Wanna Get Away Day

A Möbius sonnet in a quantum armchair attracts photons. it’s not uncommon to find me snorkeling on the ceiling on Wanna Get Away Day. My revolt insisted on moving toward willpower. I knew this day would come. But I didn’t expect it to be so down-to-earth. The smell of clay runs toward the abstract unless it can be treated with cabbage. I have often found this to be the case. The first time I saluted a flag I felt grabbed by something. That's when I knew that one day I would have to fight a strategic adversary within. A bald eagle or a gnome embalmed in honey. Meanwhile I get by on selling cashews at the flea market. My face is cracked and withered and so invites a degree of trust. Life is a pilgrimage, that’s for sure. The trail is instinct with dispossession. Primitive ferns and lizards. The abyss glows with lava. And is there to remind me what a joke a lot of these streaming services are. A lot of motels don’t even put the big screen TVs where you can watch them from your bed. Nobody watches them. They look at their phones instead. Travel boosts my appreciation of divine guidance. My hearing thickens at the horizon. Maturity has charms that youth never had. At age sixteen I crashed into a wall that I later discovered is a phenomenon called reality. People in heated arguments are fond of invoking that word. I puzzle over it, pummel my fists into it like a punchbag. As I got older, I began to see it sag like the breasts of an old woman running an automotive shop in Lubbock. The word itself convulsed on the page like a furry accordion doing a mazurka. Men shivering in doorways. Memories aglow in the dark. That first day in Chicago when Bo Diddley opened the door to Chess Records. That sense of the beyond that never goes away, and generates such a lovely sense of anarchy. It’s a fiery little word, tough like Barcelona leather, and built like a Möbius sonnet.

The Meaning Of Hair

I sometimes get asked what the meaning of hair is. It's a gleam of luxuriant orchids folded into words. I saw this once in a Jim Jarmusch movie. None of the ones that have been made but the one that had never been made. It starred Charles Bronson and Gina Lollobrigida. It was called The Spur Below The Cowboy Exalts His Corpus. It was about the practice of phenomenology at a biker’s rally. For example, the premise of chains, and how that might be perceived as a symbol for intentionality. I’ve seen stranger things. There's a spectrum of abalone that leans against the rain as it vanishes into the afternoon. But what really gets my attention are forklifts. I love to watch them in operation. The stellar conditions in the sanguinity of elbows is a slightly more common phenomenon. I see it a lot in bars. Somebody gets off a creaky stool and walks over to the jukebox and drops a quarter and punches a couple of buttons. Minute later you’re hearing Needles and Pins. Rain pelts the window. You see your old face in the mirror. The one you had before you got old. And made movies in your mind while seeding the fields with flax and barley.

Bela Lugosi's Refrigerator

What if you gazed at an object so hard it sprouted blue blames? What if the object were a fork? Or a female breast? Objects form the substance of the world. Therefore, they cannot be donkeys. Donkeys carry things on their back. Pickaxes and propositions. Roughly speaking: objects are inscrutable. Mute. Completely mute. Except for microphones. Coffee machines and blenders. The hiss of irons, the chatter of jackhammers. Objects contain the possibility of all states of affairs, and are analogous to tutti frutti. Propositions can only represent the whole reality if they’re plugged into a source of energy, a 50-watt generator or Bela Lugosi’s refrigerator. It all gets rhythmical in the end. And we all become bits of information on an enormous grid. A phenomenon called social media. Where the medium is the message and the message is infinitely diffuse, the microwave radiation from the Big Bang and a wop bop a loo bop a lop bom bom.

