Mid-Year Report

Holy shit is 2009 really half over? What a world. What a world.

half.

-Continuous reading
I have a new friend who’s given me a stack of wonderful writing to work through. Some Chinese writers, American Splendor, and hopefully more once I finish those.

-Save 12% of each paycheck
Ongoing. Had to use all of my emergency money to get through the month of June, so I’m starting from zero again, but it’s better that I had the money.

-Track daily spending with a budget

-Daily Zazen
Still not daily. I’m renewing my commitment and adopting some new practices to get me excited about it again, and starting next week I’m gonna head down to the AZC on weeknights I’m available & Saturday mornings.

-Submit sundry stories, new and old, to at least 12 journals
I’ve fallen behind here as I haven’t submitted anywhere since I moved in May, but that’s OK. I’ve started and nearly finished three new stories, and once I’ve lived with them a little longer I’ll start submitting them along with the old stuff. These new things are good, I think. Yeah. They’re good.

-Participate in NaNoWriMo 2009
Still planning on it.

-Reduce car debt to below $3,400
Progress.

-Begin substitute teaching
Austin ISD has officially called a hiring freeze for the 09-10 school year. Out of my hands.

-Graduate School

During my last quarterly review I made this big announcement that I’d be reapplying to grad schools this fall, and that no matter the result I’d be leaving Austin for somewhere new next Spring. I jumped up on an upturned crate and shouted to the four winds:

I’m 22! This is the time to make life changing decisions and move across the country and screw it all up and start all over and do it right the third time and come back home in shame or triumph depending on my work ethic and my luck and how much I drink, right? So let’s make it happen.

Since saying that I’ve learned a couple things. Namely–

1. I don’t need to drink.
2. I need to write every day.
3. I need to meditate every day.

Provided I follow these three rules I might have even more success as I hurtle to the conclusion of 2009. Thus far it’s been the most unpredictable year of my life, and I look forward to finding out where it’s gonna go next.

hangover tanka

blackout angels have
blackbird feathers in their wings.
their rustling in
the darkness is the
sound of my lost hours.

we two, how long we were fool’d

We two, how long we were fool’d
Now transmuted, we swiftly escape as Nature escapes,
We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return,
We become plants, trunks, foliage, roots, bark,
We are bedded in the ground, we are rocks,
We are oaks, we grow in the openings side by side,
We browse, we are two among the wild herds spontaneous as any,
We are two fishes swimming in the sea together,
We are what locust blossoms are, we drop scent around lanes mornings and evenings,
We are also the coarse smut of beasts, vegetables, minerals,
We are two predatory hawks, we soar above and look down,
We are two resplendent suns, we it is who balance ourselves orbic and stellar, we are as two comets,
We prowl fang’d and four-footed in the woods, we spring on prey,
We are two clouds forenoons and afternoons driving overhead,
We are seas mingling, we are two of those cheerful waves rolling over each other and interwetting each other,
We are what the atmosphere is, transparent, receptive, pervious, impervious
We are snow, rain, cold, darkness, we are each product and influence of the globe,
We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again, we two,
We have voided all but freedom and all but our own joy.

–Walt Whitman

the center cannot hold

“You look at things falling apart as a blessing because it shows you what you’re holding on to. Things falling apart reveals the possibility of suffering in your life, but it also reveals the opportunity for wisdom. You can’t actually get that when things are going great, or so it’s said .”–Ethan Nichtern

lol

hi i am still alive lol

dead ends 1: beginnings that went nowhere

Just for the sake of doing SOMETHING with these, over the next few days I’ll be posting openings I never followed up on. Here’s my first (and thus far only) attempt at a hard-boiled detective opening.
———–
Rogelio was dead.

A few days earlier he and I had argued about baseball. He insisted the game was purer before they started regulating and requiring doping, before steroid regimens became a part of the league rules. I told him he was naive. The game was never pure, I said. They’d been doping in secret since long before the regs got changed. Things got heated, he called me an irredeemable cynical asshole, and I told him to go fuck himself.

