Extraterrestrial Bingo

Let me tell you about extraterrestrial bingo: it’s loud. They put the speakers over my head. And the microphone keeps moving. Most of the organisms here are old. And from another planet. I see a lot of tentacles. A lot of auras and bugeyes. Everyone seems to know the rules. Which proves what the physicists say: bingo is pervasive and uniform throughout the universe.

We’ve always known that, though, haven’t we? The light follows the sun over the horizon and we call that glow twilight. Because it’s sad. Though sometimes glorious. It’s all a matter of perspective. Right? It’s at twilight that we come together, the time when borders dissolve. We’ve always suspected that, always intuited that nugget of cognition: that the mysterious energy holding the universe together is a spirit of fun. The universe expands because it’s laughing.

I’m a caller. I take the numbered balls one by one out of a cradle at random and call the number. Idlaviv from the planet Eobo shouts “bingo!” Idlaviv wins a margarita, which s/he (there’s no specific gender or pronoun for Idlaviv, who resembles a squid with dreadlocks) sucks from a glass with a long, flexible proboscis.

None of the stakes here are big. None of these extraterrestrials need money. They don’t have money. They don’t understand money. They only have Being. I relate to them completely. And I’m good at what I do. I never understood money either. I know you once needed money. Before they arrived. The extraterrestrials. Though we don’t call them extraterrestrials anymore. We call them Beings. We are all beings. My head’s been turned around, let me tell you.

I wasn’t always a caller. I worked the fracking rigs in North Dakota. And before that I had a small farm. Couldn’t make the farm work. Too much corporate control. I couldn’t make decisions for myself. I was told what seeds to plant. What pesticides to use. All of it toxic and price-controlled, of course. Well, the pests are all gone now. And so is my farm.

The money on Wall Street sucked up everything. It was based on a future that didn’t exist. Trillions of dollars, pulled out of the air. And when that house of cards crashed, money was worthless. Everything the money stood for had turned out to be empty. This was mainly debt. Debt servicing debt. Until it became so overwhelmingly obvious that the whole setup was a hallucination. Did I say it crashed? That’s inaccurate. It couldn’t crash, because there was nothing to crash. The entire scheme was a fiction, and fictions don't crash. Fictions are a wine that turn a light on in the mind or delude a population into believing wealth is capital. Which is a capital swindle. And cannot endure. And the next thing you see out your window is a whole lot of hungry people. 

That’s when the first ships began to arrive. And then more and more. Planet Earth became an amusement park, an Orlando of the Cosmos, a Disneyland of the Void. A Vegas for Interstellar Beings. Most of whom, it turns out, love bingo. Poker? Forget it. How do you read faces when some of these organisms don’t have faces? Monopoly? Yuk. They hate it. It’s a game for the criminally insane. Nope. They like bingo. Bingo reigns supreme.

Our town isn’t big. It’s just a little grid of streets and houses in Nevada whose small population once mined silver and gold. I like my job. Though it’s not really a job. I get paid in pomegranates and shiny, extraterrestrial doodads that put funny colors on the walls and emanate vibrational waves that fill you with lightness and euphoria.

My wife and I live modestly. I have a house and a toolshed. Which I don’t actually own. Owning anything has already become an obsolete concept. There’s just a tacit agreement with the entire community that everyone’s needs should be fulfilled without obligation or condition. A house and privacy are considered needs. This recognition of intrinsic value in all organic and yes – even inorganic matter - promotes harmony. Are there contradictions, inconsistencies, disparities at play in this community? Yes. Many. But as our crazy, sometimes turbulent tournaments show, there is a core phenomenon holding it altogether, and that core phenomenon is bingo. 

My calling as a caller is just that, a summons to the richness of spirit that permeates all things. It’s something I do to make these Beings happy. And they are happy. They somehow managed to accomplish what only a few on Planet Earth had been able to do: find wealth in Being. Sounds corny, I know, but there you have it: bingo!

