(from today's three twelve class) I'm totally and absolutely flustered, coming in from supporting Rene's class once again, trying to pull my thoughts and myself...in. Not that it's dramatic, or too dramatic, but this morning I focused my breathing for a good length of time, trying to locate the big white ball of stress caught up in the in the middle of my diaphragm. I actually got somewhere and it would be a mistake to say things have gotten out of control. Vibrating phone and world comes back. If there was a way into the chapter, I could play the location game with confidence. Instead it's the grind, as the say, another day another dollar. The beatings will continue until moral improves. I entered Rene's class in a good spot, but after all this pushing and shoving about trying to understand the student's final projects, I've ended up back inside my chest. No location or locution. An awkward position and coming in late, men with no conscience and the women who love them. Tonight at eleven. I'm looking forward to doing some gardening on Saturday.

Two on the War

i.
Perhaps the way to implode radical Islamic militants is to legitimize their authority and presence. Give them something to lose. As an organization or bureaucracy grows so does its ineffectiveness on the street; the strength and seeming root of fundamentalist belief. Fat cat unioneering and giving everybody what they want. The middle class: some thing to love.

ii.
Insects hatch while they can, all at once. Red ants and flying ones, within hours they were all gone. I would've liked to have told you. I would've liked for you to have seen it. They were swarming up the banister out of the concrete, thick and of one mind. Why did I forget to to tell you? Why is the answer to the question always the same? A semi-circle of mushrooms grows undisturbed. If only I had thought to bring this up, the beginnings of a radical script.

Relevant Employment

Free Lance Painting, WI, WA, OR, RI, NY.................................................2000-Present
Painter, Four Square Painting and Home Repair, Madison, WI........................Fall 2005 & 2006
Maintenance, The Perry Center for Children, Portland, OR.................................2002-2003
Painter, River Bend Youth Center, Oregon City, OR........................................2002-2003
Tom Naue Painting, Madison, WI.........................................................Summer 1999
Factory Work, American Pine, Prineville, OR...........................................Summer 1998
Landscaper/Laborer, Midland Builders, Madison, WI............................Summers 1995, 1996
Laborer, Merry Christmas Tree Farm, Mineral Point, WI (family business) .............1985-2000

Relevant Skills

Painting
Oil Painting
Faux Painting
Removing Paint
Prepping Walls for Painting
Plastering
Sanding
Taping
Drywalling
Basic Carpentry including knowledge of tools, and ability to read blueprints
Wall Paper Removal
Water Damage Repair
Driving heavy machinery including tractors and Bobcats
Lawn maintenance
Construction site maintenance
Putting up Barbwire Fencing
Using a chainsaw
Brush Burning (Fire Safety)
Wood Staining
Rock Work
Hay Bailing
Weed Wacking
Tree Trimming
Tree Planting
Field Mowing
Vehicle maintenance
Sewing

consumption as a break from desking, i went out to amoeba records yesterday afternoon, riding the thirty three over and down the hill to the upper haight. i had a list of records i was interested in, and found most of them, took them over to the listening station, previewed and picked a few, went back to the stacks, founds some more etc. but in the end, unable to decided amongst the multitude of options, i put them all down and got back on the thirty three. i'm not made out of money you know. today's sunday paper had yet another five articles about how we're all headed for economic/spiritual doom once the lenders come calling for their money, and by lenders i mean foreign countries who are invested in these big (morally) bankrupt companies such as fannie mae. apparently the only way that we can save our selves is to keep spending money. but if we are using all our money to pay off debt, we don't have much to spend on ipods, or rims or whatever. um, (say something smart say something smart,) i think it would be best if we all got some rest. this morning i woke in a panic prompted by dreams of class (school class, not economic). it's been quite busy lately. my mind is a ball of mud.

