Nostalgia

Nostalgia

At twelve I knew
God as a my bedroom ceiling,
the undulating pattern of glue
and sheetrock, the pressed boards
with cold nails living in holes. I knew
God as the final verse of a hymn, when the song
thrust itself out from my throat,
the variance, the pitch, the note.

He stood on the roof, listening to the speaker
at the pulpit praise him, to the mother of four
digging in her bag for cheerios, He smiled. To me,
while His knuckles turned white, gripping the steeple,
He shuddered, shaking off the dust of Sodom, the mist
of Eden, the endurance. He shuddered
while listening to me sing the last note of the hymn
and He prayed, to what, to who; He prayed
as I lay prone in my bed, the ceiling fresh with shunted light.

He prayed as I prayed. As such, I understand why He
was busy when I asked for help. Being twelve I asked
for help a lot.

I knew God then as a visitor, one who lurked
at the window, His voice a crick in the sounds of the night,
the mourning dove, the settling house—uncomfortable
in its foundation—He talked as if wounded, that breezy
voice that interrupted my prayer. The wonder of God
is the moonlight crossing over a boy in supplication. The word
on both our lips just catatonic gibberish, a screech, a bottle housing
a message that will dip and sway with the water, then sink
to a place where it can rest and go unanswered, but known.

Families are Forever....They Say

We all showed up at the baptism ready for anything to happen. We dressed up. We shaved. We made sure to comb our hair, to smoke our cigarettes early enough so that the smell of smoke wouldn't trail us into the church-house. We arrived on time. I, accompanied by my gay brother and his partner, quickly found our seats in the chapel and hushed our mouths. At the front of the room sat my niece in her little white dress--her blond hair in angelic wisps behind her ears. She smiled much brighter than the other eight-year-old children getting baptised last Saturday. Halloween. My niece stood when it was her turn to be introduced. My sister, her mother, beamed with pride. She was at my right, several people down. Her husband sat next to her, then my two younger siblings, then my parents. A smiling, proud, happy family.

My sister's husband sleeps on the floor in the living room. He, almost four months ago, confessed to my sister that he had been unfaithful, with a number of different women, all prostitutes. In the interum of said confession, my sister has waxed and stewed, prayed and fasted--what to do, what to say, how to reliquish this horror and protect her children. She welcomed him back into the home. Phew. With his arrival came a list of things he had to accomplish. Of the many chores, the first was that the dog had to go. He piled the mutt into the car and sped him away. Check. The list went on and on.

Still, sitting in that chapel, the visage of my family seemed so fragile. I watched as my younger brother baptised my niece, her father standing by with a vexed look on his face. Another uncle confirmed her into the Mormon church, and her father still remained stymied and stoic. It wasn't until the small luncheon afterwards, that I finally had had enough. When two of my brothers exchanged brief, but angry words, I got up, said goodbye to those around me and left the church.

It has been almost five days and today, still lurching a bit from a latent anxiety, I called my sister to check in. Of course she had her feelings hurt by my quick exit. She said as much, and I apologized. Yet, it feels unfinished in a malignant way. Their will be more words, I am sure.

I wonder how this chain reaction, this bombshell of a surprise (my brother-in-laws adultery) will continue to make itself known, and for how long it will spread its poison into my family. As if my family didn't have enough shit to deal with--the gayness, the in-fighting, the malaise and distrust we all seem to harbor. To climb up from this feels preposterous. To imagine what it might take to retrace my steps into normalcy while dealing with my family guarantees work, and fucking hard work at that. There is no sure way to quantify the damage sustained, no device to measure the friction or velocity of fury. And if the old adage about families and forever holds true, I need some Neosporin and some Band-Aids ASAP. This wound gonna bleed for awhile.

A Little Dagger in A Perfect Heart

The first Chapter of Job, in the Old Testament, begin by setting up an unusual scenario. Job is "perfect and upright," with riches and a large, healthy family. Unbeknownest to him, a secret meeting is being held within the glittery walls of heaven. God, the Lord, and Satan are all present. They begin discussing Job, his wealth, his upstanding character, and his unwavering belief and faith in the Lord. Verses 11 and 12 include a deal struck and the conclusion of the heavenly meeting: "But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face--this is Satan tempting God, but the Lord responds: "All that he hath is in thine power, only upon himself put not forth thy hand." In the days to follow, Job loses everything, but at the end of his losing, rents his clothes, shaves his head, and falls upon the earth saying, "the Lord gave, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord" (v. 22).

