There and Back Again

A quick jaunt to the islands, and it was beautiful and quiet, restorative, perfect. I saw my aunties at their orchid farm up Waianae Valley where the road ends, at the place the coastal mountains meet the Koa range. Haleahi Ranch-- literally, House of Fire, for the way the rising sun flares across the ragged peaks, edging everything with a hot red light. The beach at Pokai Bay and out Makaha, where I spent much of the best times of my childhood, is much as I remembered it. Ghetto paradise. I ran every morning, starting in darkness and hitting the cliffs over the churning reef as the sun came up, everything too bright and beautiful, even the great piles of trash from the squatter's camps extraordinary on the the yellow sand beside the road, such strange beautiful broken things discarded-- the tire and handlebars of a child's bicycle, a fan torn from its casing, a television with a shattered screen, an antaennae set on top and still raised as if to catch some phantom signal. On the last day, I made mochi with the family there from scratch, pressed and formed the searing rice in flour, turning the inside out until it had the right shape.

It was a very good trip.

The strange part has been returning to my life. I would like to claim that I have new perspective and high hopes, that everything looks better after stepping away. That has not been true at all. Instead, everything that I have feels tight and small, the escapes available to me in this cold wet town tawdry at best and sometimes even unendurable. I plan on getting out of here soon. I just need to find an opening, an opportunity, and I'm gone.

If you can't beat it, leave it

In these last three weeks, I have discovered a number of things. One of them is that it makes very little difference if you stand and face what afflicts you or avert your eyes and pretend there’s nothing there. I have discovered that you can wipe a slate clean and still remember so vividly what was there that you might as well have let it be. I have found it makes only the difference of a hangover if you abstain from alcohol or drink as if to empty every whiskey bottle in Eugene—the action or inaction, the diversion or sober endurance still points at the same unhappiness. In short, I have coped as well as I know how, and have found nothing to mitigate loss. And I’m tired of trying, exhausted with the sound of my own voice, tired of being tired of being sad.

And so I’m going to Hawaii, where I haven't been since my grandfather died five years ago, to visit my aunties and family there for a week. I'll be where nobody can find me, out the leeward side of Oahu where the tourists don’t go given the likelihood of turning up facedown in the surf, going to the beautiful white-sand beaches and red cliffs. I’m getting away from my life.

I leave Monday. And that really does make me happy.

Some City, Somewhere

Recently, my friend Rica wrote to ask me when I was moving to the Bay Area. She was tongue-in-cheek about it, but was awfully confident in the superiority of San Fran and environs, the one urban area I know well, as my father’s whole family grew up there and mostly stayed near, a familiarity I expanded in four years of undergrad in Palo Alto. Is San Francisco, that North-Coast Cali lefty techie thing where I save the environment by googling ‘efficiency’ on my iphone and then purchase a Prius for the prestige (yes, a Malibu would have been most ‘efficient’…) and offset my carbon and be sure I’ve pinned my lapels and stickered my bumper full of my politics writ in pithy phrases really the…best? Is it?

Don’t get me wrong: I love San Francisco, and as I said, I know full well there’s the grittiness of Oakland, the suburban Silicon bubble, the pricey ocean digs of Santa Cruz, the hemp-international cosmopolitan hippieness of Berkeley, the choices are endless. But this America is myriad, too. Is San Francisco the best there is?

Or is it Seattle, serious and dark, but dapper too, never a shortage of coffee or hipsters or alterna-anything, northern outpost and port city and place of markets, Mariners, warehouses made studios with walls of concrete and metal and velvet drapes?

Nearer to here, there’s Portland, that uber-clean, uber-progressive mecca of everything done right: the outdoors, the organic everything, the counter-culture and counter-counter-culture and all of it embraced by everyone simultaneously in a place like a series of Eugenes interconnected and fed steroids? Is Portland the perfect million-five, the place of all places like Portlanders claim?

I have no great affection for Los Angeles or San Diego, as long as we’re talking about the West Coast; I love me some sun, but have found too that the further South I get in California, the less comfortable I feel, as if every white person were going to mistake me for Mexican and at the same time I’d drown in standardized suburban sameness. Perhaps not, but too I do like the natural world. And I have the sense that the closest one gets to natural in L.A. is when in a four-mile long traffic jam, one breathes through a cloth for filtration, and the scent of exhaust is temporarily undetectable.

But I offer California too much. What of New York, the place my father was born, a place I’ve visited a couple times, in each instance concluding that the noise and clamor and press of so much was too much? Does that recede with neighborhood and familiarity, with time? Or will I discover after all these years of complaining about the provincial that I actually am a small-time, small-city, rural West type who whined of the place I was born until I was forced to leave it and found myself marooned in an alien urban nightmare of subways and skyscrapers and teeming throngs of strangers?

Cold as it is right now, with the recognition is this cold all winter long, I have to dismiss Chicago out of hand, the myriad wonders of Midwestern cities aside (yes, that goes for Minneapolis too).

And what of Boston, or more specifically Cambridge, that self-declared center of all intellectual activity, where black-clad graduate students sip wine and compose algorithms and feel confident in a place that promises that America is a meritocracy, and you’ve arrived through force of merit in a place where everyone is commendably meritorious and bound for imminent fortune?

