Get Lost

I’ve lately had the feeling that I don’t fit inside myself. Like, my inside is bigger than my body. You mustn’t take that too literally. It’s not like I’m bloated. I don’t have the urge to peel my skin off. Rather—I don’t know, it’s hard to explain, but—I feel like there’s more me than the me inside me.

You know how when you’re in the mall and you see a woman screaming at her toddler and you start crying? Yes. Exactly. I’ve been pushing this notion of identifying with people into the territory of actually being identical to them. Do you see? I can’t fit inside me.

It’s confusing. So let me begin again. I have insides outside my skin. A blur, a blend: Imagination / Attention.

For instance, if I pay attention to a tree, what does that even mean? To pay attention? You give the tree something. You give the tree you. Now a tree is usually considered alive but not sentient, but what I’m trying to express here is that by observing a tree, by giving it your attention, the line between in and out BLURS and the tree achieves its own kind of subjective inwardness. That’s what the tree buys when you pay attention. And now you, because you can’t fit inside yourself, are a tree—"your" inside is inside the tree—and you’re looking down at the odd human being, staring up at you, stunned, mesmerized by being ecstatically lost in the forest.

“Hello,” the tree says, feeling you out for the courage to imagine. The future—it dangles on your reply.

When You Drop Your Flowers

If you could just slow down, stop moving, get still—for guidance, look to big rocks in the park or old men bathing in memory while gazing out windows—if you could just dull the frantic pace, not do the next right thing, stop. Maybe then you’d get sad enough to shatter like an expensive vase, become pieces, drop all your flowers, let the water run off the table, splash to the floor, and run out the door into the great big world.

Only broken, with fragments of you everywhere, will you find your voice that speaks to squirrels. And when they ignore you, minding their own business and looking for nuts, seek your answers elsewhere. Get quiet—like an old woman smiling or a stone in the stream—and, somewhere past the wind and the crickets, you will hear your answers in the song of lily pads. 

And Blue Is Certain Never

Start with the sun. You got it? Now hang it in the sky. A sky as blue as your imagination goes. Bluer. Or whatever color you’d like. And now move to the beach. But don’t take the whole view. Get subtle. Look closer and closer until there—that one grain of sand.

It’s 2:42 PM, September 13. The sun hits the grain of sand and the grain of sand—it’s so little, and yet—reflects the sun back like a catastrophe of diamonds. Nearby, beneath a park bench or wherever you like, the threads of a spiderweb shine in the reflected light and the spider stands out like something exulted, there, revealed. 

It’s 2:42 PM, September 13, and I, such a tiny thing in all these galaxies, am singing in my car.

It's Almost Three Football Fields To Being A Person

When I reflect upon the span of time between me and Jenna bringing our son home, wondering what to do with him, and now, still wondering what to do with him, I feel death blowing in my face because that’s just kind of how I am, always with death in my face.

It’s strange to see him at the school’s open house, 14, immersed in a society of friends, taut from being stretched between a boy and a man. I literally—I don’t usually stress the literal, but literally—had to teach him how to piss in a toilet. You know? I had to show him. Standing there, peeing, discussing technique and the criteria for being a big boy. And now he’s a full fledged world.

I think a lot about bridges. Rich with transitions. This one’s my favorite:

It has the widest concrete arch in the Western Hemisphere and it’s the second highest bridge in the United States, 840 feet above the Colorado River. I park at Nevada’s last casino, run the trails behind the Hoover Dam and then BAM: it opens out in front of you, takes your breath away. I run to the middle, stop, look down, and think about things like span, gap, synapse, distance, near, far, what between means.

Nobody knows how to be a parent, especially the ones who read all the books and do all the right things. Looking back, I don’t know how he grew up. We gave him some food, played a lot of good music, blinked, and now he’s a person.

More about that here.

Drinking, Running, And Sadomasochism

“For I is another. If the brass wakes up a trumpet, it’s not its fault.” —AR

So yes—thanks for your concerns and outreach—I did get drunk for 8 days, which is to say I burned down the house of my ego consciousness and floated around in a vague psychic space where I couldn’t distinguish between my self and the vast otherness that bled into my identity, which is to say I plugged into the mystical world soul where all matter is infused with life and where fantasy and reality communicate. You had to be there.  When I woke up, coffee sounded gross so I quit drinking alcohol and nixed caffeine so of course the first week was wonderful (not really). But I’m free and clear about 3 weeks now and I’m not afraid to go in grocery stores. Plus I’m working out like some monster who wants to smash guitars on people in wheelchairs. That’s a pretty fucked up simile but I’m letting it stand. 

