Dallas vs. Miami

MIAMI: You think its easy. Lemme know how yor white-ass, racist-style deals with the shithole I'm in right now. Middle o'nowhere. You'd get your ass beat. About to get mine. But watch me fight, these racist rednecks. Watch me. You fucking bitch.

Motherfucker just told me a crazy story. Now I know how to pack a 9 millimeter. He explained it all in detail.

Maybe you get that from your adventures. But I certainly get it from mine. Thank God they don't want to fight me. They like me.

This redneck bartender fucking loves me -- I love her too. So go fuck yourself.

Now I'm in the bathroom alone. I jus needa psss, ya bish, ya bish.

But you're right. Gonna watch my back now, nonetheless.

Lemme not become a bitch.

But how about this: lemme jus taka psss, ya bsh.

Might still fight though. Would you?

No, 'cause you're a bitch.

Bartender keeps coming by me. Dudes are getting mad.

I will punch these retarded men.

DALLAS: You're bombed out of your head. Go home.

MIAMI: I will punch them very soon.

You have no idea where I am.

DALLAS: Recognize you are wasted. Get an uber and go home now.

MIAMI: Watch my punch, ya bish.

Angling right now. These guys deserve it. I might get arrested. Fuck it. And fuck you. You don't know shit. Throwing my phone after this.

DALLAS: You're a drunken fool. Go home before you fuck your life up.

MIAMI: Won that fight, kinda. Woman gave me her number anyway under the bar. Dude hit my head. Not happy about that. I hit him good too, but my hand hurts. In the Uber now.

DALLAS: You're a total fuckup and a moron.

MIAMI: Yeah, as if you know. Never been in an actual fight in your life. GO FUCK YOURSELF

DALLAS: You will read this when you are sober and regret all of this. Clean up your life bro. You are a fucking drunk and a nobody. A zero.

MIAMI: FUCK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!

Fuck you, going to the hospital now.

You don't know shit about a street fight -- you little faker. Well this woman. She just showed up. I love it. I'm bleeding everywhere. Thank God for her.

You shit fuck.

They're gonna take my phone, ok! You fucking but!

Go fuck yourself.

You would never bail me outta jail. You're a little bitch. Miller, Hem, Sal -- they have no faith in you. They'll punch you in your bigass nose. I will never support you, man. Ever. 'Cause you'll never support me. So wanna box? Name the time and place, asshole. Be scared, 'cause I will fuck you up. I will you fuck up.

DALLAS: You are a fool and a nobody.

MIAMI: Yeah. Would love to box you one day. No training. Gonna box the shit outta you. Name it. Let's film it.

DALLAS: We will set this up when you are sober. Go to sleep. You are just embarassing yourself right now.

MIAMI: It must be done. Chris will give us the venue. People will come to see this. I did get into a fight, btw. And my nose is bleeding, but I gave it my all. If I can take that bigass dwerb, I can take you.

DALLAS: You're a skinny wasted drunken bum. A never-was-been. Youre a waste of my time. Alcohol and courage are different things. Youre a mediocre man and a worse than mediocre writer.

MIAMI: Good, good. Get worked up. It will give you energy. Please don't be upset when I fuck you up.

DALLAS: Go to bed

MIAMI: This is why I'm gonna fuck you up. Let's plan this. Let's roil up your boring life. Don't worry, I will use gloves. And for the record, I've done this before. Back then, it was about a woman. Now it's about shutting your goddamn mouth.

DALLAS: Go to sleep faggot

MIAMI: Good, good. Keep trying me. Makes me stronger.

DALLAS: Was texting with chris. We both agree you are the next miami person to die.

MIAMI: Awesome. The truth is -- you've never been a friend to me. All you've done is diss me and my work. So it has come to this: I challenge you to a fist-fight.

Let's see who wins.

Seriously.

You fucking bitch.

DALLAS: Youre a drunk. Drunks have no friends.

MIAMI: Yeah. Drunks also punch people in the face.

DALLAS: Go to sleep bro

MIAMI: Fuck you.

