by Tomorrow's Man
September 26, 2005, 6:20PM:
Off to my date with Kari Rueslåtten. Who would have thought that a dare in the dim dawn snowfall outside a Reykjavik nightclub three years ago would result in this quick jaunt to Chicago to make poutine in a hotel room? Not bloody likely me, 'tis true, but, true 'tis.
It just goes to prove that one's knowledge of Oslo can come in handy when one has none but fakes it well while dancing the Dance of the Fifth Veil in the cool early-morning precipitation of silver Icelandic snow.
Check the suitcase: Ore-Ida french fries, packed in ice; a fresh pound of white cheese curds; and a small Tupperware tub o' turkey gravy mix, pre-prepared, with my special secret ingredient (Pickapeppa Jamaican pepper sauce, three dashes).
Pants? Who needs 'em - we're cooking by the whirlpool bath; apparently, her tour manager's set up a hibachi, and emptied the bar on the bed.
I used to respect the term 'researcher,' til I had a bit of an epiphany -- 're'?
Imagine the frill and thrill of being dubbed with the appelation...
"Searcher."
Searcher...how very, very amazing.
As I told the judge, I do not spend my days cramping my jaw to suck mole milk from my Maker's teat, not even should She menstruate another world as warped as ours; it is not the fault of the courts, nor Her oblong womb that's misbaking this cake, it's too much yeast, too much yeast, it's too much yeast fermenting our brain puddings.
It's so simple. Seems so simple, should've had it years ago.
Single-parent children, we're not excuses. We're not using memory crutches to swing at the crowds. We're quite developed, almost exponentially.
We're thirty-six, and we fear the hell out of being alone; and we rail against being left alone.
It's not drama. It's not a lonely man becoming excuses, swinging crutches. It's that, when it happens so early in our lives, there's no way to fight back. There's no way to ask forgivness. There's no way to fight. There's no way to know what we did, if anything. There's no way to accept. There's no way to fight.
So, these dancing days, we fight. In our heads, we damage you before you've picked up your keys.
We see you not for who you really are - we see your face composed of the fifty faces of the demons that dragged our daddy away.
We expected this, all along; because before daddy, before mommy, there was nothing.
We had nothing; then isolation; then fear; then the expectation to survive, mate, smile, pray, die.
We're doing okay, mostly.
We children of one.
But, we're scarred, to the point where we know it and it makes us so strong, it damages us, and we're unable to judge a single feeling clearly.
See, to us, we're damaged because we were abandoned. And you, you are perfect.
Right up until the moment you leave.
heart sparks a lung
sparks a breath
sparks a word
sparks a reply
sparks a gasp
sparks a turn
sparks a tear
sparks a tear
sparks a run
sparks a drive
sparks speed
sparks speed
sparks a twist
sparks a lurch
sparks a metal tumble
sparks a spark,
sparks a spark,
sparks a lung
sparks a breath
sparks a word
sparks a word
sparks one more word,
then flame.
My legs feels like teardrop-shaped metal straws, bendy and supple in that way that helps me leap and leap but still have a razor edge where my nylons would be sexy an edge that can cut a throat at "Ave," and be cleaned by "Maria" by the right lapping tongue what likes lapping copper red from shiny veiny aluminum, my lampreys generate electric porn and can fire cancer UV out of their glittering eyes, which is why I never look
I never look too closely,
the more I stare at such a femanical animal, the more it become human and lovely,
the more it becomes shivery icepick love,
the more it becomes death or die for.
It started as a autumn stroll, but got warmer as my calves sunk in deeper, leveling out against the inside of its skin.
The ribs, thousands of them, sored the soles of my feet, and I still had miles to go, walking gingerly, stubbing my toes on once heart-protecting bone, tripping over parts that no longer served Purpose.
The head was a hundred miles away.
The path inside thickened and I stumbled, having to crawl forward for many, many yards. The smell was not yet overpowering in the bowel, but I attrributed that to the refrigerator-chill temperature of the air. When I stood, my wet, coated arms instantly cooled and got my teeth to chattering. I slogged on, the night growing colder, the body ever more difficult to traverse.
The head, it was almost a hundred miles away.
