shanubydoo

[shanubydoo]

“Places With Terrible Wi-Fi”

by J. Estanislao Lopez

The Garden of Eden. My ancestors’ graves. A watermelon field in Central Texas where my father once slept. Miles of rivers. The waiting room of a hospital in which a doctor, thin-looking in his coat, shared mixed results. A den of worms beneath the frozen grass. Jesus’s tomb. The stretches of highway on the long drive home after burial. The figurative abyss. The literal heavens. The cheap motel room in which I thought about praying despite my disbelief. What I thought was a voice was simply a recording playing from another room. The cluttered attic. Most of the past. The very distant future, where man is just another stratum in the ground. The tell of Megiddo. The flooded house and the scorched one. My favorite cemetery, where I can touch the white noise distorting memory. What is static if not the sound of the universe’s grief? Anywhere static reigns.

[shanubydoo]

No more thy meaning seek, thine anguish plead, But leaving straining thought and stammering word, Across the barren azure pass to god; Shooting the void in silence like a bird, A bird that shuts his wings for better speed.

[shanubydoo]

ponyo - 2008

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glass oysters by Michael Potecha

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I just want to show you everything you can’t see yet, record everything you can’t hear yet. The fractal patterns on the noni trees sprouting from the side of the mountain, how each branch is a little replica of thing it came from. The way the world feels inverted underwater, like it has a ceiling but no floor. The sudden flood of millions of tiny forage fish, glinting like tinsel above us, below us, in our peripherals. The photo-negative pause when the sky gets black—I’d teach you to take off more clothes in preparation.

The chickens on this island are wild, which makes me want to cry sometimes. According to an old guy outside Pat’s Taqueria, Hurricane Iwa splintered all the chicken coops when it blew through in 1982, undoing the old order and returning Gallus gallus to the jungle. I love to imagine them all, the hens and roosters and awkward adolescents and fuzzy chicks, suddenly encountering the world without the crust of hexwire. We’re always getting more domesticated, us and the chickens and every breathing thing that can be used or useful. When you’re old enough to be classed as useful too, I’ll tell you about this small reversal and what it says about your possible futures.

[shanubydoo]

[shanubydoo]

There

Reno, NV

The salt flats outside Reno are where I woke up for the first time in five months. The thrill of an alienscape, ghost-white ground, sonorance of fear and loathing. Take me somewhere new, please, god, and I promise not to breathe. Burley, ID The hot tub at the Best Western was full of people who all seemed to know each other, a lot of them kids—twenty people, thirty. I could hear them laughing even with the window shut, and was surprised by the spreading sadness in my body. I stared into my phone on the maroon flowered bedspread while it got dark outside and wondered if leaving home had been a mistake. Yellowstone, WY I remember the first pullout after we entered Yellowstone, taking off our shoes to wade into the river’s glass-water, every pebble gleaming in ultraresolution. I felt like a hawk, like my eyes had suddenly sharpened. I wanted to disintegrate into sediment and join the current, I wanted to open my mouth and swallow it all. The hotel was on the edge of a steep incline that dropped down into the river rapids. When I’d looked it up on Google Maps the night before, I’d assumed we were going to be right on the riverbank so Sam could fish. Instead, we ended up tromping around in the dry grass on the cliff’s edge, looking for a route down the embankment and just getting stickers in our paws. Note to self: satellite view next time. Bozeman, MT The sky got dark outside Bozeman, black cloud pile-ups like more mountains. Pre-storm weather always feels like life’s about to turn a corner. That was my mood for 3 days: I knew what we used to be, but not what we are now. We were recognizable once, but now we’re animals molting. Everything has been easier to lose than I thought it would be.

In the Cherry River, Sam caught a baby brook trout, a crawfish, a mountain whitefish, and a fever of 102.

Billings, MT In the Best Western lobby, the newspaper on the coffee table said Billings welcomes Q-Anon. At night, we got Popeyes and shared it with the mosquitoes beside the pond.  The next day, we entered the Dakotas, blasted reservations interspersed with small stretches of semi-green until the next reservation. In each non-town, a black plastic water storage tank. Bikers heading home from the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally Superspreader Event kept passing us in mini posses. At a checkpoint, the policewoman motioned to me to roll down the passenger window. 

