It's been a while...

Just dropped in to make sure this thing still works. Big happenings on the horizon. I'll keep you posted.

Because I Am Too Tired To Write More And It's 80 Degrees @ 11PM

Paradise is hidden by the horizon. You know it's there, but it does you no good until you see it with your own eyes. Until you walk in its fields. Until then Paradise is something hoped for. And hopes don't always become reality. And so I choose to keep walking the road of struggle. Striving to overcome the obstacles I place in my way and the obstacles put there by others. Chasing that horizon knowing that Paradise may not come to me, but if I can get close enough in this lifetime to taste the same winds that pass through its fields then that will be good enough for me.

Another Poem for Poetry Month

Poetry Month is almost over so I thought I would share this poem that found me this afternoon. Perhaps a reminder that we're all in this together.

A Prayer For This House

In one room of our house
a church bell rings through
the air.
In another room
the morning call to prayer echoes
out of ancient speakers.
The mourning cry of old women
and unborn children
breaks the silence in the hearts of
strangers down the hall,
and the loss of every person
we've yet to meet
makes this house feel just
as empty as it did
before we chose to live here.







Copyright Sylvester Alley 2013

A Short Poem For Poetry Month

The Shadow You Left Behind
By Sly Alley

When you left in the morning
your body departed from my presence,
but your belongings and I sat and watched
the shadow you left dancing on the wall.

The Pain and The Struggle Becomes Our Fuel

[The following blog stems from a conversation with a friend in which I conveyed this thought: "It's a strange struggle to move emotions from the surface and bury them. I've gotten good at it. I think that struggle is part of what fuels the creative drive." These are the notes I produced elaborating on that thought.]

I'm starting to think that I can overcome most things in two or three days. That doesn't mean that I'm not haunted by them after that. Some things you just can't shake from your soul. They stay with you forever. But this affords a choice. Do you let it crumble you, or do you use that weight to strengthen your soul? Either way there is a pain involved. And now that I think about it there are many pains involved. The pain from the initial scenario that requires one to bury feelings and emotions. The act of swallowing those emotions that are, at times, too big to contain within one's self causes pain. Once they are compressed there is a pain in keeping them in their place. It often requires an amount of self control that few possess. At times all of that pain and struggle are for the greater good. Many people define a hero as one who lays down their life so that another may live. I would add that sometimes a person should do more than lay down their life, they should lay down their soul so that others may heal their own.

But how does enduring this pain and struggle benefit that one who swallows their feelings? That one gains a fuel to push through life. If you have endured so much don't think, "It's so bad! I just can't endure anymore heartaches!" Use that past to say, "I have suffered much and still I stand! No bullet or blade can cut me down!"

The artist gains a doorway to inspiration for her art.
The lover gains a new level of understanding.
The diplomat learns to wield new tools to face the problems he seeks to solve.
The pain and the struggle becomes the Fuel of Life.

Of Music and Memories

A few years ago I went into a self imposed exile to the worst place a kid from Oklahoma could go. To this day I'm not really sure why I went to Texas. There is a large part of me that feels it was necessary, yet the part of me that keeps telling me it was one of the worst mistakes I've ever made in my life is the one that seems to resonate the loudest in my heart. There was a bit of romanticism and familiarity involved. My grandfather's grave was a 15 minute drive from where I lived for the first 6 months of my stay, and it was in a place I was very familiar with considering I spent a lot of time with him in his final two years on this earth. But in the end, the main reason I went into exile was to attempt to figure out what it is I am supposed to do with this life I've been forced into.

Up until this point I had been working in a field that requires one to spend more time on the road than Bruce Springsteen. Anything that makes you live like a rock star makes you party like a rock star. And therein hides the danger. It only happened once in my time on the road, but I was in a town where a man that shared my profession died in a hotel room. I overheard his "friends" scheming to get out of town before too many questions got asked and before the body was cold. It took me a month or two after this incident to figure I should really take a look at the life I was facing. In fairness, there are a lot of people in this profession that are not going to meet the same fate that young man did. But still the possibility made me rethink what it was I was going to do with my life, and a few months later I was living in Waxahachie, Texas. I had traded hotel rooms by the week for a rent house by the half-year.
I had hoped that by removing myself from the things that had become too familiar in my life, I would have some clarity and focus enter my field of view. This was easier wished than done. I found myself struggling with the responsibilities of the settled life and trying to shake off the carefree lifestyle the road had drawn me into.

My small house in Waxahachie was about a block from the railroad that ran along the south side of town. At night I would sit outside with a bottle of Buffalo Trace whiskey and a few beers for chasers. I would turn out all the lights to my one bedroom house, sit on the porch, and embrace the sky. To me that was the one thing in Texas that made me feel comfort. I could see the same stars and constellations that I saw as a child growing up in small towns in Oklahoma. 

In those days I was pretty low. I made it to work, though most days I didn't feel like walking out the door. There were two albums out that I would listen to every night. From the time I got home to the time I passed out on the couch, bed, or floor I would listen to these same two albums. I purchased both of them at Hasting's in Waxahachie.

