People (or their hypertextual avatars) seem to have different ways of dealing, coping, processing, buttressing, ignoring, rationalizing, distracting — everyone chooses the vocabulary they like the best, like how I chose the mechanical keyboard switches I like the best (Gateron Banana!) — even if ultimately it doesn’t matter, the thing that’s out there is still out there and heading towards in here, so it would appear, really fucking fast. Likewise with the keyboard — trawl (or troll) the forums all you want, design the perfect keyboard and never be satisfied; you’re still going to type whatever it is you’re going to type, or not. One way or another.

Some people refer to this conglomerate or aggregate of things that seem to be happening to us right now as an inflection point. I’ve also heard shit show. Take your pick. Crisis, downfall, beginning of the end, return of feudalism, etc, etc. Some like to focus on what wasn’t perfect about the previous administration(s). Or the previous status quo. Some say what’s happening now started in the 80s. Some would say more like the 1880s. Others would say they’re all zooming in too much, thinking too small! People talk of cycles.

It’s weird how much of my day is consumed by thinking about it all, and how little of my day involves talking about it with anyone else, hearing people talk about it in any concrete terms, or doing anything about it. Like, look around on the Ave (being careful at all times not to get murdered by a car) and everything basically looks and sounds and smells the same — except, does it? Is something different about the angle of the sunlight, the wan way it filters through a sky that seems, somehow, I don’t know, slightly fake? Or is that just my imagination.

I guess the question I keep coming back to is, What am I supposed to do? What can I do? I feel ashamed of myself and to an extent my whole generation, that that’s where I so readily end up. “What am I supposed to do” is the question that makes me grit my teeth when my students ask it. Read the fucking directions! It’s all right there! Don’t be so helpless! And yet here I am, asking the same fucking thing. This question is where the pinball ends up after you’ve frantically flapped the flippers to no avail. How many balls I got left? Game over.

Is there a goodwashing, like how there’s a greenwashing? Recycle your plastics! That’ll show ’em! Quit complaining and be a part of something good! Be a source of positivity. Greet your neighbor. Volunteer. Meanwhile, your student debt skyrockets, your health insurance is a joke, your investment in your home is suddenly not as bulletproof as everyone assured you it was going to be, and any program that actually helps actual people gets its funding burned to the ground. A day is no longer a day. The nazis are no longer the enemy, wait what? So all that stuff I learned in, like, elementary school...?

And yet, the fact that I’m trying to be ironic and cynical and world-weary and, I don’t know, what’s the word, not exactly jaded, urbane about all this stuff? Understated for effect? Flat? Dry? Isn’t that serving “them” too, though? If being a pollyanna isn’t going to do any real good, then neither is being too smart to be a pollyanna. Hell, I can still get up and walk around. I still have a job, at least today. Tomorrow. I have a car. I have some food. Yes, all this could change in an instant. We’ve been over this: everything and anything can change out of nowhere, on a random Thursday afternoon. It’s your funeral if you respond to that reality with paralysis. I think this is what our greatest storytellers have understood. The story isn’t you being aghast, the story isn’t your burning angst. The story is just what happens. Just tell that. Tell it. Get as honest as you can with it. See what happens. I don’t fully understand how, but somehow that is one of the ways we survive, one of the ways we take care of each other.

OK, enough of that. Let’s reveal tonight’s pigeon, shall we? We still have pigeons. They’ve survived volcanoes, empires, solar flares, karmic inversions, regicide, genocide, bombs, fires, plagues, revolutions — they can survive this too. Maybe.

pigeon

Going to Glim’s photography class with a bowl of raw cookie dough: “Wow, that’s hard core.”

There’s national or global hard times, and there’s personal hard times. There’s times you think are hard times at the time, but looking back you’re like, why did I think that was such a hard time? Compared to what came later, that is.

On the bridge over a little creek in the summer heat, with the smell of the planks, the tar, and the sweltering sun, I’d asked Glim to marry me and she’d said yes. Well, it was more like “We need to either break up or get married!” And she was like, “So ... do I get to choose?”

We had two apartments, one upstairs and one down, in the same pleasantly dilapidated 1920s tan brick rectangle on the collegiate side of Columbia MO, and we mixed all our stuff together and pretended they were one big apartment. That was kind of fun. It was like playing house in an enormous pillow fort made out of bricks. We mingled each other’s messes and made a bigger mess.

