May 14, 2010, 10:40 a.m.

Stopping by the kids' school to drop something off and ending up making tie-died shirts with your kindergartener outside on a bright, cool Spring day is one of the many good reasons for getting laid off.

Just like Jelly Roll.

Listening to Astral Weeks this morning in the car it was wet and the streets and parks and buildings outside the streaked, dropletted glass were ranging like the expansive continual unwinding feeling of this album which is soul music like Van's other albums but soul unthreaded. More spaces between the notes. Like the windows are open on a rainy spring afternoon, blue notes but coming from another room down the hall or up the stairs where someone's got an old ray charles record on.

I got a home on high / in another land / so far away / so far away.

I felt that way a long time walking around with my eyes closed looking for something invisible. But music, any kind of music, even blues with its love and loss and being broke, is a way of remembering what's right here.

Dear Mr. Morris.

...it has been six months since we broke up. I'm happy to say that at last, I don't miss you every day. I don't miss the foul-smelling hands and clothes. I don't miss brushing my tongue, gargling mouthwash, and scrubbing my face hands and arms every time I want to kiss my lady. I don't miss doing the same shit to hide from my kids the fact I'm doing something I hope they never do. I don't miss going out in the cold. So, please stop sending me emails. I don't want to read them anymore. Cut it out with the embedding sexy pictures of yourself into movies and TV. Yeah, your sultry blue curls are enticing but I know what kind of baggage you bring with them. And please, stop sending your friends to stand outside and blow on me with your familiar perfume. I don't want to smell you anymore. Check back with me in six months if you want, but I suspect I'll feel the same. Besides. I have a new intimate friend now named Caffeine. Regards, Eric.

"I'd like to dedicate this song to anybody with hearts, any kind of hearts, and ears."

-Jimi Hendrix' intro to a cover of Like a Rolling Stone he did at Monterey Pop Festival.

Me and the Heron.

I heard just the opening of this one morning on the clock radio and that was enough for me to know I had to track it down and when the DJ said it was Gil Scott-Heron it added even more urgency to my needing to find it. (The whole album is available on emusic).



The spoken word on this record will make you want to write poetry even if you're not a poet. It reminds me the few times I tried to compete, badly, at the Nyorican Cafe but it excites me the way the idea of spoken word once did and I'm trying to write poetry again so thanks, Gil, for yet another indelible contribution to American culture and to my life.

May 6, 2010

Ezra and Ams sang together in the car this morning, Ezra teaching his brother the words to a rainforest song from school, which he belted out full volume as Ambrose tried to keep up with his own sweet little voice.

My son sends me email.

Dear Dad,

I really really really really really really really really really really really really really want to watch ZombieLand.If you don't i'll get really mad!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I love you soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

much!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I want to watch Avatar and own it and it has to be the Avatar with the blue ones,not the magic ones.

I want to know why you never let me see ZombieLand.

Ezra

April 25, 2010

Walking the dog, I met the kids at the bus. Ez came up to me smiling, but not talking. I asked him how his day was and he didn't answer. He just pushed his hands out, and up, and above, doing that "I'm in a box" routine.

Standing there while the dog sniffed around in the grass on a brightly cool Friday afternoon, I decided to indulge him. I was in a good mood---I'd had a week off from classes, and had used the time I already wasn't getting paid to take myself to movies two of the days instead. Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski both have films in the theaters. Today I'd come home early; there wouldn't be frantic scrambling to get ready for a weekend at the other house, me thumping up, and down, and upstairs again, breathing heavily and sweating in a rush to scramble clothes and toys together while the kids mulled around uselessly, me barking curses at them. Elizabeth's kids are littler and go to bed earlier, so I try to get there earlier. I want to get in as much time together as we can and there's traffic to contend with.

"Oh, you're in a box," I said. He nodded. "OK but still, how was your day?" He had a long answer, but he only mouthed it. His breath came out in unintelligible puffs. I couldn't make out any of it and kept asking him to repeat. "Earnest goes to camp? You've captured the pancake of redemption? What?"

Finally I said "You need to work on being a better mime."

He gestured for me to wait a minute and jogged up the street to the house, his book bag shuffling up and down, swinging his arms out awkwardly to keep it it from falling. He came back with a discarded envelope and a pencil and huddled on the sidewalk to write something.

. . .

