Thursday, December 4, 2008

Reasons for being cold

I type tonight to pass the time. I'm waiting for later. I don't know what I'll be doing later. It just won't be now. My wrist hurts. Not as much as before but still there's some pain. My nails are too long. They are cracking and pitted on some of my digits. My lips are chapped and my scalp has an itch. It's cold inside. Maybe colder in here than out there, though, I'm still not sure how that's possible. Maybe it's the wood floors, or the uncovered window panes that make it seem like tundra conditions in my kitchen. I sit on the toilet and yelp. Cold seat on my seat. Still, there are colder places I could be. I keep my fingers moving on the keyboard. Circulation. If they sopt moving they might shrivelup into balls and then where'd we be? I can't feel my toes. I have socks on--not even cotton--and dry shoes. They aren't on feet that are walking, though, and that might have something to do with it. Again, circulation. Still, where would I go? I walk up and down stairs to move and to stay in the house. If I leave I'll be colder, I think. I'll want to walk to the Ship. I'll order neat whiskey, well and a beer. I'll drink and want to go home but won't want to as well. Instead I'll sit here tonight exercising my fingers. Sipping red wine. Laundry.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Thursday, September 11, 2008

I lay there neither awake nor asleep

A laptop computer can make quite a racket. After an hour of, say, idle time the laptop computer prepares itself for sleep. There’s a tiny fan that spins, and the laptop computer’s screen lights up. Little green lights blink as the computer quests for hibernation.

Before going to sleep I’m awake. Tired I start reading, I’m not tired enough to fall asleep on my own. I read for a while and my eyes became too heavy for the next paragraph. I turn off the reading lamp. Still not asleep, not awake, my mind continues reading the story. My eyes are shut, but sentences form as the novel goes on. I’m back in the book with next paragraph to make sense of. I’m flooded with words, dialog and detail. It's different.

If I turn the reading lamp back on to bring the laptop computer out of standby, I know outcome will not be the scene I’d seen (not read). The thoughts I just lost cannot be recorded and saved on the screen when I wake up.

I stop not reading and begin dreaming. In my dream I invent a way to connect my laptop computer to my subconscious. I want these thoughts to be there when I wake up like I typed them to sound true. My eyes are closed and I’m unable to write it down. An hour of idle time the computer turns itself to sleep mode.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

At the park today

"Did you see the ferrets?" the old woman at the park asked me looking back from the path she was walking on.

"I did."

"What did you dog think of them?"

Heidi is still on the leash I haven't removed it for fear of her chasing the ferrets which I saw when I entered the park. Also, I don't want Heidi jumping on this old woman who later tells me about her knee replacements and an old ski injury. "I didn't let her meet them."

"Oh, I had never seen a ferret before."

"No? But you recognized that they were ferrets."

"They told me. I asked." The friendly woman said.

Ferrets kind of scare me if you want to know the truth. I had one when I was younger. For a few days. I had to return it because we didn't understand each other. I knew it was a ferret, I mean, but I didn't know what to do with a ferret. It, conversely did nothing for me.

"What kind of dog is that?" isn't just the most common question I get walking Heidi but the one the old woman asked.

"Well, she's an Austrailian Shepard, Corgi mix." Is the best and most friendly answer I give to anyone and this woman.

"Ah, she has beautiful, intense eyes."

I've just heard that from a man at the school, next to the park. A man who paused right before the last word in the sentance. The two sentences he spoke to me.

That's a great (pause) eyes.

and

Have a nice (pause) night.

As if he was going to change what he wished me well at the last moment.

Walking with the woman I can't help to think of my grandmother, who is at home. We'd talk like this, sharing everything we could think of. I'm in no hurry to get rid of this company I'm with. And I think she enjoys it, too. "Have you lived by this park for a while?" I ask because I'm curious of this park I recently moved near.

"I used to live in an apartment near Reed, now I live over in Sleepy Hollow," she said or said some other apartment complex by name I wasn't familiar with. "I walk my neighbor's dog here every morning. I take her out because she lays in bed all day."

