Adventures In Suspension

Last night my suspenders ate the chair. I can't tell you how upsetting that is. It was my favorite chair. I climbed Mount Everest with that chair. I wore it like a hat and fed it pieces of civilization. As for my suspenders, they’re remarkably fat now and shaped like a novel. The clips are metal and click when I put them on, flip the straps over my back and fasten them to my pants. It’s a small thing, but it’s so damn nice not to have to keep hoisting my pants up. Suspenders use tension to support pants. They counteract the downward pull of gravity. This is why they’re always hungry. They’ll eat all the furniture if you don’t keep an eye on them. I recommend hanging them on a hook when not in use. Woe to the negligent who leave them on a chair.

There should be more written about the metamorphoses of aging. It’s truly phenomenal. A man enters a bar and spits out his investigations concerning the enigma of pain. I give it enough attention to learn something new about existence. I keep a little behavior around me at all times. It comes with a script, a smile, and a chaise longue. I get nervous when things grow quiet. You can feel it in the air. The caprice of the gods. Bang, bang. Gunshots were heard in the barn. Minutes later we heard sirens. Chuckles poured me a shot of Smoky Goat. A body can begin the day in a good humor and end the day in a humor so foul with the fumes of evil that a simple walk can prove gestational. We give birth to a new version of ourselves at least once a week. Arguments hone and sharpen the brain, creating cognitive idiosyncrasies. The human milieu swarms with anomalies. I had a sore back in the morning. Wings and antennae by the afternoon. 

I remember when there was an art to letting the clutch out, or working a manual stick shift with the instincts of a matador. I knew when to comb my hair, when to call a cab, when to apply myself in earnest and when to climb into some knowledge to impress my peers. I remember that sudden turn in the Fun Forest when you were running toward me with a reindeer in your smile and a crescent moon in your tiara. I didn’t fully appreciate the full splendor of the Ferris Wheel until a needle helped me find my vertebrae. Things are happening in such a way in the current moment that it takes a pretty big tarpaulin just to cover the lies. It’s not that the truth is buried in éclairs. The truth of anything is visible on any sidewalk. I saw it get dragged through a sentence once fuzzy with description. There was once an art for that. I’m not sure it helped anyone find the truth. But the diversions were thrilling and the poetry crashed words together like cymbals.

Here. Take a look at this photo album. That's me over there dripping with conveniences. I'd just married a freeway. I have crazy impulses. I go berserk at barbecues. I attend poetry readings dressed as a scuba diver. I fall in love with highways. I bring them home and feed them BMWs and Jaguars. I define bliss as the silhouette of a rhinoceros in a parable at the tip of my tongue. I’m not sure I see a meaningful connection there but I feel certain that one will come in time. The splash doesn't recoil when it crashes against a rock, nor does it desire it, but it happens. And is just as wet when it does than when it doesn’t. It all sloshes around in the end, tossing old logs on the beach and kelp and dead skates for the gulls to pick at. If it’s a matter of leaves, get a rake. But if it’s hole you want, get a shovel. Or a telescope. I’m a little spooked by infinity whenever I get near it. It sneaks up on you. Even at your most vulnerable moments. A funeral. Or a wedding. Cathedrals and mosques wrap themselves around it. Give it a voice. And predicaments and bells.

 

Bring It To Me

My course is set for an uncharted voyage. I have maps. I have swivels. I have sleeves. I have predicates and mints. I have the power of English, the agility of Swahili, and the gallantry of French. Words are more like tongs. They hover in probability clouds. I plan to captivate the moment and float. Float wherever the currents take me. From the burble of water over the rocks to the hushed murmur of the estuary. That place between heaven and earth where the postpartum of life begins. That place off the highway where the mist tingles on the skin and the waves beat the sand. That place in the distance where the horizon hangs on the revolution of the planet. Full moon in a ring of noctilucent clouds. Is being dead the ultimate high? Being dead means being dead. Whatever being dead is. There’s no ‘is’ about it. Is is a stative verb. Is is a state of being. It is what it is. Bring it to me. Bring your sweet loving. Bring it on home to me.

The book is a spiritual instrument. It flaps across the room dropping clay tablets, cuneiform ordeals performed in the underworld. It has sentences in it that crawl across the page by secreting a layer of mucus and contracting vowels on the underside of their insistence by inducing in the mind of the reader a wave-like motion, propelling them forward, sentence and reader, arriving God knows where. Palermo, maybe, or a state of mind, a cognitive Palermo, a cat on the patio. Milwaukee. A used bookstore. Minneapolis. Another used bookstore. Used bookstores have become the tombs of a literary culture that began with ancient Sumer and ended in a social media platform. Things are implicit in books which means that Vivaldi composed Concerto No. 10 in B minor for 4 violins in a tacit, unspoken look in the eyes of a female violinist, which were arousing in an understood swoon of sensuality grasping at beauty in the milieu of a book.

