Stepping on the Toes of the Muse

I’ve taken more breaks than I expected to on this blog and now I’m stepping away again, but this time for a welcome reason. I’m putting most of my creative attention into a new project, something I’m writing for myself that I’m not telling anyone anything about.

I’ve been dancing with this blog when suddenly across the room I see another face, and rudely I break away and stride across the floor and when I get close enough I see that she's who brought me here at the beginning. I hold my arms out and we come together gliding and weaving, and I know I’ll step on her toes and breathe on her and lean on her too heavily and not know what to say. It’s always been like that; I’ll never learn properly. But somehow she wants to go home with me.

Stop by again, guys, we’ll put some music on. I don’t know when -– maybe tomorrow, maybe in a couple of months. Seeya. Love you guys.

France, U.S., In Role Reversal

The French are intent on thinking less.

While this article is bound to send American CEO's scrambling to read more.

Moi, je pense trop aussi. Est-ce possible que je suis au fond français?

It Didn't Have to Happen This Way But It Did

I drive by a field where a painful incident in my past occurred, and I feel only a mild wistfulness as I keep going forward, the strands of myself separating and recombining, mutating and adapting. These quiet days, even my metabolism feels new: a craving for fruit has come over me: pineapple, cherries, blueberries, blackberries, mangos, plums, any fruits you can name, and once a day is barely enough, as if I’ve regressed into some kind of tropical forest ape.

I lull myself to sleep with scary movies. I cherish the unnerved feeling after it’s over, when you feel you’re still in it, the monsters coming at you, the cave getting pitch dark. Sitting in your easy chair you’re in a deep-breathing, slow-lifting trance that’s almost postcoital. I recommend The Descent, about a group of six adventurous women -– all, coincidentally enough, raving beauties – who get trapped in a deep cave. Never before in my adult life have I been tempted to sleep with the lights on.

Change works through the drifting days as well as the dramatic ones. This is how you make your trail, your worldline, the unique squiggle in spacetime that represents how you danced and ran and squirmed from birth to death. You take one step, then another, none of them necessary until it’s already taken, and at the end you can read your whole life’s unplanned choreography, the curlicued signature you left on the page of eighty years, and it looks just right.

My worldline has led me back to reading science fiction, as I did in adolescence. Currently it’s Stephen Baxter’s panorama novel Evolution, which covers all of primate history from 65 million years ago to the present -– in fact the future. It’s like an exceptionally readable textbook in human paleontology, with imagination added where the fossil record is sketchy. There’s a wonderful set piece about a handful of anthropoid apes set adrift on the ocean on a downed tree after a flash flood: it’s a lifeboat survival tale, complete with long-delayed cannibalism, and reads like Life of Pi except with all the characters as animals. Baxter renders the full stink and slime and gore of animal life; it’s shocking to think of my ancestors defecating on each other to assert dominance or obsessively picking bugs out of each other’s pubic hair to establish social bonds. But that’s us, dear readers: we’re “bipedal, tool wielding, meat eating, xenophobic, hierarchical, combative, competitive” and possessed of “doggedness, exuberance, courage, and vision.” Chance and opportunism, smart or foolish or arbitrary choice, pre-adaptation or blind leap, guiding us through an unexplored cave so that we miraculously chose the right passageways and crawled through into the light. We’ve still got the dust on our clothes.

Some of us back then lived among sabertooth cats who were specialized to prey on hominids. No need for scary movies. No luxury of splitting the monogamous pair.

I look back gratefully at my four-foot-high, stone-axe-chipping, fireless, garmentless forebears of a million years ago and wonder at the courage of the primitive. It’s still all we have.

The Imaginary Philosophy

It was one of those newsmagazine articles that explain the latest impenetrable philosophy to readers who are flipping through on their way to the movie reviews and are keen to learn of something they can hold over the heads of their spouses. It told of a book eight hundred pages long, three hundred of them footnotes, that purported to overturn all conventional views of identity and consciousness. Fueling the excitement was the fact that the book was unreadable.

