Gettin some new digs

This blog is now retired. I've moved over to the Wordpress platform.  Why? Duh, all the cool kids are using Wordpress, that's why.

If you were reading via RSS and the link you polled in your reader was for Feedburner, you shouldn't have to do anything.  I think.  Probably. Ok, I'm not sure at all, but I really like you, so what about just heading on over to the new site and signing yourself up?

I also set up an About.me page, which is like an individual splash page. So far, it's narcissistic and self-obsessed, so it'll likely work very well for writers, although not everything is functioning yet. But if you want to check that out, click here.

So, thanks to everyone for reading and commenting. I hope to see you on the other side.

Pushcart Nomination

You remember the girl that ate grapes with a spoon, that twisted the hot cigarette into her flesh? Hopefully, you do. Well, I received an email from Frank Hinton of Metazen that they are nominating A Burning Bliss for a Pushcart. You can read it here.

So, lollipops for everyone.

In other news, I'm still looking for an agent. That involves a lot of waiting. The full manuscript of my novel is being read by two publishers and two agents right now. It isn't being represented or bought by anyone however. Yet. You ever notice that when you say yet, it's almost like spitting? Yet! 

There's a bareness on our walls now. Books used to be there but now it's simple color. Green abounds. All the shelves of books I used to own have been condensed to one. One shelf of books that I couldn't bear to part with or that I need for reference or fuel or to read late at night and lament that I'll never write that well. At least not yet.

I've been reading more e-books on my iPad and really enjoying it. There's nothing to fear there. You touch the screen and words appear. You swipe your finger and the page turns. In a book good enough, the medium always disappears. The medium is ancillary.

My daughter is nearly three. She wears yellow and dances and tries my patience. She's in love with apple juice popsicles and Cinderella. Tonight her cheeks are red and she's slow with fever. I feel that heaviness pillow my limbs and wonder at the things that jump between people. Her knees are bulbs of moonlight. In the middle of the night, she cries at things I'm not allowed to see. I love her so much it scares me. 

If you haven't read Tom Franklin's Poachers you're missing out.

I'm reading Shya Scanlon's Forecast and thinking how strange it is, possibly prescient.  One of the interview slots I'm running for Dark Sky Magazine will feature Shya, so look for that. Also, I'm reading John Wray's Lowboy and Zora Neale Hurston and Nam Le's wonderful-so-far The Boat.

But, you know, Pushcart. There's no chance, right? Why even think that way. Well, why the fuck not?

As I watched her drive away, listening to my breath hiss through the hot ember of a cigarette, I thought she'd be back. I thought she would turn around. I thought, and I recall this specifically, why the fuck not? 

We are so often ill-informed  We are so often blind.

Also: doesn't the seething ember in the picture look like a brain? Is it burning with bliss?

How Strawberry Pie Sounds

I saw a man with wet eyes holding his hand on his belly. One could tell he loved tacos and had a wife that knew the lyrics to the theme song of Family Ties. His hands were well-washed; he liked to do the dishes.  Each evening he’d squirt a stream of lemon Palmolive over his knuckles and cup his hands under the warm water till bubbles rose from his skin. He had an intellectual smile and a janitor’s neck.  Deep in his closet, he secreted away a box of poems he wrote to a girl in high school. Late at night, his head sloshy from beer, he’d pull these out, smooth the creases, and read them furtively under the yellow eye of a flashlight.

~ 

A wide-faced woman with the stern hair of a small town government clerk ate a caramel from the candy bin in the grocery store without paying the quarter. Her son left three days ago for college.  She has an unkempt house of pale brick and tiny windows and a husband that’s thumb-clumsy with hammers.  She’ll hum Justin Bieber songs to herself in the shower and wake each night at 3:17am without knowing why.  She is fond of saying consequences are things that happen to other people and she adores all shades of blue except ice because that one reminds her of her mother. 

 ~

Also a little girl, clutching a doll to her ribs with both hands.  She breathes like a tired puppy and has the mouth of a librarian. One can imagine her sweating on a school bus seat when football players jostle to the rear or holding her knees together in church when she’s older.  Of course she wears socks to bed and once ripped the petals off a flower.

~ 

I saw another man with small feet taking large steps. His shoes were shiny and his tie too short. The tie flapped in an unappealing way. He walked as if he were proving something to his father or ex-wife.  His car probably needed shocks and would bounce up and down for thirty feet after he ignored the speed bumps, intent on moving forward. 

