Signs Of Change

*

I was reading this book on the current state of neuroscience and the guy was presenting the brain as essentially this modular grab-bag of different systems- this one for this skillset, another for that one, yet another. Dozens of them. And what makes you "you" in your brilliant specificity is not so much the modules as how they interact, how they interface with each other.

"You" is very plastic. "You" changes through time. But you have this more rigid sense of self.

*

Anyways, I was thinking about this in reference to this similar feeling I've had recently since I changed jobs. I work with all different people, in a different building and a different office and, really, it's been a big change. And yet, I still feel like "me." But so much has changed. I'm changed. And it's the same thing when you move to a different house, or get a divorce, or retire, or get fired, or go to jail, whatever. Everything is different and that has to make you different, too.

But you hardly notice.

You hardly notice your own self, obsessed as you are with it.

*

I think all the time about different things. What does this mean? How about that? How does it fit in with this other idea over here? Why do I do this thing and not that thing? What if I did? Is there any peanut butter left?

*

Look, I gotta go to work. There might be some more little people running around, need to get rounded up.


*

Deer Run

*

Okay, Universe.


I'm listening.


Are You?


*

I hereby announce my wish for you, The Universe, to fulfill:


Please make Deer Run ours.




*


Okay, okay, I know how it goes. I know you don't just throw it into our hands willy-nilly. You are more subtle and coy than that. But do that thing you do. Crack open a door. Make someone I shake hands with in the doorway be somehow connected to me in a strange and surprising way, a way that nudges the door open a little bit more. Give me dreams that are vivid and disturbing and compelling, dreams in which you have hidden a clue on a scrap of paper that I find in my pocket when I am changing my pants as I fall down the side of a mountain. On the other side of the world, make that little butterfly flap its wings in a spot of warm sunshine so that the mechanisim of fulfilling our desire can be fueled. Make my fingertips itch. Conspire with us, put a little grease there where the big gears bind so that when we throw our weight against them, there is some give, a little shudder.




*


All my life you have been making my dreams come true.


*


I'll keep my eyes and ears open.



*


And thanks.



Thanks for all of it.




*

Betty and Margaret Confront The End

*

I stole this piece. The whole thing, except for the ladies( and the grunge, etc.), is a piece of jewelry made by Daniel Jocz, a ring he called "The Muse Leaving The City", which he made in 1991.

*

It is an incredible piece, and all the stranger for its prescient imagery.


Which I appropriated because I was so drawn to it. I wasn't trying to improve on it, I just felt compelled to try to inhabit it for a little while.


*

Yesterday was so fucking fun.


*

Snitches, wires, running surveillance, big adrenaline rush take-down in the Home Depot parking lot with shotguns pointed and everybody screaming and bad guys in cuffs wondering what the fuck just happened to them. Then into the box for the dance, and serving a search warrant on, I shit you not, a house full of little people.

*

You should have been there.


*

The little people yelling and gesticulating and running around, the big cops in raid gear chasing them around, towering over them, yelling back or trying to calm them down...


I ask my partner, "Hey, where's David Lynch? He in the back bedroom, or what?"

He goes, "After this, lets go to the diner and have a cup of joe and a slice of delicious apple pie."

Then a little person rides past us on a tricycle, laughing like a maniac.




*

Some shit, you can't make it up.


*

I came home, I couldn't get the grin off my face for hours.


*


I hope your weekend is as much fun!





*

Self at Forty-Two

*

My life has a small orbit, but a sweet one. At forty-two I feel more centered and calm than I used to. My wife says that one of the great benefits of aging is the mellowing out of our emotional storms, and I have to agree with her there. I still have plenty of rough edges, blind spots, and places on the map marked "Beyond Here Be Dragons," but for the most part I'm doing well. I got a good job, a house, money in the bank. Better, I have someone to share it all with. The central fact of my life, the core of it, is my marriage and parenthood. Everything fits together nicely now, though, nothing is in conflict with itself.

Ah, but I still sit in the little puddle and make my own waves.

Still crazy enough to do that.

*

I got art in my eyes and fingertips and sparks flying across the synapses in my dark brain. I got writing and reading. I got a strong back and hard hands and two legs to stand on. I got a sweet spot. I got a bitter one.


I have more than I ever dreamed I'd have.




*

I am dumbfounded by the munificence of this universe,
and humbled, and grateful.