"Well that's nice of you to do," I said. "It's probably good for both of you."

It's nice to have for me to have an excuse to get up and out of the house to daily. This is the only time I've left the house this day. And not having the excuse to walk the dog I don't know if I would have at all, wouldn't be having this conversation that feels reminiscent of ones I've had with Grandma.

We walk on. "It's good for me to walk. I've had knee replacement, both knees, and I'm battling and dealing with an old ski injury," she told me. In high school the old woman skied at Timberline when it first opened. She loved it but broke her leg. After she recovered from that she started running with the men in her office (I didn't ask but was curious as to what she did) and that's how she wore her knees out.

"I'm going to walk this was," the woman said when we got to a bend at the top of the hill."

"OK, it was nice meeting you." I'm I'm left with Heidi to wonder if even though we didn't exchange names--just a couple of war stories--we did meet and it was nice.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Down and Out in Beijing

I joined the Olympics as a spectator. I caught what became a Fever. Soon, implanted in my head: BOM-BOM, BOM-BOM. Yes, I felt Phelps phenomenon. I was gay for Gay. Kobe, LeBron, together, No way.

I’ll watch what I can, I said, but then I felt nauseous, so I flushed with fluids . My fever lasted only a little longer than the 100 meter dash (9.96 seconds – Lighting Bolt!)

And just as quick as I got it, my fever is gone.

I became disappointed that the most exciting thing about these Summer Games was the achievement of a swimmer savant receiving more medals in one Games than anyone ever has—we won’t mention your DUI as long as you don’t mention anything larger in context to what it is you do: swim, down and back.

I realized, too, feverous in my obsession, I was like all other Americans, watching only Americans. We almost forget to realize that there are other countries in these Games, that there are other countries in this World. We’ve forgotten that there are other People living in other Places. We care only to broadcast U.S. The only colors we wish to watch on T.V. are red, white, and blue. And the only sports that we can watch are those that capture our attention in the time span of a few lengths of the pool. Further, the ones we dominate.

When I walked in on Bob Costas, Michael Phelps and Mark Spitz tri-copulating was I cured once and for all of my Olympic Fever. Gone was the sweltering inner temperature. No longer did my head pound the anthem BOM-BOM, BOM-BOM. I was done with these Games before they were over. I finished first.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Final Bolano - 2666

I read Bolano all the way up and down the Max line and bus lines—from home to work in time to get in by 8 and leave by 12; back down to a little café to eat a brunch of organic beef and eggs and to sit reading hunched over a little 2-top squeezed next to the kitchen, tapping my right foot as if it’s possessed and holding my head with both hands; back on the Max to home to pick up a forgotten item for the journey and then back downtown (I have to stow the book while I walk from the Max stop to the Union Station); then on to the north bound train where I commence to read halfway to Seattle with a brief pause to look out the window at a stop just north of Vancouver, Washington where a scrap processing plant sprawls, heaped with old car parts; wanting to take a picture but not wanting it enough, or in time, to get out the camera; making a quick note about the perspective of 2666.

It’s deep into the part about Archimboldi and I’m at turns floored, without suitable access to reference material (at times despairingly so), just lost, and throughout it all slightly awestruck. We obviously learn more about Archimboldi than do the reconditionally endowed scholars in section 1. Infinitely more. We go deep into the Reiter’s past and into the pasts’ of his literary touchmates and into the past revolutions that inspired and then ensnared or ensnarled or enshrined them. We go so deep that we marvel, or grit through, those passages that we can’t always bear to follow, but nonetheless keep hold of the wire and respect Bolano all the more for having inspired us to do so.

We meet up with Fercho, a Colombian cousin accompanied by his California fiancé Karen, and go to dine and then to spend the night at their cozy apartment. He’s a mad scientist sort who’s just taken his doctorate studying electromagnetic fields of marine organisms, and his newly promised who has just begun her PHd in Electrical Engineering. Her Spanish is improving less rapidly than his English. He raves about some Colombian dark chocolate we buy at an Asian grocery and she about the fresh caught Tuna salad for dinner.
We breakfast on arepas con mantequilla y queso con café bien hecho y jugo de naranja. On our way out we stop by Pike’s Place market and the Seattle Art Museum, which we rush through on a lucky free Thursday.

