(sic): From Spike's Ego

spikedunn.blogspot.com

2006-02-08T10:29:00.000-05:00

Stops

2005-09-27T14:04:00.000-04:00

writing from work stop computer in a coma stop boot area virus stop wasn't really using blog lately anyway stop will post again when computer works stop and I have something to tell stop end transmission

back to the instants, I guess

2005-09-16T09:45:00.000-04:00

09/16/2005

9:18 AM
It’s back to the instants, I guess, though different in form from what they were. A month or so without really writing anything, did I learn anything? No, not really. I’m still what ever I am when I am writing. Life is mostly mystery with guessing and taillights. I’m not really here. I’m not really there. Fine and so be it.

9:22 AM
The first rain of autumn. I called in sick. Unfortunately, I am sick. A full-on phlemmy head-cold with accompanying dizziness and sleeping. The good thing about being sick is how it slows down the spinning wheels. What do I want? What do I care? It’s raining and the light is made for me. I’ll sleep in a little while. We cobble together a philosophy and let it change as we obtain more experience. Those people driving by, do they wonder too? They must, they’re human aren’t they? But still they drive by on a day as calm and beautiful as this, flicking on the windshield wipers and agreeing with the TV weatherman that it’s a miserable way to start a weekend. Repent ye, the day of today has arrived. Walk ye in it.

9:28 AM
Love me a little, raindrops that walk down my window, sleep me in the bosom of an English mystery novel or an Inkling’s fantasy. I stay alive here and rest from my fears. What comes, comes. Maybe some were born with the desire for greatness so they could find it in others and not themselves. We search far and wide for that hint of the great aesthetic in order to cultivate it in ourselves, and if we cannot grow it, at least we can fall asleep knowing that there were some who found it in the base of their spines and the pits of their stomachs and grew leaves that drip with And So It Is. Now the eternal dawn of the rainy day. Get up, get up and make. Get up and find. Go ye into all the world and watch the lilies of the fields. First envy, then acceptance, then the waking rest. I do not feel the loss of Christmas acutely any more. It is merely something that was and is no more. Sleep now and wake rested.

9:41 AM

Something about the Nietzch

2005-09-12T06:22:00.000-04:00

09/12/2005

6:00 AM
Are you there, God? It’s me again, Margaret. What do I believe about it? There is a God, who was and is and is to come. I do not believe that he answers prayer in any way detectable to us, at a human level. I believe that if we cannot count on something in this way, it becomes a plastic garnish – pretty and useless. Do I pray then? Yes, in a rambling way that one has when one addresses the inner dialogue to another. Wishes and hopes that flow freely, without a hint of that revolting “binding and loosing” witchcraft that I was brought up to chant. In times of extreme duress, it becomes more urgent but remains detached from reality. I believe that God did once answer prayer, but hasn’t done so in almost two thousand years. We killed him/his son, and he said, “Okay, time to grow up.” The dark ages is an example of what happens in the denial stage of death, in this case, the death of the present God, when he sent a comforter (the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting Amen) and we refused to accept the new face of God, and continued instead in the old ways of worshiping when those ways were addressed to a god that no longer lived. God is dead. Nietzsche is dead. – The two do not contradict. Like all good philosphers, Nietzsche was a journalist reporting old news. In this case, news that was more than fifteen hundred years old. Stop mocking him, he was braver and wiser than you and took the terror of it to heart. By his honesty, we were brought a step closer to the living God.
6:18 AM

Anonymous backstabbing fun!

2005-09-10T21:42:00.000-04:00

http://www.blogjam.com/vent/ - go ahead... Try it!

Closer.

2005-09-06T01:58:00.000-04:00

We should smell the bodily resurrection. If Jesus could eat, he could poop. But what after the death and resurrection? Were the intestines and sphincters resurrected? Or were they deemed “ungodlike” and rejected? Watch yourself, you’re thinking about the Intelligent Designer here. Cutting to the chase, will there be dick and fart jokes in eternity? I’d like to think so. I enjoy them. When done well, few things stink less of lies. They said no marriage in heaven, but they didn’t mention sex. Will the heavenly comedians ever run blue? I hope so. When done well, there’re few jokes that make me laugh harder (when run amuck, few things that make me change the channel quicker).
They’ve given us the promise of an eternity free from fleshly impulses, finally able to succeed in the task that they had set before us, which, being impossible, they made us come in at five in the morning on a Saturday to stand in a circle in front of the alter of the loving God that they had created and we had killed and chant the prayers that they had taught us to chant but scolded us when we used the same words that they had used and demanded that we find our own way of saying what they had taught us to say in order to atone for our failing and so we hated ourselves, but they were not hypocrites, they hated themselves right along with us, so great was their need for magic that, after learning to put the rabbit in the desk before the performance, they forgot it when the time came and they pulled the rabbit out of the hat and so they stood as astonished as us that were the audience to see the virile audacity of the God of Puppets that they had created and we and they had killed and continued to kill every day with our fleshly impulses and so we came in exhausted on a Saturday morning to atone for our sins with a mortification of the flesh and a chanting that they had taught us and scolded us for and then forgot the teaching and the scolding so that they could heard it again for the first time and feel the precious tortures of first love all over again, but I’m not playing the record right, I’m not telling the history quite right, because I’m saying that they forgot, but they didn’t forget, not then anyway, they forgot at the start when they were still just in the audience, they forgot when they were still just one of us, but that isn’t quite right either, because we, the audience, had forgotten by then as well. It must have been in those times before we became one of the audiences that we knew and decided to forget. Forget that we pissed and shat and didn’t like it, because it makes us common and weak, and we wanted to be special and strong and, above all else, sure. And so we conspired to create a creator that would take away the shitting and pissing and farting and fucking and make us beings of pure spirit, forgetting our fleshly failings. But in doing so, we were required to forget the promise of the resurrection, because it held the implied threat of dicks and farts.
A guy walks into a bar and goes up to the counter. Out of one pocket he pulls a small grand piano, out of his other pocket he pulls a man in a tuxedo that stands about a foot high. He puts them both down on the bar and the little man in the tuxedo sits down in front of the piano and starts to play.
The bartender walks over to the guy and says, “Wow! Where did you find him?”
The guy reaches into his pocket again and pulls out a brass lamp and sets it on the bar.
The bartender looks at the lamp and says to the guy, “do you mind if I give it a try?”
The guy looks at the bartender and says, “keep me in drinks all night and you can have anything you wish for.”
The bartender says, “you’ve got a deal.”
The guy says, “have at it then.”
So the bartender picks up the lamp, rubs it and shouts, “I want a million bucks.”
There’s a pause for a little bit and the bartender is about to tell the guy that he’ll be buying his own drinks, when all of a sudden the doors of the bar burst open and ducks start flying in. Hundreds of them, thousands of them just start pouring into the bar, and just when the bartender thinks that that’s the last of them, even more fly in. Finally, when the bar is almost completely packed full of ducks, the bartender turns to the guy and says, “What the hell was that?”
“I’ll take a shot of whiskey and a beer,” says the guy, “do you really think I wished for a ten-inch pianist?”

Still not.

2005-09-04T23:55:00.000-04:00

While I try to figure out what this is supposed to be doing, I thought I'd distract with a couple of new blogs. The goodly Mr. James has come back to the fold: http://www.livejournal.com/users/snarfeck/ and the one and only Mr. Andrew P.C. has entered the arena: http://www.campmodern.blogspot.com/. Take a test run or two. I'll be listening to Sufjan and reading novels that I haven't written and watching the ceiling rotate. ...what's that sound?

No.

2005-09-02T17:24:00.000-04:00

There was a white plastic bag floating in the air outside when I went out for my break. It
twirled and twisted but mostly it just floated. I thought of "American Beauty" and I
thought that the bag had to be alive. Of course, I knew that it wasn't. I couldn't be.
It's just a thin bit of plastic, caught in the winds that get trapped in this city when the
air turns cool after a long, warm summer. But I decided that, for as long as I was watching it fly, I would believe it was alive. And so I watched and it flew and lived. It made it up to the twentieth story of the Rand Building before it began to fall but in it's falling it maintained its sense of grace. It curved around the building's stone facade at about the fifteenth floor and I thought that it might be making its way down court street, but it stopped and turned and started towards me. It made it as far as the parking lot across the street before the wind ran out and it began to spin slowly and descend more quickly, loosing its grace. It dropped out of view among the sedans and SUV's and then suddenly picked up as if to rise again, but it caught on an antenna and strained against it for a few seconds, then the wind died and it fell out of view to the ground. Like the shark, ceasing to move, it ceased to live. In ten minutes I'll be leaving for home. I'd live to sit alone and read for a long while, but I doubt it will happen. There's just this - a thin bit of plastic and no pretty girl watching from below. We're only alive for as long as there was an imbuing observer.

Randomness: An Example

2005-08-19T07:15:00.000-04:00

I am listening to “Faith of Our Fathers: Classic Religious Anthems of Ireland” and eating a small bowl of “Grape-Nuts.” The CD I picked up from the 2-Dollar bin at New World Records a few days ago. My favorite track is titled: “Cead Mile Failte Romhat” – but with a lot of accent marks that I didn’t put in. The cereal is loud. Just like it says in the commercials. And there is nary a Grape nor Nut to be found herein. That’s just amazing. After waking up at 4 am, I spent the morning browsing the internet. Not writing. It’s raining, which means that I think it’s a beautiful day, but I’m going to have to leave early for work so I can change when I get there. This is not an instant. This is just my normal rambling. I think that the instants might have moved on to some other mind. They had a good run. Almost a year. I was just checking. I wrote the first one on August 22 of last year. Maybe I’ll write one more on Monday so that they can have had a full year. The novel is partly languishing in several pieces inside its “My Documents/Fiction” folder. I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit, but I haven’t actually worked on it for three or so weeks. I’m afraid that there are several rather drastic changes that are going to be made in the 3rd draft, which means that the Final draft will get bumped back even further. Oddly, like John, I’ve had a reluctance to pick up the novel for a while. My reasoning are fairly simple – I’m afraid that it sucks. It’s not a weird Steven Kingish novel with literary pretensions like I had imagined it to be at first. I hate too much the figuring out what’s going to happen in the story before the end of chapter three. Boy. You sure can’t in my novel. The problem being, reading my novel is a lot of having your chain yanked. The flow is random, which is to say, not actually a story. It is, God help me, lit fic – the most boring writing in the world. Well crap. So be it. I’ve just got to finish the damn thing. Then I can move on to a “Wham! Bam! You betcha!” story. Maybe the one about the werewolf… Okay, let’s see if I can’t get some work done. On to it.

"Aaaaand... Action!" or "The Problem of Randomness"

2005-08-18T19:36:00.000-04:00

It is not death that I fear. I view death with a mixture of curiosity and hope. It is what death takes from us that I fear. We live from day to day and each day may be our last, this, after an initial reluctance, we come to accept. But the fear of death is not what grabs us, it is the fear of loss. After a time, we learn not to fear our own death (except for in a few scattered moments), but we cannot seem to avoid the fear of the death of those things that we love, whether those things be people or plans or "stuff." The race is usually to the swift and the battle to the strong, but, following their own mysterious schedule, time and chance eventually pick off everyone. The problem with this is that while we only seem to make predictable progress when we make an effort to do so, time and chance still come into play and randomly knock our blocks to the ground. It is the randomness that makes life so difficult. When I was little, I believed that good things happened to you when you did good things and bad things happened to you when you did bad things. It works for a kid. Without that ignorance of time and chance, I doubt that I would have made it through those days when my body felt like 98% hormones. But, at some point, we come face to face with the randomness of the universe. The universe is neither just nor fare. My father did not die because God was punishing him. My father did not die because I prayed that he would (and I did). My father died because time and chance found him. He pushed the odds quite a bit - if you're going to be having unprotected gay sex in the late 1980's and early 1990's, your odds of getting away without getting the ick are quite slim. But not impossible. And there we stumble upon time and chance again. Time and chance are not always subtractive and negative - somebody has to win the lottery. The problem being, we cannot depend upon them to bring us what we want. We must work for what we want and hope that our efforts will come to something that we enjoy. The fact of the matter is, we do not know what tomorrow will bring. If you steal, you increase your chances of getting caught stealing, but there are people in jail who were convicted of crimes that they didn't commit. Being "good" is no guarantee of being thought of as "good." Not even by yourself. One day, you may sneer and your counter-culture friends for sneering at Wal-Mart and the next day you may sneer along with them when you discover that Wal-Mart is a flagrant miss-user of the “just compensation” clause (or whatever your hot-button clause is). Unknown data is the substance of the swing vote. The honest man is left forever in the swing, not knowing what data he is missing. “Time and chance happen to them all.” The universe is random or God is a pervert. Where do our hopes lie?

"The Drunkard Posts" or "The Problem of Randomness: Part Two"

2005-08-18T19:03:00.000-04:00

The universe is disrupted by our presence. We, being free creatures, destroy the semblance of purpose. Whatever God intended, we continue to escape. We, by nature of the unstable interaction of ghost and machine, act in ways unpredictable. Noting that while everything we could possibly do is known beforehand, what we actually do is unknowable. Excepting of course those times when we ignore the trails and bushwhack. But that is not true because even the bushwhacking is limited by the mortality of men and the finite nature of the universe. So, the question arises, "what did/does God see in us?" Could it be that he only wanted a baby maker? That seems contrary to what I imagine to be the romantic heart of our Creator. Something in me sees the divine desire for a bitch - the self-full creature that would be worthy of his effort. Would an entirely pre-written script account for our consciousness? Even leaving open the possibility of cosmologically limited free choice, we are left with nothing more than a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book. Why then do we exist? Why do we worry and want and feel and love? Why would God want a story that he already knows? It can't be that we're pre-known. That would make God empty and shallow. But what other option is there? We live in a limited universe as mortal creatures. My hope is that the interaction of ghost and machine produces something truly unique, something that God, in all his wisdom, could not foresee. How, I do not know, it is an odd hope. But I hope, that when I find my She, she would be a bitch most lovely and pure.

in the gloaming

2005-08-16T05:58:00.000-04:00

08/16/2005
5:34 AM

Two minute: And there it is, and here I am. I am my own. I’m on my own. How I wish that she were here to love me. How I wish that he were here. As you can see by the front of the post card, it’s beautiful, wish you were here, Spike. In the gloaming of the day, the boreal forest awakes, the teeth come into their own again. Let us grow then.

Five minute: Ahleh, ahleh, ahleheloo-oo-yah. And the rise and the fall and the silence drops. Welcome to this world of ours. We lie here in bed, wondering at it all. When I die, I will not know what comes next. When I sleep, I will not know if I will dream of She or humiliation. There, in the gloaming, there. Wake up. Wake up and sing your lamentations. Wake up and sing your purple-gray note. Arise, oh soul, and wake into the mechanical dream. He was and is and is too come. I do not know this, but I say it, hopelessly hoping. There, off in the distance, the white stag beckons us to re-enter the forest and find ourselves again inside the wardrobe.

Ten minute: If this is it, this is it. If the mechanists are right, this is still what it is. The hope, if it is a lie, is still far better than the Not. Said Puddleglum, stamping out the enchanted fire, filling the air with the smell of burnt frog. If it is weakness, I’ll take it. I’ve never claimed to be that strong. But I will not swallow the Old Man’s bitter pill – it rots the soul and we are told that that is how we know it’s working. Standing on the Bald, the fog surrounds. We do not know what came before, we do not know what comes after, and we do not know what Now consists of. The evil men of both camps claim surety of what the fog holds. Do not surrender to that comfortable lie. We are ourselves. The day dawns. The daylight fades. Walk this step in the gloaming and then the next. Going further from the fog behind, closer to the fog ahead. The ground does not shake and smoke – magic was taken from us long ago. We walk the machine to our close. Wake up and sing your note, whatever color it may be. I am my own. Wish you were here. So much it hurts. Wish you were here. Sing hey-nonny-hey, sing hey-nonny-nonny. Wake now to the mechanical dream and fashion something from its scattered gears.

- 5:57 AM

Wanna make a comic book?

2005-08-12T07:05:00.000-04:00

Look here: http://stripedb.freeshell.org/printing_comics.html I found it via http://www.makezine.com/blog/ - a cool site John put me onto a week or so back.

This and things like it

2005-08-08T06:17:00.000-04:00

08/08/2005
5:41 AM

Five minute: Wrapped up in brown paper, tied with a red ribbon and taken for a ride in a shiny blue car. We step off the platform and emerge from the depot ten miles down the line from where we started. We’ll get off here and walk the planks to the road. Down and walk. Up the dirt road to the hills and off to the little bit more. If you did, they asked me. And the answer is not what I expected. I’m still not sure if it’s true, but it’s more true than the old answer. The muscles tighten as we carry our bags up the hill. This mode of escape is an old one, but the idea is seen new this time. To instead of from. This is significant. Though the from remains a heavy dealer in gravitons, we always know what we wanted, though the water is muddy today, we’re going on up the hill. I am my own. And that is where we start and end. Perhaps there is another way. Perhaps we have left something that still works. Perhaps we have not foiled ourselves again. - 5:47 AM

Five minute: The cat, the mouse, the too long response time. We put on our running shoes and do what they tell us to do. It’s how they keep themselves in a state of constant fear, constructing a philosophy that demands constant shouting to drown out the ever-present specter of doubt. But this is at it is and only has a minor voice inside, the rest is this: that I trap myself and try to figure the way out. That I continue to defy their commands and admonitions. I am my own. I am myself. I’m three cents down and five cents up, ten thousand more to go and not a dollar to spare. The questions become ones of next. What is it that we want when this bit is over? What’s the next to begin? Not the wild and unsupported dreams, but the better small hope, the attainable peace. There walk the tall man, there the short, both stride the way with one foot always in the grave. We’re just this. It’s the spooky things that make us laugh, that make the weight less so. Pick it up and go, walk the dust to the woods that overlook the lake. Find the tomorrow worth living in. Make toys of heavy things. We get it only once. The worst possible outcome is that, no matter what, we’ll be damned. The best possible outcome is that, no matter what, we’ll find our way to heaven. This side of the fog, we merely cease to be. - 5:57 AM

Ten minute: Stand up and see what it is that you’ll do with the last few seconds. We live from tick to tick. They catch us tick to tick. We escape tick to tick. We figure out why from tick to tick. In the end, we’re trying to escape the zombies. In the end, we have met the zombies and he is us. The dead inside, walking down the street to the grocery store and we do not want to be him. The dead inside, screaming loudly, walking down the street to church and we do not want to be him. The living. We the living. To be them. To find the bloom of it in the base of the spine, the pit of the stomach, the bottom of the balls. To live so full that the universe explodes around you in a war whoop of rushing blood to hands and feet ready to play. Open wide and laugh the weight back to the place of the dead. He arose and ascended to heaven where he sits at the right hand of God the Father from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. I love those switches of tenses. We walk here on the dry ground, up the hill to the possible peace. Will it work? They say that’s what the strong ones ask. So I require it of myself when I feel I can. Dream. Dream on and on, but someday, you’ve got to do something. What is the something worth doing? If you had your cottage by the water in the woods, what you do? And he’s right when he says I’d want to Do something. I could only sit for so long before I’d need to Do. And I suppose that this is what I’d do. This and things like it. So I’m not as far off as I thought. But to know is one thing, to feel it in your bones is something else. So we pick up our bags, step off the planks and start again to walk the dusty road up. There’s got to be a pony in there. Somewhere. - 6:12 AM

Dunn Paternal Lineage

2005-08-06T15:22:00.000-04:00

I got more info on our branch of the Dunn family line from a book (Landmarks of Steuben County New York published in 1896) that I stumbled across in the stacks yesterday at the library.

Our Branch of the Dunn Paternal Lineage:

Goo and Pumpkin Dunn
-
Aaron Michael Dunn (and Spike too)
-
Harold James Dunn
-
Richard Angevine Dunn
-
Myrtle Dunn
-
Angevine Dunn
-
George C. Dunn (born July 11, 1837 somewhere in New Jersey; moved to Pulteney NY in 1846)
-
Jacob Dunn (born somewhere in New Jersey)
-
Jeptha Dunn (born somewhere in New England)
-
?

I'm seeing what else I can find, but, damn, we've been in Steuben county for 159 years and the states for a wicked long time.

Not as bad as it might have been

2005-08-06T13:08:00.000-04:00

I just had a strawberry flavored protein beer shake.

Untouched photo

2005-08-06T13:02:00.000-04:00

"I remember the first albatross I ever saw. ... At intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king's ghost in super natural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets not below the heavens." --(Herman Melville, Moby Dick)

at least it’s not sociology

2005-08-06T09:22:00.000-04:00

08/06/2005
8:38 AM

Five minute: And that damn smell of burning plastic is coming through in stereo. What will this much coffee accomplish? We’ll get up and get on. We’ll see what the length and height and width. We’ll swallow the pill. And if it doesn’t last long, what the hell, it was fun while it lasted. Turn it up, that’s the Pixies. If you lean across the dashboard and turn the knobs on the radio, the noise changes and the scenery becomes immaculate. Plus, I can look down your shirt. There was never a time when he wasn’t here, so stop trying to figure out when it started. Embrace the inner bastard and discover ourselves in the throws of the pitcher of margaritas. Welcome down to the basement of the cabin in the woods, built into the side of the hill. There’s a cave down there and it leads down, down, down to the forgotten places. I hate it that evil comes into the stories, but that’s the only thing that keeps it interesting. My favorite Harry Potters were Year 1 and Year 3. But that’s just me. I want innocents fighting the forces of darkness without being touched by it. But that cheapens the tale. Tragedy is what gives a story weight. - 8:44 AM

Five minute: Wait, wait, where are you going? We haven’t read the magazines and filled out the quizzes to see if we’re a love match. I was mean to a bum yesterday. I felt bad about it for about twenty minutes. Around until the time when another bum called me a humbug for not giving him any change. What the hell. I might have slept in a tent in the woods for a couple of months, but I never stooped to begging from strangers. You’re a drunkard. Good for you. Way to give society the finger. Now fund it your own damn alternative life-style. Get out of the city before it makes you hard. Too late. I dream of the country. Not at night. Those visions are still chiefly concerning me getting caught and yelling but not really being able to get free. I should try some of that controlled dreaming. Yeah, right, that is to crap as the bad hair preachers are to crap. On the odd good dream note, I think that the surfing dreams that I had this morning had girls. Hot ones. Gotta love that. Then we get up and get out and get on the plane and jump out when it’s crossing the deep forest. I’ll take the money and run. I’ll be the laughing bad man. Someday. And someday I’ll just get out of the city and find a little place with a garden and trees and physically distant neighbors. They may have jumped up my mutant E powers, but I’m still, at core, I. Ha, and there’s a double meaning in that. Even when we come to realize how little of a science psychology is, it still gives up fun metaphors. And at least it’s not sociology. - 8:54 AM

Ten minute: Silly communists, don’t you realize that we’ll always fight you with our love of our fellow man? (singular, but possibly “woman” – original text difficult to decipher) We walked down the sidewalk to the edge of the marsh and then walked the boardwalk to the beach. The air smelled of salty mud and comfort. I miss you, Cape Cod. Kisses to your bookstores and cheap seafood shacks. Oh, and I don’t want to forget the big windmill store with all the cheap stuff inside. That was awesome. Bzzzt. The alien lasers only affected organic materials. Bzzzt. There goes another rubber tree. Bzzzt. There goes another rubber tree. Bzzzt. There goes another rubber tree plant. Driving the hills above Cooperstown, we had no knowledge of the brewery. Those bastards had taken away God’s great gift. So we take it back. The problem being, I didn’t do it until I was far, far away. It’s not any fun to give someone the finger when they can’t see it. Unless it’s a joke between others. So, here it is. I’m giving you the finger, HCA. God gave us beer and I partake with a merry heart. But that’s, like, so twelve-year-old. Oh, but I forgot. I’m twelve as well as twenty-nine. So. There it is. Not a stitch of sense in the whole thing. Just this long line of long lines. The clouds outside have formed a rough square. What is God trying to tell me? Let me see what it says in the Strong’s. Yep. I thought so. In English, it says, “yeah,” but in Greek is says, “nah.” Ha. Trapped the bastards under my glass. I look at her and she melts. I walk there and back. I take it up and put it down. I fly and learn to fight better. Bend and get bent. Be and be haive. Bigger than the fall-down. Better than the man in the cocktail bar. I walk by in flip-flops, feeling the weight of the groceries in my deltoids. Ding, ding. Fight’s over. TKO. It’s still better than losing. Except for the guy that lost, everybody’s a winner! - 9:10 AM

Maybe the next epiphany

2005-08-05T06:36:00.000-04:00

08/05/2005
6:00 AM

Five minute: That I am awake and not asleep. That I am alive and not dead. Write. This too is living. I am my own. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. For the She, the cottage, the garden, the water, the woods, the books with my name on the spine. And all the rest. They are all there but become steps to fall back on and we pick up and move on. There it is, this part and the next and the continuance, the persistence of the experience of a single self. We are our own. We are one and not the other, but the one become many in a single. If I knew what it meant, if I could see how far it goes. There we are though. Here we are. If it doesn’t mean anything, it simply doesn’t mean it. But that is hard to see. What are the negligible parts of the equation? We wonder what the end of it is, but we see this far. We’re here now. I’m here. This one that lives and will die. This one that tastes and smells and feels. We are our own. I am myself. - 6:07 AM

Five minute: And maybe it’s because I ate too much. That would seem to meet the requirements of satisfactory explanation, because we can tell ourselves that this is what happens if we do this. Maybe it was the sleeping pills. Maybe it was the heat. I did get up, though. I got up late and I have less than an hour before the possibilities narrow. A man rode by on a motorcycle. See, I told you my bad poetry was always about escape. I don’t quite know how it works. I don’t quite know how to move from point A to point B. I know enough to go to bed early and get up early. I write my little bad poems and push up a few times. I walk to the kitchen and turn on the coffee maker. I walk to the bathroom and pee. I light a cigarette and wait for the coffee to brew. How do we learn how to stop waiting and be? But that’s an old question and I’ve collected a dozen answers by now. This too is living. That’s what that one is about. I remembered it again yesterday. It’s easier in these small pieces. You eat the whale one bite at a time. And Shel had more to say that they seem to know. We remember “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” We remember “Howl.” We remember “The Giving Tree.” But they won’t put them on the same shelf. But they should. And there should only be two genres – worth the effort or not. - 6:17 AM

Ten minute: But how would you know if it was worth the effort for you, until you’ve read it. And there’s the dilemma. Turn on the pen light in the theatre and take notes. The director, the critic and the actress. But that’s one thing and we don’t know where it wants to go enough to follow it. The daylight comes up. The air has cooled and we have to wake up and do something today that will add to the continuance of the years, the accumulation of this strange compound of things that become “my own.” And maybe there still is that fifteen-year-old sitting inside me that knows what I should do. Get married – have love and sex – everything else is just alongside. But I chuckle at the fifteen year-old. He is informed by the nineteen-year-old that says, love and sex are crap, what you need is money. But he doesn’t know the words of the twenty-two year old – money isn’t enough, you’ve got to earn it doing something that you love. (a synthesis that) And then comes the twenty-four-year-old, vanity of vanities, says the twenty-four-year-old, all is vanity; no matter what you do, it won’t be enough. Am I really all those people? But I am. I’ve over-simplified, but I am. There’s at least three more epiphanies between 24 and now, and a lot more between 18 and now. Until I lost my faith in epiphanies and they stopped coming. Ha! Yeah, right. Always the epiphanies, just not the faith and hope in them, this leads to cynicism. In seeking wisdom, you discover that wisdom is not enough. Hmm. But this is just itself. You’ve got things to do. Madman though you may be, you still have to eat and sleep. Close the book, get up from the chair and do those things. Maybe the next epiphany will be the one that takes you home. - 6:32 AM

An equal number of pages

2005-08-02T05:36:00.000-04:00

08/02/2005
4:59 AM

Five minute: And it’s okay, and it’s all right. Lay down your head and rest. The details become themselves and we grow older and go on. It’s good news. They cast a relative unknown in the role of Kitty, so you can keep imagining yourself intangible. Sleeping becomes floating, floating becomes flying, flying becomes seeing and the seeing is weightless. Seven up, seven across, seven down, seven to go. We’re walking here. We’re always walking, one step more and one step more and one step more. Were she here, she would tell me the same and we pack up and walk through. The comic books are just comic books. The comic books are just the point. When we grow up, our mutant powers will kick in and then we’ll know our purpose. We’ll know which road to take. We’ll know which woman to love. We’ll have our own code name. And all good things rising will obtain. - 5:07 AM

Five minute: And so drink your coffee with assurance and smoke your cigarettes with a merry heart. Joss Whedon is writing the Astonishing X-Men and he wouldn’t handle them wrong. We walk that road and keep walking, the words becoming rain, the rain becoming the fog that always dogs our path. We can walk there. The fog is comforting. The feeling of secrets kept. Two of Noah’s sons were blessed and one was cursed. The Cursed was put so for leaving his father uncovered in his shame. The Blessed for covering shame. It was a moment of truth and that is all, but it was a moment of truth that was not for others to see. They don't have any idea what that passage is about, because they do not believe in hiding shame. Forgive us our trespasses. God knows better than his own. The fog becomes our own and we hope for the Blessed sons to find us and throw the cloak around us and let us sleep it off. The sun sets and the sun rises and Ecclesiastes becomes the better thing that it always has been to me. Wake up and start walking. - 5:17 AM

Ten minute: Up now and on to today. But who knows what today might bring? We can hope for adventure and treasure at the end of the quest, but it will be itself, more than likely. And while we love our super-hero comic books, because they are us at our most intense, this day is still a comic book. Harvey Pekar, maybe, and you won’t start getting the point until your at least 28, but when you do, you laugh and see yourself writ large as a cartoon. But, of course, we love Donald and Scrooge and the boys best. No powers, just fatherless ducks and adventures and, sometimes, treasures at the end of the quest. But always humor and naughtiness and good cheer. An equal number of pages is given to playing jokes on the Truant Officer as was given to the finding of the Lost Dutchman Mine. In duck comics, it’s all an equal adventure, because the point is to get our two-bits by gluing us to our seats with smiling. A smile. To make someone smile. What a beautiful and noble purpose for a life. The ducks are so much more human that the mutants, though I love them both, and I am just a reader, briefly wandering through their four-color world. Itself is just itself, and we have to go on from there. The dump truck goes by. The clock reads the time. I wake up and am myself, as I am every day that I am alive. - 5:36 AM

This is how it works

2005-08-01T08:28:00.000-04:00

08/01/2005
7:54 AM

Five minute: Look, buddy, you’re not going to get it, says God. Here, have a cookie. Because that’s what I need him to say. Because that’s what I want him to say. Because today I can see it. Because today I can handle it. I’ll scream and curse it in a few days or weeks or months or years, but today it’s the right thing. Today it’s the thing that’s here. And I find it odd that I think that there is a hell, but not eternal damnation. Because it’s the fear of eternal damnation that keeps me from seeing what’s three inches further than my fingers can stretch when my arm is stretched to its limit, but this is just here and there. I’m up and I had my strawberry shake. I drank my coffee with its bits of sea creatures. I pushed up several times. Does it work this way? I guess it does. We’ll see how it works out, but it works. I don’t want to remember my dreams lately, because my dreams are undesirable. Let’s not think of them, at this point, we can learn nothing of them. There peanuts, salted and in the shell and they're mostly fatty stuff. They taste good. Tomorrow will come and I get up today and go on from there. - 8:00 AM

Five minute: Five down and some more to go. The yellow on the houses has dimmed to a less-than-butter light. It’s nearly walking time and we get up and go. We walk to see what’s over the hill and hope that it’s the mantra: the She, the cottage, the garden, the water, the wood, the books with my name on the spine. The things go thin, but that is their nature. We pick up the bookbag, we walk out the door, we watch the squirrels run around their trees and wish we were them, we walk down the road to the bus stop and wait while the dew on the grass or the snow on the ground soaks into our shoes and wets our socks. The bus comes and we get on. The only one aboard for the first half-hour, aside from the driver. And sometimes I have to carry my tuba. I put the music books and the stand inside the bell. Am I less myself then? Am I more? But we get out. And someday, we’ll get out early and walk up the hills to the tops and watch the deer and sparrows. Maybe today, we’ll find out how. - 8:08 AM

Ten minute: The person is a montage of personalities. I am every type at some point. It is not the most frequent type that defines the person. It is not the memories. It is the chaotic interaction of ghost and machine. The blue emerges from this and it is the blue residue that coats us that defines us as human. We walk as we walk and someday we will fall to the ground and the ghost will leave the machine and take with it the blue spark that is our own true self. It rises from the dust and presents us to the One Man and the One Man presents us to the First. Where and what is still lost in the fog. It’s all lost in the fog, but we can hope. We are defined by our hopes and dreams and actions and wills. We pick up and continue on to the next thing. Where is she, I wonder as I sit in the shade of the olive tree. But it is enough to sit and wonder, today. To rest for the next battle as the next battle will always come. I guess we’ve never lost. We fail, but we never lose. We get up and do. We sit down and think. We do whatever it is that we do. And I breathe in and breathe out. These things are just themselves. These theories are just theories. I walk down the road to the bus stop and lean against the fire hydrant. I’ll be gone in a few years. The hydrant will have to learn to wait for the bus without me. I’m still learning to wait for the bus without the hydrant. Why is Calvin a cartoon and I am a human? How do I know that I did not blink into existence three seconds ago? What is the difference between a brain in a vat and a boy at a bus stop? I must believe because I can’t not believe. I get up in the morning and I make my coffee and I smoke my cigarettes and I push up several times and I sit here and write and I when the clock tells me to, I go to work. It’s not what I thought being alive was when I looked out the window of the bus and gazed with longing at the hills. But this is alive. This too, is living. This is how it works. Somehow, I will find my way to that Calvinball field that I know I know I know is hidden up there in the heart of that forest. Someday, I will find my way home. - 8:25 AM

New Blogger!

