A Random Page from Grant Morrison's "Doom Patrol"; ah, Good Times...

A Season of Discontent, Part II: “Let’s Give Peace a Chance,” or “Can’t We All Just Get Along?”

So I think I’ve finally figured out my favorite Breeders song. It’s not especially catch, not even in the same league as “Cannonball” and “Iris” and “Summer” and I haven’t heard Title TK at all so maybe I’m full of suet. Anyway, “I Just Wanna Get Along,” that’s the track, and I don’t remember any of the verse lyrics or the hook really or anything else, except that the chorus consists of an exasperated Kim Deal blurting “I just wanna get along” over and over again as though she were stuck in the middle of an endless argument she’d had enough of but couldn’t find any way out of. She sounds tired and deflated and defeated, and lately I can definitely empathize.

It’s funny. I scribbled four pages of pathos on a legal pad two weeks ago in my mom’s living room, when I was supposed to be working on book reviews but got too emotionally overwrought about other stuff. Now this is turning into a running series of soapbox grouses, a way to just sort of unburden myself. I don’t know that I’m feeling any better yet. Maybe I said this elsewhere but sometimes I feel so fucking powerless in the living of my own life that it scares me. Are you there, God? It’s me, Raymond. Can we make some kind of deal?

Enough, enough, enough. Happy Thanksgiving, pass the gravy.

Dubya Strikin’ Poses, Hangin’ Tough in ‘Nam

(Thanks Doug!)

A Season of Discontent, Part I

"You think it's easy, but you're wrong." -Pavement, "Zurich is Stained"

(The image, from Twisted Metal II, is a shout-out to Dave Labowitz - great talking to you the other night, dude, we've gotta do that more often!)

So, I dunno it I've really gotten into it here, but being a dad is great, and not as impossible and uncomfortable as I'd expected it beforehand and considered it early on. Back then I was petrified by the thought of holding Nodin and changing his diapers, but 10 weeks or so in I'm pretty sure I've gotten the hang of it - though the lil turtle keeps getting heavier and heavier and more and more mobile, or, maybe that's not the right word, I should probably say...agile? No, that's still the wrong word. Let's say that he twists and propells himself around, even while it my arms, making it necessary to pay close attention and keep a solid grasp of the guy so he doesn't break away and fall or inadvertantly headbutt you in the jaw (which he's done plenty of times but, when he did it this weekend, he actually hit me pretty damn hard for once, hard enough to get my attention, anyway). Nodin's sleep schedule varies - some nights he's out all night, other nights he wakes once or twice or makes noises like he's gonna wake up but then he doesn't, other nights still he's up all the time and his mom and dad are listless zombies all the next day. Dude eats every 2-3 hours, but it seems like every thirty minutes - by the time the formula's been prepared and he's eaten it and dosed off or whatever it's suddenly time to start the routine all over again. Usual amount is 6 ounces of the soy-mix stuff, but sometimes he'll only eat an ounce or two or maybe just a sip, then drift off to dreamland. (which, you know, I have a question for anyone reading this, please don't be shy with your answers: what do you think babies dream about, if they dream? Nodin woke up a few times this past weekend screaming his head off and Alecia said "he probably just had a bad dream" and I said "it's weird to think about that - we don't know what that dream might have been, and we'll never know because he won't remember it!" and she said "you never know.") We've got a bunch of battery-powered toys and contraptions and seats and stuff for him, and he's at the point where he eagerly interacts with the ones that make noises and play dinky kid's song tunes, which is always really amazing to watch, in no small part because it just makes me think about how completely stunned I still am that I'm a dad and he's my son and he's actually out in the breathing, living world with us - that, despite my knowledge, which is everyone's common knowledge and biological fact, of the reproduction process and it's many many demonstrations, everything worked out for us and deposited a smiling, gurgling (sometime screaming), wild-haired, drooling, adorable lump of love in our care. Sometimes I feel like I don't deserve him at all...even though I only see him a few days a week.

Is this, I wonder, how active-duty members of the military feel right now? That sense of homelessnes, of adriftness, of exhaustion, shuttled between the hearth and encampments far distant, with no clear idea when fate will finally see fit to cement them at one end or the other?

