This essay was commissioned and paid for by a journalism 2.0 start-up that originally hoped to cover controversial domestic issues but never quite lifted off the ground. The piece, which I spent weeks reporting and writing in Montana and Wyoming, never saw the light of day. It is reproduced in its entirety here.

Today, with our semi-automatic weapons, cars, and bright electric lights, it’s hard to imagine the anxiety predators evoked in the precarious populations of earlier times. Until they were substantially culled by killing and trapping, they were one of the most widely distributed animals on the planet, found from Finland to India, and blanketing the island of Manhattan. Since ancient times, they have been a morbid vessel for human fears. In Medieval times, landlords and cancer were both referred to as The Wolf. In early Puritan New England, the threat of wolves was so omnipresent that the colonial government paid 20 shillings to any pilgrim who brought the head of a wolf to a magistrate. There are reliable accounts from 18th century France that wolves came out of the forest and ate dozens of children. During the Civil War, they were often spotted at twilight, feasting on the battlefield dead. They have also been known to dig up graves and eat cadavers from time to time (until 6 foot burial became the norm, stone slabs called ‘wolf stones’ were placed over gravesites as a last line of defense.) In the late 1800s, frontiersmen and trappers swept across the American West and extirpated wolves in a vicious campaign of strychnine poisoning. In 1893, Theodore Roosevelt penned a dark chapter in his book Hunting the Grizzly and Other Sketches about wolves in the American West, in which he called the animal a “beast of waste and desolation.” Roosevelt hated wolves, but the chapter possesses a certain head-shaking melancholy at the abrupt extirpation of his favorite quarry. “The slaughter wrought by man seems insufficient to explain the scarcity of wolves throughout the country at large,” he wrote. And yet, the campaign to exterminate the wolf intensified. In 1905, Montana experimented with an early form of biological warfare, passing a law that allowed veterinarians to infect wolves with mange and then send them back in the wild to spread the disease. An early 20th century wolf hunters guide literally froths at the mouth, calling the animal “an enemy of the state.” “What greater enemy can the state have than one who is able to wage war on his chief industries day and night?”

After having been vanquished from most of North America, the animal was placed under the protection of the Endangered Species Act in 1973. The National Park Service concocted schemes to reintroduce wolf populations back into the American West. In an effort to preempt the concerns of ranchers, who were worried about wolves preying on their livestock, a group even set up a “wolf compensation fund” to pay ranchers the market value for any livestock that were killed.

In the mid 90s, the federal wolf reintroduction plan reached fruition: 66 wolves were released into Yellowstone National Park and a barren wilderness area in Idaho. Montana politicians, angry about the Eastern influence, angrily fired back with legislation proposing for wolves to be reintroduced in Central Park. Idaho threatened to call the National Guard to have the animals removed from the state. But in the end, the reintroduction was successful—like a chapter of the Old Testament, the wolves went forth and multiplied, and now there are about 1,700 animals today. The Rockies have become a fault line for a bitter, politicized battle over the wolf that is really about states’ rights. The wolf is seen as a livestock-drain brought in by hippie wolf-hugging Eastern bureaucrats. The hatred and fervor is such that you practically can’t get elected to public office in Idaho, Montana or Wyoming today unless you make at least passing reference to hating the wolf.

After four decades of protecting the wolf and paying to have it reintroduced into the west, last year, Congress caved to pressure from Western politicians and took the unprecedented step of removing the animal from the Endangered Species List—the Rocky Mountain Gray Wolf can now be freely hunted in Idaho and Montana as well as three other states. The wolf remains somewhat protected in Wyoming, despite vigorous efforts from that states’ legislators to have it removed completely. Budd Betts, a Wyoming outfitter who’s had several of his dogs killed by wolves told me, “Everyone in Wyoming hates them, outside of Jackson Hole. Our forefathers hated this animal. We’ve spent 75 years trying to get rid of them.” Jackson Hole remains an island of Eastern money and liberal wolf-sympathy in the vast sea of predator hatred that is Wyoming. Why had the debate over wolves become so contentious out in the Northern Rockies? In other parts of the country like North Carolina and Arizona wolf reintroductions were carried out with relatively little ire or controversy. I headed out west to find out.

