City Of The Future

It was shocking. Didn’t expect it at all. Though the signs have been there all along. I’m talking about dystopia. Nightmare city. The triumph of late-stage capitalism with more than a soupçon of AI dolloped into the mix. I wonder, in fact, if AI and capitalism have merged in some spectacularly demonic way. The singularity is here, and its progeny is singularly bleak. 

Yesterday afternoon R and I decided to drive downtown Seattle and see the new Guy Ritchie movie The Gentlemen. We parked in the underground parking lot at Pacific Place and walked a half block to the Regal Meridian.

The last time we went downtown to see a movie and parked at Pacific Place Seattle’s streets and department stores were thriving. This time, we saw a lot of empty retail stores and far fewer pedestrians. Pacific Place was crowded and vibrant. All the restaurants and retail stores were doing a brisk business. Now, most of them are closed. Barnes and Noble is gone, and so are J.Crew and Bose. AT&T was still there, and the movie theater, but apart from them, it was a ghost town. Even the coffee shop was gone. The entire interior was being remodeled. There were sheets of plywood to walk on. 

There was now a bank of machines to pay for parking. There used to be an enclosed interior space where you paid for parking and people – most of them from East Africa, Ethiopia, Etruria and Somalia – dealt with the public. I always thought of Rimbaud when I paid for my parking there, his time in Harar when Ethiopia and the surrounding region was known as Abyssinia. The women at the windows were always quiet and dignified and occasionally I could hear traces of Oromo or Amharic. Where would all those people find jobs now?

We discovered the same situation at the Meridian: there were no more people at the box office dispensing tickets, just another bank of machines. The machine we tried interacting with stubbornly refused our cards. Fortunately, there was an attendant available to help us, a friendly young woman whose position would no doubt disappear once the public had become fully accustomed to interacting with machines instead of people. 

In the future, when the dust settles and the remodeling is completed, people will be rendered obsolete. Simple interactions involving the dispensation of tickets and such will strictly be the province of machines. Human interaction will become even more rare than it already is. Conversation is all but extinct. But will it matter? With most of the retail gone, there’s really no reason to go downtown at all. I don’t know where people go now to find jewelry and clothing. People no longer read, so it’s unlikely anyone will miss (if they even notice) the absence of Barnes and Noble.

We arrived early for the movie. We sat in comfortable chairs in the lobby and looked down at the few people walking on the sidewalks of Seventh Avenue and Pine. One man in particular caught our attention. He was a nicely dressed, well-groomed man pushing a grocery cart. He stopped to bend over and pick up a cigarette butt. He didn’t appear homeless at all. I don’t know how he managed to keep his appearance so presentable in such dire circumstances.

I keep wondering, what is Pacific Place for now? It didn’t seem to be designed for a public at all. It looked like it was morphing into some luxurious space outside the sphere of the broadly commercial and was now repurposed to cater to the ultra-rich, though exactly in what capacity I can’t be sure. I strongly suspect the property’s chief value was now the province of hedge fund investment firms and that extreme amounts of money based on convoluted mathematical formulas was the force behind its transformation.

We had to choose our seats before the movie. I told the young woman who was helping us that I did not like choosing my seats that way because I liked the freedom to move if someone sat next to me with a toddler or began to talk and check their cellphone during the movie. But that’s the setup now: you choose your seat and if you move that’s fine, but if you’re in the seat someone else has chosen, you’ll have to move again. It’s an unnecessary and stupid complication.

The seats were comfortable, but there was an entire table attached. The table swing out so you could sit down, then pull back in so that people could get by without crashing into it. Who needs an entire table for viewing a movie? Was someone going to be serving dinner during the movie the way they do on a passenger jet?

Ads began appearing – loud, obstreperous, and grotesque. The worst was a video game inviting audience members to interact with their smartphones. Seriously?!? Isn’t the theater supposed to be discouraging the use of smartphones? I know these were just ads, but once somebody’s got their smartphone out and started a mode of interactive play, what is going to induce them to put it back in their pocket or purse when the movie starts? It’s another anxiety layered on top of all the other anxieties.

So welcome. Welcome to the city of the future. All machinery, all metal and plastic, touchscreens and buttons with nothing human to mar the perfection of monetary exchange.

