Signs Of Change

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I was reading this book on the current state of neuroscience and the guy was presenting the brain as essentially this modular grab-bag of different systems- this one for this skillset, another for that one, yet another. Dozens of them. And what makes you “you” in your brilliant specificity is not so much the modules as how they interact, how they interface with each other.

“You” is very plastic. “You” changes through time. But you have this more rigid sense of self.

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Anyways, I was thinking about this in reference to this similar feeling I’ve had recently since I changed jobs. I work with all different people, in a different building and a different office and, really, it’s been a big change. And yet, I still feel like “me.” But so much has changed. I’m changed. And it’s the same thing when you move to a different house, or get a divorce, or retire, or get fired, or go to jail, whatever. Everything is different and that has to make you different, too.

But you hardly notice.

You hardly notice your own self, obsessed as you are with it.

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I think all the time about different things. What does this mean? How about that? How does it fit in with this other idea over here? Why do I do this thing and not that thing? What if I did? Is there any peanut butter left?

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Look, I gotta go to work. There might be some more little people running around, need to get rounded up.

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Deer Run

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Okay, Universe.

I’m listening.

Are You?

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I hereby announce my wish for you, The Universe, to fulfill:

Please make Deer Run ours.

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Okay, okay, I know how it goes. I know you don’t just throw it into our hands willy-nilly. You are more subtle and coy than that. But do that thing you do. Crack open a door. Make someone I shake hands with in the doorway be somehow connected to me in a strange and surprising way, a way that nudges the door open a little bit more. Give me dreams that are vivid and disturbing and compelling, dreams in which you have hidden a clue on a scrap of paper that I find in my pocket when I am changing my pants as I fall down the side of a mountain. On the other side of the world, make that little butterfly flap its wings in a spot of warm sunshine so that the mechanisim of fulfilling our desire can be fueled. Make my fingertips itch. Conspire with us, put a little grease there where the big gears bind so that when we throw our weight against them, there is some give, a little shudder.

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All my life you have been making my dreams come true.

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I’ll keep my eyes and ears open.

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And thanks.

Thanks for all of it.

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Betty and Margaret Confront The End

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I stole this piece. The whole thing, except for the ladies( and the grunge, etc.), is a piece of jewelry made by Daniel Jocz, a ring he called “The Muse Leaving The City”, which he made in 1991.

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It is an incredible piece, and all the stranger for its prescient imagery.

Which I appropriated because I was so drawn to it. I wasn’t trying to improve on it, I just felt compelled to try to inhabit it for a little while.

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Yesterday was so fucking fun.

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Snitches, wires, running surveillance, big adrenaline rush take-down in the Home Depot parking lot with shotguns pointed and everybody screaming and bad guys in cuffs wondering what the fuck just happened to them. Then into the box for the dance, and serving a search warrant on, I shit you not, a house full of little people.

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You should have been there.

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The little people yelling and gesticulating and running around, the big cops in raid gear chasing them around, towering over them, yelling back or trying to calm them down…

I ask my partner, “Hey, where’s David Lynch? He in the back bedroom, or what?”

He goes, “After this, lets go to the diner and have a cup of joe and a slice of delicious apple pie.”

Then a little person rides past us on a tricycle, laughing like a maniac.

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Some shit, you can’t make it up.

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I came home, I couldn’t get the grin off my face for hours.

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I hope your weekend is as much fun!

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Self at Forty-Two

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My life has a small orbit, but a sweet one. At forty-two I feel more centered and calm than I used to. My wife says that one of the great benefits of aging is the mellowing out of our emotional storms, and I have to agree with her there. I still have plenty of rough edges, blind spots, and places on the map marked “Beyond Here Be Dragons,” but for the most part I’m doing well. I got a good job, a house, money in the bank. Better, I have someone to share it all with. The central fact of my life, the core of it, is my marriage and parenthood. Everything fits together nicely now, though, nothing is in conflict with itself.

Ah, but I still sit in the little puddle and make my own waves.

Still crazy enough to do that.

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I got art in my eyes and fingertips and sparks flying across the synapses in my dark brain. I got writing and reading. I got a strong back and hard hands and two legs to stand on. I got a sweet spot. I got a bitter one.

I have more than I ever dreamed I’d have.

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I am dumbfounded by the munificence of this universe,
and humbled, and grateful.

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Ed Goes To the Fair

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Home sick another day. But today I’m really just fucking off. I feel much better, thank you.

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I’m gonna go for a walk with the wife and the dogs and breathe in some cold morning air and then have another cup of coffee or two and then I don’t know what.

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Last night I dreamed of millions of squid, thrashing and pulsing in the dark waters around a fishing boat. They had their big lights turned on, facing the water, and these squid were streaming toward the light in a frenzy.

I was not on the boat, I was in the water.

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Something’s stirring….

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Twenty-four Ways of Looking At a Shellfish

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This is a detail from a piece I did last year.

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I dunno. I thought maybe you’d like to see it.

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I like strange. I like things interesting. I get a kick out of oddball shit.

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I arrested this guy yesterday, he was full of oddball shit. He wanted to go on and on about it. Me, I wasn’t in a mood. I have a sinus infection, a cold, I ain’t been sleeping right…I told the guy, “Look, I don’t give a shit about your story. I just wanna ask you these six questions and then send you on your fucking WAY…”

He wasn’t having nothing of it.

