I arrived in Madison around nine thirty last night. The snow had begun to fall about an hour previous to that and the roads were fine. I went out side before I went to sleep, maybe around one, and the snow was about a foot deep and falling quickly like rain and sticking to my jacket and my hat. This morning there was more of it. After some pancakes I went out with my niece and my mom ("grandma") and made a snowman out of the sticky and heavy snow. By now, the middle of the afternoon, I just woke up from a nap and the snow is still falling, the wind starting to blow a little bit. The room where I lie has the blinds down but I'm going to get up now so I can watch it from here. There. Glad that's done. More light but the condensation on the inside of the storm window obscures the details. Oh well. 

Five days until Christmas, eleven until New Years, fifteen until official duties for the next semester starts, eighteen until classes start, and nineteen until teaching starts. Obviously, if I'm writing this I've made it through the trials and tribulations of the end of the semester: two twenty page papers, a take home essay test, grading student projects, revising and rewriting the syllabus and calender for teaching next semester, three presentations, and a few shorter response papers. In comparison to some folks it wasn't that big of a final crush, and I have to admit, after getting done with the first twenty page paper (a short history of expressive rhetoric and some of the roots of English departments, going back about a hundred years) it began to feel like I was already done. The second paper (an overview of the identity approach to second language learning, plus an informal case study of a former student through this lens) was not quite as polished as the first. But it was a lot of writing, based on research that I had been doing for the previous two months or so. Neither paper felt finished but both had reached their limits as far as pages, and I was happy to be done.

Writing in graduate school is a different kind of writing than, say, writing in this blog. It's not like writing an email, and I worry that the more time I spend doing the academic work the less I will be able to do this. Both in terms of consistency of voice as well as motivation. Already, the last two months, the blog or any other kind of 'personal' writing has been a low priority, and more fundamentally, has not been a habit, which is how most of my writing gets done (as opposed to inspiration or request or whatever other reasons exist to write). Is this bad? Am I headed in a direction that I'll never come back from? I don't know. BUT I will say that what I've been studying has been absolutely fascinating, half in world of rhetoric and composition, thinking about writing, teaching and institutional ideologies, and half in the world of Second Language Studies, taking a more empirical and hard science derived approach to what language (including writing) actually is, including how we learn it. I'm not sure where either of them will lead, but have another couple semesters coursework before I need to worry about the answer to that question.

One thing though, that I've figured out, for the time being, and I might be wrong, that has been enormously helpful, has been the difference between a rhetorical approach to writing and a poetic approach to writing, and why it is so difficult to mix the two together. Simply, the rhetorical approach to writing is concerned with what writing can do in the world, i.e. how it leads to action. The poetic approach is concerned with the internal cohesion of a given piece of writing, i.e. the rules that it creates for itself independent of external conventions. James Berlin calls this the action/contemplation dialectic. Coming from poetry and spending a lot of time on the 'internal cohesion' of a poem, line, book, song, drawing, email, mixtape, etc. I find that I am resistant to thinking about writing as a way to act on the world. In doing this, we have to consider audience, their expectations and the conventions we might use to reach them. This blog, generally, has never been concerned with audience hence the six or seven hits it might get on a good day. Yet, audience consideration has little to do with, say, any satisfaction I might get from writing a post (and the motivation this satisfaction brings with it), or how I actually go about writing. I can imagine an audience, or invite an audience in depending on what, and how I write (for example, the audience for this blog is generally people who know me), but all this is apart from the actual act of writing, and audience consideration is more or less a matter of interpretation that occurs after the fact/act. 

(Look at those long sentences! A tangible example of how all this writing and reading is rewriting some of my habits. Who is this person?)

And so it's been a struggle to consolidate a poetic approach with the rhetorical approach, and produce, what I'll call Academic Writing. It's not about the writing itself in academic writing, but the ideas that develop in and from the writing. How interesting! But writing into this 'voice' will take a while and I wonder if this process will create a more versatile writer, or a reptilian intellectual. Or then again, in the spirit of the end of the world says MF Doom, "When the poles shift / it won't matter which crew you roll with / cold and stiff" speaking of which I'm going to get back to things here in wintry Wisconsin. In these next couple weeks, I'm going to post a few short essays that I wrote for the Second Language Acquisition class. Merry ifmass. Happy clueyear.

The sun is coming through the now leafless trees and landing on top of the cats, splayed on the rug on the floor in the morning. The dining room window is now exposed and as I sit there eating macaroni off wooden plates, I can look out onto the street and whoever is out there can look back. I need to get my books and folders together and head off to school in a second,  the last day of the week before Thanksgiving. It's been much more relaxed these last couple of weeks, especially this week and the next. Relaxed in terms of urgent class work, and so I have time to read and research for the two twenty page papers I have due at the end of the semester. It's strange, different subjects ranging from identity approaches to second language acquisition, to investigating the roots of composition and where it split off from creative writing, to the work I do with my class, working on discourse communities and remediating work for different audiences. All of it's different, but it feels like it's part of the same project, and each subject or class is bleeding into each other. I guess I am the constant, and naturally, it all flows through the one making sense of it. I wonder if it would even be possible to hold all these things in mind separately. 

Meanwhile, a cat gets up and walks to another patch of sunlight, WWIII gets underway in the middle east, and Jack Gilbert, the poet, dies. Here is an excerpt from "A Brief for the Defense." Have a lovely weekend:

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies

are not starving someplace, they are starving

somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.

But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.

Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not

be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not

be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women

at the fountain are laughing together between

the suffering they have known and the awfulness

in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody

in the village is very sick. There is laughter

every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,

and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,

we lessen the importance of their deprivation.

Response to Carl Herndl

Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s connection to sustainable environmental policy and academia's trouble with communicating what it does to the outside world? Carl Herndl’s lecture on the myth of Latour’s connection to reality. Carl Herndl’s lecture on bringing back reality into discourse. Carl Herndl’s lecture on bringing back reality to Latour’s discourse. Carl Herndl’s lecture on bringing Latour back to reality. Carl Herndl’s lecture on bringing Latour back to Carl Herndl’s lecture on reality. Carl Herndl’s lecture on bringing Latour back to Carl Herndl’s lecture but arriving a few minutes late. Carl Herndl’s lecture on arriving late to reality and Latour’s lecture on arriving early for Carl Herndl’s lecture. Carl Herndl’s lecture on arriving late to Latour’s lecture or at least, arriving late to Latour’s ideas in Carl Herndl’s lecture. Carl Herndl’s lecture on fact vs. artifact, anti-representation vs. anti-real, Tyler Carter vs. Carl Herndl. Tyler Carter’s lecture on Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s reality vs. Latour’s lecture on Tyler Carter’s lecture on Herndl’s reality. Carl Herndl’s lecture on historicizing Tyler Carter’s reality using Latour’s construction of the modern. Have we ever been modern? Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s translation of reality including the process of, the research of, the writing of reality.

Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s critique of a perfectly circular reality. Carl Herndl’s lecture on unmodern ideas of reality as odd shapes and lines below the second dichotomy. Latour’s lecture on the unmodern ideas of reality as the odd shapes and lines below the second dichotomy below the two circles below Carl Herndl’s lecture. Below Carl Herndl’s lecture below unmodern ideas of reality as the odd shapes and lines accross the first dichotomy between humans and nature. Below Latour’s reality of Carl Herndl’s lecture beyond the first dichotomy we pretend to exist. We pretend to exist above the second dichotomy above the unmodern ideas of reality as odd shapes and lines. Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour pretends to exist above the second dichotomy above the unmodern ideas of reality as odd shapes and lines.

Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s Relationist Realism was difficult to understand. Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s Relationist Realism was difficult to understand because Tyler Carter was unfamiliar with the ideas of Latour’s Relationist Realism. Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s Relationist Realism was difficult to understand because Tyler Carter was unfamiliar with the idea that "nothing is reducible to anything else." Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s Relationist Realism was difficult to understand because Tyler Carter was unfamiliar with the idea that “an entities identity is determined by its articulations with the other entities and its consequences.” Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s Relationist Realism was difficult to understand because Tyler Carter was unfamiliar with the idea that "things are true because they hold." Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s Relationist Realism was difficult to understand because Tyler Carter was unfamiliar with the idea that “the real is that which resists and perturbs other entities.”  Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s Relationist Realism included a definition of sacrifice: to give up one thing for another thing you value more.

Today is my birthday. I am 34 years old. It is 17x2, or 29+5. When I turned 33 I felt happy to be 33. Turning 34 feels like one year away from 35, and 35 seems much closer to 40 than 33. An in between number. Not on the other side of 35, but not a comfortable distance from it. All this a strange measure, when we live in moments and make it through days and do our planning by the week. If we're lucky we look forward to the break, as I do as a teacher and a student. Yet I set my alarm to the minute, stay under the covers for an extra fifteen, feed the cats, piss, meditate, cook and eat breakfast and get on my bike, and depending on the wind and the traffic lights and the song in my earphones, get to class with a few minutes to spare. Onward.

  

Wow. I'm busy! Last night I had a dream where one of my cats encountered a skunk, sniffed its butt, and then bit it on the back of the neck. For some reason I was proud. I'm not sure if there is any meaning to be gleaned from this.  The other day I was walking down the street in Lafayette and came across a pumpkin bowl that was filled with cough drops, sitting on a stoop. But it had been raining, the the bowl was full of water, and the twelve cough drops were all floating at the top. The meaning of this too, is uncertain. Happy Halloween. I have to get back to work now. Daylight savings time here we come.

Forgetting this morning's dream I was plucking weeds.



-Hosai Ozaki translated by Hiroaki Sato, from Right under the big sky, I don't wear a hat

Sunday morning. October 14th. It's fixing to rain. Rained yesterday afternoon and then got humid, low sixties but lots of warm air. The wind is blowing hard but it's a warm wind, a weird wind bringing something, probably rain. Eight weeks have passed in the semester and there are seven left. All the busy business has continued but the pressure has subsided. I'm getting to a be a faster reader, more focused and getting more comfortable with the idea that not everything is going to be relevant, and that I can be selective as to how to spend my time, what to read and what I want to know. I'm finding a rhythm to the work, one based in the week and knowing how much time I have to spend on what portion of the week. Ah! It's raining now, and the leaves are turning colors and falling off the trees. In front of my apartment there are piles of dried leaves that crunch when we walk through them, and on the well traveled parts of the side walk it's not leaves but flakes of the leaves that have been walked over, and these don't make as many sounds.

Last weekend, the "October Break", last Monday and Tuesday off, Dara came to visit. We tooled around Indiana, saw a couple of movies ("The Master", "The Thin Red Line"), made dinner, made a pie. It's stopped raining and the sun is coming out. At four I need to meet a member of my group for Second Language Acquisition and continue to work on our presentation for Monday. I'm nervous to be responsible for presenting so much material (80 minutes) on the subject of "Young Learners and Age" which, before a couple weeks ago, I knew very little about. I guess that's what I'm doing, that is, "learning" which there's been a lot of lately. I wonder if I'll forget how to write poetry, which actually, might be a really good way to write poetry. But more so, I wonder (read: am worried) if I will lose the impetus. The rhetorical mode is all about what our words "do", which poetry is not so much interested in.

Colouring of Pigeons

I've really been into this song, by The Knife and a few other musicians and made for an opera about Charles Darwin, a scientist who discovered a really big and useful idea through bit by bit accumulation of scientific observation. Is inspiring. I believe most of the lyrics come from his journals and when the opera singer starts singing his observations of birds at the end, O! For more context, this youtube version is narrated and shows the lyrics, which I would of put here on the blog but for the Swiffer ad that comes first. In other music news, I've uploaded a short little downloadable collection of songs (of my own) to my soundcloud page that I've added a link to on the right. Happy Fall.

Discontinuing Dinner: Avoidance Methods, (Re)defining Cat Food Expediency, and the Role of Ambiguity in (un)Professional Discourse

These cats don't let me sleep. Why does it need to be this way? A precision in language cuts both ways, like a spade or what the seventh grader called it, "a garden hoe" knowing full well double speak implications and the pathologic memory of seemingly agent-free class clowns. Cuts the tools and the reader, we couldn't arrive at precision without smaller and smaller infinitely unsatisfying delineation of language. This is the work, so to speak. And so to speak what moves us forward can also like the classic argument against gun control, it's not the gun that kills people but who pulls the trigger, an uncertainty between what is purposefully and what is needlessly complicated within distinctions motivations get lost, though experience may be able to dig through the litter box what makes good "scholarship" proves no difference, Persian or American tomcat. Generosity not just in how much chicken paste scooped from the open tin but in value, nutritional and otherwise inedible, unable to understand if properties of deliciousness, habitual, or demanded by wery wery cute little furry little fuzzies.

That is to say there are expectations beyond the sun rising but every morning and it's impossible to sleep past six and maintain neutral relationships with both animals and the expectations of animals knowing they are hungry will be hungry and will continue to sniff as other, objectifying thier relation to the human ear. Through verbal cues discontinued and rarified impulses of walking softly never pressing but presence alone delineates consciousness and an end to dreaming. Big yellow eyes, yowling, or the little brown one habitually vomiting before the day begins as a biological function or dysfunctional pet owner relations that yes, we do have the power but not the motivation. The job of some to get the others to do the work or in the case of creature with no thumbs a life or death necessity spurned as motivation, not avoidance of associative necessity or a lack of affective filters. A leading ambiguity can lead into generative succession but when the methods work in the other direction meaning signifies other meanings and we are lead into the specific conclusions and to reiterate, this is the necessary work if one is to work against uncertainty towards a vertical accumulation of capital always at a moment on our way towards the next.

