ivory towers and reflective powers

a friend of mine from way back when is in college now, and like me, reads a lot of blogs, and like me in my early twenties, quite the idealist with other earnest friends. I was kind of an older sister figure, introducing him to Fugazi and zines and other underground kind of things.

I take things more seriously than a lot of people, but even in my younger years, I didn't have much patience for those conversations about race/class/gender that were more theoretical than anything else, and often profoundly disconnected from the dynamics of the real world in any real sense. Not that things shouldn't be thought about or are unimportant, but sometimes I feel like these conversations, mostly between us people socioeconomically privileged to go to college and be connected to the internet, tend to get extremely circular and self-indulgent.

When you get off the Internet, most people aren't losing sleep over the things that young people care about on Tumblr, aren't arguing about tasteless Halloween costumes or something clueless that some guy posted on his Facebook page, but I guess it's always fun for people to feel smarter and more enlightened than others, hence Internet haterade. I still don't have patience for the competitions of the Suffering Olympics variety, if you trace back anyone's history you'll find out that their ancestors were screwed over by someone, and that everyone's felt disrespected or had judgments made about them because of how they look or whatever.

Evidently to total strangers this makes me an awful person full of white privilege, which if you know me, is kind of ridiculous because I geek out on history and anthropology and the ins and outs of others' worlds, willing to be the uncomfortable and awkward minority, to the point where I have empathy but only to a point, that everyone's got their issues, and to focus on just one place's is kind of myopic. If you go anywhere, people are racist and classist and judge by the gradient of your skin tone or what religion you practice or who your parents are. Not to invalidate anyone's experience, but it's a human problem not an American middle class cracker problem exclusively. Jerkitude is universal.  Besides, such conversations are always better had over caffeine or booze as it is.


And so I wonder if this is why, in tandem with my companions with whom I snark about all things brainy (Pynchon, Shakespearean English, obscure medieval history), I find maybe I prefer these things with those in my world who are older, because we've got less to prove and we've seen more of life and there are other stressors like how are we going to pay the heating bill this winter and what are we doing with our lives since we're perpetually underemployed and there are fewer and fewer open doors.

And I love eating dinner with someone else again, cooking the proceeds of our gardens, talking about how our days went, these life things that are so simple, the things that I miss about roommates and friends who worked on my side of town who used to drop in at the old apartment. It's so good to geek out over history and play music and listen to records again and laugh, I don't think I realized how much I missed this kind of companionship until it started happening again, it's hard to believe that it's 2 in the morning and I have to go to work the next morning, he's laughing as I back out of the driveway and almost run over his datura plant, but all that coffee would have kept me up as it was, and despite the tired eyes and the continued drinking of tea, I feel so alive.

at the corner

so last night, I got a text from my pastor and facebook messages from some people who go to an awesome church on the corner of Scranton and Clark that they were going to be doing a prayer vigil thing at the corner of Scranton and Seymour, just a block or so north, so I ended up going down there to show some solidarity, to give comfort, to listen, even though the introvert in me wasn't sure if I even belonged there, because I want to respect that people are trying to live their lives and stuff and not become part of the inevitable media circus. Whether I did or not is up for others to judge if they want.

I drive over and I can already tell it's going to be crazy when I get off the exit and there's hundreds of motorcycles roaring down 25th, handmade signs thanking God for this miracle, people in the streets everywhere like it's 4th of July or something. I park in the church lot and walk over, and it's quiet over here, I see a few people I know that I haven't seen in a couple years since me and the roommate fell out and I dropped out of that social circle, but a commonality of belief and vision makes it seem like days. It is quiet over on our side, except for people praying and singing on the steps of a church at the corner.

Most of them are more charismatic than me, so I don't get too loud, it's hard enough to string coherent thoughts together with the emotions so overwhelming and I find myself grieving that this took ten years and that there's so many others who've gone missing, and that awful things happen to women in this city and around the world all the time. We pray for the girls, for the families, for the neighborhood, for the law enforcement that they would start doing their job in a way that doesn't hurt others, for the men themselves. A woman who says she's the aunt of the one of the girls asks us to pray for the Castro family because of the pain they're dealing with and the inevitable blowback to come.
 

And there were so many news cameras and vehicles everywhere and people with their cameras gawking and taking pictures of everything with their iPhones and people just kind of milling around who were hoping to get interviewed. Neighbors sitting on porches observing, people riding by on their bikes,  I've never been around that kind of thing really and to see the level of production, the incongruity of impeccable broadcasters and us regular folk. 

There are four of us left hanging out in a parking lot under the stars, trying to figure out what we could and should be doing, because these emotions subside, but we live here, this is where we need to be connected and trying to love, and trying to figure out how to do that more.
 

negative creep

So I spent the last hour of work in the Batcave listening to Napalm Death, and I'm just kind of cranky and even more skeptical than usual. My cousin's posting all sorts of C-O-NSpiracy business, people I don't know super-well are telling me I'm a misanthrope for thinking that Patton Oswalt's platitudes about the awesomeness of humanity are nice words that ring false. Yes, there's one race, the human race, but I'm always amazed we haven't destroyed the world more than we already have, I don't think we're inherently good, and a continued reading of history only bears that out for me.We might refer other people as tribal, but we all are. We'll come together in some sapitude for a day or two and go back to pointing fingers and finding scapegoats in a little bit.

Someone said today "look how far we've come" since 9/11 and if anything I feel like it's more an issue of look how far we've fallen. I don't ever remember the definition of rape being debated ten years ago, or torture justified, or the treatment of Arab Americans as second class citizens being something that was totally okay. I wonder what planet these people live on because it's not mine.

