Facebook, because of that movie that I went to see last Friday and no I don't have any children though a lot of my friends do or will soon and yes it does make me feel a little bit like hm what am I doing with my life but it doesn't really matter what other people are doing until I begin to think about what other people are doing in the abstract which leads me back to Facebook, a site that I might log into once a month to reply to a message or write a message through because Facebook is not all that fun for me. Reading about what other people are doing or looking at pictures of ex-girlfriends is kind of painful because instantly my little lizard brain will start to compare itself with all those other bites and picas and pics or whatever else consists of our on-line selves. I read the google buzz because I'm already logged in and its mostly articles. Facebook creeps me out.

This period-lite writing inspired not just by that movie which is pretty good really fast and entertaining with music is done by our old friend Trent Reznor but just now I read this little article about another article about Mr. Reznor's views on Facebook such as this summary his of thoughts: "people don’t put their actual selves forward on the network and instead portray themselves as they want to be seen for whatever reason" which makes me think yeah what a bunch of fakers and then all of a sudden I find myself writing in a blog that I've been trying to post to on a regular basis since the summer and so far have been generally successful and recently I've noticed that the number of people reading the blog has been going up and I can attribute that to two changes; the first being consistency which is primarily the reason that more people visit but second, and maybe this is a distant second, removing the comment option the uncomfortable "0 comments" tag at the bottom of each post which always seemed to create the effect of speaking to an empty room regardless of whether anybody was reading or not.

But I want to circle back to Mr. Reznor's comment about Facebook, that is, of course its a false image that gets presented. That is to say I really overuse the phrase 'that is to say' or 'that said' but it seems useful. That is to say this blog, if it wasn't obvious, is actually not me. It's artifice intentionally made to do intentional things. Like a screwdriver or a banana cream pie. It depends on how I use it which depends on how I slept last night speaking of which the bar across from where I live was bumping the worst trance music I have ever laid in my bed for two hours listening to. I wrote them this letter: "Dear Amnesia, It's 1:45 AM. Your fucking shitty shitty techno/trance has been keeping me up for the last hour and a half. I've called the police. You are a fucking horrible neighbor...." It goes on. I don't know if that will change anything but it felt good to write. This fact of feeling also seems like a legitimate way to go about making choices.

On Sunday while making breakfast I broke my favorite cup. Here are its pieces,and its remainder:

On Tuesday, yesterday, I went to Henry's Hunan Restaurant and received this fortune,which corresponds nicely with the fortune below, in the sense that both talk about days of the week. The one mentions Tuesday specifically, and the other, since I received it on Tuesday, indicates that today, Wednesday is the day to give flowers. Which could happen, though I'm not sure what kind of opportunities I'll have for that today, as I'm working here in the morning, will be at work in the afternoon and then go to Oakland for therapy. I think what I'm going to do, speaking in the present, is give my cats some catnip which I think is a flower. Here goes:LLLLLL
Okay. Now that that's done, that the whole fortune for today has been resolved I can move on with my life. And by move on I mean show you the stamps that I bought on Monday on my way home from work: which I only bought because it was either these or a stamp that featured a painting of a violet (?) and the word LOVE. Barf! When the postal clerk told me I only had two options I said "Are you kidding me?" and then he said "No I'm not." And then I said "Okay I'll take the sailors." And then he said "Would you like cash back?" And then we proceeded in anonymity for the rest of our transaction and I went home. At any rate, I got up at five this morning. Mostly because I feel asleep at nine last night. Also because Henry's Hunan started a fire in my belly. It's a sunny day in San Francisco. Chance of showers said the guy on the radio but I think the chances are pretty slim. It's cooled off since last week and is back to normal. Last Friday a student in the writing lab informed me that in 2004, over 2 million Spiderman costumes were sold during the Halloween season. This morning I ate a delicious nectarine. Hope all is well. See you later.

]
]

Each semester in the persuasion and argument class I teach, the transition from personal issues to social issues is awkward. It's a little like, "okay, now instead of doing this, we're doing this," and the 'why' of our switch remains a little bit nebulous. In theory, writing about something important that happened in a-life-so-far leads into thinking about larger social issues; "the personal is political" or more specifically, everything we go through is something that many other people have also gone though. That our lives are examples of larger social and historical trends. The memoir is, for our purposes, a short narrative about a time when a person learns some kind of life lesson. "A time when I realized I was all alone in this cold and cruel world." Translating a subjective theme into a concrete argument requires some work.

On Friday, it was the point in the semester where we give it a shot, and this time it made little more sense than usual. We started with the chapter on narrative argument and discussed one of the essays at the end of the chapter, an essay by Leslie Marmon Silko about border patrols. We discussed implict and explicit reasoning and looked at on the diagram the book provided:
We worked to figure this "nipple" (as a student put it) diagram out. Say you write a story about being carjacked. Of course it's no fun to to be carjacked. You write, "he pressed the gun to my temple and told me to drive to the airport." This is a scary. From this feeling, our subjective reading experience, we conjure up a reason for being scared: I am scared because there is a strange man in my car threatening to kill me if I don't drive him to the airport. Or in simplified terms, I am in danger (vs. the objective viewpoint, this is a dangerous situation). From this reason we create a 'claim': lock your doors; and in turn, an argument: lock your doors because carjackers are dangerous.

That's about 45 minutes of class time condensed. What's neat about this little system is that it explains how the stories we tell are, in a sense, arguments for certain world views. We all know this in a sense, but the mechanisms that actually persuade are hidden, and it's helpful to see them. Granted that all forms or rhetoric (finding the best means of persuasion) require a little hoo-ha/ magical thinking/ faith that somebody is listening, but the point of beginning the class with a memoir is to ground argument in the personal. To show that the reason we are arguing about prop. 19 or tax cuts is not because it's an intellectual game, which it can be and has seemingly turned into on the national level, but because we live in our bodies and experience feeling. Right or wrong aside, we all have preferences for how we like to feel. These preferences color everything we do, including the stories we tell.

"Idea City" 2005, acrylic on wood and then some Photoshop. Click to enlarge.

In the Fall of 2005 I was working on a house that sat across from Van Hise Elementery and Middle school. Everyday at around 7:30 the little children would line up to be let in. Soon they would be bored to tears and looking forward to recess. Meanwhile, I painted the house. The above painting is made out of the negative shapes cut from primer applied just above the garage. I took a picture of each square, so as , , x38. Then took Photoshop and got rid of the white and then began to play around with the shaggy red squares. I wasn't about to write any of this before my roommate walked in and said:"you should tell the story of how you made it."

Yesterday the MacArthur grant winners were revealed. David Simon, the guy who made The Wire and Treme, amongst other things, got one. If you follow the link you'll find a little video interview with each winner. Mr. Simon's is particularly interesting to me because The Wire taught me more about how the world (or at least the US) works than most anything. In the video he speaks about moving from journalism into TV producing (when newspapers started to go bad in the mid 90's), and that he basically does the same thing in television that he used to do in op-ed journalism, that is, making arguments. Which is a helpful way to think of The Wire; as an argument rather than a drama. That the "Dickensian" nature of the characters was actually a side effect of the ideas in play. By that I mean each season targets a particular area and makes a case for how, in general, the US is no longer concerned with dreaming and progressing as a unified group, and instead is splintering into factions of small groups out for themselves. "The end of empire," as Mr. Simon calls it, and we're steeling ourselves for famine.

