Things We Miss

I miss when there didn’t have to be a bad guy
And when every bad guy wasn’t Hitler
I miss how Ernie made it meaningful to be a man
I miss when we didn’t have to spend paragraphs on everybody’s stupid eyes
I miss Hunter’s vitriolic hubris
I miss when erudition had a point
I miss Leo throwing trains around with absolute conviction
I miss heros that didn’t have to be super
I believe the world is a less interesting place without Hank’s mastery of the word “cunt”
I miss kennings
I miss when every sentence, every thought, did not require a personal pronoun
I miss the cynical jig in every line of James
Christ, I miss when every book didn’t have to be about twice-gay trannys
I miss how reading felt like I was sitting in Papa Twain’s lap
I miss the well-intentioned god that at least made an ergo possible, here and there
I miss allegories that weren’t about sex, politics, or religion
I miss F Scott’s rotted glamor and wish he could have met Trent Reznor
I miss when it wasn’t either about the cash, or overtly ignorant of the cash
I miss Johnny’s good boozy folk
I miss when we didn’t have to kiss Oprah’s ass
I miss Vlad’s dirty little truth
I miss the days before exotic punctuation (fuck: you!?)
The world is certainly smaller without Jorge Luis’ infinite imagination, though possibly also less terrifying
I miss the little bit of magic that Gabriel used to hide under every stone
I miss how Norman stripped everything down to naked
I miss how description used to be about capturing something
I miss Kurt’s whimsy and his drawings of assholes and beavers
I miss how writers were quietly content to hide between the lines
I miss the time when ideas were still dangerous, like Tom’s Rockets
I miss when death, war and hopelessness could even touch the rich

I miss these things, and understand they are gone forever
Ernest Hemingway is not walking through that door
The meaning of our lives cannot be found in Finnegan’s Wake
Gary Shteyngart’s new novel will not be Anna Karenina II
Tucker Max, they don’t serve beer in the canon
The goal has changed
It used to enough to write to reveal the undiscovered
There is nothing new in the world
We must write to rediscover truths and meaning
In the things we miss

Missing the Maestro

I can’t help it. How much fun would Borges be having with 2008? Consider these:

- Technology has created an infinite of new infinites that he might have played with

- Encyclopedias now rewrite themselves. Something can become true instantaneously.

- Identity is much less centered on our breathing, eating selves. We can have many identities. There would be many more characters in Borges and I.

- We probably could have fixed his eyes

- The Borges Experience could be extended through new media. Imagine a massive multiplayer Library of Babel, or Lottery in Babylon.

- We have the technology, random number generation could create all possible permutations of the 25 characters over 410 pages and use them to populate a world. We know exactly how much data that is, and in the era of the petabyte, I suspect it’s trivial.

- Shit, you could probably make money off of that. You could even start religions…

- Never mind. Borges was too smart. Apparently, the number of possible books contained in the Library of Babel is 251,312,000. Which means:

• If each book were an average sized paperback, the volume of these books is overwhelmingly larger than the volume of the universe


• That even of we someday achieve quantum memory storage devices (the most dense method of data storage postulated) and converted all of the matter in the universe to storage space, it still doesn’t approach the volume that would be required to store the library.


• In the story, a God Book is described that contains the answers to everything. The narrator worries it may have been destroyed, however is comforted by knowing that there would be many books that would only differ from the God Book by a character or two. A space here, omission of a comma. etc. In fact, if you measured all of the variations of the God Book that differ by only 12 characters…they alone would fill the universe.


• Damn, those exponents really add up quickly. Thanks to the various internet sources that basically just ruined my day.

I still miss the guy, and think he would have had a ball with the last 10 years, even if we couldn’t have built him his library; even if we killed all of his dreamtigers. Everything is expanding so rapidly. The scopes of our lives, the sum of our possibilities. We seem to be lacking that stern, erudite voice to warn us where the line is between wondrous and abominable.

