Poetry Jam #9

A funny thing happened, just now; I looked in my big folder of handwritten writings and found that the number of new poems it contained was only enough for one decent-sized poetry jam.  This isn't because I've stopped writing poetry; it's because, although I like writing by hand, with my shiny fountain pen, when I have an idea for a poem it's usually easier to type it out on the closest computer.  Does this mean that I spend way too much time in close proximity to computers?  Probably.

But at the same time, I also have a number of hand-written stubs, proto-poems I started without finishing or fixing, that I've been meaning to revisit.  The next poetry post will probably include many of these, because some of them are actually pretty cool.  They're just not done, is all.

As for the poems I wrote on the computer, I might have included a few in this post to pad it out a little more.  But they're on my desk top, and I've only got my laptop here, so they'll have to wait!

Today's poems are from the approximate period of April 2011 to December of that same year.  The themes they address are diverse, but mostly they are sad, because 2011 was kind of a downer of a year for me.  It had its bright spots, as most years do, but on the whole 2012 is really kicking its ass.  Way to go, 2012.  Keep on kickin'.


A Downtown Walk

I think I hear an echo,
or am I speaking double,
talking loud enough for two?
A distressing conversation
set between myself and you.

I swear I heard a whisper
of something like a whistle,
something small enough to miss.
In my lifelong agitation,
in the shadow of a kiss,

I think I hear a siren
in buzzing, throbbing silence,
walking up the busy street;
a vibration in my headphones
where the storm and waters meet.

I wonder where it's screaming,
to where its wheels are squealing
in a little lonesome town,
upside down beneath the waters
where the stranded ducklings drown?

It feels like something's burning,
a million pictures taken
in the lifetime of a day,
of a moment soon forgotten
set in sepia and grey.


Song to You

No beauty meets a melody
like yours in every word you speak,

No light could shine as crystal clear
and cool as you in your mystique;

No secret ever kept as sweet
and left my heart so weak,

Your soul so like a minor scale
expressed in an ecstatic peak.



Amazon Blues

I think I saw you walking
seven blocks from Ferry Street;
I pulled up to a stoplight,
watched you cross and didn't speak;
I didn't want to say a word,
I just tried to be discrete.

I guess I figured you'd be leaving,
thought you'd go and disappear;
I hoped you'd travel 'round the world,
come back in twenty, thirty years,
and I still can't quite imagine
why you'd keep on living here.



The Ballad of the Silent Word

The silent word was dead;
it died three thousand years ago
the instant it was born,
it shouted with a silent voice
and gently drooped its head.

The silent word was dead:
the mourners let it lie in state,
it moldered in the room
and suffered long in silence
as the eulogy was read.

The silent word was dead:
asleep inside a stack of paper,
dreaming of a song,
it flared up into silent life
the instant it was read.


Sleight of Hand

The sound of a hundred hands inspires
the sight of a thousand lucky eyes,
the lines and lights,
and lies
a powerful public work declaims;
the words of a silent leader's mouth,
the people's fear
and doubt.

The radio plays the people's choice
of cynical songs on endless loop,
to see the depths
to which they'll stoop;

A miracle on a darkened stage,
identical birds and swarthy cats:
a rabbit from
a hat.


Cherry

The sunlight on a beam of cherry wood,
warming in the afternoon and
holding warmth throughout the night;
a blossom on a branch of vanity,

Nothing comes close
to water at the end of drought
or drifting dunes of melting snow;

Nothing comes close
to floating on a stream of melody,
slowly sinking at the moment
nothing holds you up but earth;

To dreaming, and at last remembering
nothing comes close.


The Long Night

If only to be young and strong
as all the world is breaking down,
with fire burning all around,
releasing ashes to the evening,
keeping moonlight from the ground,
I would stay where I belong.

If only to be home among
my people, and to see their faces'
resignation take its place
beneath a grainy layer of dusk;
I'd take a look at them and brace
against the plunge that comes along.

If I were ever young and strong
and swaddled in decaying light,
I would be troubled by the night;
observing all that's growing and
remarking on the present blight,
I would admit that I was wrong.



The Nothing Man

In the name of Nothing Man,
a final will and testament
bequeathing none and nothingness,
to name whoever else will know.

Nothing leaves the Nothing Man,
and nothing new has come before
it disappears into the night,
like nothing new has ever done.

Come the night the Nothing Man
denies the night that came before,
and never mentions anymore
the only name he ever knew.



Broken Glass Around my Head

Shining streets of broken glasses
gleam in corners of my eye;
I had nothing much to do with
how they broke; I don't know why
but something makes me want to hurry home,
hurry home away from  here,
away from all the broken beer
that's soaking in the stars.

Music in the evening hours,
music in my eyes and ears;
I am blinded, I am out of touch
and deaf to all the sounds the people
make; they make me want to hurry home,
hardly have to say a thing
before I hill the doorbell ring
and I am back at home.



Poway Under Cover of Darkness

The spotlight on the silver streets;
the absence of persistent beats
is keenly felt, as keen as night
as winter's cold in city lights.

A chilly fifty-three degrees,
this southern California breeze;
the constellations upside down
above my California town.

All of this I keenly miss
with music in my ears; if this
is music, let it stand and play
a song of moonlit nights and days.




Roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll,

Rolling on the paperweight forever,
ever rolling on a compact disk
and spinning on tectonic plates,
roll, roll, roll, roll,

Rivers in a cabinet
and monsters under bassinets
roll, roll, round and round,
ever rolling under solid ground,
roll, roll,
twisting in the horrible,
horrible hurricane,

Rolling over carousels together,
never rolling anywhere apart,
and twirling into silver dollars,
roll, roll, roll,
____________________

Commentary now!

The end of the last poetry jam left me moping and despondent over the ill-treatment of my foolish heart at the hands of a pretty girl.  A Downtown Walk, Song to You, and Amazon Blues find me in much the same condition, because I would not just get over it already.  None of them, however, are actually about that particular girl.  The first is a more general contemplation of melancholy.  The second is an abstract expression of longing, directed at no one in particular.  The third is about a completely different girl from a different time.  One day, I may find it difficult to keep them all straight.  But for now, I take comfort and peace of mind from my lovely girlfriend, who doesn't seem to be going anywhere.


