Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Did I mention?
My boss is still fair-game for a fictional butchering. Expect to see his scalp sitting hefty on a heap of bargain books sometime soon.
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
Corporate-collar sulk
Blog bi-day today because of wrangled work ethos. Why is it so cool to deride 'assiduous' workers for sub-menial pay....(I have to due a buncha shit while everyone else in the office bats their eyes at the solitaire screen)Oh well, every ass-hole boss that's ever pillaged my paycheck is fair game when it comes to antagonist fictional charchters...So, all I can say is, ( to my bosses) thank God we live in a society that reads far less than they did ten years ago....this may be you're one shot at fettered-fame.
Monday, June 28, 2004
Late-night opus for dream seraphs....
My body folded it's limbs into a vivid pocket of sleep last night accompanied by the dream symphony of gypsy angels. Dulcet harmonies hung heavily around my forehead like dole-cratered satellites. My body, still drained from interstate vertigo, floated up and into itself in search of a horse named salvation. In search of a hushed vision anchored in subconcious soil, milked by the quiet stream resonance of light entering stain glass. Was this my reward for leaving and refusing to come back? These staccato hard scratches of light that peel my body in half. The illuminating tiff of interior transcendence? Was this my reward simply for leaving?
*
In the dream Vanessa is standing crossed limb and taller than me as if on stilts and we are having the one conversation that escaped us. Her hair is long and her lips bite into one no-none-shit burgundy hyphen and both of our bodies are facing the polar other.
"What else do you need to know?" She requests. I know all about Jeff. She knows all about Carol. I remember holding her on my tear-swell carpet in my old apartment on Columbia Terrace, listening to the Beatles, watching as the last thirteen months of joy mingled with hurt grazed frustration emptied her body through her sockets. The last time we made love it was almost a human impossibility. Hard lanks of limbs using the other for levitation, and seeminly, succumbing to crumble.
"What happened to us?" Vanessa cries in real-life, five years ago.
"What else do you need to know?" Vanessa asks me last night, in the goassamer foam of dream.
I realize now that I don't know the answer to either query.
*
"It was as if the whole world were a dream, being dreamed by a single dreamer, where all the dream charchters dream too. In India this is known as the Net of Indra." A magnetic digitalized cassette of Jospeh Campbell says in his James Joyce lectures titled Wings of Art, amplified through the lobes of my stereo.
"You go through life. You get this job, you marry this person, you have this experience amd its almost like everything that happens to you has been unplanned. Then you get to about sixty or so and you look back over at the discourse of your life, and, by god, its got the continuity of the novel.
"Schopenhauer asks the question,'Who wrote the book?'"
*
Her voice empties out late at night into the husk of the phone and pours majestically into my ears. The ends of her sentences roll and kick and drool puddles of excitement into my body. I smile. I am exhausted. I tell her that I want to hold her right now. Even though I can't, I tell her I can.
"I went fishin' in my chest last night and got a nibble from an angel."
*
In the dream stream Vanessa and I exchange glances and I am choked up for words. She is looking at me with her uppity glare of importance. Her face is perfectly chiseled with pools of fine-featured hues. She retains her mastery of expresssion; a pensive purloined Waterhouse aura usurped from mythological renderings. She is asking me the question again and I am pulling out of her. My entire body is leaving. My neck periscopes; my body scrunches and Vaneesa inquires again.
"Is there anything else you need to know."
*
"Then you realize that everyone who has influenced you has in someway been influenced by you. So your whole life fuses forth from this intersection" Joseph Campbell comments. I press pause and yank the tape from the mouth of the stereo. I continue to dream.
*
All my life father believed in angels....
*
When she leaves she gives you back the ring that you once gave her. The ring your grandmother gave you for confirmation when you were fourteen. The ring that had your initials, D.V.B., chiseled in cursive font inside. The ring she wore around her neck affixing the oval broach to a pink ribbon.
She has a couple of your shirts still. She asks you for her grandfather's suit--the suit you wore to La Boheme.
You wrap her in the quilt your mother gave you. You kiss without entering her face. You are moving out of everything you have lived inside of--or rather she is moving out of you.
*
"David, is there anything else you need to know?"
*
We laugh about our bloggin'-threesome. We talk about mysticism. I publically confess that if I hear the word 'Mara' used one more time in casual conversation I'm gonna adopt a mutt and address it by that name.
"See," She says. "That's your 'Mara'. You're afraid of embracing it or even acknowledging it."
"But if I had a dog named Mara I could tell it to go fetch. I could tell it to go roll over. I could tell it to go beg. I could tell it to go shit on the groutchy neighbors thoroughly-groomed rhododendrons."
"Your still ignoring your Mara." She says in a tone that's implicit of 'I'm-the-smartest-girl-in-a-classroom-full-of-dumb-boys' vibes.
"I'm not ignoring it." I say. "I'm just giving my Mara a milk-bone."
"Even if it is your dog." The intelligent girl smiles. "You still have to pet it from time to time. It still comes to you to be fed."
True. I think.
"Touchay!" My palate surrenders.
*
In the dream stream she invocates the question again. She asks me what else I need to know. Everything we ever felt for each other is lying face down in a pool of our own failure and infidelity in front of us. She asks me again. I watch as her body becomes the question mark. I watch as her body becomes the mystery. I watch as her body opens and closes the way a garage door opens and closes--the way a question opens and closes.
"What else do you need to know?" She reiterates. That moment, in my dream, my head conducts a blurry spin like an elementary classroom globe and I see him. I finally see him. I see my dad.
*
"I prayed for my bloggin'-buddies." I tell her. "I prayed for Uncle Mike and Marjein. I said the fire tablet and thought of you. I prayed for the community of scattered souls. I prayed for insight and assistance for those who need it. I recited the long-healing prayer that I love. I looked up at the doiley-threaded dome and said the greatest name.
"I prayed for peace."
*
"What bothers you so-much about Mara?" She asks.
" I don't know." I answer honestly. "There's a certain realm of dedication where your hobby overtakes you and you become one with that in which you were initially seeking. Get what I'm saying."
Her lips hallucinate verbal tapestry. I continue on with my bull-shit rant.
"With mysticim, especially, we talk about it like we're in a book club sometimes and don't realize that potentially, it could destroy us. We spin around in that dervish-vortex so many times that eventually we no longer have to rely on the slow gravitational tug of the earth and the sun to orchestrate the continuity of the seasons because, from our periphery, its already here. All time and space, eternity in itself has been eclipsed in this moment that last forever."
"That's true with any profession. Any devotion, not just mysticism. You always run the risk of throwing yourself out there and not coming back. The boat seldom makes it back to port without embracing a tempset or two. "
"True." I think and smile.
*
My dream-stream vision has averted from the slender frame of Vanessa and I am chasing my father. I see the back of his gray hair in front of me. We are in a labyrinth of cubicles and I am chasing him. I am shouting out his name and he is almost ignoring me.
He is moving faster. His back is zipping around hard-cornered plastic. The cubicles of the white-collar bussiness office is starting to look like the hard-curves of the human brian. I am trying to reach him. Trying to hold him again. I see his neck and his shoulders hovering in front of me, speeding, vascillating, vanishing, appearing. Vanessa has completely dissipated and I still haven't seen the front of my father's face yet. We are silver-beams streaking around the contours of the universe.
I am trying to hold him again. I call out his name and he pretends he doens't know me.
*
In reality-stream I received a card from Glinda, Vanessa's mother when my father died. I called Vanessa up to thank her for the card and she hung up on me.
The next day when I spotted her runway-gait strutting across campus I accost her. She turns the other way and keeps on walking.
*
"When you see Buddha in the middle of the street....."
*
"Dad!"
*
"When you see Mara massaging your emotional mettle..."
*
"Christ was crucified because he said 'I and the father are one.'" Says Joseph Campell after I placed the rectagular magnet back inisde the appliance mouth.
*
I have been chasing the back of my father. Chasing his torso and his thighs. I can smell him. Smell his hair. Smell his body begining to leak drops of perspiration. I see his occiput and his earlobes. I see the back of his glasses. I am chasing him and I am unable to connect.
*
".....Only connect." Epigram from E.M. Forrester's Howard's End.
*
"...the further one travels, the less one knows."
-Buddhist adage.
*
"And in that second of silence, I heard my mother's voice. And I heard her say something that I had heard many times before: "In times of great danger, say aloud "Ya Baha'u'l-Abha!" So I said it."
-Arya Badiyan
*
After I say the greatest name to my father's back he turns around and pauses and I can see his face. He is somewhere else, but right now he is with his son. I am drowned in the nautical fathoms of dream-stream but I can smell his hard skin, can smell his breath and his hair. I can feel his embrace. And I am moved to tears, moved to tears as I blog when I think about that the fact that the one word I said to get him to stop was the one word he said to me, when he did stop and turned around and addressed his only son by saying the greatest name.
*
Was this my reward? Was this my inter-dimesnional tithe? Was he thanking me for saying prayers for him at the HOuse of Worship. Was he thanking his son?
*
" I should warn you," I tell her voice into the phone. "I really don't do well with girls whose first name ends with the letter 'a'.
She pauses
"Damn vowels." I say to myself afterwards, covered in an applause of laughter.
*
(smiles)
*
In the dream Vanessa is standing crossed limb and taller than me as if on stilts and we are having the one conversation that escaped us. Her hair is long and her lips bite into one no-none-shit burgundy hyphen and both of our bodies are facing the polar other.
"What else do you need to know?" She requests. I know all about Jeff. She knows all about Carol. I remember holding her on my tear-swell carpet in my old apartment on Columbia Terrace, listening to the Beatles, watching as the last thirteen months of joy mingled with hurt grazed frustration emptied her body through her sockets. The last time we made love it was almost a human impossibility. Hard lanks of limbs using the other for levitation, and seeminly, succumbing to crumble.
"What happened to us?" Vanessa cries in real-life, five years ago.
"What else do you need to know?" Vanessa asks me last night, in the goassamer foam of dream.
I realize now that I don't know the answer to either query.
*
"It was as if the whole world were a dream, being dreamed by a single dreamer, where all the dream charchters dream too. In India this is known as the Net of Indra." A magnetic digitalized cassette of Jospeh Campbell says in his James Joyce lectures titled Wings of Art, amplified through the lobes of my stereo.
"You go through life. You get this job, you marry this person, you have this experience amd its almost like everything that happens to you has been unplanned. Then you get to about sixty or so and you look back over at the discourse of your life, and, by god, its got the continuity of the novel.
"Schopenhauer asks the question,'Who wrote the book?'"
*
Her voice empties out late at night into the husk of the phone and pours majestically into my ears. The ends of her sentences roll and kick and drool puddles of excitement into my body. I smile. I am exhausted. I tell her that I want to hold her right now. Even though I can't, I tell her I can.
"I went fishin' in my chest last night and got a nibble from an angel."
*
In the dream stream Vanessa and I exchange glances and I am choked up for words. She is looking at me with her uppity glare of importance. Her face is perfectly chiseled with pools of fine-featured hues. She retains her mastery of expresssion; a pensive purloined Waterhouse aura usurped from mythological renderings. She is asking me the question again and I am pulling out of her. My entire body is leaving. My neck periscopes; my body scrunches and Vaneesa inquires again.
"Is there anything else you need to know."
*
"Then you realize that everyone who has influenced you has in someway been influenced by you. So your whole life fuses forth from this intersection" Joseph Campbell comments. I press pause and yank the tape from the mouth of the stereo. I continue to dream.
*
All my life father believed in angels....
*
When she leaves she gives you back the ring that you once gave her. The ring your grandmother gave you for confirmation when you were fourteen. The ring that had your initials, D.V.B., chiseled in cursive font inside. The ring she wore around her neck affixing the oval broach to a pink ribbon.
She has a couple of your shirts still. She asks you for her grandfather's suit--the suit you wore to La Boheme.
You wrap her in the quilt your mother gave you. You kiss without entering her face. You are moving out of everything you have lived inside of--or rather she is moving out of you.
*
"David, is there anything else you need to know?"
*
We laugh about our bloggin'-threesome. We talk about mysticism. I publically confess that if I hear the word 'Mara' used one more time in casual conversation I'm gonna adopt a mutt and address it by that name.
"See," She says. "That's your 'Mara'. You're afraid of embracing it or even acknowledging it."
"But if I had a dog named Mara I could tell it to go fetch. I could tell it to go roll over. I could tell it to go beg. I could tell it to go shit on the groutchy neighbors thoroughly-groomed rhododendrons."
"Your still ignoring your Mara." She says in a tone that's implicit of 'I'm-the-smartest-girl-in-a-classroom-full-of-dumb-boys' vibes.
"I'm not ignoring it." I say. "I'm just giving my Mara a milk-bone."
"Even if it is your dog." The intelligent girl smiles. "You still have to pet it from time to time. It still comes to you to be fed."
True. I think.
"Touchay!" My palate surrenders.
*
In the dream stream she invocates the question again. She asks me what else I need to know. Everything we ever felt for each other is lying face down in a pool of our own failure and infidelity in front of us. She asks me again. I watch as her body becomes the question mark. I watch as her body becomes the mystery. I watch as her body opens and closes the way a garage door opens and closes--the way a question opens and closes.
"What else do you need to know?" She reiterates. That moment, in my dream, my head conducts a blurry spin like an elementary classroom globe and I see him. I finally see him. I see my dad.
*
"I prayed for my bloggin'-buddies." I tell her. "I prayed for Uncle Mike and Marjein. I said the fire tablet and thought of you. I prayed for the community of scattered souls. I prayed for insight and assistance for those who need it. I recited the long-healing prayer that I love. I looked up at the doiley-threaded dome and said the greatest name.
"I prayed for peace."
*
"What bothers you so-much about Mara?" She asks.
" I don't know." I answer honestly. "There's a certain realm of dedication where your hobby overtakes you and you become one with that in which you were initially seeking. Get what I'm saying."
Her lips hallucinate verbal tapestry. I continue on with my bull-shit rant.
"With mysticim, especially, we talk about it like we're in a book club sometimes and don't realize that potentially, it could destroy us. We spin around in that dervish-vortex so many times that eventually we no longer have to rely on the slow gravitational tug of the earth and the sun to orchestrate the continuity of the seasons because, from our periphery, its already here. All time and space, eternity in itself has been eclipsed in this moment that last forever."
"That's true with any profession. Any devotion, not just mysticism. You always run the risk of throwing yourself out there and not coming back. The boat seldom makes it back to port without embracing a tempset or two. "
"True." I think and smile.
*
My dream-stream vision has averted from the slender frame of Vanessa and I am chasing my father. I see the back of his gray hair in front of me. We are in a labyrinth of cubicles and I am chasing him. I am shouting out his name and he is almost ignoring me.
He is moving faster. His back is zipping around hard-cornered plastic. The cubicles of the white-collar bussiness office is starting to look like the hard-curves of the human brian. I am trying to reach him. Trying to hold him again. I see his neck and his shoulders hovering in front of me, speeding, vascillating, vanishing, appearing. Vanessa has completely dissipated and I still haven't seen the front of my father's face yet. We are silver-beams streaking around the contours of the universe.
I am trying to hold him again. I call out his name and he pretends he doens't know me.
*
In reality-stream I received a card from Glinda, Vanessa's mother when my father died. I called Vanessa up to thank her for the card and she hung up on me.
The next day when I spotted her runway-gait strutting across campus I accost her. She turns the other way and keeps on walking.
*
"When you see Buddha in the middle of the street....."
*
"Dad!"
*
"When you see Mara massaging your emotional mettle..."
*
"Christ was crucified because he said 'I and the father are one.'" Says Joseph Campell after I placed the rectagular magnet back inisde the appliance mouth.
*
I have been chasing the back of my father. Chasing his torso and his thighs. I can smell him. Smell his hair. Smell his body begining to leak drops of perspiration. I see his occiput and his earlobes. I see the back of his glasses. I am chasing him and I am unable to connect.
*
".....Only connect." Epigram from E.M. Forrester's Howard's End.
*
"...the further one travels, the less one knows."
-Buddhist adage.
*
"And in that second of silence, I heard my mother's voice. And I heard her say something that I had heard many times before: "In times of great danger, say aloud "Ya Baha'u'l-Abha!" So I said it."
-Arya Badiyan
*
After I say the greatest name to my father's back he turns around and pauses and I can see his face. He is somewhere else, but right now he is with his son. I am drowned in the nautical fathoms of dream-stream but I can smell his hard skin, can smell his breath and his hair. I can feel his embrace. And I am moved to tears, moved to tears as I blog when I think about that the fact that the one word I said to get him to stop was the one word he said to me, when he did stop and turned around and addressed his only son by saying the greatest name.
*
Was this my reward? Was this my inter-dimesnional tithe? Was he thanking me for saying prayers for him at the HOuse of Worship. Was he thanking his son?
*
" I should warn you," I tell her voice into the phone. "I really don't do well with girls whose first name ends with the letter 'a'.
She pauses
"Damn vowels." I say to myself afterwards, covered in an applause of laughter.
*
(smiles)
Sunday, June 27, 2004
Completely exhausted....
Just rolled into town. Haven't slept much in the past two days. So many stories to sprinkle over the keyboard......
Saturday, June 26, 2004
Who's who and thank you Lady Benzedrine....
JUST GOT MY MIXED CD!!!!!! THANK YOU DANIELA!!!!
I haven't had a chance to spin it yet but I LOVE London Seude!
I'm off an a crazy adventure. My sister 'Boyfriend' is picking me up in an hour and we're trekking up to Miss Illinois. We're hoping Jenn makes the top ten--with these daffy pageants you never know. Like writing and athletics all you have to do is compete and whatever happens happens.....
Have no clue who Mona is but Blogger Shannon Moore is a local poet (she always beats me in poetry competitions) and a formidable songwriter. She's sorta both of my sisters best friend, but she's been sweet enough to conceal a few of my secrets over the years, which is a dear respite considering the past behavior of fellow family memebers (i.e., 'Blabbermouth Beth')....
Feel free to harnague. I've told Shannon that both Arya and Daniela are mystical divine-eyed creatures in their own accord and she knew exactly what I meant by that.
I'll be gone tomorrow. Mom's letting me borrow her car to motor home so I get to stop at the you-know-where (see recent recital offering) and pray for you-know-who (see-your-own-beautiful-recent-profile-in-nearest-mirrored-frame).......
Gotta go, Lots of love and maybe, when I get back home, I'll tuck you in and tell you and story, a story about a girl who wasn't afraid to dream when she closed the lids of her eyes.......
I haven't had a chance to spin it yet but I LOVE London Seude!
I'm off an a crazy adventure. My sister 'Boyfriend' is picking me up in an hour and we're trekking up to Miss Illinois. We're hoping Jenn makes the top ten--with these daffy pageants you never know. Like writing and athletics all you have to do is compete and whatever happens happens.....
Have no clue who Mona is but Blogger Shannon Moore is a local poet (she always beats me in poetry competitions) and a formidable songwriter. She's sorta both of my sisters best friend, but she's been sweet enough to conceal a few of my secrets over the years, which is a dear respite considering the past behavior of fellow family memebers (i.e., 'Blabbermouth Beth')....
Feel free to harnague. I've told Shannon that both Arya and Daniela are mystical divine-eyed creatures in their own accord and she knew exactly what I meant by that.
I'll be gone tomorrow. Mom's letting me borrow her car to motor home so I get to stop at the you-know-where (see recent recital offering) and pray for you-know-who (see-your-own-beautiful-recent-profile-in-nearest-mirrored-frame).......
Gotta go, Lots of love and maybe, when I get back home, I'll tuck you in and tell you and story, a story about a girl who wasn't afraid to dream when she closed the lids of her eyes.......
Friday, June 25, 2004
Cat gotya tongue?
