Wedding Anniversary Power Outage Blues

It came very unexpectedly. It’s been a pretty mild winter. I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to snow this year. The Midwest has been getting slammed by a murderous cold shoved down by a loopy jet stream, but the Pacific Northwest has been almost balmy, few temperatures lower than 45℉. But just to make sure it wouldn’t snow, I invested 45 dollars in a pair of Diamond Grip Yaktrax.

It didn’t work. I got up this morning to discover three or four inches of snow on the ground. Well, I thought, looks like I get to use those Yaktrax after all.

I got into my running clothes, filled a sandwich baggie with unsalted peanuts, and grabbed the new Yaktrax, which I proceeded to stretch over my shoe while sitting at the top of the hallway stairs. I realized I shouldn’t wear them walking over the shale tile of the entryway so I hopped to the door with one on and put the other one on outside. I wasn’t sure whether to put the pull-strap on at the back or at the front. I don’t think it matters. I put them on with the pull-strap at the front. I thought it might be easier to tug the rubber frame from the front than from the back. The studs looked pretty serious, almost like something from a video game where all the weaponry is exaggerated. You jiggle these things and they jingle. They could also be used as a musical instrument.

My crows were nowhere in sight. I whistled. No crows. I was disappointed and worried. I wondered how they were bearing up in this unusual cold.

         The cold was invigorating. I liked it. It made me feel all jazzed up, like cocaine, or Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew. Paradoxically, I found myself much more comfortable at 26℉ with low humidity than 40℉ with high humidity. 

I liked the sound of the crunch on the ice as my diamond grip studs came crashing down into it. The street was solid ice. A guy in a car honked at me from behind. I didn’t hear him. I got out of the way and he waved as he drove by. I marveled at the fact he was driving in such treacherous conditions.

There were a couple of crows at the end of Bigelow but none on West McGraw Place or further down by the Five Corners Hardware Store.

There were a few by the Queen Anne branch of the Seattle Public Library. They were definitely glad to see me. I had a lot of peanuts to toss and it felt good to get them out there and hear them click on the ice of the street. If I threw them into the snow they tended to disappear. There were hardly any cars around.

I glanced at the tent set up in the most discreet part of Bhy Kracke Park, under some shrubbery in the midsection where the switch back trail winds around under some tree branches. I didn’t see anyone, didn’t hear anyone. The tent was blanketed in snow although somewhat protected by the shrubbery. If there was anyone inside, they must be freezing, however many blankets they’ve got. I still don’t know who – or if anyone – has been living in that tent. It has been there for several weeks now and although I pass it twice a day I’ve seen absolutely no one.

I got home to discover everything was dark. We’d had a power outage. I pulled the Yaktrax off of my shoes and hung them on the doorknob of the hallway storage closet. Then I came in and got undressed while R phoned Seattle City Light to see if there was any information about the power outage. The messaging service said energy would return at about 6:00 p.m. R managed to fish a battery-powered dome light out of the cupboard to use in the bathroom while I showered. Showering is a dangerous enterprise in the dark. The little dome light came in very handy. Our big red flashlight wouldn’t work. The battery had expired.

We thought about going to one of several restaurants for dinner that were within walking distance, but their power was also out and we didn’t know for sure when it would be returning. And the two restaurants don’t begin serving dinner until five. We couldn’t wait that long. So R made a couple of ham sandwiches with avocados and mustard, lit some candles to put on the dining room table, poured herself some wine while I opened a bottle of sparking water and we celebrated our wedding anniversary in the dim, ambient light of three burning candles.

Our ham sandwich dinner was followed by two servings of tiramisu, which I’d purchased the day before. It was delicious. The richness of all that layering was a diffusion of gustatory pleasure so unashamedly lush as to border on the metaphysical.

Afterward, I put on an LED headlamp and read Ezra Pound’s Cantos while R covered herself in a blanket and read The Sun Also Rises.