...

.

Later the silence had gone on for a while and I, inevitably falling into the rushing back and forth cursing mode, still fought my impatience when he only mouthed answers to my questions about where his underwear or Scout uniform were. Only in the car a full half-hour later did he finally talk, after both I and Ambrose bellowed at him to stop already, him only mouthing words to our questions. It was good to hear his voice again.

April 28, 2010

Ezra to his brother, "Hey Ambrose, you've got to listen to this. If you do, I think you'll really like 'The Korn.'"

Not to forget.

Your six-year-old sitting on the toilet belting out "Eye of the Tiger."

Earlier still.

Hello, I am a mysterious mist
creeping in the grass
down by the lake
in the coy sunlight of April.
Big, dumb trees twist in the air
crooked bars of shadow
pass over me.

From human as hell

Afternoon earlier.

I'm playing hooky and nobody sees me
driving so slowly through my old neighborhood
passing two ladies with strollers
who are wincing because they just got sprayed
by a sprinkler.

Like I said somewhere else it's April
and the coy sunlight, etc.

Nobody notices me stepping out of my car,
UV protected, the world all amber,
walking to the shore of the marshy lake
and looking and looking and thinking nothing.
Just another ripple of light on the water
gently disturbed. Gently disturbed, ha.

I turn around and walk as slowly
as I possibly can,
making nothing of a sound,
grass and weeds just bending,
pretending I have nowhere to go,
making the walk to my car
not a walk to my car.

In it again, the tires passing
just as quietly as I did over the ground,
the radio and the open window
are my oldest friends,
and I don't have to tell anybody about it.

From human as hell

Sirius afternoon.

Man it is cold.

April today alongside this sleepy lake in the middle of the

city, where today it would be cold anywhere. But the wind

is moving toward me so the wiggling oblongs of sunlight on

the fine ripples moving toward me look like a thousand fish

moving toward me. The sun and the wind are competing for

space. And here is one of those weed-like trees whose every

leaf is designed to flutter. They're all shivering, hoping each

side can get some cold sun on it. I take off these dumb

sunglasses and everything changes so I put them on again.

Because I don't like the afternoon and that is why I am a

Spring person, a person of Spring. It also makes me repetitive.

II.

This person over here cradles her phone under her neck

leafing through papers. That one holds her dog in her lap and

and makes me think of a small friend who died last week and

and the woman he left behind and I wish I could go to her and

and go to him and it's funny how people, well, I, hold on to

pain. How it can be so warm and exquisite. I'd rather feel

my breath catch in my throat and get shook like those

leaves I mentioned than let the suffering part of sadness go

away. Because I'm afraid it will hijack my memories. I

I am afraid to say the words "good bye." As if we ever can.

Love marks you forever like a knife across the cheek. Or

something. Not something. It does. It kills me and today is

a good day to die. Good bye small friend.

III.

There's that dog again, no longer in the woman's lap but

lifting his head up to the wind smiling at everybody and

everybody who passes smiles at him in the same way they

would a new baby. Does the other woman, with the phone,

wish she could be with somebody, instead. I don't know. I'm

going to lie back like a dog and let the sun dig its fingers in me

because there's things that need to come out. Maybe the

wriggles of light -- jumping up now vertical and pointed to snap

at the air will snatch whatever it is away from me that made

me snap at you yesterday. But I don't want to end with a

metaphor about pets but maybe it's time to risk not taking

things seriously. The little lights on the water are pretty trivial

but they are gathering around me and I will listen to them.

IV.

My kidney hurts

There are geese overhead

An airplane roars

An hour is over

Good bye.

The Tao that cannot be named is Untitled.

A note to remind me to tell you sometime about the many ways kung fu changed my life.

Sing a reminder of white winter in April.

When a song comes on more than once on "Shuffle" you're being told to listen to it even if you're not in the mood for it just now. Today it was White Winter Hymnal.

But nevertheless why not

I think I've always believed that if you jump into something without thinking, but you do it with all of yourself, however it turns out is never a mistake. When I was 27 and found out my 19-year-old girlfriend was pregnant, I was in between freelance jobs, running out of money fast, and running up a credit card debt that would hang around my neck for the next 10 years. We'd only been together for six months. I didn't even hesitate choosing to keep this child. We were infatuated with each other and thought we were in love. What the fuck, right? The relationship didn't work out, but having my son did.

