I WANT

I want to bust you out of the city. I want to steal a car and drive up I-5 as fast as I can go. A nice car, a solid box, a bubble-pod, a car that smells like vinyl, nothing of the forest, a euphoric comfort machine. Stolen. What better thing to steal, than a car?

A stolen car and a suitcase full of money, to pay for all the gas. I’ll find the suitcase under some tumbled rocks on the mountain-top, underneath a giant Alaskan yellow-cedar of record diameter. A suitcase full of money and a car. The seas are filling with oil, the world is ending, who cares. This is no time to be pretending to know how to bake bread. This is no time for routine. This is no time for patience, for tolerance. This is no time to love the land of here below.

I’ll pick you up in my new car and then we can go anywhere. First, we’ll chase the sun. For moral. We’ll bust out of the rain cloud that clings to the cascade mountains and drive east into the summertime. It’s so bright out there that we’ll get suntans on our feet in the shape of flip-flops, even while driving. No more getting cheated out of summertime. No more pretending to know how to bake bread.

I never want to learn how to really bake bread. How to give an egg wash, sprinkle the loaves with seeds, mist the ovens with water to make a nice crust. I want to burn all bread loaves. Next, I want to burn all gluten-free bread loaves. I want to burn all pizzas. I want to burn the word PIZZA. As soon as I’m out of the rain cloud this feeling will pass. I’ll have my feet up on the dash, in flip-flops. Bread loaves can live. Bread loaves make a pleasing smell, sandwiches are sometimes interesting to assemble. Anything can go in them. Absolutely anything.

I’ve got you in the car with me and we’re busting out. Routine does not need us. School in the fall can Eat a Dick. Being far apart from each other is unnecessary. Missing your freckles come out, one by one, in the springtime, and seeing them only in bunches now and then, for a night or two, tears my heart apart. Now I’ve got you till the money runs out or we get sick of each other, whichever comes first. You’re wary of my plan, my stolen car, my mercurial wanderlust, but then I tell you that I’ll pay for your art school so you don’t have to spend your savings, and you feel better.

We go to North Dakota, because it is far from everything and not overdone. There’s an abandoned ranch, the grass waist-high. The wind blows ferociously, and sucks the moisture from our lips. The old house tips into the earth, but there is no mold anywhere. All the rooms are filled with light. The paint is peeling, and paint chips get in everything. I have a small gas generator for electricity. You’ve brought a good table and enough coffee to fuel a mild obsession.

All we do is fuck and work. We wake at dawn and run, without time pieces, down the pitted dirt road that goes through the grass. We can see the horizon in front of us, and I think of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her bareback ponies.

We run until we are exhausted, farther every day. There’s a stream to jump into, clear, with wildflowers. We bathe in the stream and then make breakfast out of things from our garden. We’ve cleared an overgrown patch of yard for our garden. It has volunteer watermelons and chicken bones in the dry soil. An old compost pile. We’ve got chickens. We eat and then I push you over into the grass and take off your clothes. We lay in the sun and bake. Then we crawl into the shade to fuck, because I am intolerant of the heat.

After fucking, we do not know what time it is. It doesn’t matter. We stumble, barefoot, into the house, leaving our breakfast dishes in the grass, and begin to work, you at your table and me at my computer. When we get hungry we eat from the big pot of food on the stove. Simple things, mung beans and brassicas and bone broth. Wild potherbs. Bacon.

When the sun sets we stop working, for we have no electric lights, and if we tried to work by oil-lamp we would go blind. The oil lamps hiss and we lay on the warm boards of the deck and watch the stars come out. I’ve got a banjo, and you’ve learned to play the thumb piano. Our hair is wild. We have no mirrors. It doesn’t matter, because we know how beautiful we are. We fuck again. All day, when we are taking breaks, moments of staring out the window at the tall grass, and the wind, we are thinking of new ways to fuck. Ways to fuck that no-one has ever done before. Fucking as improv, as spirituality, as ritual. Fucking that pushes our limits, our pain tolerance, our love for one another. Fucking that doesn’t try to be anything at all. Sometimes I read outloud to you from Little House on the Prairie while you masturbate. Sometimes I try and make myself come just by breathing and watching the clouds.

Frequently your coffee consumption keeps you from sleeping. These nights you sit up in bed and blind-contour draw my chin as seen in the moonlight. During the day you nap, and I write you love letters because I miss you, and feel my infinite smallness, all alone on the plain. I am like Ma in the dugout, when Pa has gone away to find work back east, and the blizzards will not stop coming. Only Ma was infinitely more patient than I am, because she never had the internet. Eventually you wake up, and find that I’ve taken off your clothes and tied you to the bed with some rope I’ve found in a broken-down stable. I’ve rubbed you all over with oil and placed warm stones along your spine. I’ve made constellations of your freckles with one of your shoplifted drawing pens. I’ve made you come seventeen times, in your sleep. You’ve had the strangest dreams, and you’re flushed.