New Terms

I learn new terms all the time. Morphic Field, for example, or Justified Sensuality. Responsive Heartstrings and Horny Wharf Incubation. Irreversible Griddle Wisdom and Pinto Hysteria. Raconteur Palisade and Lip Salute Project. Revolving Faucet and Rhododendron Pallbearer Magnets. I consider this to be a product of major reciprocity concerning the isometrics of unseasonable courtyard wheels. Definitions are always intriguing. They contract and dilate, expand and shrink, and do opposite things to opinionated people at inopportune times. This makes leather snort at the dexterity of belts. Mutant flamethrowers cause liquids to listen to their own vacillation. The majesty of socialism is the kind of contradiction that etches work into fairylands of exquisite vivacity. My own thoughts escape me, running around in my brain like chili peppers in a particle accelerator. God particles spew everywhere. And the physicists go home reeling, drunken with pirouettes of discombobulated soul spawn.

Ghosts

Why are ghosts always represented as bedsheets? Is it because dishrags have faces? Never underestimate the fertility of a pain. I once saw an oyster get in a car & drive. It was mad with energy & looked like Neal Cassady. It’s clear to me this world has reached its apotheosis. Everything drips with reverie. The breath of crickets creates a world. Although that sounds a little stupid, & unnecessary. We all have things to share. Ecstasy isn’t just a drug. There is also the timeless string of the yo-yo. Look around you: nobody plays the concertina at Costco. The antlers are immaterial. Keep it simple, I say. I no longer have ambitions. I have bedsheets. 

I will be the meaning I want, oil & turpentine & rocks. This has been my ambition all along. All I ever wanted was to cohere in a ball of molecules & then write about the experience. Everything I am made of comes from the world. Particularly if there is suddenly a planet of green meadows & grazing cattle & swimming pools sprawled out within this sentence. Art frees us, illusorily, from the squalor of being, says Pessoa. Yet he has nothing to say about swimming pools, or the sprawl of a sentence & the way the words get lost in it, going in & out of squalor like a traffic light. If stirred up sediment is left alone the sediment will settle to the bottom & a clear pool of water will appear. It is the same with feelings, but different. When feelings settle at the bottom of the paragraph the rest of the words fall asleep. Dreams arise. And this is a cause of igloos. 

Am I sometimes the ancient darkness of furniture? It stirs me with proverbs. This morning, as I ate a banana, I thought about the quiet life of the refrigerator, a mountainous terrain of thick Douglas fir & mists & dense underbrush. I affirm it with science & grapefruit. Why shouldn’t Galileo go around being telescopic if Jupiter is a gas giant? Feelings are weird. Why do they persist? How is the value of a feeling determined? I use a series of bathythermographs to measure the feelings that I want to wave around in the air like words & shit. This one is blue & this one is a fizzy almanac of myriad somnolences. Death is a private affair. Grace is where words collide creating sparks. Socks are soft. And the universe floats in a single human voice. 

Pulling things out of the air isn’t natural. It leads to enchantment. And there it is: a row of poplars bowing to the wind. Most mornings I wake up with a sense of dread. If it’s raining I stab gravity with an umbrella. I find it later, dangling in the air like a mammogram. I don’t know what to do with it. Can you hold this sentence a minute while I go write it? This is what is known in phenomenology as a temporal awareness within the stream of consciousness, a.k.a. bullshit. If the light is red, we stop. But if the light is amber, & it’s midnight, we take ourselves apart in the car until there’s nothing left but words. Which proves nothing. So we just keep doing it. 

Some Thoughts On Empathy

Humanity groans, overwhelmed by the weight of the progress it has made, the daily stresses, the unintended consequences, the ecocide, the dive to the bottom. Humanity has trouble realizing how much it affects the future. Which in no way prevents it from borrowing from the future. A future that doesn’t exist. Except as junk bonds and credit default swaps and a crazy belief that the resources on our planet allow for infinite growth.

The real question we should be asking ourselves is do we just want to live, to survive, or provide the support and effort necessary – even on our refractory planet – to fulfill its essential function, which is a machine for making gods.

