Good for all time

Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn is the book that opened me up to the world of art. What a treat it is, in Miller’s Letters to Emil, to find him discussing his thoughts about the writing of Capricornas he’s writing it!:

“What I am doing, if I can explain it, is to free myself for expression on a different, a higher (?) level. I am working out my own salvation, as writer, thinker, human being. I am working it off on the world […].”

“I’m writing for posterity, which is with us always in the shape of those who love us. […] I don’t give a fuck about being right, or artistic, or clear—I only care about what I’m saying for the moment. If I say that with passion and sincerity it’s good for all time.”

“And when you detect discrepancies in the narrative, lies, distortions, etc., don’t think it is bad memory—no it is quite deliberate, for where I go on to falsify I am in reality only extending the sphere of the real, carrying out the implicit truth in situations that life sometimes, and art most of the time, conceals. […] I am the most sincere liar that ever lived. You will see that. But to myself I lie almost negligibly. I am writing out of my system, wiping it out, as it were, all that kind of lying. That is the real purpose of art—among all its real purposes, which nobody understands anyway.”

The third beer

I’m reading Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and I’m totally digging it. For whatever reason the following passage struck me in the way it exposes the cruel tenuousness of young love:

She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it’s there, because it can’t hurt, and because what difference does it make?

It wasn’t going anywhere and it was keeping him lazy, like a pampered honey bear who had only to stick out his paw for another scoop, and so had lost the agility of the tree-climbers, the bee-fighters, but not the recollection of how thrilling the search had been.

Défilé du Père Noel

I’m a lousy tourist. Chicago last weekend and now Montreal. Not a single photo taken. How will anyone, including my future self, know for sure that I have really been where I say I’ve been? If a tree falls in the woods and an image of the fallen tree is not captured on an iPhone and then posted on Facebook, does it make a sound? God only knows.

It’s strange to hear French being spoken everywhere in a city that’s only a few hours drive from where I grew up. I’ve always thought of Canada as an icy appendage of the U.S., but at least here in Montreal I’m feeling like I just fell off the turnip truck. At the hotel and at all the local businesses I’ve checked out so far, the employees switch effortlessly between French and English, even going back and forth when socializing with each other. The barista at the hotel café — a scruffy type who didn’t strike me as particularly well educated — was able to speak fluently in French to the customer ahead of me in line, then switch to perfect English with me, and then later chat in Spanish to another group of people. Here I am struggling and straining to make a bit of sense in Spanish and this kid is pulling off trilinguality like it ain’t no thing.

My wife is here for the annual American Anthropological Association conference and I’m just along for the ride. Last night we ran into several of her former classmates from graduate school, folks I haven’t hung out with in years. Most of them have multiple children now and are getting their careers underway at various universities. Aside from my new beard (in fact, my first beard, at the age of 40!) and the fact that I now live in New Mexico, I feel like relatively little has changed in my own life. I’ve been in a holding pattern for so long that I’ve forgotten what it feels like to take a step forward.

Tomorrow we roll on to East Burke, Vermont to visit my in-laws, then to Troy, New York for Thanksgiving with my family. Nephews will be bigger and able to do amazing new things. Parents and siblings will be a bit older and perhaps a little less able to do the same old things. I’ll be there with my new beard in all its brown, red and gray glory.

Time keeps doing its thing. Always forward. Always onward. Always grayward. There’s a big Santa parade (Défilé du Père Noel) happening right now on Rue Sainte Catherine. Children squeal in French — which is somehow much more adorable than English squealing — as they race ahead of their parents to take their posts along the sidewalk. Something is looming just down the pike. Maybe it’s a giant snowman, or even Santa himself. Whatever it is it will be amazing. Then it will be a memory. Then it will be forgotten, unless of course someone thinks to snap a picture and put it on the mantle or on Facebook or wherever it is memories will be kept in the future.