Jespersen was avid to understand this outpouring of genius but he knew in advance he would never be able to slog through the book, and probably not even a single chapter. He would have to make do with the magazine article instead. Taking each journalistic phrase as the distilled essence of pages of leadfooted inference, by the third column of the article he came to a thunderous realization: he understood! The philosopher was analyzing the human mind as if it were a mechanism and the physical universe as if it were a human consciousness. Jespersen teased out the meaning further: animate and inanimate were equal creations, twin mirrors of the double face of their creator, who could see himself only in them. There is no social agent, there is no experiencing ego, there are only reflections of the invisible.

From then on, Jespersen lived in the charged air of a disciple. He wrote poems inspired by the new system. His diaries recorded how the modernday Pythagoras’s thought had transformed his life. He bored his coworkers with clumsy explanations of exactly what the great thinker meant.

Then one day, feeling that he had at last prepared himself, he read the book--and its ideas were not at all what he had expected; he had completely misunderstood. All that about the human and the inanimate, the identity of creation and creator--it was nowhere to be found in the eight hundred pages.

Overcome, he sat in his bathroom looking at an open razor. Then he shut the razor and put it away, bemoaning his lack of nerve.

He sat on the edge of the tub all night, wondering how he could have believed in a philosophy that had never been invented at all, that had been thought of by no one.

Why Love Is Not of the Body

"There are too many of us to have sex with. There's a whole world to love, but too many marriage certificates to hand out." -- Byron Katie

Younger than a Rock

In my twenties I identified with a fictional character, a much-honored artist who was selfish and difficult, silent and unworldly, obsessed with perfection and ignorant of humanity, a blandly monomaniacal recluse who insisted not only on cutting his own path up a lonely forbidding mountain but on dragging his loved ones with him. Now I’m the character’s age and I feel as much resemblance to him as to a rock that I stub my toe on.

Another Babka Bites the Dust

It's not that I miss the old culture all that much -- let a hundred trendy restaurants invade the Lower East Side, I say, who needs the knishes and the dry goods stores? It's become such a cliche to lament the passing of some commercial semi-institution from bygone generations and to rail at the uncultured rich young vampires who move in. Yes, populations change, new immigrants replace the old, and demographic patterns shift. Otherwise New York [substitute the name of your own place] would become an ethnological museum.

What moves me about this very short New York Times article is not the disappearance of an old bakery or even of my parents' and grandparents' historical environment -- in which they were mostly miserable -- but the emotions of the reporter, which come through so strongly through his journalistic prose. It's not every day that a Times writer gets to tell the world how overjoyed his family was when their father brought home a cake after a day's work at the hosiery shop. The telling is better than the cake.

And let's face it, though I've never been to Gertel's, I'm one of those "grandchildren…of striving sewing machine operators." On both sides.

Rain Haiku 2

In honor of the wettest May and June in central Texas, not only in my memory but in anyone's.


Raindrops in coffee cup --
clear cold spears splashing hot brown --
I’m arms out, sky-eyed.


No, cat, you can’t run
between raindrops. Drink the wet
from your sleek white fur.


Whenever it rains
haiku ideas come to me.
No, not ideas -- storms.

Then and Now: A Face

When I was thirty I looked at my face in the mirror, the baby smooth skin, the longing liquid eyes, the thin cheeks, and thought, “This is a face that has been untouched by life.” I didn’t know enough to want to keep it that way.

Now I look at the skin tags, the baggy eyes, the yellowed sclera, the drooping eyelid, the wrinkled sockets, the hanging jowls, the thickened neck, the puffy cheeks, the parchment forehead, the bumps, the pores, the blotches, and think, “Touched--and not harmed.”

In No Voice

Not to speak for one’s subject, but to let each thing speak for itself. The dirty white bubbles when you wash your hands after a day outside. The grateful sting of eyedrops after a long night’s reading. A dust-rimmed empty can of tea: pencils, a two-euro coin, ancient dried-up tea leaves.

Thinking of buying a photograph. A photograph of a hand adjusting the frame of a photograph. The stillness of angles, the quiet of black and white.

