PUSH, SHAKE, RATTLE

Goodbye Blogger.......

2011-08-21T21:37:00.002+03:00

.......hello www.elihastings.com!

Cadaqués

2011-07-10T22:53:00.002+03:00

Tell me it ain’t a madman’s wind

Blowing off the bluffs

This morning over the town

A haint slipped off about dawn

From the roof of the ancient church

Went the way of a gull feather

On a winging current

He was like

The sliver of smoke

A dangerous woman

Knifes from one nostril

His was like

The departure

I did not get to watch

Of others, who never knew

The whitewashed walls and

Bougainvillea of this horseshoe bay

Nor the multiplicity

Of blue doors

Stirring the Fire

2011-06-25T23:03:00.001+03:00

Dear readers,

My close friend Danielle Prince is currently on a mission in Cambodia with UN filmmaker Phil Borges, documenting the realities of survivors of acid attacks--a particularly nasty type of violence against women. Follow her blog here, where you'll find inspiration as well as horror.

peace

ALL AT ONCE

2011-05-31T03:25:00.000+03:00

For Pongo Teen Writing

ALL AT ONCE

I see my father in the eyes of an incarcerated teen

For nine years I’ve been without a compass, yet somehow

found myself

Standing in a predawn kitchen letting my son smear jelly on my forehead

like a blessing

I listen to late night traffic for counsel

And if wind takes my smoke sideways

I reach out a hand and close my eyes

But with a house and wife, baby and dog, university degrees and leased Subaru

The space for loss has shrunk

I’m glutted on ease and fortune

The domino effect of privilege has taken a hold of my life

The sweet stink of gore, the tangled limbs in the trench, the sheets of rain that cloak the enemy as he bears down

Have no place on this beach

Each year it’s getting easier and easier

Which scares me because

I don’t want to wear a smile back to war

And I know it's coming

All at once.

MAN CAVE, LATE

2011-05-17T07:49:00.002+03:00

The AK ammo on my shelf is called Silver Bear, and it’s from Russia.

The airbrushed sticker from a hip burger joint in West Seattle is of Lucifer, with pointed ears and pleasure in his face.

The Blues Brothers in their powdered makeup stare the garage down with glasses and cigarettes and not a concern in the world for political correctness.

My medical marijuana license bears paragraphs indented dramatically and tamper proof seals and careful signatures.

The Suzuki seems to lounge more than stand, lean more than sit, canted at an angle with a shiny black helmet on its hip.

Pema Chodron smiles off the cover of a book the size of a box of smokes.

Knife, mace, mini video camera and flashlight pose on my shelf for someone to come along who needs their service.

Yellowing papers of poetry and Comcast bills sleep tossed about like the end of a binge by a cyclone no one else felt.

No Occasion

2011-05-15T01:48:00.002+03:00

When you exhale Marlboro red smoke

In my memory, I’m reminded of

How much was cloaked between us

We fogged the years with tequila and towers of music

Fine blue looping script between the lines

Was more of a plan than an action

I’m not sure which glow is the cherry of your cigarette,

Which the glow of your brake lights

Rolling down the long, sooty slope of

An Angeles mountain

I want a red

And one more night

Goddamit

When you exhale.

MY Block, Circa 1993, 2011

2011-05-10T08:15:00.000+03:00

I swing through the corner in my black family wagon that’s also kind of sporty; it starts with an ‘S.’

Can’t bear to say it.

I’m sitting on the curb and my eyes are spiraling with lost purpose, my homies are popping ollies and smoking.

I’m kind of embarrassed at having nothing else to do.

I stomp the brake three times behind a raucous red haired skater kid.

Rolling past his seated homies I cast a look at one, level, but I realize there’s a spark fired there anyway.

Subaru driving motherfucker with a fedora and baby seat stares hard.

My shoulders jump and my eyes fire in a fake attack without my thinking.

Without thinking I stomp the brake again, once.

Window sighs down and my anger launches.

I figure he must be beefing to lurch his car like that.

I ask him if he is and my skin is popping but I’m calm too.

My fingers punch the seatbelt before simple math crowds around me.

Translate the rage as it tumbles out into something prone to words….

Boss of the pristine block he’d like to be.

I don’t blink at the holler about his cop neighbor and shit.

Nobody’s leaving and the redhead is on my window fake friendly.

The crew is more laconically defiant than bristling, actually.

Punk’s off no doubt dialing the law.

But Mr. Bitchass fucked up my high and now I can see how we might be blocking the street.

Park hard and dial, ogling the rearview.

But I flipped out like a man I never meant to be, want to walk down block and shake hands; I duck into home instead.

BURIAL AT SEA: A DREAM

2011-05-09T02:11:00.000+03:00

Somewhere in the Arabian Sea

a wall of gray that turns out to be a warship slices a curtain of fog.

This is seen from above, not quite a bird’s eye view,

but hovering above the muster deck like a real gull might

(hoping for hail-maried scraps of MREs maybe).

The figures are no longer masked

sweated veils hang like extra faces around necks.

There is no camouflage, no formation, no banners or horns.

It might be called solemn.

The camera, as God, zooms in but

another force has powdered the faces with bits of fog.

They are as shrouded as the bundle that a trio powers overboard without

so much as a rifle shot.

Without so much

as an audible splash in the great wake of that unstoppable craft.

Tripping on Postmodern Nightlife

2011-05-08T02:43:00.001+03:00

I make the effort once in awhile to go out to places where, for example, a forty-something, bald, white German man in a Hawaiian shirt spins the hemisphere’s nastiest collection of African funk records and even the slimmest and prettiest girls in the crowd grip tall boys of Pabst. But it’s so complicated. I mean, last night I bought a slice of pizza from a very skinny, timid, long-haired boy wearing an Eazy-E RIP teeshirt. This was before the DJ. A boy wearing sleeves of tattoos and a flat-brimmed cap had a pair of flowers inked on his cheekbone where tears would be inked were he actually the hardened con that his attire suggested. My friend Oli told me of glimpsing one of these tight-black-sagged-jeans and black denim jacket wrapped kids trotting a downtown hill with three inch black pumps on. It’s not an unpleasant city out there, but somehow it makes me want to put on sweatpants and read poetry on the sofa with the drapes pulled.

May Day, 2011

2011-05-02T07:44:00.000+03:00

I’m like a guy with a cut straw standing before the line of _______ chopped out on the top of the toilet tank in the stall of a bathroom in a place where the music kicks the walls. I keep lifting the red plastic hose to my nose, starting to lean in, chanting a silent mantra of fuck it/fuck yeah in my head, pushing the powder askew with quivering fingers, poised, but something stops me. I keep straightening back up and cursing my conscience, the splinter in the middle of the party. I want to cheer Osama bin Laden’s death and I really, really try to. A strong impulse shoves me to do so. But moral philosophy—or at least my blurry tornado that resembles it—keeps twisting me up like an Alabaman mailbox. How can we cheer the death of anyone? If we do so, aren’t we somehow worshipping the same God he did? Bring violent death upon innocents; bring violent death upon the guilty. An eye for an eye. Of course, that’s America. We are a Judeo Christian nation of law and morals. And some courageous young man (or woman) just pulled the card of an evil Muslim anarchist. That I cheer, actually—I mean whomever it was that got to lean five pounds of pressure on that trigger. I’m sure to him, or her, it felt like praying. No. I’m not sure of anything. Maybe she cried. We all do.

Blood on the Wings of a Butterfly

2011-04-29T02:55:00.000+03:00

A bomb detonated in a café in Marrakesh where I drank a pot of mint tea in 2006!

A bomb detonated in a café in Marrakesh and killed 14 people, eleven of them tourists (which is why it is front page news).

A bomb detonated in a café in Marrakesh, a city where my good friend’s seven-year-old daughter will soon be traveling with her mother.

I realize as I flip through the BBC gallery of carnage that I’m titillated by my connection to the tragedy; it feels like something cool to tell people about. It’s the sort of thing that gives you the occasion to claim proximity to world events. Al Qaeda in the Magreb may be responsible! It’s only a somewhat absurd stretch of the imagination to think that maybe they were scoping it out when I was there with Lili, the taciturn waiter (who tried to cheat me out of my change) pouring the long strand of boiling beverage without a splash into my cup, far below. I wonder if he was wounded today.

What immense privilege it is to be titillated by one’s connection to tragedy! To enjoy the fact that this kind of run of the mill mass murder brushed by me on the space continuum if not the time continuum. That’s truly what it means to be a privileged white American : the shrapnel and bullets and IEDs and RPGs that obliterate children the size of my son as a matter of daily course are a sensationalistic flicker; a head shaking dinner table stroke of serendipity; something for a blog post.

Reading Friday Night

2011-04-22T01:27:00.000+03:00

.......At the Writers Center in Bethesda, MD.

Me and genius novelist/commentator Andrew Altschul and a radical cellist.

http://www.writer.org/

First reading ever from my forthcoming book, Clearly Now, the Rain (ECW Press, 2012)

six pm on alki in my truck

2011-04-12T07:50:00.000+03:00

Keep the glass rolled up and the majesty of this view could even give the illusion of warmth. People get so dazzled by the big god teeth of mountains and holy spears of sunlight that they forget to shiver. They just squint and smile and stroll like it’s 75 instead of 53 out. Lots of small dogs and beach chairs, toddlers with parkas thrown wide, women on cell phones with luminescent heads of hair thrown backward in long distance laughs. It’s fucking lovely. Nothing like Seattle. Alki is a place I should have known about growing up, but it’s probably like certain picnic spots in Ravenna Park if you’re from West Seattle. You’re just not gonna know. But this is bigger and grander than Ravenna Park and would be an escape even in the midst of winter. You can breathe here, just because of the space. People are always mooning about the trees in Seattle, but give me the beach and a big, flat horizon of water.

New Audio/Print Article on Pongo at NPR!

2011-03-29T02:20:00.002+03:00

http://www.kplu.org/post/washington-states-childrens-psych-hospital-poets-and-pongo

Wow

2011-03-11T05:34:00.001+02:00

The right wing is convening an "extremism" conference to specifically look (only) at Muslim radicalism. Two headlines from today:

http://lezgetreal.com/2011/03/peter-king-convenes-his-radicalization-hearing/

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2014455568_spokanebomb11m.html

Gotta support the defense of the homeland.

New Short Story ("Ghost Train")

2011-02-19T00:05:00.002+02:00

http://10ktobi.wordpress.com/

A QUARTET OF PAST MASTERS ATTENDS AWP

2011-02-11T20:39:00.000+02:00

The walls around the DC zoo are shorter than I would have expected and riding the updraft of the afternoon’s first cocktails we joke about scaling in after dark to match up with our spirit animals and while such Thoreauvian jests ease some of the jadedeness from our Mastery of the Fine Arts and let us swagger through the Marriott like veterans through a boot camp, in the end the wind-driven gloom pushes us deep into overheated pubs with bad Van Morrison covers, flat pints of off brand beers and soggy microwaved mozzarella sticks until such time as the snatching of a white scarf from the neck of a Jameson-swilling Republican poet seems not only a good idea but necessary until he turns, pins his garment between an arm and a rib and we have to struggle into grease stained coats to make transient poetry with cigarette plumes in the cold, swallowing our cowardice like the shots of bourbon and leaning on through the choking bars and streets and lobbies where pale similarly scarved and carefully-carelessly clad wannabes fight with elbows and repartee to briefly share the air of has-beens as the latter clumsily flees to soirees or perhaps just quiet rooms and then the hordes fold inward, designer frames hosting narrowing eyes and what’s your genre, man? fires forth with the same intention as but none of the gravitas of what set you claim, homie? does less than a mile south on street corners never brushed by a Chuck Taylor or a suede loafer and though we do step out into the streets and fall in love with Asian waitresses merely because they serve hot food in quiet corners of corporate Chinatown, at least one of us also does squeeze the clammy hands of editors, claims his genre at least once and slinks during headachy morning hours to panels where truth and bullshit are spoken in equal parts save one of pure truth where soldiers read their pup tent prose written in the scorched Arabian desert of finger necklaces, tank-pancaked children and a poem concerning the destruction of the walls of the Baghdad zoo, recounting how bears ate women in alleyways, baboons lit out for the tree-less nightmarescape of the sandy horizon, giraffes galloped and wavered past the ministry of oil, civilization coming apart in a kaleidoscope of blood and dream and smoke that I realize that is, at least in part, what I want for us.

COMING CLEAN

2011-01-22T00:14:00.002+02:00

It wasn’t strange for dad to take us out for ice cream in his patrol car. But it was strange for him to stop in Irish Alley where we knew he’d gotten the scars from the time we were too young to remember. And it was new for him to invite mom. The engine ticked. We licked our cones. She chewed her nails. Dad smoked. Two bums watched from their nest of dirty blankets.

“Guys,” he said with a sigh, and his brown eyes met our green ones in the rearview mirror, “It’s time I told you about your dad.”

My brother looked confused. Quickly, I sucked up the last of my mint chocolate chip.

2011

2011-01-18T03:59:00.000+02:00

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.      

A true revolution of values will lay a hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. 

www.democracynow.org

Tucson

2011-01-15T22:01:00.000+02:00

Hands over hearts and feet in mouths we pray and fuck and cry for you. There are those who will water the tree of liberty with your blood, those who will cremate their loved ones and pretend their ashes are yours and mix them with tattoo ink and chart great rippling flags across their bulging pectorals, or tiny crocuses behind pierced ears. There are those who will stay up till tiny hours writing text that could become laws that bear your name and these laws might ban large clips of bullets or might legalize bazookas in strip malls or might conjure more money for mental health or might guarantee the noose for crazies or might make it illegal to ever, ever mention you again.

Brevity

2011-01-08T23:15:00.001+02:00

(for my Hugo House Flashslam! class)

BEEF JERKY

The violence of your syllables is like knives catching the light as they work. They make me salivate and I can feel the enamel on my teeth hardening in anticipation. The fact that within your name there exists a pejorative only demonstrates that you can be hated by the closed-minded and that only increases my adoration; the soft launch of the your long ees, the molar click, the syrupy libation released with the with one firm nibble, your immortality to say nothing of shelf-life, the economy with which you fit into a bag or pocket, wrapped or not, the patient protein molecules crouching between savory sinews, the passion you inspire in the listless dog in the passenger seat, the way you’re sometimes forgotten on the dashboard and revealed in the exciting 2 a.m. flash of a vapor light just as stomach acids start to boil for a real meal.

If you’re paired with a Snickers and an apple, we might just make Missouri tonight.

HATCHET

Farmer Dave held the old bird down on the stump with both hands.

“Bobby,” he hollered over his shoulder, “bring me the damn hatchet!”

Bobby, bitter that he wasn’t in a booth at Applebee’s with Sue Ann by that hour grumbled as he banged around in the unlit shed. He cracked the corrugated tin door for some light from the moon and that’s when he saw the glint in the coop, the huddled masses of birds barely obscuring it. One pair of beady eyes belonged to the best-layer and she implored him silently to see their shared interests.

BALLYHOO

IsitlowT.com

Unpimp your body

If you died tomorrow, who would take care of your family?

CouldIhaveLupus.com

Do you ever feel sad?

An everyday moment can turn romantic at any moment

It’ll blow your mind away

PMS is nothing a good vodka cocktail and cupcake can’t cure

Small penis? Have we got the car for you!

I’m lovin’ it

Still a virgin? For help call 888 743 4335

Jesus is the answer

Pax Amidst the Bustle

2010-12-22T02:08:00.000+02:00

A Ghazal for PTH

He doesn’t know a thing about mistletoe, rock the jinglebells anyway

He doesn’t care about the hassles of the snow, rock the jinglebells anyway

Ravenous senses without burden of meaning, the restraint of named sentiment

In the sky it doesn’t matter if it’s an eagle or a crow, rock the jinglebells anyway

He’s fallen from a height, choked on cheese, turned blue, smashed his fingers,

He strikes terror putting on his show, rock the jinglebells anyway

The tree is just something wrapped in trippy lights, Jesus just a beard to tug

Fuck pricey toys, he’d rather play with a box and a bow, rock the jinglebells anyway

He teaches us about giving, soggy cheetos proffered like jewels

No Christmas blues and I don’t want him to grow, rock the jinglebells anyway

Questions for an Empty Sky

2010-12-08T03:12:00.000+02:00

(A Ghazal for HN)

If she’d asked to burn the whole rulebook, I would have

If she’d asked me to strategically overlook, I would have

Sometimes I think I drag death around like a chain

And if there were powder to toss, a talisman to be shook, I would have

It’s just being left behind time after time like the proverbial fat kid

To search bleary eyed in foreign harbor nooks, I would have

When do you stop counting all the lives you have to live for?

If I’d thought to measure what I gave and what I took? I would have

After the Wedding, in the Carriage, the Princess Broods...

2010-12-07T03:42:00.000+02:00

(A POV writing exercise by Anna Balint)

At least it could have been rainy. This is bloody London, after all—would it have been too much for a bit of a drizzle and an hour of winds? Just a small touch of dourness, a hint of the blackness that’s spreading inside me like a stain. But no, the blooming sun is as big and fierce as August, the thermometer may as well have been stuck in a steaming brisquet and everyone thinks the balminess is some kind of confirmation. I tried for my Pradas, thinking at least the brightness would allow me to hide my eyes, but Elizabeth, that mink-wrapped bitch, snatched them off my face before I even made it out of the foyer.

All these commoners smiling and waving and even crying—they think I’m like them in some manner, they believe the bollocks the press puts out. I wouldn’t share a glass of sherry with any of these black-toothed wretches for all of the diamonds I’m wearing, but the storyline is valuable to William, to her Highness, so I’m instructed to follow it: to hug a filthy laborer in front of a camera now and then; to be spotted in casual wear. So today with the hordes pressing in on us, I better not stop waving, blowing kisses.

And William: people probably see him as charming, noble, self-assured. He’s had a lifetime of practice at living a lie, of course, so it’s no surprise. If they knew he’d spent the night being ravaged by two hired west Indian brutes while I listened from my quarters gulping scotch, the whole of nobility as a bloody concept would come tumbling down—and I’d relish it all, I would. But I’m not a fool. I could care less if I go home with the love of the people, much less the love of the royals. But I’m not going home broke. I’m going home garishly wealthy, I just don’t know how yet.

Bang! (A shot rings out)

Oh! Thank you, God!

Our Last Session

2010-11-29T23:12:00.000+02:00

How do you say goodbye to someone who was helping you to say goodbye—to people that have already left, to stories about yourself that you tell yourself that are full of poison, to the millstone of shame and guilt that you’ve carried through your life? How do you say goodbye to someone who you meet every Monday at 9:30 a.m. in a tiny, cold office but when you get there she’s been dead since Thursday? How do you say goodbye to someone who was only three years ahead of you in the very same career that you’re beginning now? How do you say goodbye to the third person in your life whose sadness was too much to bear? How do you say goodbye to someone who would have broken all her own rules if you’d ever told her that sometimes you don’t want to live?

You gasp and sob in your truck, as you’ve done before until you run dry and the numb sets in. Put it in gear—no music—and drive straight ahead, up the hill toward the east where the sun is still close to the horizon. Stop at a mini mart and buy a piece of vice, Marlboro reds or a tall can of malt liquor. Also buy something for your home and your family, say a box of Duraflame logs or a cheesy calendar to mark time as it passes. Get back in the truck, punch once through the numb, hit the pliable surface of the dash with knuckles, pull out your smart phone and find her photo on the web. Ask it questions out loud, drop a tear on the screen, scroll through obituaries with no result, speculate that maybe it’s a dream, think how she would have raised her eyebrows and laughed at that if you’d told it to her.

Drive farther east till you reach the water and park illegally. Get out with your vice and your computer and sit on a damp picnic table and listen to the ruckus of crows and the despondence of gulls break the air as the sun pushes the day up with veiled power over the hunks of iced mountain and dormant volcano. Write out your questions and a self-help passage as your fingers slowly numb like your heart. Smoke a cigarette within 50 feet of the picnic shelter because it says not to.

If I’d asked her about herself even once would it have changed things? If I’d broken up with her, as I considered doing, with the explanation that I was more interested in her as a friend and more interested in her story and her sadness than in being her patient? If I’d asked her what had happened that caused her to move so stiffly or what had been the cause of her own sleep disturbance that she alluded to once or twice? If I’d brought my baby in one day to play on the carpet with ballpoint pens while we talked about my quite mild issues? If I’d told her even once—true or not—that she was really helping me or that she was an excellent therapist?

