dripping pitch and made of wood

thing-like

2008-12-05T08:35:00.003-06:00

i like these cold, overcast days in houston that follow thanksgiving because i know it means that, soon, the stacks of grading that have piled to the ceiling will, with steady toil, diminish in size, and i will eventually be hitting the "submit" button on my grade sheets (only to realize i have two or three days to get ready to head back to the northeast and i haven't done a thing to prepare). it's true that i have been a bit overwhelmed the past week by the sheer institutionality of my place of employment -- the weird, pepto-bismal pink walls on the tenth floor where i have my office, the beige metal desks, the smell of dry erase markers, and, always, the looming jailhouse just across the bayou.

this happens at the end of the semester, when the hundred and twenty students i've been working with from all four classes (from the student who, without irony, compared zora neale hurston to sarah palin to the one who told me, also without irony, that my class was tedious) have finally sapped me, when i just cannot take any more committee meetings, and when the antics of my coworkers seem less colorful or charming and more like a sign of the sheer insanity. do you experience this? institutional architecture and infrastructure just seem so much more . . . pronounced, vivid, articulated, material, stark, concrete, solid . . . thing-like.

after mortification, the giggles

2008-11-01T14:44:00.003-05:00

upon recently discovering that the neighbors have heard every god-awful note of my top-of-my-lungs singing of anything from bjork to yaz in the shower every single morning for the past three months, i resolve to continue.

protected only by the kindness of your nature

2008-10-27T19:31:00.003-05:00

the secret is that sometimes i miss my sisters with all of my heart and i wonder what it would be like if i still lived nearby if i had not moved so many many years ago all the way down to texas to do this thing with my life about which of course i have no regrets but now that one of them my younger sister is pregnant and i mean really pregnant i feel the press of time more than usual i feel it sliding through the day the time that is not spent in her company like how i loved it when two of my houston friends got pregnant around the same time and i'd walk with them and smile it's what i want to do go for a walk with my sisters you'd think that with time one would become used to the distance and find closeness in spite of distance it is true that one certainly does but it is not a permanent state of being for all time the ache of missing comes back and i have to live with it these days i imagine a map of the u.s. by the gulf coast and picture little me just me so tiny walking down indiana street to la guadalupana for tres leches after dinner in my pajamas the sky carrot and gold the breeze just a little cool against my skin neighbors kids playing soccer in the yard the men outside the quik time food mart drinking cans of beer and then i think my sister is doing ? and i zoom out and think subway? cafe? apartment? cab? where is she now? so pregnant in her red and black stretch clothes i think cell phone email facebook blogosphere i just want to see my sisters both of them in the flesh i want to do that thing where we hug each other all three of us at once i have that antony and the johnsons song stuck in my head 'you are my sister' how does it go? you are my sister/and i love you//may all of your dreams come true.

creature comforts

2008-09-25T19:23:00.004-05:00

i'm sitting on the futon with the lights out, listening to the cicadas, thinking back over the past two weeks, from preparation for the hurricane to panic to hunkering down to nausea and exhaustion to adjustment and now, seemingly, back to normal, what with the return of the electricity late yesterday. i feel funny whenever i hear folks get really really riled up about the power loss, especially when said folks have a lot of good in their lives, because, while the loss of power was very annoying and a bit bewildering -- eleven days without it shook our sense of time -- things are actually pretty much okay for everyone i know who weathered IKE in the city, and those nearer to the coast really got slammed. last night, the buzz of air conditioners filled the air much like the cicadas, and i wondered why. it was a rather pleasant evening -- perhaps to make up for lost time? i was saddened when our twenty-something neighbor reported to us, after day number 3 without power, that she wanted to get a generator because she was bored and wanted to watch TV.

we've been lighting candles, reading, playing a lot of scrabble, visiting friends with power to do laundry and eat dinner. we went for walks, sat outside, rode bikes. i had long, spontaneous, and much needed conversations with people i consider to be closest to me. the yoga studio where i study was open, so i took a couple of extra classes to keep myself limber. still, i took a lot of naps last week -- i am unsure if it was the weather or the sheer exhaustion of disaster-area living that wiped me out.

classes resumed this week, and many of my students are in bad situations. some lost everything. others are just as bewildered and tired as the rest of us.

i think the news about the economy (which seemed so distant until about two days ago, since all i could find to listen to on the battery-powered radio were hurricane-related reports) has further freaked everyone out. that, and since no one -- and i mean NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON -- i know would even THINK about voting for mccain and palin in november, i've grown increasingly alarmed by reports of their political support. how could two people who so many of us find absolutely terrifying gain the support of our fellow citizens?

i have no way to wrap this up. except for maybe these two things:

1) since, after the hurricane, the weather has been coolest in the early mornings, i took to stepping outside to sit on the stoop out back to eat my cereal and yogurt. the first morning, i noticed what i thought was a locust buzzing around. upon further inspection, i realized a gorgeous hummingbird was flitting in perfect geometric patterns, quietly sipping nectar from the strawberry-colored flowers that bloom on a vine on the neighbor's fence.

2) similarly, one afternoon, a baby lizard (of which there are hundreds living under the house) about thiiiiiiisssss big wandered inside the house and lept up on a photograph H has of a pair of broken glasses. i was in the bedroom, cooling off with a glass of lemon-water and re-reading james baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, when H brought him in and gently placed the little guy and the photo next to me on the bedside table before heading off to work. the lizard sat perfectly still on the photograph for about twenty minutes when, suddenly, he cocked his head, spied a drop of water splashed from the glass, and, in one unbelievably graceful movement, leapt, bowed his head to the droplet, drank until it was gone, and looked back up, regally. after a moment, i very carefully coaxed him back onto the photograph, took him out back, and scooted him onto a long blade of grass. i watched him until he jumped and darted under the house.

list (for ike)

2008-09-11T15:48:00.004-05:00

fill containers with water

move plants and recycling inside

secure trashcans in garage

scrub bathtub and fill with water

make ice to fill a cooler

roast red potatoes, beets, and tofu

rent movies

check flashlights

charge phone

charge laptop

call friends

hunker down

object lessons

2008-09-06T09:34:00.003-05:00

the first two weeks of my first-year writing courses, i ask my students to summarize and respond to a few short articles on the atrocious conditions inside our local county jail. i read these pieces and pluck from them choice sentences that exemplify some of the most common grammatical mistakes first-year students make: subject/verb agreement, no apostrophe "s" to signify possessive, incorrect verb tense, misspellings, article choice, sentence fragments, run-ons, and colloquialisms, mostly. (yes, i know it might be surprising to some that a first-year college student -- one who has already passed the first part of the two-part writing sequence -- will make these mistakes, but it is true.) these sentences become an object lesson in grammar, and it gets a rise out of the students because they will more often than not find their own among those needing revision.

checking out one of the examples of colloquial writing on the page, a plucky young woman claimed "you can tell this sentence was written by a man. look at it!" the sentence in question began with "matter of fact" and continued in a very conversational way, including a "just sayin is all" near the end. i happened to know that, in fact, a woman wrote the sentence, so i asked the student who assumed the author's gender why she believed this. "you can just TELL!" she said, and read the sentence aloud in what most of us what call "a man's voice" and we all had a good laugh. when i told her it was written by a woman, many of the students did not believe me.

later, during the same class but after the grammar lesson was over, i was reviewing the short book i'm having students read this semester that has a chapter on gender and incarceration. "what's gender?" i asked, knowing exactly where the conversation would go. one student replied, "like if you're a man or a woman." not exactly, i countered, and began to outline the way that some theorists conceptualize the sex/gender binary, and briefly glossed the biological, medical, cultural, and social ways that these two terms function in the US, at least in the contemporary moment. i said "penis" and "labia" and "estrogen" and "vas deferens" and "ovaries" and "testicles" and "clitoral hood" much to the amusement of the students (students seem to love any direct reference to the body and its functions -- probably because they don't usually think of them as having any intellectual substance, so to speak), and then made a case for gender as a more socially mediated category (although we all might know that "sex" is just as discursive as "gender," but i am trying to introduce them to the subject, so we were only going this far) available to us through the slippery variations of masculinities and femininities. they seemed to get it, but still some puzzled looks.

i returned to the comment about the sentence that my student believed was written by a man (but that wasn't). "you wouldn't call the sentence 'male,' right?" i said, continuing, "it would be more accurate to describe it as masculine -- it's not like the sentence has a penis hanging off the end of it," i concluded, much to the great delight of my students, who seemed to fully grasp [grasp!?] the concept. thinking i had really knocked it out of the park, i turned to erase the board, and behind me the voice of a young man quipped, loudly, "yeah, but you have to admit -- that sentence DO have its period."

it's rare that i am so tickled by a student's joke that i laugh to the point of no return, but this unexpected, smart, hilarious joke sent me over the edge. i laughed so hard i had to sit down and pound my fist on the desk.

best. grammar. gender. pun. ever!!

start up

2008-08-29T20:22:00.001-05:00

if i opened a hair salon called MULLET, would you come in for a cut?

albumin

2008-08-02T15:48:00.002-05:00

whose idea was it to move on a day so hot the sidewalk would not simply fry an egg, it would instantly scorch it into a sticky black smear? o right, it was mine . . . still too dizzy from the yolky sun to be able to hatch a smart metaphor, and plus there's loads of things to unpack but, yeah, it does feel good to be in this little blue house with so many windows.

zero

2008-07-23T12:44:00.002-05:00

guess what today's account balance on the student loans i've lived with since i was 17 reads? i'll give you a hint: it's in the title.

who's got the crack?

2008-07-18T10:06:00.004-05:00

I almost don't even want to write it down because it might jinx the whole thing, but I believe it is time: we are going to move into a new place.

This is what we decided: a place that is better kept: no rats, no rot, no crumbling and cracking. A place that has more room, preferably a bigger kitchen. A place that is bigger or that stands alone. A place that has windows that can open and close. A place that has an outside area -- porch, balcony, patio, or stoop. We've been quietly looking for about a month now, with our eyes set on some really interesting, almost unbelievable apartments in the area, including 100-year old buildings with tiny little drawers built into the kitchen walls, goofy staircases that lead to triangular sleeping lofts, walls painted black with lots and lots of track lighting . . . We might have said "yes" to any of these well-priced, groovy little gems, but the poor conditions of the walls, chew-holes under the sinks, and leak-stains in the ceilings would just be more of the same, and why spend more for pretty much the same? It was by accident that we drove past a charming, blue, multi-windowed house with a For Rent sign stuck in the front yard, not too far from where we live now. We scribbled down the number and called. When we learned the affordable rent, we wondered what would be wrong with it. Less than a week later, we were standing in the unbearably hot kitchen signing a lease.

Five years ago, when H and I were looking for a place to live and ended up here, we had went through a similar, perhaps more extended, search. One evening, we met with a landlord who let us in to take a look at the top floor of a duplex about a block from where we live now. The woman who was moving out was home when we arrived, and we asked her some questions about living there. As she prattled on about how terrible the landlord was and why she would recommend that we not move in there, I began to notice little -- what are those things called? (my mother calls them "sticky tabs" and it wasn't until later in life that I realized no one else called them this. post-it notes?) -- post-it notes stuck all over the apartment: on the kitchen cabinets, on the fridge, on the bathroom mirror, on the door to the bedroom, on the sliding glass door to the balcony, and on the inside of the front door on our way out. These little yellow notes all had the same uncanny message: "IT'S NOT ALL ABOUT YOU!!" The tenant never made mention of these notes, and H and I didn't ask, but it made looking at the place an even more surreal experience in which, at every turn, we were reminded that looking for a place to rent is not all about "you", but something larger, more complex that might be at work and that, you have to finally admit, no place will be exactly what "you" want.

It is with this in mind that I return to the heat of the kitchen in which I scribbled my signature at the bottom of a lease a few days ago. After looking under the sinks, opening all the cabinets and drawers, checking out the tops of the closets and base boards along the storage areas, admiring the sheer size of the rooms, finding the tub immaculately caulked and sealed with none of the tiles broken or missing, and inspecting the perimeter of the property for signs of decay and/or varmint habitation and finding none, I said "yes" in my mind and "yes" out loud and "yes" as I moved the pen across the page. Stepping out the back door and onto the tiny little screened in muckroom to once again admire the small back yard area where we will certainly throw parties, I noticed what looked like the long butt-end of a yellowing cigarette. I stepped over it, and then, thinking again, turned around and looked at it more carefully. Cigarette butt, i told myself -- right? Right. Right? I crouched down and picked it up off the ground only to discover that I was, in the brilliant afternoon sunlight, holding a full vial of crack in my now trembling fingers.

An hour later, I was reasoned with. Just because you find a vial of crack in the screened in muckroom of a reasonably priced rental house does not mean that you have signed a lease to move into a former crack den. It doesn't even mean that the neighbors smoke crack, that the former tenants smoked crack, or that crackheads have been smoking crack in the backyard. We met the soon-to-be neighbor in the garage apartment in the back, she is certainly not a crackhead and she had nothing but positive things to say about living there. It is quite possible that someone saw the house was for rent, saw the back porch as a fine place to toss a vial to come get later. Once we move in and there are signs of activity, we should be okay. The street is in a decent neighborhood. Also, I have to remember, I see crackheads and methheads every day in this neighborhood. They're not going anywhere. A person who had most likely been smoking crack was found by our neighbors pleasuring himself in our garage out back not too long ago.

Perhaps I should take the advice of my friend RM, who suggests that this should be seen as a little offering, a premature house-warming gift . . . In any case, we'll be smudging the rooms with a large cut of sage and moving in on the first of the month. Wish us luck!

could cloud (two)

2008-07-09T15:35:00.002-05:00

you could pull out everything you've ever saved -- your macrame owls, your peacock statuettes, your blow-up alien dolls, your thousands of pillows, your tapestries and blankets, and use them to throw a party. you could drive through a smoke-filled landscape, up into the mountains, and find ancient rocks that drip boiling hot water into muscle-softening pools in the earth. you could hang out with cowboys, work a corn patch, read books in a rocking chair on the porch of a unkempt building and smell the alfalfa growing in the fields. you could breathe the driest of airs, down in death valley, where the heat is so intense the boulders are bleached white and nothing lives except an eccentric 83 year old woman who runs what she calls her opera house, a space she painted and danced in for the past twenty years -- all by herself, at times danced for no one but herself. you could visit the graves of the unknown buried in the desert, mounds of dirt surrounded by rocks, little wooden crucifixes marking the head. you could freak out under the flash and neon of las vegas lights, a postmodern sublime wavering in the heat, the exorbitant cash flow ringing like a register from every corner. you could decide to move. you could fly to birmingham, quiet, dilapidated birmingham, check into an old hotel, listen to an old man stomp and howl with his orchestra under smoky amber lights. you could, with a crowd of downtrodden thitry-somethings, sing along to songs about the razor blade hidden under the candy surface of every day life. you could fetch a bottle of wine and a six pack of beer from a trading post on a dead end street, sit on the curb with your beloved and watch fireworks explode over the statue of a vulcan that sits at the highest point on the hill above the city, watch the kids run in the streets, and eavesdrop on conversations tipsy adults have about how long the owners of the building kept it in disrepair, and who would own it next.

sometimes a storm is what you need: this afternoon's clouded darkness, its rumble and boom, its downpour.

could cloud

2008-06-18T16:50:00.002-05:00

fog of possible,
an atmospheric verging --
vaporized desire.

bionic tonic (for a summer cold)

2008-06-11T22:08:00.003-05:00

one small onion, thinly sliced
three or four scallions or ramps, sliced
one bunch radishes, sliced; greens chopped
4 cu. water
one bunch watercress
olive oil, lemon, salt

sautee onions, scallions, and radish with pinch of salt for 3 mins.
add 4 cu. water. bring to boil and simmer 15 mins.
add watercress and greens, simmer 5 mins.
season with fresh squeezed lemon and salt to taste.

paparazzi

2008-06-06T09:35:00.006-05:00

in the first released photos, i'm walking back from the co-op in mismatched clothing, a striped t-shirt and pair of plaid shorts, a canvas bag filled with carrots, fennel, beets, and chard swings from my grip and a pair of yellow sunglasses perches on my nose. i have bedhead and my face is pretty scruffy. i hold hands with an unknown woman in dark sunglasses, covered in tattoos. we walk down a sidewalk, turn a corner, and cross the street.

a second set catches me out back alone, talking on a cell phone. these are shot from above, most likely the neighbor's roof. it is dusk. i am barefoot, and i wear what looks like sweat shorts and a ratty t/shirt, like i've been doing yoga. i pace the driveway, bend over and poke at the plants. in three of them i gesture cartoonishly with my hands or make a goofy face to emphasize a point or as a reaction to some piece of news.

i turn the page and find the last set. in these i'm out at a bar. it's late and i'm with my friends. we leave the bar and the photographers take me by storm, the bulbs flashing in my face. i am tired and don't want them to see me like this. in the first few, i try my best to look uninterested, eyes elsewhere, leaning into my friends with sly grin, lighting a cigarette. but then the series changes and i am angry, getting closer to the cameras. my hand takes up a whole frame. on a diagonal from the frame, my friends hold me back as i try to throw a punch. my face contorts and eyes bulge as i threaten and curse.

sitar, or dijerydo

2008-05-29T10:49:00.002-05:00

the puddle on the driveway next to the apartment has been growing, inch by inch, every day until finally it dawned on me that maybe, yes, there is a leak and, sure enough, when i squatted down and looked under the bricks where the hose comes out from under the building, a fine, needle-thin spray of water could be seen arching from the pipes.

since our landlord is, at best, absentee, the process is this: call the landlord, wait for him to never call back, call the plumber, pay for it yourself, deduct from rent check at the end of the month, and cross your fingers this is okay. so far, we're right on track, having completed steps one through three. i am currently listening to the plumber bang and jingle in the bathroom, where he not only laughed right out loud at the current arrangement of the pipes under the sink, which have been re-routed along a peculiar path that seems anti-thetical to drainage, but also advised us to "get rid of" the old, leaking faucets we have in there and replace them with new ones. and so, for the past two hours, i've been uneasily trying to settle into my reading and note-taking, but mostly i am distracted by this man, the fact that the water has been shut off, and that i've just finished my fourth cup of strong black coffee.

on memorial day, i got off my lazy ass and took the push broom from the garage and swept the mounds and mounds of tree-pollen from the back driveway/patio area. i swept up a final large pile that came to about the top of my knees, and shoved it into the little gated area where i sometimes toss the leaves of turnips or beets. suddenly, the back area was a fine place to be, again, and i built up some shelving out of old bricks and planks of wood in the garage, artfully arranged our flowers, herbs, and plants along them to make the sitting area look like a place where neo-hippies might hang out with a sitar or dijerydo. i noticed the infamous pomegranate tree has three new fruits coming in, and i listened to the mysterious warble of a red-headed bird that was hopping from limb to limb in the pecan trees that tower in our back yard. the weekend was so quiet -- HH and just about every one of my neighbors were out of town, so i felt like i had the whole block to myself as i walked to get some groceries and some beer, and then, after the sun set, i sat outside and scribbled notes to myself on the big ideas that have been governing my thoughts these days, watched the stray cats chase after frogs and saw bats flittering wildly over the rooftops.

i guess part of getting rid of that "unmoored" feeling is to remember that you might, in fact, have an anchor and that you might have to cast it down right where you are to -- what? not necessarily feel stable (i have problems with sea sickness), but at least get a sense of where you are, leaky pipes and all.

unmooring

2008-05-02T14:35:00.004-05:00

when we were little, my grandfather would wake us up in the morning by pretending that the bed was a boat and that he was the captain, and that we were headed out from a dock that was the bedroom or whatever fold-out sofa bed we might have spent the night. "goodbye!," he'd yell to no one who was there, "goodbye, now!" we'd wake up, one by one, listening to the sound of the engine that he made low in his throat. pretty soon my sisters and my cousins and I would be yelling our farewells, too: "goodbye, mom!" "goodbye, uncle jack!" "goodbye, aunt ro-ro!" i would picture everyone gathered on the dock, the water dappling in the sunlight, the sides of the boat as we moved out to sea, unmoored, having departed for an imaginary world that, after several minutes, gave me great pause -- where, exactly, were we going?

it occurs to me that this is a memory of an act of imagination about departure that was performed upon awakening and, in a way, a reversal. you might, for example, expect your grandfather to take you on an imaginary journey for parts unknown as a way to bridge the space between waking and dreaming. for us, it was the opposite. and, from what i can remember, we never arrived anywhere, we just left and we had no real destination in site. at first, it was really easy to get wrapped up in the fervor of yelling and waving, trying to one up each other by remembering who we still hadn't said goodbye to -- distant cousins, neighbors, schoolteachers. but, eventually, you'd get to puzzling over what you were supposed to imagine was happening once we got out of sight, once we were at sea and there was, ironically, nothing to see, and then it was simply over. now that we were fully awake -- well? well, now what?

i'm thinking about departures and endings because, of course, the summer's coming, which means i'll be saying goodbye to the all-too familiar routine of exhaustion and, by hook or by crook, i'll enter a new way of inhabiting the world, just for a little while -- on my own terms, more or less, while i intellectually and emotionally recuperate from the drain of way too many students who exert an unbelievable amount of resistance. the goal is to read deeply, develop more Big Ideas, and write about them. keep on with the yoga. go for walks. listen to abstract music. communicate with smart people. maybe return to this blog, which feels distant from me, now, especially since i suspect that, yes, students are reading it and i am not sure if that matters at all or maybe just a little bit.

i'm also thinking about departures and endings because, of course, the above memory demonstrates the bizarre temporality of such moments -- the imaginary boat ride begins as an ending, as a departure, but it never formally ends in its own right. it just kind of fizzles out in a vague non-memory of non-completion. you might say it fails to end. it is a strong memory, this awakening to the beginning of an ending, but it leaves me feeling a bit adrift in the waters of my own in-between moment.

sister

2008-04-23T16:43:00.001-05:00

the surprising thing about ideas is that they find other homes besides yours

2008-03-26T20:26:00.005-05:00

wind rattles new spring leaves outside the window from about three blocks away i can hear revving engines of westheimer's traffic men's voices from the bar call across the yards the sun has just set the dishes are washed and stacked on the draining board the apartment is tidy and a quiet glass of something to drink makes rings on the desk next to me why o why is starting something new so incredibly difficult?

six word memoir

2008-03-20T10:50:00.002-05:00

your

plastic

eyes

gave

warmth.

I was tagged by the other mother.

