If anybody happens to be reading this and wants to get in touch with me/be friends, hit me up on LJ (metallicstream) or AIM (thricedotted).

Is it weird to say I missed the Wordpress admin panel?

I rolled down the windows of my rusted car, and we hefted the little red canoe on top, secured it with a byzantine mess of criss-crossed rope, and Russell sat in the back, with his too-big hands hanging onto it, the rope, to keep the canoe from sliding off. I turned the key and the engine kicked up and I fiddled the tuner on my radio and the station crackled anyway, bits of top forty from nineteen eighty-four punching through the static as I stamped on the gas pedal. My car kicked up white chalky rocks and trundled forward, zipping past irrigation pipe and grey-barked cottonwoods and budding cornstalks. Dust was everywhere, sticking to our teeth when we grinned. Russell sang along to the radio, and I slapped the side of the car while I steered, one-handed, down the road to the Republican River. The road was pure dirt, sunbaked into a series of ruts, dips and rises, like driving down the spine of the earth. The air smelled like dry alfalfa, musky and thick. Russell flexed his hand on the rope, and I stopped the car. The road had ended. We were at the treeline, sitting amongst a thousand curlicues of thin gritty earth, and we climbed out the windows and undid the byzantine knot.

The canoe slid easily off the top, making a sound like a whetstone on a pocket-knife. We hauled it up on our shoulders and stumbled through the treeline, dodging stinging nettles and fallen logs. Finally, we came to the river, wide and flat and slow. The Republican was opaque, a brown swirling night that swallowed us up to our ribs as we slid the canoe down the bank and into the water. The water was cold—later that summer it would be a lukewarm tea, but now it was cold, and we swore as gooseflesh formed on our milk-white chicken legs. We awkwardly climbed into my brother’s canoe, rocking it mightily, side to side, laughing as we felt it begin to tip dangerously. Waves rippled out from our little red lifeboat, and we grabbed our plasticine oars with the conviction of conquistadors and voyageurs, intent on conquering all the tree-fletched world before us.

At first we rowed with unbridled enthusiasm, impressed by our ability to move, to power onward, to test our mettle against the liquid river anvil. We chose narrow passages when islands split the river, skimmed close to fallen logs and other trouble spots, felt daring and strong and machine-precise. For a time, there was no longer Russell, a canoe, oars, me, there was only one—meat-powered polyethylene surging forward, cutting through the water like a gladius through a brown barbarian jugular. We stripped off our shirts and soaked our heads in the brown water. It trickled down our backs in fat pearls, mixing easily with our sweat.

It was hot. We stopped at a sandbar, ramming carelessly up on its bank and tying the rope to a sunken log. We lazed in the river, belly-up, toes wriggling through top-sand and down into the cool rivermud, which anchored us from the slow current. It felt good. A deer crossed the river, thirty yards up, bounding clumsily through, kicking up great big waves and making a roaring oceanic cacophony.

‘A deer. Lookit that.’

The sun began to lick the treetops and settle down like a flaming melon-eye, behind us. We strode loose-limbed up the sandbar and shoved off again into the water, intent on reaching Carter Bridge before nightfall. As we traveled deeper into the Republican, she turned on us, stymied us where once she had been so smooth and so sweet. We bottomed out and had to get out and pull through long sandy stretches. Then, first, Russell broke his oar, and I broke mine as well, trying to push through another shallow stretch, and we lost long, sun-filled minutes hunting for sticks long and thick enough to use as punting poles.

We swore hoary oaths and grunted and cursed the rasping scratch of polyethylene on sand. The sky grew dimmer, and blue dusk set on, though we seemed no closer to the bridge. The uncomfortable thought that we might be stuck out on the river in the pitch-dark began to niggle at the corners of my mind, manifesting as a soft-nausea. Still, the night was beautiful. The temperature had plummeted, and we shivered in our still-wet shorts, listening to a symphony of crickets and night-birds and the echoing unknown.

‘What if we don’t make it?’

‘We’ll make it.’

Russell shrugged. Stopping before the bridge meant crossing great, corn-packed fields and barbed-wire fences, barefoot as burdened by a mountain of red polyethylene. My arms began to ache clean through to the bone, but I kept paddling, even as Russell slowed his strokes and at times stopped all together. Never give an inch to the snakebacked river, not even in the face of night, not even with sunburned back and feet, not even when bug-bitten and rawboned.

