Brief Interview With Jasper Lyman, Kolob, Utah, September 2010

"I'm not buying."
"Mr. Lyman, I'm not selling anything.  I came by to see if you could answer a couple of questions about Lauro..."
"I don't have no answers about that stupid Mexican fuck."
"He worked for you last summer?"
"Get the fuck off my deck and don't come back."

Editor's note: I attempted on three other occassions, twice at the gas station and once at the post office, to talk with Mr. Lyman, but each time he refused to talk and threatened me.  He did not respond to a letter.  He has no listed phone number and, apparantly, no internet access.  Lauro worked on Mr. Lyman's feedlot crew sporadically during the summer of 2009.

The Living Room

Ah. Ah ah ah ah kin barely look at these.  2006.

Siena

Fall 2006 sketch.  About a week before the discombobulation of my family.  It was an inside job.

Latest Outrages Against the Canons of Fashion and Good Sense

Ebayed, purchased and am presently swaddled in a shearling coat. Emma says, "Janis Joplin. Or, no, who's that English guy who froze at the north pole?" Beard is enormous and blonde with a big streak of white down the middle. Eyes increasingly crinkled, distant, indifferent, registering irritation and humor at wrong moments. Black cowboy boots with crazy Maori-Mex stitching make me about 6'7". The phrase "get-up" might come to mind. "Costume." "Assemblage." Excessive. Outlandish. I'm starting to resemble myself. Keep adding layers.

Touch off palpable alarm and mirth upon entering Trader Joe's. Talk with skinny jeans scraggly beard guy about cloudy olive oil, how it will clear up at room temperature, whether this is a room, what the temperature might be, the increased greenness of the oil when cloudy, the weirdness and beauty of olive oil. To the no-longer-refrigerated hand-whatevered flour tortillas, which are totally fucking excellent, which excel my own attempts at tortillas, now aborted. Draw looks of amusement and horrified quasi-admiration from a woman. Buy six bags of tortillas because sometimes they're out, because they're so dern good when coated with oil and crisped on cast iron skillet on stove and then doused in butter and cinnamon sugar. A loveliness.

When Penny, the daughter of a colleague, was four the universe said something to me through her. She turned up at school one day in a faux shearling with enormous tortoise shell Wayfarer's which she refused to take off for the duration of my attempted interrogation. She also wore a leopard print mini-skirt, lime leggings and super sparkly ruby red slippers. Totally awesome. Now that she is five and can tell what goes together we have begun to part ways. But no matter. There was a period of time there when she was my polestar: the distant, twinkling object on which I set my gaze and kept walking. Now I will find my own way.

Trying to Write Something Honest

I can't feel much.  I think it's likely that when I was 11 or so and dedicated myself to abolishing fear I also abolished joy.  There were other pairs: I tried to abolish sadness and I lost hapiness.  I tried to abolish uncertainty and I lost moral strength.  Maybe we don't get to choose what we feel, only how strongly we feel it.  We can't choose to feel only good feelings, we can only choose between intensity and numbness, and each covers the full spectrum of feeling.  So, if you force fear, for example, down into numbness, you also experience your measure of joy in numbness. 

I remember when I was 11 suddenly feeling just overwhelmed by feeling.  Mostly, I remember feeling anxious and alone and not having any sense of how to get out and being near panic most of the time.  I didn't know anyone that I thought could help me, and I think I probably didn't even know that asking was ok.  I think that much of my public persona is what I created to avoid intense feeling: competence masks insecurity, articulateness masks befuddlement, agreeableness masks contempt which masks my sense that I'm missing what most people understand about happiness, etc.  I miss joy, but I'm not sure I could handle the anxiety and feeling of exposure and aloneness that would come rushing back if I opened myself to feeling intense joy again.  Living with the live possibility of loss seems like too high a price for joy.

Am I totally misunderstanding this?