Apocalyptic imagery is all over the place; you just have to know where to look. A plane passing hazily overhead, barely seen through the clouds while sirens blare from a nearby house fire. A wet and dying dog padding through a busy cross street with one milky white eye and blood on its fur. Costumed children lined up and attached to a string, greedy for candy and full of bright-eyed confusion, Bumblebees and Spidermen and Death at the end of the line being herded through town by a witch, a clown, Han Solo. With the right attitude all of this stuff slides into place like a gun click. It’s enough to make a man grow a moustache, just to have some thing to hide behind. Facial hair as a particle board desk during the bomb drill.
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More often than not, the things we hate about other people turn out to be the things we hate about ourselves. This is a cliché, but clichés are generally true, plus I’m blogging here so that shit is allowed. Anyway, I was thinking how solipsistic and silly that is, like we can’t even hate someone on their own merits. We can’t even put ourselves aside long enough to really loathe a body who deserves it. And then that got me into thinking about phenomenology, which is kind of a ridiculous subset of critical theory, and so then I stopped.
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I am so tired of irony, and I know full well that I am typing this while wearing an Alvin and the Chipmunks shirt and drinking coffee out of an Epcot Center souvenir mug. What I mean is I’m tired of irony as an ethos. It’s not productive. It’s not even productive in being destructive. It’s just there, a defense mechanism against ever having a real feeling. Even worse, sometimes irony is used to mask the earnestness of a real feeling (for example, that whole stupid goddamn no homo trend, which seems to be meant as an ironic piss-take on homophobia but really just makes homophobia permissible), so the irony becomes that you are presenting your real belief in an ironic fashion, and all of a sudden we’re in meta-irony territory and nothing has meaning ever again. We’re embracing and celebrating fakery and hollowness. Congratulations.
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I am sort of falling back into that old trap of feeling lousy about myself, which is goddamn silly.
 

I’m watching out the window of a plane, the way the clouds and the shadows of the clouds on the ground create a diorama of America, of land, of Rocky Mountains, and I’m feeling kind of lousy and hung over and out of ideas. I smell a little of vomit (not mine). The book tour, it was a success as far as I can tell. Mike and Joey tolerated me, I guess, and I sold and signed a lot of books in Seattle and Portland. San Francisco was more Joey’s town, partly because books about gender queer frustrated youth sell well there for some strange reason, and partly because he really nailed the goddamn reading whereas I felt a little off my game. It was kind of a bummer way to end the tour, but that feeling lasted all of five minutes and overall the experience was wonderful.

I met a lot of good people and drank a lot of bad beer. Joey got pepper sprayed. We all sat on the roof of our hotel and watched the fog roll in over the Golden Gate bridge. A girl called me and told me she wasn’t going to hang up unless I touched myself. I gave the phone to April. APE wasn’t really my scene, but I had a good time anyway. I promised someone who came to hear us read that I would slap him in the face before the night was over, and then I did. We went to an arcade in Portland where all the games were a quarter. Someone gave us ice cream cake. Most of the details I’ll leave out, because I’m sure Mike and Joey are going to write it all up and exaggerate it, make me look bad in whatever ways they can, then put it in a zine.

It's odd, the way things are transmitted between people.  I know you don't know what I'm talking about.  I'll back up.

Today I found S+B brand Golden Curry, Medium Hot.  Denton, surprisingly, has kind of a dearth of international foods and weird ingredients.  This is a hippie hipster doofus town; where is my kimbap?  Where is my bean paste?  I mean, if I want beetle larvae in a can, what am I to do?  Drive all the way to Dallas?  An outrage if there ever was one.

I went to four stores, talked to a nice Indian lady about it at one of them.  She explained to me that she had all kinds of curry, but not S+B, and I explained to her that I was extraordinarily white and unadventurous in general (ignore that last paragraph) and a little particular about my goddamn curry.  I told her I might be back.  Eventually, I found three dusty boxes of the stuff behind some rice at the Kroger I don't usually shop at.  A small victory, but a significant and joyous one.  My friend April says that I would say "Well, this is pretty okay" about something like this, the way I do when I am really pleased.  She thinks I am an understater.  It's possible that I probably am.