DALLAS: When you read this nonsense later youll call me to apologize

MIAMI: This fool and "a nobody" has bigger balls than you. I don't care anymore. Go fuck yourself. What have you done for me, or anyone, as a friend?? Nothing, absolutely nothing. You have no friends, and that's OK, perhaps. You're a solipsistic bitch. We shall not speak again after this text. I have decided now to disown you as a friend, as I realize it doesn't matter to you anyway, right? Good. Then let it be.

Human Side Podcast 21: Always Leaving

With Andreas of Austria. Topics discussed: Imprisonment in Burma; smuggling cocaine from Colombia to Ecuador; islands in the Pacific; the great state of Texas; and the danger in seeing too much of the world.

Human Side Podcast 20: "Don't Pull the Knife Out"

With Andreas of Austria. Topics discussed: the absence of artistic greatness in contemporary life; marrying foreign wives and divorcing them; dating girls from Montenegro; Darwin's theory of Genetic Drift; Colombian knife attacks; and the silencing of the restlessness that forces a man to leave his home and country.

Human Side Podcast 19: Andreas of Austria (Part 3)

A dialogue with the great Austrian.

Human Side Podcast 18: Corporate Slavery

To relinquish a hard-gained freedom and happiness for the stability and certainty of making money. But to discover the only certainty is misery. How is it that two men who learned this truth years earlier have returned to the West and gone back to work for it?

Dear Omar

"Form is never more than an extension of content" (Robert Creeley).

Explain to me why the content of what you've written is best presented in a spontaneous form.

Kerouac had specific and carefully thought out reasons (religious, literary, and content based) for his use of spontaneous prose ("first thought, best thought" — Ginsberg).

One of my early criticisms of your first chapter was the interjections of a narrative voice that looks back and explains. Again you do this in what you've sent me and it does not work at all with a spontaneous prose form. Spontaneous prose is about energy and the moment — not so much the moment of your writing as an author (although Kerouac did this to great effect), but the moment of your character when shit is happening. Your sober, authorial interjections about where MDMA comes from, and good or bad batches of it, destroy any energy and momentum the spontaneous prose form might generate from Shay at his moment on the rooftop with the girl, etc.

So my assessment of this is the same as my assessment of the first chapter you sent me months ago: You are mixing your narrative techniques when they must not be mixed. This tells me 1) you are well enough read to know of certain narrative techniques, but also 2) you do not understand how and when to use them. You have not considered at a philosophical level how they can work with the subject matter and action you want to present.

It took me years of work and taking apart sentences and paragraphs to figure this shit out.

I have suggested certain books to you that would explain — much better than I can or want to here — narration as done by some of the masters. After you understand how these masters (Joyce especially, but all the Modernist writers to some degree — it hasn't advanced much beyond them) were able to create through techniques the images and feelings in a reader, then you will have to practice how to do it with your own material. That may take years. Or you may never master it enough to do it with any fluidity.

I'm not knocking your material. You may very well have a story. But you are murdering it with bad, uninformed and amateurish narrative technique. Its clear to me narrative technique is something you've never studied, but you will have to study it if you want to write better.

One of the earliest indications for me that you did not know about narration, came from an edit you made on my story "A Panty Shop in Bogota" in Simply Good. You added "my future wife" to a story that was a slice of life piece, a moment in time. It was information irrelevant to the story, coming from the future, an entirely unwarranted authorial interjection that broke the narrative flow. This was a genocidal crime of narrative technique — that unfortunately got attributed to the author, me. You made me look like an amateur with that edit. I was furious at the time, but you insisted on it and stood by it. It was then that I realized you had never thought rigorously about narration and techniques and how they work and when they are applicable. But I knew too and was comforted by the knowledge that nobody of any consequence would read Simply Good and my story in it, and that this magazine would fold and disappear just as your earlier magazine MAP (fortunately) did.

I have also recommended the translating of the Belgian poet as a way to improve your feel for the English language. Meditating for sometimes hours on a word and a sentence is most instructive. Especially as you are not someone who has traveled widely and learned how a word is used by different people in far away places and in other forms of life.

I know you think you're good with words, but I can show you even in your latest text messages to me where you criticize me about video games, how the words you are using don't actually work together.

Just as with narrative techniques, you show some familiarity with certain words, but you show in the awkward way you use them that you lack fluency with them. You're lazy Omar, and you know that. I want to make you rigorous. Uncompromising. To eliminate all the dross. You get by on showing off to tiny people in Miami. Yes, you've got enough to impress them. But to roll with the big boys you got to have more rigor and be more studied.

