Just Wrought

Prior to Starting Work on My Still Unproduced Farce

8/7/07 -  5:0? PM

If I do this grudge play it has to be in the spirit of Wilder.  It has to seem silly and overly earnest and then cut to the bone and then throw up its hands and say, “Oh, no, no you misunderstand.  Forget that last part. I really AM just silly and overly earnest.” It has to ring a bell true and then say, “Who me? What? Ring a bell? Well, yes, I guess I have.  But I didn’t mean anything by it. Honest.”

 

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While Simultaneously Reading Stephen Jay Gould and Larry McMurtry

While Simultaneously Reading Stephen Jay Gould and Larry McMurtry

For reasons I would rather not get into I have taken to re-reading all my journals since I started handwriting them into marble comp books back in 1997. (I was typing for a living at the time and wanted to spare my wrists keyboarding my personal thoughts. I never went back to a digital.) The review is a pretty tedious endeavor. I wish I had described a lot less of my career woes and a lot more of my physical delights, but youth is ever wasted on the baselessly self-fascinated. Every so often as I read, however, I run across a little snippet, or string of them, that pleases me such that it prompts a desire to share.

9/26/07

. . . . Surprisingly, I find a deep correspondence between the Gould and the McMurtry. Both maintain—one overtly, the other subtly and subversively and ultimately more convincingly—that life has no plan, no forward progress, not even dominant echoes or themes; just the faintest hints of them. Contingency is all and contingency is one brutal motherfucker.

Grudges are stories with strings attached.

And the Celebrity Guests will be . . .

I am cleared for PR take-off by my fearless producer, Leslie Law, and can now confirm that our special Seattle Celebrity guest stars for Sandbox Radio Live! 8 : Fools Rush In, one night only, this coming Monday, are . . . 

. . . Nancy Pearl and Cliff Mass!

NOW will you get your tix?

 

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Sweet Air

I grew up in a house on Sweet Air Road just outside the tiny town of Jacksonville, Maryland.

This poem’s from around a quarter of a century ago, maybe longer: it is undated. I remember that I typed the surviving copy — and I do mean typed: it still has the little dabs of Wite Out^® where I screwed up — from the handwritten original at my temp job at Northern Life Insurance, circa 1993. Suffice it to say that when I wrote this, I was still a kid, though I would have fiercely argued otherwise. (Clearly, I had a tabbing problem.)

One working definition of an adequate poem is “an improvement on silence.” I think that, at that time at least,  this was.

 

Sweet Air

breathes alcohol blossoms
blurs pressed-flat, cut-dried memories.

    Turn a corner in that house
in your mind
    sick, sweet air finds you.

Follow your brother
    in your dream
into the black at the bottom of the basement stairs;

Watch as he turns and you see
his face has changed—the sheeted head
of a ghost—not your brother at all.

        Don’t run.  Go dumb—paralyzed.

Dream again

    see a man, strange and dangerous,
    standing in your bedroom grinning.
Scream silent like they say abortions do.
Know that if downstairs they
    could hear they’d come

        warm to you.

but they can’t
so they won’t
             won’t
    won’t won’t
        warm to you.

Listen to the one come now
(ah, you’re not dreaming)
    cricking knee climbs the stairs;
It’s Mom

Dad comes more silently,
    soft drunken concentration up
        the carpeted steps

        exploding through the door, roaring!

Lie rigidly, impossibly asleep.
It wouldn’t have saved you if you were.

 

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Markheim Collides with the Seattle Superhero Scene

In the upcoming episode of Markheim, to be recorded live, next Monday, April 29 at West of Lenin as part of Sandbox Radio Live!

 

MARKHEIM:  Is that Didge up there?

STANK:  He doesn’t go by “Didge” anymore.

MARKHEIM:  That’s some get up he’s got on.

STANK:  That’s his superhero gear.

MARKHEIM:  And that thing on his face?

STANK:  His mask. He made it from his hair.

MARKHEIM:  Charming.

DIDGE (over the bullhorn):  Many of you knew me by my street name. But I’m wanna tell you today “Didge” is dead. This is someone new. Someone stronger. In the bible the greatest hero was a man with long hair named Samson. He was invincible.

MARKHEIM:  Kid needs to read that book a bit more closely. . . .

Get your tickets here,  now, while they last.

 

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"Markheim" - Robert Louis Stevenson

Be like life— a knife.

Your skin remembers across my fingers, coming like thunder over a cornfield.

Knowing the way is not the answer.