Alaska as variously defined:

Notes on a bookstore:




The bookstore is a crowded, sordid affair. Everyone/thing looks uninterested and uninteresting. Cell phones carry conversations that one hopes are left at the door (or, left in another, lesser dimension). There is a café – really an a queer, hyper-electronically atavistic study pen – and a lofty (sic) hum moves about in the six feet above all those focused on screens that burn bright opposite the white, floating apples. They are in The Garden and each computer user appears to have taken a bite of the Forbidden [Corporate] Fruit.

Like too many of the café patrons, the books appear groomed, glossy, and forever reprinted; so clean and focused on their respective subject(s), you don’t dare pick one up for fear that merciless instruction has replaced stoic dreaming. I get no sense of wonder when I draw a copy towards me. Spines are newborn. The corners sharp enough to draw blood that would drip across covers so bright and impossibly full of fortune that the language within seems auxiliary, a byproduct, a side effect. I search in vain for Carver and am overrun by Cussler; copy after copy of which is wrapped in foil proclaiming slight variation on the theme (which best I can tell is completely awesome stuff. Seriously). Walking through the cordoned grid of each titled section, I see the categories we’ve arrived at: romance and computer programming, mystery and religion, Kathy Griffin and world history, rock/roll and horse calendars — all the stuff of good fiction presented in this reality.

A legion of men and women swarm the aisles to proceed with some sort of inventory that invokes them to all kinds of motion and noise, a type that is unplanned, momentarily considered, eternally understood. Each holds a small computer that resembles a re-invention of the calculator – the only visible buttons, labeled 0-9, are arranged in a grid like those on a cash register or old computer keyboard – and all tap incessantly and carefully at the keypad like archeologists exposing a dig with their really tiny hammers. Many don’t know exactly what is expected so there is a general air of bluster and amusement – an elementary feeling regarding those days of ‘substitute teacher’. I can hear (and see) one older woman, who, because of her age or her apparent confidence or her [rimless, stainless [steel] glasses, or possibly a combination of all three, repeat to a half dozen others, not collectively but individually, how to turn their handheld counting devices “ON.” They then begin to swarm saurian over the shelves, breaking that modest sense of focus Person X – completely average shopper – might reasonably hope to find in a corporate, cubist, book-selling box such as this one. All swarmers appear somewhat nattily dressed in generic, forgotten-logo-over-the-left-chest-emblazoned-maroon polo t-shirts and khakis that run the styling gamut from tapered leg/pleated, pleated/straight leg, straight leg/cuffed, cuffed/pleated, pleated/straight leg etc., etc., including slight color variations due to washing, time in service, brand, fabric type used by said brand; also some inner, lower leg seams are slightly frayed – those sitting bunched and crown-like above the crest of the shoe and that rub the opposite pant leg when the wearer is walking and/or running, although why one would be running in khakis, except in some sort of emergency or in an intoxicated state, possibly the very state that caused the emergency proper, is a question I’ll leave altogether unanswered, for now – from use, as are certain pant bottom cuffs that have been drug across numerous carpeted floors as the wearer schleps them room to room, having not had the foresight, possibly the means, to take them off while not at work to preserve their appearance of being relatively new, neat and kept, paying them no more mind than if they were a discreet woodland tic or foster child, OK, maybe not your foster child, but a foster child. Ostensibly these maroon and khaki workers have never been in a bookstore, their body languages and bawdy dialog more akin to electronic retail or wait staff, although possibly, since we’ve taken to creating general atmospheres of, arguably, disrespectful bigness regarding choice in store and product, and extreme impersonality also regarding store and product, they are simply mimicking the faux-mercurial, completely indestructible, predictable, experience of consumption today, that rounded emotion of ‘I guess so’ that crops up when, and if, we chance to consider ourselves in relation to our market actions and their significance, and how though we may believe choice as a consumer is dead, choices made as a consumer affect larger markets which in turn affect still larger markets etc. etc.

There is an angst and bustle that begins to ever-so-slightly rise towards climax – think the second of the fives parts of a story: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement. There is a sense of general helplessness and good humor among shoppers — something like ‘Oh well, what you can do with people you’ve selectively hired to perform an immediate and specific function regarding the well being of our store and, ostensibly, our customers.’

Anchorage, Alaska.

From my favorite recent time gone by:

a.) Chicago, Illinois.
b.) Coney Island – Brooklyn, New York.
c.) Manhattan, New York.
d. & e.) Hoboken, New Jersey.
f.) Manhattan, New York.
g. & h. & i.) Boston, Massachusetts.

Forks, of course.

Portland. Terrebonne. Jackson. Gros Ventre. Jackson. Terrebonne. Eugene. Portland. Seattle. Dawson Creek. Whitehorse. Tok. Anchorage. Hope. Seward. Anchorage. Palmer. Anchorage. Whitehorse. Dawson Creek. Prince George. Great Falls. Jackson. Gros Ventre. Jackson. Terrebonne. Portland. Boston. New York. Boston. Chicago. Portland. Terrebonne. Portland. Anchorage. Portland. Terrebonne. Elko. Salt Lake City. Jackson. Gros Ventre. Jackson. Helena. Spokane. Terrebonne. Portland. Seattle. Anchorage.


58 words. 58+ destinations. the last 15 short months of my life. myriad stops in, among and between. doors opened. doors closed. gas pumped. clouds gouged reflective in that white space around the colored eye. smiles released. frustrations blossomed. apologies given in lieu of understanding. not knowing who or what you might possibly be written across the brow. homeless. searching. allowing place to sear remembrance on the visible backs of said eyes. cars, planes, and trains, my own two fucking feet – forms of transportation, travel.


I have quite normal revelations, realizing as they happen that ‘quite normal’ seems both intuitive and circumspect. The world is an intrinsic place; one that we must neither apologize to or for. My job amidst my movements and actions has been to find that place – the blue moment of just before dusk – where the magic of created fictions dovetails with the loneliness and ache imposed by public reality. How do I impress upon the world that geese heard at dawn coursing upriver beneath a pregnant, coming pink sky is what I hear when anything utters the word perfect? Where does one find the proper place to exemplify the stone silence of a mountain that has just allowed you to climb her?


Words are given and taken — and I wonder how often they are gifted and how often they are just given away. Photographs compile unforgettable, ratcheted seconds of time. Books soothe a mind that aches for the impossible and gives said mind relief in all of impervious beliefs.


I am here to stitch realities together. A seamstress – one quietly pumping the foot pedal that the machine in front of me may sew from the myriad threads that unravel bright and searching from behind my eyes. Seeing all as a precursor to making notations. What constitutes mere thought and what is waiting language? How do we decipher what goes where?


Quite literally, I am sitting on the floor of the room I came to age in feeling – the good and great pressures of one who must channel that which has been given to them, mainly thought. Snow falls. The silent world is both in and outside. My laughter is lonely. Adrift. My smile fading in and out like AM bandwidth somewhere in North Dakota – Minot, a town where you’ve seen the sun rise across the dusty brick of main street, bits of hay collected in the gutters like last nights dreams and car exhaust piling up so that you slide from the town both noxious and removed enough to question what you just witnessed. I’ve met no one to whom I can introduce myself with abandon. What doesn’t seem to exist, what was once prayed to, is not troubling so much as unlinked — the inability to know too much drives my molten, somewhat disheveled core. Temporal and transient living means that the self is relegated to finding meaning in created understandings that chance to follow you everywhere. Dynamism through connection. Connection as that thread that hasn’t yet spooled from behind my blue eyes.