am i the only one whose heart breaks just a little listening to Sam Cooke's "Having a Party"?

to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves

She dreams in photographs.

The Tomb of Roland Burris: A one-act play

Based on an actual conversation at work.

Me: Did you hear about Roland Burris’ tombstone?

S: No, is he dead?

Me: No, unfortunately he still breaths our air and drinks our water and it looks like he will soon be our US senator.

S: How unfortunate.

Me: Isn’t it? Anyways, turns out the guy bought himself a plot and erected a mausoleum to use as a family tomb.

S: Sounds gothic but not that unusual.

Me: And the guy had the words ‘Trail Blazer’ carved in big block letters under his name followed by a list of his many, many accomplishments with extra room left for whatever he might do in the future.

S: You’re kidding. What kind of achievements are we talking here? First man on the moon? Getting his GED?

Me: 'First African-American to: serve as Illinois state comptroller, serve as Illinois attorney general. First Non-CPA member to: serve on the CPA board.'

S: That’s an accomplishment?

Me: Well he blazed the trail, sure. He was the first. The level of hubris is almost unfathomable here, like something from a Greek tragedy.

S: If only this were the Trojan War, I’m sure he would have already been brought down by his pride. That or by a griffin or a hydra or something.

Me: Maybe by Cerberus.

S: Sure, three-headed demon dog, that would do the trick.

Me: So I figured now is the time that I should invest in my own plot and tombstone and put all my extraordinary accomplishments on it. That way history will never forget my intense and immense glory.

S: So maybe just a small 8x10 headstone for you then?

Me: I was think more like 15-foot tall obelisk made of volcanic rock. That way there will be four sides on which to record my historic deeds.

S: How about a normal-sized tombstone that’s just 15-feet thick. That way people will notice your accomplishments when they trip over them.

Me: Another good idea to consider. Maybe I’ll just have a statue of myself standing holding two stone tablets with my list of accomplishments on it. Like Moses.

S: And clad in flowing robes and a beard. Hey you could get the guy who did the Michael Jackson statue on the cover of HIStory.

Me: Or the blind girl who made that godawful plaster head that looked nothing like Lionel Richie in that one Lionel Richie music video from the ‘80s.

S: I understand she’s hurting for work these days.

Me: I don’t think I want to be as humble as Burris either. I’ll include accomplishments that I haven’t yet accomplished. Yet.

S: Give yourself some motivation to get out there and really strive.

Me: Sure, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. ‘First man on Jupiter, first Caucasian-American to lead the NAACP and/or the Nation of Islam.’ Now that its engraved in stone I kind of have to do it. No more sleeping in on Saturdays. 'Star of The Goonies.'

S: Well, what with all these accomplishments your engraving costs are going to be unreal.

Me: Maybe I’ll save some money by just scrawling all my achievements in marker on a piece of cardboard and leaning it on a rock.

S: Or just use the office printer to print up a list of accomplishments and just tape it onto a marble slab.

Me: It’s a laser printer, right?

S: I believe so.

Me: I’ll just send the marble slab through the printer, let the lasers carve it up for me.

S: Lasers are so awesome.

Me: So is Roland Burris.

A Proposal on Taking Your Newsmagazine to the Next Level, 1

I keep telling myself that things could be worse. They could be so much worse than smooth jazz. I imagine pregnancies and broken fingers, birth defects and rapists with bad breath, death, dismemberment, and smiling Republican presidents. I imagine being asked to 'rock the vote.' Yes things could always be worse, but when I'm sitting beneath those flickering fluorescent lights in that cold and barren building, sitting with the ugly white glare of the computer all over my face and the smooth jazz pouring all over my ears, I just can't deny it to myself any longer. This is the fucking worst job I've ever had in my whole life.

I mean, keep in mind that I worked at Burger King when I was 16. Remember that? I would come home every night with grease dripping from the ends of every hair. Keep in mind that I worked as a deli slicer in college. I would come home every day with the stench of meat encrusted into my pores. It was terrible. You remember. But this, this is so much worse. Every day that I'm here I wish I was cooking burgers for fat suburbanites instead.

