Redemption

"...and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."

I didn't give it my full attention because I was grading papers, but last week I finally rented Broken Flowers. The movie is what may have started this depression. I liked the extra footage of Jim Jarmusch talking about the "film" (he called it that) better than I liked the film. Bill Murray needed to be resuscitated. There were bright spots, like Sharon Stone's daughter, or Jessica Lange's dog, who told her Murray had a hidden agenda. "He said that?" The sets were so strong and stylistic and demanded so much attention, it was like Murray's house wore him.

I saw The New World last week, too. It was longer than hell, or so it seemed. The audience breathed a communal sigh of relief when it was over. It did, however, make me ponder that idealized version of native americans that was portrayed, and our conflicted desires... to live in harmony with nature and to have dominion over it. "Civilization" represents how far we can fall, how degraded and shrill we can become when are in discord with nature. And how far away are we now from respecting and caring for our home (the earth)?

I finally finished Drop City yesterday, hovering over the last hundred pages or so, wondering what TC Boyle was going to do with these characters, whether there would be redemption... and I've got to say, the ending was what I needed.

I, the Boat

I, the boat
unmoored in boundless
Water

You the cleansed one
whose feet I washed
sitting on the shore
sifting order out of
Disorder

Saving soil
Building continents
Great Divides
Heaving
Crust
Mantle
Core

I, the boat
unmoored in rolling water
infinite gray waves
foam and motion
shore no longer

Recess (Bullies on the Playground)

Iranian Uranium
No passing zone
Non-proliferation
On a cell phone

Coca Cola Pensacola
Dalai Lama too
TV, skinned knee
Up a tree in Innisfree

I heart you!

-MJ


Livin this life
A fuckin empty box
Of broken things
Everything
Is useless
Hello?
You said it would turn out alright?
I tried to believe for so long
My conscience knowin that
Belief comes from fear
Bein sad
Made me pissed off
And now I'm just mad
Everyday I ask myself
And anyone who will listen
Is it worth it?
Ill wake up another morning
Feindin coffee like its crack
It'll gimme a fix and then ill crash
Not really to live anymore
But to let life carry me
In an opposite direction
This isn't a pity poem
Don't pity me
Anyone understand?
Good.
Now lets have a cigarette.
Lets fuckin wreck the place.
Lets trash it.

-AJ

Snowy Morning

Chain Gang

Being tagged by a southern gentleman, how can I refuse? This chain of thought is the best I can do. Here's to you, Bobo the Clown.

It is wrong to be this busy. We have reached the end of the semester and grades are due Monday, so this weekend will find me hunkered-down, grading a mountain of essays and other sundry assignments. Over the edge is where I've been the past week. On the verge of lunacy. My job is my life, not by choice, but because of the sheer force it requires to push it ahead of me. God! I never dreamed I'd be in this predicament. I used to jump nimbly from experience to experience.

Hell, jobs didn't even qualify as jobs. They were life! During high school the town kids, me included, became carnies for ten days each summer at the county fair. Working at a french fry stand in front of the the grandstand, I learned to twirl a paper cone to attract the attention of passers-by as I leaned on the counter facing the midway.

One memorable year, however, my job was to take tickets at the fun house, which was tucked away in the dim recesses of the fairgrounds, near the motorcycle daredevils and the freak show. Even I, stoned and unaffected teenager, was shocked (but somewhat pleased) by the sheer enormity and gaudiness of its presentation. The exterior, covering the entire two-story maze was a badly-designed hilariously gargantuan primary-colored shiny fiberglass clown head. Like a John Wayne Gacy hallucination of heaven, the main entrance led up past the neck ruffle and into a huge gaping clown mouth out of which hysterical creepy clown laughter blared non-stop. Titillated fair-goers raced through the garishly painted smile into the dark depths of fun, where I would frequently have to rescue terrified children. The scratchy earsplitting canned psychotic laughter competed with the resounding revolutions of the daredevils' motorcycles and the endless taunts and insults of Bobo the Clown, who was set up next to us.

