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my eggs are pretty scrambled

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writing gay little stories again, in honor of pride month

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god I love drinking at work ...

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Loving life comes down to loving your yard, and loving your yard comes down to the privilege of having one

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One of the things when a friend dies is, now they've experienced something you will never experience until the very end, and you'll never be able to talk with them about how crazy an experience it is, and you'll know for a literal forever that they've experienced something you haven't

[segamascott]

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In a second, you're young again: your friends are playing a big thief cover set, they sound great, you're in a concrete block of a room with terrible sound but it's the best noise you've heard in a long time. Your flask is still half full, the room is body warm, and you have all the time in the world

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Note: plot spoilers for Beloved by Toni Morrison ahead.

Just finished Beloved by Toni Morrison. If I had read it ten years ago, on the precipice of a liberal arts education following eight years of the Obama administration, I might have thought "gee, how far we've come," with a shudder at the horror of the past. It speaks to how much hope has diminished, or how much older I've gotten, or both, that now, having finished it, I only think "how far we still have to go."

It was a difficult read, not only in terms of subject matter, which is a fairly obvious thing to expect from a book about a runaway slave who opts to kill her daughter rather than see her be taken back into the grip of slavery, only for her daughter to return years later, vengeful and longing. It was also just difficult in terms of prose. At times, I struggled figuring out the perspective of speakers, the sequencing of events, what was real and what was imagined-- but in a foreword to the edition I read, Toni Morrison writes, "I wanted the reader to be kidnapped, thrown ruthlessly into an alien environment as the first step into a shared experience with the book's population-- just as the characters were snatched from one place to another, from any place to any other, without preparation or defense."

She succeeded.

What Morrison describes as a kidnapping can equally be described as being transported, from the reader's perspective. Her rendering of Sethe, the mother who killed her daughter to protect her, reminds me of something T. Geronimo Johnson said to us during a workshop during my MFA: that as a writer, your task is to exhibit god-like empathy for all your characters. Sethe is as complex a character as her actions demand her to be, and she is simultaneously feared, treated with a morbid fascination bordering on respect, and shunned by her community.

Beloved, the murdered daughter, is rendered with equal care. Her name comes from the only word her mother could afford to have chiseled on her headstone: Beloved. Not Dearly Beloved, but Beloved.

I am grateful that Beloved, the novel, exists, despite the shame and terror we should all feel that history progressed as such to make its existence necessary. The reader enters it confused, but leaves with resolution, and another story that they would do well not to forget, despite its horror. That it is based on real historical events elevates its enduring power and makes the events of its plot all the more grotesque.

I hope this brief note reads as a positive review, because that is what I intend here. If my comments seem circuitous, it is because I hope to speak with sensitivity toward a book that perhaps wasn't written to my preferred taste, but is still worthy of immense respect.

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i'm not gonna give up my autonomy to a fat guy

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a placid evening of playing songs at a scarcely populated open mic, followed by a peaceful bowl in temperate weather

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"He stood absolutely still in the dark, and it seemed that the whole of life was freighted with pathological possibility: murder, catastrophe -- the blackness outside, the pitiless natural world -- it all seemed terribly near and threatening. From his soiled coat, the odor of blood rose. He stirred, went into the bathroom, closed the door, and turned the light on. In the mirror over the sink he looked at himself. Perhaps if he had waited with the doctors and taken some more of the sedative. His leather coat was spattered with blood. At some point he had bruised his forehead, and a small red welt stood out on his chin. One elbow of the coat was barked and torn. Even when he thought about it, he couldn't remember getting under the car. In fact, the whole event seemed to be fading quickly around the edges of one image -- that of the nurse sitting in the pool of her own blood. It seemed now that the belief in the brutal reality of the thing had come to him, not with the deaths of the others, but in the moment of seeing her sitting there so matter-of-factly with her hands in her lap, dead.

Remembering this, he began to cry. He sat on the edge of the bathtub and, putting his hands to his face, cried silently with profound exhaustion, like a spell of madness. At the pit of his stomach, but in a way which was more than that -- as though it moved on the surface of the little trembling core of his deepest being -- he was mortally, wholly afraid."

- Violence, Richard Bausch

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my family has started sending me AI slop over Facebook messenger, please end me

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NOTE: minor spoilers for North Woods by Daniel Mason ahead.

In following the successive inhabitants of a remote saltbox farmhouse in Northwestern Massachusetts built before the American Revolution, North Woods by Daniel Mason asks us what happens when historical objects lose connection from those who know their stories. The novel forces readers to confront the connections between space, history, and life, both human and non. And it happens to build a lush linguistic tapestry of the woods I grew up in, the woods I recently learned my family has lived in for centuries, if you count New England as a cohesive ecosystem.

There are lovers seeking their own Eden, stewards of the land whose work improves upon it without intruding on the surrounding grandeur of nature, jealous twins, great white hunters, amateur historians who seek to unveil the past with love. There is a sense of those who came before blessing those who come next as long as their intentions are just.

