I'm Me.

I looked at myself in the mirror at the video store tonight and thought that I looked like someone who looked like me.

When I was young I was equally intrigued with three ideas that spoke to a single, young, and budding existential dilemma. I would look in the mirror trying to imagine whatever it is that was before the universe, and later (presumably) human beings. I couldn't get over the fact that in trying to imagine nothing - a void, a vacuum - I was in fact imagining something, and that it was impossible to imagine anything prior to the time when there was something. When I got bored with that I would - still looking in the mirror - repeat my name out loud over and over again, until I attained this acute sense of 1) what an utterly bizarre sound the sound of my name was and 2) how it failed miserably in even coming close to representing anything that might signify who I was as an individual. I was always aware of the fact that the association between myself and my name was arbitrary (which is, apparently, one of my top ten favorite words according to Rachel). Similarly, there was this cartoon on Sesame Street that I remember. It consisted of two spice-drop looking characters, one large and blue, and the other small and red. The large one would hop onto the screen and bellow: "I'm BIG... I'm BIG. I'M BIG" or something to that effect. Troubled, the little red fellow would fidget about for a bit before finally mustering up that courage to utter the words "I'm... I'm ...I'm... ME. I'm ME! I'm ME! I'M ME!" Obviously it was one of those propaganda clips meant to inculcate kids with a sense of worth regardless of size or color, but for me it represented a different dilemma. Later, looking in the mirror, I would have a hard time reconciling the truth of the statement "I'm Me" with the truth itself. If I was first of all someTHING - did indeed exist - was second of all not my name, nor merely an amalgam of my physical characteristcs (red, blue, big, little), than what was I?

let alone this semester

I've been giving it some thought and hitting a brick wall fairly early each time, so I've decided to go ahead and begin my list of "to-dos" for the Winter Break. Though the day after tomorrow will dawn upon a new, recently done with the semester me, I still can't see the light at the end of the tunnel, that is: I can't really conceptualized a me that is done with anything, let alone this semester. Already my English Literature class is done, my Deans Scholars seminar is over, my Arabic work is done - leaving me only my COMS and Algebra finals, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, respectively. But enough of that: what do I do next? There are quite a few events, including parties and Christmas family and Church get-togethers, traveling to Oklahoma, working, planning for next semester. By a list of things to do I mean things I want to do/ need done. We'll start with want to do.

Reading list: read a book. Fiction. Which one? I've been wanting to read a modern notable like Michael Chabon or David Foster Wallace, but it seems as if both libraries are all checked out of the books I want. I've also been reading Dante's Divine Comedy, but for some reason I'm thinking something... "lighter?" I don't know. Dante is pretty cool. I've also checked out a collection of H.P Lovecraft short stories. I'm a bit obsessed with Cthuhlu lately. I also need to finish Naguib Mafouz's "Children of Gebelawi," but that, too, seems a bit heavy for my needs right now. I have needs, and I'm going to feed them, and then sic them on somebody. Also there is my mentor's book "Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics," that I need to read, and Leela Gandhi's "Postcolonial Theory" that I also need to read, but I'm thinking about having a non-academic rule concerning what I read over the break. That would mean that "Graduate Study for the 21st Century," which is also on my list/ stack, is also out of the question. God willing, my mother has purchased St. Ephraim the Syrian's "Spiritual Psalter," which will give me some substantial spiritual food, but still, I want some fiction. I am also almost done with the final Darwish compilation, which is fabulous.

Sigh.

My lists are really lacking these days.

Take two: Things to do over break:

1. Read a book.

It's a start. Here is a poem I wrote and posted at
la revista de la estrella blanca:

I want a suit
a grey suit, like
a real poet
serious but informal
tieless with the memory
of a tie having purposefully
been there earlier

like poets can wear suits
now like businessmen wore
suits but a poet might get
a state burial or a statue
but not me, I'll just be
a nobody in a suit

children or no

I spend a great deal of time walking around in circles in my children's room in the dark. Well, not really a great deal of time, but it seems like alot, and I probably do spend more time walking around in circles in a dark room than most of my friends, children or no. My son has is turning out to be quite the little gremlin. He's built like a lumberjack, and enjoys romper-rooming about like a Wild Thing. This translates into many a spill and subsequent markings, but he doesn't mind much so neither do we. I don't let myself get angry when I feel as though I've got a lot to do and I've got to take the time getting him to sleep. It isn't easy. I'm often on the verge, but besides him not being able to help his crankiness (age, teeth coming in), and him being beautiful beyond belief, it is good to stop and think, focus on the details of the dark room, my creaky body, my aching sinuses, my mind in browning motions. I watch the digits on my daughters clock tic, tic, tic, gauging when it will be safe to put him in his sleeper. I feel the weight of his head sink deeper into my arm, his breaths spread out, his limbs dangle. Then I put him down, and get back to work.

you and the parentheses (parenthesi?)

