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.

Untitled

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."

___________

Much to my surprise, I received this email earlier today.

Church Reminder:

Reminder: You, Reed Huff, and Michel Richmond are assigned to clean the church today.

Thanks!

Bishop Bumbaugh

So I wrote back, "I think you have the wrong email address." I think because it's possible that this is a message from god, somehow, and in fact, I should be sweeping the church today. Or it's possible that the right guy might not get this email, so who is going to sweep the church now? Reed and Michael? Again, even if this isn't a message from god, it seems like the right thing to do is to make sure the church gets cleaned. All that said, I can't go right now. If the Bishop had asked me ahead of time I could be there right now, getting things ready. But I'm not, and won't be there, and it's such a nice day in Oakland. Warm. I go to DC on Thursday, and until then, I'm going to try and relax. Spring.

At noon today, instead of attending a talk by Jay Rubin and J. Philip Gabriel, the translators of 1Q84 and many other Haruki Murakami books, something I've been looking forward to since last week, I opted to play basketball. Weird.

____________

In 2005 I participated in a study that had something to what parts of the brain were affected by certain sounds. The scientists put me in an MRI machine and gave me headphones, and two buttons, one for my right hand and one for my left. Depending on which side I heard the sound on (left or right), I was supposed to press the button. I don't know what they did with this knowledge but they gave me some pictures of my brain.

The sly interplay between the old fox, Red Ivy, and Beth Szabo, the Forest Management Team Supervisor, part of the 1999 ad campaign for the Ford F-150 Supercrew. Larry Broadway is the fixer. He can fix any machine you put in front of him. He's not always the best company but he's awfully handy to have around. Mack FairCloth is the driver, him and Rick Rozar take turns. Of course when they're driving "with that full back seat, your knees aren't touching your chin." Bobby Boutwell and Rick play poker on the weekend but the rest of the crew don't always get an invite.

What kinds of words get passed between Rick and Larry in back seat, Red barking orders while Beth hunches over a map. What do they talk about? Bobby's thinking about buying a new motorcycle and Mack mostly keeps to himself. So much can go unsaid on your way to work, but when you've got somebody like Red to stir the drink, ribbing Rick about his losing habits, or sparring with Mack about the best way to get over West River Ridge, the silence doesn't last long.

"Fuck Larry Broadway. Fuck Red Ivy. Fuck Mack FairCloth. Fuck our fucking names" Bobby muttered.

"What's that?" yelled Red over the wind, sitting on Bobby's left. Ears like a field mouse.

"Nothing." said Bobby, picking his head up and going back to what he was doing.

"You're going to want to take the left fork up ahead." Beth said from the back, knees not touching her chin, "We can pass around the base and come up the other side. It's a little less intense."

"Alright," said Mack, "I understand." He gives it a little more gas and the truck bounds out of sight down the left fork. In the empty forest, an owl turns it's head and hoots directly into the wall, and every wood pecker, grub, chipmunk and elk within three hundred yards looked up, and then went back to what they were doing.

This August I am moving to Indiana to attend Purdue's Composition and Rhetoric program. It will be about two and a half years of course work followed by a dissertation that seems to take most a year and a half, possibly two. If all goes well, I'll end up with a PhD. All the fees are waived plus a stipend and health insurance provided I teach one class a semester, which of course I will, beginning this August. This is all good and exciting news, old news if I've spoken to you in person anytime in the last couple months, but serious life changes await and I've been doing a lot of thinking, chatting, moving towards planning, about what these next four months are going to look like.

As much complaining as I've done about my employer in the last five years, I am so ready, in part because of the trial by failure after failure my hair is turning white rapidly, to formally study Rhetoric and Composition. A study of what writing is, how it can be taught, a history and sociology of the written word, along side philosophy and theory. There's formal rhetoric, ancient Greeks and Aristotle, what we like to think western civilization is based on, there's rhetorics of particular groups of people, say the rhetoric of the medical profession or the rhetoric of twitter, and there's also more philosophical and psychological questions about how we identify with the written word, and how we come to ideas through articulation. This is what I'm most interested in, a kind of applied philosophy in the context of the classroom. And there's another part about the actual nuts and bolts of classroom application, so it's also a kind of an education degree.

I might be wrong about some of this, but that's what I understand about "Rhet/Comp." Teaching writing for six plus years has gotten me pretty curious about what exactly I've been doing this entire time. Teaching writing, along with ESL and pronunciation, alongside my own writing, poetry and whatnot (this blog qualifies as "whatnot") has lead to many many questions about what actually works and why. I'd like to be able to not just teach and write, but to talk about what it all means in a context outside of my own experience. Plus I'd like to get paid three to four times what I'm making currently. Which leads me back to complaining about the insanely dysfunctional bureaucracy that is my employer. I can do that now that I'm leaving. But I won't. Freedom!

