Your Life Is Your Life

Charles Bukowski's novel, Ham On Rye, is neatly stacked alongside my other sixteen favorite books, which sit in a sacred place on top of my bookshelf. I was deeply moved by troubled Henry Chinaski, Bukowski's alter ego, and his difficult and lonely Los Angeles upbringing. I went on to read the rest of Bukowski's novels and much of his poetry, and despite his sometimes crude writing and dark outlook on life, something kept bringing me back.

I stumbled onto this beautiful poem through a close friend, who wrote about the poem so eloquently, and it came at just the right time. I keep reading it over and over, finding solace and comfort in these beautiful words.

The Laughing Heart

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

___________________

your life is your life.
know it while you have it.

YES and AMEN.

Nonrequired Reading: 017: The Dirty Life

This is the memoir about a single, vegetarian, urban woman who lives in New York City and two years later finds herself married, eating animals and living on a farm in upstate New York. Partly a story about finding love and partly a story about food, what moved me the most was her ability to capture the essence of being a farmer. Reading about the early morning milking and planting seeds and buying equipment and surviving weather and slaughtering animals was intoxicating. And somehow she achieved this without being overly sentimental or cliche.

In preparation for my first garden last year, and in light of the food overhaul that has changed my eating habits, I have been reading books and blogs on food, farming and gardening over the past eighteen months. After reading a piece on NPR about this book, I wondered if it would be a nice companion read to everything else. It ended up being so much more. It captured, in simple terms and forthright language, the story of the farmer behind our food. It's vulnerable and honest and has provoked me to continue to think long and hard about my daily food choices. It also provoked me to think about farming myself one day. For now, though, I'll stick to the vegetable garden in my front yard. :)

"The other day, rummaging for something in the depths of my desk, I found an eight-year-old to-do list scribbled on the back of a receipt: “Reheel black shoes. Pick up dry cleaning. Call super re: sink. Meet P for drinks.” For a minute, I sat there remembering what it was like to be a single woman in Manhattan. Now my to-do list starts with milking eight cows at dawn and ends with closing the laying hens in their coop at dusk. The dry-cleanables wore out a long time ago, and I wear heels so infrequently I’ve forgotten how to walk in them."

-- Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life

Nonrequired Reading: 016: Lonesome Dove

I have debated for much of the week whether or not what I'm about to say is as objectively accurate as it can be. And it seems after much thought and deliberation, the following statement holds up: Lonesome Dove is my favorite book of all time.

One of the strongest indicators to this declaration was how sad I felt that my reading of the novel would one day come to an end, even though I first had this notion with some 700 pages to go. With 50 pages left, I literally set the book down, took a deep breath and decided to hold out for a few more days, even though I was aching to read to the end. It's the kind of novel that leaves me wondering how a writer could possibly make up such a beautiful and compelling story. Surely great writers are the rarest folks on earth.

The writing isn't mesmerizing like Chabon's, nor does the plot twist like Foer's, but the main characters, Call and Gus and Lorena, were as memorable as any I've ever come across. The plot is straightforward in it's direction and character development, yet this Western cowboy-and-Indian story pulls you in on so many levels, constantly leaving you wondering where the last hundred pages went. It's also a travelogue, as the story revolves around two men who decide to take a cattle herd up to Montana. The come across Indians and women and sandstorms and everything else that makes up a great traveling tale - except the backdrop is this wild west that I know very little about. I'll be thinking about this one for a long time.

"Evening took a long time getting to Lonesome Dove, but when it came it was a comfort. For most of the hours of the day — and most of the months of the year — the sun had the town trapped deep in dust, far out in the chaparral flats, a heaven for snakes and horned toads, roadrunners and stinging lizards, but a hell for pigs and Tennesseans. There was not even a respectable shade tree within twenty or thirty miles; in fact, the actual location of the nearest decent shade was a matter of vigorous debate in the offices — if you wanted to call a roofless barn and a couple of patched-up corrals offices — of the Hat Creek Cattle Company, half of which Augustus owned."

Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove, Page 1

Nonrequired Reading: 016: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

The following is taken from my new favorite Sedaris collection of essays. For me, these essays were weightier than other works, both in humor and redemption.


"She'll turn on him sooner or later," my father says. "Just you wait. In a couple of years Madelyn won't want anything to do with him."

I look into the future and see my brother's face, impossibly middle-aged. His daughter has rejected all of his values, and stands now on the dais of a major university, the valedictorian preparing to deliver her commencement speech. What will she think when her dad stands in the aisle, releasing a hog call and raising his t-shirt to reveal the jiggling message painted upon his bare stomach? Will she turn away, as my father prediects, or might she remember all the nights she awoke to discover him: this slob, this lump, this silly drooling toy asleep at her feet.

David Sedaris, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, 244-45

Nonrequired Reading: 015: Everything Is Illuminated

"Fearing his frequent deficiencies of memory, he began writing fragments of his life story on his bedroom ceiling with one of Brod's lipsticks that he found wrapped in a sock in her desk drawer. That way, his life would be the first thing he would see when he awoke each morning, and the last thing before going to sleep each night. You used to be married, but she left you, above his bureau. You hate green vegetables, at the far end of the ceiling. You are a sloucher, where the ceiling met the door. You don't believe in an afterlife, written in a circle around the hanging lamp. He never wanted Brod to know how much like a sheet of glass his mind had become, how it would steam with confusion, how thoughts skated off it, how he couldn't understand so many of the things she told him, how he often forgot his name, and, like a small part of him dying, even hers."

Jonathon Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated, 83-84

2009 Reading

Purely for my own meticulous record keeping...

Ham On Rye -- Charles Bukowski -- 10/10
East Of Eden -- Steinbeck -- 10/10
Under the Banner of Heaven -- John Krakauer -- 9/10
Open -- Andre Agassi -- 9/10
Post Office -- Charles Bukowski -- 7/10
Factotum -- Charles Bukowski -- 7/10
Moneyball -- Michael Lewis -- 7/10
Game of Shadows -- Lance Williams -- 7/10
Choke -- Chuck Palahnuik -- 6/10
Women -- Charles Bukowski -- 5/10
Fugitives and Refugees -- Chuck Palahnuik -- 5/10
Manhood for Amateurs -- Michael Chabon -- 4/10
LA Diaries -- James Brown -- 4/10
Survivor -- Chuck Palahnuik -- 2/10

Nonrequired Reading: 014: In Defense of Food

"And what these acts subvert is nutritionism: the belief that food is foremost about nutrition and nutrition is so complex that only experts and industry can possibly supply it. When you're cooking with food as alive as this - these gorgeous and semigorgeous fruits and leaves and flesh - you're in no danger of mistaking it for a commodity, or fuel, or a collection of chemical nutrients. No, in the eye of the cook or the gardener or the farmer who grew it, this food reveals itself for what it is: no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living beings, some of them human, some not, but each of them dependent on the other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight."

-- Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food, 200-01

__________

Hopefully a review to come soon...

Nonrequired Reading: 013: Generation A

Serge gave me the let's-play-ball stare. "Look, Julien, you're twenty-two and your frontal lobe is incomplete. And part of having a frontal lobe still in development is the sense that you have right to scorn everything around you, but all you really are is a biological cliche. Your brain has a few more years to go, so for the time being, you're this judgement robot and everything you think and feel is the product of incomplete cortical hookups and hormone-driven whims. So don't try to pull any sort of superiority trip on me, because at the moment, what you consider to be your personality is, to me, an unwanted and boring obstacle in the way of finding out what we need to know."

-- Douglas Coupland, Generation A, 45

Nonrequired Reading: 012: Shop Class As Soul Craft

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, who has no real effect in the world. But craftsmanship must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.

-- Matthew Crawford, Shop Class As Soulcraft

_________________________

While at times tedious and extremely heady, Crawford's work moved and challenged me to rethink "knowledge work" vs. "manual work" or white collar vs blue collar. He makes a strong case for manual labor, runs through it's history and weaves his own story as a motorcycle mechanic into the book. I wouldn't necessarily recommend the book, which I doubt I would have made it through if I wasn't listening to it in the car, but I would highly recommend his essay that preceded the book. You can check it out here and it's definitely worth thirty minutes of your time.

