The New Savagery

Jamaal's Status Updates

2012-02-10T13:02:00.000-08:00

My buddy and Warren Wilson classmate, the poet Jamaal May, writes some of my favorite Facebook status updates. They're are almost always funny and thoughtful, and often challenging. If Facebook status updates are a viable and distinct genre (and I believe they are), Jamaal is a master. Here are a few recent examples:

"What percentage of people who describe themselves as "blunt" and "outspoken" are just tactless assholes who are too lazy to work on that shit. Gotta be up in the 90s right?"

"My compulsion to multitask has resulted in me failing at making tea not once but twice this morning. Once when the boiled water sat alone until it was no longer boiled, and once when the smoke alarm informed me that all my water was now steam. Might as well do away with the pretext and just have this shot of whiskey straight."

"I'm surprised how many strong fiction writers don't seem to know 'black man' or 'arab woman' is not a complete description of a person's look to anyone who dosen't think all non-white people look the same. When I read 'Asian boy,' I can't make out a face. I don't even know what stereotype I'm supposed to be seeing, because if he's from Japan he's not even going to look remotely like a Bangladeshi boy, for example. It's not just an identity politics, race relation, or whatever the BS panel buzz word is this week, issue. Never mind me taking offense, (especially since that's written off as being 'too sensitive' these days) it takes me out of the story. It's at the very least a basic craft issue and I find it bizarre people aren't learning this in their creative writing programs. Could you imagine workshopping a story with a white narrator who describes ever secondary character he encounters as 'the white bank teller,' 'the cute white guy down the hall,' 'the white mechanic...' Umm... actually, I kind of want to read that story."

Jamaal

First Grade Summer Journal

2011-06-24T09:50:00.000-07:00

My friend Kyle Arango posted his "first grade journal" on his facebook wall yesterday. For a bit of context, here is a picture of Kyle on the beach:

Kyle (left), the consummate beach hero.

Whenever I think of Kyle, I think of the summer.

And here is Kyle's first grade journal:

Happy summer, friends!

Beauty and the Beast

2011-05-29T12:44:00.000-07:00

I'm reading Hayden Herrera's life-changingly awesome biography of Frida Kahlo for the second time. The first time around, I was struck by Frida's resilience in the face of her horrific health problems. I feel equally struck this time around--perhaps more struck. It's just shocking to read the description of Frida's terrible accident on the public bus:

"The steel handrail had literally skewered her body at the level of the abdomen; entering on the left side, it had come out through the vagina."

Herrera writes of the aftermath of this accident:

"Frida's life from 1925 on was a grueling battle against slow decay. She had a continuous feeling of fatigue, and almost constant pain in her spine and in her right leg. There were periods when she felt more or less well and her limp was almost unnoticeable, but gradually her frame disintegrated. A lifelong friend, Olga Campos, who has Frida's medical records from childhood to 1951 says that Friday had at least thirty-two surgical operations, most of them on her spine and her right foot, before she succumbed twenty-nine years after the accident. 'She lived dying,' said writer Andrés Henestrosa, another close friend for many years."

This time around, I'm also struck, again, by just how ugly Diego Rivera was.

Diego, Herrera, writes, was "undeniably ugly."

Yet, she continues: "Part of his appeal was his monstrous appearance--his ugliness made a perfect foil for the type of woman who likes to play beauty to a beast..."

He is so ugly

I've always found Frida's self-portraits and photos disarming: even in reproduction her gaze is magnetic. And the fact that she so clearly reveled in the look of her famous unibrow and her light mustache inspires within me an expanded sense of feminine beauty.

To me, Frida was one of the most beautiful women of all time:

Taken by her father after the death of her mother

But Diego, by all objective standards of beauty,was just plain ugly. That's fine, of course. I'm sure he had a lot to offer. But really, does history offer a more glaringly obvious case of beauty and the beast? Arthur Miller and Marylin? Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts? I think Diego and Frida are the archetype of this fairy tale.

Letter to My Wife on the Eve of the Rapture

2011-05-20T13:47:00.000-07:00

I've posted a new piece on The Nervous Breakdown:

My wife,

I would've liked to meet you at eighty. Our busy lives behind us, perhaps we could've watched all those movies we missed. I would've liked to see Hangover II. I would've liked to watch JAWS one last time. I miss you already. I know, we don't believe in Heaven, but tell me, please, when we meet again, somewhere, even if we're just two amoebas sailing over the waters of some new world-promise me you'll notice me. Forgive, my wife, it was I who lost our wedding rings. We never did make that trip to Jeweler's Row. It was I who never had the money. I had hoped to take care of you. I had hoped to buy you a ring. I had hoped to buy you an entire house. I had hoped we might sit in perfect stillness and wait for the good news. I had hoped to take you to Barcelona. We will never see Barcelona again. We will never share ice cream again. Forgive me, I let my illness make me crazy.

Read the rest of the post here...

Drunk in Some Serious Way: On Hearts, Poets, and Poetry

2011-05-16T06:50:00.000-07:00

I've posted a new piece on The Nervous Breakdown:

When I recently received the good news that my uncle Deano, a poet, had undergone a successful heart transplant, I celebrated by re-reading some of his books. At the time, I hadn't read any poetry for months; and, though I began writing, at sixteen, with the ambition of following my uncle, I hadn't written a poem in six or seven years.

This experience-the joy (relief!) I felt for my uncle, coupled with my reading-initiated a new season for me.

Since then, I've devoured poems in the way, post-diagnosis, I've devoured medical information: with an obsessive, indiscriminate mania; as if in pursuit of some transformative antidote.

Read the rest of the post here...

Something Happens and I'm Head over Heels

2011-03-06T08:09:00.000-08:00

This past Saturday, as evening collapsed on the orangeade drinkers carousing the boutiques, I put my hand down my throat to touch my heart and it stung. Well, not exactly. That's actually a line from my uncle's poem "Dog Toy"--a line, I once told Deano, that I would forever try to commemorate in my own life. The implications of orangeade. The art of carousing. The urge to feel my own heart. The sting of trying.

When I read this line I think of Icarus. In the myth, Icarus flies. Only thing: he flies too close to the sun, burns his wings, and plunges into the sea. I look at this high-flying champion. I see the self-destructive attitude of the spirit. I see the self-obliteration of a man in whom the spirit is strong. This is spring to me: the season of self-obliteration.

The spring always fucks me up. Recently, I've suffered a relapse of my stomach illness. Every year, it’s the same: spring rolls around and I experience a fresh slew of symptoms.

And yet, I love the lunacy of spring. Jubilant crowds take to the streets with no other design than to enjoy living. Young couples kiss in full view on the crowded streets. Old ladies eat fruit on the corners. Old men bound up steps, two at a time. Everyone’s making important decisions and making the exact opposite decision the next day. The weather, echoing this mood, changes erratically from day to day.

Here's what really happened this past Saturday: I was walking with my wife down 17th to Rittenhouse Square, when we came upon a somewhat massive black man. He was strutting in orthopedic shoes, wearing fat, old school headphones, and singing Tears for Fears at the top his lungs:

Something happens and I'm head over heels
I never find out till I'm head over hee-ee-els
Something happens and I'm head over heels
Ah, don't take my heart
Don't break my heart
Don't, don't throw it away

He seemed to have a foot injury, something that made him lunge forward, on one foot, then the other, from side to side. He didn't really walk; he bounced. And yet, somehow, he had made his foot injury a part of a massive, swaggering style. He was all confidence. His voice, high-pitched and somewhat melodious, was certainly flawed, yet he sang without inhibition, with the fist-clenching braggadocio of a diva. He infected me. I've always loved Tears for Fears. I couldn't help myself: I sang along at the top of my lungs.

The street was jammed with the tipsy affluent people you'd expect to see on Rittenhouse. We walked through the crowds, down 17th, singing, past Bleu and Devon, past the glamorous line of wood tables outside Parc. Two springs ago I sat at one of these tables with Karen, Suzanne, and Andrés. We drank too much wine. At one point, I bolted up from my seat and challenged the entire street to a bet.

"I bet I can run around Rittenhouse in three minutes!"

A few people flashed five dollar bills in the air. Andrés set his watch.

"Ready?" he asked.

I took off.

Empty glasses

Whenever I feel ill, I lie in bed and daydream about a different life: a different body, a fresh hack at my twenties, my thirties. I'm not sure why I just can't lie in bed and simply think about my life as it is. Someday, I hope to no longer dream about being anything or anyone or anywhere different. Someday, hopefully, I'll just dream about being me, as deeply me as possible, alive to my triumphs and my failings. I will recover from this latest relapse, no doubt. And then, sometime, I will relapse again. When will I just actually accept this.

"We must change life," writes Rimbaud.

Following this dictum for years, I've played the role of a change-pusher.

"This book changed my life," I've said. "Read it!"

"This mango changed my life!"

"This pot changed my life!"

"Eat this mango! Smoke this pot!"

But what’s the point? To be different? To go elsewhere? I've spent a lot of time trying to change. What if the point is to merely fulfill, not change, life? Paraplegics, it is said, recover most of their happiness within six months of becoming disabled. I wonder if that's actually true.

That night I sprinted around Rittenhouse, a warm, early June night, I wore boots--big brown boots. I'm not making excuses for my performance. Just saying.

Anyway. The transit around the square took longer than I had expected.

When I breathlessly arrived back at Parc, Andrés called out my time. "Three fifteen!" I had lost the bet, but everyone agreed that, in trying, I might have won. I was sore for days.

I suppose this is why Spring fucks me up so much: my soul feels inspired to riotous action, and yet, my body feels compelled to nap. I walk around sticking my hand down my throat to touch my own heart. I make stupid bets based purely on drunk enthusiasm. I seem to pay for all this with blood. What, exactly, have I inherited? How much of this is inevitable?

By the time we reached Parc, the black man's tune had changed. He now sang a new song, another eighties classic, from Toto:

It's gonna take a lot to take me away from you
There's nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do
I bless the rains down in Africa
Gonna take some time to do the things we never have

The tipsy waved and clapped. And this massive man, seemingly oblivious to the tumult he was inspiring, just bounced along, singing at the top of his lungs. For a moment, the entire street seemed mobilized by this solitary voice crooning into the dusk.

The tipsy cried from their tables: "What is that one?!"

"Does anyone remember that one?!"

At the end of that poem, "Dog Toy", Deano writes,

What are you
waiting for? You've already
been given your free gift.

Inspired by the solitary crooner, inspired by every single person on the goddamn street, I couldn't help myself: I sang along at the top of my lungs. Spring had arrived early, it seemed, and I had no choice but to welcome it. Others joined in. Soon a whole tipsy chorus accompanied this man, a whole slew of people singing along at the top of their lungs.

Letter from Uncle Dean

2010-12-10T04:41:00.000-08:00

Over the past 16 years, I've carried on a letter exchange with my uncle Dean. In these letters, Dean introduced me to the life of a poet--to the challenges, and surprises, and victories of the writing life. I still read some of the early letters Dean wrote, back when I was just beginning to write, for guidance and inspiration. Below is a letter he sent me when I was 21. I had just left college with a vague plan to travel and write.