Bobo, a skinny little local kid with a gift for ridicule, could draw a crowd. Periodically he provoked male spectators, often in uniform, to rush the dunking booth, at which time Bobo would jump splashing into the cold water and hightail it out of there, temporarily. Then the big guy's buddies would calm him down and they would move on to other amusements, where he could regain his honor. Perhaps he would demonstrate a chain-gang-like show of strength by hitting a post with a mallet so hard the bell would ring loudly. His girlfriend would clutch her stuffed animal to her breast as they wandered down the midway, his big arm holding her close.

Across the midway from my perch by the giant clown mouth was the g-string show, where, much later in the night, my friends and I would sneak in to watch the strippers' last show.

Once I worked as a newspaper photographer in a small midwestern town and stoned, I attended ladies' hospital guild meetings and took pictures of smiling midwestern matriarchs.

Restlessness and boredom catching hold, I moved on to the cognitively impaired, driving a van-full of residents from the local mental institution to the beach ("Where in hell is Rosario?! We gotta find him. The lifeguard is pissed!"), to the store ("No. You cannot hug the other shoppers.") and on country walks ("Run! It's wasps!").

When my identity had merged a little too closely with my clients', I became a staid librarian, quietly encouraging the town ruffians to come in, make some noise, open some books and shake it up a bit. But the town didn't like these scrubby kids, rejects in mohawks who carried who-knows-what bad influence?

So I moved on to a job supervising "delinquent" adolescent girls. A whole houseful, who just wanted to sneak out and score some drugs and get laid. We went to the nearby apple orchard and picked bushels-full of crunchy apples and sang in the van and (oh dear!), one of them set her mattress on fire. House closed.

Yellowstone Park would be a cool place to work, wouldn't it? I scanned the chaotic colorful fragments of paper which layered the college bulletin board for directions to my future. Soon my days were full of steaming vats of sheets and towels and huge chomping machines that dried and pressed and folded bedding for thousands of vacationers at Old Faithful, Yellowstone Lake ... and that is where I enjoyed a background playground where reality became much more surreal than any fantasy.

I have lost interest in myself, so here are the other groups of 5, more or less, in condensed form which frankly, why bother reading? But if you must... speed read!:

I saw Pride and Prejuduce three times in the theater, which is a lot for me, and when I am in a period piece mood, occasionally I watch A Room With a View. I love The Royal Tenenbaums. The Edge is entertaining. Hmmm... It's mostly pieces of movies I like. The porch scene in The Village. Detroit, Michigan, Portland, Maine, Montana, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Curb Your Enthusiasm, Charlie Rose, Reno 911, The Simpsons, The Daily Show. I am just not interested in food lately. Not that I don't eat it, but it isn't interesting. Black licorice. A boat in the blue ocean, a garden on a warm day, in the arms of someone who loves me, hiking a remote trail. My relationship with music is so wacky of late. There are classic albums I love, but never listen to. My latest obsessions are dished up by i-tunes randomly. At the moment I love Daniel Lanois, and listen to him continually, especially in the morning, especially Slow Giving and Fire (and Ryan, I think you'd like Sometimes).

Ding!

Happy Chimp

You have no idea what liberation I have experienced since learning that we humans are just smart chimps, just animals who think too much (thank you Mo). What a lot of pressure off. I no longer feel the veins in my forehead threaten to explode when I hear George Bush's voice or see him on TV. I don't even have to change the channel.

Another thing. My job! It is just something that I do every day. Things that used to provoke eye-rolling now make me smile! An e-mail to staff reminding us to dress professionally doesn't phase me at all. And what I once would have thought of as an idiotic school assembly of screaming dunces now has become a comedy, something for my entertainment pleasure.

I am freed from spending endless hours contemplating the meaning of life and the "God Question" hardly enters my mind at all... along with my own impending mortality. What does it matter if my house collapses from all the fucking rivers of rain we are getting in JANUARY? To hell with global warming and the fact that amphibians are disappearing from the earth and people are stupid, self-absorbed and destructive. Of course they are!

I no longer agonize over relationships, because what's the point? I'm just a smart chimp, and not too much brighter than a chimp at that. Just brighter enough to not be able to enjoy myself, ask too many questions, care too much. So fuck that.

