Fully Indulged

Engorged by maple syrup, my beard extends chaos before the beard is even grown. And since a dormant beard requires a special hat, I wear a drug on my head. It’s called Spinoza, and has a wide brim, and a fibula for keeping papers in order. These aren’t the kind of things that tend to happen in youth. These are the kind of things that happen in old age. It is so much easier for we elders to improvise some approximation of a tree. But that’s not what happens. What develops is what unburdens between our allegories. Marginal things. Things you don’t ordinarily think of to bring with you to a wedding. Or a funeral. What transpires between the wedding and the funeral is a door to another dimension. The door opens and we walk into life with a different goal and a different mode of travel. Even in the midst of the strangest experiences, there will be oysters and bingo, various entertainments and resources, arabesques and steel. A prodigy in a gown of spoons and a primeval forest with a beautiful lake. Nudity is voluntary. It gives us a sense of agency. A teardrop can always leave room for some form of invention. I deepened my biology by exploding my employment into tiny bits of introspection. In the beginning was a sonnet, and a whale swimming in a bay of participles, all silken and dark. And now everything is either some form of door, or an unnecessary severity. Beautiful art on hospital walls. A tendency to behave differently at home than in public. That kind of thing. The mess of existence, fully indulged.

What we experience in dreams is bonfires. Damascus and ratatouille, the cuddle of the seasons, and a great love of ovations. Please don’t go. I promise things will change. I will give you the power of flight. But you have to believe in yourself. And that flapping your arms is a serious proposition. If you’re not rising yet, there’s something wrong with this sentence. It has a different color and definition in my waking life than it does at night, when I’m out carousing. There was a dwarf in the bathtub when I arrived home. He was dyeing himself indigo. People differ about what has value and what does not have value. One must consider that as a valuable perspective, despite its tendency to bite on occasion, and shatter previous conceptions. The fiduciary of the nose is a sure sign of lavender. If Polynesia is in turmoil, I will feel it in the unknown, far, far away, like a thoughtful breeze of strawberry fields. The nose is home to so many odors. There is the smell of molten iron and the smell of the bayou. The smell of books. The smell of banks. The smell of beef stew on a Tuesday evening in Memphis. The older the song, the newer the sound. Building a case for devilry and insatiability is achievable in countries like Monaco, but it must be done quickly, like a scarf blowing in the wind.

Life can be made to pile up in the mesh of memory, but is that truly life, or more like graciousness, patience, and spirituality? I can hear it in the voice of some singers. Patsy Cline. Etta James. Billie Holiday The loneliness of the night. Tropical monsters and archaeological finds. It’s all up for grabs. Every nuance. Every hue. Every in between moment. Words tethered to the breath. And heaved into the furnace of time.

Listen: the storm is threatening my very life today. The Stones keep grinding away. Despite their dalliance with multibillionaires, they strangely maintain the swagger of insouciance. Even in old age. But that’s a story for another day. Do moralists hate the tropics? I don’t think so. But what do I know? The more I know the less I know. Trite, but true.

I tell stories with a harmonica and a snowshoe. I prefer to farm incognito. Today we go on a tour of the salt mines. I hope you like French fries. I know I do. I just don’t know where any of this is headed. Could be Montmartre ahead. Could be a fabric. Could be a fabrication. Could be a fabrication of Montmartre. The singing in Sacré-Coeur de Montmartre is beautiful. And there’s an angel outside acting funny. I’ve manufactured a cat for your pleasure. The chair writes its own arrival. It’s quite literally a literary chair. A vintage Louis XVI Neoclassical chair with fluted legs and a big umbrella. I enjoy pondering objects. Fountains, curiosities, skeletons. I have a special fondness for cartilage. And when I feel moody, I like to watch raindrops trickle down a window pane. I dream of anthologies. Like that one back in 1968, the Don Allen anthology. That kept me happy for days. Years. Decades. And now it all seems like a waterfront in the pouring rain. I like acting out arabesques occasionally, and spit and shine in the fantastic glow of vespers. The ships haven’t been coming in lately, not since the dolt in charge threw tariffs at everybody. But what matters to me is art in the service of politics. The emissions go foggy, like that static on TVs back in the day, when they had tubes and Walter Cronkite, and there was a storm outside. The real news was happening down at 24 University Place, the Cedar Tavern. Pollock dripping steak sauce. Kant’s doctrine of the sublime falls short of the paint can, and impairs functioning. Not to mention the difficulty of pissing in a jet bathroom while bouncing in turbulence.

