This essay was commissioned and paid for by a journalism 2.0 start-up that originally hoped to cover controversial domestic issues but never quite lifted off the ground. The piece, which I spent weeks reporting and writing in Montana and Wyoming, never saw the light of day. It is reproduced in its entirety here.Today, with our semi-automatic weapons, cars, and bright electric lights, it’s hard to imagine the anxiety predators evoked in the precarious populations of earlier times. Until they were substantially culled by killing and trapping, they were one of the most widely distributed animals on the planet, found from Finland to India, and blanketing the island of Manhattan. Since ancient times, they have been a morbid vessel for human fears. In Medieval times, landlords and cancer were both referred to as The Wolf. In early Puritan New England, the threat of wolves was so omnipresent that the colonial government paid 20 shillings to any pilgrim who brought the head of a wolf to a magistrate. There are reliable accounts from 18th century France that wolves came out of the forest and ate dozens of children. During the Civil War, they were often spotted at twilight, feasting on the battlefield dead. They have also been known to dig up graves and eat cadavers from time to time (until 6 foot burial became the norm, stone slabs called ‘wolf stones’ were placed over gravesites as a last line of defense.) In the late 1800s, frontiersmen and trappers swept across the American West and extirpated wolves in a vicious campaign of strychnine poisoning. In 1893, Theodore Roosevelt penned a dark chapter in his book Hunting the Grizzly and Other Sketches about wolves in the American West, in which he called the animal a “beast of waste and desolation.” Roosevelt hated wolves, but the chapter possesses a certain head-shaking melancholy at the abrupt extirpation of his favorite quarry. “The slaughter wrought by man seems insufficient to explain the scarcity of wolves throughout the country at large,” he wrote. And yet, the campaign to exterminate the wolf intensified. In 1905, Montana experimented with an early form of biological warfare, passing a law that allowed veterinarians to infect wolves with mange and then send them back in the wild to spread the disease. An early 20th century wolf hunters guide literally froths at the mouth, calling the animal “an enemy of the state.” “What greater enemy can the state have than one who is able to wage war on his chief industries day and night?”

After having been vanquished from most of North America, the animal was placed under the protection of the Endangered Species Act in 1973. The National Park Service concocted schemes to reintroduce wolf populations back into the American West. In an effort to preempt the concerns of ranchers, who were worried about wolves preying on their livestock, a group even set up a “wolf compensation fund” to pay ranchers the market value for any livestock that were killed.

In the mid 90s, the federal wolf reintroduction plan reached fruition: 66 wolves were released into Yellowstone National Park and a barren wilderness area in Idaho. Montana politicians, angry about the Eastern influence, angrily fired back with legislation proposing for wolves to be reintroduced in Central Park. Idaho threatened to call the National Guard to have the animals removed from the state. But in the end, the reintroduction was successful—like a chapter of the Old Testament, the wolves went forth and multiplied, and now there are about 1,700 animals today. The Rockies have become a fault line for a bitter, politicized battle over the wolf that is really about states’ rights. The wolf is seen as a livestock-drain brought in by hippie wolf-hugging Eastern bureaucrats. The hatred and fervor is such that you practically can’t get elected to public office in Idaho, Montana or Wyoming today unless you make at least passing reference to hating the wolf.

After four decades of protecting the wolf and paying to have it reintroduced into the west, last year, Congress caved to pressure from Western politicians and took the unprecedented step of removing the animal from the Endangered Species List—the Rocky Mountain Gray Wolf can now be freely hunted in Idaho and Montana as well as three other states. The wolf remains somewhat protected in Wyoming, despite vigorous efforts from that states’ legislators to have it removed completely. Budd Betts, a Wyoming outfitter who’s had several of his dogs killed by wolves told me, “Everyone in Wyoming hates them, outside of Jackson Hole. Our forefathers hated this animal. We’ve spent 75 years trying to get rid of them.” Jackson Hole remains an island of Eastern money and liberal wolf-sympathy in the vast sea of predator hatred that is Wyoming. Why had the debate over wolves become so contentious out in the Northern Rockies? In other parts of the country like North Carolina and Arizona wolf reintroductions were carried out with relatively little ire or controversy. I headed out west to find out.
The sprawl of Denver gave way to the sad, treeless subdivisions that flow over the lumpy bare mountains around Colorado Springs. I drove up over the high-altitude desolation of the Front Rage until I reached the Colorado Wolf and Wildlife Center. Inside, I found Darlene Kobobel, a blonde woman in her early 40s, who had moved from Los Angeles to start the sanctuary. She explained that the center is home to 17 wolves and wolf-hybrids, most of which have been rescued as abused pets and from for-profit wildlife parks. Nearly twenty years spent dancing with wolves seemed to have soured her on her own species. “Wolves have more feelings than people. My motto is that if people could be more like wolves, it would be a better world. Look at humans: they’re disgusting. Some of them shouldn’t even have the gift of life. All they want to do is destroy.” She said she had to rescue one wolf from a dorm room, where college students were keeping it alive on pizza and Cheetos. Kobobel saw wolf opponents and ranchers as complainers who had unwisely set up their livestock operations in what was naturally predator country. When it was time to feed the wolves, Kobobel, lugged a wheelbarrow of meat out through the snow, flinging huge slabs of venison over fences. I couldn’t help think but Kobobel’s wolves exist in what must be a strange purgatorial state for an animal: not domestic, but still totally dependent. We went cage to cage and Kobobel introduced me to the different subspecies. The massive regal gray wolves, bigger than mastiff dogs, who like humans go gray as they get older; the pure little arctic white wolves; and the straggly, skinny Mexican gray, naturally camouflaged. As we passed, the animals ambled over to the fences and poked their faces out, looking out with intelligent eyes.

Kobobel jumped into a pen with two wolves, one gray and one black, and they nudged her around, playing with her roughly. When I asked her if she had ever been bitten, Kobobel gave me a tired look that seemed to indicate it was a question that everybody asked. “Yes. It’s something you have to deal with. But you live by the gun, you die by the gun.” Back in the center’s little gift shop, I perused the rows of paraphernalia and thought about the fetishization of the wolf--All the indie bands with ‘Wolf’ in their name; all the ironic Native-American-dream catcher airbrush shirts. all the people in New York and LA who love the wolf and ‘the wild’ but live in the city—and for a moment understood the resentment of rural people who lived the life while others just pretended and postured.

Why do people love the wolf so much? Kobobel’s tough exterior suddenly fell away, and her voice became high-pitched and feminine, like a six-year-old girl describing her favorite plaything. “You just watch them run and interact and play and love their young. They’re just so pure. There’s going to be people on both sides who will fight until the end. It just depends on which side you’re on.”

Which side are you on? Is the question that the world asks every day. Like any person with a conscience I hate the thought of animals being killed and tortured senselessly—but does that hate overpower the contempt I have for educated Eastern bureaucrats and urbanites in distant air-conditioned office buildings, who, in their eternal rightness earned through an expensive liberal arts education, love to tell rugged and independent people what they should and should not do to protect their land and their livelihood? I drove through the empty lunar landscape of Wyoming at night—nothing to look at for miles—and when I almost ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere learned the important Western lesson that one must always stop for gas even when you’ve got a quarter of a tank. Late at night I approached Casper, a ghostly bright little orb in Wyoming’s otherwise impenetrable darkness. Casper is spooned up against the mountains, notable only for being an oil town and the home of Dick Cheney. It’s central location on a major highway makes it the de facto stopover spot the state. For this reason, and on account of the brutal, wind-lashed winter, Casper hotels have amenities. The first place I looked was a hotel called The C’mon Inn that looked like an REI sporting goods store from the outside and an Atlantic City casino on the inside—just past the lobby was a huge courtyard filled with hot tubs, each surrounded by a little scenery of fake trees and rocks, burbling away waiting for a swinger’s convention to show up. The late-night receptionist was a twenty-something girl and I stood chatting with her for a while. When I asked her why no one was in the dozens of hot tubs and she shrugged, “I don’t know, but I would get in one right now if I could.” I smiled and said it was nice chatting and went out into the iced-over parking lot to get in my car and drive to another hotel, the Ramada Plaza, near the center of Casper’s tiny downtown. As I was checking in, I poked my head into the wood-paneled hotel bar. There was a lingerie show going on—scantily clad women gyrated and spun and danced on laps, trying to evoke a reaction from the statue-like Wyoming cowboys, stock-still leathery flacos with boots and moustaches. By the time I got settled into my room and came back downstairs, the bar was empty. I took a seat at the bar across from the bartender and ordered a beer. I told him I was writing about the wolves and he instantly knew what I was writing about. “Everyone has an opinion about them around here,” he said. Wolves, he told me, were the hot-button political issue in the region. “They’re trouble,” he said, “You’re going to find a lot of people around here that don’t like ‘em.”

