Remember to thank what you are eating. It’s not food; it’s just the survival machine of set of genes, like you are. Trying (and failing) to avoid predators, like you should be. It gave its life for your hunger. Honor that?

This may be what happens when you read Custer Died for your Sins and The Selfish Gene in the same year.

Paying for food makes me forget (or at least greases the rail toward forgetting) to thank each being I’m eating. Because that’s what I’m doing, right? You’re not eating “food,” a “vegetable” or a “steak.” We don’t consume products or categories. (Let’s not even start on what passes for Chicken McNuggets.) We eat life. Because that’s how life works. Just as we were stalked and eaten by our predators (and would still be), so we feed on a panoply of life. That’s pretty amazing. You can process an enormous quantity of life in your stomach, teasing it apart, as Jad said once on Radiolab, to make it a part of you. How can you not be grateful for that?

You who grew up in cultures in which this was obvious, please pardon me. It takes longer for some of us to wake up.

Are we so disconnected from our world that we deeply that all life exists to feed us? Well, yes and no. It’s probably a meme. We’re omnivores because we have almost no innate hunting skills. And we’re lucky we’re so bad at running, clobbering, and tearing other animals apart with our teeth. We survived – very nicely, it seems – by hunting, gathering, developing tools and predicting the future. Our guts can assimilate almost anything. Seems to me this is all the more reason to be grateful, in addition to the Powers Beyond Us, for everything’s submission to this system. My salad bowl is a cornucopia of sacrifice. What’s in yours?

I didn’t cry much between the Austin hospice in January 2010, and my son’s safe arrival in Berkeley, in November 2011. I wanted to. But it started when I left her room; I didn’t know her parents like I did her (or like I do now), and I sure as hell didn’t know the contents of the ATX airport terminal. It was like being so exposed in the airport – looking all over, texting anyone that felt right – left me so alone, so unsure, I bent a pipe inside myself. Despite everything I did (and everything that continued around me) that merited a good, hearty cry, I was dry.

Our mutual friend Ross – G called the lot of us her Legion – took some pictures of her days before cancer finally swept her body. I remember he said they were “hard.” And yes, they are still hard to look at. But they didn’t bother me like I thought they were supposed to. Yes, Gabs had lost a stunning amount of weight – she joked about it – and in the corners of the photo are the little, horrible reminders that she was IV’d and dying. But her eyes. Jesus, she still had it. Whatever that thing is that makes us so sure of the soul.

I wrote that paragraph a month ago. I’ve listened to a lot of early RadioLab in the meantime. I listened extra hard for explanations of Time and Identity and Memory and Forgetting. I thought I’d turn up some clever physicist’s profoundly calming view of it all. I thought maybe Science could tell me what vanishes from the eyes when we lose the creatures we love. It doesn’t. Science just wants to duplicate things. It’s a method of inquiry, of acquiring explanations. There is sometimes meaning in explanation. There is sometimes comfort.

In those photographs, she’s wide-eyed and loving. So goddamn loving. Yes, that’s it. If I’m sure of anything, it’s that Gabs loved us each though all the morphine tumble, into her last breath.

Two things happened on the Internet in the two months before, and the two months after. Maybe they’re the same thing; I don’t know. But you have to understand Gabrielle’s love of Burlesque, of teasing, of Playboy bunny costumes, and the National Poetry Slam’s Erotic Open Mic. It was her show. Each year she’d make arrangements with what was probably the only quality sex shop in the host city, for a uniquely-styled vampy getup, and, of course, bunny accessories. It was her signature. If she got no tail at NPS, at least she got to wear one. On stage.

So, December 2009. Our friend Rachel began a campaign of printing Facebook profile pictures/applying bunny ears/scanning and reposting. It shook our corner of FB with such force, friends of friends started putting them on, too, not even certain why, or who for.

Then, despite all our effort… despite all our love, and hers… Gabrielle died. I was in Orlando that night. I got the call from Phil West about fifteen minutes after. I cried a little in my friend Kelly’s car, drank a pink bottle of wine called Bitch in her honor. Tried to cry more. Just got drunk instead.

I’m still learning to forgive Gabrielle for dying. This post is part of that.

I fell into a hole. After a while, I stopped registering that I was falling. I backed out of a relationship I shouldn’t have been in, messily. I continued running daily. I posted every other day to her Facebook page, beside many others. It felt like Facebook had become our shrine, our holy point of contact. It took me a while to realize I had friends physically nearby who also felt her loss, and we could grieve her together. Maybe because we all had to go to work, and at work, surrounded by people I didn’t know too well, if nothing else, I had… Facebook.

