I got a new blog

This blog didn't work out so much, so I decided to try a new one: http://daddyorsomething.blogspot.com/

Roasted Rosemary Red Potatoes

Ingredients:

red potatoes (couple handsful)
rosemary
olive oil
cookie sheet

Cooking Instructions:

Preheat oven to 425 . . . cut potatoes to bite size . . .

Drizzle cookie sheet with olive oil . . . place potatoes . . . drizzle taters . . . sprinkle rosemary . . .

Cook for 30-45 minutes, turning halfway through . . .

Savory Kalamata Chicken

Ingredients:

chicken (couple breasts)
carrots (few)
mushrooms (half dozen)
kalamata olives (3 oz)
lemons or apples (1)
olive oil
savory
all spice
thyme (optional)
italian seasoning (optional)
cookie sheet

Cooking Directions:


Preheat oven to 425 . . . cut carrots to 3 inches . . . quarter mushrooms . . . wedge lemons . . . open olive jar . . . spread olive oil evenly on cookie sheet . . . place chiken breasts aesthetically . . . add accoutrements . . . drizzel project with olive oil . . . sprinke all spice and savory . . . sprinkle desired spices . . . add salt and pepper to taste . . .

Place project in oven for 1 - 1 1/2 hours, turn halfway through . . .

Serve over rice or with rosemary red-skin potatos. . .

Role Model

There is a boy. At a young age, he witnesses the murder of his parents, the rescue of a small child, the burning of a building, the hitting of a homerun, the flight of the Valkeries, or Hamlet suffering. In the meantime, he falls in love with an angel, a whore. She is unattainable because of class, cultural, familial, or racial differences. Also she’s married to the king who is a villain. One day the boy and the angel / whore cross paths, have an argument, avoid each others’ glances, giggle because they brush hands when they both reach for the same comic book, or sneer at each other; subsequently, falling deeply inexplicably painfully in love for (let me repeat) no real good reason. He’s kind and gentle, rude and obnoxious, patient but realistic, romantic and inept, desperately pleading “For God sake notice me,” strong and silent, clumsy and adorable. He rededicates his life to earning her love. He lifts weights, runs thousands of miles, meditates for weeks on end, climbs the tallest mountain to find the rarest flower, practices swordplay and boxing marksmanship and martial arts and playing poker and flying the starship and enduring pain. Eventually, the villainous king leaves on a “hunting trip” but really has an affair with a lecherous woman married to his brother, who thinks so highly of the king that when he finds out about the affair, he kills his cheating wife and himself after writing a short poetic note regretting his never being a good enough brother to the king, but that’s all beside the point. When the king returns, he discovers whatever it is between the boy and his wife, and he decides to kill them and their families, etcetera. But the boy says, “Are you gonna bark all day, little doggie, or are you gonna bite?” The boy says, “Say hello to my little friend.” The boy says, “Fucking A, man. Are you talking to me? You gotta ask yourself one question, ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Yippe-kai-ai, motherfucker. I’m coming for you, Murdoch. I’m gonna save the fucking day. This is this; this ain’t nothing else; this is this. You can’t handle the truth. I must break you. You shut up, and don’t you fuck with me. I’ll bleed you, real quiet, leave you here, got that? I keep trying to get out, but they keep pulling me back in. Yes, it’s true, this man has no dick. Wait’ll they get a load of me. I’ll be your huckleberry. I will have my vengeance in this life or the next. Get your patchouli stink out of my store. All right you sons of bitches, you know how I feel. Get the hell off my spread. Get your damn paws off me, you ape. Losers are always whining about doing their best; winners go home and fuck the prom queen. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.” So the boy rescues the angel / whore by swinging in on a vine, jumping out of a helicopter, holding his breath underwater for a very long time, walking to hell and back, jumping into a helicopter, winning an unwinnable hand, driving the bus faster than 55 miles an hour the whole time, saving the planet from nuclear annihilation, or punching the king until he collapses; subsequently, bringing the king to justice. Needless to say, the angel / whore is impressed. Nonetheless, we know very little about how they spend the next thirty, forty years.

Play: River: Need

A___ and I promise to quit drinking and smoking and chewing and pills and pot and coffee and overeating and impatience (where applicable). We draw up a plan, which reads largely like this: we get in a canoe with two fishing poles, a tarp, two paddles, some worms, a flashlight, and some matches in a ziplock bag – our homemade detox.

We put in up above Tionesta. That first night, the sky closes in fast and we’ve never seen so much rain, and, once we hit the island, we can’t decide whether we should make a shelter first or build a fire. We can’t decide whether we should wade out in the deluge to find some crayfish for dinner or whether we should eat the worms. The short version of the story ends with us hungry and soaking wet, wrapped up in the tarp like so much meat inside a big blue burrito. In the middle of the night, I catch a fourteen-inch Maglite with the back of my head, because A___ woke from a dream in which I was a bear, sleeping in his tent. An honest mistake; we think no more of it. Next morning, A___ catches a crayfish and we can’t agree whether we should eat it or fish with it. In the meantime, I notice a Maple tree about two feet in diameter, shaped like a U, the trunk running horizontal for about twenty feet along the ground. A___ cannot fucking believe I’m worrying about trees at a moment like this – seconds after he’s baited his hook and I decided we should get on the river. We get on the river and there’s not a cloud in the sky, not a drop of sunscreen in the universe, and the minute I get my hook baited, Ange decides we should try to row like hell, the forty or so miles downriver to the camp. We throw up our hands in frustration. A___ decides he’ll agree with whatever I want to do, and that pisses me off, because I need his input, not his fucking approval.

