haiku for the birthday of byoo

one year a vapor
image embodied in text
left behind like seeds

discs of cake

floppy like eight-paneled hats, flatter than a can of grandpap’s blatz,
saturday morning pancakes more massive than channel cats,
not all the time, but once in a while they’re an event,
akin to running into that girl you love--wearin’ a scent,

slap butter on 'em like yarmulkes on heads in synagogues,
now shrouded in fat like london-night beds hidden in fog,
but that’s the flavor, as you already know too well, me maties,
pancakes without butter is like a devil-less hell, a styx-free hades,

not to be outdone by the all-enveloping sap of the maple, of course,
syrup sinks into my shortstack like absorbine jr. soothes a charlie-horse,
but easy on your pour, i’m not the guy for excess sugar that relax in tooth cracks,
this is a hungry man’s breakfast, get your hyper toddler some sugar smacks,

eat them quick, the heat’ll vacate the premises now that the syrup’s aboard,
rip into them with a utensil, in relevance to your plate, the fork’s starboard,
aft i’ve had my fill, my stomach’ll appear to you as a hogshead offshore,
my tee-shirt snug, holding on for dear life, clinging close to my core,

i pound down some one percent, the red cap is a bit too heavy,
my belt and i are gonna bust like brian bosworth, his movies, and louisiana levees.

your set of 32

your teeth, your teeth,
allow those words to pass by,
they should’ve slammed shut like
heavy black gates
in almost any movie you can think of.

them teeth of yours.
32 flags of surrender,
giving larynx carte blanche.
foolish bicuspids,
i bet you're sorry the ones with wisdom got yanked.

those teeth that are in your mouth.
aren’t judicious. they don’t edit.
they just linger in hot darkness
like stalagmites and stalactites,
caring nothing of your blather.

XX Observations About Life Now

1. When I walk around my city, I'm secretly worried about terrorist attacks. All the time, I eyeball every threat suspiciously. Each random overstuffed plastic bag, every open grate venting subway heat, everything makes me think of the devastating explosion that could follow. I think about how easy it would be to completely terrorize this city if half a crazy really put his mind to it. The special effects in my secret worst-nightmares are incredible. I'm stepping on the concrete between two grates when the explosion hits and shielded from the heat and force of the blast. I'm rounding the corner of the next building when the dingy Toyota I've seen circling the block detonates its charge. Time passes between bouts of hysteria and these thoughts subside. Then some crackpots get about a quarter of the way down the road to pulling off a scheme, and it all comes rushing back. ¶ The worst thing about these imaginings is that I feel a vertiginous pull toward the aftermath. In all these strange little imaginings, I narrowly avoid disaster, and by surviving, I am a suspect, and as I peek down that rabbit hole, my life is destroyed, and I wish that the explosion took me instead.

2. Keen focus on mortality, if kept in reasonable check, can be a useful thing. It's this focus that makes people go to the gym, run marathons, eat diets free of carbohydrates, wear seatbelts. I ride a bike, based on my physician's insistence that I will eventually die if I don't do something other than leisurely stroll from the train to the office and call it 'walking a mile.' I zigzag around the streets like the worst courier in America, collecting sneers from cabbies and the obvious derision of other people on bikes, and putting myself into stupid positions like being caught heading the wrong way down a one-way street with a high sidewalk and no curbcut, thus having to stop completely and awkwardly crab-walk my bike over the giant curb. ¶ The other day, the forecast was miserable, so I took the train to the office. I was again leisurely strolling to the train station, but now feeling like a tourist because normally, I'm telling myself, I ride my bike. At one intersection, someone is jogging and is caught by the red light. They jog in place, huffing, to keep their wind up. The light turns and we all step off the curb, and the jogger breaks from the pack and heads up the hill. Bad red light timing reunites us all at the next intersection. In my head, despite my blatant bicycle amateurism, I ask, "How fucking inefficient is jogging?"