Travel Notes: Comfort, Texas

Down the road a few miles from Welfare, another of those little Hill Country towns named by the German immigrants who stopped and settled instead of continuing further west, having recognized a paradise when they saw it. Comfort was founded by freethinkers and abolitionists and, like many towns in this part of the state, voted against secession in the Civil War. In fact a battle broke out here between local Union sympathizers and Confederate soldiers, and a monument flies the flag permanently at half-staff.

It’s about 110 miles from Austin, through the broken plateau with its toothed hills and seasonally flooding creek beds. Once, we stayed at an inn here, crossing a bridge over a waterless rocky gulley, and after an overnight storm the creek bed overflowed into the pasture and almost to the house. That’s what the wildflowers count on. By this time they’re darker than in the spring, dusty purple and orange like dirt-smudged fruit, with lots of bare stalks, and they appeal to me as much as in their youth. I’d like to stay with them, to sit with them and talk about what we’ve seen and what we remember. The Hill Country storms also make Richard’s Rainwater possible: the nation’s first bottled rainwater company, its tall collecting tanks rising in faded crayon colors above a green meadow. When you get past the For Sale signs on the ranchland on Highway 290, there’s a wildflower seed farm: a big square field of purple next to a big square field of orange next to a big square field of yellow; a lavender farms. And peach orchards and blackberry bushes, and roadside stands one after another offering homemade jams, ice creams, cobblers, and pies. A claque of adoring purple flowers applauds rapturously at the feet of graceful young fruit trees.

With a population of about 2,400, Comfort strikes me as a smaller and more easeful Boerne, which in turn, at 10,000, is a smaller and infinitely more bearable Fredericksburg. Fredericksburg, the area’s foremost cutesey-boutiquey retro-Teutonic daytrip destination, has become absolutely choked with chain hotels and fast-food franchises and weekend crowds, while Boerne offers the same features – the town square, the streets signs in German, the big stone library, the old houses with nineteenth-century trellises and columns, the cowboy-style storefronts – and still makes them a pleasure. In Boerne’s outskirts, I drove past a spanking new biotech company and right afterwards 2 Fat Guys Complete Automotive.

Comfort was where I stopped and walked, though. High Street is lined with antique shops and cafes and the storefront public library, a 1916 native limestone building incorporating elements of an earlier building. The Closet, a dress shop, is also a full-sized old-fashioned soda fountain with big vinyl booths. In Bud Kracher’s antique shop, amid beautiful tables and armoire, I saw an authentic Sinclair gasoline pump with the dinosaur logo, $2,250. A sign points to Comfort Cellars Winery, as small a winery as you could possibly hope for –- I couldn’t find it, and concluded it must be someone’s backyard. Across the street, the window of the Meet Market, a club-in-progress, bears a handwritten “Opening Soon” sign, with each of its optimistic dates crossed off and replaced by a later one—“Spring!”—“Summer!”—and finally someone’s scrawled response, “Really?”

High Street is marred by the gutted shell of a big old limestone building protected by a chain fence, but it’s no long-term eyesore. It’s the Ingenhuett Store, a landmark built in 1887 and burned in the middle of a March night in 2006. There are ribbons on the fence, and signs saying how much the store is missed and promising to rebuild it. Down the street, two of the Ingenhuetts’ ancestral homes have been preserved; the newer one, from about 1900, is a reasonable size, but the original is tiny; yet here lived the town’s first family, who owned the hotel, the saloon, and many of the stores, and who filled the lucrative sinecure of postmaster.

Comfort. Just enough city escapees have moved here to keep it alive. No evidence of construction anywhere downtown. In an antique mall I was sorely tempted by an Arkansas toothpick in a beaded leather sheath, but it was a multi-owner place and the cashiers weren’t authorized to bargain. Well, I was just as glad to see it and leave it alone. I strolled and smiled, I greeted shopkeepers and appreciatively left without buying, and drove home carrying plenty to write about.

“The divorce is granted and the agreement is approved.”