I can bring you to a moment of great formulation if you’re willing to ride along on the propositions of words. Relax. I’m not carrying a gun. But I can feel a wave coming. I have its coordinates in my valise. The charm of mutability is in the glaze of the arbitrary. If you follow these emissions to their speculative conclusion fold the paper into an origami duck and watch it waddle across the table uttering lines from Finnegans Wake. The horizontal is a vertical butter and the vertical is hysterical and slate. Things are what they are because they exist on a license plate of epistemological combustion causing the thumb and index finger to turn the page to see what happens to things when they get written down and described with exotic adjectives and worrying prepositions arranged according to a fever of Möbius loops and unfamiliar machinery. Rebecca del Rio in that David Lynch series Twin Peaks season 3. No stars. A mournful legato. I get a charge out of blossomings of burning perception. Thing I held once, wet and trembling and glowing from the inside in a rage of ruby dispersion. I will rise and go now. And go to Innisfree.

Horizons are like a big Zen joke. They keep moving ahead as one approaches them. You cannot attain a horizon. It has no real existence. It’s a line in the far distance of the ocean where the surface of the ocean blends naturally into the sky and so by extension implies the same tandem connection between life and death, that tenuous zone between the open country and that wide open majestical roof fretted with golden fire we call a sky. There’s no real division there. These aren’t opposites, either. Their split is actually a fusion. And really mysterious and haunting and exciting and scary. The horizon is a hot summons to elsewhere. I could stare at it for hours. Which I did, several afternoons in Kauai. And once in Nevada, on Interstate 80 to Reno on a long, unending alkali desert and above the biggest damn sky I’ve ever seen, an infinite pale blue, stupendously different from a night filled with stars. This was a color so spooky in its implacable neutrality that the only thing that kept me somehow tethered to earth was the doleful voice of Willie Nelson singing Red Headed Stranger on the tape player. This was in the 80s. The “Good Morning America” 80s. Lennon dead. Reagan grinning. Money detached from gold and launched into digital psychosis. Everything turns around. Maybe this will too. Pivot into something indigestible to the cells of the human brain. Funny and sad like a big Zen joke.

If you can imagine a shy stampede in timid grass, perhaps I can show you a fragment of the hole in my head. And if the prospect of that doesn’t interest you, the texture of my arm has a strange color. That’s right. I’m an extraterrestrial. I arrived here in the womb of a wombat. I was awakened by flash lightning on a hot humid night in August. My morphology confused people. I was told I resembled an iguana. My neighbor recommended I watch Night of the Iguana. It was during the scene in which Richard Burton walks barefoot over broken glass to the astonishment of the young and beautiful Sue Lyon that I knew I wasn’t made for life on this planet. My survival depended on whatever gifts or aptitude I could discover within myself. I was impressed with Cyril Delevanti’s role as the poet Nonno. He had a certain dignity and stamina for enduring the madness of the human dominion I found inspiring. Maybe I could be a poet. After practicing daily for one month, I learned how to make some maneuvers with my hands and hypnotize myself instantly. When consciousness becomes words it becomes harder to find. Because it turns into words. Until it became words it was a soft thing full of patterns. Now it's a skull dripping rubies in a motorcycle repair shop. Nonno rumbles off on a Harley Breakout. The rest is silence.

 

No Easy Answer

Where do you seek salvation? Church? Art? Literature? Pure speculative thought nibbling at the fragile contours of reason? A broom closet in a girl’s school? A bath house in San Francisco? A prose poem masquerading as a flapjack in a flashback? Today is the day our environment circulates in the grass like a deity of wind. And I face homeward, dressed in Thalassa up to my gills. If, on the atomic level, sugar turns out to be a sincere apology for the many contradictory features of dark matter, then I will expand my ignorance on the breath of heaven. I will take to bed and I will sail no more. I will remain there many years, watching movies and eating popcorn. I take sleeping very seriously. It’s indelicate to dream in an unmade bed. I agree. But this is not the way to suspend a poem in midair. What you need is a scaffold, and a fuck ton of pretense.

