Roman à clef

Yes, this is the joke of life, the big one: you’re not always fully alive, just like poems and paintings are not always beautiful, the bars not always full, friends not always in touch. When you go climbing out of your bedroom Rachmaninov is not always there, kneading aloft to the sunrise, cartwheeling round with the beat.

Sometimes you’re tired. Sometimes, yes, you’re not at you’re best, you’ve had a little to drink—not too much—but yes, you’re chasing taillights in the distance loping down an abandoned rural highway, barely feeling, barely existing, the headlights like guiding themselves through every gentle curve. The radio is on but you don’t hear it this time, you’re not drunk, still, drunk driving is wrong, and yet at this moment you are morally impregnable in the worst possible way, as if you find it simply hard to believe there’s a law or a court in the country that would even find you human.

There are extraordinary periods of time where we simply cease to be... alive. And yet there we are.

This is the big joke. The big laugh. We are never completely complete.

So there’s a worry about writing too much down in the spirit of documentation, preservation. The problem is this: memory must be protected against memory, its family of happenstance stacking atop itself like an endless accumulation of Harvard Classics whose weight slowly converts the volumes beneath into a voluble fossil fuel, leaving only a firm word there and a moment here uncorrupted: love. fear. the view off the family veranda. It’s carrying a roadmap to a foreign city folded and refolded over itself endlessly. Street names dissolving in the bleach of the creases. Entire blocks collapsing into the widening holes where folds collide. And yet even after writing you’ve lost the city of your visit, having counted on your map to remember for you. The only thing left a shadow of a reflection. The memory of a name like faded graffiti. The signified already laughing in the furnace, facelessly warming the rest of your life for the rest of your life.

And then it happens. A January afternoon, trees casually bleak, the sun strong enough to run the A/C in the car, I was thinking about an old girlfriend on this day #243 of living in the city everyone leaves, a rolling treeline, a line of schools, and then a burst, suddenly, of Cuban music—sax and guitar and trombone and, now I don’t believe in a god but if I did I’d be on hands and knees thanking him for the radio, the closest thing to magic I’ll get in this life, bop bop bop badop-bah, in school we fancied ourselves young Kerouacs Kerouacking all about the place, very hard to write this, of course, but we are now only part-time astonishments, throwing up our hands in our suburbs and saying “it ain’t me, man” as if this would send us flipping over the handlebars of our day jobs...

And then it’s gone.

There’s a problem inherent with having a personal philosophy: reason demands perfect attendance. And we can’t deliver. The atoms of the universe tremble and collide in the absence of consent as well as its presence. When you drive on the highway and miraculously find a way to somehow lose all agency, your body still finds the way home whether you’re asking it to or not. Words on a page exist whether you understand them the first time or the third time or never at all.

As if we exist as this nebulous mass of feeling and understanding and remembering, existence taking shape at random, interacting with the world with chaos-levels of coherency and interest and diplomacy. A perfect imperfection.

Almost sounds like a novel.

The last great courtroom of desire

Chicago, late summer. I thought I’d go to watch the money race out of my wallet. (What an economical oddity this city is: everything costs twenty dollars when it comes with a beer.) Cermak, Quincy, Divison, and the blithe bohemia of Wicker blight—and yet—Chicago’s a gas, but you just can’t quit the air that breathes you.

I sat alone in a park as the sun nosed below a row of brownstones, throwing everything in progressive layers of night, the immediately local activity now cloaked in mere suggestion. Nearby, someone playing Frisbee in a geyser of affable obscenities. Five murmuring babushkas on the bench next to me, a Polish gaggle of dowagers and spinsters helping busy up the fountain square, their collaboration lasting well after dark. The water giggling. History crossing its arms. The shades of passing couples multiplying fixedly, alarmingly, the park suddenly a carnival of hearts on this hungry night of August, everyone precariously clothed, imprisoned at this hour between talking and making love. And this is the miracle of cities. All afraid of dying and so needing motion near; needing, and finding. Dresses flapping softly; the El, roaring its consent.

The night, the night, and summer’s fear of fall.

And yet.

We think of existence as fragile. The entirety of eschatological and moral discourse is defined by this recognition. And yet neglected is the almost incomprehensible power of memory to eradicate reality. Totally. To transform itself into a great destroyer of worlds, arriving suddenly like some handsome second cousin of the abyss come to rearrange the fundamental moorings of the cosmos.