Every Monday morning at 4:25 a.m., I awaken in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, wash my face, dress, pack up my car, say goodbye to Alecia and Nodin, and begin the three-hour-or-so drive south to Abingdon, Maryland under veil of frosty darkness. Awaiting me are an avalanche of proofing work, freelance assignments so numerous (I've overbooked myself considerably), traffic jams that seem to have no cause, generally fruitless online job searches conducted in the bustling centre of disrespectful humanity that is the Pikesville Library, and nights spent along on my mon's fold-out sofa. By Friday at 4:30 p.m. I'm on my way back to north, inching along in the creeping twilight. It's unsettling and depressing, this interior sense of desolation and disconnection from people and places, this straining to remain positive that before long some hiring manager in Harrisburg or Camp Hill or Williamsport or State College will happen upon my emailed/snail-mailed/electronically-submitted application to be a technical writer or a mailroom prole or a PR flack and have a eureka moment and hasten to a telephone to breathlessly beg me to come work for him or her. Discouragement thens to set in when once has been job hunting for nearly a year without even the slightest hint of an interview offer - not merely for the central purpose of residing full-time with one's nuclear family, but because the form-letter rejections and negations-of-self-by-electronic-silence hammer home he fact that I'm not getting any fucking younger or more attractive to employers. Far enough removed from my full-tome reporter days that newspapers aren't interested; so invested in my current profession (proofreading, half a decade, in hindsight perhaps at least attempting to climb the corporate latter a wee bit higher might have been beneficial, thanks for asking) that other companies probably think I'm capable of little else. Add to this the fact that publishing/media/etc. jobs are all but nonexistent/hunted-to-extinction in the relevant part of the state and the abject helplessness of this situation becomes clear.

BOO-YAA, Hot Damn, Oh, SNAP: Dems Take Back Congress For First Time Since 1994, Hunter S. Thompson Does Backflips In Grave

It it unseemly to gloat? Sure it is, but who cares - we totally won this time.

Perhaps it's foolish of me to feel this way just a couple days after Election Day, but I'm overcome by a sense of political optimism that hasn't been this strong since, say, October 2004. Nothing much will ultimately change, really, but right now I feel like John Travolta at the end of "Staying Alive," and I imagine a lot of other folks do, too. Rumsfeld's being put out to pasture was just icing on the proverbial cake.

Okay, Pelosi, Reid, et al. - this is our window, or chance to start making America a decent nation again; don't blow it.

Also: BOO!

Father in Awe, Offspring in Repose

"You'll never grow old, Michael, and you'll never die. But you must feed!"

"Puppies!"

I think I know where a lot of my extremely limited free time will be spent in the near future.

"Eh?"

Also: Cormac McCarthy's latest, Mike Tyson ages ever-so-gracefully, and Mark Foley, All-American Hero.

Daddy's Lil Daddy-O

Sugarbear and Cub, A Study in Delight

A link to Doug's new publishing company.

Also = cop show cliches run amok.

Recent Stuff I've Written...

Less Self Is More Self comp, Tam, Vampire Can’t, Alix Ohlin, The Yellow Swans (interview), Thom Yorke, Marble Valley (interview), Lonn Friend. There's more, of course, but these pieces I'm proudest of. For other terrific personal creation news, well, see below - more on that to come, soon.

(Also, check out Brett Hickman's in-depth interview with over-sharing Howard Stern Show regular Artie Lange, presented in installments - one, and two.)

Here, Nodin ponders Descartes’ famous “mind/body problem.”

Nodin Ray Cummings, born at 11:09 p.m. on Tuesday, September 5, 2006 at St. Joesph’s Hospital in Towson, Maryland, weighing in at 8 pounds 3 ounces...

...all fingers and toes intact, lungs definitely powerful!

Shed Cicada Shells

So mom and dad were right, all those years ago: I should’ve started a journal. My excuse for not doing so? Too busy, other things to attend to, don’t know what I’d write about because nothing ever happens to me. So the milemarkers of my last few decades of life aren’t preciously intimate - a few momentos, an album of photographs, a box or yellowing correspondence (cards, letters, and postcards), my published clippings and those of other people, dog-eared copies of the Elm and the Collegian I managed to hang onto – a physical array of rememberance to match and complement what survives in grey-matter memory.