The first time I had S+B brand curry with pork and vegetables in a kind of stew set up, I have to admit that I found it pretty unremarkable and maybe even awful.  Because of this, it is not a meal I would really drag out in front of friends unless they told me they liked that kind of thing.  But over the years of eating it and making it, the stuff began to grow on me.  Something about the knife sounds against the board while chunking potatoes, the pot bubbling with me stirring and feeling the heat on my face, the essence of the stuff kind of hanging around the house for a day or two afterward, well I guess it became a part of who I was, who I wanted to be.

If you haven't gathered already, the dilemma is one of association.  S+B brand curry is not My Ingredient.  It was transmitted to me through my ex-wife's heritage, served hundreds of times in her childhood home, carrying with it the associations and memories of each of those moments, and now the fact that I'm making it for dinner is surely a statement of regret, in a way.  I'm not sure what to do with that.  Or maybe I am doing it as an act of reclamation.  I'm not sure what to do with that, either.  At any rate it feels significant.

This weekend, one of my new good friends is going to not get married. What I mean is she was going to, but now she is not. She seems quite happy about it, and if I were her I probably would be too—she is not the type to relish in the domestic give-and-take and the easy, unthinking acquiescence that marriage becomes over time. I don’t say this as an affront, because really she is a lovely person and probably the one I have met in the last few weeks that I found myself most easily connected to. But she is one of those people who is stunningly beautiful and knows it, who is casually brilliant and knows it, and it’s not so much that she puts it in front of your face or that these are bad things to know about oneself. It is only that it makes her sharply independent (which I would contend is both strength and weakness, but that’s a debate for another time). My own marriage is due to be legally over in a few short weeks, depending on paperwork and when I can make the trip down to Houston to appear before a judge. So what we have here is, in essence, an abortion for her and a burial for me.

So it’s on my mind a lot, the nature of marriage and what mine meant and what it means to her and to others. As a result, I have been having these unspecifically ominous dreams loaded down with guilt and malice that aren’t congruous with the actual plot. In one, Lin told me that she always hated Bright Eyes. So what, right? I can see her argument. But I woke up devastated. In another, I lay in bed all day with some unknown girl who loves me so easily, like it’s breathing, with our bare legs touching, and she gets up and walks into a dark hallway. Again, I woke up devastated. 

I have been struggling with a lesson learned is what I think it is, and that lesson keeps getting thrown in my face in all its meanness. In a Christian household, you are raised to think that apologies are the spiritual and psychological equivalent of blank checks, as long as you mean them hard enough. I held this as a valuable truth about life, when really I should have dismissed it as foolishness somewhere around the fifth grade. So when I made my decade long, lumbering, ugly journey toward revelation about self, and when I dragged Lin along, and when we both went about unconsciously eating away at each other, I always held that no matter what happened, I could make it right again, somehow. When I left my home—a  home I no longer felt a part of for reasons it would not be fair to explore in public, particularly from only my point of view, and really what does it matter except to point fingers and assign blame where there is enough to go around already—with every intention of either killing myself or disappearing forever or something, something, something, and who knows what that something was, well, I guess I thought it would somehow be okay if ended up alive if I could just have the right words at the end of the story.

But that’s bullshit. It was only me thinking that being a writer somehow had relevance in real-world application. That words somehow carried the same freight of meaning that my hateful and inexplicable actions did (and they were hateful, and they were inexplicable, both to myself and to Lin). My apologies about this were quite frankly unacceptable, and I was angry about their not being accepted even though I knew this was true. What solipsism! What stupidity about life! What a heartless act of psychological violence I’m guilty of by even assuming that an apology is worth anything at all!

Which brings me back to my friend, in a way. At first, I thought the idea of having a pitch black wedding cake and drinking a whole lot was somehow wrong, that it carried with it an unhealthy cynicism. I do not know the full story of why she is not getting married, but knowing what I know about how remarkably easy it is to annihilate a body without knowing why you did it or even that you’ve done it at all, now I am beginning to think it is right to celebrate. If she is sure that she’s made the right decision, then I will trust that she did, and I will eat that cake, and I will drink those drinks, and I will tell her that I’m proud of who she is. It’s the only thing I’ve left to do.