Because on that night my happy little ember of urbanitas—brownstones and youth and babushkas all—was doused remorselessly by the remembered glimpse of a pair of empty stilettos collapsed ownerless next to someone’s front door. And for a complete ten seconds the heartrending memory of a bedroom four hundred miles away assembled itself at the indisputable center of the known universe, all the rest of creation arrayed like a distant satellite in a sad loose orbit of this presence, this protuberance, this one true god.

The last great courtroom of desire.

We don’t find memories that strong. They find us. And for those of us for whom the quest for an afterlife seems a little morally transparent, the presence of memory becomes the last most sacred of secular beatitudes. And it’s a worship with which we are already familiar, absurdly manifest everywhere in culture, in pictures, in paintings, in those stories we tell a million times, those million-time mythologies of our lives told so often that it’s commonly concealed that nothing of the original sensory matter remains, often only an assembled configuration of probationary approximations clinging loosely to facts safely established in the casual public of our minds. Yet we persist.

Memory is everywhere because memory is how we stop time; memory is how we live forever.

But time is never truly stopped. And we never live forever, and the Second City will always reassemble itself around you, reconstituting that bench where you sit alone on that dying night in August. Days pass and end. This much is certain and inevitable. To this end, our memories are perfectly powerless, no matter how bound they are to the very reality of the human soul.

But to quote Proust—we have as hostages these divine captives who will follow and share our fate. And death in their company is somehow less bitter, less inglorious, and perhaps even less probable.

The water giggling. History crossing its arms. Dresses flapping softly, and the El roaring its consent. These words are all that remain.

And yet.

The opened portmanteau

Back to the desert. Silence, darkness, the earth immobilized beneath a gentle wheel of stars. Existence’s sensory deprivation chamber, the radical nudity of the geography like some cosmic conspiracy for solitude. You stood there and breathed uneasily and wondered if you would ever feel this significant again.

If only we could stop thinking, being. We could live forever.

Depressives. They have a knack for teasing out reality at its most undressed: their spouses are unlovable; their childhood dreams unattainable; death inevitable. This is seen unflinchingly, and known flinchingly. Happiness requires a kind of existential blindfold—normally (and thankfully) provided by biology—without which we’d be incapable of enjoying a sandwich or a concert without simultaneously cowering in anticipation of the very worst of life’s most staggering inevitabilities. Lovers lost, children lost, a death in assisted living—god forbid the fabric slip.

The alternative view, of course—staggering inevitabilities lend joy its immediacy. That without the torque of failure, existence itself would have no potency, no grip. This is a game called See Your Life, See every passing moment slipping quietly into the vast dross of its undifferentiated antecedents, nothing measured and nothing lost.

Gravity versus weightlessness.

It’s easy to take a trip to the desert and be astounded and assign it grave cosmic importance, and just as easy to smile and sigh and enjoy a much-needed escape into wilderness. Questions abound on which the proper attitude “should” be—as if anyone but ourselves could ever determine where to place value in our lives—as if “should” were a real word that actually had any power to imply that gravity or weightlessness could ever win the argument over the other. We’re always the ones that finally decide what’s important to us, and how. “Should” is inert.

Take that to the desert or the street or city hall or your girlfriend’s house, take to the pastrami shop or the roller rink or the fields of corn around your family’s home, Soldier Field, Salt Lake, Mt. McKinley. Go to the place that makes you quiet inside, go with all the fire of god smoldering passion salvation in that tight hard knot of your heart. Go like you might not come back so when you go again you can stay forever. Walk like one of the crazies of lore chanting mad poems of glory or just slip by in a thin grinning shimmer of zen. This is where you go. This is what you do.

And yet the question still remains, always remains: Now what?

Now you go to the next desert, is what. Or maybe you don't.

It's all so very important.

Labor for glory

On a recent trip out to Nevada I was standing on the shoulder of a remote desert highway at two o’clock in the morning, quiet along the rutted edge of sun-crozzled pavement thrust amongst a black silence of sagebrush and Joshua trees. Nothing moving and nothing lit, not even a rind of the moon.

A collection of nothings, in fact: no cars; no planes; no radios. No phone service. No insects or birds or rustling fauna. Not even a gentle breath of wind.

Imagine being deaf, or dumb, or blind; or no longer being able to taste, or to have memories, or to love. Imagine the death of a close friend, or imagine there no longer being stars in the sky or galaxies beyond our own, seas beyond the horizon, ships to traverse them. Imagine the inexistence of music and then the inexistence of film. Whither a light switch? Conceive of waking up one day and finding out no one had given you a name, or an arm, or a family.

Votaries of emptiness all, and to our minds, each a kind of dark matter, a negative presence; the sudden cessation of a motion, the final and comprehensive absence of a sustaining otherness.

