Revenge of the Ten Unmediated Pleasures

1. Shocking pink roses, blooms as big as your fist, from a thorn bush that seems to thrive on neglect.

2. The clack and crackle of dice on a hardwood table—and the memories the sound evokes.

3. Pinching out an A minor 7th chord and feeling it snap beneath my fingers.

4. Shadowboxing—the way you pull your fist out of your back pocket for the throw, the way your shoulders swing on the follow-through.

5. Looking out on the back yard, astonished, at a duck's stony plummet out of the sky to paddle on a pool left behind on the lawn in the wake of a summer rain.

6. Early morning at work, aching, sleepless eyes red and sore: I should be miserable with exhaustion, but I cannot suppress a smile (and a shiver) as I remember just what we were up to last night when we should have been sleeping.

7. Cracked-pepper pappadums puffing and distorting in the hot oil, with pear-and-cardamom chutney close at hand.

8. Warm little arms flung round my neck and the toddler's voice fluting, "Hug."

9. Lotte Samkang Melon Big Ice Bars from the Korean grocery down by South Town, near RIT.

10. The way it feels when the words are coming easy.
    

The First Hint That Something’s Gone Wrong

I’m gonna hate myself for asking this, because I can only imagine the horror and devastation that these people must be feeling.

But.

There is a real question here, and that question is: Who the FUCK takes a three-year old to see Alien vs. Predator?

So Clever and Classless and Free

Because I identify as working class and am largely self-educated, I have a bad and visceral reaction to being patronized. Dealing with difficult people is all part of eating the whale's asshole, in any job—but some days I can deal with it better than others.

Today was one of the others.

Part of it is the nature of the gig. I work in the research-and-development arm of a major provider of digital imaging and reproduction equipment (which shall remain nameless—but it starts with an X), and my job is basically to be the village idiot; I beat up the product until it breaks, then beg for some kindly engineer or software developer to come get me out of the terrible mess I, in my ignorance, have made. In this way the weaknesses and failures of the product are exposed; but you can see where a degree of indignity is built into the system.

Now, the engineering and development teams are generally decent enough folks¹: but there is one fellow²—one is particular—who is bright, charming, charismatic, and often unbearably smarmy, prone to treating me with the affectionate condescension usually reserved for a retarded eight-year-old, and thereby filling me with a raging desire to FUCK HIM WITH KNIVES AND SHIT IN HIS LUNGS³.

A working-class hero is something to be.
But for once I'd like to try being something else.

¹ A blatant lie. They're bastards all.
² i.e., all of them, really.
³ © and ™ Warren Ellis.

Finest Worksong (1)

A thought for today, from the Sufi master Rabia el-Adawia:

I will not serve God like a labourer, in expectation of my wages.

Awe (Shucks)

So we've redecorated the kids' room, much to everyone's delight. I'm talking over the changes with Claire:

"So what d'you think of your room now? Pretty cool, huh?"

"Yeah! It's awesome!"

"It's like the Town Hall of Awesomeville!"

"Yeah!"

"It's the summit of Mount McAwesome!"

"Uh-huh—"

"It's like Captain Awesome's Citadel Of Awesomeness!"

"Dad. It's awesome. I know."

My daughter.
Eight years old tomorrow. God help us all.

Hollywood Dream

Here's a family story for you. In 1949, my Old Man was twenty-five, with a wartime Navy stint behind him, a brand-new college diploma (courtesy of his GI benefits), and a headful of Joseph Conrad. He was utterly at loose ends: the only logical thing to do was to pack off to Los Angeles to try to make it as a writer.

His savings probably paid for the bus ticket and the first month's rent... which meant that (since he wasn't exactly setting world on fire with his writing) he ended up waiting tables. I forget the name of the place, if I ever knew—some semi-famous Hollywood deli. Not the Brown Derby, but one of those. Morton's, maybe, or Schlotzky's—it doesn't really matter. Very busy place. Lot of industry clientele.

(This isn't anything he ever told me himself, you understand. I get this all thirdhand, from my mother and my aunts.)

