Not Feeling So Bloggy...

I haven't been feeling incredibly bloggy so far this month. Spring has arrived in my part of Ohio, and there are bees (honey bees!) buzzing around all of the freshly bloomed flowers in my yard. It's hard to stay inside. As soon as the ground dries up a little more, it will be even harder. Spring is the time for riding bikes, playing soccer, cooking out, and getting allergy shots.

Spring and Summer is why we don't produce many notable epics in the midwest. They do that in former Soviet Sattelites, where it is too cold to fall through the ice. In the midwest--while we can be angsty from time to time--we're mostly good for blogs, sports articles, and limericks. The writing on the bathroom walls in midwestern universities--especially in the psych. departments--is exceptional.

I'm working on and off on a little piece about existential psychology, I've got a story or two on the back burner, and I may churn out a poem or bathroom-wall-etching every now and then, but for the most part this April (if you need me), I'll be in the yard.

I Am In Frequent Contact With You Know Who

A story I wrote called I am In Frequent Contact With You Know Who is currently on display at Pequin.

Pequin is awesome, and you should check in with them a couple of times a week.

Who's In Charge Here?

It occurred to me a moment ago, as it does from time to time, that I am a father. You may reasonably ask me where the revelation in this is, being that I have two children, the oldest of whom is six. Fair enough, but it’s not that simple. Or maybe it is.

I become accustomed to things very fast. This can be both good and bad. I go to a hotel in another city for a weekend, and on the second day, I feel like I’m home. That funny smell in people’s houses? It doesn’t bother me for long. These are good things.

But I am usually in a state of anxiety about parenting. From time to time I catch myself just kind of rolling with it, taking it as it comes, and this feels good, although not in an entirely conscious way. Then something hits me, something reminds me of how foggy and uncertain life is, and the weight gets piled on. This is such a moment.

My wife and I just got finished watching Gone Baby Gone . We had spent the whole time trying to figure out who the killer was, and were both kind of surprised how we had misjudged the whole point of the movie. The ultimate meaning of the movie--at least insofar as we could tell--was that good and bad decisions are not always so clear cut, and that the world can be a scary place.

This tapped into an anxiety I often carry around with me. I am someone who wants yes or no answers on everything, and yet I have very few. In spite of myself I believe in God, and yet I find it hard to believe anything anyone (including myself) tells me about he/she/it. I certainly have not received any discernable revelations. I don't trust people who wear moustaches.

This inability to accept received wisdom and to follow the lead of authority figures without question has left me,uneasily, with the conclusion that any meaning that is to be found in my life must be carved out by myself. Which is unfortunate, because I am not that experienced with a knife.

I know it’s trite, but I’m starting to understand where my parents are coming from. There is no one that can tell you for sure how to do things. You kind of have to play it by ear in the parenting game, and none of us have all of the equipment to make the right decision all of the time. Does anyone really know what they are doing?

It gives me some comfort to know that everyone is operating on their own best guesses to some extent, with the shoddy equipment found in their own rusty toolboxes. This is mildly alarming, but it makes empathy a little easier. It makes it easier to ease up on yourself a little too: Woody Allen is fun to watch in movies, but he's not as fun when he's perched on your shoulder all the time.

I have no idea what I am doing, and yet I am in charge of this most important project, and overall, things seem to be going well so far. My kids are intelligent, creative, compassionate, and well adjusted. So maybe the kind of uncomfortable soul searching that I do is appropriate for the role I've been given. I don’t know. I’m just going to assume that God is better at making appointments to high office than George W. Bush is, and try to act in good faith towards my kids.

Sign Test

I have squared myself.
I am six standard deviations from the mean.
The bell has cracked.
The bats are coming in.
The road is skewed. My tire has a flat.
When you make it to Grad school,
Send a car for me.
AAA isn’t returning my calls.

Swimming With Winston

I've chosen Martin Gilbert's Churchill:A Life as my spring break reading material. I was reading it the other night in bed, and had decided that I'd turn in after 'the next paragraph'. The next paragraph contained an excerpt of some of Churchill's writing that contained some really good imagery.

