“Killers, Thieves and Liars” is featured in this month’s edition of Underground Voices Magazine. Check it out, and don’t miss the other great writers they’ve showcased.

www.undergroundvoices.com

The perils of a day job have prevented me from being very present; but then, this year is all about being present, being mindful, so perhaps it’s a lesson, or at the least evocative. Either way, I have fresh updates at The Port, and perhaps some news regarding publishing to be shared later. Meanwhile, stay tuned in, tv land.

 If the declining temperature and apocalypse of mall zombies had not already warned you, it’s that unparalleled time of year we so thoughtlessly call Christmas again.
 There are many things that you can say about this season, whether you focus on the rampant and bulimic derby of consumerism, the unending genocide about its Christian/pagan roots, or just how “traditional” music we’re afflicted with remains about as old as your parents; anything a baby-boomer vaguely remembers doing with their idyllic childhood simply MUST be American tradition.
 It’s also a time when people trickle from the woodwork into churches, as if there is only one night Jesus cares that much about and for fuck’s sake you better believe it’s his birthday. Even for me it’s a time when the Catholicism comes out; well, more than the steamer trunks of parental guilt I have to look at in my closet pretty much daily. It’s not out of tradition; as I say anything we do half-ass enough we can bill as tradition, and I have always held that either all days are holy or none of them are – if God is only going to be present at specific calendar events, he’s hardly someone worth knowing, let alone worshipping. After all, no one worships their deadbeat father that only shows up when the court forces it. But I have the pull of deliberate, or tangible reverence. I want to notice an event.

 Mass of Advent Penance. A phrase that strikes the opposite of the sentiment we accept in it. Unholy, masochistic, savage and unenlightened. Penance brings to mind all manner of Inquisitorial custom, self-flagellation, ritual self-immolation, and those off-shoot sects of sadists that nail themselves to crosses in order to more fully appreciate a sacrifice on their behalf – our word for today, Alex, is Irony.
But in the context, we’re not reading it so brutal. In context, rather than punishment we’re seeing it like the term “fast” – cleansing, replenishing. Healing. A moment, like any moment in our life that really matters in the long term — that has any bearing on the remainder of our lives — to stop, to assess, to weigh ourselves and our egos carefully against the weight of the universe, of the cosmos. Of the infinity of time.
 Maybe scorn shouldn’t be heaped upon those who “only” attend Mass on the functional holidays; we all, whether believing, acknowledging or giving two shits about a divine creative/redemptive being, need a moment to be abased. We need a period of penance, of fully engaging in humility. It can only be to our benefit to take the time to remember we are frail, and we are finite, we are but a single drop of rain falling into the ocean. We have majesty for a beautiful plummeting moment, and then our story – in this book anyway – has been told.

 The event, the season of Christmas doesn’t do this on its own; other than feeling miniscule to the mass of people eager to buy up the same Made In China presents you’re hoping to express your deepest devotion with. But with the earth going into dormancy, all that is vibrantly living sleeping beneath the annual evolution of the seasons, it seems the natural opportune moment.
 I don’t think that God comes closer to earth due to some arbitrary date commemorating the birth of Christ, but that’s just my opinion; whether that, the threat of Santa assessing his Hoover-esque list, pagans pausing for the rebirth of the world into silence, the result is the same – common thread, anam. Stop and admit we are not who we want to be, who we think we are. We are words in a wordless place, yet voices in the wind. We are significant and powerful, but crippled and self-defeating. We are brilliant, capable, independent, and we are painfully mortal. After all, the rest of the time do we not “see Messiah in the mirror, and rest because he’s finally come?”
 In church, with family you’re not sure why you’re around, justifying the salary of those ash-disheveled Denny’s employees, the question this season should be where your head bows; Where is your holy place?

December 2011

New updates at The Port! I’ll be getting back to more regular blogging soon, once I get my sea-legs at the day job. Some thoughts already percolating.

10-14-2011

    What a long, strange trip it is. It never gets weird enough, always too far shy of sane, and too much time on depraved steps that pluck your boots to claw you into doomed obscurity.
   Of course I’m talking about this dangerous group of cynical masochists we call writers.
    There are those of us who take things even beyond the accepted line of unorthodoxy; some of us who, if we don’t believe it at least make the excuse, seek our muse in an aesthetic diet not dissimilar from an infant: two meals a day, mostly from bottles. It may not work better than anything else, but fuck it – an accidental diamond is still a diamond.

