Things That Might Make Mark Happy or Are at Least Worth Trying

1. Polenta cooked with chicken broth, prosciutto or bacon, parmesan, and plenty of red pepper. And eat with good steak and kale or collard greens, also cooked with butter and a bit of bacon until they caramelize a little bit.
2. Drink with Rogue Yellow Snow Ale or whatever IPA is bigger, pinier, and has more yeasty goodness floating around in it that I don't know about.
3. Feed also children in like manner, minus the ale. Instruct children to inquire about your childhood. Tell the happy stories and stories of near-death. And stories of being caught up into other people's stupidity and desperation, and imply that this sort of thing, although clearly not to be tried in the modern childhood, and you mean it, seriously, almost always ends well.
4. Listen to J Roddy Walston and the Business.
5. Listen to the Black Keys.
6. Listen to Neko Case's last two albums, the ones where she begins to talk to animals and restore the image of the Goddess. Talk to animals yourself.
7. You are now ready to read Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony. You really have to wonder a lot about the nature of Betonie's particular ceremony and of ceremonies in general. And you have to think about the way you map the universe onto your own geomorphology, climate, plants and animals.
8. Take a look at Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy.
9. Take more photos. I like your photos.
10. Watch "Le Quattro Volte". You were right about "Life in a Day". It's sort Human Truth Lite. But I still loved it, or like medium loved it.
11. Get outside and walk. It makes you feel better.
12. Buy beef bones, veal ideally, read the section on beef stock in Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook. Make your own stock. The house is so chilly anyway, you might as well cook something. Salt to taste. Mmm, yum.
12. Maintain low-level, non-draining contact with a broad circle of people who help you think and feel. Be careful not to listen yourself to exhaustion.
13. Consider going back through bits and pieces of serious theology to see if it makes more sense now that you can sort through things, bring them into your own focus. You're not an angry reactive punk anymore: there are compensations.
14. Notice the center of your desires and the edges.
15. Get hugs. Give them, yes, but also get them. Feel them. No words or meaning, just hugs.
16. Consider writing the story of a ritual, or the story of how a ritual came to be and how it ordered the experience that called it up. Do experience and ritual shape each other? Is that just obvious?
17. I love you, friend.

Latest Outrages Against the Canons of Fashion and Good Sense

Ebayed, purchased and am presently swaddled in an enormous old shearling coat. Emma says, "Janis Joplin. Or, no, who's that English guy who froze at the north pole?" Beard is enormous and blonde with a big streak of white down the middle. Eyes increasingly crinkled, distant, indifferent, registering irritation and humor at wrong moments. Black cowboy boots with crazy Maori-Mex stitching make me about 6'7". The phrase "get-up" might come to mind. "Costume." "Assemblage." Excessive. Outlandish. I'm starting to resemble myself. Keep adding layers.

Touch off palpable alarm and mirth upon entering Trader Joe's. Talk with skinny jeans scraggly beard guy about cloudy olive oil, how it will clear up at room temperature, whether this is a room, what the temperature might be, the increased greenness of the oil when cloudy, the weirdness and beauty of olive oil. To the no-longer-refrigerated hand-whatevered flour tortillas, which are totally fucking excellent, which excel my own attempts at tortillas, now aborted. Draw looks of amusement and horrified quasi-admiration from a woman. Buy six bags of tortillas because sometimes they're out, because they're so dern good when coated with oil and crisped on cast iron skillet on stove and then doused in butter and cinnamon sugar. Dang.

When Penny, the daughter of a colleague, was four the universe said something to me through her. She turned up at school one day in a faux shearling with enormous tortoise shell Wayfarer's which she refused to take off for the duration of my attempted interrogation. She also wore a leopard print mini-skirt, lime leggings and super sparkly ruby red slippers. Totally awesome. Now that she is five and can tell what goes together we have begun to part ways. But no matter. There was a period of time there when she was my polestar: the distant, twinkling object on which I set my gaze and kept walking. Now I will find my own way.

Praise and Blame

"Laus et vituperatio"
Geoffrey Hill, from The Triumph of Love

Boating and alcohol and boots you can't break in,
and other things I'd explain if I knew where to begin.
It's true this family is a train wreck
scattered back to the Fall,
but there's no one to blame.
Those are your own footsteps in the hall.
That's all.

Bring misery match sticks,
I'll bring/ catastrophe kindling--
and meet me in the next dry forest--
we'll beat sparks from the same dead horse.
Now you work in the factory
where they make gods and governments
(but you're still not funny)
and angels that say, "No complaining"
and orphans who say, "No complaining."