In the winter, locals have no problem careening over the icy permafrost-coated highways of Montana and Wyoming at breakneck speeds, turning what could be a beautiful drive into a harrowing, white-knuckle experience. The next morning, I veered into Montana over snow-covered two-lane roads, buffeted by the Paramount-pictures-cinematic-looking Crazy Mountains, and met a rancher named Sven Svenson at his home near Reed Point. Svenson, a rotund middle-aged man with a mustache, was out in his garage skinning sheep when I arrived. His overalls and shoes were covered in blood. He led me inside his ranch home and put some coffee on. Animal heads—moose, deer, and elk with blank eyes—filled the walls of the den. In 2008, Svenson began to find his sheep brutally slaughtered, with bloody wolf paw prints around the carcasses. When he put out guard dogs, they got torn up too. Svenson and his sons took turns staying up all night to keep watch for wolves. But when they left in the morning to get some sleep, the wolf made his move. “He was watching us watch him. Wolves make coyotes look stupid.” As part of their wolf compensation program, a group called Defenders of Wildlife paid Svenson market value for the 35 sheep he officially lost—around $5000. But Svenson estimates that his real losses were actually closer to a whopping $80,000. On his kitchen table, he laid out an extensive itemization; “I’ll provide an analogy for you: It’s as if the New York Police Department said when you got mugged, they’ll pay you for the $7.50 the wallet cost, but not the $500 that was inside of it.” I felt a tinge of sadness as an image of a slaughtered sheep, containing a stack of green bills, splayed open like a wallet coalesced in my imagination. Svenson’s itemization seemed like a reach, but his indignation seemed genuine. “They shoved this wolf introduction down our throats” he growled, “After what I’ve been through, I’ll shoot a wolf on sight if I ever get a chance. If they throw me in jail, the rest of the county will be right there beside me. There’s a certain bond among agriculture and we’re done—we’re tired of it—and we will rebel.”

Most of the entrances into Yellowstone National Park remain closed throughout the winter, accessible only by a small fleet of futuristic looking snowplows and snowmobiles. To get in, one has to come down through the tiny town of Gardiner at the northern end of the park. Locals told me that in the summer, Gardiner was a tourist zoo, with Los Angeles-like bumper-to-bumper cars stretching into the horizon and hordes of Japanese tourists taking pictures of the elk that roam through town. In the winter, I found Gardiner dead and Lynchian. The ominous, spindly mountains inside of Yellowstone seemed perpetually covered in swirling gray snow clouds. All the restaurants were eerily empty. Driving through town, I spotted an adolescent kid leaning over the railing of a bridge looking down at the swift-moving river like a character in a Dostoevsky novel, preparing to jump. Even the entrance into America’s heralded national park was surreal—a huge brick arch plopped down on an empty plain, with Soviet-intentional words seared into the masonry—

For the enjoyment and benefit of the people.

From the park’s entrance, I drove for an hour down a tiny, precipitous road, trapped behind a lone loping buffalo, until I found Rick McIntyre, Yellowstone’s resident wolf guru. He stood beside his car at a snow-blanketed siding looking like Benjamin Franklin, pointing a huge handheld antenna in the direction of the valley plain. McIntyre, 61, had thin graying hair and wore a worn-in Death Valley cap. He wore lightly tinted sunglasses and spoke in the preternaturally calm, prescriptively non-oppressive voice of a new age golf instructor or a family therapist. He has no interest in talking about the partisan politics of the wolf debate, but is instead only interested in delving into the ongoing soap opera of the wolves he’s been watching for over ten years, stories that he compares to the Old Testament. Though he’s had opportunities to be promoted, McIntyre has voluntarily chosen to stay in the lowest position in the National Park hierarchy. “Have you heard of the Peter Principle?” he asked me “The idea that in any organization you rise to a level of your incompetence?” The antenna, he explained, was used to pick up signals from the wolf radio collars. If he got a strong signal, he pulled out his telescope and watched the wolves, narrating their every negligible movement into a portable Dictaphone—“Wolf number 361 has lifted its hind leg. Wolf number 962, straying off to the north alone.” If McIntyre is unable to get a signal, he drives to another spot in the park and tries again. This is what he has done continuously, every day, since the year 2000. In the summer McIntyre he gets up at 3:45 in the morning and stays out until its dark. He packs all his meals and stays out in the cold for nine hours at a time. At night, he returns to his small cabin at the northeastern edge of the park and transcribes the day’s notes, trying to find patterns, adding the notes to his Wolf Bible—a document that has grown over the past ten years and is now 8,200 pages long, single spaced. Wolves are his driving passion—they are his life. Needless to say he is single. McIntyre said there was a woman for a while, in Phoenix. “I thought she cared about wolves. In the end, I was wrong--she cared more about her job.” McIntyre hopes to one day format all of his research into a Bible-like series of books that will tell the entire saga of the wolf reintroduction. “It’s kind of like how if you were a novelist and were to write a novel about American life right now, you’d want to create characters that were representative of society.” Tagging along with McIntyre is an enthusiastic college kid named Joe, a former ranch hand home for winter break, trying to get as much wolf-watching time in as possible. The kid’s initiative and drive to watch wolves is impressive—he gets up before dawn to drive into the park to stand out in the cold all day for the nebulously-satisfying reward of getting to spot a wolf through a telescope. We spend the first day in relative silent on a snowy hilltop, standing there like monks for hours, looking down at the valley. At different points McIntyre beckons me over to his telescope—there are the gray wolves with their tongues lolling out, perched in the snow, guarding a carcass.
All of McIntyre’s wolf stories start, “Well, I’m going to have to give you a short version here” and stretch out into an hour-long retelling of a three-generation-long Shakespearean saga of genetic inheritance, warfare, love and murder. McIntyre’s wolves, as he anthropomorphizes them, come to have individual human personalities, with individual charismas, birthrights and hubris. Individuals are always splitting off to form new packs—tribes are warring with each other, dynasties are built, lone wolves set off away from society. Why is it that the pack refuse to follow the alpha male, but are willing to fight for the alpha female when she gives the signal? Charisma is not usually a characteristic afforded to animals. McIntyre loves the Tao Te Ching-inspired wolf leaders who govern effortlessly without ever resorting to cruelty or fear.

When I asked McIntyre if he had a favorite wolf, his tale is somewhat heartrending. “Wolf #8 was one of the first pups born after the reintroduction in 1995. #8 was one of the smallest and was picked on by everybody. He had no natural physical advantages—he wasn’t a good hunter, he was clumsy, and in a culture where dominance means physical ability, it didn’t seem like #8 had a great chance of survival. But after the death of several dominant wolves in Eight’s pack, he became the unlikely heir of the alpha position. As alpha, #8 was benevolent and compassionate—he adopted a number of wolf pups and raised them as if they were his own. He was a great foster father. Having had a difficult time growing up himself, he taught his pups compassion. He taught them to show mercy to the enemy, and not to kill in battle. #8 went on to be the mentor and foster dad for a very important wolf--Wolf #21, who would go on to become the most famous wolf in the park. #21 was born with every physical gift imaginable. This may sound like an exaggeration, but seriously, #21 was like a superhero. His concept of a fair fight was six to one and he would always win. He was the undisputed champion. He was the ultimate tough guy, but he would always play and wrestle with the younger wolves in the pack and let the young wolves win. I watched a documentary about Muhammad Ali, and he would do the same thing. That was his idea of a game. #21 learned about compassion from #8. When he grew up and became a strong alpha, he always spared his enemies in battle, just like his foster father taught him. The best analogy I have is that #21 was like Superman—he was this child with super powers, who never knew his biological father, but was adopted and raised by this compassionate foster family who imparted him with strong values.”

