It was far easier to write when no one knew I wrote, when I didn’t consider myself a writer at all. Having boxed myself in, constricted by a label (“writer”) I find it suffocating and counterproductive. To return to the carefree days of pecking away at the keys or scribbling in a notepad would be a welcome relief. I miss that. I hate the monster I’ve created, which has put needless pressure and stress on me. I yearn for writing to be what it once was: an outlet and nothing more; least of all for it to exist in the state it currently does, a nightmare, a job almost, the pressure to be a legitimate writer with a book, not just printed articles in magazines but an author.

General George S. Patton once said, “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” Key word: good. Not great. Not perfect. Good. Key word: now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Now. And I have a plan: to journal, beginning today. Whether my writing sounds literary or not is of no consequence. It won’t pour out perfectly scripted with silver dollar adjectives or verbs. It very well may turn out the opposite; the plain truth, really, is that because it’s journaling it will be about as antipodean to literary snobbery as possibly—and therein lays the beauty.

The best writing I have ever done first resembled a flaming pile of un-literary shit. That is the absolute truth. Back when I was 20 or maybe 21, I can’t quite remember now—though I’m leaning more toward 20—I began a story that came to be known as The Court, aptly named for the basketball court across the street from where I grew up. Spurned by the diagnosis of terminal brain cancer in one of my best friends, the story, essentially, is a vignette of childhood memories interwoven with current events broken into roughly two parts: Jeremiah’s original diagnosis and the last diagnosis when his health took a rapid turn for the worst, eventually ending in his death at the tender age of 27. Over the course of a few years, from July 2003 until January 2007, the story grew to well over 100 pages.

Be that as it may, the first draft of the story—or first few paragraphs, which was all the story was originally, remaining that way for a solid year—was horribly written. If I could still find a copy of the original, I would share. However, the original start of The Court is no longer, having gone the way of the dodo when Geocities shut down; the lovely Geocities where my first ever website was built in the mid-to-late 1990s. Back in the days when Excite chatrooms were the place to be on the weekend.

In any manner, the story, as it grew and took shape from one draft to the next, one chapter atop the other, turned out to be not that badly written. Was it Nabokov? Not hardly. But it was a story…

#

Imagine if Chris Mullin ditched the flat top hairstyle and went super freak, super freaky id est Rick James. Alternate names for this hairstyle include but are not limited to:

• The Janet Jackson
• The Poetic Justice
• The Lil Bow Wow

(Click image to view in lightbox)

• 1986-87 Naismith Men’s College Player of the Year
• 1988 Crystal Light National Aerobic Championship
• 1989-90 NBA Rookie of the Year
• 1991-92 NBA Defensive Player of the Year
• The Hakeem Olajuwon 1994-95 NBA MVP

“Is that that Billy Corgan?” I asked my wife.  We were walking into a popular clothing store.

“Sure sounds like it,” she said.

“Did he make a Christmas album?”

“I do believe those are jingle bells.”

“Cow bells also. And a xylophone,” I said.

A young man, roughly twenty years of age, approached us as we entered in full. He wore a bright smile and headset. A mic was positioned just at his mouth. He looked like a telephone operator.

Gaydar had spotted him some twenty feet back. Less Red October. More Pink November. He wore a light blue button down oxford. The sleeves were pushed up to his elbows. Like the Brawny Man. Or Chuck Norris when he’s cracking skulls. Or the Brawny Man in earlier photos because the Brawny Man in earlier photos looks like Chuck Norris wearing flannel when he is about to crack skulls with his sidekick, Trevett.

“Good afternoon,” the retail clerk said.  Beaming.  Slightly effeminate voice.  Looking in my wife’s direction. “If I can be of any assistance, please let me know. And one last thing: May I direct your attention to our new line of jeans that just came in this morning?”

Just came in from a Chinese sweatshop, I thought to myself. How many knuckles of overworked child laborers bled over this curvy fit, dark denim?

‘Stop being cynical,’ the internal narrator of my life, whom I call Jason, countered. ‘Your clothes were probably sewn together in an Indonesian sweat shop by a woman eight months pregnant who is enceinte for the sole reason that she was raped by her sweatshop boss. Really, there is no use in fighting it. You could tiptoe through life all you wanted and you would never escape the effects of globalization. Even if you wore a garbage bag as clothing you’d never escape. Do you know how many garbage bags are imported from India each year?’

I had no idea how many garbage bags were imported from India each year.

“Oh I like these,” my wife said to me. “Now help me find a top.”