I don't know how good it is to pat ourselves on the back about how great we are because we didn't bomb a large event when we're perfectly cool with voting for politicians who are perfectly fine with reigning terror on a daily basis elsewhere. One of the things that got me in the class I took last year on 20th century Europe was how people lived side by side in relative harmony and then when things unraveled, the butchery started and suddenly everyone starts drawing lines of religion and ethnicity and then people end up dead. By all accounts the perpetrators loved their family and were fine upstanding citizens. Basically good people. If there was such a majority of good people, where were they when things got real and their neighbors were getting hauled off? 

Civilized "good people" colonize other parts of the world, advocate terrible ideologies, construct arguments that deny rights and basic humanity to others, enact policies that hurt people, stab each other in the back over trivialities when it's convenient, gossip about their neighbors, justify things like torture.  That potential for hatred and cruelty is in all of us, it just doesn't always come out in ways that are so obviously ugly in part because we're lazy and not very powerful for the most part and our sphere of influence doesn't involve control over towns or nations. So much of our evil is banal, so much of it is sins of omission and ignorance either accidental or willful and that's before anything drastic happened, doing good is inconvenient or unthought of.

Some would say that evil is too strong a word, but I'm not so sure it is.  And I wonder why anyone hangs out with me sometimes, because I feel like the queen of downers when I'm not laughing. My brain is always working overtime, I find myself deconstructing everything and questioning everything that others hold true, there is transparency and a lack of pretense that I think makes others uncomfortable. I don't even know what I'm saying anymore, I just feel like I did ten years ago, when I see things coming and no one else sees them or thinks it's a problem.

the existentials

So, despite all aversions to structure and whatnot, I ended up at some kind of art and spirituality retreat thing this weekend, in part because it was close by and I could bail if needed. It wasn't that good things weren't discussed, or that people weren't nice, I feel so profoundly square-peg even among those who'd consider themselves different from the norm, and averse to anything that remotely smacks of group therapy or whatever.

Part of this is leftover from certain church functions in my teens and in college where I went along to get along and then realized afterwards that I felt like it was all pretty ridiculous or just an exercise in navel-gazing/motivational absurdity with a spiritual veneer. I guess I don't totally trust other people, I analyze things a whole lot, and somehow I've evolved from a timid wallflower to someone who's still uber-introverted but way less averse to saying what I really think instead of tiptoeing around, sometimes to my detriment, in this case when I dropped some profanity in said explanation and was utterly misconstrued.

And it's strange being in this position, being the outlier among outliers, and yet much more doctrinally-traditional than my peers, emotional as anything, yet profoundly unpentecostal, not really buying into the narrative of marginalization of creatives in religious circles, maybe because I really believe in the whole one-body-many-parts thing, that we can't just say that other people who don't understand our artistic vision don't know anything, that we all have one common denominator, but a multiplicity of functions and giftings, and to be honest, the people I worship with love me in spite of my weirdness and encouraging me to do more with the art I do.  I like that where I go on Sunday morning means that I end up drinking coffee and sharing pews with people from completely different walks of life than my own, where we take each others' strangeness and warts in stride, that our politics and personal appearances and aesthetic preferences are secondary rather than primary.

So what was I left with? I guess I learned what works and what does not for yours truly, that for me the creative process is solitary, and that what seems like it'd work on paper doesn't always, that I feel like so much of this sequestering and self-separation is so overrated, and I wish I didn't feel like I was so damn contrary all the time.

bear with me here, or skip this.

quasi-political interjection, skip if you want
So tragedy is numbing to me at this point. We saw it on the news as it unfolded, I find myself more angry than sad, because while it's beyond tragic, I have far greater grief over my complicity in paying taxes that finance drones that kill kids in Pakistan and Yemen and God knows where else than I do for some nutcase with a gun. It's terrible all around, but is a mother's grief in the suburbs worth more than a mother's grief in some village with no running water? I can't imagine the final moments of those little kids, or what their parents are feeling. This has happened in other places too, and I don't have kids, but the proportional outrage involving a crazy guy with a gun compared to the terror that we perpetuate for other kids every day trying to go to school makes my blood boil.

 I ran this by my mom who I disagree with sometimes but who's got a beating heart and a thoughtful soul because I just got blank stares saying this to others, or "well their lives are already hard anyway." It was hard for me to sit in church this weekend (my pastor at the one I go to regularly is Arab so we pray for Palestine and Syria just as much as we pray for our own land) and hear prayers for the families of these children and think about all the other innocent kids (and how angried up does my blood get when even they're regarded as targets?) who die every day thanks to we the people and whose families are constantly troubled by that trauma that continues to repeat itself over and over again to the point where life is impossible to be normal because of the constant zoom of death. Who prays for them here? Even if you see them as your enemy, didn't Jesus tell you to pray for them too?

Maybe it's different for me because in Clevelandia I've met kids who've lost half their cranium to Israeli rockets and have friends who survived civil war in Lebanon and Rwanda who still have flashbacks when they hear fireworks or the airshow and have lost family members to shotguns and machetes. I went to college with a girl who survived Columbine, watched her friends die, but went on to have a beautiful decent life. With our place in the world, it's slightly more possible. It isn't for others.  It hits me in an entirely different place in the gut and it's hard to express that without sounding heartless. I believe that life is sacred and not to be taken lightly, whether that's in the womb or in the next state over or a country across the globe. I don't know what else to say except that I feel so alone in that sentiment.

things and people

There is something about being in an unfamiliar place that used to scare the daylights out of me, but now, with some degree of fiat, knowing that I have my car parked out front to take me away if it gets lame, knowing that I'm never stuck, it's made me more bold, and I take more things into consideration, if only for anthropological observing. The National Geographic narrator voice deep within my psyche kicks in as I observe the cultural habits and mating rituals of some tribe or another, be it in exurbia where there's a minivan in every driveway and chinos on ever male over thirty, or a swank condo with a glittering view of downtown where I am profoundly underdressed in the punk rock t-shirt in a sea of party dresses and sweaters, one drink (and one drink only as I designated-drove and I'm all Mary-Mary-Quite-Contrary somehow going on about how the garden grows is important as hell. 

