The One on Earth: Works of Mark Baumer (Fence Modern Prize in Prose) - Softcover

Baumer, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1944380183 ISBN 13: 9781944380182

Publisher: Fence Books, 2021

Synopsis

Mark Baumer wrote like he was trying to have a consciousness, like he's trying to avoid feeling anything; then it's like he's working really hard to feel more. It's like he's a child of the internet plus Wendell Berry, an anti-folk folksy speaker navigating the industries of gigs and professional writing culture. Baumer's life was ended by an SUV in January of 2017 while he was walking barefoot across America for the second time to draw attention to climate change. Baumer was a prolific wizard of non sequitur and displacement, and these writings show the maturation of an absurdist conscience, applying itself to inequities of access: power, security, and meaning itself, within the confines of America and within that the contemporary professionalized writing culture.

About this title

About the Authors

Writer, poet, and activist Mark Baumer was the author of MEOW (Burnside Review Press, 2019). In 2017, he was struck and killed by an SUV in rural Florida while walking barefoot cross-country to raise awareness of climate change. He once wrote 50 books in a single year. Mark Baumer was an award-winning poet, committed activist, devoted family member, and compassionate friend to many. He was in the midst of a cross-country journey--the second he'd undertaken in his young life--when he was killed. This crossing had a larger purpose--Mark's cause this time was raising awareness about climate change, while simultaneously raising funds in support of FANG, a nonprofit organization and activist group in Providence, Rhode Island that he was a member of. Oh, and he'd be doing the walk barefoot. On January 21, 2017, Mark had just chronicled his 100th day on the road that morning as was his daily habit, utilizing various media platforms--something he'd been doing since leaving his house in Providence on October 14. At approximately 1:15 p.m., Mark was struck and killed by an SUV driven by Sonja Moore Ziglar, along U.S. 90 in Fort Walton County, in Florida's Panhandle. He was walking legally in the middle of the paved shoulder, against traffic, wearing a fluorescent vest, on a long, flat straightaway. Mark was killed on impact when Ziglar's vehicle left her lane and plowed into him at highway speed. He had turned 33 a month earlier, the week before Christmas. The Mark Baumer Sustainability Fund continues his work.

Blake Butler is the author of five book-length works of fiction, including 300,000,000 (Harper Perennial), Sky Saw (Tyrant Books), There is No Year (Harper Perennial), Scorch Atlas (Featherproof Books), and Ever (Calamari Press), as well as the nonfictional Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia (Harper Perennial). His fourth novel, Alice Knott, will be published by Riverhead in 2020. His short fiction, interviews, reviews, and essays have appeared widely, including in The Believer, The New York Times, Bomb, Bookforum, and as an ongoing column at Vice. He is a founding editor of HTMLGIANT and currently serves as editor of the Fanzine. He lives in Atlanta.

