Category Archives: writing

1000 Ledes n + 3: Six and Three Quarters Years Old

Sheila Uhulay is crying. She is screaming, sobs ripping out of her throat with a force that makes her little body look like it’s being pummeled by an invisible and cruel playmate. She stops occasionally, eyes too crowded and wet to see her mother’s hand, her face puffed, lips straining in the wide oval of children’s violent grief. Sometimes, as if she’s run out of spirit, the wail dies out, and her face is frozen in this too-big emotion. Then the cry returns, halting and stuttering, until the sound begins to really flow again.

A few minutes ago Sheila was carrying the commemorative green Duckworld Bouncy Playland cup with matching crazy straw. She was tired of carrying it. She has attempted to get her mom to carry it 15 times, but Mom had been adamant, she was carrying her cup herself. She had carried it through two train transfers in busy and hot tunnels where all the huge grownups crowded down on her and only her Mom’s hand had kept her going the right direction. After all of that they had emerged onto a sunny and clear street. Sheila had walked over to a tall trash can and circled it looking for the hole. Eventually her mother pointed to the top and she pitched the cup in.

She turned away, took three steps, and panicked. A few moments later her mother was trying to reach down into the trash to retrieve the cup as she pleaded for her mom to somehow make it reappear. Her mother, unable to reach the cup, eventually took her hand and lead her away.

Now she is walking down the street, the crying calmed to the point of speech being possible. “Why did I do that?” she begs the wall, the ground, her mom. She rounds on her mom. “Why didn’t you stop me?” “I didn’t know what you were doing,” her mom replies, shrugging the shoulder attached to the hand that is holding Sheila’s hand. Sheila says it over and over again: “Why did I do that?”

Sheila is six, and now knows that she can betray herself.

From my archive: Notes on LA, circa 1997

“Precious and few are the moments that you and your own worst enemy share.” -TMBG

I was born in a city made of alien’s dreams. LA is fabricated out of the wild ideas of her immigrants. The streets are littered with dream fragments, dream dust, hope detritus. When you spend your childhood sliding between the bitter remains of so many grownup’s visions you don’t learn to dream for yourself. Hope is a quality that one conceals. You have to go somewhere else to learn to dream. It is vital for the children of LA to leave, and they do in droves. But it is also important to take the essence of it in you, you will anyway, and fighting it just makes the exodus longer and lonelier.

I have lived in self-imposed exile from my hometown for a few years now. I miss my beaches. I miss the continual crush of life. I even miss the dead and dying dreams of the Midwest. It’s easy to avoid homesickness though, thinking of the reasons I left. The worst part of LA is easily enough. It’s the worst part of California in general, it’s the palm trees. Ratty little worthless things that don’t serve a purpose under heaven but to look bad and sway dangerously when the Santa Anas blow. They don’t even have the decency to cast shade anyone can use. They occupy space, they smell like nothing, they have no fruit or flowers and they are everywhere. I hate them, I hate the hours I have had to stare at them while stuck in traffic, which is the second worst thing about California in general and LA in specific. You haven’t done traffic until you’ve come across the mouth of the valley at 2:30 in the morning and been utterly and totally packed in like a parking lot for no reason anyone can divine. it would just appear that everyone as one decided to stop moving.

There’s more, you haven’t experienced terror until you’ve tried to merge into the other form of LA traffic jam: bumper to bumper going about 80-85. Speed limits in California are not only often optional, they are at times downright deadly. The most insane part is that people choose daily commutes to and from work that are simply nuts. they are on the road forever, and driving on the edge of death the entire time. The culture has completely evolved around it; the LA freeway systems now have designated accident spots. It is LA’s own unique way of dealing with surreality directly in the face. The West Coast’s version of “reasonable travel” proves that our perspective on distance is eminently scaleable. there’s this wonderful quote from Bill Bryson that says roughly if you say you are driving from Surrey to Cornwall “a distance that most Americans would happily go for a taco” the British will think now that’s a tall order. Even the rest of America looks to the west and thinks “you guys spend waaay too much time in your cars.” In the Bay Area, this is considered a reasonable step in career building.

