a few weeks ago at a party. He tells Sage that he and this girl hit it off pretty well, that they laughed over messy ribs at Redbones, headed over to Harvard Square for a few more beers and wandered around the campus until late in the evening. He doesn’t tell Sage much more than that, but there is more:

Despite the fact that Ali brings home new boys regularly and has an active and audible sex life even when she’s alone, and which he can hear because their rooms are at opposite ends of the second (and top) floor hall; despite Kaylee’s long, low phone conversations with a long-distance long-suffering boyfriend, and Sage’s on and off love affair with the awesome and time-saving efficiency of meeting new men and women off OKCupid (which she’s probably on right now, marking favorites and sending messages to would be lovers… Marten can hear the tapping of keys), Marten doesn’t feel right bringing home a girl. He’s not sure who he’s protecting.

His exes are hardly ever in one place all at the same time and all awake, and they’re natural enemies, all exes of the Post-It Boy, a man still stuck to them by fortune and circumstance, all competitive for his once-love (even if not his now-love) and over who held more of his heart, but when they’ve had enough to drink, there aren’t four armies crossed at an uneasy standoff, it’s the three of them, Axis powers, amassing their unified assault against his limited and unwillingly drafted defenses. And though most days they are leery and wary of one another, intoxicated – they know the measure of his manhood, they know all his idiosyncrasies (they know he always pees sitting down, they know he sometimes bops his head as if he’s listening to some music nobody else can hear, they know he brushes his teeth in the shower), his stupid tricks, his weird fetishes and his gross habits.

In short, they possess the power to wholly decimate the matter of his ego with frightening ease when they’re drunk or high together, so he avoids the house completely at these times, and when he returns to their hungover morning he can see in their eyes the wild hair of dangerous knowledge now held back only by a sober contract of domestic peace and throbbing headaches. He makes them each breakfast at the separate times they stumble into the kitchen, and that somehow keeps them content, and at bay.

He knows that for the most part they want to see him happy. Maybe he’s protecting everyone. He decides he can’t get himself into anything serious until he’s got a job and his own place someday down the line, and anyway he doesn’t think it’d be a good idea to get into a relationship until he gets to the bottom of himself.

So he ended up making out with this girl on a park bench hidden in the shadows of Cambridge Common underneath the old, red glow of the Sheraton Ambassador’s neon sign until it got to be too much for public consumption (and curiously enough, he thinks, propriety never stopped him when he was with Ali). They couldn’t go back to her place because her roommate’s parents were in town; he found some excuse why they couldn’t go back to his place, so they kissed and held hands for a bit on the sidewalk in front of her Cambridge brownstone apartment, and then he walked home alone.

Sage says something but it sounds like a nod to Marten, and he knows that’s a “good night.” He mounts the stairs to his room, taking one last look at the kitchen before he turns out the light for the evening, leaving the porch light on for Ali. He briefly tries to understand how she gets up the stairs without making a sound.

The lights are out. Post-It Boy is in his room, pausing in front of his bookshelf. Read? Or write? He sits at the computer and begins to write everything down, everything that comes out of his head, crazy and beautiful and odd and wholly without sense and somehow completely sane. He keeps writing until the pads of his fingers are numb and shiny from thousands, tens of thousands of keystrokes. He keeps writing because it’s still in him and it wants to get out.

It’s quiet enough: he hears Sage turn off her computer and climb into bed. He hears Kaylee’s voice coming out her window and around the back of the house to his, hears her wishing her boyfriend a good night and she loves him and hopes to see him soon, baby. He hears the telephone beep when she presses the CALL END button. He doesn’t hear Ali coming up the stairs (he ponders that yet again) but he hears her little feet on the landing. She sees the light still on, and she knows he’s writing, and she says, “good night, darling,” with such tremendous softness through his door and creaks halfway down the hall to their bathroom. Water running, the brushing of teeth, the flushing of feces, the bathroom door opening and quietly closing, the shuffling of feet and a rustle of clothes being yanked off and tossed across a tiny room. The creaks of a bedspring, one: Ali getting into bed. Two: Ali turning on her side. Three: Ali tossing the second pillow toward the wall and twisting onto her stomach where she falls asleep. He’s watched it happen a thousand times, and now he knows the ritual by sound: 1, 2, 3, and Ali sleeps.

