People just keep checking out

forever:

Wits savage enough for prophecy

Straight backbones with x-ray vision

and unheeded verses

Malcontent hearts ready to recycle the heated shrapnel colonizing their guts

over years

over voices raised

over the choking scrape of verbal metal on membrane

ready to expel ancient buckshot newly honed

for the slaughter of aches and ignorance

I would quote Ginsberg but

his long truth is all wrong

now after anthologies

I would say why not others

any random sampling of the mundane mass

of less than lambs

upright on pale feet

wrapped in child-crafted throwaway single-season size sevens

innocent of the weight of annihilation or

the meaning of that word

in conjunction with any reality in which they star

I would say that but

It would be wrong, wouldn’t it

to ask for sacrificial stand-ins

cheap substitutes

death spores wandering

amid untimely removed kernels

of brilliance

and light

and hard-shelled compassion

Wouldn’t it?

I would howl but

in empty rooms

the screaming echoes

rebound

gain force with each pound

against rigid absence

take on too much momentum

to swerve around the creator

who gave them shrill life

cannot avoid throwing her

to the floor of the world

still searching for the annulled

the ghostly whys

her friends

By Katy Scrogin | The post Howling Again appeared first on The Public Sphere.

This isn’t exactly how it happened.

I fell in love, first with the mountains, then with a woman. And it ended. But it didn’t end quickly, in one fell swoop, or a nice quick chop. The love faded like the furniture, piece by piece. This is the love of the woman I’m talking about. My love of the mountains never vanished even if the jagged outline of a ridgeline or a range no longer appears on my horizon. It took a whole week for my furniture to disappear. It took 18 months for that love to evaporate.

The teaky futon was the first to go, and my kitchen table was the hardest to let go. It was the first piece of furniture I had bought in Salt Lake and I carted it everywhere: from the South Temple apartment to our house on the West Side to the 9^th & 9^th cottage. A modest pine table with two hinged leaves, it had been painted multiple times and partially sanded. The leaves had stretches of green and white paint on them while red and yellow paint twisted down the legs. My dad and I had found it at an art gallery consignment shop, and, with a little elbow grease, we unearthed matching chairs in the bowels of the shop. I sold the table and chairs for a crumble of cash to a half-drunk guy in his 20s.

With the furniture gone, the cottage reminded me of what it felt like when I moved in. This place had radiated potential. Here was a humble place where someone could make a life or recover from a past one. The shower had good water pressure, and the kitchen had a gas stove. Windows dotted the east, south, and west walls. The neighborhood boasted a park, a coffee shop, a yoga studio, and killer burritos. The basement provided ample storage space. There was a porch and screen door off the living room. The backyard was fenced. I had even started a compost pile. But sometimes it’s not enough to have everything in place.

The one thing that remained in the cottage was the Delta Sky Kennel, Prufrock’s home for the next several hours. I had purchased the kennel a month ago, and Pruf and I had been practicing. First, we worked on simply being in the kennel. I’d coax him in with a treat and close the door. We worked up to Pruf spending 30 minutes or more in the kennel while I was in the other room or out on a quick errand. But, now, our last morning in Salt Lake, our beloved Salt Lake, I went full-bore with him. I scooped him into the kennel, slammed the door, and prepared him for takeoff. The rumpled brown carpet offered just the right amount of resistance. We didn’t sail across the floor; instead, we bumped along, much like, I told my dog, flying over the merciless Wasatch. Wrestling the kennel across the floor, I pushed, pulled, and shimmied. I dragged it in circles, I rocked it side-to-side, I pounded on the top, I rattled the sides. I even howled. I just didn’t want him to be scared. I didn’t want him to be as scared as I was.

Natalie chuckled when she walked in on me whirling around my dog. I had said goodbye to everyone else, leaving my best friend Natalie to the final hours. We had met through a yoga workshop and had built our friendship from the ground up: funny emails at first, followed by more personal ones, and eventually, we found the courage to hang out in person. Over “B & N,” beer and nachos, we listened to each other cry, offering up yoga pointers—“Try 10 minutes of bound lotus every day for a month to break bad habits”—and relationship counsel—“She’s really missing out on life by not going with you.” While nine a.m. was too early for B & N, we could at least have coffee and eggs at the Avenues Bakery, a prime brunch spot in my old neighborhood.

It’s hard to say what the Avenues Bakery was more famous for: its tasty food or its unforgivable service. Waiting 10 minutes for a cup of coffee was routine. The wait staff was young, pierced, and inked, and as they clotted behind the counter in their black T-shirts and aprons, glaring off into the distance, it was clear that they had better things to do. The well-intentioned middle-aged couple who ran the bistro bakery had studied in France and were trying to import a foodie culture to a homogenous city whose idea of fine cuisine extended little beyond green Jell-O. They sponsored wine tastings, scrambled local farm-fresh eggs, served up a mouth-watering assortment of tortes, tarts, and other tangy confections, and yet they consistently hired a slow, surly staff. This questionable combination of the earnest and the disenfranchised made any meal there a dangerous proposition.