*

Ed Goes To the Fair

*

Home sick another day. But today I'm really just fucking off. I feel much better, thank you.


*

I'm gonna go for a walk with the wife and the dogs and breathe in some cold morning air and then have another cup of coffee or two and then I don't know what.





*

Last night I dreamed of millions of squid, thrashing and pulsing in the dark waters around a fishing boat. They had their big lights turned on, facing the water, and these squid were streaming toward the light in a frenzy.


I was not on the boat, I was in the water.



*



Something's stirring....





*

Twenty-four Ways of Looking At a Shellfish

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This is a detail from a piece I did last year.


*

I dunno. I thought maybe you'd like to see it.



*


I like strange. I like things interesting. I get a kick out of oddball shit.


*

I arrested this guy yesterday, he was full of oddball shit. He wanted to go on and on about it. Me, I wasn't in a mood. I have a sinus infection, a cold, I ain't been sleeping right...I told the guy, "Look, I don't give a shit about your story. I just wanna ask you these six questions and then send you on your fucking WAY..."

He wasn't having nothing of it.


*

Sometimes, I humor them. I let them vent. It's good for them, it makes it seem like I care, like somebody gives a shit. But yesterday, I just didn't have it in me. The guy was getting pretty bent out of shape, so I caught my partner's eye and he come over, stood behind him. (If there is something better than a partner who's got your back like that, who reads your face and your eyes and does just what's needed and nothing more, well, I don't know what it could be.) So the guy, he just can't process that I don't wanna listen to his shit, even though I fucking tell him and tell him. Finally, he sort of goes "Hey, you don't give a shit about what I want?" and I go, "No, I don't." and he goes, "Well, would you write that down for me, would you put that in writing for me?" and my partner reaches into his pocket, pulls out a pen and his business card, and scribbles down the following:


"I don't give a shit what you want."


And signs it.


*

HA.



*

It went downhill from there.




*

In looking back on it, I handled it badly. I didn't feel good and I didn't play him the way I maybe should have. I think I about half wanted him to nut up so I could punch his fucking lights out.

Okay, I really wanted that.


There you have it.



*

So next time you feel like I'm some kind of sweet, sensitive, poetic, artistic soul all bent on happiness and spiritual creaminess, make a little room for this guy. The kind of guy wants to beat the shit out of a guy just because he's nutty and gets off on threatening his ex-wife and his kids and the judge and me and my fucking partner.

*


Ugh.


*

Okay, okay. See, there is something good in me. This guy got my goat, but he's the kind of guy, I swear to god, he'd benefit from a serious ass-stomping. Alright, maybe not him so much, but all the rest of us.


Well, me anyway.



*

This week a lady got shot to death by her ex-boyfriend. Then her best friend, two days later, she gets smacked by a train. On the same tracks where the guy that killed her friend was arrested.


Something more going on there than we've figured out yet, I'm guessing.



*

Also, there's unfinished business in my head. There's these two dead women, I swear to god. They won't leave me alone.


I don't know who killed them.



I ain't ever gonna figure it out, is my guess.






*


It's a strange old world...



*

Navigate

*

I read Rebecca Loudon's chapbook "Navigate, Amelia Earhart's Letters Home" over the weekend. What I love about Loudon's work is her odd-ball language and sort of pressured speech diction, her vivid imagery that is at once disjointed and coherent, and the way that she reaches into the muck with both hands, really digs down deep into the smelly, fertile soil and pulls up something that is part root and part jewel, a sort of ruby-encrusted turnipy kind of thing that she holds up to the moonlight and howls at.

She makes me uncomfortable. She makes my bones itch. She sets off bells deep in the vault of my skull.


In Navigate, Loudon channels the lost aviator's last dispatches. If you remember Laurie Anderson's piece Blue Lagoon you'll have a feel for some small part of what's going on. Now, Blue Lagoon is all about Melville, but there is a similar haunted, ethereal feel. Amelia comes to life as she makes her way toward something else, and we are privileged eavesdroppers on the process. We get to intercept these messages from her to those she is leaving behind and it is tender and strange and heartbreaking.

And, of course, I would assert that there is also much, much more going on here.


It is a rich journey to embark upon.




*

What I Got For My Birthday

*

Amelia Earhart and JFK:


My wife got me a John F. Kennedy PT109 GI Joe.

