A heavy moon hangs over the Oakland hills. Just past full, it throws a little bit of blue light on everything, like a play or a model train.
Since I stopped smoking, I’ve had all this manic energy— or what feels like manic energy. I don’t really like it, though I do have to say I’ve been much more productive, even if I haven’t really gotten to my writing in a minute.
In early July my partner and I were in Joshua Tree, and I made some real progress on at least thinking about my novel, which I love. It felt like a turning point, and it was, just not in the way I’d imagined. The last morning of our trip, when we were way down in the lower desert on the western shores of the Salton Sea, around sunrise, I had my last real conversation with my father. “Was it everything you’d dreamed it would be?” he asked, weakly. It had been. A real apocalyptic vision, the kind he’d always loved, which is partly where I got the affinity myself.
Yesterday my youngest and I marched with thousands of other people through San Francisco to protest the seemingly never ending cruelty that the nation of israel has subjected the Palestinian people to since the middle of the last century. I watched her march ahead of me through the sea of white and black and red and green, as we took the bridge at Octavia and saw the line of police officers across the field of asphalt, remembering when she was a little toddler and we’d come to protest the 2014 escalation. And I remembered a handful of young people in Lawrence in early 2009 protesting operation cast lead. Israel is sick and pathetic, and why are the same leaders in power? Why are any of these rotten meat ass old fucks who can barely stand let anywhere near the centers of power and decision making? I’m so tired of demonstrations and protests. And old fascist fucks.
A week ago I was in PDX with my elder kids. I could feel a sinus infection coming on so every morning around five I’d run from our favorite economy hotel in north Portland down to the street below the Fremont bridge, where a network of highways high above snake together to form one double-decker serpent and disappear across the water and the fog. I think they’re harder to climb than our MacArthur maze, which is why they’re so free of graffiti— at least that’s my theory. At sunrise they stand like silent sentinels from the industrial riverbanks below.
Since I quit smoking I’ve been carrying my 20 sided die with me. I call it my anti-smoking stim but really it’s more like a prayer rope or something. I have been dedicating what calories I have for studying to studying Dungeons and Dragons, or how to play it, since I get the gist/ know the general idea, but have never played it, and have never/ do not at this time associate/d with folks who have, nor do I have the time to find those folks nor do I want to play with anyone other than my children, my teen-aged offspring whom I miss constantly and for whom the constant fiddling of the 20d and perusal of the D&D guide books more than likely acts as a sort of proxy for their absence. I am currently in the process of constructing a custom campaign of our own involving a demiplane of my own design (called “Oneir”) with an embedded materialist moral regarding the power of people to build the world and also my first character nicknamed Ember who is a Wood Gnome (secretly a Deep Gnome) Ranger who, while exceptionally sober for a Gnome, nevertheless occupies a chaotic good alignment.
A couple of years ago, following the death of my mother, I wrote a short essay on Medium on Dungeons and Dragons and Death called Dungeons & Dragons & Death that not too many people read, but that I recently went back and read and was surprised to find it was better than I assumed it was. As though I hadn’t written it. Memory is wild. It can be sacred or illusory, or even abusive. Inadequate to its own task. But also delicious and robust. Maybe someday I’ll remember that I thought I might expand on that essay— then maybe I’ll actually do it!
I keep thinking about what it means to roll dice, about inflection points, about the myriad branching and runnelled inflection points engendered in this dice roll, the dice roll somewhere behind me that gave birth to this one. Without quite remembering exactly what it meant, or he meant by it, I remember Roland Barthes’ talking about inflection points as a dialectical shifting upwards, or something like this, without being metaphysical or religious or anything like this. How the potential of the concept of an inflection point feels like a deep breath horizoning, of something like hope, while the map of my own myriad inflection points feels desiccated, limited, assaulted by the material set of conditions outside of it, the ridges and cliffs that foreclose on all the possibilities I can imagine any one inflection point or dice roll contains. I realize that this paragraph probably does not make sense, but I feel like it’s important, at least to me, because now it seems obvious to me how a creature like Ember, the uncharacteristically sober Deep Wood Gnome, can nevertheless inhabit a good chaos. It’s something to think about, at least.