Author Archive

• 04.05.08 Depression, stalemate, and gridlock:

  A friend of mine was wondering about the Great Depression. The problem they saw goes something like this. Before the stock market crash, you had people doing needed work and receiving needed wages. There was a positive economic cycle: money changes hands between lenders, employers, workers, and consumers, each of them, so far as he remains in that cycle, becoming richer and getting more needs met. But then - boom! - a problem in New York, on a particular fall day…* and suddenly no one around the country is working any longer.

  Now, what sense does that make? The work is still there to be done. The people are still there to do it. The tools are available, there is time in which to do the work, there is time and nothing but time, there is too much time and nothing to do to fill it, and yet there is no work getting done. Everybody wants the work to get done, they can do the work, and they have the tools and the time; but nobody works. How can that be?

  
  Tags: psychology, work, thinking, money, value, habit, trust, love, traffic, depression, questions.
• 04.04.08 Let that be a lesson:

  Two children, one of them in a red cap, it might have been a girl, were kicking a beach ball up in the air, back and forth. It would go up quickly, weaving side to side like an inflatable buoy against the mottled blue backdrop of the sky. It would complete the curve, drifting down slowly.

  They ran up and down on either side of a green asphalt tennis court with a saggy, torn net. For all the attention they paid one another, they might have been side by side or miles apart – they were watching the ball. The surface showed a map of the world in bright, unhealthy color. The surface was divided into twelve longitudinally, like long cantaloupe slices. The sea was pointillist blue.

  
  Tags: writing, politics, illustration, ignorance, fiction.
• 04.03.08 Looking forward, looking back:

  Technology, or new media, or google, or somebody, has helped take the mystery out. There are plenty of blogs written by Peace Corps volunteers in the Caucasus. And I actually recognize a lot of what they describe, though I’ve never been near there. There’s a certain post-Sovietness that seems to be common to where I was (from September 2002 until January 2004, I lived in a small, ethnically Buryat-Mongol town in Eastern Siberia).

  I can look forward to the same old exhortations to drink, the same condescending and infantalizing behavior by those who know me, the personal questions from strangers, unasked-for honesty, aggressive dogs, and mini-celebrity status. The same catechism of questions, even, persisting unchanged over thousands of miles of the previous Evil Empire. How much do teachers make, are you looking for a wife, is our vodka better than yours, how do you say kaif in English.

  
  Tags: blog, travel, siberia, future, time, memory, film, weather, caucasus, compulsion, garbage, illness.
• 04.02.08 Transition dialogue:

  A: You’re on your way now. That process you have been working on for so long has finally begun! You must be in a strange state. How does it feel?

  B: It’s strange to be in between. I’m not here any longer, I’m not there yet. I can’t really relax. It is a strange state, it’s like not being any state at all. It is exactly like not being in any state at all.

  
  Tags: change, travel, dialogue, future, fiction.
• 03.31.08 An early fall afternoon:

  From an elevation in the sandpit you commanded the playground. There was a train of boys running after a train of girls. It was shapes and activity. One girl seemed to stand still in the center of it. She held her eyes tight closed. He raised a sliver of bark above his head. It was his sword of justice.

  He fell upon the group shouting, holding his weapon, he flew down from the hill with air rushing past his scalp. He felt glee and power as he chased. Older boys shouted after him, he felt the sun. He was a good runner. With a sudden burst of speed he caught up with and tackled a boy. He heard cheers. The wind was rushing past and he was strong.

  
  Tags: setback, writing, learning, fiction, justice.
• 03.30.08 Biking and the city:

  Some of the best things in your life refuse to come to you except through luck, or as the backside of a problem. I didn’t choose it, but my fear of driving kept me from ever being dependent on a car. I’ve never owned a car, and never felt I had to. Admitting that I needed one, and mastering myself to the point of learning how to use one, would have been too high a price to pay. I think that’s a pretty rare bit of good fortune, in spite of all the humiliation and misery I felt during the six years I couldn’t overcome it.