The power came back on about an hour later, much earlier than expected, and the return to the normalcy of heat and light and running water made me feel almost ashamed at the tremendous cost of bringing it here, making it available for so many people. Everyone, for a time. Not it’s not everyone. And it’s not as flawless as it was a few years ago. But for the time it’s here, I’m not taking it for granted. I never really have. Except on nearly every occasion when I go searching for a light switch. It’s the first thing I do. It’s automatic as breathing. Even during an outage, my hand goes immediately in search of a lamp or a switch, and when nothing happens, it’s a strange feeling. Like that jolt I get every time I go for a trip in the country and look up and see all those stars. It’s shocking. It’s the shock of awareness. Beauty, indifference, vastness, it’s all there, nakedly gleaming in all that black. Every time that curtain of habit gets pulled back a real look at the universe can make you tremble with awe.

Admiration

There are many ways to admire things. I admire computers, but I don’t like them. Don’t like what they’ve done. I admire many of the accomplishments of human beings, but I don’t like human beings. Don’t like what they’ve done. Don’t like what they do. I like some of the things they’ve done. I like running water and electricity. But I don’t like waste and war and fracking and hacking and greed and autocracy. I don’t like deceit. I like jelly beans but I don’t admire them. I admire wire. I admire fire. But I’m not a fan of wire. I’m a fan of fire but not of wire. I admire wire. I appreciate wire. Wire allows voices to come out of my radio. Wire allows light to come out of our lamps. I prize wire. I respect wire. But I don’t adore wire. Infatuation and wire do not, necessarily, conjoin. And this is why I admire fire but I don’t go crazy for fire. I savor the warmth of a fire. I value fire but I don’t embrace fire. I admire adhesion, adherence, and umbrellas. I admire toothpicks and teeth and tongues and tungsten. But I don’t worship tongues or teeth or umbrellas or toothpicks. I appreciate these things. I value these things. But I don’t necessarily love these things. Love is a strong word. Admire is a sensible word. But let’s not get carried away. I like getting carried away but let’s not get carried away today. Let’s admire the day. Let’s admire the day and its random occurrences and delights and dents and berries and surges and choices and perplexities and contradictions and powders. I admire them. Let’s admire them. Let’s admire these things while we can. Let’s play guitars and sing. Let’s admire the momentum of the mongoose. Let’s admire mohair and mesas and refrigeration. Fingers hammers driveways highways byways and prunes. Caribou fortitude opals labels staples jonquils jewels fossils cymbals bevels buckles candles cradles councils mountains and the wind over the dunes. 

A Frog Crashing Through Silverware

I open the electric cram and say “cure the knee.” And the knee is cured. Or not. I see a package hover the table and then the table issues a pink melody to put in the air. I feel the elephants heating the interior of the helicopter. And then I visit certain regions of a chicken. Echoes move the oil. The clouds mingle with meringue. Sorbet exceeds the build of electrons and issues a direct stump for the combustion of understanding.

And to think it’s only Wednesday.  

Snow fingers chrome the keepsake. My memory of your outskirts. Which is a small organ at the front of the vulva. The fuchsia lung law courses through my realism. And what is realism? The stubbornly held gym franchise, that’s what. The ingots of honey I find at the summit of the mountain. The underworld misunderstood as a mackerel.

I smell turpentine. The sequelae of my theatre clothes is preoccupying. But I like it. I like it. Yes I do. The gerundive shoulder of time strengthens with isometrics. The hum of muslin, the scratch of blackberry vines. I roam to figure a fiend of lust and luster, rattling throughout.

I want to furnish a thoughtful black with a universe of pearls. Sugar is a key to snow. The phenomenal bang of the coconut tree, the soft hand of darkness. The chief cause of maps is tables and chairs. Rivers are more mercurial. They shine like prophesies. They roll over rocks brimming with picnics and whirls. Old wood. Candy in a birch canoe.

I have thorny hummingbird fingers. My favorite beverage is a pendulum foundry. Is pasta a form of exultation? Yes, it is. If spring meets its own abstraction, the result is citrus. A frog crashing through silverware. Moonlight on a suit.

