That Moment Before Writing

That moment before writing, butterflies in the stomach, like going on a date. The idea is close, yet the reality is so distant, it swishes back and forth like a wind brushing over the peripheral headwaters of a bizarre idea. And it’s slightly sexual, for reasons I don’t understand. Not at my age. The Age of Blurry Night Vision. The Age of Hazy Concepts and Coy Perversions. The Age of the Ages which is ageless as Be Bop A Lulu. A lot of the time I imagine writing down everything happening in the world on a daily basis. I use the word ‘everything’ somewhat loosely. The ambition is not quite so academic. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. More like pretty women on a Mardi Gras float. A sparkly decorum. A sanguine evening in Louisiana, somewhere on the outskirts of Lake Charles. A world whose moods are as volatile as the overall pitch and tumble of the voyage. This technocratic panorama of luxury and slavery and everything feeding this zeitgeist of genocidal madness. To find oneself in a moment of distress is to decide whether one wants to engage completely with life, or hold back a little, and write it down as quickly as you can. Writing happens in the intervals between events. It’s a place of redemption, an oasis of stillness amid the chaos and hurly-burly. Life is at peril on Planet Earth. Forests in flame. Rivers going dry. Wars everywhere. Anyway. Here’s my idea: I write everything down, get it printed out, build a time machine, return to the year 1956, and submit it as an adventure in science fiction. It gets rejected. The letter from the editor reads thank you. We found the ideas and events in your story to be far too dystopic for our readers. How could so much evil exist within such a tightly framed time span? The billionaires you describe are too hideous, too stupid and corrupt to be taken seriously. And all these societies succumbed to zombiedom are just too much for the average reader to invest their time in seriously. People walking down sidewalks staring vacantly at movies in a small telephone seems a little too convenient a trope for the levels of apathy you describe. It boggles the imagination to think a people would surrender so easily to such massive abuse. Your vision smacks of too much Philip K. Dick. We wish you the best in future writing projects, and would welcome a less horrific manuscript.    

The Solace Of Any Given Moment

We stir ourselves beside the strings while the movement establishes the home key. The time is ripe for syncopation. The fairy music is expanded. Everything sways. It’s all about leaps, and pirouettes, and ricochets. The kick of a resplendent chimera. What is suitable for the ceiling is electric for the soul. Water flowing through a paragraph in a carpentry of breath. Thinking in language coalesces forms and shapes peculiar to itself, a magnificent, swooping loop of a life. Things get idiomatic. Phantasmal, like Scheherazade, or a squall of nerves. Consciousness graces us with its presence as I try to wrestle my refractory life down on paper and give it light. My dream about denim pulls us there, dripping with nails.

Most gazes infringe on our privacy; those that don’t, are the ones behind our eyes. Purpose is neither wax nor impermeable. If I can figure out how to decontrol this language, I shall drink to the fruitfulness of its being. The solace of any given moment is its biggest thought, and I find that extrajudicial, if not semitropical.

Redemption scatters its reflections, before skidding around on my arm. Bohemia has its own biology, its own resonances, perceptions and scales. There are phenomena I sometimes steal for my circus, and hang from the ocean swells, finally conceding to the muscularity of thread. The spirit generates its own insistence, its own way of doing Cincinnati, and for that I am wireless, and happy.

Cubes are to Cubism what boats are to glitter.

Cause is to effect what pliers are to buckwheat.

It’s a way to explain oneself to the rotation of rubber.

It is somewhat erratic to feel aquatic. Though it isn’t required in order to play the glockenspiel.

Enthusiasm burdens the concertina with a strangely inappropriate music. And this is a cause of interior secretions, the happy adrenalin of an anticipated pleasure, the shape of a new dollar dressed in salsa. Gravity, meanwhile, gives us the communion we need to achieve a fresh new circumference.