Thatcher and Reagan. Pete Rose. Gene Simmons. You.
It's maybe okay I had nothing to say.
Who would I have said it to?
You said anger was just fashion, you said
"cowards" you said "liars".
And we were only fifteen but what we saw in the city
looked like real blood, real fires.

Bring misery match sticks,
I'll bring/ catastrophe kindling--
and meet me in the next dry forest--
we'll beat sparks from the same dead horse.
Now I work in the factory where they make
intestines and breastbones. We tune them like radios
to angels that say, "No complaining"
and orphans who say, "No complaining",
and rich men who say, "No complaining",
and junkies who say, "No complaining",
and widows who say, "No complaining".

All Our Bases Are Belong To Us

My friend tells me I've been working a combination, trying to crack the code. It's true. Ever since Christmas I wake at five am. Chest tense. Mind and heart working the tumblers. "There's got to be a way." Wantu. Sunandfog. Playback theater. A one-man show. The Hidden Life of Human Beings. Surprise Wedding. Triptykos. The Hearth. Slow Club. Love Your Enemy.

Call Beth in San Francisco see if she needs a guy meet with the board and offer them part-time Doug's got an opening on the mountain go to the college and make nice with the brainiac pitch the parenting book find the name of that one guy from the coffee shop last summer who said he did workshops for Monsanto send an email to Trent's hedge fund operator keep building the website find the email of the author who bought the Nicoise salad send the left over writing from the youth book to Martin in London meet with the pastor from West Virginia push for a meeting with the Blackberry guy demand Frank and Andy invite you to Phoenix get Girl and Bear to the historical society.

Don't forget to work the present means: men's retreat in Minneapolis, Church of God in Orlando, Lutheran family workers in Kansas City, Presbyterian teenagers in Dallas, a Valentine's fundraiser....

Then last night Joseph sits at the counter and says, "All our bases are belong to us."

"What? What did you say?"

"All our bases are belong to us."

I looked at him. "What does that mean?"

"There's this Japanese action movie dubbed in English. At one point this one guys says to the other guy, 'All our bases are belong to us.' It's like some messed up translation." Joseph heads back downstairs to his computer programming. I wash the dishes but I can't stop repeating out loud, "All our bases are belong to us." It just makes me so damn happy and centered and releases the knot in my chest: "All our bases are belong to us."

Again, last night I can't sleep. Working the tumblers. Working the tumblers. I repeat the mantra about our bases and who they belong to until I fall asleep.

This morning an artist friend sent me an email with subject: Gentlemen Storyteller. His name was Jay. It was a 17 minute clip from ninety-nine percent dot com. I watched as the elderly gentlemen explained how he'd been hired by NASA to tell their story for their 50th anniversary. He spent a year listening and reading and talking to people. Now he had a story to tell. He began to tell the story. Ten seconds into his story I felt the tumblers fall: Cherry. Cherry. Cherry. "This is it!" I yelled. "What?" My wife called downstairs from the kitchen. "What did you say?"

I called upstairs. "It's clicked. I found the combination!" I ran upstairs my chest exploding like fireworks. "What is it?" Jill asked. "I figured it out." My heart opening, opening, opening into a beautiful unknown. I look at Jill and smile, "All our bases are belong to us. All our bases are belong to us."

In Praise of Restaurants

At the bottom of the hill I live on, there's this restaurant/bar called The Falls. I love the place, even though it's still imperfect. It's the place I most often go when I want to drink coffee or beer 'out'.

The hill is really one side of the valley that opens onto Baltimore city and eventually onto the Harbor of Baltimore. From the continental perspective, it's the spent end of the vast, rolling coastal plain that you descend onto when you climb down out of the Blue Ridge heading east. The Falls is where you end up, by one route or another, if you are immigrating from Appalachia, looking for factory work, fleeing the shift and final collapse of the economy that supported household farming through 20,000 years of settlement culture. You sell the dirt and head up the Blue Ridge, across the swaying backbone of Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee and the Virginias, you cross the rivers and horse pastures of Western Maryland, noting how curiously well the grass still thrives over Antietam, Harper's Ferry, Gettysburg. You pick your way along country highways, the meanderings of which seem to have forgotten whatever historical logic first trod them into being, until with Baltimore in the distance you travel the last sleeping suburban Main Streets and the growing disorienting swarms of wallboard mansions. Finally you come to modest old neighborhoods inhabited by the hand-to-mouth middle class, teetering above the collapsed industrial dead zones of Baltimore City. Welcome.