Poetry vs Money

Money: printed on paper. Poetry: printed on paper.

Money: a form of exchange. Poetry: a form of exchange.

Money: can’t eat it. Poetry: can’t eat it.

Money: based on both the value of the commodity and the credibility of the promise to redeem it for the commodity. 

Poetry: based on experience, perception, intellect, feeling, & fire. 

Money: the more you have, the more you need more of it.

Poetry: the more you have, the more you need more of it.

Money: everybody worships it.

Poetry: everybody hates it.

Money: acquiring it is difficult & requires a lot of aggressive behavior to maintain it.

Poetry: writing it is difficult & requires a lot of aggressive behavior to get people to read it & hear it.

Money: can be pulled out of the air at any time by the Federal Reserve Bank.

Poetry: can be pulled out of the air at any time by anyone with an affinity for language.

Money: buys power, politicians, sex, drugs, private islands, & cultural influence.

Poetry: buys nothing, has limited influence, & walks around on eight legs building webs & sticky metaphors.

Money: big demand, limited supply.

Poetry: no demand, infinite supply.

Money: responsible for wars, famines, oppression, crime, income inequality & technological solutions that make things worse.

Poetry: raises the intellect, disdains easy solutions, questions everything, reverses logic, subverts authority, promotes loitering & daydreaming, enriches the enigma that is existence, responsible for visions, religions, & drug addiction. It doesn’t make things better, or worse; it just makes things bigger, fleshier, wetter, intensified, cockeyed, codified, magnified, bona fide, occupied, stratified, amplified & glorified.

The Theatre Of Benevolent Chairs

Stress inducts disorder. Ticks, for example, or dormers. Windows get stuck to my arms & I have to run as hard as I can on all eight tentacles until I come to an enchanted forest & jack my modulations into wax figurines. This jets through the sagas creating light. I feel the mass of an overhanging foulard swaying back & forth in perfect nonchalance, the creation of a moment whose fabrication nudges the palliation of tiptoe tundra. I spy a mammoth in the works. I feel like an Alaska of cunning nouns & funnies. Call me lapidarian, but the rocks are reciprocal & the mutinies inflated with thermometer nibbles. Primped jurisdictions in pumped transfusion.

Who was the first human to say ‘water’? And what was their word? Their word for water. In Norwegian vann. German wasser. Zulu amanzi. Welsh dŵr. Vietnamese nước. My gaze sometimes turns to the mouthwash on the counter and stays there, lost in that beautiful blue of the liquid, cool & divine. The embryo of a novel crawls out of the bottle & begins to evolve. Characters develop, ideas are floated, & night glitters in its empire. Still here? Still reading? Thank you. Welcome to the Theatre of Benevolent Chairs. There are tigers in my breath.

The gerrymander has a knob, or so they say, but they’ll say anything to get a vote, or a froth of media attention. The ebb and flow of things never ceases. The rapids are engorged with momentum. My confidence is gaudy. My skepticism is husbanded by spleen & a box of greasy pencils. The retorts are ponytails worn by redheads in a gale of portraits & teakettles. And now the salon is yawning & all the furniture is maudlin as a matinee in October. I hear the song of the cuckoo. I feel the charm of molecules dancing patterns of bone & ballet into tutu & gnu.

Thighbone jackhammer notch. The litmus you know is better than the perturbation you don’t. I’m not importunate so much as Victorian in my surgical gown & fleshy metrics. The quality of mercy is queasy, but relevant. I strain after it when the punctures are hunchbacked & monogrammed. The liqueurs are flip but the goshawks resemble harpoons. And my legs itch.

It occurs to me sometimes that this petulance may one day lead to invective. Oilcloth in a kitchen sink. Outlets on the walls of a sublet. Electricity from a wire of loud refreshment. Ears in Austin. Indigence in Redding. Holiness in Tucson. An oncoming largesse lashed to a radiant goodwill. Hula hoops are hoots. A pinch of plausibility in a play about futility. Bloodhounds on my trail. Dogs as Gods. Doodads as dew dads. Sunday lingered in glue. Manners as manicures. My feet are ok in a hotel. I have a keen understanding of reality. Until I don’t. The horizon is lined with mastodons & the midnight sun enters the song of the postman, at which time it turns blue.