And it sort of worked. I felt sort of healed. But no matter how sincerely, how poetically I wrote up some instant of my loss, and fired it off to some Palo Alto computer, I never heard back from her. Many of us reported feeling her in our daily activities, but that was different. And after a month or so, it, too, slowed, and then stopped. That pipe inside me was still bent, and the pressure was beginning to get uncomfortable.

Sometimes when I’m doing dishes I think about this line from Kirinyaga, when Koriba, our (anti-)hero, is admonishing his young protégé Ndemi for not being satisfied to drag water from the river. Kid wants European plumbing. Koriba says if it’s too easy to get, you will lose sight of its value.

There are so many elements of this world we’ve substituted for conveniences. Most times, I’m halfway to the grocery store before I realize I haven’t brought bags. I kick myself for a few seconds and move on. After years of tossing out scraps and inedible food, I’ve finally begun composting. I take fast showers; use all CFLs and try to keep them off most of the time; I’ve set my computer to go to sleep after 20 minutes of inactivity, and shut down every night at 5:00 – this has the extra benefit of kicking my addicted ass off it.

Point is, there are so many elements of our world we’ve become well-trained to operate at the end-point. On the web, you might say the Client-side. But for how operable they are, they all depend on hidden, incredibly complex systems, which require highly-paid skilled laborers to fix. What do you do when a tree knocks down the power line to your house? What about when your pipes burst? How about if your fridge starts leaking freon? What happens next?

Ultimately, our skill were developed for a Client-side world, and don’t have much value once those complex systems are out of play. The Server-side world, to continue with our metaphor – the world of plant medicine, on-site triage, fire-building, hunting and gathering, and on, and of mediation between the visible world and the next – would kill us. Quickly.

And if you’re like me, and grew up sub/urban… well, I’m talking about us.

Our parents, and their parents, and their parents, and so forth – they developed those skills, and passed them on to us, little by little. So when people, usually hippie-leaning, frown on you and me for not raising and killing our own food, bringing cloth bags to the market, living with nominal electricity, or showering daily – for living as we were taught – it’s frustrating as hell. It feels like an over-righteous rejection.

But don’t slap the messenger. Because that patchouli-scented doomsayer is right. Maybe not about the paths around the problem… but she’s nailed it. I still think you’re justified getting angry; it’s not feasible to do all those things differently. But our anger should be at our ancestors, and their shortsightedness – not at the emaciated, stinky-branch-haired, fair-skinned (potential) Trustafarian. Because at the end of the day, the (potential) Trustafarian is still right, no matter how bad you want to slap the shit out of him for saying it haughtily.

The reckoning day – call it the Rapture, Judgment Day, whatever – the day after the last food trucks set out from Point A, the day is coming. And our technologies are not going to save us from it. Because technology is human ingenuity made physical… and ingenuity can’t fix the unfixable. Cities have been importing their food since cities began, and we’re at last discovering that’s not possible in these numbers, at these distances.

So go on, get frustrated, stomp your feet a little. Then grab a your hammer (not your iPod – or, well, sure), and give these guys a call. With so many things we’re doing wrong, there’s so much that’s so easy to start doing right.

After a two-week binge (which I’m sure was reflected in my electric bill) I’ve finished The Wire. All of it. Snot on the pavement to Carcetti in Annapolis. I want nothing to do with television, at all, whatsoever, in any way. For a while.

By Season 3, I started taking some notes:

• It matters which scenes you show, and who’s in them. It matters what they’re doing.
• The holy goals: to show character, to advance plot. Mastery of storytelling is letting one do the other.

Let’s take these apart.

So many times does McNulty advance the plot by being an asshole. He triggers Seasons 1 and 2 because he wants to rabble-rouse. It’s in his nature, next to a sense of justice that’s so unshakable that by Season 5, he’s actually breaking big laws to serve it. (Sidenote: I don’t know what’s wrong with me that in my head, when he does this, McNulty becomes just an anti-hero, but as I hear about virtually the same thing in the news, I shudder uncontrollably.) In other words, McNulty’s really good at moving the plot along by being McNulty.

But the most-compelling examples of this are much smaller. Bunk pisses off another detective in Homicide, who crumples a note from Herc, rather than delivering it – and Randy Wagstaff winds up in a group home. This happens constantly. Little actions have such far-reaching consequences in this world.