We measure our lives in teaspoons and our semesters in breaths. At the end of my life I'll let out one long, hopefully non-verbalized (uuuuuuuuuuunnnnnnghhhh) breath; at the end of the semester I'll remember TO breath. Maybe I should work on my last breath. Perhaps I can make it a strawberry ("bpthbpthbpthbpthbpthbpth"), and hang my teaspoon on my nose. For some reason that reminds me of the dying hero-monk character in the Russian film "Octpob" (Oh-strove, approximately - not "Okt-pawb"), who, as he lays himself down in his coffin ready to give up the ghost, is pestered by his well-meaning and repentant brother monk. When asked what the monk should do with his life - his final thoughts, as it were - he breaths, exasperated, something to the effect of "Just try not to sin too much."

"I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled." (T.S.E.)

What is spirituality?

It is sighing every time I speak, or write. It is the sigh that comes directly following an instance where I have spoken, or written.

It is keeping my house clean, my dishes washed, my email in-box cleaned out.

It is hanging on to the Gospel with my mind and my heart underneath my body that does otherwise. A mouth that says other things, eyes that divert, senses that meander exponentially every direction. It is knowing the delineation of peace and repentance, that tension between what is and what isn't, ideal and actual, potential and spent energy.

It is a profound personal reality, a reclusivity in the face of the throng, it is the mirror through which my body is seen in its context, a puppet, a dancing fool.

It is the wide chasm between myself and those with whom I interact daily. It is what binds me to them and elucidates the vast distances between us.

It is a millstone, broken glass in my boots, barbed wire around my ribs, eyes blinded by lye, a spider of contrition on my brow. It is the race from nothingness to somethingness, it is the inversion of language, the lessening of the thing in order for it to be made more.

It is what is hidden and what reason must obey but can't reconcile. It is what one uses to privately sever any desire to justify oneself in the sunlight to the world.

It is being vague and concise, it is acknowledging certain binaries as existing for certain reasons, and understanding the primal urge to smash them, but seeks to move through nothingness into the aforementioned primal somethingness.

It is what begins to understand the profundity and sophistication of the Christ on the Cross, the center of the cosmos, of time, or reality.

Language is a rolling colored-water wave machine on a desk in an administrator's office, it lolls back and forth over The Fulcrum, balancing and redistributing the equation again and again, waiting for the eschaton.

monday

I awoke this morning with a dull headache and low-level nausea - nothing I can't normally handle. But after rounding up the kids, seeing them and their mother out the door, drinking 1/2 a cup of coffee, eating two heels of toast with strawberry jelly, and thinking it over for a bit, I think I'm going to stay home. Also included in this decision-making process was my very real reticence to go to school in the first place, primarily due to my general malaise, which very well might be a type of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Across the street there are fellows putting new gutters on a house. It's a small house, with no overhang. It looks as though the fascia board beneath the old gutters is going to need replaced. Our neighbor is going to be all set for the winter soon. She's already had new shingles put on and a rickety old tree that was too close to her house cut down. Soon it will be time to hunker down, turn on some lights, and listen to the wind whistle around the house.

Bring us some figgy pudding.

We gave our pumpkins to the squirrels for a Thanksgiving meal. The one with the face carved into it (pumpkin not squirrel) is rotting, making its face cave in and look like its lost its dentures. What's more: the squirrels are constantly crawling in and out eating what's left of his brains.

A Propo, whatever that is.

If I had a nice camera this'd be a photoblog, filled with the beautiful people and interesting places I see and frequent daily.

If the United States were France, Webster's Dictionary would be a department of the Federal government, wherein arbiters appointed by our presidents would deliberate on the future of the legality of such words as "snotsickle" and "ginormous." UrbanDictionary.com would be a revolutionary element.

A warming pot of coffee gurgles in the kitchen. [My stomach gurgles.]

