My Intention

I've never written a blog before. Perhaps it's because I am very particular about my words. Too frequently, I find I am misunderstood. This has nothing to do with others. It is certainly no indication of intellectual depth or complexity on my part. On the contrary, it has almost everything to do with the poor manner in which I present my ideas and myself. Anyone who knows me will attest to the fact that I don't usually seem to care much about these sorts of misunderstandings. Maybe I never created a blog before because I don't imagine many, that is besides those charitable, discriminating, and mostly uncanny few who choose to stay friends with me, would care one whit about the things I care about.

As much as I try not to be, I am a writer, albeit one who has given up on ever being paid for that behavior. I've finished a seventh draft of a first novel, have an inventory of short fiction collecting dust on my computer, a few poems kicking around, and a smattering of other short works published here and there. One reason I write is because it is the only thing I've ever done that displayed even a modicum of talent. When one is encouraged or congratulated for a specific finished task, he'll tend to repeat such actions in hopes of receiving more of the same. Unfortunately, I am as simple a person as that. As for giving up on the prospect of ever making a living off my writing, if I'm honest, there is my lack of ambition to contend with. I suppose all I ever wanted was for my teachers and friends, my family, and my wife to be proud of me, to approve of my minor contribution to our little community of interests.

As for my writing and what to expect, my fiction might be best characterized as proletarian noir. My literary interests, while certainly not exclusive to that genre, might be looked at narrowly as works representative of the same. There are a number of American writers who inhabit this particular and peculiar niche: more recently, Donald Ray Pollock, Denis Johnson, and William Gay. It is Dirty Realism; it is Southern Gothic, our strange vibrating reality limned in shadow and earthy hues. The characters of my study range in class from the lumpen to the working, the degenerate to the blue-collar hero. Frequently, these designations are not mutually exclusive. A writer writes those who he knows. Military service is also a recurring theme in my work, as well as those effects which exist concomitant of that service. And a writer writes that which he knows. My poetry consists of retrospective interpretations of my id, and not much more.

I was a brat. Growing up on military bases is both a diverse experience and a sheltered one. We end up being from nowhere or everywhere. We were taught to be green. Sometimes we cannot escape that green. We enlist. I did, way back in the nineties. After the Corps, I pushed around the US and eventually went back to college. It took me decades to finish.

I began to see oppression everywhere, real or imagined. I saw disparity between our founding principles, the rhetoric, and our actions at home and abroad. I saw disparity in the teachings of my professors and the realities of the world. But I also admired the honor displayed by individuals working for positive change. I saw integrity, idealism. I saw constructive struggle. I began to comprehend the subtle lines we cross as nations, as communities, as peoples, and as individuals, stepping between the progressive, the constructive, and the regressive or destructive. I began to understand the poverty of human thought, the poverty of my own, even the poverty of my obsession with identity.

This idea of identity, the establishment thereof, is something I find in most anything I read. If it is not there, I will insert it into my reading. And identity, I find, is very closely related to logistics, and logistics is very much related to narrative. That is, we rely on warehousing to give ourselves some sense of identity. He's a former Marine. She's a writer. He's African American. They're Italian. He's a nerd. She's an athlete, a doctor, a homosexual, transgender, a criminal, illegal, a citizen, angry, lovely, entirely unknowable.

Human beings tend to want to cast light into darkness, reveal the mysterious. We are naturally afraid of the unknown, unclever animals that we are. Pandora must open the box. The Suttungmjaðar must be imbibed. Djinn want for freedom. Urashima Taro grows old. Fruit is choked down from the Tree of Knowledge. Cats are frequently killed. To identify a thing is a step toward addressing the thing, defeating the thing, embracing the thing, controlling the thing, or frequently being destroyed by the thing.

In logistics, we identify nouns and store them. These nouns might be anything: books, lumber, nuts and bolts, weapons, files, ideas, even people. This action is a form of control. We even call it inventory control. It is a fairly understandable behavior to desire control, reasonable in the face of the vibrating terror, this chaotic reality we must, by the very nature of our existence, confront.

But logistics is not just about managing the storage of nouns; it is also about the management of the flows of these nouns. Flows indicate narrative: a beginning, middle, and an end, upstream and downstream, obstacles, twists and turns, a climax, and a denouement. That gasket will eventually be used inside that Pistenbully engine.

Muriel Rukeyser wrote, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” I believe that. There is narrative in everything. And all narrative is an effort to cast light within the darkness, to identify ourselves and others. Writing is a meagre attempt by a fundamentally flawed consciousness to control the uncontrollable. It is an effort to find balance when there is only inequality, to apply pattern to entropy, to right perceived wrongs.

I suppose this is why I write.

And I write from nowhere and everywhere. Really. I've studied the subtle ways that talented authors might employ this wonderful platform to gain a hearing, express a grievance, or to highlight injustice. I guess I wish to continue in my attempts to contribute to this discussion, in however small a way, to identify disparity in the world and pen narratives which cast light on these persistent darknesses that threaten to engulf us. I proceed on that endeavor with the knowledge that I am ill-prepared, perhaps unsuited, and that identity, the concept with which I am admittedly obsessed, can be crafted, disingenuous, guileless, or entirely sincere. Just as logistics, or systems, or controls, seek to label and warehouse, track and keep, identity can be both fulfilling and stifling, freeing and restricting. And sometimes these identities, while forever unable to tell the whole narrative of us, might help to define, light up, to therefore lift away our fear, perhaps our despair, however briefly. Sometimes they might even point the way home.