On a sad note, RIP Michael Gizzi, a poet and one of my teachers in graduate school, has died. He was one of the warmest parts of a particularly cold two years in Rhode Island. He stood in for CD a few times in workshop, and I took a class on improvisational writing with him. He was always supportive of me and my work, and was one of my favorite people at Brown. He will be missed.

It's hot in San Francisco. It's been hot in San Francisco, since Thursday. In class on Thursday the thermostat read 83 degrees. Each student wore a unique expression of misery as we talked about "On the Function of the Line" an essay by Denise Levertov, an amazingly useful piece of theory, explaining what line breaks do for our reading of poetry and discussing closed and open forms. If that doesn't sound exciting to you than imagine talking about those things in a hot and stuffy tiny room. It didn't work. Misery in the body does not lead to much. We moved to another room.

I read some memoirs for the persuasive writing class on Saturday morning, which is unusual because I try to put off reading papers for as long as possible, a job that doesn't take that long but the constant judgment (do more of this, do less of this) is draining in a particular way. It would be nice if teaching didn't require that the teachers evaluate the students but I'm not sure it's called teaching if you take that part of out of it. That's more like an after school club. "There are no wrong answers." Nobody likes to hear that from a teacher. Anyway, it's hot. The cats are really slow. Slow hot cats baking in the sun. Later on Saturday I helped C move for the second time in six weeks. The upshot of that is that six weeks isn't a lot of time to acquire much stuff, like a leather couch or an entertainment center.

At night we to see Mt. Kimbie play with Bill and three hundred other people that I had never seen before in my life. It was strange. Maybe walking down Valencia, sitting in Dolores, biking downtown, tooling around the city, people generally look familiar, like, mission hipsters or business downtowners. At da club I didn't recognize anybody. Of course it was fun. Mt. Kimbie was a little dissapointing as the sound was all booty bass, but the Brit DJ Mary Anne Hobbs that played before them played records that sounded really good. Real deal dub-step and goofy noisy reggae and hip-hop from the UK. Really loud. It's supposed to be hot all week. Happy Fall.

See It Say It

We wandered around the parking lot driving around pop cans and donut boxes. If you're good at your job you can kick the bottom of the door or bang the top of the VCR. The earth spins in silence. Another reason why we won't worry ourselves to sleep or rock the vote or nothing or just forget it. The void of voidness through indiscretion. We're always wandering around slapping each other on the back collars wider than ever we walk around the gap slowly, replacing batteries and new shoes with mud and raindrops, running through channels and grooves. No puddles, but a red bell of fire reflected in mud.

Self-Love

One thing I like about myself
is that I'm lonely.
It allows for a particular distance,
an industry insider whose views
are shared, nodding around the conference table
or a poet's poet. Each
idea, when I'm alone, is singular
and perfect.

Yesterday I learned a couple things. Number 1: a "bit" is in reference to the number of shades that a computer is capable of displaying color in. For example if you have "red" being displayed in 16-bit there are 65, 536 shades of that red available. If it's 8-bit, there are only 256 shades of that red available. Why is this important to me? Because growing up my brother and I played the Sega Genesis and in raised silvery letters on the surface of the console was the mysterious phrase: 16-Bit. I've wondered what that meant for twenty years and now I know. So now when that skinny guy in a tunic kicks the stones and a blue orb floats out and he eats it and turns into a werewolf capable of shooting fireballs at the undead rising from ruins of ancient Greece, I know that there are 65, 536 possibilities to render the color of his eyes, and the whites of his eyes.

I could of looked the information up on Wikipedia but as you can see it's not all that helpful. People talking is helpful. You can see their lips moving and things come out of their mouths and bodies. Their hands move, they erase things with their fingers and when a students ask questions things come out like spit and sound and heat and words. So, 16-Bit and more, from supporting a digital photography class on Tuesday mornings. I also learned things like what the f-stop is on a camera, ISO, shutter speed, depth of field, "opening up", "closing down", and how this stuff actually impacts what a shot looks like. It made me want to take out my dad's old camera and put some film in it and there lies the problem: what would I take pictures of?

The second thing I learned yesterday I can't remember. But, something I learned last week about dyslexia, how research done in the last ten years has determined that dyslexia might actually be rooted in how our auditory systems processes sound, that certain people have trouble hearing certain sounds, and therefore the spelling and reading of words comes off as an unsolvable mystery, one where there aren't enough clues to make a confident guess. For some a big old psychological block pops up, where it seems like written language is magic, a logic beyond comprehension that leads to a certain hopelessness and a diagnosis, at the very best. All this because yesterday I lead three pronunciation workshops where we work on pulling apart how English and the American accent works. It's pretty interesting. Like how the most common vowel sound in American English is the 'uh' as in 'bus', or more commonly, "Uhhh. I don't know."

Where were we? In bed my brother called me in the morning no my sister called me no Emily called me in the late morning we were sleeping. I wasn't sleeping I was awake, getting up to go to work on the tip the steady tip of BCT Printing the business card delivery place a good summer but it was fall I was dating Toshiko and woke up at her apartment the sick sweaty sleep that we were so fond of but I secretly despised a smell that was unusual a smell that I have never smelled before and never smelled since but it was the combination of our flesh the combination of our sweat and we were sleeping through. If the planes hit at 9 o'clock it was six o'clock in Seattle and there was no wake up call she was not from around there or here but at least she had a television and at least she had a good time in Seattle before she went back to Japan I miss her, but alas time is short I write but not enough the world is a short course timing meter jump shot course and I was awake by nine thirty and oblivious to the pull of the world in that apartment and Emily she called and I answered the call a great sweeping gesture the greatest love of all and I scrambled to listen to the radio in my dingy apartment and tune in and called her and turned her on and called her to tell her to turn on the television and the weight of a thousand dollops and the third generation of whiners and the beginning and the end and the start of the news coverage and the war on terror and the president speaking and the wails of people and that evening I went over to Joel's apartment to watch the footage on television and even on that day we were complaining about how often they showed it over and over again and over again.

From Today's Paper. Happy Ramadan.

Sitting down at my desk after a long nap. Usually on Tuesdays I'll support a digital photography class in the morning, eat lunch, do a shift in the speaking lab, maybe run a study group, and go home. A full day, but today it was a half day. After the support class I wandered over to the new ESL building, or set up, or get up, which is now located in an office that used to be a start up, so it's all nice and new and open and fancy and is totally consolidated, along with student services and tutoring. It's kind of awesome to have everybody in one place, which is unusual for a school that is spread out across the city, the biggest private land holder in the city of San Francisco yet not one of the buildings is next to another and the dream of a centralized campus and the community it would instantly create is a long ways off. At least a few of the departments are together.

I wandered up to see where the writing lab was for my shifts starting on Thursday, randomly ran into Scott who taught me easy grade pro, saw Sarah, Bob, George, etc. half of everybody who works there and ended up spending an hour an a half at "work." Which before everybody was in the same place was physically impossible. Though now that it's a wide open office I wonder if the social-ness will get in the way of work. I long for any office or a similar set up in the Liberal Arts department but that's not going to happen so never mind. It's windy out. Summer is over according to the calender and the weather and the media. It's kind of a confusing time for me at the moment, coming back from travels and not in any kind of creative rhythm, social rhythm, work rhythm etc. and in addition I'm falling into somebody so that also takes me away from this kind of thing, sitting in front of my computer and thinking out loud. Plus it's just confusing, trying to keep track of myself and be charming at the same time. "Just be yourself." Exactly. Excitement as a smoke machine and being happy on my own. It's much much easier. Case in point.

