Brining & the Art of Unplugging

Ever since I waded into the ever-deepening smartphone pool (this February)...unplugging has been tougher and tougher. One morning tradition that I have been able to keep this entire year is not checking my work e-mail & not using a computer before I get to work; in the mornings, I rise, do some body weight exercises, cook & eat breakfast, and read print (usually the New Yorker; sometimes a book).

I feel like this keeps me mentally balanced–not to mention, for a person who writes at work, starting your day with the best writing around helps me begin the day on the right foot. Er...left hand. I get to focus on the occasional stirring of a sticky pot of steel cut oats, sprinkling cranberries in before it's done, slathering a messy pat of butter on toast–and then not worrying about my greasy fingers while I turn pages printed on the same pulp we've been holding for centuries.

Tonight, we unplugged a bit, and had a rare family dinner with my brothers, all of whom now live in the city for the first time in 10 years. My older brother had brined a chicken, and we sat around the table eating it and homemade pasta, root vegetables and red table wine, licking fingers and passing the decanter, with the TV off and phones (mostly) to the side.

The chicken-skin, salt-soaked and crackly, shone on top of the bird. Brining takes time, preparation, and two basic elements of the earth, a past art that no one should have an excuse not to know about; I suspect it'll be around long after us & our scourge of smartphones have passed to some other part of the cosmos. And yet, I had neither brined, nor tasted a brined bird. Which I now recognize was 28-plus years of foolishness.

Table dinners were a staple of my youth, but now I feel as though they're a special occasion. I'd like to carve more time out like my mornings–I've thought of declaring one night a week a "writing night", where I can hole up somewhere with a blanket, or beer, and get some words down without being buzzed by a monitor, phone, screen...

Three unplugging goals:

1. Weekday mornings.
2. One night a week–writing.
3. Table dinner–once a week.

(Part of SmallBox's ThinkKit project.)

north out of the city

went to an incredibly pointless "webinar". lost some (hopefully impertinent) parts of my soul, and bulldozed some possible mental real estate. on the plus side, i had some free-writing time whilst speakerphone voices droned & duelled (and called james madison "jimmy madison").

(unedited, unrevised; much gratitude if you read till the end)


North out of the City

In my small, grey, steel car
I sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic,
watching bulldozers scoop maw-fuls
of gravel, shove it into a mound
that does not grow. Detritus rolls
in-between lanes like marbles, resting
in the narrow, brown, spit of a median.

It is the first real day of Spring,
not "Calendar Spring"--
but waking up to birds, shrugging off
your jacket in the first sign of
bright, dew-heavy warmth--and yet
my windows are down.
I'm sucking in exhaust and not even
a tree pierces my sightline of
salt-stained sedans,
overpasses tangled like veins.
The light changes briefly,
bulldozer belches into reverse,
and I slough forward with
less momentum than the gravel
still trickling off the pile.

Fuzzed-out Nigerian 60s funk,
crate-dug from moldy warehouses,
or packed and forgotten in cobwebbed rooms,
property of forgotten uncles, deceased cousins,
older brothers distant and unknown.
The guitars are fractured, sear through
shorted-out speakers. They cut swaths
out my window, above the morass of
muted humanity and chattering machines.
Drums mingle with woodblocks, metallic plinks,
clanks beaten out on spent carburetors,
tire rims, rusted oil-barrels, naked hands,
a flagellating polyrhythm of skin, steel, wood;
woven in sweat.
Voices rise and join, chanting too loud
for the cheap, overseas Sears microphone to handle.
They distort and wrap around each other.
Organs burble and levitate, wobbly till
they cascade back, swallowed by beat.

The light blinks again and I finally move.
A breeze begins, pushing the faint bead
of perspiration back into my brow.
The stereo sends lost shards of art back
into the atmosphere; lone waves
made by men who also rode in cars--
cars that tumbled down mountainsides,
were overtaken by insurrections and captured.
Worse, shot on sight, branded as heretics or
targeted by the terrible solemnity of chance.
Forgotten men existing only in forgotten,
warped grooves, box-bound under leaky roofs.
Ahead, the asphalt lies flat and straight.