by Tomorrow's Man
Road Notes: A Day in the Life
Where are you? What is happening? Why have you disappeared? What is it you fear? Why do you have these things, this pain, this love, this remorse, this shame, this fury seeping like flu from your pores? What did you do? Why did you do it? Do you think you were right about anything? Do you really feel wronged? Why were you honest? Did you lie? Why now, here, is your heart shuddering a bloody trail across your dirty sleeve as the rest of your body slowly moves toward your inevitable seaside grave?
And, who cares?
Really, who cares?
Really, do you?
What is the perception you have of this disappearance -- are you hiding, failing, or just being pitifully predictable? What is your perception of your pathos, after all? (Do you know that I am just a computer screen, just a digital window on a computer, and not your confessional, not your salvation, and certainly not your soul? Perhaps you have finally had that psychotic episode we've seen coming...subtle, as we'd predicted.)
All those questions you've been asking, about emancipation (yours and theirs) from this humiliation that stinks on you, about saving face and escaping, about the exhaustion you cause you, me, them. You're not a room full of babies in diapers, you know. This level of maintenance lately has been overwhelming for most of the people around you and breathing, as well as for me, your confessional, your digital window, your soul.
I'm afraid you've made us, you and I, too heavy for most, old sock. Unbearable. Lucky for you, it is time to prepare resolutions. Tomorrow night, you may want to consider creating, at last, a high note for all to hear, to feel, to share with a sparkle at midnight.
The fermata is up to you, of course. The length of the note. Can you hold it forever? Do you want to? Can you be that strong? Of course, if it is the final note, then forever is just as long as it lasts; but doesn't that seem like a bit of a weak exit? Better to end with an infinite symphony I say, but then I do so fancy immortality.
Best of luck today, tomorrow (and then? and then?). It seems you will need some. You might want a cup of chai tea, another good cry, and the luck to get knocked around by a typhoon for a bit. See you tomorrow, perhaps. Give my best to the non-digital road, where I am unseen; hey, there's a thought you might want to consider -- sometimes, if you're subtle enough, you don't have to hide at all...you just quietly, slowly, inexorably fade out, fade out, fade out completely, leaving all to wonder where it is you've gone, leaving all stretching to hear the infinite note.
Just A Day in the Life.
Madison Notes: The Last Day Awake
Our Father, Who art in Heaven so they say but what do I know really, I mean it isn't like You offer a tour or anything, or a hint of even a corner of a ripped postcard "From Auntie Phyllis and Uncle Bob -- Having Fun in Heaven!" or a scent like a heavenly, mustardy hot dog on the main boulevard or even a tiny scrap of anything to keep hearts beating other than that ant-scratch tome of psychotic breaks You call a Bible and Your pedophilia-infested Faith Delivery System known as the Priesthood...wait, where was I?
Oh, yeah, Our Father, Who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name -- and I just wanted to let You know that, finally, I forgive You. After all, I did get cheese for Christmas, so I guess You do manage to get into the office and claw away at that infinite In-Box of Yours once in a while.
So rest easy when You have to pop Your God-sized aspirin and think about heading into work tomorrow; You can have faith that no matter what, I forgive You.
And yes, You can put it on a bumper sticker, if You really want to.
And hey -- You don't even have to capitalize my name.
Madison Notes
This does not feel like vacation anymore. I do not feel 'on the road' or even 'away.' It feels more and more like home with each half-breath per second. And though I've spent a week feeling like the crimped hula hoop around the hips of Hell, I also feel like I'm home; and I am breathing.
Madison Notes
There are days that have a lot of goddamned nerve beginning, no matter where you are. I can watch a lamb be slaughtered by an octopus, but that does not mean that is what I want to feel under my eyelids as I begin to wake. I know my share of terror and bleating, I assure you, I've done enough of it these last few days. It has only been 1,994 miles since my front door, but every one of them has been another marble or shard of broken glass beneath my kneecaps as the days themselves grab my by the back of the neck and push me to the floor.
Some days wake up surly and want nothing better than to see you all die. Just ask the President, just ask the men with their fingers on the triggers of the big big missiles, just ask them -- they can not wait for the day that awakes with bloodshot angry eyes and finally brings its rough thumb down on the sunrise.