None of this is mine to own, of course, but that won’t keep the questions from dogging me like these blackbirds are now for long nights to come.

What’s mine to own is to keep recording my dreams, keep digging into them, to keep studying, to get my toolbox in order to help other sad people, and to live my life long and hard.

Rest in peace, H.

Happy Birthday and RI F'in' P

2010-11-24T07:01:00.000+02:00

I met F while visiting the college where she was enrolled in 1996. She was drawn together like a bundle of sticks on a desk chair in pajama pants even as the poisonous Southern California sun set over her shoulder. She leaked Marlboro smoke from her nose and stared me down. I was frightened and thrilled and could not have said why. I entered the same school the following year.

F loved dogs and hated children (or claimed to). She weighed in at a hundred pounds after a feast and she drank frat boys under the table. She spoke three languages and sometimes I spent an entire day in her company without a word. She wore saris and ate delicately from plates of curry at family events; she wore a lip ring, designer shades and cowboy hats and ordered bloody steaks elsewhere. She wrote volumes of poetry, made many amateur films, singlehandedly ran a chapter of Food Not Bombs. She ended up as a fierce corporate VP at a pharmaceutical company. She often slept less than five hours per week but could—and would, at the slightest excuse—drive from Los Angeles to New York in a cool fifty hours. In some moments of danger she split the lips of menacing strangers.

F said she had once seen something that she couldn’t remember. It caused her to live the unapologetic and ferocious way that she did, all of which was a poor substitute for the death she really hungered for. But while she lived she healed and, in some cases, quite literally saved the lives of many people blessed and cursed by her way of loving.

I am blessed. Because our relationship, from ill-advised searches for fun/relief in Mexican border towns through summer road trips, from southern California to Tennessee, Paris, Venezuela, New York City and Seattle, from 1996 to the very last days of 2004 and the traumatic end of her life at age 27 that happened on my watch did shit to my spirit like a chiropractor does to your spine.

F taught how to love someone that you cannot save. She taught us to seize the moment without hesitation or lament. She taught us to choose whom you love carefully but then never miss a beat. She was a love story, a coming of age story, the story of friendships, she was the tale, sometimes hilarious, sometimes horrendous, of our own humbling by these lessons.

Tonight I lit a couple of candles and propped a couple of photos of F up on the mantle. The city is overlaid with a sheen of ice and the neighborhood is silent in that way that only ice can make it. I put on one of her mixes and the melancholy started to swirl in me really fast. I scooped up my son who was fussing and asked him for a dance (he puts his palm out and takes your thumb if he’s down). We waltzed and spun to her tunes for a half an hour. At some point in the blur of spinning and dipping and sliding, I caught a vision of his face, full of the happiness of motion and innocence and it made me top and pull him close and drop some tears on his little head. It was very much like and very much greater than any rush of drug that I’ve ever bowed to. He was anxious to get back dancing in front of the Duraflame. I danced him over to examine the glossy flash of F in the old photos and he smiled and reached out for her—he does like brown-skinned ladies, but it felt like more than that. Some kind of recognition between souls that are so close to the same stone, touching it from opposing sides of the border, both full of peace.

All that is what I’m grateful for tonight.

(And I'm UNgrateful to blogger for not letting me upload images of the wild and beautiful woman and child because of some unknowable glitch in the universe of pixels)

Aeropuerto Internacional Maquetia ("Simon Bolivar") de la Republica Boliviariana de Venezuela Circa 1998

2010-11-12T05:46:00.000+02:00

The jet way is as hot as a throat. My mother waves from the end of the tunnel. On the plane all the passengers are dark and no one speaks English. I stuff my pretzel bag into the seat pocket because I don’t want to ask for the trash. I half-dream of bandits, cut-throats in taxis.

In the terminal you cannot see the eyes of the soldiers under hat brims; they carry their weapons like cadavers. Distracted I walk into the fat ass of an old señora. I can’t recall for the life of me how to say I’m sorry. She smiles immaculately down at me and winks.

The Walk-In

2010-11-07T22:15:00.000+02:00

Last month a drunk trucker bumped into the register on his way out the door. That revealed the grime that had built up underneath, which caused me to finally move the whole checkout counter over by the window. That’s how come I saw Him coming last Sunday evening. He unfolded from a dusty Grand Cherokee and looked up at the café’s sign like it was a sunset. I dropped three mugs, two plates and a water glass, but at least I had a heads up to suck some breath in. I made a beeline for the kitchen past the three customers and ignored Heather’s asking me what was wrong. Max was already on his way to scoop up the broken dishes, one of his headphones in so he could keep himself fueled with that awful electronic stuff he calls music.

I ditched the apron and stacked my curls and speared them into place with a skewer off the chef’s station. I opened my blouse one button and bit down on a Cert’s. I was relieved that, save for Humberto, who was blasting a pan with his back to me, the kitchen crew had already gone.

He was sitting at the same table he did twenty-one years ago. It had been a Saturday. He’d climbed out the back of a custom van with a black dog. Mom was still the queen bee back then and had finally, that same month, left dad—after four of his affairs and just one closed-fist blow to the head. A whole life wasted. Mom pretty much hated men, but maybe because He appeared the downright opposite of dad—long honey hair, skinny arms, sandals—she saw my dazzle and just sighed through her nose. Don’t you sign the wrong dotted line, Addie, she said, as she always did.

So when I came through the kitchen door last Sunday it was like one of those time warps from a sci-fi movie or something. I walked the same strip of carpet I had all those years before; I tried to mimic the same walk. I didn’t have to try to mimic the smile and neither did He. Even though Max was chatting on the phone with one of his buddies, I could feel him watching and I have to admit I wished he wasn’t. At 12 the poor kid has barely started noticing girls, so he didn’t have any business seeing his mama acting like one.

I flipped the order pad and cocked my hip right up against the table edge and looked straight into his brown eyes. I was aware of how bald he was and the meat on his cheeks, not to mention the fat wedding band, as I’m sure he was aware of my extra pounds, but it didn’t matter. Max ambled over all fake casual and checked the sugar packets and napkins on the next table. I flicked my eyes at him and saw that he was studying the stranger’s profile. I felt a surge of panic.

“Max, bring this gentleman a Dos Equis and a water, please,” I told him. He glanced at me before floating off to the cooler.

I flashed three fingers at Him and got a bright wink in return. Then I asked Heather to cover for me so I could make a couple of calls.

***

The alley door opens directly onto the freezer door and I had him by the belt before he could tap at the frame. I pulled him in and slid the safety bolt through the door handle so we wouldn’t end up like the slabs of pork and also so we wouldn’t be interrupted. The bare bulb hummed and blinked and dropped enough light for the glimpses that make up these kinds of encounters: the wild crescent of an eye, a tiny bubble of saliva on a canine tooth, a fingernail etching flesh, a black triangle of pubic hair raising toward my eyes.

The roll-away wire shelves skated around; his shoulder slammed into one of Dale Hackley’s sides of beef; my bare back melted the skim of ice on the metal wall; our breath spun our heads in blur. But at some point after we’d knocked the urn of minestrone across the floor and had to migrate to a stack of cardboard boxes to avoid the mess, the thing changed. His long fingers left my nipples and found the back of my neck and his torso levered down from on high to press against me. The thrusts grew softer but deeper and his breath entered my ear like prayer. Even when he turned me around and gathered my hair in his hands he was gentle. Again, I knew that I’d never match up with a man the way he and I did when we arched our spines together.

Our breath started to even out and the steam around us faded away and the pounding of blood quieted and the weak bulb seemed to surge brighter. He was still inside me but was shrinking away, and then he fell out. The cold was suddenly in my bones. I wanted to turn around but I didn’t.

You gotta go, I said. First, I mean.

I heard his zipper and the clink of belt.

Let’s do it again sometime, he said, just like he had in 1989 and we both laughed like we had then, too. It came surprisingly easily, me with my ass still in the air.

Sure, I said, and reached back to drop the skirt over me. I heard him fiddle with the handle, then the yawn of the steel door and whisper of the seal as it closed again.

As I sat down on a big tote of winter greens and wiped myself with a dishrag, I thought back on the first time, after he’d left me alone in the walk-in:

I’d still been bent over, feeling his seed drop out of me. It landed on the loose flap of a box of catfish fillets with a steady patter. A kind of sad panicked feeling had started up in my guts as I’d looked down between my legs and watched the cold immobilize the milky drops—after being abused, the walk-in already getting back to its work, preserving. I’d heard a bang and clatter in the kitchen and my pulse had jumped. I’d gathered myself up and righted the rollaway shelves. I’d been all the way to the door when I turned back to rip the flap of cardboard free of the box and stow it high on a wire shelf.

***

When I came out of the kitchen, four truckers were attacking boysenberry pie slices and sucking on mugs. He was gone, of course. I wrote up a check for the truckers, counted out the till and wiped down my half of the tables. Then I set up at His table to count my tips and smoke my daily Winston, but I couldn’t focus right. Max had probably already forgot about Him and his Dos Equis as he pressed napkins into holders; he was likely already thinking about World of War or whatever that internet game is that he hooks himself up to as soon as he’s home. He’s not really suspicious—and, besides, it wasn’t really a lie I told him about his coming from a donor.

I wondered if He’d paused on his way to the car to look at Max. He might’ve done the math, especially if he noticed Max’s long fingers, honey hair and square jaw. But the math would have been all off—as off as I was in thinking He’d come back sooner. As off as I was in hoping against my instinct for almost a decade that I’d meet someone else that I fit with as perfectly.

For the young who want to

2010-11-03T07:14:00.003+02:00

(and) For Marge Piercy

You should: buy spiral notebooks for no more than .99 cents

Fill them with the dirty feathers of city birds that still catch the light sometimes

With leaves that have plummeted both too soon and too late

Fill them with doodles of genitals if you’re feeling risqué

Fill them with the half-smiles of sloppy coffee mugs

Carry them with you everywhere; take them out like packs of Camels

To rest next to the water glass

You should: get out of bed when the ripping of tires

On the rainy asphalt is too much for dream

Bring up a blinking cursor and don’t be afraid

To try and see it move to the beat of a tune

You haven’t dialed up in a long time

Or ever

Close your eyes against the pixels and

Let your fingers play scrabble with the keyboard

You should: make a list of publications that

DO NOT ACCEPT SIMULTANEOUS SUBMISSIONS

And send all of them your best work

Collect rejection letters like stamps

Pin them to your desk like a blueprint

And wallpaper your bathroom

When you have enough

You should: eavesdrop on strangers

Read the toilet stall walls

Write fan letters to the poets

That publish in Real Change

Place pornographic fridge magnets

Everywhere they will stick

Give your books dog ears and break their spines

You should: buy a helmet

And knock your head against the desk

Clean the stove with a toothbrush

Curse the best and the worst of the bestsellers and steal from them too

Cry because you are so full of words

That you just have to write

Grand Launch: PonderLounge

2010-10-23T02:17:00.000+03:00

For anyone who works with youth and the arts, YOU GOTTA CHECK THIS OUT! I worked with PonderLounge founders to develop one of the "residents." See if you can figure out which one. This is a fantastic resource...

Facing Reality: A Rallying Cry for Writers Who Have Decided They Have to do Something Else, Also

2010-10-20T21:45:00.000+03:00

Rachel Kadish’s recent essay, “Face the Fear: A Rallying Cry for Writers,” has banged around in my mind since I read it, hungover, sucking a bloody mary in a street front bar in Wilmington, North Carolina. I’d attended the MFA program there years before, fallen in love with the town and some of the authors that I’d shared classrooms and barrooms with. That week I had returned to in order to meet the newborn child of perhaps the most talented writer I know who still has not sent out a single piece of writing for consideration. Also, I was there to convene four friends to commiserate about the state of the publishing world, our careers and, alternately, to rally one another to keep on pushing on.

So Kadish’s essay probably did more for me on that morning than the vodka-soaked olives.

There’s a lot to admire about her verve and encouragement, her command of wildness even inside of a perfectly-wrought essay. Peppered with quotations from Toni Morrison to Mike Tyson to the paraphrase of an unnamed, wise old Pole, Kadish allows us to hear a mandate for our art. The state of the publishing world and its unpredictability gives us permission to take big cartoon hammers to all the molds, she claims. Remember, she says, via the old Pole’s words to her, if we lived in other societies we’d be celebrated, respected, not pigeonholed, misunderstood and struggling. Most importantly she reminds us that we are the custodians of complexity in a world that would very much like everything streamlined and vacuum packed and delivered (as books may be, as microchips to our brains, she muses).

The tiny black and white thumbnail of Kadish next to her bio grew sexier by the sip in the molasses hot light of the Carolina morning.

So it was really a bummer, as I sucked the last salty sip from my glass, and placed Poets & Writers face down on my Theories of Personality textbook, that I am arguably in the process of defying her advice.

***

Defiance is too strong a word. My moves are not really defiant, but they are somewhat contrary. Six years after completing an MFA degree, I’m two months from pursuing a second master’s degree, this time in psychology, with the aim of becoming a child and family therapist. I had walked away from college with a BA in 1996 and such leather-headed aplomb that, in response to my advisor’s opinion that I could publish my senior thesis on the rise of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, I’d laughed and told him he could have it. It only took a few months of lonely struggling and jobs I was no good at to realize I needed to return to get my ass kicked—punted, really—into the so-called “writing life,” even if it was a return to “academia.”

Never did I imagine that I’d be 33 and scrambling to assemble another application for another long crawl through the classroom toward a future that I might reasonably be confident about.
The MFA experience did punt my ass down the road—more to the point, I clawed and leapt and sprinted down it. I didn’t do everything right, but I came as close as I could: got a teaching fellowship and raked in commendations and evaluations; I wrote instead of sleeping and revised over microwave dinners; I started stuffing envelopes and buck-shotting my essays out into the world and grinned through the bitter as the rejections rolled in. And through some process of karmic-literary alchemy that I didn’t understand, a pair of the rejections transformed into acceptances and even a nomination for a Pushcart. I graduated and moved thousands of miles away and pushed on. I won a contest. Then I published my MFA thesis in the American Lives Series at the University of Nebraska Press. I wrote an elegiac memoir for my best friend. I wrote and rewrote one novel, then two, then three. I wrote a dozen short stories. I was anthologized. I went through two big-shot literary agents who were both 100% certain they would sell my work in a heartbeat. They didn’t. It dawned on me that instead of riding the certainty of my next book, I had better capitalize on the supremely modest achievement of publishing one little book. My own college passed me over. Most—from adjunct gigs at English departments to hallowed Creative Writing Fellowships—ignored me. I sighed and went knocking on the doors of sundry community colleges and despite how impressed they always were with my CV, there were simply no openings, they said, and they were sorry. The suggestion was that I was overqualified—something I’d never feared experiencing.

One bitingly cold autumn afternoon, I was hurtling on my motorcycle between a part time job at a domestic violence shelter and my weekly class at an inner city high school as a Writer in the Schools, vaguely planning the two hour course I’d teach later that night at Richard Hugo House, and it hit me like the broadside of a semi-truck: I’d busted my ass for years and all I had to show for it was a desperate teaching artist hustle that was in no way sustainable or ultimately fulfilling. I looked down and found I was going 90 mph.

***

It would not be true to say that I’m studying again merely because I was disappointed by the “literary life.” Therapy is something that called to me as early as high school. More to the point, my desire for a bigger toolbox to help struggling youth has gotten a lot deeper over the last years of social service work. It would be true to say that if I had been offered even an adjunct teaching position at a junior college that would allow me to remain ensconced in the open cockpit of the “writing/literary/academic” life, I probably would have jumped on it.

But I’m married to a high-achieving doctor. I have an eight-month old boy whose raucous arrival in the world hurled my self-concept into stupendous disarray. The leather on my head started to feel less like a badge and more like a deformity. What was he going to tell his friends in kindergarten that his dad does? One might scoff at the shallow, slavish, mainstream nature of my concern—but know that I’ve scoffed at it with more venom, more often, and still come back around the to the inevitable truth of my concerns, to say nothing of the inevitable disappointment of “the writing life.”

But, of course, Rachel Kadish isn’t telling me not to go back to school. In fact, many people that I respect and who are not so disappointed with their “writing lives” have encouraged me to go back to school—and they encourage me not as grownups, parents or mentors, but as writers. Another brilliant Rachel, the Canadian poet Rachel Rose has been telling me for years to stop with the head banging. Work, she says, get another real job. Volunteer more, start a career that allows you to pay it forward more than writing. Stay away from the academy. That’s what real writers do. Even if that means time for staring at the blinking cursor becomes wickedly limited. Rachel Rose is up before her three children, writing at 5 a.m.

Rachel Kadish says, “Your furnace will die. Your boss will double your workload but not your salary. There will be out-of-town guests, projectile vomit, blasting in the neighborhood, wildebeests in the basement. And you’ll have to step away from your writing to deal with these crises.”

I think I’m afraid that chasing a career as a therapist is a swollen, self-chosen version of clearing the wildebeests out of the basement, a decision that will cause me to step so far away I might not make it back.

***

Part of me wants to throw eggs at Rachel Kadish; after all, she’s published two novels with mainstream presses and teaches in an MFA program. And when she encourages her readers with, “And if the publishing sky is falling? Write freer. If no one is paying anyway, shouldn’t we write what we want rather than what we think will sell?,” she again causes me dissociative emotion: I want to cheer and sneer at once. I want to believe her, I adore the boost, the call to arms; I email the article to my students that they might take it to heart. And yet, when I write these days, I chip away at a YA thriller/mystery that I am writing in major part because I think that, finally, after throwing my conscience into several books, this is one that might sell.

However unsexy it is, the need to qualify Kadish’s rallying cry presses on me. Because I know five people, four of them a good bit younger than me, that are beginning their MFA careers. They are so much like me a while ago: bursting with passion, swooning with the dream, manic on the marvel of the situation before them. They are devouring anthologies late into the night and volunteering to workshop stories they haven’t written. They are alive and they have no fear. And they also believe, to a one, that they will “make it” as writers and the image of “making it” does not much resemble my life. They are all amassing debts that will take years to slough off. I think they think they’ll be able to do it by book sales and a tenured professor’s salary. I suspect that the dozen ads for MFA programs (Discover the Writer’s Life in New York City!) that surround Kadish’s “Rallying Cry” don’t mind my young friends believing that.

***

In what might be my last gig for some time as a “teaching artist” (you think people look at you weird when you say you’re a writer, try “teaching artist”), I’m doing an essay class at Seattle’s one and only Richard Hugo House. We meet late on Tuesday nights for two hours, everyone scraping into his or her seat already slightly weary. Travel mugs of cold coffee, the bracing air from the cracked window, the glow from a playfield’s vapor lights across the street, and the bright shouts of children running headlong after a soccer ball keep us alert.

I’d decided in Wilmington that I wanted to share Kadish’s essay with others. I asked my students what made it a successful essay. As they discussed, making astute observations about techniques such as bookending and paraphrase and self-effacement, I realized my own answer was simply that she inspired me and irked me, caused me to chuckle and growl, agree and disagree. More importantly, she caused me to sit down, and fucking write about it.

Quake

2010-10-14T05:10:00.001+03:00

For _ . _ .

I haven’t seen him unburdened since summer collided with autumn and his tipsy levity went to smoke on the stage of graduate school. Now it’s spring—one of the first days of spring, actually. The cats are hunting lizards on the back porch as the Floridian foliage begins its annual riot at the fence line. The dogs are tussling on the dirty carpet, a black and gray yin yang blur. Our pancakes are only half-eaten; we paused when CNN started unrolling news of the Nepali royal massacre, but even this didn’t dampen his mood despite his having lived there once upon a time. The phone squeals and I have to quash an eye-roll; it’s probably one of his new literati buddies wanting to waste the end of the three-day weekend talking about writing and drinking to mitigate against the possibility of actually having to write later. He doesn’t jump for it, though, so I go to it. The line is fuzzy, the voice is formal and wants to know if he lives here. I tell him he does and the woman catches herself in a sigh and trades the information through the fiber optic: she’s at the Consulate in Lima, Peru. His eyes on me feel like hot moths but all the heat goes out of my skin and whatever reaction I should build is a hopeless seed. I hand over the receiver and watch as in twenty seconds the news falls through him like an anvil upon a rickety old house, splintering boards that were never meant to bear that sudden, that much, weight. When he hands the phone back to me with a soft smack, like we’ve just made a deal, and wanders into his office, closes the door quietly, I pause for a tickertape moment, realizing that for the last seconds the world exists as it was: sunrays, the hum of riding mowers, the chatter of the news, the giddy play of animals whose great charm is that they lack reason.

