Nightwood and Giovanni's Room: the dangers of the search for hidden messages in recommended fiction...

Language is meant to communicate, to get a point across. Perhaps also sometimes just to get something out, to express, to release some of that steam that builds up behind our eyes. We can be utilitarian in our language, try to say exactly what we mean in direct tones with simple meaning, but more often than not our feelings are more complicated than that. This is where we get into art and language and communication can get refined, yet also garbled. As we shape and express what we mean through whatever medium our art finds its expression in, it isn't usually just a simple single meaning that comes out. Had we meant a simple single meaning, why bother with art? Just make a sign and hang your message where the target will read it, or just say it straight out. As our intentions and feelings become more complex than just simple cause and effect, so too our forms of expression necessarily communicate complex feelings and messages. Of course, once it leaves our mind and enters the corporeal world, it isn't only up to the artist as to the meaning. We put what we can into something we create, but then the person who comes upon it takes from it according to what they see and what they've brought. It isn't only the creation of the art which completes it, it is also in the viewing. Finding a receptive audience is a talent in and of itself.

I'm prone to forget that everyone in an audience doesn't see the same work. Reading a book that hits on something I've felt but not known how to express always makes me want to share it with friends. I want to share what I've found, I want to discuss it with others, I want to dig in deeper. Some of this is just wanting to compare what we find and trying to see through different eyes. Some of it is just social and wanting to share things. Of course, sometimes there is the feeling that someone has communicated something that I couldn't or hadn't been able to before and sharing a reading feels like a way to let me make more sense to others: if they read this, they will understand what I mean, how I feel!

But we all read differently and each text has many messages. Coming from different directions, relating to different characters, we do not always find the same clarity in the same texts as our friends. Why am I reflecting on this now? Because I just read Nightwood.

There is something intriguing in the title, and I love the author's name. Djuna Barnes. I seem to have a certain predilection for names beginning with "Dj". I really wish I knew some Djunas and Djangos. I'm getting off track, just saying that there has been something compelling about the book that would have eventually pulled me to it, but I read it on recommendation. Ben had told me about it before and I had meant to pick it up and hadn't, so I finally decided to grab it off the shelf to be part of the traveling library that helps make this floating incarceration feel productive and less like a prison sentence. It was finally the right time to read it.

That it was the right time to read it was made all the more clear by Ben looking for it on the shelf and growling when he realized that I had taken it when he wanted to double check his remembrance of a passage for some of his commentary in his Facebook "25 things". Not that the right time to read it was when someone else wanted it (I'm not that spiteful, really) but rather that having read his comments on it and realizing how big an impact it had made on him brought it to the front of my mind and made it something that I wanted to read now. It was already in my mind and he had asked me to read it before; now the time was right to read it.

I think this also set me up for a certain confusion. Going into a book looking for someone you already know is a mission fraught with danger. We end up putting too much of our friends into the characters or too much of the characters into our friends and sometimes if we aren't careful we can distort and damage our reading.

This is particularly difficult for me. I'm an avid reader, but a brutal one. Even as I hated book reports in school, I've grown up doing one after another as a hobby. As anyone who has read much at all of what I write here knows, I've got strong opinions and a tendency to share them. I tend towards gushing or demolishing as my whims take me and often enough both about different aspects of the same thing. This is all good and well when it is just me talking about my experience with a piece of art, but what about when this is a thing you approached because it is emblematic for someone you love?

At the moment, I feel as if I am sort of through the looking glass, looking at the reverse of a scene I've been in before. On the other side of the mirror, I'm the one presenting the book which meant so much to me, so colored my world outlook that I felt compelled to share it and then eagerly awaited for it to be read and find myself understood and closer than ever. Of course, this is not how it worked out. I handed Ben Giovanni's Room, as I had handed it to friends before and as it had been handed to me. I devoured it in one night when I got it, reading as the remnants of a hurricane blew past where I waited it out in a safe inland retreat, crying tears openly (which is no great feat now, as I've become a little looser with my emotions and like a good cry anytime a book or movie warrants it, but then I was an uptight control freak who refused such silly human indulgences) and feeling destroyed and devastated by the book, but also hopeful. The book could be so tragic because there was this beautiful love story, that even if this love was doomed, the fact that it could exist, that it could be written down, that this story could make people cry was breathtaking to me. I felt like it was giving me permission to fall in love if I found it. Mason and Liz had made me read it, and I had made Michael read it (don't tell Liz, he still has her copy. I had to find an identical edition to replace it for her.) and made John read it and I don't know how many other people I forced it on. But we were all friends, in various states of tortured love (or not love). When I handed it to Ben, I handed it to someone I was in love with, who I was dating.

You may not know this, but significant others don't always take away the same thing from a tortured love story that you did when you read it years ago and lonely and single. The story told my younger self of the possibility for love and passion; to someone already in love it warns of tragedy and hopelessness. So when he finally read it, Ben seemed somewhat horrified. Why did I want him to read that story? What was I trying to say? I was so flabbergasted that I didn't really know how to respond. Wasn't it beautiful? He said it was sad. Of course it was sad, and beautiful too, but because it wasn't just a book he was reading, rather a message from me, he couldn't just breathe in the beautiful. He went into it looking for me and probably also himself in relation to me and then he finds two people destroyed by each other and the society around them. They fall profoundly in love, and one becomes more jealous and desperate and falls to pieces before being executed and the other retreats in fear and grasps for traditional roles before falling haunted into exile. Was this what I saw as an ideal relationship? Was this how I saw us?

No and no, of course, but it is impossible to take in something brought to us by someone singing its praises and saying how much it has influenced who they are without looking for them in it, and also perhaps a little of what this says about how we fit into their life. So now it is my turn, and I try to look back through and remember his bafflement and then mine too.

At the beginning, I really liked Nightwood. The descriptions are incredibly rich and there is this strangely detailed breakneck pace racing your through a bizarre, but detailed background. You fly straight through one generation in no time. In an odd way, the laying of the groundwork reminded me of Amelie.

I shouldn't have said "At the beginning." I liked the book, when I backed away from my personal quest of finding Ben and I in it. It is a beautiful book and the characters are vivid and compelling. But I've a vicious critic of books and characters. I always have been and not in a particularly generous or forgiving way. When my mother would watch soap operas when I was a kid, I remember thinking how stupid everyone it is was. If they would just explain themselves instead of weaving these complicated lies their lives would be so much easier. I've gotten a little more understanding as I've aged, but only a little bit. And as much as I relish giggling at drama in real life, I've got a low tolerance for feeling like it has been cultivated, in real life or written worlds. I suppose this was my great intolerance with soap operas: there wasn't actually any drama except what was actively cultivated by all these vapid people. They had no real problems, just made some and carefully coached them along.

I don't mean to be so dismissive; Nightwood was certainly not Days of Our Lives. The writing is lush, the characters compelling and vivid and believable. Still, there is a certain flavor of tortured love that I don't really love that you can find in here. Doomed love, I can handle, but just plain old tortured love doesn't really do it for me. There is this feeling that to a certain extent the tortured want their love to tortured, that by traumatizing it that it becomes more real or something. This doesn't inspire sympathy in me, it makes me want to pull my hair out and scowl.

If you've read this book, you are probably scowling at me now, wondering why I'm so dismissive and hostile. As I said earlier, Nightwood is not a soap opera, it is a beautiful book. The characters tug and tear at one another and talk over each other trying to make themselves heard, and there is a terrible lucidity in it all. Just reading the book, unburdened by personal association, I'd see that. I'd be more forgiving and gentle to each of the characters, because I wouldn't assume at the start that I was any of them. If Ben found himself in this book, then wouldn't I also be there too, because surely I'm in any story he is in, right? I rail against silly romanticism muddling the thinking and blurring meanings, but damn if I'm not guilty of the crimes I accuse.

It is still difficult not to ask who in the book am I when Ben reads it. If-we-were-who-would-we-be is my favorite game anyway. It just gets loaded when you think someone else has played it already and sees you hiding somewhere in a text. Who am I when I read it and do we think the other person sees us the same person? Who are they? And do we see them as that person because we like that character or is this an indictment?

I assume that there are two choices for who we are, since in the book there are two main lovers: Nora and Robin. There is also the interloper, Jenny, but we'll assume as a given that neither of us could be this character; the implications would just be too ugly to contemplate. I'd assume that Ben sees himself as Nora, but I have a hard time imagining that he sees me as Robin, even if I do like going out drinking and wandering through the night. Of course, comparing yourself to characters is an imperfect game. And only a game. I, nor you, are the the characters in the stories we read.

I assume this is the same mistake he made when he read us in Giovanni's Room. I didn't love the book because I thought I was either David or Giovanni. I love the whole book, the whole story, and listening in on their conversations and the indictments cast against them by other characters, I found things explained that helped me understand better what I was feeling and how to navigate in the world. I didn't look to it as a plan for success or what my ideal love life would look like. It informed my world view; it didn't replace it. I wonder that that was the miscommunication when I shared this with Ben: he went in looking for us or a message from me to him.