This day, this day had as much right to begin as I did meaning none. No one deserves a day like this, or a person like this, polluting their stream of time but then no one has a choice. Only the day does. Only I do. Only the two of us, the day and I, can decide whether or not we will want to rise again tomorrow.
Madison Note 11:52PM
My life is over, my life is never ended, my life has just begun, the number Three, the figure of Eight, sweet F.A., at least I looked good in my new red shirt as I brought my house down.
Spiral in. Learn to drown. I'm doing both, now.
Appleton Notes; and Christmas Day
You know you have been eating well beyond your normal capacity when just the taste of the toothpaste in the morning kicks in another quick and queasy round to the restroom; of course, it is also one of the few times of year when flatulence can smell like burning metal and people are not rushed to the Emergency Room.
Dickens, he had it right with that business about the bit of meat in the belly causing phantasms in your dreams. Scrooge, he saw ghosts when he dreamt. Last night, in the wee hours of Christ’s birthday, after a nightcap of pizza and stout, I saw midgets.
There were four of them, quadruplets, three identical females and one quite similar male. We were all, seemingly, lovers, though the small man tended to mostly sleep through the carnival acrobatics of my evenings with the three wee ladies.
We lived in a large black place, a metal mansion of many rooms that was strangely warm, strangely, like a womb – we were moist and fed and slept like babies wrapped in our soft webbing of 20 limbs. I dreamt of three days and nights with these, my friends, my lovers, three days and nights of feasts of alien meals, endless energy, and kinetic, bounding love. I was at home and happy with them like I’d never been.
I never knew their names, but for our last few minutes together I called them Snow!, Star!, Santa! and Silly!, the three young women and the man in that order, because that was what they saw, each in turn, late on the third night, when we all raced to the dark sliding doors of the master bedroom in our black mansion.
Santa had come to take them away, unfortunately. The suit was the same, and the beard, but the sleigh was a transport to someplace out of my mind, my mansion. Three days were not long enough. I hated to be greedy, but I felt nothing but great loss at the departure of my miniature, loving quartet. How could I just begin to feel a lifetime of love, only to have it depart in three days? I needed them forever, my angels. Together, the five of us, everything in our warm, dark womb made sense. It was then that I realized I was lucid dreaming – and without them, I knew I would wake up. I would be back in my friend’s borrows bed in the dark cellar of his home, in a loving enough womb of a different kind. I had no reason to feel sad about such a nice awakening. Alas, once you exist in a mansion of many rooms that holds you as only your primary womb held you when your life was nothing but dreams and a bath of wet heat and love, this before you could know that it would be your first and only true joy, true peace, true comfort, this before existence and realization began their steady entropy, you can not awaken any way other than wounded.
I will have some cinnamon cake and coffee. It isn’t the womb, or my mansion, but it isn’t the worst way to wake up on Christmas Day.
Road Notes: Green Bay for Lunch, Appleton on Christmas Eve, Brats and Packers, and Stealing Sand
The edge of a bay a hundred miles long; I’m speeding above frozen water that reaches gaping North, challenging my paradigms of what I’ve always thought of as beautiful and deadly. There is precious, godly desolation. There is a reason to live in a wasteland. To touch it, the edges of these things, deserts and tundras and bays that want to you to stride right down their frozen center until you must learn to swim. There is a reason to travel to these places, breaking your preconceived cell of where and what you are. There is a reason to sit outside Lambeau Field in Green Bay for just a second; it is the reason you should peer at each ocean or steal soil from the Vatican. It is the reason to weep when you stand on the soil of a country that sometimes does not see sunrises; it is the reason to weep when you know that country awaits your feet, yet your fear tethers you to the simplest plot of land.
