Busy-Busy-Busy.

In all the busy-busy-busy go-go-go of life lately, (there has been a lot of busy-busy-busy go-go-go BTW), I realize that I have completely lost track of a couple of things.

For instance, it is October and I had a birthday. It was terrible! Without belaboring the details, I am now old. As where before I was just kind of getting old, I am now old. Luckily I decided some time ago that standard metrics of life success were not for me, because otherwise I would be feeling pretty silly and sad about some of my life choices right about now.

Also, I have been teaching for real for a few months now, but I have been so busy teaching that I haven’t gotten to savor very much the fact that I am teaching. I really enjoy it. I have no earthly clue if I am any good at it, but since I am so good at all the other things, it is safe to assume I am good at this one … that’s how these things work, right? Go I hope that’s how these things work.

Additionally, it is October and that means next month is November and every year in November I attempt (and usually fail at) doing NaNoWriMo (which is National Novel Writer’s Month) and, oddly, while I am in a writing program and know plenty of writers, almost none of them share my enthusiasm for the project, the goal of which is to write a novel of at least 50,000 words in one month. It is a nearly impossible goal and I have only ever succeeded a couple of time, but I always learn something from the attempt. I wonder why no one else does this though. Probably this is owing to the fact that many of the writers I know are younger than I am and/or learned how to write from going to school, so they don’t conceptualize writing as a grueling marathon that one competes in completely alone. Learning to write in college teaches you that you produce short, tight work and then you show it to other people. I didn’t learn to write that way, I learned to write more or less alone, not knowing (or really caring) if anyone else would ever lay eyes on a single word. It is an act of love for me, but also I guess, a kind of compulsion or, at the very least, something that I make myself do because I know that it is something I should do. When I go running a lot (which I have not been doing enough of, on account of the disgusting heat the past few month) I feel a feeling similar to what I feel when I make myself right; it is hard, but becomes less hard through repetition and ultimately there is a tremendous feeling of pride in having done it.

Anyway, NANO is coming up next month and I don’t have any idea what to write about. A couple months ago I did read a fascinating book called Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky and I still find myself thinking about it just about every day. It was a bizarre and beautiful little book about remote islands. Each island was described in a couple of pages, but it was haunting and strange and kind of inspired. I would love to write something broken up into misshapen pieces that way. Or maybe that is just the kind of mood I’m in.

Also in November I am going to Colorado for a few days. I’m doing it primarily because I found an insanely cheap flight to Denver. It is on Frontier Airlines, which is one of those airlines that’s so cheap the planes only have one wing and half the amount of fuel required to get to the destination. My roundtrip from LAX to DEN was $76.

Let me say that again: My. Roundtrip. LAX to DEN. Was seventy-six dollars.

The wanderlust adventurer in me could not allow that to go by.

It works out nicely though because I’m thinking of applying to the MFA program at Colorado State University, which is an hour from Denver in Ft. Collins, so I justified the trip to myself by selling it as a way to visit their campus, which is a responsible thing to do. Got that? I am being responsible!

There are a million other things going on, but those are the only ones I want to write about right now. Though I should mention briefly that I have found myself mentioning a lot lately that I write a blog. I’m not bragging on it (any asshole can write a blog) and I’m not trolling for readers (I have long since given up on the idea that anyone reads this thing), but it has come up in numerous conversations lately about my “craft” of writing (which means that frequently lately I have found myself ambushed into conversations about “craft”, ick, gag me with a spoon). It turns out that part of my “craft” is simply to write a lot. I don’t write every day and I don’t write as much as I would like, or should, but I look back over the past few years and I realize that I’m almost always writing, either for fun or for school, or for this blog. I realize how useful it has been to me to have this place where I can write something and then send it out there into the world. Even if that has not improved my “craft”, it has certainly helped me do away with things like “standards” or “a sense of decency” when presenting my writing to the world.

Occasionally people who care about me have suggested that I temporarily set this blog to private so that prospective employers or students or what have you won’t stumble across it, but I have always been reluctant to do that because I’m choosing what I put out there into the world. My sense of decorum may be a little different than some people’s, but it's not like this is a blog of dick pics or anything, it is a blog about the writing life and the way in which writing is a way of attempting to understand the world.