Shortly after nine, the Saturday crowds had yet to appear at the Avenues Bakery. Natalie and I easily found a table by the window, and our coffee arrived within a few minutes of our order. The Bakery covered half a block on South Temple, a wide boulevard with cast iron streetlamps, ancient trees, and Gothic “gentile” churches. The windows spread almost from floor to ceiling, making this place a prime people-and-car-watching venue. My first couple of years in Salt Lake, when I was in grad school, I had lived just three blocks away, between the Presbyterian church and the Catholic cathedral. Once a week, usually after my seven o’clock seminar, I would treat myself to take-out. Picking up the turkey-and-brie panini on my way home from the university, I’d pass the evening stretched out on the floor, with plenty of beer and a weepy Lifetime movie, my books, notebooks, packets, papers, and handouts circling me. No dog yet, no lover yet, just all those words.

Over huevos rancheros and rosemary toast, Natalie regaled me with the latest Buchi family drama. This time, her younger siblings were torpedoing her efforts to resurrect Grandma Marge’s famous Christmas Eve Pajama-Waffle party. I fixed on Natalie’s story, laughing on cue, because I had gotten tired of saying goodbye. I commiserated on cue, inhaling and nodding, because there were too many questions I couldn’t answer, not even to myself. There was only the thin thread of something I knew. The thread was enough to hold on to, but if I tugged too hard or tried to pull myself up, it would snap. And so I explained sparingly but ached excessively. If it hurts so bad, then something here must matter. But if that were true, if something—or someone—here mattered, then why would I leave?

But, I could commiserate for only so long. Together, we had to face the unavoidable: I was leaving. Bumping over our words, we tried to explain what it meant to know each other. I thanked her for taking care of me during the six months of the so-called “separation” from my lover. I wished I had said more, but the thread tightened in my throat. Natalie thanked me for dragging her outside to play in the dead of winter. We laughed about our final excursion, just last week. Natalie and her husband Sam joined Prufrock and me on the Shoreline trail after a snowfall. The fresh snow tempted me. “I want to roll down this hill,” I announced, uncertain, for a moment, of my own sanity because the hill in question was really the side of a mountain. Natalie and Sam looked at each other and shrugged. “Let’s do it,” Sam said in his honey-velvet voice. Praying we didn’t lose our keys, we dove off the ridge, belly-flopping on the snow. And then we slid. And the momentum of the slide sent our legs up and over our heads. And then we tumbled. And we went faster and faster until the tumbled turned into a roll. Rolling over and over until we plowed to a stop at a gully full of scrub oak. Drunk on vertigo and Utah’s famous champagne powder, we tried to stand up. And we fell over. And we tried again. And we fell over again. Piece by piece we pulled ourselves back up the hill, wobbling, cackling, and chucking snowballs at each other. And then we did it again. And again. And again. All three of us were thirty, and we flew and fell, over and over, with the grace and promise of a child, someone not yet disappointed, not yet afraid of the rocks, lying in wait under the thin veil of snow.

Pruf danced around us, darting up the hill and down. Reaching his haunches up in the air, he stretched his paws forward and barked, his black ears waving. He licked Sam’s face, sat on my belly, and nipped at Natalie’s heels. He taunted us for being slow and dizzy and showed us how to run and kick up powder at the same time. My dog taught me how to love the mountains. I hoped he’d forgive me for taking him away. Another space lost.

The server cleared our plates and twisted his lips in something like a smile. Natalie and I drained our coffee cups empty and settled the bill. We still had time.

On the way to the airport, I asked Natalie to drive me around town, my last chance to lock my eyeballs on this city. From the Bakery, we headed north through the Avenues neighborhood, and I marveled at the cozy arts and crafts bungalows with their recessed porches and the fanciful Queen Anne’s. We worked our way up to 11^th Avenue and then headed west, winding around City Creek Canyon. The road hugged close to the steep, towering land. We swayed from side to side at every bend. Pruf began to stir. He stood up, his claws clicking against the plastic floor of the kennel. His tail thumped and he whinnied. Turning circles in the kennel, Pruf’s whinnies grew into full-fledged barks. He wanted to get out and run. I wanted to get out and run. I thought about the moose, deer, elk, coyotes, bobcats, magpies, jackrabbits, and rattlesnakes I had seen in this canyon. We had seen in this canyon. This was our place, and when the car made the last bend in the road, the canyon vanished. Defeated, Pruf pancaked on the plastic floor. The car continued on its course. As we made our way out North Temple, passing the Red Iguana, I asked Natalie to take me by the house. We still had time.

I hadn’t seen it in a year, since my lover had sold it. We idled at the curb. “Wow,” Natalie exhaled, “it’s so cute.” Except for that storm door, I thought. But I was also glad that the new Mission-style front door was protected. It took us two contractors and three months to get that door from the factory in Tennessee. The living room window, with the BB-gun bullet holes in it, had been replaced with a monolithic plate of glass. We had wanted to repair that window—which had snowflake stickers over the holes when we bought the house—but we didn’t want to do what these people had done. We didn’t want to swap one giant plate of glass, albeit with small holes, for another, equally unattractive plate of glass, however solid. Somehow, we wanted that window to be able to open, to offer us some fresh air, but we couldn’t figure out how. We left it the way it was, snowflake stickers and all, for the full four years of our shared life.

The front yard was still intact. We spent every weekend of August 2004 digging up with the front, just the two of us, armed only with a shovel whose handle was splintering and a pick ax. Hours and hours passed as we wedged the blunt shovel into the sun-baked sod and wielded the ax overhead. Thirsty and tired at the end of the hot afternoon, my lover and I stumbled to the Red Iguana and sought refuge in cold Coronas and homemade mole. That August was the only time in my life I ever looked forward to Monday mornings. At work, I could rest, recharge, recover, my muscles twitching, my eyelids heavy.

