Family By Choice

Since I've been here on the west coast, I've read my friend's kid's daughter to sleep or near sleep.  Depending on the book, it took 5 minutes or 15 minutes.  Yet, my ex told me I'd be a bad father.  And that sort of astounds me.  I worked at Echo Hill Camp for years and had a hand in raising some amazing kids in my lifetime.  

So, I'm hanging out with Aya, playing the amazing castle-guessing game (which it is that amazing).  And she just wants to stop.  I was up 5 cards, but she just said, "Jon Pauley, let's play a different game."  Not, I quit, not I give up.  She said, "I know you are going to win and, you won, but let's try a different game."

And we did.  It was called Blockus??????  And she won.  Legit.

D is for Dishevelment, Dick, Destiny and December

In a few short hours from now, I'll be sitting on a tarmac, waiting for a plane to take off and get me the fuck out of this city until next year.  I'm beyond excited to escape so many things: migraines, ghosts, and disturbing, unrealistic dreams causing disruptive sleep.  The dreams may stay with me while gone, but at least the naked walls of my apartment will be banished.  It is so odd.   I look at my favorite poster, a Pavement one, and can't get myself to hang it on the wall.  Another one, an old, strange Paramount silent I've had for ages.  Nope.  I blink, look and just look away only to find it glaring at me.  Alas, that is dishevelment.  That is feeling cold on the inside so your surroundings do the same.  And, meteorologically, it has been a cold one here in New York.  So, while hiding under the covers and being rather anti-social, this boy has dug his nose in books. There was one thing I went back to, though and it was a gem.   I finally finished Moby Dick!

I started this leviathan of a book three years ago.  The first edition I had of it was a cheap, Barnes & Noble joke of a version.  It was next to impossible to read due to the lack of references.  The vernacular is old and the countries have changed names many times over.  After becoming frustrated while still in Nantucket, I shelved it.  While at the beach, as is it perfect to read at the beach, the pages began to fall out.  I finally tossed it out of frustration.  I knew there had to be more.  My best friend told me this was really a novel worth reading.  People who have read it said it is a monument to literature, unlike anything that came before it…..

I got the Norton Edition of Moby Dick and dug my teeth into it.  I re-read all I had before, but with page notations and it made so much more sense.  The biblical references were explained, as were coins, words, countries.  It became an adventure and a book that was beyond educational.  It was fun, adventurous and full of word play.  Then, other things popped up.  Moby Dick collected dust as other things needed to be read.  Life was changing!  Things were happening!  It sat by my bedside for two years.  Yet, I kept coming back to it….hoping this would be the time I would finish it.  The point is that it is a quite exhausting read.  It is a great deal of work to get through until the payoff.

I was on the phone with my friend Carl the other day and he referred to it as a cork ready to pop.  And, did it do that indeed!  I plowed through the last 140 dense, sweaty pages like a starving python in a cold place looking for warmth in prey.  The book really can devour you as you devour it, but only if you let it.  Melville breaks so many barriers.  He trashes convention in narrative storytelling and told the story he wanted to tell.  The lesson of Moby Dick is that you will never really find what you are looking for.  If you obsess over something that is unattainable, it will drive you mad.  That white whale is the analogy for everything you want but is unattainable.  All that shit has been said before, but what  Moby Dick did for me was prove that there is some sense of irrationality in what drives us to do anything.  The ending may end up being a calamity, or it may end up being peaches…..rosy even.  Moby Dick doesn't give us the rosy ending of misguided obsession.  Obsession is a cruel, dark (even though here it is white) brooding thing within each of us.  The point is can we control it before it breaks us and takes all we care about, even superficially, down with us?  A book that can force us to ask that question, ponder on it, go off on random sidesteps of interest and return to the obsession is what makes it so unique and beyond that, realistic in its scope.