Now I find myself fighting this same instinct with Nightwood. Even knowing this is a mistake and not why Ben told me about the book and wanted me to read it, I still couldn't help looking for us in it and being irrationally critical of the characters, thinking "I would never do that!" So I back up a little, relax, try again.

The writing is so beautiful it leaves me jealous. Even not imagining myself as the characters, they still irritate me somewhat, though flashes of brilliance shine through in their speeches. The character of the doctor is of particular interest (had this book not been recommended by a lover, he is the character I would have picked as myself: meddlesome, know-it-all, talkative). Interestingly enough, both of our emblematic books are set in Paris amongst gay expatriates and in roughly the same time period.

Perhaps I've written in enough circles about all this. I've just had to coach myself out of this trap and back into (somewhat) objective readership.

Happy Birthday.

Happy Birthday, Rhodesia!

Trying to write...

I write to think. As I subject thoughts to the textual exercise, I'm able to hone down ideas and get to sharp crisp points and shiny bright edges. Until I start writing, I'll get caught in loops and trip over ideas and things stay in a big gloppy mess.

More and more, and perhaps somewhat disturbingly, I write to converse. Is talking to yourself any less ridiculous when you write it down? Actually, even though I might be the only person who ever reads much of what I write, I always assume a greater audience. This isn't just for things published on the internet, but even things I never publish or share. This doesn't necessarily mean it is any less pathological than talking to yourself; when I talk to myself, I also assume a wider audience than just me. I'm not talking about being overheard, but I assume that conversations in my head are between a multitude, not just the back and forth of one mind playing with itself.

But now I've turned down a dark road. Up til now, I've contented myself with writing simply about whatever catches my fancy. I start with something I'm excited about or confused about or pissed off by and then just tear through it. You begin with a framework and each addition builds off that. There is a set territory and you've got only so much space that you have to wriggle around in to make (or find) your point. For some reason I'm leaving this happy countryside and staring at blank pages daring me to write something. Why couldn't I leave well enough alone and leave fiction out of it? I suppose it had to happen sometime. But the blank page is a daunting devil to dance with. Even with a loose idea of what I want to write. I've got concepts and ideas and even a few characters laid out, but how to begin refuses to cooperate. That blank expanse screams and dares me to step in and being the cautious coward that I am, I'd back away quietly if I had a choice. But there is an idea, the seed of a story that seems to have lodged itself in me and it is too late to turn back. I couldn't back away from the blank page and leave well enough alone: it would follow me taunting and daring.

I can't promise that I'll get somewhere beautiful on the other side. What comes of it might not even make it as far as this blog, much less a printed page, but as in all things I don't step into it without grandiose plans. Wish me luck.

ghost posting...

in an attempt to be two places at once and break my bad habit of glutting this blog with tons of reading and then going through silent droughts, I'm scheduling delayed posting while I out at sea this trip of things which I wrote during the last trip. Hope you enjoy...

More Nashville: the if-we-were-who-would-we-be edition

Most of what I've heard about this movie before is from Kearney, because he is from Nashville and has talked about loving it and growing up with people talking about it and knowing people who were extras in it. He recently told me of being confronted with his early perceptions being a little askew. When he had seen it before, he had associated most closely with Opal, the journalist from the BBC. It was his hometown and he saw the locals as he experienced it: lots of backwardassness and self important people full of shit. Not that different from how many of us judged our hometowns as teenagers back when we knew everything, but perhaps carrying more of his projection than how the movie itself presented the characters. He then saw Opal as this sophisticated outsider moving around through all these local morons. Sharing this with friends, having not seen the movie in years, someone finally pointed out to him that in the movie she is the small-minded idiot, more bitch buffoon than any of the locals. So he rewatched it, and realized that they were right, she was a horrible person. He has been telling people for years that he was this character and only now realizes that he's been self identifying with a jackass the whole time. I of course love shit like this.

This also encouraged me to play the if-we-were-who-would-we-be game. I was already running though my mind, "Well, if he isn't the journalist, then which character is he?" so it was a short leap to trying to peg other friends as other characters. Actually, I really just look forward to telling Kearney that he is the waitress that can't sing. Traditionally, this game was played with me, Mason, Liz, Lisa, and John back in college. We would then suck in anyone around us, and in the heyday usually drew in Dean, Michael, Preot, Vanessa, Brock, and anyone else close enough to tease. According to tradition, John and I were always assigned two polar opposite characters, usually friendly rivals. Which in this case would make me Barbara Jean and him Connie White. Actually, at this point everyone else objects and points out that I have it backwards because I like Barbara Jean more. Which is true. Of these two, I'd be Connie, because I'm always the hussier of the two options and I'd look good in that red dress and be more likely to sing on a stage in a hotel bar with a post in the center of the stage, and it is remarkably easy to imagine him in that white dress (looking at photos friends seem to have dredged up recently to post on Facebook, perhaps i could sport the white dress. Speaking of these terrible pictures, there is actually one of me in red which would complete the set, which thankfully has yet to surface) with ribbons in his hair and he would definitely sing on a stage made to look like the back of a river boat. And I'm the one who would have to ask who that was after being introduced to a famous actress. And he's more likely to be widely beloved and meaninglessly assassinated beneath a giant American flag in front of classical architecture.

All of this is wrong though. John would actually be the sassy Pearl, the older redheaded lady who gets all emotional talking about the Kennedy assassinations. She doesn't have a natural foil, and J. and I aren't really all that much of personal foils anymore, so I'm free to pick someone else. I still don't get to be Barbara Jean. We all know she goes to Mason: lovable sweetheart singer who has just recovered from an accident involving a flaming baton. Which unfortunately makes Kat her husband, who isn't the best character, but the comparison stands only because of the brightly colored bow tie which he wears untied around his neck the whole time. He's at least got flair. Actually, screw that. I can't give Kat a comb-over even if his bowtie is great. She gets to be the blonde chick who runs from her husband who drives the red pickup around. That chick has style (and can fix a truck).

Liz is the British journalist. Why? Not personality reasons, but I could totally see her wearing that hat and probably that dress too. And I can totally see her getting out of a painful conversation by saying, "Oooo, Elliot Gould!" and just getting up and walking away. This means that Stan is the son of the singer who shows her around everywhere.

L.A. Joan is Dean. Outfits, hair, facial expressions. No debate. He is always Shelly Duvall.

I'm always accused of picking people for me just because they are my favorites and trying to twist them into who I would be. This is true (but I am good at it). So of course I want to be Linnea, Lily Tomlin's character. Not exactly classically beautiful but strangely attractive and sporting an odd yet flattering haircut? Most likely to attend a black church and sing in a gospel choir? Ok, so actually Lisa is Linnea. Lisa would also be Lily Tomlin in 9 to 5 (Michael is Jane Fonda, I get to be Dolly Parton. Don't argue with me on this one; not up for debate. John is the boss's nosy assistant who they send to France.).

I was going to do a whole thing with me as Linnea and Ben as Tom (Keith Carradine's character), which was going to cause trouble since they are doomed lovers, but, in my defense, the two with the most chemistry in the film, and Ben is a tall hot blonde dude that always has people throwing themselves at him. But Lisa is Linnea, so I don't know who Tom is. Once upon a time he was Brock (not to Lisa's Linnea, just in general. I mean this as a compliment, not a criticism), but now Brock is the guy running around arranging the big concert for the politician (also a compliment, not a criticism). Or it could be Michael: everyone wants him but no one ever gets as much of him as they want. But it isn't Michael. He is Jeff Goldblum's character, in funky glasses riding around on a giant tricycle, although I'm tempted to make him Linnea's deaf daughter just to give him that mullet.

Well, if Ben and I aren't Linnea and Tom, then I suppose we are Sheila and Patty, The Smokey Mountain Laurels who sing "Oh These Troubled Times". I'm the short bossy one who asks for beers as soon as we finish singing.

Nashville!

I just watched Robert Altman's Nashville. Ok, so everyone else on the planet has seen this movie already, but I have a special knack for not having seen all the things that everyone else has seen. I'm slowly catching up on my quota of pop cultural touchstone movies in my time in floating prisons.

Prior to this, the only Altman movie that I know I've seen (I'm sure somewhere along the way I've seen some others but just don't remember or recognize as his; I'm that kind of opposite of a movie buff) was Prairie Home Companion. I've heard a few people pan that movie; they are morons. Perhaps I could be kinder and say perhaps they didn't get it because they weren't familiar with the radio show the movie was based on. Some of the characters like Guy Noir only really make sense if you know the show, but even if elements of it play better to a familiar audience, the over-all feel of the movie was heart breaking (in a good way). I totally cried when the old fellow died. That movie along with Mean Girls totally forgives anything stupid Lindsay Lohan does for a long time coming. Her interactions with Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin were spot on.

I like Lily Tomlin in anything. How could you not? Out of a cast of 24 characters followed throughout the film, you'd think she could get lost in there somehow, but during the scene where she goes to the club to see Keith Carradine the entire movie becomes about her. She doesn't say a word, but when he sang and she looks on everyone else is knocked out of the picture. He's the hot (and how!) rock star womanizer, singing out to a crowd including at least three other women he's been sleeping with who all to some degree think his song is about them, and I'm sure it was intentionally meant to be ambiguous and in that way not to any of them any more than all of them and every other girl he's chased but watching her, it isn't just about any girl. If it wasn't meant to be before he started singing it, it becomes Lily's character's song in that moment. It becomes their movie, a love story.

