Thursday, March 14, 2024

Improprieties Of Property

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, in his chapter on “Property Considered as a Natural Right,” refers to a “frenzy of possession.” Marvelous phrase, which perfectly captures United Stares culture. 90% of time, energy and innovation in the United States is devoted to the acquisition of things. Possessing things. Which involves money, and predation and borrowing and loaning and trickery and thievery and skilled labor and unskilled labor and misery and tedium and sometimes – if you’re lucky – having a blast performing on a stage, which is more a matter of being possessed than possession.

The other 1% of time is spent in waiting rooms, dressing rooms, bus depots and airports, scrolling up and down a screen on a mobile phone, gossiping, talking, adjusting a seatbelt, reading a map, hanging out in bars hoping to get lucky, reading menus and laboring to keep a conversation going without veering into politics or religion, which can be quite dangerous in these times of hypersensitivity and paranoia.

Why do people in our society crave ownership so much?

The legal definition of property in the United States is “anything (items or attributes/tangible or intangible) that can be owned by a person or entity. Property is the most complete right to something; the owner can possess, use, transfer or dispose of it.”

That doesn’t sound very exciting, at least on the surface. The complete right to something excites libidinal thoughts and – in many instances I’m sure – assholes exercising this principle in abusive and exploitative ways. But maybe that’s just me and my cynical mind. A right to something can also mean right to a bed and shelter, right to food, right to speak one’s mind, in which case language is the item in question, nobody owns a language. At least I hope not. Right to travel freely, right to plant vegetables and flowers and till the earth and fertilize it however one chooses, right to keep a collection of postage stamps in a locked drawer, right to take certain drugs and medications, right to an attorney, right to medical attention, right to modes of transport, especially private forms of travel, in which one can drink whatever one wants and gaze out a window and not have to think a single thought. Right to a thought means what, exactly? You have a right to think whatever one wants. And sell it to the highest bidder.

Intellectual property is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect and imagination; the best-known types are patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets. It does seem odd that something with no physical existence, no boundaries or weight, no density or texture, no smell or color can be considered property in any conception of property however stretched or inflated it may be. If I imagine a speech balloon propelled by a glass propeller proving the existence of God does that become a property? Can I sell it to a baseball enterprise? Will it buy me a house in Malibu? Can I auction it off at Sotheby’s?

I think God would have some say in the matter. Is the idea of God a form of property? Clearly, nobody can possess God. Of course, if anyone did, they’d have one hell of a bodyguard.

“The whole strength of the State is at the service of each citizen,” Proudhon wrote. “The obligation that binds them together is absolute. How different with property! Worshipped by all, it is acknowledged by none: laws, morals, customs, public and private conscience, all plot its death and ruin.”

Property is anti-social. The items most illustrative of this phenomenon are books. I remember doing a lot of visiting in my 20s, and everybody had books, everybody loved books and everybody read books, and bought books and talked about books and wrote recommendations about books. Almost every time a friend would visit, they would scour my library and pull out a book with excitement and ask to borrow the book. It felt wrong to say no. Books are communal. There’s some inherent quality books possess that makes them immune to the poisons of possession. This is certainly not be the case with online magazines and other similar entities that ask for a fee. Nobody possesses words, but if the words are arranged a certain way, arranged to convey knowledge in the clearest way possible or arranged for aesthetic purposes, to create a certain feeling or sensation or cause the mind to dilate and disburden itself of harmful ideologies and conceptions, then it has value as something to possess. Possession, however, is not the right word. The right word is access. You may be asked for a fee in order to gain access to the pixels holding the content in place. This is not anti-social, exactly, but it does impose burdensome conditions on someone’s time and financial resources.

