We laugh and we know that we lose

Dan-U-el my boss says, giving me the name he gives me when he’s in a good mood, gonna put you to doing the fence today.

So I shoulder the tools from the shop and he takes my job, jingling change behind the counter, leaving be the paperwork and the back office to stand here staring through the window to the gas pump islands, listening to the beeping bleeping whirring register registering the flow of gas and cash mobilizing in and out of the economy. He goes back behind the counter, back to doing what he started doing, 45 years ago, before he was a manager, before he was an owner, before he retired and unretired, back at the beginning, making change. He puts off his trademark expletive motto of F—ing people and does the demeaning little three-step repartee of the clerk, saying How we doing? How we doing? That’s good.

I have to dig out the four-by-fours first, the rotted out ones and the run over ones of the fence’s knocked out sections looking like knocked-up teeth, but the ground is soft and the posthole digger’s handles are new and I set in to the rhythm of work.

The sweat starts in, like something I hadn’t really forgotten, the wood loosens its hold a little from the dirt and the cars come in and out, in and out and I don’t care, don’t care about pre-pay or post- or drive aways or pump numbers or change and wha’cha need or wha’cha lookin’ for. It feels good. Real work. Unmechinized labor. For the first time in six months with this gainful employment I’m doing something that’ll be here, tomorrow. This fence, this is something that’s not alienating or degrading, that doesn’t make me want to fight back, walk out. This isn’t making change on the selling out of the American dream. This isn’t dealing numbers on the hopes of a fluke in your favor even though we all know the house always wins.

They pay you extra for the hard work? the garbage man says from his truck, eating lunch. They aint in the business of paying extra, I say. And we laugh and we know that we lose, and he’s here to play his triple twos - they all play triple twos, like it’s a trinity of hope - and I string out my twine in a straight line for a section of fence. The wood’s almost white, unweathered unstained, and I stand my panel of pine in the dirt kicking the dead leaves out of my way and leaning them against the old fence that wants to wobble.

The election results are coming in from Ohio, Ohia, ‘hia, the one place I lived this year without registering to vote, the one of the four swing states I stopped in that’s turning red, the radio said, and now I remember this is what I was doing when I heard the results of the first race I followed, eight years ago, back in California, back before, back at the beginning. I was tearing down a fence that time. I had to set the radio on top of a post to get the reception to hear the results. I was working behind a hill in back of a field on a corral that was falling down and not needed anymore. And it was Dole/Kemp, Clinton/Gore, and I watched a coyote walk through the fields in the late afternoon, watched him watching me and keeping a board-throwing distance between us.

Good fences, I thought then, and I think now, though I don’t know if anyone believes that anymore and can’t think
of when the last time was anyone voted for good fences. Good work I think I lean on my posthole digger and look at this work I can look at.

I bust my knuckle building this fence, and the red blood left a red spot on the white wood like a marking scent, like a signiture waiting to be washed away with the weathering into gray.

Dan-U-el, my boss says, how we doing?

I built a fence, I say, I built me a fence.

Barak Obama 2008?

Election Day, 2004

Engage

My article in Gideon Strauss' Comment on the New York Intellectual's attemps to found a tradition has been reviewed by Fr. Neuhaus in First Things.

Pictures of breaking away

In Ohio all the postcards were from Florida, from outside, away, where they don’t grow hay, where the dirt’s all sand and the water’s real blue and on the front of every post card was a girl bikinied and air brushed and tan and she was always arching her back or something like that and they pinned up the post cards by the shop door. There were a half dozen of them there, below the clock and covered in diesel dust and we’d stand circled between them and the door and the pop-filled refrigerator hanging hay hooks on our belts and waiting for our next truck to come.

I read them once, unpinned them from the wall and flipped them over to the blank white side where they’d been addressed to back here home and postmarked exotically Florida and signed out by uncles on vacation. They didn’t say much. Weather was great and I’ll be back soon enough but damn it’s nice away down here.

