And Fire

The times are always strange, if you're paying
attention, if you read the small stories buried in the
back of the newspaper, if you read the newspaper at all,
if you watch the news, if you look out your window, if
you keep your ears open, if you can avert your eyes
from the mirror ball that orbits ceaselessly in your skull,
if you can pull your head out of your ass for five minutes,
if you're tuned in enough to strangeness and the bottomless
shared well of otherness that when a woman you've
never seen before turns to you at the street corner and
says, wide-eyed and in no apparent context, "I thought
there would be a lot more smoke," you nod your head,
not simply out of polite, sympathetic habit or discomfort,
but because you understand exactly what she means.

I Don't Know Why I Do It, But I Do

That's a poor photographic souvenir from my time spent playing softball with Ronnie Goddamn's ragged beer league club in Orlando. It'll have to serve, though, and every one of the grainy, out-of-focus snapshots I retain from those few months seem at the very least metaphorically apt.

As you can see, Ronnie Goddamn's softball team often eschewed shirts, caps, and even footwear. Most of the guys had long hair, and a bong would usually be stashed in with the gear (such as it was). Some of the guys would use truncated wooden bats that their (mostly) illegitimate children had received as bat day giveaways at Tinker Field, at the time the spring training headquarters of the Minnesota Twins, and home as well to the Orlando Twins, the big league team's Southern League affiliate (I was, I suppose I should mention, then working as a groundskeeper at that same complex).

Ronnie's team was called Cheap Smokes, and it played in what passed for a fairly legitimate league in Orlando in the mid-eighties. Many of the other teams wore actual uniforms, which I found as ridiculous as the decidedly informal get-ups favored by Cheap Smokes.

I wasn't a particularly good fit on the team, but I could hit a little bit, and run down balls in center field, and Ronnie lived in the basement of the shabby side-by-side duplex I was renting on Mariposa Avenue right in the middle of Orlando, and, after seeing I had a decent mitt, he'd badgered me into joining.

Obviously, Ronnie Goddamn wasn't the man's real name, but that's all I ever heard anyone call him. I didn't know anybody in Orlando in those days, and though Ronnie often kept me up all night blasting Deep Purple at maximum volume and hitting beer bottles off a tee with a Lance Parrish model Louisville Slugger down there in the basement, I did sort of get a kick out of him.

When I'd first encountered Ronnie he was out in the front yard, and had removed a wheel from the Impala that was up on blocks in the carport. This wheel he had filled with charcoal, and he was barbecuing chicken in a metal gym basket he'd stolen from the YMCA. He'd filled the basket with chicken, poured over it a bottle of some store brand barbecue sauce, and set the whole thing down in the coals to cook. Every once in awhile he'd shake the basket or move the chicken around with a rusty garden trowel. I thought this was pretty ingenious, even as I passed on an offer to partake of the chicken.

I think Ronnie Goddamn won me over that day with his clear-eyed tale of woe. He was sporting a nasty shiner and a split lip, and he told me without a trace of self-pity or rancor that his wife's old man --who was "seventy-three fucking years old"-- had "kicked the living shit" out of him for violating a restraining order.

"Seventy-three year old and still kicking ass," Ronnie said (with obvious admiration, I might add). "Imagine that."

At any rate, every Thursday night I'd come home from work and drive Ronnie (who had a suspended license) to the Cheap Smokes games. We generally lost, but, given the overt hostility of almost every opposing team (They'd yell stuff like, "Hey, Sweet Home Alabama, I thought you dickweeds all got killed in a plane crash"), and frequent gratuitously rough collisions at home plate, it seemed to me that the majority of our losses counted as moral victories.

To be perfectly honest with you, I had no idea what I was doing in Orlando. I was crazy about baseball, tired of Midwest winters, and one day I had just packed a couple bags and hopped on a Greyhound for Orlando, hoping to find work and take in Spring Training baseball, which was still six weeks away. One of the first ads I saw in the newspaper was for a groundskeeper at Tinker Field, and right away I rode my bike out there and filled out an application. That was the only time in my life I've lied on a job application, but this seemed like such a stroke of fate that I was determined to get the job, and certain I would get it.

Which I did, of course. And since I was the low man in the pecking order I spent most of my time dragging the practice infields, mowing the grass, and keeping the bullpen tidy and the mound in good shape. It was pretty easy work, and I got to stand around a lot and watch baseball in the sun.

When I wasn't at the ballpark or playing softball, I'd sit out on the patio of my duplex, drinking quarts of beer from the 7-11 up the block and becoming daily more infatuated with my next door neighbor, a lanky, impossibly toned, six-foot-tall blond woman named Sundra Nillsen. Sundra had a high jump pit set up in our backyard, very professional looking, and she seemed to spend hours every day launching herself over the bar. I was no expert, and she seldom deigned to speak to me in the initial stages of our acquaintance, but it seemed to me she was jumping higher every week, and rare were the times when I saw the bar wobble, let alone fall.

Sometimes when I was feeling a bit stalkerish I would retire to my bedroom, which had a window facing the backyard, and I would sit on the edge of my bed watching her, in her tank top, nylon shorts, and track shoes, sail upside down through the falling darkness. Because of the way my window was positioned in relation to my bed I could only see her airborne body rising and falling, again and again, but this was somehow all the more thrilling.

This, as I mentioned, was the eighties, and --outside of certain subcultures (The Cheap Smokes roster being one such, although I'm not sure that, in and of itself, the team represented a subculture)-- you seldom saw elaborately tattooed people, particularly beautiful, athletic women. Sundra, however, had a number of distinctive and exotic tattoos. For a number of weeks this fact drove me nuts, as, given my reserve and halfhearted attempts at maintaining respectful distance, I couldn't ascertain what they represented.

For quite some time I couldn't even get Sundra to make eye contact with me, let alone engage in a conversation. Eventually, however, she warmed to me, although I have no idea why. For a few weeks we had exchanged what can only be called very small talk, and then one day, when I was out in the yard trying to teach myself how to juggle baseballs, she came out and handed me a piece of paper on which were typed some words.

"Be honest and tell me what you think of that," she said. "It's a personal ad."

I read the text: "Looking for someone to help me explore my wild side. Musicians, artists, or poets welcome. Money not an issue. No commitments. Long hair and tattoos a plus."

I'll admit that I was a bit taken aback by this unexpected intimacy, and I suppose that I blushed.

"Ronnie Goddamn's probably got some friends he could hook you up with," I said.

"Don't be a smart ass," she said. "I don't want any dumb shits."

I shrugged. "Who knows?" I said. "I'm not sure you're going to find many poets or artists in Orlando, but --what the hell-- send it up the flag pole and see if anybody salutes it."

"What's that supposed to mean?" she said.

"It's a joke, sort of," I said. "I think it's a quote from Lemmy of Motorhead. What I meant was, give it a try."

"Thanks," she said, took the paper from me, and disappeared back into her apartment.

A couple weeks later I ran into Sundra when I was coming home and she was sitting on the porch in her high-jumping outfit. She told me she'd had a traumatic weekend.

"How so?" I asked.

"I was arrested over at Lake Eola," she said.

"Arrested for what?"

"Fucking," she said.

"Wow," I think I said, or something equally inept. "That's a bummer."

"A slap on the wrist," she said, "but it's embarrassing. I keep looking in the Sentinel to see if it will actually qualify as news."

"I doubt it," I said, although I really had no idea.

Since Sundra seemed beleaguered, and to have let down her guard, I took the opportunity to ask about her tattoos.

She stood up without hesitation, turned around, and pulled up her shirt a bit to reveal an elaborate and colorful map stretched across the small of her back just above her waistband.

"That's Greenland," she said. "Never been there, but it's a place I dream about."

Next she pulled her shirt all the way up in the back to display a sentence etched between her shoulder blades in what looked like German.

"It's Rilke," she said.

"What does it say?" I asked.

"'All you undisturbed cities, haven't you ever longed for the enemy?'"

I had no idea what to make of that, but by this time she was raising her left arm and running her finger along black braids of musical notes that ran from just above her elbow to the furthest valley of her bicep.

"And that?" I asked.

"It's a partial transcription of Bill Evans' 'Waltz for Debbie,'" she said. I indicated that I was unfamiliar with the piece (or, for that matter, the musician).

"Find it," she said. "You'll like it, and I think you'll discover that women dig it."

"Not to change the subject," I said, "but how high can you jump?"

"High," she said. "But not yet high enough."