Me and Jimmy are going to run the Grand Canyon from South Rim to North Rim.

Do you see Phantom Ranch? Do you think the North Kalbab Trail is going to be a pleasant ascent? I think perhaps I will wish for death more than several times, always a good thing because all the best poets say you should walk with your death or carry your death inside you or let the darkness blow through you and illuminate the secrets of opacity—cool shit like that. That’s what I tell people when they ask me why I’m running across the Grand Canyon: I want to embrace my own death in the context of extreme situations like Arthur Rimbaud and all his crazy deranged senses. Then people change the subject.

Truth? I don’t know why. It’s better than drinking myself to death. Drinking myself to death would be so cliché and it’s terrible for my abs.

I had this weird conversation with myself today on a training run (a tempo run where you run a little bit faster than you can—you push yourself beyond your comfortable pace) that seemed to shed some interesting light on my fascination with sadomasochism because, usually, you think of sadomasochism in terms of a relationship between 2 people—a sadist and a masochist.

But when I’m running, strangely, I inhabit both these roles. One pole of my identity is the sadistic task master who insists I keep running no matter what, especially when the other pole of my identity, the masochist, insists it can’t continue and yet derives a sort of pleasure from being dominated and forced to submit via continuing to run. What an interesting psychological constellation, you think and rub your chin.

But I think of more vital importance than dwelling on these polar opposites is that, opposed to our normal mono-sense of being just one self, the quirky recognition of two contrary people peopling my psyche throws the door wide open for a richer community of selves hanging around in there too. Imagine a cocktail party of selves, all mingling and arguing for their chance to emerge into the light of persona. There’s a depressed man, an optimistic woman, an arrogant kid, a quiet humble girl, a scared little boy, a shy man burdened by thoughts, a thief, a priest, a murderer with blood on its hands.

But we apply unneccessary constraints when we limit ourselves to only the human realm. I’m a spider, a fly, a fox, a crow, a tree with my roots buried in Hades and my branches yearning for the sun. And finally, and I think primarily, I’m a stone, hard, unyielding, concealing an infinite number of potential meanings while remaining persistently quiet, hiding, resisting all attempts by others to secure interpretation.

Quick Note About The Bridge Between My Daughter Brushing Her Hair And Me Making My Bed

As my daughter brushed her hair, I imagined being the brush. This is the root of my loneliness, I thought, I identify with household objects. And kept right on brushing.

*

When you consider—really consider—how well your plans go, any plan whatsoever, you’ll begin to detect that your will doesn’t carry much weight in this world. The easy mistake here is to take charge, try harder, to hunker down like those southern men and get’r done. That’s okay. The world will wait.

*

This morning, as I made my bed, it occurred to me that I was not much more to that bed than a brush to my daughter’s head.

Can you imagine?

The bed, with a will of its own, using me to smooth its blankets and straighten its pillows. The dishes demanding their bath. This is the way I am in the world, I thought, laughing at its parties, smashed on its rocks.

Babble

I just got back from a run where I had this little zing in my chest and I thought Please get worse. Please be a heart attack. Please kill me and I willed myself to death but I only ran faster as if a little more speed might find a hole in the world.

So that’s how I am. 

And I don’t especially want to write post after post about being miserable. But then Dooce linked to the green beans and a bajillion people read it and now I’m thinking SAY SOMETHING! THE BAJILLION PEOPLE! (Rewind: About an hour after supper, Kate asked me what I was thinking about and I said I’m thinking about those green beans. They want me to say something and then, LOOK, those green beans are the most read post on this goddamn blog. Moral: Listen to your vegetables.) But then I think Fuck that, Black Hockey Jesus. You can’t just drum up a post because of the bajillion people, you fucking poser who can’t even die of a heart attack right. You don’t belong on this blog, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram—none of that shit.

