The Second Law of Thermodynamics

 When we passed the lesbian couple looking at breakfast bars, and the cute girl on the other side of them, and my daughter was scolding me from the passenger seat of the shopping cart and my face was a mask of patience, a mask cracked and possibly showing the anxiety biting the back of my neck or the scream I had been choking down, I thought to that grim audience who did not care for my existence, I'm sorry for doing this in public but I don't get to take a break for my collapse, I have to keep buying food for the kids and responding to their questions with quiet patience and all I can do is break and disintegrate inside which is why I look this way.

I didn't recognize the number so I was leery when I picked up, and in retrospect I was surprised at how easily she convinced me it was not a scam--that she really was here to serve me with papers from my wife's lawyer--so much so, that even when I got downstairs to receive them, and found the letter was open-faced and un-enveloped with every piece of our situation available for anyone to read, there in a woman's hands whom I'd never before seen in my life--so much so, I say, that I still thanked her.

Because my friend asked and because she insisted on presenting to me more and more outlandish and devastating scenarios of my collapse, my ruin, my eradication and homelessness and hopelessness and horrifying evisceration, I observed with no employment, no marriage, no community, aging--I thought about it and realized I don't know, I suppose, what it would take, or what it will take, or what it has taken already perhaps, to really break me: to make me whisper, "I can't take it anymore," and then, to be honest, I would not kill myself but I would turn my face to a wall and simply never rise again, not to eat or drink or shit or bleed or anything, I would just lay in that place until I died of all the idiotic blank inaction that brought me to that mental state to begin with, and the procrastination and unwitting laziness that broke me would then heal the world of me with nothing left but a corpse to take away.

All this behind my eyes, lodged somewhere behind my sinuses, as we passed the cheez-its and I told a four year old we didn't need them and she scowled at me and set up a complaint targeted to gain the attention of that couple and that girl and the sob in my throat around which I gingerly stepped to vocalize something soothing and appeasing while I pushed the cart towards milk, towards bread, towards the vegetables, towards home, towards sleep, towards some other day when some other troubles would grind and gnash and mulch these current horrors into soil.

December 2024

archives empty

but it's hard to talk about a closed diner being made into an auto parts store; being made so completely into an auto parts store that i have to check my location on a map

i say it's hard to talk about it when there are kids in Afghanistan, you know, whose whole and complete childhoods are rubble now—

the ache of being
unable to appease memory by visiting an old scene

some of my friends are intentional orphans by which I mean they do not speak to their parents not because their parents are dead but because their parents are so horrible to their memories that they are pretending their parents are dead, and these friends sometimes call me and mourn that there is nobody to remember it all.

the way a mound of dirt might be all that's left of a city over which splendid men and divine women schemed and planned and bled for a thousand years—maybe not even that, say

we think there will be more memories because of photographs, and records, and data,
but i tell you it is not so. Nothing
hear me, nothing absolutely at all will fill
the empty archives where we laid our past

12/24/23

Obituary

 Ross Morinalo died of a massive heart attack when he couldn't have been over 60, and the last time I talked to him I tried to sell him Aflac insurance.  The time before that when I last talked to him was maybe ten or 15 years earlier, when I was a kid.  He taught Sunday school one year and I remember he was very excited one Christmas to hand out little plastic miniatures of USS Starship Enterprises from Star Trek, which is something I'd never heard of before.  It was either that, or the little die-cast model airplanes that I had as a kid.  I remember having two: one was a blue Navy plane and the other was a white model of an F-15.  Maybe he gave us both, maybe different years or something.  The blue plane was my favorite, between the two. I lost it, somehow.  I had the white one for years and years, even as the plastic bits chipped off and the paint peeled off the metal.  But that blue one was my favorite. 

One time I had to drive somewhere with Ross Morinalo in a big moving van for something related to church.  The other men were going in cars; it was dusk; Ross said he'd take me along because I had young eyes and he didn't see as well anymore at night.  I think of it a lot of times when it's getting dark out and I can't see the road as well as I used to--how I'm becoming more like Ross and less like the kid in the passenger seat of that big truck.  I kept an eagle eye on the road that trip, but he pointed out something on the drive that I hadn't seen, and I carry that sense of failure too, inside, even though I lied to him in the moment and said I'd seen it too, of course, because I was ten and he'd given me die cast airplanes, or space ships, or something.

Ross ran a cleaning company that maybe sold janitorial supplies, or maybe they were the janitors for big buildings, or maybe a mix of both.  When I was down on my luck and trying to sell insurance--which I never successfully did, not once--I remembered this fact and looked him up and eventually got him on the phone.  He was a little annoyed to find out this ghost from his past, this kid from a Sunday school class now long, long forgotten, was just trying to sell him something; was not calling to say Ross had changed my life or that I remembered anything he'd ever said or had anything redemptive to offer him.  I remember I thought his wife was pretty, but I didn't mention that on the phone.  When we got through the formalities and novelties and I revealed that I was trying to sell him insurance, he sounded tired and said he was busy, and honestly now I really understand why, and I forgive him the slight offense it unreasonably caused me in the moment.  Hopefully he had good life insurance, though, because my parents told me he died a few years later, and I probably could have sold him a life insurance policy.

August 2022

Americana

 "Why do I write," he wrote in his second journal, the one for musings and useless thoughts.  I'm almost forty, he thought--no one will read me, never mind publishing.  He flipped back through his prior scrawls, some quite familiar and close, some shit, many of them too dark to read out loud.  "If I want people to read me, I need to write some kind of Americana," he wrote, rattling his mind to recollect some poignant stories--if not from his own life, then things he'd heard.  Cutoff jean shorts, country music, latchkey kids, diversity in public schools, that kind of thing.  There was a current of melancholy running through his thoughts; he labored to make it flow into faded empires and the American Disappointment of the late 1990s.  There wasn't anything good.  Nothing Hemingway.  "I probably shouldn't write," he wrote, thinking, but I won't stop.  A brief vision of posthumous discovery and fame first pleased, then infuriated him.  Finally he settled down and wrote:

The kind of man that buys a lot of fireworks for the family July 4th reunion is often also the kind of man who refuses to be paid back, although he will also grumble about it between Coors Lites if something doesn't go his way, thinking without acknowledging it that he did pay for this evening, after all, and so it's somewhat owed to him--in which, he's not completely wrong, but there are so many rebuttals that it's hard to know where to start; so, most people don't say anything, and he either gets his way or gets a good cause for a short-lasting resentment, and then his wife or daughter or maybe his mother-in-law will bring him another beer, and that's that.