Finally, you peer down Sulgrave Avenue, over the last several million years of eroded time, and there at the bottom is Jones Falls. Falls is a regional word for 'river', and Jones Falls is the river that Baltimore used to power its mills, choked into a coma, and then built a highway over so as not to have to think about it. And curiously, most of the beautiful buildings along Jones Falls, under the roar of Jones Falls Expressway, are old stone and brick mill buildings that are a hundred times better able to shelter actual human warmth than the mansions you've climbed down past to stand here, at the bottom of Sulgrave, in the neighborhood of Mount Washington, in front of The Falls restaurant.

The Falls is not housed in one of these beautiful old mill buildings, but it squats near the warmth of the last one, near the expressway, the lightrail tracks and Jones Falls. God, I really hate the racket from the expressway, but there is some deep principle of gravity that draws us all to this intersection--me and the river, the highway, the edge of the neighborhood. I'll happily sit out in the heat and roar on a summer morning and scribble just for the pleasure of being near this sense of gravity. Even though it feels poisoned in some ways.

The Falls opened about two years ago in a storefront that for years had a Korean grocery with nearly nothing on the shelves. There was then a struggling and failed deli. The corned beef was awesome; the lighting was death. The place was just too big, inorganic somehow, yucky. You ate the too-expensive corned beef and fled, wishing them well but unable to stay. When the place closed it was depressing because, while there are several other restaurants in the same little part of Mount Washington Village, there was no place for people from the neighborhood, really. We have expensive taste but no money. Mount Washington Tavern is an expensive sports bar with bad beer that attracts aggressive young professionals on the prowl. Ethel & Ramone's does often-good Cajun fusion but it's expensive and dark. I don't really know why I don't like it there. Their gumbo is excellent and I've had a couple great evenings eating late on their front sidewalk on warm summer nights. The crepe place next door to E&R can be a great place to take one of the girls to talk and eat snails but I don't like the fussy little tables. Everything is like doll furniture that got sent through a bigulator, including the food, sort of.

The Falls always has nine beers on tap, often really interesting and beautiful, often local. Always an IPA, and always a stout or porter. The the food is only adequate but they make a good burger and there's also more interesting stuff if you want to try, and there's always veggie stuff if you're with a veggie, which I really appreciate. But what makes it part of the landscape to me is the restlessness of the owners, the way they've gradually made a restaurant that fits the weird L-shaped space, found lighting that drew the room towards its centers, filled in corners with bottles of whiskey and tequila, glasses of various shapes, drawn the eyes up with clay busts, with paintings and photos, books. And the wait staff and bartenders are smart and polite in a very human way. None of the particular decisions is all that important in itself, although the beer is crucial and the lighting was deathly and bad bread is really sort of literally depressing. What makes the place work is something else.

Luca Turin has called perfume "the most portable form of intelligence," which reframed some of my thinking about art. That is, art--for me, anyway--is defined in part by intelligence. All kinds, obviously. If something is artful or elegant it is in some way just right, fitting. And when something is fitting in an unexpected way, there is the delightful pop of discovery, that clicking in the brain when a new synaptic pathway switches on. And something that continues to grow with those sorts of clicks and shifts is alive and enlivening. To know a restaurant as a form of intelligence, to be around for some of the attempts to make it fit the place: these are, in the modest scale of an ordinary life, great pleasures.

The Falls is slowly becoming a place where they know the food and drink that they serve. They have chosen it mindfully and they eat and drink it themselves with real pleasure. They stand around and taste and speculate over the relative quality of the new charcuterie platter. They understand the pleasure of drinking good beer, and there I don't have to feel self-conscious about noticing and sometimes talking about the layers of sensation and flavor. It is becoming a place where a person who wishes to locate himself or herself in the senses can attempt to do so with some of the resources and types of thinking required to do that. No small thing.

The continent is behind you. The Falls is just down there, at the bottom of Sulgrave Avenue.

Call and Response - the Folkways of the Urban Bicycle Commuter

Before a man is going to push his boulder up the hill there are a few questions he must answer. So too did I have to answer some questions before I got going: first, "Am I strong enough?"; second, "Can I keep the bicycle in good working condition?"; third, "Can I be safe, pushing this boulder?"

I take this third more seriously now than I did when I was a bicycle messenger in D.C. one summer in college. I shudder to think of the things I did then: riding one way the wrong way down one-way streets in rush hour. Being willing to do almost anything to avoid stepping down of the bike - cutting across busy intersections at crazy angles, veering up onto the sidewalk heedless of (even rejoicing in) the stricken looks on the pedestrian faces.

