As my coffee table and I aren't having the greatest year in keeping up with The New Yorker (every week, Remnick? haven't you heard of the Internet destroying publishing revenues?), I'm clearing my mind today before reading the self-debated "20 Under 40" summer fiction issue.

First, I've just finished reading the short-story collection Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me, the birthday gift from my brother that pretty much makes up for the time when we were kids and he gave me a crossword puzzle book when he was the one who loved crossword puzzles. Rob, consider all the crosswords forgiven.

Here is my favorite passage from that book that isn't totally obscene or the last essay in the book, as I try to stay away from quoting endings. It's from Will Forte's "Beware of Math Tutors who Ride Motorcycles."

… As we got off the phone, I wondered about Steve. Was he some tattooed clubber guy? Was he on a collegiate sports team? Would a representative for a modeling agency approach him on the street and give him their card?

I walked back to the van and, in a jealous mini-rage, slammed the door hard enough to provoke a "Trouble in paradise?" comment from one of the ski teamers. Could be, ski teamer, I thought to myself. Could be.

That night, I slyly asked Michelle all about Steve. I didn't like what I heard. Apparently, Steve was a blond-haired, blue-eyed surfer. He was nice, smart and funny. But nothing scared me more than the information I found out next: Steve played bass for a popular campus band called the Brewmasters. Oh, great, a fucking musician. When pressed, Michelle admitted that she found Steve attractive, but claimed she didn't think of him in "that way." As I went on with my questions, Michelle became annoyed. Didn't I believe her? They were just friends. Steve was helping her with her studies. If anything, he should be thanked — I mean, the more solid grasp she had on her math theorems, the quicker she could do future math theorem homework, and the quick she could meet me for romantic date nights at local taco establishments.

Next, I watched Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears play Get Yo Shit.

Remnick, I'm ready. Right after breakfast. And more procrastinating.

As you know, Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium has entranced me this year. The first essay was "Lightness," and Calvino sought balance between capturing difficult reality and his dreamlike aspirations. The next, "Quickness," explored narrative aerodynamics. Both essays spoke near-directly to my life in the weeks I read them.

In the third essay, "Exactitude," I didn't expect to connect as deeply as with the first two. "Exactitude" was such an anal-retentive word, and a glance at my apartment shouted the opposite. This guess was wrong, of course. While I didn't connect as personally, the depth was there.

Speaking to the topic, Calvino didn't act as a friend. He was a ride. I imagined the space elevator. He telescoped in and out. Exactitude, to him, was a dichotomy in writing. Did a writer use the primacy of words to find form in the world? Or did a writer use the primacy of the world to inspire words to catch up? For as much as a writer could measure actions to try and capture the infinite, the writer could also describe the seemingly finite to an infinite extent. Zooming out, zooming in.

Exactitude, for Calvino, began with precision but lived on exploration.

He raised a metaphor of a crystal and a flame. A crystal appeared to be a rigidly structured object but was only as such because of its life inside. A flame seemed to be wild and uncontrollable but was only as such because of its steady, mathematical, thermodynamic engine.

Putting aside some beautiful extended quotes Calvino used (among them, a meditation on how we observe indirect sun and moonlight), this was the first of two favorite "Exactitude" passages for me:

The fact is, my writing has always found itself facing two divergent paths that correspond to two different types of knowledge. One path goes into the mental space of bodiless rationality, where one may trace lines that converge, projections, abstract forms, vectors of force. The other path goes through a space crammed with objects and attempts to create a verbal equivalent of that space by filling the page with words, involving a most careful, painstaking effort to adapt what is written to what is not written, to the sum of what is sayable and not sayable. These are two different drives toward exactitude that will never attain complete fulfillment, one because "natural" languages always say something more than formalized languages can — natural languages always involve a certain amount of noise that impinges upon the essentiality of the information — and the other because, in representing the density and continuity of the world around us, language is revealed as defective and fragmentary, always saying something less with respect to the sum of what can be experienced.

Here was the second, again dueling with descriptive dichotomy:

There are those who hold that the word is the way of attaining the substance of the world, the final, unique, and absolute substance. Rather than representing the substance, the word identifies itself with it (so that it is wrong to call the word merely a means to an end): there is the word that knows only itself, and no other knowledge of the world is possible. There are others who regard the use of the word as an unceasing pursuit of things, an approach not to their substance but to their infinite variety, touching on their inexhaustibly multiform surface. As Hoffmannsthal said: "Depth is hidden. Where? On the surface." And Wittgenstein went even further than this: "For what is hidden … is of no interest to us."

I would not be so drastic. I think we are always searching for something hidden or merely potential or hypothetical, following its traces whenever they appear on the surface. I think our basic mental processes have come down to us through every period of history, ever since the times of our Paleolithic forefathers, who were hunters and gatherers. The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.