Personally, I used to be the kind of half-assed guy that hangs back at first but by the end I'm lighting all the fuses; but I've made a few subtle adjustments, and now I'm the kind of half-assed guy that sits back the whole time, only getting involved if the safety of my kids demands it, leaning on someone's car like it's the bar at a downtown cocktail lounge and drinking pricey scotch since about 3 in the afternoon because if that asshole is going to drink Coors Lite like it's the only thing not too fancy for him, then I too will drink what I prefer instead of downing the IPAs and wheat beers everyone else bought.  That's the kind of dick I am now, despite a few weak efforts to be anything else.

The literature for the pontoon boat says it carries 15 souls, but everyone's stepmom was watching her 3 grandkids from the first marriage, so that made it 18 and ruined everything.  One of the middle kids looked up a law about it and we could have all gone out together, but it didn't matter.  Some people had a nice fight about it while I watched my three kids and two of someone else's kids and maybe there was a neighbor kid, too.  Since the other seven adults watched two of the other little kids, it was pretty much an even split.  At some point I was sitting on a porch with the step-mom and one of the brothers-in-law and someone's daughter from a previous marriage and I realized none of us were related by blood or even directly by marriage.  But America is all about family, and family is very important, so we gather for reunions and argue with each other just to remember how incredibly special we are to each other--even though Family, as a modern American concept, deconstructs into "people somebody else picked for us to hang out with."

He stopped writing and looked it over.  All shit, he thought, closing the journal & tossing it on lightly on a nearby chair.

sad

I like to be sad.  I cherish the sincerity of it, the privacy & otherness.  Silent grief is a pain I trust; it is a trunk I carry on my travels, filled with memory and longing, filled with the last remnants of loves and voices long since turned to silent dust.  Sorrows are the lost treasures of my fallen empires, the ruins of my forgotten histories.  For me, to grieve is to touch again some lost, bright joy--sometimes the only joy I know.  Grieve, and be alive; do not numbly die.

We would totally push the button

    “Dad, don’t take our doggie downstairs.” Oliver, talking about a newly rediscovered stuffed animal, which plays music. 

    “No buddy, I’m taking it downstairs because it’s noisy and I don’t want it to wake up Lily.” 

    “But dad, we won’t push the button.” 

    “That’s nice, Oliver, but honestly I don’t trust you.” 

    The briefest pause. Then, in a low voice under his breath, “Ohhhh that’s riiiiight, we would totally push the button.” 

April 2020

Resentment: a monologue

My poetry sucks.

In years past, I would occasionally go back through and read things I liked, things I thought were clever--I could sink an hour or more into my own writing.  Self-congratulatory and narcissistic as that may be, I generally felt proud of what I wrote.  But...not recently.  And goddamn, if I can't please a one-member audience, why even write?

Catharsis, I guess.  Ironically, I wrote a poem about that once.  The raw, broken nature of poetry helps clarify a single thread of ideas--isolate the strand, hold it up to the light bulb and trace its line.  Sometimes it's in focus; sometimes not.  I find it useful.

Ideally, it would be art.  But, like, fuck art.  I'm not skilled enough to craft the thin subtleties and meta self-importance of modern poetry; I'm not scarred enough to write the real poetry of the past.  The stuff I write is just self expression, but like the music that I write, anyone serious about art can easily and correctly dismiss it.  (The other side of the coin: I dismiss the idea of being "serious" about art the same way I dismiss theologians--when we trap it in the glass, we suffocate and kill it.) (Oh, hey, another side: I recognize that I feel that way because of my own perception of inadequacy, so if I just described you, don't feel insulted.)

I think it's just catharsis, then.  If art accidentally declares itself in the midst--whatever.  Congratulations.

And as a catharsis: recently, there have been too many strands to isolate and focus.  What do I isolate?  How?  I am standing in between two tremendous piles of good and ill.  I brag about the good, and whine about the ill.  And what paralyzes me now is that I find it impossible to string a thread across both without revealing the extent to which I put my hand on the scale.

At some point in high school, I realized the usefulness of having someone in a social group whose life was just ... stable.  A photogenic life with wrinkles and bad hair to give it an aura of authenticity.  Not as displayed in social media, but actually lived in front of my friends and family.  Look, I said.  The world is chaos.  But there are some of us standing on relatively firm ground.  Let me give you a hand.

And it's not a lie.  My life is stable.  I'm stable.  Things are net positive, with a growth trajectory.  Not so great that you have to be envious or sickened by me, just--you know, okay.

But in the background, I am piling up resentments.  I don't know why--I guess I avoided a few major risks that tempted me; I made safe choices, sometimes in conflict with my basic preferences.  So now, at 34, with a surprising amount of white in the hairs they cut off my head today, I have a background radiation of resentment at my (still, good) life.  It's cheap shit: I didn't go nuts in college, or spend a year playing a festival circuit or getting high on park benches in Europe or whatever it is I would have done (let's be honest--probably would have just done white trash stuff in Pittsburgh, but allow me some self-aggrandizing vision of how cool I might have been).

Shit, is this what a midlife crisis feels like?  Am I about to buy a nice car?  Damn, I would like a nice car.

The problem with my resentments is that I have just let them sit here silently for years--decades--like a moron, not saying anything.  To bring them up to those involved, including myself, would be a nasty shock.  It would probably not fix anything.  And I'm a total coward when it comes to those kinds of confrontations anyway.  It never really mattered; it was just background angst, and I could call up my resentments if I wanted to be emo and smoke a cigarette and stare coldly at the moon.  They never really mattered.