I am hopeful you can do it. You will be getting a late start. I did most of this work from the ages of 20 to 30. I used to sit in the American Library in Paris in the late '90s taking apart sentences to figure out why they worked like they did. I spent 4 years reading Being and Time by Heidegger. This was all necessary work. Could I do it all today? Probably not. It is the work of youth and youthful energy.

But I wish you luck.

Translate the Belgian. Meditate on each and every word and line. One of those poems should take you a month to translate well. Its hard work if you are rigorous. But you will learn the English language in a way you did not before.

And read those 2 books on narrative technique. Then begin to try out those techniques (from Maupassant, Chekhov, Hemingway, Joyce, etc). Get good with them.

Then when that period of work is done, the translating and reading, you will be able to apply a high level writer's abilities to your story of Shay and Miami and all that debauchery.

You have much work to do. But it is great work, the work that can make a greatness.

Human Side Podcast 16: A Dark Age

... and trail running.

Human Side Podcast 15: Ramblin' Man

The road as one's home and the hospitality of the earth's wild places. Two lifelong ramblers lay it on you.

Human Side Podcast 14: Shalamov / Crazy Days in Budapest

Discussion of a forthcoming Human Side Press translation of gulag poetry from Varlam Shalamov (fall 2018), followed by talk of Budapest in the late '90s and a Hungarian female stalker.

Human Side Podcast 13: The Shaman

Is there an "antidote" to alienation in the West? Part III of a series of podcasts on Jordan Peterson and philosophy as therapy.

Human Side Podcast 12: Critique of Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson now leads a vast internet army. What are the implications for his thinking? A discussion with reference to the English philosopher John Gray, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the great theorist of crowds, Elias Canetti.

Human Side Podcast 11: Jordan Peterson / Order & Chaos

Discussion of the work of Jordan Peterson, Nietzsche, James C Scott, Wittgenstein and others.

"The Letter Carrier's Satchel" by Varlam Shalamov

a translation of "СУМКА ПОЧТАЛЬОНА" from Колымские тетради

Frigid, the hours at nighttime,
In monstrous disquietude,
To the sky I send up my call sign
from the seventieth latitude.

Warming at a fire somewhere,
May a bearded geologist,
Locate my position there
On this cursed mountain,

Where, like Tannhäuser and Venus,
A captive of barren snows,
Having lived twenty years in a cave,
Misery, the only dream I know.

Still, longing to break free,
my shoulders like Samson heaving,
to bring down this vault of stone,
so many years I've imagined leaving.

          *  *  *

I held on to that fairy tale —
Until that fairy tale was dead.
Its human caress
had long since fled.

A moth in a snowstorm,
She was hidden,
To the light she came,
To the window bidden.

The flakes of snow
Became moths in crowds,
A flutter of wings let loose
From the low clouds.

Out into the snowy distance
With a tear on my cheek,
Through my fingers the delicate
White pollen sweeps.

          *  *  *

In memory are great evils disguised — 
In number and degree unperceived.
While in life lies, only lies,
In it we can no longer believe.

Maybe, the cities are gone,
Gone too the orchard's trees,
Only the power of ice lives on,
and the briny seas.

Maybe, the world — is only snow,
A road lit by stars.
Maybe, the world — is only taiga,
In God's mind, not ours.

          *  *  *

I — Archimedes — fishing upon the sand,
In the swift shadows of the mind,
On a crumpled, tattered page in hand
Have this poem's last line signed.

I — Archimedes — will not avert my gaze
from these vague stanzas' theoretical resolution.
In those moments of life in my last days —
Another line in this poem's evolution.

I know for me this is no game or test,
But deadly. It is for life itself played.
I — Archimedes — will not let my pen rest,
And this notebook must not be mislaid.

Human Side Podcast 10: Pabst Blue Ribbon

Technical problems destroyed nearly all of a 3.5 hour podcast on cultural Marxism, leaving only these 3 minutes about Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer.