Shane Jones is the author of the novels Light Boxes--which has been translated in eight languages and was named an NPR best book of the year (2010)--Crystal Eaters, Daniel Fights a Hurricane, The Failure Six, and Vincent and Alice and Alice, as well as the short story collection I Will Unfold You With My Hairy Hands and the poetry collections A Cake Appeared and Paper Champion. He lives in Albany, New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Stock Tips for All the Unpublished Authors Trying to Get Rich1. I’m a very experienced stock market analyst. Just the other day, I was eating free croutons at the salad bar inside my local Wal-Mart (WMT:$86.79).2. Even though gasoline prices are down, almost every unpublished author in America is extremely poor and depressed.3. Did you see that tweet (TWTR: $35.75) about the guy eating grapes who got so depressed he took a picture of the grape stems when he was done with all the grapes?4. Even though I’m an unpublished author, I am almost rich enough to be happy.5. It took me a long time to figure this out, but the stock market isn’t like scrabble. In fact, even if you do a double word bonus on your scrabble board your financial portfolio will not get any of those points.6. Most published authors probably don’t need any financial advice because they already have six million free croutons in their bank account.7. Technically, I’ve made zero dollars from my investments.8. In fact, since I began investing three weeks ago, my portfolio is down nine dollars and two cents.9. The first thing you need to know about buying stocks is that you’re not in high school anymore … unless you’re young enough to still be in high school. In that case, congratulations, you haven’t done anything with your life yet.10. One really interesting thing to remember about stock prices is that a stock price is also an approximation of how many people own that stock. For example, the stock price for krispy kreme donuts (KKD) is $19.83 which means about 19.83 people own KKD stock. This is the reason why google (GOOGL) stock is so expensive. About 534.23 people own GOOGL stock.11. If I was a severely depressed unpublished author, I would probably steal my dad’s bank account information and invest all his money in Wendy’s/Arby’s stock (WEN: $9.16) then I would stand outside every Burger King (BKW: $35.80) in America and handout directions to the nearest Wendy’s/Arby’s store.12. High school was a weird time for all unpublished authors, but you can make up for all that weirdness if you just invest enough money in the stock market.13. The people who own stock in Caterpillar (CAT: $92.70) don’t even have to like caterpillars or cats. All they have to do is pay the insect queen.14. I’m still not quite sure what happens to everyone’s money while it’s invested, but I have a feeling it all gets put in a special cloud. That’s why acid rain used to turn my mom’s hair green when she showered. Luckily, wall street fixed their clouds and they’re no longer lined with copper.15. One special perk of owning Starbucks stock (SBUX) is you can go to any Starbucks location and buy coffee at no extra charge. You literally pay the exact same amount as anyone else who doesn’t own Starbucks stock.16. To get rich in the stock market you just have to figure out what company is going to win the best.17. I bet all the companies in the world have secret laboratories.18. And probably, right now, most of those secret laboratories are trying to figure out how to invent a technique of harvesting poop and then converting it into food that can be resold to everyone.19. Sort of like Ebay (EBAY: $57.21).20. But if I were going to put my money on anyone successfully achieving a marketable poop to mouth service, the easy choice would be Yum! Brands (YUM: $73.32) and its warehouse of taco bell, kfc, and pizza hut. Unfortunately, it’s not really an affordable investment strategy for unpublished authors which is weird because whenever I go into a taco bell or kfc its always filled with nothing but unpublished authors.21. Also worth noting, whether or not you are still in high school, the stock market doesn’t care. All it cares about is turning two chicken nuggets into three chicken nuggets.22. If it were up to me I would let Sprint (S: $4.10) win the best because their stock is really cheap. We should all buy a share of Sprint then if it wins we each get a million dollars.23. The really sad thing is there once was a perfect stock for unpublished authors.24. But then it got bought out by another company who was then also bought out.25. The name of this perfect investment opportunity for unpublished authors was Novell (NOVL).26. Novell was bought out in November 2010 by Attachmate at $5.85 a share.27. NOVL stock no longer exists which I guess is sort of fitting because every novel by every unpublished author probably won’t exist in a few years either.Excerpt from “Science Animal”This science was the forty-sixth volume of animal.Each member of the science received an allowance of one handmade wooden crown.An isolated element in