Museums Are Zoos For Artists

Museums are zoos for artists. Artists are zoos for museums. But. I just want to know one thing. How strong is a gorilla? Gorillas are very strong. Gorillas can bend thick bamboo, uproot trees, and break termite mounds open. And yet their tenderness is legendary. If you know how to dip a mountain in wildflowers, you can overflow the edge of anything and arrive at some semblance of goodwill. You may stumble a little along the way, but that’s to be expected. Perfection, in this life, is unattainable. No one visits the afterlife without an attorney present. Whenever I visit the underworld, I put a magnificent bone in my suitcase along with an array of entertaining items. Tentacles, tits, and pieces of bright pentameter. You can find redemption in almost anything these days. So get ready. Some life is about to happen. If you feel like singing go ahead. But root the descriptions in good honest dirt. Keep an eye on the weather. Nobody can choose the direction of the wind. Not from the timid sanctuary of a motel room. No, what you want is a mutation. Form is the downfall of content. You can’t trap an image in a cube of rain. Not unless you intend to start something, just when I’m looking around for an exit ramp. My stream of consciousness indicates I'm chronicling something gnomish and wet. But the speedometer tells me we’re going head over heels in verbal embroidery. We could end up anywhere. Dancing in a Kentucky roadhouse. Or lost in some old melody with a dreamy tempo and a provocative thread.

One should undress before crawling on a pyramid. A negligee if you have to. It’s going to be hot. That Egyptian sun is murder on the skin. It’s up to you. I’m not entirely sure what rejuvenations lie in store, but I’m sure the journey itself will merit our gratitude. Wear something appropriate to the afterlife, assuming it’s just a casual visit and not an entire stay. Find a bedsheet. Try cutting through the fabric in an erratic fashion. Whatever it ends up resembling will not matter. What’s important is socks. Or a rattlesnake jacket with a plus sign and a history of chains. It will accommodate the rain quite well if it has been sewn with dragonfly thread. The zipper must be provocative, and consistent as gas. Rehearsal is good, but it behaves too much. Remember: wood before swan equals aluminum during credibility. Meanwhile, if the map widens our absence I will imitate something itchy. I have a feeling it’s all going to work out fine in the end. I know something about snorkeling and mechanical nouns. The future is an elusive phenomenon. I’m more comfortable in the past, where everything is predictable, because it already happened, but not set in cement, because time is fluid. Time is an aquarium in a psychiatrist’s waiting room. Just getting it started requires a vigorous push and a madeleine dipped in lime blossom tea.

I’m not equipped with Proust’s prodigious memory. I can barely remember the subject of a conversation ten minutes after I’ve had the conversation. I’m lucky if I can remember who I was talking to. Koko Taylor? Willie Dixon? Wang Dang Doodle? Smack me into umber and I’ll come out cinnamon. I can barely control who I am much less than manage who I’m not. I love the Fauves in the same way I love a junkyard pumpkin. I give my spit a zip code and shine my shoes. Things get done quickly here. I don’t need a reason to fall in love. Like most things in life, it comes as a surprise. Gravity is easy. You can feel it in your bones. And in bed. Spreading you like butter. Heave that emotion into a sentence and see what happens to the mirrors. That feeling you get after a dental filling is a blunt example of disembodiment. I’ve been there. Yesterday morning I woke up on the ceiling. Gertrude Stein handed me the newspaper. I heard there was an ape in the salon last night. No one knows how he got there. But man could he cut hair. 

 

The Art Of Mowing

I used to mow my father's lawn. I remember the arduous task of bringing the lawnmower to life. This required pulling on a rope repeatedly until it engaged a spring-loaded rotor, which in turn rotated the engine's flywheel and crankshaft, initiating the combustion process. Once the engine started, the recoil starter disengaged, allowing the engine to run independently. It made quite a racket and had a lot of power. The yard, front and back, was quite large, so it was a job that took several hours to complete. I was living like Gregory Corso at the time, or John Keats, adepts at couch-surfing. Mowing the lawn was a way to compensate for the kindness of food and lodging provided for the few days, sometimes weeks, it would take to find a job in order to secure an apartment. Rents in Seattle in the 70s were phenomenally cheap. It’s why I moved back to Seattle after ten years in California. The nascent flowering of what would soon be Silicon Valley had already begun driving rents and real estate way up. It would be another ten years or so before the same phenomena would convert Seattle from being one of the most livable of cities to a dystopic hellscape of unaffordable homes, “suicidal” whistleblowers, cratered roads and drones.