Brush With Death in Miami

“I want to die on this motorcycle.”
(coughs whiskey) “Wait, what?”
“I want to die on this motorcycle.’
My bartender, an unexpectedly engaging Haitian immigrant, diligently manning the bar at Blue Prime in Miami, revealed this to me because when there is nothing else to talk about, the incredible truth is as good as anything else.
He had just talked me through the glorious details: the pointlessness of helmets at 180 mph, the speed at which cops, for the safety of all nearby, will not chase you, the highly illegal kill switch for the lights.
“We shall drink to knowing how you want to die,” I toasted him, with scotch whiskey, neat.
There had been a lot of near-dying around me recently: hospitals, subversive genes, assholes on the Turnpike. I had once, in my formative years, full of the type of pathetic angst/hubris that later became known as “emo,” written a fairly meaningful short story that concluded with the line “I don’t want to die screaming.” It got me a lot of ass, and was complete bullshit.
When you’re 17, and string together a handful of marginally impactful words, they don’t have to mean anything. They’ll ring true to idiots who don’t know any better. From there, all you had to do was pretend you believe it, and BAM, nothing but flannel shirts hitting the floor.
Sitting at that bar for the dying passions of middle-aged men in downtown Miami, on my 10th finger of expense-report scotch, I became determined to decide how I wanted to die. I already knew the answer wasn’t at the bottom of that particular bottle, so I got up and left.
I walked along the water, considering the played-out catalog of bullet, orgasm, and robot related deaths, with nothing quite seizing upon the combination of didacticism and spectacular bad taste that I was looking for. I got to the hotel and noticed a gaggle of my fellow conference attendees at the lobby bar. I hated them, but thought it might be fun to ask them how they wanted to die. So, I walked on up.
I was going to describe all of these people, but I’m getting tired, so lets just hope Raving Buffalo, Coal Miner, and Just Happy to Be Here covers it. Well as it turns out, like the butcher said to the lamb before making sausages (sorry, been reading Pickwick), they were talking about my favorite TV show: Man vs. Wild. They were discussing the episode where he survives the Everglades. I made my entrance to the conversation by interjecting my concept for a spin-off of the show that would be called “Urban Survivor,” and pit Bear Grylls against the wilds of Staten Island, Newark, the Bronx, and other harsh terrains. My audience found this idea hilarious, and ran off several of their own ideas. It wasn’t long before Just Happy to Be Here though surviving Miami would be an interesting episode, at which point I felt it necessary to point out that she was an idiot.
“You’re an idiot,” oops, that was blunt.
“You don’t think it would make good TV?” she said and glared at me.
“No. Anyone could survive Miami, this town is soft. It’s 80 degrees all of the time, there are practically no laws. He wouldn’t even have to drink piss and eat bugs, there is fruit hanging…… everywhere.” Mid sentence, I had noticed that there actually was fruit hanging EVERYWHERE. The lobby of the intercontinental had palm trees in it, and that balmy January evening, they were laden with big green coconuts.
I already knew where the conversation would go, and I already felt that I would do it.
“Really?” she said condescendingly.
“Okay, not everyone. You would probably die.”
“Well I would like to see you…”
“Baby, shhhh. Watch.” And I was climbing. I could see it now, retrieving the coconuts, cracking them open with a dull tool, or Just Glad to Be Here’s face, taking my choice of the women under my arm, and leading them to the bar where the bartender would add rum to the fresh coconut milk. Except I hadn’t really climbed anything in a while. Also, it burns the shit out of your thighs. Awkwardly. Slowly. I hadn’t stopped yet, so for all intents and purposes, I would have got those damn coconuts, before the clucking momma-hens bellow me caused enough of a stir to alert the front desk. By the time I was maybe 15ft up, a surly looking dude was already yelling and running over, presumably to…I don’t know….shake me out of the tree? It wasn’t happening, so I decided to come down. I slid for a few inches, but that burned my thighs even more. I was going to have to let go. I was drunk enough that it wasn’t going to be a problem, but I fucked up the coordination and let my arms go before me legs. My torso levered out, so I fell almost parallel to the ground. For a second, I gazed up at those beautiful coconuts, under the dozen false suns of the hotel arboretum. I smiled.

It really wouldn't be a bad way to die.

Tonight's Random Thought

Faced with any decision, everyone does exactly what they are instantaneously inclined towards. Those considered "smart" or "reasonable," are just the ones who managed to come up with compelling reasons for whatever they did when asked about it later.