Summer gets old and dried-up, and we run out of salve for our lips. We’ve eaten the twenty-pound sack of mung beans and are down to the bottom of our barrel of salt-pork. The wild pot-herbs have gone to seed and we’ve eaten all the watermelons. One day I wake up and want to read the news. You’ve been reading it on the sly for many months, and tell it to me in one long narrative there in bed, propped on your pillows, talking with your hands. I work in some magical realism to put the world back together, like an emulsifier. The seas are still filling with oil, there is still nothing I can do. The sun from the window is resting on your perfect tits, which have exploded in freckles. I pull the suitcase of money from under the bed. It’s empty. We haven’t grown sick of each other.

What to do next? Get married? There is nowhere else to run. North Dakota was the last place. You furrow your brow. You are both worried and excited by my mercurial wanderlust. Your hands are neat and square, the blue of your eyes has faded from the sun. I do not know what to do with you. Maybe I was exposed to too much lead as a child. All those peeling low-income apartment complexes. The lead weights in window dressings. Lead affects the part of the brain that determines impulsiveness, and one’s ability to learn from one’s mistakes. I flop back down on the sheets, and whine like a puppy. The sheets are thin and soft, like my grandmother’s sheets. They have small simple flowers on them. The sheets make me want to have sex, and sleep. They fill me with infinite peace, like my grandmother’s house, with its hardwood floors and chiming grandfather clock.

We don’t have money for gas, so we leave the car at the house, at the end of the long pitted dirt road. We use some of your savings to mail your art and art supplies and my computer back home, to the raincloud. Then we walk. It’s fall, and the wind blows drier than ever. I have a mason jar of water and a cucumber, and my banjo. We’re barefoot. Our jean-shorts are torn. My tye-dye shirt is faded and thin. Around my neck are rainbow freedom rings, and they glint painfully in the sun.

When we get to the small paved highway we’re so hot we almost pass out. A woman with air conditioning picks us up. She’s unhappy, so I give her my banjo. She rambles when she talks, and offers us diet sodas. You’re allergic to diet soda so to protect you I dump yours out the window when she isn’t looking. In this way you know that I love you, and that I Pay Attention. The woman is so excited by our energy that she calls her husband and breaks up with him, and then drives us to Oregon. She throws her shoes out the window, and after dropping us off in the raincloud she moves to a small beach town, and opens up a shop selling bath oils and gluten-free cinnamon rolls. She’s reached the end of her personal evolution and lives there, happily, until her death.

My problem is that I fear that I will never reach the end of my personal evolution. Back home, we both get jobs somehow, even though the world is ending and capitalism is becoming irrelevant. It feels good, to have routine. It’s much easier to pretend to know how to bake bread than to think. The wild part of me goes to sleep and I lose my suntan. The rains come back and we both have allergies. We don’t worry about what the next part will be because we both know that one day, the day will come when we won’t have to figure out the next part, that the next part will come for us, over the mountains in a tidal wave, and we’ll never have to think again.

an update

Here I am, back in Portland. I was just in the woods for a few days, doing a working interview at the local hot-springs resort. It’s dark in the woods, and rainy. I ate a lot of gluten-free walnut bread and in my off-time worked my way through the Little House on the Prairie box set. At this moment in time I seem to like those books more than nearly anything. The clean rhythm of the story hypnotizes me. Pa is always going to town, the sky is always darkening with grasshoppers or prairie fire or blizzards, and everything is always going wrong. But then no-one is hurt, only a little soot covered, and “all’s well that ends well.” Pa plays his fiddle and Ma is gentle and reasonable. There might be a bolt of calico, if the wheat crop does well. The sun is always shining.

Right now I’m tired. C and I just spent a long time at the store buying food for the month in Idaho at the residency, and it made me feel a bit like I was setting out on a covered wagon trip. We leave early in the morning, to drive ten hours north then south then north again, around big forests where no roads go through, to the place where our rooms are, bare and warm and waiting, without a thing in them to pull us away from our art. I cannot wait. I cannot wait!

I’m going to Idaho! I’ve raised nearly $200 for my trip, and it’s awesome. Thanks to everyone who donated. This opportunity is not one that comes along often, or really at all. I can’t wait to see what comes out of it. Me and my brain, alone in rural Idaho. An unformed mass of time. Clear cold sunlight. Many pounds of black beans. I can’t wait!

I’ll tell you all about it, dear reader. Thanks for your support in my endeavors!

challenging the ocean to a fistfight

I am applying for a fantsy-pants two year writing fellowship, the likes of which I have never applied for, and which over a thousand people apply to each year, and this is what it feels like- it feels like buying sixty dollars worth of scratch tickets, and scratching them while standing naked in front of a panel of judges, blindfolded. It feels like challenging the ocean to a fistfight. It feels crazy. It feels amazing. It’s also giving me lots of motivation to try and polish things I’ve already written, which is my new favorite hobby. I’ve got a veritable mountain of things I’ve already written, all piled up like crumpled newspaper, and yet all I do, most times, is stare out the window and wring my hands over what to do next. But not anymore! I am fashioning things together, and if I do it well enough you won’t even be able to see the tiny stitches when I’m done. The thing will appear as if cut from a whole piece of cloth, as if I’d chipped it from a single hunk of stone. This is what I want.