In California space is considered irrelevant and personal. As is the custom of so many city folk Californians measure distance in time, as in “oh, the restaurant is 15 minutes away.” The phenomena, however, goes beyond how I have seen it played out anywhere else. If you say but how far is it, a native will look at you as if you just asked “yes, but does the owner have a foot fetish?” it’s none of your business to know more than the freeway exit. The caveat: there are pretty much just two measures of time: 15 minutes, and 45 minutes. These two measurement however have no real relationship with how far it to somewhere or even how long it will take to get there. They pass to you one bit of information: whether you are going to spend most of the journey on the freeway or the surface streets. Anything on surface streets is 15 minutes away. It takes more than 15 minutes to park in most of southern California, actually. If you should be visiting, budget yourself an hour. As for a 45 minute trip, budget yourself 15 minutes. When you arrive is a completely arbitrary unit of time. La has one of the world’s finest freeway systems that may at any time be utterly impassable. The culture has again adapted wonderfully though; if you say “sorry I’m late – traffic” you can be instantly forgiven for missing anything up to the birth of your child. If you toss in “..and I couldn’t find parking.” you can miss everything on up to puberty.

I went back to visit recently. I learned there is a flip side to the idea that there is no such thing as a prophet in his hometown- a hometown makes a lousy Mecca. Nothing had changed. All the little strip mall corner shop I had know had gone out of business and been replaced by corner shops that would be out of business before I return. I sat in a room full of stand up comics on a Wednesday night, no smoke hanging thickly in the air. More than three hours of carefully timed bitterness turned the funnest thing in the world into ditch digging. People sat around like piles of cloth. Slack and lost of purposes- they seemed to have sacrificed all the wrong things. They came to Los Angeles with the idea that LA owed them something for the effort; they have replied its indifference with a persistent indifference of their own. What I hated most about the world of that room was all the erie places it connected to my inner world. They highlighted their pain, and sometimes they highlighted mine too. They served it cold and without love. They said “it’s funny cause it’s true” but the truer it got the less funny it was. Southern California lives totally in reference to itself- making a twisted yardstick to measure the world with, and my fellow comics had internalized this yardstick. Selling out was the topic of the hour, and how much you could get for doing it. I escaped into the night air and thought hard what I had learned since leaving; as long as you love your life and what you do you can’t sell out; when you don’t care anymore it’s time to stop, even if you haven’t made a cent. It’s cliche, but I escaped so it was good enough. Sitting beside and within my old paradigm, I saw the yardstick inside myself, and I saw the huge distance between me and brilliance. I could see where I became intolerant of my own learning process. Where I had no time for my own expression, where I would never approve. LA is sick of it. There is little room for creativity without filters, there is no tolerance for experimentation because experimentation spends so much time failing. Instead everything must sparkle and be clustered with jewels. It is a jaded where. It is a where in me that will never be pleased with all the time I spend between flashes of brilliance.

I was fairly proud to be from what seemed to be the world’s Most Hated Big City. It always gave me an underdog feel, so I loved Los Angeles and told everyone so. I tried to step back in and see it clearly, but still not for it’s own sake. I wanted something from it still; to give context to other things I have and plan to write, to define the “my city” that became the basic unit of my perceptions. Los Angeles is not a simple place to understand. I didn’t get it in these reflective meditations about it, but I also didn’t get it in the 16 years of growing up I did there. It got me without a doubt.

