by Tomorrow's Man
March 2001
Thursday, 1 March 2001I love how March and February, 75% of the century, begin on the same day of the week.
Once, a few years back, when I was very ill and home from work, I decided to put on the hidden instrumental album by Nine Inch Nails that you could only get on the CD-ROM of the game "Quake." At the time, NIN fans were desperate for a new post-Downward Spiral album from Trent, so this was a huge dilly (yo) for the fans. The album is an hour long, and all creepy instrumentals.
I was working third shift then, Midnight to 8 AM, and having a rough time of it. I began smoking pot to knock myself out when I got home at 9 in the morning; otherwise, I would be wired until 3, sleep poorly until 9, then go to work feeling like an old paper bag full of used kitty litter (i.e., not very well, thank you).
So this one Thursday evening in March of 1996, I had already taken three Tylenol PM and a shot or three of NyQuil, but the altered state of my circadian rhythm just would not let me sleep. The only way I thought I could get over my intense paranoimia was to toke up and take a hot bath.
Three puffs from the pipe, bathtub full and steaming, NIN on the CD player in my bedroom, loud, so I could hear it in the bathroom. I put on a blacklight in the bathroom, just for good measure.
In about ten minutes I began dozing off in the hot water, a vivid purple and silver landscape of bubbles quivering across the surface sending me off to sleep as my eyes finally closed. In about eleven minutes the many drugs in my bloodstream decided, in unison, to kick in.
On the CD playing in the other room, the sound of zombies (sound effects written into the music for the game) clomping down the long, echoey hallway to my front room began getting loud and menacing. Screams rose from my kitchen. A nailgun began its insane metallic chatter in my livingroom, sending nails hundred of miles per hour into my television, couch, cats, and walls, but to no fine end for the shooter, for his blood-gurgled scream screeched across the thunder of the indefatigable marching dead and into the core of my brain as a zombie (unaffected by the nailgun) ripped his head from his shoulders.
I was standing stiff and quivering in the corner of the tub, shivering and covered in shimmering bubbles, eyes wider than the lenses of my glasses, doused in lurid purple light and waiting for the undead to invade the bathroom and rend me with their decayed maws when coincidentally the track ended and my alarm clock, set for 9PM, went off in the other room and Alanis Morrisette began singing "It's like ra-ee-ain, on your wedding day..." from the tinny speaker.
It broke the mood.
But I still could not sleep.
Friday, 2 March 2001
Skipped a stone off the tail of the littlest dipper, dripped it across three wet lips before splashing like a comet into the sea, followed it down in salty haste and sanded my self on the sunny shore, flowed back to life through every chimney, bathing my self in wood's writhing chemical heat, crawled past the barking cats and their claws buring deep in human feet and began my run toward the next country, my self a stone skipping across the chop of the deep dark sea.
Saturday, 3 March 2001
"I remember elbows," He said. "Whenever I see an elbow, I know exactly who the person is, even before seeing their face, even if I have not seen them for a decade, or if I had only met them once, even then."
"I know what you mean!" I added, "I remember backs of heads. I can name a person I have met at any point in time in under three seconds, just from seeing the back of their head. It does not matter if it was a classmate I never spoke with in high school and who now has a completely different hair style and color. I would know them in a heartbeat."
"Speaking of heartbeats," She started, "That's what I remember. It's my hearing aids - they're really sensitive to heartbeats. If I am on my way home from work and standing next to someone on the crowded 86 bus that is always standing-room-only, I can make out the differences in the 75-odd heartbeats surrounding me. And I can distinguish whether I am riding with fellow commuters who I have ridden with before, or if a person is on the bus for the first time.
"I met my husband that way - I remembered his heartbeat from a parasailing course I had taken in 1992; he was the instructor, and I was smitten instantly - but I never saw him again after those three sessions. One afternoon, I heard his heartbeat on the bus. He was job-hunting in Boston. He had no recollection of me at all, but he didn't know the city and agreed to let me show him around...after dinner. We've been married alomost six years now."
We toasted her.
"Well, I'm the last one....but mine isn't very impressive. I remember breaths." She sipped her drink. "I guess it's all chemical signatures; I've never tried to figure it out, really. But if you blindfolded me and put me in the center of a room with my fifth grade science teacher after a Philadelphia steak bomb sub and an Arizona iced tea, my mother upon waking up next to her third husband the morning she realized he was gay, the old guy who always winked at me when he asked me for 'a fiver little lady, just for a bite-o, a bite-o' on Monday mornings in Harvard Square from August through October of 1997, Charles Bukowski during his hungover lecture at UCLA in 1990, my fifth college boyfriend after passing out with a mouthful of Doritos and Busch beer, and each one of you after this Chinese dinner, I could point out each person in that room accurately without having to go within five feet of them."
We were impressed, but our applause was cut short by the arrival of the next round of our scorpion bowls.
Mmmmmm, scorpion bowls. Unforgettable.