So one day my Dad was working the crushing height of the lunch hour, and one of the busboys slipped on a wet patch of floor and fell. Crockery and flatware everywhere. The kid was groaning—he'd broken his arm. The Old Man helped him up, and helped him to the door.

The manager came out from the back and roared, "What the hell do you think you're doing? Get back here! We're in the middle of the lunchtime rush."

The Old Man said, "I've got to take this guy to the hospital."

The manager said, "If you leave now, don't bother coming back."

My father took off his apron and left.

He did go back, as it turned out, once the busboy was tended and mended—but only once, and only to the deli's back door, to pick up his final paycheck. And whether it was that same night or the next day, I don't know, but soon after that he started hitchhiking back East.

It was about that time that he stopped writing, too, come to think of it.

And that's the Hollywood story in our family.

I Am Sitting In A Room

...and I am testing. How horrible is Blogger's new WYSIWYG interface?

Pretty horrible.

That Is Worth Something, When You Think About It

Noonday glare in cobalt blue. Pleasant heat to windward as I steer the car south and east, the hairs on my left forearm slowly going from brown to red and then to gold in the sun, growing lighter as the skin grows darker. I'm developing backwards into a photo negative while Pennsylvania hills give way to Virginia plain and sudden explosion of urban sprawl fifty miles to either side of DC. Everything changes in ways both perpetual and eventual; only the low thrum of the asphalt is constant.

A trip to the market
A trip into the pearl-gray morning sunlight
That settles over Washington

Crossing the bridge in Norfolk we see to starboard a tall ship, a three-master, wondrous and unlikely, ploughing upriver towards us; then it's past and we're hurtling into the sky, whining up a vertiginous overpass with tall concrete barriers blocking the view on either side. It's a tunnel without a top. There is no more landscape than there would be on a roller-coaster—only the road ahead, with walls on either side beneath a blank blue dome.

This is the only life
Sorrows everywhere you turn

I am standing on the tarmac of a service station-cum-convenience store, a gallon jug of springwater in hand, washing chunks of puke from my son's clothing and car-seat. On the backside of Richmond we hit a miles-long traffic snarl—hours of crawl-and-stall that left us all gloomy and tense. In the midst of this misery, Sam began woefully to vomit. Four hours still to drive; he lies now across D's lap in the back seat, sleeping fitfully.

The last few years have been hard for us—as for everyone, of course, but. There's been a certain grindstone austerity to the long process of breaking away and reëstablishing ourselves. This is our first vacation since—when? The epic passage to Nebraska with Sam just six weeks old felt less like a holiday than a pilgrimage; our last real vacation was probably Disney World, in early 2001—and that is too long to go carrying that weight without sustained relief. It settles in, deep into the bones, and you no longer feel it there until you recognize its absence.

Crossing some bridge or other, there's a hint of salt and a promise of the sea in the air, and a hand I did not realize was throttling me slides away from my throat.

To prove that I love you
Because I believe in you
Summer skies, the stars are falling
All along the injured coast

This prospect of a week in North Carolina took tremendous work—even with the lion's share done by World's Best Sister-In-Law Tammy—but neither D nor I feel hard-done-by. This isn't one of those too-frequent projects where one takes the lead and does most of the work, leaving that one feeling exploited and the other feeling buffaloed; We've both knocked ourselves out to make this happen, both accepted that this is the best either or both of us can do.

If I have weaknesses
Don't let them blind me now
Summer skies, the stars are falling
All along the injured coast

The children are good travellers overall, and the journey is a pleasure even as the day grows long. Because D and I care passionately about many things (each other foremost), we fight a lot; it is because of that, not in spite of it, that our marriage is strong. The last third of any long car trip is a dangerous corner; in the weariness and confinement, anything can trigger a little detonation of resentment. Today, though, there are no sighs, no sullen silences, no snaps or snarks. We are together in an almost religious sense of gratitude. We are grateful because we are not arguing: we are not arguing because we are grateful.

And the Cape Fear River plain shears away, and we are off the mainland, onto the narrow spit of Wrightsville Beach, with the breakers rolling in to greet us.