I decide to act like I’m the only person in the world on the river, and I’m not sure what A___ does for the next couple hours, even as I steer us to shore under a bridge and watch him walk up over the hill. Now I’m the only person in the world on land, and when he gets back down the hill, I don’t know A___’s opinion about us carrying the canoe up to the road, and when D___ gets there I act like I’m the only person in the world tying the canoe to his roof, sitting in the car, walking into the restaurant. We smoke D___’s cigarettes while we wait for our omelets, acting like we’re each the only person in the world in that booth.

D___ asks us how our trip went. We stub our smokes and don’t look at each other and don’t talk about that canoe trip for more than six years at which point we’re good good buddies again, chewing tobacco and drinking our beer and smoking our pot and popping our pills and drinking our coffee and impatiently overeating (where applicable) and having a laugh about the tenure of our friendship, and A___ says, “You know, sometimes, when I think about that canoe trip, I still get pissed at you.” I set down my beer and lean forward a bit and say, “You? Get pissed? At me?”

Lineage: Generations: Drill Rig

My mom, my sister, and I ride along with Dad to Ohio on a business trip. We stay in a motel room while he works on oil rigs – he’s an electrical engineer for Chicago Pneumatic Tool, and very hands on. The drive from Reno, Pennsylvania to the other side of Ohio takes four hours, but people back home are not travelers, vacationers, roamers, so this part of Ohio is the other side of the world. It’s a whole other planet. For instance: channel three is on channel eight, channel twelve doesn’t exist. Further: the sky turns green one night and a bright white squaw line roils in from somewhere, no hills to shield us from the ever-expanding horizon. New weather patterns to us, and this one, the radio says, could lead to a tornado.

A tornado! That’s the neatest thing my sister and I have ever heard. Mom, on the other hand, seems distraught, despite our six- and seven-year-old reassurances. We watch some big old hail in a dark midday. Some rain washes a couple weeks worth of dust off the world. The wind picks up. The wind dies down. The air clears. Rain falls.

During which time, we tire of waiting for a tornado, and turn instead to the motel television. The sky outside grows lighter and eventually dark with late afternoon. Dad comes home earlier than we expect with a gash on his forehead above his right eye. New excitement after a bust tornado warning. He’s been hit in the head with a hammer – I plan my vengeance. He’d been hit in the head with a hammer by accident – I postpone my vengeance. The company asked him to go to the hospital to get stitches. He and the hammer-swinger went to the bar instead to get gin and tonics. At the motel, he’s brighteyed, and when we ask what happens, he says, “What this? Well, I was sorting bobcats and I got a hold of a mountain lion.” He puts a Disney bandaid over a gaping wound, and we said, “But doesn’t it hurt?” He said, “Oh, it don’t hurt.”

Moments like this, we pick our heroes.

And the Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth . . .

prologue (end)

Thunder stops his heart and the burst of lightning shatters the world. He hears the science-fiction arc of lasers, and the second wave hits this time with less force and more surprise. The rain and wipers enter their on-going authorship / erasure, giving each other meaning against the clear and uninvolved windshield. He leans the wheel harder to the left as the wind picks up and the ground swells beneath him. The darkness, which was the horizon, brings night to this afternoon. Thunder cracks again and the lightning brings the cabin of the car into clear relief. The dark dashboard wraps itself into the doors, and the gauges spike into redzones and maximums, and the road is silence and the air is silent and the rain is the world, and he is in the palm of the world’s hand. At this moment there is no word and he knows the future has past. He thinks clearly, though not in any kind of language, I am in hell and I am hell. And the lights on the control panel go dark and the gauges never existed, and the thunder crashes in his chest and in his head and in his gut, and the lightning is his spine as the ground crashes all around him, spraying mud and glass and grass and plastic, and the palm of the world balls into a fist, and what was once the brandnew Jetta, and what was once the old green Jetta, and what was once the safety of a 3,230-pound mass of modern industry washes up against a series of trees and comes to a rest.

And the Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth . . .

prologue (continued)

The heat of the day rises up from the pavement, and the trees and the grasses and the flowers and the bugs drink down the water all around. Pedascule empties his flask and feels the warmth inside him and all around him and finds himself the world and of the world. He smiles and thinks about a cigarette and thinks I could, I could not, and does not, glad to be ahead of the storm, master of his own whatever it is. The dark green Jetta pulls the crest of an I-79 rolling hill, and Pedascule looks off to the left and off to the right and from both sides the sky rolls towards him in swirls of grays and blacks and streaks of white (orange-tinged) like two great purple palms swirling with lifelines and lovelines and fingerprints and this is how the whole world could be in one’s hands, he thinks. He crests another hill and the horizon sits dark. Black clouds solid across in front of him, held at bay by a single orange streak while the blue sky narrows and shortens and narrows and shortens, a self-reductive geometrical pattern.

He pats the breast pocket of his button-down blue graduation shirt but leaves the smokes where they are. He flicks off the c.d. player and on his headlights. He rolls up the windows snug as he can get them and battens down the doorlocks. He breathes deep the stale smoky air and holds that breath while the interstate pulls him along. The blue sign by the side of the road offers a rest stop in two miles and another in thirty-four, and, time and space being relative, he decides to ride this one out. The blue sign by the side of the road says, “Rest Stop 1 Mile,” and the interstate pulls him on. The blue sign by the side of the road says, “Rest Stop Next Right,” and the tractor trailers line up on the off ramp. Pedascule raises his left eyebrow in what he believes is an ambiguously smug gestured. He pushes the knuckles of both hands together and a dozen small pops break up the sound of the engine and the tires and the silence of an afternoon full of promise, as formulas for coefficients of friction and velocity and mass and rates of acceleration draw themselves on the windshield and wash away. Pedascule believes life is a complicated series of simple equations and that a lightning bolt is a concentrated atmospheric discharge of electricity which can travel at the speed of sixty-thousand-miles-per second. And the great gray and black and white palms of storm cloud blot out the last baby blue up above and close in around him, a tiny conscious bug of a god, but (he tries to shake the thought) a mighty bug-god, nonetheless.