Bumper Thoughts

2010-09-25T22:33:00.001+03:00

There are moments on the roads when I marvel at the scope of the differences that surge between myself and all the souls in their steel boxes around me. An obvious example is when I glimpse a W ‘04! sticker, seeing as how that worked out. But the really distracting moments are when I catch sight of the pink dot of a Palin 2012! adorning an otherwise ordinary back windshield. I sometimes twist the throttle and weave ahead just to get a glimpse of the driver’s profile, just a curious peek at a strange species. I understand that this is a regional marvel; I have laid enough rubber across the tarmac of other states in my life—and, indeed, in the last years—to know that Palin stickers are to some regions what Obama stickers are to us here in the Northwest. Lest I be perceived as a lofty, lefty, motorcyling wonk, allow me to say that there are likely as many bumper stickers along the “liberal” spectrum that baffle and/or annoy me to the point of causing me to drop my bike. If one more dingy Volvo driving motherfucker commands me to Question Authority, for example, I may bang on his window and ask him who the hell he is to tell me what to do. Likewise with the mandate to Coexist, accompanied by a dozen religious and pagan symbols. What exactly does that angry looking old lesbian think we’re doing, all sitting her quietly in traffic together? What more would she ask? A heart circle before the light changes? She doesn’t even look approachable. Or the timid flock of Anglo, city-dwelling, Western people with the Tibetan Om symbol on board. Is that a statement? And, if so, isn’t it kind of beside the point? The smug 35 MPG announcements on the veritable fleet of Priuses (Priui?), which makes me want to cut them off on my 75 mpg Suzuki, but they probably wouldn’t infer correctly.

And then there are the asininities that fall between the poles decisively: Calvin (of Calvin & Hobbes fame) peeing on all kinds of presumably un-cool items, like the UN flag or a San Francisco 49ers logo. There is: Happy Go Lucky. Git ‘Er Done! I Love My Dog.

I’m beginning to sound like a humorless dud, a dour reader of the popular imagination, but that’s not the case. I should point out that there are bumper stickers that I find clever, endearing, or even cutting in just the right measure. Keep Honking, I’m Reloading is undeniably righteous, as is the rebuttal quip My Dog is Smarter Than Your Honor Student, though the latter might could get you pummeled by the wrong road raging papa. Dog is My Copilot and Jesus Save Me From Your Followers are just the kind of nuance that I can get next to (without honking).

And in case you think I’m boring, blank-bumpered (ok, so I own a truck, too) and anonymous, I should say that I’ve placed my own bumper stickers of late and am undeniably a fan, at the end of the day, of having something to read while sucking gas fumes and rocking the clutch. I’ve got two in particular that I’m proud of—twists on themes inspired by the myopic and self-righteous of America that we must share the road with:

Support Our Troops: Bring Them Home Now!

And

Uncle Sam Wants You To Learn Spanish!

I enjoy watching people trying to decide where to locate me on their spectrum—how close to tailgate; whether or not to allow me into the lane with a wave.

What Fear So Great?

2010-09-10T08:21:00.004+03:00

Did I see the man curled against chain link with his blade and his wood some weeks ago? Did I register the knife in my peripheral vision, shift my gaze to his face? Did he nod and smile at me to acknowledge my presence, to quietly indicate that he was working, was an artist, like myself, unlike myself already seated and working art instead of walking to the foolhardy task of "teaching" art?

I would say "yes, surely," to all of this, but the truth is a slippery thing. The truth is something told by dashboard cameras that capture 10% of the view of what things, naughty or nice, just or unapologetically brutal, occur in the periphery of the camera. The truth is that to me John T. Williams appears friendly, harmless at least, possibly even wise. I must believe, simultaneously, that to officer Ian Birk, the same man looked threatening enough to kill before, presumably, he or someone else more or less innocent was killed by the legal length blade that John T. Williams held to his carving. I do not believe myself more or less virtuous or honest than Ian Birk, having never met the man, but our versions of the truth might be as divergent as the definition of "imminent danger."

Do you see the confetti of questions tossed frivolously by Officer Birk's small cloud of cordite? Is it merely exhausting or is it quite necessary--or both--to answer them all? Are the questions of race, of policy, of power, of law, of information not all at stake here? Could it not be said that if justice is not defined and served here than we all suffer and will continue to? Or is it merely the byproduct of a society menaced by weapons and rage that we must accept (as very distinct societies once accepted) sacrifices to vague and terrible gods?

Under one minute. A half-deaf, frail man. A legal knife. A block of wood. Four bullets. Ten feet away.

What fear is so great as to compose this?

RIP John T. Williams.

Stranger 1

Stranger 2

Komo 4 Video Report

Lifting the Lid

2010-08-21T22:43:00.001+03:00

for Anastacia Tolbert

There are US Navy trunks
That live like sea turtles beneath
Cast-off cassettes; clothes and
Faded orange life jackets in
What was once my father’s basement

I haven’t seen the liner paper twisting
Free of wartime glue
In years

Haven’t smelled the burst of dust and parchment,
Desiccated skin and sawdust sprinkled
Like dried ablutions over
My father’s dog-eared notebooks, half-smiles
Of coffee mug stains on manuscripts in
Smith-Corona font

It was his father that was in the war and
Whatever the iron USMC padlocks secured
Was not originally paper and dreams
I think often of the brass hinges cool
As the Pacific to the touch
Rusting closed forever from disuse

Molting

2010-08-14T00:55:00.002+03:00

for Macklemore & Scribes

When snakes molt they aren’t reborn; the loss of old, used scales shouldn’t be conflated with a new beginning, just a shedding of skin. But I think that we are so ravenous for metaphor that we don’t check the seal on it very consistently. Or maybe it’s that we’re so desperate for new beginnings that we conjure suggestions of them wherever we can. New beginnings are rarely poetic and rarely fit with any convenience into metaphorical boxes.

I was not reborn when my father died I just sluffed off a layer of childhood that wasn’t ready to go, much like my father wasn’t ready to go, so I bled. The universe is a restless child with a thumbnail and someone else’s scab.

I wasn’t reborn when Farah died either, I just let the violence of her going beat all the dust of dead ideas from me like a broom does from a rug. The dust was not composed of impossible dreams of her survival but it was composed of exaggerated notions of my own evolution: I would have peace, I thought, because I knew it was coming. I would be happy for her, I thought, because I knew she wanted death. The lies were not about her, but about my own readiness and those lies drew blood.

I was not reborn when my son was born either. I just had to step out of some really silly clothes that I’d long ago outgrown anyway. The pants are still hooked around my ankles and cause me to stumble from time to time, and being mostly naked is kind of embarrassing. But he doesn’t know the difference yet, though we sleep, play and cry skin to skin.

The Dance of the Stupid and Hateful

2010-08-09T09:08:00.002+03:00

Yesterday in Afghanistan some 10 medical aid workers were lined up and shot in the head by the Taliban. The word is that they had Christian money behind their work, whether or not they were actually proselytizing, and that earned them execution. They had been at work providing free medical care to Afghanis for over 40 years.

In New York, the construction of a Mosque and Islamic Center on a small fraction land NEAR what has become known as "ground zero" has conjured tsunamis of “patriotic” outrage. Signs that say, We’ll Have a Mosque At Ground Zero When There’s a Mega Church in Mecca abound at street protests. A woman in California called for an anti-mosque rally and invited everyone to bring their dogs because Muslims hate dogs, allegedly.

What I propose is exporting everyone self-identified as a militiaman, tea party member, or white supremacist, and send them to a really hardily jungled island on the other side of which will land every Taliban soldier to fight it out, hand to hand, branch to branch. But they’d all end up plugging one another beneath the same moon and plotting, again, to take over the world.
over the world.

Tremendos

2010-07-13T23:08:00.002+03:00

One of many expressions in Castilian Spanish that I wish translated well into English is the common "es tremendo/son tremendos." Literally it's what it sounds like: "tremendous." But its use is better understood as "unbelievable" or "shameless" but neither quite do justice.

I'll let the following clips and quotation from a retired Israeli General (who authored the "investigation" into the commando assault on the Gaza Aid Flotilla) illustrate it.

Es tremendo.

"...But also we did find some...very positive findings and one of them that should be emphasized is the very professional and courageous way that the Israeli commando behaved on this ship...."

- Giora Eiland, Retired Israeli General, quoted on Democracy Now!

Animal Control

2010-07-13T01:51:00.002+03:00

Circa 1995: on a camping trip to the Olympic Peninsula me and three friends are surrounded in the small hours of the morning by some 50 to 60 raccoons. They move in from various points and as we defend camp (throwing rocks, pine cones, kicking) on one side, they move in from another.

Circa 2003: my ex-girlfriend’s dog tears a barking blue streak into the depths of her yard in the middle of the night; she follows and finds a pack of raccoons backing away from her snarling dog. In the foreground is her beloved cat, partially disemboweled and mutilated. He dies slowly over the next two days.

Circa 2005: my friend Paul James, hearing a commotion down by the water at his father’s home, finds his dog being attacked and dragged by a pack of a half dozen raccoons, into the bay where they are attempting to drown her. He eventually is able to beat them away with a wooden oar and get his dog back.

Circa 2008: shortly after we move back with our Spanish cat to a Seattle apartment, I find a raccoon halfway up the dogwood tree outside the house, shimmying up towards our porch where the cat hangs out. I deliver many blows with a broomstick to this raccoon’s body to no avail. When I literally knock it out of the tree, it glowers at me from the ground for awhile before sauntering off.

Circa 2009: in the backyard of our new home, during a summer’s evening dinner outside, my old Golden Retriever sniffs across the lawn and immediately locks up with a raccoon in the bushes. By delivering a few kicks to both the raccoon and my dog, I manage to get Kaya off and locked away. I return to find the raccoon in my tree about 8 feet off the ground. I hit him directly with an entire can of pepper spray, which does not impress him (but does float across the yard to poison my wife and inlaws). Eventually he climbs down and walks away.

2010: my mother’s friend in Leavenworth, WA happens to hear a commotion in the woods outside her house and discovers two raccoons mauling and attempting to drown her Golden Retriever. She manages to knock them off the dog with rocks, at which point they turn on her and chase her back into her house.

Last night: I finally purchase and inflate a kids’ swimming pool for my baby in the backyard. It’s been 93 degrees out, so I figure I’ll let the water warm up slightly overnight. In the morning the pool is deflated and empty and ripped into colorful tatters. Floating in the remains of the water is a tiny intestine and pair of kidneys, like miniscule, transparent beans.

****

When I tell the nice woman at PAWS animal shelter (where I call to see what I can do around the house to dissuade raccoon crime) the above stories, she says “Oh my, I’ve never heard of that.” She says that raccoons don’t “really” hunt, though they will eat meat.

She tells me that live-trapping of raccoons for relocation is no longer considered a humane or effective option since they may be rejected by already-local raccoons—even beaten up or killed!

She asks me if it’s possible that there’s a food source in the neighborhood that they are attracted to. I ask her if she means the block-long alleyway lined with trash and compost cans.

She suggests that I consider installing “coyote rollers” (rolling pin like contraptions) or sheet metal on top of my fence to keep them out. I explain that I have a wooden fence with slats and holes in it like everyone else in the neighborhood.

She reluctantly acknowledges that the primary problem is one of overpopulation.

She reminds me that though they are cute, they are not nice.

I thank her very much.

A Perfect Afternoon

2010-06-19T11:22:00.003+03:00

Dear Seattle Times

2010-06-17T20:37:00.003+03:00

Article: Video%20captures%20policeman%20striking%20jaywalking%20suspect

Dear Steve Miletich & Jennifer Sullivan.

I'm writing to express my displeasure and, frankly, indignation in the June 15th issue of the Seattle Times (online). Like many residents of Seattle and concerned citizens in general, when I first came across footage of the incident at hand, I turned to local media for some more information and context. While I did obtain more information from your article, and you did provide more context, I have to say that much of it was immensely inappropriate and unprofessional and that, additionally, there seemed to be some glaring holes in the reportage.

To wit:

In the third paragraph of your article you write:

"Police arrested the girl, Angel L. Rosenthal, and her friend, Marilyn Ellen Levias, both of whom have criminal records."

Firstly, I wonder when the Seattle Times opted to release the names of juveniles as a matter of course, given that Ms. Levias is 17 years old. More importantly, I wonder why it is relevant to mention the criminal records of these two young people before even examining the incident in depth. If they had been honor students, would you have mentioned that aspect of their characters? Is the fact that they have criminal records meant to inform the readership of something forthcoming in the article that is relevant, perhaps that one or both had outstanding warrants and were therefore wary of being detained? Not that I could find.

Paragraph 5:

"It also comes as the department is conducting a criminal investigation into the actions of two other officers who were caught on videotape April 17 kicking a prone Latino man, with one using ethnically inflammatory language."

I find this formation interesting. In the second half of in the article (which, research shows, less than 50% of readers will reach, no matter how well-written), you are more forthcoming about the appalling abuse of the Latino man, but not here. It would seem that you are interested in providing readership with a great deal of information in your prose given your intensive look into the lives of the young women involved in the present incident. In the name of full delivery of information, I think that "kick" is a rather soft way of describing "stomped" by a pair of officers. Also, "ethnically inflammatory language" seems an awfully soft shoe way (excuse the pun) to describe the racial slurs and threats of severe bodily harm issued by Officer Cobane to an innocent man in the prior videotaped incident.

"During the incident, a hostile crowd of onlookers gathered and appeared to be cheering Levias and Rosenthal"

Really? I've watched the video several times, as have many residents of Seattle and readers of the Seattle Times. I realize here that you are quoting the police report, but it seems that it would be incumbent upon you as investigators to provide an alternate point of view, which would be readily available from ANY of the other young people present, non of which you managed to track down and interview. "Hostile" seems a rather extreme way to describe the group of young people who seem to me more interested in trying to defuse the situation. And after some examination, I can't find any "cheering" going on at all.

"Neither Levias nor Rosenthal is a student at Franklin. There is no record that Rosenthal ever attended Seattle Public Schools, a district spokeswoman said. Levias is a graduate of the district's Interagency Academy, an alternative program, according to the district. She received her diploma in February.........Rosenthal appeared Tuesday in King County Juvenile Court, where supporters said that she lives at the Virginia Miller House, a residential facility with behavior-modification programs for teen girls, but was in contact with her family. It's unclear why the girl is not living with her family."

As I said above, all of this, in addition to the extensive information about previous arrests of the females involved, all of which were DISMISSED or deferred, appears irrelevant to me. It would seem that you are attempting to create negative characters of the two young women so as to influence the manner in which readership thinks about the situation. Particularly in the absence of any extensive research into background of Officer Walsh AND the absence of research into the other jaywalking incidents that have escalated into violence that you merely refer to, this all strikes me as highly inappropriate.

"Marilyn Jamerson, Rosenthal's aunt, spoke after the hearing in support of the girl.
'She's perfect; that's why we call her Angel," Jamerson said. "She was named Angel for a reason.'"

Clearly this comment is a matter of public record and you have every right to use it. But what exactly is your purpose? To illustrate the "other side" of the girl whose character you've successfully flayed with other, irrelevant information? I find that hard to believe. It almost feels tongue-in-cheek; obviously Rosenthal is not perfect nor an angel.

I've noted the presence of several questionable passages in your article; as for the notable absences, allow me to briefly outline them:

One, as I've said, there is total dearth of statements from the eyewitnesses to the incident and family and friends of the girls (except for the absurd "angel" statement) despite the fact that these were no doubt available.

Two, as I briefly mentioned, there is no detail about past jaywalking incidents that have escalated into violence and the findings of probes and reports related to those.

Three, there is no discussion whatsoever of the well-known and historical tension between the SPD and the black community, which seems particularly relevant with respect to this incident and the kind of ill-will it may conjure. To my mind, the most troubling part about this incident is that SPD policy calls for officers to create situations such as this to enforce the universally-laughable infraction of jaywalking, yet you barely mention the policy angle.

Four, you completely fail to interrogate the professionalism of Officer Walsh. Does it ordinarily require more than 2.75 minutes for an officer to detain a suspect that is half his or her size? What does that indicate about the training practices of the SPD? How did that protracted and messy struggle contribute to the tension of the situation? What other methods besides a closed-fist blow to the face did the officer have at his disposal to deal with the interfering young woman?

I could go on, but I think this is quite enough. Perhaps you think I'm nitpicking here, but I remind you of the sensitivity and fragility of these situations, of which I'm sure you're well aware. I hope very much that in the future, the Seattle Times will do a better job in its analysis of violent incidents between citizens and the police.

Sincerely,

Eli Hastings

Article: Video%20captures%20policeman%20striking%20jaywalking%20suspect

SPD, Once Again, Demonstrating its Valor and Professionalism

2010-06-17T14:00:00.002+03:00

I post this particular link to this video because I admire what the narrator has to say at the outset. He's right, of course: you should NEVER lay your hands on a police officer, even if you think you are protecting a friend from unlawful force. It's not going to turn out well, as the detainee here was trying to tell her friend, too late.

It would be facile to howl over the ugliness of punching a teenage girl in the face. It would be doubly as easy to decry the fact that it was a white, male officer and that the girl punched was black. I will leave that to articulate firebrands the internet over. What really interests me in my new capacity of progressive adult (versus infantile leftist--that part of me that wanted to title this post "Fuck the Police"), is how the Seattle Police Department, after all of the incidents of both excessive force and alleged racism over the years, can possibly employ an officer who would behave this way in this situation. Given the relationship between this police department and the black population of the Central District and Valley (this takes place right at the border, in front of Franklin High School and its looming Quaker mascot for a touch of irony), it is the mark of truly disastrous policy management that inept idiots--if not brutal racists--are patrolling that hood.

Oh yeah--the crime for which the arrestee was initially stopped for was jaywalking.

Some Much-Needed Truth

2010-06-16T10:20:00.001+03:00

"........This strange discourse can only be deciphered if we understand the two apparently contradictory themes that have come to dominate the emotional landscape of Israel. The first is a trenchant belief that Israel exists to realise Jewish power; the second is an equally strong sense that Israel embodies the Jewish people’s collective experience as the eternal victims of history...."

Read

Pilgrim

2010-05-31T19:51:00.001+03:00

Flashquake!

So Crazy!

2010-05-28T07:57:00.003+03:00

I HATE it when people compare Israel with, like, SOUTH AFRICA. It totally pisses me off. It's, like, so offensive. As IF Israel would have anything to do with South AFRICA after, like, what was done to the Jews??? Hello???

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/24/israels_most_illicit_affair

Coast Guard Grounds Ships Involved in Spill Cleanup After 7 Fall Ill; BP Reportedly Preventing Fishermen from Wearing Respirators

2010-05-27T21:22:00.003+03:00

One of the Best Exchanges From the Gulf (DemocracyNow!)

AMY GOODMAN: What about respirators? Are people wearing respirators?

CLINT GUIDRY (president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association. He’s a third-generation shrimp fisherman): No, ma’am. Having had prior experience, I know these people. They’re friends. They’re family. I bought respirators, and I brought them down to these people. And when they tried to wear them, the BP representatives on site told them that it wasn’t a dangerous situation, and they didn’t need to wear them, and if they did, they would be taken off the job.

AMY GOODMAN: If they wore respirators, they’d be taken off the job?

CLINT GUIDRY: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

CLINT GUIDRY: Because BP lies, and BP protects BP. And that is the biggest problem we have in the south of Louisiana right now, is BP.

CLINT GUIDRY: You know, President Obama ran, and he carried the hopes and dreams of young Americans with him. I would tell him, should I meet with him face to face, to be a man and take control of the situation, because this is totally of control.

AMY GOODMAN: What are the first steps you think he needs to take?

