Futurism Loses Its Way

She never could stand the cold without the snow. A sparkling, virginal blanket of white on the streets and the lawns and the windowsills excused a host of meteorological sins. The padded quiet of a world sound-proofed in snow was hushed and womblike and she felt like nothing could harm her. If the sun was deceptively shining, however, and the ground was dry, the frigid wind felt like the sting of a slap from God’s own disdaining hand. No scarf or glove or coat could take the cold from her mind or heart. It’s as though winter would take up residence in her and the weather only confirmed her suspicions.

Mostly, she stayed indoors breathing the stale dry air of radiators and cigarettes. She refused to eat the food that wasn’t in the cupboards. When leaves were colorful and off their branches, she’d salvaged a tiny child’s school desk from a dumpster and it had found a home beside her bed. The zeros of her alarm clock blinked red off the branches of a small plant breathing its last backwards CO2 breaths in a strawberry basket on the tiny seat. In the middle of the night, the rattle of her ringing cell-phone would shock her awake, trembling against the industrial metal. A single pulse of buzz-saw silence would plead from a foot left of her case-less pillow. She knew it was him. She told herself she probably didn’t care.

Every third day she’d get all dolled up to go out. She’d try not to scrape her cornea with her eye-liner pencil. She’d try not to burn her neck with the straightener. She’d try not to nick her chalky ankles with the razor. The cutest tights with the prettiest dress with the least comfortable shoes, but she’d rarely make it off the landing. She’d fall asleep in her Sunday-best, a stepped-on paper crane on the couch. A used up Kleenex of indifference. She liked the light of the television, but not the sound. She liked the heat of the coffee, but not the taste. She remembered sleeping, but not how. She never listened to the music he’d pretended to like anymore.

She’d done her best to be kind and maybe that wasn’t too impressive. He’d just stood there, letting the rain pour across him. He didn’t ask for the explanations she’d told herself just below the music all night. He’d dragged her there, to the middle of the road and wrapped his hand around her hand. He said something she didn’t hear about the rain and Hollywood movies. She just stared at his worn out converse and wondered where her air had got to. When it finally spilled out, he nodded and flipped up his collar, like he’d only just noticed the weather. She didn’t remember walking home.

The empty sky still refused to snow and the sun was impotent to quell the stark winter. She won’t get dressed today. She didn’t know last night’s rasp of cell-phone sadness was the last he’d ever try.

Pragmatist Produce Preoccupation

For some time now, I’d been neglecting the question and problem of ethical eating. Long ago I committed myself to an ethical position on Western drug/alcohol culture and started calling myself “Straight Edge.” That had its roots in an at-the-time inexplicable revulsion at our societal relationship to drugs, alcohol and tobacco and I’ve since worked out a rationale about and behavioral posture towards those things I’m pretty happy with. After 8 years with that commitment, I’m finally allowing the concerns about all those other things I ingest to become influential.

And, much like that first commitment, I’ve finally decided to take action and then work out the arguments behind it. As I encounter difficulties and new discoveries in the ideas behind the behavior, like a good pragmatist, I’ll adjust my actions and ideas in a reciprocal dynamic.

So, what’s the new commitment? Well, it’s not as radical an abstention as being Straight Edge. I’ve decided to be an almost, not-quite vegetarian. Red meat is certainly out, as is pork. Dairy and eggs and other vegan-no-no’s are hanging in there. I’ll probably eat small portions of chicken and fish here and there, either because circumstances don’t allow me to avoid them without being rude/difficult/etc or if they are from a local, green, reputable source as far as I can ascertain.

So, it’s a nuanced and plastic position. But so is being straight edge. Being uncharitable or inhospitable in order to “stay pure” in either is just not an option.

And I have lots of reading and studying and thinking to do before I determine my “final” position. So, here we go:

-This Michael Pollan article convinced me to take a serious look at my eating habits, especially because I want to be able to (paideia-style) show my children someday a rebellious, counter-cultural way to eat.

-This website has lots of scary graphics which I’ve now stolen and posted w/ this blog post. Also, an awesome example of how to re-imagine local, amateur produce production towards the end. It comes with this exhortation:

“And finally, in the context of ecological economics, fossil fuel depletion and climate change, ask whether what you do in your life, vocation, hobbies, and habits, contributes to the long-term function (or dysfunction) of society.”

And this excellent advice:

"It appears that some of the greatest saving can be realized by:

* reduced use of petroleum-based fertilizers and fuel on farms,
* a decline in the consumption of highly processed foods, meat, and sugar,
* a reduction in excessive and energy intensive packaging,
* more efficient practices by consumers in shopping and cooking at home,
* and a shift toward the production of some foods (such as fruits and vegetables) closer to their point of consumption."