Who the hell is licking my page 24-7? It's very flattering but since Tues. I've had over 100 hits....that's scary. If you enjoy rummaging around in my underwear drawer trying to foist a souvenir that's your own fetish but please, say hello. Who knows, we might even form a rapport?
Head out of your ass, boy.....
Alright. Gonna finish at least one of the recital blogs before I leave work tonight at six. Out to get coffee. Make a sandwhich. If you write alot you use alot. Last semester my zip drive split in half and I lost 18 pages of Literary analysis "stuffy" theory that was due 18 hours later....what did I do. I cursed. I kicked the copier machine. I went out, bought a cup of coffee, diluted it with a few shots of Uncle Jack, stamped out cigarettes and became a locomotive. 17 hours later I finished the assignment and had five pages more than I had started out with.
The teacher was amused......
The teacher was amused......
The elusive G-spot
Finally got g-mail!!! Thanx arya and co!!!! (wink-wink nod-nod).. Turns out the invitations were sent to my yahoo (smut) bulk account which I seldom check. My new address is: david.vonbehren@gmail.com
I've been ferrying furniture between houses all week which leaves me completely drained. I've also transitioned into a full fledged insomniac. I writhe and seethe and dip into dream vignettes, kick my way out to shore, leave the abode, stalk the streets, smoke cigarettes, ponder and ploy what direction the writing will take...wash up in my sheets of my bedroom hours later, make coffee, go to work, go down on Microsoft word for a few hours, recycle stale metaphores, bitch in my blog, tune my recital, read copious sports commentaries, be shamed by my boss, realize that he's not desperaging me as much as he just needs an outlet to plug his own frustration into and my earlobes come replete with an extension cords and digital sound.
I haven't shaved in five days. Unlike the avg. american male, instead of sprouting a healthy mop on the bottom of my chin when the blade on my razor declares dullness, my facial follicles form abandon minor league ballpark patches...tiny little vortexy nests spattered randomly across my countenance granting me the disheveled semblance of a middle-aged academic still cranking out his botched senior thesis on flannel and funnel-cakes.
Had a patron who was Al Gore's 2000 speech writer talk me up for an hour this morning about how she plans on overthrowing the republican party. She seemed really lonely and carping about politics brought a glean to her eye. Politics like religion fascinates me. Everytime I hear someone talk about their political/religious proclivity....the same thing always happens. I find out less and less about that person's particular notion of "God" or the "President" is and more and more about what that person values as an individual currently are. Happens almost everytime.......
I've been ferrying furniture between houses all week which leaves me completely drained. I've also transitioned into a full fledged insomniac. I writhe and seethe and dip into dream vignettes, kick my way out to shore, leave the abode, stalk the streets, smoke cigarettes, ponder and ploy what direction the writing will take...wash up in my sheets of my bedroom hours later, make coffee, go to work, go down on Microsoft word for a few hours, recycle stale metaphores, bitch in my blog, tune my recital, read copious sports commentaries, be shamed by my boss, realize that he's not desperaging me as much as he just needs an outlet to plug his own frustration into and my earlobes come replete with an extension cords and digital sound.
I haven't shaved in five days. Unlike the avg. american male, instead of sprouting a healthy mop on the bottom of my chin when the blade on my razor declares dullness, my facial follicles form abandon minor league ballpark patches...tiny little vortexy nests spattered randomly across my countenance granting me the disheveled semblance of a middle-aged academic still cranking out his botched senior thesis on flannel and funnel-cakes.
Had a patron who was Al Gore's 2000 speech writer talk me up for an hour this morning about how she plans on overthrowing the republican party. She seemed really lonely and carping about politics brought a glean to her eye. Politics like religion fascinates me. Everytime I hear someone talk about their political/religious proclivity....the same thing always happens. I find out less and less about that person's particular notion of "God" or the "President" is and more and more about what that person values as an individual currently are. Happens almost everytime.......
Thursday, June 24, 2004
Breeched Blogs....
Writing block-long-blogs that will be posted in the recital sometime shortly. A pending blog called 'Indigo Worship' details my first sojourn to the House of Worship (second one is this comin' weekend)...wish I could spill out words with more efficacy.....oh well, I told my boss that I planned on resigning from my librarian post in pursuits of joining the NBA draft tonight.
"Yeah, Sam. I think I have a shot of being drafted in the 79th or 80th round."
"You doof, There's only two rounds."
"I know but I hired Don King as an agent. He thinks I have promise. He thinks I have finesse. He thinks my long-hair will get me shoe endorsements.
Oh well, nothing like reverting back to the library when all other dreams fizzle out like stale soda.......
"Yeah, Sam. I think I have a shot of being drafted in the 79th or 80th round."
"You doof, There's only two rounds."
"I know but I hired Don King as an agent. He thinks I have promise. He thinks I have finesse. He thinks my long-hair will get me shoe endorsements.
Oh well, nothing like reverting back to the library when all other dreams fizzle out like stale soda.......
Wednesday, June 23, 2004
Lady Benzedrine is a euphemism for excitement....
You know...Batman and Robin. Lone Ranger and Tonto. Bluntman and Chronic. Mara-Arya and Lady Benzedrine are the heart bloggin' g-mail bandits saving the realm of cyberspace from poetic infidels such as myself.....look for the comic book to hit kiosks shortly!!!!!
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
"........?"
Chicago on saturday. Do I go outta my way to contact Swissy-Missy and tell her that I love her?
Sibling Default
The coolest thing about my little sis' Jenn doing Miss Illinois is that if she wins, not only does she get to go to Miss America but she also gets a brand new car to ferry her royal rump around the state for palatial engagements which means, by degree of sibling default, I get Jenn's 1989 Buick Lesabre which runs like a stag and only has 90,000 miles on it!!! No more hoofing everywhere.
My station wagon 'shed the mechanical garment' shortly after I moved in with Uncle Mike and in a way I kinda miss it (even though the rearview mirror wouldn't stick to the windshield--so it just swayed back and forth like a fresh suicide when I was wobbling down the interstate)....Not having a car can be a blessing. Insurance is a bitch for one. Gas is riddiculous. Plus every time I get a new set of wheels all I ever do is drive around the countryside to unwind. I love hilly-country backroads and (thank you Vanessa and Margot) have a HUGE 'Little Women' predilection when it comes to dating. Something about meeting very intelligent females in remote little country towns where Casey's gas station serves as the social hub makes me feel like I'm dating Louisa May Alcott. Plus there's nothing like driving around with someone whom you love and chasing the sleek-purple chinese-kite tendrils of the sunset. Nothing beats that feeling. Thermos of coffee, lavender jet stream sunset, killer tune on the radio, and of course, a beautiful girl to hold beneath that blanket when the stars dot their smile across the noctural sheet.
Few crickets orchestrating in the background. Slight breeze zipping in the sidewindow. The scent of Summer in America. And of course, eddie vedder ululating "untitled" in the background:
I got a car, I got some gas
oh let's get out of here
get out of here fast
ooh everyone's confused
so I stay in my room
if I go, I don't want
to go alone
I hope you get this message
oh you're not home
I could be there in
ten minutes or so
ooh I got my things
we'll make it up as we go along
oh with you I could
never be alone
never be alone
So there we have it. Sibling default. Jenn win so I can get that car and find that girl.
Beth started doing pageants back in 2000. We all thought it was really chessey but she's raked in a ton of cash. It went to her head the first couple of years. I think she sat on her scepter because every time she opened her mouth she sounded like a stuck-up drag Queen. Oh well, she got a free ride into law school. She's a hard worker ( i still hate looking at my sisters in swimsuits, though....)
Also, how cool is this, since I'll be in Chicago Saturday night, I get to attend my first House of Worship devotions Sunday Morning!!!! Totally cool!! Plus I get to stop and see my best-friend John. John and I have a weird connection. Our birthday's are both July sixth (although I'm five years older), our mothers are both named Linda (I always flirt with his mom--she's single and hot and that aggrieves him to no end) we both wore thick glasses that looked like old television sets growing up and we're both major sports nreds!!!!!
Johns cool! We worked the late-night 11pm to 3 am shift at the library together. We even had a mock-radio type-of-show called the DAVE and JOHN show where it was always Happy Hour even when everyone else is asleep. Lots of crazy humor! Next to writing childrens books and compelling young minds to adopt a life in the arts, I think humor writing is important-more important than stuffy 'literary' stuff. We take our lives too seriously sometimes. We take our professions too seriously. John reminds me of this.The funniest thing he ever did was to fart in the PA system during finals. His flatulence echoed throughout the thick shelves of the library, and Barb, my 72 year old sweet-as-can be co-worker, thought it was her and excused herself!
Ok, no more pull-my-finger flatulence. Beautiful ladies and no-name eunuch's present.
Narrative interruption
(Shit!!! My Boss just came back and we had to fill out an 'incidence report' form concerning the previous-blogs theft. He seemed just a tad pissed that I abandoned my post even though I got the license plate number. "Don't be Captain America," is what he said.
EXCUSE ME!!!
The patron who was robbed was so thrilled she nearly gave me a gratitude hickie on the spot! My Boss is new and he's trying to impress people (he's also bald and his name is Skip--you know what they say, 'Everybody loves a bald man named Skippy!"--and where was my boss when all this dramam was transpiring? He was out to lunch!!!
I hate corperate america! Funny-you get an MBA and you go back into the crib and incessantly whine about not having the latest 'toy'-- although you're wearing a bussiness suit and hiding your dreams in a coach briefcase.
Oh well. Corporate American intigates professional loneliness on a capitalist caliber and that's where art comes in. Even if it's a CEO who buys a motorcycle becasue he just read "ZEn and the art of Motorcycle maintenace" or the latest Vice President taking an interest in contemporary art and sounding 'snobby' about it at cocktail parties. Secretly, the CEO yearns for such freedom and you know what, you can't have it (SKIP, and every other boss I've ever had) You've already sold out.
I'm so pissed I could just fart in the PA system. Maybe that will deflate the tangible rifts hanging like musical whole notes around here.
My station wagon 'shed the mechanical garment' shortly after I moved in with Uncle Mike and in a way I kinda miss it (even though the rearview mirror wouldn't stick to the windshield--so it just swayed back and forth like a fresh suicide when I was wobbling down the interstate)....Not having a car can be a blessing. Insurance is a bitch for one. Gas is riddiculous. Plus every time I get a new set of wheels all I ever do is drive around the countryside to unwind. I love hilly-country backroads and (thank you Vanessa and Margot) have a HUGE 'Little Women' predilection when it comes to dating. Something about meeting very intelligent females in remote little country towns where Casey's gas station serves as the social hub makes me feel like I'm dating Louisa May Alcott. Plus there's nothing like driving around with someone whom you love and chasing the sleek-purple chinese-kite tendrils of the sunset. Nothing beats that feeling. Thermos of coffee, lavender jet stream sunset, killer tune on the radio, and of course, a beautiful girl to hold beneath that blanket when the stars dot their smile across the noctural sheet.
Few crickets orchestrating in the background. Slight breeze zipping in the sidewindow. The scent of Summer in America. And of course, eddie vedder ululating "untitled" in the background:
I got a car, I got some gas
oh let's get out of here
get out of here fast
ooh everyone's confused
so I stay in my room
if I go, I don't want
to go alone
I hope you get this message
oh you're not home
I could be there in
ten minutes or so
ooh I got my things
we'll make it up as we go along
oh with you I could
never be alone
never be alone
So there we have it. Sibling default. Jenn win so I can get that car and find that girl.
Beth started doing pageants back in 2000. We all thought it was really chessey but she's raked in a ton of cash. It went to her head the first couple of years. I think she sat on her scepter because every time she opened her mouth she sounded like a stuck-up drag Queen. Oh well, she got a free ride into law school. She's a hard worker ( i still hate looking at my sisters in swimsuits, though....)
Also, how cool is this, since I'll be in Chicago Saturday night, I get to attend my first House of Worship devotions Sunday Morning!!!! Totally cool!! Plus I get to stop and see my best-friend John. John and I have a weird connection. Our birthday's are both July sixth (although I'm five years older), our mothers are both named Linda (I always flirt with his mom--she's single and hot and that aggrieves him to no end) we both wore thick glasses that looked like old television sets growing up and we're both major sports nreds!!!!!
Johns cool! We worked the late-night 11pm to 3 am shift at the library together. We even had a mock-radio type-of-show called the DAVE and JOHN show where it was always Happy Hour even when everyone else is asleep. Lots of crazy humor! Next to writing childrens books and compelling young minds to adopt a life in the arts, I think humor writing is important-more important than stuffy 'literary' stuff. We take our lives too seriously sometimes. We take our professions too seriously. John reminds me of this.The funniest thing he ever did was to fart in the PA system during finals. His flatulence echoed throughout the thick shelves of the library, and Barb, my 72 year old sweet-as-can be co-worker, thought it was her and excused herself!
Ok, no more pull-my-finger flatulence. Beautiful ladies and no-name eunuch's present.
Narrative interruption
(Shit!!! My Boss just came back and we had to fill out an 'incidence report' form concerning the previous-blogs theft. He seemed just a tad pissed that I abandoned my post even though I got the license plate number. "Don't be Captain America," is what he said.
EXCUSE ME!!!
The patron who was robbed was so thrilled she nearly gave me a gratitude hickie on the spot! My Boss is new and he's trying to impress people (he's also bald and his name is Skip--you know what they say, 'Everybody loves a bald man named Skippy!"--and where was my boss when all this dramam was transpiring? He was out to lunch!!!
I hate corperate america! Funny-you get an MBA and you go back into the crib and incessantly whine about not having the latest 'toy'-- although you're wearing a bussiness suit and hiding your dreams in a coach briefcase.
Oh well. Corporate American intigates professional loneliness on a capitalist caliber and that's where art comes in. Even if it's a CEO who buys a motorcycle becasue he just read "ZEn and the art of Motorcycle maintenace" or the latest Vice President taking an interest in contemporary art and sounding 'snobby' about it at cocktail parties. Secretly, the CEO yearns for such freedom and you know what, you can't have it (SKIP, and every other boss I've ever had) You've already sold out.
I'm so pissed I could just fart in the PA system. Maybe that will deflate the tangible rifts hanging like musical whole notes around here.
Monday, June 21, 2004
".........!"
When all else fails, fart, and don't take yourself too seriously. I had just finished typing out the first paragraph of a short story I was going to post on RECITAL called "Ghost Petals from Chechnya", (cool name, i know, nothing like spankin' ye olde ego before loggin off of ye olde bloge) sort of sensual and autobiographical or whatever and the next thing you know, loveable Brian (who sort've looks like a bespectable Winne the Pooh who somehow found a box of marlboro Lights in the bottom of the jar o' honey)turned my computer off for no inexplicable reason! The lab closes in an hour and he shuts down half of the computers early. He turned down the computers flanking both of my sides and then, just like he was pressing a dead-tooth elevator button--click.
"Brian."
"Oh, man, shit Dave...I'm really sorry. I just sort of zoned out."
LESSON IN SYNCHRONCITY
Shit, shower and synchronicity, that's my new mantra. Earlier today I was still reading about boy-to-man psychology and I came across the problem of ego. I'm re-reading a book called KING, WARRIOR, MAGICIAN, LOVER--a jungian sort've glance at the four mature types of masculine archtype. They correlate classic tales to contemporary persona's--for example you can say that Uncle Mike's the magician, Daniela's the princess, arya's the gypsy, and David's the youngin' with a bad haircut who needs to start making a more consious effort to save his fledgling short stories to disk before his red-eyed co-workers inadvertantly cut the power again.
Anyway, I was reading a chapter detailing the classic 'Trixter' charchter. This chapter correlates the trixter to the medieval jester. the court jesters job was to jounce on top of the Kings ego. At royal banquets the KING would get showered with courtly accolades and his ego would augment and the next thing you know, the jester would jump on the table, avail his 'arse' and fart.
Deflation of the ego. Detachment. It actually didn't bother me that I lost this story (it was due for a class in twelve-minutes or anything)..but I think brian serves as a contemporary stale-breath jester when he bent over my computer and farted the screen into darkness. I was seminally exited that I finally came up with a 'smooth' title and the next thing...
Nothing like a lil' detachment. Daniela, there's how many miles between our modems?
Ahhhh...nothing beats a lil' syncronicity........
"Brian."
"Oh, man, shit Dave...I'm really sorry. I just sort of zoned out."
LESSON IN SYNCHRONCITY
Shit, shower and synchronicity, that's my new mantra. Earlier today I was still reading about boy-to-man psychology and I came across the problem of ego. I'm re-reading a book called KING, WARRIOR, MAGICIAN, LOVER--a jungian sort've glance at the four mature types of masculine archtype. They correlate classic tales to contemporary persona's--for example you can say that Uncle Mike's the magician, Daniela's the princess, arya's the gypsy, and David's the youngin' with a bad haircut who needs to start making a more consious effort to save his fledgling short stories to disk before his red-eyed co-workers inadvertantly cut the power again.
Anyway, I was reading a chapter detailing the classic 'Trixter' charchter. This chapter correlates the trixter to the medieval jester. the court jesters job was to jounce on top of the Kings ego. At royal banquets the KING would get showered with courtly accolades and his ego would augment and the next thing you know, the jester would jump on the table, avail his 'arse' and fart.
Deflation of the ego. Detachment. It actually didn't bother me that I lost this story (it was due for a class in twelve-minutes or anything)..but I think brian serves as a contemporary stale-breath jester when he bent over my computer and farted the screen into darkness. I was seminally exited that I finally came up with a 'smooth' title and the next thing...
Nothing like a lil' detachment. Daniela, there's how many miles between our modems?
Ahhhh...nothing beats a lil' syncronicity........
Every minute the male genus produces 235,000 sperm cells....
...and looses 35 brain cells. No wonder I have trouble remembering her name afterwards (smiles). No but seriously, I've been reading alot about what jungians call 'mature masculine archtype' (that's pronounced ark-types, as I was corrected after I gave a psycho-analytical speech last winter)--this is reminiscent of the "Childman weary manchild in the womb" stream of thought. How does a boy transition into a man? Although I know I'll get dot-com mara-lambasted for scribing this,the woman, the essence of femininity serves as a harbinger of nature channeling the mystery of life. She is muse; she is both alpha and omega. Kingdom Come and the Life Everlasting rests solely on the position of her ankles and thighs in relationship to the perpetuity and genetic continuity of her species. I'm not saying that a woman's function is an incubator (not really saying anything as much as stuttering over footnotes and raked thoughts)I'm just saying that she's a vessel of humanity. By the time a female has her first menstruation life over takes her. She has made the transition from girl to woman.
This is intriguing when you consider the metaphorical notion of the womb. The womb is metaphorically a place of spiritual incubation. It has been suggested that the cave paintings of Lascaux and Les Tres Freres (caves that were implemented in boy-to-man rituals) were suppose to be emblematic of the womb--a rebirth so to speak. The young warrior slides through a narrow tenebrous plume (the birth canal) enters mother earth fraught with cave paintings and incense and animal skins. The burgeoning man meditates, fasts, incubates, allows his spiritual limbs to cultivate before he releases himself from the 'womb' realm, sluicing out through the narrow canal, re-entering the planet 'born-again' so to speak.
Hell, even Christianity utilizes this womb theory to administer their message of gulit mingled with a shot of sporadic forgiveness. Look at the architecture of a church. The center aisle becomes emblematic of the birth canal and the front of the church is the 'womb'--a place where the sacrement is offered. Where the baptismal fount is located. The congregation exits the church 'reborn'---is there any wonder that gothic cathedrals dotting the european countryside are called Notre Dame or "OUR MOTHER"?
Where the female arguably becomes life, the boy has to choose to become a man (purportedly).
"The boy has to act," is what jaded fairy-tale huggin' jungians suggest. They point to male rituals evident throughout humanity's discourse where the boy leaves the tribe, searches, nurses a vision, sloughs his old belief system like a snake skin.