3. The power went off hours after a recent lightning storm. Throughout the low-cloud lightshow, our electricity held steady, with nary a flicker. The post-storm humidity is insufferable, and the house is locked up tight so all the air conditioners can perform at their peak efficiency. My wife is upstairs asleep, as are my children and dog. I'm brushing my teeth, and everything goes black. ¶ I spit. I wait for my eyes to adjust, but there is simply no light. There is also the eerie sensation of hearing no sound; eerie because our home is normally host even in quiet times to the constant thrum of fans, air conditioners and dehumidifyers. They are all silent. Nobody moves. Nobody else in the house even knows the power is out. I follow the walls to get candles, matches, flashlights. My dog tragically walks down the pitch-dark hallway and slips on the top step, roll-falling down the entire staircase, kicking up a spectacular racket. I recognize immediately that it could be no one falling down the stairs but our dog. If someone stopped me on the street and described the situation and then said, "Then you hear something falling down the stairs," my response each time would be, "That's going to be the dog." ¶ The dog is stunned and sits at the landing at the bottom of the stairs. I've gassed the first floor of the house with a strange mixture of musk and vanilla, since the only candles we have are a mismatched passel of scented candles. I arrive at the landing to make sure the dog hasn't broken a bone, and the warm teaberry and vanilla aroma rushes up behind me like a vampire's cape. The dog raises her nose to the scent, sniffs a second time, then exhales gruffly, simulating a derisive snort. I have no response. ¶ Everything is electric now. The phone doesn't work, nothing works. I find my cell in the dark and call the power company. The touch-tone response system is metallic sounding, and the long pause to 'research my report' leads me to believe that either I have beat my neighbors to reporting our outage (the entire street and houses behind ours are similarly dark), or something more sinister and ominous is afoot. The voice chirps that I have reported a new outage, it is being investigated and there is no timeline for repair. The line goes dead, and as I stare at the words "Ended" on my phone's screen, the silence makes me feel for a candid moment like I'm the last man on earth.

poetry, pre-wifey

i write a poem for them, and they
say aww, that’s so sweet. what made you
think of that?
but that’s the wrong response.
not the one I was looking for.
i shrug and play humble like it’s a member of the woodwinds.

awkward silence now spins me around,
slaps me on my ass,
and sends me forthwith.
my heart topples like a redwood in the most guilt-
arousing deforestation documentary ever.
a systematic voice yells timmberr.

wet

rain comes down as if God lost someone.
like i should expect to see shut-eyed orangutans
and pot-bellied tribesman stalking dinner
outside my window; water beading-up
on their slick straight bangs.

but i dare not rise from pillowed comfort
to separate the hanging sliced privacy
to bolster my suspicions.

instead, i lay like stones
that are perfect for skipping,
while God uses window sills and wet
to send monday morning morse code.

patio penance

i’ve been digging like lucas with the frigid grip.

or andy dufresne.
but I’m not being obtuse,

just relentless
with a spade and a some old sneaks
that i forsook like

those drunken college years.

unkempt exposed stomach soon to be crème brulee.
soufflé becoming syn co pat ed from countless crust punctures.

such is soil toil.

always there

the silhouette of a grandfather,
painted on an april afternooned window,
gameshow reruns suspended in time,
tic-tac-dough or joker’s wild,
something with tweed sportscoats
and microphones that look like martian antennae.
coffee that’s cold in a styrofoam cup
sitting there all day,
adjacent to a remote
with buttons the size of boggle cubes,
resting on a christmas-themed tv table,
always there, while I come and go.

shots and her

he came out of her,
he’s back to her.
instead of giving him the tit,
she’ll be making macaroni with meat sauce,
and asking what his plans are now.

he’s back to brushing his teeth
in her kitchen sink while she’s asking
what his plans are now.

of course she’s talking macro picture.
he’s not.
he’s capping the toothpaste,
he’s opening the screen-door,
pending divorce, living at mom’s,
pretending to be proud, he walks to the bar,
thinking about shots and last words.

Argument

"You son of a bitch."

Randall didn't really yell it as much as growl it as he came through the door of the bar heading straight for my drinking companion, Howard.

Old Howard didn't have much of a step left after our fairly robust celebration of opening day, or Easter, or whatever excuse we had cited earlier for drinking heavily and immediately after work. Randall's first punch was more like a bear's huge claw, swatting at Howard's head and neck without discretion.

Howard went down from his stool with some general arm-flailing that didn't impress Randall or me. People got quiet as Randall stood there about three feet from Howard breathing heavy. The bartender quipped the perfect bartender statement: "I think his foot was stuck on the stool," and began to move away from the action without looking like he was going anywhere.

Howard and I weren't friends, mind you, and my obligation to defend him from the much larger Randall was close to zero. We had been drinking on a pay-as-you-go basis, so I wasn't owed anything. For all I knew Howard had killed Randall's dog or slept with his wife. In my head, I believe the 'barrier for entry' into this particular conflict was something like Howard's imminent demise. That wasn't in the cards just yet.

