15 June 2017

And other faculties change and fail. I fail, therefore I'm a white man in America; I conceal my weapon because I know the deep state leaks secrets. There's a cloud over this administration, pregnant with rain, and it's been seeded by the opposition, those who, according to the president's son, aren't even human. They call it my political rage, but I also beat my wife. To be “depressed about” suggests there's content to your illness, but content comes after forms, filling in its crevices like zeros a box score. There are no hits on this grid other than the shot that took down the second baseman. Our vocabulary did this to us, confounding a real game with an attempted massacre. The coin of the realm is metaphor rendered as fact. “He mowed him down on the base path.” My son has his video game turned up; I hear gun fire from below. PTSD is fantasy after fact, an imagined bear inciting terror because you once saw a real bear. As I child hiding under covers, I assumed all sirens came for me. I ask my son to turn his gun fire down.

--17 June 2017 

10 June 2017

The first alteration speaks to us from the Rose Garden, promising transparency and--above all--safety. The only safety is that of exclusion; safety's pure, is cream that floats on milk, is hemmed in, is corral or coral reef. A mother's hand is barred cell held against sun-washed wall, territory of faults and callouses. I ought not talk more about my children's adoptions, for what I get back are narratives of loss and reunion. “He found his mother, in the end.” They're book-ends to what excludes me, the middling present-parent. Narratives are theory, but I'm all practice. I am family resemblance in a family that cannot resemble. Yet silence concedes the field to theory, mandates we hire ideas rather than persons, that we value origins not as history but as nature. “It's in the nature of the person,” James Comey says, but he doesn't invoke the nature we mean to preserve. Self-invention's a fine idea, so long as you have a mirror and a podium. When my son tries to get my goat, he sounds just like his dad. That's safe to say; I've always loved goats.

--10 June 2017