--YOU WERE BLACK AND I WAS WHITE.  BANG BANG, YOU SHOT ME DOWN.

 

…Tonight I'm going to a reading at The Hugo House.  It's called "Cheap Beer and Prose."  Last time I was there I read a short piece, "Missing Chance" which was named one of the 50 best online stories of 2009.  It's a little intense and I think the crowd was a little stunned, not because it was good but because they didn't get it.  The story is here under "Words in Print" if you want to check it out.

…Here are some things I learned this week.  You might find a few interesting:

…Percentage of men who say their friends would feel bad for them if they knew how much they actually make -26

Women -17

…Percentage of people who would take a pay cut for a more flexible work schedule -42

…Chances that your boss is a woman -3 in 10

…In 2011, percentage of men who said they’d prefer to work for a man -26%

In 1975 -63%

…Percentage of business travelers who are men -77

…Average length of a job interview -40 minutes

…According to hiring managers the most common mistake job applicants make during an interview is –Talking too much

…46% of resumes contain false information about employment history, education, or references

…Percentage of office employees who work in a cubicle -70

…Median Salaries for the following:

Sales Manager -$101,000
Astronomer -$95,000
Management Consultant -$78,000
Web Developer -$77,000
Special Ed Teacher -$53,000

…Free School Lunches per Year:

2000 -13 Million
2011 -18.3 Million

--EVERYTHING'S AMAZING AND NOBODY'S HAPPY

 

…I’m just back from a boy's weekend in Las Vegas.  Now it feels like I need to sleep for a week.

Las Vegas is a strange place.  It’s a bit like someone dropped acid and decided to build a Technicolor theme-parked city.  They're pyramids, pirate ships, circuses, Eiffel Towers, a Statue of Liberty, not to mention ads for strip clubs everywhere you look, and even if you don’t look.
Mostly it's fun to people watch.
It's good to be hope.  Wish me luck on re-entry.

…This is something that I wrote which appeared in the first Issue of the print journal Gigantic Sequins:

 

Sketch Marks

 

                                                        Cuckold

She says she has a new diet, that she will only eat words from now on.  I say, “Worms?” but she corrects me.  She fills her bowl with adjectives.  She floods her plate with plurals connoting paganism.  Or maybe she means plagiarism.  I get so jealous.  She is one of a kind.

 

                                                        Fondue

            I am lines and glyphs and a face full of folded things.  I walk on stumpy stilts.  I need a cause to fight for.  You told me once, “I believe in you.”  People used to think the world was flat and now such a notion seems silly insanity.  If you place your hand here, dip a finger into its gooey center and have a taste, you might be able to understand me.

 

                                                         Beneath

            My trachea is a leaky boat spilling saltwater as well as my secret impulses.  These, they bob and throb beside bluewater veins and slippery shells, fragile but not yet broken.

 

                                                          The Dead Sea

            She laid me down in a bed, in a bath of oily holy water stole from foreign soil.  I felt compromised.  My eyelids reflected on the surface, looked like unshut doors, windows left open for lurking burglars wearing gloves so as not to leave prints.  When I dream now I mostly float.  The salt is briny but it brings me luck.

 

                                                           Six

One omen is that Mother hums now, a feline, a heater, a planet twisting wrong in its dark orbit.  She irons shirts and underwear.  Her hair is frosted, her lids glossy lime.  There was a time so long ago, when I was maybe an embryo, that she needed me.

                                               

                                               Dumb               

Today I woke and learned that I can no longer speak.  My tongue is gone.  My mouth is a hole, a rictus, a well.  Drop a penny down to hear the splatter.  Make a wish for me, please.

 

                                               My Confessions    

These words are my organs, pulsing and spilling sloppy over my skins and blank pages and choruses.  I have urges that frighten me.  Lean your head here and try not to tremble.

 

                                               History

His breath tells stories, glories, never boring but always lethal.  The stains on his striped overalls are permanent.  They are.   

 

                                               Messages

I have possessions I want to share, little origami items with prophecies stuffed inside.  When I try eating them, they show up the next day, dry and smearless.  I wish I could find a person in need.  I wish I wish.  I wish I were more like my possessions: clearly written and meaningful.

