by Tomorrow's Man
January 2002
Tuesday 1 January, 2002 New Year's Day
Open eyes. Touch body. Douse. Dry. Grab cloth. Adorn. Sip dark brown wakefulness. Smell that cold air. Walk.
Ready?
Here we go, fellow camel-riders of the clock, Happy New Year. Mush.
Wednesday 2 January, 2002
You open them like a treasure chest, you reach in, your arm enters the dark to the elbow and feels the thick and loose wet disjecta of a full, spilt bowel coolly enfold your skin, you root around past the smell and the bits of flotsam that cling to your knuckles and beneath your nails, you grasp a hard, jagged lump of discard from the muck at the bottom and pull it toward the light and in your hand is a sapphire or maybe an emerald, you will have to clean it first, shine away the waste with your sleeve (near your heart), and maybe what you will have, then, is a treasure worth five precious moments, maybe, and you have to wonder if the love is all that worth it.
Thursday 3 January, 2002
Happiness, see, happiness is a banjo player, yeah, an old banjo player out on his porch, and it's an old porch and it's probably hot out, it's down South that's it, happiness is an old banjo player down South on his porch and it's hot out and he's got no teeth and drools a little but he's sure got a big ol' smile, and so, well, he must be really old, which is fine, that can be fine, so he's really really old, like all big pink gummy drooly smile old, but he can still play the banjo, even though it's really slowly and the banjo isn't tuned very well 'cos the really old guy he can't see too good anymore 'cos he's like 93 or something and he can't hear it too much either 'cos he probably went deaf like in World War I and probably doesn't give a foghorn's whistle about whether he's in tune or not or how fast he's playing 'cos he's happy, real happy, just pluckin' away, and that, that there, just pluckin' away, that's what happiness is.
Friday 4 January, 2002
"You caught me in the nick of time, I was just heading out to become a star shortstop. Nah, not in Boston or New York, but maybe in Milwaukee or somewhere, yeah, just for the heck of it. I like the uniforms. Sleep in 'em. Yep, 30 teams, I got me thirty sets of team pajamas. Nope, she divorced me about 5 years ago. Yeah, that time I went out to become a star center fielder. Well, no, it wasn't that, it was, er, something else. Well, it was my tattoos. That I got while I was away. What? Well, they were baseballs. Yes, tattoos of baseballs. Two of them. I think you can figure out where without me saying, I'm sure. Well, yeah, my wife got pretty fed up after that. No, she didn't like my plans for the tattoo of the bat, either. Especially since it says Louisville Slugger on it. Oh, well, I got it about six months ago. Only 300 bucks, and the guy was a true artist.
"Well, I've got to catch my bus. Could you just leave that subpoena in my mailbox for me? I ought to be back in late October. Sure, sure, I'll be there. You have a good day now."
Saturday 5 January, 2002
"I had these two huge zits on my face, I mean big, angry, suppurating whiteheads, so I had to pop them. When I pinched the first one, these huge, yellowish chunks of stuff squeezed out of the wound in my face, ripping my skin and bruising my chin blue. They landed on the counter in the kitchen with a wet slap, long, viscous tubes of noisome, pustulent, cheesy material. My chin was bleeding, having been basically ripped open.
"Then I noticed that there were small black things in the cheesy-looking stuff, strange sharp black lines mixed in with the pale-yellow. When I looked more closely, I saw that they were small black ants, eating and farming the cheesy stuff from my face. When I realized that they had been living in my skin, I nearly fainted. I ran to the bathroom to get some bandages for my face.
"When I came back and noticed that the chin-cheese was missing and that you were eating a hot-out-of-the-oven pizza covered in pale-yellow cheese with tiny black bits baked into it, I woke up."
[I hate when people tell me about their dreams that I'm in. Do I get peeled grapes fed to me by nubiles? No. I get anty face-cheese pizza.]
Sunday 6 January, 2002
Glass looking eye, sand blasted, tongue leaves wet in crevices, she skydives parachute immortal hubris in a black-cloth silk skyline with stars falling and bayonets holding up the skeletons of dead rock stars, tunnels fill with marbles aggies and immies cracking into New Jersey, thunderheads fall, writhe, sigh, and as the thick gray settles like slow-motion tragedy feet become slugs upset with the guppies, suicidal hedonists playing in the flooded grass. Yet, on they trudge.
Monday 7 January, 2002
She was pure. She strummed. Virgin catwire. Pink-not-yet-red lipped.