Tonight, as I spend my first Christmas Eve away from my family and friends in Boston; as I feel the tug of distance snapping me toward home even as I sit here a thousand miles away and jotting; as I sip a stout in a reality, a reality that never existed before, that I have created by my new presence in this subtly archetypical place; as I open my head to all this I am hit with a revelation; an Epiphany 'tributary' stemming from the Eleven: State lines, countries, river bridges, border crossings, the consumption of local food in local places, changing your watch to reflect the time zone, losing sleep under an endlessly bright northern sky, writing postcard hellos by candlelight during a hurricane on an Atlantic island, taking trains to, from, within, taking planes and cars and sneakers, stealing sand from the Vatican, stealing sand from Laguna Beach, from both shores, East and West, of Winthrop, Massachusetts, from the scruff along frozen Green Bay, from the pink beaches of Bermuda, from the volcanic gravel of Iceland, from the rough scratch of Japan and from the scour of Cairo, as I grow, as I flower, this is what I plan to do, this is how I will dream and create and become a Joy Torch as I let my life expand, Big Bangs where my hands grasp, I will be as a God, uniting Heaven and Earth through stealing sand.
Road Notes: Madison, Appleton, and a Few Observations of All the Nothing in Between
1:00PM: Cows are yummy.
I love cows. Nothing as Zen as an two-hour-long drive by cows. Yummy cows. Milky cows. Early-era-television cows, when the world was full of wonder at black and white. Half-moon cookie-sweet cows. All the way salt and pepper with an attitude cows. Pre-cheese cows, Gods of Curd, cheddar romano ricotta parmesan asiago feta fontina mozarella monterey jack jalapeño brie bleu colby camembert chocolate cheese extra ice cream pemmican jerky and hotcross cows roast beef burgermeister meisterburger with bacon too please half-and-half cows, yummy cows.
3:30PM: Evil is afoot.
We’ve seen the map to the Black Lodge. Its rays anti-light spearing across the sky, leaving us in the inner webbing of a rotting orange. We headed away, away, as the highway curled us toward home; but had we kept going East – well, now we know where to find the root of all evil (somewhere outside of Green Bay, or maybe in Michigan).
4:30PM: Trucks are big.
If your four-door Eagle sedan is going down the highway North at 65 miles per hour and a Peterbuilt loaded full and running hard is coming down the highway toward you at 75 miles per hour and there is a brisk and steady 30 mile per hour gust blowing laterally across the highway, how loud will you scream “Holy Fried CHRIST!” when your Eagle is tossed sideways like it’s a fat girl’s butt-crack in a hula hoop contest?
11:00PM: Air is cold.
Damned cold. I am in Northern Wisconsin in late December. By choice. What was I thinking. There are two now-atrophied parts of my body that had no idea until this night what ‘freezing your cojones off’ truly feels like. It is less than pleasant, I assure you. Amazing there is any population up here. Damn. Their children must just be what molts off in the Spring. Stack of dimes. I’ve got a stack of dimes.
Sometime After Midnight AM: Meat is good.
I have discovered that shooting deer and waiting for them to die and dragging them to a truck and bringing them to the rendering plant and grinding them up into tubes of meat sausage is not cruel because it is yummy and anything that tastes that good has got to be humane. Yummy venison and beef, deer and cows!
My “Tribute to Two Meats” Haiku of December 23rd:
Cows are so yummy.
Oh, and deer are yummy too.
Yummy deer and cows.
Madison Notes: Guessticity by Brett Holinbeck
"Don't make me get out the dictionary" he said as he peeled his eyes off the freshly fallen carcass of the electronic deer hitting the ground. Sure, he was a big one, but not big enough to require a dictionary to measure his size. He took a big messy drink from the bear skin flask hanging around his neck, pumped the bright orange shot gun once more, and set his sights for the next challenge. This next bitchin bambi of ones and zeros would not be easy. Not when restricted to shooting such a small vital zone. Zen floated on the air, and the fawn never seemed to hear the nasty auditory rape of Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap blasting in the background. With a small leap the fawn began its last trek to the side of the screen. That flat predetermined world was all that he had ever known, and it was going to come to an end. Bambi's vital zone had been hit and her entrails spilled to the ground just as red as Rudolph's Christmas nose. "Woo-hoo!" our hero rejoiced as scratched one more notch on to his reindeer gun. "Let's see Santa fly tonight!"
Road Notes: Sauk City, Wisconsin, Cows, and the Spirit of Robert Cummings
I love cows. Nothing as Zen as an hour-long drive by cows. Yummy cows. Milky cows. Chocolate cheese extra ice cream pemmican too please half-and-half cows, yummy cows.