She was outgoing, I was reticent in mixed company (unless we were in Mixed Company). She made friends with relative ease, I usually had to wait for the right situation to present itself. Making friends with her friends — that helped. The gaggle of pagans that we fell in with. She was sexually adventurous, defiantly so; under her tutelage I guess you could say, I began to embrace bisexuality. My first gay bar, my first threesome, my first — well, a lot of my firsts were because of her. That I didn’t recognize the vulnerability under the defiance was merely one of my many failures of perception at that time in my life.

It was all fantastic, except we weren’t really in love and I didn’t really want to get married, and I don’t think she really did either.

Funny thing — I don’t precisely remember how or when we called it off. It must have meant something, felt some kind of way at the time, but — yeah. Hm.

Well, now I’m thinking about it, I do remember — but some parts of it are other pigeons so maybe we’ll visit them later.

I used her to cushion my fall into my first big period of feckless depression. I am sorry about that. She was still enrolled in classes; I was taking the semester off because I had failed a bunch of classes (can you believe I used the excuse “I fell in love” — actually said that to one of my actual professors!?) and my dad was like, get your shit together or we’re not paying for any more of this. Only because he’s my dad, he said it in a more civilized way.

This was before the shared apartment — I was mostly staying at her place, with her roommate, whom I took a bath with once (another pigeon), because I couldn’t stand being at my place, partly because my roommates kind of hated me, for mostly pretty legit reasons. I had crap jobs but also a fair amount of time off. One stupid afternoon, I got bored of playing with her wicked fast Mac IIfx that she had convinced her mom to buy (exorbitant!) because she “needed” it for her artistic pursuits. So I made a big ass bowl of raw cookie dough to eat, because why bother baking the fucking things when there’s no one there to be like, hold on now, let’s actually make the fucking cookies. But I was still bored so I went to visit my cushion — at her photography class — with my big ass bowl of cookie dough under my arm. And a spoon.

In the dictionary to illustrate the word “askance” there should be a picture of the look her photography teacher gave me when I entered that room. She was like, damn, I mean I’ve had days when I wanted to sit around and eat raw cookie dough before, but to take it out in public? Now that’s hard core.

I did not take it as a compliment.

It was not meant as one.

Later, Glim would tell me that she had had a long talk with that professor, with whom she had one of those good teacher-student relationships, and that she, the teacher, had said, “You know, you can wait.” As in, wait to get married.

Glim said it pissed her off, but I knew — come on, we both had to have known — her teacher was right. But we were still acting dumb, like we didn’t know stuff, because we wanted to feel good, and getting high and playing with the Macintosh and eating a fuck ton of cookie dough wasn’t enough. Yeah, those things were good enough for a day, a night, a week, a bath, but we wanted a life! We wanted to be grown up and be someone, I guess? Ah, who am I kidding. I don’t know what we — what I was thinking. Maybe just that I didn’t want to be alone.

It was the 90s. I was young and pretty fucking cute, a passable twink if you really want to know. Yes, AIDS was still doing a lot of psychic damage to a lot of sexual identities at that time. But still. I wasted more time than it seems like I would have had to, worrying about myself. I guess I wasn’t unique in that. Sometime around then is when I started trying to find the perfect typewriter. (They were a lot cheaper and easier to find in thrift stores back then — not all that trendy yet!) After that it was fountain pens, stereo equipment, sexual identities, bicycles, career aspirations, camera equipment, the exact dead-on perfect fucking mouthpiece for my flute, for fuck’s sake. It was always something. Mechanical keyboards. That’s one of the reasons I don’t actually “have” any money, even though I have a house and a car and stuff like that.

Besides her in my life I’ve asked two other people to marry me and one of them said yes, and that’s a whole fucking flock of pigeons, each carrying their one small, solid memory, arcing overhead, over the chimneyed skyline, into the twilight, out of the morning, under the strangely slanting sun.

Not married now, of course. Likely never again. I still want some things. Just not that.

Now if you’ll excuse me, my daughter is downstairs making cupcakes, and I’m gonna go eat some of the batter.

That’s a small good thing (yes, that’s a reference — couldn’t help it — I dreamed Raymond Carver kissed me on the cheek one time, you know!) in a time like this.