I didn't make it far. I got too cold, too covered in chyme and ephemera, too exhausted tripping over rib after endless rib, and collapsed into the body. Deep inside, it was still warm. I curled up to stop my shivers, hoping that the rumors were not true; that the sun would rise even if I did not reach the head of this hundred-mile long eviscerated snake that connected the desert from the night to the day -- as long as the chosen one walked from the initial rift of the tail, down into the endless gut, along the hundred mile slit in the serpent god's belly, and at last chewed the dead tongue at the head-end. Only then would the sun rise on Earth again.
The way I felt and figured, the Earth was due for a long, long rest; the head was still a hundred miles away.
I just bought a Harley Davidson motorcycle.
I just bought a single, large pickle.
I just bought a ticket on the last train to Clarksville.
I just bought a new set of twins' souls with a 2 for 1 coupon.
I just bought my way out of a Tyvek bag.
I just bought your right pinky toe - check, it's gone now.
I just bought the Man, man.
I just bought a stitch in time, but with inflation I only saved about 7.2.
I just bought the mulberry bush and if you kids go 'round it one more time I'll taser you.
I just bought the Dish and am holding it for 2 mil in ransom from the Spoon.
I just bought cheesecake.
I just bought a CD of pop songs, but brother I tell you they ain't got that swing.
I just bought out my contract requiring me to finish this senten
Bleach; Blonde.
Blonde; Hydrogen Peroxide.
Hydrogen Peroxide; That one summer when me and all my friends, except the already blonde one, dyed our hair blonde in an oddly touching if young-teen gawky tribute to our favorite band at the time, the Police.
That one summer when me and all my friends, except the already blonde one, dyed our hair blonde in an oddly touching if young-teen gawky tribute to our favorite band at the time, the Police; Sting.
Sting; This bee flew up my shirt once and stung me right on the nipple and it hurt a wicked lot, but it actually hurt less than this other time a bee stung me right on my lower lip and it swelled up like a big stretched out balloon.
This bee flew up my shirt once and stung me right on the nipple and it hurt a wicked lot, but it actually hurt less than this other time a bee stung me right on my lower lip and it swelled up like a big stretched out balloon; Pamela Anderson.
Pamela Anderson; Pam and Tommy Lee Sex Tape.
Pam and Tommy Lee Sex Tape; Porn.
Porn; Women's genitals.
Women's genitals; I can't frickin' believe Sting showed the birth of his kid in the movie "Bring on the Night," though I can't believe even more that Trudi's Yoni was the first 'live' one I'd ever seen.
I can't frickin' believe Sting showed the birth of his kid in the movie "Bring on the Night," though I can't believe even more that Trudi's Yoni was the first 'live' one I'd ever seen; Lingham.
Lingham; Rhymes with gingham.
Rhymes with gingham; How to get stains out of a checked-pattern dress.
How to get stains out of a checked-pattern dress; Bleach.
Just had brunch with this guy, Les Brevvies, an odd duck with a pendant penchant. Thing is, he's got a thing for penguins, too, preferably purple ones carved into sapphire all ornate with paisley wings.
So he wears these things, these purple paisly-winged penguin pendants the entire time he's working. As a Protestant Phillipino phlebotomist living in Port-au-Prince you'd think he would stand out with all the purple and paisley and penguins, but it turns out he's really more notorious for having very garlicky breath.
Farewell September
All we hear trickling trickling through the slipstream are the hyperbolic echoes of charlatan sorry aped from bloating bodies and bored movie stars as a once great city becomes a massive and rotting canker sore on the best cunt on the planet - and all the Valtrex the government shoves into its wound isn't going to keep the media from picking at it to keep the thick pus flowing.
Many things are many things and many of them sway sweet to horrid and back again, but this poor, poor month - already suffering from the AIDS it caught on 9/11/01 and is still killing it off one soldier at a time -- has contracted itself yet another mark of decay, another malignant melanoma on its history, that will inevitably push any of us that are left to survive its entropy into declaring its dismissal, its denial, its abduction and rape and murder, before we then carve it up and fill a nondescript box with its rotten parts, seal it closed, spit on the wood, and shove it far in the back of a closet on the 13th floor of the continuum.
