And So It Goes

After all these years I find I have very few skills. It’s never really been an issue until recently. But now that things are looking apocalyptic & becoming more & more Mad Max-ish by the minute, I’m beginning to regret the incapacity to grow food, for the autonomy of a garden, adequate skills to repair a car, or more importantly a tractor, or find & care for a horse. That takes acreage, arable land & a house & a barn, which makes it a fantasy. I can explain the poetics of Mallarmé but I can’t install a kitchen sink. Or could I? Maybe I could. These are odd times, an odd age (70s) to be regretting all that time spent with writing & books & so little with calipers & screws. Even odder to think that, not long ago, I envisioned a future with libraries & decency.

I remember watching Gunsmoke on a TV in a Bottineau motel by the Turtle Mountains of North Dakota. Because Dolores O’Riordan was singing “Dreams” for the Nobel Peace Prize concert in 1998 on YouTube. Which made me think of that year. And what motels were like just before the advent of smartphones. Before surveillance & fascism. Before pandemics & war. The melting of the poles. The assaults on the imaginary. The emptying of the library. What was it like? It was like watching Gunsmoke on a motel TV. And sensing a change in the stillness of the prairie.

When I was a kid, in the 50s, I used to love those jaunts for chokecherries in the Turtle Mountains in my grand-uncle’s jeep. It was basic, didn’t have the comforts & amenities of riding in a car, the axle was high off the ground, it was built to go over rugged terrain, open air, no enamel making it look pretty, just a basic military greenish metal. I like way it bounced when it over rough terrain. It felt like it was laughing. Ha! Ha! Can’t stop me I’m a fucking jeep asshole.

How do we measure our experiences? Are there spirit levels for dancing? Sphygmomanometers for kinky sex? Theodolites for weeping alone? Accelerometers for bungee jumping? I can’t measure this moment. Its ingredients are elusive. It might be one thing then it’s another thing than it’s a bunch of things but mostly it’s hydraulic & creamy, old age & coffee. Reality is mostly breath. Therefore, use the genius of the human hand to feel the nub of a fingertip. Consider possible ways of being in the world. Cognition is mostly ants going off in all directions. But it can be done. Streams of consciousness slosh back & forth in a ballpoint pen, & drip.

I don’t live on Earth. I am Earth. I was generated by Earth. And when my cells all collectively agree that’s it we’re done we’ve gone as far as we can with this organism & let go & everything rots is it really rotting or just dissipating to become something else. Mud. Stone. Water. Oxygen. Carbon. Sulfur. Potassium. Phosphorus & Oreo cookies. Jello & pasta. Poetry & iron. Self-consciousness & wild boar. Reeds & reading & rice & semen. Molecules, atoms, protons, ions, mastodons, leprechauns, polygons. It doesn’t die it just gets recirculated. What dies is the narrative I’ve been driving down the highway all these years. You got to let it go. And so it goes.