Deano is facing an enormous challenge right now. He needs a new heart. Here is an open letter from his best friend, Tony Hoagland. If you've been touched by Dean's poetry or teaching, please consider donating to his cause. Additionally, Anna Clark wrote a blog yesterday, detailing other means of support. Finally, please do send your well-wishes to Deano personally:

Dean Young
2809 French Place
Austin, TX 78722-2235

***

2/17/98

Dear Seth,

I was very happy to get your letter, and my mom sent me your story which I want to get to but things have been so busy lately, what with school here and all those demands, and I've been flying around doing readings, and always feeling that I'm not devoting enough time to anything, even my cat, I figured I'd better write you soon, even if it was before reading your story, because I guess you're off across the seas soon. I don't know if I can really help you through your uncertainties, but I think I understand what you're feeling, and wondering, and maybe doubting. As far as missing out on life because of devoting your time to writing, I don't think you need to worry about that: life will happen to you no matter what you do. There will be joys and celebrations. There will be nights crossing bridges you don't know the name of when some unspeakable beauty envelopes you. There will be nights looking from windows upon the staggered lights of some town when some unspeakable sadness envelopes you. There will be people you love who you can no longer find your way to. There will be new discoveries, new clouds that resemble strange and terrible things, tangerines and hangovers, and long, long telephone calls made of almost entirely silence. There will be enormous pains and small pains that are almost pleasurable. There will be haiku that suddenly make sense, and the feeling that something has been taken from you, and songs, always songs. So don't worry about missing life, it's like missing the sky, you can't, you'll always be under it and in it and sometimes high in it, but often just on the ground, moving from thing to do to, needing, crying, making people laugh, although it's hard to tell what they're laughing about because it seems you were just talking about how terrible life is. But one thing that won't just happen to you, like life, is teaching yourself to write well. So whatever time you spend doing that, can stand to spend, and need to spend, all that time that seems wasted and those rare moments that seem volcanic and so sure, is the time that must be spent, otherwise you'll never become the writer you want to become. And there's a funny thing about that, too. One is that you'll never become the writer you want to become. You'll never be satisfied, never really know if you are any good. You'll never be certain. I mean to you it probably seems I have some sort of certainty, I've published some books which sometimes show up in used bookstores right down there with Yeats and John Yau (who?) and just in the last couple of years or so people have started to hear of my work, of me, and now I'm teaching at this la de da writing program and poets who I think of as giants are treating me as a friend, which is, I admit, great, but there is flattery and there is the truth and one can never tell where one stops and one begins. My own sense of my my own writing is what have I done lately? It's the writing-nowness of it that matters, and in that we're all equals in the fog, each of us with a single flashlight with the batteries only lasting so long and we're not sure if we should signalling to some landing airplane or is that the galloping of horses we hear coming our way, or should we be just trying to find house again, that place where we were born, where some huge, beneficent force would lift us from our groggy tatters and fit us into a voluminous bed. So don't worry, Seth, you're feeling what you have to feel, and as John Ashbery says, The reasons that religions are great is that they are founded on doubt. So you have to be the religion of yourself, which surely Walt Whitman said somewhere, and it sounds like you're finding your way. Because it has to be YOUR way. Certainly there are teachers who can help you with things like dependent clauses and plot formation and run-on sentences (yikes), but all the hard play and work you must do yourself, which means above all else doing it. In my experience, the people who become writers are the ones who keep writing through the yards of silence and the years of discouragement. I think you may be worrying about things more then I did when I was your age. At least about writing. I knew it was a thing I did. I started writing poems in the third grade, and although I'm disappointed I'm not a lot better, it is something I do and therefore part of who I am, and cannot be reft from me. Perhaps I was too stupid or stoned or drunk or distracted or comfortable, or it was another world of skinny-dipping in the Bloomington quarries with a group of friends most of whom were trying to write well, with stupid jobs, and reading Frank O'Hara. I guess it was something I had faith in. It was later, by the time I was in graduate school, that the real ambitions (and poisons) of trying to get published and all that came into play. By then, well, it was too late. It was what I did. Remember, Seth, you can't sustain inspiration, you can only court it, and here's the thing: it happens WHILE you work. It's not something to wait around for. You have to sweep the temple steps a lot in hopes that the god appears. Go back to college. It is a good place to try to teach yourself to write and to be surrounded be fellow blockheads that love books. Now I must get back to working on a poem I have no hope for because it is important to keep writing even when you aren't writing worth shit. There's a lot of luck involved in being struck by lightening, so you you want to make sure you're holding a pen when it happens. Write again soon, dear nephew. Allow yourself to be uncertain, but don't let your uncertainty turn to despair. It can be wonderful to write when you're sad and full of the dark bouquet of doubt, but misery leads itself to silence and one must get out of bed every morning and prepare for the great celebration of one's own imagination, even if it doesn't happen that day.

Love,

Dean

Seth's Beauty Secrets Revealed!

2010-06-27T11:54:00.000-07:00

My wife fears this post. Perhaps she just doesn't want me to expose my beauty secrets. Perhaps she just doesn't want me to expose my vanity. Perhaps she fears what my friends call "Seth's femininity." That phrase has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? Seth's Femininity.

Of course, my friends do not use this phrase! What my friends do call me, say, when I pop out of the bathroom wearing a yogurt mask, or when I sport my bright blue short bathing suit on the beach, or when I show up at the bar, my hair slicked with extra virgin coconut oil, is unmentionable. Perhaps this is what my wife fears: the ammunition I might be giving my friends right now, as I type.

I'm thinking, specifically, of Brad Kramer; of Cogan, Jacquette, and Charlie; of Matt Prince, also known by his ring name, The Wifebeater--the guys who went on the yearly "all guy" fishing trip this weekend. I missed the trip, just like I missed it every other year. This year, I had dinner plans: I was cooking dinner for my wife and our mutual friend Kelly--Kelly, a woman we met on Myspace and, until last night, had never actually met in person. She came over with her daughter, Amelia. We had a lovely, gentle evening. A far cry, I'm sure, from the scene on that boat: six or seven guys out to sea, curses and testosterone flying, the waves slamming against the prow. The very thought of it drives me to Dramamine.

So let's just make a little pact: if you see one of the guys please do not mention this post. I'll never hear the end of it.

Yogurt mask!

I simply ADORE yogurt masks! Since discovering yogurt masks, in January, I've applied one or two to my face every single day, and, let me tell you: my complexion has never been better! My skin is SO smooth and, for the first time in my life, my skin is blemish-free.

Regular readers might remember my post: What This Hideous Rash on my Face Taught Me. In that post I talked about my rash, what I had thought was seborrheic dermatitis. Turns out, I actually had perioral dermatitis--an angry, hard-to-treat red rash seething around my nose and mouth. It lasted three months and it seriously undermined my beauty regime.

When faced with a health challenge, I read every bit of information available on-line and in print. (Hypochondria? Or supreme attentiveness?) What I learned about POD, as it's so hideously referred to by the woman who suffer it (did I mention women are usually the only ones who suffer from POD?), is that it's often a result of skin sensitivities. On my favored message board, Earth Clinic, many people suggested a simple cure for POD: don't do anything. Don't use any soap. Don't use anything. Maybe just a little apple cider vinegar. Or yogurt.

Now I had been using Mychelle Dermacueticals for years with great success. I trusted these plant-based products. (Still do). And yet, I spent about $25-$30 a month on my skin and I was still having major problems. So I stopped. I stopped washing my face. I stopped everything. I haven't touched one skin-care product in six months. Except...yogurt!

I now spend maybe $2 a week, total, on skin care. I slather yogurt on my face everyday; sometimes, I slather it on my body. I think anyone could benefit form this mask--it's gentle, yet effective. Milk has been used for thousands of years as a skin softener and nourishing agent; and the good bacteria in yogurt fight the bad bacteria that cause blemishes. Simple, right?

Try it. I think you'll love it!

Seth's Yogurt Mask
I add probiotics to the yogurt to amplify the effects of the good bacteria. Full fat yogurt is best. And Greek yogurt is a must--other, less thick yogurts, sort of just slide off your face. This recipe is good for a week's supply.

1 7 oz. container Fage Total Yogurt (full fat Greek Yogurt is best)
2-4 probiotic capsules, such as Primal Defense Ultra

Place yogurt in a small bowl or Pyrex container. Empty probiotic capsules into yogurt and stir to combine. Refrigerate. Lasts about a week.

Sunbathing!

I LOVE sunbathing, and I truly believe safe sun exposure is one of the best things you can do for your inner and outer beauty. I know this is a contentious subject. Many think that sunbathing is a leading cause of skin cancer. More to the point of this post, sunbathing causes wrinkles.

First, to the people who deny any benefit from sun exposure, let me ask you a question: Have you ever heard of photosynthesis?

It's an obnoxious question, I know, but seriously, how could the very object that gives life to everything on earth be inherently harmful to humans?

The answer is complicated. Because, really, the sun can be very harmful to humans. The sun is powerful. I think we all know what Walt Whitman is talking about when he writes, "Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me..."

That's why safe sun exposure makes sense. The point in sunbathing is to NOT burn; the point is to color, slowly. Sunburn looks atrocious and is atrocious for your health.

But what about a suntan? How could something that makes you feel, and look, so good be inherently bad?

The second part of that Whitman quote is telling: "If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me."

What is he talking about if not a suntan?

The benefits of safe sun-exposure are supported by a valid scientific point: Vitamin D, absorbed from the sun, is a major factor in almost every health process. Most people in this country are vitamin D deficient--and some worry that, in fact, the real problem behind our excessive cancer rates is lack of vitamin D.

My vitamin D saga is too long to relate. In short, optimizing my vitamin D levels has enabled me to maintain what my doctors have assumed is impossible: as a type-1 diabetic, I've sustained my "honeymoon period" for six years. Nothing--nothing--has improved my health over the years more than optimizing my vitamin D levels.

What does the National Cancer Institute recommend? Sunscreen. Yet sunscreen blocks vitamin-D absorption. Also, most sunscreens contain toxic ingredients. And, in recommending sunscreen for sun exposure, the NCI makes no distinction between toxic and non-toxic sunscreens. The rationale, of course, is that any sunscreen is better than sun exposure. Nonsense! This, to me, is malpractice.

Suntans look beautiful. We desperately need Vitamin D. Yet, sun exposure certainly causes wrinkles, and might even be responsible for an increase in cancer. What to do?

I like Dr. Mercola's advice. He makes interesting and common-sense points. For example, photo-aging is essentially a process of oxidation: the body's skin cells dying. We know one of the best ways to fight the process of oxidation is by consuming antioxidants, like those found in summer's fruits and vegetables: fresh blueberries, tomatoes, and greens. So, if you're out in the sun, make sure you're consuming plenty of fresh, preferably local, fruits and vegetables.

Perfect right? If you live in Philly, just stop at the farmer's market for some fresh Jersey blueberries on your way down to the beach.

Anyway, I urge you to read Dr. Mercola's report on sun exposure. It might be the best thing you do for your health and your looks--ever.

My wife!

The picture above was taken at a little boutique in Brigantine. I popped in on Karen in the dressing-room and she mugged for the camera. The sultry expression on her face is almost completely at odds with the mischievousness in her heart. As usual, whenever Karen and I hang out, we were trying to make each other laugh.

There's something else about this picture, though, something, to me, that defines my wife's beauty. Karen suffers from psoriasis. Perhaps you remember commercial: The heartbreak of psoriasis. Each summer, as the world sheds its clothes, and I adopt my new, revealing, summer outfit--tank-top and short shorts--my wife experiences a crisis of confidence. She desperately wants to wear her own tank-top, her own short shorts, but she worries about exposure.

What will people think of her psoriasis?

Happily, she gets over it. And this is always an event for both us. Somehow, each summer, Karen decides, anew, to just fuck it. She sports her tank-top; she lets it reveal what it may. And here's the beauty, to me: Her skin suddenly exposed, I hardly notice Karen's psoriasis. I notice her light, yet determined expression.

Just fuck it, she's saying.

This, to me, is true beauty: taking what you got, accepting it, and owning it, flaunting it, celebrating it.

This is why the very term "beauty regime" is so absurd: "regime" implies regimentation, rules. Celebration is impulsive, anarchic, and goofy. You know why I really love the yogurt mask? Because I just can't take myself seriously when I'm wearing it.

To wear a tank-top: this is nothing to me; to my wife, it's a triumph. And I adore her for it. I adore her strength, her willingness to not take herself so seriously.

This, to me, is beauty.

Belly!

This post is dedicated to Julia. You can see her in the picture above, that bulge in my friend Suzanne's belly.

For her entire pregnancy, Suzanne kept a blog detailing the enormous growth of her belly. As her belly got bigger and bigger, and we laughed harder and harder, Suzanne just kept getting more and more beautiful.

Julia was born just the other day.

Tu Fu's "By the Winding River"

2010-06-10T07:11:00.000-07:00

This is from Kenneth Rexroth's wonderful book of translations, One Hundred Poems From the Chinese. I keep the book around like a talisman. I take it out when I feel lonesome. Something about Tu Fu, the way, to me, he celebrates sadness--something about his joyful melancholy speaks to me, especially now, as I struggle to maintain my health in the face of illness. I've discovered that illness speaks, if I let it. What does my illness say? It issues a challenge: to live, even as I feel death; and to try, as hard as I can, to feel joy--a joy that maintains sadness, even as it yearns to for happiness. Isn't that just life, though? Yearning? Does that ever end?

By the Winding River

Every day on the way home from
My office I pawn another
Of my Spring clothes. Every day
I come home from the river bank
Drunk. Everywhere I go, I owe
Money for wine. History
Records few men who have lived to be
Seventy. I watch the yellow
Butterflies drink deep of the
Flowers, and the dragonflies
Dipping the surface of the
Water again and again.
I cry out to the Spring wind,
And the light and the passing hours.
We enjoy life such a little
While, why should men cross each other?

~Tu Fu

What This Hideous Rash on my Face Taught Me

2009-12-13T07:34:00.000-08:00

This October I developed seborrheic dermatitis on my face. I’ve had it before, to varying degrees and each time it returns I feel a renewed sense of dejection. It’s angry and red and it spreads, like spilled ink, from the corner of my nose. Sometimes it spills down my chin. Once, for a brief time, I had it on my entire face.