And then she breaks his heart. Which we (they) knew would happen. He might have thought it would be the other way around, as he used up and pushed away all the other girls throwing themselves at him (except Shelly Duvall's character, L.A. Joan, who was rude as hell but absolutely unflappable), but he's finally found a woman he can love: one who can't be with him and won't and leaves before he can want her to.

out to sea...

Finally headed out.

love is strange.

(This was written on a boat quite some time ago, I believe right before coming back to New York last summer, so it isn't exactly indicative of my current mind set -I am much less melancholy- but I like the ending. I don't think I've posted it before -couldn't find it in a quick search- and thought it might be an appropriate Valentine's Day post. Happy Valentine's Day everyone!)


if any sentence has ever been true, that one is. i'm learning to relax into that truth as i grow older, but it just gets stranger and stranger still. i don't know what i'm doing, and i'm almost ok with that. god knows i've been pretending like i was ok with that all this time but its just a monstrous front. i have NO idea what the fuck i'm doing. there is no future no past; it is all happening right now. i think i've settled this and that and then these ghosts come flying in from all corners. they don't give me any peace and never will. perhaps i like it that way; if i don't i better learn to because i know it won't change.

i don't even know how to conceptualize/imagine it any other way. i can't even get my mind through a short little story that pulls me out of this weird loop. i find myself calling out to old ghosts even as i'm reaching out to hold what is right in front of me right now. why can't it be enough? why do i have to know what i'll miss in it? why must these hobgoblins torture me? how do i survive this?

oh cut the crap, this is the only way i can live. smack in the middle of a swirling complicated world with all the uncertainty and absolute certainties colliding and acting a fool. i have to occasionally sit myself down and remind myself that i am a devil and my part in all this is rapturous laughter and conspiratorial giggles. I'll not let this absurd existence get the better of me. I've said my prayers ("Wow!" and "Thank you."), so enough with time on my knees. I'll stomp out and hold the beautiful as close as I can and dare it to hurt me deep; I can smile deeper. the joy is ecstatic, only the more so because of the pain. a thousand curses upon my name if I lay down and give up, if I break and beg for a stay of the trauma and tragedy, if I trade the joy for the cozy complacency, for a membership in the bleating mass. I've said what prayers I'm allowed already ("Wow!" and "Thank you."), but if I can offer up another... never mind. no new prayers; only new horizons. one day after another, one hallelujah and then another.

Only boring people get bored.

I keep telling this to myself. It is one of those horrible aphorism thrown about by busybody aunts who chide any complaint and encourage guilt, but I might be one of those people kind of people deep down. I don't particularly encourage guilt; I'm more in the camp of perpetual re-analysis for results and reshaping future actions accordingly, but none of the handwringing over episodes that one would rather not repeat. If you repeat them and hate the results again, you should feel stupid, not guilty (sometimes I am stupid, but I try my best not to be). Anyway, I am more prone to chiding complaints than coddling them. Particularly when I am the one complaining.

I am currently bored, and it is stupid. Actually, boredom isn't the right word. Maybe I am more restless. Because I spend so little time on land when I am working, I feel like time on land is valuable and I shouldn't waste the goodness. I like working up here on boats specifically because it gives me time to crawl into my own head and cut myself off from the world and read. And I have my stupidly heavy suitcase full of books that I look forward to reading, so I could just pull one out and get started. But I can do that at sea and I am on land, so I can't sit reading a book without the potential of terra firma nagging me that I should be doing something that I won't be able to do when we finally set sail.

I've been wandering about and enjoying the beauty of the area and rambling around town and enjoying time spent with friends here, but I already do so much alone and on my own time that I kind of don't feel like wandering around by myself at the moment with no partner in crime. I've got a couple of friends in town who are awesome co-troublemakers at night, but who have real jobs and so I've got an expanding series of days with no one to ramble with.

I might get up tomorrow and try to find somewhere to build a snow man or something else fun that you can do in the snow, but even though I'm staying plenty warm and like the white fluffy landscape, I'm really more of a tropical soul. I want to go hiking and swimming and even just lay on a beach or in the grass. I know, wah wah wah. Just feeling a little disjointed and I'll quit my complaining. Don't worry, my moments of self pity are short lived (self pity is something that is mercilessly brutalized and destroyed by the other inhabitants in my head) and I'll get back to normal.

so much I will miss in New York...

...but the best thing about being trapped on a boat is all the books I get to read when there is no phone that can ring, no email that can be checked, no happy hour calling my name.

And I promise to write more this go round.

and so it begins...

I almost titled this "and so it ends...", but sided with forward momentum and letting this be the capital letter at the beginning of something new rather than just punctuation at the end of our sentence under bush. We have a new president!

A few quick thoughts, having tried to watch it online while doing some work. I got to see most of it, just not always synched up with the sound. I did listen to it all.

rick warren was a brilliant choice in some stupid ways, speaking in that bland hypnotic cadence that preachers are taught to use to help you nap during sermons which may resonate with a large demographic, but he remains a royal failure of style. Even if he appeals to the kind of people who can in all seriousness argue that their Christian faith informs their politics and in the next breath support bombing the hell out of people and the task Obama faces will be easier the less resistant and alienated these people feel, the fellow still lack 'umph'. He just doesn't have it. He has the charisma of a couch cushion: a fine place to rest for the lazy or tired, but why put it on a stage?

Rev. Lowery on the other hand, blew it out of the water. Perfect delivery and helped recaptivate after that boring poem.

Pres. Obama's speech was amazing. Not too long, but damn he packed it in there. Pleasant enough to not seem mean, but it had to be like a punch in the face to bush, which it should be. He should get a punch in the face every day for the rest of his life. But it is sad that it should seem like a slam for a president to talk about things that should just be the plain normal business of the position and it seem like a revolution. Nothing he said was vindictive or mean; if the last administration hadn't been such a failure (and to varying degrees, those preceding them as well) nothing he said would be pointed.

Anyway, I'll leave the computer for now and go out and enjoy the sun. What a beautiful day.

it is cold

My feet are slowly beginning to thaw. I know chucks aren't the right footgear for winter cold, but so far this season they hadn't been so bad and I put on thick wool socks this morning. This was not enough.

Our apartment is generally way too cool but today I just couldn't get warm in there. Our heat never really warms things up much, but with the extra cold outside it really isn't doing the job. But after sending off some emails this morning I didn't really have a good reason to stay in and the lack of food in my stomach was mirrored by a lack of food in the fridge so I did have a compelling reason to leave. Carefully bundled, I weighed my options. I just wanted to go sit somewhere and have some lunch and sit with my computer and type. This is New York; there are a thousand places for this to be accomplished. There are two places right beside my house perfect for this, Cafe Nijasol and Boulevard, but I had it in my head that I haven't been venturing out far enough and that I wanted to go feel the energy somewhere else.

Just going into Williamsburg seemed like copping out and it was too cold to deal with how retarded public transportation is for getting around Greenpoint. The West Village was briefly considered, but I wasn't sure of where to go and wandering in the cold looking for a pleasant place seemed daunting particularly since anything over there was also likely to be packed with college kids or tourists. Chelsea was also quickly panned, though not without briefly pausing to miss Big Cup. I never really spent much time there (not a big coffee drinker), but still it was good for what it was.

Since I wasn't in the mood for more than one train, that left the East Village. It is where I am most comfortable here, but familiarity can be decieving. Once I headed that direction it became apparent I don't know the cafes and coffee shops like I know the bars. And it was too early to go to the bar. I never actually liked AltCafe, but it was good for what it was: a place to plop down with your computer and get online. Like Big Cup, it ain't there no more. So I went with Cafe Pick Me Up as a default. I like it fine for sitting with a friend chatting, but I've never particularly warmed up to the place. This is odd because I've always ended up finding it really pleasant once I sit down and get settled in, so I remind myself that I like it and head there.

Feet already frozen, just walking the few block from the train, it seems perfect when I step inside. Nothing on the menu jumps out at me, but it is warmish inside and I don't care to search out somewhere new so I order. Before sitting down, I ask the lady at the counter if there is a password for the wifi. She looks at me like I am a crazy person and starts rattling off prices for using the internet. I look at her like she is a crazy person, which she is if she expects someone who just gave her 7 bucks for a sandwich to fork out more money for wifi access. She comments that they never had free wifi, and I suppose reading my skeptical expression clarifies that it has been at least 5 years since they did. Which is also not true, since I went there several times this summer and used it. Whatever. So I couldn't relax and write, I'd just sit and read. I do remember why I don't like the place though: the staff. I always get the feeling from them that they would rather not be bothered. The sandwich was bland (meat, cheese, bread) and not very big with a pleasant enough side salad which became the condiment for the sandwich since it had no other. Reading Terry Prachett while eating was punctuated by a fat drama student talking at her gay bff who didn't get a word in edgewise.