I could see the moon. I leaned back and stared up at it and felt bonechilled. We drifted down the river, all precision and effort forgotten, ground out of our milk-skinned meat. We got stuck again, beached on another sandbar. Russell sighed heavily and stepped out of the canoe. Instead of getting back in, he grabbed that coarse rope which had earlier been criss-crossed and byzantine, swore at it, called out to it, ‘C-mere, you sumbitch.’ He began to pull the canoe down the river, making long, slumping steps in the shin-high water. I paddled softly behind him, trying to keep the rope from getting taut. We continued on like that, as the stars turned on, one by one.

Russell stopped in the water, legs splayed apart, shoulders drooping.

‘The bridge.’

He pointed. I jumped out and ran up beside him.

‘The bridge!’

‘Fuckin’ right.’

We laughed then, great big glorious gales of laughter, laughed breathless and heaving as we stumble-sprinted down the river into the waiting moon, dragging the canoe, waving our improvised paddles in victory. We had won.

We dragged the canoe through fifteen feet of stinking mud and cat-tail reeds, and hoisted the canoe on our shoulders.

‘You got it?’ He asked.

‘Yeah, I got it.’

We walked the last quarter mile into town, shirtless, mud-speckled, and grinning, modern-day hoplites, bone-dead and gloriously alive. Come home with your shied, or not at all.

Phrases Which Have Stuck Out From Books For Me

1. “Greedy towels” from I, Jedi (nerrrd)

2. Pus-yellow ice cream from

Important Trips

1. Going to see Leila the first time, at the Museum of Natural History.

2. Driving to My Cousin’s wedding in Las Vegas.

3.

Important Occasions

1.  My dad’s wedding, wherein I was the best man

2. My Sister’s Heart Surgeries

3. My Brief Foray into Private School

Facts About Parents from Before I was Born

1.

Family Stories I’ve Heard More Than Once

Titles Or Words From Other Fiction Writing

1. Cold-penny Tang of the Autumn Night (Infinite Jest)–Something about this phrase, even if I can’t make a story on it.

AFDSFJJ—-FREE ASSOCIATE TIME—-

The fact that my dad says “pumpkin” as “punkin”

My brother’s post-adolescent fascination and love of child-like activities–nobody has ever loved pumpking carving and boiled egg dye-ing like that guy

A treatise on what it is to be someone’s younger brother

The theme of failed manliness, particular failed manhood as role model

My mother and her cigarettes, possibly re: who she is, divorce-type change

Neurosis as a function of modern society–the advantage of inventing fear

Weird fears in general as a way of understanding people

The time my sister found a snake in her room

Something about the internet and the malleability of identity (how fresh is this?)

My brother Casey–warts and all

“I’ve found something terribly sad about a deflated balloon,” I found myself saying, and I nearly believed it.

Something about my freshman roommmate

Haircut as life-metaphor

Failure as soccer coach or perhaps soccer as a bigger idea

The time I had a part in the Spring Play

The time I couldn’t make a basket in gym class

Swearing–swearing as creative endeavor, swearing as metaphor for writing?

My grandpa was a typist during WW2?

Something to do with my mother raising puppies?

The time I hit a deer–other car accidents I’ve had?

Playing at the river–Uncle Steve visiting, fishing all the time

The Summer in Which We Canoed

Campfires which I have sat next to

Shit I’m terrible at getting down specific events–why is everything a theme to me?

Trip to Branson–ugh

Turkey Days

Being in a elementary school “gang”

the time we all sat in the tires past the whistle

Getting lost in public places

State fair?

I really wish I could do a good “stuck on an island” story, but I can’t think of any good details or anything that would make mine stand out.

Thrift (stores?)

Things my mother says “okey dokey”

Other people “I tell ya what”

McCann! He would be a great character

Other things I’ve wanted to write: Vietnam War Story, Post-Apocalypse Story (radio-themed)

“the rank wet smell of dirty laundry”

“lobbies that smell like chlorine”

The differences between my grandparents

The toys and stories I made when I was a child (hey Big Sheep)

Spiritual Deadness

Star Wars–something about it

Pickiness–Green Beans

Race in a Monoracial Upbringing

Bird’s Egg

Bowling?

Man, this book on Writing Creative Nonfiction actually looks okay.