Sunday, 4 March 2001
I swear to (all) gods someday soon I am going to grasp (firmly) and then rip (succinctly, even if bloodily) this rotting sliver of grey bone right out of the tense and throbbing left side of my mouth
Monday, 5 March 2001
Candles lined up like nervous soldiers along the edge of the glass coffee table. Bottles of water in and around the fridge, standing at the same anxious attention. Few batteries in the house. Maybe a moot point. Early yet, 9:29 AM. The center doesn't hit for another 20 hours. In our sleep. While we dream. Jetzt kommt die flut.
Normally, the Atlantic Ocean laps and whispers about 40 feet from my front door, forty feet from the grand view of my picture window. A straight walk of ten steps from my front gate to the large rocks that line my street will bring you to the edge of the sea, where it writhes about two feet below the thin line of friction that holds your shoes to the slippery rocks of the breaktide. My cellar is below the waterline. There are three electric pumps in it that churn through the night during high tide at the full moon. Without the pumps, the sea comes in. We have been told to expect the electricity to go out by five this afternoon.
The full moon is in four days. The Full Worm Moon. The eating of the dead.
The dangerous phase of this immense storm hanging over our heads this morning is not going to hit until the wee hours of tomorrow morning, between 4-8 AM on Tuesday.
To reiterate: The Eating of the Dead Moon begins in four days. The heart of the storm hits in under 24 hours. And high tide - forty feet from my front door - is at 7:47 tomorrow morning.
The candles are lined up like nervous soldiers along the edge of my coffee table. They can hear the sighing of the sea. It sounds like the whisper of the skins of a billion worms slipping through the soil, hungry.
I just heard a crash. And maybe a crack...? Life is beating at my front window. It is finding a way in.
Tuesday, 6 March 2001
{[Filler, circa 1.15.01]
This was not written on a [Tuesday]. I am pretty sure that by the time this one is seen, the storm will have passed, but the nifty-like-lightning part of this is that I put these very letters in this particular order about [six weeks] before this day.
I know that there is always a storm coming. Trust me on this one.}
[addendum, 3/6/01; posted when power returned, 3/8/01]
This Storm '01 is bad. Nor'easter. Winthrop being hit hard. The water in the cellar is rising, rising, seeping in from six feet up the old, crumbling walls.
Saturation of the land.
I am standing in a leaking concrete cave while the worms inches beyond the wall drown...above my head.
Sing: "They live, they live, these worms, these worms, they survive to consume me soon..."
But - the ones just beyond my ear, the ones I could hear gasp for a last humid breath if they had vocal cords enough, they will not ever know me to surrender - and neither will the rest.
Even with the grand Atlantic thirsty to cure me like a side of salty meat snared between cold slabs of decaying concrete I will stand in this cold cave alive, I will listen to the sighing of stone becoming thin mud beneath the press of her tenacious, insidious tide, and I will keep these sheets dry and report this, my awe, of the godly-given power of this sea to the world.
Wednesday, 7 March 2001
10:11 PM
The past few days were the Storm of the Season, and they were. It got a bit scary 'round here. I really can't even think in detail, fact becoming so twisted that it seems like forgettable fiction; life, for the past few days, was not exciting, was not intriguing, was in fact quite boring for life that was bordered by cataclysm.
The ocean rose high. The full moon pushed it over the walls of my small seaside town, washing us in the salt water. There are three pumps in my basement that kept back the flow as diligently as they could and diligently it was, since they let no more than two inches of the sea's tears seep across the cellar floor. The water beneath the house had risen along the outside of the cellar, however, and it leaked in from the saturated ground. Watching it trickle down the walls was like watching a spider build a web across your front door.
The electricity held, so the pumps held, so life was boring in our isolation. Three of us roommates, video-ed out, emailed-out, staring at the grey sea-ed out, Scrabbled-out. Drink, smoke, sleep, wait. Not what I expected to be doing during three days of Storm of the Season quarantine.
My home is on a tiny rise at the end of the peninsula, so we fared well by this same time this morning (10:30 AM or so). but the rest of seaside Winthrop looked like the throat of a leviathan. For hours this AM we were trapped on Point Shirley by three feet of water that had decided to laze along the other side of the shore wall for a while. Around noon we could get a mile down the road. We saw sights.
Sights. Things you don't see. The roads for blocks West, North and South of the shore were covered in thousands of dead and dying starfish. Most of them were sized so they could have made funny hats; some, though, were big enough to be alarming to see, especially three blocks from the water and atop a mailbox.
At one point we got stuck trying to get around an immense National Guard truck. It had broken down. It was one of those people-carrier types, and the top of it had to be twelve feet off the ground.
Turned right when we got to the part of the road that heads out of Winthrop; it was still cordoned off by the State police, so we had to go left or right. We went right, and down the beach road. Residents only. We were.
More of those kinds of sights. Garage doors blasted in as if my Mjollnir. seaweed and rocks everywhere; driving was hard in the little Toyota because the pavement was covered in sand, mud, and larve gravel puked up by the great tide. And not just gravel had been thrown from the ocean's floor - dozens of people in soaking clothes carrying oddly distended trashbags were moving frantically along the beach. I found out why quickly as the driver's side front tire ran over a sea monster, making such a loud explosion of crunching that I slammed on the brakes. We skidded in the gravel about nine feet.
