May 26, 2018
Treasure
It glistens, azure, beckoning across the field. The children approach from afar, captivated by its sparkle. What promise does it hold? Something beautiful, something unknown. A thing that others would want. They swiften in eager competition, maybe noone wants to share. Maybe this is something valuable, beyond any of their reckoning. It’s easy to lose, in the hillocks, until its blue glint in the corner of the eye is recaught, a starry beacon. One girl catches her toe in a rabbit hole and gashes her shin all the way up to the knee on a broken tree limb. She lays blinking in surprise, holding her leg, the anguish not yet arrived. Her friend pauses before her, then continues on, the jewel sparkle catching her eye.
May 27, 2018
What I feel
I am a 39 year old man who is discovering that he can allow himself to feel more confident, sometimes. I have a 1 year old son and another child on the way. I have a career that I am known and relatively respected in, though I have achieved no major success. I still hold on to some juvenile aspects of my personality, though I’ve slowly sacrificed them as the years pass. The biggest one I’m trying to fight is my stubborn resistance to forcing myself to do things I don’t want to do. This battle is playing out in my attempt to write a book. I’ve barely gotten anywhere in it because I have a hard time sustaining my attention and energy on it. It’s almost like I need someone to structure my time and hold me accountable to work for me to really get it done, which is probably why I have achieved no major successes.
May 28, 2018
Cooking
While living in Tahoe in my early and mid 20s, I realized that I was not self-sufficient – I couldn’t cook for myself, and barely even knew how to boil water. So I took a cooking class at Tahoe Community College and bought a Zen cookbook. As a celebration of my newfound prowess, I cooked a whole Thanksgiving meal. For myself, my needs were simple – I just cooked brown rice and sauteed vegetables and tofu for most meals, though I wonder how nutritionally sound this was over time, as I recall being really sick for a couple of months that winter. But I was proud of being able to provide for myself, being able to go to a supermarket and pick out items and cook them without great expense. I could take care of myself.
Now Jamie cooks everything for me. I made some meals, in the beginning, but I was a little too careless in trying new things and boring for her, I think. So it has now been years since I made a meal aside from pancakes and eggs. This makes me feel bad, as I took pride in being able to cook, once upon a time. But I also don’t feel like I have the time and mental space to devote to relearning how to cook.
Chris bought me The Food Lab, a giant book on science-based cookery, and I bought Samin’s cookbook on how to cook without recipes. Maybe one of these days I’ll dig into them and cook again.
April 2, 2018
Awake. Snow is on the ground, light snowfall continuing. It’s 6 o’clock, which really isn’t that early, when you think on it. I went to bed an hour earlier last night, and it made a difference – it feels as if I slept a really long time. My morning routine is admittedly not usually productive – I should be working on my book or running or something. But trying to get this freewrite for 10-15 minutes thing going. Because then at least I’ll have written something each day, and maybe it will help get me going on this book that I’m having so much trouble getting myself to work on. Ah, the book. I should have known better than to go around announcing I’m writing a book. Now that I’ve done that, part of my brain thinks it’s already written. Note to self, if I ever write this book and decide to write another one: don’t announce anything until you’ve at least gotten it halfway written. It’s 6:15, cars slushing through the sleety slush. There’s more snow than I expected, which means my commute is going to really suck. And now it’s time to complete the remainder of my morning – shit, shower, clothes, shoes, pack up.
April 4, 2018
Stress
Took a workshop at Fordham on Stress Reduction yesterday. Not because I felt the need to reduce my stress, but because it was at Fordham and I could get home earlier.
But thinking of stress. We know that the kids at the schools I work with in the Bronx experience toxic stress. Their communities are stressed. Scarcity and tunnel vision is the norm. It’s like their communities are inflamed, in the way the human body undergoes inflammation when someone is stressed out. The immune response attacks itself.
Some stress can be good, however. I know that I need more stress in order to be less complacent. Stress from a boss or from a desire to do a task well helps me to focus and produce better work.
What I’ve found is that I lack independent self-discipline to produce work. I’m struggling to write this book because I have no one overseeing me, so I can keep backing out of it when I should be producing.
So some stress is essential. The question is, when does stress become damaging? I think perhaps this hinges on whether the stress is around something you can control to some degree. For example, I mentioned stress as being positive in a work or task specific situation, whereas stress that I couldn’t control, like car alarms outside, or whether the heat is coming on in our apartment, whether there is violence in my street, etc. That kind of stress takes its toll, and that’s the type of stress we see with many of our kids. It bestows learned helplessness.
April 5, 2018
Jasper will turn 1 year old next Saturday! It’s amazing how quickly this time went. I can remember that 1st night back from the hospital, after we changed him and put him down on our bed to sleep, when we looked at each other in the hallway and said, “there’s a little human laying on our bed. What are we doing?” It was terrifying, and magical.
And now he’s crawling all over the apartment, babbling away, playing with toys, pointing at everything, eating eating eating. The terror is gone, but it still feels magical. He is so sweet and fun, I miss him everyday when I have to go to work.
Everyone says how hard it is to raise kids, but so far it’s been nothing but bliss. Knock on wood.
April 6, 2018
Why does there need to be a topic in order to write freely? There doesn’t. It does provide a form of discipline, but sometimes it’s good to just get the fingers clickety-clacketing away. Off to the races. Tally-ho. And so forth, on the foxhunt of freeing up the mind.
