Looking Out From The Shore

Broom spirits swept the diving board clean. Potato soup fulfills the goals of the stomach and makes it a festival. Go pearls, go snow. Sequels whistle my art. I’m the hotel jewel man. The dwarf does nothing fast. His very absence fulminates in melody like an idea. Slothful ingots of cocoa belie the noodle barometer. It’s a cracked elfin bronze, like my sister’s hat.

My eyes trigger the refrigerator, which whirs into action, creating a cold like that of the arctic, but less strident, and more like the jellied veritas of congelation, or marmalade. A daily disaster of butter chews through the confusion and grasps the helm of appetite. A cricket climbs up to my hip and chirps like a second pelvis. Later, after gorging on a chocolate doughnut the size of Isamu Noguchi’s Black Sun, I stood in a field of algebra palpating a polynomial. Eventually, it sneezed, and made a new library. A Martian emissary arrived on the horizon with a truckload of percussion, and we all floated in hindsight, believing the past to be a form of Gothic realism, from which we harvested lyrics for our songs and mosses for our podiatry.   

Hunger personifies the gondolier whose short nimble wings carry us into the domain of the invisible. Battle ears are the nutmeg of analysis. Buy a bingo lobster and enjoy the outdoors. The Sparkle Club was its own happy setting, harked the fierce cactus with a lisp and a desert frown. And so I sat down and amended my adjustments to the world with a loud cockatoo obtained from cocaine and an incendiary dimple I let fall in a pile of innocence. Do not attempt this at home. You will only confuse the neighbors.

I believe a shrill cry will cause the gates of Hades to creak open and hairdos to rumble with the kind of benign neglect we saw in the middle of the last century, when everyone was trying out new modalities of thought, and crashing into religions. That was then. This is now. Scraps of morning tinkle in our conversation. Masturbating euphemisms scratch at everyone’s door, yearning for sanctuary, and a nice warm bed. A thin melee of unbalanced perspective savors of provocation. The hibiscus dares state itself as a hazy wild noise, and we sink into the field wanting a few more napkins to daub the mustard from the sun.

I know what it is. The source of the problem. If you want to call this a problem. I let things happen. I encourage things to happen. And the outcome is rubber, as always, and a little bit custard, and vanilla extract. I crawled through a hole in the eye of a newborn and saw the future of orthodontics. This made me understand the need for pepper, but where was the salt, where was the empathy for paper, and the people that make paper, and the trees and streams that bring paper into being? It was all turning around in the mind, exciting as the biology of retail. 

I opened the door to the kitchen, and there were onions on the table and soap. I’ve always been eager to generalize from actual experience. The potato chips are worth exploring, yes, but what is better, the ears or the tongue? Flexibility punishes bronze. It was a muslin Monday and the canopy of my bed trembled with onanistic conviction. The cat ate quenelle by the candle. A bullish feeling of streaks brought me to the brink of oblivion. The view was ageless. And that includes seaweed. 

The Outer Limits Of Things

I like the outer limits of things. The places where the limits are vague and the patterns are decoys. Like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. This is the Zone, a dank, gloomy, industrial outpost in the middle of a post-apocalyptic wasteland where the natural laws of physics are rendered bizarrely ineffectual. The goal is to find a legendary mystical room in which all desires are gratified. One begins to feel a wide gap between the empirical and the numinous. It’s a dilemma. Navigational equipment is useless. You have to go by intuition. This is difficult. It’s a question of subtleties. It’s a little like trying to choose among the many CDs in the glove compartment of a car. It’s never a rational decision. You’re reaching for something otherworldly in a grave of the mundane. Impulse is the only way out. You just grab what’s available and stick it in the slot and it gets sucked into the player on the dashboard and music comes streaming out of the speakers. If it’s Bob Dylan that’s ok, but if it’s Burt Bacharach forget it. A line has been crossed. No one is going to San José today. You’ve just been initiated to the divinity of the undecided. This is a resin without reason whose relish is a raison. The heat will come on in a second. Turn right at the next corner. Turn left at the next light. Or don’t. Google hasn’t mapped any of this. Nor could it.

