Is there anything so great in this world as a shower? I doubt it. There is something ineffable about the way it focuses one’s mind and thinking, at least sometimes, that makes it the single most consistent source of inspiration, resolution, and clarity that I have access to. You want to go do a cool groundbreaking psychological study? Attach electrodes to the brain and see what channels and conduits open and close as said head is doused by hot water, shampoo, and soap. But for all the collateral electrocution, you’d come up with some pretty amazing results.

In any event, I came to Albuquerque for nigh on a month largely to get a reset on my life. To try to figure out what the swath of damage was from 2010 and to determine what, if any, resolution I could make for 2011. Not resolutions, mind you, necessarily, because although I appreciate the tradition, the whole thing is a little contrived and probably more directional than I could count on myself to be on this trip. But some kind of decision, or decisions, some kind of purpose or at least a path to try to find it.

It’s frequently been a tough trip, as I’ve found Albuquerque to be haunted by memories old and older. Much time was logged before friends arrived and their arrival has not heralded the automatic good times that such encounters used to. Which is not to say that I’ve been miserable or even largely unhappy, nor that others have made me feel that way. Much of my time here has been wonderful and I’ve found my friends and family to mostly be powerful aids in my effort to establish an interest in the future. Or at least to share a meal or a game with, even if it isn’t quite up to pre-2010 standards in my own beleaguered soul. But up until the shower this early afternoon, nothing had really resolved itself. Nothing was funneling or folding toward some purposeful outcome, let alone a set of them. I’ve read a lot, thought a lot, talked a lot, cried a lot, seen more than a few movies. All minor little influences to be sure, but it took falling water to put it all together.

How long any of this will last remains to be seen. It seems literarily contrived in the extreme that the path for the next few months snapped together like the proverbial mosaic gone groutless in the waning hours of the year, with less than twelve to go before a deliriously celebrated transition to the next. The next that, please God, has to be better than this one, though admittedly 2010 was not without accomplishments. Certainly in spite of the disastrous middle times between the accomplishments, finishing my third novel and leading Rutgers debate to a fourth ranking in the nation are not to be trifled with. Indeed, had my marriage persisted, this year could be counted perhaps among my five best, especially since that means it also would have involved our scheduled trip to Egypt. In any case, contrived-seeming or not, temporary wishful thinking or otherwise, a list of directions for the coming annum has sprung up in my head amidst the steamy confines of tile and glass block.

I present them here for the same reason that people have listed such things for time immemorial. Indeed, this blog itself could be considered one gigantic New Year’s Resolution machine, applied evenly to every day or thought or perspective to usher in the accountability and consistency required of making public declarations to any sort of audience. I can resolve to do all kinds of things every minute and the last six months have been aswirl with just that: emotional and mental lines in the sand that were constantly erased and redrawn, moved and altered, bent and broken, till all that was left was a pile of overwrought pre-glass. Now it’s time to apply some heat and pressure, to try to cobble the tiny grains of windblown wreckage into something useful, solid, even stable. Fragile and vulnerable, of course, as all glass is, but at least tangible and visible to the naked eye as something other than infinitesimal fragments.

Here goes:

1. I will not be seeking a part-time job upon my return to New Jersey in January.

2. Instead, I will spend that time ramping up creative pursuits of many stripes as though this time were deliberately spent away from day jobs like 2009-2010. Among these will be escalating the visibility and promotional potential of The Blue Pyramid, with new quizzes and especially the long discussed but still unfulfilled Facebook integration.

3. I will also aggressively ramp up the pursuit of representation/publication for American Dream On and The Best of All Possible Worlds.

4. Finally on this creative front, I will commence work on my fourth novel. Soon after returning to Jersey, I will set a deadline for it as with the past three novels and I will finish the book by the deadline, taking this process just as seriously as the prior ones. The novel has a working title already, but it will be known publicly as Project X for the time being.

5. I will obviously fulfill the remainder of my commitment to the Rutgers debate team, attending every tournament this year as previously planned.

6. Unless significant reasons to stay emerge, I will plan on moving West in the summer of 2011. I will spend time scouting out cities and possibilities, with few to no places in the western thirteen states ruled out. I will plan to return to conventional full-time employment for the year starting in fall 2011, possibly even multiple jobs.

7. Aside from the above, I will not put pressure on myself to do or be or pursue anything else. Which is not to say that I might not also find other uses of my time or energy, but I will keep myself from beating up on myself about any shortcomings outside of fulfillment of the above six pursuits. While I will try to stick to a budget, I will not worry about money, because this plan is financially sustainable. While I will try to volunteer some, I will not berate myself for prioritizing creative pursuits over volunteer time. While I will try to read a great deal, I will not get on my own case if I spend more time playing video games. As long as nothing else interferes with the above goals, it’s fair game.

It doesn’t look like much, now that I have it up there, and a good bit of it was probably already the gameplan in one form or another. But it feels like an incredible relief to have it up and out there, especially #7. I’ve spent enough time in the last half-year contemplating the brink of my own self-destruction that there’s simply no point in not making sweeping decisions to improve the quality and purpose of my own life. I believe that the only really fulfilling aspect of the human mind is the pursuit of creativity. The soul may be fed by love, however painful that seems to be, and even efforts to help others, which all good creative pursuits also are. But the mind requires creativity and the only thing I really value or trust about myself at this point is my mind. If I don’t focus on that, in finding my way back to feeling okay through maximizing those efforts and those pursuits at the detriment of financial concerns or emotional self-flagellation, then not only will I not make it, but there will be no point to making it. I’m in a long, ongoing argument with myself about the value of getting through this. I must arm myself with all the best reasons to go forward.

2010, no one will miss you. Please see yourself out.

“And it’s all good
cause I’m no good
and believe me
you don’t need me
it’s a big world
and I’m old news to you.”
-Allison Weiss, “July 25, 2007″

A year ago, I’d just finished editing my first novel to be completed in the better part of a decade, American Dream On. It’s my longest book in a decade that saw three novels written and I’m pretty sure it’s my best. It’s probably the best thing I’ll ever write. The world looked new and hopeful and everything finally seemed like it was falling into place and I was thinking most of the time about two things when I wasn’t focused on writing. The first was how much I wanted to be able to go back in time and tell my old despondent self that life was going to work out. The second was how much I was preparing myself to have a child, to get into the mindset and mentality and place in life to raise a child with the woman I loved and had married long before.

There are really no words to describe the amount of loss that I feel when I confront 2010. To say that it’s irreparable feels at once like giving up and like saying something blandly self-evident, akin to “people should probably get some oxygen from time to time.” I have to have the humility and perspective to realize that if December 2009 Storey wanted to tell prior incarnations of himself that things would work out, there could be future mes who want to come back and ensure this me typing at this second that the same will happen. Ah-ha, I must remind him, you have no idea what might lurk around the bend and how random and crushing it could be to your life. And on and on it may go, until inevitably it doesn’t.

It’s sad to think that this is all that life amounts to, or is sort of the quick summation one could throw on it. It’s also sad to think that I only focus on this when things aren’t going well. Truly, rationally, reasonably, I should lament these kinds of things at all times, even when my own life is in swimmingly good states. And indeed, my capacity to still be unhappy, or more accurately thoughtfully depressed, even when life was good, is something that probably baffled a whole bunch of people. “If you’re not angry, you’re just stupid, you don’t care.” I quote it often and it comes off like justification, but it’s really just visceral awareness. How can people accept the world as it is and still be paying any attention at all?

I have no conclusions tonight, save the titular one. It’s profound and all-encompassing and I don’t care who knows. I get in this mindset where I try to craft a capacity for a murky, undefined future that largely seems untenable, and I sometimes try to come off as a little more hopeful. I mean, look at the banner for this site. I get irrationally exuberant with the throes of not being quite so depressed as I was for days before. But you know what? It’s illusory. It’s temporary. I am sad. I am probably just a sad person. I have all sorts of reasons and all sorts of factors, but in the end, this is the way that it is. I can seem different in some contexts, I can get myself up for interactions with friends or a favored activity or whatnot, but in the end, I’m just sad. The world, beautiful as it can be, is a sad place for our species. It should make you sad too.

Sadness is not the enemy. Sadness is a motivator, as is anger. These things have their limits, maybe, but ultimately they are the root of caring and striving and trying. I don’t know how much capacity for any of those I have or will have, but I know I’m sad. And I’m not going to apologize for it or try to make it something it isn’t. I am sad sad sad sad sad. And I should be. And I don’t care.

Boy, can I not wait for this year to be over! Who’s with me? Yesterday I found out that I need a root canal, which joins my wife leaving me and kidney stones as great things that have happened in the second half of 2010. Not all of these things are equal, of course, but the piling on could really stand to stop. Forgive my lack of posting lately, but sometimes trying to live one’s life overrides trying to chronicle it. Suffice it to say I don’t feel totally poetic lately.