A week after reading, I love that image. I sit here at the beach, wondering when to be the crystal and when to be the flame.

Yes, Strasburg didn't make All-Star. But consider how far we've come.

Opening Day Nats program, at the fam's house as we beach-prepped:

The first came in a nap during a weekend rainstorm. The next four paired up in twos, on weeknights. Dream, wake, fall back asleep, dream. The fifth was an old dream but one I'd forgotten and never blogged. The sixth was early today, technically my first day in years of being employed by nobody.

JUNE 6 — I worked alone in a plain white room. I sat at a wide folding table with probably my laptop or a notepad in front of me, but I wasn't sure because I had my hands over my eyes, thinking. A door opened in front of me and to the right. An editor stood at the door and began to update me on a mess of projects. I tried to lower my hands and arms, and the light in the room blinded me. I tried to squint and failed. Arms still covering my face, I apologized, embarrassed. The editor paid it no mind and kept talking. The worst part of the dream was I hadn't heard of anything he was talking about. Blind, I couldn't begin to respond.

JUNE 8 — A top executive talks to me with his arms folded. We're on a high floor of an office tower. He leans against a glass wall overlooking an interior courtyard. A window swings open in the wall. The executive moves his arms a little; but he falls backward over the side, saying, "I always knew this would happen to a nice guy like me." I yell and run to find someone. An office admin makes a call and finds the executive had ordered the interior courtyard cleared that night. I see another of the top executives. She's broken up over the news. We hug. I see a boss of mine and try to explain how it's the worst thing I've ever seen. He says he knows but needs to talk to me about a different work matter.

JUNE 8 — That dream was immediately followed by a dream where, using the work travel system, I was going to New England and flexible on my travel dates. The system then booked me on a trip to Paris and London on the Concorde, for just $900 total. My mother or someone else looked at the itinerary and said the price sounded about right.

JUNE 9 — I drove around a mountain town in a RV with friends and a colleague. I sincerely wish I could remember more of this dream.

JUNE 9 — A security guard sees a colleague stumble into the office, flip out and begin shooting. On video screens, I see different scenes of the incident occurring, become upset, and take off down a hallway to help.

JUNE 25 — At my farewell, a colleague reminds me of a work dream I had several years ago and told to him. In the dream, my editor didn't want me on a certain project, so he had a jungle tiger attack me.

JULY 5 — In the dream, USAT held an all-hands meeting, and bosses named me the CEO of the Florida Power utility. The news surprised all, myself included. I didn't know USAT even owned a power company! The meeting let out. I leafed through a folder about Florida Power (with its 300,000 customers), answered confused questions from friends and wondered what the CEO of a large electric company did. I visited the utility's website and found the employees already up in arms over the move. The homepage included a picture of me in a tie, with a diagonal red line over the photo. The picture linked to their letter of protest.

Then I woke up. Rising, I found the utility's official name was Florida Power & Light Company. It had 4.5 million customers, and I was not the CEO. At breakfast, my dad told me his father, who was a banker, often visited the corporation with the other financial analysts, and my grandmother always enjoyed coming with to a Boca Raton resort. So, it had that going for it.

Bring on the crazy NPR dreams, I say. But let's enjoy the beach first?

The first question every one of the cousins asked yesterday was "Did you have to wear a helmet?" And, yes. We did have to wear helmets.

They were required, and helmet speed was exactly how fast we were driving in our high-speed, beyond-the-airport go-karts. Bookending a week that began with a LivingSocial deal for shooting guns, the week ended with a LivingSocial deal for driving these high-speed go-karts.

I'd approached a number of potential drivers with this kart possibility. Alison was the only one who immediately said, yes, let us drive these high-speed go-karts. In fact, she had already been to the facility. Not willing to accept go-kart mediocrity, this was exactly who and what I was looking for. So, prior to Marah rocking Arlington, we raced to outer Dulles, raced in the fun small cars and then charged back to the city.

We did have to wear helmets. And racing suits. And gloves. And head socks under the helmets. Beforehand, there were safety forms and a room with a safety video. On the track, there were three attendants, electronic race times, flags that included black, and the most powerful go-karts I've ever ridden. They had more than lawnmower engines.

The speed and slick track was like nothing I'd ever felt in a kart.

I looked like a dummy in my suit (pictured below); I knew as much. It (the suit) made me feel like Buddy Hackett in Herbie's Love Bug or Don Knotts in Herbie Goes Monte Carlo. I apparently wasn't man enough to feel like Dean Jones. Until I got behind the wheel. Alison and I didn't put up times like the racers after us, whom I captured in the YouTube below. They nailed the roar into the corner and the subsequent power slide. But when we did open up the engines in the turns, accidentally or briefly on purpose, what a ride. It was easy to see why this track had memberships and formal races. Had I grown up near here instead of near Little League fields, my life might have turned out differently.

