Vicious Circles: Rejected Bit from Beautiful Morning Blues

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

There are October mornings in The Woodlands when the watery Mid-Atlantic sky still burns with a white-hot sun even though summer is long gone. Clouds explode in smoking bursts, stilled just slightly by the strange heat of the autumn stratosphere. Crows and pigeons bob on the wind, but The Woodland’s Gap store advertises sales, and the weekend street fills up with SUVs and Audi station wagons stuffed with families on the way to football and soccer games. Waitresses go one more button down on their blouses and bend just a bit more across tables.
During the week divorcee mothers tow their small children in new red wagons down to parks, take off their shoes, wonder if they should feel happy to be free from marriage, put the little ones down for their naps, yearn for a tryst with the renter next door who sits reading on his porch, drinking a daiquiri in the sun. The youngest of the divorcees are usually the most feral. They roam the streets all day in Grand Cherokees, Escalades, Navigators, Suburbans, doing errands and transporting their kids to and from schools with names like Williams Prep, The Woodlands Academy, and Cliveden Friends Select in that doting white-anglo-saxon-protestant way that only plentifully breasted, patrician faced, rich women can, waiting for their attorneys to call them. Delicate bone structures, big, blue cat’s eyes, full mouths, white teeth, long legs, educated rears, narrow salad-eating waists, luxurious hips, well-adjusted minds from the utopias of Vassar, Wellesley, Georgetown, Duke, and Sarah Lawrence.
Sometimes they aren’t divorced at all. They’re just unhappy, or searching, or needy and have lost their husbands to making the making of money and the games of rich males – racquet sports, golf, hunting, biking, fishing. The vectors of desire change direction slowly but steadily in the land of the rich and couples move into different sets of desire. Women all over in The Woodlands can be just as much on the prowl as men, emotions roaming through them in vicious circles, vectors of desire spinning out of control.
It happens sometimes. They make the lone male shopping in the grocery store at lunchtime happy while his colleagues back at the office read memos and talk long-distance to Taiwan; they coat his body with theirs, pump against his thigh, walk across his living room, blooming, even after two kids and a misfired marriage, smelling sweet as a new car, willing to do the unthinkable, taking a risk and dominating the moment just enough to gather the strength to force the now AWOL businessman lying naked on his back, to provide oral pleasure, his face cocooned by her thighs until he has done what she wants of him. She reminds him of his ex-wife, but she is also someone new, so he gets her to kneel or lie on her back and finally attaches himself looking into her blue cat’s eyes and thinks about his wife as he vaults on top in spasms of brief lunacy, knowing as soon as he is done that she is not his wife and he has made a mistake. He is still married, he wants to divulge, but he never spends any real time with his wife anymore and isn’t sure she even loves him. This intimacy is too much, however, and he remains silent about his despair. They make plans for the following Monday and she gives him a quick nip on the neck then lets herself out through the back door.
This is what happens when people are confronted with the inevitable loneliness of living in a hot city during the school year just before the weather turns and the north wind raises its violent head in celebration of winter. There are more than 28,000 people in The Woodlands. On good-weather weekdays, people shop, eat lunch at outdoor cafes, and ogle each other’s flesh. On bad days, when the rain jets out of the sky horizontally and stings the face, people think about sex and murder and watch TV, or masturbate while they surf Internet porn sites.
He is not thinking about murder, but he has been going over the mechanics of the device for the past hour, contemplating the physics of an explosion. He has the suitcase, the battery, the cell phone he lifted from a grandmother at a supermarket he drove to in West Virginia, a small roll of fourteen-gauge wire, the relay, the traveler’s alarm clock, four strips of blasting cord, thirty-three pounds of Cemtex in fifteen light-yellow, sausage-shaped rolls, and the clothes he purchased at Old Navy and The Gap to hide and pack the assembly. He will take the train to the North Philadelphia station carrying the suitcase full of these components, walk two blocks to the van he has rented with a stolen credit card, then make the twenty minute drive to 30th Street Station. In the parking lot under the building he will climb in the back and, shielded by tinted windows, arm the device. His wife and son think he is flying to St. Louis.
He will sit on the bench nearest the information desk in the center of the station for half-an-hour then walk out the West exit to have a smoke. In the van, as he merges with traffic onto the Schuylkill Expressway, he will dial the special number they gave him for the cell phone. The alarm on the clock will switch on. Ten minutes later the explosion will have killed several hundred people. The suitcase will have been left strategically near the large wooden benches so that they act like giant shrapnel in the blast, huge chunks of one hundred year old timber and iron slicing through the air with the same velocity as the chemical reaction.
There is no such thing as murder when there is a war like this, he thinks. The United States do not understand what they are up against. It is no longer about nations and territory. It is not about principles or morality. It isn’t even about ideology or politics. It is what happens after millions of conversations and arguments throughout the world have been left unresolved.
How many ways are there to say stop? What part of “leave us alone” is so hard to understand? The United States is not a danger like communism or fascism. It is something far worse. Inside, it is impossible to see the whole thing. Inside, you can see it mutating, chaos and emotion grow more and more predictable, so predictable they don’t seem like chaos and emotion growing.
It all gets mapped out on television and then played out in every home and office around the country. Nothing reasonable can stop it. No one wants to stop it. There is sex and lust attached to everything they are making and the whole world is buying into it. It’s not that they’re Godless, it’s that they think they are in the hand of God and that everything is okay with them. The equation has gone beyond good and evil. The object is to approach nothing bad. With nothing bad, pleasure becomes the basis, and God’s hand is all loving because they say it is so. Everything is all right.
He will fly to St. Louis if they do not shut down the airport then drive back in his Saab. If they happen to shut down the airport, he will just follow highways of the Mid-Atlantic for 12 hours and eventually return home from the road. His wife and son will be happy to see him. No one will wonder about the Saab. He is gone far too often. He will accompany his wife after all to the party at the Willoughby’s and participate in conversations about the blast and terrorism, and the Occupiers at City Hall, and the Twenty-first Century’s failings. He will watch them and pay close attention to which of them is afraid and worried and which is not. One of them may die there in the train station. They will have the party anyway, of course, and the guests will drink a bit too much and say a bit more than they should. He will see if Hugh Donovan is concerned. Hugh Donovan is the barometer. If Donovan seems worried, then they will all be worried. Donovan is the canary. He is smug, self-possessed, aware that he’s attractive, arrogant, and clearly hedonistic. It is incredible that no one seems to understand what Donovan is doing, that the men ignore him, that women do not talk about it. He knows nothing happens with his own wife, and he is thankful for that. She is watched and guarded anyway.
There is a great deal of work to do even after the train station. Once Donovan begins to quiver, he will have succeeded. He will watch Donovan carefully.
30th Street Station is a beautiful building. He finds it a bit sad that he should be responsible for destroying it.