At the end of the story Job shows his unwavering faith and all that he once had is restored to him, children and all. Growing up Mormon, I was taught to revere Job for his unshakable belief in God--to see him as an open and willing conduit for the Lord's redeeming love. To look at the story now, I see betrayal; I see a trickster God and an ass-kisser for the devil. And I see Job caught in the middle of a huge pissing match.

Later in the Bible, just as THE PREACHER begins his solipsistic and buzz-killing Ecclesiastes, I find another startling example of betrayal. Verse 10 and 11: "Is there anything wherefore it maybe said, see, This is new? It hath already been of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after." Mere verses later, an indictment to remember everything, to keep it close to the heart, to bear witness, to exhort and change, to forever strive to become like God.

I am not trying to prove the Bible wrong, inconcurrent, or stupid (in its own right). I am trying, like thousands before me, to grab hold of something, to find my own struggle within scripture, to be seen. The language--that brittle diction--paints a Janus God, a multiple personality visage that contradicts his own way home.

I am in the middle of Isaiah now, and I find more of the same, more grafted imagery in the hope to prove the Mormons correct in their religious assumptions. But I care not for Mormon pandering. I want a history, a lithograph of struggle. I want a lead rope. But there are those that will tell me that the journey is half the battle, the fun, the proving ground. It is work to find God. Yet, I am not looking for God, I am looking for his dictionary. I am looking for his journals, maps, and letters. Just to see who it was that began all this carrying on. I have words locked between my teeth, waiting, like a dog, to set them down for safe keeping, because there is nothing of noteworthiness here. Not now. I will just wait.

Gazebo Days

Yesterday I helped my grandfather empty his gazebo. We did this to make room for a new addition on his house. As it is, the house has two bathroom: two upstairs and none on the main floor. The washer and dryer are also downstairs. Bedrooms: upstairs. This might not be an issue had my grandmother worn a good pair of house-slippers instead of the bad ones, if she had not tripped in the living room, fell and broke her ankle in two places. She is 85. My grandfather is 73. Twelve years difference between them. The disparity in age seemed meaningless when they were married: both in their pusedo-prime and decades from becoming dependent on one another for basic needs.

The gazebo became the place for storage almost a decade ago. Every time some part of the ranch was fixed, upgraded, moved, etc. all the scrap and leftovers made their way into the gazebo. We backed up the horse trailer and three hours later, it overflowed with wood, sheeting, siding scraps, tin, old motors, tables, a front seat of an old car, broken broom handles, metal poles, cardboard, shingles, tar paper, two wooden benches, and more junk. He wants to keep it all, trained as he is with Depression era ethic: Use it up, Wear it out, Make it through. But the gazebo is not empty. Only the most valuable of possessions remains.

Instead of calling an architect he drew up the plans for the remodel himself. There will be a hallway connecting the old house with the new apartment. A long hallway, 12 feet long, 8 feet high will bridge. The gazebo's new home will be out in the pasture, next to the electronic watering trough. Once relocated, I imagine everything inside of the horse trailer will make its way back; nothing will be wasted.

My grandmother believes that she won't live to see the new addition. It is a risk he takes, trying to please and accommodate her. It is hard to see them get old enough now, that even a trip to the bathroom could take their life, that stairs become impossible, broken ankle or not.

Forgiveness and Other Impossible Feats

First, let's talk repentance. The concept itself, that favorite of Christian words, guards the entrance to Heaven (any figurative peace). It's a juggernaut, a wide-mouthed Faustian trickster. Religion would have us believe that in order to repent, to purge, one must open a 2g connection with the divine. He/she, in kind, litters our path to redemption with hurdles, burs, and patches of glittery danger. Much like the prince that fords the thorn-ridden forest to rescue Sleeping Beauty, a soul must traverse, wear to exhaustion before any real conversation about repentance begins. Then comes forgiveness.

I struggle with this one. Self-immolation: I have down. But to forgive--with its gnarled sister, forgetting--stumps me. For example, a member of my family has been wronged, big time. The accused has never been my favorite, or even mildly welcome into my life. He baffles me. He purloins himself at every turn. And now this, this huge bundle of madness brought about through a series of selfish decisions on the accused's part, his net of sin thrown wide, traps those in his life, drug kicking and screaming into a dilemma. For his part, the path to repentance began months ago. My father admonishes me, with the aid of scripture, to withhold judgment and start to forgive.

