Forgive

Yesterday was Forgiveness Sunday. In a vespers service after Liturgy, the parishioners gather in the temple and, after some prayers and hymns, proceed to prostrate before each other, and ask forgiveness. Each person, in turn, bows before each of the others, young and old, new converts and cradle-born. Even the priest himself will fall to the ground before little Timmy, and the middle-aged matriarch before her teenage son, and ask for forgiveness for wounds they’ve inflicted, known and unknown:

“Please forgive me if I have harmed or offended you in any way…”

A great procession is formed. Even visitors, people not yet Orthodox or only interested or there only for the food, can participate. It’s strange, I know, especially in a culture as laid-back as ours. People ask forgiveness, though many seemingly having done nothing to the person they bow before, but all put their foreheads to the ground with the knowledge that each of their sins, have affected the world in a way unknowably profound, and sometimes frighteningly direct. Like the reverse of Pay it Forward.

I got into my truck after the service yesterday raw-eyed and tired and convinced that the last hour or two had been the most real thing I had ever been apart of as a human being. We embraced one another, and people thanked me for apologizing and for accepting their apology. The deacon with salt-and-pepper hair pulled me close and whispered in my ear his regrets and his joys in knowing me. The young woman I had talked to, then avoided, then thought badly about, then continued avoiding, listened sincerely as I tried to express my own trespasses against her. A guy my age who always stayed cloistered in the corner during services and never came to meals, the same guy who I judged and silently scoffed countless times, stood before each person present and asked for forgiveness for his distance, fear, and neglect.

The work of forgiveness, after all had met face-to-face, had begun. I realized that I had never before put my back to such a hefty task. I stood listening to the prayers and hymns beforehand and slowly became aware of the great spiritual debt I’ve incurred at the expense of others. I choked on the immensity, the impossibility, of the job. To forgive and be forgiven. Why, I could spend years learning just to forgive myself! I’d need another lifetime or two for the work I’d have to do with others!

And to think, in the early Church, people confessed their sins aloud, and in front of all. I bet all those saints are thanking God that there’s two thousand years between them and me, otherwise, it might have taken that long when my turn to stand at the front came.

In this great, complicated, sputtering life I’ve grown used to my own failures and, I guess, half-expected others to accommodate them as well. This blog, sadly is a glaring example. In six years, I’ve posted nearly 200 entries on The Papers. They’ve contained many things. Anger, suspicion, sarcasm, lighthearted observations, despair, incoherence, recreational vehicles. There are some things that I regret writing just as there are things I regret doing. I’ve considered deleting this blog entirely and striking from the record the dawdling, wayward record of a boy wading through the muck and blackness that he thought was the outside world, but was really just his own flooded and darkened soul. But, just as it does no good to repress and avoid the harm I’ve done to someone in the past, I don’t see that removing The Papers from the historical record will accomplish anything redemptive.

Instead, I want to ask for your forgiveness.

Please, please, if in these last six years of writing, I have wounded you; if I have scrawled out something that caused you confusion, or sadness, or anger; if I have hurt you when I described things low and vile as if they were glorious and beneficial; if I have caused you to doubt the True God; if you were tempted to throw virtue in the gutter as I often did; if I have singled you out in any way; if I deceived you into thinking that my life was right, was true, was directed or suggested that others’ were flat, or misguided, or immature; if my pride, even in this very post, works to project to you a Benjamin Dolan that is not a child of God, that is not utterly dependent on great, heaping servings of Grace just as a kidney patient needs dialysis; if any of my various transgressions or evil thoughts or wayward intentions has somehow whispered its way from the shambles of my soul and stained, somehow, your own…forgive me. I fall down before you with as little melodrama as possible. Forgive me. Seventy times seven. I’ll probably need more than that, but start there, if you will.

Oh, I forgot to tell you about the best part. When the priest asks for little Timmy’s forgiveness and is on the ground in front of him, Timmy, just as every one will in turn, reaches down to his spiritual father, takes the broad shoulders in his small hands and, while he helps the man to his feet, says:

“Father, God forgives and I forgive.”

And mothers speak this to their daughters and daughters whisper it to their mothers, strangers say it to strangers, friends to enemies, wives to husbands and brothers to sisters. I hope, also, that it isn’t too far fetched or strange, for readers to say these words to a nervous, delinquent blogger.

Thanks.

Thinking on a Mountain

We shouldered our packs and started trudging up the mountain, shaded by aspens and spruces and cooled by the little creek that trickles there. Occasionally we passed slower hikers, backpackers mostly, heading further into the deep folds of the Sangre de Cristos before the real cold hits. I can already feel it coming. I woke up last night in the RV, which was four thousand feet down the mountain, and I was cold. Way up there the air seemed even more frighteningly autumnal.

When we reached the little wooden sign that humbly harkens the entrance into the Pecos Wilderness, we turned right and kept along the Raven's Ridge trail, a trail I had trod several times in the last few months with the group of kids I shepherd at a local summer-camp. The little path stays along the saggy barbed-wire fence that marks the boundary of the wilderness area and wanders up the backbone of the mountain. It was right there, about two hundred feet from that wooden sign, that my young summer-camp wards usually found that they absolutely did not have the will to go on any further, and though it was 10:30 AM it seemed an appropriate time to eat lunch, because if they had to take another step that wasn't downhill or in the direction of the smelly 15-passenger van that bore them to this alpine hell, well, they were going to keel over and wither next to a nearby clump of angry looking mushrooms. Of course, being the compassionate-type of summer-camp counselor, I ignored them. And when they asked if we had to go much further before lunch, I answered simply, “Yes.”