Literature is the junkyard of ideas. Where have I heard that before? Probably the boardroom of a multibillionaire tech mogul. I can see it now: a ghostly Cézanne melted into the upholstery of a Ford Escort.  This is what happens when art and commerce encounter one another on the Salvador Dali expressway, and it’s midnight, Captain Beefheart is on the radio, and the UFOs are everywhere. That’s when you want to get down with the vertical, and chummy with things that talk. I learned this from Max Jacob. I know. I’m name dropping. Shame on me. But I see there are emotions stirred by the charm of my tentacles, and nascent gold on the shine of your forehead. My other mode is a temperature. This is how I come to know certain things. Things that pertain to buttons. Tender buttons. Not difficult buttons. Easy buttons. Weird buttons. Terrifyingly sensitive buttons. Edgar Allan Poe buttons. Tarantula buttons. Dead buttons. This is not why I read Tolstoy. No. It isn’t. Whenever I dive into an emotion, I’m never sure what I’ll find. But I didn’t think it would happen like this. Robins in a laurel hedge. A universe in my hat.

Why is there such a compulsion to feel one’s wounds? What is the fascination? Pain can be fascinating. And exquisite. In the realm of pain, the miniscule is huge. Even a mild toothache can build to an intolerable crescendo. The worst I’ve had is a kidney stone. It took half the summer for it to pass. I can’t begin to describe the ever-present pain in my groin, its many shades and gradations. It had the magnitude of a symphony, say Beethoven’s 6^th, the Pastoral Symphony. Passing a kidney stone is very much like hosting Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony in your groin. For three weeks. My advice: be careful with calcium carbonate. I think it’s time we start talking about Umwelt. Umwelt is a concept “that emphasizes that different organisms perceive the world differently based on their sensory organs and cognitive abilities, leading to distinct perceptual worlds. For example, a bee's Umwelt is dominated by ultraviolet and polarized light patterns, while a dog's Umwelt is strongly shaped by its sense of smell.” So, was Wittgenstein right? If a lion could talk, we could not understand him. Hell. 30 years later, I still can’t understand French.

There are approximately 140,000 neurons in the brain of a fruit fly. But that’s just a number. God only knows what the actual quality of cognition a fruit fly is capable of. The ones in our neck of the woods all like Proust. Every time I open Proust there’s a fruit fly, circling Odette’s head or landing on Madam Verdurin’s madeleine. What the heart learns the cartilage spurns. And anyone gets fast with a ruffle will later regret the loss of a collar. When I first wrote my ode to a junco, the paper functioned as a vanity folded into an ear. I still remember my first barroom brawl. Just before seeing all my consciousness get swept under my face by a punch. What if life were purely quixotic? That we treasured our ideals. That we proudly upheld our principles. And tilted at windmills. Until arrested by the police. It’s hard to drive I-5 near the Columbia gorge because of all the windmills. They make your head spin. I sat in a restaurant booth a long time while the waitress waited. No, sir, you will not find posterity on the menu. Let me know when you’re decided. Decided? I don’t think that’s ever going to happen. I can’t find that on the menu either.

There’s no easy answer for the prevalence of strawberries in a three-dimensional bowl. It just happens. There were strawberries. And there was a bowl to put them in. It just made sense. As for the three-dimensional manifestation of the bowl, that is mostly surmise. Surmise on my part. It’s what I’m accustomed to. It’s how I see things. How I read things. I only visit the fourth dimension when opportunity knocks. And a door opens. Not a physical door. A metaphysical door. A door that doesn’t exist in the world of knobs and toasters. The door is a feeling. It’s that vague. That nebulous. That incorporeal. But I know it’s a door. It feels like a door. I can feel its hinges. I can feel its knob. But they’re not cold to the touch. They feel soft, like a woman’s breast. And open as anything I can think of with a lace mantilla and a hand forgiving as death. 

 

The Fascination With Poetry

Is it possible that the things that happened in the past that I think of as being very negative events with very negative consequences were, in fact, the best things that could have happened because they culminated in this particular moment? But what would an otherwise set of circumstances look like? I can imagine some things going differently. More wealth. More fame. Fewer worries. Fewer headaches. Fewer betrayals. Fewer insults. But these imaginings do more to taunt me.

This is where art comes in. The art of my time, which was music. The music flourished for a decade before it was destroyed by Disco, mirror balls, cocaine, and rampant narcissism. At some point in the mid-nineteenth century, with the dizzying blast of industrialism, art replaced religion. The artists – unless they became fabulously famous and wealthy - were not treated with much respect. Picasso would be an important exception. Van Gogh would be a more typical case: artists were volatile, violent, insane. It’s what made their art so great. Madness and eccentricity were key elements in the creative life. Art made for a very strange religion. It required sacrifice, yes. But those who devoted themselves to its power were nuts, highly unstable and tortured people impossible to be around. This gave the educated, unfulfilled bourgeoisie an alibi. It wasn’t long before technology replaced art as the premier force of its time. The new zeitgeist masked its obscene wealth with T-shirts and jeans and were happy to display an air of elitist superiority while trapping the rest of humanity in a web of digital addiction and hegemonic algorithms. The mythology of wealth so saturated the media with stories of wizardly entrepreneurship it blinded the public to the psychopathic reality of moguls preaching sustainability while their AI data centers guzzled electricity and water at unsustainable rates.

