This is me

From Wikipedia...

"The Tetris effect is the ability of any activity to which people devote sufficient time and attention to begin to dominate their thoughts, mental images, and dreams. It is named after the game of Tetris, which requires the player to rotate and move falling blocks of different shapes (see tetromino) to create, and thereby eliminate, complete horizontal lines of blocks.

People who play Tetris for a long stretch of time may be subsequently involuntarily prompted to think about ways different shapes in the real world can fit together, such as the boxes on a supermarket shelf or one's home furniture. They may also see images of falling tetrominos at the edges of their visual field or when they close their eyes. They may also dream about falling Tetris shapes when drifting off to sleep..."

Characters

Today's hunter-gatherer type: A large man in sunglasses fumbling out of a silver Ferrari. He's wearing a dress shirt tucked into belted slacks that choke him in the middle. Puffy blue lips. A goatee the color of dried milk along a sunburnt slope of a no-chin. He moves as one who fears stopping means death, throwing his legs in front of himself almost violently. Minutes later he emerges from the coffee shop, stuffs himself back into the rocket and and whines away in low gear, drink in hand like a sacred amulet...

Crazy days

Been having a lot of insane thoughts lately. The holidays bring too much mental garbage.

One involves money and how I can make more of it. I'm getting on in years, you know. A want a house -- again. And I want money to retire with. Actual savings.

I have two problems with this desire, however. The main one is my belief that money is rotten. It's just a really rotten thing. Yeah, it motivates people, but rarely does it seem to motivate for good. We'd all be better off without it ... except I can't fathom how any of us would get off our asses.

The other problem is that I've made decent bread before, but it came at a mental price.

Writing stories that people paid me for took a lot of energy away from what I thought of as real writing, which is the stuff I loved as a kid, writing that comes out of your heart and guts. Being money-minded, however, punched all kinds of holes in the part of me that wanted to create. It made me sad and depressed.

So I don't know. Money and I make terrible dance partners. I get a lot of it and start taking it for granted. I don't have any and I feel pissed and trapped. I don't even like thinking about it.

And yet here I am, thinking about it.

I'm thinking of making money apart from my current "business" of writing. Things I wouldn't seriously think of doing before. But things that, maybe, I might be good enough at to actually enjoy and possibly "give back" in ways I couldn't before.

Ideas are coming to me that don't seem forced. I'm in an extremely motivated mood.

An empty canoe sits by a stream...

Poem

Spikes drill my head
lungs chocked with goo
no shittin', just pissin'
Motherfuckin' flu

Tiptoes

I have to be very careful here.

Sometimes I'm happy. Not always proud of the choices I made, but rather the fruits of them. I've done better than I thought I would.

And sometimes I want to throw it all away.

I have to be careful, because I'm prone to taking my current emotions and misplacing them for the truth or my general state. Emotions come and go.

But sometimes I think I myself am misplaced. That I listened to to other people's desires and feelings before my own. That I've been bamboozled, trapped. Sucked dry. And I've let it happen because, in many ways, it was easy. Petty needs were met. But not the real ones.

On days like this -- and today is one -- I don 't wonder "what if." I wonder "why not?" As in, why not hang it up? Take off?

There are lots of why nots. The feeling never lasts.

Still, it's a dangerous place to be...

Characters

A gray day, late November. A tall Mother with a tiny, dry skull and exploding hair makes a sharp left into a diagonal parking space, gets out, and opens the back door for three young kids she doesn't wait for. They straggle while Mom cuts across the windy sidewalk into the coffee shop. She scans the menu as they pile behind, examining Big People as if they're pillars about to fall. What Mother wants isn't here. They slump. Out come their bottom lips. And they follow. Bye bye.

Working

Starbucks is becoming my office away from home. I work here more than anywhere else.

I don't like the coffee very much. Always charred. And these Xmas cups. Blech.

I'd much rather go across the street to Peet's. But the honey bought me a Starbucks card and I got no spare cash. So here I am, drowning out their stupid jazz with college radio and trying to work.

There's a guy sitting across from me who looks a little ridiculous. Brown cords, blue navy vest over a tan button down shirt and tie ... and a mohawk. Business casual punk. I wish I could take a picture.

My hands

My hands are mangled pink and picked at from nail to palm, a potpouri of stabs and broken and trashed digits. The middle knuckle on my right hand juts from punching the fridge. Simultaneous scars on the front and back of my palm from the teeth of a guard dog. A right middle finger twists and bends at the tip. The backs of my palms ripple with time like an old man's neck. We've got unknown kitchen cuts, dried blood, creases upon creases in the palm and a scratched silver wedding ban. My hands, aging way too fast.