The House of Marten’s Exes is quiet again.

He turns out his light, climbs out his window onto a small flat space of roof, not so much a balcony but a little sitting place barely big enough for his legs, crossed. The fall air in Cambridge is cool and nips at his bare feet. He’s dressed in a day-old tee, his green flannel plaid pajama pants and a brown corduroy smoking jacket he bought for $15 a few years back at the same thrift shop whose ad he circled today. He fishes in his jacket pocket for a pack of cigarettes – nine months old now – and picks one out of the remaining twelve. One a month. He lights it and inhales. The smoke tastes sour in his mouth and for the first two drags he doesn’t like it any more, he hates the taste, and then he stops hating the taste and a nice soft heaviness settles into his forehead.

Marten’s other hand holds the sticky note from Sage, a print of Kaylee’s email and the ripped side of an empty box of Ali’s condoms fished from the top of the trash bin in their second-floor half-bath. His breath, even between drags of his cigarette, eases out into the late night in little clouds of water vapor, white, catching the nearly full moon’s light. Crushing the paper and the note into little balls, he sets them with the box in an old, carbon-stained round cake tin and holds his lighter sideways over them, its flame bending out yellow-white in a slight upward arc, first charring the tops of everything black and then when just the right amount of heat is applied each piece catches alight: orange, red, and always yellow. They begin to burn and that border of black descends from burning tips slowly to the bottom of the tin. He sets the tin on the edge of his little sitting place, he takes a long drag from his cigarette and exhales it all into the noiseless and implicit night, everything, everything and everything at once.

The breeze catches little pieces of paper and flame pushed aloft by their own updraft of heat and he watches in silence as they climb their own small pillar of smoke into the blue dark, the dark blue sky, sparkling and burning and chasing each other in great spirals, finally ascending, invisible, into the great ceiling of diamonds held aloft by the dreams of those who can sleep.

An Open Letter to Harvey “Gollum” (Entry)

2011-08-22T13:36:10Z

“Over the years, I have paid a significant portion of my income to the various federal, state and local jurisdictions in which I have lived, and I deeply resent that President Obama has decided that I don’t need all the money I’ve not paid in taxes over the years, or that I should leave less for my children and grandchildren and give more to him to spend as he thinks fit. I also resent that Warren Buffett and others who have created massive wealth for themselves think I’m “coddled” because they believe they should pay more in taxes. I certainly don’t feel “coddled” because these various governments have not imposed a higher income tax. After all, I did earn it." (My Response To Buffett And Obama – Harvey Golub)

The biggest lie of the richest men and women in our modern world hides in those few words: I earned it; many of the rich wall themselves up behind its defense to justify hoarding, miserly and often short-sighted, self-serving behavior. And in our current political climate, the loudest Libertarian voices shout: “God forbid a man work hard, get successful and earn his millions.”

There are two legal ways that I know of to make the sort of mega-millions that the richest make: by being paid extremely high wages (the less common approach), and by return on investment. But where does that money come from? In both cases – millionaire’s wages and high returns – it comes from the profit produced by the collective effort of tens or hundreds or thousands of other “hard-working Americans” (or Chinese, or Taiwanese, or Mexicans, etc) who do their best to earn their living wage, who work amongst industrial machines and deal with occupational hazards and put in long hours and unpleasant managers and endure stories of the rich people who own the company complaining bitterly about taxes keeping them from leaving a “little something for the grandkids”, sometimes just to put enough food on the table to feed their family of four.

And somehow those who earn^{1} a living, who pay, on average, twice as large a percentage of their income as those who bring home millions more per year, most of them manage to scrape together enough to have a family, buy a house, and leave a little for the grandkids.

What the rich call “earning” is skimming off the labor of modern-day serfs. Sure, serfs today can switch jobs, start their own, and perhaps get rich themselves. And the skimming itself is not necessarily evil, and may be accompanied by some of its own labor:

Let’s pretend, for a moment, that Harvey Golub once put in countless hours a day doing his job at American Express: talking with people, reading reports, making decisions, shaking hands, going out on interviews and a few hundred more tasks appropriate for a man of his position. Let’s say he earns $6,000,000 each year for his hard work, receiving a CEO salary in addition to multimillion-dollar performance bonuses if the company is having a good year, in addition to a significant amount of equity in the company. (If you think this is exaggeration, this is less than he made as CEO of American Express.)