The sprawl of Denver gave way to the sad, treeless subdivisions that flow over the lumpy bare mountains around Colorado Springs. I drove up over the high-altitude desolation of the Front Rage until I reached the Colorado Wolf and Wildlife Center. Inside, I found Darlene Kobobel, a blonde woman in her early 40s, who had moved from Los Angeles to start the sanctuary. She explained that the center is home to 17 wolves and wolf-hybrids, most of which have been rescued as abused pets and from for-profit wildlife parks. Nearly twenty years spent dancing with wolves seemed to have soured her on her own species. “Wolves have more feelings than people. My motto is that if people could be more like wolves, it would be a better world. Look at humans: they’re disgusting. Some of them shouldn’t even have the gift of life. All they want to do is destroy.” She said she had to rescue one wolf from a dorm room, where college students were keeping it alive on pizza and Cheetos. Kobobel saw wolf opponents and ranchers as complainers who had unwisely set up their livestock operations in what was naturally predator country. When it was time to feed the wolves, Kobobel, lugged a wheelbarrow of meat out through the snow, flinging huge slabs of venison over fences. I couldn’t help think but Kobobel’s wolves exist in what must be a strange purgatorial state for an animal: not domestic, but still totally dependent. We went cage to cage and Kobobel introduced me to the different subspecies. The massive regal gray wolves, bigger than mastiff dogs, who like humans go gray as they get older; the pure little arctic white wolves; and the straggly, skinny Mexican gray, naturally camouflaged. As we passed, the animals ambled over to the fences and poked their faces out, looking out with intelligent eyes.

Kobobel jumped into a pen with two wolves, one gray and one black, and they nudged her around, playing with her roughly. When I asked her if she had ever been bitten, Kobobel gave me a tired look that seemed to indicate it was a question that everybody asked. “Yes. It’s something you have to deal with. But you live by the gun, you die by the gun.” Back in the center’s little gift shop, I perused the rows of paraphernalia and thought about the fetishization of the wolf–All the indie bands with ‘Wolf’ in their name; all the ironic Native-American-dream catcher airbrush shirts. all the people in New York and LA who love the wolf and ‘the wild’ but live in the city—and for a moment understood the resentment of rural people who lived the life while others just pretended and postured.

Why do people love the wolf so much? Kobobel’s tough exterior suddenly fell away, and her voice became high-pitched and feminine, like a six-year-old girl describing her favorite plaything. “You just watch them run and interact and play and love their young. They’re just so pure. There’s going to be people on both sides who will fight until the end. It just depends on which side you’re on.”

Which side are you on? Is the question that the world asks every day. Like any person with a conscience I hate the thought of animals being killed and tortured senselessly—but does that hate overpower the contempt I have for educated Eastern bureaucrats and urbanites in distant air-conditioned office buildings, who, in their eternal rightness earned through an expensive liberal arts education, love to tell rugged and independent people what they should and should not do to protect their land and their livelihood? I drove through the empty lunar landscape of Wyoming at night—nothing to look at for miles—and when I almost ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere learned the important Western lesson that one must always stop for gas even when you’ve got a quarter of a tank. Late at night I approached Casper, a ghostly bright little orb in Wyoming’s otherwise impenetrable darkness. Casper is spooned up against the mountains, notable only for being an oil town and the home of Dick Cheney. It’s central location on a major highway makes it the de facto stopover spot the state. For this reason, and on account of the brutal, wind-lashed winter, Casper hotels have amenities. The first place I looked was a hotel called The C’mon Inn that looked like an REI sporting goods store from the outside and an Atlantic City casino on the inside—just past the lobby was a huge courtyard filled with hot tubs, each surrounded by a little scenery of fake trees and rocks, burbling away waiting for a swinger’s convention to show up. The late-night receptionist was a twenty-something girl and I stood chatting with her for a while. When I asked her why no one was in the dozens of hot tubs and she shrugged, “I don’t know, but I would get in one right now if I could.” I smiled and said it was nice chatting and went out into the iced-over parking lot to get in my car and drive to another hotel, the Ramada Plaza, near the center of Casper’s tiny downtown. As I was checking in, I poked my head into the wood-paneled hotel bar. There was a lingerie show going on—scantily clad women gyrated and spun and danced on laps, trying to evoke a reaction from the statue-like Wyoming cowboys, stock-still leathery flacos with boots and moustaches. By the time I got settled into my room and came back downstairs, the bar was empty. I took a seat at the bar across from the bartender and ordered a beer. I told him I was writing about the wolves and he instantly knew what I was writing about. “Everyone has an opinion about them around here,” he said. Wolves, he told me, were the hot-button political issue in the region. “They’re trouble,” he said, “You’re going to find a lot of people around here that don’t like ‘em.”

