Part 1

For me, I think, I have discovered the problem, the root problem, or at least the symptom, the symptom that would have me bled out and therefore may as well be the root. The disorder and the virus that creates it are not the same thing, let's be clear, but agents of the mind are ill-defined entities and it's hard enough to puzzle out epidemiological causality in the visible world, let alone these swamps.

For me, the issue is what happens on a Sunday afternoon when I have nothing planned, nowhere to go, and a hundred possible low-to-mid-level needful tasks to perform, each one urgent in its own right and each one revoltingly futile when placed alongside the flooding truth that a Sunday afternoon unveils, which is of eternal loneliness and death. I have a car headliner that's falling down bit by bit, obscuring my driving and drizzling a horrible ocher foam of heat-degraded adhesive onto heads and into eyes. I have a tutoring session to prepare for, with a student I enjoy and on a subject I'm interested in studying. I have an article to write about a thing I want to write about. I have okra to pick and a garden bed to build. I have an endless stack of magazines to read. I need to find a good doctor. I need to call my mother, my soon-to-be-married friend, my in-the-hospital friend, a dozen friends I barely keep in touch with. I have a list of discrete and pleasant obligations to perform, none of which are the least bit overwhelming or intimidating.

It starts slowly. It starts with coffee. I drink some cups in the morning and read the paper. That's a good start to the horror -- there's so goddamn much of the paper and it's all goddamn important, I don't care what you say, but is it more important than those magazine articles? Than my vehicle? Than my own mother? Then it's noon. It's noon and I'm still in my house. I fidget the paper down to the floor and decide to do something with my hands. I walk up and down. I pick up tools and books, trying to start on anything at all and leave them laying inert and sad on horizontal surfaces. My roommate leaves to do good things, worthy things, things outside the house. I stay home because I have things to do and the day is ticking away and away and I have things to do and my god. Outside, the afternoon heat peaks and the air conditioner helpfully keeps me in a comfortable external stasis, all the better to ramp up brain temperature to a boil from the inside. Thoughts and worries loop in on themselves, knotting up tight and generating internal heat with their own frantic friction. I get on the Internet. I get off the Internet. How many of the semi-important tasks have I accomplished? You guess. It's less than one, that's for sure. A thrum has started at some point -- I didn't notice it before, but now it's rising and rising. I pick up the tools and books I dusted my furniture with earlier in a frantic attempt to triage myself with housework. It's at this point I usually start talking to myself.

Laid off

It's never been easy for me to write anything, ever. It's always a tortured, disorganized process of constant switchbacks and spontaneous edits. I agonize over syntax for hours. It's a war of attrition. I don't know any other way to do it. Now I'm not sure that I can do it at all.

Here's the thing. Three months ago I was all giddy with mountains and salmon and New Experiences. I was ready to blog my diminishing youth away as best I could. Then a hole in my life opened up and death and caprice magicked away two of the principal people for whom I write -- for whom I wrote -- and with them whatever voice I had developed. And after that, things kept happening, changing. Geography, jobs, textures. Possibilities opened, possibilities closed. Diminutions. Inversions. Transmutations. Devolutions. A lot. A lot has happened.

I don't want to stop writing on my blog. I never intended to stop, but that's one of the things that's happened. I've tried to start again numerous times here in my new old house in my old new town in my refurbished life. I sit down at the desk. Or on the couch. Often, I have coffee with me. Sometimes it's late at night and I'm the only one awake; sometimes it's a sunny afternoon and I'm fully alert. Either way, I sit and I sit. I visit the Internet carnival and bloat myself with cotton candy. I come back. I write a sentence and backspace it away. I read some old posts. I read other people's old posts. I go back to the carnival for more candy. I check my bank account and think about making a budget. (I don't.) I have some Triscuits. I read some Salon. I read some Slate. I open up a bunch of lengthy things in tabs that I'll never read. I listen to the cats who've been having sex for weeks on the south side of our house. I go back to the carnival.

A carnival, even a bleak and banal one, is bound to be better than sitting in an empty cubicle that smells of office cleanser. The boxes all have been cleared out and there are men from the remodeling company here measuring things and marking up proposed changes to the HVAC system on blueprints. The remaining workers are whispering to each other and surreptitiously pointing when they think to look my way. I just keep sitting here. Evidently.

This is 2013

Our New Years Eve party was commissioned at around 2:30 p.m. that afternoon. We'd had two parties in December already and weren't dying to have another, but for some reason this NYE was a party desert. There was simply nothing out there. It kept coming up in conversation the days prior. What are you doing? I don't know -- nothing. What about you? I haven't heard of anything either. Man.