Let’s also pretend, for a moment, that a mid-level operations manager based out of middle America – Willy Loman – puts in countless hours a day doing his job at American Express: talking with people, reading reports, making decisions, shaking hands, giving interviews and a few hundred other tasks appropriate for a man of his position. Let’s say he earns $60,000 a year for his hard work, in addition to a $500 Christmas bonus if the company is having a good Q4.

And finally, let’s pretend, for one more moment, that Joe Sixpack drives every day to his job as a phone support rep for American Express, doing for each and every moment he’s there the things appropriate for a man of his position: answering phones, answering questions, entering data, and filing reports, gets paid only for the time he’s actually sitting at his desk and on the phone (only two 5 minute bathroom breaks allowed, one 30-minute unpaid lunch-break, and more than 3 minutes per hour off the phone is grounds for termination). Let’s say he earns $20,000 a year, with no bonuses, and lives in fear of his call center being replaced by reps in Bangalore.

Let’s imagine they all work as many hours as they can, diligently, doing their best job because they’re proud of what they do and they were raised to work hard. Can we really pick and choose among them and say one works harder than the other? No. And can we really say one earns (“gains or incurs deservedly in return for one’s behavior or achievements”, New Oxford American Dictionary) more than the other? No.

What we make is not what we earn – what each person deserves is a fair, working wage – but what each person gets is related to the socially constructed value of their work.

According to our thought experiment, then:

Our society values Gollub’s work at $3,000 per hour.
It values Loman’s work at $30 an hour.
And it values Sixpack’s work at $10/hour.

We confuse our top-heavy sense of fiscal worth, our stratospherically skewed beliefs about the value of work (which even with actual numbers shows a logarithmic preference towards people in executive and ownership positions) with our understanding of earning – a delusion that richness is an indication of moral or holistic value, a misunderstanding that richness comes with great wisdom and thus gives one not just more ability but also more right than those with less money to determine the path of their money.

It becomes even more apparent that this is a delusion when this is money made by investment. Let’s say a young man named Jimmy Buffet works hard as a musician at a beach resort in the Florida Keys one summer in early ‘77, and earns a fair wage and some good tips for his work. Let’s say he decides to invest the money in Apple and a few other companies that excite him, and he makes a good profit on his investment over the next 10 years, so he hires an investment firm to do the work for him – and they do an awesome job at it.

Suddenly, here’s Jimmy sitting on the beach drinking his margarita and munching on his burger making money residually – getting paid not per hour of work but continually getting more and more for that one summer of work. He’s not earning any more, but the value of his work continues to rise. It’s not a bad setup. But the value of his work is elevated by the continued work of not one company of 10 or 10,000 employees, but by tens or hundreds of them. The value of his investment is the direct result of possibly millions of middle-class workers creating value by working hard to earn their middle-class wage.

So the rich are not rich because they earned their money; they’re rich because we earned money for them and accepted a system where people are paid by their perceived value.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Except when people like Harvey Golub act like Gollum and clutch their purse tight to their chest, whispering “My Preciousssss” loudly and with venom. When some people, who have retired and no longer have children in school and don’t drive and just want to hold tightly onto “what they earned” jump into local government to break down its progress and prevent investment in schools and transportation and hell, even the damn plumbing. These are the self-important self-interested who seem to see nothing beyond their oncoming death and in its approach they seek only to protect their own, and the world around them that has benefited them so greatly no longer holds value to them: aside from family, the world is an enemy that seeks to take back what it gave. Their value to the world drops, and they seek to prevent their riches from dropping with it.

Warren Buffett, on the other hand, offers up his purse and says, “Here, I’ve more than enough, and I understand this is a system of shared service for a common cause” and even if he doesn’t always agree with where the country goes… he understands the system itself is designed that way – to represent a myriad of often conflicting interests as best it can, and that a homogenous set of ideas is a dead-end road.