We take a bus across to the Canadian border. There is a delay with some spacey guy with the wrong documents who for a minute or so tries to pretend he’s deaf but than gives up the ruse in the face of the stern Canadian border guardswomen. I learn this after almost two hours via the bus gossip. During most of it I’m on the curb racing through revelation after revelation in the book. Then we are back on the bus and across the border into Canada, and pulling into the station as the final section of 2666 pulls the narratives together but not definitively so; or rather, in such manner that one—despite the length and intensity of the book—is half-tempted to pick it up and start all over again, but this time at the beginning of a randomly different section, to examine it a different way, aided or hindered by the previously unknown.

Monday, June 30, 2008

Blogging Bolaño 2666 6/29

Had to get a day away from 2666 most of the day, it was too sunny out for the dark stretches of the book. 'The Part About The Crimes' section (4)is drawing to an end and has been harrowing. I should make it through tomorrow and then start on sec. 5 p. 637 which I will not finish on that day but likely Tuesday, or more likely Wednesday on the train ride up to Seattle. We are leaving Portland in the afternoon and arriving in Seattle for dinner with Maya's cousin and probably Zabel. The next day we're headed to Vancouver to see my friend Virginia and hang for the weekend of the forth. We're not expecting any fireworks up there.

Blogging Bolaño 2666 6/28

Got a while further through Bolaño in the afternoon, though the insufferable heat sapped my initiative. The murders are really picking up in Santa Teresa, and a panorama of Mexican society emerges. From the crookedest cop to the simplest psychic, and through the jails, streets, bordellos and borders of México we go. Some gringos make appearances, though the preferred nomenclature is the ‘North Americans’; but the most numerous and saddest characters in 2666 are the young women.

Blogging Bolaño 2666 6/27 11:45 PM

He was at the bar reading like a maniac, getting caught up in the flow; sensing the texture and tone; feeling the cyclone structure spiraling out brutality, farce, sex, inchoate love-dreams; and aching out its eye a demand for intimate examination, in some sections practically tears as well; if only to feel a little human.

He was on page 512 and felt himself swirling down a giant drain, so large that those kinked hairs and dark fluids took on monstrous proportions, a familiar, filthy prelude to the inevitability of that dark tube at the bottom.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Blogging Bolaño 2666 6/26/08