"Red Lily of the Valley" poetry by Varlam Shalamov

a translation of "РОЗОВЫЙШ ЛАНДЫШ" from Колымские тетради

Upon a saint's tomb laid
Placed above a headstone
A wreath of flowers in braid,
In the purest blood soaked.

With glossy, sagging petals,
Heavy with dew.
Displaying delicate tendrils,
in all its beauty on view.

And shy and clearly scared,
blossoms to the earth bowed,
like a child's trembling hands
hanging from its boughs.

But these pinkish clusters
Among rags of pale-green
Will tomorrow flower in bluster,
Into a blazing, fiery scene.

And, like a bloody tear,
Like Macbeth's ghost,
It will draw our eyes here,
in its tumult engrossed.

From these eyes blood flows,
And turning to the setting sun
We are before it froze,
by some shame unknown.

As if we could live another way,
and read from other books.
And not from a graveyard bouquet
was it the truth we took.

And we kiss the petals,
And to something make our prayer.
They tell us: Its all nothing special —
Of our smile they are unaware.

I hear it, like grass growing,
These new flowers breaking through.
I feel it, into words transposing,
and compose this poem for you.

Human Side Podcast 09: A Vendor's Meeting in Denver

A CFO, an accountant and a truck driver discuss the day's events.

Aphorisms on the Individual

1. The individual is man the citizen, taxpayer, consumer and economic unit. 

2. The individual is the human animal brought to legibility by the State and the Corporation.

4. Men are expected, through coercion or enticement, to identify with the numbers they have been assigned (Social Security, bank accounts, etc); to use the acceptable platforms of expression (elections; Facebook; etc); and to speak of themselves in officially registered categories (Democrat/Republican, Male/Female/Fluid, Black/White etc). The State protects and demands observance of these categories of individual for its own measures of population oversight, taxation and control, but as well to improve access to a human population by the sales and marketing forces of the corporate class.

11. The feeling of oneself as an individual is a symptom, not a truth. 

19. The task of the State and Corporation is to make legible or undermine the hidden transcripts that maintain the local community, small group and family: to release man the individual from the bondage of hidden transcripts.

29. Agriculture combines with advances in the technologies of transportation and communication to challenge the small group, the local community and the family (see James C. Scott). Guided by these technologies small groups generate surpluses (caloric and later fiat) and, by their own internal growth in numbers, threaten themselves from within; while simultaneously they are stretched apart through outside trade. They now speak beyond the global and of Martian travel — the spreading of human units of economy beyond the earth. 

34. The global community/economy is a crowd formation (see Canetti). As a crowd formation it must be always on the increase or risk its dissipation.

35. The global community/economy is a crowd made up of individuals, not local communities, small groups or families. The local community, small group or family slows global crowd growth — as keepers of hidden transcripts they exist outside State and Corporate purview.

49. The interest rate is used to stoke or slow global crowd growth over time to maintain its functioning and satisfy the crowd's debt holders. 

53. The velocity of money is a measure of the global crowd's unity and sustainability as a crowd.

57. Money moves with a faster velocity between individuals than between families and small groups.

"The Blue Notebook" by Varlam Shalamov

a translation of "cиняя тетрадь" from Колымские тетради

Cave dust, blue mold
stains my verse.
Born of so many Sundays —
Peaceful and terse.

These poems, as animals, quickly grew
by the snow's cold baptized
in the frigid dark, in the marshy damp.
And after all they survived.

Of ancestors they do not boast,
For heirs not a care.
Theirs is only the granite cell
Through the years unaware.

Now, by a birdsong aroused
Not a nightingale in call alone,
But a scream, always of dreams
From the comfort of forest and stone.

Forgive me these analogies
Anyone, who knows this life of mine,
knows from zoology it is derived
with sanity always on the line.

            *  *  *

Frail, lonely and naked,
without firelight blind.
In a lilac, polar gloom
I am confined.

To the pale darkness I entrust
my poems all.
No longer on my mind
sins large and small.

With lungs torn by cold
with a mouth sealed tight.
With teardrops like stones
with sweat frozen white.

I speak these poems,
I cry them out unbade.
Trees and pebbles, the deaf,
little by little more afraid.

From far mountains the tiny echo
I listen for,
and hearing it my chest fills easily
I breathe once more.