In the winter, locals have no problem careening over the icy permafrost-coated highways of Montana and Wyoming at breakneck speeds, turning what could be a beautiful drive into a harrowing, white-knuckle experience. The next morning, I veered into Montana over snow-covered two-lane roads, buffeted by the Paramount-pictures-cinematic-looking Crazy Mountains, and met a rancher named Sven Svenson at his home near Reed Point. Svenson, a rotund middle-aged man with a mustache, was out in his garage skinning sheep when I arrived. His overalls and shoes were covered in blood. He led me inside his ranch home and put some coffee on. Animal heads—moose, deer, and elk with blank eyes—filled the walls of the den. In 2008, Svenson began to find his sheep brutally slaughtered, with bloody wolf paw prints around the carcasses. When he put out guard dogs, they got torn up too. Svenson and his sons took turns staying up all night to keep watch for wolves. But when they left in the morning to get some sleep, the wolf made his move. “He was watching us watch him. Wolves make coyotes look stupid.” As part of their wolf compensation program, a group called Defenders of Wildlife paid Svenson market value for the 35 sheep he officially lost—around $5000. But Svenson estimates that his real losses were actually closer to a whopping $80,000. On his kitchen table, he laid out an extensive itemization; “I’ll provide an analogy for you: It’s as if the New York Police Department said when you got mugged, they’ll pay you for the $7.50 the wallet cost, but not the $500 that was inside of it.” I felt a tinge of sadness as an image of a slaughtered sheep, containing a stack of green bills, splayed open like a wallet coalesced in my imagination. Svenson’s itemization seemed like a reach, but his indignation seemed genuine. “They shoved this wolf introduction down our throats” he growled, “After what I’ve been through, I’ll shoot a wolf on sight if I ever get a chance. If they throw me in jail, the rest of the county will be right there beside me. There’s a certain bond among agriculture and we’re done—we’re tired of it—and we will rebel.”

Most of the entrances into Yellowstone National Park remain closed throughout the winter, accessible only by a small fleet of futuristic looking snowplows and snowmobiles. To get in, one has to come down through the tiny town of Gardiner at the northern end of the park. Locals told me that in the summer, Gardiner was a tourist zoo, with Los Angeles-like bumper-to-bumper cars stretching into the horizon and hordes of Japanese tourists taking pictures of the elk that roam through town. In the winter, I found Gardiner dead and Lynchian. The ominous, spindly mountains inside of Yellowstone seemed perpetually covered in swirling gray snow clouds. All the restaurants were eerily empty. Driving through town, I spotted an adolescent kid leaning over the railing of a bridge looking down at the swift-moving river like a character in a Dostoevsky novel, preparing to jump. Even the entrance into America’s heralded national park was surreal—a huge brick arch plopped down on an empty plain, with Soviet-intentional words seared into the masonry—

From the park’s entrance, I drove for an hour down a tiny, precipitous road, trapped behind a lone loping buffalo, until I found Rick McIntyre, Yellowstone’s resident wolf guru. He stood beside his car at a snow-blanketed siding looking like Benjamin Franklin, pointing a huge handheld antenna in the direction of the valley plain. McIntyre, 61, had thin graying hair and wore a worn-in Death Valley cap. He wore lightly tinted sunglasses and spoke in the preternaturally calm, prescriptively non-oppressive voice of a new age golf instructor or a family therapist. He has no interest in talking about the partisan politics of the wolf debate, but is instead only interested in delving into the ongoing soap opera of the wolves he’s been watching for over ten years, stories that he compares to the Old Testament. Though he’s had opportunities to be promoted, McIntyre has voluntarily chosen to stay in the lowest position in the National Park hierarchy. “Have you heard of the Peter Principle?” he asked me “The idea that in any organization you rise to a level of your incompetence?” The antenna, he explained, was used to pick up signals from the wolf radio collars. If he got a strong signal, he pulled out his telescope and watched the wolves, narrating their every negligible movement into a portable Dictaphone—“Wolf number 361 has lifted its hind leg. Wolf number 962, straying off to the north alone.” If McIntyre is unable to get a signal, he drives to another spot in the park and tries again. This is what he has done continuously, every day, since the year 2000. In the summer McIntyre he gets up at 3:45 in the morning and stays out until its dark. He packs all his meals and stays out in the cold for nine hours at a time. At night, he returns to his small cabin at the northeastern edge of the park and transcribes the day’s notes, trying to find patterns, adding the notes to his Wolf Bible—a document that has grown over the past ten years and is now 8,200 pages long, single spaced. Wolves are his driving passion—they are his life. Needless to say he is single. McIntyre said there was a woman for a while, in Phoenix. “I thought she cared about wolves. In the end, I was wrong–she cared more about her job.” McIntyre hopes to one day format all of his research into a Bible-like series of books that will tell the entire saga of the wolf reintroduction. “It’s kind of like how if you were a novelist and were to write a novel about American life right now, you’d want to create characters that were representative of society.” Tagging along with McIntyre is an enthusiastic college kid named Joe, a former ranch hand home for winter break, trying to get as much wolf-watching time in as possible. The kid’s initiative and drive to watch wolves is impressive—he gets up before dawn to drive into the park to stand out in the cold all day for the nebulously-satisfying reward of getting to spot a wolf through a telescope. We spend the first day in relative silent on a snowy hilltop, standing there like monks for hours, looking down at the valley. At different points McIntyre beckons me over to his telescope—there are the gray wolves with their tongues lolling out, perched in the snow, guarding a carcass.