I've consulted dictionaries, thesaurus', the Koran, Bhagavad gita, Old Testament and New, Facebook and The Onion, old letters and new: nothing is conclusive about how or when to forgive, which leaves it up to me, as all those slippery indicatives are apt to do. I know forgiveness means absolving, to some level. I know it means that I carve off a piece of compassion and set it forth. I know that I must make eye contact, hold it, hold it longer, and let the waste of anger slide down the walls of my brain. I know patience, with its salty tongue, will ask things from me. I know very little, though, about what good it does to let my fury abate, unfulfilled and cowed. My close friends need very little forgiving, and with them, the give and take is simple.

Perhaps it is in this singular experience of forgiveness, upon which I've sacrificed too much of my thinking and energy, that I have no map to follow. Does he deserve my empathy? Of course. Has he asked for it? No, and why should he? But to incite a directive from the cosmos is to stumble for light years. I've awakened this sleeping giant; I've dangled food at its face; I've stumbled upon a question so large that I barely recognize the disparate paradoxes in my crumpled paradigm. To go back now, to start at the simple things, those rudimentary feelings and emotions, is to shut the whole factory down to examine a rusty nail, a smudged thumbprint of little concern.

So I'll do my best. Go forth and do. I'll take baby-steps and teaspoons of caution. And I will do it all for the sake of myself. As for him, he's on his own, precariously perched at a cliff of his own making, or comfortable with yard markers and repentance in sight. If he asks, I'll just say I am busy making a mountain out of a mole-hill, and the time is running out.

To Score a Root Ball

My mother and I planted almost thirty willow trees at the perimeter of her property several weeks ago. Most have taken hold, the neighbors cattle destroyed almost three. In fifty years, give or take, the trees will sweep together and provide a beautiful barrier from the traffic (one or two cars per day) that travel past the house. While planting the trees I remembered several tricks I must of retained from my youth: it is easier if the hole is full of water, the ground must be level, and, most important, you must score the root ball. The process of scoring requires a knife, a long bladed one. Right before setting the tree into the hole, the knife must be run deep into the compacted dirt, through the mass of roots, slicing down and away. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. This allows the tangled mess to grab hold and set roots in the surrounding soil, otherwise they will stay coiled and the tree will die. There is sacrifice here. Several intact roots will be cleaved, sloughed off. Everything has a purpose.

This struck me only recently, several days ago, in fact, as I watched a barrage of Facebook friends of mine heatedly discuss a recent speech given by Dallin H. Oaks, Apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Oaks talked in front of thousands of BYU-Idaho students in Rexburg, chronicling the heat taken by The Church as a result of their contributions to Proposition 8 and other recent gay rights legislation. Before actually reading the talk, I made several knee-jerk assumptions about what had been said. For me, growing up in a staunch Mormon family, having ministered to TWO gay brothers after bitter attacks against their "lifestyle choices" by other family members, I knew The Church's stand on Prop 8, and was fairly certain how they would justify it. Couching their actions in religious freedom, Oaks, at one point, compares members being discriminated against to the civil rights marchers in the 60's.

Talk read and now I need to score the root ball. The Church has always managed a way out of things. For them it is just reward for following God. For those of us still wound up, to greater and lesser degrees, in The Church, the decisions handed down from on high never seem to exactly justify their means. When polygamy stymied Utah's chances at statehood, the Lord sent a revelation. When The Church was being castigated because of its racial policy that was 14 years behind even the most lack-luster of groups, poof: a revelation. (There are other examples.) With Prop 8 and homosexuality, there was no poof, no revelation, just a mainlined order to the members: STOP THIS FROM PASSING, and there was hundreds of millions of dollars. Tithing money, either way you look at it.

When I tried to argue with my sister in-law about it, we dovetailed the conversation into homosexuality itself. She defends the family. I take a good look around and see the family she is defending needs a lot more than that. She claims faith and belief. I see fear and reluctance. But as I thought about it, I realized that it comes down to lived experience, not logic or tacit belief. I know what it feels like to jeopardized: mind, body, and soul. I see privilege where others see normalcy. And the strange thing is, I don't wish that on anyone--for two reasons. One: it's mine, even when I know how foolish a thing to think. Two: if given insight, I wonder how much of the knowledge would warp for lack of use, therefore wasted, therefore back to square one.

I feel a hurried sense of caution when talking to members of the LDS church about homosexuality, even those of my own family. I have a unique experience--just as every other gay person--but in terms of sheer quantity, my family is a rarity, but not the exception. Three gay children. Those twisted roots that keep circling in the dark for safety. When the ball is scored, we've taken lungfulls of air and called it freedom, only to be plunged into more dark, more searching. I am ok with this. I am ok fighting the Mormons on everything, every precept, every line--because I still live among them. I still eat with them and call them family. And I wait, watching, germinating my hope that even in the dark, we'll all take grip of something solid and be held.