~ 

I saw a girl who knew she was better than me.  She had a name that felt common in the mouth, a third toe longer than the second, a scar below her navel through which her future motherhood had escaped. She had dreams of being a redhead or a police officer or the wife of a bouncer.  She stood supremely at ease, like she was rich and possessed no faults. Peppermint ice cream fascinated her and she worried each time she had a stomach cramp. 

~ 

In the post office, there was a faint woman that moved the way chrome glinted.  She had an edge to her wrists, a thinness that made one nervous at first glance.  It was easy to assume she was ill, or self-obsessed, but her eyes were those of one at ease in the faintly green steam of a bowl of collards. She knew how to make biscuits from scratch. Her hands were deft with flour. She was talking to the clerk, answering questions, looking into his small, round glasses and nodding. The clerk leaned forward to hear her. Then he made a joke and she laughed,  a rich sound, bright and loud as strawberry pie. And she was more beautiful in that moment than anything. Clouds were set free in her face and everyone in the post office was mesmerized by her humor. That her throat so soft in speech could release such naked abandon showed us all something human.

~ 

These are some of the things I saw today. What about you?

My tongue probes a growing hollow

We came together full of breath. Our hands were idle and wanting on the rough-haired couch, our knees silvered by moonwash. The house was so quiet I could hear her heart, like a bird trapped in a glass. The soft hair on her thigh rose to meet my touch. She was uneasy with her tongue. A sweet clumsiness in our kiss rough with teeth. Then the light turned on and we were caught.

My tongue probes a growing hollow. It’s a tooth, an upper molar. Actually, it’s an absence, something that used to be fully there that’s now only noticeable through loss. It’s like I decay each day into something less than what I was prior. So much of life is like that.

So much isn’t of course. There’s a swelling bump on my wife’s belly and that’s not an absence, unless that bump’s growth is measured in what it’ll soon take away, that is time, sleep, and perhaps sanity. New life ushers new demands. The world is in constant flux, except for drunks, which never change, and work, which is a quotidian ache like the one that’ll urge blackly forth from that toothy gap on occasion.

I think so much of what we are is measured by what we’ve lost. Take Hawthorne’s Wakefield for instance, who leaves his wife, moves a block away, and watches her for twenty years in order to discover who and what he is. There’s a man shaped entirely by others, decidely anti-American, anti-Thoreau, but universally true. My heart is so woefully shaped by that girl in Colorado with the apple eyes that wouldn’t face me anymore or return my calls or write me back. It’s not that I did anything wrong, she told me while driving away. It’s just that I didn’t do enough.

Or the time my son wanted to have a light saber battle and all I wanted was to write an idea down, a paragraph, something dreadful, something inspired. 

“You’ll never defeat me,” he said hopefully.

I looked up at the plastic green blade he held out for me and shook my head. “What I’m doing here is important. Not now.”

His arm flagged, then stiffened. “You never play anymore.”

“If I don’t get this down, I’ll lose it. You must understand.” And I bent my head back to the page, searching for the word, the thought, the importance. It was gone. It would not face me. A glass jumped when I slammed my fist on the desk. “I need time to myself. Don’t you understand? Just a few damn minutes to think!”

Then it was out and I could do nothing about it. Loss compounds loss and we are shaped by these things more than we are molded by our intentions. My wife was there, her face ripe with shame, her hand on my son’s shoulder. “Leave Dad alone for a while.” An Outcast of the Universe, yes.

The hollow swells. Bits chip away, get tongued free, erode. Emptiness grows. People turn away. We are our hollows because that is what shapes the other. Loss has no weight yet it’s the gravity binding us together.

They sat me and the girl I kissed when I was twelve before a semi-circle of Elders, old men with rheumy eyes and baggy, red throats. They wanted specifics, demanded details. I sat clutching my knees, staring at their leather shoes, answering yes, I used my tongue and yes, I understand what that can do to a girl. And no, no we didn’t do more. My grandfather had died two days before. He was gray on the bed as the door creaked open for me to see. So still. Of all the things a body can pretend, death is not one of them. I braved the hard knob of his knee under the blanket with my hand, but that was it. I couldn’t bring my fingers to his cheek. I wanted to write a poem about hope and life and a girl’s heart wild beneath her skin. I wanted to be close. That’s all. But the light turned on and it was blinding. The light always is.