Taking leave of this delightful lunch (it was more pleasant than I'm making it sound), my feet, which never really thawed, are already refrozen by the end of the block. My Swedish longjohns are sort of doing their job, but most of my cold weather layers are in Anchorage waiting for me to return and really need them, so I'm looking again for somewhere warm to thaw out and type. My apartment is not warm. It is 3, so bars should be opening but the stools are still on the bar when I walk past Section 218 (and I don't know if they have wifi anyway). I start to go to Nowhere but I remember that the last few times I've had my computer there, the wifi has been screwed. Metro definitely has functional, if slow, wifi AND fireplaces. Propping up my feet in front of a fireplace becomes the most appealing thought in the world.

On the sidewalk and subway I remember that even worse than the glut of commuters pouring out of work into every form of public transportation at 5 is the glut of kids pouring out of school, though I have to say that despite popular opinion that the next generation are a bunch of rotten little bastards, lately the crowds of kids I've found myself sandwich amongst have been suprisingly polite even if boisterous. Of course when I get metro, I see the bartender leaving the bar and locking it behind him and walking off on some errand. Despite wanting desperately to toast my little piggies in front of a fire, it is too cold to wait and even if I am one of those people who shows up at the bar far earlier in the shift than any happy hour bartender likes, I am not going to be that guy who is waiting at the door when they walk up. So back to my neighborhood and my two originaly options.

I chose Cafe Nijasol. I haven't been there since it got cold, but it is small which in my cold-numbed mind equals cozy which = warm. Which is by then my number one requirement. It is a little further, but a block and a half isn't so far if I can warm up then. I can't. It is closed, according to the apologetic sign on the front just for today, but closed none the less. So back to Boulevard, which I am mainly skeptical of because it is a larger space with a big front window and where I have sat in there before is right by the door. I know I can sit in a different place, but I am that kind of creature of habit; if I like the place I sit one time, I want to sit in that same place again and irrationally assume that I won't like sitting somewhere else. I each of the places I have mentioned today I planned out where I would want to sit as I considered it. I know, kinda crazy.

It isn't closed. The guy behind the counter is friendly and doesn't look look like it is annoying for a business to have customers. There is a spot at the counter far enough from the door that I can take my coat off but not so far in the back that I feel quarentined. Most importantly, it is warm! For the first time today, I'm not cold. The coffee tastes fine to me (but I don't drink it very often so I won't pretend to have a useful opinion on this); the carrot artichoke soup is perfect.

in the Brooklyn Museum

Happy Dance: my new favorite punk rock superstar

(Originally written back in May)

YouTube - Happy Dance

On a whim, I decided to look at William Gibson's blog, which I hadn't glanced at in more than a year. Following a cryptic link about the coolest thing in second life, I suddenly find myself introduced to Amanda Baggs.

"I made the mistake of doing this sort of thing in front of a psychologist."

"He called it an 'inappropriate emotional display'."

"He wanted to get rid of it."

"He tried to get rid of it."

"Sorry, Doctor."

"I'm still quite capable of showing happiness."

"My way."

swedish hobo candle

While in Sweden earlier this year on a business trip, my father was taught a simple yet useful trick for turning an ordinary log into a sort of stove/lantern/torch. Turn the log up on end, saw several criss-crossing cuts lengthwise taking care not to cut all the way to the bottom, add a little diesel fuel to the center, light and enjoy! He calls them "Swedish candles" and was told they were developed years back by a Swedish hobo. Perfect for cooking your tin of beans on top of and huddling around during cold nights, but none of us came up with a good answer as to how a hobo might get his hands on a chainsaw to make one.

Above is a picture of one we made over the holidays as practice for the Burning Labyrinth.

burning labyrinth design 3

burning labyrinth design 2

burning labyrinth design 1

location, location, location...

Of all the places in my parents house, why is it that my bed is the universal choice of place to bed down for all the various cats we have had down through the years. And even if I close the door, they always find a way to get in. At least this year, Okra (my brother's cat) is a much better cuddler than Waleena (my sister's cat) ever was.

the fountainhead: Part III

(written early last year, during my second trip in Hawaii)

Ok, so I may have softened a little on the fountainhead. Yes, I still think it is mostly pompous rape/cuckoldry fantasy done up in flimsy drag as radical philosophy. But it can be a reasonably readable book when it isn't busy monologuing and explaining everything.

If you haven't noticed, I've been kind of hard on this book from the start. My irritation comes from three sources. One is obvious: the book itself is irritating. The hero worship starts on the first page and only get cringingly more fawning as it goes. The philosophy of the whole thing is so black and white and so condescending and pedantic that even when a good point is made, you want to disagree with it because you know that had that point been made in that same way in real life, it would have been made by someone you hate.

The second is a few well-meaning friends commenting when they heard that I was going to read it that I should be careful and not be taken in by Ms. Rand's wily storytelling. I know that they are afraid of me becoming as annoying as they were when they were fifteen and read it and thought it was mind-blowing that someone could suggest that being selfish was something to aspire to and felt it really spoke to their frustrations with all the mindless imbeciles that every teenager feels surrounded by (and not always without reason). I'm not exactly a teenager and don't exactly shy away from fairly difficult reading, so I'll admit to being mildly offended by this well-meant warning. Ok, initially miffed and increasingly full stop offended as I've proceeded through the book.

The third reason is that over the years too many people have made comments like, "Have you read the fountainhead? I think you'd like it. Your take on things reminds me of it." Which is not unlike when I worked at a summer camp one year and was told repeatedly that I was just like Dan Edge who had worked there the year before. "You are just like Dan Edge, except he was a total asshole." Thanks. So my take on things reminds people of the philosophy expounded in what may be the most annoying book I have ever read? Great.

So, yes, I walked into this with unfair baggage, already prepped to dislike the book. But the baggage was only unfair because I hadn't read it yet, not because the book wasn't annoying enough to deserve the derision outright.

Actually, I should be clear. If this were a random tome picked out of obscurity from some shelf, I would have nicer things to say about it. It is reasonably well written. The characters are well developed, even if annoyingly developed as one-note sychophants, and the plot keeps sort of twisting til the end. As just a book that had managed to get published, I would judge it kindly and might have finished it, though probably not and if I had would have found it reasonably thought provoking even if a little naked about its intentions. But it isn't just some random book. It is a book which tons of people hold up as this life changing experience and a brilliant mind expanding read. At the end of the day, it is a bold attempt at sexualized hero worship, a story about a woman getting to be bored by the mediocrity of the world and lashing out with her beauty and competence and status to keep it all at bay until she meets this powerful machine of a man-god to ravage her. Yawn.

the fountainhead: Part II

(written early last year, on my second trip in Hawaii)


I don't know if I am going to make it. I really don't. I'll put down a book because I think it is wasting my time or I'm just not in the right frame of mind to digest it at the moment; normally not a problem. But this isn't just a book which sucks, this is a book which sucks and has a rampant following of people who felt led to adolescent epiphanies by this book's bold declaration that most people are obnoxious and that only the defiant artist (and very few of them) could have true integrity. And being who I am, I'm certain at some point I'll end up surrounded by people whose lives were changed or whose minds were opened by the fountainhead and someone will see me roll my eyes and say, "What?" and I'll answer. And then it would come out that I couldn't finish the book and they'll smugly dismiss my opinion and suggest that I didn't have the strength of character to finish such a noble and challenging book blah blah blah. And I'd rather finish it and be able to say it all was annoying instead of having to listen to someone say that the last little chunk was where it was all tied together and that of course I didn't get it if I didn't finish it.

And I may not finish it, but if I can't, it won't be for lack of stamina but for lack of stomach. I finally took a break and decided to read something else, so I've just finished Battlefield Earth, the longest sci-fi novel in history. I'll write about that separately, but a total joy to read and let no one say it was the length of the novel that turned me off from the fountainhead. I'm trying, I really am.

I still think that the novel is pompous rape-fantasy, which at the end of the day is the most cowardly kind of fantasy, but perhaps also one of the most common. I don't think the prevalence of it as fantasy is acknowledged enough. The desire to be violated. It is the secret dark dream of the pious and holier-than-thou. It is the wish to experience carnal things but without having to experience any of the responsibility for the act. "I was forced!" This is not to make light of rape or to suggest that in real life that people who demurely suggest that they won't go any further are asking for it or that no really means yes; this isn't about that at all. I'm talking strictly in the realm of fantasy and how so many people use secret rape fantasy as the route to accessing taboo desires. If they imagine themselves as violated, then they couldn't be guilty of dreaming about sex or whatever guilty pleasure they dream of, can they? Not that this doesn't have its real world correlaries, with people who aren't yet comfortable in their sexuality seeking out predatory or manipulative types so they can feel compelled into something they desire but still feel guilty about.