All of McIntyre’s wolf stories start, “Well, I’m going to have to give you a short version here” and stretch out into an hour-long retelling of a three-generation-long Shakespearean saga of genetic inheritance, warfare, love and murder. McIntyre’s wolves, as he anthropomorphizes them, come to have individual human personalities, with individual charismas, birthrights and hubris. Individuals are always splitting off to form new packs—tribes are warring with each other, dynasties are built, lone wolves set off away from society. Why is it that the pack refuse to follow the alpha male, but are willing to fight for the alpha female when she gives the signal? Charisma is not usually a characteristic afforded to animals. McIntyre loves the Tao Te Ching-inspired wolf leaders who govern effortlessly without ever resorting to cruelty or fear.

When I asked McIntyre if he had a favorite wolf, his tale is somewhat heartrending. “Wolf #8 was one of the first pups born after the reintroduction in 1995. #8 was one of the smallest and was picked on by everybody. He had no natural physical advantages—he wasn’t a good hunter, he was clumsy, and in a culture where dominance means physical ability, it didn’t seem like #8 had a great chance of survival. But after the death of several dominant wolves in Eight’s pack, he became the unlikely heir of the alpha position. As alpha, #8 was benevolent and compassionate—he adopted a number of wolf pups and raised them as if they were his own. He was a great foster father. Having had a difficult time growing up himself, he taught his pups compassion. He taught them to show mercy to the enemy, and not to kill in battle. #8 went on to be the mentor and foster dad for a very important wolf–Wolf #21, who would go on to become the most famous wolf in the park. #21 was born with every physical gift imaginable. This may sound like an exaggeration, but seriously, #21 was like a superhero. His concept of a fair fight was six to one and he would always win. He was the undisputed champion. He was the ultimate tough guy, but he would always play and wrestle with the younger wolves in the pack and let the young wolves win. I watched a documentary about Muhammad Ali, and he would do the same thing. That was his idea of a game. #21 learned about compassion from #8. When he grew up and became a strong alpha, he always spared his enemies in battle, just like his foster father taught him. The best analogy I have is that #21 was like Superman—he was this child with super powers, who never knew his biological father, but was adopted and raised by this compassionate foster family who imparted him with strong values.

Obligations to others
shunned or left unfulfilled
Brings shame and anxiety
Alcohol and exercise help dull the pain
Late night comes
and the world heads off to sleep
you finally have an excuse
To climb inside that coffin
That you call a bed
and go to sleep
Not to rest yourself
but from exhaustion with the world
you are in hot pursuit of non-existence

Awakening
from a night of disturbed sleep
all my troubles so distant now
covered over by the green moss of days
generally content with the passage of time
and the early morning Brooklyn trees budding and birds chirping
a kind of joy here sprouting forth from concrete
a resigned religious passage to the days
I think of Peter Taylor
that 35 year old Tennessee bachelor in NYC
and all the others who hated their provincial small towns
stomping through the endless smoggy Brooklyn night
defectors
eternal exiles
lost
a little bit of concrete having been soldered onto their hearts
in the morning light there is a glimmer of hope
for the damned like myself
showering is so pleasurable
the breeze through the open bathroom window
memories of Portland ten years ago–different coast, different bathroom window
dead times I never recorded
so many dead times that will fall away into oblivion when the bodies that experienced
them die
memories like the black boxes
of slow-crashing passenger planes

