Episode 2: Talk About Rules

PowerPoint presentations by anarchists are a thing of beauty. There's a guy named Margaret at the podium giving a brief history of intellectual anarchy; the Pearl Room of Powell's bookstore, a huge edifice of bricks and books, is packed. Mostly people plop down to see the icon of Portland fantasists, Ursula Le Guin, like me.

Then the sketchpad filled with stick figures illustrating key moments in anarchy literature is hoisted high. Modern technology at its finest: Sharpie and paper in perfect harmony. Red marker helped highlight the antics of more notorious anarchists with flame. An occasional bit of arson, and the knifing of a secret police captain, later and the speaker is quick to put it, “I'm not with the bomb-throwers!”

Mr. Killjoy was anything but.

This is not about that night.

I'm rushing. I've just been from the graduation information booths at the university's. It was an unpleasant experience dealing with the Registrar.

“I know, but you aren't actually planning on graduating as a Japanese major. We can't let you write it down,” she said. I've been waiting to hear an answer and hoping it would be different. “You'll have to talk to Financial Aid.”

“I've already talked to them. We had a meeting Friday. If y'all can just clear me on this, they're okay with my...,” damn you Maruki-sense, and your twisted naming conventions, what was it again, technically? “Modernity Japanese Narrative class. It meets the requirement, you just need to let me put it down on paper. The major.”

I know I can get a Japanese professor to sign off on it; they owe me a solid by now.

“I've talked to the higher-ups, and you can't do it. You'll just have to talk to Financial Aid.” She keeps repeating the mantra, like a sacred charm.

“I've talked to them. I don't have any options and I'm maxed out on all the other aid. This is it. We should be able to do this.”

“There's nothing I can do.”

A white cake with white frosting and a lemon middle sits on the table when you enter. I sliced a piece before grabbing my robe order form and getting down to business with the registrar.

Two bites. Forget it; I toss the cake in the trash.

“I was walking around this anarchist book faire looking for anarchist fiction. Have you tried that? Not a whole lot. I was determined to buy every novel written by anarchists there,” Margaret says, grinning. “I bought both of them.”

He held up a book, but I miss seeing the cover.

“Could you move? We have to keep the aisle clear,” says a woman with a Powell's nametag. I was squatting down near a pillar, trying not sit on another listener's bag of stuff, my legs sore and jacket thick. There was no room for me to shed my jacket in the congested room.

“Sure, sure. Sorry.” I stand, move closer to the pillar. I lean on the pillar to scoot in from the shifting aisle between people, supporting my weight with my arm. The rest of the session is spent shifting my arm occasionally to reduce fatigue.

The guy next to me, his stuff is piled on the floor. He doesn't move it, and despite anarchy in the air I don't either. I just stand for it.

I seek a meeting with the associate dean. 1:30, no problem. I'll just keep climbing the totem pole. I'm only trying to play the game I've been offered, because I want to play it, but the only weapon I have are the rules themselves.

And just before the meeting, literally the minute before I slide out of my chair and shake off enough of a slump not to smell desperate, I get an email. The numbers don't crunch. Modernity Japanese Narrative can't be an independent study with a 455 tag; will 395 do?

No. No it won't. Not by the rules. If the class is not a 455, I don't graduate. Money be damned.

“Numbers. Paper. I'm getting buried in them,” I write back.

Calm.

Calm.

Goddammit. Calm.

This is the conversation I didn't have with Margaret.

“What about Daniel Quinn? Ishmael? I mean, you stressed horizontal power structures versus vertical ones throughout the talk. Why isn't he listed as an anarchist here, in the appendix? Isn't tribalism just about the ultimate form of anarchy.”

“Well,” he thinks about it, “with a tribe, you'll still have a structure you're born into, right? A set of norms that don't allow for variance, and an even stricter cultural taboos. So there's still a hierarchy. You might even have a chief.”

“Chiefs are temporary; once they're permanent you've moved into a power structure, sure, and you've got what we've got here. But I mean, can't we take the basic ideas of a tribe, and rework it into something new and voluntary? Something not ethnographic or geographic,” I'm struggling to put the words in the right order, “something more voluntary. Like a circus operates. Or gypsies.”