Which brings us to this post, my second pre-Malia post after claiming that I wouldn’t post anything else until she was wrapped in swaddling clothes and struggling to open her eyes. Often I try to create a mental picture of who I was at previous pivotal times in my life and fail, in large part because I don’t keep a personal record. Impending fatherhood being probably the most significant thing that will ever happen to me, and being that I have this nifty blog that no-one reads, this seems as good a time and place as any to leave an imprint of some sort so that in years to come I can look back with Malia in 10 years time and say “That’s who I was when you can into the world, and that’s what I liked, what I cared about, what I consumed, what I was afraid of, and so forth, and words to that effect.”

Been thinking lately about going back to school, to get a Master’s in English or an Associate’s in Communications, or something. I miss being taught in a formal sense, being forced to learn about thinkers and cultures and systems I wouldn’t necessarily encounter on my own. And I feel behind the curve and damn near unemployable with just a B.A. in English under my battered belt.
For months and months now I’ve been trying to find a job in Harrisburg or State College or thereabouts, because we’re moving to Alecia’s hometown of Selinsgrove at the end of September. While I doubt that I’ll be gainfully employed up there before it’s time to relocate from Maryland, I’m holding out hope for several jobs that I seem to actually be qualified for – assoc. editor for Fly-Fishing Magazine, senior editor for a Penn State alumni mag, one or two others. It’s been frustrating beyond belief to put out feelers and applications and calls and e-mails and more with regard to this and meet with blithe dismissals and general indifference, but someday I’ll look back and laugh about this. My friends and family have been supportive and encouraging and that’s been wonderful, and just what I need now.
Can I just say that Alecia and I watched Running Scared last night, and it was maybe 10x better than expected?
No matter how many times I point out to Alecia that, even at 9-months pregnant, she remains solidly adorable, she doesn’t believe this herself.
The pile of half- or un-read new books is growing unruly. Actually I’ve issued myself a fatwa on the purchase of texts until I’ve gotten caught up, which isn’t likely to happen anytime soon now that I’m actually reviewing them at the rate of one per month. Last few nights I’ve been picking at one of the Chekov short-story collections mom got be for Christmas this year. Dude has some interesting ideas and follibles but he’s way, way too silly and way, way too fond of exclamation marks. Everything’s a joke. Apparently he wrote some plays and his fiction betrays that sort of theatrical voice as a strength. Maybe you had to be there, or maybe something was lost in translation? Only 30-some pages into a book of Foucault’s seminar lectures, the same distance into David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion (thanks Alecia!) – the story where the character’s recounting something that happened in a classroom with nausating detail at the point where he’s hung up on stuff happening outside (minutae upon minutae, exhaustively). Halfway through Octavio Paz’s book about Marcel Duchamp, which I purchased because I wanted to know more about Dada, but Paz just drones on about “Large Glass” and what it means, which is interesting but not what I’d bargained for really. Satisfaction in droves: John Gregory Dunne’s Regards and Donald Barthelme’s Forty Stories, masterworks – regal non-fiction and regally pomo, respectively – that every writer should be forced to visit with (not finished with either yet). Borrowed two thirds of Cormac McCarthy’s border trilogy from the library to prep for a review of his upcoming novel and was floored; Wikipedia was all “he’s so Faulkner” but I call Hemingway. Speaking of uncle Ernie, my dad loaned me a copy of Hem’s newspaper stories that’s long out of print, I dip into it every now and again and a lot of it trumps his fiction hard. Almost done with Eggers’ Why We Are Hungry, finally. The plan is to send it to a friend