But today was a mid-September Saturday, and summer-camp had long been over and the sweet, intense freedom of those hot days had laid down for a nine month nap. I found myself now accompanied only by two adults and noticed that the conversation was tending towards '70's era film and worthwhile novels, instead of video games and inappropriately funny jokes about noisy bodily functions. The only whining noises I heard were the grey jays squeaking overhead, waiting for us to drop a tortilla chip. No one was talking about their aching feet, or their pounding head, or their failing legs, or their dad's rifle. Amazing. I relished for a moment the company of my peers, and considered how much lighter my pack was when it wasn't weighed down with thirty-four pairs of eyes glaring and grasping at my jugular vein.

The first lookout was achieved in what seemed like seconds. We sat for a while and talked about birds, because there were lots of birds. Birds were shooting across the ravine below us and sailing up invisible currents to points higher than our strained eyes could see. There were chipmunks, too, which were bold little boogers who didn't seem to mind getting cracked on the head with a well-aimed pebble. The grey jays finally showed up and loomed in the branches of the spruce near us, probably casting lots for who would get the first taste of salami. We sat on some rough rocks that shone because of the micah flakes. We talked about Jeremiah Johnson. I never had to tell either of my comrades to sit down, or to stop throwing things, or to apologize to the person they just smacked with their walking stick. I never had to listen closely to make sure Jana and Chris weren't discussing something inappropriate, something that I might have to mention to their parents. Nope, no“quit its”or“don'ts”or“in a second's.”We probably sat there for nearly an hour and a half.

We kept on hiking after that nice rest, just a few minutes further up the mountain that only a handful of kids had been able to conquer this summer. The trail becomes steeper and eventually leads you to Deception Peak and its brother, Lake Peak. However, maybe five hundred feet from that first lookout is another nice spot, a rock scree on the opposite slope of the ridge. From here a partial view of Santa Fe is achieved, and we could see the Jemez Mountains and the little villages to the north of our city.

And what I've noticed about this rock scree, though I've only visited it a couple times now and with very different company, is that, whether they're ten or twenty-four, whether they've got $20 or $20,000, whether their parents woke them up this morning or their parents live three states over, a person must sit down on those big rocks and stare out over the tops of the evergreens and aspens at familiar pieces of the city below. They must grow silent and their gaze will only be broken, but for a second, by the movement of a little rodent below. And whether a person deals in business cards or report cards, they might think for a moment of the things that aren't with them on top of this mountain. A person might look north-west and think of the apple trees bending in exhaustion in a little valley in Central Washington, waiting eagerly for a wayward young man to relieve them of their load. A person might consider Denver, beyond those low, curving mountains to the north, and Texas at their back, boiling in the late summer sun. A person might wonder at the whereabouts of a former lover, or the health of a grandparent. Up there, it seems like everything, every last detail of a person's life, is visible in all its minutia and every complication is somehow clear and as approachable as a math problem after a moment of epiphany.

A person might begin to realize that the sun above them is so warm and the rock below them is so cool and that they are just another member of the billions of tiny, spasmodic creatures that crawl around in the great terrestrial sea of mountains and valleys so vast that they could never climb enough to see all of them like they can from their place here in this scree on the side of Raven's Ridge. When that thought comes into their heads, it is only right that they think next about the one Person, the only One that can never be seen from any altitude but begs us to keep trying, to keep climbing down, down from our inaccessible heights. Thoughts like these often occur in wilderness. Smallness, longing for true humility and understanding. They come not as miserable shocks like they might at the dinner table or when the phone call ends with a person's girlfriend. These thoughts come gently through the trees, quietly and, sitting there calmly on the rock scree, a person is ready for them, invites them, even, and meets them in neutral territory a little closer to God and a little further from man.

And, whether a person's favorite TV show is Degrassi or Dexter, such clear vision certainly flows into other sweet thoughts, because when a person's behaved them self and stayed away from Carrie, who gets them in trouble, and John, who only talks about poop, then a person thinks its only right that, in this ecstatic moment of clarity and understanding of a Higher Order, they should get Baskin Robbins as a reward for being so painfully and perfectly good, because they never get Baskin Robbins except after these really hard hikes and we've been sitting here quiet long enough.

"Ben, can we get a sweet treat today?"

There's nothing like the sounds of the mountains.

Lessons from Other People's Pasts

On top of one of the canyon walls near Cañones, New Mexico a city once stood looking over the river and the canyons it cut. I imagine the people who lived there predated any boot print or influenza-like cough. Their homes were built from over-sized bricks hewn from a soft, volcanic stone resembling pumice. They cut wonderfully circular holes in the rocks for putting things in, I guess, or just to prove to easily-excited 19^th century white people that circles weren't invented simply for controlling an iPod. They had pots and jars and other pot-like jars. Somehow they had enough water to sustain a small town despite the nearest source flowed in the canyon floor, at the bottom of a steep slope covered in sand. They hunted with arrows. They probably watched the sunset.

In case you were wondering how I developed such a knack for mapping out ancient cultures, well, I'll just say that I could have minored in Anthropology had I taken two more courses.