John Updike said being human cannot be borne alone; we need other presences. This is why we blare TVs and go to the symphony and sit on our porches staring out at the road at the traffic trudging by. Hence Facebook and real books and Wal-Mart and the discarded stubs for Amtrak tickets. The twelve-pack, the four-door, the queen-sized bed. The rituals of Christmas and the birthday alike. Fortune cookies and this blog and t-shirts with words on them; Walt Whitman and Paris Hilton and the Rolling Stones. The Hague, the Statue of Liberty, and the street where I live—all these things are bound to us.

So do yourself a favor and go set yourself down in the middle of a desert in the predawn dark, all the vibrations of culture and knowing fucking motionless on this bald causeway of the earth as the deathbed of philosophy and ideology and politics lay sprawling cold beneath you.

Someday we die. That’s it. Beyond that, nothing.

But knowing that and feeling that and then waking up the next morning is still, now as it ever was, some good hell of a thing.

What it means to be a writer

When I made my visit to Chicago, one night I found myself sitting on a bench in Wicker Park wondering what I’d meant when years ago I’d subconsciously decided somewhere along the way to commit myself only to writing “important” stories, “important” poems. I was in transit to adulthood now that I was out of school, and it was becoming increasingly clear that “important” only meant “self-important.”

The problem was that, in our heads, we’re all geniuses. We are all the stars of our own lives, as David Foster Wallace had once noted; the most important person to ever exist. We’re all cologned with some slight expectation of greatness.

The problem was also that, when you listened to someone like David Foster Wallace speak, you realized that you were not a genius, and that you were doomed to a lesser level of recognition that was inevitable for writers in this culture anyway. Regardless of your talent, you’re not going to be writing the Great American novel; as you’d long suspected, there are too many Americas, and too many brilliant Americans already writing about each of them.

So I sat on my little bench in Chicago penning the obituary for my own glory. Good. Nice to get that out of the way.

Let’s talk about writing as a tool for survival.

Those of us not in grad school will likely have to adjust to the eight or more hours of day that we will spend at an entry-level job doing little tasks for nominal pay. We have to confront that, four these eight (or more) hours, our brains are sedentary. Fielding calls for customer service means few synapses need to be fired. Less connections need to be made. Your brain becomes maximally efficient at doing menial work that had required very little effort to begin with.

This is your brain on the twenty-first century.

Writing will help keep you in intellectual shape, like jogging for a few miles a week. If you maintain any standard of quality for your work, fiction should force you to maintain a sense of clarity over long distances of plot and characterization, helping to combat the ADHD tendency of your Google-adapted thought process. On the opposite side of the spectrum, poetry will encourage you to reach different parts of your brain not normally accessible and smash them together to create something unexpected.

Reading, naturally, is also encouraged, so that you encounter minds other than your customers’.

Now, what does it mean to be literary if you’re not a professional, or a career academic?

In many regards, it’s about being a repository of culture, thoughtfulness, and idiosyncrasy. Contrary to hipsterism—which is being subjected to increasingly aggressive marketing these days—it’s about being interesting not through the clothes you wear or the quality of your sarcasm but by the depth and breadth of the ideas you hold. People may think reading is dying—it is—84% of Americans want to write a book, yet only a fraction have read one this year—but YouTube notwithstanding, writing will at least be around for as long as people don’t want to embarrass themselves. Writing is the final defense against a culture of instantaneity that values sound-bites and missteps more than thoughtful presentation.

And in a society of rampant consumerism, where sadness is inefficient, and unprofitable (except to sell antidepressants) writing reminds us that it’s still okay to try and be the heroes of our own lives even when things aren’t going so hot. No matter how bad things get, your day, your life still has value; art can still at least be made, no matter how pedestrian.

When David Foster Wallace died, his friend and public radio literary critic Michael Silverblatt commented on his show that “The death of David Foster Wallace seems to speak to the difficulty of life itself; depressed or not, brilliant or not, are we living in a time that makes it hard for us to find the things that allow us to want to stay alive?”

Perhaps. Writing and art can’t heal everything. But it’s still worth trying to leave a testament to the desire we’d once had to be so much greater than ourselves.

And I think that’s something.

The ballad of El Burrito

In the beginning, my dad never actually intended to become a photographer. He went to UMKC in the late 60s/early 70s and got his degree in English (!) and economics before becoming a traveling salesman. He got his start when he shot a few polaroids at a wedding, more out of curiosity than anything.

When he started his business my grandfather told him that he'd never make money taking pictures; he told him that he should get a "real" job.

