Rough Week

Really rough.

Feeling very low and emotionally lethargic.

So these comments on my ENL 505 Autobiography Biography assignment were really needed:

Shannon, These two pieces validate the worth of the assignment. Both pushed hard at their limits, high and low, and both achieved a stunning originality. Further, there are numerous treats along the way: "the undeniable fact of the matter is that success for any brain, Shannon's or yours, must in part be determined by checking bank statements"; the concluding line of the biography; "cried like paint spilling over the side of the can"; "I fell. I'm falling. I will fall." 

Oh, I got paid to write a song. Sure it was off Craigslist and sure it wasn't for much and sure it isn't likely to win a Grammy or three but I can't help but wonder: what percentage of the population ever gets paid to write a song?

Don't Look In The Mirror

https://www.npr.org/2019/03/20/705363744/new-zealand-banning-weapons-like-those-used-in-mosque-attacks-in-christchurch

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced Thursday that the government will ban "military-style semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles," in an attempt to head-off "the kind of horror and attack that we saw on Friday." She said the outlawed weapons will be listed on a website and are the type that were used in the attack on two mosques in Christchurch last week.

We will not follow New Zealand’s lead because of our values. We won’t ban semi-automatic weapons because we value them.

We love military-style semi-automatic weapons. Adore, cherish, esteem...pick a verb.

Have you ever fired a military-style semi-automatic weapon? Oh my gawd the insane power...as fast as you can pull the trigger. Exhilarating! It’s like a roller coaster ride but with gunpowder. Fucking incredible. Better than sex.

Even in a climate controlled, sterile, shooting range, the wash of power from a military-style semi-automatic weapon pulsing through you is so powerful it’ll make you cum your underwear full.

It gets better. Have you ever defended your home or your loved ones with a military-style semi-automatic weapon? What a rush! I keep mine under the bed just in case someone tries to steal our gazing ball from the yard or makes a play for the minivan. Sakes alive, shooting another person in defense of property or loved ones is an immeasurable rush; you just haven’t lived until you’ve killed someone with a military-style semi-automatic weapon as they try to pilfer your lamps.

Is there a greater good argument to be made about banning military-style semi-automatic weapons?

What’s that? I can’t hear you over the awesome cacophony from my AR-15 as I help control the deer population.

BBBBRRR!BBBRrrrbbrbbrbRBBRBBBBBBBBBBB!RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRbRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrr!

[finger rest]

bbbb!bbbbbbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRR!RR!RRRRBBBBBBBBrrr!rBBBBBBBBBBRrbrr!

Don’t look in the mirror America. 
Don’t look at New Zealand. 
Don’t look at the dead bodies. 
Don’t look at your values and don’t mind the dissonance. 

It’ll go away, just like the soul of the country.

The 505 Doubling

ENL 505 - Stylistics
Doubling Life Story Assignment

I

I was born then died, thinking.

My life story is relationships. You should see the other people. Ooof.

“He was unique. Like everyone else. Rust belt kid, rust belt sensibilities, and iron oxide emotions. He tried really hard though.”
-Todd Snyder, Ohioan

My mom said I scaled a fence just after learning to walk. I loved hearing her tell that story; she seemed to intimate I could do anything to which I put my mind.
And I have.
But I put my mind to a lot of the wrong things.

Jimmy Fallon: Tell us your life story.

Me: There isn’t much to tell. It’s a miracle I earned a college degree and it’s an even bigger miracle I earned a master’s degree. Can there be degrees of miracles?

Jimmy Fallon:

Me: So to make a long story short I work, parent, husband, and think about ranking miracles. I can’t believe, practically incredulous, I’m not back in Barberton, Ohio, drunk, working some soul-killing manufacturing gig, living in a double wide trailer, awaiting a triple bypass, after a fourth divorce. But enough about me, tell me your miracle.