Morality comes into play during times of extreme inequities between shelter and resources. The city I live in – Seattle – is extremely expensive. The minimal amount required to buy an average house in Seattle is an annual income of $200,000 dollars. I thought this was ludicrous when I first read it. I thought the only people who make $200,000 a year were Hollywood actors, corporate lawyers and gifted neurologists and heart surgeons. Turns out quite a few trades and professions pay that amount. But it’s still far from average. Most people are struggling to make rent and put food on the table. And a lot of people have fallen into the most inhumane circumstance of all, which is homelessness. The most conspicuous aspect of morality here is its complete absence.

Proudhon famously said that “property is theft.” The hoarding of wealth keeps it out of circulation. And wealth buys power, particularly the capacity to insure legislation favorable to the acquisition of more wealth and more power, while removing goods and services from the public, and further impoverishing those whose assets keep shrinking. “Behind every great fortune,” said Balzac, “is a great crime.”

Ok, but what about someone like Taylor Swift or Paul McCartney, musicians who made ginormous fortunes writing songs and making music? There was nothing criminal in their actions. You can’t arbitrarily demonize the rich and expect to maintain a solid grip on the morality of money. Which is why I say thank God for cognitive dissonance. The dissonance of being rich. And the propensity of property to become private. One man’s privacy is another man’s deprivation. And who isn’t galvanized by dreams of plenty, luxuries and exhilarating freedoms? Is there a balance to this picture, or anything like a center that serves to make it coherent?

Wealth and poverty are polar extremes, but not polar opposites. A young man in good health in a one-bedroom apartment is wealthier than a billionaire with pancreatic cancer. That’s your center. Life itself. Life is nobody’s property. I don’t own my body. I am my body. And my body owns me.

 

Saturday, March 9, 2024

A Mood Comes Up From Behind

I’m not as autonomous as I like to think. A mood comes up from behind and gives me a push. I punch around in the air looking for a mood or something I can fight. Most of my feelings are figments of something I’ve imagined. I hear the tinkle of glasses. The fizz of champagne. I have an attitude after me now. It catches me during an idle moment when my attention is drawn to a nude in a Finnish sauna. The attitude twists my arm. I’m compelled now to perform wonders, however banal they seem to the unelected. If it's snowing I roar the parallels. The analogous. The comparable. And assorted maps. I’m going to Deadwood. I hear they’ve got eggnog. And gold and loose women. There are fortunes to consider when an absence sublimates steam. Experience is a contraption like a spoon. You stick it in your mouth, give it a lick and wipe it clean.

My castle is a palette of detonating rain. I see things as they exist not as how they might exist. Language alters nothing. But it reveals everything. Makes things real. Weirdly real. Really real. Surreal. Real as snow. The crisp kind that crunches underfoot alerting the wolf packs to your presence. Two weeks later I was on a mission to Mars. This is how things happen when words take control. Nuances and wharves. Middle-aged people getting sloppy drunk on a cruise ship while passing over unimaginable depths and bioluminescent fish. Does any of this sound familiar? Welcome aboard, my friend. Let me tell you something. I grew up believing in acne. Later, when I became a man, I abandoned bobsledding for shuffleboard. I love the ocean. Love the rolling of waves. It’s why I agreed to a round of golf with the pope. I love the interactions of letters. And on some nights I can hear the metaphors stirring among the banalities of this world.

I may be at liberty to say anything I want, but I will need a pound of grammar to begin. Let’s begin at the toolshed. There is a footprint, there is a shovel oozing darkness. Everything falls into place when a windshield intercedes with reality. All I get on the radio is static. I have a problem with invocations. They’re so solemn and inexact. You never know what you’re going to get. It might be a goulash of renegade abstractions, and it might be a Wichita sarsaparilla. Try not to sneer. It’s impolite to mouth emotions so insincerely. Never be ashamed of your nothingness. It’s the unspeakable that allows a cow to stand in our room expecting to be milked. Life is funny that way. I like Corot since I live in art like a pastel. It’s more than a fashion, it’s more like a foundry. The paradigm is red hot. We come riding out furiously on our ponies. I have cuticles to explore.