Oaks's talk can be found here:
http://newsroom.lds.org/ldsnewsroom/eng/news-releases-stories/religious-freedom

Gay Synchronicity - My Favorite Kind

Last week I began reading Judy Shepard’s memoir The Meaning of Matthew: My Son’s Murder in Laramie, and a World Transformed.*

On Thursday of last week, the House passed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. The measure says “The problem of crimes motivated by bias is sufficiently serious, widespread and interstate in nature as to warrant federal assistance to states, local jurisdictions and Indian tribes.”Its purpose is to expand the 1969 United States federal hate-crime law to include those crimes motivated by a victim’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.

On June 7, 1998 in Jasper, Texas, three white men chained James Byrd, Jr., an African American man, to the back of a pick-up truck and dragged him to his death. Byrd was a 49-year-old disabled vacuum cleaner salesman. On the night of October 6, 2008, Matthew Shepard was tied to a fence, tortured, and left in a coma because he was gay. Matthew died on October 12 from severe head injuries.

The national and international press covered these brutal murders, which helped to galvanize the beginning of the fight to update U.S. hate crime legislation at both the state and federal levels.

Obama has pledged to sign it if it passes the Senate.

* Nobody gave me anything, FTC.

The Death of a Goose

On Saturday morning, I walked through the garage, out into the garden to have a cigarette. While passing my father's pick-up truck, I saw two dead geese frozen into grotesque postures, riggered to the cold metal, their feathers pocked with blood. I felt something snap inside, a quickened grief I was unable to readily explain. The complication came not in the emotion itself, but in the knee-jerk reaction, almost retraction, of empathy in proxy, a mutated, reversal of Schadenfreude. I knew my father to have hunted, recently. He roves over coyotes on his snowmachine, but he is not cruel. The slippery context of the situation resides in decades of hunting, fishing, trapping, and surviving in a often cruel landscape. For years of my childhood, my family survived off the animals my father killed. Venison, elk, and beef filled our freezer, and the kitchen stewed with the meaty smells throughout the fall, winter, and spring. After mistaking a fawn for a cow elk, after blowing its leg off and watching it suffer until shot in the head, I renounced hunting, but not the right to hunt. But here is where my problem begins.

There was no need for my father to kill the geese: no hungry children or starving neighbors. In my estimation, hunting thrills him. I find a certain satisfaction in simply shooting a gun at non-living targets, but could not, at this point, bring to end a life.

It just so happened that Saturday began the seasonal deer hunt. Small pops drifted from the mountains behind the house all morning. My brothers were up there, somewhere, tracking and waiting for a buck or doe. Although, I knew they hunted at the same moment I smoked my cigarette, I felt no anger at them, no animosity, no judgement. In this area I am passive, or more specifically, I have no opinion save my own adamant desire to forgo hunting all together. Or I did, that is, until I saw those geese. To add insult to injury, four days later my father took the birds out of the truck, threw them on the ground close to the riverbed, and said: "Some animal will eat them." What a waste! Why kill them, these geese that are purported to mate for life; why simply point, shoot, and toss away?

What instinct, manufactured or innate, brings into being the desire to kill? I understand they are animals, mere animals, so beneath us as humans....fuck that. It is not simply the killing that boils me, but the desire that proceeds it, the idea that you do because you can--end of story. The privilege, the desire that can lead us so far away from stewardship, from the symbiosis of being upon this earth as a participant, not an avenger, makes me truly disappointed in my father.

There is always in the back of my head this voice, this speck of skepticism that I am making a mountain out of a mole-hill here. That stopping to inspect this scrim of brutality keeps my attention from the REAL problems. Then I stop, I think, I reorder. To ignore this beginning, to behave as nothing comes from blind, orgiastic pleasure like this is, means that I am allowing myself to suffocate. It is a slow bleed, a long way from my heart, my brain, my liver, but somewhere inside of my body I can feel the slippage, that small tug that could drown us all.

Signs and Symbols

Best Signs from Sunday's National Equality March on Washington.