The most important one that helped me bleed through those strange nights was Bob Dylan's "Modern Times." As I type these words I am listening to "Workingman's Blues #2" and I still recall the hopeless feeling of loss that haunted me. "I'm listening to the steel rails hum." A line that takes me right back to hearing that train roll down the track. It felt like my short life was flying by, just like that train, going somewhere that I knew not. "Meet me at the bottom / don't lag behind / bring me my boots and shoes / You can hang back or fight your best on the front line / sing a little bit of these working man blues." Dylan's words helped me to work my way back to those front lines. "Nettie Moore" also holds a meaning to me. I won't go into it here, but if you listen to it you can figure out why.

The other album that pulled me through, and one that I played before I sat down to stare at this once blank screen, was Lucinda Williams' "Live at the Fillmore."

Those were strange times. Long nights of self reflection and self destruction and hoping that was was built in its place was an improvement. Asking myself those unanswerable questions. And tonight, I felt like revisiting that time to see how far I've come from that point in my life and how far I have yet to go.

Highways Flew By...

I just returned home from a long weekend in the Colorado Rockies in a place called Union Park.

The feeling that several hundred miles and an extra 9,000+ feet of elevation can instill is something that is hard to describe to people who've never experienced the mountains. It's one thing to see pictures or videos. It's another to drive through the mountains. It's something spiritual to pitch a tent in a place that is void of any artificial light (not a radio/cell tower or house in sight), highway sounds, or generators from some Texan's 28' Fleetwood Mallard (IF YOU WANT TO SLEEP IN A BED AND WATCH TV GET A HOTEL ROOM LIKE A NORMAL PERSON!).


The picture below was taken as we first entered Union Park. It's about 9 miles from the main road to our camp and the terrain makes the drive last about an hour.

Union Park is the kind of place that allows a person to shed the weight of paying bills and looking for the cheapest gas in town, if only for a little while. The next picture was taken looking to the east northeast from the edge of our camp. The field in the foreground is carved up by small streams and beaver ponds. There is far more water here than the picture shows and contains the best trout fishing I've ever experienced. You don't catch a lot of large fish, but you catch a lot of fish.

A few of us decided to take a hike to a lake about 2 miles away and a thousand feet above out camp. None of us had been there before so it took a bit of navigating to get there. About a mile and a half from camp we stumbled upon the remnants of an old log cabin near a small stream. 

The lake sits at a little over 11,000 feet above sea level. There were a couple of campsites that showed sign of recent use. A raft sat on the dirt under a foot of water. Until I saw this lake, it was hard for me to imagine a place more secluded than our campsite. The next time I come to Union Park I plan on camping here at least for a night (even though the night before we broke camp a myself and a couple others heard a Mountain Lion screaming nearby).

So, here I am. A short week of classes ahead of me and I'm trying to figure out what the Clint Eastwood speech was about (this took place on the way to the woods and I have yet to view the video), and looking forward to football season. Every team could stink and the season would still be more entertaining than the coming election...it's late...I'll save that noise for next time.   

"You who wish to conquer pain...

you must learn, learn to serve me well." Leonard Cohen sang that. A man named Samuel Johnson once said, "He who makes a beast of himself, gets rid of the pain of being a man." What Johnson forgot to mention to those of us who choose to become Beasts to deal with our pain is the fact that it is only a temporary fix. The more one relies on transforming themselves into a Beast to alleviate the Pain, the man becomes more Beast and less Man.

I have to wonder if Johnson was advocating this method of Pain management, or merely making an observation? No matter, there is something at the Dark Heart of his statement that each person should examine when attempting to conquer pain: Is it really necessary to rid myself "of the pain of being a man?"

Pain is something that every human being encounters at some point in life. It may be a spiritual pain, a physical pain, a mental pain, an emotional pain or any combination of these and other forms that Pain can mold into itself. For some, the slightest discomfort becomes too much to bear. Some embrace the Pain and use it to fuel themselves towards their goals and desires. Still others become addicted to their Inner Beast, choosing to misuse it at any chance and for the flimsiest reasons.

The methods we use in a feeble attempt to alleviate our Pain does not come without side effects. It only takes one medication commercial to help one see that the side effects can be worse than the Pain.

Cohen goes on to sing, "You who wish to conquer pain, you must learn what makes me kind."

A Thought on Rumi, Dante, and Milton.

I have been reading a lot of poetry lately. Besides the occasional glimpse at "Paradise Lost" and "The Divine Comedy" I have been spending the majority of my time reading Rumi, a Persian poet from the 13th century. The common theme between the works I have been reading (in some cases re-reading) is that of man's relationship with God and religion. I don't wish to start a debate on religious issues here. I just wanted to take a minute to write about something that I think gets overlooked when these texts are discussed, especially in the part of the world where I live.

Religion is always a hot topic here. There are probably more misinformed and polarizing opinions around this little town than in any other place I have had the Cosmic Punishment of living. This often drowns out what, to me, is the more important and useful insight found in these texts. The idea that a Persian Muslim poet can encounter similar questions (whether they are from within himself or observed in others) about the nature of man's relationship with God and religion as Dante and Milton shows us that the questions surrounding the nature of those relationships in our time are not that dissimilar. The subjects and characters found in these poems relay the message that human beings have always struggled with the questions surrounding God, and they likely will continue to struggle with these questions. It's not the religious ideas that are in focus, it's the human ideas these poets address that can give one insights as to our own thoughts and the thoughts of those with whom we share this world.


