Trying to find a job in a city where you don’t know anyone is also a challenge. Going to group interviews where you vie for 1 job with 8 other candidates in front of a panel of interviewers feels something like launching into a mosh pit; you just hope you come out with fewer broken bones than the other guy.

The weather has been great though, I’m climbing again, I get to see my girl everyday, and I just bought a physical CD for the first time in who knows how long. “Futures” by Jimmy Eat World for $1. Saw Bryan play Doug Fir, hung with my brother, went for coffee with Jordan. My friend Tyler is looking for a new job too. The other day he told me, “It’s going to be okay. No, wait… it is okay.”

I cannot claim anything like a comprehensive knowledge of the details surrounding the infamous 1993 triple murder of three 8-year-old boys from West Memphis, Arkansas, whose bodies were found dead and partially mutilated in a drainage ditch in the Robin Hood Hills. I first learned of the crime after hearing “Free the Three,” a stridently opinionated song by the hardcore band Zao.

The song’s title is a reference to the three men eventually convicted of having committed the murders as part of a Satanic ritual; Damien Echols, Jesse Misskelley Jr., and Jason Baldwin, who came to be known as The West Memphis Three. The chorus features vocalist Dan Weyandt repeating the phrase, “You lie, you lie, you lie and they pay.” Not too objective, but visceral and compelling.

Echols was condemned to die for the crime, and Misskelley and Baldwin received life sentences, despite serious allegations of a mishandled investigation, limited forensic evidence, and a jury foreman apparently hell-bent to convict. Certain members of the victims’ families subsequently came to doubt the guilt of the men serving time for their sons’ murders.

Today, in a surprising and emotional reversal, the West Memphis Three were released from prison. It is difficult for me to imagine a more hopeless scenario than being wrongly imprisoned and sentenced to a death for a crime one did not commit. I wonder how Dan Weyandt feels today.

I’ve followed Mr. Rember’s column on writing, which he produces from his home in Idaho’s Sawtooth Valley, for a few months now. The following excerpt, from an autobiographical essay by Mr. Rember is indicative of the mixture of hilarious candor and self-described aprés moi le deluge cynicism he employs to such withering effect. The man’s writing is compelling, bracing, and more than a little bit sad.

A few years ago I started writing a monthly column for a paper in Ketchum, Idaho. For some time I’ve been an après moi le deluge kind of guy, although for me the deluge wasn’t nuclear, biological, or chemical. I just thought, based on my teaching experience, that secondary education was getting worse and worse in this country, and that a tsunami of over-enthusiastic mouthbreathers — eruptus adenoidae erectus in the literature — was going to make it impossible for civilization to function. More and more it looked like morons were the only people running things, mostly because they were the only people with simple enough world-views to want to.

I made jokes. “I’m in favor of marauding hoards,” I said. “Let the food, gold, and ammo come to us.”

The folks at The Other Journal were good enough to publish my thoughts on Terrence Malick’s latest film, the much publicized “Tree of Life.” I’m flattered. Apparently mine is the first of a three part series. I’m curious as to whether the ensuing two pieces will take me to task. I’m way out in the minority with my opinion of the film.

If you never got a chance to examine the film’s companion website, click the image above.

In addition to facilitating all of this good the WWW has also been a harbinger of much that is insidious. Of course, as an inanimate network the internet itself cannot be held culpable for the abuses and changes it has wrought on our social and geopolitical landscapes, most of which are the result of good old-fashioned choices.

One of the most egregious examples of these is that way in which the web has delivered to us the opportunity to rob ourselves of the intoxicating pleasures of mystery.

If you attended rock and roll shows with any regularity before the turn of the millennium you’ll recall the experience of showing up to see a band you loved and not being sure what they would look like. You might have seen a few images of them in liner note photographs, perhaps the occasional poster or magazine profile. But even album-specific promotional shots were often dated by the time the band went on tour.

I can still vividly recall the first time I saw the heavy metal band Zao play a concert after singer Dan Weyandt had rejoined the group. It’d been a couple years since the band had released their devastating Liberate Te Ex Inferis LP. When that album came out Weyandt had still been in his rockabilly greaser phase—hair tightly pomped, biceps rippling beneath vintage cowboy shirts. Drummer Jesse Smith had been experimenting with an androgynous look that featured nail polish, eye shadow, and a penchant for hydrogen peroxide.