The Ballad of the Silent Word is kind of heavy handed, and it used to be more so.  It's written in my notebook with a different fifth line: "and whimpered as it bled."  Clearly, I spent way too much time being morbid before I wrote this.  The idea for this came from an article I read about a "post-literate" society, a concept of which I am very much not on board with.


Sleight of Hand is also kind of heavy handed, I guess.  You try to make a general point about society and everything comes out totalitarian, with the statues and the subliminal messages and what not.  No, I don't think we live in a Stalinist nightmare of memory holes and gulags.  I just think people aren't as fond of truth as they are of comforting illusions.

And then there's Cherry, which is a positively cheerful bit of dreaming.  I've posited before that my most artistically successful things have always been melancholy rather than happy.  But while I can read melancholy into this poem, it doesn't strike me that way.  Reading it makes me feel happy, and I think it's still a really good poem!  Imagine that.

The Long Night was written as a more or less immediate response to the novel Less Than Zero, which I reviewed last year.  Needless to say, it sent me right back into apocalyptic-doom mode.  The feelings came from reading the book, but the imagery was inspired by my memories of 2003 Cedar Fire in San Diego County.  What connection is there between the two?  None really, but there felt like there was one at the time.

I wrote The Nothing Man more or less in one piece between sets at an open mic night that I was attending.  No, I wasn't reading poetry in front of anyone; I just had an idea and wanted to write it down before I forgot it.  It's kind of ridiculous, but not the most ridiculous thing I wrote last year by far.  No, you're not allowed to read those things.

The only way that I can explain Broken Glass Around my Head is that I was slightly drunk when I had the idea for it.  I was walking home from a social event for my teaching cohort at the Eugene Hilton, and much wine had been served.  Judging by my handwriting, I wasn't really drunk by the time I sat down and wrote the thing, but walking through the streets at night can clear your head a bit.

Poway Under Cover of Darkness reflects another night time stroll, under much soberer conditions, back in my home town for the holidays.  The difference between those two walks can clearly be felt in the difference between these two poems.  I like the second one more, to be very honest.

And finally, Roll, x10 is, well, a poem.  I'm not even sure if I meant to title it at the time, it just had the word "roll" written a bunch of times in the upper margin.  Word association and stream-of-consciousness produced this underrated masterpiece.  Look upon it and beware; just reading it might get you high.

Just a Regular Road Trip

Last Monday, I went shopping for a used car.  On Thursday, I drove my purchase off the lot.  But strictly speaking, it wasn't me driving: the driver was my friend Bau.  You see, the car that won me over, that I knew could satisfy my needs, fit my budget, and provide me with the satisfying road experience I wanted, was a 2008 Chevy Aveo.  And it had a manual transmission.

The Scariest Thing in the World, scheming in Eugene, Oregon.

Now, a short-term thinker might have shied away from such a purchase.  Not only had I never so much as turned the ignition on a stick-shift before, I had a stated commitment to embark on a journey of over a thousand miles just three days later.  I had to return to my ancestral lands to participate in my father's wedding, and there was a general expectation that I should arrive in one piece.  Were I to play it safe, I might have stuck, at least for the immediate present, with my dad's Dodge Magnum (pictured here, covered in snow).

But I had other considerations.  I wanted a car in my own name: one that was more practical for my lifestyle, easier to maneuver in tight spaces, and lighter in its fuel consumption.  I also thrilled at the unexpected opportunity before me, to learn a new skill and impress some folks.  So I signed on for The Unknown Quantity and spent the next three days mastering its conceptual intricacies, and trying really hard not to roll backwards into a line of cars when I parked on hills.

Finally, on the date of Saturday, July 15, having sufficiently leveled up (and placed all my meager skill points in hill-scaling), I set off down Interstate 5 on my epic adventure.  It was, for the most part, uneventful and unremarkable.  But I learned a lot about diving, lessons that rang truer as each of the ensuing, interminable hours passed.

I've made this particular journey several times, in both directions.  I've done it in a Suburban, a task that seems harrowing through narrow mountain passes.  I've done it in the Magnum, which is a lot more secure but not much more economical.  I had reason for trepidation, driving stick for the first time over such a long distance.  But I found that, on long stretches of sparsely-populated freeway, driving The Mighty Muskrat was a lot like driving an automatic.  I might glide in neutral over a slow curve or down a steep hill, or shift down to fourth or third while ascending an imposing mountain, but most of the time I could sit in fifth gear and cruise along at a steady 70 miles per hour.  I couldn't exactly zip past slower traffic with the greatest of ease, but you have to give some things up when you surrender a machine with an 8-cylinder hemi engine.

I stopped in San Francisco to spend the night at my sister's place; despite my fears, I was not defeated by that city's exaggerated, non-euclidean topography.  True, I only had to negotiate two hills in my time there, but it was an important personal triumph, not to mention a mercy for my transmission.

The Mountain Goat, greeting the dawn in San Francisco, California.

Monday morning took me out of the Bay Area and back onto the 5, where it is distressingly easy to go more than 80 miles per hour, whether you want to or not.  High winds swept across the central valley, jostling me on the road and somehow generating the ghostly sound of a windshield wiper on a dry pane of glass.  That noise was probably the scariest thing on the entire trip, but since I only heard it in high-wind zones and it persisted even when I was in neutral, I decided to press on without fear of catastrophic failure.  It's that kind of optimistic thinking that characterizes my general attitude toward drives like these.

Driving through California's great central valley is not one of life's most essential experiences, unless you're way into expensive gasoline, malodorous cattle ranches, and perennial angry placards accusing Democrats in Congress of taking away the region's water (which I suppose was once naturally abundant).  Fortunately for me, The Yellow Submarine has a capable sound system, with a quiet engine and decent isolation from the inherent noise pollution of a high-speed freeway.  Armed with a book of over forty CDs, I beat back the monotonous advance of insanity and kept my eyes out for the slightest change in elevation.