Ode to a Cheese Wheel

Was the circle invented, only for your residing?

Could there be any higher tribute to geometric designing?

Such suppleness, such tenderness, such delicacy in blossom;
You remind me of Pacman, and that game was awesome.

The glories of your mold captured in a beautiful vein.
You’re waxen skin, imparting such a dignified mien.
Supple roundness abounding,
Bulbiosity, outstanding!

What is the tangent of delicious?
Cheese wheels and mouths, both round; serendipitous?
My desire ferments much faster than you do,
Curdled desperation, like Archbishop Tutu.

I’ve got rind on my mind, and it’s round,
When I’m lonely, I’ll often pick up half a pound,
But when it’s time to go large, only the wheel will do,
Ballin' out of control with like, a gallon of fondue.

Earthy, barnyard, grassy, or creamy,
Pungent and love’n life? Mmm just dreamy.
Velvet texture, piquant, and herbaceous,
This whole cheese thing has me feeling salacious.

So thank you Euclid, and thank you Pasteur,
You guys have my taste buds delirious with rapture.
Pretty much, this whole party can go suck on deez,
Cause I don’t need you guys, I have a wheel of cheese.

By V. Rogers and F. Pollock

Odor of Chrysanthemums

In just about every culture but ours, chrysanthemums are symbolic of death. I don’t actually know what the fuck they mean here, something like, you’re cute, and maybe we should get a puppy. They are probably the trademarke of Zanax, or more appropriately, Aldous Huxley’s nightmare realized: Soma.

To be honest, I’ve never taken the time to bend over and smell one of these flowers, but to borrow from Steinbeck and D.H. Lawrence, who rather obsessed about them, Chrysanthemums smell bittersweet. Steinbeck was overbearingly sexual in his phallic description of their long stalks and the delicate things women’s hands did with them. Lawrence’s descriptions here mostly symbolic associations; physical foreshadowing of inevitable death and lament. At least where I came from, they were still the decorative vegetation of choice among cemetery landscapers.

So…

You know the stripped smell? Cheap sick-sweet perfume with cheap citrus undercurrents, applied heavily between the breasts and ass crack? That’s it. The Odor of Chrysanthemums. Life mimicking art. Sad art. Defiant little phoenixes, wearing the essence of the flowers that will one day be planted around their lonely graves, after unobserved passings.

Damn, I would like them so much more if they somehow realized this irony.

This stream of (chrysanthemum) consciousness came to me at my best friend’s bachelor party, rubbed across my face by just such an entertainer. It has soaked in and permeated her bikini top, threadbare from too frequent takings on and off. That stuff is indelible; the odor of chrysanthemums stayed with me for days. It effervesced citrus sweet from her nooks and crannies, but the essence was unmistakable in the ripe and fertile breasts sewn with butchers’ chord to her anorexic body and dying soul.

A memorable description of the chrysanthemums from Steinbeck’s such named short story was that the flowers could not be grown from seed. Sprouts from a flower’s main stalk must be separated, uprooted, and transplanted to start a new growth. This rings eerily true allegorically as well in the allegory.

So why do we keep going. Why did I pay these two specimens a large quantity of money to entertain my best friend the week before the supposed happiest day of his life? I’m certainly not the only, or the smartest man to see the decay behind the makeup and wonder how they came to be.

The answer is probably as simple and intuitive as it is terrifying.

It’s sexy. The dying of a vibrant flame is a visceral, instinctively pleasing thing to watch. The extent to which they ignore inevitable tragedy is beautiful and brave. They are riding the crest of our culture’s ever-building rogue wave of intentional deception, self-depreciation, and conditional morals. They have evolved, like the octopus, and are quite possibly a superior species. When the shit hits the fan, we know the cockroaches and the strippers will survive. They’ll have our money, our secrets, and our shame. They’ll stop wanting diamonds and manicures and realize they can be empresses.
And let me be the first to declare my allegiance! I am ready to be a drone in your honey trapped hives. The “Vote for Tits” ticket should be able to easily claim the bulk of the power seats by 2020, and I am on board early. I am ready to ride this silicon wave to its crest, to where it will inevitably break and roll back, leaving only the odor of chrysanthemums.