Hemingway had something like it; this is how his buddy, the novelist and journalist José Luis Castillo-Puche, described it:

“The angry red streak running from his nose to his cheek, the rash of little whitish pustules that sloughed off like dandruff…the bright red patch, extending from the bridge of his nose almost down to his mouth and up to his eyes.”

Beautiful.

I developed seborrheic dermatitis for the first time as an adult when I returned home from my honeymoon in Barcelona, freshly diagnosed with type-1 diabetes. It was a rough time. The dermatitis seemed to know this; it stuck around for the better part of two years, a glaring symbol of my new life with illness. I tried everything: Elidel, steroid lotions, EFT. It just got worse. When it finally spread to my face, I went into Whole Foods and spent nearly $100 on a natural skin care regime from Mychelle Dermacueticals. It cleared, finally. When I met the founder and creator of Mychelle, Myra Michelle Eby, a year later at a Natural Products Expo in D.C., I actually burst into tears.

“Thank you! Thank you!” I said.

We embraced.

(I still think Mychelle is the best skin care line in the world.)

Unfortunately, in my experience, seborrheic dermatitis shares a distinctive feature of many autoimmune illnesses: it comes and goes, sometimes independent of treatment; and often each relapse requires a new, novel form of treatment.

The rash returned last winter. I was in Asheville at the time, at my residency session for my MFA program. I was living in a dorm. I was especially sensitive to my appearance at the time because James Franco had just enrolled in the program. I remember walking into the a reception the very first night of the residency. I had taken a percocet (the beginning of residency was always an especially anxious time.) I saw James. Jesus, I thought, that guy is handsome. Later I walked into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Jesus, I thought, investigating my dermatitis, I'm ugly.

One night we had a long face to face discussion. We talked about Emily Dickinson, kissing Sean Penn, and my skin problems. James, a perfect gentleman, stopped the conversation twice to say, “Dude, I don’t even notice it.”

Equating my dermatitis with Harry Osborn’s horribly burnt face in Spiderman III, I asked James what it was like for a handsome man to appear so disfigured on screen.

“Dude,” he said. “It was Spiderman.”

Last winter's outbreak was minor. I came home from Asheville and took hydrocortisone (a steroid cream.) The dermatitis cleared up in a week.

***

This recent outbreak was different. When I first noticed it, in early October, I again tried the hydrocortisone. It worked, at first, but then, it seemed to start spreading. I looked in the mirror and felt ugly. I thought: It will never go away. I complained, unfairly, to my wife (who herself suffers much more severe skin problems). As the days and weeks went by, I started to lose a bit of my winning optimism; my integrity eroded. I ignored my typically reliable faith in natural healing and went in search of strong pharmacueticals. I tried a stronger steroid, Desonide. It worked, at first, but then it got WAY worse: Hemingway proportions. Apparently, if steroids are used too long, you develop two or three additional skin problems. I learned the hard way.

Throughout this time, in the immemorial fashion of frantic sick people all over the world, I frantically searched the internet for a “cure.” The internet is a terrible place to look for a “cure.” Balanced perspectives on skin problems are shockingly rare. Message boards are crammed with pessimistic complaints; thousands of sites suggest miracle cures that simply do not work; and drug companies pay massively for advertising.

Still, inspired by my internet findings, I washed my face with Selsun Blue. That helped a bit. I actually tried tanning! (In an electronic ballast tanning booth; finding the booth was an incredible hassle.) That helped a bit, until I developed a secondary rash on my stomach. I went to my family doctor. He told me simply quitting the steroid lotion would resolve the problem. I thought, bullshit. I urged him to prescribe another pharmaceutical treatment, one that I had assiduously researched: Nizoral foam.

Nizoral is a potent anti-fungal. When ingested, it has been associated with hepatic toxicity, including some deaths.

The foam worked, a bit. Then, once again, it got worse.

***

In his life-changing, soul-changing book, Re-Visioning Pscyhology, James Hillman writes, “We owe our symptoms an immense debt. The soul can exist without its therapists, but not without its afflictions.”

I’m reminded of this quote when I suffer illness. I’m reminded of my sulking; my complaints. And I’m shocked, almost appalled, by my behavior. Sometimes, in the midst of it, I actually do realize that my suffering can be a good thing: for my growth and maturity and anti-narcissism. But still, it bums me out. I mean I wake up after a restless night of sleep (I never, ever sleep well and typically I wake six-ten times a night to pee), check my blood sugar (the first test of ten or twelve tests for the day), and look in the mirror, only to discover I’m much uglier than my dreams had led me to believe!

And this is the exact moment I lose my integrity.

I start to think: You know what, I have a fucking lot of illnesses for a 33 year old guy; every person, every fucking single person in the world, sometimes hits the point where enough is enough, and, well, I’m entitled to say, “Enough is fucking enough,” because of my illnesses, because I’ve been through so much illness so early, and no one, exactly no one, I know, understands what it’s like to be a 33 year old guy living with type-1 diabetes, ulcerative colitis, Raynaud’s disease, and some fucking skin rash, not to mention I’m allergic to shellfish and have never even known the pleasure of slurping a fresh oyster!

This is me, losing my integrity.

It's funny, though. Standing in front of the mirror, I drive myself to this point—this point of extreme dejection—and then something small happens. In my complaining, I catch a glimpse of myself as a child, a child throwing a tantrum. It’s laughable, actually. So I smile, in spite of myself. Then I smile, again, just to see what it looks like. I start making faces: ugly faces, happy faces, stupid faces. The dermatitis is still there, of course. But, suddenly, instead of complaining, I'm making fun or myself. And I suppose this is when my heart starts floating, just a bit, it sort of just bounces up, and I’m aware, however briefly, of the possibility of change.

***

Change. In terms of my recent battle with seborrheic dermatitis, change means relaxing; it means re-finding my integrity. It means taking a deep breath and considering the blindingly obvious.

I’ve successfully treated seborrheic dermatitis on my scalp for ten years. I’ve performed the same routine, two times a week, every week, for ten years. What I do is simple: I wash my hair. I apply about 1 tablespoon of extra virgin coconut oil. I leave it on for a few hours. I wash it out.

Why not try it on my face? Seborrheic dermatitis often effects both the face and scalp—and whatever it is, both areas manifest the same disease process.

Friday night, I rubbed a little extra virgin coconut oil on my face. Saturday, I woke up and my skin had improved. Last night, Saturday night, I repeated the routine. This morning I woke up my skin had essentially cleared. After weeks of suffering, after weeks of complaints and internet research, weeks of steroids and antifungals weeks of just feeling ugly—my skin had completely cleared with two applications of extra virgin coconut oil.

The simplicity of it is absurd. Albeit, not as absurd as my behavior.

Illness is worthless unless you learn from it. My lesson, of course, has nothing to do with extra virgin coconut oil. More likely, it has something to do with maturity, how I might grow into that complicated, half-ugly, half-beautiful human being I'm meant to be. The proportions are meaningless, of course: maybe it's 60% ugly/40% beautiful. Probably, the goal is just a sort of unity. Obviously, I own a lot of ugliness: inside and out. But in my ugliness, I learn things. I learn about fighting. I learn about hope. Life handed me illness; it also gave me the capacity to fight. Life taught me the comeback.

Moving on, I'll try to remember this.

Be still, my shark-filled heart

2009-10-04T07:24:00.000-07:00

Heading out of the beach town, Stone Harbor, the Stone Harbor Boulevard cuts a thin strip of road through a salt marsh. It's a beautiful, mystical strip, dotted with marinas, crab shacks, farmer’s stalls, and stilted houses with docks jutting out into the high cordgrass. Bull sharks have been known to swim there and the place rivals the tropical rain forest for biological productivity—facts that seem to verify what I’ve been feeling for years: that the salt marsh holds a beautiful mystery; that certain pockets of Jersey rival the world’s most alluring spots.

This summer Karen snapped a picture of the back doorway of Tim Rush Farm’s Country Food Market. The salt marsh is framed in the doorway like a blue river with low green banks. I look at it when I feel wistful. Jersey, I sometimes think, kicks the world’s ass and this small strip of road rivals any place for pure, summery beauty.

Stone Harbor Boulevard

The summer's over, I know, but I'm still feeling the sharks in my heart. Today, a balmy October Sunday, I pulled a chair out in the sun and sat in my skimpy bathing suit reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's biography. My tan has not yet faded.

This was a momentous summer for me; a weird summer, in ways; but ultimately the best summer of life. I graduated from my writing program in Asheville. I read a selection from my novel in front of about 100 people--the people I most admire in the world, my peers, my friends, my wife, my brother, and my mother. Later, to celebrate, my wife cut a rug with James Franco.

Karen and I drove away from Asheville, circuitously, up the Blue Ridge Parkway, and then back, and then we hit the road home. It was mid-July. The sun on I-81 was dazzling and tremendous. I felt like I was not only driving home, but into the heart of my summer.

A few days later we ate a celebratory meal with Sue and Andrés, friends from Barcelona--great friends whom we see maybe once a year. We drank too much wine. On a dare, I sprinted around the length of Rittenhouse Square--in just over two minutes.

In late July, we went to Borgata. A group of us waited in line outside the Gypsy Bar. Karen, the center of the group, tethered us together with her irresistible buoyant mood: she assured us we had no place in the world to be because we were the world, we were the party. I looked around at the people looking at us and I believed her. Inside Gypsy Bar, we danced. The band sang “Don’t Stop Believing” and I crooned loudly from the center of the dance floor. Later, we drifted into Carina, where, after watching Karen try on a slew of extravagant dresses in the dressing room, we tousled on the carpeted floor, bedazzled dresses strewn around us like luxurious bedsheets. Looking at myself, naked and skinny in the dressing room mirror, I laughed outloud. Something broke within me: I felt unusual and damaged, but fine with it, and suddenly Atlantic City became a new scene.

Then there was a Saturday in August, Karen and I sunbathing on one of Stone Harbor's tight beach plots, the waves rolling in between the jetties. I went for a dip in the green water. I swam for about an hour, bodysurfing the little waves, wading over the red swaths of seaweed on the ocean floor. From time to time, I'd look up into the clear sky and catch one single-engine plane trailing a banner.

Then there was an epic walk on the beach with my Dad. A weekend at the Cogan's beach house. And a brisk Saturday morning in Cape May. We walked out of breakfast and into a parade. Chris Cogan hadn't slept for days. He felt, he said, "Like hot garbage." I burst into laughter.

It was August. I remember missing the moment as it happened.

Goodbye, summer. Be still, my shark-filled heart.

Love, Large & Small

2009-09-29T12:32:00.001-07:00

I fall in love daily. I develop huge, swelling crushes and infatuations. I imagine secret rendezvous without uttering a single word: with books, with interesting people, with fonts. Lately, I love Georgia font. I play around with fonts. I try to trick myself. I’ll be puttering along, writing my stupid novel in Times New Roman when suddenly, a simple change in font (Georgia!), and my novel is no longer stupid, but elegant, lean, beautiful.

I love women, too: elegant, lean, beautiful women.

My wife, Karen, is all three. She’s also multi-lingual, freckled, prone to yawns, and exceedingly in thrall of lotions. All types of lotions: hand lotion, foot lotion, face lotion, and, of course, massage lotion.

I love this picture of my wife. That's a wedding invitation in her lap.
And that's New York City zooming by in the window.

I am NOT in love with massages. I don’t love giving massages; I hardly love receiving them. This is one thing my wife hates about me. Just as it’s important to love, I think it’s important to hate. I must admit, I love much more than I hate, but Dick Cheney is just awful.

I love small things. I especially love wearing small bathing suits. Have you seen Before Night Falls with Javier Bardem? In one glorious scene he wears a small bathing suit on a cliff overlooking the sea. The movie is unbearably sad, of course; in some ways it seems to say that illness (AIDS) equals the loss of a small bathing suit; but in other, important ways, it seems to say that a small bathing suit is worthless without a tragic sense of life. Like I said, sad.

(I’m wearing a small bathing suit now.)

I love small glasses. I drink wine out of very small glasses. Small glasses remind me of Sunday lunch in Barcelona, of small plates of tortilla, of small bathing suits dangling on the balcony, implying naked people somewhere. I remember one Sunday, stepping into the doorway of the Bar El Paso. A man was playing a slot machine, drinking a small glass of wine.

Bon vespre, I said to the man.

Em sembla bé, the man said

He was mean-looking; his face scratched, perhaps by a fierce animal. He looked at me, made a slight expression. I looked at him and smiled. I turned away, looked at the tapas on the bar, the retinue of six or eight small white plates, small bites of fried seafood, slices of baguette coated with smoked salmon, anchovies or cheese, all of it sodden under the harsh, yellow lights. I looked at the linoleum floor littered with cigarette butts and dirty napkins, the empty bar stools scattered about. Then I looked back at the man. He sneered.