The suburban dream is a crescent moon, an empty street, and a wood-burning fireplace
Boy running across the street and into a backyard
Like some kind of horror movie golem
Men taking out the trash with flashlights
A car pulling up into the driveway
And idling there, not getting out
Until the solitary night-walker shambles past
Bare trees and a crescent moon
The lonesome train whistle in the distance
Cars streaming down the highway
And all the Christmas decorations still up even though New Year approaching
Multicolored lights draped across rooflines
The smell of chimney smoke
Inflatable santas lit up, casting ominous shadows on the brick ranch-style houses
Two books in my hand
Cigarettes in my pocket
Long after midnight
Another good night alone loving up to G-O-D
And his freshly-trimmed grass
And this hometown

I uncrumpled myself from the luggage compartment of the overnight train, where I spent the night and morning hiding from tickettakers that might have come into the sleeper cabin, and stole a blanket and pillow before filing out onto the grey Copenhagen platform. I wnadered around in the crush of excitable, crunchy dreadlocked ecoactivists who all disboarded the train at the same time, smiling and happy to be in town while I coughed and ached. Outside, I looked for a hotel I could check myself into, to get a day to recover, but finding none nearby I got on the buss and followed the directions my host apartment had given me to get to the neighborhood. Before I got on the bus, I dropped a fifty Euro note…a woman chased after me. “Hey, wait, wait!” and handed it back to me. On the bus, an older woman with gray hair, hearing my phlegmatic cough, handed me a package of strange gummi candies, which tasted like antihistamines. I rode the bus in silence, thanking her. Stefanstrade stop, across the river. Grey Copenhagen, grey dull morning.

***

Before knocking on the door, in case my hosts were sleeping, I walked around the neighborhood a bit–through the miniature, socialist-style gray parks and past all the tired-seeming immigrant businesses. When I finally rang the buzzer, I walked up five flights of stairs and was ushered into a luxurious, comfortable Scandanavian apartment by a pierced, buxom Danish woman who showed me around…this is the attic….this is the kitchen, and the living room, before we settled down to have tea. Several other gorgeous blonde women arrived, also housemates, and introduced themselves; I took a shower, and after explaining my trip and devastating sickness, crumpled into the room they had set up for me, a baby’s room at the house, and took a nap. I slept on and off through the gray day, measuring the progression by the windows…when it was dark I woke up and asked if it was time to eat dinner, but they smiled; “It’s only five o clock!” so I fell back into the bed and caught a few more hours before attending the collective dinner. The collective was made up of thoughtful, kind, mid-to-late twenties activists, as disallusioned as I am.

***

After dinner, caught up on the online news, staying up all night in the living room, while all the other collective mates went to bed. Finally descended on the tiny bed, waiting for me at five in the morning, and woke the next day in order to get an early start. Got up at 10 and started to make my way across the Norrebro neighborhood–I stopped at the radical media center, where activists were having impassioned discussions over minutia, and one British journalist was screaming at a girl to express himself. I stayed there until I was able to print some press accreditation papers, and then left the site and went to the main convergence space, Stoberiet. Hung out at Stoberiet for a while and then went downtown to another space called Rahuset, near the climate Forum. At Rahuset, I wandered around for a bit, and then found the mess tent, where I devoured some soup and bread, and had a brief chat with a girl from Sweden and guy from Brazil. AFterwards, a boring talk on Nordic People, and then wandering the climate convergence for a while—took the bus out to bella centre to attempt press acredittation–failed to attain it. Came back. Went to the Naomi Klein talk at the climate center…came back in the rain, in time for the collective dinner..afterwards bunkered down on a computer to write. Up all night writing, until five in the morning.