This summer was pretty great. Very productive and relaxing. I wrote a chapbook that given a little more revision and adding in a few more pieces will mean I actually have something to show for it. By it I mean summer. Which is over. Begin again. The lamp post shaking in the wind. Kitty girl has been insane since I got back from traveling, puking and full of anxiety. I finished the second book of The Hunger Games and am trying to figure out a way to get the third one for cheap. In technology news I have been given access to Google's new App creation software so I'm excited to get it working and start in on a few ideas I've had. That, writing, music projects to finish but the second main event this Fall is going to be residency and grant applications. I'd like to take next year off. A sabbatical. I say that every year. Every ear. Nary a dry eye in the house. Shaky trees and the kind out side. I've quit smoking habitually though not situationally which maybe means I haven't quit smoking. I like ice cream.

)
)
Happy Labor Day! Every store I walked past today was open. Happy Labor Day!

Does what we put inside of us affect what comes out? Is it e-ffect as opposed to a-ffect? I will not indulge my second guesser. I'm stalling. The plan was to write a list of everything I can remember from the last seven days, three in Kentucky four in Madison, but I ate at the A & W in the Minneapolis airport and am wondering if my recall will be colored by cheeseburger. One of the best things about airports, fast food restaurants, and combinations of airports and fast food restaurants is their guaranteed anonymity. The lack of context and expectations that come with context. I don't feel bad about eating fast food in airports because nobody I know will see me: no expectations. Unlike a trip to see family and old friends, old palaces and old restaurants. For the first time I wondered if the squash curry I love at the Vientiane Palace in Madison contains MSG.

In Kentucky spent a lot of time with Uncle Jim. Do I capitalize Uncle? He gave me two hats and cousin David let me take a third. After a day with Jim the rest of my family sans elders came: brother, in-law, sister, niece and we stayed at my great Aunt Jean's house who died last last January but the house hasn't sold yet. My two point five year old nicece fell in the pool behind the house by accident, was quickly scooped out, but she had a nightmare that night and told her dad when she woke up, "swimming pools are for grown-ups." Three days of donuts, second cousin Emily's soccer game, chicken salad, a trip to Wal-Mart, swimming, heat, crossword puzzles, Jim's eye, a mammoth's tooth, napping w/my brother, time-zone adjustment, Ebay, that chair made out of horns, a picture of Peanut, and Beatrix and Zane squealing together on the sideline.

On Friday I flew out of Lexington to Detroit, and then on to Madison. J made Pizza. On Saturday I went with my mom up to the horse ranch and brushed her horse Oliver. Also learned how to walk behind a horse before I left and went up to visit my dad at Clearview, where he was sitting in a chair. I spoke with one of the younger caretakers. She was cute but her heavy eye make-up scared me a little. She asked if my dad was a photographer. I said yes, back in the day. I told her about his history in Southern Wisconsin care facilities over the last seven years. It was her fourth month on the job. I wanted to speak to the head nurse about his fever two weeks ago but she wasn't there. I told my dad I would come back on Tuesday, which is kind of like telling myself. I left to go pick up my mom from the horse ranch.

I was depressed the rest of the day. That night I sat with Anna and Kwame by the lake. At this point this blog posting is getting a little long so I will speed it up. On Sunday I went out to Mineral Point to visit Ted as well as Joe and Christy, who were firing the kiln (i'm in the blue hat looking into a fiery little hole). That was probably the most exciting part of my trip. Went to bed early and did school work on Monday, saw my step-brother, and hung out with Nate and Megan in their last pre-Phd moments. There's more but I need to go to bed because I have to get up and finish planning for tomorrow's class. In transit I started reading "The Hunger Games" trilogy which is pretty fun to read, if you're looking for young adult science fiction. to read on an airplane and at your parents house. I will leave you with this image from today's edition of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Back home after an insane weekend with old friends a couple hours north in a rented house on a Point Reyes ranch. I can't stop crying, not from sadness but as a result of my depressed and abused system. Twenty minutes after leaving the ranch I vomited four times out the left passenger door. Relapse and recovery. On the brighter side, friend Cole came in early last week and we toured the city on bike. We looked at art and ate burritos, talked about music and went to a Kurosawa movie, met up with friends and went grocery shopping. On Thursday more friends came in then on Friday we went up to the ranch. So beautiful and calm. Sheep and a swampy pond. Home to the Strauss creamery, which happens to make my favorite yogurt and we ate dinner. Joked and made jokes, smoked cigarettes and drank. On Saturday we went hiking up to Bass lake and beyond to a water fall by the beach. Followed by drinking. Followed by multiple layers of hangover. I wouldn't have it any other way, but only once a year.

Tomorrow I leave for Kentucky to see my uncle, cousins, second cousins, brother, sister, brother-in-law, and niece. On Friday I leave from Kentucky to go up to Wisconsin to see mother, step-father, aunt, aunt's wife, step-brother, old friends, and my dad. I'll have four full days so it's not much time but enough. I come back here a week from Wednesday and start school on Thursday. Much to do today to get ready to go and be gone and be ready to come back. Unlike last week I will have my computer and will be in touch. In the meantime, here's a Kimiko Hahn poem from the June issue of Harper's. I found it on a scrap torn from the magazine while cleaning out my bag this morning:

Xenicus Longipes

The four known species of bush wren in New Zealand
are, by now, endangered or extinct.
Possessing trifling tails and wings, none fly far—
instead they hop and dart
in whatever undergrowth scrapes the landscape.
Those on Cook Strait's margin of rock
entirely lost the capacity for flight
and in 1894 were destroyed not by farmers,
hunters, pet traders, rats, disease,
natural disaster or want of food—
but by Tibble, the lighthouse keeper's cat.
Oh, what we think we need to survive kills others:
I have consuming need for my beloved, he knows—
and I hope he is not sorry.

3 Reasons to Write

Missing hearing the sound of English and reading, sitting up in the room drawing, but more importantly the realization that my Japanese professors didn't read the papers I wrote, I started writing about ridiculous things, Haiku and moon men for poetry class, urinating in the alleyways for a class on Japanese law. It was so easy to write what I was interested in, rather than force my words into imagined expectations. Wow. It blew my mind, the idea to write whatever I want to write, and the discovery that there lots of things to write.

__"In the first half of the poem, I said that our school had the finest teachers there ever were. And in the latter half, I said our class was the greatest class ever graduated. So at graduation, when I read the poem, naturally everybody applauded loudly."
__"That was the way I began to write poetry." Langston Hughes,
_____________________________________-The Big Sea

Morning in San Francisco. I've been dreaming of acid reflux, the feeling I get when failure appears. Dreaming dreaming dreaming. I dreamt I had no Christmas presents to give. I dreamt of fighting with students. For a while, two weeks ago I dreamt of things bigger than myself I dreamt I kept moving, not giving up like Senator Joe Biden or the McCain campaign.

Update on Sunday's post / sick and dying news: they gave him anti-biotics and attribute these to knocking out the bacterial infection, thereby the fever and thereby he's able to ingest liquids and food again because he is able to swallow. It is relieving to hear this though it only puts off the inevitable. "Of two minds," whether to keep him going or let him go. I feel relieved because I don't have to think about it anymore today. I feel embarrassed, amongst some, because I was so upset over the weekend.

