840 Valencia (Part 2)

The ambiguity of who was going to stay coupled with personal allegiances made for a particular mix of entitlement. I, on the one hand, felt entitled because I was better friends with Chris (a friend from graduate school) than Casey was, and so it made more sense that I stay on in the apartment if Amy left. On the other hand Casey's rental agreement was with Amy and not Chris. If Amy decided not to come back (and Chris did) then Casey could stay in Amy's room and it would be an easy transition. There were two ways to argue and both were fair, depending on who you knew.

What Casey and I didn't know, but soon learned, was that Amy and Chris' communication about all of the above was less than fluent. Amy might talk to Casey on the phone about her plans, Casey would relay the information to me, now taking the form of gossip, and in turn I would pass it on to Chris. Or I would hear something from Liz (a mutual friend of Amy and I), I would pass the information on the Casey, etc. It became apparent that Amy and Chris weren't speaking to each other and to be fair, they tried, but both being absorbed in two different worlds / time zones made things difficult. Maybe this is how information gets spread (selectively) when nobody is in the same place at the same time. Anyway, the effect of all this was four different ideas of the future.

Meanwhile, Casey and I lived relatively peacefully in the apartment, neither of us unable to unpack our boxes or settle. This lasted for six months until Casey volunteered to leave. I write this as a post-script in the apartment, Friday morning San Francisco rain and finally at a (make shift) desk. Not because the story is finished, but because over the winter vacation I had trouble getting to sleep thinking that I had been screwed over after Casey had left. When I got back yesterday I was still angry, the flip flopping and positioning and how leaving the apartment seemed like a better option than to be caught up in some weird drama with people that I apparently didn't know very well. Anyway, I might get into trouble writing like this, so I have to be careful to not spill my angst in a way that does more harm than good. My hope is that I can tell the story in a way that everybody can agree on. It is probably this instinct that keeps the conflict open.

My brother and I listened to Obama's inauguration address on the radio of a Mazda 3 in the hills of West Virginia. We were on our way back from our great aunt's memorial service that we had left for on Sunday morning. An eleven hour car ride from New York, we passed the time on our way there playing silly road games and a long discussion that hinged on the assertion that in reading our brain pays attention to every letter in a word and processes it subconsciously while our conscious mind handles the meaning making portion of reading. Regardless, we got to our uncle's around eight, sister and husband and baby and dogs got in from D.C. at nine. The next morning along with cousins and cousin's children, we set aunt Jean's coffin on a wooden palette and the grave diggers did the rest. Aunt Jean didn't want any services and her wishes were respected.

She was the youngest of three sisters, my father's mother the middle sister, and all three were buried next to each other. She was the grandparent that would come with us to Dollywood, take us to the pool, and in general, make efforts to meet us kids wherever we were at; probably our only grandparent to do this, the fun one. She was also incredibly stubborn and had a reputation for constant criticism spilling out of her mouth, quick to tell you that your haircut is terrible and that your hand writing sucks. Just as quick to love, a squeeze or to give some sugar (her word for a kiss), this honesty, if that is what we call it, was also what made her endearing and there was no doubt how much she loved her sister's children, and their children (us).

After a pizza wake we all went over to her house and began the process of figuring out what to do with her stuff. My sister claimed some light fixtures, I got some end tables and some pans, my brother took with him an eight pack of twelve ounce bottles of Coke, cousin David joking/asking if he could drink my brother's inheritance. I found in an old box of jewelry, the names of my grandmother's children, my brother sister and I and our two cousins, etched on bracelet and a locket containing an old picture of aunt Jean and grandmother Anderson, what looked like a high school picture of them both, fresh faced and smiling in the sun. I sat down thinking that I would write about Obama's speech, reacting to the silliness of pundits talking for six hours about a twenty minute speech, instantly analyzing what might be better left to simmer, but never mind about that. My brother and I made it back to New York last night, and I leave for home (is where one starts from, T.S. Eliot) tomorrow.