He and his brother Jack had taken a boat out on a lake in Ouchy, Switzerland. This was while he was on break from Sandhurst. They had jumped from the boat to swim, and a strong wind took the boat away from them. Churchill tried to catch up to it, but it kept getting blown away. The boys were getting tired, and this is how Churchill described the scene:

"Up to this point no idea of danger had crossed my mind. The sun played upon the sparkling blue waters; the wonderful panorama of mountain valleys, the gay hotels and villas still smiled. But now I saw Death as near I believe as I have ever seen him. He was swimming in the water at our side, whispering from time to time in the rising wind which continued to carry the boat away from us at about the same speed we could swim."

I got a chill when I read that. I don't know if it had anything to do with the tumbler of scotch I had imbibed, or the late hour, but I know that I smiled at the good writing, and then took a cursory glance around at the shadows in my lamp-lit room.

Easter Reflection

John Marks provided the most appropriate way for me to herald in Easter this year, with an essay about Dracula on All Things Considered.

lawnmower season

I'm pleased to let you know that a piece I wrote called Lawnmower Season is currently on display at Eyeshot. Thank you to Mr. Klein for posting it.

e-book

Good news: my first e-book--a collection of poems entitled Mule and Horse--will be available for free download from Why Vandalism April first.

In the meantime, there are a few things I've written for their march issue, so please help yourself to those. While you're there, be sure to treat yourself to a look at the e-books available from Chris Major and David Mclean, both of which are worth your time.

The Parachutist In Love

For E.G.

The Parachutist’s ripcord is malfunctioning. He is aware of this piece of information, and finds it duly disturbing.
You see, were the Parachutist on ground, in his plane, lying in his bed, sitting on the toilet, eating eggplant parmesan at his favorite Italian restaurant, bedding a young vixen, bedding a few young vixens (one slightly older than the other), practicing the clarinet, making a shopping list, or even playing volleyball (again with young vixens) at the beach, becoming aware of such a piece of information would be easily resolvable. Being however that he is currently falling from a very great height, the information about the ripcord is pertinent.

His instinct is to curse, but not being the swearing type, he decides to pray instead: Praying turns out to be harder to do mid-free fall than one might expect, so he curses.
Being a person who has read a book or two by Deepak Chopra, he attempts meditation: He is going to die. This is evident. He attempts to clear his mind by focusing on the snowy mountain tops that cap the quickly disappearing horizon. Also difficult: Consider G-forces.

What about the man in the colored jumpsuit with goggles and helmet?

The Parachutist’s favorite joke is one that usually only garners polite laughs when he tells it:
Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Two: one to hold the giraffe by the neck, the other to fill the bathtub up with clocks.

He has a picture of his nephew riding a horse on his coffee table at home. The picture was taken by his brother, on the boy’s twelfth birthday. The boy’s name is Cody. The Parachutist has tried to teach the boy how to play chess several times and has failed. Once, when Cody was about six, a little marble pawn showed up in his stool. The Parachutist has quit trying to teach the boy chess.

The Parachutist closes his eyes, takes a breath, and then opens them back up again. The earth is very beautiful, and very small from where he is. It is getting larger quickly, which is vaguely alarming. The Parachutist decides it would be better to misinterpret this alarm as exhilaration. ‘Whoop!’ he says.

He’s over a piney region of Alaska. The tree line spreads far and wide, and there are mountains in the distance. The Parachutist tries to imagine himself crashing down through the evergreens. Every snapping twig that he foresees, were he to write a blog about this episode, he may call it ‘Returning to the Earth in a very real way’, and the post would be very spiritual. The Parachutist is a very spiritual person in his own way. He has read books by Deepak Chopra, and always plays Prince music when he beds young vixens.

The Parachutist is pleased with how easily he turned the whole tragic affair into a philosophical one.
He imagines the earth wrapping around him, his body becoming thin and embedded, and he begins to relax his muscles as it all becomes very near, the whistling becoming increased, and the mountain view becoming out of sight. He thinks about the terrain, and tries to picture it without trees. A parking lot. A desert. An ocean. A pile of feathers.

To the ordinary wild porcupine, the grass is gentle and high, and the soil is agreeably moist. It easily absorbs the creature’s small footprints as it pads and sniffs it’s way through the sweet smelling forest, looking for whatever it is that porcupines look for.

Some kind of small bug, I would imagine.

Blackwater Shot Our Dog

Thank you to Zygote In My Coffee for posting a poem I wrote called Blackwater Shot Our Dog.