2005-07-31T07:40:00.000-04:00

Yay! My brother has a blog! Go see it... http://gooandpumkinsdaddy.blogspot.com/ ...now. No, seriously. He's an officer in the Air Force. He has classified access to the Roswell UFO. They moved it to Guam. He took pictures. And posted them. The aliens look just like frogs and spiders. And (soon, hopefully, hint-hint-hint-to-my-brother [look at Abby's blog -http://shotsnaps.blogspot.com/ - for ideas] ) my nephew and niece.

the last thing before dying

2005-07-30T15:27:00.000-04:00

07/30/2005
2:05 PM

Five minute: No. Not just yet. Soon, I hope. Soon. “The maker of all things is astonished at the things he has Himself made,” and that isn’t me either, that’s Chesterton. And I am Job, because everyone is sometimes and there’s no dishonesty in it. And I ask Him why all the pain and fear and dead fathers who died like that and He says, “no, why not ask why it’s so bad with pain and fear and dead fathers,” and I think I see the evil that spilled out across all the paths of existence when He made it all, but there’s something more that creeps through behind the blackness and it’s the Great Secret that I can find if I try hard enough, but won’t because only one man really tried hard enough and we killed him for it, but he knew the Great Secret so he laughed and raised/was raised by Him/himself, but the Secret’s still there and the glimmer that crept out was a laugh because the Secret is Happily Ever After, but we can’t see it because we’re still in the middle of the book and tragedy is what gives the story weight, and comedy is how we deal with the weight, and because we are not the One Man, the core of our being is tragic, but it is not sad because the glimmer that creeps out is a laugh. - 2:15 PM

Five minute: And we can’t know this because we cannot know what the air feels like three inches further than our arms can stretch, but we hope it, and it’s a fucking hope, a shit hope, because it keeps us from stopping and giving up and resting, and Oh, Dear God, how we want to rest and forget the weight and we hate it for it, but it’s still there, taunting us ever further up the mountains. We are still ourselves and the universe is still as it is and I cannot see God and I cannot feel him in my heart even though I invited him in every month from the age of 4 to 17, but I know that he is there and was there before I asked because he is not a gentleman, He is a bastard of cosmic proportions because the world cannot contain the depth of his Ego and the mind cannot understand the immensity of the bones in his hands. The thinness grows to it’s own and falls away to the alleyway below and we become ourselves with everything and everyone and all of this is all of this, itself and nothing more. Half of one/half of one/half of one/half of one/half… turtles all the way down… and still we are here, dancing to the screaming whispers of sin and righteousness. - 2:26 PM

Ten minute: And there is always more to say, though the words stop saying themselves to us and so we sit here ourselves. Oh, God. The mystery of the unversed is that there is a pearl of great price and we sold all we had to buy it and when we could say that we owned it, we discovered that we had nothing to eat and nothing to buy food with, but we did not sell the pearl and there was a rumor that the pearl would nourish us, but it did not, it could not for it was merely the most valuable thing in the world, so we put the pearl in our pocket and found a job and worked hungry until the first paycheck and then we bought food and ate and we slept in the rain and hated it except for those few seconds when we loved it so much that we couldn’t understand why our bodies did not rise and float to up to the ten thousandth heaven, but we got up in the morning and went to work and soon it was payday again and we bought more food and slept in the rain and then, one day, we’d saved up enough money to pay the first and last month’s rent as well as the deposit and we gave it to our landlord and signed the lease and we slept on the floor until we’d saved up enough to buy a bed and then we saved enough to by a stove and then a refrigerator and then a car and then we found a better job and got paid more and we dressed better and joined a gym and soon we had a girlfriend and then another and then another and we discovered that we loved her and we proposed and she accepted and we moved out of the apartment and into a small house in the suburbs and our wife told us she was pregnant and we had a baby and then another and then another and then we got promoted and we bought a farm in the country and grew crops and raised babies and had a long commute but we didn’t mind it because we had discovered Books-On-Tape and we finally made it through “Anna Karrinnina” and then the first baby graduated from high-school and then the third one did and then the first one graduated from college and went to grad school and the second one dropped out and moved to Montana and we worried about him and the third one graduated from college and got married and had babies and the first one graduated from grad school and his first real job paid more than our current one did and the second baby called all the time to ask for money and we gave it to them because we didn’t think we could understand them and then we woke up one day and realized that we were old and we don’t remember how we got there and the first baby and the third baby brought us grandbabies to bounce on our knee, and while we bounced them we wondered if we did the right thing, we wonder if we could have done better and years passed and we forgot many things and those we loved began to die and we knew that we were going to die and that we had already started to and we lay down on our death-bed and looked over the memories that we had like a box full of shiny pebbles and we wondered if they were worth anything and the second baby kneeled beside us and looked at our pebbles with us an we finally knew who he was, and then the moment came and we felt the coldness rise from beneath our feet and begin to cover us like a blanket slowly pulled up from the bottom of the bed on a winter's night when the sky is all moon and we ask the second baby to reach into our pocket and take out the pearl that he’d find there and the second baby did and we asked him to put it in our mouth and he did and then we knew that the rumors were true because the pearl tasted like the ocean without the salt and the stream full of bull sharks and the wine that flowed from the side of God and we arched our backs and swallowed the pearl and it was like the scroll: honey to the mouth and bitter to the stomach and the fog swelled and turned to flame the color of ice and lamb's blood and the world imploded to the edges of the universe and we remembered. We remembered that the last thing before dying is the laugh that emerges from the opening where evil escaped into existence and the pearl we sold everything to buy is the price of hearing it. - 3:22 PM

those silver skates

2005-07-29T07:00:00.000-04:00

07/29/2005
6:09 AM

Five minute: The Escapist – able to free himself from any bonds: physical, emotional, economic. He relaxes his mighty muscles and the ties drop away and he slips away into the shadows of the night to rise again ten thousand miles away, strong and free in the morning sunlight. And I don’t want to be myself anymore today. I want to be someone more free, more mighty, more great. I can’t write. I can’t exercise. I can’t be beautiful. I can’t be honest. I can’t answer the phone. I can’t look at the mail. I’m afraid of my own face in the mirror. I’m afraid of my hands and what they can’t do. I’m afraid of what they can do. I’m afraid of my mind and what it can’t seem to learn. I’m too small and too close to the fire. I just want those silver skates to skate away on, but the metaphors always run out at some point and we’re left with this tragic tale, better left untold. - 6:16 AM

Five minute: How do I keep going? How do I keep trying when all past experience has proved that it just won’t be enough? I’m not ten feet tall and rising. I’m not a Fast Boy. I’m nothing but a deadbeat in an okay apartment in a half-dead city. I alternate between being afraid of them and hating them and hating myself. All’s I want are those fucking silver skates to skate away on and they aren’t coming and they aren’t listening and God’s in His heaven and the world is as it is and I’m just myself and though I try to get better and try to be something more, I’m just myself and my self is small and weak and unable and not enough. But I get up in the morning and I put on the coffee and I smoke a cigarette and hope that, somehow, a redeemer will come and the year of jubilee will begin. But God doesn’t work that way anymore. Magic is gone now. This is a world of machines and electricity and bad poets work in libraries and dream of silver skates to skate away on and none of this matters. It’s not even ink on paper and my dreams are all about getting caught while trying to escape. Even my subconscious won’t let me get away from the facts. And it doesn’t matter and no one really cares. Not even me. Fucking silver skates. - 6:25 AM

Ten minute: And it’s just a pity party today and I don’t really give a fuck. I just so fucking want to be free from all this weight of twenty-nine years of life outside the garden. Oh God. Hold me now. Oh, God. Where are You, now? And those aren’t my words, they’re Sufjon’s and I’m just so fucking tired of this infinite line of Not Enough But Not Enough to Kill Me. Ha. And I’ll be better in a few days, after a few days of not answering the phone and not reading the mail and not thinking about the bills and the relatives and the friends. How very stupid someone so smart can be. And they did used to say that to me. And their voice inside my head is still saying it. Oh, God. No other Man could raise the dead. Tell me to wake up. Tell me to get up and walk. But you’re just a fable, now. A magical lesson about living in a non-magic world. Understand if I don’t care anymore. I see no evidence of your god, and evidence for mine abounds. In every pointless act and heartless action, my God establishes his mighty non-presence. I still love the stories, but I can see that they’re just stories now. This is the God-vanished world and magic has no place here. And if there is no magic, how could you possibly expect me to care what happens here? Even if I had those silver skates, no matter where I could go, there would still just be dead men that want nothing of me except my money and I’m not allowed to do anything alone. And it’s so fucking beautiful outside my window and I think my dead faggot father is the only one of them that could see it. I think that’s how you killed him. But I guess, blah-blah-blah, that isn’t true. No, you’re right. Blah-blah-blah. I was just having a rough day of it. Blah-blah-blah. No, no. Blah-blah-blah. Go play, go play, go play. Yeah and amen, go play. I'll do a few push-ups and hope. We’ll be fine in a few days, because I still can’t fucking help hoping. - 6:41 AM

the iris shot

2005-07-27T05:43:00.000-04:00

07/27/2005
5:02 AM

Five minute: Look me up, look me over, over-look me. I’m ten feet tall and rising. I’m floating in a small boat across a sea of fog. Fog is a good thing for people of my sort. The bombardiers cannot see you. God has to squint. The mad scientist and his henchman tune their instruments vigorously to watch us, but the fog confounds them. We float on in peace, far from the maddening crowd. The damp air is relief to the face and lungs after a long march through sand and heat. Watch me now, watch me float to the bottom of the world, to the heart of the facts at hand. The She, the cottage, the garden, the water, the woods, the books with my name on the spine. We pick up and start again with the work of forgetting. The rain flicks the puddles and we’ll walk to work damp and cold, as God intended. What am I? What is an I? Set down to pick it up again. - 5:08 AM

Five minute: Not exact, an approximation of the facts. There are too many bottles on my desk. There’s not enough to run away on. They’ve caught me by teaching me to enjoy the company. I’m big enough to get away from that. And all I want is to be happy, and no one can have that, except for cared-for children. I’ll settle for content and useful to myself. Buy that world and all its problems. Is the time for forgetting beginning or ending? Whichever brings me closer to happy. The problem with the robot is that it can’t feel the rises and the troths. So we remain ourselves, fools flabbergasted by the sight of a flitting sparrow, brought low by the sight of a man in the rain who does not love it. The fool that I am. The fool that I will be. I’m not nothing. I’m not something big enough yet. I shall forever be learning to grow up; I feel it in my bones, like the Pumpkin King. Walk the yellow moon down to the snowy night woods. Walk the way home to a soundtrack of perfect beauty and a heart the size of a dump truck. Brag yourself dry, then come back inside and drink ‘til drunk on your own near-sightedness. - 5:18 AM

Ten minute: Let your ego grow large. If you keep it in a small place, there’s nothing better. Those heroes of ours are made out of ink and paper, celluloid and light. Nothing substantial, so feel free to swallow them whole. Caught on the hook, caught up into the third heaven, watching the flicker pictures that play out across the backside of our foreheads. She’s sitting next to me, eating popcorn as the sound-track swells and the hero dies. Such perfect beauty in that. May the lights never come back up and let us be caught in the twilight of the picture show forever. Forever and a day. But the lights do come up and we exit by the back way, into the sun-wetted grass. The death of the hero is always with us. His resurrection is ten thousand years off. There is that hope, though, as we fall to the ground, feeling the weight of the responsibility of dying well. Ten thousand years and we will rise again. I believe in the Holy Spirit: the communion of saints, the holy catholic church, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Amen. We can hope, too, for fiction. Or the pure form that the fiction breathes life into. Give me back my dead heroes. I need to ask them what to do. They died when I closed the book and pressed “stop.” They died when I stepped out of the black and white twilight of the flicker show and strolled through the green grass. Forgive me my sins, as I forgive those that have sinned ‘gainst me. Forgive me my kindnesses as I forgive those that were kind to me. Walking off into the forest, we disappear into ourselves. If we emerge again, it will only be when we have learned to bear the weight of the sublime. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that have trespassed against us. My bad poetry is always about escape. Walk away, fading into the iris shot. Be better. Be great. Be at peace. Be at play. - 5:34 AM

my bad poetry

2005-07-26T05:24:00.000-04:00

07/26/2005
4:49 AM

Five minute: At 27.39726 years of age, I’d lived 10,000 days. 10 down, 10 across, 10,000,000 left to go. The two great abilities – the ability to adapt to the surroundings and the ability to adapt the surroundings. Grant me the strength to change the things I can, the courage to accept those things I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference. But do we ascribe those attributes to the Invisible Hand? Would they not come on their own otherwise? The scheduled and the unscheduled. Fighting the institution of the schedule only to discover that it was not the schedule that we fought, but the imposing of it by external forces. The strong force and the weak force and two forces remain, untapped. What can we say other than, we our ourselves? We pick it up again where we left off and try to change the world for the better. Adapting the surroundings while needing to adapt to the surroundings. Where is that damn line? - 4:56 AM

Five minute: Invite me to the sound of waves pulling sand and nothing else. Hard and soft. Weak and strong. The atoms fly apart without them. They fly apart when there is too much of either. Or crunch down to the size of infinite smallness. The universe is apart from me. The universe is a part of me. I am a part of the universe. I am apart from the universe. The paradox is resolvable; it’s the cynicism that is tripping. Walk me down, walk me down the fallen path to the secret and silent images of a hundred years back. Contemplate my finitude. I’m a crap in a box. I’m a flying thing of multiple dimensions. I’m just myself. I can’t change the bad poetry, only the poet. We close our eyes and come alive to the disappearing. The body fills up and fills out. We forget the largeness and the small sea turtles. But we’re the turtles. See the picture they’ve painted on my back in my imagination. Pick up the skipping rocks and walk down by the river with James. Look at the pictures in Ball’s blog. Look at all the pictures in Abby’s. Read John’s with its comments. I’m infinitude of thinness. I’m myself. Swears and all. - 5:06 AM

Ten minute: So with calmness, we enter this day. Tomorrow the maelstrom may come. Wish it would hold back, but it won’t. I fight the storm with my own and that is the only way I know how to do it. I’ll grow old, someday. I’ve always wanted to. I hope I die at peace. I hope I die in rest and not rage. But that will come as it will, and I’m just myself, sitting at a desk, stringing thoughts into words and words into thoughts, hoping that I’ll attract the attention of a muse. Pick me up and carry me off on wings of inspiration. But it doesn’t work that way. You pick them up and carry them along and they whisper the story in your ear. The She, the cottage, the water, the woods, the garden, the books with my name on the spine. Get up and throw off the covers of the sleeping pills. Drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. Forget the world that you’re trying to forget and sink into words and stories of your own hand. I’m just myself. I’m all myself. Pick me up, Babydoll. Mistake me for your favorite toy. Mistake me for something better than I am. Then I can do it too. Pick up your bed and walk. Stop time and roll it backwards. I’m counting on science to save me from breaking down. I’m counting on God to save me from hell. I’m counting on my words to save me from myself. Can you out-write the flames that slowly make their ways down the page? They’re coming to kill my soul or enslave my body, I don’t know which. I pretend that they don’t exist. It seems to work. I get through the day without the nagging hopes of sudden death. Such a stupid existence. But I stay alive and the days are better sometimes. Sometimes, they are even glorious and I forget to be my melancholy self and become the boy with wings. Grow up and walk down the road to far away. I am myself and my bad poetry is always about escape. Walk away. Walk free and go play. - 5:21 AM

Fight becomes a boy

2005-07-24T20:53:00.000-04:00

Look everybody! I'm scary! The downward angle hides the waddle under my chin and shows off my shoulder muscles. I find the strange, hellish red light of my desk lamp flattering as well. The beard is coming back but I'll keep it shorter than it has been and the hair I think I'll keep short for a while. Basically until I get bored with it again.

More cool

2005-07-24T16:19:00.000-04:00

Well, this is fun! I was looking for blogs sorted by personality type and I came across this fellows site (INTP): http://travis.webseitler.com 1) Christian, 2)Libertarian, 3) Brags about getting his copy of the bound edition of the complete "The Life and Time of Scrooge McDuck! Holy freaking cool! I'm going to be stopping in to this guy's site now.

eternal hostility

2005-07-24T14:28:00.000-04:00

In my life-long, ongoing quest to find out who and what the hell I am, I stumbled upon this quote by Thomas Jefferson (an INTP they say): "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." It raises so many interesting ideas and questions. And I concur. I must discover more about this "Thomas Jefferson."

something to break my fists on

2005-07-21T07:27:00.000-04:00

07/21/2005
6:43 AM

Five minute: And I don’t understand it, so I grit my teeth and breathe heavily. I’m not that fellow. I’m not the bad man there. Fuck it. I’ll just grit it out until the bile drops out of my brain and returns to its bladder. Whatever did it. Whatever hit there. Whatever. I’ll just drop it and say fuck the world; I’m going to do pushups until it catches up. I’m going out and taking my better self with me. I’m out of here to the big tomorrow. The sleep. The slip. The anger keeps me firm. Anger is shit and I’m a ten-inch pianist. Fuck it. I’m going home. It doesn’t matter that I don’t know what it is or where it is or how to get there or why I haven’t been there in eleven years. I’ll remain whatever I am until I’m not. I’m just going home. I’ll figure out a way. - 6:50 AM

Five minute: If we start right now we’ll make it by nightfall. And that’s a lie. Whatever it is that they put inside me won’t let me be that, but it won’t let me drop it. It just keeps adding names to the enemies list. Stupid crap. I’m too old for this. All the fine, fine things I like. And I just want to go home. And home doesn’t exist. Home never existed. It’s why I went out into the woods and wandered down the railroad tracks. I just wanted to find home. But there is no home for bad little boys that hold their own opinions. Fuck, fucked, fucker. I’m fighting you and I’ll keep it up until you set off the bomb you sewed inside me when I was three years old. What did you expect? Obedience? To you? To your masters? I’m an orphan now. I always was, but no one knew it. I’m big as a house and I still can’t find someplace to live. I’m going home and I don’t know what the fuck that is. I should have been worse. I should have been an obvious bastard. Cost for cost. Wretch for wretch. I’m ten feet of waste and growing every day. I’m not your fucking broom. - 7:00 AM

Ten minute: No one’s smart enough to pull it off except for Prof. X and he’s a tights wearing superhero comic character. Not even worth the derisive laugh he’s pressed upon. I’m going home and I’m going to find out what the hell it is. What does it mean? What do I mean by it? Why do I want it and why do I feel as if I’ve never had it except for those times when I have it to myself? It’s just another way to say “mine” and they’ve got me so deep in debt that I’ll never be able to say that word and mean it. Give me those damn silver skates to skate away on. I’ll head up to Alaska and pick up a new name. Spike’ll die somewhere between Buffalo and Anchorage. Yah. And if I actually had the balls to go through with that one I’d have been in Alaska for ten years now. I’d settle for something to break my fists on. Something besides the fog of benign existence. To actually be dangerous instead of just muttering about while I timidly masterbate to pictures of weak-willed girls. To actually be a bastard instead of just writing it in another goddamn limp-wristed, interior decorating, swish of a blog. Oh, this stupid and ridiculous excuse for an existence. This stupid fucking city. This momma's-panty-wearing suburb on steroids. The only reality in the world is a cabin cut into the bones of the hard, dark woods that scared the shit out of Thoreau. And I’m not man enough to make it there. I have the disgusting need to check myself in the mirror of another paisty human face at least once a day. If I went, I could go. If I could go, I’d already be gone. But I’ll just get up. Do a dozen or so pushup and crunches. Take a shower and walk to work. And I’ll be nice every stupid shit that I meet. I’ll suck the great Worldick and hope for the spare change in his pockets. Fuck bunnies. They like it. Ahh, fuck it. I just need to get laid. Orgasm is such an acceptable substitute for living like you’ve got balls. Go fuck yerself – the Happy Bunny. - 7:17 AM

why the rocks stay silent

2005-07-20T06:17:00.000-04:00

07/20/2005
5:48 AM

Five minute: I really don’t feel pressed to write. I wouldn’t if it weren’t for the fact that this is the only writing that I’ve been doing lately. In digging through old files looking for the old stories, I found a long short story that I was working on out in New Mexico. Maybe I’ll finish that. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how it ends. But maybe that’s a good thing. Milk crates. I need three damn milk crates and I don’t know where to find any. Well, maybe something equitable will show up. I started reading the new Eco book. Excellent thus far. An Oliver Sacks type case goes searching for his past in a collection of oldish pop culture artifacts. I even get a few of the references. About 15-20%. Not bad for an Eco book. I shaved of my mustache last night. I had a Jim and Pepsi. Tall in the Jim. The lower beard is still there, though. I look like a hipster. Like I should spend a lot of time in record shops. Or live on Elmwood Ave. Boy this techno I’m listening to is crap. I’m switching back to the Neil Young. Hold on… - 5:53 AM

Five minute: It’s chilly and not humid. Sweet. That’s the first time in, what, two weeks? Something like that. I’m planning a hike. I was going to take a full week – the second week in October, but then I remembered that I’ll be on seasonal by then and I’m not allowed. I guess that I’ll just try to take a four-day weekend. I’m thinking of doing the Bristol Hills branch of the Finger Lakes Trail and follow the main branch for a little bit. Maps are 20 bucks for the whole set. Sweet. Wow. I’m just not into this whole writing thing this morning. It’s a good thing that I just keep typing. So those that read my blog will have to read non-lyrical crap. Ah, screw it. Let’s see what I come up with if I just go fast. Zen focus on un-focus. Wait. Should I wait ‘til the ten? Yah. It’s only a couple of minutes ‘til the ding so I might as well. Back to this crap stuff then. A good backpacker strengthens lower back, abs, upper back, and legs. And then does it for endurance. No pecs or arms. Man, that’s a weird looking physique. - 6:03 AM

Ten minute: Okay, the ten. It’s actually thirteen minutes as of about right now. So we’ll just do that fast thing and see if anything happens. Aaaaand… focus, focus, focus… now I’m sleepy. Wait. Focus, focus, focus… aaaaaaaand. Go. Off down in the jungles of the great American southwest, there was a toad and a rock. The toad said, “rock.” And the rock said, “toad.” And then the toad road off on his horse, never questioning the fact that the rock had spoken. What a weird toad. If a rock spoke to me, I’d take note of it. It probably why rocks don’t speak to me. There secretive folk. I went down to California town. There were movies stars and their high-priced call girls. We all drank expensive drinks that tasted like candy. It was horrible. But the call girls were hot. So I says to one of the movies stars, did you actually need this? What? He said. This life of high profile excess. I said. Oh, right, he said, I suppose. I haven’t really thought of it in a while. I pay someone to do most of my thinking for me. And I pay another guy to make sure the one that does my thinking for me isn’t trying to cheat me. He has to keep a record of the thoughts that the guy who does my thinking for me thinks up. But that means that I have to pay a guy to read the things that the guy who writes down the things that the guy that does my thinking for me thought up. It gets very confusing, so I pay another guy to summarize everything for me and put it in a three-page treatment. Then my agent reads through it and takes out anything that he thinks might not help me make money. Turns out that most things I think up don’t make much money, so every few weeks I get a couple of sentences of money-making thoughts from my agent. At this point, I had to leave. So I stood up, thanked them for their candy flavored booze and walked out. My only regret is that the call girls all had the brains of a seagull. Apparently, all the smarter hot call girls cost too much money for every-day sort of use. This is why the rocks stay silent. - 6:19 AM

Fun James K Interview!