The first wave hits the Jetta from the left and pushes the car onto the rumble strip and blots out the remainder of bright day. Then he is in a carwash, the blown-water on metal sound comforts him, and he feels the safety which is 3,230 pounds of German engineering of metal and plastic and rubber and, yes, of course, combustible fluid. And just as the rain washes the world away, the wipers draw it again in a blurred and distinct swath of dark gray trough of highway between the green green waving hills. Pedascule leans the steering wheel to the constant left, holding steady against the wind and rain. The taillights of a less fit vehicle shine up from the median, but he knows it might be more dangerous to stop than to drive on, and he takes note of the mile marker to call emergency services for said disabled vehicle at that next rest stop. The wind relinquishes and the rain slows to a steady downpour and a single streak of ionized white light brightens, dims, and disappears like a multi-filamented bulb. He realizes he has not been breathing and pats his breast pocket. I could, I could not. And he flicks the c.d. player back on and back off. No need for that right now, he settles into his own racing heart. He glances down at his flask and reminds himself to fill it up as well at that rest stop.

And the Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth . . .

prologue (continued)

He slides smooth into that driverseat and throws the keys into the ignition. Pumps the gas, revs the engine, idles out of the parking lot – no need to showboat. Back on the road, he winds along the bright beaten path and onto the highway. The punk music pumps. He flicks the butt of his cigarette out the driverside window and cranks it tight, exhales the last lungful of smoke off to the side into the vast tiny cabin of the world in which he moves down the road. Three single drops of rain hit his windshield, and he thinks out of the clearish blue sky, The universe is a blue sky with a single small cloud on which the sun floats ahead, and I am a single raindrop. Shouldn’t somebody be writing this shit down? The yellow lines ahead, pretending at a vanishing point, over the crest of a hill, around a hill, on and on and, “Yeahyeah, yeahyeah.” He small-skanks behind the windhield. He leaves a trail of cigarette butts to the past.

Meanwhile, right where he is and in other places, the Earth spins on, inclining people and other animals to eat and reproduce. He sees the world in blues and greens and opportunities, and the world does not see him. It rolls on. He sees the universe in patches and instances and heartaches and touches, and the universe is atoms and empty space. He knows all this as well as he knows the distributive function of multiplication, and, yet, he sees himself as important, as meaningful. Though he’s been trained not to see himself this way, he sees himself as a god or, at least, as a godfunction, creating the world and moving through it as such.

When the forth, fifth, and sixth raindrops hit his windshield, he cannot distinguish them from the other ninety-seven thousand that hit at that moment. This sheet of rain falls so fast and hard that, rather than mix with the ground cover, it forces the dust and pollen and leaves and mites and very small rocks up into the air and down onto the Jetta’s windshield in a thin layer of mud, which the rain washes away almost immediately. Pedascule breathes deep and remains calm and godlike, reaching for his windshield wipers. He flicks the switch and the sitting water shatters and the rain stops. Blue afternoon sky up ahead, and behind him the beginning of the world ends in darkness and windscape.

And the Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth . . .

prologue (continued)

Pedascule moves like the pull of gravity across the dulled yellow striped concrete. He’s smooth, to be sure, he’s like his own music – like a river’s quick ripple, like a fresh-shinned tree branch, like f prime of three equals the limit of three plus h (the quantity squared) minus nine the quantity over h as the limit of h approaches zero – a beautiful music of theory, a prone and infinite S, a moaning bent back. Smooth, he sits hunched over a thick, pewter, roommate’s-graduation-gifted flask with a quote from ancient philosophy about rivers and valleys and the way we approach the world, written in Hindu, he thinks, he remembers his roommate saying, as the rum rolls across his palm and onto the parking lot. Close enough. The quick evaporating alcohol floats from his pale, slim fingers, his hand of a thousand books. He tugs the bottle to his mouth and moves it to his trunk as his door slams smooth and he gas-pedals smooth off towards this mythical around the bend he’d been fingered towards moments ago. With the back of his hand, he wipes the slim-dripping drop of rum from his smooth chin, rubs his cheeks and thinks about shaving again, not today, though, maybe tonight.

Five miles down this bright whitey-gray and winding Pennsylvania off-the-beaten-road road, he skids into a gravelled and spring-puddled parking lot and out of his car and skids into the stool farthest from the darkest dark corners of this dark dark bar, a stool amid-stream a flotsam of flannelled and smokey-bearded men and saggy women. Pedascule, B.S., builder of immaculate and unyielding cardboard bridges, pushes a bill across the bar with a serious downward tilt of his head, loosens his tie and asks if he can buy a drink for anybody who would celebrate a college graduation. Gas money made good. He lights a smoke, throws the pack on the bar, chalks a cue, racks the table, shoots a game, shoots some whiskey, shakes hands and hands, and stretches the cue above his head and behind his back as the flannel shirts and smokey and sagging men and women ebb and flow through his five-year triumph as the country-musicking jukebox shatters his hold on the future as he dances and breaks and sinks another eightball and downs another beer and downs another beer and buys another round and looks forward to this very moment in his life. He reemerges into the same bright fecund day, the dark green Jetta meets him in the gravel, his tie stays behind, wrapped around a sagging and flannelled and warm and lithe woman who promised him three wishes if he would just stay with her forever. The country music twangs stilly into the distance as the heavy wooden door closes on that world forever, goodbye, forever, thinks Pedascule, farewell, forever. Though he can’t be sure about the future, he only knows that this point, “p,” where he stands doesn’t allow for his presence inside the bar as well as outside. Though he can’t be sure about the future, if the past is any indication of how the present will pass, goodbye. Forever. A single bead of sweat shatters the puddle beside the driverside door and the world opens into itself.