840 Valencia (Part 1)

Last march I moved out of the Oakland apartment into a two bedroom San Francisco sublet on Valencia in the Mission district. I was going to take over Chris' room until the end of May while he was away in France doing some movement related studies. He got back in June but was again headed away to teach in El Salvador and a residency out in New York (state), so it made more sense for me to stay until he got back from the second trip, extending the sublet until the end of October.

Concurrently, Chris' roommate Amy was also going to be out of town, working on a Sol LeWitt installation at Mass MoCA until the end of August. Amy found Casey to sublet her room. Since Amy was leaving a month before Chris, I moved into Amy's room in the month of March, the plan being that when Chris left at the beginning of April I would move into Chris' room and Casey would move into Amy's room. In theory I was subletting from Chris and Casey was subletting from Amy, and both Chris and Amy would deal with any subletting issues that came up based on this division.

The trouble, or ambiguity of who is where until when, began when instead of me moving out of Amy's room in April when Chris left and Casey came, I stayed in Amy's room and Casey moved into Chris' room. Though this didn't create any immediate problems for Casey and I, or Chris and Amy, it mucked up the clear cut lines of communication and division of responsibilities.

Originally Amy was due back at the end of August, but having met and fell in love with Nobu out in Massachusets, her plans changed. Instead of coming back immediately, she and Nobu decided to come back to San Francisco and live together. This meant that Amy would be moving out of the Valencia apartment for a number a reasons, the most important being that the apartment was not big enough for three people (Amy, Nobu, and Chris). Thus raising the question: who was going to take Amy's place?

But let's back up a little bit. Casey and I had been living together since April and were getting along just fine. We weren't the best of friends but were both semi-reasonable people, relatively clean, respectful of each other's space, etc. and happy to be in the apartment. At some point early in the summer the possibility was raised that Amy might not be coming back and we talked a little bit about who would stay. Around that same time Chris was in between trips and was around the apartment to pick up some things. He was frustrated at not being able to find what he was looking for through the hubris of Casey's things, and offhandedly, walking down Valencia after lunch, told me that if Amy moved out he would rather live with me than Casey.

A couple days latter, fueled by the idea that if I know what I want I have every right to pursue it (as opposed to passively hoping that things and people will work out in my favor), I mentioned to Casey Chris' remark and the bad blood began to flow.

Brief shout out to Tim DeChristopher the environmental activist / graduate student who mucked up an oil-lease auction in Utah. Civil disobedience at its 21st century best! Here is today's Washington Post article that reasonably summarizes his actions (it requires creating a washington post account which only takes a second...sorry. Newspapers are hard up anyway these days).

Dreaming, in college (will I ever leave?) that part my my final assignment was that I was going to burn down the library. I got it cleared with everybody in the library, and nobody seemed to be bothered by my ambition, so I picked a time right before it closed and wadded up some newspaper and sticks, set fire to it around the computer station and left. Soon I found out that the fire didn't catch and I out one final project. I was disappointed and a little embarrassed that I had failed. What am I going to tell all those people who find out that I didn't burn it down?

Anyway, dreaming in DC, at my sisters and husband's house. I've been in nanny mode feeding the baby mangoes while sister is at work and husband is working on finishing the kitchen. This weekend I am off to Virginia to see friends Erika and John.

Snitznoodle + Neice

Time Life Love Poem

Let’s suppose there’s an unbreakable bond
between us that transcends (supposing
still) space and time, okay?
A psychic connection
like that man who gets on a plane
or doesn’t. The plane crashes
after he hesitates to board:
a feeling out of nowhere, he puts his fingers
to his temples, squinting as if
receiving a transmission.

And then there’s the lady
burning her hand while three
thousand miles away her twin
feels a sharp pain. Let’s say
these kinds of bond exist
instinctively, or we are attuned
to these types of disturbances
in others, or vice versa,
another’s pleasure. Let’s suppose
and I remember
after a long visit we left each other
and listened to the same song
without any premeditation.