We’re just like the small goldfish at carnivals, I thought, living in our separate fishbowls, at a close distance, staring at each other through the glass with unblinking eyes, asking, Who the hell are you?

Barcelona reminds me of the time in my life before I had even considered illness. I was twenty-three when I lived there. I was twenty-five when I first experienced illness. Illness, of course, is large and scary, but I think it can be defeated with daily smallnesses: drinking a cup of water with an entire lemon squeezed into it; smiling, two, three times an hour; probiotics.

Illness makes some people tiny. I feel lucky: illness makes me large. Sometimes I think illness is like pot, maybe it just amplifies what’s already there. (That’s why I only smoke pot when I’m feeling great.) I was large before illness, but in untenable ways: my anger was large, for example.

I remember the summer after I had been diagnosed with my first illness, ulcerative colitis. I had refused the drugs, but had yet to discover my remedies: Ayurvedic pills from India, stellar probiotics, and an obstinate refusal of wheat and cow’s milk dairy.

Anyway, I suffered that summer (and well into the fall and winter): all the awful symptoms you wouldn’t ever want to read about on-line. But I was also reading new books. James Hillman, Robert Bly. And I was seeing a mind-body therapist named Rosemary. So one morning, mid-July, a broiling morning, I woke up feeling hopeless and grrr, angry.

Why me? I wondered. Why the fuck me? Why the fuck did I get this fucking disease? Me. Me. Me.

At the time I was living with my father. I stepped out onto the deck, wearing nothing but my small bathing suit. I looked into the woods that surrounded the house. Fuck you, woods, I said. Then I grabbed a golf club and dashed into the woods, slashing at brambles and weeds. Slashing and cursing, I thought of my childhood, running through the cornfields of Lancaster, slapping the tall, green stalks. I thought of Clash of the Titans, Harry Hamlin, one of my first role models. I was crying, or maybe not crying, just trying to cry, which seemed to me infinitely pathetic. At some point, though, I suppose something happened, something stronger than anger, because I started laughing.

I stopped, looked around, asked myself: What the hell am I doing? And I laughed.

Now my anger is small. Now when I drop a small glass on the floor, I have to fake a conniption. That’s how small my anger is. (Thanks for that, ulcerative colitis.)

I love the New Yorker. I love opening its fresh pages and reading the movie reviews. Then I go to an article or two; then “Talk of the Town”; then, another article or two. Eventually, I read every single word. This takes about a week. If it works out just right, I’ll finish one issue on the exact day the next issue arrives.

I love arrival, but it’s often too large for me, too fraught with exclamation: We’re here! What I really love is the small steps on the way, the fits and starts.

Living Illness

2009-08-15T04:35:00.000-07:00

This is a collection of a few blogs I have previously written about illness. I'm re-posting it now for a colorful friend...

April 6, 2007, I received a letter, a letter I had been waiting for, impatiently, for more than two months. The letter announced a great success for me, an impending Season of Triumph. I read and re-read the letter on a sunny Friday afternoon. I took a walk around my neighborhood, my fist raised high in the air, in triumph. Walking through the bright, sun drenched streets, I felt enlivened and validated.

A few nights later, after eating a bite at a café, and upon stepping outside to hail a taxi, I fell into a stupor, whereupon a few white lanterns festooned below a red awning across the street appeared to me as the sole constellation of stars in a universe from which I was slowly receding, as it were, into a hole, as black as pitch.

My wife helped me into the taxi. She helped me home to bed. That night, I woke up drenched in my own sweat. The next morning when I awoke I was unimaginably thirsty, as if a high powered vacuum were sucking the water out of my organs, indeed the very pulp from my bones.

Suddenly, surely, it seemed to me, I was suffering a re-lapse of an old illness, an illness I had assumed I had "cured" several years ago.

The fantasy of my impending Season of Triumph seemingly sidetracked, I looked at myself and I judged my life cruel and unfair.

So I called a doctor in India and ordered a two month supply of ayurvedic herbs—the wonderful herbs that had healed me before; the wonderful herbs that had left me symptom free for almost three years. And I waited, impatiently, for the herbs to come in the mail. Meanwhile I moseyed around my apartment with the dour expression of a mope.

How could I have so easily let go of my impending Season of Triumph? To me, it seems obvious: I was immersed in my own unhappiness; depression had laid a thin veil over my senses. I had lost my sense of fantasy.

Is it possible to lose one's sense of fantasy? Yes, of course. But here I'll make a distinction between two types of fantasy: the fantasy of the soul and the fantasy of the body. Hit with illness, in the midst of my triumph, I had somehow lost my sense of soul fantasy and suddenly, powerfully, I was intoxicated by my body fantasy.

What is the difference? Soul fantasy imagines. Body fantasy identifies. Quite simply, my capacity to imagine a season of triumph had been replaced by my identification with material reality (my illness). Stuck in this identification, like a fly in glue, I envisioned no triumph, only illness and more illness stretching out towards the summer.

I was lying on the couch. feeling tired, ill, apathetic. I mulled my symptoms in my head—fatigue, sleeplessness, moving pain—and the more I thought about the symptoms, the more they seemed to change, or more precisely, evolve. I was immersed in fantasy, and yet, suffering confusion: I did not experience this fantasy as fantasy; in fact, I believed I had abandoned fantasy in favor of reality.

But I had not abandoned fantasy!

After all, I had already made up plenty of fantasies to satisfy the simple question, "What is wrong with me?" The organic sickness may seem obvious, but the fantasy of illness, the sense of wrongness, is what really plagued me.

We all suffer the weight of living within our bodies; our suffering is similar. Modern medicine assumes this very fact: while we all suffer in unique ways, the nature of our bodily suffering can be catalogued and explained with reference to the suffering of other bodies.

And so we tend to believe the fantasy of illness is eclipsed by the reality of illness. After all, the pain in the body is a stark reality, a truth that cannot be ignored. And so we deal with it, in a manner that seems fitting: perhaps we flop on the couch; perhaps we raise our fist in the air, in triumph, and decide to beat the illness to a pulp.

Still, whether we bear our illness like a hero, deserve it like a martyr, or run away from it like a coward, we are still fantasizing, attempting in any way we can to deal with the unknown. And we differ, immensely, in the manner we deal with the unknown. Yes, we all share the weight of living within our bodies, but we are astonishingly unique in the fantasies we devise in order to live, happily or unhappily, with this weight.

I am writing here in favor of fantasy. I do not buy the ridiculous notion that fantasy takes us away from "what is." To me, fantasy is deepening pursuit, where every experience, every moment, becomes an opportunity for soul-making. When I fantasize about my triumph I am fruitfully making; when I fantasize about doom I, too, am fruitfully making.

Yes, fantasy, or imagination if you prefer, takes us away from our material reality. But it leads us, step by step, to an altogether different reality, a reality of our own making. Through imagination, I see through the seemingly cruel fact of my illness; I give it meaning, when before, mired in reality, it had none.

"There is a joy in this," James Hillman writes, "For as the soul becomes a vivified reality of its own, an image-finder and image-maker, life becomes relieved of having to be a vast defensive engagement against…reality."

***

I will let you into a bit of my fantasizing, as I had wrote it in my journal around that time:

"I had intended on working on my novel the entire morning, but now I am paralyzed with a pervasive fear that seems to be gripping my shoulders and literally pushing me down into the floor. It's saying: 'Give up, fall asleep, be fearful, be very, very fearful…'

Fear: it is the hardest part of any illness—the illness itself, and the recovery, for recovery always leaves the possibility of relapse. What can I do? Endure? Live? I have no choice but to acquiesce to life. I have no choice but to continue to live.

What am I afraid of? My fear is not the fear of death. My fear is life! The mere idea that I am alive is enough to throw me into hysterics. I want to run out onto the street and scream at the top of my lungs: 'I'm alive!'

And yet, at the same time I want to flop down on the sofa, close my eyes, and keep them closed until my fear subsides.

Will it ever subside? I cannot say.

My illness has forced me to mature and now my recovery is doing the same thing. Recovery. Perhaps we are all recovering, everyday, and death is just the final reward for a lifetime of recovery. What are we recovering from? Birth. What a drastic trauma! What a ridiculous circumstance! I mean we come here naked, we spend our lives in clothes, and the whole time we have the vague feeling that what we have always thought is appropriate is not really appropriate at all. In fact, perhaps the most appropriate thing to do is strip naked, down to our bones, and walk the streets in utter triumph. I can just picture it: thousands of people crowding the avenues, everyone naked—enormously naked. We will pump our fists in the air as if it were a protest, a protest against fear.

We will not cower in the face of our troubles. We will triumph.

Yes, the cries will fill the afternoon air! We will overcome!

The choice is simple. Do you stand in place? Or, do you take one step forward? That first step—it must be like sitting down to write, each morning.

The first step—and then one must take another, and another, until one is walking. And then when we become bored of walking, we jog; we jog, until we become bored of jogging, but by then we have reached the coast and all we can see for miles around is the beautiful white sand. No longer jogging, we sprint. And then we fly over the sand—yes, fly. We are rising from the ground, floating into space. And that explosion we see in the night sky is our head bursting over the firmament. How beautiful it must feel, to spread ourselves out over the sky, to liquidate.

But really, perhaps I am only a thin man, dreaming of implosion. And the scene I see over the firmament is not my head bursting, but the wide expanse of a black hole sucking everything down and spitting it back out.

It's obvious: I want to go somewhere and come back changed. I want to take my herbs and suddenly become irrevocably new. And there's my impending Season of Triumph, always about to begin.

The illness I suffer from is not called dying, but living."

***

I can't read this without feeling somewhat embarrassed, even alarmed. The person who wrote that seems like a fanatic to me, a true madmen. Of course, I was a fanatic, a madman. This is what illness can do to you: throw you into a new, crazed realm. That is why the experience can be so disastrous; it's also why, it can be so enlightening.

Illness, I think, can help you grow into a new person. But you have to fight it. Illness and recovery are fundamental components of the human experience. We all experience illness and recovery. But can we use the occasion of illness to truly recover? Recovery is often more about what is not apparent then what is: the obvious physical illness may be shielding the less obvious psychological issues—issues that simply need to be dealt with, in order to heal, to be fully alive and healthy.

I believe illness can offer transformation, but only if the experience of being ill is fully lived. Too often we take drugs that suppress our symptoms and so we never actually live the symptoms, letting them teach us what we need to learn.

We tend to think that illness is an unnatural state from which we must escape. We are meant to be well, to be happy. I know I tend to think this way. I absolutely do not want to feel unwell. I absolutely want to be happy. But life is not entirely about being well and happy. Life is also about struggle. In my darkest moments it is not the idea of happiness that gives me strength, but this notion of struggle.

Yes, life can be excruciating, but I have the suspicion that life is supposed to be this way, that we are supposed to live under all kinds of moons; to suffer loneliness and relish it; to laugh because if we do not laugh we will cry; to clutch our stomachs in pain; to hurt ourselves as we hurt others (only worse); to eat the last bite and drink more then enough wine and still not be satisfied; to be hungry and hollow one moment and satiated and disgusted the next; to want to die, just a bit, every day; but to want to live a bit more, because life is not intended to dull us into submission, but to continually alert us, again and again, that life is living when it is felt deeply.

I always feel slightly ridiculous when I recover from an illness. I think about the time I wasted being ill, the time I wasted worrying, and the crushing symptoms that no longer seem real. Still, I notice: I am deeply impacted by the experience of illness—illness has changed me. And when I recover I notice: I am a bit more humble, a bit more in love.

Isn't this the value of illness? The experience of being ill scores our identity. And yet, as we try to walk away from it, a bit dazed, we take new steps towards new possibilities.

Naked you are blue as the night in Ambler

2009-06-17T18:25:00.000-07:00

My fifth wedding anniversary is July 3rd. I’ll be in Asheville, North Carolina, attending my writing program. I’ve been there three consecutive years—three years, I‘ve missed my wedding anniversary. My wife, Karen, who has learned not to expect gifts—at least gifts you can buy—anticipates a letter. I’ve lived with her six years. I talk to her daily. I’ve been dating her fifteen years. And yet, I write her letters. I can’t buy a diamond (my wife’s engagement ring was sapphire; she lost it), but I can write a letter.

I can write, for example: Desnuda eres azul como la noche en Ambler.

Actually, I would never write that line. That’s Pablo Neruda, from his first collection of poetry, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.

He wrote: Naked you are blue as the night in Cuba.

