Life is best lived raw. And watching people live like that, like we’re ions or isotopes and watching our molecules merge. Or at least that’s what I use as my opening line.
It is a moment. It might be connected to birth or akin to that. It isn’t complicated. It’s just moving forward and dreaming the next thing to come.
After spending a strange fifteen months applying to schools – 100+ rejections in the end – and a temporary contract online, I’m back in the classroom. It’s a good place to be, not only for me but for my book, Fuck Pedagogy.
As I have mentioned previously, the book is my autobiographical take on education, how many in the industry have no idea what they are doing or if they do, not giving a shit about the students.
I’m not a pedagogical person – “listen to the students and offer what I know” sums up my practice neatly – and I have had my issues with the powers that be. That’s what I’m working on now – the drama of my three dismissals – so that I can focus on what the book is really supposed to mean.
Don’t speak. Or when you do, don’t say anything. That’s the maxim of this age. Or a code for something somebody said, got liked and then deleted. The point is to live your life and not be kept in a burrow. Unless that’s your life. The burrowed one.
Things get broke and then come alive again. It’s a dead thing. And then it’s something else. Profound and fecund. And fuck all of that. The point is to not bow down. No genuflection and all of that. Say what is hard and true, look back in anger and say it right.
The detritus is just that. Clean out. Move on. Grow up or out. And then die. Yeah, that happens which is the point. Jimmy.com. Waking up remains the best part of the day
I am not a student of the Greek language. I know naught. That said, there are letters between ‘d’ and ‘o’, a whole heap of them, and that is my cause of concern. I like to be rigorous – do I ever! – and I want all ships to stay afloat, and so I ask why now?
What is this flurry of new fear? Must I triple down? Must I wedge myself into a safe haven and curse out more heathens? When is the reprieve? Or is this on repeat? A religious bit that we are acting out for some multinational experiment? An old man talking to himself, a gay fellow in a fur coat, a fat couple salivating at Costco’s gates, a little dead dog, all of that. Nothing decent anyway.
That is certainly how it feels, Zuckerberg at the till, never getting off this planet and sinking into the murk. Why now? Why us? Tbd.
He sits across from you, one earplug in, as he espouses on the failings of the world – and you – and begrudgingly takes your five dollars. “You are wrong. Nobody has said anything dumber.” He’s out of tobacco and would like to squat your living room for the winter.
He rambles on, first about the barter system, then on the meaning of work until he starts a full tirade on the failure of representational government, everything you need to know and how you can change, all that just by being like him. He ambles off, briefly holding back the subway doors just for the fuck of it, and vanishes up the stairs.
Doing another edit of my Treeplanting screenplay, Baller, and have to kill a few scenes, such as this one of Davis calling his ex-girlfriend.
EXT. OUTSIDE WIDOW MAKER TAVERN – EARLY EVENING.
Davis, sitting on the sidewalk, stares at a mound of tarps and collapsing pile of lumber beside a Legion Hall. He calls Lola on his phone.
LOLA (Message machine): Gone Sailing. Whoo-hoo!
DAVIS (Leaving a message, sounding drunk): Yeah, you’re out sailing. I get it. (Pause) I don’t know. I miss you. I wish I didn’t. (Pause) I’m balling it out here. (Pause) Yeah, I’m the baller king.
I don’t have a clue who I am, where I am going or what I’ve done. It’s a meandering thing that goes out the door and comes back in. I know something about nothing and that is about all. I am fascinated for a time. People too. There is a moment. And then not. I know it is about nothing, nothing and nothing again and almost take solace in that. Not quite.
The fact is that I hate the look-at-me dissolution of our world, the babies that never grew and think people cares about their childish discoveries. That is where we have lost everything. While the barbarians culled these ones, we’ve decided to let them run the show.
The crazy-not-crazy voice of Chief Bowden in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest shunts straight into a place we forget about because we’re scared: That ain’t me, that ain’t my face. It wasn’t even really my face then; it was just being the way I looked, the way people wanted. It don’t seem like I ever been me. I was seeing me do things that didn’t fit my face or hands, thinks like painting a picture or writing letters to somebody in a beautiful flowing hand. (140)
And defines happiness as best as any: We’d just shared the last beer and slung the empty can out the window at the stop sign and were leaning back to get the feel of the day, swimming in that kind of tasty drowsiness that comes over you after a day of going hard at something you enjoy doing – half sunburned and half drunk and keeping awake only because you wanted to savor the taste as long as you could. I noticed vaguely that I was getting so’s I could see some good in the life around me. I was feeling better than I’d remembered feeling since I was a kid, when everything was good and the land was singing kids’ poetry in me. (202)
It’s his foot. It’s not just his foot. It’s his intention. He sees me running to catch the subway. I’m going to miss it. But he swings his foot out, a big construction boot, and blocks the doors. The conductor repeatedly tries to close them, but the boot is there. And I am on.
He’s a small Latino guy, a brown construction helmet hanging from his backpack along with a level almost his height. I thank him but he says nothing. He seems indifferent. But he isn’t. I know that. He goes back to quietly talking to his friend as the train leaves the station.
I do my research and read the tweets and bios of the agents who specifically request speculative fiction. And I make my pitch. “No” is all I hear.
The biggest clunker came from an agent asking exactly for what I am writing – a generational ship off to a distant planet – and I got this form-letter response.
My Cx Trilogy pitch must be more of a scream. They need to know that the book is the future of the speculative genre. It is real. It is direct and clear. It has the voice of terror as we go straight off the cliff. In other words, it’s now or never. Now. Or never.
One step at a time. I’m getting there.
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