Kerig's Korner

Saturday, September 20, 2003:

Seas of sage, ashy green, like dust kitties under the wrinkled spread of Wyoming sky. A gray truck speeds. The cruise control doesn't work and my heel goes numb. Cruise doesn't work because I pulled the parking brake out. Came out in my hand. The handle in my hand. The light stays on. Forgotten thoughts come back. Humming tires chant unendingly. The driver unraveling. The me coming out of the driver. The person I once knew re-emerging from self-imposed exile of frenetic work ethic. The urge to move is the urge to simplify. Escape brings clarity. Traveling to see where we live. To feel again the deep ache of love, of missing, the anxious guilty ache of being missed. Of happiness and the impossible love for a child. Drawing toward far-off horizons pulls at the tangle of so many yesterdays. Knots untwist into a plotline of one's own life. And it almost all makes sense. And the wonder of wondering if you could see the pattern if you just acheived the right elevation... The truck vibrates above 90. A pickup is not meant for 90. Speed brings smiles. A taunt to invisible cops. The brake light says "brake" in red letters. Brake is broken. My heel goes to pins and needles and the sage bounces by.

Rawlings. Ten bars and one coffee shop. Vacancies at the core. Dusty empty indoor spaces. Chain stores at the edge. Empty Main Street. The church billboard reads: "Reliably fundamentalist." I picture a brimstone preacher, stiff upper lip in a crumbling town. Stick to fundamentals. God has his plan. The business loop has potholes. Sage-dry wind sweeps away a large fries box. Red and tumbling, like an amputated hand, a severed bloody dream. If I didn't have my own sadness I could bear to stop. But I do and I can't. Too much loss here. The empty box brings no notice. The drive-through espresso shop serves scalding progress in styrofoam. The woman is missing teeth. She gives directions. She knows how to get where I'm going. She sells caffiene and has a story to tell, but it's a drive-through and the Ram truck is big in the rearview.

Angling off onto the two-laner is better and feels like country and not merely space between places. Dipping down and curving and "Welcome to Colorado." And now at beloved brother Dan's and on the way to the first Colorado Avalanche hockey game of the season. Hockey. The glaring whiteness of the ice. The breathlessness of the crowd. The quick brutality. The sure honesty. It's hockey season again and life becomes sensible. With the snows and the snap comes clarity. The mushiness of summer is well frozen. Stiffened up. Fundamentals of frost and freezing. Colorado. Winter.

Dan's business card on the desk reads, "Lucky Kerig," which makes me think, if only for a moment, maybe we all are. Lucky that is.
Bill // 4:33 PM

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Tuesday, September 16, 2003:

I’m stuck in time. I spend each day returning to another day. A day that has already happened. A day that is seven thousand miles away, seventy days past. I go there through this small screen. I mouse around, dice, reorder, give absent people a presence and present people absence. Crop out the boom.

I am editing video of Beirut, assembling a tale. Or that’s the story I tell myself about what I am doing. I am stuck in a moment, trying to find ways to move characters up and down stairs, in and out of vehicles. I’m shaping, scoring, learning the mechanics as I go. I really don’t go anywhere. Just here. Into this small rectangle of active matrix.

I have a friend who thinks he’s discovered the holy grail. He thinks he created all the people he’s met. The successful ones anyway. Sees himself as Svengali meets Jesus, by way of Einstein’s salon. This friend is not made up. He is not a figment of my delusion. I didn’t edit him into being and he’s not going anywhere. He is locked up. Incarcerated. He scared people. Now he’s doing time. Stuck. He calls me from prison, but can’t get through on the cell, which is the only phone I have at work. When I go home for lunch there are ten messages, all from a computer. “You have a collect call from _____. This is a call from a correctional institute.” I can’t call back. I hope he calls when I’m there. I hope he doesn’t call. The doctor said psychotic break. The doctor said bi-polar. Delusional. Sometimes I just want to eat a salad.

I try to cut around the flaws in my Beirut story. I have a book to learn from. Final Cut Pro. It gives me tricks. Yesterday it was cross fades. “You are taking the long way home,” a different friend tells me. “Hire someone.” This friend is not in prison. He can call my cell phone any time. He calls maybe once a week. He is in a mountain cabin, waiting for some sort of deal to transpire, down on the flats, in dry rooms, out of the mountains. I wonder how much friction his days present. The terrible Teflon of waiting. This friend is not crazy, at least not so’s it would scare you.