An entirely different beast of a book is Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle.  WOW! This was a perfect follow up to Moby simply due to its brevity at only 146 pages.  I really ripped through this one.  It has such a dark sense of humor and general foreboding through all of those short pages up until the 100-120 page mark where shit truly hits the fan.  It is a sort of novella where you begin in a certain place and you know that place will, or its inhabitants will come back to haunt you.  The book deals with cruelty and misunderstanding to such an extent it is almost nauseating.  There is a good deal of repetition in this book, but it serves its purpose well.  It also makes it very human, as we do things in such a repetitive nature as well.  We avoid streets, people, places and things we feel as if could hurt us.  Whether or not that pain we might feel is a reality or not, we do our best to keep our distance.  I never thought of going through a daily existence as a board game until reading this.  Yet, it opens just like that.  There is strategy involved to avoid pain.  Two turns forward, three back on the next roll.  Five on the next and so on.  But, as in most games, as is the case here (and in life), the strategy becomes a moot point.  Sometimes things come to you and all of your devising gets thrown out the window…..

Finally there is the apt titled Tenth of December  by George Saunders.  This is an amazing collection of short stories.  I'm not done with it yet, but have already felt its profundity deep in my bones and heart.  He is an observer of human nature unlike any author I have read since Raymond Carver…on the short story level that is.  So, my dear readers, I will leave you with my favorite passage from this fine collection thus far.  It comes from Escape from Spiderhead.  Basically, it is about a guy who is serving a prison sentence without doing time but forced to participate in mental/physical experiments to not serve time.  What he endures is far worse.  This is the most beautiful and eloquent thing I have read in awhile.  Enjoy:

I sailed out right through the roof.
And hovered above it, looking down.  Here was Rogan, checking his neck tattoo in the mirror.  Here was Keith, squat-thrusting in his underwear.  Here was Ned Riley, here was B. Troper, here was Gail Orley, Stefan DeWitt, killers all, all bad, I guess, although in that instant, I saw it differently.  At birth, they'd been charged by God with the responsibility of growing into total fuckups.  Had they chosen this?  Was it their fault, as they tumbled out of the womb?  Had they aspired, covered in placental blood, to grow into harmers, dark forces, life enders?  In that first holy instant of breath/awareness (tiny hands clutching and unclutching), had it been their fondest hope to render (via gun, knife or brick) some innocent family bereft?  No; and yet their crooked destinies had lain dormant within them, seeds awaiting water and light to bring forth the most violent, life-poisoning flowers, said water/light actually being the requisite combination of neurological tendency and environmental activation that would transform them (transform us!) into earth's offal, murderers and foul us with the ultimate, unwashable transgression.  

On that note, I leave New York City with this:

17 Days

One of my favorite Prince songs is 17 Days.  It was the B-side on the When Doves Cry single.  It is a downer of a song about the sadness and pain he feels in not having had contact with someone for such a short period of time.  Moreso, that number of days is arbitrary; it could be months or even years  Anyway, the next set of haikus begins with a line borrowed from that song.

Let the rain come down,                            
drenching, soaking and lonely.
Coldest December

Must be a way out,

this vortex of misery

has become too much

So many corners,

places that have history,

unabridged in mind.

It's what could have been

those unreal conditionals.

The ifs and then some.

Keep on having dreams

of nonsense conversations.

Greatly lacking sleep.

Cold December air,

cutting wind and blowing dust,

nothing to protect.

Nothing is answered,

a plaintive face and slack arms,

all facing downward.

A lack of spirit,

walking alone through the streets,

ghostly air from lips.

My head is pounding,

the loudest like gongs ringing.

Troubling, piercing.

Many censored thoughts,

some recycled and some new,

the same conclusion.

When all bets are off

it feels  just like a mousetrap.

Small pellets of shit.

You have not left me.

I carry your memory.

A weighted burden.

I try not to look 

at hundreds of images,

great, botched reminders.

Fuck this  Christmas shit,

songs and all the pageantry

can go straight to hell.

There is deep anger,

inexplicable feelings

devoid of passion.

Sometimes one gets burnt,

the struggle to get past it.

The same as drowning.

There are strong people.

I know quite a few of them

much stronger than me.

Dark in the air shaft,

the weather as mystery.

Sun or not, dark days.

To go far out west

for simple escapism,

new geography.

I think about him,

all he introduced me to,

then took it away.

The cruelest of blue,

sparkling eyes that match the sky.

A black hole iris.

True, everything dies,

many wish to avoid it.

I'm sure its calming.

Over just one year,

all has been turned upside down.

A blind tsunami.

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