I made more than she did and that fall, I spent my money on plants. Silver fountain grass, yucca, Japanese blood grass, saltbush, Russian sage, feather reed grass, and blue fescue. The front yard was spare but textured. The violet blossoms of the Russian sage sparkled next to the corduroy bricks of the house. The pointed yucca and billowing saltbush took over the southwest corner of the yard. The silver fountain and feather reed grasses reached high as their plumes bobbed in the wind. Struggling to find their footing in the rocky soil, the fescue and blood grass kept their bold colors close to the ground. But, it was the zebra grass that enthralled me the most. The tall, broad blades alternated from base to tip between a rich but pale green hue and a neutral fawn color. Like a tiger-striped kitty or my own speckled blue heeler, this grass was nature’s version of a rugby shirt, the Fair Isle sweater, argyle socks. Patterns released by genes, no elaborate stitching required.

Next to the zebra grass, there was a spot in my heart for the Alpine Blue Spruce, a young evergreen we had planted in front of the living room window. We had told ourselves we planted the tree there to block the late-day western sun. But really we had planted it to prevent passer-bys from seeing the snowflake stickers and their sister BB holes. We named the tree Bruce, Bruce the Blue Spruce. He was a squat Christmas tree, tinged with smoky blue, and we loved him. When you look at something you love every day, you don’t really notice that it’s changing. Bruce looked the same every day, but we told each other that he was getting bigger. “Look at him, now,” she’d say to me. “He’s getting so tall! In a few years, we may have to prune him. In 10 years, we’re going to have so much shade in the front yard.” Today, on this bitter, drab December morning, Bruce did look taller. My throat swelled and my jaw tightened. In 10 years, that will be an enormous tree. In one year, the space in my heart for her will contract so smoothly that I won’t even notice until it’s almost closed. This isn’t exactly how it happens.

At the airport, Natalie gave me a gift, a candle. “For meditation,” she said. We watched Pruf and his kennel get wheeled away. We hugged goodbye.

The plane to Atlanta was empty. I scooted over to a window seat. Pruf’s kennel sat on the tarmac, next to a ramp. I could see his black nose pressed up against the holes. The ground crew sweet-talked him as they loaded the kennel on the ramp. His tail flickered. He disappeared into the cargo hold. I closed my eyes.

By Hope Miller | The post Breakfast: December 2007 appeared first on The Public Sphere.

When you cough, I hand you a napkin, remind you to cover your mouth,
Coach you in swallowing. I take your hand, gently, as she would have done,
Help you rise from your chair, steady your hesitant steps.
You are like petals folding into their calyx, or a hibiscus closing for the night.
I admire the young mother who coaxed this bud into bloom,
Who intuited from slender wisps of hope the man you might become.

Now as our world shrinks to a table for two,
The taste of butter your sole residual joy,
I remember how you could spin me in a waltz,
Turn on the sun with a moonlight kiss,
Harbor me within your encircling arms.
I feel sure you cannot unbecome what you became.
What you have been, you are.

I must intuit, as your mother did, what you need and feel.
Once you said fervently, “With all my being I love you.”
Now the words will not come, yet I believe them.
Even as my heart grows heavy with fearful tears,
I read your smile, and strangely find content.

She has done well by you,
The woman whose love you did not have to earn,
Who guided your toddler steps uphill,
Releasing you when your manly stride
Assured her all was well.
May I do equally well by you, holding your hand to guard against a fall,
Helping you gently down the shadowy slopes,
Releasing you when the evening petals close
And the music from the stars
Assures me all is well.

© 1999 by Helen Heightsman Gordon

By Helen Heightsman Gordon | The post Close Parentheses (The Last Love Song) appeared first on The Public Sphere.

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By Carrie Hawks | The post Sprawl appeared first on The Public Sphere.

Perhaps an argument could be made here for the ascendance of spectacle and celebration, for commemorative events taking on a meaning and importance based on ritual rather than remembrance.  Maybe we live in a time and a place defined by bullet points and power point presentations, where history is boiled down to a holiday, where the details fall by the wayside and public drunkenness and wanton celebration find justification in the commemoration of any event that allows us a bit of freedom from the Puritanism of our daily lives.  By this line of reasoning, such anniversaries are little more than empty vessels to be filled by the repressed desires of the celebrants, ciphers floating without reference.  One could even go so far as to argue that anniversaries in and of themselves have become nearly irrelevant; commemoration has been flattened across the public sphere to the point where everyone and everything can have an anniversary: people, animals, buildings, events, stores, corporations, products, television shows.  Anniversaries have been indelibly linked now to commercial language; indeed, one would be hard pressed to find an anniversary whose commemoration hasn’t been transformed into an occasion to buy, sell, or consume.

Given all this, what then is the utility of an anniversary?  Why are anniversaries still important, even after their rampant commercialization, indiscriminate application, and often specious interpretation?

Much has been made of the drive towards instant gratification as a defining characteristic of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.  The statement that the internet puts the world at our fingertips has gone from a revolutionary idea to a cliché.  And yet, along with the expectation of access to everything all the time, another shift has quietly occurred.  It finds its genesis and its metaphor in a device/service offered by our cable and satellite television companies.