for her 30th birthday, because somehow it strikes me as the sort of book people need to read around the time they turn 30. Unless I flat out just don’t care for something, I usually don’t pass it along without asking for it back. But Eggers’ book seems like the sort of object that should be passed continuously from 29-33 year-old person to 29-33 year-old person forever, with each recipient reading the book once then re-gifting it or leaving it in a subway station for a stranger to find or something; there isn’t quite enough nourishment there to justify actually owning it and returning to it. In five years, Eggers’ quirky, self-impressed fictions will simply just seem more precocious then they already do, and what limited value there is – something about navigating the transition between being a young adult and an actual adult that I’ll never be able to articulate better because I’m not reading this thing that critically now and, of course, I’ll never read it again – will have passed its sell-by date. Then there’s the stuff I haven’t even cracked: Umberto Eco, Marcus Aurelius, Rousseau. The stuff I need to re-read: Plato, Niethzche, Kyle Andersen, Aristotle, Upton Sinclair. The stuff I need to seek out: Walter Benjamin, George Saunders, John Stuart Mill, John Cage, Tristan Egolf, and too many bloody others.
It’s a blustery, overcast morning with the threat of serious showers looming; said threat has loomed for days now.
It occurs to me that I should have started this a week ago. In a few hours I’ll leave for an OB-GYN appointment where Alecia will see if her doctors are willing to induce pregnancy, and there isn’t time to throughly encapsulate my present state of mind and perform my (demanding) job at the same damn time.
A recurring dream: I am about to begin my senior year at Washington College, though in the back of my mind I know that I’ve long since completed said year and graduated. Thinking about how I can make the Collegian a better features magazine this time around using what I’ve learned in the years since, how I can go about attracting more writers and better represent the student body and such. It’s all so vivid and true to life that I’m certain it’s all really happening but before I can really get down to work the dream has ended.
Presently I’m assisting Doug in his fledgling publishing venture, twentythreebooks; this involves crafting publicity strategies and drawing up media contact lists. We are putting out a short book of political, philosophical poetry by Omar Shapli, ideally by Election Day 2006. An exciting enterprise to be a part of, though not the sort of work I imagined I’d be doing. There’s a certain nobility to championing poetry in this modern age.
Over the past couple years, I’ve come to dislike telephone conversation more and more. Starting to feel the same way about e-mail conversation, at least in terms of communicating matters of actual weight (beyond essential day-to-day exchanges regarding dinner, hellos, freelance particulars, etc.). But all of you have heard me go on about this and now it’s a boring meme, right? So my current preference for letters and postcards need not be restated here.
When one is youthful and immortal and horrible things happen – freak accidents that leave people disabled, car crashes, terrorist strikes, natural disasters – shrugging them off is easy, especially if you didn’t lose anyone you care about. You are still alive, and well, and there will be plenty of time and opportunities for you to go where you wish or accomplish what you want to – no need to rush or fret. The onset of parenthood (and accompanying that, the pre-parental empathy that lends news stories about child abductions and murders and what have you a new weight) drives home the fact that it could all be over tomorrow, anything could happen. Without blathering on too much, let’s just say that for me the time to put up or shut up is nigh, to quit telling myself that someday soon I’m gonna start putting these short stories, screenplays, and essays that have been bouncing around in my mind for almost a decade through a word processor already before life gets me in a full-nelson and I’m unable to. Enough opportunities have been blown already.