Hey everyone.  Allow me to drop the blog posture for a second and make an announcement: I will be going on a west coast book tour for Apathy and Paying Rent from Oct 13th to Oct 20th with the always fantastic Joey Comeau and the always terrifyingly blackout drunk Mike Lecky of Loose Teeth Press.  We'll be stopping in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco (where we will be attending the Alternative Press Expo, probably sitting with the Topatoco people), and Los Angeles.  We will read from our respective books and then we will hang out with you and have awkward conversations.  Tell everyone you know.

www.looseteeth.ca/seattle

www.looseteeth.ca/portland

www.looseteeth.ca/sanfrancisco

www.looseteeth.ca/losangeles

After that it rained for years

 
It was a year of conversation, a year of dragged-out lousy days, afternoon suns and bad coffee. I felt bad all the time, I felt bad about feeling so bad around her, I felt bad like it was the answer to something. I guess it was.

We talked about things that didn’t matter, just to talk I guess, like at what point do you call a thing a tragedy. She wanted the word to have a concrete scope that suggested profound human loss. She said losing a thumb doesn’t count as tragic, for instance, and I said she only thought that because girls didn’t really need thumbs to explore their bodies. She worried the word would lose meaning, and I reminded her that insurance companies had itemized the term awhile ago already. We were complicit in all things, a crime spree of language left in our wake.

Every once in awhile some staggering truth would come out, like what happened to her in that bathroom or the circumstances of why I stopped sleeping at night. We said these things casually, just dropped in real quick when no one was looking. We had grown up great victims, and we found small pleasure in shocking each other here and there, which these things were multi-purposed and nuanced hand grenades of love and trust.

The thing about a conversation that lasts all year is that it’s dangerous, like how sometimes you start thinking about your breathing and then you have to keep thinking about your breathing until you become sufficiently distracted by a television set or another semi-autonomous process. What I’m saying is it becomes the focus of your existence, and then one day it’s gone, leaving you oxygen-deprived and wondering. The whole thing is a tragedy.
 

When we are young we have a clarity of purpose and vision that is startling. Slowly, through disappointment, heartache, revelation, success, reflection, self-awareness, shame, and the everydays that stack unending, we become complex, grown, muddled. Understanding is a burden only.

Look at it this way: heliocentrism feels good. It was a silly deceit, sure, built on bad science, but we felt close to the center of something. We felt important through the transitive property. Then we learned about our galaxy, other galaxies, the whole muted enormity of a universe and maybe other universes. What else is there to feel but marginalized and awed at once?

I find myself at twenty-seven years old in an office, unshowered, lights off, having been punched repeatedly in the mouth by beers. From the idylls of youth I have emerged bitter and shaken. I am sitting here waiting on some revelation about some proper course of action, and I am realizing that of course that’s another myth. There’s no such thing as a proper course; we are reactive and feeble-brained. We stumble in to everything, and then if we’re lucky we maybe stumble out again. Stimulus response.

We built this society up and we decided that we were too busy to survive, that we could get other people to do it for us. We learned things, we became sophisticated, and all this sophistication, this great gift of Western civilization, has given us the free will of a slime mold.

So. I sit. And I wait.

This one is an allegory

This is the kind of guy I am: shot three times through the vitals and I’m checking for a wedding ring as she strips the sanitary wrapper off the hypodermic needle and jams it into my arm, which by the way I don’t feel that. She’s got one strand of hair in her face and her pursed lips tell a story about what’s happening to me for real, and it’s not like how the story went when I felt the first electric pain exploding through me and thought that people are gonna ask me what it felt like.

The rest of the world was red and blue and red but that was just the edges. I was with her, and she kneeled over me like she really meant it, like it wasn’t just a job. I felt this whomp in my head over and over, which I guess that was blood pumping or something. 

What I wanted more than anything was for her to stop and see me, but she didn’t. She saw parts of me, sure, where the needle goes in and where the bullets went in and my mouth where blood was collecting and kind of choking me some. But she didn’t see me. I was just another story she wouldn’t have the heart to tell.