Atmospheric River

There’s an atmospheric river moving in. I can feel it already: a mood of indigo with a dash of witchcraft. We were playing hopscotch on our mosaic rails when the sky broke in half and tons of water fell on our heads, thus anointing us to the cataclysms of our time. Why is water always so cadenced? Its flows are rhythmic, yet its splashes are tumultuous. Butterflies fill the space we punch and heave. I’ve never before written a sentence like this. So imploring, so helical. Where did it come from? I’m guessing Sri Lanka. The embassy from Mars. It’s raining. Our grammar crackles, and our hooks and talons are sculpted in silver and 18ct gold vermeil, each curve and point perfected by the maker's hand. I’m also really into boots and I can give you a description of my hat by giving it to you drop by drop. It will help explain things. Why languages always leave such a mess behind, and emails prowl the cupcake. The day Old English turned rags into pounds, and injury assumed new meaning, as did blubber and enthusiasm, a new perception was born, and we called it fog, until we knew better, and gave it a different fable. Awed intentions extrude my copperplate. I told you from the beginning. God was a tortoise. And parabolas consumed the study. Every poem needs an ingredient. And grumbles with footnotes in pools of light.

My feelings about grease have always been pleasantly neutral. It’s something I rarely think about. I know it’s important. Vital as a haircut. I like the way it sizzles on a grill. So juicy. So hot. The scorch of art on a canvas. Which is a grill. The mouth waters. I’ve never seen Grease. Capital G Grease. Danny Zuko, Sandy Dumbrowski, Betty Rizzo, Kenickie, and Frenchy. Bacon grease, I’ve been told, is a good way to season cast iron cookware. And can also be used as a base for popcorn. If not an entire empire. An empire of popcorn. And jealousies and appellate courts. Here comes the night. On iron axles. It’s a time for speculation. A time for parades and celebrations. All of them silly provocations. All of them written with howitzers. And explosions of box office gold. As the lyric crashes, the enrichment is in your quiver. Take aim. Do it slowly. Take your time. When the time is right, and your mind is focused, let it go. Let it all go.

I remember looking at the traffic on I-90 west from the vantage of the rest stop in Cle Elum and thinking holy shit these fuckers are going fast. This is not a normal world. Not at all. It’s an abnormal world. A subnormal world. A paranormal world. Everyone in a panic. Everyone tortured with insecurity. Let’s rock! Edgar Allan Poe oozes out of the air and hands me a grimoire containing all the recipes for acceleration into the vast wilderness of space and time. It calls for Chile peppers, cayenne and horseradish. Nausea, delirium, and wang dang doodle. A truck goes by at 90 miles an hour. Driven by a demon. Silver wings and a Stetson. Long white beard braided with the skulls of a thousand megabats. Tats everywhere. Instinct is never demure. Instinct is instinctual. As a herd of stampeding bison. As an old man on a country road in an exhilarating demonstration of free will. Will is never free. It comes from a well. And has international scope. Guns and pumpernickel. Instinct with tango. La Cumparsita. And Dulce de leche. I’ve never been to Argentina. But it’s locked into my imagination as firmly as Tierra del Fuego. Fronds of Chilean firetree. Or the woman barreling down I-90 in a Tesla. Knitting.