Barry Lopez, in his indispensable book Of Wolves and Men pointed out, “We do not know very much at all about animals. We cannot understand them except in terms of our own needs and experiences.” Despite centuries of research and human experience, the true nature of the wolf remains steeped in mystery. We still know almost nothing about the “rules” that govern wolf behavior. Sometimes they go after prey that is sick and old. And sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they kill just what they need to eat, and are compassionate to their prey. Other times they slaughter ruthlessly, almost as if for fun. Wolves are hated because they are smart and because they are elusive keystone predators that seem to serve no other purpose in God’s Great Plan other than to muck things up and do whatever they want—that is, they are hated because they are too similar to humans. A common mantra repeated by wolf supporters is that no healthy wolf has ever killed a person in North America. This is probably not true, but was definitively disproven last March when a young special education teacher working in Alaska was found mauled to death on the side of the road. Bloody wolf prints were found all around her body. She had been going on a run and listening to her iPod. Wolf attacks on humans, though very infrequent, read like a collection of humankind’s worst fears: a young kayaker sleeping in the open air wakes up to find himself being dragged into the woods. Children in Alaska and Ontario have been grabbed by the head when their parents aren’t looking. In the 1940s, a railway worker in Ontario was ambushed by a wolf while he was on the train—he grabbed an axe and clubbed the animal to death to save himself. However, the special education teacher in Alaska is today the only recorded person in North America ever to have been killed by non-rabid wolves. But when her father was interviewed by reporters, he didn’t sound consumed by the kind of face-reddening, mouth-breather hatred that is widespread in Wyoming and Montana. “They’re just doing what wolves do.” He sighed to a local paper. “Their nature happened to kill my daughter, but I don’t have any anger towards wolves.” The young wolf victim had kept a blog documenting her interesting life as a teacher in small-village Alaska. In it, she comes across as very preoccupied and concerned about the threat of bears and various wild animals—a chilling reminder that sometimes your worst nightmare can come true. In one entry, she posted a picture of a stuffed wolf in a glass case, that seemed to eerily presage her death: “Chignik Lake’s mascot is a wolf and it sits in the lobby of the school,” she wrote, "It's a great reminder of what lurks outside in the wilderness and to be on the alert at all times."

Big Hands #9 has sold out from Microcosm distro and from
most of the NYC bookstores!

I'm in the process of running around and making
more copies, restocking the print copies at store.

In the meantime, here is the PDF: Big Hands #9

Labels: Lebanon, Simone De Beauvoir, The Mandarins

An unpublishable collection of fragments, written several years ago.

ONE

Short sentences for short attention spans. You don’t have time to read as much linear text (now accustomed to the world of multimedia—short blips of text interspersed with pictures or YouTube videos). I don’t have time to write as much because I’m busy consuming all that information too (newspapers, videos, thousands of years worth of literature that I’ve barely made a dent in). We are such very busy people—let’s start by not wasting each other’s time.

TWO

The power of positive thinking—my friend says affirmations to herself. One of them being “The world is lovely and full of laughter." A beautiful thing to say. One of my co-workers says with authority “If you want to be happy—you can be happy.” A woman I meet on the plane says “Give up the pridefulness, the roadblocks—do whatever you have to do to get into the ballpark that you want to be in."

THREE
The organic nature of the fragment, synapses cracking together to make a brief connection, like sharing a moment with a stranger you’ll never see again. One thought experienced and then transcribed. Slowly accumulating pictures and seeing that they form an unconscious photomosaic of the times. The process is like collecting the contents of your pockets and weeks later finding yourself with a full change jar. To utilize all the parts of writing [notes on sugar packets, embarrassing dreams, harsh analysis that fits nowhere else] the way Native Americans processed deer: meat, bones, hooves, none of it wasted.

FOUR

New York’s fetishization of appearances—the hyperspeed dishy sexuality of men and women. Everything is satisfying to the eye but somehow rotting underneath, like Victorian England. Every object and person is on display, putting so much into his or her outward appearance. Cleavage, make-up, big shoes, sculpted facial hair, men in tight shorts, V- neck shirts. Despite their breathless presentation, many still head home to shoebox apartments alone, removing their unnecessary packaging and discarding it in some sad closet like Christmas gift-wrapping. The exhaustion and wear so visible on their faces. Empathy for these poor people--the urge to hold their hands and let them know it's all right. “I used to think New York was romantic." a friend tells me, "Now I just think it’s dirty and expensive”

FIVE
Corporate childhood reversion—the compartmentalization of all impulses. Exercise belongs in gyms. Sex is for escorts. Crying is what you do with your therapist. Crawling around on the floor like a toddler is acceptable only in yoga class. Spending all day an office feels no different from spending all day at a public school—the same feeling of cold, air-conditioned skin exiting the building and reacclimatizing to the hot sun. After the final bell rings rushing out to commute home, calling up all your friends up to see if they want to come out and “play”.

SIX
Like a flume sucking in at the universe, every couple of weeks red carpets roll out for me and everything I say is right on. All the trains are running with my walking patterns and arrive just as I step out onto the platform. Supermodels stare at me in the streets, strangers smile and talk. Free drinks and comp’d pizza materialize out of nowhere, and the guy at the video store deletes my late fees. How do these waves come and go? I become the great burning star coasting through the city without preoccupation on my face. But the inevitable question of holding on—can it be like this all the time?


SEVEN
The faded brilliance in my eyes after I’ve been in one place for a while. The sanding down that comes with a routine, the loss of the desperate, high frequency wavelength. When I first arrived, wide-eyed and incredulous at everything happening around me, strangers would look at me and smile, magnetized. Now I’ve faded into the crowd, unable to sustain that initial catapulting magnetism that comes from being a stranger noticing the details of others lives. What is the secret element? Now I feel old. Youth can come and go at any age.

EIGHT
Fragments like the exoskeletons—the cold, harsh mechanical whirrings underneath the smooth skin exterior. The gears and motors of a hundred novels, ripped open and exposed, no muscles, no skin.

NINE
College students across the country, in their dorm rooms typing up papers to send over wireless internet; silent zombies of the computer labs dry heaving stale, regurgitated information back to their professors, regurgitating back and forth to each other ad infinitum. The university is no longer a place for discourse but a factory for trivium—they are even now selling the bankruptcy by saying “grad school is the new undergraduate”. Thousands of worthless papers to be printed out or emailed and then immediately dispelled from the student’s thoughts. Kept just occupied enough by high-speed Internet access to keep them from engaging meaningfully with other students, let alone to speak of the community, which many avoid as if they were being kept on campus with an electric fence.

TEN
Typewriter—computer—blog—Garageband—tape records—iPhones; The democratization of media is the search for artistic transparency—the dream of no longer having to push any buttons or really interface with any machinery. The perfect blog would just read your brain and post it to the Internet, where you could compare your life perspective to others life perspectives. The search for the ultimate how-do-I-feel-right- now device. Cheap telekinesis.

ELEVEN
Some books are written so badly, are so painfully talentless that they can only make you wonder, “How did this get printed?” and make you want to put them down and work on your own writing--you know you can do better. These horrible commodities are necessary in the cultural sphere if only to provoke other, less confident bodies into action. But then there are some books--you can pick them apart and analyze them to the very core, and still never discover their hidden secret, their central catalyzing mechanisms—a secret element, a missing link, a stroke of genius, or some incantation that animates the golem to life.

TWELVE
The collection of fragments: “like giving someone a big bag of diamonds instead of focusing on the aesthetic presentation, having it set into a ring or necklace.”

THIRTEEN
The sense of infinite possibility in first encounters—new people, new chances to make it right. Strangers in restaurants and casual conversations in parties, the opportunity of first impressions that are no longer available. Let’s withhold the emotion and go wild with the charm—let’s try and ignore the black cloud that has been hanging like a funeral over our heads for the last 8 years. Lift us up. If you’re not feeling the spirit—YOU’RE DEAD! Crashing parties and throwing things in the street. Meeting people and pouring drinks.

FOURTEEN
The reverse-psychology of forming habits. Playing little tricks on yourself in order to get blood from the stone of your life. Trying to get a job you don’t care about so you can have to the time to work on what you’re really committed to. To pursue your passion without compromise or preoccupation at the end of the day—to do what you love without the scent of commerce. To continue a horrible living situation so you can have a repository of blame for all your easy self-distraction. To move into a nice, quiet house without distractions is to be forced to confront your own shortcomings, and then to either overcome them or fall victim, because there’s nowhere else to place the blame. Once you’re in the good situation, it seems hard to go backwards, to devolve back into the old ways. The hard questions that no one has a good answer for—Really, why aren’t you getting anything done? What’s the excuse this year?

FIFTEEN
Fully “alive” and experiencing the many moods of a pregnant moment with all six senses, but cursed with a poor memory and unable to achieve synthesis, cohesion, or stay focused on a five-year plan or longstanding, well-warranted grudges. Like Kimber explaining her ex-girlfriend to me: “I think she lives in the present in a very real way. Which has its benefits—wherever she is she can usually be happy and find some good in it. But she doesn’t really make plans more than four or five months in advance.”
“And the past? Does she learn from it?” “No, she can’t remember the mistakes of the past. She’s an amnesiac in that way. And when she is confronted with the future, like everyone eventually is—she panics and runs.


SIXTEEN
Without their social networking tools, he’s no longer on an even playing field with people I talk to. Without them knowing his favorite bands, and who he’s dating, and the bulletin-board update minutia about his life, they have no clue what ‘he’s about.’ The conversation is ready made with their other friends—there’s gossip and shared causes, recent break-ups and creepy social networking stalking stories, but around him—I can sense their uneasiness and fear in the face of what is essentially that omnipresent avatar face with a question mark over it, the sign on these websites of “user has no picture”. He’s an illegitimate and ghostly offline presence, unvouched for by the matrix. Radiating a sense of calm and a desire to share life isn’t enough.