The lawn mower was old and stubborn and hard to start. It was the hardest part of the mowing job. I liked the uniformity of the process, the machine vibrating its power in my arms, pulling me along like a mechanical mule, a Martian rover with rotating blades. I liked the combined smells of newly mown grass and gasoline. The strong smell of freshly cut grass is caused by green leaf volatiles (GLVs), quite generally a mix of various oxygenated hydrocarbons, which are released when grass is damaged. In the French movie Perfumes (Les Parfums), Emmanuelle Devos plays a famous French “nose” who can discern with acute sensitivity a universe of odors. She refers to the smell of newly mown grass as the smell of carnage. I would, as a rule, mow the lawn in orderly strips, going back and forth, lost in thought. When I was finished mowing, I would rake. Raking took a lot longer. But there was something Zenlike in the motion, a meditative rhythm.

Lawns appear to be disappearing. A lot of the new McMansions use every square inch of property, leaving room for little else but a few rocks and some beach grass. A number of luxurious dwellings use artificial turf, which I find quite off-putting. Why would anyone do that? Grass is not a rare metal. It’s everywhere. It does require water. But this is Seattle. It rains a lot.  Mowing, it would seem, has lost its allure for a lot of homeowners. Many yards now have been landscaped to accentuate rocks and moss. The effect is enchanting. The larger homes, the ones upwards of two million, will quite often have a fountain and a statue of the Buddha, seated in a lotus position with a benevolent smile and a large well-exposed belly, soliciting a rub for good luck. I find this curious. That people blessed with wealth should allude to an eastern philosophy whose tenets advance non-attachment, deliverance from our enslavement to material possessions, even within our thoughts and emotions. Is this because once wealth is attained, it seems only natural to despise it? Does the effort to acquire wealth have a damaging effect on the psyche, recommending that a Buddha should be seated strategically somewhere in the garden, ideally near a fountain, as a talisman to the further grip of the material world, or as a warning to people not to seek wealth and property, it’s just a headache, an ongoing anxiety? Wouldn’t a more apt religious figure be someone espousing a gospel of joy and prosperity, the idea that God rewards faithfulness and devotion with material wealth and success, or one of many celebrities hosting meditation videos on YouTube, Sam Harris or Kevin Hart? A Buddha in a lotus position does, I must say, look far better suited to a setting of lobelia, elephant ears and water hyacinth than a podcast celebrity smiling sagely out of a backdrop of bugleweed, spirea and stinking hellebore.

It was British engineer Edward Beard Budding that we have to thank for the invention of the lawn mower. It seems appropriate that Budding, who worked as a mechanic building and repairing machinery for textile mills in the Stroud valleys, that the words ‘beard’ and ‘budding’ should constitute the bulk of his name. Budding was granted a patent for the first mechanical lawn mower in 1830. The machine was based on a tool used to uniformly cut carpet and comprised of a series of blades around a cylinder. Cast-iron gear wheels transmitted power from the rear roller to the cutting cylinder, allowing the rear roller to drive the knives on the cutting cylinder. It must’ve been a hell of a thing to push. Lawn sports like croquet and lawn tennis had become quite popular in England, as well as in the U.S. By the mid-19th century in America lawns were firmly established as a signature of the prosperous American homeowner’s landscape. However, it was evident in the Flintstone cartoons that the prehistoric Flintstones had a grassy front yard with a cobblestone walkway and a driveway, as well as a grassy backyard with a pool and a coconut tree, thus belying the lawn as an eccentricity of the industrial age.