A couple days ago, though, I joined my parents for a trip to Bandelier National Monument. I’d thought it was my first time ever there, but upon arriving I realized I’d been there briefly with my Dad once before, though not climbed up toward any of the cliff dwellings or anything terribly detailed. This time, I took lots of pictures so I wouldn’t forget:

The remains of the dwellings at the base of the cliff.

The holes in the cliff face are all either footholds or former dwellings.

The cliff face.

Looking up the cliff.

Cool formations, with a vista beyond.

The view from the cliff.

Dad with his camera.

Reminds me of Yosemite.

The old apartments.

Lookout.

The old community below the cliffs.

High rise.

Easy access.

Hole in the wall.

Majestic.

Dwellings more conveniently located.

Cactus!

The sign between my parents says “Do not handle the bats.” We saw no bats.

Winter scene.

The remaining snow.

Red wood.

At the base of an upcoming climb! (The camera case belonged to other photographic tourists.)

Going up…

A light in the distance.

High atop the cliff.

Streaked with airplanes.

Sunset in the distance.

The highest kiva.

Sun sets on the highest kiva.

Various distances.

From within the kiva.

Twilight.

The loneliest tree.

Going down, with people I don’t know.

I climbed down the ladders facing out from the wall, since they felt a little more like steps.

Looking back at where I stood, ensconced in the cliff wall high above.

My favorite tree in the park.

When I hit the parking lot, I thought the closest car was actually my car. From a distance, it even looked like it had yellow Jersey plates. Upon closer inspection, it was clear that they were Nuevo plates. Upon even closer inspection, it was revealed that the plates read “119 PFT”. As in 119, my current address in Jersey. As in pft, the dismissive onomatopoetic statement of derision. As in, maybe the idea of staying east is laughable. Yeah. This moved me pretty significantly, though it hasn’t managed to literally follow suit. Yet.

Nifty sign near the little village of shops and ranger housing near the visitor center.

On the drive home through the Jemez Mountains, we saw this gorgeous winter horizon.

Dad got out the binoculars to look at a distant herd of elk.

Aspens in snow.

Bonus shots from my parents’ camera: it’s me, looking strangely happy.

Bonus shot 2: me climbing.

Bonus shot 3: my mother and I on an untolled bridge.

Before the year ends, it’s supposed to snow again, my friend Brandzy is supposed to show up, and I may write in this space at least once more to sum up what has almost certainly amounted to the worst year of my life, despite the successes at Rutgers debate and the completion of my third novel. As I once told Mike Galya, there’s really only one portion of one’s life that really matters. 2011, you better be better.

My previous record was 620.

This year, I folded every single bag. Except David Winks “Gris” Gray folded one bag, and Matthew Randolph “Fish” McFeeley folded two bags into paper airplanes that had to be unfolded and refolded properly. Other than that, I folded, sanded, candled, and laid out every single luminaria of a display of seven-hundred and seventy-two. My Mom was a tremendous help with lighting, and my Dad was also of assistance troubleshooting a disaster with propane canisters that were either too old or too finicky or both. In the end, after a couple hiccups, everything was lit by 6:00 or so.

And then the crowds came.

It’s hard to fully contextualize luminarias for those who have never seen them, which is almost certainly most of you. The traditional minimum is to do the sidewalks and pathways leading to one’s front door. If one has a wall, one adds that if one’s making an effort. And ringing trees is also fairly basic. But the complexity and intricacy of the yard and house that my father has rebuilt makes it particularly prone to diversification of lumis, especially with this year’s roof additions. And my tenacity and unending appetite for the little bagged candles.

This year, perhaps more than any prior, the efforts were vastly appreciated by the masses of New Mexicans and visitors who mob a few neighborhoods in Albuquerque each Christmas Eve. I watched enthralled from dark interior windows as group after group came, stopped, and stared, many if not most posing for pictures in front of the expansive display. Cars stopped dead, many parked, some even opened their doors. Flashbulbs popped throughout the night. Whenever I was out amongst the display to get some air or switch out a few prematurely burned-down candles, people called compliments and accolades, culminating in a late teen’s remark late in the night: “You guys win!”

It was unseasonably warm last night, a good fifteen to twenty degrees warmer than most Christmas Eves. Perhaps more importantly, it was windless, making it feel even warmer and failing to disturb the bags and their interior flames. More perfect weather for luminarias I’ve never felt, nor may it ever come again. For it to coincide with this amount of effort and to be met with this kind of appreciation is the only thing I could ask for on this loneliest of Christmases.

Pictures, you say? Oh, yes, there are pictures…

Nearly full view of the house from across the street.

Getting closer.

From inside the side gate.

From the left.

From the far left.

Little bit softer now.

From under the arbor, on the porch, centered on the pampas.

Many angles.

A three-layered wall.

Close up.

Far out.

The front porch and front roof.

Interior porch, including table, tree, and fountain.

Up on the roof!

Look right.

Back to center.

And down.

Zoom in on the pampas and the front tree.

Rooftop rows.

Side walk.

Pampas, one more time.

Levels galore.

Two in my room’s window.

The porch revisited.

Straight on till morning.

Elevation.

So many bags!

Obligatory internal shot.

It’s bad that all I can see in this one, as a perfectionist, is the one burnt-out one.

All is what it seams.

Under the eaves.

Garage-front row.

Magic.

Blurry wallside.

Internal.

Welcome.

View from the bottom.

Follow the path.

Many paths.

The curve of the earth.

Walking back in for the last time.

Facing the side gate.

The lone window bag.

Good night.

Merry Christmas to all so inclined. May these holidays give you peace, comfort, joy, and light.

“Courage is when you’re afraid
but you keep on moving anyway
courage is when you’re in pain
but you keep on living anyway

It’s not how many times you’ve been knocked down
it’s how many times you get back up

Courage is when you’ve lost your way
but you find your strength anyway
courage is when you’re afraid
courage is when it all seems gray
courage is when you make a change
and you keep on living anyway”

-Orianthi (via The Strange Familiar), “Courage”

This song has been following me around lately, most recently finding me on the way to Fish’s at a time I was starting to feel particularly haunted again. One of those “awareness is never enough” moments to be sure, even though it seems sort of innately silly that such moments can come with frequently heard radio songs. I remember finding significance in every time “The Freshmen” by Verve Pipe came on, even though it was probably #1 in the country for most of that summer. I also remember a time just after when “Brick” by Ben Folds Five came on at precisely the right time and my counterparts and I shook a late-night hotel parking garage with the reverberation of speakers echoing against our plaintive sing-along cries. That was a night I balanced off a fifteen-story interior balcony and later ripped up a dollar bill to post, ticket-like, under the windshield wiper of the most expensive car I could find. I would long call it the best buck I ever spent.

It’s easy to feel like the radio is speaking to you, especially at nights when you’re alone and the power of your feelings is so great that it feels like it’s almost extracting penance from whatever DJ is on the other end of the signal. I’m using the second person not as a crutch, but to convey the singularity of feeling spoken to that the radio itself provides at such times. You can go around and around as many have about whether pop songs reflect our emotions because they are trite and corny but have manufactured similar shallowness in our hearts or whether they reflect fundamental truths that cut to the core of emotions we try to complicate and mystify in our own minds when, deep down, people are really quite simple. I don’t have a horse in that race, but you might. I just feel and react as sincerely as I can when it feels like the world is talking. And I’m listening a lot lately, especially.

Driving back from Fish’s house has involved late nights on Second Street in Albuquerque ever since my family first moved from the place on 12th Street to the current location on Silver in the midst of luminaria central. I’d long discovered 2nd’s superiority to 4th, the slightly larger street more famously close to Fish’s windy back-road domicile. It’s got higher speed limits and fewer lights and way fewer businesses with drunk and/or distracted drivers pulling out into traffic without looking so much as one way. So for nigh on a decade or so, I’ve been wandering back from late nights and early mornings at the place long lovingly dubbed “The Tank” (where does a Fish live?) between the straight-shot painted lines that demarcate Second.

Early on, Second Street is as much hinterland as anything, but as it approaches downtown, there is an eerieness that creeps in, especially in winter. I forget about it almost every drive, or more accurately every first drive of the season I’ve returned home concurrent with Fish. Albuquerque’s downtown buildings tend to be lit in various colors at night, especially during December, and Second is particularly partial to purples and greens. Additionally, Civic Center shows up on Second, a wide-open expanse of paved space that’s so clearly designed for throngs of people, yet so often empty. Needless to say, the confluence of lights and buildings, against an often misty frigid backdrop of winter sky creates an aura of presence and even prescience rarely felt in vehicular transit.