I am a materially different person these days. Old and fat. A father. Winner of bread. It would not do to die or be maimed or suffer the dependent and deranged state of the traumatically brain injured. That of course could still happen, but meanwhile I will try to do my bit not to raise the odds. One of my goals, after all, is to get healthier.

That was not the only kind of safety to consider. The neighborhoods through which I would ride are the stuff of white-flight nightmares: abandoned row-houses, arrests on the street, poverty, suspicion, and violence. Or so I imagined. The fact is that the intra-urban interstate I commuted along in my car conveniently circumvented most of these neighborhoods, and I know of them mostly by rumor. So, to "do this safely" is coded language. Coded for me and for others who ask about my riding in the City: first they clearly think of how narrow and congested many of the City's street's are, and then they almost inevitably ask, "Wait, how do you ride home? What route do you take? What neighborhoods do you ride through?" So, I thought about that, too.

What I mostly thought was that this plan would not work if I were to ride, guarded and paranoid, can of mace or other milky defense mechanism clutched in one hand, down the hill and up. I did not want to spend an hour and a half a day afraid. So I took the opposite tack. I decided to say hello to folks as I went along: embrace the whole thing. The advantage of a bicycle is that you are going slowly enough (especially at first, and especially uphill on the way home) that you can call out and there is enough time for a response.

So that's what I did; what I do. On days when the weather is not too heinous (storming so I can't see, or blowing a tornado watch's worth of headwinds my way), I try to say hello to most folks I see. I try not to be obnoxious about it - if someone's not making eye contact, is on the phone or whatever, I leave them alone, but otherwise I throw a "Mornin", "Evenin", or "How you doin?" their way. Almost all of the people I interact with to and from work are African American. Probably two-thirds of them respond to the call, but here's the thing: not one of them has been rude or hostile or paranoid. Everyone who responds has been nice, and I get all kinds of responses back: "Hey", "Why hello, how are you?", "'Sup?", "Be safe", "What's goin on, big man?", "Mornin", "Evenin", "Hey, Brother", endless variations in the various accents telling of lifelong city residency, immigration from the Carolinas or other points south, or New York or Philly. I had a conversation with one guy in a car at the end of the summer about the importance of hydration - he had just come from working out and I was nodding my head to the music coming through his open windows. He told me to make sure I got enough water because it was hot and it was important for my health.

Occasionally the call comes from the pedestrians, and not from me - one young man was waiting for a bus, listing to headphones and nodding his head in time to the music. I was going slowly up the hill, not pushing too hard, so I also started nodding, which brought his exuberant call of "My nigga wid a bike!", to which I could only smile and keep pedaling. I had never been anyone's nigga wid a bike before. Pretty great, really. Another man called out "Hey I keep seeing you!" - pleased - and I gave my response.

Occasionally - usually at night - I might get a long stare, and once, from a kid who looked like he was about ten, a real eyefuck and chinthrust, and a call, "You police?" I just laughed. He asked once again on another night but I just shook my head and kept riding. His assumption has left me pondering, but I'll write about that later. Once a young man in a car waited till I was abreast of him and blew his horn - I jumped, and all the guys in his car laughed, but it was not malicious and I was willing to be the object of fun. Another guy rode his scooter by me going my way, honking tonically, laughing like a madman, but again he didn't bother me (and the sudden honk from the loud car horn is much more effective than the long blare of a slowly approaching scooter anyway).

Overall these interactions with the people along my route have been the most gratifying, most unlooked-for and wonderful part of my experience. That there is such a pleasant interaction between strangers of different backgrounds in this City just feels very good to me, better than the weight loss and sticking it to Big Oil. I do not fool myself that there is more to these interactions than there are. After all, folks are mostly just being polite. But the fact is that I don't think the white folks would be as polite to unknown black folks coming through their neighborhoods. If I ride through a white neighborhood and say "Hey" I often do not get any response. And so I am grateful for the people who are polite and warm to me, because it makes my life easier in a small but very important way.