Whenever people ask me what do I write about, I never know what to say. I write about everything. Everything that has a word to describe, illustrate, substantiate, encompass or embody it. Even if it takes a jar of synonyms. Eventually the right word will present itself. But not always. If there’s no word to describe, depict, explain, epitomize, or denote whatever it is that I’ve felt, touched, undressed, seduced, waltzed, or crinkled, it doesn’t get written. The thing I experienced. The thing that made me itchy. The thing that made me sad and cryptic and sacerdotal. That caused me to walk the streets with impossible frustrations. And seek shelter among the taciturn and withdrawn. I would describe it as vague. Elusive. Enigmatic as Iowa. Extravagantly ineffable. Like a philology caught in a hurricane. Phenomena blowing everywhere, circulating in the bloodstream, creating huge and remarkable sensations which nobody can describe, or cage in a zoo of gilded nouns and garbled intonations. Something like an atmospheric river. A long, narrow body of roiling mists hundreds of miles wide and thousands of miles long. Ominous and dark and vaporous and silk. It knows everything, and throws piles of dictionaries at our heads during dinner. No one saw it come in the room. This husky pastiche, this fabulous mélange. This search, this blue confusion. This box of mingled correspondence that defies the logic of cork, that crawls on its punctuation until it achieves maximal simultaneity, boils, bubbles, burbles, gurgles, blusters and flirts with a paperweight I echo in asterisks. 

Hell Is Other People

I’ve often thought of paying someone skilled at needlepoint to sew Jean Paul Sartre’s salty phrase “Hell is other people,” so that I could pin it to the door of our apartment.

Now, why would I feel that way? I’m going to be optimistic and assume that most people with even a modicum of familiarity with the species inaptly named homo sapiens on planet Earth would have some appreciable understanding as to why someone might feel well represented by that phrase. Certainly, anyone who has dealt with the U.S. healthcare system, spent time in a sports arena, stood in line to order a latte, driven a car, tried hard to make ends meet on a kitchen table, flown on a passenger jet with a toddler kicking the back of your seat or watched an episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians would – at the very least - excuse such blunt acerbity, if not find it relatable, and chalk it up to the inhospitable moods of people who pay attention to things.

A video catches my attention. An 81-year-old woman, arrested by Metropolitan police for silently sitting in Parliament Square, London, with a sign reading, “I oppose genocide,” is flanked by two female police officers guiding her to what I would have to assume was a police van. The woman was extremely frail, and could barely walk. Another story, just minutes later, catches my attention: Grok, Elon Musk’s chatbot, was briefly banned from Musk’s social media platform X, due to its posts accusing Israel and the United States of committing genocide in Gaza. Kafka, on his best day, couldn’t make this shit up.

So yeah. One might say these are the end times. One might also condemn humanity for its chronically petulant violence. But I oversimplify: “hell is other people” has layers of meaning that are surprisingly deeper than raising a middle finger to humanity. Sartre was not suggesting that people are inherently evil. The phrase comes from a play he wrote called No Exit.

No Exit takes place in hell, which is a room appointed with Second Empire furniture, three sofas and a bronze sculpture. Three people – a man and two women – share the room with one another. All are tortured by guilt and remorse. This is where hell comes in. The hell of hell. They torture one another, not just by judgements they make on one another, but by judgements they make on themselves. They implore one another for validation, affirmations that their actions on earth were defensible, justifiable, if not actually noble in some instances. They go in circles. Tempers flare. Alliances are formed. A sexual tension emerges. The emotional pitch rises, subsides, then flares up again with renewed vigor, as additional layers of complexity and maddening ambiguity are added to the grand guignol. At one point, the man – a deserter from the army who is executed by firing squad – opens the door of their room, which until then had been locked. He’s free to walk out. But doesn’t. He can’t. He doesn’t know why. But he can’t. And that’s when he arrives at the realization that hell isn’t filled with devils with pitchforks. Hell is other people.

Existence precedes essence. Why is that? There are no prescribed roles. We enter life without a script. We make our own meaning. It’s all invention. We make shit up. A combination of lungs, vocal folds, and breath create worlds. Words make worlds. Here I sit, pressing bells and buttons innumerable. Some of them glow. Some of them throb. If this act becomes tedious, please alert me, and I’ll refund your attention. I’ll package it in a box with lots of bubble wrap. Attention is a precious thing and shouldn’t be wasted. Protocol calls for a solution. My recommendation is to build a scow and float down the Meuse River à la Arthur Rimbaud, drunk on the effluvium of life. Delirium is neither a turnstile nor an unction. It’s a fantasia. It’s an outcome, a natural development. The plant fondles the water from the pump. The thunder loosens its tongue. We’re efficient beginners. All of us. It’s the end that is difficult. The water spreads into an estuary. And the mind joins its rhythms with the wings of an albatross.