  I still feel a little uncomfortable riding in a car, though I don’t panic or lose control any more, and I can talk about it now. And now, it’s really only discomfort: I don’t feel comfortable with the huge disproportion between the size and importance of what’s being transported (me), and the large, loud, bulky machinery that seems required to transport it. Mass transit is different, a bus would go where it was going regardless of whether I was on it. Walking was always how I preferred to get anywhere, but longer distances or regular transport I depended on the bus. Regular reading time, habitual mingling with people, breathing all their various smells, I find I need that even in my most withdrawn moods. A certain basic level of exposure to humanity, any kind of humanity, is part of what I require to keep myself sane.

  
  Tags: thinking, pace, anxiety, habit, transportation, city.
• 03.29.08 Politics and self-abandonment:

  I am a sucker for what you might call political pathos. A large group gathered peacefully for a common purpose will reliably bring a tear in my eye and a lump in my throat. I’ve noticed the tendency for at least ten years. It’s a curious sensation: it’s longing, and happiness, and hope, but it’s mixed with a feeling of great loneliness and distrust: I mistrust the group and its aims, and I mistrust myself, and my own feelings. I feel like I want to be one with the group but I feel completely cut off on the other hand. There’s a certain exquisiteness, like a sensual tickle or a painful exercise session. But it’s a feeling I don’t like to sustain for too long.

  I suppose I could trace it back to church meetings and religious summer camps from my childhood. But the occasion doesn’t have to be religious, or political: I also get it at concerts, at parties, even, in the right setting, at a lecture or discussion. And I don’t have to be present at an actual gathering either, nor do have to be in agreement with its purpose, I can even be revolted by it, and all the same I will be carried along, and left with an inner core of coldness and non-committal feelings. I nearly wept at the end of The Battle of Algiers each of the three times I saw it, and each time my feelings of ambivalence towards the movement and the events celebrated in it only increased: in the same proportion as my emotion. It’s as if I have the urge to leap into the sea, and I can only barely hold myself back. There is a roiling, tumbling chaos of water below me, and I want to dive in, even though I am fearful of and sure of being smashed and torn apart in it.

  
  Tags: volunteer, water, nationalism, music, mood, anxiety, politics, history, memory, film, weather.
• 03.28.08 Outside my window:

  My west-facing window is divided in two. The north side slides laterally. I don’t think the panes or the frame are original, but the external setting contains some old wood indeed: it’s so weather worn it’s almost not there at all. It’s a bundle of splinters that continue to associate from habit.

  The south, fixed side of the window is on the outside. The moving side is backed with a screen, and has a permanent smudge which covers over half its area in a vertically elongated diamond shape; in combination with the screen behind it makes a double distortion. At night, the center of this area glitters and the streetlights beyond grow fuzzy spring dandelion heads.

  
  Tags: water, anxiety, weather, home, window, view.
• 03.27.08 The lodger’s money:

  Trying something a little different here: write a story keep it at exactly 250 words. We’ll see how it goes. Just trying to keep things simple for now.

  The mother and her daughter were sitting at the small table by the window in the otherwise empty kitchen. The lodger came in and sat down. The mother angrily pulled closed the curtain that looked out on the road. She turned to her daughter: did she have anything so say for herself? The daughter continued to stare at the lodger. She sat curving her spine, contrary to her recent, conscious habit. Her mother repeated the question. She bent further forward, her head tilted back and her broad chin elevated. She kept her small teeth tight together. The silence acted as a goad on him, and he jerked forward in his chair.

  
  Tags: writing, fear, money, memory, fiction, guilt.
• 03.26.08 Work and the otherworkly world:

  There was a sudden rain, and the view of the north-west warehouses from the fifth-floor window was sunk in the kind of blue that I usually see only in lowlit photographs from digital cameras. Other people weren’t surprised, it was predicted. But I didn’t know about it, and didn’t pack a lunch. I went stood underneath the canvas cover of the burrito cart outside my building. The rain wasn’t the usual Portland rain, but sharp and swift and it came in at an angle. The cart was empty, the surface of the salsa was getting filmy, the cheese was starting to drown, and the wind was knocking the tinfoil around.

  
  Tags: reading, work, taste, thinking, water, weather, plato.