Dialectics Licking Your Ears

Do fish ever get seasick? Maybe in a whirlpool. Round and round and round and round. Dizzying. Reminds of the Seattle World’s Fair, 1962, that ride called a rotor, big cylinder you got in and when it spun the floor went away and you were stuck to the wall. I exited with an intense case of nausea. Didn’t puke, though, thankfully. Wonder if anyone did. How does Dramamine work? Vaguely recall it’s an antihistamine. Reduces the effects of histamine in the body. And what is it histamine does? Or is it do? What does histamine do? Don’t have a clue. Something to do with the dilation of blood vessels. I’ll bet astronauts take a ton of Dramamine. And you’ve got to wonder what that’s like, floating for six months. Doing what? At no point in my life did it occur to me to become an astronaut. Why is that? Never had the urge to be a cop, not until I got holder. People on the bicycle lane at Westlake whizzing by on ebikes at 40 mph make me nervous. How strange that must be to have the power to tell people not to do something. Because why? Because they might harm themselves, and others. Or people that drop their pants and shit in public. Never used to see that. Common now. Something wicked this way comes. Civilization is unraveling. Good time to be an astronaut. Float up there looking down at that big blue and white marbled ball with its swirly hurricane clouds and crazy land formations. Nobody, far as I know, has had sex in space. Sex in weightless conditions. How does that work? Hard to do anything without resistance. Traction. I remember running in sand. Effortful. And years ago the white sand of Carmel, California, same year all that great music appeared, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Dylan, Donovan, Moby Grape. Remembering those sounds and smells and afternoons and the entire gestalt of a generation the people and circumstances characterizing that time. It’s like having a travel agency in your head. Memories are such strange things. Images and feelings from the past dredged by contemplation into reflective ponds of eerie clarity. Like that pond I saw up in the Cascades some years ago. A long hike in early summer. I stood there riveted. The clarity was stunning. Tangle of branches in silt. Which is now a memory. A stunning lucidity in my mind. That serves no purpose. It’s just there. There are a lot of other memories in which I play around with dialogue. Things I could’ve said. Things I shouldn’t have said. Things I said awkwardly. Wrong decisions. Right decisions. It gets to be a mess after a while. A capharnaum. What a word. An attic of the head. Stacks of National Geographic. Old vinyl records for which no phonograph exists to play them. The sounds asleep in the grooves. Everything YouTube now. iTunes. People cocooned in music. Siloed in private listening. Even on planes, right next to people. Not the shared experience it once was. Maybe in clubs. Bars. Haven’t stepped into that culture in years. Those booths smelling of beer. Big casks. Big smiles. Ebullience of foam. Bubbles rising. Nice thick fluted glass in the hand. Glow of a jukebox. Juke. A Gullah word, meaning wicked, disorderly. A box of disorder. Which shines & glows. Punch a button and the record comes down, needle goes in, song comes out. Dialectics licking your ears.