 Don't get me wrong, I've got little patience for the local food cultists, but I do think that we need both the city and the country to exist. Cities where everyone moves tend to be awful and difficult places for the poor and middle-class who become poor by default: see almost any Real City anywhere: Mumbai, Shanghai, Dubai, Rio, London, NYC, DC shall I go on, or places like Paris where the city is a playground for the affluent and the tourists and the immigrants and other folk are stuck in the suburbs isolated from everything.  Hell, even when my burg was really populated, life was great for the Rockefellers and Hannas, but sucked pretty bad for most of the working schlubs crowded into slums and ethnic ghettos, getting poisoned by factory smokestacks and sick when the slaughterhouse reek blew downwind. No wonder people wanted to get the hell out.  THIS IS WHY PEOPLE MOVED TO PARMASTAN FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE, this is why the suburbs existed even before white flight.  

I'll probably be a city kid til the day I die, but I understand why people live in the suburbs, or why people live in the country, and that even if we go back to a mythological "way things were" that things won't be any better. Sure, there were streetcars back then that ran all over the city, but my grandpa was picking up coal from the railroad tracks so they could be warm, my grandma came up here to work as a domestic and then quit to work in a factory after the man of the house tried to take advantage of her. This was the way it was, and neither of them ever talked about "the good old days."

 But I read too much, and I'm not very cool, and I'm not voting for Obama and even though I take the bus to work, I love driving my car because it helps me help out other people and gets me from my house to Parmastan to see the folks and shows that I go to by myself, and home from places after dark where the bus doesn't run. I had no social life before then, and it's made life much better now even as I know that this isn't necessarily good. 

And so then Saturday, I handed out candy to kids that came through the doors at church to play games and drink hot chocolate, despite the mayor cancelling the holiday for good, 600 people came through the doors and then back out. Tangerine joined me and we decamped to the Big Egg for late night diner breakfast food, for girl-talk and life-talk and wondering why people create dubstep remixes of "Sweet Child O' Mine," and my sister's life drama hit the fan even more thanks to the Internets, though it seems such slander was redacted, and I was full of thoughts and ponderings and decided to join my old Parmastani homies for foodage and laughter to end the night and restore the equilibrium. Politics was skirted and thankfully not discussed, one more day and all this crazy will be back to the stupid normal.

What I've concluded over the past election cycle is that ultimately we as a society consider things and concepts as more important than human life or even the life of the planet. We might "buy green" but we're still conspicuously consuming, and job creation involves consumption of unnecessaries, and I know I'm complicit due to my love of books and music and art. The blood of women and children in countries that worship Allah are considered a worthy price for the freedom that we're continuing to lose, to keep the money for our student loans flowing, to maintain the cars we drive. We're willing to prop up regimes that stone women for adultery and don't allow them to drive because there's a supposed "War on Women" going on here. I kind of feel sick sometimes if I think about it too much, the lack of love and compassion and seeing outside of one's own sphere and perceived needs and comfort is profoundly disconcerting. I wish I had more love and compassion than I did.

I read some apocalyptic stuff the other night out of Ezekiel where God goes on a big rant about religious people screwing others over, and people using power and usury to take advantage of society's vulnerable, and rulers enriching themselves and their friends at the expense of the people, and those who prey on the women, the children, and the immigrant, and I can't help but think "Oh jeez that's us completely," when I think about mourners being bombed at funerals, and the cruelty shown to those who have darker skin than me who live here and work our crap jobs and speak Spanish or Arabic or whatever. The powers that perpetuate such suffering, and those of us who get enough bones thrown our way to keep them doing what they do best.
 

eremita

It's been a hermiting weekend, with a quick interlude of funeral procedures assuaged by hiking among the ledges with a fellow traveler when the weather was beautiful. Something so peaceful about being immersed in a landscape of epically giant sandstone rocks pockmarked and cavitied, with undulating greens and reds, hosting ferns.

No texting, the minimal of phone conversations, no epic plans, even church was just the most minimal of social interaction, I had nothing to say, really and a chance to retreat was beautiful, good, and needed to step back and examine.  I have a whole day tomorrow that's a blank slate and that's wonderful. My sleep has been like the dead. We don't have to talk about politics for a few days, these social obligations can be deferred, it feels good to be alone and untethered, but knowing there's a loving encircling should I need to reach out. A CD player full of autumnal tunes. I don't need much these days.

the chill

Last night the rain felt so cold as we walked back to his car after watching RJD2 conjure beatacular magic with keyboards and drum machines and turntables that remind me I don't know what I'm doing with those 1200s at the station.  There was hail this weekend, heated discussions of election issues which make me look forward to the day after election day when the kinder gentler machine gun hands return to business as usual, a couple of friends had babies, got to know some acquaintances better,  and some of the plants on the porch have died.

Sitting on the porch leads to chills now, the windows left open all summer are shut, the sore throat needs tea, and the grunge layers have resurfaced, as have the long skirts and clunky boots, melancholic dirge chord music and trip-hop being operative tuneage right now. I want to carve pumpkins and hibernate, sit by fires and get existential, see where all these new tendrils of acquaintanceships go. 

I open up my wallet and it's full of blood

I should have played this on the show this morning, maybe, but there's plenty of other days to be mournful and angry and I feel like I'm permanent blast because it's election season and such. Last night was my grandma's birthday and we had dinner and while my grandfather and I don't see things the same way often, as he listens to way more talk radio than yours truly and I usually have to excuse myself, we were able to agree that as a country we have sucked fantastically (my words not his) at dealing with things, sacrificing freedom for "security," ill-advised ventures into sundry parts, an absurd approach to dealing with the day-to-day, the expansion of bureaucracy, an appalling lack of reflection on the who what and why. We are prideful and cowardly as a country, we continued to pass the buck and consume with gusto, because we're not the ones who are sacrificing anything.

