Everything Has A Thread

It’s still raining. Flooding is rampant in the state of Washington. It's cold, too. 46℉. It's the winter solstice. 3:00 a.m., I hear a small pulse coming from my bedside radio. Satie. Gymnopédie. I fall back asleep. 8:00 a.m. I get out of bed. The world is still here. I can feel it under my feet. The carpet is soft. It signifies sanctuary and comfort. Why have hardwood floors become so popular? A renewed zeal for material prestige has encouraged a certain petulance, as if fussiness were now a sign of refinement, and actual refinement was seen as outdated as wall-to-wall carpet. This comes from my knowledge of physiology. It wasn’t handed to me. I did it by cultivating fennel. One susses things out by a kind of fumbling. Reading signs. Analyzing tusks. Deconstructing Babylon. Interpreting emotions. Footprints, fingerprints, blood, hair, semen, handwriting, chemical residue, crumpled aluminum foil, fictitious entities, nervous leprechauns, paint chips, skin cells, wet floors. Profiling DNA, CPU, FAQ, EKG, QED, TLA, TSA, FBI, CIA, R.E.M., E.L.O., LSD, NYU, WWI, WWII, ABC, NBC, NPR, and Bikers Against Dumb Drivers. Deciphering graffiti. Visiting Tahiti. Vetting Jeff Tweedy. Erecting a teepee. Scanning the cosmos for radio signals. Noting down anomalous atmospheric phenomena. Casting I Ching hexagrams. Hunting bioluminescent mushrooms in the forests of Paraguay. Studying textures as texts. Otherwise, nothing changes, the prayers for well-being continue, as does Roche Bobois. 

The journey to the afterlife has nails in it, or so I once believed. Something lurking among these words appeals to my otherworldly side. Something striking like honesty, or a kitchen stool with smooth red legs and a vinyl vivacity. Unless I move from this to that, I don't see the other side of the dark matter forming the cosmic web. I just see paint. Skin. Introversion. By what means do I launch this new idea, this new approach to language involving alchemy, despair, ecstasy, impropriety, type A plugs, T.S. Eliot, loafs of brioche, interplanetary dictionaries crackling with celestial mythologies? Language is a chameleon, and where words attempt to create a description of beauty, it gets lost in its own complexity, dissolves into coefficients of verbal bric-a-brac, and merges with the void. For nothing in this world is simply proverbial. Not if it’s made with clay and has a reason to exist. Not if it’s pink, and it’s a Tuesday, and the hardware store is open.

I have a thought beneath what I thought came from the words I put here when I wasn't looking. It's a step down from a job I held in the past, and the events surrounding it have been transformed into a story. It’s ablaze with untenable ideas and fairy tale forklifts. Do you sometimes feel like something or someone is trying to put you in a box? I’d like to help you with your problems, but I’ve got a leaky gasket and a bowl full of bills. Ever get one of those urges to throw everything away and head to the great outdoors with a biology in your destination and a dictionary in your backpack? My progress can’t be measured by pavement. It has the form of a summer and the charm of Saskatchewan. You could call it a gestalt. Or a freshly waxed pair of skis. When we is with us I can turn plural and include everything I left behind. If I was the sun up there, I’d go with my love everywhere. I would. I’m not kidding. Here’s why. I’ve got a plum in my left hand and a plume in my right hand. This would indicate a certain charm, n’est-ce pas? Something about to happen. The sly hiss of potential. This is it then. The big kahuna in my garage. The tuna comes with a motherboard and works by tilting the lumber against the wall, as you would a rawhide. Or the very fat chance of a river of words flowing inside your eyes, all the way to the ocean. Seagulls and mist. Foghorn. Lighthouse. Viriginia Woolf reading a letter.

Our movements are always directed towards the past, but the future is in the rearview mirror, which messes everything up. Traffic lights make things clear. They depend on color. The color orange is the first time anything gave me a reason to go against language both in my passion and my affinity to green, and discover its true nature, which signals me to move forward. There's an equation there that apologizes to us as if it's dealing with Wednesday and has no time for cheese sampling. Equations are like that: supercilious, perfumed, gregarious. If our logic is flawed, we pick it up and smash it against the wall. The resulting image is a waterfall of coins in a Vegas casino, bells ringing, lights flashing, jaws dropping. And this is how we get through it. How we stir the soup, as it were. I comb my hair with a munitions dump. It gives me a wild look. And that’s how I begin my day. I fold the darkness into a jewel and dangle it from a silver chain. 

It's hard to believe that there was a time in my life when I was obsessed with disco. Meaning, I hated it. But what a luxury. To let your mind drift without any intrusions from the so-called real world. The violence of the rich. The futility of the poor. The uncanny persistence of the Stones finally at an end. Arthritis. The art is right but the joints are inflamed. The bones are tired. The muscles in pain. The notes in knots. An epoch is fading into the past while a new one crawls out of the lab of some gazillionaire. If the river was whiskey and I was a diving duck, I’d swim to the bottom and never come up. How do you digest such circumstances? With relish. With vigor. With pleasure. There’s nothing else I’d rather do than do nothing but give off a nice warm light. And sit back and examine all my tendencies and countertendencies. And do it auspiciously. As if none of it mattered. But it does, of course, on some level. Whatever level that may be. It’s probably not all that level. Because everything has a bias. And everything has a thread.

I remember the French landscape. Those two women near Alet-les-Bains who wanted to touch my hair, which was quite long at the time. It was like walking back in time to discover an existence that had not yet lost its enchantments. It was a moment that felt pleasantly carnivalesque: I had become an object of curiosity. I am who I am, but according to this principle: anything that can be thrown into the air that can advance the idea of ​​alterity is welcome. The concept of identity is notoriously ambiguous. At that moment, I was hair.  I was more than myself. I was an algebra of circumstance. The we between us. The banana is peeled, like this: a single touch can ignite the history under our skin. And a chain falls from our body.