run

doing

not to betray myself as a lazy dumbass, but people take their work way too seriously. either that or (if everyone's level of seriousness is actually appropriate) i am most certainly in the wrong field--as in, the field i should be in is playing rock festivals in Europe year round, getting high and writing poetry, sleeping in parks and dirty vans, with the retirement plan of dying at age 32 of massive liver failure. so that's probably not my field (neither, i'd wager, is my current field: namely, the real-life married-man steady-paycheck job, complete with the 6:00 metro ride into town with a tie on my neck and the badge that gives me authority to search databases all day). and since i got you into this paragraph with an either-or statement, that leaves us with only one solid conclusion: people take work too seriously.

given such an iron-clad argument, i now present an extension thereof, from which anyone who actually Does belong in my aforementioned field may be graciously excused: chill out.

none of us are changing the world, nor will we at this rate. modern success is a holding pattern for retirement, at which point we mostly intend to forget the previous part and convince ourselves we were born with grandkids, creeping dementia, and highwater pants (i guess the middle one is true, so you'll have an easier time with that).

our problem seems to be a lack of role models working at the bottom of a pay scale. as in, no coloring books celebrating the fact-checking bureaucrat--but secretly, we don't start our careers as best-selling authors, millionaires, and/or U.S. senators (don't tell anyone, though, especially not in college or elementary school). so then, how does the early professional behave? similar to copy-pasting when you have the wrong thing copied, we wind up with Serious-Business attitudes at internet-level jobs. you can ask around at 4chan how that works out.

for me: let's be honest, i wish i was on a stage in Europe, but i'll be on the metro at 6:00 tomorrow looking forward to coffee and trying not to want to change the world. whatever.

gina

gina thinks i should start a blog. i'm too lazy to design a new one, so i'll just bastardize this thing and go to town.

they put a roof on the home next to mine today. a bunch of greasy guys were standing around when i went to work, and there was a rent-a-crane (really, that's what it said on the side: rent-a-crane) in the parking lot. when i came home there was a nice slanty roof, kinda exactly like a normal roof. crazy what a bunch of greasy guys can do in a day.

speaking of, dinkel comes to town tomorrow, and then we go see ryan get hitched, so this blog is off to one of those leaping starts where i won't write anything for like another week. meaning: don't get your hopes up, gina.

oh anyway: the roof was missing, apparently, because before i moved in there was an enormous fire in one of the units and a mom & two kids died in it. the given cause of fire was that mom hadn't paid rent or utilities for long enough that they'd shut off the electric and she was using candles for lights.

i don't really know what to say after that, so i won't. goodbye for a week.

a return of Poetry (XII)

into the chasm of time that is my life's commute i drip my words, in obscure piece-driven slow pursuit of meaning eked from these blank, mounding minutes. for years i've missed my deep soul-patrons, they having left me high ashore (or i left them: i'm never sure), but seldom do i miss them more than here.


once or twice i've dreamt the brush of Poetry, shrouded in a gentle face jostled about by the train's foul mob and sway--and i admit she might have been: though always, in the end, i find she's lost amid the crowd.


then again: i've seen her, too, in the dust-shone light of a train coming in underground where we wait for it, we wait for it, checking our watches in a bump-up fight for place against the space-drop down to the tracks below. she's there, in the open volume where the ceiling accomodates the platform above us we rode in--despite the screech and rush, i find her peace in that glowing air. the light belongs to her, as she to all.


--then through the hole. the train plunges out and towards us, a narrow miss, and promises us home. we're carried forth, to the mundane life, poetry in that moment of light left behind: and yet--


at dinner i subdue the imaginations of my day to favor thoughts of the less ideal. i take my meals alone, now, at a mirrored table whose reflections of my face betray the cheap resentment of my frozen loneliness. i never sat alone like this before to eat.


what differences divide, like desolated platform stops, the tracks that string together this exile and entombment? some few, i think: but not decay (which binds the soul before the body starts to go), not idleness, not the dull morbidity of an empty face. we are quite closely dead, we many who are alone.


and yet, we're thus in temperament more than truth. this solitude is a counter-preference, sociality deferred to times that we control. our species does abound, after all: it is my hesitance to meet my neighbors, to greet a woman on the train, that so exiles. this, and theirs to do the same. we live in angles of self-and-else resistance: and so, crowded all alone.


and so at length to sleep, although each passing night i ask the dark what more composes History than time's untiring, vectral thrust. we pile on these many evenings, then find a year is gone; then a decade, then a life; what's more to History, then? yet echoed against the walls i hear the answer spoken in my own voice, and Poetry close beside.








may '11

a more beautiful hour

In an evening where a cloud-damped sun descends behind the storm-grim ceiling sky, there waits an unknown hour far more beautiful than her brothers. From a thundercoil luminescence, the Earth glows nude--stretching lean her raw elegance, her naked true nobility, disrobed of all less worthy lights. Within her atmospheric lust we open infant eyes to find ourselves enfogged and more than men: we must be gods: for only such could see her thus and live.








May '11