Is the end, in fact, the beginning of a journey? It is if you believe there’s a soul. Energy can neither be created or destroyed. So it makes sense something of our being would continue. Maybe not in a recognizable form, or a surviving ego, a sense of selfhood, but a diffuse energy, an impalpable aura, adrift in space until some inexplicable event channels our energy into another form of being. This is me being metaphysical. And wishful. Deep down I’m more empirical. Even in bodily form I was never actually me, but a constellation of cells and organs that developed billions of years ago and evolved into the bipedal creature I am today, lying on the bed with a cat on my lap listening to Albert King and Stevie Ray Vaughn play “Texas Flood  Jam.” My identity has been theater all along, as anyone’s, as Hamlet or Ophilia, as Napoleon or Cleopatra, as Dolly Parton or Etta James, playing out an impromptu script in a world nobody really understood, except frogs and Komodo dragons. And I’m not sure about them.

I agree with Nietzsche: without music, life would be a mistake.

And I wonder, has anyone composed a song called “Hell Is Other People?”

I’ll bet it kicks ass. And makes everybody in the room do a wang dang doodle.

And jump in a drug to paradise.

 

And I Looked Inside

I went backstage to look for a water intake. Hamlet was about to engage in some dialogue with a gravedigger. Ophelia whispered in my ear: I find redemption in apricot. Aren’t you supposed to be dead? I’m an idea, she answered. I’m the figment of romance in everyone’s head. Which is why it’s always drowning. The world is crawling with concepts. You need a good hammer and a big bag of nails to keep it all down. Magic abounds. Most people don’t see it. But please. Listen closely to the sounds of eggnog. It’s so hydraulic, so blissfully unhurried. The humor of our situation embarrasses the concertina. You can fill a glass to the brim, but the first sip is going to cost you some dignity. The earth is full of subtleties. France, for example. And sometimes ancient coins, Ice Age cave paintings, and the black diamonds of the Perigord. A song can agitate the flames in the hollow sockets of a human skull, but it takes an agate to locate Laputa.

It takes a large sail to create a canopy for the ashes of an explosive theory. Nobody is used to it anymore. Sensation. Unpredictability. The false division between the organic and inorganic radicalized me. I see things differently. Plants, the diabolic magnetism of power, the newly awakened garrulity of granite, hollow generalities, hydrocarbon molecules, complexions, fireworks, radiators, citadels, radiology, carousels, swashbucklers, Irish rock groups. I see an old hammer with a splintery handle has been scrapped in the arena of our mutual jurisprudence. Judgement has become a thing of the past. It was bound to happen. Reality can only take so much abuse. I’m tired of pretending to be a sewing machine. I’m looking for some real action. The glory of the pomegranate is still just a dream in the eyes of most bowlers, not because the lanes are empty, the shoes woefully unrented, but because Neptune has a more active atmosphere than anything our current malaise can produce, and the experience of what is present in the ever-elusive and ruminant present signifies the true, unmediated experience of things themselves. California Lilac. Agave. Sage and Manzanita. San Diego. Rosie and the Originals. Angel Baby.

