accident

i ran into a car while riding the bike and if i didn't hit the car with my head i fell onto my head when landing in the road. i scraped up my shoulder and my knuckles pretty bad, and i had cuts and swelling on my face.

i got lucky and walked away and only an informal nurse's examination that day at a party made me worried. she told me, beer in hand, that i might have an orbital fracture. my brow was swollen and numb, with cuts above an below my eye. she said it was not bad if the eye was not hurt, but in a day or two i might begin to lose some vision if there were interior trauma.

she told me to try to notice especially my peripheral vision. i had made collision with my left side, and the left part of my left eyeball might be weakened. i thought about this sidelong sightline, the corner at the hook of my checking my left, namesake for this page. i haven't lost the peripheral sight, but i keep sharping my eye down that corner, to see it hasn't gone missing.

you have to look really, straight ahead, then make yourself aware of the periphery, to see it. a bottle of orange peels. some worn out sneakers. i don't even remember now the car striking me.

fingers crossed

Here's how it happens: from somewhere--or nowhere--comes a piece of good news. But it isn't final, yet. You've been told something "may happen." If it did happen, you'd be excited--so excited you might use an old timey phrase like "over the moon." You'd be over the moon if this thing happened. Like, let's say, a job that might get you out of your miserable one comes around--a friend puts in a word. Or an agent requests the rest of the novel you've been killing yourself over for five years.

But instead of letting yourself be over the moon, instantly, you shift: It probably won't happen. Don't get your hopes up. Don't get too excited. Wait and see. Nothing is definite yet. You put in the caveats, doubts, hesitations. You kill your joy; you strangle your imagination of the future. Why do you do this? Because, you think, by downplaying it now, you're protecting yourself. You think you can mitigate disappointment by inoculation. You think you will be less sad, if nothing comes of it, because you never believed, entirely. It's a desire not to be hoodwinked--you were smart enough to know anything you might lose was already accounted for. You think you're saving yourself future pain.

This, I think, is a lie--maybe even a malicious lie. Why rob yourself of the pleasures of imagination, a better future, the dream of a more complete, more satisfying life? If what "may happen" turns into "what didn't happen"--are you really better off for having not allowed yourself a week or two of hope, comfort--joy? Are you really one iota less disappointed because you imagined disappointment? All the pre-sentiments of loss aren't really any preparation for the actual thing--the actual loss usually hurts in unexpected ways. So if you're not saving yourself any pain--if the quantity of disappointment is unavoidably the same when it comes to pass, whether you spent time imagining or not--why not give in? Let it be, for it's moment, a happy thing. When you cross your fingers, that's a pleasure for it's own sake, in its own time, that can and should exist undiminished and immune from the ravages of whatever actually comes to pass.

The Dead

[Rejected from 236.com]

More U.S. troops died in Iraq in 2007 than any other year, news reports. In the whole first ten months of the year, the war killed 852 soldiers. Six died Monday lifting to 3,856 the grand total of military deaths from the ordeal.

But I ask why should 2007 be not the deadliest of all years? As populations grow, don’t more people die each year, everywhere?

Hamlet once told Shakespeare that in a battle between armies of the dead and living, the dead would win every time, because whatever soldiers they killed simply joined their team.

I remember reading to the contrary: more people live in the world today than all human history put together. But that can’t be right, right? Still, world population is now greater than 6 billion, 600 million people. Google that shit. To put this in scale, consider the age of dinosaurs lasted 180 million years, Outkast’s Stankonia sold 3.79 million records and 2,726 people died in the World Trade Center attacks.

No word from Hamlet who would win a cage match between a bear and a mountain lion.

Question

Are there writers in the war?



Other generations have their war writers. I mean not the essayists, debating policies, or the journalists, corresponding from the lines. War philosophers and cameras. I mean the voice of the war, voices made in it. Hemingway was not a soldier, but he was there. And we had Mailer, and James Jones. We had Tim O'Brien, even Anthony Swofford.

It is a little unlikely to imagine. Armies are different these days. Service is not compulsory, so educated elites do not fight. Working-class soldiers have made writers before, but something else is off. Romance is not anymore in war, and causes not grand. That too is old. But do writers go to wars? The writers we know cannot think of it.