That’s something I’m taking to heart. Everyone has a supple side, a rock side, a game face and a dreaming face, and sometimes showing one in the wrong environment changes everything. It’s the writer’s job to find those sides, and how those moments serve the larger plot. We know from David Simon The Wire’s writers start with the plot, then find the scenes in each character’s life that support/construct that plot. Which is exactly the inverse of how I’ve worked. I’ve been all character – actually, all theme – all the time, letting plot emerge all on its own. In the shadow of the totality of the show, I thought maybe I was doing something wrong, but with some distance now, I can see it’s a method. A good tool for my box. (At 60+ hours, a fucking expensive one, too.)

But anyway. Let’s talk about the big, ugly hole in this show. That’s right, let’s talk about the women.

Kima Greggs has Bad Mother Fucker branded on her wallet, no doubt. As one of the show’s two female leads (three if you count Snoop, who first appears in Season 3, and all against a recurring cast of dozens), and a lesbian at that, she’s awful good at never looking awful alone in the men’s-men’s-men’s world of The Wire. By a traditional standard, because Kima and Cheryl do share some conversations about work, their relationship and their kid, the show passes the Bechdel Test. But I mean fucking barely.

Held to the only-slightly-more-strenuous standard Anita Sarkeesian suggested in February – 1/90th of the show, or about 40 minutes – it’s pretty clear the writers don’t care about Baltimore women’s perspectives. Even if it eked through that test, so what? Women’s thoughts on their lives, and their city, would still amount to a little more than 1% of the series. Against men’s 99%. I know it’s men pulling most of the strings, but 99% means something’s phenomenally out of balance.

This isn’t a comment on the quality of the show. It’s a luminous show. Probably the best that’s ever been on television. It broke boundaries, rotisserie’d taboos, and breathed life to a huge number of stories. Just… very few of them concerning women.

There are a lot of female characters on the show, yes, and they’re nearly all turned and explored a little, as everyone is. But they affect the plot like men do so infrequently, it’s easy to point to them: Beatrice Russell, in over her head, cracks open Season 2 with the dozens of bodies; Theresa D’Agostino directs Carcetti’s mayoral campaign; Snoop Pearson rides around with Chris Partlow, killing for their boss; Nerese Campbell wheels and deals with the best in the City Council; De’Londa Brice aggressively punishes her son for her life choices. Rhonda Perlman and Kima Greggs have the most pronounced roles, and affect the most change. But for all that, I’ve just described almost every primary female character on the show. (I’m not even sure De’Londa counts in that group.) Stack their actions against the enormity of the plot that all the men drive forward, and you start to see just how profoundly the show’s limited its perspective.

Frankly, I don’t see why a show so capable of complex plots and characters should have to concede those perspectives. My friend Ben argues the world the writers built is a world run by men. Its slow self-destruction is an indictment of the men running it. Okay, but what about the women who also live in Baltimore? Over and over, The Wire demonstrates that you don’t have to invent new characters to fill a need, because those characters are already there, and have something to say or do about it. You just have to listen to them. It’s precisely because The Wire is so tight in all its narrative and character mechanics, the subtext here is that women have no agency.

This matters. It’s deeply problematic to call out women’s powerlessness while largely ignoring their perspectives.

It shouldn’t be surprising then that men vastly appear to have outnumbered women in the writers, directors, producers and other major decision-making roles behind the camera. Even in the S4 interviews, when David Simon’s not speaking, on a stage of 11 cast and crew members, only one woman appears. And she speaks for a generous 16 seconds.

To recap: that’s a group of men indicting a world of men, for being men, to the noticeable exclusion of women in the process. That’s not clever. It’s self-defeating. (The self-defeat isn’t clever, either.)

And yes, that makes this a criticism by a man of a group of men indicting a group of men. I guess someone had to say it.

I have nothing of much empirical value to say about online dating. Of the many, many missives I’ve sent to the smart, fine, reputedly talented ladies of the greater Boston and Albuquerque areas, I’ve got a friend, a kid, and some soul-wracked confusion to show for it. And, hell. When love did blow up inside me, it was with someone I reconnected with at a friends’ party. Clearly, this is not one of my talents. But after two years of trial (and mostly error), it’s clear there’s something fundamentally weird about the medium, too.

As in other social media, the product is you and me. Which means the service can only rise to the quality of you and me. The dating sites are very shrewd about what they offer: matching. Not humans. They’ll help you through some of the negotiation, because it’s in their financial interest to, but ultimately it’s you and me on a them-branded pedestal. If you think that’s a little creepy, I think you’re fully justified.