Despondent, angry, confused and tired I responded in traditional American manner; I went midnight shopping at the local supermarket. I went and shared my space with other silent consumers, and stopped a while to eat my own paradoxes. What I hate most about LA is that even my picture is still not true. In the time between the lines that is a 1:30am run to Ralph’s you come face to face with people in a way with no social consequences. We became our shadows; we became real. We met each other in the eye, thanked each other for the help, they offered me a cut in line because I had only two items. Suddenly the tired bustle of the city opens and shows a tolerance that lives between the lines. There is, against all odds and because humans cannot ever be all one thing, a quiet and hopeful celebration of life we pretend not to see in each other in the light of the over exposing sun. LA is a city dying to be gentle. The people are sensitive but lost in the hype, even when they are creating it. Malice in LA is often the malice of a young child; unfocused and unhappy and slips all over and fades away and is forgotten. It is hard to sit quietly and think, aw- I am describing myself. I went to the beach I grew up on. It’s still big, but getting smaller. Time curves different as I get closer as well, some street I drove on no more than a month ago, the next turn I may have to retrieve from a distant past just to pick my way there. And when I said hello to my ocean I was sure that it had been no more than a week since I had last. It was night, this was gang territory, I was afraid the car would get fucked with, I was afraid of everything. But I had something to prove- that this stretch of beach was still mine, that I was still its. I walked getting sand in my shoes beside the sewer overflow we called the creek when I was growing up. Intellectually I know how bad that is, but I still go to taste that water. This bit of Pacific is my holy Ganges. It still washes me and its taste is imprinted in me somewhere below reason. I traced my way back to the under highway tunnel that led off the beach. I could feel the dried salt sticking to my face where I had washed it and sticking to my hands. I didn’t feel cathartic or even satisfied, but I can still feel that stickiness now. I carry it with me. I won’t be back for a long time.

This is my struggle with LA- that I can’t hate it, that I really can’t love it, that I have to stay away because I can’t handle it, not because it can’t handle me. But maybe it can’t handle me anyway. It isn’t a place to dream after all, it is a place to bring dreams to, and I’m not finished. The psyche it created in me is one of coping, and too often with vicious disappointments. To learn to dream, I suspect it’s better to go somewhere with a real public transportation system.

1,000 Ledes n + 1: Hetchman Noe Forgets

Hetchman Noe is writing a real actual paper letter. He is telling the object of the letter that he has recently moved to Portland, OR and since he

Since looks wrong. Sinse? sincse? cinse? Definitely not cinse. He stares at the letters he’s written. s i n c e. A cognitive paralysis begins to move down and throughout his body, beginning at his tight cheeks and pinched brow and continuing until his hand aches from an over-tight and immobile grip on his pen.

He knows how to spell this word, so this is ridiculous. Was it right he first time? Since, is it since? This is a first grade word. He stares at it, all the words around it melting away into the gibberish of inattention. It still looks wrong. Cince. That looks possible, but somehow unlikely. Hetchman closes his eyes. He looks for it on the page of a memory. He has the page up, he can see a jumble of other words, and where it belongs, there a five letter blank spot. It’s not there. Somehow it’s escaped the page, fled his memory. At least now he knows it’s five letters. He grits his teeth. “I have known this word since first grade,” He says quietly, never opening his teeth, “I know how to spell since.”

He stares at the words he’s written. He picks up his phone, flips to the editor and punches in his first spelling. S I N C E. He spellchecks. Since is the correct spelling. Even his dumb phone knows that. He turns back to his letter. Since still looks wrong. It looks so wrong, as if those letters cannot possibly add up to a word in English, not any word, much less since. He’s beginning to panic a little, he’s telling himself this is stupid, of course that’s how since is spelled. But inside him is a feeling, a feeling of wrongness that can’t speak, but if it could it would be yelling “Fuck the dictionary, that is not how you spell that word. It’s not!” He’s upset, enough that he can feel it in his throat, a large knot tying inside his neck, his own muscles choking him. Why the hell, he starts to wonder, do you have muscles in your neck that can choke yourself? He puts the letter down and takes a break. He will come back to it when he knows again how to spell since.

1,000 ledes #n: Ananda Panek

Ananda Panek doesn’t like peanut butter, but likes Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups for the particular end note of salt they give the chocolate. Also, they don’t really taste of peanut butter. She doesn’t like them enough to sneak her roommate’s whole precious supply at 2am, while unable to sleep. She is often unable to sleep. She takes one out of an actual desire for the pleasure of eating it- and her roommate wouldn’t mind that, either. As the taste goes a bit stale in her mouth and she looks at them, she knows there isn’t much pleasure in eating the rest. When she does eat them, it is out of compulsion. The experience isn’t devoid of pleasure, but neither is it really worth much.

After disposing of the wrappers and promising – promising she will replace them tomorrow morning, perhaps even before her roommate discovers they are gone, she lays down on her bed, feeling guilty and weak and not at all good in her stomach. She holds the pillow a little too tightly to be likely to go to sleep. She switches out the last light. A few moments later something flashes in the dark room. She sits up, and it happens again. The room seems to brighten in a grey, fuzzy way, but she can’t see anything much more distinctly than before. She feels warmer. More flashes. This time, she recognizes them.