But it is the echoes of such prior experiences and revelations, many themselves already documented on this page in one place or another, at one time or another, that really compounded the feeling tonight. I remember early trips down Second in the green Kia, blasting music of my own choice wrenched from any awareness-yielding fates lingering at the touch of a far-flung jockey. “A Murder of One” at top volume, with thoughts of at least two different girls vying for my heartache. The liberation of loud music belted along to in the company of self alone, the release of such insane frustration at one’s personal state, the glinting possibility of the dead of night contrasting against the vast emptiness of darkness itself. “Change, change, change!” And things, they did. Later trips down Second Street (memory lane?) with Emily herself, even relating the stories of my lonely angsty nights years prior, warmed and heartened by having finally secured love and having her fall asleep to murmuring stories of yore after a long night with friends and games and camaraderie, the throes of knowing exactly how lucky and happy I was in the moment I was feeling it. An awareness that seemingly could only come with the totem of the asphalt beneath us and its solidity, its unflinching sameness, the constancy of the buildings and the environs and even the lighting that evoked resonance. And now, full circle, back again and alone, raging against wrongs present and imagined futures in a quieter, hollower, aged way. Only to pass Civic Center and discover that it was precisely past two, the bars of Central emptying themselves of short-skirted revelers and their bravadoing cohorts, all spilling in an overdressed but underclothed mass into the damp night air. The concern that one or another might trip and fall into the path of the oncoming gray Kia, the fourth car utilized in this unending lifelong procession from one home to another.

I have no conclusions for this nighttime series of visions, only the sinking feeling of being thrust into a hologram, of seeing the shadowy ethereal nature of reality blinking back at me but being no more able to seize it or control it than I could hold down a phantom and demand the answers. It’s a little like a Ray Bradbury story, “Night Meeting”, but I am the Martian I am colliding with, blending the story almost into “Night Call, Collect” as well. But I am not here to torment my past or future, either, just to nod at it, to sagely wave as I pass through versions of myself, stalling and humming at red, sailing along through green.

Time is an illusion in this world, a well held and reinforced one, but a fraud nonetheless. To be able to see through it, to capture the constancy of what underlies our lives, surely that must be what most of this metaphor is trying to show us. Damned if I can see it, or how, or why, but I can detect the underlying attributes, the essence of what is being shown. Hello, Storey. It’s Storey. You will live and love and feel pain and mostly, even between friend and family, you will be alone. You will feel alone. And no matter how well or much or deeply you connect, no one will ever understand. Not really. Not fully. This is your lot. And it will be okay. For maybe in the manufacturing of multiple selves through time, you will find the understanding from another that you crave so deeply. Even if that other is merely yourself in another mirror.

But tomorrow is luminaria day and now you must rest, if only for a little while. Good night.

When I was very young, Christmas was an exciting time. Of course it was – I was a child growing up in America and for many of the Christmases, we were not poor. For some we were, but even then there was sufficient money for new toys or games and books. I loved the colors of Christmas lights, something that flourished in college and persists about me today. I loved the delicacy and beauty of each glinting ornament, even (or especially) the ceramic dinosaur I broke in Washington DC and still feel guilt about to this moment. And I liked the religious implications too, at least for a while.

My first real encounter with the religious aspects of Christmas was the pageant at the Episcopalian church we casually attended that was associated with the school I attended well, religiously, for kindergarten and first grade. St. Paul’s Elementary in Visalia is still there today, but presumably without Father Cole and Mrs. Vickers and certainly without the wheeled TV for the Challenger explosion that changed the course of my career aspirations and provided the basis for essays that vaulted me into college. All the boys of my age (4? Maybe 5) were to be shepherds and all the girls angels. I petitioned ardently to be an angel on the basis that they were “closer to God” and “I have always associated Christmas with angels.” (Admittedly we had no shepherd ornaments I can recall, but plenty of small wooden angels.) Father Cole (never was quite clear why he went by that without being Catholic) was sufficiently impressed not only to grant my gender-bending request, but to retell the story frequently in subsequent years.

I enjoyed the role, enjoying even more my role that would become my defining experience with Christmas performances when we moved to Oregon. In late 1988, my mother wanted me to try out for a play, a musical no less, having high aspirations for her son that were left unfulfilled by his lack of instrumental talent and not even being enrolled in a choir as in DC and California before that. After a long argument, I finally acquiesced and we raced down to the Coaster Theatre to barely squeak in the door in time for the audition. In fact, it was too late and the casting directors were sitting around mulling their departed choices, but the piano player was still available to bang out the original tunes for the experimental hybrid of A Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist to be staged that December. I think my mother had her eye on Tiny Tim for me, given my stature as the shortest third grader, male or female, at Gearhart Elementary, and my textbook Dickensian bowl-cut. But it was Oliver Twist, perhaps the prize role for anyone younger than Scrooge or maybe Bob Cratchit, that I landed in The Dickens Play. The directors were sufficiently impressed by my plaintive soprano that they told me I was Oliver before we even left the otherwise empty stage.

Despite my initial misgivings about the role, I never enjoyed acting so much before or since as during what proved to be two Christmas season runs as Oliver in the seaside British mash-up. I had never before held an audience in such thrall, especially given that most of my prior experiences were in minor roles in plays designed to showcase much older children. It was there that my love of performance, something that carried with me to the present day in debate, was really born, there that I first realized I could control the experience and suspension of disbelief of so many with the mere use of my voice and a few gestures. There also my love of Christmas likely crystallized at its apex, at a time when I was still devotedly Christian and found a new angle on the joy of giving when we would, per Coaster Theatre tradition, circulate still costumed and make-upped to distribute holiday cider and Christmas cookies to the just performed-to patrons. It was also an exercise in receipt as well, given that we got back in praise thrice what we handed out in festive sustenance.

I rarely think of this phase in my life – it seems so distant from what my life became. We moved from Oregon and I’ve only returned to the Coaster once, for the summer 2007 trip that marked the end of Introspection and its eventual replacement with this blog. But Christmas dredges it up occasionally, as especially does spending the Christmas season reading a book about an actor and his youthful development, which Until I Find You (in part) is. At the time, I talked about a possible future as an actor or even a singer. I made fabulous friends those two Decembers, from the girl who played Tiny Tim to all the starring adults whose lives consisted of drifting between community theater opportunities (with the exception of Scrooge, already a local celebrity who owned several area businesses and donated his grandiose humbuggery each year). The second year, 1989, there was an older schoolmate with whom I carpooled from Gearhart down to Cannon Beach – I think she played someone in the workhouse or Fagan’s gang or maybe even Scrooge’s childhood flashback squeeze – and another peer in similar roles with whom I played seemingly endless games of War backstage while we mouthed the lines to the entire rest of the play, which everyone knew by heart by the season’s end.

There I learned how to play Twenty Questions and how to fight through a sore throat or other larynx maladies to still project clearly and cogently while under the weather. I learned how disciplined people can be when magic is on the line. I learned to take things less seriously sometimes, mostly through the Wednesday-night gag-rehearsals once the play was already running, wherein people would improvise slight alterations of their lines designed to make rival actors break character in laughter. It was a community I didn’t even appreciate sufficiently till I was out of it, as is true of most every community worth being in. At least when one’s age can still be expressed with a single digit.

It was January 1990, scant days after the close of my second Dickens Play, that I first enrolled in Broadway Middle School. There were even those amongst my tormentors there who’d backdropped me in Fagan’s gang on stage, no doubt eager to relive their portrayed jealousy in a real setting. They didn’t hold the Dickens Play eleven months later, but I probably wouldn’t have had the heart for it again anyway. I’d been a little too tempest-tossed in real life to reprise the innocent wonder of Oliver as he gets bounced around his own olders and wisers. Not long after, my voice began to change and I have never once been able to sing properly since. Somehow puberty took with it my ability to carry a tune, transforming my once angelic soprano into an uncomfortable between-range effort that fails to find true notes and always sounds like I’m making fun of myself.

I didn’t give up on acting completely, though it was also in 1990 when I settled on being a writer, the first career aspiration I acquired that didn’t shake after a few years. Indeed, I drifted through minor community theater efforts for the rest of my time in Oregon, culminating with my last known role, that of the father in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. Most of the humor in the play, or at least my scenes, revolved around my laid-back attitude foiling my intensely high-strung partner, the mother whose overbearing attitude leads to unending hijinks in the play. It was at the Catholic school where I spent seventh grade, Star of the Sea, and it was a fitting send-off being both a meta-play (most of it is, itself, about a play) and of course, about Christmas.