"When you look in a mirror,
you see yourself, not the state of the
mirror."
-Rumi's "Moses and the Shepherd"

New Mexico, Non-Required Reading, and Other Adventures

The second half of May has presented me with some great opportunities to do some travelling and to catch up on some reading.

After I finished up my finals at the University of Oklahoma (putting to an end my least productive semester of my acedemic experience), I packed up and headed out west with some friends. Although I have relatives in New Mexico, this was my first trip to the area. We spent three days in Navajo Lake State Park camping, hiking, and fishing the legendary San Juan River. This old Navajo stone building was about a mile from the river on the wall of Simon Canyon.

Next, we stayed an afternoon and night at El Vado Lake. Many laughs, good food, good drink, and a good campfire.

After that, we spent a couple of days at Wild Rivers National Recreation Area near Taos, NM. From our campground it was about a mile hike down to the Rio Grande.

Aside from travel, I also have been catching up on some reading. I finished Mohsin Hamid's best-seller The Reluctant Fundamentalist. It is a well written novel that reminds me of the way Gatsby looks in on the lives of the rich, except it is looking at the lives of Americans and Pakistanis (and in a way the relationship between the two countries since 9/11) through the eyes of a person who is both yet neither.

I am almost through The Essential Rumi and plan on following that up with Nathan Brown's Karma Crisis, Carol Hamilton's Lexicography, and hopefully some more books that have been at the ready on my shelf.

Hopefully, I can shake this lazy phase I'm in long enough to do some more writing in the coming days. Until then...

"When you see Indians; be careful...When you don't see Indians; be twice as careful."

Before I post the excerpt that I read at the 2nd Annual Howlers and Yawpers Creativity Symposium, I feel like I should talk about what this collection of flash-fiction means to me and why I feel it says something that needs to be said.

One of the things that I find extremely fascinating about human beings is our ability to change. I want to avoid the terms "adapt" or "evolve" here because those terms seem to imply that whatever it is that endures change automatically comes out improved or better than before. When we endure a change the outcome is not always certain and it is not guaranteed to be better, but once that change is enacted there is seldom an opportunity to regain what is lost in changing and we are left to do the best with what we have if things don't go as we hoped.

I have avoided these stories for a while now, hoping to address these ideas about change in a similar way but side-stepping the places and people from which they come. I have avoided these because I don't want to be labeled a "Native American" writer, but for the most part these stories are from my (and other's) experiences in and around the American Indian culture. Also, the more I read American Indian literature the more I notice that the viewpoints presented in such works are somewhat limited to Indians on reservations and the complications that come from that, but hardly any address the viewpoints of the rest of us that didn't grow up at Crow Agency, or Rocky Boy, or Fort Hall, or Pine Ridge. Though we share some common social problems, the conflict between tradition and progress is a bit different than those that were born and raised in rural reservation towns.

I hope to kill two birds with one stone with this collection:
1) Change is something that all human's experience whether we are aware of it or not, and the individual's experience with change is something that can be a bonding factor between generations or cultures.
2) Write with the voice of, in a sense, the anti-Sherman Alexie. (It doesn't always take a white teacher to tell an Indian kid that she or he is smart and to get out and get an education. Some of us had parents that would tell us that.) I don't have anything against Alexie. In my opinion, he is one of the more original voices in modern Native literature. It is his content that I wish to provide with an opposing view.

That was more than I wanted to say...

So here it is...the opening story from my flash-fiction collection "A Tradition of Change"

Change: The Old Man’s Last Story

By Sly Alley

             

“Things were a lot different in those days,” he began, “but change happens. It happened before I was born. Change happened all my life and I’m sure it will keep happening long after I die.” He paused to rearrange the thin white blankets that covered his legs. Before he got sick he looked ten years younger than his age, but now, after several months of late-night rushes to the ER and long drives to doctor appointments and all the hassles that those of us who depend on Indian Health Service must endure, the old man looked much older than his age.

“They keep it too damn cold in here,” he said under his breath as he retreated from his battle with the blankets and took a long drink of water from the hospital mug.

            “My dad wanted to be here today…” I started to explain before the old man cut me off.

            “I know he has his own problems. We’re all getting old. Hell, every week I read the obituary of one of our classmates in the newspaper. Your dad’ll come by when he can.”

            We sat there in a strange silence that only lasted a few seconds, but it seemed to engulf the entire hospital. I had spent enough time in hospitals to know how loud they can be. There’s usually an orchestra of buzzers going off, nurses talking way too loud, someone knocking a food tray off of a cart. For a sick person a hospital can be hell, so I wasn’t about to interrupt this momentary symphony of silence. I left that task to the nurse who came in to check the old man’s blood pressure. After she finished and left the room, the old man gestured for me to close the door.

            “Is your recorder going?” he asked as he took another drink of water.

            “Yes,” I said as I pushed the button on the small, black digital voice recorder that sat on the tray next to the old man’s water. “Start whenever you’re ready.”