Some people have a knack for floating through life. It's easy to be detached when you’ve got nothing to hide. But who’s got nothing to hide? What saint? What senator? What priest? What human resources manager? Teeth make a feeble portcullis when the tongue gets loose. Innocence and guilt are intertwined. A breeze blew through an orchard and whispered I approve of you, and so a therapist is born. Language is dangerous these days. Certain words can get you arrested. And some words can liberate you. It’s hard to tell the difference. Meanings alter with the spin of the propaganda machine. No sane person ever becomes a poet. The hours spent sowing roses fill with thorns. The terrain is largely uncultivated in the realm of the half-truth. Even the seeds are unpredictable. The biggest plant in the field is a paradox, a complete and utter contradiction whose branches extend outward with blatant displays of sanguine glossolalia. The certain is very often the least certain. This is what makes certainty so maddeningly opinionated. But who doesn’t love a good hypothesis? Our senses learn only late, said Nietzsche, and never learn entirely, to be subtle, faithful, and cautious organs of cognition. It’s better to be taught by perception than to teach perception what to perceive. It deepens the cave, but kills the light.

In 1962, some young French teenage boys were asked how they envisioned the year 2000. It was featured in one of those video panels that pop up on YouTube. It didn’t play long. Everything was a glimpse. A peek at a fairly predictable future, based on the technology and norms of 1962. I was 15. What I remember most vividly was the Cuban missile crisis. I remember sitting at a picnic table during recess at a high school on the outskirts of Denver. The sun was out. And even though we all knew we could die at any minute, the entire world gone in a flash of heat and blast waves, we couldn’t stop laughing. Had somebody told a joke? I can’t remember. But the euphoria of the moment was glorious. The French kids described a future in 2000 as luxurious, full of labor-saving technology, a bright and shiny place where all the shortcomings of the 20^th century – its wars and poverty and civil unrest - were resolved in the enlightenment dreamscape of 2000. That’s what I thought, too, age 15. And then I read Brave New World. And 1984. And It Can’t Happen Here. Which, of course, it can. And did. And does. And somehow keeps going.

The door was open so I walked right in. To my right, Robert Desnos muttered odd phrases in his sleep. I wrote everything down, published it, and won a Pulitzer. And on my left, Guillaume Apollinaire knitted a gray firmament, a hypothesis so big in its sentiment it puckered with attitude. The crackle of meaning attends an ecstasy behind the brocade, he said. As trees to a pathos so antlers to a dripping forest. I nodded in agreement, though I understood nothing. Ironing is lonely, he sighed, but irony is lonelier. I stood silent. It seemed like the kind of phrase that should be left alone to drift in the air. I looked out the window. The sky was a naked blue. Hypothesis is an umber among the ashes of calculation, I muttered, gazing at Apollinaire as he cast his net over the waters of reverie. He looked tired. Every poem is a hopeless dilemma, he said, but if you look under the hood, you’ll see the entire escapade turn pale with negative space. And then what, I asked. Enjoy it before it turns to smoke, he said. Does the void have a face, I asked. Yes, he answered. Consciousness is oceanic. Therefore, the planetarium is a mess. As well as it should be, no? Imagine a peach with a sugary throat singing Strangers in the Night. We see a pretty eye in the key of black and a beast with horns emerge from the depths of the cave. Lessons are given. Conversations resumed. The light tuns soft. The mood turns aquamarine. Everyone comes to a single realization, only to see it engorge with ink, and become meaningful.

Upper paleolithic imagery rarely employed innocence. There was no sin. Therefore, no innocence. Which is why I elevate chrome to the highest distinction of my perception. It’s so shiny. It makes me think combustion is the metaphor of our age. Pistons thumping up and down. Axles turning. Wheels turning. Galaxies turning. We navigate by stars and heliotrope. It’s how we achieve the dizziness of language and keep pushing it until it reaches some kind of climax. So many words. So much grammar. What do we do with all this? Create things. Objects. Ideas. Monkey ballast with Pataphysical binoculars. Resurrection cue card kiwi radio. A crowd with unprecedented reticence moving around in a dilemma. We run the violin through its strings and find it preoccupied with music. It was to be expected, I suppose. It’s a violin, not a skeleton. The power of visibility rises in the attic up to the rafters, and turns invisible. It’s how things propagate. The sternum connects the first seven ribs via cartilage. The rest is a matter of proportion, crushed shells and black humor. If you keep tugging on the sleeves of night, eventually a hand will emerge and write a symphony of pigments bursting into stars. And if you really insist on existing in multiple states, go for it. Move to Spokane. Produce a musical.