The other night I knew
you wanted to call me, and I felt that
twinge, that cosmic foam popping
between us. That pull.
And I called and was right:
you were in love with somebody else
again, and again I too was in love
with all this beyond us.

The woman at the airport security gate asked me if I was "all together." I asked her what she meant ("what do you mean?"), and she made a gesture indicating the person ahead of me: was I traveling with this person?

For a second I thought she meant it like the expression "pulling it together" or "keeping it together," like she knew I was going through a difficult time and was offering support.

tomorrow i leave wisconsin for chicago to have a new year with cole and melissa and molly and barnaby and other who's names i may not remember. it should be fun. it was a nice, mellow/low-key christmas. wisconsin is cold and snowy which is novel and short term so therefore exciting. the last couple days i've been getting in touch with my inner-painter so therefore i'm exhausted. enjoy the following megapixels, and heck, i don't know, have a happy new year.

brother ben made this blanket for niece beatrix

friend joel post village bar when the snow turned into rain and fog (spooky/pooky)father + brother at clearview

whell, it's the end of the semester yet again and whell, that's about it. i'm leaving san francisco for a month and half, the entire winter break, to visit my mother's house for christmas, will stop in chicago for new years, head to d.c. to my sister's for the beginning of january, hopefully stop by new york and also los angeles. it seems ambitious but i like to travel. it relaxes me, even more than playing the tuba. this semester has been another hum dinger and i'm going to take next semester off of teaching, though i will probably keep doing esl work and tutoring. maybe i will go into steamfitting or airplane repair. i sort of forget how to write in this blog but that's probably a good thing. i was perfectly content with having that st. vincent millay poem sit there for the next five years as the last, depressing post of somebody who got bored and abandoned their blog. maybe this will be the last blog post for this blog. recently i've gotten into some music software and it's been where my creative energies have been going, if you can call it creative. mostly i've been making bad techno music. it's pretty fun. once i figure out how to actually write a song, the next frontier, the music might get more interesting. is there a difference between writing a poem and a song? probably, but i figure that the drive needed to carry a poem out to completion is the same as the drive needed to carry a song out to completion. then again, making music on a computer is not exactly like opening a note book. it's confusing with all its bleep and blops and buttons. i've got to give it more time. anyway, it's a null day in san francisco. kind of cloudy, a little cold. sarah's coming by to drop off my hat and i work from three to nine.

The machine rattles and hums like it has a larger purpose in life, its function a part of the whole (the kitchen below, the restaurant's ventilation). Poetry was the first thing that anybody had told me I was good at, that I had a talent for and being in my last year of college having no idea what to do, I pursued it. People ask if I am still writing and I say of course, always. And this is true, but not as the center piece of my day.

I have to work, or rather, want to work in other capacities. The writers whose trajectories I find most appealing were all part-time in a sense: Wallace Stevens the insurance executive and George Oppen the labor organizer. Both had other lives that did not ever directly translate into poetry. Consummate outsiders, never fully beholden to either title, thereby creating a distance in which to write.

Free agents thus free to wander into any dream. The trouble with construction in the early morning is that it prevents free wandering into dreams. Seven thirty is when I first heard the jack hammers. They start early and work fluently until everyone else is awake, the language of breaking up concrete and tank tread.

Forrest asked, sincerely, do you like writing? I like the generation of words but don't like a work that translates into a kind of pyramid scheme: writing for relief, and this relief turning into something to sell. Pure innards, like pig intestines or a gutsy Academy Award winning performance, seem unsustainable in comparison to an on-going relationship with community. i.e. a dialogue with others, a role to play.