Is this making any sense? Personally, I like to believe that, regardless of gender, both sexes have to 'act'--spend time knocking and digging, exert energy finding out what they are capable of achieving as human being verses their four-legged mammalian counterparts.
Sometimes I think the notion of intelligence is completely arbitrary when it comes to mammals. I could teach a well-trained monkey how to punch keys on Microsoft word. I could show him the pattern for a hiaku. I could teach him how to wipe his ass or how to sign out his gratitude. But still, human beings come to the notion of what does it mean to feel, what does it mean to overcome? What does it mean to Love? What does it mean to have a 'vision' and to feed that vision with splashes creative-fuel.
Jungian archtypes are cool but they've almost become posh. Hell, mysticism has become posh. It's no longer about suffering and yearning and eternal-longing as much as it is about sounding erudite and well-read at a campus dinner party and hoping to get laid afterwards. I read the greek etymology of 'mysticism' over the weekend and it stems from a word that means 'silence', 'secrets'...the early greek mystics knew something and they weren't gonna promulgate it or market it. Although, for a wayfarer or for someone searching they'd assent their chin and smile when they saw that they had embarked on their own personal sojorn.
Reverting back to masculine psychology...there's a well-known book by poet Robert Bly called IRON JOHN: A Book about Men (it's the yang to Woman who run with Wolves yin)....Bly alchemically dissects a grim's fairy tale 'Iron Hans'..it's really beautiful in a way. I'm familiar with the story and have owned the book many times (like all the books I love, I keep giving them away) every time I read it I get to the point of the story where I'm at psychologically and then...still-life with a dictionary, I can't move. Maybe someday I'll be able to finish the book, but perhaps that's what the author wants..."it's cool to read books and sound intelligent, much harder to live a life and experience and not share it because your their......get what I'm saying?
Just random speculations and irritating errata.
I do have one special place of spirtual incubation. Mattheison state park, outside of Starved Rock--it's my 'vagina' so to speak. It's place where I go to and let my hair down and run wild. A wet, moist, leafy, autumnal place with lavender sunsets and wheatfields and steep dells foaming with Waterfalls (an Illinois anomaly) with the beautiful vermillion river brushing through nearby. Once my booksies start selling I'm gonna build a thick log-cabin up near there so you girls (arya/daniela/ and the 'other' ex-girlfriend that is stalking me) can come and visit and we'll go on long hikes and I'll show you what my heart looks like as seen through the ontological lenses of mother earth. I may even dabble a book called "MATTHEISON GRACE"-every time I sweep through then canvas of Mattheison crazy shit happens and I come out 'reborn' awaiting a pending trial in my life.
I blasted up to Mattheison last year and skinny-dipped in the Vermillion (pretending it was the ganges). I looked up on a gravel precipice and saw a cross. Vision? Freak? Hallucination? It was a cross made of wood with thick black letters strewn across the plank. Reaching for my sandals and shorts I began to mount the precipice. As I neared it I saw the word JESUS thickly scribed across the plank followed by (freaky) my own birthday. JULY 6, 2001 (day in which I turned twenty-four and the day President Bush finally turned two). I scrambled up ot the top of the precipice and it turned out that it was a memorial for a spanish boy who had died. His first name was Jesus (hey-zeus) and he was born one year after I was and had died, on the precipice,on my twenty-fourth birthday.
There was a plastic statue of Mother Mary, half-melted from the late september sun. Burnt candals littered around the cross's trunk. For some reason I felt connected to this person. This Jesus. I uttered the prayer for the departed--kissed the bark of the closest tree, took off my sweater (the A&F sweater I purloined from Jenn's wardrobe; the sweater I wore when I first kissed Caroline two three years earlier) and tied it around the tree closest to the cross as a sacrifiece.
Six weeks later I went back to my 'sacred' place. Re-entered my 'vagina'. An early November snow had coated the bleak Illinois landscape. In early winter the entire state of Illinois turns silver--alchemically it aches for gold. I went back to this secluded palce where I always take off my clothes and bathe (not in the winter) went back to the cross, expecting to find mu double-knotted sweater damp, dirty, infested with bugs. Went back to mount the gravel precipice and to say the prayer for the Deaparted for Jesus. When I reached the summit there was no trace of the cross. There were no candles. No scattered beer cans. NO trace at all and when I went to the tree where I double-knotted my sweater as an offering, it too had completely disappeared.
This is intriguing when you consider the metaphorical notion of the womb. The womb is metaphorically a place of spiritual incubation. It has been suggested that the cave paintings of Lascaux and Les Tres Freres (caves that were implemented in boy-to-man rituals) were suppose to be emblematic of the womb--a rebirth so to speak. The young warrior slides through a narrow tenebrous plume (the birth canal) enters mother earth fraught with cave paintings and incense and animal skins. The burgeoning man meditates, fasts, incubates, allows his spiritual limbs to cultivate before he releases himself from the 'womb' realm, sluicing out through the narrow canal, re-entering the planet 'born-again' so to speak.
Hell, even Christianity utilizes this womb theory to administer their message of gulit mingled with a shot of sporadic forgiveness. Look at the architecture of a church. The center aisle becomes emblematic of the birth canal and the front of the church is the 'womb'--a place where the sacrement is offered. Where the baptismal fount is located. The congregation exits the church 'reborn'---is there any wonder that gothic cathedrals dotting the european countryside are called Notre Dame or "OUR MOTHER"?
Where the female arguably becomes life, the boy has to choose to become a man (purportedly).
"The boy has to act," is what jaded fairy-tale huggin' jungians suggest. They point to male rituals evident throughout humanity's discourse where the boy leaves the tribe, searches, nurses a vision, sloughs his old belief system like a snake skin.
Is this making any sense? Personally, I like to believe that, regardless of gender, both sexes have to 'act'--spend time knocking and digging, exert energy finding out what they are capable of achieving as human being verses their four-legged mammalian counterparts.
Sometimes I think the notion of intelligence is completely arbitrary when it comes to mammals. I could teach a well-trained monkey how to punch keys on Microsoft word. I could show him the pattern for a hiaku. I could teach him how to wipe his ass or how to sign out his gratitude. But still, human beings come to the notion of what does it mean to feel, what does it mean to overcome? What does it mean to Love? What does it mean to have a 'vision' and to feed that vision with splashes creative-fuel.
Jungian archtypes are cool but they've almost become posh. Hell, mysticism has become posh. It's no longer about suffering and yearning and eternal-longing as much as it is about sounding erudite and well-read at a campus dinner party and hoping to get laid afterwards. I read the greek etymology of 'mysticism' over the weekend and it stems from a word that means 'silence', 'secrets'...the early greek mystics knew something and they weren't gonna promulgate it or market it. Although, for a wayfarer or for someone searching they'd assent their chin and smile when they saw that they had embarked on their own personal sojorn.
Reverting back to masculine psychology...there's a well-known book by poet Robert Bly called IRON JOHN: A Book about Men (it's the yang to Woman who run with Wolves yin)....Bly alchemically dissects a grim's fairy tale 'Iron Hans'..it's really beautiful in a way. I'm familiar with the story and have owned the book many times (like all the books I love, I keep giving them away) every time I read it I get to the point of the story where I'm at psychologically and then...still-life with a dictionary, I can't move. Maybe someday I'll be able to finish the book, but perhaps that's what the author wants..."it's cool to read books and sound intelligent, much harder to live a life and experience and not share it because your their......get what I'm saying?
Just random speculations and irritating errata.
I do have one special place of spirtual incubation. Mattheison state park, outside of Starved Rock--it's my 'vagina' so to speak. It's place where I go to and let my hair down and run wild. A wet, moist, leafy, autumnal place with lavender sunsets and wheatfields and steep dells foaming with Waterfalls (an Illinois anomaly) with the beautiful vermillion river brushing through nearby. Once my booksies start selling I'm gonna build a thick log-cabin up near there so you girls (arya/daniela/ and the 'other' ex-girlfriend that is stalking me) can come and visit and we'll go on long hikes and I'll show you what my heart looks like as seen through the ontological lenses of mother earth. I may even dabble a book called "MATTHEISON GRACE"-every time I sweep through then canvas of Mattheison crazy shit happens and I come out 'reborn' awaiting a pending trial in my life.
I blasted up to Mattheison last year and skinny-dipped in the Vermillion (pretending it was the ganges). I looked up on a gravel precipice and saw a cross. Vision? Freak? Hallucination? It was a cross made of wood with thick black letters strewn across the plank. Reaching for my sandals and shorts I began to mount the precipice. As I neared it I saw the word JESUS thickly scribed across the plank followed by (freaky) my own birthday. JULY 6, 2001 (day in which I turned twenty-four and the day President Bush finally turned two). I scrambled up ot the top of the precipice and it turned out that it was a memorial for a spanish boy who had died. His first name was Jesus (hey-zeus) and he was born one year after I was and had died, on the precipice,on my twenty-fourth birthday.
There was a plastic statue of Mother Mary, half-melted from the late september sun. Burnt candals littered around the cross's trunk. For some reason I felt connected to this person. This Jesus. I uttered the prayer for the departed--kissed the bark of the closest tree, took off my sweater (the A&F sweater I purloined from Jenn's wardrobe; the sweater I wore when I first kissed Caroline two three years earlier) and tied it around the tree closest to the cross as a sacrifiece.
Six weeks later I went back to my 'sacred' place. Re-entered my 'vagina'. An early November snow had coated the bleak Illinois landscape. In early winter the entire state of Illinois turns silver--alchemically it aches for gold. I went back to this secluded palce where I always take off my clothes and bathe (not in the winter) went back to the cross, expecting to find mu double-knotted sweater damp, dirty, infested with bugs. Went back to mount the gravel precipice and to say the prayer for the Deaparted for Jesus. When I reached the summit there was no trace of the cross. There were no candles. No scattered beer cans. NO trace at all and when I went to the tree where I double-knotted my sweater as an offering, it too had completely disappeared.
Sunday, June 20, 2004
Hate my new haircut...
You think cuddly mara-arya had it bad. I just saw my reflection in the window and I look like I could be on a cover of Dutch Masters cheapo cigars. Nessie, 'member that time your dad was trying to grow his hair out long and I said it looked like hippies came over on the mayflower...welll
He who lives in the moment sometimes lives in hell....
Couldn't sleep again last night so I ended up (oh-no) wadding up my long hair in a cumberbun and completely shaving off my sides and scalp so now I look like I'm fourteen, trying to become an insurgent by growing my hair long and going to Ozzfest....yuck. This is the first time in like ten years I haven't had sideburns (or sides-period). Uncle Mike roused me up into gunky-morning conciousness and of course, I forgot what I did and I'm like emulating Maculy caulkin's torrential cauterwaul when I see myself in the mirror....
"Wake up."
Didn't want to go to the Baha'i center this morning either. I walked in late and of course, lovely caroline shoves a Prayer for Fathers that I am to read (don't like thinking about fathers on F-day) which I smiled and read the best I could. Perhaps its the concourse playing tricks on me...
Good news is I found a huge Blackberry orchard in our backyard. Huge. Like the wicked witch of the West cackling "poppies" although it's bushels of blackberries instead. I went blackberry picking last night and decided, in typical house-husbandry fashion, to don an apron and do some baking.
(alright-no apron, but I'll still bake.)
I LOVE cooking and devising recipes. Love GRILLING!!! I'm going to make a Blackberry pie. Should be fun. I have no talent whatsoever in the kitchen. oh well. True, commensurate talent is reserved for other rooms in the house. I talked with poet Laureate Billy Collins a few months back and his advice was that students and writers should always be a 'sophomore' in some other profession other than writing. A dilletnante. I like that alot....
"Wake up."
Didn't want to go to the Baha'i center this morning either. I walked in late and of course, lovely caroline shoves a Prayer for Fathers that I am to read (don't like thinking about fathers on F-day) which I smiled and read the best I could. Perhaps its the concourse playing tricks on me...
Good news is I found a huge Blackberry orchard in our backyard. Huge. Like the wicked witch of the West cackling "poppies" although it's bushels of blackberries instead. I went blackberry picking last night and decided, in typical house-husbandry fashion, to don an apron and do some baking.
(alright-no apron, but I'll still bake.)
I LOVE cooking and devising recipes. Love GRILLING!!! I'm going to make a Blackberry pie. Should be fun. I have no talent whatsoever in the kitchen. oh well. True, commensurate talent is reserved for other rooms in the house. I talked with poet Laureate Billy Collins a few months back and his advice was that students and writers should always be a 'sophomore' in some other profession other than writing. A dilletnante. I like that alot....
Arthur George...
Third father's day w/out the father. Love you buddy. You had the most dulcet wife and the most beautiful daughters. Jenny's doing Miss Illinois this year, just like Beth used to do. Can you believe that shit? Beth got married last summer. I couldn't ask for a better brother-in-Law. Dan's a great guy. He just completed his medical boards and Beth has one more year left of Law school at Kent. They refurbished a beautiful house in a tiny town called Harvard...you'd be proud.
I was an usher at Beth's Wedding. Always the bridesmaid never the...usher. I'm sick of always being a fucking usher and asking pointless query's. You know, "bride or groom", "straight or gay" "inner or outtie". Uncle Larry walked Beth down the aisle. She was stunning, an immaculate white sheet bearing veiled wings. It was the first time the whole family was together since the funeral...
...You wouldn't have beleived you own funeral dad. Davidson-Fulton said it was the largest Wake they ever had. You would have been embarrased at the number of people who showed up. There was at one time, a two hour wait for people to pay their respects. Police had to be called in to marshal the traffic on Garfield. We received so many cards and hugs from former students. Our living room turned into a greenhouse. And of course, the best part about funerals is always the meat trays everyone drops by.
The funeral itself was overwhelming. Jim Van Buren gave a eulogy (everyone laughed when he told stories about how you used to court mom and your romantic foibles), Jenny gave a brilliant testimony and Doctor Bob's serman was soothing. The funeral procession was amazing. There was about three miles of cars with their lights on en route to the cemetary. You wouldn't have believed it, Dad.
I'm still writing. I was working two jobs; working too much but now I'm back at the library (no Greeley!)and even went back to school last semester full time and made the honor role.
My writings getting better too. Stories still wierd but at least they're more coherent and I'm not as pretentious as I was when I was in high school.
Your wife's doing good. She's hanging in there. She renovated the house and now there's all hardwood floors and even a marble fireplace. Mom and I didn't talk for awhile, but I think gradually we're rectifying our relationship.
Need to tie this up, buddy (fucking grieving...writing this at work and tears are welling)...anyway, you died so suddenly that I just wanted to tell you how proud I was of you. You were a man virtues and of chrachter. You loved for wife very dearly and you did what you could for you family and even though we had our rifts, I love you and still pray for you. I don't think I'll ever have a family (unless my books are my kids...shit...they give me enough hell, that's for sure)but if I do, father, if become half-the man that you were, I'd consider myself a success.
You're my hero, buddy.......
Love you dad
I was an usher at Beth's Wedding. Always the bridesmaid never the...usher. I'm sick of always being a fucking usher and asking pointless query's. You know, "bride or groom", "straight or gay" "inner or outtie". Uncle Larry walked Beth down the aisle. She was stunning, an immaculate white sheet bearing veiled wings. It was the first time the whole family was together since the funeral...
...You wouldn't have beleived you own funeral dad. Davidson-Fulton said it was the largest Wake they ever had. You would have been embarrased at the number of people who showed up. There was at one time, a two hour wait for people to pay their respects. Police had to be called in to marshal the traffic on Garfield. We received so many cards and hugs from former students. Our living room turned into a greenhouse. And of course, the best part about funerals is always the meat trays everyone drops by.
The funeral itself was overwhelming. Jim Van Buren gave a eulogy (everyone laughed when he told stories about how you used to court mom and your romantic foibles), Jenny gave a brilliant testimony and Doctor Bob's serman was soothing. The funeral procession was amazing. There was about three miles of cars with their lights on en route to the cemetary. You wouldn't have believed it, Dad.
I'm still writing. I was working two jobs; working too much but now I'm back at the library (no Greeley!)and even went back to school last semester full time and made the honor role.
My writings getting better too. Stories still wierd but at least they're more coherent and I'm not as pretentious as I was when I was in high school.
Your wife's doing good. She's hanging in there. She renovated the house and now there's all hardwood floors and even a marble fireplace. Mom and I didn't talk for awhile, but I think gradually we're rectifying our relationship.
Need to tie this up, buddy (fucking grieving...writing this at work and tears are welling)...anyway, you died so suddenly that I just wanted to tell you how proud I was of you. You were a man virtues and of chrachter. You loved for wife very dearly and you did what you could for you family and even though we had our rifts, I love you and still pray for you. I don't think I'll ever have a family (unless my books are my kids...shit...they give me enough hell, that's for sure)but if I do, father, if become half-the man that you were, I'd consider myself a success.
You're my hero, buddy.......
Love you dad
Saturday, June 19, 2004
Blogging-Bitch fest....
...or cafight. "YOW". Talk about being pummeled and bashed with blogs. The last day unveield the purported masked identities of beautiful-eyed daniela and myself plus re-affirmed common universal knowledge that yes indeed (duh) arya badiyan is omniscient and ravishing and david likes to publically whine and bullshit and devise strategems to make him sound more intelligent than he actually is (ibid. see the inane READERS PRIVACY ACT of '04)....
Anyway, thought I'd take a hiatus, a sabbatical, place my blogging dreams on the back-burner. Surf the internet. Try to explain to other net-voyeurs that there our very complicated, altruistic and aesthetic reasons why I frequent certain web-sites (smiles).
Uncle Mike and I are in the process of moving to a huge house with lots of land and a swimming pool. I'm learning how to do all sorts of 'domesticated' stuff (a tractor lawn mower!!! spraying the basement for bugs!!! fertilzing the huge garden!!!) I feel like I'm in my mid-forties and my hair is going bald as I lumber around the aisles of lowes or menards with all the other, "house-husbands" searching for mulch, comparing different shades of paint, looking for a new door knob. Ahhhh...the pangs and perils of house-husbandry.
Anyway, thought I'd take a hiatus, a sabbatical, place my blogging dreams on the back-burner. Surf the internet. Try to explain to other net-voyeurs that there our very complicated, altruistic and aesthetic reasons why I frequent certain web-sites (smiles).
Uncle Mike and I are in the process of moving to a huge house with lots of land and a swimming pool. I'm learning how to do all sorts of 'domesticated' stuff (a tractor lawn mower!!! spraying the basement for bugs!!! fertilzing the huge garden!!!) I feel like I'm in my mid-forties and my hair is going bald as I lumber around the aisles of lowes or menards with all the other, "house-husbands" searching for mulch, comparing different shades of paint, looking for a new door knob. Ahhhh...the pangs and perils of house-husbandry.
Friday, June 18, 2004
"If love is blind I guess I'll buy myself a cane....."
Been riddled with insomnia all week. I shower, I lay down, deluged by thoughts, neon embryonic vignettes wafting and hovering above my head like it is always the fourth of July and my scalp is Ellis Island. I ferry back and forth between the kitchen chugging shots of Britta water. I check on Uncle Mike lying in front of a boxed whizz of static blue. I channel surf, drooling over infomercials featuring spandex-clad lasses inserting their limbs in contorted yogi positions while smiling. I sweat. I shower again. I go on long nocturnal jaunts and smoke cigars. I got called over by a bunch of denim-skirted sirens last night playing EDWARD 40hands. They had two forties of king-Cobra Malt cheap liquer that looks like stale Clysdale piss ducktaped around each palm. I continue to walk. My ex-girlfriend teaches art and lives on Moss Avenue. We didn't date long and we still have a mutual respect for each other. I get inspired when I see her up, at three in the morning, through the sallow dim-lit square of her apartment watching her splatter paint on the canvas... Last night I found my novel BOOK OF MUSES (BLOCK OF MESSES) and went through it. It's sloppy and large. Parts of it are pretty steamy that I'd get kicked out of the sauna if I'd read it in public.