Perhaps I am getting off track. I really don't mean this to be simply sexual or for it to all be simply guilt centered. (Unfortunately, I can't remember what the hell else I meant to write about it, though. This is the point where I cut it off when I was originally writing about it and never seemed to get back to it. I've read and reread it thinking I'll one day finish it and so have gone almost a year now without publishing these three essays on the fountainhead, but I've decided enough is enough so here they are in all their unfinished glory).

the fountainhead: Part I

(written early last year, on my second trip in Hawaii)


On my first trip, I headed to sea with far too few books. I didn't think this when I left; the weight of the books was a ridiculous addition to an already cumbersome collection of junk. But you never realize how quickly you can read books when you take away other forms of distraction. Suddenly held tight on a boat where only one other person really speaks english well enough to hold a conversation and you suddenly plow through books like a maniac. Not all because you necessarily love them, but simply by the fact of them being there. Anyway, this trip I swore I wouldn't spend three days straight playing Snood on my cell phone and grabbed books like crazy.

"Like crazy" may be a more appropriate description than I would like to admit. I had all these plans of going book hunting and buying tons of great books and reading them and being all excited, but somehow with all the days spent in the office and then running around doing all my other tasks in that short valuable time that we spend on land, I didn't go out book shopping. Thankfully, as I unloaded the books I had read, I picked through the assorted books left behind at the house and the gear shed and came away with a motley crew of things which I had thought perhaps in the past of reading, but knew there was no way on earth I would ever read most of them in any other situation. So here I find myself in the middle of the ocean with Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard, The Good Earth by Pearl Buck, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, Jewell by Brett Lott, The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck, and the fountainhead by ayn rand (I also have Morning in the Burned House by Margaret Atwood and A Lover's Discourse by Roland Barthes, but since these made the previous trip with me and have both been read and picked apart many times, they seem to require separate mention). For some unknown reason, I decided to pick up the fountainhead. It had to happen sometime.

Why do I persist in refusing to capitalize the title of the book or its authors name? Because I have begun reading the book. THIS is the heralded beacon of reason and objectivity that annoying goth kids in high school and pretentious college antagonists have gushed so enthusiastically about? Granted, I'm not finished with the book, but I wouldn't have trudged past the first chapter if I wasn't stuck on a boat and wasn't rationing my few precious downloaded episodes of America's Next Top Model like they were manna from heaven. But I am on a boat, so I'm going to finish the damn thing.

It isn't exactly a painful read. It might be reasonably enjoyable if it didn't have all that reverent hoojab about how great and life changing it is. It is written as poorly as Ishmael (speaking of reverently adored, eye-opening, badly written books), but at least Ishmael did have some eye opening insight to offer which wasn't found laid out as directly or as challengingly in other books, even if it was clunkily chinked into a silly story. the fountainhead doesn't have all that much which is eye opening and unavailable elsewhere. It is basically just elaborate rape fantasy spruced up as Frank Lloyd Wright fan fiction. If she manages to cram in the description of a shirt clinging to the shoulder blades of another man, I'll throw up. The book starts with a naked dude looking at nature and thinking about how he would control it and overpower it, how it was waiting for him to take control and improve upon it. Force himself upon it, if you will, but as it has been waiting for someone to do, for someone to bring it to that climax that only this ultimate man could deliver. Throw in some other characters, some time, a perfect beautiful stone-cold bitch, a nice trajectory to the bring them together... whatever.

The book is fine as what it is. The story is reasonably engaging, the characters sometimes border on likeable and you even find yourself wanting to see Mr. Roark's buildings get built. But unless there is something really waiting for the last half of the book to bring it all together and make this profound commentary that people have told me this book makes, this is just one more book that I really couldn't recommend anyone devoting the time to unless they find themselves stuck in the middle of the Pacific with only a few books at hand.

updating...

I've been away at sea for a few months so I've been a little quieter than I would like. And my laptop cord bit the dust early into the trip so I have less written word to share now that I'm back on land but I'm putting up what I've got. I'm also going to put up some back log, things written in the further distant path but which never made it up here for one reason or another. Hopefully amongst all this you will find something you consider worth reading.

wings... or not

(also written at sea, sometime in October)

If I could walk up on deck and take flight, would I? Where would my wings take me?

I want to say back to you, straight to New York as fast as I can fly. I'd fight the frigid winds and work my way across a continent back into your arms, the arms I'm missing so vividly right now. But we live in the time of choices. Choice and ability are the blessings of our generation. As is so often the case, our blessing is also our curse. The truth is wings would change nothing. I am not held on this boat against my will. I do find myself too far out to swim, but the only thing holding me in sway here was my decision to come here. I could have stayed back East. I wasn't stolen by pirates or at gun point. Not attached to my back, but there are metal wings which could sail me home faster than my fantasy wings could possibly transport me. There are few physical barriers which remain, certainly none between populated areas, only financial ones and those are the ones which put me on this boat and which wings wouldn't help overcome, except perhaps as a carnival attraction. Which has its appeal.

In a way I've already signed up as a carnival attraction. "Look at me! Look at how far I can go! Who else does what I do?" I'm not charging for admission, but it ups my hand in conversation, gives me currency when answering that inevitable query: What do you do? Honestly, what I'd really like to do is bartend or play music, but so far I've managed to do neither. There is a ukulele that I carry with me even at sea, a physical manifestation of a promise to myself to learn an instrument that taunts me with how little I have mastered it. Which I could if I practiced every day, which I don't.

I do do what I do because I like it and I'm good at it. I chose what I do, so wings aren't going to save me from it. I'd have to chose not to do it, which I could, at any time; but then I would have to chose something else and I still haven't mastered that ukulele or convinced anyone to allow me behind a bar. I'd also like to garden, but I grew up on a farm and worked for a landscaper: I know this is not a pleasant thing when it is for other people. And I do really like what I do, it just doesn't allow me to do so many other things which I love that it demands a frequent reanalysis. So do I go back to school, which I hate, and try to take it to the next level, which I might not enjoy and which would force me to interact with other people, which I do well but have less and less patience for?

The life of an artist tempts me from time to time. Perhaps I should say the life of a commercial artist, though I don't mean that in the typical way. I don't just mean someone painting signs or sculpting custom fittings; I mean artist who live off selling their work. All the artists represented by all those galleries, who would shit a brick if someone called them a commercial artist, are commercial artists in perhaps the baldest way possible. All they are selling is art. Their most intimately personal and expressive works are the ones made for public consumption. I like to think I live the life of an artist on some level (despite being horrified by how conceited and stupid that statement sounds), constantly processing and trying to express, sometimes through words, sometimes through images, sometimes through other materials. I don't do it as much as I'd like to, but I also don't do it for money. But I'd like to.

Wings can't give me that. If I were trapped by circumstance, carried away from a place I loved, prevented only by walls or distance from return, I could wish for wings and dream of taking flight. People around me would yell and scream, surprised and scared then awed as I took to the sky. They would either cheer or toss threats and warnings, but my wings would not be wax and I would be gone. An eruption of feathers, a rush of wind, the exhilaration of freedom. But I'm not held in a prison, I'm held by contract and identity and bank account. A take to flight would feel like a free fall: what now?

So I go back to my work, which is not forced upon me, which I chose. The only foe attacking me is impatience and laziness. I remind myself what holding you is like, how sweet it will be when I return and how stale I felt during the long days this summer with too much time and too little motivation. On return, I'll be crisp and fresh, something more pleasant and refreshing to cling to, instead of the sluggish, fading facsimile I was becoming. It might have taken years to fade, but I've seen it enough times to know that I wouldn't be happy that way. That I would take flight from, but that is what you can't fly away from, the feeling that you've wasted time and the dead inertia that you've adopted. So in motion I remain, coming and going. Not on wings of my own, but not dead weight.

"I love you." a brief personal history.

(written earlier in the fall, somewhere at sea)

"It will not be enough to say I love you. I know you have heard it before.

"I love you. Those words were not worn out two thousand six hundred years ago. Are they worn out now? Perhaps, but not by repetition, but by strain." from Art & Lies by Jeanette Winterson

On a whole, I didn't enjoy Art & Lies as much as I had other Jeanette Winterson novels. The story seemed more strained and less fluid, like something created to hang her thoughts on. The overall effect made the book feel more piecemeal. Still, as always, there was plenty to get entangled with and tremendous mental/emotional stimulation. The passage above was amongst the ones which stood out to me, partly because I agree with it, partly because I don't.

Others might object, but since I'm not really writing to analyze the book itself but rather as a leaping off point for my own thoughts, I'll leave this without context from the story. The context isn't the point.

"It will not be enough to say I love you. I know you have heard it before."

Beautiful line. And I suppose I agree for anyone for whom that phrase is over-used. I know there are people who just talk about love for the sake of love and mostly, they make me want to vomit. This isn't just my curmudgeonliness; I get stupidly serious about stuff like this and place way too much importance on love and all that shit. Really. I promise. Perhaps it would be easier to start from my usage of the word and work out from there, rather than blather about how other people (mis)use the term.

My parents have always said I love you. My father not as often, but my mother almost never let one of us walk away without saying 'I love you.' At the end of every phone conversation, every time I left the house, every time we said goodnight (even, during my adolescence when I was so rage filled that I refused to say 'goodnite', abbreviating it purposefully to "'nite" when trying to avoid all interaction failed). And doubly true with my grandmother. None of this is romantic of course, but it is the background of my understanding of the word (and the action): I've heard it, and frequently, all my life and the people who said it meant it.