A metaphor is like an unblown balloon, potential shape and form waiting for someone's hot air to fill it up and give it meaning. [My butt is a like a balloon, waiting to release hot air.]

Tomorrow I will sleep in a bit, then get up and work around the house. Leaves, recycling, storage, [you know, man stuff *scratches groin*.]*

-Jthulhu

* Bracketed text pirated by my lovely wife, Rachel, while I was putting the youngest child down for the night.

I want to be at home.

List of things to do, in random order, starting the moment I get done with class tomorrow afternoon:

1. Clean off back porch, borrowing my father's truck in order to haul the massive overflow of cardboard, assorted plastics, aluminums, glass bottles and jars, etc. for recycling. b) Finding a new home for the large shipment of "Save Darfur" t-shirts the Save Darfur Coalition sent me after I'd already cancelled the order and since then have done nothing with nor had the money to mail back, and b.1) return the large rubbermaid tub in which the majority of them are stored to its rightful owners.

2. Find a place to store our Nissan for the winter, out of the weather so I can either 1) work on it or 2) not worry about it deteriorating. This will involve a) calling around to places for a cheap deal and b) figuring out exactly how I can afford to do it in the first place. Also, I will then c) clean out the parking space of the assorted junk that has accrued do to long years of disuse, and then d) trim the various and sundry shrubbery and plant life that has worked to reclaim the square footage for nature. Once these things are done, I will then e) beginning parking the car we actually use in the parking space.

* THOUGHT: Maybe if we find a good deal on storage for the car I can also store some of the random crap we've got sitting around the house as well. ANOTHER THOUGHT: I wish we could build a carport type structure over the parking spot to keep the snow off. RELATED THOUGHT: I've often considered some sort of rubber mat for the back porch, for when it is snowy and we've got to wipe off our boots. I've also always wanted to enclose a part of the porch in something akin to those plastic strip dividers you see in large walk - in coolers, to shield anyone shaking the snow off from the cold, and also to add another cold barrier to the house. I've thought of using a tarp but that's tacky, right? These thoughts lead me to number

3. Finish winterizing the remaining windows in the house, using the plastic and tape routine, and maybe locating some decent weatherstrip for the front door.

4. I also need to cut down the new threshold for the bathroom floor we put in forever ago, and find some temporary baseboard for the west wall of the bathroom, as well as maybe some plywood to act as a temporary plug for the hole in the wall.

5. The toilet water hose needs replaced probably, and the bolts that hold the toilet down need cut down and capped with those little white thingys, if I haven't lost them since we put it in.

6. Other winterization ideas involve the sewing of large curtains both for our windows as well as the hallway doors, to the end of keeping the bedroom/ bathroom side of the house warm via space heaters strategically placed in the bedrooms. Another heavy curtain will cut off the foyer from the main room, hopefully keeping more cold and higher gas bills at bay.

7. My ultimate dream is to get into the crawl space and staple heavy duty plastic to the underside of our floor joists, completing the anti-winter-bubble. Not sure how the landlady would handle that.

8. Assorted: Rake the yard. Take E1 and E2 outside for some fall fun. Tidy up. Attend to the gutters. Find a lid for our trashcan. Put up some Christmas lights?

9. Sell some bikes. Anybody want a bike? Just in time for winter.

The Verb must broker an agreement between the Subject and the Object.

All of these fellows had birthdays. And days on which they died. Next to the truncated biography is a photo or a painting, and under that another reminder of the day they died and the day the lived. In parenthesis, as if an afterthought or a fun fact, are the number of years they were alive.


October 30, 1821. January 28, 1881. (aged 59)


November 13, 1850. December 2, 1894. (aged 44)


February 2, 1882. January 30, 1941. (aged 58)


August 20, 1890. March 15, 1937 (aged 46)

Food for the worms. Worm farm fodder. There are no political overtones to the fact that we die, making it somehow a refreshing thing to remember, though not poetic by default. Just dead.

no walls

I was standing on the second floor of a restaurant with no walls in Loiza. The ocean was dark; rolling white-noise oscilloscopes emerging from the silence of night, faint and gray, palpably fawning over the beach. The warmth of the sand complimented the warmth of the water. They danced, moving this way and that, in and out, together, apart, holding invisible hands.