One of the hard to explain realities about Pick's disease is the on-going, non-finite nature of disintegration, and his now, 5 year long stasis in a vegetable like state. It's been almost twelve years since diagnosis. On average, when a person is diagnosed with a form of dementia they live seven more years. It's been almost twelve since he was diagnosed. How does one die from dementia? Usually from a bacterial infection, like pneumonia, which the body is unable to fight off because parts of the immune system have shut down. Or the brain eventually loses its basic motor functions, like that of swallowing. Because he was relatively young upon diagnosis, and because of the nature of Pick's disease, attacking some different parts of the brain than say, Alzheimer's, he manages to keep going.

Part of me is proud of this kind of fortitude, the idea that I'm descended from these genes, the kind that fight with other patients and try to escape from institutions. The rebellious and difficult kind. Another part of me would like for the ambiguity of his situation to be over. It's a sunny day in SF. It's been getting incrementally warmer over the last four days. On Saturday I saw the movie "Inception" alone, at ten in morning. I highly recommend this as a way to see movies. I thought it was pretty good. Smart and well made and beautiful. In the afternoon I spent time with a friend who has gone though similar situations as the one with my dad. Nothing feels better than being understood.

On Friday morning my sister called and told me that that the care facility in central Wisconsin had called to tell her that my father had gotten a fever and had lost his ability to swallow. How the two problems relate to each other I don't know. The question my sister had for me, and my brother who she called just before, was the question of giving approval or disapproval for a feeder tube. We unanimously said "No. There's no point to keeping him alive in the condition he's in." His main nurse was off for the weekend so they said let's wait and see. Maybe the fever will pass and he'll get his swallow back. On Saturday night my sister wrote an email reporting that my dad had swallowed around 340 ccs of liquid. We'll know more on Monday when the nurse comes back. It's been a difficult weekend.

Karma

I sat with my brain dead father in the crazy ward, and got up to leave not wanting to be there any longer. I asked my mother if she hurt herself.

I went to Sunday School to get out of church.

Jerry and I picked Kurt up from the bottom of the stairs and set him in a chair.

I let the student fail.

"I'm tired of feeling superior to other people."

One student gave a proposal presentation yesterday that involved distributing a Whopper and speaking in front of a giant American flag. He advocated handing out MREs (meals ready to eat, standard military issue) instead of welfare payments that could be abused. Another student used pictures of the class, including me, from our visit to the SF Public Library, and placed thought bubbles coming out of our mouths with captions such as "Weed!" and "300! Go Spartans!" My caption had me referring to my students as my "sons." She also included a picture of herself in her power point presentation, and bullet points listing her traits including "worked in the video game industry" and "beautiful." It was one of the better presentations.

This 202 section has been great, very laid back and fun to be with. Even better, all of them noticeably improved as writers, or at least improved as far as writing the way I advocate. Thier papers and arguments came out: maybe Esperanto is the only second language anybody needs to learn. Maybe I will support Prop. 18. Maybe we should put a finger print reader on video game consoles. Maybe we should have a mandatory two year conscription policy. Maybe vocational programs in high school should be prioritized. Maybe we should promote morally responsible television programming. Maybe this experience off sets the terrible section I had over the spring semester. Maybe I'll put off grading papers and doing final grades.

*

It's difficult to say goodbye. The end of a class always makes me a little bit sad, and a because I'm holding back; a little bit awkward. This awkwardness leads to paranoia, and all of a sudden I'm interpreting the statement "the child's face is pure but in fact they are lying to their mother" and its accompanying visual argument to be about my secret life as a scuz bucket. Sad feelings mutating into strange, self-centered thoughts. The question is to embrace the sentimentality or avoid it. Either way, the end of class is an odd mix of relief and apologies. Maybe it's just difficult to accept the end of anything. And yet, I'm still here, regardless of whether I accept it or not. "It's always the same damn day." And I mean that in a good way.

This weekend I helped C the subletter move some of her things into her new place in preperation for C the roommate's return this evening. The cats have been confused all summer long. It's been cold. They're used to it. Bothways. All the moving around inspired me to reorganize my room, which makes it sound like I'm thirteen, so maybe I'll call it my space which is a little bit more sophisticated but again takes us back to something else. It's not my apartment so I can't call it that. I got it: my bedroom, which isn't exactly true, since my bed is in the closet, but it's close enough. My office / sitting room / cat palace. Who cares. Anyway, I moved stuff around from four in the afternoon on Saturday until two o'clock in the afternoon the next day.

It was a total waste of time. Friend S suggested that it was theraputic in the sense that it fulfilled a need to destroy something. Mm. Maybe. But I pretty much put everything back where I found it, coming to the realization that it had gotten it right the first time around. Anyway, in the process I did some mega cleaning and found this piece of paper, written when I was nineteen and fresh off the plane in Japan (click to enlarge to read):

In more current discoveries, I've been really enjoying the new Mount Kimbie album "Crooks & Lovers." This song is my favorite thus far but it's all nice. That, and the new Joanna Newsom album, which came out four or five months ago, where it's taken me this long to listen to the three discs enough to get to know it as something other than homework. Such an amazing writer she is. Okay. The sun is out and I need to go where they pay me. Tomorrow is the last day of the semester. Ya.

2 Poems About Food with Similar Endings

Beans & Rice

Eat this food
park dude.
Don't fall asleep
in the dark, because if you don't
somebody else might.



Scooping Granola

I've begun to go
for the rasp-
berries because "If I don't
somebody else will."

Wens-day mor-ning, clap-clap clapclapclap It's kind of cold in San Francisco. Not cold like an ice cube or a cat ear, but cold like it tends to be here in the summer. Temperate, but in and out come the winds and clouds. Since June, it's overcast in the mornings until the sun burns the clouds off, which is usually around noon; it's nice for about 3 or 4 hours, and if the wind isn't blowing you can sit on the grass and read a book or find a big bag of pot like I did on Monday (the third one I've found in this city: imagine the stoned dude who's pocket it fell out of, and his moment of realization). But around five the wind comes back with the clouds and I'm so cold when I ride my bike back from school/work. Dress in layers they tell us. In theory, summer here doesn't start until August, and September is one of the warmer months. Weather weather weather weather. Weather weather.

Here is an article about higher education that Cole put up on Google Buzz this morning, another article that basically says universities suck and degrees have no value, the teachers are overpaid, the administrators are greedy, text books are a rip offs, adjunct teachers (like me!) are slaves, etc. etc. and all of this may be true, but it's a little disheartening to read all these comments about money to say nothing of the value of an education or more fundamentally, the impulse to improve ourselves and the faith in unseen results that it requires. That said, it's supposed to be difficult. When I say it, I mean everything. In my case, it's freaking hard to teach. It's not hard to show up, but having been doing it for almost five years, only recently does it feel like I'm doing more good than harm. Maybe people who post on the internet experience a similar learning curve.