Pedascule leans an elbow on the open driverside door and pisses into the impenetrable Pennsylvania forest – a bush, a shrub, an Ash, a Maple – canopies from years and years of forest. When the cop slows along the road to account for the not-from-around-here Jetta, Pedascule raises his arm and smiles and thumbs-up and the cop drives off. A damned good day. Pedascule slams his palm on the c.d. player and the angsty pumping punk crashes into thin air. He lights a smoke and moves – right arm left leg, left arm right leg, and again. And he’s flailing in place bobbing his head. Skanking into the brand new day. He pulls the flask from his pocket, still skanking, and twists the cap and the rum hits the back of his throat from two feet above his head. He’s a television commercial, selling himself to the world. If life were like me, you wouldn’t have to buy anything, but, because it’s not, drink rum. “Yeah, yeahyeahyeahyeahyeahyeahyeah . . . uhm.”

Mid-July 2009

Dear Ones, Loved Ones, Loved One, and Friends,

Many moons have risen since I’ve added a familial update and otherwise kept you informed on the comings and goings of the Oberg / Connor family. It’s been a busy year, a doozy, even by our standards. Since last July, we have sold a house, rented to own a house, and bought a compound replete with concrete lions, three sheds, and a fig tree. Other things happened too, I’m sure, but the figs, by God, they look yummy.

The kids have all grown taller and tougher, and Chaos is typing away, waiting for one of his offspring to become Chronos and rearrange the power structure: that is, I felt more obsolete yesterday than I did the day before, and today, well, you can imagine, I hardly feel the need to draw my own breath. But I’ll be more specific:

Zac decided this year to become the tallest member of the household, putting me in a steady third (though I suspect Sam will occupy that honored spot before he reaches high school). He’s making his way through the ranks on the rock-climbing team, pulling himself up one hold at a time. In fact, he’s probably at the gym now. He took time this past winter to teach himself about electromagnetics and proceeded to build a motor out of some cardboard from a case of Yeungling, some Romex wire from the shed, and twelve dollars worth of magnets he bought on line.

Sam decided to study the Rubik’s Cube -- his best solve time is a minute thirty-one seconds, which is well faster than I can scramble the cube -- and he’s working daily to improve. He, also, competes on the rock-climbing team, but is taking the summer off to chop wood and keep an eye on my parents. A major triumph and joy for Sam this school year came when his band took second in a state-wide band competition, and would perhaps have done even better if the flautists had held their instruments at the requisite thirty-seven degrees, instead of thirty-nine and thirty-five.

Naomi, of course, walks mostly on her hands and that only when she’s not jumping. She advanced from level one to level three gymnastics this season at our local gym, and hopes to join the preteam team this fall. In school, she has fallen in love with math and is a member of the advanced learners program for such things. And in June she started reading the _Harry Potter_ series.

Leah runs everywhere, sometimes putting eight, ten miles on her sneakers in a day. Luckily, she often lists off to the side, so she ends up back at the campfire, and none of us has to stay in shape to catch her.

In the meantime, here we are in Pennsylvania, land of my progenitors. traci and I brought Leah, Naomi, Sam, and Desi in the middle of June and we’ll be here until the middle of August, leaving Zac to slug it out with North Carolina’s muggiest months. We’re at my parents' (Maga's and Pappap's) camp, making sure the Allegheny keeps listing off down to the left there. Traci and I are living in Pappap’s toolshed with the mice and the moths and a bottle of rum. Sam and Naomi sleep all but the windiest, rainiest nights in a tent. Leah usually tips over mid-stride and runs all night long in her sleep in whichever corner of the tent we set her down.

We’ve been here a month and I’ve started this update ten, twelve times, and each time I feel guilty and study for my PhD. exams instead. But I’m going to take a shot at being more diligent, more timely, more consistent in posting over the next few months, but, as some of you may or may not know, the best laid plans of mice and moths often end up petering out when something really exciting happens on The Deadliest Catch. So, here’s hoping nothing exciting happens on tv over the next month.

Take Care,
Jackson

And the Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth . . . (a novel excerpt)

prologue

Pedascule, recently Bachelored of Science, steers the old Jetta through the currents of Interstate 79 South. The Great Erie Lake falling away behind him. The future all around him, and now, just the distant hum of his tires beneath his feet, hummmmhnh. Five years of Higher Education and Internships and Kissing Asses and Now He’s Free to begin. He thinks This, now, this, this this this is the first day, for the first actual time, of the rest of my life. The rest has all been practice. The rest: clods of dirt and roots and small boulders, aggregate, moss and rot, bones and dust and layers and layers and layers of ashes: a base at the base of the rest of my life. This, now, this. Life. Cruise controlling through the slow rest of the world, he lights a smoke, flicks the ash towards the windshield, and watches it lift through the slightly open window. Whoosh, he thinks, though in fact the motion is without discernable noise.