Hippopotamus Pearls

It’s quite easy to imagine William Butler Yeats sitting in an armchair, thinking. But it’s not so easy to imagine Philippe Petit balanced on a cable 1,000 feet above the bottom of the Grand Canyon reading Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen. Or is it? I change my mind. It’s easy. It’s easy to change your mind. Let me restate that. It’s easy to change my mind. Not your mind. Another person’s mind is a secret so deep that it only appears in glimpses, in flashes of wit, in passionate declarations, in shouts and sighs. But mostly in words. Hippopotamus pearls and a village of levers. Are minds even singular? Are they unique? Or are they singularly similar? What makes a mind unique? I’ve got a mind like a parasail in a dome of mollusks. Bulging and pregnant. But when I hit the ground the little homunculus I’m imagining as me in the dome of my mind vanishes because ultimately it just wasn’t that interesting. The scene shifts. Everything feels like a highway, even in my own head. Maybe it was all those years of hitchhiking. This is where you learn philosophy. This is where you learn about human nature. The Hyperion storm of the universe. All those spirals and spheres and nebulae in the cosmos. And here on earth the caprices of wind and undulations of wheat. But most of all patience. Hitchhiking is where you learn patience. And trust. Not a full, unconditional trust. That would be stupid. What you want is a Farmer’s Almanac, a qualified trust. A refined trust. A calculated trust. In bridges. In Newtonian mechanics. In toes and planetariums. In doctors and car mechanics because you have to. You have no choice. Unlike politicians, in whom trust is a joke. A toothy grin. And a mouth full of platitudes. Everybody likes platitudes. They’re designed to excite you to do something you’re probably never going to do. But it’s nice to dream, isn’t it? Hence, William Butler Yeats sitting in an armchair, turning. Turning where? Turning and turning in the widening gyre.

Hour Of The Bonfire

Did you ever have an entire dialogue stewing in your head all day and you couldn’t stop it? They say it’s advisable to suck venom from a wound but I don’t think language works that way. It’s not that kind of venom. It’s too abstract. And the scenery isn’t right. Everything is so new now it already feels aphoristic. I’ve never been the piano player in a band before. That’s ok. When the world becomes impossible the best thing to do is bake bread. I learned to swim in Wisconsin. But I didn’t get the full impact until I jumped into ancient mythology. Anyone my age would be able to show you a list of things they once believed that turned out to be nonsense. No need to go into it. It annoys people. It’s easy to be yourself when you’re not around. Think of it as a walk in the forest. The flapping of its wings creates a big lightning. And becomes paper again.

My job is an open secret. I have things to say. I agree, the sidewalk does seem to grimace with prolongation. People look at me like a light bulb filled with blinking ants. I feel the balm of nothingness and fondly reminisce the smells of an old hotel in Memphis. For I am the chitchat bird and this is my story. One night when I was cleaning the barn a molecular storm churned in my muscle and I saw the electric unicorn neon sparkle. And nothing else mattered. This is snowball art not Parcheesi. I found a smaller bit and succeeded at making a hole. I found a universe on the other side of a coconut palm. This isn’t surrealism this is contingency pure and simple. Infinity takes a long time to get here. The letters heat up and I dream on paper I’m twisted like a parachute. I congratulate the toad in a cloud of sprockets and turn to face the sun.

I tried to find a practical use for my pessimism. I should be more optimistic. Were it not for ruining my pessimism. It’s the Hour of the Bonfire. If these words are present to you the past is right behind. It’s where I get all my pessimism. The sound of a drummer brushing a snare drum is like lingerie falling to the floor. How can you not love that? I had to get out of Dodge quick. There was a noise on the ground. It was time to shift gears. Move forward. Put the past in my rearview mirror. I had fun sitting down at a table unfolding my woes. But that was then. This is now. I stand before you a naked oaf. It’s something of a luxury to be dissociated from yourself. Nothing to prove. Just a slice of doorknob pie and a way to punch the unsayable into the sayable.

I once heard it said that deception has eleven elevators and ten combustible gags. I’m paraphrasing. The important thing is to proceed with prudence, and knit. You never know who you’re going to offend. Funny how words come in and out of the language. Take awesome, for example. Awesome is an awesome example of semantic leaching. And it’s a shaky fact that nicknames create chameleons. Glass only pretends to be transparent. I think what it’s really doing is lifting us into the sublime. Listen: I can hear the fish whisper. A piece of fleece in the hand feels amazing. But watch it. It’s so easy to trigger people these days. All I need is a microphone & a frequency. I will rise like Godzilla at a Zillow rally. I have a plan based on spit.