We should have just moved on, he says, instead we've turned it into something else to buy and that cheapens it. Who needs a memorial? Who cares if someone wants to build a mosque over there? Life goes on.

Mind you, this isn't a peacenik talking at all. This is someone who's more close ideological to Glenn Beck than Glenn Greenwald, but even he's getting fed up with all this hagiography and the flag-waving.

I wish we could have done what Norway did when dealing with a national tragedy, sure there were the platitudes of coming together, but not fearing one's neighbor, welcoming increased militarization, moving on after dealing with wackjobs with weapons, not letting it change our day-to-day. I really respect that. I wish we had done that.

And then last night I ran into my movie night/softball homies at the gas station. We watched Stripes and drank sweet tea and talked about the way things were growing up for us, the indoctrination, the propaganda, each of us is a decade removed and grew up in very different circumstances. When I was younger, my anger was more abstract, now I'm way more chilled out but there's certain things that really angry up the blood more than ever. I say, happy to be among folks who aren't fearmongering with WAR ON TERROR! WAR ON CHRISTMAS! WAR ON DRUGS! WAR ON WOMEN!

I'm fed up with people trying to scare me. I'm fed up with other people being screwed over in order to maintain an unsustainable way of living that's starting to unravel. I can't be around the party-line-towers on either side because I find myself far to the ends of either of them. I want election season to be over, because I'm sick of the propaganda and the fact that my whole adult life has been a national nightmare. 

The car is on fire, and there's no driver at the wheel
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
And a dark wind blows

The government is corrupt
And we're on so many drugs
With the radio on and the curtains drawn

We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death

The sun has fallen down
And the billboards are all leering
And the flags are all dead at the top of their poles

It went like this:

The buildings tumbled in on themselves
Mothers clutching babies
Picked through the rubble
And pulled out their hair

The skyline was beautiful on fire
All twisted metal stretching upwards
Everything washed in a thin orange haze

I said, "Kiss me, you're beautiful -
These are truly the last days"

You grabbed my hand
And we fell into it
Like a daydream
Or a fever

We woke up one morning and fell a little further down
For sure it's the valley of death

I open up my wallet
And it's full of blood

tiptoeing through landmines

Redacted aggravation with the usual suspects of smugger-than-thous and sanctimonious twits of both sacred and secular persuasion, to obsess about admittedly absurd gaffes and the personal views of fast-food CEOs when the country is full of drought, the air is full of drones, and everyone would rather just get on their personal high horse about the people across the aisle rather than be decent humans all the way around, but maybe that kind of grandstanding's way easier and theoretically less ambiguous than the day-to-day grind of simply getting along with other people that you may or may not like,where the fine line between lazy and stupid is vexing because both involve a degree of tact which sometimes eludes me in my not-so-charitable moments. Loving one's neighbor is a hard business, loving one's enemy even moreso, especially when you want everyone to shut the hell up and stop making life hard for everyone else.

love and noise

On a particularly caffeinated night, I postulated to a couple of friends that being in a band is like being in a relationship, only there's sometimes more than two people and it's probably not romantic. I lapsed into incoherence shortly afterward, but I really think this is true.

There are expectations, differing degrees of give and take, investments of time and energy, some degree of inevitable emotional intimacy due to that whole expression of the soul thing, balances of power, and sometimes it clicks immediately and sometimes it takes awhile, and the duration is hard to ascertain. Is it a weekend warrior project or a summer fling, a gig on the side or a lifelong commitment? Does it fall apart due to incompatible personalities or tastes or differing expectations and desires? Do you stick it out because it's more economically feasible than severing those ties? Do you stay in it For The Kids?

I love music in countless forms, I love making music with other people, and I love hanging out with the male species, those two things being consistent life pleasures for the sheer intellectual stimulation and geeky camaraderie that most women around me aren't really into, but I've never been in a steady musical project or a serious relationship that lasted more than six months. Do I like the idea of said things better than being in them itself?

I feel like whenever it get past the just messing around with chord progressions in the basement or the extremely comfortable strictly platonic where we're admiring other things besides each other's eyes, I find myself looking for any exit out. It makes me feel trapped and obligated and a bit spooked. Maybe there's too many social expectations, or I don't feel like I'm taken seriously or that anything I say matters. I don't mind pushback, but I don't like being pushed to the side and taken for granted either. Maybe I don't want to play these songs in front of other people, that me and you don't have enough in common to really go anywhere, or that extra something just isn't there no matter how hard we try.

Maybe you want to move too fast, get too close too quickly, maybe you think I'm going to drop everything and practice three nights a week and gig on the weekends. Maybe the songs just aren't all that good, maybe you and me just aren't right for each other in that way and we can't get past our respective shortcomings. Can we just play music together for fun and make some noise? Can we just be friends? Is it just easier if it doesn't go anywhere per se?

I used to go along to get along and then realized I couldn't do that anymore, that it was easier to cut off things that weren't working before too much time and pent-up feelings piled up. It's easier to bail out before the other person makes plans or thinks things are heading towards a tour of the midwest or matrimony. I wonder if this makes me an awful person and a total flake to cut the losses so quickly over and over again. To leave before the acrimony gets too big.

So I brought this up to a fellow musician and dear friend with a couple extra years of wisdom on him in regards to the music thing, because we've both had our share of soured relationships and I don't want to go there. You just haven't found the right fit, he says, because we've been playing in the liturgical setting for five years now. It's not that you're not committed. It's just that it doesn't work all the time with everyone and it's better just to figure that out. I hope that he's right. I hope I find something that works someday somehow.

the temperature at which books burn

Yes, I am. I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long days every summer in the library. I used to steal magazines from a store on Genesee Street, in Waukegan, and read them and then steal them back on the racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest. I didn’t want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wash my hands before I read them. But with the library, it’s like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there’s so much to look at and read. And it’s far more fun than going to school, simply because you make up your own list and you don’t have to listen to anyone. When I would see some of the books my kids were forced to bring home and read by some of their teachers, and were graded on—well, what if you don’t like those books?