2005-07-19T07:49:00.000-04:00

James K Interview

the Two Movies Option

2005-07-19T06:34:00.000-04:00

07/19/2005
5:45 AM

Five minute: And then I stumble over myself. Who knew that I was actually partly an E? Does this change the formula? No. I don’t think so. I think I want to be out in the woods in the cottage. I just don’t want to be out there alone. I needed some human interaction and some coffee. It’s stupid, in a way. I’d like to be a good solid I. I’s don’t need external validation. I’s do what they do and mark it for themselves as enough or not enough. I’s don’t get lonely. Their chief audience is always with them. Well, my chief audience is myself, but I still need that feed from the external to tell me if I’m still alive and doing something worth remarking. I’ll have to continue back to the questions and see what happens in the other. At least I’ve still got N. Well, I’ve still got I. It’s just not nearly as pure as I thought it was. Damn. This narrows my options. But at least it narrows my options. - 5:51 AM

Five minute: And why am I making sense today? Why am I not talking about squirrels of the mind or something? Where’s the selfish stream-of-consciousness obscurity? Ah, don’t worry. It’ll probably pop up before long. In fact, I think it’s coming on now. Blim, blam, bloom. The old ladies son picked the flowers in the doorway. He’s gone now. He isn’t coming back until he changes the world. I am myself and myself continues to be a mystery. Get on it Scooby. Would you do it for three snacks? Plug in the hairdryer and shoot the piano player. Those obscure French movies are just as much entertainment as the C-grades action flicks with an A-grade budget. They just tend to be entertainment for people that have watched a lot of movies. My movie watching has always been there. Mum wouldn’t let us watch TV. We did anyway, but only when she wasn’t going to catch us. For all the on-the-sly TV watching I did, it’s surprising the few times I got caught. I watched movies. I watched obscure movies because they were the closest I could come to watching porn. Boobies and people having orgasms. The problem being that “Henry and June” was just a damn fascinating story. You forget to get turned on. - 6:01 AM

Ten minute: The old movies came from being poor. First – Cary Grant. I was crashing at the house of one of the many people’s houses that I crashed at and I had nothing to do. There was a cheap Cary Grant collection. I can’t even remember which movies were in it. I watched them all except for “Penny Serenade.” When the box description on an old movie says, “get your tissues out,” I know better than to watch it. The last thing that I need is to be reminded of is 1) how much life can suck and 2) how good people in old movies look when their life goes to suck. They don’t put on sixty pounds. They actually look better and better as things get worse and worse. I still haven’t watched it. Someday. When the cottage in the woods is mine and paid for and I don’t have any more debts, then I’ll watch it. Once I’d gotten over the “bad” acting in the old movies, I discovered that 1) they were usually a hell of a lot more fun than modern ones; 2) they were always cheaper to rent. A choice – you’ve got only five dollars – you need to buy that pack of cigarettes but that will only leave you with two bucks (it was a long time ago). With that two bucks you can rent 1) one from the regular section or 2) two from the “classics” section. Since you need to drown in a flicker show until you fall asleep or you’ll just spend the rest of the night hating your existence and wishing God would just get it over with and kill you, you go for the Two Movies Option. Ahh, the clicking of the tape, the whirring of the VCR as its automated robot eyes search for the right tracking configuration. Three minutes until the rocket blasts off and you’ve left the weight of your existence crumpled on the bedroom floor. You’re dancing with Ginger. You’re opening your eyes wide and lewd with Harpo. You’re tilting with Charlie. You’re making someone do a double-take with Cary. You’re trying to figure when it is that Hitch is going to walk through. You’re lost in a Hepburn’s smile through a Vaselined lens. Oh take me back, take me back to that beautiful hour-and-a-half In Glorious Black and White. That’ll be two dollars and twelve cents. There’s the bell. Hopefully, I didn’t make any sense sometimes. Go play. - 6:20 AM

Stop reading this crap and go play

2005-07-18T05:21:00.000-04:00

07/18/2005
4:50 AM

Five minute: Help me out here, girl that does not yet exist. Help me get up and get on with it alone. Walk down the roads to the flickering light of swamp gas. We’re getting there. Will we be Rascal, Rouge, Hero, Villain. What are we to them – the little ones that watch us set off into the forest, armed with naught but a notebook, piss and vinegar? All this is too far up for me. I’m still a boy on the edge of it myself. I’m just a quarter bit, fishing in the stream. Walk me up, walk me out. Take me to outskirts of the dark and let me out in the sun and fields. Run away, run away, give me silver to skate way on. You watch it and it begins to work its way into the bones. Then it bubbles up with the blood and swirls around your body. I am not your broom. God help me, I’m not. -4:56 AM

Five minute: At least there’s this – playing to beat the band, training to outrun the freight train. The whistle blows and I go back to the Green Fog Swamp. Take me up, take me down. Dance the idea of me to the difficult rhythm of time and chance. I’m only myself. I’ll be bigger some day, but I’m quite small now. I learn things on occasion. I often forget things. I’m going out to the countryside. Someday. Somehow. Somewhere. Here inside the factory, the heat rises and the workers move as they do in winter – tight and afraid. And that’s all we’re saying. Give me a while to work it out. Give me the rest of my life. I’m not real, you know. Not today. I’m a myth fighting the implication that I have to be real to have meaning. Bob and weave. Here and go far. Up and up. Over the mountain and through the woods, to my house I’ll go. What’s a house? What’s a little peace? What’s a little free action? Myth of myths. The reflection of a reflection of a reflection. I fight it with a push and pull. Straining against the walls of the iron box, we build our muscles for the chance that, one day, they’ll forget to lock it up and we can run free to the trees and glens that few have seen in ten thousand ten thousand. Grit your teeth now and run with the wounds still open. -5:07 AM

Ten minute: Whose taken the salt out of my chips and the sugar from my ice-cream. Oh. Right. That was me. Trying to loose weight. The taste of salt we cannot change, for it is a real thing. The affection that we have for it is not. I’m not playing it right. I’m not playing it for the bones. Let it go and slide into the maw of the jabberwocky. Leftrigntupdown sing hey nony nony, here and go far. Up with the dawn, down with the man. Rise. Raise the legs to the full and go. Faster, faster, fastest. You can’t catch me, I’m the Ginger Bread Man. They’ve eaten me up in trying to cross the river. I trusted a wolf. I think it was me. Eat me up. Let’s see what I’ve become. I’m three shades drawn and two pencils apart. I am not your broom. I am not your broom. Shake off the chains and run. Forgetting the lies of their law, we free ourselves to the better law. This is too much, too little, too soon and I am a jackanapes. Halloween comes but once a year, bringing songs and candy to all the good girls and boys. Bah and go. I’m old and grumpy today. This is all just crap. I’m tired and I need more coffee and smoke. This is just nonsense. I’m going home. If I have to gnaw my leg off to do it, I’m starting now. Where’s the salt and pepper? We once saw something, but today the view is blocked by fat damn trees. I’m going home. I am not your muse. I am not your muse. I’m standing up and throwing down. This is stupid and I’m going home. Oh, crap. What a stupid day. Stop reading this crap and go play. -5:20 AM

the dispassionate factory

2005-07-17T05:46:00.000-04:00

07/17/2005
5:00 AM

Five minute: Come kiss the worry from my brow. I’d do the same for you, if only I knew how. Ten thousand out and ten thousand waiting in the wings. Shes and hes and the continuing blare of car horns and streetlights. I’m waiting for the day. This is half stuff, half nonsense. Walk with me through the changes the shifting seasons has on the subtle psyche. Fail me again to the mountains and steams. Take me out, take me back. Take me to the infinite better. What is the good, acceptable and perfect? Can we buy our freedom by stuffing our fingers in our ears and singing? This is not itself, it seems. Ten up, ten down. Ten back, ten across. We’re walking away now. We’re lowering our weapons to the ground and backing away from the car. Turn and run. Bullets and clubs. Ace beats queen. This beats all. We’re going now. We’re ten feet tall and growing. - 5:06 AM

Five minute: When waging a war on your own knee-jerk response, take into account the weight of the shoes. We’re slip-sliding away. Down the apple-grove road. Father Autumn and the Cool Winds, come fast for me, I’m slipping down the drain. Remind me of what I’m waiting for. Tell me of She and the cottage and the water and the garden and the books with my name on the spine. Sit down, child of quiet, we make our own worlds, whereever we may be. Here is a book with pictures, read and fall inside. Don’t worry about the way. The way finds you when you look down at your feet and plan one step more. One step more. One step more. One step more. Ever on to the limits of the physical world. Then one step more through the gray curtain and we find what lies beyond. Thought of death are unusual in a child so young. Death is ever there before us. One second it taunts, the next it reassures. This is the way of all things: neither good nor evil, just itself. Control your reactions and the reality changes, having never changed. One-half of one-half of one-half is still one-half. But here we are, he says. But here we are she says. Forgive me my humanity for the love of my humanity. - 5:16 AM

Ten minute: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass ‘gainst us. What constitutes a creature? Is it his breath? His movement? We stand in the world both creature and man, machine and ghost. What do we love about us? That physical form, so pleasing and desirable. That physical form, so smelly and weak. That ghost, so smart and free. That ghost, so useless and confounding. We remain ourselves and the world turns and turns and turns. Come back with me and be my love and we will all these pleasures prove. The fish and the dove my fall in love, but where will they make their home? I am myself, one and undivided. I am myself, ten thousand things at once. Teach me your name that I might google you. Teach me your face that I might look for you in the crowds that I pass on the street. Teach me your type that I might learn your needs and ways of expressing. I’m going out the country someday. I’m going and I won’t be coming back. Time is slipping away, like broth down the drain. We’ll be gone some day, and this will be a memory of a nothing. Traveling back in time, we step on a butterfly and nothing happens. We step on a thousand and still nothing happens. All there ever was was the choice to step or not to step. The machine clanks on without our permission. It doesn’t care a whit. But we have this in the heart of the dispassionate factory – for a few split seconds – we saw and felt. We crumble to ash and dust and the wind blows down from the mountains and scatters us to the corners of the world. The machine reabsorbs us and we become gears and cogs again. But for one beautiful flicker we were more real than all the matter in the world. We are the machine. We are the ghost. Let us do and feel. Close me now, an ended book. Put me on a shelf and go outside and play. - 5:34 AM

Strangely perfect

2005-07-15T22:25:00.000-04:00

Have you ever stumbled upon something that you thought was strangely perfect?

From http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=20725.

riding the ridge

2005-07-15T07:03:00.000-04:00

07/15/2005
6:27 AM

Five minute:
Take me as I am, right here and now, knowing that when the wind changes, I will change too. All I want to feel is that you’re out there and you’re listening. We love the Wolverine because he feels the wounds as badly as the rest of us; he just gets better a lot faster. The soft and corny is what I love about me. The cold, hard and sure is what keeps me alive. The velvet cradles your ego as a good egg. The iron is the skeleton that keeps the velvet from collapsing into that soup that I sometimes become. There is good and evil, though the lines of demarcation blur thick at the boundaries. I don’t want to be the soup. The soup slips through the fingers and slides down the drain, into the deep dark. The iron stretches out from the bones and weaves a nest for the velvet to slide its merry way this and that, here and go far. I am my own. My spine grows stronger, my muscles thicker. Perhaps I’ll be strong enough someday. For now, I am my own. My pirate ship is sailing ever on. I do not carry regret in the holds, it weighs too much and the ship sinks in the storms. I am my own and no one can save me. Thank God for that. There it is, the faint melody from across the waters, tickling my ears with tales of scantly clad native girls. -6:33 AM

Five minute:
How tall up and how deep down? Both need the other. We’ll make it as far as the wind takes us. The stories have all been told. And who gives a damn? Tell me the oldest ones; I haven’t heard them in a while. There was a boy who met a girl and chased her. She got away and turned to chase him. Before they met, something happened and they fled each other. Then something reminded each of the other and they fought their way back. And they lived happily ever after. What does happily ever after consist of? Is it worth the effort of the story? Read it in the tabloids of your friend’s lives – no one knows what happily ever after is. Everyone fucks it up. Some manage the lived, some the happily, some the ever after. No one seems to get all three. So we pause here, at the plunge, asking the way or the point. This is the substance of the dilemma. Pray it’s false. There are other stories in the meantime. There once was a boy of noble birth who, through treachery, was cast upon the hard waters of poverty. Through intellect, kindness and hard work, he made his way in the world. Every obstacle became a challenge to be overcome and, eventually, he made his way to the position that he never knew he’d lost. Only after he’d bought it, did he discover it was his by birthright. And he lived happily ever after. -6:44 AM

Ten minute:In that story too, we arrive at the dilemma. One, albeit long, grand adventure and then the foggy shroud of happily ever after. What is this dubious reward? This is why we sit on the hills, riding our bikes along the ridge-tops. It is not fear of success, it’s frank skepticism of what follows. We watch those that plunge and they always end up back where we are, riding the ridge. “At least we tried,” they say, as they wait for the next opportunity to ride down and wreck. Well. Hooray for you. That’s a good thing, why, again? “We lived the stories,” they say. No, no, not quite. You made it to the end of the adventure and wrecked, not the happily ever after. And if you can’t make it to the happily ever after, the point of the adventure is what? The adventure itself! Why? It’s real living! So’s riding the ridge; you’ll die; I’ll die; everybody dies. But not everyone truly lives! No, technically, everyone really lives. But not everyone really lives well! And that’s what you’re doing – tearing off down the slope, crashing into the crazy others that do? It’s living! - he cries as he turns his wheel and starts the decent. So’s this. And maybe I will fall the slope down, someday. But it will be for something better than that inconsequential fog of happily ever after at the bottom. -7:00 AM

memories and stretch marks included

2005-07-14T07:34:00.000-04:00

07/14/2005
6:45 AM

Five minute –
When I sit and watch the concrete crumble, I’m considering the nature of the media. When I wait alone for the girl in the summer dress, I’m just being difficult. I’m going mad again, I think I’ll sit back and enjoy it this time. Hello, my name is Spike. I weigh less than I did a few months ago, more than I did when I was born. If I was actually born that is. I might have flashed into existence only few seconds ago, memories and stretch marks included. Who can tell? Sit down with me, as the sidewalk moves us to the far reaches of the city, past the kids in shorts, doodling on the road with chalk and spit. Here she comes again, passing overhead with the sound of a superatomic engine, breaking the sound barrier. I’ve got this itch right here. Scratch it for me. Down in Carolina, they’ve got a dock that leads out over the waves and, if you’re there at the right time in the right state of mind, you can just keep walking to another place. What’s there, no one can tell. Everyone that’s managed to pull if off has never come back.-6:54 AM

Five minute –
Love me too much. This grows the plants that I want to eat. Love me not at all. This fills the gas tank of the motorcycle I want to ride away on. Boobies are an intellectual property. Ghost to mind (intellect), mind to body (boobies included), body to stuff. I went down to the river, but only in my mind. I went up the mountains, but only at heart. When we learn how to flee, we will do it with our all. When we learn how to stand, we will do it well. There once was a man in the back of the room who fell in love with the woman in the spotlight. It’s happened a thousand times, with results miserable for the man or the woman, but this time, he happened to be more beautiful than the woman of his regard, and she was just a little bit smarter than him. It worked out well, after the chasing and losing and chasing and finding. They lived happily ever after, which is to say, they chased and lost, but always found each other again. Take me down, take me down to the downy-headed dawn, where we wake in happy exhaustion. Take me up, take me up to the sunset hill where we watch the valley fall into bed.-7:09 AM

Ten minute –
When we wake up, we remember our purpose, after the coffee has made its way through our blood. As the day goes, we forget, little by little, but we know that we know it and smile the good smile at the thought of the next rising. Ten miles up, ten to the left, soon, we’ll find ourselves free. That we become another’s bad man is regrettable, but only for the seconds that we think we might get caught. There’s smoke and coffee and shower and breakfast and I continue to type these morning things, though I haven’t written in weeks. We learn how it was that the pirates did not despise themselves. We learn why bad men feel no regret. The bastard is born so, it’s his better nature to behave bastardly. I saw the ships come sailing in. But it’s not Christmas. Always winter and never Christmas, cried the faun. We’re going now. Up to the roof. The men with the plan and the laugh are waiting. We’re going down the garden path. I’ve got a bridge to sell. Steal back to England and steal, they say. Steal back to England and steal. Emphasize this. Buy the better product. The fan rattles on. The boy rambles on. Enough of this. Enough, enough, enough. We went down to the riverside to fish and work at playing. That’s all we’re going to do. Better living through dissipation. Hide in the forest and wait for me. We’ll do dirty deeds by the light of the silvery moon. Three down, four across – the answer is always “Urdu.”-7:23 AM

The mites were coming

2005-07-13T06:15:00.000-04:00

07/13/2005
5:44 AM

Five minute
When you go that way, I can feel you wade through me. And always that smell of morning dew clinging to clean laundry that’s been left on the line overnight. Take me out, take me back, back to the trees and the rain. The pale skin and the gunshot wound, the movie’s over, the story’s starting now. He’s fast is what they say. To be that fast. She’s falling all over my brain. Now comes the sun, now the heat. Get away and be better. Leave loose ends and see what happens. The hard, sure man and his imaginary friend, we’re leaving today. Toot, toot. Up now. Pick up your head from the grazing pasture and see the stars disappear. Poof. One by one, by the dozens. You’d be sweet on me if I were taller. Fresh milk and toast. Up and go, up and go. Feel the stretch in the cloth. Feel the tall times near mountain streams. Pop and go. There she is, three feet down the way. There she is, miles away. Bad lyrics make for better dancing. Forget me to one who lives there. Forget me to them all. I’ll make my bed in wet candy and frosting. The leaves cling to the cuffs and we brush them off. What must they be thinking? The pulses of neurons to not obtain the speed of escape velocity and fall, breathless, into the sheets.
- 5:50 AM

Five minute
No, really this time, is that what went by in the cloud of dust? She imagines that I care. She imagines rightly, but I’m still learning. Stepping out on this. Stepping down to the level of the passing cars and the plaid-skirted schoolgirls. But the mistake of the assumption is in the data. The frizzing and flap are not taken into account. I am not your spoon. I’m not my own. Yet. We’ll see what happens when dessert arrives. Hit them up with the long-lost cousin bit. We’ll see how it rolls. Go down, go down to the mud-bottomed room where the last of the magic remains. It’s easier this way. It’s better in the cold and quiet. Oh. That’s who she is. I’d thought I was thinking of someone else. The way she crouches is almost angelic, if it weren’t for that bit of blood on her lips. That’s just lipstick. But I don’t think that it is. She’s coming down to the swamp in my basement. She’s coming because someone called. I guess it was me. We’ll see who the better monster is. When the sun rose, the story was over and the movie had just begun. People filed into there seats quietly. The flicker machine hummed and the pictures moved, casting the viewer into a cloud of ethereal gloom. Better you than me, said the hero. Better you than me.
- 6:00 AM

Ten minute
Meanwhile, in the baseball field on the far side of the garden, the boys were lining up to pick sides. There’s comfort in horror. The world is worse than you’ve found. She sat up in bed, clutching her chest. They were coming, she knew, they were coming to town again. Standing on the hill near the east end of the valley, the man with the gray beard watched the puffs of smoke rise from the forest. They’re coming again, he though, they’re coming to town again. There was no panic, how can you panic for the inevitable that you’ve seen twice already. The mites were coming and no one knew whom they would take. The boys began counting. One potato, two potato, three potato, four… the wind died to nothing and the sound of the gnawing could be heard. The world is an evil place. It should be punished. It was not the old man that said that. It was his apprentice. The apprentice had not known horror. The old man wondered if he would know it when it arrived. They turned and walked back inside to begin the morning service. The mites came slowly, millions upon millions. Where they went when they went, no one knew and only the young and the stubborn still wondered. The rest of us hid in the routine. You can’t stop the mites. They’re too small and too many, so we went about our lives, waiting for the day to fall and the four to disappear. They always took four – two couples. Whoa to those who loved. I’d stopped loving years ago. I knew I was safe. Who would it be? There was no point in pretending. The mites always knew. There was no escape. The mites were everywhere; they were just so small that, alone, you couldn’t see them.
- 6:15 AM

In case anyone was wondering...

2005-07-13T04:53:00.000-04:00

...this is what a form rejection slip from The New Yorker reads like:

"We're sorry to say that this manuscript is not right for us, in spite of its evident merit. Unfortunately, we are receiving so many submissions that it is impossible for us to reply more specifically. We thank you for the chance to consider your work.

The Editors"

Well, poo. Now to find someone else to bug with old stories.

“Anyone Can Crack An Egg”

2005-07-12T07:37:00.000-04:00

This post is in response to a Wendell Berry quote that John posted over at his blog (http://trawlerman.blogspot.com/).

There’s this apocryphal story about Columbus that goes like this: later in his life, Columbus was at a diner party thrown in his honor when he heard some mutterings from the far side of the table. “I don’t see what the big deal about Columbus is,” some were saying, “I could have gotten in a boat and sailed east looking for Asia, then accidentally stumbled across the new lands.” Columbus thought about this for a while and then, glancing around the table, he saw a hard boiled egg that was still in its shell. “Tell me,” he said, picking up the egg, “can any of you stand this egg on its end?” The egg was passed around the table, each man taking his turn trying to stand the egg on its end, each man failing, to general merriment of all. When the egg had made its way back to Columbus, he took it and carefully tapped one end lightly on the table, forming a small dimple where the eggshell cracked. He then set the egg on the table and balanced it on the dimple. When he took his hands away, there was the egg, standing on its end. He picked up the egg again and handed it to his neighbor. “Now try it,” he said. The man carefully balanced the egg on its new dimple as he had seen Columbus do and again, the egg stood on its end. “Anything can be done,” said Columbus, “once you have been shown how.”

If that story were true, I’d bet that Columbus learned that trick with the egg from someone else for some other purpose entirely. Probably to con a gullible Columbus out of a few bucks. “If I see further,” said Isaac Newton, “it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants.” Ideas do not “come freely.” They are earned by climbing the shoulders of giants and seeing, and it’s the simplest thing in the world to climb on the shoulders of giants – once someone has shown you how – but it’s still not possible to teach someone how to see. With all due deference to Mr. Berry, I think that I do have "intellectual property," and I think that all who claim that such property does not exist are (or are about to be) thieves.

Wheat is a gift of God. A wheat field is a work of intellectual effort. Cotton is a gift of God. My favorite pair of jeans is an intellectual work of Mr. Dickie. I traded him about four hours of washing dishes for them. I’m putting this “arraingment of words” out on a blog (or two) for a price – my own enjoyment. It’s fun. It’s taken me about two and a half hours. It shows it. I didn’t invent any of these words. I did arrainge them. Mr. Dickie didn’t invent cotton. He did arrainge it. Mr. Berry didn’t invent the words he used. He did arrainge them. Just because we didn’t start from absolute scratch does not mean that we’ve done nothing. Just because we stand on the shoulders of giants does not mean that we see nothing. To look is a gift of God, to see is a work of intelectuall effort.

If ideas “come freely” then why do we have libraries? Or librarians. Shouldn’t those things be completely superfululous? “Like teets on a rainbarrel,” as my grandmother might say? All those “arraingments of words” that libraries contain, shouldn’t they just come freely, maybe like, say, bacon in the city?

Those Big Evil Multi-National Pharmolgical Companies charge too much for drugs? Then don’t buy them. Those ideas “came freely” to the drug companies? Then try making ‘em your own damn self. How “freely” do those ideas come now?

But word are just words, and anyone can arrainge them. Shakespeare was just “arrainging the words.” Hell, Eienstien was just “arrainging the numbers,” Rembrant was just “arrainging the paint” and everyone knows that Columbus was just an imperialist thug that didn’t do anything special that hadn’t been done before by the Vikings, Asains, Africans, Siberians and, probably, Austrailians when he “arrainged the maps.” Anyone can crack an egg.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to check on some MP3’s that I’m downloading from Soulseek.

Boom, kick, ba-da-da-da-da

2005-07-11T07:50:00.000-04:00

07/11/2005
7:07 AM

Five minute – 7:13 AM
This time down we’re going to see what the meat looks like on its hooks. Play it to the bone. We’ll do it tomorrow. We’ll be him today. Look and see how far we can take it. This is three times down and seven up. Pop. The rolling of the ship induces a terrible visage in the crew. The flim-flam man gon’ have a time of it, here in Zombie Town. The light is coming on and I am not myself. I’m just some old man that downloaded “Dust in the Wind” because he watched “Old School” and now he can’t get that damn song out of his head. Fine, fine, now drive the car around and take me out of this damn town and out to my country estate. How the fuck are we going to beat the rap? Two options, one not resting on ones self, the other a dread monotony? How I hate these false dilemmas when I can’t see my way between the horns of the bull. Zoop and down. Swish and spit.

Five minute – 7:24 AM
Did Cher sing that song or was it somebody else? Not that one, the other one. This time next year, we want to be watching the plants grow, out in the country. The question is, how do we get there? How long to the bouncy bounce? Bah. Double nuts. If I had two I’d be king. Miss you, pop. The last time we had it this bad; it wasn’t cured until the incident. Well, we’ll let it go. Maybe the night came on and the women did too. That way, we can arrange it scientifically. In the core of my being, I want to be Cap’n Picard. Externally, I’m just a red shirt. We’ll take important character #1, #2, #3 aaaaaaand… that Red Shirt. Damn it. You know they’re going to get you. But that’s an old joke. Might be fun to run with it. Might be able to make a story out of something like that. Hmm, and wouldn’t it be fun. But no, no, no. We’ve got other fish to fry. We’ve got the fog, the werewolf and the ever-looming desert. Damn desert. Be done. Just fix the fucker up enough and send it out. That’ll freaking work. Let it go and go on. On to the girlies in the tight dresses and the shaking glutes. Neck roll. Bump. Start running and see if the cop can catch you. How bad can you be and get away with it? That was always the question.

Ten minute – 7:39 AM
No wait. Back to the girlies. Hmm and hot damn. Oooooo… you so bad. Sweet. Boom, kick, ba-da-da-da-da. Boom, kick, ba-da-da-da-da. Hot damn again. Wicked smile. Run free and let the world fuck itself into oblivion. What’s my new last name? Mr. Brown or Mr. Hill? Well, we’ll soon find out. Soon as the cops bust in the door. Run. Run, Forest, run. Stop and think about that though. A whole damn forest. Running. Now think of the Cameron Diaz butt wiggling scene in the first “Charlie’s Angels” movie. That’s what I’m talking about. See. I’m completely evil now. It’s better this way. The temperature drops to an acceptable 68 and we party on, Wayne. Pop culture defines the common metaphor. The questions arise, what is the tone of the metaphor? Every culture hides something they don’t like in plain view. What is ours? Think on it and then let it go. This is a stupid post and it makes me silly. Better that than a dead lion. Meow. Hello, old Sally. How stands the life? There’s the bar down on 22nd street where the… well, we’ll just let it go. You’re not really their type. When did I grow this cheap and why wasn’t I before? Man, you waste your life on that deep crap. Except when you’re not. Out of smokes in a second. Damn it. Swish and spit. The crowd goes wild. God, she has a nice butt. I mean, thank you, God, for nice butts. Nope. I’m still myself. I’m just playing around with the dancing shoes. If you put them on, they’ll bite your hand. But only if you feed them. Wait. Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn didn’t wear any shoes. It was that creepy stone guy in Rome. Oh, you knew that. Me too, I’ve just run out of anything but nonsense. The world will end tomorrow. Start playing now.

between here and the big, big sleep

2005-07-10T15:00:00.000-04:00

07/10/2005
2:17 PM

Five minute – 2:24 PM
When it comes around, it comes around. The dream about the girls, is that what left that tint of sadness? Was it one that came after, one I can’t remember? We build upwards, growing down. The thrill of her embrace. It chases me outside, out into the world where things are, where you can touch them with your hands. I don’t really like the city, but I respect it. I’d understand the reaches if I could know why. There she is again, haunting me back into my rain-drenched world of tough, smart PI’s and the bottles of cheap whisky. The typewriter sits on the desk and we start from there. He’s just what he’s doing. We play along with it. Letting the flow change from song to song. Look up and see the boys walking down the sidewalk. Stand up and get ready. This is where we’re going. It’s ten blocks down and we’re ready for it. The heat of the sun is added incentive. We make it and track the beast to its den. We’ve met the enemy and he is us. Don’t worry, kid. That’s a good thing.

Five minute – 2:34 PM
The coffee’s hot still. That I woke up when I did is just as it is. Glad to hear it. Better off here. Better yet to be off to there. Find the way, figure the numbers. Become him. The surface, the hero, we are still both and so many things in-between. How’s the day and where’s the good times? Good times are here to stay. Even if we have to nail their feets to the floor to do it. Look out from under the brim of that hat and let me see you smile. Walk with me. Walk me down to the countryside. Fresh-baked bread in the morning and a meander down the creek when the cool of evening light falls toward us, this side of the hills. How fast can the world be moving if the shadows only creep along at a quarter-inch per half hour? Those angles, those fine, fine angles. The houses we build in our heads and then only get to let out on paper. Ahh, damn the necessity of money and time. Screw it dude, we’re human, doomed to a life sentence of hard labour and happiness, if we can only find the right judge. The girls in the summer dresses. The turn of the clock hands. We’re falling back into yesterday’s long lost cousin. The brown shades. The funky angles that could only be there by a hopeful mind. So be it and so on and so forth. This and that, fuck it, fuck it, fuck it. Sheeit, dude, it’s only two thirty in the pee em. We gots hours and hours before the old man comes with cold hand and tells us to get up and do something. She’ll love us, someday. Someday, we’ll be what we were meant to be and we’ll just let it flow like spit from a coronet.

Ten minute – 2:52 PM
Man, that Harry C. Jr, he rocks. What am I listening too? Harry Connick Jr. and Branford Marsalis. Too much too soon to fast – just perfect for the way it goes. We let it go and let it slide and the day comes on and the night isn’t what we thought it would be – it’s better. Wake up with me in small, small hours and lets sit quietly on the porch and drink warm coffee and wait for the sun to rise. All I want is you in a quiet forever. Let my heart break a thousand times a second just to see the sun rise on your pleased look at me. It’s all this and none of that. Better days is nothing but dust and wind. We’ve got each other and the world. Sing me songs again of how much better tomorrow will be when today is more perfect than yesterday. How could they take us away from perfection? Don’t think it. Think only of this warm breeze and the who we are right now. Right this very now. We’re going ten thousand years into the future and never coming back. This is where we are and who we want to be. Perfect from today back to birth, better from now to endless. Let the tale be told, simple and sweet. You and me. Boy and girl. Lost in imaginary worlds. So slides the shoe. So rolls the trumpet. So claps the thunder. Up, up, up and out to inside. There’s our garden. There’s the garden path. Go there and stop. The journey is inside from now on. Buy your freedom from the hard-handed money world. Spend you’re life in endless dissipation. They lied when they sold us that horse. Give it back and walk away more free. Sing me just one song before we go back. Laugh quiet in my ear. If it weren’t for the days, I’d be a millionaire. If it weren’t for you, I’d be a cheap, cheap thing. Play me the song. Play me the words. Play my soul with fingertips and whisper in my ear. It’s a five-and-dime world when you play the song yourself. Play me like a chump. Play me like a toy. Play me like a game. Just play me for all the hours between here and the big, big sleep.

barley discernable as stories

2005-07-09T09:14:00.000-04:00

07/09/2005
8:28 AM

Five minute – 8:35 AM
And how did you like the rain? The washing of the cars by natural action can only result in higher speeds. When she saw me standing there, looking like a rock-star turned zombie by the radiated water, she had to stop and take a picture. We mumbled down the roads, trying to walk the drunk man’s gait stone sober. Walk me down to the willow tree where we played at war with plastic men and BB guns. There was the bit of effervescing sunlight, the played house and the drapes that molded to the color of flesh. Walk with me again. Walk me to the better world. We’ve got ten thousand ten thousand tries. They can’t hurt us in a permanent way. The wobbling of the world increases as the pioneers blast off in rockets of wood and steel to find the setting sun of ten thousand light-years away. The natural evolution of the creature is beset by germs the size of Jupiter and we, dying, continue on in cosmic rays.

Five minute – 8:45 AM
Look outward for a moment and see the plants. See them rise towards the water in the sky. The firmament above, the firmament below. Cover your head and let the puddles move around your feet. She isn’t here. She’s waiting over there, on the other side of the mountain. By the time we get there, we’ll be free men. Follow the drinking gourd. A generation of abuse could not beat the heart that beat the band. They fled and flew in the dark. Let us meld with the surroundings and cast off the chains of servitude. I am not your broom. Run towards. There is a pull, cast by ourselves, and a push, a reaction against. She was better than the common blonds by virtue of my admiration. Heehee! Sell the bottle, buy the wine. Smarter, faster, stronger – we can rebuild him. We can sell the wine to the sky for better portions. But keep some. The creature is bound only by his reaction, if he be a free creature. Be a free creature, you cannot imagine otherwise. There is the sound of the Scottish pipes. Run faster. Push harder. Think more clearly. Where have you gone? I’ve come around. The empty isn’t so much. That’ll be fine for today.