            “My earliest memories are of a white woman I called Mrs. Kate. Of course at the time I didn’t know that she was white, and I didn’t know that I was an Ind’n. We lived in a little house in Pawnee. Mrs. Kate enrolled me in school…I guess what they call kindergarten these days. And I went for a while. I think it was that same year that I met my mother. I was four years old. At that time I didn’t know I was going to meet my mother. Mrs. Kate told me that we were having a special guest over to the house that day. I took a bath and got cleaned up. Mrs. Kate started packing the few clothes I had, some trousers and t-shirts and things, into a little black leather suitcase. I couldn’t figure out why she would be packing my clothes for a guest. Later that day this woman showed up to the house. This woman and I sat on the porch for a while before she began to speak. 

‘I am your mother. My name’s Julia. I came here to take you home with me,’ she said.

“I said okay, told Mrs. Kate goodbye, and I climbed up into a horse drawn cart and left Pawnee. That year was 1946.”

The old man coughed, took a drink of water, and closed his eyes while he spoke.

 “My point in telling you this is that even at an early age, my life underwent a change. And that’s what people don’t know about Ind’ns. That’s how we survived all these years…we were able to hunt and fish and grow crops, that was a part of it, but the bigger part is that we recognized when the time comes for us to change. We don’t all see that need for change at the same time. The same goes for any people, not just Ind’ns.”

The old man opened his eyes and looked out the window to the cold November clouds that hung somewhere between the earth and sun.

“Tradition,” he said. “Tradition has caused some of the biggest arguments for our people. These young people like to brag around about tradition. They say ‘I was raised in the Old Ways’ but they have no clue what the Old Ways were. None of us do… When I was a teenager some people came to study our tribe. People from different universities would come and ask these older folks to tell them about their ‘Old Ways’ and traditions. The old folks would tell them ‘You’re about 300 years too late for that. Those old ways were lost before we were born’ they would say. Since I was a young man, the elders would tell us, ‘Go to school, get an education, learn English, get jobs.’ They knew that it was time for us to change.

“My mother’s generation had trouble accepting that change, so they took to drinking…they couldn’t get jobs because they drank too much and wouldn’t show up for work. When you hear these stories about children being ripped out of their mother’s hands and sent to boarding schools and being stripped of their heritage…it was that way for some, but there were some of us who knew it’s what we would have to do to survive. I made a friend when I came back home with my mother. We grew up together. His parents died when he was little, so his grandparents raised him. His grandparents knew our language, but they spoke in English to us young kids. When they started to get old and were dying, they told him to go to Haskell Indian School. I was with him at the bus stop when he went up there. He was 14 years old then. Someone said he died a few months ago.” The old man paused for a moment as if he were silently paying respect to the man whose funeral he was too sick to attend. Then he continued.

 “Even when things were bad at home--sometimes we’d go hungry for a while, we were never starving, but hungry--even then there was that hope that we could go get educated and make ourselves better. We had to learn from our parents and accept that a time had come to change.” The old man paused, this time to catch his breath. Then he chuckled and with a smile he said, “I sure didn’t want’a live in a house with dirt floors and haul water for the rest of my life.” His laugh and smile gave way to a hard cough and he spat into the washcloth that he clenched in his left hand.  

“I’m going to tell you one more thing, nephew, then I’m going to rest,” said the old man, looking out as the sleet started to tap the thick glass of the window. The smell of the hospital dinners were beginning to creep through the hallways like a lazy rainstorm cutting through the mountains. Wheel of Fortune was at maximum volume in the room across the hall and Pat Sajak’s voice carried through the door.

“The tribe has money now. Now, they have all these different businesses. They have casinos, and construction companies, and farms. They have money to send you to school. Things haven’t always been this way, so take advantage of these benefits. They might not always be available to you. A lot of us worked hard to get things this way so that the young people have better hopes and dreams than we had. We were able to change towards something better, now it’s going to be your turn.”

He paused and took the last drink of water from his cup. We sat there listening to the sounds of the hospital and the sleet and rain pelting the window. After he had fallen asleep I turned off the recorder and quietly slipped out of the room, unaware that this would be the last time I saw the old man alive.

 

© 2012

  

"I do the best I can between high spots."

Hunter Thompson said that. When you're a person like me, a strange human-chameleon that either blends in with too many crowds or tries to sink into a wall and observe the things that most people will forget about ten minutes later, the high spots come often, but rarely do they linger and it's back down to the bottom to do the best I can. This past weekend was a tremendous high spot.

It started Friday when I attended The Scissortail Creative Writing Festival at East Central University. As always I enjoyed Jim Wilson reading from The Journeyman. Poet Alan Berecka read some great poems and shared some funny stories. Steven Schroeder was great. I had the pleasure of having lunch (too much curry chicken) with poet and organizer of Scissortail Ken Hada, Scissortail presenters and good friends Jessica Isaacs and Rayshell Clapper and others. After the afternoon session, I had the pleasure of visiting with many of the presenters at the home of Jim Wilson and LeAnne Howe. It was another one of those days that made me want to drop everything in life and finish either of the two books I have been working on for a while (The Thompson Gunner novella is still in the works and I've started something else that I will talk about shortly).

I followed that day up with a fishing trip to Lake Texoma with some good friends of mine that I haven't had the opportunity to hang out with in some time. It was just before dawn and I had been enjoying my two hours of sleep when it was time to hit the water. In about two hours we had caught 70 fish. I love fishing because the things that I would like to change but know that I can't don't take up one fraction of my thoughts while I'm reeling in that fish and it's a great way to build memories with friends.