***

Awoke feeling great, at noon. Wandered down to the protest, which was squaring off and divided in two parts by the Queen Loisa Bridge…The police were blocking traffic across the bridge and divided protesters into two parts, a very efficient way to neutralize any opposition. Stranded on one side of the river, the scattered protesters drank cans of beer and stared at the cold river. One man played video game noises out of a solar-powered DJ bike set up–interested bystanders crowded around him, trying to understand the infernal machine, which abruptly stopped playing blips and bleeps and started playing country Western. People crowded around a photographer with his laptop set up on an oxidized, gigantic Danish statue–like Prometheus, a man creating some digital fire in the cold–to look at the photographs he had taken from the other side. One particularly incredible one showed a cop swaying, like some Aztec warrior in full regalia, doing a tribal dance in his headdress and swinging his truncheon. I stepped away from the milling protest to refill my camera battery, and when I came back the police had let the march over the bridge, and protesters in black were streaming past and congregating in the middle of the street to be interviewed by television and radio crews. One old squatter perched up on top of a Post box, giving an interview with a furry TV microphone dangling over him, like some kind of urban hobbit. I followed the stream of protesters to the Stoberiet culture house and activist info point. Inside, people lounged on couches and chairs drinking coffee, and a huge television played the news recaps of the mornings protests–a huge crowd watched the TV, laughing at the images of themselves. Milling around the place, I ended up talking to two Russian antifascists who looked like they were from Latin America–they said in St. Petersburg, all the punks and radicals carried knives and rubber bullet guns, for the ongoing war with the Nazis. They said that 7 antifascists had been killed in the last three years. Then I spoke with a wise-looking Ghanainian man who sat by the window by himself–he had an incredible lisp, and a very friendly way of speaking–and his total blackness, the fullness of his mouth–as if the entire world came out of his mouth. We spoke for a while and then I left the building.

***

In a colorful, DIY-produced magazine that’s being passed around for free at alternative spaces in Copenhagen for the Climate Summit, titled ‘Dealing with Distractions: Confronting Green Capitalism and Beyond” a couple of pages in above the table of contents there is a strange drawing that seems to wordlessly express the horror of modern life and absurdity of leaders getting together to talk about such a precarious,hated thing as nature–in the simple black-and-white drawing, a little girl sits among her things. The viewers first thought is “what does this have to dowith this magazine?” or initial cynicism like “did someone’s friend draw this and they just decided to throw it in?” pops up. Surrounding the girl are the symbols of nature found in every modern home–a plastic statue of a flamingo. An owl toy, a mickey mouse head, and several potted house plants, cactuses. Behind her is a giant landscape painting of mountains, yet another symbol for the ever-elusive ‘nature’. The girl’s shirt reads “Even if the world was to end tommorow, I would plant a tree today.” But the entire drawing is made by her eyes. They look to the side with dissapointment with the objects surrounding her, her mouth turned downward slightly. The look of a person seeing phoniness and simulacra clearly for the first time, it’s a potent and memorable image that seems to capture the emergent radical response to the massive worldwide greenwashing of everything. Their frustration and anger is warranted by their authenticity. After decades of living sustainably outside of the system and doing without, all of a sudden, the corporate polluters who never before cared now loudly change their tune and flout how much they care about the environment in their advertisements, while doing markedly little to reduce their consumption and production cycles. Rather, they utilize the new: new technologies, new approaches, new innovations as a smokescreen to avoid changing anything–but rather, using the greenwashing as a way to make more money, to sell more, different kinds of products.

***

Drunk, in a twenty-five year old squatted village in the center of Copenhagen, at a bar in a place called Christiania, I have my first of two distinctly distorting European experiences. Horrible, strange noises are coming out of the back of the bar–a guy is DJing. Like most expirimental musicians, he’s sitting on the floor and twiddling with knobs. But the sounds he is making are unlike anything I have ever heard. Like some infernal doom contraption, grinding to a halt, tape splaying everywhere. A dark, vibrating beat that shakes your insides is the spine of the whole thing. Another guy smokes cigarettes and projects videos from his computer–the videos are like some extremely dark Nickolodeon cartoons–cartoon couples fucking, aliens smoking weed, black metal kids, demons, people being engulfed in flames. The audio and visual pair together to make a uniquely disorienting experience. The Danes love it–they dance to this strange, mutated form of breakbeast and techno the way American audiences dance to punk bands. They mosh each other and raise their beers in the air and freak out.

***

Another bar in Christiania reminds me of the Jackpot, the hipster bar in Raleigh, North Carolina on a Friday night. It has all the lonely backwoods ambiance of a barn hoedown. Inside, people crush against each other and smoke. A couple of guys sell coke in the bathroom and all of the urinals are filled with fluid, perched on the brink of overflowing like those gambling coin games where quarters add up and the last to put in their quarter gets a flood, a jackpot. Old haggard squatters wander the place, throwing their arms around strangers, looking like lonely sea fishermen who have just washed ashore and are in search for some kind of human brotherly love. When we come in, people in the bar are dancing and swaying wildly to ACDC. Then this song comes on.