Let me give you my opinion: the human body is total genius. The dexterity of fingers. The sensitivity of skin. The frolic of hair. The mobility of legs. The endurance of feet. The fantastic array of noses. The goofy bumptiousness of male genitalia. The wonderful subtleties of female genitalia. The infinite constellations of the brain. The mind is a fist of willingness which unfolds like a daylily into forests of reverie. It expands like an ageing sun with the fermentations of age and the lubricants of experience. There are things I learned in my youth that I’ve forgotten in my dotage. And what is dotage? Dotage is the postage of time. I knew, when I was young, that I was young, and that I would one day be old, and forget things, and invent things, and trip over things, and argue with ghosts. We all like to challenge the notion of objective reality. Some of us do it with words. Some of us do it with dice. Some of us don’t do anything. The happy ones. Who play video games. The very act of measurement creates the flavor and character of a thing. It’s not a correct world. Or an incorrect world. It’s a world of phobias, and pilgrimages, and mirrors and invocations. I’m particularly fond of good titles, and good creameries, and bread and aliens. Anything weird. Basically. Like a one-word sentence. Or an anchor settling into the muck of Venus. Which is unscientific. But phenomenal. Like a tambourine, rattling the ghosts away.

Extravaganza

There is something metallic under the tarpaulin, I can elect it as something to amuse myself, the ashes being too stubborn, too cold to lead into the realm of reverie. After I finished reading Mallarmé, I folded myself into an eyelid, a species of banister steeped in Celtic mythology. The tarpaulin was something I’d shrugged off as supernatural, and not worth the splendor of a single minute, however infrared the exhilaration, or beautifully framed the cocoons. Everyone reacts differently to depth, the sugar drapery that hides in a snowball. I happen to like Ice Age art and find in it a pleasure with which to mend my mind. The snow looks so eloquent atop a mass of tarpaulin. I see reindeer crossing from one world to another in a single sentence, a single chain of words drawn over the abyss of existence. This is how we make bridges from one dimension to another. The shaman of the Ice Age used hematite and charcoal. Manganese oxides. Crushed calcite, chalk, and gypsum for white. We use liquid crystal display technology with light emitting diodes for backlighting. I prefer a little hustle and bustle on the shore, some shades of conflagration in the underground. Fountains are silly, and therein lie their true sagacity. It's as if the water had a reflective voice and the plumage of an extravaganza. How to express oneself at the foundry should follow one's own capricious inclinations. Anything else is a waste of Jello.

I have, here, a box of almond furniture. I generally wear silverware to dinner, but I'm always willing to make an exception for the unknown pedestrian wearing silver earrings, whoever they might be or whoever they think they might be. Life is a tricky clarinet. Challenges include embouchure development, fingering complexity, and the need for precise breath control. Other than that, green denotes weirdness, not surliness, though in this case I can never finish feeling old. I use geometry for juggling and calculus for rock climbing. Everything in between requires a healthy dose of inquiry, and a good shoe polish. I can get us as far as Satori, but Pittsburgh is out of the question. I just need to pick up a prescription in Damascus, and get a tattoo in Stuttgart. I’m a man of the world, you know. I started life as a ball of confusion. Maps were a luxury. I had to feel my way to awareness, picking up hints along the way, certain sensations, certain russets and seminal inputs. Eventually, I came to discover that I have eight tentacles, ninety-two testicles, four rotary wings and a ruby appendix. The air has depth. It tastes like a banana. Things are a little spooky. Exits are hypnotic. And there’s nothing like a B major to lead you back home.

I’m beginning to wonder if I belong to the final generation of human beings on this lovely planet. I get this way around harmonicas. I use my arms for lifting and my hands for praying. I’ve got a tongue that flickers with sonnets and a table made of ultimatums. Grace and plumbing are understandings born of the cascading frailties of sugar that characterize so many sad warehouses in the district of broken hearts. You can’t ride a pony to the moon. It's high time I loosened my suspenders. The Queen of Melee has entered the arena. Limitations are sometimes disguised as plankton. You can see it in the way the words press forward, always seeking resolution, always alert to slippery situations, things written down so that they get discovered, or drag something completely unexpected out of the air, and translate its movements into a legible sexuality. I’m looking for a new habitat, a new perception, a new body of water, a new shadow to carry on the back of a worm, where the sun eats the darkness and the darkness eats the results. Where the old are young and the young are old and the roots grow into the sky and the leaves fall up in the fall.