Golub would have us with no Department of Energy, or Education, when our energy infrastructure, our environment and our children’s education are all already suffering due to political and economic lack of support. He would have us with no regulation, because private companies like BP and Exxon and Monsanto and TEPCO (owners of the Fukushima reactor) are so foresighted and ethically motivated that they would never short-sell human lives and safety for profit.

Golub thinks it’s stupid to pay above-market wages for public works projects (read: this astoundingly rich man who built his fortunes on middle-class labor barely even values blue-collar jobs at the wages they’re paid). He doesn’t believe in energy-efficient forms of mass transportation like trains. He thinks that giving money to his kids and grandkids is the same as giving money to charity.

Golub thinks that we’re just fine with coal and nuclear and fossil fuel as sources of power – he doesn’t believe in spending money to encourage the development of alternative energy sources like wind and water and the sun. And why should he? He’ll probably be gone before Peak Oil really puts a stranglehold on the world.

It’s not that it’s particularly wrong to believe any of these things or hold contrary opinions. In fact, it’s a very popular pastime in modern culture. But when cited as reasons someone like Golub shouldn’t pay taxes, they’re not pragmatic or philosophical differences. They’re conditions he demands must be met before he’ll do what’s expected of every income-earning American: in essence, he’ll pay more when government does what he wants (and only what he wants) it to do. Or as Charlton Heston so aptly put it, Golub will pay more taxes when they “pry it out of his cold, dead hands.”

Are our tax codes twisted and broken? Yes. Are they full of loopholes and preferences to special interests? Yes. Do we need to revisit, revise and simplify them? Yes. But Golub says “fix your system before you ask me for more money.”

Because he earned it.

The middle class has been asking for that for years, Golub. What makes you so special?

^{1} (from the Old English earnian, or “get a reward for labor”, itself from the Old Norse önn, “work in the field.”)

for the general welfare (Entry)

2011-08-15T15:55:30Z

I originally wrote this in response to a Facebook comment on Henry Koren’s thread asking about the meaning of “general welfare” in the Constitution and how it affected the Healthcare Reform debate. He reprinted my comment, with my permission, on his blog, and I’m reprinting it here too.

The Constitution was written over two centuries ago and is an actively re-interpreted and occasionally amended document. The Supreme Court exists specifically to interpret the Constitution within the context of modern situations that are not always clearly covered or even conceived of under the original language of the document as written. Health insurance didn’t even exist for almost another 100 years after the Constitution was ratified, so it stands to reason that the ‘founding fathers’ had no concept of it at the time.

Furthermore, there were 2 schools of thought even among the writers of the Constitution: the Madisonian, or “doctrine of strict construction” and the Hamiltonian, or “doctrine of implied powers.” The Madisonians believed the government should be strictly limited to the responsibilities directly enumerated in the Constitution. The Hamiltonians believed that the Federal govt could levy new taxes and spend money outside of the strict limits of the Constitution if it improved the general welfare of the people in a broad sense.

In 1936, the Supreme Court sided with the Hamiltonian interpretation, stating “the power of Congress to authorize expenditure of public moneys for public purposes is not limited by the direct grants of legislative power found in the Constitution.”

In 1937, upholding the constitutionality of a federal unemployment compensation program along with the Social Security Act, the Court further stated that “the conception of the spending power advocated by Hamilton… has prevailed over that of Madison.” and that a situation had developed (with respect to unemployment) wherein “the states were unable to give the requisite relief. The problem had become national in area and dimensions. There was need of help from the nation.”

On that same day the Supreme Court upheld the joint federal/state cooperation necessary to make the Social Security and unemployment programs possible.

As a constitutionally-formed body that exists to interpret the Constitution as it applies to new situations and context, the Supreme Court’s body of decisions carry the full weight and power of the Constitution itself and can only be overturned by subsequent decisions of the Supreme Court or by constitutional amendment. As such, it makes little sense to return to the “original document” when we have more recent and constitutionally valid body of precedent to serve us, and when even the writers of said document were not in agreement over the scope of the government’s powers.