--WHEN BLACK FRIDAY COMES, I'M GOING TO DIG MYSELF A HOLE

 

 ...Hey Hi.  I hope your week is going swimmingly.  Here are some things I learned:

…The lawyer for a suburban Albany, NY strip club argue before the state’s Supreme Court that its lap dancers are entitled to the tax exemption that ballet and artistic performances enjoy.

The state wants $300,000 in back taxes from the club called “Night Moves.”

…Things that make us feel guilty:

39% -Wasting food
27% -Leaving lights on when I leave a room
27% -Wasting water
22% -Not unplugging electronics
21% -Not recycling

…Percentage of men who consider themselves “innovators” in the bedroom

…Adele’s album, “21” just passed Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” staying in the top 10 for 79 weeks.

It should pass US sales of 10 million copies by next month, a rare feat any time, but especially in these days when albums rarely sell even a million.
Only 108 albums have ever sold more 10 million copies.

…The cost of a 30 second ad during the Super bowl is $3.8 million, and that's not counting production of the ad.

…Will you be able to retire before age 65?

1997 -50% said Yes
2012 -34% said Yes

…During the 1970s, an average of 290 major work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers occurred annually in the United States. By the 1990s, that had fallen to about 35 per year. And in 2009, there were no more than five.

…Oprah was named the top money entertainment earner last year after raking in $167 million.  Yep, $167 million in a solitary year.

…After suffering its biggest loss ever, Hewlett-Packard announced plans to cut 29,000 jobs in the US.

…The average annual public school teacher salary has risen from $44,655 in 2001 to $56,643 in 2011.

…This summer was the third-hottest on record.  Last summer was the second-hottest.

…In just the last four years, 60,000 people have been killed in Mexico due to drug violence.

…Percentage of adults who smoke:

2008: 20.4%
2011: 18.9%

Percentage of US births to unmarried females:

1990: 28%
2101: 40.8%

…I like these:

"An artist is always alone---if he's an artist. Actually, what an artist needs is loneliness." Henry Miller

"The manner in which it is given is worth more than the gift." Pierre Corneille

"Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy." F. Scott Fitzgerald

"In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you." Tolstoy

"We all die in the middle of something." Roman Payne

"I'm less attracted to the stoic. I'm more attracted to the floridly psychotic." --David Milch

"It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place that I am not." Paul Auster

"Poetry is as exact a science as geometry." Flaubert

"Eventually, we all sustain injuries.  Realizing this, Mike decided it was easier to speak to people who had never existed at all." Nick McDonell, "The Third Brother"

 

--JUST LIKE A PAPERBACK NOVEL, THE KIND A DRUG STORE SELLS

 

…How was your weekend?  My was quite fun.

Also, I had three things appear in the print journal out of NYC, UCity Review.
Here they are:
 

The Strength of Water

            Not rain, but a shower, hot water pelting my skin like agitated chicks pecking, pecking insistently and urgently, and for a moment, as I’ve trained myself to do, I picture myself bathed in white light, hold radiance among this halo of grace and safety, with the moist smell of baked bread and slathered butter, sounds of a choir singing about salvation, the swish of their robes like secret whispers of hope, and when in that moment I have given myself away to a world as light as angels themselves, a hammed rips my arms shoulders back, black pain indiscriminate, everywhere, then back to the real world and the middle school shower and Brian Bickman and boys cackling, some pointing, saying, “It looks like an earthquake,” about my back, my skin where the bruises sat like mildewed splotches, and I knew they knew but still I said, “I fell.  My brother did it.  I wrestled a bear in the woods.”  I blathered on while involuntarily touching each tender spot, sparking a flame of pain, like a purple firework, and a memory came, the taste of bile and blood, and with that, quite miraculously, the taste of forgiveness in the form of water after the boys had gone, water when I tried to clean myself, water when I dunked under it and vowed to be new, to be strong and true, to give grace, pledging to be a man of peace one day.

I Can Be Your Sweat-Stained Shirts

 

I can be your witness,

the frost on your windshield that you
 like to scrape just to hear the sound.
I can be your black exhaust,
 your sweat-stained shirts and
  ring-around-the-collar.

I can strip the sheets

 and take your temperature,
ladle broth into your mouth
 and look away when you swallow.