CLINT GUIDRY: Have a military takeover of the cleanup, especially. Let BP and their, quote-unquote, "expertise" be responsible for shutting this well off.

JUAN GONZALEZ: But what do you say to those even in the government who has say that the government doesn’t have the expertise, that only the oil companies themselves have the expertise, and that the whole cry for a federal takeover would not really change anything?

CLINT GUIDRY: If the oil company is such experts, why are they trying to kill my fishermen?

http://www.gulfaid.org/

Kaya's 11 Years Young...

2010-05-25T20:31:00.002+03:00

Political Dilemmas of an Aging Dissident in Ravenna

2010-05-13T02:10:00.004+03:00

So I was about to strap my baby to my chest and amble down the block, dispersing the following (signs and) letter:

Dear Neighbors on NE 62nd (between 15th Ave NE & Brooklyn Ave that is),
Whereas I recognize there has been past neighborhood disagreement on the topic of whether or not to post signs such as the one I am hereby delivering;

Whereas I am NOT a militant neighborhood-watch type of person and in fact grew up a troubled youth in large part on this very street one block over and consider break-ins and monthly 911 calls par for the course;

Whereas I really don’t care if kids smoke pot, write graffiti under the bridge where homeless folks sleep;

(But) whereas I have a wife, small baby and very sweet non-English speaking nanny in house these days;

(And) whereas I have heard/seen/experienced the following in the last months: car burglary, screams for help by a woman from the depths of the park in the middle of night, screams for help by a man from the depths of the park in the middle of the night, several very blatant drug deals, used syringes in the grass, clear cases of prostitution heading under the bridge;

(And) whereas my superficial research tells me that these type of visual warnings certainly can do no harm (besides visual pollution);

(And) whereas I would much rather not have to confront car burglars or possibly violent types of all kinds in the middle of the night to deter their activities;

I hereby entrust you with one, a Neighborhood Watch sticker and, two, a Neighborhood Watch placard to do with what you wish, while prevailing upon you to imagine a block where virtually every house and car hosts one of these markings and thereby might just gently deter undesired activities in our and our children’s environs.

Peace,

Eli Hastings

Then I came across this:

Is it silly to conflate these two things? Is it merely bleeding heart liberalism that gives me pause about passing out the Neighborhood Watch signs (which clearly state the community's intention to call our "local police department" due to any suspicious activity)? Or is it an alarming drift into middle age-ish, new father, ANGLO, conservatism that prompted me to get online last week and order up these admittedly kind of big brotherish signs in the first place?

Because this feels like a sharp ethical question to me right now. To put it plainly: do I endorse the kind of brutality we see here (and which has been a penchant for the Seattle PD-if you don't believe me, just search "Seattle Police brutality" on youtube) by posting a visible threat to call that same police force? Clearly I'm not going to call them any more or less readily based on the presence of the placards, but am I encouraging vigilance on the part of my neighbors who may or may not be as progressive as me? Who might just be more likely to call after my letter and gifting of this sign when they see a "hispanic" on the block?

I suppose much of this boils down to the resentment of needing the police and yet feeling disgusted by not only their public reputation but also my own experiences with them over my life.

Or maybe it's just the whole righteous indignation about bullies that I possess percolating up again when I see a helpless figure assaulted by a coward.

Thoughts?

Pope Paxton I

2010-05-07T05:04:00.002+03:00

To direct a whole new era in the Catholic Church

Oooops

2010-05-04T02:36:00.000+03:00

April 12th this year was both the eighth anniversary of my father’s death and the Mariners home opener, so needless to say I scoured my schedule and met good friends Alex and Ben and my brother KC at a meathead-packed sports bar a stone’s throw from the stadium at about noon. Bellied up to the sticky bar we put away a few pitchers in good spirits, then snuck out the door with plastic cups full despite the belated hollering of the diminutive bouncer.

In the saucy pedestrian thoroughfare, lined with hot dog and peanut vendors, criss-crossed by drunken, confused tourists, we strolled. The program vendors set themselves in the midst of this like boulders in a river. When I spotted one of them slanging “two for five” I veered his direction, figuring I needed to brush up on Mariners knowledge given my companions’ expertise and the chance of actually being engaged in another season—a clean slate. I wasn’t thinking about the bomber jacket I got for 3.99 or the hooded sweatshirt I had on when I approached him and I wasn’t any more conscious of the habitual motion I make every time I have to take out my wallet: removing my folding knife from my pocket where it rides, clipped, blocking access. Because everything had taken on a warm glow and there was a general happy cacophony in the air, I didn’t hear the first thing the young man said to me, so I just said, Yeah, give me two. He paused like a video game for a few beats and then with peculiar relief, handed over my programs in exchange for a fiver. When I thanked him, he thanked me back.

I couldn’t believe you were gonna mug me for the programs, he chuckled nervously, as if I still might.

I felt terrible of course, buried my knife deep in my jacket pocket and tried to give him more money and apologized about six times. But as I walked away back into the flow of mismatched fans, and he resumed his cadenced pitch, I considered the long tradition of Seattle sports gaffs that my father had cursed and laughed over and figured I was sort of part of a clumsy tradition that we nonetheless happily persist in.

Thanks Aunt Jess.........(I think?)

2010-04-25T02:01:00.001+03:00

If you ever happen through Wilmington, NC, be sure to stop by the U.S. Trolls. It'll freak you the f*#@ out.

Can You Guess What Happens Next?

2010-04-21T18:27:00.002+03:00

Important to Remember

2010-04-19T23:40:00.000+03:00

Into This World (In 3 Parts)

2010-04-18T04:44:00.001+03:00

1.

MSNBC has something horrific to tell us about.

In Massachusetts and Texas in the last week, two teens were literally bullied to death. Phoebe Prince, an Irish immigrant in the 9th grade got stuck with the moniker of “slut” due to some typical jealousy-based madness at her high school. Thrust into the morass of America without an ally she was isolated, ostracized and chose a loop of rope over another Tuesday.

And John Carmichael, a Texas 8th grader, committed suicide by unspecified means after being consistently, publicly, privately, and one might even say “institutionally” teased because of his small stature. He follows in the footsteps of another middle schooler at the same institution last year. The school underwent “anti-bullying” training at that time.

In my 10th grade classroom (in which I hold the fortunate position of “visiting teaching artist”), it’s dim because one of the more alpha students really doesn’t like the false light. Amid the odd configurations of desks, there are Samoans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Latinos and blacks. Lots of blacks. Some are the coal black of the mines of Congo and Nigeria and carry that haunted sway in their blood. The cackles and slurs of the lighter Afro-Americans around them—Yo Dinka! I got your spear right here! Hungry ass Somali better stay away from my chips—light fuses under their skin that exit as a harsh breath through wide nostrils, or else glance off the enamel of smiles that are truly beyond. Sometimes it’s hard to tell these expressions apart.

Other times it’s a freckled, mixed-race kid draped in awkwardness that inherits the crosshairs: Why you talk like you’re white, bro? Probably want to go to college, get your ass out the ‘hood, huh? This particular tact one day raises the tormented and tormentor like feverish puppets, long limbs tangling around a snapping pair of scissors in the hand of the fed-up freckled kid.

Or the target can be as obvious as the lanky boy whose bones are the only thing finished about him. He peers at the world from the flappy swaddle of athletic gear that’s meant to be swollen by the bulk of a grown athlete. Scrawny ass bitch, bet you’re scared of girls, huh? Yeah, you heard me—so what? What are you gonna do about it? The skinny kid awaits the bell perched on a chair in the corner, his bloomed fists clenched tight at his temples, rocking against the derisive laughter.

In utero, my son rested head down, his two little fists drawn up on either side of his face like a fighter. He followed the scalpel out of his mother’s abdomen and into the world that same way, adding a wail that could only be called violent as he arced across the halogen bulbs and past the masked figures, thrashing. Still now, sxeven weeks later, he keeps those fists close, sometimes to chew on angrily, other times to throw as what I would swear were practiced little jabs against invisible enemies.

2.

A Japanese gaming company called IllusionSoft first released the videogame RapeLay in 2006 but international women’s groups didn’t get their full doses of fury until Amazon.com started slanging it like it was a Harry Potter novel. The resulting uproar caused the game to go “viral” on the internet immediately.

In the game, the player begins by harassing a young, very sexy (it must be said, even if she is a cartoon) woman on a subway platform. At first it’s almost innocuous, possesses a touch of the reverential even—you can “pray” for a gust of wind that will lift the vixen’s skirt. Soon enough, though, that kind of play isn’t cutting it any longer and you get access to a disembodied hand with which to grope at the woman until her sexual arousal meter ticks high enough. Then your assault had better get brutal and fast if you want to compete. Something like bonus points are earned if you can force your victims (which include the original woman’s young daughters) to take abortion pills—especially if this results in their deaths.

My teaching partner Katie and I walked into our 10th grade classroom last week with the hopes of grabbing a plastic seat and inhaling saran-wrapped food before the next period. The teacher was back early from lunch, as was one of the students. He had plugged his Ipod into the classroom’s audio system and he kicked back and head-nodded and guffawed as these lyrics swamped the room: Women are stupid and I don’t respect them. That’s right, I only have sex with them. Show me your genitals, your genitals….

Though I will later find this to be a spoof of the misogynistic nature of pop music by an insightful artist, I know that my student doesn’t get it, and that he finds it wildly entertaining for reasons I would classify as wrong. The teacher rolls her eyes and gives the student a look that might be called playfully scornful. My teaching partner bites a carrot in half and flashes her eyes at the kid as he continues to snicker.

In the penumbra of a scarf-muted bedside lamp in the small hours of the morning, wearing a clean diaper and already full of milk, my son waves his little boxer’s fists in a rage and then bites down on Lili’s nipple with his hard little gums. She cries out in pain and I resist an impulse to snatch him away and get in his face about reasonability and respect, about how we do and do not treat women.

3.

Last week the verdict came down: Albert Snyder, the father of a marine killed in Iraq, was ordered to fork over almost $16,000 to the Westboro Baptist Church.

Westboro Baptist has been busy for decades spreading what they describe as “God’s hatred.” Because of America’s alleged embrace of homosexuality, we have earned ourselves the wrath of God. How has God chosen to punish us in the new millennium? By striking down our soldiers on foreign battlefields. The church grew restless merely picketing the funerals of murdered homosexuals (where they hold signs proclaiming that the deceased are burning in hell and that God hates the family), and moved on to military funerals (where they hold signs that say things like Thank God for IEDS and God Hates the Faggot Military). When Mr. Snyder sued the church over emotional distress caused him and his family, he was awarded $5 million in damages. On appeal, however, the decision was flipped and a judge sided with Westboro, ordering Snyder to pay the appeal costs of the defendants.

On June 15th of last year Westboro cut a swath through the diabolically multi-cultural progressive city of Seattle, hurling anti-Semetic clichés outside the Seattle Jewish Federation, lambasting the fag-loving Methodists of Seattle Pacific University, and making an early morning pit stop outside of my alma mater (the same school I now visit on Fridays as a teaching artist). The reasons for targeting the high school ranged, like most of the church’s reasoning, but had to do with the visible support for President Obama, the school’s charter for a Gay and Lesbian Association, and a chance to shine “truth and light on the little brats for once in their lives.” An analytical mind, however, couldn’t be blamed for musing on whether the racial makeup of the high school had something to do with the descent of the apoplectic Apocalypticos on the edge of the school’s turf. They seethed and surged behind barriers, baring teeth and promising these children that they were doomed to suffer colorful fates in the homeroom of hell.

In response, hundreds of students, faculty, parents, and community members donned the school colors and arrayed themselves across the street. There were funny reports of counter-protest signs (God Hates Figs!, You’re Not in Kansas Anymore!), predictable reports of verbal counter-assaults and obscene gestures, and laudable reports of songs and chants intended to snuff the screeched vitriol.

There is a picture, though, that I like the most of all, of a fifteen year old kid in a purple headband offering a small flower up before the contorted mask of a howling Westboro faithful.

Not beneath the brilliance of the kitchen’s lighting nor in the soupy dimness of the bedroom can my son distinguish between male and female nipples until he gives them a test pull. A blessed chasm of months separates him from any knowledge of gender and a generous gift of years from any fraught consideration of sexuality. God is a soft breast and the play of sunlight on a bare wall. The range of his vision is growing by the day and soon he’ll be able to see better than I can. For now, his gaze locks in on dark-skinned faces faster than on my own or my mother’s or my brother’s. It’s simply that they are better defined, of course, but I like to think he knows he’s witnessing someone different than himself and so he pays more attention, opens his bright eyes wider. All in all, judging by the sounds he makes and his wild little jabs, he likes what he sees of the world and for a few diamond-crusted moments each day, so do I.

Small Victories

2010-04-09T01:19:00.000+03:00

I had a months-long battle with my printer. I cursed the general reputation of the appliance, the precise errors in the printout of my letters, the pathetic performance on computer-generated performance tests, the “deal” the Best Buy geek was assuring me of on my clearance-rate purchase of the best printer in the store, the shoddiness and treachery of generic ink cartridge companies, and the ineptitude of the porn-addicted rat boys they had on the Epson support line. And then Isaac suggested I check my printer settings (“settings?” who ever heard of such a thing? It’s just a printer) and I changed the intended paper feed from “premium photo advanced color detail” or some such nonsense, to “plain” and shit is better.

Be happy for me. Small victories and all.

They Have Yet to Meet, and Yet.....

2010-04-07T08:09:00.002+03:00

Why is it that they hate us again?

2010-04-07T08:05:00.002+03:00

It's all a video game; it's just that the graphics are bad.

The Coming of Pax

2010-03-31T05:05:00.009+03:00

NOTE: Yeah, I know--this essay includes excerpts from earlier blog posts. For my loyal readers (all four of you), I apologize. But I realized that I had expressed important things already when I sat down to write this all out. Lord knows, the light in which I see it all is new and brighter.

e

It’s strange that our handful of appointments under the unforgiving lights of Swedish Medical Center should be the recollections that are blurred for me, wrapped in a sort of bubble paper of the mind. We were ushered by well-made-up professional young women in scrubs and our visits never lasted more than half an hour. Everything was so antiseptic and well lit and freshly printed out and scrubbed down, you’d think it all would be spotlighted in my memory. And yet it’s the succeeding chapter’s moments, the long conversation in the neighborhood coffee shop on a sleepy Sunday morning with the doula, the coconut-tea taste and burnt orange of the midwife’s home office, the test bounces on the birthing center’s soft double beds that are vivid, these are the memories carved from the rush of the last thousand hours like gems from stone.

These are the two worlds we traversed in pregnancy. Months 2 through 7 in a glass and steel tower on Seattle’s Pill Hill. Months 7 through 10 in home offices with cats and over stained coffee tables. There are more and better ways to draw a stroke between these two experiences, but this much is clear: we walked away from what is now considered “traditional” and into what was once considered “traditional;” we walked away from the proclivity toward drugs and interventions and comfort into the loose embrace of “natural” and all of its proponents with their mysterious, knowing smiles.

***
In 1997 my father fell ninety feet from a cliff somewhere deep in Costa Rica. After an airlift to a San Jose hospital and various diplomatic and financial snafus, we got him life-flighted to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle where he would reside for a long, long time. It was my first major exposure to hospital reality. Everything before had fallen into the shallow, bitter drawers: a high school brawl that tore up a friend, my mom’s tumble from a horse that chipped a vertebrae, the fraught and dreamlike visits to my high school sweetheart, locked up for her refusal to eat. Nothing pleasant but also nothing that swamped hospitals themselves in bad juju. But that changed while we sat vigil by my father’s side. Before his flight even landed, I was strong-armed for a bag of crackers by a gang member in the ER. By the time we wheeled him out the front doors into a sunny spring day six weeks later, he’d undergone seven major surgeries and officially died twice. I’d come close to blows with negligent nurses, swept desks clear of their contents in rage, and we’d threatened a lawsuit that was narrowly avoided by the magic of a veteran social worker. I’d learned that if my father had lacked one of the following things—an education, an attentive family, good insurance, monetary resources beyond insurance, or the ability to speak English—he’d have been dead many times over. I learned that doctors are cocky when they’re having success and dismissive when they’re not and that nurses are underpaid, overworked, often inept and unkind at the drop of a hat. That I was superimposing my experience of the Harborview trauma wards across the whole of American hospitals was not a conscious problem for me.

***

When the word came down that my wife was soon to swell with our child, I was standing on a multi-colored carpet in the hallway of Hotel Barceló in downtown Barcelona—ironically, I was in her home town and she was alone ten thousand miles away in mine/ours. The reasons for this are less interesting than the image: me, in the city we’d moved away from less than a year before, back again, watching the last of the Mediterranean sun fall on a palace façade through a fortuitously placed window, between the beehive apartment blocks that conspire to cloak Barcelona’s treasures. Nothing could cloak my joy. Lili wept with apprehension over the satellite and I had to bite my lip to mitigate the sounds of my happiness—after all, she needed to know I was hearing her. There would be plenty of time for me to geek out over the news.

As early as that afternoon I was already experiencing tachycardia over the image of the delivery ward of a major Seattle hospital: a sterile chamber full of whirling, masked gowned figures, high in one of those spires of glass and steel that stand impervious to Seattle’s wicked winter. Lili did test the conversational waters about “our options” for the birth and, because I trust her memory, I know that I did indeed cast away any “alternatives.” It was to be the robot bed and plentiful groves of IV poles and efficient technicians for us. No chances were we taking with my kid.

But as the weeks slid by and what turned out to be a little boy punched and kicked and grew, I loathed every visit to the hospital. I loathed the perky, bright non-recognition from the receptionists. I loathed the fact that the nurses led us around like waitresses. I loathed the fact that the doctor somehow—smoothly, I must say—was always in and out of the visiting room in under five minutes. Now I know how much more I would have loathed if I’d had the information: that they lied to us and told us they were non-interventionist and never hurried births (the lie was right in front of me on that one). I’d have loathed that our own doctor was to be on vacation for three weeks around our due date and either didn’t tell us or didn’t know.

My wife, a Spanish physician herself and forged by the sometimes-callus necessity of socialized medicine, shrugged all this off. My protests about how it was different here, how these people were making loads of money in this culture didn’t resonate much with her. After all, she’d often seen 75 patients in a four-hour shift back in the immigrant barrios of Barcelona. International socioeconomic comparisons were lost on her. But we did coincide on the decision to interview a doula, an experienced birth attendant who’d hear us out about what we wanted our experience to be—unrushed and drug-free and relatively private—and could stand up for our interests.

When we sat down in our neighborhood café on a dour Sunday morning with Rebecca—a gentle, raven-haired girl with big wet eyes and excellent bohemian style—we explained what we visualized. She did some practiced breathing and adjusted the pins in her hair.

“I just have to be totally candid here, you guys. If you want the kind of birth you just described, you should not be going to Swedish—or any other major hospital.”

The world tilted on its axis momentarily, but not in a scary way. Rebecca proceeded to educate us on the reality of hospital-based childbirth, but the analysis she brought was less impactful to me than the realization that I already knew all of it. I had read it in any number of sources. I’d heard it from more than one wise female friend. I’d known, at least nominally, that words like midwife and birthing center were not foreign. But I’d never considered it. Somehow I’d excluded it as an option. And as I realized that, I started to get angry. Because I realized why: it was my trauma and anxiety around hospitals that made me think we needed to be in a hospital. That dose of irony could be lethal.

Rebecca explained that the chances of something going so wrong in a home or birth center labor that surgical intervention would be immediately necessary were astronomically low. The chances of us getting pressure from OBs and hospital staff to bend to drugs and interventions that were expeditious but not necessary, on the other hand, were astronomically high. As I say, we already knew most of this—we’d scoffed at the narcotic ease with which the majority of women enter their ultimate rite of passage, clucked our tongues at the mighty industry constructed around medicalized childbirth. But somehow it hadn’t connected, for me at least, that we were headed into the crucible of exactly that.

We didn’t want to go to war. We didn’t want me to relive buried traumas about doctors and nurses and fluorescent-lit rooms. We wanted to have a baby.

***

So we had only a few weeks to endure before we became a family. And we turned on the hustle: to transfer all of our paperwork to a midwife, smooth things out with Blue Cross/Blue Shield, fill out birth center registration papers, and recreate the momentous narrative of the soon-coming night (day?) that we’d already cycled in our heads in another version many times.