SEVENTEEN
Trying not to show my emotions on my face, not to be so readable, and to exude confidence and charisma rather than looking like I’m about to cry. The stuff inside is too horrible to let loose on the world—don’t want to gloss over it, but to try to use it differently, not be so readable. To look out at the world with eyes like a newborn baby.


EIGHTEEN
Things still happen, but they have a certain scent of kitsch, both parties half-experiencing it, the rest of the energy of the encounter going into processing it into an anecdote for later. An attractive stranger coming up and talking to you on the train. A surprise encounter. True love. We’ve watched these things happen on movies and television. We haven’t experienced them ourselves, but have internalized the reactions. A coy, bemused smile indicates our familiarity with the situations, but it’s a thrill to actually experience them firsthand. Shoot-outs, robberies, explosions, war, terrorism, death—will they be like they were in the movies? We’ve learned how to scream and run for our lives, how to kiss, how to die gracefully. We are plagiarists, studied imitators.

NINETEEN
The interlocking shadows and mirrors of the World Wide Web—all positioned to appear as truth. Blogs so heavily trafficked that they seemingly convey veracity and metered thought. Most are still reservoirs of unverified hype and echo-chambered opinion, forced humor. Information vying as fact in a world of make believe. Web denizens plugging outward towards something, dipping their hands in the murk to try to dredge out information but grabbing only handfuls of silt and rocks. We indulge in endless shadow-gazing at flickering mirages of information, all fact and credulity wiping away into unintelligible pixels as we zoom in on the image. This is the packing of life into a wiki-world. People frittering away trying to build replicas of the world on the Internet, making computer scans of every grain of salt in the desert. This is playing God. Looking for resistance, I Google search “Criticism of Wikipedia”. Wikipedia’s model has succeeded in appropriating even this, the top Google result being it’s own composite analysis of its shortcomings, with multiple subsections in neutered language its critique. This great sweeping wave of false certainty, leveling everything in sight into a bland, vaguely authoritative information. At a party a man telling me about having spent days thinking about creating a Wikipedia entry for proof that he is real. Proof of existence is now determinate on the length of the shadow cast by your Internet self.

TWENTY
To walk across America unironically. That was the idea. To actually do something. To feel weather. So it hurt me when I told him and he brought up the movie Forrest Gump.

TWENTY-ONE
Our lust for something real is insatiable, observable from our patronizing purchasing habits—people paying top dollar for their food to exude an aura of “clean” and “organic”. Paying admission fees to historical park so we can have a chance to see what the brutal past was like. Paying for gyms so we can be peer-pressured poked and prodded into the abuse of bodies that we call exercise. Paying for “primal therapy” so we can scream and cry like a little baby. Paying for yoga so we can relax. The carnival amusement value in letting a child ride on a donkey; how silly it was that our ancestors had to actually do things, churn butter, make tools, chop wood. We pay to watch parody of their harsh, fuel-spent lives. At the end of the day we lean back on couches, pampering ourselves as if we deserved it.

TWENTY-TWO
The most unbelievable signs from God that I should leave this place—like biblical plagues wrought upon my life—a slow, seaward crumbling away with a girl, lost jobs, a broken-up band, wheels spinning in the mud, tornadoes whipping past my place of work, literally touching down and uprooting trees in the vicinity of my little ramshackle house. Walking around with an ice cream cone and getting jumped, choked and dragged into the woods from the place where I usually sit at a computer writing.

TWENTY-THREE
Hands lined up on a subway pole, everyone trying to keep their grip steady. Hands brush, fleeting electric sensuousness; fingers touch rocking back and forth.

TWENTY-FOUR
Unbuttoning my shirt in the bathroom to look at my chest in the mirror. It’s a tiny miracle to not yet be dead, to not have scars, or growths, or tumors. That’s for later, but for now body young and healthy. I look good, cutting a dashing figure with my one-day stubbly face and soviet-minimal haircut. Nice eyes, pretty eyelashes. A smooth, barrelly chest except for one black hair than has grown at the cardinal center of my solar plexus. I pluck it out with my fingernails. It hurts but feels good. I make a wish—to never be grown-up; to stay young forever.

TWENTY-FIVE
The avatar digital cat on my desktop is curled up in a ball napping beside the Quicktime video of a blazing fire—I let out a loud, waspy sigh, and slip back into my pneumatic pump-action adjustable chair, making a pinching motion with my fingers to bring my E-book to the front window of the flatscreen.

TWENTY-SIX
To watch a feel-good indie flick and just be happy like everyone else? To accept whatever they throw you? To cite their opinions as if they were a testimony of our worth? To just be normal? To strive for their approval and live in their world rather than build your own?

TWENTY-SEVEN
My 12-hour-shift on the job is a brief, microcosmic encapsulation of how I life my life: Silent, resentful, waiting for it to be over, it’s a completely unmemorable blur except for the moments when I arrive and depart hastily.

TWENTY-EIGHT
Our economy chugs along, developing and growing only for the sake of versioning itself up, eventually slipping back around retrogressively by plowing backwards into it’s own nostalgia for itself. We are at the point in our development where only the wealthy can afford things made of natural materials (iron, mahogany, handpicked “slow food” greens and vegetables), a privilege even the worst-off once enjoyed in the scarcity economy. Our poor are now economically terrorized--now eat fake foods, us fake products manufactured in chemical plants, eat out of Styrofoam and drink out of plastics. Disposable products, disposable people, disposable world. When Emma Goldman said, “anarchists are aristocrats of the spirit”, I think she meant that she wanted to make it possible for everyone to have the chance to lead a dignified life; not just those with the money to buy themselves out of the synthetic.

TWENTY-NINE
There are no analysts to tell you how you’re doing. No therapists to get inside your head. They can only look at the hard evidence and make a measured judgment based on traditional symbols of success, based on the clues that you give them as to who you think you are. No graphs, no productivity analysis or testimonials from peers can give an accurate reading. There will never be a summation flow-chart of your life that you can look back at and take notes of the ups and downs, realize the lowest and the highest points and be able to use that information to guide you—excepting the moments before death. We’re driving snowblind into the future, with only intuition to guide us.

THIRTY
Let’s get at the kernel of the thing, hard and fast. Let’s not drag it out, let’s save paper. Information from all angles, has effectively trounced fantasy and imagination. The Internet--magazines are slag pits for old information, dead stories, reconstituted and calcified into a narrative. A mock-up clay world representation, consisting of real people’s lives, dreamed up from the journalist’s perverse mind. Hunter-gatherers on the plain of ideas head out to pillage untapped histories and ‘characters’, the ones that haven’t hidden themselves too far away. Let’s get to the heart of it. I’m writing what I would like to read. Too much story, no thank you. The caffeine squeezed into a small number of water molecules.

THIRTY-ONE
A lingering unspoken worry that friends and overconsumption of information will temper your ideas—that they will wear you down and put your ideas down with their more dominant and forceful ideas—I don’t want to watch your movies or read your books or have a debate. Let me hold on to my crazy ideas—a crazy idea is a dying thing in a globalized world. Maybe I have the right one. Let us loose them on the world before they are tempered by pragmatism and liberalism.

THIRTY-TWO
Distilled knowledge: knowledge about what others think about knowledge. Ideas about John Cassevetes ground into my head from years of Le Tigre songs (Misognist/genius? Alcoholic/Messiah?). One afternoon on the computer while updating my Netflix movie cue, I come upon his films: I had already forgotten about him and have no opinion, but because of the song I will only be able to see him in the context of four narrow opinions.

THIRTY-THREE
Generations: It is scary to start seeing kids start rip offs of bands you used to hang out with and set up show for, and for whatever reason, have fallen out of touch with. It only proves that, despite their true worth, they have been entered into the historical canon.

THIRTY-FOUR
Only in the dark—not so much the literal dark but the solitude dark away from all your peers, your subculture, cut off completely from outside information—are you free to take your skin off and see who you actually are.

THIRTY-FIVE
Carnal thoughts while walking around the city in spring—the desire to pull down skirts, to suck strange men’s fingers.

THIRTY-SIX
They could never fetishize ideas the way they’ve fetishized art. They would grab to appropriate it and it would slip like jelly through their fingers.

THIRTY-SEVEN
Spanungsbogen—self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing. Bethesda—the place of forgetfulness, of amnesia.

THIRTY-EIGHT
A system to manage my interfacing with technology—living a dual life, angel of historical-consistently on one shoulder, the devil of digital, of ease of use and keeping up with everyone else on the other shoulder, not to mention it’s ease-of-transfer and the factor of just plain laziness. I decide that notebooks are for notes and ideas. The laptop is for working on pieces and execution. This split-personality experiment trying to keep technology in its place pretty much fails, like seeing how long you can write in the style or handwriting of someone else.