Xmas Dinner #1. Most of the cows are out along the road, but quite a few indeed are simmering away in Kathy's kitchen crock pots. Mmm, mmm, steaks on feet with no more feet. And there's pigs and chickens and shrimps and it's a darn good thing for us that animals are smart enough to take no truck with all that rigamarole of worshipping Jesus or we'd be eating a whole big bunch of boring bread instead of feetless yummeat.
By 3:12 introductions have given way to conversations, conversations to appetite for much meat, meat reluctantly gives way to football, and then football surrenders its hold to hooch. And I mean HOOCH. I mean Grandad Cummings' vintage best Triple X served at its right-from-the-root-cellar coolest. The bloody marys had been great, as well as the vodka-7 slush, and the beers, and the wines, and the bottle of Awamori sake, sure, but it was Grandaddy C. who got my wink toward heaven this afternoon, not Tuscany, Italy or Golden, Colorado, not Siberia's most sullen distillery, not even the Shinto family on Okinawa that I'm pretty sure still chewed and spat their own rice, chestnuts, and millet into the fermenting tub to make such a splendid kuchikami no sake as I had today, and no, not even Krishna and his tasty tasty cows nor even that fellow Jesus that everyone seems to be on about got my glance this afternoon. As I lifted my glass and a wink to heaven it was for Grandaddy C.
Bring on the scarab-swarm of sugar-dosed children bashing about like a cigarette-stunted version of the Phliladephia Flyers of the 1970s, bring on the Q&A sessions coated in hairy eyeballs running themselves from my shaved head to beard to tattoos to piercings and back, bring on the decaying chivalry toward my east coast ancestry as the deluvian levels of liquors loosed most of this Saturday afternoon in this upper-Midwest baby-town of Sauk City (City? With a population of 3100? More like a moderately well-attended gathering) and turned the hours into a cross between an ad hoc presentation by French mimes of Lord of the Dance at the two-minute warning of a Superbowl at frosty Lambeau Field and playing a game of Twister with an infinite number of typewriters all trying to randomly create the word MONKEY with an infinite number of broken K keys (but you try explaining in vain that they could just do APE instead), bring even a snowstorm in bright sunshine such as I peer through right now, but please just please bring me another jigger or three of Grandaddy C's Finest Triple X first, yes, if you please.
Dedicated to Robert Cummings; Cheers, Old Sock, to you keeping the Earth and I'd guess most of Heaven lit like Christmas and I don't mean with lights.
Madison Notes
Surprise, surprise, what do you spieze with both your eyes, jest my thighs and parts attached at the door, nothing fewer and fewer more, Boo Boo kitty whore and dog truck Thor smelt me coming up the path before, I peeped out loud and zoom zoom here, hi there, brother, where I been? Riding the rails and roads with angels, vermin, trails of religious on their rickey ways to God and scattered insanity mixing coffee with cheese, these are the people I need to see, their eyes their knees and their crazy parts in between, hi folks, it's me again, causing another storm, but don't blame me for when Jesus was born, I'm just here to show up at the door and remind you that God done oft forgot what he was up to after the vodka did roll, God yes him made a mistake or three, and with my big smile across the miles, knock, knockity knock I'm back at the door, your Prodigal Son, Mistake Number Four.
(Would you like an apple? It'ssssssssssweet.)
Road Notes: Minneapolis, Minnesota to Madison, Wisconsin
Survival, despite the Greyhound and its thousand-mile long chemical toilet reek and burning Velcro babyshit stink of the infant poo-machine churning away with its green innards in the seat in front of me for half that distance (a mere 500 miles?), then the ice storms of Minneapolis and the bottomless gullets of my hirsute hosts (men and women alike) who saw fit to guarantee my bus-ride insomnia h’ain’t saw nuttin’ as it got extended to a brutal, beautiful, and bittersweet 100-plus hours, then the six-hour ride across what would be a tundra on any honorable continent (though I did get to have an Amish pair of hot dogs somewhere in the darkness-as-only-the-expansive-Midwest-knows outside of La Crosse – okay, they get a point back), to stumble into the waiting embrace of my second city compatriots, a mug per fist and Chris-gullet ready.