I have unplugged my landline. Those grave-voiced student loan collectors can screw themselves. I have left that worry behind with rear-end collision repairs, my childrens' survival and faulty plumbing. All are distractors from the simple act of being a chimp.

From now on I am a happy chimp (probably a bonobo would be best, now that I think about it) taking life as it comes, swinging around in the trees, eating whatever I can dig up without worry about nutrition and weight control. This is the life! What a relief.

Larry David Will You Be My Fucking Soul Mate?

The Neil Diamond litmus test, which has reliably divided the population into two kinds of people, those who like Neil Diamond and those who don't, is apparently a thing of the past. The cultural divide is now being determined by attitudes toward Brokeback Mountain. I, for the record, count myself as part of the gang who like it. Not only was I not offended by the gay sex, but I liked how the movie transcended gender and became a story about what happens when you give up things that you love (although love sucks, of course!). The landscape was absorbing too, I thoroughly enjoyed spending time there.

I respect people who can tolerate hardship, be outdoors in the cold, have some grit (I like that word grit, if you haven't noticed), so it is a mystery to me why I have fallen in love with Larry David (sorry, Dalai Lama). AJ, who turned me onto Curb Your Enthusiasm (she loves the show), says Larry David's hair is awful, and he is a scrawny Jewish guy who can't let anything go, but at the moment I find all that endearing. These guys (Charlie Kaufman too) manage to weave their lives into really clever screenplays and scripts. I like them. So since I don't get HBO and I have no life, I have taken to renting seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm after work, pulling the curtains tightly closed, pouring myself a glass of wine and spending three hours nightly with Larry David while listening to the rain come down... it has been raining for three days and three nights. (Kyoto Protocol? Global warming? The Iraq War? George Bush sucks cock for money. But (deep breathing) this is partly what I am avoiding, the anxiety of the daily political nightmare, so have another glass of wine. Relax. Watch another episode.)

I tell AJ it's the glasses. He probably would be good looking without the glasses. A couple of times I caught a glimpse of him when he took them off (no, I haven't tried to freeze-frame the image, do you think I am a fucking adolescent?) and he is downright cute. Forget the penis angst, the obsessive behavior, the selfishness, childishness and compulsiveness. He's likeable. And he gets it.

Maybe I relate to his character because he realizes of the impossibility of intimacy and yet he desires it it, making him extremely heterosexually flawed. Gays, on the other hand, are like perfect 1950's heterosexuals. They obviously have grit (we now know, since Brokeback Mountain, that they can tolerate cold weather) and they are true believers in romance, marriage and finding soul mates for life. Hell, they are like the new Christians, they have joined the moral majority. They are family-oriented, neat-lawned, community-oriented and socially acceptable in every way but the one-man-one-woman deal. God, the freaking homophobes don't know a good thing when they see it. Homosexuals are the new heterosexuals!

So, even though I have been shutting myself off from the world, refusing to follow friend-wisdom ("Get out!" "Go out to dinner!" "Join a book club!"), I have been laughing a lot. And you know what? Laughter seems to be the key.

The Copulation of Highway Construction

Isn't it strange how ideas in a book, as you read, glide along the already well-traveled thought-roads in your mind, grooved deeply by millions of duplicate thoughts, racing rote, merging like clever obligatory notes to your subconscious: "This is original!" "Whoa!" "This is different!" Occasionally I am shocked to discover that my thoughts are not my own. After writing "...the tropical hurricane that is AJ", I went back to a favorite blog and "discovered" the phrase, "...Tropical Storm Emerson". Suddenly illusions of originality began to crumble in my mind. Here come the bulldozers. Highway under Construction. Fuck me.

A couple of dark nights ago, asleep at the wheel, I awoke to find myself in an old farmhouse, the very same one where I spent a snowy winter with torches and silver (another story) in a distant past. Researching T.C. Boyle this morning, I find his uncanny resemblance to Jesus (including the savior's long-haired sexiness combined with otherworldly compassion and the ability to see into my very soul!) remarkably similar to the lover who joined me there. Big old gray midwestern farmhouse in need of paint, with many small drab wallpapered rooms upstairs, all draughty and cold, but the kitchen was warm, and that is where we found life. Bacon crackled on the cookstove and pancakes on the griddle multiplied and suddenly strangers at the door asked for food. Flower children. "I think we have only apples," I said generously but suspiciously. Tentatively. At once, like a dazzling powerpoint presention, a bowl of Delicious apples (Shiny! Red!) popped into the foreground of this dreamscape, funky silkscreen abstract still life, buffed to perfection like a subliminal affirmation of heaven. Seeing a good thing, the hippies, drug addicts, aggressive demanders of generosity, marched right in, jostled me(!), cold eyes darting into the kitchen where my lover cooked delicious aromatic food that I had just denied that we had. Children played innocently on the floor. The vibe darkened. Distrust became discomfort.

