Took a drive with Cayden last Monday. A simple mission: to drop off the recycling. I forgot, of course, that all recycling centers are closed on Mondays and that, despite my persistent meandering, uptown and Old Town will all greet me with closed doors. I was playing 'The Walkmen' in the car which, by now, Cayden is very used to. Analog-recorded, gritty music. The drummer's Tom Cruise-small, but he's still the biggest sound in the band. Cayden's kicking his feet with the percussive punches, humming happily. The cracked window is tousling his hair. At the end of every song, I hear a faint 'ye-ea' from the backseat and a small clapping of hands.

I take Pershing to the freeway. Pershing remains one of my favorite roads in all of San Diego. Just past the sprawl of North Park bungalows, and riding parallel to the golf-course with all its gentrified house-fronts, Pershing is a lazy switchback poised above Florida Canyon. One switch past the Morley nursery the curvilinear Coronado Bridge comes into view. During a Santa Ana wind, which--in the fast desertification of San Diego--occurs more and more often, the Coronado Islands are visible in the distance. The mesa above Tijuana's chaos of ill-clustered buildings and ramshackle boroughs is topographically obvious: a flat-topped signal that Mexico is Mexico and San Diego with its rolling hills and blue commas of bridges are separate, with or without sentry-guarded border stations.

Cayden points out the passing cars from the backseat. I'm squinting. The sky is sun-bleached and the lack of contrast means I-can't-fucking-see. A recent visit to the opometrist had my doctor finally admit to what my mother has said for years: I've got cataracts that, come thirty-something, are gonna steal away my vision.' My doctor always claimed the spots on my lenses were congenitally deposited. That they were actually a 'rather beautiful' constellation of cholesterol spots set into place as a birthmark: my own ocular Milky Way. Well, the Milky Way is in way of my vision. Street signs are blurred and I get lost in Old Town. Were I to drive at night, the headlights and freeway reflectors would prismatically multiply. I'd be having my own laser show in the rearview mirror.

I felt old on Monday. And I'm sure my forty-something friends would've laughed and said: 'just you wait.' Still--being thirty-one and consorting with friends a few years younger--there's something to be said about the '30' benchmark. I've unmarried friends worried about being alone at 30. They drop insubstantial relationships right-quick. Or else they choose to stay in tired relationships despite their bags being packed on the front stoop, ready to leave.

In common: everyone claims they are 'too old.' Too old for this, too old for that. The quarter-life crisis has replaced the mid-life crisis. By the time we're exhausted of the twenties, maturity at 30 seems impossibly grey-haired and incalculable.

Cayden remarks the dog-walkers on the way home. 'Woof-woof' he says, pointing out the window. I squint and see what he sees. A jogger in the shadows of Morley Fields' deep-set trees, Lab running behind her. 'Woof-woof. Doooog.'

Cayden makes me happy. I'm imprisoned in sentimentalism which makes the 30 mark not so bad. Never too old for that. Despite the squint.

March 15, 2007

When I was younger, my brother and I wiled away our summer hours in the backyard pool--an above-ground Doughboy with a blue plasticene liner. A goldfish-bowl of a pool to think of it.

It's curious what you don't remember. I don'tremember too many of the games my brother and I must've played together in the artificial cerulean. I remember the perfume of chlorine blossoms, the filter trap which housed a menagerie of struggling water-bugs, the swirling leaf-litter. I remember pushing off the aluminum sides of the pool with pruny feet and savoring the chemical burn of eyes-open underwater. But I don't remember any Cousteau games of make-believe or little-kid splash fights.

I do remember this: every afternoon, usually when I was in the middle of some self-involved gme (me as tugboat captain, me as merman), my brother would tuck his arms close to his body, hands meekly a-dangle above the water's surface like some aquatic T. rex, and he would trod a tireless circle round the pool's perimeter. I would be underwater and would see his body from mid-section down. Through chlorine-fuzzy eyes, this: a slow plodding, hippo's feet. A plumb-line footfall all aqueous slo-time, circles upon dizzying circles round the pool perimeter. My brother would push chest-forward, fingers skimming the water, a far-away look glazing his face. And he would turn circles as if on the long end of a mill's arm. The pool-water would begin a sluggish whirlpool, and behind my brother eddied a shipwreck of plastic boatsand half-inflated beach balls.