Anywho, the cats are cold. Kitty Girl is laying on top of Jinx. I've been slowly reading a book called The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton, which I've been enjoying. It's kind of pop philosophy about work, annoyingly overwritten but really funny because pretentious verboseness is a strange way to talk about the cookie manufacturing process in England. That probably didn't sell the book but oh well. That's the update. The semester ends a week from today and then I'll have three weeks off to gallivant about; do a little construction, spend time with old friends, and head back to the middlewest to see family. In the mean time:

p.s. you may notice that i've removed the "comment" tab that usually appears at the bottom of postings. two reasons: a better visual flow, and to get rid of the awkward decision to comment or not. please send me an email if you have a response. or, if you really want the comment option back, let me know.

Sunday at Dolores

Two kids playing on the grass
"Don't throw~(unintelligible)", a young mother commands their attention.
Two boys.
"No More, No More."
"Gabe, bring it to me."
Gabe is throwing something.
He doesn't know what he's done wrong.
"Wha'd you find, a pine cone?" said the non-father young man.
"Why don't we start a little smaller."
He's not entirely comfortable: I wouldn't listen to him either.
"Luke you have to stay close, man."
I'm afraid for him but am hopeful he'll find a way.
"The sun is in the way? Why don't we go there."
This is a question.
Little friend has had enough.
"...you probably could but I'm not going to be able to catch it."
"I'm hungry," says older one.

*
Purpose comes out of comfort with metaphor, one thing standing in for another. For example, "these objects in the outer solar system are the blood spattered on the wall after some violent murder" (Mike Brown, Discover Magazine May 2009). That to use a metaphor one must have a deep understanding of the process one is using. And backwards, to make the leap into abstraction indicates experiential knowledge of a concept. Purpose is a clear image.

**
My psychoanalyst suggested the reason I was interested in the headline "ARE WE STILL EVOLVING?" is because I am interested in my own personal evolution. I see how the logic works, but I'm also interested in evolution as a non-personal subject to read about on the train ride home. Sure we can trace something back to a person's psychology, using what we know to interpret the signs they flash, but doesn't that discount the person's experience?

The possibility that my deepest subconscious thoughts are cliches is a terrifying thought. But that fear, to me, means there's something to it; more threads to follow. Not necessarily the truth of "my own personal evolution" (whatever that means), but my distrust of that statement. The fact that I'm writing about it right now as opposed to speaking directly to him. This is the fruit. Inevitably I come back to my own experience: this one, not some weird abstract idea of my experience.

Dear Editor,

I don't know if I agree with Packer's conclusion that the inability of the US to impose its will on Pakistan is because of credibility problems established during the Bush years. I mean, is it always up to US to determine the fate of the world?Aren't there are other problems (like Pakistan) that need to be addressed as a global community. Right now, the US has got its hands tied and besides, the most terrified people in the world are living in India (?). They're the ones with something to worry about, granted nuclear disaster in 2013 seems like something we should take careful pains to avoid. Will I die alone?

Saw Restrepo on Saturday night and afterward had a drink with poetry friends. (I actually meant to see Yojimbo at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive but it was sold out. Anyway,) Restrepo is a documentary about a military outpost in the Korgengal valley in Afganistan, and the soldiers who built it, and their year long deployment. There is a lot of footage of the soldiers engaged in firefights, and of the soldiers in-between firefights relaxing or whatever you call it during a war. No voice over, just editing mixed with interviews of some of them after their deployment ended.

It was strange how "normal" their experience seemed, at least the soldiers, their conversations and jokes and mannerisms. The only difference between them and the rest of us is that they're constantly being shot at, conditioning that a movie can't really capture, and probably shouldn't. I have a student in one of my classes this semester who worked out of the back of a humvee in Iraq, manning the turret gun with team that rode around looking for roadside bombs. He wrote his memoir (an assignment for the class) about how his military experience made him a man. That when he came back from training, and came back from Iraq, it was hard to identify with his friends.

How is it possible to explain these kinds of experiences? Much less your own hard wiring jerry rigged from trauma, wide eyed and jumpy. The strangest solider in the bunch, at least in the telling of the story, was the one who was smiling the entire time he spoke; smiling when talking about setting up the camp, about being shot at, about his dead comrades, about not being able to sleep, about nightmares. Such a deep smile, and genuine. But in the footage of him in the field, him firing back, smoking, cleaning his gun, he's not smiling. I don't know what this means.

What was most striking was the huge contrast between them in the field, and their post field interviews, how the experiences had seemed to settle in their faces and mannerisms. No ending, but that's all there is to this post. It's Sunday evening. Still light out but overcast. It was a sunny day, in the low seventies. I met friends in the park to watch the SF Symphony do a free concert. The big black cat just jumped on me. It's hard to type when there's a cat on my arms. Did laundry. Ate a burrito. Etc. Hope you're well. Now back to scheduled programming.

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Movie Review!

Quantum of Solace is concerned with building character, the habits and legend of the Bond character, a psychological explanation as to his hero complex, always saving the girl/world. He turns back to save the girl as if he could save the life of Vespa, "the only woman he has ever loved."

"I sometimes feel that we are losing an intuitive sense of our own bodies," Mr. Ito lamented at one point during my visit. "Children don't run around outside as much as they did. They sit in front of computer games. Some architects have been trying to find a language of this new generation, with very minimalist spaces. I am looking for something more primitive, a kind of abstraction that still has a sense of the body."

__________________________________________Toyo Ito, NYTimes 7/12/09

"Allman says a girl recently asked him why he so many tattoos. She's just had her breasts enlarged. Allman pointed at her chest and said, "Tattoos do just the opposite of what those do. Instead of attract, they kind of..." Then he put up a hand, signaling, "Stop right there.""

_______________________Mark Binelli on Gregg Allman, Rolling Stone, 7/09

When I was out of college, living in Seattle, I still didn't really know or see myself doing, or being anything; living with Joel and Dave in the Northgate house. I had no plan, no idea and in some ways I'm still there, the same glass eye half full of desire as seen on TV a small blanket pulled up to my chin. No mountain in the way, but a gravity beyond comprehension I've wasted a lot of time trying to come to and probably never will, but this isn't the first time I've been beautiful.

"If group involvement or the ordering of choices changes the process of making a particular decision, and in turn the result -- whether because it tweaked our notions of risk or because it helped elevate social goals above individual goals and led to better choices for the global commons, -- that isn't necessarily a distortion of our true preference. We tend to always wonder, what's that person's true preference? What do they really want? I think that's the wrong question because we want it all. People have multiple goals."

___________________________- Jon Gertner, NYTimes Mag. 4/19/09

The more choices we make the more we become who we are. That if one is in a position where choices are being made for you (like a child or a cat) one's idea of self stalls. Like a conversation amongst three people, or planning a birthday party (that you later cancel), we must take possession of ourself before we can give it away.

This requires not just knowledge, but an ability and willingness to adhere to what one knows, right or wrong; to test every possible explanation and carry it though (to failure) until one reaches, as Wallace Stevens put it the palm at the end of the mind. You have to be a prince before the kingdom is yours to leave.

