Let's Talk About Language

Let's talk about language. I hear a crow in the distance. And a dancer in a shimmer of black sequined silk shaking a tambourine. It reminds me of the day I first proposed marriage to nature. It was consummated with a wide-eyed enthusiasm. Believe me when I say that what I’m feeling inside doesn’t always correspond to what is outside. Thus, the birth of words. Which are endless. Infinity reflecting infinity in infinitely recurring images. If a description doesn’t fit its own description, try using a different set of words. Sometimes all it takes is a lotus, a bone, and a good hand lotion. Language is neither an instrument of precision or prediction. It’s a construct, like a small village. Today is a special day and everyone is running to the park. I marvel at the diversity of eyes. What detours, what misunderstandings, what convoluted trajectories, all to end up saying what one says. Existence is multifarious. This can be a problem if you’re brilliant. Mallarmé by a window, having breakfast, spoon in a grapefruit, contemplating Rimbaud.

Naiveté can be dangerous. Everyone remarked at how sexy the assassin was. That should tell you something. It’s an important clue. If it isn’t clear to you yet it soon will be, in the future, where the past goes on vacation and the present is unopened privately in a hotel room, button by button, Pacific breezes blowing in on a fairy tale, a knife on the floor and a multicolored moth on the ceiling. Meanwhile, certain expenses are carried over to another financial year. It’s how we get by. We live in a fiction. Which seems to be changing. Quite drastically, in fact. Language can’t help itself. It keeps trying to explain the universe. Listen. Listen up close. The first place you come to at the edge of the universe is Cheyenne, Wyoming. Maybe this isn’t what you were expecting. But hey. Sometimes what is most needed is a U-turn and a good woman at your side.

If language were perfect, people would cease to think. But now that I’ve brought it up, let’s get down to some milking. Gently grasp the teat between your thumb and forefinger near the top, squeezing downward to express the milk. That tingling you feel is just the night air. Microbes. Organelles. Mitochondria, powerhouse of the cell, converting juniper berries to thought, dynamite and communion. They call it thinking when it raises welts. These welts can appear anywhere on the body and may vary in size and shape. Don’t let it get in the way of your fun. Do what you want, go where you want to go. I would consider it imprudent to use a penis as a hammer. Don’t do that. There are other forms of entertainment far less taxing. Those tiny veins indicate something big is coming. Raise your arms to heaven and repeat after me: the birth of light takes place in darkness. Words are defined by other words. Click. Clack. Just like pool.

People have concerns. Shark attacks have been on the rise. There are drones over New Jersey. Chaos reigns on a Caribbean cruise ship. The wild west is still quite wild. You can smell it.  Desolation and sage. Creosote and oil. James Dean in Giant. Now come the elements. Oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen. The slap of the sea. The slap of indifference, which hurts the worst. Beauty persists, but it appears in strange, unexpected ways. That’s always been its modus operandi. A little threatening, a little edgy. Beauty is never innocent. Music often makes me feel like I'm busting out of my inhibitions. And I often do. The consequences can be a real problem. I find it increasingly difficult to describe things. The sunflower makes a splendid tattoo. But it’s hard to describe. It’s irrational. An irrational flower. And when the winter air is so cold it crackles in your voice I stop talking and listen. I hear the plumage of infinity rustling in the basement. 

Anything Can Happen

Anything can happen. It’s a hell of a time to be alive. A little introspection can go a long way. But’s it’s not as quick as being there. I have a duty to observe the moon. I built a telescope with golden nails and a silver saw. The best time to plant a word in a sentence is 8:30 a.m. Pacific Standard Time. But much is contingent on the tides, and the phases of the moon, and your willingness to go along with any of this. Look: in a second or two a lobster will crawl toward a can of luminous paint and pine for glory in the glow of an acetylene sneeze. The elevator will hover in indecision. We’ll get there eventually and the doors will slide open to the glory of a new floor & a new desk. There’s plenty of cable left over to lift a stanza into your stock portfolio, and thrive. But a poet grabbing at treasures and treats while working hard to get it all down on paper where it will languish in obscurity, turning dark and fermenting, essentially, until heady fumes of reverie fill the room and Lisbon explodes into goldenrod, is taking on a huge irresponsibility. I sometimes find that a little too much certitude can quarantine a healthy skepticism. And so I come to understand the metaphysics of imperfection, how perfect it is, inflammable and flawed.