Hospitals are for sick people, I chanted in my head. We repeated to each other what Rebecca had said: Being pregnant is not an illness and giving birth is not a disease. If mom and baby are healthy and have no risk factors, why seek out a hospital? We watched The Business of Being Born and Orgasmic Birth and held hands. We cried a little, joyfully, witnessing the grainy footage of blue-skinned tykes popping past the surface in bathtubs. We read Ina May Gaskin’s many books (ok, I read one) recounting the common-sense magic of the hippie-commune-cum-spiritual-midwifery center “The Farm” in Tennessee and felt stirred, joking about driving southeast.

We went to ninety-minute appointments with Geraldine, a calm, pierced, bicycling midwife in Fremont. Her cat snuck into the appointment room where we leaned against burnt-orange walls and drank coconut black tea and talked about intuition and emotions and listened to the baby’s heart just like we would have in the aseptic, cold cell of a “visiting room” across town. We listened to Geraldine’s assurances that a woman’s body knows what to do and that women have been giving birth naturally for thousands of years.

We rehearsed our Lamaze positions with Rebecca as coach and cheering section, the dogs looking skeptically on.

My mother in law arrived clutching suitcases of frightening Spanish baby clothes and bubbling over with eagerness. My sister in law arrived to calm our mother in law and get her first up-close preview of pregnancy. I blogged and jogged away my anxiety as our due date approached, then cancelled all my commitments and assumed a holding pattern within a short orbit of the house.

And nothing happened. We stimulated nipples, made love, ate spicy foods, walked long miles on the uneven trails of Ravenna Park. We took her to acupuncture and massage sessions meant—promised, in some cases—to trigger labor.

Then came the “no stress tests” and “biophysical assessments” and the presage discussion of “induction options.” Of course this fanatical fixation upon the “due date” felt like just the last (or perhaps not the last) slap in the face by the medical establishment. The gestation period of a healthy woman is between 37 and 42 weeks and the day the woman slides past the magical number, it is assumed to get heavy. And by the time a woman is approaching 42 she’s treated as if she’s picking her way through a minefield. And it’s all statistical, litigious BS, of course, because the number of babies who suffer or die as a result of being overdue is something incredibly low like 1 in a 1000. Yet “42 weeks” (which is often torqued down to 40) is powerful enough motivation to have made its way into not only hospital bylaws and regulations but even midwife protocols and, so, despite any number of tests that showed our baby was healthy, Geraldine would have to insist upon a hospital induction by the time we reached 42.5 weeks.

This is the part that’s been left out of all the pregnancy books; Lili and I would discuss our upcoming bestseller while stuck in gridlock on our way to shop for antique furniture or drink Italian sodas or whatever we were doing to distract ourselves—Still Pregnant. What do you do when your date has come and gone, the family is hovering, you’re too huge to enjoy physical movement, and the professionals are casting pointed glances at the calendar? And how to face the notion of a return to a hospital if you’ve been planning for natural birth at home?

So at 42 weeks we shelved the discussions of waiting longer (and risking a mandated transfer back to hospital care). After a breakfast of happy-pig bacon squiggles and organic strawberries and pancakes, a long last-ditch walk through the unlikely, stark winter sun, I poured Lili a castor oil shot with a raspberry spritzer chaser and she threw it back, then another, with more aplomb that I expected.

Then she pooped mildly once, passed out for four hours, and woke up craving cupcakes.

At 9 p.m. that night we convened at the birth center with the Geraldine, her assistant, a rotund and kind man that shared my name, and our Rebecca, for a strategic huddle: parents to-be, doula, midwives. The plot hatched was to set some kind of awful-sounding cervical stretching device in place for the night and hope that the draft—I suppose—would usher our boy south. And then it was all for naught because Lili was suddenly wet with amniotic fluid, pooping wildly, and feeling the first stabs of contractions.

In a bustle of irony that would later confound me, we left the birthing center and drove quickly home to—hurry! hurry!—get into position for the experience we’d planned on, which would include a relatively mellow and magical few hours of early labor before needing to travel back to the center. The presence of my mother, mother in law, brother, brother’s girlfriend, sister in law, two dogs and cantankerous cat on the main floor did not register with Lili as I helped her up the stairs and into the tiled bathroom where she immediately banged and whooped and stomped around, leaping high over anyone’s notion of early labor and right into the thick of it, as if the little guy was making up for the extra two weeks he’d dallied.

I was far too delighted with the arrival of labor to realize that it was moving inexplicably fast. In the bathroom I devoured a cold plate of chicken and broccoli between contractions, raced to my wife to touch her dumbly when they hit again. As we whispered over the border into February 24th, it occurred to me that I ought to be using my phone app to time contractions. Despite a marked unwillingness to communicate with me on Lili’s part, I was able to deduce that they were coming in every one to four minutes and lasting up to three minutes, which tattered all of the math I had been told to expect and caused me, by one a.m., to use the phone in the old-fashioned manner and call Rebecca.

It should be said that from the moment we arrived at home, Lili had been effectively vocalizing her pain with staggered hollers that began somewhere deep and allegedly made the cat and dogs paw their ears a floor below—without a doubt it made the group of helpless family members wince and pace and wring their hands. For my part I heard the gorgeous savagery of natural birth and welcomed her volume as much as her breath. As did Rebecca with her sleep-tousled locks and bright eyes and Doulas Do It All Night tee-shirt. As did Geraldine and her assistant, slipping into the penumbra of the bedroom at 2:30 with duffle bags of supplies for what we all assumed now would be a home birth.

I don’t know exactly when the experience tilted. Geraldine and Rebecca remember it as some time past dawn. I remember the unnerving, soupy light of guttering candles illuminating the first moments of pain and fear—as distinct from labor and anxiety. What I know for sure is that the sounds coming from my wife marked the change accurately; no longer were they merely the feral catharsis of someone pushing oxygen out of lungs and over teeth; at some point they became simply the screams of a victim, the sounds of someone being sawed in half. Contractions were running into one another and Lili was weeping in desperation between them. With her submerged in a bathtub, I leaned over her from above and pressed my forehead flush with hers as she ground her teeth and every muscle locked like someone had dropped a live wire in the water. With her trembling arms around my shoulders, I knelt before the toilet while she strained there, our support team leaning in the doorway behind me, all of us willing gravity to work with her power.

I do remember the blue light of morning leaking like a gas into the hot, fetid, blood-spackled room when Geraldine withdrew a latex glove from my wife and announced calmly that a cervical lip was impeding the process of delivery. At that moment there seemed to be many options of maneuvers and positions and techniques to resolve this, despite a nauseous wave ripping through me at the prospect of harder work still ahead. I looked to my doctor bride whose eyes looked like a horse’s during a thunder storm between contractions, and like a speared bull’s during them; I noticed a smear of blood at the top of her cheekbone and the sneer of her perfect teeth and the lack of words—notably, the absence of the words, Give Me Drugs, and I wiped my face like a mime with clammy hands and helped her onto the birthing stool for the much more painful work ahead.

I don’t know for sure how many hours Lili pushed against the “manual reduction” of her cervix by the strong fingers of the midwives. I don’t know how many times I slipped in blood and urine trying to hold her in position as she strained and wailed. I don’t know how many times she told us she couldn’t go on any longer with a scream and then took it back with a sob. I do know that by the time I really broke, and went into the cheerful, empty nursery to sob and pray to God wildly for my wife and son, the sun was bright and hot on my face.

Rebecca dragged me aside when I returned, not much steadier for my supplication.

"Eli," she said, seizing my forearms and forcing her face into mine, "I know that it’s unbelievably hard for you to see someone you love that much in pain. But I promise you this: Lili is having her own experience. She’s in her own world right now. Yes, it is painful, but it’s also something more. You have to let her have that."

And there I was, spun like a dradle by a handful of words from this experienced woman I desperately wanted to believe—maybe this was still normal. Maybe this was how it went. Maybe a cervical lip was a minor bump in the road to a joyous welcoming of one’s handsome son in one’s own bed. But the fist that closed around my guts with each one of Lili’s screams was dissenting.

I wrapped my arms around her humid, pulsing torso from behind. Between contractions, I closed my eyes and tried to see Paxton slipping out, blue and slimy and wailing into the gloved hands that would emerge from Lili to catch him, to become gentle hands instead of forceful hands. But all I could see were burnt colors, flashes of my father’s eyes in 1997 when his lungs collapsed, the Harborview crash cart, the latex snapping and flinging drops of blood, babies that were too still and dusky on the feverish stage of my mind.

Lili made the call herself; she said: No more. I can’t, anymore. She wept and cursed herself and apologized to us, as if she’d dashed someone else’s dream. But the fact was that Paxton was not coming out. The empowering surges had become bone-splitting assaults of pain. Labor was not progressing. She was so disappointed even as she struggled not to pass out from pain.

The drive to Group Health was all potholes and red lights, the wall-eyed stares of other drivers, the surrealism of daily life trundling by all around.

In the hospital, the facts were plain instead of elusive, the procedures were written instead of guessed at, and it all went very quickly, ten different figures moving with the swift certainty of choreography: IV port, epidural, vaginal exam, staggered doses of Pitocin, monitoring of the uterus, taking of temperature, a fever recorded, forms signed, wheels turning, hairnets placed, the OR prepped, the curtain dropped, the morphine shot, the knife arcing, clamps biting, the screens beeping, brows beading, your wife pale and seizing up with narcotic and pain, and your baby suddenly screaming and blue, hoisted by one leg free of the sloshing guts, over the entire alien theater like the only thing that’s real.

***

There is something—or many things—wrong with the conversation about childbirth in this society. Lili and I felt throughout her pregnancy that the only stories we heard were horrible; or, at the very least, that people’s retrospective limelight always fell squarely upon the agony of labor. This was primarily from women who’d had medicated, hospital births. As a result we began to seek out alternative stories, and we found them plentiful when we researched: beauteous experiences of transcending physical and spiritual boundaries in the company of calm, loving partners that read like allegories. On the other hand, my aunt, a real-world Christian woman with a lot of life under her belt, said the following to me after hearing of our experience: Childbirth is the worst pain a human being can ever experience. There is a shockingly inaccurate picture of beautiful, fulfilling childbirth as an expectation for every good, decent mother…with the implication that there is something wrong with you if it doesn’t feel like a giant orgasm!

Indeed, these two renditions of the birth experience seem to be the only ones available in the public discourse: either you are practical and modernist (and/or scared of pain) and you go in for a “procedure” that 21st century surgeons make as easy for you as possible. Or you are prideful, skeptical, independent-minded, “alternative,” perhaps “spiritual” and you embrace the birth experience as a rollicking rite of passage that will perhaps hurt but will also carry you beyond pain into the realm of the spirit and bond you in a more special way to the life you’ve created.

What I know for certain is that childbirth is a lucrative industry in the United States; many a hospital administrators is guilty of looking at a maternity ward like a factory. Whiteboards host grids of names and track the Pitocin drip, the dilation progress, the drugs that might still be arguable to introduce. Shift change hour looms large. Nurses bustle about with their convictions intact, sure that they are modern feminists for the efficient relief and safety they supply women. Hammer-handed doctors see nails everywhere.

What I know is that we don’t regret anything—despite the trauma we both experienced, despite the fact that it was determined there was no way our baby was going to come out vaginally and all the struggle was in vain, despite the arduous emotional and physical climb back into the saddle. Our baby was never in danger and despite the strong fist opening and closing in my bowels, neither was my wife. We planned based on our values and I’m proud we walked away from the disingenuous impersonality of the corporate hospital when we did.

What I know is that my gratitude for the nurses and midwives and anesthesiologists and, yes, the OBGYNs of Group Health Hospital is beyond measure, beyond any attempt at expression. My appreciation for the exactitude and confidence of modern medicine is immense. Women’s bodies may know what to do and women may have been giving birth naturally for thousands of years, but it’s only the progress achieved in the last hundred that is responsible for both Paxton and Lili being alive and well.

What I know is that the next time someone I care about is musing over what kind of birth experience to pursue, I will be quiet. If asked, I will tell them that both of the extremes of the conversation that they are about to be party to are right and both are wrong. I will tell them that childbirth is scary and painful and beautiful and transformative and wild. I will tell them to plan for nothing going according to plan.

***

In the days after our return from the hospital (three feverish cycles of the sun), Lili and I debriefed and celebrated and, it has to be said, we mourned. Rebecca came and prepared Lili’s placenta. We ground the dried product down into a powder that Lili swallowed in gel caps for the allegedly palliative postpartum effects, the re-consumption of the life-giving organ that she had lost.

One night under a new moon, we lit a candle in the backyard. Together, handful of soil by handful of soil, we buried Pax’s umbilical cord in a flower pot and said a decisive goodbye to his beginning.

Shameless Self-Promotion ReReRedux

2010-03-24T04:03:00.001+02:00

For anyone remotely interested in literature in Seattle, help a brother out and come rock the page with me!

Convention Convention: On the Front Lines of Genre

Often the chasms between novelists, short story writers, essayists and memoirists make the Army, Navy and Marines’ rivalries appear warm. However, much like the armed forces, writers of all these forms have a singularity of purpose: to produce worlds that sweep readers away. And this work can be a battle! In this course we’ll spend one class on each of the conventions that make literature sing, no matter the genre: characterization, dialogue, scene and plot/arc and one to two sessions workshopping. Look for writing exercise boot camp, illuminating examples, personal attention (outside of class if necessary) and lots of laughs.

Hugo House

Pax's First Lunch Out (total lush)

2010-03-21T07:55:00.003+02:00

Mom Snags First Smiles! (Shocking)

2010-03-21T07:48:00.002+02:00

Everybody Loves Pax!

2010-03-20T00:08:00.000+02:00

Life's Speed

2010-03-18T07:25:00.002+02:00

I just had my first bath with Pax. It was lukewarm and only came up to my calves, but it was the best bath I ever had. I laid him across my thighs and could lift him in and out of the water. He was returned home in his eyes, to be sure. Even hiccups and being hungry couldn’t take him away from the trance of being back in the real estate he still knows best with only 3 weeks in this chafing, dirty air world. I’d squeeze a sponge over his little dome and he’d blink frantically when one fate drop crossed his brow, like words were colliding, then relax and make a coo and sigh and kick one leg and wink, involuntarily. He’s growing up so fast.

Forked Tongues

2010-03-17T07:39:00.000+02:00

The surface of the table in the Juvenile detention dormitory is plastic made to resemble wood grain. It’s not very compelling, scored and marred and carved as it is. But then again a couple of shelves of cast-off YA novels does not make this a library, the word “dormitory” doesn’t make this not a cellblock, the term “student” does not make the function of this place educative.

I think I dislike euphemisms because they feel like a slippery slope. My 10th grade Language Arts classes at the/my high school up the hill are called GPA—“Garfield Preparatory Academy,” which I have deduced must describe some vague (and not defined on paper) combination of remedial and behaviorally challenged, an irony not lost on my 95% students of color in their 50% white school in their 70% white city. A couple of whom I’ve already seen hangdog shuffle stepping these cacophonous hallways of the “Youth Service Center.”

I could whittle down the tip of this half-assed essayistic spear further by digging up the demographics of Juvie out of my binder, but what’s the point, really? Nobody can deny the facts of disadvantage and racism in this society, hence the big group shuck and jive on the stage of euphemism.

RIP?

2010-03-13T08:44:00.003+02:00

It’s been a long time since I ranted political and that’s probably because I have the same freeze-frame “I just shit my drawers and I don’t know what to do about it” look that millions of real progressives that worked for Obama and pounded the Kool Aid have. I feel foolish in so many ways, wizened in so many others, and just plain numb about the whole thing in many more. I’d never say fuck it and throw some stock at Exxon, but I’m seeing that my critique is going to become more and more sideways and art-based as life marches on. Because all the beating of the beast in the face with the facts doesn’t accomplish a goddam thing in America. We got a black President and major cities where the majority of black men are under the control of the DOC. We got a President with an Arabic middle name and we keep bombing the shit out of Muslim wedding parties from Virginia with joysticks. We have a “progressive” President and we’re “reforming health care” by enriching the insurance bandits more and shoving our proverbial cock deeper into Afghanistan with each passing day (not that our proverbial cock is strong and Afghanistan helpless; chances are they are going to come out with some proverbial teeth).

And yet, what did we expect? It’s important to say that progressive people with a few years on me and mine are a lot less vitriolic about the disappointment. It’s not really fact-based, it’s just that when you confront them with the clear evidence of the administration’s hypocrisy or waterlogging or warmaking, there’s just this kind of movement-breath-thing that they do that makes you wonder if you might still have something to learn that would make you less angsty in the future.

I have to believe that Obama is still connected to his community organizer. To the black dude on the street of Chicago doing good against the tide. To the mixed race, multi-continental son with an absent father who was the Other and graced that experience time and again. The dude who knows how to talk to the other side with a very striking smile and then chop their fucking knees away with a backhand when justice demands it.

Ok, maybe he was never that last, but you get my point.

If he doesn’t find whatever vinegar it was that launched him again, if he doesn’t take the chance to make some enemies of those good old boys that loathe him on the hill, if he doesn’t remember that he was elected on a peace platform among many others, we’re lost and Rush Palin 2012 could become our next fever dream.

What do I know? Probably a little callused by the newcasts tonight. Peace upon Barack and us all.

This is All I Got, Folks

2010-03-10T06:12:00.003+02:00

Today while I lay on the guest bed in the basement, beneath the assaulting lights of MSNBC on the big screen, my newborn son gripped my thumb and slept hard against my breast. He didn’t care that I had been sweating against a barbell and a carpet for half an hour before that, and I didn’t care that he was probably holding a big pantload quietly. We were very content, he and I, just laying there on an unmade bed not really watching the news.

Pause........

2010-03-03T09:32:00.001+02:00

Many updates coming as soon as possible........

Rubiks Cubes Homework for the Soul and the Goddam Clock

2010-02-23T08:38:00.005+02:00

“No stress tests” and “biophysical reviews” and “induction options” got me blue. I just want the little tyke to be howling in my ear all night. And I invite all the tired, cynical parents to chortle at my claim—I know that it’ll suck when he’s howling in my ear all night! It’s just that I defy you to claim to me that it could possibly suck worse than all this waiting.

Of course this fanatical fixation upon the “due date” is just the last (or perhaps not the last) slap in the face by the medical establishment. The gestation period of a healthy woman is between 37 and 42 weeks and the day the woman dares to sleep or work or walk or cook her way past the magical number, it is assumed to get heavy. And by the time a woman is approaching 42 it’s as if she’s picking her way through a minefield of OB GYN bouncing betties. And it’s all statistical, litigenous bullshit, of course, because the number of babies who suffer or die as a result of being overdue is something astronomically low like 1 in a 1000. Yet “42” (which is often torqued down to 38 or 39) is powerful enough motivation to have made its way into not only hospital bylaws and regulations by even midwife protocols and, so, despite any number of tests that show our baby is healthy, our midwife would have to insist upon a hospital induction by the time we reached 42.5 weeks.

I should say, here, that I’m one of the fanatics, one of the fear mongers, one of the ones that wants Paxton—who I know is healthy and kicking and practicing his diaphragm breathing right now—out of there, in my arms, pink, squirming, and screaming at the top of his lungs. I’m not willing to push further on for a natural birth if it means even a minuscule up-tick in the danger to him. I’m feeling more like an ant than a God before all of this child-creation and pregnancy stuff. I have to say that for all the passion I’ve spouted in my life—both saccharine and solid—I should say now that I believe in natural childbirth because I think it’s safer and healthier and it’s provable; I can’t prove that it’s safer and healthier to let a healthy woman and baby go past 42 weeks—it very well may be, but I can’t prove it.

I'm so VERY grateful for the existence of modern medicine, even the American corporate kind. Did I mention that? I am.

Does it feel a little bit like fluttering an eye at the usurer that mistreated us once? Yes. Is that melodramatic? Yes. If we wind up back in a hospital bed after all the distance we’ve tried to shove between us and that project, I suppose the philosophical lessons of all this will grow even sharper and weightier than they already are. And someone up there seems to think I’m made for such lessons. And worse. All sauced up evenly with a rich cream of privilege.