Futurisms' Myriad Marvels

It’s all light and lightness, cozy in the heavy white of morning dreams. A creaky hand of mine excavates the sheets beside me, traversing the hollow of where bedside companions would be. Colors tumble into shapes behind my stubbornly shut eyelids. Angles and flashes and light and nothing and more, depending on which way I loll and roll about the broken down mattress we’ve shoved in the corner beneath thrift-store curtains and odds-and-ends decorations; amongst a litter of clothes and stacks of un-shelved books. The swirled mass of blankets beside me evidence that she’s been here and their remnant warmth evidence it was recent enough. It’s a good thing she quits the bed well before me in the mornings. If she lingered, I’d never write a thing.

When I convince eye-lashes to part with cheeks, she’s perched at the window sill, like a kid to candy store windows. Our mountain looms somewhere in her gaze and the morning sun can’t bleach her silhouette. She heaves a contented sigh and the blinds shimmer around her. I sleepily push up seated and the corners of her mouth lift and the corners of her eyes pinch pleasantly.

“I think the peak thinks we should dance today. At least once.” She says, gravely. “To something old and something new. But not necessarily in that order.”

“Easy for him to say. Mountains don’t have to finish dissertations.” I reply, gruffly, while tucking a tired pillow behind my head.

I press my eyes closed again, gently, and the swirl of shapes and kaleidoscope patterns washes around me. For the theater of my mind, the random dance of rods and cones before the blood-vessel patterned curtains. She’ll pad across the floor in bare-feet and re-inhabit the mass off blankets and sheets where she nests with me every night when our eyes can’t keep to their reading lines. She’ll run a cold hand across my chest and hook an ankle with mine and nuzzle into the crook of my arm and chest. Her cheekbone will set into the notch of a long-ago-broken collarbone as though God set the cost of this moment before our births; one bitter tumble and 6 high-school weeks in a sling.

“Did you notice?” she whispered into the egg-shell sheets.

“Notice?” with eyes still closed, feeling her breath rise and fall.

“God gave us a new place in the night. We’ve been the victim of angelic relocation. I can’t believe you slept through a miracle, young man.” She yawned,” While you were staring at me, I bet you didn’t notice the drywall is now exposed beams and white-washed cedar walls.”

She poked me in the ribs.

“You’ll find that Gabriel rolled up his sleeves and built our deck in the night, with his own golden sweat and honey blood. Patio furniture, delivered by cherubic messengers, carved from heavenly Galilean corral, light and sturdy, bears our morning meal. Jesus himself strolled through the home, performing inverse-fig-tree miracles on every pot and planter. We live in a sea of white and green. Michael’s sword cauterized a white-sand beach just steps from our front door. The basket is already packed with brie and strawberries and crusty, rustic bread.”

“I’d settle for coffee,” I teased.

“Let’s not pretend I’m the weird one, yeah?”

“Coffee, three pages and lunch and a swim. Then we’ll dance. Does the peak have a playlist in mind?”

“Let’s start with Marvin.”

“…and end with Justin?”

“and we’ll improvise in between.”

In our still-damp t-shirts and swim-clothes, we swayed and smiled and laughed as the afternoon sky darkened with the mountain’s bass-beat of thunder. It would be a week before we saw another soul. A month before either of us laughed at anyone else’s jokes.

Hemi-veritable History (Futurisms' Look Back)

It was a look you’d expect on the face of a mischievous child, really. Her chin held squarely and evenly straight ahead, with a waxing smile to its north and arching eyebrows more northerly still. It was the eyes most of all, somehow looking at me, though they were directed up and away. It was a face that said “Water balloons? What water balloons?”

But it resided on a face I’d never seen before and it traveled with a person passing me in a public place. I fear I may have gawked openly at first, only to drop my head shyly at the last moment, and catching that troublesome look only sidelong. Her hair was a weightless but satisfying whirl about her head in the springtime wind and her white, unbuttoned and knee-length coat whipped with a contrasting sharpness. The rest, including sharp dark jeans, rolled to the peak of the ankle and some stiff, elegant but simple collar of her shirt showed without imposition. The only item without tact and impressive consideration was the plastic handled, retractable dog leash, which conjured images of velour be-track-suited housewives on mid mornings walks much more than this urbane cloud of lavender scent.

