Where have I been? Call it my semi-annual crisis of confidence, winter version. I don't know why this happens, or rather I don't know why it ever subsides. Not that it helped me feel like a better writer, in fact quite the opposite, but I read the new offering from mighty little Clear Cut Press, Charles D'Ambrosio's Orphans, a book of essays. You know how once in a while you come across a writer who just completely reduces you to insipid power-nodding and frequent laying down of the book and staring off into space wondering if it's really, truly possible that you just read what you think you just read, that someone actually tried to put into words states of mind and vaporous human moments you would've sworn were utterly beyond language (you little fool), and succeeded? Like that. I'm sure I should have heard of this man before but we're not concerned with the past and the horrendous gaps in my knowledge of the literary landscape just now. Charles D'Ambrosio is an astonishing writer. On one hand I want more, more, more but on the other I've just barely skimmed the surface of these essays and I should go back and read the whole book again from the beginning. He wrote a book of stories, The Point, which is already on its way to me. There's a book launch event for Orphans here in Portland next week, naturally I'll be too chickenshit to go. If I didn't admire the man's work so much it would be easy. How awful life is.

I bought a portable music player and I walk around listening to Tropicalia, nodding and smiling pleasantly while suddenly-mute vagrants gesticulate wildly at me. I'm normally a pretty twitchy pedestrian anyway and now with these tiny earphones that dig into my ear canals like alien parasites it's like being sealed in a sarcophagus with a boombox, so my paranoia about crazy drivers and bicyclists on the sidewalks and rats emerging from behind the dumpsters at Plaid Pantry and thoughtless joggers and me-first mommies pushing militarily serious-looking not-fucking-around wedge of doom babystrollers and lunging dogs behind front yard fences and buzzing live wires dancing like rattlesnakes on the pavement and bus drivers suffering massive myocardial infarctions is dramatically amplified since I can't hear one single thing except beautiful voices singing something lovely and probably deeply politically engaged in Portuguese. The other day a car suddenly pulled out of a partially hidden driveway just as I passed and I had to jump out of the way. I think I gasped, I'm not sure. I didn't hear myself gasp so maybe not. They say heart disease is the silent killer, or loneliness is, or the nameless anxieties which corrode you from the inside, I forget, but when your auditory apparatus is hermetically sealed by Gal Costa or Gilberto Gil the silent killers are cars and light rail and raging meth addicts with loaded handguns. It occurred to me also that if my life ever flashed before my eyes my first thought would be mortification about how red my eyes must look.