"I wasn't out to save the world. I was out to get a story."
Eddie Adams, photojournalist, rest in peace.
Sep 21, 2004
Sep 20, 2004
My other suit to the salvation army
A woman came into the gas station for $20 on pump four and I recognized her in a vauge sort of way so I think it's from her being in the station before but I can't remember what happened last time to make me remember.
She said "Hello. How're you? You're still here?"
I wanted to hate her "still here" and I wanted to be sarcastic and I wanted to demand an explanation.
I said "Yes."
A woman came into the gas station for $20 on pump four and I recognized her in a vauge sort of way so I think it's from her being in the station before but I can't remember what happened last time to make me remember.
She said "Hello. How're you? You're still here?"
I wanted to hate her "still here" and I wanted to be sarcastic and I wanted to demand an explanation.
I said "Yes."
Sep 16, 2004
On a day when nothing happened
an ongoing series in a weird legend
1. I was born in a mobile home
2. on a hill of overgrown Christmas trees
3. in the former chicken-plucking capital of the world
4. the year the town flooded in a 1000-year-flood
5. and my dad was so excited he ran down the hall to yell "it's a boy" into the empty living room.
an ongoing series in a weird legend
1. I was born in a mobile home
2. on a hill of overgrown Christmas trees
3. in the former chicken-plucking capital of the world
4. the year the town flooded in a 1000-year-flood
5. and my dad was so excited he ran down the hall to yell "it's a boy" into the empty living room.
Sep 15, 2004
Didn't notice it was dead or didn't care
The wind blew down blue from the north and the earth woke up frozen. The morning was iced over in a fierce ugliness – the frosted-up cellophane-looking ice shell suffocating the trees, crusting the concrete, and sealing in shock the brown grass of winter. The houses looked freezer-burnt, everything was closed and the roads forsaken to salt.
I don’t remember if that was the winter they threw us out of that church, or the winter we hawked Mom’s guitar for rent and rice or some other one, but it was winter in Texas. January and I was 12 or 13. I put on two flannel shirts, sweat pants and then overalls and laced up my brown boots with yellow-brown laces and got my jacket.
We’d build a chicken coop in the spring, built it from tin and unpainted plywood and treated pine with a floor of somebody’s throwaway oak slats that twisted and bent two brown bags of nails. Past the garden’s fenced-in tangle of the once-living and once-ordered tomato vines and zucchini leaves now rotting black back to dirt, and past the turkey’s coop emptied to the winter wind, their door left open dragging into the dirt since the day we killed them, leaned against the backside of the chicken house, were the construction scraps. Sheets of corrugated tin, with edges sheared sharp, leaned over warping two-by-fours, rolls of chicken wire sinking into the hard-frozen ground and plywood pieces circular sawed to uselessness.
I picked up a plywood piece ripped into the shape of a letter unknown to alphabets, grasped the end and banged into the ground. The wood bent and sprung, flecks of wood colored without pattern flexing flinging off bits of frozen leaves and dirt and poultry feathers. I hit it three times, four times, and brushed it off with my jacket sleeve.
The hill rode down from the porch to the tree where I wasn’t supposed to have carved my name into the bark and to the four-foot high fence that pretended to separate our suburban cut-grass yard from the raccoon, rattle snake and poison ivy filled woods of the gully that drained out to the lake. I put the plywood on the ground, ran up and jumped on, riding the slide down speeding blurring over the ice, past the compost pile, past the tree. At the last moment I rolled off, bailed out, tipped left spilling out sending the board free skating to bounce into the fence.
We spent the whole morning that way. David trying to jump the sled off the compost pile corner and Valerie losing a glove trying to palm a brake into the hill and Michael too little to learn to lean with the steeringless sliding sheet of plywood. Our parents stood on the porch and said how did we not kill ourselves and looked at our bodies bruising with tumbles and faces going red with cold, at our exuberance beating paths into the desolation of a world frigid dormant dead. We pushed each other and raced each other and beat a broken path along the side of the slide, hauling our boards back to the top to do it all over again.