Focus, Gary Shteyngart, Focus

Gary Shteyngart is starting to look like the Stephan Marbury of writing. He’s really good at it, all the necessary tools, but can’t focus for a whole 200 pages. There are moments of isolated brilliance, and sometimes events, or language, are connected. You can start to see the big web of narrative and fictive elements, and you start to think you might be reading the next Nabakov, but then….he trips over his ego, or gets distracted by religion, or otherwise shoots himself in the foot.

Which by the way, Stephan Marbury is bound to do any day now. Has he ever actually worn a Starbury 1? I’ve worn more comfortable buckets. Also, seeing how his foot is currently in his mouth following his “p.s. I had sex with an intern in my truck” footnote to Isaiah’s trial, the results of the foot-shooting should be quite spectacular.

See what I just did there? I was building a promising discussion of Gary Shteyngart, when I couldn’t help shovel a little extra completely unnecessary shit on Stephan Marbury. That’s what Shteyngart does, and the result is that the meaning of what he writes become diluted, or fails to emerge all together. Without that essential ingredient, I have to take him off the “canonical” shelf, where Nabakov and Dostoevsky live, and demote him to the “talented entertainers” shelf with Tim Robbins and Hunter Thompson.

(I feel like now, less Gary come after me with that bear, is a good time to point out that having two novels published is a rare accomplishment. Having them sit on a shelf with Robbins and Thompson is extraordinary, and fun company. Shit, I can’t focus for 10 minutes, never mind 200 pages. Also, I much prefer Shteyngart’s paragraph long brain farts to Thomas’s Pynchon’s multiple 100 page diversions from last year’s “Against the Day.”)

As a debut effort, “The Russian Debutante's Handbook” was stunning. You know what I love about writers for whom English was a second language? They don’t fall into the same patterns, the syntactical ruts that everyone else does. They don’t what words we really do, and do not, use. It’s fantastic. I found the mechanics of Shteyngart’s writing to be endlessly entertaining. He’s not quite speaking 21st century American English, and benefits from it. And rightly so, 21st century American English has become a stagnated, polluted bog of a language.

“Absurdistan” was following it up nicely. We had some easily identifiable symbols: the single minded goals of a father, or fatherland, white American consumerism, and black American soul. We had classic literary themes: exile, excess, obsession, and self-depreciation. It was building, building, building, and then “Gary Shteynfarb” slips into the plot to seduce Misha’s bootylicious girlfriend. Why do they all want to do this? Vonnegut: Guilty. Robbins: Guilty. It’s troped out at this point. I can’t take your book as a meaningful piece of literature if you give yourself a cameo. Sorry.

This particular offense is symptomatic of what I feel haunts these novels in general. At some point, Mr. Shteyngart decided to be entertaining instead of holding true to the purpose and the meaning of what he set out to do. He didn’t have the restraint to keep it lean the way that the true greats did in their primes. The John Steinbeck school of editing: edit out half of everything you wrote. It’s quite possible that here, in his second novel, Gary Shteyngart didn’t set out to write a “great” novel in the canonical sense. Dude has to eat.

The thing is: that’s what everybody is doing. No one is setting out to write “great” novels anymore. At least no one with the talent to actually do so. No one is brooding in dark rooms, eating ramen noodles, burning Atlantic Monthly rejection letters for warmth, and suffering through the greatness. I would like to formally beg Mr. Shteyngart to do it. Move away from the immigrant themes just a bit and get to something universal. Let the laughing happen naturally and stop forcing it out of us. Submit the greatness, whether it sells a hundred or a million copies. We’ll figure it out. Trust us to buy the greatness. You’re one of a handful that I think can do it.

I’m hearing rumors that your next book is about the death of meaning in language. I’m already pissed that you got to that one first, I’ve been trying to write it for years. Maybe this is it, huh? The first definitely Great Novel of the 21st century? I sincerely hope he pulled it off.

Told By An Idiot Full of Sound and Fury

The common misinterpretation is that Faulkner loved the South the way Midwesterners seem to love their home states: as idealized, elysian fields of milk and honey. That is obviously not the case with much of today’s South, but I don’t think it ever was. Faulkner loved the South the way I love New Jersey. Not the vulgar sprawl of pizza and Hyundais, but the arena of infinite, highly charged interactions between good and evil. In Faulkner’s South if you weren’t careful, you could accidentally find yourself banging your sister, executing a whole bunch of white people, or turning your mother into a fish. In New Jersey, you are faced with….essentially the same problems.