Character

David Ginney points his squat and chunky frame in the direction he thinks it should go. It helps if he perceives and casts his eyes on an imaginary spot yards away and holds his arms stiff to preserve intent, so in spite of the floppy dress of an unemployed ne'er-do-well he is a man resolved. He bounce-walks when he wants to run but thinks it impolite, and sometimes he jabs his legs forward when the tiny weights he drags behind him grow heavy. Occasionally, on David's afternoon hike to the coffee shop at the end of the block, where he bathes in the comforting scent of chickory and orange zinger tea, someone calls out, and he stops himself as if impaled on a spit or preparing to be shot out of a pipe. A straight back means self-respect; a level gaze demonstrates one is approachable, engaged. He knows this. Because it is entirely about expressing in solid form the rigidity and shape one no longer owns, a mental suit of armor that may forever allow David to endure moldy kitchenware, unpaid credit card bills and the tiny, red rectangle on the phone that silently blinks its concern...

Old Poem

Boots melt like a black jigsaw
puzzle at the front door:
We need more
Vodka.
Where are my shoes?

It's the final party in this town,
paid for with the final paycheck,
and my home's wrecked
by final friends
who need to be out by noon.

All these hyenas
Sniffing through dollar bill tubes,
needing an excuse
to get stoned and struggle
through buzzes and swoon

I watch like the supervisor of love
that I am,
Effective as Spam
smacked against the wall
Gripped by booze.

Pain is need
two hundred miles of scars
Like bugs
that stick to my truck
A collection of doom

And I'll wake up tomorrow
thinking I could have been
sixty miles to the wind;
Instead, eyes bleeding
to an alarm's salty croon

Good cracker?

I'm a gawker when it comes to politics. Rarely a participant. Partly because of the career I chose, which demanded that I be "objective" about such things. Neutered is more like it.

The closest I came to political activism was attending one of Ralph Nader's "super rallies" in 2000. Lots of folks voted for Nader in 2000. I did because Gore would kick Bush's ass in my state. It still seemed somewhat of a radical thing to do for someone with an unoppressed, suburban upbringing. I went out of my way to show support for a losing cause.

Otherwise I stay away. Unless something really trips me out.

Take George Allen. I didn't even know about him until a week ago, when I heard that he's a Republican and he may lose his Virginia Senate seat.

What freaked me out after reading about him is that he seems like a straight-out racist -- and he almost won.

Besides using racial epithets in campaign speeches, he opposed a Martin Luther King Jr. state holiday, fetishizes the Confederate flag (in spite of growing up in Palos Verdes, Calif.), and courted support from the Council of Conservative Citizens, formerly known as the White Citizens' Council.

I know Virginia is considered a Southern state. I lived in the South briefly in the 90s, and I heard the word "nigger" more times than I ever heard in my previous 28 years -- and that's counting every Tarantino film I saw. So I know how things are.

Still, nearly half of Virginia's voters looked at this scum and said, "All right by me." And until recently, Republican leaders were calling Allen a front runner for the presidential nomination.

Which just amazes me.

So I've been glued to the Internet, hoping Webb's victory holds. Not so much because we'll have a Democrat-controlled House and Senate. I don't typically vote for either party. I'm just curious whether this bitch actually makes it down the toilet in one flush.

A nightmare...

They circle the playground, gently timed caws nestling into quiet gaps amid the children's squeals, surfing the wind, softly as naptime against the slate sky, almost like real birds. But they gather in such number that the teacher with the porcelain gaze and hair dark as ink moves away from the window and toward the door, just as the first creatures land among her children. "Stay away!" she cries, jogging awkwardly at them, just as a girl shrieks and a large, yellow-haired boy with freckles and tiny teeth leaps after her, mashing one of the black feathered things between his hands. The teacher waves, pleading with them, only now it seems every boy has grabbed one and found a pigtailed victim to terrorize while they laugh like Christmas. A gust from behind blows black hair across her mouth as she inhales; the strands tickle her throat like ants just as the device in the yellow-haired boy's hands BANGS and flashes in orange fire and he drops, arms gone ... The teacher can only choke while, with machine-gun efficiency, the horrible things slice and gouge her tiny charges as if they were soft ground round and the cracked asphalt hungrily laps up their juice...

You got a problem?

Some German gangster. Just trippin' on this...