Somehow when I moved to Albuquerque, the acting bug had unbitten me. I took some theater classes, but most of my interest was from the creation end of the script, not its fulfillment. This of course culminated in writing the one-act Before They’re Allowed to Be Free, performed under co-direction with Fish twice to ultimately depressed audiences. This somehow was the last time I set foot in a theater to do something other than merely watch. It occurs to me that acting, like writing, is something one need not start young or succeed at young in order to do for the long-term. It has probably never occurred to me until the last couple days that I could just start this back up again. Sure, as a hobby at first, or maybe forever, but it’s something I loved and dearly miss. I think debate replaced it somehow, the performative and persuasive aspects finding coincidence in both events, but the intellectual leverage and lack of repetition (let alone face-painting) winning the day for the overtly competitive speaking. The competition probably didn’t hurt, either. One doesn’t exactly win in the theater, only run the risk of losing.

What this post was going to be about initially, somewhere a thousand words ago or so, was the other Christmas tradition I picked up, the only one that stuck from New Mexico and still sticks, in New Mexico, to this day. I parted ways with Christianity at the Catholic school, finding myself intimidated and even frightened by the historical behemoths of said faith in my new state when we moved here shortly thereafter. I couldn’t get over the cross as a figure of execution, the deification of Jesus as a misinterpretation of his very egalitarian and humanizing underlying message. Because of other religious experiences at Star of the Sea, I remained (as I do even now) inextricably faithful to God as a concept, but Christmas lost most of its force when the much-altered story of the birth of a good man no longer carried the significance of God’s one sacrifice to try to save us all. I don’t mean to get lost in parsing what I do and don’t believe from now until Christmas actually dawns this year, but it should be easy to see why the fall of Decembrist mythology carried with it a reduction in excitement about its 25th day.

Luminarias, however, recaptured my imagination. Like so many New Mexico traditions, including the Frontier and probably even green chile, I didn’t discover lumis at all until I’d been here a few years. I resisted assimilation into the local culture for a while, or maybe I was just really isolated. But once I started making luminarias, in mid-to-late high-school, I never wanted to stop. And each subsequent year, I’ve discussed breaking the personal record, expanding locations for the candlelit bags to glow, and part of this has always relied on the idea of actually laying out some lumis on the 23rd.

Though I’ve discussed this frequently, luminarias, in short, are a tradition on Christmas Eve designed to commemorate Mary & Joseph’s legendary search for a labor-friendly place of lodging. While there was famously no room at the inn, these humble sandwich bags of sand and a single lit candle each are meant to light the way of said couple along the walkways and up to the doorways of every participating home, as though to rewrite history and offer every house as the birthplace of a wayward child. It’s a beautiful custom, not just in the actual manifest visuals of breathtaking simplicity and charm, but in the retelling of the old story, in the offering up of hope and light and hearth to those who’ve lost their way or run into a patch of bad times. It still defies imagination that there are Christians of any stripe who believe in capitalism.

This year was that year, finally, when I had enough time in Albuquerque beforehand and enough planning to actually get everything ready to start laying out bags on the 23rd. Today. There was a bit of morning rain and we attended the funeral of a neighbor of my parents whose windblown display of lumis I helped salvage the winter of 2007. Like so many important ceremonies of our culture, it was hollow and empty, strangers to the deceased trying to proxy themselves into understanding her wishes and hopes with overused verses and platitudes. Despite the disappointment of the occasion, I was heartened later when the sun emerged and appeared triumphant, salvaging the day for layout.

It was after I got about 200 or so of the slated 610 for display settled in place, candlewicks erect and centered within each bag, that the raindrops returned. And they’ve persisted since, mangling bags and soiling sand and probably combining with wind to topple some of the display altogether. I won’t be able to survey the full extent of the damage until tomorrow morning, when I alight as per usual with dawn not only to lay out the arrangement but, this year, to repair the head-start I thought I’d gotten on the 24th.

We can’t outsmart the weather or the calendar. We can’t predict anything – this year appears perpetually determined to illustrate that for me. No matter what the script says, how many times we read through it and make alterations or amendments, what we’re doing on this planet is almost entirely improv. And everyone else, be they people or God or forces of nature, they’re improvising too. Maybe debate is a more fitting activity for these lessons of life than stage plays, since they better prepare one for the unpredictable twists and turns of existence, to say nothing of their often adversarial nature. At the same time, perhaps there’s more beauty in the theater, for, like any tradition, the order and predictability of the layout provides its own form of comfort. We love our old stories, be they of Jesus or Oliver or Tiny Tim, in no small part because they are so familiar and worn and we can find small differences in the nuances of one retelling or another.

In some form or another, I guess I have more stories yet to tell, be they old or invented. But for now, I have to get 200 new bags and start folding all over again, hoping all the while for dry skies and wet eyes on the morrow.

I’ve made it pretty clear this year that I will neither be sending nor receiving gifts for Christmas or associated holiday seasons, though I’m still deliberating about sending out a New Year’s Letter. On the one hand, it’s a tradition that I started with Emily in 2003; on the other, it’s one that I was well more enthusiastic about and she basically pressured me into giving up. So there’s some opportunity to reclaim it. At the same time, what do I really have to send in a friendly greeting to everyone about the advent of 2011? “Thank God it won’t be 2010 anymore!”? An inspiring message, to be sure, but do people really need an 8.5×11 in their mailbox with such declaration? Not at all sure. Besides, it’s not a mystery to anyone who’d be on the list that this year was a setback. I could just send out an e-card or even post a holiday letter right here, where everyone’d inevitably see it anyway. But then isn’t most of the point that someone cares enough to go to the trouble of printing something out on actual paper, of signing their name, of finding the address of their friends? So, yeah. Nothing is simple these days.

So despite my moratorium on gifts, largely borne of exhaustion at the idea of giving and horror at the accumulation incumbent in receiving, I went and bought myself a big ol’ new toy this week, which arrived today on a Budget Rent-a-Truck masquerading as a FedEx delivery vehicle. It’s what I’m using to write this very post, a Dell Inspiron laptop that is my first ever computer of the portable variety. I don’t really need it, which begs the question of why I went out and spent ~1% of my net worth on it. There were a lot of micro-factors, including a desire to become familiar with post-XP Windows operating systems (while not having to rely on them, thank you trusty desktop!), a desire to utilize streaming Netflix movies while not trying to use my office chair like a couch, and a desire to be able to write in places that are not my apartment. None of them singularly compelling, but in combination enough to make an interesting case, especially when my misperception that any decent laptop cost at least $850 had been so roundly dispelled. This one was less than $500, including taxes and shipping.

I’m not intending to make it my primary computer, which really gets me on my case about spending money like this for a backup computer at a time when I intend to be saving for some indeterminate future. At the same time, I haven’t bought a new computer in about 7 years, and that one cost about the same as this one. $750 a decade is probably a reasonable computer budget, especially for someone who uses theirs as much as I use mine. Plus it’s a little lift, sadly, to get a new toy. I say sadly because I truly wish I were immune to the American-instilled pleasures of having a new material item to play with. But I am honest enough to admit that it gives me a little thrill, that it’s fun to explore and learn, that I enjoy the tactile pleasures of the shiny o-bespeckled base and cover. Am I nervous as all get-out that I will tire of using the keyboard which, although not bad for a laptop, is still annoying? Sure. Or that if I spill something in this keyboard, the whole computer is wrecked, something I’ve long criticized about laptops? Of course. But hey. Life is unpredictable. Might as well take some chances when the impulse strikes. And, y’know, it doesn’t do grievous harm or something.

Meanwhile, New Mexico continues to be a really mixed bag. I’m loving the food, splurging additionally to stuff myself with rellenos, enchiladas, and burritos. I continue to read a lot, now about a third of the way through John Irving’s behemoth Until I Find You. I can’t tell if he’s writing it absurdly simply to prove a point of some kind or if he really was always a very simple writer and I didn’t notice amidst his really engaging plots like Owen Meany or Widow. Maybe I’ve been reading too much Pynchon and DeLillo and Russian lit lately, but this work is coming off like a third grade composition. Maybe he’s just lost it as a writer. Nevertheless, it’s entertaining in the lurid way that most Irving pieces are. And I’m sure it will be ultimately convoluted and heartbreaking, so there’s that to look forward to.

Now that I have my laptop, I might move forward with the ambiguously talked-around quiz project that was laughably short of launching before I left NJ, despite my ambitious claims to the contrary. Of course, we’re also in the full throes of luminaria season, which gets going in earnest tomorrow as I take the 600 folded bags and start filling them with sand to be stored in the garage. My ambition was to place them a day early (the 23rd) – something I’ve often talked about but never actually followed through with for one reason or other. But they’re now predicting rain that entire day, meaning it’ll have to be another dawn-to-dusk marathon layout on the 24th, as per usual. And that’s assuming the rain doesn’t start to impinge on the actual display day. Now that I’ve got a camera built into the laptop, I even toyed with the idea of making a “How to Make Luminarias” video, but I probably won’t have the energy. At least the rate at which projects occur to me is steady, even if my inertia is larger than normal.