Along the way into day three of this 2999 sprint, he carved out time for a little two-person asado o barbacoa, out in the little yard behind their triplex apartment house: that little patch of grass that neither their upstairs nor their basement neighbors seemed to pay much regard. They, he and Maia, had the little mini-Weber grill that had survived in Oregon before, during and after their time in Bogotá. Bogotá is only relevant because Maia grew up there, though truth be told government records can prove clearly, to her everlasting discomfort, her legal birthplace as Cali.
Maia was taking a rest while ‘the rake’ was marinating the ‘organic’ split-breasts, a steal for just over $6.09, in thick Petaluma red ale, fresh tarragon from his parents’ garden, a splash of olive oil, lemon pepper, lime-rind and salt on the kitchen counter. And while he divided the lines of coals on either side of the lop-sided, squat little cruddy black grillgnome and sprinkled them liberally with lighter fluid. His preferred method of achieving the desired grilling temperature (since the charcoals ought to be synthetic and mesquite-mashed) was to vigorously fan either side of the mounded coals with a broken-flat wheat cracker box. That particular brand of wheat cracker box he admired with utilitarian satisfaction, combining as it did equal parts flexibility and strength, not to mention the air displacement ratio coincidence apropos of the little rusted, busted down mini-Weber.
He sat out in the yard, buffeted occasionally by a clean, early summer wind. He read through his tome; an endless chronicle of fictional lives that though less-described, were often equally essential as our own.
This sort of dark, analytical, joyful, shivering novel existence struck him, as he watched the resplendent green foliage on the southern hill of the yard swing back and forth and tried to concentrate on the hollow sorrow of the wind chimes hanging under the stairs leading to the houses upper floor. How superior they must feel tramping about up there unfettered, he thought. This sensation struck him as logically as the dark flow of Bolano’s characters’ narratives, caught up as they were in upsetting yet not truly dire endeavors that one nonetheless feels building in the way every word and phrase is supposed to in a short story pushed to the shifty red limits, pushed outward by an ‘event’ the circumstances surrounding which are subject to strenuous daily debate. He got into his mind the scenes from Terry Gilliams’ film Brasil, in which terror and farce are pushed to the limits of absurdity: a place where suicide bombers and fine dining need not disturb each other provided that the ‘central bureaucracy’ keeps all its documents in order.
Being a bona fide bureaurcrat {he never could spell it properly}, his occupation felt phantom-like to him, as though—as he’d ready recently—a short course of mirror therapy might produce in him astounding results, seeing as how it had proved quite intriguing in the treatment of those whose brains had mal-functioned in the face of a shorted-out interpretation. ‘Just hit the right reset bundle and you can be cured by correction the expectation of a part that’s no longer ‘objectively’ there, by exploiting the image of the good brains’ reflection, allowing the previously atrophied side of the brain to unclench, declench and bench press a new realization of nothing. This seems to have happened to Liz Norton, the English professor in section 1 of 2666.
That’s why the phantom limb mirror treatment can’t be applied to those the most disturbed by a select few disorders. Those kinds of experiments minted not a few but at least seventeen documented cases of death or dire damage to the applicator {foot} etc. by the applicated. There were even cases posted on YouTube, before those got taken down by popular and legislative demand, showing grainy, muffled rampages.
‘It’s like watching fucking freddy cougar with shards of glass glued to his fists!’ one stoned adolescent had declared, the U-Tube video of his reaction quickly virating to the those in the know gawkers.
Back before, during the waiting part of the backyard BBQ for two, while she slept, he tended the grill and his book, the newly acquired coal design succeeding beyond expectations. Then they were inside and La Maita—looking stunning and sated after a long day of wall-painting at the perennially under-funded public media office on MLK—was raving about her roasted corn and he was devouring his chicken with two hands like a maniac. Mostly during the grilling process he had burned himself adjusting the food and wiping his greasy, black-flecked hands on his green corduroys and trying not to get any stain on the 2666, but at the same time absolutely drug into the story of the black magazine reporter who’s mother dies at the beginning of section 3 ‘The Part About Fate’. He heard the wind chimes again, blown to swinging by the warm gusting winds, and heard the meat sizzle and downed the rest of the 22 oz. Lagunitas as he fumbled around back by the wild yellow roses planted in the corner lee of the house under the stairs leading to the third floor. He was slated to read another solid 100 pages this evening but he only dreamed of plowing through fifty assuming he kept himself sober. That would be enough, he thought, to still allow him plenty of time to catch up on Saturday.

Blogging Bolaño 2666 6/25/08

Finished up section 1 ‘The Part About the Critics’ today and made it through section 2 ‘The Part About Amalfitano’. Amalfitano is a philosophy professor who is introduced in section 1 when the professor’s travel to Sonora in search of the elusive German author Benno von Archimboldi. Amalfitano is a Chilean of Italian descent who ends up teaching in México after leaving a position in Spain after his wife leaves him to go visit a poet living in an asylum. This mirrors an incident in section 1 where the European professors go to a Swiss asylum to visit a famous painter who has mutilated himself. Professor Amalfitano is in the midst of a nervous breakdown and almost oblivious to the troubling series of unsolved murders of young women that plague the border town of Santa Teresa and our upsetting many residents. He is hearing voices, has some strange run-ins with the son of the philosophy department dean and the section ends with him dreaming about chatting with Boris Yeltsin. Strangely enough, this all makes sense.