“No no no no no please no,” she whispers quietly, throat tight, tears welling up. “Oh god,” she says, “The chocolate. Oh no, why did I do that?” She gets back up and without turning on the light and walks quietly to the kitchen, Trying not to pay attention to the continuing flashes. She returns with a bowl and puts it beside her bed. She lays down again, reaches out to touch the rim of the bowl, and confident that she can reach it without trouble, closes her eyes and waits for the pain that will slowly sever her head from her body. It begins from the left.

My current favorite poem, by Katherine Dunn

I found this only in one place across the net, and never found it included in any book. It’s like it barely exists- just on a personal blog called broken ladder, and in a song by illimitable Steinski. It is simply one of the most amazing poems I have ever encountered.

american dozens: remembered curses from the playground – by katherine dunn

your mother is probably the only one you’ve ever known
who really wanted to kill you
and your mother stopped cars on sunset boulevard
by the length of her legs and the magyar in her cheekbones
though she claimed it was just good posture

and your mother married five handsome men
but swore she only did it for the money
and your mother made ships out of pine cones
and guns out of milk cans
and no human male was calm within fifty feet of her

and your mother told wild stories at the dinner table
till you were cramped and leaking with laughter
she said stalin died from eating two whole chickens all by himself
but she ate only wings and necks and the pope’s nose

and your mother called you ‘dove’ or ‘childy’ and broke your nose
and put your baby brother in the hospital with a fractured pelvis
and your mother dragged you through bean fields and dreams
and turned the hose on bill collectors

and your mother could curse
and your mother stole proudly saying “it’s not dishonest, it’s resourceful!”
and your mother the teetotaler
ran a desoto full of booze into dry counties to buy christmas toys

and your mother ran a red light in a strange town and got the arresting officer
to pay her rent
and your mother fed you, all one winter
by drawing portraits of albert schwietzer with black crayons on old pillowcases
and selling them to suckers

and your mother forgot toothbrushes but taught you to make slingshots
and keep your distance in a fight
and your mother didn’t really care if you went to school
but she told you you were god and rubbed your face
in raw beauty three times a day

and your mother knew if you got hurt even across town
but it never worried her
and your mother made pie out of one saltine and a raisin
and your mother singed her eyebrows scooping you from a fire some claim she set
and drew them on with maybelline forever after

and your mother ran off with a new man and did her best to leave you behind
but you hitchhiked after her
and your mother wore you out with switches, broom handles, belts
and her paralyzing tongue
then snatched your ass from the draft board and hid you for a whole war

and your mother sliced off the top of your skull with her terrible love
and poured in the charred sludge of hate
and there was never a dull moment

and your mother suspects you of plotting against her
and she’s right

Too beautiful, too stark

Infinite Jest, pg 347

— and then you’re in serious trouble, very serious trouble, and you know it, finally, deadly serious trouble, because this Substance you thought was your one true friend, that you gave up all for, gladly, that for so long gave you relief from the pain of the Losses your love of that relief caused, your mother and lover and god and compadre, has finally removed its smily-face mask to reveal centerless eyes and a ravening maw, and canines down to here, it’s the Face In The Floor, the grinning root-white face of your worst nightmares, and the face is your own face in the mirror, now, it’s you, the Substance has devoured or replaced and become you, and the puke-, drool-and Substance-crusted T-shirt you’ve both worn for weeks now gets torn off and you stand there looking and in the root-white chest where your heart (given away to It) should be beating, in its exposed chest’s center and center-less eyes is just a lightless hole, more teeth, and a beckoning taloned hand dangling something irresistible, and now you see you’ve been had, screwed royal, stripped and fucked and tossed to the side like some stuffed toy to lie for all time in the posture you land in. You see now that It’s your enemy and your worst personal nightmare and the trouble It’s gotten you into is undeniable and you still can’t stop. Doing the Substance now is like attending Black Mass but you still can’t stop, even though the Substance no longer gets you high. You are, as they say, Finished. You cannot get drunk and you cannot get sober; you cannot get high and you cannot get straight. You are behind bars; you are in a cage and can see only bars in every direction. You are in the kind of a hell of a mess that either ends lives or turns them around. You are at a fork in the road that Boston AA calls your Bottom, though the term is misleading, because everybody here agrees it’s more like someplace very high and unsupported: you’re on the edge of something tall and leaning way out forward….