Road Notes, Port Washington, WI
Sent to the upper inner thigh of Wisconsin, close enough to gargle on the listerine-green waters of L. Michigan, for a business trip that, yes, is my job, and is business that makes me feel giddy as the cryptic caffeinated icons that macarena around the Matrix.
However, guilty joy aside, I made the best of it by booking a gig to read my new book "Pissing on the Hollowdrag" in a seedy little shack called "Howard's Johnson" that boasted the latest in cigarette-burnt leather barstools as well as the well-matched sounds of the new Brad Paisley disc whiskey-and-ballsing from the jukebox.
When I arrived, Howard J. Jr., the owner's 40-ish son who reminded me a ton of Peter Falk with two glass eyes, greeted me with a hearty handshake, a free beer (Old Style, a score of cheaply-cloned brothers of whom he would pop for me free all night long), and the precious saluation, "Hey we've never had a poet in here before but for all those fukkin' young-ass cowboys thinkin' they can be the next Johnny Cash scribbling 1:30-2am away in the corner and lookin' all broody over they're notebooks! Maybe you can 'read'n a kick to their ass!" He gave me a second free Old Style before I'd taken a sip of the first.
Showtime, and the crowd would be a crowd that would be unfair to expect to live up to the moniker of A Crowd as the total turnout amounted to 17 proud patrons, well, 17 if you included me and Howard. I'm pretty sure one of them was Brad Paisley, though.
I read to them from Hollowdrag for about 20 minutes when a black man with the shade and shadow of peppered beef jerky asked me what I was smoking. I said they were Djarum cloves, branded and commonly known as "Blacks." He earned my eternal respect and friendship by uttering the quotable, "You give me one of them 'niggarettes' and I'll stick around for the rest of your fucking poetry." I gave him two, demanded to know his name (Michael), and lit the first for him by tearing out page 13 from the book and setting it on fire with my own 'niggarette.'
It was an hour more before I finished, and it was only because I'd run out of "Pissing on the Hollowdrag," then bio, then anecdotes, then harder stories, like that of my unfortunate luck to have toasted the very 767s that hit the WTC as they took off on 9/11/01 from Logan Airport in Boston and flew over my home. Only Howard, Michael, and Michael's ladyfriend Bonnie (it's 'ladyfriend' if she's over 50, but goes back to 'girlfriend' if she's over 60 - by 60, she's re-earned it) were left, and I had put down the microphone a while back. I told them all about my now ex-wife waking me up with a bottle of Brut champagne for my birthday, going out on our deck that overlooked Boston Harbor to toast (as via sick irony I so gruesomely dubbed it) 'the most beautiful day to live,' and stood out there cheersing the planes as they accelerated, landing gear rising and never to come down, into history.
Bonnie, the doll, shook her head silently for a moment, then lifted and finished the last 7/8 of her vodka-7 before saying - with her heart and voice full of the earnest inquisitiveness of a woman wrestling something she just can not grasp, "So, you writing about pussy so much because you ain't gettin' it; or because y' is?"
I was trying so hard to think of something pithy to write today, but the moment I thought the word "pithy" it began echoing in my head, "pithypithypithy" ad infinitum, until it finally evolved into the Opus phrase "Pear pimples for hairy fishnuts" and I gave up and you got this.
Show me just one single cell of your body, from hair or toe or eye, 'cos that's really all I need to see for each one of my millions to feel this thunderous attraction.
Supernature
Imagine a chocolate-covered cherry apertif, the kind that is cream and liquor-filled. The chocolate, it can be either milk or dark, whatever you prefer (but really, it's wonderfully sweet dark chocolate).
Imagine this chocolate-covered cherry and liqueur-filled confection isn't the usual titillating, sensually negro-shaded nipple-shape in which it usually appears; imagine this typically tasty treat is in the shape of a voluptuous goth goddess, the kind you're confident - nay, you're nigh on preaching faith - has plenty going on beneath her folds of silken black, as much as she's got going on behind her sharp, clever eyes.
You touch its darkly-smoothness and feel the sticky on your flesh as your fingers lift away sweetness with a hot hand. You gaze at it and see your fingerprints there, melted into chocolate so chocolate it is almost ruby.
