Excerpt from a forthcoming interview (not mine) with one of the cooler people on the planet:

Interviewer: Your kids are named Mister Jamba-djang Vladimir Ulysses Hope (daughter, 19), E Harper Nora (daughter, 8), and Yo Xing Heyno Augustus Eisner Alexander Weiser Knuckles (son, 6). Do you consider them an art project?

Interviewee: No, no, they’re more than an art project. They’re a science project!

Ran on a treadmill for the first time yesterday. What a horrible device. The gym in any circumstances is not a pleasant place, but at least lifting weights can't be done elsewhere; and there is something pleasantly meditative and removed in listening to music and working my muscles just enough to feel limber and prepared again. Swimming, too, is not possible anywhere else. But running -- running is for the outdoors -- to see the world, run by people . . . but the treadmill -- right under a bank of fluorescent lights -- a screen two feet from eyes -- it felt gross . . . as if I was being shaped by the worst aspects of the gym -- the substitution of routine for play and the natural working of muscles, and the desire to go not just to feel physically better, but to look a particular way. The guinea pig aspects. And when I run, I like to eat the distance with my strides, to lope like I imagine a wolf or tiger would -- weight landing on the balls of my feet, springing forward my with calves and the backs of my legs -- when I finally hit my rhythym the muscles are not tired, they are a given, and the run becomes a voyage, breath and mind and skin absorbing the surrounding world.

It didn't help that I couldn't quite get the hang of running on the treadmill. But I also suspect that treadmills just aren't made for long strides.

Because of my presence in the morning, my roommate has been unable to tend the garden, which is reached through a door in my bedroom. As a result it has grown with abandon, much recovering from the shearing she gave it early in the summer, when she eliminated a whole hedge of what she would term 'shrubs,' which had grown to the size of small trees. There are, I suppose, two fundamentally opposed philosophies of gardening: one in which plants called shrubs are by definition undesirable, and one in which plants are categorized by pleasantness rather than name. At night it had been pleasant to stand beneath the leaves, back to a wall, staring up into the branches of a row of ancient elms that towers in the center of the apartment block. From the right angle, I could see nothing but the elms -- no building, no city -- and there was a quiet I hadn't felt since moving to New York. After the shearing, the garden felt denuded, and vapor lights from a nearby building crossed the wall where the shrubs had stood. But a couple months have passed, my roommate has been effectively barred, and now the garden is again dense and wild, with leaves that rustle happily in the wind.

It takes a while for eyes to adjust to the dimness, but once they do the leaves stand out in detail, as in Rousseau's jungles, and two white chairs seem to glow. The chairs are a fine place to sit and have a beer. I'm going to miss this garden.

Notes from last summer's story, to be resuscitated at some point . . .

Thomas was outside smoking when the call came. It had been a lazy summer so far at the airport's Mobility Authority office. In the winter they'd received several guests -- suspected security threats who arrived on redirected flights and were, with one exception, released after a few hours' questioning. The exception left in handcuffs and a blindfold on a private Gulfstream registered to a Virginia consulting company with no website. On this evening, though, Thomas' mind was filled with the night air, with the clover and fireflies that thrived between the runways, with the gasoline that spilled on them, with a woman who in his mind's eye had red hair though she was actually a brunette. When he stepped into the office, Jim's voice came as if from a distance, half-intelligible and unwelcome.

What did you say? Thomas asked.

On the Boston to Iceland, Jim said. He gestured at a computer. As he placed his hand on its mouse the screen froze. He'd been playing a military combat sim; with him it was always tacticals or porn. Sometimes he forgot to clear the browser history, and once Thomas had watched some, pseudo-amateur stuff full of bright lights and closeups and dead eyes and mock pleasure.

It took a second for the screen to change. Baghdad or Falluja or Kabul, a rifle and ammunition beside a fallen body -- a non-uniformed combatant, as it happens, rendered with sloppily textured polygons -- are replaced, screen refresh by screen refresh, by the image of a boy, pale, cleanly defined cheekbones, conservative cropped brown hair. Behind him are anti-war banners, the sunburned skin of protesters at the end of a summer day. Jim picks up the phone and dials.

Name's Peter Fields. Twenty-three. Grew up an army brat, went to Berkeley, temping tech since he graduated, he says, then hands the phone to Thomas.