Bamboo Hairdo Breakthrough

Nothing is better than improvising thought. It’s a euphoric occasion. The mettle of the mind is experienced as a phenomenology of the soul, a forge of creativity creating meaning that is constantly changing as interpretation grows & develops. One day sooner or later it happens to everybody. The forehead folds into a toaster & the mind makes up its mind to spend the day lying around or go mingle with the crowd. Hope is a painter loading phenomena into a boat for a voyage across the River Styx. This is what it looks like: a reflection on a downtown window.

One must adapt to the world in the best way possible. We kiss behind the stepladder. The world continues to turn. We hold the nipple of a wet feeling. We push it to the end of a sentence. It drops on the floor & explodes into clouds. Everything drips opinion. I encourage the park & watch the evening sky grow dark. I like to feel water by watching the lake break our eyes into radio dials. I’m undone by intending to go somewhere & then not going. Let’s just say not all ambitions reach fruition. Sometimes they feed on words & get fat. A thousand themes enliven the frogs of Texas, but I don’t know what any of them mean, & that makes the world beautiful.

Aldous Huxley thought Joyce’s fascination with etymology & words as magical powers a bit strange. Well I find that strange. Huxley discovered there an immersion in language so deep & so intense that it becomes its own reality. He found this disquieting. Not mescaline, not LSD, but language. How can this be? Language is born of absence. Who needs airplanes when you’ve got verisimilitude? This is how our biology speaks to us. Not with whispers, but burps & declarations. So this is my world: 93 words quarantined in a paragraph of glass & horseradish.

Can I have your opinion on herring? Have you ever had herring? Do you have good herring? My herring isn’t what it used to be. I often endorse stampedes of words as they gallop into my head carrying news of the outer world. The outer world is what I like to call that stipulation out there in its heavy-duty boots & helmet playing the oboe at a construction site. Harmony is precisely why I sing. If I’m feeling stentorian I will also hold moraines of hearth & heaven, cradling them in my arms like baptismal palettes, gobs of color in monstrous shawls of zodiacal vertigo. And this is what I call a quadrant, or sundial. The integration happens later, largely in the nude.

If I have a codicil I have a monocle. This is because icons flash with comical hairdos & strange epiphanies. You know what I mean. The monotony of monuments. The botany of consonants. This is what time does: it manacles pianos of sunlight to the prattle of a spectral ambiguity. Which happens a lot around here. It’s a process, not a neoteny. Neotony is not for nothing. The adolescent in us never dies. I’m sometimes so intimate with a sentence that I come to my senses at night & occupy the quiet mathematics of the air. The world of language is not its traffic lights, but the musk of its investigations. The hum of neurons mediating the smells of the kitchen.

Fricassee Of Despair

Metaphysical nihilism cannot negate the impulse toward understanding. No, but it can get in the way of carving tight arcs, smearing turns, straight lining chutes & floating in powder. A good pair of skis should be your first priority. A disinterested perspective should be your second. You’ll also need a good pair of boots, a wad of cash, & a towel for the sauna. This is how life gives itself to us: in bits & pieces of stringy incentive. Things like clothes, hair, accessories, and so on. You know the drill. We hold these truths to be self-evident: Tuscan bread is best eaten with a drizzle of olive oil, cotton should be washed in warm water, & the truth of being is Friday.

I’m not sure what to think of dance. It’s an odd thing to do. And then there’s the guy I saw today holding a device over the street, moving it along, it had a pointed rod & a meter at the other end, I think it was some form of sonar, radar, it made pretty sounds, melodic little bleeps, I assume he was trying to find a pipe, or a sewer line. So you see, the romantic spirit isn’t dead. It’s just in a different time zone. That being, of course, the underworld. Something like Florida. Or outer space. Here’s what I think: the zeitgeist needs a bath. “We are all the leaves of one tree,” remarks Thich Nhat Hanh. But I see a lot of those leaves are rotting on the ground while a few at the top are getting abundant sunlight. My point being: the elbow is in control of its own reality. It just is.