We got out of the car and looked behind ahead and all around us. Lobsters. Hundreds of lobsters were scrabbling headlong back toward the spray of the sea, dazed, addled, but quite surprisingly alive. Smaller, younger, redder ones moved quickly across the sidewalks and street, while huge 14-, 15-, 16-pound oldsters, barnacle-encrusted and powerful clawed, stood their ground suffocating while waiting for another gasp from the waves still crashing over the wall. Young and old, small and grand were scooped inevitably into trash bags. I counted 37 in 10 seconds and knew that there would be much boiling water in Winthrop tonight.
We got back in the car (all three of us non-lobster eaters) and made it three more blocks across the corrugated road before coming to the two large blocks that had been pushed out of the beach wall by the waves and thrown directly into the middle of the road. Each one was a large gray square of concrete, about six feet on a side. All around them people chased lobsters, shoveled gravel, and piloted large yellow backhoes and tractors to try to clear the tons of rock and sand from the road as quickly as they could.
Everything was in motion, cars, people, seagulls, lobsters, backhoes, shovels, seaweed, sand on the wind, spray from the ocean...everything but those two immense squares of stone. With everything slowly but frantically morphing around them from a mini-apocalyse world into a sublimely surreal one (no normal world has lobsters battling over starfish limbs in the middle of the street), their lack of motion became profound. I could see an aura around them, as if everything in motion faded in and out of its own existence as it intersected that of the stones. They were there, they were staying a good and long time, and they were presence.
I can say that was perhaps the first time I had ever really felt the tangibility of a presence, of something immense and truly ineffible.
Thursday, 8 March 2001
Walking through the snowy parking lot today, I was in an unusual state of intense scrutiny of the back windows of the cars parked along the side spaces. And a good thing, too ñ it amazed me what was piled back there! In one was a menagerie of at least fourteen stuffed animals, mostly lions and other felines, but there was one panda and a triceratops mixed in along with other more boring ones (a bear or two). I counted fourteen stuffed animals in the few seconds it took me to walk by the car.
In the back window of another, more expensive car were small green and yellow paper packets, bundled together with thin, blue elastic bands. When I moved a step closer and paused to focus, I could see that there were quite a lot of sachets of flower seeds; all carnations. Hundreds of carnation seed packs (thousands of carnations) in the back window of a 1999 Beemer.
In the back of another was an open box of Ramses condoms, one opened packet, and the former occupant of said packet (I assume) stuck like chewing gum to the exposed left speaker. It was still glistening.
In the back window of a black Lexus were several silver tools of some type, very clean and shiny-looking. A crane-of-neck and I could easily make out a medical clamp and a speculum. I moved on.
In the back of another vehicle were balls. Golf balls, baseballs, tennis balls, ping pong balls, small rubber ìsuper-balls,î a softball, and even an undersized football with a Los Angeles Rams logo on it (they must have had it for some time). I swear I could even see gobstoppers and gumballs in the mix (I saw an eyeball ñ which I am assuming was a gumball painted to look like one. Of course it was.)
That was the second to last car in the lot, then a pickup with nothing interesting in the back ended my survey. My mind wandered amidst those quiet human collections for a bit longer.
For some reason (I had not had coffee yet) the progression in my mind came up with: saleable testicles. A set (2) of menís testicles, i.e., balls, packaged in pairs, like flower and vegetable seeds, like herbs to grow at home. Of course, the testicles would be fully matured and ready-to-use. You would find them in the hardware store, on that dusty rack in the corner behind the house-painting supplies, next to where they also keep the sod and the years-old, never-sold flower pots that have been there since 1997 when old lady Messings died, since she was the only one who ever bought garden supplies there in the first place. A shiny silver metal scaffold like you see in any CVS, holding dozens of green and yellow packets of fully developed (human) male testes, in sizes ranging from ëextra smallí to ëlarge,í consistencies from ëripeí to ëfirm,í and sensitivity from ëdelicateí to ësturdy.í
I could fathom out a price for you by morning (since production would likely be easy in this, the age of cloning); however, I have no idea how the Money Back Guarantee would work if a customer was not completely satisfied. Iíll leave that set of red-tape shennanigans for the lawyers to wrassle over.
Friday, 9 March 2001
Maybe what makes me different is that I do not remember when planes were called airliners, but I know it anyway, like I know I am called Chris, or that you are called You. Maybe what makes me different is that I do not remember when freezers were known as ice boxes, but I call them that today, anyway. Maybe what makes me different is that I feel the rush of love when I see a slim woman in a long dress, her ankle naked and jutting peek by peek as she mounts stair after stair ahead of me, and this boils my blood in ways pornography never could. Maybe what makes me different is that I can sit here and smile in this cold, with the heating system failed since the gas jets went out, the wood stove empty but for this morningís smoldering newspaper becoming a last bit of ash, and my rum and water more water than rum, sure, but my smile more sincere than a whoreís posture.