So tomorrow we’ll get up and I’ll cook pancakes—buttermilk, with strawberries without pesticides on them—happy-pig bacon squiggles on the side and some Italian percolated coffee tincture and we’ll walk under what might still be the outrageous Seattle winter sun freakshow with Kaya, climbing dirt trails over stroller wheel tracks and spent condoms; then we’ll come home and mix up a castor oil and orange juice concoction with heavy ice and sugar. I’m thinking of calling it the “Castorangoil Breeze.”

I looked back on all the personal and not always advisable and certainly not often wise words I’ve painted on this template in the last weeks and I feel sheepish. But then I remember that only my friends read this mental dropping—and that those of my friends who are wolves bite sweetly.

4 Minutes into V-Day's Grasp

2010-02-14T10:02:00.002+02:00

We’ve taken long walks, up hills, in the rain, tentatively played with nipples, taken warm baths together and solo under the skeptical eye of the cat, we’ve put up pleas bent naked together under the pound of the shower like a prayer or as close as we get, we’ve asked for campaigns of pressure on Facebook, attended massages with freaky but kind acu-pressure people in apartment studios over the University Ave, we’ve eaten liters of spicy fare and also we can neither confirm nor deny that we have engaged in some hanky panky.

Pax is going to sit up in there till he damn well pleases. What do you say to him? What can you, really?

It’s not so bad out here? It’ll be a smooth descent? We’re professionals and ready to handle all possible scenarios? The food is better?

All lies. He seems to know it.

Once I was trudging toward a subway train in a pedestrian tunnel in central Barcelona. I had a somewhat heavy shoulder bag on and when I saw on the oversized digital screen that I only had 28 seconds to make it down the tube and through the doors, I got lazy and threw in the towel. I was strolling, dialing up something wait-y on the Ipod, when I heard behind me a joyful commotion and whirled. A horde of Senegalese vendors with their great carpet bags of knock-off Pravda purses were hurtling toward me, aiming for the train, faces frozen between fright and exhilaration, over their pumping shoulders, a pair of middle-aged, moderately overweight Spanish cops of some stripe, huffing and hollering in Catalan. I can’t say if I chose to press my shoulder bag to my hip and sprint ahead of the Africans or was literally swept up in their midst and didn’t feel a choice, but there was a tussle of color and crazily fired French-ish exclamations and a hand on my lower back and we were on the train together, the doors biting closed, the cops grudging themselves to a gasping stop in the tunnel. There was no fright or anxiety lingering on that train car—there was immediately only laughter and big smiles and jokes and cheer and someone offered me a high-five, just for the hell of it.

I know this makes no sense, but I hope that somehow this coming labor will be something like boarding that train.

Seattle drools! Raccoons prowl. Drunks holler love-hate in the park and emails bubble up. My child kicks and stretches and turns on his side, settles in for another night, as do I.

Seattle Animal Control are SUCKERS/Killing Time Waiting for Paxton

2010-02-11T06:13:00.003+02:00

Dear Ms. Graves & Mr. Baxter,

I just wanted to write and express my displeasure with the lack of reasonability with respect to the application of leash laws. Having lived in Ravenna for 18 years and raised three generations of dogs here, it was with great resentment that I heard of my 6.5 month pregnant wife being stopped, lectured, ticketed and harassed on a rainy morning in November for having our two friendly dogs off the leash in a deserted park. I have already submitted written mitigation for that incident, so I assume it's under review and will not rehash it here.

Today, however, another incident occurred in which we were again ticketed. Since I have to sit down at my desk and write out a check to the city, I figured I may as well take the opportunity to articulate my disappointment to you as well. Yesterday was my wife's due date; today we were walking our ELEVEN YEAR OLD ARTHRITIC Golden Retriever in the rain in Ravenna Park, hoping that the stroll would help labor begin, when we were approached at a near-run by two Animal Control Officers, the lead of which was Officer Leahy. She immediately made clear she was going to cite me so I did not waste anyone's time trying to dissuade her. I did point out, however, that as much as society depends upon a fair application of the law, that part and parcel of that is the decision of what is "fair" on the part of law enforcement. I asked her and her partner if they thought it reasonable to be ticketing a nearly in-labor woman and her husband ambling at one step per minute with a rickety Golden Retriever at their heels. Her response, paraphrased, was "Well, what do you expect me to do when the guy with aggressive, out of control dog sees I didn't ticket you?" to which I pointed out that she was making my point about reasonability excellently. I asked her if police officers should make it a point to ticket every jaywalker they come across and otherwise push the enforcement of every possible RCW to the maximum extent allowable all of the time, but she did not respond.

I'm going to pay this exorbitant $54 fine right now and I'll include this email correspondence with it. I would truly appreciate a response to my concerns about the enforcement of this law. For your convenience, I'm also attaching the written mitigation my wife penned (with my assistance) after her November encounter.

It's very easy, Sir and Madam, to retreat behind the facile statement that "the law is the law," shrug, and return to paperwork. It requires a civil servant with somewhat more vision and integrity to actually engage in a critical debate with citizens that harbor reasonable concerns--or perhaps even entertain the notion of amending the strictness of the policy that Officer Leahy clung to in our conversation today.

Sincerely,

Eli Hastings
1342 NE 62nd St.
Seattle, WA 98115
Cell: 206 617-1456
nhasting@earthlink.net

February 10, 2010
The Municipal Court of Seattle
Attn: Magistrate Case Prep
P.O. Box 34987
Seattle, WA 98124-4987

Dear Magistrate at the Municipal Court of Seattle,

I’m writing regarding citation # 12329809, case # 202850916. Though the “Mitigation by Mail Form” makes mention only of traffic and parking infractions, I assume this option is available to me as well. I am requesting mitigation of this matter by mail not least of all because I am currently thirty-eight weeks pregnant with my first child.

On the morning of November 19th, 2009, I was walking my two dogs in Ravenna Park. There was a rather severe rainstorm that morning and the park was deserted. As per my usual routine, I walked the dogs on the smaller trails in the park. When I reached the creek and footbridge at the southeast end of the ravine, I encountered an Animal Control vehicle and two employees. At this point, seeing that I did not have the leashes I was carrying in my hand attached to my dogs, they ordered me to stop and proceeded to do the following:

- Issue me two $58 citations (one for each dog)
- Demand that I prove that I had in my possession plastic bags for retrieving dog feces (I did)
- Call in the dog licenses of both dogs to investigate their status (they were current)
- Deliver a stern lecture to me about obeying city ordinances

I grew up in Spain and lived there until 2007, and so the entire concept of leash laws is somewhat new to me. However, I realize that is no grounds for protest here. And, in fact, I am willing to admit my culpability for not having leashed my dogs. But, at the urging of my husband, I would like to illustrate some mitigating circumstances:

First and foremost, at the time of the incident, the park was deserted. It was early in the morning and in the midst of a heavy rainstorm so my dogs could not even have had the opportunity to bother anyone. Secondly, at the time, I was some 6.5 months pregnant and extremely heavy for my stage of pregnancy. The experience of having a pair of dogs attached to my wrist on steep trails had become somewhat unnerving in my state. Thirdly, one of my dogs is an eleven-year-old golden retriever with arthritis that has scarcely been leashed in her life and obeys perfectly. My other dog is a younger mutt with absolutely no interest in humans and only playful with other willing dogs. I mention the characteristics of my animals simply to demonstrate that they are in no way an annoyance or a threat. Fourthly, Ravenna Park is usually occupied by dozens of off-leash dogs and their relaxed owners, who are often observed by unconcerned police officers, which is what contributed to my poor understanding of the leash regulation in the first place. Fifth and most importantly, while I recognize the duty of the Animal Control officers, I do not feel that their behavior was appropriate or in any way commensurate to the situation. Being forced to empty my pockets to show plastic bags and being detained and lectured in a scornful manner by a strange man—uniformed or not—for long moments in the depths of a city park, 6.5 months pregnant, under a heavy rain is not logical enforcement of the law. To be absolutely frank, I was uncomfortable to the point of real anxiety by the way the officer attempted to shame me.

I recognize that a civilized society depends upon a just application of the law to run smoothly. However, it seems to me that a logical application of judgment on the part of law enforcement is also a necessary element. In this case I feel very strongly that the application and enforcement of the law, not to mention the behavior of the officer, was entirely out of proportion to the infraction I committed.

I hope that my explanation of the circumstances will be of assistance to you in adjudicating this matter.
Sincerely,

Lili D. Sperry

Anyone else want to write?

ann.graves@seattle.gov
donald.baxter@seattle.gove

2.9.10

2010-02-10T07:17:00.002+02:00

Today, Paxton, you were due to join us! Today you did not come and in fact slumbered on more peacefully than usual in the big skin pouch of your mother’s belly. Who can blame you, really? While there is no vision for creatures in your state of what’s coming, there must be great surges of instinct that happen down that fleshy cord or waver through the layers that separate you from reality’s press. You probably think it sucks out here. You’d be wise to question it, but I’m here to tell you now that your world will not be the world, that we’ll construct a warmer one around you and teach you how to keep it so when you step away from us, too. Even if we haven’t hammered out all the flaws in the plan yet.

So you can come out now. Seriously.

We will hold as calm a place as we can for as long as we can, and if you need a prod to enter this world, we won’t mind and we’ll be ready to catch you when you come, surely, with too much speed at all of this. We’ll try to be the reception that you need and cut the lights down and sing to you the right verses and surround you with so much love that it feels like the blood that you know!

Rehearsals I

2010-02-08T09:22:00.003+02:00

Today, after swapping the places of the glider and the changing table, hanging a strange Spanish portrait of two rabbits, and angling a paper-maiche star-light in our soon-to-be son’s green, purple and blue room, I asked Lili to show me once and for all, how it is that one diapers a child. She agreed not only willingly but with excitement, probably because this is something that has been causing her anxiety: my husband has never changed a diaper. I caught up the ragged, pink Piglet stuffed animal that an old comrade who fights a lot of pitched and drawn out battles inside his head gave me last week in honor of my impending fatherhood. We prepped the table with a plastic…lay-out (nomenclature??), wet wipes, diaper salve, and the little winged plastic monsters themselves. It wouldn’t be a lie to say that my heart beat harder as I lifted Piglet’s legs, both at once, to slide the allegedly biodegradable contraption into place under the chute. So focused on that imagined chute was I that I’d forgotten the gutter.

“The pee-pee teepees,” Lili said. “If you really want to do this right, you need the pee-pee tepees. He’ll piss in your face, he will.”

This nomenclature I own: pee-pee teepees are small cones of cozy fabric that are to be cast as in a carnival game over the oft-spontaneous spurting member of little infant boys. My brother was by some strange crook of nature aware of this tool many months ago and gave me a small six pack of sky blue ones. So I turned to the brightly-painted closet and found the teepees and turned back to my wife, flashing them like a freshly procured vice, lifting my eyebrows to create some fun out of the absurd ordeal of changing Piglet, but she was already grinning and weeping at me, one hand absently caressing the pink fur.

STILL LIFE of BOULEVARD

2010-02-04T09:01:00.001+02:00

My Suzuki turns away from me
Neck twisted like a proud gazelle
She’s pissed at the absence of a toothbrush
Scouring her loins for acidic toxins
As if I’d left her in a summer dress
Amid thugs at a barbecue we didn’t plan attending

She’s carried me through a snowstorm and many a diesel splash
Her steady idle blowing through sludge like oxygen
But the number of sunsets she should have purred at
Is a foolish bitter negative
In the cloud of northwest winter
That sits like a nest on top of the world

One day she’ll save me from a madman on four wheels
Dip, slant and roar away from his stumble rush
She’ll whip flat and round the trash talk of V8s
Scoop a wowed and mistreated girl from the midst
Tour guide a world that’s only visible from two wheels
Turn her on to danger, get her clean of defeat

COMING DOWN

2010-01-28T10:32:00.000+02:00

What you have heard is true. I didn’t believe we had a choice. I slogged through the rain every three weeks to the 11th floor of a glass tower on top of the aptly named Pill Hill. I accepted the bright salvo of falsity from the horse-faced young receptionist every time. I accepted the deviated eyes of all the scrub-clad women as simple busyness. I accepted four minutes as an adequate slot of time for a prenatal appointment. I sucked sterile air to slow the anxious gallop in my chest when I imagined the gowns and masks and tube lights and machines and IV poles and bladders of antibiotics, though these things hurled me down wormholes of memory that had nothing to do with coming to life. I believed in my fear. My fear handed me an oxygen mask and I placed it over my mouth and nose. My anxiety spiked and I wished for a needle. We never intervene unnecessarily, the sculpted doctor lied soothingly. We have a very low rate of intervention and a great record of respecting mothers’ wishes. In negotiation with the schedule-receptionist—a chipper chubby girl who never remembered us either—we found out that “our” doctor would be on vacation three weeks around our due date. Subtler but louder than the Muzak, I heard something shatter in my head. We went to Fremont. We met a green eyed midwife and her tabby cat. We sipped Chai with a straight-talking doula. We watched documentaries of babies pulled from screaming, smiling women in their own living rooms. We never went back to the 11th floor.

For Forché and the Olympia Ladies

(And if we end up in a hospital it’ll be for a good reason and even if we do I’ll not regret not going back to the 11th floor).

UNITS OF MEASUREMENT

2010-01-27T07:58:00.004+02:00

Thirty-eight centimeters is the diameter of my wife’s stomach
Until the baby drops, Geraldine says. To get ready for the world

124 centimeters is the height of the smallest jump-suited boy in Juvie
Until he shoots upward, no doubt, to get ready for the world

But our baby is healthy and calm and safe
And from what we hear, that boy in Juvie knows how to hold his own

It’s enough to make you wish you could suspend time
Wag a wand and grab a chair and see how good, really, it is

But there is blood and pain coming, and necessary courage
Rites of passage and risks that defy measurement coming

I hope that, in the case of my baby, as much beauty as I expect, also
And in the case of the boy in detention, much, much more

Because the Night

2010-01-26T09:09:00.003+02:00

It takes this level of activity:

Rising and feeding animals and brewing coffee and writing a poem and showering and driving 1.15 hours south and plotting and planning and .75 hours of writing with a psychologically disturbed young person and then coaxing that young person to share her work and then driving 1.5 miles north and then walking an old dog through a park with your ear bud speaking Wallace Stegner foreign beauty to you and then 1.7 hours of work on a book proposal that you are by no means qualified to write or even shape and then a drive downtown to see Patti Smith make you feel like a bitch for complaining and inspired to stop waiting for inspiration and a fancy dinner of lamb loin and beans the size of your testicles and then the drive home and the dog’s dinner, given.

To recognize how easy it is to grow tired in the world.

How blessed you are.

That the truck is not sensible.

There is a scratching or a dragging in the wall of my garage/office/Garoffice/Man Cave. It happens only once ever several minutes, but it sounds like just that: scratch or a drag or a fart, maybe, if something pressed something’s ass really tightly against the plasterboard. I have to assume it’s not alive, this thing making the sound, or I’d be rather freaked out by its punctuality. What would that mean? A consciousness of time and timing, a complex mind?

This is probably why I need a child. I spend my time spinning these mental yarns that usually—fortunately—never even see the page.

This is not why I need a child. This is, though, why having a child will help correct my time management problems.

I don’t need a child. But I do desperately want him, now, can’t wait to see him turn from blue to pink and to shake my head and shake his little hand and welcome him to the savage duty and the immense privilege and the rest.

Remedial Parenting on Fast Forward Vol. 1

2010-01-22T09:45:00.002+02:00

(Idiot Toy)

Today our friend Sarah paid a visit to deliver an infant bathtub. How an infant bathtub works is, as of this hour, still a mystery to me. I deduce that it is something like a chair that you place in a sink. At any rate, glowing Sarah, showed up with her off-the-walls intelligent toddler, Nico, and her piercing-gaze daughter of 9 months. Sarah and her family are good friends of mine. Shane, her husband being a wildmand of my brother’s ilk. At any rate, they left me alone with Nico in my man cave, because he knows me and was comfortable and because he likes motorcycles. Well the women and baby girl swirled down to the basement to consider something vague and of feminine concern, and I popped Nico on the back of my motorcycle.

“Hey, it’s good for me,” he said, meaning the size.

“Totally,” I agreed. “But I maybe I should drive just for now. Where you wanna go? California?”

“Yeah!” he clapped. “Let’s go!”

So I fired up all 800 ccs of the Suzuki and gunned it in place and the poor child screamed as if I’d stabbed him in the heart. Good lord. What had I done?

I cut the engine and whisked the boy off the bike and apologized but all he wanted was to holler for his mom and to tell her what I’d done. He was downright traumatized. Of course, Sarah was cool and said he was just tired and even the kid came wiping his eyes, ambling back into the man cave as I lacklusterly critiqued student papers.

“Hey…It’s ok about the…moto-cycle,” he said, resentfully.

“Thanks, it’s really my fault,” I said. “I should have known better.”

But later in the shower with my wife discussing it, I had to defend myself, at least half-heartedly in my own mind.

“I mean, I thought that by six, something like getting startled would be sort of… resolvable…” I muttered. “I comforted him and shit.”

She sighed and rinsed her hair (at least as I see it now).

“He’s three,” she told me.

Shit.

sloppy rain psalms 1:2

2010-01-21T10:54:00.003+02:00

Almost one in the a.m. and the psycho ex-frat boy trainers are waiting to tear me up at the gym at 9. I guess that’s not such a bad night’s sleep, in fact in the past it would have been downright indulgent. But nowadays I don’t sleep like I used to—and I can’t drink like I used to, which is a double insult but also a blessing. Lili tosses and sighs and curses all night and though she doesn’t technically keep me awake, I think that I very rarely if ever dive whole-bodied into the lake of black slumber to sink like a stone. I dip in a toe and recoil back up onto the shore as she kicks the cat and a big, human-sized body pillow across my face. But I’m not complaining—she’s the one that has the reason to complain. She’d probably have my ass if listed here all the conditions that keep her spinning like a baby dolphin without half the or joy all night long. She used to anticipate sleep like I anticipate beer but now she dreads it and that saddens me perhaps more than anything else I’ve seen her go through. But the wildest test of my fortitude has yet to come because when that fat baby gets to sliding out, I’m gonna want to rob pharmacies like Justin Warfield but will instead have to not only breathe, but get her to, correctly.

Bring it on. We’re (just about) ready.

I can’t say I don’t still wonder about that tired-ass philosophical concern about “bringing a child into this world.” On day 7 after the Haitian massacre by either god or Satan or something that Danny Glover says has to do with Copenhagen; the afternoon that the Democrats lose their majority in Congress (which is ordinarily not enough to make me even sneeze) and the fringe right—that has occupied the media’s wide angle lenses like a Port Au Prince airstrip—loose deep yee-haws at being able to defeat healthcare reform and keep poor people (like many of them) dying.

Does anyone know of a tea party we could get into? I think I need some mischief like that before I become a locked-down father. Team Liberty? Do we have a plan? Dave? MJ? Kazoos?

But hell, maybe it’s the reality check stomp that Obama needs to stop being such a goddam unifier and start being a leader with fists. Maybe the earthquake will shake the moral foundations of the world community and Haiti will find solidarity like never before as a result. And I did NOT just echo Pat Robertson’s proclamation about this being a blessing in disguise. I’m only saying that maybe a silver lining is worth looking for in the shit storm of the world if only for lack of an alternative. ‘Cause my baby is coming one way or the other.

(That's my great grandpa standing in front of the plane he just crashed. That's what smiles are for, I reckon)

sloppy rain psalms 1:1

2010-01-20T09:05:00.003+02:00

The sky drools offensively on the roof of my garage-office, which is laughable for many reasons, for example because I have wrapped cheap, blue outdoor Xmas lights around my bookshelves, or because my motorcycle, dressed in my motorcycle clothes sits idle in the middle of it, but really it’s laughable because of how very little office-like activity has taken place under these newly insulated panels of ceiling since I ‘moved’ my ass in here. I’m in a foul mood, but it’ll be a really super quick, passing one, I can tell. It’s like a storm cloud nibbling at the sun but there’s no real front of a lead belly front rolling in from the west to back it up. At least I hope not.