Arcades

Driving Late at Night in Nebraska

Visits to the Zoo

Board Games — Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble, The Farming Game!, My intense dislike of losing

-Geography/Spelling Bees

-Working at the library

-My first job at the computer store

-Why are all my jobs always boring?

-Nepotism

-Teachers I have had

-those times when you realize that you’ve been saying lyrics wrong for years

-False memories

-Hitting a buzzard on the way to school

–A discussion of the schools I have gone to

-my grandparent’s house

-my stepdad, stepbrothers

-Is it possible to write something meaningful about video games?

-Why do writers seem to eskew using technology? I mean why does using or mentioning technology seem to cheapen a story?

-that story about the snake-how do i do that? make it smaller

- love library

-the pond in our pasture

-pastures in general

-how i feel about horses

-wearing my brother’s clothes all the time

-christmas traditions–eating those icecream bars (santa or christmas trees), opening on christmas eve before my half-brothers left for their mom’s, dad ho-hoing and we all knew it was dad but clinging to the idea of Santa anyway

-my half-brother’s mother, and my understanding of her despite never really meeting her

-my mother’s friendships

-losing my hair

-dating someone far away

-my feelings on the internet, nerd that I am

-sledding with my brothers, time I wiped out and laid in the snow until it got dark

-birthday parties I have had

-my grandparents’ wedding anniversaries

-how i like soda, even though I hate everything about it

-things I have stolen from friends by not returning, things I have had stolen from me

- my predilection towards sleeping on couches

-writing about Wallace, writing about Vonnegut

-the terror of ordering sandwiches

-how i suck at making phone calls

-didn’t know my home phone number for ages

-”don’t tell your dad/whoever, but here’s the truth.”

-pets I’ve had–Daisy, Ace, Berry, Marshmallow, Rafriki,

-my shame over not knowing anything about art

-first memory–waking up to having my eyes glued shut from i think pink-eye

-attending church as a kid, esp. my confrontations with authority

-my problems with authority in general

Okay, so there’s an hour of brainstorming. I’ll look through this tomorrow and see what I like. I have a feeling a lot of it is bad. We’ll see.

“The country I come from
Is called the Midwest”
-Bob Dylan, “God On Our Side”

Oxford is a town in the southern, central part of Nebraska. It’s twenty miles south of Holdrege, which is thirty miles south of Kearney, and that’s along Mighty I-80, so everyone ought to have heard of it. Oxford has seven bars, seven churches, and not much else. Evangelical Free, First Baptist, United Methodist, St. Paul’s Catholic, St. John’s Lutheran, Spirit of the Rock, New Beginnings Fellowship. We went to the First Baptist when I was a kid, but my mom was a Methodist, and kind of believed in evolution, but don’t tell anyone. Thelma Lou’s, The Wagon Wheel, The Longbranch, The Sail Away Lounge, Cornhusker Bar & Grill (perpetually with new owners), Union Bar, and Tufty’s. My parents didn’t drink when I was a kid, but now my mom and stepdad go to the Cornhusker to drink their frosted-glass tumblers of spiced rum and diet coke. The tallest building in town is the grain elevator, and every year the silos rust over a little bit more. Oxford is a town that has been rusting and peeling for the last sixty years, like a homely scab that eventually dries and flakes down to nothing but a funny little mark on your knee.
Oxford used to be a rail town, when people still rode trains. The Oxford Indians—the local baseball team—used to play the University of Nebraska baseball team every year. It used to be a big deal. There used to be a buffalo farm, until the man who owned it got tragically gored, a bowling alley, until it became Thelma Lou’s, a Dairy Queen, until it became a feed store, a man named Homer Twilegar that sold kettle corn in that abandoned lot between the real estate office and the Longbranch, which used to be the Muleskinner. I liked it better when it was the Muleskinner—the cheerily grinning donkey on the front facade made it seem more appealing than it really ever was.
Now, based on the signs, Oxford is the ‘Gateway to the Outdoors’ or the ‘Home of the 1992 Girls State Basketball Champions’ or the ‘Last Gas Station for 23 Miles.’ It’s an Ampride, and my best friend from high school still works there for $7.25 an hour. I don’t ask him if he has any plans for the future anymore. Futures only happen in places that aren’t Oxford. You might be breathing, but you sure as hell ain’t living.
Oxford used to be a lot of things, and it claims to be many more, but for me, it will always be the town I grew up in. It will also, always, be a part of myself that I don’t know how to understand. It’s my home, sure, but it’s a home that I still feel self-conscious in—like I don’t really belong there, like I’m just a guest and not a particularly wanted one. When I was much younger, my parents used to take me to high school football games, and all the other boys my age would come with their parents too. We’d all gather behind the concession stand, and the kid who brought the football (there was always a kid who brought a football) would present it to the rest of us and proclaim, loudly, that we were going to play a game called Smear the Queer. Smear the Queer is a game where one kid holds the football, and he’s the Queer. Everyone else, they chase the Queer around and around behind the concession stand, and they try to Smear him—this involves tackling him and then hurting him until he coughs up the football, which someone will then grab, and there will be a new Queer, and the process repeats.
I never understood this game, and looking back, it was the first glaring sign that I simply did not have a place in that town, with those people. That town where I was a dandified pussy, pussy, said with the jeering hateful tone that only children can manage, for not particularly wanting to end up as the inevitable kid who walked out from behind the concession stand with blood streaming from a broken nose or chipped tooth. Well, pussy it is, then, and I’ll wear it with a bloodless grin.
The game’s greatest reward was the chance to run like hell from a world of hurt. This realization did not change me, but the capacity and clarity required to make it, that marked me as different from them. So, too, did the fear, the desire for self-preservation above the animal fervor of the hunt. I used to tell myself, sometimes, that I was a lover, not a fighter. That was before I ever convinced anyone to love me, but it might very well be true. I have lived much of my life to phrases like these—clichés that provide some excuse for whoever I am. Regardless, I began from that moment to identify with the Queer. I knew intimately the sense of not belonging to the pack, and I developed the desire to run like hell from Oxford, to escape from a place I never chose to be from.