I have already heard your confession,

 that off-kilter yodel
tamped tight inside a pillow,
as frail as the blank batting of your eyes.

And, yes, of course,

 of course I could duct tape all your doors at the seams,
  hoist black sails across your windows,
   sit and listen as you recite all your reasons,
but there’s one thing I won’t do,
 can’t do,
never in a million years,
 and that’s
let you leave me.
 

            Brother

            “You can’t be a girl,” I told my brother, “it’s not scary.”

            “You ever try walking in high heels?”
            He had a point.  Besides, it didn’t make sense to use our lawn job money to buy costumes.  Halloween came once a year and we weren’t dumb or rich enough to be wasteful.
            At the first houses I was embarrassed.  My brother’s lipstick and mascara were perfectly applied, but too colorful.  He’d made himself a macaw, a Madame.
            I got used to it, even though Mrs. Fitzgerald slammed the door on us and Bobby Graham’s mom called my brother a hideous freak.
            “You’re not getting as much candy as me,” I said.
            And it was true.
            But at home he got even.  Still wearing a dress and nylons, he pinned my wrists to the ground and gave me Chinese torture until I cried.  Years later it was he who cried as he told me his plans.  I put my arms around him.  I held him strong.  “It doesn’t matter,” I said.  “Then I’ll just love you like a sister.” 

 

--YOU LEFT A MARK ON ME

 ...YAY! 

I finished editing my novel.
I took Nike’s advice.  Yes, I bore down, and just did it. 
I think I’ve written a pretty good book, or at least an entertaining one.
Now, writing wise, I’m not sure what to do next.  It’s been months since I’ve written anything short.  My mind is glued to the longer format.
Sure, I’ll send the novel out, but I need to write.  The only question is what?

…The Republican and Democratic Conventions are over.

I actually enjoyed watching them.  Does that sound sick?  Does that make me sick?
I’ve always loved politics.  When I was a young boy I thought I wanted to be president.  (True story.  True embarrassing story): I even made little cutout posters and Scotch-taped them to every wall around our trailer—“Len for President of the United States.” 
In a rare acquiescence, my parents humored me and let the faux posters stand for a day or so. 
After college, I clerked at a law firm.  It wasn’t what I thought it would be.  No romantic “Truth and Justice,” just billing hours and foreclosing on people’s homes.  I became pretty disheartened and decided to forgo law school, being a lawyer, getting into politics.
Besides, I had too many skeletons in my closet even back then.
But I still follow politics closely.  A friend of mine says it doesn’t make any difference which party is in office, that it doesn’t even matter who the president is.  I disagree.
But enough of that…

…Here are some things I like:

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

"Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things." Robert Brault

"Happiness is often the result of being too busy to be miserable." Robert Zimmerman

"I always say to students, give me four pages a day, every day.  That's three or four hundred thousand words a year.  Most of that will be bilge, but the rest…?  It will save your life!" Ray Bradbury

"There is a sense of exhilaration that comes from facing head-on the hard truths and saying, 'We will never give up. We will never capitulate. It might take a long time, but we will find a way to prevail'." Jim Collins

--I'VE SEEN YOUR PICTURE, YOUR NAME IN LIGHTS ABOVE IT

 

…Last night I saw the beaver swimming home across the lake after what I presume was another hard day’s work for him.  He’s quite a large animal, about the size of healthy Labrador.

…I’m just 75 pages from finishing an edit of my YA novel, “The Break-in Artists.”  I keep encountering clumps of writing that are either pretty good or pretty lousy. 

I think I tend to over-write sometimes.

…Here’s a story that appears in the latest print issue of Santa Fe Literary Review:

 

                                         In and Out of the Womb

 

            The guilt is real and so is her hatred for this thing she’s created.  In her lap it sits, a loaf, a swaddled globe warming the tops of her thighs, weighing less than a cat, not a worthwhile thought inside its bald head.

            Aww, she looks just like you.

            She has David’s nose.

            What a little bundle of joy!

            You’re so blessed.

            Cursed is how she feels.  Since the birth, a kind of asthma has leeched into her system, making it hard to breathe, as if a cape of 1,000 sand bags has been lobbed over her shoulders and chest.  It takes too much effort to see, to taste, to scratch her cheek or pick her nose.  Her tongue is swollen so thick it might as well be a python.  Her eyes are dry chick peas.