on the bright side, today i went to burger king and felt extremely lethargic for about two hours afterwords. it was totally worth it, but you would think a wax paper cup full of ice cold coca cola would burn through that bloated salty feeling. there was something wrong with the straw. when i was ordering i almost (almost) said to the cashier as she told me my total of six dollars and seventy something cents, you know, when i was in high school, whoppers were only ninety nine cents. for two dollars you could feel totally bloated and blob through your fifth period psychology class, repressing farts while listening to the funny psychology teacher talk about pavlov's dogs while waving around a diet coke. or that time cole and i thought it would be a good idea, while we were living in prineville and working at a lumber mill during some weirdo summer between our sophomore and junior year of college, to buy a bag full of thirty nine cent hamburgers from mcdonalds to take advantage of their sunday special, and eat them all throughout the week. that lasted three days maybe. the hamburgers began to not taste so good after awhile. it's possible that they never tasted good. god is good. it's a beautiful night.

(notes from class today)

Today is muddled. Today the barometric pressure has dropped. Today not all that many students came to class. Today is cloudy. Today is a mud ball. Today is a plate of beans. Today is the color green leaking slowly from low hanging clouds. Today is the expression on my face. Today is not my first language. Today is a grease trap. Today is a pound of bacon. Today is a glass of water sitting on the counter collecting dust. Today is a wide mouth pop top. Today is a wool sweater. Today is a low quality sausage with just enough pepper for it to taste good. Today is a clown snack. Today is an extremely large glass eye.

What is this arguing for? The world in a minute? The world is a vampire? The world is a cold and barren place? Damn I need a sandwich. Damn. Damn I'm hungry. Damn you're hungry. Damn. Damn. Damn.

There's a poet named Vernonica Forrest-Thomson, or, rather, there was a poet named Veronica Forrest-Thomson, who published a book of literary criticism named Poetic Artifice posthumously, following her suicide at the age of twenty-eight. Bummer. I woke up thinking of this, not her exactly but one of the ideas from this book, a book that I read while living in Brooklyn a book that was at the New York Public library and is considered a rare book because not many were published, thus you can't usually just order one on-line. You have to find it in a University collection (if you're lucky. Anyway...). The idea that as readers we have a tendency for "external naturalization" when we read a story or a poem; a tendency to try to create a comparable meaning outside of the writing that we can compare the two with, for example "this poem is about the writer's relationship with his father" or "this story is about living in Israel as a Palestinian"... something like that. We do it all the time: remove whatever it is from its context and put it into a context that is easier to understand and explain. Think 'soundbite', or your friends in the avant-garde explaining how a particular piece of dissonant music was made.

This isn't a bad thing, our tendency to relate, and in fact it's why we're able to make sense of things: because in our readings or listenings we relate what is being said to ourselves and our own experiences. In reading a poem or listening to a song, we'll go back and forth between paying rapt attention to the thing, and rattling around in our own minds. Like a pop song, think verse chorus verse, and the chorus is when our ears take a break and we sing along, or inhabit the persona of the hip-hopper, or whatever. She writes:

"Our reading must work through the level of meaning into the external world and then, via the non-semantic levels of artifice, back into the poem, enriched by the external contexts of reference in which it found itself momentarily merged. This is what continuity in poetic language means."

Or in other words, every time we go into our heads we bring back something new to the poem or piece that we're interacting with, and with that new information or memory, we go back into the poem's structure, thereby setting up new and fresh comparisons until we are once again sent out into our own heads...back and forth back and forth etc. I write all this because I woke up thinking of what we were going to do for today's 'freewrite', where at the start of every class we spend about ten minutes writing and then sharing what we wrote. My question (or topic) is not who was Veronica Forrest-Thomson, but does everything we write or say or do have a comparable external meaning?

friend cole emailed a particular youtube clip that i want to share with you all. it is truly amazing. while i'm at it, here is another one. have a good weekend if you have weekends.