I’ve been writing the same magazine stories for months. These are stories about people who slide well on white, crystallized water. Stories of skiing. Skis. Skiers. People who go up and down very fast. Slices of their lives. People who define themselves in relation to this sport. A man skis seven times a year and says he’s a skier. I ski seventy times a year and shun the label. At least he knows who he wants to be. There is no illusion of forward momentum in this work. A deadline plods. Mind cramp creeping ever closer.

In the morning I walk to work. The new office down at the corner. A steady stream of cars pass me as I walk. All headed downtown, to high buildings. I look at these people and wonder. Do they wonder if their efforts will ever pay off? Do we share that question? Do they listen to drive time? TV at night and two point four kids? Do they wonder at the wondrous? The horrible? The deadly dryness of these days? Do the feel the Fear? Do they ogle the newspaper, unable at times to believe that the shits are really running the world?

I shuttle video. Digitized images. I make enough for caffeinated products to keep me working. I'd say I was a rat like all the rest, except I love it. This new and different way to tell stories. Two unpublished novels sit on the hard drive. And now another spec concept. I have to give myself credit for the continued golden triumph of optimism over the gray shades of experience. The cars stream. I post video clips for my partner in New York to look at. Optimized clips for faster streaming. Each car has one person in it. Singular people, alone. They shuttling back and forth. Jog shuttle is one way to get around. Mousing works too. Then there are key strokes. All these finger punches move the characters. Tomorrow I'll learn match dissolve.

Outside the door, the office fills with human sounds. Stirrings of the other marginal characters. Living in the gummed up gutters of history is the best that can be hoped for. The incessant squawk of TV. The chatter of a printer. Monotone phone calls. Eeking out is the sound that comes through the thin walls.

On my desktop there’s a princess, an aging dowager peering from the corner, around the side of this blog. She’s been there, framed in her Final Cut window, watching me as I type. Her mouth is open, she is stopped in mid-speech. A Lebanese princess who CARES about ART. Art should have more than three letters. It should wear a bunch of honorary vowels around it’s neck. It's too big to balance on three legs. I've frozen the Princess in time. I control her. She wears a big, heavy beaded necklace that’s four hundred years old. Or should be. Or will be when I’m done with her. It’s a frock of some considerable design. Hand made. How many hours for some needle-pusher to make that? A tunic of time.

I don’t hate her, nor the opposite. Money is wardrobe that dresses a character in black. But that’s old thinking and I’ve used up my resentment. Except when I haven't. The Princess is a character to be moved through. A conflict to halt our hero for a moment, until he figures out how to hurdle her. He’s a big Irishman who, in my mind anyway, delivers as advertised. Which is to say, a good and solid guy. I'm making him into a product. A good solid product that you can trust. Travel with. Ride around on, like a Morgan horse.

The Princess didn’t want to be shot, until she did, and then we couldn’t get her to stop. A timeless torrent of Middle Eastern complaint. “How many American promises have not been realized?” The Arabs are like nonMormons in Salt Lake City. Nothing is their fault. Pot hole? Blame it on the Mormons. Air pollution? LDS polluters. Minorities manufacture licenses to moan. Oh the injustice. Arabs see western conspiracy behind every shortcoming, many of their own doing. There is truth to some of it. The western bullies. Bush is a bully like all bullies. Filled with fear of being found out. But that's not relevant to the point I veered toward, which is this: conspiracy thinking is only license for laziness, for half-thought-through arguments. At home the phone may be ringing. Computerized collect calls from prison.

Hours later I’ll see the evidence. Caller ID. You can never call back. My friend hasn’t said when he’s getting out. He’s stuck in the machinery, but he doesn’t mind prison. This is what he says. This is the only time he laughs. The doctors tell me he’s crazy, but who are they? Which pills are they taking? Pot is illegal but the whole population is on pills. How slippery our definitions of sanity. How changeable, dependent on the fits and spasms of the collective beast.

My inbox is all spam. Not a single message from a human. This is a first. I feel like the lines are cut. Sounds are smothered. I read the Times religiously, the international news is an obsession. All the world is American flavored, going low-cal. Atkins.

