Quietus / Essays as Stories

The aforementioned book and essay have been given some time in a British blog
called The Quietus. Check it out. I think it's an essay, but they call it a short story.

I'm posting some selected paras below, check out the blog or the book if you like it!

from "It Darkens, Brother" (title stolen from a Jimmy Schuyler poem)

There was a year when my death watching became unbearable; I’m going to say 2007, when I was 22. Gray thunder of oceans reminded me of death. Washington Square with jugglers and Manhattan trees and jumbo pretzels reminded me of death. The activists I lived with, monastic, dumpstering bagels & watching genocide documentaries full-screened on the computer—they especially made me think about dying.

At 22 I worked around the philosophy section of the university library, second floor north east corner, where people go to get nothing done. It’s the meeting place of the Librarian Chess Club, where weary shelvers congregate to drink Crown Royal on the sly, and play a little chess.

While I read a line, “And when you look for a long time into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you,” Charlie my coworker was a table over, stretching his arms to me. “Jimmy, put down the books,” he unstacked some Dixie cups, filled one halfway. “Play some of this chess with us.”

Journal Moments Without a Home

“In my childhood there are many caves.” -- A Turkish bus driver speaking about the local geography.

It is 5am. I am reading in my side room. My emergency exit is a sealed door to another apartment. On the other side is a dog in a crate. I turn a page, he mumbles annoyed in his crate. These are the morning sounds.

Things that are unsatisfying: Joe Strummer’s inspiration for the song, “Spanish Bombs.” Literary anthologies without author biographies or contextual notes. The first time I used the word “chill.” Reciprocation. Catholicism being a system of faith when it is obviously a system of works. Gino’s East frozen pizzas. Dressing rooms in winter months, my body is as pale as the moon.

“Being an adult means expressing jealousy in the form of cautionary advice.” Whose aphorism was this? Why is it in my notebook?

The car had engine trouble. My dad took a look under the hood. A small bag. Inside the small bag, a wad of cash. “What’s this?” he asks my grandpa. “You think you’ll never have an emergency!” says my grandpa. 

Booked - The Way We Sleep

Hey faithful readers, an essay I wrote on sleep, Catholicism, and death appears here with pieces by fellow Chicagoans Billy Lombardo and Jeffrey Brown plus fun others who you can discover on your own. 

As of now, they're shucking these glossy bad boys for $10 with free shipping. I might  rewrite/remix the heck out of this essay later and release 20 copies as a choose your own adventure zine, but hey, this is a cool book and Curbside Splendor is a grand supporter of Chicago writing. My friends Billy and Frank gave me some heavy editing advice and I'm finally starting to figure out this essay form.

Anyway, I ordered a copy few weeks ago. If you don't need to add another book to your life, I'll show you mine over coffee and you can humor me since this is my first book-thing I've been in.  

As to  the cover, if it were of me, the picture would display --  

• a frail man child spooning a pillow 
• drool all over the place 
• and since I moved, no bed frame, floor mattress 
• no facial hair and babe less.    
• but isn't it a pleasing blue? Appearing below, a message from the publishers: 

The Way We Sleep is on Black Friday sale for TEN FREAKIN’ BUCKS (FREE SHIPPING!!!) from Curbside Splendor Publishing this weekend.Jessa Marsh and I are honestly just insanely proud of this thing we’ve been able to put together over the last 2 years with so many creative, talented people, working with friends and making new ones along the way. I know I’m biased on this, but if you’re literary friends or friends who are just into cool stuff, you really can’t go wrong buying this anthology for $10. And you didn’t even have to sleep outside Best Buy all week to get it! Get it today at http://curbsidesplendor.bigcartel.com/product/way-we-sleep

Prose Poem #5

Here is another piece I wrote, this one about 

the neighborhood on 111th and Western.  

"Beverly"

The rosary in my Grandma’s hands holds Oh My Gods in the beads: slinks to life on the table, shivers when she turns away.
          My one grandfather is in the cemetery. The other chops ox tail in the kitchen. He has dim eyesight, he has not told me of his friend who suffered from severed head, which Latino parks I am not to visit, or that my oldest uncle’s wife has left him for an Argentine florist. “Infidelity is the risk of the entrepreneur,” my grandfather will say, tapping his union pin. 

Bands/Shows/Nights

Last night I saw a new play by Beau O'Reilly, a Chicago playwright and director. My
friend Charlotte drove me. She and I took one of O'Reilly's week-long classes in Iowa
City last summer. He's got one of these immense personalities that fills a room when he
speaks, so we thought it'd be good to see him onstage, as he acts in this recent play.

I've spent many hours on stage, in varying states of consciousness, steadily getting sharper
in recent years. Playing bass in bands, my big thump and crush Fender keeps time with a lot
of musicians named Dan, and many others with single syllable names, Pat, Bobby, Brett, Ben.