I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.  - Ray Bradbury, read the interview here.

 
There seems to be a trend in the bibliotheques, noted in a previous post about music collections, to "go digital" with as much as possible at the expense of tomes already on the shelf and anything from previous decades that may be dogeared but is just as good if not better than what fills up the shelf now and is definitely preferable to the hundreds of copies of Danielle Steels and James Pattersons ordered to satisfy the masses and jettisoned within the next to years.

As many of the Powers That Be in this field seem to really want to be "cool" and also "with it" and not the stodgy chignoned shushers of yore and guardians of dusty crumbling tomes, the trend seems to be more towards becoming like the now-deceased Borders with a cafe atmosphere and tablets and apps and only works put out or repackaged with swankier graphics in the last ten years.

As if "digital" and "edgy" weren't tired ten years ago, but whatever. For those who peruse the bestseller lists, who consolidate collections to one department rather than tailored to the needs of specific communities, cutting corners every which way. Because really, they read industry journals and beach books, they're not quite as interested in learning and being a source of knowledge and inspiration and the expanding of horizons. Yes, there's lots of cool stuff I can find on the Internet, to indulge my geeky love of Elizabethan pamphlets and medieval alchemical texts, but there's something very satisfying about the tactile printed page, of books that have lasted for a couple hundred years or so.


Those aren’t books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.

Not that I always swing towards the apocalyptic, but if the gatekeepers shut down, if the Internet blacks out, what are we left with? Formats involving electricity go obsolete quickly, there are disks with information on them that I try to process only to find that my computer no longer has a drive for them or that they sat near a magnetic desensitizer and have been wiped clean, that the Almighty Cloud doesn't work in more censorious countries (and who's to say we're not heading there as it is), texts can evaporate off of one's Kindle, and as we toss things that are old only because of that, I wonder if we in the industrialized world are at risk of losing our collective cultural memory if the shit ever gets real. I couldn't imagine the Library of Alexandria doing this.

Our education system has gone to hell. It’s my idea from now on to stop spending money educating children who are sixteen years old. We should put all that money down into kindergarten. Young children have to be taught how to read and write. If children went into the first grade knowing how to read and write, we’d be set for the future, wouldn’t we? We must not let them go into the fourth and fifth grades not knowing how to read. So we must put out books with educational pictures, or use comics to teach children how to read. When I was five years old, my aunt gave me a copy of a book of wonderful fairy tales called Once Upon a Time, and the first fairy tale in the book is “Beauty and the Beast.” That one story taught me how to read and write because I looked at the picture of that beautiful beast, but I so desperately wanted to read about him too. By the time I was six years old, I had learned how to read and write.

We should forget about teaching children mathematics. They’re not going to use it ever in their lives. Give them simple arithmetic—one plus one is two, and how to divide, and how to subtract. Those are simple things that can be taught quickly. But no mathematics because they are never going to use it, never in their lives, unless they are going to be scientists, and then they can simply learn it later. My brother, for example, didn’t do well in school, but when he was in his twenties, he needed a job with the Bureau of Power and Light. He got a book about mathematics and electricity and he read it and educated himself and got the job. If you are bright, you will learn how to educate yourself with mathematics if you need it. But the average child never will. So it must be reading and writing. Those are the important things. And by the time children are six, they are completely educated and then they can educate themselves. The library will be the place where they grow up.

One of my acquaintance is an education major and she tells me that The Kids are not being taught fiction anymore because it's deemed somewhat pointless by the current wave of academics. I read literature in part because it taps into the universal desires and struggles of humanity, it tells incredibly powerful stories and provides metaphor for the daily experience, has taught me empathy and helped me understand the inner life of people halfway around the globe or who lived long before I walked this earth. It's strangely comforting to know that people haven't changed that much fundamentally even if their culture and way of living was vastly different from my own. And it fuels one's own imagination. What other thing does that so well besides maybe music or art? But those are getting cut from schools too.

Will it come to a point where we don't need the Fahrenheit 451 firefighters to burn the books because they're already gone. People come to the bibliotheque where I work because we still have tomes on the shelves, and we don't even have that many. The Powers That Be are a little perturbed at this because they'd rather play with apps and order online subscriptions, and we don't get much new stuff, but there's at least three copies of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  It's easier to read disposable substanceless trash on one's Nook on the bus without shame because it has no bodice-ripping cover, and like a survivalist stocking ammo, I find myself snagging copies of books I loved as a kid so that I have something to share with the next generation of nieces and nephews because I know that the books I loved won't be at the library in another ten years.

As a society we've already lost a sense of history, lost interest in the outside world except on the most cursory level and are all too ready to sacrifice freedom, especially the freedom of other people to not have a sucky life, to preserve our compulsive need to be entertained. "Aberrant behavior" such as not engaging in front of the screen and just taking a walk and observing the world is increasingly  looked at as something strange. I hope I'm just a premature kook and not a Cassandra, but this is where my thoughts have gone.  It's hard to not read the literary tea leaves of Bradbury, Huxley, and Orwell to see the tides continue to shift.

To find a way to turn the signal back to heaven sounding blue

A detour off the ramp because the front end was dragging on the ground, trying to find a parking lot to examine the damage in a neighborhood of abandoned buildings and skeezy strip clubs, and everyone's cars look better than mine in the hood so The Local Kids were scoffing and the men in cadillacs disdaining at my duct tape repair job (incidentally Family Dollar sells the duct tape in the automotive section so there!), but we turned around and got to the museum where the Finster exhibit was everything I hoped for and more, paintings on mirrors with truck enamel, cheetahs as guardians of paradise, visions of spaceships and the towers of Planet Heaven, whimsical hellfire and brimstone, an exuberant and consistent strange vision part Flannery O'Connor, part William Blake.

