Tiktaaliks

“Everyone needs to know this.”

So started the harangue B experienced at the park last week.

A man with a red hat told her about the Tiktaalik, a lobe-finned fish that lived 375 million years ago. Lived for around 10 million years because it had wrists.

Tiktaaliks could pop out of the water and gulp air if they needed and grab land snacks if they wanted. As far as the man was concerned, these creatures were one of our great ancestors.

“And so,” he said, “if you ever make it big one day, it might be because of these.” He tapped his wrists together.

“Also,” he whispered, “I love dogs.”

Observations, News

There ought to be a website for streaming tourist info radio broadcasts. The ones that play on loops and describe the local birdlife, unkempt museums, and mayors of ill repute.

Conglomerate rock is rock made of other rock. Catholicism is obviously a conglomerate religion with robust pagan bedrock.

Has anyone written about the, uh, metaphysical implications of Pokémon Go, of how we walk down the street and pass creatures of great or no value that cannot be seen but which exist in a pretty arguable way?

On Friday: A kid told me I looked like an actor. I waited for him to specify. Well, no, not an actor, a cartoon character. Then I canceled the conversation. 

Last night I fell asleep with the thought that the melody of Richard Berry's "Louie Louie" might be paired with the lyrics of Black Flag's "Gimme Gimme Gimme." My worry was that, no, that's too stupid of an idea to write down. But now I see that the quality of this thought stands true in the morning light.

This is the first day that I have turned on the space heater. Soon I will turn on the regular heater, or at least once the average indoor temperature is 60. I once worked with a person who trailed a space heater around like a pet. I understood this because my hands will be cold from mid October to late April.

On My Slow Output

Either because I read Myles’ Inferno two days ago or watched a clip from Muench’s Where a Blade Becomes Horizon or because Daviel Shy’s Lady’s Almanac was playing at the MCA, I was thinking about things reaching completion.

We, Vicky and I, have this deadline—I don't even know what day it is—to finish and screen our horror movie, or our zine creep feature, a 10min whatever that turned out well last year, and could it this year?

I was just thinking, it’s been done; it can be done again.

And how I wrote some pretty good paragraphs when I was 25, and how the confidence to do so six years later has left me. And how that makes me frantically write in pocket notebooks. And will I be doomed to be a pocket notebook man? And is that so bad?

Or as Gore Vidal once asked a friend who feared the answer: “And what is wrong with [being] a second-rate writer?”

My bedtime reading is: Life on the Mississippi, Swann’s Way, Geography of the Imagination, I Must be Living Twice, Pan, Supplication, and Simone Weil, a biography. These put me right to sleep. (I may die before I finish any of them.) Though if it’s the poems, I feel like I’ve really done something, knocked out those poems, and then I can snooze.

Why am I telling you this? Because I have a hard time getting into bed and just admitting that the day is over, that there is no more to be done. No planning, no grading, no drinking, no eating, no journals, no texts, no more any sort of tasks that I can start.

To the reading list, Guy Davenport’s Geography of the Imagination. Davenport is always ready to explain how someone’s little sister or dad is more interesting than their more famous sibling or kid, and so it is with Yeats, whose father, I learn, was a great conversationalist, seemed to make a living out of it. Anyhow, I’m only recalling the first para, which has been in my head for a week, and is about Ireland in the early 1900s, not really about Yeats at all.

He begins—

“Of time, the tyrant and obsession of the rest of the world, the Irish know nothing and care less. Dublin, a city for 1500 years, has never gotten around to building a cathedral.”

Sometimes I wonder if I were Irish and not American if I would have a better handle on things and fall asleep at a decent hour.

Also this band Martha, from England. I read about them in Razorcake when I was looking for new music. They were highly reviewed, on every other person’s top five, it seemed. Namely Blisters in the Pit of My Heart, their new album, which is very good but also way too catchy and sweet to the point that it feels like self-indulgence, like being drunk and hearing the Replacements and because of that getting all nostalgic and wanting another drink when what I really need to do is have some water, get up early and take a bike ride or do something healthy, not drown in wine like a fly or try to conduct some disingenuous lonesomeness out of thin air.  

And so the second to last song on Martha’s album is called “Do Nothing,” a slow burner that takes off in the final two minutes with this end-of-the-album philosophical turn that I would guess is the reason people love Springsteen. That verse goes like this, in a sort of Ted Leo-ish romp (“Timorous Me”),

“Years ago sat by the road, / Waiting for the van to tow us home, / I was cursing my old car,  / And you were looking at the stars and you said, / 'Everything is infinite but nothing is eternal' / 'Naïve romantic shite' I thought until I wrote it in my journal."

So anyhow, “Everything is infinite but nothing is eternal,” that’s really good as a maxim, but I get lost in maxims and pretty soon its all maxim and tattoos but no healthy breakfasts and good habits. What I’m wondering is, will Vicky and I finish this thing? Will it be fun? Which horror movies will we lift from? And will I finally heed that great warning that Marquez slipped into one of his early short stories, “Divers die of nostalgia”?

The fresh school year is here, all is possible.

The Pencil, The Planner

(A journal entry I found on my computer. Dated May 2015)

I lost a pencil this week, last week a planner.