Passing through the Grapevine and into that mystical parallel universe known as Los Angeles county, I knew I was about to face my greatest challenge.  Armed with my stick-shift, I was to attempt a crossing of the most congested city of the American Nightmare, at just about five o'clock in the afternoon.  I would be forced to stop, and start, and stop, and start, time and again, inching my way through urban blight and doubtless ruining my machine with amateurish jolts and stalls.  And that was why I abandoned the direct route and made for the San Bernardino freeway.

I have no doubt I saved at least an hour from my total travel time, but that section of the 10, at that time of day, isn't much better than the 5.  Apart from a few glorious minutes of 60-mile-per-hour bliss, The Tiny Minivan and I crawled our way home in first and second gear, when we were allowed to move at all.

There was basically no rush in taking this shot before I had to start moving again.

It was at these low speeds, navigating the capricious currents of Los Angeles traffic, that I truly began to appreciate the joyful burden of the manual transmission.  Although I frequently found myself in the position of having to start in first from a dead stop, I avoided the stalling and lurching that plagued my early efforts.  I reached a level of basic understanding with my vehicle.  Although I obviously could not hope to control the traffic, I could control my car to an extent that I'd never been able to appreciate in an automatic.  When we finally reached the 15, and I was able to move about once more with freedom, it was a very satisfying release.

Finally rolling into the humble town of Poway, California, I felt a great deal of pride in my accomplishment.  I'd taken a car I knew very little about and finished a physically challenging drive.  I'd covered the last 215 miles of the trip with only about six gallons of gas, even as I pushed through stop-and-go traffic and steeply inclined grades.  I had renewed my confidence in myself as a driver.  And then, with less than half a mile to my mother's house, I stalled at a stop sign at the top of a hill.

The Car of Many Nicknames, relaxing in Poway, California.

My two-day drive was an important lesson in humility and in possibility, a chance to reevaluate my relationship with my car and the world I drove it through.  It was also dull, long, and by the end of the second day physically uncomfortable.  But it was definitely worth doing.  I'm not looking forward to doing it in reverse in a few weeks, but I'm sure that will be worth it, too.

Miniature American Flags For Others

Is this becoming a political blog?  I really don't mean for it to.  My purpose has always been self expression rather than straight-up advocacy.  I don't make any effort to hide my political opinions, of course.  I'm a liberal, and I am so because I believe that the economy and the government and all of our various societal constructs exist for the benefit of the people at large, rather than the minority with the most money.  So I favor strong, viable institutions, available for use by the entire public and supported by the entire public.  Public schools, public transportation, and yes, public healthcare.

So obviously, I'm pretty pleased with today's decision from the Supreme Court that preserves the Affordable Care Act in almost exactly the form it was passed.  There's a lot that is wrong with that law, but "overreach" is certainly not the issue.  Our current health care crisis was created by the private insurance market, and the ACA functions primarily by trying to enroll more people in that market.  Having coverage with a company that makes money by taking as much and paying as little as possible is better than no coverage at all, it still represents a situation that no fair-minded person should regard as ideal.  And yet I am pleased nonetheless.

The ACA provides us, the American people, with many tangible benefits that we would be worse off without.  The Republicans have proposed no comprehensive alternative, so their demands for "repeal and replace" are really just demands for repeal, and then allowing insurance companies to operate however they please.  I prefer some rules to no rules, especially when the rules prohibit discrimination against women, the elderly, and the sick.

Pleased as I am, though, I find the Supreme Court's decision to be fascinating in a lot of ways.  Liberals will note that Anthony Kennedy showed his true colors by writing in his dissent that he and the other three justices in the minority regarded the entirety of the law (not just the controversial "individual mandate") as "invalid."  Anthony Kennedy may agree with the liberals on some points, but he is not a liberal.  He is not a moderate, either.  He is merely an idiosyncratic conservative.  Better than a dogmatist like Scalia or Thomas, but far too easily led by them.

Chief Justice John Roberts, on the other hand, is a tougher one to analyze in this case.  He had, before this vote, a more conservative reputation than Kennedy.  He probably still deserves it.  But his vote gave the liberal justices their majority and allowed this law, which conservatives despise, to survive.  As a result, Americans will keep what benefits the law gives them, even as they await the real long term solution that will help lift us out of our real crisis.  Because conservative media and politicians will publicly flay him for this, he should be commended for a courageous vote.

On the other hand, the decision he wrote seems calculated to preserve the law while simultaneously undermining the power of Congress to pass progressive laws.  It feels odd to be so thankful to John Roberts when he seems determined to put social security, medicare, and countless other programs on increasingly thin ice.  In the best case scenario, the language of Roberts' decision is a face-saving measure for the conservative crowd, while allowing him to vote his conscience.  In the worst case, he's up to something sinister, and this is merely laying the groundwork for the annihilation of every progressive law since the New Deal.  It may be something in between these extremes, but Roberts' real motivation is certainly something more than he's let on.

Regardless, it should be clear to all liberals that the Supreme Court, while occasionally capable of doing the right thing, cannot be counted on to back the interests of the public above all else.  At least five of the Justices are prone to the influences of reductionist ideology, and will side with injustice if it suits their "originalist" fantasies.  Nominating Justices to the Supreme Court is an extremely important power, and ought to be a major factor in our consideration of who to support for the Presidency.  The Court is powerful, and it should be powerful, but our only means of influencing that power directly is through the President.  With the oldest members of the Court currently in the conservative faction, we have an opportunity to buy ourselves some measure of judicial security; provided the President in office is inclined to appoint liberals, or at the very least true moderates.

All of this may sound cynical and nakedly political.  If you are a conservative, it will sound horrifying.  But we're stuck playing this game now, and I'd like to see the side that favors justice and equality playing it well.

WFJ Book Club #9: Dreams from My Father

Some time in the future, probably not very long from now, Barack Obama will be remembered in much the same way as all of his predecessors, one more link in a chronology of American Presidents.  It will be assumed without much critical thought that he was destined for that list, that every stage in his life was a step in that direction.  Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer, Lyndon Johnson was a public school teacher, and Ronald Reagan was an actor, but none of these things seem to define their identities except as stops along the way, as if they were just biding their time and waiting their turn.