The wind blew down blue from the north and the earth woke up frozen. The morning was iced over in a fierce ugliness – the frosted-up cellophane-looking ice shell suffocating the trees, crusting the concrete, and sealing in shock the brown grass of winter. The houses looked freezer-burnt, everything was closed and the roads forsaken to salt.
I don’t remember if that was the winter they threw us out of that church, or the winter we hawked Mom’s guitar for rent and rice or some other one, but it was winter in Texas. January and I was 12 or 13. I put on two flannel shirts, sweat pants and then overalls and laced up my brown boots with yellow-brown laces and got my jacket.
We’d build a chicken coop in the spring, built it from tin and unpainted plywood and treated pine with a floor of somebody’s throwaway oak slats that twisted and bent two brown bags of nails. Past the garden’s fenced-in tangle of the once-living and once-ordered tomato vines and zucchini leaves now rotting black back to dirt, and past the turkey’s coop emptied to the winter wind, their door left open dragging into the dirt since the day we killed them, leaned against the backside of the chicken house, were the construction scraps. Sheets of corrugated tin, with edges sheared sharp, leaned over warping two-by-fours, rolls of chicken wire sinking into the hard-frozen ground and plywood pieces circular sawed to uselessness.
I picked up a plywood piece ripped into the shape of a letter unknown to alphabets, grasped the end and banged into the ground. The wood bent and sprung, flecks of wood colored without pattern flexing flinging off bits of frozen leaves and dirt and poultry feathers. I hit it three times, four times, and brushed it off with my jacket sleeve.
The hill rode down from the porch to the tree where I wasn’t supposed to have carved my name into the bark and to the four-foot high fence that pretended to separate our suburban cut-grass yard from the raccoon, rattle snake and poison ivy filled woods of the gully that drained out to the lake. I put the plywood on the ground, ran up and jumped on, riding the slide down speeding blurring over the ice, past the compost pile, past the tree. At the last moment I rolled off, bailed out, tipped left spilling out sending the board free skating to bounce into the fence.
We spent the whole morning that way. David trying to jump the sled off the compost pile corner and Valerie losing a glove trying to palm a brake into the hill and Michael too little to learn to lean with the steeringless sliding sheet of plywood. Our parents stood on the porch and said how did we not kill ourselves and looked at our bodies bruising with tumbles and faces going red with cold, at our exuberance beating paths into the desolation of a world frigid dormant dead. We pushed each other and raced each other and beat a broken path along the side of the slide, hauling our boards back to the top to do it all over again.
Sep 13, 2004
Places I've been
"Wait wait. You worked for a newspaper?"
"Yeah. I was the editor of two college papers."
"I knew that."
"And was a reporter for a daily paper the summer I turned 19 and that Christmas and the summer I turned 20. The biggest beats I had were cops and courts where I was in the court house every day and covered a bank robbery and a couple of murders, and the environmental beat, stuff with forestry and the indian tribes and salmon hatcheries."
"Gee Daniel have you left anything to do when you're old?"
"Well, I could get my degree. And I've never been to sea."
"Wait wait. You worked for a newspaper?"
"Yeah. I was the editor of two college papers."
"I knew that."
"And was a reporter for a daily paper the summer I turned 19 and that Christmas and the summer I turned 20. The biggest beats I had were cops and courts where I was in the court house every day and covered a bank robbery and a couple of murders, and the environmental beat, stuff with forestry and the indian tribes and salmon hatcheries."
"Gee Daniel have you left anything to do when you're old?"
"Well, I could get my degree. And I've never been to sea."
Sep 8, 2004
Sep 6, 2004
Into sand
My vision of this Labor Day is an empty beach battered by storms slung out up along the Atlantic’s edge by the hurricane, rain battering down, the sea unsettled and raging up on the camel-colored sand stretch abandoned by the Jersey girls and the sunshine seekers and the last vacationers and the crowds for this secular sabbath, left to the opening skies of falling water and empty to the violence drumming itself upon the ground. The beach is empty to the storm, with only me standing there for the last of the weather-rage in the lash and froth of water on the rasping sand.