This has wound up being a rather prosaic post. Blame the latent materialism, blame John Irving’s low-vocab influence. I had more poetic efforts in mind last night amidst the lunar eclipse and the solstice. But after lying down on the rooftop for the better part of half an hour it was too cold to persist. By the time I went back out in search of a reddened orb, it was blockaded entirely by clouds, the world hemmed in from the astronomical convergence. It almost brought me to tears, and not mostly because I was sad to miss out on a direct visual of one of the most photographed events of 2010. The moon does funny things to people. It tilts the tides unseen within us all.

I’m about halfway through my month in Albuquerque. Up till now, almost all of the time has been with family. Much more of the time to come will be with friends. These twin pillars continue to radiate the import of this place for me, whatever toys I bring or hold, whatever meaning I ascribe to its tasty food and haunted corridors. In the end, as always, it’s about the people. The luminarias, laptops, and lunches don’t hurt. But it’s about folks. That’s all we are in the end.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Before the Snow | During the Snow

The summers I was 14 and 15, I spent intense three-week sessions at the Center for Talented Youth (CTY) at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The program was designed to augment the studies of languishing “gifted” kids scattered in normal middle- and high-school routines and give them an outlet for their overactive intellectual interest through taking college(ish)-level courses in an actual college environment. The larger point of the program, and the one I probably enjoyed the most, was the social element – throwing a bunch of bright nerdy youngsters together to meet each other and feel less lonely amidst summers that might otherwise be spent reading alone or trudging through some mindless job. Indeed, it was at CTY that I first danced with a girl (outside of a play performance, at least) and where I was first introduced to Diplomacy, which I then promptly imported to my own batch of regular-season bright nerdy fellows back in Albuquerque.

There were other dancing girls at Dickinson those summers, ones I would usually only see periodically and mostly picking at their cereal bowls during crack-of-dawn breakfasts at the cafeteria. CTY had a strict lights-out policy at some absurdly early hour like 10 PM (it may have been 11, or it might have even been 9:30 on weeknights). They checked for flashlights and militantly patrolled the halls. And while I bitterly resented the requirement to sleep far more than I normally would (I was already down to 4-6 hours a night and, by the second summer, pulling all-nighters periodically), I did appreciate that the schedule forced me out of bed at 5 or 6 in the morning so I could take a shower long before anyone else was up. Being housed in dorms, these summers were my first brush with communal bathrooms and I was seriously unprepared for the kind of familiarity and camaraderie implicit in such confines. After all, I’d always gone home after baseball games rather than face the horrors of the long row of uncurtained showers. There was a perfectly good shower at home. Dickinson’s showers were not so devastatingly unprivate, but the idea of even appearing in a bathrobe or trying to change while wearing one in front of other people was overwhelming to my modest early teenage sensibilities.

Thus I was done with showers by 6:30 at the latest and found myself in the unlikely scenario of being awake to see one of the only phases of the day I routinely missed during the rest of my life. Breakfast opened at 7:00 sharp at the cafeteria and many were the mornings that I leisurely waltzed up the brick walk from the dorms to the student center, breathing fresh dawn air and watching the sun’s first glimmers through trees and feeling pure and whole about the opportunity that life itself provided. Only in the euphoria of paper-laden all-nighters in late high-school and early college did I find such similar bliss of first light hitting the world, of being so alive while the rest of the world rested. I remembered talking with Gris at some point during college about how he felt sort of queasy if he was ever awake when most of the surrounding society was asleep, that he felt out of balance with the universe. To me, it’s always been just the opposite. When the world is silent, the mind comes alive. See?

So I would get to the cafeteria, inevitably a little too early, to find myself in the tiny line leading to the fading brown double-doors that held one of the best breakfast spreads I’d ever encountered. It was wasted on most of my cohorts, of course, those attending the ballet camp of indeterminate origin that shared the campus during those summers. Indeed, exactly three groups held regular camps at Dickinson in 1994 and 1995 while I was there – the ballerinas (who we lovingly called “rinas”), us, and the Washington Redskins. It was like some poorly constructed joke or an ironic attempt at diversity by the deans of the school. Tiny high-school aged female ballet students, enormous burly adult football players, and average mid-to-high-school prodigies. Grace, brawn, and brain. Small, large, and medium. Female, male, and mixed (or for the most part, more accurately, sexless). Those who refused to eat, those who ate everything, and those in the middle.

As the doors flung back at 7:00 to reveal eggs, potatoes, waffles or pancakes, breakfast meats, a cereal bar, and countless fountain-sprung beverages, one couldn’t help but wonder whether the intent of the deans had merely been to evenly space the burden on the cafeteria staff. Not only were the rinas generally disinclined to eat food, but it was clear that the dawn rush of undersized dancers relished the competition of who could eat less in front of the others. No football players ever saw the doors open at 7:00 and I was generally one of one to three representatives of CTY. But the rinas usually streamed in that early, maybe under the theory that failing to sleep would encourage weight-loss or perhaps their program began earlier than our classes (it must have). And while I loaded up on hearty American breakfasts, they rushed the cereal bar for underfilled bowls with spritzes of skim milk, tiny portions of delicate fruit, or sometimes just the beverage tray of juice a la carte. Smug looks were exchanged and indifferent blank stares as it gradually became clear to me that their respective undereating was as much for show as for function.

Occasionally I would wax eloquent about my early-morning eating habits and persuade one of my friends at CTY to rise at dawn’s first salvo to join me for the meal. I actually enjoyed the solitude of it at times, but solitude gets wearing, especially for an only child ensconced in a summer program to remind him that he is not alone. While I prevailed upon many classmates to join me at least once, I think few to none ever made a repeat visit to the pre-7 line at the cafeteria doors. No doubt a handful were lured by the promise of unfettered visibility of dainty rinas, already suited up in their skin-tight attire, only a few throwing a slovenly sweatshirt over the top. No doubt this was a competitive aspect of the breakfast display as well. There was virtually no fraternization between rinas and CTYers, and mutual contempt ran high. Sometimes an ambitious older experienced CTY male (CTY was capped at 16) would attempt interaction and there were even rumors of one or two rendezvous, but most of my friends were content to look from a safe distance. Me, I never much saw the appeal. I was certainly noticing girls by that point (I’d been noticing them for about ten years, truth be told), but the squat taut bodies and lifeless sneers were not particularly my style. Mostly I was fascinated by their social groupings and birdlike hierarchies, and occasionally was drawn in by the kindred loner who (always sweatshirted) would linger with a walkman or a book and mostly stare into space unegotistically while chewing slowly and thoughtfully.

We were cruel to the rinas in our own conversations – everyone gathered at roughly the same time for lunch and we’d chuckle about their haughty prima donna attitudes and empty plates. We had no inklings of the pressure they must be under, oblivious to the depth of others’ plights in the way that even brainy young teenagers inevitably are. There were the more sage among us who would speak philosophically about bodily drive and the need for artistry and how our own pursuits of mental fitness were undoubtedly superior. Some who would jest about trying to convert a random rina to the more intellectual pursuits, which inevitably devolved into a gag about what part of their pursuits they were really after. I would ponder the table-corner loners and shudder at the idea of approaching one for so much as borrowing the salt, let alone a conversation.

I saw “Black Swan” with my father last night, a movie ostensibly about ballerinas. To say it was my first contact with ballet since the summer of ‘95 would be gross exaggeration, but much of the movie served as a time machine, teleporting me to the quiet breakfast air of exactly half my life ago. The film itself is brilliant, a crushing examination of the drive for perfection and the pains and power of artistry in a seedy, practical world. Darren Aronofsky has had my attention since “Pi” and while the subject matter of “The Wrestler” left me unwatchably cold, I have great esteem for both “The Fountain” and “Requiem for a Dream”, both first watched in the last year or so. As can be expected in his films, there are moments that are profoundly unsettling and uncomfortable. No matter how old one gets, watching sex scenes on a big screen next to one’s father never gets easier. But we were both able to agree that the film was a triumph by the starkly contrasting credits.