                   *  *  *

Do not judge us too severely.
Better to be merciful.
Our way we will find,
A path narrow but defined.

Along the cliffs go musk deer
Let's go above those clouds,
Hand in hand up to where it is clear,
Poetry we need, a bridge made aloud.

These verses we build
now solid and true.
Though they sway in the wind,
once they were flimsy all through.

Stepping out onto the wobbly bridge,
Pledging only this book we make,
Whatever the envy or anger,
Will not us to Heaven take.

                *  *  *

A timid imagination,
Come up here to me.
Cope with the dizziness,
After all, it's not easy.

Awaiting you unfamiliar words
But at the mountain's base,
That land — it's only foundation,
We've long known that place.

From here one can further see,
With widest sight ...
How the plains offend me,
This — the mountain's birthright.

Human Side Podcast 08: Madmen at the Wall

Discussion of the nature of truth for localized hunter-gatherers vs. truth for sedentary, agricultural peoples. Also mountain lions, big rig trucking, the divinities past and present, and the emergence of the "individual" in Western thought. With reference to James C Scott, Hugh Brody, Edmund Carpenter, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Marshall McLuhan, etc.

Human Side Podcast 07: Cured Meats & Cheeses

Retirement to a leisurely life of pleasure vs. a lifelong struggle in cheerful, joyous rage.

Human Side Podcast 06: McCandless in the Wild

A discussion of Chris McCandless, Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, and why some young men must go on adventures.

Accident Part II: The Wrecker's Prayer

Ahead of me the wrecker was sweeping the accident debris off the shoulder. The wrecker continued to my truck and knocked on the passenger side door. 

I caught up to him. "You need something?" 

The wrecker turned to me. A wide scar ran from his right eyebrow up his forehead and back through his hair. The hair did not grow where the scar passed.

"You're the driver?"

"Yes."

"Nobody was hurt here tonight?"

"No."

"When I got the call I expected there to be dead people. When did it happen?"

I told him.

"I was in bed and an explosion woke me. I said to my wife, there's been a terrible accident. But that was 25 miles from here. I couldn't have heard it." 

"It was like a bomb went off when he hit my tandems."

"Somebody should have died."

"Yes." 

"If he hits you a second earlier he goes under your tandems and you drag him down the road crushing him. A second later, he hits the rear of your trailer and shears off the top of his car taking his head off. He should have flipped from how he hit you."

"Yes."

"I was in an accident with a truck once. Its how I got this," he pointed at the scar. "My brakes went out and I hit his trailer going through an intersection. Ejected me from the car. Truck dragged the car two miles before he knew he was in an accident."

"You don't feel anything when you're driving a truck."

"I asked an EMS guy once what was the worst accident he ever saw. He was off-duty sitting at a diner eating a burger and from the window he watches a car collide with the trailer of a truck. The driver is ejected 15 feet in the air, then lands on his feet and starts running. The EMS guy chases him down the street yelling after him. He chased the guy until he collapsed from blood loss." The wrecker smiled.  "That guy was me. You lose a lot of blood when your head's opened up."

"You didn't remember running?"

"Nothing," said the wrecker. "I was in the hospital a long time." Then the wrecker said, "Are you a Christian?"

"Yes," I said.

"May I pray with you?"

"Yes," I said.

The wrecker held out his hands and I took his hands in mine. We bowed our heads and the wrecker began to pray. The wrecker prayed in thanks to the Lord Jesus Christ for what had happened this night, that I and the other driver were both alive and unhurt. The wrecker prayed in thanks for the Lord's protection against evil and prayed for His continuing protection. The wrecker prayed in thanks for the gift of His son Jesus Christ, who's birth we were to celebrate in a few days. The wrecker prayed that more of the world would come to know Him and accept Jesus Christ as Savior. The wrecker prayed this all in name of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior, Amen.

"Amen," I said.

Accident Part I: Over the Line

The night was clear and very cold. After leaving Dallas in rush hour there had been no traffic on US 69 through Oklahoma, and it was very quiet in Pryor and in Muskogee. In my trailer was more than 45,000 lbs of boxed Coca-Cola syrup. It was three days until Christmas.