Finally, I will be reading from a work in progress titled The Last Deer Hunt at The Second Annual Howlers & Yawpers Creativity Symposium (the link is here) on April 27th at Seminole State College. It is a collection of flash fiction and short stories set primarily in north central Oklahoma between the mid 1950s and the present day, and it deals mainly with Native Americans in this region. This is a collection that until recently I was affraid to approach. I won't go into too many details right now because it's just after midnight and I should be finishing up my paper on Sartre and Camus that is due in 12 hours. I was affraid of these stories because I don't want to become a cliche Native American writer, but after studying modern and contemporary American Indian writing I found out that it will be quite impossible for me to be a cliche since I'm not a Cherokee. In Songs From This Earth on Turtle's Back there is only one Otoe-Missouria/Ioway writer out of 66 selected to be in the anthology. He's my uncle. There is not one Citizen Band Potawatomi. There are stories here that need to be told and it appears very few are trying to tell them. These aren't stories about how the bear chased the kids up a mountain and turned it into Devil's Tower. These are stories about how Cousin Pepper crashed his car on the way home from drinking and playing cards and almost got away with it, or the time Connie got so drunk she pissed her pants in the Deli Mart. They're also stories about realizing that change can be hard, but in the long run it is worth it and sometimes it isn't. So I decided to move forward with this collection and am now looking forward to sharing an excerpt (which I will post here in a few days) at Howlers and Yawpers on the same stage as LeAnne Howe, Nathan Brown, Phil Morgan, Ken Hada, Christian Morgan, Rayshell Clapper, Kelli McBride, Carol Hamilton and many other talented poets, authors, musicians and clay rubbers.

So, I'm coming down from Scissortail and Texoma and doing my best until the next high spot at Howlers and Yawpers.

"Jesus, I must be crazy to be in a loony-bin like this."

The air outside of Arrowhead Stadium was as cool and crisp as the frost on the Coors Light can that found its way out of the ice chest and into my hand at just after 9:30 a.m. The light breeze swept across the parking lot and waved the Oakland Raiders flag that I wore as a cape as we dropped the tailgate and fired up the grill. This is the most intense rivalry in professional football. Especially this year as the Chiefs and Raiders were battling for a playoff shot. We were in the minority. It was a sea of red and white with black and silver spots here and there. There was a tension in the air, but not a hostile one...yet. At this point, it was the tension of anticipation.

It was a great day for tailgate party, and a better day for football. After a hot dog and a few more Coors we stashed the cooler and grill in the back of the truck and headed into the stadium. The walk going in was pretty fun. There was a mix of cheers and jeers as our squad walked across the parking lot. A Chiefs fan had us line up to be a part of his new Facebook profile picture (the 13 of us in Raiders gear, some with painted faces and shoulder pads, lined up as the Chiefs fan gave us the double middle-finger). We entered the stadium and found our seats. Then began the descent into madness.

It didn't take long before plastic beer bottles were flying. I saw one soar through the air as it showered the people unfortunate enough to be seated below its flight path. I didn't see were it landed, but a thousand sets of angry eyes (mine included) searched for the idiot who launched it. The ushers tried to find the culprit and started grabbing at anyone wearing a Raiders jersey. After they took a couple of Raiders fans down for waterboarding and enhanced interrogation, I saw one of the best tackles I've ever seen at a pro football game. The funny part is that the tackle wasn't on the field, it was in the isle about 25 rows up in section 341. A Chiefs fan was walking down the isle (he had been talking trash or something) and a Raiders fan (not of my crew) took off down the stairs after him in order to throw down. The Raiders fan's friend ran after him to prevent him from starting the fight (he probably saved the whole section from a bloody close quarters war). Once he caught up to his friend he didn't grab him and tell him to cool it. He decided the best way to prevent an upper deck brawl and save his friend from injury and/or jail was to run full speed down the stairs and tackle him into the seats. If you've never been to an NFL stadium, the stairs are very, very steep. The tackle sent the target flying across two or three rows of seating. Arguably the best hit of the day.

The game went into overtime. The Raiders won the coin-toss, took the kick-off, marched down the field, and Sebastian Janikowski kicked the game winning field goal.

The two dozen Raiders fans in our section celebrated wildly as the Chiefs fans marched to the gates on a trail of tears. We carried our celebration down the spiraling ramps to the exit of the stadium. I wasn't quite prepared for stepping out of Arrowhead Stadium and into Dante's Inferno. A Raiders fan that was way too high/drunk/insane was getting screamed at by a group of Chiefs fans as a lone cop was trying to prod them into moving on. Another Raiders fan was down on one knee dry heaving as his friends stood around him laughing and taking pictures on their iPhones. A Chiefs fan was wiping the blood from a fresh cut over his left eye while he accused his friend of being a Judas and not having his back. The police were everywhere, but they didn't care if you were taking a dump on the hood of someone's car. It was one of the few days that uniformed officers were actively preventing murder after murder. As we crossed the parking lot, I saw two young officers escorting a handcuffed drunk towards one of the U-Hauls that the KCPD rented to ensure that they had enough vehicle room to haul the violent offenders off to county jail. The Chiefs fans that dotted the parking lot were peeing everywhere and on everything. The puddles of urine looked like Oklahoma farm ponds compared to the Great Lakes of pepper spray that had rained off the face of someone too drunk or high to have listened to the reason of the Law. Golf carts carried 5 or 6 cops at a time to break up fights, or to arrest the survivor.
      