Imagine me strawberry-hair-plastered in the middle of the pool. I've a diving ring in my hand and look as if my six-year-old kingdom has just burned down. "Mooooom! He's making a current again!" And my brother doesn't look at me--just keeps plodding to some Greenwich-specific time--while my mother uncrosses her legs on the patio stoop, puts down her magazine and says: "Quit fighting."

Fast-forward a number of years. My brother is in prison. I'm awake in bed next to my wife whose chemicals are correct, aligned. I'm whispering words to her back come 4 a.m. Latin words, taxonomical words. Song lyrics. Anything.

I'm thinking about sepia-toned biology-class films and chalky illustrations of nerve cells. How neurons look like jellyfish, tentacles waving round orb-like neurotransmitters--precious pearls of serotonin.

All my pearls washed out the oyster's mouth.

My brother's in prison and he's still jogging circles and suddenly I'm the plastic boat-wreck behind him.

I don't remember any games my brother and I used to play, but I do know the current he pilots.

Election Night '08

Nov. 10, '08.

Last Tuesday 'yes we can' changed tense to 'yes we did.' On this truly historic election night, a geopolitical game of Othello had red states flipping blue; states that had--since LBJ--ridden on the back of an elephant suddenly thumbed a ride with the donkey.

I was at San Diego's Civic Center Tuesday night, 1) hoping for an Obama victory and, 2) hoping that the purportedly leftwards shift of the socio-political climate was enough to defeat Prop 8. How, in 2008, can you have a ballot measure that features the phrase 'an amendment to eliminate the rights...?' It's like casting a ballot to put Rosa Parks back at the rear of the bus. Then again, the Civil Rights amendment has been brought to the Supreme Court more often to defend corporate rights than it has civil rights (!). So is our nation...

Prop 8 was narrowly passed and, to punctuate the point, Prop 8 supporters stormed Golden Hall following the Obama call chanting, "Yes on 8!' with evangelical passion. And I say 'evangelical' literally, because the coterie of '8' supporters seemed to be a church youth group led by a pastor alarmingly resemblant of Bill Richardson. Golden Hall became a volley of chants: "No on 8, no on hate" and all its variations; and the insistent 'Yes on 8.' Jay Bakker--where were you to mediate?

The stand-off made me realize just how divided the populace still is. After two questionable elections and two election-night CNN dissertations on the popular v. electoral college vote, we are undoubtedly aware that a 'landslide vote' is anything but. There was much jubilation on Nov. 4th--globally even--but, and as the punditry has made evident, a good deal of resentment. Rush Limbaugh has declared, "Let the games begin," and Sean Hannity is still insisting Obama's gonna bomb a church the day he takes office.

To illustrate the idea of resentment: at Golden Hall, big-screen televisions broadcast election night coverage, what with all the fancy CNN touchscreen maps and celebratory/concessionary speeches. John McCain appeared on-screen and the lot of us gathered around the tube to listen. Rather, I should say 'read.' The noise at the center was too loud to actually hear McCain's speech and so we had to read the closed-captioning subtitles. There was immediate bristling from the progressive crowd as we read the words: "...and I concede to Senator Obama EVEN THOUGH HE CHEATED." Did he just say that? We were aghast. But, as McCain continued and the closed-captioning soberly and now accurately broadcast McCain's words--his anecdote about Booker T. Washington haing been invited to Teddy Roosevelt's White House, his compliment of Obama's decency--we all realized that the claim of 'election fraud' came from whatever bitter citizen was in front of the closed-captioning keyboard. Probably some guy with an 'ACORN drives me nuts' T-shirt and a bumper sticker proclaiming 'Obama/Marx '08.'