I missed my children. I called my wife on our cell phone. The moon did a bad job of hiding behind a palm tree whose trunk was in arms length but whose palms were in space above the ocean. I thought of Christmas, St. Nicolas' Day in Lawrence, Kansas. White snow on a brown earth. I was a little drunk.

Memory is heavy like El Morro, perched on the edge of the world, the precipice of what I've learned up to this point. The implications of such memory are heavy and dark like El Morro's shadows. People I know and people I don't know pass through them, are heavy like shadow and then light, like air. It is a golden sun with a jealous blue sky. A vast battlefield separates us from the past.

an achronologous chronology

[situated in the so-called simple-present tense, a daily memoir that disregards any sense of chronology]

The children make messes peacefully, whispering amongst themselves. I prop the baby against myself and become absorbed in a book.

My blog is a repugnant mirror that shows me some part of myself I don’t want to see and can’t comprehend. My revulsion for the previous post - and somehow myself - grows every time I log on. I sense this thing, this blog, this despised new media/ literary phenomenon that I’ve bought into for some obscure and ridiculous reason, has some important role to play.

I’m on the plane. The book I will finish in two weeks I can’t touch, because white-hot rusty switchblades are being pressed into my brainpan via my inner ear. My eyes feel like they’re squeeking. The lady next to me doesn’t speak English, I try to act like I don’t feel like I’m dying, but I feel like I’m dying so I’m not sure if I care. Just then the ocean returns to me, first pulling me, then pushing me, gently. The waves come one after another but they’re the same waves, like the leaves, year after year. They don’t force me, they filter through me, spreading the different “me”s over a palate, a spectrum. On the plane I can feel the ocean, it’s too big, too powerful; too many countless grains of sand flow in too many directions. I’m not seasick. There is a halo around my memory, from the sun setting beyond the rocks.

The sun is setting over the neighborhood where our church and my daughter’s soon-to-be preschool is located, and the air is cool for the first time in a week. The deep green of the trees imposes a sense of the deep south, though we’re in the midwest. My son slobbers on my shoulder while attempting to consume his hand, pausing to watch the birds or the electric lines, both a stark black against a constant blue. The moon is lucid and half-illumined, the August evening gives me a sense of space between myself and it, and the moon becomes a very real cosmic presence to me; I sense its enormity and the miracle of its suspension, but also that I might reach up and pluck it from my vision if I wanted.

The clock says 6:59. I've woken with a start for some reason. The house is quiet.

In the park my wife and children and friends’ children are playing and resting in the shade on a park bench. My daughter approaches me with a request to swing. The hour-long walk hasn’t seemed to wear me out so I agree to it. Before I know it, the whole gang wants to swing. So I help them out and then join them. I haven’t done it in ages, due to an instant nausea trigger, but today for some reason I’ve managed to sidestep it. I pump my legs, lean back and forth, and force myself into an upside-down pendulum arch. The children are impressed. I turn upside down to look behind me, like when I was one of them, and I see the basketball court, its players walking on it like a ceiling, jumping but never falling, the trees and shrubs growing and shrinking, undulating like the ocean.

Walking with my son in the August evening a hymn to the Holy Spirit comes to mind, so I sing it:

You are most blessed, Oh Christ our God. For when you had made the fishermen most wise by sending down upon them the Holy Spirit, by them you drew the whole world into your net - lover of humankind glory to you.

My son cries.

I walk up the hill towards campus for the first time in awhile. That subtle sense of autumn approaching underlines everything, like a general, sustained prelude to a flashback or deja vu. Many of the houses will have different people living in them, since I began walking this way on a regular basis almost two years ago. I imagine passing glances out the window at me as I trudge up the hill, in sunshine, snow, rain, and that massive space in between all of those things.

The coffee carafe knocks against the sink and the unwashed dishes, the coffee pot itself, and the counter at regular intervals, the way it does every morning.

Today life is hard.

I'm sick, and I'm worried about it. I need to see a doctor and a dentist. I'm worried about my wife, who is tired from having taken care of the kids for a week while I vacationed. The car we've been using is in need of repair, and our other car hasn't worked for a year now, and we've not the funds to fix either of them right now. Because of my new student income schedule we're low on funds of course. In August, when the funds do come in, much will be used to pay back borrowed monies for the summer.

I've got a presentation on Friday. For this I need a powerpoint, for that I need to walk to campus for a good chunk of each day. This would be okay if I wasn't deathly (and I do mean deathly. I'm so sick I'm scared!) sick, and I didn't feel guilty about leaving Rachel home with the kids, and the reality of her having to deal with them while I'm on campus. Besides this my paper is due a week following, and requires much attention that between my family and my sickness and work will be hard for me to give.