There are different ways to survive, folks, from pooping on time each day to hey I didn’t get killed by that creepy guy who just stripped naked on the bus; survival, like dance, should magnetize everything around you.
2100 Miles Traveled 0, Chris 1. Take that for survival.
Road Notes: Minneapolis, MN.
A Dream across Indiana; or, Bobbing for Lampreys. 11:50PM
“Jackson, what is your favorite color?”
“Red, Blondie; it’s red.” Crying, of course, Jackson dipped his head back into the big bucket.
Blondie grabbed the next child and didn’t care that she was 32. Over his earphone he got her name from the assistant to the show’s producer and said aloud to her and the crowd, “So, Starla, do you believe in…fate?”
Starla, her hands not tied behind her back tight enough, quite, to draw blood, squealed out a “sure…” that ended in a little girl grimace as Blondie’s robot smile re-welded into a beatific grin that was lit up like an end of the year Times Square virus. Blondie’s happy waving fist rose and found the back of Starla’s head, then pushed it into the bucket without his creepy eye-wrinkles barely shaking, really.
So then Starla came up a moment later just like Jackson had, but then most of them end up that way but at least after the tranquilizer they stop screaming soon.
Contestant #3 came to the gray podium and well he was weird. Not big, really, not an exhibition of cocky power so much, more just a purely crazy guy, really. When Blondie asked him the Question and (the weird guy) Contestant #3 got it (something about Selenium) wrong and he (Contestant #3) was gonna get dunked in the pool he, the weird guy, almost really looked happy about it, almost, he looked ready though how can you be ready for something like that of course, unless your society breeds you that way, so.
He walked over to the grand bucket like he was stamping out Communism and banged his head into the water like a drunk, magnetic with his pillow for sure. He was not down more than five, six seconds, though, before he came up biting.
The lamprey he’d caught, of course in a tale such as this, a gothic if you will, was Old Melvin, the granddaddy of them all no one figured anybody’s catch, since there’d really not be a story otherwise, except for a bunch of unsuccessful lamprey-diving. Old Melvin, he lashed about, his ring of teeth oddly impotent, probably for the first time in Melvin’s fishy existence which was at least since the invention of peanuts, I’d swear; but Melvin didn’t have long to lamprey-wonder about fate and future and the like because Donald, the weird guy, Contestant #3, ripped out a jerky-length of Melvin’s back-flesh, spilling Old Melvin’s vitals and really leaving him not to wonder about much afterward at all.
The Dainty Queen of Freemont, Indiana was the prize to the person who could successfully bob for a lamprey, which no one had ever before done, well, before Donald.
She’s in Freemont now, her sisters preparing her with oils and valiums. Donald, you know, he’s on his way over post-haste, to slip her his Merriest, though a bit too hairy, strange really how far up the hair grows on that thing, Christmas.
*
I have got to get more sleep on this trip…though First Avenue is right around the corner, and it’s two-fer night on Grain Belt pints…Hell, where’s the dusty jacket; how often do I get to trade swigs and swag with welders and lumkberjacks?
Road Notes: Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Amish, and blasted Indiana again.
I got to watch the Patriots lose Monday night's game just after midnight as the game played to a crowd of vacant brown faces, tired white ones, and countless sets of intestines gurgling around the one warm food we've been able to consume for miles, rotating greasy and deplorably gray hot dogs. The taste was exactly what you would expect if you knew how to expect the taste of forlorn meat in Cleveland.
To this point in the trip, all has gone smoothly. The entropy decided I was being a less than entertaining fool and tossed me several rotting pomegranates at once to juggle. Each one fell, and I had to eat up every sickly purple pip.
First was the Amish. Apparently, when then are not getting killed in speeding-bigrig-meets-rickey-cart accidents out in the amnesiac stretches of Pennsylvania, they are taking Greyhounds and drinking hazelnut-toffee coffee from aluminum thermoses. (I wonder if Juan Valdez would care to pick beans in Pennsy.) My bus, already close to capacity, added thirteen Amish to the vacant 12 seats available; one uncomfortably clad woman would be holding a baby on her lap for at least the five hours to Chicago.