Five years of college fall into and out of his head and that was not a life of moments, but movement, not a series of experiences, but an experiment in being human – the early mistakes of his Freshman year crash up against viewing the incoming classes making the same mistakes; the moment he crawled out of his parents’ brand-new Jetta and climbing the New York Hillside to his first college dormitory flows into his final hungover middle finger to the entire temporary hometown. The empire of books and computers and small late fees crumbles. He tames his mind’s chimera of lectures and Buddhists and breasts, soft underbellies of institutions and marvelously frail coeds. Hidden fistpumps of triumphs and regrets meld into one another and fade away like so many pebbly ripples in the vast and breathless waves of a hurricane. Fighting the urge he’s been fighting since the West Coast called him back and called him back and finally offered him the salary he’d anticipated, he refuses to even think the tune “California, here I come,” and shakes his head hard against the notion. Pedascule, B.S., he thinks to himself, slams his palm against the C.D. player, flicks his butt out the window and jams, baby, yeah yeah yeah.

“Yeah, yeah, hell yeahyeahyeah,” he says, to the tune of the c.d. “Yeah.” He lights another cigarette and fake flicks ashes through a crack in the driverside window. “Uhm, uhmuhmuhm. Yeah, yeahyeah.” The sun floats on up there. Floats bright and springy on a slow-moving day, the road pulling along underneath him. The world funnelling him on and on while the flowers and the Earth and the future open up all around, a bowelly, soddy smell – silt dredged up from a slow-slow-slow-moving stream. He blows smoke, pounds his palms on the handed-me-down steering wheel of the Old Jetta, a graduation present, alongside a few thousand miles worth of gas money. Better fuel up. The Jetta pops and swerves beneath the great big blue and green world, the sun high overhead, the crest and troughs among and between the I-79 Southbound stream. The Jetta hops onto an off-ramp, into a parking lot. Pedascule swipes Pedascule Sr.’s credit card for a carton of smokes and a bottle of rum, asks for a bar and gets pointed just around the bend there. He thanks the old man and flirts with himself in the tall glass door on the way out – Sharp, he thinks, and scratches the fifty dollar mess of hair back into place.

Work: Stone: Boss

The mason that A___ and I worked for called me his Big Mean Bitch. I’d sling two sixteen-foot planks over my shoulder instead of one. I’d pull the mixer out of the way rather than bother hooking one of the trucks up to it. I’d throw twelve-inch blocks four high onto the scaffold. He meant it, I know, as a compliment.

Somehow, each day, I thought that if I could push just a little bit harder, carry just a little more weight, work one extra hour, that my boss would be happy. I thought that if I were just a bit tougher and stronger that the jobs would go well, and he’d stop motherfucking his crew, his clients, Hebrews, his wife, his kids, the weather.

It also feels good to walk through the hottest heaviest days of the year, dripping sweat, spitting tobacco in swirls of mud and oil, and chasing away onlookers with a stare the way I imagine a bigger, meaner dog might chase away a smaller, smarter dog.

Work: Steel: Scar

Purple and wide. Sometimes yellow, pink some would say. Roiling, bumpy, a costumey pastiche of cauterized flesh on flesh. In the pit, where the bars are two-hundred-fifty feet (still white hot, snagging on the old, old rollers), the guys sometimes walk away from a month’s worth of raking carrying a design like they hired someone to burn their lineage into their forearms in a forgotten hieroglyph.

Sometimes we get cut in awkward places, I mean, like, now-just-how-in-the-living-hell-did-you-end-up . . . ? And sometimes we need stitched up, but we’re not even sure if we brushed up against anything sharp, like being at the mill is reason enough to bleed, like just one more pain on top of another on top of a whole pile, a life, a religion of pain.

Doug comes into the Corner Pocket while we’re shooting pool one day, slams the world’s littlest manila envelope on the bar and says, “Buy a drink for the guy just lost his last tooth?” A couple months shy of his fortieth birthday.

We don’t get sent to shrinks, nobody thought that far ahead. But, like I say, you can see the neon lights of the Corner Pocket from the breakrooms of three different departments, and, though it’s a short stretch from the shower to that stool, you can do a damned awful lot of recovering once you get there.

Play: Home: Woodchuck

D___ and A___ tore off across the field with a single rock between them. The woodchuck was a good long ways out there, farther than you’d want to run carrying a rock built for two. But A___ or D___ had said, “Let’s get him,” for no real good reason except we’ve never needed a reason between the three of us to do much of anything. I stood there in the middle of a pre-plowing spring cornfield, the trees budding on all sides, the woods so thick and the sun so bright that I couldn’t see the world for the sky and the land, holding the box of white zinfandel and three plastic cups, yelling, “Kill that fucking rat.”

A woodchuck’s job is to keep himself between you and his hole. He’s always got a backdoor. Always. And he can move pretty damn fast when he’s getting chased by something. On the other hand, get him cornered, he’ll have your thumb faster than you can say, “I wished I’d a stayed home today.” D_ and A___ got up there and the woodchuck hadn’t run off. Rather it looked up at them, didn’t bare his teeth, didn’t hiss or peep, didn’t waddle off or scurry. They hesitated, looked each other in the eye, and didn’t have any reason to mash the woodchuck or even real desire. But, well, for Christsake, they set out across that field to chase something beyond themselves, something that by all rights should be elusive, and here it was. Without a word, the rock went above their heads and down on the woodchuck’s spine. His tail might have twitched a touch, but he had had it.

To this day, I wouldn’t mention this to them if I was you. By all rights the woodchuck should have hustled off to its hole, should never even have been threatened. But there it was. And D__ and A___ have to carry this around with them now, one more thing shoved deep in their guts that makes them, every once in a while, pound their fist on the steel and stone of their respective lives for, what you might say in looking at them, is no apparent reason.