I tag:

The six word memoir rules are:

write your own six word memoir.

post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like.

link to the person that tagged you in your post.

tag five more blogs with links.

leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

keywords (notes for the future)

2008-03-10T11:01:00.000-05:00

domestic disruption
new buildings and public works
rogue and failed
airport as border
detention and delay
anti-lynching film
textual orientalizing
studio-backed film with Black themes
new talkies
desire for cinephilia
mumblecore
hand-held verite
world without adults
lo-fi
millenials
indiewood
niche audience
art cinema-lite
cinema of provocation
structured absence
cross-over film
gonzo v. amateur
queer caucus
authetification of female pleasure
aesthetic of disappearance
impossible addressee
surrogate's point of view
rhetoric of authentic sex
inability to communicate
freak status
indie-quirk
personal excess of identification
radically un-ironic

roobois

2008-02-23T23:41:00.000-06:00

have you noticed how, in the rearview mirror, the little wrinkles under your eyes have become just a little deeper, and did you wonder, today, if the guy in his twenties, who called you and your partner up looking for a little guidance, might have noticed, and maybe that's what, in the end, made you seem more like you knew what you were talking about when it came to matters of being alive in this world, having lived the struggle to this point, having already been shaken to your very core by the unexpected meanness of the world, and having survived it, and come out feeling like you are doing just fine?

fine -- a fine afternoon walk to the teahouse leads to the meeting of this new young friend, you can call him your friend even though you never met him, and you sit outside, together with the one you love, and go from one question to the next, thinking and trying to say, like, how do you account for the decisions you've made, and why do, all of a sudden, decisions seem less like decisions and more like some sort of roll of the dice, some kind of cosmic kaleidoscope that set you turning and falling into strange but colorful patterns, suddenly there and seemingly together, and just as suddenly gone and rearranged? if he asks how do you know, when did you know, how did you decide, what was it like, what's it like now, you will pour the red roobois tea and sip and think it's such a wide, wide past to return to. you recall, in exact ways not, at first, the times and places and people but, more accurately, the unbelievable crisis of not knowing, when nothing made sense, and it all seemed terribly new and unavoidable, and you reach for an answer but you cannot quite grasp it. you listen with care.

how the story of not knowing must begin with trying to put into words what you do not know how to say, how weird this feels, how it makes you so sensitive and shy. when was the last time you felt this? what to compare it to? what the street smells like when new rain falls on hot asphalt. what leaves sound like when breezes blow at night. like sweeping the dust out of a corner -- you're not touching it with your hand, but you know something's working because your holding the other end of the broom. how to not be alone in the world when you start everything over. finding your way around the apartment at night with no lights on.

the sun starts to set. you smile and hug your new friend. he is red like roobois. you walk home with your beloved and think about the new wrinkles. you don't mind -- you like it. so much more to go. it's not even half-over.

in fifty words or less

2008-02-15T16:30:00.000-06:00

how the day has passed: overcast and balmy, hammers and the boom of construction, with holler and echo. before me, an empty cup of green tea. the keyboard's lettered black squares huddle safely together -- snug chiclets, in a row, magically making paragraphs of light under my fingers.

fragments (in pairs)

2008-01-20T22:26:00.000-06:00

storm and cold . pillows and quilts . jeans and sweatshirt . shops and windows . posters and tape . windshield and wiper . commerce and anxiety . crane and hook . bulldozer and nailgun . co-op and recipes . squash and parsnips . dreams and water . book and chair . sunlight and window . notes and coffee . sex and film . talk and manhattans . scent and memory . austin and time . email and facebook . clutter and desk . receipts and clipboards . depth and surface . frame and lighting . tacos and balloons . cap and scarf . mat and block . stretch and rest . ankle and sit-bone . ribcage and spine . steam and peppermint . towel and socks . rodent and drywall . empty and spacious . sirens and traffic . hollers and helicopters . calendar and ink . diamonds and cactus . moon and stars .

smile

2008-01-02T17:05:00.000-06:00

what leads to tea and advil?

2007-12-29T10:31:00.000-06:00

hours on the plane and more in the car which lulls me with the slush and hum and my mother's constant chatter and the heat running she swerves from one topic to the next and asks so many questions the city of brotherly love shines magnificently in the afternoon light and we cross a bridge and motel motel motel strip mall strip mall motel and then into the little town where i grew up all the same houses all the same there's ours my father in his sweat pants hugs me some of the furniture is different and then i drop my bag in the room where my grandfather lived and died

later at the local bar i meet with old friends the people on this earth i have known the longest outside of my family every one of them a study: the one who just moved into the city the one who became a cop the one with a secret she whispers to me at the bar the one whose grandmother who raised her just died the one who knows she is sexy and the one i haven't seen in fifteen years who looks exactly the same and tells me she is unemployed all have big smiles and we drink into the night remembering how it was mostly when we were teenagers and what ever happened to? on the way home i discover a pack of marlboro ultra lights in the hidey-hole in my mother's car and smoke about a half of just one

in the catholic church i notice everyone there is white and mention this to my father who specualtes that the church would be much stronger if after slavery the catholics had and my mind drifts because i don't really understand what he's talking about and so i'm nodding but really thinking that as long as i am here i should be paying attention and try to remember what it was about this place that held so much for me as a young person and then drove me away with such force as a teenager i like the dirge quality of some of the songs that suggest otherworldiness i like statues of the saints the stained glass windows the smell of incense i like how ritualized everything is i like when we all turn to each other and wish each other peace how we shake hands with strangers smile and say peace be with you

there are three children eight six and two that make me smile as soon as we get in the door after a long drive up into the hills in the northern part of the state my ears pop every couple of minutes as we pull in the last stretch of the ride there is snow on the ground and it is gorgeous the house is cozy with sad sounding geese honking and flying in V-shapes overhead [my older sister yells up to them you! are going! the wrong! way!] and the kids beckon me to discover new things they've received from santa there's lots of chasing shouting spinning running my beautiful beautiful sisters are there and it is such a relief to see them instantly i feel giddy and the wine is poured and i hug them and i laugh like i haven't laughed in a long time and we break out into song at the top of our lungs and dance like crazy people and tease each other mercilessly so that the children are quiet for a second and look at us like maybe we were once children too that night i read the little boy the youngest five bedtime stories and he is very cute and small with big eyes a toothy smile and a runny nose the cutest part is that he has made up a word for when he cannot think of the word that he wants and that word is "heh-heh" as in "uncle, you? heh-heh." which means please run a comb through the tangled mess that is my hair

the rockettes if you've never seen them are like watching a kaleidoscope of women's bodies that fall into impossible shapes and patterns only to realign themselves straight across the stage in dazzling costumes in NYC we take the subway and hold the gloved-hands of the children radio city music hall is tremendous and nostalgic the crowds outside are impossible we all pack tightly back onto the subway afterwards and my niece the eight-year-old reports seeing a man with six fingers on one hand back at my younger sister's tiny little manhattan apartment we all eat roasted red pepper soup and salad and the best pizza i have ever eaten the kids and my parents leave and i spend the night drinking wine and talking with my sister and her husband until i curl up under a warm blanket and fall asleep

the drive from NYC back to my hometown is cold and grey and the NJTP is clogged with traffic once again i doze in between conversations and when we arrive back home my parents take naps while i read and do laundry i miss my friends and i miss my partner more sharply than i thought i would and i start to come down with a cold and i think about the apartment all drafty and by itself plus i discover that benazir bhutto has been killed and we turn on the television and watch until we realize that CNN is more interested in talking about what this means for the security of the united states than in bringing us news from the people of pakistan

that evening i roast a butternut squash in the oven and mash it with salt and pepper and my father makes fresh pasta it feels peaceful he teaches me how to spoon just a little of the squash into the middle of the pasta squares and then press and cut to make ravioli it is blessedly methodical and time consuming my mother makes a salad and declares that everything is hereditary which makes me cringe she and my father drink a manhattan each then we open a bottle of wine my parents ask me if i ever listen to opera and i say no the voices from the speakers are gorgeous but so melodramatic and a bit too loud but my parents love it get almost teary-eyed they tell me: this is the part of the story when! and o! then this is the part when! and o! then this part here is when

i wake up the next morning to pack everything back into my bag and think about how i have not written in my diary or in this blog for a long time or if i have written it has only been sporadically and i think about how i have had so many things that i have wanted to write but that i am tired of the formula sick of how witty and anecdotal i tend to be that i rely on a set of conventions and as i hug my father goodbye and get into the car with my mother i think about maybe getting rid of the blog since the stories rise and fall in my mind faster than i can keep up with them and then my mother gets lost on the way to the airport which seems impossible but really it is true we are off the highway and zigzagging through philly's center city streets looking for an exit and my mother's voice is loud and very anxious and she questions how? how could this possibly be happening? and she thunks the palm of her hand on the steering wheel to emphasize how exasperated she is and says over and again o! and christ! and jeee-sus! and alll-right! the clock is ticking for me to make my flight and suddenly we are back on the highway and she is elated and reflective and analytical about how it happened and what the other possibilites might have been if she had or had not turned here or there or doubled-back or continued on or crossed-over or pulled-out-into or if only there had been a sign that was posted or an exit that should have been built or an on-ramp that should get constructed or a new road that could get public works funding i mean really now when you think about it it could be

i hug my mother goodbye and thank her for such a wonderful time together she gets teary-eyed and tells me how much she loves me and we smile and i head into the terminal and think about that word TERMINAL and i get a little shiver but the good news is that the airport is not as crowded as you'd think and i get through security and think about that word SECURITY and i wait for the boarding call and remember that on the last flight i was on i was seated next to an older gentleman who slowly ripped every page out of a magazine and folded them into little squares and stuck them neatly into the barf-bag thingy on the seat-back in front of him for the entire three-and-a-half hours and i hoped that it wouldn't be him again and it wasn't it was a blonde girl with a lot of make-up on who slept the whole time i was so happy to be back in houston when we touched ground but seem to have picked up a cold which i am now nursing with tea and advil.

there is no other troy (for me to burn)

2007-12-01T10:50:00.000-06:00

In the dream, I was waiting downtown, outside of a hotel, checking each face that passed by for the one I wanted to see most. I was wearing my backpack and carrying a camera in the pocket of my sweatshirt. I was also holding an umbrella. In a short while, I saw who I was looking for -- a woman a little older than me. Quite short, with a neatly shaved head and large, soulful eyes. She was lingering outside the hotel doors as if she, too, were waiting for someone.

I was nervous, but I walked right up to Sinead O'Connor and said hello, introducing myself. She gave me a warm welcome by hugging me and asking me if I had been waiting for long. No, not long. "Listen," I said, getting right to the point, "I know we've only just met, but I've been wanting to talk to you about some things . . . " And I continued, a bit nervous, but feeling like this was the best way to approach her, since I didn't want to faun or gush, but ask her some direct questions that I knew she'd have answers to. She listened very carefully to my questions. I cannot recall the exact content of the questions, but I know the questions bore an enormous emotional weight for me, as if I'd been waiting my whole life to ask someone for an explanation. Sinead was so good. She told me that she could tell I was doing everything exactly right, that the questions were what mattered, for now, and to know that, just as I was struggling with what to do with problems unearthed by memory, so she was, too.

Things then shifted. Sinead was bored and said she wished she knew what there was to do in Houston, that she couldn't wait to leave because there was nothing, nothing, nothing happening here. I told her that it wasn't true, and then advised her, with growing excitement, to walk over to Allen's landing and check out how the bayous run together between the university and the jailhouse. I imagined that Sinead would find this contrast stunning, and that she could spend time reading the history of the landing that's been engraved on the walls there, perhaps see some people in kayaks or canoes paddling past. She could explore the grounds of the old, boarded up Sunset Coffee House, look at how massive the city seemed when you are dwarfed by its still-changing architectural history. Maybe she'd write a song about it.

Just as Sinead was agreeing to go for this walk, it started to rain. The streets filled with pedestrians carrying umbrellas and, in the rain and the crowd, I lost track of her. Had she gone back inside the hotel? Was she already on her way to Allen's landing? Shouldn't I find a way to invite her home to meet H. and have dinner with her? Also, didn't I need to at least get an autograph and a photo, to remember this unbelieveable meeting?

The sun finally came out. The streets cleared. I headed back to where the hotel was and went inside. I wandered a maze of floors and corridors, wondering how I would know which room was hers, and for how long I should look before heading back home.

The last thing I remember about the dream is that I did manage to find her, again. No, she hadn't forgotten that she should get to Allen's landing, but she'd be on her way out of town that evening. I tried to act casual about the whole thing. O yeah. Of course. No big deal. It's cool. Well, it was really great to see you, I said. Yeah, it was, she said, smiling, but a bit distracted. Goodbye, now.

Bye bye.

look what i can do (ribcage)

2007-10-26T19:52:00.001-05:00

In the late-70s, I made an interesting discovery about my body.

Early one autumn, near the beginning of a new school year, I surprised myself by realizing that I could -- and you must visualize this, please -- hook the bottom tip of my left ribcage over the waistband of my corduroys, the same way a normal child might poke a thumb through a belt-loop or tuck one foot behind the other while standing around, waiting for his mom to pick him up from the bowling alley. It was a neat fit, and it was comfortable. Secure. Weirdly cozy, like a little way of saying hello to that unknown part of my body. And, because I have been who I am since at least this age, the act went from being a one-time discovery to being a fully-blown neurotic habit. From September of that year through May of the next, I graduated from simply hooking the tip of my rib over the waist of whatever pair of jeans or uniform pants I was wearing to going even further with my practice, thrusting my hip back to get at my waist from a better angle, and moving the lower ribcage all the way over the width of the pleather belts my mom bought for me that cinched in tight around my middle. I would hook the rib as far over the belt as I could, then push the belt, very gently, in, so that the boney cage, at the same time, was pushed out. And I did it over and over. I did it waiting for the bus. I did it during mass. I did it while taking a break from vocabulary homework. I did it while laughing like a lunatic at Scooby-Doo. And, like I said, this went on for months -- two whole seasons of my own brand of body modification.

Since I was as shy as I was skinny, I never told anyone. I never said to Stephen Hansbury, "Watch this!" Or, even to my sisters, "Look what I can do!" Not that it was a secret, but it was a private thing. It wasn't something to show off. It was my body-idea, and I'm pretty sure I had an inkling that other children were not doing this.

That said, when summer rolled around, and I was spending my days leaping through the sprinkler out front, my mother stopped me with a weird look on her face one afternoon: "Come over here." She trained a critical eye on my narrow chest with its newly formed lump protruding above and to the left of my stomach. I remember her gently poking at it, and then sending me on my way. A few days later, I was in the doctor's office, my mother nervously gritting her teeth as he poked at the lump and asked me a few questions. Does it hurt? No. Does it ever get red and puffy? No. I remember there being some conversation and confusion, and I felt an intense worry. The doctor asked me if I was doing anything, like pushing on my chest or pulling at it in any way. I reluctantly nodded yes. "Will you show me?" Barechested, I got up off the examining table and, for the very last time in my entire life, I thrust my right hip out, pulled my torso up so that my left ribcage jutted up and out, and, with real gusto, bore down and hooked my lower-rib cage over my belt, pushing it all the way out. It was quite a performance. I wish I had said, "Ta da!" and made jazz hands. My mother nearly fainted. The doctor told me that I needed to stop doing this. Right away.

I don't remember much after that visit. I mean, I don't remember struggling with trying to stop. I remember that the ribcage eventually returned to normal and, in the years since then, my mother has commented on it and concluded that the growing human body is a malleable and amazing thing. Really, there is no trace of it that I can see.

But, lately, I been wondering what would have happened if I hadn't stopped -- What might my body might have finally become? What kind of exceptional freak might I have been, and how much they would have charged to come see me, locked in my cage and eating lightbulbs?

brang? durn?

2007-10-20T11:19:00.000-05:00

thirty-six

2007-09-30T09:37:00.000-05:00

1. early morning voice overs
2. small wildflowers
3. the tea house
4. short walks that clarify
5. lion's pose
6. throat
7. thresholds
8. pink moons
9. window panes
10. films noir
11. soft foot touching
12. rattle and clink of dishes while reading
13. heirloom tomatoes from the co-op
14. peppers and herbs out back
15. my sisters' voices
16. students with grills
17. communal meals
18. everday mazes
19. letters in the mailbox
20. calendula
21. dreams of the dead
22. taking notes
23. stacks of books
24. small children's pointing fingers
25. the gaze inward
26. solitude's ease
27. brain stretching
28. muscle tickles
29. skin tags
30. endless leg bones
31. the edge of missing people
32. intrasubjectivity
33. soul showers
34. joining
35. towards and further
36. surprising halos

clever, clever

2007-09-17T19:27:00.000-05:00

(To be read in Andy Rooney's voice:)

You know how, lately, you must secure an especially sensitive on-line account by choosing three questions to which you and only you knows the answer? And you think and think: "What will I always know the answer to?" And then you finally land on three very clever questions that you are sure will prevent any fraudist or theif from busting in and taking all you've got? It's the cleverness I want to disabuse you of, especially if you are a writer and being clever is your specialty.

(To be read in my voice:)

In 2004, I opened an account with ______, and came up with some very clever questions and answers. Typically enough, I never used the on-line account, opting for the old-fashioned way of dealing with my affairs -- through the postal system or on the phone. But recently, feeling even more 21st century than ever, I decided to go back and try to get into the account on-line, only I forgot the password. Inevitably, I could not get ______ to send me the password via email, so I called up and got an operator. The operator told me she could send me an email confirming my password if I could answer the three questions I posed to secure the account when I opened it. Simple enough, I thought. "Okay," I said, "Shoot." I nailed the answers to the first two questions, which I will not, of course, reveal to you on-line (buy me a beer and I'll tell you).

Then came the third question, which the operator introduced by saying, "Okay, and so, now, the last question is . . ." She paused, cleared her voice, and then she deadpanned, "Who is the worst student?"

I was not only stunned by this question, but I was also incredulous about its odd phrasing -- "WHAT? 'Who is the worst student?' What does that mean?" Not even, "Who is the worst student I've ever had?" or "What is the name of the student who did X?" but a brief, almost dull-witted articulation of extremes. I couldn't believe it. Remember, I am the author of this question and I presumed that I would always know the answer.

When I confessed that I was totally stumped, the operator, feeling sorry for me, said, "Well, you wrote the question in 2004, does that jog your memory at all?" "Hm, 2004 . . . 2004 . . . I'd have to look at a grade book," I replied. What was going on in 2004 that was so awful, and why was it that I could no longer access that memory after being triggered by a question designed for its immediate recall? At the same time, I think the question is also a bit green, because it supposes that, really, this student was the worst! ever! and none would ever match her or him in what I am sure was an astonishingly aggressive and endlessly dramatic approach to learning. The question betrays a Chuck who, in 2004, could not -- or would not -- separate the professional and the financial from the emotional. It's a Chuck who chose, finally, not a question at all but, instead, a mood -- one that has no answer, only endless questions attached to it.

And I wondered, at the same time, what other kinds of bizarre questions people ask themselves the answers for in order to access their digital hordings, and how many questions have answers that go unremembered, or that are based on moods. I wondered about mean-spirited questions, sort of like my own, or ones motivated by love, anger, jealousy, loss, broken-heartedness, or delusions of grandeur?

Even though I am hating closure these days, I'll tell you that, while I never figured out the answer to the question, and had to go through a whole rigamarole to get a new password, I feel like the more I think about it, the closer I come to understanding who this might have been and why I thought I'd never forget the answer. Sorry for the vagueness, but I'm still cautious about the limits of pseudonimity.

(To be read in someone else's voice:)

(I know this seems like a lame ploy to keep readers interested in a blog that hasn't been very active these days but, really, the beginning of the academic year along has me taxed in ways I didn't expect!)

bettin' on the bull in the heather

2007-09-05T20:03:00.000-05:00

What's that Sonic Youth song? The one where Kim Gordon counts by tens?

And the bass booms along a low down dirty beat, keeping you rooted in the earth while her vocals go up into the creaking sky?

The urgency of Kim's message gets more and more heated, only to be tempered by a rat-a-tat on the drums and a shake-a-shake in your right ear.

I'm grooving on this right now, hard core, thinking back to a time when it was the early 90s and I am stuck living in a motel room whose only protection is a broken sliding glass door, and the sink overflows every night with the unflushed waste of other rooms' debris. The smell of cooking fish from the communal kitchen. Everyone's sick. 70s drapery and a bed bolted to the wall. It was cheap. A time when I was new to H/town, fresh from the northeast, thinking "Soon," and "How fast I'll be done here," and "My ideas are abstract and important."

Notice that Kathleen Hanna dances into the frame and sticks out her tongue. She punches Thurston in the face by accident while Kim curls up in a nightie in what looks like a little kid's bedding. Kim has understood something. She stares into the camera and, tacitly, asks the viewer why he's so interested in seeing some betting game gone so weird. Thurston gives a horse a banana.

You can dance to it and feel proud, but you shouldn't expect anyone to leave feeling any better.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=2T4BsnXmJaI

granny creeps

2007-08-22T16:28:00.001-05:00

cone of uncertainty

2007-08-19T12:39:00.001-05:00

Erin was easy. If I can just remember not to drive the car into any really deep puddles, I'll be fine. And now there's Dean [remember Dean? ah, boyfriends . . .], who was predicted to wreak havoc all over the Gulf region of the U.S., but more recent evaluations of what will happen next week is that it will head right into the Yucatan, and by that time it will be more of a depression than a hurricane.

The language of weather parallels the language of the psyche: depressions, storms, and floods. Scorchers. Weakening systems. The cone of uncertainty: I picture all treacherous doubts funneling into the top of my head and swirling around in my brain before being pumped to my heart, where they flutter and jump until a more predictable pattern emerges.

Fruit flies. Mosquitoes. Fire ants.

Today I purchased wood filler. The intent is to make the window in the shower look less like a rotting frame and more like -- like a window. Will this work? The window is beyond opening and closing, although we gave it a shot when we first moved in. "It will be nice," I thought, "to have an open window to air out the shower and keep down the mildew. Much nicer than the shower in the old apartment, with that broken gas heater installed in the tiles opposite the shower head." But opening the window requires a serious effort, and every time one of us did, more and more of the frame crumbled off, and more and more of the frame cracked. So this wood filler isn't going to fix anything. It'll just make it look better by filling the wood in where there isn't any. I'll need to use sandpaper.

This is a description of the coffee mug in front of me: a smiling, cross-eyed, grey elephant skips rope against a sea-foam green background, with these words written next to him: TTPbIT-CKOK, TTPbIT-CKOC TDE-TO PYXHYA TTOTOAOK

Yesterday I made pasta sauce using fresh sage from the sage plant Cake left us. Sagacious Cake's sage plant. It was delicious.

feels like

2007-08-13T08:56:00.000-05:00

With the "feels like" temperature spiking at 115 degrees in the heart of the city, you've got to really steel yourself for the day's events. What happens when it is this hot? If film noir has taught us anything (which it has), it can only be trouble. Time to hole up, watch The Asphalt Jungle (dir. John Huston, 1950) and Strangers on a Train (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1951), and try to make it through the next week.

august already? (dream)

2007-08-05T10:44:00.000-05:00

Where, I ask you, has the summer gone?

I had a dream last night that, with great excitement, I realized that I had bought a fishtank, a large, glowing cube of exotic-looking, fantastically-colored fish that I was keeping on top of my dresser in the bedroom. It was a spectacular sight, especially at night. When I went to feed the fish, I realized how tiny they were, and also realized that the towel I had forgotten that I was carrying was supposed to be placed inside the tank in order to increase the amount of nutrients in their food. Against all rules of logic, the towel, rather than soaking up all of the tank water as I feared, simply disintegrated and fed the fish, who were suddenly large and beautiful, swimming in terrifically complex geometric patterns.

Instead of being satisfied with these results, though, I recklessly went in search of another towel to add, hoping for even better results. I came back to the fish tank, which was still on the same dresser but now so high up I had to climb on the knobs on the dresser to help me reach the top. The whole structure was profoundly unsteady, but I was determined to add another towel. Once I got to the top and peered into the fishtank, I knew my plan might cause problems, but I figured it was too late now, and so I began to put the second towel into the tank. About half-way in, the problems started. The towel was getting very wet and heavy. I noticed that the fish in the tank were frighteningly big, shark-sized, with open mouths and sharp teeth. Much to my horror, I saw that one of the fish was battered and diseased, and that its eyes had been eaten out by the other fish. All of the fish bumped up against the side of the tank with astonishing force. I lost my grip on the dresser, and the whole thing tipped. I clutched the lip of the tank for support and grabbed at the heavy, water-logged towel, thinking it might anchor me.

We fell. Water and fish went everywhere. I scrambled to pick them up to put them back inside the tank, but I couldn't tell which onces were alive and which ones were dead. Some had become so small I couldn't tell if I was holding a fish or not. The room was also very dark, and I worried about stepping on the fish as well as getting bit by them. Their population, since the falling of the tank, had grown significantly. The floor of the bedroom was covered in several inches of water.

Then it dawned on me that I needed help. If the situation was going to improve, I would need to call someone. The realization stopped me in my tracks. Who? Who could I call for help?

(Thanks to Julie Doucet's My Most Secret Desire [Drawn and Quarterly, 2006] for the inspiration, I am sure.)

terror, gasoline, and the local

2007-07-23T19:57:00.000-05:00

I was driving back from the Y, dreaming of the tempeh, lettuce, and tomato sandwich I was going to get for lunch at Field of Green's [it pains me to keep the apostrophe, but it's their spelling], when I noticed, in my rearview mirror, an enormous, sleek, red pick-up truck bouncing down Montrose towards me. It was lunchtime, and so the traffic was a bit heavy, and the truck stood out because of its color, size, and shiny newness. It stayed behind me for a couple of seconds, then pulled around so that it was in the lane next to me. As we waited for a light to change, the driver of the truck, a man, leaned over, waved, and motioned for me to roll down my window.