Ten minute – 9:01 AM
The strain in the brain is felt mainly on the plain. Spiff it up, she said. I couldn’t agree more. Once again we learn that the constraints of space-time is felt more than perceived. How can they catch us if that which they catch with is some part of that which we seek? Seek, do not flee. Now, to put that into a form that actually works in the every-day every day. Nice legs. Nice butt. Let’s stop there and leave the rest to scattered and fevered imagination. The bug on the skyscraper has no issues. Those ascribing issues only ascribe issues. Unless you’re really nuts. What does it mean to dream of the old man in a common and decrepit state? What does it mean when the blond is a coke whore? Does it mean the subconscious is breaking free? Don’t bother me with thoughts of eternity, I’ve got a raging libido. The sultry summer of the picture is echoed again and again in the images from the video game that the hero plays in his sleep. For once, could you just tell a good story? Damn it, if you’ve got the talent to do the pictures, why not work at the story where you obviously suck? I could tell a better story than that, and I tell tales that are barley discernable as stories. Hello, fishy. Hello, nurse. Books. It’s the books; they made me def you know. Mos def. Boom! Then came the rain and it washed the last remnants of the Great Asshole War from the city streets. The sun came out and baked the sidewalks, ridding the cement of disease. We walk away now. The secret of the “End Of the World” movies is this – we think we should be the ones that inherit the planet after the warring factions have destroyed everyone else. I’ll tell you a secret. You’re wrong. I inherit it. Boom. ‘Scuse me. Me and mine are going to go play. Boom. Baboom. Boom.

a notch in the doorway

2005-07-08T06:08:00.000-04:00

07/08/2005
5:28 AM

Five minute – 5:34 AM
How beautiful is beautiful enough? Is it an ever-increasing thing? Is there a point at which you can say, “that’s beautiful enough, you can stop improving it now”? We ask these questions to ask them sometimes. Better than before. Still not good enough. The yellow glow of the streetlights speaks in contrast to the blue-gray light of the cloud-cast morning. When will she come? How will she know the way? We move around and change so much, how would she know us if she saw us and would she be sure that she’d like us when the wind changes direction and the sock turns it’s gaze to new beyonds? The miles add up on the soles of the feet. The pretty skin turns useful but we still long for her to take our hands in hers and pronounce them so nice. How far up? Where’s the top of the hill? Not content with how far we could climb, we built planes and then rockets, but we still wished it was our feet that felt the weight.

Five minute – 5:45 AM
Let me down, let me down to the pastures and meandering brooks. She leaves us in perplexity to build a house. But we left her to build a house. Who called the call first? The distant lowing of cattle, we walk the creek-bank over grass bitten off at the height of a cow’s lips. Where did she go when we sent her away? Is she waiting still? Did she find a new love? Settle down beneath the oak tree where the steam curves and the waters deepen. Put on the worm and cast it out into the water. Bobber float it from the rapids than mark the start to just before the rapids that end it. Over and over again. Smoke thick cigars and drink whisky cut with well-water. The sun climbs but the leaves protect. When the belly growls, open up the bag and take out the sandwiches. Eat. Sprinkle the crumbs in the water. Catch crayfish until the sun starts to drop, then back to the wet line and the drowsing over a book on theoretical physics or some other fine fairy-tale. No fish today. Just fishing. Reel in and pack up. Walk home with darker hands.

Ten minute – 6:05 AM
If you care, your heart will break and you’ll be left alone again. If you don’t, you’ll just be alone. Take me back, take me back to the pretty girls and me. The days go on and I remain myself. Insubstantial. Mulligan. Call a mulligan and lets play it out again. Someday, we’ll get it right. There’s a town in the hills that they’ve all forgotten about. A long time ago, people lived and died and played and worried where we’re standing. Today, only we, remembering, continue the thought. Sit down in the dust, lean back against the dry dry fencepost and look at the gray fallen buildings. We’re going there. Our lives will continue on only as anecdotes, three-color printings of drawings of imaginations that were cut and pasted from scraps of life. Listen to the sounds of the ghost town. The wind. The creaking of decrepit boards. The rustle of dry grass. The rare squawk of birds. When forgetting comes, it comes with its weight and consumes our own, adding to its bulk. Forget me now and remember me as I was, the boy full of promise and pride. We’re remembered best when we’ve sinned well. Your jeans powered with dust, you stand up and stretch. Head home now and remember yourself to yourself. Mark the height of your existence with a notch in the doorway of an abandoned home. Come, baby mine, baby mine, let’s make hay while the sun is falling. Your lips are ripe as wine-ready grapes, it would be a sin not to try them. Round the mountain, the song of the half-second serenades the walk to the cabin’s front door. We’ll be gone, someday, and thank God for that. Autumn will come and we'll bed down in piles of new-fallen leaves and smell the moss air. For the moment, let’s play at this game of saying summer with wrinkling eyes and foxes' smiles. You are too beautiful to carry lightly.

the object of our affection

2005-07-07T07:00:00.000-04:00

07/07/2005
6:19 AM

Five minute – 6:26 AM
The time comes when the sun reflects off the TV antennas and the signals are broadcast into deep space. Hello, alien life form. How goes things in the world of the non-existing? Up late two days in a row. Trying to avoid the weight, we sleep longer and find comfort in hunger. The hands move, the mouth talks, the eyes rove the bodies of girls in pants that can’t be good for circulation. Haha! Come and get me, he shouts over the bulwarks to the flailing paper leaves. We run faster when pursued by the sound of the old voice, the one we had when we were in captivity. We’ll learn the new path. We’ll find a way to the quiet. When no one was looking, the gods enjoyed themselves. Run back, run back, to the five-and-dime. There waits a boy in jeans and cowboy hat, sipping chocolate malt. We’re bigger than we were before, but the pull of the dark tide still feels it’s way into our bones. Forget it for now. Forget it while you yet can.

Five minute – 6:36 AM
We drop down from the clouds or rise up from the stream. The dripping remains. The odd feeling rises again and we become that toothed creature. I see female people. Boo. Like ghosts, the sun’s light rises. Where were you that cold spring day that the purples did not obtain? The black, damn it back. That strange taste in the back of the throat, milk, or something close. The green head of the swaying giant, the angles of yellow, that silver shine. Cough, spit in the ashtray and keep going. These are the benefits of the run: the cleansing cough, the sexy sweat, the brain buzz, the need for mindless/mindful concentration, the seeing, the being seen. Tomorrow we’ll find our way out again. This is how we fight. This is the object of our affection. My own damn life. We rise again and find the path to the dawn. In waking, we bring the sun. The odd thing that the aliens tell us is that each creature that looks and sees is the center of the universe.

Ten minute – 6:52 AM
In the age of empires, gravity was a force. In the computer age, gravity is an exchange of information. There is a perfect place. That is what we believe. It holds, but not exclusively, these things: a motorcycle; five to ten acres of rural, wooded land; a self-build house; a garden fit to feed a man well for the year; beer; books; a good internet connection; a workshop; a wood-stove. These and several other adventures are things that lessen the tidal pull. No, these are things that strengthen the spine. These are things worth fighting for. These are things worth living for. Find the path. Keep friends. Discard weights. Go. And soon I will pick up my novel again. Maybe today. There’s another idea now. Perhaps that will spur on. Believe the better lie until the lie obtains. The sound passes by. The day rolls over on itself and I go and come home again. Walk the day. Walk to the lean face and powerful arms. Make the earth say beans instead of grass. We find our way by running into walls at night. Walk. Just walk. Let the hardness build. The soft flesh is bad for hiking. House upon his back, the turtle is always home. Go on down the garden path, go on down the city streets, we’re fighting to find our way through the brush to the better world beyond. Out of our flaws we construct the better thing. Working mistakes, we find perfection. The aliens call back from above the clouds. They’re telling us to play, of course.

The turtle manifests

2005-07-06T06:58:00.000-04:00

07/06/2005
6:25 AM

Five minute – 6:32 AM
For this we ride the wind to the dirt packed trail. There was a girl in the far-away that said the sounds reminded her of the games and trains. Am I yet myself, am I not? The light is not full-fleshed and the remnants of sleep hold the boy to the task. Who calls? No one. I am not quite myself. I am not quite my own. I fight the imposition. I fight the stupidity of it all. There is the better lie. Climb the valley down. Climb the riverbed to the end of the discourse of mankind. I walk here and own the way. I walk here and fight the imposition. Where is the jubilant song and the throw-aside muscles? When she was her own, she owned the world. When I obtain, the better world finds itself to have always existed. Fight the oppression. Fight the ridiculous demand. How can the seed find purchase? How do we walk free?

Five minute – 6:42 AM
Fine then, I’ll be the bad man. If I thought it might make a change in the temperature, I’d sell the last few bits. I’d kill the cooing doves. Split down the middle and walked through, we emerge on the other side, better than we were. Always this. Always that. It’s the vomiting stupidity of it. If I had it, it’d be there. But I don’t have it. And since I can’t fight the system, I’ll find a way to ignore it. I am my own. I say it now, knowing it to be a half-truth, but in saying it, I’ll stumble upon a way. This irrefutable bullshit. You don’t matter. I am the sole inhabitant and you don’t pick up the garbage that washes ashore. I’m better than this. Better. I’m still walking. I’m still learning. I’m still remembering. This light does not hold me. It’s the light of a burning man, a hand of doom. The voodoo princess and her henchmen do not obtain on this island. We here walk free. I’m better than your lie. I was a fool to believe you’d make a difference. I walk to work and ride the bus home. You lie in the act of believing. I’m going to my home.

Ten minute – 6:59 AM
What do you say when the words said are meaningless, when the tale being told is stupid and boring? How do you fight with yourself? Divided. Split down the middle. A war between hands. Do it. Swallow the bitter pill. The deep dark will come, but so too comes sleep. Then you wake in the morning and the chains are no longer invisible, but you can see them now. You can learn how to break them. It’s all nonsense. It’s all stupidity. Vanity. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What good saving your soul? Why not save the soul of a dog? You will both turn to dust and what happens after is a hopeful guess. Think smaller. Leave a good-looking corpse. Make, work, and tell a few good tales. Find a woman that’s worth it and sleep with her. Then comes the great embrace. The dirt nap. The passage through the fog? And what dreams may come? Ahh, there’s the rub. Dead dog, dude. Dead dog. Bit sized pieces. One day. One hour. One minute. This and then one tiny little that. Write. Exercise. Shower. Put on clean clothes. Eat. Go to work. Dream of sex and candy. Come home. Tell yourself stories. Do that one little thing. Let it go. Go home. Home is what you carry on your back. The turtle manifests. It’s turtles all the way down. Plan to do it. Let it go. Sleep and dream of small, strong women that are smarter than you, yet strangely find you attractive. Comfort in hopes, plans, dreams. Do the one thing. That’s all there is. You can’t escape the dirt in the road. Just take it one second at a time. Fuck it, dude. Just grow up one tiny little bit at a time. In the mean time, remember, it’s all just a game. You can't really fuck it up. It’s all just plastic toys in a sandbox. Play. Just fucking play.

the dreaded things

2005-07-05T04:59:00.000-04:00

07/05/2005
4:08 AM

Five minute – 4:15 AM
Who goes there? Who comes? What is it? What do you want of me? Speak no more, spirit. Though you be dead, your voice does not cease from troubling. I am myself. I am a small blue thing. I run away and the sounds of the old things still call to me as loudly. Going on. Going on and going away. I’m here. I’m up. I’m free for a few seconds. I am my own for these scant few instants of empty time. There was a sound and a fury. There was a woman of high regard. There was a dragon and a mouse. The mouse we know, having seen his kind a thousand times before. The dragon is a new thing, imagined. The funeral bells in the church steeple sound the same tones as the wedding bells. We run faster, trying to find a new way of living better. We know simply this – we are the bastards of time and space. Our fathers are ghosts; our mothers gave us up for adoption to the madmen of pulpit and mines. We claim ourselves and have our revenge for kindnesses that cannot be repaid and never could.

Five minute – 4:25 AM
We’re going down to the lake of forgetting. Drink of the fluid in the Stygian sea and the good passes away. So too does the bad. Who saw you at the start of the enterprise? Why did his hand shape the mold? It isn’t here. It isn’t there. This is its own. There are creatures unimagined beneath the tall mountains. Down in the roots of the rocky growths is a bottomless lake that has never seen the light of falling days. In the water swims the creatures without eyes, for they have no use for seeing. My brothers swim this ocean and we have no memory of dread, for we are the dreaded things. There once was a man who set out to know. In knowing, he lost his sense. The madness claimed him and he became one of a million, a patch that darkness stitches over the sky. That we are insensible is our only hope. To be too stubborn for either the greater evil and the greater good is our only plan. May the world vomit us up on the dry land of some other Ninevehian shore. We wait for our moral beneath the life tree. The canker worm is coming. The lesson. Then the book closes and we are on to something new.

Ten minute – 4:42 AM
Perhaps this is darkness. Perhaps the light. Who can tell whose eyes have been stitched in backwards, casting longing gazes over the endless waters of the sunless lake? When she came to the mouth of the den, the flocks looked up and saw in her the glare of the sun. Mistaking her for the origin of light, they followed. But she remained the sheep she always had been and they forgot her. The disillusionment remained. That is why, they say, the bruit force of longing cleared the valley of its plants. The deserts spread to the encroaching hills and the hills fell back, stung by something more than they were. Look upon me and despair. The falling, the rising, the falling, the rising. This new madness is odd. Not unpleasant. Different. We will learn towards enjoyment. The seven daemons that compose the soul of a man become angels in a different light. The seven become one where the mud flows. Listen back to the angel days and hear the foolishness of the speech. There were no better days. There was always only this: a stubborn ignorance and a thick skin. Get away, we told her. Get away, we’re waiting for something better to come along. It did. It didn’t. There’s this instant, and we, Our Favorite Bastard, remain in the long days of summer. Welcome the rain. It doesn’t come. Don’t care. Forget the wobbly nature of the universal substance and lie to inanimate matter. Hit it up and see what happens to the falling candy. Thank god, her kiss is a bite. Play. Play it til you bleed. Play.

Arf, arf

2005-07-01T06:29:00.000-04:00

07/01/2005
5:48 AM

Five minute – 5:54 AM
Adolescent rage at that which we cannot understand. Ahh… screw it. That’s what we say. We’re still young and invincible because we haven’t died yet. Someday, we’ll settle down to comfortable uncaring, but while we yet have strength, let us remember the ideas worth a sneer. And that’s not where we want to go with it. We just want to be shallow and hot and bothered. We still measure ourselves by the sticks of adolescence is what I’m saying. The we and the I. The eternal battle. Ha. It’s not that dramatic. This is just itself and I remain the one that I was as I become the one that I will be. Nonsense. It has to happen by accident or it makes for a lousy story. They say. Maybe they’re right. But there has to be something behind the accident that makes the product worth hocking. Go now, therefore, into the desert and find the single flower worth a damn. Eat it and die a thousand deaths, rising each time to find a new way home.

Five minute – 6:04 AM
Go on down the wobbly board to the windward sail. How you doin? It doesn’t matter if she’s worth the effort. Seeing yourself in the mirror is worth it. Save the one thing. Walk the way. Walk the way. The bobbling of the streetlights attests to the perfection of the moment. Each crack of lizard-skinned pavement reminds us that all that exists is this quarter of a second. Sex, drugs and bad songs about sex and drugs. The dominant force in the universe is neutral. The trees don’t give a damn and the ants only work for electronic impulses in brains smaller than grains of sand. Go to the ant, you sluggard, consider her ways and do as I say. She runs and in that there is hope and life. Being alive, that’s the thing. That’s the secret of the Old Ones. Cthulu was an octopi. Key Lime pie. Six-toed cats wander the house, searching for food. The Old Man died by jumping out of a plane. They covered it up with a shotgun blast. A tendril of adrenalin creeping up from the inner thigh precedes the scatter of photons. Run faster, Forest, run faster. Fuck ‘em. It’s better to be a live dog than a dead lion. Arf, arf.

Ten minute – 6:20 AM
The banners that fly over the street proclaim a sentiment that no one actually endorses. It’s a slogan imageneered by ad-men from a corporation that doesn’t care for a corporation that claims to fight corporations. The tough boy walking down the street wants to sleep with my girlfriend. Ha ha. What he doesn’t know it that I haven’t got one. Feel free. Swim in the sea. The puck in the damn falls slowly past swaying weeds and the monsters creep up from beneath the mud. What’s the last thing? Before? Before. I think I remember the sound of rocks and trees singing something about dancing. But that’s impossible, isn’t it? We grow too large and flatten the houses with a look. We leap off the blue marble and sail into space, pulling the sun along behind us. It’s to cook the cosmic bear and fish. Backpacking from here to eternity is a long, quiet walk in the woods. That’s why we carry a book and cigarettes. It distracts us from the better world that we imagined when we were still young enough to stir up the fires. The hot sticky mixes with the Nyquil and cheap whiskey and who are we to judge the man with the striped boxers? He’s just not allowed to ask for change. I gave at the post office. Jump in the car and drive to the creek. Get out and run into the mud. Never leave. Find a way to stay in the one perfect moment. She’s hot and I’m randy. Randy Newman. New man. Made from plastic. Plastic melts in the face of the sun. The sun runs for his mother. The mother is the queen. The queen is in drag. The drag races. She’s still there and we can’t get around it. Just kiss her, you fool. Dance. Dance. Dance. She trips the light fantastic and pulls me toward the naked singularity of her sex and sunlight. Kerpow. I’m off and halfway down the belly. Go play.

like fire-lit diamonds

2005-06-30T07:34:00.000-04:00

06/30/2005

Five minute – 4:58 AM
Herm… sometimes I have to stop and wonder what I want to be. Not externally, in a goals type thing, but in a seeing, feeling sort of way. Do I want to be sure and confident or open and spontaneous? I think strength trumps feeling, but I want to feel it in my writing. I want to retain that sense of wonder with the world; I just don’t want the world to overwhelm. Hmm and hah. Bother and go brah. In a few minutes, it will be time for one thing or another. One more day and I can read the desert novel again. Thanks to everyone that’s given it a read and thrown me comments and corrections. Danni and Tim gave me a hard copy so that’s too damn sweet. I’ll be reading that and working it through. I think I’ll do an aloud reading of it this weekend since Ben will be out of town. I haven’t done an aloud reading of it in parts yet. See. Now just looking back at what I wrote. My style switches from day to day. Some days, clear and factual. Some days esoteric and mystical. Odd. I like it. Now to see if I can make it work.

Five minute – 5:08 AM
I’ve got an idea on what the next novel might be. Going with an older one. We’ll see. Sock in a windstorm, remember. Hurry, hurry, hurry. This thing then the next. The Days Are Just Packed. Man, do I love Calvin and Hobbes. So many great lines and metaphors. Doing things and feeling things. Strong and sure, questioning and seeking. You have to be all. You find the parts that are your own and involute and then you do what you need to as the desire arises. This then that. Better than I was. Harder and kinder at the same time. Stone-face and smile. We are all these things, inherent. You learn to see and do and act and be. The self exists, the expression and ways of seeing changes. There’s this and then the other. Solid core, covered with whimsy. Iron frame, paper walls. It is not that the questioning is undesirable. It’s that the never finding answers is questionable. 2+2=4. It remains. Reality exists. Existence exists. I exist. My feelings change. I will find out how to steer them. I’ll be better than the average, the normal. Better than I was. Better than I am. Stronger. Clearer. Surer. I am myself. I am my own. Ego sum propritus. Something like that. I’ve got more research to do on it.

Ten minute – 5:21 AM
A mighty ship sailed by a man hard and clear, so that the child can play wherever, whenever he wants. This is a picture. This is a metaphor. This is one self. This is what we're looking for. This is what we want to see. We swim the ocean to find a better land. We swim just to swim. Ten thousand and ten in the hole. Roll the dice, rattle the bones. Be better than you were the day before. Fight for yourself. First with yourself, then with the world at large. Keeping the innocent and silly in its rightful place of centrality and purpose, we grow larger and harder. Our wits grow more clear; our eyes sparkle like fire-lit diamonds. We’re better than we were. We’re better than we know. We will yet be something great. We will stand taller than the shadows and touch the arm of god. I am myself. I don’t apologize for that. That I am kind and sweet when I can be, I do not apologize for. That I am cold and distant when I need to be, I do not apologize for. I will find a way out of the maze. Maze. Bullshit. What I mean is debt. No metaphor needed. It’s all about money. Money=The Black Pearl. The Black Pearl=Freedom. You find your ship and sail it. By muscle, mind, hook or crook. You do what you can live with and sail free. Sail free. I like that. Okay, things to do. Thoughts to think. Muscles to work. Feelings to convey. Off to then and tomorrow. Teacher’s left the room. Everybody act up and play rough.

behind my little green wall

2005-06-29T20:09:00.000-04:00

06/29/2005

Five minute – 4:52 AM
I exist. Reality exists. What does not exist at this moment is my internet connection. Odd that it irritates me so much when I haven’t used very much in the last few days. I don’t like being irritated, but that is as it is. The question becomes, what will you do with that irritation? I exist. Reality exists. My emotions about reality exist. I cannot change. Reality cannot change. What can change are my emotions. But can I change them? Can I really stop being afraid simply by saying no? Can I stop being irritated so quickly as that? But I have. I’ve distracted myself already with my questions. And there’s a start.

Five minute – 5:03 AM
If enjoyment of life is a choice, how do learn to choose? How do we subjugate those emotions we do not enjoy? How do we learn to accept reality without giving up on our dreams? Not that I could give up on my dreams if I actually wanted to. I have actually wanted to, but the dreams remain. A thunderclap rolled through Buffalo. It’s too hot and muggy to sit in my room, so I’m out on the fire escape in the deep morning, hiding behind my little green wall of plants. The questions that I’m asking now are the questions that I was asking when I started the desert novel, those so few, so many summers ago, sitting behind my little green wall of forest in Houghton. I think I’m closer to answering them, but I’m still left puzzled at times. You can change yourself, a little and slowly. I believe that even the core substances can change. You can change reality, at least that little bit that you have power over. And that is, perhaps, where the lust for power comes from. To shape reality to your better enjoyment. Nothing inherently wrong with this, I believe. The problems begin to emerge when you extend your power into areas that infringe on the powers of others and their enjoyment of life.

Ten minute – 5:19 AM
But I’ve gone and ventured into preaching, and I can’t stand preaching. Preaching doesn’t apply to the preacher and is, thus, nonsense. What does this mean to me? How do these questions affect my existence? Grow callous is partly what I think. The wounded heart cannot help itself. Do not grow too callous or the heart loses its meaning. The Middle Way. That is the path of the Buddha. It’s the path of Ecclesiastes as well. It is an aspect of Christ then too. Learn to walk again each day, lest we forget how. Do not spend too long learning; you’ve known how since before you can remember. The sky is lightening by degrees. Little specks of rain flit down upon my laptop and me. What do I really want? To be happy. How is one happy? By enjoying life. I have not surety but confidence in my eternal soul’s salvation. Now is the part where I find confidence in my mortal life. Thank you, God, for my life. I don’t know how long my gratitude will last, and I don’t believe in telling lies of that sort. Not to you. I’ll always get caught. So, while the thanks is inherent and honest, thank you for my life. It’s raining now. A light rain, but rain falls. I’ve come inside. We see by degrees. We learn the right thing in taking small steps. The rain falls and the city cools. May the enjoyment of life prevail.

PS - the internet connection works now

The moment exists

2005-06-24T06:34:00.000-04:00

06/24/2005

Five minute – 6:07 AM
You stay alive and learn. Listen observe do. Learn from your actions. Consider the outcomes of past actions. If this led to this, in one instance, will it obtain if the process is repeated? To be. We will be. We are being. How do we do it better? Feel the muscles and joints. Work the mind and the body. Grow better. Stronger, faster, wiser. Keep your many faces, know them, know how to work them. Let there be two in operation in public, except for those few blessed occasions when only one is required. Be yourself, but learn to emphasize those various aspects of personality. Be the Strong You when he’s called for. Be the Smart You when he’s needed. Be the Silent You when he’s the best option. And, in all of this, learn to find unity in the faces. Learn the thickness of the ghost.

Five minute – 6:17 AM
There is more. There is the object of desire. What do I want? Why do I want it? Is that desire good, acceptable? Is it enough? Will it carry the action through? Strength, endurance, flexibility. These are means. What is the end? What do you truly desire? If the desires are many, to what locus do they point? What are they drawn from? Are you avoiding or pursuing? Good, acceptable, perfect. The perfect is the odd one. Perfect does not exist – there is always a better. Acceptable is comprehensible. Not the best, but better than it was. It’ll do, pig, it’ll do. Who is the master that we crave acceptance from? Mother? Dead father? God? Girl from high-school? Find the self that is master. All others are paste-overs that will leak again when the supposed desire is obtained. For now, we fly with our feet on the ground. Our feathers are muscles. Our breeze, a surer thought.

Ten minute – 6:32 AM
And there it is. Throw it down and let it go. Pick up the words and the music and let things fall and fly. Away, away, away. To the better lands. We find our way a step at a time. Aim. Aiming for something. Aiming for the Beloved. What, why, how? These slip in the moment of the exertion. The muddy self drops away and that is forgotten. The expending is its own peace. The moment exists. Forget. Forget what lies ahead, though it be good. Forget what lies behind, though it seemed the end. There is just this. A body in motion through time and space. Self. Self. Self. I am. And the creature that I am is good. The creature that I am enjoys. The nonsense drops and the mind slows to the pulse. The beating of blood. The girl of the better tomorrow. The not that is. Just let it go. Let go and let the wormholes emerge. Grasp, forget. Grasp, forget. Beat by beat by beat. I am my own. I am. I. There is the emergence of the forest wall. The sheltering place of the warm damp. The cool blue. The calm green. We are ourselves. We obtain in the moment. We become and the dross drops away. We who do yet live. We who remain and find in ourselves the pride that fuels the legs and mind. Moving. The motion of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Better than. Past is past. Let the curtain fall and the boy with the wings fly. Forgetting nothing. There is nothing to forget. Forgive. There is nothing to forgive. There is life. There is word. This is the way. This is the code. This is the key. Forgetting is remembering in tribute. Raise a glass in remembrance on the way to the better oblivion. We wake and the trembling sweats have not obtained. We are ourselves. I am myself. I am my own. Rest in the work. Enjoy your life. Deep breath. Go play.

the limits of the rubber

2005-06-23T06:08:00.000-04:00

06/23/2005

Five minute – 5:36 AM
You know why I think I really liked Episode 3? I think it’s because we finally got to see what the heart of the dark side of the force is – disappointment. A cessation of enjoyment. It was so fun to play as the bad guy when you played Star Wars as a kid. The Sith seemed to have so much more fun than the Jedi. Maybe they did by the time Luke came around to bring them down, but at the heart of them is a great sadness, a feeling a futility. Unable to save the one he loved, Ol’ Vader just gave up and went for power. I think that’s what James meant by how Episode 1 now seems better in light of Episode 3. So much potential, so much disappointment. Vader didn’t go bad because bad was more appealing. He did so because goodness seemed so pointless. Now watching Luke enter Bobba Fett’s layer is so much cooler, because in doing so, we are redeemed for still finding hope in goodness. Silly, but true. Thank you, George.

Five minute – 5:44 AM
Our duty in life is the enjoyment of it. Such a difficult task, so eagerly struggled for. I like that. Work is redeemed from sadness by a realizing of its purpose. But enough of big thoughts, I want to actually play with a story when the instants are over today, so I’ll just play with words and see what happens. If all goes right, this will be a boring post. But I talked about Episode 3 in the opening 5, so we’ll have that to reassure the readers. Once, I like the smell of ice cream, and then I ate too much and no longer did. Now I like it again. I once bumped into a king and said, “excuse me,” and he did. Things drift down to the bottom of the stream and the crayfish play volleyball with them. Then my hand sneaks down behind them and I, in quick, careful, practiced movement, grab them on the thickness of shell behind the eyes and pull them out of the water. The fall is coming on, as I stand on the creek-bed, but the air is still warm, it’s only that the smell of cool floats down from the top of the hills and tickles the crayfish bellies. Peace before the cold.

Ten minute – 6:01 AM
We ask ourselves, “What do I want to be when I grow up?” over and over again, until the meaning of the words is lost and it becomes a mnemonic chant. But I do want to be something when I grow up. An iron glove, wrapped in velvet, but inside, there is a hand. Alive and living, we walk down the streets and dream of what it means to be better and what the unforeseen outcomes of better might be. Will I obtain my gladness? Will peace arrive? Will She find me, in all her resplendent glory? Is it possible to find two people who move independently but remain in close parallel courses? The breeze has fallen and the wood is quiet. I, absorbed in my reading, glance up. There is nothing to see, for nothing is there and that is the cause of my start. On Being and Nothingness. We cannot actually imagine nothingness. It’s too metaphysical a concept. A minor abstraction blown up to a state that we try to learn the limits of, but continue to fail. How can you think the limits of nothingness? By definition, nothingness must be limitless, but we cannot imagine anything without limits. All of our data and data processors demonstrate limit, but limit is not a possible tenant of nothing. So to, our concept of God. God, the Absolute, the Unlimited. To imagine him, we must imagine him with limits. Perhaps, for us, he appears with limits, but it is a finger stretching a sheet of thin rubber. We can know only the limits of the rubber, not that which stretches it. But our context is the rubber. It is not wrong to have a context, nor is it wrong to try to image what lies beyond the context. What is wrong is claiming to know what lies beyond. The game cannot be played that way. It is also wrong to throw your hands up and ignore what lies beyond. In doing so, you deny your ghost his existence, and your ghost is your self. You continue to exist, even when you deny that you do. Without a self, you cannot enjoy your life, for there would be nothing to enjoy and nothing to enjoy it with. Buck up, now. Stop being silly and go play.

Survey For Bloggers!

2005-06-22T21:27:00.000-04:00

One of John's blog buddies posted this (I've forgotten which, but it was a cool one)http://blogsurvey.media.mit.edu/request. I love a good survey, so I had to give it a try. It took me about 15 minutes and has fun statistics to look at when you finished. If you blog, give it a whirl. It's MIT, people. M. I. T. We're important!

I'm a Friendster

2005-06-22T20:48:00.000-04:00

See... http://www.friendster.com/useropen.php?uid=8179819

morning runner girls

2005-06-21T08:23:00.000-04:00

06/21/2005

Five minute – 7:50 AM
That this is work is true. But they lied when they told us what work was. Play is work. Play is the perfect expression of human existence – work for the sake of enjoying it. I downloaded a bunch of Dance Hits from the early 90’s last night, and I’m listening to them now. This was my first real introduction to non-CCM pop music. It’s so happy, so silly, so fun. So playful. Full of play. This came out at the same time that grunge was emerging and its stream is completely different. I respect grunge. Hell, I like grunge, but this is just so happy and free. This is life seen as silly and bright and shiny and full of potential. Sometimes I wonder if I wouldn’t enjoy life more if I embraced this perspective – so light and frivolous. I did try once. Then the deep dark came and I found grunge and gained depth. Sometimes you just have to say, “fuck depth, I’d rather enjoy this life than see the fog at it’s heart.” Man. Those morning runner girls are so hot.

Five minute – 8:02 AM
Yesterday, I got up at five and played around on the internet, posing questions to myself and trying to answer them. Around 9:30, I started working on the instants but just kept going instead of stopping for the dings. It’s an interesting little essay, but it’s not finished yet. At about 11, I stopped and read for a few minutes and then I fell asleep and took an hour and a half nap. I woke up around 12:30, took a shower, and then went out and tied up my pea plants. It took about an hour and I loved it. All these simple little movements that required concentration but little thought. I sat just looking at them for about a half an hour after I’d finished. I want that life. I still want that life – small and shallow with such resounding light and depth. I was not for city born, though I’ve learned to enjoy my time here. I long for home. For green. When I drove down to Houghton with James two weekends ago, my heart lifted and sparkled and laughed at all that green. Dirt. It’s everywhere in the city, but it’s thin and negative. Real dirt is so hard to come by here. I want to sift tilled soil through my fingers, smell its soft, moist warmth. Perhaps, for once, the sexual joke is wiser than it knows, but it’s not the climax, it’s the stillness that falls over the humid room after.