All good

Up until now I’ve been feeling a little uncomfortable with how… comfortable I have been feeling these days. Crazy, I know. As is the case with most issues in my life, acceptance seems to be the key. And so I’m finally accepting the difficult truth that life is pretty damn good right now. (I can feel the sympathy radiating from every direction.) It’s good not to be saddled with a full-time job, for however long it might last. At first it was weird, but now it’s just plain sweet. I hate being in harness and, for now, I’m not in harness. Hence, the goodness.

One of things I’m particularly enjoying about having my new found freedom is that I get to play a lot. Aside from my usual antics with the guitar, I’ve rediscovered the sublime joy of playing outside. I’ve never had my own back yard, until now, and so the eight-year-old in me just had to turn it into my own private fun-zone. I bought a 4×6 soccer goal at Target, and ordered the lawn game Ladderball. Next on the list is a ping-pong table (although that will require a playmate). I’ll be 41 in less than two weeks, and I get to spend time, every day, playing in my back yard. And I feel great. It’s funny how little I’ve changed in the last thirty years. I can still spend hours making up games to keep myself amused and engaged in the absence of a companion. “Right vs. Left” is one of my all-time favorites. Yesterday, my left foot was finally able to defeat my right foot in a soccer shooting contest. It was a big moment for ol’ lefty, especially considering all he’s been through with the recent knee injury and surgery. The left hand, however, has been getting consistently drubbed in Ladderball by the right hand. I guess that’s why they call it the “dominant” hand. In any event, I’ve rediscovered that sweet spot where getting lost in my imagination meets being completely present in my body. And it’s all good.

I’m also getting in pretty good shape. Who woulda thought that playing soccer in the yard would be better for my health and fitness than sitting at a desk entering accounting invoices. The More You Know!

I’ve also been reading and playing music and getting plenty of sleep and not shaving and goofing around in countless other ways. And I’m done with the guilt. Done with not enjoying this situation to the full. Of course I’ve been “productive” in some ways too, as I also do just about all the housework and run all the errands and make it so my wife can focus 100% on her new job. It’s a win – win. And I have studied for and taken the GRE, applied to graduate school, searched for jobs almost daily and sent out about fifteen applications, and chipped away at several long-term creative projects. I’m getting shit done, and I’m NEVER bored. Not for one second. I don’t know that I’ve ever been bored when my time is my own. At school and on the job, yes, of course — but never when my mind and body are free to expand and express.

This is the life I have been given to live, and although I’ve done nothing to deserve it, I may as well enjoy it while it lasts.

Roadmap to nowhere

Another glorious spring day in Carrboro, North Carolina. A few hours ago I strolled these familiar streets as I have countless times over the past dozen or so years. A lot has changed. I seem to tire more quickly, to head home a little sooner, to withdraw into myself with less resistance. Most times I still pass by the Open Eye Café, but these days I rarely stay for more than a few minutes. In the year 2000, I was approaching 30 without a clue as to where I was heading, just a dull ache in my chest from the extraction that had recently taken place. She was gone, just as I had always suspected she would be, eventually. I was raw, alone, and craving connection. I would sit in the café for hours, waiting. Waiting for something to happen. Anything, really. In truth, I was hoping to be rescued by another she. Hoping to be salvaged, saved, shaken up. Woken up. I waited for a long time, but no one came. Nothing much happened. I read a few books. Wrote a few poems. Exchanged a few furtive glances with many a would-be savior. But I never initiated a single conversation with someone I didn’t already know. Never reached out or took a daring step on behalf of my deepest desires. I just waited.

On November 18, 2000, I sat in my familiar spot on the far end of the big, comfy, filthy sofa. This was my pathetic way of courting destiny. Someone, anyone, might sit down next to me. Right next to me–without a barrier between us. I wrote the following little poem, hoping someone might subconsciously pick up on my creative vibe:

Time folding back on itself like a roadmap to nowhere.
The colors in this room are soft, warm, lulling me into a dreamy haze.
I feel as if I might suddenly begin floating up from the sofa.
How wonderful to stretch out, spread-eagle against the ceiling,
feeling the gentle pull of weightlessness.
Outside it is dark and the cold is biting.
It numbs the bones.