I work in a cheerless basement. Voltaire is wax. I have to keep things cool. Cool as reason. If a radical forsythia accepts its eyebrows, it’s not my place to garnish it with a Bohemian allegory and a complete secretion of truth. Today it’s my suspenders holding my pants up while holding me down. Tomorrow it could be Puerto Rico and coconut milk. I don’t know anymore. It’s all up for grabs. Try fishing for an hour in a chasm below Cincinnati. You’ll see what I mean. Some books are to be tasted, others chewed into earthquakes. Some books are to be fished like mountain rivers, others bent into participles. Some books are chapels, others propel nouns across a terrain of spouts and fumaroles. Clicking moves my confusion toward punctuation. It is here I chose to sit and knit a carrot with imaginary wool. I believe they call it wool-gathering. I turned it into a career. I could’ve used this sentence in a different paragraph. But I chose to put it here.

I once built things. Plays, sonnets, displays of wit and unseemliness. My shirt translates existence as an ironing board so that a hot steam can understand it. This was back when universities championed free speech and Socratic maieutics. I love free speech. I urge it at every verge and tendency. I speak with an unfiltered tongue and find it a blessing to perform miracles of misinformation for kisses and fanfare. I’ll do anything. I once shot a comma with a coincidence. One gets used to the hard oak bench in a municipal courthouse. You can resist beauty but you can’t resist charm. We manage to disconcert whatever the language provides, and yet survive. I once found work as a chain of elegance. I got fired, of course. I reinvented myself by attaching antennas to my body and waiting for frequencies of gnostic understanding to light up my balls.

In the old days friendships were based on kitchen conversations. They were very informal, but extended far and spontaneously into cosmic equations and the infinitely amusing behavior of cats. We would stand there drinking in one another’s arms. We pleaded for colors to dance in a cube of air. And as new details emerged we packed out suitcases and went in search of true meaning, which proved to be a chimera, a walnut waltz in a chintz abalone. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. That’s not why I’m here. Fact is, I never did get to the bottom of that little conundrum. If you can’t find it in Max Jacob, you might find it in Gilgamesh. Keep looking. If you smell fragrances of lavender and myrrh, you’re probably not in Chicago. Try Wisdom, Montana, in the Big Hole Valley. I can’t promise you satori. But I guarantee you’ll love the sky.

This Is What The Poem Does

This is what a poem does: it topples over and begs to have its belly rubbed. Which turns out to be surprisingly cold. The gloom of December in the northern latitudes. Where the broadloom glees in warp and the treadle glees in weft and all the metals of the realm shine in immediate value. There are castles. And mythologies. Fontainebleau: sculpture of a man stroking the head of a lion on the body of a horse. The idea of freedom. Which isn’t an idea. It’s a puffy piece of discord. Basically, a marshmallow. And the freedom to make it. And hold it. And eat it. A marshmallow is basically a foam that's stabilized by gelatin. But I have a different question. How can you tell if it's raining underwater? You can feel it rain underwater when the fish turn hypothetical. And a finger welcomes fingers like a leg welcomes feet. And we kiss in a foundry in a shower of sparks. And enjoy life. Heavy rain at the tip of your finger. Furtive glances at a bus stop. A typical fun day at the karate dojo. Getting thrown to the floor. And getting up laughing.