She had not dragged me along. I volunteered to help her clothes shop. I can’t dress myself for shit but do have a considerable eye for what looks good on the ladies. I am the white reincarnation of Leon Phelps and usually stop off for a fish sandwich sometime after my time spent as a heterosexual fashionista.

Being a fashionista is oftentimes exhausting work and requires a reboosting of blood glucose levels. Glucose is a fancy way of saying “sugar.” 1 in 3 American children will be diagnosed with diabetes in their lifetime and 1 in 3 are already considered overweight or obese partially because of jacked up glucose levels from most everything they eat containing high fructose corn syrup.

“If we’d drop the damn embargo against Cuba and bring in some real sugar cane to this country we wouldn’t have this problem,” my old college roommate Kelly McDowell-McCormick used to say. He’s Irish. In case you couldn’t tell by the name. “You ever drink any Old English 800? That’s good shit.”

He used to always fill the top row of our apartment’s refrigerator with OE800; that, and Chinese take-out. He spent a summer in China and came back with a bootlegged copy of Thank You for Smoking and was so inspired by the Chinese culture he took a job as a rickshaw driver when he got back to the States.

The two of us scoured the store high and low in what was becoming a somewhat futile attempt at piecing together a single outfit.

“What about this,” my wife asked holding up a thin, long-sleeved pink shirt that appeared to be made of spandex with a ruffled front.

Spandex, or elastane, is more durable than rubber and can be stretched up to 500% from its original size and still retain its original form. Because of this statement alone, “more durable than rubber,” spandex should never be worn as an outer layer of clothing.

Because of the second half of this statement (“can be stretched up to 500% from its original size and still retain its original form”), spandex should never be worn as an outer layer of clothing.

Unless you are Heidi Klum. Or Eva Green from the film The Dreamers.

“Their selection is sort of eh,” my wife said. Her face turned sour. “What about this?”

“It’s okay but, I mean, it won’t exactly keep you warm either. Winter is fast approaching and it’s already cold as balls out. And balls are pretty cold, usually 1-2 degrees cooler than normal body temperature. It’s the only way the male species can produce viable sperm and continue the human race. How about this sweater,” I finished.

Inquisitively she responded, “With the buttons on the shoulder?”

“Yep. It’s different. I know.”

“No, I like it actually. I just didn’t think you’d go for something like that.”

“That sweater is hot like Tex Pecante,” I said.

“What,” she said.

She grabbed the two items, paused, found the “Fitting Room” sign and proceeded in that trajectory. I stayed close by her side as if a small puppy with its owner.

I began searching for the man chair but only found, the closer we walked toward the fitting room, another man standing. His hands were in his pockets. He rocked back and forth on the balls and pads of his feet. He wore somewhat dirty and scuffed Adidas running sneakers, a black cap with orange and red flames, which is truly the type of hat that should never be worn in public and why firing squads still exist in Somalia, and had unkempt facial hair.

“Back in a minute,” my wife said smiling walking toward the fitting room. The man with the unkempt facial hair pulled out his cell phone and acted like he was checking for missed calls or text messages but he wasn’t. He wasn’t because I was getting ready to pull out my cell phone to see if I had any missed calls or new text messages. Because that’s what you do when you can’t find the man chair.

While Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, and Newt Gingrich were crowing about in South Carolina, President Obama unleashed a little soul

2012 Reading List
Carr, Nicholas – The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (NF)
Krakauer, Jon – Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster (NF)

2011 Reading List
Borowski, Tadeusz – This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman (SS)
Boyle, TC – My Pain is Worse Than Your Pain (SS)
Cheever, John – Reunion (SS)
DeLillo, Don – Baader-Meinhof (SS)
DeLillo, Don – Mao II (F)
DeLillo, Don – White Noise (F)
Downey, Peter – So You’re Going to be a Dad (NF)
Euripides – Bacchae (PL)
Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World (F)
Kerasote, Ted – Merle’s Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog (NF)
Krakauer, Jon – Under the Banner of Heaven (NF)
London, Jack – Call of the Wild (F)
McCarthy, Cormac – Cities of the Plain (F)
McCarthy, Cormac – Outer Dark (F)
Olear, Greg – Fathermucker (F)
Orwell – Homage to Catalonia (NF)
O’Neill, Eugene – Bound East for Cardiff (PL)
O’Neill, Eugene – Fog (PL)
Sartre, Jean-Paul – Dirty Hands (PL)
Sartre, Jean-Paul – No Exit (PL)
Sartre, Jean-Paul – The Flies (PL)
Sartre, Jean-Paul – The Respectful Prostitute (PL)
Sophocles – Ajax (PL)
Sophocles – Antigone (PL)
Sophocles – Electra (PL)
Steinbeck, John – Tortilla Flat (F)
Stevenson, Robert Louis – Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (SS)
Stevenson, Robert Louis – The Body Snatcher (SS)
Read, Piers Paul – Alive (NF)
Vaughan, Stephanie – Dog Heaven (SS)
Wallace, David Foster – A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (NF)
Wallace, David Foster – Brief Interviews with Hideous Moon (F)
Wallace, David Foster – Infinite Jest (F)
Walter, Jess – The Zero (F)