Ten minute – 8:15 AM
The metaphor reappears and I try to learn something new from it, see something that I hadn’t seen before. After the little bit of gardening, I read for the rest of the day. It’s been a long time since I did that. I’ve spent days reading, but not this wholly consumed reading. Losing track of everything. I stopped being a writer and just became a reader again. That’s all I ever really wanted. The fact that I write is just an aspect of a separate part of my personality. I’m a reader and a gardener before I’m a writer. That smell of dust in cool summer morning air. God help me. Why couldn’t I be smelling it at home? I’ll get there. I’m just a little homesick today. The city has taught me to fall asleep early and rise early and I’ll thank it for that, for reminding me, but I so badly want to be home today. I want to be working in my garden or jogging down a dirt road or building a chair to sit and read in. Those things are so real, so immediate, so right there. The city is so abstracted. Food, water, air – they become not themselves but symbols of other things. Power and money, usually, and those things are merely symbols of time and work. Abstractions of abstractions. Give me dirt that’s nothing more than dirt and work that’s nothing more than work. Just for a little while. Just the rest of my life.

Just something to think about in loo o' post.

2005-06-17T07:58:00.000-04:00

Up late. That new sleeping pill I tried was lousy. Here's a little something interesting instead. I picked up Michael Crichton's new book "State of Fear." Fun! You might have heard some of the controversy. While my own ideas about global warning are mixed, I do like Crichton's thoughts about politicized "crises." Both the red and the blue (long fly the black flag!) do like a good bout of fear-mongering, nothing like telling people "They're going to kill you and your kids and I'm the only one that can save you" to get more power for yourself. Here's a link to Crichton's thoughts about mixing celebrities, politics and "crisis." - http://www.crichton-official.com/fear/index.html When you've read the assignment, you can go outside and play.

how I get there

2005-06-16T07:18:00.000-04:00

06/16/2005

Five minute – 6:36 AM
Better living through chemicals. Something. I get more tired, it seems, when I sleep longer than I’d planned. I realized that I had no story to tell myself yesterday. I’m not too worried. It always comes back. But what if that was the price, though? That one that doesn’t worry, does he no longer need stories? I think I’d be willing to let it go. How sad. How scary. To be free from worry, I’d let the stories go. Does someone strong not need the fictions that I’ve told myself for years? To be honest, I don’t think it’s the case. I think I’ve presented a false dilemma. It’s a result of not having started anything in a long while. The written story beginner is rusty. I need to find something that catches me off-guard and demands to be told. I’ll just have to go at it again and see. Bite-sized pieces. Just find one thing that catches and go from there. A story. Just a story. Simplest thing in the world. I need some fucking money. I need to get out from under the debt. Somehow. I need that. I watched “My Dinner with Andre” again the other night. Something new always pops out at me when I watch it. This time it was in the opening monologue. Sean Wallace’s character says something like, “when I was young, I lived in comfort and thought only of art and music. Now that I’m older, poor and art is my life, I think only of money.”

Five minute – 6:44 AM
The desire for more money is what took me back to college. Now, student loans are what make me worry. The only thing that I can see as giving me a way out of this is writing a novel that sells. The only writing that I seem to be able to do is lit fic that no one really wants to read. All I ever wanted as I writer was to be a writer of clever and philosophical pop. I wanted to be Steven King where the characters discuss Kant and Hegel while waiting for the monster to devour its next victim. Ha! And that reminded me of an old story that might be fun to write. Typing slow but feeling better.

Ten minute – 7:02 AM
I never really wanted to be rich, just slightly padded. I never really wanted power, just to be free from the power of others. I never really wanted to be famous, just to hold my head high when I walk through the old hometown. I’ve never really wanted to write things that live after me, though I’d like to think that my writing was good enough that it might. I want to live comfortable and free and deep and long. I’d like to be successful enough to help a few others find their own way. So I take a deep breath, hold it for a second and then let it go. This is how I get there. This is it. The pirate is part of the picture, not the whole. Up, up. Get up and write. Tell the tale worth telling. Let others see a better world, a better metaphor. Don’t bore them. Don’t depress them. Make them chuckle and jump and be grateful to be alive. Give them something to tumble in their minds. Don’t try to change the world, just the parts that you know and care about and can change. Fear God. Enjoy your life. This is the task that God has appointed to each man all the days that he is alive. Play, play, and play. Just let it all be playing.

his own game

2005-06-15T04:56:00.000-04:00

06/15/2005

Five minute – 3:59 AM
The deep dark comes even for the pirate. It lingered for only a day this time and its tone was different. It wasn’t how bad a person I am. It was “oh, really?” But I will learn to live it all. This is a part of life too. I will learn its nature, learn its purpose, learn to appreciate it, learn to listen to what it has to tell me. Somehow, I will learn to enjoy its company as well. My body is sore from the exercise that I did yesterday morning. I’m glad for that. I can become more than I am. I called out of work yesterday. The reason that I gave was true but tangential to the actual reason. I just couldn’t do it. I haven’t done that in a very long time. Instead, I faced the deep dark and slowly worked my way through it. I’m tired today. My body and mind are a little groggy from the Nyquil that I took to make myself sleep, but the tiredness comes from the intensity of the darkness. What caused it? I know what triggered it, but why was that trigger able to effect? My new system, my new schematic, my new perspective, whatever I want to call my pirate take on life, it helped, but it did not prevent. Perhaps I actually will have to learn to enjoy the dark instead of simply not experiencing it. I will enjoy my life. That is the first command. The how we will work out as we live it through.

Five minute – 4:08 AM
The question is not, “am I a bad person?” because the point of the pirate perspective is that it depends on where your standing and what the time is. The questions become in the league of, “is there anything that truly fulfills?” No. I don’t think there is. Not in that way that the Preacher asks. Not in that place where the deep dark resides. The deep dark is the bullshit detector. It emerges from its pit and riddles me. “Oh, really?” it says. I must answer its questions. Can I stand being as ruthless and cruel and hard as the pirate way requires? The main point of the pirate perspective is that “they” can’t really hurt you, do you really want that? You’ve said you’re the villain for years, are you willing to actually take that on?

Ten minute – 4:50 AM
The way the bullshit detector of the deep dark works is this – it points out contradictions that I hadn’t seen or been willing to see. The action of depression is to take the comfort out of the things that you normally hide behind. My beloved romantic comedies become dull, flat things. I can’t engage them as they need to be engaged in order to produce the desired emotional outcome. Depression strips away the coverings and forces you to answer the questions you’ve been avoiding. Am I willing to be that cold and hard? Really? I was surprised by my response. “Yes.” The wet velvet kid can handle the interactions so no one gets bruised more than they have to, but I am my own. In our society, our culture, that makes me the bad guy. I am the villain. Mind, if you step outside the conventions, I’m not. No bad guy actually believes he’s the bad guy. The founding fathers were bad guys. So was Stalin. The question thus becomes, what kind of bad guy are you? Did Stalin weep for the millions upon millions he had killed? Would I? Stalin was fighting for a Utopian dream, so were the founding fathers, so am I. What makes me different? Pirates were terrorists, so is Al-Quida, where is the difference? Hell, a pirate fought for money, Al-Quida at least fights for a cause. Who am I to flout the conventions of society and fight for my right to be happy? And there-in I find my justification. I fight for a small, good land. I fight not to expand my territory but to free that which is my own. I do believe in private property. It starts with my ghost, proceeds to my mind, out to my body and then to that which my mind and body have created or bartered for. I am at war with that which demands that my enjoyment of life be stamped with an external seal of approval. St. Ayn and I disagree on many things, but on this we always agreed – each man’s life is his own, and his enjoyment thereof is based on his own internal sense of value. No matter how convincing the rhetoric, or lovely the speaker, each man must digest his own meal, each man must play his own game of Calvinball. It’s a hard game sometimes. But I’m up this morning. I’m up and I’m writing. No matter how tired my body and troubled my heart, I pick up the ball and run out onto the field to play. Just play. Play. The body alive and in motion, the heart beating out its pulse of emotions, the mind tumbling its rocks. Play. Just play. Ten thousand ten thousand, play.

I am loosed

2005-06-14T06:49:00.000-04:00

06/14/2005

Five minute – 6:18 AM
And some days you just don’t feel like a great pirate. You just feel like crap. What do I owe? Anything? Am I allowed to be free? Even of this? But yes. I am. This is the first great test, I guess. It’s not that the ghost or the material world have changed. It’s my feeling about it. I am my own. I had no choice in the matter. It’s just more bullshit. And I can try to avoid thinking about it. I can’t help judging myself with the mindset of the wet velvet kid; he’s been me for far to long to be easily dismissed. But he is wrong and I am right. I am allowed to be free. Sorry for you, sour grapes I guess. No one can claim me. Freedom from their words and disappointed looks. Go screw yourself. I’m not yours. You have no lay of claim on me, my life, my work. You and your god gave me nothing but depression. You can have them.

Five minute – 6:27 AM
You continue on the path, down the pirate way. Free from all save death. And death’s time is welcome. Just not yet. The emotions are essential, they just happen to be bullshit. Change. Change, little heart with this new breeze that I blow. Strong. Happy. Enjoying life. This is the only labor that matters. All else falls to the side as tools or impediments. We are ourselves. We grow better. We lift up and fly. If a pirate isn’t enough, then it’s a super pirate that I’ll be, until I can discover how to make the real work better. I dive into my fantasy until I can make a better reality obtain. You build here. In the real world. I’ll let the words roll now. I let the fantasy overwhelm and drown the sorrow and loathing. Let it be nothing while the soul incorporates its new orders of operation. Faster, faster, fastest.

Ten minute – 6:47 AM
I am my own, a free creature, unbranded. Your kind tortures I will no take it. I will not accept your guilt or bullshit just because you need that external assurance. If your god is not enough to make you happy, then find a new god. I’m not your consolation prize. My love is not a cheap thing. You still have to earn it. Even you. I am not this self-hating monster that needs your pats on the head not to kill myself. I am my own. Though I am weak, now. That will not make me strong. Leave me alone. Do you hear me, harpy of guilt and despair? Leave me alone. I don’t care. Someday, I might be in a situation where your plying absurdity is amusing and cute. I am a fanged creature. I am a man with snarls. I will not take this nonsense. It’s far time that I ran away from home and slammed the phone down. If it takes anger to break your absurd hold on my happiness, then so be it. I should have done it a long time ago. If it weren’t for you and the tormentors that you jailed me under, the process would have started a long time ago. It’s time for me to grow up and find my own. When I get there, we’ll see. But this above all else: I WILL BE HAPPY. I WILL FULFILL MY FIRST DUTY - TO ENJOY MY LIFE. Good-bye for now. Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye. I’ll see you when your hand is no longer on my throat. Arrrrrgh. Fuckshitdamn. This is bullshit and I refuse it. This is nonsense. This is stupidity and cruelty. Do not touch me. You put me in that cage. You put me in that cage and damn your hands for it. I was better than that. I deserved more from you. Do not touch me. I will learn. I will learn to have your voice ruffle me no more than the yapping dog across the way. I AM FREE. I am free from you. In your words, I am loosed. You have no hold on me. I breathe free. I am my own. This is my game. This is my game to play. I’m playing it. I’m playing my own goddamn game. You had your chance. You fucked me up. It’s my game and you will not touch it. You will not touch me, anymore. You will not touch me. I owe you nothing. Nothing. Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I’m free at last.

a good land

2005-06-13T12:49:00.000-04:00

06/13/2005

Five minute – 11:58 AM
Okay, James, big first-time test of the mix. Starting at a quarter to twelve on a hot, humid summer day. Can we (the mix and I) force the (my) mind to reel in a firework of rabbit-trails? And the answer is? Who gives a fuck. I like it. I’m writing. Success! So we pick it up again and go on. Awake. Too much coffee. Learning of ourselves the paths of ourself. It is learning what we were before we got mixed up, thrown around and beaten down, Ball. Learning the oddities of the one that we were, the one I want to be. We, the ones of this density of ghost, with forehead of flint and heart of tinker-toy glass. Always learning the better way, seeking, sometimes finding, the perfect metaphor. I am not the soft velvet that I wrapped my face in, but I’ve learned to wear it and am a better social creature for it. I’ll keep the mask for wearing when it needs wearing, but my bones are not soft and weak. I’m a scientist, an alchemist. He’s not the villain that they called him. But he will be to them. I’ll wear the soft skin for those that need it and have earned it. Giggles for the kiddies, death for the governor’s men. I’m not going to be that creature that they wanted me to be. I was never meant for the jello-mold and damn them for trying.

Five minute – 12:11 PM
The hill, the trees, the dark brown earth of home. It smells of soul and the potentiality of work with the outcome of food. Understanding time and our place inside. Stronger that the oppressors. Fight all power save that of the better idea. We’re re-learning the face of snarl. They beat it back inside. Good job, cocksuckers. Well it’s coming through again. The soft face remains, but it’s been the only for too long. The best face is the smile and chuckle of respect. The "yes, you're right. Fucking brilliant," but that will emerge only when it has been earned. Respect will no longer come cheaply. I am myself. I’m not a tame lion. I’m not your girlfriend. No. You probably won’t see much of a change for now, I’m still going to wear the mask they made me wear, while I figure out the nature of the core, but if you pay attention, you might see a flash of the flint spark through the eye-holes.

Ten minute – 12:51 PM
This is the accumulation of effects that I’m so interested to see the outcome of: the ghost was of iron, they tried to beat it into jello, it learned to wrap itself in wet velvet and passed for one of the jelly-fish. The iron wrapped in velvet was so nice – he just happened to hate himself. We cannot know what the iron left un-tortured might have become, but we can discover what it will be when it re-learns its density. I like being thought of as nice. I just don’t like hating myself for getting shit on and just taking it as given that I’m in the wrong. If I had no core, it wouldn’t matter. But I do. I’m not the smartest, strongest, fastest, but I’m smarter, stronger, faster than they let me be. St. Ayn was wrong in this. Redemption is possible. I am a pirate. King of myself. Ruler of a good land. Leader of a great expedition. Hoist the sails. Play the game. Play it to the core and rind. Play it to the bones. Play it to the balls. And I don't really give a fuck how you play your game. Just don't try to tell me the rules to mine anymore.

We’re coming

2005-06-11T06:43:00.000-04:00

06/11/2005

Five minute – 6:00 AM
Roll the neck, pop the knots. A man discovered a magnificent pearl. Selling all he had, he bought it. This is why we tell these tales. This is why we love pirates. Expressing the inexpressible. The only way to express this odd and right interaction of ideas and emotion is in a tale well told and inexplicable. It’s explicated right there. Understand or don’t. Faster, faster, fastest. Fight the Dread Monotony, the evil at the heart of it all. We are ourselves and will not settle for less than the good, right and true. That the words can’t be broken down into smaller packages, easy to swallow, isn’t the fault of the perspective, it’s the size of your throat. I am myself. Pirate king of myself. Land of possibility and strength. Growing wild in my garden, bowing to none save the God of wind. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Five minute – 6:10 AM
You… just… know it. It’s not here to be pre-chewed for you and spit out into your squeaking maw. It’s a rock to fall on. A rock to fall on you. Crushed, your bones grow strong. You learn to laugh more. I don’t need it, unless it is valued and value arises from a sense of inherent beauty. Harder than we were. We’ve dried our eyes and wiped our noses. We stand up and dust off our trousers. Hit me again, cocksucker. One more time. Try to hit me one more time. We break the noses of fools. That you’re not big enough isn’t our problem. You struck first, now hit me again. Go to hell. The pirates of the oceans tread the waves because it’s ours, the free land. You rent it from us. Time to pay up. It didn’t need to come down to this. Whatever faults I take credit for comes from suffering fools. I am bigger and I’m not apologizing. I’ll be quiet about it. Except for here. Showing my fingers to those it mostly doesn’t apply to. I am myself. I’m not sorry for that any more.

Ten minute – 6:29 AM
Ten thousand ten thousand, I’ve got a long road to walk. I’m learning to love every fucking inch. Walk with me or don’t – I don’t give a flip any more. I love the real. The ocean tastes of salt, the sky sings blue, the dark gray clouds bring rain to the feast. Hard, harder hardest. It wasn’t just the shit that came later or the bad that happened early. It was the beatings I got mid-stream. Well, I’m bigger now. Bigger than you. My balls dropped and I don’t have to apologize that your point of view is wrong and mine is right. I don’t need an excuse. I might explain it if I think I’d enjoy it. It was joy that you beat out of me. No more. No more molestings. Not by fathers, mothers, brothers, pastors, teachers, bosses, friends. The cruelest trick was teaching me to molest myself. You couldn’t have done that one by yourself. You’re not smart enough. You must have had help. I know who it was. I know the smart one. It was me. Well, he’s been scolded enough. He’s been tortured out of purgatory. His soul is white as falling snow, bloody as war. He’s out now and he’s joined me on the ship. We’re sailing the seas together, flying fast the black flag. We’ve raised the Jolly Roger. The skull and crossbones prominent. We’re coming. We’re coming for you, cocksucker.

An entire sea of commerce in a can

2005-06-10T08:07:00.000-04:00

06/10/2005

Five minute – 7:24 AM
Ug… I’m up and feel mushy. It’s the heat and humidity. I’m actually liking it. I downloaded Offspring’s “Come out and Play.” So that makes this go a little better, a little harder. For something like the 5th time in the last two weeks, I woke up late this morning, remembering setting and turning on the alarm last night, but finding it turned off when I checked it today. Creepy. I’m a sleep-alarm-turner-offer. Sweet. Zombie. Pirate zombie. Unstoppable. Fear me. I got woken up at 1 this morning by a very loud thunderclap. It was awesome, although I did worry for a few seconds about the house getting struck by lightning. But then I was like, “screw it. I’ll just find something else.” I listened to the thunder for a while, and then I fell back asleep. It was cool. But somewhere between then and when I woke up at six, I turned my alarm off. I remember the lighting storm but not the turning-off of the alarm. Zombiefied.

Five minute – 7:34 AM
Pushups when this is over. I’m pretty okay with the size of my other muscles, they could all stand a little building, but cut out the fat and they’re still not teeny. But the pecs… well, the pecs are boobs. Weird ones too. I need to remember that it’s better to eat before I start my walk home and have some energy to take me through until supper is ready than to not eat anything, feel sugar-deprivation anger and then get really tipsy off of two beers. That’s fine like once a week, but two or three days straight gets me into off territory. And I’ve seen enough of the off territory. Off-the-beaten-path: good, excellent, best. Just off: bad. When I get tipsy and haven’t had any real calories for a while, I eat too much, because, well, I’m tipsy. I think it’s right and good and true to take an awake-time break from reality every now and then, but you do it all the time and it’s not helping you. You’re just replacing one bad reality with another.

Ten minute – 8:03 AM
And now I’m chillin’ with the House of Pain. They’re Irish, shouldn’t it be House O’Pain? One long lilting word as in “Erinbegorin, now an yer chullin’ wit deh Houseo’pain, me laddybuck.” Fake Irish rocks. They’ve got “Talk Like a Pirate Day” where’s “Talk Like a Leprechaun Day”? I would secretly celebrate both. I need to remember more loud, silly music. Depth gets boring and monotonous too. What did I have on the “Good Trash Mix”? That was a mighty fine workout/running/driving/hitting things tape. Wow. That girl walking the little yappy dog down Elmwood is hot. Okay, I’ll admit it; I’m board with the Crystal River dream at the moment. Not to say that it won’t be the one that I come back to when it’s time to stop dreaming/planning and actually have to start doing. Hmm… where else can I go? Rural, warm most of the year, lots of rain, lots of gardening possibilities, good jobs around, comic shops and used book stores within weekend driving distance, cheap rent of very small house on two aches of land… what else do I want… low taxes. A Wal-Mart. Yah. That’s right. You heard me. Read me. Whatever. I love Wal-Mart. That great staggering beast of inconspicuous consumption. Seller of cheap meats and Dickey's clothing. Oh, Wal-Mart, to thee I sing. An entire sea of commerce in a can. I love the fact that everybody except crunchies shop in you. And they’ll do it too, if they think other crunchies won’t catch them. Rich people, poor people, clean people, smelly people, Spanish-speakers, English-speakers – oh, Wal-Mart, your heart beats with the pulse of true equality – everyone getting what they want, when they want it, as long as they've got the cash. Or credit. Which is not to say I wouldn’t plunder you if I thought I could get away with it. I’m still a pirate, my dear. Hoist your sails, set your guns, all hands to battle stations. A-shopping we will go. Play now.

how freaking libertarian is that?

2005-06-09T07:40:00.000-04:00

06/09/2005

Five minute – 6:05 AM
No, no, no, no, no, no… no guilt. It’s my right to be free. If it is not a given right, it’s a taken one. There, I’m glad we got that settled. Now it just has to stay. The pirates were muggers. There’s really no way around it, but at the time it was legal to be a pirate, provided you had a license. If you had a license, you were called a “privateer” – a state-endorsed mugger – and you flew under the colors of a country. They might raise the black flag (or the red flag – that was popular too) to indicate that they were going to mug you, but they did so as an indication of intent not nationality. The real pirate, that pirate of bastardly lore, was, while he was on a ship, a citizen of no land. The black flag indicated both intent and country of origin – pirate, hailing from piracy. That the pirate was, in fact, someone trying to break a state-sponsored monopoly (as all monopolies must be) doesn’t change that fact that the business they were trying to break into was inherently depraved.

Five minute – 6:21 AM
So what is it that continues to draw me? I’m a libertarian, not a libertine, why am I fascinated and respecting of these vultures that preyed on free trade? It’s the “damn authority” that I love about them. The way they seemed so free from guilt and worry. Most pirates were unmarried men between the ages of 18 and 35 – hale and hearty men at the peak of their physical prowess. But, after a life of piracy, those that didn’t get killed off or die of cirrhosis of the liver (pirates, as a whole, tended to be drunkards), what happened to them? – They married and settled down. They hid their black flag in the past and became normal sailors and citizens. Those few that actually made a profit in piracy bought land and became farmers or became merchants – became normal. But so few actually did make a profit. What drove them to continue? Sure, the hope that they next ship they took would have a belly-full of Spanish gold, but that rarely happened. Day after day, month after month, year after year, they mugged boats to get supplies to stay alive, not even earning a profit. Even someone as under-educated as the average sailor of the day would have figured out that there was better profit to be made legally, sailing under a country’s flag.

Ten minute – 7:40 AM (um, yah, that was ten minutes)
As he was led to the gallows to be hung, a notorious pirate (his name escapes me and I can’t find the book), who died excellently – with a smirk and a speech of defiance – spoke of why it is that men became pirates – “ill usage” was, I think, the phrase that he used. Sailors were wage slaves. They had few to no opportunities to advance without the benefit of class connections that the officers enjoyed, and the rule of the captain was tyrannical and often cruel. They were wage slaves where the middle-management held actual whips and used them frequently. The pay was crap too. “To live a life, merry and short,” is the way another pirate phrased it when asked why he went into a life of piracy. He was caught, so he got his wish. A pirate ship was an amazing world. In “Pirates of the Caribbean,” Capt. Sparrow bemoans his mutinous crew, and while there were pirates that owned their own ships, most pirate vessels were taken by a group and thus, “owned” by the group. A fairly honest sort of socialism – we stole it together, we own it together. They’re really couldn’t be a mutiny in most pirate crews because a captain was elected and could be deposed at any time, if the crew thought he was a fuck-up. The only time a captain’s authority was absolute was when they were chasing, being chased or fighting. At all other times, he was just one of many – albeit with slightly better wages (two to six shares of the booty, as opposed to one). It’s also interesting that pirates usually did away with middle-management. They realized how useless they were. Captains decided where to go, gave the chores and led the crew into battle (executive branch). Quartermasters acted as judges and arbiters of a sort (judicial branch) – like the captain, they could be deposed if they screwed up. The legislative branch was really quite simple – every person that became part of the crew (willingly or unwillingly) was forced to sign “articles” - a simple contract that stated wages, duties, restrictions and punishments for failing to keep the contract. If those articles were to be amended, the crew voted on it. When the voyage was over, the hold of the contract was voided. There was also a limit to the length of the voyage, usually determined by the profit – no one got to go home until each share equaled 1000 pounds and no one was obligated to stay once that goal was reached – that was a common one. And while everyone could take from the perishables (food, alcohol and tobacco mostly – water was a last resort for the thirsty) as they wished (provided they didn’t get too glutinous – piss off your fellow crewmen and you might end up getting your nose and ears slit, stranded on a remote chunk of land, or, if you were really bad, tossed over the side – it was really too much to bother with that walking the plank crap), there was a harsh penalty for dipping into the shares before the voyage was over or stealing personal items from fellow crewmen. In an age of monarchies and open government-owned-and-operated monopolies, a pirate ship was, in effect, a small country with a democratic contract-law government of limited power and duration, assembled for the point of making a profit and sticking it to the man – how freaking libertarian is that? Well, ignoring the fact that it wasn’t uncommon for a least a quarter of the crew to be there because they were told, “if you don’t join us, we’ll kill you,” and that the whole enterprise was based on theft under threat of violence.

My boobs hurt

2005-06-08T07:20:00.000-04:00

06/08/2005

Five minute – 6:55 AM
And so we go on, look for the answer to the age-old question, “can a man kick ass to Mozart?” If we think about it, the answer is yes – but only bad guys. Which suits me fine, now that I’m a pirate’s apprentice. I finally watched “Pirates of the Caribbean” again last night. So fun. It wasn’t the kick in the ass exuberance that I experienced the first time I watched it, but I didn’t expect it to be. I woke up late today, so no writing other than the instants and no exercise other than walking to work. Just cut down on calories for the day. But I should anyway after yesterday’s supper. Two bowls of pasta with dressing and oil-basted baked chicken. And two beers. Heehee! That was fun. Cause the beers came first, while I was waiting for the food to cook. I need rum. To be a pirate, I mean. And bourbon. That would just be to be a better version of me. Mmmmm… sweet Kentucky corn mash.

Five minute – 7:11 AM
Up in the stacks today. Lots of lifting and no patrons. I’ll come home physically but not mentally exhausted – hopefully. Unless I get caught in one of my obsessive circular thought patterns and realize that I’d just started to contradict everything that I’d been thinking for the past few hours. I hate that. Maybe it will be story-making today. It’s usually politics or scatter shot, but, every now and then, I get four or so hours of stories. That’s a good time. Damn. I’m almost out of coffee and it’s already 7. On stacks days, I go in an hour earlier than circ days. I should be stopping now. But I’m not going to. I’m a pirate remember. Improvisation and bastardliness. I’m reading a new book on pirates and this one is actually pretty cool – “Under the Black Flag” by… well, I don’t have the book right next to me, so I can’t check, but it’s a good book. Broad but good. I always find it amusing when one of my source books contradicts another of my source books. That means I get to make up what happened myself. Magic’s between the cracks. The neighborhood is lighting up with buttery yellow again. The yappy dog is at the window of the house next door. All’s right with the world.

Five minute – 7:20 AM
Hmm… distracted by the Ben. Now I will only do a final five. I have to eat and make my lunch and shower and all that stuff, so here goes. I need to poo now. And smoke. I can do 12 pushups. I think that’s the best I’ve managed in about 8 years. My boobs hurt today, though. But it’s a good sort of hurt. Mmm… girls. What? Where was I? Oh. Okay, that’s fine then. And then I went to the mall and impressed shallow girls with my flaring pecs and strutting. And the cigarettes. Chicks dig bad boys. “Chicks dig bad boys” now that just reminds me of the Meg Ryan/Russell Crow debacle. How depressing. Mmmm… Meg Ryan. Now I’m not depressed. Okay, Ben distracted me again. Blame it on him and not my getting up late. Go pillage something. Play.

a pep talk for the bastard in me

2005-06-07T05:03:00.000-04:00

06/07/05

Five minute – 4:30 AM
The mind goes blank. Reeling in nothing and possibility. How’s the day? How stands the union? I’m groggy and searching. What is this? It’s a pep talk for the bastard in me. Who do we fear? What is there to be afraid of? Reality is perception. Perceptions can be changed. The underlying substance remains; our feeling about it is the variable, the X component of the equation. Going into the matter, we remain ourselves. Pride doesn’t come before a fall. Arrogance comes before a fall. Pride matters. The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. Time and chance happen to them all. Bet on yourself. A man went out and discovered a treasure in a field. Selling all he had, he bought the field. This is the kingdom of heaven. The perfect secret. We the pirates of the world, in order to make a more perfect union, do make ourselves an independent state. Without the state part.

Five minute – 4:38 AM
You need that something to push off of. The man in the solitude of space can only float. The gravity-bound bastard must fight. They wore many pistols. The dampness of the sea tended to damage gunpowder. It’s to fight. It’s to free yourself and then the greatness. It was disappointing to see greatness as a kid and then grow up and discover that it was fiction. The poor folks up on the screen are only actors. They’re just pretending to be great. They’re fools, for the most part. Look at their politics, their families. Fight for yourself, your soul, your self-respect. The audience gives you money to be entertained, not to give you your validation. You fight them and their “settle down, settle down.” Don’t settle for anything. This is dead serious. It’s freaking Calvinball.

Ten minute – 4:54 AM
Running faster, you judge your progress by the speed of those that you used to respect. Then you judge yourself by the better fictions. You’ve still got a way to go. You’re already there. Sustainability, they use the word, they don’t have a clue as to its cost. It costs you your country. It costs you your family. It costs you… ahh fuck it. It’s the only way to fly. Ten times up, twenty down, ten thousand ten thousand beyond. Bigger than your heroes. Bigger than you are right now. Gaining mass as speed approaches the barrier of light, you swallow the universe. Strong, stronger, strongest. Fast, faster, fastest. Fight for the perspective that lets you rule the world and ignore it at the same time. The better kings did nothing. The fallacy of monarchy is divine right or rule by someone other than yourself. Crush the toy cars and belay the rules. Hoist the mizzenmast and set sail for dawn. The glow of the water is caused by tiny creatures trying to screw. See, I told you life was good. We’re going further up, further in, beyond the Pale Lands to the World of the Better Pirates. Grit you teeth, bare them to the fools telling you to stop and donate to their cause. They’re monsters underneath the water level. Sail on, sail on. First star to the right and straight on to morning. The best villains are also the heroes. Welcome the symbols. Raise high the flag, and float on with heart as black as she. You’re a pirate now. You always were. Play it like you mean it.