Comin' Out Shootin'

Snow has come early to Teton Valley. Long, vigilante clouds stretch across both sides of the valley, their thick grey coats puckered and heavy. In the off chance the clouds move away from the lip of the horizon in the last couple of days, we see the Peaks blue hue is hidden behind scratches of white. October is early for such changes, even in a place where winter lasts for nearly nine months out of the year. The temperatures, usually in the mid fifties, dropped below freezing yesterday. Our overnight low was 17 degrees. It shouldn't really come as a shock to anyone that this weather has plans of its own. Between the considerable number of natural disasters spread throughout the world--shit that just normally doesn't happen in such rapid succession--and the composite picture of a world gone mad (wars and wars and wars aplenty), I am sure nature has better things to do than play nice with the humans. That is like wondering why God didn't help your high school basketball team win, even though you prayed really hard in the locker-room at half time.

As a result of the weather, I busied myself in the house; I cooked and cleaned. Waiting for my parents to get back from Mormon church, I wrote in my journal, read, played some stupid Faceplace game, browsed job boards and then ate lunch. While my dad watched football, I picked up my Old Testament. Since moving home while on the job hunt, I've decided to read the OT for several reasons, least of which to actually come closer to God. I am in First Kings: Solomon, the king most known for his gold temple, for 700 wives and 300 concubines has just died. His replacement is wicked. In one particular verse, the idolatry of the people reaches a fevered pitched when even they become unconcerned that the "sodomites" are entrenched in their cities. I then remembered it was National Coming Out Day. Across the country, thousands of men and women were involved in the tenuous challenge of confession, of verbal mastication, of letting loose the hounds of hell upon suspecting and unsuspecting parents alike. The local news gave the annual march on Washington about two minutes. Even the Weather Channel focused on the event longer than that.

Wishing those folks well, I went to my bedroom to continue reading Jose Saramago's, DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS. The novel begins with death, a very literal figure, taking time off. The results are hilarious, profane, heartbreaking, and very political. In one harrowing scene, a family must sneak their two dying family members, an old man and a baby boy, across the country line so that they may finally taste the finality of death (death has continued her work in all the countries except the one in which the story takes place). The overlying metaphor got me thinking about life, ironically.

With thousands of people marching on Washington for equal rights, I wondered what would happen if everything just stopped: no more marches, or parades, or committees, or organizations, or political fund raising dinners, or political referendums, everything. What would change? What new face of the homosexual would emerge? What new human? Saramago writes: "you say metamorphosis and move on, it seems you don't understand that words are the labels we stick to things, not the things themselves, you'll never know what the things are really like, not even what their real names are, because the names you gave them are just that, the names you gave them." There is something here.

I've watched people come out. I've been there for that moment, that little pebble descending until it becomes a boulder tearing up the underbrush, until finally, it crashes through the webbing of our lives and lands with a sigh at our feet. For some the load is light, for others heavy. But to name it, to give it life--whatever it might be--is something individual and reverent. I am not opposed to National Coming Out Day, but more and more it has started to feel like National Secretaries Week, or Columbus Day. Once we figure out our secretary's a bitch, or that Columbus, well, you know, rhymes with fenocide...then the wind just goes out of things. Far better to be the parent of your own decision, of the process of naming, of claiming, of bringing to life.

Happy National Coming Out Day!

Emotional Problems

My parents are getting ready for a wedding. They both look wonderful. The groom of said wedding is the child of a relative. Because my great-great grandfather busied himself with three wives, the hows and whys of how we are related to the groom are long, obtuse, and kinda creepy.

My dad and I were watching the Dodgers vs Cardinals game, and he asked if I wanted to go to the wedding. To be honest, I barely know the groom. I am sure there will be oodles of my extended family, people I see only rarely and who spend their time quizzing me about grad school, the plight of education, and why the shit I don't have a job. Boo.

Anyway, the younger brother of the groom has emotional problems (that is what my dad tells me.) This kid was supposed to be watching his grandmother--this all took place three or four years ago--who was very old and in need of constant help. When he took a small break from his post, his grandmother had a massive stroke and died. Upon returning to his post, the kid found his dead grandmother and, to put it in my dad's words, got his brain all screwed up for awhile. Now, each time any enquires about this kid it is always about his emotional problems.