“Cute dog,” she said, maskless, leaning in to pet Lucy.  Rapid City, SD I kept trying to find a vegetable. Under the Salad header on the hotel menu was a nacho salad and a taco salad. At the bottom of the hill was a store called The Indians. Outside The Indians was a stand selling Trump paraphernalia, staffed by a ten-year-old.  Sioux Falls, SD We hadn’t planned our meals very well. Noon, one, two, and still we hadn’t passed a single place to get food, just miles of dry grassland and fences. New COVID rules: in the reservations, we weren’t legally allowed to exit the car. Finally we hit a tiny town with a general store, a saloon, and a video-store-fry-shack. Sam got a fried burger from the fry-shack, and I bought ham-and-cheese Lunchables from the general store. We ate them in the car and listened to Jalen and Jacoby, voices from a faraway universe. Chicago, IL Long drive, pizza in bed. Lucy hopped in the shower with us, and afterwards we made out in our towels and watched House Hunters International. Ann Arbor, MI I remember the walk back from the river, and how the man we passed knew we were tourists from the way we were watching the birds overhead with reverence. They were just riding the thermals, not flapping or straining. “Turkey eagles,” he said helpfully.

[shanubydoo]

& Back

Charlottesville, VA

Our only fight of the trip was the last half hour outside Charlottesville. I don’t remember what it was about—maybe we were just alone-alone for the first time in a while and needed to let off steam—but at check-in, the clerk was being painfully cheerful to compensate for our stoniness. He commented on the weather, on Lucy, on Lucy’s harness brand, on the local restaurants.

“Finally the fucking key,” Sam muttered on our way to the elevator. 

I laughed and then remembered we were in a fight. Later we ordered bad pizza and felt a little ashamed of ourselves.

Nashville, TN I drove the last couple of hours into Nashville, and almost as soon as I took the driver’s seat, the skies began emptying themselves. It was unlike anything I’ve ever seen before or since—a black sky-ocean with its seams ripped out, just purging itself over the cowering earth. Semis fishtailed in front of us, beside us. I felt fear in the hearts of the trees. I could only see the road in brief flashes between wipes, like an ominous flipbook. I thought about pulling onto the shoulder, I thought about asking Sam to drive, but instead I slowed to 40, turned on my highs, and stopped blinking completely.  Little Rock, AR Driving through Arkansas, we took turns reading each other Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s Wikipedia entries.

Later we found a waterfall installation in Argenta Plaza (imagine: somewhere with enough water to spend it on art). It was 40 degrees out, but we thought if we ran through the water-sheet fast enough, we wouldn’t get wet.

Austin, TX I was rereading a lot of Deleuze in Austin and wishing I’d become a botanist, because then I might not be struggling so hard to understand humans. It’s not beginnings and ends that count, but middles. Things or thoughts advance or grow out from the middle, and that’s where you have to get to work, that’s where everything unfolds. My head was pounding with rhizomes, roots, multiplicites, grain, how we grow together in little clusters of water and need. 

On Thanksgiving, we tried to get real Texas barbecue in the middle of the afternoon, but everything was closed. We drove to six different joints, and were honestly kind of relieved people weren’t working holidays. At dusk, we watched the bats erupt from the bridge in dark sky-sized shapes, hundreds of thousands of them bulging and contracting like a weather event.

Western Texas Our initial plan had included an overnight in El Paso, but that week all of west Texas was a fiery pit of COVID, so we drove right on through and kept our windows up. That was our longest drive: 14 hours in a day. Around 1pm, we pulled off the highway into Fort Stockton for lunch, where almost everything looked beige and closed or old. We considered a mission-style building that advertised “Sea food - Mexican food - Steakhouse - Breakfast,” but opted for the Pizza Hut across the street. We unfolded our camping seat in the shade of the car and opened the pizza box across our laps, half pepperoni, half Supreme. 

One thing I can say about America: Pizza Hut tastes exactly the same anywhere you order it, and that day, it felt like grace. Tucson, AZ The atmosphere in Arizona is transparent as hell—you can see the weather moving through the sky and everything feels permeated with zero-moisture sadness. A half hour before sunset, I walked Lucy to the edge of town that faced the mountains, and we climbed a 4-story parking garage so we could watch the purples arrive. I threw the ball for her until a car finally drove to the top floor a little after dark, and I had to scoop her up.