Much of the examination of the movie resembles the same examinations we used to make from three cafeteria tables away, with varying degrees of compassion, about the impact of the art on the artists. How could one live on a quarter-grapefruit (a half-eaten half) a morning, especially when one was about to put one’s body through unbelievable torment? We had no visibility into the condition of the rinas’ feet from looking over our heavily laden trays that summer, but “Black Swan” spares little in its stark displays. We never turned the camera inward in those discussions, asking whether four mandated hours at the library each day were truly necessary, or what impact being openly intelligent might have had on our social progress. Although, of course, our physiological health was largely untouched by a commitment to college-level coursework… we could eat what we wanted without reprisal. Although no doubt many of the girls among us felt disproportionate pressure to stay slim with the already glaring “strike” against their social standing of high intelligence.

What’s amazing about “Black Swan” is the disconnect between the artist’s personal vision of perfection/accomplishment and the vision of everyone around her. Everyone else has their own theory about what will provide a leg up for her performance and ability, and while she dabbles in each suggestion, she ultimately crafts her own ideal solution to the problem of how to find flawlessness in performance. And while the conclusion, which I will not here spoil, is shocking to the allegedly objective eye we try to watch with, it is undeniably a form of perfection unanticipatable and unexpectable. In exceeding the bounds of what we could dream of, it reaches a nirvana of unassailability that provides true transcendence.

Which helps inform the journey of any artist or performer or just striving person in the long road of their life. And this, of course, takes me back to my own struggles, both of late and of yore, and one of the greatest pieces of writing I have ever encountered, both in its own twirling perfection and for informing me about my own path. The story is “Hommage a Bournonville” by Peter Hoeg, which appears in his brilliant collection Tales of the Night. I first read it in the hurried boxed-up finals week of my second sophomore semester at Brandeis, nestled between thin detentes between myself and both my roommate of that year and my only girlfriend of that year, both patchings-up that were frail and destined not to last. While both people had headline-level impacts on the awful nature of that year that almost drove me from college (at least temporarily, though it probably would’ve been permanent), it was an anniversary e-mail from the most significant of ex-girlfriends that drove me to the initial brink that dark annum. No doubt that interaction and the fallout of what followed were heavy in my mind as I spun page after page in awe.

Through the magic of my extensive public record-keeping efforts, I can know that it was the fifth of May 2000 that I first read the story and the fifteenth of June eight years later when I anointed the piece as the second best short story of all-time. You should go read it now, on page 154 of that file. But if you don’t, you should know that the centerpiece of the story is, of course, ballet.

The story is about ballet about as much as “Black Swan” is, about as much as this post is, which is to say entirely and not at all. It is as layered and multifaceted as both, a story within a story within a story, much of the narrative embedded in a third-person retelling of an autobiographical story to a second party described within what is, itself, a short story written by another author who, at some point in his life, really was a ballet dancer. And the story, like the movie and what you are reading now, is mostly about art. About the sacrifices people make for it, about striving for perfection within its unforgiving but paradoxically flexible confines, and about how love or life itself weave and bend within the treacherous passages left for them by the self-demanding artist. It is hard now to truly talk about what is most relevant about these pieces without spoiling them mercilessly, without ruining their ends and conclusions, and yet to navigate even those waters while still enabling you to finish this post and then see and read is perhaps my own struggle with perfection at this very moment.

The point, it is probably though perhaps not safe to say, of “Hommage a Bournonville”, of “Black Swan”, is that love itself and even perhaps sexual feelings in the first place, are tools with which grand artistry can be crafted. They are implements of scouring pain and visceral sensation, they have unmatched power to provide release and tension, outlet and bottling up, strife and chaos. And when the artist can examine these feelings, without flinching or turning away, as mere tools in the bag of life for creating the grand performance, the ideal artistry, it is then that the artist simultaneously flirts with perfection and madness. What person in their right mind would choose an artistic acme, be it on stage or on page, over a happily fulfilled life of love? None. And yet, there is an argument for it, no? There is an argument to be made that living and loving is commonplace, mundane, the march of the masses, while true artistic genius requires putting such temptations in their place.

It is dangerous territory to contemplate, for sure, especially as someone who has, despite its alleged mundanity, always placed love first in line. But in reading and rereading “Hommage”, in watching “Swan”, it is clear to me that the opportunity of heartbreak, especially this continual and renewed heartbreak I now face, offers consolation prizes in the form of artistic expression. These prizes, as they always have, seem hollow and shallow and pale to me, but it is only in understanding their insufficient nature that I can truly feel the feelings necessary to make the whole project work. It’s like a game I’ve long played with the universe and found important – one can have faith that everything will work out in the end, but as soon as one resigns one’s fate in that way, takes the path of those who replace medicine or decision-making with prayer, then one invalidates the deal and submits to the only path of possibility for things not working out in the end. That the rules for the game are that one must play it sincerely and react accordingly. One must be devastated by losses and setbacks, not winking at the camera (wherever it may be) and nodding that things will ultimately be for the best, but collapsing in the knowledge that they will never again recover. And only by doing that, by feeling it to its fullest extent, can one enact that strange moral strings of the universe that preserve real hope.

Which makes one start to wonder to what extent life itself is a performance, that existence in this strange backwards planet is itself rigged for artistry and beauty. That what captivates us about ballet and makes said dance such a conduit for grand metaphor of screen and word is its resemblance to life itself. That in standing on tippy-toes and flailing effortlessly and yet exactly, we all see ourselves and the eternal struggle to both let go and be precise in our deeds. And the judgment the ballerina fears may reflect the same we dread in our own lives. Will our existence remain in the shadows, unnoticed? Will we fall at the moment of our grandest opportunity? Will we prioritize base concerns like eating or sleeping or laughing with friends over the highest calling of our otherwise mundane existence?

And what role pain? What role do the pitfalls and pratfalls of physical and emotional scarring have in shaping who we are, how we will perform, what we will be remembered for? No doubt the high emotions of a ballet like “Swan Lake” or “La Sylphide” are meant to illustrate the profoundest impact of love, especially love taken or unfulfilled, on our very lives. To what extent is it more important to illustrate such impacts for others than to live them oneself? Is every artist a martyr? Is martyrdom, emotional or literal, itself what enables artistry? Are those tapped for greatness in dance or writing or filmmaking merely those who have, by accident or unluck, endured more than the rest of us? Can it be shaped or crafted? Or is it merely those who see their almost universal pains and losses as opportunity who have the advantage, who get the toehold on explaining what we all know in the bottom of our arrhythmic hearts?

It seems that if I make it as a writer, I will have to thank the two people (so far!) who have hurt me the most, for bringing me a depth of feeling more oceanic than all the experiences in the rest of my three decades of life. Neither were dancers of any kind, unless one can classify their devastating twirls of deceit and betrayal, their flowering lack of confidence and trust, as a form of ballet. I have been known to say I could not have found pacifism or believed it as thoroughly, were it not for my life-threatening experiences at Broadway Middle School, four years before Dickinson. Is all this meant merely to bring me skills and understandings that only brushes with the harshest of feelings can bring? It is a cute and convenient story, and one that doesn’t wash most of the time, that sounds profoundly like an excuse, a juice-squeezer desperately trying to churn through a mountain of lemons with gallons of artificial sweetener. But I see “Black Swan”, I read “Hommage a Bournonville”, and I have to wonder. To remember, to feel, and to wonder again.

As Ani DiFranco put it in her own song about swans, “I don’t care if they eat me alive. I’ve got better things to do than survive. I’ve got a memory of your warm skin in my hand. I’ve got a vision of blue sky and dry land.”

Artistic vision and triumph in the face of the gravest of threats. Pain unending, manifest in visions of blood and wrathful vengeance. To what extent is this wishful thinking, the efforts of a poetic mind to make meaning of unthinkable agony? And to what extent is it real, true, the nature of beauty and redemption in a warped world unsure of its own purpose?

A visual follow-up to Before the Snow…

Living room in blue.

Shed a little light on the subject.

Fire in an empty theater.

Dis mantle.

Nesbitt waits patiently…

…grabs for the burrito…

…and wonders why the burrito was taken away.

The first snow sticks!

It’s pretty flaky.

Quick accumulation.

Like a real lodge.

Our work here is done.

Five times larger than the leading brand of snow, and twice as reflective.

Makin’ tracks.

Haunted tree.

The back deck.

They were pining for snow.

Gateway to another world.

A rabbit, a chicken, and a bowl walk into a snowstorm…

The tips of winter.

Almost Dickensian.

Table for four.

Not only did we wind up with less snow than predicted (it stopped only an hour or so after I was out running around taking these pictures), but it mostly melted by midday today. Albuquerque rarely stays cold enough to keep snow around for days at a time, unless we get one of those stalled-out swirls of precipitating cold air. Like so much of life, it was fun while it lasted…

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

The conflagration crackles in the cast-iron fireplace. The tabby lounges on the table, soaking up the radiant warmth from its glow at a safe, unsingeworthy distance. Later he will rise and stretch, his yawn revealing sharp fangs that have never known ferocity before he attacks the bamboo poker with reckless vigor, just less than oblivious of the looming burn risk overhead. It will pop anew as the flame licks previously untouched bark and the feline will scramble away, only to return when the noise has subsided.