For years, the fascination with poetry was about the form of poetry - its scansion, its rhyme scheme, its aesthetic decorum - and how to free oneself from the constraints imposed by decades of stale, academic convention that barred its energy from a full, electrifying expression. The quest was an alchemical challenge, to find a way to release a fragment of true reality, a great and brilliant amalgam of potent actuality. The pioneers in the western sphere were mostly French. Les poètes maudits: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé. These were followed by another crop of names: Apollinaire, Cendrars, Eluard, Breton. Added to these were two Irishmen who had made Paris their home - Joyce and Beckett - and an American: Gertrude Stein. Stein invented a whole new approach to language. Also, she became a celebrity: no more poet maudit.

Once could argue that Joyce, too, unveiled a whole new way to create things – personal explorations, streams of consciousness, elixirs - with language. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are astonishing demonstrations of linguistic transport. So are Beckett’s novels and plays and Kafka’s fantasias of modern dystopias. I’m sure I’m leaving out a whole galaxy of innovators. Creative spirit was strong throughout the 20^th century, and it wasn’t so removed from society that it didn’t often make news. What has become of it now is so abysmal I’m not done processing it. People who continue to read books – not pixels on a screen – are rare. The end result is a large population of people who have so completely lost touch with themselves that if there’s a period of unavailability for ChatGPT people go nuts. They start clawing at the walls with their fingernails. It’s a mystery to me how anyone can so completely negate their own inner universe. It’s a form of consciousness as alien to me as what goes on in the mind of a banana slug. Slugs, at least, leave trails of glistening mucus, a mode of far greater integrity than going full Monty with AI. AI is not a God. AI is a tool. People have a habit of falling in love with tools. I had a crush on a hammer once. My hammer and I spent hours pounding on nails. We built birdhouses. We built patios and tables. I was going to propose marriage. Until it hit my thumb.

I don’t know why I write. It wasn’t that long ago I had a reason to write. But now that reason is gone. I write for myself and strangers, said Gertrude Stein. That was her raison d’être. Just writing. The joy of writing. If the joy is there, the writing will find an audience. But an audience, for her, was a peripheral issue. Gertrude enjoyed a good degree of financial security, so I’m sure that helped with her cavalier dismissal of earnestly trying to merchandise or tailor her product to a population of strangers. The important thing to appreciate is that she took great pleasure in writing. Isn’t there a word for the compulsion to do things that aren’t necessary, aren’t appreciated, and basically just an irritation to most people? I asked AI: what does AI have to say about an impulse to devote one's creative potential to making things people aren’t interested in? Here’s AI’s answer: nothing. AI has nothing to say about this. Someone did provide an answer on Quora: “AI says that creativity is the ability to answer questions about how and why.” When was the last time I wrote something because I wanted to know how and why about something, anything, lepidoptera, the history of the sombrero, the chemistry of cement, the compulsion to create things people don’t give a shit about? I would be far more apt to read about those things. Why would I frame my questions in a body of prose, or a series of poems? How is that creative? Isn’t that just curiosity? Curiosity is an element of creativity but it’s not, in and of itself, a core value of creativity. That desire to put things in words. Create things out of words. Why is that? Why do I do that? “Can the poem say the unsayable,” asked poet Philip Lamantia, “Isn’t this what poets have always aspired to? Seemingly failing but finally achieving a miracle in words.”

I don’t know. But here I am doing it. Writing. Pixelating myself with pixels. I’ve thought about doing a podcast. Is there a Joe Rogan in me screaming to get out? He asks questions. He asks about the how and the why. And he makes millions doing it. He gets lots of guests. Celebrities. Eccentrics. Stand-up comics. And they tell him the how and the why. Most of it is total bullshit. But that doesn’t bother his audience. It doesn’t seem to, anyway. Maybe a few get a little upset. Or a lot upset. I don’t want to do a podcast. It’s too theatrical. I can be theatrical. Believe me. I can be theatrical. But not on a steady basis expecting to get an income for it. Not that I get an income from writing. That sure as fuck is not happening. But hey. It was fun to write that.

I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you. Song by Bob Dylan. This song is huge. Colossal. Big as the American prairie. From Fort Vermilion in Alberta, Canada to Laredo, Texas. What makes it big is in the tempo, the slow, measured, contemplative rhythm of weltschmerz, that Schopenhauerian acceptance of loss, suffering, and the limitations of human existence, all of it embedded in the grandeur of an expansive D major. It’s the tempo of old age, people who’ve traveled from childbirth to grade school to high school to college to pushing boundaries, exploring philosophies, pearl diving in Polynesia or searching origins on the Kalahari, all while managing a volatile temperament and making terrible mistakes and coming to terms with grim inevitabilities. And ending up in a hotel room in Oaxaca with a Martin in the corner a Bible on the bureau and a Glock in the drawer. And finally a table late at night on a patio with the stars out and a warm hand reaching across the table with liver spots and veins and a genuine warmth. And that declaration of reverent self-effacement: I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you.