Here's more: the tribe that lived there doesn't anymore. How do I know? Well, I've ruled out the possibility that the tribe leaves very early each morning after toppling each house into little more than piles of bricks. It's just not a realistic lifestyle. Why? Well, the only place to get something decent to eat is Bode's, a little gas station with what I hear are top-notch burritos, and that place is closed sometimes. What do they eat when it's closed, huh? In fact, I'd like to propose the theory suggesting that they came to leave their beautiful city atop the canyon wall when, years ago, Bode's closed for a month of remodeling. Of course, at that point they had long forgotten how to hunt and had grown fat off green chile and bean burritos. They were without options. Imagine spending all morning pushing your entire town to the ground, shattering all your pottery, and driving for miles down a pot-holed highway to show up at your only source for food and find a sign saying something to the effect of “Sorry, will be closed until August for improvements”? If they didn't flee for fear of starvation, they most certainly did out of heartbreak. This story seems, at first glance, to be another sad tale of modern civilization choking the life out of a native people.

But they didn't die! Oh no! They stood near the locked glass door of Bode's—children crying, dogs whining, women pulling at their whiskers—and the chief stood before them on the curb and spoke in a language mostlyinaudible to the European ear. He inspired them with his calm words in their time of distress. He told stories of their elders, of the time when they fashioned sharp rocks and attached them to sticks as a way to slay a running deer, of the time when Bill George's house fell (before they were knocking the city down each morning) and the whole town worked together to rebuild it in a night and Bill George was a only teased a bit for his misshapen bricks. He told the story of his great-grandfather who had grown tired of tramping down into the canyon each day for water and so, after a late-night epiphany, had developed a water pump system that would make the city a veritable floating garden. Did he give up after the candy bar fundraiser only raised $38 when $15,000 was needed? No! He just kept walking down in that canyon for water! He wasn't going thirsty! Not him! And just like his great-grandfather, he wasn't going to just wither here beneath the fickle shade of the Philips 66 awning! They would learn new ways of survival. They would struggle and grow and find a new land, one flowing with food and drink, one worthy of every man and woman of the tribe.

They forgot their city-on-high, their creek shaded by trees and wild roses on the canyon floor below. They took with them only the clothes on their backs. They left behind the beautiful vistas and the sweet summer evenings watching the young New Mexico sun fall below the mesas to the west. One teen went back for the Walkman he stashed under a tree near his family's brick pile, but the rest began marching down the highway. A mass exodus, a trail of wonder and fear.

Years later, as their city lies calmly waiting their eventual return, the people of the ill-fated tribe are alive and well. They've developed new skills. People flock to see their new homeland. Some leave with riches only to be dreamed of.

And if you come to visit me sometime, we'll walk the trail of this tribe. We'll go to their abandoned township, we'll drink from the little creek that quenched their forefathers' thirst and we'll eat a burrito from Bode's that filled the stomachs of the ancients. Most especially, we'll go to the place where these people have built a new life and, if you're here on a Tuesday, the blackjack buy-in is only $5 and the first round of beers is on the house.

If all goes well we, too, will leave with our pockets and our hearts filled with the abundant riches of a tribe tested and hardened by the potholes and remodelings of history.

A Letter of Apology

Dear CONSISTENCY and his child, ROUTINE,

I've spent many years and countless breaths running from both of you, most especially ROUTINE, who seemed to me so obviously evil, so blatantly backwards, that it behooved me simply to go wherever he was not and to do the things that I knew would anger him. I took jobs that would prevent me from ever seeing either of you, working late into the night and returning home to beer or bed, waking the next day at an irregular time, and going about my day quite randomly and with only my emotions as a guide. Only a couple weeks after graduating from college I abandoned our already shaky relationship and fled to New Mexico, where you certainly did not find me. I hitchhiked here and there. I met many people then said goodbye. I slept in abandoned lots in Kansas, in basement rooms and old apartments in Washington, in tents along rivers, in an old RV in California, in an Arizona monastery, in a driveway in Denver, on a skinny bunk bed, and in a new RV in Oklahoma and Texas. I've driven miles and miles and miles and I know that I can always stay ahead of you two, because you're slow, and predictable, and reluctant. In my head I've stirred the mental pot simply so as to avoid even thinking like you. New ideas and plans and moralities clicked in and out of my brain like cars at a busy traffic signal: some stopped, some sped through, but all moved on eventually. 

Don't think I haven't noticed your ever-growing relationships with some of my friends. I've often scorned and judged them as they sit down to dinner with you each night, or take you to friends' houses on the weekends. Me? I've been spending time getting to know TRANSIENCY. He's got a friend, too, that he calls EXPERIENCE. You know them, I'm sure. They cuss about you all the time. TRANSIENCY was a little suspicious to me at first but every time I started to get down on him he called this gal EXPERIENCE and she came over with lusty curves and cigarettes and new ideas and all of my senses were lit up and time and time again I got that itch, and I started to think about you two, CONSISTENCY and ROUTINE, and with a little wine in my gut I quietly regretted allowing either of you ever to trick me.

But that guy TRANSIENCY never stops. He never rests. On a hike we might see a beautiful flower and he wants to move on after only a minute because he thinks there's a waterfall worth seeing around the bend. And when we get to the waterfall, which is also very beautiful, EXPERIENCE sets her camera to the sepia tone setting and she takes thirty-four pictures of the sun beams coming through the water. They never stop talking, bantering on about the closeness of nature and how one must be detached and removed from the material world. I am the only one that sits. They each tell a story about times in which they were in beautiful places, then they each tell more stories trying to top the other's. We leave rather quickly as there is a party we told someone we'd attend that night, and EXPERIENCE wants to upload one of the photos to Facebook.

All I wanted to do was pause and spend time with that beautiful flower.

