Perm Vacation

Perm Vacation

32 pages, self-published on May 28th, 2020

No copies remain, but I can print and mail (within the US) if you throw a couple bucks my way. Email hisnameisdan @ gmail dot com, if interested.

Poems from Perm Vacation:

Perm Vacation

Three Poems

Free Throws: End Game

 On Saturday, Halloween night, I stayed home while Elizabeth took our son trick-or treating. I waited in the drive way, assuring that our candy bowl, placed at the end of the driveway between two pumpkins and in front of a smash-faced plastic hawk, wouldn't be greedily raided by princesses and super heroes. The children must be rational with their candy grabbing. They must not follow in the footsteps of their toilet paper hoarding parents.

While waiting for trick-or-treaters, I shot free throws. It was getting dark outside. I shot some shots. I made 34 consecutive free throws. While shooting these free throws, my mind found a space outside of space. I think this is what the mystics refer to as "catching fire." My body on fire. My mind on fire, but the fire was air. The basketball on fire, but the fire was my touch.

Obviously, I missed a shot. Shot #35. It was in and out. I stopped shooting for a while.  I put on a Bill Clinton mask and a hot dog costume over that. I called myself Bill Clinton Hot Dog Thanos. I snapped my fingers and half the basketballs on earth disappeared. I sat in a lawn chair and hydrated, calling attention to the candy as the princesses and super heroes passed by. There would be no excess of candy in my house, I thought. 

Friends, there remains an excess of candy in my house. My son brought home as much as I gave away, and you have to strictly control the sugar intake of a 3.5-year-old in order to avoid undesirable behaviors. I snapped my fingers the next day, but half the candy did not disappear.

I haven't shot a basketball since that night. This is mostly because my car is parked underneath the basketball goal, and I've been doing other things.

The Jorō Spider

A spider native to east Asia has recently (within the last 5 years or so) spread over North Georgia, where I live. An orbweaver, the Jorō spider builds its massive golden-hued webs between trees at the edges of forest and all over my yard. 

The Jorō spider is an invasive species. It is believed that they arrived in Georgia in cargo and escaped around I-85 in Jackson County, just a 30 minute drive from Athens, where I am typing these words. 

The spider itself is beautiful. Its web, too, is beautiful. There is another spider native to Georgia called the basilica spider, named for its dome-shaped webs, which are quite messy. The Jorō spider's web is also messy, featuring several layers of strong web that when touched feels as strong as fishing line. The web shines gold in the sunlight, giving the whole scene an unearthly quality. In my opinion, the Jorō's web evokes the spiritual nature tied to a word like "basilica" more aptly than does that of the basilica spider itself. These webs, plus the large spider's striking yellow and black contrasted with the pinkish red of its spinnerette, make it no surprise that this spider has inspired folklore. If folklore or cryptozoology interest you, I recommend you click these words and read on. It's ok if you click and read now. I'll wait.

Welcome back. Recently, while the school where I teach had its field day, which was a make up for the lack of field day in the spring when we were all sent home on March 13th to quarantine at the onset of America's Covid-19 outbreak, I spotted a Jorō's web near the edge of some trees. I called my students over to teach them about the spider. Another teacher chimed in, "Those are an invasive species. We sprayed about 20 of 'em yesterday." I nodded. "We're seeing a whole lot less of our writing spiders because they're taking over." I had also noticed fewer writing spiders (or argiope aurantia), which are native to Georgia and similar in size and appearance to the Jorō. The writing spiders web is less impressive to me, though respectable nonetheless. 

In my opinion, killing the Jorō spider is a lost cause. They're well-established and will continue to spread. You can kick at the wind, but you will never stop it. Ironically, this spider-killing teacher does not often wear a mask while in the building, which has been proven to stop the spread of one thing or another, but I digress.

I don't know why I'm writing this, but if, for some reason, you are reading this and it is far into the future, I hope you are doing ok. I hope there are not currently any pandemics. I hope our collectively anxiety and fear resolve themselves peacefully. I hope the Jorō spider's ecological impact does not outweigh its inherent beauty. I hope no one judges me for highlighting previous uses of Jorō yellow, which I did accidentally while trying to paste the word. I hope formatting errors are acceptable where you are. Perhaps, it won't even show up when I publish this blog post. I hope the weather is nice. I hope we managed to halt our climate crisis or at very least our bodies learn to evolve into the chaos that we've created. I hope you imagined Kevin Costner in Water World when you read the previous sentence. If you didn't, you are now. I hope you are also imagining Kevin Costner in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, specifically the scene where he is nude, climbing across some rocks after bathing beneath a waterfall. I hope you are able to bathe under a waterfall someday. That sounds peaceful and nice. I hope on your way to the waterfall you do not walk through a Jorō spider's web and become entangled in its thick, gold grasp. I hope that if you become entangled that the Jorō spider doesn't end up biting you. I've read that their bite hurts. 

Prose

I'm trying to write more prose. I've only start one thing of prose lately, but I intend to carry through with writing more. After finishing 100+ page book of poetry over a 6 or 7 year period, I feel the need to put my thoughts into another form. I find prose challenging. I write it very slowly. I also write poetry slowly. My prose velocity means that it is highly unlikely that I ever write a novel. I wrote slowly because my hope is that I can feel the impact that each word has as I type it out. 

That sounds stupid because it is.

I kind of picture it like a piano hammer striking the strings inside the body. 