The poem may actually be called Blackwater Shot My Dog, but I can't remember, because I don't have a copy in front of me right now. The poem most likely has one of those two titles, although there is a remote possibility that it is called Kubla Khan.

I got the idea for Blackwater from the newspaper article I quote at the beginning of the piece. I got the idea to look in newspapers for poem ideas from John Updike, who starts many of the poems in his book Verse with quotations from newspapers. I admired his resourcefulness, and decided to copy it.

Making Salad For Abby

My wife was on her way home for lunch today, so I made her a big, pretty salad. I took a big scoop of spring mix lettuce leaves from a plastic tub we had bought at the store the other day, added some wasabi-ranch fritters, a few green olives, two cherry tomatoes, some bean sprouts, a drizzle of sweet Italian dressing, and the rest of the crumbled gorgonzola cheese.

I paused before I put the cheese on. My parents are coming over tonight to watch the kids for us, and I always like to have the fridge and cabinets stocked with food and drink, so they know we are flourishing, and that they did a good job raising me. In my mind, my mom would open the fridge and see the gorgonzola cheese and say, oh, wow. Gorgonzola cheese. Spencer must know more about jazz than we thought.

But I decided I loved my wife more than I needed my parents to think I was sophisticated, so I put the rest of the cheese on the salad. I didn’t tell her all of this when she walked in; Instead I said, look at this gorgeous salad I made for you? Isn't it beautiful? Don’t you just want to have sex with it?

2 poems@ the jargon

there are two of my poems currently on display over at Thieves Jargon. One was born of a reminiscence of white yuppy caricatures that were used as foils in many 1980's comedies. The other came from the complicated relationship I entertain with door-to-door religion peddlers. Thanks to Matt for posting them.

Lists

Some things never change.
Other things change for awhile,
And then change right back.

When I was smaller--and had more hair on my head and less hair in other places--my dad would take me to work with him from time to time, so he could prepare the company newsletter. It was night-time, and no one was in the building but us. Sometimes the rest of my family would come along too. It was fun, because we got to eat fast food, and explore the dark hallways. Having already seen my fair share of slasher films, I usually never went too far.

Eventually we would get bored playing with my dad's art supplies and running around, and we'd settle down in a meeting room with long white tables and rows of flourescent lights and watch a little T.V. on a cart that my dad had pushed in from his boss's office.

I was in little league, and one of the things that I invariably ended up doing was creating the backside of my baseball card after years of turbulent service in the major leagues. I always liked it to be turbulent. I was about eight, and I would imagine (as I filled out all of my stats) that I had been traded somewhere mid-career after I had suffered some kind of career destroying injury, or drug dependance. My batting average would go down, and I would end up on a team I didn't really care about in real life, like the Expos. In the end, I would recover, and end up on the Cincinnati Reds again, or the San Francisco Giants.

I went through a big phase where I was always making lists. I track it back to this point, at my dad's office, after hours. From the backside of my baseball card to favorite movies, superheroes, books, and tracklists for mix tapes and CDs I would compile.

I stopped making so many lists once I started dating, although there were a few girls I did make mix CDs and tapes for (mostly my wife).

There is something fun about lists. Listing your most influential this and that. Reality can be difficult to control and define. So much is up in the air, and who's giving direction? There is so much we can never know.

We can know what we like.

new mix CD:

1. November, Dave Douglas
2. All This Ugly, Crash Test Dummies
3. Like Humans Do, David Byrne
4. To America We Go, Ashley Mac Isaac
5. Glosoli, Sigur Ros
6. So What, Miles Davis
7. Frog and Toad, The Bad Plus
8. We Will Still Need a Song, Hawksley Workman
9. Angels Come to Comfort You, Black Francis
10.Breathless, Nick Cave
11.Hellzapoppin', Louis Armstrong
12.Cool Water, Laura Veirs
13.Dead Man's Rope, Sting
14.Let the Devil In, TV on the Radio
15.Hey Jane, Low Millions
16.Don't Wait To Long, Madeleine Peyroux

A Glacial Parade

There is a fun piece of writing by Brian Foley posted over at eyeshot right now. It's called A Glacial Parade,and I wish I had written it.

Who Would You Throw Your Knife Away For?