The digital video recorder, with its ability to pause and rewind live television, is subtly shaping the way we live our lives.  The marketing for this product promises that we will never miss anything again–should the real world intrude on our television watching, we can simply hit rewind and not miss a single moment of programming.  We can record our favorite shows and skip through the commercials with the press of a button.  The DVR has singularly revolutionized the way we watch television.  Once one gets used to the idea, it’s surprising how quickly it translates to other venues.  More than once I’ve caught myself reaching to push some non-existent button on my car stereo, attempting to rewind what someone has said on the radio.  And of course, while that button might not exist in my car, a few minutes on the Internet will likely yield that radio station’s website with an archive of the program in question, allowing me to listen to it again whenever I want.  The same is true of television and, if something is not on an officially sanctioned network website (or even if it is), it’s almost certainly on YouTube.  There is no such thing as missing a televised event now that everything ends up on YouTube.  The DVR is a metaphor for how we live our lives, where everything is instantly repeatable, instantly archived, and always accessible.  Nothing again will ever be “can’t miss”; indeed, nothing can ever be truly missed again, as everything is instantly documented, archived, and available with a couple of clicks.  History repeats itself, literally.  

Within this context, the anniversary does still hold value and meaning.  The anniversary makes the argument that time does matter, that time is real, that despite all our technology time is still the one thing we cannot change, alter, or halt.  An anniversary is the insistence that today is different from yesterday is different from tomorrow.  When we commemorate an anniversary, we are not just celebrating an event, we are recognizing the passage of time.  An anniversary marks an important event, but it is not just about remembering that event, it is an affirmation that what has happened between then and now is also important.  Anniversaries tell us that life is important, that life is not repeatable, rewindable, or redactable.  Time marches on and every moment is singular and unique and precious.

We may not have known it on that margarita-soaked night, but in its own way Cinco de Mayo commemorates the significance of time.  The Battle of Puebla took place on the Fifth of May, 1862, with the Mexican army successfully, if temporarily, forcing a withdrawal of the occupying French forces.  It is widely recognized that French General Charles de Lorecenz’s fatal error was beginning his campaign too late in the day.

photo credit: Bengt Nyman

By T. R. Kiyoshi Oshiro | The post Why Anniversaries Matter appeared first on The Public Sphere.

I eat mud 
when sun doesn’t shine
and
eyes, mine like seas, busk
heavy with the sadness of every season at winter.

To cheer me up
they use illumination therapy and melatonin, carefully ionized air,
but I tell them nothing

of what I cannot speak: that I eat mud
because I can’t swallow this thick rain peacefully,

that I understand leafless branches’
sorrow
having managed to exist
past frost.
And though you may see me snow-balled and laughing
I am not

unafraid of the tragedy and change
so terrifically embodied by this moribund
post-autumnal haze!

But would be loved
and even if am

am not.

For I speak not of mothers, neither of fathers nor siblings
other
do I speak.

The sweet ambiance of well grown seasons means everything to me.

I would go where weather still exists
and cease 
to
cease.

2.

I thrive through the ebullient seasons 
made of light
and redolence, and the hypnotizing dusts
of flight

through brilliance and dander, 
and wet green smells
of water 
circulating through healthy bark
of trees 
in blossom     and
even the rain then

fall down onto me
with the light!
into entirely everything 
at the same time
as i scoop
from the torrent 
so many changing, wonderful beings;
cupping my hands, my whole body, into a biblical ark
and am not alone then, in those moments never without you 
Helios, Apollo, Utu, Ra,
Mithras, Phoebus, Horus,
Sol

in our sun-spangled atmosphere 
of meaning 
flowing for what feels
this time to surely

be the long awaited eternity 
of peace

By Geoshino Ollscia | The post Elsewhere appeared first on The Public Sphere.

What exactly is this relationship between big hair and handicapped animals in American society? The bigger your hair, the more likely you are to share your life with a domesticated animal missing a limb. Case in point: the tripod canine hobbling around the pool at our motel in El Rio, Oklahoma and his owner, the motel”s proprietress, a big-haired, faux blonde with acrylic nails.

This dog reminds me of Jesus. We”re swimming on a summer night. All the heat trapped in the air enhances the dark blue of the night sky in such a way that lighter objects seem to glow in contrast. This dog is such an object. His sandy and grey flecked body shines against the swelling blue Oklahoma night. He seems heavenly.

And he whimpers. Whimpering does not preclude heavenliness. Jesus wasn”t all shimmer and gilt. He cried out on the cross. He wanted out. This dog wants out. He hobbles around the pool, translucent and crying. His owner, the motel”s proprietress, leans against a stucco wall and releases cigarette smoke into the blue night. She wants out.

We left Atlanta at 7 o”clock that morning. Fourteen hours later we”re a few miles west of Oklahoma city, at this motel, in this swimming pool. Our destination, San Francisco, is twenty-five hours away. Tomorrow night at about 9:30, after having just crossed into California at Bakersfield, we will make the decision to drive through the night. But tonight, we stop. It”s hot, we”re dirty, we swim, the dog whimpers, the big-haired, faux-blonde smokes. I get out of the pool.

☙

I”m laying in the street, bleeding. I”m at the intersection of 2^nd and Market at a red light. People with power–power ties, power suits, and power pumps–step over me as they traverse the crosswalk, moving north-to-south and south-to-north on their way to and from power lunches. A group of homeless men on the corner in a drumming circle begin chanting, “ouch, that hurt, ouch that hurt” over and over as they beat on their plastic buckets. I pick up my bike and my body, pretending that I am not in pain. Two minutes earlier I had no idea that my bike would capsize if I rode on top of the streetcar tracks. The light turns green, I mount my bike and ride down Market Street with the fervor of someone who knows exactly what she is doing.