I work 40 hours a week at a newsmagazine targeting the African diaspora community in the city. I know that doesn't sound bad but trust me. When I answer their internet ad for an assistant editor they say they're getting ready to launch a new magazine for ethnic families. The magazine is going to be called 'Ethnic Family'. Only it turns out I'm not editing at all. I'm writing. I'm writing product reviews of 'gifts for dad' for the holidays. What kind of ties do black fathers want? What kind of aftershave are Hispanic uncles dying for this season? I didn't know that generic holiday gifts had any particular ethnic angles to them but now I have to find them, figure them out, explain them, and play them up to try to sell lucrative related advertising.

So every day I sit here and listen to smooth jazz and want to punch myself in the throat for the low, low cost of only $8 an hour.

I should have never left you.

flowering orphans chained to the broken drums
know the mirrors hidden in the back of the sun
asleep in black clouds they say cut off your wings
in the parish of sorrow you must sing
of seaweed and sickness that quickly depart
the angry perfume that spills from your heart

its just a sympathy for the strawberry
its just a synonym for the soul

an economy of animal mysteries.

Protest, Outakes.

This is the largest piece that was cut from the Heavens story. Bits of it are still in there, but most of it isn't. I think I'm going to send it out soon. See if I can't get it published somewhere after all the work. Weird to think I started this thing a year ago.

For the other posted pieces of this story, check the 'heavens' tab at the bottom of the post or in the sidebar.

---

She took PJ's hand and just like that we were going to Chicago, we were facing our destiny head-on, we were nearing the garden, the city of the air scraping the sky, endless Atlantis submerged and balanced and bent before the Cloud Gate that hovered at its edge. Traveling independently or in groups, together or alone, in cars or in buses, in planes or on the backs of trains, we made our way over the miles and the highway lines all the way down through the concentric rings to the dark, dead heart that lay silent in the center.


Pulled across blank streets and endless railroad ties, as the city, the hermetic waves of it, flashed by in time to a secret kind of melody to the lumbering, ancient rhythm of rubber on concrete. And everywhere, everywhere were cubes, squares, rectangles, all manner of obtuse angles divided and subdivided and placed one within the other in a dizzying endless array of mazes, a labyrinth of geometry and geology across the entire shape of the land. Trees and rock and history all subsumed and recast as that neverending layering of cubes, stretched and strangled and tangled one through the other until they emerged at the top like kitchen knives stabbing the sky, shimmering halfway between the ground and destiny before they gradually erased themselves, fading away and disappearing into the mist that swung off the lake like an empty mirror. We knew that it was different from other cities, that it had died once in fire and was reborn only to be killed again and again like Prometheus every winter. The wind whistling through wide thoroughfares and tiny breakways, buried under a clogging plaque of snow and ice and mood disorders, the city in need of an angioplasty to clear its clogged arteries, strained veins and depressed capillaries.


Along the way we decided that America was a lie.


Its vast empty spaces, its fruited plains, its aching central myth, all of it a lie that rested on the backs of Indian labor, sickness, death and ethnic cleansing. We discussed this in our little groups, strung out across the empty miles, jumping on cell phones and text messages to explain our ideas to the other cars, the other buses, the solitary riders in empty traincars, engaging in a distended, unraveling debate that bounced across the road from three or four us to the next three or four and onwards and onwards. See it was like this, America with its streets paved in gold and its revolutionary past was a kind of heaven, it always had been and always would be. It was a rumor of prosperity, of a city on a hill, of a beacon of hope, of the last best hope for all mankind that called the miserable forward to its supposedly empty shores that teamed with the blank dead ghosts of generations of natives screaming their woe. It was a rumor of perfectibility, a rumor of a heaven right here on Earth that spread through the nations of Europe one by one and then on to China, Japan, South America, Mexico and onwards. America, founded once by mercenaries and again by religious extremists and it was pulled between those two poles ever since, between the profit motive, blind greed, angry explosive ambition, and a wider kind of spiritual salvation that wormed its way through its witch trials, its great awakenings, its public crusades against itself, its working ethics, its wars, its traveling preachers with sacred harps, its slave gospel and shaped notes, its simultaneous hatred and embrace of all those foreign and other, its monkey trials, its purges westward, its elections, etc etc etc and on into the burning crystalline night full of flaming, kissing clouds and ice-bound stars that rotated in a silent, wet kind of pre-dawn contemplating their own birth.