But now Rogelio was dead, and I was crouching over his body. With two bullets through the chest, I imagined he didn’t care much about baseball anymore.

“Look,” the cop said, “I called you here first as a courtesy, man. But the black and whites are gonna roll up here any minute.”

“Give me a second, Marcus.” I bit my lip.

“Jaime you don’t have a second. Landsman is gonna be right behind the black and whites, and if HE sees your ass here–”

“Landsman can fuck himself,” I said. I stood up and slipped a cigarette out of the soft pack in my jacket pocket. I lit it. “You haven’t touched him since you found him?”

“No.”

“Who would leave him in the middle of a field like this?”

“West Side detectives ain’t got a lot of friends,” Marcus said.

“But plenty of that other thing,” I answered. A quarter mile away I saw the blue and reds flash as the first of the two patrols came over the top of the hill in the dark. “Thanks for the heads up, Marc.” I took one last drag on my cigarette and one more look at my old partner’s corpse. There was more light in the midnight sky than there was in his eyes. I stepped on the cig and climbed onto my bike. “You’ll keep me posted if Landsman’s goons find anything interesting?”

Marcus looked over his shoulder at the approaching cars. I saw his shoulders rise and fall in a sigh. He turned back to face me.

“We’ll see,” he said.

I started the engine and rode back toward the road.

Quarterly Report

update type of

Holy shit it’s April already. I’m due for a check on my goals for the year.

-Continuous reading
I haven’t been reading every night like I’d planned, but I make it a habit to carry a book with me everywhere now and I generally read on my lunch break at work as well. The idea to blog about each book I finish has worked out well, though there are 3 or 4 I’ve read that I just haven’t had anything to say about. Denis Johnson’s The Stars At Noon left me nonplussed and Lethem’s Girl in Landscape was so good that anything I might have said about it would have seemed pat and boring by comparison.

-Save 12% of each paycheck
Thank God for automatic withdrawals. If I don’t see the money it’s like I’m not even squirrelling it away.

-Track daily spending with a budget
lol this ain’t happening

-Daily Zazen
I finally bought a zafu and used it maybe a dozen times. Now it sits on the top shelf of the closet gathering dust. I’m hoping that once I move I can commit to a daily morning practice.

-Submit sundry stories, new and old, to at least 12 journals
I’ve submitted to three places so far this year and was accepted by two of them. The noir e-zine Crooked published my story “Trooper” early last month, and I just got word that my old thing “Lions in Summer” is in the final consideration folder for an upcoming anthology called An Honest Lie.

-Participate in NaNoWriMo 2009
I’m finally doing serious planning for this thing and working on a couple short pieces that take place in the environment of the novel. Trying to get a feel for the fucked world I’ll be inhabiting.

-Reduce car debt to below $3,400
Progress.

-Begin substitute teaching
I did a lot of pussyfooting around about this and ended up missing the deadline to substitute for the Spring semester, but I’m gonna make it work for the Fall. My new place on the South side is just down the block from a Middle School, so it’d be ideal to get called in there.

EITHER

-Enter Graduate School
No luck. I have to admit that even though I had a Plan B and I felt I’d prepared myself for the possibility that no grad schools were going to take me, it was still a shock to receive all my rejection letters on the same day.

OR, Provided all rejections:

-Begin working on my teaching certification

That was the plan. But given my ambitions to get out of Austin and try new places and new things, I’ve made a new plan. I’m gonna spend this year working. I’m gonna write the damn first novel, ramp up my pub credits with short fiction, take as many freelance gigs and sub days as I can to save money, and then reapply at the end of the year. I’m building my list of programs to apply to as we speak, and here’s the punchline: I’m getting out of here whether I get in anywhere or not. This year I’m also researching the steps to get teaching certification in the other states I’m applying to grad schools, so if I don’t get into the program in (say) Chicago I can just go anyway and start working on teaching certification as soon as I get there. This way I can go somewhere new if I do get in, and if I get shut out again then I’ll just be looking at more places to choose from.