“An Illumination that Works,” From Dawn of the Summertons: A Work in Progress

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

Nine miles away, in the northwestern section of the city, Twyla Summerton was trying to keep herself from rushing the painting she’d been working on for nearly a week. She had a yoga class at 9:00 in Chestnut Hill and then coffee and tea at Peggy Laughtons’. The painting was the last and best in a series of a school bus parking lot filled with banana-lemon vehicles lit just off their usual tone of gold by a pale blue sky amplified by hints of silver. “Like sun sparking against raw aluminum siding or an Airstream wall in a Texas summer desert.” The hard thing was not the bus shimmer in their banana shells. It was, indeed, the light. She’d spent a year playing with gold and yellow and white and silver. Her first instinct had been to try some version of Hundertwasser’s child-like strokes, the way you saw that he actually loved yellows like a child, but they all seemed cheap and shabby for her intent. She’d asked Reggie and Kristen both and they said they loved what she’d done. Reggie had even said, “Hunsucker or someone like that?” Their like was her dislike. They noticed it. That was not supposed to be the effect. You noticed it with Hundertwasser, but that was supposed to happen. He was scattering splinters of future in his work. She was searching for something less magical, more ephemeral, like the look of a girl clad in an ivory colored satin gown running through a field or down a hill in Maine. She’d tried to work in tans as well, thought they might make the white-yellow mix she’d been working with stand out, fresh with subtlety (subtleness?). But it didn’t work at all. She was wrong-headed about so much, she thought. But here she was now, ten minutes to leaving for yoga and she’d maybe found the effect she wanted and she didn’t even have time for a debate with herself about art versus the universe of things prosaic (or was yoga prosaic? Possibly, just a slight bit self-indulgent? Or maybe just overtly and unrealistically hopeful – like recycling or re-lamping with compact fluorescents).
She put down her brush and stepped back. All 187 buses rested as one grid of lamps to the eye; the light she had washed in gave that effect. To her, when she read about sustainable development or renewable energy, she felt just off in the future a world waited for them with a cartoon feel and utopian glimmer – and it all had to do with the light; the light will be different soon, she thought, promising and warm, touching our skin and imbuing us with the subtle change we need to live in that new world instead of this one. The parking lot there on the canvas was indeed touched by exactly the thing she’d sought (beginning to be touched, anyway). Perhaps time away, an hour of yoga, two hours of chat and gossip, and the time driving – my God, the time driving! – and then back again. If this feeling she had was still there after all that quotidian power, then she’d done it? Well, found it? An illumination that works, she thought, turning toward the door and the rest of her life, which was good and normal, though a bit more demanding than anyone could understand or might want to simply consider.