Spring Training had wrapped up by this time, and the Twins had gone back north. The AA club took over Tinker Field and began preparing in earnest for its season, while on the other adjacent diamonds the rookie league and instructional league players had assembled for long days of ridiculously repetitive drills and conditioning. This also made for very long days for me, and I would often leave the apartment at dawn and get home after dark.

Then one day in the middle of April, Ronnie Goddamn was arrested for aggravated battery, possession of marijuana with intent to sell, driving with a suspended license while intoxicated, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and assault on an officer. I read about this in the Orlando Sentinel a couple days before some of the Cheap Smokes guys came by with a truck to get Ronnie's stuff. Word was, they said, Ronnie was going to go away for a stretch this time.

Two days later I came home and found a typewritten note from Sundra on my front door. "Off to Europe to jump," she'd typed. "It was good to find a nice guy in such a shithole. You should go back to wherever you belong and write poetry and find a girl to sleep with. Use a condom, and try not to become just another dumbass."

With two of three units empty, my landlord decided to take the opportunity to remodel the building into a single-family dwelling and put it on the market, and he gave me a thirty-day notice.

Which was fine, really. I'd had my numb adventure, was developing a drinking problem, and despised Orlando. I announced I was leaving at work, had a debauched going-away party at Church Street Station, and the morning of my eviction was headed back north in a 1973 Toyota Celica I'd bought for a thousand bucks from one of the Cheap Smokes guys.

Many years later I was in Chicago on business and was channel surfing late at night in my hotel room when I stumbled across the broadcast of an international indoor track meet somewhere in (I think) Asia. And there was Sundra, still jumping, her blond hair grown longer and pulled back in a flopping ponytail. I watched her clear six feet-four inches with just a wobble of the bar. They showed this jump again in slow motion, and for those few breathtaking moments I was allowed to actually watch her sail through the air in exactly the way --her head thrown back almost ecstatically and her body an elegant, suspended wave-- and at the exact same hypnotic speed as she had done countless times in my dreams. And then the fuckers cut away to a hurdles race, and then the shot put, and the pole vault, and a bunch of other bullshit, and though I turned off the lights, took off all my clothes, and sat up until I could no longer hold my eyes open, I never saw her jump again.

Never Not To Say

"Now what kind of sentence is 'Nothing in the world'?" (Wittgenstein)

"Thus we expunge the sentences that don't get us any further." (Same guy)

"A doubt without an end is not even a doubt." (Again, same guy)

Seriously, some nights Wittgenstein is even funnier than Beckett or Flann O'Brien.

Tonight I spent watching baseball and looking through war photographs. A strange experience on any number of levels. I would be trying to look hard into a photograph by, say, Larry Burrows, some unimaginable horror from Vietnam, and Jim Thome would hit a homerun, or Gil Meche would walk another batter, and I kept looking up from the world of suffering contained in the photograph to see what was going on in the game. Or, even worse, I would be distracted for some moments by the chatter of the television announcers or by the inane challenge of a trivia question that had appeared on the screen.

I eventually muted the TV and managed to lock in on the photographs.

And looking through (literally, in most cases) those photos, my thoughts were a stream of heartbreaking speculation that went something like this: Imagine that is your life. Everything you know is burning and you are walking away with a battered suitcase in your hands. It might not even be a suitcase; it could just be a box. Or you are standing in a dirty river up to your neck clutching something tiny and still breathing in your arms, raising it, in fact, like an offering, and it is raining and growing darker. A boat passes slowly in the murk, carrying a pile of gray bundles that only yesterday might have been sitting around a benign fire playing cards and maybe even laughing. Or: you are a dazed young man on your belly in the mud, surrounded by other young men who appear to be dead or so exhausted they might as well be dead. There is yet more smoke in the distance, and a helicopter is hovering above you, from which a body is dangling from a rope. The posture of this body, the way in which it is folded almost exactly into two halves, is not encouraging.

Nothing, in fact, about the photographs was encouraging, and I was unable to see them as history, let alone ancient history or something anyone has survived, or could survive. I was also bothered by their silence, by the absence of what I felt certain was a ferocious soundtrack, as well as by the cropping involved, a cropping that seemed to excise the panoramic violence and suffering of which the images I was looking at were but one small, harrowing detail.

I was struck, finally, by my utter inability to imagine any of the scenarios I've described, and felt like a schmuck for closing the book and concluding nothing more than that what I had been looking at was simply --or not so simply-- the world as it then was, as it still is, and as it ever will be, which is not something (at least constitutionally) I want to believe.

As is generally my habit, as I was looking at these photographs I was taking notes, but this process is still a mystery to me, because it seems to tap into a different stream in my brain, and often as not these "notes" end up having no relation that I can understand to the material supposedly under consideration.

After I close whatever book I'm looking at or reading I am almost always struck by the ridiculousness of the things I've written. What follows are the notes I scribbled while I was simultaneously looking at those photos, occasionally turning my attention to the baseball game on TV, and entertaining the above thoughts and speculations (none of which appeared on the pile on index cards in my lap):

A city is not a dog. A dog is not a shopping mall. A shopping mall is not a flag. A flag is not a caterpillar. But why the hell not?

Earnest goes to camp.

I can't make sense of these operating instructions.

I thought I was eavesdropping on someone at dinner, and it turned out to be my dining companion.

A fellow can get lost in the old words and never find his way out.

How much confusion can exist in one room, in one house, in one family? Turn that confusion out-of-doors, let it run up against other people, against walls and barricades, real and imagined, literal and metaphorical; let it tell stories whose points elude me, jokes whose meanings are lost or misunderstood; have it toss in references to television and film and cheap popular culture and I find myself drowning in even the most casual conversation. Perhaps a casual conversation is no longer possible. Means, even, who knows what that means? All the millions upon millions of agreements and auto-pilot incidents of shared comprehension, and yet still some of us are left out of the loop, and increasingly so. What is Bedlam? What do we agree that means? Could we somehow reach an agreement --if only among ourselves-- that it means this?

It's all nonsense, it seems, all that wasted, mysterious ink, which so often feels like it was spilled by a stoned 15-year-old. Still, there's no stopping it now, the endless staggering of the tongue upon its torturous treadmill, the idiot, freelance rambles of the pen, looking for something to say, even if the spastic pursuit increasingly resembles the way a dog goes looking for a whiff of a phantom squirrel.

Take away the dog's miraculous nose, and I think you've got a reasonably accurate picture of how I spend my nights.

I'm just happy these days if something in all this cross-wired cogitation [sic, I suppose] eventually sends me down some dark little dead-end spur that recalls to me (for reasons I couldn't begin to understand or trace) an Undertones or Webb Pierce album that I haven't heard in years, and I put aside whatever I'm doing, manage to dig out the desired record from somewhere (a minor miracle, this), and put it on the turntable.

Because I long ago discovered that only music can mostly make the words go away.

When The Rock Starts Rolling, It's Going To Roll Until It Stops, Even If It Has To Roll In The Second Person

Some days you go, Wait, what the hell is going on? And no answer is forthcoming, so you just try to keep things from sitting still for too long. You walk back and forth in your apartment, until eventually you are once again at the windows, looking out at the darkness, or what passes for darkness in an inner-city neighborhood. You put another record on the turntable and, though hoping for a full-on shimmy, settle for the lethargic sway of a bored housewife stoned on Valium and listening to some old original cast Broadway show recording.

You turn out the lights and ask more questions, or rather let the questions come slowly and unbidden: Wait, this is the world? This crooked gyp? Answers to such questions, you've discovered, are stubborn things.

Someone's always telling you not to do things, which is difficult for a specialist in disregard.

The response to anything incriminatory you might wish to allege tonight is either, So?, or Of course, neither of which you are in a mood to find satisfactory.

Earlier this evening, while walking your dog, you encountered the sort of young man who will always fancy himself in charge until --God willing-- the world teaches him otherwise. He was shirtless and dialing his cell phone as he stared down at a barbecue grill upon which a group of creepily pink sausages was merely sweating. His hair was ridiculous, a disheveled and heavily-moussed style that's meant to suggest casual indifference but, you feel certain, actually requires a great deal of time and money to maintain. And he was wearing large, white-plastic framed sunglasses that you figured were supposed to be ironic and which were probably purchased from a clearance rack at a drug store or truck stop.

"Listen to me," you heard him say into his phone. "I am trying to tell you that there is something seriously fucked with this fucking charcoal you sold me."

Now, though, planes are once again sneaking down through the darkness. Nights like this, standing at the window, you remember things. You remember riding your Schwinn stingray over to the Coast-to-Coast store and standing before the glass case of jackknives. Jesus, you wanted a jackknife so badly, but there was also something about them that frightened you, and you never have owned one.