Work: Oil: Walk

D__ and I get hooked up with an oil-tank building crew over in Rouseville. They work all over the country, but the boys are back home to put some tanks in there just between Oil City and Titusville. Our crewchief D.R. picks his feet almost up to his knees when he walks, and that might look goofy at first, but he never stumbles or stoves his toe in a very busy workplace, and you might even laugh at the walk like he’s doing it just for your amusement, but you get the impression that he could probably rip your arm off and beat you over the head with it with an overzealous handshake. So you start to adopt the walk yourself and hope someday to be six-four with a mustache like a pushbroom and boots the size of Volkswagons.

D.R. tells how great it was working for Matrix in the seventies. He’d just started there and ended up in charge of a crew. His boss said to take the boys out and show them a good time on the company. D.R. bought the boys six bottles of liquor, three cases of beer, and called in a professional. D.R says, “So I’m supposed to account for every dime we spend. You should have seen the secretary’s face when I turn in my receipt and ask for reimbursement for eight blow jobs and two round-the-worlds.”

The reason I like D.R. right away is, well, just that: I’m afraid he might pat me on the back and my spleen will end up on the other side of Oil Creek in a pile of sawdust. Plus here’s this guy who is a local high school’s all-time leading scorer, the head of a fairly prestigious tank crew, a world traveler, and an all-around big boneshattering mother fucker, and if called upon, I imagine he could castrate me with a couple of simple sentences or just a look out of the corner of his eye.

Palin and Letterman Miss the Point

Every joke is an attack: Freud said this (forgive me, academics, I know he isn’t in good favor, but he had his moments), and before Freud, Lott said this, and, if it isn’t obvious, it should be upon consideration. This is why it is not okay to make racist jokes or Polish jokes or West Virginia jokes or gay jokes in our house, because we don’t want people in our house to believe for even a second that there is room for viewing people of color, foreigners, the oppressed, the disenfranchised, the alien, the other, as something less than ourselves. But that’s just in our house, so do what you want to do: it’s none of our business.

That said, I don’t know of too many people I think less highly of than Sarah Palin. She’s embarrassing. Really. We all know the bad things I want to say about her. But, for the sake of brevity, I’ll skip those things and just say this: she’s right. Even though she can’t articulate her way out of a yes-or-no question, it is not a stretch to make the connection between jokes that reinforce negative stereotypes and the ways in which we view people around us. And even if she’s taking this opportunity to get some good facebook, and is, ultimately, more of a problem for young women than a solution, Letterman was deadly wrong to make those jokes.

Even if he thought he was making jokes about Palin’s older daughter, rather than the fourteen-year old, one problem with the jokes is that in our culture it is still okay to laugh at the power structures that exist between men and women. Haha, the baseball playing man knocked up the young woman. ‘Knocked up’ – come on, can we give her some kind of agency? – but, more to the point, while the man in the joke receives zero negative attention in any form for having sex, the woman is the butt of the joke, under attack for having sex. The old sad double standard – stud/slut, man/woman. Highfives for the men, not-allowed-to-walk-at-your-graduation for the women. It’s not funny, and jokes which encourage or reinforce such double standards are deplorable (unless, of course, the joke teller is actively seeking to continue the oppression of half the world’s population, in which case, Good on you, buddy. Highfive).

In the meantime, nobody makes me laugh as often as David Letterman. I saw a photo of him giving a thumbs-up one time and I almost wet myself. By which I mean to suggest that I think he is very very funny. And I don’t expect him to rededicate his life to the pursuit of equality in joke telling – he is going to cross the line sometimes. But, and this is the thing Palin (I believe) doesn’t understand or really care that much about: this joke is indicative of the ways in which we (men and women) view women as somehow lesser than men. This joke and others like it are not responsible for, but are continuing to make it okay that women earn 80 cents on the dollar in equal positions to what men earn one year after college graduation. And 60 cents on the dollar five years down the road. All this despite the fact that women are graduating with higher grades than men at every level in every subject.

So, yes, I think Sarah Palin is dumber than crushed monkey turds, and, yes, I think David Letterman is HI-larious. But no, it’s not okay. It’s not okay. It’s not okay at all to go on in this fashion, and if it takes a regrettable human being such as Sarah Palin to bring this isolated incident [italics added to indicate sarcasm] to light, and if it takes a funny funny comedian such as David Letterman to issue a public, down-on-my-knees-type of apology, in order for us as a culture to start to try to view women as actually equal, rather than nominally equal, to men, if that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes. And if the writer who wrote the joke has to lose the job for making an honest mistake, that’s what it takes. And if I get kicked out of the Hip, Liberal, Republicans-Are-So-Unreasonably-Lame Club (the HLRASULC), because I – and this hurts real bad – agree with Sarah Palin, well, that’s what it takes.

Super Wednesday

A brief update:

Last week we watched the election results on tv with great anticipation. Desi and Dolley got bored and gnawed on each other and some squeaky toys. Leah passed out after a ba-ba, and we took her to bed. Naomi drifted off shortly after PA was decided. Zac insisted, "I'm up, I'm up," as the election wound down. And Sam and traci and I continued to speculate until president-elect Obama earned that 235th electoral vote.

In the morning, when I woke Naomi, before she even opened her eyes, she stretched way out and said, "Who won the president?" I said, "Obama." She said, "Oh." I said, "Are you excited to have a new president?" She yawned for a long time, then said, "Not really. It's not like he's going to come to our house or something."

Which reminded me that I am going to be old enough to run for president in four years, though I won't be old enough until after the primaries, so it might be a moot point. So, that being said, expect to see me running in 2016 on my I-promise-to-come-to-your-house platform. And make sure you have a futon ready for me, because I'll probably stay for a while.