            Had she wanted this baby in the first place?  How did it happen, how did today become this day, bleak and oppressive despite Indian summer outside, the sun obscenely bright?

            And why had they named the child Maya?  It’s an exotic name, ethnic-sounding, ridiculous now that she allows herself time to ruminate over the four letters.  The moniker Maya and the gurgling-thing-stuffed-in-cotton Maya have nothing in common.  One suggests mystique and bronze skin, the other doom and pasty cottage cheese.

            “What are you doing here?” she says to the smelly lump in her lap, or to herself, she is not sure.  “Why have you failed me so?”

            The baby’s chocolate pupils search the air, as if for a streaking starling, then speak.  “Ca-Coo,” it says.

            The woman sees through the infant through the floor through earth.  She sees herself, age eight putting up construction paper posters with her name then, FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.  But next she is nine years old, the posters are gone and she is staggering down the hall, knocking photographs off the wall.  Once she makes it to her bedroom, she locks the door, but on the other side wolves are laughing, then cannon blasts that shake the door until a bolt pops free, teaching her then and forever that doors are really not meant to be open or closed, that nothing can be hidden or protected because innocence is just an idea, a heartless hoax.

            She’s read news stories about women who leave their newborns on porches, toss them into dumpsters.  She’s not about to do that.

            Instead she takes Maya, puts her in the bassinet.

            She pours water into a kettle, puts it on a red-coiled stove, dumps dry pasta noodles into the hissing liquid, stirs. 

            When he comes home she will kiss her husband and tell David it was a good day.  She’ll repeat this routine for the years to come.  But when Maya and the other female children she will have are old enough she will share the dark secret so that they might know it is normal—this dead sensation—so they won’t, like her, feel trapped inside the dark womb.

 

--SINK YOUR TEETH INTO MY BONES, LET'S SEE WHAT YOU CAN DO

 

…Happy Labor Day Weekend.  I hope it's a fun and relaxing time for you.

Here are some random fun things to think about:

-There are 74 million cats in the US.

30% of roaming house cats kill prey--two animals per week--and are linked to the reasons why one in three American bird species are in decline.

-How we watch videos of movies and TV shows:

Streaming -52%
Rent DVD  -42%
On-demand service -32%

-Congress is on pace to make history with the least productive legislative year in the post-World War II era, passing just 61 gbills or less than 2% of all bills proposed.

-The number of new credit cards issued to consumers is the highest it's ever been, with 26% of those cards going to people with credit scores of 700 or lower.

-What is most effictive in increasing your loyalty to your company?

Having a good boss -90%
Retirement benefits -87%
Health care benefits -86%
Convenient commute 78%
Flexible time -68%
(Pay rate didn't make the top five)

-The US Postals Service lost $1.2 million by selling only 318 million of the 1 billion "Simpsons" stamps it printed

-Vivid Entertainment offered Prince Harry $10 million to star in a porn film

-While summer movie-going revenue was flat, theaters sold 100 million fewer tickets than a decade ago

-Expenses too important to give up, regardless of financial concerns:
1. Internet connection -57%
2. Driving -44%
3. Pet -39%
4. Cable TV -29%
5. Mobile phone -24%

Largest Hispanic groups in US

1. Mexicans -65%
2. Puerto Ricans -9%
3. Cubans -4%
4. Salvadorans -4%
5. Dominicans -3%

…I recently read an interview with Tommy Lee Jones. 

Here are some of the bits I liked most:

“How do you play someone in a movie?  How do you do that?  It’s impossible—unless you know how.  How do you cut somebody open and take out their appendix and sew them back up and watch them get well?  That’s impossible unless you know how.”

“I’m a believer in belief.  Faith is something that works—it causes people to do things, it has results.  It’s an intangible, indefinable very real thing.  And it moves people, sometimes to atrocity.  And sometimes to survival.”

“Cobb” has one of my favorite lines in all my experience of movies that I’ve worked on, which is when the guy who works for Mr. Cobb when he was older says, “Fuck you, Mr. Cobbs!” That line just rings like a bell in my mind.  It’s poetic.”

“You don’t want to get so excited that you drop the ball.”

“Don’t put it in too soon, don’t take it out too soon.”