These two instincts in America, the mercenary and the puritanical, the greed and the salvation, the twin obsessions of sex and the death, found themselves combined finally in that central, load-bearing pillar of the American Dream--the protestant work ethic. The desperate desire to prove oneself saved, to prove oneself worthy of heaven by finding Earthly success, a sure sign of God's smile, of his favor, of his free pass right into heaven. It didn't matter what you did as long as followed rules, amassed a wide pile of wealth and scorned the poor pigeons and sparrows and squirrels that did not or could not or would not work for the clouds. After all, the first two things the Pilgrams built in this New World of theirs was a church and a prison and that seemed to say it all to us: salvation or punishment. It sounded to us, here at the end of it all with the whole thing falling to bits, our voices drifting over the humming frequencies and the spinning pavement, it sounded to us like the worst kind of false heaven, like the new Jerusalem descending from the clouds, luring tourists and emigrants to leave their families and face the xenophonia of those who arrived before them, to face Ellis Island, their names changed, their faces erased, to rot away in some ethnic ghetto watching their children lose personality and language and honor, dreaming in desperate sepiatones of their life back, back in the Old World.


But Kay, the leader of us all, the one who encouraged us in these kinds of conversations, who drove us forward to challenge new heavens, heavens we had never dared imagine before, Kay comes over the phone, her voice crackling and fading in and out at the whims of the the cell signal, that tells us that America yes, America might be a heaven but it was the only one that had ever actually paid off for anyone. Not all people, not the original inhabitants, not those forcibly imported, or those who wound up settling in the wrong mountains, on the wrong plains that prosperity avoided. But it was the only heaven she could think that had actually delivered on its promise for some people. They had come to America and found a better life, free of the tangled old webs of hierarchy, nobility, blood lines, castes, no longer bound to the Earth but free to travel where they wished, to where they might. Free to find new names and raise their children to new goals. Undoubtedly the Jews had a found a better life here then they had ever had in Germany, in Russia, as they fled centuries of persecution, of pograms, to find a new home. And America had fractured the old governments, forever invalidating the belief that kings, lords, dukes, earls had descended from the clouds, were destined by God to rule, were the representatives of heaven. America had destroyed that mandate of heaven, it had done some of our work for us. And it alone had reintroduced republicanism to the western world, had replaced a divinely ordained, orderly system of control that lasted for lifetimes with a chaotic, freewheeling form of government that ideally was supposed to embrace everything that made us human: disorder, disagreement, rapid change, desire, conflicting ideas and opinions and philosophies and it attempted to find not the perfect, not the truth, not the ultimate way forward but a swampy kind of middle ground that lay between these poles, a terminally fractured, endlessly divisive, partisan canyon that separated and combined us again and again.


We were surprised to hear Kay say all this, surprised because she had always been so critical of all heavens, so demanding that things be messy and confusing but ultimately human. We didn't know what to make of it. Craig actually scoffed. "That was America," she said over the phone, "and that was a place where she wanted to live."


And there we were pulling right into it--sharing stories and singing Motown songs and eating gas station twinkies with a dozen supermarket bags tied up full of little crosses. Pulling into the hallowed, hollow capitol of the ancient nation of the Midwest. Canaries and cannibals hung suspended over everything. It rose up gradually in slower and slower relief like a god-scaled tombstone to the flat and empty plane, the flat and empty meadowlands and the flat and empty suburban halo that each ringed it in turn. We wondered if this too was the view of the settling pioneers, of the dead and dying natives, of the Potawatomis, of the Miami, the Sauk, and the Fox people, of Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable as he sat in his wooden cabin, seeing in the empty landscape only an unending stream of potentialities, of possibilities that rippled and stretched off like a filmstrip into the vast gleaming future, seeing the unrealized spires and unimagined grid that would rise up all around them, dreaming their dreams of dominance, alienation, and commerce.

Eyewitnesses reported that when Singleton was picked up by police, he was naked, covered in blood, standing in the middle of the street and staring at the sky.

as the global mall reproduces, it sells only itself.