I wasn't sure. I've had some problems with men in trucks and other large vehicles that have ended badly. There was that time, right after 9.11, when a man from Whole Foods was sure it was me who threw a carton of raw eggs on his SUV, which had "Bomb His Ass and Take the Gas" and "I'll Be for Peace after We Get a Piece of Them" signs and American flags decorating its windows. That whole thing went on for fucking months, almost a full year. And how many times have I been riding my bike only to be nearly run down by some asshole driving a Hummer, speeding through the urban landscape like he's fleeing a scud-missle attack? H. and I were once almost killed by a man driving an SUV so large it couldn't fit around us in a supermarket parking lot and so the driver decided to teach us a lesson by nearly running us over and then coming to a screeching halt, getting out of the cab, and demanding to know which one of us touched his car while his terrified children watched from the tinted windows.

Feeling generous, I took the risk anyway, and rolled down my window. Maybe he needed directions to the vegan lunch place I was about to visit . . . I raised my eyebrows and tilted my head up.

"Yeah?"

"Hey!" he yelled, leaning way over, wild-eyed, frantically gesturing. The truck was so wide it could easily have fit four or five other people in the front. "I need your help!! I drove off this morning without any money and my truck really needs some gas!! I'm on empty!! Would you pull over so I can borrow some cash?? -- I just need a couple of bucks to make it home!!"

What!? I almost laughed out loud. "Um, no," I said, shaking my head and looking back at the traffic light, which was about to change to green.

But the guy was pissed. "FAGGOT!!!" he yelled, and gunned his motor and sped off down Montrose, swerving as fast he could in and out of the lanes.

Ouch. You'd think I'd be used to it by now since it's a word that I've been accosted with ever since I can remember. Still, it stings. Anyone whose ever been called a faggot knows this. Anyone who has ever been mean enough to use the term to describe someone else knows its easy power. I'd say, in the past five years, someone yells this at me about twice a year. It always catches me off guard, especially since it happens when I least expect it -- like today, or like the time I was unlocking my bike at the Half Price Books and a school bus rode past and a chorus of children screamed it at the top of their lungs from their windows, or the time I was walking down to one of my favorite watering holes and someone yelled it from a truck window, or the time I was camping with H. and someone yelled it at us as we were packing up our tent, or the time I was visiting friends in Austin and their crazy neighbor started to interrogate me about faggots, or . . . well, you get the drift. And, look, I know that this guy was -- clearly -- out of his mind. I know, I know . . . it was just the icing on the cake, really.

But, it makes you think about terror and terrorism, and anti-gay violence, injurious speech, and the cultural and emotional trauma that it takes so many of us so many years to get the fuck over; and you think about that big red truck and that man's frenzied truck-to-car begging for money so he could fuel it, and you think that maybe this is not some Mad Max future, but right now, right here.

What did this guy actually think was going to happen, anyway? That I was going to say, "O, you poor man! Yes, let's drive past the homeless vet begging for booze money on the median strip and the gaggle of street kids looking to stir up some trade and park safely in the Exxon station so I can get out of my car and meet you face to face, at which point, I am sure you will not stick a gun or knife in my face and rob me or, worse, shoot me or stab me. Yes, please, by all means, let's pull over -- the wax job on your truck clearly indicates that you need me to buy you some gas. In fact, let's use my credit card so you can fish the receipt out of the trash and steal my identity after I drive away."

I reminded myself that tailing this guy and trying to run him off the road was not a good idea. I took a deep breath and put my turn signal on. "It's gonna be alright," I said to myself, "It's gonna be tempeh, lettuce, and tomato. It's gonna be a little cup of vegan gumbo soup. It's gonna be a slice of lemon in your glass of water -- you'll love it," I promised myself, "you really will."

remember (what everyone else forgets)

2007-07-18T10:29:00.001-05:00

I was sort of dreading the trip back east to the family reunion. The whole idea of reuniting with people who I felt I had nothing in common with seemed like a chore, an obligation. My strongest memories of this side of the family are the two-dozen or so cousins I would see once a year, those who would tease me for reading inside while everyone else was outside playing hockey. These are the guys who couldn't believe I knew nothing whatsoever about the big game that was playing on TV on Thanksgiving. I would just be patient and wait for it to be over. More recently, I would see these cousins at my sisters' weddings, and it was hard to explain the academic job search, how you could be a "doctor" and still have a hard time making ends meet, the problem of adjunct teaching at four different campuses, what I was writing about, not to mention the queer thing. It was easier to speak in vague generalities like, "Yeah, I like living in Houston" and "Teaching is going well" and then direct the conversation back to easier subjects like marriage and kids.

My older sister is the one who told me that my anxieties were largely a part of a family hangover, and that this is the side of the family who I should feel most connected to -- tall, goofy-looking, working class people with yellow teeth who are just as socially and physically awkward as I am. I didn't really believe it until H. and I showed up for the "day in the park" picnic. Throngs of cousins and their kids stood in what looked like uncomfortable half-circles, smiling in their baseball caps and sunglasses, waiting to figure out what was going to happen next. I thought to myself, if I can walk into a classroom of thirty complete strangers and act like I was born inside a university, then I can, surely, mix in with this group of blood relatives. And so I did. I plunged right in, tapping into that energy that makes me "go" when I'm teaching. I walked right up to somewhat familiar faces and re-introduced myself and H. I turned to give a hug to the next person and asked the kids if their teeth had been stolen or if they fell out on their own. I easily made my way from young to old as if I belonged to this family more than anyone else did.

It was, of course, exhausting, but it mixed things up just right, and before I knew it, the shy, quiet, high strung boy who felt radically alienated from everyone else was gone, and, for the first time, I had animated conversations with all sorts of people in my family, who seemed as relieved as I was that I had lost my fear of being the black sheep.

Alcohol is important to this side of the family, sometimes dangerously so. It was both interesting and a little unsettling to see what happened when the bar opened towards dinner. Certainly the bonds formed in the park over whiffle ball, kite-flying, and hoagie-eating became, in the evening, more lubricated with the addition of old-fashions, manhattans, side-cars, beers, wine, and lots and lots of cigarettes. At one point, late, I realized that half the family was trashed and telling wild stories at the top of their lungs and the other half was slumped over a half-empty drink, ready for bed. In the room where the bar was, a couple of poster boards had baby pictures of everyone in attendance ("Guess the Baby" was a game you could play), along with a couple of candid shots from over the years. One of the candids was an enormously embarrassing photograph of my cousins and me from the mid-1980s. In it, I am fourteen or fifteen. My hair is, like, shorn up the sides and off at a gigantic, bizarre pointy angle to the left side of my head. I am emaciated, with bad acne. A pair of round metal glasses sits on my nose. I'm wearing all black. And even though everyone else in the photo has bad mullets and big permed hair, clad in white jeans and day-glo t-shirts, I am the one who everyone sees as an index of 80s poor taste. The thing to do at this point in the reunion is to yell "Flock of Seagulls!" or "Devo!" and then use your hands to shape an imaginary new wave hairdo before collapsing in laughter. I do it, too, to make sure eveyone knows I am not shy, not the outsider. Then I catch the eye of my cousin T., who I have only met once, and we step out for a smoke.

I remember T. from when we were both eleven. She came to visit my family for about a week, during which time we spent an entire day floating in inner-tubes down the Delaware river. This is all I remember. She's my father's sister's daughter, adopted. We clumsily began a conversation remembering the tubing trip, and then went in circles, talking about her search for her biological parents and the hurt she felt when they were rude to her, telling her to go back to her adoptive parents. We talked about feeling like outsiders, like black sheep. As a teenager, I remember hearing that she was always in trouble, although I don't know exactly what that means, now. I have a cousin on the other side of my family who once accused me of the same thing -- "You were in a lot of trouble in high school, weren't you?" Trouble? It's not something you ever think you are in -- just the way your life goes, unlike regular teenagers' lives, yours will be trouble. We smiled about this, finishing cigarettes.

Then T. asked me what I knew about why her mother and my father were taken from our grandparents as kids. This is something that I always forget to remember -- when my father and his three older sisters were children, they were taken, by the state, from my grandparents. They were also separated from each other. The sisters were put in different foster homes, and my father was put in an orphanage. No one really knows why. One result was that T.'s mother was very badly abused. Eventually, my grandparents regained custody of their kids, and the reason why it happened was never, ever talked about. When my father has asked people from his parents' generation why this happened, he cannot get a straight answer because the response has always been, "Your mother always loved you kids and you better believe she fought tooth and nail to get you back." T.'s interesting observation of this is that, as terrible as the situation was, she believes that the trauma my aunt grew up with is what brought her to adopt her children, and that, had the abuse never taken place, my cousin T. might never have been my cousin.

I really enjoyed this conversation because it was a strange, intimate moment in which secrets were shared and a mystery emerged. It was a serious talk, and it also reminded me why this reunion was, in fact, of historical significance. I come from a family that came very close to being torn apart. My father and his sisters, who organized the reunion, are now the oldest members of the family. The outside conversation with T. shows that those who have always felt the most outside the family can, finally, come together and talk, and that, importantly, we are the ones who will remember what everyone else almost forgets.

quick sketch

2007-07-09T22:04:00.001-05:00

At the Bus Stop, in Capital Hill, Sunday night karaoke is sung by the neighborhood's most interesting people, including my old friend Seanna, who performed a killer cover of Sid Vicious' "My Way," and H's old friend GC, who tore it up with a rousing rendition of Modest Mouse's "Float On." The beer was nice and cold, and we drank until no one was left but us, and they threw us out. You should have seen H. do his cover of Gary Newman's "Cars" -- it brought down the house.

feet out the window (stomach just above intestines)

2007-07-07T18:05:00.000-05:00

The unwritten part of this travel is that I have some sort of virus, some bug, which, since about Tuesday, has had me sick -- at first almost unbearably so, frighteningly so, but now almost manageable. Almost, but not totally.

Upon our arrival at Kalaloch, in a nauseated panic, I made a call to my doctor's office. I was told that I needed to stop eating the normal foods that I eat and stick with dried toast, bananas, rice, and tea. That, and to get some rest. Real rest, not hike-for-several-hours-and-then-drive-for-a-few-more kind of rest. After posting my last entry at Port Townsend, I slept for pretty much the entire day and that whole night. I was exhausted and very sad. Today I feel okay, but I am sick of being sick, sick of herbal tea and plain white rice, sick of having to explain to wait staff -- no, no butter, just rice, just toast, no jelly, no jam, just dry, just sprite, no coffee, no cheese, water only, just the broth, do you have any bananas?, no, no cocktail, yes, I am sure I only want an apple . . . I keep thinking I've turned a corner, but not yet.

This morning, we said goodbye to H's cool cousins who live in this amazingly cute 1970s treehouse-looking home in the woods near Bellingham. We drove north to see them yesterday, and had a really chill afternoon and evening, taking in the fresh air, the view, and the trees, talking about politics, driving their biodiesel truck to the co-op for vegetables and cooking, and hanging out with the kids. We spent the night in a camper in their front yard and woke up to singing birds.

We landed in Seattle around noon. We've checked in to the Ace hotel in Belltown, where we've rented a tiny little room with a shared bath on the hallway. It's a pretty hip place, what with the hip-hop being piped into the bathrooms and the tattooed and crooked haircut crowd. We did some much-needed laundry in the basement. Everything is painted white and all the fixtures are clean stainless steel. I've got my bare feet hanging out the window onto 1st street as I type this, and I am trying to will health back into my body, to calm all of my internal organs down. H. is out at a barber shop down the block getting a haircut. We have plans to go see some live music tonight, perhaps meet up with some old friends, but I'm taking it about an hour at a time, which means that I might be just as content reading Don DeLillo's new book, Falling Man, which, so far, is pretty great.

I'll post some photos when I have a couple more minutes.

notes on the nose (bald eagle)

2007-07-05T11:13:00.000-05:00

It's really too bad you cannot take a photo of scents, because the strongest sense I have been exercizing the past couple of days has been through the nose. Seattle smells strongly of flowers, everywhere you turn. And while I love how jasmine and honeysuckle perfumes the street I live on, Seattle's flowers are an incredible variety of sweetness -- like wandering through a vaporised herbal tea. And after just one day in Seattle, we took a ferry and landed on the Olympic peninsula, which is not only stunning, at times unbelieveable, to see, but also home to a clear air filled with the fresh aroma of coniferous trees.

I think we've been really lucky with the weather, too. The days have been warm and sunny, bright and clear, so you can see gigantic snow-capped mountains on the horizon while you comb the beach for rocks. We've seen lots of deer (some as close as several feet away), butterflies, chipmunks, salmonberries, spittlebugs, a rabbit, seagulls, and little fish swimming in crystal clear waters. The ancient Hoh rainforest was a mesmerizing twisting, draping, and hanging of deep yellows, emerald greens, light golds, and pale oranges against the blue sky. We wandered a trail along the bluffs leading to Dungeoness Spit and ate a picnic lunch. Just as we were leaving the beach, we looked up and could not believe that we were seeing a magnificent bald eagle perched in the branches of a pine. Let's call it part of the national narrative that H. and I are trying piece together whenever we travel during the July 4th weekend.

Right now, we're on-line at a little cafe in Port Townsend, where I'm eating toast and drinking mint tea. We arrived in time yesterday evening to watch some fiddle-players at the Centrum in Fort Worden state park, which looks like this really interesting former-military base turned arts complex slash college campus. We returned to the park for fireworks last night (the temperature drops a bit in the evening, and the strong winds brings a little chill to the air, so folks were wrapped in blankets) and watched them burst over the water. We're staying in a hotel that used to be a brothel, where the different rooms are given women's names. It's got a claw-footed tub!

Tomorrow we're headed north to Bellingham to visit some relatives of H, then back to Seattle for a couple of days. The most important thing to do today is nothing, which I, for one, cannot wait to get to.

accomplishments (of sorts)

2007-06-30T13:21:00.000-05:00

-Realized I have kept a pretty good blog for an entire year. Only regret the wording of one or two entries (esp. one in which I describe state employees in a way that reeks of self-important, bourgeois expectations). Always interesting to see comments from people I've never met. Blurkers who read this blog should always feel free to comment.

-Finished the semester, graded two big stacks of papers and exams, turned in grades, and then ran screaming from the institution.

-Raised a last glass and said goodbye to long-time close friends A. and S/Z, who are moving to Singapore. Still somewhat in denial about that. Can't really picture Houston without them.

-Packing for trip to Seattle, a city I've never been to but that I've wanted to visit for quite some time. Hope to run into an old friend from my teenage years, who I haven't seen since the early 90s. Plan to spend time on the Olympic Peninsula, visiting the coast and the rainforest.

-Finishing Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, a devastating memoir about a son, a father, homelessness, poverty, and work. Read it.

-Contemplating the interviews with Democratic Party presidential candidates I watched on PBS the other night. Journalists of color asked the questions. Particularly excellent was Michel Martin from NPR. She'd finish her question and I'd declare "A-NAL-Y-SIS!" while pointing to the screen.

I'll be posting from the road, y'all.

body

2007-06-23T15:19:00.000-05:00

In Jennie Livingston's 1989 documentary Paris Is Burning, there's a shot of one of the subjects at a ball, descending the stage, completely naked. "Body!" shouts one of the MCs into a mic from the floor as the crowd goes wild, "Body! Body! Body!"

It is with this in mind that I began the day. An imaginary voice-over followed me from the bedroom to the kitchen and bath, exclaiming the word over and over. My knee has healed, and I took the last dose of nausea-inducing antibodies, but I am dragging stress around with me like a giant bag of rocks. The muscles of my upper-back, neck, and right shoulder are twisted up, stiff and painful, and there's a big red zit next to my right nostril. I'm scruffy. "Body!" I hear echoing in my head, "Body! Body! Body!"

And so what to do? I made an appointment with a place in the neighborhood that advertises for massage. I described the place to a friend, who queried, "THAI massage? Isn't that the kind that finishes with a happy ending?" No, no, I assured her, this place is legit. I looked up the website and it should be fine.

But I wasn't so sure once I got in and I met my massage therapist, Pauline, who was wearing a lot of make-up and, of all things, a short skirt. That seemed unusual. Where were her Birkenstocks? Nose-ring? She led me to a little room and I disrobed, leaving my boxers on for good luck.

"First time here?" she asked. Yes. I laid down on this futon-like mattress and the massage began. A lot of warm oil poured over my back. But she seemed awfully close -- practically sitting right on top of me. Shouldn't I be up on some sort of table?, I wondered, and shouldn't she be walking around this table?

She bent over my shoulder and whispered into my ear, Did I want a simple massage or deep tissue? Deep, I replied, I twisted a muscle in my neck. I could feel her breathing on my neck and she murmured very slowly, "Ahhh . . . IIII liiiike youuurrrr tattoooooo." She pulled one of my arms back and laid my hand so that my fingertips touched right above her knees. A bit hesitantly, I pulled them away. She picked them up and rubbed them, and put them back pretty close to where they were originally.

I decided right then and there that I could very easily say "Stop it" or "That's not why I'm here" if anything more unusual started happening -- No problem. But I was super-disappointed about the whole thing because, really, that's NOT why I was there, and I was afraid that the $80 I spent was not going to do a damn thing for the knots in my back and neck. Okay, I thought, why don't I just take a deep breath, relax into the massage, and see what happens.

A few minutes later, Pauline got up from beside me and, much to my alarm, she removed her skirt. The lights, mind you, were very, very dim, and it wasn't like she was completely naked, but she certainly was no longer wearing the skirt that she came in with. She climbed on top of my back and started, how to describe it? kneeing? yes, kneeing the oil into my shoulders. Kneeing it, if you can picture that, with her thighs sliding back and forth along my sides. It all happened very quickly. When I finally got around to responding, I uttered, a little louder than I wanted to, "Um!?!" She stopped. "Does it hurt?" "No," I said. "Okaaayyy, let me knooooow if it doooeesssss," she soothed. And I thought, But! I can feel! Your crotch muscles! Tightening! Against my spine!

Is this normal? Maybe this is what is meant by "deep tissue."

The knees in the upper-back, though, was super-intense, and they did the trick of pushing the knots in my back flat for about ten minutes. She used her elbows, too, then climbed down off my back and did my legs, head, and neck. The next thing I knew, the massage was over, and I was beginning to wonder if maybe the back-climbing part of things was just the way this woman liked to work. As soon as that part was over, she reattached her skirt and kept on working. So maybe it's all in my head?

Recently a friend of mine, let's call her Wendy, went to visit a massage therapist and had an orgasmic release. Wendy didn't go to the therapist for a happy ending, it just happened that way, and from what I remember of her description, the therapist was very cool about the whole thing. While a different experience from my own, I thought about Wendy's massage as I was walking home, and thought about how work on the body might always verge on the sexual depending on how we think of it.

And so this is how I spent the morning of H/town's Pride Celebration, with a nearly-naked woman sliding around on my back. I have to say, hours later, that something really worked. The knots are still there, but the severity of the stiffness is nowhere near as bad as it was. The massage was actually quite good, although I don't think I'll be going back. It was too oily.

But H. and I will be heading out to the parade this evening, rain or shine. Our street already has little places marked off for the floats. It's one of the good things about living so close to Westheimer -- we can walk to the parade and meander down the street, pop into a bar and have a couple of beers. I know I'll be keeping my eyes peeled for Cyndi Lauper and Margaret Cho, both of whom are in town for a live performance tomorrow, and both of whom are rumored to make an appearance in Montrose tonight. I'll bring the camera.

daily rain

2007-06-15T14:48:00.001-05:00

It's been rough, these past few days, but I'm glad for the rain. For the past couple of days, it comes down hard out of a dark grey sky in wide curtains, lightening and thunder like angry exclamation points.

Those damn antibiotics didn't work, and I've been back to see the doctor. Now I'm on round two, this time I'm on something stronger that takes just about all of the energy out of me. Gosh, it is really just astonishing how exhausted a person can be after doing practically nothing all day. I guess that's called "rest." I'm not very fond of it.

Wednesday I went to have an MRI done on my knee and I went to see a specialist. I go back again this afternoon, to see what has developed.

I've had two dreams about going to visit a friend who is out of town who doesn't realize she's left her apartment unlocked.

knee, i worship thee

2007-06-04T15:30:00.000-05:00

all knobby patella and elastic cartilage, bending at my whim . . .

Why You Should Not Get a Knee Infection:

1. It hurts.

2. It's gross.

3. It'll make you sick with fever.

4. It will make you think that someone has a pin in a doll somewhere.

5. It will force you to look up subcutaenous infections on WebMD where you will learn about necrotizing faciitis and its symptoms. You will quietly decide that you have this and the resulting panic will ebb and flow all day.

6. It will make you spend a lot of time inside, which will make you very cranky. And paranoid.

7. It will cause you to miss work during a condensed summer schedule where every minute counts.

8. Like some colds, it will seem like you are 100% cured in the morning, but will get worse as the day goes on, and leave you distressed and exhausted by nightfall.

9. It will call attention to your other, non-infected knee, and you will start to compare and contrast the two, out loud, to anyone who you can get to look at them (especially your partner, who has been very, very kind), even if it has only been about an hour since the last time you rolled up your cuffs for inspection.

10. It will make you miss your favorite yoga classes.

The Short-List of Good Things about It, if It Does Have to Happen:

1. You might remember how totally awesome your doctor is and it might give you pause over how lucky you are to have health insurance.

2. You might get some anti-inflammatory drugs, which act like mild-sedatives.

3. You might have vivid dreams every night about people from your past.

4. You might have time to read.

5. It might become fodder for a blog entry.

say "hi" to your knee

2007-05-31T17:20:00.000-05:00

When my sister and I were kids, we loved that joke.

About two weeks ago, I twisted my ankle and fell, onto the sidewalk, knee-first, as I was getting out of a car. I scraped up my right knee pretty badly. I treated it with peroxide, band-aids, and neosporin until scabs formed. I thought nothing of it, really. I went swimming in Barton Springs Creek, went to the gym, practiced yoga, went to a few parties, and taught my first classes this week.

Yesterday evening, as I was leaving my office, I noticed a slight pain on the top of my knee, almost like a spider bit me. When I got home, I took a look -- no bite, nothing but the just about healed scab, but the knee-cap was so sensitive and painful. Hot. A few hours later, it was hard to walk. I took some extra-stregth tylenol and drank some chamomile tea, put the knee on ice, and googled "suddenly my knee is killing me" and "why is my knee so hot?" I checked WebMD and called my dad, who sells artificial knee implants to hospital emergency rooms. He told me it sounded like I got bit by a spider and recommended amputation.

At 2am I woke up with some really bad, throbbing pain. I couldn't move the knee very easily, but I got up to take some more tylenol and worried the rest of the morning about what was wrong with me. I called out of work sick and went to the doctor's office around 10.

My doctor tells me the knee is swolen from a subcutaneous infection. Gross! I'm also running a fever. I got a nice big batch of antibiotics and anti-inflammatories to treat it. I spent the day dozing and re-reading The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. It already feels better, but it'll be a while before I am swinging from the chandeliers. I go back tomorrow for another visit.

The irony of all of this is that, for the past few months, my left knee was suffering from a tear in its cartilege, and it hurt like hell. It finally started to feel better when I kissed the concrete.

seven things (tag, i'm it)

2007-05-25T09:24:00.001-05:00

1. I was on a bowling team when I was in the fourth grade.

2. Once, going through airport security in the 90s, I was stopped by a guard who was convinced I was MCA from the Beastie Boys.