Prior Reading
abu-Jamal, Mumia – All Things Censored (NF)
abu-Jamal, Mumia – Death Blossoms: Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience (NF)
abu-Jamal, Mumia – Live from Death Row (NF)
Albee, Edward – The American Dream (PL)
Albee, Edward – The Zoo Story (PL)
Alighieri, Dante – The Divine Comedy (F)
Alinsky, Saul D. – Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (NF)
Attaway, William – Blood on the Forge (F)
Boccaccio, Giovanni – The Decameron (F)
Bond, Julian & Lewis, Andrew – Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table (NF)
Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales (F)
Chomsky, Noam – Deterring Democracy (NF)
Chomsky, Noam – Latin America: From Colonization to Globalization (NF)
Chomsky, Noam – Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (NF)
Chomsky, Noam – Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies (NF)
Chomsky, Noam – On Power and Ideology (NF)
Chomsky, Noam – Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs (NF)
Chomsky, Noam – The Chomsky Reader (NF)
Clinton, Bill – My Life (NF)
Cockburn, Alexander & Jeffrey St. Clair – Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press (NF)
Dalai Lama – Ethics for the New Millennium (NF)
Decker, Shawn – My Pet Virus: The True Story of a Rebel Without a Cure (NF)
Eliot, T.S. – Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (P)
Eliot, T.S. – The Wasteland (P)
Endo, Shusaku – Silence (F)
Euripides – Cyclops (PL)
Euripides – Medea (PL)
Fanon, Frantz – The Wretched of the Earth (NF)
Faulkner, William – Absalom. Absalom! (F)
Faulkner, William – Barn Burning (SS)
Faulkner, William – Delta Autumn (SS)
Faulkner, William – Go Down, Moses (SS)
Faulkner, William – Pantaloon in Black (SS)
Faulkner, William – The Bear (SS)
Faulkner, William – The Fire and the Hearth (SS)
Faulkner, William – The Old People (SS)
Faulkner, William – Was (SS)
Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary (F)
Forman, James – The Making of Black Revolutionaries (NF)
Gimarc, George – Punk Diary, 1970-1979: An Eye Witness Record of the Punk Decade (NF)
Golding, William – Lord of the Flies (F)
Goldman, Emma – Anarchism and Other Essays (NF)
Green, Johnny & Garry Barker – A Riot of Our Own: Night and Day with The Clash (NF)
Greene, Ivery C. – The Disastrous Flood (NF)
Halberstam, David – Playing for Keeps (NF)
Hemingway, Ernest – A Way You’ll Never Be (SS)
Hemingway, Ernest – Big Two-Hearted River: Parts I and II (SS)
Henry, O. – The Last Leaf (SS)
Henry, O. – The Unabridged Fiction of O. Henry (F)
Hesse, Hermann – Siddhartha (F)
Hoffman, William – Lies (F)
Hoffman, William – Stones (SS)
Hoffman, William – Winter Wheat (SS)
Hoffman, William – Yancey’s War (F)
Hughes, Langston – The Collected Poems (P)
Hurston, Zora Neale – Spunk (SS)
Hurston, Zora Neale – Sweat (SS)
Joyce, James – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (F)
Joyce, James – Dubliners (F)
Joyce, James – Ulysses (F)
Kelley, William Melvin – A Different Drummer (F)
Kelley, William Melvin – dem (F)
Kerouac, Jack – Dharma Bums (F)
Kerouac, Jack – On the Road (F)
Kesey, Ken – Abdul and Ebenezer (SS)
Kesey, Ken – Demon Box (NF)
Kesey, Ken – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (F)
Kesey, Ken – Sailor Song (F)
Kesey, Ken – Sometimes a Great Notion (F)
Kesey, Ken – The Day Superman Died (SS)
King, Jr., Martin – A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches (NF)
King, Jr., Martin Luther – Why We Can’t Wait (NF)
Kipling, Rudyard – The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories (F)
Krakauer, Jon – Into the Wild (NF)
Kriegel, Mark – Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich (NF)
Listi, Brad – Attention.Deficit.Disorder (F)
Lydon, Johnny – Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs (NF)
Marx, Karl – Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy (NF)
Maugham, W. Somerset – The Razor’s Edge (F)
Mehta, Gita – A River Sutra (F)
Melville, Herman – Bartleby, the Scrivener (SS)
Morrison, Toni – Beloved (F)
Nader, Ralph – Crashing the Party (NF)
O. Henry – Confessions of a Humorist (SS)
O’Connor, Flannery – A Good Man is Hard to Find (SS)
Olear, Greg – Totally Killer (F)
O’Neill, Eugene – Anna Christie (PL)
O’Neill, Eugene – Beyond the Horizon (PL)
O’Neill, Eugene – Long Day’s Journey Into Night (PL)
O’Neill, Eugene – The Emperor Jones (PL)
O’Neill, Eugene – The Hairy Ape (PL)
O’Neill, Eugene – The Iceman Cometh (PL)
Orwell, George – 1984 (F)
Paine, Thomas – Common Sense (NF)
Paine, Thomas – Rights of Man (NF)
Parenti, Michael – Against Empire (NF)
Pynchon, Thomas – Gravity’s Rainbow (F)
Roth, Philip – The Breast (F)
Rushdie, Salman – The Moor’s Last Sight (F)
Said, Edward – Orientalism (NF)
Salih, Tayeb – Season of Migration to the North (F)
Shakespeare, William – The Tempest (PL)
Sinclair, Upton – The Jungle (F)
Singer, P.W. – Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Centure (NF)
Sophocles – Oedipus at Colonus (PL)
Sophocles – Oedipus the King (PL)
Sophocles – Philoctetes (PL)
Sophocles – Trachinian Women (PL)
Steinbeck, John – Of Mice and Men (F)
Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath (F)
Taylor, Nick – The Disagreement (F)
Thomas, Bruce – Bruce Lee: Fighting Spirit (NF)
Thoreau, Henry David – Civil Disobedience (NF)
Thoreau, Henry David – Walden; or, Life in the Woods (NF)
Updike, John – Rabbit, Run (F)
wa Thiong’o, Ngugi – The Wizard of the Crow (F)
Walter, Jess – Financial Lives of the Poets (F)
Wells, H.G. – War of the Worlds (F)
West, Cornel – The Cornel West Reader (NF)
Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass (P)
Woolf, Virginia – Mrs. Dalloway (F)
Woolf, Virginia – The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf (F)
Wright, Richard – Black Boy (NF)
Wright, Richard – Native Son (F)
Yeats, William Butler – Purgatory (PL)
Zinn, Howard – A People’s History of the United States: 1492 – Present (NF)
Zinn, Howard – Declarations of Independence: The Civil War to the Present (NF)
Zinn, Howard – The New Abolitionists (NF)
Zinn, Howard – The Zinn Readers: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy (NF)