You also remember your parents dragging you down to the high school auditorium to hear Ferrante and Teicher. You were maybe 10 years old and thought it was the most ridiculous thing you'd ever seen. You lived in a place where it seemed like 80% of the women over the age of 25 had a beautician's license. All day and all through the night, in the Gormenghast-looking slaughterhouse on the east side of town, they tore down animals into meat.

"Meat is Community," read a billboard along the main drag.

You remember walking slowly home from detention in the early October gloaming, remember walking into the inescapable smell of a tuna casserole in the oven. Somebody was practicing piano in the little room off the kitchen. In the living room the television seemed like an endlessly looping laugh track of obviously fraudulent and crazy-making ha-ha-has. The place was so tiny in those days, everybody on top of each other. There was no place to escape. You'd take a book and go down behind the furnace in the basement to sit with the dirty laundry.

The library alone was your refuge, and books broke your heart in a way that felt different from the way hearts were customarily broken in your world. Yes, the books were what ultimately took you away, and what broke your heart. But it was a beautiful heartbreak that did not surrender longing.

If the people in that town looked at you, you desperately wanted them to know that you did not belong there, that you would never belong. Your mother taught you and your siblings --taught you zealously and well-- that the greatest escape was pretending.

Finally, you remember falling asleep in the far backseat of your father's station wagon, returning late at night from a trip somewhere, the surf of darkness and locomotion murmuring at the slightly open windows; streetlights and headlights strobing the car's interior, disorienting, and the faint strains of some dated pop hit or a baseball game drifting back from the AM radio in the dashboard. Everyone was quiet, and you were so tired that you wobbled back and forth at the edge of sleep.

You don't know why you're remembering these things now, as another day slips away and another long night looms. Maybe, you think, it's because you're trying to recall what it felt like, all those long years ago, to have the unquestioned knowledge that you were on your way home.

Heaven Is A Place....

The fires they have in Heaven are pure blue and smokeless, with bright flames that stretch downward into the clouds in columns of braided light. They burn continuously, in secret locations on the outskirts. They burn thousands of tons of baggage in Heaven every day.

When I first got to Heaven I didn't know anybody there, and I was sort of stunned by how crowded and chaotic the scene was. I mean, this was in what I guess you'd call the Ellis Island part of Heaven, the processing area (no actual Pearly Gates that I was ever aware of). Still, you know, I thought there'd at least be someone I knew there to greet me. I guess I expected to immediately encounter my father, my grandparents, my dogs, a big family reunion of all the people I was related to but never met, the people who died long before I was born.

Heaven apparently doesn't work that way anymore (if it ever did), and once I'd been cleared and had passed through I was on my own. I remember asking some guy where everybody was. "Your people?" he said. I nodded. "They're here somewhere if they're here somewhere," he said. "if you see what I mean."

I asked him about God and Jesus. "You might see them around occasionally," he said

A group of women on a bench who looked like they'd been dead hundreds of years --I mean, they looked perfectly healthy, but not like anyone from a century I was familiar with-- directed me to some sort of registry, which they insisted would have the records I'd need to get properly oriented and track down people I might know.

This place was a long walk. It turned out there's a lot of walking in Heaven. The first week (I'm just guessing; the place is like a casino: there are no clocks anywhere) I never saw anyone who looked like an angel, and never encountered a single familiar-looking face. I slept, I guess, but it was narcoleptic sleep. I would just nod off anywhere and anytime, and this was initially disorienting, as you might imagine. There were no dreams, and when I asked somebody about this I was told, "Oh, no, your dreaming days are over. Dreams would cause nothing but problems up here."

It took me a few days, but I did initially find the registry. The building was immense, labyrinthine, almost impossible to navigate, and ridiculously crowded. I heard someone say that there were stories of people who spent their first ten years in Heaven in there. "There's no denying things are a little bit out of control," a functionary said. "Overcrowding is a problem. But when God makes a promise, He keeps it, and it takes some people awhile to recognize that time is no longer an issue here. What part of eternity don't people understand?" Then, in a hushed voice, this fellow said to me, "Be honest, isn't it sort of terrifying? Weren't you ever scared to death about the whole idea as a child? I used to lie awake at night fretting. I couldn't get my head around it; forever seemed like too much time to spend in any one place."

I certainly don't want to seem like I'm complaining. People are pretty much universally agreeable in Heaven, and I haven't seen a single dust-up of any sort. I found a bunk in one of what are called the "dog stations," and spend my nights surrounded by sleeping dogs. None of them, alas, are dogs I spent any time with on earth, but there are supposedly thousands of these stations. I've been assured that no matter who you were when you were among the living, you'll never see even a fraction of Heaven, and it's possible that my relatives could be installed in some sector that is as far from my lodgings as New York City is from Honolulu.

I don't know that for certain. I've never seen a map of the place, and haven't met anyone else who has. All I know is that I've been here for what now seems like a long time, and I still haven't found anyone I knew in my previous life. Maybe there's a reason for that, and maybe it's for the best, even if it doesn't jibe with some of your preconceived notions.

I also haven't seen Jesus or God yet, but remind myself that I lived my entire life (relatively short as it was) on earth without ever laying eyes on an American President.

I'm not going to pretend to understand Heaven. I never felt entirely home when I was still a living, breathing entity, and I have to confess that I also never had any real expectations of an afterlife. It's an odd place, certainly, though quite beautiful. People seem to spend most of their time walking around, or sitting in parks staring (happily, it always appears) into space. There don't seem to be any concerted efforts to organize any sort of social activities, and with nothing to buy you just sort of find yourself settling into the peaceful lull of things.

Still, I'll admit that there were times I felt restlessness, even though this wasn't supposed to be an admissible possibility. I eventually volunteered for a job burning baggage, and it suits me just fine and passes the time. One of the advantages is that I get to look through the stuff before I burn it, and it's always interesting to see the sorts of things people try to bring with them. I burn a lot of photographs, and a surprising number of unfinished manuscripts, journals, and letters. And jewelry, which for some reason isn't allowed. Much of the baggage is of a sort that I guess you'd call purely psychological or metaphorical, and is heaped in what feel like very heavy garbage bags. We're not supposed to look in these bags, but a co-worker told me that he'd had one break once only to discover it was empty. I can't explain that.

They do have a truly incredible musical repository here, stored in a giant tower with an awe-inspiring atrium and listening stations arranged in a circular manner and spiraling upwards for what seems like a mile. Somewhat to my surprise, this incredible trove gets very little traffic, and most of the patrons appear to be ancient curiosity seekers who lived in the time before recorded music. I hear a lot of gasps from these characters, and some of them seem to be genuinely frightened by whatever it is they're hearing. It's a cool system, at any rate. You sit down, put the headphones on, and type in whatever it is you want to listen to.

Tonight on my way home from work I stopped in and listened to Badfinger, and then I walked home to the dogs.

It was a good day, and I have no reason to suspect that there will be any better, or any worse.

Make Believe

It's as easy as breathing, and every bit as hard.

This feeble effort, for instance:

The old goat was uncomfortable standing on a raised platform (perhaps, it occurred to him, a platform was by its very nature raised, but he had never before stood on one; a few moments earlier the man had instructed him to get up on the platform, and, coaxed by the rope around his neck, the goat had done so).

This platform was small, had been hastily assembled out of scrap wood at hand, and did not feel sturdy beneath the old goat's wobbly legs.

The old goat also wasn't at all comfortable wearing a red felt vest, green satin britches, straw hat, and wire-rim spectacles, although he was somewhat astonished by the improvement in his eyesight that had been effected by the glasses. Be that as it may (and was), the ridiculous get-up was not his idea. Clothing of any sort had never figured in a single idea he'd ever had, and he'd had his share of ideas. Ideas, in fact, were his stock in trade.

If he weren't convinced this whole charade was necessary to save his neck, and if a human being hadn't tied the rope around that very neck to drag him about, he wouldn't for a moment have gone along with this nonsense.

The old goat wished like hell he'd never opened his big, fat mouth. There was nothing he could do about it now. He could talk, and he'd be damned if he wasn't going to make the most of it and speak his mind.

The humans got a kick out of a talking goat. Always had. They saw him as entertainment. The old goat, however, hoped for something more truthful than mere entertainment.