How characters react in the situations their environments force them into helps the author, and us as readers, measure them up. Their measures of greed, empathy, cruelty, and soul surface easily. Faulkner’s south and my New Jersey are good literary landscapes because they contrive an inordinate number of situations through which these definitions can be established. This breeds rugged identities, often centered around single dominant traits. This makes our characters easy to use in metaphors and allegories without having to get them run over by trains.

So, would Faulkner still love this South? It’s a lot denser than in his day, and displays a lot of cultural necrosis in the form of chain restaurants and strip malls. In Faulkner’s time the South was still Frontier-ish. It wasn’t the easiest thing to just stay alive. That certainly isn’t the case anymore. I see a lot of people drifting though life.almost completely untested. A lot of mediocre happiness, moderate comfort, and could-be-worse justification. That leads to poor decision making at all levels of society because there is less cultural/organizational experience in taking the necessary steps to make high-pressure decisions correctly. Take all of these bankers throughout NC and the like, whose lives are lived in these ivory towers of stratified risk decisions that mean essentially nothing when real chips are on the line. I often wonder why we don’t send the NYC homeless down to run Arkansas or something. They’ve all fucked up big time shit in their lives. That makes them way more qualified. Sort of like how Bush honed his skills while running the Texas Rangers into the ground, perfectly preparing him for….and my argument is fucked.

So yeah, I think they might be coasting down here. Some are coasting good. Some are costing bad. I don’t see a lot of quality decision makers, in large part because I don’t see an environment that fosters them by forcing tough decisions day after day. I see a lot of golf courses and weed.

For what it’s worth, I think Faulker might like New Jersey better.

Write What You Know

(The Lagavulin Distillery, Islay, Scotland)

I normally wouldn’t advocate taking advice from suicides, but Hemmingway put it best, as only he could:

“Write what you know.”

By most recent count, I’ve spent nearly $100k of my parents’ scratched-out savings, tens more of my own, burned through the charity of strings of relatives, friends, and philanthropic interests, pissed away an awful lot of goodwill, and invested all of my years learning that I know very little. Maybe 10-12 pages, all said and done.

Whatever this thing ultimately becomes, I aim for it to be guided by that instruction. All the pages and hours I’ve accumulated before have been creative efforts, or at best attempts to build fictive or narrative structures around things that there just isn’t any knowing of. Assays and essays, that had I been honest, Borges, Marquez, and the others basically closed the book on already. We’re to keep it simple here. Cut down on the conjecture. Avoid the phrase, “my impression of.” Ignore frivolity. Not buy the car for the cup holders.

Malt whiskey, which is by my count, mankind’s 4th greatest accomplishment, is made by germinating barley grain in “mash” to trigger fermentation. The resulting fluid is fired by peat fed hellfires in copper stills so that the light fluids evaporate and are separated from byproducts. This process is repeated until what is left is a neutral grain alcohol. This is then aged in oak casks, where it acquires taste, color, and further potency.

If you for some reason didn’t follow that metaphor…
I spend maybe 16 hours awake every day. Raw data is accumulated. We’ll sprinkle some insights from great minds (The aforementioned Hemmingway, Bukowski, Dr. Dre, etc.) on top and let it ferment. Then we’re going to fire it; put some pressure on it. The true bits will rise out of the mixture, having taken on the hard smokiness of the distilling. We’ll keep doing this until only the essence is left. Then I’ll stick it in the archive for a while (which is ironically what the distilleries call their repositories) and let it take on perspective from time and distance. I’ll take a look at them some time later, have a dram or two, write off the angel’s share, and apply finishing touches. Maybe, if we’re lucky, I’ll be able to pull enough good stuff from the casks to put together the Lagavulin 16-year-old of books. The sum of what I know, with a healthy dose of peat smoke.

Useless?