"Pro football is like nuclear warfare. There are no winners, only survivors."-Frank Gifford

I have just finished packing my bag for the trip to Kansas City and the legendary Arrowhead Stadium. I also updated my will just in case the Oakland Raiders beat the Chiefs. I am going to the game with some of the most hardcore Raiders fans outside of the bay area. Which means that for me it is not the usual "enjoy the game because I like football" type of atmosphere. There is a line carved into the concrete between these two rival teams and it is choose a side time. And when the Raiders win, I will be on the side of my friends when the Big Fight breaks out and skulls become landing zones for bricks and old mufflers. Wearing a Raiders jersey in Arrowhead is the equivalent to walking into someone's home and taking a shit on the floor, laughing about it, then using the homeowner's face to smear it into the carpet. A sane human mind doesn't do that and not expect a world-class ass kicking followed by chemical castration to come your way. Now...were'd I put that riot helmet and gas mask?   

Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall

I've had this little tradition that until now I've never shared. I'm not sure why I haven't, or why I feel like I should share it now, but here it is:

Sometimes, when I'm writing and may be having trouble finding that rhythm that lets the words flow through my fingers and punch the key that needs to be punched, I put my shot glass and/or or beer glass in front of my Fostex monitors and let Bob Dylan's music seep through it. Like the sugar cube resting on the Absinthe spoon, it gets doused in some strange music that doesn't translate to the human ear. It gets covered in a fuel that doesn't ignite with an earthly spark. Once it bonds to the blood, that door is kicked down and the words and rhythm come with little effort.

Cheers!

The Governor or: The Copulation of State and Church

I had just finished my plate of scrambled eggs, tomatoes, sausage and toast when Governor Mary Fallin entered the restaurant. I watched as she was mobbed by churched-up conservatives who believe President Obama is a Muslim Socialist sent by Satan to destroy Jesus and Marriage.

“Don’t pity her,” I thought. “This is what she lives for.”

I watched as she posed for pictures with bratty looking kids with spiked hair. They had no idea why their parents forced them to stand next to this strange blonde woman who smiled as her lobotomy eyes glared into the camera. A hunchbacked grandmother with white cotton hair rolled her quadriplegic granddaughter to the governor. The grandmother held back tears as she begged the governor to help her crippled granddaughter. The governor smiled and sent her aide to retrieve a long white robe and a ceremonial brass bowl from the trunk of the limo. She changed into her robe and poured water from a Mason jar with the word “Holy” written on the side in black permanent marker into the bowl. The aide kneeled on all fours as the governor placed the brass bowl on the aide’s back. The governor raised her hand and the chattering of the dining area instantly ceased. The only thing that moved the air was the sound of Interstate 40 vibrating off the glass windows. The governor mumbled “Ab amicis honesta petamus,” a Latin phrase she learned from Wikiquote.com. She then sprinkled a few drops of water on the child who sat helpless in her wheelchair. The grandmother wept as the governor touched the child’s forehead. Suddenly, the child’s right arm began to twitch as if it were about to be released from the grip of paralysis. But it was only a malfunctioning nerve.

“Well shit!” exclaimed the Governor, kicking her aide and sending the brass bowl crashing against the wall. “I really thought it would work that time.”     

The World's Level of Insanity Just Dropped a Notch or Two...

The Iraq War ended again Or, more accurately, will end again. This time the president didn't land a Lockheed S-3 on the USS Abe Lincoln. There was no "Mission Accomplished" banner hanging in the background while he dipped his Cohiba in a fine Port and propped his feet up on the head of one of those Saddam statues that had been ripped down by an M1 Abrams.

This time there was a speech that simply said the troops will be home by the end of the year. No mention of the failure to reach an agreement concerning troops staying in Iraq. We did all the heavy lifting and now it's time to call it a day. Turkey and Iran will stomp down hard on the Kurds then shift their focus into carving up the rest of Iraq. And in the next 15-20 years, we will be back over there killing and being killed over another Big Nothing. I'm a bit conflicted over how to feel about all this. I remember watching Colin Powell make a fool of himself in front of the UN. It was supposed to be the "Boo-Ya!" moment of our time. The equivalent to the Adlai Stevenson address to the UN during the Cuban Missle Crisis (one of my all-time favorite moments in history). Instead of giving clear cut proof, Powell presented some pictures of trucks in a desert. They could easily have been a semi full of oranges parked in Barstow. Skepticism filled me in at that moment and it never left. I'm for war under the right circumstances, but if your reason's aren't even clear to yourself... But for now let's try to enjoy the fact that a soldier's family can rest a little easier in the coming months.

Qaddafi. I awoke the other morning, turned on my laptop and saw the "Breaking News" banner next to a picture of Ole' Moammar. The initial reports of his capture gave me a strange sense of excitement. I was already looking forward to his trial when moments later "capture" turned to "killed." The ideal scenario was not to be. The man said he would die in Libya. A dictator to his own fate.