It was first come first served at the uncontesteds’ counter, and I was the earliest to arrive, along with the junior lawyer who was shepherding me through. A simple and sometimes nonchalant process: after I passed through the metal detector in the courthouse lobby, she and I had tried to find each other by walking slowly around in the crowd and giving furtive are-you-the-one glances, trying to guess each other’s identity on the basis of vague descriptions, like a couple on a blind date.

In the elevator we talked about how she’d had a flat tire that morning and had used Fix-a-Flat, a recourse I highly recommend. It was my first time in a courtroom, and I sat in one of the rows of spectator seats, with four or five other about-to-be-divorced citizens and their lawyers waiting scattered. Our judge was a cranky type on the verge of retirement, the lawyer had advised me, but she turned out to be perfectly human. She mistakenly called the lawyer “sir” instead of “ma’am” and apologized smilingly, and she sounded sincere when she told me, “Good luck to you, sir,” at the end. It was just a matter of answering “correct” to seven or eight formulaic questions as the junior lawyer had coached me to in the hallway.

The judge entered the courtroom at 8:30 a.m. and by 8:35 I was on my way out, having been wished a friendly, “You can go now,” by the lawyer, who had another client to usher through. (“What a way to meet people,” that divorcee had told me as we chatted uncomfortably before the opening of the session.)

I wandered the halls. I lingered to read the family court docket, a long sheet of printout paper taped to a glass door: restraining orders, divorce trials, and assorted motions. I read the names of the parties and wondered who they were, what had brought them to this. Out on the street again I started walking to the state capitol, near which someone I know is going to start a job soon, and for some reason I started thinking of myself in the third person. “The man is walking up the hill. He looks at the bronze statue of a soldier next to the fountain. He turns around and heads for where his car is parked.” It made me feel better to think that way. At some point I was focused enough to drive home.

At some moments I wanted to plunge back into work and at others I wanted to lie down and sleep, so I alternated both strategies through the day. Waking up from a nap at 3:00, I warned myself that if I didn’t get up and get moving I might go into a downslide, not to mention bing unable to sleep once night came. So I went to the gym and that energized me. Then I dropped by the martial arts school to pay a test fee for the kids, then I went to pick them up from day camp, then I took the three of us for ice cream, and then I drove us home and made them take showers, they were filthy from playing in the dirt all day.

Yin and Yang in Relationships and Recreation

My divorce becomes official in a couple of days. I was going to wait till then to give you a report, but why wait? I feel thoughts bubbling up right now, and in a couple of days I might have more observations.

It’s my policy not to say anything specific here about the situation, out of respect for others’ privacy, and I’m just going to bend that policy to the extent to telling you that it’s hard to imagine a divorce going any better than this one. We’ve negotiated a fair settlement, we’re amicable as can be, the kids are thriving (largely as a result of their own inner development, I think, as well as seeing that their parents’ breakup hasn’t created enmity), and we all eat dinner together once a week.

In short, things may be better now than before, and that’s the goal of a breakup.

I’m still feeling ridiculously upbeat, and thinking of Katie’s adage, “When you things can’t possibly get any better, they have to.” At the same time I’m tempering my mood by reminding myself that the wheel keeps turning and downturns are inevitable. I’ve lived through a great many of those in my time. This time, though, there feels like a difference in the texture of my anticipation: I’m telling myself that if I fall into pessimism, that’s just the night coming on and night is the time for growth and dreams, for the ascent of intuition, for unseen preparations. (“Telling myself?” What’s the good of that, you ask? In fact one of my recent pleasant surprises is how much change can be accomplished through self-talk. This is in line with the ideas of cognitive therapy, rational emotive therapy, and The Work.)

Another reason I’m feeling good is that this past weekend I attended a great 16-hour workshop in Chen style tai chi, taught by Cheng Jin-Cai (pronounced Chung Jin-Tsai), a great master who grew up next to the ancestral Chen village. He has studied for 47 years (he’s my age), and is the 19th generation successor of the originator of this style. Previously I’ve studied Yang style, which is the most popular in the US and I think in China too. Chen, the original tai chi style, is much more physically demanding and more martial in its approach. To see Grandmaster Cheng at work, to feel him throw you with absolutely no use of force – just a tiny shrug as you try to push him and then fly off his body – and to hear corroborated stories of his healing abilities -- is to believe that chi, the Chinese version of the life force, may really exist, whether it’s hormonal or neurological or something else. He’s also a fine teacher despite limited English. Like a Western teacher and unlike a Chinese teacher, he doesn’t withhold selected parts of his knowledge from you, and he patiently pays attention to each individual student.