We're torn between wanting to communicate with animals, the expectations of the animals, and the facticity of not having ingested any cat food of the sort. That to pick up an animals and throw it off the bed will not necessarily prevent said animal from returning to the scene of instigation and picking up where it left off. As with ambiguity, that it too can be equally used and abused much in the same way as perpendicular cross-talk and it's no wonder we're still hungry or always hungry as our standards will always be in disagreement so long as questions of "is it time to eat yet?" are articulated outside of both the body and the academy. There is not a single shoelace for cats to wear and have no use for tools and those they do know such as claws and ears and cute faces are extensions of bodily desires. Ambiguity hides laziness of thought while precision disallows access, either due to mismatching discourse community or bioengineered apple-ness looks good tastes like nothing. That the scholar is able to make these distinctions between baloney and insight just as the poet delineates between genre fed cliche and experienced reality. Cats do not differentiate between dinner and breakfast but are equally persistent in both and know despite cat food breath and smallness of stature the power of presence and what engagement entails. There is just as much ambiguity in precision but it operates on a different unit dependent solely on when you ate last. To sleep well is to build a machine to feed these animals at a specific time and they make them, I've seen them, and I'm going back to sleep now.

Holy shit am I busy. One day when I wasn't so busy I asked one of my professors what the pedagogical purpose of being so busy was, and I didn't get an answer. Probably because the answer was something related to sorting, and weeding out the people who have a hard time keeping up. Twenty percent of people who begin PhD programs finish. Eighty percent drop out. It's a cold world. Meanwhile, the heat came on in my apartment. The cats are happier. I'm happier. Dear Margie, Hello, it is 10:16 PM. I need to finish another three hours of work for tomorrow and I'm already late. Bye.

The end of week four. Fifty-six weeks to go before I take qualifying exams. It's getting easier, schedule wise. On Tuesday I woke up dreaming of categories and on Wednesday I woke up from a nap dreaming of reading. The physical strain of the academic work I hadn't anticipated but I'm settling in and by nine thirty on Wednesday night I experienced the strange sensation of having caught up with the day's work. I celebrated by eating some crackers and cheese spread and a week old episode of the Daily Show. This weekend I have two full days of work, preparing for teaching, preparing for Monday and Tuesday class, starting a paper that is due next week, and grading student essays. I would be happy to get a good start on three of the five tasks, but am slowly gaining confidence that if I don't, it will be okay. 

The cats are settling in and there is one sitting next to me as I write this. The brown one stopped puking and the black one started yowling, which means things are back to normal. They don't come to greet me at the door like they used to but that's probably a function of the distance between their preferred sleeping spot under the bed and the door. I gave them a stern talking to about their duties as house cats but they didn't seem take the lecture seriously. I miss writing like this in the blog or otherwise and right now, it feels good to be doing this. I finished reading the David Mitchell novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which was pretty good. About Dutch traders in Japan during the end of the eighteenth century, and mystery and intrigue. His narrative is constantly interrupted by the details and movements of the characters, and it was a book about moral conviction, its pros and cons. In the last week I've been reading, at night, in bed, Violence and Splendor by a philosopher named Alphonso Lingus. Here is one short essay from the book:

The Stone

On my last day in the Highlands of West Papua, a Lani man I came to know gave me his precious possession, a black stone some four inches long strangely marked with think white lines and thin white lines intersecting in the zones the thick lines squared off. It is oval in shape and smooth and nestles in the palm of my hand. He gave me to understand that he carried it with him whenever he left his compound to go into the jungle, and was giving it now to me to guide me on my onward wanderings. He had seen that every day I wandered about without any discernible objective or goal, and understood that I had wandered over the planet to New Guinea without any task or project.

Older white travelers would say that this stone is for the Papuan a fetish. What is it for me? It is not really a cherished souvenir of his friendship; in fact I can no longer remember very clearly what he looked like. Yet I am often drawn again to this stone; it summons me.

Cats! They came on an airplane thanks the efforts of Amy, Steven, Dara and Kamal, the pilots, baggage handlers, customer service representatives, gas station attendants, oil refineries, and coffee vendors. I left around 8, picked up Kamal and drove through severe thunderstorms to the Indianapolis Airport where the flight, coming in from Cleveland via San Francisco (the cats transferred at Cleveland) was about two hours late. But it arrived and though a little freaked out and tired and hungry, the cats were in good condition. Brought them home and the big black one got comfortable pretty quickly sicking his paw off the edge of the couch while the little brown one wanders around the apartment. And is still wandering Saturday afternoon the black one is sitting next to me. Just like old times and it feels good to see them, hold them, feed them, talk to them, and to have them here. We all slept last night in a fur/skin/blanket mound.

Essay On Change

The feeling begins before anything happens. It's a mindset that colors every word and interpretation. In a good mood, a clear mood, I don't follow the sparrow. It begins in the chest and scrunches every word that comes in or goes out.

One word for feeling is pretension, but it's a loaded word that applies to an interpretation of why the feeling exists. A better way to explain it is the assumption of the thing before the thing, ideas of what the world is without consultation.

Meditation is one way to disarm assumption and in a way, it works. Paying attention and learning to pay attention to things other than expressions of self. For every moment my attention is elsewhere, its not busy interpreting signs or generating meaning.

*

What is this relation between what I don't know and what I don't want to know? The fact that I devote time to putting off questions, playing games or making music or writing, a kind of busy work that keeps me from what?

Yet I remain on a Sunday afternoon. It's not about some incalculable distance but a few simple facts, my desire to be alive a desire beyond articulation. No words can alter its course through the body, and the best I can do is describe it.

Whereas purpose occurs concurrently with language. A hardening stance or a poem coming into focus. It is a course of action. Listening to music, consuming news, counting the number of ships coming into the harbor, all this purpose.

*

Pleasure becomes purpose but I get lost in my own feeling. There are entire worlds untouched inside us. Entire subjects we never think to mention. It's not fair to compare anything to what we have been through, but even desire can be segregated.

We perceive the one. Oneself in one's body, one's hands and one's thoughts. There is something god-like in numbers, but to think the one and the two and the three is universal, only guides us back to pictures of ourselves, standing in, our arms around each other.

I wonder what my statue would look like? Said the little girl to her father.

She held her hem at arms length and admired her shadow.

He did the same.

About that first week (see last post), it's not often that every single second of one's day one's week is an entirely new experience. That, and coming out with arms and legs and health, for the most part, fully intact. This second week was not nearly as difficult and I'm beginning to relax and get a sense of the rhythm, what I need to do and how much time I can take doing it. My students are smart and proactive, and definitely different than the academy students. They seem a lot more driven, are younger, and are better readers. It's nice to be able to assign longer readings. And the material that I'm teaching is more interesting than the Academy courses. This is part of what I came here for.

