The delay

Nov 29, 2007

I needed to blog under a new banner or title, so I've moved on to Attention, without a me.
I hope you follow.

In the meantime, check out my new book Irresponsibility on Ahsahta Press. It's at SPD, too.

I get to see the sun rise a lot. Driving to work along the Durham Freeway at 6:30, I kind of drive right at the sun. As I am navigating the secondary and tertiary roads to get to the freeway I try not to focus on anything, try not to let my eyes linger on anything or anyone, so that the sun is more or less the first thing I see.

The sun is a star. That awes me. In the same way, and to the same degree, every time. That's probably not awe anymore but something else. Our planet is close enough to the sun and far enough away from it to be exactly the way it is here. Humans couldn't live on Venus or Mars. But then if whatever catalyst that happened here that made life had happened on either of those planets, no doubt those beings would be looking at Earth as a place as inhospitable as we look at Venus and Mars.

Anyway, it kind of makes it no use to marvel at the narrow band of distance from the sun that Earth has to be for humans to survive. We just would have been something else. There are no miracles within the infinite.

I hurt my knee the other day running. It heals a little bit each subsequent day, or hurts less. Who cares? I also wrote three good poems, drank glasses of that algae-infused superfood, masturbated, brushed my teeth in the shower which I don't normally do, did an ATM transaction in Spanish, talked with the kids outside the tattoo shop at one in the morning, helped a teacher in Georgia develop a reading list for the struggling kids in her 4th-grade class, heard an owl, paid a gas bill three weeks early, cashed a check just to hold all the cash for a few days to look at the wad of it and then deposited the cash, helped Iris mix various tones of gray so she could pour them over a canvas that we've glued wadded-up fabric onto, got mad and impatient when people got in my way while I was hurrying to get to places I didn't want to go to. I ate a good apple. It takes me 15 minutes to drive to work. I am 93 million miles from the sun the whole time.

This morning I swung down the cloverleaf from Broad Street onto the freeway and as the steering wheel returned to equilibrium and I took my eyes off my mirrors after completing my merge, the sun was as usual snapped into place directly in front of me. Hazy linear clouds were in front of its lower half which made it look like something was broken in it, hemorrhaging onto the road and the roofs of the cars, golden, or yolk-like. Lots of things shine. The earrings and necklace that the CNN woman wears shine. Door handles shine. Facial oils in flash photographs shine.

After a couple three miles of driving into the sun the road dips and turns and you're in a dark divot. I always gun the car through this to get through as soon as possible. I'll cut people off, take risks, anything. My eyes have habituated to gulping direct sunlight, and then when it's taken away in the divot, the colors of the Earth are horrible and ruined. Everything looks in black and white. I still see the grass is green but it's like you could make a green out of just black and white. The colors don't matter. They aren't flat or absent, they just don't mean anything. They're paint chips, or wavelengths. None of the things are those things, they're photographs of things, they're reflected diffusions of light. My retinas are a photographic surface. They just do what they do, whether or not I am using them. The eyes of snakes or sharks that only see in a specialized way, that solely determine whether or not something is prey. It's an awful mile of road.

Sunset is miserable. Evening twilight is miserable unless you can see white dogwood blossoms in it. It's late November though.

Nov 28, 2007

Nov 24, 2007

dream in a bed in my parents' house. i was in the living room of my apartment, with a friend of mine from work. we were arguing about the differences between spanish and english, which one was more complex, which one had more average words per sentence. i made some point about vowels being more plentiful in spanish, which made it easier to read off the page but harder to listen to, whereas english was comparably difficult on the page and through the ear. this made english preferable, its consistency, and this was a weakness of spanish that could be exploited by other languages. i realized while we were arguing that our company was considering buying one of these two languages and that this debate would settle which one we were going to try to take over. i was aware of the fact that the company had all but decided to go after spanish but my kind of last-minute vehement pitch for english was seriously inconvenient, and my friend was annoyed with me that i hadn't participated up to that point and now was throwing a wrench into the works right when it was time to pull the trigger on the purchase. he had written the contract and everything or some letter or agreement, some almost-binding document. then, to make matters worse, a young woman walked in huffily, maybe an undergraduate, and i knew she had just walked off stage during a dramatic performance. there was nothing about my apartment to visually indicate that it was now the wings of a theater, but it was, and she had several minutes before a scene change when she had to go back on. she was something like the main supporting actress in the play that was going on, i had an image in my mind of her just getting bad news over the telephone, standing behind a couch that other characters were sitting on craning their necks to look back at her as her reaction slowly changed while she was listening to the bad news. she was very angry at my friend, she had on a lot of eye makeup which i figured was so it was visible all the way at the back row of the audience, eye liner and eye shadow, and she was wearing a pale green satiny evening gown with grotesquely padded shoulders, and cut to an awkward length kind of between her ankles and her knees, and she wasn't wearing stockings, so i thought that people in the audience must just immediately be looking at her bare 7 inches of white, exposed legs and how distracting that would be and maybe they couldn't even listen to her lines because of it or leaned over to point it out to the person they were sitting next to and her lines would be missed. she and my friend weren't talking but were sort of enacting a conversation with body language that i could tell was substantial and had a lot of emotion in it but i couldn't tell either the content or exact emotion of it. was she a woman in his past who he had forgotten for a long time and who suddenly appeared with a kind of vengeance? had he wronged her and now she was appearing to put in his face the fact that she had recovered and even kind of thrived while also betraying the fact that she was still hurt underneath, or savoring that hurt? was he in love with her? was he frightened of her because she could do something to him and would always hold that over him? which one of them had power over the other? obviously neither and both, which meant obviously nothing clear. or maybe i was reading much more into it than was really there. he bowed his head slightly and squinted his eyes up and pinched the top of his nose like he was having a severe headache. i don't recall specifically what she was doing but remember thinking how powerful she was, and that she was probably two thoughts ahead of my friend and five thoughts ahead of me. then my friend calmly reached up into one of the ceiling corners, there was some skewing of perspective and scale in order for this to happen, and he fiddled briefly with the corner, picked at it, and loosed a thread from the corner and pinched it very purposefully and pulled it firmly and carefully downward, the way you pull to unravel a seam but not break off the thread. the room kind of peeled away and turned inside out at the same time and we were in my childhood bedroom, a room that is in reality adjacent to the room that i was actually having this dream in, which is now my mother's painting studio, but still has my old bed and nightstand in there even in the same positions. the young woman was gone and my friend was just looking at me with apologetic pity and he shrugged as if to say "i tried to tell you" or "i'm sorry you had to find out like this" or "nothing could be done about it" or something like that. i realized that i was not the child that had grown up in this room, i was not my parents' son -- he was and always had been. i was his childhood imaginary friend, and had been so vividly imagined that i kind of animated and set off on my own, and became a part of the imaginations of several people including that young woman from the stage. but i wasn't really there, i wasn't really anything at all. and i knew that now that i knew this, that i was over, i would vanish like smoke or something. i thought to get angry at my friend but as quickly i thought that i actually wasn't his friend, i wasn't any kind of anything, not an equal to him since he was flesh and blood, and that i really didn't even have emotions at all except as copies or imitations or possibilities of the emotions of the people who were at one time or another imagining me. but i was no longer of use to my friend or the young woman or the other group of people who had me in their heads, and in fact i had gone on too long, they had all sustained me way past my usefulness because they felt sorry for me in my ignorance of this inevitable dissolution. and the room faded like someone turned a rheostat down or a television show faded to a commercial that never came.