The same way it takes more than a bag of almonds to create a tiger out of a wad of hypothesis, a beautiful autonomy hums within the genesis of thought until it assumes form in somebody’s alphabet and promotes the rhapsody of substance. That thunder you hear is a rose bursting out of a bud of punctuation. Sometimes I don’t know whether I’m being chased or followed by something in a dream. What goes on in my head rarely, if ever, goes on outside my head. I suspect this is the situation for most people. If something going on in my head happens, also, to be going on outside my head, I make sure my gun is loaded. All truths are half-truths. Each minute of each day a Cecropia moth slips through the circuitry of a clock, and it leaves a shadow. The shadow, which assumes multiple forms, can carry a mountain of prose or a thought so light that no amount of gravity can hold it down. This is the birth of fiction. There are roots in the jungle that can remedy almost any disease, and if you toss a scarf or a handkerchief into a stream you can see it happen. Enigmatic meanings storm the walls of logic. Reason dwells in a granite hotel. Every fixation has a phantom presence. On Saturday we paint scorpions on our foreheads and on Sunday we divert our confusion with pieces of amber and volumes of ambiguity. Those of us who escape the prison of the ego find the providence of breath. Intoxicating fumes emerge from the abyss. When a boat appears in the mist of the river Styx you must pay the ferryman the coin that was deposited in your mouth before you began this journey, though he also accepts debit and credit cards, mobile payments and electronic bank transfers. He will not accept checks.

I need turpentine for a noun mist. And a diminishing pain in a trance of grapefruit. We should give our pleasure a month to get used to the easy darkness of the cathedral. I’m overflowing the hay of my necessity to create a tenable circumlocution. This is the place to do it. This is the place to sit down and eat a sundae. I call it Xenon. This is my summons to one and all to come and join me. Bring a dog. Bring a God. Bring a lapidarian. Bring an abstraction. Bring a truckload of abstractions. Especially blue ones. I’m stitching a tincture of universe. And it must be blue. Blue is the color of reality. If mass is a bath at the very beginning of flannel, then ink is a net of rain. It’s easy to affirm a reality. The hard part is convincing other people that your reality is the real reality, absolute reality, one-size-fits-all, the ultimate ululating ukulele reality, the one we all try so hard to adapt to, mistaking what is ordinary bedrock common sense with empyreal cloth.

I put the sponge in the whirlpool chamber for a reason. I need to prove how tomorrow’s parcel of time will be based on a theory of whalebone. I’m reminded of the night I discovered the ghost of a sparrow in a riverbed rock I split in half in with a mallet. It felt nimble to splash around in a swamp. I do not say this nonchalantly. Indecision claws at the gates of certainty. In youth, I aspired to be a dishwasher. But when I became an old man, I realized my true ambition, and became a semi-colon. Not many people use semi-colons anymore. They go for colons. And who wouldn’t. Colons means business. They’re not wishy-washy like semi-colons. I get it. But I still firmly believe that the semi-colon was destined for greatness in the world of punctuation; they provide habitat for a gently detached mimosa, and provide the sentence with a means to float. 

 

Letters Are Skeletons

I made a map in the sand of the island of my dreams. It hovered at the edge of absence. And smoked and trembled and quaked until it was swept away. Just like Ricky Nelson singing “Hello Mary Lou, Goodbye Heart.” I’m floating an armchair into my mind so that I can readjust to the gravity of the situation. When you get to be my age you spend so much time in the past that the present seems like glass & the future is 90 seconds to midnight on the doomsday clock. There was a time I slid down the hall in my socks crying out for the gods. Now everything is echoes. And feathers and mollusks and splatter and rhubarb. Wi-Fi bombast blood and bombs. Androids drones and homelessness. Wall Street corruption and sycophantic swordfish dinners. It used to be candles & wine. Wouldn’t it be nice to get back to that? I’ve got mosquitoes on my terrycloth sneakers. I’ve got a black magic helmet and a suitcase packed with voodoo. I’m ready to go. 

I’m immersed in pink noise. Ten hours of it, to be exact. It’s a sound therapy program for people who suffer tinnitus to get a little relief, available on YouTube. The sound masks the ringing in one’s head. It sounds like being on a passenger jet. I’m lying on a bed but it feels as if I could lean over and see clouds beneath. I find myself getting a little euphoric. The noise provides a perspective from which I can think about my experience of tinnitus more objectively. I think of the sound of background radiation and how it helped astrophysicists form their Big Bang theory. Background radiation has a pulsing buzzing sound that morphs into a monotonous sputter. It appears the entire universe has tinnitus. But in this instance the tinnitus is a pink noise that drowns my tinnitus in an ocean of sound. Why bother to travel anywhere to go look at a waterfall if you couldn’t hear the thunder of it? Tinnitus is the sound that accompanies consciousness in the same way the sound of a waterfall is the sound of its volume affirming itself in space.