Thursday, June 17, 2004
All my freinds are getting older so I guess i must be too...
...although I feel like I'm twelve, my vocie is scratchy and an octave lower than a year before, my face is oily and patches of hair have begun to harvest wheatfields across my lower abdomen and beneath the socket of my arms.
My friend Shannon just left.
"Tori Amos is forty. Eddie Vedder is forty. Courtney Love is forty." She huffed.
...and I feel like I'm twelve, going on a tour of a highschool with hallways that smell like chlorine and disenfectant and girls with side-ponytail holders wearing their boyfriends lettered-varsity jacktes who smell like they have just showered and used conditioner and life is brand new....
work is arduous. check back periodically at the recital for long pending stories. and oh...mara-arya...say chesse... your gonna need more than the devil to chase satan outta that shot(smiles--just kidding, you we're bloggin' buds-gotta give you a hard time)
My friend Shannon just left.
"Tori Amos is forty. Eddie Vedder is forty. Courtney Love is forty." She huffed.
...and I feel like I'm twelve, going on a tour of a highschool with hallways that smell like chlorine and disenfectant and girls with side-ponytail holders wearing their boyfriends lettered-varsity jacktes who smell like they have just showered and used conditioner and life is brand new....
work is arduous. check back periodically at the recital for long pending stories. and oh...mara-arya...say chesse... your gonna need more than the devil to chase satan outta that shot(smiles--just kidding, you we're bloggin' buds-gotta give you a hard time)
Wednesday, June 16, 2004
HAPPY BLOOMSDAY!!!!!!
Even GOOGLE is acknowledging BLOOMSDAY today!!!!!
BLOOMSDAY is the day when James Joyce's (BEAUTIFUL, DIDACTIC, SNOBBISH, INDULGENT) novel Ulysses takes place on. Dublin, June 16th, 1904. You know, who can possibly forget chapter three, Stephen Dedalus's solitary stroll along Sandymount Strand, "Ineluctable modality of the Visible, at least that if not more. Thought seen through my eyes. Signature of all things, I am here to read..." or Leopold Blooms sozzled cogitations as he stumbles home from the brothel, helping Stephen urinate. "The pre-ordained frangibility of the hymen. The pre-ordained frangibility of the thing-in-itself in id." Or Molly Blooms sixty page single-sentence fragment that transitions into lotus shaped orgasm, "Yes I will, Yes, YES, YES!!!!!"
The book was initially banned and rightfully so becasue it doesn't make much sense. It is considered by many to be the greatest work of quote 'literary fiction' ever conceived. It is difficult and abstract even for scholars, let alone the average reader to discern. For a long time, especially in my early-twenties, James Joyce was heroin and I was a junky licking my needle in anticipation of his linguistic high. I wanted to know everything about James Joyce and to prick his antics into my flesh. I figured that if I could harness Joyce's aesthetic and master his literary parlance (not too mention he's pretentious as all get-up)I would be a great writer myself.
For a long time almost everything I spat out of my literary digestive system was merely ego driven. I made the mistake that almost all naive young writers make--I didn't want to have the burning desire to write as much as I longed to be a conspicuous writer. I wanted to carp and be a critic and assent my clefted-snobbish chin up the snobbish realms of literary pedagogy; to write maybe one or two 'scholarly-shoveled' books deemed 'literature' in my lifetime, crack open the Western cannon, wedge my flatulant prose inside it, be immortalized on a Barnes and Noble montage smoking cigarettes, have one of my own epitaphs chiseled into the marble neck of my tombstone.
I tackled and re-tackled all nine hundred erudite pages of ULYSEES (not to mention Finnegans WAKE---UCK). I wrote conceited-fictional vignettes inked in Joycean physique. I wore berets, considered myself important, used 'ugly' voabulary words in public to sound overtly intelligent. I made HUGE deals about literary theories and brushed-shoulders with semantic scholars.
I wrote stream-of-conscious Kerouac novels where single run-on sentences streamed into waterfall paragraphs that bubbled into pages upon pages of drivel and doggerel. I hurt people. I fell under the class of writers that I used to admire (David Foster Wallace, James Joyce, William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon) that I now diagnose as having the 'SHREK' factor---their noevls are so big and so lingusitically tortuous that they are obviously TRYING TO COMPENSATE FOR SOMETHING. 'Member mama bear warned you about dating guys with big vocabularies....
I was sick.
The summer of '98 was the summer I was going to master James Joyce. I spent over $600 on elucidatory texts for Ulysses. I had the Gilbert notes, the Gifford notes. I had slides of Dublin. I had annoted drafts of Joyce's epic cached in my own writers desk. I had six-hours of Joseph Campbell lecturing on James Joyce (these would later save me. Joyce was kinda Campbell's hero. Campbell sort've helped me out--more later)....
I was alot like that person you probably had teaching your ENG 101 class who publically corrected your grammar and enjoyed making a mockery of your ideas.
Here's what I've learned. Language works when you give. When you sit on your ass and your ego everyday and (for all you other aspiring writers out there)when you care more about the person you are writing for than you do for your own writing itself. When you care more about what that beautiful, faceless, (danielaesque) creature thinks than what you think--when you care enough to give enough. You have to hold a rapport with the reader, almost like a commercial pilot...I'll take you to that place you always wanted to be. I'll entertain you, I'll help you grow along the way. I'll give you everything inside my chest so that someday you can give everything inside of your chest for soemthing you believe in...that sort've thing.
But I've ranted long enough.
BLOOMSDAY is the day when James Joyce's (BEAUTIFUL, DIDACTIC, SNOBBISH, INDULGENT) novel Ulysses takes place on. Dublin, June 16th, 1904. You know, who can possibly forget chapter three, Stephen Dedalus's solitary stroll along Sandymount Strand, "Ineluctable modality of the Visible, at least that if not more. Thought seen through my eyes. Signature of all things, I am here to read..." or Leopold Blooms sozzled cogitations as he stumbles home from the brothel, helping Stephen urinate. "The pre-ordained frangibility of the hymen. The pre-ordained frangibility of the thing-in-itself in id." Or Molly Blooms sixty page single-sentence fragment that transitions into lotus shaped orgasm, "Yes I will, Yes, YES, YES!!!!!"
The book was initially banned and rightfully so becasue it doesn't make much sense. It is considered by many to be the greatest work of quote 'literary fiction' ever conceived. It is difficult and abstract even for scholars, let alone the average reader to discern. For a long time, especially in my early-twenties, James Joyce was heroin and I was a junky licking my needle in anticipation of his linguistic high. I wanted to know everything about James Joyce and to prick his antics into my flesh. I figured that if I could harness Joyce's aesthetic and master his literary parlance (not too mention he's pretentious as all get-up)I would be a great writer myself.
For a long time almost everything I spat out of my literary digestive system was merely ego driven. I made the mistake that almost all naive young writers make--I didn't want to have the burning desire to write as much as I longed to be a conspicuous writer. I wanted to carp and be a critic and assent my clefted-snobbish chin up the snobbish realms of literary pedagogy; to write maybe one or two 'scholarly-shoveled' books deemed 'literature' in my lifetime, crack open the Western cannon, wedge my flatulant prose inside it, be immortalized on a Barnes and Noble montage smoking cigarettes, have one of my own epitaphs chiseled into the marble neck of my tombstone.
I tackled and re-tackled all nine hundred erudite pages of ULYSEES (not to mention Finnegans WAKE---UCK). I wrote conceited-fictional vignettes inked in Joycean physique. I wore berets, considered myself important, used 'ugly' voabulary words in public to sound overtly intelligent. I made HUGE deals about literary theories and brushed-shoulders with semantic scholars.
I wrote stream-of-conscious Kerouac novels where single run-on sentences streamed into waterfall paragraphs that bubbled into pages upon pages of drivel and doggerel. I hurt people. I fell under the class of writers that I used to admire (David Foster Wallace, James Joyce, William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon) that I now diagnose as having the 'SHREK' factor---their noevls are so big and so lingusitically tortuous that they are obviously TRYING TO COMPENSATE FOR SOMETHING. 'Member mama bear warned you about dating guys with big vocabularies....
I was sick.
The summer of '98 was the summer I was going to master James Joyce. I spent over $600 on elucidatory texts for Ulysses. I had the Gilbert notes, the Gifford notes. I had slides of Dublin. I had annoted drafts of Joyce's epic cached in my own writers desk. I had six-hours of Joseph Campbell lecturing on James Joyce (these would later save me. Joyce was kinda Campbell's hero. Campbell sort've helped me out--more later)....
I was alot like that person you probably had teaching your ENG 101 class who publically corrected your grammar and enjoyed making a mockery of your ideas.
Here's what I've learned. Language works when you give. When you sit on your ass and your ego everyday and (for all you other aspiring writers out there)when you care more about the person you are writing for than you do for your own writing itself. When you care more about what that beautiful, faceless, (danielaesque) creature thinks than what you think--when you care enough to give enough. You have to hold a rapport with the reader, almost like a commercial pilot...I'll take you to that place you always wanted to be. I'll entertain you, I'll help you grow along the way. I'll give you everything inside my chest so that someday you can give everything inside of your chest for soemthing you believe in...that sort've thing.
But I've ranted long enough.
Symphony for the Underdog
Feel just like Kid Rock when I bellow DEEEE-TROIT's in 'Da HOUSE!!!!!!!!
Let's hear it for the Detroit Pistons whose IMPECCABLE defense dipped with their offesnive swagger propelled them to the biggest upset in recent sports history!!!!
This was simply a case of no-name Underdogs (Wallace, Prince Billups, Hamilton) vs. EGO (SHAQ, Kobe, Father Malone, Trash-talkin' Payton).... It was modesty over Money, ethics over ego, team harmony over team histrionics, fundamentals over fear...
..it was beautiful.
Anyone who has a vision, "A vision boy, A 'Damn' VISION" (QUOTE Ginsberg to Kerouac) knows what its like to be an underdog. Knows what it's like to have people look at you and scratch their chins in bewilderment while they privately confer that "they'll never make it."
Maybe it's because my first name's David (Lots of words loaded in that sling I've been 'a brandishing) or because my father's favorite movie of all time was ROCKY, but there's something beautiful in actuating your dreams. Soemthing beautiful in assiduosly breaking a sweat everyday, something beautiful and compelling in LIVING THE LIFE YOU FEEL MEANT TO LEAD and doing what you feel BLESSED to do. Something, simply, beautiful in overcoming.....
Now, if you'll excuse me, allow me to verbally distribute my pent-up elation for Detroit.
"That'sallI'msayingyo!!! That'sallI'msayingyo!!!! That's ALL I'm saying yo!!!"
My Boys!!!!!!!
Let's hear it for the Detroit Pistons whose IMPECCABLE defense dipped with their offesnive swagger propelled them to the biggest upset in recent sports history!!!!
This was simply a case of no-name Underdogs (Wallace, Prince Billups, Hamilton) vs. EGO (SHAQ, Kobe, Father Malone, Trash-talkin' Payton).... It was modesty over Money, ethics over ego, team harmony over team histrionics, fundamentals over fear...
..it was beautiful.
Anyone who has a vision, "A vision boy, A 'Damn' VISION" (QUOTE Ginsberg to Kerouac) knows what its like to be an underdog. Knows what it's like to have people look at you and scratch their chins in bewilderment while they privately confer that "they'll never make it."
Maybe it's because my first name's David (Lots of words loaded in that sling I've been 'a brandishing) or because my father's favorite movie of all time was ROCKY, but there's something beautiful in actuating your dreams. Soemthing beautiful in assiduosly breaking a sweat everyday, something beautiful and compelling in LIVING THE LIFE YOU FEEL MEANT TO LEAD and doing what you feel BLESSED to do. Something, simply, beautiful in overcoming.....
Now, if you'll excuse me, allow me to verbally distribute my pent-up elation for Detroit.
"That'sallI'msayingyo!!! That'sallI'msayingyo!!!! That's ALL I'm saying yo!!!"
My Boys!!!!!!!
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Gavel Postcard for Florence Avenue on a Rainy-Day Morn
Just got into work and brushed up on fellow blogs.It's raining sheets of static precipitation outside and I got soaked trying to circumnavigate around Noah's zoo while walking en route to the library. I really want to read this morning--I love reading when it rains outside-- but, duh, I left my satchel back at the crib. Work is tedious. We just got a new librarian and half of my summer hours have been axed. (!) In dire need of ingetsing copious amounts of caffeine in order to keep my eyelids from flapping south.
Cubs won big time last night! I think my boys in Detroit could win it tonight. I know, nothing like climaxing about sports when you're engaged in a "trialougue" with two beautiful women. I'm actually a basketball-freak. "H to the izz-O, V to the izz-A/ shizzle on my nizzle used to dribble down in VA " Something like that. I tutor Bradley Braves basketball players during the school year. "Jabbar, head out of your ass and in the books brother." Beautiful giants. They limp around campus as if they just got shot in their achilles and when they see me they shout out my first name and give me a long complicated gangsta handshake and make me feel like I'm part of the team. It's really special in a way.
I used to teach english at an Alternative junior high and High school. (Alternative meaning the kids were expelled from the district or had pending court cases) It was the worst job ever. I got paid shit and got cussed out and hit every hour and once--right after my father's death, a 17 year old 250 pound seventh grader named Marcus with leather thick skin and John Henry bones fell off his desk and broke my leg. Real funny, only problem was that the hospital--the same hospital where my dad capitulated his earthly rug only two weeks before--took x-rays and misdiagnosed it as gout(?) So for ten days I'm limping around the hallways thinking I have gout, walking with this cane. When I did finally get a valid diagnosis and got a cast my students drew gang signs and vulgarities on the side of my leg and Sherita, my precocious little angel, even wrote me a Valentine stating that, "Muster V.B., you is so ugly." Even when I'm crippled she refuses to write proper english.
Teaching was sometimes fun though. I'd always get in trouble with the district for doing crazy things. They got pissed off because I was using rap lyrics to teach the parts of speech. "Circle the conjunctions, Snoop....With my mind on my money and my money on my mind." Oh well, the kids learned for once. One time a student called me a "Snow-Cone-head-camel-breath-looking-mug" and I made the entire class compose short-stories where the antagonist was a "snow-cone-head-camel-breath-looking-mug" ahhh...teaching is such an arduous profession.
Kids are crazy. I was walking home from the library just last week when one of my former students (she's in 8th grade now) flagged me down. She was driving a car and she was only 13!!!!
"Use needs a ride, Mistuh Vee-Bee?"
"Trina what the hell you doing driving a car?" I said.
"Picking mies mom up fromsuh work. I can give use a ride if use like."
Kids.
*
Cubs won big time last night! I think my boys in Detroit could win it tonight. I know, nothing like climaxing about sports when you're engaged in a "trialougue" with two beautiful women. I'm actually a basketball-freak. "H to the izz-O, V to the izz-A/ shizzle on my nizzle used to dribble down in VA " Something like that. I tutor Bradley Braves basketball players during the school year. "Jabbar, head out of your ass and in the books brother." Beautiful giants. They limp around campus as if they just got shot in their achilles and when they see me they shout out my first name and give me a long complicated gangsta handshake and make me feel like I'm part of the team. It's really special in a way.
I used to teach english at an Alternative junior high and High school. (Alternative meaning the kids were expelled from the district or had pending court cases) It was the worst job ever. I got paid shit and got cussed out and hit every hour and once--right after my father's death, a 17 year old 250 pound seventh grader named Marcus with leather thick skin and John Henry bones fell off his desk and broke my leg. Real funny, only problem was that the hospital--the same hospital where my dad capitulated his earthly rug only two weeks before--took x-rays and misdiagnosed it as gout(?) So for ten days I'm limping around the hallways thinking I have gout, walking with this cane. When I did finally get a valid diagnosis and got a cast my students drew gang signs and vulgarities on the side of my leg and Sherita, my precocious little angel, even wrote me a Valentine stating that, "Muster V.B., you is so ugly." Even when I'm crippled she refuses to write proper english.
Teaching was sometimes fun though. I'd always get in trouble with the district for doing crazy things. They got pissed off because I was using rap lyrics to teach the parts of speech. "Circle the conjunctions, Snoop....With my mind on my money and my money on my mind." Oh well, the kids learned for once. One time a student called me a "Snow-Cone-head-camel-breath-looking-mug" and I made the entire class compose short-stories where the antagonist was a "snow-cone-head-camel-breath-looking-mug" ahhh...teaching is such an arduous profession.
Kids are crazy. I was walking home from the library just last week when one of my former students (she's in 8th grade now) flagged me down. She was driving a car and she was only 13!!!!
"Use needs a ride, Mistuh Vee-Bee?"
"Trina what the hell you doing driving a car?" I said.
"Picking mies mom up fromsuh work. I can give use a ride if use like."
Kids.
*
Monday, June 14, 2004
Rosebud Tattoo tickled on my ankle.. (ugly entry--read at risk of pending visual sty!!!)
Divine irony or knee-clattering embarrassment? I just found cute Jenny-from-down-the-hall's VICTORIA SECRET catalougue mis-placed in my mail slot this morning. So now, what do I do?
"Yes, this is yours, I haven't read it or drooled over it or anything (don't think about page 32! don't think about page 32!)." She already thinks I'm kinda weird always walkin' around with a heap of books and Uncle Mike. Now I suppose I've just graduated from Weirdo to Pervo.
*
Family rifts run blood deep. I really love my family and wish I could rectify many of the mistakes and foibles I have made in the past in regards to my siblings. It's kind of sad in a way. The last thing I asked my Father before he died was for $150 so I could pay off the laptop I bought on the black market which had over 500 pages of my book on it and I'm still pissed about that. My sister had their own pricy instruments to serve as creative mediums and I didn't need a token of love as much as I longed for a ring-manager. Someone to slap my ass occasionally on my way back to the dugout and say, "Good job" even when I just struck out. Even when I swung the bat as hard as I fucking could and just couldn't make contact with the curve ball life hurtled at me from the mound. Sometimes I think that the job of a parent (maybe even the job of a god) is just to show belief in the creature you created, regardless of the creatures innate flaws.
Not that I totally blame my parents as much as I blame coifed or "contemporary" Christianity where the yin/yang of our collective subconious is filtered from the authorative din of the pulpit to the naive earlobes of the pews as HEAVEN/HELL, RIGHTEOUSNESS/EVIL HOLY/SINNER. My parents were both heavily schooled in the nazi-conservative James Dobson Focus on the Family cadre and to this day, I wonder how many lives--how many families-- James Dobson himself has marred? I'd be willing to bet my lifeworks that its somewhere in the tens of thousands. If he likes Jesus so much he should nail his own askance belief-system on a few wooden-vertical helixed planks so he can see just how UNFOUNDED his purported scriptural based belief system is and the psychological havoc it has spawned on young kids. Brilliant and burgeoning Young Minds.
The problem being firsthand is that, when a parent neglects to feed the child, the child learns how to hunt for food himself and will sometimes put things inside of his body for imminent nourishment that are not healthy.
Example: the last four years I've been seeing alot of older women. The avg. age would be somewhere between 38-42. Some were classy scholars, some bar whores. Mostly I have learned that sadness and lonliness is pretty much universal and that if your looking for longterm contentment between the thighs of another its very doubtful that you'll ever find it (although, being a lover, you strive to find this union, and harbor some sentiment of optismism that it exists--its what fueled you into a life of the arts in the first place...)
Anyway, I realized that perhaps the reason I was indulged and fascinated with the older sex was because, perhaps, I was still looking for something that my own mom should've given me. Looking back now (hindsight is ALWAYS 20-20) there were voids that needed to be filled that my parents filled with two sentences.
MOM: You've made bad choices.
DAD (God rest his soul): Do what Jesus wants you to do.