We all have to do this alone is something I knew already, but I never really believed it. There were systems in place to prevent it, families and love and such. Medical professionals, they counted too. So I thought. But there it was, she working on me, an angel, sure, and a hero, sure, but she wasn’t here with me after all, she was in her own moment, and that’s what made getting shot today bittersweet.

Below are the things I wrote down on the trip:

3/10/09

What does it feel like?  It feels like if you focus hard enough on the horizon you'll just be gone, lifted out of the scene like you were never there in the first place.  It feels like you're an electron, motion only, like the hero of your life isn't you but where sun meets sky meets earth.  And you're headed there.

It feels good is what I'm saying.

Woodlands to Roswell today.  There were wind farms, a buffalo, a whole host of trees worth mentioning.  I felt like I could see the curvature of the Earth, which was probably not true but still.  I ate lunch at some crap place, one of those newspaper-clipping-on-the-wall places in a football town called Post, TX, which there's a town full of moustaches for you.

It's lonely in the hotel room, but out on the road I feel so free, and I wonder if it's the act itself, or if it's the land, or if it's something else, something I shouldn't pry too hard at, for fear of my everyday life crumbling.

Getting good writing done, I think.  The Royal, which I've named Gerald, is sticking a lot, and the ribbon doesn't stay tight all the time, but I can deal with it.

I played guitar at a dinky rest stop for awhile, which was awesome because of the silence of the place.  It felt good to play again, but I felt so rusty and useless at the end of it.  At any rate, another car came up ad seemed to contain a pretty skeezy dude, so I left.

Maybe more later?

3/11/09

I drove from Roswell, NM to Santa Fe, NM today via Socorro, NM.  I ate lunch at a place in Socorro that served either "steak" or "the children's menu."  I got steak.  After that I got in a fight with a Taco Bell delivery driver who had blocked me in.  When I told him he'd blocked me in he said "Are you a Taco Bell customer?" and I said "Are you telling me you don't care?"  It went like that, basically, until he finally moved his truck, which I don't know what kind of monster I must have been to have parked in the Taco Bell parking lot and then decided on a better restaurant to eat at without moving my car.

From there I drove to the Very Large Array, which was really cool.  It's on a fairly empty stretch of highway, out where you're close to the sky, and there was no one there, and it was snowing a little bit.  I guess I am a fan of science.

Santa Fe at sunset is a nice place to be driving into, but once the sun is fully down and you’ve got a hotel room across the street from Cheeks and the adult video store the magic wears off. “Come to Santa Fe, we’ve got neon butts.” That’s my experience in this town.

3/12/09

Today I did Santa Fe, NM to Window Rock, AZ, then from there to Tuba City, AZ, then down to Cameron, AZ. Window Rock is the seat of the Navajo nation, and I got a distinct “go away whitey” vibe from the place. It was intensely depressing for me, since I tend to associate with that small genetic sliver of me that is Native American much more than with the Dutch label I’ve been given, and the casinos and the trading posts and the over-exposed charade of it all just hurts.

The drive to Tuba City was fascinating, probably the most interesting part of the whole trip. Every twenty minutes the land is different, from thick forests to rolling hills, to turning a corner and being swallowed by a deep scar in the earth. I drove through a lightning storm and saw a brush fire start because of it. It was really just an amazing part of the country. I was in no mood for it, though.

I knew on this trip I was probably going to have some kind of thing happen, and this is when it did. You see, Imaginary Audience, I’ve been trying to not admit to myself that I’m clinically depressed, probably for years but seriously so in the last 4 months, and I guess I sort of snapped right here after driving 1400 miles. I had a real crummy evening in Cameron, just out and out bawling riding into town, which I’m doing this thing where I’m painfully honest with myself, so I have to tell you that and I’m not ashamed to do it. Add to that the fact that Cameron, AZ is literally a motel and a gas station. Add to that the worst enchiladas I’ve ever had in my life. Add to that some serious time zone confusion (why don’t you celebrate daylight savings with the rest of us, Arizona, you asshole?) and some rocks blocking the sunset. Well, it wasn’t the best time for me is what I’m saying.

3/13/09

Today I saw the Grand Canyon, then I drove to Flagstaff, then I saw the painted desert, then I drove into Albuquerque in the middle of a damned blizzard (or some snow, whatever). At some point on the way to the Grand Canyon, I decided that life was awesome, I was awesome, and everything was awesome, and I rode that shit all the way through the day. It was awesome!