You can only bend reality so far. And it takes a lot of words to do it. Though the fewer words you use the more effectively does reality bend to your will. Not knowing what reality is to begin with is a big help. Visits to the junkyard in search of a carburetor opened an avenue of thought and discovery I hadn’t anticipated. Cars don’t use carburetors anymore, they use fuel injectors, and it’s a downright shame. Carburetors are less expensive and have jets that push the gas into the combustion chambers. Fuel injection requires a lot of fiddling because of electrical components and return lines to the fuel tank, and only delivers about 10 horsepower at peak. This is a reality I’d like to bend into a CT4 Cadillac with a 2.7L Turbocharged engine, premium alloy wheels, HD color touch-display and heated seats with lumbar massage. Or I could just buy it. If I had money. Which I don’t. I could steal it. But I’m too old for jail. Like I say. You can only bend reality so far. Bend it too hard and it’ll break. You’ll find yourself standing on the shoulder of some highway, thumb out, your hair blowing in the wind as a fragment of reality speeds by.

The theater is the best place to demonstrate percussion. These are my slow night theories. I'm fresh from the soul cave. When I do my fast night theories I wear a thousand scarves and a homesick sponge. Can a dry poplar stray far from the sleet on a windy night? Not at all. The poplar needs the sleet as much as the sleet needs the poplar. Distance may be achieved in other ways. Trains, planes, and electrolytes. Needs are often served in the guise of hazard. A punch to the gut, a brawl in the alley, a perforated peptic ulcer. It’s all part of life. I find comfort in philosophy. It makes me feel cadenced and gyroscopic, like a foghorn, & gives me enough words to make a paragraph feel comfortable. Then why am I anticipating a visit from my temper? I’ve got water, food, a wife and a warm room, a slithering inkling of better possibilities awaiting us all at the gates of sequence, and a helicopter that is so perfectly derelict in explanation I weep. Some nights I just don’t feel like using capital letters for anything. And that’s ok. What irks me are leaky pipes. This winter has been particularly bad. But enough about me. What about you? What are you wearing? Am I some sort of pervert? Quite frankly, yes. But a really good one. I mean, who writes poetry in the Age of Wi-Fi? Techies rule the world, not poets. If poets ruled the world we’d have libraries everywhere and traffic lights using haikus instead of color signals. Jack Spicer would’ve survived the Beatles. Lou Welch would’ve survived the seventies. Emily Dickinson would’ve lived to be 108. And Adrian Rich would’ve been much much richer. Don’t you give up, baby, don’t you cry, don’t you give up till I reach the other side. Dick and Dee Dee. 1961. My first concert. And then I became Fredrich Nietzsche & grew a pet mustache to keep me warm and inquisitive on cold lonely nights at the edge of the known universe. Which was the parking lot at Dicks. And sometimes the wharfs in downtown Seattle smelling of sea slop and mollusks. And sometimes a bookstore open at midnight, fragrant with thought and fabrication.

Letters are skeletons. The flesh is in the imagination. If I try to slip an actual chicken into the word for chicken, there are difficulties. Needles awaken in my skin and I sprout feathers. I become a chicken. I peck and scratch at the ground. I lay an egg. I incubate an egg. The egg hatches & another language emerges. And it becomes a chicken. Soon the world is overrun with chickens, like in Kauai, which is teeming with wild chickens. This is the story of language. According to the International Society for the Understanding and Proper Feeding of Chickens. One day a chicken laid an egg and out of that egg a universe emerged, dressed in lottery tickets and pyramids, and began making sounds that mirrored the world in ways that made it appear distorted, and cotton, and imbued with aspirations toward truth and understanding. This was the world’s first chicken. But if this was the world’s first chicken, where did the egg come from? How did the egg precede the chicken? It was probably caused by heating an allegory, which caused a flame of semantic yolk to flicker within the heart of an ovoid, and become an omelet.