Emotional problems? I am not sure I understand what exactly these are? Each emotion, it seems to me, has problems as built in mechanisms for use. Or consider confliction--two or so emotions dueling it out for optimum performance space. Consider paradigm and paradox. To say problems in the context of a young man who finds his grandmother dead on his watch, not to mention the guilt and shame imbued with such an experience, and who the fuck wouldn't get caught in an avalanche of emotions? Does this necessarily mean that the young man is different from any one of us with emotions that flare, spout, appear like sirens to sing us to a lovely pain? He is troubled, for sure, but certainly not in the GIRL INTERRUPTED sort of a way (as a sidebar, those girls--except for the one that kept chickens under her bed--weren't all the messed up either) but again, who the hell wouldn't be? To demarcate him as the son with emotional problems is to ridicule and couch his grief, frustration, guilt, anger....in a kind of sado/masochistic cocoon, one that he will inhabit alone, gripping at his emotions as if they were poisoned-tipped arrows he must handle with care--believe me, there the warning signs all over. But I take issue with him having emotional problems, or the way in which that makes him the damaged goods to the rest of his family that aren't.........really?.....? I know some stories, I believe we all have emotional problems, all of us, not because of any inability or weakness or slight, but because emotions are problematic just as they are. And we are problematic just as we are.

I hope his brother has a good wedding.

Communism and Nationalism: A Love Story

In the pursuit of becoming a more well-rounded person, and because I have plenty of time on my hands, I've begun watching as many documentaries as possible. With my Netflix queue as full as possible with Frontline and PBS programming, I aim to understand a little more of the things I don't understand......whichever comes first, I think (I am trying to write while my niece and nephew play some motorcross game on the Playstation next to me, and my little brother and posse of duck hunters have returned to regale us with their torid narratives of near misses and feather explosions. I will focus.)

The first documentary I watched complied all the research done by Joseph Campbell two years before his death. With each segment I learned how conjoined our narrative traditions, as they concern separate cultures, societies, religions, nation-states, cities, peoples, etc, are, and how each attempt at myth making simply revivifies old myths and their narrative structures. Simply put: the stories we tell, the metaphors we live by and through, the remonstrated discourses of our lives are regurgitated, reused, recycled, self-reflexive plots derived from ancient and disparate people. It lends a bit of credo to the adage, "Nothing unknown is knowable."

Next I watched (or am watching) a three disc series on Vietnam. Prior to viewing, I thought I had a little knowledge about the subject. I was awestruck by how complicated and yet, how straightforward the sordid story went. A bunch of people were sick of being under colonial rule. They form a revolution which undermines American beliefs in "freedom" and "liberty" and "self-preservation." America gets involved and things go to shit. People are needlessly killed. Millions of tons of bombs are dropped. Landscape is changed diametrically. The narratives of an entire people shift. A newish, oldish story emerges. America leaves amidst cultural fear, communist wet-dreams, and antipathy to the hundredth power. The love of country starts the story and becomes its end. I struggle with that concept. Perhaps I have never really loved my country--even more---I believe I take a lot of things for granted. Yet, when I do something demonstrative of my rights (mere privileges) I do not think of the men and women who died in Vietnam as having provided me with some tenuous source of safety or patriotism. Instead, I just feel bad. I feel sad that we are so reductive and beyond a certain shame which becomes necessary in the face of narcissistic imperialism. Just a small hope.

I have more to come, in the form of documentaries. One on Lincoln. One on something else I can't remember, but I feel to be important. Maybe it is not the best for me to ingest such realism. Not good at all, but I still do it.

The Disposable Female

Sometimes Robb roams around my head, flipping through my thoughts, as though they were old photographs. Granted, they are of people he has never met, places he's never been. Still, he finds them familiar, which, for me, is a dependable antidote to loneliness. Other people do this too, force their way in, toss my thoughts around, and search for some loose connection of which there are many--baseless loyalty, indiscriminate empathy, stubborn idealism, etc.

Recently, an ex-friend attempted such an assault. She called me at work, having found the number through a work directory. She was drunk. I was busy. She was suicidal. That reckless empathy kicked in. I talked to her through two cigarettes. Some stone goblin came to life. I spoke in tongues, spewing rote reassurances. She always catches me off guard. When I returned to my office, she called me 5 more times. (Yes, yes it was excessive and freakish.)

Before I could send her the lengthy rebuke I had composed during my hour-commute, she e-mailed me with her template apology: I was pretty drunk. Hope I didn't fall asleep or say anything mean. She is an expert at tamping down my anger. That anger will arise at some later time. Cougar-like, it stalks me and will disembowel me with its razor claws. I'll have no idea.

The Oppositional Male

I dreamt of high school last night. Not the usual blanched nakedness at photo time dreams, not the missing test day because of nigh extraordinary circumstances dreams, not even the surely Freudian duplicate selves, or Foucauldian power displacement (or should I say reenactment?) dreams. No, these dreams stung with a visceral awareness that even while in their midst, some part of my conscious, or subconscious--or both--seemed hell bent on mandating that my waking self remembered not only the images, but the root pinpricks of despair that ran like a whacked-out Wagner score in the background.