They're relentless, these two. They slap me on the back when they see that I'm waning. They hand me a beer when I'm shuffling my feet in the corner at a party. I found out some time ago that TRANSIENCY and EXPERIENCE are in love. However, every time I've wanted, I sleep a night with EXPERIENCE and she gives herself to me in a way that I begin to think I possess her. But in the morning she always leaves. And when I awake and find her gone, I'm off again chasing her. Some months ago I realized that I would never catch her, that she was TRANSIENCY's girl. She's nice to be with, though. She has such a wonderful fragrance and her body yields to you in the moment.

As far as I've run, as many nights as I've wallowed in filth and pleasure and ignored your silent knocking, you've never left my mind CONSISTENCY. I tasted it in early mornings in the orchard, when the cold air wrapped around my knuckles and when I heard the familiar calls from the other pickers echo from down the row. You got a few words in at St. Anthony's when, in the pre-dawn services, the monks sounded out a foreign but sweet ritual. Though I don't think you were anywhere near Denver at the time, I could feel your presence each night as I lit my lamp and read the words of Christ and the Fathers and Mothers who have followed after Him.

They talk about you. Two thousand years of Christian voices sing your praises. A Russian ascetic and a bearded monk in California and scores of others somehow know you and know you well, and all seem to suggest that you are one of the most important allies as we work out our spiritual lives. I had no idea you spoke Russian.

And to top it off, they also talk about my old pals TRANSIENCY and EXPERIENCE. They mentioned all the things that were really rubbing me the wrong way about the pair. And they don't call EXPERIENCE by her pet name, but by her real name: DISSATISFACTION. Only TRANSIENCY and his crowd, apparently, call her EXPERIENCE. Actually, I've come to find out that one of your friends is named EXPERIENCE, sometimes your refer to her as TRUE EXPERIENCE just to be clear. But she's so quiet and modest and unimposing! How could I have ever met her? That small girl in the corner at church each Sunday? She didn't seem too talkative or exciting, so I just let her be. Turns out that she is TRUE EXPERIENCE. Who knew?

Well, I'm still spinning from my extended time with TRANSIENCY and his girl. When I think of them they make me a bit nauseous though, I'll have to admit, I still sometimes long for that woman at night. I know that you and ROUTINE can't hang out with those two stumblebums. But, if you can forgive my hateful words and deeds towards you over the last few years, would you and ROUTINE come visit me sometime and maybe stay over for a while? I'd like to talk with you some, not so much to get things straight but to keep things straight. When you guys are around my mind settles and I'm able to see things more clearly and simply. Ever since I stopped hanging around with those other two losers I've been a little lonely, and I've had a hell of a time trying to get ahold of you guys. I'm begging you. I can't stand the thought of living this life without you.

I'll be waiting. You know where I live; I'm off of work every day at 6:00. After I water the garden I'll sit outside and have some dinner, and I sure hope you'll come. If nothing else, I'll see you at church this weekend. Maybe after a while your friend EXPERIENCE can come over too, you know, when I get things sorted out a bit more. I'm sure you've got plenty of people for me to meet. And, to be honest, I'm a little scared.

Love,

Benjamin

Things change and people become confused.

It's been a two months since my last post, I understand that. Don't be mad. Once again, I have been treating the blog badly. If you are not used to my swings and slumps by now, well, you can stop coming here. I can't blame you, of course, but if you leave, that'll be about 14% of my readership gone. After this last dry spell, you may actually be the only one left who even remembers that this site exists.

I return to this blog mostly because it was mentioned to me by my friend Steve, who is tall and a graduate of Stanford and knows many things. He said, “You are one hell of a writer, Benjamin Austin Dolan.” This proves that they must not do a lot of critical reading at Stanford these days. Too much brainy work. I think he's mostly used to reading technical manuals about the innermost workings of the human mind or the stuff that makes up the universe or bicycle cranks.

He went on to say, after the above-mentioned flattery, that my last post, “We're from There,” was the most interesting. Now, I may, after all, be a grad-school drop out, but one thing I remember from my short stint in post-secondary thought-weaving is that one should never, ever use the word “interesting” when describing anything. Like, “George Orwell's sopping, lethargic description of the Burmese jungle is interesting...” or “It's very interesting that ideology, in a Marxist system, is unavoidably the currency of power...” These sentences would have made my bookish and skinny lit crit professor reach desperately into a desk-drawer for her emergency supply of saltines, for use only when students do stupid things like say something is “interesting.” It's like an engineering student starting a paper on electricity by saying, “The study of electricity is scientific. Thus, through scientific inquiry must we approach the study of electricity.”

(However, I strongly encourage the use of these phrases when looking for puffy filler in an undergraduate paper. “Interesting” allows you to use a whole bunch of proper nouns and long, blurrily-defined adjectives to produce a hefty sentence that really, in all reality, says nothing that is original or useful to the world. But, after all, an undergraduate education is neither of those things to begin with.)

But, Steve, my friend, though you've done the unthinkable, I will not think poorly of you. I've already embarrassed you enough by quoting your misguided praise. You're right though, my last post was different, in these ways: it had been seen by peers, edited, redrafted, edited again, redrafted, picked over, hated, redrafted, forgotten, redrafted again. I don't find it odd that the first polished post I published on my website in four years made people go, “Hey, what the...this isn't the normal acidic pile of rotting innards we're used to!”

Look, don't get upset. I'll start rolling out the filth again. That last post was just a passing fancy, a pre-prepared piece that bought my some time with the ol' Ben Papers publishing house staff. Believe me, those people are ruthless. A deadline every two months? How should a man with my schedule accommodate such an aggressive timeline? Between slapping the snooze button for thirty minutes, eating mustard sandwiches, and rolling top-notch cigarettes, even the most organized man could barely find time to blink. And I am not, after all, the most organized man. I'm close though. Fifth in the U.S., I bet. Maybe top twenty worldwide.