If I have money
If I have children
Summer skies, the stars are falling
All along the injured coast

A New England kid, I—my idea of Ocean formed by the bleak beauty of the Ipswich shingle and the kneebusting scree and nipplestiffening brine of Maine—never knew water so warm or waves so high and laden with shells, each literally rattling as it breaks to the strand carrying such treasures as to drive Caligula to war with Poseidon.

My shades reflect kites blazing in a perfect sky over the pier. Claire is seven, soon to be eight, thigh-deep in thundering surf, lovely and fearless. Sam and Sophie are the picture of laughing industry, bright plastic shovels working in the sand, shooting an occasional appraising glance at the encroaching sea with eyes big as thumbprints on a Christmas cookie. Something in me aches at their sheer beauty; the fierce grin will not leave my face, and my eyes are brimming beneath my clip-ons.

Three hundred steps away, the house is cool and quiet. There's a book lying open face-down on the porch swing, just waiting, and later there will be mahi and tortillas. When we go, so few days from now, the foodstuffs and supplies we do not use will go to the church across the way, and from there to folk who need it.

I am at perfect peace, if only for a while; I am surrounded by the people I love best, and if my heart is breaking it is only because it is overfull.

Leaving the Valley of the Shadow behind me now.

Colossus

Attentive readers will doubtless have noticed the recent change to the title and graphic of this page. Partly it's a whim—a desire to track the permutations of the archetypal Jack from architect to monster-masher—and partly it's because I was getting sick of all the search-engine hits I was getting looking for the nursery rhyme "The House that Jack Built" (which apparently—who knew?—has some crypto-political significance, although I never quite worked out what it was).

But there's a real shift here, too. Because I honest-to-God do feel like I've killed a monster.

After nine months of unemployment and spiraling debt, I'm pulling a regular paycheck again. The wolf, if still howling balefully in the middle distance, is at least no longer on the doorstep. Much of the great looming anxiety that's marked the last year has dissipated.

But what the fairy tales don't mention is that killing the giant is not in itself an end to all problems. That nearly every action creates as many problems as it solves is a hard truth to accept. We want the quick fix, the neat resolution, the happily-ever-after. But after the beanstalk comes down, there's still the issue of how to dispose of the huge, stinking corpse in your back garden. And that becomes your new day-to-day reality.

I think of the old joke that I first heard from Lea Hernandez:

Q: How do you eat a whale's asshole?
A: One bite at a time.

Munch
munch
munch.

The Sawdust King Spits Out His Scorn

Time it was, my friends, when prog rock was intellectually respectable; when a triple-disc live album could be hailed as more of a good thing; when Greg Lake was thin, Robert Fripp was the thinking man's guitar hero, and Phil Collins was not yet the Anti-Christ but just a drummer.

That time was the early 1970s, and highly-proficient, symphonically-inclined, cerebral rock music was living on borrowed time in the days before punk turned it into a punchline. It was into this rarefied moment that Genesis released The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway.

It's a double album. And a rock opera. Or maybe a concept album: I've never been clear on the distinction. In any case: Of all Peter Gabriel's work with Genesis, this album makes it hardest to take seriously his protestations that he never did drugs—or argues most strongly that perhaps he should have done. Certainly the storyline for The Lamb is not the work of a man whose brain chemistry is entirely right. Dig this partial synopsis, distilled from François Couture's exhaustive review at the All Music Guide:

It is early morning in Manhattan and, as the city awakens, Rael, a young bum, comes out of the subway where he painted the letters R-A-E-L. Amid the low-life activities of the city, a lamb lies down in the middle of Broadway street... [W]alking on the street, Rael sees a dark cloud lowering in Times Square and slowly moving toward him. He starts to run, but ... he is being sucked into another dimension (or a parallel universe, if you will)... Rael regains consciousness .... in a cave where stalactites and stalagmites grow very quickly, forming a cage and pressing on his body. Rael sees his brother John looking at him placidly, responding to his cries with a single tear of blood. As [John] walks away, the cage dissolves and Rael starts spinning. When it all stops, he finds himself standing on a factory floor. A salesgirl shows him around, explaining that the expressionless human beings packaged and stacked are available for purchase. Rael recognizes old members of his gang along with his brother John. Fearing for his safety, he runs... into a reconstruction of his old life in New York. We learn a little more about the character, his rough life in a gang, and how he affirms himself through violence. Here he pictures his fluffy heart being shaved by a razor blade....