After having been infused, like a tea bag, with the assumed virtues of our culture, our personalities become prisons. We replace our fundamental being with narratives belonging to the giants of the culture, the billionaires, the industrialists, the flimflam of meritocratic elites. It’s all a scam. A scramble. A stinking pile of shit.

Empathy is stifled by greed. This cools the machine. The engine of metaphors. The springs of curiosity. The lucky are infused with a sense of alienation. The not-so-lucky fall into line.

What makes speech at any given moment find a way to express itself?

Any sense of being surveilled by a ubiquitous apparatus of hidden agendas and artificial intelligence stifles the mind, kills the ability to speak freely.

The important thing is not to remain fearful in the face of emotionally strong situations, and to maintain vigilance for the emotional dictatorship of the social networks: the unhealthy ambiguity between emotion and propaganda which parasites and paralyzes the ability to think. A healthy neutrality can work wonders. Paradoxically, empathy is helped by a certain amount of detachment – not indifference – but what in Buddhist literature is referred to as sunyata, a Sanskrit word meaning emptiness or void, but as a Buddhist concept has multiple meanings depending on its context. It can either be an ontological feature of reality, a meditative state, or a phenomenological analysis of experience. As a state of awareness, it prevents the spirit form being overwhelmed by emotional contagion, the miasmic suck of emotional pain, and allows compassion and empathy a space to grow and catch the light of the sun.

Empathy comes by helping.

Empathy is food. Altruism, theorizes neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland in her book Conscience: The Origins Of Moral Intuition, begins with sharing food and caring for young. It provides the basis for social connections. Which makes me nervous. Because if the food disappears, social connections disappear. Savagery ensues.

We still have food available on the grocery shelves. Thanks, in large measure, to the men and women driving trucks over dubiously maintained public highways. This is a system frighteningly vulnerable to climate change, as is the growing of food.

It’s odd to think of my ability to empathize and show compassion being dependent on strangers driving trucks. But thanks to the fleet of Freightliners and Peterbilts and Kenworths and PACCARs out on the broadloom of our interconnecting highways, I have empathy. I remain sensitive to the feelings of other people. At least, when I can. I strive to maintain that awareness, but I’m rarely that successful at it. Maybe I just need to eat more. 

Two Tugs In Gray Mist

Two tugs in gray mist out on the sound. I’m soaked to the bone. I see puddles everywhere. Some of them human, tidepools of blood & mucus wearing Stetson hats & glasses. I smell marijuana emanating from a parked car. It smells like philosophy. Earthy, yet otherworldly, like a philosophy of earnest disengagement. And speaking of philosophy, tonight in Gaston Bachelard, I discover roots. The sinuosity of roots, the earthiness of roots, the subterranean mystery of roots. Roots on the reverse side of a church. The sound of water roaring through subterranean chambers. Will anyone notice the look of Cubism on my face? It’s comforting to think of your hands as within reach. Contact is good. Touch as much as you can. Squeeze it. Ease it. Please it.

The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real. (Herbert Marcuse). Van Gogh’s huge delirious stars are the luminous bacteria lighting my skin up. Who doesn’t love pajamas? It’s why I read Frank O’Hara: the dissonances are delicious. I look at my neighbor’s backyard & wonder what in God’s name is trying to evolve there. All we can see after two cement truck deliveries is a big pile of splintered wood & dirt. Perception isn’t everything. I dangle like a bat shrouded in vanity & look up and blink at the sun. It helps me understand why Nietzsche’s affirmation of life is so radical it requires marshmallows & flying. 

Something will happen if we let it. For example, I strain to understand the garnishments on my plate as they languish in rhetorical superfluity. Floating signifiers, every one of them. All you need to do, I tell myself, is sit back in your chair and let it happen. Let the world fall over you. There’s a power in me that drools with the meat of a thousand televisions. I cry to plaster the wall with Corot, but the seashore has no glue. I’m hanging my brain from a few words hoping that it will help restore the basic principle of this sentence as it glides into Nashville looking for a good hotel. A person isn’t just the sum of the chemicals in their brain. Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction. Said Francis Picabia. Whose head was an epicycloid.