Everyone Always Wants to Do the Cooking

~ David Biddle ~ 2 Comments

Flash Fiction:Flash Read
(not copyrighted; if you want it, use it…even if you want to put your name on it)

Original fiction by David Biddle

Steve is out buying hotdogs, buns, carrots, more beer, and ice cream. It’s a long way to town and back. We’re all just letting gravity take its course sitting around the trailer house on his farm near the Hungry Mother Forest. Doolin is smoking a cigar and Powell Dodge has out a deck of cards.

“Can someone cut my hair?” Powell says, shuffling the cards. He has been asking that question since we were swimming in the afternoon. Lysen wanted to oblige so he and Lionheart go through both the little kitchen and the bathroom cabinet looking for something to cut Powell’s hair. All they find is a rusty razor blade and a meat cleaver.

“Shut the fuck up, Dodge.” I say. We’re all a bit drunk with our empty stomachs.

“I’m bored, man,” says Dodge looking at the cards.

“Someone turn on the radio,” I say.

Doolin with his stogie saunters over to the console next to the TV. His hand wants to go to the tube. I say, “Turn on the radio, please. There’s no reception out here for visuals.” Doolin’s hand waves at me behind his back then hovers over the radio while he tries to figure out the controls. Finally the radio comes on and it is someone reading from a book.

Earl enjoyed a drink as much as any man. He enjoyed women too. They went together. Three whiskeys, hang his gun up behind the bar, find a pretty little thing up the stairs and around the corner. He wasn’t particular, wasn’t Earl. They’d come in all shapes and sizes and colors. He liked the redheads most, but the drink kept him from being too particular. One thing he noticed was how they all had eyes spattered with cloudy diamonds when it was dark and he lay with them slow and steady.

I watch Powell. “How about we play poker?” I say. The room is a happy place all of a sudden. Doolin moves into the kitchen smiling. Lionheart standes to help him. Kevin McGlinnity burps. Lysen and Doolin open the fridge and bring out the last beers. My brother, Willy, sits across from Powell Dodge and tells him that his hair looks fine. Dodge seems grateful.

Shamanism is not a profession. It is a calling. It is the movement of a soul from that of luck and desire to the life of the coyote, alone with his soul.

“What the fuck is this?” Lionheart asks.

No one opens a mouth. Dodge deals the cards. We play with our beers, look at the cans, hoping and wishing. It’s hours since we came back from swimming.

Earl has finished up with a blond and is heading down the stairs for a last shot or two. He’s got a good ache to his danglers and a warm glow in his gut. He is beginning to wonder about settling down, thinks he needs to start testing each of the girls to see which is best, maybe go up sober so he isn’t fooled by them. That’s when he sees Sidewinder Fremont come in through the door looking mean and ready. Earl is at a loss. His gun belt is hanging on a hook at the bottom of the stairs.

I’m looking at the hand I’m dealt thinking about hotdogs and carrots. Everyone is, I think. Doolin lights up a new cigar. The room smells like beer farts in a shoebox.

“This isn’t music,” says Lionheart, fiddling with his cards.

The shaman is a coyote in human form. He is walking along the road looking for truth and meaning. The moon reflects off the asphalt skittering cloudy diamonds into the air. Each diamond is a possible future. The shaman can choose only one. Some do a good job, others struggle. But even failure can change the course of human history.

I look over at my brother. He’s got a good hand. I love my brother. I also know him like…well, my brother.

Powell Dodge runs his hand through his hair considering his cards. “I wish I had some smack,” he says. “Man. I’d like to get fucked up. I fold.”

We look at each other: me, Doolin, McGlinnity, my brother Willy. Lysen blinks. Lionheart shakes his head. None of us will ever be so grown up as to put our feet in the waters of heroin.

Earl tries not to move. Sidewinder sees him anyway. Drawing his gun, he says, ‘It’s a nice day to die you thieving scoundrel.’ Earl knows he can make a run for it, but that’s all the time he has because Sidewinder Fremont slams his palm back on the firing hammer three times and shoots Earl once in the gut, once in the shoulder, and, finally, through the top of the skull.

“Shit. Where’s some music?” Doolin asks.