But now, judging by my absolute inability to write poetry--and the fact that I keep thinking of these goddamn resentments instead of living and enjoying my undeniably rich and fantastic life--I guess it seems I can't just hang on to this pile of disappointments and half-opened doors for free, anymore.  Let's be honest, this screed (which I'm typing up insanely for strangers to read) is the closest I'll get to dealing with it, but you know, it means I got pretty close.

Looking forward to that car.  Man.




April 2019

Dystopia

"Do you think we live in a utopia?" she asked, idling on the Albanian hillside under a foggy sunrise in early spring.  "Is this how our ancestors dreamed of living?"

A clear brook bubbled along the bottom of gentle, grass-clothed hills.  The first few migrant spring birds, back from winter's distant exile, sang melodic calls to one another in the gaining daylight.  Brian took it all in and answered, "They wouldn't complain.  I'm sure of that."

"Yeah, but--Hang on," she intoned; seasons flipped, new gear dropped into place, and the hills filled with snow, a clear powder.  She kicked off on a slender ski path and he followed close behind, watching the edges of his skis.  Conversation paused in the slashing breaths of snow and speed.  Eventually they landed in a wide plain; she twisted the world back to fall and they resumed their long wander, hand in hand under colored leaves drifting through the clear-blue wind alone.

"I see why you're asking," he observed.  "On the one hand, this--but on the other..."

"It all depends on whether one outweighs the other."  She caught a bright orange leaf from its twisting journey.  "And I guess that might depend on the person, or situation," she said.

"We're happy," he said quietly.

For now, they both agreed.

Dinner with two other couples--close friends, frequent companions--took place at a quaint old farmhouse in the valley.  Nearby, an old grain mill churned the stream with its old, heavy, wooden water wheel, filling the atmosphere with its creaking rhythm.  They talked of culture, and wine, dining long into the night.  It was beautiful; it was perfect; it was free.

It was free.

They did this every night.

It was hell.

Animal

Picking my way across a darkened hollow, tenderly following a narrow path, I see him: far up and to my left, shadow upon shadow, a tense profile outlined against the stars.  More animal than man, he pants with fury, spent by rage; then pauses.  I follow his blackened gaze.  From the opposing crest of a moonstruck hill, she is watching him--has been following his every move--hears him howl with shame, and wounded pride.  Their eyes meet in crystallized violence; his gaze shatters first, and with a snarl he disappears behind the hill.

I have been holding my breath.  I draw a shaky slip of air and look back; she remains, bright and pained astride the far ridge.  Faintly I hear him crashing away through the branches and the bracken, a fading cacophony.

Time dilates beneath wheeling stars: years slip past like days within my hollow.  I see him return; I hear the mumbled apologies; I watch the man-beast stumble among the trees.  Some nights there is peace beneath our galaxy.  Some nights he screams, raising his beast's fist against heaven.  I cling to my short path; the hollow's stream swells and dries, swells and dries, in seasonal repetition.  His voice rings out across the valley--sometimes in fury, sometimes in desperate sorrow.  He screeches of mercy; disclaims her; weeping, begs her forgiveness.

Yet she is a statue, the only frame unmoved by centuries.  The hills themselves shift shapes and settle into place, time-smoothed in their edges and their slopes; in answer, my hollow deepens, pulled by the movement of its streams.  Now deep within this newborn valley, I crane my neck to see her remain, a granite fortitude.

Who can believe her now?  The stars slow; he is old.  His bright fury has dulled to bitterness, resentment, exhausted rage.  His yellow nails still scratch the dirt and his eyes shift nervously, senses alert to forest dangers.  Animal.  Within me, a parade of mounting doubts crash through my silent observation.  She will not really save him.  She is not even real.  She is a stone, an imagined thing.  He will perish--thus.  Crippled mortal, with yellowed lungs, his untamed hair thin and weak, his wild gaze dim and unintelligent.  Animal.  His bones will disintegrate before her--an unflinching stone.

Then steadily within the valley walls I hear her different voice ascend.  She asks me how I learned to measure all his damning sins; how it is I separate the animals from man.  Despite his pride and wild rage, he grieves his sins, she says--but why?  And then demands of me--"Whose voice am I?"

Now from her moonlit perch she moves, shaking off a thousand years to claim such vivid heights I cannot help but see her.  I cannot look away.  He sees her too; she fills our view; somehow not with size but sheer necessity.

"I am the ancient, eternal flame," she simply states: "unchanged, and every morning new.  I am dark clouds of terror, beautiful and fierce; deadly holiness; all time's power narrowed to a moment's pierce.  Yet I would breathe to you of grace and love--redemption in my patience and my pain.  So then, I ask again--Whose voice am I?  And who are you to hear?"

All this in silence; heard deep within.  Rustling, I find I am the animal-man; we are the same; so pierced are we with her holy claim.  Without answer, without a name, I hang our heads in shameful frames.

Then a gentle touch, her hand upon the skin of my rough-hewn face.  She breathes of grace; of love--a glimpse.  I know that I shall find myself the animal again.  But now, hope-pierced, I watch his course upon the hill and wait with silent joy.




March 2019

Summer of the Cucumber Martini

(with apologies)

ONE

In the summer of the Cucumber Martini I started learning to not defend myself. It was the summer of Anna bringing ripe peaches over and getting engaged to a very different man with a similar name; the summer Erik and his family stayed with us and we learned how life could be. That was the summer after Scott and I each bought old houses and when Greg taught me how to maintain my riding mower.  Also the summer after Jimmy lost his grip because of a student's suicide; during all of this he was fighting, screaming, to claw his way back to sanity, burning through his cigarettes and tears with me on that porch that came with the old house.  That July, I traveled in a daze to Guatemala, ostensibly for humanitarian reasons, and missed one week of my sons' childhoods.  Then, in a sweating Pittsburgh August, we watched Ruthie marry Bruce and again remembered how it could be.


Cucumber Martini summer extended unseasonably long into a drifting, campfire autumn, mostly in my backyard, although we spent time at Scott and Julie's farm too. After her husband's suicide I reached out to Lynda to see if she would be okay, but never really learned. That was the season I spent so much time at the capitol, insisting on numbers in front of U.S. congressional committees and then driving home in a Honda Civic like the nobody I actually am.  Ben moved to New York and we talked less then.