When I hear a sound on the sound I say the sound coming from the sound is the sound of the sound of the sound. The original sound. The prehistoric belch. Life is different now. It requires different skills. Deceit and confabulation. Imagine a life wrapped in lies. This is life as it is lived in the present moment, AI getting rich off other people’s work, the tongue tip popping like candy. Nevertheless, some things remain relentlessly real. Did you know, for example, that King Charles has an enlarged prostate? Combine geology with majesty and you get the San Juans. The leap of killer whales amid storm-driven waves. I remember, age 12, new to Seattle from Minneapolis, the Ivar’s menu with the cartoon of a man sitting under an umbrella in the rain with the caption “keep clam.” Calm is neither a crustacean or an exhumed body propped up on a chair. No, it is not those things. It is sometimes coaxed into one’s being by flirtation and melodious echoes rising from the void, but it is best achieved by concentration. Try to be still. Try to focus. Feel yourself feeling yourself. As soon as the chirp begins, your tongue tip will begin to give off synchronized tingles onto your tongue. And you will be glad and propagate.

I’ve learned a few things in my time. The primary lesson to be learned in human society is that rarely, rarely does anything make any sense. But that’s no excuse to crawl into a nice warm meaningless bed of nihilism and dream your life away. One should iron with cause and determination to propagate abstraction. Abstractions heal. They heal because they crackle. They heal because they slide through consciousness like a big fat Buddha. They’re flagrant & mathematical. They are bazooka wallpaper with a misplaced aesthetic. But they seem to work. Nobody knows how. All we do know is that one day the weather was scarlet and the table smelled of wax. Our sadness tired of its paper daggers and became the actual memory of a crochet hook. We need to argue not because the cabin boy is enigmatic but because the tightrope walker is a calorie in our accordion. And every day new details emerge. Equations jingle with calculus. Olives ripen in Morocco. A goldfish remains still in a bowl, fins undulating in languor.

 

Turning The Heat Up

Planet Earth. December, 2024. A wide-eyed iron deity excites the skin. Helicopters crowd the sky. I sense something erotic in the air. I jump up the stairs just to touch your olives. Our boxing throbs upside-down. My big slap is in the flower.

Going into a cold room, turning the heat on and waiting for the heat to build then completely envelop you is one of the great pleasures in life. It’s quite similar to waiting for a drug to take effect, alcohol or cannabis, ecstasy or psilocybin. Feelings and perceptions change subtly, gradually, like when you're traveling by car or train and the landscape changes as you go from region to region, some hilly and densely forested, some mountainous and rocky, some flat and desolate, some smelling of sage, some written into the soil by tractors and ploughs. It is a form of inner metamorphosis, a discovery, as in adolescence, of feeling differently, seeing differently, delighting in novel complexities, feeling the metal of trumpets in a pool of violins.

The drug of life embroiders a sanguine hope. That there’s autonomy behind the thunder, elevation behind the bone. That red is red that green is green that brown is brown that oranges are orange and that pattern that is endemic to the history of plaid is the catalyst that awakens the enlivening actualities of black.

The paint stick accelerates the swirl of paint. Picasso’s muffin glows and crackles with abstraction. Is this because of words? The wood creaks as a character walks on stage. This is the language of wood. Fishnet stockings stiletto heels. The sink belongs in the kitchen. You can put it there if you use the right predicate. The wrong predicate will put it in a work of art. And make it do things improper to the use of predicates. As if anything were foreign or anomalous to a predicate. I assure you it is not. Is is a transitive verb. An ingot of red. Which is a poplar in the foreground. This is a sample of Fauve painting rendered in oil and thiamine with a thick brush of religion hanging from a sunbeam. Predicates are predicated on something, even if it’s just a forge. Backstage you'll see frost in the eyes of a mosquito, and the machinery of how it all happens. These aren’t predicates, these are more than predicates, these are stories. The stories are created to lift themselves into paradise, where the predicates are calm and graze on nouns.

Yellow is the color of joy. It’s also the color of caution. Of intellect. Of Anxiety. Of clarity. Of excess. Of sunlight. And crows and corn and a man painting crows in a field of yellow.