 

Trampoline

A fall from grace can bounce you right back up if you’re on a trampoline. Think of this as a trampoline. We hurry to give it a standing ovation. Some very gallant people built this disorder. I offer you an extract of the wind’s scripture. Whatever correspondences appear will help form a giant beanstalk and lift us into the sky. Writing is a form of spatial copulation. Words appear after unzipping one’s inhibitions. It’s what they do. It’s what they’re all about. One cannot abolish time. But one can engorge with stigmata. Do what pathos prescribes. Grammar is nothing but fruit. Everything hangs in prepositions, or drifts over us like a tingling mist as we gaze upon the Statue of Liberty in the fog. A life in banking can do that to a person. Put you in a muddle of beeswax and unrealizable ambitions. Imagining the future is like trying to sail over the horizon. If you follow the brush, various surprises will dazzle you with unsolicited voyages, places that only exist in fugues and hillbilly operas. When you don’t know how to frame a situation the best you can hope for is a pencil and a piece of paper. Something happens out of the ordinary and scintillates in our neurons. Elephants trumpet the dawn. Followed by Paganini and Hilary Hahn.

This is indicative of trees. This ceaseless quivering. This unending search for canopies and branches, alternatives and wax. I have a trinket based on the parcel theory. It goes like this: if you receive a package in the mail missing any ontological grandeur or tangible existence, you should try opening it with your imagination. This is called unboxing reality and is a task undertaken by anyone who sits down to write a letter, or build an ark, or read all eleven volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu. So many destinies have emerged from an ovulation, or a parcel left on the stoop by an extraterrestrial postal service. It will probably have stars all over it and strange symbols and maybe a little art. A scene in Vermont. A woman’s hairbrush strategically left by a pool of goldfish. Meanwhile a beautiful robot climbs out of the box and stares at you with deeply focused attention. It’s Miss AI. And you are now being surveilled.

I’m feeling shy now despite a morning filled with Kabuki. Kabuki does not give me confidence. Confidence comes from a different part of the psyche. In my case, it comes from age. Words furnish my hungry things. In an age of bombs and trumpets, I grow ravenous for Shakespeare. I hunger to hear passions eloquently expressed. Instead, we get two men dressed like toddlers playing video games. This is called progress. Even the shadows mourn for the waves of a more romantic time. Remember Duncan? Roots and Branches? “My yearning was of the ground. My yearning was of the seed. Hidden wherein, the workings of ecstatic form.” I remember yearning. People don’t use that word much anymore. It’s a romantic word. Too romantic for the tech sphere. I feel archetypal. The old man disdaining the present age. A junkyard romantic with a long green bench and a chrome hood ornament. Winged Mercury shining out like an oracle.

July afternoon dragging itself over the ground, pound by pound. How much does a photon weigh? A photon's rest mass is zero, but its energy and momentum are related to its lip gloss, giving it an effective mascara. What I need is a stove with the power of a thousand suns to cook a single strain of melancholy. Our melancholy. The one we’re feeling. You’re not feeling melancholic? Good. You may be excused. As for the rest of us, I find solace in strawberries, blueberries, chunks of pineapple and a big mound of whipped cream. This constitutes a mood. A humor is different than a mood. Humor is more like fluid, as in aqueous humor, the fluid normally present in the anterior chamber of the eye, between the cornea and the iris. And jokes. Those too. Mood is more modular, modal, and whatever conceivable escalator we may be going up at the moment, surprised to find some retail still functioning somewhere in the country. It’s an aggregate of things. Disappointment, rip tides, sparks, oceanic consciousness and a pair of sterling silver cufflinks. Most of this comes from the heart. But a little comes from Cartier.

History is alive. And there’s a lot of them. A lot of histories. Like tributaries to a river. The big river of history. Floating around a star. Einstein’s theory of relativity makes us more aware of this. We’re drawn to the open-ended, la forma aperta, open form, of perception in provisional motion. There are no plots in life. Plots are for best-sellers. In everyday life each minute is a collage of sensations and sounds and temperatures and sirens, a mosaic of arms and arteries and muscular exertions, melodies and sharks and Holiday Inns, French fries and megabytes and surf. Crows cawing, cars honking, sewing machines humming, ankles swelling, throttles opening.  Twist the cylinder of a kaleidoscope and all those little glass pieces form a new pattern. I speak with some authority because I’m old and iconoclastic and wear colorful shirts. I’ve learned to daub everything that flows through rivers of distress with licorice and robin egg blue. Colors are visitors from another dimension. They’re here to learn how to shape destinies and enhance the horizon with layers of accentuation. Horizons aren’t real. They’re conceptual. And ultramarine.