A couple years before that, and before his stint as a salesman, Dad'd had a "real" job in San Jose at a gas station on the outskirts of the city, near the desert. He wasn't sure what he was doing there, exactly; he'd moved to Cali with my mom to check out west coast living for a while.

On his first day of work, he asked the guy who'd been running the place for eleven years when the last time was that he'd been robbed. Guy says, we've never been robbed.

Two weeks later, at two o'clock in the morning, a shirtless man is standing over my father (facedown in the candy aisle) with a machete to the back of his neck telling him to count to twenty-five; if you get up before twenty-five, I will come right back here and kill you dead. The man ran out the door.

Dad didn't quit this "real" job, though.

His next brush with crime came a couple weeks later, in the afternoon. It's hot. Dad's mopping the aisle next to the foodstuffs when he notices a Mexican migrant worker standing nervously in front of the microwave. Dad asks if he could use any help, and the guy doesn't reply. He starts fidgeting. Dad walks over to him and looks in the microwave and realizes that the man is trying to microwave approximately forty burritos at once.

Dad laughs. "You have to do them one at a time."

The migrant worker doesn't say anything, and Dad makes hand motions. One at a time.

At this, the migrant worker immediately flings open the door of the microwave and dumps all the still-cold burritos into a plastic sack and sprints out the door without paying.

Dad runs after him.

With a baseball bat.

My father had a scholarship offer to play tailback at Brown. He was an all-state sprinter. But the little short guy with a plastic sack full of burritos actually starts getting away. There's a Buick with five passengers (three in front, two in back) out in the parking lot with the engine running and a door open, everyone from the car shouting for him to ondele.

When he realizes that he won't catch him, Dad stops, cocks his arm, and hammer-tosses the baseball bat instead. 

He misses the guy-- but he hits the car. BANG. And the driver, who must have been thinking my dad had a gun, immediately panics and punches the gas-- neglecting to make sure that his buddy had actually made it inside the vehicle.

Hombre was being dragged down the street, one hand on the handle of the door, the other on the trailing bag of burritos. He wouldn't let go of either. The driver only figured out what was happening a block later, stopping long enough to get his buddy in the car.

My father watched them drive away. It was 1973. He had a "real" job. He was getting minimum wage.

A Song for You, pt. II

I have a longstanding hypothesis about relationships-- some of you may have heard this before-- that no matter how much two people like each other, there's always one person who likes the other a little bit more. It's not original thinking, nor is it probably a revelation to any of you, but the theory goes that whoever likes the other person more is inevitably the one that gets dumped.

(It's just another of my idiot-proof dating theories kind of like the one I have about knowing when people like you: when someone's into you, they don't make excuses about not being able to hang out; they find a way to make it happen. Add booze, stir, simmer, voila. Your gut is never wrong, folks. Trust it.)

(p.s., Here's another for the road: if you know they like you-- you can tell-- then they are the one that's more into you. If you find yourself asking your friends to interpret mixed signals, you are more into them. Sorry. The more you know!)

Anyway, in that line of thinking-- about who likes who more-- the people who write songs are inevitably the kind of people who always like the other person more.

Think about it. Which set of these generic lyrics I just made up right now would you think are more common?

I've been thinking about you

Wondering how you've been

Don't want to see you with that other man

I want to see you again

Or:

That girl from the coffee shop is kinda cute

I dunno though

I'm not sure I'm feeling it

She's been calling a lot

I think I'm gonna go nail my ex

Exactly.

Of course, the most astounding thing is how cool musicians are in this country when the vast body of their work consists of the kind of clingy sentiments that drive a normal person's significant others away.

For instance, let's say you're trying to win someone over. Pragmatically speaking, what's the best way to do it-- telling them how you feel? Hell no! That's romantic suicide and you know it. Every single one of your friends will tell you to pretend like you're not interested. You have to run away a little bit, not write love songs, you dork.

Think about this: for every awesome love song you know, there is a person out there that that song was written for, and they wish their creepy guitar-player ex would just stop calling them. Bon Jovi, you're eating up all her texts.

If there's an exception to the rule, it's that rappers maybe seem like they're not all that sentimental-- they're too busy tappin' dat ass, I guess-- but I think they're actually dating geniuses. Rappers feel pain like everyone else. But what better way to drive up their stock with the ladies and get revenge on the woman who toyed with their hearts than to brag over national radio about all the hotties that are climbing all over them at the club? Brilliant.

Anyway, I guess there's something to be said for music in that it can turn the inherently uncool into Al Green's "Let's Stay Together."