Actually, what he truly hoped was to spook the living bejesus out of the people who came to hear him speak. If he was to do his job he would need to choose his words carefully --his English was decent, but he'd had to pick it up where he could and hadn't exactly spent his long life surrounded by humans of much eloquence or erudition. The old goat also spoke in a very slow and halting tenor, poorly pitched, and with a slight lisp that tended to lend unintended comic effect to his words. This last was something he was keenly conscious of as he stood on the platform.

The old goat also, of course, couldn't write, so whatever words he did speak had to be either extemporaneous or committed to memory.

There was surely some risk, he supposed, for a goat willing to speak plainly and honestly to humans, but the old goat had also surmised that there was potentially a good deal of money to be made off a talking goat. He was counting on this factor --and the sheer wondrousness of the spectacle-- to allow him to speak his mind.

A large crowd had assembled at the fairgrounds that day, and they were still pressing into the hot tent as the old goat wobbled slightly on the platform and awaited the signal that he was to speak.

When a loud and gracelessly hyperbolic introduction had been made, and he had received his signal, the goat raised his head and stared out at the gaping faces that surrounded him.

"This gentleman," he said, nodding in the direction of the man who had provided the introduction, "has described me as a 'storytelling goat.' I'm afraid this is not quite accurate. I do not have any stories for you. It is my belief that those who begin by telling stories inevitably end by telling lies. I do not wish to lie to you, and also am of the opinion that the world is a story that tells itself. That story --whatever it might be-- should be sufficiently harrowing, heartbreaking, entertaining, and instructive.

"No," the old goat continued, "I am not here to tell you stories. I am, in fact, reminded of a monstrous swine maiden of my acquaintance who saw her business as the telling of stories, and the 'nurturing' of stories in others. 'For what,' she would frequently ask the barnyard animals, who, I might add, were her only audience, 'is your character dying for want of?' She would ask us to imagine those very words as if they were lodged behind our ribs in a sort of circling maze, with the question mark at the end of the sentence stamped squarely on our hearts. What a foolish question to ask a herd of animals destined for slaughter! How many possible answers I could have given that wretched woman, and not one of them would have been profound enough to satisfy her exalted and misguided notion of the importance of stories.

"So, no, I am not here to tell you stories. Pardon me if I repeat myself, but I wish to be clear. I can only tell you what I have observed and learned in my long life, which has not been blessed with a great deal of kindness or happiness. In this, I know, I am surely not unique, but I nonetheless believe that the ultimate source of all cruelty and unhappiness is standing right here before me. If it is your honest opinion that my words do not apply to you, I ask that you not take them personally. I must tell you, though, and please understand that this knowledge gives me no pleasure whatsoever, that from my experience I can only conclude that a great majority of human beings are monsters and...what is the word? Dicks. They are dicks, and the dicks, from what I have seen, cause nothing but suffering and misery and the endless perpetuation of untruths and make believe of the most grievous and heartbreaking sort. They will dress a tired old goat up in ragged human clothing and hope that he will deliver some mock, feel-good bunch of hogwash masquerading as wisdom that will allow all the victims of the dicks to walk away feeling good about themselves and hopeful regarding the human condition. That this goat cannot and will not...."

There was a great deal of obvious discomfort and vocalized displeasure in the crowd as the old goat moved into this peroration. A steady gaggle of parents dragging youngsters by the hands was making a hasty retreat toward the exit in the back. At one point the man at the side of the platform had given a hard jerk to the rope around the old goat's neck, which caused the spectacles to slide from his face and bounce from the platform into the crowd, where they were pounced on by a scrum of children. Eventually, before the old goat could properly wrap up his remarks, the man with the rope, assisted by a group of clearly exercised men, succeeded in wrestling him from the platform, hauling him through the back of the tent, and shoving him into a trailer.

The old goat was driven away, and was not heard from again for over a year. When he did finally reappear --at a county fair in Illinois-- he had been bought and sold several times and was a truly doddering, glassy-eyed creature who had been reduced to reciting classics from the folk and fairy tale canon to crowds of rapt youngsters and mocking teenagers.

When he died a short time later he was buried outside a local historical society in a small town in the Midwest (the same institution is also in possession of his spectacles, the gift of an anonymous benefactor). His grave is marked with a modest plaque that reads simply, "Hiram, The Beloved Storytelling Goat."

Hell Yeah, That's Exactly What's Been Missing From My Life, A Three-Disc Deluxe Blu-Ray Edition Of "The Incredible Hulk"

What the hell does space even mean in this context, when there is no bottom of the page and somehow finding a way to fall all the way down there to the bottom is the one solid goal of the day? When the presumptive "you" can't even see all the empty page down there beneath the words "down there beneath"? I'm just going to write --or type-- as fast as I can, because I really don't have anything to say, but feel like it's been much too long since I've said anything at all. How did this country become so lax in the credentialing of celebrities? And do I really want to watch Charles Barkley and Ben Stein debate some damn thing or another on Larry King? Seriously, what is wrong with us (and don't lie to me; something is seriously wrong with every one of us, or we wouldn't engage in monkey business like this)? Honestly, how do you take anyone seriously anymore? Celebrity sickens me, the absurd hyper-hyphenated nature of the ubiquitous class of talking heads: Actor-game show host-comedian-economist-political pundit vs. Ex-NBA star-professional provocateur-Pro Am golfer-celebrity wrestling referee-purported political aspirant. I saw this one on a screen beneath some completely unfamiliar face and it made me laugh out loud: Actor-musician-activist-children's book author. And that description could actually apply to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in this world. My God, what is that woman wearing (not the A-M-A-CBA)? And why am I watching this? Because I am bored, and when I am good and truly bored I watch television. This usually only happens when I am in motel rooms, but is also an undesired side effect of watching baseball on TV, which I am capable of doing obsessively for at least six months a year, and which I would somehow be able to hoodwink myself into believing did not actually qualify as watching television if it weren't for the fact that I restlessly channel surf between innings and following the last out of the game. I sometimes feel like driving for hours through darkness in any direction and then just checking into a place. Tonight is one such night. I'm extremely picky about the sorts of places I check into, but not picky in the way that I assume most people are picky. I assume this primarily because virtually every place I do check into is almost entirely --if not entirely-- devoid of other occupants. I don't believe I've ever encountered a "No Vacancy" sign, and I'm pretty certain that I've checked into places that were no longer even in business, or that were closed for the season, places that were dark and had long since vanquished any expectation of future revenues and thus were so surprised by the appearance of someone wishing to check in that they took my money and gave me a key to a room that had clearly been unoccupied for many months, if not many years. Fine with me. One such place I checked into not that long ago had had the only window entirely removed, a fact the owner attempted to obscure by hastily drawing a heavy pleated rubber curtain across the space where the window had once been. It was not a warm night, I should mention, and all night long trucks blasted by on the busy state highway just outside my room. Still, I lodged no complaints. What I most like are dim places of a certain vintage, places long on faded or downtrodden atmosphere and short on what the business traveler would call "amenities." It's a bonus (almost expected by now)if the art above the bed is incongruous to the point of ridiculousness --I recently encountered a giant and gory depiction of Sherman's March to the Sea on the wall of a room in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I don't cotton to out-and-out squalor, mind you, but I've endured it on plenty of nights. I do prefer, however, that the proprietors of such places retain a modicum of pride or even dignity, however delusional. I like to have a sense that the scarcity of guests is no real fault of either the place or the people who run it, but rather a product of economics, geography, and the general fucked-up priorities and squanderous proclivities of the average dumb ass. Ideally, and most often, the kinds of places I check into are far enough away from my home that getting to them provides me with the satisfying sense that I have gone somewhere, that I have traveled a sufficient distance and arrived in an unfamiliar place under the cover of darkness. I live in a big city, a city of disorienting freeways, constant road construction, and inexcusable congestion, so when I go in search of a place to check into I am almost always --almost unconsciously-- going in search of small towns and space. I like to time my arrival at the places I check into so it is late and dark and I am tired and don't entirely know where I am. Ideally the office will be dark, and part of someone's home, and I will have to ring a bell to summon a proprietor. In a perfect scenario it will be raining or snowing, and I will have been driving through thick fog, and the place in question --the place I intend to check into-- will suddenly loom up out of the fog --a beacon of forlorn, minimalist, antiquated neon-- and I will have the unmistakable and thrilling sense that I have found exactly the refuge I am in need of. What, really, does it say about me that when I hear the word "sanctuary," so often the first image that comes to mind is a park-at-your-door motel in the middle of North Dakota?

An Apology For My Dereliction

I gotta be honest with you, I'm living stuff right now that's just flat out better than anything I could write. Not saying much, I realize, but I'm in a situation where the truth's just so damn good and mind-boggling that I spend every free moment trying to process it.