*
Sorry. I wanted to write about my sister but the sting of sentimentality and family histrionics is brick heavy and still very palpable. It hurts, but let me just say this before I re-cycle (haha-arya and D, 'nother 'cycle' pun) this blog. We, everything we are as human beings, is a sum total of all of our collective experiences reflected from the interior screen marooned in the confines our own skull. Walt Whitman posits this in his hymn " i am part of all of those I meet" Likewise, I think Joseph campbell says it best:
"Life is pain and life is suffering and life is emotional poverty but--Damnit kid, you're alive!!!!"
No matter what season, how high the hill or how abysmally deep the valley we have that inside of us; beckoning us to LIVE THE LIVES WE FEEL LEAD TO LEAD (that's lead-2-leed, phonetically)... and shit, sisters and friends, what a wonderful life it is!!!!!
"Yes, this is yours, I haven't read it or drooled over it or anything (don't think about page 32! don't think about page 32!)." She already thinks I'm kinda weird always walkin' around with a heap of books and Uncle Mike. Now I suppose I've just graduated from Weirdo to Pervo.
*
Family rifts run blood deep. I really love my family and wish I could rectify many of the mistakes and foibles I have made in the past in regards to my siblings. It's kind of sad in a way. The last thing I asked my Father before he died was for $150 so I could pay off the laptop I bought on the black market which had over 500 pages of my book on it and I'm still pissed about that. My sister had their own pricy instruments to serve as creative mediums and I didn't need a token of love as much as I longed for a ring-manager. Someone to slap my ass occasionally on my way back to the dugout and say, "Good job" even when I just struck out. Even when I swung the bat as hard as I fucking could and just couldn't make contact with the curve ball life hurtled at me from the mound. Sometimes I think that the job of a parent (maybe even the job of a god) is just to show belief in the creature you created, regardless of the creatures innate flaws.
Not that I totally blame my parents as much as I blame coifed or "contemporary" Christianity where the yin/yang of our collective subconious is filtered from the authorative din of the pulpit to the naive earlobes of the pews as HEAVEN/HELL, RIGHTEOUSNESS/EVIL HOLY/SINNER. My parents were both heavily schooled in the nazi-conservative James Dobson Focus on the Family cadre and to this day, I wonder how many lives--how many families-- James Dobson himself has marred? I'd be willing to bet my lifeworks that its somewhere in the tens of thousands. If he likes Jesus so much he should nail his own askance belief-system on a few wooden-vertical helixed planks so he can see just how UNFOUNDED his purported scriptural based belief system is and the psychological havoc it has spawned on young kids. Brilliant and burgeoning Young Minds.
The problem being firsthand is that, when a parent neglects to feed the child, the child learns how to hunt for food himself and will sometimes put things inside of his body for imminent nourishment that are not healthy.
Example: the last four years I've been seeing alot of older women. The avg. age would be somewhere between 38-42. Some were classy scholars, some bar whores. Mostly I have learned that sadness and lonliness is pretty much universal and that if your looking for longterm contentment between the thighs of another its very doubtful that you'll ever find it (although, being a lover, you strive to find this union, and harbor some sentiment of optismism that it exists--its what fueled you into a life of the arts in the first place...)
Anyway, I realized that perhaps the reason I was indulged and fascinated with the older sex was because, perhaps, I was still looking for something that my own mom should've given me. Looking back now (hindsight is ALWAYS 20-20) there were voids that needed to be filled that my parents filled with two sentences.
MOM: You've made bad choices.
DAD (God rest his soul): Do what Jesus wants you to do.
*
Sorry. I wanted to write about my sister but the sting of sentimentality and family histrionics is brick heavy and still very palpable. It hurts, but let me just say this before I re-cycle (haha-arya and D, 'nother 'cycle' pun) this blog. We, everything we are as human beings, is a sum total of all of our collective experiences reflected from the interior screen marooned in the confines our own skull. Walt Whitman posits this in his hymn " i am part of all of those I meet" Likewise, I think Joseph campbell says it best:
"Life is pain and life is suffering and life is emotional poverty but--Damnit kid, you're alive!!!!"
No matter what season, how high the hill or how abysmally deep the valley we have that inside of us; beckoning us to LIVE THE LIVES WE FEEL LEAD TO LEAD (that's lead-2-leed, phonetically)... and shit, sisters and friends, what a wonderful life it is!!!!!
Saturday, June 12, 2004
Carousel days and Unity parades
Jenn was simply ebullient and graceful last night in Carousel. Her voice swept through the flaps of the tent with all the svelte, sincerity and class of an operatic diva-- a voice capable of sawing open both hearts and tear ducts simultaneously. Her 'autumnal' hair was long and curly in a Lousia May Alcott Little Women sort-of-way. When the spotlight's illuminated cone captured her vibratto the entire audience (including her brother) fell in love. Is that why I left early and cried. Hoofing home, through the park late at night. So proud of her...wishing my father could have seen his daughter. Pissed off that the wound of death hasn't completely scabbed over. Raking up scattered leaves of family remorse sifting inside my chest, wishing I could set the crumply heap ablaze and start new, which of course, will happen over time. Life isn't a unicycle (Thanks arya). Nor is it a motorcycle. Geez; my analogies are so lame and cheesy this morning that even my witticisms are subject to mold....
Anyway, I have two beautiful talented siblings. We're not very close. When I first left home it was my sister Beth who asked me to leave. Told me that's what mom and dad wanted. They didn't want a bum-son lounging around the house stringing compoud sentences together via Microsoft Word. Jenn and Beth were kind of sheperded through the arts under the aegis of my parents. But maybe being a loner sometimes forces you to find yourself--find what you are capable of dreaming and seeing... I used to (many, moons ago little tree) practically breathe under Hesse's adage "The true profession of man is to find his way to himself..." That's true but can be quickly contorted especially when finding yourself is synonymous with Loosing yourself in a spate of vices.
I never would have heard of Uncle Mike or the Baha'i faith ( or arya or daniela or Pearl or Hafai) had I not drooled over Joseph Campbells books and his compelling recorded lecture series for years first. When asked the inevitable query of "What is the meaning of Life" by Bill Moyers in the widely anthologized POWER OF MYTH documentary, Joseph Campbell politely asserted that he didn't think singular "life" possesed any sole meaning.
"Not true." Moyers barked back in acerbic retort.
"I don't believe life has a purpose. Life is a lot of protoplasm with an urge to reproduce and continue in being....sheer life cannot be said to have a purpose, because look at all the different purposes it has all over the place. Each incarnation has a potentiality and the mission of life is to live in that potentiality...."
( I Love that, 'live in that (your) potentiality'. I remembered the 'protoplasm' part but just dove into the catacombs of the library to retrieve the rest)
Campbell: ......How do you do it? My answer is, 'Follow your bliss.' There's something inside of you that knows your in the center, that know's when you're on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you've lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don't get any money, you still have your bliss.
Moyers: I like the idea that its not the destination that counts, its the journey.
Campbell:Yes. As Karlfried Graf Durckheim says, "When you're on a journey, and the end keeps getting further and further away, then you realize that the real end is the journey." (Moyers, 229, 230).
A blessing in my own life was coming into the Baha'i faith through this ontology (epistemology? dunno. Ugly philosophical word--you know what I'm saying). I had pretty much jettisoned the whole notion of a supreme Godhead and everything and then, gradually...wow. All of this plus Uncle Mike's mysticism and knowledge kindled with Arya's Odyssey (first Baha'i lecture I attended and still, by far the best) left my spiritual Longing blasting off the mystical launchpad inside my chest.
*
Amazing things are transpiring in the community right now thanks mostly to Mike and Marjean (Beautiful Marjean, she's in her 80's and her face is post-stroke sloped; but she's a beautiful angel)...Keep in mind that our community is older, ego-aged and dwindling. Our feasts are almost always under 10 memebers. Mike and Marjean (along with myself...which really makes people jilt their necks in wonder when they see us together) rented a hall and had a huge Naw RUZ party last March. The whole time I'm plagerzing lines from Doubting Thomas, saying that there's just no way given. Turns out 120 people showed up......
(here's where I just wrote like-5 plus beautiful heartfelt pages about Mike and Marjean, their actions, and even about how Mike found the faith. Low and behold the Computer crashed and and only saved the first part of it.....Think the concourse was involved? There's a story about how all of the Master's miracles were chronicled and Shogi Effendi sent the manuscrupt to be destroyed b/c he didn't want people being attracted to the faith b/c of certain (weird) deeds actuating through spiritual gifts.
FIVE PAGES!!! UNCLE MIKE'S STORY (including seminary...usurped to the Greenpeace recycling den in cyberspace, along with my LOVE POEM TO STACI PERKINS last Spring, my ten pages of the Nucelar woods and my short story I flushed out of my skin in a fit of rage that I'm sure would have won the Nobel.....
.....ahhh, nothing beats lessons in detachment
Arya and Daniela rule. Everyone else who reads this log on a daily baisis and refuses to comment will be riddled with impotency...
Anyway, I have two beautiful talented siblings. We're not very close. When I first left home it was my sister Beth who asked me to leave. Told me that's what mom and dad wanted. They didn't want a bum-son lounging around the house stringing compoud sentences together via Microsoft Word. Jenn and Beth were kind of sheperded through the arts under the aegis of my parents. But maybe being a loner sometimes forces you to find yourself--find what you are capable of dreaming and seeing... I used to (many, moons ago little tree) practically breathe under Hesse's adage "The true profession of man is to find his way to himself..." That's true but can be quickly contorted especially when finding yourself is synonymous with Loosing yourself in a spate of vices.
I never would have heard of Uncle Mike or the Baha'i faith ( or arya or daniela or Pearl or Hafai) had I not drooled over Joseph Campbells books and his compelling recorded lecture series for years first. When asked the inevitable query of "What is the meaning of Life" by Bill Moyers in the widely anthologized POWER OF MYTH documentary, Joseph Campbell politely asserted that he didn't think singular "life" possesed any sole meaning.
"Not true." Moyers barked back in acerbic retort.
"I don't believe life has a purpose. Life is a lot of protoplasm with an urge to reproduce and continue in being....sheer life cannot be said to have a purpose, because look at all the different purposes it has all over the place. Each incarnation has a potentiality and the mission of life is to live in that potentiality...."
( I Love that, 'live in that (your) potentiality'. I remembered the 'protoplasm' part but just dove into the catacombs of the library to retrieve the rest)
Campbell: ......How do you do it? My answer is, 'Follow your bliss.' There's something inside of you that knows your in the center, that know's when you're on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you've lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don't get any money, you still have your bliss.
Moyers: I like the idea that its not the destination that counts, its the journey.
Campbell:Yes. As Karlfried Graf Durckheim says, "When you're on a journey, and the end keeps getting further and further away, then you realize that the real end is the journey." (Moyers, 229, 230).
A blessing in my own life was coming into the Baha'i faith through this ontology (epistemology? dunno. Ugly philosophical word--you know what I'm saying). I had pretty much jettisoned the whole notion of a supreme Godhead and everything and then, gradually...wow. All of this plus Uncle Mike's mysticism and knowledge kindled with Arya's Odyssey (first Baha'i lecture I attended and still, by far the best) left my spiritual Longing blasting off the mystical launchpad inside my chest.
*
Amazing things are transpiring in the community right now thanks mostly to Mike and Marjean (Beautiful Marjean, she's in her 80's and her face is post-stroke sloped; but she's a beautiful angel)...Keep in mind that our community is older, ego-aged and dwindling. Our feasts are almost always under 10 memebers. Mike and Marjean (along with myself...which really makes people jilt their necks in wonder when they see us together) rented a hall and had a huge Naw RUZ party last March. The whole time I'm plagerzing lines from Doubting Thomas, saying that there's just no way given. Turns out 120 people showed up......
(here's where I just wrote like-5 plus beautiful heartfelt pages about Mike and Marjean, their actions, and even about how Mike found the faith. Low and behold the Computer crashed and and only saved the first part of it.....Think the concourse was involved? There's a story about how all of the Master's miracles were chronicled and Shogi Effendi sent the manuscrupt to be destroyed b/c he didn't want people being attracted to the faith b/c of certain (weird) deeds actuating through spiritual gifts.
FIVE PAGES!!! UNCLE MIKE'S STORY (including seminary...usurped to the Greenpeace recycling den in cyberspace, along with my LOVE POEM TO STACI PERKINS last Spring, my ten pages of the Nucelar woods and my short story I flushed out of my skin in a fit of rage that I'm sure would have won the Nobel.....
.....ahhh, nothing beats lessons in detachment
Arya and Daniela rule. Everyone else who reads this log on a daily baisis and refuses to comment will be riddled with impotency...
Friday, June 11, 2004
Ostrich Quill, Ink, Parchment....
Those are the literary utensils I feel like using while composing my next "luddite" YE OLDE FASHION BLOG. Been trying for the last three hours to EDIT MY USER PROFILE so I could post a face to go along with my fingertips... (even though I think its tad vain and conceited and almost boarderline cupid-dot-comish)...I even downloaded that crazy Picasa thing from Blogger but it still doesn't acknowledge my Desktop or 'my photos' or dip into the files on my zip...Ahhhhhhh!!!!!!!
Oh well. Nothing beats Campus 'pewters. Guess I'll have to frolic underneath the honed mask of anonymity. i was really pissed off, then my good friend arya via'd me a gift I can't wait to open and my other good friend daniela wrote a wonderful ditty about smoking, which of course, lulled me into passive nicotine-reminiscent abeyance.
Still not crazy about my sisters play tonight. Sappy musicals. Hot tent. I get to watch my beautiful sister Jenn solo and then make-out on stage and then watch her thesbian boyfriend talk about how cool he is afterwards. Fun Times..........
Oh well. Nothing beats Campus 'pewters. Guess I'll have to frolic underneath the honed mask of anonymity. i was really pissed off, then my good friend arya via'd me a gift I can't wait to open and my other good friend daniela wrote a wonderful ditty about smoking, which of course, lulled me into passive nicotine-reminiscent abeyance.
Still not crazy about my sisters play tonight. Sappy musicals. Hot tent. I get to watch my beautiful sister Jenn solo and then make-out on stage and then watch her thesbian boyfriend talk about how cool he is afterwards. Fun Times..........
From Balloons to birthmarks...
What's up with me today? I can't stop blogging. I boxed up my novels last night for the move and its almost like...wow...I have lots of sentences that still need to hemmed, ploughed and water.
Hopefully I can get my BIG novel self-published next month. Considering paper and color illustartions, each printing costs me about $80 for about a limited run of ten that'll a give away to the people who compelled me to write it (its taken four years!!!!). Hopefully I'll have a copy or two left over so I can give it to that sexy middle-aged publisher at Random House who thinks I have potential if I can get my head out of the blog.
An aged-hippie just came in and bashed Bush for an hour before going off on Reagan's faux-pas antics. He then shook my hand and nodded at me, like I knew where he was coming from...
There's a short story by Donald Barthelme I've been thinking about today called The Balloon. "The Balloon, the exact location I cannot recall..." is how it starts. Its a really stupid story. It's about a New Yorker whose wife leaves him and, b/c he's so sad, he blows up a balloon. All of his sadness and everything that's inside his lungs feeds into the stretched rubber. The irony is, the balloon doesn't pop. It just keeps on growing and growing and eventually occupies most of New York City. Kids jump outta High Rises and flounce on the balloon like a trapoline. People get used to the balloon and eventually no one seems to mind that a giant clowns balloon has appropriated all of Lower Manhattan.
The irony is dual. New Yorkers everywhere are bouncing up and down on the narrator's exhaled sadness. Eventually, when the protagonist's wife comes back to him, the balloon becomes no big deal. No big deal at all. He poured everything that was inside of him into this permeable object and then, one day, pop..she's back, and her presence flitted perfectly inside his chest that place that had been huffing and puffing for all these months....
Started to think that maybe blogging has been my balloon and maybe all this writing is just a method of interior investigation. Where's my Dad? Who is crazy Mike? Who's the faceless femme with the bubble-gum name? What's up with all these crazy carousel rotations!
God I love every second of existence!!!!
Hopefully I can get my BIG novel self-published next month. Considering paper and color illustartions, each printing costs me about $80 for about a limited run of ten that'll a give away to the people who compelled me to write it (its taken four years!!!!). Hopefully I'll have a copy or two left over so I can give it to that sexy middle-aged publisher at Random House who thinks I have potential if I can get my head out of the blog.
An aged-hippie just came in and bashed Bush for an hour before going off on Reagan's faux-pas antics. He then shook my hand and nodded at me, like I knew where he was coming from...
There's a short story by Donald Barthelme I've been thinking about today called The Balloon. "The Balloon, the exact location I cannot recall..." is how it starts. Its a really stupid story. It's about a New Yorker whose wife leaves him and, b/c he's so sad, he blows up a balloon. All of his sadness and everything that's inside his lungs feeds into the stretched rubber. The irony is, the balloon doesn't pop. It just keeps on growing and growing and eventually occupies most of New York City. Kids jump outta High Rises and flounce on the balloon like a trapoline. People get used to the balloon and eventually no one seems to mind that a giant clowns balloon has appropriated all of Lower Manhattan.
The irony is dual. New Yorkers everywhere are bouncing up and down on the narrator's exhaled sadness. Eventually, when the protagonist's wife comes back to him, the balloon becomes no big deal. No big deal at all. He poured everything that was inside of him into this permeable object and then, one day, pop..she's back, and her presence flitted perfectly inside his chest that place that had been huffing and puffing for all these months....
Started to think that maybe blogging has been my balloon and maybe all this writing is just a method of interior investigation. Where's my Dad? Who is crazy Mike? Who's the faceless femme with the bubble-gum name? What's up with all these crazy carousel rotations!
God I love every second of existence!!!!
Is that your Nimbus 2000...
...or are you just happy to see me? Yeah, blogging's addictive. Everyone in the office is huddled around the television evincing mock-elegies for Ronald Reagan. There was a tornado warning last night and I stammered up to my balcony to try to espy a glimpse of the vortex funnel, only to get doused with massive amounts of golf ball sized hale. Uncle Mike was being ornery last night, too. He still had on his Caterpillar work-badge and said that if the tornado did sweep through our abode, the coronary would be able to identify him immediately. Whereas I would probably get my laminated-wallet identity pillaged by looters and remain anonymous until my first novel-- a horrible novel I wrote when I was twenty about Basketball and Opera (?)--somehow arises from the shelves of its underground cult status and becomes recommended reading, henceforth adding to the aura of my mysterious demise....
The Harry Potter books are brilliant and I'm head over kneecaps in love with JK Rowlings. Reading THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX last summer it was just like....there were PERFECTLY constructed sentences. Perfect. Sentences that read like a shaft of light streaming through stain glass windows inside of St. Pauls cathedral. So-called snobbish "literary" theorists and critcs despise this sort of ' low art'--but my personal aesthetic is this...the absolute HIGHEST form of art their is occurs when a writer (artist) creatively propels and encourages young minds to read and write. Very few writers I know of can do this (CS Lewis and a few scholastic scholars comes to mind). I think Rowlings achieves this and does so with class and grace....
My friend Chrissy just strutted in and filled me in about the Swissy-Missy fiasco (sniff). Why do all these transient girls have Sweet Valley High teen-age monikers for names?
Uncle Mike panned a few of my short stories last night. Told me that I'm very good I just try to go for the 'shock' value too much. 'Geez. I've known Mike for three years and his normal cavil in regards to my work is that "People won't be able to understand it."
Although one time I read him a short story about Sarejevo called "WHERE ALL THE DREAM CHARACTERS DREAM,TOO." and he was silent for a long time and then told me that it was pretty good for a human. Not that a caged Chimpanzee doesn't harbor a random plunge at Hamlet every now and then.
Uncle Mike then told me some cool stories about Pearl last night then told me not to write them down.