I spent today in a gym, pressing bars of steel for my health. I spent today in a kids’ jail, pressing bars of steel for my health. I had a Latino banger hard as flint and then a pierced repentant philosopher of a boy with vocabulary and perspective and a really bad alcohol problem at 16. They both wrote beautifully with my frantic scribble as midwife, but I’ve seen enough of that place now that I’m not at all sure I won’t see them again next year, a little shaggier, a little more scarred, a little less likely to write poetry, but still likely to tilt their chins at younger inmates and tell ‘em, “I did that shit, dog. You should do it. It’s dope.” Or maybe that’s fairy tale or one-sided or some other crime of hyperbole, but give me one sided fairy tales to end the night for Pete’s sake. I’ll take ‘em.

Lili seems to swell bigger everyday still and I guess that’s probably a medical as well as a blog truth. I just can’t believe it; it’s one of those things that makes you say in your stupid human squawk, “I just can’t believe it!” even though it’s hefty and stark and beautiful and in your face. We sat through three and a half hours of CPR and first aid tonight with a wiry mountain climber type of a corporate dude who wanted to get out of there and into the wet streets and a pub worse than we all did. It was good, though, even on fast forward, even the fast-food version was useful. I like to think that because of my heightened senses I subsumed every possible last nuance of the lesson on infant emergency care—so now I can never think about it again, thank you.

Whatever God had nothing to do with the Haitian earthquake, keep the cold sheltered tonight, keep the depressed near a light, everywhere, no matter what kind of weather it is that fires out of each particular scrap of sky.

Pat Robertson's Most Recent Bigotry

2010-01-18T03:54:00.002+02:00

In case you missed it, Pat Robertson hopped on his splintering soapbox this past week to inform his viewers that "Haiti had sworn a pact with the Devil," which was the cause of earthquake (read: those wicked voodoo negroes deserved this). Notwithstanding this analysis and showcasing the mild senility and swiss-cheese composure of much of his record, he claimed the whole thing may also be "a blessing in disguise."

If you'd like to tell the Christian Broadcasting Network what you think of Mr. Robertson's comments, you can do so here. Operators are standing by, I'm told.

Where He No Doubt Was

2010-01-13T10:15:00.002+02:00

Last night I placed the dog food can in front of the cat door. I did this because for the last three nights the cat has successfully battered aside lesser obstacles and then coaxed the faulty lock on the cat door open in order to slither through and gallivant amid raccoons and the tipsy swerve of anonymous small hour cars. I awoke three hours pre-dawn to rain and wind, like pebbles against the window, with no fat cat purring between Lili and I. Irrationality struck like a dose of cheap caffeine. Did he sneak past me—all 20 pounds of shock-white fur—when I stepped out for a smoke before bed? Was he therefore locked out in the storm, facing down raccoons and their senseless fangs? Would he vanish this night and haunt me forever like other cats that the city has consumed? So I got up and descend the stairs and stumbled through the thick night and slid the dog food can aside, flipped the faulty lock and did a cursory tour of the house before tumbling back down the rabbit hole of hard early morning slumber. I awoke at 7 with his motor on high between our heads and the rains and the wind on pause.

But the echoes of irrational fear are still whanging around in me because in a few short weeks it will be my baby boy and not my manly cat that breaks my rest. And how many more dangers lurk inside and out for a helpless infant than a savvy feline? How will I ever sleep again?

You won’t, my friends that are parents chuckle, with no small dose of satisfaction. But I suppose I will, some, just the minimal amount, maybe, once the outlets are capped and the co-sleeper is hitched to us but empty of hazards, the floor is vacuumed, and the fat cat that tries sometimes to asphyxiate even me with his friendliness, is locked out of the room.

Shaking the Trance

2010-01-08T05:28:00.003+02:00

When the word came down that my wife was soon to swell with our child, I was standing on an ill-advised multi-colored carpet in the hallway of Hotel Barceló in downtown Barcelona—yes, ironically, I was in her home town and she was at home alone ten thousand miles away in mine. The reasoning and logistics for this are less interesting than the image: me, in the city I’d moved away from less than a year before, back again, watching the last of the Mediterranean sun fall on a palace façade through a fortuitously placed hotel window, between the beehive apartment blocks that conspire to cloak Barcelona’s treasures. Nothing could cloak my joy. Lili wept with apprehension over the satellite and I had to bite my lip to mitigate the sounds of my happiness—after all, she needed to know I was hearing her. There would be plenty of time for me to geek out over the news.

I remember, though, that as early as that afternoon I was already breathing hard over the image of the delivery ward of a major Seattle hospital: a sterile chamber full of whirling, masked gowned figures, on some floor of one of those spires of glass and steel that stand impervious to Seattle’s wicked February. I know now that Lili did test the conversational waters about “our options” for the birth and, because I trust her memory, I believe that I did indeed poo-poo and cast away any alternative possibilities. It was to be the robot bed and plentiful groves of IV poles and efficient masked medical professionals for us, goddamit! No chances were we taking with my boy.

Fast forward eight months—picture a pair of childbirth texts arching and flapping in midair against the progressing pages of a calendar if you’re a cinematically inclined person. It’s barely 2010, Lili waddles and huffs, and there is only a skinny window of horrid winter weeks to endure before we become a family. And we are turning on the hustle: to transfer all of our paperwork to a midwife, make the eyebrows of Blue Cross Blue Shield faithful return to flat lines, fill out birth center registration papers, and recreate the momentous narrative of the soon-coming night (day?) that we’d already cycled in our heads in another version many times.

When we sat down with a doula, Rebecca, in Cowen Park Grocery last Sunday and she asked us to explain the kind of birth we’d like her to assist in, Rebecca didn’t waste much time or mince her words.

“I just have to be totally candid here, you guys. If you want the kind of birth you just described, you should not be going to Swedish—or any other major hospital.”

The world tilted on its axis momentarily, but not in a scary way. Rebecca proceeded to educate us on the reality of hospital-based childbirth, but the analysis she brought was less impactful to me than the realization that I already knew all of it. I had read it in any number of sources. I’d heard it from more than one wise female friend. I’d known, at least nominally, that words like midwife and birthing center were not foreign. But I’d never considered it. I thought it wasn’t an option. And as I realized that, I started to get angry.

It was my past trauma with and fear of hospitals that made me think we needed to have our baby in one. Does that make sense? No. But it’s true. It’s so ironic it stretches the bounds of the concept of irony. I loathed every visit to Swedish. I loathed the phony, perky, bright non-recognition from the receptionists. I loathed the fact that the nurses led us around like waitresses. I loathed the fact that the doctor somehow—smoothly, I must say—was always in and out of the visiting room in under five minutes. Now I know how much more I would have loathed if I’d had the information: I’d have loathed that they lied to us and told us they were non-interventionist and never hurried (the lie was right in front of me on that one). I’d have loathed that our own doctor was to be on vacation for 3 weeks around our due date and either didn’t tell us or didn’t know.

Hospitals are for sick people.

The chances of something going so wrong during childbirth that instantaneous surgical intervention is needed is astronomically low—however, if we try to have an intimate, natural childbirth according to our wishes in a hospital, the chances that we will have drugs and procedures that we don’t want pushed on us is very, very high.

I don’t want to go to war; I want to have a baby. When I walked into those hospital wards my jaw locked up and my chest constricted and vapid stares zoomed past my head. When I sit with Rebecca the doula or Geraldine the midwife, I feel fucking heard and seen and calm. We don’t want to share this with people who don’t respect our wishes or honor our values. As a matter of fact, from where I’m sitting tonight, it looks a lot like a syndrome of mental illness to even have considered it.

I could push on and on; I could say how much all of this says about our society and what’s wrong with it—about fear and profit and narrow-mindedness. But that’s not where I want to be.

I want to be in a warm room with patient, kind people and watch my son slide into the world the way he’s meant to.

Home For Now

2010-01-03T04:46:00.001+02:00

Sitting here in my garage/office, affectionately dubbed “man cave” by my wife, blinking in the soft bleed of blue LCD Xmas lights that someone wrapped around my bookshelves (oh yeah, that was me!), smelling the grease and gas waft off my warm Suzuki, sensing the lights in the kitchen blink on through my dusty panes, I feel very much full of gratitude to be home. I don’t mean “home” as in the place I will pass the rest of my days as Lili’s career will likely fling us about the globe from time to time, not to mention back over the pond to Barcelona. I don’t mean “home” as in a house that I sweated for years or decades to lay down a mortgage on, because all I have to do in this beautiful 100 year old joint is pay rent to my mother. I don’t mean “home” in the sense of Seattle, because she’s growing like the Kudzu does out there where so many of my people dwell: chaotically and in every direction and unconcerned with integrity of structure. I mean “home” as my ten and a half year old dog, my 8 month old baby, my timeless and brilliant wife, my frantic med school brother down the block, and my indefatigable mom and two impossibly young and bright adopted brothers just up the highway. Home is where the heart is and it’s by a luck that extends beyond privilege that my heart doesn’t have to hop and skip and spread itself thin to cover all the territory it might anymore.

It makes me think of Jefferson and how his luck—as great as it is—doesn’t filter through his life in the same way these days. How he had to blow through the NW in less than two weeks, bending like a palm tree in a hurricane to the desires and needs of so many people to lay hands and eyes on him. How he had to try to present a tranquil, sustainable view of this land to his wife, Helena, if he is to have any hope of one day corralling this unwieldy notion of home in the same way I’ve somehow been able to.

This is an attempt to turn over a new leaf with this blog, to dispense with my need to always have an occasion or a statement to make, an attempt to start to try and place myself on the screen without motive. The impending arrival of my wickedly grinning son instructs me that it’s time to record—and share.

Happy 2010.

Pongo Teen Writing's Rocking New Website

2009-12-10T21:27:00.002+02:00

For anyone who's got even one toe dipped in the vast seas of social services, youth work, or the arts, you've got to dig Pongo Teen Writing's new website. There are heart-rending examples of work that distressed teens have produced with us over the years and tons of resources for teachers, youth, and anyone else interested in real poetry (vs. academic onanism, not that there's anything wrong with that in its place). Dig:

PongoTeenWriting.org

VERNA OF LOS ANGELES INTERNATIONAL AND GREAT COMPASSION

2009-12-02T23:36:00.001+02:00

Oh Verna!

You did not roll your Caribbean eyes across our vacation-browned skin with scorn in the gunmetal five a.m. light of the terminal. You helped us, instead, Verna: explained clearly the one bus, the second bus, the way to the terminal we needed to be in to fly home to our privileged lives. And you explained with a lilt, with a “love,” a, “my dear” sparsed in like flowers between the pages of a daunting text.

But you didn’t stop there, Verna, you couldn’t, it seemed, though perhaps it was only coincidence that hove you aboard the shuttle bus with us, but I have to say that the industrial stretch of disemboweled luggage trucks and greasy cargo containers that sit like a moat around the American Eagle terminal where we were to transfer to our next bus was easier to take with you at our sides, Verna! After all, to know that someone like you inhabited the gray linoleum hall that glowed like a tube light out on the wasteland of tarmac.

When you disappeared into that mini-terminal, Verna, leaving us to await our next shuttle bus, I must say that my heart fell. My wife was tilting beneath gravity’s hammer, no sleep, too many rich fish dishes for a week and 6.5 months pregnant besides and all the taciturn doorwoman would tell us, rather sharply, was to wait. To wait, Verna! But to wait 35 minutes amid overflowing trashcans and the lurch and grind of taunting buses that won’t take us? To wait, Verna, standing, and to trust that the taciturn door woman will take care of us? When I asked her if she had a notion about when the bus might come she wanted to know when our connections were, Verna! As if that were the point, Verna, as if the pretty young pregnant passenger getting hypoglycemic and clutching her belly were not the reason we needed the bus that was supposed to be there half an hour ago!

Oh, Verna, when you reappeared and that troubled look crossed your soft and wrinkled face, I have to tell you that I loved you then. And when you shuffled in your old woman way past the taciturn door woman who scowled as she chewed her Burger King and texted violently with greasy fingers, when you shuffled out to the tarmac and waved down a bus and talked our way onto it, Verna, well, we could breathe again, Verna, the state of war in our chests diminished, the heat of our hatred for American Airlines, cooled. And that would have been enough, Verna, we would have made it to terminal 3 with the bus you’d bid us, but you did more: you rode with us and you spoke in soft and lilting ways about love, about caring for customers, for people, about the deeper meaning of being a traveler, about aid to your fellow human, you spoke about it with the mild passion of one called to it. And then you led us, Verna, despite great professional risk to yourself, through the bowels of terminal 3, offered us the cheap soda from the employee machines, scanned your security card and placed us in an elevator, which opened on the blessed expanse of terminal 3, the heavy scents of grease and sugar, the bustle of people from all over the world, and you shook our hands and wished us well and said goodbye.

Oh Verna of great compassion, Verna of LA-X! You shall not soon be forgotten. Oh Verna, when I appeal for justice from American Airlines for how my pregnant wife was treated, I will wish to give my free tickets to you—if only the fine print would allow me that.

(DIS)Respect

2009-11-20T09:03:00.000+02:00

This thing called respect
I’ve seen it cause bloodshed
I’ve seen it cause friendships to go like an old Viaduct in the Big One
That fast

I imagine, also, that this thing has probably ignited wars

Then again I’ve seen it cause manhood—and womanhood—
To flower like weeds in the cracks of a forgotten sidewalk
In a nation where war veterans swaddle themselves on corners
And citizens hold their babies away from the begging maws
Or rip their eyes away at the bottom of the onramp

You have to wonder
How many would settle for a glance or a smile or a nod
Which probably has more to do with respect
Than the tinkle of dimes

I remember once, tipsy, on a forgotten sidewalk
A warm tetrazzini in hand
That I offered off what would be my lunch tomorrow
Mistaking magnanimity for respect
And did not take the refusal in stride
When he said he was a vegetarian

That I felt disrespected
Does not define the word
Only its breadth and depth
And the size of the world on one square of concrete

A Trip to the Seattle I Grew Up In to Consider the Purchase of Decidedly Hip Furniture (and there is an essay here--copyright!)

2009-11-13T08:38:00.005+02:00

Sí. Seattle Home Company is located in the old Central Loan & Gun Exchange.

Don't act like you don't know, Alex.

Postcard From the Womb

2009-11-07T22:21:00.002+02:00

Is this a good or bad sign?

The Glory of the Palmetto State

2009-10-02T06:24:00.001+03:00

1. Late summer: Governor Mark Sanford gets nailed in an absurd coverup for having an affair with an Argentine woman (his "soul mate")--he was "hiking the Appalachian Trail," creating a fabulous new euphemism for muckrakers and lovers of snark everywhere. Sanford was a premiere family values demagogue before this, of course.

2. August: Rep Joe Wilson loses his short stack and hollers, "you lie!" at President Obama during his health care address, a first in something like 100 years. Side note: Obama was speaking factually, as was later ascertained by even mainstream media and Joe Wilson was, well, just a little excited about the whole thing.

3. Today: Rep Jim DeMint of South Carolina decides to travel to Honduras to express his firm support for the military coup government that the President's Administration is trying to diplomatically undermine and urges them to "resist" the United States.

Wow. What a month or so for our patria, ma.

The Healing Power of Prison Poetry

2009-10-01T05:59:00.000+03:00

In YES! Magazine by me.

Rocking the Regional!

2009-09-23T04:42:00.001+03:00

Hey all you who may know writers in Seattle--tell them to check out my course that will hopefully start next month....

Setting: not just a convention—and the less conventional it is, the sexier a story or an essay. Tennessee Jones’ badlands; James Lee Burke’s Louisiana; Benjamin Percy’s Oregon; Junot Diaz’s New York; Donald Ray Pollock‘s bruised hometown of Knockemstiff, Ohio. Somehow, as we globalize by the nanosecond, haunting literature of place has found a great audience in the literary market. We’ll wash our tent poles in this stream of localism: through the “new masculine” of Percy or the ocean hopping eyes of Diaz. We’ll come out the other end with an essay or short story that spotlights where we come from.

Instructor: Eli Hastings
Meets: Thursday, October 08, 2009 - Thursday, November 12, 2009
Thursdays, 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM
Min: 5 Max: 15

Link

Joe Wilson, Get a Helmet

2009-09-11T20:05:00.002+03:00

Maybe, like my friend Justin said, Olberman is just another talking head, but in this case he's at least approaching the meat of the issue. And, hey, he's very entertaining. And we need some kind of castigatory catharsis after watching those apoplectic maniacs behave like they wanted to lynch the President the other night.

Dan Savage on the Impeachment of Mark Sanford

2009-09-09T06:09:00.002+03:00

"And so it's gonna be hilarious, South Carolina is gonna impeach the heterosexual, soul mate seeking, Argentine ___ eating, governor Mark Sanford and they're gonna end up with a closet anti-gay fag governor Andre Bauer....Couldn't happen to a nicer state."

Hi fam!

Israeli Defense Forces Attack Al-Jazeera Journalist

2009-09-09T01:10:00.002+03:00

Just ask yourself, perhaps, what would happen if Glenn Beck got treated this way at an Obama rally? Or, more to the point, if he received a similar response inside the Palestinian Authority? We'd have Fox pundits lobbying for a nuclear strike.

The Road to Quintana Roo (Part III)

2009-09-07T04:27:00.004+03:00

Part I

Part II

I wish I could say that I went to a place drastically distinct from La Lata to put a decisive end to the day, but that would be a lie. There isn’t anywhere in La Velita that’s so distinct. Sometimes when they play stale American movies on television I fantasize about what it would be like to have a proper place to booze: leather and polished wood and bunny waitresses in little tuxes. A place where drinking made you feel good and powerful instead of just Gone. But El Camarón is what we’ve got.

Raul drools from one side of the mouth—a home invasion gone wrong—but his hands are faster than anyone’s laying drinks. Besides, I happened to catch the men that busted him and his house up and Raul was able to reconnect with those caballeros in an interrogation room. So, as usual, I had a tumbler of mescal and a beer lined up for me before I even bellied up to the bar. A few wrinkled ranchers nodded at me; a few younger men slapped down pesos and split. I didn’t care. I shot the mescal: fire. Chased it with a half a beer: ice.

Rosario’s smiles and shrugs dance behind my closed eyes. The damndest thing about the old man is that I don’t even know if he’s on the take. It almost doesn’t matter. At least I know he’d have a philosophical explanation if found to be what I’d call “corrupt.” If he were “corrupt” he’d be on the right side of it somehow. But then isn’t that the last word on what has become of my home? That corruption—moral as well as professional—is the rule. Someone as good as Rosario might have to compromise himself in order to stay safe. The carnival mirror of justice, left too long in the high desert.

I finish the bottle and don’t even have to point before Raul is pouring me another dose of mescal with one hand, capturing the drool with a bar towel in the other.

Sick ironies tossed about as casually and commonly as corpses. Another: the epidemic of missing girls used as justification for “cooperation” with the cartels. The logic goes that if the cartels are responsible, it’s likely an issue of prostitution, which would be a relief to many families who fear their daughters murdered. Or, maybe, the disappearances are punishment for a lack of “good will” on behalf of the people of the state. If the Relámpagos aren’t involved, then their “good will” will be imperative in finding out what kind of monsters are. Either way, for fat fucks like Maximilio, pocketing payouts and looking away from extortion and even murder, does not even have to present itself as self-interest; it can be public interest. And that’s what makes me sick—the slow, surreal evolution of demons like Emilio Herrera into folk heroes.

I find a fresh beer in front of me and drain half of it. In the back, a whore cackles, mimicking Raul’s lopsided gait as he moves past with a tray of empties. I think about disciplining the whore but discard the notion—half-cocked heroism won’t change anything about today fundamentally.

I have too much respect for Rosario to discuss the elephant in the room without a fully cooked strategy to set things right in La Velita. What the man’s cryptic philosophy really says is: Give me a solution—until then I will take the path of least resistance and keep myself, my men and the community safe as possible. And despite thousands of predawn hours, both in my old home with Angela and alone in the rancid apartment since she booted me out, thousands of fantasies I’ve auditioned, not a single one comes close to realistic. I know that Rosario intervened to keep me alive five years ago out of respect for me—the Relámpagos would have made me the next peeled-face corpse on the shoulder of Mex 2 as a matter of course—and probably taken Angela and my grandson to a horrible end just for kicks. Only Rosario had the stature to negotiate my salvation, to convince the bastards of the mere truth: that it had been a mistake. And to fashion my penance: exile my son and obey the cartel. So I will not go to Rosario and disturb the sorrow and shame that has settled over not only me but the idea of policing until I have a solution.