***

In my eyes, the Rammstein song ‘Amerika’ best embodies the truth of Europe. I first seriously encountered the song in a packed squatter bar in Christiania, a former naval base and now squatted autonomous village in the center of Copenhagen. In the bar, everyone had just finished freaking out and dancing to ACDC. People swayed and walked in circles, going nowhere, like drunk and disoriented insects.

And then ‘Amerika’ came on. It is a song…if you haven’t heard it…a song unlike any other song you’ve ever heard in your life. A forceful and terrifying prophecy, not unlike Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Amerika speaks the truth. In one drunken, moshy unison chorus the Danes and Europeans flung themselves across the bar, grabbing each other and shouting in one beery uniso,

“We’re all living in America! America! It’s WUNDERBAR!”

This statement, in the form of a German nu-metal song rings crushingly true. It seems that Europeans, no matter how much they buck at the thought, and trash the US, are in fact living in their own parallel universe America, the EU–the EU is like America in many ways–the omnipresence of advertising, technology and modern lifestyles. One uniform currency. Massive superhighways pocked by cold, dull gas stations and fast food joints, most of them American.

But the European version of America is colder, somehow depressing–it doesn’t have the necessary spice and proper landscape. There is something, to me, inconceivably sad about the tiny little cars on massive highways pumping techno, driving hundreds of miles to go to some festival. And the euro guys, with their greasy hair and faux-leather jackets and femme cigarettes. Mostly, there is something sad about Amerika being the universal point of reference–Europeans know American books, American movies, American politics, American pop culture, eat American fast food, and shop in American shops, and then in their spare time feel resentful and make fun of America, their cultural wellspring. A quiet pastoral Europe without the globalized American input is dead and gone, but it feels like the new self-sufficient Europe is yet to be born.

Fall, which was once a time of renewed promise and fresh hope, for the last several years for me has become an often acrid-tasting period of transition: leases always seem to be ending, relationships need to be reneged or renegotiated, wardrobes must be swapped out, and the elements of one’s life need to be reevaluated. As the dog days of August, when the heat makes work impossible, slowly fades out, a sinking feeling sets in as Fall-proper is slated to begin. Perhaps due to some global-warming-related temperature variation, in recent years in my home state of North Carolina, Summer seems to draw itself out as long as possible to make an abrupt transition to winter; Fall, that magic and subtle time that I used to know, feels like a faint voice, warbling out of existence.

September is a month filled with birthdays: parties must be attended, presents must be bought. My own rolls around at the end of that month, forcing in this already-wobbly period, a badly-timed reckoning with my own progress—Am I ‘better’ than I was before, or have I regressed? Birthdays, like all annual holidays, are a truly awful mile marker, making one remember the mediocrity of years passed and the swiftness with which time devoured them. Only the excrement remains, the rabbit-pebbles of memory.

The last time Fall felt magical was, not coincidentally, a year I spent a lot of time outside. Since joining the ashen-faced ranks of white-collar culture workers, the seasons have tended to blend together, to be something that’s happening outside the window behind the computer screen. At that time though, I lived in a small Southern town and worked in a bakery at the edge of town. I spent my days scooping cookie dough onto sheets and listening to either affiliate NPR or the Silver Jews with my Gen-X co-workers. At night I would take long solitary walks down the train tracks through the quiet town, where the crisp wind carried the reassuring fall smell of fire. My comrade-at-arms Rita and I would range around town at night on our bicycles looking for college-kid parties to crash, where we could procure some wine and beer. We would bike all over the deserted town at night, often not seeing a single car, and often end up at a lonely railroad bridge hidden away in an old money neighborhood downtown. When we happened to have a mass of bikers with us, on a Friday night, or after an art opening, we took them to the top of an empty five-story parking lot: the best view of the ever-expanding fall landscape of the Piedmont/Triad area. On other nights, I would drive to Borders and drink refill after refill of their pumpkin coffee, flipping idly through books that I still haven’t read.

In this metallic-tasting future of windows that you can’t open and climate-controlled air being pumped into dwellings and offices by massive physical plants, does the season matter anymore?