San Diego, CA

In La Jolla, we picked our way along the rocks in the dark, kind of drunk, kind of sharp anyway. I was holding a Solo cup in one hand and cradling Lucy in the other.  My brother took us down to a curl in the rocks where the water rushed in like an exhalation—filling the tiny cove to our armpits, a shock—and instantly sucked back out the same way, leaving us damp and foolish, like the sea was just something we’d imagined or dreamt of.

[shanubydoo]

Permagrief

Everyone should wear a mask, but god—the difference between feeling free and full of possibility versus same-same is smelling the seasons change in real time. I miss my nose. Even in winter, the least smelly season! The rot slipping up through the ground, that nutty dead-leaf funk elbowing through the cold, that extra carbon released by a weirdly warm day in January. 

There’s grief everywhere, man. I can hardly take it. It’s coming up through the ground, ambient and dank and everywhere. I’m sad for all my friends who live by themselves, all my friends who were looking for love last year but had to stay inside instead. For all the edited plans and missing audiences. For the conversations that never happened—the ones that animate and texturize our lives. For everything and everyone we lost to death and other forces.

I keep thinking of this bird I saw in the Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport a few years ago. I was waiting for an early morning flight before a work trip and this little brown bird, a sparrow or something, was flying panicked through the terminal—knocking itself against the runway-facing windows in desperation, zipping back up toward the white metal ceiling struts, searching frantically for an out. There wasn’t anything I could do, but I briefly considered throwing my body against the floor-to-ceiling glass and letting us both out.

///

For a few months of my life, I lived in Paris with a mostly blind ex-professor-slash-author who was intimidating in the extreme. You couldn’t help but feel scrutinized under her sharp wit and cloudy eye. She had dyed wine-colored hair and loved rich things: bone marrow, syrahs, liaisons, brocades. She usually kept to herself but sometimes we’d talk at night and share a meal. Her shelves were all obscure expressionist art books, socialist primers, and hefty niche novels from her Parisian contemporaries. She was a novelist herself, but not a popular one. She was shifty about the number of books she’d sold, not that it mattered.

She’d never married, but she had a daughter and a grandson. She’d had a lot—a lot!—of lovers, but one of them stuck out above the rest. And sometimes, if she’d had a whole bottle of wine and the windows were open, she would talk about his intensity, his hand motions, his talent for cutting to the heart of things.

Books (to me) are a conversation with the author, a way to say “I see what you’re doing here. Thank you for revealing yourself to me, and myself to me.” I’m always the most interested when the author is someone I know, or know about, so I ordered my host-manan’s novel off Amazon. At the time, second-hand books were way cheaper than new ones, and I was broke, so I ordered a used copy for $3. My plan was to read it as best I could with my shitty French, then surprise her with a discussion one day at dinner.

When the book arrived, I noticed there was an inscription in almost-indecipherable Art Person handwriting—the book had, at one point, been a gift. Cute.

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I remember when I finally told Ms Clémenson I’d read her novel. Her face was delight, then hesitance or light fear—a quick study in the power readers hold over writers, in the way a bad landing might knock the wind out of you. 

C’etait formidable, I assured her.

She demanded to see the book, and I kind of regretted not ordering a new copy at that point. When she opened the flyleaf, her face darkened. The handwriting on the inside cover was hers, a copy she’d gifted to her old love, and that he’d subsequently sold on Amazon. The reach of her book was suddenly clear, and we were all embarrassed for no good reason. She went to bed without talking to me.

I still think about that all the time—how being received by one or two people that matter to you is what makes the hard work of art worthwhile, and how dismissals from those same destinaires can erase the work of years.

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I’ve been reading This Little Art by Kate Briggs this week, about the discipline of translation, the extreme intimacy and honestly illogical devotion to someone else’s work that’s required to translate a text artfully. She references Barthes: “It’s not true that the more you love, the better you understand.” Instead, so much of learning and loving each other is a project in projection, in self-discovery.

She asks instead: “What do I want, wanting to know you? What would happen...if I were to situate myself as another force confronting yours?” 

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There are bigger things to grieve this year, but I can’t get over the loss of no longer bumping up against each other: the grating of mismatched assumptions and working theories, the pure physicality (you’re slouchy, you’re sweaty, you’re gorgeous, you’re chewing gum), the discovery—or even invention?—that comes from trying to reconcile your hot takes with someone else’s.

I’m not me without everyone else. I’ll never grow without your particular complicating friction. I’m counting down the days until we can restart our full-bodied conversation.