But there is also a sense of the cosmic, of the eternally returning, and of cycles. North Woods has an undercurrent of ecological anxiety, as the New England forest has changed not only due to human intervention, but also disease. Beetles, bugs, and blights have transformed the landscape by removing specific species, and all members of an ecosystem play their part. That anxiety is offset by the ambition of its perspective; in the end, we follow the house for centuries and project into a future ravished by climate change, where even maple trees can no longer inhabit the region. But a fire sweeps through and cleanses the land, priming it for a slow return to what came before.

All places undergo this process. In a way, all that live are in a process of changing, of returning. In that cycle, one can find hope, even if it's a non human-centric one.

History and narrative are inextricable from one another, and both are inextricable from space. The novel's progression teaches that curiosity about stories that come before is a form of love and a form of honoring space. It also reminds us that everywhere we tread is a graveyard, everywhere a marital bed, everywhere the seat of inexpressible joy and unimaginable grief, simultaneously and always.

It's a beautiful book. Its prose is fairly purple at times, which may explain the divergent tone of this entry compared to past ones. It speaks to how Daniel Mason's language got into my head.

This book is great, particularly for New Englanders or lovers of the forest. Its characters brim with life, ironically, even beyond their death. Don't let my pretentious descriptions turn you off-- this book is a genuine comfort and a great story.

And it makes you want to go for a hike. What's not to love?

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NOTE: major plot spoilers for East of Eden ahead.

"Timshel." Hebrew for "thou mayest." The last word spoken by Adam Trask at the end of East of Eden, after his devastating stroke upon learning of his son Aron's death in World War I.

Aron joined the army after his brother, Cal, revealed to him the truth about their mother, Cathy: that she is not dead in the east, but in fact living in their city, and runs its most notorious and vicious brothel under the name "Kate."

Cal feels he killed his brother. Lee, long time servant of the Trask family, desperately implores Adam to absolve his son Cal of the guilt that is set to destroy him. Adam, in his fugue, finds a moment of clarity to mutter "timshel," a Hebrew verb central to the understanding of the story of Cain and Abel.

Brief aside: while I haven't read all of Steinbeck's work, I think it's a safe assertion that East of Eden is his most ambitious work. It also appears to be his most sentimental one, and could be described as a novelization of two variations of the Cain and Abel story. The more literature one reads, especially in a digital age, and the more one tries to write literature, the bitterer one can become in his reading tastes. My instinct is to criticize East of Eden for being too "on the nose," but another part of me feels that the sprawling ambition and psychological depth of the novel are salves against such a critique.

When Cal and Aron are boys, their father Adam, his servant Lee, and family friend Sam Hamilton discuss the story of Cain and Abel. Initially, they were drawn to the Bible in pursuit of names for Adam's boys, who, at ten months old, remained unnamed-- their father, fully beset by grief at Cathy's betrayal and abandonment, withdraws from social living and relegates Lee to caring for the boys. As they search for names, they discuss the story, which is perhaps the most important conversation in all the book.

"Adam said, 'I can't get over feeling that Cain got the dirty end of the stick.'

'Maybe he did,' said Samuel. 'But Cain lived and had children, and Abel lives only in the story. We are Cain's children. And isn't it strange that three grown men, here in a century so many thousands of years away, discuss this crime as though it happened in King City yesterday and hadn't come up for trial?'" (354).

In discussing the lasting appeal of the Cain and Abel story, which Samuel believes to be seemingly hopeless, Lee says "'I think this is the best-known story in the world because it is everybody's story... The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears.'"

Ten years pass. The boys grow. Samuel, Lee, and Adam are discussing, again, the story, and reflecting on the night they first discussed it in their pursuit of naming Cal and Aron (as he comes to be known, shortening from "Aaron").

Lee discusses his disquiet at the differing translations of one set of lines of the story. One translation says "if thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him."

Another translation says "Do thou rule over him."

Lee, so troubled by the difference, connects with scholars at his family association in San Francisco, who learn Hebrew upon hearing about the issue. They conclude with a true translation of the verb timshel, "thou mayest."

It's not a command, and it's not a promise. It's a choice. You can rule over your desire, but there is no guarantee.

In the end, after Aron's death in war and Adam's stroke, Lee drags Cal before his father. "'Your son is marked with guilt out of himself--out of himself-- almost more than he can bear. Don't crush him with rejection. Don't crush him, Adam,'" he says. "'Help him, Adam-- help him. Give him his chance. Let him be free. That's all a man has over beasts. Free him! Bless him!,'" he continues.

And out of his fugue, Adam says only "'Timshel.'" Thou mayest. You can, Cal. You can conquer your desires and the innate badness you think inhabits you. And in so doing, he frees his son.

Cal lives on and has children. Aron lives only in the story. Just as Cain and Abel find themselves in their story.

And the best part? Supposedly, there's no verb Timshel in Hebrew, and the whole thing is a Steinbeck invention/mistranslation. And it doesn't matter, because Lee, Cal, and Adam believe it to be true. People make their own meaning.

It's masterful parallel structure, and there's still so much more to say.

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so strange that it's already been a year. poem?

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"'I am myself sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining--small mining. You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.'"

- Sam Hamilton to Adam Trask, East of Eden, Steinbeck

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"Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world grows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then--the glory--so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men."

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

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can't post the cool evil Spotify widget 😔 can't post this on my IG story because the lyrics are too edgy 😔 steak too juicy, lobster too buttery, etc etc