This whole time I seemed to gather up the wrong sort of people and bring out their worst.  Jeff, at work, with the unique power to hate anyone.  Jen, also at work, who would rage and curse at friends with no cause nor warning.  Others, whose names I conspicuously omit.  Family, friends, darling or distant.  Anger would flare and startle, bursting sudden and hot around me.  At first, hearing the loud noise, I would rush to my defense, but in time I learned to tell the sound of pain apart from meaning, and I will confess I also tuned it out.


What does it mean?  It's not as though we can really tell, and God and everyone knows they'll never beg the stars for mercy.  With increasing cowardice I hid my sons from the world to keep them safe and enjoy our privileged days in false aristocracy.


And after all of this you may expect I am inclined to think well of myself, but no: I learned this summer that I cannot even properly desire what is good. Given an inch, given the briefest moment of honest thought, immediately my mind and heart turn foul and dark, begging for selfish sin with a spiteful fist raised toward heaven. As I do with my one-year-old, so Father does with me, ignoring all my feeble hatred to bathe my filth in overwhelming, undeserved love.

TWO

Summer started in October, I suppose. We all traveled to the beach, aging kids drawn to the wide sands under blue open sky; but in the days before we arrived, a twelve-year-old killed himself. And Jimmy--his teacher, his mentor, himself a son of abuse, whose own son had learned from the dead boy how to hit a golf ball--spent the week hemmoraging inside, screaming himself awake at night in a millionaire's rented beach house filled with friends.  And we?  For us, that week became one long smear of frozen friendship, dumbstruck with an intimate pain none of us had expected. How do comfortable Christian tribalists from the suburbs help their friends and fathers, thrown from IEDs or childhoods into a nightmare world of death around each corner? How could we help Jimmy?


And I spent the week asking myself, seven years ago--How did I help Kelly, the stoic utilitarian and bitter-hearted nihilist, when he wept and retched with remorse on my porch, three weeks into knowing me, because someone had to know his brothers--his men, they'd been with him the whole war--all three had been killed together in Iraq, the night before? "They had families," he croaked, looking like a roadkill frog. "Kids, man. They loved their wives. What the fuck? It should have been me."


Don't hold your breath. I mumbled something about their lives living on in him, how each of us live in each other by the things we say and memories we plant--we affect each other every minute of our intersections and live on, the human race one overlapping life--but he looked at me and we both silently agreed I was full of shit. It should have been Kelly. He slept with a roster of girls from his old college days, smoked weed in an endless cycle, and lived with his divorced mother in a house he owned. His father lived in Germany and sold furnaces, I think. Kelly had a gun in every room of his house--he showed them to me, insanely--and would wake from a dead sleep with a scream, clutching the rifle at his bedside in suburban Pittsburgh. It should have been Kelly, in George Bernard Shaw's world.


I said nothing more helpful to Jimmy, in that October visit to the Outer Banks setting up the Cucumber Martini summer. I hunched with him and watched and tried to speak, and never had a useful moment.

THREE

--The martini recipe. I discovered it while looking at Gin in a liquor store. It makes a 6 ounce martini, or if you are like me, it makes two martinis and you must convince a friend to have one with you.  Here is how it goes. Five parts Hendrick's gin, one part St. Germaine, a splash of extra dry vermouth, and the guts from an inch-thick chunk of cucumber. Shake over ice with the diced remains of that cucumber chunk. Pour into a pre-chilled glass and garnish with thin cucumber slices. What makes the martini is the St. Germaine, but people are more familiar with cucumbers than the liquor of elderberries, so I deceptively call the whole thing a cucumber martini. Lies communicate.


The best part of that whole forsaken summer happened toward the end. For one hour in a Pittsburgh August evening, I was Daniel's drummer again and we erased the six years we'd been apart as musicians, playing a small private show in his parents' idyllic backyard: the after party for his sister Ruthie's rehearsal dinner. He announced I was back on drums--and old friends I'd only ever barely known cheered wildly for me. I felt a thrill of false love and mild, silly fame, and learned in one dose to fear the addiction that still drives rich men wild. Someone confided that he preferred me over the drummers they'd collected through the years; I heard the words as a prisoner receiving freedom.


Two other things collided with Jimmy at the Outer Banks that October. One was hurricane Matthew, through which we drove to reach the island, trapping us in place for the several days we'd already planned to stay. The mildly overturned beach houses and communities, nearly vacant, surrounded us with an eerie disaster tourism, thrust upon us.


We also were trying to secure a loan to buy our first house, dragging our newborn and a two-year-old into crippling, life-long debt if the housing market were to crash again. I'd hold Jimmy while he raged or wept and go inside to pore over amortization tables and credit scores.


We closed at the end of November for a price we probably could have reduced, but I couldn't bring myself to fight an old man and his fading wife on the value of their family home.  Immediately we tore out their old carpets, repainted the walls, and had new hardwood floors installed. We moved in an unseasonably warm late January, surrounded with good friends and help.

FOUR

In February my parents visited. In March my brother Ben came for a week, and then we went skiing with Greg and Pam for a week in Colorado. In April we hosted Seder, and I traveled to the woods with men from church, and then Jessica turned 30 in our house while I made our garage into a speakeasy. During all of that, our heating system died and we had to replace it. In May the trouble over Margaret bubbled over, as she declared her intent to preach Jesus in places where they kill for that. The committees who handle such things had meeting after meeting to ensure our hands were fully wrung; I was there. At the beginning of June, Erik and his family moved in; at the beginning of July, they moved out. During that time, our friends from Oklahoma visited, then we went to visit my family in Pennsylvania, and then all my family came to visit us. For two nights we had 17 souls sleep in the house. In mid July I spent a week in Guatemala, digging a well for natives and dreaming misplaced nightmares, while Gina watched the boys as a single mother. At the end of July, Daniel and his wife Bethany visited for a week. Anna, Bethany's younger sister, brought us those peaches--the most perfect I will ever experience this side of the grave. We steamed clams and I invented vodka drinks with limes and crushed peach slices. In mid August we traveled to Pittsburgh for Ruthie's wedding; later, I spent a night in some hotel for work. We welcomed September while camping in the Appalachians, and I looked down to see we had a three year old and a one year old; I could not find the newborn or the two-year-old anywhere. All this time, Jimmy toiled to redeem October, to recover, to find and reclaim his lost life, and I played a flute in the margins of his world.