Writing will not get me or anybody else there, but the effort of concentration and the nudge of attention helps bring me to autonomy in that I cannot be sure of the choices I am making if I am not aware of the choices I make. Subject verb object and back again. Poetry is what one is willing to take credit for.

set out for work early ended up with a bagel ended up at the bank ended up sitting on a park bench reading a book checking my cellphone for the time and a man comes up to me selling a street sheet and he said sweetly excuse me and began to introduce himself when i interrupted and said i think we've met before you told me that i had nice hair which was true two weeks ago in front of the moma he began by saying i had nice hair maybe beautiful hair i don't remember exactly but it was strange because nobody has ever really commented on my hair not that there's anything wrong with it but it's not particularly remarkable a dark brown with a little wave a little thick and when it begins to grow it grows out not down resulting in a kind of afro that i've only let grow out once living in japan not knowing where to get a hair cut and afraid to ask i said we've met before and he asked if i wanted to buy a street sheet it's a new issue and i said you know i don't have a buck on me and he said well you look like a million bucks and i said thanks and he said have a great day and i said you too and went back to my book

Picked up my new bike from the shop up the street. Not exactly new, but my old bike after a serious tune-up including new handle bars, chain, back wheel, brakes, and wires. So it feels like new. Sorry about the "bait and switch" first sentence. Actually I'm not sorry. I just wanted to use that term: bait and switch. I tried to explain it to a student the other day, something like, offering something to get somebody's attention and when they try and take what you offer, you replace it with something else. Bait and switch. So it was a very exciting today riding around comfortably, running errands and went up to the Fillmore to see the movie "I Am Love" which is so good. It felt old fashioned in that it used symbolism and had "universal" themes. The end of the movie is amazing, a really strange and interesting mix of grief, John Adams, and love. I've never before been taken where that movie goes, at least not at the movies. In some ways it reminded me of "The New World" and "Paranoid Park" (two favorites) in a formal sense, using art school-ish camera work (at points) that did not feel intrusive or indulgent, and in fact advanced the story as much as any dialogue or plot point. There was barely any speaking for the last 45 minutes but you wouldn't know it because the images and editing do so much. That's a complicated way of saying it's beautiful, and I doubt it would be the same watching it on a small screen. Who knows. Maybe it would be just as much of an experience watching it at an airport terminal. Movies! I'm going to go take a shower and go to bed. Good night.

Today I was helping a student work through some ideas for an essay on Gianni Versace, helping her come up a with thesis from the three pages she brought in. I couldn't quite read her mind or her words well enough to understand the larger point driving her essay, and in fact, as is the case with a lot of reluctantly written first drafts, she didn't know her larger point either. This was a problem. One-on-one writing work can be tricky because it's tempting to do the work for the student, i.e. tell them what they should be writing about. It's easy and it's fast. Some students want you do to this, some do not. Personally, I don't want to write an essay about Gianni Versace so as, I have to find a way to help the student think through her own ideas.

What doesn't work is beginning with a big idea: the illusion that everybody knows what they're going to do before they do it. Ninety-five percent of everything that's appeared on this blog I didn't mean to write. I mean, sometimes I'll have a first sentence in mind, or an idea that I'm trying to get to, but usually once I get going I completely forget why I started and am just looking for a good place to stop. Then again (from a Liz Waldner poem,

I fell in love when she said,
"any insect creatures' babies make me disgusted."

For these people, they just open their mouths
and the world is there.

"Wants to Sit in the Big Chair. Does.") Sure there are some people who have big ideas on cue, but most of the students I work with don't. And even if they do, there's just as many problems supporting it, usually leading one to modify or abandon it and start back at the beginning anyway.

What seemed helpful was simple description of the image in front of us: what are these patterns called, how does the shape of the earrings relate to the shape of the dress, what associations come up when looking at this set of colors; simply, where does our attention go? What is there? What do we see? Starting at this point we were able to build an idea, rather than imposing one from the top down. Observing and then pooling all our observations until commonalities emerge. A kind of research. Here, in this moment, all these questions of what to talk about and how to write, disappear and we are working, finally.

on my way back from school a.k.a. work heading towards my bicycle which i lock around a large metal pole on the corner of howard and new montgomery with the black kryptonite cord that will sometimes receive the comment you know you should get a new bike lock because thieves can easily cut through that to which i reply i don't think anybody wants to steal my bike in a self-depreciating way to which they respond well you never know

on my way back from school a.k.a. work on my way to get on my bike and ride the not so far distance home from the academy's downtown location but far enough to warrant a bike ride and save a little money on the bart because i don't get paid until friday so as its been three weeks since i had any money coming in and a student today asked if i was a "biker" because i had forgotten to unroll my pant leg and i said i'm not a biker but ride a bike feeling like the terms was a little bit derogatory but isn't it always better to be specific than general and then we talked about skinny pants and how the crotches of my not as skinny pants have ripped from riding a bike

on my way back from school a.k.a. work before i got to my bike on the corner of howard and new montgomery there was some traffic lined up a car pulling into a parking place the car behind it honking the guys in the car getting out the guy honking leaning out the window telling them "that's not a parking spot" me standing there looking at the parking meter thinking that's a parking spot alright and then saying "that's a parking spot, look at the meter" and then looking up to see a meter maid stopped at the traffic light and i asked "is that a parking spot" and he said "not until seven" and the light turned white and i walked over to my bike and came home

Independence day in San Francisco and it's hot. Tyler doing? Woke up like its Monday meditated walked two corners away and got a paper, made breakfast and read. Laid on my bed and read. Got up and started writing (this). Feeling a little bit punky today, spoke with brother and sister who are in Mineral Point for the annual 4th of July race and parade, an event that my dad used to take us to as kids and in recent years my brother, who runs a lot, has been coming back to run the two mile version. Kind of like a ringer, but it doesn't exactly work out like that as he's taken second place to an 18 year old, maybe twenty now, for a number of years in a row.

It would be nice to be there though, instead of here, where my roots stretch no further than October of 2006. Recently a friend said to me: "There's no reason for you to be here [in San Fransico]." I agree. There is no reason for me to be here. Asides from work, teaching, I have no family here, not all that many friends, no car, no money, no in-roads into a particular community aside from where I teach, no connections, no etc. And not to be a boo bird, or a whiner, but when my colleagues skip town to shoot off illegal fireworks with their friends and families I get a little jealous and a little bummed out.

Then again maybe all this angst is actually a stack of student papers, and the thought of getting though them, so I can go watch the fireworks with a clear conscience. I could reframe the discussion of what my problem is, pretty radically, by getting on my bike and riding to the beach, like I did yesterday on my roommates borrowed bike (mine is in the shop), headphones and a sandwich (yesterday's big realization: if you get all the fixings on a sandwich it doesn't matter if you put meat on it). Lie out in the sun and doze, and read:

In almost any experience there's usually a little agony and usually a little pleasure, and the problem is happiness is something else...containing both pleasure and agony, a state that accepts and encompasses and transforms the whole range of experience, and when I called Jane the following afternoon, happiness was what I thought I wanted.

____________________________-John Haskell from "Out of My Skin"

Tuesday is a long day at school. I use a couple hours in the morning preparing for 202, teach 202, the usual rhetoric class, then head off to support 620, the graduate writing for broadcast taught by this man who knows a good deal about writing. It's interesting to listen to him lecture. The last two classes has been about the finer points of grammar, and common mistakes that journalists often make. "Writing for the ear." Much of the grammar stuffs can be found in The Elements of Style, which I've also been reading (again) in conjunction with this class and just because it's helpful to review, and kind of interesting. Ninety five percent of it I already pretty much know in the back on my head, sub-consciously and do, and my time in the writing lab with student writing and explaining why a sentence is written in a particular way and in class, after about four hours I begin to lose a particular sharpness, no longer able to focus on what's in front of me, and instead start to focus inwardly.