Today I bought a piece of plastic so toxic that I need to mail it back to the maker after one year of use. It sends out a blue tooth signal so that whatever it’s attached to can be easily found. This piece if poison is called The Tile. But my iPhone 5 isn’t new enough to talk to it.

The lost pencil is a Mitsubishi Hi-Uni HB. The Hi-Uni is soft, it floats on the paper. Either that pencil will turn up or it will make someone very happy. The planner, in particular, is upsetting.

I seem to be full-blown materialistic. Little things. It is not as bad as the year, 2010 I think, when I followed a fashion blog and bought a pair of blue jeans with a fly that always unzipped itself. Couldn't wear those to work.

Once I was standing in front of my apartment and a former partner passed on her bike. We made eye contact. She cringed and then stopped.

I’m still borrowing some of your books, she said.

Give me back Eula Biss, I said. 

She told me that my fly was down.

Months before I’d explained about the blog, my year of needing to feel like I had nice clothes. All of my friends knew about these pants. What I’m saying is, it was unnecessary to point out the broken zipper. But I understood that it was time to get rid off them. 

We bid each other a good riddance. I bought new copies of some of the lost books and the pants were made into shorts and the shorts have since disintegrated.

Down with plastic, up with pencils, Levis forever.  

God or no God, the universe sends us messages.

Thinking of the New Condo Beside Our Current Apartment

The third story window of the new four-story brick condo, high-ceilinged stories, is set badly. It’s about five feet above our back porch, about four feet from our porch, at a good angle for glaring down at us. A person standing in that window is standing from a taller spot than I might be, and this difference in height annoys me in a way I find surprising.

Do I feel that I am somehow superior to the non-existent resident of that building? Yes I do. Because? Something’s wrong with me, something wrong that I will not soon correct, what with the prohibitive cost of therapy and the amoebic mass of student debt that gains ground with interest even now as I type this, chewing jelly beans. Or maybe I don't feel superior, I just don’t want them to be able to watch me so easily.

What I know now is that I will need to find a way to block their view. Jasmine, which is always creeping into songs and poetry, would be good for this. I will smell it midsummer and realized that I have more or less, prejudices and finances aside, been victorious.

Thinking of My Old Apartment

A party, maybe 5 or 6 years ago, 2am, summer. 

A man I don't know, very drunk, looks to my friend Sean and says, "Nice beard, you fucking loser." I , too, am over beards, but I say nothing. Sean smiles and thanks him and continues his conversation. "Your beard is stupid!" the man shouts. Sean closes his eyes, sighs, and continues talking about whatever it is he was saying--a new guitar pedal, saving up to record on analog, reel-to-reel instead of digital. "How nice would it be to record on actual tape?" he asks. "I bet it's so big and warm."

The other man shouts nonsense. Sean's younger brother Leonard tells us to hold it. He twirls around and pushes the drunk man. "Leave my brother alone or I'll kick your ass," he says. Screams, really. He's escalating it. Leonard has a ponytail and owes another one of my friends about $500, but that's not this story. 

"Fuck you and your brother," the man says. 

"That's it," Leonard says, "that's it!" He takes off his leather jacket. "Sean, hold this!" he says, and he throws the jacket to his brother. Sean makes no attempt to catch anything. The jacket lands on the floor with a thud. Leonard winds back, slaps the drunken man hard across the face. I wince.

The man makes a whimpering sound and leaves. 

Some of our friends return from a late dinner with a bag of tacos. "What'd we miss?"

I dislike violence, but the dropping of the jacket--that gesture and the memory of it are prized possessions of mine.

   

The News from March 6th

The prayer plants look dead in the day, but they come alive and night and lift themselves. It is like lily pads in the air.

Talking with one of my teachers last January, Cheever, was so gratifying that I forgot I was hungover. When the conversation was over I was still hungover.

An advertisement before a music video is another music video.

Dinner with my parents and Brianna, learned that my mom got a tick in a New York state field and bedbugs from a dumpy hotel around the same time that I, across country, got bedbugs, too. A dumpy motel. I slept in the fetal position with my socks tucked into my pajamas and a hoody over my head. I still got bit, though less than she. If I could choose, I would take those bites on her behalf.

The more assignments I grade the more I’m convinced that grades are toxic. Of course all teachers know this. I’m at that age when I’m arriving at what older people always knew, when I’m like, Oh, this is what you were talking about.

The pain of knowing that Morrissey will never layer his vocals. (After hearing some jangly twee pop group on the internet radio at Bowtruss coffee, where the people next to me were having filthy conversations while I was trying to grade. God bless them, it being a free country, etc. and sometimes home to Morrissey, too.)

It was Nelson Algren who fell out of a friend's car and hopped back in without her noticing. (re: last post)

Dreamed I was biking on a superior version of Chicago Ave. It was 80s Chicago. Better signs, older stores. I recognized Henry Rollins from behind. I know that crew cut and those blooming shoulders anywhere. He walked into a camera shop. Old cameras with flashbulbs. Henry would do that! I thought. I made a distinct choice not to talk to him. I try not to bother famous people. Told myself, too, that I would not write about dreams, which are insulting in their lack of coherency.