I Could Finish My Homework, Or I Could Think About Whales, God

I was at my cousin’s wedding, which was lovely, and the service was lead by a monsignor, a guy above bishops. He was conversational and Herman Melville turned up in his sermon. I’d just read In The Heart of The Sea, a book based on the boat-staving sperm whale who inspired Meville’s Moby Dick, so I thought yes, Melville, you’ve got me, Father. Now what about the novelist?

Mostly what I’m thinking about is that it would be hard to write so many sermons.

At this wedding in LA, my friend Danichi wedding, which was also beautiful, but the priest, a young guy, not catholic, so I guess he would not be a priest, he talked about Kierkegaard. And quoted him. In his service before the vows. Very bad. So many hip philosophers to choose from when speaking about love. Why that one.

I’ll admit that I was dehydrated at this time from a late night. And I also had food poisoning from a vegan restaurant in Silver Lake that Munchie chose for us to eat at for brunch. And the day before, in a bathroom of a San Francisco Starbucks (serves me right) my glasses fell into the urinal while I was peeing, and suddenly I was peeing all over my glasses, and urinal water, my glasses sat in urinal water. And I kid you not, I had fleas. Or maybe bedbugs, from the Fisherman’s Wharf Hostel. I wrapped my clothes in trash bags and dumped those bags in a public trash can.

So, bitten, blind, nauseous, and headached, and very, very ashamed, I can’t remember the quote, but the important thing to know is this—that Kierkegaard was a miserable creature who hounded his intended fiancée, and after begging her for marriage, he backed out of the deal so that he could, I don't know, be, what, severe and anxious? Which is his right. But really, what I’m wondering is, what a brave and worldly, or not even worldly but practical monsignor to use the skeptic Herman Melville, and what a poor move to use that emo Dane.

What was the Melville quote? I thought I’d never find it. I knew I wanted to look it up but I thought, nope, that thing is gone. Turns out it’s everywhere:

“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.”  

The context was, it’s OK not to be a good Catholic, and get this, the guy actually said it, it’s OK not even to be Catholic, just so long as you are decent to people. I wanted to cry if that were the kind of thing I could do. I’d been waiting to hear that for years. This is the closest I’d come to God in decades. How can he say such good things? Probably this guy is an atheist who knows he has a fun job, I thought.

But to the literature point, it sounds like Melville—“A thousand fibers… among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes” a third of Moby Dick is just wild flashes of rhetoric and cadence. Can you read scansion? I bet that line has some meter. 

But then I read this blog, melvilliana.blogspot.com, and they found that above quote in a sermon by Henry Melville (no relation?) a British preacher, 1855. Herman the Novelist was alive then, had just finished his whale book a few years prior. How about that. And what does it all mean, and etc. 

I don’t like Moby Dick as much as I used to. So many encyclopedia chapters where the author tries to prove to you that he’s smart and knows his shit. All this is because critics made fun of his early books—Omoo, Typee, Mardi, Red Burn, White Jacket—said that he made it all up, and knew nothing of Fiji and these other, to New England, uncivilized communities where people were always doing it and having a good guilt free time. Although he published these books as novels, I’m not sure what genre expectations were at the time, but they came off as too outrageous for most.

So I’ve just been skipping those encyclopedic I-will-prove-it! chapters. I write “Herman, no!” under those chapter titles. Why I still read it, aside from my love for setting and novels set in small spaces is how Ishmael, although he does not really believe, still challenges himself to. Either because he is lonely, worried, or because (not or, but and) he realizes that there is some value in the practice of belief. Or that haters are often coming from a place of wanting to believe.

Now, I am not that person, but I do like reading a book about that person. And I also like that London preacher Henry Melville’s quotation got misattributed to a spiritual mess of a guy like Herman Melville, whose now classic novel was almost unanimously hated in his lifetime and earned him no money in large part to his narrator’s endless knocks against his Protestant countrymen and his embrace of taking transcendence where he could get it.

Spring Break!

Some things I’ve been thinking about in the last 48 hours.

My friend Ramona was in town about a year ago. We met up for coffee at Alliance Bakery, then split. She was going to go dancing at Rainbo Club, Brianna and I were going to head south. Later, I asked Ramona how dancing went.

            “If by dancing you mean drinking 40s in an alley in the rain, very well.”

On a phone call waiting for some FAFSA info, the machine voice got tricky with verb tenses. “Your call was very important to us,” it said, and I waited for something bad to happen.

The manager at White Palace Grill was talking to a regular. “It's too, too expensive to fly into San Francisco. What you should do is fly into Oakland, save a hundred bucks, and take a fifteen-dollar train to San Francisco.” 

              I actually wrote this down in the book I was reading. When I got home and checked some prices, Oakland was somehow at least seventy-five dollars more. But that doesn’t make sense. So I still believe him.

I’ve watched two Werner Herzog documentaries in the past two weeks. Which isn’t a lot of anything by anyone’s standards, but I don’t watch many movies. After seeing Happy People and Cave of Forgotten Dreams, I slummed onto YouTube to hear him talk more. I love his voice. During one interview, someone in the distance shoots him in the stomach with either a powerful pellet gun or a weak rifle. He taps his stomach and mumbles, then the camera cuts. Afterward, at the interviewer’s request, he reflects on the shot. “It was an insignificant bullet.”