A steady rain absolves eternity of its endless somersault. It’s the cruelest joke that ever existed. Except the one about the pope, the donkey, and the Hollywood pimp. I’ve got to cut this out and get a decent job. Glitter invocation into my intentions. I must convince myself to tear the canvas off and reveal eternity for what it is. It’s more than a bus stop. It’s more like a pot of air for the consonants of our tenuity. It takes a long time to learn how to backslide into reflection. There are languages to learn, and soliloquys and songs. Everything is thin there due to the altitude. I see insects quickly disperse among the bottles. And mountains as far as the eye can see. A woman breaks out of the ice and offers me immortality. No thanks, I say. I like being temporary. She hurls the sky at me. I drift through downtown Omaha. Next time I’m calling an Uber.  

Tuesday, March 5, 2024

Dinner At Saint-Cirq-Lapopie

Midnight. Saint-Cirq-Lapopie. We sit down to eat. It’s a big table. Solid oak. The milieu is an accessory for the sequins everyone is wearing. Overhead is a chandelier. Under our feet are planks of roughhewn prose. The debris of letters whose subtleties unveil a world released from the lie of being truth. This is a place of refuge. No prescribed choices. This helps explain some of my biases, which were carpentered in the Black Forest by a group of innovative elves. It's always beneficial to reflect on things. What is love: a lampshade, or a bowl of ambrosia salad? Mitochondria are essential to the functioning of biochemical reactions. We should show them as much hospitality as possible. Propulsion starts with engineering & ends with butterflies. After that, life becomes a biological rather than theological matter. And we all have ecstasy for dessert.

8:45 a.m., Sunday. I put my hearing aids in and the soundscape immediately comes into high definition. I hear the rustle of my pants, the metallic clacking of letters on a keyboard, and think about the developments in writing in mid-nineteenth century western culture, when the image of the writer assumed the character of a craftsperson, who (in the words of Roland Barthes), "shuts himself away in some legendary place, like a workman operating at home, and who roughs out, cuts, polishes, and sets his form exactly as a jeweler extracts art from his material, devoting to his work regular hours of solitary effort." But now, in the digitalized world, that exaltation of language as an exacting and venerable art has been superseded by a culture of conformity and shallow entertainment, and writing relegated to the gratuitous monasticism of Lindisfarne in the Middle Ages. The monks feared Viking invasion. The writer fears the erosion of value.

The chair creaks whenever I get up to do something, get a glass of water or feed the cat. The creaking audibly matches the strain in my legs with such accuracy that I often forget the creaking is coming from my chair and think it's coming from my legs. And sometimes I lean back and sip the solitude soaked in whatever scenery happens to be drifting around in my mind. Little details, like eluding a splinter or sealing a letter. Petting a cloud. The rustle of new wings moving by trial and error. The voice of an angel echoing in an aquarium. That weird smoky smell of candle wax. The excitement and anguish at the start of a revolt. How stellar it is to ship my freight and drive across Nevada on a Suzuki Intruder. Is that a detail or a dream? I think it’s the ignition of unburnt fuel in the exhaust system, or ceaselessly exploded clichés in a wilderness of words.

When I was young, I engorged with lyricism. Now that I’m old I engorge with oblivion. The universe becomes erotic. Because death is involved. And cataracts and arthritis. And moments of euphoria followed by despair followed by the ghosts of rock and roll past. Jackie De Shannon. Needles and Pins. Rosie Hamlin. Angel Baby. Merrilee Rush. Angel of the Morning. Which was written by Chip Taylor, who also did Wild Thing, Early Sunday Morning and Fuck All The Perfect People. I remember meeting Merrilee Rush. She was sitting on a stump in a woodsy yard somewhere near Burien, Washington. I was sitting on a stump, too. Feeling massively stumped. Couldn’t think of a thing to say. Don’t know why, lately, it has been popping into my mind. It’s one of those funny memories about something inconsequential that bubbles up for no reason, and yet holds a certain fascination, a certain mild excitement, and pops, sprinkling glitter on the void.