THIRTY-NINE
To give up the possibility of achieving success, of “becoming something”. To stop toying with culture and stop vying for social credibility. To be in solidarity with those people in those far off dirt-road countries like Cuba and Afghanistan who never had a choice one way or another of making successful indie-rock records or putting out a book on a respectable imprint or getting an interview in a niche cultural magazine. I am certain there are health benefits to a State-Socialist model of continued existence: You can finally relax. Nobody is getting famous, nobody is getting rich, nobody is getting ahead. No real competition to speak of. Nobody is moving.

FORTY
I don’t care what we eat. We can get drunk or stay sober. We can kiss, or have sex, or just fall asleep. I start books and don’t finish them—that is what keeps me up at night. I will just let the hours pass uncomfortably, strained like the night before having to go in for a doctor’s appointment. Life here has taken on a tinny quality, like food for someone who has undergone chemotherapy.

FORTY-ONE
The absolute repulsion and wrongness that one feels in “paying ones dues” and working one’s way up. “Doing it the right way”--in other words, performing fellatio on-demand to institutions of power in the vague hopes that one day, in some gratifying future, you might be the one getting blown. No self- respecting American can respect people who pay their dues. Protect your naïveté and compassion. These will be your most valuable personality traits. The world can smell the stink of selfish-ambition from miles away. What insider doesn’t find themselves compromised in an absurd spider web of complicated interests and wish they were once again on the outside? Like the successful Manhattan socialite that sat beside me on the plane told me—“Hunt your passions like wolves in the forest—the essence of life is in the hot pursuit, and the compassion and strength you display when you finally overtake your prey and move in for the kill.”

FORTY-TWO
The desire to just go ahead and execute these crazy plans we’ve schemed up. Plans that can’t be mentioned in text because they would later be admitted as “evidence.” Plans that end with us either dead (by SWAT team or FBI or just plain mercenaries) or imprisoned. Future-primitive dreams of finger-sucking orgies, youth culture subversions, broadcastings of tapes of Network over the Wal-Mart intercom system and political kidnappings and media-stunts. Don’t let art keep you from living life. No one does that stuff anymore. Duty--if we are to live, we will fit the sense of possibility provided in the future into the frame of the now. So no more theorizing, criticizing, nostalgizing. It’s not too late, there is still time.

FORTY-THREE
The television is on its way out. Soon it will be a nostalgic afterthought, a glimmer in the memory of simpler days like the cassette player. One thing to be said for television hypnosis, for the psychological devastation it’s wreaked, is that at least it’s a social activity, not part of the alien new form of “personalized media”—people sitting in their rooms watching movies on small laptops alone. At least in it’s spectacle rooms still have couches centered around an object of interest, reacting, providing commentary about the spectacle. Commercials taught us patience, gave us a moment to catch our breath and interact directly with the other TV watchers—personalized media, in its race towards a critical mass of cultural consumption (that is still ultimately unrewarding) has rid itself of commercials and diversions and pauses. The flatscreens on the wall of every bar and office lobby are not even noticed or discussed because many of those portals are tuned to CNN and considered valid because they are providing useful information. Whose information? Valid to whom? Smoking is as outdated as cigarettes—people who chose to smoke know the risk and do so because although shortening the objective years of their life, they feel that smoking helps them take pause and savor the sweet life that they are living—not some life in the distant future when they’re 85 years old and on the way out. Cellphones are the new cigarettes—a product whose health consequences will be denied for decades before it all comes out that addiction to them, like anything else, has long-term repercussions.

FORTY-FOUR
To force our way back into the garden through fire and struggle—we want to have to suffer, to have to earn our privilege. We beg for some apocalyptic wage of sin so we can be absolved from our misdeeds; so we can go back to the wild without glossy pamphlets describing what the trip will be like. To live without air- conditioners. The really real—like an aerobics group where you’re exhausted and the only thing that keeps you from quitting is the horror of no longer going on. So will be the condition of the new world. The only way to get there is to be put where we have no recourse from our fasting.

FORTY-FIVE
The undeniable suckiness of any PR-activated cool; brand control, viral burn, release hype. Everyone knows what’s cool but they have no clue why, and charge blindly forward anyway trying to fit these misshapen puzzle pieces into their lives in hopes that the jumbled mess will start to form a more coherent picture—hence, the coffee shops, American Apparel clothes, the endless lines of aluminum Powerbook laptops, which everyone assures me are “the best choice”, without seeming able to give me hard details when I implore further as to why. This focus on the minimalistic material (the bikes, the computers, the clothes, the music) and not the passion or use-value behind these objects.

FORTY-SIX
The young, indie rock stockbrokers—bearded and slightly disheveled-looking in their suits, ties loosened by the heat of the subway, reading Vanity Fair without much interest. The sole social value of their work is self-interest, is making the world safe and comfortable for themselves. The ironic grin of the “don’t-feel-guilty” lunge of their chosen profession has since worn down into a serious, sloping frown as they slowly realize their acrid distaste for life-spanning monotony. I can see them seeing their futures spreading out before them, static. How horrible to excel at something you don’t care about. How boring and bland to know that you’re boring and bland and the only thing you’re good at is making money.

FORTY-SEVEN
The crusty travelers that have been crashing in my living room for weeks have a capacity for cognitive dissonance. A recent conversation that I overheard in my kitchen: GIRL WITH SEPTUM-PIERCING: I hear that Dustin’s mom always pays for him to get a hotel when he’s traveling...[Everyone laughs at Dustin, who is not present, but who has committed the ultimate hobo faux pas of being a rich little poor kid.] Sue, my housemate who’s unconcerned with propriety and has a tendency of asking naive questions smiles big and asks earnestly, “So have any of YOUR parents ever gotten you hotel rooms?”
The crusty travelers freeze, caught in their own web of hypocrisy. CRUSTY 1: Yeah, but only once or twice. GIRL WITH SEPTUM-PIERCING: But it was like, really really cold outside that one time...it was snowing. And the other time that we got a hotel room it was raining really hard. To my horror, Sue continues to press these lumpen Narodniks, completely unaware of what she’s asking.
“So, are your parents well off?”
The needle scratches of the record. The girl hems and haws and pretends that she can’t hear what Sue is asking—Sue repeats the question a couple of times while she bides her time and figures out how to respond. When she answers, she stares down at her shoes “Yeah..they’re well off, I guess...”
“Oh!” Sue says, seeming to have forgotten why she asked. We change the subject.

FORTY-EIGHT
A friend in his thirties that has disappeared off the map for about six months reemerged at his mom’s house in Columbia Missouri, by sending out an email to all his friends telling us he’d become a Christian libertarian. Always with the putting away one identity (the punk radical) and picking out another from the closet (right-wing libertarian). He is a mutant—and has obviously been molded by the righteousness and intolerance of the community he’s been a part of for so long, the community that is more militant about tolerance than any other. They helped make him what he is now. If he hadn’t felt so pressured to fit into a subculture mold, so embarrassed to speak his mind honestly, he would have never fallen down the slippery slope that people slide down when they form their ideas in reclusion from the world, without a chance to bounce them off their peers and see if they’re reasonable or not.

FORTY-NINE
There are metaphysical formulas that govern the world. The harder you’re concentrating on something, the more pleasure it seems like people derive coming around and trying to distract you. There must be something repellant, some deep genetic-repellant, to a man hunched over a notebook deep in thought. When you are lonely the phone never rings. When you are busy and engaged, it’s as if everyone out there somehow calls all at once. But then you’re not lonely. You don’t pick up. You’re busy.

FIFTY
How did Seneca, a man who lived over 2000 years ago nail all of my shortcomings? “You’re not traveling, but just moving around in a wide circle.” The blush of shame passes over my face, brought on by a man older than Jesus. The remnants of the long dead can elicit emotions and responses more powerful than those of anyone living.

FIFTY-ONE
It is one of those unsalvageable days where I really should just sit down at a computer and write, but instead I just flit around from one trivial task to the next, trying to impart some brutal structure on the otherwise blank day—talk all morning on the phone to my bank, eat, walk around aimlessly, check emails several times and nothing is there and then once I have some free time for work, I can’t, having already spent all of my willpower on the worthless morning. I hate myself for it and buy a beer and go sit on the train tracks at the edge of the university. I feel like it’s a feel-bad-because-you’re-watching-it-waste-away kind of day where it hurts to listen to records or read books because you’re not making anything great and the people who made the things did. By the traintracks, a possum pokes his head out of the rusted tin-can warehouse behind me and creeps up on me while I’m sitting on a log. I finish my beer and out of nowhere a train pulls up and stops almost directly in front of me. It’s not just an average train. It’s stacked with military-grade hummers. I get up and as the train starts chugging away--a hail of rocks hit the hummers, then a couple more, dust and glass spraying off the desert-tan exterior of the vehicle. It is more enlivening than any antidepressant. Even the smallest symbolic shows of resistance are a good way to bolster the spirit.