I hated high school, but until recently, I can't be sure why. My mother tells me that most people did; that for some, that time of life is just meant to hurt. Two of my brothers remember their time in fashionista like awe, the wash of their success in athletics and conquests (I mean that) of women almost brittle memories now, as the weight of real life hunkers down upon them.

My dreams of last night would have me remember old jealousies and arguments, injuries that speak with a juvenile lisp, things that should be healed, forgotten or dismissed due to proximity, or by the mere fact that they happened in that time, in that place, in that fucked-up dimension. Apparently I carry around an assortment of grievances. It is humbling and embarrassing to admit--not because I distrust my dreams, or believe merely in their contextualized randomness of meaning. I admit to teaspoons of shame because I still am unable to catch on, to readily understand what it is I am supposed to do. There is too much talk of forgiveness. There is that word "closure," which to me seems as useful as words like "sin" and "wrong." There is a message here. I know it. I can feel it, and it leaves me bereft.

Book Review: Where Men Win Glory

by Jared Blackley

Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman
by Jon Krakauer
416 pp. Doubleday. $27.95

Apparently, Doubleday sent out no reviewer copies of Jon Krakauer's Where Men Win Glory prior to publication. Krakauer had scheduled the book for publication last year, under the title The Hero, but pulled it a few months before it was supposed to hit the shelves, presumably because he wasn't satisfied with the end product. Perhaps his confidence in the book is still not solid, so maybe he (and the publisher, of course) decided to not allow any reviews to be written before publication. Of course, I'm only speculating. But when the book was published last week, it immediately became a bestseller on the strength of his name alone. I bought the book and read it. It's quintessential Krakauer--clear, concise, direct prose that describes complex situations with simple language. It's not his best work--it starts out choppy and the research into Tillman's life seems superficial at times--but all in all, it's a good book. He doesn't waver in pointing blame where blame should be pointed. And the description (near the end of the book, not at the beginning) of the firefight that ended Tillman's life is brilliant. The affidavits and other documents from the military's seven (yes, seven!) investigations into what transpired numbers more than several thousand pages and are often contradictory and full of redactions and outright lies. To cut through all the bullshit and deceit and come out with a fairly accurate, and beautifully written, account of what actually transpired must have been a difficult and painstaking process.

One of the things that really struck me while reading the book is how thoughtful Tillman was. He faithfully kept a journal, from which Krakauer quotes liberally, and he was quite eloquent at times. Men generally have a difficult time understanding (sometimes even acknowledging) let alone explaining their emotions, but not Tillman. While in the military, his emotions were often conflicting. And his descriptions of them are worthy of note.

Krakauer's postscript is a bit baffling. He goes on a strange tirade about the American wimp and its counterpart, the alpha-male. At times, his logic seems to contradict itself. He uses Nietzsche's notion of the Übermench to describe Tillman and the alpha-male. While I agree with a lot of the basic idea he puts across, it seems a strange and random way to end the book. Nevertheless, it's worth reading.

Faith Fiction and the Process of Melting

I give a book almost 100 pages before I decide to read on, or stop. At times the process happens transparently, or without conscious recognition (unless the book sucks). Also, as a person who reads, I am generally more willing to read something recommended by others than merely picking something out willy-nilly. But, as it happens, I picked out two random books and became intimately acquainted with FAITH FICTION. The book, Levi's Will looked harmless enough, religiously benign. But forty pages in, I started to wonder why God was mentioned so many times, and each mentioning, I found even more bizarre, was generally positive.

I started to think about genre fiction, of why, most of the time, books that fall under a very specific genre and sub-genre tend to suck. The writing is mostly subservient to the narrative. It alone does not seem to merit much on its own terms. What is important here, and for most books of sub-genre material, is the story. Because, in the case of Levi's Will, the story struggles to maintain allegiance to meta-narrative, in often blatant ways, the story cannot allow itself room to roam, to curve, to change course mid-stream for the sake of the narrative, not the narrative's sake itself. Thus, the story seems to dictate how characters must react and how the reader must intuit thematic strains. In FAITH FICTION, the power of God, the redemption of man through God, God's love and gentle/demonstrative guidance present themselves almost like thick, woolen blankets covering the bones of the narrative just begging to be expressed in its own terms. Anthropomorphizing aside, the narrative of such books reminds me of melting snow. It follows a governed, prescripted pattern when sliding off the house. There are basic guidelines at work here. And when it's ready, the whole fucking thing comes barreling down the side of a mountain, a roof, or a hill. There is no trickle down, no Hansel and Gretel type treasure hunt in this sort of fiction. It's an avalanche that often leaves only the very lucky, or very faithful alive.