The situation I was in at that time, being broke and living in one room in a filthy house full of hippies, came from another one of those decisions.

I had been working my first real job and I was constantly frustrated by the sense I wasn't doing enough with my creative life. It was a marketing job, and I got the idea you could use marketing, which I kind of liked, to promote stuff that mattered, like the arts. I met another guy who had had the same idea. He was an artist living with other artists in this knotty house that had once been a hunting lodge and fronted on a river bank. The New York/Connecticut State border ran directly through it, there was a marker on a stone out front. Everything was crooked, every surface lined with found objects placed or glued there by previous waves of creative, wayward people perhaps going back a few decades. I decided to quit my job, survive on freelance, and move into the house to start that company, which never got started, at least not because of anything I did. I was too busy getting my girlfriend pregnant. Later I would move to Minnesota with her without ever having visited there.

In between the times when I make decisions like these, that could be considered ballsy, I criticize myself for being scared. I should've enrolled in Graduate School in England like I wanted to. I should've moved to New York City or San Francisco like I wanted to. I had a free plane ticket to New Orleans I never used, even for a weekend. More than anything, I should've finished the ten different novels, plays, screenplays, songs, and poetry manuscripts I'd written only one or two pages of. What I'm afraid of in all these cases is steps. The individual steps it takes to do something seem really boring or inconvenient (e.g., applying to Grad School, doing research, booking hotels) and I find that kind of stuff agonizing. But when something is handed to me I almost always take it.

A year-and-a-half ago, I separated from my son's mother, who I'd ended up marrying and having another child with. Just a few months after the first one was born we had started having these fights that got worse and never stopped getting worse. It's another story, suffice it to say I'd been so frustrated for so long I couldn't breathe anymore, and anger might have been the only thing keeping me alive, because when I wasn't angry I felt fat and domesticated.

Suddenly I was again living in a room in another filthy house full of wayward people. I spent a lot of time alone on my kid-free days doing the kinds of things I'd missed out on for the previous ten years, like taking a four-hour-long run all the way from Uptown Minneapolis to Theodore Wirth State Park, or going to movies by myself, or sitting and meditating for hours, or taking hours to just walk quietly in the woods. I started writing and playing music again. On free weekends, however, I complained of being bored. I said this to a coworker and she suggested I try an online dating service. I had no interest in dating if it meant working toward finding another relationship. But what the fuck, right?

A few weeks after I signed up someone called "butnevertheless" winked at me electronically; the dating machine had matched us up. A few times I was matched up with women because we both liked cats or were carbon-based lifeforms. Having had one nearly bad date, I knew that a pretty smile that hints of a sense of humor; and eyes that might flash with intelligence; and tousled hair that might feel soft twined around your fingers; and that might elude you trying to call it any one color, because it changes in the light; and what could be, as far as you can tell in an over-exposed vacation photo, a body that makes you wish you could paint a picture of it; that these might not be enough. She could've been dumb. Or cruel. Her personal description sounded witty and literate, but that didn't mean the first time she opened her mouth she wouldn't say something awful. My senior prom date did ("You know what I think is really funny? When dogs get hit by cars.") I considered these things and decided to write her a note anyway.

She wrote back, and then we talked, and it was obvious we should try meeting. When we did it was daytime and I saw the pictures had been good pictures. When we met again at night she told stories and she made me laugh.

That night, we were in a restaurant. The air was subtly energized like it can be when the lighting is a certain way, and there was just something about her that darted back and forth and danced around behind whatever it was she was saying or doing that made me want to take hold of her, so I could pin it down. One day three weeks later we were writing to each other. We'd been writing for hours every day between trying to do our stifling jobs, which were even harder since we were so tired from staying up past one in the morning every night, and she said, "Am I your girlfriend?"

Not liking uncertainty, my mind had been been trying to put labels and definitions around what was happening with her and I'd get anxious and push them away. It had been four months since I split up with my wife. The ten years before that had worn away just enough space, between me and my thoughts, to hesitate before making any more of these impulsive decisions. I knew I was holding on too tight to the idea of those four months and I knew saying the wrong thing now could screw me forever so I kind of laughed at myself, and shrugged, mentally, and put my hands on the keys and typed "Yes."