So reading his first book, the memoir Dreams from My Father, seems a little surreal.  The book was first published in 1995, before he'd been elected to a single public office.  The edition I own, republished in 2004, identifies its author on the back as "the U.S. senator-elect from Illinois."  A title like that is so immediate and time-bound I can't help but laugh at the prospect of a future political scholar pulling it from a library shelf, and wondering briefly if they've got the right author.  I don't know when Obama began planning in earnest to run for President, but there was a time when "senator-elect" was the highest office he could claim.  And years before that, he was just a regular guy; if he was a future President all along, there was no way of knowing.

Obama certainly has one of the most unconventional life stories of any U.S. President.  He was born in Hawaii and lived for four years in Indonesia, moving to the American mainland only when it was time to go to college.  From there he adopted the lifestyle of a socially conscious African-American in the early 80's, though he pursued it in a variety of ways: business, community organizing, and eventually the study of law.  There was no special destiny about any of this, and Obama's primary theme throughout the book is doubt: uncertainty of who he was, what he was doing, and what he was going to become.

History will remember Obama as America's first African-American President.  Examining that claim, however, brings us to the great contradiction of his identity, nestled in the contradictions of our racial politics.  As an American of African ancestry, he certainly meets the definition of an African-American.  In common parlance, however, "African-American" is a synonym for "black," and black is implicitly regarded as the opposite of "white."  But Obama is biracial, with a white mother and a black father.  If you were to try explaining our racial system to a Martian, it would be difficult to explain in purely rational or mathematical terms why someone who is precisely half black and half white should be regarded primarily as black.  Obama accepted the label, but not every biracial person he meets with on his journey accepts it in quite the same way.

The path toward coming to terms with his blackness, the part of himself that makes him "African," leads Obama to reevaluate over and over his social status, his mission in life, and most of all his family.  His extended family is large, particularly on his father's side.  But Obama never really knew his father, apart from a brief reunion in his early adolescence.  He did not come to know most of his half-siblings, cousins, and other African relatives until years after Obama Senior had suddenly died.  Dreams from My Father reaches a climax with his first visit to Kenya, where the reunion with his long-lost family introduces new stories and facts into the mythology Obama constructed for himself.  He recounts these discoveries with high emotion and no small amount of pain, but by the book's end it is implied that he has drawn some measure of peace from them.

Race is everywhere in Dreams, and it is discussed primarily from a black perspective.  This means occasionally stepping on the toes of whites, describing them in terms of oppression and colonialism that the less enlightened may find threatening or offensive.  But Obama is always in a state of doubt: partly as a result of his white heritage, and partly from experience working in impoverished, inner-city Chicago, he tries to look beyond the orthodoxies of the black community.  Where the line between idealism and reality should be drawn is never resolved, but it helps in some way to explain Obama's pragmatic political style.

As someone who, like most people, came to know Obama first as a rising political star and then a sudden contender for the Presidency, it is impossible not to analyze this book for clues to understanding his political choices.  But apart from the oft-observed truisms that he is both a liberal and a pragmatist, there's not much to learn about Obama the politician.  Politicians are cautious with their words, careful to offend as few people as possible.  I chuckled somewhat at the younger Obama's fond recollections of Jeremiah Wright, knowing that he'd probably prefer to publicly discuss the Reverend as little as possible after what happened four years ago.  Dreams is not a collection of boring freedom-flavored platitudes, the like of which major candidates like to foist upon the public to boost their electoral potential.  It is measured and not at all sensational, but it is also frank, honest, and emotionally powerful.  Even knowing the job that Barack Obama would one day hold, it still comes across as a book about a man's past, not a strategic support-piece of a career politician's ambition.

The man who wrote Dreams from My Father is the man I voted for in 2008, or at least the version of that man who I most identify with and support.  After meeting him anew in this way, I wonder what a time traveling, mid-90's Obama would make of his future self's administration.  Would he be disappointed by what pragmatism and political reality had made of his ideals?  How willing would he be to accept those compromises?  Could the Obama of the past properly appreciate the burdens of the office which the present Obama has carried for almost four years?

I'm not sure that any of us could, any more than one book can ever take us directly into the heart and mind of another human being.  But Dreams will be as important to Obama's legacy as just about anything else he has or will produce: a first-hand record of a man who would be President, long before he could have thought it possible.

The Price of my Piracy

I'm not one, in a lot of ways, to "speak for my generation."  It's said that nowadays, nobody pays for music anymore, yet I sit on a pile of CDs I bought with my own cash.  I sift around for aged music I can forge a connection to, rather than chasing the latest sensation.  But I do display one of my generation's vices: I own a lot of music I didn't pay for.

Recently, a pair of articles made me think about this in a way I've usually avoided.  The first was a short post by Emily White, an intern at NPR, describing her history of collecting music without paying for it: essentially, the recording industry's worst nightmare. White doesn't flaunt her piracy, but she doesn't exactly apologize for it either.  What she does do, however, is lament the system that asks her to choose between paying into an antiquated model, or simply breathing in what seems to float freely through the digital air.

The second was a response post by David Lowery, a musician and member of the rock bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker (don't worry if you've never heard of them, I hadn't either).  Lowery's open letter in particular is a fascinating and extremely well-informed read, and brought home some truths that many people in these modern times, myself included, have preferred to ignore.  It's essential reading and I won't try to duplicate or summarize it here, but I do feel like I have something to say about it.

Despite his stated intention not to shame or guilt Ms. White or others like her, after reading Lowery's essay I was seized by a moral concern over the contents of my hard drive.  Most days I can't be bothered to think about the issues surrounding illicit digital distribution, accepting that it's just something that exists among my peer group.  I've participated in it, both directly and indirectly.  Most of the time, it's not a part of my daily life, but sometimes it is.  If taking music for free is wrong, I want to know just how wrong I am.

I have a lot of music in my iTunes library; not as much as White (who keeps 11,000 tracks), but a substantial amount that keeps me listening to a wide variety of sounds all year: altogether, 5,831 tracks of music and other recordings.  Some of it I love, and some of it I like a lot.  Some of it, I keep around largely for novelty value.  Since I can still remember where just about every album came from, I decided to do a quick count of how much of it I could rightfully lay claim to, and how much I could be blamed for stealing, and how much I might reasonably be held accountable for should the RIAA ever succeed in tracking me down.