There’s an unparalleled resource beyond the obvious. I can sense it in Apollinaire. The trickle of interacting hymns. And great machinery. The night is a chamber of stars. My bed is the prairie. My radio is crickets. I feel Gothic. I feel melodic and imminent. Like hives. Like a pharmacy on the edge of town. Like a song about a woman who dropped her life into a microphone and created a sense of urgency in people’s lives. Darkness sees itself in our obscurity. This is where the story gets puzzling. The chameleon that walks on my nerves is thoroughly intuitive and trained in the martial arts, and yet it can never find a substance that can justify its choices. My life has been a lifelong conundrum. Is that such a bad thing? The dilemma of singularity can never by resolved by robots. It takes controversy, delirious mitochondria, and big mistakes. 

No better feeling than propofol diffusing into the bloodstream. Consciousness and all of its clatter and all of its clutter sublimating into a vapor of blithe inconsequence that is swept away by the breath of an angel. It’s on my mind constantly. This flirtation with death. With oblivion. With the void. It’s enticing. It’s beguiling. But I don’t want to feed it words. I just want let it exist as is. A vapor of blithe inconsequence. Nothingness is inherently unstable. It can’t exist without something. Nothing needs something to be nothing. It needs protozoans and hemoglobins and semicolons. Quarks popping in and out of existence. The crazy vagaries of dreams. Agates in the river Lot. Stars in a web of galaxies. And a staircase that leads nowhere. 

 

Sunday, March 3, 2024

A Western Groove

I see a western groove tune itself in a pair of overalls and wonder if our cosmetics could have some fun together. Think of the wealth such union may bring, not to mention the propagation of various shampoos. Maybe next time. You look like you’re in a hurry. I’ll shave now, and attend to my hygiene. You may not see me tomorrow. I like wandering. They say the sea is good for that. But today, I'm at the yellow theater watching a nuance get guttural with a slattern. It's a complicated play, more like an undulation than an adumbration. But with a touch of Beckett. Slopping around in a gallon of amusement. So easy to imagine. So hard to perform in a bucket.  

Do you feel punctilious? I don't. Not at all. I'm not even necessary. Nor am I good at poker. The introversion is just a disguise. I made it up so that I could dance with a skeleton on the Golden Gate Bridge. I’m home now, sighing, weeping, laughing maniacally. I feel so unfettered at times I have to sit down and look at a Rembrandt. The browns and russets bring me back to earth. Luxuries like this are never innocent. But it’s not friendly to deny things. Better to accept what’s there. Especially despair. Writing is an accompaniment to despair, a vain extravagance, like Charles Olson wearing a helmet of porcupine fish skin to a wedding. It is often lauded as a transformative energy. I think of it as the rupture of expectation by the rapture of predication.  

I get lyrical around sand. I can feel it. The sand between my toes. The fervent waves breaking against the rocks. The city lights to the south are tantalizing. We move with disproportionate fluidity towards whatever destiny offers. Our arrival is met with hullaballoo, firecrackers and madness. A turbulent universe emboldens everyone on the sidewalk. They dance with abandonment and frenzy. This is our chance. We can do it. We hold the power. To change the mind. Detonate conceptions that control nothing, but thunder it like hell. The art of the parable makes me a little shaggy and nervous at the wheel. I'm old now. All the decisions have been made. But so long as there are subtleties of voice, we can deepen our understanding of sand.

I like the sound of fanning paper money in my hand. Is this because it’s lost so much value due to inflation that now it’s really mostly paper? Was my perception occluded by the commercial power of the dollar when the dollar still held market value, or did it engorge with the pulse of poetry, whose value is incalculable, because it’s phantasmal, and variegated, and backed by abstraction? Matter matters when it matters. It's very funny to make declarations of things. The house of language has a fast current running through it today. Let’s get lawless and boil our hope in deutsche marks. The heart holds life. I just let it sit there for a day or two until it marinates fully in Rembrandt. And then I take it down from the hearth and release it into the wild.