Hi. It's about noon on Monday. It was supposed to be raining but its not. As I keep saying: we need the rain because it's been very dry. Dry like a bone or a dry rock. This weekend I went hiking up Dry Rock where I could see all the way to Dry Bone Valley. Not true. It rained all day Saturday and into Sunday. Made music on Friday watched an old movie with Dara on Saturday. On Sunday I went to visit Amy and Steven's new baby. Very cute. Then came home and finished the last hundred fifty pages of Reamde, the newish Neal Stephenson that was really hard to stop reading. Normally this is good when it comes to novels, but it felt a little yucky at times, addicted to turning pages. A thousand plus and now I am free to read something not so controlling.

You may notice to the right that I've added a blog, a Tumblr account that I'm going to use for posting articles that I used to post on Google Buzz, the now defunct social media service that worked though gmail. Buzz worked well for me, but apparently nobody else liked it, so it disappeared along with my ability to share articles. There are many services that do this, but my doubts about sharing information with strangers and gigantic companies that mine my data to sell it back to me always keeps me from committing to an entrenched matrix of public internet activity indicators. I still regret the time I filled out my Facebook profile after drinking a full cup of Theraflu. Even though I erased what I wrote, it's still out there. No doubt, in the middle of a job interview ten years from now they'll ask me how often I abuse over the counter painkillers.

One of my proudest internet moments was deleting my Facebook account last Spring, after I had to reject a student's request to be Facebook friends. I never know what to do in these situations, and so decided that instead of grappling with this question at the end of every semester, I would just delete the question itself. I never used it anyway. I'm an introvert you know, and sharing my junk via somebody else's tightly controlled system always made me squeamish. This blog is personal but I leave large swaths of my life unmentioned. Which are usually the parts and stories that make me look bad. Maybe they can come up with a service that will let us be the assholes we really are. But don't get me wrong. I love the internet, and am happy to have a platform that enables me to write whatever and put it out there. Magical tools that enable us to build houses, or put people in the hospital. As if anything outside of ourselves could satisfy us.

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Who designs noodles? Is there somebody in charge?
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A little introduction to this poem: Lorine Niedecker was a poet, Wisconsin born and raised and died, who was loosely affiliated with the second wave of modernists, a small group of "Objectivist" poets, that included Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukofsky, and George Oppen. They were largely influenced by the visual art esque poetry of William Carlos Williams (think The Red Wheel Barrow), the idea that there is "no ideas but in things." Niedecker wrote in the vein but was not published much until the 60's, when all of a sudden she became a little more popular until her death in 1971.

During the 50's she wrote a series of poems called For Paul, for the new born son of Louis Zukofsky, who she had a long running correspondence with. However during the 30's Zukofsky and Niedecker had a love that resulted in an abortion. During the 40's, when Paul was born, they continued to correspond and these For Paul poems were based on what Zukofsky said about his son's growth. Niedecker never had any children herself. The poems were a mix personal information alongside larger historical events, though they were never published due to Zukofsky's discomfort with them. Here is one these poems:

Understand me, dead is nothing
whereas here we want each other,
silence, time to be alone
and Paul's growing up—
baseball, jabber, running off to neighbors
and back into the Iliad—"do you really believe
there were gods, all that hooey?"
And his violin—improvising
made a Vivaldi sequence his,
better than I could have done with poetry
at twice his age...
so write your father, L. before P.

A start in life for Paul.
The efforts of a life
hold together as Einstein's
and lead to expectations of form.

To know, to love ... if we know nothing,
Baruch the blessed said, would we exist?

For Paul then at six and a half
a half scholarship—
turn the radio dead—
tho your teacher's gone back to Italy
stumped by American capital.

In my mind, the child said,
are rondeau-gavottes 1 to 11,
here is number 12.

Bluebird

You can't expect
the milk to be delivered
to your house
by a bluebird
from a picture book
you looked at
at the age of four:
he's much older
now, can't carry those
bottles 'neath his wing,
can hardly even carry a tune
with his faded beak
that opens some nights
to leak out a cry
to the horrible god
that created him.

Don't think I'm
the bluebird, or that
you are. Let him get
old on his own and
die, like a real bluebird
that sat on a branch
in a book, turned his head
toward you, and radiated.


________-Ron Padgett

Two Quotes

"I said to them, look at the Taliban. They believe in their cause, and that sustains them. You people have no cause. You don't believe in anything. And these guys just sat there in their chairs. They agreed with me."