The Social Life

I don't like disliking anyone. My first instinct upon meeting anyone is to find common ground. It's just an instinct. It’s not a realistic plan. Common ground is boring. So I lean in close and tell the person that they have lit a fire in my soul. This doesn’t always produce happy results. The person looks stunned and doesn’t know how to respond. But it’s a start. And neither of us have made mention of the weather. Conversation is important. It’s how the language revives itself. It’s an art requiring a minimum of two people. Conversations with myself go in circles. And I always know what I’m going to say in advance. Most people are shy and averse to conversation. Starting a conversation is like cracking a safe. Once you find the right combination the door opens. Sometimes the safe is empty. But sometimes you find rapport. Things flow. Words fly. Points are made. Ideas are floated. Delicacies disentangled. Opinions weighed. Insights expanded.

The opposite thing happens when I dislike someone. Meetings tend to be accidental. And awkward. The silence must be filled. This is what weather is for. The vagaries of weather are a convenient resource. Who thought it would rain this hard today. Isn’t the snow beautiful but treacherous. It’s cold but sunny. Isn’t the sun wonderful? You do know I hate your guts, right?

Why do I like some people and dislike others? I like warmth and spontaneity. A good sense of humor. A capacity for pessimism and wit. I like a cynical wit. People obsessed with always being positive are upsetting. They make me contract. Pull my head back into my shell. Why is this? I don’t trust positive people. It’s usually contrived. It’s not authentic. It’s a put on. It’s what society expects. The more toxic the society, the more it demands its citizens display a positive outlook. The pursuit of happiness becomes a tyranny. It’s easy to smile with a knife behind your back. Nobody has ever just been honest and said “I don’t like you.” How would I respond to that? I have no idea. It wouldn’t feel good. But there would be a funny relief. The weight of pretense removed like a cumbersome armor. I’d feel lighter. And more than a little excited. It’s exciting when someone I dislike dislikes me. I feel I’m doing a good job being myself. Representing whatever it is I’m in the business of representing. Whatever set of values. But if someone I like dislikes me, this is an unhappy situation, and one I don’t know how to negotiate. It's happened a few times. There’s really not much you can do. Extortion won’t work. Blackmail is out of the question. Sycophancy is off-putting. You just accept it. And talk about the weather.

Elevator Safari

9:14 p.m. January 1^st, 2023. Anana Kaye sings Dylan’s Señor (Tales of Yankee Power) on a YouTube video. Her voice is fresh and smooth, like an Orange Julius. Or the dawn air over Athens. The song is complex. It’s like an allegory of the old west. A man appears to be in thrall to a man – or spirit – named Señor, who is taking him somewhere. The man wonders where they’re going, dropping riddles and incongruities along the way, and does so in what seems like a drugged or hypnotic spell. That’s the song’s allure, its hypnotic power, and capture of the weirdly wild old west.

The word ‘safari’ used to ignite a lot of excitement in me as a kid. It meant cool shows on TV, Tarzan shouting, thumping his chest, swinging from vine to vine, elephants and giraffes and rhinoceros’s and big gorillas drilling holes into your soul. Those deep-set eyes made them seem so wise. The natives – the inhabitants of these fascinating regions - were treated abominably by the European colonialists, who were there to extract resources, which confused me, why were the original inhabitants being treated so shabbily? What had they done? I was intrigued with these people. As a kid, you don’t realize that what you’re seeing is most often through the lens of European and North American cultural biases. And yet, your instincts tell you something is off.

The man who inspired Edgar Rice Burroughs to write his novel about a man raised by apes in the African wilderness was William Charles Mildin, the 14^th Earl of Streatham. “I was only 11 when, in a boyish fit of anger and pique, I ran away from home and obtained a berth as cabin boy aboard the four-masted sailing vessel, Antilla, bound for African ports-of-call and the Cape of Good Hope,” writes Lord Mildin, who left behind 1,550 handwritten pages of memoirs.

Lord Mildin writes that the apes he fell in with and that accepted him into their group gave him nuts, grubs, and roots. He was starving, so he ate the castoffs, which made him sick. “I was terribly ill afterwards,” he writes, “and the apes appeared to understand this. Once ancient female hunched her way over to me and cradled me in her arms.”

