Remember that time I tried to be a train conductor?  Here's a recap of the hiring session:

HR lady had a cheese blintz fixation, and the first hour of the orientation was dominated by increasingly dire predictions of our future in train conducting.  One little known fact is that trains, much like dobermans, can smell fear...

...and will act upon that.  If you aren't "truefful" to yourself, if, for example, you did not wear your seatbelt, or did not really mean it when you prayed, the train may CUT YOU IN HALF (they really said this).  It's like the final scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when Indy and the bad guy have to pick the real holy grail, and the bad guy picks the wrong one and gets eaten up by maggots and rot and blows into dust.  Sobering, folks.  Also, not for me.  And for our hours of early a.m. misery, they didn't give us so much as a cup of coffee, hence my wistful tracing of the carrot nipple I brought in my pocket.

Anyway, on Monday I begin a different job, a job which has risen from the ashes of my transportation industry career dreams on warm gentle winds: hot air balloon launcher.  I know!  So much better than being a train conductor.  Wish me luck.

P.S. Sally, these drawings are very inspired by the ones you used to do in class.  Thanks for showing me that coping mechanism.

Dreams and Sour Grapes

The night before last I dreamed of a woman with seven vaginas arranged vertically down her middle, multiply (-plee) pregnant and a highly popular prostitute.  Last night my wayward soul must have inadvertently entered a swimmer at some foreign, perhaps English or French beach, scaring the swimmer's friend and causing other beachgoers to believe she had lost her mind.  One shocked old man in red flowered swim trunks stands out particularly; he stared at me when I buried my hands in the sand for stability.  I reeled my soul in asap when I realized the mix-up and lurched into the kitchen for water.  On an unrelated (?) subject, I decided optimistically to attempt the ivory tower of grad school.  As with any tower, the approach to this one begins easily but becomes totally dismal when you get to the tower part.  I registered for the GRE.  I looked for scholarships, because nothing is happening without generous moneys.  Would you like to know why I am prepared to resign myself to a life of sometime babysitting and quail egg-peddling?  This is a sample awardee.  Please do read it:

Skroch graduated in 2009 with degrees in Political Science, International Relations, Peace and Conflict Resolution Studies, and African Studies. She studied at Université Gaston Berger in Senegal. She was the recipient of the Abraham S. Burack and F. Chandler Young Awards for outstanding research abroad for her year-long fieldwork examining local resolutions to violent civil war in the Casamance region of Senegal. She has worked with international students and refugees in various capacities, with a dialogue and reconciliation initiative in Israel and the West Bank through the QUEST Program, and as a Soliya Connect Program Facilitator, using new media to mediate dialogue on relevant political and social issues between young people around the world. She worked for Wisconsin Public Television as a documentary editor and transcriber, was interviewed on NPR’s Here on Earth about her experiences, and presented a thesis on dependency theory in the Congo at the Interdisciplinary Conference on Violence. Post-college, Skroch was a Fulbright Scholar in Morocco, researching post-conflict democratic transition via the Equity and Reconciliation Commission, while also interning at a medical rehabilitation center for torture victims. She grew up in the Philippines and Wisconsin, and speaks French, Arabic, Moroccan Darija, and Wolof."

Wolof, huh?  They can program machines to do some pretty amazing things these days.  All that boring human stuff like food, sleep, sex, tears, failure -- gone.  Maximum efficiency.  Fuck me.

My own CV has the stale flavor of a life crisis and seems to be saying, "You're old enough to know that if you ever want to get off food stamps: ITT Tech."  Nonetheless, can I show you a funny thing I made?

Malediction

You wise men and your hideous, oppressive unities, your eternal progressions, regressions, fractals, and universal laws, pure and empty as a fresh condom.  When I see your gnostic, patient smile, glassy, thousand-year fisheye stare, I shudder.  I throw myself behind Satan and say, "better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven!"  Swallow your enlightenment like the tongue of a paralytic -- you have settled, mummified in your high seat without even the quickening of maggots or the thrilling odor of bacteria.  If you, preacher of the ONE, the GOOD, all-seer, all-knower, benevolent puffy-lidded lord, are the gatekeeper, keep your nation -- of order, of fascistic columns, serendipitous coincidences, providential meetings, holy numbers, asymptotic lines.  May they rot you through and through like ingested fiberglass, like rigid diatoms do flies.

Oh sweet, wild life, keep me from wisdom.  Gift me with confusion and disaster.  Crush my kingdom.  Undo me.  May I never believe.  May I never ascend to enlightenment.  Give me no powers of persuasion.  Give me sex, accidents, paroxysms of terror, early morning light, swarms of insects, unruly fruits, flowers, thorns, poisons.  Impale me with unlooked-for ecstasies.  I adore you, life.  I scream in adoration, hatred, joy.  Take no prisoners here.