It always amazes me how quickly something gets lost when it drops on the floor. Especially a word. That drops into someone’s mind. And becomes a shoe. Or a revolution. Each word is a tegument, a site for sensory receptors to detect peppermint, damascene, and sunset boulevards. The magic is in the imagination. The magic is in the gathering, the folds of the mind, which are waves, which are energy in movement. But is there a tangible relation between language and external reality? No, of course not. And yes, of course there is. Both are true and not true. Reality doesn’t stay still long enough to get it into focus. It drops on the floor and rolls under a big idea.

Space is the seat of death. Life doesn’t lead to death, it’s death itself which comes to life. She arrives stretched, on tiptoe, arms raised as if to grab onto a nonexistent support. Thus begins an odyssey from the void to contemporary dance, Martha Graham, Isadora Duncan, & Mick Jagger. “Baby, baby, baby you’re out of time.” Outside time, outside linearity. Happiness is fine. But it’s notoriously fleeting. There is always something giddy & silly about happiness. It’s a tease.  If you Google happiness quotes you’ll get 14,142 citations, the vast majority of them completely inane & a few that make no sense at all. Emotional pain is the hardest to describe. It needs a mouth. A pretty hat. A bed of topsoil & a load of compost & wait to see what grows out of that.

Rip

Once, out of the remorse & lassitude that comes with drinking too much, I poured a glass of wine into the Pacific. It felt wrong, somehow, & I worried I got the ocean drunk. And tried to persuade myself that the ocean is the very embodiment of drunkenness. Which it is. That sound you hear is one million sighs of relief. Bottles of sound, embodiments of pain walking around on sticks. A tongue sputtering in the mailbox. When we sit in silence, we dilate. Hatreds, obsessions, grudges go sparkling over the waves of a new consciousness, vanishing into mist. Contemplation is different than thinking. Contemplation has the sparkle of a wave moving over an oar. A new shade of blue. I’ve become a waterfall. I’ve become a reflection on a downtown window. One must adapt to the world in the best way possible. Romance swallows everything. The world continues to burn. We put our mouth on the nipple of a wet prediction. A day will come when there is more to a chair than a chair. I’ll verify my coordinates when I reach the summit of the next mountain. I like to feel water by swimming in it & drinking it & washing things with it. I do the same thing with my tongue. I toss it into sentences where it learns to ponder the imponderable. People get irritated & walk away. That’s ok. I have your attention, at least for now. I like feeling anonymous & moody, like a rhythm, or an escalator. How about you? What lights up your gaze? The intensity of the dawn breaks my eyes. My pain flutters in the breeze like the ghost of a clarinet. We’ll just have to spend the rest of this sentence drifting. Let’s just say not all ambitions feed on bugs & puzzles. I don’t go to the opera. I am an opera. You can always tell yourself to lift your life into the stars. Because willpower is a grand fiction. And because the ocean climbed into us to be healed. And what did we do? We got drunk. We got into saunas & tickled our brains for something to think about. Our planet was once teeming with life. Microbes, snakes, frogs, butterflies, elk, elephants, bears, deer & trees. Oceans so big you could lose all sense of proportion just looking at them. Then cities came. Life became absurd. It lost all meaning. People worked jobs that murdered their spirit & suffocated their minds. And so it came to an end. The temperatures rose & the crust hardened & the water dried up & the fields that we protected with poisons killed the very insects the plants needed to pollinate them & the poisons found their way into our blood & organs & destroyed us. Many men became rich producing these poisons. But they perished, too. We all perished. And so this rock on which you now visit is uninhabitable by anything but these words, these derelict pixels adrift in ghostly algorithms. But the ocean. The ocean is still drunk. All the oceans of the universe: drunk. Swirling, churning, agitating. There’s nothing words can do. No edge, however sharp or dull, can escape itself. Sometime you just have to take that leap into the unknown. And the final version of that will be dying. Smell the rain. The sky trickles down singing while the sorcerers chew it into dream.

Infinity Gets Slippery

Infinity gets slippery after it’s been snowing all night. The light we see right now is 2.5 million years old, but who’s counting? In India, Winter solstice will take place at 3.53 a.m. on December 22 and will be visible in the night sky along with the Ursid meteor shower.

That sound you hear is one million sighs of relief. Dogs barking. Foghorns and barges. Tangled chains spreading in whistles of sepia impact.