Dada has a date with a clarinet as the letters of a foreign alphabet may conceive of various tactile charms in a linguistic context, and so dilate the parameter of our perception, that life’s inherent pungency scintillates in the sun’s shadow, divulging a vehemence that is new to music. Accidentals intensify the leaves of a passionate logic, as the seven tones of a chromatic invention create such contrasting folds as may prove to be latitudes of a fresh new hope. We’ll make their heads turn every place we go. Hamlet stands in the doorway rattling his analogies, proving nothing, but illustrating everything. We cannot stop death. We cannot stop war. What we can do is sublimate chaos by boiling our weltschmerz in a bouillabaisse of zany miscellany, and everything bad and everything good, everything noble and everything vile, rise to its level and boil, leaving nothing behind but the bombast.

 

Hibachi

If I sense the day is raw, I will wear it in the local bars. Our salt is that compelling. The twang, of course, is a French ochre. It gurgled it in its entirety through my analysis. I removed all the opinions, as I needed to give it some reality. I folded it into a signature flibbertigibbet, a brine of cartwheels, which ballooned into a new biology. This required some sifting. I needed to do something prophetic. I squirted a beard on my face, which made it biblical. Until we lure ourselves into listening, we’re really only loops. But if it’s quicker to abandon what we intended to begin with, then yes, it strikes my fancy to flap it around the cleavage, bouncing words off the kinks of the vista. Last night, for example, I dreamed I was lost in Illinois. Whatever makes a dump, I pondered the supply. I backed the language into cracks. A highly vocal freight hung in suspension, screaming, belching, and bending the bars of its cage. This is what words do when they embark on chocolate. Everything gets expectant, and thought starts to feel like an airport. Even a boat has gravity. It takes some considerable evocation to clap a token improbability across the tangible. I’ve heard so many the first time I met Bob Dylan stories it’s all I can do to remedy the time with intrigue. I must cling to obscurity. Because if I don’t, the words start feeling contrary, and invent their own hibachi.

Hibachi (火鉢) literally translates to "fire bowl" in Japanese. Chögyam Trungpa: “Things are symbols of themselves.” Gustave Flaubert: “the ordinary is extraordinary.” The best way to light some words on fire is to make a god of induction and reason from particular instances. Plunder the brain for quiet pleasures. Anxiety is a hive of false honey. I am at war with my anguish. This is clearly the wrong approach. It indicates a too-controlled canvas, and an unwillingness to flirt with anarchy in all of its unfocussed and glorious pleasures. Everybody hunts for a landscape appropriate to their predilections, even if it means a night in Bangkok. The immediate supersedes the eventual, the generalized, and the superficial. Acceptance of things as they are is the best way to get across a terrain of unexplored turmoil. When the hammer of conviction surrenders to the thrill of a beautifully finessed negative capability, the sky thickens with birds, the blood simmers with a magnificent perturbation, and the charcoal blushes with fire. 

Have You Ever Tried Combing A Chameleon?

Have you ever tried combing a chameleon? It gave me a voice, a finger I could slide back and forth. And time’s knives have ever since busied their blades, slicing space into minutes, and minutes into merit. The structure means nothing. It’s all about choosing wheels. Incongruity must also play a role. At the circus, we boil the dirt. Then we spread the sawdust, allowing our triggers to dream. Occurrences like this are called auroras. Tensions tend to swallow their own allegories. I saw morning flail in its emotion like garlic. It’s why I feel so sparkly and hirsute. A funny innocence haunts our singing, and so we twist our words, and put them in catalogues, to pound the public into veins. We trapeze ourselves toward crackling. And in the end, we find the beginning, from beginning to end. And fight our way back to the galaxy, where the stars are implicit, and the glue is entertaining. And then we unfurl. By which I infer eating, and slithering across the Missouri, hissing.

I crush the sweat trickles. It saves time. The ponderance pinned it to my mucilage. The table trembles with its own complexity. I spread it with linen, and the effect is calming. If it cracks, it’s not a table. It’s an exultation, sneezing our elation. Everyone is shouting halleluiah. Do you have a place for me in your voice? Caustic cactus into what? It’s something to consider. I can dig it if it hovers over our dilemma. It helps to map a strain with a black orchid. It’s revelatory to employ a volume against a wrist by whatever means. Imagery is tailored spit. The humidity in the conservatory is a little exaggerated. Furrows are a cause of raking. In this world, everyone gets everything backwards. We spin the beat until the rhythm pops, get down to business, make some faces, invent some abstractions, ignore the ultimatums, harness our words to a tender structure, let the traffic go by, sit back and listen to the moonlight spill its healing proportions. The air smells Gothic, and there’s everything a body could wish for waiting to happen in another lifetime.