And cat pictures. This is also a blog of cat pictures.

And pictures of buildings.

And other cool things that I “find”.

And I find a lot of cool stuff.

That is all I have time to write about right now. I have a bunch of busy-busy-busy go-go-go to get back to after all.

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hanging back on my heel.

hanging back on my heel

by james bezerra

i keep a picture on my laptop that I can make desktop in four clicks. five or six if i’ve been drinking. of you. walking away. only it isn’t you. because i don’t have a picture of you. like this. bag strap over your slim tan shoulder as you walk toward a bridge like a backbone that seems to lead to a baking azure sea. simple white tank top you wear. that you know i love. and your short hair twisting on a simmering breeze. the whole thing is very ocean summer. little black strings at the back of your neck. make me think of stowaway sand between our humid bodies. it isn’t you because it isn’t you. it is a fucking random internet picture from where i don’t even remember but i remember seeing it and knowing it was you and i had taken it on. hanging back on my heel. flipping camera switch. so in love with you. and your shape. just then. on a trip we never took. during a life we never thought to have. i click five times and there you are. looking away. i see you. just then. through a viewfinder. the girl who would have gone anywhere with me. i begin to wonder if it is a malaysian beach. what you have in your bag. if we’d spent the night before in a peg leg hut over some lagoon. or wrapped sweaty in giant palm leaves. i lean in toward you. now. wonder what tragedy would have to crush your life. now. to make you into this you. into her. with me. walking toward that beach. whatever it is. i realize. almost without conflict. i would accept.

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DRD4-7r.

About a year ago I settled on the word restless. This is the word I am okay with when I have to explain to people what the hell the deal has been with my life. Most people are far too polite to ask specific things like, “What happened with that marriage you were in?” or “So I hear that you don’t sleep in a bed because your ex-girlfriend broke your heart so bad that you’re essentially the emotional equivalent of Jason Bourne”, but even though they don’t specifically ask those things, those are usually the things they’re asking, though usually for sport and not out of a sense of concern.

So “restless” is the word I have found which feels both honest and yet somehow still obtuse enough that it allows me to not have to talk about those things … you know those things … they happen inside your body and make you feel the … what do you call them? The feels. No one likes those.

“Restless” gets me off the hook without my having to be dishonest.

And it is such a dynamic word. I’m surprised presidential campaign propaganda is not all over this word yet: Vote for So-and-So, the Restless Patriot: Spreading Justice and Freedom and Truth Sunlight to All the Corners of the World Not Yet Reachable by Disney Cruise Lines.

Obviously that is a hyperbolic example.

A few months ago, right around Christmas, I had drinks with a friend of mine in the East Village of Manhattan. It was a fancy as fuck little tiny bar that made its own bitters. He’s a student at Columbia Law and also one of the finest readers of poetry I have ever met and we talked about life and such and he asked why I’m doing this teacher-training thing that I am doing as part of my MA and I was more honest than I usually am and I said that I simply enjoyed the teaching thing in a way I never expected to, but also, that that wasn’t it all on its own. I'm not one of those selfless adjunct professor types who is simply drawn like sailors to the rocks by the Sirens of TEACHING. I told him that I find something appealing about the idea of having 100% portable credentials; I can get a job down the street or in Arizona or Portland or Texas or West Virginia. I told him that I liked the idea that I could go teach in Colorado for a couple of years and then decide not to anymore. I told him that the restless part of me likes the idea of living a semester at a time.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t have big-picture goals and don’t want commitment, that I don’t want kids and a home that isn’t floating a foot off the ground, but I was being oddly honest that day (it was kind of drizzly and wet weather always makes me feel closer to myself) and so I think I used this word “restless” numerous times.

It is one of those words that is both solid and simultaneously empty. It is a great container. If I tell you that I am restless then you are immediately willing to pack up the Subaru Outback of my soul with your own problems/desires/fantasies/fears/wants/hopes and then you give me a pass because the thing I just said ceases to be about me and becomes about you. This is why women in relationships find me, on average, 7,000% more attractive than women who are single (which is half the reason I don’t date.); I am, and can be, whatever.

