Bomb Cyclone

10:09 p.m. December 24^th. It felt good to run today. All the ice had melted. Yesterday there was so much ice I couldn’t make it to the end of the driveway. It was much warmer today. About 45 degrees. It was raining heavily but I had to go. I hadn’t run for three days. I don’t even want to weigh myself. I’ve been gobbling food like there’s no tomorrow. R's mince cookies especially. R's rain jacket was too thin to do much good but she brought an umbrella. She ran ok with the umbrella but the awkwardness of the umbrella combined with the bag of peanuts she was carrying proved too much and she turned back home. The combination of it being Christmas Eve day and the rain emptied the streets of pedestrians. Not much traffic either. So it was much more relaxing than usual. And no crows begging for peanuts. They remained high in the air having fun with currents. I left a few at a couple of key spots, in case they come out later. 

And to think that less than a month ago we had to get up early to for a run and avoid the heat. It was always in the 80s in Kauai. I carried a bottle of water. Palm fronds trembled in the breeze. Roosters and hens and their progeny dashed across Lawai Road. Early morning surfers returned to their cars. I dove into the Pacific when we returned. The water was warm. It felt fantastic. 

I watch a large white snake coil itself around a young woman in a black dress. Chelsea Wolfe.  Singing “Hypnos.” “I licked your hatred. You set me free. In summer, in the boiling blood.” 

Bomb Cyclone Leaves America Powerless reads a headline on YouTube. Eighteen dead. Buffalo, New York got 22.3 inches of snow in one day. Cars and trucks sliding all over highways and freeways. Collisions everywhere. One small hill in our neighborhood got four crashes within hours of one another. Scenes of powdery ethereal snow blown wispily and crazily over dark asphalt as if in some apocalyptic dream. Thousands of canceled flights. People sleeping on the floor at international airports. Icicles on bridge railings. Transformers exploding from the cold. In Texas a homeless man in a wheelchair fell into a fire pit. Sedan spins down a street hitting two parked cars. And day before yesterday I saw a man driving without chains down icy 8^th Avenue West and turn toward an oncoming car while gazing at his smartphone. A train derailed after hitting a truck in Collegedale, Tennessee. Train 55 from Ottawa to Toronto stopped after a tree fell on it. Emergency services provided food & water, but those supplies soon ran out, & the toilets had stopped working. A train derailment near Grafton blocked all trains in Kingston. Iguanas dropping out of trees frozen and dead in Florida. Homes buried in snow in Buffalo. 

It's hard to believe that such a fragile thing as a snowflake can cause so much mayhem. One might think of it as an equation of collective action. There are roughly 22,400 snowflakes in a pound of snow. Multiply this by a factor of infinite flakes in a cold uncaring universe and you will begin to see the problem of existence as a problem of precarious quantification. In physics, a jerk equation is the minimal setting for solution showing coffeehouse behavior. Try it with rubber. This will only work if you forget everything you know about dynamical systems & stretch it as far as you can. Then, after you let go, you won’t notice yourself crashing through the window. And what will you have proved? The anxiety of death is a farce. Said the Snowman.

 

I'm A Yo-Yo

Consciousness means we’re involved in the creation of the universe. It’s a process. What you’re going to need is a philosophy, a shovel, and a bag of cement. Romance, precision, generalization. Quills and calculus and pliers and a caulking gun and motorcycles and a big garage. A drummer. A bass guitarist. A case of beer. The voice of Merle Haggard. The spirit of Moses. The linguistic prowess of Cleopatra. A stiff felt hat and a whirlpool of upholstery in somebody’s basement. Lights are good and a Persian carpet and a roll of duct tape. Include a peninsula and a noontime snooze. Everyone is here. Everyone is involved. It’s time to get started. This one’s all but gone. But we can salvage the nails and lumber. It’s going to be a kick-ass universe. Timeless as string. If we do it up right, it will echo the cravings of the spirit. And walk in beauty like the yo-yo.

I’m a yo-yo. No doubt about it. It amazes me the number of times I have to get up and piss. The night becomes a pattern of up and down, up and down, up and down. Pissing has become an occupation. I’ve had to cultivate a new relationship with my body and its organs. In youth I flew around like Ariel, hardly aware I had a body at all. Unless I had a hard-on. Or I was getting punched in a fight. Because some guy’s girlfriend took a liking to me. And gave me a hard-on. But sometime after passing 50 things changed. And by the time I was 70 I became the caretaker of 170 pounds of elements like hydrogen and sulfur and phosphorous and an amalgam of muscle, gum and bone. I do what it wants. What it needs. And now if you’ll excuse me, I have to piss.

Remember when people used to say stupid things like job satisfaction is a cause of well-being? They don’t still say that, do they?