And what astounding locales have I missed?

Statement of Intent, and Disclaimer

It’s colder still today, and will be colder tomorrow, and then on Thursday the paper prediction said COLD in capital letters, just like that across the box usually devoted to pictorial depictions indicating weather: emoticons, snowflakes, the beaming (mouth of the) sun. There is a draft under the door here, so I can attest; at my office in the Prince Lucien Campbell prison block (no, really, the building seems to have been built with our ugliest prisons firmly in mind), it’s more like testify, as in, yes, your honor, I nearly lost a finger that Tuesday that the heat stopped working, so I can understand how the Professor Emeritus came to be frozen solid—although it’s true he wasn’t the warmest fellow when he was alive.

But I— I don’t think digress is the right word. I hyperbolize, prevaricate, indulge in foolishness and generalized fuckery, I speak nonsense, am filled with it, and feel the need to be filled with something. Aren’t there worse vices?

Perhaps not those that afflict you, dear reader. But then, if you’re still with me, you probably know me or are yourself disinclined to judge.

If you set yourself to a feed of this blog at some regrettable point in the past, I cannot help you now—surely you ought to have noticed the long hiatus, and if you liked the tone of that earlier blog and are still reading, well, I cannot help your bad taste. Here’s what my current project is: to be at the keyboard, to use these words to say something. As you’ve gathered if you looked at these last couple posts, I’m feeling particularly frustrated and stuck, in limbo professionally and in transition personally, and currently consigned to this cold gray lameness that is Eugene, a place so agreeable and comfortable I could pour lamb’s blood on a vegan just to hear the scream. I quit writing here because most of my serious work goes serious places now, and I cannot really get away with posting it online, and so this blog has become little more than a link and report for my minor writing success. That was nice enough for a while, but as I’m waiting on representation, and have no immediate projects on the queue, and as that word, serious, has a tendency to define me overmuch, I’m going to let it go a little. Forget the necessary lapidary quality of the well-made object. Forget aesthetic, form, the need to get at something significant or leave everybody weeping.

There may be some of that, of course—but I wouldn’t count on it. What I’m saying is this: there will regular posts here, of what I have no damn idea, except to say that I’m feeling edgy and polemic and uncompromising, and at turns of course am equal parts sorrowful atonement for every angry thing I’ve ever said, and the only thing I can imagine doing is speaking until enough of those words are gone that I can go on.

So, that’s what to expect. If the prospect excites you, I promise to disappoint. If you’re already disappointed, chin-up and buck up and go find something more exciting. This won’t be, I promise that. But it may be a bit confessional, a bit silly, a bit angry, a bit—grand, in an overblown, overwrought sort of way. It’s time to live up to titles.

There it is

This morning my windshield was petaled with frost, and the cold was acute, seeping inside layers and pressing everything in. I went to bed early but woke bleary and exhausted, feeling as if I’d spent the night warding off bad spirits, the demons that often accompany a deep freeze: loneliness, doubt, loss.

It has been a difficult month.

For six years now I’ve lived in Eugene, the last four as a glorified adjunct teaching at-risk students of color, atonement for the Delta and purpose in the present: I can offer these kids something. The intermittent schedule of such work has allowed space to write, enough so that, after perhaps a thousand pages thrown at the Delta and what I need to say about it, I have finished my novel, even written a book I am proud of. My work goes everywhere (well, nearly everywhere—any time the New Yorker wants to come calling, I will acquiesce), and the unplaced pieces on the queue are better than what’s been placed, and sometimes now I receive checks in return for the work I would do for free because it’s the only thing I really am any good at.

But let’s be honest: given the choice between counting my blessings and decrying my failures, it’s always the latter—I’d call it an aesthetic, even, which is less exculpatory than descriptive of my particular sensibility. And so there’s the part where commercial publishing is in crisis, making agenting and sale of this book increasingly unlikely. There’s the part where I’d planned my life around a girl who’s gone, planned to leave with her so that now I face the prospect of another year here, the deadlines for the fellowships I would have applied for already past. There’s my apartment, recently stripped and scrubbed clean of every memory of the last year, and as you might expect, rather than feeling I’ve started anew, all I see are the things that used to be hers: the pictures and books and rows of beauty products, the collages of Raptor Jesus, the missing rows of shoes, all these things more vivid in absence.

Today I’ll finish the grading that remains, and be done with this quarter. I am already done with this year, 2009, which I dedicated to a relationship that was bright and ephemeral, a flare and the attendant dark after, deeper for having been temporarily dispelled.

I know: time and all wounds, we heal, we move on, we find possibility, let all those old, brittle hurts fall away. I would mix metaphors further, but I’m ill with it, light and dark and cold and deepening and lightening and falling and rising and for god’s fucking sakes, abstracting abstraction, overburdening language, sitting at a café staring at a screen whining about what was, is, will be, with the simpering solipsism of every weeping nancy.

I am tired of it. But then, that’s where I started, that’s what I already said. So there it is.

"Harm" published in Southword

My story "Harm," which was shortlisted for the Sean O'Faolain Prize in Fiction from the Munster Literature Centre, is published here in the journal Southword.

And I think they've done a nice treatment of it.