Life is huge, though, isn’t it? We get lost everywhere. It can’t be helped. One cannot step into the same river twice. It takes a benevolent knot to hold the aroma of a diving board. The ephemeral helps explain the many amenities of being temporary, but it’s difficult to identify with any certainty the many dazzling folds and hollows in the chambers of the human heart without a flashlight. It was the era of the light bulb and the hands of the gifted and brave were spent dog-paddling in the deep end of a very louche simulacrum. Excuses were silly. There was never any need for an excuse. Those days are gone. When was the last time you saw a hummingbird? It’s a well-established fact that the saints have come to realize their lost state. Who can blame them? The world has become a sad arena of lost vision, bitter reflections and bankrupt distilleries swarming with ghostly ambitions and tantalizing exoplanets. Appetites are huge. Things quickly get out of hand. Perturbation is a way of life. The garden hose spews cotton. The Coke machine provides free advice. The minotaur at the center of the labyrinth was once a financial wizard on Wall Street. It’s impossible to predict the choices people make when the supports holding the culture together are no longer there. Money means something very different than what it meant a few years ago. The more it loses value the bigger the debt. The bigger the debt, the greater in value. I can stare at it all day. There's something stubbornly empirical about a glass of cold tea. What we need is synchronized dancing. What we get is artificial intelligence. Clogged veins. Zoom cameras. Stressed trees. Inexplicable urges. Shaggy thoughts. And a stake in bitcoin.

 

All I Need

How might one translate a sour taciturnity into a sweet and artless eloquence? If one is to go where the current is swift, one must be prepared to exhort blueberries. The wax of the beehive was created to help the senses find their queen. The world must be pollinated. I would not know how else to put this. Our planet is a pearl in a shell of emptiness. It emboldens me to say that. The very presence of its absence is absinthe to my frayed and troubled journey. I don’t remember that time before language, but it would have been the last time I could see things without the machinery of grammar. Language changes things. It’s virtually impossible to fully and accurately translate an emotion. I feel a paragraph coming in which I may sit among the clouds as if the sky were an armchair and the planet were an amusing toy. I call it a paragraph. You are, of course, free to call it something else. This isn’t my first rodeo. Nearly all my proposals require a great sum of money. If you cage a tiger in words, the tiger will learn to speak. Its language, however, will not be designed to create categories. It will sow the air with fire. The savagery of its metaphors will rip the sky into a million bright crystals and envelop the cathedrals in fog.

There is nothing more charged with mystical longing than ocean mist. The everyday is not without its own peculiar charms, but the vastness of the ocean can overawe a warehouse forklift fueled with the implacable energy of the desperate. The correspondences between a raft and a zipper must be relished in small infrared arias if they are to be appreciated at all. Perceptions aren’t mechanical. They’re the carpenters of our saga. They have the fluidity of angels and the nakedness of orchids. There are those who are drawn by things obscure and elusive and those who are drawn by pencils and chalk. I was never invited to be on the Bob Newhart show, but I can imagine myself talking with Carol all day. There was something about that space I found strangely beguiling. The camaraderie of work in a public space, the minor embarrassments, the wobbly scaffolding that is small talk. Life is a wilderness, serviced by elevators and great religions. That’s where the mist comes in, adrift in the sparkle of consciousness.