There is a man there, too, or a boy perhaps, given his environs and their eerie pseudo-familiarity. Thirty going on thirteen, the reverse of the well-worn axioms of his youthful sagacity. “I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now.” Maybe all the artists age in reverse, Benjamin Buttons in search of infantilism and the birth of all things. As though the roots of creativity were somehow planted in wisdom but only understood in the aged fruition of the wry vigors of taking life less seriously. Alas, he is not an artist now, or yet – only a dreamer.

His hands are waxy with the residue of brown paper sandwich bags, a numbing subtle feel that exaggerates itself once noticed, all but to the point of putting the nimblest brittlest of limbs to sleep. These limbs have touched much today in their quest to keep the house of his parents dry – brooms and cement mix and the drops of cold rain whispering the promise of snow in its harsh icy decline. The fingers have come gloved and ungloved, pocketed and unpocketed, clutched at hair in his face and tissue before it as he navigated the warm-cold-warm-cold confines of a day on winter’s verge. It is the house of his parents he has helped protect against the worst of the dripping leaks around the edges, but it is not the house of his youth or even his upbringing. By the time he was here, he’d already been brought up, already begun the joyful decline into first real childishness.

The sandwich bags are the first step of a worn tradition, one he normally anticipates all year. They are to be filled with sand and a candle each, propped just so at just such a distance on just such a night to light the way for wayward tourists and reborn children in search of their soulful expression of a red-numbered day on the calendar. This whole calendar year has gone red for the man-boy, the red of debt and blood and the ink of insufficient penmanship. Whole months struck from the annum like typographical travesties, or perhaps just awkward sentences, whose denotation could no more warrant full expression than the merely self-describing awk. As though whatever professor were grading this set of days couldn’t be bothered to write in complete words, let alone sentences.

It is not Strunk & White’s manual which now concerns the man-boy, any more than he can fret about the precise length of the lip of each bag as it is folded outward, over, amidst the retribution of wax and the febrile protestations from the glass-faced hothouse. The tabby refuses to settle while the surprisingly boisterous lunchsacks meet their sequential fates, beginning their transformation from would-be tuna-and-Ruffles containers to full-fledged bringers of joy. The triangular ears twitch and start with each new vessel, ultimately finding solace in a clawing and half-biting into the latest foldee, as though perhaps said fish-wich were still to be procured through sheer grit and imagination. His look of affront from being batted away speaks volumes to a sense of cool entitlement that few outside the feline race can express.

Others try, though. They feel deserving of so much, satisfied by so little. The man-boy himself cannot count himself apart from this judgmental generalization, knowing that what he asked proved too much in a scarlet flash-flood of useless days. And now he sits calmly, picking up the pieces as though manifest in each new light brown ex-tree, dexterously processing them in a way his thoughts refuse to bend. He has been down many mental roads these last few days, raised voice and lowered it, cried to the heavens and sobbed to the winds. But not today. Today there is calm and the whispered promise of overnight snow.

He will wait for it, watchful, like a forlorn lover awaiting news he knows may not be good. Staring out the window between foldings like his thirteen-year-old self on a birthday where miraculous frozen water fell from the sky on a beach town three lifetimes past. Like a man who knows the adage but stares at the gas-fired pot all the same. Like a man whose time is long and his road is unseen. From time to time, he tears himself away to converse with his parents, harbingers of his future as all parents are, or to check the retoasting of his jacket and hat for the fateful moment when the sky turns white.

Tarry now. Wait with him a while. Wait to see his smile rise, his cheeks bloom, his eyes crinkle at each edge for a new reason. Look now, for then he will be out the door.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

There seems to be a directly proportional (or close) relationship between pain and learning. Or at least challenge and growth. Our muscles exist as a metaphor for the way we are supposed to advance ourselves. With the tearing of new wounds comes the opportunity for new advances. Now muscle tears may be more acceptable or reasonable than psychic rips. The paradox persists that even though pain is an opportunity for growth, it’s no reason to actually incite violence or cause pain to others. A reason to not despair at receiving such pain, however, it may be.

In any event, it’s been a heck of a ride lately. My Dad would probably claim that there are larger forces in the universe that made, say, the 13th a really difficult day and today much better. Maybe so, maybe so. But I like to think we all have a little something to do with our lives as well. And so I present some haphazard collections of platitudes that I’ve gleaned or reinforced in an intense two days:

• I made the right decision in staying in Jersey for this year. I had long suspected this, but this trip has fully confirmed that New Brunswick is/was preferable to the available alternatives for the annum. This is very exciting, because people often make the right or good decisions and never get confirmation of their correctness. I’m lucky to have such early affirmation.
• Teaching something is like a mantra or a prayer that reminds the teacher of the value of whatever one is teaching. Conveying something thus has almost as much value for the one conveying it as those hearing it for the first time. This also makes teaching something of a religious, or at least philosophical, exercise.
• Thomas Pynchon just isn’t very good. He’s clever and occasionally hilarious, but I suspect a great deal of his success comes from incoherently talking above the heads of most of his reviewers, thus being received as brilliant for surpassing his capacity to be understood. I remember the same principle applying to some bafflingly successful debaters back in the day. Also probably applies to a number of philosophers. The one redeeming trait he has is capturing the sentiment of creeping universal paranoia that those who are paying attention to the universe may get from time to time, but there are ways he could do this without sacrificing cogency.
• Computers have gotten a lot cheaper lately. Thanks, Recession.
• It’s good to be impulsive sometimes.
• It’s often easier to feel good about life when the weather is terrible outside. There’s a passage in the middle of Watership Down about why humans like winter when other animals don’t – because they get to feel safe and secure and insulated from the dangers the season of bad weather brings. To expand this idea, it may often be easier to feel good in opposition to something than in favor of it.
• Not just because of the above, Seattle is starting to look really promising for 2011-2012.
• When in doubt, reach out.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

My month-long return to Nuevo Mexico is off to a bit of a rough start. I just can’t seem to get in an emotional groove I feel good about. Someone or other told me the first holiday season would be especially challenging, but I really had no idea. And then I remember how difficult it was just to sort through ornaments. Sheesh. The way things are going, I’m starting to believe that I need to spend mid-2011 and thereafter in a new town I’ve never lived in. Or visited. With all-new stuff. Yeah, that’s going to happen.

Anyway, here’s some things that are all-new and might not even be depressing. A couple shots from Albuquerque, but most of these are scenes from yesterday’s trip with the parents to the Salinas National Monument, home of several old missions on the east side of the Manzano Mountains south of ABQ. They’re pretty neat, even if they do represent Catholic co-option of native religion, culture, and people. So it goes.

Abandoned apartment building in downtown ABQ – they never finished building it when the boom went bust.

I could swear that part of the Senior Project film that Gris did with Bay & Toby was filmed in this back alley. Or that we were initially going to film some of my homeless-man scenes there but then shifted to another nearby locale. It’s funny what being back in one’s hometown can do to the memory.

The iconic towers of the ABQ skyline.

Nesbitt L’Orange, my parents’ relatively new cat.

Trains!

Abo, the first of the three missions.

Big sky.

Abo meets big sky.

Ruins.

Long wall.

They don’t make contrast like that everywhere.

A tree grows in the ruin.

Light and shadow.

The horse we rode in on.

The door is ajar.

Almost like Nebraska.

Mesa with tracks.

Best sign ever.

Cactus in bloom.

Arch with parents.

This is Gran Quivira, whose color is more traditional stone than the traditional mission color.

Room with a view.

A view of the room.

My father, gesticulating wildly.

View of many rooms.

View of the basement.

Quorai, the last of the three.

Church in state.

Slice of sky.

Sunset within.

Glorious ruin.

Ground level.

Contemporary interruption.

Almost Aztec.

A little bit of sol.

Runs down the hallway…

Silhouette.

My favorite window.

The moon, incoming.

The sun, outgoing.

There is something afoot in America right now. It’s hard for me to focus on it right now, because much is going on in my life, but I can’t just overlook what’s going on out there altogether. It’s important. It’s something that all conscious Americans, no matter how besieged by personal challenges and busy schedules and the idea of holidays incoming, ought be paying at least some attention to.

Obviously, part of it relates to WikiLeaks. And part of it relates to the recent Bernie Sanders filibuster, a heroically triumphant 8-hour monologue on the state of the nation. It relates to the Obama administration uniting with the Clinton family and Republicans to decry both of these influences, to convince the American people with rhetoric centered around fear, national security, and the lowest common denominator, that Julian Assange, Bernie Sanders, and those who believe in them are out to destroy the country.