He “gathered branches to make a crude treehouse.” He repaid the care and kindnesses his newfound ape family gave him (I’m guessing these apes were chimpanzees) by making fire and stealing weapons from a native settlement. “I found new and easy ways to root under logs for grubs and dig for roots with a sharp-tipped stick.” He also talks about dressing their wounds with cool moss or wet mud.

Lord Mildin eventually returned home to England where he reclaimed his fortune and title. He died in 1919.

‘Safari’ comes from the Arab word ‘safar,’ meaning journey, or migration.

A story on Le Journal de France 2 vingt heures – a French news show – runs a story on an enterprising young man who started a safari company in South Africa. He gets up early to take some tourists out in a large jeep-like vehicle. They park near a watering hole where a group of elephants are bathing and having fun. Their eyes fill with wonderment.

There are 150,000 muscles in the trunk of an elephant.

A photographer named John Lund has taken a series of photos of an elephant in an elevator, one of which was taken at the airport in Buenos Aires. Why? He doesn’t say.

You never know what to expect when you press an elevator button. You hear the whine and rumble of gears and two panels whoosh open and there you are, facing a street hoodlum from 18^th century Paris. You hesitate getting on. But there’s nothing to fear. The hoodlum is slowly spinning, as if in a trance. Not as if. He is in a trance. But it’s ok. Let it go. You don’t have to get on. Here comes another one. The panels open and there stands a hologram of The Rolling Stones as they appeared in 1965. Scruffy, insolent, and happy. This will be a fun elevator ride. But as soon as you get on and the panels close the elevator begins going down. You wanted to go up. You must not have been paying attention. The elevator arrives at its destination, July 12^th, 1962. London’s Marquee Club. This isn’t he button you pushed. Your appointment was on the 20^th floor. But what the hell. You decide to get off. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. And 61 years to find another elevator.

 

Bomb Cyclone

10:09 p.m. December 24^th. It felt good to run today. All the ice had melted. Yesterday there was so much ice I couldn’t make it to the end of the driveway. It was much warmer today. About 45 degrees. It was raining heavily but I had to go. I hadn’t run for three days. I don’t even want to weigh myself. I’ve been gobbling food like there’s no tomorrow. R's mince cookies especially. R's rain jacket was too thin to do much good but she brought an umbrella. She ran ok with the umbrella but the awkwardness of the umbrella combined with the bag of peanuts she was carrying proved too much and she turned back home. The combination of it being Christmas Eve day and the rain emptied the streets of pedestrians. Not much traffic either. So it was much more relaxing than usual. And no crows begging for peanuts. They remained high in the air having fun with currents. I left a few at a couple of key spots, in case they come out later. 

And to think that less than a month ago we had to get up early to for a run and avoid the heat. It was always in the 80s in Kauai. I carried a bottle of water. Palm fronds trembled in the breeze. Roosters and hens and their progeny dashed across Lawai Road. Early morning surfers returned to their cars. I dove into the Pacific when we returned. The water was warm. It felt fantastic. 

I watch a large white snake coil itself around a young woman in a black dress. Chelsea Wolfe.  Singing “Hypnos.” “I licked your hatred. You set me free. In summer, in the boiling blood.” 

Bomb Cyclone Leaves America Powerless reads a headline on YouTube. Eighteen dead. Buffalo, New York got 22.3 inches of snow in one day. Cars and trucks sliding all over highways and freeways. Collisions everywhere. One small hill in our neighborhood got four crashes within hours of one another. Scenes of powdery ethereal snow blown wispily and crazily over dark asphalt as if in some apocalyptic dream. Thousands of canceled flights. People sleeping on the floor at international airports. Icicles on bridge railings. Transformers exploding from the cold. In Texas a homeless man in a wheelchair fell into a fire pit. Sedan spins down a street hitting two parked cars. And day before yesterday I saw a man driving without chains down icy 8^th Avenue West and turn toward an oncoming car while gazing at his smartphone. A train derailed after hitting a truck in Collegedale, Tennessee. Train 55 from Ottawa to Toronto stopped after a tree fell on it. Emergency services provided food & water, but those supplies soon ran out, & the toilets had stopped working. A train derailment near Grafton blocked all trains in Kingston. Iguanas dropping out of trees frozen and dead in Florida. Homes buried in snow in Buffalo. 

