Dostoyevsky On A Pogo Stick

Have you ever noticed how easily wires get entangled? Do you spend a lot of time thinking about these things? I do. It’s why I never get anything done. The day breaks and, further on, in the small port of Spinola, the fishermen are already bustling about on their small multicolored boats. It’s why I write poetry. You can map oblivion with propofol, or the unfiltered voice of summer rain, and still have difficulty netting certain ideas. The conviction that, for example, some laws are bad resulted in The Ramones. But really. It’s so hard to convince people of anything. It’s a big problem. Especially if you have your heart set on becoming a self-help guru. I had a lifetime to do that. And look what happened. Nihilism. Nepotism. Cynicism. Emil Cioran. Is there a universal mind where one’s interior can thrive on the power of a waterfall and remain calm in the face of a plutocrat? I can’t answer that. Nobody can. I’m still stuck on these wires. Disentanglement. String Theory. Inflationary Universe Theory. The Theory of Everything. The components of life are courtesies of sunlight and dirt. You’re here as long as you’re here.

I’m fairly open to things. But there are exceptions. Genocide. Technofeudalism. Global surveillance. Centralized digital banking. Neoliberal economics. Tax cuts for the rich. Things have gotten so sordid lately. There were incidents during last night’s bingo game I’d just as soon forget. What makes the vividness of the fourth of July so spectacular and simultaneously demoralizing isn’t the fireworks but the absence of anything truly independent. And who can’t be a little amused by Musk and Trump’s little breakup? If you must break the law, said Julius Caesar, do it to seize power. In all other cases don’t slam the door so hard. I’m trying hard to keep us both in focus. Bank robberies are exciting and cathartic. But when it comes to scandalous levels of extravagance, you can’t beat the pentagon. Bubbles do pop. Carry a widget wherever you go, and observe the law as you might a great judge of character. Leonardo de Vinci. Lao-tse. Marie Curie. Gypsy Rose Lee. Johnny Rotten. Dostoyevsky on a pogo stick.

Poetry doesn’t need to be written. It just happens. The day I was born I didn’t argue with anything. Or did I? Does crying count? Frustrations begin in the crib and mount with the evolution of our needs. I will apply words to reality whether they truly apply or not because words are more interesting when they detach from reality and flit about like hummingbirds in a cage of grammar. You can build an emotion of extravagant hues around a jewel of music. But can you make a tiger prowl through a sentence filled with entanglements of vine and orchid and yet remain untethered to anything proto-utilitarian or syntactically crystallized, as in the practice of doing dishes? Why would you? I’m a glutton for polysemy. My favorite shirt is a ceaseless provocation with four hundred buttons of flaming preternatural gold and eight sleeves for each tentacle. I live like Greogry Corso, still harboring that 5,000-year-old secret behind Jack and the Beanstalk. Gogmagog. Fee-fi-fo-fum. I smell the blood of a beatnik poet high on ayahuasca. 

There are infinite resources for the thickness of things, much of it rendered by the infinite resources embedded in the semantic thickness of words. My fingers squirt words all over the surface of a walnut desk. I didn’t invent this language, but I do go swimming in it occasionally. I wish people took better care of it. Which is a massively hypocritical thing to say, all things considered. I remember when correspondence meant something. You could see a mind drifting through itself, crackling like a power socket in a moon jelly exhibit. For example, that night Joan Rivers sat on my lap and told me a joke about my monkey. I got lost in Johnny’s eyes. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: noodles improve the soul's lampshade. I’m far more comfortable when I’m insoluble. I can’t just amble around in iron. I must rub things together to get sparks. Our bodies are here to propagate, but our minds like to flourish in solitude. The human brain houses approximately 86 to 100 billion neurons. What kind of solitude is that? Mending things demonstrates a kind of tenacity, but I’m not here for tenacity. I’m here for the doughnuts, as always. It gives me release. The more bites you take, the bigger the hole.