I’d rather shoot myself. I hope to God I never become that person. Which, considering my age, is highly unlikely. I’m a different species of asshole. I’m the kind that goofs off all day, and then blames it all on Arthur Schopenhauer.

The spawn of John Calvin is everywhere. Original sin. Predestination. Humility and obedience. Hard work as a religious duty. Jesus. What bullshit.

Those forced grins you used to see everywhere, at least that’s gone. Now that the corporate juggernaut has achieved its goal of hijacking governments and prosecuting a plan of neo-feudalism for the masses, it’s ok to show your despair and look askance and not engage customers in conversation. Those self-serve aisles at the grocery store have become a remarkable success. It’s got work, martyrdom, and debasement all over it and as an added bonus you don’t have to engage with anyone.

Whatever happened to well-being? For a lot of people, people fleeing Afghanistan or Ukraine or Syria, it's a luxury. It begins with shelter and food. And for a lot of people - many of them living in the United States and Europe - shelter and food have become a luxury. 

There’s no such thing as well-being. Being is a meaningless term. It’s not an entity. Not a cotton swab. And what does ‘well’ mean? Skilled, competent, good, healthy, strong, vigorous, shrewd, judicious, fit as a fiddle. In other words, an asshole. Non-being is a form of well-being. If there’s no being there’s no worry, no purpose, no agenda, no target, no intention, no weaponry, no animus, no machinations, no aim. Therefore, non-being is the nebulous chew of reverie. Blue rubies. Black Beauties. Musical breweries. I’m done now. Done with being. This is clearly the moment to talk about something else. Eccentrics in Africa and the greenery of rattling shirts. Cherry blossom pink is the nipples’s friend, and this involves easels and paint, and a sense of non-being.

It's a simple formula: if you have non-being, nobody can get their hooks in you. When well-being becomes a commodity, non-being is a way out: ownership is suffering. When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose. 

Normally, I don’t get this preachy. But every time I see a white blank sheet of paper or word document I see a theater. I see a stage. So here I am. To be or not to be, that is the question. Everything pivots around that.

The Universe Isn't Empty It's Just Sleeping

Nothingness feels like velour. Velour ain’t nothing. But it is velour. And that’s saying something. Something velour. All things verifiable are germane to velour. The purpose of velour is to educate the fingers. The purpose of fingers is to educate velour. This is a funny universe. It’s all velour. Velour all over. The universe isn’t empty. Virtual particles pop in and out of existence. And they’re all velour. The truth is velour. Lies are velour. This is a lie. I’m telling the truth. This is velour. All velour. Except for the parts that aren’t velour. They walk around like they own the place. They fold themselves into nouns. They glitter and endure. And they like to spin. Spin is an intrinsic degree of freedom. This is called a wave function. It describes the wave characteristics of a particle. So you’d better put something on. Something red. Something velour.

This sentence is around here somewhere. I know it’s somewhere here. Or maybe it hasn’t been written yet. Maybe this is the sentence. It’s delicate making these decisions. Ask me where the femur resides in the mammalian anatomy and I’ll hand you a jacket and a can of spam. This is my way of saying I don’t know where it is. This so-called sentence. This subterranean toolbox of chthonic wrenches and seventeen neologisms based on a principle of monarchic rule. I know the sentence I’m looking for I can feel it I can even smell it it smells like a Memphis recording studio after Bob Dylan got done recording Blonde on Blonde in June, 1966. There were a lot of sentences around then, a lot of them hanging from the mouth in psychedelic colors, syllables flashing colors and rolling dice, a quirky syntax moving in untidy bones across a sheet of ice.

If you feed a sentence nothingness it will feel like velour. But I don’t want to go into that just now. I want to listen to the beat of drums. I want to dig holes in the air. Deep holes. Holes of elsewhere. And fill them with words. Move away twisted eye. Dry mechanical fingers join the rattling percussion of a hummingbird to the fox of the poetry chickens. I light up my knee with the jewelry of movement. I have a beehive wardrobe and a shawl of informal temperatures. Dazzling admonitions help lend beaks to the management of noble emissary hums. Genitals are glorious answers to the injuries of existence. Iron denials. I rattle like a blister and go where the poplars smell of rain. Rafts of weariness carry us into sleep. And the night swallows our pain.

The Voice Is An Instrument

It puzzled me to hear that Sarah Bernhardt would often request a pitcher of hot water to be placed discreetly near her somewhere on the stage to keep down the dust. Why dust? Who cares about dust? Then it hit me: because she’s performing. She’s inhaling deeply to give her voice power. How cumbersome that would be, to try to send her words soaring into the theater while suppressing a cough. Her voice was described as a “golden bell.” It mesmerized people. And she had a personality to match: grace, beauty, and charisma. The voice is an instrument, she said, which the artist must use with suppleness and sureness, as if it were a limb. Or a bell.