"You're getting people too excited." He said. He then blathered about mis-firing of chemical synapses in the brain. "People need to be attracted to the faith because of the threading of both spiritual and practical principles into one universal strand." Mike huffed.
He said that when he worked for the Universal house of Justice in Haifa if one of the hosue members had a 'dream' or a 'vision'--that was the person the house as a whole body believed the least.
"The House members are the most practical people you'll ever meet." Mike says.
When Mike asked me if I'd write down the stories I told him what I tell everyone. That I write everyday and that I'd write with unbidden honsety if granted the opportunity.
*
The Harry Potter books are brilliant and I'm head over kneecaps in love with JK Rowlings. Reading THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX last summer it was just like....there were PERFECTLY constructed sentences. Perfect. Sentences that read like a shaft of light streaming through stain glass windows inside of St. Pauls cathedral. So-called snobbish "literary" theorists and critcs despise this sort of ' low art'--but my personal aesthetic is this...the absolute HIGHEST form of art their is occurs when a writer (artist) creatively propels and encourages young minds to read and write. Very few writers I know of can do this (CS Lewis and a few scholastic scholars comes to mind). I think Rowlings achieves this and does so with class and grace....
My friend Chrissy just strutted in and filled me in about the Swissy-Missy fiasco (sniff). Why do all these transient girls have Sweet Valley High teen-age monikers for names?
Uncle Mike panned a few of my short stories last night. Told me that I'm very good I just try to go for the 'shock' value too much. 'Geez. I've known Mike for three years and his normal cavil in regards to my work is that "People won't be able to understand it."
Although one time I read him a short story about Sarejevo called "WHERE ALL THE DREAM CHARACTERS DREAM,TOO." and he was silent for a long time and then told me that it was pretty good for a human. Not that a caged Chimpanzee doesn't harbor a random plunge at Hamlet every now and then.
Uncle Mike then told me some cool stories about Pearl last night then told me not to write them down.
"You're getting people too excited." He said. He then blathered about mis-firing of chemical synapses in the brain. "People need to be attracted to the faith because of the threading of both spiritual and practical principles into one universal strand." Mike huffed.
He said that when he worked for the Universal house of Justice in Haifa if one of the hosue members had a 'dream' or a 'vision'--that was the person the house as a whole body believed the least.
"The House members are the most practical people you'll ever meet." Mike says.
When Mike asked me if I'd write down the stories I told him what I tell everyone. That I write everyday and that I'd write with unbidden honsety if granted the opportunity.
*
How soon hath time the subtle thief of youth....
Too early in the morning to muse over John Milton. Whereas the cast and company of RENT may measure their life in cups of coffee sprinkled with seasons of Love, I've always-- for some weird reason--measured my life in four year increments correlating perfectly with the pending Presidential campaign, the olympic games and the anomolous leap year. Always have...it seems like every four years I tersely look back, ask myself where the hell I am suppose to be going, looking over the palces I have already traveled wondering what avenue will appear next....
...Voluntarily chose to go see my sister tonight in Carousel. God I hate musicals and my whole family did summer stock growing up. Jenn has the lead but the play is like FOUR hours (is this a cheesy-lighthearted musical or a Wagnerian Opera?)My sister's also do beauty pageants. Beth was Miss Chicago three years ago and almost won Miss Illinois (the girl who beat her became Miss America)...Jenn's trying to win the state tiara this year and I hate going, hate seeing my sisters gambol around stage in heels and tights posing like their limbs are constructed out of orgami. Hate watching my sisters (MY OWN SISTERS) prostitute their brains in their bathing suits. Hate watching them be leered and ogled by middle-aged judges.....and regardless what anyone says, they still look like Drag Queens daubed in all that make-up!!!
Oh well, to compound matters mom just called. Turns out I have to share a hotel room with Jenn's boyfriend, Eric--who I can't stand!!! I almost (I shit you not here) hit him on Christmas eve! I'm not alone. Beth's husband Dan (who's in med school and who's mind and persona is poured like a Kennedy) can't stand him either. Oh well, I'll try to give him another chance. Maybe I'll buy a gun and pretend to clean it out while talking to him about the time I used to castrate bulls in the summer.
Need to write. Need to write. Need to write.
...Voluntarily chose to go see my sister tonight in Carousel. God I hate musicals and my whole family did summer stock growing up. Jenn has the lead but the play is like FOUR hours (is this a cheesy-lighthearted musical or a Wagnerian Opera?)My sister's also do beauty pageants. Beth was Miss Chicago three years ago and almost won Miss Illinois (the girl who beat her became Miss America)...Jenn's trying to win the state tiara this year and I hate going, hate seeing my sisters gambol around stage in heels and tights posing like their limbs are constructed out of orgami. Hate watching my sisters (MY OWN SISTERS) prostitute their brains in their bathing suits. Hate watching them be leered and ogled by middle-aged judges.....and regardless what anyone says, they still look like Drag Queens daubed in all that make-up!!!
Oh well, to compound matters mom just called. Turns out I have to share a hotel room with Jenn's boyfriend, Eric--who I can't stand!!! I almost (I shit you not here) hit him on Christmas eve! I'm not alone. Beth's husband Dan (who's in med school and who's mind and persona is poured like a Kennedy) can't stand him either. Oh well, I'll try to give him another chance. Maybe I'll buy a gun and pretend to clean it out while talking to him about the time I used to castrate bulls in the summer.
Need to write. Need to write. Need to write.
Thursday, June 10, 2004
jealousy, envy, spite...
What the hell? Outta the trinity bloggers I'm the one still sitting at the kids table without a G-mail account. Oh, well. G-mail sounds like something Snoop-Dogg would use to check his e-mail anyway. I must've been passed-over by the G-mail seraphim because of my, (dare I say it) youth? I know, (as my other two bloggers scowl in my direction) it's not easy being young-folk. Kids these days. Daniela, you would've been a senior when I was a freshman in High School and would've chuckled at my romantic foibles when I would have read to you a sonnet I composed for you in your native tongue....and I'm sure Arya was already endowed working on her PhD in all things Brilliant and Profound at that time (dare I speculate)...
Anyway, weird shit. I took ten year old Baha'i twins William and Zacahry out to see the new Harry Potter moive tonight and guess what, in the first five minutes, I shit you not, there, on the screen, was the brick house I had dreamed about and blogged about earlier in the day. Unreal (that's waht TS (BS) Eliot says about London in the Waste Land. "Unreal City. Unreal"
I'd continue blogging but of course, youth, curfew and Detroit is SMEARING LA!!!!
Anyway, weird shit. I took ten year old Baha'i twins William and Zacahry out to see the new Harry Potter moive tonight and guess what, in the first five minutes, I shit you not, there, on the screen, was the brick house I had dreamed about and blogged about earlier in the day. Unreal (that's waht TS (BS) Eliot says about London in the Waste Land. "Unreal City. Unreal"
I'd continue blogging but of course, youth, curfew and Detroit is SMEARING LA!!!!
Kiss of the Thames....
Sleep. The most salubrious of human activities. The anatomical purgatory. The eyelids fluttering, swiping pupils back and forth like REM windshield wipers. The body, strained, convulsing, dreaming, revisiting the inner utero of thought and requests, nocturnally gyrating, palpitating, drooling, tumbling, following, seething, blossoming open into a lotus of sketched pedals...Last night I am in London with a faceless girl who is showing me her underwear before the charter bus ferries us through the swanky suburbs. We are in London and I am with her even though I am alone. I am talking to my mom on the bus, telling her that I have finally made it back, that I have finally made it back to the hoi-poloi of England. The mad dash of red buses, the mixture of suits and bodies. The swelling of limbs being chewed into the underground.
The bus is smashing through cemeteries, motoring through dual-laned roads. My faceless beloved and I are looking for a building, for a brick-lane house. For a place we can make love in. For a place we can cultivate a family in. For a place I can come home to everynight and give her a kiss on the cheek and a smack on the ass.
The England sky is lucid. Certain patches of it are so blue that they are almost appear to be crystal. I find myself walking outside the border of my dream, walking next to the Thames; my body hooked to a visionary-reel so that it feels like with each step I am pulling the entire panel of atmosphere, the ambiance, the scene; with each sure-fire step of my gait I am hositing the next frame of existence with me and I am walking in tandem with the Thames river, walking by myself, walking alone and with England inside of me. I am wearing a suit with my hair pulled back and I am sure and shitfire that the direction I am going is the direction I have gone before.....
The bus is smashing through cemeteries, motoring through dual-laned roads. My faceless beloved and I are looking for a building, for a brick-lane house. For a place we can make love in. For a place we can cultivate a family in. For a place I can come home to everynight and give her a kiss on the cheek and a smack on the ass.
The England sky is lucid. Certain patches of it are so blue that they are almost appear to be crystal. I find myself walking outside the border of my dream, walking next to the Thames; my body hooked to a visionary-reel so that it feels like with each step I am pulling the entire panel of atmosphere, the ambiance, the scene; with each sure-fire step of my gait I am hositing the next frame of existence with me and I am walking in tandem with the Thames river, walking by myself, walking alone and with England inside of me. I am wearing a suit with my hair pulled back and I am sure and shitfire that the direction I am going is the direction I have gone before.....
Wednesday, June 09, 2004
Broadcast me a joyful blog....
Am I getting in touch with my feminine side? Box of kleenex, barrel of Starbucks mochachino ice cream, Jerry McQuire on the television set and every time Amy Dalley's 'Men Don't Change' line-dances across the radio I begin to sing along with the hick lyrics:
Cupid works for the devil: be suspicious if he cries:
"You know sex is usually good."
Yeah, but it ain't always right.
Chocolate is a band-aid, no matter what they say,
Shoes don't stretch,
An' men don't change.
God love it. Uncle Mike and I are in the process of moving and as always, viewing your possesions heaped in moldy cardboard squares gives you perspective on what is important. What you can take with you. What you can live without. So much of emphasis in a material-driven society tottering with human loneliness at the same time. It astounds me. Astounds me more than hippie-elfs and mystic-recluses. What people value as externally important vs. the internal drive to feel as human as possible.
Good news is my health. The last twenty-four months have been open hurricane season on my body. I've been working roughly 60-80 hours a week, two jobs, trying to make bank, but blessed none the less. For a while I was working 8am to 2am everyday...heavily flooded with caffeine. Last May I actually had two days where I was forced to work 40 hours shifts intermittently and it just about floored me, only I'm always so zany and overly-exerted anyway...good news is that working odd hours forces you to write; compells you to analyze your life and acknowledge what you want to do with it.
But sleeps nice too. I've been averaging a stellar 10 hours a night and its UNBELIEVABLE. (Codeine-god love it. The miracle Vice!) My stress rashes and acne are also starting to subside. As is my caffeine intake. I don't care what anyone says, Starbucks imbibed under certain copious dosages equates nothing short of a lethal injection to the nervous system. Even certain powdry dust is nowhere in the same Java-area code as Starbucks. Of course that's debatable. I hate coke--I mean I really hate coaciane. Next to Heroin its the one drug that I've seen sew war havoc on individuals life. A good buddy of mine got heavily into it and he had a heart attack one night at age 24. He practically lost his septum too. He would just sit around and shove white-dust up his nostrils until they would bleed and he would then wedge flecks of cotton up there to quell the bleeding and then act like the reason his lips were crimson-coated was becasue of the altitude in the room.
But caffeine as well. I got my first coffee pot when I was fourteen and me, being the studious writer that I am, used to burn-out coffee pots in high school like a flailed academic rushing out his flat thesis. Trying to prove something no one really cares about. In high-school I wrote arrogant as all get-out "po-ems" (two syllables) and was a purported authority on everything. I probably should have come home with more wedgies. I probably sounded like many liberal art profs. today sound...overly important, solipsistic, academically-indulgent, vanity-driven. It takes a long ass time for the scholar, the poet, the artist to realize that the world of art (even the world) wasn't designed for their own personal carp and critique. Everything you do in life has to done for the benefit of humanity. It has to be done for the benefit of the other.
Example, suicides kinda run in my family. My mom trunk of the genealogical tree (ironically Czech...her maiden name was Bozac and her grandfather was sponsored illegally in America as a Bottlegger, employed by Al Capone himself) has been riddled with them--mostly attempts. Four years ago my cousin Joey killed himself and he was only eleven.
Anyway. I went through alotta personal-shit around the time of Joey's death. I missed about a week of class and I had a fuckwad french prof. who told me that he was sorry for my loss but that it wasn't his problem. He was correct, It wasn't, but it still pissed me off that he didn't seem to empathize. That he didn't seem to care. He was from Angola and had witness his own parents assignation at a very young age. He then had the gall to quote some existentialism verbiage a la John Paul Sartre about man's true teleos or prupose ended in dust anyway and how mankind was responsible for his own ass.
Ok, whatever, I had read Sartre, and me being the then academic-pedant that I was had also skimmed through Immanuel Levinas, a jewish-philosopher who was one of Sartre pupils. Levinas theories extrapolate from the ashes of the halocaoust and he agrees very adamantly with Sartre's no-afterlife views on the condition of mankind. Levinas branches off from sartre's bleakness by stating that mankind's true purpose in the world is to the capital-voweled Other or L'autre (in french). This is what intriniscally adds meaning to our lives...having an interface; harboring a rapport with other human beings. Helping them out as they help us out. Trying to cement a feeling of oneness in a planet that no-longer feels period, however terse that feeling may be....
I told my French Prof this and then I told him to have a good day, inserting a few choice vulgarities for affect, telling him to have a nice life. It was too late to officially drop the class and I received a volitional F. However, to this day, that conversation with my french prof. ranks as the most honest thing I've ever said, done or written in a classroom. And if I had to do it all again I would, but of course, I'd save my cousin first....
Cupid works for the devil: be suspicious if he cries:
"You know sex is usually good."
Yeah, but it ain't always right.
Chocolate is a band-aid, no matter what they say,
Shoes don't stretch,
An' men don't change.
God love it. Uncle Mike and I are in the process of moving and as always, viewing your possesions heaped in moldy cardboard squares gives you perspective on what is important. What you can take with you. What you can live without. So much of emphasis in a material-driven society tottering with human loneliness at the same time. It astounds me. Astounds me more than hippie-elfs and mystic-recluses. What people value as externally important vs. the internal drive to feel as human as possible.
Good news is my health. The last twenty-four months have been open hurricane season on my body. I've been working roughly 60-80 hours a week, two jobs, trying to make bank, but blessed none the less. For a while I was working 8am to 2am everyday...heavily flooded with caffeine. Last May I actually had two days where I was forced to work 40 hours shifts intermittently and it just about floored me, only I'm always so zany and overly-exerted anyway...good news is that working odd hours forces you to write; compells you to analyze your life and acknowledge what you want to do with it.
But sleeps nice too. I've been averaging a stellar 10 hours a night and its UNBELIEVABLE. (Codeine-god love it. The miracle Vice!) My stress rashes and acne are also starting to subside. As is my caffeine intake. I don't care what anyone says, Starbucks imbibed under certain copious dosages equates nothing short of a lethal injection to the nervous system. Even certain powdry dust is nowhere in the same Java-area code as Starbucks. Of course that's debatable. I hate coke--I mean I really hate coaciane. Next to Heroin its the one drug that I've seen sew war havoc on individuals life. A good buddy of mine got heavily into it and he had a heart attack one night at age 24. He practically lost his septum too. He would just sit around and shove white-dust up his nostrils until they would bleed and he would then wedge flecks of cotton up there to quell the bleeding and then act like the reason his lips were crimson-coated was becasue of the altitude in the room.
But caffeine as well. I got my first coffee pot when I was fourteen and me, being the studious writer that I am, used to burn-out coffee pots in high school like a flailed academic rushing out his flat thesis. Trying to prove something no one really cares about. In high-school I wrote arrogant as all get-out "po-ems" (two syllables) and was a purported authority on everything. I probably should have come home with more wedgies. I probably sounded like many liberal art profs. today sound...overly important, solipsistic, academically-indulgent, vanity-driven. It takes a long ass time for the scholar, the poet, the artist to realize that the world of art (even the world) wasn't designed for their own personal carp and critique. Everything you do in life has to done for the benefit of humanity. It has to be done for the benefit of the other.
Example, suicides kinda run in my family. My mom trunk of the genealogical tree (ironically Czech...her maiden name was Bozac and her grandfather was sponsored illegally in America as a Bottlegger, employed by Al Capone himself) has been riddled with them--mostly attempts. Four years ago my cousin Joey killed himself and he was only eleven.
Anyway. I went through alotta personal-shit around the time of Joey's death. I missed about a week of class and I had a fuckwad french prof. who told me that he was sorry for my loss but that it wasn't his problem. He was correct, It wasn't, but it still pissed me off that he didn't seem to empathize. That he didn't seem to care. He was from Angola and had witness his own parents assignation at a very young age. He then had the gall to quote some existentialism verbiage a la John Paul Sartre about man's true teleos or prupose ended in dust anyway and how mankind was responsible for his own ass.
Ok, whatever, I had read Sartre, and me being the then academic-pedant that I was had also skimmed through Immanuel Levinas, a jewish-philosopher who was one of Sartre pupils. Levinas theories extrapolate from the ashes of the halocaoust and he agrees very adamantly with Sartre's no-afterlife views on the condition of mankind. Levinas branches off from sartre's bleakness by stating that mankind's true purpose in the world is to the capital-voweled Other or L'autre (in french). This is what intriniscally adds meaning to our lives...having an interface; harboring a rapport with other human beings. Helping them out as they help us out. Trying to cement a feeling of oneness in a planet that no-longer feels period, however terse that feeling may be....
I told my French Prof this and then I told him to have a good day, inserting a few choice vulgarities for affect, telling him to have a nice life. It was too late to officially drop the class and I received a volitional F. However, to this day, that conversation with my french prof. ranks as the most honest thing I've ever said, done or written in a classroom. And if I had to do it all again I would, but of course, I'd save my cousin first....
Tuesday, June 08, 2004
So you think you can love me and spit in my eye
Devastating morning. Feels like my tea cup heart has been inadvertantly dropped while being juggled by a midget or something. Just came back from emptying my e-mail account and I received that perfunctory reply from Swissy-Missy with the sentence, "random trips to Peoria to visit my sister and my boyfriend" sliced in the middle of a paragraph. Nothing is worse in a relationship than being the 'other' guy. God I hate this feeling.
*
Remember that scene from the first Rocky where his ring manager tells Rock-o to quit sleeping with Adrianne b/c "Women weaken legs!" Perhaps that's true with writers, "Women weaken prose!" Having a hard time reaching that bloggin' " end-zone" inside me this morning. And of course, I know inside that all I have to do is suck it up, throw a few punches and get back inside that ring and finish the bout.
*
Woke up this morning thinking about zookeepers adage which purportedly states that "cage any given homogenus species of the opposing sex for long enough and they'll eventually mate,"--Is this what college is? Is this what reality is? We're all lving in this atmospherical cage and, given close proximity, we'll eventually get it on?
*
"'Cause you know there's no gender in the next world." Uncle Mike informs me last night at dinner.
"What do you mean?" I look at him.
"What's the purpose of gender." He inquires.
"Procreation." I say. He nods.
"People have a hard time envisioning this. That the soul is without a sexual preference."
I have a hard time envisioning this. That our genitals and our our innate animalistic desire to feel oneness and to create a bridge of union between genders doesn't follow us to the next world.
*
Night I 'randomly' bumped into Swissy-Missy outside of One World I asked Mike why, if she wasn't interested in me or whatever, did she come on to me like she was in the first place.
"It was hormonal" He said, dismissing the matter.
"Oh," I say, looking at my elonagted shadow beneath a streetlamp.