It’s September and the last of the summer’s wearing out. The college-stickered cars with out-of-state plates circle into my gas station asking for directions to the school and the Wal-Mart and the IHOP. I remember Hillsdale with September, skies blue and the smack flip flops, days with long evenings of shorts and jackets, everything cooling out into the fiery colors of fall. This is Hillsdale’s month of glory, when you meet new friends and re-meet old ones and no one has yet slipped with the overload of it all under the wheel of that since-1844 depression, when up-all-night hasn’t been translated from a foreign pleasure to a familiar chain. Here is the time when the syllabi are still in working order, not yet laughed-out monuments to the folly of plans, when you still get to class five minutes early and can talk about the possibilities of opening the world with questions that might be asked, might be studied, before the hope of coherence hasn’t reeled away in reality. I call feel the call there, as persistent and unarticulated as a bird’s feeling the time to move, to set out, go back, feel it down in the bottom of my stomach where all I can say is I’ve been thinking about Hillsdale.
But even as I look at my truck pointing out to the Hillsdale road, ready in it’s unavoidable green, even as the migratory devil sets up shop on my shoulder saying move, move, I remember the growl the scowl the squint of untouchability I had to have, I’d have to have, to get off the turnpike at exit 13 and make that turn past the most popular fair on earth and up that little towered hill.
Even then I remember the scam that I always was and had to be to that place and don’t know that I’m ready for even a weekend of those recalled ghosts in the looks of admiration and the looks of spite. And even out here, pieces of the place are coming out to me in half stories of they broke up, maybe he likes her, expelled, goth freshman, in the street, half keg, slapped in the face, no more again, and I know I’m not ready yet, can’t go yet and don’t want those keys back even though and as I know now the place is mine and I am its, know that I’ll go back if I can in a return from this banishment of mine.
I’m being given things here, in this Philly year, here where here leans out into the dark of the future and way out’s always unclear, things I couldn’t have taken before. Some of them I’ll tell you about, maybe, when we sit in a circle on the porch and testify with scars and stories, and maybe some I won’t tell you about. Maybe some I couldn’t say.
For today, at least today, I couldn’t say but maybe you could see, would see and come with me into the storm thrashing out the shore, watching as the divots left by tanning toes fill with the rain, as the hurricane dumps itself into the emptiness of sand.
My vision of this Labor Day is an empty beach battered by storms slung out up along the Atlantic’s edge by the hurricane, rain battering down, the sea unsettled and raging up on the camel-colored sand stretch abandoned by the Jersey girls and the sunshine seekers and the last vacationers and the crowds for this secular sabbath, left to the opening skies of falling water and empty to the violence drumming itself upon the ground. The beach is empty to the storm, with only me standing there for the last of the weather-rage in the lash and froth of water on the rasping sand.
It’s September and the last of the summer’s wearing out. The college-stickered cars with out-of-state plates circle into my gas station asking for directions to the school and the Wal-Mart and the IHOP. I remember Hillsdale with September, skies blue and the smack flip flops, days with long evenings of shorts and jackets, everything cooling out into the fiery colors of fall. This is Hillsdale’s month of glory, when you meet new friends and re-meet old ones and no one has yet slipped with the overload of it all under the wheel of that since-1844 depression, when up-all-night hasn’t been translated from a foreign pleasure to a familiar chain. Here is the time when the syllabi are still in working order, not yet laughed-out monuments to the folly of plans, when you still get to class five minutes early and can talk about the possibilities of opening the world with questions that might be asked, might be studied, before the hope of coherence hasn’t reeled away in reality. I call feel the call there, as persistent and unarticulated as a bird’s feeling the time to move, to set out, go back, feel it down in the bottom of my stomach where all I can say is I’ve been thinking about Hillsdale.
But even as I look at my truck pointing out to the Hillsdale road, ready in it’s unavoidable green, even as the migratory devil sets up shop on my shoulder saying move, move, I remember the growl the scowl the squint of untouchability I had to have, I’d have to have, to get off the turnpike at exit 13 and make that turn past the most popular fair on earth and up that little towered hill.