I've written short stories in the past that didn't take too much effort. It's as if I've conditioned my brain into overthinking language. Writing can feel like a trudge through a swamp. It also feels unnecessary to write every word that enters my field of thought. My language needs space, which is maybe I struggle with the visual density of prose. Maybe writing papers in college and grad school killed the joy of prose.

Here are some things I mostly avoid when writing prose:

1. Dialogue: I just don't like writing it. 

2. Character names. I always forget character names when I read and watch movies. As long as I can tell who's who, it's all good.

3. Action: When I write prose in the non-non-fictional realm, I feel this urge to have nothing happen. It's like reality is already filled with so much insanity that I want to write things in which the drama is purely in the act of continued existence. At least this applies to what I'm writing right now. Everything has already happened or will happen, but right now is just existence. Don't come to my prose looking for drastic acts or sexy shenanigans. There will be no conniving, just more thinking, but hopefully the blood of thinking.

4. Narrative resolution: I think there's only one story in which I've "resolved" the narrative, and that one was resolved by a world-ending storm overtaking the protagonist's home while playing Madden. 

5. Characters that are writers. Self-explanatory. 

After a productive period of poetry during the first month of quarantine, I found myself struggling to create until recently, which I'm forcing. I need to do that from time to time. I hope this is not something that I start and then abandon. I once wrote 30-40 pages of a novel on a Saturday before quitting the next day. I think I needed to do that to commit myself to writing poetry. I was in college at the time, still living in the dorms. All I can remember is spending an entire page describing the protagonist walking around an empty strip mall parking lot. I remember thinking that was my favorite part. It was the last thing I wrote before giving up the novel.

Here is an old tumblr post reflecting on writing a poem

I don't think anyone ever read this, which is why I feel okay about posting it here:

Today, while writing a poem, I reached a point in the poem where I felt the need to add a last line. I was sitting outside. It was windy, probably the winds from the front of a hurricane’s weather pattern as it makes its way inland from the Carolinas. I just sat there for awhile and stopped looking at the poem. When I remembered the poem, I realized there was no need for a last line. I closed the notebook and walked inside where the internet needed to be reset. I would have to wait to type the poem into its file, hosted in a digital cloud. I unplugged and replugged the wifi. I walked outside to check the mail. I wasn’t wearing shoes. I felt pebbles and leaves stick to my feet. I thought about how long I would have to wait to upload the detritus into my body. I didn’t wonder this aloud. I didn’t even wonder it verbally. It wasn’t until I wrote it down that I realized I had wondered it. Now that it has been wondered, it is here, inside me.

Mass Exodus

My thoughts left me in full. I didn’t try to chase them. I was glad they were finally gone.

I could sleep now.

Except I didn’t sleep.

I thought if my thoughts were gone then what about my dreams.

My dreams were gone too.

And if my dreams then what about my perceptions of who I am now.

Those were gone too.

And if my perceptions of self were gone then what would be left of me?

I started culling the algae from my throat.

I scraped the lichens from my forehead.

I harvested oysters from between my toes.

All of this was nothing without thought.

What would I do with all of this?

My thoughts have all left me.

I scraped the interior of my skull, spritzed it like a fern.

A couple explodes next to the neighborhood pool. They both look at the sky, acknowledge its passing. Embarrassment is a capitalist invention. Yes, but so are we.

Everyone hushes, “There is a pandemic going on.”

Thought as an injury that will ever happen.

Thought as climbing out of a vacuum.

Thought as building the ladder

into my brain’s lap

causing a concussion

and a sweetness of thought

The purring of thought.

Thought’s effervescence.

Thought as murder.

I thought I thought a thought outright.

I did not. I tried to think a thought outright.

As I have said “to try” is the essayist’s dream.

“To try” carries violence against “to be.”

I sit and let my blood cascade through me.

My wife and son are doing a sleepover. They are watching Mulan. Action scene after action scene. Horses screaming. Crowds shouting. There is always a winner.

Mulan wins because of her mental ferocity.

Same with the bugs that shout outside. They are ferociously loud. Same with the timbre of being cool enough to have read this far.

If you’ve made it this far, here is a list of VIPs at my funeral (I prefer Sky Burial):

Squids

Anyone who feels like they know me

Babies (any)

MyFamily

People that are chill

Werner Herzog

Me (my ghost)

Nothing to Say

Having nothing to say is my new religion. I decided this while in the shower. I imagined writing a poem that began and ended "I have nothing to say." I rinsed the dandruff shampoo from my hair.

All's well that ends, as they say, including thought.

When I write a poem I attempt to crack beauty's mirror, only to remember that attempting (or trying) is the meaning of "essay," a fact that essayists like to weaponize in their attempt to expand upon nothing. But saying nothing should not be weaponized.

The story starts when it begins and ends when an ending arrives. Everything between holds hands. When I say that "having nothing to say is my new religion," I mean that I have lost my voice's whetstone. I think I left it somewhere in time's microwave.

I want so badly to say nothing that it becomes sin. In this, I have failed to live up to scripture.

Silence is instinct. The coyote stays hidden from the sun. The bat sees nothing but must click its tongue to locate its meal. Having nothing to say is different from not knowing what to say, but these religions share bread and juice. They impale the sun on a mutual spit and roast it in the absence of language. Every orbit simultaneously sets the limits of being.

I have said nothing new, if I've said anything at all. Welcome to my blog.