That isn’t me being coy, BTW, I really am frequently what-the-fuck-ever.

For years now I have felt like that one montage scene in Legends of the Fall when Brad Pitt is wondering lovelornly around the globe doing things that don't even make sense (I think he kills a rhinoceros at one point), though I promise you this is the only time I will ever compare myself to Brad Pitt.

“Restless” buys me all of the things I have said so far. It is a word that most people will let slide by. Ironically it is a word like “love” or “sad” or “hungry” in that people acknowledge it on the level of a base emotion which does not require additional explanation.

This is not to say that my restlessness is a manipulation, because I assure you that it is not. You’re frankly lucky that I’m not one of those people with a world map tacked onto a bulletin board with color-coded thumb tacks indicating which continent I went to on which trip, or even one of those people with a globe tattooed on their back (though I have seen some of those skinny lithe backs and they aren't always bad, with that ink circle up between the shoulder blades and its circumference altered by the tensing of shoulder blades), I would enjoy being one of those people very much, but I am already halfway through my thirties and I am also ambivalent about patchouli. So permanent-globe-trotting-backpacker is probably not in my future. However, I AM going to hike the Camino de Santiago in France/Spain, that is just a thing that will happen, be assured of that. I may even wear the patchouli for that one.

This whole thinking on the word restless is because I read this article: The Wanderlust Gene: Why Some People Are Born To Travel, which seems to posit that there is a “wanderlust gene” called DRD4-7r, which I do not believe for one single second, but that word “wanderlust” is pretty good too, isn’t it? And it — like “restless” — can be used to explain away all manner of sins. I am always inclined to think that I have this Wanderlust Virus everyone Pintersts about, but I don’t travel widely enough to get it tattooed between the sharp edges of my shoulder blades. That’s just a function of money though. If you would like to loan me your Black Amex card, I will be in Morocco tomorrow with the Mercator Map inked into my very own flesh.

A few months ago one of the “travel” blogs I read (i.e. : written by an attractive young person with the money to pay for plane tickets) linked to the video below. I am posting it not because I think that it is good or bad, but simply because I am both the girl described in the video and also, somehow, the guy who the video is waving off. Also, please note how great the song is (Seriously, watch the video and then watch it again just to listen to the remix).

(Hey, isn’t it funny how this post about restlessness didn’t answer any of the questions it raised and then ultimately misdirected you toward a video with a great song and cool girls in small black bikinis?)

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A Minimalist Travelogue.

As you may very well have gathered from the metric fuckload of pictures I have posted on here recently, I went back east for Christmas and New Years. I do not have any detailed notes about the trip and I haven’t really written up a long and rambling thing about it (yet!), but below I have posted what I am going to call a minimalist travelogue. I probably couldn’t have nailed the trip better if I'd written a whole book about it.

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Travel Tips.

As long as we seem to be on the subjects of both travel and poetry, this is from my man Walt Whitman:

Come said the Muse,

Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted,

Sing me the universal.

And this is from Lao-Tzu, though you’ve probably seen it on Pinterest:

A good traveler has no fixed plan, and is not intent on arriving.

I like to think about that whenever I go out on adventures, though I have to modulate it some. After all, Lao-Tzu died 1,700 years before the invention of non-refundable airline tickets, so, you know.

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Low Frequency Yellow.

Low Frequency Yellow

by james bezerra

The memories don’t seem to come to me with the same clarity and color that other people have. I remember the elements of fact. I remember in broad strokes. This is the quality that made me a good student of history. I remember how one moment flows into the next and I remember what was important about the moments. 

The moments themselves are rather flat.

The memories come to me that way. Flat.

They’re also liars.

I have trouble knowing what I remember and what my brain has colored into the empty spaces. My brain is just trying to help; making stereoscopic memories out of ones that might otherwise be only half memories.

It is like that with the bus.

Greyhound trips between home and the coast. Two hours by car, almost four on the bus. I remember those trips and I know that I remember them. Because I must remember them. Because I am remembering them right now. 

Only I’m not.

