Alaska

It was good to be home. And I really didn’t want to leave.

Alaska in winter has an ambience that induces the right mixture of sleepiness and calm. Doubtless, the darkness lends it this impression, but there seems a general ocular dimness in air and in biology alike—a hazy, dreamy contentedness. Of course, soporific auras don’t occur unless you’re safely inside, away from the below-zero temps. The landscape, minus periods where Chinook winds turn every street into ice skating rinks and thus energizes the air with howling franticness, seems the living vision of every Chirstmasy cliché, the collective imaginative vapors of every Dickensonian holiday narrative deliverer. There’s a reason the town of North Pole, AK, economically revolves around tourists looking for that authentic Yuletide experience.

Anyway, I’ll suspend my tendency to show off with overly poetic sentences and just tell you all what happened.

The first week, I stayed in Anchorage and mostly hung out with my friends Theo, Julie and Mike. I alternately crashed on each one of their couches and at my mother’s place in South Anchorage. The tail-end of the craziest Chinook storms I’d ever seen hit the state soon after I arrived, and it was probably the most damning proof of global warming I’ve witnessed. Theo and Julie and I went on a short run on the Service High trails and the wind was strong enough to literally recline on. Their tarp blew out of their SUV, sucked past everything, blowing amidst snowdrifts to where it finally rested on a fence about a half-mile away. We also went ice-skating on the frozen Westchester Lagoon, and this was probably my first genuine ice-skating attempt since I was eleven. I think the only reason I fell once was because I had been roller-skating with my friend Brian Hudson all summer, which probably improved my sense of balance.

After seeing my mother and other friends, I hitched a ride down to Kenai to visit my dad with my friend Mike, who was meeting up with his fiancée’s family. This was most likely the last time I would spend in my childhood home, since the house is probably going to be sold next summer. Appropriately, I read a theoretical work by Gaston Bachelard called the “Poetics of Space,” along with several other works.  Reading this book enabled me to “live” the theory, as it were, since it emphasized the memory/spatiality connection as a product of everyday phenomenological awareness. I swear, I thought I was the only person who thought about tight corners and other areas as protective carapaces or physical manifestations of the innate desire for shelter, which facilitate memory almost better than any smell.

Anyway, I went out to several restaurants, gobbled all the Alaskan foods I’ve missed, soaked up the cold and effectively recharged, Mr. Freeze style, after living in the dead center of Satan’s sweaty armpit, otherwise known as Norman. I reconnected with old high school friends that I never should have gotten out of contact with, and will be sure to hang out with again when I come back this summer.

When I came back to Anchorage, there was a medical scare with someone very close to me (won’t mention who), which involved EMTs, ambulances and hospitals and other very scary medicinal things that I’d obviously like to forget. Hanging out with Theo, Julie, Mike and Heather enabled me to forget about it all, which I can never repay them for.

I came back with a little taste of home too: moose meat! It’s honestly among the leanest, healthiest meat in the world. My dad and a few buddies bagged a few moose on the Yukon during their annual trip up there, and were kind enough to send me home with some. I’ll need it to churn through this coming semester. 

Also, my cat is very happy I'm back: 

The Trip Home and Bizarre Alaskan Weather

It’s weird how locales seem to change along with the traveling individual and their experiences. You’ve doubtless all heard the expression, “You’ve taken X (earthquakes, rain, clouds, etc) with you” when you travelled to a new place and found that something unforeseen and unexpected to the residents happens soon after your own arrival. These experiences, however, aren’t new to you, and people seem amazed at your jaded placidity.

When I travelled to Oklahoma last year, a spate of earthquakes hit the state. This wasn’t new to me, but it was to everyone else there. The generally apocalyptic weather that this state effortlessly summons seems preternatural and somehow unfair. Like there’s some metaphysical agenda against this pancake land, mocking the attempts of these walking bags of blood and bone to dominate nature by turning their finest architectural achievements into junkyard scraps. It actually helped me theorize the abundant penchant for religiosity in the weather-stricken Bible Belt. Theological abstractions must be conjured in order to persevere, and this particular streak also inserts itself into the ubiquitous football discourse (“Boomer Sooner” actually means “Go God/Jesus/BBQ/ Toby Keith!”).

Anyway. I arrived back in Alaska and it seemed to turn into Oklahoma. It was unseasonably warm, with 80 mph wind gusts that I have literally never seen here. Last week, a friend of a friend told him he saw lightning. Yes. Lightning during an Alaskan snowstorm in December. A truly freak occurrence, even during the summer, let alone dead winter.

I went running in the windy, icy street outside my mother's place yesterday, and felt like I needed Yeti blood just to keep going.

One last note. I seem to have a frustrating knack for meeting incredible, beautiful, intelligent women on flights from one random city I’ll never even be close to and another equally distant from my usual location. This particular knack seems, at once, bittersweet, somewhat cool for its rarity and storybookishness, and also painfully sadistic (lol). I once had a flight from Phoenix to Seattle with someone I connected with on every single level. Mind sparks flew, and we ended up having a two-hour layover after the flight and hung out at the airport. Alas, it ended with email exchanges and all, but we ended up flying two opposite directions and eventually lost touch. This scenario happened again on this most recent flight, and makes me wonder why I can make ephemeral encounters with beautiful, intelligent, professional women of my age in metal tubes five miles above the surface of the earth, but rarely when I’m firmly attached to a small segment of soil I happen to inhabit for long periods of time. Yargh. 