After nine hours of imagined and real explanation a kind of tiredness sets in and metastasizes into the thought that something bad has happened to me. When I come home I am much more likely to quickly consume two slices of cheap pizza than make my own dinner. Pizza tastes good! but, there is a kind of little failure I feel when I go this route. I'd like to think that the feeling isn't completely my fault, a lack of self control caused by the cruel world, but that seems to be the idea that gets the ball rolling in the first place. "I deserve it." When I'm tired and drained it seems more reasonable to address the feeling directly, i.e. take a nap. Lie down and not do anything, as opposed to staying awake via life support, plugging into a video game like the basketball one I've been playing.

Which is why I'm bringing all this up in the first place: in this game there is a 'my player' mode where you design a guy ("Bucky Kat") and play him in basketball games, and if you do well you are given points to improve the guy, his jump shot or whatever. It's kind of like a role playing game, where when you kill dragon you get the sword, and then you are ready to kill the super dragon. Or kind of like real life, where if you get a book published you can get a better teaching job, or if your girlfriend would just stop doing that one thing everything would be peace. Anyway, its addictive and totally escapist, and like spending a weekend smoking crack in a locked bathroom in a basement apartment or looking at pornography, it's an experience that doesn't translate well when somebody asks "What have you been up to?" I'm getting an eerie feeling that I've written all this before. Oh well. Maybe next time I'll write something new. In other news, Miley Cyrus is testing new identities which actually seems pretty normal.

Blogs are embarrassing! San Francisco was kind of kooky today, and generally all weekend because of the Pride festival, including the parade and Backstreet Boys concert. On my way home from purchasing a small brown bathmat I traversed ten thousand lesbians marching down the street late Saturday afternoon. Only in San Francisco? Maybe. But that was yesterday. Many a leather chaps have I seen today. Though I did not see the big parade this morning, I did witness a man wearing a speedo and cowboy boots, riding a ten speed down the middle of the street at eight in the morning, so feel like I didn't miss everything.

Later on, after some cleaning, I spent an inordinate amount of time with newspaper. It was pretty awesome, for example "I mean, the show is based on the premise that there's something wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with you. You're just a human being. It's not easy being a human being." says Laurie Anderson about the Oprah Winfrey Show. After doing some light school work, preparing for a study group and sending out a few emails I should of sent last week, I went for a really really slow walk with a plum. The plan was to walk really slowly up to Dolores park, find a bench, and eat the plum, thereby officially enjoying the sabbath. It didn't work out exactly like that, but I did manage to go slowly, catch a good amount of orangish sun and the dregs of Pride in form of strewn beer cans and ATM receipts blowing around. The plum got eaten mid-stride. Maybe the nicest days of the year thus far? Quite warm and perfectly breezy.

Oh, by the way, remember that last post about the readership flat lining for five days? Well, I figured out that when I changed the look of the blog it changed the html code of the blog, and in that code was the tracking code, so as, the reason it flat lined was because it lost the signal. So, yeah. Roommate Chris leaves for El Salvador on Wednesday and subletter Carrie comes for a month. The first week of school is over and I think it will be a good semester. My 202 class is small, ten people and I've decided to drop one of my support classes so as I can have time to do more writing, which I admittedly have put on the back burner the last couple semesters. In theory I teach so I have time to write but if I spend all my time teaching and don't write much I get grumpy. My cats don't seem to contain many bones when it gets hot, sprawled out and slow. Okay. Bedtime. Need to get up early. Goonight.

Usually it works like this: as soon as I say something definitive I turn and do the opposite. A week ago I wrote in the blog that I didn't feel like writing and I didn't, but since then have felt like writing and have. In the mean time pretty much everybody who reads the blog stopped reading. Google offers an analytical service where I can see many many statistics about who visits the blog (minus actual identity), for example I can see the number of visitors to the blog in a day. Then it takes that and puts it on a graph, so I can see the number of visitors who visited in a week/month/year etc. and it looks a little something like this:


However in the last five days it has done this:


Which is kind of exciting in a couple of ways. The first is a freeing way, that well, great, I've lost my entire readership. I can completely change direction/identity/purpose. No readers means no pressure. Second, it means that I no longer have to worry about posting to the blog. I can just totally let it rot, like a loaf of bread wrapped in a plastic bag tucked in a drawer in an unused kitchen in a locked apartment.

But, I can't help but notice that the drop off began right after the posting two postings ago the one written a couple of days after I got back from the meditation. That posting, after that posting the reader ship dropped off dramatically. Hm. Maybe I seem affected? Less so than the last time but the last time I was so paranoid about speaking about the experience because when somebody is under the spell of something it's easy to tell...unless you're under the same spell and then it seems normal. Like stress, or the World Cup. Or having two hands and ten fingers. My cats used to watch my hands by now they look at my face. I used to look at their eyes but now watch their ears. Most of my writing has come out of anxiety and misery, small islands of clarity in the midst of confused paranoia. I fell in love with English when I went to Japan. I fell in love with Japan when I came back home. Serve! I hope nobody reads this.

Aw heck. Who am I kidding. Of course I want your attention. I'm just sore after the first week of being back in school. Rather, during the first week of school. Breaks are lovely but the transitions are awkward: meeting a new class, or two, or three; settling into a semester, trying to solve problems that may or may not exist, snacking on anxiety cakes served by fellow teachers and students. Done for the day though. Laying on my bed with the cats. Jinx is making a heavy breathing noise and the brown one is dozing on my thigh. That's all for now. Nap time.

Today the summer semester started. I've decided to write in full sentences. This morning I supported a fiction writing class. There were three students in the class who may or may not need my support services. Tomorrow is the beginning of teaching teaching for the semester. Trying to avoid the pronoun 'I' by changing the order of the words in the sentence. It's different to begin a sentence with the object rather than the subject. Or a verb, which only works in speech and in novels. Why am I writing in the blog? There were some reasons. Okay. Got it. The other day in the mail Cole sent me his latest mix. It's pop-ier than his last couple of mostly ambient mixes. Here's the link.

Speaking of Cole, he and a couple others started an ambient music group blog that posts good stuff called Field Mic. There is a link to it on the right. Lately I've been listening to the new Crystal Castles album. Lots of great punky poppy techno, though there is this track as well. It's a little harsh at first but settles into something I like a lot. Speaking of things I like a lot, the other day a small press offered to publish a manuscript of mine but I turned them down. They offered a kind of 'raw deal.' I won't go into the details but it's a good sign that after four years of arranging poems maybe I've found a winning combination. Maybe the next deal won't be so raw.

The last week before school started was pretty great, relaxing. Good weather with plenty of time to get ready for the semester, organize, comb my hair, meet people, computer music projects, read and take naps. Continuing my hipster list of consumption, I quite enjoyed reading "Out of My Skin" by John Haskell if you're looking for a short beautifully written story about illusory identity, and the other day I saw the movie "Winter's Bone" which is a really engaging suspense movie about crystal meth in rural Missouri. Highly recommended if you have time to see movies. In addition, please note my new hit single "You should be ashamed of yourself." on the music blog for this week. Oh, and do you like the new colors of the blog? Blogger had new options so I tried them (after reading something somewhere about the difficulty that people have reading gray text on black) but now can't go back to the old template so that's that. Please:

On Sunday I got back from the 12 day meditation course and was feeling a particular kind of cleaned-out-high. Not a high as much as a somewhere-else-outside-of-old-habit mode of being that generally feels good, but not in a sensational way. The course was not as "life-changing" as the last one but this is good in the sense that it wasn't as dramatic coming back and making life style changes, such as morning meditation, shifting priorities from anxious busy work to whatever I feel like, and not eating not much for dinner, because I've already been doing all that.