Eating Animals

[disclaimer: I know. It's loooonnng. I think I'm making up for several months of pictures without much written material. Think of all the time I've saved you (the seven of you who read this blog) by only posting pictures...now it will even out.]

Should I consume less meat? Should I only eat meat from reliable sources? Should I stop eating animals altogether?

These are just some of the questions spinning a tangled web through my mind after finishing Jonathon Safron Foyer's wonderful book Eating Animals. His research is thorough (he committed three years to the project), balanced (he used the most conservative statistics available) and about as unradical as a book about factory farms can get.

It wasn't just this book, or these past few weeks reading it, that got me thinking about my meat intake. This internal dispute has been going on since 2005 when I stumbled upon a copy of Fast Food Nation, and continued through the years with Michael Pollan and the recent documentary Food, Inc. And finally, I seem poised to take some sort of leap into a mysterious and foggy eat-less-meat place, a position that I couldn't even begin to imagine the implications. What do I order out? What happens when we eat at a friends place? If I decide to eat some meat, where do I get it from?

This book, along with myriad other sources, has challenged me on several fronts. Probably what eats at me the most in regard to eating animals is the entire food process that takes place from the animal's birth to slaughter to transport to my mouth. And since 80-99% of the meat we eat comes from a factory farm, it only makes matters worse. The amount of research and interviews and videotapes of the gross and inhumane treatment of animals that happens in factory farms is staggering (think workers abusing animals in the cruelest ways possible). And even when the animals aren't being abused by their caretakers, their very existence is a short and cruel means to an end (think battery cages and disease and famine). One example Foer gives is that of a pregnant sow (and this is only half of it):

"Consider the life of a pregnant sow. Her incredible fertility is the source of her particular hell. While a cow will give birth to only a single calf at a time, the modern factory sow will birth, nurse, and raise an average of nearly nine piglets. She will invariably be kept pregnant as much as possible, which will prove to be the majority of her life...After her piglets are weaned (14 days instead of the normal 14 weeks), a hormone injection makes the sow rapidly "cycle" so that she will be ready to be artificially inseminated again in only three weeks.

Four out of five times a sow will spend the sixteen weeks of her pregnancy confined in a "gestation crate" so small that she will be not be able to turn around. Her bone density will decrease because of the lack of movement. She will be given no bedding and often will develop quarter-sized, blackened, pus-filled sores from chafing in the crate.

To avoid excessive weight gain and to further reduce feed costs, the crated sow will be feed restricted and often hungry."

And when you think about the way we have CREATED these animals through genetic engineering (vs. animal husbandry), the meat we eat doesn't even seem like real food. Through great feats of science, we have engineered chickens, for example, to grow so rapidly that they are slaughtered after 42 days of life. They are so fat they can't fly and often can barely walk by the time slaughter day arrives. And the only way they can even survive those 42 miserable days (sometimes even 39 days) are because we have laced them with hormones and antibiotics. The hormones and chemicals keeping them alive are also coming into my body, which doesn't sit very well. And the kicker for me on this front is that we don't even know the physical implications all this meat eating is having on our bodies because factory farming is such a new trend. And the same goes for pork and beef and even fish, believe it or not.

Then there are the slaughterhouses. And the greedy factory farm owners who have literally put hundreds of thousands of family farms out of business (or hired them and paid them barely enough to get by). And the reports coming out now that livestock contribute more to global warming than anything else (think massive piles of shit that seep into our rivers and lakes and release toxins into our air -- a typical cattle feedlot produces 344 million pounds of manure annually).

Of course, it's not all bad news from Foer or any of the other factory farm critics. There are farmers out there who still care for their animals and feed them real food and let them roam freely and find more humane slaughterhouses. And more and more people are asking these questions and shifting away from eating factory farmed meat, or any meat at all.