Anyway, it also gives me some reason to be optimistic after feeling particularly nauseous about the whole romantic thing lately.

My Furry Prisoner (aka Animal Companion)

I have a cat named Blaze. I never thought I would own a cat—call me a sucker for the obdurate loyalty of the canine, which trumps almost any ephemeral human connection—yet here I am, and I love the little guy.

He’s a zestful fellow who, in his short year-length span on earth, has managed to see half of North America, albeit flashing by through the window of a car. An ex-girlfriend, who was driving with me from Alaska at the time, owned him. When that didn’t work out, he ended up mine. And he’s a great companion for the secluded scholarly sort, the kind of creature that adores privacy and a good nap. If dogs are perpetually extroverted, the cat is introverted, and scrupulous and practical regarding his selection of companions.  The gateway to a kitty’s heart isn’t a free-for-all. One has to earn it.

Anyway, I’m in a quandary. Blaze used to be an outdoor cat. Due to a pretty bad injury resulting in several teeth marks and a large open wound on his leg from an angry neighborhood dog, I decided to wean him off the great outdoors and keep him inside from here on out. Indoor cats live longer and are less expensive to keep around than an adventurous Zorro-cat seeking nightly duels with other local felines.  Budgets matter when you make 12k a year as a graduate teaching assistant.

However, I’ve since noticed a tad bit of melancholy creeping in. While before he was a blur of furry excitement, he’s become a tad mellower, collapsing lazily on the carpet, watching to see when I’ll go to the kitchen and thus be near enough to his food to beg in the form of inquisitive meows. I’ve bought him several electronic and non-elextronic toys that spin and bounce and squeek and even mimic the movements of actual prey, but he gets bored of them quicker than it took for me to spend my hard-earned money on them. I’ve found him clawing at the posters on my wall, possibly thinking they are avenues for escape.

I catch him gazing longingly to the outdoor awesomefest he once had a daily dose of. A squirrel occasionally comes onto my porch in search of bird seed, and Blaze makes his typical predatory sounds and lion-like movements, but quickly gets discouraged when he realizes his efforts will always be deterred by a thick pane of glass.

It would be different if he had never experienced the outside world. One doesn’t miss what one doesn’t know. But he has, and I cannot avoid the icky feeling that I get when he pines for his outdoor prey-fest…the feeling like I’m a prison guard, keeping my furry inmate from living the life he was meant to.

On the other hand, I also get more icky feelings at the thought of letting him out to kill helpless birds and rodents and whatnot. This is what a cat’s meant to do, yes, but I feel like somehow harnessing the beast within is the most humane approach. Let’s face it: they’re adorable little Ted Bundys, people. I saw a documentary once where some documentarians filmed neighborhood cats National Geographic style. Despite the fact that most of them had full stomachs, they still proceeded to rip the heads off of a few dozen baby chicks the crew had placed in certain locations.

I don’t know what to do. I want him to be happy, and I guess he’d be happier if he weren’t dead and had a nice meal and a warm bed, right?  

Tool and Other Auditory Friends

I was asked recently why Tool is my favorite band. It’s one of those questions you’re almost annoyed to hear because it’s so incredibly painful to explain. It’s like being asked why I think trees and oceans are pretty.

 I should have qualified my previous statement to this person by saying that Tool is usually my favorite band, but I suppose to most straightforward thinkers this wouldn’t make much sense. Either you prefer it above all other possible choices or you don’t, for most people. But I rarely think this way. As an indication, some days I immensely prefer Coldplay to Tool when I feel that surge of inspirational life-energy, usually just after heavy doses of caffeine.

I think most people have dimly lit 90s memories of Tool, of distorted claymation figures zombie-walking about the penumbra of their MTV-charged thoughts to roiling tribal drums and pulsing bass notes. Here’s “Stinkfist,” as a case in point:

 

The vocalist, Maynard James Keenan, sounds alternately angelic and demonic, changing form quickly or slowly—ecliptic or apocalyptic. I suppose I say that Tool is usually my favorite band because it usually corresponds with my mood. Contrary to popular thought, Tool does not dwell in negativity. Rather, it appeals to highly sensitive people (like muah) who get the thought sniffles when they observed the tragic world around them. In this regard they’re often read analogously to Friedrich Nietzsche, one of my favorite philosophers, in that those with short attention spans often mistakenly accuse them of celebrating nihilism, like the inept, ferret-bearing German dudes from The Big Lebowski. 

Maybe people think he’s filled with despair because young Nietzsche looks kinda like Viggo from Ghostbusters 2? It looks like his flesh can barely contain the intensity in his skull. Which is why his eyeballs protrude so much.