A lot of conflict emerges from the discrepancy that we have of our feelings and the material reality which temporarily gives them birth, said Lucretius. Well, yeah, I’d say that’s got something to teach me about me. How about you? And why? Why is pain necessary? Pain doesn’t contain what it doesn’t understand. The lessons of life are relatively easy. Eat well, keep warm, get plenty of sleep. Try not to kill anyone. Above all, pay attention. Notice things. Care for things. Love animals, they have to put up with human beings. I blow soap bubbles for our cat. Do thoughts have substance? In a word, no. And so I became a dumbfuck. Blowing bubbles.

No fiery declaration, no thirsty desire, no blind passion, just loyalty to a specific being after exploring the world. Isn’t that what it’s all about? I never know how to display my emotions. Incandescence doesn’t go well with small talk & wheat thins. Intensity is easily mistaken for madness. Someone may be teetering between life & death on an operating table. Above them hovers the ghost of an exuberance. The universe does not necessarily conform to our language. Consciousness is a chiaroscuro of fire escapes & alleys. This is what life does when death isn’t around. It walks around in my blood until it finds a hand & a reason to write itself down.

My first instinct in all things is to grip something & hang on for dear life. I know this feeling. It’s called fricassee of despair. It starts as a head of lettuce & ends with a new religion. A big one, with turnstiles & polo. Spinoza saw God as nature itself.  And why not? Just look at what I’m wearing. A tiara, a tutu, & a butterfly wand topped with faux gems & flowing ribbons. Now do you believe me? Grab that idea & yank it right out like a squishy mash of thought. Did you know Chekhov's body was transported to Moscow in a refrigerated railway car meant for oysters? A little ironic, yes, but also a little pragmatic, really. The inexplicable reconciled to the veridical.

Polysemy Park

The charm of any theory is that it’s refutable. It can be huge & ludicrous. It can float in the mind like a cruise ship. You can take it with a grain of salt. You can give it a dirty look. But one day the “why” arises & everything begins. Theories are a weariness tinged with amazement. My favorite theory is the theory that language determines & structures our apprehension of reality. This implies that if a lively language is keeping you from sleep you will awaken the next day & speak the language of dreams, which is a language similar to living in a city. At first, nothing makes sense. And then everything does. And that’s when the world is a very soft voice, lips unzipping a larger peculiarity. Kelp & Irish moss. Peter Green with a piece of cheese in his hair.

What’s the difference between a theory & a chair? A chair is a structure such for sitting, kissing, spitting, quitting, emitting, omitting & unremitted knitting. Theories are insights juiced by a spirit of inquiry. Theories are wonderfully abstract & gallant. I’ve got theories about everything. I believe that fungus has intelligence, that dunes are beautifully sculpted by the wind, & that when money becomes a deity the sublime gets buried in bullshit. New Age Silicon Valley billionaires dining on steak & lobster at Burning Man. Tent cities for the have nots. Teslas & tanning salons for the haves. And so on. Theories do not cure ignorance. But at least they don’t create it.

Death is a private affair. But not always. It impels reflection. I feel the sympathy of earth in a loaf of bread, how the universe is matter & energy, which is nice, but really, it’s mostly sourdough. You know? I can feel you under my skin. I feel you squirm. You’re thinking: who is this asshole? My brain feels gray as an operating table. Bewildering as a tumor, dusty as an old book. Rattlesnakes aren’t cruel they’re just rattlesnakes. Morality doesn’t exist in nature. Grace & energy belong to the realm of the highway. This is where words & people collide creating sparks. I just left behind a lot of ambiguity. I’m often trailed by a lot of ambiguity. It’s an occupational hazard, like polysemy. Millions of words suffer this affliction daily. Donate now.