3. I was an altar boy.

4. I am deathly afraid of rollercoasters and almost all carnival rides.

5. I've performed naked in front of a live audience.

6. My first love tattooed my name on her upper-back, near the left shoulder.

7. I've been arrested.

I was tagged by Cake to list seven things you might not know about me. I tag JiP of Bad Texas fame.

underdog

2007-05-22T13:55:00.000-05:00

The first performance artist I ever knew was a woman who lived in the township where I grew up, named Suzanne (pronouced "Susan", from what I can remember). She was known, when I was a kid, for rollerskating up and down the blocks of Delran with her cat in a bag, a wide cape trailing behind her. Capes, long, long skirts, and her rollerskates: she was completely out of place in the mall-obsessed, consumer-savvy Delran of the late-1970s and 1980s. When I was seven, she was probably 23. The kids on my block called her "The Rollerskating Lady." She lived in an apartment complex across the highway. When I was very young, she was like a celebrity. I wanted to ask her questions. She made me so curious: did she *know* she was wearing things that made people gawk, or did she not? Did she *want* for people to look at her funny, or did she want to be accepted? Later, when I was a pre-teen and early-adolescent, even though she was about fifteen years older than me, I thought of her as a kindred spirit -- a weird-o living in an anti-art, pro-athlete, all-white middle-class suburb.

She also had a beautiful voice, and sang in the Catholic church attached to the Catholic school I went to from first- through eighth-grade. She wore her plain brown hair long and straight. She had an Irish face, often scrunched into a contemplative frown. She did not seem to care in the least what anyone thought of her even though it was clear to me that she was an outsider. When I would ask questions about her, my parents told me she was retarded, which did not seem correct to me since she was not, to my mind, the same as other people I knew who bore that description. I have a bad, emotionally-charged memory of being in the second grade, just when school was about to let out for the summer, and hearing stories about how some older boys bought a slice of pizza at the parish carnival and purposely dropped it on the blacktop so they could laugh at her when she walked over and picked it up and ate it.

When I stopped going to mass in high school, I stopped seeing Suzanne. Shortly thereafter, however, my cousins came to visit from north Jersey and asking if we knew Underdog. "Who's Underdog?" "She's this crazy woman from Delran who's been on the Howard Stern Show who has this whole dance that she does." My mother interrupted, "That's Suzanne! And that Howard Stern ought to be ashamed of himself for exploiting that poor girl!" Really? Suzanne? The Rollerskating Lady? She was on Howard Stern?

It was true. Suzanne had made quite a name for herself through Stern's radio and television show as The Underdog Lady. Although I never saw this show, or her performance, I was left with the same feeling about how "funny" she was as the day I heard about dropping the slice of pizza -- a sort of soul-crushing blow to the heart triggered by the awful realization that cruelty comes readily and easily to people, and that people take a real pleasure in watching it happen over and over again.

When I left for college, Stern's book [title?] came out. I heard there was a photo of Suzanne in it. At a bookstore, I opened up right to a page with a photo of Hollyweird Squares, a knock-off on Hollywood Squares and, in one of the squares, sat a tiny little Suzanne with the word "Underdog" marking her square. I looked at the picture for a long time, trying to see the details of her face. I didn't buy it.

Time passed. I moved to Houston and meet people from all over the place. Every once in a while I was reminded of and tried to accurately describe this Suzanne from my childhood, a.k.a. Underdog, a.k.a. the Rollerskating Lady. I have not thought about her for what? -- years, probably. Today, however, my sister forwarded me the Wikipedia entry on Suzanne Muldowney [her full name], and I found out that she has Asperger's Syndrome, and that she has worked hard to shed the Howard Stern years, to bring dignity back to her art by establishing herself to be an artist with a life-long devotion to public performance. Underdog is not her only character, but one of several that she brings to life in public at small-town New Jersey parades and carnivals. This, I think, is really cool.

It's hard, still, though, because (as I discovered over the past, um, three hours has it been?) YouTube videos of her are accompanied by really mean-spirited comments that totally debase her. I can't even watch the stuff left over from Stern. I got about five seconds in to one of her picking up tootsie roll candies at a parade before I had to stop it. Just mean. Horrible. Like the pizza slice. It fucking makes me die inside.

I'm interested in seeing the documentary film about her, though, which got rave reviews from the critics when it screened at the Atlanta Film Festival last year. The trailer makes the film seem decent. You can watch the trailer at www.artofmadness.com.

multiple choice

2007-05-10T12:08:00.000-05:00

Which of the following is most likely to drive a writer working at home stark raving mad?

a. The all day beep-beep-beeping of bulldozers backing up combined with the upsettingly loud, non-stop sound of explosions and crashes of who knows what? at the construction site right next to where he lives.

b. The terrible screams of cats fucking and fighting under the apartment.

c. The fruit flies swarming in the kitchen.

d. The upstairs neighbors' heavy-footed thudding back and forth across the apartment.

e. All of the above.

cityflowers

2007-05-05T13:21:00.000-05:00

jade

nasturtium
pepper
sunflowers
vines
pomegranate flowers (inside)

mystery bloom
mystery bloom with gas light
pomegranate tree with hank
pomegranate flowers
nasturtiums

two thousand six hundred and four

2007-04-30T14:50:00.000-05:00

Since January, I've been getting a bill from AT&T that says I owe them for long distance. These are little bills, not more than $8.00 accruing each month. The problem is that I don't have AT&T for long distance, I have Working Assets, that groovy company that gives you pints of Ben and Jerry's ice cream, donates money to great causes, and is linked to Sprint. When I moved in with H. a few years ago, I decided to get off the AT&T corporate teat once and for all, opting for Working Assets long distance, and SBC for wireless and land line.

Since January, I've been calling AT&T, trying to clear up the bill. This is difficult because my SBCglobal account is also now called AT&T, only, I've come to find out, this is different from "the old AT&T" or "legacy AT&T" which is the one that's billing me for the long distance I never ordered. To try to straighten out this mess, I called Working Assets, who told me to call SBC, who told me to call AT&T, who told me to call Legacy AT&T, who told me that my local provider is the one who switched me and that I had to call them. I call back SBC and an operator tells me that there is no record of this, but that she'll get to the bottom of it by doing a three-way [no giggling] call to the Legacy AT&T. This happens a couple of times with promises made on all sides that the account will be removed. But the bills still come, and the amount is increasing.

Then I get a call from Legacy AT&T telling me my name is being sent to a creditor, which really pisses me off. This past weekend, I spent about an hour and a half on the phone, mostly waiting and being transferred to various "associates" named (I wrote them all down) Kevin, Nikki, Judy, Clarence, and Heather, all of whom, ironically, sound like they are from south-east Asia. When I would ask for last names, I was told they were not allowed to provide me with last names, which makes me wonder if I was being helped by prison labor in the global south. Finally, I was transferred to "Tricia," who tells me in heavily-accented English that she even though she is a supervisor, she cannot help me. According to Tricia, the person I needed to speak with works in the "Slamming Resolution Center" and I will have to call back on Monday between 9am and 5pm and thank you for choosing AT&T. I hang up.

But, as things go with me lately, it doesn't stop there. As I'm getting off the phone, I hear the mail carrier posting letters in our box out front. After I hang up, I check the mail. There is only one envelope, and it is from AT&T. I open it and it says that I owe AT&T a past due amount of $2,604 on my long distance plan.

$2,604 is a lot of money. I immedately fly into a rage. I am irrational with anger. I am the world's victim. I shake my fist at the sky and grit my teeth, cursing god's cruel joke. I decide that not only have I been slammed (had my long distance switched without my authorization), but I have also had my identity stolen and someone, somewhere is having lengthy phone calls in my name.

Since today is Monday, I took off from the university early and called AT&T back and asked to speak with the Slamming Resolution Center. It took forever. I hung on the phone even though the recording told me it was going to be at least 30 minutes and that, since Monday was their busiest days, I should call back on Wednesday. I was mistrustful of the recording and held on. Finally, after about ten minutes of muzak and advertisements for all kinds of useless AT&T services and products, I managed to get "Blair," who told me the $2,604 bill was -- oops! -- a little typo, and that the bill was supposed to read $26.04 [I should have been able to figure this out on my own, but, like I said, I was through the roof with indignance and didn't bother to compare.]. After going around and around with Blair, who kept finding ways to put loopholes in my demand that he erase all charges and close the account, he finally does what I tell him to. I even got a confirmation number in case anything goes wrong.

But this is the point: if you get slammed by the heartless and soulless AT&T, you not only have to be tenacious and patient, you have to bully them just as hard as they are bullying you. The operators will try to talk you in circles. They will tell you that your local provider switched you even though you explain a million times that you've already heard that version of the story and it didn't do you any good to hang up and call your local provider. They will say things like "O, I see, well, I can remove two months of charges for you, okay? Let me go ahead and do that for you right now . . . " and you have to reply, "NO. You will remove ALL of the charges or you will transfer me to someone who will." They will say things like, "Ah, okay, our record now shows that you were the one who made the agreement with your local provider that we can now find to be in your long distance plan which, Mr. J_______, as you can plainly see, is why we have been able to reduce your charges by 5% for you today." And you HAVE to tell them that that makes no sense because they are expecting to bewilder you with nonsense so that you'll just give in and they can continue to profit off of your weariness.

That's that. I really don't want this to be a blog about getting the run around by the powers that be, but it is a very real and annoying -- potentially endless -- part of life, one that has the potential to overshadow the fact that you had your last day of classes today, and the gardeny perfumes of jasmine and honeysuckle this spring has been so lovely, following you everywhere you go in this city, and that you don't want to jinx the weather by saying out loud how glad you are that you can still keep all the windows open and sleep well in the cool evening air.

sometimes the answers come in the mail

2007-04-19T18:04:00.000-05:00

"Hey you Lose your Driver License
at the 'Airport' Shone Shine Stand
We had you 'Page' at the Airport
that day. Sorry it take so long
to mail you DRIVES LIC
back to you.
P.S.
I found it behind the stand"

no command to smile this time (not again!)

2007-04-16T16:09:00.000-05:00

I stuck it in my back pocket after picking up my boarding pass at the IAH airport, thinking that when I went through security, I'd be flashing it a couple of times anyway. I didn't even realize it was missing until I got in to New Orleans, hopped out of the shuttle, and needed to provide ID to get into my hotel room. Suddenly my hard-earned driver's license was nowhere to be found, making me very, very unhappy and filling me with a deep sense of dread.

Steady readers know about my year-long fiasco with TxDPS, and so I won't recount that hellish scenario again. But since I have really bad luck with driver's licenses, I assumed the worst: that I would not be able to get onto my return flight without it, that it would not be found, that there would be hours of waiting at the DPS to get a new one, that some crazy glitch in the system would delay the production of a new one . . . for these and other reasons, I was in no hurry to get back to the DPS. (Yeah, I checked and if you lose your license you cannot just "order a new one on-line." You have to go get one.)

While on the flight home (which I got on using my work ID), I also realized that I needed a license to present to the people at the D______ Unit I'll be taking my students to visit for a prison field trip this coming Friday. This morning, I remembered that JP commented on this blog about the one DPS you could go to in the city that, from what he knew, was almost always empty. I emailed him and got both sympathy and directions, and headed South right after work, at 3pm.

The miracle is this: I was there for about a total of fifteen minutes. I stood behind a couple of people in line and then boom! my photo was being taken and I was issued a temporary license and on my way home. I have no great hopes for its smoothe arrival on Hawthorne, but I am keeping my fingers crossed.

What's weird is that, even though the wait was short, the workers were very much the same as the ones I encountered at the place on South Gessner, who I figured were overworked and, for this reason, machine-like and unhappy. No one smiled or looked me in the eye. No one provided an explanation for what was going on. There were a lot of one-word commands that I had to ask to be repeated so I could understand.

I assumed, going in, that, since I just got a license, the replacement would be a digital copy of the old one, which is, surely, somewhere on file. This means that I figured that I wouldn't be getting my photo taken, but would just pay a fee and someone would place an order for a new copy. When I first arrived, I explained that I lost my license and needed a replacement. "Fill this out and come back when you're done." Anyone could quickly and easily just check the "no" boxes and scribble a fast signature on the form right there but, rather than point this out, I just circled around and got back in the four-person line. When I get back to the desk, about 45 seconds later, she points to another line of waiting motorists, "Line to your right." I wanted to say, "The line for what?" but, again, kept my mouth shut and got in it.

I stand in the short line and get called forward from behind a screen with a finger wave, "Next," the woman orders. "Hello," I smile, "I lost my license and I'd like to --". Before I can say, "get it replaced," she interrupts me by saying "Social security." "O, I'm sorry what? O, you need my social . . . ?" I am looking to find her eyes but she is staring at a computer screen. Her mouth is a straight line across. "Okay, sure," I say and recite three numbers before I realize she is not listening to me, so I stop and say, "O, wait a minute, so, do you want the number or the actual card?" Reply: "Card." Not looking at me. I put the card on the counter. She types in numbers and frowns deeply at the screen, reading my record, I guess. "Middle name," she says. I tell her. More tapping and scrolling and frowning. "Street you live on?" "Hawthorne," I say, trying to exactly mimic the robotic sound to her voice. She looks some more and then, satisfied, says "Ten dollars." I use the zombified voice again as I hand her cash, "Here. You. Go." She takes the money and says, dully, "Sign." "Yes," I drone, wanting to enjoy this little game, but my spirits are dampened by her joylessness, her profound alienation -- how much she must truly hate this job! Then, "Red light. Left thumb." Then, "Right thumb." Mm-hm. "Walk to the X." I move as robotically as I can over to what looks no different than the scuffmarks all over the floor except that it seems a little gummier from having once had black electrical tape on it in an "X" shape. No command to smile this time. I stare dumbly at the camera and the flash pops. The whole time, I wanted to ask, "But can't you just send a replacement license? Do I really need a brand new one?" But this just doesn't feel like the kind of place where you are allowed to ask questions, only take commands. She pulls a temporary license out and signs it and pushes it toward me: "Sign." "New license in the mail two- to six-weeks. Next." I mimic her a final time, trying to sound as bland and exhausted as she does, "Thank. You. So. Much." I push each word out of my mouth, and dodder over to the exit sign and leave. It's all I can do to not stick my arms out in front of me to impersonate a sleepwalking zombie.

The good news is that I now know the place to go get your license renewed or replaced that is the least crowded place, ever. (Thanks, JP!) Rather than publish it, lest the secret get out and it become overcrowded, just know that you can use me as a resource and I'll send you the directions, as long as you promise to do the robot thing with your voice, too.

inside

2007-04-04T19:14:00.000-05:00

For those of you following in my footsteps, here's three shots I took of the inside that also made it onto the camera. The shots I took of the bathroom didn't come out, but you can see its folding door next to this little brown couch, pictured here with my Dickies backpack thrown on top. The little desk did not come in handy for writing, but you could, ostensibly, sit at it and gaze out the window at the teepee next door while your tamales microwave on high. I kept my laptop on my lap as I sat on the brown couch with my notes spread out around me.

Yes, it is dark in the teepee, although a little bit of sunlight comes in through tiny windows and, of course, the front door, if you keep it open. (I did find one mosquito and one brown recluse in the teepee.)

I say it is high time we claim Wharton as a writer's retreat -- a place for solitude and focus.

Dibs on Teepee 2!

yurts

2007-03-31T13:26:00.000-05:00

I swore that since the camera shut down every time I tried to juice the little bit of energy out of the dying batteries that it meant there were no photos to be had of my motel experience a few weeks ago but, as you can plainly see, here's two I took the day I arrived.

My friend Cake claims these look nothing like teepees. "More like cupcakes. Or yurts," she says, but I think she's been listening to too much Laurie Anderson. If I had only taken a photo of the No Vacancy sign with it's Indian logo, you'd get a better feel for these teepees.

i really owe you one (new york city)

2007-03-24T10:32:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, when I meet new people in Houston who ask me where I am from, originally, and I tell them that I was raised in New Jersey, there will be a lifting of the eyebrows and a smile followed by, "How lucky to be so close to New York! You must really miss the city!" It used to be that I would feel embarrassed explaining that I never took a bus or train into NYC as a teenager because it was, actually, a couple of hours away and, well, Philadelphia was so much closer -- a matter of minutes. For Texans, especially, a couple of hours drive to a city like New York might seem like nothing, but when you grow up in a tiny little mid-Atlantic state that believes it has a distinct "North" and "South" to it, these hours seem long, and the northern stretch to the city seems far.

This past week, I've been attending a conference in New York and, really, for the first time ever, I've been able to finally check out the city as I've always wanted -- no theater tickets, no shows or concerts, no big plans to have the ultimate city experience. Instead, I've been getting on the subway, getting off in random places, and walking in the bright, sunny Springtime weather: bookstores, coffee shops, bars, parks, vendors, trucks, benches, corners, E train downtown, L train to Brooklyn, Union Square, Christopher St., Avenue A, Chelsea, Nolita, Grand Central Station, Tompkins Square Park; finding a health food store with a juice bar, eating pineapple fried rice with tofu and sunflower seeds, bagels with veggie cream cheese and tomato slices, looking and not buying, late-night cab rides back to the hotel, the cityscape in the window as my nightlight.

I also have had the pleasure of reconnecting with two long-time friends from two very different periods of my life. My friend Gretchen (see post below) who I lived with in Syracuse, and my friend Jama, who I met in Houston (at the much-missed Toopee's Coffee on West Alabama) and worked with in the Queer Artist Collective in the mid-1990s.

It was with a wide sense of time that I got to play catch up with Jama in this unfamiliar city, remembering, as we drank margaritas one night and walked through Brooklyn the next, the mid-90s in a way that made the past seem unbelievable to me -- the intensity of being in Texas' only DIY queer peformance art troupe (ever? yes, ever!); who we were back then, and how pissed off, wounded, and unglued we all were; how we ever managed to get anything done (not to mention done well and with sold-out audiences each night) without any money but with a whole lot of over-inflated egos, dexterity, and ambition; in addition to what has become of us, the QuAC kids (as we were sometimes called); was difficult and astonishing for both of us. Seeing her smile lets me know that it is good to live through your twenties and come into a third decade of existence with a past that dazzles as much as it scares the living daylights out of you.

After our first night of seeing each other, with only a few dollars in my pocket, I got lost on the way back to my hotel. No matter which way I turned, it seemed, the subway I needed was nowhere to be found. It was late -- really late -- and I was really, really tired. The more I wandered, the more confused I became. Wasn't I just at this corner? Wait a minute -- is this Seventh Street or Seventh Avenue? In addition, my ATM card was not working. I was, as they say, shit out of luck. Feeling brave and desperate, I stepped out into the street and hailed a cab. When I got inside, I said, "Hi. I need to get to 53rd and 6th Ave. I only have four dollars in my pocket. Can you take me as far in that direction as possible?" I braced myself for a surly reply to get the hell out of the cab, but, miraculously, the driver said, "Don't worry about it." He raced me all the way to the hotel and smiled as he collected my measly cash. When I climbed out, I touched him on the shoulder and said "Thank you so much. I really owe you one." When I related this story of kindness to Jama's girlfriend, Joann, she said, "Chuck, that is what we call a true New York moment."

Cool.

feat. guest blogger, gretchen (new york city)

2007-03-21T22:55:00.000-05:00

It's been wonderful to rediscover life with Chuck after having had to do without it for so long. For some reason, during the time we spent sharing space in the physical and metaphysical realms, there were a lot of towels involved. Tonight has involved far fewer towels, unless you count napkins, which Chuck enjoys torturing. Dinner at Angelica Kitchen was interrupted by the realization that he'd once again committed this small domestic abuse, wholly inappropriate in this whole food, vegetarian sanctuary. (Who knew it was the East Village cafeteria? Dining hall days came rushing back.) I took advantage of the opening to swipe a forkful of his marvy Roots of Spring pie. Mmmm, tofu cheese. So glad he had a fresh tube of Italian toothpaste from Ricky's, where fabulous Latino stock clerks spritzed us with Votive room spray, serenaded us with "Blow That Whistle" and ushered us to a wall of Tom's of Maine's finest -- unavailable in the Hilton-on-Sixth gift shop. (It's just past the doors where a rather lost Dee Snyder -- yes, that Twister Sister -- asked me for directions to Warner Center. Alas, I couldn't help him besides offering a sotto voce "thanks for the music.") Keeping to the Italian theme, we repaired to Bar Veloce to swap Ciaos and loaded glances with the loaded Fernet Branca fans next to us in this slip of a bar. Only the nutella panino was more delicious. But posturing wit aside, man, it feels good to laugh again.

no vacancy (at the teepee motel)

2007-03-14T11:41:00.000-05:00

I think I saw a short article about this place in the Houston Chronicle a couple of weeks ago and, since then, I have had it in the back of my head as my Spring Break destination. It’s called the TeePee Motel, located off Hwy 59 South about an hour’s drive from Houston, and I’m the guest staying in Teepee Number 3.

I know I am going to hear a collective groan of disappointment when I reveal that my digital camera has dead batteries, so I have no photos to post of this weird slice of Tex-Americana. I know I should have checked before taking off but, you know, I was more focused on getting together the materials I needed to start writing a talk on jailhouses and universities that I’m supposed to be giving in New Orleans in less than a month. I figure holing up for twenty-four hours in an architectural anomaly will inspire me to think critically about my theorization of institutional space and the production of knowledge. So here I am.

When I first drive up to the TeePee Motel, I literally gasped. The photos on the web site don’t do the place justice. Ten identical, beige-colored, one-room “teepees,” built out of concrete and plaster, sit in a perfect line at a right angle off the highway, like a row of giant cupcakes. There is nothing else but a parking lot and some grass and puddles. And the highway. If I open the door of my teepee, there’s my parked car, that stretch of grass, some trees in the distance and, behind the trees, what looks like little houses or, more likely, trailers. Every so often, a rooster crows.

The teepees are daringly close to one another. I’ll say about five-feet apart. There is a little walkway leading from the parking lot to the teepee’s dark-brown door, which is centered in a recessed entrance. (I know my friend Cake will call me later to tell me my architectural vocabulary is impoverished. I’m trying the best I can!) There are three tiny windows in the teepee, two are on either side of the teepee, like little ears, and one is over the sink in the bathroom, directly across from the front door. The windows have dark brown awnings. The tops of the teepees come to a point, and have three little spikes, suggesting, I think, feathers. I am reminded of the igloo-shaped building that Julianne Moore moves into at the end of Todd Haynes’ Safe.

Inside, the room itself is not much: a bed, a little desk, a small fridge, a microwave, and a chocolate-brown couch. The ceiling is about nine feet. The trap door in the ceiling tells me there is an attic that comprises the architectural point of the teepee. A television juts out from high on the wall near the front door, reminding me, eerily, of a hospital room. There is a Gideon Bible on the desk, but I’ve placed it in the top drawer of the nightstand, where I think it is supposed to be.

Since I arrived around noon, I’ve been reading and writing. I’ve kept the door open for fresh air, although there is an air-conditioning unit and I opened one of the windows, too. The kindly woman at the front desk, who called me by my first name, asked me if I was a writer. When I told her I was, she let me know that there is a couple saying in TeePee Number 1 who both write children’s books, and that they’ve been staying there since their house burned down a few weeks ago. I have not met them yet, or any of the other inhabitants. When I asked, the same woman told me the teepees are almost always full, especially on weekends. Right now, the neon “No Vacancy” letters on the TeePee Motel highway sign are lit, which means, obviously, we’re at full capacity.

The families in Teepees 5 and 6 are friends. They’ve had their camping chairs out in front of their teepees and a cooler of beers and some wine going all afternoon. There are some kids throwing a Frisbee. There’s a man in Teepee 1 who is just sort of hanging out in the doorway. I smiled and waved at him earlier. I want to stress that sort of hanging out in the doorway is not at all a weird or creepy thing to do. It’s, like, the only thing you can do, unless you brought a chair with you. It’s a good way to get some air. (The teepee is a little stuffy, but it is also really humid today and, right now, the skies are dark with clouds threatening a thunderstorm.)

According to the website, the Teepee Motel was built in the 1950s, and survived for years before finally shutting down in the 1980s. You can see the disrepair of the teepees in photos posted from the late-1990s. Fortunately, some lucky and kind soul won the lottery and donated money to the motel to renovate the teepees, which is why I am able to, um, use them as a writing retreat.

Surely, there is something to be said about how the stereotype of the “Indian” gets perpetuated by this kind of hokey 1950s Americana, and how the historical specificity of various Texas tribes gets erased by a vacation-style teepee experience for white people. (I have not seen all the guests, but all the ones I have look white to me.) But there is also something -- what? campy? queer? about this place. It’s the kind of place you want to bring your friends from New Jersey to see. Teepee Number 2 (no lie!) was the setting for a scene in the 1995 cinematic remake of Lolita.