In late spring, the doctor took the soft cast off and my dominant arm was free for the first time in more than two months. It came off and I felt a surge of strength course through the scarred tendons and mangled muscles. A distinct impression of power overcame me. My hand closed around what was nearest, which happened to be the doctor’s throat, and I trembled, possessed by the muscle’s preternatural instinct for violence.

My grip tightened.

With indifference, I considered the doctor’s life. For a thousand years, the master smiths of Japan tested their blades on the prone bodies of petty criminals and peasants. No weapon was considered suitable for a warrior until it went through this bloody tempering. Staring at his neck and emboldened by this samurai ethic, my arm felt like a weapon, forged from the same completely ridiculous, utterly badass lineage.

Something gave.

Something in the elbow squirmed like a worm on a hook. My grip, and the strength that possessed it fell away. The arm dropped limp to my side and I grabbed for it, trying to steady the rubbery flailing beneath the skin.

“You fool, what have you done?” the doctor asked with disgust. “I told you to hold it still.”

“I didn’t mean to do anything,” I replied, sounding guilty.

“You were supposed to do nothing. You let it all contract. All of that shit it your elbow works like rubber bands. When you fell and hit the rail, they tore away from the bones, and were stretched to a point where small ruptures and fraying happened all over the chord. For the last two months, that has been healing, but like anything else, there is scar tissue. It’s like dipping the rubber bands in crazy glue. There is a crust of the stuff.”

“So why did everything contract?”

“Healing takes up the slack.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to grab you”

“I think you did, but it doesn’t matter. That wasn’t my neck you were squeezing; it barely felt like anything. You probably just dislodged 2 months worth of scar tissue. It’s like picking a scab. Of course your arm is still strong, but those tendons aren’t ready to do anything with that leverage yet. Every time you force something like that, you’ll set yourself back weeks, if not months.”

“Fuck.”

“Yes, that about sums it up. Anything else you want to know about your fucked elbow?”

“How long, I was psyched about the spring rugby…”

“You should never play rugby again. Those tendons aren’t going to reattach to the bones. There will always be slack, and even mild jarring could dislocate the bones”

“Fuck that, there has got to…”

“No.”

“But could…”

“No. "

_______________


Thank you medical science. Hey, after you’re done telling me I’m fucked, would you mind putting me on the advance waiting list for one of those Terminator arms? Stuff to do, people to choke.

Luckily, Dr. Killjoy was not the final word in this matter. There was a cure:

Pushups.

Three weeks into physical therapy, after the electric field stimulus and the deep tissue massaging type bullshit, the therapist let that little nugget slip. By filling up as much space around the joint as possible with muscle, the less the slack elbow would bother me.

Now we’re fucking talking. 18 inch pythons here I come. Pushups, I can handle.

So I tried one. I didn’t try another until several days, and a fairly disturbing quantity of percocet later. By June, I could do twenty-five pushups before shit got really wobbly. I can rest for a little bit and do 25 more. Lather rinse repeat. Alright, progress. It was late summer at this point and there wasn’t a lot of rugby I was interested in playing.

The phrase “mild jarring,” and the associated potential of re-FUBARing the elbow were still problems. No point in playing if it meant playing like a pussy. This required scientific testing. Fortunately, the result arrived of its own volition. It was the patented NYC taxi no-look, no-hesitation, right on red. Right into where I was drunkenly meandering. I was trying to beat the last flashes of the orange palm, which I now understand are the international symbol for “you are about to be killed by a cab.”

It was a relatively low speed altercation, and the rag doll factor saved me from much damage. The cabby’s window rolled down, he took a peek to make sure I wasn’t anyone important, and went on his way. Sitting on the curb, I looked down, and broke into a smile.

My arm was still there.

Still attached, not lying half through the sewer grate, no bloody stump, no bones protruding, no rubbery feeling; my arm felt fucking solid. Now, said cab being approximately Pablo’s size, and perhaps running with Renee-esque inertia, this felt like a fucking reliable test. Five-star government side impact rating. Fully approved for ongoing mouse usage, shark bashing, pint raising, relentless masturbation, and…rugby.

Motherfuckers, I will play again.

Which brings us to Sept 1, 2007, and its scheduled friendly match with Providence. I have no alligator arms over this, literally or figuratively. We will march on a road of bones with the ball firmly in my hell-grip.

I’ll let you know how it goes.