What drives the poem is reverie. The weight our sabotage. The light of our eyes. The ruby ​​has left us in darkness. But we have other minerals to pursue. The knowledge of which exceeds one's own cognition. There will be light to the east. While the west awaits our immodest assumptions.

It’s easy to speak to the dead, but hard to speak to the dying. You might as well be bowling. You feel so ineffective. Words tend to fade in the soft light of a hospital room. Nothing can reverse time or circumstance. Words lack the power to effect certain things. Like prolonging life. Power yields nothing without a fight. And what power do words have, when you’re up against fate? Destiny. Whatever you want to call it. There are words available for such things. Just don’t expect magic. Expect the unexpected. Life is full of surgery. And surrender and meatballs.  

Words are turkeys. Gobbledygook. But they make spectacular fodder for fairy tales. Think of me as a frog awaiting your kiss. The onion of whatever moment bristles with kites. We are all in a state of becoming. At least, that’s what I hear. That was me just a moment ago. And now I’m me again, until now, still in a state of becoming, which is unbecoming, because I’m still here, becoming foreign, becoming luggage, becoming maps and the leisure to study maps, becoming reflective, becoming omnivorous and spongelike, lingering in obfuscation, trying not to try to be somebody else, and try it without trying, and ending up on the dance floor, masquerading as Fred Astaire. But still me. Fantasizing. Driving a bus of Baptist schoolteachers to Puerto Vallarta. Not as Fred Astaire. Not as Richard Burton. But me: a young man in the dark chasing iguanas into the ocean I painted on the wall. And walking through a hole and coming out the other side somewhere in Finland, where the fun is, and the streets of Helsinki, and the fiery wet of a sauna.  

 

The Case Of The Phantom Paperclip

I was sitting on the steps in the entryway to our apartment building taking off my running shoes when I spotted a paperclip on the floor. I assumed it had fallen from the mail that R had just taken from our mailbox. Once my shoes were removed, I went down to pick it up. I looked down, but I didn't see it. How could this be? I’d just been looking at it. Did it stick to the bottom of my foot? Nope. Did it somehow manage to slide under the welcome mat? Nope. I closely examined the floor, which is covered by a dark brown carpet with a dense nap. It was nowhere to be seen. I entered our apartment and got a flashlight and came back out to look some more. No sign of a paperclip anywhere. What the hell. Did I hallucinate a paperclip? Had it been an optical illusion? Why would I hallucinate a paperclip? I mean, they’re handy, but I don’t think they’re worth a hallucination. People hallucinate demons and angels. All sorts of things. But paperclips?

I was sure it had been real. The paperclip had the exact appearance of a medium-sized paperclip. There was nothing remotely odd or distorted about it. Nothing that would suggest it was a minor hallucination, a harmless perceptual anomaly. It drove me crazy. The world can survive with one less paperclip in it. That’s not what bothered me. What bothered me is reality. Things in the mundane, empirical world of Newtonian laws – the human universe - don’t pop in and out of existence like virtual particles in the vacuum of space. Virtual particles are theoretical, short-lived particles that manifest as temporary fluctuations of energy. They tend to appear in pairs due to the fundamental principle of conservation of energy and momentum in quantum field theory; when a virtual particle is created from the vacuum, it must simultaneously create a corresponding antiparticle to maintain the overall charge and other quantum numbers as zero, effectively "borrowing" energy from the vacuum for a very brief time before annihilating each other, and disappearing. But that’s not where we live. The human universe is dense with predictability, solid as a fireplace grate and as true and undeniable as the red glow of the logs it cradles. In Greek philosopher Heraclitus’s world, fire represents the underlying principle of the universe, the material basis of an orderly universe. He had nothing to say about paperclips.