Art elevates our autumn to the status of a chimney despite the actual palette, which is bedrock. I see in it a detail of stars and stripes. I get a rise out of art. If we discuss it this summer, I will give it a push. If its components chew mint, then we are the minions of thyme. Here it is. I found it. Charles Olson’s proprioception. It was in the closet the whole time, hanging there like a small evergreen government. I must say I really like denim. Something about it shouts Wyoming. Monument Valley. The prairies in both the Dakotas. If denim is a problem it excuses whatever makes this world so busy. Busy with sugar. Busy with bananas. And empire and trumpets. Many romantic ideas were based on the banana. Some call this an enigma, others a conundrum, and still others a dirigible. I call it a trombone. We now have a diagnosis over rubbing what the exhibition engendered, which was nothing less than ink. I have a photosynthetic tattoo.

One night as I gazed at the sky I thought I saw Wisconsin and spurred my horse. I like to take long gallops in the open air. I look for subtleties of balance and interplay. One day I stopped to pick a fight with a hesitation. I found a language and folded it into a flower. Meaning is a device made of wire and snow. It's a dart that pins my war to the wall. I find it hard to be spontaneous socially. But you have to be. If you want to interact with life, you’ve got be willing to take a punch to the groin, and a grudge to the dance. Nipple sticks are everywhere. A nipple stick is a form of rosary. Lightning is a nipple stick. It comes with a warranty and a pair of earrings and fits nicely in a tool belt. But no. I don’t know why there’s something instead of nothing, and that if a thing isn’t forbidden by the jaws of quantum gherkins, it’s guaranteed to happen. If this little emulsion of awe can soothe your ecstasies you can glue pieces of me to the axle. I’ll understand.

Here’s an idea: make an analogy out of wire and paper mâché, then compare it to a jigsaw. The pointlessness is exhilarating. It may or may not manage to capture fully our sense of what things are, or if that was even the intent. It exceeds the limits of understanding. I don’t know what it’s trying to comfort, what it’s trying to convey. We’re in the country of the silly, where consciousness thrives without a subject, and the drawers are plump with gadgets. A good word or two might gratify a usurpation but it can never take the place of ointment. When a man loves a woman, can’t keep his mind on nothin’ else. What does that tell you about existence and being? It tells me that a pot should have enough soil in it to support the plant, and control is illusory. 

 

Friday, March 1, 2024

My Skinny Lily

R tells me that what I want is daylight. This is in reference to a light bulb. I’d prefer a daylight bulb, a bulb designed to replicate the tone of light emitted from the sun, so they can reach up to 6,500 Kelvins, and are usually a crisp and invigorating light source, in which chestnuts sparkle like crime and waves of quicksilver lucidity diffuse space with uncanny delicacy. This will be for my new lamp, which I ordered from Home Depot, and assembled on the living room floor, like building a flower, an extremely skinny lily, with a small white cone bending down in happy splendor.

I watch a YouTube video on light. It’s in French, so that I can feel fancy when I’m trying to shed light on light. Light consists of electromagnetic waves characterized by their level of energy and intensity. It travels by wavelength. It doesn't oppose anything. It imbues. It penetrates. It goes around. It bends. It's too light for nothing. Nothing is bitter. Nothing is everything. Light can't butter anything so insistently dark that it can’t spit skin at a vacant fetish.

Picture a stream of wavelengths beating into a lush mud slide. This will tell you all you need to know about our planet. The rest is kept in a vault in the Vatican. It walks around like a sequel of bones in a cathedral panegyric. All religions are the same, so your coupon is good at all mosques and synagogues. Tell them a swamp sent you. And that it smelled of waffles.