Grammar Geek-Out

For 30 years, Andy Ross owned Cody's Books in Berkeley, California. After the famous bookstore closed, he became a literary agent in Oakland. Recently he posted an interview with Mary Norris on his blog Ask the Agent. Norris copy edits at and occasionally writes for the New Yorker. In this interview, Norris succinctly explains the grammatical rules to "lie" and "lay" in a way that can only be described as stunning:

Mary: When I first got into the copy-editing game, I wondered why writers persisted in the error of their ways when they must have seen the changes that the editors made. Finally I figured out that it isn’t the writers’ job to style their own copy. For writers, having to think about those things is constricting. Plus, if they did, it would put us out of a job. . . . The difference between “lie” and “lay” in the past tense continues to confound. It is “lie, lay, lain” (intransitive verb, meaning “to recline”) and “lay, laid, laid” (transitive verb, meaning “to set [something] down”). “Laid” is so often used incorrectly as the past tense of “lie” (as in “She laid down for a nap” [ding, ding, ding: wrong!]) that people are afraid to use it even when it’s right, so you’ll get a sentence like “She lay the stones on the grave.” It doesn’t set off so many bells, but it’s a mistake, in this case attributable to overcorrectness.

IndieBound

Buy a Friend a Book Week has rolled around again. For ideas, check out IndieBound (which was once BookSense). From their website, you can find the independent bookstore closest to you. There are also several lists of notable books, divided into categories intuitive enough to make a librarian blush.

Some standouts of new releases include Pete Dexter's Spooner and Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply. Also, good news for those of you who have to move every 18 months: Marilynne Robinson's Home is now out in paperback.

Going, Going, Gone.

Former Governor Sarah Palin has finished her memoir "Going Rogue: An American Life." Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins, plans to print 1.5 million copies of the 400-page book. They expect it to be a big holiday hit.

From an early draft using voice-to-text software:

I'd of gone rogue younger if I knew there was so much money to make. I ran for office with old McCain. He was a real drag. All those houses and no guns. Just didn't make no sense. Also, I know he didn't really believe in the rapture. I kept asking to use some verses from Revelation, and he kept saying no and massaging his temples. Probably why we didn't win. But 2012, watch out. I'm gonna fly over America and shoot down all my opponents. The last thing they'll see is me in my helicopter, a gun aimed right at their evil, media-loving hearts.

Wow, this thing really types whatever I say. It even adds the g's. Okay, I'm going to begin now.

Now.

I know how tough fights are won. I won the vice presidency. I won the governorship of Alaska. Next, I'm going to win the president of Alaska—I mean America. You guys can get rid of that right?

I know what you're gonna say. "Sarah, I thought you hated the media. Isn't a book media?" Let me just answer that question now, so we can get to the important stuff. Books are not media. Newspapers and the internets are media. Broadcast news is the media. Books are books. They are their own thing.

The voters know that there is a time for politics and a time for leadership. I know this too. That's, therefore, something that we have in common. Todd understands too. He fishes and works in the fields just like regular folk. Granted, he is a world champion snow machine racer, but he's not uppity about it. You know that I have a servant's heart. That's why I quit being governor of Alaska. That country—dammit. I mean state will be okay without me. America needs me in 2012. If they don't let me down, I won't let them down.

Financial Problems or Drug-Induced Brevity?

Denis Johnson

Tree of Smoke (2007) 720 pages
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (September 4, 2007)

Nobody Move (2009) 208 pages
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (April 28, 2009)

Thomas Pynchon

Against the Day (2006) 1,085 pages
The Penguin Press; First Edition edition (November 21, 2006)

Inherent Vice (2009) 384 pages
Penguin Press HC (August 4, 2009)

BAFAB: Buy a Friend a Book

BAFAB week is upon us again. Debra Hamel created this holiday in July of 2005. I have never met Ms. Hamel, but she is obviously some sort of genius. Yet, participation is easy. Buy a book (preferably one that will either encourage avid readers to continue their insane pursuit of the perfect sentence, or one that will entice new readers to take up the habit) for a friend. You are not buying it for the person's birthday or for any other reason except to infest the rest of this world with book smarts. If you want more information about BAFAB or need ideas on books to give, check out their website.