My brother and I took my two sons to a Barack Obama rally today so they could get a chance to see our potential next president. We waited in line for two hours in a good-natured and talkative crowd; we bought the kids some souvenir buttons (it's never too early to begin indoctrinating the little ones); gradually we made our way to the doors. When we got to the metal detectors, my brother realized he had brought his pocket knife with him. When he reached the station, the guard made it clear that he either needed to discard the knife, or not enter the auditorium. In an important moment of decision, my brother decided attending the rally wasn't worth tossing his knife for*.

Later, after the rally was over and we had witnessed mini-speeches by Mayor Mark Mallory and Barack Obama, waved at ourselves on the jumbo-tron and clapped and hooted, we caught up with my brother, and I asked him why he didn't throw away the knife. It was only a ten dollar knife, which could be easily replaced. He said he would've felt bad for the knife if he threw it away. I can identify with that feeling. Knives are kind of like watches. They make interesting gifts,in that they have unique mythologies, prohibitions, rituals and guidelines attached to their being given and received**. Of all the things a man is likely to have on his person at most times, a knife rates right up there with car keys, wallet, watch and chewing gum. I threw a pocket knife away when we went to the capital building a few years back, and am still vaguely chafed that I didn't come up with a better solution.

So, after framing the situation, I asked him who he would throw a knife away for. Say we had a time machine, and could visit anyone in history, but those same metal detectors and guards and regulations stood between us and our target. Is there anyone you would throw your knife away for? Obviously, I'm easy. I threw a knife to see the inside of a building. My brother passed up seeing a speech from an potentially historical political figure in ascendance.

He pursed his lips and considered. Maybe Tesla. He said. How about David Bowie? I offered. I like Bowie, but I'm not sure. Maybe Einstein or Gandhi. More likely Tesla. But still doubtful.

I rattled off a list of people I'd ditch my knife for: Theodore Geisel.Teddy Roosevelt. Bowie. Tesla. William James. I felt somehow less in touch with whatever special ancestral (or whatever) vibe it is that links man and his knife. My brother feels inclined to honor that deep connection. I'd trade in my knife like it was a movie ticket.

Who would you ditch your knife for?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*I don't fault my brother at all for his choice. While it was neat to see Obama in person, and to be in that atmosphere, the speech wasn't long, and the material wasn't new or substantial. Much like a high school football rally, it was all pom-poms and platitudes.

**I'm thinking of the one that says you have to give someone coins when they give you a knife as a gift, otherwise the relationship will be cut.

The Fruitfly Suites

I. Chasing Fruit flies Around the House in Your Underwear

No one knows how they get in, or where they come from.
When they show up, you better do the dishes.
Better not leave any food out.
If zombies invade our cities, we can eat the fruit flies.
It will be too hazardous to trek out to the farmer’s market
For fresh squash or strawberries.
We will ka-bob their little bodies (swollen on rotten bananas
And whatever else fruit flies eat) on toothpicks,
And we will roast them over the heat of your zippo.
In the face of adversity, there is little time to be squeamish.
They have suckers on the sides of their faces.
The fast ones are tricky to kill.
When the zombies come, we will see what we are made of.


II. And We Hunted Them For Sport

You were chasing fruit flies around the house
With a rolled up paper.
You were in a white wife-beater.
Pajama pants.
No bra.
Breasts jiggling with all of the celebration
Of David ecstatic before the lord.
You were laughing
As you climbed over table and couch.
Slipped on a magazine
And fell on your butt.
No one knows where the fruit flies came from,
But we’re not having another party
Until they’re all gone.


III. All Quiet On the Western Front

The little red spots here and there on the ceiling
Stare down with tiny black irises.
There was a greens scare a year or two back,
And we stopped buying lettuce from the supermarket.
Remember when they recalled the sushi
From the store, and every week we’d check the little freezer cart
To see if they’d restocked?
There was a time when fresh produce promised only a good time
And a clear conscience.
There was a time when I would catch a spider in my hand
And release it into the backyard instead of squishing it.
You can only get bitten so many times
Before you rethink your stance on corporal punishment.
We’ll be picking their tiny bodies out of our hair for weeks.

caviar

I just found this story by David Gregson over in the Pequin archives. It's called Caviar. It's very good writing, and I recommend it.

clean bedsheets

One of the best things about being alive is the ability to slide beneath freshly washed and scented bed sheets after a long day of doing things you probably wouldn't have done if you didn't have to.