Of course, the Elders told the entire congregation. They announced it via microphones and loudspeakers: this must be stopped. My punishment was that no one would be allowed to talk or look at me and when that was said, all two hundred or so people in the building showed me their stiff spines and crooked elbows. Even my parents. I stood there sweating while the room grew hollow and I imagined myself gray and still, holding back all my bright breath. To this day, if I see someone from that group on the street, some of them will avert their eyes because I never repented.   

Now, I find the sharp remains of the tooth and I work my tongue there. If I weren’t afraid of dentists, I’d get it fixed. I hear they can fill hollows, but I am afraid. I am afraid there is no hope for what’s left.   

Sometimes you have to switch to spinach soup

Sometimes you have to switch to spinach soup. Sometimes you have to turn away. Sometimes you have to embrace. It is through these mechanisms that we make our life. Of course, switching always involves some manner of castigation and it’s the hardest thing in the world to do, to give up our loves.

This is a post about ruts. And free will, which, perhaps, is illusionary. I’ve been reading about the brain lately. Say you hold up your hand, palm towards your face, and bend all your fingers at the knuckle save the middle and then you stiffen your arm and wag that finger at some Tea Party member or bible thumper. Surely this is an act of volition? But when measured by machines more complicated than a wife, one discovers that synapses fire and muscle fibers begin their twitch a few moments before consciousness “decides” to shoot the bird at whatever abomination is being confronted. We’re being tricked!

I’m not sure what this means. I do know I was in the car during my lunch hour on my way to U-Haul to buy boxes. All my books, some of them at least, are going into the boxes to be sealed away from the open and free air. Maybe I will sell them. Or give them away. The walls are being cleared where we’re planning some color. Color must be planned, so rarely does it sprout on its own. This culling was my suggestion.

My wife turned toward me, her face full of suspicion. “Are you sure?”

“Physical things carry spiritual weight,” I said.

“First you decide to give up chicken-fried steak and soda. Now your books? Are you ok?”

It’s not that I’m giving things up, it’s that I’m looking for free will. But that’s not what I said. I told her, “Maybe.”

All agony arises from hesitation.

When we’re acting, we’re ok, right? Rarely do we abhor the actual drinking. It's the next day woe shows its black face or it's the waiting for everyone to go to bed before the glass is poured. We agonize after we stick the knife in the bitch or the bastard or before we work up our blood enough to grip the haft. I trail my fingers over the spines of the books on the shelves. There’s Gass. There’s McCarthy. There's so many others that have been there my entire life. There’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind! How can I box that? Attachment stirs and latches. It’s like fucking a woman that loves you but wants to get away. It’s like punishing your children.

Then there’s Rum. There’s something that compels. Compulsion is the same thing as those muscle fibers arcing into action before the thought gels. It’s not as if every decision we make is one we make. How can we tell?

She crawls up into my lap, all blue eyes and candy-sticky fingers. “Daddy,” she says, “I love you. Wanna play princess?” And it’s a shame one wonders where that action comes from. Did all the molecules for all time collide and merge to produce this moment? It seems like an awful act of good will to give me that.

But there I go again. Good will is an illusion.

Sometimes all one can do is switch their weight to the left foot when the right is aching.  

Twenty One Pages of Freedom

It’s wrong of me to say this after only twenty-one pages, but this is the Internet and everything’s relative, right?  Wrong is a localized phenomenon, moody as a mom with her special evening cocktail. I’m twenty-one pages into Franzen’s book and I’m trying to find a reason to go back. I’m shaking for one.

I know Freedom is supposed to be awesome, especially since he's god's fucking gift to capital L literature, but I really wish something would happen already. It is very smooth, though. Polished and gleaming. Like a cufflink.

It's also very, how shall I call it, white and upper middle class. Very white. Very folded napkin and bright silverware. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I've always considered those Volvo driving and fancy-watch-wearing middle classers as being divorced from reality. In a way, that book is too, with its languid beginning and drunk focus and real life hidden under surface detail. Reality is a loud fart in an elevator. It's a cruel word whispered in a soft ear. Reality is being denied, forsaken, left alone. Reality is a room full of light which no one can see.

There's a wealth of character thus far, angry striations under a calm and glassy surface, but I wonder if it's ever, really, going to muscle up and come out. The first twenty-one pages of Freedom are like a woman swallowing the sound of her orgasm. The first twenty-one pages are like a one on one with my mother-in-law in a small room. Too much information about things I care little about! I keep thinking somewhere around page 400 perhaps the book will have a typical housewife breakdown, maybe throw a glass of red into the plush carpet or leave the bathtub water running so it burbles over the fine porcelain lip, but I just can't see it ripping out its insides the way the chick in Richard Yate's novel did and I can't imagine the book hiking up its skirt as it leans down to take some black man's fat cock into its mouth.