I plan to heat up some tamales I picked up from Whole Foods in the microwave later and, if I get enough writing done, watch the film Medium Cool (1968) on my laptop. I am hoping there will be a terrible storm later, and the sound of the rain on the teepee’s roof will lull me to sleep.

the only way to do it (if this is you)

2007-03-12T13:59:00.000-05:00

If you wake up, disjointed, from a long night of spring break celebrations that went on way, way too long, you might spend several minutes composing imaginary apology emails to all of those who were witness to your caterwalling and booty-dancing in the wee hours of the morning; or, you might, in an apocalyptic mood that accompanies these kinds of mornings, decide that you are actually dying, and the current raggedness you feel is only the terrifying beginning of what will surely be a long and painful decline. If this is you, go ahead and get up and immediately call your partner, who has been happily busying himself at work unaware of your impending doom, and alert him to your condition. Notice that he is unsure of what, exactly, your problem is. Be grateful that he is a pro when it comes to your eccentricities. He will gently remind you that eating some food will help put you in the right frame of mind. You will hang up and force yourself to gather your wits about you only to discover that you tossed the last pair of contact lenses onto the bathroom floor before passing out the night before, and you will quickly call and then drive to the optometrist to pick up some new ones. On your way, the appeal of miso soup and steamed kale with rice will be so great that you will steer yourself in the direction of the vegan buffet out on Richmond, only to learn that, since today is Monday, and the chairs are all turned up on the tables, the restaurant is closed. Initially, you will be devastated by this unfortunate circumstance, and you will stand in disbelief in front of the restaurant for a couple of minutes, trying to will it to open right then and there with a fresh pot of miso soup ready for your ladeling. Fortuantely, in the last analysis, what seems like an upset will actually be serendipitous because the buffet at the vegetarian Indian food place on Kirby has that clear-brothed, very hot and spicy soup that cures any body that's trying to crash through its spring break like yours. You will notice the effects immediately and practically come to tears as you pay your bill, eternally thanking the cashier for his righteous existence. If this is you, go ahead and treat yourself to a cup of coffee at the fancy little cupcake place that's opened up down the block before you head home to call the plumber. The caffeine will be excellent, and you will drink it as you simultaneously watch the plumber fix the sink and type yourself a new blog entry.

in the tower of knowledge

2007-03-01T16:18:00.000-06:00

An hour's worth of unfinished discussion about Hiroshima, the Cold War, Beat Poetry, and what I kept calling (borrowing from Lauren Berlant) a national fantasy of normalcy in the 1950s. Over and over, I repeat the line "Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb," from Ginsberg's poem "America." "What," I ask, "does it mean when you tell someone 'Go fuck yourself'?"

Hesitation, then a few answers: That person thinks he is better than you. That person has a bad ego problem. That person thinks he's great and isn't.

Right, I reply, but what does it mean, more specifically?

Silence. Smiles.

Next: "Let's try to visualize it. Can you picture it? I mean, what it might actually look like?" Suddenly I realize that I am skating on thin ice, but I cannot help it. I go ahead and try to rescue the moment, "Do you think it is possible that when Ginsberg writes the line 'Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb' that he wants to reader to wonder what is more obscene, the curse word "fuck" or the mass death caused by the U.S. in 1945 by using nuclear weapons on a civilian population?" This gets nods. "Is it possible that Ginsberg wants to show us that what is considered to be a crass vulgarity -- 'Go fuck yourself' -- might be considered highly poetic?" This gets nods. "Okay, then, write it down: Ginsberg teaches us that 'Go fuck yourself' is highly poetic, and that it is more obscene to bomb civilian populations than to utter the words "Go fuck yourself' in public."

I am looking forward to Spring Break.

poison pen

2007-02-18T11:29:00.000-06:00

Hope to see you there!

not exactly crazy, just a little nervous

2007-02-17T17:35:00.000-06:00

In the seventh grade, I went to see Cyndi Lauper perform during her She's So Unusual tour. My dad took me and a couple of friends to the Mann Music Center in Phildelphia for this, my first, concert. But rather than write about how incredibly, um, gay that is, or how fantastic the show was, I want to write about something else that happened that night -- I had, for the first time in my conscious memory, what I would later learn to call a panic attack.

This is what happened: We arrived at the show and took our seats in the balcony of this theatre, which was relatively small, but cool because it was outdoors. I was astounded at how high up we could be and still have a great view of the stage. When the concert started, the entire balcony stood in their seats and started jumping and dancing. Much to my great shock, the balcony itself began to move under us, not giving way, of course, but bouncing along with us, in much the same way that a diving board does. My father, who had no opinion of Lauper except that she was "weird," brought a walkman with him, kicked back in his seat, popped his favorite Pavarotti cassette in, and conked out. My friends were smiling and bouncing up and down like everyone else.

I, on the other hand, could feel nothing but sheer terror, so much so that I couldn't even speak. As I sat there, confronting my mortality, everyone else was having the time of their life. How come no one else felt such great alarm? What was wrong with me? Why couldn't I enjoy this, too? This added to the terror-effect: No one realizes we are going to die except for me.

I imagined the breaking away and terrible crash of the balcony, what it would feel like to fall, who would be trapped underneath of us. I was convinced that at any moment concert security would interrupt Lauper's show, announce that the balcony was about to collapse, and usher us to safety. About twenty minutes passed, and a thought entered my brain: Since no one is going to help us, since no one else seems to mind, and since I cannot do a thing about this terrible danger that we are all in, the only thing I can do is enjoy it. The anxiety lifted a little. If I am going to die, I thought, I don't want to die in abject terror, I want to be happy like every one else. I started to bounce along with the crowd. The balcony bounced right under me. Every once in a while, the terror returned, and I'd have to stop. My heart would be racing and I would not be able to breathe. It sucked the air right out of my lungs. Then I'd hear my voice in my head ask me the question: "Do you want to die terrified, or do you want to enjoy what little of this life is left?", and I'd ease myself back into the "fun".

This whole ordeal, of course, was in my head. I never said anything to anyone about it. Everyone else was hanging out, dancing, singing along and cheering for Lauper. I, meanwhile, was negotiating matters of life and death. It was a difficult evening, to say the least. Looking back, I wonder if the reason no one else was terrified was because, really, the movement of the balcony was something that I hallucinated.

But I identified this night, years later, as the first time I consciously remember feeling this way. The therapist I was talking to about it noticed that I had, in fact, employed a coping mechanism that night to deal with what was happening, that I was conscious of the panic and worked towards alleviating it the best way a twelve-year old knows how.

In graduate school, my panic attacks were so bad and so frequent that, as anyone who has them knows, I would not be able to leave my couch. I didn't even know what they were. They were a part of this thing that I grew to call my "nervousness." "Nervous" was a word I used for a long time to describe myself or how certain events or things made me feel. When it got to the point that I felt like the attacks were interfering with my life, I finally took steps to figure some things out. Very lucky for me, I learned how to manage the problem, finally, without medication.

But panic attacks can come when you least expect them. Yesterday, H. took off on a long, long bike ride. Almost as soon as he left, I started to spiral. I couldn't do anything. I was a wreck for about three hours, and when it finally lifted, I was totally drained. I slept. When I woke up, I felt better, and into the evening with friends, I kept thinking about what happened, what triggered it (as I learned to say), why now, etc. I thought back to that night in the balcony -- the terrible fear of a plunge into obliteration as the raucous carnival danced and bounced around me.

she's giving me way too many (dream)

2007-02-08T15:42:00.000-06:00

Last night I dreamed that I was trapped in some asbestos-contaminated building's crawl space. But it wasn't just me -- there were others in there as well. A smooth concrete walkway was just to my left, and if I could get to it, I reasoned, there would be a less-likely chance that I would be inhaling the dust all around me. Suddenly, something shifted, and I was dragging myself through the dust to an opening, and I was out, covered in crumbling dirt. There were people (EMTs, police, fire fighters) waiting for me.

When I emerged, it was clear that I needed to be taken to the hospital right away. In the ambulance on the way to the emergency room, I was asked if I had swallowed any of the dust or gotten any in my mouth. The answer was yes. Lots.

In the emergency room, I rested on a cot, hooked to some tubes. Every once in a while a doctor came by and gave me a shot of morphine. She was a gruff doctor, uncommunicative, and her needle sticks were surprising and painful. She's giving me way too many, I thought. Soon enough the doctor told me that it took at least three times for the drug to kick in. As she injected me a third time, I felt a complete and total calm wash over me, and a profound nausea that kept me from going under completely.

As I nodded off in this sleepy dream-within-a-dream world, I was given a battery of tests to check the extent of poisoning. When I finally came to, I was told that, while I had a low toxicity level of asbestos, it was a good thing I showed up to the hospital because it turned out that I had to have a portion of my spine removed. In an x-ray, the doctor showed me where the top knot of my spine was freakishly huge and painfully jutting out of my back. The only option was surgery, I was told, and that would mean not only removing the vertebrae, but the surgeons would have to drill in through my skull, down past my brain, and pull the spinal knot up from there. Once the bone was removed, I was told, I would experience a pain-free life, since the overgrown top of my spinal column had been, for years, exerting an extreme pressure on the alignment of my entire skeleton that was causing me pain so severe, but so normal, that I could no longer detect it.

This dream was gone in an instant. I woke up this morning thinking about the work I had to prepare for today, and have been focused since. Just right now, as I was about to leave the office, the dream came up, vivid and baffling, in precise detail.

panic!

2007-02-03T17:06:00.000-06:00

Yipes! The pepper plant has aphids (and, of course, some ants)! Ew!

Any suggestions for how to get rid of them without chemicals? The internet tells me to mail order ladybugs (a fine idea), but I would like to move on this.

earliest memory?

2007-01-27T16:47:00.000-06:00

I'm trying to concentrate hard enough to have my earliest memory come forth. I can remember before kindergarten, and I remember pre-school with Mrs. Chimes. I remember living on Aqua Lane, before Kathy was born. But we lived in a little house in Northeast Philadelphia for two years before we moved to NJ, and I have no recollection of that.

Here's what I can remember from living on Aqua Lane:

I remember asking my mom who the devil was.

I remember having dreams about water coming through my bedroom window and washing me down the short flight of steps to the kitchen.

I remember listening to 45s on our children's record player, and thinking the song "Animal Crackers in My Soup" was eerie.

I remember when four of my cousins spent the night and we got up before it was light out and my youngest cousin, Mark, turned the radio on really loud and woke up my mom.

I remember Mary Anne and I would, every single morning, say goodbye to my Dad as he was going to work and we would yell out the door after him, "DON'T FORGET TO FEED THE MONSTERS!!!" (I do not know where we got that from. Sesame Street?)

I remember sitting around the kitchen table and my parents asking Mary Anne and me, with enormous enthusiasm, "Who wants to go trick-or-treating tonight?!?" and, instead of saying "Me! me!!", Mary Anne (who was in kindergarten) quietly raised her hand, and then so did I.

I remember sitting around the same table and my parents telling us that we were going to have another brother or sister soon and how exciting that was.

I remember running home from this kid P.J.'s sandbox [as if he owned it. We all called it "P.J.'s sandbox," even his older sister, Heidi] and, when I got to the front door, I was surprised that there was a giant pumpkin decoration on it. (That's the second memory from Hallowe'en that year. I must have just turned four that September.)

I remember an older girl in the neighborhood, Barbara Weiner, told me that Ronnie Ferro (a neighbor) poured a whole bottle of ketchup over his head and said "Bloody Mary" in the dark in the bathroom and she appeared to him in the mirror. (I mentioned this to her a couple of years ago when I saw her while visiting Delran and she looked at me like I was out of my mind and said she did not remember, which was disappointing for so many reason.)

I remember that I liked the pink crayon in our Crayola box because it was mottled from having rubbed up against all the other crayons but pure pink on the inside.

I remember my two favorite books: The Laughing Dragon (top favorite) and Stand Back, Said the Elephant, I'm Going to Sneeze!! (second only by a smidgen -- my dad would do all the voices of the different animals).

I bet I could keep going. I wish I could remember stuff from northeast Philly, but I don't think I can. I know there was a girl named Darah who lived on our street at that time, and I feel like I could picture her, but maybe that's because my parents always made fun of her parents because her parents were of the belief that they should never say "NO" to their child. And, one day, when Darah was over and doing something she shouldn't have been doing, my father yelled the word so loudly at her that she got scared, started to cry, and ran home. That was before we moved to New Jersey.

How about it? Do you have your earliest memory? What was it and how old were you?

pass the peppers (raw, please, and hot)

2007-01-25T19:05:00.000-06:00

See this little orange pepper? It's the last one hanging from the Carribean Red Hot Pepper plant I purchased out at the Feed'n'Seed [?]with my friend, MaGreen, over the summer. Since the weather has been so chilly, I brought it indoors to hang out in the sunroom. At its most fertile, the plant was bearing seven full peppers at once. We've eaten all of them. Hank ate one or two raw, right off the stem, and they are incredibly hot (nearing the Habanero-level of heat), but when you cook one of them, seeds and all, into a pot of vegan chilli or just some black or pinto beans, it lends the food a hot smoky flavor, almost chipotle tasting. It's astonishingly good.

You know, I grew up eating baloney and ketchup sandwiches on white bread, with a side of spaghetii-o's. We shook oregano flakes and garlic salt on our frozen pizza, and it was "spices." I remember when I first moved to Texas, I was invited to a Sunday brunch with a bunch of graduate students at my friend Louise's apartment in the Heights. Salsa, for me, was a ketchup-y sauce that came in a Tostitos brand jar. More sugar and vinegar than anything else. But at Louise's brunch, one of the guests, a Texan, made pico de gallo with fresh jalapenos, seeds and all. I remember being so hungry, and probably a little hung over, and going for this chopped tomato and onion concoction with drool coming down my chin. When I bit into the first scoop, a blast of hot pepper burned my tongue and the roof of my mouth like nothing I had ever experienced before. Trying not to be a rude guest, I stepped outside. The fire was so intense, I thought I would hyperventilate. I began to cry from the pain. My panic escalated everything. Something horrible had happened, and I wasn't sure what it was, but it was now in my esophagus and headed for my belly. As I was having this physical breakdown, Louise, good hostess that she was, came outside and found me red-faced and in tears. When I explained what happened, she reached up and patted me on the back (she is a full two-feet shorter than I am) and said, "Oh, it'll be okay, darlin'. Think of it this way: You probably knocked out every cold you might have had coming for the next couple of months just with that one bite." And she went inside. Cold? What?

Since this time, I have become more acculturated to hot food, especially peppers. A few years ago, before my friend Cake's apartment burned down, she had a potluck with a few friends -- black beans, tortillas, guacamole, etc. etc. Cake had a dish of freshly sliced jalapenos in a dish, and I think it was our friend KP who popped one in her mouth after the meal was over, saying something cavalierly, like, "Mm! O yeah, this will suck all of the heavy metals right out of my system." Really? Heavy metals? Hank, Cake, KP and I went, watery-eyed, through several rounds of whole pepper eating, registering the heat and the intensity of the fire, the oiliness of the chili, the sweetness lingering after the heat, and the crispiness of the flesh itself. I pictured all of the lead or copper or whatever heavy metal I might be storing in my cells sizzling as it came into contact with the pepper's oils. Each successive pepper was not quite as hot as the last, but still something to remark on as a flavor outside the realm of the ordinary. It was a severe high, elevating us into a realm of strange calm and sheer experience that lasted for about an hour or two. I will never forget how serene and communal the intensity of the experience was, and how we struggled to describe all of it in words.

The transition between the two pepper experiences was a weird and shaky road, but now I feel like I can savor the differences between these shockingly hot fruits. And I am proud of this little plant in the back room, bearing its last little fruit like a miniature sack of healthful dynamite.

cheers!

2007-01-19T22:29:00.000-06:00

o my humunculous

2007-01-19T09:56:00.000-06:00

Two days ago, when the freeze was here in full blast, I went about cooking to keep warm. I concocted a recipe for a delicious pot of split pea soup (now totally devoured) that I began in the morning and cooked through to perfection into the evening. It was excellent. That night, I put on a pot of steel cut oats for breakfast the next morning. It takes about 30 minutes to cook oatmeal in its non-instant form, and when you grate fresh nutmeg and cinnamon into it, it fills the apartment with a sleepy, incredible aroma all night long. It'll be cool in the morning, so you just have to re-heat for a few minutes and then off you can go to the first day of school, bright and shiny.

So, in any case, I had these two green apples sitting in the fruit bowl, and I thought it would be a good idea to slice them up and add them to the boiling water to mix in with the oats. Isn't there an instant oatmeal flavoring called "green apples and cinnamon"? It sounded like something you'd see in a television commercial, where everyone is warm and protected from the early morning gloom. As I cut into the first apple with a recently-sharpened knife, my aim was not true, and I sliced right through the tip of my thumb, which didn't really hurt (at first) but produced a lot of blood. In fact, I bled all over the apple slices and they were stained a weird pinkish color but, you know what?, I added them to the oatmeal anyway, and then went and bandaged myself up. As for the blood-oatmeal, Hank and I both ate it the next morning and, since you couldn't tell, I didn't even bother to mention it. (Surprise!)

This morning, the thumb is pretty much healed, although still a little sore. The flap of skin has come off, and there is an incredible dent at the tip of the digit, where it used to round itself out into completion. It's weird for me to look at and, for this reason, I've been reciting the following (hilarious) poem in my head:

Cut (by Sylvia Plath, 1962)

What a thrill --
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of hinge

Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.

Little pilgrim,
The Indian's axed your scalp.
Your turkey wattle
Carpet rolls

Straight from the heart.
I step on it,
Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz.

A celebration, this is.
Out of a gap
A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, every one.

Whose side are they on?
O my
Humunculous, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill

The thin
papery feeling.
Saboteur,
Kamikaze man --

The stain on your
Gauze Ku Klux Klan
Babushka
Darkens and tarnishes and when

The balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence

How you jump --
Trepanned veteran,
Dirty girl,
Thumb stump.

f-f-f-f- . . . .

2007-01-16T21:40:00.000-06:00

it's (almost) f-f-f-freezing in houston!

apparantly, we have a heat-pump system, and not a heating system, so there is no real "heat" in our apartment (took us two years to figure this out), but, instead, the system taps the outside air for any trace of heat, and sucks it into the vents. as a result, there is cool air blowing through the rooms.

it is very, very cold. pass the groovy quilt . . .

we brought the plants in, so please do not freak out if you are worried about the pepper or citranella plants, they have been brought inside, and are doing well.

are you wearing long underwear? i am not.

well-placed objects (and does it matter to memory?)

2007-01-07T10:55:00.000-06:00

I got up early yesterday so I could accompany my friend Stephen to the airport with Melanie. Maybe it was that whole wheat bagel with veggie cream cheese, or maybe I got a good night sleep, or maybe I was desperately needing to re-establish some kind of order to my life (I feel like I've been traveling since before the holidays, even though I've been in Houston for the past week), but whatever the cause, when I got back home, I plunged myself into the project of deep-cleaning the apartment. Dust, sweep, wipe down, scrub, shake out, mini-vac, and organize. Not only that, but I also had enough energy left over to do several loads of laundry and take a trip to Target, Radio Shack, and Southland Hardware to pick up random domestic objects: new trashcan, floor lamp, hamper, radio, and some scrap wood and brackets to make a shelf for the wall in the sun room. Last night, as we watched Robert Bresson's _PickPocket_ (1959), a structuralist French film that seems to be less about theft than it is about doorways and the well-composed insides of apartments, I kept stealing glances around our place, liking its well-placed objects.

The visits of my life-long friend Stephen has an interesting effect on my sense of time and memory. While in his company, time gets re-routed to the deep past in sometimes totally surprising and often difficult ways, a never-ending maze of memories that do not emerge unless this friend is there to trigger them. What amazes me is how much is there, and I wonder how much we do not remember, if we could ever remember it all.

I found a photograph from highschool of Stephen standing in front of a class we took as seniors called A.P. Comparative Government and Politics. In the photograph, Stephen is giving an oral report on the cultural significance of teaching abroad and, as an intentional bad joke, he has written on the black board (which is actually green) "Teaching A Broad." He hunches over a little lectern, his right elbow resting on its top edge and bent so that he can press his hand to his downward-looking forehead. It is a self-conscious gesture of anxiety, as if he is being given a hard time for his sophomoric humor. He is dressed in the Catholic school uniform all the boys were made to wear (black polyester pants, black pleather shoes, your choice dress-shirt and tie), along with a pair of Buddy Holly-looking glasses. The only part missing is the burgundy blazor which we could take off if the teacher was cool enough to allow it. Stephen is not wearing his. The room itself is starkly institutional; we both forgot how sparse the rooms of the school were. In the upper-right hand corner, the black letters "EXIT 2" are stencilled in spray paint high on the cinder block wall. Neither Stephen nor I could remember what "EXIT 2" meant -- if it was some sort of fire emergency exit route, or a way of numbering and classifying the different doors and hallways in the building, and yet we lived under those exit signs for four years.

Interestingly, Stephen, at first, did not remember anything about giving this oral report, but I have long remembered it (the misfiring of the joke, the way we all laughed), and I wonder how much of it has to do with my possession of the photograph. Once he saw the photo, he remembered that he had chosen that topic because one of his favorite aunts had recently taught abroad, and he found her stories about it very interesting. (I am only now, as I write this, remembering that I don't think I gave an oral report for this class like Stephen did; or, if I did, I don't recall what it was about. I remember, instead, that I collaborated with a cool smart girl named Jen Laverty to argue for a radical position in a debate about the tactics of the IRA.) In addition, neither Stephen nor I, at first, could identify the other student caught in the frame of the photograph, a skinny-looking tannish guy with braces, who has twisted in his seat to the back of the classroom, cracking up. Within a few seconds I got it: that's Tom Rinkavage, someone neither of us ever knew very well, but how interesting that I could remember his name, possibly only because I was sitting next to Stephen at the time.

Does it matter to the clarity of these memories that I still consider this class to be one of the best I took in high school? That I remember how attractive the teacher's leftist politics were to me? That the teacher had long, brown hair that he wore in a ponytail and, when he took it out, it was actually an unflattering mullet? Does it make a difference that the man who taught us this class was, in March 1994, found strangled to death in a crawl space in his apartment several years later, and that the man who was arrested soon afterwards confessed, during the trial, to choking him to death during a sexual encounter they arranged for pay after they met at a pornographic bookstore? (See http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:erb2RfySruQJ:query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html%3Fres%3D9D02E4D9143CF932A15750C0A962958260+%22james+semptimphelter%22&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1 for the NYT report.) Does it matter that the case was all over the media, including the GLBT magazine The Advocate, which ran an article titled "Dial SM for Murder," and that friends of this teacher and members of the queer community in South Jersey wrote letters to the editor expressing their outrage at the sensationalization of the tragedy?

This morning, I'm lounging in a quilt in the sun room, drinking coffee and absorbing the sun coming in from the three huge windows. The room is bright, cozy with its red furniture standing out sharply against the quiet white walls and floor. In the weird corner of the room that sticks out for no reason at all, we have our six-foot-tall, skinny, green pencil cactus. This year, Hank purchased some red, glass Christmas ornaments and we hung a dozen of them from its branches. The result is a lovely holiday tree, simply trimmed. It is remarkable in the corner window, especially lit at night by a low-wattage lamp. Michael, our anthropologist friend, gave us the tree before he left town to do fieldwork in Chile. Thank you, Michael! The plant is healthy and looks great! (See Michael's blog here: http://frazer.rice.edu/~kriz/blog/)

keywords (notes for the future)

2006-12-28T23:46:00.000-06:00

torture as inverted mirror
de-bodiment
culture's viscera
intensive capital
the legal person
the future of endless war
persons who do not count as persons
Common Article 3
confiscation of humanity
body warehouse
necropolitics
"jail face"
homoerotic violence
bare life
the decline of the rehabilitative ideal
an excess of law
black sites
Son of Sam laws
the cultural barrier of clothes
grave violations
the captor's desire
architecture of reflection
the exponential freedom to isolate
undead life
military commisions act
the language of permissible treatment
new global gulag
imperial history of incarceration
temporal punishment and war without end
Arizona -- Iraq -- Haiti
secrecy as essence of prisons
de-citizenization
new war prisons
probable felons and the expectation of criminality
WHISC/SOA
life-long detention
the negation of negation
cultural phenomenology and affective engagement

flavor molecules

2006-12-27T14:24:00.000-06:00

I just got back from the Reading Terminal Market in Philly, where I was ecstatic to find a fresh juice bar that had a carrot, celery, and beet-combo, as well as some good, cheap hummous, tabouli, and baba ghanoush.