“In-flight Magazine”

We spoke at some length across a transatlantic telephone wire. Within that particular pause I suffered considerably and was handsomely compensated in “character” currency. All was suspiciously still. The desired list began to coalesce in my fading consciousness as a stout, absolute yet slippery, intangible ideal I could neither grasp nor examine as I lounged, irresolute, atop a protruding precipice pointing out over a canyon a-slosh in sandman’s slush. Not a lot of groundwork laid in advance. Life as holding pattern. Oil on wood. Fist on chin. Modifier on noun. Double or nothing, go with the plan, let’s do this thing: get it on. Specters haunt hallowed spaces forever and a sigh. Pachyderms stand out everywhere. Our hands found each other. Penetrating imagery. Brief, declarative sentences. Unpack and re-shelve. When I read you I should want to be you. Tight and sweet. No. Keep it real dumb. Craziness. Traumatized. Dream took place at the height of 1,000 feet, early morning or early evening, I possessed developed telekinetic abilities and propelled myself at a leisurely pace through a sky I could not feel; no fowl in flight, no insects caught in the slipstream, no-one pointing aft at a right angle. We missed each other. We mumbled protracted goodbyes. Gingerly we settled strangling receivers into waiting cradles.

Not Quite Primo “Blog Rock” Pipe-Stuffin’ Fodder, Pal

It’s a hackneyed cliche to say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Fortunately, it’s usually true. In this, my final blog post until after Malia’s breathing the same air we all are and crying and screaming and I can post photos and gush about childbirth and fatherhood and related once-in-a-lifetime emotional junk, I leave you fine folks with a random collage of images, large and small and illustrated, unrelated and resolutely not meant to weave any sort of pop-culture visual tapistry of this moment in time or anything like that.

“Let’s...be careful out there.”

An Update of Sorts

1. We've found a place to live in Selinsgrove, a few minutes away from Alecia's parents' house. It's an unsullied, relatively new townhouse at the end of a row of four with the advantage of being very close to the main drag there (11 & 15, as its known) yet set back a street, so we're buffered from the sound debris of mass traffic but can easily get to department stores, the grocery, the mall, gas stations, and so on. Quite ideal. No basement, but three bedrooms and a large, shared backyard. We move house on Sept. 23.

2. I may have a job!

3. Malia could get here any day now, which seems more incredible than it probably should.

4. Matthew Friedberger, God love him, is nearly impossible to understand when you're playing back a taped interview with the man.

A Tale of Two Flicks

So far, Clerks II reigns as the summer's best comedy. Of course, the only other comedy I've made it out to see was Talladega Nights, but so what? Clerks II was profane, bust-a-gut funny, poignant, and moving (not to mention a sequel with an actual non-commerical reason for exisiting, unlike Irvine Welsh's Porno, which was a limp, cash-in follow-up to Trainspotting). The cheaply-made original was endearing in its black-and-white stock and awkward direction; the full-color sequel is endearing in its willingness to allow Dante and Randal some sensitive-dude-hey-I-love-you-man lip-biting. Also, there is human-on-donkey sex, a few seconds of Ben Affleck, and extensive gross-out situational and fast-food glutch humor I won't get into here because then you won't be surprised when you actually see it. Critics say by and large "stupid" and "immature" and "Kevin Smith's fanbase will love it." They're right, even though they mean these things in a negative way, which is wrongheaded and misses the point. Nights, on the other hand, made the exact same mistake every movie trailer editor makes these days: the good stuff is given away before the customers can hand over their ticket fare and the marketing-tie-in TV commercials are funnier than most of the movie. Will Ferrell, many have said, redeems his recent losing streak here; this is not true. (There was a preview for an upcoming film featuring Mr. More Cowbell, Queen Latifah, and Dustin Hoffman - in which Ferrell is a novelist's character - that promises to make Nights its bitch. Believe it.) Ferrell and his trusty director/co-writer mostly squander the humor value inherent in the phrase "Will Ferrell NASCAR Movie OMG OMG OMG!" Andy Richter (gay), Molly Shannon (drunk), a cougar (rrroarr!), and Gary Cole (crazy, drunk, shriveled like a prune) all appear here and are the only real reasons to bother with this abomination, effortlessly stealing the show. Even Ali G, pretending to be a gay French Formula I driver and Ricky Bobby nemesis, blows his deal. Ferrell's funniest scenes - aside from the ones where he thinks he's on fire and is running around on a race track trying to put nonexistent flames out and just bellowing like a maniac and the outtakes that run during the end credits (something tells me that the DVD extras will smoke) - come when he's praying to Jesus: little baby Jesus, mind, not the bearded, older Jesus, and the arguments and asides that ensue as a result. Anchorman, all is forgiven!

On a sidenote: does anyone besides Alecia, Doug, and Thom read this thing?

Rubies, etc.