With knife, pistol, and cool sunglasses.



Rebecca Loudon's Navigate, Amelia Earhart's Letter Home came in the mail.


It is salty and wind-blown and bee-stung and sunburned and such a fucking wonder.






*

Also, my girl is home from school for a week!




*


I have made some art today and later my wife is taking me out to the Sea Chest for a big pot of mussels and a bottle of wine and something sinful for dessert...




I must have been a good boy this year.




*

Man Walking on Pear

*

Why am I given this measure of plain happiness? Why me, among the millions of hapless souls born into this world of sorrow and pain?

Why these many blessings?

Why the simple pleasure of the passing of my days?


*

Why all this love?




*


I am not tortured by the images of dirty children digging for food in garbage dumps, nor of them laying on hospital beds, bleeding through the bandages covering the stumps of their arms or legs, or wrapped tight around their fractured skulls. These children are not me. She is not my child there in the smoking wreckage. I understand the nature of this world, its need to grind us up. I'm not naive about the workings. We're all for the boneyard.

But how are there these lost islands of happiness, where some lucky few live out a part of their lives?

It is not due to their small virtues.



*

It is an accident of the weather.





*

Look around. The wheezy contraption has sailed over your head once more, its blades whirring and clacking.



*


You are spared another day.




*

The Princess of Secret Beach

*


This one makes the river of my heart overflow its banks.





Portrait of a girl who's gone away...





*



I imagine her now, strolling the moonlit flanks of the darkened beach with her magic wand and her crooked crown, casting
all manner of spells, charming strange creatures up from the depths of the sea where they have long conversations with her, sharing their obscure folk tales and singing ancient songs to her as the stars wheel above their heads. Off on the headlands is a small cabin where her Mother and Father sit tending a small fire and reading books while they await her return...

Perhaps she still lives in a place much like this. Perhaps there is a place where all our children live on.


*






A place we inhabit ourselves.


*

God Made Me A Woman At Last

*

Like Adam and Eve, today my wife and I are the only people on the planet. Outside our small hut rain lashes the green world. Inside we have built a fire and we huddle together for warmth and companionship. Images lie scattered on the floor around us, and off in the shadows the dogs circle and circle before they settle in with deep, satisfied sighs.



*

Let it rain.


*

Werner and Jasper

*

Werner Herzog is the kind of crazy person with whom I can identify.

I love seeing people through his lens.


Tortured by the machines they've built in their own dark hearts,
crippled by their need to overcome imaginary obstacles and to
win the last gasp battle, though it cost them everything to do so.


Which it does,
without fail.


*


I don't know why the broken-hearted and broken-headed appeal to me so much. Except, of course, that I dress myself in that garb in my own interior dramas. But, really, everything looks so much more vivid and real and just somehow better when seen through those eyes. I go through my daily life and it seems a wasteland peopled by folks who really do care about shopping at Costco and what Bill O'Riley said yesterday that it makes me want to grab them by the collar and shake them, shake them, shake them-

"Do you not see?"....


*

I am so goddamn grateful for my strangeness. I wouldn't give it up for the world. I love that I can make art, and that I can make poems, and that I can make love to my wife. I am deeply grateful for the ability to see sunlight fall on the floor, to feel the coolness of clean sheets against my skin as I slide into bed at the end of a long day. For the scars on my hands and arms and the lines around my eyes and the furrows in my forehead and my strength which has yet to fail me. For my unreasonable fears and my many failures. For the taste of good food and drink and the smell of wet grass in the dark and all that comes with being a broken human being in this world.


For all of it.



*




It is a debt I cannot repay.




*

Beach Skull

*


Things are good.



*




I just got no way of getting right in my own head.






*


I can't hardly sleep. Then I'm tired all day.

My head bone's broke.





*



I love things like Carl Sagan's Cosmos. A reassuring, off-beat voice describing all of creation to me in a way that seems to make almost perfect sense. I love the show Nature. I love to watch television like Frontline and Nova.


"Here's the world..." they say. "Look at all of this wonderful stuff....


*

It's enough to make you get off the chair and drop the noose for a second, just to see the world in that way.

I get the same feeling from reading Richard Siken's blog. I would make a link to it here, but I don't know how, so just go over there to your right, it's called "Aye, Wobot."

The guy's a fucking nut-job.