OkCupid matches based on answers to highly polarizing questions. For example, “Are you Jewish?” Answer yes or no, then rate how important the response is from other users. It’s kind of an ingenious system (and doubly ingenious that users write almost all the questions as part of their profile setup). You can confidently make clear your needs and tastes, and get a scattershot of someone else’s.

Still, and consistently, the site clouds you with people you’re just not attracted to. I mean, thank the heavens. I’ll take a 50–1 ratio of women I’m not attracted to over some Orwellian facial analysis that delivers women I want to fuck, based on my history of preferences. And maybe that failure is part of the “special blend” that keeps you glued to the site. You just keep thinking, “Well, it’s the middle of the night day; there’s just no way I could be picking someone up right now, so why not just keep looking? It’s ‘productive,’ right?”

When I get into to the thick of it – when I wake up to myself scrolling profiles and sending notes – I notice something weird. As a man seeking women, you have to: write to a lot of people, mean it every time, and vow only to look at your neglected inbox as a source for study. That’s a really strange romance; you might say an addictive one. Maybe it’s because I’m naturally a writer it’s only obvious to me here.

I don’t think there’s any way around the number’s game. But to wit: if it’s no different than dating in the real world, why’s it so pronounced here? Could be because you get a chance to work your words; editing always makes a production. And there’s a pile-up of evidence.

I’ve thought about collecting a book of all the “Hey, you sure sound swell, let’s get a table at the malt shop!” emails I’ve let fly into the Internet. I used to send these outrageously long notes. Like, three, maybe four meaty paragraphs. Here’s one:

So, I was all primed to write a message about travel – and this awesome conversation I had with my dad the other day, about how it’s become necessary for Americans to travel to repair a few defective strands of cultural DNA – and ask if you’re teaching bilingually or teaching in one and learning in another, and maybe for your hot sauce credentials… but then I got caught on this photo of you in Milan.

And while I know it’s no surprise to you (you, lookin’ awful cute with that ‘mmm-hmm, ICED TEA’ expression table-left), it’s a fresh, wide internet, and that blue-shirted dude TOTALLY has my attention. He looks like he’s

a. sublimely impressed with the back of your head,
b. got some serious wandering feet, and nevermind the iced tea,
c. gloriously, benevolently stoned. Like, Jamaican shit stoned. Damian Marley’s toasting at a private block party in his head stoned. And the leering’s just coincidence. Or
d. really, really, just awful hungry. Really.

So, though I’ve got questions, all of which I really do want to ask you (including if you Kodak’d this moment yourself with your free hand) over tea – hot or iced – I’d settle for just the one answer. You know, what’s homeboy up to. That.

So, if I said Diesel late next week, what’d you say?

Almost invariably, the energy I put in never came back. In person you cover all these bases immediately. “Can I buy you a drink?” is an exquisitely simple interaction. Now my emails are more like this:

What is it about the rain you don’t want to ever see again? It’s pretty rare you run into someone who also says she wants nothin’ to do with it. I’m from Boston, land of Overcast Everything, is my excuse.

You write, it seems like it’s working; you check back on it a few hours later, you sound like an idiot. Check again a few days later, you sounded fine. A few months after that, idiot. Sigh.

And what’re you supposed to do with a nice email from someone you’re just not attracted to? Thank the Internet for its mighty opaque glass shield and move on. Back out to the bar again, maybe. Where the cost of doing business is measured, at least, in dollars and minutes.

Not hours, hours, and hours.

When you’re writing a book for so long, you start thinking about the same damn things all the damn time. You talk about those, mostly. What’s really not obvious at all is how much time you spend playing. The last year I’ve spent too much damn time thinking about the damn title of my damn book: in my head it sounds like Thhhhhhhhhe Dreeeeeeedddddddge Cyyyyyyclllllle.

Cycle of poems, cycle of unearthing; cycle of history, wash-cycle. I’m a fucking genius.

In that most lucid state after working out one night, I got to thinking one good genius title deserves another. Or fifteen. So here’re the best subtitles I’ve toyed with. If you’ve followed the blog a long time, a lot of this will be familiar ground. This book is becoming the most indulgent inside joke in three states.