Life story = biography = picture of life. My life. Is my life worthy of a picture? Worthy of a picture, others might care about? What have I done to warrant attention? To warrant interest in my life from dirt-poor Ohio kid with alcoholism in his genes, to married to an Ivy Leaguer, master’s degree educated, upper middle class, Rhode Island parent of three, still with alcoholism in his genes? You see any picture of life requires the past...the past that weighs like an anvil on your chest...All. Life. Long. No one escapes their past. Logicians, of which I count myself, don’t like to use “none” or “all” because “one” collapses the argument. But everyone has a past because they have a present. If you don’t believe me, and I don’t blame you for not, consider this line from Being There: “A man’s past cripples him. His background turns into a swamp and invites criticism.” So it seems I’m crippled. And in a swamp. Not a great combo. And for the trifecta I have you there, reading this, criticizing. Probably murmuring something about metafiction and how cheap and lazy it is. Great.

II

Think of the way it feels when you hear your voice on a recording. Most of us bristle, even if a little. “Is that what I sound like?” Autobiography asks a similar question: Is that what I’ve lived like?” Autobiography tosses your lump of a life onto a steel-cold table in the gross lab, where with razor sharp scalpels and muscular forceps and probes, tears apart your judgement and character and personality with unceasing fire-breathing criticism of your horrible decisions and gnashes teeth at your incessant laziness and wrings hands raw due to your pathological sensitivity and erodes all possibility of contentedness or serenity or self-actualization at best and at worst births institutionalization, to produce the same face piercing cringe when you hear your voice through your ears and not through your head. Autobiography is not some mild, innocuous self-sadism akin to a sauna what with its relaxed-muscles finale. Nor is it torturous introspection to reveal the glass is half-full and “just look at all you’ve accomplished from such modest beginnings!” Honestly and authentically, factually, it exposes existential pain reaped from a life lived not through the ears, but through the head.

When you hear what you hear, matters. I heard I am a being-unto-death in an Existentialism class in 1992. Death - the possibility of me that prohibits all other possibilities. In my early twenties I was open to information, a sponge soaking up the world and Heidegger. Saturated I became. I have lived, knowing there is an end. An end that cannot be outstripped: by women, booze, weed, tv, NOTHING...looms on the horizon quite like it. I proceeded accordingly, but took chances, put myself on the line, THE line! for us both. For all of us.

Hear me: My life is counter to Pascal’s wager. Infinite gains necessitate infinite beings; I am finite. What I believe matters. Beliefs bloom behaviors.

The real eternity is before birth, in silence. I hear. I live.

A cacophonous, volume-sickening, ear-splitting, authentic, life.

***

Write your life story in 6 words. Then, write your life story in 12 words. Then 24, 48, 96, 192. Or, if you want to begin with 192 and work your way down to 6, you can do that, too.

Caveat: once used, you cannot repeat any phrase. That is, you are not simply revising, adding, filling. Each piece should be unique. And try not to repeat your “style” or “voice” from one to the next. Mix them up. Take chances. But meet the word count. Focus on making each word a vibrant contributor.

The 505 Bio Auto Bio

In general, it is a spectacle to behold in all the universe: an organ composed of 100 billion neurons, capable of: multivariate sensation via transduction, complex emotions like love and disgust, memory, dreams, and abstract calculations enabling travel to and survival in, an atmosphere from which neither it nor its predecessors eternal, evolved.
            In Shannon specifically, it is not so much a marvel as a beleaguered, middling, also-ran in a world of Mensa-belonging, Ivy-league attended, Rubix cube-solving brains encased in skulls attached to bodies that employ cognitions to high IQ contingent pursuits such as multiple patent electrical engineering, rocket science with legitimate blast-off credentials, and quantitative track PhD’s in Psychology requiring the ho-hum ability to master linear algebra. Lest it is forgotten, all heretofore pursuits earn the kind of cash cachet that demarcates Shannon’s brain as a welfare applying, double-wide trailer living, cheap beer drinking kind of brain.
            Certainly, the story of Shannon’s brain, like any other brain, is a story of what it isn’t, what it fails to do, of what is isn’t capable. But this story, honest though it may be, withholds, omits, and fiendishly commits biographically felonious sleight-of-hand by failing to mention the context, the environment, the nurture in the nature/nurture of Shannon’s brain that, once known, renders his brain a microcosm miracle, capable of overcoming a deep-root familial failure in letter and spirit, besting genes predisposed to the most vile, insidious of diseases: addiction, and silencing a penetrating self-hatred formed in the trauma of poverty that, with just a quick peek on Facebook or Google street view, constricted and choked others so slowly and subtly but so surely that their lives, like their breath, wheezed to nothing if not mere existence in need of relief via death.
            The failure of Shannon’s brain is relative to the success of the brains of his wife’s family and their garnered accolades, inductions into academic Halls of Fame, patents and publications, and especially the monetary value associated with and resulting from those achievements: the undeniable fact of the matter is that success for any brain, Shannon’s or yours, must in part be determined by checking bank statements.     
            The “success” of Shannon’s brain is relative to the failures in his own family history, the absolute inability to thrive, the unadulterated disease of addiction for which failure of the will must be indicted, tried, found guilty, and summarily executed -for genes are passed down and disease runs deep as the Mariana Trench in just a vein- and the fearful choices, decisions made, horrendous and shallow in forethought are/were/will be profound in pathology. Yes, these are the only conditions in which Shannon’s brain has achieved “success.”
            A holistic biography of Shannon’s brain isn’t a case of mutual exclusivity: both the failures and successes must be part of the story and both can be true at the same time. At once it is a marvel and meddling; mediocre and microcosmically miraculous; incredible and indelible while incoherent and inconsistent; underwhelming and unforgettable.