*

I'm loving reading Kay's blog, too, "Una Maccia."

I'm right there with you, sister.

Sister Vex.

*

And Rebecca. Always. I read her, the world comes into focus again. All jangly and wangly and electrified and smelling strange and oddly comforting that way.

*

The Human Museum.


What the fuck is going on there?
I don't know. But I know I like it.


*

I'm not going to list all of you. I'm too lazy. But goddamn if you don't make this world bearable. You light up its edges and the hot crazy center of it. In a world full of robot-brained boring empty shells pretending to be people, seeing evidence of real creativity and insanity and warmth and love and love and more love is enough to make it all worthwhile.


Or most of it, anyway.


*


I came this close to deleting the blog today. I think my wires are all crossed up or something. Those wasps are eating away at my beautiful pear.

I just know it.



*

My wife is my salvation. My wife is my salvation. My wife is my salvation. What kind of luck must I have to have found her and kept her all this time? Like the odds of life developing from some primordial swamp and four billion years later wanting to buy itself something nice at Old Navy.



*

Okay, so right now I'm sending out good, good, good vibes to you.


In your hour of need.

In the dark corner of your soul I'm lighting a candle for you.

I'm holding your hand as we leap out the window together.



*

Autmnal Diagram

*

He liked it okay.


It was the biggest pear he'd ever seen,
and it had grown right on his very own
pear tree, the one he looked down on
from his bedroom window.

*

He had his son take a photograph
of him standing in front of the pear.
This way his sister and his mother would
have no choice but to admit it:
he had grown the world's largest pear!


*

What else could be his now? Now that he
was in possession of the most wonderful
and stupendous fruit in all of creation?
Why, he could be Mayor! He could be
Czar! All of the dark-coated petty tyrants
that had kept him under their bureaucratic
thumbs would be looking for work soon!


He could hardly contain his pride
and his confidence. The sun itself
would shine down upon him from this
moment on with a special warmth and
brightness: just enough to fill him with
a wonderful warmth, but not so much
that he would have to remove
his hat.



*

All was well with the world!


*


He tucked himself into bed late in the evening.
For hours he stood at his bedroom window
and watched the beautiful pear fairly glowing
in the light from the harvest moon.

It filled the pit of his gut with a wonderful,
gooey warmth, just to be witness to such
an event.


*

The Pear of The World!

*


It was only with tender regret that he forced himself
into bed, into the cool white sheets and the curious
buzzing in his blood when he could no longer gaze
upon his gigantic fruit.


*

He tossed and turned in the night.


He dreamed of enormous wasps, gorging on his
tender-skinned pear. He could hear their terrible
jaws working on the sweet flesh.

Their pitiless eyes black as swamp water!
They would devour it all before dawn!
His tender dreams for the future,
in peril!

He moaned and swatted at imagined foes
with his pale, sweaty hands.


*


He awoke to a pale sun in his eyes. Hot
and bothered, he washed his face in the basin
with cold well water his wife had brought in
an hour earlier.

He could hardly bear his fear. He stood
by his bed in his damp nightshirt, trembling.
Daylight streamed in from the window,
throwing a hot and slanted square of light
onto the wooden floor and filling the glass
with glare.

What would he find, should he muster the courage
to go to the window and look down?


*


His glorious future, his own sweet pear...







*

In the Far Fields

*


It's here.....





*

West-Side Jesus

*
Went to Emily's school yesterday for the second annual "Round-Up." Familys are invited to come for the weekend and camp out. There's music and games and a fund-raising auction.

We watched Emily play volleyball and run around hugging her friends.

The Three Graces in the garden...





*

The school is rustic.


Plain.


Beautiful.



*

We listened to some music in the garden and I kept not being able to tear my eyes off of my daughter.


She's killing me.




*

She took us up to the ceramics studio and showed us her coil-built vase. "Westside Jesus and Satan." The reverse shows the devil throwing gang signs.


*






*

Our kid is an artist.




*


The rest of the weekend is "All Artwork, All The Time."



And vodka martinis.




*




It is great to be alive.







*

Rabbit

*

I have a hunger for beauty. My eye craves it like a drug addict. A day at the Getty or the Met or the Frick or the De Young and I am undone and breathless as a farmgirl behind a haystack.


*

In a bid to save younger girls, 13 year old Marian asked to be shot first..."