I said goodbye to California just before San José became Silicon Valley, and headed north. I believe spangles have a future. I hope so. I’m completely lost around the auxiliary mode. All those surfaces, lines & angles make a beautiful setting, but I feel awkward around octagons. That said, I’m fascinated by Renaissance plumbing. Go figure. Something there is about a thick white tablecloth that induces good manners. Put a woman’s scarf on it though and things change. Everything turns immoderate and saying anything feels like smuggling a provocative thought across the border of decorum into the realm of anything goes. Which it does. Nobody can control a language. Tell that to the censors. Once you prune a tree you’re forever pruning a tree.

So come on, take my hand, walk with me. Kinesis emboldens temptation. Let’s hurry. I’m feeling chromatic and I want an éclair. It’s one thing to be in love with technique and another to be infatuated with varnish. Nothing is ever truly extracurricular, but if it is, so much the merrier. Everyone imagines the bartender is some form of therapist. This might be. When you start to see people in terms of decibels, and you can’t really function, people can surprise you with their parables. Quantum equations have otherworldly meanings. Kung Pao Chicken, for example. Or life on an island. I need to gain a better understanding of shade. I feel like there’s something there but I can’t see it. Even the prepositions hang loose. That kind of sentence. That kind of day. 

 

Loop Morph

The sentence evolves into coherence as a herd of lips moving over the page with the dexterity of fingers picking up words along the way. Everything that exclaims the fertility of mass is eager to consummate a semblance of grammatical outboard that can push us forward toward the opposite shore. Which is exactly what a subject is. What a subject is subject to. Either a fly rod or a strong wind blowing over your casting shoulder. The density of mass which shines out of a stein is proof enough of Innsbruk. But language is more like thaw, the romantic thermodynamics of a mutual couch. It requires a warm hand and a hard outer layer of wilderness. If you’re like me you’ve probably already spent a lot of time googling solutions for the human condition. It’s like casting a line into a void of uncertainty hoping something bites and dreading the moment it does. Knowledge is always a little disturbing and slippery, like a fimbriated moray. Language comes from the other side of where I started. It slid through the unconscious like a penguin and emerged as a full-blown human. The names of the dead stream from the mouths of the living assuming a ghostly but vigorous existence. The constitutional crisis is now become a tenuity. More like a referee than a referendum. A man with a black bowtie trying to separate two sweaty grammars, even though everyone knows it’s fake. It’s hardcore theatre. We once had a body of laws but when the laws became a body the appetites profited from the situation and nominated themselves relentless. They ate the entire country. And then ordered a bowl of Venezuela for dessert. Proposal is more than a dispersal of words. It’s a form of carnation, a state of being with an added personal touch. You might think of it as something slid forward on the counter for a fuller appreciation of its many hues and facets. It’s not exactly as if I were trying to induce a hysterical reaction to something fairly mundane, but I would like to expand my options a little. I wasn’t sure it would happen like this. But it did. It stood first as a significance, filling itself with stone mullions and tracery. The imagination does this. It decants, allowing its fragrance to envelop you in voluptuous impracticalities. There are many challenges that I pass on to my predecessor, but burdening the past with my irrelevance isn’t one of them. I’m much more interested in zoetropes than proctoscopes. The big door closed on the riotous outer world and a light beamed through the rose window unhesitatingly defining itself as an ontological phenomenon in its own right. 

 

There's A New Sound Now To Figure Out

There’s a new sound now to figure out. It’s a hard crisp slightly metallic sound, a thud with force and purpose. It’s the two panels on our new living room window shutting. They have handles, and slide easily within their grooves. I’m not used to it yet. They haven’t been opened much in the past several months. But now it’s May and the air is getting warmer and it feels good to air the apartment out. Keep them open until the interior smells like spring. The noise has an image: panels shutting on a late afternoon in May. Crisp as an equation. Resonant as a gong.