When they finally came out on the stage at Slim’s that night to set up their equipment I saw that Dan had new neck tattoos and was growing his hair out. He was already several hard miles down the road of his transformation from harrowingly beautiful 19 year-old punk rock icon with porcelain skin into the haggard, zombie-obsessed patron saint of heavy metal burnouts that he would become. The trucking company t-shirt he wore did nothing to conceal his growing paunch. Jesse, for his part, appeared sporting an ungelled mohawk, worn cowboy boots, and jeans that laced up at the crotch.

I’ll never forget the sound of some other fan screaming in delirious excitement as Weyandt appeared onstage to help move an amplifier or two.

“Fuck yeah! Fuck yeah! Dan! Yeah! I drove from Missouri for this!”

We were in San Francisco.

Nowadays our sense of anticipation is easily lost. It’s not difficult to burst the fragile zeppelin of suspense when one can stand at the bar ten minutes before the show and scroll through dozens of photographs and videos of an artist’s performance from the previous night of the tour. That cool backdrop they made especially for this tour? The light show? The choreographed dance moves? You’ll see it all coming. We’ve reached a situation in which instant gratification is the norm, and the pleasure of having things revealed gradually or even in a blaze of unexpected glory (like that time the guy from The Darkness surprised everybody by appearing for his penultimate guitar solo riding atop an animatronic tiger) is in danger of being lost.

Given my own capacity to dilute the thrill of anticipation, I’ve come to actually respect those artists who don’t update their websites with regularity. They heighten my sense of pleasure while delivering me from my own lack of self control. If it was up to my most impulsive self I’d know everything there was to know about an album, a tour, an artist’s most recent meal, at a moment’s notice.

But wait a minute, that sounds familiar. Many artists gleefully manipulate the joystick of their romping publicity machines with cavalier disregard for their own privacy, let alone the capacity or appetite of their audience to take in (or care about) the amount of information they’re being given. Madonna used to reinvent herself once an album cycle. Lady Gaga reinvents herself every day, sometimes more than once.

I once walked into a restaurant venue for dinner and ended up sticking around for a show headlined by a band called Six Organs of Admittance on nothing but a whim and the strength of my waiter’s recommendation. I’d never heard of them. Them turned out to be him, a guy named Ben Chasny who, along with a drummer and a third fellow who could be vaguely described as a “sound manipulator” proceeded to rip through one of the most primal sets I’d ever witnessed, incendiary and tender in equal measure.

Since that night I’ve been intrigued by Chasny but haven’t been able to learn much about him. He doesn’t update his website much. He’ll go weeks or months without touching the thing. His bio is outdated, he doesn’t have current pictures, he doesn’t always post his tour dates.

I was speaking with a fashion designer several months ago about the pressure she felt to connect with her prospective audience, to manipulate Twitter, Facebook, and a video blog, all toward the end of staying present in the consciousness of potential consumers. Chasny seems to have ignored that pressure. He refuses to accept the mantle of the new norm, in which you’re expected to fight to keep yourself in the spotlight of a culture afflicted with terminal ADHD.

It’s the same principle at work in a song with a chorus you absolutely love but which only occurs once or twice. You have to wait for it, yearn for it. At least, as Arcade Fire points out, “we used to wait for it.” We used to have to. The radio wouldn’t let us pause or go back, and resetting the needle on our record player or rewinding the cassette was too much of a hassle. Now we just click our mouse or tap a key and we’re back at the chorus.

When Willy Wonka uttered the words from which this essay takes its title, however firmly his tongue may have been planted in his cheek, he revealed author Roald Dahl’s understanding of the danger we face in sacrificing the pleasures of mystery on the twin altars of immediacy and the illusion of the possibility of absolute knowledge. Will the hero get the girl? Will my favorite guitarist show up onstage with an incredible new rig? Will my night out be a huge success or a total failure? I could look up every frickin’ bartender in the city on Yelp and try to hedge my bets, or I could take a chance on a restaurant, a band, a book, a movie… hell, even a person.