In old San Juan the bricks were blue and over one hundred years old. On the coast by the old fort there were thousands of graves. Over the front gate here was a faded tile picture of John the Baptist in the wilderness. Up the hill from there stood a church, it's doors open, electric fans plugged in everywhere for the faithful. It was comforting to see a Catholic church after all the Pentecostal churches. It was like an oven inside the walls of Old San Juan. Hand bells from vendors peddling their wares rang at random intervals. I couldn't smell the salt water breeze from the ocean, but I could feel it.

I feel like a failure. Like I haven't done too well at this whole "life" thing. I don't think I'm alone in feeling like this, and I don't feel hopeless. I know I'm moving forward. I'm scared, but hopeful. More than that I can't go back on placing my trust in God now, then I would be a hypocrite. How could I with all the blessings I have?

The end.

Love Righteousness

The other night I discovered that I had within me a certain love for righteousness. I was getting ready to go for a run when it hit me: first a sensation not unlike being smitten by a high-school sweetheart, then the implications of harboring such an emotion. I'd never felt that way before.

Years ago, before I converted to Orthodoxy, I had the realization that the spiritual life wasn't merely comprised of NOT doing some things, but in actually DOING other things. The idea was that an upward or forward motion was needed, movement, a drawing closer at all times to God, and not merely a moral obedience. A moral obedience is virutally impossible without this forward movement, or growth, regardless of whether we perceive this.

After leaving my Protestant faith - I'm getting to the point I promise - I disavowed, or attempted to disavow, any semblance of what I called "emotionalism" from my understanding of truth. People tampering with my emotions, basing "worship" on feelings and finely crafted ad campaigns had all taken their toll - I was unable to make sound judgments from within this hyper-emotional context.

Fast-forward to the present day: me with my struggles to harvest the virtues and destroy the passions, to grow closer to God, just like I was then, only equipped with the teachings of the Church (and the language to understand what I'm doing). Now what do I find? I find what I once might have once referred to as a carrot on a stick: this sensation within me that desires righteousness. I feel as though I am and have been such a sinner, that if I could go one day or one hour thinking on or doing something righteous I would feel great!

Granted, righteousness is far from its own end. I've always hated the reward/ effort model of motivation for good works. I've felt that love of God was its own reason, motivation and motivator.

Perhaps Orthodoxy has shown me the connection between righteousness and God, the essence of righteousness which I won't define here (I don't think I could). I know now that I can love righteousness out of my love for God, my desire to please Him.

I used to try and remind myself of the hardness called of me in order to undertake the simplest asceticism of the spiritual life: now when faced with temptation I remind myself to "love righteousness." And right now, thank God, this isn't hard to do. I pray that it stays that way!

Destroying Binaries

When I say "my spiritual life", there are certainly two ways to read it. The first, I suppose, being an indicator that this blog is about a compartment of my life that I give the title "spiritual". This is entirely incorrect. Serious faith, or serious belief, must insist on a lack of disparity between one life with the other. The chief agency of sin is to separate, dispel, dissolve. The duality felt in life between the real and the potential is part of this. Therefore my life, it should be read, is spiritual. Everyone's is. St. John of the Ladder says in "The Ladder of Divine Ascent" that

"God is the life of all free beings. He is the salvation of all, of believers and unbelievers, of the just or the unjust, of the pious or the impious, of those freed from the passions or caught up in them, of monks or those living in the world, of the educated or the illiterate, of the healthy or the sick, of the young or the very old. He is like the outpouring of light, the glimpse of the sun, or the changes of the weather, which are the same for everyone without exception."

Therefore one of the first steps in the spiritual life is destroying the frail barriers we erect in order to understand the world and ourselves. The modern paradigm is one of compartmentalizing: we are comprised of many disparate systems: "emotional", "intellectual", "physical", "spiritual", "financial", etc. that all battle within us. Modern pop-psychology has to do with synchronizing them to the end of fulfilling their various needs, with disastrous ends. This compartmentalization of life is at once our attempt to understand it and the product of our inability to understand it with our fallen logic alone. Bringing the self to one, the aim of the spiritual life, is a matter of pulling these fractured spheres of our self into a harmony with God's will, putting an end to discord, through the harvesting of the virtues and the destruction of the passions.