I'm currently in town for the Big Academic Conference that many, many scholars dread because it means 1) being on the job market and having to block out the thousands of neurotic grad students all whipsering to themselves in the corners of hotel lobbies who are rehearsing their interview scripts while, simultaneously, doing it yourself; or, 2) being the person on the other end, watching the endless stream of stressed out job-seekers try to ease their way through what we all know is a very difficult and highly charged 30-minute interview; or, 3 [and the best reason to be here]) to participate in or attend one of the many, many organized panels on cutting-edge work in literary and cultural studies, and to catch up with old friends. That's why I'm here (although I have been made aware of rumors circulating that contradict this truth).

I rode in a car with my folks up from Delran up to my older sister's child-filled house in the big woods in northern NJ for Christmas day, and then took off to NYC where my younger sister lives with her husband in a tiny, little apt. in the West village. It was a busy, two-day period of family overload and couch-surfing, and when Kathy put me on a bus to Philly late this morning, I was grateful to be alone, with my thoughts.

I've arrived ahead of my friend, Gretchen, who will also here for the third reason listed above. She's not in, yet, so I made the executive decision to purchase the $10/day wireless connection in the hotel room.

Where we are staying is, uncannily, *right next door* to the Big Pharma building where my mother worked in a variety of non-pharma-related positions for her entire adult life. During the summers of my junior and senior years of college, I scored a paid internship with a trade publisher at 401 North Broad St., and shared a ride with her. The internship, though, was so tedious that I had to invent ways to keep myself awake and entertained, including the time I called the Clearly Canadian beverage company on the 1-800 number that is listed on the side of the bottle -- the one that the bottles ask you to call if you have Questions? Comments? -- and asked them to account for how a pear-flavored soda in a glass bottle was in any way "all-natural." The answer, and I will never forget this, was that the company "extracted the flavor molecules" from the fruit, and that was why it was natural. O, right -- the flavor molecules . . . On the last day after two summers of paid work, during my exit-interview, the editor-in-charge told me that she was happy to hear I was going to graduate school since I clearly did not belong in the 9-to-5 world.

I'm getting side-tracked, though. I'll see what emerges during the conference and figure out a way to post it in an anonymous way.

statue (climb the tree)

2006-12-23T18:37:00.000-06:00

Quickly -- as if no one from my family will be able to see, just by looking at recent history, that I have a blog and write about, well, all sorts of things -- I want to write that I am in Delran and, soon, will meet a couple of my oldest friends. Stephen and Michael (and, I hope, maybe, Tommy) will be up at the Whistler's Inn in Cinnaminson, a local bar on the Rte 130 South, not too far from here. There are rumors that Renee will be there, but I have a feeling she might not be coming.

I met Stephen in Mrs. Klopstein's kindergarten class. A girl named Laura Eberhart and I used to play a game called "statue", in which we would talk about the statue in our kindergarten class and whether or not we thought we saw him move. Stephen, as the statue, would stand or sit perfectly still, not too far from us (hands up, thrust to the side, tongue sticking out, or whatever other kind of contortion he was inspired to express), and then move, just a very little bit, and Laura and I would grab on to each other and laugh and laugh. I don't know what happened to Laura. She was my first girlfriend, and gave me a big rock painted yellow, red, and green wrapped in tissue paper for Valentine's Day that year. I've known Stephen ever since then.

I met Michael when we were both put on the Delran little league, t-ball team. Michael warmed the bench with me while everyone else played the field. He had a pizza sauce stain on his baseball hat and a big smile. It was comforting to know someone nice was on the bench with me. I didn't see him again until we re-met in high school, as nacent punk rock kids who listened to the Dead Milkmen, the Meat Men, Misfits, Circle Jerks, Social Distortion. I once spent a couple of weeks of high school at his house, sleeping on his floor. I had a bad sinus infection, I remember. His dad got me to put on those climbing boots that have spikes in the sides to climb the tree in their back yard that they were cutting down. It was one of those things where I really didn't want to do it, I was scared, but Mike's dad kind of was like, "You'll do this, and then we'll all have done it, and we'll have a bond," and so I put a belt on around my waist, stuck on the boots, and climbed up the tree. It was great.

Can't wait to seem them both.

smile (caught in the machinations of the state)

2006-12-18T17:04:00.000-06:00

Last spring, April to be exact, I headed out to the TxDPS on South Gessner to get a new driver's license. My license had expired and, for complex reasons, I could not renew my license on-line, like most people do. I knew that the line at South Gessner would be very, very long, so I packed a stack of student essays and a thermos of coffee, and drove out bright and early, just as the building was opening. I waited in the line to get to the front desk, filled out paper work, sat and graded until my number was called, waited in another line to get my thumbprints and photo taken, was issued my temporary license, and was told my new license would be arriving within four to six weeks. In all, it took about 3 1/2 to 4 hours. But I left relieved, thinking that I would never have to return to the building again.

But I was wrong. Four to six weeks passed, and my license never came. Then my temporary license expired. I was suddenly a driver with no state-issued license to account for my identity. Naturally, I got in my car, and drove, without a license, back to South Gessner. I stood in line for about two hours with everyone else and, when I got up to the counter, I told the woman working that I never received my license. She looked up my case, raised her eyebrows, and disappeared. When she came back, we had this little exchange:

"Did the electricity go out the day you were here?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"No. I mean, it didn't go out while I was in the building . . ."
"Okay -- the day you were here, the electricity went out and our computers went down. That means that your license was never processed. Here -- let me give you another temporary license and you'll get your license in four to six weeks."
"O, well, okay . . ."

I took the temporary license and went home. Four to six weeks passed and I received nothing in the mail. I drove back to the DPS again, this time a little angry.

I stood in line and imagined the speech I was to deliver to the new woman working there: "Look," I would say, "this is my third time here. I have waited, been patient, and waited again. If I don't receive my license today," I would say, thumping on the counter for emphasis, "there are going to be hundreds of activists clamoring for a better-run, full-service, clean TxDPS outside in no time, and the media will be all over it!" This, in my imagination, would guarantee that I would leave that day with my license in hand. When I got to the counter, though, my ferocity dissolved. I felt alone and grew nervous, instead. I simply told the worker that I still hadn't received my license and, um, could she maybe help me get it?

She looked up my file and, without saying a word to me, went over and spoke to a police officer while pointing over at me. The cop nodded and came over and sat down where the worker had been, which made me very anxious. The cop looked at the computer screen (which I couldn't see) and asked me if I had recently moved. I said no. She then told me that Austin had tried to deliver my license and that it was returned by the post office. I said, "None of my other mail has been returned," which is actually a lie, because Hank and I have had several problems with the postal system since we've moved in, but that's a totally different story.

So now I'm lying to the cop, and I also realize that she thinks I am only *pretending* to not have had my license delivered, that I must be involved in a racket in which I get multiple licenses sent to my address and -- I don't know, what? sell them to underaged drinkers? The cop looks at me in the eye and, coldly, tells me I need to go have a conversation with my post office about why they are returning my mail. She starts to get up to leave.

Defeated, I almost turned around and left but, in a moment of desperation, I asked, "So, there's *nothing* I can do, here, now, after waiting all this time, to get a new license?" And she replies, "If you have ten dollars, you can apply for a re-issue for a lost license."

Why didn't she say this to begin with?

"Okay," I said, "great -- here's ten bucks," and I shoved a crumpled ten dollar bill that smelled like the floor of Lola's at her and she gave me paperwork to fill out to get a new license. I then waited, further, for my number to be called to get my photo taken.

And this is where it gets weird. When I got up to the counter to get the photo taken, the woman working (note: no men work at this DPS, that I can tell) pulled up my file, and her face turned a dark shade of red. She started wringing her hands and hissing, "God!! This isn't a re-issue! God! I hate it when people don't do their freakin' job!! Jee-zuss!!" and she disappeared. When she came back, she had more paperwork, and explained to me that this was called a "Dropped Case," and that, rather than re-issue the license, Austin had to process the license by hand, and that it was sitting in a file somewhere, along with a bunch of others that needed tending to. Um, okay . . . I signed a form and asked, "How can I be guaranteed that this will be processed? I've been coming here since April, and no one seems to know what's going on." She told me that she would personally call Austin that day and have the license produced and, in a couple of weeks, I should call her directly and ask if the work went through. She wrote down her name and number. I thanked her and left, a bit mad, but relieved that this was going to finally happen.

But, of course, it doesn't. I think this is what Marxists like to call getting caught in the machinations of the state.

Early September, I dutifully call the DPS and ask for this woman. The reply was very curt: "She don't work here no more." When I tried to explain why I was calling, I was interrupted and asked for my license number. I gave it to the woman, and she looked up my file. "There's no record of your license being sent. You have to come in and have it re-issued." As soon as I started to say, "O no, hold on, you see, I've been coming in since April? and I've been getting the run-around? and I've already been 'in' and it doesn't seem to do any good," I realized it was already too late and there was pretty much nothing at all I could do except, once more, to drive down to South Gessner and wait in line.

So, now it is the fourth time I drive down there, on to 59, South Gessner exit, past the little strip malls, the low-income housing, the school, and into the parking lot. Once again, it is an early Friday morning and I have my coffee and a copy of everything dating back to April. Once again, I stand in line for two hours, like everybody else, waiting just to get to the Information Desk. I get up to the front and explain everything all over again. Once more I am told it is a dropped case. When I ask what happened to the woman who "helped" me last time (who had given me her name and number), I was told she freaked out and quit the week I was there and left all her work undone. I was issued another temporary license and go home, fuming.

One afternoon, a couple of weeks later, I get an envelope in the mail from Austin.

It is from DPS! O, happy day!

Unfortunately, it was just a letter on baby blue paper, telling me that there was a computer error and that the processing of my license malfunctioned and, as a result, I needed to bring the letter with me back to my nearest DPS to get another one re-issued.

Great!

I chose the South Gessner office because, honestly, I was beginning to feel right at home with the grey walls, the dirty floors, the stains on the ceilings, the smell of the bathrooms that comes out into the waiting area, the screaming of children as they run past. I enjoyed the socio-economic puzzle that I pieced together about why everyone else in line was, always, a person of color and I was, each time, the only white person, and why, when white people did come in and see the line, they always, always, always, exclaimed, loudly enough for the entire line to hear: "WHAT?! O, please -- I don't have time for this," and left. I wanted to turn around and say, "Hey, listen, I've been coming since April, the line is *always* this big, the waiting room is always that crowded, and there is no "good" time to come to the DPS building. Jerks!" I felt like an expert. Well-seasoned.

So, this time, the fifth time, I get up to the counter in about an hour and a half, and show my Austin-issued letter. The woman pulls up the case. She frowns and says, "You've been waiting for this since April?" I say yes. She has me fill out the familiar re-issue forms. I sign in all the right places. I say, "You know, since this isn't really an error that *I* have made, maybe it would be okay if I don't have to wait in the waiting room?" And she is nice. And she says, "Of course," and writes "Walk Up" on the top of my form and tells me to go ahead on into the line to get the picture taken. This takes a blessedly short five minutes. But, the woman who is supposed to take my photograph is terrible. She raises her voice at me and tells me if I do not have the appropriate receipt I will have to go home and come back again. Feeling infantilized, and slightly criminalized, and trying not to cry, I pull out all of my papers that I brought with me and simply give her the stack. She fills out a form that says I do not have to pay and shoves overthing back at me. She turns to her computer and flatly commands, "Smile."

And, apparantly, I did. The license came in the mail today -- finally.

The smile is not a very happy one. I look sort of scared. In fact, it looks like I am flinching with my lips. It is an uneven smile, pulled up on my right side, just a bit. But my skin is clear, which is nice, and my hair has been freshly cut, but that smile . . . it looks like it has been waiting around since April, at least.

reading, or studying?

2006-12-17T10:54:00.000-06:00

Angela Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (2005)
Mark Dow, American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons (2004)
Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1963)
Joseph Hallinan, Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation (2003)
Tara Herivel and Paul Wright, eds., Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor (2003)
Micahel Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750- 1850 (1978)

A friend, excited about books, recently asked me what I have plans to read over the holiday break. I replied, "I don't read books anymore."

Reading? No, not exactly. What I do with books is study them -- and I don't write that to gloat or with sass. I write it with a sense of loss.

I live with someone who reads and reads and reads books. Everything he can get his hands on. (He recently read the biography of Harpo Marx. Ask him about it. He absolutely loved it!) And when he says, "Wow, Chuck, you *really* need to read this book," I think "I would really like to" and then look at the stack of books I've chosen to study and teach for the next couple of months and know that it will not happen any time soon. That's what I mean by "reading," and that's what I mean by "loss." (Which of my classical-realist friends will comment that I *am* reading and the distinction is negligible?)

I know I should "make time" to read for pleasure whenever I can, but I feel obligated to my studies. The works I choose are often difficult, both conceptually and emotionally (see above list). I want to be able to master the material so that when I get into the classroom or sit down to write about it I can feel confident enough to be critical. Delving into prison studies means entering a world of terror, isolation, and helplessness, and I need to be strong enough to do this for the next several months. (And I wonder about the very formulation of these last sentences -- it isn't as if I am inside the prison. What does studying all of this *do* to the reader? I cannot "make time" but I am not "doing time," either. How is a sentence not unlike a "sentence?")

In addition to the theory and history above, I've also been studying Miguel Pinero's play Short Eyes (1975), John Edgar Wideman's Brothers and Keepers (1984), and the collected works in H. Bruce Franklin's Prison Writing in 20th-Century America (1998), which includes pieces by some of the most famous U.S. prison writers like George Jackson, Kathy Boudin, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Assata Shakur, and Iceberg Slim.

If you are a literary and cultural critic, immersed in your studies, you forget that most people will be surprised by what you actually do for a living. They think of professors as wealthy-looking, tweed-jacket-wearing, large-house-dwelling, married white men who mostly help young people realize the true meaning of life or that we are all different in our own special way. Thank you for that, Hollywood. A few years ago, I had a conversation with my mom about my work. It was probably the first time I fully and openly explained what she was reluctant to find out -- that I was doing research and writing on the subject of lynching. I was scouring the NAACP archives looking for materials on the lynching of black soldiers, still in uniform, during the Red Summer of 1919. It was exhausting, depressing work. After a moment she said to me, "Are you ever going to, you know, write about something happy?"

I think of the literary critic Elaine Scarry, who wrote the inimitable book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985), which takes on the subjects of war and torture in devastating (and eye-opening) ways, and who, later in life, wrote a book called On Beauty and Being Just (1999), which, even if many critics thought it was silly, must have been so good for her to work on, for her own sake.

What keeps me going is that I know I am learning -- a lot. And I know I can write about this. The research on lynching led to two, important publications, which is the whole point, after all -- to make public what feels like, right now, is so private: me surrounded by a pile of books and notes, feeling a bit like a lunatic.

sign here

2006-12-13T14:48:00.000-06:00

Confronting plagiarists is an act so dreadful that I find myself in a panic, having to take time out to calm myself down through breathing exercises and to rehearse a psychological narration that tells me to take it easy.

Rooted in a not-too-distant history of shocking encounters in which students have flown into an aggressive rage, all directed at me, the confrontation might (if you are me) be likened to early-childhood run-ins with bullies, whose certain postures and words you learn too late to understand as immediate predecesors to the awful swinging of fists.

Childhood traumas aside, the only way to cope, for me, is to calm down -- way down. I must think and perform empathy. I must ease into the whole thing gradually, like this:

"Good morning, _____, how are you? Good to see you. O, before I forget, let's step outside for a minute, there is something I want to run by you. Let's sit. How about on this bench over here? So, _____, you know what plagiarism is, right? MmHm. You know what I'm about to say, don't you? Yeah, I have to have you fill out this paper work . . ."

[Wait for student to deny plagiarism three or four times in a row and ask, helplessly, "How could this be happening?"]

"See here, how I've highlighted the stuff you took from this web site? And now see here where you have the same thing? I know, you must be very, very tired. Listen, go ahead and sign this -- unless you want to arrange a meeting with the Chair and explain this in a different way -- no? Okay, then sign here. Look, since this is an automatic failure, there really is no need to take the final. No need for extra stress, right? Alright, take this copy of the form and go ahead and get yourself some coffee or tea or something. And, promise me you will never, ever do this again? Promise? Good. Take care now, and don't ignore me when you see me in the hallway next semester!"

I had to do this twice today. Both times, it was blessedly easy. No anger, just a little bit of crying and eventual acceptance. In the second case, I was actually thanked.

But it is exhausting. Having always been the kind of student who was in awe of his professors and who would never dream of plagiarizing, much less raising his voice to a professor or verbally attacking any of them, I find it unbelieveable when this happens -- not just to me, but to all of my colleagues as well.

I told myself I would never blog at work, but now look what I've gone ahead and done.

not at all

2006-12-11T20:04:00.000-06:00

This will not be one of those posts you see on people's blogs that make you think, "Why is this blogger even bothering?"

This couldn't possibly be the kind of post that sheepishly apologizes for having been so lax on updating the blog, and then muses, in a predictable fashion, about what might be preventing attentiveness to the blog.

Who, I ask, would be banal enough to actually write a tedious explanation about how busy the blogger has been, especially with work, so much so that, when time makes itself available, the last thing the blogger wants to do is natter on about recent surprises, foibles, failures, confusions, ironies, memories, dreams, or confessions?

You will not feel embarrassed for me as I self-consciously describe how the last post, a poem about depression, makes me feel like I must drum up something wickedly funny or artfully observant to clear the blog air.

Really, there will be no need to post a comment that says, "Glad to have you back!" or "Took you long enough . . ." or "That's okay, Chuck, we all get stuck every once in a while."

You will not have to cringe, think I have run out of ideas, hope that I get out of my rut, wonder if I am actually boring, or think ill of me because I have ended the post with the two-word pseudo-sentence "More later."

No, no -- not this post.

plummet

2006-11-30T16:04:00.000-06:00

this morning's dark yard. tiny yellow leaves
flutter and drift. like snow. a steel sky.
black wool hangs over downtown's silver buildings.
wind whips. from 70 to 40
in less than an hour. now into 30s.

the last day. bourbon soaked egg
nog on desk in plastic bowl. plastic
ladel and paper cups. workplace holiday party. get buzzed. listen
how the children have a lot of reasons and really
who cares? papers stacked
in corner of office must mean someone is
smart. more egg nog. some crackers.
cheese. now
put self into car.

drive to the cure.
a mixed tape from 1987. it's B-sides.
that song: "man inside my mouth." suddenly high school
and your room in the dark. lying on the floor. wanting to
die. so badly. your plans to run away. how long ago that was. how
important.

how the grey
sky now matches your hair. turn right
into it. a nearly-frozen 35
by midnight.

how are you enjoying the demolition?

2006-11-24T12:29:00.000-06:00

The noise of the deconstruction crew tearing down the Westheimer Square apartments has been going since 6a.m. I hear this crashing, slamming, splintering, dragging, motor gunning, and "I'm in reverse" beeping every morning but, usually, by the time I am showered and out the door, I forget all about it. To be home on a day off and have it as a constant sound track is nerve-jangling. Believe it.

Yesterday, when the streets of Montrose were eerily and beautifully deserted, I surveyed the damage. Almost half of the complex is gone, and the other half torn open, waiting for a giant claw to smash it to pieces. Rooms ripped in half. A bathroom with the floor torn out, but the toilet, looking a bit embarrassed, still standing. The wood, metal, plastic, and tile remains of what people called their homes have been neatly pushed into giant piles.

A couple of days ago, as I was walking back from the grocery store, I bumped into our next door neighbor (to the west of us). This is the neighbor who lives right next to the fence that divides the old complex from our dead end street. He and his partner live upstairs in a 1920-era brick duplex, and they run some kind of interior design business downstairs. They also have a gross little ratty-looking grey dog that shits all over our front yard (and they never pick it up) and yelps at the demolition noise. Their house is lovely, I think, but I also think all the 1920s-era buildings on this block are lovely, including the white brick one across the street that resembles a sad face with a black eye.

But I'm getting away from the point, which is this: When I saw the neighbor I asked, "How are you enjoying the demolition?", thinking we'd share some common annoyance about the noise, dirt, and loss of local architecture and community. But his reply was, "I cannot begin to tell you how happy that noise makes me. I'll take it any day over the cha cha music!" Cha cha music? O, of course, you racist white homo, the tejano music that residents of the complex played out of their station wagons in the evening. The music I enjoyed listening to because it went well with the sound of the church bells in the evening, and the smell of coffee that wafted over from Deidrich's coffee shop (now closed). That music.

This guy bothers me for many reasons. Last week, when Hank and I were outside thinking about doing something to cover the cement grates that lead to the crawl space under the apartment, he came over and chatted with us about the building. When we said we wished the landlord would do something about the crawl space, he said something like, "It would be even better if he just tore the whole thing down and built something new," and then he laughed and touched his moustache, nodding as if we were we all in agreement about that.

But I was stunned by this ugly comment. It made me feel bad.

It wasn't until later that night that I mustered up the courage to even tell Hank that the neighbor's words hurt me, and Hank agreed that it was a nasty thing to say. Why? Because it means that he doesn't like what he lives next to. And Hank and I do like living here, even though there are many, many problems that come with the place. It's a class thing: He's a property owner who couldn't be happier that they are about to put up what he called "very high end" condos -- four stories that will tower over our duplex, blocking out some sky. I dread this intrusion because it means that more suburbanites will move into the city, thinking it both "cool" and, now that they have four floors separating themselves from the horrible, horrible street, "safe" to live in Montrose. This guy has dollar signs in his eyes because it means, for him, lots of new business.

(I do enjoy the fussy design queens that work for our neighbor. They come in the morning, dressed in khakis and crisply ironed shirts, and smoke cigarettes out back while gossiping about their friends. They are very sweet to me, waving hello and mugging, as if caught doing something wicked, and then laughing, asking me how everything is going. A couple of them hold their hands limp at the wrist as they move about up and down the driveway. I always appreciate a queer who embodies a stereotype.)

In any case, have you realized that it has been a full year since I helped Cosmo come forth from his mother's womb? It's true. Cosmo is one year old, and Hank and I are about to walk up Hazard for the open house birthday party. Watching him spiral out of his mother and into the hands of the midwife was, perhaps, the most astonishing thing I have ever seen.

justice for janitors (houston)

2006-11-19T12:08:00.000-06:00

For those of you not in Houston, you can follow the incredible demonstrations and protests in which activist workers from Houston and around the nation are participating regarding just wages and health care for janitors at http://justiceforjanitors.blogspot.com/. You'll be able to see HPD at its, um, finest.

interesting ingredients (for J.P.)

2006-11-19T10:44:00.000-06:00

This is right from the internet, with behavioral recipes added in by me. Recipes for tofurkey, stuffing, and your choice of mushroom gravy or/and mushroom sauce, both of which are delicious. Left over tofurkey, if there is any, is really good sliced up and put on sandwiches with romain or green leaf lettuce and sliced heirloom tomatoes (if you can find and afford them).

Music

Depends on if you cook in the evening or in the morning. In the evening, listen to the righteous stylings of Erykah Badu or the deep roots of Burning Spear. Enjoy a glass of wine or two as you listen. If you cook in the morning, and you've had your coffee, measure, mix, mash, and stir to the beats of the M.I.A. or Handsome Boy Modelling School. Sing out loud and in your head. Defintely dance around the kitchen, occasionally grabbing the dishrag as your dancing partner.