It seems clear to me that the 1936-7 decisions gave the Federal government broad power to spend for the general welfare and then indeed DID define “general welfare” to include the relief of its citizens, especially when situations arise such that individual states are unable or unwilling to provide relief, and the problem is national in “area and dimension”. Further social welfare programs by the Federal government have survived constitutional challenges, no doubt in no small part thanks to these SC decisions, and this only further cements that the US govt has the right and responsibility to act for the general welfare in a broader sense than originally outlined by the Constitution or supported by the Madisonian school.

The issue, then, becomes whether one believes health care has become a problem that is national in scope and intensity, and whether the federal government should act to address the problem directly, but I think the Supreme Court’s decisions and the continued existence of other federally-supported social welfare programs confirm that such action is indeed supported by the law of the land and that the federal government is well within its jurisdiction to implement remedies.

practice what we believe (Entry)

2011-08-15T14:47:59Z

I had this to say to a right-wing friend of mine who asked “When did it become a bad thing to believe in God?” during a political discussion on Facebook. I felt, perhaps, it’d be good to share here as well.

It’s not a bad thing to believe in God. And you know, I don’t know anyone who believes it is. But sometimes the people who don’t believe are so protective of their rights and sometimes the people who do believe are so protective at theirs that we end up feeling like we’re enemies. People make stupid decisions, file stupid lawsuits, do stupid stuff all the time, and it doesn’t really matter whether they’re Christian or not. Most of the Christians and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and atheists I know are open, friendly, good people who don’t really care who you pray to or even if you pray. We’re all people, and individually, you know, it’s hard to point at a single person we know and say they’re all bad. We all have our reasons, our fears, the things we want to protect.

You have your right to worship your God. I have my right not to be held accountable to Christian or Muslim or whomever’s religious law (and that’s where we fight church and state the most; do you as a Christian want to be subject to Sharia law, for example?) – the idea is that we are accountable to our fellow man under civil law and that we’re accountable to our own God under whatever religious code we believe. That’s it. Simple. Belief is a personal thing, a relationship between the divine and self. I’m assuming you’re Protestant; I was raised that way too, and the forebears of Protestantism fought for this religious freedom because they were once persecuted by Catholics and the Church of England for their ‘liberal’ beliefs; religious freedom played a major role in the colonization and creation of America.

I hate that we come to so much anger and venom over something as simple as that, when it could be simply said, “we each practice what we believe, and we live according to the code of our beliefs, and we don’t use our government to force others to follow our beliefs.”

And sure, there are tougher questions: abortion, for example. That’s one I don’t know if we’ll ever sort out, because the passion is so great on each side. But we can at least try to find a way that we can live with each other.

the corner of If & Maybe (Entry)

2011-08-12T23:18:12Z

An early draft of the first chapter of The Land of If, a novel in progress. Enjoy! (And your thoughts, praise, or criticism greatly welcomed.)

Your story begins — as your best stories do — on the slats of a bench at the corner of If and Maybe, with a smoke and a pair of legs. A peeling green wood-slatted bench; a stale smoke and a borrowed lighter; a long, long, pale and well-made pair of legs. She lets you borrow her lighter before lighting up her own, then she leans down, this young woman and her legs interrupted by a tall set of socks pulled nearly to her knee, and she smiles, but it’s too hot here in middle America.

Every storefront squat–brick and none tops three stories, all of them squeezed up against each other like a mass of books, and across the street just shacks and one-stories and grain, grain waving its dust bowl dance easily all the way to the horizon, and you – you stopping here on a bench, somewhere in the fields east of Omaha, for one last smoke before the dry road. Her companion half-turns to you, his eyes cast out at the very same distance that holds your gaze, and asks you about a bus you know nothing about, and so that’s what you mumble, I don’t know. And should you know anything about a tiny little plains town? No, not more than the sign on the bumpy road here could tell you from the rusted, torn leather seats of an old tow-truck:

Welcome To If, Iowa

pop. 244

And so that’s what they’ve called the main and only road this way through town; and the only other road, stabbing through its center at a slight angle with an old man’s semi-senile sense of humor, you’ve also already met: and every square and manmade foot dulled over and aged over by a layer of sedimentary dust from decades past – as if the great Midwest lay at the bottom of an inland sea with its cast-off debris and excrement drifting and solidifying at its floor – A pool hall, three bars, a drugstore (the kind with pop and ice cream floats) and a barber shop with an old striped pole. Further down, with no more fanfare than the rest, yes, a police station hunkered down under concrete, and barely recognizable on its facade, a scratched, spray-painted sign marking the station a fallout shelter: here time slowed in the forties, sputtered in the fifties, and gasped finally in the sixties. What’s left here: the undead, ghosts who refuse to give up what their parents and grandparents built, hobo shacks on the edge of town and hidden among the grain, and you’d wonder if a bus even stopped here (or more plainly, if the world around here still considered this place a here worth an afterthought), but there is that sign, right above your heads.