 

 

Dear Reader

Dear Reader: are you still there? I'm here, minding my own business in obscurity, packing my suitcase and humming Inagaddadavida. Maps, underwear, attire, hot air balloon, and Pataphysical Snorkel Kit. I’m braced. Firmly ensconced in the never-ending challenge of hotel faucets. The glitter of audacity. The smell of the Mississippi in Mississippi during a sunset in Tupelo. There are things I can’t explain. What has become of the role of the writer in a world of AI? Am I a ghost? Is there any reality to what I’m saying? No ideas but in things, quipped William Carlos Williams. Opium and denim. Earthworms and pillows. I get it. But what happens when things turn spectral? Consciousness is fluid. Sometimes words mean different things. You’ve got to keep an eye on them. Ideas are the ghosts of thought, raked from the infernos of divination. The Oracle at Delphi breathing in the fumes of the underworld. Words eat the air. They drink the light of the sun and detach and die. They flutter with the tumult of the mind. They decompose in piles of raked leaves and cut grass, producing heat. And this becomes a haunting.

There are plenty of things in life to care about. Périgord truffles. Petrarchan sonnets. Feral cats. Reading is a way to remember. Wherever I go there are more things to absorb, more things to learn, and more things to pay attention to. The slosh in the toilet when the Space Needle swayed during the earthquake of 1965 when I was in health class learning about human sexuality and drugs. The high school was an old brick building. It shook like a stripper at the Peppermint Hippo in Las Vegas. The teacher clung to the blackboard. Now I’m an old man and sit in a chair gluing words together with folklore and bile. I’m surrounded on all sides by galaxies and asteroids. Carl Sagan’s wallpaper. The odysseys of objects in a woman’s purse. The worrisome debts in wallets. The weirdness of purple. The bump in the road. The charge of an elephant. The talk in the backseat. The differences between elevators and escalators. The convoluted blobs of oysters. The voices of old men in the night. Hard to say these days, what’s real, what’s not real, and what’s in between. Certainty is a rare feeling. Those who claim its patent are either hopelessly imperious or totally insane. The truest certainty is uncertainty. It’s not a moral. It’s not a trick. It’s just uncertainty. One more thing to care about. One more thing to read. Decipher. Drink from its spring. 

Books are repositories of boiling, oceanic consciousness. Did you know you can make a waterfall with a megaphone and a little urine? It’s true. Beauty is often in the eye of the beholder, squirming in the backseat to juggle two planets in a dance of prose. Don’t treat yourself like a prison warden. No, no, no. Try to imagine yourself as Elwood P. Dowd. Or Harvey, his invisible a six-foot-three-and-a-half-inch tall white rabbit. Words can’t do everything. Not when infinity detonates in our eyes as we attempt to drag a large vocabulary of Hindi through the flowering vines of India. You’ll need a deep understanding of prepositions, and a map of Manipur. In the end, there is no end. Each end begins another beginning and each beginning slows before the next detour, the next exit, the next last chance, the next hothouse romance, the next smell of sawdust, the next play, the next crisis, the next fight in the ring, the next appliance, the next sweater. The weird motels of blue highways, the face on the back of a spoon, the incursions on your time, the escape into cinema, the push to go somewhere, always, until the journey itself becomes the destination. Fresh rain. The sway of willows. Fingers on a wall of frosted glass.

Red soil is a good indicator of iron. Color, texture, and the presence of certain minerals can indicate past climates, including temperature, barbecues, igloos, and rainfall patterns. If you can read whatever terrain for signs of potential wealth, or water, or oil, or old coins and the remains of ancestral dwellings, then Mars is the place for you. Or the Mesabi Range in Minnesota. My reading of dirt concentrates on pleasure, how good it would feel to sink my fingers into some black topsoil and smell it. Smelling is the power to read the air for signs of brushfire or frost. Texture, too, is a form of text. My sweater feels like Proust. My pants are vintage Kerouac. Legibility is all things and all things are legible. The illegible is legible when it provides clues about our headstones. Cemeteries are libraries of the dead. Hills are compilations of rocks and grass. Mountains are anthologies of mines and summits. Our carpet is encyclopedic. Our kitchen drawer is poetry. The knives are eloquent. The forks are ambivalent. The spoons are spondees of splendid inattention. Everything rattles in chorus. Everything points to syntax. Everything needs a predicate. And a name. This is the press of a bashful hand, this the float and odor of hair.