To catch you up, briefly, with the things that have happened since March 26, 2010.

--I was baptized into the Orthodox Church, after a year as a catechuman, on April 3, 2010, the Saturday before Pascha (Easter). I was given the name Anthony. The church has become, as you might have guessed, a huge part of my life but, to be honest, I have no idea how to approach this experience in writing. Besides, if I wrote about it, you might again be upset by the quality and substance and I'd get an email saying something was “interesting.” I think I'll stick with what I know: fluff.

--On May 5th I abandoned Denver, drove the Tiger to Texas, piddled there for a few days, then drove West again to New Mexico, landing in Santa Fe on May 11th . I plopped the RV in it's spot and I've been staring at the trees there ever since. I'll be in Santa Fe, God willing, until September, though maybe longer.

--I planted a garden: five tomato plants, four pepper plants, a squash plant, basil and oregano. I lost a pepper plant to pneumonia and I think one of the tomato plants has mono. I recognize the symptoms—it's losing weight, doesn't seem to want to move, and it's been missing its appointments. I'm hoping that, when the mountain nights are consistently in the upper fifties, I'll get some growth. Either that, or I'll need some Vicadin for the little guy.

--Next week summer camp starts. Also, another friend, Chester, begins his work in the forest east of town next week, too.

So, now that you're back in the groove, I'll be able to proceed from here with the typical eye-melting spittle that we all have come to love so much.

As Buzz Lightyear and Tim often say: “To infinity, and beyond!”

P.S. If you haven't visited my mom's blog, you really should. She's more consistent than me, much funnier, and includes pictures and recipes. In fact, I'm unsure if I should tell you about her blog, as there'd be no reason for you to come back here. Anyways, the link is in the upper corner, under Places I Go Sometimes. 

We're From There

I submitted this piece recently for an assignment in a non-fiction writing class. The assignment required us to write a short essay centered on a single idea: "sense of place." Not sure if I succeeded, and I've yet to get the grade from the professor.

~

As I watched Hayes Carll stand alone on stage in a faceless bar surrounded by warehouses and dimly lit streets in northern Denver, each passing song further convinced me that he understood my plight, my rootlessness, and my inability to locate home. Indeed, I've never forgotten his enigmatic response to an interviewer’s inquiring, especially in a genre that sings mostly of heart break and hard times, as to how he had much of a musical story coming from our well-to-do suburban Houston community:

“Well, we all got problems.”

I turned that phrase over in my mind while standing in line to meet him after the concert, pondering how close Hayes and I were, though we had never technically met. We tread the same blacktop as children. I played with his younger brother. I'd been in his parent’s house and played his very own Sega Genesis. There wasn’t a single dastardly woman he sang about, in my estimation, that had played his Sega Genesis.

I took his outstretched hand with a knowing confidence.

“Hi Hayes. Hey, I just wanted to introduce myself...”

Hayes was a tall man, with big, pointed cowboy boots. He wore a plaid shirt and blue jeans. He had a full beard and hair that hung down to his chin; his eyes were small and reserved and his smile was polite and humble. He nodded a lot. He looked over my shoulder as if he was counting the number of petitioners he'd have to field before the night would end. I spoke louder. He bent down to hear me better.

“Yeah, I'm Ben Dolan, I grew up on Slash Pine.” I thought this would surely bring fireworks or cause him to break into verse. There were maybe only twenty families on the block; we were like brothers. Maybe he'd ask me to go on tour with him. Our band could be called the “Slash Pine Kids” or something.

“Oh yeah?” he said, manufacturing emotion, it seemed. “What'd you say your name was?”

A little thrown-off, I told him the whole story. He listened intently, smiled warmly, and shook my hand again.

“Well, it isn't often you meet someone from there, man. Glad you came to the show.”

And with that I was shuffled incredulously past the merchandise table.

I became very depressed, like a pirate who had followed the map but found the treasure already dug up. Hayes knew what those tall pines looked like at sundown. He knew what the street felt like on your knees when you fell of your bike. He knew how many passes it would take to make a touchdown in the field in the middle of our neighborhood. I began to doubt that these memories were anymore than non-descript images of everyone else's American childhoods. I stood pouting under the bar's orange lights for a while, watching the grovelers smile and take his picture. I realized that I had been stupid to think he might know something about me, that we might share something. We were not brothers. Hell, we weren’t even acquaintances. I loped from the bar and lit a cigarette in self-pity.

Of course, Hayes stood casually near the door, smoking a Marlboro Light. This only made it worse: I'd have to meet again with that same indifference reminding me I was a satellite orbiting the rest of the world, distant but not free. As much as I didn't want to further my disillusionment, I felt that we couldn't just stand there, the only two suburbanites sucking on cigarettes in the empty silence of the sleeping brick warehouses all around.

“How's Jon doing, man?”

“He's doing good,” Hayes said, looking at me kindly, obviously waiting to catch a ride home. “He's living in Japan now, doing something with translation there, I don't really know.”

He laughed a broad-smiled laugh. We talked a little more about our parents, about the exact location of my childhood home in relation to his. He mentioned familiar names, schools, and streets. The talk was comforting in a way, as I thought happily about the place where I was raised, but the conversation soon lost its fervor. I spoke finally, as if to make one last significant point:

“Yeah. We all spent most of our lives playing in that creek behind your parents' house, you know?”

His eyes widened a bit and then he looked over my shoulder again, nodding his head. Our cigarettes steamed between us.