This content isn’t ready at this time. But here’s what I have to say: nothing below the reel is a truer experience than crawling toward a seismograph during an earthquake. The real is never so reel as when it’s turning. I greet denial with survival. It’s a tin dimension that knocks on would. I snap at the mention of tendonitis. Right now, it’s quiet at the wharf. This sentence is tethered to a warp in space. That’s why it’s attracting so many clouds. The swirls in the armchair rouse our audacity. There’s always someone that needs the key to your laughter. The smell of opium mingles with the smell of elderberries. It can echo the gleam of a stethoscope. Sometimes I clank in the wind. Everyone sat beside it. The feeling. The feeling after. The feeling before. The feeling of gauze. And butterflies. We hired the best. The way to extend things via the sorcery of spice, and lace. Velocity comes in a stir of combustion, and they drill to obtain it. It’s time now. The map is folded and put back in the suitcase. The car is quiet. Until it starts.  The wheels are never so real as when they’re phantasmagoric. And the road goes right through us.

 

Memorandum Of Understanding

It was high tide this afternoon when R and I went to visit our two favorite rocks by Puget Sound. I enjoy sitting there all the more when the rocks are surrounded by water, although it requires a bit more agility to clamber aboard. We were quick to notice two objects floating toward the shore, sometimes getting closer to attaining a restful position on the rocks and sand, sometimes getting drawn further away from the shore. One was clearly a small glass bottle; the other was harder to identify. We thought it might be a turtle. It turned out to be a bird. It was black with a white belly, a short neck and a beak with a little hook at the end. The wings were folded close to its body, forming a shroud, and the eyes were missing. Whatever death it met with was a mystery. The bottle drifted close enough to shore that I could fish it out easily. It was a Hornitos Tequila, a popular, mid-tier brand of 100% blue agave tequila produced in Jalisco, Mexico. No doubt, it was from one of the cruise ships moored a quarter mile distant at either Pier 91. The Port of Seattle opened Pier 66 (the Bell Street Pier) to cruise ships in 1996, and opened Pier 91 to cruise ships in 2009. My feelings concerning cruise ships is fundamentally negative. They’re grotesque sources of pollution, heavy air emissions of fuel oil containing massive amounts of sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter, vast liquid wastewater discharges, solid waste dumping and underwater noise. Washington State law prohibits bans all sewage releases and the Port of Seattle prohibits exhaust gas cleaning system (scrubber) wash water. In addition, the Port of Seattle has a “Memorandum of Understanding,” whatever the fuck that means, with the Washington State Department of Ecology in which large ships “agree” to prevent untreated or treated wastewater discharges into state waters. One very hot August a few years ago I waded into the water about knee deep and discovered a used tampon bobbing up and down. Water is such a forgiving element. It can lull me out of a rage or dislodge a black and ugly thought that’s been stuck in my brain for a number of hours, or days. And nothing is sweeter than a complete immersion in water, though in Puget Sound the temperature is around 54 to 61 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s cold. The dogs don’t seem to mind it, but it’s rare to see a human lolling about in it. Over the years, I’ve cultivated a memorandum of understanding with Puget Sound. It’s simple. Not much to it. I’m here. You’re here. Thank you for the rocks. The salmon. The birds. The jellyfish. The octopi. The oysters. The crabs. And especially the waves. The way they roll. The way they slop on the sand. And recede. And vanish in the light.

On Feeding Crows

Ten years of feeding crows has taught me a lot. It has confirmed the popular observation that crows are, indeed, highly intelligent. It has also revealed that crows can be phenomenally stupid. On balance, no single generality concerning their behavior will serve. One must resort to nuance and contradiction. The bird of paradise is a brightly colored rainforest bird with long, elaborate feathers and a bizarre courtship dance. It is not a single species, but an entire family containing roughly 42 to 45 distinct species. The crow is not among them. The crow is not a bird-of-paradise. The crow is a bird of paradox.