We decided to make a day of our time down south of Clevelandia, and detoured through lands of strip malls that haven't changed since the 1960s to Grace Cathedral, home to the local toupeed televangelist who's gotten a bit senile in recent years, and despite scriptural admonitions about gluttony and greed, has a buffet and gift shop full of cornball crystal jewelry, sentimental tchotchkes, and shrinkwrapped tissues for when the sermon gets emotional I'm guessing.

I only had the giant camera, and said gift shop, buffet, and wax museum were closed and despite theoretically worshiping the same God, we probably looked more like snarky jaded heathens than actual acolytes, and so we headed north to Kent, land of bibliotheque school and frat party rioters extraordinaire.

Much of downtown has been torn down and redeveloped and while I'm generally not a fan of destroying old buildings, there's actually stuff downtown besides Bars for Bros and aging punk townies. The best burrito place ever satisfied our hunger, we ambled through sundry stores and then down to the river where the sunlight filtered through the trees,  the honeysuckle smelled incredibly good and there were teens being angsty under the overpass spraypainted with graffiti.

 (as I didn't get the pictures off the memory card, this photo is courtesy of someone on flickr)

We drove up through Ravenna, hometown of a certain singer, marveled at the signage and the proliferation of non-vacant storefronts and this strange sculpture on the children's elementary school playground.

 Someone's not Thinking Of The Children.

Drove back through the darkness and the heat lightning, spent the next day errand-running and filling out the garden with okra plants and mini pumpkins and hanging out at my favorite record store talking about literature and outsider art and listening to the Rolling Stones before heading up to the lake on Sunday to hang out with the family and sit alone on the breakwall in the darkness with the swirling of the waves like a Winslow Homer painting, to contemplate and re-examine some already existing sad things that swirled to the surface in the past couple of days that have left me a little wrecked and questioning every interaction and motivation. It's not that it isn't good, it's just that this growing up thing is really hard and painful. 

the voice of many waters

Can you fathom the mysteries of God? Can you probe the limits of the Almighty? They are higher than the heavens above—what can you do? They are deeper than the depths below —what can you know? Their measure is longer than the earth and wider than the sea.

  One of the strange silver linings of living in a dying town is even the peons have access to cheap rent within walking distance of the lake. It is true that most of our lakefront is cut off by highways and salt mines and the homes of the affluent, but to have the simple primal pleasure of being near rocks and water, it is there, and we make use of it. It keeps us alive, keeps us from killing ourselves, lets us clear our heads. Is it some kind of thing wired in us to love rivers, oceans, lakes, to live near them, to drink and baptize and immerse, because they are our lifeblood, we would die without what they give.

The rational side of my weird brain knows that these moments of extra intense melancholia have their reasons and that they'll pass, that feelings and reality are not always congruent, and so I let the waterworks dry up and went to the park where the rocks and water are, and walked down, navigating the concrete breakers and the scrubby trees growing between the boulders that keep the shoreline from washing away.

I try not to think of all the people who used to come down here with me, all the memory of this place,  I try not to think of the occasionally encroaching loneliness that hovers closer like a bird of prey each year.

The waves were too high to walk across to the beach of pebbles beneath the cliffs so I made my way to a flat rock not completely soaked by water, far enough to not infringe upon someone doing the same thing. And I sat there for a couple hours at least, in non-yogic quiet meditation, silently pouring out my soul to the creator of all this beauty, seeking some kind of oneness with indescribable longing, with the waves breaking and the water undulating through watering the deep green moss on the sides of the rock where I perched, taking a break only to grab a sweater out of the car as the sun sank lower and changed from orange to pink.

The water in this lake may be dirty, and I haven't swam in it since I was in my teens, but there was this cathartic cleansing in the moment, of the sense of smallness of one's self and one's inner drama in the face of elementals that made me realize I should seek out this place and others like it much more than I do.

Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me.

I walked up to the top of the hill to watch the swollen pink sun sink into the violet waters, with the sounds of the birds and the sweet smell from the honey locust trees, we were all enraptured by the newest installation of the endless cycle, the teenage girl scrawling in a notebook, the Muslim family on the park bench, the dead ringer for latter-day Kerry King, the couple with the big hair and the couple embracing on the breakwall, and the old man on his night walk. As the light vanished, we walked back to our cars, back to the neighborhood, experiencing some small moment of transcendence.

For the grace of the presence, be grateful.
Touch the cloth of the robe,
but do not pull it toward you,
or like an arrow it will leave the bow.

Images. Presence plays with form,
fleeing and hiding as the sky does in water,
now one place, now nowhere.

Imagination cannot contain the absolute.
These poems are elusive
because the presence is.

I love the rose that is not a rose,
but the second I try to speak it, any name
for God becomes so-and-so, and vanishes.

What you thought to draw lifts off the paper,
as what you love slips from your heart.

 - rumi

that's why flags are such ugly things

Taking off yesterday to decompress and think and plant, reading Dorothy Day to get some perspective as to the living out of principles, because I have no use for platitudes, have seen too much to be an idealist, and want to know what the hell I should be doing or how I should be responding to the way that things are going here.


I can see through this expression
And you know I don't believe...

 We have a short historical memory as a country. The same things that are said about people in the Middle East are what was said about the Japanese sixty years ago, and it's often forgotten that FDR signed an executive order to intern thousands of citizens based solely on their race rather than anything else. To this day, there is next to no evidence that any of these people detained who lost almost everything were doing anything wrong or "unpatriotic."

But they hate us. You can't reason with people who blow themselves up for a cause. 

That is what was happening, right?   Kamikaze pilots were the suicide bombers of the 1940s. Kids were raised to die for an ideology if need be. People still justify the nuking of two cities, and no one remembers the devastation of the firebombing of Tokyo. Now things are more or less okay between our two countries, if only because history on both sides has been swept under the proverbial rug.