Yet they are there. Certainly, already they are there. Some of them will be killed and never write but some too will write. True we will get war memoirs, and Iraq thrillers, but thought too, literature. So they are there already. They are being made and it becomes a strange thought, them sitting between the bullets and mortars, laying in barracks, the ones who will write, eyes wide, polishing their weapons.

The Grass Is Always Greener

We were at the park, looking for a good place to eat a picnic. We spotted a nice patch on the side of a hill, lush and green, half in shadow, half in sun. But when we got there, the grass was sparse and spiky and the ground was mostly mud. We did this a few more times. From a distance, the park appeared deeply green, thick with grass, but upon arrival this turned out not to be the case.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. I had always thought this expression concerned humans' innate covetousness. That our greedy brain is skewed to see yourself as impoverished and everyone else as rich. But the events in the park made me realize a simple fact: seen from a distance a patch of grass will truly appear greener. Due to foreshortening, the further afield you look, the more grass is condensed in a smaller area of vision. The grass actually DOES look greener, and since a color is merely an impression, if something looks greener, well it IS greener.

This is, perhaps, a minor distinction. But it changed the meaning of the saying for me. Before, I had always thought that it was commentary on the weakness, the sinfulness, if you will, of the human heart. Now I realize it is simply a matter of optics, of physics. Ancient peoples were obsessed with the tricksy quality of reality, with spirits and imps and talking animals with suspicious intent. For modern people, deceit is mostly a human invention. We love to talk about how people lie to each other and about how we lie to ourselves. And of course we do. But don’t forget: the world also lies. The grass is greener on the other side. But when you get there, it is mostly mud. You have not tricked yourself. You have been tricked. The universe fools us.

Looming

I stand on the rooftop and see towers on all sides. A radio tower springs high from the roof of another building, and another. In the distance, over the water, a taller tower -- for a few years now the tallest tower again in the New York City. The Empire State Building is well known for its monumental height of course, an edifice contributing to the city's identity for generations. That height is at once preposterous, in the true sense of after coming before, out of order, and like Eiffel's tower made practical at first only because its height could be sold to radio broadcasters.

I wonder if this double function as a radio tower has been too long overlooked. New York is not the capital of America, it is the Empire City. I have called it the pons colloquium, a bridge where national culture crosses into the local, because it is the center of media -- that place where conversations and faces get reproduced then cast broad. New York's towers may be an evolutionistic response to running out of real estate in an overpopulated port, but they become spandrels giving rise to a new reach of technological communication. And communication's binding grip.

There are towers too without spires, with just water tanks, or nothing. Plain rooftops. Plentiful rooftops. New York is a city of rooftops above all, and from rooftops I have enjoyed many sunsets, a few daybreaks. Rooftops are the city's best yards, its choicest dancehalls. I will leave the city, but it pleases me to celebrate one last time from a roof. There is not much real estate left. Transmitting towers make provincial our cosmopolitan ground, but on the rooftops we can still stand and holler.

California Dream On

We were driving from San Francisco up to my parent's home in Arcata, about five hours north. Me, my sister, my brother-in-law. We all live in New York City, but we were on vacation. As we passed through the Napa Valley and somebody said, "Ah, isn't it beautiful here? I do miss nature sometimes."

I looked up. Golden rolling hills, wisps of clouds in the azure blue sky, the flickering rows of the vineyards, perhaps a cow or a sheep. Since forever, as a child, a priori, I have believed in the beauty of California. It's a promised land. Even people in Wisconsin know that. But this time, after being away for several years, it suddenly struck me differently. I had the same feeling that one has upon seeing a Pomeranian. It's nature, but not really. It's an animal shorn of 99% of the things that make an animal an animal. Napa Valley: same thing. It's nature in its most domesticated, luxurious, simplified, soporific form. Now, I'm not opposed to Man conquering Nature. I can appreciate a quarry or a cornfield--they have aesthetics and purpose and they have meaning. But Napa Valley has none of these things. It's a playland, a trifle, a cupcake. It's a footnote to an idea of something that we want or once had, it's an allusion.

Take me back to New York. Or let's keep driving, all the way up to Alaska, where I once saw a moose so black it looked like a piece of the world had been punched out in a moose-shaped shape.