I find old postcards sometimes, in antique shops and estate sales and pinned up in old garages and kitchens and sometimes tucked in forgotten in books someone sold without flipping through, and they never do say much – there and back, me and you, home and away and weather and touristy sight you can say you can see. There’s not much space on a postcard and not much ever said and half of it’s just addressing anyway and we write in the white whatever we think of on hand.

It’s just a little blank space on the back of a picture waiting for your words, if only you had something to say. If only you had something to say but you just stare at the space. Waiting. Daunted. Every post card is a case of writer’s block.

I bet mailmen don’t read postcards. Maybe they do in the beginning but if they’ve been at it for awhile they have to know what they say, know they’re just let downs letting down the people who didn’t get to go and the people who have to come back, just pictures of dreams we can only remember wanting to have. They have to know postcards are well wishes benigned into thinking of you, exotic wishes mailed home as temperature information.

Or maybe they do read them, they know what they say but can’t look away and they always read every one and the mailmen too are taunted by the pictures and the hoped thoughts of escape, or breaking away, and then they flip them over and stare at the white side and the boredom again, again every time, lets them down a little sad.

I bought a deck of picture postcards for the pictures back when I was on tour and thought maybe I’d mail them to friends from gas stations along the highway. I found one last night, stuck in a book I hadn’t looked at in awhile. The front’s a picture of Dali-painted cars with clothe draped over the long 1940s hoods and shiny hub caps and the black door panel’s peeled back to showing a red brick wall and a tree grows out of the roof like the car hasn’t moved in a long time. It’s stamped, and addressed but never sent. Half the back is blank. Saying nothing. I addressed it, bought a stamp. I looked at the picture and thought the car needed wings to get away and I looked at the back and had nothing to say. The weather maybe. Or I could tell them I was thinking of them and liked this picture or that I didn’t know if I wanted to be here and didn’t know if I wanted to go back there but I was just blank staring at the square and thinking stop breathing, stop breathing for me now. Write it on a postcard.

Should conservatives vote for Nader?

The two percent

It's been a long really long sad long time since I've laughed so hard I laughed milk through my nose.

But then, I don't drink milk.

In halves

Boss: "You're stupid, but you're honest-stupid."

Co-worker: "It's half of one of those days."

This morning in Ambler:

I held the door open for a man with a cane and a coffee.

A black hearse let me in and a silver hearse cut me off.

The coffee shop bus boy smoked a cigarette in front of a blackboard chalked Yankees go home! Go Red Sox and watched a stone mason set a head-sized rock.

I plugged a hole in my truck tire, which is like the fourth time I've had to since I learned how to plug tires.

I'm thinking maybe I should take up woodcarving again.

What do you do

There’s a man I heard about in Montana who’s in prison for starting a grass fire. It killed a couple of people, firemen maybe, and the families of the dead were demanding justice and the neighbors all scowled at him and the court said recklessness and manslaughter and he was convicted of a couple of misdemeanors and a felony and I guess there was more legal language to it than that, but what he did was mow his field during a dry spell without carrying a fire extinguisher.

Hit a rock. Spark caught. Somebody died.

He just hadn’t thought about it. He was just mowing. The grass’d got long in the spring and he’d been too busy and now he’d been thinking it needed to get cut real short and without any rain he wouldn’t have to cut it until late fall and he was doing circles on a Saturday with a ball cap attempting shade and his skin was all itchy from the scratchy dry grass shredded by double blades and floating gnat-cloud like around the mower and he was coughing and spitting up the dust when he hit the rock. Heard it and winced at the garbling grinding gnarl of the crunch of a rock hitting the double blades with a double thump, clanged up against the housing and got spat out the grass shot with sling shot sound effects and he winced at the noise and thought that blade’ll need sharpening and then there was fire.