I’ll take your hand, you take my hand. Together we’ll get away.

Sings Neil Young.

A conflagration of waves glories in the sound of clouds scraping over a caribou. The rush of the greenery capsule blossoms in my index finger. I burst, twisting to buy a sad honey bee. I climb onto a black awning and become a minute of mirth.

I need a marshy button to live. The fulminating phenomenon of a notebook. I want to pin a climate to this paragraph so I don’t have to dream alone. My shoulder twinkles with understanding. I understand water. I don’t understand neoclassical economics. I offer it a fat kick to the groin.

You can’t walk away from an experience. They get inside you and become you. Good ones, bad ones, monsoons, moratoriums, dinghies. Wind, sunlight, horticulture.

I paint a cuddly knot. The darkness of my gym toes is strangely vertical. The fox rids himself of aggression and becomes a better fox. I maneuver the detached crust to the side of the plate and muse on the zigzag of ancestry. It all leads to welts and lingerie. I suck the iron teat of contrast. And return home to a rising tide of unrest and skeins of worry. This will be answered by the wasp. Agreement between nations. Legs distressed by their own similarity. Get out. Get out now and stir yourself into circumstance. A red crack aglow in the crawl of the sun will lead you to the other side where the molecules are sewn into musk and the dead are clawed into light.

Crows

I take a handful of unsalted peanuts and give them a hurl onto the grass and try in my hurl to scatter them as much as possible. The crows are all waiting, perched on telephone wires and roofs and trees. As soon as the peanuts hit the ground they come swooping down from different directions. Their flight is smooth and agile, their movements quick and acrobatic. These are highly intelligent birds. If they get too close to one another they caw loudly and go on the attack. I love the way their feathers fan out and catch the air. The comical hop they do to cross a patch of ground. Their phenomenal alertness and sensitivity.

I add a two-pound bag of unsalted peanuts to our groceries while visiting the produce section at the grocery store. More peanuts for the crows. The man at the cash register is familiar. He’s worked at the store a long time. He always sings. He sings everything, whatever the exchange may be at the checkout stand. He’ll sing “how are you” and “is that all” and “are those cookies your cookies” in a baritone operatic voice. I frequently want to join him in song but I’m afraid he’d think I was making fun of him. I mean to ask if he sings in a choir but I’m often so taken by his singing and wanting to sing along that I forget to ask him if he sings in a group or ensemble.  

Crows are associated with death. It’s their black feathers. And their knowing demeanor. Crows always seem to know something. I find it uncanny how they can hear me leave the apartment building within seconds and come flying from a respectable distance.

I guess that’s why they’re called – in groups – a murder of crows. But I don’t find death in crows. Death is everywhere. Everywhere there’s life, there’s also death. I don’t associate death with crows. I find them lively in the extreme. Their energy is contagious. They feed greedily and bicker but when in the air they’re the very model of grace.

In world mythology, the crow is often represented as an irritant, or a favorite of the gods, or Norse giants. In a Sioux legend, the people are starving because the crows – which are white – keep warning the buffalo of the approach of hunters. The leader of the crows is captured by stealth and tied to a rock with a rawhide string. An angry hunter lunges at the crow and throws him into a fire. The crow escapes, but is singed black, and ever since all crows are black.

English poet and children’s writer Ted Hughes devoted an entire collection of poems to the crow, published in 1971 and titled (aptly) Crow. He describes the crow variously as a being of prophecy and mischief, a hierophant, “humped, impenetrable,” a creature of “delirious joy, with nimble balance,” refrigerating an emptiness, and “with the faintest breath,” “melts cephalopods and sorts raw numbers out of their dregs.” Hughes’s crows are conduits of weird spiritual forces; ageless, inscrutable, unfathomable. “And he realized that God spoke crow – Just existing was His revelation.”

God speaks crow. That’s good.