At the end of this retractable, awful leash was a gleefully spirited terrier, like a pit-bull, but smaller and with none of the menace. Only Romanesque musculature in miniature. Its broad head swung, smiling mouth grinning to the world, from side to side, weaving erratically across the paved path between swaths of inviting lawn. Uninterested in me, the terrier dashed across my path from behind, and then returned behind me again, following the trajectory of a Frisbee or the like. Responding to its mildly annoyed owners calls, it dashed before me again, and I realized I was going to be wrapped in its tether. I attempted to step to my right, onto the lawn and out of its spiraling path. The leash joined me in the traverse.

Some other distraction found the canine attention and my ankles’ noose was suddenly synched. Laughing embarrassedly, the girl who’d moments earlier looked away, stepped towards me, stooped and trying to free me.

“Oh my god, I’m SO sorry!” She chirped, between titters of laughter and stammering steps towards my predicament.

And we pitched together on the lawn in a silent moment, my eyes filled with springtime sun and my ears with springtime wind. We just lay, for a moment, laughing with mutual shame and good-nature. A rough, warm tongue came to my cheek and streaked across my forehead in the greeting of four-legged friends. I gripped the pooch about the ribs and lifted it into the air.

“I think this is yours,” I said, staring into friendly eyes.

“Haven’t you ever read this before?” she replied, holding up my copy of Gatsby that tumbled from my bag in our mutual felling. Propped up on her elbow, she flipped through the pages casually. I put the terrier down between us, immediately regretting the barrier.

Starting to stand, she clutched the dog under her arm, pressed a free hand against my chest and said, “Besides, you should make notes in pencil. Second readings rarely yield identical notes.”

I nodded, without looking her in the eyes I would have bet were green, and untangled myself to leave.

She was already laying out her blanket beside me.

Sweltering Summer (Futurism)

At least on the balcony, there’s a breeze. The soap and brush and bucket from when I scrubbed these ancient patio furniture this afternoon still sweats in the corner, beneath the vine creeping across the wrought iron, losing its grip on the decrepit French windows. Those awful windows, single paned and warped, that let out all the heat in the winter and leave no place for an air-conditioner in the summer. Her sandaled feet, clad in the gladiator style of several summers ago (that I teased her so mercilessly for following), rest on the railing, nestled into a niche of bare wrought-iron amidst the august greenery. She’s been drinking the white wine I’ll only buy a bottle at a time.

“I won’t display alcohol like it’s a prize,” I’ve been known to say, over wine-racks at flea markets and bazaars.

“Its not a liquor cabinet,” she’d tease,” its vino!”

The glass still hangs tenuously from her slender fingers, just a breathe from the brick. Her nails are painted an ice-like blue and I can’t tell if her eyes are open behind her sunglasses. Her head is tilted gently back, at rest and her face is creaseless in a near smile. The breeze remains faithful. A favorite t-shirt, washed and re-washed to near-gossamer, wraps across her stomach, crinkling here and there with deep breaths.

A train rolls by as I mutely take my seat beside her placid sea of composure and the bell cuts over the din of work-a-day traffic. Beneath us, 10 or 15 feet, an army of joggers and students and young mothers march their discordant parade route of the late day. It is the heavy golden hour of cinematographer dreams, and warm in that way only the late summer can be. Warm and heavy and somniferous, like the atmosphere is decompressing us (and school children, most of all) for the ascent into autumn, we retreat from the brick oven of the apartment. Salad for dinner and day-old bread with oil and vinegar linger unattended between us on a low, wobbly table decorated with a spotty mosaic of a rose or some such thing. We’ll nibble at our meal eventually, when she feels like talking and I’ll mostly listen and eat more bread than salad.

Her breathing pauses ever-so-briefly and I look, expecting her words.

“How come I’m never ready for August?” she exhales, in mock frustration.

She laughs that easy laugh of youth and smiles at me, shielded in the blank owl-eyes of her sunglasses. I reach across, leaning my chair perilously on two legs, and swipe her wine glass carefully. She reaches out for the lost item, faux-pout on her lips. I switch the glass to my right hand to keep it from her reach.

“ I’ll open a bottle of red when it gets dark,” I say, taking her hand in mine. We fold our fingers together and she resumes her perfect relaxation, as though I’d dropped a stone in a pond and the ripples had diffused themselves, to be forgotten for always.

I squint against the golden glow to catch in my view the slightest part of her lips at her breath and the throb of pulse in her regal neck, trying to make a memory in the materiality of the life she shares with me.

Blessedly, the breeze remains faithful, propelled to us by a storm the french windows will not survive.