And then the second Fall, the second October, brought Jimmy to the brink of his own dark pool--and in a gasping week he and his loves and his demons and his laugh were swept away from us, up to Michigan and family, and a suddenly tentative grasp on daily life, even for simple things, even for Cucumber Martinis.


Is that too abrupt?  Well, life is.  In a moment, standing with Chris and Visi on my porch, with chicken cooking too slowly on the grill, answering scorching texts from Jimmy while my sons bickered and fussed and my tired wife demanded an answer to something I can't remember--in that moment, in that inch, I had my chance and never played my cards.


Not that it ends.  It goes on.  We conceived a third child, and my large and wildly joyous family visited again for Thanksgiving.  Ben started dating a woman in New York, and Emily wrote a musical.  These things mean so little to the world outside my heart but as I write these words the worlds of implication and memory leap forth in vivid clarity.  We live whole years and decades sitting still, when suddenly the world erupts with life and movement--and in the chaos, with everything happening, we lose track of so much.

A Page from the Abel Monologues

"Life is simple when observed dispassionately.  Absent implications, absent fears, hopes, or dreams, it follows a very basic course of metabolizing and procreating, until eventually time runs out and it's over.  That's that.  And Life goes on, all around it.  Careful consideration calls into question whether Death is even worthy of any independent consideration, being only a bookend on a repetitive organic process.

"Dying an animal's death terrifies humans, who hope (despite themselves) to exist forever.  The human imagination of immortality recoils from the prospect of termination, of simple not-being.  Once thrust forth into the universe as an existence, a reality, the mind of a mammal expecting eternity becomes its own fatal addiction.  Existence itself becomes the underlying desire creating context and cause for all other desires.

"Cynics and atheists insist..."

K shut the book with a snap.  Whoever Abel was--he didn't understand humans.  "I was okay with not existing, before I did," he muttered.  "Don't figure I'll mind after I don't anymore."  With the slim volume clumsily back on the shelf, K fumbled toward the door.

He couldn't fault Abel too gravely, he decided in retrospect.  Plenty of humans didn't understand humans--and they had the advantage over Abel of having actual experience being a human.  As far as K could tell, Abel had only ever been an artificial intelligence algorithm living in a fungus hurtling through space in one of humanity's stupidest ideas.



June 2017

February

Well, I missed February for posting.  I really didn't--I've started transcribing a journal I kept in the summer of 2007, but that's all grouped together under the 2007 label, so according to my judgy little calendar on the sidebar there, I missed February.

I'm tired and grumpy, lately.  Uncharacteristically so: short with friends, snapping at my sons for wiping the Earth on my clothing as it passes through their nostrils, needlessly cold to my wife when there's a lot going on.  Mostly, it's sleep deprivation.  Partly, it's the stress of having little time to myself.  Between moving in, fixing all the little things around the house, organizing all the nooks and crannies, and having a jolly stream of hilarious friends and family come party through my house, life is always moving.  It's good to remember to step away from the stream from time to time and breathe for a minute.

There's no need to write this.  Previous generations would balk or sneer or criticize this behavior.  Future generations will roll their eyes.  The current generation won't read it anyway.

The thing is, I'm just trying to balance out the internet in my own way.  Every time I read an Op-Ed, someone is blaming a system or another person or Some Thing (But Not Me) for something they don't like about life.  Well, in contrast: I've been an ass lately, and it's my fault for not managing my time and mental health more responsibly.  Just so you know, Internet-at-large.

Similarly, I've started trying to drive courteously on I-95 lately, even though inevitably it only ends with people blocking me in a slow lane or some other annoying scenario.  When someone in a hurry winds up riding my bumper, I look for a spot and change lanes to let them through.  When someone needs in front of me, I let them in.  You know.  Normal driving things that Northern Virginian drivers do not, ever, under any circumstances, do.

Today, while letting the 5th driver through in 10 minutes, I started to wonder if my behavior had any chance of impacting other drivers' behaviors.  Probably not.  But the happy thought of starting to drive courteously, and by doing so consistently, slowly encouraging a culture change (in a city of several million--yeah, nope) was tempting to consider.

Then several other people let me through, further down the road, and I wondered--what if we're all actually, subconsciously, already being affected by some other very courteous driver out there inspiring positive change in our behavior?  Who knows, perhaps there's some superhero of polite driving, inspiring us all whether we know it or not, and in 20 years we'll all be driving kindly and we'll all have that one hero driver to thank.

Actually, in 20 years, humans won't be driving anymore.  So the problem's fixed one way or another.

Brain dump complete.  Have a happy evening.




March 2017

Dishes

If you happen to find yourself breaking and entering into someone's house, and you suddenly realize they are home, they are armed, and they are probably going to come kill you, one good idea is to head toward the kitchen and start doing the dishes.


They might still decide to kill you, but no sane homeowner would ever kill someone doing the dishes. And while they wait for you to finish up, you have a few minutes to either figure a way out of the situation or put your spiritual house in order.


Just a thought.

Sandcastles

__________

Last night we couldn't find Jimmy and it turned out he was sleeping on the front porch, curled in a fetal position with his Nat Shermans sitting there, like someone dropped off a body at the hospital.  He was fine--just drunk--and Rob leaned over Jimmy and told him to get up in his Fireman Voice, asked what he was doing.  "Sleeping," Jimmy said.  "Come on," said Rob, this isn't your bed."  "Not my bed?! What do you mean, it's not my bed?!" shrieked Jimmy.  Not really debating the bed-ness of the concrete pad, I think.  It seemed Drunk Jimmy was mostly just astonished by Rob's Fireman Voice, which admittedly was jarring between friends.  The whole time, I just stood there watching stupidly.

Last week, Rob's best friend's dad died snorkeling in the Caribbean.  Also last week, a former student of Jimmy's hanged himself in the woods behind the house.  I guess a girl had broken up with the student.  They don't know what killed Rob's friend's dad.

