A Ten Years' September Rambling Aside

It's a chill day in Vermont after a week of tropical storms, wash-outs, rain fronts and blah. Have the hummingbirds gone, or are they just laying low?

We're coming up on the tenth anniversary of "9/11," and this week has been full of hubbub about that day in 2001.

I care little for the "where I was then" stories, or even the "what has happened to us since" stories. I know where I was; I can re-feel the tilting of the world when the second plane hit the towers. And no one needs to be reminded of the mess that has been made of the aftermath.

But today I listened to a 9/11/2001 audio assemblage courtesy of the New York Times--radio dispatches from air traffic control, the military, etc., recorded as the events unfolded--and I found it chilling. When she saw the the audio link, Lauren announced, "I don't want to listen to any radio recordings."

I get what she is saying. But I think I am looking for something I'm not getting elsewhere. I don't want the  commentary, parsing, and wistful nostalgia. I want actual reportage. Or not even reportage. I just want to understand--or really just experience--the unfolding of events, the artifacts of that day. I want the radio chatter, always a half a step behind, or the intimate cell phone dialogs laid out on a timeline. Even, yes, the images of the jumpers.

I half-remember them from live TV that day, the jumpers and fallers. They haunt me, maybe, more than anything else from that day.  I'm not the only one, of course. But from time to time I've even searched the web for images of their falling, never finding significant results. It's as if those images have been blocked somehow, unsearchable--out of consideration for the families or for the nation as a whole.

There is this one, now easily found, of the one so-called Falling Man. But the images I see in my mind are blurrier than this, almost incidental--ghostly monochromatic figures, suspended high in the air where people shouldn't be. These blurry pictures could just be my imagination, or a false memory. But for me, to see them would represent something concrete and necessary, something that cannot be provided by thoughtful commentary or ground-zero waterfalls. Maybe the events of 2001 can only be analyzed and rediscovered, not really understood. It's in the memory-images, and a few of the photographs. And in the mumbled words of Mohammed Atta saying "We have some planes," or the flat affect of all the flight controllers and other workers trying to understand the scope of the problem (and in the brief moments when you can tell they do).

Maybe we as a country still don't understand the scope of the problem--or, really, what the true problem ever was, or is.

A “Writer’s” Dialog

Call:

I had a day today o f near complete freedom--son at "LEGO Camp" all day, daughter at a friend's house all day, no job-related work to do--and of course much of the day was given over to a growing feeling of paralysis. Oh, I mowed some of the lawn, I bought chicken feed. But there is so much else I could have done with that luxurious time. The writing, the accordion (the picking up the cleaning the calling of gutter contractors). And this evening as I listen to D. Shields on some podcast or other I think back to grad school and the increasing distaste for the contrivances of fiction, and of course a fair amount of what he says resonates (though his assumption that art should reflect the current condition is itself kinda quaint, if you ask me). And I think: maybe what he advocates could be the un-paralysis-ing agent that I need. But I fear there is so much more to it for me than the chucking of contrivances. I want to be liberated, but not merely from the bonds of 18th-century fictional structures, but from whatever it is that keeps me from playing the accordion as much as picking up a pen. I'm nearly 50; this is such a tired old tale. (it's the condescending editorial voice that gets the last word).

Response:

...who or what will do the liberating, I wonder? You sound like me. Waiting for something to come along and blow everything apart. I am not coming to terms well with my passivity, my true and daily desire for a miracle.
I can't remember the name of that type of depression in which one cannot fully engage in the ordinary; there is the perpetual need to hold back. Anyway.
Me. But we were talking about you.
The way you talk to yourself by writing to other people is...very good. Write one of these ruminative mini essays each day for one year. Your photo of the day? Ach. But there's your book.

 

Call Again:

Good idea, the daily talk with self/other. I don't think I'm waiting (anymore) to be liberated deux ex machina style. But I spend most of my time avoiding the sense that I am in bonds at all--by working, mowing, Facebooking, parenting. When confronted with "free time" and I remember that I wanted to spend some of the summer writing and playing the accordion, then I start getting that bound-up feeling and I start thinking there must be a way out of this, of liberation, but it's a mechanism I can't seem to unlock, except by avoiding it altogether. I guess that's not unlocking. But I--at least sometimes--try to engage it, to understand or even just plow through it. I mean, I certainly have my passivities, but as far as I can tell there is no real difference between internal and external liberation in this instance. I grapple with it, when I can, but ultimately I grapple in pain and self-recrimination.