Of course, none of this matters. Who’s going to be around to read or make art or design things when the neocons finally get their way and the planet is blown to smithereens? And if they don’t do it, AI will make sure goals are achieved according to a strict, binary logic. Robots. Androids. Cyborgs. Waltzing in ancient discos. It’s transparently placatory to pretend to find a positive spin to put on a civilization spinning crazily out of control. Or try to appease my disaffection with the human species. Weltschmerz wasn’t built in a day. Nobody at Home Depot has expertise in this matter either. God knows I’ve tried. Everybody arrives at their own conclusion in their own way and in their own dinghy. Just make sure the seams are properly caulked and the thwarts are fitted with care. If you’re dreaming of building a spaceship, forget the billionaires. Wealth makes people arrogant and stupid. Who needs a spaceship when we have Cinnabon, Emile Cioran and cinema? Buy a Cessna. I really dug the way that Steve Carel movie ended. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. I thought it was sadly underrated. Steve Carel carrying Keira Knightley to his father’s plane while the Hollies sang all I need is the air that I breathe, and to love you. As cornball as that scene was, I enjoyed, unreservedly, the lead up to the impact of the asteroid. The final moment. The peaceful acceptance. The last caresses. The big boom. The flash of light.  

The Truth Is Engineered

The truth is engineered. We know that. Every day we see Eloi shepherded by algorithms. You could call it propaganda. Psychology in action. But please. Don’t tell me I’m skin diving. I know what I’m doing. I’m good at dismantling bombs. But brainwashing eludes me. I have to watch my ears. There has been talk of other worlds. And since thought is a mode of transport, I demand a soliloquy for the growl of abstraction. The architecture of improbability makes the jaw slide forward. It’s not a look people trust. It’s a bit aggressive, for one thing. You have to be careful with language these days. People are being arrested for things they say. Stress reduction techniques like erotica, lemon meringue, or spending time in nirvana can help. Poetry is a burst of cerebral fireworks. Use whatever you have at hand. Fingers, thumbs, tapioca. The entire works of Aristotle. It's not easy being a tree. It takes thousands of mouths to nibble the sun. You can hear it in the leaves, when the wind blows: the clatter of similarities tethered to a semantic crack. It takes a lot of synonyms to simulate a jungle. A little Apollinaire, and the jingle of ink.

You can laugh about jingling an improbability to a physics class, but will the equations lift the adherent husk of reality from a semantic gall? Anything to do with the sea confers a veneer of luscious anticipation. If I see a yo-yo, I try to protect the spin with my vocabulary. Much of my learning has been the result of error. Massive fuck-ups. Faux pas, Freudian slips, badly timed jokes and a salty disposition. Cioran is a bitter fruit, but with just enough sweetness to make it alluring. Sometimes a solid trumps fluidity. This is a wonderful thing. For example, belugas and dolphins love ice cubes. They can’t drink seawater, and fish contain little water. Remember your Pataphysics. Indentations are the propellers of rumination. Words that no longer refer to the familiar become the stirrups of phantom horses. All it takes is a bronze pronoun pressed into the hand of chaos, and within minutes a towering contraption of words clanks across the floor spitting assumptions at the environment. This is where anticipation comes in, and mirrors and invocations. Forget coupons. Forget bitcoin. All anyone needs is a pretext, and a quantum dime.

The bedroom light painted a pleasant story. An imperfectly made bed, an elegant old bowl and pitcher from the 19^th century, a bureau, some lamps, a Bluetooth radio and Van Gogh’s washerwomen at work under a drawbridge. The wealth underneath the bed is a mental construct designed to listen to my skin whenever I flop around in bed. I fear this may get a little personal, but isn’t it worth it, occasionally, to fondle a wild elevation with the gloves of sleep? At night, the buffalo drift over the hills like clouds of shaggy fur. Pollock’s use of black anchors the splatter of white and red to a punctual riot in green. I stiffen every time I see it. The grouse is prominent when the sweat convenes in eagles. Art is what made me so strange in the 60s. Art, and Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, which I read one summer afternoon in San José, California, 1968, lying on a mattress on the floor. The sensations of that moment are still with me, but mainly the euphoria of mountain exuberance, and the spontaneous vigor of the prose. I love whatever is manufactured out of thin air - rock fire rucksack and wood, the ecstasy of the stars - and falling into a trance, pumping shadows out of the underworld and nailing them to the wall.