Have you ever driven out of Flagstaff on I-20, turned up the Blood Brothers’ “Young Machetes” to the point that you blow out a speaker, and just rocked the hell out going 90 miles an hour? I have. Out where the sky is huge and the shadows play on the hills like children. Out where the land is all there is, and there aren’t any bullshit suburbs to drive through. And there you are, and then you’re not, and you just go all passive and let the experience wash over you. 

The Grand Canyon was cool, exactly as I expected. There were too many tourists, but what can you do? I really liked the drive into Flagstaff because it had snowed, and I’m from Houston so snow will always be God’s own magic trick, the equivalent of pulling a quarter from my ear when I’m 8 years old at a birthday party. I got out of my car and hung out for awhile. Then I went to the Painted Desert, which was a cool place to be at sundown, because it was very much abandoned and beautiful. 

I’m stuck in a smoking room tonight, so I look forward to smelling awful tomorrow, when I’ll be pulling a 14 hour drive to get home again.

3/14/09

And I did.
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So that’s the trip. If you want to see photos or listen to the songs I played on the side of the road, I’ve put them on my Facebook page. You’ve got Facebook, right? Well, why not?  We could be FRIEEEEEEEENDS
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Oh and just for the hell of it, here’s a vignette I wrote while I was in a motel room:

These things they don’t happen

She was one of those girls everybody fell in love with, with one of those faces that months, years later I’d be on again, just laying in bed heartsick for not saying hello marry me already. Even better was everybody knew this but her, which wasn’t about being coy or something but was honest belief. What I’m saying is once I saw her I was doomed one way or another.

But that’s a cute barista for you. Add some sleeve tattoos and a nose ring, not one of those studs but a ring, honest-to-God I would have been just a zombie with a perpetual erection.

How we got here on the back stoop smoking with her head on my shoulder is anybody’s guess. My apron was always splashed with milk and coffee at the end of the day, but hers was all like it was right out of the bin. I was gonna ask her how she did that, probably get teased or be a teaser, when I realized that she wasn’t just tired but crying on top it.

This was the kind of gift I’m too nice to work with. Somebody else would be spinning this into penetration already, but me I sat there and let her go for a few minutes, which I put my arm around her but didn’t try to pull her in or anything. I wanted to say, but I didn’t, because her problem was temporary, and if I said what I wanted to say it would still be there the next shift and the next, and I’d never be on this stoop smoking with her again. But I thought it, I thought you know I never want to stop holding you.

Tomorrow morning, I'm heading out to the wastes of New Mexico and Arizona to see what's what.  I plan to be gone pretty much from now until Sunday.  I'm going to be spending a lot of time in my car, and I got to thinking that might get kind of lonely.  Here's where you come in:

Call me!  Send me a text message!  I'll talk to you about whatever!  I can't promise I'm good at talking on the phone, because I'm not, but I'll do my best.  I think this is either one of the best ideas I've ever had, or one of the worst, and there's only one way to find out.

Here are some conversation starters:
-Which poets have the best beards?
-What the hell have you done with your life?
-Did you see any interesting dead dogs?

The number: 2816868574

Please don't be an asshole about this!

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For those of you who maybe share genetic material with me or otherwise have reason to want to know my agenda in case I die cold and alone in the wilderness:

Tuesday is a killer.  I'm getting up early and driving to Roswell, NM, which is about 12 hours total.

Wednesday I'm going to the Trinity bomb testing site, then driving to Santa Feand seeing what that's all about.  Total driving time ~6 hours.

Thursday I'm getting up early, heading to Window Rock, then taking a long, slow drive to Tuba City, AZ, and ending in Cameron, AZ.  Total driving time ~7 hours.

Friday is the Grand Canyon in the morning and then writing all day.  At that point I will either start heading back or stay another night to watch the sunsetand keep writing, depending on how it's going.

Saturday I will either be starting back or already about a third of the way back.  The plan is to stop in Amarillo, but I'm just going to drive until my face hurts.

Sunday I will end up back home.

Total driving distance: ~2400 miles.  It's ambitious, but I've done similar things before.