Monday, June 23, 2008

Blogging Bolaño – 2666 6/23/08

The reading was going in a different direction. I was at a bar sipping a beer and working through Cortazar's Rayuela, consulting my Spanish dictionary frequently but actually making progress. After a couple hours, someone approached me from behind and slipped their arms around me. I reacted rather calmly, though I had no idea who it was. Turns out it was one of the bartenders who I have a passing familiarity with: one of those guys who ignores you when he's sober and gropes you when he's loaded. It was around 6:30 and he was loaded. His hair was dyed pink. After some nonsense talk, he convinced one of his co-workers to shave his head at a table behind the pool table. Another duded, who was also very smashed, decided to get in on the action. I tried to read a little more and made it through another chapter before things got too loud and I left. Later, I went to Carson's to pick up some furniture my brother had left there before heading off to Maine. We formulated the idea that Saturday evening after Carson had gotten off work at Powell’s. He had a surprise; an advance copy of the final Roberto Bolaño novel: 2666. My idea was to read it in a week, or as much as could be accomplished, and put in a brief daily blog entry recording my progress. The book is just under 900 pages so I figured I would need to get through around 130 pages a day. I’m on 127 now, though I haven’t really had the kind of uninterrupted periods one really needs to burn through a text—seeing as how my full-time academic clerkship covets my hours. I’m thirty pages from being through the first of the five sections of the book, entitled ‘The Part About The Critics’. I cheated a little, it must be admitted, by reading a handful of pages before today – less than twenty – just to fortify myself for the endeavor. I won’t get into summary or critical platitudes. After the main characters--a Spaniard, Frenchman, Italian and English woman--are brought together by their common literary interests and modern European academic dispositions, around pg. 121 or so, after three of them embark on a trip to México in search of an elusive literary figure – a quest not unfamiliar to those who’ve have read Bolaño’s previous knockout novel The Savage Detectives – comes one of those break-free prose passages that justify investing in fiction by putting into perspective some of the many ways that investment can go sour.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Can Having Colored Dreams be a Habit/

I’ve taken to reading Montesqiueu on the toilet, his Persian Letters, of late. This is a new habit. My ages old habits include biting my nails, reading, scribbling dubiously, lying effusively, and soccer. I was watching some of the latter (soccer sucker that I am) this afternoon: the Colombian national side against the powerhouse, smooth-oiled, Bleu French machine. The Colombians were taking such a drubbing that I had seemingly no choice but to lay into a long nap.I had green dreams; another new habit. Can having colored dreams be a habit? This I don’t know. I figured it was because of that expanse of white-lined green turf, and those streaks of bleu and yellow uniforms blending into a hectic habit of sport in that French stadium that caused the green dream. I’d had a citrus acid red dream the previous weekend involving a pink Greyhound, Latin American history, and a large pitcher of red ale; and even the least literary understand it when I tell of having had a night of bleak black dreams.When I woke from my green nap I scrambled to work on a pair of stories—not this story—but those two others that I’ll soon be getting graded on. I’ve got a two-day deadline. They grate on me, deadlines, and that is perhaps their greatest quality. Without the flesh they rend from my back I am but a naked, one-pound block of sharp cheddar cheese; but when those deadlines threaten, I transfigure my habitual smoke and my habitual mirrors into something satisfactory.

Like a Quesadilla, or The Saddest Factory

I’m squeezing something satisfactory out of a long nap and a lousy soccer match and an Ouza with coffee at the corner pub where I’ve gone to find some salty peace. The other stories, those suffering from deadline syndrome, are coming along. Neither is too ambitious, that much can be said for them at the least. One of the stories is about a sad story and the other also, but unintelligibly. I wouldn’t be surprised to wake up tomorrow to take in the anguished flight of a brother colored dream; the color of the backyard mass of grass mulch that a recent great friend of mine was jumping up and down on in the gravender light of a cold, cloudy early June Oregon evening. I would not be surprised that he’d have been telling me about a recent lucid dream of his in which his ailing grandmother and Heaven and heaving sighs all played starring roles. I would hope that a dream like this would convince me unequivocally of the habitual potential of colored dreams.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

I lost my phone today

I sent a text message to M when I woke up. I punched in “hi” and “I love you.” When she wrote back, “ah shucks,” I plugged my phone into its charger and the charger into the wall and left to have breakfast with two friends at the café up the way.