At midnight, miles from the Kansas border, I turned into the dirt truck parking lot at the Buffalo Run Casino to take my 30 minute DOT break. I heated water to make coffee and lay in the sleeper reading. I had 180 miles left to Kansas City and a 4 am appointment at Vistar. 

It is my custom to begin driving after exactly a thirty minute break -- the minimum mandated by the DOT to unlock the remaining three hours of drive time on the daily 11 hour clock -- but on this night, knowing traffic would be light into the city because of the holiday, I chose to make a proper coffee from grounds, requiring water heated longer and to the highest temperature. 

I remember finishing the coffee and noting on the Qualcomm my break had lasted 42 minutes. I was not pressed for time, and would likely have to wait to be unloaded when I arrived at the customer, but a truck driver lives by his clock and as a matter of principle these twelve minutes in excess bothered me. 

I began driving and crossed into Kansas. US 69 merges with US Route 400 at the town of Baxter Springs and the posted speed increases to 65mph as the road leaves town, a northbound and southbound lane undivided by a median. The road continues to a roundabout with Route 66, a very technical obstacle to pass cleanly with a semi-truck, but one I each time looked forward to as a test of my professionalism. 

A mile before the roundabout a southbound car edged over the line. 

At 65mph you do not have much time but I gave the driver the tiniest moment to right himself in his lane, then yanking my horn I started to the shoulder. But he kept coming into my lane and now with both hands on the wheel, headlights coming at me, I jerked the tractor onto the shoulder, as close as I could get to the drop off into the ditch and bushes and the pond, and he went by me. Then an explosion like a bomb had gone off, but I felt nothing. I slowed onto the shoulder but in my mirror I saw nothing. Then bounding down the road went one of my trailer tires. 

I quick put on my coat, took my flashlight, my knife and a blanket and jumped out of the truck. The driver-side outer tandem tires on the trailer were gone, the rims bent and disfigured. A quarter mile back in the ditch on my side of the road was a car with its lights on and I ran towards it. The road side was littered with pieces of metal and plastic and glass.

A car stopped on the shoulder ahead of me. A young couple was inside. I told them to call 911, I gave the location, and told them to say a car has collided with a semi.

I hurried down the embankment through the grass, shining my light on the car. The hood on the driver's side was crushed, the front tire was gone, and the driver's side door panel was torn away. I prepared for something awful inside.

Someone was in the back seat. I shined the light in on him. A young man was packing things into a duffel bag and mumbling. I asked him if he was okay. He said he was okay and continued packing. I told him I was the driver of the truck he had hit and I asked him to step out of the car. He stepped out and faced me. I looked him up and down, shining my light over him. I asked if he was injured, if he was in any pain. He said he was fine. I could hardly believe it. 

On the knee of his right leg was a spot of blood. A skin graft, he said. The skin was tender and prone to bleeding. It was nothing. He really was fine. I could hardly believe it.

A patrol car arrived and parked on the road. The state trooper came down the embankment with his light on us. The young deputy was called Noble Deakins. He asked each of us if we were injured. I gave the deputy my CDL and insurance card and told him what had happened. He sent me back to my truck to call my dispatcher and roadside service. 

After I had made my phone calls I walked back to see the deputy. A wrecker was down in the grass preparing to winch the totaled car up onto a flatbed. The young man was gone. A friend from Missouri had come for him, the deputy told me. He claimed to have insurance, but could produce no insurance card and had been cited. Deputy Noble Deakins also said the young man told him it was I who had gone into his lane and nearly killed him. I smiled and shook my head. The roadside evidence does not support his story, I said. The state of Kansas does not assign guilt in accidents and the two stories would be presented in the report, the deputy explained, the insurance companies will then debate who is at fault. 

I said goodbye to the deputy but he stopped me.

"You did a good thing here tonight," said Deputy Noble Deakins. 

"I know, sir. But I was lucky too."

He held out his hand and I shook it. Then I walked back towards my truck. 

(PART 2 TO COME)

Human Side Podcast 05: Knut Hamsun

Discussion of Knut Hamsun and a recently completed English translation of his book of poetry The Wild Chorus (Det vilde Kor). Drawing of Hamsun by his then 10 year old son Torre Hamsun.

Human Side Podcast 04: Bicycle Touring

Two veterans of the road discuss bicycle tours in Europe and the Americas.