 

Aristotle's Kitchen

Books are repositories of boiling thought. Parachutes for rebellious angels. Sunglasses for the cynical. Telescopes for the oracular. Absinthe for the emotionally crippled. Things happen among words that are too weird to happen elsewhere. For example: prophecy. The curse of Cassandra. The warning nails itself into the past, where it is promptly ignored. Human beings have a very complicated history of crusades, war, oceanic consciousness and nutmeg. Did you know you can make a waterfall with a megaphone and a little urine? It’s true. Beauty is often in the eye of the beholder, squirming to get out from under the eyelid. Bitumen feeds the gallantry of our highways and roads. The rearview mirror gives us a clear view of the past. Pomades consist of rostrum sweat and bits of singing. The splendor of rain. The glitter of consciousness in outer space. One can obtain medications from plants. No prescription necessary. Just jungle. An entire planet juggled in prose. Riotous drinking, strummed guitars, chronicled aspirations. Letters putting out buds of semantic fruit. Gauze. Cephalopods. The clatter of metaphysics in Aristotle’s kitchen. 

Don’t treat yourself like a prison warden. No, no, no. Treat yourself like a mad wizard atop a high bluff overlooking the ocean, invoking a storm with a rod and a battery of words gathered from the grimoire in your cave. Try to imagine yourself as Elwood P. Dowd. Or Harvey, his invisible a six-foot-three-and-a-half-inch tall white rabbit. Converse with fabulous beings. Make friends with spirits. Press a stethoscope to the beating heart of night. Dream of a weekend with a Caribbean reef squid. Emotions aren’t like lingerie. They’re more like overalls. Let all the parts of you go berserk like laundry tumbling in a dryer. Turn resistance to resilience, then reverse it again, just to be sure the coffins remain below the sod and the moon mellows our intestinal biome with the languor of her phases. Despair is the daughter of hope. Hope is the bastard child of mitigation. Between these, we find intervals of rapport. Daylight in our laments. Moonlight in our bones.

Language breaks down when it’s employed to describe Paraguay or orbit tidepools. Words can’t do everything. It’s a magic limited to Jimmy Stewart’s role in Rear Window. His character, L.B. Jeffries, an adventurous photographer confined to his New York City apartment with a broken leg, allowed him to convey intense emotion. Infinity detonated in his eyes. The flash of bulbs. Immobility in the face of danger. The chaos of voices with different timbres and different needs reverberating in a building courtyard. When language breaks down the world breaks down. Details we hadn’t noticed before peep out. Thought on thought creates a dot of high density and temperature until it explodes into tennis shoes and rattles and intestinal biomes. In the same way glue is busy with adhesion, the croissant is a paradigm of the jaw. If we are to believe that the air inside a balloon is instinct with distillations of pink, then we must also concede that behavior is often the result of glia. You can drag a large vocabulary into the flowering vines of India, but you cannot make it engorge with blood and pump feathers out of its ass. To do this, you’ll need a press, at the very least. You’ll need a deep understanding of prepositions, and a map of Paraguay.

In the end, there is no end. Each end begins another beginning and each beginning slows before the next detour, the next exit, the next last chance, the next hothouse romance, the next smell of sawdust, the next play, the next crisis, the next fight in the ring, the next appliance, the next sweater. The weird motels of blue highways, the face on the back of a spoon, the incursion on your time, the escape into cinema, the push to go somewhere, always, until the journey itself becomes the destination. The engine clicks as it cools. Fresh rain. The sway of willows. Former truths turn out to be the biggest lies. And the biggest lies turn out to be fabulous entertainments. The saddest days are generally the most difficult to explain. The Victorians had beautiful salons in which to work these things out, eloquent speeches that shined like an English afternoon through frosted glass. The murmur of rain. The chatter of sparrows. The curve of a finger. Anything to draw the attention, and hold it long enough to get a point across. Which is most often pointless. The steam from an iron is more than apt to describe infinity as a collar. But that’s the iron. Everything looks wrinkled to an iron. It’s the things we’ve been busy neglecting that get us in the end. Bite us in the ass. Or flow over us like a solar wave in a Finnish sauna.