FIFTY-TWO
In the Richmond Virginia greyhound station, with lyrics cycling through my head: Has the world changed or have I changed? CNN is blasting on the flat screen with teenager girl that escaped from a polygamist sect explaining why she didn’t run away sooner. “It was about being obedient”. I walk over to the arcade. There are three shooting games in a row—in one you’re a cop, in the next you’re hunting terrorists with an AK-47, and in the third, the eponymously named Warzone, you get to play a soldier in the Middle-East. Over the deafening intercoms, advertisements are disguised as public radio interviews, where you catch yourself listening attentively to what someone has to say, only to be popped a product at the end of what had seemed like an objective, educational experience.

FIFTY-THREE
Laying around in the broken mess of my twenty-something life...piles of clothes, pieces of paper and a broken computer that no one will fix. Too prideful to pick up the phone and call someone back like I used to, but also too sad and crazy to buckle down and write. The birds are chirping outside and it’s such a beautiful day and it makes me sick, languishing in my own helpless lack of willpower. I’m being ridden by pettiness to the point where when I try to throw it off, I almost miss it—I’m used to it; I need it.

FIFTY-FOUR
THE WRITER IS A CONFIDENCE MAN
I’m despondent
THE WRITER IS A CONFIDENCE MAN
I have no confidence
THE WRITER IS A CONFIDENCE MAN
It hurts to smile
THE WRITER IS A CONFIDENCE MAN
I can’t stand more time passing
THE WRITER IS A CONFIDENCE MAN
I’m getting too old
THE WRITER IS A CONFIDENCE MAN
I can’t seem to get this book off the ground
THE WRITER IS A CONFIDENCE MAN It’s getting too complicated.

FIFTY-FIVE
I don’t want to hear the birds chirping outside my window. It’s driving me nuts. I shut all the windows and lock all the doors and put in a central air conditioner. I just want to hear the dull maternal rumble, the comforting whoosh of this life support system.

FIFTY-SIX
The days and weeks loom before me like a fog cloud. So many hours and so few plans—How will I fill them? What will I do? The thought crosses my mind to buckle down and work—but then I think about how fast I am working and the days almost seem to be too many; I’ll finish the work to quickly and get bored and just be right back where I am now—watching the seconds of my life tick by.

FIFTY-SEVEN
This is our inheritance: all the knowledge in the world at our fingertips thanks to the World Wide Web, but now we’re too abstracted from the world to put the knowledge to good use. The last humans will live on empty vessels circling the remnants of a ruined planet, Google searching into the void to try to figure out what happened. Looking through plexiglass out into darkness, it seems like we’re only living in memories.

FIFTY-EIGHT
He goes to work from 9 to 5 at an office and then comes home at night to sit in front of the blue glow of a
DVD and like a dog, play dead—watching his life satirized on this week’s episode of The Office.

FIFTY-NINE
The rush to get good at something, to become something. If only I read a couple more books or keep working hard or develop a more marketable skill set. This sorry, empty longing to become a more complete person. Feel out the walls of the prison because you’re not going to escape it. Why continue striving to be something that you have not yet been? Why not just turn up the gain on what you already are? There is something unique genetically preprogrammed inside---all the words, all the code, your own death is already written inside of you. No Google search or phone call for advice to a friend can awaken it—there is something seared onto your spirit. The problem is learning how to awaken it from its long slumber.

SIXTY
The vignettes and stories of Paul Theroux like obsessively smoothed, tiny polished pieces of soapstone. My own snippets and fragments like jagged pieces of anthracite cutting up my hands, pulling them out of the ground and setting them to fire in the furnace.

SIXTY-ONE
Laid up in the Greensboro train depot at 4 AM waiting for my train that’s been delayed. People are talking and drinking beer in the vaulted, echoing waiting area, simulated to look like the train depots of yore with big wooden benches, checkered bathrooms and phone booths. The phone booths don’t actually have payphones, but rather have a little mobile symbol on the outside of them—the hybrid of convenience set to the future with a vicious nostalgia for the past; there’s a place to go talk on the cell phone. The old-timey veneer is betrayed by crisp linoleum floors and the train schedules appearing not on clunky, flipping letters, but on a big, wood-paneled flatscreen. There’s the whoosh of the air conditioner, and the fact that train travel is no longer a necessity. We have a whimsical view of the past.

SIXTY-TWO
An entire day spent “following up” with jobs and chasing down more effective technology on craigslist computer sales forums only to buy a used laptop at the end of the night and curse myself when I take it home and its noticeably slower than my aging Windows 95 machine. Is it my own personal techno-curse or are laptops getting to be slower as the technology and operating systems improve? The market is showing that people long for the past where computers were just a tool to accomplish a task—a bulletin board system as an extension of real life, not a hologram with a life of its own. Google, Craigslist, Wikipedia, Apple—so much effort going into devolving computer applications back into simple hunter- gatherer tools. All the human effort that went into making the Internet glossy and chock-full and we end up using it for that one simple function that the Internet performed in the beginning, all those years ago—as a digital trading post.


SIXTY-THREE
A toothless young woman gets on my subway car and prostrates herself before a random sampling of New Y orkers.
“Ladies and gentlemen...I’m sorry to bother you. I know you hate me. But everyone just ignores me and pretends I don’t exist. I’m just trying to get something to eat or drink. You people are all that I’ve got. I’d rather just ask you than be out there selling my body or stealing stuff or anything like that. Please, if you have some money could you help me get something? Please, you guys”... she begs, arms pocked up with scabs, hobbling across the train car, adding hopefully, “Or maybe you just have some food or drink that they could give me?” A couple of people give her a dollar or two, having the look on their faces that to get in front of people and humiliate yourself like that means that you need it. The rest of the mass averts their eyes when she walks by. In everyone’s eyes, the same words and cynical understanding reflected— She’ll probably just use it to buy heroin. What a level of abstraction have we come to—hopeless people begging, not for food, but for proof of existence.

SIXTY-FOUR
Daydreams of giving up the pursuit of a decent laptop. Future daydream of lighting my house with lamp- oil and curling up beside the wood-burning stove on animal pelts. A life of sweat and necessity. And giving up my cell phone while I’m at it—chasing down and replacing technology, losing my ATM card, navigating bureaucracy has stolen my day. Something is always lost or broken or missing or needing to be replaced or sold. I’ve checked my email five times so far this morning. I’m pacing around trying to find my lost cell phone. I’ve failed to tame my tools and make them work for me.

SIXTY-FIVE
The slouch of my ideas, pumping away hard to begin with but losing their erection mid-coitus, unable to stay focused on the act. The “ADHD” generation--thinking about their list of things “to do” or cleanliness of room or getting distracted by someone beautiful walking on the sidewalk out the window. And the yin to ADHD’s yang: the wonder-medicine Aderall, like some kind of verbal Viagra.

SIXTY-SIX
Is there anything better than the stark 2001: space odyssey quality of an empty college library tower? Matte white walls, low pile carpet, the dull maternal rumble of central heating whishing in through platted vents. There are big windows that you can’t open and darkness and fog are draping the campus and woods and one can see the 21st century like the construction projects fading off into the horizon. The flattening of all possibilities into knowledge and non-knowledge. The wolves have been beaten back into the steppes and we’ve got ways to keep warm so survival is no longer an issue: the new issue is information and how to consume it. Could a 21st century disease be “information sickness”? The mind crumpled with unusable, implacable knowledge, being smothered by the wireless streaming data like a baby under a pillow? Can it breathe and can it place these facts, and learn any of this, not by remembering the travails of Gilgamesh, but by ones own hard-lived trials and failures? The 21st century— like Jonathan Franzen said, is infantilizing; When we come out from whatever wireless hot spot we’ve been using the laptop in for the last seven hours, our arms and minds are spongy, our eyes squinty, like mole people. The college library—it’s as dry as a desert and as spotless as a microchip manufacturing “clean- room”. The limitless potential of knowledge at one’s fingertips in this cerebral cortex, this tentacled nerve center for the eons. It’s a rainy day--rather than spending it huddled under a rock outcropping and trying to start a small fire to keep warm, it can be put to use. I can recede into my own head and spongily suck at the thoughts and perceptions of those famous or unreachable or long dead. For the lonely man, all are interesting companions.

SIXTY-SEVEN
In Greensboro, a scent on the wind like the smell of New York immediately after 9/11. All senses immediately stand at attention. Like Draino for the clogged pipes of my memory. A putrescent wind from the North in May.