A bird landed on the fire escape and chirped in my direction. I looked for it; scanning the ledge and the rusty metal fire escape that climbs over the ledge, the bird frantically chirping over the rumble of machinery. As soon as I made eye contact, it flew away. Was it waiting to be seen? It seemed angry. Maybe it thought I was responsible for the noise and could put and end to it.

The sky is mostly clear, though the smell of construction wafts somewhere near. Unlike yesterday morning the noise is distant. It's possible they're just further down the street and instead, the peace is relative; a whole block or blocks of people experiencing what I did yesterday morning.

Bailout?

The True Encounter

"Wolf!" cried my cunning heart
At every sheep it spied,
And roused the countryside.

"Wolf! Wolf!"-and up would start
Good neighbours, bringing spade
And pitchfork to my aid.

At length my cry was known:
Therein lay my release.
I met the wolf alone
And was devoured in peace.

___-Edna St. Vincent Millay

An alarm clock is one way to wake up. There are others, like gradually, with the sun rising in the East, to be shook awake by your step brother, or by you mother in the early early morning. To be sleepy until one jumps in the water; to sit on the warm grate while the freezing cold festers. Mornings like these.

I could wake up from the sound of a garbage truck, from the need to pee, a dream where I'm looking for the bathroom, an elbow touching mine. I could wake up from voices, a roommate or a couple walking by, a bright afternoon sun and the sudden feeling of sloth. I could wake up because I'm cold, wander through a house looking for blankets until Aric's dad hands me one. I could wake up in a tent, to rain, or wake up on a train going south, on my way to Los Angeles. I could wake up with drool on my pillow, with a boner or with a crick in my neck. I could wake up with the realization I've been sleeping on a wadded up t-shirt, dreaming that a biker had just stabbed me in a ballet studio. I could wake up with a dream in my head or a stereolab song, and listen to it on my way to work.

I could wake up from the a-tonal hum of a tea pot, in a panic, in a sweat of anxiety about teaching and work. I could wake up as a wire strung between fence posts, humming or laughing at a joke in a dream, goofing with friends. I could wake up in a foreign country, in a closet converted into a bedroom, look at the wall and not know where I am. I could wake up to my father trying to read a newspaper headline, or a bird trapped in the stove pipe. I could take a nap and wake up twice in a day, wake up sick, and wonder what it feels like to not feel sick, shake Tony and wake up from a dream. I could wake up to a friend's voice wishing me a good day, wake up to my own voice wishing him good luck.

earlier this evening while eating a dinner of eggs scrambled with spinach and garlic along with some buttered olive bread my roommate mentioned that he had had a dream about barak obama last night, bill clinton was in the dream too. which is funny, because i had a dream about barak obama on saturday night. five months ago i had had a dream about john mccain: we were at some kind of party and mccain kept side hugging me really tightly, too tightly i thought. anyway, about the obama of dreams, i wondered out loud if a lot of people had been having obama dreams, reading about beyonce saying she fell asleep on election night with tears of joy in her eyes. chris, my roommate, matter of factly stated that a mass of barak obama dreams is a sign of an "archetypal paradigm shift." i'm not exactly sure what this means, but it makes sense that we all have experienced something amazing together, and that this experience would show up in our collective unconsciousness, not to get all jungian on you, but you know what i mean. it's that same kind of symbol making that made the trade center attack about more than lost lives;that an image gets imprinted, whether we like it or not. thus, the power of poetry or whatever you call it. the importance of symbols, that we're not entirely in control of the meanings we assign. anyway, we finished talking and the dishes got cleaned.

as i write this i'm listening to the stereolab album "sound dust," one of many stereolab albums that are really easy to find used and for cheap. i hadn't listened to them actively since college but i bought their new album ("chemical cords") after reading an interestingly positive review and have since been working my way backwards through their albums.there's so much to listen to, each album a kind of experiment though each album sounds exactly like a stereolab album. please enjoy. this post is over.

