how alive are you (excerpt)

the intro to a character in a novel i am working on (how alive are you)

      Summer heat berated my back and foreign chemicals pumped through my blood and I felt like a man inhabiting dead space. I stopped moving and thought about the chemical deeply and my hands starting shaking uncontrollably. I tried to lie down but ended up sprinting. I was in a suburban neighborhood, leaping fences, soaked in mud. Someone could have been following, was not exactly clear, but in the accelerated haze I pumped my arms and legs and decided to not take a chance on anything, ever.

      My foot caught a chain-link fence and I spilled over onto the front of my neck. Mud grits in my teeth. Chemicals. I felt them. I felt everything. I looked up and saw the night sky bloom around me. The concept of burning balls of carbon and hydrogen billions of years away, moving at immense speeds, the frightening nature of it, all spurned me to rise up and bolt towards my house. My lungs were on fire.

After a steady pace I collapsed in my basement and fell asleep.

If they want me, they got me, I thought, I give up.

kind of like how eventual death justifies smoking cigarettes

liquid sleep gel tablets sliding gently down a dry throat
the man enveloped in the summer heat
essentially palpable heat
humid air also stale and biting
like the atmosphere was made from grass clippings
like the air itself was converging maliciously at his position
the sun raging up in the morning like a buzzard circling the dead planet
spotting the tracks in the sand
peaking over a nearby breakfast restaurant
the man will wake up and stretch and piss
and things will be more or less the same tomorrow

the enigma variates

my dad said ‘I’m fifty-two years old
and I still get acne on my back’
and I said ‘so’
and my dad said ‘so life doesn’t
always turn out like you plan’

baboon

couldn’t say no and now
I don’t want to be here for another year
i don’t want to be anywhere for another year
let me turn twenty six so that I can get over my
quarter life crisis
and move on to my mid life’s one

swing low
sweet chariot

I own too many mirrors
too much plastic garbage
I am walking to the gas station
to buy sweet tea
and a forty of medicine
on a credit union debit card

coming forth to take me home

think about heaven as I watch television
clouds dissipating in my hand
a more or less profound vapor
try to elevate
figured it was impossible
bone spurs on my elbows
rip into the couch
meat hooks, hooking meat

swing low
sweet chariot

Seeing ‘everything in nothing’ or ‘nothing in everything’ seem like dual and equal concepts to me right now at two in the morning

a bright orange car idles at a stoplight
the color orange can bring on feelings of pain and anger
a man told me, once
a different person told me that the color orange
is a terrific anti-depressant
the dichotomy evokes a strange emotion in me
that when it comes to the abstract
everyone is talking
tongues essentially meandering
in some kind of large and fucked circle
the bright orange car peels out
when the stoplight signals green
the color green can bring on feelings of calmness and serenity
some woman told me, once
another person told me that it represents illness and money
I want to hold the concept of meaning in my palm
and pet her little belly
like meaning is a tiny hamster
scurrying aimlessly in a cage

thoughts on 'falling man' by don delillo

i was in junior high during 9/11, and can mainly remember watching television in the class room on the day. i remember a few teachers mumbling to each other in my morning class. i remember the 'funny' teacher was the one who told everyone a plane flew into the world trade center. when i got home, and i remember my mom having an extremely neutral facial expression, but she was very pale. she avoided eye contact. she seemed very frightened and very human.

i was about 13. the event was sort of 'lost' on me, i imagine. i remember comparing it 'march madness', because the teachers all would watch tv in class for that too. i was talking to a girl and made a joke about guys jumping out of buildings and the girl scolded me. it was everything that followed 9/11 that had an impact on me. all the incendiary speech and flag waving and general feeling of hope/fear.

delillo starts the novel with a man named keith emerging from the bottom of one of the towers. he does not recount his experiences until the novels finale. the children refer to 'bin laden' as 'bill lawton'. they hide binoculars from their parents and search the skies for more planes. they claim the towers are still standing. it is a very effective dynamic for establishing muddled fear/confusion + an entertaining vignette.

delillo's style is strategically repetitive in parts and disconnected and often brilliant. characters spew clunky philosophy that is endearing somehow, probably because how muddy and confused and humane the entire novel is. i wouldn't imagine the dialogue as being universally liked, it frequently goes 'abstract/disconnected', like a dialogue with two people is usually basically two monologues seemingly chopped up. it works, though, but it ain't 'easy' or 'streamlined'.

i think a huge part of why the novel 'works' is because this is not about the terrorists. while he does write scenes focusing on a 'terrorist' character, it isn't out of hate/malice/any kind of spite. its a calm veil of understanding. don't confuse the understanding with sympathy. the style is not passionate about any particular character. its a grey medium that lets the individual colors of scenarios/situations 'pop' out.

i remember watching the planes hit the towers a lot on cable television, wide eyed, absorbing, digesting. i watched them and i never really reacted, never fully committed to a set, established reaction. i remember our jr high had a fake election debate in 2000, where one kid in the grade pretended to be george bush and one kid pretended to be john kerry. i was george bush.

housewife kafka

She drives to the hotel and there is no reservation
like some kind of monster from the abyss
so she goes to her church’s training seminar
with no home but total darkness, our universe
and she parks in the street but it is raining
seems much to bright. A sentience with a generic feeling of
and she forgot her umbrella. She finishes training
hunger now meanders from planet to planet. It understands
and comes back and her reservation isn’t fixed so they
all the intricate and horrible moving parts of working universes
find it and fix it. She goes to her room and there is no
and travels freely through them. It is looking for what
hot water. She gets her room moved to a different building
it considers to be its true offspring, a maleficarum of deep
and she locks her keys in the car, but can’t call triple A from
wrath. Barely above a man, but with power willing, sitting
the hotel phone.  She calls a towing service to unlock her car
serenely in a lost pocket of reality, waiting for some
and when she gets to the room there is no Kleenex
poisonous being to creep in and make it more
and she tells the hotel staff this in the morning
than it already is in terms of wrath and awareness
‘oh, the troubles I have had to endure’ she says
‘oh, the troubles I have had to endure’ he says