Thursday, December 16, 2010

Let's Browse With Topical Focus


I dreamt of a small gelatinous cube, similar to what is found during the winter simmering beside the register in a Japanese convenience store. I recognized that cube at once. "That's my heart," I said.

Now's as good a time as any to share a few helpful hints about the management of despair:

Don't try to save your life. Aren't you the one who fails at everything? The hopeless one? Therefore, this attempt, too, is doomed. Aiming to save your life, you scratch for reasons. Not finding them, self-loathing grows. Therefore.

Do not try to save your life, but merely to postpone fatal acts. Keep it in the attic. No need to act like it's some great gushing treasure, like it'd really turn out to be worth something, if you could just get it onto Antique Road Show. By all means, let the dog sleep on it. Just don't puncture or burn it. Leave it in the rain. Don't toss it out.

Save your life by accident. That old thing you just happen to have around. Kept out of basic respect for its materials and, even more, from simple thrift. Some use may yet be found. And then there will be your life, which, it just so happens, you never quite got around to destroying. Saved, as lives so often are, by simply being overlooked.

No brightness, no optimism. It just so happens you never get as far as whiskey in the morning, or the sling at the baths. With zero enthusiasm and no fatal acts.

Thus life is saved silently. By means of neglect.

What comforts me? The image of meat cleaver. With a red handle. Falling through space. Nothing to impede it. Nothing to interfere with it. No tears and no complaints. The cleaver is simply falling. And I am letting it fall.

Tameikesanno station, which is so immense that even once you arrive underground, your train may still be a kilometer away, down a vast white corridor with neither benches nor signs, nothing but a single green public phone, which you could use to call someone and announce, “I seem to have arrived in some peculiar alternate world. So far all I can say for certain is that everything is tiled.”

In New Hampshire, in the early Eighties, my pet mouse was resurrected. Please keep this is mind. It was much too cold for the mouse, in a cage on the porch during the winter, but my Dad wouldn’t let the mouse live inside. It was a male mouse and it stank. Also I admit I wasn’t so interested in my mouse, prior to my mouse’s resurrection.

In preparation for burial, I wrapped my mouse in a Woody Woodpecker washcloth. Then I went upstairs and read the entire book of Genesis. I must have been 10. My mother was dead. I suffered from horrendous nightmares. I believed reading the Bible protected me from monsters. After Genesis, I returned for the burial and found my mouse resurrected, gnawing through his Woody Woodpecker burial shroud.

Please keep this in mind. I think it explains a lot.

QB House. 10 minutes, just cut. One of those places where there is a rule on every flat surface. Family and friends may need to wait outside. Danger, please don’t lean. The four digit number on your ticket has no relevance. Seeking to ward off or control the sociable, the lazy and those obsessed with numerology.

1000 yen. No coins or bills of higher denomination accepted. Hair is cut and that is all. Beard trimming and conversation are both verboten.

They did, however, take time to remove the hair from my ears. Proving that human sympathy is not yet extinct.

Looking across the river at Laos, I am accosted by and old American with long gray hair turned yellow by the sun. He is drunk and charming and resembles a cancer-stricken walnut.

“I’m Mister Blue!” he says. “I’ve fought in all the wars! Vietnam! Grenada! Afghanistan! I killed plenty of people in Vietnam. Bangbangbangbangbang please pleasesir baby my baby bangbangbang. I can’t go back to Vietnam but I can come here this is my home my heart is here. You ask anybody in Udon, Where is Mister Blue? Everybody knows me. My brother’s dying but he won’t come. I ain’t got no passports he says. I got two sons they never come. If you’re here to do business maybe I can give you advice. I’m Mister Blue. I’ve fought in all the wars but now I’m home I’m home I’m home.”

Roppongi at half-past noon: the sidewalks packed with businessmen on lunch break. Arriving at the crossing, I see a man, sprawled out on the shoulder of the street, his hat nearly in traffic. My first thought was that I was hallucinating. No one else saw him. His long gray hair spilled across his face. He clutched a plastic bag. His eyes were open: he was muttering at the sky.