Let's just face it - who are we kidding here - we both know exactly which part we are just aching to eat first, to sniff until our sinuses are drunk on thick cocoa, to lick until, until, until she's melted, and the cream inside flows forth, glazed with her intoxicating liquor. Somewhere inside rests the cherry, and the only thing separating it from you is just how much you love this confection.
This confection, let's face it, is nigh on irresisitible - the only reason you have not yet eaten it is because you know there is no way in hell anything such as this will ever exist again.
Lucky for you, this is just a review of the Goldfrapp album "Supernature," and you can listen to it as often as you like.
What I like is,
At this age,
I can laugh and admit
I don't know shit about shit
I know nothing about anything
And that if I dare assume I have an answer,
I'm just an asshole in a bag
pretending to be a cat
frantic to be let out.
What I am is what I know,
And what I know has come on the bean-scented sigh of a tired muse more often
than on the shoulders of one who vehemently bears
what they carry.
I hear,
and now
I know.
Hapy birthday,
to me.
36th birthday tomorrow.
I'll be honest - after surviving 16, 18, 21, 25, 30, and 35, birthday number thirty-six, so far, deserves all of the pomp and most of the circumstance of a hair on a sweet young hairpie.
Well, you know what they say - life is like a box of earwigs; you never know whatcher gonna get until you open the box and
AAAAAAAAAAHHHHH AAAHHHHH AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH AAAHHHH
Road Notes: Syracuse, NY, 7:30AM
It can't be a bad business trip that begins with a 400-mile 17th floor view of a tequila-soaked sunrise dripping down on a strawberry pancacke landscape drizzled in warm honey.
Who needs breakfast with such a blanket of a scene....
Road Notes: Cleveland, OH, 6ish pm, EST
Bored aboard flt. 2788 heading oh so close to home, but still far more than a simple skin-itch from my Quiddity.
When I touch down in Syracuse, the faint westward curling drift of seasalt in the murky EDT night will feel to me like being lodged in the womb.
Who'd ever thought I could find a problem with that.
I am sick of being the Better Man.
Every time I come up against an instance of Me vs. An Asshole, I'm expected to "take the high road."
Why?
In at least 80 out of 100 tmes (I'll admit, I've had my various faults, various and colorful) the Asshole is really and truly an Asshole; i.e., they deserve to be reprimanded, cajoled, sometimes barely short of stoned - not in the weed way, but in the Christian' Crack Their Head Open' way.
I am so nauseous over the intelligensia; the fragile; the socially unincorporated; the weak; the awkward; the precarious, being expected to slough off the cancerous effluvium that coats us whenever a feeble minded Regular decided to get a hair across his or her ass becaouse we're...well, one of the definitions listed above.
How come these malcontents; these creastures that make conscious decisions to interfere with communication; with equity; with love, with life with, really, what defines the "pursuit of happiness" are allowed, nay, sometimes maybe not encouraged, but certainly not dissuaded, from acting in a way that only brings PAIN, that only brings dissention; that only can ever bring about more and more problems between individuals in a world where individuals should - for survival's sake - truly and utterly eschew the small things that separate us, and instead of escalating them and inevitably making them not only rifts between people, but rifts between social groups that - when you really sit down with a cup of tea and think about it - have no reason at all to be on opposing sides. they are allowed to be given a Golden Ticket to act this way; to be empowered to continue to behave in such a detrimental manner that they quite literally - whether it is a high school bully beating up a "geek" or a 35 year old man married for 15 years who has zero confidence in his wife's honesty and valor - are allowed to foment this behavior to the point where their escalation - perhaps to shouting; perhaps to punching a wall; perhaps to beating a human - is considered "just...[THAT PERSON]."
Why, oh why on Earth, do we deal with being bruised by these people every day, and instead of forcing them to "take the high road", we force those we respect, we force those we appreciate, and we force those we love to do it in their favor.
These people - they are not victims. But, they have found a fast and easy way to teach us to be.
"A writer who passes up any opportunity to refresh his language is not a writer you can expect to meet in Heaven."
-- Tom Robbins, on writers who [dare to ever sleep well at night thinking more than three paragraphs adjoined concurrently in any missive can stand not the test of time, but the test of the certainly hoped for advancement of said writer's inner voice, rhythm, style, and let's fact it, ability to spin magic].