And we love to wear a badge, a uniform
And we love to fly a flag
But I won't
Let others live in hell
As we divide against each other
And we fight amongst ourselves

And I'm reading about police brutality, about scapegoating of anyone and everyone for the convenience of having a bogeyman, because in every movement, be it animal liberationists, Occupy, pro-lifers, whatever, there will always be unstable violent people that make everyone else look bad.  The faces might change, the movements have different names, but these principles are still the same.

Man's freedom stems from his free will, and he must respect the freedom of other men because they are made to the image and likeness of God and are temples of the Holy Spirit. To build up fear of other men is to build up hatred too. "Perfect love casts out fear." Such a witch hunt as has been set loose in the country today, serves to distract the mind from our own militarization and enslavement, our growing materialism, and to set us in the self righteous position of rooting out the evil in other men, paying no attention to the beam in our own eye. It is always so satisfactory to find a scapegoat on which to heap our sins. During the depression it was the international Jewish bankers. Now it is the communist.

And depending on what side you are, this scapegoat could be someone with an Arabic last name, the crusty punks on the public square, or the evangelical Christian with some weird views on fetuses and how the world came to be that you read about on the Internet and revile because you don't actually know any of these people in real life. 


The teacher is afraid to speak of interracial justice, of peace, of social justice these days, for fear he may be considered subversive. Loyalty oaths are beginning to be required at some state universities before a speaker can give an address to the students. This last month, Fritz Eichenberg, Quaker, who does magnificent illustrations for The Catholic Worker, refused to take the loyalty oath at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn where he teaches. I suppose that means he loses his job. One must accept voluntary poverty these days to keep his integrity.

I used to roll my eyes at this rhetoric when I was in college, but then I see this fly the flag and show your loyalty to the state business that's been resurrected and it starts to not seem so crazy after all. I stopped saying the pledge long ago, because I don't need to pledge allegiance to anyone's damn flag, because what it stands for goes against everything that I believe, cultural religious trappings be damned. One nation under God? The whole damn universe is, not just us, and not everyone believes in said higher power anyway. Liberty and justice for all? Ya think? And so I live here and obey the laws that don't go against my moral code and do my best to treat others the way I'd like to be treated, treat the land with respect. In theory this should make me a good citizen, but I'm sure that others would dispute this.


The occupied countries became the occupied countries because people were terrorized into saying yes, when they should have said no. Hitler and Stalin, Mussolini and Franco--this is the age of repression and McCarthy, in the guise of fighting Communism, is finding it in any honest criticism of the status quo?

Neither system proposed by the overlords or the economists or the protestors is working. Humans as a rule are broken, and therefore it's inevitable that our systems are too.

Angry words won't stop the fight
Two wrongs won't make it right
A new heart is what I need
Oh God, make it bleed
Is there nothing left?

in spirit and in truth

The place where I hang out on Sunday mornings is a mix of cultures and personalities that mesh in a way that I rarely see elsewhere, a smattering of age differences, ethnicity, politics, economics, and personal tastes and conversations where our different understandings and cultural baggage come to light. The differences of age, taste, culture, tangle and are melded harmoniously mostly, with doses of snarky humor and a deeper understanding of where we come from, who we are, where we are going.

Those of us who kind of ended up in charge of picking music and such ponder these things together over dinner once a month, seeking truth and sight within our respective blind spots and the ways in which our personalities respond. A lot of other people came from more charismatic backgrounds as opposed to mine, and sometimes express dismay at the lack of emotional engagement on the part of many, but there's a lot of introverts where I go, some others who came from a similar tradition as me or others who were burned by a misplaced emotionalism in the past. Being introverted as a rule, and wary of gratuitous displays of piety, my prayers are rarely spoken, existing scrawled in notebooks in ballpoint, or scribbled on canvas with paint markers bleeding into acrylic, wordless spiraling from a guitar neck.

As much as I couldn't stand the deadness that was going to Mass and mumbling through a liturgy so rote that the words ceased to have meaning, I'm still profoundly wary of emotion for emotion's sake, when the lines blur between emotional and psychological euphoria, because that stuff is real, especially when everyone else is having this collective experience and inevitably you get swept up in it.

Sometimes it's in a religious setting, but I see the same dynamic at play in other crowds, be it watching your sports team score or when you're watching a really good band play and are absorbed with the crowd in the sound or when Obama's inauguration was on tv and everyone on campus was bawling and I found myself getting misty-eyed too even though I didn't vote for him or whatever, and I knew this was purely a collective emotional wave more than anything connected to what I was thinking. I can step back after the fact but there seems to be something to that shared experience that wells up. I never delved into psychology but I'm sure someone's subjected this to analysis.

One of my good friends in high school was really charismatic and the whole 'slain in the Spirit' passed out on the floor was a normal thing to her and I can't doubt what she says but when I went to her church, my lack of outward expression and movement was taken to be something akin to spiritual frigidity or utter lack of faith and led to some very weird prayers being said for my soul, probably out of the best of intentions, but I left feeling a little pissed off nonetheless. When my friends from more Pentecostal backgrounds want to know why others aren't more "into it," I want to say, how do you know that people aren't, and how do you know when someone isn't just showing off?  Who is anyone to say that maybe one's experience of God might be expressed differently? Heck, even when I go see one of my favorite bands play, I might sing along, but I don't move much. I'm just trying to take it all in.

I can't tell if that's just personality or culture, but ever since this whole faith thing went from my parents' religion to my own way of life, it's always been expressed in a way that's still emotional as anything but shot through with a whole lot of thinking, because my weird brain and my gut/heart/soul have a strange and tangled relationship.

I went to a small conservative college for one lonely year and there were people I met who liked the pray in public but sounded phony and canned like a tv preacher or a motivational speaker lecturing us rather than communing with something higher and greater, and others who avoided the microphone but when they did speak aloud to God it actually sounded like they were talking to their best friend who knew them as well as they did themselves. Who am I to judge either heart, there are only my preferences and I know I've been wrong at times.