My favorite frontmen and the occasional women were probably better with talk than with
song. I hear Tom Waits is like that, but I've never seen him. Once, a band called Horse
threatened to murder the entire front row if another audience kid called the piano player
Napoleon Dynamite again. After the threat, the singer kept whipping people with his mic
cord and made fun of everyone for having the same haircut. It was beautiful.

The play I saw is Evanston, Which is Over There. The TV Guide type summary might read,
"neurotic people enter middle age in Roger's Park," but I don't know what else. There were
two chairs, a small stage, and O'Reilly plays a side bit as an old prostitute who's slept with
Ray Charles and BB King. There are aging musicians, loser sons, Montenegrins, lovers gone
friends. At one point these two ladies double as an elevator; at this my heart had palpitations.

I tried to make sure everyone in my dreamband Krayola acts as a defacto frontman. Our
playing can be staggeringly bad due to tuning and nerves. But everyone has to talk. We
have routines at practice that take a second life on stage. Our music set is so short, I try
to see how long we can go without playing a song. Only five minutes is the answer.

Some nights, I've looked at the crowd with shame and grief, but afterward people ask us
back. I think because of our banter. But I never think about acting and I am a bad, bad
dancer. Still, I would like to write a short play if an idea ever came. Part of me also
wants to drink coffee in Roger's Park on quiet intersections or drink beer on dates near
the lake. I get these Chicago fantasies in my head and I can't shake them out.
         

Let it Sink + Red Eye

When I served coffee I'd grab a red eye for the crossword then ditch
the paper in the trash. Once The Hallow were in it and I grabbed that
one for posterity. Inside, one of the guys in our group gave a miserable
interview talking aboutus as if we were an 80s hair metal act,
throwing pizza or some BS I'd never do, the sort of reasons I don't get
into band culture anymore.

Anyway, at school we have this unit on Transcendentalism -- Thoreau
and Emerson. It lasts about a day or two or three. Not even a unit, really
a few lessons to show some American Lit roots before starting Huck 
Finn. So Thoreau is critical of news, he thinks most of it is redundant
gossip, "just stick to what's happening in your town or on your block,"
that kind of thing, and be suspicious of 24 hour news coverage. So we
were looking at red eye's and  I saw my zines were on page two, next
to a runway lady and a bottle of wine. It was a nice little moment, the
type of thing that would've blown my mind at 17.

When I think of my audience, I think it is myself in 2003, or maybe
my friends Ruby or Ben. I did not make it to the karaoke event, and
I have not printed any of these zines in a few months. I must get my
act together and move on this attention, at least in a casual presence
around-town kind of way, like that Clash song, "City of the Dead,"
when Joe Strummer quotes Johnny Thunders, "You should get to
know your town/just like I know mine." 

Prose Poem #4

Below is Carl Sandburg's "Wilderness." I am typing this from Sandburg Court, an
apartment complex in Chicago, how about that. There is a rough sketch of him in
the security office by an elevator I take, but I can't see any other note of this place
being his namesake.

Anyhow, this is a longer one, I guess. But Sandburg's phrasing is always evocative
of bodies and primal things, so reading him moves quickly. His sense of balance
with these paired "A & B," "sniff and guess" moments is great. I feel like he had a
slim secret dictionary full of power words when he wrote. Check out "The Mob,"
too, if you like this one.

*                  *                *  "Wilderness"

There is a wolf in me … fangs pointed for tearing gashes … a red  tongue for raw meat … and the hot lapping of blood—I keep this  wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will  not let it go. There is a fox in me … a silver-gray fox … I sniff and guess … I  pick things out of the wind and air … I nose in the dark night and  take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers … I circle and  loop and double-cross. There is a hog in me … a snout and a belly … a machinery for  eating and grunting … a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the  sun—I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will  not let it go. There is a fish in me … I know I came from saltblue water-gates  … I scurried with shoals of herring … I blew waterspouts with  porpoises … before land was … before the water went down …  before Noah … before the first chapter of Genesis. There is a baboon in me … clambering-clawed … dog-faced …  yawping a galoot’s hunger … hairy under the armpits … here  are the hawk-eyed hankering men … here are the blond and  blue-eyed women … here they hide curled asleep waiting …  ready to snarl and kill … ready to sing and give milk … waiting —I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so. There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird … and the eagle  flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights  among the Sierra crags of what I want … and the mockingbird  warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles  in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes over the  blue Ozark foothills of my wishes—And I got the eagle and the  mockingbird from the wilderness. O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony  head, under my red-valve heart—and I got something else: it is a  man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother  and lover: it came from God-Knows-Where: it is going to  God-Knows-Where—For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and  no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from  the wilderness.