I haven’t gotten much done because I’ve been getting through my first week of summer school and having a new job at the library and just general “it’s summer and I want to be horribly lazy for a little while, please.” Anyway, I expect (and hope fervently) that next week will allow much more time for writing, but we’ll see. Another factor is that I have been in the process of re-reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest for about nine months now, and I really want to finish it during the summer while I can take advantage of the free time.  Jest is a very important book to me, but a book which I am also gaining much more appreciation for as I go through it a second time, as a older, smarter and somewhat wiser individual. That said, I recently read a passage from the book which has struck me particularly, and I want to share it with anyone who reads this because I think it’s wonderful and because I want to remember it.

(from page 694 in my copy)

”

It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip—and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naїveté on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have liked about J.O. Incandenza’s The American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naїveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America. And since sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively, it’s natural that Himself’s dark little cartridge was mostly about a myth, viz. that queerly consistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naїveté are mutually exclusive. Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naїve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.

“

Yes, the new theme is shitty. It was necessary, to shed the Valamity that was, and to forge on to a Valamity that may be again. Also, Leila is busy making disguide pretty, and I am too damned lazy to learn how to make pretty themes when I just want an online place to put my writing.

I’ll probably do a life update eventually, but for  now,  just know that I (+Leila) am planning some sort of creative writing bent for the site.

Can I admit something? Of course I can, but may I? Screw it if I can or not, because I’m giving myself permission: I kind of hate what blogging is for most people, probably including myself. There are a handful of blogs that I really, really admire, and I know I could never live up to that standard because it would (a) take a higher degree of introspection than I could achieve and an abolition of pettiness I’m afraid I can’t do without, and (b) my definition of “blogging” is far more casual, far less strict a regime than theirs. And even with that, I give it away, because something tells me that it’s not a regime, yet in my narrow-mindedness I can’t imagine it as anything but. It is, at least, a far more disciplined approach than what I’ve ever taken.

When I was 14, I used to type journal entries in text files, and craft them meticulously for an audience — a very well-defined audience, seeing as it consisted of a very specific set of people (and/or person). They were open letters cast in one direction only and I had to do them well to make sure my bait would bite, and anybody else who saw them…they were just bystanders, occasional onlookers, never meant to participate in the games I played with the few people whom I was trying to tell something. I miss that challenge — the writing between the lines, the thrill of imparting of a personal secret in a public realm. Like writing in code, but far more annoying.

I’ve lost that sense of forced direction since then, and maybe my problem is that I need to stop looking for it. I have the most fun writing to people, not for people — saying what I want them to hear while they’re listening, rather than saying what they want to hear so they listen. It’s the opposite of how to maintain a popular blog, but as long as I’m being self-indulgent — and I’m sure we’ve all covered at some point how narcissistic we bloggers are in our lengthy, over-written “about” pages — there shouldn’t be any problem with that.