           
***

Be quiet. Hear that?Listen.I hear you. I hear things. I hear the hear-able and it is enough. More than enough. 

I also listen. I’ve listened to you. I’ve listened to many people. I haven’t heard a lot of sense. Not enough.  There were times I listened to you and trusted you. There were.
I am a wave conduit. I relish in sounds and impressions, words for their own sake, accents, dialects. Always have. I cherish music. I spent thousands of hours alone with it and it alone -pouring through me like an untamed river but damnable with patience and caring. I committed to music in a way I could not to people. People make noise. Music never judged... People judge so harshly. For a long time I listened and listened to music. Sometimes I couldn’t hear what I needed to hear, it seemed. I was desperate. I learned the difference between hearing and listening. I was just ignorant, green. I was willing though. Willing to put in the time and effort. It was painstaking. I grew like a weed then lost patience then wilted. I improved little by little. Miniscule steps taken with stumbles aplenty. I’ve heard so many lies. I’ve heard them from within and without. People lie. Music doesn’t lie. Music fools unintentionally. I didn’t spend enough time listening. I remember my mother’s voice. Or do I? I remember my father singing like Dan Tyminski in a parking lot in Wadsworth, Ohio. I heard B.B. King in a small theatre. I heard melodies and cried like paint spilling over the side of the can. They were so beautiful I couldn’t have cared more. I connected to the universe with the strength of a million magnets. I’ve listened to heartbeats still in the womb. Heard life unborn. I’ve heard fights break out among slurred words. Too often. I hear fear in the conscience. Maybe fear is all I hear in conscience. I listen for value judgements. My lone supersense is hearing judgements. I hear you judging me, this. I AM listening.
Maybe I’ve done something other than hear or listen. Maybe it isn’t the sounds out there in the world. Maybe it’s me the receiver. Maybe I distort and corrupt. Maybe the sounds are pure, innocent, neutral. Was it Monet that cut off his ear? How come nothing is definite? Nothing that comes through me is definite. Nothing concrete, dependable.

I fell. I’m falling. I will fall. Is there nothing dependable? Nothing to reach for? Trust is an issue. Trust is the issue. I can count only on myself. I’ve done that. I am doing that. Am I not? Still there is doubt. Still there is mistrust. Still I listen and hear and doubt and worry about what I hear and what I listen to. I do. I’ve heard that no man is an island. I’ve heard that relationships are essential for happiness. I’ve listened to calls and pleas. They were coming from me. Full circle.

***

Write: Write a 500 word biography of your brain. The biography should be composed in a noun/periodic/hypotactic style. Then write a 500 word autobiography of your heart. The autobiography should be composed in a verb/paratactic/running style. If you prefer, you can substitute the anterior of your body for your brain, and the posterior of your body for your heart. Or, you can use eyes, ears, nose, or mouth to replace brain/heart.

The biography/autobiography will reflect not only a shift in stories but a change of perspective as well (3^rd person to 1^st). As you write these, pay close attention to voice, and, in the case of the autobiography, to personification.

Biography Word Count: 500

Autobiography Word Count: 500