the process of science looked at the process of science and thought, “Why?” The process of science looked at the isolated element and thought, “I don’t know.”Animal diseases were found in several different farms.Restrictions were required to form new operational methods but it’s important to remember science already knew the answer.If the center of an animal was removed from a body, the center would continue to blink warmly until its love was no longer a burden.Equations containing animals were difficult.Science had very little patience for excess amounts of untrained movement.A thirty-six-year-old science and a thirty-seven-year-old science tried to determine if their results were potentially useful.During an investigation of the heart when the foot of an animal was removed the nerves remained excited and muscles contracted.Pieces of this science were not always science.It was unclear how to process the resolution of doubt.Known voltages were partially a source of conditional existence.Weather claimed it was the first science.Not Ted Cruz (Mark’s Tinder Bio)One day I will probably die of something Ichose not to acknowledge or fix.Someone once told me I belong on the moonbut until then I’ll just be alone in my room.I’m just trying to not die while swimming acrossthe universe’s great river of loneliness.Sometimes I want to put my phone in a sockand beat the internet with it.Please don’t stuff any waffles in themetaphorical gas tank attached to my neck. Statement of Plans” (as submitted in Mark’s application for a Wallace Stegner Fellowship)On July 1, 2016 I will leave Providence Rhode Island and begin running west. After about fifty or sixty days of running I will arrive on the West Coast. To accomplish this I will need to run an average of fifty miles a day. In 2010, when I walked across America in eighty-one days I walked an average of thirty miles a day. The human body was never meant to be as weak as we’ve allowed it to become. Running fifty miles a day is no more impossible than any other aspect that is the insanity of the American way of life.Once I arrive in San Francisco I will build an eight-by-eight-by-eight-foot box. This is where I will live. It should not take more than two days. The inside of the box will be outfitted with a few blankets, a spoon, a bowl, and a battery hooked to a solar panel on the roof of the box. I hope to exist in my new home with as few possessions as possible.For the next three months I will practice the same daily routine seven days a week. It will involve: waking up at four a.m., meditating for twenty minutes, writing/editing for an hour, practicing qigong, going for a jog, eating breakfast, reading for three or four hours, meditating at noon for twenty minutes, eating lunch, visiting with friends, walking, eating dinner, and falling asleep by eight p.m. Part of me would like to make a list of books I will write over these four months, but I’d rather be both flexible and open enough to take advantage of whatever ideas my new home will present to me.Over the winter break, I will travel to the top of America with a golf club and a golf ball. At the Canadian border I will begin hitting the golf ball south. I will continue to hit the golf ball until I have reached the bottom of America. After I hit the golf ball into Mexico I will return to my eight-by-eight-by-eight-foot box.In the spring I will return to my daily routine with a focus on refining it without ever becoming inflexible.When summer arrives I will either do nothing or I will do everything. A lot depends on many different variables that I can’t predict at the moment. In one scenario where I do nothing I literally will not leave my wooden box for three months. Every day a different friend will visit. I will pay someone to deliver groceries, but mostly it will be important to maintain contact with the outside world while never venturing out into it. In the opposite and very different scenario where I do everything I will either dribble a soccer ball from Oregon to Brazil or I will ride a bike across Canada with my mother.It is difficult for me to know what the fall of 2017 will bring. By this point I hope I will have accomplished enough to sort of give up on myself and begin focusing primarily on the world outside my own head. I don’t think I will ever give up refining my daily routine or my daily writing practice, but a part of me hopes I begin to worry less about my own involvement in my writing and life so I can refocus my energies on teaching others how to maximize their own work ethic. Maybe I will have a child at this point or maybe I will begin coaching middle school track. Basically, I don’t want to forget the world exists. One of my biggest regrets while I was earning my MFA was I lost contact with the rest of the world. It wasn’t until I was done with the MFA that I remembered the world existed. My goal is to never forget things exist.This poem was rejected by “a public space”the milk / on the stairs / had dried / it weighed / enough / to be / too much / a five hundred pound milk / we did not / own