Karen lived in Chile, Neruda’s home, when she was nineteen. At that time, I was at Bloomsburg University. We talked on the phone once a week, a difficult, static-filled affair. But we wrote glorious letters. I told her about my Saturday afternoons, drinking beer at the Cattawissa Inn, an ancient establishment located off a solitary road outside that sold draft beer for sixty cents a glass. She told me about her Santiago life, sharing a mango with a certain Brianna, drinking boxed wine in the squares, visiting the streets called Maruri and Argülles where Neruda, young, unbearably skinny and unbearably alive, wrote his early poems.

Young Neruda

Neruda was Karen’s age when he was living in Santiago, in the 1920’s, writing poems that would lend credence to the myth of the Latino lover:

Tonight I can write the saddest lines. Write for example, The night is shattered and the blue stars shiver in the distance.

I would never write something so ridiculous. I’m surprised we even accept this from Neruda. Maybe just him, and no one else. I must admit, though: I’ve written more than a few sentimental letters. I looked over some of my letters today (Karen’s kept them all, a hundred or more, bundled neatly in a shoebox). I’m almost completely embarrassed by everything I wrote from May, 1996 to September, 2004. I did discover a few good tidbits, such as early evidence of my health fanaticism. (I asked Karen's permission to quote the letters; after all, they are her letters. She said, Fine.)

On February 27, 1997, for example, I wrote:

“I just read a few chapters of a great little book: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Energy But Were Too Weak to Ask. The book includes a recipe for a wonder shake that's supposed to make you feel better than you’ve ever felt. This spring I plan to purge my system of all its toxins with a five-day fruit and vegetable diet. Then, the milkshake.”

Most of the letters were monstrously sentimental. Spring, 1997, I lived in Italy. A letter from the time (March 25) begins:

“I cannot begin to tell you how lonely I feel. I have just bought a huge bottle of Chianti for 6,000 lira; now, writing you with frequent sips is my only pleasure of the day.”

Later, in the same letter, I wrote:

“I must strive to understand my misgivings about Rome. Now, I must understand myself; more than ever I’m alone: I am all I got…One thing’s for sure: I will never be happier to see you. I already can’t stand how much I miss you.”

The height of my schmaltz was January to May, 1999, when Karen was in Chile.

On February 18, 1999, I wrote:

“I’m listening to Billy Holiday: The way you hold your knife, the way we dance to three, the way you’ve changed my life, no, no they can’t take that away from me. Something rings so true in that simple, ridiculous line, like a stickybun with raisins. When I listen to that line I think of the way you changed my life. And I wonder: Who is they? I hope they never try to take that away from me.”

What? Who? Where?

In May, 2000, we graduated college. Winter, 2001, we moved to Barcelona. I was living with Karen, so I wrote only cards. Karen hides these cards amidst her clothes, in secret places I’m unwilling to explore.

By 2002, we were home and I was experience my first bouts with illness. I entered a silent period that lasted nearly two years.

In September, 2004, I started writing letters to Karen again. I’m not necessarily embarrassed by these letters. I’m not sure how I feel. At the time, we had just returned home from a three-week honeymoon in Spain. I had been hit by a car on the second day of the trip; a few days later, I entered the hospital close to death (at 118 pounds) and was diagnosed with a chronic, life-changing illness. In letter after letter I tried to explain to Karen (and myself) what had happened to me:

“If I was fighting for my life, I was not fighting for myself but our marriage. I was fighting for the oath I had given a little more then a month before, to have you as my wife, to live together in marriage, to love you, to comfort you, to honor you and keep you, in sickness and health, in sorrow and joy, and to be faithful to you, as long as we both shall live. A few weeks was certainly not enough to live this oath. I mean, with the wedding vows surely comes another unspoken vow, one that two young people feel probably feel obliged to ignore: to stay alive.”

By then, of course, I saw Karen every day. I talked to her for hours. And yet, the letters I wrote during that time seemed crucial. Somehow, I was trying to figure it out: what had happened to me? Why? I was absolutely poor so the letter, once again, became my de-facto birthday and anniversay gift.

Last year, a day after her birthday, a day late, I wrote my wife a letter. It began:

“I had a string of bad dreams last night. There were snakes, faceless people, classes I had missed and dark showers. All the familiar tropes. In one dream, you left me. I couldn’t believe it. I went into some room, looking for you, and I was distracted by the snake. There it was, huge and ugly, a python in a glass tank, smashing its head against the glass, trying to get out. Somebody fed it a bat. I woke up, terrified. But you were there. You hadn’t left. I asked, where’s the blue sheet? You mumbled something funny.”

Later, in the same letter, I wrote:

“Summer’s here, more or less. A new summer. The days are colored with imprints of what’s happened. The imprints will fade, though, as we stamp over them. I have faith. I have faith in our ability to keep trying. I no longer see snakes. I knew writing a letter would help. I’m selfish. I write to redeem myself. I write to crawl out of the wallow.”

In this way, my letters seem selfish. I write them for myself. I try to explain myself to myself. And then I give this as a gift?

Still, my wife wants letters. This year, I’ve written her one letter. To her, this seems like incredible negligence. After all, I currently have three or four active penpals; I write a novel; I write two, three blogs; I litter my friend’s facebook pages with comments; I twitter. So what’s one more letter to my wife?

I don’t have an answer to this question. In some ways, I know, it is incredible negligence. Maybe after I graduate from my program, this July, I’ll re-commence. I better, because I don’t anticipate becoming the type of man who buys gifts anytime in the near future. I’d love too, of course. I’d love to treat my wife to extravagant dinners, shocking jewelry. Right now, though, I’m poor.

Words are all I can afford.

In Defense of Self Portraiture

2009-06-04T14:12:00.000-07:00

My wife and my friends will tell you: I’m a narcissist. I’ve been taking self-portraits for a few years now. I’m addicted to my own face. I love taking pictures of my self and posting the pictures on social networking sites. To me, the profile picture is an essential part of the social networking experience; it's a means of introducing myself to the community; it says, “This is a bit of who I am right now, for better or worse.”

My wife rarely enjoys my “self-portraits.” She thinks I present myself as too serious. She thinks it's embarrassing: I actually mug for the camera, snap my own photo. On a recent trip to Brigantine, she “caught” me, leaning against a stone wall, gazing longingly into the camera, snapping photos of myself. Later, on the beach, I implored her to take a few pictures of me:

"Having never met you before but already hating your guts. It must be your picture."
~A recent anonymous blog comment on this blog.

How are my self portraits different than, say, Rembrandt's self-portraits? Of course, there's the medium, and the level of talent, but is my impulse essentially different?

In an 2006 article for Smithsonian magazine, celebrating Rembrandt's 400th birthday, Stephanie Dickey wrote: "Rembrandt painted, etched, and drew some 70 self-portraits, more than any other well-known artist of his time. By making his face the centerpiece of his art, he engaged in a uniquely personal means of self-marketing."

Narcissist?

Rembrandt was certainly not unique in this way. Self portraiture has been a viable means of "self-marketing" at least since the Renaissance. Giotto included himself in a cycle of "eminent men" in the Castle of Naples. Botticelli made himself the hero of the Adoration of the Magi. Van Gogh painted more than twenty self-portraits. Frida Kahlo is famous for her self-portraits.

Was "self-marketing" the impulse behind these various painters use of self-portraiture? Perhaps so (Giotto, for example, or Botticelli) but for many painters, "self marketing" was only part of the impulse. Frida Kahlo, for example, painted herself as a genuine means of self-fulfillment. She started painting after a terrible accident, in 1927, left her bed-ridden and severely wounded.

"From that time," she later explained, "my obsession was to begin again, painting things just as I saw them with my own eyes and nothing more…Thus, as the accident changed my path, many things prevented me from fulfilling the desires which everyone considers normal, and to me nothing seemed more normal that to paint what had not been fulfilled."

For Kahlo self-portraiture was a means of self-birth. The fact that her self-portraits so easily helped to advance or "market" her art was, for her, incidental.

The Broken Column, painted in 1944 after Kahlo had undergone surgery and when she was confined as she had been after her accident.

I’ve taken many pictures of myself. I've photo shopped many more, always in search of an expressive image. My impulses are varied and contradictory. Certainly, I'd like to present myself in a certain way--as handsome, dashing, mysterious--but I'm also keenly aware that I often appear ridiculous, goofy, and, yes, completely narcissistic.

Lately, I’ve noticed I’m getting uglier. I snap pictures of myself and I’m surprised: I look weathered; my prominent nose looks uneven, somehow more flattened and large; and there’s this line, this new line that runs down my left cheek. What’s that line doing there? Perhaps it’s too much wine, not enough sleep. My true feelings might best be expressed in a line by uncle Dean: “How goofy and horrible is life.” This is often how I feel: goofy, a bit horrible. I have not always felt this way. My earliest self portraits, taken when I was 25, just before I experienced my battles with illness, portrayed a different attitude, a sort of brash confidence that might be best expressed in a line from Vladimir Mayakovsky:

Without a grey hair in my soul
Or a snip of senility's gentleness
Raiding the world with
Sheer force of voice I'm strutting
handsome
22 years old.

My bouts with illness destroyed my sense of my good looks. In a short period of time I lost twenty, thirty pounds; my skin yellowed, my eyes sunk. Recently, an employee at the YMCA told me he remembered me vividly from this time; he had assumed, based on my appearance, that I had AIDS.

“You were so skinny, so yellow, and yet so flamboyant,” he said. “I just assumed you were gay, and that you had AIDS.”

Of course, this comment struck me, but it did not sting because he said it in the midst of my recovery. Had he said it back then, I would have crumpled. Tellingly, I have no pictures from this time. Had myspace or facebook existed, I would have stayed away.

I still feel a bit wounded. And yet, I feel confident, which is something I try to express in my pictures. To me this sense of confidence is not about strutting, but acceptance--of who I am, what I've become. However, I don’t want this sense to drive my expressiveness (in my writing; in my pictures) into dour seriousness.

Self portraiture gives me range to be slightly goofy. And to me, that’s the ticket—goofiness: the antidote to horribleness. I love the sense I get, while snapping my own photo, that I am participating in a goofy celebration. Surely, as Botticelli painted himself as the hero in the Adoration of the Magi, even as he actively engaged in “self-marketing”, he was also laughing inside. After all, how goofy to paint oneself a hero?

On the other hand, even as Frida Kahlo suffered immensely and charted this suffering in her paintings, she kept a still place in her heart for vibrancy. Kahlo’s last painting, in fact, (not a self-portrait) is emblematic of this idea. Painted merely months before her death, after the amputation of her leg, in the midst of a tremendous period of struggle, it is a testament to living. It is a still life of watermelons, chopped into halves, quartered, or left whole. The watermelons rest upon a plain brown table and are flanked on all sides by a clouded blue sky.

Eight days before her death, Kahlo put the finishing touches upon the painting. She inscribed her name and date upon the red pulp of the foremost watermelon. Then, in capital letters, she printed a final statement on the red pulp: VIVA LA VIDA: LIVE THE LIFE.

And this is really what I want to express in my pictures: the sense I have that despite my woundedness, or perhaps because of my woundedness, that I'm alive. I suppose this is a serious sentiment, but it is also a celebration.

Addiction? Diligence?

2009-06-03T10:47:00.000-07:00

Early February, I signed my father up for a blog. I suggested he write occasionally, as an exercise. Since then, he’s written 90 blogs, more than me, Steve, and Suzanne have managed to write in three years at FoodVibe. The topics are wide-ranging, the achievement impressive: my father has never practiced writing before; now, suddenly, he has a 700-800 word-a-day habit. I suspect his diligence is part compulsion: my father, like me, assumes plenty of addictions. But I also suspect his diligence is just that, too: diligence.

The Addiction-Diligence Paradigm motivates most aspects of my father’s life. Take his business career. My wife, Karen, and I worked for him in 2000. (An insight into my father’s ethics: I was his lowest-paid employee; Karen made a 35% higher salary.) Our most cherished image from that time was my father in his office, his feet up on his desk, playing on-line chess. He was clearly addicted. (As he had been addicted to Dr. Mario years before.) He played sometimes for six or eight consecutive hours, as his thirty or so employees moved in and out of his office, fielding calls and questions.

My father has always been an advocate of results: it's not the time you spend actually working, he likes to say, but the effect your work produces. During his business career, my father seemed to be able to create profitable results in minimal time. Often, he performed a week's worth of work in ten minutes; he spent the remaining thirty-nine hours and fifty minutes playing chess. Still, his early diligence had made his last business successful, a business he had started only seven years before, with two partners, in the front porch of our house in Gwynedd, PA. Karen and I left the business in early 2001 to live in Barcelona. My father sold his share a few months later. Now, eight years later, he lives in Brigantine, NJ, with his wife (my stepmother) Phylis. He spends sometimes ten or more hours a day watching tv, blogging, and playing internet poker.

I think about my father's current lifestyle whenever I find myself feeling lackluster. What does it mean to have a productive day. When I’m not working, I try to write all day. It’s hard, though. Some days I feel titanic. Some days I feel utterly defeated. I look at my novel, think: It’s terrible; what’s the point?