(F – Fiction; NF – Nonfiction; PL – Play; P – Poetry; SS – Short Story)

Mrs. Hartness, for that was her name, was a tiny thing indeed. Soaking wet, her weight may have faintly surpassed one-hundred pounds. A curve in the upper portion of her back was exposed through garments, which rested, swathing her delicate build. Her skin was stretched loose and markings of age covered her entire body from head to toe—from her neck all the way down to her swollen pale ankles.

The hair atop her head was thin and fine, the color of faded strawberries and silver and snowflakes like the cap on the peak of the Alps of Cisalpine with small hints of white flowing in between. From her larynx came a soft voice that shook with each word she spoke. Though, I must say, it would only be accurate in this account to mention that within her soft voice was contained a slight scratchiness and congestion. At any given moment, a cough would erupt and it would seem to those around that her lungs had surely failed her.

When this happened, she would stand up, her body as erect as gravity and arthritis would allow, and grasping for the closest solid object to balance herself, a wall or a doorframe, she expelled from within what the cilia had failed to catch.

Reaching upward to cover her mouth, the veins in Mrs. Hartness’s emaciated hands were quite noticeable and plump. Her fingers were thin and long; and much to the mimicry of her voice, her fingers shook with her every movement as if the last leaf in autumn blowing in the wind—quavering yet resilient.

Everyone she knew and loved from infancy to her adult years had by now passed away into the verve of the afterlife except her own flesh and blood: the precious children she weaned many years ago.

Yet, there was one without a drop of kinship that loved her just the same—not as if she were his grandmother or even a relative—but as his best friend.