Living The (Ancestral) Dream

So, it really does just come down to genetics and accidents of history. *Shrug* Meh.

Pushing @ Alpha

Eventually, I'm going to need to get a mathematics education.
(Thanks to Steve for showing this to Emily. Thanks to Emily for showing this to me.)

Where Is Our Fanciful Futurism?

The linoleum is cold and plastic and awful. It hasn't been mopped in...well, a while, so its gritty with crumbs and a little sticky in spots. Four minutes have gone by and I'm pressing the handle down on the french press, with bleary-eyed diligence. Preternatural quiet. 50 grams of just-ground Trader Joes something or other. 30 ounces of just-not-quite boiling water. The black pours itself through its own cloud of steam in the early spring morning cold. Those fucking boilers...


Traversing the interior threshold from linoleum to hardwood, the steady pad of my feet weaves around the boards I know tend to creak. There's another I ought not to wake. The floorboards are just as cold, but worn softer with the years. More pleasant beneath my toes. The books are already stacked on the sill of the tall windows facing the street. Beside the works, on one side, are the sunflowers I keep in a copper vase and, on the other, the magnolias she keeps in an empty wine bottle. The curtains hang around them all like wedding veils. I lift them and kiss the texts with my fingertips, pulling today's old, dead friend. The mug, sitting beside the stack of tomes, steams the pane of glass in a conical opaqueness.


Wrapped in an afghan blanket from the first time I lived in this city, against the opening volley of cold from a tired leather sofa, I sip and read and stare at the street. A few folks trundle through the cold towards a days labor. A neighbor walks a dog. Too early still for school children. I pencil in a note or two. Underline here and there. I'll open my computer in another place. I can read in this spot, but never write. Couldn't tell you why.


I don't hear her steps, but I do hear the bedroom door creak and scrape across the surface of the floor just a little. I smile and, for a moment, don't read the words my eyes pass over. As I feel her breath on the skin behind my ear only a second before she presses her lips in the same spot, I stare at that photo of her from the lake so many months ago. A strand of her hair falls across my neck. I grin and tilt my head, revealing and yielding more of the tender skin of my neck to her kiss. She obliged, pressing her cheek into the hallow between ear and shoulder. I crane and twist back to look up at her, still sleepy-eyed, but smiling, arms folded.

"You always think I won't hear you. You think you can grind coffee on the back porch and it won't wake me up."


I laugh and she winds around to sit across my lap. She's only wearing a t-shirt and socks, with just the glimpse of boyish underwear peaking out. Its a t-shirt that, the first time I saw her wear it, we lived a thousand miles away. A t-shirt I could never wear again once she'd claimed it without knowing she'd claimed it. She curled in my lap like a cat intent on keeping me from my work, her arms around my neck and nose pressed to my nose.

"Let's bundle up and see the tigers today."


She knows I've got to work. She knows I need so much to read and to write and grade papers and... but she'll talk to the tigers and hold my hand and smile at me when I laugh at her one-sided conversations.

The evening's warmth will be my opportunity to read in peace, after dinner, while she gardened. The rest was too sacred to sully with responsibilities.

He Has Dreams, Like I Do

About dancing:

Sometimes I even close my eyes. Other times, because I forgot a bandana to tie my bangs out of my eyes, my sweat-slick hair whips across my glasses, so that it's like I've been crying in front of my glasses, and not behind. Then I don't even need to close my eyes. I just let them wash in unfocus, my peripherals used to prevent collisions.

But it always starts a little more tentative; a little less in general. Feet together, head bobbing and shoulders rolling side to side. Getting the feel. Finding the beat. Remembering the steps. Remembering to forget that people watch and smirk and judge. Learning all over again how to just trust the music's instructions. Its little cues and set ups. Its mini surprises and pseudo conclusions.

And most nights, I get going a little, take a break, enjoy a song, goof off with friends, and maybe even dance with someone novel. I've been the guy kissing a stranger on the dance floor. That's happened. That's kind of thrilling.



But the best nights are the nights where I'm alone in a room full of people. The nights when for 20 or 30 minutes, even an hour, I get into tribal-rain-dance mode. When I peyote-vision-quest that shit for song after song, except without the peyote or the desert. It's when I lift my head from my feet and the floor and avoiding eye contact with non-dancers of all stripes. When I lift my head and smile and look at nothing and let my body wind and bounce and shift improvisationally, mysteriously in tension with what's been and what is about to be.

And I smile. I just grin pleasantly to no one in particular. And I try to lose all my gravity and keep my balance all at once.