The inexplicable is not a good feeling. Things don’t just disappear. Imagine pulling out a chair to comfortably sit down and having it disappear the minute your buttocks – anticipating a nice, cushioned landing – find nothing but empty space and you end up on the floor. Or plunging a fork into a bite of ribeye and the ribeye vanishes and your fork comes down hard on a plate of fine bone china, sans rib eye. Nothing there. Maybe a bit of sauce. What the hell? Did it come to life and get up and walk away? Go to the men’s room? Should you call the waiter and ask for another rib eye, as the one you were about to eat suddenly vanished?  

Or, let’s say you’ve got to clean the gutters on your roof. You get a ladder from your garage and set it against the wall and put your foot on the bottom rung of a ladder and - no rung. Just empty space.

Or during a long sea voyage you come upon a ship at sea, everything intact, everything normal, except there’s no crew. This actually happened. December 5^th, 1872, the British brigantine Dei Gratia happened upon a disheveled but still seaworthy ship called the Mary Celeste with its sails slightly torn and moving in the wind but with no crew aboard. Not a soul.

This is not the kind of reality I signed up for. I mean sure, things do disappear over time. People die. Pets die. Land masses are swallowed by the ocean. Lakes dry up. Cities are deserted. Empires fall. But not all at once. Not one minute there then next minute gone. Not like that. This is a circumstance with far-reaching implications. Today it’s a paperclip, tomorrow it might be a car. Or a house. Or a wife. Or a father. Or a mother. Brother sister cousin uncle. Who knows?

It doesn’t help that I’ve never felt especially secure about our reality. I’ve seen too many abrupt changes over the years. Friends turn suddenly sullen, or bitter. Lovers who once doted on you begin undermining your confidence with stinging, sarcastic criticisms. People who were once passionate about social justice begin ranting about how lazy the homeless are, or providing justifications for the use of terrible weapons in foreign countries.

And now – due to climate change – the entire planet is undergoing a colossal transformation with ominous implications for the survival of the human species.

It’s not an especially friendly universe. It works in mysterious ways. There’s so much phenomena out there that doesn’t fit a logical framework. Dark matter, for example, the mysterious substance that makes up a huge portion of the universe’s mass, causing discrepancies in gravitational calculations of galaxy rotation, but eludes the detection of our finest technology.

Or that dark energy that’s accelerating the expansion of the universe, what’s that?

Or consciousness, emotions, God. Self-awareness, sexuality, the origins of life. Why do cows stand along the Earth’s magnetic poles – facing north and south – whenever they’re grazing or resting? Why did mammals return to the sea and become whales and seals and dugongs? Why do certain plants contain alkaloids such as morphine? Why does biodiversity increase as you approach the equator? How did Argentine ants manage to colonize across three continents?

And why does anything exist at all?

I looked again the next day. Not a sign of a paperclip. Not a sign of anything. Not even a tack. Or a stray brad. Or a bobby pin. Or a rubber band. Or a piece of lint. Or a button or a barrette. Nada. Just dark brown carpet and the silence of the hallway.

And I keep wondering why, why a paperclip? Why not a tarantula? Why not a capsule or a pill or a lozenge? Something with a little mystery. Something to which a narrative might stick. Paperclips are such inane objects. Why would I hallucinate something that tame, that insipid, that tedious, that uninspiring? Was this the revenge of a bureaucrat, the prank of a policy-making poltergeist? What the hell is reality anyway? What’s holding it all together? Besides a paperclip.

Somewhere South Of The Nearest Reality

If I aim the arrow I have just now manufactured out of air, and because it's a simple word, assembled with syllables and myths and the wisdom of the morpheme, and hisses and whistles and bears the weight of my convictions, and is pointed and quartz, it will pop the balloon of the simulacrum surrounding us and sparkle in our nerves like spontaneity. We will all see that fat sphere of false reality come tumbling down in shreds of illusion, wondering what to do now that our balloon is gone, our delusions gone, our beliefs gone, our chimeras and fables gone, and a new reality has taken their place, which is both correspondent to our senses and velvet to our touch. That said, the texture of text is not always velvet. Sometimes it's coarse and widespread  and unfolds in a thousand tin angels and mysterious dirt roads, some going east, some going west, some going north and some are off to a sideshow somewhere south of the nearest reality.