As Rael comes out of his daydreaming, he finds himself in a carpeted corridor where kneeling people slowly move towards a spiral staircase leading to a big wooden door. One of the Carpet Crawlers explains that going into the next chamber is the only way out. The hero rushes to the door.... only to find himself in a large hemispheric chamber. 32 doors are at equal distance of each other on the wall and people come in and out of them, looking for the only door that doesn't lead back into the room. Trapped in the chamber ... Rael hears among the crowd noises a blind woman asking for help. If the boy was to guide her to the center of the room, she could feel where the breeze blows and find the only door that doesn't lead back into the room. So they do and she takes Rael through the corridor and into a dark cave where she asks him to sit on what appears to be a throne of stone and wait....

...Rael smells a strong perfume. ...[H]e finds a small crack from which the scent entered. ... Following the odor, he enters a room lit by candlelight in the middle of which is a pool. Three small half-snake/half-woman creatures welcome him. He enters the pool and, swallowing some of the water, his life energy starts to escape his body. The lamias drink his energy, caressing him all the while. But when they get down to his blood, they quickly die and Rael, out of passion, eats their lifeless bodies before leaving the room from where he entered. As he looks back, he sees the stage is back to its initial appearance, awaiting a new visitor...

It goes on like that for a while, growing ever more grotesque and bizarre before culminating in a Freudian Grand Guignol of self-castration. All of this is somehow Euro-Continental in its misogyny and deep, deep headsickness. (Not unlike the Raelian religion, actually -- and though I've never been able to confirm if the freak behind that cult was a Lamb fan or not, for sure the whole enterprise is awash in the stink of prog.) If Les Humanoides were a rock band, they'd have made this record. It's a dysmorphic nightmare to give Kafka the shits, written by Jodorowsky and drawn by Moebius.

The devil of it is that this bastard's got some pretty bangin' choons. Anyone who's heard Jeff Buckley's rip through "Back In NYC" knows that The Lamb's compositional sturdiness shines even through the hiss and dropouts of a crummy four-track: but it's more surprising, maybe, that the title cut was in fact a big radio hit.

Or maybe it's not. There's certainly an immediate musical appeal, from the pseudo-classical piano introduction to the warm tones of the distorted bass—that's a Big Muff Pi, if I'm not mistaken, which might have given Gabriel a moment of amusement in his gynophobic delirium—and the ostinato of rippling 8th-notes over a harmonic framework that reminds me inexplicably of later Duke Ellington. Collins has chops, but he's overly-busy—he had not yet learned to hit a groove and stick to it. Gabriel, though, is at his apex: for all the pomp and self-importance, his phrasing is wonderfully conversational, and his tone makes the most of the inherent drama. The grainy snarl of the verses gives way to the shocking beauty of the brief tag (And the la-a-amb... lies do-o-own...) that serves as a chorus, then turns intimate, almost tender, at the bridge before exploding into the last verse with fresh fury.

And lyrically, it's probably the most accessible piece here. It's a surreal urban travelogue that sets the scene for the rest, but stands on its own perfectly well. The details are pithy and well-observed (The trucker's eyes read "Overload"), and even the introduction of the protagonist doesn't bind the song to the context of the story as a whole—although perhaps that's because for ages I misheard his name: so when our hero lets out his cry of identity I'm Rael, it became instead (for me) a universal cry of individual authenticity in the face of a plastic consensual reality—I'm real!

And I was, you know. And it seemed worthwhile to be reminded, once in a while. When I disovered, years later, that The Lamb was a load of made-up hoo-hah from a sexually-insecure Englishman looking to reclaim his vitality by pretending to be a Puerto Rican street punk, it was a letdown—but I was still as real as ever I was.