Denny

Well, if it ain't daddy's little helper, he says, as I pedal uphill toward the old house. He is sanding a '63 Dodge pickup, his long hair flapping in the wind. A sobriety bracelet clanks and scrapes against the gray metal. The front screen bangs and Megan shoots out with a screech; her blue Keds skid on dirt and she disappears around a corner. Janine pushes back open the screen, holding Tyler in one arm. I feel her eyes going through my backpack. Testimony tonight, Den, she says. Don't forget.

Denny has put on his puffy jeans jacket and we are walking through the old garage, past walls where 60-watt bulbs once flashed over glossy Bud Girls and swimsuit models. Janine tore them down when she became a Witness. We leave the smell of wood rot, sawdust and oil behind and hide out back, to the top of the family picnic table overlooking the East Bay hills. Denny taps out a Camel Light. I unzip my backpack and pull out two large bottles of Anderson Valley ale. What kind of yuppie swill is that, he asks.

Better than that dishwater you drink, I tell him.

Hey, I got a great idea for a Web site, he says, his lips smacking off the top of his bottle. Here we go, I think. Denny was full of good ideas for Web sites ever since I told him I work with Internet companies. This one's about selling used cars online. Been done, I tell him. But wait, this is different, he says, and he rattles on about cable TV shows, digital cameras, dealership presentations and "venture dudes," attacking me with flailing arms and beer spit. You're the Web guy, he says, you can design the site and telephone the billionaires -- as if I have Bill Gates' home number. A visual appears from his breast pocket: It's a folded piece of binder paper with a rendering of a car in blue Bic. So what do you think?

Maybe, I said, and was about to say, I really don't know, Den. Maybe you should get a computer first, maybe you should at least buy a book or magazine on the subject and figure out what you're getting yourself into. Or maybe you should learn a little bit about business besides how to rip off your boss. Maybe, Denny, you should stop getting bright ideas and just divorce the bitch, you hate her anyway, and wouldn't have to worry about misbehaving or the house or testimony or Bud Girls on the walls because she wouldn’t be there to judge you. Maybe you could go back to school so your ideas wouldn’t be so godawful and I wouldn't have to sit here and listen to them and pedal back to BART with your damn Camel stink all over
my clothes.

But I don't tell him this. Hmm, I say, maybe, and Denny knows what I mean.

We are silent for a long time. I drain the rest of my bottle, warm hops slide down my throat and I cringe. I got a couple tickets to the nationals next week at Sears Point, he says. Wanna go?

Can't. Gotta work.

Yeah, he says. I am picking my hangnails; Denny's eyes are boring through the opposing hillside. Well, let's get it on, he says. Finally.

Denny pulls the last of the crumpled up 10s, 20's and 50's out of his charcoal jeans and drops them into my cupped hands. They lay in fetal position, soft like cloth and huddled together like mice. Some have grease on them. Denny must think Dad looks at these wretched bills and believes his first son works hard, is doing the best he can, blah blah blah. I never told my step brother I keep his cash and write Dad checks for the full rent, and it becomes obvious to me now that I don't tell Denny a lot of things. We are brothers -- always co-conspirators, never really friends.

Denny puts his sobriety bracelet back on and sees me still staring at his bills. I'm a little short, he says, which of course I already knew. He grabs hold of his bottle by the neck and when I think he's about to hand it to me -- he knows I recycle -- he says, Web sites, and flings the bottle as hard as he can. It arcs high, makes whipping somersaults, and plunges -- threshhh! -- into an oak tree halfway down the hill. I don’t hear it break. I really thought it would.

"The Manjerasaurus"

Glory be!!! My five-year-old nephew/foster son has discovered a new dinosaur! He even got close enough to draw it, in spite of its somewhat four-dimensional choppers.

In Sir Joey's own words ("Sir," because we expect he'll be knighted any day now):

"This is a Manjerasaurus. It's the Most Powerfullest Dinosaur in the whole wide World. It has teeth all over it and it can kill all the other dinosaurs in the whole wide world, even sharks. It can kill everything, and that's all."

Not one to rest on his laurels, Sir Joey proceeded to draw pumpkins. Some of them had enough teeth to build a barrier reef.

To wit:

Untitled poem, from a class...

Ugh... ;-)

Everywhere I work
has concrete floors
made with sand and lime
spun through metal chambers and
loaded indoors.

This site, too
run by silicon fixers,
where we bake the brains
and wheel on trays
dot-com tickers

We wear blue smocks with
frequency probes
clipped to pockets;
A chip cook's stethoscope.
Green monitor in tow,

that's me, the token white
in a sea of Asian bakers,
hauling boards formatted
by Mexicans, of course.
Born chip tray makers.