I hit the next light green and cut over to Sansome, beginning my climb into Pac Heights. I think this is the best way into Pac Heights. Today is only my second day as a bike messenger; next week I will learn how to loop around the Embarcadero and enter Pac Heights from the north. At this moment, the most power I have in my life resides in my legs. My right leg is slightly numb and bleeding. I hate having a job. This is the sixth job I”ve had in eighteen months. I will have one more before I move to Utah. My parents think there”s something wrong with me. “Honey,” they say, “you have been beautifully educated, why can”t you get a real job?”  Because I enjoy sitting on a bench along the Embarcadero at 8:30 in the morning, watching the pigeons twitter and pick, watching the homeless unfurl from their blankets and cardboard boxes, watching the standing traffic on the Bay Bridge, waiting for my dispatcher to call me with a pick-up. I prefer my life this way.

I arrive at the graphic design office where the drawings are to be delivered. The receptionist is old and fat. Her glasses are thick and large, covering her cheeks. A knotted chain dangles from the sides of her glasses. She has smeared makeup all over her face, perhaps to conceal her deeply etched wrinkles, and she smells like the Clinique counter at a suburban mall. I hand her the tube of drawings from my bag and ask to use the restroom. “I”m sorry,” she whines, “our restroom is for employees only.”  I turn and leave, still bleeding.

☙

The Canon to the Ordinary just fired me. He called me into his office, an office blanketed in plush green carpet, an office with two wingback chairs in one corner and an expansive mahogany desk in the other, an office much larger than the Bishop”s office. He sits behind the desk, instructing me to take a seat in one of the wingbacks, a good ten feet away from him. “This just isn”t working,” he tells me. “It”s just not working out,” he clarifies. I don”t tell him that ordering the Bishop”s coffee and tea supplies is not a good use of my “beautiful education.”  I don”t tell him that the only thing I like about my job is riding the cable car to and from work. I don”t tell him that I think he treats his secretary like crap. And I don”t tell him that two weeks ago, exactly two weeks ago, I gave my two weeks notice, meaning today, the day he is firing me, is, technically, my last day. I sit and listen to him yell. I turn in my keys and leave.

I walk across the Close to the Cathedral. Grace Cathedral sits atop Nob Hill, right along the California cable car line. Grace draws crowds; tourist and locals come to see the stones, the stained glass, the doors, the Bishop himself, but mostly they come to walk The Labyrinth, a maze to spiritual enlightenment, first designed by the Catholics in Chartres. Grace has two Labyrinths:  one carved onto the stone of the Close, and the other, a velvety carpet model, sits in the Cathedral”s nave. I have never walked The Labyrinth, and I do not do so today. Today, I cry.

I sit in a pew and cry.

The B.V. M. stares at me. I am sitting beneath her. The Window of the Annunciation shines down on me: Gabriel bestows God”s message on an overjoyed virgin. I have nothing. This is what I think. I quit my job and was fired from my job. Unemployment does not scare me; losing my health insurance scares me. Zoloft, my antidepressant of choice, costs $93 a month for a subclinical dose. I am on a subclinical dose. The Rev. Gwyneth Murphy breezes past my perch beneath The Annunciation. I recognize her from a staff cocktail party. She wears a 2″ clerical collar. Most female priests in the Episcopal Church wear the 1″ collar. Three years from now, she will work at St. Mark”s, the Episcopal Cathedral in Salt Lake City, and I will live 2 blocks away. I get up and leave.

☙

After our swim, Jonathan and I decide to get some food. Not being familiar with the local cuisine in El Rio, we end up at Denny”s. We think it”s better to know in advance that our food will be bad rather than hope for something fantastic and regional, only to be disappointed and disgusted. I have no idea that San Francisco will disgust and disappoint me and that, after two years, I will leave it for Utah.

I want an omelet. It arrives and the waitress, attuned to our travel fatigue and noticing, perhaps from my short hair and Jonathan”s tongue ring, that we are not local, asks where we”re headed. San Francisco. “On I-40?” she asks. Yes, on I-40, straight through Texas. “Be careful in Groom-there”s a speed trap there. Also, right outside Groom is the largest cross in the Western Hemisphere. It”s beautiful.”  She smacks her gum, slaps the bill on the table, and turns on her heels.

☙

It is the summer of clergy deaths. In addition to ordering the Bishop”s coffee and tea supplies, one of my duties in the Diocesan Office is to make and send out clergy death announcements. Clergy death announcements are postcards, a somewhat questionable generic decision given the postcard”s message. But I do not dispute the use of postcards; I simply make them. At first, I try to have fun with the assignment, crafting in large, obnoxious text: “Dear Clergy, Hey!  What”s up?  Weather”s great, wish you were here…all of you except the Rev. Bill Riley “cuz that motherfucker bit the dust!  Have a good summer. Love, The Diocese of California.“

Marilyn Belove is an exacting person. She has been the Bishop”s secretary for five years; before that she worked as the Canon”s secretary, but she fell in love with him. The Canon to the Ordinary dealt with the situation by firing her. The Bishop hired her. Her new desk sits right outside the Bishop”s office door and right outside the Canon”s office door. Her new desk is one foot to the right of her old desk. As the Bishop”s secretary, she has the same paper weights, paper clip dispenser, sticky notes, mousepad and file tabs as she had as the Canon”s secretary. And she swoons every time the Canon walks by in his dark cleric suit, tortoise shell glasses, and wavy blond hair.