Saturday, 10 March 2001
It was a too-early-awake hungover Thursday March morning and a March Wednesday was too early in the week and the season for an all-night binge. I had been up until 5 AM drinking cheap whiskey, smoking cheap pot, and listening to lesbian roommates play melodies and harmonies on folk guitar. My boss was a cute blonde, and though I never thought to try to score with her, I did get to keep my left hand in her warm crotch for the 75 minutes we attempted to sleep cuddled together on her roommateís floor before the alarm clock sent shrills to pierce my jangling spine.
I left her place and headed to my job quite late, wearing the same work clothes I had had on the day before. I never made it home, but I lived alone. My bossís apartment was far up the Red line, so I had to go five stops on Red, then one on Green, then five more on Orange to get to mine.
I made it onto the Orange Line and got within two stops of mine before I had to panic off of the train. My head was spinning, and the bottle of Gatorade I had chugged down ten minutes before was sending my stomach into caterwauls. I was at North Station, which was thankfully spare of folk at 11 in the morning. Still, the few people around disoriented me, and I headed up an escalator that held no one aboard, and no one behind. It crept up three steps before I heaved, sending a fount of purple liquid onto the sheer silver stairs. Another gush came and one more, and then I was empty.
Luckily, the steps of an escalator are corrugated, and there is space between each one as well. All of the fluid in my belly, Gatorade and alcohol-poisoned bile alike, flew between each of the cracks. Then the sticky stairs slid beneath the grating, my evidence was disappeared, and I canted into a wall after four shaking steps. Though it is sometimes true about feeling improved after heaving, I felt no better this time.
I went home.
(Dedicated to a good friend who, while riding the Orange Line recently, had to puke into her hat.
It had been a nice hat.)
Sunday, 11 March 2001
Iíve had it. For thirty years. But now Iíve done it. As I promised (I never kept a promise I didnít make). I ripped it right out of my head, seniority be damned. Sitting on the crapper no less. A sudden space in my face. Reached for some toilet paper, though there was little blood. Little enough, so easy to swallow, barely a drizzle of copper. Then forgot what I was going to wipe - felt like I had just eaten, in a very strange way that took teeth from me. Chompers chompers, jaw jaw, good thing my tongue is fine, what would I do without my tongue? Drool. Good thing for the world that I donít have 32 tongues; good thing for me, too...oh, the places I would be burning to put them -
- fiancÈ, fiancÈ, where are you, oh you are going to be so happy when I get to hold you...my 32 tongues are flickering like Medusaís kinetic serpentine hair awakened after a shower in a lightning storm, thirsty thirsty electricity makes me and I need to lap lap, lap like a kitten at a bowl of honeyed cream, one less tooth just gives me this much more room for within my flickering tongues to move...
Monday, 12 March 2001
I donít like picturing Layne Staley in a recording studio. Heís got a raw, edgy scruffiness that looks as if it would be as comfortable in the midst of the twin cans of $650.00 studio headphones as a porcupine with A.D.D. thatís been wrapped tightly into yards and yards of melted-tootsie-pop sticky pink taffeta.
Scott Weiland is different; somehow, a picture of him alone with an acoustic guitar in a tiny black room (perhaps a residual image from the one adorning his solo CD cover) makes a certain homey kind of unwashed and enjoyable muscatel-and-warm-brie-scented kind of sense;
--lots of muscatel; real funky.
Ozzy Osborne, now, heís one I canít picture quite right. And thatís exactly as it should be.
[footnote: Layne Staley is the lead singer of Alice in Chains; Scott Weiland is the lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots; and if you donít know who Ozzy Osborne is, then quit the nunnery, buy a short leather black leather miniskirt, get your eyes off this computer screen, and go out and read yourself a damned Rolling Stone, woman! Oh, and if youíre a guy over the age of 10, then just plain shame on you.]
Tuesday, 13 March 2001
This morning when I woke up my hair looked like a mother wolf eating its young. I showered, added hair spray. Then it looked a bit better - it looked like I gummed up her jaws and saved a few pups.
Wednesday, 14 March 2001
I want to be 18,000 words strong. Asking alot, I know. With about a half-million words in the English language, and about 322 million people speaking it, that's less than a tenth of a word each. 18,000 is quite a request, though let's face it, a few of these half-mil words can amply describe many, many people.
Ah, I'm being Ameri-centric, or Anglophilic at least, aren't I? There are so many other words, beautiful ones, in so many languages...I want to be Atontamiento in Spanish; I want to be Le meilleur amoureux in French; I want to be abbagliamento in Italian; and even "gehangen wie ein B”r" in German.
But even those languages are used quite a bit...perhaps I should seek description in others, like Shona, or Kurmanji, which are spoken by under 10 million people each in the entire world; of course, Swedish is only spoken by 9 million, too....
This is something to imagine. Don't you think? I want to be painted by words, 18,000. Don't you?
Imagine this: Tongues moving and clicking, smiles and pursed lips and spittle and teeth glimmering, lisps of flesh and of phoenetic form -- at the echo of the clasp of my hands, 18,000 mouths will say one unique word each, about you. You are illustrated by 18,000 different words.