“Sure, and there's even people doing it. But not enough. Fiction might inspire more. We're buried in theory right now.”

“Well,” I shrug, “what about Quinn?”

“For one thing, I don't really remember him ever self-identifying as an anarchist. So I didn't think to interview him.”

Self. Identify.

This is the actual conversation.

“Oh, hi. Could you sign this?”

“Sure.”

Thrilling.

Mythmakers & Lawbreakers. A book full of interviews with a wide variety of anarchist philosophies represented. I spend far too late in the night devouring it once I'm home, delighted to see Le Guin, Alan Moore, even a line developer for a defunct Dungeons & Dragons setting. I make a note to investigate some authors I never read before.

I walk in reeking of desperate.

“Oh there's the subject of our conversation.” Professor Beard is just walking out of the associate dean's office, Steve Smith right behind her. I nod hello. Keep it together. Keep it together.

“So, right, you see there is no 455 it turns out, and we can't assign an independent study to anything more than a 395. Or you'd end up taking it to the Registrar and they would just be confused and reject you.” Well, it's a familiar feeling this week. “So, we're going to write 395, here,” she shows me the green form, the holy grail I've been chasing the last few months, “and then I'll talk to the Creative Writing faculty and we'll see if they'll make an exception. I think it will be alright.”

People have been telling me they think it will be alright a hell of a lot lately. Or, worse, they “hope” it will be alright.

“Sure. Well, I'll just pretend it's fine for now, all done.”

Mr. Smith doesn't look too sure. He goes over the whole deal again himself. I repeat myself.

“Well, is this what you're here about?” asks the professor.

“No, no, I just got your email five minutes ago, right before I came. This is about something else.”

“Oh, well, good luck. I should be able to get back to you tomorrow, yes?”

“Okay.”

Mr. Smith leads me into his office, sits down at his desk. We exchange a few strained pleasantries, and I shrug my coat off on the back of the chair. If this were second story or higher, the window would look inviting.

“I'm losing two thousand dollars, because I did the right thing, I filled the paperwork out on time. I know it would take me another two years to graduate with Japanese, but it's been a long time. I mean, thirteen years, I need to be done. I can do it this year. It's not like I might not still come back and do Japanese, but I need to survive for now.” I hedged before, with the Registrar, with Financial Aid. I tried to tapdance with hypotheticals, falling short of begging. “I don't want to graduate and starve the next day. It's paper; I don't understand. Shuffle a paper here, for me. Sign something. That's all it takes.”

There's more, of course, but you have to sandwich it between mental commands to Hold It Together and stuttering and looking away and looking back and what with all that, translation from garbled memory and fierce emotion to dispassionate recitation suffers a tad. Or flushes straight down the toilet; dissecting verbal diarrhea is a messy business.

Turn the spigot off.

“Look,” Smith leans forward, hands steepled on the desk, “I don't know if there's anything I can do. But, this is like any other bureaucracy, it has its own wheels. I can't promise anything. I'll look into, see what can be done. Okay? Will that do?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure.”

We shake hands.

I hope it's alright.

Dawn is soon. A book you can't put down is a thing of beauty. Mythmakers & Lawbreakers leads me to Lewis Shiner's Slam. A recent parolee is having the worst week out of jail, and it's not his fault. Drug deals are going down he can't control, he has a ridiculous job, a UFOlogist and the blind and the deaf are breaking into his new home almost every night.

On the edge of the Gulf, in Galveston. I've seen that sea. The water is never blue in the book; nor is it ever. Brown and warm and, if you close your eyes and don't think about it too much, clean. He's just trying to get a beer and play poker with his old friends, things any man unparoled could do, no problem.

But it doesn't work, any of it, until he dies. According to the rules. A simple paper trick.

I keep thinking of the last words he shares with his parole officer.

“This isn't your fault or mine. It's a problem with the rules. They won't stretch to fit me.”