This, like every town left past its prime, has a thousand untold stories, but yours is not one of them. Yours doesn’t begin here, it turns here in the hushed voices of an unshaven young man and an un-showered girl seated here beside you on a bench at the corner of If and Maybe; it begins as you exhaust your lungs of the smoke from what you intend to be your last cigarette (the last of the pack). The butt ends of his unintelligible words bear force, and she’s sitting arms-crossed over her lap, leaning forward and inward. She whispers weakly, and bored, and resigned. He rises, looks again at you and declares he’s heading down the street to get something to drink, and do you want anything too? But you shake your head, no, no. He heads off down the street and is forgotten.

Even the wind that picks up feels dusty and dry and hot and she’s looking at her hands, this young woman in dark shorts and tall socks, a dirty (grey or perhaps dingy white) tank-top, a cast-off, torn and broken faded blue hoodie and a knit winter cap with fringes that hang down along the sides of her face. And there’s a tear on her face a tear leaving behind a pale white stripe and you say “Are you ok?” and all she does is nod and look at you with a little girl’s smile.

Then you rise up, casting the end of your smoke into the street, and reach your hand down to hers. All you can offer is a weak blessing – the same blessing you’ve been offering yourself since you began this journey east – to home – to the land you know too well: I hope you get where you’re going okay.

You’re off, heading ‘round the corner. Keys in the car, unlocking. This place isn’t your West, and it isn’t your East; it’s somewhere in between, the heat and the air and the endlessness of the sky and grain and the ground oppress you, as if all the oxygen in this world were sucked out and replaced neither with despair nor hope but with emptiness itself. This is not your somewhere in between – it’s nowhere in between, and you’re hurrying to get back in your car, with its brand new timing belt, and press your foot to the floor until If and Maybe are just a distant memory on the long road home.

She’s there next to you, a bag slung over one shoulder, nose-ring flashing the sunlight from one nostril, dark hair blue black spilling out over her shoulders from below her cap and her eyes wide open. She opens her mouth to speak, the first uncertain words of hers you’ve heard and understood:

“Can I go with you?”

You try to process the question like a kindergartner practicing calculus. She shifts, looking hurriedly around the street, and repeats it.

“Can I go with you?” and the second time you think you understand something about a woman and a man, and it’s too quick to calculate. No time to ask or investigate the Why? hanging in the air between; you take her bag and toss it in the back. And you’re back on the bumpy road out of this little dying town, passing fields and fields and fields and on the back of the welcome sign there’s graffiti; the signs for I-80 stretching clear across the state pop up out of the grain with growing urgency. The intersection looms ahead like a distant mirage for minutes and minutes and then you’re there, and that’s when your thoughts finally return from the road. And the first question you ever ask your passenger:

“Which way are you going?”

Behind her eyes you can see her thoughts go, and you’re just set on believing she’s about to say wherever you’re going when she speaks up.

“West,” she says.

West. And there, in the nowhere between the East that is calling you back home to rest, the East of your childhood and the East of settling down among bricks and cobblestones and maple, the East where the sun rises out of the bay, the East that you understand; and the West that turned you away, the West that you came to conquer, the West that wanted so much to spit you out, the great wide open West with all its impenetrabilities, impossibilities, consequences and unknowns, there -

there you look at your nameless passenger and look one last time into the red and purple evening rushing in from the east -

there you turn into the sunset -

Your story begins – as your best stories do – in the middle of things, in the middle of America, in the middle of a journey, at the intersection of two roads, a choice, east and west; and at the place where two stories meet -

there you turn back to the West.