Etiquette

Wash all the dirty dishes you find in the sink before you begin. Check to see if there are any forgotten pots or pans on the stove that also need washing. Might as well sweep, too. Naked cooking is interesting, but you should probably wear clothes. Barefoot is okay, but I always wear socks, no shoes. Try to avoid the phone when it rings, but do answer knocks at the door, and invite whoever has dropped by to come on in. Offer wine or coffee. Only curse when you cut yourself with a knife, accidentally forget something, or realize you used the tablespoon when you really needed the teaspoon. If you have to engage your OCD tendencies by counting every single chop, slice, or mince, go ahead and do it, but don't feel weird about it later.

Food

Tofurkey with Stuffing

Turkey:

5 pounds of firm tofu (use the TastyTofu extra firm from the Fiesta -- it's the best)
1 pound of tofu for the "drumsticks" (optional -- I never do this.)

Stuffing:
2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil
1 large onion, chopped fine
1 and 1/3 cup celery, diced (about 4 stalks)
1 cup mushrooms, finely chopped
3 to 4 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 cup sage (may use 1/8)
2 teaspoons marjoram
2 teaspoons thyme
1 teaspoon winter or summer savory
salt and pepper to taste
1 teaspoon rosemary
2 teaspoons celery seed
1/4 cup soy sauce or tamari
3 cups toasted or stale bread, cubed and herbed (original recipe calls for Pepperidge Farms, but I improvise. You can also search around for other stuffing recipes on-line if this one seems boring, however this turns out great.)

Basting mixture:

1/2 cup toasted sesame oil
1/4 to 1/3 cup soy sauce or tamari
2 tablespoons miso
2 tablespoons orange juice
1 teaspoon vegan mustard of choice
improvise with anything else you think tastes good

Directions:

Mash tofu or mix well with hands. Be sure that all of the lumps are out. Line a 12" colander with wet cheesecloth over lapping the sides. Add the mashed tofu to the cloth covered colander, press down and cover with the overlapping sides. Place the whole thing in a large bowl. Cover the cheesecloth with a plate that fits inside the colander and place a 5 pound weight on the plate. Refrigerate and let sit for 2 to 3 hours.

When time is up, start the stuffing. Saute' the onions, celery and mushrooms in the 2 tablesoons sesame oil. When soft, add the garlic and all the rest of the stuffing ingredients, except stuffing, mixing well. Stir and cook for 5 minutes. Add herb stuffing and mix well.

Remove tofu from fridge and take off weight, plate and top of cheesecloth. Hollow out tofu to within 1 inch of the sides and bottom, placing the tofu in a bowl. Place the stuffing inside the shell and pack in firmly. Cover with the remaining tofu and pat down firmly. Turn stuffed tofu onto a greased baking sheet, flat side down. Gently press on sides of "turkey" to achieve a more oval shape. If desired at this point, you may mold "drumsticks" out of one pound of tofu, and place on each side of the "turkey".

Mix up the basting mixture and baste tofu "turkey" with half of it. Cover the "turkey" with foil, and bake at 400 degrees for about 1 hour.

Remove foil, baste with all the remaining mixture except a few tablespoons and return to oven for 1 hour more, or until the "turkey" is golden. Remove from oven and use rest of basting mix. Using at least 2 large spatulars, move to a large plate. Serve with the gravy of your choice, if you wish, and cranberry sauce.

NOTE: I always grow increasingly alarmed as the tofurkey roasts because the sesame oil cooks really fast and the drizzle run-off is prone to burning on the baking sheet. I worry and worry that it means that the tofurkey is burning, but it never does. Keep an eye on it. I've never seen anyone else write or complain or worry about this on-line, so it might just be me or my oven.

Mushroom Gravy

Ingredients:
1/2 cup dried mushrooms, chopped into small pieces
1 cup strong veggie broth
1 small onion, diced
2 Tbs. flour
1 1/2 Tbs. margarine

Directions:
Hydrate your chopped mushrooms with about 1/2 cup boiling water. Cover and let sit for 10 minutes.

Melt margarine in a small-medium saucepan over medium heat. Sauté the onion lightly. Don't brown too much. Add the flour, and stir constantly with a wooden spoon until frothy. Do not let it burn! Add the mushrooms and their liquid and your vegetable broth. Cook over medium heat to a boil, stirring constantly. After it comes to a boil, turn the heat down a bit and let thicken.

Serves: 6
Preparation time: 10-15

Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients:
finely diced onion
clove minced garlic
sliced or chopped mushrooms [any kind you like]
water
arrowroot, kudzu, or cornstarch [dissolved in a little cold water]
shoyu, tamari, or soy sauce
salt and pepper
thyme
vegan white wine or sherry
fresh chopped parsley

Directions:
This recipe is all to taste, and you can make as much or as little as you want, but here's the basic procedure. also, I've made it very simply before, with no wine, thyme, parsley, etc. So if you don't like something, or know of something you'd like better, experiment! In the parentheses are approximate amounts that I used.

Sauté the onion (~2 tbsp) and garlic (1 clove) in olive oil (~1 tbsp) until soft. Add mushrooms (~1/2 cup?) and let it cook until they get "watery". then add water (~1 cup), wine (just a splash for some flavor) and shoyu (to taste). Let this simmer and reduce for a bit, then add the arrowroot slurry (you'll have to experiment with the thickener, depends which one you use and what consistency you like) and thyme (to taste). Simmer/adjust thickener to get desired consistency. at the end add salt and pepper to taste, and sprinkle with parsley (optional).
This is good on just about any ol' thing. Mashed potatoes, rice and tempeh, tofu, lentil loaves... go wild! It's very nice made with crimini or some other heartier mushroom, but also delicious with plain ol' white button mushrooms.

Preparation time: 15-20 minutes

Clean up

If you live alone, you should probably clean everything up right away. That way you don't have to look at it all later and wish that you had a roommate or live-in maid. If you live with another person, you have a couple of options: 1) Leave everything for the other person to clean. This follows the logic that you have labored to cook, so the other person, naturally, must do the dirty work. Plus, you are tired of the kitchen and the other person is not. Drawbacks: The other person might not get around to it for a while, and you might be tempted to go ahead and do it yourself, later. 2) Do it right away by yourself, but make a big deal out of it. Drawbacks: The other person might call you a martyr. 3) Share the clean up with the other person. Drawbacks: If you are a control freak, you might start thinking the person is not washing dishes the right way and this might make you really cranky.

Now you are ready for Thanksgiving.

when the toaster says "ding!" (and i've suddenly written about being a vegetarian)

2006-11-11T11:56:00.000-06:00

This morning I have decided that, if I were not an academic, I would have to be a grill cook. It gives me immense satisfaction to a have a spinach and cheddar omelette slowly cooking on one burner, stewed tomatoes on another, soy patties frying on a third, coffee percolating, and some bread toasting all at the same time and when the toaster says "ding!" the whole meal is ready at once and dished out on heavy blue fiesta ware plates. Mm.

That said, I was thinking, as I was unwrapping the above-mentioned "soy patties" (which are really called "veggie sausage"), about fake meats, especially since Thanksgiving is coming up and, also, because I recently rehearsed the fake meats conversation I have about every year or so with a friend who is not a vegetarian. It's one of those things about which, when i first became a vegetarian (fifteen years ago, now), I was confused. If I have decided not to eat meat, then why would I want seitan-shaped and flavored "ham"? Why the "no-chik" chicken tenders? I don't want to think "Wow -- it tastes *just like* real ham/steak/turkey/duck" when I am eating. The whole point is that I *don't* want to taste any of those things.

You know how it happened, right? I was having really awful, recurring dreams about dead animals. Scary. Violent. Bloody and full of gristle. The nightmares stayed with me during my waking hours, and I realized one evening, while eating cheese steaks with my meat-loving family, that I was really not supposed to be eating animals. I remember trying to just get through the meal, make it through without reacting so I could think about it later. I was not able to do it, and I quietly announced that what we were doing seemed wrong to me and maybe we should talk about it. It felt weird, but correct, and I never looked back. Thankfully, I knew vegetarians and vegans who let me in on the secrets of cooking, protein sources, etc., and who also clued me in to the fascinating politics of meat-consumption, which really helped me see the decision I made (which was not, at first, political as much as it was deeply psychological) with new eyes. (It was harder for some members of my family to understand my vegetarianism than it was for them to understand the gay thing or the literary and cultural critic thing or the anarcho-socialist thing. Although, if you were my therapist, you might point out that they're not all that different.)

For a long, long, long time, I've been enjoying lots of legumes, tofu, nuts, cheeses, etc. And every once in a while, I will eat a veggie burger or garden burger. I don't think of a veggie burger as food that tastes just like a hamburger -- clearly, for anyone who has eaten both, there is a difference. But every once in a while, I get bored. And I want something different. And I pass the weird aisle at the Fiesta where there are boxes and boxes of all different kinds of MorningStar Farms fake meats and I think, "I don't want fake chicken or a no-meat corn dog or a veggie salisbury steak, but hey! What about this fakin' bacon? I could eat that." or "Hm -- I am so tired of my avocado and sprout sandwiches. What if I got these tofu pups? These not-dogs? That might make it so that I am not ravenous an hour after I eat." But I want to stress that, while I enjoy these foods, they don't taste like what they resemble, and I don't relish their flavor because I am wishing that it was really an animal's innards that I am eating. It's more that, after fifteen years of strict vegetarianism in the dead cow capital of the U.S., and being friends with many, many, many "vegetarians" who tell me how guilty they feel because they gorged on parts of a dead bird that was probably raised in its own filth trapped in a cage in a factory farm, I'm going to go ahead and put the soyrizo in my basket and crumble it into my chili.

I know, that sounds mean, but I rarely -- if ever -- sound off about such things. You could come over wearing your fur coat, take me to a French restaurant and order the fois gras and I wouldn't say a word. This is because I don't think that guilt should inform food or clothing choices. That can be really damaging (ask me sometime about an animal rights activist with an eating disorder I knew who had a poster of a vivsectioned monkey on her refrigerator and nothing but bottles of water inside -- true story!). Also, notice I am not a vegan. And I often buy my vegetables from the Randall's grocery store close by (which I do not like) that sells me ginger from China, not locally grown organic stuff from the community. I'm not pure (although I am obsessed with the concept, and wrote many chapters of my dissertation about it), but there are weeks that go by where I realize I have been eating vegan, and being conscious about that is important to me. I would rather not smoke corpoprate cigarettes [or any tobacco, for that matter], but I do that, too -- talk about dangerous and bad for you . . . These are things that, if they are going to change, it's not going to happen because someone has made me feel bad. You see what I'm getting at?

That said, if it's in demand, I'll go ahead and make another tofurkey this year -- from scratch. Since Hank and I have moved in together, I've made a couple of them based on a recipe I got from David E. (true veggie-friend who has a tattooed cow on his back -- ask him if you can see it next time you run into him). It's really easy and a lot of fun, and it makes me smile when it comes out just right.

how to spend election day

2006-11-07T19:04:00.000-06:00

Forget to tell students to remember to vote. Receive phone call from discourse-obsessed partner reminding you that there will be hours of radio and television to monitor this evening, and that Todd is coming over to listen and watch. Have disheartening discussions with left-wing colleagues about the future of the nation. Ignore Libertarians who hang out and table on bridge near workplace. Notice how many Kinky posters are up on co-workers' doors. Wonder if your precinct's polling station has moved since last year. Look forward to the walk over to the beautiful school. Think about all of the walks you took to cast your ballot over the years. Remember 2000 when you stayed up all night drinking white wine hoping that, for once, the person you voted for would win and how, when he lost, you yelled (rather dramatically [and perhaps a little drunkenly]) the word "NO!!" long and loud at the top of your lungs out the front door and into the wee hours of the Montrose morning. Shudder over all that's happened since then. See a W'04 sticker on an SUV on Allen Parkway and wonder if the driver feels stupid for having it. Consider that this might be what people think about your own SUV=WWIII sticker. Arrive home early to your partner who has realized that he is still registered to vote in the Heights. Give the key to the SUV=WWIII vehicle to partner so he can go vote. Find the mail amazingly free of political flyers or envelopes. Realize you haven't paid Green Mountain in two months. Wander over to the polling place, carefully avoiding those canvassing. Feel self conscious about how you walk. Open the door and see no one waiting in line. Recognize your neighbor, the old woman across the street, who checks your voter's registration card (secretly be pleased that you don't use your, um, driver's license). Remember that she didn't recognize you last year, either. Vote. Come home and snooze for about a half hour. Awaken to your partner cooking tacos. Pay attention to the voice that says you do not want another bean-filled meal. Cook spaghetti and a small salad. Enjoy it. Receive a phone call from your older sister, on her way home from voting in the hills of New Jersey. Discuss politics briefly before inquiring about your nieces and nephew. Laugh about your nephew's reticence, how he only points to communicate. Tell your sister how much you love her. Hang up and wait for the polls to come in. Pop a bottle of wine, as per tradition.

squeeze

2006-10-30T17:57:00.000-06:00

I want you to understand,

especially on days when I feel most vulnerably human, and I have been sad since I woke up, and when I know that you do not think or perhaps you do not even believe that I have a life outside the role you see me in, and, since I'm seeing you linger outside the classroom door and you've been there for half the class waiting for me to come over to you, rage and not pity makes my heart skip fast beats in my chest and I really do not want to have to remember that you will believe, for whatever reason, that I am not me but, instead, your parole officer or absent father or jerk older brother or perhaps you have confused me with an interested therapist or forgiving priest or kind reverend or, in its most surreal manifestation, homosocial homeboy;

especially on days when it is all of this combined with the fact that you have suddenly realized with utter shock that, yes: you are going to fail despite the countless times I have stayed after class and spoken with you one-on-one (alternating quiet concern and hopeful enthusiasm or brass tacks honesty) about the critical importance of reading and writing well or, if not this, then at least the importance of shaking bad habits, and despite the time I took to clearly and sensitively make positive suggestions on your essays so much so that I actually got up in the middle of grading one of your papers to move away from it -- I was so pissed that you seemed to have forgotten everything I had taught you in the last two weeks and you reverted to positively annoying text-messaging/email language -- because, deep down, I believe that no one deserves to feel that wrath of misplaced anger (how easy and deliciously cruel it would have been to have crossed it all out and written in crazed capital letters in your too-big margins ARE YOU A COMPLETE MORON??) and because I need to teach and not be angry at you;

especially when you start to tell me I have done you wrong or tricked you or lied or ruined your life or your chance at success in the world, and when you begin to cry and tell me how hard you have tried, that you have quote not even gone to church on sundays just so you could work on this unquote, it is so hard not to listen to a tiny voice that says, "I saw this coming on the first day of class," and then hear how quickly the second voice says "Don't think that -- what good does it do?"; but I still remain with you and allow you to project all of your hatred onto me for a full twenty-minutes because, I am telling myself, you need to do this and it doesn't really matter if it stings a little bit, after all, in another hour I'll be sitting in a meeting discussing something administrative and this whole thing will be another part of a longer day that, surely, will not prevent me from sleeping or from cursing someone like Rod Paige or the increasingly popular (and totally iditotic) idea that active learning in the writing classroom means giving students something called "clickers" with which they can play a kind of video game to answer questions about grammar when the whole point, in my estimation, is to tear students away from point-and-click reward systems and have them think out loud, discuss, write, and revise their ideas with a circle of people that, eventually, become part of their intellectual community;

that I am on your side, and that I am working my best to figure out how to do this without either of us getting crushed in the squeeze.

deadly scribes

2006-10-25T13:34:00.000-05:00

who knows what's nesting?

2006-10-20T20:23:00.000-05:00

I remember this past summer when Melanie, Hank, and I were traveling in upstate New York, and the sky was the color of Scope, and the day was full of cool air, and I felt so lucky to be out of the scorched dirt of Houston. Today, however, is miraculous -- about 65-70 degrees during the day, with that big, blue Texas sky. It could trick you into thinking the city has no pollution problems whatsoever.

At noon, I took the elevator ten floors down and stepped out of the university with four colleagues to get lunch. On the university's deck, looking out over the Bayou and the edge of downtown, watching the waters from the recent rains rush past, I could do nothing but stretch my hands in the air and try to grab the sky. The day felt huge, the city -- smart and clean. We descended the long, winding concrete staircase that leads from the deck to the Bayou, followed a little path, and crossed the bridge into downtown, admiring the workers who were putting the new, huge lettering on the side of the building. We turned right and ducked into the Vietnamese cafe right there on the edge of Market Square, ordered our $2.00 tofu sandwiches, and chatted in the sunlight as students, lawyers, theater folks, columnists, waitstaff, and businessmen stood in twos and threes, decked out in sunglasses and carrying the local free city rag.

This evening, I'm thinking about Westheimer Square, the huge, affordable apartment complex whose parking lot borders the gated and locked dead-end of our street. Much to my surprise, a sign went up a couple of months ago claiming that it was going to be knocked down to build some -- surprise! -- pre-fab highrises that no one I know could afford (Well, maybe I can think of one person. Or two.).

The apartments have been vacated, and it looks like they've already begun the process of ripping some of it apart. I've known a few people who've lived there over the years, mostly working class queers and Mexican families inhabited the place. We used to squeeze through the gate when we first moved in here to go swimming in one of its many pools, get some sun when it wasn't too hot outside. In addition, it was really easy to sneak in with a couple of pairs of jeans and secretly thrown them in the washing machines, which only charged .75 as opposed to the $1.50 the local laundrymat charges per load.

My other worry (sorry . . .) is about what will happen to all of the vermin that live over there once the wrecking ball starts to swing. When I lived over on West Alabama, a mostly empty four-plex about three lots down from where I lived was knocked down one summer. That night, while sitting out on the porch drinking beer with my friends Walter and Rebecca, a massive carpet of roaches suddenly and grotesquely swarmed over the front wall of my apartment and began to dive-bomb us. I remember Rebecca, who has very beautiful, long, thick, curly hair, yelling "They're in my hair!! They're in my ha-a-a-air!!!" as we ran down the staircase and out onto the sidewalk. It was awful, even as it was funny, but the roaches were thick that summer, and I was told that it was the result of the knocking down of the building. The place just west of us is not just a building, it is a huge, sprawling complex. Who knows what's nesting over there . . .

Tomorrow there are free films showing on the lawn of the Menil made by or about Paul Klee. We're hoping our friends join us with picnic baskets and coolers and blankets to check it out around 7pm. (If the rain stays away.)

deluge

2006-10-16T11:03:00.000-05:00

Houston's tropical weather has kept a massive storm right on top of the city, with rain pouring straight down for the past two days. We tried to keep the windows open to let some of the air in (thinking rain = cool air), but finally the humidity was too much, leaving every surface slightly damp, so we shut the windows and turned on the A/C. All day yesterday, into the evening, the darkest hours of the night, the twilight of dawn under cloud, the rain just kept on coming. A real deluge.

When I woke up this morning at 6am, I had a feeling the university would be closed since its location (right where two major bayous meet before they head out to the Gulf) makes it succeptible to flooding. Sure enough, the web page had a sign telling us to stay home and, soon after, the chair of the department kindly called with a message to stay put. For sure, tomorrow there will be at least a dozen long and pointless phone messages from students on their cell-phones who want to thrill me with stories about how they got into their cars, got on the highway, got stuck in traffic, cannot see, want to turn around and go home, and how I have to call them back as soon as I get this message. Hm, sure, I'll make it my top priority . . .

Meanwhile, I actually drifted back to sleep while listening to weather reports and the latest from NPR. I got up and listened to Democracy Now! and heard Amy Goodman's interview with the civil rights attorney Lynne Stewart, which left me feeling so sad and anxious to hear how the judge will rule. (see full story here: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/16/143257).

The rest of the day will be a chance to play catch-up with grading and preparing for classes, reading the blogs of friends and total strangers. My seniors finish Go Tell It on the Mountain this week and start with Giovanni's Room, so I should have something smart to say about the two, together.

telescope, or kaleidoscope?

2006-10-15T12:02:00.000-05:00

It is literally the middle of the semester, and this past week has been filled with not only trying to meet the deadlines I have imposed for all of my students (which means the stack of papers and one stack of exams were, at one point, up to the ceiling), but also my own struggle to meet the ones of the university and the its committees. Everything needs to be in by mid-October so that something can be done with it before the semester ends.

People zoom from floor to floor, elevator to elevator, room to room, building to building with their own stacks of paper, clipboards, handouts, and a wild sense of how important it is to accomplish something. I enter classrooms with dry-erase markers and a sense of daring, demanding that we try something new, shake things up, learn differently. I experience a dream-like sense of time that telescopes into and out of itself, making Monday mornings through Thursday afternoons one, long complicated day. Friday seems like its own day, as do the days of the weekend, but the rest of the week becomes a kaleidoscope of hundreds of different human encounters that turn in my head, in the evenings, for my contemplation:

We sat in a circle of thirty-five.
The flourescent light danced on his balding scalp.
I smelled beer on her breath.
He puzzled over the color scarlet.
He talked on his cell phone in a bathroom stall.
I asked too many questions.
She cried because she failed.
There was silence in the room and I had to remember not to fill it.
I knocked on his door but he wasn't in.
We discussed the difference between guilt and shame.
She grabbed a set of keys and unlocked the door of an office I had never seen before.
He left because the film was too upsetting.
She slipped a demanding note under my door.
She rushed past my office and yelled, "Go home, Chuck! It's late!"

Different people and different rooms and different times of day. I am impressed with the quotidian and banal because both seem to be freakishly human.

tak.a.boost (drink.a.toast)

2006-10-07T12:55:00.000-05:00

Tak.a.boost (which you can also call Drink.a.Toast, and both names appear on the bottle) is exactly like flat Pepsi or Coke. You know it if you grew up in South Jersey, across from Philadelphia, by the Delware River: Riverside, Delran, Palmyra, Rancocas Woods, Cinnaminson, Burlington. Although I haven't had it since my early-teenaged years, I can still remember it as a powerfully sweet and licoricey beverage. Usually poured on ice and served to you at the day care in the bowling alley, in the municipal building where your Mom went to vote, or handed to you as you finished something like the Crop Walk, it was supposed to give you sugar and coat your stomach. I really did not like it. How many times did I eagerly approach a collapsable table thinking paper cups of Coke were sitting ready for my consumption, only to realize, too late, that the unfizzy Boost was all there was. I would rather have had Orange Drink, which seems to be the equivalent elsewhere in the country. (Note: Delran, the name of the township [not even a town] where I grew up, is not Del Ran, but Delran, a condensation of the Delaware River and Rancocas Creek, between which it lies, trying desperately not to produce the next spate of white high school shooters.)

Didn't Boost come in a weird shaped bottle, almost like a jug of moonshine, with large bottom and a tiny little neck, and a spout the size of a half-dollar? Am I remembering that right? My family never kept a bottle of it around, so maybe that's why I never developed a taste for it. Legend was that it was a sure thing for a hangover.

home, sweet home

2006-10-02T11:34:00.000-05:00

http://www.answers.com/topic/takaboost

thirty-five

2006-10-01T13:27:00.000-05:00

1. Grey
2. Right knee pop
3. Softening middle
4. Publication frenzy
5. Dog dreams
6. Miso
7. Blog
8. Spider painting
9. DVD player
10. Children's laughter
11. Plants
12. Compost
13. Patience and kindness, together
14. Nose hairs
15. Kale cravings
16. New flatware
17. Workplace elations
18. Openings
19. Quality of light
20. Wide sense of time
21. Compulsive knuckle cracking
22. Birth
23. Mother's milk
24. Interconsciousness
25. Extimacy
26. Lung capacity
27. Muscle strength
28. Whole days
29. Words as things
30. Eye hugs
31. Persistent fear of death
32. Memory hangovers
33. Voyeurism
34. Joy in faces
35. Spirals and axes

do colds move? (and is it gross to describe it?)

2006-09-27T18:21:00.000-05:00

Since forever, I've known colds to be different from allergies because they move. The one I have right now started as a scorching hot pain in my throat (mixed with sheer physical exhaustion), but has subsided to a weird itchy thing that nearly chokes me when it is in my throat, and causes convulsive sneezes when it travels to my nose, all the way out to the tip. I sense that it travels back and forth between my throat and my nose throughout the day, and into the night.