Even then I remember the scam that I always was and had to be to that place and don’t know that I’m ready for even a weekend of those recalled ghosts in the looks of admiration and the looks of spite. And even out here, pieces of the place are coming out to me in half stories of they broke up, maybe he likes her, expelled, goth freshman, in the street, half keg, slapped in the face, no more again, and I know I’m not ready yet, can’t go yet and don’t want those keys back even though and as I know now the place is mine and I am its, know that I’ll go back if I can in a return from this banishment of mine.
I’m being given things here, in this Philly year, here where here leans out into the dark of the future and way out’s always unclear, things I couldn’t have taken before. Some of them I’ll tell you about, maybe, when we sit in a circle on the porch and testify with scars and stories, and maybe some I won’t tell you about. Maybe some I couldn’t say.
For today, at least today, I couldn’t say but maybe you could see, would see and come with me into the storm thrashing out the shore, watching as the divots left by tanning toes fill with the rain, as the hurricane dumps itself into the emptiness of sand.
Sep 2, 2004
Aug 30, 2004
Something simple something everything
She had a nightmare, she says, of me laughing. And she laughs at her slyness, at her teasing, 10-years-old and wearing Easter’s bow. He laughs too hard at a throw away-line of mine until his wife comes in with a two syllable han-ha laugh and the kids want to hear again the impersonation of Joseph in jail doing his late night call-in dream-interpretation radio show.
Her hand’s on my shoulder as she says something simple something everything as if there’d never been anything to forget.
Good-bye Daniel, they say, as if afraid I’d get away before they got it in, before they got in to me. Thank you, she says, as I stand on the stairs and wonder what, ever, they could owe me and wondering when between the un-slept days of giving offense, of growling and snarling through, of being fought and hated and despised then, and now, when how I became likable.
So I smile in the sweetness of my silence, still within the raining of their cacophony. Thank you, I say.
She had a nightmare, she says, of me laughing. And she laughs at her slyness, at her teasing, 10-years-old and wearing Easter’s bow. He laughs too hard at a throw away-line of mine until his wife comes in with a two syllable han-ha laugh and the kids want to hear again the impersonation of Joseph in jail doing his late night call-in dream-interpretation radio show.
Her hand’s on my shoulder as she says something simple something everything as if there’d never been anything to forget.
Good-bye Daniel, they say, as if afraid I’d get away before they got it in, before they got in to me. Thank you, she says, as I stand on the stairs and wonder what, ever, they could owe me and wondering when between the un-slept days of giving offense, of growling and snarling through, of being fought and hated and despised then, and now, when how I became likable.
So I smile in the sweetness of my silence, still within the raining of their cacophony. Thank you, I say.
3 short reviews of good films
GARDEN STATE
Great tones of sweetness and irony. Graduate-esque about going off the medication and accepting sadness. Some excellent acting, music.
HERO
Absolutly stunningly beautiful. Warriors learn stoicism, the power of martyrdom. Plus: music, go, calligraphy. Minus: crass American viewers.
COFFEE AND CIGARETTES
The the of hip. Oversold to me (my own fault) but still very good. A fascinating basic self-subverting theme of comfort/awkwardness. Some excellent work. Bill Murray, Tom Waits, Jack White, etc. Minus: It's read hard to go to a diner after seeing this movie and not act very weird.
GARDEN STATE
Great tones of sweetness and irony. Graduate-esque about going off the medication and accepting sadness. Some excellent acting, music.
HERO
Absolutly stunningly beautiful. Warriors learn stoicism, the power of martyrdom. Plus: music, go, calligraphy. Minus: crass American viewers.
COFFEE AND CIGARETTES
The the of hip. Oversold to me (my own fault) but still very good. A fascinating basic self-subverting theme of comfort/awkwardness. Some excellent work. Bill Murray, Tom Waits, Jack White, etc. Minus: It's read hard to go to a diner after seeing this movie and not act very weird.
Aug 28, 2004
Mau mauing me
Leonard comes in every day. Between 2:25 and 2:40, he’s there with his list of lottery tickets that comes up costing $22 and then he adds one, thinking maybe I think that fate won’t know he’s betting on a number if it’s not on the list.