I decided to divide the music into two categories.  The first included albums that I had bought myself (either as a CD or download), plus albums that I had received as a gift (i.e., from someone who had paid for it, or from the artists themselves).  Category One is, therefore, all the music I obtained ethically.

The second category included all the music I had personally clutched from the internet (whether it was offered freely or not) and music I might term as "illicit gifts:" either received digitally from a friend's hard drive, or copied from a CD owned by a friend or family member.  Category Two is, therefore, music which I should have paid for, but did not.

After running a quick tally (as quickly as I could, anyway), I came to these totals: Of my 5,831 tracks of music, comedy, and various other sounds, I judged that 3,297 of them (Category One) were properly paid for, while the other 2,534 (Category Two) were not.  Applying the standard iTunes rate of ninety nine cents a track, I deemed the value of my ill-gotten goods at roughly $2,508.86. For all the rhetoric about the freedom to share culture on the internet, you have to admit that's kind of a lot.

It's not really a definitive number, however.  A small handful of items in Category Two were albums that had been made available by the artists as free downloads (at least at the time that I downloaded them).  I also had a certain degree of difficulty in distinguishing, in some cases, between albums I could consider "gifts" and albums I had simply copied from friends or family.  After all, I built much of my initial iTunes library, back when I was a teenager, on CDs that belonged to my parents.  I counted the vast majority of these in category two, but it certainly didn't feel like stealing at the time.

Hedging aside, there's a lot of audio on this hard drive that I simply did not pay for.  And honestly, I feel kind of bad about it.  Not in the sense of depriving starving musicians of income: because my tastes tend to run in the direction of classic rock, most of what I didn't pay for was produced by older artists (or even dead ones) who made their money long ago.  Not all of it; I have plenty of tracks by contemporary artists who ought to have been compensated.  Most of them, as far as I know, are doing alright in the financial sense.  That isn't really the point.  The point is, I took something off the market that should have been paid for.  I enjoy most of this music far too much to delete it on principle, but I would very much like to stop stealing it.

Nowadays, I listen to a lot of Spotify.  It's a fantastic concept, putting just about all the world's recorded music in one instantly accessible archive, paid for by ads and subscriptions.  It's also not perfect: Spotify "compensates" artists and labels at cutthroat rates, while sitting on massive profits that it hasn't fully earned.  But it has effectively killed any real motivation for me to use file-sharing to hear free music.  I hate Spotify's ads like I hate most ads, but I'm willing to sit through them if they represent even a trickle of money flowing in the right direction.  Spotify and other "internet radio" sites represent the best possible future for music: everything paid for, and everything instantly available.

I like CDs, because I honestly love the album experience.  I still listen to the ones I own (and as you can tell from my stats, I own many).  But I've always believed they cost more than they should.  I'm not likely to buy many more that aren't discounted or very, very special to me.  I shouldn't have to pay more than about ten dollars for an album.  And in this brave new world, I really shouldn't have to pay a premium for a physical medium unless I choose to.  Ad-supported streaming looks like the best option for me: I want to call on services like Spotify to do right by musicians and make sure they get the money they deserve.

One of these days, when I'm able to be freer with my money, I'll try to make up for that $2,508.86 that I owe.  For now, I'll focus on making sure my tab doesn't grow.

Borders and boundaries

Greetings again, readers and passers-by.  It has once again been some time since I wrote in first person on this blog, so I thought I'd do a little reflection on the state of things around here.  Some people don't like to analyze or talk about their own work; in fact, many great artists who I admire have recoiled at the idea.  The oft-quoted, oft-paraphrased maxim is that art, literature and so on should "speak for itself."  But to a certain extent I can't help myself.  I like to peel the curtain back, and get a better look at the process that led to the results.  This is me thinking out loud.  With text.

The latest news for the blog is of course the addition of a new short story, Snow Globe Slowdown, to the archive.  I imagine that it's fairly typical in style and tone to things I've written before, to the extent that I have a signature style.  The title is not particularly great: there isn't exactly a snow globe in it, although there is a lot of slowness.  The real merit of the title is that I like saying it out loud.  In fact, I often come up with titles on the basis of euphony alone, and allow the mental images they evoke to influence the plot or scenario I'd thought up previously.  That was definitely something that happened here, and it was definitely an improvement over what I originally had in mind.

You see, sometimes I get it in my head to write something funny.  This particular story began its conceptual life as an absurdist, whimsical, and ultimately pointless farce.  I was doing laundry one day and, after all the shuffling from machine to machine was done, I had an extra pair of unidentified socks.  I briefly considered the possibility that the dryer was in fact generating extra socks, and that eventually the world would be overrun by socks.  If you think the idea of people fleeing from an avalanche of socks is funny, you're clearly as hopeless as me, but it did lead to a mental image that I liked: looking down from a modest hilltop at a ridiculous end-of-the-world scenario (a trope I seem to be disturbingly fond of).  And once I latched onto that image, the story stopped being funny (if it ever was) and started being bittersweet.

My artistic tastes can basically be taken as a veneration of the bittersweet, so obviously I had to do something with this.  But at first, I couldn't really think of anything except excuses to get a couple of people onto a hilltop.  After dumping the endless sock apocalypse, I realized the scenario wasn't really unique, and I had to focus on something besides the view: I had to develop the characters.  I had to give them personal reasons for being alone, together, and at a high elevation.  If they had good enough reasons, then the disaster could be something as plain as a flood and it wouldn't matter.

I'm not sure exactly when in the process I decided to make them a gay couple; the initial thought occurred early on, but I treated them as straight or ambiguous throughout a lot of the idea phase.  I think I know why I committed to their relationship, though.  Mostly, I was challenging myself to write characters who were very different from myself.  All of my characters, Caleb and Julian included, are drawn from myself, and none of them thus far have been intentionally depicted as anything but straight (though interesting and entertaining cases could probably be made for a few of them).  Making them gay got me thinking not only about how they were different from myself, but how they might be different from each other.  Defining them in opposition to one another was probably the most satisfying aspect of writing this story.