 

Consciousness Is A Ghostly Occupation

Every journey happens afterwards, in the mind. Stay focused. Don’t stray too far from the path. Demands have fangs. Mirrors dance the air. I can hear a horde of words fight and howl in a paragraph. On the basis of this occurrence, it is possible to go beyond semantics and exhibit some chutzpah. I’ve never felt so close to earth as I do at this moment, orbiting earth on a Santa Cruz bicycle. I know it in my bones. The most perfect drink is a blue wind on a green day. One sip confirms this. Two sips condense it. Three sips cause a little discussion. Heidegger asks the question what is metaphysics. The answer is fish. Our neurons are stars. Our valleys are mud and chaos. I think that thoughtlessness is a thoughtful idea. To be a mollusk or a hornet is still to be a living entity, a word, a noun, a name, a squeak, a squawk, a squeeze, a squab. Nothingness is identical with Being. An unknown vigorous button is like a beatitude to me, a thing that only happens when the splash forgets the wave that brought it here. A dream of description is salt to my tongue. I look for the best way to get it done. I recommend a stroll. Bring some binoculars. Old men sing differently from young men. There’s a reason for that. But you’re not going to find it until your turn 80. At least. At last. Death on the back of a donkey, tattooed and sparkling.

The word for discretion got lost again. Nobody remembers what it looked like. What color was it? How big was it? Did it appear hard to pronounce? Crossing a new horizon is always makes a splash. Whispers in the nave are not uncommon. They’re quite noticeable. Friends stand around chewing the fat. The revolving display racks in the lobby creak. They serve a purpose. But no one remembers what it is. Somebody suggested peacocks. Someone else insisted that there can be embellishments to the Act of Love. Peacocks, for example. Peacocks can be supplemented with a variety of acolytes. Acolytes, like argyle, can be supplemented with speech. What did they come here for in the first place? What were they seeking? Did anyone look satisfied when they left? This is what life looks like to a burglar: one stolen moment after another. In a room of 100 people, there will be 99 conceptions of God and a shivering bivalve. I wonder, though, how many people feel something inside them that wants to be announced – defined, described, chatted up, promulgated – but there are no words for it. You want to mean something very precisely. As precisely as any language has ever permitted. Meaning that when meaning itself has been stripped bare due to semantic leaching, as say, the word ‘awesome,’ it is magnetized by the nearest iteration of it, which is to say the seminal event when a feeling acquired a sound, and a sound acquired a meaning. Something hot. Something soft. Something key. But something.

Acting parts is vital. I don’t know who I am. An internal investigation has been opened. I should have some results by the end of the month. Until then, let’s party. As I don’t have an identity, I’m free to do what I want. I don’t even know where to begin. Florida, maybe. Predicates come into play, and scenery and mashed potatoes. Life occurs in sizzling coefficients. Music can take you elsewhere. But you have to meet it half way. There’s a bookstore in Key West with a rug and a cockatoo. And shelves and shelves of books. This is why I like mahogany. It looks good almost anywhere. It’s clear the universe has other things on its mind than agates. What we’re dealing with here are words at the edge of reality. Adjectives like a skeleton broken into rain. I surround myself with beautiful blunders. Nobody gets hurt. But there is percussion. Ginger Baker in Nigeria in 1971. This is the logic of skin. Clods of dirt. Horticultural syntax. You know the feeling. The feeling that comes at night. And smashes a piece of wedding cake in your face. That’s it. That’s what I need. A violin concerto in D minor played by a refrigerator. The truth that we put into words does not extend to Las Vegas. Grammar is always so sad. It helps to frame it as laudanum. Consciousness is a ghostly occupation. Nobody really likes Platonic forms. They’re useless in a kitchen. Just give the word and I’ll paint some cherubs on the ceiling. I can see it in your eyes. The entire shit show. And whatever else we might find in the drawer.  