At the other end of the line, a boss. An order from a higher boss, from a higher boss before that, all the way to the top; encrypted emails intercepted and number-crunched to reveal hints of a satellite falling from the sky. The boss omitted the language of the messages, the sense of unashamed poetry and untested rightness that is the fairy light of youthful ideologies; the satellite falling like a star, one visible even under the light canopies of the cities, where no stars are ever seen, reflected by ponds in the mountains, the information systems visualized as ecologies convulsing and shriveling like brain cells in a petri dish dosed with the chemicals we breathe and eat and drink every day.

We need know which satellite and when. So they can redirect its data, the boss says. Or else the economy's fucked. It'll be Mad fucking Max out there. Peter, he explains, was the recipient of the emails. He got them under a different name through a free account he accessed one day at an internet cafe where he'd used his credit card to pay. The name, added to the system, set off an alarm when it showed up on an online booking manifest, Boston to Iceland; the flight was redirected, would land in Bangor in ten minutes; the job of Thomas and Jim to make Peter talk.

Yes, sir, Thomas replies. I'll call when we've made contact.

With a look at Jim he strolls out the door and stands beside the docking station, where he lights another cigarette. The amber lights along the runway glow in the distance, converging in the middle of the night. The image sits in his mind for a moment, but already the pixels have faded. They are replaced by Katherine, lit by soft Saturday-morning light, sunk in a comforter with only her face peeking out, freckles pushed to the side by a smile. He closes his eyes and concentrates on the smoke.

Spent several hours standing beside abstract paintings and asking people how they felt today. There was Joan Miro's "The Birth of the World." Wasily Kandinsky's "4 Panels for Edwin R. Campbell," and Umberto Boccioni's "The Dynamism of a Soccer Player." Among were young people from Jerusalem and Torino and Valencia and London. Sweet platinum tourist moms from Wilmington, North Carolina. A few admitted, almost apologetically, that they didn't like abstracts. "To me it's just stuff thrown at a canvas. Isn't that terrible? I know it's supposed to be famous." Most were moved in some way. The Miro was large and heavy; it loomed from its own wall, the background washes like concrete on a rainy winter day, a black triangle -- mountain? -- in the top left quadrant, beneath it a thin jerky rectangle -- fallen question mark? prostrate man? -- which feels somehow human, and also tethered to the washes. But out of it all buzzes an orange circle. Escaping? It is a monumentally gloomy piece. But moving. The Kandinsky and Boccioni, by contrast, were -- joyful. their colours were so joyous -- primary reds and yellows and blues and greens -- Mike Timlin gives up a bases-loaded double to Derek Jeter on a full count in the bottom of the seventh. Yankees 11, Red Sox 10. Where was I? The abstracts were not chaotic or meaningless. They were evocations of states of mind. They gave a shape, a softening, a humanity, to the disorder. The woman from Balencia was as beautiful as the Boccioni. She said the Miro made her cry. Her skirt was the Kandinsky's green. According to the Landau study, which prompted my visit, abstracts remind people of the underlying disorder to the world, shaking the foundations of the structures we've created to soothe our foreknowledge of death. These did not do that for me. They were affirmations of life. Births of meaning. I came tired to the museum and departed refreshed.

Everyone says it was brutal, but the Zidane headbutt was a beautiful thing. He might have thrown away the game for his team, but he won the game for another team: everyone who's ever observed the code . . . nobody says that about my mom. And he affirmed another code: that meaning exists beyond the score. It's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. Of course, it'd have been even cooler if he'd won the game on a penalty kick, then walked over and headbutted the dude.

That time in early August when, finding it nearly dark at eight on a cloudy evening, you sense the summer and the sunshine slipping away, experience an anticipatory taste of autumn melancholy and winter bleakness, and the next day, riding the bus all morning under a pristine blue sky, are filled with unease, a mix of loneliness and finity.

I'm tired of people talking about leaving New York City. The more people talk about this, the less likely it seems they are to do it. This holds for a lot of things I think. When I'm ready to go, I'm not going to talk about it; I'm just going to go. And so on.

Home for fragments and words that would otherwise have been buried in my journal file or forgotten in a half-completed notebook.

On a slightly turbulent plane ride one week ago, window seat looking out across one wing. Remembering reading an experiment -- the setup escapes me -- in which a person is sensitized to an inanimate object, in this case a desktop; striking the desktop makes the person react as if you'd struck the top of their hands. So I tried to project myself into the wings of the plane, and the wings into me, by concentrating upon the buffeting, the roll of the craft; and after I while I could half feel it, a ghost feeling, an anticipation of a feeling, so when the wings caught cross-currents, I could feel a simultaneous strain in my pectorals, the lateral muscles across the top of my chest, tingling, thrilling with force and freedom of wind.