I'm hoping for bad behavior. That is literature’s life blood. Will Freedom give me that? Convince me to keep reading. Give me hope.

A Thumbscratch Away

Picture a wasp trapped in a jar. Or a cat with a hind paw caught. Or how the sea heaves its white hiss against walls of rock. One feels a frantic sense rise like steam from a fast boil in a pot.

So I walk past a man at the booze store. I’ve a bold grip on the neck of my weighty bottle of Dark Cruzan and he cradles his three dollar bottle of Mad Dog. Perhaps I look at him, as I’m wont to do. Hunting for a detail to steal. Is his left leg shorter than his right? Does his hip buck strangely as he walks and is that right eye brighter than the left? Yes, it is. How we adore asymmetry! Huff a palmful of chalk across that left iris and you’d have it rendered aptly. Wiry hair fumes greyly from the small V of his mis-buttoned shirt. And now he stops, fixes me with that bald and hollow eye. “The fuck you staring at cunt?”

And it’s here the air tenses. Perhaps it sings a little. No, that’s a mere tremor or the blood gushing sudden through the tight veins in my ears. Here’s where a day could change, a life. The guy looks at me the way the rich look at cheap food. “You got some beef, let’s take it outside.”

I want to tell him he’s being hysterical, just like the fat-wristed woman that sped up her glowing Lexus to prevent me taking her spot on the highway when I tried to merge, just like the sunken-cheeked heart attack that stomped his foot on the floorboard of his truck and screamed at the ATM while I waited behind him.

Our civility is such a sheer finish. When you scratch your fingernail across the top of a hundred dollar IKEA table, the truth of the table is exposed. It doesn’t take much effort to show the furniture for what it is. It’s the same with us, I guess. How quickly we can be revealed for what we are. A thumbscratch away from the hysterical.

Of course, I didn’t look him in the eye. I turned away and looked at the sloshing want in my own bottle, offered some platitude about him resembling my uncle or the coach that taught me drafting in high school. The guy stands there obdurate and stiff, and his cheeks puff with a sort of regnant victory. His face turns sly and demeaning and then he too turns away and I catalog that drag of his heel, the fingers on my rum-free hand loosening. I note those black frowns of grease tipping his fingers, how his money is wadded instead of folded. And I huff a little, thinking Mad Dog. Yeah. At least I’m spending twenty bucks, you high-strung fuck.  

Hysteria is everywhere. It brightens the curved colors on our soda cans. Our tenses won’t hold. Hysteria weakens the plots in our movies to hew more room for tits and explosions, the emotional catalyst for the numb. We’ll clutch each other at the fake horror onscreen while locking our gaze straight ahead when we see a middle-aged woman with tight brown hair sobbing alone in her small car. Our fiction postures and twists like a teenager flexing in a mirror. Our sentences wind their sinew through excrement, piss, blood, ravages of weather, and they build these howling structures of nothingness, vast alphabets of pure voice reflective only of itself. What comes out of the body is not profound. It never has been. What we want is light and we want it to be uniform. What we need is less mirrors. We’re no good at establishing opinions of ourselves. Look to others to find out what sort of person you are. Reality is a negotiation. 

I try to play Philip Glass for my son. I tell him to be quiet and listen, to yield to the absence in the music. He fidgets. I say you must listen carefully because when the note becomes strident that is your chance and you may only have one, perhaps two, depending on the piece. He doesn’t understand. He wants The Crystal Method. Is he lost? I don’t know. Nostalgia of this sort doesn’t warrant any attention. He’s only eight. Hopefully, there’s time.

Things are the way they are. They always have been. This is the mantra of the poor.

My daughter will listen to Philip Glass. She’ll curl up her warm legs in my lap and lay her cheek against my chest and twist her tender fingers in between the buttons of my shirt. She’ll raise her palm and rub it across my day-worn chin and when the violin seeps from the speaker, her breath floats in her throat, and I feel the fluttering throb of her heart. If we could freeze things here, we’d be all right. Here’s where the world could stop. Hold on, I tell her. Listen to where the notes are headed. Hold on, it’s happening soon.