A consonant rubs my mouth to find a vowel. That’s not where I keep my vowels. You’ve come to the wrong place, my dear. Keep on going until the kangaroo finds justice in a cemetery. No one has told this story before. Because it hasn't happened yet. No one has a memory of things that haven't happened yet, except Mr. Super Future, who lives next door to himself in a warm reminiscence. That zone we call our hodgepodge hinges on a plurality blessed with pyramids and papyrus. But if it worries you, just don’t give a damn, and everything falls into place. The sun rises to the east, the moon is in Scorpio, and the skulking incendiary of a dying culture is ugly as the end of a road on the coast of reality. The sexton is dead and the wind is slamming the door.  

We decide daylight might be wrong. We need a globe. Something globular. Daylight is bright. Too bright. Maybe what I need is a globe. Or a republic. The norm is gone. We live in a new zone now. I have whirlpools in my shoes and jewelry in my noodle. I feel frenzied as a hive of wasps at Easter. I must take it upon myself to be my flesh. To do what flesh wants. Because it keeps my bones hidden from view. And makes the world feel quizzical. The irony of life is that the older you get the more intensely you live. Bleeding hearts grow best in full sun. If you follow this sentence to the end you’ll find that it has no point. But did you notice the fish were noble and expressed themselves by wandering through the water in quest of nothing of interest to us?

 

Friday, February 23, 2024

We Were Walking South On 6th Avenue North

We were walking south on 6th Avenue North when we saw a cyclist crossing Mercer get hit by a large delivery van. It was shocking. The cyclist appeared to be a man in his sixties. I was sure he would continue to lie still in the street, unconscious, possibly dead. Instead, he got up with an uncanny suddenness, straddled his bike - which didn't appear to be damaged and was still operable - and rode off with such vigor and force of will that you'd think he was fleeing a bank robbery. I'm pretty sure what he was fleeing was a giant hospital and ambulance bill and an exhausting, nightmarish engagement with a merciless and predatory medical billing system. The driver, meanwhile, a young black man, sat frozen in his seat. I felt really bad for him. He seemed to be in a state of shock. I used to drive a van myself, and dark rainy nights in a crowded city always held the prospect of disaster.

10:32 a.m., Sunday. R is transplanting her ferns in heavy February rain. The window people are coming tomorrow to install our new windows. They'll be stomping around in the area where the ferns and moss have been thriving. She's leaving one because the roots are deep. She's going to put a bucket over it, and hope that the workers have enough sense to avoid it.

Our apartment is in chaos. I seek refuge in Proust. Who, at present, is enjoying a champagne breakfast with his friend Saint-Loup, and Saint-Loup’s mistress, an actress and prostitute, in a private room with angled mirrors all around. I mistranslate a passage to mean that he is smiling at the champagne and the champagne is smiling at him. I messed up the indirect pronoun. He’s smiling at himself in a mirror, because he looks disheveled and ridiculous, which is his image in the mirror smiling back. I prefer the mistranslation. I remember that feeling. The glee of something inside creating a new language, a foreign disposition. I can see why spirits are called spirits. Nobody calls alcohol spirits anymore. It’s a shame. And yet another mistranslation. Not that it matters. It’s just that old craving, to feel something other than myself in myself. Something more like Emerson’s oversoul. Which has a fruity taste and a touch of sweetness.

February 14th, a cold and gray Valentine’s Day, the window installation crew (I don’t think they’re called glaziers anymore, at least no around here uses that term) arrived in two big vans, one of which parked in back of the building. They looked like a heavy metal garage band, but with gigantic toolbelts instead of guitars. I was greatly relieved to see they arrived on time. They went to work immediately on the window in our bedroom, a narrow window with a lovely view of a concrete window well. I worried about those guys getting in there and maneuvering around. It was extremely noisy. I tried reading an article on Proudhon and the concept of property in my French philosophy magazine. The concentration kept my mind off the noise and a little less ill at ease with all these guys stomping around. We put Athena (our cat) in the bathroom with her food bowls and litterbox. She didn’t like it. She scratched furiously at the door. After they finished with the bedroom, they moved their operations to the other side of the building to work on the living room window. This allowed us to take refuge in the bedroom, where I watched a video on the origin of the universe.