1. Leave the gun, take the treaty
2. Like how mushrooms grow on cow turds
3. The saddest same old story on earth
4. A new book with every reprint!
5. What your mother doesn’t know she doesn’t want you to know
6. How much hype could a hype-man hype if a hype-man could hype hype…?
7. Can’t we pay someone to do this?
8. Or, 250 finely-edited pleas for my job back
9. Soon I’ll be as old as my protagonists
10. How white people learned never to ask why white people learned never to ask

Amended as necessary.

Great covers demonstrate someone finding great value in someone else’s song (or poem, or whatever). I keep listening to the Gourds’ Texified Snoop because it represents five white guys from Texas discovering some of themselves in the experience (or desire) of a black man from Long Beach. And word is audiences still scream for it, to start the show, 14 years later. So clearly, this between-space is important.

Now, true, I do have to listen around around the misogyny. Maybe those Texas boys’ and SoCal fella’s willingness to entertain it means there’s not much that separates men in our culture. What about the other things they have in common, like the importance of an ounce of weed, a good all-night rager, and everyone packing a pocket of rubbers. (Sincerely, if bizarrely, at least Snoop’s about safe sex.) It’s a party song, and it sounds like they all have the same party priorities.

Great covers range. There was that time when (12 months after it dropped) Tori Amos aimed “Smells Like Teen Spirit” back at itself. Whiny, violent boys’ anthem becomes sarcastic dirge about the girls around those boys. Didn’t change a word; just emphasized “she” and hung on “with the lights out it’s less dangerous” a half-moment too long for comfort. Changes everything. This time the smirk has teeth.

Ever heard Toots and the Maytals’ version of “Take Me Home, Country Roads”? Dude changes, like, two words, and you’d swear it was always about West Jamaica, and who the fuck’s this Southerner trying to step on it? Again, cultures meet, become each other for a few minutes. Beautiful.

This speaks to stories, of course. It’s the same mechanism. You carry on the song because it’s valuable to you, same as you carry on the story. You spin it your way, make it your own, but keep the core of it pure. It’s a shame we’re so into intellectual property. It encourages us to gloss over some of our more fulfilling instincts.

This between-space doesn’t really appear elsewhere in our culture. Oh, yeah, ‘melting pot’ blah blah blah, and Japanese-American diners, Quentin Tarantino appropriating anime all night, all spilling from our asses. But we don’t often get bona-fide crossover.

I’d love to see a cover turn into conversation. Maybe someone covers something iconic, the person responsible for the original covers one of hers, or covers the cover. Something like that. Like, wouldn’t it be awesome if Ozzy dug in and covered The Bad Plus covering him?

What’re your favorite covers? List or link them in the comments.

And that can be crushing. I understand why this system accomplishes so much of what it does. We trade access for intimacy; if you want a hero on the Internet, can’t get one without sacrificing the other. But the delivery mechanism creates a false sense of intimacy. I think that’s unfair. Not like, ‘there’s much we can do about it’ unfair… just unfair unfair.

I’ve had a bit of a crush on Anita Sarkeesian since a friend pointed me at her breakdown of the Bechdel Test in 2009. (If you’re not familiar with the test, I strongly recommend you watch the video, below.) I just discovered her breathtakingly well-argued YouTube channel in fact is a satellite of her Feminist Frequency blog. So, like you do, I put my name on the mailing list, and will excitedly unwrap links to new vlog posts when they come in.

I think what Anita’s up to is doubly brilliant for being both absolutely on-point and profoundly accessible. (If you’ve ever heard me half-drunk and rambly, you know how much stock I put in accessibility.) She’s well-argued without being confrontational, which makes her, in a pure sense, a resource: someone you can return to for insight and practical application. Her visual style is the lovechild of a TV news anchor and a radio talk-show host. She uses visual aids like quotes in an essay, and often with a helpful splash of humor. Here’s a taste:

That explanation gave way to a whole new section of my book. Because I got my head realigned in time, and began writing from the so-far primary female character’s perspective, I started discovering new depth in the plot, and in several characters. I want a chance to thank her for all that, tell her how awesome and important I think her work is. And call me a Leo, but I want it to mean something to her when I send a gushing email. I think we all want that from our celebrities (which is why it’s probably best those boundaries are there.) Regardless, here’s a woman looking me in the eye, literally, as she articulates truth to power. That creates a one-way personal relationship. A false intimacy.

Happy face; sad face.