enough equipment / or / carpet / someone tried calling / the police / but / their equipment / was violent / instead / we built / a hole / in the ice / pond / and / climbed down / the hole / it seemed unlikely / the carpet / would save us / if / we drowned / but / no one drowned / the dried milk / watched us / pray / for / the pond / and / the ice / to never become / separate / objects / at the bottom / of / the hole / we found a chair / it was big / enough / for / a five hundred pound milk / stain / and / the pond / wasn’t planning to do anything / with it / later / after / the chair / and / the milk stain / were gone / a man with a handful / of / sauce / nodded at us / as we filled in / the hole / and / he said / come onThis poem was rejected by bostonreview.netOn one of the recliners someone had written the word “humans.”The pleasure of existence can only be experienced if you accept a lung tin.Concepts represent important attempts to define things like problems.Somewhere in the future, the human heart will only beat six times a year.My condo is not in a bad neighborhood because I don’t own a condo.People are always dragging things out of their apartment in trash bags.Saying, “I don’t know,” is a pretty good self-defense mechanism.I threw a package of expired fingernail clippings into a pasture of horses.The structure responsible for everyone’s wellbeing said, “Tell me I’m good.”It is delusion to think with anything connected to your face.At my reunion I told people I had recently slept in pile of breakfast meat.There is nothing more upsetting to a human baby than its own existence.It’s not that strange, but whenever I see a naked hand at the beach I get nervous.The person named “mule tail” told us his “mule tail” was thick.Sometimes I think I would be president if it didn’t take so much lung effort.I am obsessed with winking whenever someone asks me if I am leaking blood.It’s doubtful anyone will ever figure out the paradox of a soft chair.What if diamonds were made from chewing oatmeal really slowly?On side of the white van someone spray painted the words “snow globe.”I Began Running Across America Barefoot Yesterday Oct 14, 2016I woke up at 5am. My plan was to leave at 6am. I was not done packing. It took me six hours to pack. I left the house at noon. It was sunny. I said goodbye to a few of the special people in my life. Then I began running barefoot across America. I felt very excited. My body was not quite as heavy as it used to be. It was like some large weights had been lifted from my back. The day had finally arrived. I was actually running barefoot across America. After I turned onto Garfield Street my phone told me to take the Washington Secondary Trail. I followed this trail from Cranston to Warwick. It was a very nice trail. I saw a guy running in barefoot shoes. A very small bear or dog tried to injure me with its voice. Two old people held hands and nodded at me. A policeman on a bicycle pedaled very fast on the verge of a mental breakdown. Some teenagers yelled bad words in a tunnel. Some other teenagers were doing massive amounts of ice cream near a picnic table. I passed a baseball field that was almost dead at least until next year. Some men were dumping hot cement where the humans who paid them said to dump it. At around four pm I went to a grocery store and bought arugula, green beans, blackberries, a pear, dates, dried apricots, and coconut water. I had wanted to save the dried apricots for breakfast but I ate all of it. It was a little difficult to run after I ate so much but sometimes that happens. Anyway I wasn’t going to let something like eating too much food stop me from running across America because there was too much good stuff to see. I saw a man selling BMWs on the side of the road. Some men were eating nachos in a tree house. A pipe was buried in the sidewalk. Thousands of tiny pebbles tried to stop me from continuing. It got dark. I ran barefoot in the dark until I was near all the stores that are always trying to get near people. I ignored all these stores except the one that sold bedsheets. I rented a bedsheet. It came with a bathtub. I filled the bathtub with ice water and sat down in it. A part of me wanted to fall asleep. I looked over at the trashcan in the corner. It was covered in dry vomit.It rained so I walked barefoot in the rainA recap of the ninth day crossing America barefoot…I stayed in a motel room with windows. It was nice to stay in a motel with windows. I opened all the windows. Most motels and hotels in America don’t have windows. They just have pieces of glass in the wall. If you are in a motel and you can’t open the windows then you’re not really in a motel with windows. You’re in a motel with pieces of glass in the wall. As I was leaving the motel I looked at my phone. Someone wrote a tweet about me. It felt good. I wanted to celebrate by doing a lot of miles. I began doing some miles until I found some beans. I did two bean cans and was about to do some more miles when it began raining. I wasn’t scared. I put on a poncho and continued doing