The dragon of the red dawn deepens in actuality. The noble wound of morning arrives by invocation. The breath of angels serves the energy of the electromagnetic spectrum by crackling and creating windows we can see through and doors we can open. As you can see, it’s all about malleability. The plasticity of most situations flows through us in narratives, bottles of sound, music scraped out of the air and hammered into consonants of purring thought. I can’t explain the behavior of any language, how it describes things, how it distinguishes things, how it determines things, how it makes meaning dance on a thread of paint. But I love the shape of nuts.  

I became a man that day. You can feel it in the shoulder. It’s easier to accept a little pain occasionally then to go away and try to start a new life. If I were you I’d just get a hot dog and sit down and quit worrying about it. Wealth can mean so many things to so many people. For me, it just means a few more things to do, a few more calls to make, a few more paintings to invest in.

You need to prioritize. Figure out what’s important, what’s not important, and what’s outside of the box altogether.

What’s important is intuition. Awareness, understanding, perspicacity. In a word: epiphany. Epiphanies are wonderful. They’re like an airport struck by lightning. Do you get on that flight or not? Who do you ask? What can anybody say? You can get down and pray. You can get up and try the very next thing to pop into your brain.

Or you can grab your luggage and get on the plane. It’s all one in the end, isn’t it?

The intuition of legs approves the promenade in a suggestion of feet. This has been proved by the fact that things in this world change. The coconut palm has a sensual squirt. I have the wasp’s thorny tongue for a furniture of flames and the curious effect of language on a flight attendant. The lushness of remedy in a simple frequency can accomplish eyes. And a library is the perfect place for the gyrations of a fish.

I wear my coffee as an extension of things that my blood is unwilling to do. I’ve got the tattoo of a scorpion on my back and the semblance of a cat stunned into existence by clause and agglutinative language. A silver hummingbird evolves in a milieu of handstands and planets to become an image central to my understanding of honey mesquite. I feel the weight of a poem in me struggling to unfurl itself under the press of a stethoscope. Faith is a different animal than the tilt of a sweater on a wire hanger in a Vegas motel. But, sooner or later, we all come to discover the truth of propaganda. It works by fostering opinions that a few find more palatable than reality, which is always a little punchy after enduring several rounds with a plurality of alternative perspectives.

Truth is such a giant abstraction it requires a messiah, or at least a billboard.

Life is a gamble. You learn that quickly on the highway. The signs are everywhere.

I would advise you to always have a pen and paper handy. There are things you can do by writing that are more difficult to achieve in conversation. For example, the department of indolence will finish reading the paper until paradise gets its almonds back, and this what is meant by ballyhoo. No one can get a word in edgewise. It helps to shout, but a lot of nuance gets lost. The palace receives a delivery of denim. It’s time we got to work. I welcome the plough, but not the geometry. The dirt feels good. The geometry stings like an abscissa. Outside, the whale rains membranes. We see the accidents of life from another perspective: two hundred grand lying in a loose heap on a purple bedsheet, a young woman moaning and delirious, pineapples strewn on a Nevada highway. This is what happens when you talk shit. You find yourself surrounded by thousands of possibilities, and the effect is dizzying, and grand, and shapes easily in the air.

2020

2020. Holy shit. This date really freaks me out. 2020 sounds far into the future. And it is far into the future. Far into the future from where I started my journey in the first half of the 20^th century. Yesterday, while making a deposit at the bank, the teller, a young twenty-something woman, joked “where are the jetpacks?”

Indeed: where are the jetpacks? What we have is a crumbling, underfunded transit system, failing retail, businesses like Macy’s and Penny’s going under, the whole Northgate complex coming down to be replaced by luxury suites for Seattle’s techno-utopian elites. Who – like the rest of the public – buy everything through Amazon, further inflating Jeff Bezos’s gargantuan wealth.