[shanubydoo]

I’m skipping showers and switching socks, sleeping good and long / bones feeling dense as fuck

[shanubydoo]

Valhalla blues

Aunt Marie died 3 weeks ago, but I swear this is fiction. 

The three of you arrived the morning of the wake, straight off a red-eye. It wouldn’t have been my first-choice welcome activity, but here we were. You were all leaning against the wall at Arrivals: Tian looking immaculate, Leo hugging a pillow, and you sucking down a Red Bull.

We barely had time to drop the luggage off at my place and put on some darker clothes before we had to get in the car again. You offered to drive, and I sat in the middle of the backseat so I had a nice side view of your face. 

This is gonna be pretty religious, I warned everyone. But you don’t have to do anything, just like...be supportive.

Yikes, said Tian. Like will there be a sermon?

Maybe a short one? I said hopefully.

I liked the way you were flying smoothly through all the complicated roundabouts and intersections that you’d never even seen before. It was legitimately hot, but I was trying to get in a funeral mindset. Your hand was resting on the seat-divider-slash-cup-holder, and I thought about reaching for it, but that seemed like overkill. I decided to loop my pinky through yours to see what happened. You made yours into a little hook so they’d stay linked.

When we arrived, the room was already crowded. It was really dinky, 60 people max capacity. There were a few old folks in chairs, but most of us were sitting on the floor: cousins, friends, neighbors. The door was propped open to let the air circulate. I found a place to sit in the back, but the three of you chose the front of the room, lounging back on your elbows.

My dad, the pastor, went up to the podium. 

Noel was a strong person, he started. But the last decades of her life were marked by pain and deterioration. She lost faculty of her feet, then her legs, and eventually her mouth and organs. It’s been heartbreaking to see her decline, but today we take comfort knowing that she has a new and perfect body. Where she is, there is no death, mourning, or crying, for the former things have passed away, and all has been made new.

I heard Tian clearing his throat, and thought, shit.

But what if she’s just gone? he interrupted. That’s also relieving, right? Like if her existence is just over, wham, there goes the pain. 

Are you serious? my dad said, taking off his glasses and holding them out to the side. It looked sort of sassy.

Yeah, said Tian. Like why do we need these myths? They’re not even more comforting than reality.

You gave Tian a kind of aggressive side hug that was performing something for the room, like, oh, you crazy rascal. 

Different strokes, you said by way of explanation, not really apologetically. Pastor dad shook his head, put his glasses back on, and picked up where he left off.

Afterwards, we opened some wine and went around the room sharing memories we had of Noel. It was weird how everyone talked about her like she’d been a fat cripple her whole life. All the tributes were the same: She had an amazing attitude, so impressive how she retained her joy and hope in that shitty bedroom where she peed laying down, she always looked for the silver lining in everything, she was so kind to others through the pain.

My brother told this story about going to the San Diego Zoo and how the tiger reminded him of Noel, pacing back and forth in its pen, so much wilder than its bounds allowed for. We all winced—the analogy was so forced. I imagined my brother writing out his speech the night before, high on shrooms, water in his eyes.

I fucking hate saint-ification. I wanted people to talk about how Noel was a semi-secret lesbian, a polyamour who grew cannabis on the porch. How she was a lazy, gifted athlete with horse-girl hair who cursed creatively in traffic. How she pretended to be a health nut but drank six Cokes a day (can, straw).

When I die, please never talk about me. Let me burn in peace. If you have a memory of me, just hold it in your head instead of killing it with form.

[shanubydoo]

2020 feeling it all

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Island living

A month or two into quarantine, everyone was suddenly obsessed with Animal Crossing, so we bought it too. The game permeates you like weather. I was helicoptered to a beautiful island in the middle of the sea, then gently informed that I owed some money to the host raccoon for my tent.

I know I was supposed to care about the “premise” (domesticate your island? build a nice house?) but all my character wanted to do was run around and feel free. The island was rich in natural resources—you could eat fruit from trees, plant flowers anywhere, and catch fish, bugs, and small creatures. The whole geoscape was carpeted in soft grass and sand.

I sold my clothes and shoes and built a butterfly net. I took short trips to other islands to uncover spiders and beetles I hadn’t seen before. You could hear the leaves moving in the trees and the soft suck of the ocean on the shore.

I just re-watched Being John Malkovich and The Talented Mr Ripley back to back, but the echoes didn’t register until later. Both movies get straight to the fundamental chafing of being alive, how it feels to run up against the limits of your face and voice and circumstance. Who hasn’t wanted to split from their own consciousness, get out from behind their own eyes?