The sun’s liquor falls into my refraction. My reflection. My misbegotten swivel. My enzymes & sleeves. The modality thickens & confesses a nibble at probability. It’s impractical to write anything anymore & so the writing has never been better. Everything’s been said & there’s nothing to say. Not saying anything requires a lot of words. Ask Mayor Pete. Go ahead ask him. I like to hobnob with the prolific. The subconscious is a furious recreation. Introspection stands on three legs immoderate trembling & Gothic. It takes a guitar to cry. But it takes a haiku to iron a shirt.

I dwell within the colors surrounding me. Once, I pulled a bronze shield from the dirt, brushed it off, & admired the workmanship. But I’ll stop fooling around now & move toward you with tomatoes & kilohertz. The external world is the work of our organs. Eyes, ears, nose, mouth. Appearances & dreams. Movies & pizza. There’s an energy in the head demanding kingdoms. The mind craves meaning. And the field expands. There is a chain of cause & effect. Avoid guns & knives. Consider Mahler. A vowel without a consonant is just a naked sound. But a vowel enclosed within a sack of consonants will develop a spine & get up & walk around in your mind.

Something Wet And Flowing

Sometimes the highway is a vernacular of color you don’t often find in the politics of the soul. But the gas stations are alright. You can usually find a little soap left & something interesting to read in the mirror. It’s amazing what transformations take place, what apocalypses occur when enough is not enough & variables curtsy to surveys sponsored by billionaires. It’s why I do this. It’s why I do anything. I do it for what Artaud said about art: “No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.”

Being is ineffable. Incalculable & incomprehensible. Sometimes I will feel the explosion of something huge in my being. I don’t know what it is. I like to use the word ineffable. This would be a good occasion in which to use the word ineffable. But I won’t say ineffable. One must be careful in giving names to things, especially feelings. Naming is a form of conjuration. It is how Prospero conjured storms. Imagine that: standing on the balcony, a big stick raised defiantly, exploding the matrix to smithereens. The artist is not an army but has the strength of an army. It’s because he has the secret of death in his arsenal.

I used to have ambitions. Now I just shake, rattle, & roll. The universe happens everywhere, even in a John Ashbery poem. I like extreme, indeterminate values, but I don’t like dribbling, & I don’t like war. Daytime is not a brain. Do we really know what we want? I do. I want a nice easy death that doesn’t cost anyone too much money & a few comfortable years before it happens. Also, hot dogs & marijuana. The mind spins its webs & settles in the imagination as postulates of something wet & flowing. Something like a river. Like silence. Like sunset on the Ganges.

I know I’m wordy, but I seethe with self-importance. May I be forgiven if I duplicate a vacuum cleaner with an actual vacuum? The immemorial heartthrob of a business portfolio leaps into consciousness like a life-style & commits temperature, a big one, like a rogue mammary gland, or Wisconsin. Wisconsin is also quite beautiful, but let’s face it, the perspectives are underexposed & maraschino. It’s better to be a lisp than a triumvirate. There’s enough ointment left in this sentence to garden a pyramid with a waddle. I say let there be mastication if the sauerkraut is getting old. Bombast is but the braille of a limitless warble, & so fungal it’s funny.

This is precisely why mushrooms belong on pizza. It’s our local anesthesia, our slice of Polynesia. Big cities make life unnatural. But it’s not all bad. There are gypsies in Barcelona, philosophers in Paris. Psychonauts at the library. Multicolored lights on Mulberry. We’re all required to play a part. Duplicity is profitable. Honesty is subversive. Just look inside the bar, the conversations shimmering & blistering. Reality is perched on a bottle of nitroglycerin. Have you ever stood in a room feeling disheveled & listless & pervaded by truth? The insolence of the guitar comes naturally. Insinuation is the metal that makes pain mechanical & hot. Purpose has a nuclear core dwelling at the heart of fate. But the breath of heaven is soft as thought.