For example, one of their more maddening traits is to make life and communal living perplexing as a quantum algorithm using Hamiltonian simulation for solving wave equations in multidimensional space. If I toss a peanut to a single crow, it is not uncommon that as soon as the crow pounces on the peanut it gives a jubilant cry to its tribe, who then appear in a murder of twenty to thirty crows. The murder breaks up into a chaos of activity and high excitement. The crows speedily diverge to claim their trophy peanut, and fights break out almost immediately. The fights are serious, and weirdly primordial, like something out of the Cretaceous period. Crows aren’t inherently mean, but they do seem to have flash-point tempers. A popular tactic is to grab one of the opponent’s wings, give it a mighty tug and flip the combatant over on its back, upon which the antagonist pounces with bloodthirsty gusto. I have to break things up. It’s one of the reasons I ceased – or tried to cease – feeding crows. This behavior doesn’t break out all the time, but enough to make one question whether feeding crows is a prudent thing to do.

Which, of course, it is not.

That said, I wasn’t motivated by prudence to feed crows. It was something deeper. A need to connect with them. I had a crow when I was ten. I got it out of a nest with another infant crow, which I gave to my dad’s brother-in-law, who had a farm nearby. It was he and my dad that sent me up the ladder to get them. I had my doubts, but they were adults, grown men, so I deferred to their knowledge and wisdom; they must know what they were doing. My uncle-in-law’s crow grew to old age. He got to fly around a farm in what they called Gopher Gulch until a very mature age. Mine did not. I spent several months with her, spending nearly all day with her, including a trip from Minneapolis to Denver. She perched on the rim of a cardboard box on the backseat of my dad’s Buick. We let her fly around at rest stops. She slept with Pepper, the family dog, a black cocker spaniel with a sweet disposition. The crow would nestle so close to the dog that the two looked like one animal. They did most of their sleeping in my grandmother’s laundry room, who, I suspect, was less than pleased with the arrangement. Predictably, one morning the crow was gone. My father attempted an explanation. The crow was taken to a zoo. I was ten. I knew that was bullshit. But I didn’t want to know her true fate. I didn’t pursue the topic, and brooded on yet another aspect of the human adventure, a world-altering phenomenon ponderous with irrationality, violence, ingenuity, phantasmagoria and baffling contradictions.

I’m a runner. I began feeding crows on my runs. I’m astonished at how long I was able to keep that up. Eventually, I found myself spending more time feeding crows than running. My wife accompanied me most of the time. It was good to have some help. Nor was it long before the neighbors began to complain. We were a little taken aback by the hostility so many people directed toward crows. Keep in mind, we run in one of Seattle’s more affluent neighborhoods. The homes and landscaping are high end real estate. There are mansions. Most of the homes are priced between one to two million. When it comes to property, people are understandably anxious. One neighbor in particular, a man about my age, maybe younger (I’m 79), upset my wife his brash and highly aggressive attacks on her devotion to feeding and caring for crows. The first time he upbraided her was while she was walking one of the switchback trails in a small park. He demanded to see what was in the bag she was carrying. She told him it was none of his business. The exchange did not go well. The man assumed the obdurate stance of an ICE agent. I was with her the last time the man aggressively accosted our otherwise mellow walk to the street where we begin our running. My initial response was to tell him to go fuck himself. But I refrained. Instead, I approached him and tried to educate him on the more positive aspects of having crows in one’s neighborhood. The man was obsessed with rats. The rat population had gone up, and had done some damage to the wiring system of his RV, but the increase in the rat population had nothing to do with crows; it was due to a neighbor across the street digging deep trenches to renovate their sewage system. There is also a high population of rats to begin with on Queen Anne Hill since our neighborhood is only a mile or two distant from Pier 86, where three towering grain silos overlook a wharf for filling tankers with grain from the Palouse country in eastern Washington. I explained that crows outcompete rats for resources, and have been known to attack rats on occasion. I suggested that if he worried about rats damaging his property and nibbling on his wires, he might consider feeding crows. He found my suggestion pretty funny, and it was nice to see my friendly approach assuaged his hostility a little, but I don’t think I made much headway in softening or altering his stance against corvids.