I reread Conrad’s short story, “Youth”, because Heart of Darkness is too long to finish in a sitting, I think. Here is the setup for a quotation I enjoyed. After the coal they are trying to ship to Bangkok sets alight in the cargo, the ship explodes. When they meet another ship, it is described like this – “One of the boats dropped in the water, and walked towards us upon the sea with her long oars.”

 

Over break, I’ve been trying to write about this time I rode an elephant and felt icky afterward. In one cheesy paragraph I’ll probably have to cut, I think about big eyeballs on animals. Which animal has the biggest eyeball proportionate to body? The vampire squid. Which overall? The colossal squid, I think. I looked up elephant eyes, too. Really, they aren’t that big. When I went to sleep I had a nightmare wherein I asked Brianna about eyes, some weird eye question, and then rows upon rows of eyes appeared and she chased me, a departure from my usual nightmares that are about forgetting to lesson plan, etc. 

I try not to write about dreams, but it always happens.

And now I have to go to bed.   

The Pirates Are Robbing the Ship

So I jog a little now. For about twenty minutes at a time, maybe three days a week. The endorphins start jumping and I can be satisfied free and easy by most things.  

I feel pretty special about that. Podcasts are really slow to listen to, so I listen to Dear You, which is pretty slow, too, but I know the words real good so I can rock, rock until my feet fuck up the rhythm of my jog and I throw my breathing off.   

The other day, I was signing a check at Handlebar the restaurant. I think it might be my favorite place to eat. Brianna and I go there and eye up the posters. I'd just had my first car bomb. There have been times when twenty dollars for a meal and a drink would be unthinkable for me, but now it's not. What happened there. The way I spend my money makes me think about how I earn it. I had just finished posting six letters of recommendation. They turned out fine, but I would have liked more time to review them. Which is why I ordered the car bomb. I drank it quickly but felt no effect, though I was reminded of living with my old roomie and at the start of winter break with May Linn and her fiancé drinking Bailey's and watching Eat Pray Love, a long movie.

When I left the school building I saw that my front wheel had been taken from my bike. Here we go, I said, for my benefit. I asked the two homeless men across the street if they had seen anything, which I'm sure they had not, and which I'm sure they found a little annoying -- who is this idiot from the big school asking for things -- but I thought in movies and stories people tell asking is helpful. 

I heard Myley Cyrus on the radio last night for the first time while Brianna was driving. She  wanted to change the station but I had not heard it yet. Myley Cyrus' got these stadium songs. You came at me like a wrecking ball. I see her faces in the grocery line and I believe she is a child out of time. Myley Cyrus  you make a nice Egyptian creature goddess. But pop musician, I don't know. 

Still, I'm thinking about it. Some cunning child slipped my front wheel away from the rest of my bike near 5:15pm. The cameras caught his blurriness on fuzz film, he was hipping himself over the rail, wrench out, taking the wheel, bolts and all, another wheel for the collection. 

Back at the base on 2024 S. Allport, I am reviewing my options. I am listening to the Everly Brothers and drinking Mole Stout, which tastes like spicy dirt. The chain on my one bike. I can get that fixed by Thursday for about forty bucks. A new wheel and tire and tire and inner tube will empty out the nickel jar for sure, that'll take longer. The week will proceed like this:

1. The frustration instigated by dudes in bike shops. 
2. The light anxiety of asking them something. 

                   - I say do you have one of these things? 

                   - They say did you mean one of these things? 

                   - I say yes. 

                   - They say, Yes, hundred dollars. 

                   - OK. 

I would like to know the journey of the objects I have lost. Not have them back, just have some thoughts on them. Was grading on the bus with a red marker. Two women across from me were arguing about their no-good guys, and when I got off one of them handed me two pens and said they were for me. Figured if I lost a wheel I should come out on top with two pens, thanked her graciously and hunted out the Cermak bus.

The Uppers, The Downers

I was hungry and confused and it was raining. At the cafe I used to work at the tables crammed full with study dates. I was drinking decaf coffee and getting upset about it, it was bothering me how I couldn't sit in my red brick apartment and do anything. It's so dark and cold, and I uncaffeinated.

I got some beer and hamburger at the bar place across from the coffee place, and then the server smiled at me a bunch, but I thought, Come on, Jim, servers always smile, it's their job, and she kept dropping by, this lady, maybe she was a student at UIC or something, maybe from nearby, a Mexican woman in her 20s, I'm not obsessed I'm just saying.

But really because I'm Irish I am obsessed because over all those mornings on the Western bus, all those cool Mexican kids we never hung out with who had better taste in music and cooler haircuts, I was only ever friends with the guys, but almost could've been with their sisters, because we were all Catholic and had that hard crucifix connection.

I thought about all this while I was eating alone, sifting through a pile of papers, feeling older than my age like I was looking into this dusty future of me in this blandness drifting off the map, just getting withery and working this bell curve forever, then the Depeche Mode song started playing, "Everything Counts," everything counts in large amounts they kept saying, which is when my bill arrived, there was a smiley face on it, Everything counts in large amounts, I said, signed it and left, I wanted to stay and see, but I live with my aunt and I'm in shambles this week.