What’s it like being a musician these days? It’s a question I put to Google. Google came back with a list of answers written by musicians, who all pretty much said the same thing: if you love making music, make music. As far as supporting yourself, it’s really hard. They advise crowdfunding, live shows, and streaming services. Pretty glib response. And rather dreary, except for the live shows. AI has already begun undermining the market. Making a ton of money, but destroying the romance of creativity, and the quest for something real, something genuine, something pure and new and exhilarating. Imagine a medieval laboratory in a chamber illumined by a liquid boiling in the alembic of an alchemist’s quest for the philosopher’s stone. I think that’s a much better vision. Although it’s not music. It’s an image of artistry as a pursuit for the divine. Which is a little pretentious. Hard to picture the Ramones on a quest for the divine. Buy why should that be? As soon as I make one statement, another bangs into it from behind, and I have to start all over again, trying to make a coherent hat out of a brim of nonsense. Not a surprise. Much of the time is spent in idle speculation. And sometimes I just want to be sedated.

Will the public discern true beauty from the digitally counterfeit? Let’s hope so. Does freshly poured concrete dry in the rain? Yes, but not well. It’s weakened by the rain. The coolest thing to be in the 60s was a rock musician, or a writer. What is the coolest thing to be now? A billionaire? A game developer? A mobile app developer? An Ethical Hacker? An InfoSec analyst? A cockroach? A dung beetle? An AI sex robot?

I’ve got a satchel of prose and a ticket to Rye. Why Rye? Why not Minot? No particular reason. I gave up on particular reasons a particular time ago. I’m not particular now. I’m completely lenticular. And occasionally perpendicular. I’m at my best when I’m horizontal. And on a train to Kauai. By way of the locomotive I just plucked from the air. It’s made of ice, and rice, and extracurricular devices, such as a Dental Nitrous Oxide System purchased at Na Huhu Lani in Kauai. It doesn’t ride on rails it rides on dolphins and mermaids, and is fueled by Bo Diddley.   

I’m getting better at it. Not sure what. But I feel I’m getting better at it. Better at whatever it is I’m getting better at. How could I not? Do anything long enough and it becomes a meditation on an acoustic guitar, a trance by the fireplace, a horseback ride up a switchback in Bryce Canyon, or landing a rocket ship on the icy surface of Pluto, which I defiantly continue to think of as a planet, maybe my favorite planet, other than earth, which is melting and burning down, but it’s resilient, it’s been through all that before, and thanks to a lot of cyanobacteria we now have Zen gardens and green tea. The feelings grow distant with time, broader, more universal. The perceptions slip into various modes of expansion and malleability, depending on one’s capacity for sitting still for a really long time, and willingness to let things dilate and recede into mist.

I often wonder who uses those desks at hotels and motels. I imagine the mobile phone has obliterated that form of writing. Missing someone, being somewhere else, seeing something new and wanting to put it into words. It’s easy to picture someone circa the 20s or 30s doing that just before going to the opera or a walk down the shoulder of the highway to the closest roadhouse café. Or the 50s. There sits Kerouac in a Los Gatos attic hammering out the details of existence in a mode of creative transport fueled by whiskey and Benzedrine. Or the 60s. There I am at the Arcata Hotel in 1968 laboring to figure out how all those poets in New American Poetry created such lively poetry. It was a verbal paradise. By the 70s the whole idea of belle lettres was sadly obsolete. The sensibility did not comport well with Disco. And by 2024 bookstores once engorged with a gazillion titles had become stuffed with tchotchkes, T-shirts and coffee mugs.  

Favorite hotel is the Hotel Récamier in the 6e arrondissement of Paris, by the Church of Saint-Sulpice, where Baudelaire was baptized, and around the corner on rue Ferou are all 100 lines of Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre. Life felt so different there. Richer, headier, more stimulating all around due to a beautiful Baroque architecture with its flourishing colonnades and classical tablature and bartizans and bay windows and chimeras rather than the brutalist architecture of the U.S. and its aggressively drab Philip Johnson office buildings. I enjoyed awakening in bed and turning my head in the direction of the window to see the wall of the cathedral where Baudelaire had been baptized and feeling a familial connection, as if Baudelaire had been my grandparent.

I’m also partial to the Hotel Sorrento in Seattle, where I got married. And Free Spirit Spheres in Vancouver, British Columbia, which are pods hanging from trees. And the Time Out Of Mind on Mars, which overlooks Elysium Planitia, and features a stunning vista of absolutely nothing.