Crows occasionally make a rattling sound, or clicks. I have no idea what their meaning is, what is intended, what is being remarked. And I like that. The mystery of it, the nonsense of it, the uniqueness and peculiarity of it. It’s primordial. But also a little silly. A goofy sound. Wacky, yet also a little mindful. Savvy, alert, fascinated.

82 Buttons Unbuttoned In Bliss

A proposition is a statement or an assertion that expresses a judgment or an opinion. It’s a tentative and conjectural relationship with the world. With phenomena. With experience. With cookies and ants and pharmacology.

A proposition can only say how a thing is, not what it is. I can say, this is a spoon. The handle is bent because it’s been used to scoop out some ice cream from a container that’s been in the freezer for a long time and has consequently hardened into a statement such as the one I’m currently making in which a spoon is cornered into a spectacular reality, the reality of a word, which is made of sound, which is a conveyance of feeling, which is a music of raw sensation. The metal feels cold. That’s reality. The sensation of coldness is a reality. But the word ‘reality’ and the reality of reality are sprouts of stereophonic clank. They have a moment of colorful perfume and then a distant galaxy of stars crawls through my right arm and I can feel the generosity of the thermostat twist into greater and greater quiddity.

The name represents the object. Spoon represents spoon. That is to say, a name assumes the place of an object, the alibi of the object, not the actuality of the object, which is obscured by dishwater, sudsy bubbles in a kitchen sink, and awkwardly presented to you as a word: spoon.

I do a lot of this during the course of a typical day. I make proposals. Propositions. Prepositions. I make propositions about prepositions. I use prepositions to make propositions about expositions of compositions that may be sniffed by any dog and arouse the curiosity.

This is why I like propositions. I feel the arrival of a warm darkness, the ecstasy of a fence scratched by the wind. I see the influenza tree drop tears of nebulous milk. I’m proposing a situation. Think of this as a swollen subconscious, a rolling mass of garrulity. A tree. A root. A branch of leaves. An incident of words. A sharply defined dachshund. An occurrence of vertebrae and dots. Eyes. Fur. Paws. Ears. Tongue.

Can I be your friend? Thank you.

Africa has the right idea. It has 54 countries, seven major rivers and a very high linguistic diversity. I think I could lead a good life there. I could get up in the morning and shake the stars out of the sky. I’ve got 206 bones and a war to fight. The war against the imagination. All other wars are subsumed in it. “The ultimate famine is the starvation of the imagination.” Thank you. Thank you Diane di Prima. Thank you for fighting the good fight. And bringing such a delicious rant to the table.

The big crime of the hip is full of words for the unfurling of a drowsy quadruped. I eat the heel of a dragon and ride a finger joint to the taste of a big music caused by a chorus of chameleons. I’m a thin diver of shoals. I’m an empty thought. I’m an insider and an outsider and consider the cider to be pleasantly insidious. No sitar is completely ugly if it’s also a little medical. I must go now and go to Innisfree. I smell something incendiary, something exciting and wonderful in the air. Light. Clouds. Awakening. 82 buttons unbuttoned in bliss. 

Spigot Trinket

The lake is shaving its form. The dazzling flu cuisine mirrors the tumble of belts in a drum of adults and this makes the lake both sad and subconscious. It’s clearly a lake. What isn’t clear are the perturbations and wrecks at the bottom. The many writhing figures, the columns of victory, the proportions and stools. What do we make of these things? Is this a moral universe, or just another truck stop along the way?

The heel of the universe drinks an ingot of Sunday’s planet. The old tiger senses a thought in the throat and lets it out in the form of a hotel. What I’m trying to do here is ugly. It has to be. It has to be shaggy and weird and automatic or the arthropods won’t dance and the curves in the eye will fail to transfer the images to the brain. The brain is constantly hungry for stories. It must be appeased by detachment. It’s the only solution there is to the aggressive delicacies of tea.