I think you know what I’m getting at. The audience might be leaving. But the performance isn’t over. There are secrets to reveal, confessions to make, grudges to vent and blizzards to face.

Not to mention so many things unstated, things that must be said and are never said.

Give me a call. We’ll talk about it. We’ll get things solved. But if this is a recording, wait for the beep. I’m not here right now. I stand behind these words. That’s why you can’t see me. All you see is words. These words. Heady, vivacious, buoyant words. Words swirling in words. Like twigs in a river. Like turtles. Like blood. Like the glare of sunlight on Puget Sound in winter.

And a thousand other things that are on my mind this first day of December. And so much to remember. And so much to forget.

Right now, I’m a little preoccupied. Engorged, let’s say. Indulged by my own inclinations and left to my own resources. Absorbed. Immersed. Lost in thought. Found in absentia. Deeply focused. Senselessly abstruse.

I’m focused on tomorrow morning’s doughnuts. You can’t put your arms around a memory. But you can put your mouth around a doughnut. I like the ones powdered with the fine white dust of heaven. They say heroin is not always a wise choice. Sometimes what is most needed isn’t even necessary. It’s just a stray thought looking for some words to crawl into and become something, a circumference and a hole. In other words, something like a doughnut. Vegetables get complicated. Broccoli requires a chassis of multilayered prose. And the rhetoric of carrots is often tractional, and involves traffic. And if it lies amid ferns in the forest and looks injured, stand back and let it breathe. It’s probably nothing. It might be a mirage or a perturbance in the space-time continuum. It might be a snow globe or ultimate meaning. Or maybe just a doughnut. 

When Negativity Don't Pull You Through

I don’t understand the taboo against complaining. Do all cultures have this sour disposition toward people who insist on telling the truth? Of lifting the veil? What was it Shelley said, “lift not the painted veil which those who live / Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there.” Things like: Pilates on a spacecraft, as it hurtles toward earth in flames. Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess. The truculence of poets. Ruskin weeping in a men’s room. Who wants to see that? What everyone wants, apparently, is quiet. And who can blame them? Nobody wants to find themselves in Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. We just want a crackling fire and a huge willingness to gaze into the eyes of a penny and say I love you. It whispers of all sorts of impulse and indication that all those sexy pencils we bring to a sheet of paper just to repeat our grievances over and over and erase them in a fit of shame might be a bit too melodramatic to suit our purposes. Complaining must have an edge, or it’s just a wet sponge. People aren’t always great listeners. The mind wanders. A good complaint can coax a swarm of happy minds out of their fake contentment. Illusions are intoxicating. The truth is an old rag soaked in gasoline.

Art alone, by being useless, can be used to patch an existential tire. And since most people consider complaining to be useless and annoying let me show you how consciousness tosses about like grain in the wind. The grain isn’t complaining because there’s nothing to complain about. It’s grain. At least, I think it’s reasonable to assume that that’s what goes on in the domain of grain. Grain being grain. Wind being wind. Nature accomplishing its tasks in unhurried calm. Complaining is different. Complaining sensationalizes the ideal. Its agitations are squalls. Small craft warnings. Inundations of nihilistic bile. The sharp burn of brandy, exquisite as a catharsis.

All grain does is sensationalize eating. It grows it waves in the wind it turns into bread. Complaining comes from pain. This is why it’s immodest, and irritating, and holy, and annoying. But it should be respected. It shouldn’t be shunned like it’s a sin rippling through the puritan community.

Cowboys, according to the John Wayne Hollywood model, hate complainers. They just look you in the eye and spit at the ground and ignore you. Hamlet would not have made a good cowboy. George Carlin was a spectacular cowboy. And so was Bill Hicks. But there was also a lot of Hamlet in them. People given to solitude, but craving a stage. People seething with preternatural insight. O cursed spite, why was I born to set it right.

