Beneath the surface. This is gun in your face talk amazing. To think that we have come this far, this fast.
New office 2013: There was an overwhelming amount of pressure to write, to capture it, sort of how people capture endangered animal, throw them into cages in order to “save the species” maybe that is what one does when they are writing. One to simply write about life, isn’t that what David Foster Wallace says, fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being. But it is hard to catch isn’t it, you can’t do it justice. How your feel right now, the things you are thinking, cascading over each other, ebb and flow in and out a million times over. I am thinking of my sons. Their faces smiling up at me. The sun, in the living room. How do you capture just that moment without a database of words.
Trying the new key board out. It is a little awkward at first walking backwards through snow and ice sticking on your pant legs so cold it is hot, burning your legs.
Spent last night toying with the device, using it without its keyboard or mouse, just getting a feel for it as it should a be, as it is intended, a naked tablet. I must say it was awesome, makes my iPad look like a cell phone and my cell phone makes everything else look like a gumball machine.
Today is the day we are supposed to vote. I voted, my wife and me, with the kids up early in the morning, 15 degrees out, kids bundled up and our breathe turning to ice crystals. My father down in Texas with his liver falling out, his bile tree choking him yellow voted.
Just off the top of my head, Degas, one of the founders of impressionism, he painted the absinthe drinker correct? L’Absinthe. For some reason I always confuse him and El Greco, The Greek. And why do I think El Greco is his name? It is not. In my head, I see them all together, in a corner of Spain, painting legs and moons and stars and staccato buildings. Why?
My father should have some pretty cool paintings, it was weird going over to Stuart Island, before Finn was born, towing along my eldest son Gavin from a previous marriage. Gavin was 15 and a handful and getting into a lot of trouble. Finn was going to be out first child together, my first biological child, it was stressful, traveling, my wife pregnant, my ex-wife calling, Gavin sneaking off to make phone calls and smoke cigarettes, my sister Laura starting her drug addiction.
A couple of glitches I noticed, last night while using the kindle app on the surface:
1. I was stuck on a page of David Foster Wallace’s “both flesh and not” the page wouldn’t advance, I would push forward, try to advance it, take it to the next level, anything, but I was stuck on that page with Roger Federer and DFW and tennis balls whizzing by my head.
2. When I woke, the surface itself went black, I tried holding the start button, I pressed against the window icon, I fell out of bed, into the darkness like William Styron, drunk and mad bouncing down the hallway.
Listening to music on the surface is a real treat. Xbox music somehow remembers every song I have ever downloaded, I can shuffle them and wade through the nostalgia. Welcome Friday Harbor. Introducing Belgium, my father there in the living room drink a Heineken at 6am, painting a picture of Gavin’s head. Me staying up late at night listening to OK computer writing Florida dreaming, my friends that is nostalgia in nostalgia. This is life really when you think about it. When you are in bed at night and how the thoughts just keep coming to you in waves, daisy chaining off of each other, folding and out. I think that is the art I miss most about writing, you were somehow able to take these feelings, saturate yourself in them and sort them, make sense of them. But then, there you are with two little kids running around, a loving wife, maybe the kids are sick and you are working 10 hour days and the diapers and shit and dinner and dishes and mess, in bed now reading one of the three stories that your son picked out to read, the same book you have read a million times. You don’t have time to think and sort it, you are here to live it, to live it, to live it.
I’ve decided that I no longer like the name “surface” from now on I will call it the amazing device
And just so you know where I am coming from, here are some of songs just played via my Xbox music shuffle
• Ol’ dirty bastard- Brooklyn Zoo
• Peter Wolf Crier- untitled 101
• A Tribe Called Quest- Midnight
• SLRAS-Bull to Weak
• GZA- Liquid Swords
• Radiohead- Pyramid Song
• Death Grips- The Cage
• Little Dragon- Ritual Union
• Spank Rock- Energy
I am not joking, that just happened, in that order.
Sitting in my house. It is late, veteran’s day and we have tomorrow off. There is a fire, the kids are sleeping, wife is in the shower, I have a glass of wine the candles are lit. I could live this way. A long run during the day. Maybe I could go back to contracting. 75 bucks an hour. Just bill out 4 hours a day, plenty of time to read, maybe write, and long runs.
Today at Tidal wave books found Don De Lillo’s “names”… I keep getting pulled in, there is something dark about this book and something I am missing. I read it before, but was too young and it just slipped away over my head, but I am different now, aged, seasoned.
Just in case you are reading this, I am trying to compose meanderings using nothing but this/the amazing device, and office 2013. Today I am messing a lot with the touch and track pad, there are also weird buttons on here that I am interested in trying out. A couple of comments real quick about the touch cover keypad or whatever they call it, look at the period, it is so small, almost microscopic and by the light of fire and gauze of wine, it is almost impossible to make out. Sometimes you just have to go on trust and instinct. A lot of this key pad words this way, it is for the serious typist, one who looks at the screen and not the keys and after a while you start to like it, trust it, lose dependence on the textile touch and click of the buttons. You are creating by almost just thought alone and some minor fingerings.