"In rural communities especially there's very strong feeling that the land belongs to you and you belong to it, and if you lose that, you're not just dislocated physically, but you start to lose a sense of who you are."

**

An Afghani businessman talking to other Afghani businessmen and Kai Erikson on displacement.

Freedom Story

After eleven years of slaving over the hot stove
a yellow bird came to
tell her she didn't have to do it anymore. This freedom

was all consuming, like a grease fire
late at night when all you have to fight it is a grease
monkey fire. "Where will I go?" she asked herself.

"What will I do without this claptrap husband of mine,
this virtual Tiger Woods of a bitch?"
What is the opposite of sitting in a patch of flowers?

What is the square root of decision?
"It's not an emergency," she thought, "I can stay here for as long as I like."
Silent dreamer! I want to hatch from a dragon's egg!

We need more training to leave the dojo.
Seventeen years isn't a short time at all to become a master.

From the Haruki Murakami book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running:

I don't think most people would like my personality. There might be a few - very few, I would imagine - who are impressed by it, but only rarely would anyone like it. Who in the world could possibly have warm feelings, or something like them, for a person who doesn't compromise, who instead, whenever a problem crops up, locks himself away in alone in a closet?

These are the ingredients for my new shaving cream/gel: Organic Sucrose, Organic White Grape Juice, Organic Coconut Oil, Organic Olive Oil, Organic Shikakai Powder, Organic Fair Deal Hemp Oil, Organic Jojoba Oil, Organic Corn Starch, Organic Lemongrass Oil, Organic Lemon Oil, Organic Lime Oil, Citric Acid, Tocopheral.

It's like smearing food on my face, and then shaving it off with plastic razor. It smells like food, and I think as I shave, if things get tough, I could probably eat my shaving gel/jelly, maybe put it on a piece or bread or leather.

It has to be a pretty good movie to be better than no movie at all. It has to be a pretty good poem to be better than no poem at all. It has to be a pretty good song to be better than no song at all. It has to be a pretty good museum to be better than no museum at all. It has to be a pretty good book to be better than no book at all. It has to be a pretty good bookstore to be better than no bookstore at all? It has to be a pretty good class than no class at all. It has to be a pretty good apple than no apple at all? It has to be a pretty good coat than no coat at all? It has to be a pretty good conversation to be better than no conversation at all. It has to be a pretty good cat than no cat at all? It has to be a pretty good cat toy than no cat toy at all. It has to be a pretty good video game than no video game at all. It has to be a pretty good performance than no performance at all. It has to be a pretty good friend than no friend at all? It has to be a pretty good test to be better than no test at all.

Hi. One cat is asleep on the couch the other is somewhere else. Outside a man in a blue coat is walking down the side walk and two others, one a grey coat and one in a brown coat are behind him. It must be a little cold then. If I want to know what to wear I look out the window. A couple more are now walking down the same strip. One is wearing a hat. I could do this all day. If I want to know who is walking down the sidewalk I look out the window. Monday.

It's the fifth week of school. At some point today I'll enter the quarter point "progress grades" that are good indicators for students who have never been to class. On Friday a student came for the first time. It was the fourth class. I told him I was sorry, but it was too late to join. Another student used the term "blackie" in his memoir, and I gently let him know that it's not a word we in California often use. Other than that though, two good classes. More energy so far in the Thursday class but it's only a comparison if I make it one. It's hard to cover the same material twice and at the same time stay open to spontaneity. In other words, it's hard not to form attachments to the good things that happen in one class and want the same thing to happen in another.

The sun has come out in the time it took to write that last paragraph. It's been relatively chilly but only because it got up into the low seventies on Friday. February. It's so confusing what month it is. From a free write we did in class on Friday from the word Sun:

The sky is full of sun but instead of suns we call them stars, banks full of coins or cars full of gas. Our sky is full of stars. As we get closer we might call them suns but we won't get closer and there is no other way to know them. Points of light or pinholes in the canopy but it never feels like a jar and I don't live in a hole. As we zoom out we look small but there is no such thing as zoom a blade of grass to an ant an elephant standing next to a mailbox. There is the sun and there is scale. One is hot, the other an idea, cold as the heart of the speaker. A hole in the sky where instead of darkness light pours forth, somehow. The root of our evil not within us but eight minutes from us. All that is good.

This is my attempt to write about the newish Haruki Murakami book 1Q84. Q is pronounced "que" which is the phonetic version of the number nine in Japanese. So the book's name is 1984, but a little bit different. I finished it last night, all nine-hundred something pages of it, over the course of a couple months. Since about page one-hundred and fifty I've really enjoyed it, savoring it slowly. Reading to find out what was going to happen but also paying attention. It's my favorite of his books since Norwegian Wood and like NW, IQ84 is fundamentally a love story. But unlike NW, it has a happy ending.