When I was younger, in my late twenties, writing another novel, feeling like I might quit writing altogether, I wrote my uncle, a poet, a letter offering the same complaint: My novel is terrible, I wrote. What’s the point?

"Your struggles with writing your novel," he replied, "are worthy of your suffering, but don’t get so that you love your suffering. I don’t really know what it takes to write a novel, though judging from N, it takes a lot of time, perseverance, obsession, and slavish dedication, only one of that last three am I attracted to."

In another letter, he wrote: "Allow yourself to be uncertain but don't let your uncertainty turn to despair because it can be wonderful to write when you're sad and full of the dark bouquet of doubt, but misery lends itself to silence and one must get out of bed every morning and prepare for the great celebration of one's own imagination, even if it doesn't happen that day."

His point, as always: Keep going.

I don’t know why it’s so hard for me. I am obviously diligent in other ways: I run 4-5 miles every day; I cook dinner every night; I have type-1 diabetes for Christ’s sake, which requires total diligence. But these things are easy for me; writing is hard. Perhaps I’m merely addicted to running; merely addicted to cooking dinner and injecting insulin (self-care). Then again, I might be addicted to writing, too. Just now, for example, when I found myself unable to work on my novel, I felt compelled to write about it. My fucking novel. What will it take for me to complete this thing? What sort of reserves must I call forth? What drugs must I take? (Adderall?)

Success, like addiction, runs in my blood. I know this, but it doesn’t make writing any easier. In fact, as I enter my 33rd year, the looming success of my family members (not just my father and my uncle, but every family member who has gone before me) hovers over me, sometimes inspiring me, often overwhelming me. I want to triumph, like them; but if I fail, I feel, I fail Big Time. It’s a heavy thought. I feel constantly expectant, jammed with the promise I’m not sure I have the courage, or the talent, to keep.

I try to make myself feel good: What if I’m not supposed to feel burdened by promise, but lightened? What if I’m meant to fly up to my challenge? Not like a bird, or a plane, but clumsily, like a person?

The only thing I can control, really, is my effort: I can only sit down, write. Like my dad, the blogger. Like my uncle, the poet. With diligence and/or addiction. I'm not sure it matters how I qualify it: whatever it is, I need to do it.

The Dr. Mario Champion

2009-06-01T11:19:00.000-07:00

In my prime I was one of the top ten or so best Dr. Mario players in America. I was a senior in high school, I was utterly unbeatable, and I was so nonchalant about my primacy that my brother and father, avid Dr. Mario players themselves, might have considered plotting my murder.

At the time, my brother had just graduated law school, my father had just retired from his job, and, as far as I could tell, they had both decided to take a year off to play Dr. Mario. And play they did, incessantly, all day and all night, in my room, on the weekends as I tried to court my future wife, and late into the weekday nights as I tried to rest up for school.

I never played but when I did I crushed them easily. I was so good I mystified everyone. To tell the truth I mystified myself too. How was I so good? I don't know. It might have been drugs.

Anyway, that year I met my Dr. Mario match: Mr. Mallozzi. Mr. Mallozzi was the special education teacher at my school. In the second half of my senior year I devoted a portion of my time to hanging out with the special ed. kids. I went down into the bowels of the school once a day and hung out with the most lively, fun-loving, and chaotic group of kids I had ever met in my life. Most of the kids had Down's Syndrome; a few had severe Autism.

Mr. Mallozzi was their task-master. He was also the center of their world; I entered his realm like an outsider, arousing suspicion and giggles. One of the most treasured activities was video games. We played Nintendo for hours on a beat up old television. One day I mentioned Dr. Mario and Mallozzi went off.

I am the greatest Dr. Mario player alive, he said.

I have to admit, his gusto impressed me.

No way, I said.

And so the stage was set. It must have been a Thursday. Mallozzi set up a Grand Match for Friday afternoon. I skipped it as I skipped every Friday.

When I came back, Monday, the kids actually hissed and booed. I looked on the chalkboard. In bold letters it said: Mallozzi winner--Seth Loser.

The kids thought I had wimped out. I was pissed. I loudly proclaimed a challenge on the spot. Malozzi agreed with all the venom he could muster.

I have never, ever so fully dominated as I did that afternoon. The kids cheered; I pumped my fist; Malozzi nearly exploded.

The very next day, I walked into the class and Ms. H, Mallozzi's assitant teacher, handed me a bouquet of roses. The entire class cheered and hailed me, The Winner. And of course, the chalkboard was amended. It said: Mallozzi loser--Seth winner.

Mallozzi came up to me, gave me a big hug. He was that type of guy. I loved him, even though I kicked his ass.

The Green Lantern

2009-05-31T07:53:00.000-07:00

The first line is the hardest,
so why not abandon it
and start as John Coltrane, in the middle,
moving two directions at once?
In this way my life begins at thirty,
as darkness collapses on the metropolis.
I prowl the alleys, alone, an innocent amongst monsters.
I am Green Lantern, the opulent hero.
I can hardly leave the house without testing the power of my ring.
My giant green hand.
Tonight, I fly amongst a night-blue sky in which
two or three other superheroes drift.
They say the only thing that hurts me is wood.
Then why do I feel so devastated, as I lean my head
into the super-hero filled air?
Perhaps the work I've done this evening is still alive,
filling me with doubt.
Perhaps the chill in the air is not in the air,
but my bones.
Do I really trust my powers, in the end?
Sooner or later, I find myself
desiring a long nap on a wooden bench.
My wonderful life, always about to begin.
John Coltrane often played the same chord
three or four different ways in the same measure.
At daybreak, I return home, mildly drunk,
oddly luminescent in my green street pajamas.

My Wife Does Certain Annoying Things

2009-05-26T07:16:00.000-07:00

My wife does certain things, certain annoying things. I’m sure this is not uncommon. Many wives, I hear, do certain annoying things. I’m sure, too, that husbands do certain annoying things. What things? I’m not sure. The things I am sure about are wife-specific.

I’ve lived with my wife six years. We’ve been married almost five years. Marriage has not changed us entirely; I think it merely accentuated what was already there. Our arguments now seem more berserk and unpredictable; our tender moments, more simple and soothing.

I have noticed, though, that my wife is evolving in her quirkiness. What was once a set of charming little idiosyncrasies have now become a cluster of odd symptoms. Clearly, she has a disease. Maybe the disease is marriage. Or, more likely, the disease is marriage to Seth.

People ask my wife: How do you deal with this?

This, being me.

People, though, don’t see the entire picture. In public, I’m bombastic and rude; my wife is composed and elegant. At home, I see another side. I see my wife confront a centipede with a horror-movie shriek. I see my wife’s appalled and unforgiving expression just after I’ve woken her from nap.

I adore my wife. I adore her in public, and private. For better or worse, she has determined the man I am today: the foolish, but sincere husband; the aloof, but giving friend; the hard-working, fun-loving writer. My wife gives good things: affection, support. She also takes away bad things: fear, doubt. These things are large. I understand and cherish these things.

My wife also gives and takes small things—small, ant-like things. The sum of this give and take, though, mystifies me. Like ants, it also annoys me. It’s the essential cloying mystery, in fact, of my day to day life: the small things my wife gives and the small things she takes away.

Put another way, we live in an apartment in Ambler. Many new, useless things appear in this place and many useful things disappear.

My wife, I suspect, has something to do with this.

The Small Things My Wife Gives

I sometimes wonder if my wife has a side-business, a side-business in small, black, rubber-band-like things. These things, I’m told, are hair-ties. I rarely ever see them in my wife’s hair. I do see them, though, lonely and unattached to my wife’s head, sporting strands of honey-brown hair. These things just appear, everywhere, often in odd places: my jean pockets, for example; or, tortuously, in the garbage disposal; or in my desk drawer, wrapped around a stack of defunct credit cards, expired licenses, and old high-school IDs. I also find them on the living room floor, under the car seat, or, sometimes, in the corner of the shower, wet and tangled.

Fabric softener sheets are meant to be used in the dryer, right? Why, then, do I continue to discover one random, used fabric softener sheet under the passenger car-seat? I take one sheet away, sure enough one more shows up. Laundry never enters the car. Why, then, do I continue to discover one random fabric softener sheet under the car seat?

(Incidentally, how many different bottles of lotion does one bathroom really need? How does one acquire all these lotions? Are they gifts? Is there some sort of lotion fairy? )

There’s a sole apple sitting in my fruit bowl. It’s been there for about a week. I look at it. I think about my wife. I think about her adorable sense of ambition. When we first dated, nearly thirteen years ago, she told me she’d be a lawyer. I told her I’d be a writer. She’s managed to accomplish her ambition, even as she advocates mine. This is a large thing. The apple is small. Still, it’s there, sitting in the fruit bowl, this $2 organic Fuji apple. Will someone eat this apple? I doubt it.

How does this happen?

I see my wife, at Whole Foods, excited by her sudden resolve: I will eat more fruit!

She buys an apple. She comes home, places the apple in the fruit bowl. Then it sits there, like a sock in a corner, subtly annoying me each time I pass. Soon, it’s too soft to eat. And yet, no one seems willing to throw it out. It’d be like tossing $2 into the trash.

It is a useless thing, this apple; it just suddenly appeared one day. It reminds me of a hair-tie, a misguided fabric-softener sheet, a bottle of foot (foot?!) lotion. It also reminds me of a newspaper and its half-finished crossword, jammed into the sofa. It reminds me of a cool cup of Starbucks coffee, merely sipped, abandoned in the car’s cup-holder.

The Small Things My Wife Takes Away

My wife and I share a chaotic social life. Friends and family come over three, four, five nights a week. There’s wine, laughter, and arguments. People come and go. In the chaos, things go missing: wine bottles, wine glasses, random dishes. I look at this as a sort of friendship tax: enough people come over, glasses, even plates and bowls, are bound to be broken or lost. This is simply what happens.

The other night I walked into my wife’s garden. The garden is my wife’s secret spot. She’s growing gorgeous cucumbers, Swiss chard, tomatoes, watermelons, eggplants, peppers, and a bounty of herbs. The garden, though, seems incidental. It’s the secret she loves. In the garden, she calls Barb and Lis and Traci and Vitola. In the garden, I suspect, she smokes cigarettes and drinks wine.

Anyway, I walked into her secret spot the other night, and I was shocked, even scared, when I discovered a scattered assortment of mugs and dishes. It felt similar to the moment when, as a child, I came upon my father’s secret stash: I was excited and frightened and entirely confused.

I had been looking for those mugs! I had been asking about those dishes! I picked up one of the mugs; it was, weirdly, covered in plastic wrap. I opened the plastic and sniffed. It smelled like wine, rancid wine.

Oh, my wife’s ambition! I imagine my wife, at home, excited by her sudden resolve: I will sip this last bit of wine, in private, in the garden, with a smoke! What mystifies me is the plastic wrap. It’s almost as if my wife knows she’s not going to drink the wine.

I’ve bought four pairs of nail-clippers since January. I use one. I put it back in a specific, little basket. And yet, I look in the basket, no nail clippers. Where have all the nail-clippers gone? Also, why are all my razors always dull, when, clearly, my razors are meant for males and I am the only male in my household?

Where is my tank-top? Where is my special Burt’s Bee’s comb, the only comb that seems to work with my hair? I heard my wife took it to the beach; I haven’t seen it since.

Where is all the Pyrex?

I asked my wife this last one recently: Where is all the Pyrex?

I don’t know, she said.

You don’t know?

I haven’t seen it.

Are you sure? Because I need that Pyrex for work. I bring it home, clean it. I use it again the next day. Are you sure you haven’t seen it. I really need it.

Maybe you left it at work, she said.

Maybe you did, I said.

No, she said. Impossible.

I suppose I felt vindicated, then, when I received this text-message from my wife the very next day: “Guilty as charged.”

There was also a picture:

My wife and I share a small, strange life. There’s mystery. There’s secrets. There are accusations. And then there’s absolution.

We both have quirks. And coupled with the annoyance, I should say, there’s also a lot of fun and side-splitting laughter. There’s impromptu caresses and bottles of wine and giant, festive chicken dinners. Honestly, I walk around most days, inspired and fulfilled, not just by the laughter, but the annoyance too.

Our wedding ceremony began with these words:

“The meaning of marriage begins in the giving of words. And, as the poet Pablo Neruda tells us, ‘words give crystal to the crystal, blood to the blood, and give life to life.’ Karen and Seth meet here today to celebrate life, and to give the gift of words to each other.”

Writing, it seems to me, is a fundamentally optimistic activity. It assumes that people care to hear what you have written. It also assumes that you care to take the effort to write about something that matters to you.