The creek behind our suburban neighborhood was not as much a creek as it was a drainage ditch. We called it the Creek and it was a creek to us, though at most places even our nine year-old legs could straddle easily the little trickle as it made its way south, curling by paisley neighborhoods, through mossy culverts, and over concrete spillways. It originated, as far as we knew, at the pro-am golf course up the street from our homes and, once or twice during the rainiest months, the Creek would carry in its brown water hundreds of wayward golf balls, purged from the golf course's man-made ponds, and deposit them in the sand near our little path that led out from the woods.

Part of a green belt, the creek was bordered on one side by a strip of trees thick enough to make us feel far enough from home and, on the other side, a hike-and-bike path seldom trod that, with each passing year, became more and more obscured by youpon trees and rotting pine needles.

The water in the creek rose and fell with the rains, and in the summer we'd walk down the dry creek bed in order to avoid the spindly green grass growing on its banks. After big spring thunderstorms we'd rush through the woods to see how high the water had risen.

A handful of boys ruled this place. Though hundreds of other upper middle-class dwellings filled with numberless nuclear families stood within a stone's throw of the thin strip of green that held our Creek, we would rarely encounter other children playing in the muddy water or jumping from the little clay cliff near the retention pond. The bridges we made, the forts we constructed, the rocks we stacked, even the things we drew in the sand were left alone, as if we were the only inhabitants of a distant planet.

Upon my first discovering the Creek, I remember thinking that it was something huge, a grand and impactful secret much like, a few years later, the image that popped on our new Compaq computer screen showing me, for the first time, the parts of a woman's body I had never seen. The Creek was as mysterious and as curvy as the smooth line of that woman's hip and thigh. It had a natural cycle and a strange way of changing even when we'd rather it no. The Creek taught me about the joy of commitment and steadfastness: for ten years I'd return to that creek nearly every day, maybe walking along it with a fishing pole in my hand on the way to the pond downstream, maybe looking for tadpoles or even a crawfish, maybe dreaming of walking hand in hand with a girl down this same stretch of grass and dirt.

Logs and stumps were our building blocks. There were big holes that looked to have been dug years before we started playing there. We built forts then let them rot and fall. One guy broke his collarbone there. In junior high, I once found a woman's purse lying strangely near the brown water and, a couple weeks later, there was a set of men and women's underwear draped in some young trees. In my high school years I'd often walk slowly along the slithering line, thinking about how miserable I had become (which I got over), or how beautiful Liz White was (which I never got over), or how I wished that I could just drive to New Mexico (which I eventually did). The Creek was always new, offering golf balls and woman’s unmentionables and a humble ear for my woes. It was a place I had never forgotten and it still moves quietly through me though I’m sure it has changed by now, as it never stopped changing before.

Hayes and I stood smoking, a thousand miles from that place, two men who had never before met, who had been wandering, looking for home, singing songs about ideals and hopes, taking up space at bars, listening to old friends' strange lives, building and tearing down and mourning lifestyles and relationships that weren't what we wanted, but were closer than before.

Truth be told, I hadn't talked to Hayes' brother Jon since I was fifteen or so. I didn’t even know Jon’s older brother’s name until my mother mentioned his recent country-music fame. I began to drown a bit realizing that he and I were nothing alike, that he probably knew his brother about as well as I did, and that our home was little more than a flickering candle's flame in us, and didn't shed much light on my current path.

Hayes looked down the street pensively, nodding his head as he had done all night. He took another drag of his cigarette and turned his face to me. I noticed his expression wasn't politely distant, as it had been, and in his eyes instead was a soft feeling, a deep recognition and love for something so common and backwards as the wood-paneled tract houses we had called home.

“Yeah man. I know that creek.”

I'm Telling Me

If I could split both the lives
That battle in my heart,
I'd live them each in their own way—
Keep them arm's distance apart.

They wouldn't live together long;
They'd have different paths to tread.
One would sleep in tents, on leaves,
The other prefers beds.

One would smile and walk the girl
Politely to her door.
The other'd order three more drinks,
Hoping for some more.

One would eat just enough
To keep him breathing fine
The other would eat mostly cheese
And drink gallons of red wine.

Time and time again the first
Would smile at sky and sun
But the other'd wake long after noon
Just in time for fun.

One would listen to Chopin and Bach
The other'd opt for Cake
The same would drive through Burger King
While the other prefers to bake.

If both were mutts at the local pound,
One would find a home.
The other would bite the keeper's hand,
Escaping just to roam.

If both were books on dusty shelves
The first would bring a tear.
The other's plot would bump and jolt,
It's theme and tone unclear.

If both were parks on summer's days,
Where lovers came to dance,
One would push up flowers and grass,
The other's have muds and thorns and ants.

Sure, both these people make my person;
Like how lungs both breathe and cough.
But I'd love if one would have the gumption
To tell the other: “Piss off.”

And Your Kicks For Free

Albertson's, the grocery store nearest our place here in Denver, has begun a particularly subversive and painfully effective marketing scheme. Really, the hurt is compounded by several factors: 1. Whole Foods is eight blocks farther away (which, all said and done, matters little because A. I make $14 per week and B. snowflakes the size of thumbnails are floating about in the sub-freezing air), 2. it isn't even cool to shop at Albertson's, 3. they've had especially noxious navel oranges lately, and on sale, and 4. I could resist free Snicker's tasting, kissing booths, and piles of money better than I can resist their current method of subliminally-reinforced consumerism.