In high school and college, and to a lesser extent the years immediately afterwards, it was not uncommon to read a book that would transform, right then and there, the way I saw the world and myself. Something that revealed new meanings, new relationships, new ways of seeing. That doesn't happen so often anymore. It hadn't happened in years actually. Maybe because I am more fully formed; maybe because I am less open; most likely some of both. But I finally had that euphoric feeling again with Sesshu Foster's Atomik Azteks, which went supernova on me several weeks ago. The story itself is brilliant -- the protagonist is an Aztec general from a world where his people became an imperial power, though ultimately one just as brutal as the European and American empires, and given to fits of madness and confusion in which he believes himself to be a worker at a meatpacking plant in East LA; both are real, and the narrative chronicles his quest to achieve salvation, in the Aztec world by becoming self-aware and surviving assignment to WWII Stalingrad, and in our world by organizing a union drive and reviving his marriage. But it is the style that captured me, filled me . . . the ferocity and humor and grace and coarseness and determination and poignancy and ruefulness and joy, the swings between contemplation and hyperventilation, that Foster brings to these battles:

(Three excerpts:)

I'd just realized that the Clan Elder had said that I was being transferred to the Russian front as special candidate for War Hero against the bad Nazis, liaison to our anarko-syndicalist allies, causing me to choke and to cough up coffee thru my nose. Some things are more scalding than bitterness drowned every morning with coffee. I told as much to the Clan Elder. "I protest! I request re-assigment to another Theater of War, someplace with coffee shops, sidewalk cafes, cultural events, a happening night life, efficient and affordable public transportation, a higher quality of life, better schools, a few remaining shreds of civic pride. According to my research, that's either San Francisco or Paris! We shall invade Paris, drink wine, learn to paint likek a Cubist, look like Picasso, read Celine, hang out on the East Bank with North Afrikans, boogie in jazz clubs with expatriot Negroes, write manifestos, walk along the Seine, acclimatize ourselves to French cuisine with a view towards preparing ourselves to become ready to strike a death blow into the heart of the Nazi War Macine at the first possible Opportunity! Sir! Who said James Joyce has a lock on interior monologues?"

It wasn't easy for me to get a good job like this in the meat industry. I wasn't born working in a slaughterhouse. I crossed deserts to get here. I traversed the mountains of the Rumorosa & the Coast Range, skirting secret borders of forgotten history & identity. I sacrificed the Past, relationships & dreams of community. I tore open blisters & stubbed my toe on rocks. Empires lay in ruins along the way. I survived long odds, bad luck & bad trips as one of a select few. I negotiated with coyotes, rubbed elbows with travelers from everywhere, hung out under the watchful eye of the Migra. Lots of people -- maybe most -- dont make it this far. When the maroon Buick Riviera rolled over 4 times in the desert outside of Riverside, who do you think climbed out of the trunk & puked on a rock? when 19 other vatos were asphyxiated in a boxcar locked in the Arizona sun, who you think was the last left alive sucking air out of a tiny rust-hole? Who you think tried hardest to live & go on? Who you think kept walking across the desert with water in plastic jugs on both ends of a stick when the rest of them gave up, wandered off to die bloated & black under a bush? Those ain't my bones unknown out there, not my teeth scattered out there like a broken necklace. Mice aint' making a nest in my jacket elbow. Sow bugs ain't sleeping under what's left of my shoes. Blackbirds ain't playing tug of war with tufts of my hair. Rattlesnakes ain't sleeping in my last resting place. A cottontail ain't hightailing it from a piece of paper with my name on it blowing across a gravel wash. A creosote bush isn't wearing one of my socks. The wind isn't whispering my last words. I stayed alert at all times to every possibility in any given moment. I had to keep my mind alive to the multiple chances hidden inside every second. I had to feel the potentiality of the living moment, where every next step could lead to Death or to Life. There are secret worlds hidden in the air, secret possibilities that can keep you alive in the worst situations. You got to find them or you may not make it. When the odds are all against you, you got to consider that there might be one possible thing you could do. Or one misstep to avoid. Your life depends on it. That's why I think like this. It's gotten me this far. I been waylaid, ripped off, lost & turned around, and still I made my way. I offer you suggestions on how to survive. You go through all thsi, you too can get yourself a jjob in some industrial section like the City of Vernon slicing the heads off pigs with the circular saw descending from the ceiling, its yellow electrical cord recoiling overhead, hogs' heads rolling across the floor (with a helpful kick every now & then) as you reconsider behind dripping plastik safety goggles the fakt your wife really left you in spirit a long time befeore she departed in the flesh (you can see that now, as the saw bites thru the neck of the next hog, bits of skin shredding as you press the ripping business end all the way thru the spine), I concede I still owe my ex-mother-in-law two grand for a front end repair that didn't work, my kids who dont talk to me anymore are now gangbangers or evangelical christians -- now that they got it made in Amerika they disdain me, my values, everything I worked and sacrificed for. This thought alone might've killed me if I let it. Sometimes I did want to die. "Better watch yourself," I told myself sometimes when I caught a glimpse of myself, passing blurry by the little windows inset into the steel doors, I muttered to myself, "Sometimes your worst enemy is your self!" You heard that the suicide rat is 100% higher than the murder rate? That guy in the mirror, he was giving me some nasty looks.