But I've always had more of an inward meditation than visible expression, not that I don't talk about it, or that it doesn't come out in the artwork I do when I'm home by myself, or drenched in reverb from an electric guitar on Sunday morning, old words resung like Billy Bragg channeling Guthrie, but I don't want to be the focus, I don't want to be the center, and I just put what I do out there, and leave it to others to connect with the divine in the way that they see fit. I don't want to manipulate that, because it's beyond what I understand and what speaks to each of us is so different, and I respect that, and only want to please the only one to which it all matters as it is.

ash wednesday incoherence

T.S. Eliot describes my frame of mind so well right now.

Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

This world that breaks my heart. 

Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy rotten system.


We are the nation the most powerful, the most armed and we are supplying arms and money to the rest of the world where we are not ourselves fighting. We are eating while there is famine in the world.

I've been reading Dorothy Day over dinner, and find it amusing that the last two presidents have quoted her, considering that everything they've done in the past decade or so would have been reprehensible to her, like predator drones and warpiggery and enriching the few at the expense of the many, though everyone quotes their respective religious figures when they see the need to, so there's really no difference.

I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions.

It's been ten years since I've been to an Ash Wednesday service, I feel disingenuous taking ashes and not the bread, and so I try to comprehend, too unstilled to contemplate, too resigned to truly rage, because I doubt the righteousness of my fury, there is too much of me in it still.

"I hold more temper in one minute than you will hold in your entire life."


But it's hard for me to listen to people who say they respect the sanctity of life as created by God who have no problem degrading the humanity and personhood of others through torture, who seem too enthused or all too willing to blow up other parts of the world because of some perceived clash of values. Human life is cheap to the powers that be, who utilize human resources until they run dry, justify the unjustifiable with economics and ideology and appealing to emotions and blaming the other side while doing the same exact things that were once decried.

It is not just Vietnam, it is South Africa, it is Nigeria, the Congo, Indonesia, all of Latin America. It is not just the pictures of all the women and children who have been burnt alive in Vietnam, or the men who have been tortured, and died. It is not just the headless victims of the war in Colombia. It is not just the words of Cardinal Spellman and Archbishop Hannan. It is the fact that whether we like it or not, we are Americans. It is indeed our country, right or wrong, as the Cardinal said in another context. We are warm and fed and secure (aside from occasional muggings and murders amongst us). We are the nation the most powerful, the most armed and we are supplying arms and money to the rest of the world where we are not ourselves fighting. We are eating while there is famine in the world.

  ...We are the rich. The works of mercy are the opposite of the works of war, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, nursing the sick, visiting the prisoner. But we are destroying crops, setting fire to entire villages and to the people in them. We are not performing the works of mercy but the works of war. We cannot repeat this enough.

Words are as strong and powerful as bombs, as napalm. How much the government counts on those words, pays for those words to exalt our own way of life, to build up fear of the enemy. Deliver us, Lord, from the fear of the enemy. That is one of the lines in the psalms, and we are not asking God to deliver us from enemies but from the fear of them. Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them.

Even as a lapsed Catholic whose soul still turns towards the liturgical end of things, I've never been good at this whole Lent thing, more out of absentmindedness than anything else, and having only been in the land of parochials for the first decade of life, never quite developed the guilt complex endemic to the others in my circle. I know better than to try and give up caffeine, and I eat too little meat for it to be denial, maybe a cut in consumption of goods, perhaps?

 We will print the words of Christ who is with us always, even to the end of the world. "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who persecute and calumniate you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, who makes His sun to rise on the good and the evil, and sends rain on the just and unjust."

I realize more and more that acquisition and use are so endemic to the lifestyle of paychecks and solo living. I have no one to provide for, and I make all efforts to share what I do have, but so much volunteering throughout my twenties has soured me on a lot of charitable work, when you realize that more goes to pay an entitled administrator than that goes to the people. The money trails of even the most altruistic causes make me not want to waste my time and resources, but instead of looking at other options, so often I just become busy with my own life and my own circle, and I don't give as much of myself and what I have as I should, even more not okay because I have no one to sustain except myself.

Love is not the starving of whole populations. Love is not the bombardment of open cities. Love is not killing, it is the laying down of one’s life for one’s friend.

So, to give more of my time, of what I possess, of my skills, of my soul? To just start, I guess, and see what happens. 

My strength returns to me with my cup of coffee and the reading of the psalms.  

How often it does. 


Shout it aloud, do not hold back.
   Raise your voice like a trumpet.
Declare to my people their rebellion
   and to the descendants of Jacob their sins.
² For day after day they seek me out;
   they seem eager to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that does what is right
   and has not forsaken the commands of its God.
They ask me for just decisions
   and seem eager for God to come near them.
³ ‘Why have we fasted,’ they say,
   ‘and you have not seen it?
Why have we humbled ourselves,
   and you have not noticed?’
   “Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please
   and exploit all your workers.
⁴ Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife,
   and in striking each other with wicked fists.
You cannot fast as you do today
   and expect your voice to be heard on high.
⁵ Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
   only a day for people to humble themselves?
Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed
   and for lying in sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast,
   a day acceptable to the LORD?
 ⁶ “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
   and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
   and break every yoke?
⁷ Is it not to share your food with the hungry
   and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
   and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
⁸ Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
   and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness will go before you,
   and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.
⁹ Then you will call, and the LORD will answer;
   you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.
   “If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
   with the pointing finger and malicious talk,
¹⁰ and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
   and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
   and your night will become like the noonday.
¹¹ The LORD will guide you always;
   he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
   and will strengthen your frame.
You will be like a well-watered garden,
   like a spring whose waters never fail.
¹² Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins
   and will raise up the age-old foundations;
you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls,
   Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.