A new parable emerges from my sleep. Our wall has been expecting it. I’ll admit it. I was drunk. The spins were improved by electing a frontier to be my wife. I won’t mention the secrecies of the garden and its many perversions. Let’s just say that the new arena is good for inflating fingers, and the bar is a mailbox for the letters of the soul. But it’s the infinite that borders our little shell of straw and violins.

This is a poem about Danny Kirwan. We will go right down to the sea. Bathing in light we will be free to wander. And we will find ourselves splattered by the sociability of surf.

I grow fat to start a franchise. The carrot has its molecular wilts and touches us with swallows. The sloth of the lazy ratatouille pulls a pound of kaolin into a dynamic eye that alters us with its visions. The tea strives to arrive. The heat perfumes Wednesday. I have to go and sew now. I have feathers for the cape and powder for my face.

I design the net away. The frail water likes to hike until it becomes an impala. The bickering words buy us some time. I maneuver the beautiful pendulum into horses. I want to go beyond suggesting perfume. I want to destroy time and resurrect it as life itself.

Life as a wide-eyed tug-of-war with existence at one end and fermentation at the other.

Life as an alarming gown of bugs and boats.

Pages upon pages of paradox. Bristling green moss on a concrete banister. A fashion model tripping on a divine hammer.

Bleed the mailboxes. Shake the pain to simmer a dream. The mint does its insects into growling fornication. I drink and think the pyramids are rascals of ancient empire. I generate knives by burning an experience with a fire in the rain.

I rub the vowels until a genie appears. I rub the genie until a vowel appears. I rub appearance until a genie howls vowels. The clumsy myth is screaming a cave into existence. The tickle is powered and accelerates our transactions. It’s raining suns and collar studs. The rolls play a role and are an impenetrable bungle. The swan queen has chiseled a dance out of fire.

Panta Rhei

I feel lucid and sad, like a cold day. It’s good to forget oneself. It’s better to remember that one doesn’t exist. Not in any true sense. That is to say, if non-existence is our ultimate destiny, life is sweeter and much more tolerable when this awareness penetrates consciousness and becomes a reality.

Diversions are visceral and ultramarine. They have my full endorsement.

Every day I feed crows. And wonder. What’s it like to be a crow? Is it to be constantly hungry? To enjoy moments of total transcendence when spiraling in the air? Who’s the man that brings us peanuts?

I always imagine thoughts in other animals that are similar to the thoughts that float through my head periodically. This is, no doubt, a mistake. Most of my thoughts are a brew of words. Ruminations assembled out of words. Narratives assembled out of words. Dramas assembled out of words.

Are there dramas without words? Yes. Of course. Many. Sunrise. Sunset. An owl swooping down on a mouse. The process of inquiry, the intent attention of intention. A man and a woman sitting in a car on a cold winter day, both searching for the right words, the sentence that will make everything right again.

Is calculus a garden? Is it a garden of convergences and infinite sequences? Yes. And much more. There are derivatives and infinitesimals. These are flowers of infinite abstraction. Flashes of insight and elegies and hammers.

There’s not a single atom or molecule of my body that wasn’t formed on this planet. Generated by this planet. Created by this planet. I am the planet. I’m a piece of the planet. An epiphenomenon of this planet. This whirl of feelings and thoughts I experience every minute of every day are the responses to phenomena to an entire universe of which I’m a part. Feelings and thoughts are waves, essentially, disturbances with no associated mass. Oscillations, vibrations, pulsations that transfer energy from one place to another. Or shape it into stems, bubbles, faces.

Or words. Words are waves. Vibrations. Sounds. Meanings. Images. Signals.

Everything.

Paint, oceans, nipples.

Nipples are signals. Railroads are different. Railroads differ from nipples in interesting ways. One is soft, the other is hard. One is totemic, the other is shovels. Just shovels. Ties and rocks. Steel and language. The shouts of men. Caustic tones of sweat and salt. The lowing of cows. Steers. Boxcars. The smell of shit. Clumsy actions. Frequencies of penumbral butter.