The young boy was her neighbor. His stature was less than a foot in height shorter compared to his elderly friend with long, skinny arms that seemed out of proportion with the rest of his body. As the years passed, his body would grow into these long extremities, taking away from the disproportionate specter to which he had known for such a protracted period in his childhood. He had deep blue eyes reaching Caribbean depths, dirty blonde hair, and skin the color of fresh homemade biscuits straight out of the oven, painted as if with a blend of russet and taupe acrylics from an Impressionist’s palette.

Everyday, the young boy would scurry across the green grass, past the pale leaf Yucca plant one house over, to his elderly friend’s door. Her face so gentle and kind was the only face other than his immediate family and friends that he remembers distinctly from that age—a mere four years old.

Sometimes, more often times than not, the lady next door could be seen crouched over, the bumps of her vertebrae poking through her shirt, raking leaves that had fallen from the oak tree that adjoined her and her young friend’s residences. Other times, she was to be found hanging wet laundry from the turning wire clothesline that sat beside a leaning cement birdbath in her backyard…

Read the rest on The Nervous Breakdown.

There, behind the Brewer, Pennsylvania ice plant, a backboard and hoop have been nailed to a telephone pole. A group of young boys gather, a game of basketball having sprouted from the cracks of the concrete slab like bracts of green grass and yellow weeds too long festering. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom stands there watching the children play, a cigarette dangling from his lip. Though he is not, he cannot help but wonder if the boys infer him a deviant of some sort, a sexual pervert ogling at them in their common game.

He was once that boy there in the green knit stocking cap pushed over his ears, “the natural. The way [the boy] moves sideways without taking any steps, gliding on a blessing: you can tell. The way [the boy] waits before he moves.”

The basketball skips off the front of the rim, bounces away from the children, rolls to his feet, and stops. Rabbit bends down in his business suit and lifts the ball to chest level. He has almost forgotten what the leather feels like, “that old stretched-leather feeling makes his whole body go taut, gives his arms wings,” what it smells like. The cigarette smoke fills his lungs and he breathes out, flicking the cigarette to the ground, crushing it. He massages the basketball like a sore muscle with two hands, sets his feet, displacing loose pebbles underneath foot, squares his shoulders, and follows through. The ball reaches its highest point and cambers down from the sky and through the nylon net. He looks at the boys in the ice plant yard, sullen. “They have not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him.”

Rabbit, the protagonist of Updike’s most memorable novel, is a 6’3″, 26-year-old, former basketball star turned kitchen gadget door-to-door salesman, pushing the Magi-Peel Kitchen Peeler, a tool he sells despite believing it to be a fraud like Walt Disney and the Mouseketeers but “fraud makes the world go round . . . [is] the base of our economy” and we, our culture, keep it spinning.

His wife, Janice, is seven months pregnant with their second child and a complacent alcoholic. The couple married young after Janice became pregnant with their first child, Nelson, when Rabbit was 21. When Rabbit returns home, there his wife sits in the armchair: drunk. Toys litter the floor. Her eyes are reddened and bloodshot from staring into the “vast wasteland” as Newton N. Minow once said in reference to television; and she, Janice, is contented in living this way. “Just yesterday, it seems to him, she stopped being pretty.” Rabbit can no longer take living this way and runs.

Rabbit Angstrom is a character on the run simultaneously frozen in time by his past: once a star athlete, now faded and fizzling, just another flicker in the night sky of Kerouac’s universe; trapped, Rabbit feels by his poor decisions, by the complacency and coldness of his wife, her pregnancy, by the fraudulence and plasticity of the American dream in post World War II America, that he cannot escape though try he must as accounted in Rabbit, Run. What he finds in his departure is that which he cannot escape; and what of his family, of the birth of his new child, his wife, and the woman he meets, Ruth Leonard, while away? Will Rabbit run or will he man up to the life he has chosen for himself? Do they get it? Do they get him?

In typical Updike style, the prose is vivid and the picturesque landscape that of a literary realist tradition. The reader cannot help but feel crouched down beside Rabbit as he plants flowers and pulls weeds in Mrs. Smith’s garden or on the road from Brewer, Pennsylvania to the country roads of West Virginia. Updike is the master of setting the scene, of “giv[ing] the mundane its beautiful due,” as he once said.

Questions of marriage and fidelity, family and individualism, love and sexuality, as well as organized religion and isolated conviction are common themes in Rabbit, Run by John Updike, which can be purchased at Barnes and Noble or on Amazon.com, beginning at $8 new or $2.95 used. If you have yet to read Updike, let this be your introduction. Updike was a generational documentarian in the literary field from 1960 until his recent death almost one year ago on January 27, 2009.