Discomfort quickly found the fast-road to fear. These psychopathic drug users wearing peace love personas multiplied and fanned out, the front yard was full of them. Inside they sat in old stuffed chairs, their bare feet claiming the cold hardwood floor, their eyes full of greedy entitlement. The house was suddenly lit with bodies, long electric hair moving with a warm glow from livingroom to diningroom and soft skin the color of flesh-brushing-against-flesh filling all the wintry remote bedrooms. Dismissing me as unimportant. Me! Me!

My mind, now racing, also dismisses myself as irrelevant. Bullshit motherfucker cocksucker assholes! I can't trust my thoughts. Panicking, I see two frolicking love children chase one another into oncoming traffic at the bottom of the lawn and narrowly avoid being crushed like blissed-out insects.

Desperately seeking solace, I remember that Buddhists might say my thoughts aren't my thoughts anyway. They are simply thoughts, out there, like a movie reel that never stops passing through our mind. We desire to claim them as our own, dwell on them, publish them, analyze them, victimize ourselves with them, roll in bed with them, fuck ourselves over. and over. and over, with them. What we really need to do is see thoughts for what they are. Illusions. Distractions. The same old mind grooves.

Why shouldn't we clear new roads through the wilderness? All that unused territory, with no thought life whatsoever, it probably holds natural wonders, useful resources that would soothe the mind and prove (at last!) we are the cleverest of geniuses. As new construction gets underway, unearthed is what may be the remnants of my self. Stop digging! I resist slyly pocketing the find and calling it an artifact, selling it on the black market. This is no undeveloped wilderness. This is empty. This is home.

Mousetraps and the Days of Questioning

Preparing for war, I have loaded the mousetraps and placed them in strategic spots on well-traveled roads which lead to bedroom, loft, remote areas behind the stove. Arriving home from Florida to find slippers full of bird seed, little stashes of food in folds of flannel sheets, I have declared war, with the drum beat of Dolly's voice in my mind. "Mice carry disease. Mice are dirty." Mice deserve to die.

How quickly we become ruthless killers! Only two weeks ago I confidently surveyed this cabin as lofty liberator, kicking over deadly mousetraps which flew into the air like little firecrackers of freedom behind me. Mo, respected carrier of archaic wisdom, outlined moral guidelines, defined our goal. "What if they don't die right away? What if they are in pain?"

I remember a squirming mass of beating hearts in a pie pan, little baby mice, naked, eyes closed, being blindfolded, transported to remote locations and killed (smushed!) in the most horrible of ways under the order of a wise mother who squealed in terror while standing on a chair. Blood on our hands, as children we go forth to war with no recollection of death.

Now, hearing traps spring from a distance, imagining smoke rising, perhaps some desperate wiggling, futile attempts at escape. Ha. My grandfather's wisdom is my brave battle song.

Further

I have traveled back in time to the frozen tundra, leaving Veronica the bee-atch, with her pedicures and her goldness, behind. (Actually this memorable AJ quote, in the form of a text message, was plural: "You bee-atches with your pedicures and your goldness"). My mind carries already-distant recollections of unending 80-degree days, clear ocean nights, dolphins swimming right offshore... shared, paid for, protected in gated affluence.

On the plane, two men wearing camoflage hunting hats sit like bookends on each side of a muslim woman in long robes, head covered. The best of the midwest. I nod off, come-to, read Drop City, wonder if it matters where you are.

Strangely as we land it feels like home, with its familiar cold humidity, distance between people, backyards, knot in the stomach, work in the morning. It doesn't feel so bad. I'm back, kids.