Then there’s Jay Smooth. We should co-parent beautiful, adopted babies. At least, he should coach me on Sunday afternoons in constructively discussing race. Or idiot celebrities. Or just teach me how to better have a conversation. His straightforward, literate, funny and concise style is so exciting to me. Virtually no one – think, like, Cornell West – is appealing to her/his audience this way. And to most of us between 18–40 watching, it’s an almost invisible rhetorical strategy; finally, someone’s just talking to us. That’s how medicine goes down. Here he is on the ridiculous “Until Abortion Ends” campaign:

Why can’t we all be so goddamn elegant? The jump-cuts make a nice style, while he finds his place in his script. ‘Dude in a t-shirt in his bedroom while behind him his cat doodles in a chair’ is the perfect presentation for (I’m assuming) his target demographics. And because he’s delivering right to the camera – to you, to me – he can let the funny out in a way that might get lost in writing. Once again, here’s a man, looking me in the eye, literally, as he makes me laugh, articulating truth to power. A face behind glass.

Finally, Adrienne K..  The mission of her blog, Native Appropriations: “documenting images of Indigenous peoples, languages and cultures in everyday life: countering stereotypes one cigar store Indian at a time.” She does it so handily, after a half-dozen posts, you start to sense this is shooting barrel-fish for her. Except the same fish keeps reanimating, then attacking smaller, vulnerable fish.

Somehow, she rarely seems to repeat herself. Maybe that’s because every offense is an offense. Every appropriation has personals consequences. Her plea against the use of Indian mascots makes a fine starting point.

She isn’t speaking to me eye-to-eye, but what she’s talking about is deeply personal. The world of her readers is my world, too; I grew up never connecting the Redskins to red people, the reduction of 500 nations to a few caricatures. The journey of reading her blog as a person of privilege is powerful as it is personal. This is the kind of media analysis you expect from an academic paper, dusty and coded so no one with any real authority can make sense of it. But Adrienne is writing a manifesto, month by month. And manifestos warm the blood so intimately.

Still. It’s a big world she writes about, while finishing her PhD, and time is short. She’s doing the good work, calling for a sea change. But though she seems right there, just a few keystrokes away, she’s writing from another world. Where the heroes live.

I’ve wondered before if that almost-availability is what gives the great commentators some of their charm. The mystery is so compelling.

This isn’t the same relationship we have with movie stars. Those people are paid to put on other people’s faces. Musicians play to an audience, of whom we’re all members, but they don’t sing to us individually. Even moreso than radio personalities, these people appeal to us directly; they engage us in a conversation. They use “I” and mean “I.” It makes them unique.

I think this problem travels all over the Social Network contract. On Facebook and Twitter everyone’s their own PR Dept.. Postings and status updates are little, semi-personal emissions, and while we can respond to them, a personal response to our response isn’t guaranteed. I always feel special when I get the attention of the person making the posting – even when that person is a close friend. I think that’s just what the system does: muddies traditional social contracts.

Some days, much as I’m grateful for it, I think about walking away from the World Wide Web. Some days I’d take the heroes I could talk to over lunch, or at least the ones who keep me past arm’s-length, on the TV, from the grave. At least there the boundaries are clear.

Edited 4.18.12: Okay, seems I gotta eat some crow. After tweeting this post, I got personal responses from all three thinkers. When I get through vibrating I’ll start that follow-up post.

At the start of Metacom’s War – the bloodiest conflict per-capita in American history, perhaps in all the continent’s story – there was one of those fuse-lighting moments. Most of it happened December 19, 1675. That might seem like an early date to you – but get steeped in the 17th century, and you’ll see it’s almost three generations years deep. It’s not early at all; it’s the beginning of the end. Or, if you prefer, the beginning of this. All this.

For more than five decades, the Pilgrims and Puritans had been slowly revealing to the Wampanoags, Pocassets, Massachuseuks, Narragansetts, Pokanokets, Nipmucks and Pequots that they were practicing a whole ‘nother kind of settling than the indigenous people knew. After a tenuous 1620s and ‘30s, the first children of the immigrants were establishing themselves, in new treaties, new land trades, new villages, new courts and new technologies. And these kids were entitled. Whatever their parents had suffered and lived to broker with the first people, to put it bluntly, these kids didn’t. That’s not to say they were born without cultural inheritance. Their parents’ allegiances were not theirs, but their skull-itching drive for land sure was. So they were doing what their parents had done: sometimes beginning, always carrying forward the process of assimilation.

Of course, this wasn’t happening in a vacuum. By the early 1660s, the Pokanokets and their neighbors had begun realizing the English were perhaps unlike any people they’d met before. They collected everything. As the history books go, that was largely the fault of Wamsutta.