I’m 22! This is the time to make life changing decisions and move across the country and screw it all up and start all over and do it right the third time and come back home in shame or triumph depending on my work ethic and my luck and how much I drink, right? So let’s make it happen.

with a quickness

I’ve gotten a bit behind here, so I’ma bring the abbreviated news:

-I’m nearly finished with David Lodge’s Thinks…, a novel about cognitive science and infidelity. When I’m done I’ll write a fuller review of it here, but for now suffice it to say that it keeps the Updikian (??) “unhappy college professors have affairs” mode alive while getting playfully modern with form.

-I still haven’t started packing for my move to the south side, but I should probably get on that.

-On 3 separate occassions this week 3 different people have expressed incredulity at how little I sleep. This makes me weirdly proud of my insomnia.

-Last week I went back to the slam for old times sake. I qualified for semifinals, which meant that I could have gone back this week to qualify for finals to compete for a spot on the team at finals next week. I briefly considered the whirlwind of fun it would have been to show up after 4 years and make the team again on a whim, but the practicalities of making it to weekly rehearsals (not to mention the cracks in my old poetry notebooks and decided paucity of new poetry notebooks) made me slow my roll and opt against.  Maybe next year, or maybe not. That was a whole different life, and it might be over now.

-I sat down at Magnolia Cafe the other night with my notebook and planned out the structure of this dystopian migrant worker detective novel that’s been bouncing around in my head since like November. It was good to finally put it on paper and have something solid to work from. Now if I can just get past page 12…

Records I’m Keeping: Captain Beefheart’s “Clear Spot”

Captain Beefheart. It sounds weird, doesn’t it? It should. He made weird sounds.

In July of 1977 John Lydon sat down to do an interview and select some songs to put on the air on London’s Capital Radio. With everyone waiting with bated breath to see which garage rock obscurity he’d dig up, Lydon started with a Tim Buckley song. Then he played some dub. Then reportedly there was some Can, and somewhere in the mix–along with some prog rock and Velvet Underground–there was a Captain Beefheart song. Though he probably hadn’t intended to do it, Lydon had just expanded the boundaries of a lot of listeners and helped lay the groundwork for postpunk in the process.

It’s not hard to hear Beefheart in postpunk. At heart (ahem) the Captain is a bluesman, and I used to enjoy imagining that he was an alternate universe Howlin Wolf with an affinity for abrasion. But the Captain and his Magic Band took blues cliches and ran them through a Donald Judd machine so that what came out was all sharp edges and impenetrable monolith. The blues is in there–there’s no denying the Magic Band could work up a groove when they weren’t busy freaking out the world–but it’s bent to the Captain’s strange will.

Before today I owned 4 Captain Beefheart records. Trout Mask Replica was a landmark of dense rock experimentalism & noise, and Lick My Decals Off Baby channelled TMR’s discoveries into some great and deeply weird songs. They were postpunk touchstones. Doc At the Radar Station served as an acerbic
response to the art-school weirdos like Public Image Ltd that kept claiming the Captain as a Godfather, and it was probably the most overtly abrasive rock record he ever made. But I only kept one.

Clear Spot lacks the outre cache of Trout Mask or the monetary value of Decals, and it’s not becoming a record that’s hip to namedrop like Doc apparently has. In my opinion, though, Clear Spot gets you your best ratio of weirdness to grooving to songs. It doesn’t have “Ashtray Heart” or “Making Love to a Vampire with a Monkey on My Knee,” but hot damn if it doesn’t groove.

Here’s Clear Spot’s “Big Eyed Beans from Venus.” You probably don’t want to watch the video if you have a history of epileptic issues.

Records I’m Keeping: Sam Cooke’s “Night Beat”

What do you even say?