I don't know if I initiated it, through habit of saying it with my family or if it just arose organically or if someone else initiates it, but the same goes with speaking to my friends. Not all the time, not every conversation, but I've noticed that with most of my close friends we say 'I love you' to each other, usually as part of saying goodbye over the phone, but it gets said. And (at least from this end) meant.

Things, of course, get a little squirrelly when we start talking romantically. Don't they always? For someone who says the words so often and so frequently, you would think they would flow so much easier in a relationship. You would be wrong.

Perhaps I get too serious sometimes. I take things too literally or too heavily; I've worked hard to be lighter and more zephyrus, and have mostly succeeded, but deep down, there is still an uptight virgo literalist in here. And I don't kid about love. Or I didn't; I'm trying to learn how; why should everything, particularly beautiful things be so serious? I'll dive into a little abstract relationship history to hopefully illuminate my point.

I've long have a serious aversion to saying 'I love you' to someone I'm dating. It always seemed to be a big step, somehow in my mind something akin to an engagement ring. That might seem a little bit exaggerated, but at least at one time this was true. I refused to say the words lightly. I could say them to my friends, but as soon as I was dating someone, there was this extra weight. A certainty that if I said 'I love you', I had to mean forever or at least with no end in sight, that it had to be some other level, a way of saying "You are the One," even if I personally didn't believe in 'the One'. This isn't exactly what I meant. I've never gone in for one-true-love bullshit, and certainly don't believe in meant-to-be, but I'm just trying to communicate something of the heaviness that I attribute to saying I love you.

I just don't feel that most of the time, in most relationships, when people say 'I love you' they mean what I want it to communicate, what I mean when I say it. They are saying "I love having a boyfriend" or "I love having someone there to hold" or "I love the way you make me feel" or "I love not being alone" or whatever. And those can be fine and sweet things to say, really. Those are partial reasons why we want relationships and love in the first place. The practical considerations are part of anything in life, and I don't begrudge them being said. I just don't want to hear 'I love you' as a stand in for all these other things. It may mean all of them too, but for me at least it has to mean something special, something more. This is what is meant in Ms. Winterson's text when she says the words are worn out, "not by repetition, but by strain." It isn't how often they are said, but how they are said, used to cover so many emotions, forced to carry so many meanings other than their own.

So I've worked hard to avoid straining these words, and refused to say them in ways I didn't mean them. I had more than a few serious relationships where the words were never said until after it was over, which I regard as a success rather than a failing. I'd rather them seem pointedly absent rather than pointlessly present.

I'm not as harsh as I used to be. This is mostly because I found someone who I could say the words to. They lost their threat: waste us now and you will never get to mean us. I get to mean them and not as stand-ins for other things I don't know how to say, but as exactly what I am saying. Having said them with full resonance, they've become lighter, gentler, more approachable. Having taken up this mantle, I hope I can avoid wearing them out in the way Ms. Winterson warns. If repetition could ear them out, I'd have already failed, but I think I can fairly argue that I at least have never stretched or strained them.

Having learned to say these words, they flow freely from me out into the world (I still mean them). I sometimes wonder if the significance of me being able to say this is lost on him who inspired me, as he never knew them as a protected commodity in my life. The water in a lake doesn't know how dry the lake bed was before; it has been wet since water arrived.

It is hard too for me to remember sometimes as well, but why bother. I like it wet.

"It will not be enough to say I love you. I know you have heard it before."

Oh, but sometimes it is enough...

Phoenix rising

(Written sometime in October, somewhere in the Bering Sea)

I might try my hand again at fiction in November. Why then? Not exactly sure, but it seems a good month for such an undertaking. November has always been my ill-placed month of rebirth. October scours me clean and in November I rise anew. Why these months over any others? Wouldn't it makes sense for my rebirth to be at New Year's, particularly since I've made a cult of it's celebration? Or maybe in the spring when new life springs forth or summer when it grows? Why be built fresh in the season of dying, with leaves falling and days shortening and temperatures falling?

If I had been consulted in the matter, I might have chosen differently but my rhythms seem to have been mostly preset. As to this one in particular, I grow restless in the fall. As soon as the summer starts to cool even a little bit, I get hit with wave after wave of ecstatic wanderlust. At first there is mostly wonder and joy in this feeling, calling me out to explore and enjoy. If, as I am doing now, I can heed this call and take flight and explore, then the feeling can keep some of the joy about it and I just flit about like a kid in a museum for the first time, all big wide eyes and gaping smiles. If I can't, the feeling turns dire and I feel like there is a freight train continually slamming against the inside of my skull, violently and persistently screaming for me to move. I have a hard time sitting still. I have a hard time dealing with other people and retreat deeper and deeper in myself and catch myself wanting to scream out loud or smash things. I do neither; I'm not the type to give into such whims, but I might manage better if I occasionally did. I find myself wanting to force away every familiar thing around me and start over completely. There were more than a few years where it was speculated that any relationship I was in could not survive October unless I was completely sequestered away from my beloved. This was both true and not: October doesn't inspire me to just destroy anything in my reach, it simply refuses illusions. Without illusion, many things fall apart.

Anyway, the point is that this time of year is when I'm rattled to the core. Pleasant or otherwise, every loose thing is shaken loose and all the joints and bends tested to see what will hold and what needs to be repaired or removed. Then comes November, whose main significance to me seems to lie in following October. And so I begin again...

isolation or not

(this was written in early October)

Fishing in the Bering Sea is not like fishing long-line off Hawaii. It isn't the weather that marks the greatest difference; it is the isolation or lack of it. Dutch Harbor itself feels cut off from the world because it is small and the people there are mainly there for one reason: fishing or somehow supporting or profiting off the fishing fleet. And internet access is slow and not so easy to come by and the cell phone service is controlled by a monopoly which wants you to pay through the nose.

But on the water... it almost feels crowded. This is ridiculous, of course, or at least relative. The boats are huge and comfortable and much more connected and modern. This opinion may change later as we venture further out, but two days into fishing and I can still see land! This is a stupid thing to be excited about, but in Hawaii, seeing land was so rare. After three weeks at sea, you would go on deck every few hours on the trip back to see if you could spot land yet and as soon as you could, you would just stare. The solid lines and bulk of it seemed so amazing and almost like a mirage after so long without. We were so far out and sighting anything but birds and fish was so rare that the light of a single fishing boat on the horizon would make you stop and stare and wonder which boat it might be. Even trash floating by became fodder for the imagination. Any little suggestion that there were things in the world beside your little floating prison.

Maybe it is also the contrast of having more people on this boat, it being larger, and the crew all speaking English that makes this feel less isolated, but I still haven't been out of sight of land and other boats are almost always visible. Even when we do leave sight of land, it is unlikely that we will ever be even 200 miles from shore, which is closer than we would start fishing in Hawaii.

This is early, it is still warm. Let's see how I feel about it all as the season wears on.

The Purpose Driven Tripe

I'm back from the provinces, however temporarily. Much to write about and hard to decide where to start, but before I scramble through a backlog of impressions from Alaska and crab fishing, I'm struck by an annoying bit of news that keeps popping up in headlines and irritating the shit out of me (and what is this blog for if not for griping about current events?).

It seems that richard warren is to give the invocation at Obama's inauguration. I suppose that there are more toxic religious figures out there. It could be worse, much worse, but I have to register how much this decision irritates me. Why him? Why did they have that stupid thing at his bloated church before? Because he sells a lot of books? His books are stupid. My mother sent me The Purpose Filled Life back when it first came out and I tried to read it. I wanted to like it is theory, but it just isn't very good. The writing is crap and the ideas are vapid. And he's anything but a biblical scholar. It is just feel good crap for dumb middle class people not quite happy enough with all their excess who want a religious leader to give them a quick fix to feeling better about their lives. I read for a few days (it is a daily devotional guide) and then flipped through looking for anything that suggested it shouldn't be shelved then dropped it. When I admitted to Mom that I thought it was crap, she admitted that she had also found it kind of useless and quit reading after a few days.

I'm not the most religious fellow these days, but I'm pretty fierce about it when I've got to deal with it. I appreciate the desire to find and feel magic and the supernatural in everyday life (and that is exactly what religion at its best is about), but most of these modern bullshit artist peddling god for mass consumption and easy digestion kill all that with their assembly line vacuum packing of the Word. I was a uptight religious nerd in an earlier incarnation and read and poured through the Bible nightly, seeking and analyzing and praying and meditating. And I thankfully made my way out someone intact and avoided the looney bin that would be the likely end point of my trajectory had I gone to these false prophets and snake-oil peddlers instead of straight to the text. And even that would have likely left me mentally crippled had I not had people to challenge the popular interpretations and assumptions and force me to also find the Word scattered as it is through so much other text. All of this is just to say that having invested so much time in this subject matter I'm not inclined to be particularly generous to folks who condescend on it and proceed to talk out of their ass.

