Reality Lights Up With Writing

Believe me. I know what I’m doing. I’m taking shots in the dark. The bullets are words. They go rat-a-tat-tat. They go bonga bonga bonga. They go bananas. They sit and do nothing. Like batteries. They must be inserted into the mind. The mind draws their energy and they go wild. They go myriad and sing like a choir. They stall in the air and go still and stalwart. I'm irritated by an unprecedented heat parallel. The strain of Monday. Monstrosity regret pulled towards a fireworks display. Unhindered, our glasses prove nothing. Sculpt and fill the walls by opening yourself. We bend radically, and the disturbances increase our treasure. The strain fits our example and my sip. When needs impose on me, I zoom in on life. What weight of goldfish causes your valiant stars to imitate a dusty old town by Rembrandt? Oblivion rips my deepening awareness that a steadiness needs for fabrication but a listening needs for guiding a chisel. Soften the taxi with a little dextrose. Grab a bottle. Empty it. A fork shines a light above the sneer. Whenever I awaken above a distress there’s a lever, a can of paint, and a lingering sense of tinsel. A succubus sits on a tire in a swamp. It would light the sky if I threw a grenade. But I'm not here to cloud the issue. There is so much we need to understand. Everything. Except eating. know how to eat. I do it all the time. My favorite dish is word salad. Reality lights up with writing. The cutlery is warm. Ecstasies excite the quantum beauty card. The glass is so pure everyone wants to jump into it and drink it all down. But there’s nothing in it. The glass is empty. Until the imagination fills it with something. Orange juice. Tequila. Drambuie. Anisette. Sambuca. Words do nothing until fins appear and darkness and the abyss. To satiate the unbalanced man we can make another mess. But what will this accomplish? A bushy vertebral hill, a black on white belying a soft underlying gray, and a larger understanding of ivy. Throw the clay at what perception arouses. The sphere box has a crack in our room. Never waste a wild resilience. It gives life to a horn and pulse to a precipice. I seriously worry about what is gentle for a cat. If you play Bach I will extrude a knee exactly like this consonant, and swing it back and forth. Last night in Massachusetts a new awareness overtook my consciousness and turned it into Seekonk. This is why the Higgs boson is important. I went fly fishing in the Harvard business department and caught a rare puffer fish in the tide pool area. It felt hot like a chimera. How do we know that mass is energy? Because things come out of the mist and the pain is exquisite. Nobody wants to be embodied in anybody. It's not about the swamp and its eccentricities it's about creating a big round love and letting it walk around. We can discuss this later, after the drinks arrive. It’s enough that I have a home in your mind. Please don’t kick me out. This is why we write books. Those of us still writing books. We write to put chaos in a cage of letters. Though some insist they write to raise chaos. And ride it to the ends of the earth.  

Dreams Are Life Turned Inside Out

A wink gives innocence to a freshly painted house. A wink and a thermostat. This itch is my contribution to the perception of falling. By itch I mean this. My itch. This itch. This itch to finger the stars. I walk in English and merge with it and indulge it and am emphatic in diving into it. This is the itch I was talking about. And so I keep scratching it. One line of poetry is all it takes to keep a mind afloat. Two lines will burn it. Three lines will hurl it. A quatrain will siege the walls of logic and make everything alive. I present a sunlight squeezed into a bikini. The oysters we carry are deepened by tumultuous fluency and are monumental in their syntax. Huffing and puffing propels the rumble of my intentions. I’m plunged in odor like a forest. I’m extroverted at room temperature. But when it’s hot I grow introverted and straw. I become a drive-in on Mars. Tom Ewel introducing The Girl Can’t Help It. Dreams are life turned inside out. But movies aren’t dreams they’re exultations. Crimson lake a pigment I can slather all over the scabs like sawdust. That hat there by the binoculars is what also lingers among these coordinates. A pot of tea floats my garrulity. A napkin, a hibachi and a slop of sweet potato surge through our breakfast like a superfluity injected with experience. It’s not every day that a parlor like this expands into cribbage. We’re delicate, so I feed a machine to protect us with its dials. I once considered playing a role in a morality play while sky diving, but the proliferation of cellphones has soured the experience greatly. I prefer novels. And thunder and quartz and forests where the arbitrary elects itself king of strawberries. I cover my chest with a shawl of mud and walk forward into the sentence dropping words along the way. Letters are skeletons. Soon the world is overrun with chickens. I don’t care. My beef is with the world. I like the outer limits of things. I steal the wealth of cruel despondent kings and spend it on places where navigational equipment is useless. You have to go by intuition. There’s no equation that could ever solve a marigold. That thunder you hear is a wall of logic crashing to the floor in a protein sequence. I’m overflowing with circumlocution. This is the place to do it. The hard part is convincing other people that your reality is based on pudding. Time doesn’t matter to me. But joining sentences in a habitat of smoke and poplar must boil for three days in the mind of a glove. The extracts will satiate the drinking needle. And when the rest of the words get here we’ll have a blast. Plastic bags propped by sticks inserted into the sentence and held in place by rubber bands make good propagators, although holes should be cut for air to flow. That’s when the fun begins. Ideas create propulsion by squeezing their syntax and pushing hard at the first sign of a contraction. Eventually, a new music fills the street and consciousness spins around in a hippodrome of bone.