As far as classes, I oscillate between mind-on-fire and there's-no-way-I-can-finish-all-this-by-tomorrow, but it's, for the most part, completely engaging and energizing. The world of rhetoric and composition is surprisingly unfamiliar, having spent the last ten years amidst writing teachers, it's strange that most everything I'm encountering here, as far as ideas, is news. On the other hand I've gotten the impression that all my teaching experience doesn't count for much in terms of the Rhet/Comp conversation. What I was teaching, a variation on "current-traditional", is considered "bad" teaching, and so I've been experiencing, first hand, the divide between the academic world and the "real world." A quick dismissiveness of experience, and faith in a certain kind of intelligence that I'm not convinced holds up well beyond campus (see the Republican National Convention and the possibility that Romney might win, for proof of this).

But I'm going to try and keep my mouth shut, as best I can, try to keep my ego in check, and try to submit to the discipline. I trust my teachers and I trust the program. Change is hard and doubt is useful. It will take some time to settle in, and in the mean time, why not enjoy this sliver of perspective? Balurble wargle. Waddle waddle waddle. Flallulaluls. Yeeeea howwwh. Uhf. Blaburble bloggle bah. Hffft. And so ends the second week. Dara is back (in California) from her silent meditation and thank god, I missed her. The weather people say Hurricane Issac will make it's way as storm, up here this weekend. Looking forward to staying in and reading, taking care of my sore throat and resting. Happy Labor Day.

A classic is something that is always nice.

One day when I was a kid, I felt something in my ear. I tilted my head and a fly covered in ear wax came out. I expected a bean or something. Once I woke up with something in my mouth and this time, thought it was a fly. But when I opened my mouth into the bathroom sink and let it roll out, it was a tooth. Last night I had a dream about playing cribbage with my brother and he was cheating. He played five cards straight in the counting round and made a slew of points and I got so mad I stood up and left the the table. Later in the dream, or maybe in waking life, I realized that you can't play five cards straight if you follow the rules of cribbage. And thought about how if I hadn't gotten so mad and blinded my reason, I would have called him out.

Graduate school has been difficult so far. It's wonderful to have to time to read and study and discuss but the adjustment to taking classes, the schedule and relentless work load, that I'm certain will only get more intense, has left me questioning if this was such a good idea after all. Change is hard and this is going to be painful. Of course, there are worse pains and worse problems, but it will be some time before I settle into a manageable rhythm. On top of the work, there is the work of teaching, teaching a brand new course in an unfamiliar format. Fifty minutes five times a week. I told Don that I couldn't set the chairs up like I was used to doing, the rooms being so small and full. Don said, "it changes your pedagogy [these kinds of adjustments]." I've been thinking about that simple phrase ever since.

And so I'm at the bottom of the learning curve, and in some sense, slightly below it, having to unlearn six year of teaching habits while simultaneously adopting new pedagogy and approaches to teaching. The good news is that all these approaches are interesting and I think, better and more helpful to students than some of the ones I was using. And that's why I'm here, to grow into a more versatile creature. But in the mean time, survival mode is on and the walls are up. Lots more to say but there is even lots more to do, and I need to get to it. See you soon. Love,

One of my neighbors, I just learned, used to be a hog farmer (he's now studying veterinary medicine) and it made me think of one of this poem. By David Lee, from the Porcine Legacy (Copper Canyon Press, 1978). It works best when read out loud as fast as possible.

For Jan, with Love

1.

John he comes to my house
pulls his beat up truck in my drive
and honks
Dave John sez Dave my red sow
she got pigs stuck and my big hands they wont go
and I gotta get them pigs out
or that fucker shes gonna die
and I sez John goddam
well be right down and John sez Jan
he yells JAN wheres Jan shes got little hands
she can get in there and pull them pigs
and I sez Jan and he sez Jan and Jan comes
what? Jan sez and Johns red sows got pigs
stuck and his hands too big and wont go
and hes gotta get them pigs out
or that fuckers gonna die (John he turns
his head and lights a cigarette)
(he dont say fuck to no woman)
and Jan she sez well lets go
and we get in Johns beat up damn truck
and go to pull Johns pigs

2.

Johns red sow she doesn't weigh
a hundred and sixty pounds
but he bred her to his biggest boar
and had to put hay bales by her sides
so the boar wouldn't break
her back becasue Carl bet five dollars
he couldnt and John he bet
five she could and John he won
but Carl enjoyed watching anyway

3.

Johns red sow was laying
on her side hurting bad
and we could see she had a pig
right there but it wouldn't come she
was too small and John sez see
and I sez I see that pigs gotta come out
or that fuckers gonna die
and Jan puts vaseline on her hands
and sez hold her legs and I hold her legs
and Jan goes in after the pig
and John gets out of the pen and goes
somewheres else

Jan she pulls like hell pretty soon
the pig come big damn big little pig
dead and I give Jan more vaseline and she goes
back to see about any more
and Johns red sow pushes hard on Jans arm
up to her elbow inside and Jan sez
theres more help me and I help
another pig damn big damn dead comes
and Johns red sow she seems better
and we hope thats all

4.

Johns red sow wont go
out of labor so we stay all night
and John brings coffe and smokes
and flashlight batteries and finally Jan
can feel another pig but Johns red sows
swole up tight and she cant grab hold
but only touch so I push her side
and she grunts and screams and shits all over Jans arm
and Jan sez I got it help me and I help
and we pull for a goddam hour and pull
the pigs head off

and I sez oh my god we gotta get that pig now
of that fuckers gonna die for sure
and John sez what happened? and Jan
gives him a baby pigs head in his hand
and John goes somewheres else again
while Jan goes back fast inside
grabbing hard and Johns red sow
hurts bad and Jan sez I got something help me
and I help and we start taking that pig out
piece by piece

5.

Goddamn you bitch dont you die
Jan yells when Johns red sow dont help no more
and we work and the sun comes up
and we finally get the last piece of pig out
and give Johns red sow a big shot of penicillin
her ass swole up like a football
but she dont labor and John sez
is that all? and Jan wipes her bloody arms
on a rag and sez yes and John climbs in
the pen and sez hows my red sow?
and we look and go home and go to bed
because Johns red sow that fucker she died

I moved into my new place in Indiana last last Thursday and tomorrow I begin the orientation for the Rhetoric and Composition program at Purdue. It has been an amazing summer, focused on the sensory and experiential rather than the intellectual, which might make for a difficult transition this coming week as I'm plunging back into the world of academia. Next week I start teaching and taking classes but I'm told even though this week is an orientation, it will be intense, a kind of boot camp for the coming teaching and course work. Who knows. In the mean time, here are a few facts about my move to Indiana: there was a dead mouse in my toaster, 179, 451 thousand people "like" the website dmv.org and Chris Rock doesn't relate to his kids. The cicadas are sustaining a high pitched drone that isn't that annoying and I keep finding their carcases on the sidewalk. The sky is over cast and it's about a fifteen minute bike ride to get to campus.

