New Year's Letter

Dear 2009:

iHate sexy.

Please, stop bringing it back. Take my girlfriend (please), who's plenty sexy, but for good measure feels compelled to smatter her work, her life, indeed, with it as a kind of personal edge-cum-business utility, which is rather like putting one of these in one of these.

It's the world we live in, she would say, and she would be right. This year, though, after idling the foregoing years in darkness, I've finally hit upon the answer: live in a different world! Become expert in the constructions of yurts and live with a nomadic tribe in the outskirts of Mongolia. Find a corner of the earth where Steve Jobs, Justin Timberlake, et al. fall a distant second to a lactating Yak.

Oops. What's this? A Greek chorus, hmm? Well, let's hear what they have to say -

But it is the sacred and the profane!
They must exist together.
They are complementary.
You must embrace the one to fully embrace the other.

- well that is true, isn't it? Damn Greeks. There's a problem, though. Today, what passes for sacred (nationalism, religious dogma, ambition, bigdreams, money, the social contract I never signed) isn't really sacred at all and what passes for the profane (Britney Spears, E! Television, Hollywood, Carl's Jr. hamburgers, Mardi Gras) sure as hell ain't profane.

To have things like these form your constellation of that which is sacred and that which is profane is to do nothing other than be a dead human being. And not in a good way.

C'mon, let's go milk some Yaks, who's in?

Happy New Year.

Genealogy

to be perched high in wet clouds with
they behind, themselves the vessel

and I:

"Land!"

My Own Dear Terror

I sat alone on a park bench
(very alert quite alone I was)
holding a shotgun,

waiting. for

The menace, my own
dear terror there
beyond the horizon

you see and

In a second, any second,
there it would be:

swimming languid circles
quite without
appetite or purpose

and you see

In a second, any second,
here it would come:

instantly, absently, with a
wild mouth and the world's
malice on its tongue.

In this way, this is how
it would come,

and for me.

Ian Says: Topple the Doppelgänger

Do you find yourself constantly finding yourself?

Do your socks routinely disappear with no explanation?

If so, you may have a Doppelgänger. There are certain measures to be taken in a certainly measured manner, and deliberations to be followed through deliberately, in order to rid yourself of yourself:

1. Abandon mirrors with reckless abandon. Without you, you will be lost.

2. Try not to talk to yourself. If yourself talks to you, nod and remain silent until you've stopped talking.

3. Neglect your dress, and frequently wear shoes absent socks. This will confuse and weaken your Doppelgänger.

If these steps are followed with sufficient zeal you will find success. One must apply oneself, especially in matters concerning one's selves.

Good luck to you.

(and to you).

Turgenev the Tables

So, here I am, 15,000 or so words into NaNoWriMo when an old romance between myself and a certain Russian author of the 19th century (who happens to be the critical whipping boy of literature professors everywhere, but who has securely won this author's heart) is suddenly rekindled. Before my steadily flowing narrative about a man and a hill - a sickly but determined love-child of Kafka and the Diamond Sutra - knew what hit it, I was leaping up the stairs to my bookshelf to draw, nay, to embrace, my volume of Turgenev's Diary of a Superfluous Man.

By way of answer to the question posed by that admirable work, I resolved then and there to write my own work in the same format, illuminating the opposite reaches of the heart than were explored by Turgenev with his superfluous man. So, dear readers, I give you:

Diary of a Mellifluous Man

August 21

Today the doctor told me, “You're dying.” Feeling rather exposed at this revelation, I retorted, “Well - so are you.” Then he told me that he was giving me two weeks to live. I told him that if the situation were reversed, I would have been more charitable. We shook hands. Very grim business. His solemnity was infectious. I couldn't help but imitate his manner. For anyone looking on it may well have seemed that I was consoling him. A very courteous affair.

The stale light of the office was reflected in his shoes. It's a peculiar thing to stare at a man's shoes, but as a dying man is presumably allowed some extra latitude, I excused myself from his parting words and stared at them. They were solemn, too. Maybe they gave the doctor my two weeks for him to give me. The brown leather was very clean. Disarmingly clean. There's something about excessive cleanliness that is disturbing – there's a touch of malice in it. My own shoes are shot to hell, and I was relieved at that moment to be in them, whether they belonged to a dying man or not.