Many of the reviews, and the ones that compelled me to read it, mentioned that it was a strange book. And it is. I concur. Not in terms of narrative, or structure, or characters or plot, but in terms of symbolism and ideology and the ideas in the book. There are no archetypes in this book. The world it creates is not recognizable, nor are its themes or details. Part of the reason I read a bunch of reviews after I finished it, was because even after reading it, I'm not sure what it was actually about. Which is kind of what it's about. Not a post-modern mishmash organized by theme, but an entire world of unrecognizable values. The quote that begins the book is from the song "It's Only a Paper Moon," and goes: It's a Barnum and Baily world, / just as phony as it can be, / But it wouldn't be make-believe / if you believed in me.

As I came to the end of the book the quote started to make sense, the idea that all these symbols and characters and references have meaning because we give them meaning. Or more specifically, we give them meaning together, hence the love story. Janacek’s Sinfonietta, a billboard that says "Put a Tiger in Your Tank", a little dog running through a yard as the main antogonist's last thought, "the little people", along with a zillion other references, all hang out, unexplained. And this is what makes the book strange. It doesn't even attempt to round up all the errant wound up toys. Instead it only ties up the ones that are important to the main characters, leaving the rest of this world to run its course.

Normally this kind of thing might make a reader feel like it was a waste of time, and that is what some of the reviews have said. A minority but that's too bad, because I think they missed the point. Busy looking for something outside of the book in front of them. Other reviews have been as thoughtful as the book. That said, I would be the first to say that Murakami's books all started to blend together, Kafka on the Shore being my breaking point, and I had really planned to stop reading him: no need to keep reading the same story over and over again. But this review is the one that committed me to the book. Slightly negative review but it ends by saying that despite their confusion upon finishing, they kept thinking about it. Which is where I find myself now, a little bit under a mysterious spell. Good or bad I don't know, but it's something, and that's more than I can say for most.

After class on Friday I walked down to the Powell Street Bart station to catch the train back to Oakland. Because of some construction at the station, the ticket kiosk, a twenty foot long box, was closed on one side so there were only three machines, and three long lines to get a ticket. Usually I just swipe my Clipper Card at the turnstiles but there was no money on it, and I resigned myself to standing in line. It took about fifteen minutes to get to the front of the line, listening to the chatter of some high school girls behind me and observing the odd trio two spots ahead of me, slotting money, coin by coin into the machine. It would of been easy to get annoyed but I was mostly done with my week, and had accepted the fact that it was going to take a little longer than usual.

When I got to the front of the line, facing the machine, a man stepped up to me, a foot away and asked if he could, "real quick, get change for a dollar." He was a little thuggy, but also a little dirty. His dollar bill was pretty crumpled. I didn't get a good look at his face but I was determined not to let him go ahead of me, and said no, and turned back to the machine. As I got out my debit card and swiped it, he stood there and cursed me: "mother fucking faggot ass little bitch etc. etc. etc. faggot mother fucker fuck you etc. etc." I punched in my PIN, swiped my Clipper Card, saw that the dollar total was correct, "faggot little bitch fuck you bitch mother fucker fuck fuck etc. etc." hit accept, swiped my Clipper Card again to get the money on it, "fuck you fuck you fuck you etc. etc. etc." and put my debit card back inside my wallet, and walked to the turnstiles.

As I was walking away I heard him ask the high school girls behind me the same thing, but didn't hear their answer. It was scary, not knowing exactly what this guy was going to do but I don't think he was crazy, and merely wanted to avoid standing in line. To get change or maybe to get a ticket I don't know. Either way, I stood there and absorbed the abuse. I could almost viscerally feel his hate washing over me, but it didn't feel scary. Instead I was focused on my routine, not rattling but moving slowly and deliberately. There was almost something kind of peaceful happening in those moments. Once I got free though, free to think about it, through the turnstiles and down the escalator, there was a train waiting. I hopped on relived to get away, thinking about what just happened, feeling the adrenaline in my system and a little bit of pride.

Overheard, guy on bus talking to no one in particular:

"I'm not even an original. I'm ashamed of athletes. I'm ashamed of entertainers. I don't care about Whitney Houston."

I sometimes look to my cats and their relationship as something to emulate. Not to say they don't have problems. When I come home Jinx will usually charge towards Kitty Girl (KG) and bite the back of her neck, bringing her down to the rug. Then he might get on her and keep her pinned down, dominating. When they were younger, it seemed to cause KG a lot of pain, and she'd cry out for a few seconds, then flip around and wap him in the face, hiss, and run off. It's embarrassing when I have guests, people who haven't spent anytime with them might think I willingly lord over their violence, and encourage them by my unwillingness to stop it.