One is tempted to say that the more a poem is itself, the more it is independently controlled, shooting through a hole in our scheme and exploding into action. The moment it’s engaged it shoots out a stream of liquid fire, a brilliantly luminous aporia circulated throughout its vast elaborations. The power of it is exhilarating. It has zoom. It has panache. It has coordinates and upholstery. It’s a summer of French ochre doing trinkets and fairs. It’s a barroom fight. It’s two men in jail, strangers to one another, brooding. The cloth of allegory is spotted with its blood. Some people like to flirt with volume, some with philosophy, some with filigree. And that’s meaningful. Significant as a woman’s hands scattering ashes on the Alleghany. This is the interval known as sunyata. Mallarmé leading a prison escape. Existence is a creative liability. You’ll need a napkin. A skull full of diphthongs and the sparkle of consciousness dripping on a sheet of paper. Because music is pink. And desperate. And Percy Bysshe Shelley isn’t dead.

So here I sit. Boiling. Infuriated. Bent out of shape. Hopping mad. Corybantic. This makes all my emotions happy. They like excitement. Is there a way out of this hotel? An exit to the back alley? What if I told you I hear Kentucky in Jackie De Shannon’s voice? There’s no analogy for this. And I don’t want one. I’m tired of trying to make sense of things that make no sense. I’m at the end of my life and I still don’t know what to make of this planet. Our species. Our species especially. Jesus. What a cock up. This is me, headed into the wilderness. The wilderness of language. This English of which I have learned something of how to speak it to the ghosts surrounding me. Anyone who has spent a night by a candle and a bottle of wine listening to the Beatles must also have an inkling of motorcycle repair. Everyone needs a meaning to tinker with. Try saying plum without using your lips. It’s an incendiary situation. All the details say so. Lou Welch wrapped in a bearskin coat, brooding. Marilyn Monroe. Bouncing on a trampoline.

 

A Creature Of Habit

I like the French word for 'habit’: habitude. Ah-bee-tood. It’s not as harsh as the English word ‘habit.’ That short vowel ‘a’ is rasping. Severe. “You’ve got a bad habit of looking at me the wrong way, mister.” I picture Jean Harlow. A smart-ass platinum blonde. That’s not the kind of habit I’d ever want to get mixed up in. I want habitude. French ‘habitude’ sounds comfortable, like a venerable armchair in an opulent study. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. It just means that you’ve grown comfortable with a certain routine, a manner of dress, a way of doing things. You’re dignified. You have preferences. Inclinations. You’re a man of the world. A femme fatale. A deadly coquette. An enchantress. You enjoy European squares with baroque fountains and elegant statuary. “I have the habit of impulse, monsieur, and cannot always restrain myself.” J'ai l'habitude de l'impulsion, monsieur, et je ne puis toujours me retenir. And then whip out your rapier and execute a flawless thrust at an imaginary opponent. You’re not in the habit of duels, but it’s sexy to appear capable of anything. Breaking out of habits is even sexier. But only if you fall back into your habit once you escape. That makes you appear vulnerable, and is a boost to your overall panache, which is yielding and genial. Habits are things you break. Habitude is where you live. Habits are rabbits. Habitude is gratitude. Latitude. Largesse. You can go a long way with habitude. It’s like sailing a yacht, while canoeing on a pond. Habit is the dull routine that one day turns into a crisis. You need to be rid of it. Ditch it for some habitude.

I have a long list of habits. Some of which I’ve broken. Gladly broken. Some I miss. Most I don’t. I don’t miss smoking. The first six months were torture. I was constantly angry. I had to exit a bus once because it was winter and the driver hadn’t turned the heat on. Deep down I knew how grotesquely patrician it would be to yell at the guy. Privileged, I think, is the proper term for that these days. Privileged because I was Hamlet. My privilege extended back to the 14^th century. I lived in a castle with a treacherous uncle and a lascivious mother. I moped around pushing boundaries. I was brutal to poor Ophelia. So I got off. I dinged the bell and got off the bus. I even gave a nod to the driver. My Hamlet nod. The nod of an aggrieved prince in a time before YouTube. And walked the rest of the way. Resumed a measure of calm. I never thought I could ever feel so good about ditching a bad drug. Not so with booze. Alcohol I miss. That was a tough one as well. Brandy, Guiness, cognac, tequila, Glenfiddich, martinis, I loved them all. Loved the movie Barfly. Mickey Rourke as Charles Bukowski. I felt right at home. That was a difficult divorce. Still miss it. Gives me nostalgia. Imaginings I won’t go into. Maybe another time. I’m still waiting for that long slow distance between me and the fantasies I dare never entertain.