I was very sorry that I am not one of those people who always know what to do. The man’s hands jerked open and closed. His face was angry. I’ll stand beside his head, I thought. The cars will see and hopefully not run either of us over.

I’m standing in the street almost, looking back at the crowds on the sidewalk. Is this the afterlife? I‘m thinking. The man looks enraged and totally out of his head. Cars honk at me. We’re real, evidently.

Eventually a policewoman arrives, stands there her head tilted down, arguing with the man. I continue on to the gym. I wonder if the man ever comes around, is lucid for awhile. I would like to leave a note in his pocket. A note which reads: I am going to get the hell out of here. I suggest you do the same.

In order to sleep I imagine a man’s arm around me. Not my husband’s arm, I am ashamed to say. This man has been around since long before my husband. Although I must also admit that I’ve never met him. Still, I’ve learned a few things about him, sleeping with him all these years.

He is lithe and has brown skin. A little shorter than I am. South American, I think. His arms are quite smooth. He works everyday outside. I don’t think he would say he is gay if you asked him.

How is it that I’ve slept with this man all my life and never investigated him? I never thought about him. He is just there, with his arm around me, as I fall asleep. He is naked and sleeps tucked against me, his arm over mine. His cock is big, just regular big, and often gets hard during the night. He sleeps like a log.

I have slept with this man as long as I can remember. I am sorry to say I don’t think of him much, aside from the moment I must think of him, in order to fall asleep. Only now does it seem strange that I have always slept with this man and never thought anything about it. Perhaps everyone has such a person. An invisible sleeping companion. Perhaps we are always accompanied. And perhaps not.



Friday, December 10, 2010

The Tokyo Subcommittee for Hopeless Causes (TSHC)


Allow me to remind you, again, that I am a comprehensively wholesome and unremittingly respectable person. If you met me elsewhere you would not hesitate to nominate me even for the post of children's librarian. Departing from my dignified presence, you might very well unbutton your top button and breathe a little easier. You might be tempted to use the word stodgy. You wouldn't do so, of course -- I am so obviously well-meaning. Anywhere else in the world I am wholesome to the point of near total indigestibility. Only in Tokyo am I forced, due to the merciless vicissitudes of circumstance, to become hyper-zealous in the practice of vice.

How else to meet people?

How many times have I, upon greeting someone with painstaking courtesy, been viewed with the utmost suspicion, even fear?

Whereas if I lurch toward that same person while reeking of alcohol and sweaty mammalian essences, making known my intention, by means of grunts and gestures, to sodomize them in a manner not generally considered considerate -- oh how cordially I am then received!

I fear that prospective visitors and residents of Tokyo will be put off by the previous description. Therefore I hasten to assure you that, fear not, there is another social option.

You can join a club.

Flower arranging is popular, as is the painting of miniatures on porcelain. You can learn how to participate in the chorus of a noh drama -- though it seems to me the hula people are having a much better time. Group lessons in countless foreign languages are available and interested parties may sign up without fear. Even if you participate in such a group for forty years, there will be no alteration of your language skill whatsoever.

Nostalgic for virtue, I myself joined a club. I am a member of the Tokyo Subcommittee for Hopeless Causes, or TSHC. We at the TSHC are exuberantly in favor of anything which is obviously doomed.

Literature and ecology feature prominently, of course. Though we also have a soft spot for avant-garde music, third party candidates, and old-fashioned courtesy.

Just as the wise allow that every phenomenon must also contain its opposite and make allowance for it, the great city of Tokyo has, in its infinite magnanimity, reserved for us at the TSHC, the most ideal meeting space imaginable.

Our bright and airy room faces directly upon a roller coaster so that, during the warmer months, we are constantly serenaded by the terrified screams of youth as they plunge.

Naturally the competition to become a member of the TSHC is gruelingly intense. Eminent personalities, garlanded with worldly honors, plead for admission -- and are swiftly disqualified.