Clutter Survey, Summer 2010

"Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity."

-Albert Einstein

Rainier: Two Years Ago Today

Two years ago I reached the top of Mt. Rainier with Bob Kackman and John Dunn. It was effing amazing.

"Eric's Written a Sketch"

Actually, not Eric: Rob.

It's a little set-piece of in-jokes I made today for Jimbo.

Jim, are you out there? This is for you.

My Favorite Bad Movie of the Last Six Months

When I first saw "Hoodwinked" (and I've seen it twice now; I'm not ashamed), it was one of those desperate hotel-rentals-for-the-kids.

If you saw the first twenty minutes you would be right to feel incredibly dubious of the whole endeavor. B-grade computer animation! Fairy tale theme! Patrick Warburton! David Ogden Stiers! Andy Dick!

It's got it all.

But it grows on you, and honestly, it's also pretty fun, with some funny banter and silly characters. I dare you to rent it. I think it's well worth the three bucks (or 75 cents apiece for a family of 4).

Probably only Svenja Will Appreciate This. Maybe.

Yes, it involves twitter. I'm sheepish, okay?



The link he provided pointed here:

Urbaniak is In

Time to assemble this thing.

I Have a Sudden Desire to Buy a (Stained) Trailer Home

About this commercial Errol Morris says, "The best commercial ever made (I should be so lucky as to achieve this level of excellence.)"

The First Entries Have Arrived

Some of you know what I mean.
Represented so far: Vermont, New Mexico and Northern California.

I'm trying to decide if the Mellotron merits bonus points or penalties.

Thirty Years Ago Today in Someone Else's Life

Appropriated with admiration from the late Jamie Livingston's Polaroid of the Day project.

Chapter One, In Which I Carry a Bear

My life as a John Irving novel. Main Street, Montpelier.

Best Electric Bike Ever

Okay, so Dan PN's neighbor electified his bike for him. Is this a sweet bike or what? Rust pretty much everywhere, girl's bike, banana seat, monkey bars, single gear with a coaster brake. Still peddle-able (in fact, Dan described this as more of an "electric assist" bike than an electric bike). Electricity provided by 12 volt automobile battery under the seat. Power comes from a converted Peugeot (auto) starter motor, with drive transferred to the rear wheel via an old skateboard wheel (friction drive). The best part (which you can't see) is how you engage the electric motor: you squeeze a wooden clothes pin that is attached to the handlebars. Brilliant.

It's a Matter of Degree

Wikipedia Picture of the Day

Enjoy your day.

Pants

Just because.



These pants were in a parking lot in Montpelier Vermont at the time.

For the Olympics: The Best Curling Song I Know

Okay, it's the only curling song I know.

Withnail: The Anti Olympics

None of this would wash with Jeff Wode.



(I'm in a "Withnail and I" sort of mood)

Egads. Have you not seen Withnail? You must.

Things Keep Blending Together

It's a sign of my aging brain, perhaps, or maybe of something in the world at large. But things keep blending together.

Several months ago a Mary Gaitskill novel merged with a memoir by A.M. Holmes as I read them both, becoming some kind of hybrid in my mind.

Now I am reading Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel "The Year of the Flood," which describes a fragmentary, broken civilization of the near future.

Today I read Edwidge Danticat in the New Yorker, talking about her family in Haiti, and I can't separate the two worlds. They are too similar. It's a little unnerving.

An excerpt:

Everyone sounded eerily calm on the phone. No one was screaming. No one was crying. No one said “Why me?” or “We’re cursed.” Even as the aftershocks kept coming, they’d say, “The ground is shaking again,” as though this had become a normal occurrence. They inquired about family members outside Haiti: an elderly relative, a baby, my one-year-old daughter.

I cried and apologized. “I’m sorry I can’t be with you,” I said. “If not for the baby—”

My nearly six-foot-tall twenty-two-year-old cousin—the beauty queen we nicknamed Naomi Campbell—who says that she is hungry and has been sleeping in bushes with dead bodies nearby, stops me.

“Don’t cry,” she says. “That’s life.”

“No, it’s not life,” I say. “Or it should not be.”

“It is,” she insists. “That’s what it is. And life, like death, lasts only yon ti moman.” Only a little while.

Kochalka Artifact

I found this on the floor today; an artifact from the day a couple years ago when James Kochalka visited Fergus' "Comics Club" at the library in Montpelier. It must have fallen out of our copy of "Pinky and Stinky" (a story of two space-traveling pigs). If I post this online do I have to pay him royalties?