Holy Father John of the Ladder, pray to God for us!

Everything is a Text

Associations are odd things.

Association is an odd thing. Avoiding it seems to be an act not unlike slipping between the raindrops in a downpour. Is this really how we establish what we know, or think we know?

When you look at me you look at what I'm wearing, my hair, my glasses, my skin color, my gate, etc. All of these thing help you to form an embryonic opinion of me. What follows, if we interact, is either a series of predictable outputs or a litany of surprises, depending on the accuracy of your initial assessment.

When you come to my blog, you look at the colors, the words, the quotes, the links, the titles, my spelling, the topics, the length of posts. A similar assessment is made concerning your opinion (maybe opinion isn't the right word) of me and/or my blog - either my blog, myself via the blog, or the blog's message, or me personally via the blogs message, and whether or not said message is related with skill or not.

That being said, by this point, you've probably stopped reading and clicked "back" on your browser, though not before at least some of this had taken place.

Perhaps I haven't satisfied you. Perhaps the requisite photo and caption weren't present. An obsession with these associations can lead to the habit of either attempting to fulfill all of these expectations or circumventing them altogether, neither of which being completely possible.

If I place a cross, or an icon of the crucifixion on my blog, you know exactly what I am, what my blog is about, what "I am about". So I'm reticent to do it. What if I told you that I believed the crucifixion was the profound center of the earth, of reality, of time, the cosmos? Or that I believed that "the greatest and most perfect thing a human being can ever desire to achieve is to come near to God and dwell in union with Him"?

What does that do? To us?

Words are a strange thing. I spend my time writing them, and I believe that they spring from this mysterious center of the cosmos, but I hardly ever turn to this thing as a subject of my writing. But everything is a text.

Readership

So this is familial bliss. He thought.

The sun shone off the newly swept wood floors (in the morning it reflected off the birdbath through the window and onto the ceiling, but this was the evening). The old mismatched sofa, love-seat and chair were clear of the usual clutter - laundry and/or toys and library books - the dining room table was cleaned off. His eldest was already in bed, tired out from a day of exploring, swinging and going down the big slide. On the back porch there were a number of containers with soil, surely dead by now earthworms, an eggshell or two, a dead cockroach and a couple of tiny maple trees that had miraculously forced their way out of their respective helicopters. The back porch was swept and the recycling was in its' bins. Mother was on the phone with her mother, and baby boy's thoughtful almond eyes were smiling at the window or the ceiling light; the icons or his papa. He punched and kicked profusely and babbled, the drool bubbling and cascading over an assortment of rolls that belonged to his face, chin and/or torso. His diaper was dry and that was bliss.

Later, walking down a dark alleyway, relaxed and lucid, he remembered all of this with clarity, and returned home again to it, though the shades were drawn and the windows dark. A warm lamp that used to belong to an old friend glowed in the dining room, waiting for him to return. He brushed his teeth, washed his hands, ate a piece of bread and drank a glass of water. All of these things he did within the context of his family. The whole house breathed with them as they slept.

Who were his readers? He had thought that earlier. He had no photo of the fun to share, no fashion tips or celebrity sitings. And now his glass was empty. It was time to sleep.

I don't know nothin' about no Mexico.

A day or two ago. Our car sounds like an idling jet engine chewing up sand and chalk. I drove it up to the University anyway, hoping to get some face time on a computer, betting on the quality of our crystallized conversation. I would net it, like a digital butterfly and "email it to myself". It would pass through the ether and be waiting at home should I find more time or the need to continue.

Campus was as near deserted as I'd ever seen it. I parked in a random spot I wasn't sure I was supposed to. Seeing the Union closed I damned its eyes, but noticed the cloud work up and to the north, mostly hidden by the Union and the new Multicultural Resource Center. The parking garage was all but empty so I found a spot to sit and watch the array of colors and shapes that filled the sky. My mind raced for words to describe it immediately, but I knew it was in vain. Who could relay such information?