 

This Is Why I Hate Paywalls

Existence begins with a sigh, a goat, and a slide down a birth canal. I want the full meaning of this sentence to disassemble itself in a centrifuge. What can we do to make this moment incandescent? This is where the hammer becomes a couplet. Stupefaction by Wi-Fi. I like to think of it as a kitchen appliance that straddles conventional boundaries and eludes definition. I enjoy every opportunity I get to wield a wrench. But sometimes I feel more like Malta. The call of an interior postulation puts my focus on hold, and I turn to the window for a ride across the Rubicon. I’ve made up my mind to go warm and temperate into the tropical regions of my southern hemisphere. Experience begins with a single inhalation. And ends with a fantasy. My fingers curled around an orange. My head wrapped around a novel perspective. How do you draw the light? How do you draw space? Just space. Nothing in it. No planets. No stars. No bus depots. No diners or donors or dinosaurs. Space. And many exciting minutes later Sandra Bullock. Reaching the sandy shore. And standing up. But that’s not space. That’s moo. Nothingness. Absence. Non-being. How do you draw that? What pencil do you use? What brush? What anarchy? What piano sonata? This is just silly. All the space is between the words. Not in the words. The slide in the park was put together with syllables. And a crescent wrench.

How does one manage to put so many words together without burdening them with the world’s tedium? I want to see the energy of life on paper. I want to see syllables and morphemes click as they collect the residue of combusting metaphors. Poetry is an incendiary problem with an explosive solution. Every now and then one gets a nice clean shot on the gun range. We live in an era nebulous as a rice ball. There are no parameters or parachutes. Capitalism is kaput. Competition has been replaced by authoritarian updates, unfulfilling fulfillment centers and sternly timed bathroom visits. Do you remember what it was like to feel your life unfold in candlelight and confession with the same quality of attention as a reader feels the articulations of a book tease the mind into thought? Writing gives us the opportunity to pour the northern lights over a crust of definition, and walk away grinning like Minnesota Fats after clearing the table with a single shot. It doesn’t always work out that way. It usually goes sideways. It’s why I get a kick out of punctuation. Is there still a place for poetry under the tutelage of techno-fascism? Sublime dead authors enlighten no one in library mausoleums. Books should be as wide-spread and available as water. You can use my swimming pool until I'm insoluble, & lost in butterflies.

Life is so much better when things are within reach. This is why I hate paywalls. Everything is siloed. Privatized. Automated. Society has been atomized into YouTube shorts. Who invented the zipper? I’ll bet there’s a video on YouTube to provide that information. Shared reflections can be erratic, depending on the host. Feelings aren’t always aluminum. And anything orthogonal can be abandoned for something folded and linen. Can you show me how you were born? I’ve forgotten much of it. Things continue to lie dormant within me. Trees. Hygrometers. Skies boiling with altocumulus. In the prominence of tidepools there are ample definitions for the weave of Michaux’s sumac. I want to see it do something extraordinary. Pour polar oil on a plaster mosquito. Sometimes I feel compelled to pin a question mark on a crab. There’s a melee every moment that staggers in the timeless presence of a Helsinki coconut. Here we have a group of carpenters swarming around a sonnet. I’m not always so openly scientific. Which is to say the carpenters are real. But the sonnet is not. The sonnet has been transformed into a bloodmobile.

Yesterday I bought a sound. A gown of sound. I’m a man of elder years and chrome elephants eavesdropping on marathons of pain. I consider clothing to be sparkles of perambulation on paper, parables of lavender and gray, like the sunsets of France. The sleeves of evening may be deployed in the libraries of the soul. These are the ghosts of pool sticks, the very things of which the world is made, including all the fractured ideals following a bloody revolution. Subtleties of this sonority shake the inhibitions from my horn. It’s a funny feeling. But I’ll get used to it. This isn’t the first time I’ve been to Mars. I crawled out of the world early in the game, when two tickets to a concert of frogs cost two bucks and a papal dispensation. I just come here for naps now, and a little vanishing point perspective. I keep looking at it with the old perspectives. And then it occurred to me, isn’t the need to alter one’s perceptions the sine qua non of poetry? The Norse gods are deep in their mead, howling sagas at sawdust dolls. That was the original sound. Not the new sound. The new sound is from outer space, catching fire in a Belgian dictionary.

