Written While Avoiding Grading

I could return an essay in 20-30 minutes if using pencil on paper, and the students would struggle to read my not so bad handwriting.

The program TurnItIn.com allows me to leave typed feedback. This feature is applauded. It takes me 45-70 minutes to return an essay on that format. That is a great sadness.

Sometimes, not that I’m letting myself get too shook up by this, I feel like I probably haven’t taught a thing since September. But I have left many notes in many margins. Actually, that does make me want to collapse on the floor and hug myself just a bit, but I think it’s a reality many teachers must face here and there. I did not have such low esteem as a bookseller, not as a coffee server either.

Let’s talk about beer labels.

Backwoods Bastard is an ale aged in oak bourbon barrels. I’m finishing my last one from the four pack I bought last week. The copywriting on the back of the bottle notes that one might taste a “scintilla of dark fruit” in the Bastard.

Scintilla is a word I learned from Dr. MLK’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which is probably the most convincing piece of rhetoric I’ve ever read. “Scintillating” is how it appears in the Letter, at the very end. Use of that word is an example of aureation, decorated with gold.

A sense of hopelessness before typing the next paragraph. Shouldn’t you be grading instead of doing anything else? A desire for another beer, too, but I finished the beer.

Onward.

B and I went to Salvation Army last Wednesday. I never miss a chance to say Salivation Army, a Nelson Algren joke, one he made after buying a piece of rope from the store to use as a belt.

I also try to make sure to always criticize the group for its shitty motto, “doing the most good.” Last time I gave them money I left a note in the envelope: “If you change your slogan to something less sanctimonious I’ll give you twice as much dough.”

But who would even read that note? A bottom level employee who must think, Oh boy, another joker. So I understand it was petty of me. And yet I do things like that—give unsolicited advice to charitable organizations—and I see the note being written by my hand, feel the venomous thought forming, and I know that it's a symptom of some subcutaneous anger or sadness.

It’s like, as I said to my therapist a few hours before, I don’t even like God, so why am I so beholden to him, and why am I so prayerful, and why this drowsy anger?

But that will take years and quantities of zines to answer. So on with the anecdote.

We were walking into the Salvation Army when we saw the duck standing in front of the automatic doors. A security guard was speaking to the duck. “Go on, get outta here. I told you already.” The guard explained that this duck was looking for a snack and had walked the floor earlier. “Of course she flies away when the police come,” the guard said, and she rolled her eyes.

In response, the duck, a female mallard, opened her mouth and let out a tiny hiss.

At the Window

The buildings on my block are pretty, but not having to see what’s just in front of me is such a relief. It is foggy outside, which I love. The sky looks like frosted glass. And looking out the window is like looking out a window into another window, or at a photo, which I think is the dream in some way: to observe without worrying about my place in things. Maybe I’m a high-functioning agoraphobe, maybe this is just the post-election poisoning talking, or maybe I’m just an asshole.  

Before I go to bed and before I get up I worry about all of the things I have not done or that I owe. I know that this worry will not derail me because my dad has shown me that it can be handled. Still, this fog helps. And now that I have the weather cooperating with me, as it does with characters in literature, I am better able to enjoy my morning coffee and not think of whatever it is I should be doing to be some better professional version of myself.   

(Also, even with the sun, the carelessness of Goethe in this painting has always seemed to me like the epitome of relaxation.)

Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Goethe at the window of his room in Rome, 1787

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.