Second Draft is Done

2005-06-05T10:50:00.000-04:00

Still flawed but the overall structure is set. If you want a copy, email me (uncle_spikey313@yahoo.com). If you want it, remember, you have to help me edit. Avast, there flies the black flag.

Fade my little daisy

2005-06-05T08:33:00.000-04:00

06/05/2005

Five minute – 7:55 AM
Absolutely nothing on my mind except finishing the 2nd draft today. I’m tired but I’m up and typing. Coffee here beside me. A chilly but not horribly so breeze blowing in my window. The Buffalo gay pride march was yesterday. They marched right by our apartment so we got to watch. There was a really hot girl in the parade. I’m still wondering if she was really a girl. Aside from her, I didn’t see any of the drag representing. Like last year, the tail end of the parade was dogged by a guy with a megaphone wearing a sandwich board shouting how Jesus was going to send them all to hell. I didn’t know that people still wore sandwich boards. Most of the marchers looked like nice people, only a couple of lesbians that looked like they could and would beat the crap out of me on principle. One guy had one of those little dogs that can only be owned by gay men or Paris Hilton types. He pulled it off.

Five minute – 8:04 AM
James crashed at the apartment last night. We talked programming. I still don’t know how to program, just a little html authoring. I have many fun ideas about it though. The sun is starting to burn away the haze. The butter light of morning is spread across the houses. So much to do today and tomorrow. Writing and cleaning mostly, but there’s a bit of both. I do not feel inspired today. But I do feel able. Tired and achy, but able. Slow. Fast, faster, fastest. And… go… down to the farm to the rabbit hutches and the dogs that circle the way, waiting for a chance to feed. We walked the soft-lit grass through a field of uncompromised solitude. Passing thought the grass to the trees, the trees to the railroad tracks, the tracks to the swamp, the swamp to the mysterious grove, the grove to the farms, the farms to the forest, the forest to the hills.

Ten minute – 8:22 AM
At first, when I could see you no longer, I was aghast. And then the years past and I saw you as a fool. Now you are another of the disappeared, to be remembered only on occasion. The vanishing leaves footprints. The footprints begin to fade as the water fills them and then dries. The creatures that walk the forest pass by the point where you departed and their trails wipe clean the soul. You cannot exist in such a sullen place as depth and so you left for the sprightly cities. That you are too small to exist amongst the rippling creatures, you come home to your mother. She builds a house for you and you hide in the attic. I, moving, stay close to my woods. You’re mostly a faded photograph. Your hair lacks the luster it once had. Your skin thickens and falls. When you peel away the scales… but you never do. My guess is that you remain one of them, the shiny children of the righteous darkness, an enemy of the bad and the great, an unthinking champion of mediocrity. Fade my little daisy, fade into oblivion, leaving only the tattered remnants of precious memory. The brighter flowers were born to fade. She is not herself these days. They tell me. If I were the sort, I’d tell them that you rarely were. For one brief year perhaps, before the garish colors of the glossy overwhelmed you. But now you sit, wrapped in paper in your white attic, waiting for your prince to come. He will not. They’ve outlawed him. You must save yourself these days. It’s too bad, really. There still are maidens in distress. But it isn’t a prince you need. It’s a wide stance, sea legs and a knowledge of the ocean paths. Walk a while inside your belly. Learn the swamps and gardens of your gut. Find the rabbit holes and fall deeper and deeper into the fleshy well. But there’s the bell, sweet child of childhood. I leave you to your cocoon. I’ll look towards you from time to time, to see what you become. You’re still alive. There’s still a chance. Close your eyes. Close your eyes and play.

The ten brought poo

2005-06-04T06:59:00.000-04:00

06/04/2005

Five minute – 6:24 AM
Groggy again this morning. My alarm didn’t go off. I can’t figure out why. It was turned on and set for the right time. I woke up at 5:40. That’s a good thing, I think. I’m getting up early now, naturally. It’s not four yet, but I’m getting up early on my own. Someday, I won’t need an alarm. That will be sweet. To celebrate my bigger paycheck, I bought a 6 of the Saranac Pale Ale and drank four. I rarely drink more than three in an evening. Maybe that’s why I’m groggy. Ah, well. Stacks today at the library. No patrons and lots of lifting. It should be good. My mind lately has been tumbling over an idea for the next novel. I think I’m drifting towards a funny political novel about modern pirates. That would be sweet. Of course, this is me. Subject to change with the passing wind. Speaking of passing wind, I had a huge salad for supper when I got home last night. I added four boiled eggs. I’m stinky this morning. If my brother were here, he’d have a reason to call me Stinky Boy. Stinky Boy and Goo – in my brother’s world, his brother and his son are funny superheroes. That rocks.

Five minute – 6:32 AM
Almost finished with the first cup of coffee. I’m trying to cut back on calories and fat, to trim down even more. My one thing that I’m not allowed to question is my coffee intake. I like it with lots of sugar, lots of cream. But it gets me going in the morning, so it’s the hair of the dog, and the hair of the dog must never be questioned. I’m still thirty-five pounds outside of the “healthy” range for someone of my height and build. Plus, I just want to look damn sexay. Actually, apart from writing, Citrus County and pirates, my mind has been mostly tumbling over ideas about fitness and money. I’m not letting myself drift into the deep dark. I don’t know if the slight increase of fundage and decrease in weight has made it possible, but it seems to be working. It will work, damnit. Enough remorse and guilt and self-loathing. I’ve had enough of that crap to set me for the rest of my life. Wow, that was a slow fiver. Oh well. Let’s see what the ten brings.

Ten minute – 6:50 AM
After a brief poo interlude, I’m back. Also a coffee refill interlude. On to the second cup. I should post a picture of the cup so you can see that it’s a damn big cup. Like, two times the size of mortal mugs. Feel my wrath, puny coffee containers. As I was pooing, I thought of a new tweak for the writing schedule. It’s been a while since I tweaked it, and everything in my life should suffer periodic tweaking. Keeps it fresh and interesting. The new twist is this – instead of just writing up to the last possible second, I should stop about forty minutes before so’s I can go back and edit. That satisfies both parts of my brain – creator and critic. It’s how I work the instants, why not the substance? Heehee! I just made that one up. The Substance. Bump bum buuuuum. It has a cool linguisticy compare/contrast thing with The Instants. Crap. Now I’ve run out of ruminations to write. There has to be something. Nothings coming. Word associations! Hello my name is Forgoth; I’m the forgotten Visigoth. I eat Goths. They taste like chicken. Oh, sweet. There’s the bell. The ten brought poo. Enough crap for one day. I’ll think of something cool a few seconds after I stop typing. Screw it. Go play.

A pirate prude

2005-06-03T06:53:00.000-04:00

06/03/2005

Five minute – 6:16 AM
After spending a half-hour searching Kev’s blog for the Umberto Eco mention that Jonny mentioned, I can’t find it. What I’m left with is the odd idea that I’d love for Kevin to make a film based on his life as it is right now. He has such an interesting urban tribe. In addition to his daughter and wife, he’s also something like a parent/brother/friend to Jay, who lives with them. Then there are those people who, I think, are domestics or personal assistants. Something. So odd. But I’ve been turning into something of a prude lately. I find myself feeling unwholesome after reading Kev’s blog. Not because of vulgar content, I still find that highly amusing, but because this is real. This is someone’s life, right up there on the computer screen, down to the numerous DVD’s, bedroom shenanigans and kid’s tantrums. It’s been said that watching movies in an act of voyeurism, but that’s lessened by the fact that it’s a highly processed fiction. Real life is real. Kev really does argue with his wife over stupid things and watch a LOT of tivo’ed television. I really am becoming a prude, I think. Don’t really mind though. I tried to read a manga that had been recommended to me “Battle Royal.” I got through four books and realized that I just wasn’t going to go any further. I felt nasty, dirty and brutish. A pirate prude. Somewhy, I enjoy thinking that that suits me immensely.

Five minute – 6:31 AM
So what about the second draft? Well, what I intended to get done last Sunday is actually done. What I didn’t realize is that I still had gaps. Pretty damn big ones. So that’s what’s up with it. I’m currently working my way back through the novel, start to finish, reading and correcting everything that I see. Hopefully, this Sunday will be the send-out date. By the way, if you want to read it through, it ain’t a pleasure boat cruise this time. I’m expecting actual editing help. The other day, I was reading a section that I thought had been proof-read years back, only to discover two different instances of the misusing of “their, there and they’re.” Obvious things, but I simply didn’t see it until this time through. So, with the 2nd draft is going to come a responsibility. With great drafts comes great responsibility. Teehee! ‘Cause it was like a comic-book reference. Teehee! Oh. Wait. Everybody’s seen the movies. It’s not an in-joke anymore. Crap. Anyway, back to my point. I need help. I’m planning on getting out of my dread-laden world, but I need help getting there. So please help. The children need your help. Call the number on your screen. Seriously though. Proofreading, continuity checks, Boring Stretch Alerts, Needful and Missing Part Alerts – all that stuff. Okay, now that I’ve said that, I’ll get on with it and finish this so’s I can actually finish the Damn Thing.

Ten minute – 6:44 AM
Payday today. And payday means joy to all of the good girls and boy. It rhymes better. At my normal 19 hour-a-week, I was, after taxes, making $6.10 an hour. Today, we’ll, see what it’s like at 35 hours a week. Sort of. Man oh man, I hope it’s better than I think it’s going to be. If I can save $400 a month, Citrus County, here I come. Next May. But that feeling. When you see your savings grow for a purpose, nothing like it. The Black Pearl = Freedom. Money = The Black Pearl. But I’m a pirate. If it doesn’t go as planned, improvise. But it’s going to go as planned. They have waterfront cottage efficiencies in Citrus County. I checked. 500 a month, but still, waterfront cottage efficiency. Utilities included. My book. My pirates. My warm land of crystal rivers. If I can grow a garden down there, I’m set. It smells of rain, here in Buffalo. It smells beautiful. There’s the bell. Time to go back to the desert of the fake. Go play. Me hearties.

to free the slaves of the righteous and the kind

2005-06-02T05:49:00.000-04:00

06/02/2005

Five minute – 5:13 AM
You know that it’s been a while, but it’s all right and it’s okay. Maybe it turns out that you’re not that all right with some things, but you go on and keep the burning. Better tomorrows, better todays. Up and writing. Up and doing. You go a little further on and make up a story. The pieces come to you. “Wouldn’t it be cool if this happens… but why did it happen? Oh, right. But what else would that entail? Oh, right, right so if that’s why then couldn’t this happen? Oh, that would be cool. But if that’s the case then what happens after that?” And it goes on and on and you feel alive and real. It’s all imaginary; it’s all made up. But you love it. You love it so much that you just can’t stop. The pieces come to you and you put them together and take them apart. You add, you subtract. Eventually, you sit down and type. You write the first words and you know where you’re going, and you hope to God that you get there the way you’re going. Because it would be so damn cool.

Five minute – 5:23 AM
I’m not the world and a bag of chips. I can’t save anyone. I’m not a regular on talk shows. I don’t go out drinking with Bruce Willis. I’m just myself, and I’m fine with that. The pirate was actually just a thug, a robber. At first, he was government sponsored. You had to have a license to be a pirate. Then the government discovered that they could make more money at peace than at war, so they stopped handing out licenses. Then pirates decided that they still wanted to be pirates and so they started driving without licenses. I can respect that. But it isn’t the pirate of fact that interests me (though they’re still interesting) it’s the spirit of the pirate that we find in our popular fiction. The free man who doesn’t give a damn what anyone thought. Born common, he discovered that he could be a king if he flew under the black flag – citizen and subject to no country. He added the skull and crossbones to cast terror into the hearts of his prey. I fly under the black flag. I’m more reluctant to add the Jolly Rodger. But there it is, the background to this blog. Probably won’t be for much longer. I’m not a pirate. Just a bastard, learning to be free.

Ten minute – 5:42 AM
But this is what we do, we quiet and stubborn sons of liberty. Test, try, research, explore, always questing for the explanation, the picture, the better metaphor. Being free and unafraid. More than that – being brave and strong. Worry no more, child of better tomorrows; the pirate king is your protector. This will take, for now. This is as it is. You wear the mask of the strong so the true face can continue to play. I’ve had more energy, lately. It’s the lost weight and better eating and regular exercise. I knew this was what would happen. What I didn’t know was that I’d want to keep moving. I thought I was one permanently at rest, or trying to be. But, no, the thinner me is a seeking, moving, watching, thinking, doing thing. Still the same stubborn determination to be free to be alone or in company at my own choosing. Still the same commitment to waging a war against mankind’s inhumanity to man. Still striving to say “mine. Take me as I am or get the fuck away.” Stronger. Learning. Fighting to be free of eyes and laughing to scorn those eyes that assume to judge. To scream, “I am the villain!” Is to scream, “You are the villain! And I’m here to destroy you and set your captives free.” When I finally set my feet upon firm ground, I won’t stop. I’ll wage a jolly war against them. For them, my black flag will bear the skull and crossbones. I fight first to free myself, and then I fight to free the slaves of the righteous and the kind. There is a pirate’s life for me. The Jolly Rodger yet stands. So go play, that black banner yet waves.

The Black Pearl is freedom

2005-05-31T07:32:00.000-04:00

05/31/2005

Five minute – 6:45 AM
Pirates were probably brought to the surface again by your blog ramblings, Jonny. They’re origin is a bit more clouded, but I can say that, on what was a particularly trying day a couple of summers ago, I watched “Pirates of the Caribbean” with Ball and saw a vision of personal existence that was free from worry and regret. “The Black Pearl is freedom.” That was the line that kept me from going over the edge of the pit for a while. It faded and I grew weak and sad. I learned different perspectives and those fed into the overall idea. When it re-emerged in the last few weeks, it was a bit more powerful and contained less flaws than it did at first embrace.

Five minute – 6:55 AM
Staying alive and being happy is the task set upon the shoulders of men, all the long and silly days of their long and silly life. If one thinks that life is short, they haven’t tried being smart, bored, and depressed in a pretentious world at war with itself. This is the end of the matter: fear God and live your life. Do not regret. It is an action encouraged by those that want to control you. “Living without regret” doesn’t mean “don’t screw up.” Life is one long mistake as much as it is one long successful progression. Living without regret means don’t worry about past mistakes. You’ve got enough in this one second to calculate the odds over that you don’t need to beat the shit out of yourself for those things that happened yesterday, last month, last year, last decade. Worrying doesn’t help. Tumbling problems does. It’s attitude, as unfortunate as that sounds because that’s what the self-help gurus tell you. Televangelists preach scripture. Doesn’t make the scripture less beautiful or less valid. Things are just themselves. Assholes behave assholenly, thus pirates need to be pirates.

Ten minute – 7:14 AM
Worry is tumbling in a state of fear. Stop being afraid. Fearless. That’s what a pirate is. Doesn’t mean he isn’t constantly scheming to get more. He knows how to keep his tongue and lie, when necessary. He’s realized that people rarely want the truth, no matter what they say. They want you to obey, conform to their idea of goodness. Pirates recognize the absurdity of this. And if others don’t have the ability to see that, they don’t deserve the respect that telling the truth implies. You’re floating through life, out in the middle of an endless sea. There is a long and ruthless war between the forces that want to control everyone. The pirate refuses to participate in the war, recognizes the evil inherent in all sides and chooses instead to live. This is piracy – to be alive and free when all men want you to bow your knee to them and their idea of goodness. Recognize that the entire system is corrupt, but realize that the instant you try to “do something” about it, you’ve become one of them. Fight for your own ideal of goodness, but not to make others conform to it, just keep it alive within yourself. Ask for no gifts, receive no gifts, unless you’re planning on living a life of servitude. Or willing lie to those you would call friends. Give no gifts and keep your pockets turned out so that everyone can see you’ve nothing to give. Keep your treasure buried. When you give a gift, you become a master, and to be a master is to be bound a slave. It’s better to steal than to receive a gift. It’s better to be robbed than give. Whatever you do, don’t get caught. At anything. What’s good in one camp is evil in the other. That’s the bell. That’s enough. I will discover more about this life of piracy. For now, go play. That’s what pirates do.

the one that wills

2005-05-30T07:00:00.000-04:00

05/30/2005

Five minute – 6:25 AM
Every day, you learn new aspects of the pirate code. Happiness above all else, and it only comes by way of freedom. You learn what it means to laugh without pain and regret. This is now and hear. This is itself and it cannot hurt me. Pirates are supermen, invulnerable to anything but guns, knives, punches and the normal list of things that hurt people. What is different is how they take it. It is not the monk’s bowing acceptance. It is not the holy warrior’s angry masochism. It is the surprised, jolly laughter of someone that didn’t know others could be that stupid. The soul, the dream, the chase, the smell of the briny air, these things matter. Not silly things like death and threats thereof.

Five minute – 6:36 AM
Men are fools. Trust no one, especially pirates. We remain free and true to our own code, differing in each man, united in our fight. We will stay free. We will not condescend to the angry shouts of the stupid and inane. Stay free. Learn the paths of happiness. Each man prefers his own food; let him learn what it is and how to get it. If someone impedes, sneak by. If they pay too close attention, shoot. If they still seek to stop you, kick ‘em when they’re down. If they try to raise the alarm, shoot to kill. Be a free vessel flying under your own colors. If any demand your port of origin, run up the Jolly Roger. Walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage. Tis men with a better plan for your own life that seek to throw you in the dungeon. Let the sharks suck the marrow from their bones. Would-be gods should know, pirates only bow to the Unknown One.

Ten minute – 6:52 AM
I’m going on and learning the ways. The –doe, if you will. Pirate-doe. I’m going to finish that novel today. It took more than I thought it would Jonny, but the end is nigh. I’ll finish up that last bit of the Journey Chapter, paste it in, and then the rest of the day is re-reading and polishing. It won’t be the last draft. I figure I’ve got two more after. I’ve got a little fun thing that I’m working on, for the reading of the novel, in addition to just an email attachment. But lets keep that a little secret for now. They can’t hurt you. That’s all that I want to remind you. All of this is matter, subject to improvisation and forgetting and finitude. And lets leave it here for a bit. Let’s just do the warm up and get in shape for the writing that’s coming after. Faster, faster, fastest, the turtle warms itself in the sand and swims back out to sea. There is a conjunction of fact and fiction, it’s found in the mind of the one that wills. We don’t have to give this much more than thought and determination. Determination comes by way of conviction or it doesn’t come at all. Faster, faster, fastest, being better often means being worse. Worse is a construct of the little gods that want you to do what they tell you to. This is the fighting of the dying of the light. So fight it: let it go and lay yourself down on the warm, warm sand. No man can hurt you, threaten you, because nothing has value, save that you give it value. Every day, you learn the code. Bought with a price, I am my own. Be free. Be happy. Go play. A pirate’s life for me.

and not apologizing

2005-05-28T05:26:00.000-04:00

05/28/2005

Five minute – 4:47 AM
I discovered this morning that 3am is not the coolest time to get up. I’ll stick with 4 from now on. I’m going to try to finish the first draft of the second draft today. Hopefully, I’ve only got about a page to go. From the discovery of the canyon to the discovery of the secret tunnel. It’s Isaac’s “test.” I’m not quite sure yet what it’s going to be. You’ll find that I haven’t been idle in regards to the novel. Okay, a little idle, but the damn second draft should be over in another few hours. If it goes. I’m up, Muse! I’m up and I’m writing! So that means that you have to show up. It’s an up top, behind the scenes day at the library to day. I had the worst patron in months at the desk yesterday. I came the closest that I’ve come yet to being obviously rude. I was curt. I kept thinking, “I’m a fucking pirate. I don’t have to take this shit.” I’m still learning to be a pirate. I did take a little shit from him, but I gave him the ol’ it’s-a-good-thing-I’m-a-nice-guy-or-you’d-be-fucking-sitting-on-your-ass-with-a-swollen-lip face the whole time.

Five minute – 4:56 AM
Less anger, more cold determination. I weighed myself yesterday. I’ve lost 30 pounds since Christmas. I think that I actually like being unable to fulfill casual food desires. Being poor focuses the attention on what matters. If I ever get rich, I’ll have to be very careful. No debts, few possessions, a house with a few aches, and a big fucking buried treasure. Live simply, carry your house on your back. This is the way of the sea turtle. This is the season of the sea turtle. I run fast through the trees, down the dirt road. The morning sun has not yet warmed the air to a point of intolerability. Free. Mine. Myself. Fast enough. Faster just tears you down. Fast enough builds it up. Faster. Stronger. Prettier. The $500,000 man.

Ten minutes – 5:12 AM
Because, really, would I need more than that to travel the globe as a turtle? You just keep going and, pretending you’re old and wise, look back at yourself as you are now, and chuckle at the idealism. Maybe it doesn’t have to be that way. Maybe one can pull off greatness in one’s own lifetime. There really wouldn’t be a point to it otherwise. Define the limits of the box and go. Ten thousand, ten thousand, it started a long time ago. I’m further than I was. I’ll get further on, the older I go. Freedom is now. Freedom is the bastard pirate perspective. The objective you does not exist, only the personal. If you are not personal, you are white noise to fall asleep ignoring. Turn up the volume and go faster. Yes, call for it at times. Let the movement be enough. The thrill of the impossibility of movement. Faster, faster, fastest, break free from the mindset of the common and average. As Harvey Pekar said, “average is stupid.” I’m using it out of context, but I think I’ve kept with the spirit. This is twelve, followed by the thousandth. This is the confutation of Xeno’s Paradox. As with all bits of clever and useless philosophy, we stay alive despite the wonderful tricks of logic and semantics. We go faster, covering halves in half-time. Trip-a-let, one. Trip-a-let, two. Trip-a-let, three. I am the pirate, turtle, writer, madman, man-in-blue, king of the cottage, swimmer in the river. I am the boy and the free man. I am myself, sailing onward, learning how to stand proud beneath the Jolly Roger. This is just itself. I am what I am at this second. I am what iron I force into my spine. You’re not going to make me feel guilty anymore. I’m going and not apologizing. I’m finding my way and making the world a better place… FOR ME. Just like God intended. That’s the bell. This is the end. I’ve got maps to scribble on. Shouldn’t you have figured out by now that you’re the only one who can make your life better? Go play.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

2005-05-27T20:53:00.000-04:00

Something went wrong with my blog template and I had to start all over again! Please send me your links! I'll try to get it back and better over the weekend. Crap.

There is a spoon

2005-05-27T07:23:00.000-04:00

05/27/2005

Five minute – 6:08 AM
There is a spoon, actually. Reality exists as a solid state on the human scale; what is subatomic and metaphysical is theoretical, hypothetical. It is not the spoon that bends – it is the ghost’s perception of the spoon. If I want to negotiate existence from a stance of strength, I must start now. My footing is actual, but my feeling about that footing is flexible. The problem is how subject feeling is to situation. Perhaps that is where Zen can help. Learning the constant state. I’ve been able to fake contentment for years – thank you, EK. Now, there must for a second state, a primary one, the background level of the CSS, if you will. There is my normal face - the floating, surface level of the CSS, that one is the one that I’ve learned to manipulate. There should a third level, sandwiched between the other two, which remains flexible. From this level, art emerges. The feelings must remain, as they are necessary to telling a convincing tale. But the background must remain in calm strength. Find a way to do it. I am the fucking problem-solving dude. Given time for the wheels to churn, I’ll figure a way out. It’s the only thing.

Five minute – 6:29 AM
What does it matter that I got up two and a half hours later than I wanted too? What does it matter that the student loan people want money that I don’t have? They are merely the basic substances of existence. The ingredients. That they exist cannot, at this point, be changed. What can be changed is what I do with them. Learning to grasp that emotional ideal and set it as the permanent background of the soul, that’s the job at hand. I was reading comic books last night, the Marvel mangas. Even more soap-opera than the normal comics. Loved ‘em. They got me thinking of an old problem that I’ve been working on. Yes, once you learn how to read super-hero comics, they provide an excellent means of escapism and wish-fulfillment, but what are the stories that they are so recognizable? They’re impossible, yet they act as wish fulfillment. Since my own stories are so full of impossible things, the question is authentic as opposed to academic. Fight the academic question, it only makes you pretentious. What do I hope to accomplish with my stories? Yes, entertaining escapism first and foremost, but why this way? Why speak the language of magical realism when I am a solid skeptic? Why Steven King and not Tom Clancy?

Ten minute – 6:53 AM
For me, the principle and initial receptor of this internal dialogue, it’s because my mind works on the metaphorical level: this is to this as this is to this. Thus, things abstract and iconic take on multiple levels of interpretation and speculation. The ability to fly, while just plain cool to imagine in its own right, is about weightlessness, escape, wonder, beauty, originality (the antonym of boring), seeing, knowing… it’s a long damn list. The point is, we venture into Jungian territory here. That base level of sheer delight with the idea must be able to stand up to multiple instances of scrutiny. I think in archetypes. Probably that’s, in large part, an outgrowth of the thickness of my ghost, but it’s also my ghost interacting with the data that my mind has collected. This archetype thinking can get me into a whole fucking lot of trouble. When you see existence as a tale, full of multiple interpretations, you tend to loose the common perspective, which is: pay the fucking bills. But bills exist on multiple levels of interaction. They represent past and future as well as present, strong as well as weak, green as well as blue, poetry as well as science. I suppose that the point of all this is still that it takes us back to the beginning, as a good essay should. I will perceive my existence in the way that makes it most enjoyable. I’m here. I am myself. I exist from my own context and perspective and I’m not taking anyone else’s bullshit anymore. Now I’ve got a shower to take and a second draft to finish before I head off to work. I remain a pirate bastard and I’m going to go play. Do what thou wilt.

your angry pirate bastards, yearning to breathe free

2005-05-26T05:51:00.000-04:00

05/26/2005

Five minute – 5:12 AM
When she said, “fight, fight, fight,” no one really believed her, except as a courtesy to the conventions of the genre. We fight for the bigger thing. We fight to stay mad, to stay determined, to stay strong. We do it. I’ll do it. I’ll be bigger. I’ll find my way and walk it, harder feet sending the dust flying, freeing the tomorrows from the hard soul. One doesn’t need a she to make it. If she comes, she adds. The base substance remains itself. I won’t wait for the acceptance of an imaginary girl. I’ll make my way and make it hard and alone, better than the good old days. I am myself. I’ll be myself tomorrow. I’ll be better than the bastards. I’ll be the bastard myself. You wait with a sneer at the ready. The smart angry happy have got it down. Hard and nice. Bigger than the world will wait for, I punch it in the throat and run down the dirt road to the trees. Thank you, sir, may I have another. I am not now nor have I ever been a… what? That’s not what you asked? I’m sorry. Yes you did.

Five minute – 5:21 AM
No more mister nice guy. The worm turns. Who cares about the use of cliché, this is Tomorrow Land, the past dies now. Fast and faster. I’ll be the villain. Hard shoulders, lip curled, eyes set on the things that come next. If I can, I’ll pull it off and see where it leads. Enough of the slowing, except for that which is one’s nature – the thought pattern of the homeward-bound turtle. Thin down to fighting weight and fight. Be better. Be harder and keep yourself hungry. Hunger gives the edge. Walk to work. Walk home again, even when you don’t need to. This is fighting the world. This is holding back the dark. Pass on and up, muscles like cables. If they wouldn’t let us do it by the green, we’ll do it by the purple of the rolling thundercloud. Look them in the eye. Own nothing that they can take. Be Him. Walk all the way to Florida. Drive, forgetting the false weight of lies. I am. Take me or don’t. I’m doing it my way, just like ol’ dead Frank.

Ten minute – 5:34 AM
We give no quarter. There is no word for give in the utopia of self. Give me your angry pirate bastards, yearning to breathe free. No more of the bullshit. No more of the fear. Bigger dog, snarling. I’ve got a day and I’ve got some time. Hardwalk. There’s me. The story goes that the snake slid over the monk and recoiled from the warrior. All I was shooting for was the slide. I’ll take the recoil. Flee in terror. Boo. What do I care? This is an excuse to babble for myself. This is an exercise in nonsense. I’ll keep up the pose until it stops being one. I’ll be the Hard Man. I’ll have a Randian aesthetic. The moon’s out. Right there, hovering above the town. It’s not begging any more. It’s walking its cold path, indifferent, smiling to itself. For itself. No more chasing. Walking, head down, step after step. No debts. No paybacks. Pirates don’t give a flying fuck. So I’m off and I’ll finish the novel and I’ll work my butt off and I’ll do what I need to and I’m not answering the phone any more and I’m not taking any more bullshit. The lights flicked off. That’s about enough of that. I’m going. No words of wisdom or kindness. I’ve got a world to create. See you if you show up. Bring booze and your sack.

throw their desk

2005-05-25T07:41:00.000-04:00

05/25/2005

Five minute – 6:58 AM
You get up in the morning and sit at your desk. After a while, you begin to see the light. Some days, you sleep too much, and the light is already upon you when you rise, but you get up anyway and work on your other work, the real work, the work at the bottom of a life lived. Crystal River, someday I’ll be embraced by your warm rural waterways. Someday, the waterview and cottage. Someday, they’ll stop calling me and I’ll be free. Someday, this will pay off and I’ll be alone and strong and able to speak my mind, beholden to no one. In the end, I still think that’s the first step. Beholden to no one, when you’ve achieved that, then you can call yourself a grown-up and the She and children follow. It’ll get better, the path circles round to the dark side of the mountain, but climbs, slow and steady, upward. Someday you find the way to the top and then the journey of walking begins.

Five minute – 7:08 AM
She called me weird and I adopted it as my own. It was better than being called ugly. I never really was that weird. I’m really rather parochial. Boring, in fact. Eccentric, different, befuddled, easily caught off-guard, absentminded, but I was never really weird until I decided that it was better to be thought of as weird than ugly. You find the root, pull it out, and the tree falls without effort. I was smarter than 80% of them, dumber than 15%, about the same as 5%. I guess I still am. The problem is the fuckupedness. The resolving of issues. The soul does have a thickness. The slate is blank, but its malleability varies. That odd blank thickness reacts to the pressures put upon it. The writing on the tablet slowly increases, the mind is no longer blank. A self forms, reacting to the writing upon it. The ghosts react to pressure in different ways. In one, what makes stronger, in another, makes weakness. But, like water, the ghost seeks it’s own level. It wants that state of satisfaction and pride and comfort. The ghost continues to flow. Flow uphill.