I read and studied and watched because I'm curious. I care about these issues because I eat meat almost every single day and I pretty much cover every common animal during the week. If I care about where I shop and where I get my fruits and vegetables and where I eat out at, it only makes sense that I would care about the meat I eat.

I'm one of many who simply wanted to know where this meat is coming from and how it's processed along the way. What I have found haunts me enough to make some changes. I'm not exactly sure what these changes will look like, but I'm ready to find out. Step one is to find local sources of meat from farms that raise animals in an ethical and humane way, where the animals are hormone and antibiotic free. Step two is to stop eating meat from restaurants, unless I know where it's coming from. Step twelve will be to raise some chickens of my own for eggs, but that might take a few months. :)

More of this journey to come...

Nonrequired Reading: 012: Operating Instructions

I am definitely aware of the huge wound that having a baby makes - in addition to the fact that your ya-ya gets so torn up. Before I got pregnant with Sam, I felt there wasn't anything that could happen that would utterly destroy me. Terminal cancer would certainly be a setback, but I actually though I could get through it. In a very real sense, I felt that life could pretty much just hit me with her best shot, and if I lived, great, and if I died, well, then I could be with Dad and Jesus and not have to endure my erratic skin or George Bush any longer. But now I am fucked unto the Lord. Now there is something that could happen that I could not survive: I could lose Sam. I look down into his staggeringly lovely little face, and I can hardly breathe sometimes. At the same time I feel that he has completely ruined my life, because I just didn't used to care all that much.

-- Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions, 60

__________

This is generally how I am feeling these days, apart from my ya-ya being torn up.

Nonrequired Reading: 011: Factotum

It was true that I didn't have much ambition, but there out to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?

-- Charles Bukowski, Factotum, 127

Nonrequired Reading: 010: Factotum

That was all a man needed: hope. It was lack of hope that discouraged a man. I remembered my New Orleans days, living on two five-cent candy bars a day for weeks at a time in order to have leisure to write. But starvation, unfortunately, didn't improve art. It only hindered it. A man's soul was rooted in his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a hoax.

-- Charles Bukowski, Factotum, 63

Nonrequired Reading: 009: Ham On Rye

"Hey," I said.

My father turned and looked at me.

"Give me a couple more," I told him, "if it makes you feel any better."

"Don't you dare talk to me that way!" he said.

I looked at him. I saw folds of flesh under his chin and around his neck. I saw sad wrinkles and crevices. His face was tired pink putty. He was in his undershirt, and his belly sagged, wrinkling his undershirt. The eyes were no longer fierce. His eyes looked away and couldn't meet mine. Something had happened. The bath towels knew it, the shower curtain knew it, the mirror knew it, the bathtub and the toilet knew it. My father turned and walked out the door. He knew it. It was my last beating.

Charles Bukowski, Ham On Rye, 121

____________________

I don't often think about quotes. I usually find them exhausting and question their context. But there is one quote, one phrase that I have kept coming back to over the years. It goes something like this: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle."

For me, this mantra is all about the careful consideration of what we don't know about people - about their past, their trials, their sins - the kind of circumstances and experiences that make us who we are today..that lead to the decisions we make, good or bad.

I have heard about the kind of man Charles Bukowski was. A drunk. A womanizer. A flat out mess of a human being. After reading Ham On Rye, the novel/memoir written by Bukowski, I understand why.

The selected reading is a more obvious example of the quote, but I could probably share other, less obvious examples, from nearly every month of his life. Henry Chinaski, Bukowski's alter ego, will always live in my memory. Right alongside Holden Caulfield and Oskar Schell.

Nonrequired Reading: 008: Choke

The people you meet behind unlocked doors are tired of talking about the weather. These are people tired of safety. These people have remodeled too many houses. These are tanned people who've given up smoking and white sugar and salt, fat, and beef. They're people who've watched their parents and grandparents study and work for a lifetime only to end up losing it all.

"My father was a doctor," Tracy says. "The place where he's at now, he can't even remember his own name."

These men and women sitting behind unlocked doors know a bigger house is not the answer. Neither is a better spouse, more money, tighter skin.

"Anything you can acquire," she says, "is only another thing you'll lose."