Wamsutta was the elder son of Ousamequin, the tribe’s Massasoit, or sachem. Ousamequin died in the early 1660s (it’s not clear when), and Wamsutta took the reigns. And for a time, things were okay. At what appeared to be the height of civility during that time, the court at Plymouth had named Wamsutta Alexander, and his brother Metacom Philip, in a tidy, sarcastic reference to the Birth of Civilization. Though among Algonquian communities, sachems were only as powerful as what they could deliver to their people, the English understood them as kings. In this case, one to rule, one to break everything.

Wamsutta had been selling off land to the English since their father had died. While this strengthened the Pokanokets, it of course also put them – and soon, everyone else – under an English heel. Wamsutta got wise, started asserting himself, and was summoned to the Cape for questioning. And died “mysteriously,” “of an unknown illness,” shortly thereafter. It was time for Philip to step up.

Let me here remind you of the white man’s burden: assassinating an insubordinate indigenous leader just as you’re beginning to grasp the reigns of your new region isn’t light stuff. Takes balls. Huge, God-baiting balls.

Anyway.

It’s December, 1675. The English have been forcing more land sales and mocking Metacom’s authority. So he’s been gathering an army of neighbors, and stockpiling guns for just over a year. And had the fuse not found fire when it did – if he’d had another six months, as Nathaniel Philbrick suggests – none of us might be here. Civilization perhaps stopped dead in its tracks, for a time. But sparks smell gunpowder. That’s just the way of things.

And so what had been a few preemptive, half-justified attacks on abandoned Narragansett villages in November became about 450 militiamen and friendly Mohegan warriors, led by a Narragansett defector named Peter, marching 14 miles, overnight, through three feet of snow into a  swamp in what’s now southern Rhode Island. They found a fort, about 5 square acres, and at least 1000 Pequot and Narragansett warriors, and behind them thousands of women and children.

Then what happened shouldn’t have happened.

I mean, the war was tragic, yes. But the English and their allies, outnumbered at least 2–1, shouldn’t have been able to overrun the fort. There shouldn’t have been great unspun tales of “50 guns trained on one man,” of a hellfire of bullets – quantity compensates for aim – killing almost no Englishmen. The Narragansett fort shouldn’t have been breached. Those who got through shouldn’t have been able to Rambo-blast their way through sheets of Indians. And they definitely shouldn’t have slaughtered thousands of non-combatants. We call it the Great Swamp Fight.

In short, the way Philbrick tells the story, it was kind of an act of God. Some months later, Philip’s head was placed on a spike, and his hands fetched a nice penny for viewing. They were no longer close to his body.

Okay, good. Stage set.

Let’s move on to Ramona Peters. Ramona’s a Wampanoag, and lives on Cape Cod, right now, in our very century. Ramona told me angrily last summer she had to put down Philbrick’s book. He speaks out of turn all over the place, including putting thoughts into the heads of long-dead Indians. But what really sealed the envelope was that Philbrick quoted Ramona’s own father. Saying things she couldn’t fathom him saying. And after he was dead.

This raises a lot of questions.

For 14 months, I’ve struggled with the first part of this story. The gods of civilization are angry, jealous, vengeful gods – just read the Bible. But was this a conflict between gods? Some Gaiman-esque battle of the Lord of the Hebrews vs. the Wind Spirits? Was this a collusion? Maybe only a few gods, with a plan that eludes us. Maybe indigenous people around the world are enduring a punishment for something we’ll never know about. Maybe these are gods of the laissez-faire, and they figure the natural flow of events will show us – all – right.

I think it’s natural and appropriate to wrap up from here with some kind of calculus of free will and otherworldly intervention. But ‘some kind of calculus’ isn’t very satisfying for me. In a multiversal view, there are an infinite number of universes spawned from the first moments those grave-robbing Englishmen stepped off the Mayflower. An infinite number of universes from the moment Ousamequin died, from when Wamsutta died, from when Philip first convinced Weetamoo to align her Pocassets with him and fight to bone. Every moment contains a new world. And maybe we’re just living out one of those soul-cripplingly bloody timelines. Shitty draw.

But Ramona’s complaint complicates this further. If we can’t trust Philbrick’s epically-researched Mayflower because the allegations leveled at him unravel it, we’re somewhere behind Square One. When I think of “history” in the multiverse, I think (reductively) of a definite timeline, from which other definite timelines peel away. Ramona’s charge means all things could have happened. If she says this historian can’t be trusted – I’d add, because of his perspective – it opens the field not only to her people’s versions, but to the possibility of all events, all timelines, all universes, retroactively.