I have health insurance now, and a spacious apartment in Lafayette Indiana. People are nice here and it's been not too hot. Last night there was some kind of festival on main street but I stayed in to apply a few changes to the collection of songs / album that I've been working on this summer. Here is one of my favorites, it's rather long and I recommend you sit down and plug in. Pause pause. It's been a very non-literary summer in the sense that I've done hardly any writing. Having Dara next to me almost twenty-four hours a day for two months meant, amongst other things, that instead of sitting on thoughts until I had a chance to express them, I just talked all day non-stop. Why write anything down if you can just lean over to the person next to you and say it? There's an answer to that question. I don't know the answer to that question. But it might take me a little while to find my "voice" again for the blog.

The Wabash river runs through the middle of the town, dividing Lafayette from West Lafayette. The county is named Tippecanoe, which you might know from the expression, "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" which, growing up, I heard about three hundred times from different people when they learned my name. Google search. The short version is it was a campaign song for the Whig part in the 1840 presidential election. Better yet is the actual song, as re-recorded by Oscar Brand for the Smithsonian and easily found on Wikipedia. And by better I mean pretty weird. This one goes out to the state of Indiana...

 

Still in Madison. Big storms last night. Scary but I have yet to come to harm from a thunderstorm. Went swimming in the lake before and watched the clouds roll in across the lake. Approaching the end of the summer, also approaching the end of putting together a collection of songs. Mixing and mastering and ironing out kinks is takes time. My mother gave us a bag of cookies. Having a washer and dryer in the kitchen leads to more washing and drying. Like my professor said, when they invented the washing machine instead of saving people time everybody just bought more clothes to wash. We don't really need three blades on a razor. I left my hat at the old folks home and people in Madison don't make eye contact. I met my brother's new baby and finished reading All The Pretty Horses, speaking of border crossings. I'm back where I started. An excerpt:

At a crossroads station somewhere on the other side of Paredon they picked up five farm workers who climbed up on the bed of the truck and nodded and spoke to him with real circumspection and courtesy. It was almost dark and it was raining lightly and they were wet and their faces were wet in the yellow light from the station. They huddled forward of the chained engine and he offered them his cigarettes and they thanked him each and took one and they cupped their hands over the small flame against the falling rain and thanked him again.

De donde viene? they said.
De Tejas.
Tejas, they said. Y donde va?

He drew on his cigarette. he looked at their faces. One of them older than the rest nodded at his cheap new clothes.

El va a ver a su novia, he said.
They looked at him earnestly and he nodded and said that it was true.

Ah, they said. Que bueno. And after and for a long time to come he'd have reason to evoke the recollection of those smiles and to reflect upon the good will which provoked them for it had power to protect and to confer honor and to strengthen resolve and it had power to heal men and to bring them to safety long after all other resources were exhausted.

Bonjour! I am writing this email from a cafe in Le Madison du Wisconsin. New Mexico is behind us. Ahead of us is Indiana. Here until the end of this month and then into my new place in August, five years in Indiana.  Been on the road and without internet for most of the week. It's hot here! It's hot everywhere! Kansas was like nothing on earth. Iowa stormy. New Mexico is in the past. Texas was short. Oklahoma had lots of police. Missouri contains Ozarks. May contain peanuts. I haven't read a newspaper for a week and am not sure what time it is. 4:30. Metaphorically. Actually it's 5:30. My clock is off. But I did finally get a good night's sleep last night. Motel 10. Camping. Super 8. Back to a regular work day tomorrow. I hope you're well. Just glanced at the paper and crazy in Colorado. What's wrong with us?

An edited email I sent out this morning...

Hi Again C, Thanks for those songs! You sound really great. Steven is also an amazing musician. You all should play some together. Do you have wave version of those songs or any other songs? I like doing remix projects and I'd love to play around with some of your stuff. Respectfully of course, if you have waves to send. MP3s loose too much fidelity when opened and closed.  

At any rate, I'm writing from a hotel room in Soccoro right now. Dara and I are on our way back from Santa Fe, nine or ten days at her second cousin's two million dollar house back down to our trailer in Silver City. I think tonight we'll go the long way around to stop by the radio array and camp on the west side of the Gila mountains before we get back to SC. Dragging our feet. It was so easy to get work done in Santa Fe with all the space the house afforded so it's a bit of a come down to back to the hot box. 

Speaking of which, we weren't in Santa Fe proper but just north in a town called Tesuque, which is, according to wikipedia, where Cormac McCarthy lives. Didn't see him but reading the Border Trilogy for a second time around the area where they take place, is a multi-dimensional experience. Those books are so much about "nature" or place, or country side or god's indifference to us, or whatever one calls it, and so specific. I need to read Blood Meridian again. I think I was too young when I read it the first time and didn't really get it. But I remember it being a kind of surreal version of the southwest/mexico. What I love about the border trilogy are the monologues, especially in The Crossing. It's philosophy in the guise of a narrative, mostly concerning god and death. 

But it's tough down here, the weather the living and the people. I mean, I don't understand the people, not as people (people are people right?), but as an sociological ecosystem. California is sort of easy to get the hang of (slightly superficial, laid back, consistently late, good taste), but I have no idea where to start here. Apparently NM is one of the poorest states in the country and least populated. There's a kind of desert lifestyle that my body and my mind need a lot more time to get the hang of. Native peoples abound and everything is old. It makes a lot of sense to be thinking about death and eternity (see the border trilogy) in the low desert. Anywho, time to get on. Thanks for the songs and send me some waves if you can. About the play, it needs a lot more work before I put it out there. I miss the writing lab too. I actually miss teaching right now. Work. Yuck. Onward...

Last week in Silver City I went to pick up my mail at the post office. On my way in, I observed an older man, cowboy hat and button up shirt tucked over his belly into his jeans, pass an acquaintance coming out the front doors. They stopped, greeted each other and shook hands. One says to the other in a rancher's drawl, "Another day in paradise." And they parted. I couldn't tell if they were being serious, or sarcastic, or both. It was hot as hell that day.

This week Dara and I are staying in a house just north of Santa Fe. It's cooled down considerably and the last two days have brought some pretty serious afternoon thunderstorms. They call it monsoon season out here, July and August, and I wonder if it's been raining down in Silver City. I also wonder if the shade tarp we set up outside the trailer is still standing, or if it's been swept away.

Next Monday we head back down for another three weeks, and then we leave New Mexico all together. Half way through the summer I'm finally beginning to relax, though I wonder how much of that is because of this big house we're in. It's a little bit like Goldilocks, the trailer was too small and this place is too big. But it sure is comfortable, and stays cool during the day. Lots of space to spread out and work. Or idle.