To the west a broad thunderhead was fanning out at mind-altering hights. The sun as it set shone through its curling silver lining (or set it on fire - it looked high enough), just enough so as to throw a stark golden spray on the main event: a line of developing thunder heads cummulo nimbi or some such thing, that stretched out to the north west, above the Kaw Valley, swooping just close and low enough to brush the north face of Mt. Oread, to acculmulate in an odd dark-blue stasis just over downtown Lawrence. The clouds there swept down in coudal-arch patterns, scrapping tree tops and buildings. Further north the rain was dripping from the flat undersides of the clouds, and I could tell it was falling on highway 24, Perry and the power plant. Names and places synonymous with my life. The backside of the line of clouds was the real breath taker. There is no way to imagine the pinks and blues and oranges, how high the contrast could be and gentle the shades, how clear their outline could form, how immovable and liquid it seemed.

It was almost perfectly still down on the ground. The birds were still singing, the slightest of cool breezes blew now and again. Silent lightning feathered out sporadically on the cloud's underbelly, spreading like fire on a ceiling and then disappearing.

Funny.

I've written my share of jokes. If by my share I mean no one has ever either asked or commissioned me to do it. And those who have heard the finished product have asked me never to utter another word under the heading "A Joke I Wrote" again.

My jokes have the profound ability to make everyone who comes near them feel intensely awful about humanity and long for something as pleasant as shame or embarrassment to feel.

So in order to both not be and be cruel, here are the only two completed jokes I've ever written.

Joke #1

When I was a teenager I was trying to change the oil in my car for the first time. The only thing was: I had no funnel. My dad, seeing what was going on told me to hold on and he'd show me a trick. Emerging from the garage with a piece of paper he fashioned it into a funnel-esque shape.

"Aw Dad." I said. "That's no FUN-nel!"

(I can feel you dying.)

Joke #2

What do you call a raccoon with pincers on his front paws and six legs?

"Crab Raccoon."

Wow.

The only other one I have I've only written half of, that is, the setting and the punchline. It happens at an archeological dig in Egypt and at the end of it, a guy says:

"Well, at least we have Toots-n-common."

Of course it's a fart joke. I think the joke will actually turn out to be the whole explanation of trying to write the joke and then springing the punchline on my listeners because it seems to be funny enough on its own.

I used to have a theory of hierarchy of funny involving elements like whether or not the joke involves rhyming, is dirty, is a pun, etc. But besides being ridiculously subjective, I really don't care anymore. It was probably those jokes.

A & B This Time Instead

A. Sitting down for class, a friend of mine pulled out his new pen, setting it meticulously before where his open notebook was to go.
"I've got a new pen." he said.
During class we read an article on Intellectual Property and Virtual Reality. Afterwards he told me it had frustrated him.
"As an avowed Marxist," he said "I don't believe in private property."
"Can I have your pen?" I asked.

B. A couple of Robins stood talking on the brick sidewalk. One, with his back to me, was obviously haggling the other about something. The other noticed me. With a quick look over his shoulder, the first quickly dropped his fare on the ground. It was an unfortunate earth worm. The other snatched it up and they both flew off, rather hastily, in opposite directions.

Life, Uh... Finds A Way.

This morning I caught a pretty interesting article on bdelloid rotifers at the New York Times dot com. I've been a little preoccupied with the concept of asexual reproduction lately, due in part to my recent class and lab in Biology - my first in over a decade. For reasons pertaining to the ever-budding tree of ideas for stories that will probably never get written as well as my usual mental meanderings on the natural world (daydreams), I've been giving the idea some mental face time. I also have Wikipedia and slow shifts at work to thank.

Youtube was also suprisingly fruitful in my search for some good rotifera action:



The idea of asexual reproduction really struck me when I learned that an asexually reproduced animal was actually a clone of its mother (though the more sources I read the more it seems genetic variation does occur somewhat sometimes, though not to the extent that it does in sexual reproduction). What further caught my mind's eye was the fact that some species actually "change" (I'm not sure how - generationally?) from sexual to asexual reproduction depending on the stability of the environment. The idea is that in a stable environment where an organism's evolved characteristics are a good match for the factors it meets there, said organisms will revert to asexual reproduction, in a sort of "if the shoe fits" maneuver. On the flip side, when the environment becomes unstable for any reason, it switches back to the card shuffling game of chance that is sexual reproduction, betting on a good hand to weather the storm. It smacks of Jurassic Park's gender-switching frogs that allowed the Dinosaurs to reproduce on Isla Nublar.