If you’re anywhere near Houston and are interested in this kind of practice, I recommend looking him up. My teacher, who’s a sixth-degree black belt, regularly travels 3 hours into Houston to take private lessons from him. Cheng brought along an assistant, an Asian-American who owns his own tai chi school and has been practicing for “only” 27 years, who regularly drives seven hours from New Orleans to Houston for that purpose. This assistant has studied with prominent masters in China, Taiwan, and elsewhere, and says he had never found a true teacher until Cheng Jin-Cai.

The experience has renewed my enthusiasm for tai chi, which had waned over the past couple of years because I’d found Chen style bewilderingly difficult. I’m practicing again, and it feels good.

Sailing Solo

All my life from the age of seventeen I've either had a mate or, in the aftermath of a relationship, was actively looking for another. Now I seem to see a different vision shimmering on the horizon, the faint mist of another possibility: is it possible to travel alone?

A solo journey? It hadn't occurred to me before. Worth sailing toward the mist before it burns away?

The Festival at 3 a.m.

The last links of jalapeno smoked sausage have been washed down with wildly inappropriate wines. From the tentsites in the hills come guitar chords and whoops of celebration, and no one shouts, “Hey, I’m trying to sleep.” You sit at a campfire with people you don’t know, listening to songs you’ve never heard before. You half-stumble in the dark on the path to the community toilets, moving aside into a branch of a juniper to let two lovers pass on their way to their tent. Down in the hollow you stay another half-hour to watch the fire dancers twirl their flaming torches behind them and through their legs and across their shoulders as they bend and turn and arch their backs to a fierce song strummed by a hoarse singer.

If you spread your sleeping bag at your host’s campsite you’ll just toss awake listening to the song circles at the campfires. So you keep walking past the darkened outdoor stage, past the entrance gate, to the rocky, rutted farmer’s field that’s the parking lot, and for ten minutes you search for your car. Sometimes a couple or a threesome walks nearby, uncatchable phrases fluttering like batwings. Eventually you fit your key into the door lock. You perform a number of tests to see which would be less uncomfortable, curling up in the back seat or lowering the front seat, and your head knocks the rearview mirror awry and you knee knocks into the gearshift. The rear windshield is damply mud-specked but is that an almost-full moon through it? No, it’s the white light from the parking lot lamppost.

You get into position but you’re still awake. It’s a matter of waiting now, waiting for your mental state to shift, for hybrid animals, long-gone friends, and movie stars to appear and the landscape to change like a slide show, and then for it all to bow goodnight and sink away. You watch your consciousness slow down, speed up, a leg twitch, a new thought, a replayed conversation, a remembered face, will your mind spin till morning, which side will the sun rise on, will you wake up with a neckache, and is there any reason not to feel that this is the peak moment of your life?

What think'st thou the difference, then, 'twixt friendship and love?

Love demands; friendship requests.

An Experiment in Equanimity

When I conducted the experiment with anger, two things happened that I wouldn’t have guessed. One was how easy it was to let anger drop. I’d expected to put myself through a series of trials of awareness therapy, paying attention to episodes of anger until they receded and took their place humbly alongside the other emotions, like obstreperous schoolkids finally sitting down in their seats when the teacher stares at them long enough.

Instead, the first time I tried it out, my anger felt so ridiculous -– and so frail, so lacking in the strength it pretended to display -– that my only inclination to repeat the experiment was because it would fulfill a resolution. But what’s the point of a resolution to do something obsolete? The idea of going around cursing people in my mind, or with my voice, had become irrelevant -– not in one stroke, but in one step across a threshold long approached. I tried it out a couple of times in brief isolated minor bursts and it just didn’t convince me. And since the idea was to bring out authentic emotion, not to drum up false emotion, I let it drop. Whether I’ll spontaneously enter the state of mind to run another trial, I don’t know, because everything in the future is “I don’t know.”