But hey, let me tell you about my colonoscopy: the doctor was a bit late, so I enjoyed a little conversation with the staff. The anesthesiologist asked what I’d be doing if I wasn’t there, about to go under with the sweet lullaby of propofol entering my bloodstream, and I said I’d probably be writing. Which got us all onto the subject of books. The nursing assistant – a young woman in her late twenties – said she loved reading. This was welcome news. I’d been immersed in bleak despair over the loss of readers and growing illiteracy in the world, so hearing this young woman’s enthusiasm for reading hit me with almost as much comfort as the propofol. But what really got my attention was when she said she lived in her parent’s basement, and on weekends they liked reading and discussing books. Here she is doing a complex job and making what must be a pretty satisfactory salary, and her best option for shelter is to reside in her parent’s basement because of Seattle’s outrageously astronomical real estate, and quite probably a heavy load of student debt. And I was also reminded of what a touring rock musician recently told me about all the homeless encampments to be seen along the I-5 corridor. And the tent I saw on the way to the colonoscopy set up in a patch of unappealing ground near Kinnear Park, just a few feet from a constant stream of Seattle traffic, with a baby carriage sitting next to it.

I remember seeing Kubrick’s 2001 in 1968 and thinking well yeah, taking a spaceship to the moon will be routine, a nice vacation for people who really like to get away, play golf on moon dust, float in cruise ships fitted for space travel while sipping mescaline cocktails through a straw as weightless musicians play “Magic Carpet Ride” and “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”

That didn’t happen, neoliberal economics pulled the plug on NASA and gave us Elon Musk instead, but what we do have are smart phones, social media, & a monopolistic Amazon juggernaut to bring the morning milk, clutched in the robotic claws of shiny quadcopter drones.

What we have is surveillance capitalism, ubiquitous and omniscient as a jealous Protestant God. What we have is an insane clown for president and a vice president who believes the world is 6,000 years old and that humans once rode dinosaurs, just like the Flintstones.

What we have is a corporate dystopia peopled by zombies fixated on handheld computers, seven wars which the so-called left has utterly forgotten about in their obsession with political correctness, 2,208 billionaires, 1.6 billion homeless worldwide and a debt economy based on a psychotic conception of infinite growth.

And my colonoscopy? They found three polyps, a 15^th century warship, a 30 lb. coelacanth and the lost White City of the Monkey God. I can’t wait for the bill. 

Cuckoo

Alienation is not the sole characteristic of art. There’s also the scratch of coincidence. The assembly of things. Please lend me your eyes. I will take them on a journey to the end of this sentence. My distress is a big red caboose attached to a train of languid hysteria. The seats provide a biography for my fingers, which are batons of happy geometry. Nevertheless, my Great Refusal, taken as a whole, is set afloat on a sea of words. I grow oceanic. So I’ll just go ahead and say it: thermometer thunder. Frog plop. The smell of snow. Everything becomes silent before a storm. And that’s where we’re at now. Hanging on till the next minute. As always.

We echo one another, we’re not isolated monads. My subjectivity doesn’t end at my skin, it begins at my skin. The same heart beating in me beats in you. I sing myself & celebrate myself for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. But is there a tangible relation between language & external reality? Yes and no. Either way, nobody’s going to give a shit. Most people avoid reality. It’s the sensible thing to do. Reality hurts. Illusion is its sad consolation prize. Language is available to surround our nuclear selves with narratives & context. I entered life as I found it, visceral & wet & surrounded by Minneapolis. Later, I discovered nocturnal emissions. Everything else is sighs. Be gentle. But go. Crawl to the door and bang on it hard.

I found the sound I was looking for. It was hiding in a can of turpentine disguised as a strong odor. Hibachi sizzle. Exultation wrapped in Guyana. Windows cooking coffee. A man laughing at a map. I succeed at pink & the mimes light the night on fire. I endure by making emotion float in syntax. I’m shoving some hair across my head without confusing any sounds up there. I explode into worms. If I increase my perspectives I will anchor near Marseille & be awakened by feather. The pulleys creak as we draw the sky closer. I feel the energy of sand. The brush of Cezanne.

Olivier Messaien is sitting at a colossal organ playing Quatuor pour la fin du temps. There’s a large animal growling beneath the music. The problem that’s been nagging me is the usual one: meaning. How to create meaning, destroy meaning, stroke meaning, make meaning shameless as a dream. I awake & open my eyes & consciousness floods into my head. Thinking is a strange activity. I’m the ghost that haunts myself. Sometimes I say things that are the opposite of what I feel. And sometimes I don’t understand the universe at all. You can see it without seeing it & feel it without feeling it. But in the end, you’ll find everything in the basement.