SIXTY-EIGHT
The icy lobby of the skyscraper that I work in across the street from Ground Zero, its 21st century Death Star matte-black facade. It's sliding doors and huge marble desk retrofitted with video cameras to take pictures of all the visitors. The conspicuously-placed shops in it's lobby--a Starbucks where the line is always stretched out the door, a Brooks Brothers so that executives can run downstairs and buy new suits on corporate credit cards, completing the circle of the white-collar lifestyle. A newsstand that carries magazines catering towards a demographic. The consumptive elements more subtly aware of the environment than the patrons are. The little digitized gates to get into the elevator banks that are watched by tired-looking guards, where to get through, each person has to scan their magnetized barcode--each identifiable by that symbol of numbers in a central database, catalogued citizens. The unearthly sounds of the building in the wind in the quiet, carpeted hallways of our 20th floor offices.


SIXTY-NINE
An enormous aluminum and steel condominium whose floor-to-ceiling window-encased private patios look out onto the locals sweating in the community garden buttressing it [the community garden may well be the “kickback” to the community from the development corporation, a small concession for the angry rabble] The yuppies inside look on at the hard-workers in the garden sweating and tilling like they’re looking down into a terrarium. They smile vacantly, so satisfied and content watching the community that they perceive themselves to be a part of and silently cheering it on, fetishizing their resistance. The process of gentrification is simple--move into a neighborhood with a haughty sense of entitlement, refuse to invest in it, and support those with dirt under their fingernails and sweat on their backs from the comfort of your window or laptop computer.

SEVENTY
I read Letters to a Young Poet while having a drink. On my way to the subway, my legs and body turned gelatinous. My body in mutiny, wanting to crawl into bed, against my mind, wanting to go home and work inspired by the text. There are moments—when physiology becomes radio antenna, picking up vibes, tuned in to a good station. The mind sensitive like an aroused sex organ—and in spite of my interest, the drink and my state has made me flaccid and sluggish—tired and unable to stay awake to do the work that is needed.

SEVENTY-ONE
The young champions for independent business swooping in and replacing mom-and-pop with their own self-aware versions of the dusty shops of yore—craft stores, bakeries, hipster hat shops. They fetishize and mimic their predecessors, like little kids trying on their grandfather’s clothes. A small hipster comic shop replaces an independently run Italian Bakery—the owner has kept the original sign above the door but added in the old-time lettering AND COMIC BOOKS. Preservation and love is the aim, but a certain hidden sweetness and earnestness is missing in the simulacrum retailers, the difference between the self-conscious organic farm movement and those subsistence farmers who do so because there is nothing else. The trick is to be put in a position where there’s no way out and still thrive.

SEVENTY-TWO
“I read a lot. I listen a lot. I think a lot. But so little remains. The books I read, their plots, their protagonists fade. The university lectures that I had found pretty impressive on first hearing have faded away. Now I am listening to one on Pirandello. Even the titles of films I’ve just seen recently—they have already faded. Authors of thousands of books I have read...all that remains is the colors of their bindings, their covers. I don’t remember much about Beauty and the Best but I remember clearly vividly the heat of the day as we were crossing the Rhine bridge to see the film. Everything that I see or read, or listen to connects, translates into moods, bits of surroundings, colors. No, I am not a novelist. No precision of observation, detail. With me everything is mood, mood, or else simply nothingness. I remember a lot of things that are no use to anybody. They keep coming back to me. But I have already forgotten Pirandello’s birth date.” –Jonas Mekas

SEVENTY-THREE
In a film, a scene where they show the medical examiner sliding the corpse in his tray into the repository chamber in the morgue—the doctor’s movements are so delicate and kind as he puts the cadaver into the steel encasement and closes the compartment (which looks eerily like a P.O. box, but bigger) lightly shutting the latch. The dead mans face in the film is curled up into the smile. The whole scene evokes a nursery, with children tucked away in their cribs in a sweet dream-filled sleep.

SEVENTY-FOUR
Conversation with a sallow-looking woman reading her Kindle on the train: “You have to recharge the battery on that thing? “Yes, but it doesn’t take long.” She looks embarrassed. “I got it as a gift. The worst part is that there’s no light.”
“So you can’t read at night?” “No, you think they would have built on in here...but no...” “Do you have to pay for the magazines and books?” “Yes.” She says, smiling, “But its cheaper than the usual price because there’s no...uh...” “Paper?” I ask, smiling. “Paper.” She says. “Soon they’re going to make one of those things with an iPod and a video player so you have it all...movies, books, music...” I point to the little black and white screen. “The worst part” she says, “about these things is that they’re obsolete by the time you get them.” She looks glum. “I miss paper sometimes...” she says, staring off into the drab-colored, badly lit train. “When I first got this thing, I kept trying to flip the pages,” she moves her fingers on the blank little plastic device, clutching for the ghost pages, like a trauma victim, in search of the missing past.
“Well, good luck with it” I say. “Goodbye” she smiles, with a grim visage cast over her face.

SEVENTY-FIVE
Mandatory for all humans: penance for our ecological sins. Throw yourself into the waves on a choppy day and give up, allowing yourself to be thrashed about and taken. Mother Nature as your sado-schoolmarm.

SEVENTY-SIX
She wanted to write but hasn’t in such a long time and doesn’t know if she can anymore. Maybe she’ll go on another tour, if a good band asks her to come along. She wants to go sailing in Key West. She can’t stay over at my house because she has to work the next morning. She’s a genius but nobody knows it yet. She can’t move to Boston because her friend is going through a hard time right now in North Carolina. She doesn’t seem satisfied being in a park with me on a beautiful spring day in Raleigh—she wishes she were on the beach, sipping a fruity drink. No, not the beach—Portland, Oregon. No--she wishes she were in Hawaii.

SEVENTY-SEVEN
Tonight, after 12 hours at work, I either want to play chess or drink until I’m blind. To destroy my brain or to make it stronger. No in-between, neutralizing activity will do.

SEVENTY-EIGHT
Routine and familiarity to keep thoughts and emotions at their proper flaccidity. The common reason for the deadening is that, like a science experiment, life needs to have constants so that you can place your focus on your one variable factor. My raging urge to disprove this hypothesis is ridiculous, since it has already been proven—the great ones have stayed in one place and their efforts have flowered under the mundane, routine determinants of their lives. I try—drinking from the same coffee mug, defecating in the same bathroom on the fourth floor of the college library, holding the same job, and listening to the same tape in the car when I get off work. There is the sense that stepping away from the familiar is to escape
from your own self-imposed prison, your own calcified habits and ideas. But there is the knowledge that it is also a step away from the unknown. Variety is not the spice of life; it’s the yeast of thought.

SEVENTY-NINE
The reverse-psychology effect of Internet videos in an age of reality TV. Participants purposefully posture Candid shots—a bride spontaneously cutting off her hair in a hotel room on her wedding day—planned and acted but sold out there as real, as a genuine moment captured—internet fame cleverly achieved. Fool the viewer into thinking they are the discoverer, the pioneer.

EIGHTY
The unconscious desire to isolate the people that hate you into a work camp—a desire to corral them on a desert island and let them name that island Anti-you. Like Cuba did when they put Castro in the Isle of Juventud. Like Stalin did to his persistent nemesis, Trotsky. Like socialist welfare states have done to their squatters, giving them a little splotch of land of unwanted land where they can play Lord of the Flies and set up their anarchist anti-government. The goal should be to always put in your two weeks and never be fired.

EIGHTY-ONE
Lines outside of the courthouse on a Monday morning that look like pictures of breadlines from the Depression. People wait to be shuffled like cattle through metal detectors and crowded onto elevators and run through dingy institutional hallways to sit in a court room and face an impotent and bored judge. They are then ordered to pay somewhere between $150-500, leave the building, salute the flag, and then head off to work. An institutionalized Ponzi scheme—and we wonder why everyone is on anti-depressants and our pysch wards are filled.

EIGHTY-TWO
The waking nightmare of amnesiac uncertainty: each town looking more like the last, each year looking more like the one that came before it. The double-sided nature of obscurity, like all things it depends on how you look at it. Success or failure: the horrible, destabilizing knowledge that it’s a crapshoot.

EIGHTY-THREE
On an email chat a lost young soul, searching for her life out in Portland after having left burnt-out Detroit Writes, “I miss the terribleness sometimes”. I shake my head at the computer screen, at her words. Terribleness is a great thing to miss and a hard thing to live. In it or outside it is of no importance since this is the burden of those who are already dead.