It's a good place to be, I believe, but it's also frustrating when words utterly fail me.

Tonight is typical of so many recent nights. At 3 o'clock in the morning I find myself so cross-wired and swamped with all the things I saw and heard over the course of the previous eighteen hours that my mind just shuts down and I can't shake any words loose to save my soul. The upshot: I've been sitting here for over an hour staring at a box of Triscuit Thin Crisps and mulling the mysterious words printed there beneath the brand name: "Weave Some Wonder."

Yes.

Do that.

And --if you can-- explain to me what the hell those words could possibly have to do with a snack cracker.

My Days As A Produce Detailer

All day I made things oranger.
If the purple of a particular plum seemed
less than succulent I shot the fucker full of more
purple and buffed it until it glowed like the chrome
of a muscle car. No shit, you could stare into one
of those plums and tweeze your eyebrows.
I didn't exactly airbrush the bananas,
but I might as well have, and still fantasize
about it sometimes, fantasize about airbrushing
bananas with the image of Jesus, or Elvis, or the
Lucky Strike cigarette logo. I was lauded for my gifts
with green, the whole spectrum, and it was hard to get
me head around the idea that a head of lettuce,
say, or a cucumber, or a pepper could all be somehow
considered green, but they were, and each needed to be
radiant and unreal in its own way. The Mexicans and
Vietnamese all thought I was some kind of magician,
which obviously I was, even as they also clearly thought
my brand of magic was pure batshit craziness.
If they looked at my labors as criminal --and who,
really, could have blamed them?-- they never let
on, God bless them, not a one of them ever let on.

The Landfill At The Bottom Of The Day

One more day slowly tumbles the last twenty yards down the hill into the darkness, and I have no choice but to turn away and let most of it go.

What a wondrous, depressing scrap heap must lie down there at the bottom of time's hill, a bottomless bottom full of wrecked hearts, exhausted marvels and miracles, wishes, busted dreams, goodbyes, regrets, forgotten thoughts, good intentions, memories of first meetings, wasted fairy dust, failed attempts, triumphs and all manner of disasters great and small; cribs, coffins, lost love, training wheels, castoff fashions and fads, dismembered dolls, yearbooks; shit that no longer worked or was no longer needed or that just hurt too damn much to keep around.

And under and mixed in among it all --if you were willing to dig long and deep enough-- you'd surely find entire civilizations and layer upon layer of the sort of prosaic trash and nothingness and empty, wasted hours that we all just allow to roll off and away from us at the bottom of every day. All of it gone, gone for good (whatever that could ever possibly mean).

Your first smile, first giggle, first rock t-shirt, first kiss; every forgotten memory, a million stories received from family, friends, and strangers; every bright morning and long night, every moment of ecstatic, extinct passion, all your faded dreams: They're all there now.

Your beloved old moon globe is down there somewhere as well, along with the first John Denver record you bought at Sterling Drug, and the Schwinn stingray with the sparkly green banana seat and gleaming sissy bar that you pedaled to Sterling Drug to buy your first John Denver record. The ruins of at least a half dozen of your old forts are there, and the Alvin and the Chipmunks coloring book that was once one of your most treasured possessions.

Things and memories and moments, though, not the people who are gone, not the precious people who've moved on in a different direction, into a darkness that is someplace beyond but not below. People, you need to believe, don't just roll down the hill at the bottom of the day and disappear into that landfill of everything gone.

To think of all your own contributions to the scrap heap at the bottom of the day is almost more than you can bear.

In many ways this bottomless landfill is a collapsed Tower of Babel, an immense, sprawling repository of discards from mankind's collective library of experiences, desires, and wasted time and money.

No living person who ever hopes to truly return can visit there, of course, but it is nonetheless often rumored that at least some of the most abject human specimens --living, if barely-- have made that long journey, and spend their days in darkness, roving over the mountains of the past, searching with sticks and improvised or broken rakes or shovels for some reminder of the happier people they had once been. A resonant scrap from even a single wasted, otherwise wholly forgotten day must surely be precious to these scavengers in that dark place. And how much more precious must be the rare discovery of personal photograph, a familiar toy, or a love letter written in one's own hand.

It's a landfill lottery, obviously, with very long odds, but it's what keep these wretches going.

There must be millions upon millions of love letters down there, written in every language ever uttered on earth, and I like to imagine that while the scavengers are stumbling through the piles of sad detritus they are startled time and again by the sounds of laughter and happy, disembodied voices rising up from air pockets in the rubble, sometimes from someplace that seems tauntingly close, sometimes from far below, but always sounding eerily like vaguely familiar voices carrying from a front porch in a long ago August twilight, the voices of mothers summoning their children to a home that no longer exists, voices and laughter from a dock on a dark lake. All manner of lovely voices moving on the wind of any number of perfect summer nights, in places far flung yet always far, far away and long gone.

Land of Dreams

After Mike's second DWI, when he came out of treatment, he and Linda decided he should quit his job at the railroad, take early retirement if they'd give it to him, and the two of them would open their own business in a nice little neighborhood shopping hub.

It was Linda's dream, and Mike figured it was long past time for a change.

They called the place "That Special Occasion," sold balloons, cards, candy, small, mostly corny, gifts.

It hadn't gone well from the start. There were so many things they hadn't really thought about, thought through, and there was the competition from the big one-stop outfits and shopping malls and the internet. Linda didn't want to hire anyone --didn't think they could afford it-- so for at least the short term it was just the two of them.

For the first few months absolutely nothing happened. There was plenty of foot traffic in the neighborhood, but day after day they sat there playing cards and monkeying around with displays. The Yellow Pages advertisement would make all the difference in the world, Linda insisted.

It didn't. After only nine months they were already having problems with creditors. Mike started drinking again, on the sly. When Linda caught him he said he was bored. The location was lousy. They should have considered that. They were practically hidden in the middle of a block, and customers had to drive down an alley to find their parking lot off the back of the building.

Shortly before the first anniversary of their opening they were sitting on folding chairs just outside the back door. It was almost 4:30 on a beautiful summer afternoon and they hadn't had a single customer all day. They were both smoking; Linda had quit for three years, but had recently taken it up again. Mike got up from his chair and started pacing.

After they'd sat there in silence for what seemed like ten minutes, Linda looked up at her husband and said, "We're not gonna make it, are we?"

And Mike, looking off across the empty parking lot, said, "It sure doesn't look like it."

And then everything just fell apart, and two years later he was living with his brother out in Lakeville and she hadn't seen him in over three months.

Linda was working third shift as a motel clerk, and one night she was sitting there at the front desk in the dark hours, listening to the radio, a talk program, and all of a sudden there was Mike's voice.

Every time you drive or walk or ride your bicycle down some street, he was saying, you should make a point to look around and notice all the little businesses that are just about everywhere you look.

He said, Every one of them businesses is somebody's dream. That's somebody's whole life right there. People trying so hard to make something work, something maybe they've always wanted for themselves. Mostly just average folks, I'm talking about, not some big corporation. I wish sometimes people would think about that sort of thing when they go out to spend their money, think about all them people trying to make a go of it, some of them with their whole lives on the line.

There was a pause. The host was momentarily silent, and then Mike said, That's just what I wish, I guess. Something like that. That's all I really have to say.

The man on the radio thanked him, and Mike was gone.

Linda sat there in the quiet lobby of that motel and she cried quietly. She laughed, too. She was so damned proud of him, because that was just not a thing she would ever in the world expect Mike to do, to call on the radio like that.

She turned off the radio and sat there for awhile. And then, like so many other nights, she just felt sad and lonely and started intently watching the dark for the first signs that another morning was, in fact, coming for her.

How Exactly Do You Mean?

Reading:
Matterhorn, Karl Marlantes
Telegrams of the Soul: Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg
The End of the World, edited by Lewis Lapham.

Listening to:
Eric Dolphy
Sunny Murray
Gil Scott-Heron
Radney Foster

Looking at:
Charlotte Dumas, Paradis
Peter De Ru, Sven
Krazy and Ignatz, George Herriman

Occasionally, I guess, I'll do the sort of thing I've just done above, purely for the hell of it, and because I'm often curious about what sorts of things other people are reading, listening to, and looking at. I'm thinking there's probably some way I could tuck that information away somewhere in the right margin, but I haven't yet made up my mind whether it's a good idea or not, so I'll wait a bit before I start monkeying around any more.

Honest to God, to be honest with you I honestly don't know about any of this business, which, excepting this brief bit of honesty, seems inherently dishonest.