    I went to the Mainstrasse in hopes of triggering some latent inspiration, that dream of how something noteworthy would be lurking behind a mulch-splattered planter having spent all evening waiting to ambush me. As usual, we quickly found ourselves admiring the padded seats at an annually varnished bar top, a cross-section of demographic glad it’s Friday, jostling, lounging, chaining domestic bottles like casting incense into the Ganges in the cruel funhouse shadow of alcohol neon.

    It’s still a novelty for me to smoke in public places in Kentucky. It’s as if they missed the memo about the great plague steadily ripping apart the fabric of American society, and you should light one up whether you want to or not, because if you don’t, someone might notice and jerk away the privilege, some McCarthy cigarette secret police. And those granola g-men wouldn’t understand that these are Nat Shermans, not some foul smoking dollar-store variety, because someone, somewhere, has their finger on a button.

    I’ve already had a handful of Kostrikers when it happens. And it happens subtly, like a sky that’s lulled you to trust and springs rain clouds on you; Lucy jerking away the football. The radio has spent the last seven minutes allow Elton John to convince us that someone really did save his life tonight when he makes a move. He’s taken his time, this lothario of liquor joints. But don’t mistake for steady low gearing for knowing how to drive. When it comes to the seduction of the visibly disinterested lady nursing her third pint of Guinness, it’s as if his feet can’t find a single pedal.
    I believe you can tell a lot about a woman by what she drinks. Specific to this episode, if you’re cruising through a bucket of domestics you’re probably going to find you don’t share many interests and you shouldn’t waste your time, especially with the amount of shit holding your hair in unnatural waves proportional to your ego.
    But there is no communication happening here. Even I am seeing the world through that beautiful transcendence I’ll regret in a few hours, convinced in surety of baseball favoritism spoken like tribal code. The girl pounds a package of Marlboros and pulls one from the cellophane, and our hero spies his chance. He leans in with a house matchbook, strikes cupped and leans in close like a kiss between lovers.
    And while the rest of the bar sings along to Bobby McGee – the parts universally remembered – a hunter-orange chemical fire spikes toward the ceiling, racing like a fire-eater. The light of the match has proved too volatile for his hair, and with a smell that makes any all-American man vow to be a vegan it has erupted, spread, a terrifying apocalyptic nightmare devouring souls and scalp alike. The girl screams, we can only guess overwhelmed by his eligibility as a mate.
    The bartender grabs a wet towel, but he’s no match for our hero’s quick thinking in upending the Busch Lite over his head.

     What is it we have become, that opened the door for such an incident? Is his plight not somehow our collective responsibility? Have we distanced so much from reality in human interaction? There will always be something to say about the mindless and vulgar hookup, but has that factotum of courtship so worked its way into consciousness that it’s a tape worm feeding upon itself, so this is what we’re left with in our search for intimacy, to be known and loved – pratfalls and the desperate belief in meaningful encounters in a late-night pub.
    I realize I’m not so different, seeking my own different sort of consummation, fucking as it were, under the influence of whatever mind-altering substance someone will lend me. But there’s an honesty here, and above that, a question, rising like a high-water mark on the callous face of the American zeitgeist: If I’ve lived dirty, why would I expect to die clean?

“Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I’m beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it’s actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative – they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons that I don’t fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.”— Arundhati Roy

This week’s Spirit and the Bride update is available at The Port! Clink the link to the right to follow the rabbit hole.

    I’ve reached the point where I consider myself a discerning connoisseur of Mexican food in America. Specifically, the Midwest. I could work a resume of credentials ranging from Tijuana tortas to figuring out how to cook fajitas in Italy, land without cumin, but it doesn’t take much soul searching of your culinary id to admit you as well can tell the difference between a bolognese and Fazoli’s meat sauce. We’re not talking the square root of pi here.
    Really it can be said of the middle of America that you’re doing well if you’re not at Taco Bell or some derivative, most certainly said by anyone from the Southwestern states. And they would be accurate to an extent – after all, it’s hard enough getting horchata that isn’t powdered.
    But periodically you can find some displaced immigrant sharing the warmth and wealth of their grandmother’s wisdom in a sad storefront, beneath Latino daytime TV and an abundance of cilantro; the sort of place where you’re NOT compelled to beg the cook to make it as if for his madre.