I’ve cultivated some good habits over time. Running is a big one. It’s beyond habit. It’s an addiction. If I don’t run, I don’t feel right. I feel off. Dull. Uninspired. My mitochondria have gotten use to the daily renewal, either through running or doing a dumbbell routine. When it comes to dumbbells, I’m a natural. I feel comfortable around anything I don’t have to assemble or learn how to use while being surveilled by agents I only dimly comprehend. Running is an antidote to the dopamine trickle of social media. I remember privacy, it wasn’t just a location or a circumstance, it was having an interior nobody but you were allowed to enter. Are tattoos a way to restore identity? I’m stunned whenever I see somebody running while gazing at their phone. Maybe they’re developing a new run and looking at a map. Running is a meditation. It’s good for people who get bored with the shenanigans of their monkey mind. I like gorilla mind. Gorilla mind is thumping your chest in the wilderness. Breaking your chains on a Broadway stage as the paparazzi drive you insane with their flashbulbs. You end your run swatting at airplanes. That’s a terrible analogy. Running is fun. It isn’t tragic. It can be, I suppose. But mostly it’s exhilarating. You feel a surge of good health. That said, who wouldn’t feel eased of life’s absurdities by swatting at Curtis Helldivers while atop the Empire State Building?

Museums Are Zoos For Artists

Museums are zoos for artists. Artists are zoos for museums. But. I just want to know one thing. How strong is a gorilla? Gorillas are very strong. Gorillas can bend thick bamboo, uproot trees, and break termite mounds open. And yet their tenderness is legendary. If you know how to dip a mountain in wildflowers, you can overflow the edge of anything and arrive at some semblance of goodwill. You may stumble a little along the way, but that’s to be expected. Perfection, in this life, is unattainable. No one visits the afterlife without an attorney present. Whenever I visit the underworld, I put a magnificent bone in my suitcase along with an array of entertaining items. Tentacles, tits, and pieces of bright pentameter. You can find redemption in almost anything these days. So get ready. Some life is about to happen. If you feel like singing go ahead. But root the descriptions in good honest dirt. Keep an eye on the weather. Nobody can choose the direction of the wind. Not from the timid sanctuary of a motel room. No, what you want is a mutation. Form is the downfall of content. You can’t trap an image in a cube of rain. Not unless you intend to start something, just when I’m looking around for an exit ramp. My stream of consciousness indicates I'm chronicling something gnomish and wet. But the speedometer tells me we’re going head over heels in verbal embroidery. We could end up anywhere. Dancing in a Kentucky roadhouse. Or lost in some old melody with a dreamy tempo and a provocative thread.

One should undress before crawling on a pyramid. A negligee if you have to. It’s going to be hot. That Egyptian sun is murder on the skin. It’s up to you. I’m not entirely sure what rejuvenations lie in store, but I’m sure the journey itself will merit our gratitude. Wear something appropriate to the afterlife, assuming it’s just a casual visit and not an entire stay. Find a bedsheet. Try cutting through the fabric in an erratic fashion. Whatever it ends up resembling will not matter. What’s important is socks. Or a rattlesnake jacket with a plus sign and a history of chains. It will accommodate the rain quite well if it has been sewn with dragonfly thread. The zipper must be provocative, and consistent as gas. Rehearsal is good, but it behaves too much. Remember: wood before swan equals aluminum during credibility. Meanwhile, if the map widens our absence I will imitate something itchy. I have a feeling it’s all going to work out fine in the end. I know something about snorkeling and mechanical nouns. The future is an elusive phenomenon. I’m more comfortable in the past, where everything is predictable, because it already happened, but not set in cement, because time is fluid. Time is an aquarium in a psychiatrist’s waiting room. Just getting it started requires a vigorous push and a madeleine dipped in lime blossom tea.

I’m not equipped with Proust’s prodigious memory. I can barely remember the subject of a conversation ten minutes after I’ve had the conversation. I’m lucky if I can remember who I was talking to. Koko Taylor? Willie Dixon? Wang Dang Doodle? Smack me into umber and I’ll come out cinnamon. I can barely control who I am much less than manage who I’m not. I love the Fauves in the same way I love a junkyard pumpkin. I give my spit a zip code and shine my shoes. Things get done quickly here. I don’t need a reason to fall in love. Like most things in life, it comes as a surprise. Gravity is easy. You can feel it in your bones. And in bed. Spreading you like butter. Heave that emotion into a sentence and see what happens to the mirrors. That feeling you get after a dental filling is a blunt example of disembodiment. I’ve been there. Yesterday morning I woke up on the ceiling. Gertrude Stein handed me the newspaper. I heard there was an ape in the salon last night. No one knows how he got there. But man could he cut hair. 