This indeed is a strange time. Having mentioned Marx, I have to quickly comment. McCarthy and his whiskey-liver have been dead and pickled for over fifty years. Last I checked, McCarthy was the buffoon of this past political century. He created a big-top out of the House of Un-American Activities, lavished in the celebrity of a burgeoning TV culture, deposited the 'Bachmann-of-her-day' Ayn Rand on the stand, and found a Red under every rock (especially them Hollywood rocks). And every night he would, as Halberstam reports, eat a stick of butter to buffer the body-shock of liquor he'd drink in bars up and down Capitol Hill.

Why, now, is McCarthy suddenly the go-to model for civic behavior (that first part at least, maybe not the bourbon+butter part)? Why is Fox News quoting the 'Communist Manifesto' when interviewing Joe Biden? Why does the phrase 'redistribution of wealth' leave a bitter taste in the mouths of who utter it in nationally syndicated forums? Wow--the Cold War may be on ice, but we can sure defrost its language in the RNC microwave when we want a vernacular snack.

And now that socialism's greatest hits are being spun on the punditry turntable, I want to urge you to take a studied look at what is heralded as the 'Great Nationalization' of our banks ('nationalization' is the juiciest of socialist words--it's the low-hanging fruit plucked by the Hugo Chavezes of our day). Perhaps many of you were confused as I to read of history's most Neo-conservative administration (talkin' about 'W' of course) "partially nationalizing the American banking sysytem." Even my CEO uncle, former employee of Bechtel and avid over-seer of data-mining, has said: "Hank Paulson sure ain't acting like a Republican." Still, Paulson wins support from my 'Grand Ole Uncle' and--on a broader scale--Paulson surely isn't being hammered from the Right with questions about Das Kapital. Why the disconnect? Why are there Obama bumper stickers featuring hammers and sickles and there hasn't yet been a Photo-Shopped image of Paulson's bald head besmirched with Gorbachev's birthmark? I went to my favorite media watchdog--Naomi Klein--to garner perspective.

N. Klein is the author of 'No Logo' and 'The Shock Doctrine'--two of the most important reads I think one can have in their library (right next to 'People's History of the United States' byHoward Zinn). Klein has been adamant in documenting modern (read: post-Eisenhower) history as a narrative of Chicago School thinking and Friedman-ite excess. In a time where we ideologically confuse confuse democracy with the free-market, there remains a persistent historical chain-of-evnts pointing towards an in-fact disregard of democracy and an aggressive forward of laissez-faire greed.

Currently, Klein's attention has been placed on 'The Bailout.' The Bailout was--if you remember--rejected almost universally upon its revelation mid-October. Then came the McCain-Obama support, thn came the famous DOW upswing (momentary upswing I should say). At this point, with a revelatory Obama win, I think it's easy for the populace to forget mid-October (and today's market fluctuations) in ieu of Mr. November's win. But the Bailout is happening right now and--in a Lame Duck period--there are billions of irretrievable tax dollars being 'pre-1/20' shed to AIG's Wall Street. Obama only presides at the Bully Pulpit right now--he is not yet at the Presidential Podium. He can't change anything just now. This remains an important time to get informed and act accordingly with regards to bailout legislation.

Which leads me back to my original thread: Klein and Klugman and Stieglitz and Phillips (R) answered my questions with regards to bailout cash-flow. There does NOT exist a partial nationalization of banks, but--rather--a partial privatization of the U.S. Treasury. The consensus is saying the bail-out is lacking the regulation we as the populace need. Money is indeed being funneled to the Wall St. collective, but it's being handled by ethically-hollow consultants. Federal oversight is legally absent and, for the most part (and because they're not legally obligate) banks aren't loaning a dime. The point of the bailout was to get the banks loaning again, like in Europe. It ain't happening. Remember the AIG outrage? It's happening tenfold, under-reported. Golden parachutes are flashig 14K as they descend into the green flash horizon. And banks are merging into big swollen nothings. Why loan when you can conglomerate? (A symbolic t-shirt reads: I'm not fat, I'm American).