Though for years when this would happen I'd always break them up at the first sign, pulling him off her by the back of his neck. Recently though, in part because he's gotten old and feeble, it's like some weird dance, not totally felt. KG allows him but just kind of stands there and waits until he's done. He doesn't have the strength or the will to prolong the ritual like he used to, and seems to be satisfied with going through the motions. "Yeah yeah, you're the boss." Which in my mind is kind of sweet, this allowance. As the stronger one these days she could beat him up but she doesn't. Instead they sleep together throughout the day, body on body. Keeping warm and keeping each other company. They've been together most of their entire lives and I really don't think they know what they would do without each other. They are symbiotic, always looking to the other, for better or for worse.

Granted they haven't had much of a choice, always stuck together, and in the last five years, stuck with me. Eventually I decided to just let them conduct their relationship without interference. Whatever it is they're doing, it's beyond my understanding. They communicate, but they don't reason. Instead they have their own way and I believe whatever it is they are working out between themselves should remain between themselves. It's really sweet when the spend fifteen minutes cleaning each other but then they bite each other, hit each other, hiss at each other and run away. I don't understand how they flip rapidly from what looks like the deepest love the world has ever known to punching each other in the face, but something about that seems natural. High and lows yes, and what's important is not so much the details as much as the commitment to being with each other. At any rate, Happy Valentines Day. I need to go to work.

In the early days of teaching creative writing and the rhetoric class, occasionally a student would ask how the material was applicable to the "real world." In response, I'd ask "isn't this the real world?" And that would usually end the conversation, not that I wanted it to end but my question always came off as a joke rather than an open inquiry. I mean, really, what about the classroom is not real? Am I not real? Is this conversation just a dream? Combating the fallacy we sometimes tell ourselves, that when there is more at stake we work harder and do better. From what I've learned, doing well is more of a habit than a talent, and the issue of the real world, waiting for it, becomes an excuse not to be fully wherever we are. One of many.

Last semester I started thinking about outcomes. In the curriculum development class the instructor shares a lot of student art work, and it's striking how much of it is good in a technical sense. Clean lines and concepts. Work that is truly finished. Whereas in the rhetoric class I teach, very rarely does an essay, a proposal argument for example, reach a point where it's unquestionably finished. Or say, the writing of an English as a second language learner, even though it might be very well thought out and organized, there will be grammar irregularities and other signs that keep it from perfection. Maybe it's not fair to compare visual images with writing, but there is a difference between expectations. With writing, at least as I've experienced learning and teaching it, the goal is improvement. Yet if you write a grant proposal, you either get the grant, or you don't. It's a binary in the "real world" yet at the college level, it's okay to fall short.

Maybe this is part of what makes an American style education an American style education: room to experiment and try new things and slack off and charge forward and give up and restart and in general, an education that gives us room to consider the process along with the material. People from all over the world come to universities here despite all the bad news about education in this country. But there must be something to the material fact that it's never life or death in school. I write this not to get all rah-rah about an American style education, but to point out this strange paradox between process and product. If we think about testing, No Child Left Behind and increased standards and measures by which to determine success, education becomes a matter of life or death, of funding and economics and resources. Of jobs and students and numbers. Our interactions translated into dollar values, a real-time symbolic logic that takes us away from where we are, and what we are doing.

I'm done writing about meditation, okay? Instead I'm going to begin a fifteen part series about my cats. It will be called "About My Cats" and will begin with parts 1-15. Here goes: CUUUUUTE. Now it is over. The semester has started and today I finally finalized my final schedule. Today I also discovered the Higgs boson particle. Both are significant achievements but finalizing the schedule means no more worry about money this semester, so as, now I can relax. In other news, an audio piece of mine is appearing in the new issue of textsound along with many others, including Bronwen, who I went to graduate school with back in the day. It's a good publication and there's lots of interesting things to listen to. That is all. Hope all is well. See you.

About Vipassana (part 5)

It's Sunday night and I just watched the last five minutes of the Super Bowl. I didn't really care who won but I always like to watch people celebrate sports championships. The crazy high of all that work, maybe a life's work, must be something else. They're so happy! A couple years ago I made some recordings from the internet (before homeland security blocked most of the illegal streaming sites) of the press conferences after the Lakers won their last one and made it into a really depressing song. You can listen to it here. But speaking of a crazy high, it's been a week since I got back from the meditation course and even though I wasn't exactly "high" I felt pretty good last Sunday. Very clean and clear headed, at a distance from wanting the usual things. Over the course of the week, as stressed piled up from the new semester and as I fell off the schedule of evening sits, I'm remembering what real life is actually like.