Ten minute – 7:29 AM
It’s the promise of a better tomorrow. It’s the endless possibility of the future. Possibility is so interesting. When she told me that I couldn’t have her, I’d already known it. I’d known it from the years prior to the shiny boy. What caught me off guard is the fact that it still mattered, but not in a way that I’d expected. I dreamed I was pretty again last night and got up this morning and started worrying about bills. Odd, they said, how could someone as smart as me be so stupid? I wondered too. Part of it is still a middle finger raised in protest. I don’t have the power to fight them, but I can still fuck with ‘em. But that would be satisfying, if that were all it is, I’d take what happens as a killing storm to laugh at as it drowned me. Die a hero, a man. There would be no worry. It’s not the problems, they’re just problems, and I like problems – they’re a chance to show how smart I am. It’s the sudden freezing in the headlights, the strange desire to see what happens if the car plows into me. Perhaps a bit of the old self-destructive tendency, to find either punishment or reward, to test my mettle. Look and me! Look at me! Look at me! Still believing the old lie that if they see you, you’ll be okay. But I’m just waiting for a chance to throw my desk across the room, kiss the pastor’s daughter, tell the teacher to go fuck himself and walk out and away. Walk all the way to Crystal River. Start a new life without the tainted old one to bother me. The great promise of forgetting and remembering what you never knew you lost. To be pretty only for one’s self. The joy of the boy, the freedom of the man, our laughter, raucous, bawdy and wise, floating out from one mouth, over the river to the sea. They’ll never put their shit-stained fingers on us again, we’re free to be who we are. You fight them by ignoring them until you’re strong enough to kick their ass. Find a way to throw their desk, and sit down at your own. Throw it and tell them to go fuck themselves. We’re alive only to play, beholden to no one.

it’s just the second act

2005-05-24T04:32:00.000-04:00

05/24/2005

Five minute – 4:02 AM
Previously on the program, when we were last all together at the table, the things that we knew were about to be overturned by a discovery of life-quaking proportions: ghosts are sometimes born with spines. Well, that might not be the best way to describe it. A more accurate description might be that the thickness of ghosts varies. But whether this is true or not, no one can say. It's one of those things that we, the shadows on the cavern wall, must wonder about, but cannot fully comprehend, due to our two-dimensional perspective. That we have solid shapes that we are cast from is sometimes imagined, due to our interaction with one-dimensional ideas. But, we cannot really purport to know the first dimension either, we exist as two-dimensional creatures, flickering in the light of burning logs.

Five minute – 4:11 AM
It’s reported that there was a point where Momma Cass turned to the skinny Momma and said, “you can have any of them, why take mine?” But the one in question was not in Skinny’s power to give, nor Cass’ power to take. Soon thereafter, Momma Cass choked to death on a chicken bone. We wonder about the nature of the creature when we hear stories such as this. Was the one in question much to blame? Skinny? Cass? Do we find a “no-fault” ruling or is that just a creation of finite men? The cosmos acts without thought, but we, the children of matter and ghost are torn between the passions of both parents. Which did come first? The ghost or the matter? Some believe that once matter reaches a certain state of complexity, a ghost comes into being, but that doesn’t quite fit the facts of longing and contentment. And if it were the ghost, where came this power to interact and control substance? For, by its very definition, it is a free creature.

Ten minute – 4:29 AM
My playlist is excellent but way to short. I’ll have to add more soon. It’s so wonderfully dark out. I got up this morning at the same time that I went to bed the day before. Or is that two days before? You stumble upon that one perfect moment sometimes. You plan for others. “Sweet autumn green-eyed girl. All fiery Irish, clip and curl. All brine and piss and vinegar. I paid twenty-five cents to light a little white candle.” That’s the Decemberists from “Grace Cathedral Hill.” I’m listening to it. I had it stuck in my head all Saturday. Perfect girls. The odd impossibility of Muses is what makes them a Muse. The cold of the rain slips through them and only the shimmering magic of the perfect wet moment remains. When he awoke in the morning hours, too small to be seen, only felt. He slipped out of the sheets and into a pair of old blue jeans, pulled on a tee-shirt and a pair of boots and walked out of the apartment building, jingling his keys as he went. The air was warm enough to leave the window of the car open as he drove, so he did. His first stop was at the corner gas station, where he filled up the tank and bought a very large coffee and a pack of cigarettes. What happened for the next four hours, right up to point where the tip of the sun finally found him, laughing at the cuts and bruises that covered his body while She stood by him, laughing for the world to start again, what happened then is never really that important, it’s just the second act and the second act is there only to build up to an inevitable conclusion. We cut the second act on this play and start the first act of a second story. The biggest question is this: “what does ‘happily ever after’ truly consist of?” But enough, enough, enough. Too much talk and reading of books wearies the soul, action is what defines character, and yet, it pays to remember that all action must flow from character. Define your existence. Go play.

just meandering

2005-05-21T07:08:00.000-04:00

05/21/2005

Five minute – 5:57 AM
I have no idea why I’m so tired this morning. Maybe there is something odd about our barley wine. I did have to take that explosive poo at two in the morning. Might have been the lettuce and oatmeal I had for dinner last night, though. But I’m up now and typing. I had odd dreams last night. Something that mixed up the video game that Ben’s been playing for the last few days with the Sarah Vowell I’ve been reading. Very odd. So I’m awake, watching the birds fly by again. My tummy is gurgling. I think it wants to poo again. And I’m up and working at the library today. I’m filling out an application for the Wilson Farms down the road. I’ll turn it in Monday morning. Maybe I’ll get my wish for sixty hours a week after all. We’ll see and we’ll see.

Five minute – 6:08 AM
What have I been thinking of? It sucks when I can’t remember and I’m actually trying. I was actually proud of yesterday’s post. It ran from babble to an actual idea, well, mood. I suddenly found myself in the middle of something that I wanted to write about. Then, violating the rule that I set up at the start of this blog – the “sic” part – “as it was written” – I went and reread and corrected until I’d managed to knock it into something that, while retaining that sense of free-flow, still had a basic underlying premise. Then I went and wrote a page and a half for the novel in an hour and ten minutes. That was a good writerly morning. Left the day feeling good. One of the benefits of writing in the morning is that, come what may, if I’ve managed to pull of a bit of writing that I’m proud of, it feels like, come what may in the rest of the day, I’ve already done that one good thing, so, what ere may happen, I’ve had a good day. It’s not the life that needs to get in order to write, it’s the writing that gives life some room to get in order. You run and you rumble. Come to me, tomorrow of she and cottage, find me in the rusty nickel and take me home.

Ten minute – 7:00 AM
I got up too late, the magic’s waiting for a better day. So screw it. All this is nothing but a deck of cards. I’m getting closer and closer to the end of the second draft. I’ve got two or three more pages in the chapter I’m working on, and then I paste it into the novel, give the whole thing a read-through (haven’t done that in a couple of months), marking the parts that need another paragraph or two. Then the fill-in and proofreading, then one last read-through and it goes out to the kids. So there it is Jonny, you might actually get it before the end of May, like I said (the second time, not the first time). There’s this and there’s the end of the day, when I get to imagine that I’ll get up early and redeem the day before it really starts. I was making a list as I walked to work yesterday. What are the items that I’d need to take care of in my life to feel like I was standing on solid ground? 1) Get rid of all debts, 2) Have an actual home of my own, 3)… it went on like this for a while. I was just thinking of this book that I read as a teenager, it might have been a Dobson-published thing. It was basically a book of financial advise for Christian teens. Seeing teenagedom as a prep stage instead of something that existed for itself, but then, for that kind of Christian, it’s all a prep stage. But I still get a warm fuzzy thinking about that book and its advice to someone that had an idea of what they wanted to do with their life. Get a job, start saving, graduate from high-school, go to college, graduate from college, get a job, get a small house, pay off your debts and add to your savings, start to stock your little house with the life necessities – laundry machines, stoves, refrigerators – the stuff of a life like your parents had. When you were good and set (you didn’t have to be debt free or have everything), you brought a wife into it. The rest of it was set out – debt free then babies then raising kids to do what you did, then kids leave, then you’re old and you’ve saved a lot, trading the small house for a large one somewhere in the mix, then you’ve got a few years of adventurous grown-up life, then you become grandparents, then you retire, then you actually get to spend some of what you’ve been saving, then a few more years of old people adventuring, then you die, then you go to heaven, leaving your savings to your children as an inheritance. I love that story. It’s so simple and hard. It is the archetype of a responsible life, and the heart of it beats between the lines. There are some people that do live it. I just can’t think of a single one that I know. And yet, I do still want some variation of that. You find a woman when you become a man; you become a man when you have money and a house of your own. Odd, having reject the ethics of the tale, I still hold with the aesthetics that proceed from it. But maybe aesthetics really is the basic stuff of it all. And there’s no way this is a ten-minute thing, and it’s not like I’m impassioned about it. I’m just meandering down a pleasant and interesting path for a little while. I just pooped. It was a fine poop and I feel better for it. The most beautiful thing that I can think of at the moment is a philosopher building his house in the country. And there is, of course, the fact that I want to be that person, but I think that the idea came to me a long time ago, before I wanted to be him, maybe even back before I went to college for the first time. I was thinking about this the other day, too: what is Crystal River, FL to me? It’s something that reminds me of Cape Cod, but it’s a Cape Cod where people can actually live, instead of just visit. A permanent, paid, working vacation. Ever since things when to shit in Long Island, that’s what I’ve been dreaming of. No more homework, no more bosses, just my muscles and my mind, the sun and the rain, my books and my garden. How beautiful. How beautiful. How beautiful. And this is what it means to play.

not against flesh and blood

2005-05-20T06:01:00.000-04:00

05/20/2005

Five minute – 5:16 AM
I guess I’ve had a brief vacation of sorts. After a whole FOUR days straight of work, I got a whole FOUR days off. It’s a long day today, 9-6, a normal workday. I’ll have to leave for work at eight, so I’ve only got about an hour and fifteen after I finish with the instants. I ended up adding only about a half a page to the novel. It’s close though. I can feel it. Only a few more pages and then I get to work on something else for a month. I’d bet that I could write a first draft in about four months. It’d be the editing that would take years. Ah, well, here we are again, sitting down to the keyboard and screen, trying to write our way out of the rabbit hole. Or into it, as the case may be.

Five minute – 5:29 AM
The fact that my talents (what level they ere may be) are so unmarketable at this point, it grits at me, sometimes. It is a little bit today. I probably would have enjoyed being a software engineer, but it would have taken a life like the one I’ve lived for the past ten years to figure that out. Now I’m a twenty-nine year old part-time library page in Buffalo, NY that tries to write novels in the morning and dreams of Crystal River, FL (somewhere he’s never actually been, rather like his ideal woman). I went to school in Long Island because I wanted to get far, far away from my hometown. I went for marine biology because I thought that sounded like an adventurous career (as opposed to say, software engineer). I dropped out of college because, after discovering that I didn’t like marine biology, I figured that I might as well get ready for the move to blue-collar suburbia. I dropped out of blue-collar work because I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was cheating myself of a life well-lived. And so began the wandering. Some good, some bad, always with the taint of the deep dark. That’s ten years now. Ten years always on the verge of the crevasse. Never jumping into the fog-shrouded pit, but coming pretty damn close many, many times. And here I am, looking out my widow at an un-purpling Elmwood strip, trying to find the patterns in my story like I almost always can in the stories I read or watch.

Ten minute – 5:45 AM
Always something better. That’s a noticeable motivation. An odd ill-preparedness for dealing with reality as it is. An inability to accept what I perceive as less. So obsessed with finding the perfect life that life loses its reality. Why couldn’t I be a happier cliché? It’s strange what we pick out of all the things we were told by the grown-ups when we were kids. They wanted me to be an obedient, if somewhat more interesting, little Christling. I ended up hearing the interesting, said “screw the obedient, you guys are full of bullshit,” and ended up a Christian only by being dragged back in, kicking and screaming, by an un-ignorable belief and need. There goes that sea gull, flapping up Elmwood again. An inability to accept where I am. I thought that might be a constant. It probably will be in the need for validation. But I do think I’d like to find myself solidly and unshakably in my cottage by the water. I don't mind fighting inner demons, I just want some solid ground to stand on. The desire to be great is a defect of personality. Good enough is good enough. But here I am, wanting to be great, wanting to have not only my cottage, but a feeling of greatness. A crow just followed the path of the seagull. Those in history that did great things rarely felt as if they’d done enough, at least that’s the way the story goes now. Maybe it’s true. We fight not against flesh and blood, but against our own perceptions thereof. The streetlights have flickered off. Times up. Class is dismissed. Go play. For ten thousand, ten thousand, go play.

Holy crap, that was a good CSI.

2005-05-19T22:06:00.000-04:00

And that's about all I need to say about that.

POP PUNK!

2005-05-19T16:24:00.000-04:00

05/19/2005 (B)

Five minute – 3:56 PM
There comes a time in everyone’s life when only one thing can save you: POP PUNK! Oh, yah. Blink 182. Okay, so I didn’t actually do a damn freaking thing today with writing, instead, I hacked my blogger site for five hours. Make that six. I’m so geek. Sweet. Okay, I’m faking a little, but, trust me, the core material is there. I still haven’t figured out how to center the “weather magnet” to the right without centering all items in the sidebar, but, given time, I’m confident that I can figure it out. Two in one day. Why? Because I damn well feel like it. I’m actually going to try to get to the novel for a few hours today. And the day ain’t over yet. So here I am again, working on the instants, trying to recapture the writing flow. Who knows? We’ll see. And there it is, the first track is ending and the timer is still waiting. So bangbangboom, let’s get it going again. More coffee. More cigarettes. More tomorrows. Better yesterdays.

Five minutes – 4:07 PM
You can’t beat slightly obscure references to Tim Burton puppets. Pop punk makes me think of all the girls in their summer dresses. The actual ones. Not that excellently written and thoroughly depressing short story. Wee! Open the window and look out at the world. Cars and girls and city streets in the sun. Drive faster and see what the tale end of the thing beyond looks like. Catch a smoke on the wing of a plane. Imagine how funny the great ones would have been if they hadn’t been crippled by selflessness. The fighting against the great bore can be more exhilarating than that. Connect the dots on the trees, see the code written into the spine of ants. Faster, faster, fastest. Sometimes it holds, forgetting what came before, imagining that there is only that which can be learned, we see the line and cross it, find the round and square, race back to the starting line and win the prize in the line of sight and the brownstone cottage with the wire fence in the trees that smell of dawnlight and the evening shades of better vintages.

Ten minutes – 4:23 PM
Zoogass and pendltyn. What the heck is the bottom of the pile and why don’t we want to see it, stand back stand back, this puppies gonna blow. Bigger, bigger, biggest, boing the drum. Bamboozaled and flaxed. That’s a mighty fine suit you’ve got. I wish I had a loose tie and the better half of a lemon. This is the thing that you wanted but the other wasn’t available, please call again at a better time, the roast is about to burn. Where was that fish? It’s not like it could walk down the pipes to the sewers and find the door to the secret lair of the fearful fighters full filled flair. If it weren’t for the other thing, this one would just sound like one of those other things that no one seems to want, even when they give them away with a free toaster. The toasting of a slice of bread is a delicate condition for a man of your position. There goes the bus. It goes without me. I want a car. I’d drive all the way to the country. I’d just go and go. I’d find the inside of the grass that grows beneath the bridge that crosses the railroad tracks at the edge of the blue, blue stream. If it weren’t for bad guys, there’d be no dames at all. If it weren’t for dames, well, that’s just redundant. Misogyny is a hoax perpetrated women to make them by books and magazines. Like we need an excuse. Heehee! I referenced myself as a woman soon after being misogynistic. The apple core is found at the bottom of the well next to the diamond ring that doesn’t shine. You had me at the sneer. You had me at the sneer. Sniffle. The round bottoms ate soft-shelled clams. The beefeaters drank vodka. The sad truth of existence is funny. The funny thing that happened on the way to the club is never really that funny. It’s what happened to the guy after he walked into the bar that we began to divine the pattern in the eggshells we walk on around the sleeping rubber ducky. Whoo! Smoke break!

the one and the long

2005-05-19T08:27:00.000-04:00

05/19/2005

Five minute – 8:00 AM
So now it’s the morning after the day of the great re-imaging. My computer is fast and light. And lacking in MP3’s. I spent 3 hours at a staffing agency doing tests and filling out paperwork, only to be told that the library was offering me a seasonal in August. Now I’m caught in a dilemma. But this is the end of the thing – I need 4K by next April. So I’m going to have to get it one way or another. But forgetting the world outside is the beauty of this little time. Even if it is late for me. I’m up and working on it. I’ve managed to re-download a few files from the online data storage place where I packed up and moved all my documents to (no MP3’s though). I’ve got almost a gig of my life floating out there in cyberspace. It’s odd and fascinating. But the desert novel is back in the box and I’m on soulseek downloading some of my favorites. It’s today and tomorrow will come when it does. Finish the second draft, send it out to the folks, ignore it for a month and then come back and start draft number three. Today is today and tomorrow will come when it does.

Five minute – 8:10 AM
I know what my programming project is, James. I want to make a better egg-timer. I’ve been using this one for months and months. It’s the best I’ve found, but it lacks some very useful elements – the ability to save time settings for one, a “start all” option for another. I have no idea where to start, but I think I know what I want the finished program to be. The sun is up already. It’s been up for a while. I’m going to try the impossible and actually write a lot while it’s light out. We’ll see how it goes. I’m spending this day with my other job. Three jobs for a year, that would be sweet. 60 set hours a week at a single job and then twenty-five or so at this one would be great, but I’ll do what I can. 76 in Crystal River. My own. Mine. Warmth, writing, alone, garden, internet – those are such happy words. If I ever get my cottage by the water, everybody is so invited. A small cottage in Crystal River on four acres of land, such a beautiful idea. Writing. Reading. Gardening. Such a fine and full life.

Ten minutes – 8:27 AM
So wipe the sleep boogers from your eyes. Have another cup of coffee. Smoke a smoke or five, and write. Write all the way to that cottage. If this is my dream, it is my dream. My jobs may be what they are; I’ve got my little dream of a cottage built on words. It’s called the Idler’s Rest right now. It’s evolved over the years. Since it’s not imminent, I can let the slow sway of the wish-wash wave and change. When the time comes for the beast to be born, you have to decide on a name. The turtle tattoo is the best idea for a back piece that I’ve had yet, but when the time comes to fork over the dough to the man with the needle, what will it be? We plan and plan and seek and seek, but when the time comes, you let it be writ in stone and so be it. The cottage will have a floor-plan whether I settle on it or not. So too with a life. So be it and so it goes and so it goes. Ten thousand, ten thousand. We live a little longer and try to preserve the wonder of childhood while combining it with the pride of adult work. We’ll find a way, somehow, someday. Do the thing. It’s a little thing. It’s a thousand little things. And someday, somehow, they’ve assembled into a picture, a story. The first drafts of the great writers were worse than the first drafts of the bad pulp writers. It’s the constant and oddly pleasant obsession with getting the story to say exactly what it wants to say that makes them better writers. So back to it. Back to the damn desert, finish it up this time round. Let it go. Go back to it and make it better. Again and again, until you get it right – as close to right as you can. Then you send it out and it’s perfect, because you worked it with skill and passion. One long mistake. One long perfect. It’s the one and the long that make it so. So on to it. On to the thing that gives your life its theme. Go play.

76 in Crystal River

2005-05-17T05:45:00.000-04:00

05/17/2005

Five minute – 5:16 AM
And so you get up in the morning, and it’s hard, but you do it. You find some things closer than you thought they were. Some things are just dreams, but the dreams take you away from the wounds of the present into some better tomorrow. I find it interesting that some haven’t found the end that they want, while I can’t seem to find the strength to achieve the dream that I’ve had for so long. But strength comes as you find it, and there’s hope in the waking. I discovered that “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon” is only around 65000 words. That book was about the length I was shooting for. The desert novel is already at around 72K. After I finish, I can actually cut again. I like the cutting. It’s so much easier than the building. You slog through it and find yourself a little further, a little closer to the cottage and the water.

Five minute – 5:26 AM
Today I walk with Ben down Delaware to find a new job. I decided that I’m not going to keep my face clean-shaven, respectability be damned – I prefer respect. You just can’t drag respect out for someone that looks like I do when clean-shaven. My father had a moustache. I think I remember him shaving it off once or twice. He had a “weak” upper lip. Thin is what that means. So do I. Not to mention my waddle and chubby cheeks. I must remember that whenever I shave off my beard, it feels like some sort of ritual suicide. Even if I was skinny, I should keep at least a goatee. Ish. This unshaveness is unsettling. I’ll be glad when it’s back up to fuzzy goodness. I look like an accountant. Odd that I forget what I look like so easily, but am startled by something like a shave. I suddenly become hyper-conscious of my image. Normally it has that comfortable padding of hair. I feel like a tamed and neutered lion. But that is all as it is. I’m awake after taking, literally, hours to fall asleep. I think I got about four and a half hours of sleep. I like my six. Six means you can get up in the morning, but still fall asleep at night.

Ten minute – 5:44 AM
When I get to Florida (Florida being the new object of my desire after a winter spent in Buffalo), I want a house that is at least ½ screened-in porch. I’ve even designed one. It’s been a while since I’ve done that. Maybe it’s spring. Winter forces a certain acceptance, certain daydreams shut down. Well, it’s spring, and I’m not content. The daydreams resume. Crystal River, FL is the place I’ve been dreaming about. Findyourspot.com found it for me, a long time ago. I’ve been dreaming about it off and on for a while. That’s my new daydream. The only downside is the sandy soil. In order to have a garden, I’ll have to truck in a lot of dirt. How far away it is. How in Buffalo I am. It’s probably going to be around 76 in Crystal River again. A perfect day for sitting on the porch and writing. There’s this silent movie reel that’s been playing in my head every now and then for the past few years. It’s in color, but I don’t think the main characters ever speak. Hmm, I guess I’m not going to tell that story here yet. I think it’s still too much in gestation. Maybe you’ll all get to see it someday. I found a long wish again. Maybe that’s all I need to say. I hope again that I’ll never have to see the edge of the deep dark, and I still refuse to believe that I have to continue to be miserable to be able to write with depth. I’ll find a way back to the higher ground and I’ll have a foundation that won’t crumble when I do. It’s odd how enriching being poor is. How many things you thought you needed slip away and you barely noticed. God help me keep that when I find my way to stable footings. The streetlights flickered out. I watched them. A sea gull flew by my window. I can fly in my stories. I want to stand in my life. Misery is not the natural state of man. I will be happy. On to the better work. Go play.

2005-05-16T20:43:00.000-04:00

See what I mean about the waddle... It's a cool pic though.

S(h)aved!

2005-05-16T08:31:00.000-04:00

I could blame it on John's recent shearing. I could blame it on the desire to look respectible when I go job hunting. But it was mostly because I was curious to see what I look like under all that fuzz. This is the best picture of the lot because you can't see my odd tan lines or the chubby waddle under my neck. I have girly lips but a more manly chin than I remember. Hmm...

2005-05-16T08:29:00.000-04:00

Hello.

I am. I will. I do.

2005-05-16T05:32:00.000-04:00

05/16/2005

Five minute – 4:56 AM
The breeze blowing in is slightly colder, but still pleasant. A cool, wet summer, they say. And that’s a great title. It sounds like something I’d write. About a boy that discovers hardship in life and hits rock bottom before finding some small hope to build a life out of. And the deep dark passed close again, and I was not immune to its harder aspects. The little boy lost in the deep dark forest, so scared of the things that make noises. The sad version of the story is that he falls asleep as the cold comes on and dies muttering: “I don’t understand. I don’t understand. I don’t understand…” The monsters find their way out from inside. That’s another story that I’ve had in the hopper for months now. And that fucking desert novel stands there. I’ve built so much of my hope on it, and now I’m terrified of it. I’m trying so hard, but I’m just swimming in place against the rip current. I’m waiting for the exhaustion to set in, so I’ll have something to tell God when I appear at the throne. I did try, I’ll say. I did, I just got caught in the current when I was still too weak to break free. If only I’d fallen in when I was stronger, then I might have made something remarkable of myself. I still love the idea of it, God. Doesn’t that count for something?

Five minute – 5:16 AM
I’m listening to my own New Find. Aqualung. I’ve only had one of those before – Richard Buckner. I like this Aqualung. The music and production is absolutely excellent. My only wish is that he had a spiritual quality like Sufjon, but, who does? It takes a lifetime of fighting against your faith to get to that level of belief. I think I know who the Fast Boys are, now. I heard it last night on an ad for “The Lords of Z-Town” or whatever the name of that pic is. “The Boy Kings.” That’s who the Fast Boys are. They appear in any situation and know how to take it. There is nothing too big, too fast, too hard, they can conquer it all and retain their boyness. What does it mean to be a boy? How much is the weight of a boy’s soul? His hands? His feet? How do we become Boy, again? In sight of the pier, they turned back to the storm, to fight the waves again, knowing the risk, knowing that they would never be conquered. Free falling is flying. The cosmos cups its hands and catches them. But I babble. The cosmos doesn’t care. I’m here and I have so much to do. I owe so much that the pot would have to be the size of a Buick.

Ten minute – 5:31 AM
It’s the hard that makes it deep. Haven’t I been scarred enough to retain the depth that I’ve acquired? I use big fucking words and ideas with nonchalance. I know what they mean. Can’t the big damn cross get taken off so I can stretch my legs and remember how to walk? There was a Sunday after. There was a day where the dead learned to walk again. They flew soon thereafter. How long before my resurrection? How long before Groundhog Day is over and I wake up to a different Sonny and Cher? My sins, God. My sins. Can’t I have found a redeemer, yet? But I’m awake and it’s early. Maybe there is a metaphor in that. Maybe the day will burst into sunlight and warm summer rain, later in the day. You wake up. You wake up and remind yourself to get up. You wake up and remind yourself to get up for the day whey you wake and no longer have to remind yourself. Ten thousand, ten thousand. I’m probably only half a day in. But we only get eighty, ninety years. I’m twenty-nine. I’m not ashamed of my seeking, just in my not finding a reward for it. I refuse to accept that my lot in life is to send reports back from the edge of darkness. I will find a place, warm and wet. And yes, the sexual connotation hasn’t escaped me; I just don’t think the connection is direct. Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes a hope of some better place is just a hope of some better place. I want to wake up in a good room. I want the trials to be past and the stories to begin. I want to be sure of myself and my place in the world. So old. So used. So spent. I want to be that better man. I want to be something more than I am. Tomorrow will come. Tomorrow will come and I’m going to find a way. I am. I will. I do. Goddamn it. Jesus Christ, God Almighty Always at My Heels, I do.

what it is that I really love about reading Ebert

2005-05-14T05:49:00.000-04:00

05/14/2005

Five minute – 5:21 AM
And perhaps I’m a bit more conversational than esoteric today. Who can tell? It is an absolutely fabulous breeze that’s blowing through my window today. Roommateless for a weekend, how fun! Heehee! It’s Saturday and I actually got up at 4:30 today. I read Ebert for forty-five minutes before I started, but I got up and finally started writing. I don’t think I’ll be working on the novel today. Maybe not for a little while. When you can’t stand the thought of writing because of the thing you’re working on, it’s time to take a break from it. I’m working on so many fun little things in my head these days. I’ll just see what I come up with. Mushrooms grow in the dark, you know. And that leaves me with what to babble on about today? Eh, who cares? I’ll walk to work today. I like rain, but not walking to work in it, maybe it will hold off for a while. Tomorrow, I think I’ll try to get up even earlier. Yah. That sounds like fun.

Five minute – 5:32 AM
Do you know what it is that I really love about reading Ebert? Reading Ebert summarize plots and point out flaws makes me make up my own plots that follow the twisting concourses of my own mind and improve on what I’ve seen and read, in my own Uncle Spikely way. I got so many fun ideas from Ebert today: from the “Mindhunters” review, I was reminded of an old story that I’ve been mulling over for years, a B-Grade (which doesn’t mean shoddy, just cheaply made – chamber pieces usually, and you know how much I love chamber pieces) about a group of friends that gather to celebrate something at an old country farmhouse one weekend and then decide to go out for a walk in the fog. It’s late morning, so they figure that they’ll be making it back in a few hours, but, as they go along, they, one-by-one, begin to disappear into the fog. It’s “Picnic at Hanging Rock” meets “Any Number of Horror Movies involving Fog” meets “The Classic Isolated English Manor Murder Mystery.” If you’re one of those luck few to have read “The Bachelor Party” (an odd and vulgar tale of mine about a group of drunk boys walking down railroad tracks), then you might remember this tale as “The Tale Within the Tale.”

Ten minute – 5:48 AM
From reading the “Kicking and Screaming” review, I started thinking of a story in which the idea that Ebert puts forth – that kids should be the coaches of kid’s sports teams – is allowed to follow itself to a fun (and fairly libertarian) end. What do kids do when they’re the ones that run themselves – play. It would probably be the worst damn team in the state, if they made it to that inevitable Big Game Where They Prove Themselves Once and For All, it would be accidental, nor would they really care. In my story, they would lose. Soundly. But here’s the kicker – they wouldn’t give a damn. They play the game for the hell of it and have a kid’s life of it. Not great, not horrible, but fully and enviably their own. The Big Game wouldn’t be the culmination, might be the climax, but the end of the movie would be something like: the season is over, our heroes have been soundly trounced, the other kids on the other teams basically fade into whatever new team sport it is that their parents have picked out for them, but, ah yes, the but, but our team has Learned Something. They don’t give a shit about winning. Never did. They were in it for the playing with other kids. For the ache in the muscles and the cuts and scrapes and bruises. For the screaming and running and kicking and hitting things. They were in it to be kids with other kids. Imagine a field of Calvins playing soccer while a bench of Hobbeses cheers them on. That’s a damn kids sports movie. Times up. Go play.

through these boreal forests

2005-05-12T05:25:00.000-04:00

05/12/2005

Five minute – 4:52 AM
Hello, old soul, and how fares the union? Stands she strong and true? Walk with me a ways down these boreal paths, finding plants and animals and precious perfumes. We can’t have the best, always, but today is itself and we must greet it and spend its change as we do every day. There is much to see, though we’ve walked these paths the day before and the day before and the day before. Ten thousand, ten thousand, the old men say, it takes, before you can see the path as it is. So wake up to the darkened sky and the perfect lonely hours. Wake up and walk with the owls and the wild dogs. Scavenge and root. Smell the food in the earth and trees. We’ve ten thousand, nine thousand, eight hundred and seventy-five left to go.