Well, it's still pretty hot in Silver City. A high of ninety-three today says the weather report. Let me try that again: today the weather report says the high is ninety-three. Subject verb object. Of course it's a little bit hotter than that in the sun, or standing next to or inside of a big piece of sheet metal. Survival seems harder out there and the bugs are more aggressive. The lizards have it pretty good. Over the weekend D and I went to white sands for a night, camping on the dunes. For the first time in my life I'm able to identify more than just the big dipper and Orion. The night sky is full of objects now. Lots of sky here that isn't obscured by trees or light. "Light pollution" as my dad called it. In the meantime I've been rereading the Cormac McCarthy book "The Crossing" which takes place, or starts, right around here:

She wandered the eastern slope of the Sierra del Madera for a week. Her ancestors had hunted camels and primitive toy horses on these grounds. She found little to eat. Most of the game was slaughtered out of the country. Most of the forest cut to feed the boilers of the stampmills at the mines. The wolves in that country had been killing cattle for a long time but the ignorance of the animals was a puzzle to them. The cows bellowing and bleeding and stumbling through the mountain meadows with their shovel feet and their confusion, bawling and floundering through the fences and dragging post and wires behind. The ranchers said they brutalized the cattle in a way they did not the wild game. As if the cows evoked in them some anger. As if they were offended by some violation of an old order. Old ceremonies. Old Protocols.

It is hot in Silver City. I was told it hadn't rained since April and it seems like it. Feels like it. There is a big forest fire to the north of here in the Gila National Forest (pronounced HE-LA) and the good news is it's 65% contained. It will not be smoking me out of my spider hole. God. It almost rained the other day. Felt a few drops but our locale fell between rain storms. You could see them not too far away. Thunder and lightning too but not today. Not a cloud in the sky. At the library starting the second week of working on a play. If I ever get it done I'll tell you about it.

Sitting in my apartment with my cats is different from sitting in a laundromat on Hudson street with Dara. Last week I did everything including packing up the apartment, dropping off the cats, shipping things to Indiana, and leaving Oakland. We took five days and stopped frequently. The Sierra Nevada mountains, Death Valley, Las Vegas, The Grand Canyon, points in-between and now we're here, Silver City as of last evening. Settling in for three weeks and then to Santa Fe for two and then back here until the end of July. Today we're getting our ducks in a row (laundry, internet, food, post office) and easing back into a non-road trip like life. Instead of a fire we have a stove and running water. Almost. We're staying in a trailer in a gulch on a farm of a friend of Dara's. It's rugged, but livable, and I'm looking forward to getting some work done. Okay. Speaking of which. To errands. By the way, I'll be here: PO Box 1996, Silver City, NM 88062 until the end of July. Send me a post card.

On Saturday coming back from The City (San Francisco) to The Town (Oakland), a man sat down next to me on the BART with two large noisy shopping bags from Ross. As the train moved along he pulled pairs of shoes out of these bags, examining them, maybe admiring them, peeling the price reduction stickers off the price tags, and sticking these stickers to the back of the seat. About five minutes into this process he told me his story: he buys shoes from Ross at a discounted price and then resells them for a profit. Buy low sell high. It keeps me out of trouble, he said and continued to pull the stickers off the tags while talking to me. I didn't mind. He showed me how to carefully pull the stickers off the tag, and then revealed that in the store he would replace stickers with the ones he pulled off from other items. So instead of paying thirty dollars for a pair of shoes, he might only have to pay $9.98 once he covers up the old sticker. One of his stickers was for $.49 cents. "It's not stealing if you're paying something at the register." I told him I would think about that, and I did. 

**

Happy Memorial Day. Thank you soldiers/sailors/pilots etc. No thanks to the silly people and decisions that lead us there. This is my last week in the White House and don't want to make you uncomfortable with the sentimental details (too many goodbyes to mention) of what happened this last week and this upcoming one, but come June 5th, Dara and I are off for New Mexico to write and read and take a break from city living for a couple months before I head to Indiana for the next FIVE YEARS. Wonderful! But I'm not sure how much internet I will be doing over the summer, and want to let you know that this blog is not going to be on any kind of schedule. Posting will be sporadic and infrequent until September when school and my days get locked down. But don't worry, I will not stop. And now that I've said something I'll probably go and do the exact opposite. And besides, there's always the hawk cam (they are getting much bigger these days).

But I do want to say one thing about leaving, that this time, having lived in many places and left many places, this time the response has been different. Unlike say, leaving college or Portland or the east coast or wherever, instead of see you later, I'm getting a lot of, "have a nice life." Not flippantly or coldly, but without the illusion that I'm going to see many of these people ever again. Of course I hope I do but this set of goodbyes and good wishes feels much more final than it has in the past. Statements of gratitude in place of future plans. Maybe it's because we're all older, and at this point, we know better. A kind of wisdom that doesn't anxiously keep the window of possibility open and instead, accounts for our progress thus far. Or maybe it's because I know, and they know, that I won't be coming back. Of course I'm not going to admit that to myself, even if it's true. I can't bear that kind of finality and besides, it's silly to worry about life beyond Purdue at this point. Regardless, I will miss my friends, students, neighbors, occupiers, homeless people, gangsters, tourists, ballers, lake birds, meditators, foodies, card players, smokers, drivers, bikers, the 72R, the DMV, my landlord, record stores, book stores, happiness, Mt. Diablo, sunsets, ocean air, the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, biodiesel, stability, sunshine and all things California. Long live California! All hail California!

Wow! It's over! I leave Oakland on June 5th. In the meantime I have a long list of things that I need to get done to be ready to go. Packing and mailing and closing accounts and selling my bike, finishing grades, car stuff, and seeing people on my way out of town. On Friday I'm taking the cats to back to San Francisco for the summer, to be with their previous owner as I'm off gallivanting around the country. Come September, after settling in to my new place in Lafayette Indiana, Amy's going to put them on a plane and send them out to me. In theory. Of course they don't know this. Possibly, can't know this, but we have five more days together.

School ended well. My Thursday class was as usual, fun to be with and they did good work on their presentations. One of the best (most attentive, talkative, academically accomplished) classes I have had at the Academy, and it felt really good to be done with that class. On my way back to BART I sat in the Larry Halprin designed park just off the Embarcadero, smoked a few cigarettes and watched the sun disappear behind the buildings. Glowing. It really feels like I accomplished something in the last six plus years of teaching. Not as a teacher, (though that would be good, it's hard to know really how much or little I've impacted the lives of students,) but more so personally, that I've come a long way as a human.

Teaching was so hard for so long. Every class was exhausting and stressful. In the summer of 2010, after coming back from my second mediation course, I rewrote the rhetoric class, and ever since then teaching has been different. Something about the combination of being physically comfortable in the front of a class and the realization that students engage when they are challenged, just like everybody else. Being nice is nice but being consistent and holding people to expectations is better. For my Friday class, my official last class, I will have to fail four students when I do grades later this week. Speaking of which, I need to get on with things this morning. Happy Monday. Happy Summer.