One thing is for certain though, that after cleaning my system out (in a very particular way...for more details, attend a course) I don't feel much like writing or pursuing any kind of creative endeavor. I don't feel much like smoking, or watching movies, or basketball, or whatever else I do for fun. I don't feel much like teaching but then again, I don't feel much like not teaching. That is to say, it cleans out my anxieties and bile so well I'm really pretty content with whatever comes up: making dinner, sitting in a park, responding to emails, etc.. But not like a vegetable the opposite of a vegetable not clinging to a schedule. One the one hand this is kind of scary in the sense that well, if I'm not doing what I usually do, than I'm not a writer, or artist or whatever. What was the point of all the work I've put into writing over the last ten years if I don't keep it up? On the other hand I'm okay with that. It's a little scary.

Specifically about the course, we spent the first four days focusing our attention and lengthening our attention spans with a meditation called Anapana. We got up at four, worked on and off until nine, totaling ten to eleven hours of sitting a day. Then we switch over to Vipassina mediation for the next five days, that is, in general, a kind of body scanning, where a sitter (like me!) develops the ability to feel sensation on every little part of the body. Once this ability develops all over the body (and really, I didn't get this far until the second time I sat a course), and done *correctly* it opens the doors on cleaning out one's system (amongst other things) through observation in a very specific way that I could not possibly do justice to in an explanation on this blog. On the last day we do Metta meditation which is a kind of love generating meditation which may or may not work because I have the heart of baboon. The end. Back to the day. No picture today.

WELL, the news from San Francisco is that the semester ended a week ago. I finished my grading and got on with it to DC to see sister, brother-in-law and niece. It was lovely! Good weather, not too humid for DC and was relatively active with niece Beatrix; painting, swimming, playing, reading, talking about kitty kats (we bonded over this) and eating cake. Bonus material included walking the dogs in rock creek park, seeing roommate Chris and Sam who also happened to be in DC, visiting some memorials in the rain with them, seeing a different part of the city (Columbia Heights) where Sam's mom lives, going to the Sackler to see some old Buddhist art, watching parts of the Giro D'Italia, having lunch with my long lost cousin annnnnnd that's all I'm going to mention. Huh. Which I always thought should be spelled "Hunh."

Oh, and I finished LOST along with everybody else. Here is a good source of interpretations of the final episode and season. My favorites are towards the bottom, one by a person talking about past lives and realization, thereby avoiding limiting terms like "purgatory" and the Christian interpretations that follow from it (Dude, the Dharma project was the name of the scientific group on the island that dominated 4 of the 6 seasons). The other helpful interpretation was by a writer on the show, and she specifically references and explains some of the larger forces working on the island, such as Locke and the MiB's role throughout. Yes I totally escaped into this show, away from a particularly stressful semester. It happens. But wow, I feel lucky to have been able to watch the show as it developed. Watching it alone on DVD just would not be the same experience of letting it sit and reading about it along with everybody else.

Now I'm back here, doing a few odds and ends before I leave on Wednesday for another 10 day meditation course, which I have to admit I'm not looking forward to but after the first three days I'll settle into it. Many projects to get back into that got pushed out during the semester. My creative writing class was great this Spring but the other class, rhetoric and persuasion, was seriously one of the worst experiences I've had teaching. Nice students generally but just a really bad mix, mostly male and had a lot of too cool for school-ness happening. At the end of the day the quality of the work was good: we got where I wanted us to go but it wasn't easy. Anyway, teaching. The summer semester starts in the three weeks. Hope all is well. The music blog continues to be posted to so, there. I will write when I get back.

One more thing, neither here nor there, I think this is one of my favorite songs: "Daughter of a Child" from the album Mu-ziq vs. The Auteurs. It's kind of old (1994) and I don't know why I love it so, but well. The whole album it's pretty great.

Michael Clayton

What I love about this movie is not the heroic tale of truth winning out over the evil corporation, but the man named Michael Clayton and his job as the law firm's "fixer." What I relate to is the unseen nature of his work, on account of his "janitorial" status, cleaning up legal problems that more public and respectable lawyers avoid: running out at two in the morning to protect the interests of hit-and-run millionaires, or soothing the nerves of a jangled adulterer. Though he knows there is so much more to the-equation-of-what-gets-seen than the truth value of content, his job requires him to bite his lip and he's good at it.

But him, the man, responding to circumstance and the sometimes disappointing faith we put in one another, and the scene where he climbs the hill to look at the horses, to say hello and to escape himself and to cry; here we see the stakes and the weight of accepting one's position. He turns, not on his bosses or clients complaints, or on his friend's death, though these are the catalysts, but he turns on himself. Standing in the gray morning light, the three riderless horses watch as he slowly climbs the hill. The truth of himself and his sadness and his frustration and his person is what sets into motion the dismantling of these larger structures of corporation and law.

because he stopped
to look at the horses

to stop and look at the horses
to want to look at the horses

pure misery
is to be without

What I love about this movie is that it makes this connection so clear, the connection that what motivates us has nothing to do with morality, or systems, or circumstance; but where we are, dealing with the day. Creating something large and lasting that in retrospect could be called an ethic, but there is no good and no evil when we are working inside of ourselves. He says to his son, chewing on the disappointment of his brother and his failed business deal, he says to his son "you will not be one of those people who has shit falling out of the sky around them," All the time around them. That you won't give in to the hopelessness that surrounds us, distracts and confuses us, that muddies our ability to judge the truth of ourselves. Michael Clayton is a flawed man but it is because of these flaws and taking a single moment to feel them that allows him to see past them.

he gave the cab driver
fifty dollars “Fifty dollars

worth.” to drive him around
until the money runs out

to be rid of all this
the expression on his face

To your right is a link to a new blog that I am using to post music that I've been making with my computer, records, and recordings. It's been a very quiet six months here on this blog, not because I've dropped out of the world but because I've been spending my writing time on music and sound stuffs ("That's a nice hobby" said my mom). Every week for at least the first three months I'll post a piece and I think I have enough to go six months at that rate, but I'll only promise three months.

I will still be posting to this blog. That said, I feel like I owe the few faithful readers an explanation for my absence. "Don't ever explain yourself." Here is an article from last week's Sunday paper about the future/present of art. I found it helpful in the sense that it contextualizes collage and sampling, methods that come natural to how people make things (music, art, writing) these days. The fact that it's in the Times means that post-modernism is officially over. Here is a link to a very warm short review of Cole's Mix "Later" from earlier this year, and more importantly you can download the mix from that site. Okay. Alright. See you later. Enjoy the music. Happy spring.

Two Poems in the New Year

Quixote

My image is like that of a movie projected onto a screen in front of an audience. Behind the screen you might find a few old chairs, a mouse, and some dust. But if you watch from the front, walking towards you, admiring the distance as it closes, you might fall in love if you are a lover of movies.

**

What is the opposite of sitting in a church?

Sitting in a church
Sitting in a bar drinking a beer
Sitting in hell
Flying through hell
Sitting in a fountain eating a bird raw
Sitting in a patch of flowers