Sometimes when 3Turkey's Apache pickup left the curb, I glanced back over my shoulder to see a little house nicely decorated with flowers, burning brightly.

***

Feeling a strange weakness in my knees, as if age or morality and all that bullshit was suddenly creeping into my system, I picked my way along a trail under the treetops far overhead. A luxuriant monarch butterfly bobbled across the path. A hidden waterway gurgled under the underbrush. Black water with dust & leaves on it flowed out of the subcutaneous earth. Some lizard in a hurry or fat rat or grinning opossum or venomous slithering copperhead scurried through crackling dry leaves nearby. Oh Maria this winged world. My footsteps were a little hesitant, something that seemed particularly stupid to me -- did I need to start walking like an old man all of a sudden? -- but it occurred to me that these sensations, weakness, inability to perceive depth perception, itching of flaky dandruff, inability to burp on command, unfulfilled wish fulfillment quotas, whimsical death wish or deep hatred & loathing of my brother & in fact all clergy the whole world over, all of these sensations were perhaps preludes to my falling into a trance state, another vision, either world-shaking & prophetik or merely cheap in an off-hand way. If I didn't watch my step -- I had the sudden vertiginous sensation -- I might all between footfalls, between worlds, and I would plunge straight through the fabrik of existence into weird awful unknowable worlds, bizarre unfathomable unknown existences, for example, I might end up a meat cutter at Farmer John Meat Packing Plant. But it was easy to shake off that idea, after all, I hoped not, I wuz a big Aztek warrior wuz I not? Surely such a strange fate could never happen to me. Still, the passing sensation, like the glimmering of an idea, gave me pause. I paused on the path to recollect my wits & collect my thoughts, fart, sniff, scratch my right forearm with my left hand, my left forearm with my right hand, scratch scratch here & there about my body & my person, maybe it was ticks, mites, biting ants . . . Was I about to go into another epileptic transmutation of the spirit from one plane to another? I took three deep breaths. Nothing happened. I slapped a mosquito attempting to suck juice out of my forehead & my fingers came away bloody. Perhaps this was all a vision, all an altered state of consciousness? I slapped another mosquito against my cheek. Okay. Perhaps not. It was all too real. That's when I knew Tezktlipoka was making fun of me.

Two outs, Red Sox down 3-2, man on second, bottom of the 6th, having
managed to scrape out a pair of two-out runs, ceded first to the
Yankees the night before, dead at the trade deadline, struggling,
threatening to drop from playoff contention, David Ortiz at bat . . .
and that's why baseball exists.

At what point in life do people begin wearing bermuda clothing? People who previously dressed with some modicum of taste or, failing that, restraint? Is draping yourself in oversized, neon-pastel floral prints a conscious decision or a biological imperative, like fattening up before hibernation, flying south when the days grow short? And could this be explained genetically?

Most people would consider the last question ridiculous, and yet not think twice about the search for genetic explanations of violence, sexuality, assertiveness, behaviors far more complex than sartorial choice. So I hereby propose the Bermuda Standard for evaluating genetic explanations of human conduct: if the behavior explained is more complex than wearing bermuda shirts, looking for a genetic origin is foolish, or at least ought not to be funded before more sensible courses of research are explored.