I have never seen so many people so united for something so allegedly pure and enjoyable look so utterly downtrodden, depressed, and displaying such a frantic, terrorized humility. They never laughed. They never smiled. I watched their faces. They mostly avoided gazing at any complexion but each other’s, the men black-hatted and hirsute, the women black-bonnetted, make-up free, feminine-free. When they did glance around at the variegated crowd, when they did skirt a glance across my face, they never failed to make me feel like I was a common card in a deck of devils.
By the time the bus got to the rest-stop in Indiana, (Indiana, the algae in the American gene pool), the 20 hours of travel, the 43 hours awake, the Patriots losing for the whole country to see, and the Amish had understandably soured my mood. I needed to re-board the bus put on my night-time music (Brian Eno) in my soundproof headphones, and sleep through to Chicago. It was then my walkman decided to have a fit and not operate. It was also then that the five Hispanic men seated next to and behind me who had gotten jazzed up on Pepsi’s at the Indiana rest stop began chatting, singing, laughing, and being all around boisterous in a language that, though typically innocuous, proves incredibly, stomach acid squirtingly obnoxious on an otherwise silent bus at 3:30 in the morning.
Dead batteries. Disorderly Hispanics. Depressed Amish. Dead, dead batteries, and the teeth chewing, the lamprey gullet flaying me alive.
Road Notes: Boston, NYC, Newark, Cleveland, the Outskirts of Hell, Ellen.
8AM-11:59PM
The minute you step on a Greyhound you have a choice to let the capillary-sized aisle close in on you like a comfy womb, or feel like the seats stretching back along the bus are rows of teeth along a lamprey throat. This time, after a pause and a breath, I decided something down the middle: The aisle was a staircase, the seats dominoes, and I was the potential flick of a thumb. This got me through 16 hours, three buses rowed with lamprey teeth, and countless annoyances that escalated in scale as the day, the evening, and the black night wore along at a pace closer to that of death than Eastern Standard Time. Verily, I was coasting like the great decadrate of the tires themselves – until the Amish came along.
Speed me across, sky, make them all forget me and the bulk of my desires, let them fancy my history as no more than a dream from once upon a time. I love like a black hole it seems, growing more powerfully darker on all available energy, and I fear such gravity was not meant to be dispersed so grandly; my love has always been as a diaspora, forever spiraling out from my heart, alas, striking everything, everyone in my passages.
Yet, in this time and chance, this is no way to love it seems, as everyone themselves loves just the same, as great and powerful event horizons, wanting no less than all they can reach. For this desire to love endlessly I must inevitably collapse inward on myself, and quickly become nothing but an excuse for a missing universe.
Which Saturday is this? I have heard about the war they want, and I can hear the ladies in the other room as they frolic and exude such incredeible smells, sounds. Which Saturday is this? I can never be sure what I think I know is now; maybe it already has been? There's a war wanting to come, sure. But the ladies, their voicesw together and their smells together, they hold a beer cold for me in hands eclipsing smiles, and there, then, is where I'll go to worship instead of worry.
Zzzzz......zzzzzzz.....zzzzzzz. Uh? Oh. Hi. Just taking a nap. Worn out. It's been tough, these last 26 texticities. Jot jot jot. Write write write. What have I been saying? I don't know. But it was something. It began somewhere, and it ends somewhere. Not here though. Not this time. This is only the end of this. A cul de sac. An overlapping point of the textician circadian rhythm. This is but a hiccup, recurring. That you can't shake. Nope. This will make yours giggle guts bob for quite some time. Quite some time.
Time for my next nap. Back to snooze, me and my own giggle guts. See you tomorrow.
Zzzzzzzz..............
"You devious little bastard. Get over here and take off those shoes. No, the other ones. No, no, not the red high heels with the thin leather straps, the Doc Martens. No you little fool! Not those brown shoe-style Doc Martens, I mean the 22-eye inch-lift steel-toe combat boots! Yes, with the damned patent leather!! Now put those others back on. No, no, no! Not the hip waders, the rainbow sandals! Jeez, no, not those cheap Korean rainbow sandals, those other ones, the virgin creosote and blushing oak naugahide Birkenstock rainbow sandals. Yes, those. Jesus fried Christ, it's a miracle you ever get your shoes on at all. I swear you're all truculence and left feet."