Nobody said so, but a fire extinguisher probably wouldn’t have done anything. You just can’t move fast enough when it’s that dry. I mean he stomped on the flames and thought for a second he had it, got it out, thought almost - please - almost, and thought that he was gonna get back on the mower in a second and finish and just be telling people he’d had a close one, and then the fire just took off and there wasn’t nothing he could do. Even if he’d a had shovel or if there’d a been a hose out there, the fire was too fast. Once it started.

The fire moved out in ripples from the rock's spark, light brown grass turned to dark gray smoke in huge ugly billows rolling up to heaven lazy and easy and unstoppable and the man was standing in the ash-black circle, his mower still idling, and he was cursing almost crying and there wasn’t nothing he could do.

He’s in prison now. For four to six years I think, I’m not sure. I wonder what he’s gonna do when he gets out.

Anglican politics

I've posted my summary of the Windsor Report and my thoughts on reading it over on the papers page.

Reading age

I am now at the point where I've loaned out enough books I can't be sure I'll ever get them all back, but not yet to the point to keep a list of loans.

Angry Bob was angry...

Finding the break

J. Derrida, rest in peace, 1930 - 2004

I was wearing a jean jacket over a sweater over a flannel shirt, naked hands jammed in my pockets and knit cap toque cap pulled down down and I was as cold as I’d ever been without knowing how cold it was, since I couldn’t read the Canadian thermometer. Whatever the thermometer read though, it was colder than that. The wind came over the lake and tunneled in down through the streets with a frozen fierceness and I said, why the hell isn’t hell frozen over?

I wanted to see Derrida. I’d skipped school and come to Toronto for a philosophy conference in ’02 with a few loonies and twonies, was living on falafels and sausages from the corner vendor and staying in the cheap and rickety hostel half heated behind the Hooters and wandering around cold as hell and I wanted to see Derrida and I was standing in the back of conference rooms taking notes (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) in a journalism notebook pulled from my back pocket and listening to real philosophers with suits with nametags talk philosophy, talk together in ivory lingo as old friends and old enemies in esoteric little sub-studies, plan meetings in hotel bars and shopping trips up town with shop talk turning to tenures and publishings. I was conspicuously undergrad, in the back suitless nametagless, jean-jacket wearing, too cheap too young too uneducated to be one of them but excited that these people existed in these jobs talking about these things.

I stood with them waiting for Derrida, bunched up in un-lines outside the doors waiting for the opening, waiting for the little wrinkled man rightly passing for an atheist and talking about prayer. You had to have a $100 nametag to get in and there were guards at the doors watching the badges held up as the profs bunched through the doors in finding-a-seat herds and stood there wondering how I was supposed to pass, wondering how I could expect a breach, stood there and threw myself to the hope of an opening in the closed, and the guards looked at the mobbing push pouring through and shrugged, motioned they didn’t care, it wasn’t their problem, motioned break and left.

I walked in, like the uninvited guest at the feast or the lame man who’s friends cut a hole through the roof, depending on your point of view.

Do you know what you’re getting into, the priest asked me and I guess you never do, but sometimes you can hear the air pressure building before you hear the sound of the orchestra’s music.



Things I learned from Derrida:

1. Look twice, look closer: take an idea, stand it on its head, and think it again.
2. Philosophy is like Calvinball.
3. Love the impossible, especially the impossibilities of prayer, justice and forgiveness.
4. Look for the poor, the parenthesized, the marginalized, the hidden.
5. Be attentive to absences, doubts and aporias.
6. Don’t be afraid of the joke, of play.

Last night

I show up in other people's dreams as often as I show up in my own.

How weird is that.

Mail mon

My mutton-chopped mail man is speaking in a Jamaican accent today.

Listening to the terror through the wall

Not that I knew him that well. Not that I knew him that well but I considered him a friend, a "fellow traveler" I might have said and we met once on the long stair steps of a bus station. He had a latte, I had a coffee and an orange and we talked about the road, experiencing deliberatly, of art.

I don't know what to say so I say "shit man. shit." He's a heroin addict now and shit man, I wish you'd told me he was dead.