"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?