The 31st arrived and still nobody had heard of anything. Surely something will materialize, we all thought. Surely this impasse will be broken. Surely we won't go over the cliff. A deal was reached only when my roommate and I reluctantly cobbled together an eleventh hour party. (There's a reason we are known around town as the Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell of LR.) It was a small affair. Maybe two dozen people, most of whom filtered in after midnight. Some teenage girls had to be kicked out. An intoxicated middle-aged stranger brought us a baking dish full of shrimp scampi and was then himself kicked out for acting foolish. I drank several pint glasses of champagne and don't remember much of the night after. I danced. I played foosball. I kissed a man on the mouth. I grabbed my shovel and dug a fairly large hole in the backyard, for reasons unknown to myself and every other creature on this earth.

I woke up with what feels like a resurgence of strep throat and I didn't leave the house all day. Who knows what will happen tomorrow.

Strange Room

It's a Saturday afternoon, four days til Halloween, ten days til the election, and thirteen days til my departure date from New Orleans. I'm sitting in a bedroom with black walls but ample daylight, thanks to a bank of dirty windows. My computer faces the windows, beyond which is a cinder block wall swarming with thick greenery and flowers. Despite my supposed love of plants, I don't know any of their names. A cold front moved in last night, bringing intermittent cloud cover and a pause in the endless stupid summer of New Orleans autumn, but the sun broke through around 3 pm and the late afternoon is now as golden as the rest of October has been.

I'm in a stranger's room, some man I've never met. He works in the film industry and is in New Jersey or something doing filmy things. The only communication I've had with him, ever, is a single text message today asking him when he's coming back to reinhabit his room. His things look hip. He has rows of books I've never read but have always wanted to or at least was told that I should want to, a slide projector, ceramic knickknacks, a set of weights, a piece of Zapatista memorabilia, and a big framed black and white photo of a man smoking a cigarette in the French Quarter and looking cool. Him? I'm not sure. He does have three mirrors in this room, though.

How did this happen to me?

My proudest moment in all my dealings with New Orleans youth

I just got back from an evening run. It was dusk when I left the house and almost entirely dark by the time I was back in my neighborhood. I was about four blocks from home when I rounded a corner to encounter a porchful of kids, ages maybe 10 to 14. As I came running by the stairs, the largest teenager, a pear-shaped boy silhouetted against the streetlight, flung a pointed hand towards the ground at my feet and screamed "WATCH OUT FOR THAT DIIIICK!!"

I skidded to a halt and they all burst out with laughter. "Yep, you got me," I said. Reveling in the hilarity he had unleashed, the large boy walked a circle about the sidewalk, clapping his hands and guffawing to himself. I looked at him and he looked me in the eye and spit on the ground. The laughter continued. I kept standing there, not knowing what to say but unwilling to end it like this.

"Don't mind him, he just don't have home training," a girl told me as the laughter died down. Something was going to have to happen soon. I decided on reconcilliation and wordlessly approached him with my hand extended. I guess I moved towards him too quickly, because he said "WHOA!" and began backing away. Seizing the opportunity, I suddenly broke into a full sprint. He shouted "WHOAAAA!" and turned and ran as the rest of the kids began shrieking with laughter again. I chased him for a good four or five seconds, including a full 360 around a parked car, then continued running down the street without breaking stride. The rest of the kids were still laughing by the time I was on the next block.

It is true that by far the funniest part of this story is the phrase "watch out for that dick!" -- the kid is a genius -- but I still feel like I came out narrowly on top.

Nice view

I stayed up late last night watching the Perseid meteor shower from a canoe drifting through a silent lake. Despite the light pollution from the nearby town, it was a good show. We even saw at least one bolide. (I did not know what this word meant until just now.) Afterwards, of course, we broke out the flashlights and gunny sacks and collected about two hundred pounds of fresh, steaming meteorites -- enough to make at least three meteorite pies for dessert this week. Can't wait!

Blogging has been difficult lately for several reasons. For one, the internet connection here is terrible (it's a  satellite link that parsimoniously allots a pittance of bandwidth each day). Last weekend I was not able to blog because I was rendered mostly inoperable by my first and (hopefully) last Soldotna bar experience, in which I unwittingly ended up on the receiving end of a spiked cocktail intended for my coworker, a lithe Ecuadorian girl with a come-hither Georgia accent. (I know I just claimed that I collect metorites and bake them into pies, but I promise you that this part is all true.) And this last week I could not blog because my job required me to spend four days and three nights in the bear-infested woods.

 No bears were seen on this trip, however. There were five of us working, with two chainsaws between us. Our job was to clear fallen trees off of a trail that winds up through twenty miles of steadily climbing hills, ending at the edge of a vast alpine tundra. The trail is used by parties of hunters on horseback seeking access to the caribou and Dall sheep that roam the wilderness. Because it is meant to be traversed by horses, it is a lumpy, poorly kempt nightmare of a trail crowded with bushes and grasses and composed of uneven terrain that is alternately too steep, too muddy, or too root-filled for bipeds to find steady footing. And for some reason, each of the legions of horses that walk this trail place their steps in the same spots, meaning the trail is composed entirely of alternating hillocks and divots carved out of the ground by the systematic pistoning of clomping hooves. Hiking consists of stepping awkwardly from hillock to hillock for mile after mile.