After I ate I left my friends at the café and walked home to get ready to bike to work. When I unplugged my phone I noticed I had a voice mail. It was from M, and the message she left was about a radio program she was listening to. She thought of me because the syndicated show was being broadcast from the campus of the college in which I attended for five years, five years ago. I didn’t call her back. I rode to work.

At work I was going to send a text message to M. There was a parade downtown and I saw the parade set-up and I thought her because we—we’ve been together a little longer than a year—went to this particular last year. I reached my right hand into my right pocket, where I normally keep my phone and noticed it was not there. I checked the left pocket and also the back pockets, but my phone was not on my person.

I retraced all of my steps from the locker room to the break room to the workspace where I work and to the computer station where I checked my email. My phone was not at any of these places. I asked the manager on duty if anyone had turned in a cell phone. He checked around, but no one had.

I called my phone but no one answered. I wasn’t there. I could be called but I couldn’t answer. I had to let my friends and family know. From work, I sent out emails. I lost my phone, I wrote. Call my friends. They’ll hand their phones over to me. I’ll have to borrow their phones to call you when I can, but there’s no sense in calling me. I lost my phone. It’s gone, I wrote in the bodies of messages.

I went to lunch, but didn’t call M like I normally do on my break. Instead, I tried to read. I couldn’t because of conversations going on around me. I re-retraced my steps. I searched but found no phone. One minute you have all your contacts, the next you have none.

The Internet connection at my house went out the other day. I can no longer send email messages from my house. I can’t receive them either. After work, as I rode my bike home I wondered if people would reply to the messages I earlier sent how would I know.

Because of the parade I had to take an alternate route home. I rode my bike down streets I’d never been on. I made a wrong turn and had to turn around at one point. I worried if I got lost I wouldn’t have a phone to use to call for help. I got back on course, though, and made my way home. When I arrived at my house friends were in the garage and on the stoop. They said hello. Words went directly from their mouths to my ears. Communication was certain.

I went into my bedroom and turned on the light. There, on my bed’s blanket was my phone. I flipped it open. I had no messages. I had missed one call. It was my work’s number. It was from me.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Nokia 6103b

I’ve had my current cell phone since I bought into my plan in August of 2006.  This is the third phone I’ve had in my life.  Under my previous agreement, my “indestructible” phone mysteriously stopped working after two years.  I got a free replacement and unknowingly extended my contract, which I eventually got out of after a lot of complaining. In the time I’ve had my current phone, I’ve gone through three girlfriends, two cabins, and one Subaru.  One time I spilled a single drop of water on it and it ceased functioning for 24 hours.  I thought I might have to get a new one.  But the Nokia is resilient and bounced back, unlike the Subaru, unlike the girlfriends. 

I have a Phish ringtone to honor the love affair I’ve had with the band since before I really knew about cell phones.  I programmed it in myself.  I have a few photos that I’ve connected with the people who call me.  Two numbers don’t work anymore but I haven’t deleted their pictures.  And I have a game called “Canal Control” that I sometimes play while sitting on the toilet.  Recently my phone began spontaneously dialing numbers without my consent.  This is concerning to me, but not as concerning as having my email program open while my laptop is connected to an overhead projector during a class presentation. 

The battery life on my phone is still pretty good.  I talked for nearly three straight hours last weekend to various friends and family, and when I was done it still had two bars left.  I like it better than a landline.  Sometimes I answer it and sometimes I don’t.  It depends on who is calling me or whether I am in a public restroom and in the middle of an intense round of “Canal Control.”  I’ve grown quite attached to this thing.  It has all my important numbers, which I refuse to back up in case of damage or loss.  I’d be screwed.  Then again, it might be like starting over, like moving into a new cabin, getting a new Subaru, or starting a new relationship.