Mid-October N.C. Update (3)

10-25-08
Dear Friends,

The long-awaited third update from North Carolina is upon you:

At least, I’ve been long-awaiting it, and you all might have other feelings about it, but, for the time being, let’s just agree that dread is a form of waiting and that, with any luck ob-la-di, ob-la-da, et cetera. That being said:

Traci and I have been vising and revising the steel-mill novel I’ve been working on since 10 May 2000, and we’re feeling quite good about it, as well as thinking very highly of me. Most of my energy lately has gone into the project, despite the fact that I’m supposed to be delegating household responsibility, watching Leah, cooking dinner, and driving Zac, Sam, and Naomi back and forth from and to school. That said, I have passed the buck such that Zac, Sam, and Naomi watch Leah most of the time, while she drives them to school. If I can just get Daisy to make the split-pea soup, and teach Desi to type up these damned letters, I’ll have more of the time I need for beauty napping, and, God knows, I don’t need skimp on that.

As far as my manuscript goes, I’ve been putting the first ten pages in bottles and throwing them in the Cape Fear River Basin for the past few weeks with Self Addressed Stamped Envelopes, anxiously awaiting checks for tens-of-thousands-of dollars to slide underneath the front door, accompanied by very pretty books with pictures of me looking very mean and intelligent on the back. Every mentor I’ve ever had keeps suggesting there are better ways to publish a book, but I don’t buy it. I’m going to keep throwing the bottles.

The kids are enjoying school to whatever extent 4th, 7th, and 10th graders are allowed to enjoy school.

Naomi tried out for the jumproping team this semester, but did not make it, which leads me to think conspiracy, but she’s decided she simply hadn’t practiced enough and will improve for the next try outs. She keeps earning high grades, despite the fact that I make her go on bike rides with me and won’t let her do her homework. She’s also newly in love with gymnastics and is rapidly approaching handspringing without hands and cartwheeling with neither carts nor wheels.

Sam tried out for soccer last week and, boy, are his legs tired. Not many 7th graders made the team, which is of little consolation to him, but he seems vaguely certain that there will be a next year and in that “next year” he will be much improved. In the meantime, he’s reminding me of my middle school athletics – Atari and Twinkies were my major events – and I long for my youth. After scoring in the 99th percentile in every category on his Ohio aptitude tests last year, Guilford Middle School placed him in the intermediate 7th-grade, despite my daily protests and interviews with guidance counselors, teachers, principals, janitors, and a number of cashiers at Harris Teeter. After three weeks, they bumped him up to the honors classes in the middle of a science test. He asked what the test was on. The teacher told him the chapter. He read the chapter and then took the test while his classmates scribbled furiously. That is, of course, where Sam ended the story. I said, “So, how’d you do?” He said, “Oh, I got a hundred. What’s for dinner?”

Over the summer, the kids found a local gym called Tumblebees where they could go once a week and use the trampolines and the balance beams and the parallel bars and et cetera. The place also has a thirty-five-foot-tall rock-climbing room. We signed all three up for weekly classes and now they climb like three tall, skinny monkeys up and down everything in sight. After five weeks of classes, Zac placed third in the men’s beginners’ bouldering contest last weekend and won a pair of rock-climbing shoes. Also he’s attending his first N.C. high school homecoming dance tonight, and, need I say, God be with us all.

Just as Chronos overthrew Chaos, Zeus et. al. chucked the Titans’s asses out of heaven, and humans got tired of the ambiguity and randomness of their deities, children everywhere eventually surpass their parents. I’ve always known my day would come – I had hoped, though, that the kids would at least be in college first. But I keep putting my hopes in that one hand and it’s still not filling up.

In the meantime, we have been a little concerned about what’s on television. With all the sex and illicit drug use, the violence and the flagrant disregard for etiquette; with commercial after commercial constantly reinforcing false ideologies of sexism, machismo, and consumerism; with the mind-numbing sitcoms and increasingly marketable professional sports; with all that tv has to offer, we worry that our kids might find themselves falling behind their peers. We try to make them sit down and watch a couple hours each night, but they’re always too busy dissecting electronic equipment and doing pull ups.

We also worry that they’re not getting enough steroids from processed food products. But they seem to be keeping pace all right.

traci is busily professoring. She created a new reading series – Wordquake – which opens this Thursday in our living room. And we’re looking forward to an opportunity to travel again, maybe sometime in the year 2025.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Be sure to join me next time I post a letter to tell you in even more detail about how great our children are. Until then y’all take care.

Jackson

Post Script: It’s recently come to my attention that maybe I’m not receiving all of my emails – I won’t go into detail, but if you’re on this list, and you’ve written me an email requesting a response over the last year or so, and I haven’t responded, there’s a chance I just didn’t get it. Also, I can’t find my left red flip flop, so if anybody knows where it is or has one just like it, I’d like it back.

Mid-August Update

08-22-08

Hello Again Everybody,

Today is the final Friday of the summer for us in our new home state. We’ve done a fair job adjusting to the climate and the people and the other things that happen in our lives. We found a nice place to eat pizza, and another place that sells tacos for $1.00 a piece on Tuesdays. We found a park, the city library, and the video store. We’re just about set.

We even had time to take a half-day vacation this summer in the midst of all this accommodation. There was some dissention in the family as to whether we should go to the water park just south of Greensboro or to the ocean (the Atlantic Ocean), which is way off to the right of us I’m told. Since there have been water parks in all the other states we’ve lived in, but very few oceans, we opted for the latter.