People are going on about mr. warren's support for prop 8 and of course that pisses me off. All his idiot blather about "a five-thousand year old definition" and crap about every culture having the same definition of marriage as between one man and one woman... has he even read the Bible? The definition of marriage changes through out the Bible and even if it doesn't endorse same sex relationships (other than David and Jonathan's love for one another), it certainly explicitly endorses polygamous marriages. I'm not so concerned that he is just one more homophobic prick (who, irritatingly says, "I'm not homophobic; be nice to gay people," right after saying vote to make the law say we are lesser citizens), but rather that he just isn't much of a religious leader. He is apparently effective and people seem to eat it up, but what the man may have in organization, he lacks in charisma. Billy Graham is a rock star; even if you disagree with the man, there is no denying that he has that umph. If we've got to have a religious invocation, could we at least have someone dynamic instead of some fat mega-church fool?

Most of religous leaders (at least on the national level) in this country are idiots. And so are most of their followers. Surely though, there is someone else? I suppose it is only fair, this guy gave Obama something of a fair shake and leveraged his visibility into an opportunity to reach out to evangelicals, so I can't say that it doesn't make some kind of sense. But it is still a dissappointment; it is a failure, if not of standards, then certainly of style.

and again...

on land briefly, and back out to sea one more time before a much needed break.

tragedy...

Shortly after leaving land the last time, my computer cord decided to go kaput. So no solitaire, no watching movies in my bunk, and most tragically no writing. So my blog output, already sparse, will for the time being be even more limited. Power cables are hard to come by in backwater locals such as this. Hopefully there will be one waiting for me when I return.

The upside of this is that I have been drawing. Doodling might be the better term, but instead of the trippy pages of color that I normally produce I'm actually making pictures and some sort of narrative this time. I got these beautiful, simple notebooks at Muji a while back, and am slowly filling one with a sort of fantasy travelogue. In theory, when I am digitally capable again, I'll be sharing some of this on here. Sort of a continuation of my attempt to make this more than just a record of political rage.

Barack out with your cock out.

I haven't actually written that much about politics this election cycle. This is surprising only if you happened to have read this blog back in the beginning, before the last election. It originally was mostly politics. And not particularly demure political commentary at that. I started writing with hopes of expanding in to thoughts about all kinds of topics, but the first couple of years were dominated with me trying to sort out some of the rage that I was feeling at the state of our nation and what we were doing, and perhaps more frustratingly, why we were doing it.

The current lack of political spit-fire here should not be read as this being any tamer a beast who resides here. This trash can still contains a fully functional grouch. Partially, there isn't that much new in this election compared to the last couple. Still, before it is over, maybe I should record a few thoughts and observations before all this wraps up. I'm a week or so out of the cycle, so don't expect to find up-to-date breaking news, just what some cranky grump on a boat thinks about all this horse-shit.

in no particular order:

* The only reason to not vote for Barack Obama over john mccain is because you don't like black people or because you don't like democrats. In that order, because the current bunch of monkey turds who call themselves republicans are about as fiscally conservative as drunk who's won the lottery at Christmas time. What the republicans have spent the last thirty or so years selling themselves as are the people to protect you, the good normal (white) people from THOSE people (niggers, faggots, crackheads, drug-dealers, devil worshipers, etc.). There whole schtick is that there are all these horrible others out there trying to destroy you neighborhood, wreck your marriage, corrupt your children, knock up your sweet little virgin daughters. And it works because neighborhoods do get destroyed, marriages do get wrecked, children do get corrupted, and sweet little virgin daughters get knocked up; so just exaggerate, blame, take up the banner of protecting Us from Them, and you are good to go.

* Barack might be harder to slime this way because he actually is black. They can talk all they want about THOSE people, but in all the coverage, Obama comes across more like Bill Cosby than Malcomn X. He is likable and normal and the more you see or listen to him, the more likable and normal he seems. If they could keep him off the tv, then they might have a chance. They've got the crowd who only reads the illiterate, stupid fucking email chain letters they send about this shit, because if you read them and were actually stupid enough to not figure out that this stuff was mostly COMPLETELY MADE UP, then of course you wouldn't like this guy. But even if you read that stuff and it kind of makes you wonder, you see him up on the teevee and he isn't this scary crazy terrorist baby rapist they want you to believe in. John Kerry could be slimed with their scary vision of the encroaching Others, because they weren't trying to make you believe he was any kind of Other besides a 'librul', which is more like an annoying cousin, someone who doesn't know how to protect you from the very scary very real threats, not the threat itself. Barack Obama is their bogey fucking man. By their estimation, he is a Muslim and they've been painting him as foreign. Not true, but who cares, it is how they play. And he is Black. Chicago, community organizing, hollerin' in church B L A C K. And this really is their favorite bogey man. So they run their code words, say their thinly veiled bullshit and warn you all about this crazy fiend who wants to run off with the white wimmins... and then up comes this smiley kind of too earnest but friendly dude with a pretty wife and cute kids who if anything resembles the popular new math teacher/basketball coach at the local high school, not anybody's scary nightmare.

People who've gotten the subliminal messages telling them they aren't supposed to trust this man see him and ask themselves, "Why not?" Their message is deep and they are riding it hard and ugly, but it might just collapse under its own weight this time.

* john mccain is a jackass. No more of this honorable bullshit. He is a dickwad and always has been. And when he talks, he talks down. I don't see how reporters fucking put up with it. Seriously, how can anyone stand being around him when he is campaigning?

* cindy mccain looks like a lizard ice queen. Remember V? I keep waiting for her to eat a hamster.

*Everyone is sick of hearing about mccain's time as a POW but at the end of the day, it was his only qualification to be a senator and it is his only qualification to be president. I said early that the only reason to not vote for Barack Obama over mccain is because he is black and I meant it. This is not just saying that Mr. Obama is the most amazing candidate ever, even if I do think he is quite a good one, but it is to say that mr. mccain is a pathetic one. Whether it is age or temperament or just being surrounded by crappy advisors, he sucks as a candidate. He won by default and shoeshine. The rest of the candidates were beyond laughable. Oddly enough, Ron Paul is the only one who might have had a chance.

*I like Hillary, but I hate her supporters. They were a psycho bunch of freaks. I'm not talking about just people pulling for her, but you know the people I am talking about. They always seemed to corner me at happy hour and wanted to talk about how she WOULD win and would get all nasty about the uppity boy daring to get out of line and challenge her. In the end though, if she had won the primary, I'd be done with the race. Completely. Her campaign was in it to win any way it could, and sorry, I don't just want a democrat in the White House no matter what it takes to get there. If we have to do THAT to get there, I don't want to go there. The reason Obama is appealing is that his campaign hasn't tried to be shady, hasn't tried to manipulate and divide and conquer. Her campaign did. Maybe she could have wiped the floor with mccain, and fun as that would have been to watch, it wouldn't have mattered. We would have already lost.

*Picking sarah palin was the smartest thing the mccain campaign did the whole election cycle. Not because she is a good candidate or qualified or experienced or whatever, but it shook things up and gave people something to talk about... and took the focus off of him. The perky fembot handpuppet is apparently the political equivalent of being goth. You are saying "Huh?" Nothing against goth kids everywhere, but the point of being goth, the whole black hair with maybe some manic panic highlights and the theatrical clothing and eye-liner and studded collars and piercings is that it takes the focus off of YOU. You might be attracting more attention, but it is you as a character attracting it. Getting people to focus on your crazy ass hair or nose ring (which you control) keeps them from focusing on your acne or lisp or whatever they've been making stupid jokes about since kindergarten. It might bring new ridicule but in a weird way the corset and platform Doc Martins put you in control of an out of control situation like adolescence. Or the pretty governor lady brings ridicule but puts you back in control of an out of control situation like your campaign.

Forget Cheech and Chong: a drug movie for a new generation, The Last Mimzy

Just got finished watching The Last Mimzy. Not to give too much away, but the movie is basically about a couple of kids who do drugs. Their parents freak out, then their science teacher and his girlfriend start doing drugs too, but they can't really handle the shit like the kids. Their parents finally start tripping, but by this time the kids have stolen a van and started hitchhiking so they take a ride in a helicopter with Ving Rhames and he gets high. He takes off to find something to eat and the parents and the kids and the teacher and his babe go in the beach house to keep tripping and talk about the future where scientists hug stuffed bunny rabbits and aliens peel their skin off and are horny tweens underneath and kids go to class in fields of flowers wearing jelly shoes.

Then teach and his lady friend go buy lottery tickets.


(You think I am kidding; I am not.)

isolation or not

Fishing in the Bering Sea is not like fishing long-line off Hawaii. It isn't the weather that marks the greatest difference; it is the isolation or lack of it. Dutch Harbor itself feels cut off from the world because it is small and the people there are mainly there for one reason: fishing or somehow supporting or profiting off the fishing fleet. And internet access is slow and not so easy to come by and the cell phone service is controlled by a monopoly which wants you to pay through the nose.

But on the water... it almost feels crowded. This is ridiculous, of course, or at least relative. The boats are huge and comfortable and much more connected and modern. This opinion may change later as we venture further out, but two days into fishing and I can still see land! This is a stupid thing to be excited about, but in Hawaii, seeing land was so rare. After three weeks at sea, you would go on deck every few hours on the trip back to see if you could spot land yet and as soon as you could, you would just stare. The solid lines and bulk of it seemed so amazing and almost like a mirage after so long without. We were so far out and sighting anything but birds and fish was so rare that the light of a single fishing boat on the horizon would make you stop and stare and wonder which boat it might be. Even trash floating by became fodder for the imagination. Any little suggestion that there were things in the world beside your little floating prison.