Friday afternoon I sat across a desk from a man in a suit and tie (it's been a long time since I've done such a thing). I listened as the man told me that "social networking is a real career builder right now."

He seemed completely serious. He elaborated: "With some of these sites you can accomplish more with a few minutes at your keyboard than you could with a week's worth of expense-account lunches with well-connected people."

"What sorts of things could you accomplish?" I asked him. "In either scenario, really, but I guess I'm most curious about the first."

He held up his palms and raised his eyebrows, a gesture that might mean many things but that in this instance I took to mean 'use your imagination,' or 'the sky's the limit.'

"It's a great way to get your name out there and communicate who you are and what you're looking for," he said (this, I gathered, after he surmised that I was a bit confused regarding the meaning of the palms/eyebrow gesture).

"I like to think I've had my name out there," I said.

"You need to make your name" --here he hesitated, apparently searching for just the right word-- "resonate."

"How exactly do you mean?" I asked.

"You want people to remember you," he said, "to be intrigued enough that they'll bookmark you." It seemed to me that he inserted quote marks around the word 'bookmark,' although he didn't, as I might have expected, actually use his fingers to indicate as much. It did, though, strike me that he was exactly the sort of fellow who would resort to such a gesture with some frequency.

"I guess I meant that question in a more literal sense," I said. "You know, a more general 'you,' a more general 'mean.'"

The man shook his head, or rather nodded quickly two or three times and then, as if his actual head were correcting the thoughts (or confusion) it was trying to process, shook it vigorously.

Yes, yes, yes....No, no, no.

As I was leaving his office I sensed that, whatever question I might have had going in, the answer was a decisive no, no, no.

I've learned to take no for an answer.

Or am learning.

Will, I gather, learn.

On my way home I stopped at a SuperAmerica where I am an embarrassingly regular customer. The clerk, a Somali woman with whom I have chatted on a number of occasions, asked me if I was a farmer.

The question startled me, I'll admit. "I'm in here almost every day," I said, and stepped away from the counter so she could --or so I hoped-- more clearly study my appearance. "Do I look like a farmer?"

"Your hands," she said, "and...." Here she did this hunching thing where she rolled her shoulders up and pulled her chin down towards her chest at the same time as she raised her arms in what resembled a combative position. "You see?"

I had no idea what any of these gestures meant. I clearly did not see. And perhaps my reaction struck her as indignant or offended.

If so, she merely shrugged and smiled.

"A farmer," she said, "is a very good thing to be. Better than the office man."

Which was an answer that somehow redeemed a week's worth of lousy days.

Upstate

Where I'm from, way up near the Canadian border in New York, there are all these old towns --hamlets and villages, they tend to call themselves, nothing if not insecure-- where a two-lane highway rips right through the guts of the place, obliterates the possibility of sidewalks or even front yards, so that you've got neighborhoods [sic] huddled right there on the lip of the asphalt, trucks rumbling by all night long.

You can always find a fucking statue or two in such towns, or at least historical markers overgrown with weeds and blistered green, indicating that something of modest interest happened here once upon a time, before history consigned the place to it sub-contractors in the moldering business. Generally at some point the people of these towns would have carved out a bit of space for a pathetic excuse for a town square, usually just a handful of benches facing a gazebo that's peeling, falling apart, and scrawled over with every sort of profane inspiration the local kids can muster in their terminal boredom and chemically-induced stupor.

I realize that it's a stereotype or at least a gross generalization, but people up here tend to be hardwired with the lawn statuary gene, one of the truly inexplicable mutant genes. My own little town, for example, population 214: on my daily walk with the dog I'll encounter at least a dozen different displays of concrete deer, usually a pair, but sometimes a forlorn, faded solitary. Why? Why the fuck does anybody put a concrete deer in their front yard? What is it supposed to signify? Is it supposed to be some kind of deterrent? All I think when I see these deer --not to mention the trolls, collies with impeccable posture, and hayseed children hunched with fishing poles next to plastic pools empty or filled with sludge-- is that they must be a bitch to mow around. You'd pretty much need a Weed Whacker.

You also tend to see a lot of flags up here --interesting how the basest, laziest sort of patriotism seems to thrive in the places that are most invisible to the people in power-- and all manner of signs, generally protesting one thing or another. My fellow citizens, I long ago noticed, are pretty much against everything other than meat, procreation, firearms, and motorized vehicles.

I also think, of course, "Jesus H. Christ, what the hell am I still doing here?"

So much about my life doesn't make sense to me, yet I've never been able to make my escape. I don't have the slightest idea what the hell else is out there, beyond the horseshit I see on the television. I guess I stuck around because my older brother and sister left, or fled, at the first opportunity and I felt like I owed it to my father to keep him company after my mom died.

I took care of the local graveyard for almost eight years, until the damn thing somehow caught fire and I got the blame. There were gravestones in there that got damaged that were more than 200 years old. Right before the fire some hopped-up local kid had driven his ATV into a stone angel and got his brains bashed in, and I still believe some of his tweaker buddies set the fire as some sort of revenge.

There's not much else to do up here in terms of work, but one of the few virtues of the place is that you can live on almost nothing. Our family home was paid off in the last century, and my old man does little fix-it jobs here and there, and gets a military pension and other government money for having gutted it out so long, so we get by well enough to afford the satellite dish, which is all that really seems to matter.

Five or so years ago the last library in the county went out of business and I went over there to the sale and bought up boxes of books. I'll read pretty much anything, and that, folks around here would have you believe, is what gives me all my crazy ideas. I'm pretty sure people would tell you that I've been the odd man out all my life. Not so much a troublemaker as a guy who just doesn't know how to play along. It's hard to play along when you don't have the slightest idea what the game is you're playing and lack even a basic understanding of the rules.

My father, who smokes and drinks too much, is the kind of homespun character this part of the country seems to specialize in. I live in a veritable Jerkwater Academy for stoic bullshit artists, or at least drunks with the gift of regularly spouting pronouncements that somehow sound both inscrutable and profound. Some of these old boys --men who spend their days up to their knees in mud or their elbows in motor oil, men who were damn near deaf from the roar of machinery-- could still drop quotes from Emerson or the Bible into one of their rambling monologues.

"There ain't no rulebook, numbnuts," my father has said to me. "There are just days, and the things a man has to do to drag his sorry ass through those days. Once you get used to the smell of shit, it's all uphill from there." Other times he would contend that once you got used to the smell of shit it was all downhill from there. I guess it depended on his mood and how much he'd had to drink. At any rate, I couldn't see a difference either way.

We actually get along just fine, and he's clearly grateful that I haven't strayed. I love him, I've concluded, and that seems like a decent enough reason to stay.

"Boy," he'll say. "You need to learn to consider it a decent day if the weather don't bedevil you but a little bit and nobody tries to tear you a new asshole. And always count on some weird shit to come along and make things interesting for a time."

I thought of those words a couple weeks ago when this Indian motel owner from a couple towns over stopped by to purchase a used chainsaw my father had advertised in the local rag.

"Now what the hell is it you think you're going to do with this damn thing?" my father asked.

"I wish to learn to use it," the motel owner said.

My father laughed about that for days, and then, out of the blue (he'd clearly been mulling the incident over), he concluded that the man was somehow in possession of some essential wisdom, perhaps even the secret of life. He came into my room one night and asked, "So what sort of a book would a guy like that read to come up with his ideas?" I fished around and found a paperback copy of the Bhagavad Gita (just a guess on my part) that I gave to him, and he sat out in the living room plowing through it and muttering to himself for several nights afterwards.

Then, this morning as we sat at the kitchen table eating cereal and listening to the crackpot local radio station, my father said, "You know, that fella don't have a single tree on his property. I'm curious as hell about what he might be up to. I think I might drive over there this afternoon and see if he wants to have a cup of coffee."

Some Things I Say To My Dog

I ran into the neighbor gal coming in the back door the other day and she mentioned that she could sometimes hear me talking to my dog. I'm fully aware that I spend a good deal of time conversing with my dog, but I was nonetheless taken aback.

My neighbor lives above me, and I seldom hear anything from up there but footsteps and the occasional unintelligible conversations.

"How do you know I'm talking to my dog?" I asked.

"Because I can hear you clearly when either I'm in the basement or you're in your kitchen or in the room off the backyard, directly beneath my bedroom," she said. "It's cute."

I sensed, lurking behind the smirk with which she delivered that last business, some mockery.