Here they’re suing kids for stealing music bytes. There the Middle East is cycling down. Unspeakable Jones for blood. When will Wesley Clark announce? He may be the only hope against these neocons. They’re starving the government beast. Starving the people. Feeding only monstrous lies. The Big Lie theory lived out daily. Even Hitler had his reasons. The insane have the advantage of singular, unshakeable conviction. “You’re either fer us or agin us.” My friend in prison says the world is a simple as geometric shapes. He’s got it all figured out. The Holy Grail is in the triangles. He created me too. Even God has his off days.

An acquaintance tells me I’m hyper-normal. Makes me wonder about him too. The woman at the coffee shop says I’m high maintenance. There’s another coffee shop across the street. It’s relentlessly anti-corporate, uniformly rebellious, filled with tattoo ink. I go there now. Tattoos dictate clothing. You drape them around your tattoos. Window dressing for skin art. The wifebeater tank is making a comeback. So many sleeveless Ts. I have no tattoos. I wear sleeves over my freckles. My grandmother told me they were angel kisses.

The Princess is waiting, accusing me with her lazy brown eyes. Procrastinating she says. And of course she’s right, but she has an agenda. A bone to pick with me. I have been cutting her down to size, parsing her words, catching her in the wrong light. I’ll send her out to the world with her bad side showing.

The media is tireless, rabid when ripping into the personal lives of our leaders. Timid as tit mice when it comes to digging into the truth of real issues. But then, those tales don’t sell space at the break, do they? I’m not even a member of the media. Not really. Below the radar is what they call it. Still on the grid, but below the radar. Just a consumer, a perfect American.

America is a bloated beast flattened with video tape. TV adds ten pounds. The beast is the color of boiled beef, or old Spam. Gelatinous gunk in shapeless suburbs where it's all curbs and no sidewalks. The beast has no mouth, only orifices, consumption holes. The beast is dry, climate controlled, yet it sweats sour milk into its seven hundred eyes that are all watching TV broadcasts of itself. The mute horror.

The Princess loved the camera. She showed us pictures of her with Marlon Brando. With American and British movie stars. She speaks of the Mamlouk period. “Mamlouk!” She delights in the sound of the word. “Mamlouk!” When I was skating the other day, playing hockey in the Sunday drop-in sessions, I heard her voice. “Mamlouk.” I was crossing the blue line. I didn’t have the puck. I was looking for a pass. “Mamlouk.” Coming through center, floating, cherry picking the breakaway. “Mamlouk.” Others voices call out.

“Adeem, adeem” says the brass man, another character I’ve been cutting. He waves over his shoulder to indicate something from long ago, the time of his grandfathers explains the translator. He pours molten brass into sand molds. I skate the blue line hearing Arabic. I don’t speak Arabic. The sand disperses the heat so he can crack open the molds. I am stuck in conversations that happened ten weeks ago. Stuckspace. A mind mould. Mold grows with time. Green like Ireland, where angel kisses come from. Time slides around me. Nearly nine and the stream of downtowners is slowing outside the window. The Princess needs to tell me something. I’ll give her a cross fade she won’t soon forget. SAVE and QUIT.













































Bill // 4:12 PM

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Friday, September 05, 2003:

Okay, so I know it's not good to gloat, but I gotta take a second to send this cyber smirk regarding our leader in chief and head frat boy. I am so pleased that cooler heads, namely Colin Powell's, seem to be getting a chance to step in and ask for help. Why he's only asking the UN and not NATO is beyond me, but that's beside the point.

My smile and glimmer of hope today, is that possibly Blowhard Bush will realize that style is substance and that supreme overwhelming arrogance has sucked since the Greeks invented it and gave it a fancy name (hubris) that 2000 years later would be crammed into term papers by legions of striving undergrads. But then our boy was too hungover in New Haven to make it to that class.

It is probably too late to salvage much of what our Axis-of-Evil a-hole has wrought, but hopefully this will spell the beginning of the end for Mr. Fer-Us-Or-Agin us. The only one who can beat him in the next election is him, and I think maybe there's a chance that will happen.

Okay, political tirade is over. You may resume your regularly scheduled life.
Bill // 9:58 AM

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