Just then Steve comes through the door with a grocery bag in each arm. “Time to eat fellas!” he says cheerfully. We throw down our cards and jump up to help him. I’m waiting for the argument. Everyone always wants to do the cooking. I’m waiting for this.

On the radio, the announcer is saying, “We hope you enjoyed this parallel presentation of Barry Moore’s Earl Jones Meets Sidewinder Fremont and Carlos Derida’s Conversations with a Desert Sorcer. Next week we’ll be doing Don Quixote and The Naked Lunch. Until then, this has been your host Dr. Richard Hocks.”

“Can someone cut my hair now?” Powell Dodge asks.

I want to tell him to shut the fuck up. But I’m thinking about coyote in the dark, and Earl the cowboy, and how he was just realizing he needed love in his life and wonder if that’s the problem we’re all having.

(not copyrighted; if you want it, use it…even if you want to put your name on it)

Of Divides and Color: 2009 and Beyond

~ David Biddle ~ 1 Comment

In a commentary piece for The Philadelphia Inquirer last week (Friday, November 6), columnist George Curry uses USA Today/Gallup poll data to paint a bleak picture of America’s sense of “race relations.” Noting that when Barack Obama was elected president at this time last year, as many as 70% of Americans were “convinced that race relations would improve…” a year later, writes Curry, only about 56% of the country feels hopeful — the proportion of Americans who felt this way in 1963.

Curry then goes on to examine American opinion about race with respect to the Gates-Crowley “teachable moment” we witnessed this summer. He reports that 30% of African Americans blamed Sgt. Crowley for the incident and only 4% blamed Professor Gates, while 32% of whites blamed Gates and 7% blamed Crowley.

Leaving aside the fact that well over half the country still has hope that racial issues can settle down, and that more than two-thirds of the African and European citizens of this country are not opinionated enough to feel that they know what happened between the professor and the cop, it sure would be nice to see statistics on racial issues that come from bi-racial and mixed race respondents. Or how about American Indians, Pakistanis, Koreans, and Chinese or Vietnamese Americans?

I for one have little hope for journalism and the American media as long as they couch so-called “race related issues” in terms of black vs. white. It is simplistic, divisive, and misses the point completely. This is not a country of two cultural groups. The reality of our situation requires in-depth and thoughtful analysis, something truly lacking in mainstream journalism these days.

Mixed race Americans are not just part black and part white. Some of us are tri-racial; some part Asian and part Hispanic and European and African; some are Japanese and Chinese; some are part Vietnamese, adopted into European American households, and raised by Swedish and Italian nannies. And we have a president who is part African (not African American as the term is generally used) and part European in ancestry. There are also millions of Americans who don’t have a clue about their DNA. They think they’re “white,” “black,” “brown,” whatever, but they have no proof where they came from.

Is there hope? Can so-called race relations improve in this country? Even with the race bating by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and others; even with the Obama-as-Joker posters, those of us who know how ridiculous the very idea of race is — those of us who see the proof of the lunacy of skin color as a dividing line — know that a person who has transcended race lives with his family in the White House. The question is no longer one about black vs. white. Evidence of improvement or failure cannot be found in single cases illuminated to the extreme by the media. And until Gallup learns to ask intelligent questions, opinion polls probably aren’t going to tell us what we all know: things are changing — fast. That’s why all these right-wing whack jobs are out in the street. They’re completely freaked out.

No, as long as you understand that “Yes We Can” applies to our cultural identities along with everything else, we’re going to get there, we just don’t know where that is yet.

Photo credit: Gary Roberts

Comments on Leonard Peltier

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

I am honored to find that John Trimbach, son of retired special agent in charge (SAC) of the Minnesota FBI offices, Joseph Trimbach, posted a letter to the editor regarding my commentary piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer on Leonard Peltier’s denial of parole. Father and son are co-authors of American Indian Mafia. The letter was posted on Wednesday, September 30th, two weeks after my commentary piece. Go here to read Mr. Trimbach’s letter and make sure to read the comments that follow.

Why am I honored? Because regardless of their position, it’s important that all intelligent people pay attention to this issue. It’s important too that we break up the silence about America’s first original sin.

“We did not ask you white men to come here. The Great Spirit gave us this country as a home.”

-Crazy Horse

See my Inquirer commentary here. And my latest extended version of that for Kotori Magazine here.

Leonard Peltier: a personal essay

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

My latest commentary was just published by KotoriMagazine.com, “Leonard Peltier and this Great, Funny Nation.” It is really a personal essay, but full of good links and resources.

“To give Leonard Peltier the last decade or two of his life outside of prison, on parole in his home community, would require that this nation acknowledge a sickness that is its original sin.”