It’s easy to get excitable in a time like this. It’s easy to look at this and say that in the next few weeks and months, the way America chooses to react to these phenomena will determine the entire fate of the country and its place in history. It’s easy to say that this will make the difference between the US being a force for good, a modicum of the potential and promise it used to represent to the world and the US floundering in corporate-controlled fearmongering, drowning in a stench of its own bated breath and the terror of its own shadow.

These are exaggerations. The reality is most likely somewhere in the middle. That no matter whether we embrace Assange, Sanders, and friends, or reject them, the country will likely persist in some compromise between its better and worst aspects for some time to come. Indeed, the language of consequences and sweeping change is unlikely to ever manifest in the way that most of its advocates would represent. Nevertheless, very important things are implied by these decisions and reactions that we have to these influences, regardless of whether there are sweeping or even visible consequences or not. If nothing else, it matters for our own sake. The way we can sleep at night. The way our hearts and minds align with their better judgment, their hopes and dreams or, more often, their dreads and fears.

What Assange and Sanders and those supporting them are trying to do is to illustrate how far from reality America’s self-perception has fallen. Many would call them anti-American, and in a way they are. Because being “American” has come to imply a self-denial and a self-delusion that would make most historic figures of ego and bluster blush. Being American has transcended a belief in the spirit of working hard and espousing freedom to go all the way to believing in a divinely inspired righteousness that wipes away the logic of any potential counter-argument that dares to challenge American supremacy and impunity. Reactions to critiques on America are all too often rabid, fueled by gibberish about terrorism and people who hate us for the sake of hating us. There is no evidence that these horrific vices and threats exist, nor that they are gaining strength, nor especially that they have anything to do with the sweeping but sober critiques offered us by WikiLeaks and America’s only Socialist lawmaker. They are paper tigers, made of the same stern substance as the Communists who were about to bring down the country during McCarthyism. They are the eternal enemy that America’s corporations and conservatives use to foment jingoistic rage and anger akin to the Two-Minutes Hate.

But Assange and Sanders are not anti-American, not truly. They do not want to bring down the country, only its traditional conduct of business. Both of these people and those who espouse their values are embracing truth and rationality to try to get America’s people to reclaim the mandate long offered them, to take responsibility for their own governance and the role of their country in the rest of the world. They want Americans to stop, to read, to listen, to lengthen their attention-spans and go beyond blind acceptance of the currently popular American “values” of secrecy, wealth disparity, theft, greed, and fear. And it is important to recognize who is complicit with these values.

I’ve long debated with friends of all sorts about the role of Obama in the struggle of hearts and minds that Americans now face. I’ve talked to them about health-care and Obama’s almost immediate abandonment of the public option. I’ve talked to them about Gitmo, about the wars, about treatment of detainees and the use of robot-assassin planes. But whatever you think of all these things, Obama has made his stance clear and transparent in light of both WikiLeaks and tax breaks for the insanely rich. Obama has condemned a call to transparency in the conduct of American foreign policy. Obama has levied the most fearful of fearmongering against his own party’s members who dare to question the latest round of tax breaks for the insanely rich. He has threatened that an America under the influence of Assange and Sanders will be unable to protect itself from terrorism or the horrors of a double-dip recession. The man who stood before us two years ago and said “We are the people we have been waiting for” now seems to have no other rhetoric than “We are afraid of our own shadow and ought be lest we give in to the rhetoric and perspective of fear”.

Being this fearful and terrified about everything in America and its political spectrum carries the same problems that it does for any given individual in their own lives. Whatever values or hopes or possibilities one is hoping to protect oneself for are already lost and compromised in the process of living in this kind of terror. The goal of terrorism is not to kill people. It’s not called slaughterism or deathism. It’s to promote fear. It’s to promote such a grip of fear that people dare not do anything but blindly trust their hypocritical government to hide all possible information about its conduct from them. The terrorists, if they exist, need not initiate a single additional event for a very long time. The goal is complete and fulfilled already at the point at which we all walk around in such pervasive fear and make such extensive commitments to others in order to prolong fear.

Similarly, the perspective of fear that weighs down our economy has led people to trust the financial experts who created the disaster in the first place with every possible decision subsequent. Not only does this equate to fearing for the fate of the hens to the point where the foxes are left in charge of all caretaking of said hens, but it entitles the foxes to concoct elaborate new schemes of de-henning the surrounding counties and states. Since the initial decline of the recession, the wealthiest sector of America has made a fortune while most of the country has languished in unemployment and increasing poverty. Those who hold on to their jobs do so in the fear of losing hours, wages, or competitive advantage if they fail to work harder and longer for the same or less money. And the allegedly progressive President wants these same corporate barons who are fleecing the country and profiting to continue to avoid paying additional taxes while all Federal employees lack raises to even compete with inflation?

While I’d best not fall into the trap of exaggerating these few weeks and their role as a potential turning point, it is nonetheless an interesting test the hearts and minds of Americans are facing down. How many mirrors will meet with studied examination and sober reflection? How many will merely fall victim to a hurtling of rocks from those too angry at how they actually look to do anything other than shatter the messenger? That choice, like all choices, is up to you.

We can fear the glass like we fear our shadows and the visage of any stranger, friend or foe. We can run screaming from reality and put trust in authority figures, no matter how similar their tone becomes, because we like their particular alleged affiliation or the sound of their voice or the nationalistic rhetoric they employ. Or we can take our time, catch our breath, and ask ourselves some serious questions as prompted by those behind the glass. What exactly are we trying to get out of this life? Who precisely are we serving, and why? Is life truly intended to be a non-stop compromise of everything we claim to espouse? And if so, why do we claim to espouse those things in the first place? What role do sincerity, honesty, and being an example play, if any?

If we ignore too many would-be heroes, too many beacons against the trends of fear, we may not have forever to ask ourselves these vital questions.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

I am safely ensconced at the homestead in Albuquerque after arriving here late Tuesday. I have very mixed feelings about most everything, but it’s good to see the fam and their cat and get green chile and I’ve been able to walk a fair bit. Also reading quite a lot, which is probably about the most inspiring thing I do these days (when I’m not with the debate team, at least). Right now wading through the interminable frustration that is Tom Robbins, who weaves between brilliantly insightful and heavy-handedly immoral. It’s basically like reading a book co-authored by Gandhi and Ayn Rand.

I’m debating about whether to tag posts from Nuevo with a “From the Road” or not. I don’t think I traditionally do and I’m not really feeling like checking. In no small part because I’m writing this on my Dad’s Mac and Macs don’t have a right-click and that’s the function I’d normally use to check something like that. Otherwise I’d have to open a whole new window manually, which doesn’t sound like much, but you probably don’t know how existentially exhausted I’ve been feeling lately. It’s more the Mac than the exhaustion that accounts for the lack of Duck and Cover lately, but that ought soon be rectified since I finally found a viable free FTP program for the Mac. And I’m going to revert to handwritten dialogue, but would you rather have that or no Duck and Cover at all for a month? I’m sure your answers will vary.

I am at sea emotionally and mentally about most everything. I am torn between throwing myself into distracting projects like those vaguely intimated before I left Jersey and just committing myself to doing absolutely nothing for the time that I’m here. I am torn between trying to aggressively stretch myself out on the walking front and just taking it easy and using the confluence of relaxation and good food to put on a few pounds. I am continually overwhelmed by the magnitude of how different it feels to be back here in my new life circumstances. I was expecting it to feel restorative and resetting, but somehow it mostly feels anachronistic. Like I’ve calibrated a time machine very improperly and the rules of physics are battling it out for dominion over my fate. I could end up half-fused with an insect or wearing the billowy clothes of sixteenth century France. Most likely, I’ll just wind up confused.

It was snowing when I trundled down to the New Brunswick train station two days ago, towing identically colored turquoise luggage behind me, the larger ‘case with a busted wheel that I keep remembering to try to tear apart to minimize the degree of difficulty of its carriage. Nuevo seems in the midst of unseasonable warmth, the mercury transcending 60 today and reminding me of Balloon Fiesta falls. Maybe it’s just making its best sales pitch for me to move here a few months hence, though it should know that matching New Brunswick snowflake for snowflake would truly be its optimal effort. Maybe later. There’s plenty of time.

For the first time I’ve been in Albuquerque since the summer I wrote Loosely Based, I’ve got time. Lots and lots of time. There is no rush to decide anything, to do anything. Just to watch, listen, slow down. And spend time. I have a feeling I might not be any closer to any decisions on the other side of New Year’s. But for now, I can’t think about that. I can barely think about tomorrow.