That said, I'm not a fellow to give up my barstool and make room for a thorough beating. I remained in my spot at the bar. Randall continued to breathe heavily. The air pumping out of his lungs was sickly-sweet, and I couldn't determine the flavor. Gross.

On the floor, Howard assumed the standard position of a four foot eleven bald man with weak muscle tone and glasses who has been thrown to the ground by a larger opponent: armadillo-ball. There was whimpering coming from his general direction, and it seemed pretty clear this wasn't Howard's first time down there. The bartender's voice floated across the bar saying something about 'squeaking like a mouse,' and I decided his role as a commentator was annoying me.

Randall wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and inhaled noisily at the same time, as if his salivary glands were working doubletime. He was not, however, drooling. Thank goodness. He said, "Get up" twice, once quiet enough only Howard and I could hear him and once again loud enough for the entire bar to take notice. Howard's hands fell away from his face and he stood up very fast. Presumably, the standard high-school bully routine didn't go much further than the swat-kick-spit-disappear four-step tango Howard had been rehearsing all his life. This whole 'get up' business caught him by surprise.

I was expecting a sitcom-perfect second swat, and I was right. Howard didn't go down, but instead skidded with some comic value from the bar to a trivia-terminal mounted on the wall. His elbow -- and possibly his funny bone -- hit the keyboard and he pursed his lips and started sucking air to make the hissing sound that indicates quiet pain. Randall stepped to him and I decided that not enough backstory had been provided for me to make a judgement. But I was interested in preserving the trivia terminal, so I quick-legged alongside Randall and stopped him with a hand to the chest.

"What's, uh, your big problem with this little fella?" I asked Randall. Howard rested a flat, glistening hand against his forehead as if he was taking his own temperature. He rolled his eyes slightly and left his hand just sitting there.

Before Randall could answer, there was an explosion outside, and people screamed like something important was happening. I looked back over and Randall wasn't there. Howard hadn't changed a bit.

After the sirens died down, we all went back to drinking. Nobody had seen Randall before, so it wasn't like we were all wondering where he went. Howard, who I had seen around and thought was mildly amusing, was gone the next day as well.

Two weeks later, someone at the bank let it slip that the safe in the basement had been blown through in the back, and nobody even noticed because the racks inside had hidden the damage. By 'let it slip,' I mean they were fired and came over and told everyone in a disgruntled fashion. It was one of those new-wave banks with long hours and matching t-shirts and weekend promotions. I didn't like using their ATMs because it reminded me of a video game at South of the Border. The story eventually got to the press, and the Virginia B.I. let it be known that they were keeping the heist hush hush until they smoked out some potential insiders involved in the scheme. They showed two headshots on the news.

You'll never guess who.

crumbs

you’re different daily
like bread.
flat and freckled staple
of countries that boast the minaret
one minute,
bloated and glossy loaf of the Ukraine
the next,
toast when you pick up the drink.
unrelenting manna,
contrived like sliced white,
dark drawers keep you from you,
I sometimes happen upon your raucous crumbs.

mondaiku

haikus are the things
that come to mind on monday
the day that ends fun.

i be westerner
friday is the orient
far and alluring.

that star and you

i hope that you tear all of your important tendons,
and that you get what’s coming to you--
million dollar baby.
you’re not worth the milk dandruff
that falls to the floor,
when I pop the cap for some utter-juice
pasteur made safe to swallow.

that star and you are a sight.

if I had my druthers, you’d be the figures
in marty mcfly’s photo,
when his mom was hot for him.
but I don’t. and you won’t.
you’ll set records and get a ring.
because I’m from a once mighty town,
now only famous for sandwiches and a fake boxer.

ignoring the sounds

If hitler were to return today,
my scarred face wouldn’t be to his liking,
and he definitely wouldn’t fancy you—
what, with the melanin and all—
i’m sure he’d return to driving his machine
of war, cleansing the earth of races obscene.
stamping countries like envelopes with the swastika,
his fun-sized-snicker mustache chortling at the myriad thwarted.
we'd get it like the rest of them...

while we waited for our imminent demise,
my foot would be saying hello to yours,
unwrapping you from a package of sleep.
you’re not awake enough for me to ask
if you want potatoes for breakfast, but I ask anyway,
our bedroom air filled with diner idiom,
ignoring the sounds outside our windows,
of innocents getting yanked and plugged like chords.
our neighborhood becoming a ghetto,
bricks and mortar making it so.