I make no bones about it. I am a loner. And though I do talk to my dog, it is now such an unconscious habit that I am not entirely sure what sorts of things I say to him. Much of it, I feel sure, must sound to an eavesdropper like complete nonsense. The habit is so ingrained, however, that it is now virtually impossible for me to become self conscious about it.

I was curious, though, so I determined to spend one entire day and evening recording every single thing I said to my dog (a day and an evening, by the way, which was pretty much typical in that the only words that left my mouth were directed to my dog). I didn't bother recording the actual monologues, which are frequent and can go on for quite some time. What follows, then, is a random collection of some examples of these one-sided conversations:

• It's much too early for this fiendishness. Ad usum: caffeine for me, a ration of brown chunks for you, and then a few hours of quiet time.
  
• I'll tell you one thing for sure, if I don't delete those goddamn Christmas songs from my iPod I'm going to snap. How the hell is it that out of 8000 songs, the Canterbury Bells version of "Joy to the World" has now shuffled through on three straight days?
• Look at this filth and tell me what manner of man I have become.
• Bring that ape over here and I'll spit some soup on his ass.
• Hear that? That's an aeroplane. I don't imagine you'll ever have occasion to ride in one of the contraptions.
• I sometimes wonder if it would improve the quality of your life if I turned on the television now and again. Perhaps tonight we'll watch the awards program.
• You wanna go for a drive and get some Dr. Pepper?
• I'm fixin' to fire up the hi-fi. Any requests?
• Always hold your head up high when we're struttin' out there in the world. We ain't the slickest fielding shortstops in the American League, but we don't have a damn thing to be ashamed of.
  
• If I were to read to you from this miserable book, and if you had the sense I credit you with, I do believe I'd pardon you for taking a snap at me.
• I don't suppose you'd recognize that the continued presence of that Christmas tree has gone well beyond a nostalgic eccentricity and now represents a bright red flag for some sort of serious mental illness.
• I'll remind you, in the event of an intrusion I'm depending on you to help me fend off the intruders.
• The old man needs a new pair of slippers. No two ways about it. These are some seriously sorry sons of bitches.
• I reckon you've got some hare-brained notions about what life's all about, and I've got no one to blame for that but myself.
• Seems to me it's about time we rustled up some grub. How's that idea sit with you?
• I wonder if it would be possible to breed fireflies indoors all year long and have them hovering around in the bedroom at night.
• It's cold as a motherfucker, so don't be getting up in my grill about heading back out there again any time soon.
• Come over here and let me put you in a grip.
• I'll be honest with you, that sheep gets on my nerves. Why don't you go fetch Miss New Moo and we'll engage in some roughhousing with her?
• There are a number of things about this current situation that would likely strike the impartial observer as highly unorthodox.
• Listen to that sloppy-ass drumming and tell me this isn't the work of a bunch of uppity morons.
• Hey, guide dog: tell me again that everything will be all right.
  
• I offer you this Buddy Biscuit as a symbol of friendship, fellowship, kinship, buddyship, and spiritship. Additionally, the fact that this particular Buddy is missing one leg makes it an appropriate metaphor, for without you I would be like a one-legged man crutching along the icy sidewalks and streets, and I would surely bust my head open and freeze to death.
  
• What's the best smell in the whole wide world? You better say me, or you'll go without your evening rations.
• This Jung book is chock full of crazy shit.
  
• Would it be an imposition if I subjected you to another viewing of "Dog Day Afternoon"? I'll remind you that it has absolutely nothing to do with dogs. But it does make me wonder: were we to remake it together, which of us would be Sonny, and which Sal?
• Do you remember the time I took you to church? You were such a good boy. Fact is, you've been nothing but a good boy. I can't tell you that often enough.
  
• Thank your lucky stars you don't have to waste any brain cells thinking about such insufferable peckers as Wolf Blitzer.
• Are you aware that we live almost entirely surrounded by doulas? That's Kingfield for you.
• Fuck this noise.
  
• It pleases me that you seem to share my preference for sturdy dogs.
• I am reading the book you gave me for Christmas. Would you like to smell it?
• Do you miss the woods as much as I do?
• Perhaps we should take some time to address this creeping disorder.
• We really need something to break for us here, fella, or I'm gonna have a tough time keeping you in kibble.
• I'll be damned, all this time I was laboring under the misconception that Taylor Swift was a man.
• Climb up here on the couch and tuckle with me.
• I do believe, mister, that you are a jazz fan.
• Do you have any idea how utterly lost I'd be without you? And how grateful I am every single day that I sprung you from that jailhouse?
  
• Look at this map. In two years you've already rambled over more of this country than most Americans will in their lifetimes. Sit down here and we'll count the states....Twenty-nine states and two Canadian Provinces. How 'bout them apples?
  
• Come here, my beautiful boy, and let me tell you a story.
• I wish you'd met my dad. He'd surely get a kick out of you.
• Don't let me go.
  
• You'll be with me as long as I breathe.
  

Conundrums

"Monet's Rouen Cathedral. Whistler. Turner. Woozy light. The textured smear of dusk, fractured crepuscule. The world through a greased lens. A scratched negative. Blowing snow, perhaps, or driving rain. Or drizzle. Or fog. No clear lines, but, rather, indistinct waves, an almost fluid transition of color and light, light and darkness. Vibrations rolling out from a concussion. Consciousness as permanent mirage, a mirage in a constant state of flux and transmogrification. Wondrous, yet at the same time entirely untrustworthy. A world that requires vigilant attention. Things --everything-- ceaselessly receding. The polyphony of perception, if such a thing is possible. Paralysis, as the light and detail bleeds slowly from the day, dragging everything into the murk. And then, just as slowly, toward dawn, it all rises again to the surface, but never quite the surface...just below the surface of a pond or stream with a fragile skin of ice. The ice grows thicker as the day proceeds and night once again rolls in, until one can no longer be certain whether what one is looking at is a city under water or a funeral procession moving along a dark country road by the light of one feeble lantern...."

Such were the ruminations of Wuertz, prompted, he supposed, by the falling light outside the windows of the 18th century monastery where he was attending a three-day conference on "Scientific Conundrums and Biblical Scholarship."

He was somewhere in upstate New York. It had been snowing steadily since his arrival, and he was feeling increasingly claustrophobic, distracted, and bored. His notebooks were filling up with crude caricatures and notes not dissimilar to the above extracts.

At the moment he was sitting in a conference room listening to a panel discussion on the subject of "The Rational Challenges of the Jonah Story." Someone did a presentation on the impossibility of any man surviving 72 hours in the belly of a whale, given the documented potency of a whale's digestive enzymes. There were charts. Another man, an expert on Biblical languages and the book's history of translation, seemed to blame the historical misunderstanding on a lazy and convenient word choice on the part of an early translator.

"Clearly," the man said, "having closely consulted original sources, the creature in question was not, in fact, a whale --which did not exist in Palestinian waters-- but a sea serpent or a dragon."

There was some murmuring in the room, and another man interjected, "One of the problems we are always up against here is trying to rein these texts in from the gauzy worlds of pagan mythology and steer them into the clear, comprehensible word of God. The introduction of sea serpents and dragons does us no favors in the credulity department."

A marine biologist with a master's degree in archaeology then posited that the creature might possibly have been a white shark, which can grow to a prodigious size and has an unusual ability to store undigested food for a great many days.

On and on the discussion went, growing at times quite heated. Wuertz continued to doodle and daydream and stare out at the falling snow. His reveries were interrupted by an outburst by an elderly scholar who had risen to his feet near the front of the room. The man appeared to be trembling.

"Enough!" he shouted. "I have sat through these increasingly absurd discussions and arguments for more than forty years. We are talking about the Almighty, the creator of all things, as if He were an illusionist, and if we yammer on long enough we'll eventually get to the bottom of His tricks. As it has ever been, these things are not for us to know or understand, but merely to believe. I have grown beyond disgusted with this nonsense."

And with that the old man gathered up his things and left the room.

Wuertz turned his attention back to his notebook, and wrote: "A landscape from a Chekhov story, or a Gogol novel. Russian, at any rate, desolate. A loneliness so complete and impenetrable that it is no longer possible to recognize the feeling for what it truly is."

Nothing Is A Sinking Something

"Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one's efforts and striving will come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good."

--Roberto Bolano, 2666


Why force the day to its knees when it's perfectly willing to go down without any assistance?