There's beet-faced Winh
and James, the kid.
Eddie hits on a
minimum wage momma;
Heads back quick

At six dollars per, Winh runs
On bug-free macros
soddering chips for twelve hours
then drives cabs at night
back in Frisco.

We watch slave laborers snap
Motorolas and AMDs in place
Seated by tongue, rows of dark
hair, older moms, mostly
Olive digits ablaze

At noon Arabs emerge
From back offices in white, all men.
Boss nods at two Mexicans
and reconfigures the boys.
They wash his Benz

Covered in suds, we see them
from our kitchen window
Their Spanish curses drowned
By the blue ovens' hum
Through the roof it flows

Inside these machines, they say
silicon ages like wine
We test for proper waves
on our monitor screens.
eject when ripe

One day Winh disappears
Undetected, until Ahmet
queries, and suddenly
Alarms sound from ovens weary
That flesh forgets

An application failed amid whirring fans
and is sprawled on the concrete floor.
Ahmet checks for a pulse while I
submit to the cur it's
time to abort

Review: The Bridge

A year or so ago I read a story in the papers about a local filmmaker capturing people on camera as they jumped to their deaths off the Golden Gate Bridge. My first reaction to the idea of filmed suicides was, I admit, morbid fascination. I hoped it would be in theaters.

It would. "The Bridge" opened this past weekend, and I saw it.

Wow.

Director Eric Steel trained his cameras on the bridge for an entire year and caught 23 of the 24 leapers, including a few more who tried and were stopped. Sometimes, while watching the film, you couldn't tell if the person you saw would turn out to be an innocent sightseer or a jumper. It felt creepy, and real. It is real.

You see people on the bridge, mulling things over. You hear family members and friends talk about how hurt their loved one was over this life disappointment, or that turn of events. The survivors' voices carry their own burdens: Pain, guilt, rationalization, anger.

The parents of Philip Manicow, 22, almost seem at ease with their son's fate. Similarly, mother and sister of Lisa Smith, 44, sort of saw it coming. They reassure each other she's in a better place now, or at least free from pain.

A female friend of 52-year-old Daniel Rubenstein walks a tightrope of self-blame and excuse. When she discloses Rubenstein asked to stay at her house the night before he jumped, and that she turned him down, you sense there's more that's not being said. Friends of Gene Sprague, a 34-year-old unemployed computer gamer whose jump is easily the film's most chilling moment, are simply pissed. But he, too, repeatedly telegraphed the blow, and they ignored the signs.

Meanwhile, throughout the film, you're watching people jump. Whether captured in a closeup or seen as a distant, tiny splash in a wide-angle shot, each demise is equally creepy.

I was glad I didn't see the movie alone. After some deep breathing and a couple awkward jokes to lighten our mood, my friend and I talked aout what we'd seen over Thai food. We both really liked it, but had to think about why.

I was amazed that it was the only theatrical film I could think of that dealt specifically with the subject of suicide. It seems that while Americans are more aware than ever to the prevalence of mental illness, suicide -- unlike depression, bipolarism, post-traumatic stress disorder, etc. -- was still extremely taboo. My friend and I also liked how there weren't too many psychologists and therapists in the film. Although some "expert" voices may have been interesting, maybe even helpful to the viewer, their exclusion made the stories of the dead more visceral, unfettered.

Still, I was curious: The friends and family on screen weren't entirely blind to the loved ones' pain -- Sprague, for example, apparently joked for years about killing himself -- but you can't help asking: What could they have done? What should they have done? And what would I do?

I don't know. And I don't think this movie offers anything that helps answer these questions. It did get me to think about those things, think immensely about them, in fact. Every person has this incredible power to negate their existence. It's such a tremendous, terrible weapon.

My friend and I disagree on whether there should be a suicide barrier on the bridge. It's an active debate that wasn't mentioned in the movie. But Steel, the director, has gone on record to say he hopes "The Bridge" results in a barrier.

My friend didn't think some sort of safety net on the bridge would stop people from killing themselves because there's always other means. I had to agree. But it seems to me the Golden Gate is just too easy. More people kill themselves there than anywhere else in the country. It's too accessible, too cheap, and provides a false sense that jumping into water is clean and painless, when it's clearly neither. A barrier might cause some people to turn back from suicide, because the other alternatives are harder or messier, and that could increase their chances to find help.

My main argument, however, is a purely selfish one, I don't want to be walking across the bridge with my kids some day and have them watch someone die. They don't need those nightmares, and I can't afford the therapy.