Quote of the race from Alison: "No pictures. You're not going to put me on your blog in this purple suit." Well played and well raced. Vroom…

This morning's read on the porch, the couch and at last the hot sand was the recently received You're a Horrible Person, But I Like You: The Believer Book of Advice. Readers wrote advice letters, and comedians answered them. That kind of read made for a decent morning. As did getting smacked across beard and body with strong, warm waves.

My favorite letter? One of Michael Cera's.

Dear Michael:

Do you think turtles tell jokes? It seems like they could be really funny.

Rilo
Akron, OH

Dear Rilo:

I think that turtles definitely do not tell jokes. They could still be funny I think, but it would be purely based on their appearance and the way that they move really slowly. But if we scrutinize further, we find that the humor ends there, and the sadness of the turtle's existence washes away all the jokes, culminating as the ultimate truth of the animal.

Michael

Poor turtles!

The subsequent letter Cera answered was about cobbler. My friend Hilary loves cobbler more than anyone else who reads this blog, so I will copy and send the text of that letter to her and no one else.

First orange…

Then white…

Cue the sun.

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The Poetry Foundation's daily feed has made me quickly, recently fall deep into the works of Tony Hoagland. I've posted a few of his poems in this blog already, and believe me, many more are bookmarked.

Today's poem squarely connects with where my mind has been this afternoon. On my mind, in broadening circles… Memorial Day honors those we've lost in battle. Veterans Day honors those who've served. Labor Day honors all those who work. Thanksgiving, when you think about it, honors the land. And the Fourth of July, almost a pair with Thanksgiving, honors our life on the land. Thanksgiving is where we are. The Fourth of July is about who we are and what we do here.

Citizens, not subjects, indeed…

So, good for Hoagland for making that point in a way that couldn't be more indirect. He takes the hard way to explain that as complicated, convoluted, comfortable, and challenging as the United States may be today, it is still our country, our responsibility and our opportunity.

The opening stanzas lay out the challenge of our American success:

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,
He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them
Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds
Of the thick satin quilt of America

Read the full poem here. There is no resolution — only possibility. But that's fine with me and hopefully you. That's how we've come this far.

Posting so I can get an unreleased acoustic version of Gaslight Anthem's Boxer, a really really good song. Gooo Gaslight.

The wee small hours come in different ways for different people. For Sinatra, on his album of that name, the time means drifting through the rooms of a house. The time is lonely and ornate. Orchestration paints a kitchen, a living room, a bedroom, a windowsill, and a hall.

For Marah, the album for these hours appears to be the new one. I have been trying to decide how to interpret Life Is a Problem, and last night's show at Iota has led me here… The kitchen has dishes in the sink, the opinions of anyone's recent grocery run and a phone with a cord that stretches forever. The living room is the workspace of the house musicians. The bedroom is for dead sleeps and sexual pacing, with a closet where everything that used to be important is piling up toward all that's now important, hung or shelved. The windowsill is heaven in summer and frustration in winter. The hall sees too much traffic and, if this is home, is the most affecting room in your house.

For Sinatra, the wee small hours are melancholy. For Marah, they are loose ends. Not lonely, not surrounded, not hot, not cold, not for work, not for play. The hours have answers, though, and they require effort.

About the show? The renewed band isn't fully formed yet, but they're hitting early marks. Dave's solos are going to terrific levels creatively, and he's bringing the new material even more to life than the raucous album. Christine's musicianship and personality are increasingly clear as the missing links in Marah evolution. Of the new band players, Mark Sosnoskie is punching his bass guitar as he jumps on the Iota bar and scaling the stage to play his trumpet. I could see Serge adopting him.

In related news, Christine raps. Best Marah randomness since Slo-Mo. Joining me in the rocking and liking what she heard and defending my chair at the bar later, Alison named it her favorite moment of the show.

Stuff to work on #1: The band needs to go on vacation together. Dave and Christine are obviously close, but the new guys are obviously still the new guys. So, the starter on the new album is Muskie Moon, an old Marah song reworked to new heights, and it's loaded with great lines. "To the moon, I say goodnight and blow a kiss" is one. "What a funny bunch of drunks have all gathered" is another. Marah has its legacy of weird personalities. Introduce us to your new funny bunch of drunks.

Stuff to work on #2: Dave mentioned coming back to town in August to play Rock and Roll Hotel. Awesome. I love Iota, but the crowd was too comfortable last night. Hotel's setup should make us sweat some more and knock out some distractions. I mean, this is freakin' Marah, people. They sweat for you, and you should sweat for them. That's the deal.

What needs no work: Cassette tapes. You heard me right. Bought the new album on tape at the merch stand. (You can do the same online.) I'm not saying this particular cassette is a magic cassette. (But it is.)

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