Something More

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

Something More (for Marion, October 13, 2009)

An older man with dark features
And an older woman – long brown hair,
Luminous eyes, blue like
A cloudless autumn sky –
Sit in an old wood bed together.
As the audience, we are tired.
They have been speaking to each other
For many days now.
We did not know
For the price of admission
The time spent would be weeks
Here in this theater
Where management has served us meals
And brought hot towels
Down the aisles
And given us breaks for showers
And toilet runs.

The older man looks at the woman,
Says, “This is amazing.”
Slowly she smiles.

The stage fades to black.

We hear sheets rustle.
The slow, sensual wet sound of lips
On skin, whisper kisses,
A quiet chuckle
From the older woman’s throat.
Then silence.

We know this is the silence
Of two lovers,
The embrace
Of what some call true love.
But we also know now
There is something more.
There are just no words to describe it.

-dcb

© Copyright David Biddle, 2009

David Mamet on Race

~ David Biddle ~ 1 Comment

Today’s New York Times contains an excellent essay by the playwright David Mamet called “We Can’t Stop Talking About Race in America.” The essay is part of The Times’ super-sized Arts & Leisure section cataloging all the new cultural events coming this fall and winter. Mamet has a new play coming out this fall called Race.

If you know Mamet, you know that he provides some fearless insights on this subject. Let me offer a few choice quotes to get you to go read the piece:

“Race, like sex, is a subject on which it is near impossible to tell the truth.”

“Most contemporary debate on race is nothing but sanctimony…”

“The question of the poor drama is ‘What is the truth?’ but of the better drama, and particularly of tragedy, ‘What are the lies?'”

In light of all the moments we’ve had this year: with Barrack Obama’s inauguration; the Valley Swim Club in Huntingdon Valley, PA; the Gates-Crowley face off; madding crowds wielding pictures of our president sporting a little Hitler moustache; and the troubling denial of parole for Leonard Peltier — a man many feel embodies America’s need to pretend its indigenous people do not exist –Mamet’s essay says a lot. What is the truth? What are the lies?

Hopefully the answers to these questions will become clear soon. If not in Mamet’s new play, then maybe in the drama and tragedy of the life we live moving into our future. We’ve got a little more than seven years to go…if you know what I mean.

Photo: David Shankbone, from http://www.broadway.tv

Confessions of a FaceBook Commentor

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

On and off today, I took part in an interesting though distressing set of comments at a FaceBook site that were spurred by this weekend’s bizarre confrontation and arrest of Louis Henry Gates by Cambridge police. Mark Cohen, an erudite Pennsylvania State Representative got the ball rolling by posting a link to his commentary on this issue at the Daily Kos. See Mark’s piece here. It’s an excellent drawing together of a number of the more bizarre race-related incidents that we’ve seen ’round here over the past several weeks.

The kurfuffle coming out of this Gates incident is the question of whether it is a blatant example of racial profiling. I usually try not to get involved in commenting on people’s posts to their FaceBook sites, but I really liked what Mark wrote and so I paid attention to other people’s comments on and off as their additions rolled into my email box. By the end of the day there are 40 comments and the entire discussion seemed to have turned into some folks claiming that racism is an evil that must be confronted wherever it is found in America, while others were arguing that perhaps acknowledging racism is a way of making it real.

Anyone who knows me or who has read this little blog of mine will know that I do not buy into racism on any level and that I choose to believe that life is about people living in the world as individuals. I strongly believe that folks cannot speak intelligently about race and prejudice because these issues are based on false premises, lies, and the funk of group hypnotism.

There is no question that there is a power system at play in America, and there is a case to be made that it is run by “whites,” but trust me, there are no “whites” in power. This is the 21st century. Who the hell is white? Generally, those in power are the ones with educations, particularly law degrees, money, connections, and hustle. You’re only as powerless as you feel. If you’re going to argue with cops, they’re going to more often than not take you in for a sit down visit and call to your parents or your lawyer.

Most important though, all of this points me towards music, comedy and intelligent poetics. Take Gil Scott-Heron’s little ditty that I ran into this morning at Peter Rothberg’s blog at The Nation Whitey On the Moon. I don’t agree with the “Whitey” sentiment Mr. Scott-Heron so expertly wields, but it’s important to pay attention to his message anyway: exactly what are we spending money on in this country?

My final word to Professor Gates, a man whose thoughts and persona we should all deeply love?

Dude, be pissed that the cops messed with you in your home! Don’t let other people’s stupidity work to manufacture and sustain the ugliness of racism.