This has been the big question upon my return: how far do I want to go with the practice? It's one thing to know how to meditate and use it to reduce stress, have a little more patience, and be a little kinder, or whatever, but it's another to make spiritual teaching the center of a life. What's different this time, is that this far into it, I feel like I can see where all this is leading, and I'm not sure I want to go there at this point in my life. Thus I rebel. So far this week I've been eating meat, having sex, and lying (though I don't know exactly how I've lied, I just figure it comes with the territory of talking), which leaves only stealing and intoxicants before I'm back to where I started. That is to say, it's really difficult to keep it clean. More importantly, I love my friends, and I feel like I would have to get new ones if I were really wanted to commit myself to living a righteous life.

Is there a compromise? I don't know. They don't teach that at the course, so I guess I'll have to figure that out on my own. Morning sits and trying to keep my mind open is the best I can offer. Asides from that I'm not going to make any commitments other than those I've already made to teaching and writing. Maybe when I actually accomplish something in the secular world there will be time to pursue meditation with the commitment it requires. That said, Vipassana has pretty much changed the way I see the world in some fundamental ways. Ways that I believe have allowed me to live a much richer and fuller and in the world kind of life. There is so much to learn by turning one's attention's inward in a trained way, and really, I'm lucky to have a job where I can get away for weeks at a time to study. No ending or conclusion. I'm going to get into bed and read a book. In the morning I'll sit and start my day.

About Vipassana (part 3 & 4)

As I pulled back the curtain in the kitchen I could see that it had rained last night. I set out some food and tried to remember if I heard the rain falling, half asleep. Around five the cats come into the bed to get warm and also wake me up. I don't really ever get a solid nights sleep but I don't mind so much when the black one paws at the covers and eventually after a few turns finds a place on the pillow to set his head. The brown one is only interested in food but that's her job as the female component of the pair, to do the hunting. In this case, the hunting consists of getting me to open the refrigerator and dig out half a fork full of cold chicken pate. It hardly seems worth it but I'm not a cat and I don't really like to eat cat food. On bad days I curse her and throw her off the bed. On good days I get up when I wake up and don't spend much time dwelling on how much sleep I'm not getting.

Today I wanted to continue writing about Vipassana, leaving off from yesterday when I finally remembered what it was I wanted to write about: the conflict between a meditation practice and adopting some kind of religious practice. On the one hand, it's kind of like talking about the merits of different cooking shows instead of cooking and tasting the actual food. But when I speak to my friend Aaron he sometimes calls me a Buddhist and I say no I'm not, all defensively, because I have some negative associations with being anything vaguely religious. I grew up entirely secular, though my dad did take us to a non-denominational church for a little while, and the very large majority of friends and people that I knew wouldn't call themselves religious or believers of any faith. It's kind of a dirty word, one that implies a blind faith or didactic ignorance about science, or social policies that make moral discriminations from an unintelligible logic.

As the course was ending and the "noble silence" was lifted I had a long conversation with a guy named W, who had a mustache and a build that reminded me of the bass player from Do Make Say Think, and I sat across from him during lunch on the last day. We were talking about the course, it was his first time, and were talking about what we felt were the most difficult parts of the last ten days. I spoke specifically about the sixth day, how I was going a little bit nuts thinking about things I'm not going to write about here on the blog and literally trying to figure our reasons to present to course management so that I could go home. On every course I usually have a moment like this, sheer panic followed by a ton figuring out the best way to justify this panic, like a philosopher using his rhetorical powers to justify why the dishes don't need to be washed.

**

W talked about his problem with the meditation, that during the hour long discourses we listen to in the evenings the teacher says many times that Vipassana is not a "rite or a ritual" and is not an "organized religion." But there we are, following a strict a set of rules and practices. To boot, there is chanting at the beginning of some of the hours, and there is a call and response that happens sometimes as well. At first the chanting put me off but eventually I came to not mind it, and even enjoy it because at the very least it gave me something to "do" (listen) asides from paying attention to what was going on with myself. W asked me how long I had been practicing and I told him, three and half years, three ten day courses, two three day courses and on most days I sit an hour in the morning. That sounds like a religious practice he said, and I have to agree with him.