It would have been nice to march him in front of the Human Rights court, but in reality Libya would hand him a death sentence and nobody would bark about it. A lot of people on TV were wondering why he was killed. They seem to forget that this is an armed revolution of the people. These fighters aren't trained military. When this fight started most of them didn't even have guns. Now everyone is worried about the country falling into a civil war. I think that's unlikely. A number of the NTC higher-ups are members of the parlimentary government that Qaddafi allowed to operate to ease the fears of the West so they would do business with Libya. They wanted a voice and Qaddafi needed a smokescreen. There is already talk of votes in the summer. Sec. Clinton is offering the almighty aid dollars to help rebuild. An interesting stat I learned yesterday: NATO bombers (mainly French and British) dropped so many bombs during this intervention they ran out and had to buy some from the US stockpile. I don't know if the income from that is calculated into the news reports about how much the US spent on pounding Moammar into submission, but it is an interesting point. Even though we are active in two wars of our own (Iraq and Afghanistan. Not to mention "operations" in Pakistan, Somalia, etc.), we still have enough bombs to go around.   

Observer of Culture: A Discussion with Rabih Alameddine

            It is a cool, evening in Norman, Oklahoma, and Rabih Alameddine, author of Koolaids:The Art of War, I, the Divine, The Perv and The Hawkawati, lights a cigarette. Alameddine is Lebanese, but he spends the majority of the year in his home in San Francisco, California. “Do you travel to Beirut often?” I ask. “I spend about four months out of the year there,” he answers as he flicks the ash from his cigarette. I comment on the ongoing unrest in Syria and ask about the effects it has on his home country. Alameddine explains some of the differences between Syria and Lebanon, neighboring countries who have different perspectives on the way they interact with the West.“[Syria] hasn’t been as developed. In Lebanon they, sort of, destroyed everything to build skyscrapers.” Alameddine says.

            This is one of Lebanon’s complexities that appear in Alameddine’s writings when he references a label Beirut has come to be known by: the “Paris of the Middle East”. It is one of the Middle East cities that welcomes and embraces Western culture. Adding to the mix in cultures is the diversity in the religious communities found in Beirut. Sunni, Shia, Jew, Druze, Protestant, and various sects of Catholicism are present. I ask Alameddine if his book reflects the real Beirut, and if he feels that his American audience tends to see him as the sovereign voice of Middle Eastern literature.

            “Even if you read my book, you’ll get a different side, but you still won’t know.” He pauses to take another drag from his smoke. “Whenever you get something outside of the dominant culture, say American Indian, a lot of people will read one book and think, ‘Oh. Now I understand!’ But nobody would, say, read John Updike and go ‘Oh! I know America now!’ For anything outside of the dominant culture the assumption is the writer carries everything.”

            Alameddine encounters this assumption fairly regularly. It is one of the quirks we Americans have come to practice when dealing with non-dominant cultures. “I went on NPR, I swear to God, for an hour the questions were all about Islam. And you know finally I had to say ‘Do you guys know that I am not a Muslim? I can answer these questions to the best of my ability…When I go to a festival nobody ever asks me ‘How do you write?’ it’s always ‘Do you think there will be peace in the Middle East?’ Hell if I know!”

            There is some benefit to be had by being a cultural outsider. It allows one to observe cultural elements in ways that those inside the culture may not have the ability, or luxury, of doing. “There’s something wonderful about watching another culture from the outside.” says Alameddine, “As an outsider you can also be a good observer of American culture…of what I would call the dominant culture. There’s a lot of non-dominant cultures in the United States, but there is one dominant culture.”

            This idea of observing something like culture from an outsider’s perspective does not necessarily mean that you have to be totally detached from the subject. Alameddine is well aware of this and the role it plays in his writings. “You cannot write about something if you’re totally enmeshed in it, and you can’t write about something if you are totally distant from it. It’s finding the right balance. How far can you pull out without being too distant, but if you’re totally in it, you can’t see it.” remarks Alameddine.

            Alameddine’s novel Koolaids: The Art of War presents stories revolving around the AIDS pandemic and the Lebanese Civil War in a fragmented and non-linear format similar to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. “When you write these stories,” I ask, “do you start out and finish a whole story, or do you take a story to a certain point and start the next one?” Alameddine responds, “With Koolaids I did. But, also, Koolaids was just a run on thing I did very quickly, but I had been building up for it for a long, long, long time. So the stories were in my head and I just sat down and [wrote them]…I think non-linearly, but I write linearly, so it comes out linearly, but I usually start at the beginning and end at the end. With the later book [The Hawkawati] I actually moved things around a lot, with Koolaids I didn’t, and sometimes I think I should have.” The first thing I noticed when I read Koolaids was the way Alameddine plays with time the way Vonnegut does in Slaughterhouse-Five. “The important thing about Slaughterhouse-Five that’s also similar to Koolaids in some ways,” says the author as he stomps out the remaining ember of his cigarette, “is it’s not just non-linear and fragmented, it’s repetition…it goes like a sort of constant cycle…Nietzche said something about ‘eternal return’ what [has] happened will happen again.” It will be interesting to see what stories this observer of cultures will share next.