Today Kevin and I built a sandcastle while the Toddler and Jimmy's son, who is six, helped here and there and destroyed it here and there.  We spent about twenty minutes on the castle and its town, and an hour and a half on the moats and sea walls in front.  The tide was coming in.  A wave hit our series of moats and exploded into a splash higher than anything we'd built, but it didn't take down the castle.  That was hours ago now.  High tide has come since then and the castle and its moats are gone forever.

Last night after we found Jimmy he went up to the roof with Kevin to smoke and cry.  I had to put the Toddler to bed.  When I was done, I went through the kitchen to follow Jimmy upstairs.  "Kevin waved Rob and Larry off," Crystal told me.  "He's... You may not want to..."  "I'm not scared," I said.

Kevin was in a chair and Jimmy was crumpled in a sitting heap on the roof deck.  I crumpled up next to Jimmy and lit a cigarette and didn't do a thing, but my shoulder pushed up on his and my knee pressed against his and I didn't shrink from him.

After he eventually stopped crying he started asking why Death always wins.  "He always wins," he said.  "I'm tired of staring him in the face.  I'm tired of his stench," rolling out the S in stench and ending with a sonic punch, like his larynx reached out and slapped the air.  "I'm tired of his fucking face."  Silence.  Continuing, in a mournful tone, "That's why I drink, that's why I smoke," and then, "Why?!  Why does he always, always, always win?" --which ended in a shout.  "Because we're mortal," I wanted to say, and, "Death has been defeated," but I didn't say anything at all.  Jimmy went downstairs eventually, and he was going to set up a game or a movie, but he and Crystal just went to bed in the end instead.  Everybody else went down to see the night beach except me and Kevin, and we talked about work for a while in that bland way people have who care, but don't have anything to say.

Jimmy worries that our fledgling church will die.  I do not honestly care.  I worry about Jimmy.  And Rob.  And Kevin.  And Crystal.  And I set up moat after moat, digging, putting my back into it, silently carrying on in my stupid way, crumpling up next to people and lighting cigarettes.

Because I know the tide will come.

But I still build sandcastles.  And moats to help them live past one more wave.

______

A Necessary Coda:

Later Jimmy told me I'd said something at dinner that night, which reminded him of terrors from his childhood.  Neither of us could remember what.  He'd gone outside to pray; he'd fallen asleep; that's how we'd found him.

So it was me, perhaps, that first sent him out to that concrete fetal nap.  Well, I meant no harm, useless as that is.  Two days later we spent the day on the beach and he sat behind us the entire day well into his cups.  We picked everything up in the afternoon to take it back to the house, and afterward I went back for Jimmy.  He was still sitting there, in the same exact position he'd occupied the whole day that'd just slipped past, but in our absence he was sobbing behind his dark sunglasses, his back heaving.

There weren't words to say and I didn't touch him or announce myself.  I fed a cheese curl to a seagull and built a tiny wall of reeds plugged into the sand.  I stared out at the ocean and wondered if I could do anything at all to help; the sea taught me to wait.

In the end, walking slowly back to the house holding his folded chair, I told him I didn't have any words, I told him that kid had made his own mistake.  "But he was a good kid, Peter," Jimmy said.  "He was a good kid."  I said some other useless things, and I asked him to drink less tomorrow, which he did.  In the real end, I mean the really real one, I guess I know my moats won't matter.  For all I try, my efforts only seem to destroy here and there so much as they help here and there, like the Toddler and Jimmy's six-year-old.  It takes the calming of the tides to mend some wounds.

Still, it's what I have, and in my stupid way, it's what makes most sense to me.  Sometimes I think the only human things worth doing are the ones that wash away.





October 2016

Double Exposure

Sometimes I take pictures of my family in the evenings, sitting with their occupations: books, or toys, mother with child, child with trucks.  I take pictures to remind my future Self of a time when I was happy--when nothing was wrong, when the troubles that inevitably arise have not yet bared their fangs.


And yet, behind these pictures, I am also often sad.  The causes are small, but numerous: petty slights, personal struggles, lost opportunities, failed efforts, grieving friends.  My children grow, and I mourn the loss of each month while still rejoicing in the next.


Meanwhile, I maintain the pragmatic expectation that true troubles lie ahead.  We will be sick, or hungry, or there will be injury and fear, or there will be discord and conflict.  Life is a wheel that does not stay fixed in place.


When those days come, I will look back on these happy times and I will forget the small troubles that now loom so strangely large.  And in the light of this expectation, this analytic likelihood, I am warmly reminded of how small my current troubles truly are.  In context, a coin can be the size of the Sun; but it is not the size of the Sun.


Therefore, I take my pictures of these trouble-free days, these splendid times, this golden age--and in the view forced by this simple click, my troubles dim to gray.








Sep. 2016

What Happens at the End

By Peter Jackson
August 2016

    "What I can't believe," said Steve, "is just the brutal, mind-blowing immensity of it.  This religion has been around for what, two thousand plus years?  And a third of every generation--the world's population, every twenty years--you have, just, what, shooting up into the sky?"

    "Well," I demurred, sipping my beer.  "It may not be a full third, you know."

    "Fine, twenty percent.  Still, do the math.  Eight billion people.  Twenty percent.  Every twenty years.  That's one-point-six billion people every twenty years.  Or eighty million people every year."

    "Wait, wait.  What's this with the twenty years?"

    "Like a generation.  A literal generation.  It's every twenty years."

    "Yeah, but they don't die off all at once every twenty years."

    "No, but they have to go somewhere, right?  So I'm thinking from the end point, instead of the beginning.  All the people that die every twenty years."

    "You think the whole Earth's population dies off every twenty years?"

    "No, I guess not.  I guess you're right."

    "So--less than eighty million a year."

    "Less, sure.  Somewhat.  But how many generations do you have on Earth at one time?  Five?  Maybe six?  Let's say five.  So we divide our figure by five.  Sixteen million a  year."

    "That's more manageable, right?  I mean, the population of heaven can take sixteen million people a year.  Less than that for the first couple thousand years, too, you know.  We only hit eight billion in the last couple decades."