What has struck me in light of all this is the relationship between organism and environment. I've been attempting to ask myself what a perfectly evolved organism might look like and I think I'm having trouble because the answer to this question is relative to the organism's environment, right? Of course I'm thinking of writing a really cool story, so this means my organism's environment will be space, so what does the most perfectly evolved space organism look like? Probably not much unlike the above mentioned rotifers (who do resemble the moster in the movie "The Host", especially in the jaw area). One of the unique aspects of them is their ability to "dry up" when the water is scarce, and literally "blow away", only to reanimate when redessicated. Besides being a pretty huge step in the war against water loss that all but defines the struggle for life, scientists are saying that perhaps this is how the rotifer can pick up some random genes and maintain a slightly higher level of genetic variation than your normal asexually reproducing organism.

This has been another rabbit trail, have a good day.

Yes Captain.

1. Years ago I bought an old tan Ford Tempo from a friend's grandma in Kansas City, Kansas for 400 dollars. It had a nude-coloured exterior, a tan interior and a license plate that said "Mary Ida" that I couldn't get off as it had rusted to the car. Thus we named the car "Mary Ida", and bought a tan throw pillow for the back seat and a tan bobble-headed dog for the dash.

Before the kids were born I remember we would often go on road-trips to here and there. At one point, we were in the middle of Western Kansas - "no where", as they say - on a characteristically latitudinal east/west road. Tan prairie as far as the eye can see. I stopped the car to look around and take some video footage. We climbed up on the roof for a better view. I imagine if someone had seen us, it would've looked like we were standing on nothing.

2. I am so proud of my family. "Proud" is an odd word, I know, and I don't necessarily mean it the way it is meant to be used, but the idea is, I guess, that I am so happy that they exist and are mine. Not "mine" in the sense that I own them so much as the sense that Ephraim is "my" son, Estrella is "my" daughter, Rachel is "my" wife. Of these characteristics that help describe them I am the sole referent.

Ephraim wears his spittle like a crystal necklace around his neck, the depths of which we have not yet succeeded in plumbing by virtue of it's rotundity. I think rotundity was the word I wanted.

Estrella played soccer with me and some other kids and grown-ups today. She was running around chasing the ball and squealing. The sweat was pasting tiny threads of hair to her face. "Are you tired?" I'd ask. "No!" She'd say. She did get nailed with the ball once, but recouped, somewhat. We were all pretty tired.

Maybe She's Born With It

1. Once, while on a visit to a reservation with a crazy professor of philosophy, I was questioned by a man named Henry as to my interest in Native culture and resistance.

"Well, I've read a few books-" I said.

"Yeah, but those are just books." He said.

Since then I've done my best to do my reading outside.

He sand a loud song in his own tongue while his wife braided his hair. The tea-pot was boiling in preparation for an herbal concoction he had made for me that was to clear my sinuses. It had no name in the English language, but it did the job.

Earlier that morning, I unzipped the door to my tent to find the rotting skull of a dear hanging from the branch of a tree, silhouetted against the rising sun.

2. I am comfortable, the light from the sun not having found its way into the box office yet. It's "slow", so there isn't much to do. Accordingly, I pick up the already irrelevant 2007 movie guide and flip to (movies about) writers.

I check out dvds (movies) to people, walking back and forth mechanically, alphabetizing, shelving, talking and joking about movies. The transactions occur smoothly: titles, total, change, due back [Tuesday], sign on the space, thank you. There are stories all around me.

There are stories on the periphery of my mind, dancing in and out of the ring in a frustrated hokey-pokey, evolving to a game of dodge-ball, taking aim at the mechanical comfort of day-to-day activities.

3. All writing is practice until it's finished. Then the game is over. This literary actualization hinges on what it means to win it.

Are you brave enough to let it be an experiment? Or is calling it that a cop-out? What are you writing? Words. What are you writing about?

There was substance in there, somewhere. I was hoping to get to it.

I thought that by writing I'd get to it. This is the gamble part of the game. An outside, unknown factor we look for to give us the win.

4. The admission that I am a sinful person, or believe myself to be, is sure to sound odd to many people in the world. The idea of being sinful is not only misunderstood in our culture, but misrepresented. What it means to be sinful is an object of gross over-simplification, both on the part of both those who deny it and those who affirm it.

When I say that I am a sinful person I am saying two things: 1) that I , as a human, exist in a sinful state, or have a sinful nature. It is something innate and as part of me as my reasoning mind and my personality. 2) It also means that because of this nature I commit acts of a sinful nature - sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes very purposefully.