It’s a mystery to me how singers are able to give so much expression to their emotion, and make it bold and intimate. It must be like getting naked in front of a crowd. I could never do that. Which is why I write. When I’m in public, among strangers, and often even among friends, I have to keep the full weight of emotion within reins. In writing, emotions can be dealt with more abstractly, even if the words get a little ornate. There’s probing & exploration. Groping, like for a light switch in a hotel, when you get up to use the bathroom, or get a drink of water. You can’t sing that. But if you do, let it puzzle the ears. And pull the mind into the light of a bedside lamp.

Actors leave their personalities behind in the dressing room. Maybe singers do that, too.

In Tombstone, thespian Mr. Fabian (Billy Zane) delivers – quite commendably -  the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V while rowdy cowboys take potshots at the stage.

I’ve always associated Bernhardt with the American West, although she was a longtime resident of Paris. On February 6^th, 1881, on her way to New Orleans aboard a train, she paid the engineer twenty-five hundred dollars, who sent the amount to his wife, should he not survive crossing a bridge whose piles had been weakened by floodwaters. She paid the amount in gold pieces. The train sped across and the bridge collapsed after it reached the other side. Thinking about what might’ve happened – what almost happened – gave her nightmares. Generous souls often act on impulse. Regrets come tumbling down later. Off stage. In the glare of a mirror.

In 1887 she entered the U.S. in Texas, bringing with her a pet tiger. She also wore a live garter snake around her wrist, the one she substituted for an asp while playing Cleopatra.

According to Plutarch, Cleopatra – the actual Cleopatra - spoke at least nine languages: Ethiopian, Troglodytic, Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Median, Parthian, Egyptian and Greek.

History is neither chronological or ontological. It’s not even logical. It’s lopsided and beige.

In June, 1876, Wild Bill Hickok wrote to his wife – Circus Queen Agnes Lake Hickok – from the Omaha Metropolitan Hotel. He wanted to put his big hands on her shoulders and kiss her smile. I can feel all the generosity of feeling in that and it makes me feel good about the man. I always wondered about that guy. He came into my awareness when I was eight or nine in Deadwood. I remember the afternoon. The air smelled of pine and there were old cabins that might’ve been around when Wild Bill pulled out a chair and sat down to play a game of poker at Nuttal & Mann’s Saloon. Wish that fucker hadn’t shot him. Bill was only 39. If he’d lived another 41 years or so he would’ve made it to 1917. The year the U.S. declared war on Germany. The October Revolution in Russia overturned the tsar’s government and led to the establishment of the Soviet Union. Jazz recording “Liberty Stable Blues” was released. And Marcel Duchamp submitted R. Mutt – a porcelain urinal - to the Society of Independent Artists who were to stage an exhibit at the Grand Central Palace in New York city. They said they’d accept any artist’s work as long as they paid the entry fee. But R. Mutt wasn’t. Upon which Duchamp resigned.  

The world lacks rebels these days. The public has become spookily compliant. Except when they get drunk on a passenger plane and are dragged off by security, shouting, screaming, trying to bludgeon the perceived injustices of the world with their voice. Which can be a scalpel or gun if used wisely. Shouting doesn’t do much, unless you’re Tears for Fears, or Lulu. A voice is useless without the precision of words. Each phrase an incision, each word a bullet fired from the mouth. 

The Smile Of Art

Desire doesn’t make miracles. It creates problems. Les Misérables is a tempest in the skull. It’s choc-a-bloc with problems. Cobbled with problems. Will Jean Valjean return to the Buccaneers for the foreseeable future, or will he promise Fantine to take care of Cossette? Fishing doesn’t always involve getting your line wet. Sometimes all you need to do is to look at things from another perspective. Inscrutability always works, as do fugues and sonatas in which we see everything going on at the airport has something intrinsically meaty about it, padded and chewed, glowing through and through with the smile of art. The ceremony of noise is coming at us from the north with sharp quills. It will take some understanding. I miss the monarchy. There wasn’t quite so much military propaganda. The mind leaps from problem to problem, brownish black and soft as coal. Words are deposits of sound from which molten rock and steam come out and shake the air with testimony. Leaves smashed in medicine, espousals of likelihood in the jungles of the telephone. This is why it’s so hard to write without being intoxicated. You keep lighting fuses until something explodes. The old world crumbles and a new world emerges. The new world is so new it doesn’t know it exists. You have to look for it in your voice. Or somebody’s eyes. When they’re not looking. And the wind is blowing. And you’re waiting for the check. As a train goes by. The world looks the same. But different. And it’s not on the menu.