We also had four pack horses to carry our stuff for the trip, a service provided by a local contractor who does such things (usually for hunters, I assume). Because horses are expensive and complicated machinery, the contractor came with us for the entire trip to lead and care for her creatures and also brought along another woman whose role was unclear, other than to drink Bota Box wine around the campfire and brag endlessly about how tough she was by relating boring Alaskan hunting experiences. Both ladies were uninterested in anything we were doing and (other than the all-important bragging) mostly ignored us whenever we both made camp. This was fine by me, because I was too busy each night trying to pretend I wasn't rapidly dying. Ten miles of hiking per day is something my body was totally unprepared for, let alone with packs and saws. And sometimes they actually expected me to, you know, use the saw to cut through trees, which is a loud, messy, and heavy process. I have not really gotten the hang of it yet. Still. I limped my way through it, and when we reached the summit at the end of the second day, a radiant white light filled the sky from horizon to horizon and the five of us were transformed into rearing, snorting stallions with wind-whipped manes. Then we were transformed back into hourly employees and we had to carry all of our shit the twenty miles back down the hill the next two days.

Comin in from all directions. Or, chewing placidly.

Who do I work for now, you might ask? As usual, it would be imprudent to discuss directly. Let's just say that, in a sense, this person and I have the same employer (congratulations, by the way). All in all, man, I am loving this job. I have gotten really, really lucky (and I have great friends). I spend all day outdoors -- digging, sawing, chopping, uprooting -- and whatever physical stresses come my way pale in comparison to the unending vistas of emotional and psychological stresses at my last position. Were I still at my old job, I'd be spending this beautiful Sunday evening bracing for the rumbling tide of returning children rolling into the school tomorrow. As much as I did enjoy many aspects of working with teenagers, I rarely, if ever, got to solve problems by using a chainsaw. Spare the saw and spoil the child, I say.

 In a scant six weeks, this weird miraculous gig ends (as does the part of the Alaskan year that is not winter) and I'll have to move on elsewhere. But at the moment, I'm for once nothing but thankful for things.

The $55 fish

I'm in Alaska for the next two months. I arrived here last Sunday around 9 PM, which is to say mid-afternoon. The magic of axial tilt has gifted this latitude with summer days that max out around 22 hours during the solstice, or so I've been told. Right now, at the end of July, it doesn't get seriously dark until around 11:30. It's ridiculous and wonderful, like most everything here. Daytime highs are in the low 60s. There are deer bigger than horses. There are mountains bigger than everything else in the universe combined. And there are the most delicious creatures imaginable streaming through the town in numbers averaging around 60,000 per day.

The town is called Soldatna and it is now about one week past the peak of the annual sockeye salmon run. There are five principle types of salmon in Alaska, I have learned, and sockeyes are one. As you are probably aware, [most] salmon are born in freshwater streams, migrate to the ocean to go to college and get jobs, and, at the end of their lives, complete an unbelievable trek back to the very same freshwater streams of their birth in order to spawn and then die. As they approach the end of their lives, their bodies transform in shape and and turn a bright crimson -- thus, sockeyes are also called "reds" locally. I think it is worth stopping here for a second to imagine what it would be like if our reproductive cycle was like this. What if we went through the vast bulk of adulthood entirely unconcerned with sex, going about our daily lives as pleasant, androgynous drones -- until one day in our golden years a hormonal gear clicks and we suddenly sprout strong jawlines and voluptuous curves and expend every ounce of our bodies' energy in a frenzied orgy until we physically collapse and die? Not such a bad idea.

The Kenai River is packed with sockeye salmon as they race upstream to consummate their dirty sex fantasies, and this town is packed with RVs full of fishermen from around the state and the country in pursuit of them. My friend S., with whom I am living and who brought me up here in the first place, is a pretty damn accomplished angler. He's accumulated a freezer stuffed with huge salmon filets. Consequently, I have eaten salmon every day since arriving in Alaska. I ate it for eight straight meals until a bowl of oatmeal broke my stride this morning.

This is like magic to me. I love salmon. I love it. I love it in forms low (salmon patties with fried potatoes and a big puddle of ketchup) and I love it in forms high (sizzling steaks, shavings of smokey lox, sushi). I love it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. A sockeye is a big fish -- ten pounds isn't unusual -- and produces a lot of meat. And there are thousands upon thousands of these perfect meals there for the taking at all hours of the day. All you have to do is buy a fishing license. A one day license is $15, but I bought a seven-day license for $55 -- a bargain, I thought, considering all the salmon I was about to have at my disposal.