I wanted stop feeding crows, but found it impossible to do so on my preferred route for running. Once you form a bond with a group of animals, it’s hard to break it. It’s emotionally draining. And the crows get crabby. I’ve seen a crow throw a tantrum on the sidewalk, extending his wings and cawing his head off. It’s also quite common to get bonked on the back of my head by a crow. It’s one of their favorite maneuvers. I’ve also been pooped on a number of times, but I’ve been told it’s good luck to get shit on by a crow. It feels like an egg running down my hair.

I began running down by Westlake Avenue North, on the west side of Lake Union, where there are rows of small, non-floating commercial buildings built on pilings over the water as well as some marinas and houseboat communities. The crows don’t know me there. I can run in peace. I also prefer it down there – with the notable exception of walking under the Aurora bridge traversing Mercer to get there, which is filthy with trash and human waste – because the space is so much more open, due to the lake. I hoped that after a year or two the crows in the neighborhood closer to home, which is a far more residential area, would forget me. They didn’t. Crows have a remarkable memory for faces, and if you’re deemed someone friendly to their cause, they will not let you forget that. People who argue that feeding crows encourages them to feel more comfortable around humans and thereby make themselves more vulnerable to the abuse of malefactors is dead wrong. Crows distinguish quite emphatically between humans who are in no way to be trusted to humans they perceive as non-violent and caring. Even then, they tend to keep their distance. It’s rare for a crow to get much closer to you on the ground than six or seven feet. Some do, which is always nice since it makes feeding them so much easier.

Today, I had a visit from Bonker. Bonker is a crow who lives on West McGraw Place. I call him Bonker because he likes to dive-bomb and hit me on the back of the head. He must know by now that I'm not the one who dispenses peanuts. That would be my wife. He never bonks her. He bonks me. I usually wear a wool hat. Maybe that’s why. He knows his claws can pierce my skin. I felt his wings as he passed within a quarter inch of my balding scalp. R gave him a peanut or two.

Louise is a special case. Louise is a crow with an injured leg. It hangs, useless and dead, while she manages to land and perch on her one good leg. I began feeding her ten years ago, in 2016, and have been feeding her ever since. She’s had a number of favorite spots over the years, but I was generally able to find her by whistling. After I began running down by Lake Union, R made a special walk to track her down and feed her. For several years there was a man a few years younger than me who was absolutely devoted to feeding her. He didn’t live in the neighborhood. He drove here. He would wait patiently for hours at a time. Unfortunately, his wife wanted to move south to Olympia, so he had to stop. That must’ve gone really hard with him. Louise disappeared for several weeks and we assumed the worse. The last time she came out I could see her one good leg buckle as she hit the ground. Her feathers get really scraggly during the summer as well. She barely has any tail feathers left. In early September all the crows start to molt and Louise’s feathers begin to grow back, which is a relief. R spotted her among a huge murder of crows on the other side of Queen Anne Avenue North, close to a Catholic grade school and convent. She does that occasionally; move to a different area. She does know where we live, and will follow us home in our car. R heard her once when she was working in the garden. That pattern was repeated for about a week and then she disappeared again. It’s impossible to say what exactly is going on with Louise. One thing is certain: she’s a survivor.

Louise reveals another aspect to crows that argues against the presumed worry that feeding them will somehow compromise their ability to hunt for food on their own. The crows do fine on their own. The peanuts are a treat, not a primary source of nutrition.

Louise, of course, has no idea we’ve named her Louise. Nor does anyone else. Others may have their own names for her. R has a crow she has named Russell (after Russell Crowe) who comes around nearly every day. It is my view that Russell should be named Jane Russell. I’m pretty sure Russell is a female. She disappeared for a few weeks and when she returned she was accompanied by two bratty fledglings.