Marilyn studies the language on my postcard. “Beautiful,” she says. I have used my father”s favorite words in the Book of Common Prayer for my third batch of clergy death announcement postcards: “a sheep of thine own fold, a lamb of thine own flock, a sinner of thine own redeeming.”  Marilyn asks me if these words need to be italicized. It”s a nice touch, I tell her. I”ve made 400 of them, I tell her. “Yes, but they”re all different sizes,” she replies, holding up a clump of oddly-sized postcards. I”m not good with the paper cutter, I tell her. “They need to be fixed,” she says, “they all need to be exactly the same size.”  They”re fine, I say. Marilyn spends the next two hours trimming the edges of 400 clergy death announcement postcards. I hop on a cable car and go home. Tomorrow I will give my two weeks notice.

☙

Lynnie is skeptical. Lynnie, a forty-something lesbian with hairy legs, blue spiky hair, and an unlit cigarette somehow suctioned to her lower lip, is reading my resume. My over-education concerns her. “You could do anything you wanted. Why exactly do you want to be a bike messenger?” she asks me. I”m not sure what to tell her. I like to ride my bike and wish for the chance to be caught by the Bay, to take a peek on my way up a hill and see the vast grey waters spread out before me. Seeing water on my way up a hill surprises me. I tell Lynnie that I just want to try something different.

She hires me with the warning that I had better not “fucking flake out” after six months. I quit after two because the surprise of the water is no longer enough. A swinging taxi cab door throws me over my handlebars in Portrero casino Hill. A Marin Country widow drives right over me on Van Ness. Another messenger slams into me on Battery. I take down a pedestrian on Montgomery. January and February, the months that I worked, are San Francisco”s wettest. Eight hours a day I skim along the surface of downtown streets, blinded by fog and unrelenting rain. Gortex begins to retain water after two hours of uninterrupted exposure. My forearms get the wettest in the rain. And it”s hard to see the Bay through the burdened clouds.

☙

On one side of the Texas stretch of I-40 are signs which read, “Caution: Hitchhikers May Be Escaped Convicts,” and on the other is, as our waitress at Denny”s promised, the largest free-standing cross in the Western Hemisphere. But what our waitress at Denny”s in El Rio, Oklahoma didn”t tell us is the largest free-standing cross in the Western Hemisphere is surrounded by about twelve respectably sized statues of Jesus, each one depicting the Son of God in various poses of distress. There”s “Standing-Up-Tall-Jesus” who, despite his erect posture, sports a look of mournful foreboding. This statue is followed by “The Back-Bent Paschal Lamb” in which our Lord and Savior appears somewhat stooped. Next is “The-Word-Made-Flesh-at-90…Degrees,” a concrete masterpiece, immortalizing Jesus”s flexibility. This forward-falling motif progresses through the rest of the statues and culminates in the final statue, “The Collapsed Christ,” in which the Messiah lays prostrate at the foot of the largest free-standing cross in the Western Hemisphere. I think about the whimpering, heavenly dog at the motel.

☙

We live in a bad neighborhood. Women have broken beer bottles over one another”s heads in the street. DEA snipers have staked-out on our roof. There”s a woman with wiry hair shooting from her head who wanders around half-dressed, screaming. She screams things like “bitch, get your black ass back to Oakland” or “I ain”t yo” niggah, niggah.”  Sometimes, she carries a one-armed doll and swings it to accent her screaming.

I am under the kitchen table, screaming at Jonathan. Get down, I tell him. Turn off the lights and get down. He tries to tell me it was a firecracker. I know it”s gunfire because I saw the man running down the street firing the gun. Was his shirt yellow or grey?  Forty-five minutes later, when the police officer asks, I can”t remember. He asks me at approximately what time did I see this man?  I tell him 8:40.

Jonathan and I crawl on our bellies into the living room. The lights are out. We climb on the couch, peek over the back of the couch and out the window. DeMarco Jenkins lays face-first on Buchanan Street. A woman in pink flips him over. Jenkins is twenty-one years old and does not live in my neighborhood. He has a beautiful Afro-it is voluminous and thick and flecked with fresh blood.

☙

The espresso machine is temperamental. I explain this to Jean-Jean, a fashion design student on exchange from Belgium, because he is laughing at my apron. It looks like a Jackson Pollack original, done in java. I just made a double cap dry for the testy gay man who lives down the street and, as usual, the machine exploded, pelting me with ground espresso. Jean-Jean thinks this is funny. He orders a Magritte.

The Magritte is my favorite, to eat and to make. I have a weakness for Nutella. The batter sizzles on the crepe wheel as I quickly chop a banana. I flip the crepe over and wrestle with the Nutella; it is thick and solid and resists being spread over the warm crepe. But soon it melts, giving in to the demands of my wrist and forearm. I add the banana, fold everything up, dress it with powered sugar and whipped cream, and hand it to Jean-Jean. I am drunk and I am stoned and I have made another beautiful crepe.

When my shift ends, I drive to Oakland to see my girlfriend. We spent a great deal of our time having sex-in the bed, in the bath, on the kitchen floor, in organic supermarket parking lots. My girlfriend takes fourteen pills a day because she is a bi-polar, borderline, OCD, dyslexic, anorexic self mutilator. In three months, she will light herself on fire and I walk out of her life forever.