Think of a paperback, 400 words on a dense, single-spaced page. 18,000 words is about 45 pages of words-about-you, unrepeating, true and honest, all that which describes you.
Imagine 18,000 colors. The spectrum of you.
Imagine 18,000 sounds, all different, all for the creature that is you. Your sonic existence, as known by the world.
I can imagine it. For you. You're worth it. Every word, note, and color.
C'mere. Let me paint you. I'll pick the words.
Thursday, 15 March 2001
End of the World Dream: I became conscious of the E.o.t.W. as I stood outside my front door, looking out over the harbor. I knew the World had been ending for a couple of weeks, and I knew it was the last day upon which I stood. Out in the harbor the ocean was bubbling...spumes of steam and lava shot from the surface...everywhere around me sink-holes would appear in the ground over the course of a few quick moments before small volcanoes would bellow forth from them. They became more frequent, and the land liquified. The ocean turned to steam. I heard a great roar, and knew it was the whole of the Pacific Ocean draining into the planet in the length of a toilet flush.
I did not feel the lava waves hit my ankles because the oxygen had disappeared and I was no longer breathing.
Friday, 16 March 2001
Ah folks, itís finally happened ñ there is a vehicle on the road that I hate more than SUVs. It is, of course, the New Volkwagen Beetles.
Admittedly, I was intrigued by the things a year ago, as everyone was; I was sucked into the slick advertising, flashing lights and shiny sparkly distraction of Volkswagenís intense campaigning the way many others were. Luckily, though, I dragged myself out from the suffocatingly sweet plastic dazzle of the surface of these ghastly vehicles and recovered before I considered owning or leasing one.
Do you remember the kids in high school who sported constant shit-eating grins before you knew they were called that? Those are the people who buy these new VWs. Do you know people who insist that the clothing made in certain sweatshops in Micronesia are better quality than other clothing made in the same sweatshops because a different brand name tag is sewn into the neckline? They buy these horrible vehicles. Do you remember the people who would argue with you tooth and nail that New Coke was the same as Old Coke, even after Coca-Cola pulled New Coke, apologized profusely to the public, and instated Coke Classic - which those same annoying people then insisted was the same as original pre-screwing-with-the-recipe Coke, even though Coca-Cola admitted that they no longer used sugar in the recipe, but corn syrup instead? Those are the barely center-of-the-bell-curve American intelligensia who buy these pretentious, obnoxious vehicles.
This is a car that sold scads before it had hit the streets. It was a smash hit before anyone had even heard its tune. People my age (30) were sucked into the great American advertising Hoover of their parentís nostalgia yet again, by Shark Marketing designed to attack the part of your brain that made you put dimes in your mouth as a baby before your common sense could catch up and say, ìDonít eat that, numbnuts.î
ìDonít fall for the pretty colors, numbnuts; buy a real car.î Pretty colors. That was the trick. These cars look like candy. And weíve eaten them up. Even the black ones. The one that almost ran me over this morning was Black. Oh, Iím sorry - VW has super-cool colors now, for those who acquire some sort of inner well-being by twisting a 300-dollar a month knife into their low self-esteem. The color of the one that almost ran me over I believe is called Satan-in-starless-night Licorice Black. But you can also get them in Choking-victim-at-a-rave Bruised Blue, Iím-gonna-kill-my-neighbor-for-wearing-the-same-Gap-pants-as-me Jealousy Green, the ever popular glasses-are-for-dorks Cataract Silver, I-broke-a-fingernail-real-low-so-i-have-to-call-into-work-for-three-days Blood Red, Late-stage Hepatitis Yellow (terminal), My-car-has-to-match-my-favorite-ultra-short-skirt Whore Panty Blue (slightly lighter than the choking victim Blue), and of course the limited edition colors (for those who really hate themselves), Baby Puke Milky White (with mixed yellow and sea green interior), 104-degree fever Magenta (with red and black interior), and Is-this-all-my-life-was-really-ever-worth Armageddon Gray (with swirled dark blue and black interior).
It doesnít bother me that I was almost killed by one of these cars. Nor does it even bother me that I was almost killed by an awful driver. It bothers me that I know ñ in the deepest recess of my cynical American heart - that when that Black Beetle turned the corner without stopping this morning and came within 4 inches of me at 30 miles an hour, the woman driving it was thinking, ìDammit, he almost touched my baby!!!î
Saturday, 17 March 2001
Orgasms are scary things.
No, no no no, I don't mean in the sense of a New York Times headline blaring "MILLIONS PANIC, FLEE ORGASMS RAMPAGING THROUGH DOWNTOWN MANHATTAN - NATIONAL GUARD HELPLESS; SATED."
I mean more along the lines of a creepy power that really takes control of you in every aspect of your inner trinity (i.e., physiologically, mentally, emotionally) for a few brief seconds, then throws a classic government cover-up on the whole thing by drugging you with endorphins and causing a powerful need for sleep and Doritos so you forget the entire incident.