Turns out that I did turn up on someone’s radar, and that someone was Robert, a.k.a. “The Colonel” — a mentally disabled man with tobacco juice always running down the corners of his mouth, who usually brought with him the faint smell of pee-pee and an inexhaustible drive to talk my fucking ears off for as long as it took to run me out of the place. I would sigh audibly whenever I saw him enter the tiny café, knowing that I would have to be going soon whether I was ready to or not. The Colonel did not respond to social cues, to firm redirection, or even to straight-up telling him “Dude, it was nice talking to you, but I really need to finish reading this chapter!”

One day I heard that The Colonel was hit by a car right outside the café while crossing the street. I was sorry to hear that he was badly injured, but also secretly relieved he wouldn’t be sitting next to me on the sofa anytime soon. That seat was reserved for the one. Months went by. Maybe even a year or more. Of course, a beautiful woman never did sit down beside me and say something like, “Hey, I’ve been secretly admiring you from the corner of the room, and was wondering if you’d like to go back to my apartment and make love for the rest of our lives.”

One day, out of the blue, The Colonel came gimping through the front door. He had always gimped, even before the accident. He picked up right where he left off as if nothing had happened. Despite how truly annoying the guy was, I grew fond of Robert. I came in to the café one day a couple of years later to put up a poster for my band’s next show. I was about to move out of state, so this was to be my last performance. The poster was a blurry, xeroxed image of me rocking out at a previous show. I showed it to Robert and he (very loudly) exclaimed, “This is you! You look like a nigger!” I wanted to run out the door I was so embarrassed, but no one seemed to register any offense or pay Robert one bit of mind. “That’s just Robert” they silently conveyed. “His brain is not like yours and mine.” Most people seemed to regard him as they would a squirrel, or a breeze blowing though the room. He was part of the natural order of things.

When I returned to Carrboro years later, in 2008, I was surprised to see that the café had changed locations. It was now a few doors down, in a much, much bigger space. It no longer had that cozy charm, but the place was still packed with people at all hours. As I looked around at the new surroundings I felt a tap at my shoulder. It was Robert. He looked exactly the same, asked me where I had been, and then he used his sleeve to wipe the tobacco juice that was dripping from the corner of his nearly toothless mouth. This was 2008 mind you. I have since been back to the café, including today, at least thirty times, and each time Robert has been there or else arrived there at some point shortly after me. I’m talking every single mother-fucking time. It’s uncanny. I just take it for granted now that he will be there. And he is. Every time.

So Robert is still there, and the same owners still run the place, but everything else, like the location, has that “familiar but different” feel. The café is still swarming with twenty and thirty-something scenesters exchanging furtive glances from behind their respective partitions. Ten years ago we would hide behind a beat-up copy of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, or (in my case) Henry Miller’s The Rosy Crucifixion. Today people hide behind their MacBook laptops, or between a pair of headphones or earbuds, plugged in to something going on somewhere, but not here. Today I spent my twenty minutes or so hiding behind a copy of the Independent Weekly. A familiar fortress. Today, however, I’m 40 years old–a place I never, ever really thought I’d be. Today I glance at the cute girl in the corner and think, “I’m old enough to be her father!” I don’t enjoy thoughts like this. I hate that for the past year or so I see everything through the lens of aging. Hopefully, this will pass soon.

“Time folding back on itself like a roadmap to nowhere.” Those words came back to me today as I headed home, haunting me like the ghost of that thirty year old who waited all that time for someone to come along and live his life for him, that guy who skulked in the corner like a thirsty vampire without fangs, who sat in a cage he knew deep down was unlocked, dreaming of a freedom that required only that he wake the fuck up and get off his ass.