New Tat

Did this drawing last night, in one marathon sitting. I'm pretty slow (and deer legs are wicked hard to get right -- they still look pretty stiff to me). It was midnight when I finished. I'd been reading Russian Fairy Tales illustrated by the remarkable Ivan Bilibin all day, and re-reading The Master and Margarita, so maybe that's why it's so... um.... whimsical? macabre?  Whimsico-macabre. I promised my girlfriend that I'd design a tattoo for her, to finish her sleeve which already has a Japanese folk tale wound up in it. So I figured this would fit in. It will be mostly green with some red for the blood and fungi, and the deer will be fawn-colored.  If she accepts it, that is.  If not, I don't blame her.  It's weird-lookin.

Thanks for that, BP.

It's like reruns of your favorite sitcom. Day or night, if you start feeling a little dead, a little disconnected, like you need a bigger narrative to connect with, want to cry a bit maybe, or maybe all that talk of the "junk shot" in the news has got you hot and bothered in that trashy midafternoon cable-porn kinda way, just take a gander at those black billows and feel your puny sorrows and vagrant loin-heat leach out into big Mama Gulf:

Live feed of the oil spill.

Thanks, BP, for attempting to fill a hole in our collective gut with tires, string, human hair, tennis balls, and whatever other cheap shit you can lay hands on. Because sometimes we just feel so empty inside.

Heart of Darkness, or Yes, I Took a Lot of Theory.

IMPORT REPORT SUPPORT TRANSPORT
COMPORT DEPORT EXPORT
APPORTION DISPROPORTION
PORTFOLIO
PORTAL
IMPORTANT IMPORTANT
IMPORTANT OPPORTUNITY

[In training today I noticed a remarkable number of words contain "port." My cynical and corroded heart told me the following, in a pretentious monotone, to be sure.]

Corporate language and the PORT.
Hot blue receiving bays of sweet virgin lands locked across waters (accidental and irreversible like swollen waters before parturition) to scummy chilly harbors where burdened northern rivers expire with stretched mouths, entered and left by teeming thousands. PORT- -PORT- -PORT is: an inner, suprahistorical preoccupation with commerce's first rapine birth in sorrow and riches (EXEUNT: riches) by ports, ports, ports opened everywhere on every continent. Forced open with guns. Eased open with gifts. Latin gate, entrance, harbor; Latin to bear, carry, bring. We always give back. Open the port. Wider. Put a burger in it. A bigger burger. Thank you for your participation. This is a very important opportunity.

[I'm no hater. I can't wait for this paycheck. I warned you. My heart is bitter and corroded and makes the worst of a really good situation.]

Day One in Brah-son City

And I've already trashed my hotel room like a rock star. Not only that, but I am simultaneously typing this, reading the New York Times, and watching music videos on a giant flat screen TV about three feet from my face (why did they hang the TV above the desk? I have the resistance of a homeschooled freshman at a  college party.)

This new job is a big deal, I guess. Five days of training and piles of manuals and four course lunches and big hotel rooms and two-hour powerpoints on business ethics and black-and-white suits... all paid. I made a hundred bucks today sitting on my ass. Actually I only sat on my ass half the day because around 3 I became violently ill and had to be taken upstairs to lie down on a king size resort bed overlooking the spring forests, after a hot bath. I wasn't faking, jerk.

The most interesting part has been watching the subtle power plays between the local mountain folk, some of them Cherokee (though none look it, to be honest, probably due to Cherokee's famously liberal enrollment policies), and the training staff flown in from Chicago. Sweet-faced office-muffin lady gestures Vanna-like to the bullet point which reads, "PETS," and says, "Now most pets are perfectly friendly, but we just ask, for the purposes of this study [involving in-home interviews, FYI] that you request the owner of the pet to please put him or her in another room for the duration of the interview." A lot of my fellow trainees have worked on various reservations before, and a chuckle goes round the room. I'm thinking about the feral dog herds of my hometown whose sole human connection is with a bullet, and the chained furies of the Navajo res in their circles of barren earth through which one passes like a ball on a mini-golf course, with fear and trembling. One lady says, "Ma'am, hev you ay-ver been on a resurvay-tion?" (Excuse the weak attempt at dialect; you really just had to hear this woman.) "Well, um, no," says the HR muffin nervously, amidst more laughter. "Guess you got nothin to say about dogs then!" hollers one of the men. And then the lady (veteran park ranger) politely prepped us all on what to do WHEN we run into bears, and another man followed up with a tutorial on bull elk. The trainers were crestfallen.

This kind of thing went on all day. When the trainers suggested professional clothing, they were laughed out. When they suggested certain ways of speaking, someone said, "No ma'am. You jest best have a sense of humor is all." The slow-talking, in-the-know locals versus the big city professionals.

Tomorrow we do role-playing. I'm nervous in the way one used to get before those prepared speeches in high school, not for any particular reason, just trembly and fuzzy-brained.