On The Outskirts Of Pahrump

This is for anyone puzzled by mirrors, anyone hanging around a glass engine in a pataphysical garage, anyone in a library curled up in a corner where a powerful inner light propels a dazzling exploration of the printed word. Anyone who has felt like a stranger in a strange world, or eaten oysters or slept all day. Picked apples. Bonded with an octopus. Wandered through a busy restaurant kitchen—lost and confused—frantically searching for a bathroom. Or a place to hide from the truth. But don’t get wayward. To embellish upon what is already there is to boil the broccoli too hard. What you want are eyebrows that offer maximum possibilities. A thick long beard and a rubbery disposition. Sometimes, you’ve got to throw life a bone, just in case it takes a cinematic turn. There are tools for repairing fate. You might call fate the engine of the plot, moving everything forward. Some might say closer to the edge. Others might say further from the past. Faraway or near the thunder, you're the reason bones need cartilage. Flexibility is a gift. Trees survive the storm because they can bend. And funeral pyres make really good page turners.

I owe our trembling to that taste you get when you've been left behind. If a feeling erupts, I could be anybody. Over there, on the other side of grumbling, everything is in abundance. It’s just the way things are around here. Heavy, raw, and overflowing. Pool improvements are evident through ingots of light. The sign keeps flashing, but the letters are dim and glow with a sad acknowledgement of mystical absorption. The noumenal comes for its visit each night. You can hear the gerunds sucking and scratching for sustenance. Swimming climbing croaking criticizing pursuing clucking clutching moonshining eating sleeping laughing crying and fucking around. As you can see, a sensual neck possesses many contours. But that’s just Rita Hayworth, sticking her head out of the tent. She’s starring in a movie I’m filming this very instant. If you look hard enough, you can see a camera whispering its attention to the forest. The house of language is alive tonight with the sounds of the Chantels. It’s all about maybe. Peut-être. Quizás. Vielleicht. Malia paha. Maybe grammar is the architecture of a grand silhouette. Something reflected from the other side through the gauze of an imaginary geography. Perhaps someone who has it can do this if they have it to do it with. And then go off and order a drink at the bar across the street. The one with the dim blue light and the letters in the window glowing hot mama red.

This time last year I fished a 92-year-old man out of the blackberries on a steep incline, reassembled his power chair and pushed him home. This year I await eye surgery. A week of piety with my head bowed to allow a gas bubble to mend a macular hole. We’re all experiencing it. This sense of something impending. Of course, something is always impending. It’s written into our DNA. The dread of something catastrophic. The premonition of Mammon laughing grotesquely and loudly at a banquet of fools in a moment of triumph. The emergence of something primal and corybantic that encapsulates everything monstrous about this moment in history. Godzilla rises from the depths of Eliott Bay, lifts a cruise ship from Pier 91 and bites into it like a Baby Ruth candy bar as vacationers in thongs and loud Hawaiian shirts plummet to their deaths in the harsh cold waters of Puget Sound. The image is gauche, absurdly violent, and for that I apologize.  Comparisons are always a little silly. If I compare my nail clippers to a pair of scissors the fusion of the two is a pair of calipers figure-skating in a Tweety Bird cartoon. Is this what a 60-year immersion in Keats has med me to? O for a beaker full of the warm South, full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, with beaded bubbles winking at the brim, and purple-stained mouth; that I might drink, and leave the world unseen, and with thee fade away into the forest dim. We shall discourse, and drink, and walking beyond these words, lie down among some ferns, and dream.  

We can relax now, and watch the mime try to escape from an invisible subjectivity. I can accept the presence of mosquitos if they sparkle like possibility. That’s my thermostat on the wall. It's time someone saw what my next move is about. Imagery is crucial to the exemption of squash. I laugh at the endless highway of remorse. I’ve got Nevada sage in my headlights and asphalt for a muse. We’re on our way, boy. Uncle Sam had a good run. Established some principles, made some good movies, then burned the whole thing down. It’s left me feeling estranged, abstract and intuitive. I have a nerve showing what a little propulsion can do. The lights of Pahrump are coming up. The marvelous never yields to analysis. It goes beyond summary to present a somber knot of abiogenesis. The interrelationships we find in-late-stage capitalism are all the more exquisite for their enduring obsolescence, and their persistent indeterminacy. Each disavowal. Every little cautionary tale. These lopsided confessions. These boots. These reflections. Those stars above the hills. That beautiful flashing neon vacancy sign on the outskirts of Pahrump.