Forty years old. A banana with brown spots. A rose starting to wilt around the edges. A mere century ago, forty years was as long as one could expect to be breathing and prancing around on God’s green earth. Forty years was the end of the road, or close to it. As it stands, I’ve probably got another forty ahead me. The second half. Act two. I hear it goes by fast, so it’s best not to sleep-walk through too much of it. Robert from the café, that son of a gun, he told me the other day that he’s 72 years old. He bragged about his thick head of hair, hardly a gray strand to be found. When I first met him, over ten years ago mind you, he told me the same thing: that he was 72 years old. He also told me he’s a millionaire; that he owns his own airplane; that he was shot in the head in Vietnam; that he used to jam with Elvis Presley. Who knows what might be true. At the very least, he may have been shot in the head. Whatever the case may be, I’m sure as shit that The Colonel never waited for someone to come sit beside him, or for someone to take him to where he wanted to go.

It’s time for me to move on, again. I may never again set foot in that café, may never see Robert gimping toward me with tobacco-stained fingers outstretched to grab my hand with a firm shake. Soon he’ll be just another ghost floating around whenever I dream of this perfect little town, of my breezy strolls on these perfect spring days. He’s sure to be there, every time. There on that filthy sofa in that cozy little café, in the smaller place before the move. He’ll be there next to that perfect thirty year old. That perfectly ripe banana. That rose in full bloom. Two men, side by side, and not a gray hair between them. One, not a thought in his head, just a bullet and a wad of chew. The other, his hands not on the wheel but instead, half-knowingly, around his own neck, keeping his voice down, as ever.

And the winner is…

nmsu3

The City of the Crosses, a.k.a. Las Cruces, New Mexico! That’s right, my wife has officially accepted a tenure-track faculty position at New Mexico State University! At long last I can realize my dream of being a childless house-husband! Hallelujah, I knew this day would come!

I can’t even begin to express how excited we both are to be moving into this next phase of our lives. It’s been a tense week of negotiations and hashing out pros and cons, as my wife was also offered a job in beautiful Oregon. Of course, Las Cruces is pretty friggin’ gorgeous too, as you can see in the photos below, and NMSU’s job offer just didn’t have any cons. They’ll even let me take two courses per semester, for free, for life. Warm weather year round? Um.. yeah, I’ll take that.

Honestly, I can hardly wrap my head around the situation. I’ve been stuck in a holding pattern for the last two and a half years, hanging on and hoping my wife would be able to finish up her Ph.D. and then land a job in this tough economy. I’m really proud of everything she’s accomplished. She’s worked incredibly hard, nonstop, for the past seven and a half years, and the pressure to land a job this year has been pretty intense. We had just sat down not two weeks ago and had a big talk about how it looked like nothing was going to come through this year. I was dreading the thought of treading water for another year and we both agreed that I needed to move forward, quit my lame temp job, and do something big and bold, regardless of whether or not she could score a position at the eleventh hour. The next day she was offered the job at NMSU! When the folks in Portland found out about it, they made a counter offer a few days later. The days since then have been a wild roller coaster ride, and we’re finally able to catch our breath and enjoy the moment. We’re going to Las Cruces baby!

HTG 3.0

In November of 2007 I completely revamped this website, launching what I then called HTG 2.0. At that point I had been goofing around online for a couple of years, in fits and spurts, without any focus or clue as to what the hell I was doing. The revamp was just the little project I needed to keep occupied while I was laid up recovering from knee surgery. What a glorious mess I constructed! It contained about a dozen different tabs across the top, each page branching out into several other sub-pages, each with its own customized side bar full of widgets. Everything you see on the site now existed then in some form, in addition to everything that exists now on my other website, plus a bunch of other random pages. And all for my own amusement! Judging from the frequency of comments, hardly anyone paid me the slightest bit of attention. (Apparently, one can check “stats” to find out about such things, but I haven’t yet been curious enough to look into that.) I’ll tell you what though–even though I was talking to myself, I was pretty excited about HTG 2.0 because, as I said at the time, “All this is really just a way to light a fire under my ass.” And it worked. For a while anyway. My blogging output has tended to wax and wane in the last few years, depending on the demands of my job. I participated in Reverb 10 last month as a way to light that fire again, and in these first two weeks of twenty-eleven I’ve spent what free time I could steal tweaking both my websites in preparation for the next great period of prodigious creative output. And…. GO! And it starts….. NOW!

