what is your relationship to God?

“Can I ask you, what is your relationship to God?”
“Limited,” I say. “Limited with the exception of spontaneous prayer in times of distress.” 
-A.M. Homes, May We Be Forgiven

Hey Guys I Read a Book

“I knew each person's delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.”

Here I am writing another post about a book which begins with a massive flock of passenger pigeons descending on a small town. This world is full of cycles, I notice, as we suffer triple digit heat just before the anniversary of the hottest day of the year last year. On that day, one July 4, 2014, my family moved to the sleepy little burg of Springville, UT and began to take the town by storm. By take the town by storm I mean that we figured out which was our favorite pizza place and have taken advantage of the local library and the local art museum in a way I can only describe as obscene.

On that day our swamp cooler struggled to keep up with the soaring temperatures, and we were forced to huddle, like kittens on an overheating laptop, in the oscillating cone of a fan. We ate hot dogs without buns on that day, which I stubbornly cooked on a grill when simply laying them on the sidewalk would have given them the same effect in much shorter time. Today it was too hot to turn on the oven, so we got the aforementioned pizza and here we huddle. The fan is soothing in its inability to keep us cool. We don't really huddle because sweat is gross, even among families.

Another book about pigeons, and another book of bouncing narrative. One that tells many stories at once, across many generations, and how each generation effects the next in ways both charming and horrifying.

The Plague of Doves is about families, by the way. It's also about passenger pigeons, but to a much, much lesser extent. There are some books that must have metaphors, and I read the whole book and miss them. A part of me vaguely wonders if I didn't give it enough attention and somehow got less from the experience. That part of me generally gets drowned out by the one that wants to read just so many comic books. Louise Erdrich's book works in metaphor so deftly, though, that I couldn't help but put it down at times and puzzle out the way these family's plights weave together.

If I were an english professor, all bitter at my life's failures and attempting to take them out on the next generation of future failures, I would assign this book as a tutorial on how to read literature as more than a story. I would stroll into class late every day, looking rumpled and confused, and lead a discussion among them saying "this. This is how to write a book. I don't know how to write a book or I wouldn't be in this position, but I'm pretty sure if I could do this, I wouldn't be here with you essentially forcing you to watch my slow decline." I would stab at the book with my index finger, both in awe at its construction and in a deep anger, as if my finger is a sword and I can pierce it, drink its blood, and take on its power like the frickin Highlander.

I am but a humble wildlife biologist, however, so I will not deteriorate before your very eyes, but instead return to a dumb blog bright eyed from recent victorious endeavors in the deep (for Utah) forests. Then I will, as I am doing now but writing about in future tense, regale you with what I thought of The Plague of Doves.

Here is what I thought: It's good.

“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.”

Evelina Harp sits at the feet of her Grandfather Mooshum while he tells her stories. She is half Ojibwe, or what we'd commonly call Chippewa, and lives in a small town located within a reservation, but is not part of the reservation.  There are lots of stories. How he met her grandmother, for example, that are charming and lovely. There are other stories that are not. The big one centers around a murder and a subsequent lynching. As the story jumps between narrators and eras, you trace the impacts of that event and many smaller events on Evelina, her family, and her neighbors.

There is a fire and brimstone pastor who survives a lightning strike, a one-armed fiddler, and one of the great revenge stories I've read in recent memory. A bad kid goes good, a good girl goes bad, and pigeons fly up from the outhouse as the privy door is opened. Like life, you know? Every time you open that outhouse door there might be a pigeon flying out of it. You just don't know.

Lipstick

Disclaimer: I wrote this 3 years ago or so for an old blog. It's not about books.

If somehow I'd never heard it, and you gave me a copy of The Cure's Disintegration today and said, "this album affected me profoundly, and even now there's nothing I'd rather listen to if there were just one left on Earth," I'd look at the guy on the cover, say "Is that lipstick?" and then shake my head.

I'd listen to it, sure. Maybe all of the way through, at least once. I'm not sure what it would do to me, though. Listening to it right now it's impossible to separate it from what comes along with it, which is to say every second of every day of years 16-18. What I'm saying is that I understand that the record itself might not mean anything to you, there's probably one that does. And as it plays, I have to admit to myself that yeah, at 32, with so much more experience and a wife and a family, it really is the best. Freaking. Album. Ever.

As I think back, there are probably other CDs I've listened to more. Add it Up, by Violent Femmes, maybe. I can still recite that entire album from start to finish without playing it. Oingo Boingo's Boingo Alive is up there. The self-titled Rage Against the Machine. The Wall. Nothing, though, takes me back to specific moments of my mixed-up teenage years like Disintegration.

I listened to it in the projection booth at the Newgate Movies 4, for example, as I closed up. Cleaning the projectors, covering the film on those massive platters with the big cloth, turning off all the lights in each of the theaters. Driving home at one a.m. on a school night, nobody on the road, "Fascination Street" playing on home stereo speakers spliced into a car stereo that sits loose between the two front seats.

Most of my friends hated my whole 80's catalog (a decade too late), so much of my listenings took place on my own, which is the best way to listen to Disintegration. There's just too much sound going on at once for it to be background sound to a car full of noisy kids who think it's a good idea to shoot plastic disks at passing cars from their parents' minivan with the easily remembered vanity plate. It's for long drives home from dates that you're not sure if they turned out or not, and if they did, is that a good thing? Because if you had fun, it just means you like her more, and as a teenager liking a girl a lot never turned out all that hot.

The clashing, clanging intro "Plainsong" is for playing too loudly in your headphones on that massive discman as you ride in the too-small backseat to your last Scout Camp. Where you'll find out that while you're too old for the knots and the white kids dressed like Native Americans, you will take a backpacking trip and subsequent 200-foot rappel down a rock face that will foreshadow the pursuits of your (so far) adult life.

"The Same Deep Water as You" lasts for nine minutes and nineteen seconds, but feels like an hour. Somehow in a good way. It's the track where at some point you forget that you were listening to anything, and you find yourself in the middle of thinking about something you've never considered before. The soundtrack for a brain that, while being absorbed almost completely with growth and chemistry flowing throughout, is still capable of profound insights that will stick with you forever. Even as you remind yourself constantly how stupid you were the rest of the time.

And then there's the tracks that give Robert Smith his reputation for depressing breakup songs. "Pictures of You" with its line "If only I'd thought of the right words, I could have held on to your heart." And the title track, Disintegration, the perfect song for the kid who fell in love with every girl only to talk himself out of it the time she doesn't say hi back in the hall.

So it's all come back round to breaking apart again

Breaking apart like I'm made up of glass again

Making it up behind my back again

Holding my breath for the fear of sleep again

Holding it up behind my head again

Cut in deep to the heart of the bone again

Round and round and round and it's coming apart again over and over and over

Now that I know that I'm breaking to pieces I'll pull out my heart and I'll feed it to anyone

...It's easier for me to get closer to heaven than ever feel whole again

And even then you know it's too dramatic. You're aware that you have to have a girlfriend first to break up and then wallow in a good breakup song. And to get a girlfriend you're going to have to somehow get past the point where your mom has to offer to pay for it before you ask someone to the Homecoming Dance. And even then someone else is going to ask her for you.

But you do understand that part about not feeling whole, because you're not. Not when you're 16 or 17 or 18.

And yet later on in that timeline, at 21, you'll listen to the album in another dark movie theater with your future wife. She'll tell you years later that she fell in love with you to The Cure. She'll fall asleep with her head on your chest as you listen to it eleven years later and you figure that if music helps make you who you are, and this one helped make you someone that a woman like her would love, at some point you're going to have to call it your favorite ever. Even with that lipstick.