Do you know what the Otzi man is, it is the most amazing thing ever and I my tiny mind keeps exploding thinking about it over and over again. Kim, Finn, Reilly and I all went to Alaska Museum of Natural history, it is a beautiful place. Privately owned I believe or at least the lady at the front of these desk who was speaking to the ADN advertising executive lead me to believe it was privately owned, and like all things of this nature it was like walking into someone’s home, It was like walking into the jungles of history that my grandmother would have saturated and lamping about her entire woodbine structure. Every inch of this place was covered with some sort of nick-knack and a lot of stuff didn’t even have to do with nature or history, some of it was the future, the beauty of it was like entering someone’s mind, perhaps the owners mind. It was completely voyeuristic. My wife went over to some story time with Finn. I walked around with Reilly, looking at bones and feathers and large maps of the ocean floor, and over there somewhere there was this little tiny plaque about the Otzi man. This guy that they found frozen in the ice on the border of Austria and Italy. Some goat herder cooper smelter dude. Just half his body sticking up out of the snow. He died 3,500 years ago. It is weird to think he died and has been there 3,500 years. His body and all that time. Not 100 years, or 200 years or a thousand. Before Christ and the romans running around. Dead. He had goat (Ibex) in his stomach and some berries, he was 45 years old, older than me, shot with an arrow. Tattoos on his skin and signs of acupuncture. 500 years before the Chinese invented acupuncture. He had whip worm, probably from night soil. A picture of him in a small museum just outside of anchorage. A half torso rising up out of the ice stronger than I will ever be.
On plane flying south to Sacramento, a time to meditate. At the age of 38. Here are some things to think about, some things that are on my mind.
1. The glaciers down below, thousands of years carving and reshaping the earth, more powerful than anything we have never known, yet we kill them.
2. May father and Jim dying of cancer, this will happen but we can prolong it somehow, keep rebooting them for two hundred thousand dollars in a broken medical system.
3. Ethan and Wesley finding him, perhaps with spittle coming out of his mouth. Stiff
4. Kelsey finding Dennis and how good he was and her performing CPR and saying, he was too stiff.
5. On our way for dinner, family friends and love and all the things we are trying to be
6. A lack of snow.
7. My wife, and her hair straight and short in the kitchen kissing before an argument about ourselves, then in the kitchen kissing me with her hair strait and short, meaning it.
8. All these fucking trips, getting good at them, 50,000 MVP miles at a time. Getting upset at slow movers. Text when “boarding” text when “landing” phones on, seat belt clicking at the ding, turning on and off electronical devices before they announce it, identifying my bag from million miles away. Looking for something new when you have seen it all.
9. Hello Mr. Spillane
10. This is dedicated to all you bitches.
We are slowly turning into our father’s you have noticed this haven’t you. (This concludes using the amazing device on a plane)
Chris, I still see him walking around the store in Darmstadt Germany. We are the main Caserne, we were at the audio sound whatever store. “I don’t know what to get Tiff, we have been together so long that I have already gotten her everything there is to get”
I can think of a few things. Chris didn’t have a Hotmail account back then because the library had not started with their internet connection. That moment in time people were saying “email me” but they meant it as a form of interoffice communication, the LAN. “Email me” they would say, with their fat old fingers, pushing back age hair. “Just put it on a floppy” as I raked leaves that fell from trees… all the while I was receiving carefully hand crafted letters from Wes telling me of this new event. Wes told me about Napster while I running around in motor pools and checking mail boxes by spinning the combo to the right. While I was drinking Heinekens at the End Zone throwing footballs through an empty hole in the wall.
Chris left and went to college. First a community college that I completely constructed in my mind, a place where he ate shitty food and grew his hair long and tried out glasses for the first time and peeled back the layers of mushrooms that were growing in his shitty car. Hot humid community college life. I don’t know what I was doing then. There were some new cats, Beaumont and they opened up the library with “internet” and I got my first Hotmail account.
That is about how it started, or at least my recollection of how it all started. Our careers in this awesomeness. Chris somehow went to Florida University. I somehow got online, we all did… a whole generation was going to change the world.
It all seems so stupid and trite now. We haven’t done much with it. We SHARED ourselves better. In a less meaningful way, not as good as the letters I shared with my friends and family when I was in Hungary. Not at good as the letters my father still sends me, or his journals. Maybe constriction creates art. Limitation creates art. If I had a prediction to make it would be some Jackson Pollock shit. The internet is going to be freed. An augmented reality in which we instead of using our stupid phones. We would slowly remove the devices. Think about it… the computer started out as a silo. Then connected. Once connected, we used more powerful computers, desktops, hidden in rooms in the back of the house and we used devices to touch and move around in these devices and all we did was share our shit. Share it more and more, never as good as a painting or a touch. From there we went mobile with laptops in the house and Wi-Fi, which just meant that we wanted to take the internet places, why not our phone. But the phone will die. Just like when touch came out, it somehow removed a layer, why the device (mouse) to connect to a device to connect to others, meanwhile we were learning to share more shit at a…(add more) augmented reality.
My heart goes boom-boom-boom and sometimes I don’t know where it explodes.
My mother in whatever she wore, me standing next to her leg at great adventures for the firework show, I was scared to death that one of the sparks would fall down upon me and explode me like the story she told of a fireworks barge. I just remember her leg and arm falling down upon me in sweet protection. Why did I feel so safe?
She was always there to rub the hair over my ear and I can’t imagine it any other way.
I met my wife in 2005…The last year I won at fantasy football and the last year I was alone.
Important lines from Names:
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