Dostoyevsky On A Pogo Stick

Have you ever noticed how easily wires get entangled? Do you spend a lot of time thinking about these things? I do. It’s why I never get anything done. The day breaks and, further on, in the small port of Spinola, the fishermen are already bustling about on their small multicolored boats. It’s why I write poetry. You can map oblivion with propofol, or the unfiltered voice of summer rain, and still have difficulty netting certain ideas. The conviction that, for example, some laws are bad resulted in The Ramones. But really. It’s so hard to convince people of anything. It’s a big problem. Especially if you have your heart set on becoming a self-help guru. I had a lifetime to do that. And look what happened. Nihilism. Nepotism. Cynicism. Emil Cioran. Is there a universal mind where one’s interior can thrive on the power of a waterfall and remain calm in the face of a plutocrat? I can’t answer that. Nobody can. I’m still stuck on these wires. Disentanglement. String Theory. Inflationary Universe Theory. The Theory of Everything. The components of life are courtesies of sunlight and dirt. You’re here as long as you’re here.

I’m fairly open to things. But there are exceptions. Genocide. Technofeudalism. Global surveillance. Centralized digital banking. Neoliberal economics. Tax cuts for the rich. Things have gotten so sordid lately. There were incidents during last night’s bingo game I’d just as soon forget. What makes the vividness of the fourth of July so spectacular and simultaneously demoralizing isn’t the fireworks but the absence of anything truly independent. And who can’t be a little amused by Musk and Trump’s little breakup? If you must break the law, said Julius Caesar, do it to seize power. In all other cases don’t slam the door so hard. I’m trying hard to keep us both in focus. Bank robberies are exciting and cathartic. But when it comes to scandalous levels of extravagance, you can’t beat the pentagon. Bubbles do pop. Carry a widget wherever you go, and observe the law as you might a great judge of character. Leonardo de Vinci. Lao-tse. Marie Curie. Gypsy Rose Lee. Johnny Rotten. Dostoyevsky on a pogo stick.

Poetry doesn’t need to be written. It just happens. The day I was born I didn’t argue with anything. Or did I? Does crying count? Frustrations begin in the crib and mount with the evolution of our needs. I will apply words to reality whether they truly apply or not because words are more interesting when they detach from reality and flit about like hummingbirds in a cage of grammar. You can build an emotion of extravagant hues around a jewel of music. But can you make a tiger prowl through a sentence filled with entanglements of vine and orchid and yet remain untethered to anything proto-utilitarian or syntactically crystallized, as in the practice of doing dishes? Why would you? I’m a glutton for polysemy. My favorite shirt is a ceaseless provocation with four hundred buttons of flaming preternatural gold and eight sleeves for each tentacle. I live like Greogry Corso, still harboring that 5,000-year-old secret behind Jack and the Beanstalk. Gogmagog. Fee-fi-fo-fum. I smell the blood of a beatnik poet high on ayahuasca. 

There are infinite resources for the thickness of things, much of it rendered by the infinite resources embedded in the semantic thickness of words. My fingers squirt words all over the surface of a walnut desk. I didn’t invent this language, but I do go swimming in it occasionally. I wish people took better care of it. Which is a massively hypocritical thing to say, all things considered. I remember when correspondence meant something. You could see a mind drifting through itself, crackling like a power socket in a moon jelly exhibit. For example, that night Joan Rivers sat on my lap and told me a joke about my monkey. I got lost in Johnny’s eyes. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: noodles improve the soul's lampshade. I’m far more comfortable when I’m insoluble. I can’t just amble around in iron. I must rub things together to get sparks. Our bodies are here to propagate, but our minds like to flourish in solitude. The human brain houses approximately 86 to 100 billion neurons. What kind of solitude is that? Mending things demonstrates a kind of tenacity, but I’m not here for tenacity. I’m here for the doughnuts, as always. It gives me release. The more bites you take, the bigger the hole.