A hundred miles down and Des Moines slinking away on the road behind and she’s flicking at the pages of an atlas found in the door pocket; and she decides to answer your second question:

“Sidney,” a break, a dramatic pause, a verbal rumble strip: she’s investigating a road sign on the cover of your atlas, “Sidney 66.”

Of course it’s not real. You’ve met people on the road before, called them by their road names, and here’s your passenger and all you know: Sidney 66, heading West, she smokes like a raging brushfire and she’s got those long – long and perfect legs.

“I’m not going to tell you all sorts of fucked-up shit about me,” she says out the half-open window, “so don’t ask.”

You open your mouth before your mind makes sense of what she said, and laugh into the evening wind. “Nice to meet you too, 66.”

She turns and half-grabs your eyes with hers gotta keep an eye on the curves; her lips curl up and the skin around her eyes wrinkles and her face says I deserve that, don’t I? Yes, Sidney, yes you do. She tucks the atlas back in its pocket, reaches into the back for her bag and grabs a pair of jeans. And off come the shorts – one swift yank – right there on the seat next to you. Legs that seem as long and unbroken as the Nebraska road looming ahead somewhere in the night and as pale as an undiminished midwestern moon, and she lifts her ass up off the seat – one swift pull – and a zip and she’s wrapped tightly in her jeans. No celebration; no shame – just denim to warm her against the oncoming cool of night. Sidney sits half-crossed in her seat, angled toward you:

“So what’s your shit?”

“Huh?”

“What’s your shit, dude? Why are you on the road?”

Here you could spoil your story by expositing every last bit of history in dialogue, but casual words are the least precise and most demeaning of Man’s faculties, they have so little poetry and are so frequently without texture. The grand accident of discovery happens in mystery and metaphor and moment that we are shown by the world around what we cannot see within. So you weave threads from your various stories, as the deep plains night overtakes you from the East. Who are you? You’re a writer, perhaps, or at least one who’d like to be. You’re a lover, perhaps, or at least you used to be. You tell her the long and the short of it, the jobs that didn’t pan out, the projects that failed, every thin letter that came in the mail from magazines and publishers and imprints and chapbooks. It all rolls out of you like the road rolls out before you, and you don’t even know why you’re bothering to say what you’re saying except that the sound of your own voice is sweeter when someone’s listening, that to hear yourself speaking for an audience that breathes and stretches and smiles and looks like a girl you once knew feels like a holiday from that unyieldingly silent and immobile empty seat who’s been your copilot since Denver.

She looks back out the window for a while.

“And you,” you ask, “what’s with that guy we ditched?”

For a mile or two, you wonder if she’ll even answer. Finally she tosses the butt of her cigarette out the window. “Him? He’s just another asshole.” And then, the silence of the open road, that unending hypnotic hum and whine of hot tires.

“What type of sandwich would you have?” Just like that, no preface, “if you could choose?”

You squint into the rear-view mirror looking for the outline of some sandwich shack you must have missed. You lean ahead and look for a Subway billboard. Nothing but the tall, comfortable darkness of cornfields; Omaha rising up in the far dark distance. She smirks quietly, looks around at the jumbled junk in the back and what the hell you consider her question just throw out something crazy something random something tasty.

“Sprouts. I like fresh sprouts, and mache – maybe spinach… and roast eggplant. Boursin cheese. All wrapped up in a crepe drizzled with a teeny bit of vinaigrette.” She stares at you as if trying to figure out why you didn’t just answer ‘ham and cheese on rye.’

“Seriously? That sounds a bit… intense.” and yes it does, but it’s only your ideal choice right this very moment, ask again and you’d come up with something new, even if you could remember what you just ordered.

And Sidney picks up a spoon from the floor, lays it down on the glovebox. “I used to work at a deli. And this guy came in one day and ordered a smoked turkey on french bread with mustard…” she looks deep into the faraway past – “lettuce, tomato, olives and havarti.

“But he only wanted a half, and I made a whole. So I took the extra half and ate it for my lunch later. We shared a meal in shifts of solitude – an isolated date.” Your eyes on the road, her eyes studying the shape of your face. “He looked like you.”

“You hopped in a car with me because I look like a sandwich boy from your days at a deli?”

Quickly added, her eyes back out her window, “I love so many sandwiches. It depends on my mood.”