Behind the Wheel of a Large Automobile

We have two cars, and I enjoy driving them both for different reasons. 'The big car' isn't really that big, but it's a Japanese wagon that feels and drives like a family car. It balances a safe blend of zippiness with obvious size. I drive it like a dad, ostentatiously checking my mirrors, propping my hands in the 10-2 position, quick-spying my kid in the back-seat like I'm in an American car commercial.

It's probably important to note that this unconscious play-acting doesn't actually affect my driving speed, for instance. It would appear to be all pantomime.

Our other car is an older Japanese sedan that doesn't travel faster than any other stock Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla in my neighborhood. But compared with the big car, it enfolds me like a space capsule. The seat is devastatingly low to the ground if I hop in directly from the wagon. When I first get behind the wheel after my wife drives the car, I'm a pilot in a cockpit, wonkishly making small modifications in the seat position, tilt steering wheel and mirrors. During this pre-flight I'll often twiddle knobs on the stereo, slot in a new cd, meaninglessly pop open the glove box or close the slow-release door on the central cup-holder.

When I drive the little car, it is an extension of me in the way the big car can't be. I'm sitting astride the big car like a rider on a horse. In the smaller car, I'm the horse's brain. I think I'm probably more confident in the little car, which might be a dangerous illusion. But I know what it can do, I know exactly how far behind me and to the right the furthest point on the car is. And while I know this information about the bigger car, I never enter situations where those memorized parameters really get re-checked. I don't slingshot the wide outer lane of one of D.C.'s notorious traffic circles to beat stopping at red lights. I do that in the little car. In the big car, I decellerate like a tugboat captain. In the little car, I power-merge and drop speed aping the engine control I had in my old five-speed Toyota, then grip the handle above the passenger-side door and take a tight turn at a safe but daring speed.

When I take the little car into downtown D.C. is when the style really comes out. I jockey for position, light up taxis and tour-buses as enemies in the chess-game of road management, and perform smug calculations in my head about beating an asleep-at-the-wheel driver out of an intersection and getting into his lane before the row of parked cars makes mine disappear. I simultaneously pay more and less attention to the road as I meld with the car in these moments. The music is playing, a breeze happens through the slightly-lowered windows, a small engine rattle catches my attention for a moment. I juggle these sensations without ever taking my mind off the critical task at hand.

At these moments, I realize -- if I stop to think about it -- that part of this driving style comes from that of my Uncle J______. He drove a manual transmission Japanese automobile with an unsuitable stereo system, even though music was his life. He remains the only person I know to be cited for wearing headphones while driving his car. If you sat in the passenger seat, you would be hard-pressed to determine the exact moments when he was actually driving the car. He was fiddling with the portable CD player and the pair of external speakers he used when not driving alone. The little speakers -- a pre-cursor to computer speakers, I guess, but battery-powered -- would roll around on the dash while the first-generation and extremely skip-prone CD player was securely planted on a washcloth pilfered from my mom's house. J______ would be tracking through songs, drinking a soda, shifting into fifth, singing along, and changing lanes on the turnpike with the windows down. Driving was barely part of this ballet. He had more than his share of automotive mishaps.

When I started driving, I took up many of J______'s habits. One of my cars had a tape deck which no longer rotated the wheels in tapes but still technically still functioned in that the sensor would read music and send it to the speakers. I stole an elementary school-type tape player and connected it to the car's (extremely weak) sound system through a five-dollar tape adapter. I frequently handled large beverages while driving, and my cockamamie tape-player-to-tape-player was a downright dangerous distraction. I added smoking to the act in an attempt to one-up Uncle J______. I memorably drove my first car into a ditch severing a natural gas line and leaving three families without hot water for a week.

Another of my driving influences was a cousin named K______. He was legendarily irresponsible though I don't recall if any of his cars actually perished because of his negligence. Mostly, they rusted into oblivion before our very eyes. (Not by choice, I copied this in some ways as well: After a concert on the other side of Pittsburgh, Tracy Chapman if you'll believe it, I was driving home with a friend when he looked down to find a four-inch geyser erupting through the floor panel on the passenger side of the car.) The car I remember K______ driving was a grey Chevette. I believe it had a manual choke and was possibly only a four-speed. K______ drove the car like a worker-drone on a Russian submarine. He was constantly adjusting cranks and seemed to be operating pedals I didn't know existed in cars. As his feet worked furiously across the gas, brake, clutch, choke and who knows what else, at times he would release a pedal (clutch?) that would pop dramatically and send the car surging forward or lurching backward. His behind-the-wheel performance reminded me of the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain. Unlike my cultivated grownup combination of these two driving styles, K_____'s endless gyrations in the driver's seat frequently distracted him from the actual variables on the road. Driving with him was reliably risky. Accidental 360s and inadvertent contact with curbs and railroad tracks were not uncommon.