Suspenders

R gave me suspenders for Christmas. Two pair, one black, one beige. R is my wife. We have been married for 30 years.

I opened the black one first. Putting it on was much harder than I’d imagined. Suspenders are more like hardware than clothes. They’re like a machine. Unlike socks, which are easily negotiable, suspenders are a mode of engineering. They’re mechanical. They have movable parts, clips and elasticity. They’re deceptively simple, quirkily counterintuitive, a combination of pliancy and applied physics, and a little ornery, like old men and mathematicians.

The shorter straps go over the back. It would seem as if the longer straps should go over the back since they would be easier to reach. Nope. It’s the shorter straps. You just have to make sure they’re pulled as far down as possible without sabotaging the situation on one’s chest. If the longer straps flop over the shoulders, it all ends up on the floor, and the process must be restarted. It’s like the occasions when you set out to explain a complicated interrelationship of ideas and it all collapses into a rat’s nest of contradictory facts and far-flung speculation.

As soon as I got the suspenders adjusted I felt different. I felt like Wilfred Brimley. Like one of those old guys in a hardware store who knows a little about everything, a range of wonder and enigma from Socrates to needle-nose pliers. Once those suspenders are fastened you’re not going to look like James Bond or John Shaft. The suspenders are all about utility. They’re there to keep your pants up. It’s tedious in the extreme to have to keep tugging at your pants all day. I’m modest about my butt-crack showing. And on several occasions my pants fell all the way down.

Suspenders are a surrender. A surrender to gravity. A surrender to vanity. A surrender to youthful illusions and besotted chimeras. They’re an adaptation clever as Australian frogs cocooning themselves in mucus, or cuttlefish detecting wavelengths of light to mimic their environment. Once I get the damn things on, the reward is uplifting: a tug of elastic support pressing on my shoulders down to my waist, the limber physics of a snug suspension.

There’s an aura of wisdom surrounding suspenders. It’s not suspense. There is no suspense. Suspension, yes. You can feel it in the shoulders. Two straps pulling down to keep your pants up. Some practice is necessary, particularly for those moments in public when I will require the facilities of a rest room. I have the option of popping off the two front straps so my pants can ride down my legs, but I don’t want my suspenders to lie on a men’s room floor. I’m fussy that way. Germaphobe. I want to get so good at releasing them and putting them back on that I can snap them off and snap them back on with the grace and legerdemain of a seasoned magician. And hope for a hook on the bathroom stall, where my suspenders can hang, idle and at rest.

My old leather belt, which I’ve had for over 30 years, is now retired and hanging from a hook on the bedroom wall. The belt is embossed with symmetrically repeating geometric patterns. The buckle is big, and square, like the buckle on a 17the century pilgrim’s hat. I feel like I’ve crossed some form of Rubicon, a divide between two manners of living, one a hangover of youthful activities long abandoned, except for the belt, and the other a resignation, a capitulation to gravity and pants and the limitations imposed by one’s mortality. Clothing as parable. A reversal: rather than a suspension of disbelief in order to fully invest oneself in a drama, a suspension of pants in order to fully invest oneself in a diminishing future compensated by a disburdened past. One begins feeling the realities of age pulling us down as the prospect of heaven pulls us up. 