I really have allowed my writing skills to fester—I can’t even type as fast as I used to be able to, and since my writing has always been contingent on the keyboard, this must affect my writing content as well. Part of my style, if you could term it that, has been to sit and write what comes first to mind. If I can’t convey it almost as quickly as it comes, then the quality may suffer. Like John McLaughlin channeling the spirits through his fret board.
This discipline, or this freeing, this practice in flexibility, is worthy of continuing. In order to write this book, I need to not only put in the time synthesizing research, but making it sing through dramatization and story. And that will require my writing chops to resurface.
I hope that this practice will assist in that endeavor.
April 10
Rain holds a mystique and power for me since I was a child, perhaps because it was so rare when it came in San Diego, and short-lived when it did. I loved it when it swelled into a downpour while I was laying in bed at night.
I loved the goosebumps I would get when I envisioned myself laying outside underneath a plastic cover, being able to look directly up and see the rain, listen to the rain as it came down right above me, while shivering in the cold. I loved imagining this and getting goosebumps. I would pull the covers down and my shirt up so I would get goosebumps on my belly.
There was a kind of pathos to this feeling, something desperately passionate but also tragic, perhaps due to the shortness of the duration of the rain. I always wanted it to continue, but it always subsided quickly.
April 12
It was so nice to be back in a school where people want to be there and like each other, and the children are cared for. It’s a good feeling – you feel part of a community as soon as you start working there, and it is such a stark contrast to the feeling I am now used to walking into most renewal schools.
Maybe it’s just because it’s an elementary school, but I recall a similar sense of feeling at JBA. The kids seem like normal kids. At Renewal schools, there are normal kids sitting there trying to get by and do their best, but then there are the damaged kids that run the schools. It’s not fair to the kids who are trying to learn and move forward that they have to walk down hallways filled with cursing, yelling, and aggression.
April 13
Water is the wonder of our existence on this planet. It accepts all, cold and hot, effluvium and holy. It has touched everything here, at some point, inner and outer, sky and mantel. The holographic hiss of its edges sexing the shore. The feeling of immersion in its aqueous mass. The taste of processed water defines our day. We throw our clothes into it, baptize our children in it, shit into it, wash our skin and our mouths and our hair in it.
April 17
Suddenly, just like that, middle age has crept upon me. My memories seem to have stopped somewhere in my 20s, while the rest of me moved on. So here I am, an adult, supposedly, with a career, and a wife, and children, but none of the other trappings that should come along with it, like a car and a house. But I also live in NYC, where there are many other adults without these things, so I guess I shouldn’t feel bad about it. I don’t think I do feel bad about it. I just don’t feel like a normal adult, I guess.
April 18
It’s inconceivable to me that there are people who “support” Donald Trump as president other than as a purely knee-jerk hatred towards anything they know they are “supposed” to support that benefits other people. The only way I can understand it is ignorance and willful stupidity, or conforming to cultural pressures around you.
I suppose we’re supposed to try to understand those on the other side and make some kind of effort at civic empathy, but in this case, I think there has to be a line in the sand. If you support a greedy, narcisstic, corrupt pustule like Trump, then you are an enemy of our future and of our nation. There is no listening to you.
April 19
Gorgon stare. The glassy wall-eyed mount of 360 all-time surveillance. We are afraid of this – the looming oppression of our civil liberties.
Yet while this fear is almost instinctual, I feel like the other side is rarely heard, nor considered. Without surveillance, we then rely upon the kindness of strangers, or the happenstance patrol and attendance of police, to ensure safety and adherence to public law.
And when you live in an area where there is a high degree of sketchiness, and you can’t trust your neighbors to be kind or law-abiding, then surveillance provides you two comforts: 1) deterrence, as human behavior is shifted simply by the awareness they may be watched; and 2) if God forbid some act of violence or criminality does occur, then there is a record that can be returned to so justice can at least have some potential of being served.
I see laws broken everyday in my own neighborhood and in the neighborhoods where I visit schools. And that’s not even mentioning traffic laws.
Everytime some asshole blows through a red light at an intersection, I wish there were a camera on that traffic light.
So to be perfectly honest, I would much prefer to live in a world where there is more surveillance, rather than less.
A world where the noise levels are automatically monitored, and when they spike at dangerous decibel levels, then police are sent to investigate and ticket. All those cars rigged up with deafening sound systems so testosterone laden morons can ride around spewing their shitty music into everyone’s bedroom? Then they could actually be addressed – even automatically through associating the noise with a license plate via camera, instead of long-suffering citizens having to rely upon the chance that a passing cop would care enough to do something about it.
I wouldn’t mind living in a world like that.
April 20
Sharks
We fear sharks, the predators of the deep, firstly, because they look scary. Layered rows of sharp teeth made for gripping and shredding. Flat, emotionless eyes.
Secondly, because they are lords of an aqueous underworld we don’t really understand. They glide effortlessly through the depths.
Thirdly, because they don’t have many anthropomorphic features or behaviors that can help us relate to them. Their very skin will cut when rubbed the wrong way. They are the opposite of the animal qualities we are most attracted to – warm, fuzzy, cute, playful, and full of expression.
April 24
Blank screen.
Mind racing.
What is worth
capture?
Or what residue
will compile along the screen,
a heavier detritus of the aery
aether left behind?
The baby cries out in his crib to be comforted.
Saved.