The 2011 Neustadt Festival (part one)

What an incredible week! I attended the Neustadt Festival at the University of Oklahoma for the first time.

The festival is held annually. Depending on the year, the award of the Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature or the Nuestadt International Prize for Literature is announced. (More Info Here)

It began Tuesday night at the Norman Depot with readings by Oklahoma authors. Nathan Brown hosted the event with Dorothy Alexander, Joey Brown, Ken Hada, Carol Hamilton and Benjamin Myers. They took turns sharing their favorite poem (by an author other than themselves) before reading from their own works. There was time for a brief question and answer session with the panel afterwards.

Myself and the rest of the Neustadt class had the privilege of sharing an evening with the jurors of the 2012 Neustadt prize.

The 2012 jury was made up of these authors:
Rabih Alameddine
Gabeba Baderoon
Norma Cantu
Andrea De Carlo
Nathalie Handal
Ilya Kaminsky
Yahia Lababidi
Miguel Syjuco
Samrat Upadhyay

That evening I had the opportunity to have a great discussion with Rabih, who is originally from Lebanon but splits his time between San Fransisco and Beirut, about his novels, the Arab Spring, stereotypes that we Americans see the world through, Obama and the Palestinian struggle. I will blog more on this soon.

As Rabih and I began to talk more on these topics, other jurors were thrust into the conversation...literally...by Rabih. Yahia, Gabeba, Nathalie, Rabih and I had a few moments of conversation before the evening had to end, but it was a powerful conversation.

It is in moments like these, in the exchange of ideas, in the exchange of thoughts and opinions and the willingness and desire to listen, these moments help us to look beyond the difference in race, or nationality, or religion, or politics and helps to remind us that our commonalities are far more important than our differences.

In the next episode:
The jurors read their works.
More discussion with Yahia and Rabih.
An afternoon with Miguel Syjuco.
The Banquet and Virginia Euwer Wulff accepts the 2011 award for Children's Lit.

Michele Bachmann and The Art of Dodging Questions (And "Why I Kinda Like Ron Paul")

It's been awhile since I've posted for at least three reasons.

1. Events in Libya have developed quickly. (I have a ton to catch up on there and will devote my next post to this.)

2. I've been busy. On top of my standard classes I have been awarded a fellowship to study several contemporary writers from around the globe and will have the chance to meet and interview them in a few weeks. That's on top of the papers and readings I have to keep up with.

3. The presidential campaign hasn't really changed much since it kicked off with the first GOP debate. (I'm becoming a bit of a fan of Ron Paul mainly because of that debate. I'm not entirely sold that he can win the nomination.)

This morning though, I wanted to talk a bit  about Michele Bachmann's comments over the past week and specifically about her appearance on Face the Nation today.

In case you missed it, she "joked" about God sending a message to politicians to "listen to the American people." (See an article with video on that here.)

Here's my issue with that comment (I don't want to go too deep in Biblical discussion). If you are a Christian, I assume that you believe the Bible to be a record of God's deeds. There are cases in the Bible that show God using natural forces to make a point. Here's the difference Michele: In those cases, God had messengers (Moses, Noah, angels, Prophets, etc) that would warn those intended recipients of God's coming wrath and why it was coming. If God wants to help people he doesn't need a politician to do his work.

Jesus never ran for President.

The other problem is that Hurrican Irene and the East Coast Earthquake didn't really target just politicians. They hit everyone indiscriminately.

So this morning, after someone probably pointed this out to the candidate, she dismissed it as a joke. Which is fine. I tell jokes and not every one of them are received the way I intend.

What really bugged me is the way she ducked Bob Schieffer's simple question.

From Huff Post:

Schieffer asked Bachmann whether she believes "God uses weather to send people messages."
"I believe in God. I'm not ashamed to say that I believe in God. I'm a woman of faith and a woman of prayer, but the comment that I made right then was a metaphor. That was very simply what I was doing," Bachmann replied.

It's times like this that I wish there was a news program that would not try to cram so much into a one-hour format. I would have liked to see ole droop-eyed Shieffer dig in a little bit and make her give a simple answer to a simple question. In the long run it's not a big deal. Or maybe it is? Is America ready to go back to the days of having a leader that travels the world with his/her foot in her mouth?

It might help Saturday Night Live be funny again.

It might have been a joke, but when Kramer started dropping N-Bombs to a comedy club full of black people the joke didn't fly that well. At this point I don't think Bachmann can make the cut, but there is plenty of time to change my mind.

A brief word on Ron Paul.

I kinda like him based on this one thing. His apparent knowledge of the Foriegn Policy blunders this counrty has put into action over the last century or so. In my opinion, one of the reasons the rest of the world hates America is not because we love freedom and liberty and that kind of stuff. It's because every other part of the world is centuries older than us. They have long histories that they know. American's can't remember things that happened ten years ago. We can't understand why Iran can't get over the fact that the U.S. overthrew their government in the 1950's and put in a puppet monarchy.

Ron Paul sees this. He addressed it in the first GOP debate and made Rick Santorum so mad that he looked like he would fly accross the stage and stab old Ronny Boy to death with the dull end of a microphone. I will talk more in this later.

Sly.