I suppose I can forgive my wife her quirks, then, because even in annoyance she inspires my ambition. She gives me, daily, the gift that has always been the most important to me: Words.

Napping & Productivity

2009-05-21T17:42:00.000-07:00

I’ve just woken up from a nap, one of those epic mid-afternoon naps you wake up from, as if from a coma, thinking: Who the, what the? How did I get here? One summer, years ago, I woke up from such a nap in a state of mute fear; I turned my head, glimpsed an alien sitting behind my television. I was thirteen or fourteen.

Epic, life-changing naps hold a high status in literature. Neruda was an epic napper. One time I visited my uncle, a poet, in Berkeley; when I arrived he had just woken up from a nap. We walked around town, talking, and it wasn’t until he watched me take a shot of wheatgrass juice, one half hour later, that he finally shook off the nap. Roberto Bolano, I bet, napped. Jack Kerouac writes about waking up from an epic nap in On the Road:

“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.”

(Incidentally, why does he have to write, “all the sad sounds?” The paragraph would be better without it…)

Today’s nap left me feeling wistful. I had a dream. In it, my friends Sue and Andres had come home from Barcelona. We were in some parlor celebrating their return. In the corner, my wife kissed a girl. Everyone went outside to have a smoke. I walked into another room and discovered my friend Kevin (Sue’s brother) sitting on a mattress. He was balding for some reason. I wondered who my wife was kissing now. I woke up.

I was supposed to go to my dad’s beach house today. I called him last night, told him I couldn’t come: my funds were low; I had to much to do.

My semester is over, but I still have a few assignments. I woke up incredibly early this morning, finished everything by noon. Suddenly, the day stood in front of me like a blank check. My novel was there, looming. I’d love to finish it by July (which means I need to be writing every day.) Instead, I worked out. I ate lunch. I sat in the sun, read for an hour. I came inside, flopped on the couch, napped.

It’s four o’clock now. I haven’t worked on my novel. I don’t intend to.

My father recently wrote a blog entry "Having Productive Days." He writes that “a productive personal day consists of doing at least one thing to improve yourself mentally, physically, and emotionally.” At least that’s what he told a client. Then, as soon as he got home, he “ate something tasty, fixed myself a glass of vodka, turned on the television, and started playing poker.”

My wife, the lawyer, left the house this morning at five am. She had an asylum interview in New York City. She came home on her way back from NYC, and briefly entertained the notion of staying home for the afternoon, doing work on the laptop. Instead, she went to the office. She’ll work maybe twelve hours today.

How can I even begin to justify my afternoon’s laziness in the face of my wife’s tireless work-ethic? I don’t. We’re in different places, my wife and I: she’s two years into her law career; I’m just finishing graduate school, working part-time, trying to finish a novel, a novel I hope to publish. Right now, my wife is living the beginning of a successful career. I’m all promise.

Some people work all day; then, as a reward, they come home, eat a quick dinner and watch hours of T.V. Is this a productive life? If the money is there, many might say, Yes.

I’ve never allayed my sense of self-confidence to my income; if I did, I’d be a pretty timid guy. Still, from time to time, my own sense of productivity heckles me, says, What the hell are you doing?

Unreasonable Behavior

2009-02-27T04:17:00.000-08:00

I first discovered the term "unreasonable behavior" during a long weekend in Philadelphia at the Landmark Forum. Before this, I had held a certain fondness and fascination for unreasonable behavior. I had even considered modeling my life on unreasonable behavior. Once, in college, I ate thirty-two scoops of mint-chocolate chip ice cream in one sitting. I did this, I think, in the pursuit of unreasonable behavior.

The Landmark Forum might define "unreasonable behavior" like this: "At the Landmark Forum anything is possible, whilst being impossible, but nothing is really impossible. Everything is unreasonable, even a reason is unreasonable. The hours are unreasonably long and the breaks unreasonably short!" (A quote from the website.)

So, a working definition might run like this: Behavior which seeks to transcend the limitations of the impossible.

This definition does not satisfy me. I am unequivocally not an advocate of the Landmark Forum. But I do credit my experience at the Forum with inspiring my affair with unreasonable behavior. Of course, I had encountered unreasonable behavior before, in certain books and philosophies—and I had certainly acted unreasonable before—but I had never captured the positive possibilities of the idea until that weekend in Philadelphia.

After all, we are often told to act reasonably as if reasonableness were a virtue. But what do we make of the benefits of unreasonable behavior? And what do we make of the confrontation with limitations that unreasonable behavior assumes?

I left college, in May 2000, exactly one credit shy of graduation. I knew only that I wanted to write and I was certain I did not need a degree to do this. But writing to the exclusion of other activities—especially those that make money—seemed to me to be unreasonable. At the time I was an ordinary man who merely held a fascination for unreasonable behavior. So I made a concession: I moved in with my father and worked at his consulting business. I did not write at all during this time, but the money I earned financed my first trip to Barcelona.

It was in Barcelona that I cultivated the unreasonable habit of writing. Karen and I lived their for six months, burning through our savings. We shared a five-room flat with three Catalans. We had two rooms, a large sunny room in the front, overlooking the San Antoni Market, and a dark room in the back, with a mattress on the floor. I awoke early every morning (excluding Sundays) and wrote steadily, for three, four or more hours.

This was my first season of unreasonable behavior. At the time, I was brash, sensitive, and proud. I was hypnotized with my own romantic vision of myself as a writer. I had no idea what I was doing, so I simply wrote, without undue expectation and with wild ambition.

My attitude at the time might be summed up by Tony Hoagland:

Friends, we should have postmarks on our foreheads
to show where we've been;
we should have pointed ears, or polka-dotted skin
to show what we were thinking
when we hot-rodded over God's front lawn
and Death kept blinking.

In July, 2001, Karen and I traveled home, to Philadelphia, for a short stay. We had intended to return to Barcelona in late September, but we delayed our trip, indefinitely, after 9-11. My memory from that time is convoluted. Ground Zero blurs with the endingness of everything. Now it seems 9-11 was the exact same day George W. Bush became my president, the Yankees stopped winning, and the euro replaced the peseta, forever compromising the exchange rate, forever shattering my Frommer’s sense of possibility that Barcelona was mine for $10 a day. I was so stunned I simply continued living my Barcelona lifestyle in my dad’s house in Gwynedd, PA.

I had no car, so I never went anywhere, and I had little money, so I cut certain extravagances out of my life: wine, for example, and haircuts. With little else to do, I worked feverishly, completing two novels, beginning work on a third, subsisting primarily on hard-boiled eggs, raw almonds and local apples. I have seldom felt so dynamic as I did then, long-haired and sober, working for hours in the day and night.

In early spring, 2002, after a furious two-week burst that took me one-hundred pages deep into my third novel, I began to feel very odd. My symptoms were vague, mysterious. I imagined all sorts of problems, some real, some not.

Still, I continued writing. My recent work, I was certain, was my best yet.

Even then, I could not ignore the obvious: I needed to see the doctor. So I went. I was diagnosed. My first season of unreasonable behavior came to an abrupt halt. As if to endorse this point, the very day I was diagnosed with my first illness—I hate to write the name; even now, years later, the name frightens me like a vodoo curse—I stopped writing my third novel. I put it aside and I refused to look at it for years.

I was told my disease was incurable. The only way I could treat it was by sticking to a regime of immuno-suppresant drugs for the rest of my life. With treatment, my symptoms might disappear within a few weeks; thereafter, I might suffer bouts, here and there, that may or may not require surgery.

I did not accept this prognostication. I refused to take the drugs. For some reason, I was certain I could cure this disease. And so I tried various diet regimes, acupuncture, supplements, even mind-body therapy. This was my second season of unreasonable behavior.

Everything seemed to help, a bit, but nothing really alleviated my symptoms. I lost weight; my complexion yellowed; and there was blood, massive quantities of blood. I felt profoundly defeated, doubtful. And yet, for some reason, I was certain I could cure myself. I was unreasonable, perhaps insane. Death was no longer blinking. It seemed he was staring wide-eyed, as I lay on the bathroom floor, in pain. And yet, I was still brashly, perhaps stupidly, hot-rodding all over God's lawn.

I will tell you: I did cure my first illness. And I will tell you something else: my "cure", the time I allowed myself to explore alternatives, even as my body weakened (and my immune system went kaflooey) might have led to my second, more devastating diagnosis: type-1 diabetes.

As we age, as we experience illness, it is often impossible at times not too feel mournful and in mourning of that happy, silly, dancing in the daisies, immortal self back there. I for one spent a good bulk of the past years in mourning of that unreasonable guy who decided to write to the exclusion of all other activities.

And yet, what do I make of this same unreasonable guy, whose sense of unreason, taken to extremes, told him to ignore his doctor's advice?

I often think my unreasonable behavior has made me what I am today: a writer and a type-1 diabetic.

However, I do not identify with my unreasonable behavior. If some omniscient force, for example, offered to cure my unreasonable behavior and, in doing so, cure my type-1 diabetes, I would certainly take the offer.

But what if the cure also obliterated my sense of writing? What if, in curing my illness, I was also cured of writing? In that case, NO WAY. I've come to the point where I am ambivalent about my unreasonable impulses. I follow them; often they frighten me. What will I do next? Publish? Accidentally kill myself? In my battle with my illness, I only had my intuition to guide me. Perhaps this was the lesson I learned from my behavior: Trust thyself. Perhaps not.

Coconut Milk & Sex

2009-02-22T05:56:00.000-08:00

I condition my hair with extra virgin coconut oil. At the end of summer, I buy coconut Surf Wax and smell it all winter. I eat coconut milk in one form or another with almost every lunch and dinner. It's in my lunchtime carrot soup. It's in my dinnertime mashed potatoes and mashed sweet potatoes. Lately, me and my wife eat the exact same vegetable side-dish every single night: Coconut Braised Greens. In this way we go through five or six cans of coconut milk every week.

That's a lot of fat.

For years coconut has been derided as unhealthy because of its high saturated fat content. My coconut milk has 10 grams of saturated fat per serving; that's 50% of the daily fat intake. I probably eat 20 grams of fat from coconut milk every day. Anyway. The coconut: unhealthy theory is bunk. Current research shows the fatty acids in coconut, the medium chain triglycerides, do not raise serum cholesterol or contribute to heart disease. Also, coconut is easily digested; it's not deposited as fat in arteries because it is easily metabolized. If you're skeptical or thinking of becoming a fanatic yourself, I suggest reading this thoroughly documented, well-presented article from Dr. Mercola's site.

Lately, as the winter enters its most hateful phase (football is over; baseball is yet to begin) I'm relying on visions of summer. The smell of coconut conjures lotion; skimpy bathing suits; an outdoor shower at a crowded beach house: the perfect little spot to steal away for a quickie.

No doubt, coconut is sexy.

Lately, on Saturday evenings, me and my wife make coconut-infused dishes.

Then, sometime after eating, we flop on the couch. We do not watch television. We do not fall asleep. Our place becomes crowded with all the things we do not do. The dishes in the sink. The laundry on the floor. The cellphones, unanswered. We just stay on the couch and pretend it's summer: We're staying in a crowded beach house; the couch is our outdoor shower.

Coconut Braised Greens

1 large bunch kale, trimmed and cut into large pieces
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 large yellow onion, very thinly sliced
¾ cup fresh coconut milk
1 tablespoon fresh squeezed lemon juice
Sea salt
Fresh ground pepper

In a large saute pan over medium heat, warm the olive oil. Add the onions and saute, stirring frequently, until soft and translucent, 6-8 minutes.

Add the greens, coconut milk, and lemon juice to the pan. Simmer over medium heat, until greens are just tender, 5-7 minutes.

Season to taste with salt and fresh ground pepper.

The Facebook Lists

2009-02-18T12:09:00.000-08:00

If you're on facebook you've probably come across a "25 Random Things About Me" list. I'm on facebook. I've read twenty or more lists. I've written my own list. Recently, The Philly Inquirer published an article about the lists. The article offers two perspectives: "Facebook list: Narcissism or a social shift?"

The "social shift" perspective argues that the lists:

"...reveal a decisive shift in our society...Many of us - younger, mostly - take a distinctive view of private and public, in which a permanent, always-connected audience trades personal, even intimate, information as part of having friends and being social. That hyperconnected life is here to stay. Call this narcissism, but it might be that the train left and you weren't on it."

The "narcissism" perspective argues, in the words of Christine Rosen of the New Atlantis, that the lists:

"For all of their apparently casual tone...are not filled with random things. They are carefully and deliberately crafted efforts to market their makers as quirky and appealing people. The revelation of one person's quirks can be endearing, but the broadcasting of hundreds of thousands of people's quirks quickly devolves into tedious mass solipsism."