I used to sit out on an old railroad trellis above the river in my old hometown, watching nuns walking in quiet circles in their convent garden, and waiting for darkness to fall and the fishermen to emerge like ghosts from the brush beneath me and begin their routines. They'd turn on their transistor radios and dial in the only local AM station, and from up and down the banks I'd hear the sounds of a baseball game, maybe, or Roger Miller, or Tony Orlando and Dawn, sometimes oddly staggered or not quite in sync, an almost imperceptible lag in each radio's signal so that the sound was like a skipping stone that slowly disappeared into the gloaming upriver.

I supposed you could take that river somewhere, and used to think ideas like that were grand.

It was already such a fast world, but I couldn't wait for it to go faster.

I always wondered what the first night as a nun must be like. Did they just stand there in the dark corridors of that imposing place built of stone, listening to the silence and wondering what they had gotten themselves into? Everything had been given, and perhaps they already had the sense of their old lives and identities receding, and thought of their families now embarked on the long drive back to some small town in Iowa or Wisconsin.

One night I encountered a young nun, in full habit, along that same river. It was a foggy night, and I heard her before I saw her. She was crying. The experience spooked me, this crying nun suddenly appearing out of the swirling fog. I remember she looked up briefly --I saw then that she was very young-- and then veered away from me and was once again swallowed up by the fog.

Almost every day I went to the library, and every trip to the library was another step out of town. Thirty years later and I am ninety miles away. I always thought I would be much, much farther. And further.

My father called me 'precious' right up until the day he died.

Now: the mind's Border Collie is a defeated dog.

I never in a million years thought it would get so late so early.

What can I tell you? I'll tell you what?

You want some hopeful line of American hooey? You want one of them big things to look at? Another goddamn gizmo to make you feel like you're connected to all the things you're disconnected from?

You want a soundtrack --happy, sad, mopey, broken, anxious, heart pounding-- so you know where you are in the story and what you're supposed to be feeling? You want a scene of dad and the kids washing the car in the driveway, complete with the obligatory shot of the lovable dog trying to shake itself dry and sending everybody laughing and squealing? You want a birthday party, honey? You want some balloons? A pony? Everybody you've ever known and loved popping out of the closets and from behind the furniture and shouting, "Surprise!"?

You want a big porch with comfy chairs and bright flowers and the intimations and insinuations and implications of a lazy summer day? You want a Ford truck kicking up dust on a country road, and some of that boot-stomping fake cowboy bullshit?

You want somebody to give you some memories to replace the ones you no longer have?

You just want to feel better? What ails you? Never mind; I can't help you with that, but you just sit tight and something will come along. Ask your doctor about that thing you saw on the TV.

It was better when guns were muskets and blunderbusses. Such better words, almost Seussian. Muskmelon and cantaloupe: as if either one of those names wasn't sufficiently inspired.

I've gotten away from the subject. I'm sorry; it's late. You want me to sell you something, but I'd just like to figure out if I have anything left to give you first.

You want something breathtaking? Something breathless? A story of breakdown and redemption and some love-conquers-all, TV-movie-of-the-week confection? You want intrigue? Some kind of escapist, sorry-state-of-the-world action-male shoot-em-up with car chases, jaw-dropping stunts and explosions, and stoic heroes and femme fatales and that sort of thing?

Or maybe you're in the mood for some quiet, bittersweet nostalgia (etymology: the pain of returning home), a coming-of-age yarn crammed with life lessons --lonely boy, dog, railroad tracks, wise old hermit, etc.? You want a dollhouse romance, complete with talking animals? Some twinkle-twinkle-blah-blah-blah? You want a new pair of shoes?

You want some comfort food, or something spicy? You want a big, stiff drink or a wee glass of sherry?

You want some of that tired old wise-beyond-her-years kid stuff?

You want a hurtin' thing, a big, messy jukebox epic that'll make you cry out your nose?

You want something real and plain spoken?

You want to know what next? What now? What then?

You want the truth?

I couldn't give you a single damn one of those things, honey.

All I could give you was this.

An Altogether Unpleasant Discovery

"I can't say for certain," I said, "but, yes, that certainly does appear to be a toenail."

Additional examination led to certainty, and it was clear that what I was looking at was the entire nail from someone's big toe, with a good deal of skin or tissue still clinging to it.

My lady friend had found this curiosity on her kitchen floor upon returning from work. She lived alone and kept a very neat house.

For the time being, at least, this disturbing discovery had trumped a personal crisis of my own; I had recently --four days earlier-- been released from the secure psychiatric ward of a local hospital after attempting to kill myself. I had been home in bed, in a medicated stupor, when I received the call from my lady friend.

The thing was, she was now saying (this as we were both crouched over the toenail in the middle of her kitchen floor), was that the moment she walked in the door she had sensed something amiss. She had the distinct feeling that someone had been in her home. Nothing seemed immediately out of place, at least in the living room off the front entrance. As she surveyed the rest of the house, however, she found in the bathroom a paring knife, tweezers, a bottle of peroxide, and a wad of bloody tissues in the sink. She went through the house room by room but didn't notice anything else that seemed unusual or out of place. There was, she noted, a trail of blood from the bathroom to the kitchen.

"From the way the blood had dripped and splattered it appeared that whoever did this was hopping," she said.

"Well, yes, hopping," I said. "I suppose that would make sense."

"Where are we here?" she asked. "Is there any way this is a crime? I mean, a crime that would obligate me to call the police?"

I admitted that I could think of no precedent, unless someone had broken into her home or committed some sort of damage to the property.

The door, she said, had been locked and all the windows secured.

I noticed as she said these last words that she was studying my face with a clear mixture of suspicion and alarm. I had a key to her home. There was obviously plenty of reason to believe that I was not quite in my right mind. All the same, I was offended.

"Jesus," I said. "You can't be serious. I swear to you I've never set foot in your home when you haven't been present."

I was already somewhat maniacally untying my shoes. I removed my left shoe first, wrestled the sock free, and waggled my foot --with its wholly intact set of toenails-- in her direction. As I turned my attention to my right shoe she was pleading.

"Please, Robert, don't be ridiculous. Stop this right now."

I had finally succeeded in extricating my right foot, and angrily tossed the shoe across the kitchen floor. At this point I noticed that my lady friend was gaping with horror at my stockinged foot. I followed her eyes and was stunned to discover that the sock still covering my right foot was soaked through with a great deal of blood. At the same time I was suddenly aware of the terrible throbbing.

I very slowly rolled the sock down my ankle and peeled it from my foot. My lady friend had scrambled to her feet and was now standing with her back to the refrigerator, one hand pressed to her lips.

For a very long moment I could sense her studying my face as I stared at the gore at the end of my right foot.

"Well, I'll be damned," I finally said.

Letters To The Editor

You can perhaps imagine my surprise when I woke up and saw my wife's words --or at least words attributed to her-- right there on the front page of the Daily Banner: "God only knows what Richard was thinking. I'm as shocked as anyone and want to apologize to the entire community."

You do that, Veronica. Put on a black shawl and drag yourself up and down every block of this jerkwater shithole; hang your head on every doorstep and apologize for the fact that your husband of 19 years took a piss in his own fucking driveway. I'm sure that will bring a world of comfort to all those poor suffering folks who are at this very moment cowering behind their locked doors, terrified by the news that a man, a "respected optometrist," has taken a piss in his driveway, "in broad daylight, and in full view of the entire neighborhood."

I've no doubt that's something you'd love to believe, Ronnie, that the eyes of the "entire neighborhood" are riveted on our house 24-7, endlessly fascinated by our every movement. Problem is, we don't live in a "neighborhood"; we live in a fucking suburban development, and people who live in the suburbs should just expect that once in a while they're going to see a man taking a piss in his own driveway.

Just for the hell of it, I'll remind you, Ronnie, that it was 7:45 in the morning, and like every other Tuesday morning of my life you and the girls were camped out in the bathrooms, preparing yourselves for your daily appearance before the prying eyes of the "neighborhood." I bang and curse, but it does no good, and so when I finally stumbled out to the driveway for the morning paper I paused and took a piss. I was, I'll grant you, at least technically in the driveway, but I was wearing a bathrobe, slippers, and boxers, and I very deliberately turned my back and pissed into the bushes next to the porch.

If Pam Ryman called the police every time I took a piss on my own property then you'd really have something to cry about, Ronnie, because I've got news for you: I've pissed off the deck. I've pissed right off the front porch. I've pissed in the front and back yards. I've marked my goddamn territory and have experienced something approaching genuine pleasure on every occasion. If Duane Ryman can claim to his wife with a straight face that he's never pissed in his own yard he's not only the fop I imagine him to be but a stinking, pussy-whipped liar to boot.