Reading Cormac McCarthy

I'm reading McCarthy's The Road while on a road trip with my family. McCarthy's prose here is achingly sparse, populated by lament and loss and the too-long onlingering of things. It reminds me of some work I've done before, specifically this one:

Somnambulist

We are walking wide-awake

we waking dead

Move across these landscape features

Across these stone foundations in the ground

These monoliths with a muted gaze

we pass.

At the turret we'll turn left

--Highway Sixty--

Before we forget the exit sounds

and all these things are gone

They will be gone amid dead cities

They will be gone amid the ash

of Apocalyptic visions

And ruinous--what is it--

Machinations

This is not the genre of the end

no Simple eschatology for the learning class.

We're looking at the sudden close of things,

The unwarned muting of color and sight

and physical approximations of forms

You say you want a recount,

A sad reckoning for the innocent.

That is the story of life

and what it's all about

Sometimes you just have to go; dissolve into

the hazy dream, the half-lit fire, leap

Atop the flat platforms of perfumed life

and go.

The welcome end! The world dissolved!

Not in Storm and fire but like a light

switch thrown, suddenly dark.

All innumerable patterns broken into elements

Everything at its own center Every

Flaw and perfection recognizing

its own heart.

This is the day

This is the reconciliation and the life

All the work was worth it, all the

indolence worth it,

Now we're waking up.

Mania

It's 1 am and I'm jazzed about solving some iPhone development problems. At this time of night these problems seem small beside the towering figure of my post-midnight genius.

As a younger man, I used to fetishize the cigarette box. The smoothness of a machine-rolled single. The Zippo. The small objects in people's pockets they fingered when getting off the bus. I had a fondness for key fobs, for complicated keyrings, and for moneyclips. I figured I could become the person I strove to be with the right accoutrements in my pants.

Over the years these things replaced one another. D-ring replaced Zippo, tiny cell phone replaced horking giant beast Motorola flip. Out with the Bic, in with the headset. Headphones superseded game cartridges, somebody invented wallet-thin tools, somebody else found them unwieldy. Gerber Multi-tool. Some cheapo pliers. A 3rd gen iPod. A nano.

I don't carry much anymore. A money clip that doubles as a utility knife, some keys, and my iPhone.

I used to run through PDAs like Forrest Gump through the end zone. 4 models of Sony Clie, 3 Palm Pilots of varying vintage, a Sharp Zaurus. These were among the dorkiest, clumsiest tools I've ever cringed at in later contemplation. The iPhone is like none of these. I'm going to develop the hell out of iPhone apps. Maybe a cigarette app.

Where Is The Walkman After The Apocalypse?

I am alkaline, the

Inexorable chase.

Moss-pitted, I sit unused,

Regal head slotted to one side

And in all the fantasy chase

Science;

I chase Science

With all the fury of darkness

With all the ease

With all the--

Oh, Science! I am

Alkaline

Antediluvian

Anthropomorphic--

Chemistry on two legs,

Sonorous note to the dim tide,

You listen!--

In Stockholm once

Did I writhe under your aim

Did I sit while you bore--

I long again to be held fast,

For water to pour out my side;

Tremendously used, I shall expire.

Science, what did you do those

Three days?

In the moment I blinked,

You were gone.

Left me--

Mephistopheles.

-Boulder

November 1996

The Viewless Wings of Poesy

I confess that I have a very great love for poetry. My most frequent method of expressing love for something being to mangle it, I have decided to post some of the poems I've attempted over the years. Most of these have never seen the light of another's eyes, nor were meant to, so they are most likely mealymouthed affairs that don't say much at all.

Still, I'm cleaning out my closet.

Nemesis Number Two

When I was in high school I was,unsurprisingly, heavily into comic books. Simultaneously, I was kind of a moron and easily distracted by shiny things. This made me the comic industry's most perfect patsy. If you're not familiar with the state of comics in the early 90s (for shame!), it was a time of the giant pendulum swing in favor of ostentatious visuals over solid storytelling. It's not just that artists gained the upper hand in their relentless power struggle/collaboration with writers; they virtually *abandoned* sequential art in favor of full-bleed splash pages, excessively detailed rendering, and undisguised aping of drawing styles.

The formation in 1992 of Image Comics represented the apex of this strophe. Some high-profile artists felt that they alone were responsible for the huge circulation of the books they were drawing (not cognizant, seemingly, that these books were flagship titles that would have sold if Mort Walker was pencilling them), and left for greener, more money-filled pastures. This was welcomed with wide excitement. Specifically, by me. I ate this stuff up.

So much so that I started a comics studio with my best friend Eric. 1993's Centauri Comics had a single book with one printing of 25 copies. The books were photocopied at Kinko's and distributed for $1.00 US/$1.25 Canada on the last day of school.





Nemesis #1 represented months that Eric and I spent laying out an elaborate plotline, designing costumes, fleshing out characters, and learning the craft of comic book creation. The end result was six pages of pen and ink art and a hard-to-follow storyline. But that wasn't the point.

The point was that creating this stuff became an obsession, a process that became larger than family, friends, high school, and even the reasonable future (I completely forgot to apply to the University at which I eventually enrolled). It kept us up all night. Nothing else seemed to matter.

The kind of feeling you get when pursing this sort of project can't be bought, bartered for, or approximated. You feel like a vessel. You're a contrapuntal Mozart. You're the right hand of God.

On Monday, I was laid off from a job that, while fulfilling in the various adult ways we expect to find fulfillment, never approached the dashing-mad euphoria I had when I was hand-binding Nemesis #1. 3 AM feels quite a bit different when you owe your wakefulness to caffeinated panic rather than the pursuit of some need you can't even properly express.

So as I start my search for something new, there is only one real question I ask myself:

Could this be Nemesis #2?

Hello World