Anyway, when I came home I immediately hit the Web, eager to learn more about the movie and the people who jumped. In doing so, I came across some reviews that I found sort of surprising.

Some said it was not a good movie, that it feeded on our spectator culture, that it was irresponsible and that Steel, the director, sat by while people hurled themselves to their deaths when he could have stopped them. It turns out the director apparently didn't tell friends and family members he interviewed that the dead would actually be seen jumping to their death in the movie. And he also apparently fibbed while getting a state parks permit to film the bridge.

So I thought about those things. I'm sure a lot of people -- young people, mainly -- will watch this movie just to see people die (although the actual death part isn't really seen; its under water, and apparently very nasty and painful). Twenty years ago, I would have been in this group. However, given the void in material tackling the issue of suicide and the power of film in general, I think I can forgive "The Bridge" for being imperfect.

Suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge aren't private tragedies, they're happening right in front of you and me. The film uses these spectacles to its advantage. It pierces through the veil we've placed on suicide and delivers something more than an after-school special for adults. It dares us to do more by showing what is.

There really isn't anything brilliant about this movie. But in its simple, arresting and haunting way, "The Bridge" turns a doorknob to a room we've kept shut too long.

Random story beginning...

Jessica and Lily sank into beanbags in the den with squeezable yogurt and Disney Channel. Gran napped upstairs, and Mark Graber curled up on the living room sofa with the Browns game on very low. The lullaby of announcers and cheering fans brushed like tiny waves off the wood paneled walls. Only the occassional seagull of the referee's whistle made it to the kitchen, where the oldest Graber child quietly did her homework. Her long, brown hair pulled back into a single ponytail -- a style she wore only in the solitude of a Sunday afternoon -- Sara's face was one of tidy angles: The lean nose bridge, cheekbones pushed out by as if by inner thumbs and the crisp arc of her left temple resembled the dots of an uneven constellation. It was the result of massive reconstructive surgery, necessitated by a cruel and shadowy incident that took place last summer and of which no one spoke...

Katsushika Hokusai

I was looking for a image to post for my profile and, as usual, hated every picture I found of me. So I went for something that was vaguely obscure yet meshed with this site's "dead" motiff: ghosts.

I googled .gov sites -- figuring that if my taxes helped pay for it, I was free to use it -- and this nifty thing caught my eye. The thing's creator is dead, too, so he's not likely to sue me if my understanding of Web copyright issues proves retarded.

Actually, "Ghost emerging from well" is part of the Library of Congress' "Floating World of Ukiyo-e: Shadows, Dreams, and Substance" exhibit. An art form originating in Edo, Japan, Ukiyo-e translates to "pictures of the floating, or sorrowful, world."

The artist is Katsushika Hokusai, who also did porno, cathouse ads and a bunch of work of Mt. Fuji.

A rowboat

You're young, maybe five or six years old, and sitting under a tilted rowboat with two older boys. The boat belongs to your neighbors, the Fishers, and it's leaning against the side of the Fishers' brown two-story, which is next to yours in your particular suburb.

(The Fishers are an older couple. In their basement, Mrs. Fisher has one of those old fat-burning machines with the jiggly strap. She shows you how it works. You need to lean back. Mr. Fisher eats orange shebert and once offers to let you lick his spoon. It's weird but you lick it anyway.)

Underneath that boat, your bony ass is planted on a bed of dead pine needles the shade of copper. The boy on your left is one year older than you. His older brother is on your right. They start calling the boat a clubhouse. The boy on your left talks about how you don't have to ever go home again, because this is your home. We'll stay here forever, he's saying to you. They'll never find us.

You stare ahead at the bottom of the metal boat that is the wall of your clubhouse and begin to cry.

The boy on your left seizes on this and tells you, yep, you'll live here until you die. And if you try to leave, we'll kill you.

You cry harder. You imagine what it's like to die. All that nothingness.

Shut up you little shit, the older boy says. He reaches across you with an arm that smells like cigarettes and backhands his brother in the face, so hard that the back of his head conks the stucco part of the Fishers' home, almost like a bell. His lips furl and he starts to cry. He runs, leaving you with the older boy.

It's OK, the older boy tells you, you can leave if you want to. He's looking straight ahead, too.

You want to leave but you don't. He turns to you. Nothing you know of makes you stay. But somehow, you're feeling more and more trapped.

You cry louder and harder. Your stomach sinks with each sob. Its beyond anything you ever felt before. It's as if, right at that exact moment, the world ran out of air.

You never remember coming out.