1. The world’s a pretty scary place right now, if you haven’t been watching the news (and I hope you have). North Korea and Iran nuclear frontin’, Hezbollah and Israel firing missiles at each other, and so on. Sure, it isn’t likely to lead to World War III but when destructive weapons are hurtling through the air – however remote and distant – you think about life and the world differently, terrible possibilities bloom in your mind. Like what if someone accidently aims wrong and blows up a throughfare in the wrong country, and disaster spirals from there? When we were walking out of An Inconvenient Truth a few weeks ago – if you haven’t caught it yet, hurry up and do so before it vanishes, it’s the most gripping, sobering greenhouse-effect history lesson you’ll ever see by a former candidate for president of the United States – my dad said something about it being the moral responsibility of people now alive to provide a better world for those as-yet-unborn and the price of failure. And I automatically thought of Malia, who’ll be joining us out here in the next month or so, and realized that I haven’t done much personally to help divert our society from a fossil-fuel based system to one based on hydrogen, water, windmills, turbine power, or whatever. At the end of the movie the filmmakers offered viewers links to visit if we wanted to make a difference; I haven’t visited any of them, and I don’t know when I’ll find the time – there’s simply just too much else to do and focus on right now. Shouldn’t feel guilty about this, but I do. Back in the days when I was single and bored, I could have gone to any number of public protests and played at least a minor part in that world – one of my former philosophy professors was heavily into demonstrating for human rights and other causes and I was on her email forwarding list – but I never did; I just sat in my room and posted on message boards and listened to records and made zines and read Will Self books and missed my friends when I wasn’t writing newspaper stories that didn’t elevate anything besides my employers’ stock prices. Youth is wasted, they say with good reason, on the young.

2. Tonight is the second of five birth classes we’re taking at St. Joe’s Hospital, where we’re headed when Alecia’s water breaks. Each class is set up like a weekly college seminar, in the sense that it lasts for 150 minutes with an intermission. So far, I’ve learned a lot that I didn’t know, about back births, what amniotic fluid actually consists of, breathing exercises, what actually happens to the body during the various and sundry stages of pregnancy (organs shifted and compressed), what a umbilical cord and a placenta actually are, and more. The instructor is this tiny, kind lady who has clearly taught this course hundreds of times and while speaking smiles and doesn’t quite make eye contact with anyone when not focusing on slides shown on the sort of overhead projector the teachers used to use back when I was in middle school and high school – the setup, I think, could make for a fairly hilarious Saturday Night Live sketch.

3. When Doug and his girlfriend, Riss, came over for dinner the weekend before last, they gave me a CD-R titled Malia’s Summer Strum, which is sort of a reply/counterpoint to the Malia’s Amniotic Summer Daydream project I out to some folks. As the name would imply, it’s mostly a collection of strummed tunes by people like David Gray and John Lennon, relaxing and laidback. Once I’ve had a chance to listen to the whole thing a few times I’ll say more about it here.

4. “She’s more than worth her weight in rubies,” or words to that effect, was the theme for the 80th birthday party my paternal grandmother’s church threw for her the weekend before last. For an eight-decade old woman with a litany of health problems, Ruth Cummings is amazingly lucid – we should all hope to have it so together should we live that long. The event was – as every Victory Prayer Chapel event predictably is – a full-on Baptist service that gives way to a dinner, with lots of praising Jesus and testifying and bible readings; on this particular occasion my grandmother’s children (and parishoners) offered impassioned (sometimes funny) speeches about her and my late grandfather, the sort where you listen and are driven to soul-searching and realize how, ultimately, family and the strength family can provide are of incredible value. Most of my relatives turned up, including people I hadn’t seen in three or four or six years like my Aunt Joyce and her daughter, Jennifer, and others who aren’t immediate family and whom I didn’t quite remember. We won’t all be together again in the same room until someone passes away. It’s a cynical thing to say maybe, but it’s true, and I need to make a point to visit Lynhurst Street at least a few more times before we move to Pennsylvania – everyone’s excited about Malia and asked Alecia how she was doing.

It's funny - aspects of Baptist worship gave me a headache when I was a kid - the hollering and people hyperventilating into trashcans and falling out and everybody soul clapping to gospel songs performed by the church band and its choir, the Voices of Jesus - but now that I only encounter this every other year or so I find a strange comfort, it's like stepping back to a simpler
time and place where the future was infinite and still ahead, when the cacophony of religious expression was overwhelming but I knew it'd be over eventually and my mom or my dad would take me home and I'd pop a few headache pills and everything would be wonderful, again.