No, I'm not talking about television ads or newspaper inserts. I'm not talking about old ladies giving out free samples of pretzels on aisle 2. I'm not even talking about major sales on Kashi products. Albertson's, like its second-cousin in the fast food business, has found a way to combine all of these things and more, so that when I heard the cashier speak in matter-of-fact tones as she weighed my tangelos, my eyes tilted in a passionate violence and I could've jumped her like Golem did Frodo.

“Have you gotten your Monopoly board yet?”

What was that? What did you say? Monopoly? My veins expanded audibly.

“Why no, no I haven't.”

Trying to stay composed, I took from her hand the game pieces she held out to me, six in all, and grabbed a Monopoly board from the stack. A great demon awoke in my stomach from a deep, deep slumber. Its full name is Something for Nothing.

“I see they're up to this ol' thing again,” I said with a chuckle, trying my best to act like I didn't give a fairy's spleen about their silly game. I might've even faked throwing the game board away.

But the truth was that I could hardly get out of the store before I greedily began to tear at the little perforations on the game pieces, eager to see if I'd won a...uh, well I didn't even know what I might win, but I wanted to win it all the same.

In case you were living in a hole most of the '90's, or in case you think the best marketing strategy McDonald's ever had was putting Beanie-Babies in Happy Meals, I'll explain quickly the premise of this ingenious and embarrassing marketing ploy involving the harmless and rather boring game of Monopoly.

You see, McDonalds printed a hundred billion Monopoly boards, complete with all of the properties, colors, etc. On a large drink, a sleeve of fries, or a box of McNuggets, you'd get to peel off a game piece, which was a property corresponding to a place on the game board. Marvin Gardens, Pacific, Baltic, etc.

Monopolies got you stuff, like cars and boats and free McDonald's until your heart fails at 43. It's genius. Combine the American pioneer-like desire of acquiring property with the American pioneer-like desire of filling one's belly for no money or hard labor.

Over the years, McDonald's has done quite a few rounds of this game, maybe once a year or so. At first, I played wholeheartedly, and with an extremely unrealistic hope of success. So as a pre-teen I'd laboriously gather and paste the pieces I got on the board, counting down with excitement the remaining pieces needed to win a projection TV or a Nintendo 64. However, about a month in, after tossing away the seven hundredth duplicate of New York Ave., I was struck with a very depressing reality. I needed one more piece for nearly every color, and so did all my friends, and so did the plumber in Wisconsin, and so did the mother-of-three in suburban Seattle. One more. We all thought in unison. One more until...

None of us would ever see that one. Only three or four pairs of eyes in the US might see Tennessee in all its majesty, and at least one pair of those eyes would be an old woman's, who had thought Monopoly was a technological digression into idiocy when it came out in 1651. She probably threw Tennessee in the trash.

Odds are a very, very difficult truth. That's why they're called odds. It's odd if you win. How odd, Mediterranean!

But McDonald's, just as Albertson's is doing in its wake, foresaw the brick wall of desperately impossible odds that might hinder even the more dedicated players from continuing on in the game. So what did they do? Birth INSTANT WINNERS! Use all capital letters! Throw them a bone! You INSTANTLY win more french fries, or a small coke, or a hot dog. Wha? Me? A winner? Well that's not so hard! I won after all! And INSTANTLY. So you continue to play, telling yourself its for the free stuff, like Big Macs and apples pies, but still secretly allowing your heart to sink when you see North Carolina again, hiding its face against the sweaty cardboard of a medium soda.

But that's not all, my friends, that's not all! It doesn't just stop there, oh no! The entire scheme is much deeper and even beyond simple branding.

What, truly, is the most inspirational, fantasy-fulfilling, and diabolically twisted method yet employed for causing us to continue buying, to continue stuffing our faces, to persist in peeling and ripping and licking and pasting and pulling our hair out in hopes that we can break free from this monotonous life if only for a moment in our new, totally free go-kart with headlights or a shiny above-ground pool?

Charlie!

That damn Charlie!

He, like all of us, tried to avoid the hype. He didn't have the money to blow on wild, risky fun. He worked hard, supported his family, listened to his grandparent's wisdom. And one day, he found by chance a dollar in a gutter, and what did he do? He bought a Wonka Bar and, a month later, he owned an entire other-worldly and physics-defying chocolate factory.

Charlie, an heir of the more socially inept and frightening Willy Wonka, is the true American forefather. He taught us the most important of American traits: hard work, kindness, gentleness, and that, if we really are worthy, we'll find all our wildest, fantastically materialistic dreams lying unclaimed beneath a soggy metal grate in the gutter.

So keep buying, friends. Keep ripping those Monopoly pieces and praying. Besides, what would Charlie do? Charlie would play Monopoly. He'd fill every piece but one, just like all the rest of us poor schmucks. He'd become depressed, even to the point of abandoning the pursuit, of taking the bus to another grocery store, like Whole Foods, where you never expect to get anything more for the exorbitant prices you pay for your groceries. He was just like us. But now his ancestors are great, happy, chocolatiers and slave-owners.

I'll keep trucking. I believe in Charlie, first among American consumers, foremost among lucky bastards. His spirit will help me along. Though I may be persecuted, abandoned by my friends, and flat broke, I'll keep on, probably with the power of Visa. And, when I inevitably find Boardwalk hiding under a peanut-butter jar on aisle 13, I'll forgive you your weaknesses and come pick you up in my brand-new Ford F350, and you will witness first-hand the true happiness and contentment offered to those of us beaming recipients of gifts from the great Something for Nothing Higher Power. I'll be the guy in the big truck. The guy wanting nothing more out of life.