I can't get the image of this shooting out of my head. This room, these girls and this man. It is one of those moments where the whole mass of the known and unknowable condenses into a single point, a black hole of the human condition.


*

One of the things I can't get right in my head. How one person can choose to act and wipe out the lives of so many others. Innocents.



You got a grudge against the world?



Why don't you go fuck yourself and leave the rest of us alone?



*

I don't know, though. I got a certain itch in my own hands. I got a bad fever. I pretend its a righteous one.


Don't they all though. Especially the worst ones.


*

I got this picture of myself in ten years or twenty, all bald-headed and wearing a robe and walking around not talking to anyone and just sitting under a tree or on a rock in the middle of a river or writing by the light of a oil lamp in a tiny cabin somewhere in the middle of some dark and forgotten forest. All "Kung-Fu" David Carradine/Dali Lama/Thomas Merton'd out...blissfully engaged in silent meditation of the real and actual world.

I don't know why, but it gives me a kind of comfort, that picture.


*

Meantime I drink too much. I eat too much. I hit too hard and too often. I curse and I blaspheme. I mock and I ridicule without mercy. I covet. I am prideful. Slothful. Mean.


Sometimes I feel like a big ol' bag of contradictions.


*

Which is the way I like it.



*


My prayer for you today is that you find a small and unexpected joy in some everyday object you've overlooked for too long.


My prayer for you today is that you love yourself with a fierceness that will scare away the faint of heart.


Also, if you could win the lottery, that would be nice.

*

Rifle

*

Range training today.


Yay!



*

We had everybody grab their shotguns out of the trunks of their cars and get on line, get their guns up and running to address an active shooter downrange. I think I know what we were all thinking about.



*

It's a ugly world. These shootings lately, I don't know. How do you stop someone like that? Wants to kill our children. Torture them.


Putting a bullet in them, that doesn't fix it. Well, it fixes one thing I guess. But that's way too late.


Too late.




*

I got a weird ambivalence about shooting. I'm good at it and I work hard at it. I teach it to others. I want everybody to know how to run their gun and how to do it without thinking. How to get good hits, move to cover, shoot and move, do their tactical reloads, fix jams and stovepipes and double-feeds without even blinking.


I want all my people to live.


And, really, if we're shooting at you, you pretty much need to be shot.



But I don't for one second look at it like I'm putting little holes in paper targets, or knocking down steel plates again and again.

I know what I'm doing it for.



*


I think about it. See it for what it is.



*

The other day my wife tells me I need to seriously reexamine my ideas about manhood.



I don't know what she's talking about.




*

In The Ring

*

So on mondays I get in the ring for an hour with these guys. They are all fighters. I most certainly am not. It's kind of like getting into a slow-speed car wreck that lasts three minutes. And then doing it again. And again. And again. Six to eight rounds, with bag work, mits, blitzing thrown in.

I stepped into one today, man. Talk about ringing my bell.


Anyway. I get a lot out of it. I get my adrenaline fix, I get to face my own weakness head on, and I get to hit people.

Win-win.


*


But.



*

I have a little anger thing going. You might know me pretty good for a long time and not even notice it. Or you might catch me on a bad day, get the idea I'm kind of an asshole. It all depends.


I mean, its not like I'm mad all the time or anything. It's just that, well, I got that speed in me.



*

So is this getting in the ring thing bad?


Does it feed the dark gorilla in my soul?


*

Nah.


*


I tell myself it's good for me. I like it, it keeps me honest, it makes me reach down deep for something. Sometimes I find it, sometimes I don't. It's gone. You have that moment, you need something and you dig for it and you ain't got it, that's a moment. That thing right there is true. You want it, you need it bad, but you didn't do what was necessary. You were soft. You were lazy. You didn't put it in, so it's not there when you wanna take it out.

That's a kind of truth.

*

I mean, it's easy in this world to get by sometimes, to fake your way through. The ring is one place you can't do that. You are what you are in a fundamental way there.

Everything else is stripped away.


*

That's an overblown way of saying it, but it points to something vital nonetheless.


*

I suppose there's bound to be good and bad sort of bound up together in it. I'd be wrong to deny the violence and brutality, but I'd be wrong too not to look beneath that at what else is moving there.


*



The monk left today. We are luxuriating in having the house to ourselves again. But we'll miss him terribly.



*






I got so much to learn.
*