 

New Year's Day

 

10 a.m. Monday New Year’s Day headlines Japan has issued tsunami warnings after major earthquakes today collapsed homes and sparked a fire the Parker Solar Probe is the first spacecraft to have flown through the sun’s outer atmosphere which is paradoxically 300 times hotter than the sun’s surface weathering unimaginable conditions including temperatures close to 1,400 degrees Celsius and solar winds charged with high-energy particles gun buyers will have to wait longer street racers face tougher penalties and there’s a change to your voting rights those are among the new Washington laws that take effect today Iran deploys warship to Red Sea amid soaring tensions Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s New Year’s Eve kiss will make your head spin round

10:40 a.m. after breakfast I heat a pot of water to pour down the bathroom sink keep it from clogging heat excites molecules ideas excite words what’s an idea an idea is something imagined or pictured in the mind heavy rain at night in Tokyo Albert Einstein writing on a blackboard in Pasadena herds of wild horses galloping in Sweetwater County Wyoming molten lava spewing from a fissure north of the evacuated town of Grindavik Iceland

10:11 p.m. I finish watching the French news which included a story about the wind turbines installed near the Addo Nature Park in South Africa home to thousands of wild animals lions leopards black rhinos hyenas buffalo and elephants the turbines were built by a French company EDF Électricité de France unfortunately the turbines disturb the elephants elephants use infrasound to communicate females call males via this infrasound when they’re in heat so that they can reproduce but the noise made by wind turbines disrupts this communication and so there’s worry that they will become aggressive and fight I remember the wind turbines by the Columbia River Gorge in Washington State and how distracting they were as we descended into the gorge on I-90 it felt like my eyes were about to start spinning around in their sockets

What is the term for material things in Hindi सामग्री चीज़ें saamagree cheezen what is it like to ride an elevator down into a coal mine split an atom split a banana spit in the wind glossary of subatomic terms Bo Diddley YouTube Nostradamas 2024 predictions in English who wants to know I sure as hell don’t

9:20 a.m. January 2nd, 2024, 43℉ I have my usual breakfast scrambled eggs and a slice of white bread slathered with butter and Bonne Maman Four Fruits Preserves it’s raining it’s not a heavy rain it’s a light rain so we can run in it without too much difficulty and there’ll be a lot of goose poop and puddle dodging I like puddles I don’t mind them the puddle is a parable of language it reflects the sky without disappearing into the sky at least not until later when it evaporates and ceases being a puddle and becomes a cloud until then it remains a puddle a puddle of water with a particular shape and depth and calm and if it isn’t calm then it’s something else a hiccup of lightning or a foot smashing an evergreen but wait a minute you say a puddle can’t create itself it has to come from rain pennies from heaven means an angel is thinking of you this is true and it’s the same with language and writing it falls from the mind in words that form puddles called paragraphs and streams called speeches 

Picking Daisies On Mars

 

Susan Sontag: to detach his [Antonin Artaud] thought as a portable intellectual commodity is just what that thought explicitly prohibits it’s an event rather than an object the recent eruption of the volcano near Grindavik in Iceland you can’t nail the wind down you have to put on a scary mask and do a vigorous dance

Different societies use different definitions of what constitutes madness here it is decided by drug companies everything is decided by drug companies what isn’t decided by drug companies is decided by oligarchs in sweatpants and hoodies none of this is true in the conventional sense but it’s true enough to fill a tire or mend a sock you may think of me as the author of an unwritten novel the very one I’m living if you want to call this living I’m Frankenstein’s monster wandering the earth with a blessed opacity of experience on my hands

Wherever I go there’s that weird sound of voices underwater Renaissance alchemy Polish potato chips the crunch of boots in snow Ukrainian cannons Russian drones those occasions when sitting down is never an option fog moving down a mountain like a waterfall in slow motion I looked for signs of David Lynch

All I’m looking for all anyone is looking for is a soft warm place in the human body guitar lessons in Honolulu ninja orchids a luminous paradigm to share on a plane

I could see a dragon in the fjord a voice emerged from the mist and provided instructions on building a coffee table with the voices of the dead they were too hard to follow the dead don’t seem to have much concern for coffee tables

Three highly charged words democracy freedom justice three big lies democracy freedom justice

I wandered the room simultaneously hoping for conversation and avoiding conversation there was a time when things made sense people knew right from wrong and now wrong is right and right is wrong I don’t know what to say to people anymore what’s allowable what’s not allowable words like vaccine cause eyebrows to raise you look for simple things to do and end up picking daisies on Mars I found myself staring at caviar roast beef in a slow cooker I persuade the rattan that our strength is great but there is modesty in our bones it’s nice to have help folding clothes the peroneal tendon goes beneath the foot and connects to the inside of the arch

Do you prefer those refinements of life which money can procure or those refinements of life which money can’t procure I once had a hat I was very fond of it had a cool way of expressing itself with sticks of bamboo and a brim of colossal breadth it would take a day to walk around it the long flow of thought must be apprehended in sound I knew somewhere there was a hole in time I could feel it I had dreams of it women love to express feelings men hate to express feelings it’s generalities like this that lost the war no matter what war was ever won what matters now is the stillness of potential the warmth of a blanket a fire that catches easily and holds the night back