Considering the economy is Obama's chief concern (though he's got a thing for Kashmir...)--and the economy is the #1 concern of exit pollsters--let's keep vigilant. We all know the 'Executive Mandate' game is going to happen regardless--Bush forwards uranium mining, Obama repeals it, etc. (the aforementioned Othello game). But we really don't know which way the economy's gonna turn. Down absolutely. But then?

I read the World Bank's predictionary report a few months ago and already it is obsolete. Global recession was predicted for mid '09, but it's already here.

At Golden Hall I was ecstatic. Jenn was crying and my toddling son was wide-eyed with the spectacle of everything. It's 2008, the forty year anniversary of the most politically active year in the globe's recent history: 1968. On a lighter note, it's the anniversary of the Rolling Stone's 1968 anthem: 'Street-Fighting Man.' My son tunes into Will I Am's 'Yes I can' video as easily as he nothing-claps to Jagger's jagged lyrics. This is a good time. Even if uncertain.

Tourmaline abbreviated

January 17, 2006: It's early afternoon, but already the day feels expired. I left the apartment at 6:45 early slung with guitar, towel, and wetsuit. Jenny was still mid-ablution, still tugging on her boots by the time I was knocking down the stairs with my Guild case, pick in pocket. The partment Jenn and I live in is older than old and centered--in old communal fashion--round a red-tiled atrium. Morning smells, morning sounds waft central. Percolating coffee, a.m. pastries, first cigarettes--it's a caffeinated perfume that winds down and into the atrium foyer amid catches of morning radio and wake-up music (Marty and Zane next door always enliven the third floor with something euro-beat each and every sunrise--our kitchen pots reverberate on their rack in steady 4:4 time come daybreak).

I meet Surf Diva Alyssa outside. White pick-up truck, boards cozied and ajutting angular out the bed. It's 6:45 and it's Pacific cold and, were the Surf Report broadcasting in this January hour, it would relay an air-temp of forty-something and a water temp in the high fifties. This is oceanic devotion: a pre-coffee, bleary-eyed, ante-jentacular drive to the coast. The dusk-and-dawn birds are pirouetting away from the shoreline, away from the sunrise; the be-suited pencil-jockeys are just merging onto the 5, cell phones already on-point. I am happy to be in this pick-up cab, warmed air playing on the feet--not looking forward to the cold neoprene suit, but definitely looking forward to that moment when pins-and-needles cold ceases to matter and the water is swelling just so. Float some, ride some. Look around and watch the California Brown Pelicans, just emerging from their eclipse plumage, dive in gannet fashion through the swells...

A letter, dated 2004, that was never sent.

M---:

It's been a long while since I contacted you. I'm sure that puts question marks above your head.

"Where is my brother?", you may ask.

I ask the same question most every day. Not in any geographic sense, of course. I've an idea of what your walls may look like: the beds, the barracks. The sea of prison blue. I know you're situated in the middle of King's County with a sky that must be horribly incredible.

I've driven the 5 a few times over in the time you've been gone and have seen the tired pistoning of oil pumps; the ruminative cattle; and the white, white haze which seems to jump senses into whiter noise.

The last time I sped through King's County was with Bradley in a U-Haul truck. A trailer shimmied behind us bearing a vintage car and three bristling, sleep-deprived cats. The cab smelled of a shared pack of Kamel Reds and spent coffee cups. By mid-morning, just beyond the King's County HP Station and directly beyond the rutted half-roads which finger out into the farmers' fields, I felt I couldn't concentrate any longer on the highway lines. We pulled over and slept on the grass beneath these wispy clouds that promised an unerringly still, cricket-shivering night. Brad slept on the trailer rig and, when he awoke, pointed out that I had slept in the grass beneath a sign reading: 'Dog Lawn.'