Wild Bill was a bit like that, and so was Samuel Clemens, whose complaints were dressed in humor, and buffalo robes and stage coach stations. People hardened by blizzards. And disease. And death. Is it any wonder a cowboy would look at you silly if you complained the service at the Rawhide Saloon was slow and the waitresses were rude? He’d pull out his six-shooter and put a few holes in the ceiling. And laugh like a maniac. Because he survived the civil war. And you’re a jerk and a cheat at cards. Cowboys may not complain. But there’s hurt and devilry in their eyes when they can see the fraudulent nature of things, and feel backed against a wall.

Hamlet was a supremely gifted complainer. My complaints are blunt instruments compared to his samurai pith and wit.

People don’t like complainers because it spoils the meticulously constructed world of denial they live in. Their own personal Disneyland.

If you’re into complaint porn like me, I recommend reading the reviews online. Reviews for plumbers. Reviews for electricians. Reviews for rabis and priests. Reviews for shamans and birthday clowns. Reviews for swimming pools and window installation companies. Reviews for Hamlet and Portnoy’s Complaint. Bill Burr at Madison Square Garden.

Complaints, especially the big complaints, the existential complaints, that whole what’s the point of rolling a boulder to the top of a hill if it’s going to go rolling back down again? Deserve a theatre of their own. And they often do at the comedy clubs. And those little bits in King Lear, when Lear is raging against the heavens in a vicious storm of treachery and abandonment. And the fool and mad Tom seek shelter in whatever hovel they can find. And Gloucester appears with a light and invites them into the castle. Where things get even worse. And hard looks suffer inflammations of harsh unforgiving speech. Grievances so hard they create armies and death.

Complaining isn’t a frivolous endeavor. Complaining will earn you complaints. It’s blasphemous. It’s a clear effrontery to the author of our existence. Who made everything perfect. Which it most definitely is not. Maybe for some creatures. But not us delicate humans. Not with our sensitive unfurred, unscaled skin. Our tiny little teeth and our tiny little eyes and our wingless shoulders and the complications of our fingers and the oppositions of our thumbs. Our big dumb brains inventing telescopes and microscopes but too stupid to take care of a planet.

Astronauts never seem to complain. Maybe its due to the weightlessness. I would definitely complain less if I could float. And good healthcare. And a stable economy. And people who loved me. Who would complain in those circumstances? Larry David no doubt. Because there will always be people who don’t know to park. Or look you in the eye and tell you the truth.

It takes stamina to listen to someone’s complaint. There has to be some appetite for negativity, or such assurance in the world you’ve constructed that its foundational assumptions can withstand a small tremor of grumbling.

Some people are drawn to the negative. These people are called nihilists, and they enjoy hard rock and Beckett, gestures without a purpose and minerals shaped like a Missouri breakfast. They’re surprisingly nimble and active participants in the game of life, once you get them motivated, and hand them some money, and a bag of cocaine.

I wrote a novel of complaining once. And those poor generous souls who were willing to subject themselves to my abuses of the English language, complained about the complaining. I think I may have taken it a notch to high. Too much trouble in the treble. And not nearly enough bass.

It’s hard trying to maintain a balanced view of things in life, just enough reward to justify the punishment. It’s good to remind yourself of the things you’re grateful for. But we all live in a state of acute precarity these days and we’re all trying to keep our dinghies from turning over. The waves are high and their menace is real. Does someone’s complaining help our situation? I believe it does. Maybe a chain reaction of vigorous healthy complaining across the nation of an exhausted people finally fed up with the imbecility of their government will spread a broad, liberating light across the darkness of the prairie all the way to Vegas to the Gulf of the Farallones and Kerouac’s old Golden Gate and brighten the sad dim lights of San Francisco.