W came from North Carolina and his family is Christian in the Southern Baptist tradition, a faith that, even though he doesn't go to church anymore, he still feels has relevance. As a person who actually has a lot experience with organized religion, he knows what he's talking about. Taking it a little further, we talked about similarities between Jesus and Buddha and more contemporary leaders like Gandhi and Malcolm X (note: not between Christianity and Buddhism) and the idea, referred to above, that to have a religious identity is generally considered a bad thing. Why is that, and it comes back to how we see ourselves. That any question of I don't want to be this, or be that, is really a question of how we perceive other people, and more broadly, how we see the world. That instead of accepting things as they are we're drawing lines and separating ourselves, (a skill that I am very good at).

At any rate, a more useful distinction might be in the realm of semantics, as in, what exactly is a religion in the first place? One could argue that the gigantic evangelical megachurches are better described not as religions, but as businesses. In the history of the world at large, religion has mostly been used to justify wars and economic expansion. One thing to be said for the communist revolutions in Russia and China is that at least they didn't hide behind ideas like "spreading democracy" and "nation building." Which is the thing: if religion is no more than a belief system one acts upon, then we should consider what exact "religion" the hedge funds and lobbyists and politicians are practicing when they make decisions. In a sense, we are all "religious", some of our beliefs open and on the surface while some of them hidden even from our own eyes. Regardless of what we say we are, it's useful to make a study of our own actions, to know what it is we actually believe.

About Vipassana (part 2)

It's turning out to be a sunny day in Oakland. About ten thirty. I don't teach until Thursday (Friday Saturday) but volunteered to sub for a class this afternoon. I'm waiting to hear back. It will be good to go back to work, as yesterday was a tough transition from the meditation course. After two weeks of a very controlled schedule it was difficult to have a full day at home with nobody to tell me what to do. Um, did this then did that, then did this, etc. As a result, when dinner time came I wanted to eat something big and cheesy because it felt like I had earned it. Which is a kind of preview into how the cleanliness of the ten days unspools: reacting to vague and broad feelings (in this case, a generalized anxiety about time and work and things to do) instead of hanging out with them. Instead of sitting across from them, chatting and listening and maintaining one's own autonomy. Our constantly troubled friends driving us to drink.

But oh well. Kitchens eventually get dirty, and one the first things I did on Sunday was to eat a chicken burrito, thereby cracking the delicate shell covering my "sila" (morality): not killing, stealing, lying, sexing, sexting, sensual entertainments, or anything that would rev up my juices. Since it was going to end anyway, I thought I might as well get the pursuit of perfection out of the way. In the past, coming back from a course I haven't written much about the actual experiences of being there, a little embarassed of if being a mediator meant being religious or a "buddhist", and as I was sitting, wandering away, I thought that I'd write in detail in this blog about that. But those thoughts were early on in the course and I don't remember exactly what it was that was that I wanted to communicate that was so important.

So here I am trying to write about the past. In the future, I have twenty minutes to finish before I need to put some shoes on for basketball. I heard back from the ESL people and they don't need me to sub. Maybe get back to 1Q84, the new Haruki Murakami book (it's great!). Since I haven't looked at a newspaper yet (avoiding it) I have no stories to report though I will ease myself back into the habit soon. I thought about so many things up there but they come and go, like clouds, one day something seems so important, and you're sitting there, paying attention in a particular way, and then somewhere somehow this thing that was generating so much trouble and stress is no longer there. And eventually something else comes up and the same thing happens. It's like cleaning out an attic, you have to get through the stuff on top before you can get to the really old stuff. Kind of like writing, writing, writing, writing to remember why we started writing in the first place.

About Vipassana (part 1)

Ah. Back to my empire of ego. Whew. Feels good. Vipassana meditation is not easy. Neither is learning to tie your shoe, how to ride the subway, or play a realistic flight simulator with all those terms like "yoke" and "yaw" and the fact that when you pull back on your mouse the nose of the plane goes up and when you want to turn you have to plan way in advance. Not that any of things are comparable to the meditation, but come to think of it, these are things I've had trouble with. I didn't learn to tie my shoes until middle school. My mom got me elastic shoe laces so I never had to untie them. I didn't learn to ride a bike until fifth grade. I still get lost on trains, sometimes, especially the New York ones (the BART not so much) and have no interest in ever playing a flight simulator again after summer afternoons with Adam and Matt, playing the Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer on their dad's super powered Mac.

Instead it's more like sitting still all day, or trying to. Lots of time to think, but eventually it becomes more interesting to pay attention to what's going on with the body. For me, this time, I didn't get to this point until the 8th day. In the last three and half years, this is the third time that I've done a ten day course and they haven't gotten any easier. I try to make it through an hour so I can make it to the next one. Then to breakfast. And then to the next hour, and then to the next one. Time passes really slowly but usually that phrase indicates a kind of boredom, which is not really the problem. The problem is more of a survival issue, trying to make it though each day. It feels like an enormously long time in part because I'm usually not focusing my attention as consistently and repeatedly as I do while there. Instead, at home, I'm doing one thing or another, reading a newspaper or watching a car go by. Mostly responding to external stimuli and letting my environment dictate where my mind wanders. When my attention is focused the day gets longer in a full way.