Five minute – 5:02 AM
To be better than you are, how very hard it is. One time out of thirty, we accomplish the task. Each step seeming harder than the last. But the last brought us a little closer. We achieve in smallness and proceed to the larger self, half-step by half-step. The lady in the white hair, we neglected to see again. Next time, or the time after that, we’ll be there and ready. This and then the next. This and then the next, we grow closer to the earth, closer to the sky. Take root and walk. Some times, it is not fast, faster, fastest. It is slow, slow, slow. We reach the end of the race, no matter how long we take. All that matters is the attempt and the achievement of motion. Tall like the oak. Hard like the sea-wall. Soft like the iron fist, wrapped in lady’s velvet. We cannot force the universe, only ourselves, who are the small, blue heart of existence. Step. Step. Step. It grows better slowly and not without regressions. But we continue to step and grow. Growing large enough to carry the world without noticing. The turtle lives a thousand years. Ten thousand, ten thousand.

Ten minute – 5:18 AM
As we progress, we learn to drop the weight. The pack lightens. The turtle carries his home with him, always. A house is a heavy thing, but the turtle knows its intimate perfection. The turtle, the cat, the dove, the fox. We learn to carry the weight of ourselves. We learn not to feel it again. We become the privileged children of time. Walk with me, my slow walk, through these boreal forests. The scent of water is always here. The quiet of timeful solitude. Carry your house upon your back and learn to walk slow, sure, aware. Your legs grow thick and you remember what might is and how it is used. Learn to drop what isn’t necessary. Learn to add what is. Step, step, step. Step. Step. Step. Each time you tread upon the forest path, a subtle perfume is released. Sublime and good, the movement of dust affects Eternity. You are not a stranger and alien. You are kin and kind. Walk slowly with me, step by step by step. The skin of the tree is rough. The fern is light. The moss is soft. Sometimes, the simple adjectives will do. Remember yourself as you were, when your dark knowledge was not yet born. He guides you. Walk a ways, step by step. You are large enough to carry your house. Someday, you will grow to carry the one who dwells within. Step by step, the wind, a cool, wet breeze, follows you, curious to see where you become. Rest by the deep, deep pools. Swim, if you like, tempting the monsters below. And then, up. Up and on. Further up and further in. The slow path is our own. Ten thousand, ten thousand and the nights of verdant breeze will wait for us. Walk with me.

the sleeve of the man at the table

2005-05-11T10:42:00.000-04:00

05/11/2005

Five minute – 10:04 AM
The nature of the pirate is this: he realizes that they don’t want the truth; they want a lie that fits their notions of how the good pirate should act. You lie, cheat and steal the world and then tell them that you made it yourself, just for them. You have to make up greatness and you don’t tell. They don’t want to hear the minutia of the art, they just want to pay the rent and watch TV. Be better. Be greater. Take the risk and pay the price. Forget the respectable; it was made for the ones that gave up. You make it. You take it. You do what you can to rule your own private kingdom. It’s my life, damn it. It’s my existence that I’m scooping out of. This is it. What sits behind the fog is a hope, because we couldn’t function until we had it, but this is the side of the chasm that we find ourselves. Build the world. Build another. Fight the bland. Find yourself in whatever it is that you’ve got. Long lost, better found.

Five minute – 10:14 AM
We pick it up and take it apart. We make something new from the parts of the old. The pulse of the universe is ours to feed on. Vampires in a bloodless world, we create the throbbing vein. Step inside. Feed the soul. The body follows through when the ghost grows too large to ignore. Puppet the puppet. Google yourself and see when you’re mentioned. Bigger, stronger, faster – the billion dollar man. Walking to run, running to fly, flying to float, floating to golden fields. We remember our arms and legs. We wake up in full armor, sword in hand. Don the helm. Work the forgotten muscles. This is where we were meant to be. We are ghosts in a machine. It’s not a less. It’s a better. Flying. Flying and feeling the rush of the blood. The taste of your own teeth. The throb of your own heartbeat. Mine. Mine. Mine. Break those dull bars. Free form doesn’t have to be form free. We are what we find. The endless repetition is necessary to becoming the better paradigm.

Ten minute – 10:29 AM
Dirt is a mixture of matter and time. From dust to dust, the shovel is finite, the reason is full. We take the path to the neck muscles and feel the hint of the breeze on the tongue. Faster, faster, fastest, and it all begins to blur: horrible time in the box of going sound without the better hope of tomorrow becomes the fraction of the infinite space of the gorge of infinite possibility to that which is the point of the compass resides in it’s own, bound by the forces of energy and matter on the sleeve of the man at the table, he rises and forgets the rules of the house, to forget them costs your life, but, if you’re already dead, what can they do to you, in dying we go down, in reaching bottom we can only rise, we don’t have the price of the field, so we sell the managers and rude boys and girls to the white slavers of suburbia we’re bigger than the world can stand and so we stand on the world the time on the clocks burst through the walls of the prison of normalcy and acceptability we become the bastard out of time and place, rule the world of the three by six by six and overcome the wall of indifference with a punch in the gut the violence escalates until the violent take it by force we can’t help but see the rainbow in the fall of the water and so we overwhelm and become the better half of time we do not want not feel not becoming the better four-color print of the supermen of the leave of spring trees and grass lawns in secluded forests without the constraints of the hopeless given we walk and see the sun sparkle on the metal bodies of our youth, the nail bends beneath bare feet the stars march to the rhythm of our endless days pirates and bastards all, we cannot help but float on to the still pool in the heart of the comic question and in finding we resolve ourselves to tell tall tales and make them true the asphalt runs out when the Indians attack, we’re young enough to go free in being captured by the savage laugh of good and right and free and strong. The box ceases to be. Ten thousand ten thousand. On to the better worlds.

in falling, we rose higher

2005-05-10T05:56:00.000-04:00

05/10/2005

Five minute – 5:26 AM
We learn to scream before we learn to speak, but behind our five-dollar words, the scream remains. Don’t dismiss the scream when it breaks out. We learn to laugh before we learn to speak as well. The sky is the deep blue dress of a girl, stretched sleeping across the mountains. Beneath her dress, the pale skin of day waits for the touch of the sun. Her movement and murmurings stir the air, moon and stars appear. The myth is not a lie; it is a scream and a laugh, potent in its clarity. Ha! That took the full five.

Five minute – 5:38 AM
Better, better, best, onward up the spiral. We circle the moon, passing from dark to light to dark to light. The passage of time is described by the arc of the pendulum in the glow of a flashlight beam. We create this with our watching. It was not there before. It didn’t need to be. In the eyes of the seer, the world is born. We are all the prophets of the past. We read the future in the teacups that we wash slowly in the heat of a summer stillness. This is just itself. I remain. Part of me is lost in each second that passes. More is gained. When mass reaches the critical point, a black hole is formed. We cannot see inside a singularity. Like her, no singularity is naked. She walks the green path, passing into the shade of the willow and emerges a swan in flight. Roll on, mighty river, roll down the mountains to the sea. Come back as rain, bringing with you the smell of the infinite ocean. She walks and I follow her with my eyes. When her dress coils in the wind, I fall again for the apple. I fall through the earth, passing though hell, and find myself in the singularity of all time. The green green of those last few good things. We plant them in the infinite and they float to the top, carrying us to the better world.

Ten minute – 5:51 AM
We grow stronger. Even in our weakness, the wax remembers the key. We cast the imprint in plaster, the plaster into iron and we unlock the door and take off our clothes, better than we were before the box with bar, shining like the whitest stars. It was because of our sin that we needed to be redeemed, but in calling from our despair, we near a better Eden. If the first Adam gave birth to sin, what greater thing has the Second produced that will keep us from sinning? If rising, we fell, in falling, we rose higher. He lived a hundred years and saw the world grow to meet his size. We become. We die. We die. We die. In dying, we gain our better life. It is not the self that ceases to be, it is the crook therein. It didn’t have to be this way, but it was, and so we become what we are. The infinite remains. When they stood on the rooftops and called to the birds, they woke the city. When they flew, they took the hearts of thousands with them. Someday, we’ll learn to fly. If we don’t, I won’t see it. There’s this. There’s that. There is what is, but I will take what could and should be. From freedom to freedom. From field to air to sky to space to time to infinity. And beyond. Hee hee hee! It doesn’t matter kids. The words are just a symbol. The scream and the laugh remain. The sky lightens. She’s waking up.

the box became ghost

2005-05-09T08:56:00.000-04:00

05/09/2005

Five minute – 8:13 AM
Okay, I think I’ve run through the Chill CD enough. Back to the old list today. Anybody got any leads for good happy rock? I’m up. I’m typing. We can hope that I’ll actually work on the novel today. A few hours of writing and then it’s off to the staffing agencies. I’ve got three picked out. After a little more research, I might be able to find a few more. Then choose three for today and see what happens. I’ve got eleven moths to get around 4K. Can he do it? Stay tuned. Plus the writing. I might actually have a productive year. We can hope. There are those wonderful dreams of what a year or two might bring. Where to next? Who can tell? Who can tell? I’ll be getting “Best American Small Art Towns” out of the library again. See where that leads. So many bills, so few qualifications. Thankfully, I don’t really give a damn about that today and I can just look at it as more data to take into account. Slow typing. Faster next.

Five minute – 8:24 AM
New glasses. Gotta get some. There are about six degrees from useless. New job. New glasses. Better days. The circle spirals upward. If we wondered where it comes from we find ourselves back at the turtles of no-consequence. Just tell the damn story. Days and nights and week and months, we walk towards the verdant fields, the inviolate substance of present happiness. If we bisect the circle, we find ourselves wiser than we were, achieving something new. The beauty of His metaphor is this: he made the metaphor into an actuality. He made a box for the ghost and the box became ghost. We cannot fathom the nature, be we understand the allusion. Dreams escaped the aether and walked the earth full-fleshed. We learned to dream fly in fact. That is powerful mojo. That is a potion that changes the substance of those that imbibe. Such a strange faith. But, of course, when hope becomes a solid substance, we are left with a mystery, impossibilities swirling in its wake.

Ten minute – 8:42 AM
Non-sense became sense data and walked among us. And what might that be? It might be a playing with words. It might be a mythos. It might be a tale well told. It might be an example. We build dreams. How, I don’t know. I’ve got theories and they are as nutty as you’d want in a bit of metaphysical speculation, but that isn’t what’s really on my mind. What’s on my mind is the precedent. I have dreams. Dreams of the cottage and the water and the books with my name on the spine. Dreams of a She and of being a He and of being Papa and friend. The dream became flesh and dwelt among us. That is the precedent. Human history is full of the creating of dreams and making them walk. But in my faith, it became in a way that is incomprehensible. The logos became muscle and bones. The Word became flesh. And therein we find a new dream, a new chance. The abstraction of abstraction popped into the common slang, the slang became a TV show, the show became a movie, the movie stepped from the screen and walked out of the theatre, dragging a flickering world of beautiful impossibilities into the possible world. Counterfactuals obtain. I don’t know the words. I don’t know how to call the monster. But I believe it happened. I can’t not. Somehow the incomprehensibly impossible is simple math when viewed from the right angle. The cottage and the water and the book and the She and the kids and the friends and the thousand thousand hard-won battles is a simple thing. What are we escaping too, not from? They laugh, unknowing, at our dreams. But while we do not know either, we can see the blue flame that makes our balloon rise to the Emerald City and the size of the cities below grow smaller and smaller. We walk the common hills and find ourselves in Aslan's country. She kisses me and I forget what I wasn’t saying.

To be worry-free

2005-05-08T08:58:00.000-04:00

05/08/2005

Five minute – 8:28 AM
Look out the window, see the world. It comes and goes. Cars. Bikes. Houses. Trees. Closer in, past the blue windowsill. The light in the lamp is blown out, but it’s daytime. What does it take to be a man that never worries? To be that guy in that place. To be free from worry but not thought. To be strong and kind. To be able to live well in the world as someone that you respect. But it comes and goes, it comes and goes. Mother’s Day, today. Tomorrow is another thing. Yesterday was James’ graduation, so I got to get out of the city and walk in country air with grass beneath my flip-flops. It was free comic book day, but I was out of the city. Don’t mind really. It is what it is. And a degree of peace has settled down in the past few days. I really would like to work 50-60 hours a week for a while, at a job that I don’t have to love, but wouldn’t hate and could do well.

Five minute – 8:39 AM
Something else to dwell on. Problems not of money and interpersonal interaction, but solvable and interesting things. Man, I should have majored in programming. Logic and problem solving with minimal work-related human interaction. But I didn’t and I’m here, looking out one window and into another. I’ve been playing around, looking into personality types again. I tried answering questions as my ideal self might and I ended up with INTJ. System builders that don’t do the whole personal interaction thing that well. I didn’t like that bit. What I like was that they don’t worry. They are supremely confident in themselves and don’t need a lot of validation from others. That’s appealing. To never worry and to view human interaction not as a necessity of self-confidence, but an enjoyable past time. Of course we have another name for people like that – home-schooled nerds. If you don’t need external validation, you're much more likely to treat others abrasively and not give a damn. And yet to be kind and strong. To be worry-free and self-confident. Good things. Good things. I’m chuckling to myself today.

Ten minute – 8:58 AM
The ten-minute remains and then a smoke and I call mum for mother’s day. After that, the day is open. I do so like days like this. A few hours of internally motivated obligation and then nothing but whatever I want. I guess I’ll always feel the need to feel the need to escape. Escaping means that you’re progressing. Progressing means that you’re getting closer to the ideal. But if you can cut that obligation down to a few hours a day, it’s okay. I do know what I want. I want that cottage by the water and I want to get there and stay there by writing. All these details are what clog the wheels. It’s not enough to dream something, if you decide that you actually want it. You have to actually bring something as ghostly as dreams into a box as rigid as material existence. The planning is fun. It’s all theoretical. It’s the dirty little moments when you see that you have to do something that you really don’t want to. All these years, it wasn’t necessarily that I couldn’t do the job, but that I’ve hated asking for it. But I’ll have to actually ask someone to publish my book and not just that, but convince them of something that I feel they should intuitively know. Talk to me for a bit, do you want to hire me? Read my work, do you want to publish me? This nonsense about listing qualifications and seeing if I can test well is silly. Do I do it or not? I’m living here, now. I’m not a box, I’m a lumpy boy. If I simplify, simplify, I’m very trustworthy. But I have to be trusted in order to make my life simple. It’s a dilemma, but few true dilemmas exist. There’s usually a way between the horns. We’ll see. Call your mum.

our Devious Machine

2005-05-06T08:10:00.000-04:00

05/06/2005

Five minute – 7:43 AM
Four-color cars with no names drive down the street in Superhero Town. Product placement is frowned upon. The ache in the joints mirrors the internal state of the common man. It wouldn’t be fun if everybody were a superhero. We look up and, in a flash, become the villain, because it isn’t easy for us. It isn’t the weightless stance of the flying folks in tights. Better. Bull. It’s this. You get up and forget the great path in exchange for the walk down the well-traveled way. If you can forget flight, you can forget anything and fuck the great, settle. Settle for the normal. Stop being weird and grow into the ugly suit that makes your butt look big. Learn to walk the uncomfortable steps to the next meeting. Become this fellow, because he’s the one that walks free. At 40K a year, he can afford a little less dignity and dreams are what you get when you fall asleep in his hammock on Saturday afternoons. Ha. If only I could.

Five minute – 7:53 AM
And maybe anger grows into action sooner than worry. Maybe that’s why the assholes succeed. They haven’t forgotten how to fly; they just sit in anger, waiting for the day when they can dump it on someone else. And all this work of waiting for the She fades to nothing more than sexual insecurity. Somehow, I’ll take it. It takes more to get away from this than dreams and hopes. It takes something with a hammer and a pair of pliers and a roll of duct tape. Pin ‘em down and don’t let ‘em up until you’ve extracted their oddity. So be what it can. It’s too late for me now. At least I’ve got that. No wife, no kids, no chance. So it’s a draw. You don’t suck anyone else into your delusions, but you can’t escape them yourself. Those perfect white clouds in the perfect blue sky are taunting me. I’m as far away from them as I was back in the classroom. Farther. At the end of the day, I’m stuck back here. At least back then, I had those few hours before I had to do my homework to wander beneath them.

Ten minute – 8:09 AM
Swallowing either pill lands you in a box. Flip a coin, don’t search you soul. They don’t want you to go deeper than they do. They just like watching you do what they told you to. And see, then there’s that. That fact that just might save me. I can't stand doing what the fuckers tell me. Blame it on what you will; I’ve always hated it. I walk taller when I think of it. At least you didn’t get me there. At least I cheated you of that small pleasure. I am a fucking superhero, because it’s the only thing that makes me feel normal and right. So off we go, forgetting the day. Tomorrow comes and we swallow the bird one more time, hoping that our Devious Machine will be ready before the next sunrise. If you run fast enough, you can leave the past behind you. So. Shower. Smoke. Pick up the $16 for the next two weeks. Buy some real tobacco. Find a real job. Hate it, yes. But know it’ll get you closer to telling them to shove it than this. Not that they give jobs like that to people like me. Hate those fuckers. Hate their world. The question is, if you step inside the Plastic Body they’ve prepared, can you ever step out again. Flee to the mountains now, one thing says very loudly. If only I could. But this too will pass. In the next few days or weeks, I’ll be happy for a while. I’ll see the thing that’s far and deep. I’ll find it again, as I always do. And we hope that this time, it will be the one. Hoping the next leap will be the leap home. Random patterns emerge only to become marches upon viewing from another perspective. The march becomes chaos when seen again. Slide away. Forget the world. Read a book. Dream of green fields and quiet forests. Alone. So finally alone. No one will ever find me again except the girl that knew me when I looked into her green green eyes. Escape the dread monotony. Peace in verdant worlds.

when they found out you were nice

2005-05-05T07:49:00.000-04:00

05/05/2005

Five minute – 7:09 AM
So you think of the better days yet to come. The ones that smell of dust in summer rain. The box you find yourself in will be replaced by another, whether you want it to or not. Someday, those boxes become solid things, but it’s not this time out. The thought that it might change, that it might do something. But you notice the changes are all small, and thankful as I am for those learning bits, someday, you want the learning to add up to something. It isn’t like college with knowledge for knowledge sake, its learning here in the bricks and mortar. You pick it up and set it down. The needle slides into the groove and the music starts. That someday thought must progress to action is a hope, a consolation. To feel the muscles in the back and arms and legs, working. You act to change. You act towards the better days.

Five minute – 7:19 AM
I don’t really want to teach anyone, unless they’re doing something to piss me off. I just want to entertain, albeit with complexity. I’d like to see what happens in the back rooms when it isn’t my job at stake. I’d like to never walk into a backroom again, just describe it as it was when I had to be there. Do the thing. Do the thing you need to do, but don’t want to. Pick it up and go. You buy the better days with this loss. There is no other option. And somehow you have to figure out how to enjoy it. The stupidity of this culture created by so many smart individuals is astounding. We arrive and find the place better than it was back home and so expect our children to appreciate it. Better is better. We will be better than the plastic boy you wanted to put us in, but you will probably never see it. And since you’re the ones that taught me to see, it will suck to be me. Just deal with it. I will find the way to make the world a better place. I’ll find it by making a place that’s better for me. I’ll take a few friends if I can. This world deserves whatever it gets, because it wants what it gets and yet, like an inhuman corporation or a socialist collective, it doesn’t exist at all.

Ten minute – 7:38 AM
We don’t have prophets anymore because God took away the magic goggles. So we made up cult celebrities. We’ve got skinny young rich twit girls for the girls and skinny young idiot boys for the boys. Then we’ve got fat, bearded, angry nice guys for fat, bearded, angry nice guys. How much better the world is for us finding our shiney new prophets. And oh how much I want to be one. In the end, it isn’t that they’re necessarily wrong, it’s that they’re assholes about it. Hopefully, the meek inherit the earth because the warring factions have managed to kill each other off without completely fucking things up for the rest of us. Goddamn cottage by the water, why do you belong to assholes? When I get there, I’ll be one myself, so I might as well figure out how to start. The realization comes that you need a vacation from all this rest, but you don’t know which should come first. You just want to build a home from bricks that you’re good at, but how much is luck? The nice ones just make it worse, so set the prickles on your spine to “mean” and go. Screw the world, you can have it. I just want to get off. But there’s that, and it means something, but only to the foolish who had it in the first place. To say, “hah! You were wrong!” But then you’re saying it now from the place where they’re right. Someday we’ll get there. Damn, one’d better hope. Damn, one’d better act. The world doesn’t bend to wishes, it bends to fists and sneers. So put your game face on and find the best way to kick ‘em in the balls. Just for the hell of it. Mmm, mmm, mmmm. For the smell of it. They stopped listening to you when they found out you were nice.

the point of the icon

2005-05-03T08:49:00.000-04:00

05/03/2005

Five minute – 4:49 AM
And how silly that was, but that’s all right. It’s the impossibility of the possibility that makes it a thing worth doing. If she loved me, it wouldn’t make everything all right, it would just make it better. You grow up and do those things that are lesser, in your mind. You grow up and do the necessary. It’s the hope of regaining the better world of the thin sliver of Good Times. You wake up and, finally, finally find yourself alone, entertaining yourself with words that might be read, but are just themselves. You wake up and put on the coffee and roll a cigarette and stare at the screen, waiting for the words to manifest. It’s itself, it’s something more, if you let it be. Sometimes you can’t let it be more, because the disappointment of not finding the world in an oyster shell has proved to be more difficult than at first you dreamed. But you sit and type and, slowly, the words come again.

Five minute – 5:00 AM
Too many promises is too much to stare at, so you close your eyes and dream of things that don’t exist. It’s okay and it’s all right. You take it one minute at a time, one second. You divine a pattern in chaos and call it prophecy to escape the dread monotony of free action. You watch the movie and see your life as it is in it’s best light, purposed. We chose the theories we believe in because 1) they’re better predictions, and 2) they make us able to grasp the world in the way that makes us cringe the least. Or the way the finally makes us not cringe at all. Somehow, all the talk about the benefits of hopelessness becomes laughable. We just want to be happy. We want what we want and hope that it all works out. I submitted a story to the New Yorker, my best story. The chances of it getting published are 1/4000 at best, more like 1/40000 in fact, but 1/400000 is still within the bounds of reason. We do things, with some small hope, but sometimes disguise it as a joke to keep from feeling the weight of improbability. I will get up and write. I will finish the novel. Again. I will polish it until it shines. I will send it out. I will be rejected. I will polish again. I will send it out again. And on and on and so it goes and so it goes.

Ten minutes – 5:15 AM
When, at last, you realize that death is not an option, there is only being alive left. You get up in the morning and tell yourself that, in getting up, you bring yourself closer to the new beam of Better Time. And why don’t you love me? Is it the weight of my existence that bothers you? Ten thousand ten thousands and we get up again and do the actions of improbability, finding strength to be alive in the hope of the Better Tomorrow. If it was only this early all the time. We stare through the glass darkly. The darkness is a function, not of self, but of self in combination to the glass. We pack up the bags and carry the heavier memories with our legs, keeping the brunt of the weight from the lower back. Those little things that you don’t want to do – work at the job you have, be nice to those that don’t deserve it, stay silent in the face of idiotic shouting – you do them and come hope, praying that the morning will come fast, so you can get back to the closer piece of Better Life. Someday, I will be that better man and he will live in that better world and the weight of this life will be laughable. I’ll finally be able to watch tragedy and not want to slap the artist who created it. Or maybe I won’t, maybe I’ll just be able to watch it. Meg Ryan, Meg Ryan, fall in love all over again. Kevin make me laugh that laugh that brings up the phlegm that’s lodged below my heart. Rodger, point me again to the better path. That’s the point of the icon. When God feels too hard, you can pray to a god with a lesser fist and hope it reaches the ears of the One In Charge. I can grasp Aslan, it’s his Father that confounds me so often. But that’s just as it is. God is Himself and His Self is Good, it’s the glass that’s dark. On to the words and the novel and the hope the Better Days.

that boy whom I was

2005-04-28T12:45:00.000-04:00

04/28/2005

Five minute – 12:17 PM
More writing was done yesterday. It was done in the evening though. And the night some too. That problem with not being able to fall asleep and not being able to get up. That still hangs around, just waiting for the days when I can’t fight back. Wasn’t a bad set though. I was up with better thoughts instead of morbid ones. It’s just this next morning that makes one feel a little off. It’s not even morning. But I’ve showered and eaten, so all that I have to do until I go to work is write. I started work on the fire-escape garden yesterday. It’s just prep work. I’m still not to sure about this Buffalo spring. Cold wind today. Not January cold, but still cold. The people walking by are wearing heavy coats and it’s chilly in my room. I’ll have to put on my sweatshirt. I looked at the old pictures again last night, trying to see if those goals of Boy Band me still held some sway. Odd the things that I came up with. I can’t just write off the past ten years, but I think I’m starting to see how he became the person that he was.

Five minute – 12:29 PM
He liked dance music, that boy that I was. Not the hectic BREEPBREEPBREEP-GETDOWNNOWMUTHA! stuff. It was just the chickachickachickachicka and lyrics about boys and girls falling in and out of love. I think that’s still in there. Why the chronic return to that boy? Because he was me at my happiest. And it is still odd to me that this was in the year following my father’s dead, but I think I can comprehend it. It was not so much a reaction against grief (though that was a part) it was mostly three things I think: time and money and an idea of his future. What does someone like me do when he has time and money? He slims up, dresses nice, goes out to eat, takes long drives and loves a girl. He’s just simple and happy. There is a state. And my past ten years of having either time or money (though not much of the latter), actually acted in an excellent fashion. It showed me who I am when I am at my base. I’m an overthinker. I’m a leisurely driver. I’m odd. Most importantly, I'm a writer. But still that happy boy remains a part of me. He was actually a good boy. That’s a thought that surprised me last night. He did very little that made him feel guilty and, as a result, he felt very little guilt. His God is not my God (though He is), but I like how he felt about God. I have much to learn from him. And he has much to learn from me.

Ten minute – 12:43 PM
I find it interesting that I’m feeling so happy about these musings. There is something to them. Something that matters to the arc. Odd. When I sat down, I wasn’t miserable, but I wasn’t happy. I’m happy right this second, and I’d like to hold onto it for a while. He was happy, that boy who I was, and his cares were exciting to him. He saw problems as cool. How incredibly odd and happy. Ballie, is this true? Was I happy back then, for that one year or two? I think that I really was. There were bits and pieces of happy scattered throughout my childhood, but there was guilt and fear too. And yes, part of it may have been my guilt and fear of my dad, but I loved and liked him too, and, anyway, he’s been gone for twelve years come August. If it were just him, you’d think I’d get happier and happier as time has gone along. Maybe these past ten years have been the thing that I needed to go through to add depth to the story. You just live, but you have to know how it’s done. If I hadn’t been miserable for so long, I wouldn’t have that solid base from which to build a happy life. Plus I wouldn’t have gotten all the cool friends that I have. I wouldn’t have the lower gold that I’ve mined in the deep dark. But fuck misery. It has a purpose, but it’s not supposed to be the whole kit and caboodle. I come round to the beginning, and I think I see a path this time. I want to be happy. Shallow-deep, stupid-wise, I still just want to be happy. And there was that bad poem that I wrote not long after the happiness went away, the one where I pretended to forget the word for the thing that I wanted: “oh yes… happiness.” It was immature, but it was still true. To learn from the happy boy that I was. And too, write. That’s something to do. Let’s all go play at it.

Up the flagstone sidewalk

2005-04-27T11:06:00.000-04:00

04/27/2005

Five minute – 10:39 AM
For years I’ve been calling it “photographer’s” light, but it’s not really. Tones that soft and subtle are better captured as they have for hundreds of years. By paint. It is not the light; it’s how the light churns the pictures and starts the inner monologue. The only problem with the keyboard here is the light and how it catches on the imperfections of my glasses, blurring and distracting. We’ll see what we can do about it. A little this. A little that. And if it is a fantasy, so be it and so it goes. You have to fight to retain some part of the losing. The light magnificent. You keep it so it keeps your tales alive. You keep it so it keeps that small skip inside the ticker-tock. Where do we go from here? Where lies the next tall tale? We’ll see, but we must plan for the journey. Elvin bread and smokey weeds.

Five minute – 10:49 AM
It’s the better story. That’s what we do, and, damnit if it takes further into the solid state. Something has to remain; something has to stay as a base. Or bass. Synonyms round the bases, setting the path to home. The positive nature of the thing. The way the eyes trace the lines until it finds a spot to rest and forget and make. I did write yesterday. It actually came to me. That’s been a while. A couple of months. Put on your glasses, straighten up and work with what you’ve got. We made a movie. That it is past tense isn’t the matter. The matter is broken down at high speeds and becomes waves. The waves crest and break upon the fragile bodies that absorb the sunlight. Seven minutes at the speed. The speed is unsurpassable, not even approachable, so we create loopholes in our arguments and our solid state is found to consist of words and words of sounds or squiggles and lines. We sub-create, that is the nature of the free creature. New Orleans and New York feel the same when eaten by the monsters innerworkings. I tried to watch “The Office” again, Jonny. I know that it’s a good show because I can’t watch more than twenty seconds before I feel uneasy and it’s perhaps a minute before I have to change the channel.

Ten minute – 11:05 AM
It’s an oddness of myself. I don’t fear the fact of a possible future, but the breaking of a present code. But if codes weren’t meant to be broken, we wouldn’t bother with them. You send a message from island to island and it’s tapped on coconut drums. Squiggles and lines. It’s the tree looming over the top of the house that makes me think of Bourbon Street. It’s too austere and sensible to be a true Big Easy, but the imaginings are what keep us feeling it. She stopped and smelled the roses. Sometimes the metaphor isn’t a metaphor at all. How does this apply to parables and similar mysteries? Class will continue after the break of dreams, set to inform the bones of living better. Up the flagstone sidewalk, we will not enter the house today. It is enough to tell you that it feels like nothing more than an endless porch on which to spend a life vacationing. We’ll follow the right-side path around the house. It’s the smaller side, much in shadows. Upon passing the back edge of the house, you’ll find a long bright expanse of green. It’s unnecessary and therefore, impossible to do without. The flagstone patio stretches out for a ways; large planters, full of vegetables, mark it. Past the patio is the full domain of green. A yard for playing. Where oh where is the water, you might ask. The left side of the house. But that’s for another day. One fairly well covered. This walk is to take us out, beyond the flat green to the shade of the leaf forest. There are paths winding throughout the forest, some take you to fine little buildings make of old stone and wood. But we’ll forego those for now. We’re heading towards the deeper forests, where mysteries live, well aware.