☙

It”s three a.m. and we are, for the second time in as many days, at Denny”s. Jonathan hands me the car keys. It”s my turn. In the past ten minutes, I”ve had three cups of coffee and five cajun chicken fingers. We are sitting at the counter. Denny”s is doing good business in the middle of the night; many of the booths are full, even if only with one person. Our waitress, with a ponytail and bangs, smiles at me every time she tops off my coffee. We leave her a good tip.

The Mojave Desert is dark at 3 a.m. There are no streetlights along the highway, nor are there any reflectors along the lane lines. I”m guessing. Jonathan is curled asleep against the window, clutching a pillow. The pillowcase, a yellow and orange array of floral patterns, is the brightest thing I can see. I sing Madonna to stay awake. I yell Madonna to stay awake: “Borderline. You just keep on pushing my love over the borderline.”  Three and a half hours later, I tell Jonathan it”s his turn. The sun starts to come up over the hills of San Mateo County, and my pupils are so dilated from caffeine that I can”t squint enough to keep out the light.

By Hope Miller | The post Magritte: The True Story of a Road Trip’s Aftermath appeared first on The Public Sphere.

My wife divorced me by text message.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. What she texted was a message that she’d signed and sent in the MSA, the marriage settlement agreement, the legal document prepared by our mutually-agreed-upon mediator that, once signed, notarized and approved by a judge after the state-mandated six-month waiting period, would officially end our marriage.

Text: “I just sent in the msa”

Six words to signal the end of a marriage, the end of a near-decade-long relationship.

And of course, that’s not entirely true either. There were far more than six words; there were in fact thousands of words over dozens of pages, parsing, dividing, untangling the each of us from the life that we had built together.

It takes only four spoken words and a one-page legal document to get married; one wonders what happens in the meantime that requires so many more to undo it.

A marriage certificate. “I do.” “I do.” It seems simple at the time, but of course it isn’t. And what happens in the meantime surely contributes to that inflated word count at the end. Years of talking to, at, past each other. The good, the bad, the miscommunicated. The beginning of the end: circumlocution, the talking around the problem, the denial that anything is wrong. The acknowledgement that things are very, very wrong. A flurry of words, pleas, begging. And finally: silence, and a legal process that stands in for resolution.

And now, words on a page, trying to sort it out. There is a question that won’t be answered, not fully. A riddle, some sort of neurotic version of a Zen Koan. When a relationship ends, this is the question: What went wrong? And if the person who asks the question doesn’t get a response, what then? What does it mean to answer one’s own question in this context?

*****

I spent part of today pruning back my bay tree. The weather this week was hot and I forgot to water it; by the time I glanced out the window today many of the once-green leaves had been scorched brown. So I cut off what was dead, pruned back what needed shaping, tried to impose some sort of order on that which had been neglected. I saved what could be saved, pulling healthy leaves from dead branches, washed off cobwebs and pine needles that had carried over from our last house.

When I leave this back yard behind, after the divorce is finalized and the house sold, I will take with me the bay tree and my Yuzu tree. I will leave behind three citrus trees, two blueberry bushes, and an entire herb garden. I have moved these plants from three successive houses now, literally wanting to put down roots, never feeling confident the I could until now. This was supposed to be The House, the one where we settled down, trading upwardly mobile aspirations for a bourgeois sense of having arrived. Three bedrooms, three and one-half baths, a partial ocean view and a sense, finally, of putting down roots.

I will leave behind the plants that I leave behind because it is no longer realistic for me to keep a traveling garden. Now that my future will likely involve more movement, it seems important to accept that I will be rootless for a while and to leave my plants in the ground. It feels good to leave something behind, to narrow down my horticultural companions to the bare essentials. When I move into my next home, I will plant a new herb garden, regardless of how long I plan on staying there.

*****

If forced to pick one mistake from the myriad I made over the course of my marriage, it would be this: At some point I began to believe that my marriage was permanent. Despite all the prevailing evidence–parents divorced, friends divorced, and everything one learns growing up in a post-pill, semi-liberated, no-fault divorce world–I somehow lapsed into the belief that my marriage would escape all this, that we would endure, that we would in fact grow old together. I began to believe that our marriage would be the one constant in my life, that we would stay the same. There is no underestimating, in my case at least, the power of self-deception, the seduction of narratives of nostalgia, of fairy tales. Nothing is more dangerous than the way in which those who imagine themselves to be disillusioned view conventional aspirations. We don’t believe in the traditional formulations of these institutions, so when we engage in them we imagine the traditional rules won’t apply to us. We believe that we are too smart, too jaded, too hard and cynical to fall into the same traps our parents did–even as we find ourselves slipping into the very traditional roles we claim to disdain. Ironical exceptionalism: the belief that, despite everything one claims to know, one will be the exception to the rule. But rules are rules for a reason, and variances most often return to the mean.

“Marriage is work,” a newlywed friend’s grandmother tells her. Not “marriage takes work,” she is quick to point out, but “marriage is work,” and if my friend thinks any different she can expect a rhetorical (and probably literal) slap upside the head from her grandmother. But what does work really mean, especially for a generation as fundamentally skeptical of the American dream as ours? A generation that doesn’t necessarily believe that work is work?