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Sometimes, I humor them. I let them vent. It’s good for them, it makes it seem like I care, like somebody gives a shit. But yesterday, I just didn’t have it in me. The guy was getting pretty bent out of shape, so I caught my partner’s eye and he come over, stood behind him. (If there is something better than a partner who’s got your back like that, who reads your face and your eyes and does just what’s needed and nothing more, well, I don’t know what it could be.) So the guy, he just can’t process that I don’t wanna listen to his shit, even though I fucking tell him and tell him. Finally, he sort of goes “Hey, you don’t give a shit about what I want?” and I go, “No, I don’t.” and he goes, “Well, would you write that down for me, would you put that in writing for me?” and my partner reaches into his pocket, pulls out a pen and his business card, and scribbles down the following:

“I don’t give a shit what you want.”

And signs it.

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HA.

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It went downhill from there.

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In looking back on it, I handled it badly. I didn’t feel good and I didn’t play him the way I maybe should have. I think I about half wanted him to nut up so I could punch his fucking lights out.

Okay, I really wanted that.

There you have it.

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So next time you feel like I’m some kind of sweet, sensitive, poetic, artistic soul all bent on happiness and spiritual creaminess, make a little room for this guy. The kind of guy wants to beat the shit out of a guy just because he’s nutty and gets off on threatening his ex-wife and his kids and the judge and me and my fucking partner.

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Ugh.

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Okay, okay. See, there is something good in me. This guy got my goat, but he’s the kind of guy, I swear to god, he’d benefit from a serious ass-stomping. Alright, maybe not him so much, but all the rest of us.

Well, me anyway.

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This week a lady got shot to death by her ex-boyfriend. Then her best friend, two days later, she gets smacked by a train. On the same tracks where the guy that killed her friend was arrested.

Something more going on there than we’ve figured out yet, I’m guessing.

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Also, there’s unfinished business in my head. There’s these two dead women, I swear to god. They won’t leave me alone.

I don’t know who killed them.

I ain’t ever gonna figure it out, is my guess.

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It’s a strange old world…

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Navigate

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I read Rebecca Loudon’s chapbook “Navigate, Amelia Earhart’s Letters Home” over the weekend. What I love about Loudon’s work is her odd-ball language and sort of pressured speech diction, her vivid imagery that is at once disjointed and coherent, and the way that she reaches into the muck with both hands, really digs down deep into the smelly, fertile soil and pulls up something that is part root and part jewel, a sort of ruby-encrusted turnipy kind of thing that she holds up to the moonlight and howls at.

She makes me uncomfortable. She makes my bones itch. She sets off bells deep in the vault of my skull.

In Navigate, Loudon channels the lost aviator’s last dispatches. If you remember Laurie Anderson’s piece Blue Lagoon you’ll have a feel for some small part of what’s going on. Now, Blue Lagoon is all about Melville, but there is a similar haunted, ethereal feel. Amelia comes to life as she makes her way toward something else, and we are privileged eavesdroppers on the process. We get to intercept these messages from her to those she is leaving behind and it is tender and strange and heartbreaking.

And, of course, I would assert that there is also much, much more going on here.

It is a rich journey to embark upon.

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What I Got For My Birthday

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Amelia Earhart and JFK:

My wife got me a John F. Kennedy PT109 GI Joe.

With knife, pistol, and cool sunglasses.

Rebecca Loudon’s Navigate, Amelia Earhart’s Letter Home came in the mail.

It is salty and wind-blown and bee-stung and sunburned and such a fucking wonder.

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Also, my girl is home from school for a week!

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I have made some art today and later my wife is taking me out to the Sea Chest for a big pot of mussels and a bottle of wine and something sinful for dessert…

I must have been a good boy this year.

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Man Walking on Pear

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Why am I given this measure of plain happiness? Why me, among the millions of hapless souls born into this world of sorrow and pain?

Why these many blessings?

Why the simple pleasure of the passing of my days?

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Why all this love?

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I am not tortured by the images of dirty children digging for food in garbage dumps, nor of them laying on hospital beds, bleeding through the bandages covering the stumps of their arms or legs, or wrapped tight around their fractured skulls. These children are not me. She is not my child there in the smoking wreckage. I understand the nature of this world, its need to grind us up. I’m not naive about the workings. We’re all for the boneyard.

But how are there these lost islands of happiness, where some lucky few live out a part of their lives?

It is not due to their small virtues.

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It is an accident of the weather.

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Look around. The wheezy contraption has sailed over your head once more, its blades whirring and clacking.

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You are spared another day.

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The Princess of Secret Beach

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This one makes the river of my heart overflow its banks.

Portrait of a girl who’s gone away…

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I imagine her now, strolling the moonlit flanks of the darkened beach with her magic wand and her crooked crown, casting
all manner of spells, charming strange creatures up from the depths of the sea where they have long conversations with her, sharing their obscure folk tales and singing ancient songs to her as the stars wheel above their heads. Off on the headlands is a small cabin where her Mother and Father sit tending a small fire and reading books while they await her return…

Perhaps she still lives in a place much like this. Perhaps there is a place where all our children live on.

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A place we inhabit ourselves.

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