davidals

So...I think all families have - by definition - a certain nebulous aspect: the outer limits are vague, and there are always mysterious step-aunts and proto-cousins a couple counties away, or in nominally familiar-sounding cities (Joliet? Las Cruces? Macon? Muncie?) in states unseen. They may or may not pop up at the occasional family reunion, or as some unannounced Thanksgiving surprise shrouded in sighs, whispers and the sort of ethereal intrigues delicately deflected from the ears of the...

I don't know the precise title of the poem, or the precise year in which it was written, but there's an old piece by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, which opens with the following words: People getting divorced / driving around with their things in their car...


My first encounter with Mr. Ferlinghetti was highly unanticipated - in my lowly high school, located in a suburb of Charlotte, the library included a handful of examples of beat writing: a general anthology, and two of Ferlinghetti's...

(February 2010 draft)

So there's this great moment in the world of customer service: you're completing a transaction, and it's usually not an especially impressive one, when the guy in question - in a moment of grand, high theatre - snakes his arm around the credit card terminal, a fat shield of flesh manouvered to prevent your (that is to say, my) prying eyes from making the mental notation of his PIN number.

Dirty peon or not, I've been the victim of nefarious...

(February 2010 draft)

Do you believe in karma? I do - sometimes, or at least I think I do, and then I also believe that it's bull****: my lingering superstitions derived from an early childhood haunted by some bolt-slinging Judeo-Christian Ted Nugent-lookalike hovering, a mind filled with vengeance, off beyond the cirrus somewhere. Perhaps my understanding of the concept is stunted and inaccurate, possibly malevolent. Or maybe I'm just wallowing in a nonspecific variety of plight...

I'm staying in this place, innocuously called the Family House. It's a bit like the kind of establishment that was once called a sanitarium, as a catch-all phrase: people who were dying, people who were recovering, people who were weird and trying not to be, or just random people the rest of the world didn't quite know how to deal with. It's very very clean, not sterile, but a vast improvement over my apartment. The transient population (we are all called "guests," as we live in a...