On the way to the beach, we played our modified family version of 21 Questions, which would more accurately be called Infinite Questions. Naomi started. I said, “Is it a mineral?”

Naomi said, “I don’t know.”

Sam said, “Is it a place?”
Naomi said, “Sort of.

Zac said, “Is it a person?”

Naomi said, “Yes.”

I said, “Is the person in this car?”

Naomi said, “Yes.”

traci said, “Is the person Leah?”

Naomi said, “Yes, good job, Mom.”

traci’s turn took us through a series of questions in which we determined that the answer wasn’t blue, green, a person, a rock, a giraffe, the direction East, the cat, the Previa, Dad, or a turtle. We asked, Are you sure it’s not the cat?, yes but what about a really BIG rock, have you thought about making the answer: Pepsi, what about crackers, Cracker Jacks, Jack Sparrow, an unlaiden Sparrow, I think it’s a swallow, no it’s a sparrow, technically it could be either since neither could carry a coconut, are you sure it’s not the color blue?, I mean like a gigantic rock, like bigger than the moon?

We were, you all can imagine, just about stumped.

Naomi said, “I know, I know. Can you eat it?”

traci said, “Yes.”

Naomi said, “Are you sure it’s not blue?”

traci said, “Yes.”

Naomi said, “Grapes.”

traci said, “No.”

Naomi said, “Macaroni and Cheese.”

traci said, “Yes. Excellent.”

Nailed it. Naomi said since she had already gone, I could have her turn, which is good, because as is my way in all things, I’d been spending their turns preparing for my turn. We had recently watched the spoof _Meet the Spartans_, which makes fun of the movie _300_, which was based on the graphic novel by the same name. I kept the rest of the family easily at bay through the mineral, animal, etcetera part of the questions. Finally, they found my scent with traci’s, “Is it an idea?”

I said, “Yes.”

It took them a while longer to lock down the fact that it was a sentence, but once that happened, they made quick work of me. traci said, “A sentence? That’s not an idea. It’s probably a line from a stupid movie.”

I said, “Yes.”

Sam said, “Is it, ‘Come let us talk by the giant pit of death.’?”

I said, “Yes. Good job, Sam.”

And it was Sam’s turn.

Sam thought for a few minutes, and he said, “Okay, I got one. It’s a good one. But it’s way too hard to guess. So I’ll just tell you. It’s Nothingness.”

Zac said, “That was going to be my first guess.”

Sam said, “Okay, it’s your turn.”

Zac said, “Got one.”

traci said, “Is it bigger than a breadbox?”

Zac said, “You know, Mom, that’s a relative question. A breadbox, after all, could be as big as the ocean.”

Naomi said, “Is it the ocean?”

Zac said, “Yes. gg.” (gg is video game player, or “gamer,” lingo for “Good Game.” traci and I hold five English degrees between the two of us, and neither of us can explain to the kids why they shouldn’t use such shorthand in their speaking or writing, so we lol when Zac ggs us and move on.)

Zac pointed out that we had all already gone once, except for Desi who doesn’t have language, and except for Leah. He said, “I guess it’s Leah’s turn.” Now, this trip was in the middle of July, and she hasn’t gone yet, but we’re expecting her to bust out a really good one any minute now. She’s already had a long time to think about it.

It’s a four-hour trip to the beach, and the Atlantic Ocean was much as I had left it nineteen years before (my only other trip to the Atlantic to date) when I had taken my family to Myrtle Beach for some sort of Engineering conference, except that this time I couldn’t stop thinking about ee cummings’s characters Maggie and Minnie and Molly and May:

maggie and milly and molly and may
By e.e. cummings


maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles, and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles; and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

for whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea

The poem doesn’t have any relevance to what I’m writing, nor does it add a layer to the letter, nor does it inform our reading of this text. It’s just what I think about while I’m at the beach these days. I hadn’t known of the characters when I was twelve, and otherwise, I jumped into the breakers, trying to beat the ocean at its own game. I jumped sideways, and head on, and dove through the waves, and rolled with the big ones, and I’m certain, if I had only had a little more time, I would have won – the same eternal struggle and conclusion I had drawn when I was younger. On the other hand, I hear that the ocean is very much like an Atari game that just seems to go on and on forever.

And that seems equally likely and unlikely to me.

We put on sunblock. We ran in small circles. We ate sandwiches and chips – I’ve always thought it ironic to eat SANDwiches at the beach. We chased Leah, who was chasing Desi, around the sand. We pretended to build a sand castle, but got distracted by the way the waves kept piling up on themselves and piling up and piling up, but not making anything noticeably bigger.

Then we drove home, listening to Modest Mouse’s album _The Moon and Antarctica_. All told, the beach was a fine decision. The day after our trip, I made mention of the fact that when we left for the ocean, I had been concerned about Leah, who hadn’t had a bowel movement the evening before, but after a short time in the ocean, she was regular – in fact, one could say, extra-regular – again. traci put a checkmark on the chalkboard beside “Things Daddy Should Keep to Himself.” And I pondered the possibility that the salt water had loosened her bowels up and that maybe it, the ocean, was good for all of us in ways that we don’t immediately recognize.

Naomi, who had been washing her breakfast dishes, said, “Well, the ocean does make shit happen.”

Yes. Little one. I suppose it does. But we’ll talk more about that another time. Right now, we have to compile our shopping lists – school supplies – for tomorrow, and hope that there will be something interesting left to learn when we start fourth, seventh, and tenth grades next week.

I suggest you all do the same. Take care, y’all, and we’ll keep you up to date on N.C.

Love,
Jackson, et al.