EIGHTY-FOUR
To talk about love is futile. How do you talk about wanting to self-destruct? How do you talk about what it feels like to crawl into the hole of another person and wish for death? Years of our life mispent, wasted— like a person after a great natural disaster, leaving with less than they came in with. I crawl into another person and tap the vein and drink of the burbling sap of their life—only to realize that I’m sucking down poison, and in return, am poisoning this person I have purported to love. How could we have come to such a cruel outcropping on the horizon where love and hate touch wires and become electrically charged. We cheat ourselves in the throes of passion, by edging towards the middle place. Skirt away from life and skirt away from death towards a dull, prolonged moderation. We expect to find happiness but only find purgatorial retreat from danger. No one can save themselves from what’s coming—least of all with some kind of purgatorial retreat. It’s like in chess how a defensive encampment surrounding the King can quickly turn into a tomb from which there’s no escape. The adage still stands—you either have to choose liberty or security. There’s no middle ground and chess is a game for the risktakers who know how to keep their eye on the whole picture—As in life and vying for success, timing is everything. Single-sightedness will leave your flanks exposed—you will be taken down from the flanks. In your quest for dominance, you can be blind and lose to glaring missteps.

EIGHTY-FIVE
In a dream, running through the times square red light district with a girl. From sex shop into sex shop, on a porn odyssey past packaged latex and simulation vagina, mouth, cock, anal teaser, lonely men standing around waiting to watch people like us. wild half-drunken romp through back room video booths, the dark eroticism of the fresh-grass smelling dark walled wombs, equipped with paper towel dispensers and two television screens, where if you stick a dollar in you can be blasted with 8 simultaneous channels of pounding, slurping, cumming and moaning.

EIGHTY-SIX
The deep-seated fear of never attaining coherence or synthesis, of belonging to the reactive, dissolute class of “cultural critics”. Worse than being a failure would be to be a critic--a negative frequency. A social liability. Rabid, sweaty-palmed pantophobia while driving down I-40. Colossal American flags over used car lots. Other drivers on the road cybernetic, half-machines mainlined into Bluetooth systems and GPS systems, the machine enabling brains to coast on autopilot. We are in the era of reaction—less artists, more thinkers responding and criticizing various stimuli: news briefs, podcasts, other drivers. Soon this era will end and the machines will begin to react for us.


EIGHTY-SEVEN
Confronted with the anxiety nightmares or the dull timelapse blackness of non-dream, either way still waking up exhausted. In these inky doldrum years it seems the less one sleeps, the better one feels.

EIGHTY-EIGHT
Evidence comes out that the US military has been sending soldiers bodies to be cremated in a facility that doubles as an animal crematorium, their ashes mixed with those of dogs. The literalization of all our hyperbolic anti-war rhetoric.

EIGHTY-NINE
I kissed her goodbye, made coffee, and walked over to Park Slope. I stopped to talk to a neighbor on the way back. When I came home from taking a video to the drop box, ambulances were parked in front of the apartment. She was dead.

NINETY
When I go to sleep too early, out of laziness when I know I can still squeeze some blood from my life, the work rots and spoils inside of me. No matter how many hours I sleep, no matter how ‘well’, I wake up groggy and tired, uninterested in life.

NINETY-ONE
Learning not to trust myself too much. Too many voices saying too many things to trust my poor memory. The visceral backlash of my pride when I have a thought and consider writing it down so I can remember this. Pride says “You’ll remember this thought! It’s great! Don’t worry!” and sometimes I listen. Usually I can’t remember the thought later. When this happens I curse pride and resolve not to do it again. Usually I do it again, and then curse myself. Hell is living the same ungracious habits over and over again—lust, booze, forgetfulness. The only way to gratification is taping together the tiny pieces of self that are spiraling away into a vortex like objects not held down by gravity. To remember in the 21st century, it requires the methodical diligence of a long-term amnesiac.

NINETY-TWO
Instead of just spending time together, we stay up drinking. Instead of fighting for what seems so obvious, we wage a war on ourselves. Instead of taking the time and effort to do something well, we waste our time. Instead of meeting strangers, we have conversations with people we already know. Instead of living, we sit around flatscreens watching.

NINETY-THREE
I’m walking through New York with friends in a public park that resembles a dystopian Fort Greene, that happens to be plopped down right in the middle of downtown Greensboro. We come upon a molded plastic dome structure that’s cartoonish and looks like a doublewide Port-o-potty. It’s dark and apocalyptically cloudy outside, and everything has a dream-like nightmare on elm street quality except the Port-o-potty which sits reflecting nothing, not menacing at all. We open it’s door and it turns out that it’s not a toilet, but a really filthy whirring, roiling public hot tub. What a brilliant idea!, I think to my dream, a public place to have sex—of course, filthy like everything else that’s publicly used! What if people didn’t fuck up public utilities because they thought of their collective use and exerted the needed respect? I walk farther into the park and on a marble table there’s pills and wads of cash, baggies full of strange glittering, glowing eggs. I look around to see if anyone’s watching. My friends have disappeared and I’m all alone. I scoop all of the eggs and pills and cash and hold them in my t-shirt. I run as fast as I can to a collective house of some people that I don’t really know that well in dream life or waking life. My friend Ethan happens to be there on the couch. I try to catch my breath and tell the shadowy uninterested people in the living room what happened—I get nervous because they’re looking at me critically, like they don’t care what I have to say. After a while there’s a knock on the door. A ruddy-faced cop lets himself in—then kneels down on the floor and picks up some of the dollars I’ve dropped on my way in—Evidence. He lifts up, grinning knowingly. “Whose are these?” he asks, looking me directly in the face. I tell him that I don’t know, but I know I’m already caught. Everyone in the room glares at me. I feel ashamed.

NINETY-FOUR
Birth of Tragedy: Once there was a man who was asked by God to do some little thing. It was just a little thing,
And I don’t know what it was. Do this and this earth will again turn into Paradise. There won’t be any kings, nobody will have to work, everybody will be free and happy, etc. Now this man kept thinking: to do it or not to do it. “What does free and happy mean anyway? Sounds kind of boring” he thought. One day he thought he should do it, the next day he wasn’t sure, and so the indecision continued—day after day, week after week, year after year. And so it went. He couldn’t make up his mind and the urgency disappeared. And yet day after day he still thought about it. And then he died one—undecided, cowardly, and half-alive. And this man could have brought Paradise to Earth.

NINETY-FIVE
The problem of the limited amount of willpower that has to be rationed through the day with respect to your artistic pursuit—depleted by work, school, exercise, arguments. Without willpower, you can’t do the idea justice—you slump out over your computer. Benefits and drawbacks to different approaches—to live outside of it all with cheap rent provides you plenty of time for artistic pursuit but you are faced with the pressure of making art all day or doing nothing with your life. The creativity problem with the city—there’s too much culture and you have to beat away other people’s stuff with a stick—there’s always an event to go to, always entertainment distracting from the blank slate of your own effort. Also the issue of how to survive economically and preserve energy late at night or early in the morning for your creative endeavors.

NINETY-SIX
Artificial humans climbing artificial mountains in the temperature-controlled, dryer sheet misted gymnasium. Fake Mt. St. Helens and Everest, Aspen and Kilimanjaro. One day only the bravest among my peers will summon the courage to surmount the Aggrocrag.

NINETY-SEVEN
I walked all the way up to the coffeeshop and just sat in front of my computer, not writing anything down for several hours, and then went home. Is this what you call writers discipline? I pick up a book to read before I pick up a pen to write. Getting things done seems more daunting now, but also more rewarding once some kind of synthesis is achieved. The stakes are somehow higher now.

NINETY-EIGHT
I’ve been here and thought this and gone ahead with my dinner plans. And when I’ve come back to it, it’s been gone—a void where for a brief minute a cup full of something—something that scientists, for all their poking and prodding and well-intentioned process still don’t have a name for yet. I’m filling my life with inconsequence. The main thing is to just keep writing. I know what the right thing to do is but have no name for the gap that exists between my actions and my thoughts—is this the fear of being alone?

NINETY-NINE
I could scream for a thousand years. Virtually unknown, set adrift, unable to hold the reins of language. My peer group vanquished into adulthood and stupid parties. I’ve wasted my time on a website that denigrates my shadow, even possibly reducing it, performing the opposite of its purported function. Windows within windows within windows, clicking through to nowhere, moving through lives and burning through other people’s time as if it were infinitely replenishible. Like the petals of a flower opening that you can’t really see or touch or smell, that has a void where there should be a center. A cold plasticity where there should be a feeling.

ONE HUNDRED
The amount of writing—unimportant. The glibness, the plot, the subtle references to modernism and postmodernism and the masters and the dead—wasteful and masturbatory. What is it that you can feel from what sits behind the words on the page? The passion, the effort is the only thing that translates through these agonizing attempts to communicate. It could be in primal grunts or it could be at an Adorno lecture. Write hundreds of pages on an hours experiences, or compress hundreds of hours down into a couple of pages. What matters? To have writing like espresso, the passion like the water searing through the language and making an oily, potent brew.

Labels: fragments, Nadir