The answer is there is no answer.

For real, this is a way heavy moment.

-- Chuck Palahnuik, Choke, 256

Nonrequired Reading: 007: Choke

The Mommy, she used to tell him she was sorry. People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become. With the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and addressed and recorded. Nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. On a roller coaster. At a movie. And because there's no possibility of real disaster, real risk, we're left with no chance for real salvation. Real elation. Real excitement. Joy. Discovery. Invention.

The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.

Without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace.

Unless everything can get worse, it won't get any better.

This is all the stuff the Mommy used to tell him.

-- Chuck Palahniuk, Choke, 159

Nonrequired Reading: 006: Fargo Rock City

"Try to look at it like this: I love Radiohead. I've slowly come to the conclusion that Radiohead is the best working band I've experienced since I started listening to music 18 years ago. Sometimes, Thom Yorke is perfect. We are watching a band that's as good as The Who. But you know what? I could never love Radiohead as much as Motley Crue because I'll never be 15 again. I can certainly appreciate Radiohead, but they're not an extension of my life. For 99 percent of the populace, that kind of mystical connection can only happen during those terrible, magical years when you somehow convince yourself that a guy like Nikki Sixx understands you. It's all about timing, you know?"

-- Chuck Klosterman, Fargo Rock City

I generally agree with this sentiment, as far as music is concerned. Even as my play count for Coldplay's Death and All His Friends hits triple digits, it will never compare to the time Jeremy Reddy and I blasted out Pearl Jam while driving through a snowstorm. Even to this day, I still feel sudden pangs of nostalgia every time I hear a song from Throwing Copper or Sixteen Stone. Some things will never be the same as High School. Everything else, like love and non-pimple skin and peers that don't pressure, is completely different and I think we're all better off for it.

Nonrequired Reading: 005: Should You Drink With Your Kids?

"At first it sounds a little nutty, but you might consider drinking with your kids. Incongruously, the way to produce fewer problem drinkers is to create more drinkers overall - that is, to begin to create a culture in which alcohol is not an alluring risk but part of quotidian family life."

- John Cloud, from his piece in Time Magazine, "Should You Drink with Your Kids?"

Brief Moments of Clarity, Many Moments of Fuzz

I've read David Foster Wallace plenty. Probably more than six-hundred pages plenty. That's not a lot compared to what I've read of, say, Coupland or Vonnegut, but it's still a couple of books worth. ANYWAY. I've read about half of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and I've got to be honest with you - I either don't get it or it's just too out there for my liking. I kind of feel the same way about seeing a David Lynch movie (who Wallace writes an INCREDIBLE essay on in another book). Some of the short stories are completely readable and intelligent and hilarious (in a twisted sort of way) and some of the others, well, are kind of like this:

"The fuzzy Hensonian epiclete Ovid the Obtuse, syndicated chronicler of trans-human entertainment exchange in low-cost organs across the land, mythologizes the origins of the ghoslty double that always shadows human figures on UHF broadcast bands thus:"
-- Brief Interviews, 235

And that little ditty is the opener for a story called "Tri-Stan: Sold Sissee Nar To Ecko." Critics think he's brilliant, writers say he is breaking new ground in literature. And while I generally agree, some of the work here is for the few. For something more accessible to the many, check out his essay on going on a cruise. It's called, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" - which is one of many essays in his book of the same title.

So all this to say, I'm going to mark that I've read this book and I'm going to give it a 4/10, but I've really only read about half of it.

Nonrequired Reading: 004: Girlfriend In A Coma

Hamilton and I were the ones without goals.

"Imagine you're a forty-year-old, Richard," Hamilton said to me around this time, while working as a salesman at a Radio Shack in Lynn Valley, "and suddenly somebody comes up to you saying, 'Hi, I'd like you to meet Kevin. Kevin is eighteen and will be making all of your career decisions for you.' I'd be flipped out. Wouldn't you? But that's what life is all about - some eighteen-year-old kid making your big decisions for you that stick for a lifetime." He shuddered.

-- Girlfriend In A Coma, Douglas Coupland