Because, if you want to become a member of the TSHC, it is not enough to be an ardent proponent of hopeless causes. One must be, oneself, a hopeless cause.

Few are so dedicated or so daring. One's near-total unprofitability must be documented. Success of any kind is prohibited. Even optimism is frowned upon. Romances are permitted, but they must end within 120 days in scenes of sprawling humiliation.

Books may be written, even published, but they may have no more than 6 readers for each year of effort. For example: if you would like to have 1000 readers, you must have worked 166 years, eight months and a week. At minimum.

Talent is allowable, even charm, but it has to be squelched in interdepartmental meetings of epic length. Those with excess talent are given the task of creating entrance exams.

Only one unmitigated satisfaction is permitted to members of the TSHC -- as it cannot be avoided. We are the hopeless causes, and we the subcommittee for hopeless causes, and cannot be blamed, therefore, for how tenderly we care for each other.

Tuesday, December 07, 2010

Guttersnipe In Print: New and Forthcoming

Stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the following:

"The Extinction of Stories" will be in next year's edition of Gargoyle.

"Louis and His Porn Compassion" will be in the Winter edition of Mary: A Literary Quarterly.

"Big Help" will be in issue number 3 of Fractured West.

"Life in Tokyo" is in the latest edition of Flash.

"Radiance" appeared in Collective Fallout. An excerpt is available here.

My essay "Metta Meditation for Hot Male Action: How to Practice Love in Sleazy Bars" was published in RFD and has been very kindly been made available here at the website of Don Shewey.

I am deeply grateful to anyone who takes the time to read my work or contact me about it.

Friday, December 03, 2010

Bear.

Most of all I love those people who come up to me totally earnestly to ask, Are you a bear?

Ideally I would let out a deafening roar. Tear off one of their arms. But evidently I am insufficiently bear.

If honesty was really my first policy I'd say, "Hell, no. I'm trying to be convincingly human -- but it doesn't seem to be working, does it?"

Of course I am honored to be associated with the bears, and it seems to me far more illustrious to be mistaken for a bear than, say, a senator.

It's true that I like my fish best raw. And that I try to keep as much of my face covered in hair as possible. However it is utter presumption and self-inflation to presume to call myself a bear.

Though certainly I accept that it would be easier to love me, if one first imagined that magnificent animal.
David W. Orr, Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse
Oxford University Press, 2009

In 'Down to the Wire' David Orr asks, "Can we overcome the tendency to settle for half-truths?" This book is a distillation of information you (literally) cannot survive without and is an excellent introduction to what Orr calls "the many disciplines of applied hope."

I've read a number of the popular books on climate change (McKibben, Friedman, Brown) and this seems to me the most useful -- perhaps best read in conjunction with McKibben's EAARTH: Making A Life on a Tough New Planet.

David Orr is remarkably skillful at presenting information about vastly disparate topics in a readable, memorable way. This allows him to discuss the many fundamental ways that the government, the media, the constitution, the military, the economy and all of our lifestyles are going to have to change if we want a snowball's chance of surviving on an already greatly altered planet.

Like the great Joanna Macy, Orr explores our urgent need to learn how to think and perceive differently. As humans, we are engineered to see what's large and fast. We must change the ways we perceive, as well as what we value, if we are going to survive. After dismissing geoengineering quick fixes, he writes, "The job of building a decent world will come down to how well we understand ourselves and how much we can improve the 'still unlovely human mind'."

Orr insists that, contrary to popular belief, people can handle hearing the truth about our situation. We have no other option. Like a late-stage alcoholic, we must change the way we live or doom ourselves and our children. Many of the changes we feared have already occurred. "We are rapidly creating a different Earth, and one we are not going to like." Despite the nonsense that fills our government and airwaves, we have not a moment to waste.

Orr writes, "I know a great many smart people and many very good people but I know far fewer people who can handle hard truth gracefully without despairing." This book is a good first step toward becoming one of those strong and graceful people.