Here is what I know: marriage is difficult. Maybe it is work. If it is, that provides a useful capitalist metric to determine success and failure. By these standards, I didn’t work hard enough. Or my ex didn’t. Or both of us didn’t. But then maybe I don’t understand capitalism. Would working harder really have saved our marriage? Is there a profit/loss sheet out there that we didn’t know about, one that could have calculated how much time, how much effort we should have put into the relationship? When it was time to quit? The language of work escapes me when it comes to love; I want to believe that marriage is work because I know how to be a hard worker–industrious, responsible, dependable–but in the end I don’t find the metaphor convincing. The heart wants what the heart wants, goes the cliché, and part of me is deeply happy because loving my ex never felt like work. Difficult, yes, but never work.

*****

The church down the road advertises a seminar on how to “Fireproof your marriage.” I laugh every time I go by because I have no idea what the sign means. I think about all the associations of heat and love and relationships: on fire, passion, hot, etc. Is the danger that hot, passionate love and all its non-Puritan excesses will literally burn up a marriage? Or is the fire from the outside world–does one need to guard against the burning temptations and sizzling soap opera-like seductions? I laugh and can’t make sense of the ad one way or the other. The fact that I live in a county that routinely faces apocalyptic wildfires makes the metaphor only more puzzling.

*****

Three things no one tells you about getting divorced:

That you will lose a language, an entire lexicon, at the end of the marriage. That there are words that you will never use in the same way, with the same meaning, ever again. Words you won’t dare to utter to another human being ever again, not in the way you once meant them, not with the same intent.

That music will become more important. In the emptiness Money is a means of final payment, whereas student credit cards is a promise to pay money in the future, or means of delaying final payment. of the house casino I once occupied with my wife, the silence at times was unbearable. Pop music filled the void, and I had the experience of discovering that all the clichés and melodrama of pop music once again spoke to me. I thought I was too old for this, that I had passed the age where I could feel as though a song had been written specifically about my experience. But I was wrong, and without shame I found myself clinging to music for sustenance, salvation.

That divorce will disrupt and distort your sense of time. Divorce will cause time to compress and expand: The end of May feels like a decade ago; a decade ago feels like yesterday. The events of my divorce are all very recent, but feel like a lifetime ago. And all the while, I’m still pulling things out of the freezer, eating things she made and left behind. I do laundry and find her hair tangled up in my socks. Time has lost its consistency.

*****

I have been trying to figure out what it means to be single again, after nearly a decade of being half of a couple. I go out to bars, restaurants, parties, but something for me has changed. Not in an exclusionary way, but in a manner that indicates a gulf, a chasm, one that can be bridged perhaps, but which nonetheless exists. I’ve picked out curtains with another person, not for a semester, not for a year, but with the intention of permanence. Window coverings signify some kind of commitment beyond just blocking out the sun. Imagining a life, a future together. To have done that once means something, is different, somehow, from not having done that.

What does it mean to build a world around someone? Or not a world, but an ecosystem, perhaps? But the metaphor isn’t quite right. More like a solar system. Planets moving around each other, coexisting within each other’s gravitational pulls. Orbits and timing and a place in the sun. And then, what does it mean to fall out of orbit?

*****

I commented to my neighbor the other day that it felt like fall, and when I checked the calendar it was. The air has changed, and the plants, animals, even humans know it. The seasons are changing, and in my most narcissistic moments I imagine that this has something to do with me.

And of course this is not true. The changing of the seasons has nothing to do with me, though I have much to do with them. These days, I find metaphors everywhere. And so October is the month when the daylight grows shorter, the moon’s orbit crosses the Seven Sisters, and the dry Santa Ana winds bring the threat of wildfires. Autumn on the East Coast is the season of decline, when the days fade into winter. Out here in California it is the season of rebirth. Wildfires, rain, the greening of the arroyos. Summer is when the landscape dries up and dies. Autumn is when it reawakens. I’m standing here at the end of something I’ve known and the beginning of something I don’t, and the timing of it all seems laden with meaning.

*****

In trying to find a way to end this essay, I come across the vows I wrote for our wedding. There is particular section that sticks out for me now:

When Galileo first published that the Earth revolves around the Sun, he was brought before the Church and made to recant. This did not sway the planets, however, and the Earth continued to orbit around the Sun. It is said that, at the end of his recantation, Galileo whispered under his breath, “e pur si muove:” And yet it moves.

When your faith in your love for each other is put to the test, remember that even the movement of the earth and stars was once in doubt.

When your faith in your love for each other comes easily, when it seems as ordinary as the air, remember that it is powerful beyond measure. It has already re-shaped your universe. By its gravity you have been brought here today.

Whether easy or difficult, your love will remain constant. This is what it means when you vow “for better for worse.” In good times and bad, your love, your faith in each other remains constant. And yet it moves.

It is that last line that puzzles me. What did I mean back then? What does it mean now? As best as I can remember, back then it was a way to reconcile the dynamism of a relationship with the permanence of the institution of marriage. And now? Now it reads as an allegory of gravity. That even the planets are slowly, incrementally falling out of orbit. That nothing lasts, that permanence is an illusion that distorts perspective, misses the point.

What is the point? That nothing lasts, but some things survive. And they survive by not staying the same. “For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health.” Nothing stays the same, nothing lasts. And that’s OK.

photo photo credit: Daquella manera

By T. R. Kiyoshi Oshiro | The post The Gravity of Divorce appeared first on The Public Sphere.

By Lauren Espineli | The post Photo Essay: “Unexpected Egypt” appeared first on The Public Sphere.