It's hard to believe that such a fragile thing as a snowflake can cause so much mayhem. One might think of it as an equation of collective action. There are roughly 22,400 snowflakes in a pound of snow. Multiply this by a factor of infinite flakes in a cold uncaring universe and you will begin to see the problem of existence as a problem of precarious quantification. In physics, a jerk equation is the minimal setting for solution showing coffeehouse behavior. Try it with rubber. This will only work if you forget everything you know about dynamical systems & stretch it as far as you can. Then, after you let go, you won’t notice yourself crashing through the window. And what will you have proved? The anxiety of death is a farce. Said the Snowman.

 

I'm A Yo-Yo

Consciousness means we’re involved in the creation of the universe. It’s a process. What you’re going to need is a philosophy, a shovel, and a bag of cement. Romance, precision, generalization. Quills and calculus and pliers and a caulking gun and motorcycles and a big garage. A drummer. A bass guitarist. A case of beer. The voice of Merle Haggard. The spirit of Moses. The linguistic prowess of Cleopatra. A stiff felt hat and a whirlpool of upholstery in somebody’s basement. Lights are good and a Persian carpet and a roll of duct tape. Include a peninsula and a noontime snooze. Everyone is here. Everyone is involved. It’s time to get started. This one’s all but gone. But we can salvage the nails and lumber. It’s going to be a kick-ass universe. Timeless as string. If we do it up right, it will echo the cravings of the spirit. And walk in beauty like the yo-yo.

I’m a yo-yo. No doubt about it. It amazes me the number of times I have to get up and piss. The night becomes a pattern of up and down, up and down, up and down. Pissing has become an occupation. I’ve had to cultivate a new relationship with my body and its organs. In youth I flew around like Ariel, hardly aware I had a body at all. Unless I had a hard-on. Or I was getting punched in a fight. Because some guy’s girlfriend took a liking to me. And gave me a hard-on. But sometime after passing 50 things changed. And by the time I was 70 I became the caretaker of 170 pounds of elements like hydrogen and sulfur and phosphorous and an amalgam of muscle, gum and bone. I do what it wants. What it needs. And now if you’ll excuse me, I have to piss.

Remember when people used to say stupid things like job satisfaction is a cause of well-being? They don’t still say that, do they?

I’d rather shoot myself. I hope to God I never become that person. Which, considering my age, is highly unlikely. I’m a different species of asshole. I’m the kind that goofs off all day, and then blames it all on Arthur Schopenhauer.

The spawn of John Calvin is everywhere. Original sin. Predestination. Humility and obedience. Hard work as a religious duty. Jesus. What bullshit.

Those forced grins you used to see everywhere, at least that’s gone. Now that the corporate juggernaut has achieved its goal of hijacking governments and prosecuting a plan of neo-feudalism for the masses, it’s ok to show your despair and look askance and not engage customers in conversation. Those self-serve aisles at the grocery store have become a remarkable success. It’s got work, martyrdom, and debasement all over it and as an added bonus you don’t have to engage with anyone.

Whatever happened to well-being? For a lot of people, people fleeing Afghanistan or Ukraine or Syria, it's a luxury. It begins with shelter and food. And for a lot of people - many of them living in the United States and Europe - shelter and food have become a luxury. 

There’s no such thing as well-being. Being is a meaningless term. It’s not an entity. Not a cotton swab. And what does ‘well’ mean? Skilled, competent, good, healthy, strong, vigorous, shrewd, judicious, fit as a fiddle. In other words, an asshole. Non-being is a form of well-being. If there’s no being there’s no worry, no purpose, no agenda, no target, no intention, no weaponry, no animus, no machinations, no aim. Therefore, non-being is the nebulous chew of reverie. Blue rubies. Black Beauties. Musical breweries. I’m done now. Done with being. This is clearly the moment to talk about something else. Eccentrics in Africa and the greenery of rattling shirts. Cherry blossom pink is the nipples’s friend, and this involves easels and paint, and a sense of non-being.

It's a simple formula: if you have non-being, nobody can get their hooks in you. When well-being becomes a commodity, non-being is a way out: ownership is suffering. When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose. 

Normally, I don’t get this preachy. But every time I see a white blank sheet of paper or word document I see a theater. I see a stage. So here I am. To be or not to be, that is the question. Everything pivots around that.