My friend Dan is a tattoo artist. At one point during a long conversation we had a few months ago he described his desire for people to be able to come into his shop and have something of a magical experience.

“Tattoo shops always had a showmanship aspect. When I was first getting tattooed it was a little bit of a magic show also. And I liked that about it. I hope that whatever tattoo shop I work in doesn’t lose that. I hope I don’t lose that. Mike Malone, who’s a really famous tattooer in the United States, said, ‘We all come from the carnival.’ And I like that. I want it to feel kind of fun, like the tattoo shop is outside of any other place you’re going to go to. You’re not going to go to any other store and hear the people talk like that. It’s still kind of a free zone hopefully, and kind of a magic place for people still. I know it’s hard, like we talked about before, how the cat’s out of the bag; anyone can go on the internet and find out anything they want to know about tattooing. All the explanations for all the magic are out there. But hopefully for some people it’ll still have a little of that magical, cool experience.”

The next time I ask you a question which will surely be answered if I just wait a little, just have a little patience… please, don’t tell me. I don’t really want to know.

“The ultimate goal of technology,” Franzen says, “the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.”

He goes on to deliver an indictment of the ways in which our obsession with personal technologies and “social” media feeds and enables a staggering narcissism. The reality he laments is instantly recognizable to anyone living in 21st century America. We are hounded by a constant temptation to check our devices, turn on our screens, and generally tend to our own business at the drop of a hat regardless of the circumstances or company we find ourselves in. Any day now we’ll hear of some groom Tweeting about his vows from the altar. Actually, we’ll probably see a photo of that moment captured on the best man’s smartphone.

To drive this point home, try having a conversation with someone who is actively reading a book. You’ll very quickly feel one of three things; their annoyance, their disconnection (they’ll ignore you), or you’ll find them setting the book down and turning to face you. It’s impossible to be simultaneously invested in both reading and conversing and be doing either well. And yet the social norm is listing more and more towards a place where it’s acceptable for people to perform any manner of tasks and activities on their phones or computers while supposedly spending meaningful time with other people.

Corporations and consumer culture couch the invitation to buy or utilize their products in the language of “connection,” when in fact we are being lured into a state of profound disconnection. Tellingly, we don’t see the dangers of overstimulation, the bleeding of our privacy, or the temptation to narcissism as such. No, we see them as our rights. We feel entitled to be plugged in; to both acquiesce to and indulge in a system that includes what author John Freeman has labeled “the tyranny of e-mail.”

The perversion of the verb “to like” is one of the most compelling lenses through which Franzen examines the perfect storm whipped up between the forces of consumer culture on one side and narcissism on the other. “Liking” becomes a replacement for loving when we only “like” those people or things that are either predisposed to like us in return or who do not have the capacity to reject us. We seek through our technologies, he ultimately asserts, the means with which to escape the pain of facing the reality that we, along with everyone we love, must suffer and one day die.

What does it cost us to remain present in each moment? To not send a text, scroll through iTunes, or fondle our mobile devices for the duration of even a fifteen minute face-to-face conversation with another person? The answer is that remaining present will require bearing the joy, sadness, and sometimes the hunger for love of another human being. We’re ambivalent about connecting to other people. We’re ambivalent about looking at ourselves in the mirror, for fear of what we will or will not find.

I was recently at drinks with a friend and was in the middle of telling a story when his phone buzzed. He immediately picked it up and started typing out a response to the text he’d just received. I stopped speaking, waiting for him to finish. Suddenly self-conscious, he said, “Keep going, this is time sensitive. I just have to respond to XXXX.” I didn’t keep going, though. He looked up at me again after a few seconds of silence, then set the phone down, visibly annoyed. I continued with my story. I didn’t apologize for his discomfort. I don’t think I needed to.

Daisy dukes, bikinis on top
Sun-kissed skin, we’re so hot
We’ll melt your popsicle.

They may like their newspapers British, but Canadian teens (or their band directors) apparently have no problem importing American pop music. The band that was playing Katy Perry was a separate entity from the group I’d seen the day before, from a different school, blasting Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” from the steps of the Victorian Parliament Building.