I prefer the spirit of the bohemian to that of the businessman. There are realities with no commercial value. To stick a commercial value on something is to effectively devalue it, to make it a part of exploitation, abuse, and structural violence. A number stapled to a cow’s ear.

I have spent my entire life trying to live life to its fullest. Everyone does. Everyone who has adequate housing and access to water and food. This is a luxury in life, to worry whether one is living it as fully as possible, so that when one dies, there are fewer regrets. Because there’s always that undercurrent. That anxiety. That life is fleeting, ungraspable, and deeply enigmatic. That life goes by fast and you need to hop on that train and experience it as fully as possible. That you may be one of the lucky ones to plummet its meaning and surface with epiphanies and insights and books to enlighten one’s brothers and sisters. Unless, of course, you find yourself in a culture that no longer gives a shit. In which case your efforts will be for you and you alone and (if you’re really lucky) one or two close friends, who are like-minded and react similarly to cemeteries and who chafe against the adjustments necessary to hold down a job and like to think outside the box. The proverbial box. The box that keeps us trapped in ignorance and comfort. A dubious comfort. The kind of comfort that rewards you for your subservience and good attitude. A good attitude is the attitude that you adopt to get along with the boss. That allows you to float gently through a life of comforting routine while beneath the planks and thwarts of your boat an ocean of nothingness festoons the horizon with an ellipsis of stars.

This is the condition into which we are born. The other animals don’t appear to have this problem. This need to avoid feeling cheated. This need to explore one’s interior complexities, one’s moods and inner geography. Some people like to call it a journey. I like to call it a sneeze. There’s a subtle but building irritation that culminates in an eruptive exhalation of air and saliva. That’s life. A sudden involuntary expulsion of slobber and air.

And then wipe one’s face with a Kleenex and stare at the rag draped over the kitchen faucet.

Is that satori? Is that living life to the fullest? Are there degrees of life? Gradations of life? How much of life is measurable and statistical and how much of life is changing bulbs and sweeping the floor and wondering who built the pyramids of Egypt?

Knowing and accepting death is a big one. The Egyptians had a definite idea bout the afterlife. Osiris opened the door to the afterlife for everyone, which was called The Land of Two Fields. According to “Ancient Egypt for Kids,” “You had to earn your way into your afterlife by doing good deeds while you were alive. The more good deeds you did, the lighter your heart became. If your heart was not light, you could not board Ra's board and sail away into your Afterlife. To avoid any chance of trickery, the goddess Maat weighed your heart after you died. If your heart was not light enough, you were stuck in your tomb forever. But once you were in, you were in. You only had to sail away in Ra's boat once. After that, you had a free pass, and your soul could come and go.”

I like the come and go part. Well, think I’ll take a spin around Milwaukee today. See what’s up in Wisconsin. I’ll be back later, in time for the all-you-can-eat-prawns night. Binge on a few episodes of Breaking Bad.

If anything like a soul persists after our body gives up the ghost (the ghost being us), what is it? A ball of energy? What would existence be like as a ball of energy? An amorphous, ectoplasmic blob bouncing off the walls. No arms, no hands, no fingers, no toes. No dick. No vagina. No ribs or snot or hair or skin. None of that stuff. Just energy. Energy is eternal delight, said Blake. I hope he’s right.

We are currently facing the most historic event in the history of homo sapiens: extinction. But that’s a whole other kettle of fish. Dead fish.

Let’s focus on the now. The Now, capital ‘t’ capitol ‘n.’ That fictional entity of continuous present tense. Which doesn’t exist. How can it? As soon as it’s now, it’s gone, it’s in the past. It’s history. It’s a word in this sentence. It’s an insight that just got written down. And we’re just in time. Here comes another one. Here comes another now. Oops. It was just here. Where’d it go?

Heraclitus got it right: life is flux. Everything flows. Panta Rhei (πάντα ῥεῖ ) in ancient Greek. Meaning change is the ultimate reality. The current in the stream is the most real thing about the stream. Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily for life is but a dream.