more miles. The miles were a little slower in the rain. I did miles until I was on a bridge. Then I did miles until I was on another bridge. I wasn’t probably going to do as many miles as I wanted but it was okay because I sat down on a bench and began to meditate in the rain. I was not bothered because I was still underneath my poncho. I wonder how I would still be alive without my poncho. A few minutes after I was done meditating the sun came out. Maybe I had somehow manifested the sun with my brain. I could feel all the sun’s warmth making my forehead glow. I began walking again. This one guy who saw me walking without shoes was like, “You need shoes or cocaine or something or else you’re going to die.” I pointed at his stool and said, “stool.” A few minutes after that I got sad. Some piece of dirt was yelling at a pebble because the pebble wanted to run out in traffic and be wild. This reminded me of the time in college when I tried to change my name to WILD STYLE. Anyway I don’t like when dirt is yelling at its pebbles when all the pebbles want to do is be wild. It’s like if you were a cardboard box of sweaters and someone tried to tell you that you couldn’t buy a train ticket to the sweater colonies. People and things need freedom to explore their own personalities or else they’re just going to get stuck following whatever personality they get stamped with at the bread factory known as the American industrial educational complex. Eventually I was walking under a bridge. A lady stopped and asked why I didn’t have shoes. I told her I was trying to save the earth. She said, “I’m in an environmental science class.” We shook hands. It got dark. Some birds on a wire looked at all the cars for sale in America. I found a store. It had all my favorite snacks. I got a large bag. Some people in my phone asked if I was real. I pretended to not be real. The snacks disappeared. I walked into the darkness while listening to some men argue about sports.from At Some Point in the Last Nine Billion Years (a novel)At some point in the last nine billion years I was probably a fourteen-year- old boy. Of course, when the world ends there will be no evidence any of us were ever fourteen-year-old boys so it’s sort of pointless to talk about the fourteen years I was a boy or about any of the years when I was anything, but the world isn’t quite dead yet or at least my consciousness still believes in its own existence so I’m going to talk about a bunch of things that probably happened and you’re going to sit there and pretend like they’re interesting.By the time I was fourteen, I think my parents were tired of raising me. We all lived in the same part of Maine where their parents had done them.The house where I grew up was gray, but on the first day of high school my mother painted the house red which for no reason was fitting because high school for the most part was satisfactory except for the time in science class, when some of my teeth were pulled out and melted on the heat spout. I struggled to chew for like a minute, but this struggle seeped into other areas of my life clouding the remainder of my adolescence and all but confirming my belief that the entire process of modern education was pointless.Fortunately, I met a boy named Leon. He gave me a few of his teeth. But his mouth was hollow and the teeth eventually crumbled. Some of them fell out when I tried to chew on a piece of toast. Leon said it was okay because he told me we were best friends.Sometimes Leon and I would go to the mall and use our pockets to steal electronics.When Leon was seventeen his parents were tired of looking at him every day so they sent him to prep school in Massachusetts.The rest of my mediocre adolescence was spent sitting at home waiting for the television to rot.This was about the time when people started using their computers to talk to other people’s computers. The internet had just been invented. Leon liked to email the internet at my parents’ house. He sent me a lot of pictures of his prep school girlfriend. She had a gerbil named “Grampy.” My father’s father was also named “Grampy.” Leon laughed when I told him this and said, “Your grandfather was named after my prep school girlfriend’s gerbil.”A few months later, I ate dinner with my parents. The next night I ate dinner with my parents again. My mother had cooked some barbecued horse teeth and cornbread. While we ate, our internet got a message from Leon. He asked if I had a girlfriend. I took a picture of an uneaten piece of cornbread and emailed it to Leon’s internet. I told Leon that my girlfriend was named “meat horse.” I didn’t actually have a girlfriend because I spent most of my free time waiting for the television to touch me.Things continued towards an utterly pointless conclusion, until Leon returned to Maine one day on a break from prep school and we went to a store that sold pancakes. While Leon ate his pancakes he said the majority of my teenage years with him had been slightly insignificant. The next day Leon returned to his prep school. There was nothing special