Xenon lights in purple and gold luridly dapple the Red Room of the White House. Quite the shin dig, this is. Now I know Strom Thurmond will never die. Sure, he kicked a few months ago and they have that animatronic filling in for him while he retires from public observation, but they have his grey cottage-cheese brain somewhere downstairs (I think in the Vermeil Room, on the mantle beneath the Chandor of Ellie Roosevelt). Well, they have it downstairs now.... The last time I was here I saw it gurgling in a jar on the 19th century Pallasart mahogany and brass table that Le Pres D'Ubbya had received from the Kremlin as a gift for his involvement in 2001’s L'Entente Française De Paix De Fromage. I was curious, took a small sip. The greenish water tasted the way it smelled, of burnt hair and absinthe. Oh, and Strom’s brain, of course. A bit cottage-cheesy. After that, they began locking the brains away.
What are you so angry about?
When was the last time you heard your favorite song?
Why does this weather hurt?
When did you last feel love directed toward you?
Where do you go to cry?
Who was the last person to see you at your worst?
Who missed it, and why?
What time would you like it to be?
What time is it?
Where do people get those amazing looks in their eyes?
Where did your last dream take place?
When will you be happy next?
When were you happy last?
Why have you read all of these questions?
Why didn't you answer them all?
A Cut And Carry Question Card
Velveteen vagina and the horses keep
rowing, the horses keep rowing
off the marshmallow pink port bow,
vainglorious veil and the hiccups hopscotch
all down the back
all down the back
of the neck of K2 to kill you,
kill you, Violet Vagina,
blink and we're in Florida,
we're in with the vermin
and the buck-moon gold-tooth of God's left shin,
vales of venal vagina
up to North Carolina
the sun fell in my pocket
I placed your violet v in a locket
and you burned away the moss
rowing up the left side of my tree,
vainglorious me,
moss free.
Unless you’re asphyxiating in the slipstream, there is nothing you can say to a subliminal treatise about love and lust and obsession; nothing, nothing you’re not supposed to know. You don’t know. But now I tell you, this, I tell you, this treatise I write and read and breathe and bleed for you to almost hear, hoping it will infect your dreams with imagery thick enough to make you think my smiling face camouflages corrupt money, this is my way of saying what I can never say to your face, in your mouth, to your head, in your mind, to the place where you accept that honesty is the only policy and love follows this rule: Love knows no honesty.
So many deaths for love, so few for honesty. So much insanity in the name of love; insanity in the name of honesty, of course, is a screaming flail at fireflies in the hopes of hitting the one that would splatter gooey glowing love. Love breeds lies. Nothing breeds honesty. Honesty is aberration, a distracting instrument of power, a misfit toy on the island of tools. Honesty and love don’t speak to each other. They eat at different tables. They fling snowballs at each other’s cars. And honesty’s snowballs have rocks in them; of course, love’s snowballs contain hunks of hard ice. So many wars for love, none for honesty.
Love hates honesty because love is honest to itself. (To love, honesty outside of love is a charlatan, a whore, again, a cheap tool and nothing more.) Love does not feel an obligation to be honest to humans, or to society, or to religion, or to antiquated mores. Love is honest with the picture it carries in its breast pocket and that picture is a mirror. In the picture love is smiling and that is always good enough for love. If you don’t like it, you can lump it, but you will still love love or hate love; either way, to love, it’s the same emotion, the same energy. It’s the same glance in the mirror, your grimace or lip-licking smile. Love smirks at you when you look at it closely on the glass surface, doesn’t it? Yes, it does. That is why you get so frustrated. Love just leers back at you. Love says, ha, I’m honest with me…I’m forthright with me…I love me. You’re the one who must learn to deal with it.
Love has no concept of time, only of presence. Love, with whip in hand and lust collared and panting at the end of its leather leash, loves where and when and whom and what it wants to love. You can’t tell it not to. Don’t try. The Pope can’t, either. Or the President. Or the Man in the Moon. Or your lover.
Living for love is suicide; ‘cos love doesn’t live for you. Love just lives. Love just is. Love, the ultimate virus. AIDS and Language have nothing on love. AIDS infects some. Language infects many. But even the celibate and senseless can fall victim to love.