Another one of the best things about being alive (and being able to hear and smell) is the ability to hear the sound two orange chambers make as they rip apart, and to smell resulting spray of citrus.

Also good: back massages (giving and receiving), and the gentle whir of fan blades.

All That is the Case

The other night I was watching some TV after my wife and kids had gone to bed, unwinding after a long day of work and classes. There was a show about Mormonism on PBS, so I decided to watch that. My interest in Mormonism has been growing over the years, not as a religion I would like to adhere to, but as another strange terrain to explore.

I began with Mormonism much in the way I imagine many people do. I’d heard some odd things, been met at my doorstep by a duo of eager, well groomed young men in suits, offering me a way to strengthen my family and bring peace to my life. In the beginning the story was ridiculous. I was barely buying into the religion I was a member of, there was no way I was going Mormon. But I noticed a funny thing as I watched the show. I laughed to myself when someone mentioned green Jello,which is an inside baseball Mormon reference. I felt disturbed by some of the early persecution of the church, in Missouri and Illinois. I was slightly moved by talk of Joseph Smith’s decision to go back to Carthage and face his accusers, even though he certainly knew the outcome wasn’t going to be good.

Of course I still thought it was all dotty. I didn’t for a second believe that there was any credence to any of Smith’s claims. I felt no need to provide cover for some of the silly, and occasionally terrible things that the early LDS church was responsible for. But it was more familiar. The weirdness that had first permeated my view of Mormonism was largely gone. For the first time I realized, this is something I could believe, were I inclined to believe in something that reason couldn’t lay a path towards. I found this realization sobering. Were I a child, and were my parents--whom I would not be at the age to question on anything too existential--to introduce me to Elder so-and-so and Elder so-and-so, and tell me that they had just learned from these two boys this great secret about life and everything…I would’ve been on board right away. No questions asked. Also, I could imagine myself as a grown man, not necessarily connected to any kind of church, feeling down-and-out, and maybe personally a little lonely. I could see myself taking the bait there too. We are social animals, susceptible to confirmation bias, along with a host of other formerly-adaptive cognitive shortcuts. Richard Dawkins is fond of noting in interviews that, while preferring something to be the case does not affect the reality of what is the case, people are pretty resourceful when it comes to believing in things that would be nice if they were the case. But of course, the world is all that is the case, insofar as our tiny little minds are concerned. We have to learn to be content with what little we do know, and to find awe and humility in what we do not.

I found myself feeling a little jealous at the way some of the Latter Day Saints talked about their religion,and what it seemed to mean to them. To believe in something so big and comfortable, to believe that there was a simple prescription to follow (tithe here, pray here, avoid this). It’s very appealing in a way. But that’s not going to be for me. Eve ate the apple off the tree of knowledge, and so have I. The more knowledge a person gains, the harder it becomes to hold onto such a faith as you find proscribed in the Mormon religion, or in most religion for that matter. When reason is the sea you swim in, the channel that takes you to faith is bound to be an elusive one.

Someone during the course of the show said something like, ‘If you’re going to be a rock-ribbed empiricist, you should stay away from all religions all together.’ That sounded true. Another person a little later on said something to the effect that, although she couldn’t embrace Mormonism, she still practiced faith, although it was a faith based on uncertainties. I identify with that.

koalas

Koala bears are so cute, why do they have to be so far away from me?-Mitch Hedberg

Mitch Hedberg's koala routine popped into my head this morning while I was working on a behavior modification project for this psych.class I'm taking. Being the type of person who prefers to be doing anything but what I should be doing, I decided to head over to wikipedia and do some research on Koala bears, because I didn't feel that I knew as much about them as I should. How much exactly should a person know about koala bears? I'm not sure I can answer that, but I'm definitely closer to the mark now than I was before.

Turns out Koalas are one of only a small number of mammals that have fingerprints, so they are not above the reach of the law. They also have incredibly small brains and bifurcated genitalia. The parts of their brains float around inside of their skulls in some kind of fluid, not attached to anything in particular. They are especially susceptible to chlamydia and pink eye (the pink eye is a result of being pooped on by birds while they are engaged in their up to seventy-two hour sleep sessions). So, when they're not passing STDs back and forth like a poorly rolled joint at a Dave Matthews Band concert, they are sleeping cozily in a torrential downpour of bird doo-doo. Koalas: easily the most unchristian animals on planet earth.