Ripley’s approach was slick and poreless—just slide into someone else’s life, just start start acting like the person you want to be! But I identified more with Schwartz: sweaty, wired, desperate to be wanted, confident in his craft but slave to its reception. Schwartz and me, we don’t actually want to be someone else. We want to be ourselves in a form people can stomach.

Since March, my avatars have multiplied and strengthened. More of me is displaced into them, or the me that’s not in them feels more starved.

I send a blue chat. I send a green chat. I send a black chat on a white field, and any nuance recedes into the scrim.

I turn on my video and adjust the desk light so I’m not a ghoul. I turn off my video and wonder if my picture no longer looks like me, and if that’s embarrassing. I want you to know I’m actively listening, but I’m tired of being observed.

What did talking feel like before, and why did it feel so much better? Was it being next to each other instead of facing each other? Was it being able to sense all your ambient undirected energy? Like heat, like a halo.

Talib Kweli: I ignored your aura but it grabbed me by the hand / Like the moon pulled the tide and the tide pulled the sand.

I used to know you as a total self existing in space: how you spoke with other people that day, how distracted you seemed, all the tells from your gait and your posture. I guess the lesson is that intimacy isn’t the result of information exchange, but of regular somatic attention.

One weekend this summer we drove east to China Flat Campground to shed our digital skins. We caught actual trout and actual dragonflies and slept in an actual tent. For showers, we took turns holding a bag of cold water over each other’s heads until our body dirt mixed with the ground dirt. I would like to say that I felt myself return to myself—well, maybe I did a little bit.

[shanubydoo]

A few years into our marriage, we started this joke, or maybe there was some part of it that was real, about how we’d be able to know if the other one had been body-snatched. I would lie with my head under his chin, my leg locking him in like a seatbelt, and try to come up with foolproof tests. You could quiz me on your top five favorite fibers, I said.

What are my favorite fibers?

Wool, I said. Dyneema. King cotton. Micro-modal.

OK, but if the body-snatchers are listening to this conversation, now they know too.

///

One night I dreamed I was in a house with a lot of relatives and strangers, and I had to catch a flight, but everyone kept aggressively talking and drinking, and I stayed a lot longer than I meant to. It was getting closer to departure time by the minute. Finally, I said, I’m out of here guys! and grabbed my wheelie suitcase and ran toward the street. It was a block or two before I noticed Lucy was following me, her tongue lolling over her little jaw from the effort.

Go home! I said sternly, pointing back in the direction of the house, but I also had to keep moving because my flight was about to leave in half an hour.

I was covering the neighborhood blocks in smooth slow motion, like laps in a pool, and I kept looking behind me to see if Lucy was still there. She stayed half a block back, like she didn’t need to listen to me if she was outside a specific range.

Go home! I yelled over my shoulder. I wondered if I could bring a dog on the plane without a carrier case. Maybe the people at the airport would see I had no choice.

At an intersection, I saw the light for cars was about to turn green again, so I pulled my suitcase into a stop and tried to smooth down my panic. Lucy caught up to me just then and kept running into the almost-green-light intersection, and she was so low to the ground, like she’s seriously only 8 inches tall or so, and the dusty pickup couldn’t see that far down, and suddenly Lucy was gone and there were brains and fur all over the crosswalk.

I woke up weeping with my whole body. Lucy was snoring on Sam’s side of the bed. Good job sweetie, I thought. You stay far away from me.

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For days after the dream, walking the neighborhood with Sam at night, I would startle at the sound of a car in the distance and yank suddenly at Lucy’s leash. She grumbled quietly, but I think some part of her registered it as love. My love always comes out looking like fear.

///

The longer we’re together, the harder it is for me to imagine the world without him. I do it sometimes as a thought exercise, because I’m a planner. I think I might try middle-aged sex a few more times, or maybe some funny dates just for the stories, but I wouldn’t be interested in love even a little bit.

If I’m over forty when you go, I’ll just join you, I say. Like in a painless way, but I’ll have lived a pretty full life by then.

Promise you won’t do that, he says.

Pills or something chill, I say.

I hate this conversation, he says because we’ve had it before.

Actually, even if you die tomorrow, I think I’d follow right behind you. I’ve already lived a ton.

I’m definitely going to make sure I die second, he says.