And what a fine mess that is.

I wonder, if your brain hurts and your soul feels queasy as mine does at the thought of this, if we’re not just looking at history wrong. Maybe our need to mythologize, to compress and make sense of our stories, just overrules everything. And when all the dust is settled, one tribe’s stories will be enough for them again. And what the next tribe tells their children won’t concern them, so long as one’s not trying to exterminate the other over it.

Sometimes I go against my better judgment. Good judgment here is defined as “remembering at least the last three times you went.”

I care a lot about poetry. I’m very vocal about that. I ponder a lot, and sometimes share my contentions. This isn’t to say you don’t care about poetry. This isn’t even to say the people I’m about to rant about don’t care about poetry. Sometimes, I don’t see any evidence that they do.

I love a good, hearty discussion about a poem, but I’m not interested in taxonomizing them, beyond “the stuff I like” and “the stuff I think sucks.” Even that line gets murky over time. Sometimes a poem is just waiting for me to grow up some before I see its relevance, poignancy, authority, insight. I’ll admit, right here, my tastes run to the image-driven, the funny and the strange.

Let’s not forget there are the poems that aren’t aimed at me. As my friend Christian used to say, as a straight white(-appearing) male, I get invited to plenty of parties; it’s okay not to be welcome at a few. Some poems are written for women, or brown people, or red people, or red women, or black men, or people mixed trans people in their 70s. Many are written in a wildly different cultural context, and neither concern me, nor will make a profound sense to me. I’m not complaining about those. Sometimes, just as it takes me a year to warm to a poem, it can take me a minute to see I’m not on the guest-list. Once I see that I tend to calm down.

Okay, enough caveats. I’m talking about the poems that fall into “I think it sucks” by a wide margin. The poems I can’t imagine coming to like in ten years. I don’t believe in many hard-and-fast rules about writing, but these are my standards:

• Be specific. Know what you’re trying to do, even if that’s vagueness, or not knowing.
• Say it only with with the words required to say it right.
• Tell me a Truth in a way that dodges my radar, or that “shocks me awake.”
• Make me feel something.

If you know me well, you’ve probably noticed doing fairly well with those first three means a good chance at the fourth.

So why do so many poets have trouble with this? Maybe a better question is, what are so many of these poets interested in that I’m not seeing? Their social/political/rights-and-wellbeing passion is clear – and I believe in those things, too – but I walk away from so many slams and open mics feeling like there’s a rule on-stage: content outweighs form. Which I categorically disagree with.

We’re metaphorical creatures. Period. Full-stop. We’re possibly the only metaphorical creatures on Planet Earth. Our capacity for metaphor – for communicating with one another by using an intermediary, such as one thing’s likeness to another – is what drives our capacity for socialization. And for us, socialization is survival. But we don’t just relate to one another through metaphor: it’s our line to God, gods, and spirits. Metaphor, which shares a home in the religious experience/imagination, is one of the more profound ways we commune. I’d put money on 90% of all non-physical “better than sex” activities having their roots in metaphor. Comedy or tragedy, metaphor is, for us, an enormous piece of the pie.

So craft – the form, the framework, the glue between metaphors and pieces of metaphor – is kind of HUGELY IMPORTANT to humans to communicate effectively. If you’re getting through to your audience with flimsy craft, it’s because you had to convince them of nothing. I don’t go to poetry readings to have my impressions of my universe flattered. I go because I want to be broken, in a soft way. I go because I’m a smart guy, who thinks and feels a lot, who wants help. I go to be shepherded into your experience. Not your ego, or our previously-established agreement. Our agreement is always second to what you’re next able to convince me of.

Once upon a slam in Boston, about ten years ago, Regie Gibson said something important to me. At the time, I thought he was just venting, a little obnoxiously. But damned if it didn’t stick with me, and now I’m fond of saying it, too:

Everyone has the right to read their poem. Everyone has the right to be heard.

Just not by me.

We all have the right to leave. We each have the right to say, “I don’t like this poem.” Ultimately, I’m just a guy in the audience. Ok, a poet in the audience who’s very vocal about his preferences, maintains a mostly-unknown blog on which those preferences are featured, and a former publisher. But most of the time, I’m just another guy in the audience.

Unless I’m not one of those you’re trying to reach, please, remind me why I’m there.