Do others sense that colds move? I know that when I was a freshman in college, and taking the worst care of myself ever, I had colds that started in my sinuses and went deep into my lungs, where they settled until I needed antibiotics. Allergies stay exactly where they begin (usually in the nose). Is this true of everyone? Instead of google the answer, I thought I'd let experience speak itself as truth, if anyone cares to respond.

The reason I ask is because I swear this is one of those things I've described to friends (or maybe it was a family member) before, only to be met with one of those really jarring "O, Chuck, you and your ideas! No, Mr. Ph.D., colds don't 'move'!!" responses to which I am particularly sensitive.

Relatedly, I feel better, although I am not yet where I want to be (as my mother always says, pouring herself a fourth cup of coffee). I need another good night's rest.

In any case, my colds move. Do yours?

symptoms

2006-09-25T15:48:00.000-05:00

When was the last time you slept all day? For me, it was today.

I've got a bad cold, and it has left me absolutely drained. It came down on me late-Saturday night and when I woke up Sunday morning, I was feeling miserable. Last night was painful (throat, sinuses), and I woke up, covered in drool, this morning at 6am to email work to let them know I wouldn't be in. I figured, since I was up, I'd be reading, grading papers, catching up on some things. But instead, I immediately fell back asleep, only to wake up five hours later, have some soup (thanks, Antonio and Melanie), and go back to sleep until just now. I bet if I went back into the bedroom I'd be out like a light.

And this gorgeous day outside has been feeling all mixed-up. The sounds of the school children gathering for morning announcements, followed by the crackle of car or bike tires on fallen pecans, long breezes drifting into the room, the sun moving, so slowly, all day, a cat meowing upstairs, the school children being let out of class, the sound of a coach's football whistle, a person walking by on a cell phone . . . time is passing in a very strange way, and I really, really miss my partner.

solitude (done up right)

2006-09-22T19:13:00.000-05:00

When I lived by myself, one thing I loved to do on the weekend was spend an entire evening watching a film, allowing for multiple disruptions by nosy neighbors, drop-in visits from friends on bikes, long-distance phone calls, smoke breaks, and sudden moments of such clarity about my life and my work that I just had to grab my journal and scribble down my stunning insights. It might sound a little mundane, but I enjoyed the leisurely way the night proceeded and how deeply into my own head I allowed myself to go. There were many nights like this that started around 8pm and the film finished up in the early hours of the morning. I'd stop the film, turn on the lights, and shove the twelve books of cultural theory, the many articles I suddenly realized I needed to look at, my journal with its madly scribbled notes, and the empty bottle of wine out of the way and head off to bed, feeling thoroughly done.

While one cool thing about living with Hank is that the conversations I used to have in my head are now very much externalized, there is a part of me that romanticizes the solitude of my twenties, what I felt was a complete withdrawl from the realm of the social in which I did not have to interact with anyone if I so chose. I feel lucky to live with someone who understands the importance of solitary reading and writing, but it is rare that I find myself truly alone these days. There are at least some hours every day, sure. And there are the days I travel back to see family in the north-east, or when I spend a night or two at a hotel while out of town for a conference, but that is not really the kind of "alone" time I'm remembering. For someone who used to really relish his solitude for so many years, I have been remarkably not-alone for about two and a half years. That's a long time, my friends . . .

The reason I'm bringing all of this up is because Hank is out in east Texas this week, working on Broke. He's been gone since Tuesday, and returns this coming Tuesday. It's the first time I've had more than a couple of hours to myself since we've moved in together, and so I am really enjoying it. (Actually, the first Christmas after we moved in together, Hank spent a couple of days with his family, and so those count as alone days, but it was really very brief, and plus, even though I convinced myself that I was looking forward to weathering the holiday alone, I totally broke down and wept Christmas morning.) I have no plans this weekend, really, except to pick up a film or two for this evening and see what transpires.

(My friend Andrew points out that he has seen all of this in a comic strip somewhere, which is exactly right!)

Updates:

1) The pomegranate has been picked and is sitting in our fruit bowl. I kind of want to wait to open it until Hank returns, but I don't want it to rot. My friend Kayte took a photo of it with her digital camera, so I should be posting that soon.

2) So far, no rat. Hank bleached out the area under the sink and stuffed the holes around the pipes with steel wool. There are boxes of poison distributed throughout the apartment and little baggies in the crawl spaces under the building (but these are not in any place that little green-parented children can get into, I promise!). My trench-composting in the backyard has come to a screeching halt until I can deal with it again and maybe find a way to do it that does not attract vermin. Other than that, I am, sort of unbelievably, suffering from a form of post-traumatic stress disorder since I hallucinate the rat at least once a day, and I have to steel myself before I go into the kitchen and use it like a normal person. Also, I have told every person I know the rat story, and have heard dozens of frightening stories concerning rats in apartments that I did not need to hear. Isn't that terrible?

3) This morning, I found out that a short piece I wrote about Courtney Love is going to be published in special issue of a really kick-ass film studies journal on divas. Applause!!

o, rats!

2006-09-12T14:18:00.000-05:00

It had been a full Sunday just with the grading of papers and the preparations for class. I kept changing locations so that a fresh environment would keep me on my toes and hard at work. After coming back from Deidrich's on Westheimer, where I finished grading, I heated up some leftovers, and plunked myself down on the futon in front of the TV, hoping the new seasons of cartoons would be on and i would have a good hour or so of time off for my teaching brain.

What I remember most is that I was coming into the kitchen to deposit my dishes in the sink, put away the tupperware containers of leftovers, and possibly even open a bottle of wine to go with the animation.

Suddenly, a RAT was -- what? hopping? leaping? from the back room (the sun room, the gentleman's retreat, if you will) into the kitchen and, my first reaction was to let out a startled yelp and call out for Hank. At this point I named what I thought I saw ("A mouse!!") until it dawned on me that, actually, it was much bigger, and much scarier looking than a mouse ("No -- a rat!!!") and as I yelled this and backed away it, the rat, zoomed into the kitchen and, without looking to see where it was going, I turned and ran screaming from the room.

Maybe its because he didn't actually have the pleasure of seeing the rat, or maybe because he grew up visiting families that lived on East Texas farms, or maybe because he labored at Deep Springs, or maybe because, simply, he is far more butch when it comes to confronting small vermin than I could ever hope to be -- but whatever the reason, Hank grabbed the nearest weapon (in this case, the extra dowel that we bought with the intention of hanging clothes from it in the closet) and a bucket, ready to trap, bash, or chase out the rat and restore order to the domestic sphere.

Not following the rat with my eyes was a bad idea, though, since I could not answer Hank's practical question, "Where did it go?". When Hank asked me to help him get a flashlight, I sort of turned into Barbara from Night of the Living Dead, because all I could manage to do was stare off into space and kind of poke around in a daze, watching while Hank went in and out of drawers, and gathered some other items that might help at least chase the rat out of doors for the time being.

After about a half an hour, however, the rat was clearly not coming back, and I was beginning to calm down. I asked Hank a lot of inane questions (Do you think it's gone? Do you think it'll come back? Do you think it has a family?), and finally decided, along with Hank, that the rat was probably more afraid of me than I was of it, and that my presence alone was enough to make it run for the hills (or at least the compost heap). I called the landlord who promised to send an expterminator the next morning and then, for some reason, compared having a rat in the apartment to being raped. Um, sorry, what did you say? I think he must have immediately regretted this comparison, because the tone of his voice changed immediately and he talked on an on about the importance of cats and did we want to adopt one?

Having finally found some closure, and since the Simpsons was about to come on, I decided to make the best of a bad situation. I grabbed the bottle of wine and the opener and headed back to the kitchen for a wine glass. The nightmare returned. The rat came right out from under the stove and zig-zagged all over the kitchen floor, looking for an exit. Once again, I turned and ran, letting out another long, terrified yell that combined vowels with a cry for help. Hank came bounding in from the living room, but by this time the rat had disappeared under the dishwasher. This was a breaking point.

What were we going to do?

My intial thought was to leave. Call a friend and stay somewhere else. Hank suggested going out, getting traps or poison ourselves, and trying to kill the rat on our own. Neither sounded good to both of us. In a moment of total frustration, Hank grabbed our bar stool, his dowel, a hammer, and the bucket, set up a post by the kitchen table, and claimed that he would stand guard and kill the rat himself. Suddenly, I envisioned a screeching, half-dead rat that hissed, bit, and fought tooth and nail with Hank on the kitchen floor; then I pictured brains, blood, and a carcass (um, not Hank's). It was too much for me. I didn't want to see it.

I then got the bright idea that, even though we didn't have a cat, perhaps our friend Laura would bring over her two dogs, both Springer Spaniels, and they would flush the rat from our kitchen, like a duck from a bush. I called Laura and she kindly agreed to bring them over, although she did express a concern that the rat might be rabid and in attack mode but I, somehow, strong-armed her into not worrying too much about that, and she was over within minutes. The dogs came in and were told to "get the squirrel" and then, when that had them looking at the ceiling, to "get the kitty." They made a good attempt to find something, but came up with zero. (I should note that Edison, the more autistic of the two dogs, did try to chase the shadows on the kitchen floor, and Clarabelle, the more vocal of the two, barked at us in confusion.)

After packing a small bag, I announced that I was not staying the night, simply because I did not want to get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom or get some water and have another shocking scream-fest that might wake everyone up. Plus, I really did not want to see the rat again. Hank, however, was brave, and stayed put.

Yesterday evening, Hank, after a day of dropping off the first installment of his serialized fiction (titled Broke and available at all Houston hotspots -- get one now and collect all nine!! Ask for an autograph!!), picked me up at work and we went out to eat (note: El Tiempo on Washington is a terrible place to get Mexican food. Expensive, bad service, and bad food.). We got home just before President Coo Coo Bananas (as Homer would say) made his September 11th speech. I drifted off into a pretty good sleep, and woke up refreshed.

The house has been, as far as I have seen, rat free. The landlord actually did not hire an exterminator, but came over himself and put rat poison in the openings under the duplex, under our sink, in the a/c closet, in the water-heater closet, and in the closet of the front toom. I hope it works.

Even though I have lived in places where I could hear rats in the walls (Berthea Apartments) and where I saw rats every single day in the courtyard or trees surrounding my apartment (Jack Street, West Alabama), I have not yet, as far as I have known, had one in my kitchen. Apparantly, the poison is a strong dose of vitamin K that causes extreme thirst and, the theory goes, the rats will leave the building and look for water outside, and then die the thirstiest death of all. My friend Gretchen points out that the whole "then they leave the building and die elsewhere" is a bit of a myth, since many have reported having to deal with them once they die in crawl spaces or attics.

I want to believe the myth, and I never want to see one inside, again.

do you swear to tell the truth?

2006-09-08T19:44:00.000-05:00

This morning, I learned that the state of Texas is the only state left in the U.S. that will allow traffic offenses to have a juried trial. Sitting in the Jury Assembly Room on Lubbock St., a judge who looked exactly like Kathy Bates told us this, and cautioned that, far from being a waste of time, such trials are an essential part of democracy here in Texas.

I have a really full history of being called for Jury Duty. I get called at least twice a year (last year I was called to serve on my birthday!), and I have yet to actually be selected. Today I found out that one of the reasons this might be is that I have one name on my driver's license and another on my voter registration (the first one does not include the III part of my name, and the second one does). No one really likes jury duty, and I always feel especially put upon when I am called since, for me, to miss work means I have to cancel class, and if I actually got picked to serve, who knows how much class would be missed? The whole semester could be de-railed. I have written countless letters asking judges to be excused from jury duty service, always careful to close by declaring that, surely, I am more of a service to the state of Texas by teaching poverty-level and working class students how to write and think than as a juror. So far, this has only gotten my dates postponed.

About two years ago, I was at the voir dire for a capital murder case. The defendent was seventeen years old. The lawyers kept making informative statements followed by questions like, "In the state of Texas, at the age of seventeen, you can be tried as an adult -- does anyone here find that problematic?" and "In the state of Texas, you do not have to have DNA evidence in order to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt -- does anyone here find that problematic?" Since I found both problematic, I raised my hand high and spoke at length about the cultural relativity of age, the ethics of human storage, the crowding of death row, innocent men being killed by the state, etc. The woman sitting next to me heaved a big, irritated sigh through her nose and, finally, the judge interrupted me, told me to stop talking, and explained to the jury pool that if life was like television, and forensic evidence needed to be supplied, the whole system would get clogged and nothing would ever get accomplished. After the next question, which had to do with opposing the death penalty for religious or political reasons, I raised my hand again and the judge told me not to raise my hand or speak again since it was already clear that I would not be selected for service.

Today was much less exciting. I sat in the jury room for about two hours before being called to voir dire, and it was explained to all of us that, if we did not make it to the jury, we had to report back to the assembly room and we'd get cycled through again until 5pm. So, unlike the times I have been let go for being a loud mouth, this time I would have to stay, regardless. At 11.30am, we were called into a trial for a man who ran a red light and wanted a jury to deem him innocent or guilty. He was up against a police officer, the ticket-writer. The woman representing the state asked if any of us had ever run a red light and been given a ticket and, this time, I raised my hand but had very little to say about it. In fact, I agreed that it did not affect my ability to fairly decide innocence or guilt. (Although I did have a minor anxiety attack over the fact that I could not remember, after I claimed that it happened, if it was indeed a red light or a stop sign that I ran several years ago. I had, after all, pledged to tell the truth.) The man who was contesting his ticket was being represented by a very young-looking lawyer who made this joke: "Now, I assume we all know what a traffic light looks like, right?" But, for some reason, I am the only one who laughed. The rest of the crew were solemnly nodding their heads, as if to show the austerity of intersections and red light-green light. He explained to us that the man was innocent until proven guilty, and asked if we all understand that it was the burden of the state to prove it to us. More solemn head-nodding. After this, the jury was picked, and I did not make the cut.

We were given an hour to have lunch and get back to the assembly room, and so I walked to a place called the Avenue Grill, which was kind of like Treebeard's, only greasier (and dirtier). The other option was to go to the police station and eat in their cafeteria. (Um, no thanks . . .) On the way to the grill, five women in their fifties befriended me, and we all sat together and ate our okra and tomatoes, mashed potatoes, and rolls. They all had iced tea and diet coke. I drank water. We gossiped about the other people in the assembly room. We guessed the age of the young lawyer. We wondered how the selection of jurors for each trial was determined. Randomness was dismissed. Someone suggested it was done by zip code. The women and I agreed that this must be the case, since we were all from different zip codes. This was also the moment when I learned that if my driver's license and my voter registration had different names on them, I would be more likely to be called. The women were very interested to know that I lived in Montrose and that I was not, as they suspected, a student, but a professor. One woman argued that teachers of any kind should not have to serve on jury duty because of missed class time. I agreed whole-heartedly.

About an hour later, we were back in the assembly room, reading, stretching, waiting, going to the bathroom, talking on cell phones, chit-chatting. There was one very talkative woman who was fully prepared with a book of crossword puzzles, little baggies of chex-mix, apple slices, water bottle, and dum-dums lollipops ("for blood sugar!"). She explained to anyone who would listen that she got called for jury duty every August, like clock-work, and had written all the dates as far back as 1992 on the envelope in which her summons arrived as proof. Slowly, the next jury pool was called for voir dire and, once more, I did not make the cut. More reading and sitting around. Finally, one of the women from lunch, Tama, struck up a conversation with me. She wanted to know what kind of literature I taught. When I told her it was African American literature, she looked very surprised, and was then full of questions. What did I teach? I showed her the book I was reading, Native Son (Richard Wright, 1940), and explained that I was teaching his work along with James Baldwin this semester to a group of seniors. She had never heard of the book or the author. For the next hour, I held this woman captive by describing the entire plot of Native Son. She was a great audience. She even took a bathroom break and then returned, full of questions: How did Bigger get caught? Why did he kill his girlfriend? How does it end? Tama told me she was an English major many years ago at University of St. Thomas, and that she was a life-long reader. The book she had with her was by Deepak Chopra and I cannot recall exactly the title, but it had something to do with peace. She had me read the first paragraph, and then gave me this knowing look, like, "Right on!"

Finally, around 3:45, it was revealed to us that no more trials were to be held today, and everyone applauded and jumped for joy and went up to collect their six dollars cash. As each person turned to leave, each shared a huge smile of sheer satisfaction. Afterwards, I said goodbye to my new friend, Tama, and she told me she'd be seeing me around.

Not such a bad thing, afterall. I came home and took a much-needed nap.

could you use it in a sentence?

2006-09-06T16:02:00.000-05:00

My sister Mary Anne sent me an email today that paused, before it asked its question, to let me know that, as she typed her greeting to me, she suddenly remembered being a small girl and finally learning how to spell my name; and that since, for her, it was a difficult name to spell (CHARLES), she felt like it was a real accomplishment.

The simple act of sending an email (this one was asking for recommendations on the kind of yoga she should take up) suddenly, without warning, transports her all the way back to the age of -- what? -- five? six? and its attendant spelling challenges. The past is vivified. She must remember how to spell her brother's name, and then does. I imagine her, back then, so skinny and pale, roller skating on the driveway in her poncho, and the way she, and everyone else I knew, said my name. It was pronounced with two syllables, "Char-rulls," and so I believe she thought it was spelled like this: CHARELS.

(FYI -- We also pronounced my younger sister Kathleen's name with three syllables: Kath-a-leen.)

I was quick to learn how to spell, and knew how to read and write before I entered Mrs. Klopstein's kindergarten class, where we were subjected to daily spelling drills in which dim students did their best to carefully sound out the letters of each word. To me, it was agony. One afternoon, bored stiff, I decided to pretend to be stumped by the word I was given (could it have been the word "THAT"?) and then I mimicked one of the slower students whose voice started to spell in a barely audible articulation, but then grew in volume until he finally blurted out the right letter with a question mark in his voice (like this: "Dog. Um. Okay: dddddDDDDDDDD!??!?! oooooOOOOOO!??!!?! ggggggggGGGGGGG!!?!?!). Funny, though, I don't recollect Mrs. Klopstein's reaction to my performance, just the sensation of doing it and wondering if it would work.

What else could I have done?

rose, plasma, and ruby

2006-09-01T14:47:00.000-05:00

The first two weeks of school have me wearing rose-colored glasses.

This means that I cannot help but see my students (all 105 of them!) as sheer promise and possibility, my classrooms as charmingly too warm and overcrowded, and the buildings where I teach as importantly urban and impressively unique. I cherish this, because I know that, in about four weeks, things will be drastically different, and by the time the end of the semester rolls around, I will have had just about enough.

It's hard to not write about work. A friend recently suggested that, even as it is now, perhaps this blog is too public. I have a lot of stories to tell about the students I teach, as well as thoughts on working in the university. I spend an amazing amount of time reflecting on the millions of things I say out loud in class, the back and forth I have with the kids (although they are hardly "kids," and the ages range from 18 to 65), the things they ask, the interruptions that anger me, the posturing of the perpetually thugged or goth-ed out, the inspired imitations I do of characters or events in the fiction we read, how I can make some students laugh to the point where they cannot stop. I don't want this blog to be about work, in that way, although I wonder what would happen if I decided to write a running, public critique of the institution, a la www.michaelberube.com?

A couple of notes on fruit: 1) The pomegranate is slowly but surely ripening! It has darkened to an interesting plasma-red, with just a portion at the top that has yet to turn color. 2) A correction: apparantly, my friend Kayte was the first to notice and identify the pomegranate at the very beginning of the summer. 3) I had a dream last week that there were pomegranate trees up and down Hawthorne street, all with ripening fruit. In the dream, I stepped outside and visted each one. I marveled over how gorgeous they were, and as I made my way toward the last tree at the end of the street, I noticed that the pomegranate fruits were steadily becoming more and more ripe. When I got to the last tree, I looked up and saw a pomegranate fruit that looked more like a plush children's toy than any sort of vegetation. I was absolutely stunned. It was ruby red, soft and fluffy, and I knew in my mind it was the ripest one of all.

self as cartoon (with red head)

2006-08-25T11:47:00.000-05:00

There is an excellent representation of the apartment on 1738 West Alabama I described a while back. Go ahead and check out the latest post by Cake on her blog http://whistlingleafblower.blogspot.com. As a line drawing, I think I look pretty good.

found journal entry (april 25, 1992)

2006-08-22T20:37:00.000-05:00

(on a ferry from Ireland to France)

All this water -- it makes me nervous. The way we move is like being sick. It's like reading a boring book. I look at the words and read them without understanding until at least the third or fourth time; my eyes drift, make circles, get tired. I squint.

Allow the major portion of your attention to sail through the waters of all sensory perception while existing as the same body in time and space, but you will not be easily located unless you understand the map.

It's not like traveling on a train or bus because there is no solid ground on which the vehicle moves. Water is soft and confuses its vesel, which tries to read it as solid ground. Here, we are cutting into that space which cannot be claimed because it is soft. Sort of like air, but with boats.

There is more of an attempt at an illusion. Your mind tries to convince you of the sureness of the body of water. Air does not offer that illusion.

Dizzy feelings are fun when you are a child because they are a new way of perceiving things. Later in life, you learn how to get sick off of this alteration in perception because it interferes with what you have established as normal. You can no longer enjoy the sensations because you've moved past the stage of fascination.

A straight line is no longer a straight line.

i think of persephone (don't you?)

2006-08-14T09:48:00.000-05:00

There's a pomegranate tree in the back yard, bearing fruit.

What a huge surprise to look up and see something hanging, like an apple, from a tangled mess of what has looked like, for the past two years, knotted vines and trash trees. Melanie is the one who identified it as a pomegranate and, since then, Hank has clipped the vines away from the tree, and now we can see it in all of its glory. The fruit has only partially ripened, with ruby red stripes running from its base toward about half-way up the fruit, and we wonder if it might not ever come to edible fruition. But everytime I see it, I feel, what? -- interested. And as a result I've become more interested in all of the plant life in the back, including the potted citranella, the jade plant, the carribean hot pepper plant (off of which I recently picked and cooked one of its firey fruits), and the other weird looking plants that I cannot identify, but which are definitely in conversation with one another.

Out back, there is a garage with a wooden garage apartment above it where our neighbor, a poet named Eddie, lives. To the right, there is a fenced off area that the original owners used to keep their dogs in, and now is a small, heavily shaded plot of dirt. I've been using the back corner of the area as a composting site for all of the vegetable waste I generate (which is lots, when you're a vegetarian who actually eats vegetables), but nothing grows in this weird little rectangle of earth, most likely because it is surrounded by pecan trees that drop their inedible nuts all over the place.

Two of the trees that throw shade in the back are in love with each other. I noticed it right away, when we first looked at the apartment before we moved in. They lean into each other, as if the one tree came up behind the other and gave him a hug, or caught him in his arms as he was about to fall backwards. They seem very happy, although I wonder if they might not be jealous of the two other trees, also in love (although not as noticeable to the untrained eye), who have given each other lots of space, but stretch upwards together in a magnificent way, touching only at the top.

The duplex we live in has all kinds of vines on the property, including the scary looking ones that choke the trees and grow along the neighbor's short fence on the east side of the house, as well as the ones I really like -- the fine-looking skinny ones that make a soft lace over the windows out front. In the morning, the sun comes through these vines, bathing the room in a sleepy spring green, and at night, when cars turn around at our dead end, their headlights catch the vines and make the most incredible shadows on the wall. (I know, vines are bad for buildings, but remember we rent, not own, this place.)

When Hank cut down the ropy vine from the east side of the property, he discovered some thriving garlic that out old neighbors must have planted, and I snipped their spicy sprouts and chopped them into the marinade I made for last night's tofu and broccoli stir-fry. Hank broke off a large lavender and pink flower and its circular jade green petals from the cluster of wild looking overgrowth near the pomegranate tree. It looks really groovy in this brown glass vase I have.

I recently explained to a new mother that I believed that when plants feel threatened, they grow fruit as one last ditch effort to somehow survive, which, to my mind, would explain the pomegranate -- the vine was choking it so the tree had to make fruit before it went to seed. I thought this was common knowledge (and I don't know if it really is true), but the new mother seemed surprised, and then took a long look at her beautiful baby girl.