It's weird: the more I write in the blog the more comments come back. Not that I'm trying to write anymore, but anyway, I've been listening to the self titled crystal castles album and really enjoying it in a kind of dance floor disco kind of way, like when certain songs come on I can't help but walk by placing one foot in front of the other in a slightly aggressive manner, like the way I imagine models do, which is embarrassing so I stop. It also makes me think of a particular ex and imagine she would be into it, the music, because it feels like its made for/by people just a little bit cooler than me, the dance punk wave that began just as the warp era electronic music that i so dearly love petered out and with it my need to keep up on what's new. Cole wrote a couple comments ago that sometimes I blog like I'm on cocaine and wasn't sure if this was good or bad. The magazine Casey brought back from work has an article on David Berman where the subheading speaks of his "path to usefulness." That sounds nice. Before bed I've been reading the The Inner Chapters by Chuang Tzu, he writes: "A mole drinking at the river needs but a single bellyful. Go home and rule through idleness." Clearly I have more work to do.

Last night I dreamt that there were two bees living in my shoes, a pair of Reeboks my brother had given me, with 'Hexalite' webbing in the heel. The window was on the inside of the right shoe, but it was damaged somehow, so the two bees could come in and out. I was worried about getting stung on my heel. I tried to squash the bees with a chisel like tool but the bees had already flown away. I woke up and opened the curtain, and sat in the window letting the sun onto my shoulders. They say it's going to be "a hot one" today.

I consider myself to be a relatively lucky person, though I’m not sure what this means. It’s one of those latent ideas or feelings that operates underneath, and ties to some large, mysterious mass of psychology if we want to think of it that way.

Or, that luck is more of the power of attraction, the secret and other self help remedies that fail to hold weight when pressed. I guess that’s why luck isn’t considered a religion, because it’s random: the alligator makes its move but snaps a twig. A bird flies away.

Somehow this makes the most sense; that things happen, but it’s easy to stray from chance to fate, as if some thing is in control. We make notes of all this to keep track. But what is it? Circumstance? If I run into my friend at the grocery store should I be surprised?

Luck seems to me like a perspective, that how we look at something determines if it’s lucky. I think this is an idea that’s easy to understand:

A moon was found in the sky, entire and singular.

I believe this is the perspective required for luck. On the other hand, sixteen year old, my friend Aric and his string of crashed cars: I think it’s bad luck, he said. I believed him.

tuesday yep and class starts at twelve but i got done a little early preparing for the incredibly awesome and awe inspiring day where we look at and talk about the nuts and bolts of argument which is kind of funny since i'm probably the last person you'd want teaching you how to argue but after teaching this class five times previous i've learned a few things but my point is i got done early because i woke up early somewhere around six for some unknown reason the orange light of the sunrise coming in to my feng shui situated head pointed north as i sleep and woke up thinking of yesterday's class, to be there and wondering why i was in charge and forgetting to have fun or at least follow one's own agenda rather than the imaginary expectations of the imaginary masses reminding myself it was just a mood left over from the weekend the party on saturday where i met a person who worked at a sandwhich shop that i would occasionaly frequent growing up which he informed me was a place where people dealt cocaine he was from milwaukee curse word curse word etc. etc. and after this story he proceeded to the bathroom to do cocaine which made me thank my dorky shirts for not being cool enough to be invited to backrooms and bathrooms to talk frantically to strangers i turned to joel thinking the guy was just quirky and was informed otherwise that no those were the drugs talking

the eye of my mini-disc shut itself today. it was tired. tired of playing songs so that i might take a break from the racket, or abridge the gap in my head, or listen. it happened on the train, hanging from two steel poles on the rush hour train. nobody knew. my headphones stayed in but the music stopped. the music came back. i fiddled with it. ejected the disc, put it back in, skipped tracks, came back to the one i wanted...my mini-disc is tired. i'm tired. every time a student tells me a i look tired i feel tired. my mini-disc has a laser beam for an eye, whereas, i have brown. they take in whatever is in front of them, though recently bright lights have been hurting i'm glancing at the white apartment building across the street. it makes blinky spots whenever i look at it. resolution: don't look. nap time.