It's the last week of school. Tensions are running high. This is the last week of my last semester. Five plus years. On Friday a student gave a presentation about using crystal meth to revitalize Las Vegas. It was an argument, and an obvious piece of satire coming from a former addict. Was it a good idea to let him present this in class? Maybe not. As is with all satire, the danger is that somebody might think you're serious, and one student did. Following the presentation she asked why he was allowed to make a joke of the proposal argument and she wasn't. I responded that he did good work, came to class on time, turned in all of his assignments, and spoke with me frequently about this project. Tensions are running high. She threatened to tell the Liberal Arts department. Teaching moments. I'm still learning.

Song

I wouldn't
embarrass you
ever.

If there were
not place
or time for it,

I would go,
go elsewhere,
remembering.

I would
sit in a
flower, a face, not

to embarrass
you, would
be unhappy

quietly, would
never
make a noise.

Simpler,
simpler you
deal with me. 


          -Robert Creeley

When does a person die? We know a person as a living organism, but when they die, their body is still alive, full of bacteria. The bacteria keeps going. Or when somebody is in a coma. The body keeps going. Of course it sounds like a silly question, because we know when a person is dead, and when a person is alive. But how? How do we know this? The medical definition is when a heart stops beating, yet that is not death either, as people come back from that condition all the time. And if they come back, where is it that they come back to?

When my dad was first sent to a care facility, for some reason at that moment it occurred to me that his condition is definitive proof that there is no heaven and by default, no afterlife at all. How could any creature, divine or otherwise, be able to make a distinction between optimal states of one's being? If I lose my hand in real life, does it come back to me in heaven? Or if I lose my marbles, does the afterlife put them back in? Of course not, as no divine force would work on a scale of human aesthetics. There is no way to separate the inner workings of a disease such as Pick's, and the expanse of one's personality. There is no dividing line. Biologist's mapped the entire brain of the incredibly simple roundworm, and found that even in a creature this stupid there is actually not one brain, but three brains in one, a network constantly modifying, responding to, and changing the neurons and synapses of the other two. Now imagine how complex our brains must be. How could anything know where to draw the line on a thing that never stop changing, and say, "Here. Here is where this creature was most perfect and from here they will live on."

Questions like these, questions that have no answers, point to problems not with divinity, but with how we think about ourselves. Specifically, that we are entities, distinct from each other and from the world around us. That we are special because we have a unique ability to articulate, observe, and control our surroundings in ways that are light years ahead of anything else on the planet. We are different from other creatures, and not only that, we are different from each other. It's a real skill and helps us divide the screws from the nuts so we can spend our lives putting together airplanes instead of searching for food. We are special because we exist on a plane once removed from the world of animals.We dwell in reason and abstraction, and because of this, we are different than cats or plants.

We don't know how or why the universe got started but we can trace it back to a single point. We can know how old the universe is by measuring the distance that light travels. We assume that life arose out of a primordial sludge. That this substance and that substance, carbon and water and maybe something else, banged against each other, randomly, and somehow, something came to life. In some pool, or pond, or crater or boulder, a microscopic spark leapt between two inanimate objects. Perhaps this happened on our planet, perhaps it happened somewhere else, and was delivered to our planet. We don't know. But we assume that we are made of the same things that stones are made of, though arranged differently.

That said, as far as we know, life comes from life. That's the only way we've gotten to it. As much as we've accomplished in the realm of science, we haven't come up with a way to create a living cell out of something that was not already alive. What's so mysterious to me about even the simplest (compared to us) organism, such as a tree, is the impulse to grow. If it really is a biochemical reaction of proteins triggering DNA triggering proteins triggering growth, why aren't we able to replicate this? Even if we are complex machines, built out of matter, what is this strange will to be alive that everything living thing has? Is it just the result of a chemical equation playing itself out? An algorithm to gather nutrients? To say nothing of our experience of being (which is more of a philosophical question), more so than reason, I feel like this "will to live" is something I have in common with everything that is also alive. We want to be here. Perhaps this is the most fundamental thing we can know about who we are.

Counter intuitive as it might seem, it makes more sense to think of ourselves as blips in a river a consciousness rather than blips in the void of space. That we appear and disappear not from nothing, but from something that is already there. It's a Buddhist idea, and most definitely something that I cannot speak to with any kind of authority. However it answers questions like what happens after death and where did we come from and what is our purpose by short circuiting the logic: we never die. I mean, we die yes, our individual consciousnesses die, but parts of us live on. The sperm and the zygote growing up and replicating times a zillion billion. And even when the last human disappears, life continues. We only die if "we" are what we think, our intellect and personality and reason. A cat pays as close attention to the world as we do, as does a single celled organism. It's just that they pay attention to different things. 

What is this thing called attention and what is the will that keeps us afloat? I've quoted it before, George Oppen and the poem "World, World--": "The self is no mystery, the mystery is/ That there is something for us to stand on." Yeah. How strange it is to be anything at all (to quote Jeff Magnum). And so ideas of the soul and the self, ridiculous as they sound now to our cynical and scientific ears, a glowing ball leaving one's body and haunting a closet or finding it's way into a new born, seem completely couched in dead end ideas of who and what we are. I'd venture to say that much of western science comes from the presumption that things, including ourselves, are distinct and separate from each other. A worldview that is wonderful for sorting and working methodically, but is not so helpful when it comes to being with other living things. Instead of stars punched out of nothingness, alone in the night sky, what if the night sky is just another way for the stars to be? What if the answers to our questions have been with us the entire time?

Warm and sunny in Oakland. Yesterday Bill and I went for a hike in the Redwoods, came back to Oakland and had a burrito. A good day. Today is Monday and I don't have to go to work and in fact, it sort of feels like the semester is already over. The fifth round of a papers is finished (though I have a few stragglers to read in the next couple days) and all that's left is collecting the final drafts and the presentations. No more deadlines, progress grades, lesson planning or student wrangling, and I can just sit back more or less and enjoy the next couple weeks. I told my Friday class, that since they're my last class at my current institution, they better do a good job on their presentations, that I don't want to go out on a bad note. As they say, the quality of your last thought determines the first thought of your new life. I'll let you know if it works.

My apologies for lack of context for last week's posting of a Ted Berrigan poem. For some reason I've always liked that sonnet. Don't know what it means but I'm 18 so why are my hands shaking? It came to mind two weekends ago during Buddyfest, but I'm not going to go into that. Instead I need to register for classes in the fall and pay some bills. The total damage of my fractured thumb (won't be able to softly pinch for three months or fully use my left hand for six months) has come to be about 1,800 dollars, which, not having much of an insurance plan is kind of a bummer. That said, my hand doctor has been really great, and has cut me a break on payment because of my limited insurance. It seems important that my left (opposable) thumb heal correctly, bi-pedal descendent of the ape and all.

On the front page of the Sunday paper was a longer article about frontotemporal dementia, which is something I know a little bit about as my dad has had it since 1999 (and probably many years previous to that). The article does a pretty good job explaining the specific characteristics of the disease (that it changes personality, language, social interactions), as well as injecting lots of narrative to "show and not tell" about the disease. Most articles about dementia are about Alzheimer's, so it's nice to read something in the mainstream about "Pick's Disease." I miss my dad.