I talked to my best friend last night for the first time in a long while. Although the last time we spoke before that was a little over a month ago, I don’t think we’ve had a real conversation, the sort where you take turns talking and listening, for months and months. And it felt good. Loyalty feels good. Being known feels good. Understanding feels good.

This semester is incredibly busy for me, but my classes are not yet demanding so much that I’m unable to keep up with them. While that pipe dream of a 4.0 might be a long shot this semester (and by god, will I metaphorically smoke it up just to get it), I want this to be something of a turning point in my life. A place where I can wake up and realize that I’m a capable person. And part of that is getting back to this: that place where I can publicly expose myself while covering everything up. It’s not something you need to read into — just me. And maybe if I search through my thoughts enough, I’ll find what I’ve been looking for…even if it’s not something I lost.

2008 was a big year for me, but I never put much stock in the arbitrary changing of calendars. Time is a river, and for the past few months, it’s been close to sweeping me off my feet. Every day is like falling in love for the first time and despite the turmoil taking place in the greater world, I’ve never felt more positive about life and (more importantly) the control I have over its direction. Living away from home has been liberating in a way I never expected. College is something I’ve waited for my entire life, and damn does it feel good to be excelling at something I actually enjoy. Granted, I’ve held back during my first few months to make sure I gain my footing, but next semester I plan to bust my ass just a little bit more and push my limits ever so slightly. Life is always better when it presents a challenge because it makes the reward of success that much sweeter. And I’ve been taught to expect nothing but success, regardless of how many times I might fail first.

So there’s the cheesiest thing I’ve said all year — and for what it’s worth, I’ve said a damn lot of cheesy things. It’s very strange, but as the economy tanks and conflict grows between nations, I know of so many people who are getting their lives together in a new way and plowing forward with a tremendous amount of positive energy. It probably has something to do with the dearth of 20-somethings around me who all happen to be infused with unjaded youthful energy, but what amazes me is how we can all feed off each other — feeling good for somebody else makes me want to go in the same direction that they’re going (generally, up).

Most of the uncharacteristic haze of happiness that I’ve been meandering through for the past few days is residue from Seth’s recent visit over winter break, during which I subjected him to many hours of Dr. Mario, Mario Kart 64, and VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Preparation) training. He returned to Nebraska-land on the 10th and tears were quickly supplanted by numbness as I attempted to passively assuage the emptiness brought on by his absence by plopping myself on the futon he slept on all day (I was there all day, not that he slept all day, obvs). It’s weird, we both know, and we don’t expect anybody beyond ourselves to understand. We’re very blissful at times, yet fully aware that there may be several years yet until we can be together in the sense that we can see each in person (gasp) more than twice or, at best, thrice a year. And yet…the future still looks bright. Because it’s the future, and hell if it’s not going to be better than the present!

I wish hope and love for everybody in not just 2009 but for the rest of these days ahead, because it feels damn good to give and get in return. And if anybody’s lacking a little happiness in their life, listen to The Submarines — I’m hooked on Honeysuckle Weeks and they are so adorable and romantic and simple and sweet that I, gosh, I love them. And cute music is such a nice relief from depressing NPR documentaries. Don’t stop paying attention to the rest of the world — but don’t forget that sometimes, for the sake of our collective sanity, it’s okay to be shallow too.

By this time on Saturday, Seth should be sleeping on the living room futon. My excitement is mounting and probably looks lame to outsiders, but when you only get to see your SO for 3/52 (roughly 5.7%) of the year, something as simple as being able to touch is still wondrous and fascinating and magical. It’s nice to feel embodied every once in a while.

For those of you who are into it, merry Christmas. For those of you who aren’t, tidings, good cheer and political correctness. I haven’t wrapped my presents yet, so I’m going to get busy with that now.

Exhibit A: Listen to Yourself, an xkcd strip from a few weeks back.
Exhibit B: Any YouTube video, but let’s use this one because I love it.

Now check out that little box to the right of the comment form at the bottom of the page on YouTube — and convince me they didn’t take that from Randall Munroe!

ETA: So, like, 10 seconds after getting into my excited tizzy, I Googled the damn thing and found out that it’s been there forever. Forever being two months, anyway. This anticlimax is a stab in the heart…*sniff*