Orgasms are incidents. Sweet little car wrecks. Tender catastrophes. I know each time I have one, I feel I'm collapsing like a waterfall of slow-motion bones. Then I reach for the Doritos, forgetting how I was in tears from a neural inferno just moments before.
Pardon me. I need a cigarette.
Sunday, 18 March 2001
Sunlight burning into my cups oh that finally feels good, good where's all that warmth up there streaking toward me, eh? Amazing a few hundred thousand miles can makes the difference between life-pops and living fricassee. I should look that word up...but it's just neat type it that way. Typical of me, enjoying my ignorance to apoint of blind ribaldry. Like the time...oh, well, perhaps that's a bit racy for these lines...I'll save that story for later. Know this, it involved tequila, me outside without underwear, and the surf not the only thing pounding that night if you catch my lazy Sunday drift.
Sunday morning, 5:47 AM. Stone Soup Sober. No coffee. Sunlight streaks acting like golden pirouettes on the sneezes of angels. My smile is at the edge of the world, where it gets all salty and muddy. More news about starfish. I still have to write that story. So much to say, but mind a sunlit garble right now.
She turns over, a few feet away. A breast is released. Sunlight plays. Her skin is cream, her nipple the color of rose-hipped chai in the sunlight, sunlight. I'm in the mood to rise like the sun, I'm in the mood to smell the sea.
Maybe I'll skip my coffee this morning and instead, have some tea...
Monday, 19 March 2001
More dreams of the end of the world last night. Have had lots lately. This time I left my boots by a fecund, moss-covered pond, thick enough to walk upon. People sat around it stunned and silent in the humid atmosphere. The sky was as yellow as J. Napolitano's poisonous garden, but the air was sweet, sweet with new, original life. (The Earth burgeoning, always, over and over, and again.)
I got in the large vehicle that was taking us to shelter. The driver, an older, bitter man, resented me because he thought I was gay. He felt anyone caught at the end of the world witohut boots must be 'wrong in the head,' to quote him. But he did not know that the grass around the pond was so, so soft (even if something of a green-yellow in color); it was the most plush layer the Earth had ever created. I would not have missed walking on that even for a chance to return to our pre-Armageddon past.
Springtime comes soon. Be waiting.
Tuesday, 20 March 2001
I was standing on the train platform of the Red line reading 'Sexing the Cherry' by J. Winterson (the best-titled book ever) listening to the second disc of Paul Sch¸tse's album "Apart" when this maniac came running north out of the southbound tunnel right along the tracks, his eyes wide and dilated, limping along at an insane clip and barely avoiding the third rail (600 watts of instant death), arms bare and torn and gouting blood, fingers missing, he'd been through things I did not want to know about even as he screamed them from a raw scorched throat loud enough to cut through the gossamer if forboding layers of Sch¸tse's soundscape, and the worst part was that in the five or six seconds after he burst into the lighted platform area of the tunnel he was looking only over his shoulder and not ahead of him as he shouted HERE IT COMES!! HERE IT COMES!! IT'S THE END OF THE WORL--!!!" before the southbound red line train approaching him at thirty miles an hour turned him into sticky red tatters.
I stared. For a moment.
I put Joe Jackson's "Blaze of Glory" CD in my walkman. I left South Station and walked to Government Center, where I caught my nice safe Blue line train.
I also got a cup of Dunkin' Donuts iced coffee, medium, with cream and two teaspoons of sugar. Perfect.
Wednesday, 21 March 2001
MASS. STATE GOVERNMENT SELLS SUMMER TO APPLETON, WISCONSIN, TO FINANCE RISING OVERBUDGET OF BIG DIG.
Governer Cellucci stated yesterday, "Heck, we love the fall around here; and now we'll have plenty more of it!" While outlining the radical plan to ship all temperatures over 50 degrees to the small northern Wisconsin town, a spokesman for Cellucci emphasized that the additional monies would help decompress the billion-dollar bloat of the Big Dig. "We'll have them bridges up in no time now. What? We're building tunnels?"
Autumn is now set to begin April 1, 2001, and will continue until December 21, when Winter naturally arrives.
...I hate this weather.
Thursday, 22 March 2001
I feel the way drugs must feel, heatless, dry so dry, able to be crushed to a powder...a quiet, dusting ramble.... I don't think I could even make mud of me right now.
It's the humidity. The Spring. It gets its water by sucking me dry, I can feel it. Maybe you can too. My skin is cracking. How does yours feel beneath the layer of lotion. How. It. Feels.
Dry.
Spring is a Vampire. I'm Spring's Spring, feeding it, I'm this season's Fountain of Youth.
I'd bet de Leon died by desiccation. Silly bastard. I know he found it. He found it, dropped to his knees, crawled through the moisture-free silicon surrounding the marble base, dipped in his hands without feeling the burn, put one sip to his lips, and dried to death.
Friday, 23 March 2001
A few ideas to help you get through your potentially dreary first full-on Spring weekend:
Do everything according to a Plan; make sure no one knows the Plan but you.
Operate your body along the lines of an iterating spectrum.
Listen to your pets. They are insane, but occasionally they do bring up viable insights.