*
If you have a life in the arts you inevitably run around with lots of people who are gay. Many of my best friends are gay and my best friend, David, and I have this long running joke that when my first wife leaves me for my sister or whatever, we're all gonna get together and have a guys night out and cry and watch a marathon viewing of LORD OF THE RINGS uncut for twelve hours straight and right at the apex of the film; right at the moment when Frodo finally free's himself of his fettered fire-hydrant-sized ego and chucks his ring into the lava of Mt. Doom I'll finally have the balls to remove my own wedding oval and chuck it into the mechanical gnaw of the garbage disposal and all my gay friends would formally applaud and address me as 'honey' and toast Zima and tell me that I could do better and she was really a bitch and then tell me that they secretly made bets before the wedding about how long my supposed nuptial rapport would last.
*
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! I hate sound sounding sooooooo sullen.
*
There's a story I heard about Abdul-baha's parrot. Apaprently if you would poke his parrot it would only say one thing.
"Be happy!" The parrot would peep.
*
Ah, shit, nothin' like feeling heartbroken!!!!!
*
Remember that scene from the first Rocky where his ring manager tells Rock-o to quit sleeping with Adrianne b/c "Women weaken legs!" Perhaps that's true with writers, "Women weaken prose!" Having a hard time reaching that bloggin' " end-zone" inside me this morning. And of course, I know inside that all I have to do is suck it up, throw a few punches and get back inside that ring and finish the bout.
*
Woke up this morning thinking about zookeepers adage which purportedly states that "cage any given homogenus species of the opposing sex for long enough and they'll eventually mate,"--Is this what college is? Is this what reality is? We're all lving in this atmospherical cage and, given close proximity, we'll eventually get it on?
*
"'Cause you know there's no gender in the next world." Uncle Mike informs me last night at dinner.
"What do you mean?" I look at him.
"What's the purpose of gender." He inquires.
"Procreation." I say. He nods.
"People have a hard time envisioning this. That the soul is without a sexual preference."
I have a hard time envisioning this. That our genitals and our our innate animalistic desire to feel oneness and to create a bridge of union between genders doesn't follow us to the next world.
*
Night I 'randomly' bumped into Swissy-Missy outside of One World I asked Mike why, if she wasn't interested in me or whatever, did she come on to me like she was in the first place.
"It was hormonal" He said, dismissing the matter.
"Oh," I say, looking at my elonagted shadow beneath a streetlamp.
*
If you have a life in the arts you inevitably run around with lots of people who are gay. Many of my best friends are gay and my best friend, David, and I have this long running joke that when my first wife leaves me for my sister or whatever, we're all gonna get together and have a guys night out and cry and watch a marathon viewing of LORD OF THE RINGS uncut for twelve hours straight and right at the apex of the film; right at the moment when Frodo finally free's himself of his fettered fire-hydrant-sized ego and chucks his ring into the lava of Mt. Doom I'll finally have the balls to remove my own wedding oval and chuck it into the mechanical gnaw of the garbage disposal and all my gay friends would formally applaud and address me as 'honey' and toast Zima and tell me that I could do better and she was really a bitch and then tell me that they secretly made bets before the wedding about how long my supposed nuptial rapport would last.
*
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! I hate sound sounding sooooooo sullen.
*
There's a story I heard about Abdul-baha's parrot. Apaprently if you would poke his parrot it would only say one thing.
"Be happy!" The parrot would peep.
*
Ah, shit, nothin' like feeling heartbroken!!!!!
Sunday, June 06, 2004
Wayward Devotional for a Sunday Afternoon
"I can prove co-existence to you." Uncle Mike says, behind the steering wheel of his burgundy-flavored Lincoln as he combs the gravel swoops of I-74, the hilly patch of road that buckles Bloomington into Peoria.
"How," I ask, of course, incredulously.
"Take a deep breath." Uncle Mike asserts. Notice the world around you. What do you see?"
I tuck my chin in typical doubting Thomas skepticism. My lips contort. A distilling silence foams.
"Notice the world around you as you see it. Note the green pastures outside. Note the sound of my voice. Here the rattle of the air-conditioner. The cars positioned around us."
"Check, check check." I metally demarcate those items in my mind. Mike always pulls this shit. One second I'm a human being, sentient, easily awed by the rapid accleration of life in a dot-com and disparate culture, the next second I feel like I'm a grasshopper and Mike is telling me to have patience. "Patience Grasshopper." I hear him almost humming, informing me that life is not what I have always perceived it to be.
"Patience grasshopper."
*
Think I've milked my mystic udder dry this past week. Everyone I meet online is a purported mystic. It almost reminds me of that old Dr. Pepper commercial: "I'm a Mystic, Your a Mystic, He's a Mystic, She's a Mystic, wouldn't you like to be a Mystic, too?" I think about reading an old interview with publisher James McClaughlin, who published Hesse's Siddhartha and how he was kinda disgusted by the initial manuscript.
"True Buddhism is tough," he said, in between drag of his cigar. "Hesse made Buddhism sound like some cool-slap hippie past time and Buddhism is nothing like that. True Buddhism means giving up everything in order to gain everything.
"...wouldn't you like to be a Buddhist, too?"
*
My boy Nick is the writer who lives upstairs, works upstairs, dishes out sentences upstairs, stomps downstairs to my desk, gives me a long handshake. Inquires how my own writing's going. Nick used to work for a swanky East coast magazine where he was paid a dollar a word.
"No shit brother, a dollar a word." I ranted, the first time we met.
"David man its considerably low by industry standards."
"Still, man, a dollar a word." I stop, thinking that the last sentence I just said to Nick equated my hourly wage. Prior to deductions, of course.
Nick's been assiduously hammering out his novel for the last four years. He's older than I am and if you'd look at us from a distance you'd think he was a solid sentence shooting Dirk Nowitski to my long-haired loopy-dribbling Steve Nash. Last semester I went back to school full time for the first time since autumn 2000. I dropped (drank) out of school that semester. My rationale was that simply there'd be more sentences in my novels than there would be calligraphed on my diploma. And of course, I was right.
Not to mention that my "Christian" parents seemed to have borrowed a bar of soap from Pontious Pilate and washed their hands from their heathen son's literary proclivities very early in my academic trudge. Perhaps human beings wouldn't feel so compelled to plant psychedelic substances down their own throats or water their earthly vessels with bottles of non-mathmatical proofs if they could feel a sense of eternal bondage, a modicum of love, and overall feeling of purpose in the world.
Nick tells me he's a dry fountain. He's written the first two pages of his novel three-hundred times.
"David, bro, I've lost everything man. Everything."
I tell him he's my hero. I tell him how much I value seeing him tow his laptop into the library every day and sit on his ass with his literary bib on. I tell him to keep on chiseling away...that somewhere in the soil of those rocky pages is a newfound fossil unearthing a beautiful tale.
"David man, I'm 32. I need to have my shit together." I look at him. He looks back at me like I don'thave a clue about the vagaries of adulthood.
"Me being a writer has ruined ties with my family." Nick says. "I've lost girls becasue they can't stand that I write for a living."
I tell him the advice that Miss Mack used to tell me. I tell him to keep on keeping on. I tell him to have fun with it. I tell him to put the ball in the hoop. When I see him ambling across campus, I say out loud, "There's a writer!"
"Just finish the book." I tell him. "We just need to finish the book. We can't let this thing that was once our life preserver sink us like an anchor."
He looks back at me and adjusts his glasses.
"...wouldn't you like to be a writer, too?"
*
"Look around," Uncle Mike insists. "Absorb everything that is around you. Look at the windshield wipers. Hear the motorized hum of the engine. Notice the position of the sun overhead. Look at the digitalized numbers on the clock."
I comply.
"Ready," Uncle Mike says. "I'm going to prove to you that co-existence exists after all."
*
It was exactly a week before 9-11 and Kinkos wanted eighty dollars just to print off the third draft of my novel.
"Eighty bucks." I say, groping multiple zip drives.
"It's a big document. Plus it has illustrations." The dweeb employee says.
"But still, it should only be ten cents a page."
"You have alotta pages."
Later on that day I went down to the pay phone in front of the abandoned liquer store. I hadn't paid my cell phone bill in months and I needed to call home. In front of me walked a beautiful girl, dirty-diaphonous blonde hair and a tight black skirt that rose just above the tropic of Cancer if her thighs and legs were represntative of the globe . Her Make-up was late 80's sloppy and she wore thick trussed boots skimming past her knees.
Her entire body I swear, was made of porcelain.
"Give me ten dollars." She said, soliciting me.
"Honey I don't have ten dollars." I said. She walked closer.
"If you give me ten dollars I'll give you a blowjob." She said, very straight-forwardly. There was a hush of traffic. I fondled the stem of the phone. It was out of order. She was in close proximity. Her lips were smeared with something that smelled like raspberries.
"Do you give hugs?" I inquired, still tapping the silver squares on the phone, hoping that the din of the dial tone would somehow make her petitions dissipate.
"What," She looked at me. Her entire body was shaped like an exclamatory mark. Either in shock or perhaps disgust."
"Do you give hugs?" I asked again, allowing gravity's tug to deal with the phone I just dropped."
"Well...." She says, still looking at me. There was a gold-toothed black man across the street. She kept averting her vision into his.
"I'll give you everything that's in my wallet if you give me a hug."
She paused. When she said the word blowjob she looked behind a dumpster. Now she just looked at me like I was crazy.
"Here?" She says looking at me. Her eyes once again volleyed across the street.
"Why not," I said.
"Because," She said. She was taller than me. Her breasts were lower case a. From what I can surmise she was probably between seventeen and twenty-two years of age.
The next thing I know her arms were wreathed around me. It was almost like she was placing an invisible medallion around my neck. The embrace was terse, but there was a squeeze and for a moment, both of our eyelids zipped closed at the same time.
"Here," I say to her. I don't remember how much currency I had in my pocket. It wasn't much. It was green and crinkly. It was all I had left til' Monday. She took it and then turned her back, clacking the thick soles of her boots across the abandoned parking, yelling out the name of her pimp across the street.
"Shit." I said, looking at her back, tilling my fingers trhough my hair, wondering where the hell I am suppsoed to go after this.
"...wouldn't you like to sell your body, too?"
*
"I don't think I've really ever been in love before." Swissy-Missy tells me, inside the student Center. We are eating lunch.
"Yeah," I say
"Really," She says. Before grabbing my hand and pulling me down into her scent as if her own hand were made of plastic gym weights.
*
I ran home after I encountered the prostitute. I hurtled up into my apartment and dump over a box of moldy books. I immediately open my cupboard. Everything that had a shelf life was hers. There were packages of roman noodles. There was little boxes of tofu. There was pasturized milk. There was sugar and instant coffee. There was rice-a-roni and mac-n-cheese. Everything that had a shelf life I had decided was hers. Cans of soup and tomato paste. Long elongated boxes of pasta and fettuccini. All hers. I ran into my room, diving into my book shelves, looking for my old comfirmation bible. My name and the Date APRIL 12 1992, initialed in silver cursive in the lower right-hand corner.
I was going to save her.
With the heap of goods boxed into my chest I ran. I didn't care who she had slept with. I didn't care if she was HIV +. I was going to save her. She could sleep in my room. She could take care of the house while I was at work. I'm sure I could bullshit with a fellow failed academic and get her into a community college.
I ran.
By the time I arrived at the parking lot it was vacant. The wood covering the gunshot gutted windows of the liquer store looked like patches, thwarting universal vision from myopic sight. I stood beneath the early September sun looking for her. I crossed the street. I went behind the Thrift store. I tried shouting out her name but then remember that I never asked for it. She asked me for a blowjob. I demanded only a hug. Currency was exchanged, names weren't.
I still had the box of food and my comfirmation bible in my hands. She was nowhere to be seen. It had been only fifteen minutes since our embraced. Our city wasn't that big.
"Hey kid," A Mexican head jutted out from the side of the liquer store. He was smoking a cigarette.
"What," I asked him, pissed off. I wanted to hit him.
"You lookin' for someone, yo?" He asked. He was in his undershirt.
"No," I said. "I'm not at all. Not at all."
As I turned around I noticed that the phone was still off the hook. It swayed in the manner of a pendulum; in the manner of a suicide, back and forth. For some reason though, I could swear I could hear the dial tone emitting a din warble.
I set the box of food down at the corner, next to a gray fire hydrant. I fished out my bible I hadn't cracked open in over five years.
I walked home alone.
"...wouldn't you like to be a savior, too?"
*
"Are you ready now?" Uncle Mike says. We are still in his Lincoln. "Okay, wait a minute, I'm going to show you that co-existence is valid."
*
With my bible tucked under my paw I began to fucking cry. Everything that was fueled up above my cheekbones suddenly broke into millions of shattered stain glass tears. I cried becasue of the direction my life was headed. I cried because I lost Vanessa two years prior. I cried because it seemed like my parents wanted shit to do with me outside of Chruch on Sunday. Cried because it seemed like I was always trying to go somewhere; trying to push my dreams out from the port inside of me; push off into the sea of reality only to watch the ship sink in shallow water.
I cried. And then I cried some more. I couldn't even save a prostitute who had her arms bobbling around my neck, momentarily, as if for support.
*
"No," Swissy-Missy says, biting into her sandwhich on wheat bread. "I've never been in love. Have you?" She says, her eyes bat. Her skin is silk. Once again she grabs my hand.
"Yes," I tell her. " Yes I have."
"...wouldn't you like to fall in love, too?"
*
I am blogging an entry titled WAYARD DEVOTIONAL FOR A SUNDAY AFTERNOON. I am writing about a prostitute. I am writing about Swissy-Missy and Co-existence. I have been writing for a couple hours. I decide to go outside for a walk.
I walk the path I always walk. It is freshman orientation here on campus. The student center is fraught with girls wearing tanktops and low jean-shorts and name tags. I walk out past the Student Center. I make a V-cut across the quad, alter my gait and head towards the tinted shadow of the library.
There are three people walking around. The females are older, they wear chic librarian spectacles. One is the color of lipton tea with a shock of straight black hair. She is syringe skinny and she reminds me of my mom.
In a weird way I want to give her a hug
The guys name is Matt. He is wearing khakis and a polo shirt. His hair is cut very short and is spiked with gel. He has a smile that looks like a roast beef sandwhich. I wave at them. The Sun is pushing heavy shafts of translucent light over the top of Bradley Hall casting circus tent shadows across the quad. The sky is so blue is could be mistaken for certain vectors of the Carribean.
"Do you mind if we ask you a couple of questions." Matt says, offering his feigned smile. The woman who reminds me of my mom opens up a notebook and starts chronicling my responses down. At first I think they want to ask for directions. But no, they ask me if I were to die today and God were to ask me "Why should I let you in?" what would I say.
I look back at them and smile.
"...wouldn't you like to get into heaven, too?"
*
I am holding my confirmation bible across my chest and I am crying. I curse God for not allowing me the chance to save her. I curse God because I'm always poor and seem to try so hard. I curse God because my parents don't even give a fuck about me.
I hear two beeps from across the street. It is Mike. The crazy psychic from down the street.
"What are you doing?" He says. I suck up my tears. I try to pawn off the color of my face on allergies. He smiles.
"Well, get in." He says.
I don't want to but I do.
As we drive around downtown P-town I look for the flock of prostitutes. He circles around SWINGERS WORLD I wonder if she is inside.
"Who are you looking for." Mike asks me.
"I don't know." I tell him. "I don't know where she's at."
"Well she has to be somewhere." Mike says, a flecked look of eternity cached in his logic. "Everyone has to be somewhere."
"True," I nod, still dubious of his purported psychic abilities even though he tells great stories. Last week he told me that he first realized that he had a gift when he was eight years old. He was living with his grandparents and he had a dream that his Grandfather ahd died. This dream freightened him so much he ran into his grandparents bedroom and slinked between their bodies. Two hours later, he was awakened to his grandmothers voice shrilling in his ears.
His grandfather was dead.
*
The trio of Baptists apporve of the answers I am giving so far. I have told them that yes, sure, I agree that Jesus was the son of God. I believe he was a dispensation of the light. They smile. I smile. We seem to be getting along fine. Matt has already made an analogy comparing the free-gift of eternal life to that of a Sports car.
"Say it was your Birthday tomorrow, David." He says, his pawned jerkey smile a stye in my sight.
"And say I gave you a free sports car and then you gave me say, three dollars for it...was the gift really free then?" His voice sounds friendly and fake. Almost like he is talking to me about morality behind the wooden bars of crib.
I smile. My mother is Baptist. My father was on the Lutheran Evangelical board growing up, He loved to tell people about Jesus.
"Or lets say there's two boats. There's the David boat with a hole in the bottom of it from earthly sin and then there's a Jesus boat that's golden and without flaw..."
I make a concious effort to smile. We seemed to be getting along just fine until they asked me what Chruch, Synagogue or Parish I attend and my answer was an unlisted "Baha'i Center". They keep talk about sin like I have just given the pastor's daughter chlamydia.
The woman who looks like my mom holds up a wad of jingling keys and begins to play "this-little-piggy" with them.
"Now I have lots of keys on my keycain but only one of them is the key that lets me into my Fathers house." She says with an aura of superficiality.
I am lost. I smile. In my mind there is a picture of a dervish. Too much mysticism in the past week. I think of the friends I have made online and I think of their own sentences. I try to picture them smiling behind their sentences. I try to picture them smiling while they pelt out sentences into their own blogs.
Then I say the greatest name inside my head. I say it over and over again. Like the plastic weathervane on top of a beanie; the name spins and spins as I say it to myself. I look at my mother, telling me that only a personal-relationship with Jesus is the key to Heaven. I say the greatest name in my head. I say it so loud that I say it with cymbals and timpani. I say it until I am dizzy, the three-idividuals looking at me, talking about grace and assurance and I am smiling, looking past them, looking at the hard slices of light ferrying down to where I am standing.
"So, again, david, can you say with certainity that if you were to die to toady God would hand you the Key to eternal life?" My mom says, holding up a rugged silver tooth in front of me.
I think about the greatest name. I think about the prostitute whose name I never learned. I wonder if the Baptist Canvassers would see her on the street, I wonder if they would walk up to her and ask her for a hug. If they would try to give her food and offer her one of their own bibles. I wonder if she would listen to them or be put off because they look like they have just stepped out of a Land's End catalougue.
I think about my dad. How some of the best times of his life were sharing the gospel.
"Yes," I say, smiling. "I think I found the key."
*
Mike drops me off in front of my apartment. For most of our drive I was silent. I told him that I tried to help someone out today and yet I failed. I mentioned only in passing that I had wanted to print out the third draft of my year old novel but that Kinkos wanted eighty dollars for it.
"Here," Mike says, his right hand pushing into his back pocket. He takes out two green bills.
"Why don't you go to the library and print your book out. It should't be more than forty dollars."
Mike, this is way too much. I say, not wanting burden anyone else financially.
"Well if you don't use it, who else am I going to give it to?" He says rhetorically before I give him a hug, the second hug I'd given in as many hours.
*
Last time I saw Jasna I took her out for a date to an Indian restaurant and then out for a concert at Weslyan. We spent the whole day relaxing, sleeping, lounging around her apartment. I had not seen her previously in almost eight months.
"We need to get ready, Daveeeeed." Jasna says. I am tired. I am sleepy. I am content just milling around her place. But, yes, we need to get ready.
"Here, I am going to change." She said. There was no door that seperated the guest bedroom from the hallway so she folded the doors of the hallway closet and bathroom into a wooden V, occluding my sight.
"What are you doing?" I said, almost offended. Although we were not lovers we were used to each others body.
"You are so silly, Daveeeeed!" Jasna says, smiling adjusting the doors.
"Why don't you just change out here." I say, walking towards the bathroom, splashing water on my face, trying to wake up.
"You are so silly Daveeeeed." She laughs, her face beaming from behind the V-cusped doors. I hear her voice and try to squint through the wooden fissure, her body pulling itself into a string of shadows.
"Stop, Daveeeeed." She says. "You think about sex too much. That all you ever think about!"