The second surprise was that I went beyond restraining my anger, into actively playing the role of the person who projects anger onto others: the passive-aggressive one, using others as containers for the anger he doesn’t admit having, and if possible, overfilling them till they spill all over the place. Instead of being the button, I became the button-pusher; instead of the infuriated, I became the infuriating. I finally learned what I had known intellectually for years but hadn’t yet been able to put into practice: that the one who stays calm wins.

I had been raised with the assumption that anger is a contest to see who can shout loudest and scare the other person more. Perhaps in some cultures it is that. But in the culture I live in now, it’s the opposite: anger is a staring contest, except that instead of the loser being the one who laughs, the loser is the one who shouts. The substance of what is being shouted about doesn’t matter; the mere act of raising the voice rules that evidence out of court.

It’s so comically clear all at once!

If a person who curses a fellow driver is a jackass, it’s not so much because cursing is obnoxious as because the curser doesn’t realize he’s putting himself in the wrong.

If the other driver honks at you and gives you the finger, smile and wave –- blow him a kiss, for God’s sake. You can’t lose. If your friendliness eases his temper, you get good karma back. If your friendliness angers him further and he goes home and kicks the cat, well, he might have done it anyway, the unstable, personality-disordered nut. You’ve proven that he’s dangerous and you’ve preserved your karmic deniability.

From now on I’m unflappable. Look out, anyone who wants to get me steamed. I’ve always been very good at staring contests.

An Experiment in Anger: First Results

Driving along for several miles this morning on neighborhood streets and a highway, I willed myself to fall into a bygone pattern of irritability and find reasons to be angry at other drivers. It was amazingly easy, a reflex that had gone into retirement but was ready to re-emerge; and soon it became an exaggeration, a parody, of the old behavior. I found that I could get angry at literally everything. Another car passing me, a driver talking on the phone in the car behind me, even a totally innocent pickup truck waiting at a stop sign. I could even become angry, with the same effortlessness, when something I approved of happened; for instance, when I joined the shorter of two lanes waiting at a red light, I was irritated at the ineptitude of the drivers on the long line. I wasn’t yelling. I was quietly cursing, making an effort to keep up a string of profanity for the experiment’s sake (and only I could hear it, of course). I brought up the bitter words with a feeling almost like nostalgia: So this is what it used to be like!

I felt as if I had overlaid a filter of irrationality upon every aspect of my experience. I knew I could undo it in the blink of an eye, and it grieved me to think that there are many people who go through their lives wearing this filter, their minds poisoned by thoughts they learned so long ago they don’t realize they’re unnecessary. (I want to make clear that my former behavior and worldview were not this unhealthy; what I achieved today was a distillation of one mode of feeling. I was repeating over and over, in every moment, a feeling I would only have had intermittently in real life.)

I tried to sense, inside myself, how authentic these feelings of irritable anger were, and to my relief I sensed that I had to work at them; they were an act, though a convincing one based in remembered experience.

Driving home in the other direction, it was the easiest thing in the world to drop the angry pose and to feel once again the calm and optimism that has dominated my state of mind lately. The angry state of those few miles seemed ridiculous, valueless, artificial, alien, and obsolete. I couldn’t imagine why I would want to feel that way.

An Experiment in Anger

In a wonderful book I just read, Stephen Mitchell’s philosophical comedy Meetings with the Archangel, there’s an anecdote about an exceptionally gifted young Zen student who achieves ultimate enlightenment in only a handful of years. Seeking to deepen his practice, he continues without a teacher, only to feel intense rage welling up from some unknown source when he meditates. Wrathfully he rejects his beloved teacher and concludes that he has gotten nowhere.

That person isn’t me. Feeling rage is no surprise in my life. I’ve known about it from Day One, and possibly before, in the womb. It’s been my worst enemy, and having your worst enemy living inside you is confusing.