I would be lying if I told you that I remember the low frequency yellow smell of sweat that the blue seats gave off. I have no idea if they were even blue. I have no idea if they smelled like sweat. I don’t remember. Right now I can’t even summon the memory of a smell. I’m not sure that I ever can. I can recognize smell and that smell may ping the metadata of memory and bring something up on the dumbwaiter that we call ‘memory’, but is that the same as remembering?

I know that I used to hop the bus to my sister’s on the Central Coast of California. She was in school in San Luis Obispo. Her boyfriend managed the student diary and he lived there in a little foreman’s apartment off tiled the main lobby and I know that I would sit there in a beanbag chair on his little patio and I would look out west to Bishop’s Peak on the other side of the black ribbon of Highway 1.

But this is where the problems start.

Because that is not a memory. It is a construction. It is artificial. It is not untrue, but it also isn’t truth. Oh the dilemmas I have!

Here, watch this:

Dana was inside but she had Randy Travis playing in the little apartment as she washed plastic plates in the little stainless steel sink in the kitchenette. The slider was open and “Forever and Ever, Amen” was warbling out to me. She was into Randy Travis back then and he was at the height of his skill: a little country, a little bluegrass, a little bluesy. “You may wonder how/I can promise you now/this love that I feel for you always will be …” Plus he was good looking for a country star, then. That was right before country music finally got the pop music makeover. Blame Shania Twain for that.

I was about 13 and doodling my binder. Mom said I was burning through wirebound notebooks too fast so she’d made me start writing on loose leaf in a three ring binder. 

From the little concrete pad of patio out the sliding door I could see the freeway and Bishop’s Peak past that, the highest point in that skinny backbone of mountains that separates SLO from the true beach towns on the otherside

I heard Dana shut the water off and then she hollered out to me, “Hey ….”

Only I don’t know what she hollered out to me and I don’t remember if she was washing dishes just then when I was sitting out on the patio looking past the freeway to Bishop’s Peak. Though I may not have even been looking at Bishop’s Peak, because that was West of the patio but that exterior wall ran East-West, so to sit comfortably against it in a bean bag chair I would have been facing south.

These are the problems of memory.

I know that each of those facts is true. I know because I googled half of them.

My memory says, “What was that one Randy Travis song that Dana used to listen to?

My memory says, “Had Mom stopped buying me notebooks by then?”

An hour ago I couldn’t have found Bishop’s Peak on a map.

Are all memories this fickle? Trying to dig to the bottom of a memory and the walls start to collapse like the moat around a sandcastle. Memory just refilling itself and all I remember is the memory as if written on an index card: SLO-DAIRY-DANA-BEAN BAG-TRAVIS-BISHOP-PAPER.

I know that the bus was real. I remember those trips. Lemoore to San Luis on a bus was as much as my parents would allow me to do alone. I don’t know that I remember any one specific trip, but I remember the god almighty thrill of them. That feeling has never left me. Those bus trips were like hours with a slow tattoo artist while he inked the word ‘wanderlust’ across the red muscle of my heart. I remembered that thrill when I hiked the Waterfall Trail to Havasupai in Arizona. I remembered it when I backpacked above the treeline into the Tablelands above the Sequoias and stood looking out over desolate Moose Lake while the Great Western Divide stared back at me with all of its power and ambivalence. I remember that thrill every time I get on a plane and wait for velocity to collide with steel.

The low frequency yellow smell of twenty-year-old bus seats isn’t the thing then; isn’t what makes the memory matter. What makes the memory matter, then, is what it makes us do tomorrow. I feel the ink in the tattoo slosh with every breath I take and I think it is asking me, “Where to next?” and that’s what what matters most: the making of the memories, the next set of sweat-smelling seats on a bus to who-knows-where, the next move, the next adventure out there beyond the comfort zone and above the treeline.

From time to time though - I will admit - I do still hear a little ghost echo, “You may wonder how/I can promise you now …” it sounds like music from another room that has grown scratchy with age, “this love that I feel for you always will be …” but it does make the trip a easier; memories pack light that way.

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Burning Ship.

Bertrand Russell wrote: Adventurous men enjoy shipwrecks, mutinies, earthquakes, conflagrations, and all kinds of unpleasant experiences.

