“No, his mind is not for rent to any God or government. Always hopeful, yet discontent, he knows changes aren’t permanent. But change is.”
— Rush, “Tom Sawyer”

Yes. Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova rightfully won Best Original Song at the Oscars last night for “Falling Slowly”, one of the excellent songs in their little gem, Once.

Just as steam became blowing out of my ears when they cut Marketa off before she could say a word, they decently brought her back after the commercial break and gave her the floor. It was my favorite Oscar moment since Cuba Gooding Junior’s speech last decade. Honesty always appears so much brighter when set against a backdrop of plastic.

“Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.”
— Samuel Beckett

The Regret
by Jace Daniel (b. 1969)

Dead at last, I get up. I see, without eyes. I feel, without touch. I breathe finality’s scent, without smell. I taste the permanence, without tongue. A state of mind, without brain. And I notice. As I always have.

Nothing has changed.

These things. These colors, these forms, these angles. These lines, these numbers. These letters. These shots. All there for my seeing, cruelly invisible, known only by the militantly creative commander embedded in the core of my awareness. Unchosen, I accept the critical mission to blend these things, to combine them, to marry them. To place them in conflict, the hanging prerequisite to their resolution. I remain relentlessly pressed to calculate, to measure, to find order in the nonsense. To have my way with these things, my cast of characters, my pawns of emphasis. And yet, as if finding perverse joy in the unattainable, they cry mutiny, celebrating the paradox. I hear them laugh, without ears.

Like vultures they wait, nowhere to be. These words, these phrases, these lyrics, these verses. Feeding. This cocktail of thoughts both written and verbal, committed to domination. Thoughts functioning in engineered harmony, resuming their gang rape on my consciousness in their ordinary onslaught. I am forced to utter them, without speech. I must write them, without pen, without paper, without type. Unwavering is this battalion of syntax, this prose corps, this brigade of sentenced passage. Invading. Percolating with aggression. In striking formation, without structure.

The the, the it, the is. The it is. It is the same, but different. It is paint without canvas. It is a story without a page. It is a song without music. It is half of what was.

I now must join this wasteland of timelessness, smothered in the routine of solitude, patrolling this one-way dead-end street to an eternity nowhere. It is a world I now haunt, as it now haunts me.

Maybe I shouldn’t have jumped.

Talking tubs and six-word memoirs with drummer Joel Taylor after the February 2nd jazz gig.

Preparing the Return
by Jace Daniel (b. 1969)

It all started with a shoebox about seven weeks before tax day. The pink one in the garage, floating around all year from workbench to shelf to couch and back to shelf again, never finding its final resting place. The shoebox labeled with a brand he didn’t wear. A cardboard halfway house once containing a sole not his, a size numbered by a measuring system different than his gender’s own. A makeshift junk drawer with a well-intended yet vague purpose: to store tangible receipts from the previous calendar year. Stockpiled mementos validating his legitimacy. Printed records of his purchases, recognized as justifiable expenses by the institution to which he was subjected by virtue of his existence. A box packed with the kind of clutter made necessary only by responsibility.

That night, at that hour, it was time to revisit those financial mementos. Arming himself with a handful of paper clips, a stack of manila folders, and a trash can, he cracked another beverage, cranked up some jazz to occupy his nerves, and began plowing through the inevitable. Like a nosy robot of flesh and bone, he went through each slip of inked paper, examining the price and the date, isolating receipts dated the previous year. With no particular plan than to be done with it, he composed his pathetically indecisive masterpiece, sculpting individual piles from the assortment, commuting through the data like a skeptic in an amusement park’s dark ride, reluctantly attentive to the obscure montage of year-old flashbacks. A summarized pairing of last year’s dates with last year’s locations. Some of them familiar, others forgotten.

Gasoline, gasoline, gasoline, bookstore, dining, gasoline, bar tab, dining, gasoline, gasoline, Home Depot, gasoline, gasoline, bar tab, gasoline, gasoline, gasoline, vet bill, gasoline, bar tab, dining, bar tab, gasoline, gasoline, gasoline, gasoline…

…dining. With a date over two years old. A straggler.

The restaurant, barely legible behind the smeared, fading toner. A place he knew well, yet hadn’t visited in nearly a thousand days. The time. Late evening. The items. A custom cocktail he had ordered countless times by heart, yet never once consumed. The bill. Twice as much as that which would be normal today.

After first allowing it one last quiet moment to utter its final words, he executed its execution, dismembering it as quickly and painlessly as termination by guillotine, certain death ensured through a lavish asphyxiation by fist.

And so it went. Into the trash can. With the pink shoebox to follow.

I admit I was a touch cynical yesterday at the implied urgency to go outside and catch the lunar eclipse. The big news was that it would be the last chance to see such a thing until 2010, which is, you know, A WHOLE TWO YEARS AWAY. “Gee,” I thought, “I’d better take a long hard look at the calendar too, February 20th, and enjoy it while I can, because the next time the date will have a zero in it won’t be until March 10th.”

Last night at about a quarter after six, I grabbed the dogs and a few Sierras and rolled down to the bluff at White Point to close the day out with our usual homegrown Happy Hour. The scheduled eclipse wasn’t the point of the outing, but more of a coincidental supplement to a nightly routine.

It had been cloudy all day long, ironically eclipsing our chances of seeing that night’s eclipse, but the day’s end brought some gnarly Pacific Ocean winds, blowing all the clouds away. The sky was as clear as ever from our vantage point, and we had what I was convinced to be the best seat in Southern California.

There’s something fundamentally profound about standing on a planet as it aligns with its sun and moon at the same time. The experience makes you feel very alive, and very aware of the Now. As a bonus, Saturn decided to join our party too, showing herself just above the moon. The whole shebang was like poetry in the sky.

How typically sad it was to realize that millions of people chose to stay inside and watch American Idol instead.

Alarmed
by Jace Daniel (b. 1969)

Late for the affair and failing the test, I flee as the unicorn draws near. Running as fast as I can, I stand still, knee-deep in the sludge of invisible wet cement. The laughing face in front of me remains vague, never completely showing itself, my eyesight warped beyond repair. I surrender to flight, soaring over the rooftops before falling into the bottomless pit. Naked. Thirsty. My teeth fall out as I stand on the railroad track, the locomotive approaching with a roar.

BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP–

My trained hand hits the snooze button. I crack an eye to see the hint of dawn crawling through the blinds and across the ceiling. Birds continue their morning conversation. A dog greets the sun at the top of his lungs. The scraping sound of a plastic trash bin being dragged across concrete serves as a reminder that it’s Wednesday. I’ll just lie here for a few more minutes and contemplate my next move.