The whole thing made me think of my cousin Randy who is a music teacher and high school band director in Ohio. The West Coast doesn’t have the same love for strutting drum majors that the Midwest does, let alone Ohio itself, home of The Best Damn Band In The Land. Randy, wherever this Sunday morning finds you, I’m thinking of you, sending out the sousaphone player of my heart to dot the “i” in our own script Ohio.

^^^^^^

I recently finished reading Barry Lopez’s seminal work, Arctic Dreams. The book is like a meal; lovingly prepared, hearty, something to linger over. In one of numerous incandescent passages Lopez describes the return to England in 1820 of Lieutenant William Parry and the crew of HMS Hecla from a long Arctic voyage. Parry disembarked at Peterhead and took a carriage to London, carrying with him all of the journals, maps and records gathered on their trip. In light of the separation of these written records from the rest of the crew, not all of whom could even read let alone write, Lopez reflects on the egalitarian distribution of experience—profound beauty and profound suffering—amongst Parry and his men.

I could only think what exquisite moments these must have been. Inescapable hardship transcended by a desire for spiritual elevation, or the desire to understand, to comprehend what lay in darkness. I thought of some of the men at Winter Harbor with Parry. What dreams there must have been that were never written down, that did not make that journey south with Parry in the coach, but remained in the heart. The kind of dreams that give a whole life its bearing, what a person intends it should be, having seen those coasts.

The sailors under Parry’s command were men who, for all their lack of formal education, were just as capable of receiving inspiration from their experience of the foreign creatures, vast moonscapes, and strange stars of the polar regions as were the most esteemed of the Royal Scientists and high-ranking officers accompanying them. Lacking the language or opportunity to articulate those experiences, to transcribe them for future generations, did nothing to lessen the impact of what they had seen and undergone.

I have returned to this passage often as I’ve contemplated what it means to be a writer. To be a writer is to be one who bears witness to one’s own story and experience as well as to the experiences and stories of others. In bearing witness to my own life I have found that there are times when language fails. There are places beyond the ability of language to describe, moments when what is required merges seamlessly with what is possible—moments in which we need only, and in fact can only, be.

I feel compelled, ironically, to attempt a description of such a moment. Sitting alone on my bed on a recent afternoon I felt the touch of the breeze on my skin as it moved through the open window, and observed the play of dusky light across the driveway just outside. I was filled with strong emotion and a sense of the transitory nature of my own life. How many things end quickly or too soon. How nothing lasts forever and that this moment too was already passing. In that moment time was meaningless; all I had was the present, the beauty and sadness it offered me.

You weren’t there with me on my bed and you’ll never know just how I felt, just as I’ll never know what it meant to stand in the light of an unending day and watch plovers wheel in the sky above the Greenland ice cap two hundred years ago. It’s alright. I have come to believe that part of living well in this world correlates not so much to our ability to comprehend and pin down the fluttering moths of our thoughts and experiences with words, but rather to our ability to receive the simplest of blessings with gratitude and in turn bestow those blessings on others. It is an ability in which our growth and skill are themselves a reflection of grace.

What then of my aspiration as a writer; to chronicle, to parse, to hew down to the essence of things? I affirm it as a good desire. The call to bear witness is a call to be heeded and blessed. Yet every person is an island, sheltering in his or her soul some virgin tract which by virtue of its very nature can never be accessed by anyone else. This is not to say that we cannot understand what it is to suffer, to love, to desire, to be in anguish. We can—the ability to share in the sufferings and joys of another is what makes compassion, friendship, relationship and love meaningful. But we can never be fully known by another, save perhaps God.

I am almost surprised to find that this reality engenders in me not primarily a sense of loneliness, but rather wonder, even while begging a question as to what we, as people, are for. Perhaps the point of life is in one real sense simply to be present. We don’t have to record everything for posterity. We can’t. At some point the continent of language ends and we push out onto the water of experience, the water of grace, where we live and move and have our being.

After having a conversation just yesterday in which I described a bunch of my old record reviews as “awful,” I think need some of this medicine.

^^^

“In life, you’re given three options (how generous of life):

1. Never write down a single word

2. Write things down, see goodness

3. Write things down, feel shame

These options are not exclusive to each other.”