Every day he’s there and I have his numbers almost memorized. I hold his list in one hand like a prayer, typing it out with the other hand, fingers running, ‘round the keys sideways for 456 and backwards for 654, doing a double step down is case the answer’s generous and a quick peck up in case it’s not like he asked. Every day he comes in and I hold and type his hope for luck, his numbers, thumping the send button and rocking on my heels while the lotto machine rattles up to $22 and he doesn’t say much past how’re you, not normally more than that, and just smiles.
I think he looks glad to see me, when he smiles, but then he leaves it there, not quite letting it fade out, leaves it there until maybe it’s a sneer, a condescension. His shirt says granddad a couple, three times a week, though I’ve never seen anybody with him, just him rolling in a new red SUV and standing there and letting his smile go stale to a sneer.
He left his wallet, one day, and I saved it for him. I opened it carefully to look at the driver’s license and tried to find him in the phone book. I left it behind the counter for him with a rubber band ‘round the outside with his name noted down. He said thanks and I said sure, next day at the appointed time when he gave me his list. He said you didn’t expect that anymore and I said you gotta trust people. He smiled and I smiled and it was, I thought, pleasant passing comradery.
And then today.
Today I woke up before my alarm and sat outside on the stoop watching the oak tree and listened to a bluesy-folk version of Dylan unexpected on the radio and I tried to match my voice to the gravely velvet of this New Orlean’s guitarist I’d never heard of before. He was tapping his feet and quick triple picking the guitar mellow and the whole way to work I pattered my fingers on the steering wheel and remembered to remember his name. 2:30 came and Leonard was there with his list and a scratch off ticket from yesterday.
This isn’t a winner, I said.
It says free ticket, he said.
I don’t see where you’re talking about. If it were a winner it’d say here in the code.
What’re you blind?
Not a winner said the machine. Do not pay out.
You’re just supposed to give me a free ticket, he said, getting loud and looking over back at the line behind him lined up for luck.
Look, I said, it’s just not a winner I’m not tryin’ to hassle you.
Well that’s what you’re doing, he said. HASSLING me.
And everyone looked, looked through slitty eyes and shuffled their feet at the nice old black man being hassled by the white kid with his machine and what’s he think he’s doing not giving the man his ticket, he says it says free ticket. What was that look he gave them that they saw a free speech saint, Democratic Man smiling smugging for his rights for not be trampled over by some green machine says he didn’t win, some kid with a Texaco emblemed collar shilling shitting for the state for the rules for the business that’s eating the old man’s dollar?
For a minute I thought about how I didn’t care - one dollar – I’d give him the ticket and then I thought about looking at the little slot on the sheet at the end of the night said I if was all right and how I’d be taking this dollar out of my pants pocket and giving it away. Just a dollar, I thought, and he smiled.
He smiled smug and sneering un huh yeah he was getting his and I thought what about him saying thank you and me saying trust and four months of numbers between us and now, here suddenly, I’m white, I’m the enemy, I’m the bad luck symbol the unfair slight of the world and the people in line said un huh he’s getting his and I thought goddamn it, you can’t mau mau me.
I gave his ticket back to him. I gave him his money, dropped it on the counter – didn’t explain, didn’t say Hey Leonard relax or say my collar’s blue or that this wasn’t The Man this was me. I flicked his money down and it slid out across slow over the edge, off and fluttering to the floor.
You throwing my money, he said, he demanded, loud with his anger.
I shrugged.
Leonard comes in every day. Between 2:25 and 2:40, he’s there with his list of lottery tickets that comes up costing $22 and then he adds one, thinking maybe I think that fate won’t know he’s betting on a number if it’s not on the list.
Every day he’s there and I have his numbers almost memorized. I hold his list in one hand like a prayer, typing it out with the other hand, fingers running, ‘round the keys sideways for 456 and backwards for 654, doing a double step down is case the answer’s generous and a quick peck up in case it’s not like he asked. Every day he comes in and I hold and type his hope for luck, his numbers, thumping the send button and rocking on my heels while the lotto machine rattles up to $22 and he doesn’t say much past how’re you, not normally more than that, and just smiles.