    "Okay, okay.  I concede that."  Steve paused.  "But every twenty years, Dan.  And this goes on for how long?  It's been two thousand years so far.  Two thousand times sixteen million, man.  What even is that?"

    "Thirty-two billion," I said quietly.

    "Yeah.  And they never die.  So the current population of heaven, assuming current statistics are about average, is thirty-two billion."

    We were both silent for a bit.  The late summer evening wafted gently toward us, carried through the dark trees.  A bank of clouds was gathering up in the night sky.  I got up to get us another couple of beers.  When I came back, Steve had crunched some more census numbers for heaven.

    "So on the one hand, maybe I'm being generous with twenty percent of all people going to heaven.  Let's say it's just five percent."

    "Five?  That's harsh."

    "Nah.  How many people actually believe in your quaint fairy tales these days anyway, Dan?  I mean, I'm fond of you, but Christianity is a Hegelian construct, an anachronism from the days of imperialism and industrialism.  We've outgrown it, as a species."

    I smiled.  "Hmm.  Well, I haven't."

    "Anyway.  So if we're only saddled with five percent of you weirdos, and the rest of my math is about the same, then heaven is only just now cresting eight billion people.  So basically it's got the same population as Earth."

    "Good to know."

    "Maybe.  I could stand to have fewer people here, personally."

    "But then again, you're a brute, Steve.  An uncouth heathen."

    "Yes, there is that.  You're trying to change the subject.  I have a huge 'but' to deliver."

    ("You can say that again," I muttered.  Steve continued unabated.)

    "So here's the thing.  Christianity promises the whole Earth will be consumed by a lake of fire.  Let's let that be true.  And, in fact, let's borrow physics and say it's going to happen because our good old sun just happens to get hot and expand.  Fortunately for us, we have a time scale on this, right?  We know this will happen in around three billion years.  But even before it happens, Earth will be totally uninhabitable, starting around one billion years from now."

    "Actually," I said, "I did not know any of that."

    "You're welcome," said Steve.

    "A billion years?"

    "Yes.  We have around a billion years left."

    "I'd better pack," I quipped.  "Anyway, let me guess.  More math."

    "Yes."

    "Another guess.  Heaven's population is in what, the trillions?"

    "Quadrillions.  Four quadrillion, to be precise.  And that's with just five percent Christians, and assuming Earth's population plateaus at only eight billion souls."

    "So it's a lower bound--"

    "Yes.  Upper bound on this is twenty quadrillion.  That's with twenty percent believers, and Earth's population averaging ten billion souls.  Which to be fair, is still conservative."

    I was quiet for a minute.  The bats were busy diving for bugs, in the dark spaces between the trees in the yard.  The sky had turned overcast and threatening, with stiff gusts of wind.  No rain yet, though.  Steve was poking at something on his phone.

    "That's a lot of people," I said quietly.

    After a pause, Steve exploded.  "That's what kills me, man.  How can you believe this?  How is that even possible?  Twenty quadrillion people?  No way.  Heaven is a sham.  You can't just have person after person show up to this party and never die.  You can't even imagine how many people you're talking about."

    "Yeah."

    "It's just a poorly-conceived invention, Dan.  There's no way around it."

    "Oh, I don't know about that.  Maybe there's something we don't understand."

    "What is there to misunderstand, though?  We did the math!"

    "Yeah."  I sipped my beer again.  A quadrillion is not really a sensible unit.  No human can really imagine a quadrillion of anything.

    Steve was still picking at his phone.  Finally he clicked it off and tossed it gently on the deck table with a sigh.  I was lighting a cigarette.

    "So that planet we were watching," he said.

    "Yeah, M76-Alpha-something-something."

    Steve laughed.  "Not even close.  But yeah.  Turns out those blips were nothing."

    "No life?"

    "No."  He lit his cigarette in turn.

    "Bummer."

    "Sorry to change topics, but I just don't get it, honestly.  I mean I've read the hypotheses about why we don't find life.  Maybe we're early, as living beings go.  Maybe it's more rare than we thought for life of our complexity to emerge.  Maybe life usually exists on another plane.  Maybe, maybe.  Whatever."  He paused, flicking an ash off the deck.  "In all that space, though--why haven't we found life?"

    "How many planets are out there?" I asked, with a smile in my eyes.  "More than a quadrillion?"

    "Oh, piss off," he laughed.

    A little while later, he had to go.  I saw him to the door.  "Drive safe," I said.  Moving around my living room, I started to pick up from the day.  Toys my kids had left in the couch were replaced on the shelves; wine glasses and dishes from dinner went to the kitchen.  Everything was straightened up in about half an hour.  I went outside for a last glimpse of the night before heading up to bed.

    I was sitting on the porch, pondering Steve's point, when the tree came down.  The wind had picked up and was pressing my trees this way and that, branches whipping into a frenzy.  Suddenly a big oak, leaning over the porch, snapped somewhere midway up.  A giant portion of the trunk came shooting down like a missile.  I remember briefly glancing up in curiosity and astonishment before everything went dark.

    When I came around, literally everything was different.

    I immediately gathered that I had died, or something even more unexpected had occurred.  My body felt younger and stronger.  My mind felt sharp and energetic.  The tired, frumpy dad of three was a bright thirtysomething with a good back and strong legs.  I briefly considered that I was naked, but it seemed irrelevant.

    I had awoken in a pod of some sort, upright, like I'd seen in science fiction movies after people were cryogenically frozen or placed in some kind of imaginary stasis cell.  The front was made completely of a curved glass, and I was apparently buckled gently against a soft, upright couch.  Although I was standing, I didn't seem to be exerting any effort to stand.  Even as I noticed all this, the glass casing unsealed with a hiss and slid back into the wall on my right.

    There had apparently been some kind of light on in the pod, because my eyes took a moment (but it seemed a very brief moment, I noticed) to adjust to the dim exterior of my pod.  I stepped out onto a narrow pathway in front of my pod.  Next to my pod and stretching off to the left and right as far as I could see was a wall of similar pods; on the other side of the path, a cavernous space yawned open.  Far across this opening, I saw another wall of pods stretching up above and below me as far as I could see.