Driving is like life sometimes, I guess. The big car is my adult car, and it is the car in which I abandon the childish habits of driving like it's fun. It's a task, to be undertaken efficiently (and I genuinely enjoy the efficiency of performing the task in the big car). In the trunk of a Honda Civic I keep the harmlessly irresponsible youth, tucked away under abandoned blankets and a mismatched set of tools that don't correspond to the car in any way. The big car came with a sleek little toolkit. And that's really the difference.

wingspan

that fat white nerd at the company picnic
wearing a miles davis t-shirt:
you own stryper albums.

or that relentless we gotta hang out sometime guy
i barely talked to back in the day:
keep your card. i’m glad you consult.

how about the mayo-globbed mouth-corner of some prick
that just keeps talking. oblivious to situations me and he:
i’m not hungry anymore.

and there’s the barely employed guy on my block
it snows. his wife shovels:
quit the belligerent neighbor banter.

racist grandfathers.
the self-important noon time aid at my kid’s school.
the person that always wants to talk about brilliant oscar efforts.
the big guy on the train that thinks he can eyeball my girl.
ungrateful eastern-block defectors bellyaching about taxes, etc.

pegasus wings should painfully take root from me,
so I can shun you all, bloody and glorious—
wingspan in my periphery.

ode to knots

i wonder if don knots and jim nabors
used to go fishing together,
off camera--
knocking a few back under a familiar dusk sky,
baiting their hooks,
asking each other:
people don’t really think that’s us, do they?

go get pop.

we’d be up catching flies in the kitchen.
late nights when my brother wasn’t michelobing.
i can feel it in the air tonight, o lord.
he was older, so he had the technique down.
he’d sneak up on one, take it, shake it like craps dice,
then slam it off the ripped linoleum.
laughing like harlem folks in the apollo,
we’d wait for another one to come down from the drop ceiling,
panels stained, looking like rorschach tests,
as if some bum lived above,
passing out, spilling his wild i.
anyway…
we’d wait for one to come down,
catch it, wing it,
all night long. all night, all night, all night long.
we goin’ to mambo, carumba, keep the
back door open like u.s. borders that create tejanos,
flies check in, but they don’t…

we had those oscar the grouch trashcans
on the back porch. They were clanging about.
step onto the miniature-golf turf that cloaked the porch floor.
dude, what was that?
lids were off. a ‘possum eating stereotypical trashcan trash—
coffee grinds, eggshells, plantain peels, the like.
turns out the fucker had a skull like jaws from moonraker.
convulsing in the corner, hissing.
i pinned his neck down with the spade my brother produced
inspector gadget style
whilst he pumped pellets into marsupial melon.
15 or so spit from a co2 gun he got for christmas;
mr. opossum was o'possible to off.

all alliteration aside,
we were getting a little nervous with rasputin here.
my brother took over the spade-pinning detail,
go get pop!
i ran up the steps and woke him like revere.
excited ‘possum talk filled his thick ears,
he didn’t say a word, put his soles to that awful red carpet,
walked down deliberately in sagging fruit of the looms,
grabbed the spade from my brother,
beat that ‘possum to stillness with a shovel in his undies,
half asleep, his back hairs like armor.

like this

Sedans compressed like a and b buttons,
uneaten pork chunks lavished with overdone rice,
waiting to be of some use again.
everywhere
there is white rooftop,
winter wonderland, glazed power line,
snot noses run toboggan time tests,
like engineers from deutchland.
more charles schulz than charles schulz.

it looked like this when we
formed to become a voltron spider.
your casket being the thorax.
i was the right, front leg.

Sunday Outside the Newsroom: Brantacide

Smoke II

At this point in my life, I was sneaking smokes. Life was full of promise, and I had made a bunch of promises, to myself and to my girlfriend and my mom and everybody else in my life who didn't smoke. It was time to quit, I was a grownup, there was that time I caught my shirt on fire driving in the mid-summer swelter, blah-de-blah.

I wasn't buying it. I snuck smokes as often as I breathed air. All these people, the targets of my promising behavior, they knew it, but we agreed to keep up the charade, as a team effort, throughout the first couple years after I left college. It wasn't that hard.