about my relationship with Leon. For the most part, the years growing up with Leon were the years when I was not quite the person I am today.The summer before I left for college Leon and I met a sixty-three-year-old keyboardist. We started a band called “Steak Trombone.” Our band was mostly a failure, but we made some colorful t-shirts. On the front of the t- shirts there was a picture of a little girl eating an ice cream while sitting in a jar of mayonnaise. Leon hardly ever came to band practice. He was too busy talking to girls he met on the internet. Sometimes when he was bored he would go to the supermarket to steal toothpaste.One afternoon I went swimming with Leon and a bee stung me on the left side of my esophagus. Leon laughed until he was the ugliest person I had ever met. The water got cold. Leon said he didn’t want to swim anymore and instead wanted to buy a dog. He flew to South Dakota and bought a dog, but on the way home the plane crashed in Brazil and the dog ran away. Leon was in a coma for the rest of the summer. I developed a bad cough and didn’t recover until the last week of August when I finally coughed up the bee that had died at the bottom of my lungs.The night before Leon was supposed to leave for college he woke up from his coma. His parents invited me to dinner. There were lobsters for sale at a restaurant near the ocean. After dinner, Leon and I sat in a hot tub withLeon’s parents and his younger sister. His parents cried as they digested the idea of Leon moving to a city to attend a university.Leon’s freshmen-year roommate was a boy from a wealthy family whose dad dressed like he was a small white mouse named “Charles Young- Juice.” For whatever reason Leon and I didn’t talk to each other for the next three or four years. I developed my own life at a small liberal arts college somewhere in the United States. Nothing much happened with my thoughts in these years. I spent a few minutes reading books. Other times I would sit on the computer and click things.About a month before I was supposed to graduate, Leon called me and asked if I had decided what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I shrugged. He asked if I wanted to go out in the woods and kill an antelope. I wasn’t even sure what an antelope was, but I thought it might be a snowflake from the warmer regions of New England. Leon said, “All humans have a moral obligation to the legacy of humanity to do something with their lives that would be interesting to people who aren’t human.” Killing an antelope seemed like a poor way to meditate with the undeveloped pieces of my brain. I didn’t tell Leon I was against killing an antelope. Instead, I told him I was thinking about moving back in with my parents until I learned how to move objects with my thoughts.My years in college had made me an overeducated, white, middle-class male with no job skills. Most of the young, overeducated, white middle- class males in my age bracket also seemed to be struggling with the guilt of their post-collegiate lives. A lot of them planned on traveling after theygraduated because they wanted to look at the pieces of the earth they had never seen before.The most disappointing thing about my college education up to that point was I had not been taught how to levitate even two or three inches off the ground.A few days after Leon called me, he showed up at my dorm room. His eyes seemed to be drooping below his mouth. He was high on mushrooms and wanted to eat pancakes. We drove around for an hour, but could not find any pancakes. Leon told me to park my car in a ditch so we could sleep.In the morning we climbed out of the ditch and went for a jog. We jogged six miles. My legs began to cramp after the first mile. Leon was a better runner than me so his legs didn’t cramp. In high school, he had qualified for the state championships in cross country, but on the day of the state championships Leon went to his coach’s farm and kicked the coach’s pony in the head. The cross country coach got angry and demoted Leon to junior varsity. A few years later the coach was still angry so he divorced his wife and ran away to Montana with a seventeen year old girl named Mandy.After our run, Leon and I got breakfast in the cafeteria. He ate two hard- boiled eggs and a piece of melon. The food seemed to make him anxious.Leon ate very quickly because he said he didn’t know what else to do with the rest of his life.The next day I dropped out of college and moved back in with my parents. I told them I had graduated early. My father gave me a big hug and then took me out on a sailboat he had rented as a graduation present. The two of us floated around the Atlantic Ocean while we ate lobsters and played board games. On our last day out to sea, my father got sick and puked. He said he didn’t like boats anymore.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fence Books
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1944380183
• ISBN 13: 9781944380182
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320
• Editor: Butler Blake, Jones Shane