I think he looks glad to see me, when he smiles, but then he leaves it there, not quite letting it fade out, leaves it there until maybe it’s a sneer, a condescension. His shirt says granddad a couple, three times a week, though I’ve never seen anybody with him, just him rolling in a new red SUV and standing there and letting his smile go stale to a sneer.
He left his wallet, one day, and I saved it for him. I opened it carefully to look at the driver’s license and tried to find him in the phone book. I left it behind the counter for him with a rubber band ‘round the outside with his name noted down. He said thanks and I said sure, next day at the appointed time when he gave me his list. He said you didn’t expect that anymore and I said you gotta trust people. He smiled and I smiled and it was, I thought, pleasant passing comradery.
And then today.
Today I woke up before my alarm and sat outside on the stoop watching the oak tree and listened to a bluesy-folk version of Dylan unexpected on the radio and I tried to match my voice to the gravely velvet of this New Orlean’s guitarist I’d never heard of before. He was tapping his feet and quick triple picking the guitar mellow and the whole way to work I pattered my fingers on the steering wheel and remembered to remember his name. 2:30 came and Leonard was there with his list and a scratch off ticket from yesterday.
This isn’t a winner, I said.
It says free ticket, he said.
I don’t see where you’re talking about. If it were a winner it’d say here in the code.
What’re you blind?
Not a winner said the machine. Do not pay out.
You’re just supposed to give me a free ticket, he said, getting loud and looking over back at the line behind him lined up for luck.
Look, I said, it’s just not a winner I’m not tryin’ to hassle you.
Well that’s what you’re doing, he said. HASSLING me.
And everyone looked, looked through slitty eyes and shuffled their feet at the nice old black man being hassled by the white kid with his machine and what’s he think he’s doing not giving the man his ticket, he says it says free ticket. What was that look he gave them that they saw a free speech saint, Democratic Man smiling smugging for his rights for not be trampled over by some green machine says he didn’t win, some kid with a Texaco emblemed collar shilling shitting for the state for the rules for the business that’s eating the old man’s dollar?
For a minute I thought about how I didn’t care - one dollar – I’d give him the ticket and then I thought about looking at the little slot on the sheet at the end of the night said I if was all right and how I’d be taking this dollar out of my pants pocket and giving it away. Just a dollar, I thought, and he smiled.
He smiled smug and sneering un huh yeah he was getting his and I thought what about him saying thank you and me saying trust and four months of numbers between us and now, here suddenly, I’m white, I’m the enemy, I’m the bad luck symbol the unfair slight of the world and the people in line said un huh he’s getting his and I thought goddamn it, you can’t mau mau me.
I gave his ticket back to him. I gave him his money, dropped it on the counter – didn’t explain, didn’t say Hey Leonard relax or say my collar’s blue or that this wasn’t The Man this was me. I flicked his money down and it slid out across slow over the edge, off and fluttering to the floor.
You throwing my money, he said, he demanded, loud with his anger.
I shrugged.
Aug 23, 2004
On Tuesday's
Her hands jammed in jean pockets as she leans back.
One freckle on her neck.
Feet crossed on the dashboard in the sun.
And I think I'd throw slow, a flaming box of matches underhand, to burn it all down. I think I'd smell her hair, and wouldn't care, with a smile I think I'd drive out straight to the desert and let the sun beat me all to hell. I think I’d give it all away all up to her, letting it come back in the rain down in rhythms and rivulets, into pools that spill themselves out into the little rocks of the sand.
I wouldn't. But I think I might.
Her hands jammed in jean pockets as she leans back.
One freckle on her neck.
Feet crossed on the dashboard in the sun.
And I think I'd throw slow, a flaming box of matches underhand, to burn it all down. I think I'd smell her hair, and wouldn't care, with a smile I think I'd drive out straight to the desert and let the sun beat me all to hell. I think I’d give it all away all up to her, letting it come back in the rain down in rhythms and rivulets, into pools that spill themselves out into the little rocks of the sand.
I wouldn't. But I think I might.
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