The catch is this: I can't catch anything. I cannot catch a goddamned fish to save my miserable fucking dilettante life.

It could be worse

I have caught exactly one salmon, on my third day of trying (for at least two hours each day)...and even it was beginning to turn red, meaning that the salmon is not too far from spawning and the meat is past its prime. Still edible, though: under my friend's patient tutelage, I clumsily filleted it and froze it for a future date when I decide I want to eat some fish past its prime. Considering we're drowning in luscious salmon steaks that are precisely in their prime -- literally dozens of fish, literally scores of pounds of filets, all caught by my friend -- I'm not sure that day will come. (This is a picture of mine.)

Let me describe the process by which one catches salmon, as it's different than any other fishing I've participated in. First, waders are donned (usually) and the participant trundles into the rushing water of the river. A hook, unbaited, is cast out into the current, and a weight attached to the line sinks it to the bottom. The participant then drags this diabolical apparatus along the rocky bottom, not by reeling in but by turning his or her body and rod as the current sweeps the hook and weight downstream. An arc is thus traced upon the river bottom as the hook bumps its way along, after which the cast is repeated. The hope is that a salmon's upstream trajectory will intersect with the arc at the exact moment the hook is bumbling past, causing it to lodge in the fish's perpetually agape mouth. The salmon is reeled in, netted (often with someone else's help), and clubbed to death on shore.

If it seems absurd to you that this shot-in-the-dark method could ever, ever succeed, I agree. It's a big river and it's moving very fast. Standing at one point in the water and dragging along a one-inch hook seems a lot like grocery shopping by wandering blindfolded through town with one of those long-arm grabber claws, repeatedly snapping it open and shut in the hopes that you stick it through the right window and snag a box of macaroni and cheese. But work it does. I've seen it firsthand -- a lot. All access points to the river are crowded with fishermen (they're over 90% men, I'd say) standing as close to shoulder to shoulder as their rod lengths will allow, casting and casting and casting and scoring and scoring and scoring.

Assholes.

What a sight, folks. What an idyllic scene. There's the Kenai River, its churning, sparkling turquoise frigid even in July, its unfathomable bulk whipping past at breakneck speeds. There's the rich green of the solemn trees -- spruce and alder and birch -- and shimmering strings of Alaska wildflowers dotting the long river grasses in assorted blues and purples. There's the brilliant sun bathing everything with warmth. There are the fishermen, hip deep in the water, their lines dancing, their voices lifted in triumph and congratulation when the water breaks to reveal a huge sockeye salmon leaping from the water and tethered by the mouth to a bending pole belonging to one of their own. There's a childlike wannabe clunking around in waders that can't keep the water from soaking his crotch, tangling himself up in discarded fishing line, spurting out flaccid casts into a narrow window of river (casts which end up snagging plenty of twigs, more used line, and decaying salmon carcasses) all the while glumly eyeing the success of the other anglers -- the real anglers -- and nursing a secret malice deep in his troll-like heart, not unlike Satan. Oh, hey, that's me!

(I should stop the self-pity for a second to remember that the salmon deserve more pity than my own whimpering ego. I am not anti-fishing by any means, but you've got to admit it's at least a little cruel to rip a creature out of its journey towards its life's fulfillment by spearing it in the mouth and then bludgeoning it to death in its last moments of pain and terror. But I'm not even gonna pretend that's why I haven't caught any fish; If I could, I'd be spearing and bludgeoning with the cruelest of them.)

In addition to my $55 fishing license that has earned me exactly one moderately sub-par fish, I have also sank most of my free time this past week into this futile activity. I have tried, folks, I really have. I don't know what I'm doing wrong or what everyone else is doing right, but since my license expires tomorrow (and my patience expired yesterday at around 9 PM after another empty trip) I think I'm giving up for now. Oh well. Really, it is only fair and just that I'm failing, because I've had a lifetime of opportunities to become better at fishing and I've mostly ignored them. Arkansas is filled with delicious fish, and although I've been fishing for catfish, bass, or crappie with my brother many times since childhood, until very recently I've gone fishing mostly to spend time with him rather than because I wanted to learn how to fish. As I said, salmon fishing is much different than other fishing, but many of the principles remain the same: how to cast accurately, how to set a hook, etc. I have neglected to train myself and now that I really want to catch a fish, I'm clueless. And why haven't I learned how to fish well? Because I get bored when I go fishing, mostly. I love the scene: river or lake, quiet and calm, friends or relations, possibly beer. But I want to talk, or listen to music, or maybe read a book. I want to go somewhere else and do something fun. I want to drink the beer more rapidly. I want to have a sandwich. I want to go swimming, but it's not allowed and anyway ewwwww gross it smells like fish.  Maybe we could play some board games or something? Fuck.

Does anyone want a $55 salmon? Come to Alaska and we'll eat it together.