saturday in the middle of the afternoon i set out to play basketball a couple hours ago but my body wasn't up to more than a few trips up and down the court and after one sour game where the proverbial team leader clearly frowned at my lack of mojo my man on man defense of let's call him "tim" not quite working out i left to come back rehydrate take a shower and return to full bore lizard position i had plans to go the gay pride parade today (post-script: it was actually sunday and i made it wowie i've never seen anything like that in wisconsin) but forget it i'm beat it was a really full week and i'm not saying that because yours was or wasn't but because its just a lot of talking and 'teaching' if that's what they call it and it wears me out so that by the time my last hour of pronuncation workshop came late on friday evening i asked the students if i could go home my person in front of me brain so tired and pretty much kaput but its saturday and later i'll finally get a chance to read people's poems that have been building up while i've been working the rough drafts of the memoirs from the other class thank the god of syllabuses for writing late work will not receive feedback because that's the only way i possibly could of gotten everything done but next week it will begin to taper off the friday the fourth of july a non-school day and the three twelve all class workshop getting into gear but i'm excited still mostly about the semester two good groups of students in my opinion last thursday we talked about haiku about basho and sent them out to do a narrow road to the interior type journey i'm excited to see how it comes out and translate a poem from the chinese wang wei deer-park hermitage that too i'm excited about but its time to rest now i'll try to do that without hurting myself

yesterday a student informed me that i used 'um' upwards of forty five times in yesterdays opening salvo lecture about sonnets the logic being that we start off talking about form before we get into content the idea that content will take care of itself as the writer one assumes has their own axe to grind or at least doesn't have the same axe as me but this is a matter of philosophy so we'll leave it open to the jury and other figures of speech to mark the day after the longest day of the year and yes its been a goofy long week and after this afternoon will mark the most teaching i've done in a week tweleve hours in a classroom and the connection between fatigue and the amount of times ones says um but in other news it was hot is still hot a haze wakes up the morning and traffic sounds go and go and go writes Witold Gombrowicz, "It is man who obliges man to work." and woman.

so saying 'um' or not actually has a lot to do with whether i'm tired or not or where exactly my motivation lies say the two o two class i taught yesterday the inevitable come down i felt in the transition from three twelve to the next day in a new building without the enthusiasm or at least not as much brings out signs of fatigue say 'um' but at least there is a santa claus virginia compounded with a study group for typography for which i embarrassingly had no answers to offer and instead offered aphorisms from the instructors mouth as a consolation but oh well we'll get them next time next life the half one or second one some kind of digital universe but to say the space in-between these places the morning as it shines my head to the north meets the sun rising from the east its all part of the wake up scheduale or its automatic when the sun begin to bake me laying in this small little box of a closet but also about school that the writing lab on tuesday will have to be cut because there was just nothing left absolutely nothing i can concentrate for a little while but in need to eat and eight hours straight of 'teaching' makes for mush mouth mealy mind today i'll plan class in the morning then take a trip to oakland to see my confidant if that's french the sun will be out all day if not we'll reconsider o lay

whell the semester started yesterday and it seems like it will be busy with a support class on noon a typography class where there's four panicking students thus far terrified of the instructors british accent that meets monday and thursday then after that its three twelve the creative writing class which also meets monday and thursday then today tuesday its 202 narrative documentary and also on friday but after today is writing lab and then the study group for the typography class and then wednesday will give me time to prepare for the upcoming classes don't ask me when i will be able to grade papers then friday afternoon its speaking lab all that to say that it will be a busy month and a half month but this is good because i've had a little too much time on my hands not in the form of the break but in the form of the last semester which was good but doing all kinds of support classes and having plenty of time for writing but it makes me think of that stephen king on writing book where he mentions that after his first big success he bought a gigantic oak desk and put it in the middle of his living space and it turned out that he didn't write anything after he did this the writing as the center of one's life metaphor that is to say its good to be busy and maybe the entirely polished lodestone of a writing practice that i've been fine tuning latey is good and dandy but it will be nice to take a break from worry about the relatively unimportant merits of what's happening inside my own head because i just won't have the time that is to say my new thing that i'm trying is to avoid saying 'um' and that requires that i just get it out before the whatever you call that has time to go back and filter through all my critical judgments and set the tone sort of say it don't spray it something like that to forget about tailoring one's speech to one's audience and instead to present oneself as one would have it it sounds simple but its not exactly a student i mentioned this to yesterday mentioned that they said cool a lot and i suggested we work on this together escaping our in-between thoughts and speak directly