Part of my "style," which is possibly a weakness, is to imply or take for granted some elements that others would feel the need to state explicitly.  I had hoped that I could carry across the fact of their relationship through a few kisses and casual touches, and let the dialogue and scenario communicate its depth and intricacies.  I do try to be subtle, and I preferred this approach to an introduction like "Julian was working intently on a sketch one afternoon, about himself and his gay lover Caleb."  If a story begins with two people of opposite sexes living together, it's not out of line to assume a romantic connection between them without directly stating it: I wanted to turn that assumption on its head.  However, one loyal reader (my girlfriend) has already suggested to me that I may have obfuscated too much.  If that's the consensus, then maybe this experiment is something of a failure.  But I'm glad I tried.

Anyway, Snow Globe Slowdown is about more than the noble effort to increase diversity in fictional protagonists.  But after a certain point, it probably is better to let the work speak for itself.  I really need to learn how to do that better.

Snow Globe Slowdown

Julian was working intently on a sketch one afternoon.  An artist by aspiration and otherwise unoccupied, he had turned his attention to drawing out what he could see through his window.  Today he saw more of what he'd been seeing a lot of lately: unseasonably cold and cloudy weather.  In a modern, unpredictable era of climate change, the word "unseasonable" didn't carry the same meaning: winter long past winter was the order of the day.  But Julian found something to admire in that, something worth sketching.  Something worth looking at later.

As he worked, Caleb rolled into the apartment they shared, projecting an air of depression and defeat.  He tossed a little bag into the corner and stumbled, almost blindly, to the dilapidated couch at the center of the room.  He stood blinking, for a moment, seeming to consider his options for interacting with the furniture.  And then he fell.

“I'm never going out there again,” he boldly announced, tumbling face first into the seedy couch.  The pillows gave him a cool embrace, and the confidence that he could stay there forever.

“You'll have to eat.”

“I don't have to eat.  I've eaten my fair share.  You could bring me food anyway.”

“For sure.  Why are you never going outside again?”

Caleb raised his face from the pillows, unwillingly, resentful.  “I said I'm not going out there again.  Our neighbors are rude and hostile and I don't think they like me very much.”

“Not with that attitude,” said Julian, his eyes barely moving from his busy sketch pad. 

“Not with any attitude.  Jerry's been a jerk to me since grade school.  Anna looks at me like a cockroach asking her to a formal ball or something.  Everyone else just can't seem to stand me.”

“Because you won't look them in the eye.  Jerry's always been OK with me.  If you don't act like a scared little mouse all the time, people actually treat you kind of decently.”

Caleb buried his face in the pillow again and pouted.  “Can't look anyone in the eye if they won't look at me.”

“I can't really hear you.”

“All I wanted to do was find out whose socks they were.”

“Can't really hear you.  What about the socks?”

Caleb tossed the pillows in frustration.  “Those socks I found in the dryer.  They weren't in there when I put the load in, but they aren't mine.  They must have gotten mixed in there somewhere from someone else's load.”

“Or they're your socks.”

“Julian, I know my own socks.”

“Well, maybe they're my socks.”

“I don't mix your laundry with mine,” he said, pointedly.  “I always do my own.  Besides, you aren't missing any socks.”

“No, I guess not.  You know what else doesn't really endear you to people?  Knocking on their doors and shoving their laundry in their face.”

The cell phone started ringing; Julian and Caleb couldn't afford individual cell phones, so they shared one.  Every incoming call was handled differently, since there was no way of knowing ahead who the call was for.  It was usually for Julian, but Caleb was often less meaningfully occupied.

“I'm not going to get it, Caleb,” said Julian.  His pencil moved steadily over the pad.

Slouching in frustration, Caleb groped across the coffee table for the phone.  He put it down much faster.  “It's my parents.  I'm in no mood.”

“Gotcha.  So we're just going to let it ring over and over, huh?”

Caleb got the point, and reluctantly reached over again to see if he could silence the ringing, without accidentally answering the call and inadvertently inviting his mom or his dad into a rare moment of relative peace.  But it wasn't necessary; the phone stopped ringing, even before it could go to messages.  Mom or dad or whoever it was had hung up on him.

“They're so impatient,” he said, disgusted.  He stood up and put the phone by Julian's chair.

“By the way,” said Julian, “how do you expect to go outside again if you aren't going into the hallway?” 

“I don't know.  Maybe I'll just walk through really really fast.”

“Well, that'll keep the neighbors from noticing you,” Julian said, flatly.

“And I didn't shove them in anyone's face,” he said indignantly.   “I just... I just asked them if the socks were theirs.  I just asked.”

“I know, Caleb.  I know.”

“I want to get rid of them.  I don't want them in here.” 

“Just put them back in the laundry room.  Whoever left them there will probably go looking there anyway.  You should have just left the socks in there in the first place.”

“Fine, I guess.  I'm going downstairs.”

Julian didn't watch him go, but he heard the door slam petulantly as he left.  “What a kid,” he said, chewing on a couple of sunflower seeds.  He used to eat them all the time on sunny days, but it didn't seem like the sun shone very often anymore. 

The doorbell rang, and Julian got up to answer it, half-expecting to find Caleb had locked himself out.  But Caleb wasn't back yet; it was only Jerry Stewart, blonde and burly and seemingly aware (yet unconcerned) that he wasn't particularly welcome.

“Hey, Jerry.”

“Hey, Julian.  Does, ah, Caleb still have my socks?”

“No,” he said, more than a little annoyed.  “He's in the laundry room.  He couldn't figure out whose they were, so he took them back.”

“Well, that's good.  He should have just left them there, anyway.”

“Honestly, Jerry, why couldn't you have just told him they were yours?”

“Well, I never said they weren't.  But he comes up to me with that lame old passive aggressive act, and what am I supposed to do?”

“You could try treating him with more respect.  He only wanted to help.”

Jerry threw up his hands.  “You know what, I don't have a lot of time to waste with a guy like that.  I had to put him in his place.  Always feeling sorry for himself, like the whole world's trying to persecute him or something.  Always blaming everyone else for his problems.  At least you're not acting like that all the time.”

