The Contender

Brilliance is its own editor.

Blood and Miles

I spoke with my little brother today. For nearly two hours. We don’t get to talk like that much anymore. Funny, isn’t it? You grow up and spend every day with someone for eighteen years and then *poof!* You’ve moved and grown up (or tried to), and the person you spent every day with, the boy you spent your summers with skinning your knees, hitting baseballs and building Legos with, scrounging quarters for candy because your mother would never dream of funding your sugar highs, well, he’s 3,000 miles away.  Moved to the back burner, treated like that casual acquaintance we all have who you call once in a while so you can remind each other you’re still friends because of that one time when… I spend more time with my coworkers now—randomly assigned strangers—than I do with my brother.

He was born two years and a day after I was and I’ve always said he was the best birthday present my parents ever gave me. Grew up together. He helped keep me sane, and I imagine, I him. Now, we don’t see eye to eye on much, or eye to eye at all since he now has four inches on my height. To compare our lifestyles without seeing the obvious likeness in our faces you may never guess we’re brothers. In our day we’ve both planted bruises on the other, real and metaphorical, and on at least one occasion lost blood to the other. 

There’s a shirt hanging on my clothes rack that I never wear. It’s worn out, the cut doesn’t really fit to my liking anymore, nor do the colors. But I’ll never toss it out or give it away, no matter how faded or misshapen it gets.  He picked it out for me back when I was a teenager. Got it from Goodwill. Sometimes I wear it around in my bedroom over my t-shirt just because it makes me feel, in some way, like those 3,000 miles aren’t so far away at all, like the fact that this boy, who I share blood and facial features and the first eighteen years of my life with, the fact that some day I will have spent more time away from him than with him, it makes those facts a little easier to accept. It’s like a big hug. 

There’s never been anything more challenging, heartbreaking, rewarding, and fulfilling, than brotherhood.  

The study of birds; the aspiration toward flight.

The study of birds; the aspiration toward flight.

Excerpt from "Ornithology," a new long short story.

In my dream I’m playing a concert grand piano littered with Polaroids from a life happily lived and even though I know I never finished learning how to play it sounds like how my father played when he was still alive. I smell oil paint. I see my mother’s arms stretch touching pigment to canvas. She has painted me climbing a tree. Now I’ve climbed a tree to find two perfect, blue robin’s eggs, one of which has cracked, shattered in its nest and it leaks yellow yolk syrup-like down between the brown twigs. I can see my breath steaming when it gets knocked out of me once I hit the ground, limb snapped. 

Cynic: A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.

— -Ambrose Bierce

‎”Rapists and murders may be the victims according to you, but I, I call them dogs. And if they’re lapping up their own vomit, the only way to stop them is with a lash.”

“But dogs only obey their own nature, so why shouldn’t we forgive them?”

“Dogs can be taught many useful things, but not if we forgive them every time they obey their own nature.”

—Dogville, Lars Von Trier

I Decline To Accept the End of Man…

Ladies and gentlemen,

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969


They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

—Philip Larkin, “This Be The Verse”

And *that* was the soft spot which destroyed what was in many ways an admirable culture. Their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of ‘rights,’ and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure.

—Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

New Story Online: Waiting for Elijah

Originally published in Seattle Pacific University’s Lingua Journal in 2010. Available for your reading pleasure now, hoping that I’m not violating any copyright or distribution laws for this.