Love is in you. Accept that you’re terminal. Love is the drug, love hurts, love is the seventh wave, love has a mind of its own, love is a many splendored thing, love is a battlefield. Love, your eternal roommate. Love, your bittersweet disease. Love, your favorite mistake. Love is what you will never abandon, love and its baggage of pain.
Love is why your eyes are open right now, yet about to blink after (reading) hearing this, this last word about love. Blink. Love dares you not to. That’s just exactly how love is.
The North Star, I've got it here, not doing that great a job in my coffee cup, I stir and stir and wander were so many have gotten so much joy, add a bit of Southern Cross, Sirius C, Baby Bear and Betelgeuse but alas, even with a dash of Mintaka, my coffee is bitter and flaccid!
What exactly is it?!? What's the floating kite you're all staring at that I'm supposed to be praying to for a decent cup of coffee ANYWAY?!?!?
That damned kite has stolen all the flavor from my coffee. It's 5:17 A.M. and dark.
Damned kite.
"Silent Majority," said Dick. "No one's ever really watching." I didn't know I could do this...like this. Look, look at what I'm doing, look, no one...no one here to see and I enjoy it anyway, the activity, the sound, the sweat. This is a phenomenon, this alone, this is akin to narcotic. Watch now, watch me no one as I do this now, watch me as I do this now, as I say this jaw-drop thing, watch, no one, watch and listen, no one, listen and enjoy it all as much as I can. Do you believe all I'm doing, all I'm saying, all I'm guilty of? Of course you do. Silent Majority, says Dick. Anything I can conceive is true. Anything I wonder is amazing to me, my target audience. I love this. No one's watching but who matters. And everyone agrees. And I never knew I could love this.
running around inside this plague of a beat i don't know why i would ever want to stop moving like this i've got nothing left to do after the ocean's gone blown to vapor why bother to do nothing but dance dance
i don't know why i'd bother to do anything else
i'm jittery and bugging and i like that i'm acting like a lemming in old sparky's lap and i'm all over you and i'm all over the floor and heaving all over i'm all over the sick painted wals and all over is all i've wanted to be so i don't know why i'd bother to be doing anything anything else really besides running around inside this plague of...
Quick incision. Just above my navel. Start it three inches long. Spread the skin, go ahead, use your fingers. Don't mind the red; pull up, pull out. Stretch me. It'll take a while, but you can use that straight razor to help. It was my grandfather's. As you pull the skin up, and pull the skin out, as you stretch me, just keep on flaying, gently, at the red tissue there that holds to the yellow. I'll open, soon enough. I'll be a warm tent. I'l be a Christmas ornament on the inside. I'll be a womb but that doesn't matter because soon enough, as soon as you pull my surface up enough, out enough you'll see, you'll see I do have a heart. A big red heart. Beating up, beating out, but more often beating up, more often, beating me up.
People get wisty about eternal life all the time but I've noticed they never just come out and ask me for it which is why, of course, they haven't gotten it yet.
On Sunday I played Scrabble with Harry Potter and beat him then I played Twister with Harry Potter and he fell down before I did and then Harry Potter and I played tennis and Harry he got nothing but 'love' from me ha ha and then I played Harry Potter at Battleship and he only sank my submarine before I sent his whole plastic navy to its translucent planar grave and then Harry Potter and I started to play checkers but Harry said, "I've got more hair than you and can shag like a rabbit" which you know whatever that means and I got mad though and flipped the board over and stuck my tongue out at him and reminded him that my glasses were much cooler than his so there.
Tomorrow Harry Potter and I are going to play some Greco-Roman Wrestling games and we'll see then who can shag rabbits whatever, you know, that means.
Now Jumpin' Jack Flash sure was a gas all right I'll give him that but he never leapt like me not in his whole springy life. I got over the Sears Tower, without ever looking down. I hopped the Pond, Newport to Lisbon, and boy were those Portugese baffled when I climbed out of the surf, smiling like Christmas and flashing my passport. I grabbed moss off the Moon and didn't even have to hold my breath.
Jumpin' Jack Flash was a candle stick jumper, nothing more. His skill was a paper tiger, a pinãta of hype. Wait'll tomorrow, Jack, when I jump the sun. I'll see you again, Jack-o, when I land next May, my tan the envy of all Ibiza.