I’ve spent a great deal of my time trying to squash this enemy, and the results have been encouraging. Living alone after my marriage, I’ve felt amazingly calm and optimistic. Perhaps I was made to live this way even though I’ve always yearned to live within a contented, stable family. Whether or not the term “made to live this way” has any meaning, I’m living this way now and liking it, learning from it.

I’ve only had one outburst of rage in almost a year and a half, and that one was enough for the rest of my life.

But something feels hazardous about all this calm and confidence. How long is it going to last? Is it going to suddenly collapse? I can rely on today’s good mood only for today, and if some would reply that today is all we can ever know – if I myself would make that reply – then I’d like the thing I know today to be more solid than a passing mood.

Avoiding anger is not going to work forever. So what will work? They say one needs to make friends with one’s shadow, embrace one’s demonic side and welcome it, retrained for a healthier function. I’ve never understood that kind of talk. It seems too metaphorical; I have trouble connecting it to a concrete action one could take. How do you embrace your demons, really; what specific acts do you perform aside from sending an interior telepathic message: “Hi, there, demons, I’d like to embrace you now.”

These thoughts came to me this evening as I drove my car in the warm Austin sunset, an almost full moon above the hills and a pale sun setting behind gilded clouds across the river. A charmed evening, driving in the breeze past the scent of wildflower gardens, the humic aroma of the soul simmering up from the earth. The very simple thought came that in order to embrace and integrate my rage, I would have to feel it. I would have to show it – the thing I have most feared showing, the thing I have been running away from for a good deal longer than a year and a half.

I’m going to perform an experiment. I’m going to open myself to opportunities for rage. I’ll do it in situations I judge safe, probably when so one is around, certainly when my wife and children aren’t. Alone in my house, alone in my car (perhaps giving a hostile glower to a driver here or there). Some shouting, some cursing. It will have to be a real emotion with a real stimulus, not a dutiful, “I will rage for the next two minutes.” But it will be a controlled reality and it will stop comfortably and it won’t echo and blast through my life. Maybe I’ll have to do it one time, maybe two or ten. At some point, I will know my anger as something other than a terrifying monster, and it will learn that I am not out to eradicate it. Since we have to live in here together, we will finally learn how not to destroy each other.

So if you’re driving in the Austin area and you pass a small white sedan with a man screaming in it, wave hello.

If We Could Only Understand a Pink Sock

I once knew someone who collected litter, or threatened to. The scraps people tossed away, which the wind from cars had stirred. Shopping lists, torn halves of photographs, crushed cans, a single glove. In them she imagined she would find a culture’s identity, and mysteriously, her own, the long-sought meaning of her quixotic self emerging in the pattern of drinking-straw wrappers and magazine subscription cards dropped by strangers. She probed the unconscious of the city, reading the tea leaves of the street. From the crumbs she tried to reconstruct the loaf.

This is the kind of person I decide to believe. And if a stray bottlecap can tell us our identities, what about the fugitive words that slip away the moment we try to hear them? Words said into telephones passing by: “Is it okay if I come semi-dressed up?” “Made a redneck corkscrew for the pinot: a drywall screw and two vise clamps. Pulled that sucker right out of the bottle.” “I’ve known her for eight years and I have never known her to say the word Yes.”

I listened and thought, “These are the expressions of my truth.”

I heard my birth-cry and heart-sigh in the sounds a car makes when it drives past: the motor sound, the muffler sound, the tire sound, the airstream sound. The textures of a bird’s singing: how its voice moves its feathers, moves its branch, how the notes echo subliminally off the houses.

She came home one afternoon carrying a child’s grimed pink anklet with a big hole through the bottom. “Look!” Was this the piece of evidence that would take her back to the first months of her life, even the moment she was conceived, and cancel out all dread?

I heard the child crying, the mother scolding, at the throwing away of the sock.

The woman and I stared at the sock on the kitchen counter. “I have a feeling this is the central discovery,” I said, wanting to love someone.

No, no, there can’t ever be a central discovery. “I need to get over this obsession,” she said, and that night she ransacked under the beds and threw out all the unsorted orphan objects, which now seemed to her like junk.