Release many endorphins, as often as possible. Work to make the atmosphere funkily you.
Change that hairstyle. C'mon. Just try it.
Tell her she's just got the cutest nose!! Then run.
See it, that thing, that thing over there? Yeah, that damned thing. Figure out why you really hate that damned thing and do something about it.
Is broccoli really that good? Especially naked, with the clamps on?
Ride in a Virgin!
Go through every one of the 16.7 million colors able to be displayed on this screen - twice - figure out your favorite, find the HTML designation for it, then have that 8-digit code tatooed on the bottom of your left foot. [If anyone corrects a single thing in this, you are silly and must color in every pixel on the screen yer staring at with a #4 pencil. Nyeah.]
Pickles with peanut butter. Trust me.
Fill in this blank: "My favorite clock, the one I trust most, once said "__________," and I did not take its advice. It was the worst decision of my life."
Put three pennies in each of your shoes before you head for work on Monday. By 10AM, you will have a noticeable, measurable fever. Go home and play.
Politely dance through the masses of the ignorant, and sweating and laughing and teetering on joy, seek more and more knowledge.
Saturday, 24 March 2001
Spent the night talking about evolution, Darwinism, abortion, pot smoking, ecstasy taking, general drug-imbibing, liberalism, socialism, communism, Kant, Heidegger, Neitsche, PJ Harvey, Michael Stipe, Barenaked Ladies, Prince, Trent Reznor, republicanism, flannel shirts, cold weather, "smoke-outs", the fourth of July, natural selection, chinese food, Amsterdam, Asia, Michael Jackson, rug:flame retaradability ratios, gayness, sunsets, really f***ing good homemade beer, sub-woofers, surround sound, prices on DVDs, where to get a good deal on a 'rubber mate' (www.realdoll.com), hair length, hair color, shaving techniques, the game Twister and its strategy, why the game Risk should never be played between friends, shenannigans, monkeyshines, lighters and matches, clove cigarettes, handing out cigars at a baby's birth, babies, abortion (again - loaded subject), shaved or furred on women (furred won by a 2:1 margin), shaved to furred on men (furred won by a 2:1 margin again - face it, we're mammals), Darwinism, acoustic guitars, Jonathan Price, George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg's ironic inability to act with a Boston accent, jumping jacks, hip hop music, ambient music, mushrooms - from shiitake to psilocybin, records made out of clear or colored vinyl, denim, plastic, we never once talked about God, or Love, my brain is so happily swollen I am smiling, dinner, beer, chinese food, and that is where we are right now so I must go pick out my D13 with chicken fingers and an egg roll, farty cabbage be damned.
Sunday, 25 March 2001
I remember the therapist I saw a month ago saying one thing in our first and last session that still stands out in my mind, "It is our past which shape us."
She seemed to feel that instances like my sister almost setting the house on fire or my mother being brutally attacked while I stood helpless in the warm kitchen or my first bicycle being stolen four days after I had gotten it or having the shit kicked out of me by R.D. every day for three years in grade school or my grandfather and then my grandmother dying or when I fell part-way off of a concrete-embedded swing-set and scraped all of the flesh off of my back to the point where my vertebrae were jutting into the humid July air I have overcome with a supple and dignified mental agility. She told me I was fine, I am fine, I am sane, sane.
But how do I know any of these things that shaped me so well into a fine sane man even happened? Because others nod their heads yes, yes that time you cleverly instigated sex with your babysitter when you were seven years old really happened?
I do not remember what I did two Thursdays ago. I do not remember exactly what it was I was doing at 2:47 PM this past Friday.
Do you?
Did you know instantly, without a doubt? And if you did, was there an exceptional reason, not just an everyday day being everyday?
I trust no one's past because I see splinters in my own. There are spots of pain I know have healed up differently than they were before; i.e.: scars alter. I trust no one's memories.
But at least the doctor thinks I'm sane.
Monday, 26 March 2001
5:51 P.M.
Watched the old woman board the Blue Line train talking to herself. I have to say, it was the first time I had ever seen an old red-haired woman talking to herself on the train in Urdu. You just don't hear that every day well sister, I certainly don't. I was less taken aback by her subsequent outbursts of vile language and violent epithets, directed mainly at the young Amish couple seated across from her. Initially, that she was speaking Urdu was a surprise, but that she had Tourette's Syndrome was simply less a shock to me - my daily quota of commuting-shock has dwindled dramatically in the past few years with all I've seen, brother, it has dwindled exponentially from the days I used to be alarmed at a woman on the Orange Line screaming rape and waving a hunting knife at any man who came within four feet of her.
The Amish couple, however, was not pleased. They were obviously fluent in the woman's relatively rare dialect (Baluchi), for when the woman shouted, "Pig-fucking religious freaks!" (or something equally vulgar; I'm only fluent in Punjabi), they left their seats so quickly the wife lost her bonnet and had to lurch back for it where it had landed on the rain-soaked, mud-dirty floor as her husband dragged her tightly by the arm further away down the train-car.