    Spot in the center of Newport, Kentucky’s weathered streets is La Mexicana. There’s a special category of restaurants that defy style but make you happy to be alive, and, in the tradition of the Buddha, leave you to “just drink your tea.” This isn’t merely one of them, this might be the top of the chain.
   You want to know how good it is? Watch the businessmen talk on the phone with their mouths full. You can’t stop eating.
    The menu is simple – a selection of meats or vegetables, and what you want them served in. With a small kitchen and attached tienda everything is made in house,  and careful prep goes into each sauce or marinade. Best of all? You don’t have to request the salsa verde linger on your gums like a comfortable coal.
    Most of the time I initially judge a place on things I won’t even order – authenticity is in a perspective, I feel. But whereas lengus makes me relax, seeing a menu with tripas and sesos is like watching Canadian geese forming Blue Angel V’s over the gray skies to season change. We hit pay-dirt, boys.

    Today I am enjoying carne bistec tacos – sporting nothing but raw onion and cilantro – and guacamole, a thing normally feared and reviled in my palate, but, again, an honest-to-god blend of succulent avocados, fresh onion, hot house tomatoes and all the secrets that make me pile it high onto everything I see. The steak has been grilled to that cookie perfection; crunchy outside and tender inside, spices just to the consummate level that makes anyone with taste-buds float into transcendence.

    Sadly, as you might fear and expect, any paradise has its expiration date. La Mexicana is for sale, or, as their sign states, “For Sale This Business.” These are the times I wish I had the capital for an investment such as this. It’s the special sort of establishment you want to throw money at just so that they’re around the next time you come through. And perhaps it’s because I’m on the outside, but I feel it could easily be successful. I won’t go into my strategical daydreams. It’s enough for you to accept everyone needs to be eating here frequently, buying that extra round of chips that horrifies purists. And in the meanwhile, let’s meet for lunch soon.

It’s probably not the best idea to watch a Top Gear marathon just before the start of a road trip in a 3 Series five-speed, but if one must get completely lost on an afternoon drive I maintain that there are days and vehicles to do it in. Certainly, southern Ohio in early October is the perfect time.

This marks the third time I have misplaced my exit coming back from Virginia, for reasons still beyond me. It’s not hard, there aren’t that many roads, but somehow in the midst of all the highway construction I can never seem to avoid I manage to blink at just the right time, a time I fail to notice until the river springs up and I’m in Kentucky.

Being as this is my third time, by now I’ve figured out how to change course before it’s much too late and accept the creeping through small river-front downtowns to be my penance, a reminder for the future. It does take you frustratingly out of the way, but things could be worse, and it’s really only one extra road to get back on course. Nothing to get too steamed about.

Unless you manage to miss that road too.

In this instance, I am going to throw blame on a mild case of distraction. This five-hour forced seating seemed a perfect time to brush up on my sad attempts at learning a second language, so I have been blithely sing-songing various articles of French grammar and such important revelations as “I want to buy beer” to my digital companions like an operatic puppeteer completely out of touch with reality. Add to this the warmth of the afternoon sun stretching across the highway, seasoning the hay meadows, changing trees and Ohio’s brambly underbrush, and suddenly I’m aware I have no idea where I am. To even pull over and consult a map (yes, some of us can still do that) at the stripe of buildings they call a town I have to dodge the sudden covey of teenagers on ATVs my alien presence flushed out.

But there are times God smiles on those hapless BMW drivers with an open sunroof. Providence, serendipity, luck, call it what you will, when the road you are on is actually a better choice than the one you thought you were on, connecting back to your intended route faster and, indeed, more straight-forward, cutting diagonally across the map instead of perpendicular. And lo, what other blessing could we terrible children desire than a two-lane highway dipping and curling like an agitated serpent through a bright kaleidoscope of autumn leaves?

The road pitches and rolls like deep sea waves, pulling me further and tighter into each new mile, the next turn, sweeping up scattered walnut leaves in caution-tape yellow around the tires; a conductor lost in swinging the baton. This could be a car advert, filmed amid the most perfect autumn scenery this side of the Hudson. The sunroof is a welcome yawn, the motor soaring in a pleased snarl, Michel and Jacqueline coaching me on how to order drinks in French, and that, my friends, is when I come upon Frank’s Deer Urine Farm.