Maybe it is also the contrast of having more people on this boat, it being larger, and the crew all speaking English that makes this feel less isolated, but I still haven't been out of sight of land and other boats are almost always visible. Even when we do leave sight of land, it is unlikely that we will ever be even 200 miles from shore, which is closer than we would start fishing in Hawaii.

This is early, it is still warm. Let's see how I feel about it all as the season wears on.

on solid ground...

...but only for a short while, to be counted in hours, part of which must be spent working. My time at sea was lovely and I am in one piece and smiling.

Not sure if I'll get to post any of the stuff I wrote at sea (pending getting my computer near a wifi connection), but wanted to put out just a little note that I am still alive.

look alike

Unfortunately I'll be at sea for the finals. I could use a new rifle. Look through the gallery accompanying the article and see if you can find me (it is easy, there aren't many Todds).

going...

...out to sea.

Looking forward to the seahab and time to read. And play solitaire compulsively. And see what kind of crazy things we can drag up from the bottom of the sea.

Say a little prayer that my seasickness isn't too rough.

:)

double Dutch

I'll enter again a time of radio silence, as I head out to sea after a hiatus on land. I'm in Dutch Harbor now, sitting in the only spot I've found so far with public wifi access, and in the background is a bar filled with Deadliest Catch people. They are filming in the hotel bar, making everyone sign releases before entering. Nothing against the show, but for now at least, I remain outside.

Dutch Harbor is unbelievably beautiful. Not the town so much, as the architecture remains the boxy functional crap that seems to be all the rage in Alaska, but the buildings are fewer and the landscape more dramatic and much closer. It doesn't simple fill the background, towering behind all the strip malls like in Anchorage; the town is stretched along the water at the base of mountains and hills here.

There are ravens everywhere, particularly around the hill I have to pass to walk to my boat. They make fun clicks and whistles and do a rolling dive when I go past; I'm not certain this has anything to do with my presence or is just something they like to do, but I'll pretend it is for me. I haven't spotted any eagles yet.

I got placed on my boat today. I make it a point to not discuss my actual job, as we all know that blogging about work is a recipe for disaster (even if temptingly cathartic), but I'll say that however much the Bering Sea is a more threatening body of water than the balmy expanse of the Pacific around Hawaii, I still think this is going to be a smoother ride than anything I've every experienced. Compared to what I'm used to, this boat is huge and amazingly clean and seemingly stable. I'm psyched. And most importantly, no smoking indoors! If you ever want to puke your guts out, shut yourself up in a floating prison with bad ventilation and chain smokers. Thankfully that does not describe my upcoming trip. Just being on the boat felt good. I'm anxious to get out on the water. Time on land has been nice, but I'm in work mode now, and there is something comforting about the water. It calms me and makes me feel, for a while, balanced. I'm really good at relaxing anytime anywhere, but most of the time on land I'm faking it. Not faking it so much as forcing it: I can sit and be calm, but I have to fight to achieve it, constantly fighting back nagging reminders of all the things I should be doing and need to get done. This is impossible at sea. I can think of things I wish I was doing and want to do, but not things that I should be doing. My tasks are limited and demand to be done when they present themselves, so no lost hours procrastinating. Reading here is not procrasting, it is its own task demanding its own time.

There is much I'll miss while out at sea, but I'm looking forward to the recharge.

Anchorage

I've meant to write about my impressions of Anchorage since I arrived, but there has always been something that kept me from sitting down and collecting my thoughts. Initial reactions to the place focused on how ugly the architecture is. And it is mostly ugly. Psuedo-modern, mostly boxy clunkers of buildings and lots and lots of strip malls. I have a hard time thinking of a place that I have been before that so struck me so seriously in how uniformly ugly the buildings were. I should admit that I have softened my opinion after being here for a few weeks, since I have found that there are some charming houses in the neighborhoods around downtown and flowers flourishing everywhere and the whole place is generally very clean.

I also wanted to write about gay life here. There seems to be more of it than I expected, with three gay bars thriving and even more homos hiding behind the scenes. And a bazillion lesbians everywhere. But perhaps the take-away thought that I had everytime I went out to the 'mo bars was that if I never see another piece of abercrombie and fitch clothing, it will be too soon. Seriously, I know that brand is a fucking plague and too many douchebags wear it, but at least half of all articles of clothing in a bar on a given night have that stupid logo assaulting our senses. I feel like the chick from Pattern Recognition, getting vertigo from the omnipresent branding. Apparently a&f is my Michelin Man. Anyway, there is some bad fucking fashion (I'm using that word loosely) in this town. But then sometimes there are some really rocking looks, just not often.

I said these are things I've wanted to write about, but I'm not going to write about them now. Because I've been crying for the last half hour.

Anchorage has a free paper that is obviously by the same folks who do the Village Voice and so many of the other free papers around the country. It has Savage Love and Free Will Astrology and News of the Weird, so it is comforting and makes me feel at home a little bit. And there are some good articles (and some insanely stupid ones, like when they take the side of the idiot suing their lawyer because they were so fat the chair broke in the lawyer's office when they plopped down in it). One bit of local flavor has stood out, though. The crime blotter is always good entertainment, because they pick the silly or funny crimes to feature. This crime blotter doesn't dissappoint, but it goes one step further and breaks your heart: they list the rapes that have occured in the week prior. Yup, a fucking rape list. Which, if they are happening, is probably good to broadcast. Warn people, make folks away that these things are happening. But you've got to admit, it is a little terrifying when a small city generates enough REPORTED rapes to have a weekly column listing them.

Our first week here, there were 10 listed. The second week, 10 again, so I began to wonder if that was just the cut-off point or there were exactly that many reported. Week three, the number was drastically lower, so we speculated about whether it was just a kinder, gentler week or cold weather keeping people indoors and safe that accounted for the steep drop. It was almost so disheartening that the only thing you could do with this rape report was make jokes about it, because really looking at what it suggested is too fucking grim.

I've been living in cities for quite a while now, and though I try to actively force myself to stay open to people and to listen to and help people on the street if I can, I still feel the walls go up when I see someone approach me who seems a little off-kilter. This is double for the middle of the night, so tonight when walking home from the bars, when I saw an older woman walking towards me, I started to put up shields and prepare to deflect her so I could keep walking and get home. Til I realize that she is truly upset. Because she had just been raped. Her cane was thrown in the bushes and she was using a stick of wood to walk with and he broke her phone so she couldn't call 911. So I did.

The dispatcher was polite and helpful and the police arrived quickly and seemed genuinely concerned and sympathetic, so I only have nice things to say about the emergency response in this town. But I didn't want to know how fast they respond. I didn't want a reminder of how calm I am in situations like this. I didn't want a reminder how much I break down and cry after the fact. But I got it, so if there is one indelible metric of Anchorage that I will take with me, it is the weekly rape report.

window in Anchorage

window
Originally uploaded by steppingonants

around Anchorage...

mushroom (2)
Originally uploaded by steppingonants

two of hearts...

DSC03801, originally uploaded by steppingonants.

on the bar in back of the Metropolitan (from a few weeks ago, before my exodus north).

around Anchorage...

ak (163), originally uploaded by steppingonants.

Thoughts on motion...

Travelling is easier
with someone
to come
home to.

Multimedia message

sunlight on building in downtown Anchorage from September.

(going back through and looking at things I saved as drafts but never posted)

teabag man

peak

Anti-Palin protest in downtown Anchorage, Alaska

Hopefully I'll get back and get a few more shots before they disperse.


I overheard this guy telling someone that his daughter had made the sign for him.







This was the lone counter-protester, across the street before you get to the main protest. You can't see it in the picture, but he is standing in front of the cage where Star the reindeer lives. She was abandoned by her parents and raised in captivity. The guy who takes care of her was cleaning her cage at the time. When I stopped to take the douchebag's picture, she came over to the side of the cage and started rubbing the fencing with her horns. Her caretaker told me that she likes cameras and just wanted some attention. Before he told me that her name was Star, I had started calling her 'Jerome' when I greeted her when ever I walked past. I like my name better. Maybe I'll just start calling her Miss J.

view from mountain top...

from Flat Top Mountain.

found...

violet...

growing in the rocks below a glacier.

up north...

In Alaska, geeking out about king crabs by day in prep for adventures out of Dutch Harbor. By night, when the homework is done we've so far found our way into riding a mechanical bull, entering a Sarah and Todd Palin look-alike contest, and diner parties at the bunkhouse. Tomorrow night we are headed to lesbian mudwrestling.

Life has been in a whirlwind lately, so the written word has suffered, but it is the times when finding pause to type is impossible which are the ones most in need of being being sorted through in text. Here's a meager attempt at diving back in. If nothing else I'm heading out to sea again shortly, so I'll have to type again to stave off the hobgoblins that visit a mind on the water.

Perhaps until going adrift again I could at least share a more images.