July 7

Happy birthday, Steffie Lea.

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Dogs First

On the trail to our cabin, the wind shifts & sculpts the landscape at whim, hurling blankets of sustained 30 mph gusts across the tundra & depositing snow in undulating moguls that cover over our precious tracks. We see gales of up to 75 mph fairly routinely. I have skied home ten feet behind my wife on many occasions & been unable to discern her tracks. Say a word & the wind will carry it aloft & away. Drop a liner glove or a hat & you wait until spring to retrieve it. In the places I’ve lived prior to Alaska, I’ve known snow to behave in any number of ways. Here, for whatever diaphanous splendor it may reveal in the structure of the flake, it is always, always dry. When it drifts, the sugary weight of it transforms into the consistency of concrete. People use chainsaws to dig out trail. & when the wind & the snow conspire, people here know precisely what to expect & what to do. No matter the temperature, our community knows to check routinely o...
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January 20

This morning I sat through the inauguration upstairs, the bosses smug in their pajamas, barking at the television, slurring ejaculates firing out of their fat lips. What a thing to witness. I live among Palin supporters, old guard Republicans who extol Christian virtue out one side of their mouth while spitting vitriol always out the other. Obama a terrorist, Obama not even a citizen, the “negro situation,” the elegance of Laura Bush, the accolades due her husband. I left the room after a comment about how blacks might finally get their acts together, went to pull weeds from the superfluous garden of these superfluous people, to tend to shoots & weeds & improve their lives even as they go about the deleterious business of condemning everyone else’s. At 11:30, I rose from weeding, nauseous with the morning, with what I was doing. I came in & packed for an hour, ate & went back to work. The neighbor stopped over in the afternoon to join the chorus & pitch polemics at ...
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January 24

Put my application in adjunct pools today. Ran in the waning cold, Willa stubborn against her leash. Spent the better part of the afternoon simply deliberating, weighing pros & cons, digging for perspective. & here I am, this new custom, packing before I’ve fully unpacked. Checked on submissions for creative works & found no updates, in some cases after four months of waiting, which I suppose is better than hearing nay within four weeks. Wrote Morning Star to prospect the option of staying in the goat shed or any other outlying building, if only for a brief time. This will all seem very little, I’m sure, once it is behind me, but for the time being every silence is pregnant with the clamor I ought to be making, every still moment an admonition against working towards change. The work of finding work, again, & so it goes. In the end, I’ve much yet to celebrate, much to look upon proudly. Silence & stillness the hardest precepts to put to course right now, though the ...
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