However, I just started writing for Babble and part of the Babble deal was that I link back to my Babble posts from here. Fair enough. I figured I’d just say Here’s a Babble post and link to it. But then I thought What if I stay miserable forever and Black Hockey Jesus becomes nothing more than a weekly link to Babble? People will send me email that says “I used to like your blog but now you’re just a Babble whore with link after link to Babble” and that would suck but I’d probably just delete it and get back in my bed of Babble money with 3 porn stars and light a cigar with flaming Babble money.

So I don’t know what to do. I have this other cool corporate blog thing and Babble and this, which I love, so I suppose I’ll just write more if I want something between the links.

Write. More. That sounds about right.

And if I can’t think of anything before the next Babble link, I’ll at least lodge it inside a bunch of rambling babble, like this.

A couple weeks ago, I was texting my ex-wife about the question of my futurity and she ended a long text with some words about my daughter: “You are her sun and her moon. She needs you. It would break her if you died.” And so what’s left to do? I gotta press on through the mud, not denying my condition, being in my condition, talking about my condition, listening to my vegetables.

My first Babble post is called Reading To My Daughter, for her, the tiny streak of silver in my lead.

Rivers

“How was your 4^th day of school? You look all bored and apathetic. Are you in a rock band that moans about the angst of being a teen in 21^st c. America? You’re smoking pot, aren’t you?”

“Oh my God I hate Social Studies.”

“What they learning you?”

“A bunch of shit about Greece. I mean. Of all the countries in the world, why are we learning about Greece the first week of school?”

“Not sure. Might be that whole birthplace of civilization thing.”

“Whatever. The battles were kinda cool. But now we’re talking about philosophers and the teacher’s killing us with his dagger of boredom.”

“Philosophers! Thales! Anaximander! Parmenides! Heraclitus! Don’t you wish your friends were here?”

“I’m officially ignoring you.”

“You can’t ignore me. I’ll haunt you forever in the closet of your unconscious. What did your teacher say about Heraclitus?”

“Nothing. He said Thales was the first philosopher except he was superstitious and that philosophy didn’t really begin until Socrates and Plato.”

“What the? He ought to be killed.”

“Say it.”

“Son. You need to learn about Heraclitus.”

“Dad—”

“No shut it! Plato degraded the natural world and the beauty of the senses by locating truth in the mind and the Formiest Forms, which of course don’t exist, while paving the way for the most vile cancer that ever infected the earth.”

“Hitler?”

“Christianity. Dude. Plato led philosophy down a disastrous detour that resulted in the mess you think is normal. But Heraclitus! Heraclitus said cool shit like ‘You can’t step in the same river twice.’”

“Yes you can.”

“No! You can’t!”

“You can too. Take me to a river. I’ll step in it twice.”

“Nope. Different river. Rivers flow. Like worlds. Are you in love yet?”

“No.”

“Well pretty soon you’re going to fall in love with a girl who has brown eyes with long brown hair that’ll make you cry, just from seeing the sun rip through it, and she’s going to make your wrists tingle and a bunch of wondrous images rain down in your imagination. And she’s going to tell you she loves you and she’s going to mean it and you’re going to believe it and that’ll be a river, you see? But then in a year she’s going to grow fangs and her eyes are going to shoot lasers and she’s going to plunge her hand through your chest cavity, rip your heart out from between your ribs, and scream in a shrieky voice ‘YOU CAN’T STEP IN THE SAME RIVER… TWIIIIIICE!’ and then she’ll cackle and hiss and you’ll feel like a black cloud in a midnight thunderstorm in Galveston, Texas. It’s going to be really super awesome.”

“Awesome? How can that possibly be awesome?”

“It’ll be an authentic ancient Greek experience. Better than video games.”

“It sounds terrible.”

“Most truths are. But when you step in a river, you’re a particular person at a particular time stepping into some specific actual water. Then when “you” step in again, the original water is way downstream. It’s new water. A new river. And, because of time, you’re not the same you either. So you see? You can’t possibly step in the same river twice. The river’s in flux. You’re in flux. Your fluxes mingle into one big Jackson Pollock painting. Which is way cooler than Plato jerking off about philosopher kings.”

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re not like most people."

“No. I’m never the same river. That’s what they should teach you in school. How to avoid being the same river and that the world is full of gods.”

“Where’d you hear that one?”

“Thales. Hey, kid.”

“Yeah.”

“Thank you. I’ve been waiting 14 years to talk to you about more than Pokemon.”