“Yeah, I try not to let it get me down,” Julian replied.  He hoped that Jerry could taste the bitterness of his words, though he knew better than to expect it.  “But you know what?  Now you've gone and wasted everyone's time.  It's not your place to put him in his place, and I don't get why you think it is.”

“OK, I get it, I get it.  Hands off Caleb, right?  I won't pick on the little mouse anymore.  Hey, speaking of, here he comes now.”  Caleb was storming through the hallway; Jerry shot him a look of mock-compassion that was far from satisfactory for Julian.  Head down, Caleb pushed himself awkwardly between the two  and retreated back to the apartment.  Julian looked accusingly at Jerry, but he knew that there was little hope in mending his ways.  If only he could make him feel a little guilt.

“I'll see you later, Jerry.”

“Later.”  Jerry sauntered away without a hint of shame, just like he always did.  Julian watched him disappear down the steps, then shut the door.

He found Caleb on the phone as he made his way back to his seat.  “-yeah, and now everything downstairs is just flooded.  I don't know what to do. I think you should probably send some one out to take care of it.”  Then Caleb grunted a few affirmations and hung up, placing the phone back by Julian's side. 

“Sounds like things got a little weird downstairs?”

“Yeah, it started in the laundry room, and then it got really bad.  I had to open the door to get out, but when I did it all just started pouring out into the common area.”

“Did you do something?”

“No, I wasn't even touching any of the machines!  One of the pipes was leaking, and then it burst, and now it's everywhere.”

“And you didn't touch the pipe either?”

Caleb looked enormously hurt.  “No, Julian, I didn't do this!”

“Fine, fine, I believe you.”  Caleb sulked back to the kitchen rooting around for something to eat without really having any foods in mind.  Julian tried to get back to work.

The phone started ringing at his elbow, and Julian picked it up, squinting momentarily at the caller ID screen.  “Caleb,” he said, “just talk to your fucking parents already.”

The pipes in Caleb and Julian's building were not the isolated problem they had assumed.  At the very same moment, most of the other houses and apartment buildings in town were flooded, and soon tenants were streaming out like river rapids.  When Caleb answered the phone, his father sounded greatly agitated; not about their usual disagreements, but about the sudden transformation of the city square into a boggy marsh.  Caleb could hardly have cared less; a fire hydrant had just exploded like something out of a summer comedy.  The sights and sounds from outside his window were spectacular entertainment, and his foul mood was momentarily lifted.  Suddenly, it was a beautiful day.

Of course, it was actually something of a catastrophe.  Soon the evacuation orders were coming in over the television and the radio, and rugged trucks packed with panicking citizens were mobilizing for the highway.  The water table was saturated; the river was running over, and over and over.  A trickle of national guardsmen arrived against the tide, but they didn't seem interested in protecting the town, beyond stopping the occasional looters from taking any last-minute prizes.  They gave orders for everyone to evacuate, but when the vast majority had done so the troops no longer seemed inclined to stick around.  It wasn't obvious that anyone would be coming back.

The water got deeper and the people got fewer; most of the low-lying streets were submerged by nature's gradual reclamation.  Even on the second floor, Caleb and Julian's position was becoming untenable, and after half a day of amused observation they grabbed as much as they could carry and headed for higher ground.

__________
"Anyway, that's more or less how it came to this," said Caleb, eyes fixed on the muddy mass of water now swamping Main Street.  Feeble swirls of snow would occasionally feed into it from the sky; otherwise, it was as if it had all just risen out of the Earth.  It flowed deliberately over the surface of all their old haunts, in a way that would have been relaxing were it not for certain apocalyptic realities.

"Thank God we're in hill country," said Julian, "or we might actually have had to evacuate like they said."  He was carrying a rough, heavy blanket from out of the tent, and as he sat down next to Caleb he wrapped it around the both of them to guard against the gentle cold.  He gave Caleb a small kiss; "as it is, I'd gladly trade losing all my earthly possessions for the most interesting camping trip of my life."

Caleb shuddered a little.  "I miss roofs.  And heaters."

"Yeah, I guess those were cool, as far as earthly possessions go.  By the way, are you sure it all really starts with those socks?"

With a sidelong glance, Caleb admitted the slightest appreciation of the joke.  "I just really wish I knew whose socks they were."

"They were totally Jerry's," said Julian, wistfully.  "He came by and told me himself."

"Well, yeah, that makes sense.  Now.  I'm going to go kick something hard."

"Don't get all uptight about it.  You were right about Jerry, and everybody like him.  Let yourself be right; and don't let him be right too.  The world's complicated enough as it is."

"Yeah."  Caleb looked down on the little sunken down, his eyes parsing the streets for the location of the abandoned apartment building.  "I hope they're halfway to the ocean by now."

"I think everyone ought to be by now."

"Say, Julian," said Caleb, "do you think the water is going to keep rising?"

Julian cast his eyes over the valley, not really knowing how to base his judgment, but determined to speak authoritatively.  "Well, it hasn't been for a while.  I figure, all the water that's coming is probably there by now.  Whether it stays or not; I guess that's up to the river now."

"I see."

"Any particular reason you ask?"

"Well, when I was a kid," says Caleb, "my dad built this really cool model town."

"What was so cool about it?"

"I don't know, I guess just because it was a model town.  It was really good, though.  It had these beautiful little houses, and these little trees, and everything was really good, and covered in snow.  I kind of wanted to live in it sometimes, because it looked like it was always Christmas in there."

"Well, that would be nice."

"Yeah.  It was great.  I miss that place."

"What happened to it?"

"Well, my parents always kept it in their room."  He bit his lip gently, staring down at his feet, and the dirty mix of soil and snow beneath them.  "I haven't really had a reason to go in there for a long time."

Julian turned to the summit of the hill, and the small tree (more of a shrub) they'd pitched their tent against.  It looked terrible; it was terrible to sleep in, too.  Neither one of them knew the first thing about tents or how to live in them.  But judging by their survival, they'd been successful.  They were even decently dry and warm, when the wind didn't blow too hard.  They weren't starving.  But they weren't happy either.

"Caleb," said Julian, "don't your folks live out on Log Cabin Ridge?"