We'll just have to split gas, you know, because I didn't win the Free Gas for a Year Monopoly. I still need Connecticut for that. I just need Connecticut...

Cactus

You have to have an iron rear
To sit upon a cactus.
Or otherwise at least a year
Of very painful practice.

--Shel Silverstein

This is a very, very important poem, of course, and has stuck with me since childhood. Never has there been a more holistically wonderful poem written, with such a clear image.

So, keep trying, my friends. It'll take a little while, but we'll get it one day. We'll get it one day...

Willy-Nilly

Tim was sitting on the couch the other day, and he looked at me gently while I was pulling on my socks.

“You see, your product is good, but your approach is horrible,” he said.

“What?”

“I think the thing you're talking about is great, but the way you talk about it is so messed up.”

He and I have been talking about Orthodoxy for a couple months, now, maybe longer. We've been talking about life, the best way to live it, how much or how little we should drink and smoke, how far we should venture into the mysterious world of females, how many words we should say to someone we don't like, how we should or should not judge people, how many carrots we should eat, if granola is healthy or really healthy, if we should stay here, go there, or saunter back to Texas.

Tim will often be the catalyst—he'll ask me some question about girls or about the Church or about a topic I know absolutely nothing about. I'll start like an old outboard boat motor and sputter stuff out incoherently until something clicks in my mind and my mouth begins to move on its own, pouring out wisdom and opinions that may come from experience, but probably are being invented right there on the spot.

“Wait, wait. Where the hell are you going here?” he'll say with a scrunched face.

We started out discussing the unconscious and innocent materialism of our suburban upbringing, and I'll have, by the end of my five-minute diatribe, ended with an analysis of the board game Candyland.

You see, it all connects so beautifully in my brain. I see the shining summit that we're striving for in all its beauty and perspective, and I scramble and bite the ground and grab on to anything in sight to get there. And when I'm there, I feel so spectacular, but when I look down at my partner in the climb—every good conversation is a climb—he or she will be hanging by the middle finger, covered in rocks and rubble that I've knocked down in my scramble.

In fact, I may have done this to you the reader, in nearly every blog I've ever written, and this is why I've taken a hiatus, and had left my blog for dead. I may have already lost you in this post, and I'm not even 500 words in.

So I'll struggle to be more clear. For example, I went back and read the last blog I wrote, the one about the Ralphie the Buffalo. I mean, what the hell am I talking about? Mascot buffaloes relating to human culture? What? How did I make that connection?

This disconnect between my vision and my ability to relate it came to a head when, as I haphazardly rushed about to make application deadlines to MFA programs, I sent a story to my aunt and uncle that I planned to include in my portfolio. Actually, I took the thing directly from a post I wrote a while back.

I felt pretty damn cocky about the story; I didn't change a thing. You're reading exactly what I sent to my aunt and uncle, both former professors now in their sixties.

They called me back and told me as gently as possible that the piece was entirely incoherent, was without direction, and was just a mish-mash of weird images and shivering cold. My aunt asked: “What is this about?”

Ow, Charlie, OW. That hurts. But I started looking at the piece differently, and it made me sick to read. They were right. The idea was good, but I communicated it about as effectively as an ostrich speaking to a termite. I was embarrassed, but I saw more clearly what I was going for. So, I ripped the piece down to the studs and started from scratch. It took a long time, and it was not easy, but when I was done, the story was actually a story, instead of a pile of vomit I sprayed Febreeze on.

Everything I had heard about writing actually was turning out to be true: that first drafts are pretty bad, that it takes consecutive drafts to get to the kernel of the story, and that you don't just get to lay an egg and walk away from it, expecting it to hatch into a beautiful bird. This came as quite a shock to me.

Of course, naturally, I turned back to my blog. It was full of first drafts exactly like the stinking mess that I had sent my aunt and uncle. I was horrified when I realized that there was stuff that was worse than the Lauterbrunnen story. Good night. What am I doing here?

So I figured I'd stop blogging and get rid of the blog. But, all said and done, I couldn't bring myself to delete it. I couldn't. I tried to make it impossible for anyone to reach it, and I don't know if I succeeded. Basically, I beat the dog as much as I could, I slapped it and hated it, but I couldn't kill it. I knew that killing it would make me a bad person, and that I actually loved the stupid little thing, and that I should stop blaming it for my imperfections.

So after it laid in the corner for a while and recovered, and I after I had cooled off a bit, The Papers and I are back on speaking terms.

But you, the reader, must know that I do this mostly for the ideas, that I will continue to write on this blog and it will probably mostly be first-draft quality. Don't let it go. If something tees you off, or if you have no idea what I'm talking about, or if you like something I said, don't just let me walk on in my blindness. Send me an email and kick my ass a bit.

Don't be like the fifth grade girl where I work who asked me how to add fractions with unlike denominators. After dragging her along through some left-field explanation of prime numbers and filling half the page with fractions that weren't the ones she was dealing with, all the time saying “Let's say you got...”, she just nodded and said “Ok, ok. Right. I see. Thanks. Yeah. Ok. Great. Yeah. Thanks. I think I got it.”

And out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that she put the paper away unfinished, and started eating her string-cheese in a daze, probably making a mental note to never ask me a question again.

I'm nuts, and I know it. My mom has the best phrase for this insanity: willy-nilly. It's not a good or bad thing. It's just willy-nilly. And it might be fun to watch me bump blindly into things, but what about that little girl? She's going to go to school and take a test and when the teacher asks her why she scored a 33%, she'll point to the page filled with random numbers and say, “Well, let's say you got...”

Doesn't that make you sick? Do it for her.