*eep*

Okay, so the changes to the sites are modest, but I did manage to break ground on my “writing project in gestation.” The working title is Esperando el milagro, so whenever you see those words in the post title, you’ll know it’s about to get weird. It’s going to be what it’s going to be, but I don’t intend to write a book in the traditional sense. Henry Miller taught me most of what I know about writing, mostly because he happens to be one of the few authors I’ve read extensively. I like the way his style is described on his Wikipedia page: “a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also fictional.” That sounds pretty close to what I’m envisioning for my project, except I don’t like the term “fictional,” because it carries with it connotations like “not true,” “not real,” and “didn’t actually happen.” As far as I’m concerned, what happens in the imagination can be just as important as (and often far more interesting than) what “actually” happens in terms of observable behavior. Who wants to watch surveillance videos or read courtroom transcriptions? Real life has both an inside and an outside, and the dividing line is not as clear as one might think.

Whatever the project turns out to be, like my music it’s not likely to ever leave this blog, but that doesn’t make it any less than what it could be. I’m reminded of a blog post by Patrick Rhone that I read just before Reverb 10 kicked off. In fact, it was R10 founder Gwen Bell who linked to it on her twitter feed. Here’s what Patrick has to say to us bloggers:

You are writers.

I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the title “blogger”. I think this term cuts wrong in several directions.

First, I think it reduces the respect and credibility of those who write and publish online. Especially those who perform this craft well and are deserving of the same recognition and respect society has long bestowed upon writers in other mediums. In fact, take any of your best journalists, authors, etc. and I could show you an equal number of “bloggers” that write just as well if not better.

Secondly, I think it helps to absolve many of becoming better at a craft that they choose to participate in by giving it a label that divorces it from the very thing it is. Writing, editing, publishing – These things that have been happening for thousands of years. The methods and medium may be different but the craft is exactly the same. It does not need a new noun. The fact that technology has progressed to the point where we can do it ourselves does not make the means of the labor different. What technology has done is allow anyone who wishes to write and publish the ability to do so no matter if they have the talent to write or not.

As with any art, part is talent but I would argue that an even larger part is also learning how to write. Once learned, practice (lots and lots of it) is what will help you eventually find, what we writers like to call, your “voice”. That little something in your writing that is uniquely you. Once you find that (and only when you find it), you will be able to cast off any other term that the collective may chose to bestow upon you. You are a writer.

That’s the spirit! At least that’s the spirit I’m taking with me into the next phase of my creative life. HTG 3.0 baby! It’s no longer about becoming this, that, or the other thing–a writer, a musician, a creative person. Duh, I’ve been doings these things all along!

This is it.

*eep*

The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye - Toni MorrisonI was pulling down a box of books from a shelf in our closet the other day, searching for something for my wife, when I noticed Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. I had swiped the book from my mother-in-law’s house over a year ago and somehow never got around to reading it. I’ve been chipping away at it on the bus to and from work, and this morning I finally finished it while enjoying my Saturday morning cup of coffee. What an awesome book! I read Morrison’s Beloved many, many years ago, at the time noting her amazing gifts and certain I’d be diving into more of her work soon. Better late than never. Here’s my favorite passage from The Bluest Eye:

“The pieces of Cholly’s life could become coherent only in the head of a musician. Only those who talk their talk through the gold of curved metal, or in the touch of black-and-white rectangles and taut skins and strings echoing from wooden corridors, could give true form to his life. Only they would know how to connect the heart of a red watermelon to the asafetida bag to the muscadine to the flashlight on his behind to the fists of money to the lemonade in a Mason jar to a man called Blue and come up with what all of that meant in joy, in pain, in anger, in love, and give it its final and pervading ache of freedom.”

Only a musician and a brilliant writer like Toni Morrison.