"Yeah, but they're all gone," he said, making a swooshing arm motion toward the old highway.  "No way mom and dad would stick around for a nature show like this."

"Well, it looks like it's all dry between there and here.  How do you feel about taking a hike?"

"I don't really like the idea of heading for low ground at a time like this."

"Yeah," said Julian, "but I don't think that's the reason you want to say no."

"Well, maybe not.  But can you blame me?"

"No, I can't.  But I can say I'm tired of sleeping on rocks and roots.  And besides," he said, "this is just a house.  A house can't judge you or reprimand you, or make you feel unwelcome.  This is your house, Caleb, and for once I'd kind of like to see it that way."

Caleb looked out toward Log Cabin Ridge; his eyes traced the path through the woods and the old cemetery that led toward it, looking for any sign of impassibility.  "I do want to go home," he said, slowly.  "I'd hate to see that house get ruined.  Do you think it'll be alright?"

Julian smiled.  "It should be.  But we should probably get going soon; I don't want it to get dark."  It was dark already; the sun wouldn't shine through clouds and snow like that.

__________
The walk itself took about forty five minutes, after the hour spent wrestling down the tent.  There was no fighting the approach of darkness, but they made it in time to view the old neighborhood under quiet, twilight desolation.  The streets of Log Cabin Ridge were not under water, though they curled around the shore of what was now taking on the appearance of a lake.  Two-story houses stood empty, their redundant rooms quiet and dark.  Wild animals (squirrels, deer, the occasional turkey) shuffled hesitantly through the leafy underbrush, in and out of abandoned back yards, always in the general direction that Caleb and Julian were coming from: up to the hills, away from the water.

"It's just like coming home," said Caleb, peering through windows as they strolled through the neighborhood, shouldering their gear.  Their feet crunched lightly in the snow, but they didn't feel especially cold.

"How do you figure?"

"It always feels like this; this is just the first time it's really looked like it, too."

"I really don't know how much sense that makes."

The house that Caleb grew up in was not much different from the others.  It had the same grey paint and square windows, arranged in the same patterns and floor plans.  Some of them were mirror-flipped, with analogous rooms and doors oriented in opposite directions; Caleb never knew if there was a practical reason, or if the developers had just indulged in a strange case of symmetry.  But his house, his parents' house, always felt like the right one.  It was only natural that it would, but it felt more than natural to him.  The emptiness did not.

"There's a note on the door," said Julian, who reached out to take it.

"And it's probably for me," said Caleb, laying his hands on it first.  It was folded in half; inside was a house key, and about fifteen lines of neat, handwritten text.  Caleb eyed the letter quickly, taking care to hold it so that only he could see.  Without changing his expression, he refolded the note and slid it into a breast pocket.  He turned his focus toward the lock on the door, and fiddled with it for a few moments; it was notoriously difficult to open, and had been since he was a small boy.

"Well, what does it say?"

With a shrug, he continued fiddling.  "My parents.  They love me, they say if we need the place and it's still above water, we can use it.  That's why the key, even though I already have one.  I guess they forgot.  Kind of typical of them."  The lock gave with a satisfying turn.  "Let's go in?"

"I guess.  How'd they know we might be coming?"

"Well, when my dad was complaining about his office getting all swampy, I sort of implied I might stick around for a while.  He certainly didn't want to take the time to talk me out of it."

"Maybe," said Julian, fumbling out of habit for a light switch (and remembering when he found one that all the power had long since been turned off), "but at least he took the time to write you the note, and leave the place ready for you."

"Mmm."  Caleb looked wistfully up the carpeted stairs; his old bedroom was up there, shrouded in evening darkness.  He also put his finger on a switch, before scolding himself for lack of thought.  "Remind me we've got to empty out whatever's left in the fridge, it'll probably start smelling."  He disappeared past the staircase into a shadowy hallway, slamming the front door hard behind him.

Julian stood in half-darkness for a time, before laying down the camping gear and pushing it neatly into a corner.  He saw pictures on the wall, and looked for images of Caleb; very few were recent, and few of these looked happy.  His parents never lost their smiles, but they did appear to be losing their son, as he seemed to will himself gradually out of existence in each recent shot.  It was the first time he'd seen these pictures: Julian had never felt as if he were unwelcome in this house, but Caleb had never brought him there.  There was a side of himself that Caleb did not acknowledge easily, but Julian could see traces of it everywhere, and especially in those disappearing photographs.

He found Caleb in the master bedroom, which was now a pale grey-blue in the waning light of day.  There were no lights to see by, except one: a battery-powered lamp rising from the center of the little model town.  Caleb was sitting in front of it, seemingly lost in thought, until he perceived Julian's arrival.  He motioned for him to sit down beside him and admire the town his father built, lightly holding his hand.  "It's warmer in here, anyway; it always stays warm in this corner of the house."

It really was a beautiful town, protected by thin glass, built in neat grids that naturally accommodated the curvature of the artificial terrain with grace and rectitude.  Trees rose out of the tiny hillsides, crafted from plastic but authentically recalling leaf and bark.  The "snow" was pure and soft, sweet like cake frosting, too innocent to block roads in unseemly mounds, or melt in slushy puddles at every street corner.  It was the perfect snow of a child's imagination, capping the roofs of handsome houses and cars, bringing everything to a serenely lovely standstill.

"It does kind of look like Christmas," said Julian.

"Everyone's inside their little houses," said Caleb, "sitting at their fires and opening presents, probably.  Everything outside is just peaceful and nice."

"I kind of thought there'd be people outside, it looks like a great day for sledding or snowmen or something."

"No," said Caleb, happily shaking his head.  "No, that wouldn't be right at all.  People have a way of complicating things.  This is all about the town."

"I see."  Julian gave his hand a squeeze.  "Your dad did a wonderful job.  I want to live in this town, too; it's like the 19th century, only brighter and cheerier.  I hope they still have real places like this, somewhere."

"I'm just glad it's not all under water.  I hope it doesn't rise any more."

Julian stood up slowly, looking down on the sleepy, empty little town.  "I think it will be OK, for now."  He walked back to the entrance of the master bed room and gently shut the door behind him.