I for one, at the risk of advocating narcissism, advocate the lists. To me, the lists are not merely an indication of a "generational shift" (one of my favorite lists was written by a fifty-something friend.) Nor are the lists merely narcissistic.

Facebook offers a surfeit of daily information. Some of it is narcissistic, and much of it, I think, is purposefully crafted. Craft implies attentiveness to an audience (attentiveness to others); it implies deliberation. Craft can be a potentially positive force that reaches out and touches others. Craft implies self expression.

I think Christine Rosen is confusing self-expression with narcissism.

I like Charles Baxter's definition of narcissism from his essay "Unheard Melodies" (published in The Art of Subtext). He cites the narcissist as part of the triumvirate (with egomania and psychic vulnerability) of the "Tower of Voluntary Deafness"--people who "can't stand to absorb what is being said" by others. For the narcissist "nothing gets through that does not directly address oneself."

"The true narcissist," Baxter writes, "feels the pain of a perpetual wound" and "this pain makes him or her distractable." The narcissist's conversations, therefore, "have a lengthy, free-floating, and often witty complaint built into them. One of the only forms of conversation that flames the true narcissist into attentiveness has to do with reparations. The narcissist is always waiting, in one stance or another, for the world to offer its apologies."

The narcissist, in other words, doesn't just say, "Look at me." The narcissist cries, "Cry for me."

This narcissistic sentiment is alive, I think, in my own facebook list. I write of my early drug-use, for example, and I imply that this drug-use might have led to my later illnesses. I also write extensively of my illnesses. What am I looking for if not sympathy?

Then again, number 25 on my list is: "At least once or twice a day I stop dead in my tracks and think: I am lucky. I am so fucking lucky. And then I just go on, and try to do what I have to do."

When I write this I am trying (and maybe, admittedly, failing) to express something essential about myself, something that I need others to know: I try, really hard.

In this, I am not asking for sympathy. But I am crafting a persona, quite deliberately.

Does my crafting imply an inattentiveness to others? When I write about myself with an audience in mind am I mired in narcissism?

Often, I do feel like my own on-line crafting of a persona crosses the line from mere expression to narcissism. But self-expression, to me, is worth this risk.

The facebook lists, true, range from artful to narcissistic, and many offer both at once. What I find in many lists, though, is a unique celebration of self, a celebration closer in spirit to Whitman than Narcissus. One of my favorite lists (read it here; #13 is my current favorite snippet of writing), written by my friend Tommy Kim, offers a mix of celebration, laughter, and self-effacement--a self-effacement that inspires celebration and laughter. To me, his list is not narcissistic at all; it's simply expressive and damn well-written.

To me, the bottom-line is that friends find meaning in these lists--in writing them, in reading them. Friends become closer. Importantly, people write. People express themselves in new ways--ways that they may have never even attempted before. And they do so in a new, confusing forum.

The implicit agreement, of course, is that you don't have to read the lists. You don't have to participate at all. Simply wave goodbye as the train leaves without you.

Hypnotically Ugly

2009-02-17T13:06:00.000-08:00

"Hypnotically Ugly" is a phrase the film critic Bosley Crowther used to describe the actor Jean Paul Belmondo in his New York Times review of the film Breathless. This is a picture of Jean Paul Belmondo from another film, Ho!

Look at that nose. The hair. Look at those lips, those fat and impeccable lips, as raw and alluring as a wedge of orange. Belmondo's lips defy proportion. His entire face, really, is a study in incongruity. Is this ugliness or beauty?

The phrase "hypnotically ugly" speaks to me of the allure of blogs: the hypnotic appeal of another person's less than pretty life. Ugly, to me, is not necessarily a pejorative term; it merely hints at a certain messiness, a certain incongruity, inherent in self expression. I think of a quote from Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch:

"Irony, ceaseless self-criticism, incongruity, imagination in the service of no one."

Some decry blogging as narcissistic. I'm writing this blog, in part, to explore the difference between self expression and narcissism. I'll probably expose too much. I have a burning desire to tell secrets. Like all blogs, this blog offers another venue for the voyeur.

Who are my voyeurs? I'm looking for a few good voyeurs. I think voyeurism is companionable to self-expression in the human need it fulfills in our modern, web-addicted life: To squeeze and to be squeezed. To reach out from the soul, on the one hand, and say, I'm here! And to reach out from the soul, on the other hand, and say, Is that you, there?

Still, the equation is not simple.

Why, exactly, do I need voyeurs?

Why do I have this desire to be appear at once humble (ugly) and yet alluring (hypnotic)?

At what point do I stop merely expressing myself?

When do I become pitifully self-absorbed, narcissistic, just plain ugly?

Is there a threshold, a certain picture pose, a certain blog title, a certain comment, that obliterates the line--my line between self expression and narcissism?

I guess I'll find out.

My Friend Tommy Kim's Marvelous "25 Things About Me" List

2009-02-16T12:11:00.000-08:00

25 Random Things, some about me.

1) The greatest gift my mom gave me was a phone call on my birthday. She was grilling lamb chops with my step dad on a beach in Tel Aviv, just hours after they finished moving. I was sitting at my cubicle in Los Angeles. My mom asked me to wait and I could hear her giggling with my step dad. She held the phone out into the open air, and all I heard was static. She then said, "You hear that? That's the ocean.”

2) I sauté vegetables in the stance of a fencer, one leg in a deep knee bend, the other leg stretched out behind me, then I toss the vegetables by wrenching the pan with one hand, the other hand, with my index finger extended, pointed at the ceiling.

3) I love writing when it is still dark outside and the sun is rising. The corner where I work begins to fill with light, and my coffee tastes absolutely delicious.

4) My first date with Jill was a date, not a meeting. Is this random? No, but a fact.

5) The proudest moment of my life was when I watched Christine, my little cousin, eat the Spaghetti Carbonara she made. It was the first meal she made using a stove.

6) When I worked at Blockbuster, I used to crawl into the video drop off bin to scare the living shite out of the customers. Once, a boy ran up to the bin and slid in a video, which I summarily ejected at his chest, and he screamed, and through the slit of the bin, I could see his mother in the van laughing hysterically.

7) The shortest email I have ever written went like this: "no."

8) From an early age, I learned the role of violence in deepening one's love for their sibling. At age 11, when I lived with my cousin, who was more like a brother than a cousin, we had a push up contest. I decided he cheated. He called me a so and so. I threw dirt at his face. He punched me in the eye. I love him tremendously.

9) According to my mom, ever since I was old enough to coordinate my fingers and grab objects, which was probably around age one, I folded the thick part of the pillowcase into a sharp corner, and I would rub my finger on it. I still do this before I go to sleep.

10) I steal my dad's clothing. I’m 31 and I still go into his drawers and steal his shirts and wear them out constantly, proudly, telling everyone around me that this is my dad’s shirt.

11) When I was coaching youth hockey, I once tried to discipline the kids for goofing off during practice and lined them up to do ladders. They began cheering.

12) Whenever my mom or I dream of my grandmother, we call each other, trading details as if they were baseball cards, what she was wearing, what she was saying, who she was with, jealous if either of us actually got to speak with her.

13) In a night of drunken abandon, I ran across a piazza in Riomaggiore, toward the edge of a cliff, then hopped over the railing and grabbed on as tightly as I could, hanging over the rocks and waves a hundred feet below. A crowd of old Italian men ran to me and pulled me over, angrier than hell. My friends were pissed and did not speak to me that night.

14) I have a fascination with fire escapes. I take photographs of fire escapes. New York was fantastic.

15) You see me full speed throwing myself on the ice, tumbling and spinning on my back like a demented beetle, Theo Fleury style? I want to build my life around those moments. Not Wayne Gretzky, not Sid the kid, not even Pavel Bure. Short, crazy, mouthy, unbelievable Theo Fleury. I have been told I over romanticize. I think, instead, I just try to feel as much as Theo Fleury.

16) I’m impressionable and crave attention. During our middle school D.A.R.E. session, when two high school students came to our class to talk about drugs, I raised my hand to ask a question. The class giggled in anticipation, and after Scott Folsom asked me to, I did it. I asked, “Did you guys have sex?” Officer Tom escorted me out of class and had me sit by the door.

17) I am shy and a social gimp. At gatherings, I need something in my hand. My hands are my most obvious tell that I’m nervous.

18) I have been ridiculed for buying Go-Bots instead of Transformers. This ridicule continues to this day.

19) In high school I used to slick my hair back into a glossy, shellac, spending twenty minutes gelling, they spraying, then blow drying until my head became top-heavy and I was faint from the fumes. When the products cooled and dried, I could feel my scalp tightening, and my eyebrows arching.

20) When I miss my family I go to Koreatown Galleria and eat lunch downstairs in the food court, placing myself in between the most teeming and chaotic families, their shouts and laughing making it real nice.

21) I once wore the same black polo shirt to work for two straight weeks. Nobody noticed.

22) My uncle organized two family gangs amongst the cousins, the oldest two pitted
against the youngest two. I was in the younger crew. On my 10th birthday, the older
cousins secretly sprayed rat poison over the barbeque drumsticks my dad had grilled.
Then we found our own poison and sprayed their drumsticks. A brawl ensued. My dad
kicked us out of the house.

23) I bought non-prescription glasses in the sixth grade so I would look handsome.

24) One afternoon I shot a hockey puck five hundred times and suffered from tennis elbow afterward. Dogged, stupid, painful. That’s the formula.

25) My sense of smell has the strongest attachment to my emotional memory, which is probably why I always sniff things, like bottle caps and warm couches. I sniff things, terrified of endings.

The New Savagery

2009-02-15T14:44:00.000-08:00

"The New Savagery" is a poem by my uncle Deano. It's from his book embryoyo. Here's the first stanza:

What does the new savagery
require of me? If I pound a nail
into the wall, the wall is my heart.

I texted Deano this morning, at 8:14 AM: Can I name my blog after one of your poems: The New Savagery?

I live outside Philadelphia, in a small, drunk town called Ambler. Deano lives in Austin.

He texted back at 9:15 AM: Of course u can!

So now "The New Savagery" is also the name of my blog.

This is how Merriam Webster defines "savage":

1 a: not domesticated or under human control: untamed b: lacking the restraints normal to civilized human beings: fierce, ferocious.

I recently spent a few days laying on my back on my bed reading The Savage Detectives by The Great Bolaño. The book starts out as a straightforward narrative of a group of "literary guerillas" in Mexico City who name themselves the "visceral realists." The group is led by two young poets, Ulises Lima and Alberto Belano. But merely 139 pages in the novel changes form; for the next 450 pages, The Great Bolaño offers first-person accounts from scores of friends, enemies, associates, and lovers of Ulises Lima and Alberto Belano. The first-person accounts sometimes build upon and sometimes contradict each other—they’re given by people whose lives merely (briefly) intersected with Lima’s and Belano’s from 1976 to 1996.

And yet, a story develops, in the details, and page by page the novel gains momentum, a growing sense of dread. Strange, seemingly unrelated details about the poets, begin to circle around each other, sometimes merely flirting with each other, sometimes exploding into momentous moments, before dying like embers, as the poets move from Mexico City to San Diego to Paris to Barcelona to Tel Aviv, and beyond. Out of the mess of details, we learn that Arturo Belano is clowning around, working variously as a dishwasher, or a night watchman for a campground; and yet, instead of inspiring his story with comic glee, the absurdity of his lifestyle seems to beckon violence. At one point Belano calls a friend and asks her to show up at a local beach so that she might “see him.” The idea sounds sad and insane and the friend begs the question by asking, “Are you planning to commit suicide?”

Then the friend describes, in hazy detail, what seems like an impossibility:

"Only Arturo and the first man were left in the middle of the beach. Then they raised what they were holding in their hands and struck them together. At first glance I thought it was walking sticks and I laughed, because I realized that this was what Arturo had wanted me to see: some clowning around, a strange kind of clowning around, but definitely clowning around. But doubt crept into my mind. What if those weren’t walking sticks? What if they were swords? "

In fact, they're swords, and they're ridiculous.

Another witness describes it like this:

"In a brief moment of lucidity, I was sure that we’d all gone crazy. But then that moment of lucidity was displaced by a super-second of super-lucidity (If I can put it that way), in which I realized this scene was the logical outcome of our ridiculous lives."

I have one goal in writing this blog: To offer a series of strange, seemingly unrelated details about my life, details that might begin to circle around each other, sometimes merely flirting with each other, sometimes exploding in a moment of discovery, before dying like embers, as I move through a range of topics, from love to politics, from crushing financial problems to enemas. Blogs are meaningful, but short-lived. I'm not a savage, but I often write like one.

Here's the fourth stanza of Deano's poem:

I will write another long last letter
about what I had for lunch, what had me
and you will understand my feelings,
how they only want to feel yours