I always feel ill at ease around people with skills. Practical skills. None of my skills are practical. Most of my skills are obstinately unmanageable and inconsequential. Hopelessly quixotic, an embarrassment for a man my age. I used to marvel at my uselessness. It was thrilling to feel detached, a romantic in ocean mist. Now I feel queered by it, sabotaged, adrift, askew. I discovered new wants in my elder years. The confidence of a skill. The more skills the better. Even if it’s just juggling skulls in the Court of Death. Defended by a lawyer whose skills reside in the obscurities and chicanery of the law. Which would make me fall in love with language again. And what a beautiful whore it is, Mae West cracking blue jokes on the stand. Judge with raised eyebrows. Jury pretending to look detached and wise. But stifling laughter. That’s language all over. Radiant energies in which linen is flipped and beds are made. In which skills are learned. Carpentry, plumbing, welding, active listening, attention to detail, fucking around.

The crew finished, but there was a problem: the big living room window wasn’t fitting right. The measurement was off. Which would make this the second time the measurement was off. We were told that they would have manufacture yet another new window. This filled us with anguish, frustration, and dread. We’d had enough of stress. Next day, thank God, we were informed that there might be a way to get the window to fit. They could get to it the next day.

Next day, the window was removed and some material was shaved off the inner aluminum lining on our window frame and the window was re-installed. But now there was a problem with the left window panel; it had a small crack in the left bottom corner and would not slide freely as intended. You had to tug hard on it to get it to open. Unacceptable. A new panel would have to be manufactured. This would take another two weeks, if not more. This meant R had to wait to replant her ferns and moss for an indefinite period of time. We were pissed, frustrated, tired, crabby, and demoralized. But compared with miseries elsewhere, it must seem small, if not ridiculous. We’ve got electricity and running water and each other. Streaming services. Sitcoms. Rattles and raspberries. Bo Diddley. B.B. King. Ella Fitzgerald. Hot dogs and baked beans.

Disasters come in all sizes. I reserve the bigger ones for another day when they may be talked about more freely. Not like now in which one word, one passionately exclaimed declaration deposited in a social media site can end a friendship of 50 or 60 years. One recklessly expressed opinion about the truth of things can turn you into an overnight pariah. Many doors are closed now, and many windows broken or closed or boarded over. And sometimes a man on a bicycle gets hit by a van, gets up, straddles the bike and bicycles speedily to a place of calm, and refuge. 

Sunday, February 18, 2024

I Feel So Abstract At Times

I feel so abstract, at times, I can swallow a piece of cake and think of nothing but the bolero. It’s as if the glitter of creativity held the exasperation in all of us as a form of invitation. But to what? The swans I stuff with animation. The lake rippling with my breath. The tiny theatre I present to the world in the form of conjecture. The cast is diverse, and if my harness is soaked in oasis pins, I will spout the truth of collision, and get gaudy around the hibachi. Discourse is produced by the creation of an alibi, a serrated rod placed in the tarpaulin and pulled violently to ignite. For example, everyone laughs when Warren Buffet tells a joke at lunch. But what does it mean to understand something? Walk under an eyeball if you want to see something shaggy. Some call it an eyebrow, others an evolution. I call it a guffaw. There is a dimension of adjectives in which the heart beats against the churchyard, and a hypothetical summit stuns the structure of existence. The table locomotive chugs with infinite fury. But it must be balloons that write the smell that I beat on a fruit. Why otherwise would I maneuver the points I’m making? I’m sending a kiss to your junkyard by freight. This will prove that our brilliance shines like soot and that we mean what we do. There are small objects that I pepper with words if I feel haunted by a language. It's this kind of thing that gets me through the day. The greenery resists a myriad frizz and this makes me phonemic, if not bubbly. If there’s anything else I can do to make you feel technical, please let me know and I’ll bake us a tarte tatin. It’s like they say: brush a jingle push a wedding.