In New York, where there is so little nature, the season change primarily indicates a change of wardrobe and comfort. Thank god it’s Fall, no more excessive sweating and a great chance to show off my new coat. But in cities like New York where there is no nature that isn’t planned and groomed by designers, some biological element of the seasons is missing.
And yet, even here, old sensations have been washing over me for the past couple of days. Last night, while finishing beers in the backyard of a friend’s house after a hot thunderstorm, the way the moon framed the big hammock-slung oak tree and neon grass, the backyard floodlight hitting the vinyl siding reminded me of Halloween approaching and of the time when the growing-cool nights were pregnant with anticipation of bike rides through piles of dead leaves, pumpkin cappuccinos at the all-night gas station and the prospects for new romance with a good-looking hoodie.

The old zeal for life that comes in with the arrival of the crisp months has faded over the years down to where it is just faint-burning light—we have to blow on the coal and ashes to bring the fire back to life.

An irritating laugh, milliseconds too slow, so you can almost see the individual “HA’s” exiting the mouth and whisping through air that was formerly limitless potential, a Switzerland of possibility, now laden with the anvil of someone else’s emotional expression. O Sunday! A kitchen cabinet that won’t stay shut, so that in the hazy fugue, lunging from bed towards the coffeemaker, you slam my head on the cabinet’s sharp edge, and unleash a whirling dervish of pent-up aggression. O blackest Sabbath! Walking around in the cold with a pack of muttering, sweatered losers to find all reasonably-priced dining establishments closed, so ending up at the strip mall, eating greasy-face at Cici’s Pizza’s, the damnable 4.50 buffet, blessing and curse of “eat when I’m really hungry and do my taxes the night before” troglodytes such as myself. Cici’s, to the procrastinating eater what Japan is to doctrinaire free-marketeer.

Sunday damnable Sunday! O, Ye coldest of days, settling like a frost on your insides that no amount of scalding coffee or hot showers can warm. Waste treatment facility for six days of carelessly flushed problems and moral depravity. Sitting outside of the rhythmic pulse of the workweek but also without the godless hedonism of the weekend, Sunday exists as an anomaly in these most impious of times having long since ceased to function as a day of rest and devout worship. Curtailed business hours, freaky displays of evangelistic Christianity, and emphasis on the family only serve to drive home the resounding 21st century sense of loss – On Sunday our Puritan ancestors roll over in their graves and biting their rotten thumbs at our untenable and godless society. Our bodies reverberate the deep subterranean vibrations of their disapproval leaving behind those deep, oft-inexplicable feelings of shame and malaise. Not only are we cursed as groundskeepers and sole proprietors of this pointless concrete forest but we are also boozeless, sexless, irritated by our crumbling or broken families and unable to avoid them by going shopping.

What’s left? A vast netherworld of non-practicing but loosely affiliated Judeo-Christians racked with religious guilt waking up late with relatively few distractions? If variety is the spice of life, distraction is for most people what the potatoes were for the Irish. Existing as a purgatorial space between leisure and employ, Sunday affords enough time to brood on the impending work week, along with the sense of powerlessness and dread you get when you’re on a slow-moving ship unmistakably destined to collide with a distant iceberg. Or for people like me who wouldn’t notice the difference between week and weekend if it weren’t for posted business hours, enough time to dwell on how I’m going to fill my Monday other than walking very, very slowly to the post office.

Sunday evening at six, at my office, my favorite polyurethaned Barnes and Nobles coffee table, a booming voice announces over the intercom that they’re closing in ten minutes. A resounding sigh of resignation rolls across the country by time zones, fog rolling over the burnt ochre of austere Northeastern cemeteries in Autumn, gliding over beaten tombstones full of lost dreams, unborn plans, with plenty of real estate for a dull, agonizing future. People trying to figure out what to do with the rest of their Sunday evening, with the rest of their lives. Watch some more crappy sitcoms? Work on another self-indulgent niche magazine? A weekly life-crisis. The jelly-like stasis inescapable except in the jaws of sleep or the self-loss in fulfilling work. No right or wrong way out. Only providence seized upon and opportunities missed, flickering ghosts of chance. Never reaching towards the grandiose. Put on some mac and cheese and set the oven to a low-simmer. It’ll be over soon enough. What else can you do but wait for tomorrow.

My piece about Cairo, IL ran in the US print version
of TIME Magazine this week. I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback.
Best of luck to the people of Cairo and Ace of Cups.

I went to the This American Life studio in Manhattan to be interviewed
for Chicago Public Radio yesterday and talked with Richard
Steele about the history of Cairo, IL, the young punk resettlement,
and historical race relations in Southern Illinois. You can check
out the archived interview here (10 min.)

I also wrote a piece about the Tarnac Communists for the Abu Dhabi
Review: you can see that online here