"I don't," I say, feeling seminally rejected. I wander back into the living room. I yell at Jasna to hurry up. I put a Tom Petty CD on. I start pantomiming the words to "Learning To Fly." I frisk the lower shelf of the refrigerator for libations. I toss punches at my own shadow, deeply elongated under the lights of her apartment. I think about how Tom Petty always reminds me of Martina Navratilova in his face.
There is a shuffle and the the sound of wood being closed. And there is Jasna, radiant, dressed all in black, her hair pinched back in twin diminutive red braids.
She looked stunning.
"Ok, Daveeeeed." Jasna says, groping my arm. "We can go now, Daveeeed."
And so we left as one unit.
"....don't you wish that life could be so new?"
*
"You ready?" Mike asks, awaiting to affirm his co-existence opus. I have already closed my eyes. I have soaked up my ambiance as if my entire anatomy were a sponge. I am waiting for Mike to verify co-existence to me.
"Now listen," Mike says "Are you ready. Co-existence." I nod, try to tell him to get on with it by orchestrating my chin. The next thing I know Mike is adjusting the plastic nubs on the radio. There is the crackle static representative of AM radio.
"See," Mike says, a flash of laughter jets across his face. He is freely pressing nubs like a switchboard operator at happy hour.
"Co-existance!" He says, laughing, looking at the chagrined look tatooed on my own face. He is still laughing and pressing buttons. The static AM warble is starting to get to me.
"And look," Mike says, still laughing. "There's even FM." He says, with almost a metaphysical snort of realization.
"Yes," I say, looking out into the window shield at the invisble outline of my own whirred reflection. "There's even FM," I say to myself before smiling.
Everyone.
"I'm a Pepper, Your a Pepper, He's a Pepper, She's a Pepper, wouldn't you like to be a Pepper, too?"
"How," I ask, of course, incredulously.
"Take a deep breath." Uncle Mike asserts. Notice the world around you. What do you see?"
I tuck my chin in typical doubting Thomas skepticism. My lips contort. A distilling silence foams.
"Notice the world around you as you see it. Note the green pastures outside. Note the sound of my voice. Here the rattle of the air-conditioner. The cars positioned around us."
"Check, check check." I metally demarcate those items in my mind. Mike always pulls this shit. One second I'm a human being, sentient, easily awed by the rapid accleration of life in a dot-com and disparate culture, the next second I feel like I'm a grasshopper and Mike is telling me to have patience. "Patience Grasshopper." I hear him almost humming, informing me that life is not what I have always perceived it to be.
"Patience grasshopper."
*
Think I've milked my mystic udder dry this past week. Everyone I meet online is a purported mystic. It almost reminds me of that old Dr. Pepper commercial: "I'm a Mystic, Your a Mystic, He's a Mystic, She's a Mystic, wouldn't you like to be a Mystic, too?" I think about reading an old interview with publisher James McClaughlin, who published Hesse's Siddhartha and how he was kinda disgusted by the initial manuscript.
"True Buddhism is tough," he said, in between drag of his cigar. "Hesse made Buddhism sound like some cool-slap hippie past time and Buddhism is nothing like that. True Buddhism means giving up everything in order to gain everything.
"...wouldn't you like to be a Buddhist, too?"
*
My boy Nick is the writer who lives upstairs, works upstairs, dishes out sentences upstairs, stomps downstairs to my desk, gives me a long handshake. Inquires how my own writing's going. Nick used to work for a swanky East coast magazine where he was paid a dollar a word.
"No shit brother, a dollar a word." I ranted, the first time we met.
"David man its considerably low by industry standards."
"Still, man, a dollar a word." I stop, thinking that the last sentence I just said to Nick equated my hourly wage. Prior to deductions, of course.
Nick's been assiduously hammering out his novel for the last four years. He's older than I am and if you'd look at us from a distance you'd think he was a solid sentence shooting Dirk Nowitski to my long-haired loopy-dribbling Steve Nash. Last semester I went back to school full time for the first time since autumn 2000. I dropped (drank) out of school that semester. My rationale was that simply there'd be more sentences in my novels than there would be calligraphed on my diploma. And of course, I was right.
Not to mention that my "Christian" parents seemed to have borrowed a bar of soap from Pontious Pilate and washed their hands from their heathen son's literary proclivities very early in my academic trudge. Perhaps human beings wouldn't feel so compelled to plant psychedelic substances down their own throats or water their earthly vessels with bottles of non-mathmatical proofs if they could feel a sense of eternal bondage, a modicum of love, and overall feeling of purpose in the world.
Nick tells me he's a dry fountain. He's written the first two pages of his novel three-hundred times.
"David, bro, I've lost everything man. Everything."
I tell him he's my hero. I tell him how much I value seeing him tow his laptop into the library every day and sit on his ass with his literary bib on. I tell him to keep on chiseling away...that somewhere in the soil of those rocky pages is a newfound fossil unearthing a beautiful tale.
"David man, I'm 32. I need to have my shit together." I look at him. He looks back at me like I don'thave a clue about the vagaries of adulthood.
"Me being a writer has ruined ties with my family." Nick says. "I've lost girls becasue they can't stand that I write for a living."
I tell him the advice that Miss Mack used to tell me. I tell him to keep on keeping on. I tell him to have fun with it. I tell him to put the ball in the hoop. When I see him ambling across campus, I say out loud, "There's a writer!"
"Just finish the book." I tell him. "We just need to finish the book. We can't let this thing that was once our life preserver sink us like an anchor."
He looks back at me and adjusts his glasses.
"...wouldn't you like to be a writer, too?"
*
"Look around," Uncle Mike insists. "Absorb everything that is around you. Look at the windshield wipers. Hear the motorized hum of the engine. Notice the position of the sun overhead. Look at the digitalized numbers on the clock."
I comply.
"Ready," Uncle Mike says. "I'm going to prove to you that co-existence exists after all."
*
It was exactly a week before 9-11 and Kinkos wanted eighty dollars just to print off the third draft of my novel.
"Eighty bucks." I say, groping multiple zip drives.
"It's a big document. Plus it has illustrations." The dweeb employee says.
"But still, it should only be ten cents a page."
"You have alotta pages."
Later on that day I went down to the pay phone in front of the abandoned liquer store. I hadn't paid my cell phone bill in months and I needed to call home. In front of me walked a beautiful girl, dirty-diaphonous blonde hair and a tight black skirt that rose just above the tropic of Cancer if her thighs and legs were represntative of the globe . Her Make-up was late 80's sloppy and she wore thick trussed boots skimming past her knees.
Her entire body I swear, was made of porcelain.
"Give me ten dollars." She said, soliciting me.
"Honey I don't have ten dollars." I said. She walked closer.
"If you give me ten dollars I'll give you a blowjob." She said, very straight-forwardly. There was a hush of traffic. I fondled the stem of the phone. It was out of order. She was in close proximity. Her lips were smeared with something that smelled like raspberries.
"Do you give hugs?" I inquired, still tapping the silver squares on the phone, hoping that the din of the dial tone would somehow make her petitions dissipate.
"What," She looked at me. Her entire body was shaped like an exclamatory mark. Either in shock or perhaps disgust."
"Do you give hugs?" I asked again, allowing gravity's tug to deal with the phone I just dropped."
"Well...." She says, still looking at me. There was a gold-toothed black man across the street. She kept averting her vision into his.
"I'll give you everything that's in my wallet if you give me a hug."
She paused. When she said the word blowjob she looked behind a dumpster. Now she just looked at me like I was crazy.
"Here?" She says looking at me. Her eyes once again volleyed across the street.
"Why not," I said.
"Because," She said. She was taller than me. Her breasts were lower case a. From what I can surmise she was probably between seventeen and twenty-two years of age.
The next thing I know her arms were wreathed around me. It was almost like she was placing an invisible medallion around my neck. The embrace was terse, but there was a squeeze and for a moment, both of our eyelids zipped closed at the same time.
"Here," I say to her. I don't remember how much currency I had in my pocket. It wasn't much. It was green and crinkly. It was all I had left til' Monday. She took it and then turned her back, clacking the thick soles of her boots across the abandoned parking, yelling out the name of her pimp across the street.
"Shit." I said, looking at her back, tilling my fingers trhough my hair, wondering where the hell I am suppsoed to go after this.
"...wouldn't you like to sell your body, too?"
*
"I don't think I've really ever been in love before." Swissy-Missy tells me, inside the student Center. We are eating lunch.
"Yeah," I say
"Really," She says. Before grabbing my hand and pulling me down into her scent as if her own hand were made of plastic gym weights.
*
I ran home after I encountered the prostitute. I hurtled up into my apartment and dump over a box of moldy books. I immediately open my cupboard. Everything that had a shelf life was hers. There were packages of roman noodles. There was little boxes of tofu. There was pasturized milk. There was sugar and instant coffee. There was rice-a-roni and mac-n-cheese. Everything that had a shelf life I had decided was hers. Cans of soup and tomato paste. Long elongated boxes of pasta and fettuccini. All hers. I ran into my room, diving into my book shelves, looking for my old comfirmation bible. My name and the Date APRIL 12 1992, initialed in silver cursive in the lower right-hand corner.
I was going to save her.
With the heap of goods boxed into my chest I ran. I didn't care who she had slept with. I didn't care if she was HIV +. I was going to save her. She could sleep in my room. She could take care of the house while I was at work. I'm sure I could bullshit with a fellow failed academic and get her into a community college.
I ran.
By the time I arrived at the parking lot it was vacant. The wood covering the gunshot gutted windows of the liquer store looked like patches, thwarting universal vision from myopic sight. I stood beneath the early September sun looking for her. I crossed the street. I went behind the Thrift store. I tried shouting out her name but then remember that I never asked for it. She asked me for a blowjob. I demanded only a hug. Currency was exchanged, names weren't.
I still had the box of food and my comfirmation bible in my hands. She was nowhere to be seen. It had been only fifteen minutes since our embraced. Our city wasn't that big.
"Hey kid," A Mexican head jutted out from the side of the liquer store. He was smoking a cigarette.
"What," I asked him, pissed off. I wanted to hit him.
"You lookin' for someone, yo?" He asked. He was in his undershirt.
"No," I said. "I'm not at all. Not at all."
As I turned around I noticed that the phone was still off the hook. It swayed in the manner of a pendulum; in the manner of a suicide, back and forth. For some reason though, I could swear I could hear the dial tone emitting a din warble.
I set the box of food down at the corner, next to a gray fire hydrant. I fished out my bible I hadn't cracked open in over five years.
I walked home alone.
"...wouldn't you like to be a savior, too?"
*
"Are you ready now?" Uncle Mike says. We are still in his Lincoln. "Okay, wait a minute, I'm going to show you that co-existence is valid."
*
With my bible tucked under my paw I began to fucking cry. Everything that was fueled up above my cheekbones suddenly broke into millions of shattered stain glass tears. I cried becasue of the direction my life was headed. I cried because I lost Vanessa two years prior. I cried because it seemed like my parents wanted shit to do with me outside of Chruch on Sunday. Cried because it seemed like I was always trying to go somewhere; trying to push my dreams out from the port inside of me; push off into the sea of reality only to watch the ship sink in shallow water.
I cried. And then I cried some more. I couldn't even save a prostitute who had her arms bobbling around my neck, momentarily, as if for support.
*
"No," Swissy-Missy says, biting into her sandwhich on wheat bread. "I've never been in love. Have you?" She says, her eyes bat. Her skin is silk. Once again she grabs my hand.
"Yes," I tell her. " Yes I have."
"...wouldn't you like to fall in love, too?"
*
I am blogging an entry titled WAYARD DEVOTIONAL FOR A SUNDAY AFTERNOON. I am writing about a prostitute. I am writing about Swissy-Missy and Co-existence. I have been writing for a couple hours. I decide to go outside for a walk.
I walk the path I always walk. It is freshman orientation here on campus. The student center is fraught with girls wearing tanktops and low jean-shorts and name tags. I walk out past the Student Center. I make a V-cut across the quad, alter my gait and head towards the tinted shadow of the library.
There are three people walking around. The females are older, they wear chic librarian spectacles. One is the color of lipton tea with a shock of straight black hair. She is syringe skinny and she reminds me of my mom.
In a weird way I want to give her a hug
The guys name is Matt. He is wearing khakis and a polo shirt. His hair is cut very short and is spiked with gel. He has a smile that looks like a roast beef sandwhich. I wave at them. The Sun is pushing heavy shafts of translucent light over the top of Bradley Hall casting circus tent shadows across the quad. The sky is so blue is could be mistaken for certain vectors of the Carribean.
"Do you mind if we ask you a couple of questions." Matt says, offering his feigned smile. The woman who reminds me of my mom opens up a notebook and starts chronicling my responses down. At first I think they want to ask for directions. But no, they ask me if I were to die today and God were to ask me "Why should I let you in?" what would I say.
I look back at them and smile.
"...wouldn't you like to get into heaven, too?"
*
I am holding my confirmation bible across my chest and I am crying. I curse God for not allowing me the chance to save her. I curse God because I'm always poor and seem to try so hard. I curse God because my parents don't even give a fuck about me.
I hear two beeps from across the street. It is Mike. The crazy psychic from down the street.
"What are you doing?" He says. I suck up my tears. I try to pawn off the color of my face on allergies. He smiles.
"Well, get in." He says.
I don't want to but I do.
As we drive around downtown P-town I look for the flock of prostitutes. He circles around SWINGERS WORLD I wonder if she is inside.
"Who are you looking for." Mike asks me.
"I don't know." I tell him. "I don't know where she's at."
"Well she has to be somewhere." Mike says, a flecked look of eternity cached in his logic. "Everyone has to be somewhere."
"True," I nod, still dubious of his purported psychic abilities even though he tells great stories. Last week he told me that he first realized that he had a gift when he was eight years old. He was living with his grandparents and he had a dream that his Grandfather ahd died. This dream freightened him so much he ran into his grandparents bedroom and slinked between their bodies. Two hours later, he was awakened to his grandmothers voice shrilling in his ears.
His grandfather was dead.
*
The trio of Baptists apporve of the answers I am giving so far. I have told them that yes, sure, I agree that Jesus was the son of God. I believe he was a dispensation of the light. They smile. I smile. We seem to be getting along fine. Matt has already made an analogy comparing the free-gift of eternal life to that of a Sports car.
"Say it was your Birthday tomorrow, David." He says, his pawned jerkey smile a stye in my sight.
"And say I gave you a free sports car and then you gave me say, three dollars for it...was the gift really free then?" His voice sounds friendly and fake. Almost like he is talking to me about morality behind the wooden bars of crib.
I smile. My mother is Baptist. My father was on the Lutheran Evangelical board growing up, He loved to tell people about Jesus.
"Or lets say there's two boats. There's the David boat with a hole in the bottom of it from earthly sin and then there's a Jesus boat that's golden and without flaw..."
I make a concious effort to smile. We seemed to be getting along just fine until they asked me what Chruch, Synagogue or Parish I attend and my answer was an unlisted "Baha'i Center". They keep talk about sin like I have just given the pastor's daughter chlamydia.
The woman who looks like my mom holds up a wad of jingling keys and begins to play "this-little-piggy" with them.
"Now I have lots of keys on my keycain but only one of them is the key that lets me into my Fathers house." She says with an aura of superficiality.
I am lost. I smile. In my mind there is a picture of a dervish. Too much mysticism in the past week. I think of the friends I have made online and I think of their own sentences. I try to picture them smiling behind their sentences. I try to picture them smiling while they pelt out sentences into their own blogs.
Then I say the greatest name inside my head. I say it over and over again. Like the plastic weathervane on top of a beanie; the name spins and spins as I say it to myself. I look at my mother, telling me that only a personal-relationship with Jesus is the key to Heaven. I say the greatest name in my head. I say it so loud that I say it with cymbals and timpani. I say it until I am dizzy, the three-idividuals looking at me, talking about grace and assurance and I am smiling, looking past them, looking at the hard slices of light ferrying down to where I am standing.
"So, again, david, can you say with certainity that if you were to die to toady God would hand you the Key to eternal life?" My mom says, holding up a rugged silver tooth in front of me.
I think about the greatest name. I think about the prostitute whose name I never learned. I wonder if the Baptist Canvassers would see her on the street, I wonder if they would walk up to her and ask her for a hug. If they would try to give her food and offer her one of their own bibles. I wonder if she would listen to them or be put off because they look like they have just stepped out of a Land's End catalougue.
I think about my dad. How some of the best times of his life were sharing the gospel.
"Yes," I say, smiling. "I think I found the key."
*
Mike drops me off in front of my apartment. For most of our drive I was silent. I told him that I tried to help someone out today and yet I failed. I mentioned only in passing that I had wanted to print out the third draft of my year old novel but that Kinkos wanted eighty dollars for it.
"Here," Mike says, his right hand pushing into his back pocket. He takes out two green bills.
"Why don't you go to the library and print your book out. It should't be more than forty dollars."
Mike, this is way too much. I say, not wanting burden anyone else financially.
"Well if you don't use it, who else am I going to give it to?" He says rhetorically before I give him a hug, the second hug I'd given in as many hours.
*
Last time I saw Jasna I took her out for a date to an Indian restaurant and then out for a concert at Weslyan. We spent the whole day relaxing, sleeping, lounging around her apartment. I had not seen her previously in almost eight months.
"We need to get ready, Daveeeeed." Jasna says. I am tired. I am sleepy. I am content just milling around her place. But, yes, we need to get ready.
"Here, I am going to change." She said. There was no door that seperated the guest bedroom from the hallway so she folded the doors of the hallway closet and bathroom into a wooden V, occluding my sight.
"What are you doing?" I said, almost offended. Although we were not lovers we were used to each others body.
"You are so silly, Daveeeeed!" Jasna says, smiling adjusting the doors.
"Why don't you just change out here." I say, walking towards the bathroom, splashing water on my face, trying to wake up.
"You are so silly Daveeeeed." She laughs, her face beaming from behind the V-cusped doors. I hear her voice and try to squint through the wooden fissure, her body pulling itself into a string of shadows.
"Stop, Daveeeeed." She says. "You think about sex too much. That all you ever think about!"
"I don't," I say, feeling seminally rejected. I wander back into the living room. I yell at Jasna to hurry up. I put a Tom Petty CD on. I start pantomiming the words to "Learning To Fly." I frisk the lower shelf of the refrigerator for libations. I toss punches at my own shadow, deeply elongated under the lights of her apartment. I think about how Tom Petty always reminds me of Martina Navratilova in his face.
There is a shuffle and the the sound of wood being closed. And there is Jasna, radiant, dressed all in black, her hair pinched back in twin diminutive red braids.
She looked stunning.
"Ok, Daveeeeed." Jasna says, groping my arm. "We can go now, Daveeeed."
And so we left as one unit.
"....don't you wish that life could be so new?"
*
"You ready?" Mike asks, awaiting to affirm his co-existence opus. I have already closed my eyes. I have soaked up my ambiance as if my entire anatomy were a sponge. I am waiting for Mike to verify co-existence to me.
"Now listen," Mike says "Are you ready. Co-existence." I nod, try to tell him to get on with it by orchestrating my chin. The next thing I know Mike is adjusting the plastic nubs on the radio. There is the crackle static representative of AM radio.
"See," Mike says, a flash of laughter jets across his face. He is freely pressing nubs like a switchboard operator at happy hour.
"Co-existance!" He says, laughing, looking at the chagrined look tatooed on my own face. He is still laughing and pressing buttons. The static AM warble is starting to get to me.
"And look," Mike says, still laughing. "There's even FM." He says, with almost a metaphysical snort of realization.
"Yes," I say, looking out into the window shield at the invisble outline of my own whirred reflection. "There's even FM," I say to myself before smiling.
Everyone.
"I'm a Pepper, Your a Pepper, He's a Pepper, She's a Pepper, wouldn't you like to be a Pepper, too?"
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