    "Rather impressive, don't you think?" asked a voice.  I turned to see a woman approaching from several yards off.  She was beautiful, and also naked, although it seemed to me I couldn't remember why either thing ever mattered.

    "Yes," I agreed.

    "Welcome to heaven, Dan," she said, and immediately I somehow knew her name was Theresa, and that I had died, and that somehow, this was indeed heaven.

    "Thanks," I answered, confused; then: "Do I know you--"

    "No," she laughed.  "You'll get used to it.  You just...know things, now."

    "Oh."

    "I'm one of the saints assigned to shepherd this seed ship," she went on.  Her eyes were piercing and kind.  "You're an early arrival, but not the first."  She noticed my gaze returning to the wall of pods, row on row and column on column stretching back into the shadows, and she added, "And you're clearly not the last."

    "Sorry," I said, "but can you back up a bit?  I take it I've died?"

    "--And Christ redeemed you," she immediately said.  A wave of strange joy came over me at the name.

    "Okay."  The confusion in my eyes asked a hundred silent questions.

    "You died several hundred thousand years ago.  The oak tree killed you; freak accident.  Your wife remarried happily.  Your boys grew up well, and all three married happily.  You had four grandchildren."  She paused.  "Of course, you now have well over a hundred thousand descendents."

    I suppose I should have expected that, but I hadn't.  I audibly gasped, then laughed.  "So, I guess it's been a while."

    She smiled good naturedly.  "It's been a while."

    "How's Earth doing?"

    "Totally uninhabitable.  That's of course what set the seed ships into motion."

    "Oh? What do--"  And then, suddenly, in the same way I knew her name without hearing it, I suddenly also saw the seed ships blinking into existence.  A great cloud of them, each of them the size of a small moon, filled with new human bodies in these comfortable pods.  A new body, a new heaven, a new Earth.  I witnessed the translation, the salvation of Christ saving souls, setting them aside in a new dimension until the day of reckoning--the day of abandoning Earth--came on.

    Theresa was smiling.  "We are rapidly approaching our destination, which is a new Earth in a galaxy not altogether far away, in galactic terms, from our own old Milky Way."

    "What will we do when we get there?"

    "We'll worship and serve the Lord, Daniel."

    "Oh," I said, a little flustered.  That was unexpectedly...religious.  "Is He there?"

    "Not exactly.  Not all the time.  But we don't plan to stand around and sing.  Hallmark cards didn't get it right, Dan.  This isn't an eternal church service--it's an eternal life.  We'll garden, and we'll paint.  We'll build civilizations and cities and explore open land and plant crops.  We'll swim the oceans and find the gems of a new world.  We'll write symphonies and build masterpieces of architecture.  We'll make movies and watch plays and have histories and cultures and societies that thrive and fail."

    "That sounds pretty much like Earth, though.  Isn't that just--the same thing we did before?"

    "Yes."

    And then it struck me that this time we could do it all--differently.  Without sin.  Without death.  Without hate and malice.  As immortal beings, we could travel impossible distances between the stars; what is a thousand lightyears to an infinite being?  Each seed ship would leave in its wake a hundred budding Earths, and in the millions of years to come they would foster an intergalactic economy, a future swept out among the stars.

    "The universe will be full of us," I breathed.

    "Not quite, it turns out," she laughed.

    "No?"

    "Twenty quadrillion was actually an underestimate, but the universe is a very big place.  Even with several billion of us on each world--and some larger worlds holding trillions--there are more places to explore, more gardens to cultivate, more stars to watch and visit, than we will ever exhaust."

    "Huh," I said.  "I guess Steve was wrong."

    "No," she corrected me, "he was right all along.  It really is immense.  More so than you can possibly imagine."

Outside

We found God in the garden where we'd left Him, sitting in a pleasant day.

"Pretty much perfect out here," He remarked, gesturing divinely. "Wish you'd come join Me."

"We know," we said, irritable and itchy, heading back inside to watch our shows.

August 2015

Coarse

The coarsening of our society is a direct response to our well-financed and heavily advertised pursuit of unmerited thrills. Modern Man sees far more murders splayed out across his hundred-inch plasma screen than ever Medieval Man saw across his mudded fields or even battlements. And these are murders full of action, story, horror, surprise--but not of blood spilled across our own shoes and mixed with our own morning air. These are murders meant to thrill; meant to tease; meant to move the story on and pass us through our convincingly boring lives.








And so we callously become the very crowd that shocks us still: the mob who saunters by the body in the street, the trampled child in our way. We, the un-thrilled masses, unfeeling and unfelt, no mercy tender to our brethren Man: for what money is there in that?













July 2015

Memory (XIII)

The silence of expectance, a paltry tale slowly scrolled across unread banners, chides the parched and uninspired soul: no artist ever was, who lived unforced as their own images portrayed.

Resting as I do at the foot of massive walls and heavy furniture, I hopelessly recall the genius of my youth. In laying prostrate upon my bedroom floor, I held a baseball in my hands and suddenly understood Size--the horrifying, helpless enormity of Earth and our own insignificant molecularity. I shuddered then in terror and now regret I have not since.

And yet I do become aware as well of the parallel design of Time--the slow quickness with which our many years unpromised pass. A child is born who wears his father's smile, and a joy-filled face looks out upon a newborn world as it has not for thirty years; a tree is felled five decades hence and warms the brick-lined fireplace all bitter winter long.

And I remember, too, a time before I knew Poetry, a time of baseballs and the gravity of high-branched trees. I recall, too, she for whom I met dear Poetry, and she for whom I tried to chain her down.

All History, this, I suppose: my darkened, aging eyes weakly piercing fog that's long accrued. And: the smell of Sea, his salted wind in California eucalyptus trees, felt in the cool damp sand of my earliest childhood, a playground by the beach with a young mother I then barely knew--and to History I tender the whispered hope that someday the inheritor of my childhood grin will also carry some similar, morning-cooled memory and scent in his different soul.

July 2015

Ceiling Cloud

It was a sky that lured one in: up and along its endless parade of low-hanging clouds, sunk beneath a warehouse ceiling of that vast suspended ocean, enshrouding us all in the light of an unseen Sun.

May 2015