 

The Art Of Mowing

I used to mow my father's lawn. I remember the arduous task of bringing the lawnmower to life. This required pulling on a rope repeatedly until it engaged a spring-loaded rotor, which in turn rotated the engine's flywheel and crankshaft, initiating the combustion process. Once the engine started, the recoil starter disengaged, allowing the engine to run independently. It made quite a racket and had a lot of power. The yard, front and back, was quite large, so it was a job that took several hours to complete. I was living like Gregory Corso at the time, or John Keats, adepts at couch-surfing. Mowing the lawn was a way to compensate for the kindness of food and lodging provided for the few days, sometimes weeks, it would take to find a job in order to secure an apartment. Rents in Seattle in the 70s were phenomenally cheap. It’s why I moved back to Seattle after ten years in California. The nascent flowering of what would soon be Silicon Valley had already begun driving rents and real estate way up. It would be another ten years or so before the same phenomena would convert Seattle from being one of the most livable of cities to a dystopic hellscape of unaffordable homes, “suicidal” whistleblowers, cratered roads and drones.

The lawn mower was old and stubborn and hard to start. It was the hardest part of the mowing job. I liked the uniformity of the process, the machine vibrating its power in my arms, pulling me along like a mechanical mule, a Martian rover with rotating blades. I liked the combined smells of newly mown grass and gasoline. The strong smell of freshly cut grass is caused by green leaf volatiles (GLVs), quite generally a mix of various oxygenated hydrocarbons, which are released when grass is damaged. In the French movie Perfumes (Les Parfums), Emmanuelle Devos plays a famous French “nose” who can discern with acute sensitivity a universe of odors. She refers to the smell of newly mown grass as the smell of carnage. I would, as a rule, mow the lawn in orderly strips, going back and forth, lost in thought. When I was finished mowing, I would rake. Raking took a lot longer. But there was something Zenlike in the motion, a meditative rhythm.

Lawns appear to be disappearing. A lot of the new McMansions use every square inch of property, leaving room for little else but a few rocks and some beach grass. A number of luxurious dwellings use artificial turf, which I find quite off-putting. Why would anyone do that? Grass is not a rare metal. It’s everywhere. It does require water. But this is Seattle. It rains a lot.  Mowing, it would seem, has lost its allure for a lot of homeowners. Many yards now have been landscaped to accentuate rocks and moss. The effect is enchanting. The larger homes, the ones upwards of two million, will quite often have a fountain and a statue of the Buddha, seated in a lotus position with a benevolent smile and a large well-exposed belly, soliciting a rub for good luck. I find this curious. That people blessed with wealth should allude to an eastern philosophy whose tenets advance non-attachment, deliverance from our enslavement to material possessions, even within our thoughts and emotions. Is this because once wealth is attained, it seems only natural to despise it? Does the effort to acquire wealth have a damaging effect on the psyche, recommending that a Buddha should be seated strategically somewhere in the garden, ideally near a fountain, as a talisman to the further grip of the material world, or as a warning to people not to seek wealth and property, it’s just a headache, an ongoing anxiety? Wouldn’t a more apt religious figure be someone espousing a gospel of joy and prosperity, the idea that God rewards faithfulness and devotion with material wealth and success, or one of many celebrities hosting meditation videos on YouTube, Sam Harris or Kevin Hart? A Buddha in a lotus position does, I must say, look far better suited to a setting of lobelia, elephant ears and water hyacinth than a podcast celebrity smiling sagely out of a backdrop of bugleweed, spirea and stinking hellebore.

It was British engineer Edward Beard Budding that we have to thank for the invention of the lawn mower. It seems appropriate that Budding, who worked as a mechanic building and repairing machinery for textile mills in the Stroud valleys, that the words ‘beard’ and ‘budding’ should constitute the bulk of his name. Budding was granted a patent for the first mechanical lawn mower in 1830. The machine was based on a tool used to uniformly cut carpet and comprised of a series of blades around a cylinder. Cast-iron gear wheels transmitted power from the rear roller to the cutting cylinder, allowing the rear roller to drive the knives on the cutting cylinder. It must’ve been a hell of a thing to push. Lawn sports like croquet and lawn tennis had become quite popular in England, as well as in the U.S. By the mid-19th century in America lawns were firmly established as a signature of the prosperous American homeowner’s landscape. However, it was evident in the Flintstone cartoons that the prehistoric Flintstones had a grassy front yard with a cobblestone walkway and a driveway, as well as a grassy backyard with a pool and a coconut tree, thus belying the lawn as an eccentricity of the industrial age.