I thought about Christopher, the editor of the now-defunct CH Press. I call it defunct because although the long-awaited Roque Dalton issue finally came out, I'm gone and D--- is gone and M. is left with a pile of manuscripts and a glass of scotch and an absence of her tow best editors. Anyways, I thought of Christopher there on that dog grass: I saw him last in the SD Jail. M. sobbed in the periphery of the visiting room and I took up the phone that lay unceremoniously on the steel-grey table. I took up the phone and looked at Christopher behind the glass--he was all slicked-back hair and waxed moustache and tight-lipped expression. On a diet of heavy metals and liver medication. He wore thick glasses which made his eyes look disproportionately huge and wallowy in an otherwise context of grey brick and cold, cold light. M. sobbed, and she sobbed. I held the phone to my ear and didn't know a goddamn thing to say.

Christopher spoke and said that my wedding was beautiful. He had crashed his car in Arizona, spent his money on meth. He had dodged the law and lost the rest of his money on smoky poker games somewheres in the Southwest. But he somehow made his way back to my wedding--M.'s date--and he cried and held M.'s hand when we released butterflies and read Ferlinghetti. Behind the glass he was frail, a mere exhalation of breath. He thanked me for taking care of M.; I thanked him for being in the audience at our wedding.

I first met Christopher on the phone 7(?) years ago when he corrected my pronunciation of Greek poet Yannis Ritsos. And here we were again--on the phone, but face-to-face. "Thom, take care," he said. "Take care of M." I took care of M. by kissing her in some hopeless manner on the cheek, and leading her out of the Piranesi-inspired civic building, phone hung-up and Christopher disappeared.

I remember when Christopher was released for a brief time and how he held forum at M.'s house in front of an ashtray. He was smoking a long and almost effiminately thin joint. Which was "safe" he confided, because "California only looks for uppers in my system." His hands were strange deep-sea jellyfish, fingers not unlike wavering tentacles. "California is a river of blue, " he said tapping out an ash, "It is punctuated by a braking of buswheels and penitentiary-blue lights."

A wave of the hand, a drag on the tightly-rolled cigarette. "California is blue." He looked pleased because, above all, he was a poet.

And, as a three-time loser on his way to Corcoran, he saw the rich blue of prison lights as the only matter-of-fact thing of beauty left in his world.

Christopher is now gone, above the law I think. Somewheres south. I've held Maggie in the meanwhile when she was overly aware of the gun in her nightstand, when the television flickered late-night Donald Sutherland movies, and when the sounds of the house shook her awake. I sat in her bed all night like a sentry, sucked the scotch from her tumbler of ice cubes set aside on the nightstand. I laid next to her, wide awake, and smelled the smoke of her dressing gown and heard her murmur resignation in her sleep.

She told me about Mayakovsky: how he left his wife because an admirer had, at an intellectual's party, recited--word for word--the full extent of his 900 line opus. Mayakovsky left his wife to embrace this young admirer. Still--a few years later, he took a gun to his head and left the girl with 900 lines of regret.

I've not seen M. or Christopher in a long time but--there in the grass of King' County, a short drive away from the tired city you've called home for the past few years--I thought of you arriving at Avenal, looking up from your handcuff-fisted lap, and seeing stark blue lights against a long-ignored landscape.

Christopher said California is a river of blue and I will never think of it differently.

I'm writing this letter , almost trembling. I need for you to hear me, or at least the story of the past three years--those you spent within labyrinthine corridors of concrete. Consider me a conduit. When lightning strikes a tree, its fires are shot through a thousand tissues and limbs fall in beautiful wreckage and the ground crackles a hundred feet around. In the end, the tree bears a scar and it continues wrapping rings of growth around its most blackened parts. The tree keeps growing but it will always have, coiled in its history, proof of of its damage.

I'm damaged. You are damaged.

We've both ushered that fire into the ground in different ways, but both bear darkened rings. We've both been conduits and have had the lawn throw up sparks beneath our feet. We've both had fire run through us, and wait for the ground to speak its response.

Still love you M---. Though angry and lost.