His face was bright, bright red beneath his black felt hat, but after leaving his wife at the opposite end of the train he strode back toward the woman and without hiding his disgust he tossed a small Double Distelfink tile in the old red-haired woman's lap before turning back toward his wife. He did not utter a word.
His noble act impressed me deeply, but I had been quite upset by the woman's bright white bonnet being so badly soiled. I turned up my walkman and let Berlioz un-remind me of what I was feeling.
Tuesday, 27 March 2001
I'm growing frenetic. Maybe it's the twitch in my fingers again, maybe the hint of warmth teasing through the air like the smell of bacon or coffee while still fast asleep late on a Sunday. Oh, the dream these scents bring...
While walking here, there, wherever my compass is stretching, the smell that I need is coming out again. The grass growing, roots and leaves and buds anxious to flower - the flora awaking in the wet, rich earth - smells of a woman's center just after her cycle has pinked out for the month, the days when it is once again beginning. I could follow this scent to the center of the earth, if it seeped so deeply.
Luckily, I need not take up such spelunking, since I have been blessed by Gaia's cleverness and lust; She has seen to it that every one of our distaff half dances through life smelling of that sublime, sensual, primal scent, the Earth awakening again.
(She passes by and smells of lilacs blooming. Though her perfume is synthetic, the scent still carries me to the kiss of the sea; and the salty sea, as its peak reaches for the full moon, brings me right back to the cherishable scent of the earth's most precious cycle, perpetually beginning.)
Wednesday, 28 March 2001
It's in me. I can feel it. Illness. A goddamned cold. Everyone's had it, every single being around me. The damned dust mites living on my pillowcase eating my dead skin flakes kept me up all night sneezing and wheezing. My hair is starting to hurt (no comments from the Ape House on my excedentemente intensa cordura hairstyle lately. It's going through a 'phase').
Vitamin C, vitamin E, vitamins A,B,D,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z, zinc, potassium, arugala, mayonnaise, O2, echinacea, ginseng, acupuncture, blah blah blah the snot will come.
I hate the Spring. I hate being sick. Put the two together and you might as well duct-tape me to the hood of a new Volkswagen Beetle (in the special web-only 'Goop Caked Around Your Eyes When You're Sick Greenish-Yellow' shell) and drive me home through the rain. Or sleet. Or whatever-the-hell the weather's doing out there today.
Morty, Morty, Pigs in Space, just throw me in a pot hole.
Thursday, 29 March 2001
"I was born in Chicago. My mother is Barbara. Please make me clean because I always want to be clean sometimes."
Friday, 30 March 2001
I donít know how it happened. I was not hung over, had done no drugs, was not, at that moment, out of my mind. We made it to the Berri-UQAM train station uneventfully, squeezing into the throng of typical Saturday afternoon commuters and tourists. When we got off the train at Mont-Royal station, my roommate asked me what was coming out of my left pant leg. I looked down. A swath of grey material ñ the color grey of only one alarming garment in my wardrobe ñ was poking out between my boot and my pant leg. I bent over in the bustling crowd and pulled out the garment with an accidental flourish. It was, of course, my underwear. They had come down my left leg and slipped out the bottom of my pants. I did a spot check ñ sure enough, I was hanging free. How did I not notice? Many theories have been posited: Perhaps I only put them on one leg? Impossible; I had been walking around in just the underwear earlier in the morning before I had gotten dressed, in a crowd that would surely have noticed and commented (ìUm, Chris, your balls are hanging out.î). Perhaps I had another pair hidden up in my pants from when I had done laundry, and didnít notice? Okay, plausible; but I only had one grey pair. I spent the day with my boxers in my jacket pocket, wondering just what can go on in your pants if you donít stay at close attention.
Saturday, 31 March 2001
I imagine a game show arriving soon in which you are blindfolded and you must step on things in boots and figure out what it is you are stepping on.
Set up like "Who Wants to Be a Milionaire," you are given four choices and you must pick the correct one. You step down on the 'mystery squash' and can only tell what it is by sound and the vague texture you would feel through the bottom of the boot. You get to pick which foot you would prefer to choose.
The first round would be easy. Down goes your foot, then Regis Philbin (or a similarly-headed clone) reads to you the four choices: "Now [Joe Shmoe], tell me, was that:
A) A lightbulb;
B) A donkey;
C) A Soggy, Half-Smoked Cuban Cigar; or
D) A Silicon Breast Implant, Small D - Large C?"
"I'm going to go with A, the Lightbulb, Regis."
[Here comes the catch-phrase]: "Are you...Sure-Footed??"
"Yes, Regis - I'm on top of it!"
"You're Sure-Footed!" or, if Joe got it wrong, "Ooh, sorry, Joe; looks like you put your foot in your mouth." (Lots of studio laughter.)
By the last round, it would get difficult: "Okay Joe, was that:
A) Garlic Mashed Potatoes from the Outback Steak House;
B) A Pile of Cat Vomit;
C) Chum; or
D) Garlic Mashed Potatoes from the 99 Restaurant?"
I'm already rapt. I'm sure FOX will run with this.