I found these lines rereading one of my favorite travel books, called “Vagabonding” by Rolf Potts. He’s a mild mannered guy who spends his time getting into trouble all around the world while living on a shoestring. If it ever turns out that I’m updating this blog from Macau, then it will be his fault. The man leaves wanderlust in his wake the way snails leave a sticky trail. Youtube him and you’ll be amazed by how much of a dork he is. Read his book and you’ll be impressed by how fearless he is. I wish someone had put his book in my hands when I was a decade younger. But I also wish that I wasn’t suffering from advanced male pattern baldness and I also wish that floating unicorns distributed Butterfinger candy bars. These wishes are neither here nor there. I’ve learned to rock male pattern baldness just as I hope to make good on wanderlust. As a thirty-four year old grad student, I have long since given up on doing things the way I was supposed to, and there is something kind of liberating about this existence. Though no word yet on the floating Butterfinger unicorns, but I am keeping an eye out.

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Oh! BTW, that beautiful painting above is called “Burning Ship” and it was painted by Frank Bodilly. He was just a boy from Cornwall who became a barrister and served as a judge in Calcutta in the 1890s. He retired back to Cornwall but died in Sicily, which ain't that bad a place to die of old age. He was a lawyer first and an artist second and not of much note in either direction, but I like that painting even though it is hard to tell that the boat is on fire.

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Long Slow Ride.

Last week I got to take a nice long train trip. I love the train! For some reason I have very much romanticized train travel. I like that it takes a really, really long time to get anywhere. I like that you get to watch unfamiliar landscapes roll by. I like getting to pass through towns I’ve never been to, I like seeing the people on the streets and waiting in their cars. I like waving to strangers at railroad crossings. I like the tight, narrow stairways that make me feel like I’m descending into a submarine. I like that there is something lonely about trail travel. I like - oddly - the feeling of stillness that it creates in me. That is oxymoronic, I know, but I think that it is due to the fact that even though one is in motion the whole time, one is also confined to that very narrow train car; there is nowhere to go, there is very little to do, and as long as you can prevent yourself from wasting that time playing games on your phone, then there is great potential to relax, to look out the window, and to just simply relax, to let your mind unfurl and to wonder at the world.

Those are some of the reasons that I like the train.

I went from Burbank up to San Jose, which was something like a ten hour ride. Here are some of the - admittedly terrible - pictures that I took along the way.

The lower portion of my body, awesome Chucks, and a Kindle.

The train as it makes a long, slow turn.

You have to look really close, but this is a picture of some Amish people who were on my train. I’m not sure if Amish people are supposed to use the train. I would have asked them, but I thought that creepily taking pictures of them would be more fun.

It is always 5 o’clock somewhere (on the train, usually wherever I’m sitting).

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Wanderlust.

I recently bought a pretty awesome backpack. You should know about me, I love bags. I love their sizes and shapes, I love the potential of them. When you have a good bag and some good stuff to put in it, you can handle anything.

So I have this really cool backpack and I haven’t gotten to use it yet. And that makes me sad. It is the perfect bag for a couple of days away from home. It is roomy; it has a lot of convenient and well-thought-out pockets. It seems durable, trustworthy. So I would like to use it.

You should come with me while I do. Let’s go somewhere. What are you doing this weekend? Or next?

I don’t have much money right now, so I can’t hop a flight to Senegal, but I do have a car and this badass backpack and more than a little bit of wanderlust (that is one of my favorite words BTW because it is made up of other words that I like yet has a distinct meaning that I also like).

So where do you want to go? We can be in Vegas in just a few hours, or San Diego, Mexico, or up the coast to anyplace that you want. I want to see the Salton Sea and lately I’ve been in the mood to hike up the side of something, or down into something. Or we can lay out a map on my kitchen table and I’ll let you stick a pin in it anywhere you want and that is where we will point the car and along the way we’ll order the chalkboard daily special at every dinner that we pass.

Or maybe we should hop a train, there are still trains you know. And I love trains. I love the world rolling by at a soothing speed and the constant low frequency rumble of the journey. And a few hours in, when you get sleepy and tired of the magazines that you brought, I will even let you lean your head on my shoulder while that train-rumble, that ever-present steel-on-steel vibration lulls you off to sleep.

So let’s go. I have this bag and the desire to use it. So let’s use it.




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