Friday, November 14th

not knowing "what to talk about"

sitting on top a rock

_________________________a man and his child

_________________________shout at the water

_________________________two men
_________________________cuss on the park bench

_________________________eating potato chips
_________________________and making phone calls

_________________________there's not a bird in this park
_________________________that doesn't know

_________________________what to do

on wednesday (i've been away from the computer) i signed up for healthy san francisco, a city wide program that provides health insurance for those who cannot afford it, like me! it was the second time i had gone in to do this, as the first time was foiled by my most recent salary versus my salary over a span of three months, which if you include the fact that in between every semester i have to go on unemployment and the month long lag between my first day teaching and my first pay check, details, etc. means i was more than 300% above the federal poverty level which thereby disqualifies me from the program. whew. so factoring the three months, i'm about 250% above the federal poverty level bank robbery is punishable by twenty years in federal prison phillip glass einstein on the beach.

the lady who helped me sign up was named june, a vietnamese "boat person" so she told me, asking if i know who the boat people were answer the refugees who came over from vietnam during and after the war she hasn't seen her sister for twenty years. without any prompting she said i was "gentle" and commented a number of times on what "good boy" i was. i was comforted but this claim. in other news it's my thirty-ith birthday on saturday. on sunday afternoon i will have a low pressure cake eating tea time on the grass in dolores park. if you would like to join us/me please do. write me an email if you'd like to come. have a good "one."

wow. i mean, wow. first obama wins pennsylvania, then mccain gives a speech that comes out decent, obama comes on with his family, makes us think, joe biden, everybody's waving around and crying and then, on my way home, a massive crowd gathers on the corner and is still going, blocking the streets and spontaneously bursting into joy again and again. the police don't seem to mind and everybody's happy. wow. that's great. i mean, this is great. at times like these i wish i had a good quality digital camera. i'd describe the dude wearing the light display climbing ontop the van while the guy with a crutch leads a chant, or the dance circle that brakes out at the intersection of valencia and 19th. why here? who knows? people on their roofs are lighting off fireworks and throwing toilet paper rolls into the crowd below. a man turns an air raid siren as people take pictures, honk their horns and turn their cars around as they realize that the crowd isn't going anywhere. wave after wave of spontaneous celebration. a dude plays a trumpet badly but we love it. he's playing the star spangled banner and people, hipsters and everybody inbetween is singing the star spangled banner. a girl wearing a green incredible hulk fist is pumping it in the air at no one in particular. maybe at everyone in particular. san fran. cisco.

Attention Alone Accomplishes Little. Well, I've been working on manuscripts and that' s the one I'm still working on. It needs some revision. There are parts in the title poem that need work, the more essay like general address pieces that fail to carry their weight. Cutting or editing so that it stays personal would be best. Then there's the issues of addendum, the strangers and MP16 and Creeley could all fit but I'm not sure how or if it's necessary. And then there's edits to chair and dresser, working the unmet i into the cycle. It...d be a good note to end chair and dresser on but to go on from where it is might be superfluous. As it is, the structure of the manuscript i think is working supremely well. I got turned down for a month at the Vermont studios today. Eeet's a bummer. I'm riding on a train to Oakland using my ears more than my mind. It's a...cool world, raining. I'm going to Bill's to have an evening of it. I spoke to A and it might be weird to be lounging over there an it probably says a lot about myspace or an inability to create it. Caught up in individual poems, failing to move forward like Mt. Eerie's lyrics, which were a little stale. Talk is cheep. And then there's the other manuscript, not nearly as exciting or 'book length poem' like. I think somebody will be interested but I think that every year. Those early poems, I'm not sure if they translate over time. What is this blog for? "The quest for sincerity is like the quest for a perfect lawn." write the editors of Action Yes. Jon Leon is a poet I identify with.

_
i want to build


and raise new
the temples of Theseus and the stadiums
and where Perikles lived



but there's no money, too much spent
today. I had a guest
over _____and we sat together




-Friedrich Holderlin as Translated by Richard Sieburth