My mescal is full again; then it’s not. I briefly count beers, then give up and slug more. The room is getting to be a fishbowl, which I like. I exercise my right as police and slide my gaze slowly over the people, the nervous teens, the beaten down ranchers, the loud truckers and a few kids with high-carat crucifixes on chains as slim as their ties to the cartel—no real players. In the booth with the mean-spirited whore I suddenly notice Maria. Her blonde wig has swung over half her face and she is leaning into the other girl. She chuckles then watches her cigarette burn. She drags on it and sees me and a smile unsnaps on her like a bra.

“Como va, agente?” she asks, swaggering up and parking herself against my thigh. I get hard immediately and this angers me. I pull my leg back and drink.

“Just another day in paradise, cariño.” I haven’t seen her in three weeks and feel better for it. Her heat, her lips around that smoke and the booze are pushing the wrong way on me. I talk fast to forestall her moves.

“Being a cop—no, joder, fuck that, being me—in this country is a curse only conceivable by God. Or his nemesis. You would not understand this, Maria, because being a whore in this country is certainly not easy, but it’s a fit. I am a foreign agent in the body of my patria now. And I can’t live this way. Survival is a half-empty glass in Méjico.”

Maria switches her hips, her smoke to the other side of her lips. She glances back at her table, maybe regretting her trip across the floor.

“I have balances to set right, Maria. I am slowly coming into sight. Years of hiding my neck! I’m not a turtle; I’m a man and a cop. They exile my own son, who ends up in a gringo prison in el norte, mixed up in their poisonous business there, leave my grandson fatherless and destroy my home and marriage because I did my fucking duty and erased one of those cockroaches from the earth.”

Maria smiles like she’s tired, stabs out her smoke.

“You should be careful with that tongue, Agente. You’re better off putting it to other use when you are drunk. Trust me.”
She folds her arms and turns to go, but I hook her elbow and yank her to me.

“You are the first to hear the truth, Maria. Live up to it. I will decapitate the Relámpagos and I will find and free Javier and I will set this town right again no matter what the rest of Méjico does. You will see.”

Her big dark eyes have a tide in them, washing back and forth between thrill and fear. She can’t hold my gaze.

“And my tongue has plenty of vinegar left tonight, puta.”

Now she can. The room tilts. A hand flutters to my thigh and this time the smile uncurls rather than unsnapping on her. My cock rises. My phone rings.

“Federico it is Angela. Where are you?”

I whip away from Maria so fast that I nearly fall of the barstool. I tell my wife—my beautiful, graceful, God-fearing, dignified and wise wife—that I am finishing dinner, nowhere special, no plans. I do this in a deliberate voice to keep the slur off. But it doesn’t work.

“You are at a cantina and you are drunk, Federico. When I need you. Of course. But I swear to you by God if you come here tonight I will call Rosario and make a complaint. Be here early in the morning and try not to stink.”
The line goes dead and Maria places a palm on my back. Vomit announces itself in my chest, I shake her off and step through the hard, lurching angles and colors out of the cantina and into the future.

Four Days, Three Dogs, Me & The Cascades

2009-08-28T06:38:00.003+03:00

August 21st, 18:56, the mountains

I’m living amid stories. I mean, we all are. But I’m living amid fictional stories. On my Iphone is TC Boyle, churning out an epic about Kinsey’s inner circle in my ear (pause). On the table is Lehane’s The Given Day, a tome that hurls me into the 1910s with fictionalized version of Babe Ruth and WEB Dubois, sussing out who America will belong to. I’m reading—when I have occasion to pull it from my bag—How to Sell Your Script in 60 Seconds or some such title, which is very useful, bold and also full of a million anecdotes from a million stories, well-known and made up by the author, which buckshots mini-characters at me. In the Writer’s Chronicle that I dutifully plod through (ok, that’s a lie, but I try to read at least one article), the academic furors pour snippets of classic books to elucidate points that I don’t grasp, but the disparate figure and their needs and desires I do. This is all, of course, not to mention my own work where Jackson and Rosario and fucking Lafayette are still trying to learn their cues, where Rigoberto might just get the chopping block if a certain kind of editor likes it otherwise, and Ezekiel might get a promotion that he will be loathe to handle. Or the un-written tales of the vampire-summoning suburban teen and his schizophrenic best friend from Ethiopia, who I’ve never quite imagined but nonetheless suggests himself in fleeting moments of daydream. And much, much more—including the deluge of personas and their wild trajectories that one listen to the American news in any form will hit you with.

I keep waiting for Prock to walk out of the woods and approach the Rebellious House. I keep expecting—half, anyway—for Babe Ruth to become a vampire slayer on some sliding tangent of stoned daydream. I keep kind of wishing that Michael Hague (author of the marketing book) was suddenly fluid and familiar enough that I could plug him to a scene and have him give a down and out writer a talking-to about tenacity. Perhaps these things will happen in dreams or not at all, but there is some small, twisted part of me that wants overlap, meld. I think—absurdly, perhaps—of the psychics who work with police departments and cover their desktops with a hodgepodge of crime scene, victim, and suspect photos, scramble the glossy images to a rhythm no one can fathom, close their eyes, open them, and see the case laid out. The plot. The secret.

August 23rd, 2009, 18:07, the mtns

Another June 23rd for the books: Alfred E. Kinsey, sexologist.

The dogs have gone wild with the way the strong winds cross scents in their brains. And strange it is out there, really, with spanked-red headed carrion birds perching like people in costume up on Spirit Rock, no doubt scanning for the flash of a dead King Salmon in the sun, on the banks far below. The Aspens, also, are growing up through the slats between the tilted porch’s old boards. The banister is bowing in the general direction of the new house, which stands like a half-birthed space creature on the far slope. Soon I will hear a frantic flurry of yapping and the thunder of a dozen paws on the deck, a commotion that seems it could take it down. I have yet to see a single thing that they believe they do, though maybe it’s only a scent and they angle their dumb rage in the direction of the smell, which may have nothing to do with the direction of the source. But who am I to criticize them? They’d all last longer than me up here with nothing but wits and instinct to keep the lovely fatalities from falling.

Out with the Dogs, the Train, the Wind and the Trees

Whisper, howl, moan
Bark, yip, snarl
Chime
Chug and blow
Sigh, creak, and fall

August 24th, 2009, 18:32, the mtns

I’m feeling every bit as alive as I always have up here, alone or with reasonable people, in the dying summer. Right now I feel like I possess all the faculties I need to wade into the grit and sludge of the NW winter and father a child in the midst of it. Of course, twenty minutes ago, I got all ataxic from my cigarette and damn near fell on my ass on the rocks at the swimming hole. But a little marijuana and exercise in the middle of wilderness will do that to you. Give you a mainline snort of wildness and power. It’s absurd, of course, and illusory in a million easy ways, but I’m here to tell you that hiking with a pack of dogs and a pistol on your hip in the north Cascades in August is enough to also allow you to carry a murse with a novel in it.

Everyday the light gets luxurious a tiny bit earlier, but in four days you can watch its slide, the way that the season is trying to spend itself out, get rid of its budget before it’s wasted. And the autumn is measuring publicity-sized gusts out, too, inserting them in the warm sheet of a late afternoon breeze. I like these borders, but I gotta say I like summer more than anything else. And it can get frantic when I think about it going—the only consolation is the increasing RPMs that life’s record spins as the years get bigger.

The transcription is dulling me. I’m not going to be histrionic and say it’s “killing me,” but it is a bitch, without an iota of creativity going into it. God send me to an epoch in which I can hire someone—hire someone!—to do this part for me and focus on the very complex weave of a story like this. Not that there’s any story like this, and I really hope that someone else agrees. Someone with power. Been thinking a lot about power, especially how it relates to the arts and therefore the emotional wellbeing of myself and many people I are about. I just finished Micheal Hague’s book, Selling Your Story in 60 Seconds, and I appreciated it and I learned a lot and I was inspired by how he signed off: it’s all about the story. The quality of it and the fact that you’re willing to be beaten down and humiliated for it. He speaks of artists going into a cocoon of believing that it’s impossible that the world, stacked as it is, will ever “get their art.” But Hague points out that that’s easy and the hard path, as is customary, is the right one: wade back in, bleeding hard from your head. But how many people can do that? How many people have time and energy and blood to spare after a day in the streets of their lives? I like to pat myself on the back for, more or less, being the kind leather-headed marketer of my work that Hague praises, but how much of that is because I have the flexibility in my privilege to spend the time, the blood and the energy to keep on hammering at doors/walls? And here I am, flagging at times, even with the advantage I have of time. I know one thing for sure: I don’t have any excuse. Hague is right, as far as I go, but I won’t be casting any aspersions on anyone for their realism.

The Daily Kos

2009-08-13T21:29:00.001+03:00

This is the most well-reasoned, no-bullshit and downright terrifying article I've read on the link between the "birthers," the "deathers," and the "teabaggers."

Race, Taxes, Birth Certificates, and Eugenics

The Road to Quintana Roo (Part II)

2009-07-31T01:25:00.002+03:00

(If you haven't read Part I, you can dig it here)

It’s 2:30 in the afternoon by the time a wrecker tugs the sewage truck off the flatbed and out of the intersection.

The only nice thing that one might say about the station is that it’s cool inside—relatively speaking. It was once lime green but the damp walls are now roped with black bacteria and covered with something like soap scum. I’d say it was like a jail, but the jail’s downstairs, and there’s nothing like that. The lights are bare tubes—meant to be muted by something plastic—and produce headachy symphonies that still buzz in your head when it hits the pillow. Worst of all, the card tables and plastic chairs are always occupied by my so-called colleagues.

“Oye Companzo!” Maximilio crows as soon as I clear the door. “Did you wash your boots?”

Apparently this joke has been anticipated for so long it doesn’t even need to be clever. The half dozen detectives and patrolmen erupt with laughter. Maximilio sends his beady little eyes around the room, pulling in validation like a gambler snatches chips. Captain Rosario permits himself a little grin and shrug. He doesn’t laugh because he’s cut from sharper rock than these fools. He’s my only predecessor in this building.

The mescal bottle behind the coffeemaker is empty; someone has drawn a sad face in magic marker on it. I pour what is probably the same coffee as this morning into a plastic baby cup and reluctantly join the group.

“Seriously, Federico,” Maximilio says now, leaning forward like he’s concerned. “How’d it all shake out? I need to know where to buy my chickens!”

The reason I want to kill Maximilio is not because his sense of humor is that of a twelve year old. It’s not because he’s half my age and gets to dress for undercover work. It’s not because he’s cracking at my benefit. It’s because he can’t see that I’m toeing an edge and it has nothing to do with chickens or sewage.

“You need to know where to buy your suits,” I manage and the great democratic wave of laughter washes over to my side. Maximilio sneers and bats a paw at me, straightens a horrid purple tie over his yellow shirt. Rosario bellows.

“Get out. Go catch muggers. Rescue girls. Companzo’s the only one here who’s earned his day’s pay.”

As the knot of men untangles toward the doors, hefting Kevlar vests, shooting coffee, there are more jokes about shit and chickens, about a day’s pay, about “rescuing” girls. Rosario watches me with calm eyes and his hands laced on his stomach. Like a Buddha. He can see me toeing an edge—always has.

“I understand you had an encounter with Emilio Herrera today,” he says like a psychologist, steepling his fingers in front of his gray mustache. “You want to tell me about it?”

Fucking Rosario. I look into the greasy dregs of the coffee, can’t bring myself to drink it without any liquor. Look at the man’s rheumy old eyes instead. He wants to know about it? Fine.

“Sure, jefé. The little gangster drives down the sidewalk and almost kills an old man. Talks back to me, threatens my life, then threatens yours, my wife’s and Javier’s. And for his trouble I cleared him a path to drive over the rest of the sidewalk like a fucking doorman.”

Rosario nods; behind the dampness his eyes sparkle, just a little.

“Ah. The same small rooster, he is. That does not surprise me, Federico. It does surprise me to hear you say ‘Javier’ out loud, however. It has been some time.”

Rosario understates the case—it has been four years, eight months and six days since I last spoke my son’s name to him. I recall it vividly. The cordite burn in my nostrils. The crust of blood on the heel of my hand. The taste of metal in my jaw. Rosario’s hands on my clavicles, squeezing hard enough to pierce the tight world that morning had built around me.

I’d trained myself to remain horizontal until the light was blue enough to see my hand outstretched in front of me; Angela would not scold me for getting up if I could reasonably point out it was dawn. What this meant for me was an hour or two every morning of staring into blackness as my brain looped. The Relámpago Cartel was taking La Velita like a virus takes a body: setting up nodules of control and sending out spoors of destruction and extortion. By then they skimmed off every real estate deal, they carried weapons freely, they raped the high school daughters and sometimes the wives of hardworking men I’d known my whole life. They charged taxes on these families for parking a truck, for safe passage down the block, for anything they pleased. And all these men I knew? They looked to me, Federico, Policia Local to set things right. And when I told them that my hands were tied, some of them nodded, like I’d denied them my last smoke. Some of them wept bitterly. Some of them cursed me in ways that were not casual or passing. Rosario heard my laments and I know he empathized because I know his heart. But Rosario is political or perhaps philosophical in a way that is foreign to me. Rosario didn’t seem to want to tear these demons to pieces like me. He had other visions of justice.

The light that morning was barely blue; I could see my hand but not my fingers individually when I eased the quilt off my legs. Angela curled in on herself, not wanting to face what I was getting up to investigate: Javier had not come home. He was twenty years old, all of a man, and I agreed with my wife about treating him as such, but I knew things she did not—I had seen Javier not once but twice in conversation with low-level narcos. Of course, Javier had known most of these boys his entire life; Angela had fed them dinners, I had punished them with my own hands for terrorizing chickens in our yard. These boys had orbited our home like harmless meteors. But things had changed: for Javier, they were still peers. For me, when they chose the life of the cartel they became something else—if not enemies, then targets. I was a cop. I am a cop. Even if many of the men who wear my badge are no better than the cartels.

Papá, I cannot pretend I don’t know them! Javier had protested, the high note of exasperation that reminded me of the nearness of his boyhood slipping into his voice. It would be worse for me if I did, you know that. They go about their business and I go about mine. If we share a word or a chingado coca-cola, what of it? Do you think I’ll come home one day and cut your throat?

My son has a grin that permits him the crassest of jokes. But I also knew he was right. Still, that morning I could not even force myself to finish one taza de café before I strapped on my gun and went into the smoggy streets to find him.

The thick smog is a springtime event in La Velita, a wind-driven phenomenon from the Pacific that arrives only in the mornings and only in April. Smog, of course, is commonplace: we are south across flatlands from Juarez and El Paso, but this opacity is unnerving. Emaciated town dogs appeared out of nowhere like phantoms and even pickups were hard to see until they were nearly upon me. I kept to the edge of what passed for sidewalk as I drew near to the center of town.

There is only one cantina in La Velita where men prone to drinking through the night and into their own blackness can go. La Lata Letal is tacked onto the backside of a service station, a corrugated tin roof and neon beer lights, but there is something contrarily sturdy about it. I didn’t care for Javier spending time there, especially given that the narcos were probably running the place by then, but it was his youth, not mine and more to the point I had not found him a job that would keep him from washing away the hours with Tecate and bad mescal.

Approaching by way of the alley and the back door to La Lata, I heard nothing at first and almost walked on, but a strand of quiet conversation and the brief squeal of a chair on linoleum halted me. I forcibly calmed myself with a couple of breaths. I closed my eyes as I did so, smelling the diesel and dust and burro shit and morning tortillas of my hometown.

I suppose I’ll never know for sure why I yanked that door wide, popping the little hook lock in the process. It’s true that La Velita is a small town and it’s true that I knew the owner Ronaldo and it’s true that I expected to find Javier inside with old friends and nothing more. But none of that fully explains my incaution.

Javier was indeed inside, tipping back on a barstool, sipping a Corona. But closer to me, at a card table, sat Emilio Jose Gonzalez Herrera and two other young narcos, one of whom was Javier’s childhood friend Victor, packing cocaine into the false bottoms of cans of corn. A .38 lay on the table and a police-issue shotgun leaned in the corner and, therefore, my .40 came up and I shot Victor in the face and neck when he moved for the pistol.

Emilio and the other kid had their hands raised before the door even hit the wall. Javier’s hand still cocked the Corona to his lips but the world in his eyes had altered dramatically. I went into numb protocol, hooking my prisoners and securing the drugs, ignoring my son, imploring the gods to make him vanish but knowing that would be my duty. From his stomach on the floor, Emilio informed me I was a dead man and I didn’t have enough emotion in me to stomp the back of his head so he went on.

You, too, are fucked Javier, he spat. Fucking snitch!

I turned to my son. He closed his eyes hard against the verdict. I told him to go home. I did not have to tell him to pack.

It was not until Rosario arrived that I found that my face was completely covered with the dead man’s drying blood.

“I think maybe it’s a mixed blessing, compadre. Seeing Emilio today, I mean. On the one hand you’re all stirred up. On the other, you’re facing a piece of what happened before.”

The old man still has his fingers in a steeple and he peers over the peak of them at me. Rosario has these fucking philosophies about mental and emotional health, especially in the face of circumstances you can’t change. He wags his finger and repeats the serenity prayer whenever he has half a chance: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. Only Rosario isn’t religious. Maximilio had once pointed out that it was the touchstone prayer of Alcoholics Anonymous, only Rosario doesn’t drink. I have to admit that if his habits make him a mighty odd Mexican police Captain, his philosophy is exactly what’s called for. Too bad I can never embrace it.

“I don’t need to face anything, jefé—I need to end it. I will never accept what has happened to this town or to this country and I will never adapt to it like these other fools—what is served in a trough is slop and I’m not bellying up to Maximilio there. I respect you, sir, but I cannot be you. I will find resurrection.”

Forgetting what’s in my cup, I stand and throw it back. Rosario looks up at me, his beatific smile a degree flatter. He deconstructs his steeple to turn the flat of his hands up and the smile regains its curvature. I rise, the wish for tequila and beer exploding in my head.

“Thanks for trying, though,” I tell him, from the door.

YES!

2009-07-30T20:00:00.000+03:00

(From Publisher's Marketplace)

NON-FICTION: MEMOIR

Dustin Diamond's BEHIND THE BELL, a tell-all account of his life as Samuel "Screech" Powers on the set of the TV show "Saved by the Bell," including sexual escapades among cast members, drug use, and hardcore partying, resold to Transit Publishing, following "a mutual decision not to publish" with Gotham, for publication on September 29, 2009, by Jarred Weisfeld of Objective Entertainment (world).

Back When I Was Crazy

2009-07-13T04:47:00.002+03:00

(Writing exercise at EDVP Adult Creative Writing Group, inspired by Roberto Bolaño's "The Romantic Dogs")

Back when I was crazy it was normal to put beer in my gut before breakfast, perched on a carved up picnic table with a warm, empty can of Miller Lite in one hand and a stale, untouched raisin bagel in the other, beneath a Seattle drizzle as common as air, drawing slow, easy stupidity down like a curtain in my brain before the experiment of the morning classroom proved me right.

Back when I was crazy it was normal to fight for hours with a girl I was making ugly and being made ugly by, shirking our costumes of cool to become red-faced lunatics over something that scarcely mattered anyway, something that was merely an excuse to strike at each other for loving someone so far away.

Back when I was crazy it was normal to drive cars down the black throats of liquored nights, telling myself lies about my ability and fate, as if simply knowing which direction a back road curved would be enough to keep my blood inside my body instead of painting the asphalt and trees like countless fools before me.

Back when I was crazy it was normal to fling a dish, upend a table, even press a knife to my fingers in a dish-filled sink, to hate walls and the limitations of fists, to hammer my spirit and hers with blunt words or pierce our minds bloodlessly with the filed down tip of insult.

Back when I was crazy it was normal to imagine myself at 32, far beyond the dangers and excesses and torn affairs of youth, to imagine myself bald and good-naturedly grumbling through a career, as close to happy as I'd get having left behind the violent bafflement of youth.