I don’t understand things like fellowships, and judging. I don’t understand how a group of people (what people? And who says that they know anything?) can select just ten pieces from over a thousand, with any sort of authority. At this point I am banking, simply, on the idea that the judges might like a little winter. It will be December January February, after all, while these stories are being read, and the huge blank institution to which I am sending my seven thousand words is nestled deep in an area that is entirely free from winter- indeed, as far as I can tell, it is free from any sort of nature at all. And my story is about winter, so perhaps the judges will appreciate that. I can imagine it now- the white walls, the formica tables. My story, dog-eared from being passed through so many hands, and the way the florescent lights hum just-so and bring out the dark shadows under everyone’s eyes, from being indoors so much and spending so much time reading. Maybe someone will have a cough. But then, this isn’t the pacific northwest, so probably not. But there will be dry, piped-in air, and windows that don’t open. i n s t i t u t i o n s. I hate them. They make me feel crazed, like I’m in prison. But man, what I wouldn’t do to have someone pay me to write. And what better writing motivator, than prison? Than nostalgia? I will close the blinds and tape up a drawing I have done, of the tree outside, just like Annie Dillard did when she was writing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which she wrote in a small blank room in a university. When she got stuck she walked to the dark library and ran the tips of her fingers along the stacks, waiting for inspiration. She even, for a while, played a game of chess with an invisible opponent- she’d move a piece in the dark library, and when she came back the next night, the other side would have made their move. She wrote at night, until four a.m. Then she went home and slept till noon, at which time she and her husband, who was also on a late schedule, rose and made breakfast. All her houseplants died.

I mean to have a life in which not even a houseplant can live. Annie Dillard called the period in which she wrote Pilgrim at Tinker Creek her “early fanaticism”, and said that immediately afterward she regretted it, although later in life she romanticized the period, which did not surprise her. I do not know if I am focused enough to be fanatical about any one thing, but I am working at it. I mean to make something spectacular before I die. That is why I am applying for things, because I have realized that I exist and that I will continue to exist, and that I will, most likely, continue to churn out sentences, and that some of my sentences are very good, and maybe I can build a ladder from them, and use this ladder to climb up into the next level of the game that is my life. I’ve been playing on the current level for eight years straight, and while I have not yet been ambitious enough to beat it, I have discovered some really cool secret things that most people never find. But now, boredom! Oh, I am bored with it! So the next level, maybe, and it will consist simply of a white-painted box and some piped-in air. A good writing chair, and armloads of nostalgia. A vacuum in which to re-invent the universe. A refuge from the intoxicating beauty of the world in which I live. A place to be lonely. I will make up my own language, and use it to record everything that has already happened, free from the stress of more things happening at the same time, piling up much faster than I can write them down. A rest! The world on pause. Absolutely nothing happening at all. There will be sunshine, and the spiritually bankrupt culture of rich people. I will bring nothing but sweatpants, and my ten wooden chests packed full of memories, their corners worn from their long overland journey.

None of this has happened yet! As usual, my imagination is getting ahead of the actual passage of time. I do this constantly, and then I never do anything, because I’ve already imagined all of it happening, so there doesn’t seem to be any point. And who knows. Perhaps the judges will think my story is stupid, or that it’s not about anything, or they won’t understand why it’s beautiful. Maybe there is too much levity in it, or not enough elderly people, or I use too many adjectives. There are a lot of good stories in the world- an overwhelming amount of them, actually. Many many people would make perfectly good writers.

But the point is, that I am bored with this level of my life, and I am acknowledging the existence of a higher one, and wondering how I might get there. That is huge!

Dear reader, wish me luck!!!

Polished! Done! So shining I can see my own face in it!

Friends and strangers! I have been working very hard here in my little wooden shack, with the rain pouring down outside, or not, and just this very moment I finally have something to show for it- a finished story! Finished as in polished, no holes anywhere, done and complete, not a single word I would change for any other word, no matter how many times I look over it. Finished, finished, finished! I do not know if you realize how remarkable this is. Polishing my stories is not something that I have ever had the patience for, hence the reason I have a blog as opposed to chunks of things that might actually be marketable. And what does this all mean? Am I gaining some sort of newfound focus, this cold damp november? Has is come suddenly with the passing of time? With age? From where did it arrive? Unanswerable questions! But for now, I have the story for you. As you read it you will notice, I think, how complete it is, how it tumbles along like a soccer ball in a patch of newly-cut grass, closed, complete. You may have read it before but I promise, it is much better now. And I’ve also changed it to the third person, to make it seem more story-like, and less of a personal narrative. Yay for today, and for rounded, finished things! The first day of the rest of my literary life!

What it feels like to be stoned