I killed a crow today

Today was my first day biking across the city, from NW to NE to SE, passing back and forth from poverties to glories, from projects to lobbying offices, minutes apart. But it was in SE near the capitol I saw the crow.

It was in the shaded and lovely streets surrounded by restaurants and pillared government buildings. It was by a small park. I was listening to The Sun Also Rises, and barely paying more attention than I needed to stay alive. I was preoccupied. The crow caught my attention because it was screaming in the middle of the road. I looked at it confused for a moment, and stopped. it was shaped wrong, and it wasn’t running from traffic. It just stayed where it didn’t belong. I parked my bike and walked out into the middle of the road. I thought “If I try to help it I need to be careful, it will try to attack.” I wanted to block the cars, I wanted to get it off the road. Other crows were coming up to it, replying with screaming of their own. They flew and land and flew again violently and without reason. I got up close. I didn’t kneel, I wanted to be visible to the traffic. The tip of its beak was covered in blood. It held it wings strangely and breathed hard and painfully. It didn’t try to step away or turn as I came up to it. It didn’t cock its head to look at me. I didn’t believe then I could save it, and I did believe it would attack me as best it could. I stood there for a moment not sure what to do, my mind was blank. A man in a grey suit behind me stopped and began walking in tight little circles with his phone out.

The birds were angry at me and one in particular moved from screaming to diving. It occurred to me there is no language in nature to say “But I want to help.” It’s not something that happens in nature. It dived again and hit my head hard, and I was grateful that I’d kept my helmet on. The screaming drowned out the city noise.

I stepped back as the cars came on, mostly big black SUVs. All of them saw the bird and slowly drove over it, trying to keep it between their wheels. I longed for someone to finish it. None killed it, only caught it here and there on the bottom of their cars, injuring it more and more. It screamed with every car that drove over it. I considered whether I could kill it. I felt sick and shaky, but I knew I had to. I thought my light bike would only hurt it more. I considered whether I could stamp on its head, but I was scared, even more because I wasn’t sure I would kill it. I imagined it staring up at me in pain I couldn’t end. The other crows were getting truly violent now, and they scared me. They had picked me as the focus of their anger. I didn’t know what they would do if I killed it.

I stayed close by. The man in the suit behind me was on his phone now, explaining. “It’s just in the middle of the street. I’ve never seen anything like it.” He was stuck in his spot. Another man, browned and tan and fit in shorts and a tank top walked up beside a jeep and stood there looking at it, scared. His gripped his phone, offered it forward like a talisman. “What do we do?” he asked me, “Do we call 911?” I shook my head, thinking, this is ridiculous, but I understood. “No,” I said, “It’s too far gone, it just needs to be put out of its misery.”

He paced back and forth. I had hoped it was his jeep, and that I could ask him to finish it, but he made no move for it. Finally I said, “Get back, be careful of the birds, they’re diving. I have a helmet on.” He paced back a little bit, not willing to go and not able to stay. The bird had stopped screaming now. A volvo came up and slowed, and I jumped out in front of it and went to the open window. “Please,” I said to the man driving, “If you can, it’s too far gone to be helped, it needs to be put out of its misery.” He looked stricken, but backed up the car. He aimed and took his hands off the wheel and flattened them against his head over his ears. He let the car roll forward.

There was a pop. I grimaced; he’d missed the head, but I was sure he’d crushed the heart. It was good enough. I ran up to the car as he pulled away and shouted “Thank you!” He didn’t look back. I turned to the bird. It was still, and I could see its viscera spilling into the street. I wished that I’d taken it to the side of the road, but it didn’t care, and there were the other birds, still wheeling violently over me.

There was more traffic coming. I got back on my bike and put my headphones back on. I continued on my way.

I have had enough of death today.