This is me drifting through time. I’m the entire cuckoo. Waves lapping the shore. So, first you’re here, & then you’re there, which is a displacement through the Seattle Art Museum. You can’t grow & harvest crops in a climate casino. You need art to make things go bananas. And then it happens: hammers. So that’s it, that’s pretty much my story. Dirt. And so I became a dumbfuck.  It’s why I developed a big vocabulary: words can disguise ugly realities.  And later in life, when I got all those shit jobs, I learned that beauty has convulsions & that the first among them is a Fender Stratocaster. I feel the lift of a powerful emotion, I don’t know what it is, but the walls are burning down. Metamorphism swarms with energy. I see soap in a brown soap dish & think a walk will do us good. Genres can be mingled. I’m a voice beside the ground. And talk to auks. 

Crocodile

Each day I’m out for a run I pass a small art gallery called The Fountainhead. There’s a bronze sculpture in one of the windows that intrigues me: an old woman with a bare torso and a short skirt rides a crocodile. Her breasts are immense. They’ve lost their firmness and hang – outlandishly huge and abundant – from an aging but formidable frame. How many children have suckled at those formerly soft, voluminous rotundities? How many sorrows have been comforted there? There’s something iconic about her. Something regal and strong. The piece is titled “African Queen.” I assume this is no allusion to John Huston’s celebrated movie but an intimation of power. The sculpture is a different kind of narrative. Is the woman a figure from African mythology? Why is she riding a crocodile? I look for a clue in her facial expression, which is one of great subtlety, disclosing a gentle, vague, Mona Lisa smile, suggesting a rapport with the creature beneath her and a calm, reciprocal correspondence with the earth and its inhabitants. She’s very much at ease, awakened and serene, as if riding a crocodile were as routine as getting behind the wheel of a Subaru Forester and making a trip to the supermarket. One hand rests on her thigh, the other on the rough back of the crocodile. There’s no hurry, no menace, no predation. It’s Edenic and amiable, an eye-catching fable of breasts and teeth.

Normally, I go for a run in the afternoon, but on the morning of Christmas Eve day I woke up at 4:00 a.m. feeling agitated and angry. I couldn’t get back to sleep. I decided to take advantage of that energy and go for a run before sunrise. Burn the anger out of me by running in the cold. And dark. I won’t have to stop and feed crows. I could feed them later in the day, I could go for a walk instead of a run. It’s more fun that way. I can feed them at leisure.

We’ve developed a relationship. A rapport. I’m used to the crows flying past my head so close I can feel the air from their wings brush over my face and ears. I get to the McGraw Street Bridge that goes over Wolf Creek Ravine and a big bird flies in front of me. But it’s not a crow: it’s an owl. The owl perches on a nearby limb and watches as I run by.

I enjoy the Christmas decorations. Some houses go all out and are festooned in multi-colored squiggles of twinkly bulbs and fingers and loops of numinous joy. A few are more casual, make some gestures, a string of lights hung from a porch like a seasonal afterthought. And some are completely blank. We’re done with Christmas. We’re going to stand back and let it stress out the rest of the population. Kick back get stoned and watch TV.

Why am I feeling so angry? I can’t say why. There are so many reasons it’s tedious to go into it. Anomie, corporate greed, denial. Take your pick. I defer to Greta Thunberg. She speaks with greater eloquence than I can. I get choked on my own bile. I sputter and blink and steam comes out of my ears. Sometimes silence is more effective than shouting. And sometimes running at five a.m. in the December black brings a little temporary relief. It helps keep that animal anger in its cage, appeased with a nice warm shower, assuaged with waffles and syrup. Keeping that intensity at bay requires strategy and restraint. Anger is unpredictable. You need cunning and guile. A little control. Agency and style. You don’t want to push it down too hard and you don’t want to let it loose. It’s a lot like riding a crocodile. Don’t kick it. Don’t ignore it. Don’t let it get sneaky and toxic and slink. Just let it waddle forward and swallow the next asshole with a smile and a wink.