I headed into the newspaper on a weekend to dig into some work -- and to slip into the socially welcoming milieu of fellow-smokers. It was a Sunday, when a team of drones sat at a sad batch of Frankenstein-monster Macs and assembled tiny ads in ancient Pagemaker like Buddhist monks. The ad-building folks had ministrations that seemed precise and appealing even though they depressed me. They took a plastic sleeve with the information about the ad, usually dug up an older version from some far-away file-server, altered it slightly, saved and moved on. Their peaceful movements were calming, but it was the endless re-jiggering of the same dozen words and the same dull images in the same tiny box that put me on the edge of weeping. One column by four inches. Two columns by five. Half page. Forever.

I was at one of my desks sniffing through some old files to see if there was any way I could avoid doing reporting that week when I heard a fracas outside. I had come to work to get something done, surely, and to absent-mindedly think about unspooling my current setup over perpetual lies and fear of life getting a proper start sometime in the near future, and to stare at the tiny sliver of alabaster skin above the waistline of an art student who did paste-up on weekends, but I wasn't above an additional distraction.

The newsroom was wedged in a slight grade; on one side you ascended stairs to go out while on the other you walked straight into to the parking lot. I took the stairs two at a time and heard a reporter named Elkins who was a good guy and gave the impression -- false as it turned out -- that he took his job too seriously. He wore cowboy boots before Washington was taken over by Texans. He was yelling at Dean, a gigantic man who drove a Lincoln which made sounds like a dozen empties were rolling in the trunk. There was no way of knowing whether the sounds were anything other than exactly that, because the trunk didn't open anymore.

"...ducks!" Dean was shouting when I arrived.

"They're Canada geese, Dean-man, and they're harmless." Elkins was angular in a country star from the forties way, and had a concave body on which clothes hung like drying laundry. It's possible that he was thin and strong and wiry, but he sometimes conjured the image of a scarecrow with a notebook. I nodded to Elkins and lit a cigarette with an amused grin. He was sitting on a rusty-looking desk chair and I sat on the ground. Dean was next to his car, red-faced and possibly drunk. The decorum which doubtlessly rules most workplaces was absent in this particular bankrupt newsroom, and reporters, especially on weekends, would drink on the job without giving it much thought.

"They're filthy scavengers and they're shitting all over my car." Dean had a point here. The Canada geese who used the nearby man-made pond as some sort of way-station were pretty gross. They walked around eating grass and defecating pretty much wherever they pleased. I hadn't seen anything like this on my car, but I wasn't in the habit of inspecting my vehicle closely. Dean, however, was.

"They're just birds, Dean-man. Give it a break."

"They're too dumb for their own good," Dean continued. He got into his car and said through the open window, "It's time for some natural selection." Elkins momentarily looked at me with wide eyes and then made for the car in a clatter of boots on concrete. Dean had the Lincoln in gear and was moving by the time Elkins reached him. Elkins smacked the trunk of the car and it was gone across the mostly-empty lot toward a batch of geese not doing much of anything.

Dean was right about the geese not being that smart. Elk and I stood there as Dean tore through the geese hitting a half-dozen while a few others looked on. They had no mechanism for responding to this. Nature's thousands of years of selection had perhaps programmed responses in the tiny geese brains to oncoming bobcats and coyotes but the flight-codes had nothing prepared for an onrushing '79 Lincoln. The birds seemed more disturbed by the damaged remains of their former gaggle-mates than the instrument of their destruction. I have to say I was, too.

Life in the newsroom unfolded in ways that surprised you. I was still relatively post-collegiate, and didn't have much experience with relating to actual grownups who had something like lives. Dean was probably the first example of palpable, irritatingly obvious failure I had experienced at that point outside of a few dispiriting professors over the years. Late on a Tuesday night not long before the geese incident, I had experienced some catastrophe or another which would lead to hours more at the paper long past midnight. I sent home the paste-up people and went to get a Coke from a machine in a poorly-lit alcove. Dean surprised me, sitting on the steps in the half-dark. He was still except for shaking hands. He shocked me when he asked if I had any siblings. He told me a story about racing his brother on 29 down to Manassas when they were kids, when Virginia's DC suburbs were an untamed countryside. He looked away and made a snuffling sound, his hands still shaking and red-white. I started to recede from the alcove as I realized that he wasn't really telling me the story as much as repeating it to himself.