Over and over, even before the actual Vipassana meditation starts, we spend three and a half days focusing our mind, over and over, feeling "sensation" for as long as continuously possible on the patch of skin just above the lip. If we wander away we come back. All that to have a fighting chance to expand this area of sensation to other places on the body. So as, the body becomes a kind of landing pad for a continuous parade: a puff of air, an itch, a tingle, a warmth or a chill or whatever. There's a a lot ways our bodies hit the world and we're responding to these sensations whether we're aware of it or not. Regardless, once this kind of eyeball opens and begins to look around it turns out that there's a lot going on other than what we're thinking about. Why is this important? Because when we're looking at a thing, for example a back pain, instead of feeling the pain, we can instead hang out with it. Ask it questions. See how big it is, how long it will last, and eventually we see that it goes away. Or with bigger kinds of feelings: how long will this anger last? How big is it? What does it feel like and eventually, we see that it goes away.

___________

Tomorrow I'm going away for a little while, about twelve days, for a meditation course. Also known as a "retreat", which isn't exactly an accurate word as sitting for twelve hours a day ten days on end actually brings most things a little bit closer, but, the point is, I won't be around. No email or cell phone, and no blog postings. The semester begins day after I get back, so will all of a sudden be back in the swing of things, Spring 2012 until the middle of May. Non-stop, and I'm sure you'll read me complain about it many times between now and then.

The good news, at least in my own lists of things to do, is that most things that I set out to accomplish in these last three weeks got done: finished my grad school application to the best of my ability and will hear back sometime this spring. Spent a couple intensive weeks working on two collections of poems, improving little bits, here and there, sequencing and sorting. That and sending out some submissions, individual poems and manuscripts, as well as submitting to a residency. I didn't get to finishing any music projects, cleaning up old files well enough to share them (I counted 78 MP3s of "songs" that were borderline finished) but there's time for that when I get back.

So as, like many, I've been busy, and now I don't have too much pressing as I head out tomorrow. It's nice to have time to work, though it's necessary the person who teaches reading and writing actually have time to read and write, or else one ends up teaching the same thing over and over again, like a boring high school history teacher. At any rate, in the spirit of automation, please enjoy this video while I am gone. The world is full of mystery. See you in February.

Greetings from Oakland California. This post is not a post but a way to put off working on the personal statement that I must complete to complete my application to graduate school that is due is six days. I should of written it earlier and I did but it was bad, twice, and now I'm on my third foot dragging draft of trying to explain my desires in a way that doesn't transparently pander and stays true enough to the nebulous and unformed ideas of what I like to call myself. I'll get on that in second, but first, no news but no news, I've been very busy this last week working on a couple different writing projects, mostly prepping pages to send out to publishers, collecting and revising and stringing together days in a row of writing time, which unfortunately never ever happens during the semester. So it's been really productive. It feels good to get back to these things in earnest.

But, even though it's been a week since I posted last, I figured all anybody really needs when it comes to reading is that last paragraph I posted (see below). Probably one of my favorite little pieces of writing, though it actually comes at the end of the book, so as, maybe I fill that paragraph with all that came before it and maybe it doesn't stand alone on it's own. Don't know and won't know. Not much else to report, no thoughtful short essay or joke to make or picture to post. The weather has been warm and the cats have been sleeping. Saw A Dangerous Method, the Freud/Jung movie, that I quite enjoyed, have been watching basketball, running a little, hanging out, and also getting over a little bronchitis, which actually, though it was kind of painful, forced me to keep a reasonable schedule that lead to getting much done, unlike today, where it's eleven in the morning and I haven't started. Okay. That's enough. See you.

But oddly because that was two paragraphs I feel compelled to write a third solely for the sake of symmetry or balance or something like symmetry or balance like lining up a fork with the wood grain on a table, folding a napkin neatly or lining up my foot along the edge of concrete the mildly OCD impulse to square things up live, in action. Of course it's difficult when there's not as much to say and instead the only impulse that fills space is the impulse to fill space and if I were you I would just stop reading right now because I'm not going to say anything interesting or of note for the next six lines, entirely self-referential makes me think of a little article I read in the paper about Animal Studies, studying animals outside the context of biology and instead in a field like philosophy they cited Derrida who wrote, "An animal looks at me. What should I think of this sentence?"

Happy New Year.

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their back were vermiculite patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

_______________________________-Cormac McCarthy, from "The Road"