II

Dear Margie, hello. It is 5:15 a.m
dear Berrigan. He died
Back to books. I read
It's 8:30 p.m. in New York and I've been running around all day
old come-all-ye's streel into the streets. Yes, it is now,
How Much Longer Shall I Be Able To Inhabit the Divine
and the day a bright gray turning green
feminine marvelous and tough
watching the sun come up over the Navy Yard
to write scotch-tape body in a notebook
had 17 and 1/2 milligrams
Dear Margie, hello. It is 5:15 a.m.
fucked til 7 now she's late to work and I'm
18 so why are my hands shaking I should know better


                        -Ted Berrigan, from The Sonnets

Happy May Day. Workers of the world unite. Today is a bay area General Strike, many coordinated actions to stand against, slow down, or stop the powers that be / the 1%. Here is a schedule of today's events. Hopefully I will be able to get enough grading done to make the evening rally, though the literature says to stop everything I would normally  do. Yet there is a stack of student papers that I need to read to stay on schedule, both my schedule and the schedule of making money for the for-profit institution I'm working for. Somebody is honking a horn, somebody else is speaking on a bullhorn, and a helicopter keeps buzzing around. It's ironic and hypocritical and doesn't make any sense but I have to break eggs to make omelets. How best to revolt?

On the left is my left thumb, newly diagnosed as a fracture. You can see a little tip pointing pointing to the center of the ball? That is part of the fracture and it divides the bone on the way to the finger nail. On the right is my right thumb, which, as you can see, is smooth. My new doctor said it will take a year for the swelling to completely subside. He also said said that the FPL tendon attaches at the volar lip of the distal phalanx. The volar lip of the distal phalanx. The volar lip of the distal phalanx...

The people who park their cars around Lake Merritt have always been strange to me. Usually on the east side of the lake, when I walk around or run around, or decide to go sit and read or whatever, I see them. They sit in their cars, usually with the windows rolled down, sometimes napping, sometimes reading, sometimes smoking or chatting, texting, or hanging out with their girl, behind tinted windows or in trucks, or in an Acura Legend with the windows cracked and sometimes there's music, gospel or classical or the quiet boom of dampened bass. I think, why would a person want to sit in a car? When they could get out, sit on the grass or a bench, and everybody can see them just sitting there. Why would a person go out of their way, to drive here to sit in their car?

So yesterday, now that I have a car I like to sit in, on my way back from buying cat food, with a back pack full of papers to grade (A-, D, B-, D+, B+ etc.) I pulled into a spot and cracked the windows, pushed back my seat, and sat by the lake in my car. A breeze came through. The sounds of sea gulls and pairs of a walkers chatting, walking through the frame and disappearing. I could see the wind blowing in on the lake, the rowers rowing and across the water, the boat house and the over priced restaurant, and behind that, the skyline of downtown Oakland. The sun was high enough to shine but the piece of metal and plastic that separates the windshield from the driver side door blocked the glare. Nobody paid me any attention at all.

People watching. Though not really, a couple hours trying to get work done. Did I mention it was quiet? Maybe home is not so much and it's hard to catch a nap at work. But you'll see that all the time in certain neighborhoods. On Dara's street, the one that lines the creek she sees them too. Sitting, mostly napping or texting. California. With a car I feel that I'm entering the main stream of Oakland. Merging like a blood cell into a major artery, swept up and moving toward the center. The center of what I don't know. The man who pulled in next to me gave me a nod. My neighbor offered to help me parallel park. The guy at the gas station helped me figure out why the door kept sticking. California. Cars. People, and what we do.

Hi. How are you? Is conversation a lost art? I don't know but have read a lot in the last week about how lonely, shallow, and isolated we are. In the New Yorker, one about Couch Surfing . com and the other about that book about living alone. I gave the magazine away so can't quote from either article at the moment, but they both keep pointing to our strong desire to surround ourselves with people like ourselves. On the radio this morning a man spoke about the isolating properties of Facebook and the Sunday paper lead off with this article, about the fact that we don't talk to each other anymore. Talking about ourselves, talking about talking about ourselves. So, yesterday, I went for a hike instead. It was warm out and I got sweaty and there were pretty little blue flowers through the valley and up onto the ridge.

The good news is that my left thumb is much better. I took the slint/splint/sling off on Saturday, put it back on Sunday and am wearing it now. But it doesn't hurt like it did. On the road to recovery, though I won't be able to play basketball for some time, and the other thing, from the last knuckle up, my finger is rotated about five degrees counter-clockwise and I can't bend it more than a little. It's still quite swollen and looks like a prosthetic appendage, devoid of life attached to my hand. I should make another appointment but insuranceless, am hesitant. Watching the basketball game the other day, the announcer said, in reference to the player formerly known as Ron Artest, "Metta World Peace is going to do some damage in the playoffs."

Last, an excerpt from the introduction to Uncreative Writing, a book of essays by Kenneth Goldsmith about approaches to writing that involve anything but generating new material, from reappropriation to collage to sampling. I'm jealous of this assignment. He writes,

Each semester, for their final paper, I have them purchase a term paper from an online paper mill and sign their name to it, surely the most forbidden action in all of academia. Each student then must get up and present the paper to the class as if they wrote it themselves, defending it from attacks by the other students.

He sometimes holds classes entirely in Second Life, and when in a real classroom, encourages students to open their computers and plug in. I'm not sure if any of this is "good" but it's interesting. Hope all is well. It's overcast in Oakland today. Or better yet, check this out.

M y h an d is injured. The left thumb knuckle is HYPEREXTENSION INJURY/CONTUSION L THUMB AT DIP with a cast. So the good news is that I can write with the right hand but can't type with both so forget it. Here's one new song on the other blog.

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When the cats come and sleep on my legs I don't dream about cats. And when I eat late at night I don't dream about food. When I wake up I sometimes remember what I have dreamt because I mean to remember it. It's no secret: math is best explained by more math. The meaning of graffiti is to have somebody graffiti over it. The meaning of Sunday is Monday. The meaning of my dream is the meaning I give, a horoscope or asking a friend for guidance. Or asking an old man for forgiveness. Or when he's blind, in the dream, he asks me to ferry him across the street. The Earth is round and filled with oily water. The fact of fear reeks and hatred abounds.

It's Spring Break. Day three. Tomorrow I'm headed to DC and will be back Monday. Please excuse this temporary extraneous break in the action. It's been very busy outside of the regular routine. Saturday Sunday hang out events, and then Monday down to Santa Cruz, to visit friends and look at a car. Planning my move, and needing a car in Indiana, I bought one. Dara's driving it to work right now but it's somewhere around here. It's a real car, a little scary to own something that large, but I'm real excited to own a car again. As my mom said, "You like driving."

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