Then there’s Buddy. Buddy’s a stellar jay, but a corvid nevertheless. On several occasions I’ve returned from a long run to find Buddy perched on the railing on our entryway porch. I had no peanuts with me, so I said wait here, I’ll be right back. I go in, get a couple of peanuts, and when I get back to the perch, Buddy is still waiting. Buddy tends to be fussy. Sometimes, if he feels the peanut is not quite up to his standards, he’ll drop it in expectation for another, which we oblige with a follow-up peanut. He’s a rude little punk and never leaves a tip.

I’ve heard crows give gifts to people whom they deem kind. It may not be gifts at all that they’re leaving, but a confluence of phenomena triggering instinctual behavior. Whatever it is, I’m still waiting for my BMW.

 

Paper Peacock Eye

 When sensations become words, words become sensations. For example, a wedding engagement. Or a bite of grapefruit. The augmentation of warmth in a room after dialing the thermostat up a few degrees. Arthritis. Bronchitis. Bursitis. Phlebitis. Age begs to voyage across the hallway tied to a sideboard. The sensation is considerable. It makes the road reflect your dollop of toss with a vague assertion of authority. The rue d’Orsel teems with sexual halibut. It makes you want to stir a canoe with your tongue. My emotions drift toward fulfillment with the excited chirping of newly hatched birds. Beat a man below the man we think we’ve become, and anguish soon follows. There are many species of anguish, including Hollywood and Vine. It’s cruel to give a man wealth after he’s turned ninety-one. Can anyone read this sentence while standing on their skin? Listen hard into a joy beneath its eating. I will climb on board and help throw cake at the variables. We hose our house with a horse of hose. The movement of a hoe, by any other noise, can move improbably fast. Someone sews a fiction near my grotto and I open into a flower. Anyone tin can see the elephant is a stab at paradox. Before abstraction, I had the rain in my hand, falling up like a pronoun. I put this paradigm here to mull over a concept of heaven. Everything growls in my life, even the more spiritual aspects. Hinduism appears as a demonstration of fireworks. A few of us turn violent, and translate ourselves as swirls. I can’t say I recommend it. It strains attitude, and causes seclusion. Knock before I cry. I feel a force that is mentally expansive steam my dreaming into a knife. The minerals I unfold glide into clapping. The infinite mode I make out of each fiber is my testament to compote. Hills open it.  Since what happens is stunning, and clacks like a noodle. This dream is a spectacular carnality such as it is in Cyprus on a Wednesday in July. Each incentive arrives with a song and a bruise. Below our tension my sweat is heavy as freight. The thermostat combines a bicycle with a honeysuckle and produces piles of vital signs, all of them intriguing as our needs. Gravity is not enough to describe the female breast. Secrets have veins, like a radio. If you wiggle the aggressions, you will tune in some irony. The mushrooms excuse our dimension. Consonants were squashed, and there was some harm done at a nearby airport. Sparks exhumed from a lamp black abandonment. I extend a detail to this in my preface. This is how the greenhouse was improbably enhanced, and the orchids fluttered with semantic instability. It’s my party and I can farm my aurora if want to. Spout salt. The iron evocation beyond is everything garish by tension and wealth. I was never everything a dollar could do on a Saturday in downtown Reno. I had butterflies in my voice. Life had the flavor of an ancestral bean. I think I held a scruple. There was a chocolate I could squat by yelling. Life isn’t always brocade. Sometimes it employs pickles, and starts an army of starving magicians. A sense unfolds itself to go chewing on another chiffon dime. Another calculus. Optical silk. Paper peacock eye. The clouds outside the steel, where a perspective bursts open. I hunger for cracks. It bubbles a sticky opium into what I needed just now. Another staircase for the proverbs rising out of my aviary. Anyone at a bronze job. We stand near the embroidery, redeeming denim. Sometimes an injury softly fluttered in gauze quivers beside it. Let me clean some gasoline and crackle the bounce of your Subaru with a blue bayou. The more seminal emotions crowd toward the palpable and spoon their genitals for time. It is a suppleness at its most dazzling. I can hallucinate almost anyone at the drop of a paradigm. The paragraph air will suffice until the greenhouse grins like a mood juggled with spit. If you look hard into the future, you can see it balancing on a preterite, coughing up metaphors.