In Omaha, a quick stop at a Kum & Go for pre-wrapped simple subs no adornments thankyouplease, water, fuel and cigarettes – she calls them fags, an affectation appropriated from a book or a friend from overseas but definitely not native to her tongue. Fags, she says, without a look around, let’s pick up some fags. And she grabs a refill for her phone and pays for it all with her little bit of cash. On the way out she pockets a lighter and waves goodbye to the cashier in one swift trick. It’s late; sitting around in little dying towns deep in Iowa fields sucks the day’s life away – waiting for the mechanic to stop flirting with that lolita in her daisy dukes – yes he even disappeared with her for an over-stretched lunch at the cost of your time on the road: maybe you’d have made it past the Mississippi, past the cuckolded empty mines of Coal Valley, past the obsolete remains of the Illinois and Michigan Canal in La Salle, and maybe even a night under the breezes of Lake Michigan. And there – crossing over Chicago’s big shoulders out of the immense, unbounded plains of the West into the thick forests and crisscrossed jungles of the East.

Everything here flows to the Big River, but not you.

In the here-now, these early miles of Nebraska, pulling into a rest stop along the highway, a rounded rectangle of grass and green, diagonal parking spaces, and a rusting swing-set, one a.m. arrives. Sidney’s phone rings; she doesn’t even look. “That might have been part of it,” she responds.

You look at her blankly until some neuron, somewhere, makes a lucky connection. “Just how crazy are you?”

“There’s a long history of the crazies on my dad’s side.”

And how crazy are you? All turned around now, Iowa’s seen you coming and going and now here’s Nebraska again. And a girl you don’t know helps you pull a pair of sleeping bags out of the car so you can rest under the stars – “keep your eyes closed if someone shines a light on you,” you tell her, “the police won’t bother you if they think you’re asleep.” – and in the morning you’ll still be heading back the way you came. Away from concrete certainty and plans already set in motion.

It’s her turn to take your hand (all zipped up individually in your sleeping bags) and she asks you why you turned west for her, why you didn’t keep going east the way you’d planned. Her hand is warm, small, softer than she looks. Under the great faint belt of the Milky Way, you can see yourself from somewhere in the sky above, two down-filled rectangles spread over too-green grass with your heads uphill a few feet from farmland, hands met in the middle, tiny things coming to rest as other tiny things zip and zoom left and right across the landscape of the darkness with their white and red beacons singing this is where I’m going; this is where I’ve been, and further south a train rolls slowly through the night carrying consequential beings along the arrow of their intentions – here to Denver, there to Chicago, onward, and further. Up here in the ceiling of the stars, it doesn’t matter which way you’re going. It all comes ‘round again.

You don’t know. Isn’t that it? She squeezes your hand and you come rushing back down to here, to now, and you tell her that.

“That’s the best kind of knowing,” she answers. “It has so much promise.”

touch unlost (Entry)

2011-08-12T21:47:42Z

I thought of you today.

In between carefully selected and codified words and haphazardly dashed phrases, explanations and explorations, right here in between a pair of oddly matched lines of text, you came to mind. And you wouldn’t leave me, wouldn’t leave me to my thoughts alone.

I thought I felt sad, but you shook your head. I thought I felt lonely, but you shook your head. I thought I felt weary, but you shook your head.

I tried to put a name to my feeling and a face to your memory but you hid in the shadows and dodged me. You were there, though. I’m a man of no regret, but it’s funny feeling this: to miss you means I have to bring you here again, here in my mind and in my memory. To miss you means I have to smell you in the room, hear you from up the stairs, close my eyes and read the words you left scribbled in the dark. To miss you means you’re here.

And when I think of you today I don’t know who you are. I don’t know if I am. I write about these things. I write about this feeling. It’s an ache, it’s a distance between the you in my mind and the you out there. It’s the space between what is and what we want it to be.

I don’t know why we fight. I don’t know why we fought. I can list out a hundred reasons but when you get right down to it, we’re no closer to knowing. But here’s my open wound. If you were to ask me, I wouldn’t even be able to tell you who cut me open or why it’s here. I don’t know why I feel this way.

I could ask those questions. But you’d just shake your head no.

So I’ll just sit here, and show you my scar, and smile.