 

Music for me has always been about emotional movement –the oceanic rumble of the drums to the predatory bird-screech of strings. But it’s always in some kind of confined space, and it summons a kind of landscape as a result, which, if you pay attention long enough, is actually far from still. Animals move, wind bends the trees, snow coats trees at odd angles. Each visual space has a musical movement of its own, and I seem to summon a unique soundtrack for every piece of scenery I look at. This is probably because I’m naturally visual or because my generation has been programmed to dutifully translate all emotions into cinematic landscapes so we’re more susceptible to commodity fetishism. Either way, visual poetry bubbles about my brain when music hits my ears, like a very distorted, creepier version of a Terence Malick film.

Tool for me will always be an Alaskan landscape during dead winter, the time of year when the sun begins setting absurdly early—3:30 or 4 in the afternoon. As the light dims and the world’s eye slowly crumbles into the dark, snowy sleepiness, I can’t help but think the auditory equivalent would be an overactive and rhythmic primal heartbeat, some symbol of brutal interconnectedness like the irony smell present in the blood of almost everything, the kind of thing that would could, alternately, evoke the loving tenderness of a wolf mother sheltering its cub from the cold or the hungry grizzly breaking the neck of a moose calf and dragging it screaming into the woods. The brutality and the tenderness of nature awakened with one scene or one strong piece of music. That’s Tool to me, and I suppose it explains a lot about the way I am. I appreciate the people and artists who can stare into the abyss but always come back and find the positive in what they saw—how they can learn and grow just as much from tragedy as they do from seeing symbiosis and kindness.

They aren’t afraid to feel, in other words, everything there IS to feel.

First Tornado Experience

As an Alaskan, the only natural disasters I’m familiar with and know how to prepare for are earthquakes. Since moving to Oklahoma for a doctoral program, however, I’ve become fascinated by these gargantuan wind tubes that droop out of the sky like demented elephant trunks and make our best-built structures look like sand castles.  Otherwise known as tornadoes.

They’re also, oddly, the only natural disaster that also doubles as a kind of tourist attraction. 

                                                  

                                Look Mommy! It likes me! Can we feed it some trailers? 

 

People come to tornado alley and follow storm chasers just for the chance to get a picture with one. I’ve tried to distance myself from the spectacle as much as possible by watching as many scary National Geographic documentaries on the things as possible, but, alas, tornadoes still fascinate and scare me at the same time. And everyone else, it seems.

The fear that these things generate has almost become commodified. It comes in prepackaged “Tornado events,” where it seems every news station around here turns momentarily into Fox News and scares us shitless so we’re motivated enough to get off the couch and go into the basement.

At the same time, a crapload of insane images appear on the TV, daring us not to watch: Power lines floating above storm chasers (who listen to Prodigy while cruising toward debris-churning sky blobs), sturdy houses disintegrating into bits, dead livestock being carried and then dumped piece-by-piece in a field miles later. I almost feel guilty for watching, almost like it’s torture porn. I wanted to sing a phrase from one of my favorite Tool songs: “Vicariously I live while the world dies.”

Anyway, the media and the images and the creepy NOAA weather station voice, which sounds like one of those grunting action movie trailer dudes (Action. Excitement. But it isn’t coming soon to a theater near you, Cleveland County. Get the fuck to shelter.) all impelled me to start freaking out a little. While talking to my dad in Alaska, who was watching the whole thing on CNN, I decided that staying in my shitty apartment complex was a bad idea. I thought that if I can clearly hear my neighbor’s conversations and slap-tastic sexual adventures, there’s no way a tornado wouldn’t make confetti out of this place. I drove to campus, because I kept hearing rumors that, apparently, the OU campus has never been hit directly by a tornado. It also has several strong buildings with basements.

As I drove, the sirens began going off. Since these are tested every Saturday at noon, this is normally just annoying background noise, like a mondo vacuum cleaner in the distance. But since the radio and the weather anchors promised all-holy-hell would rain down on our heads from a vengeful wind god (Aeolus?), it took on a robotic, bomb-raid kind of screeching urgency. I churned toward campus and wondered why there were serene Okies sauntering about on the sidewalks. Weren’t they aware of the imminent windpocalypse?

When I got to campus, many others were already huddled on the bottom floors of the library, crowded against the walls, saucer-eyes glued to laptop screens. Some undergrads looked amused, like there was some secret joke we weren’t in on, while the older folks wore faces of protective concern, guiding their dogs about on leashes, herding their offspring to sheltered corners. I found a little corner and squatted there with my friends Jarrod and Rachel, and we all took to the internet, trying to get updates.

I made the mistake of opening the NewsOK.com live severe weather chat function (also used for sporting events!) and freaking everyone else out with random people’s reports from across the state. “Huge tornado headed toward OU!” One dude reported. “An EF5 reported near OKC!” Another exclaimed. Of course, this was exaggerated bullshit, but when you’re in a near panic mode due to the overhyped television coverage, you’re likely to believe concrete blocks were raining out of the sky.

Of course, all of our minds were also on Joplin. Ultimately, a lot of property was destroyed in the state and ten lives were lost, but the single tornado that came close to Norman roped out just before the National Weather Center and just spewed debris on the city:

So...phew. I would still prefer to deal with these things rather than earthquakes though.