It's more than a year later and I'm still saying Yes. To building a relationship with her kids, to letting her build one with mine, to half moving in together, to introducing the idea of totally moving in together to my kids, to building a room for them in her house. Right now, I'm in another one of those minute spaces between two worlds separated only by my own tight grip on one of them.

One one side, getting officially divorced is another one of those things with steps, steps in this case that include lots of money and potentially, if I don't have enough of it to get good legal advice, spending all kinds of additional money that should be shared between me and Elizabeth. There's the inequality between the money I have now, and the money she has, that means for a while she'll be floating more of the bills. There's a pride thing wrapped up in there, and in the fact of at least still owning my own house. There's a family me and my boys (who I haven't said enough about) have built together, our rituals and our foods and the little adventures and guilty pleasures we have for ourselves.

On the other side is the rest of my life, which I also haven't written enough about, that promises with more certainty than the uncertain options in all my previous courageous decisions to be absolutely perfect. Our kids love each other, we love each other. There are brief moments between kids sprawling and thumping and jumping on couches and shouting, sometimes screaming, when all six of us have sat eating pizza and I've thought "This is my family" and I know those will grow. But this is the option requiring more of a leap and I'm being just a little too cautious.

I read about Tim Leary's death in the Times a few years ago. The last words he spoke after years of making many of what could be considered the wrong decisions were "Why not, why not, why not." Now I'm looking head on at what I fully intend to be the rest of my life until I die, and I'm pausing just for a second before saying "Why not?" too. I'll let you know how it works out.

When my oldest son gets mad at his brother he says, "You're fired."

Primates.

Last night me and all three boys were piled on the guest bed downstairs, where my two are sleeping until we get their room done, me reading a true story about a family of gorillas. The youngest two rolled around making animal sounds as part of their game, "Puppies," periodically stopping to check in on the story with its pictures of noble animals and the Rangers who protect them.

(And also pictures of their guns, which they carry to fend off poachers and predators; it wouldn't be honest to make it sound too idyllic. Earlier the kids, shirtless as always, were playing some combination of GI Joe, Star Wars, "Spies," and just bashing into things).

The ladies came back from a trip to buy coffee and diapers. The toddler tumbled on top of us cushioned by her puffy pink coat with a container of fruit repeating, I've got blueberries, I've got blueberries! They were gone in seconds. Kids don't hesitate. We're both still technically married to other people, but our boys called out Goodbye, Stepbrother! leaving for school this morning.

More space than you can imagine.

Tonight my boys wanted to take the dog out into the middle of Lake Harriet, which if you've never been to Minneapolis, is essentially right in the middle of the city. My dog, a prancy little collie, goes absolutely crazy out there. It's the wide-open space I guess. She never sees so much space, bumping up against walls, furniture, and people in this too-small house as she does. You get far enough out and she just starts to run. Anywhere. She runs in huge galloping circles. She comes barreling at you and then swerves at the last minute. She wheels around and jumps, putting her paws up on my chest, then drops low, snorting as the icy snow goes up her nose.

Initially, trotting along on our way to the middle she managed to walk keeping her paws (they're dainty) almost directly inside one of the two, narrow, day-old tracks of some kid's sled, which I insisted we follow to ease my paranoia about untested ice.

My nine-year-old kept ahead (he has this distinct walk even from a distance, trying to keep his head straight so his hood won't fall off; he won't wear a hat, or gloves most of the time) while my kindergartener stayed with me, explaining we were Ninjas on our way to a spying mission inside C.O.B.R.A. headquarters.

We started around 6:00, already towards the end of twilight. When we got to the middle of the lake the boys were off talking and the dog sniffing around the upturned crust of the snow layer and I stood and breathed and looked around; the moon --- in its... quarter phase? I don't know --- was mostly the color of a dusky pearl, you could just make it out, and the un-obscured part seared with cold blue light as if it were bursting free from the shadows. The fingernail of some blind god up in the sky. What I liked was the light it cast on the crests of snow. The sunlight of the coolest day. Morning in Antarctica. Quiet, but sort of a pregnant silence. Something or nothing could happen and either thing would be portentous.

I made the kids stop and listen.

On the way back there was a lot of screaming and wailing; the littler fellow said his leg was broken from walking and I had to put him on my shoulders; but I didn't care because stars had come out and I haven't seen stars in a long time.