My favorite call and response? I was leaving work, exhausted one evening and frazzled from the day. If I leave too late, the ride home is a little jangly and there is no flow, no rhythm to the ride. This was the worst so far - my rear view mirror that clips onto my glasses had worked itself loose a few blocks from where I work. I reached up with one hand to adjust it, but then I saw a car coming around the corner in front of me: no big deal but without thinking I grabbed the front brake, lost control of the bike and went down, landing painfully on my left thigh. I pulled my bike to the far side of the street to check out my pager, on which I had landed and my bike, and to finally get the mirror situated. Across the street and behind me there had been a group of kids - five or six of them, about eight or nine years old on average, probably. These kids live right there, in the projects, in lives that that tend to be steeped in drugs and violence. (These lives I know a little more about because of the toll of this kind of life on the mental health of the residents in the community. One young man told my colleague, who kept telling him to take his meds at dinnertime every day, "You keep telling me to take my meds at dinnertime, but I live in the ghetto, and I don't know what this 'dinnertime' is, we don't have dinner....") So, right after I went down, one girl started cackling at the top of her lungs: "He fell! Oh, my God, he fell! HAHAHAHAAHA, did you see that, heeee fffffeeeeeeelllllllll". I flushed with quick anger and humiliation, but the obvious glee that she was taking in my downfall was infectious, and after about a second and a half I found myself smiling ruefully. It was dusk so it was a little hard to see, and I wasn't interested in facing my mocker, so I just kept checking the bike. Then, the call came, from one of the older boys in the group: "Hey, are you OK?" And my response: "Yeah, thanks, I'm just embarrassed." And I got on my bike and rode off. That the boy would reach across the gulf and ask me, an old white guy from the suburbs, if I was OK, when he had nothing to gain but just because it was a common, decent thing to do, has been by far my favorite moment, born of my clumsiness and his willingness to ignore the class and race differences dividing us.

I have a couple of friends who have been punched while riding their bikes or scooters. I don't know whether that will happen to me, and if it does how my answer to the question of whether I can do this safely will change. For now the answer to the third question I asked myself before setting out to become a bicycle commuter - the question of safety - has been answered, at least for the moment, but in a way that is more nuanced than was the original question. How safe is it to depend on foreign oil? To get fat? To ignore the struggles of poor neighborhoods and remain fundamentally ignorant of the lives of those who surround us? I feel less afraid, less isolated, less weak than I did when I started, and I am grateful. For now that is more than enough.

This Roma Girl

What was it like? When you're a filmmaker you're always late for someplace else when the real shot shows up. There's never enough money or time. It's cold or it's hot; I'm late; no one will hold still or they won't keep doing what they were just doing that was actually interesting, and then something shows up in shit light or smiles at me, right there, and I don't see it because the film is already about something else.

The girl was about 12. Or maybe older and just small. There was food there and everything but all the people were small and hard, and looked older than they were, although I had no way of knowing how old they were. But even the children looked old. Not old with time but stamped with age to which time only needed to be added. The Roma aren't like the Czechs who age into good-humored cynics, or the Americans who age into surprised children. There always seems to be some chance that an American might escape mortality. On film they mostly look busy or surprised.

The gypsy camp was an ugly maze and I was late and lost. Men kept hitting on me, asking if I would take them home to America. I live in London, I said. Take me to London they said. And then this one little girl. She had very dark eyes, and it struck me enough to check what I was seeing without the camera. Although when it's bright like that the world disappears for a moment anyway when your eye leaves the camera. But it was impossible to see anything but shy darkness in her eyes. I mean their invisibility was palpable. And I couldn't look away. You can see how the shot wobbles. There.

And then I realized that we had surprised each other--my rush and her tears--she was weeping. They were all dusty, and the tears left channels of girlish skin down one cheek that spread to one side of her Roman nose as she wiped her face with her knuckles. We were hurrying away from each other the whole time but we did this dance, which I mostly got on film. She was hurrying back to conceal her tears, and I was hurrying to be wrong about what my film was about.

'Are you crying? Why are you crying?'
She looked away and looked back which was a kind of answer. I think she meant that I wouldn't understand, or that's what I imagined. On the film, she looks away and when she looks back she has decided that her eyes will be less opaque. She looks into the lens and the autofocus flickers and then she is gone again.
'Why are you crying?' I ask, and she shrugs. And then, "What is your name?"
'What is your name?" she says, and her voice is small, only the voice of girl, although very husky.
'Pavla.' And then, 'What is your name.' Now coaxing, which she likes, and smiles.
'Pavla?'
'What's wrong?' again. And she looked at me blackly and answered in some language I assume was Roma. I couldn't understand, of course. I speak English and Czech and some Russian but no Roma, of course, if that's what it was.
She said whatever it was again, looking at me as though it were impossible to say it in any other language.
She shrugged and--although it doesn't seem to show up on the screen--through the lens her face was a child's face and her eyes were green.