She waited, naked. I rode in, white hair, heaving lungs. Breath hot, hers, mine. I picked her up. Straddled.
She rode me, I bucked. She rode me, I fucked her dirty. She rode and the sun followed her high. She rode.
She had been pure; now she is heavenly. She had strummed; now she is exquisite solo. She was virgin catwire; now she is Hendrix licked.
She was always,
she was always,
red-lipped.
Tuesday 8 January, 2002
Well, as I say, most critters are, by and large, mostly meat.
Wednesday 9 January, 2002
She leaves me like this, spinning dizzy. I smile when I think about her, then realize -- is it love or terror? Oh, yeah -- both. That's what makes it soooo spicy. You lock onto a woman who's as tantalizing as the space between the rain, you get yourself a lot of surrounded-by-wet. It's perfect, it's the way to be, dizzy, excited, human, humid.
Perfect.
Thursday 10 January, 2002
BEEEE!!! BEEEE!!! BEEEE!!!!!
I need a new kind of alarm clock. This annoying, jarring drone just isn't cutting it. Why don't they make one that says, in a suggestive voice, "COFFEE...COFFEE...COFFEE...." Now that would get me out of bed. Or, for the non-caffeine addicted, it could say, "GOTTA PEE...GOTTA PEE...GOTTA PEE...." That would likely work as well, though if you're a deep sleeper, you'd best get rubber sheets.
And then there's those annoying watches that so many people have, the kind that these low-end-of-the-gene-pool malcontents feel the need to have programmed to play a seedy, digital version of Beethoven's entire Ode to Joy every fifteen freakin' minutes. Who needs a reminder that they're approaching death that badly?
If they want to make the watches tolerable, they have to use my alarm clock idea, but take it one step further. Give the things a bit of prescience. If instead of a little beepy reminder (or an Atari-ized Beethoven) going off you got, instead, announcements like, "WARNING...WIFE HAVING A BAD DAY...WIFE HAVING A BAD DAY...;" or, "CAR BEING TOWED...CAR BEING TOWED...;" or, "BOSS'S ULCER ACTING UP -- DON'T ASK FOR RAISE...DON'T ASK FOR RAISE...;" or, "GET PROSTATE CHECKED...GET PROSTATE CHECKED...;" or, "ONIONY LUNCH...ONIONY LUNCH...YOU SURE YOU DON'T WANT A PIECE OF GUM?"
Of course, for my watch or wake-up call, a simple "DON'T BOTHER...DON'T BOTHER..." would get me through the day.
Friday 11 January, 2002
"So, are you into all that freaky HOLLYWOOD STUFF? Oh, yeah, I'm all about that FREAKY Hollywood STUFF...."
Saturday 12 January, 2002
Eat pepperoni. Eat pepperoni. Eat pepperoni,
eat macaroni.
Eat pepperoni. Eat pepperoni. Eat pepperoni,
you're not related to Marconi.
Eat pepperoni. Eat pepperoni. Eat pepperoni,
I'm made of flesh-and-boni.
Eat pepperoni. Eat pepperoni. Eat pepperoni,
thirty pence you owe mi.
Eat pepperoni. Eat pepperoni. Eat pepperoni,
Tommy James wrote "Mony Moni."
Eat pepperoni. Eat pepperoni. Eat pepperoni,
Snoop Dog be my homi.
Eat pepperoni. Eat pepperoni. Eat pepperoni,
I wish I had a poni.
Eat pepperoni. Eat pepperoni. Eat pepperoni,
I don't own stock in Soni.
Eat pepperoni. Eat pepperoni. Eat pepperoni,
Don't leave me all aloni.
Eat pepperoni. Eat pepperoni. Eat pepperoni,
I use a blue cell-phoni.
Eat pepperoni. Eat pepperoni. Eat pepperoni,
Lord please get me homi.
Sunday 13 January, 2002
Once...once, I liked you. Lucky for us both, it was while I was in a dream. I was already dead, and sat upon a silky cloud, somewhere half-way to Heaven, in no rush to get there or anywhere else. I was pure 'being,' like time.
From my perch I watched your subtle brutality, purely human and lethal as your smiles and kisses and words left a wake of decay echoing alongside your every step. Then, the day you took one too many, and someone stopped you in your tracks.
I gazed down upon you and the Earth revolved through years as you clawed and climbed your way up, up, up, stronger than I had ever known, resisting the gravitious pull of your dire fate below. I smiled at you as you lay your bloody palms upon my cloud, half-way to Heaven. I held my hands out to you, to help you rise, even as I saw the lethal grin part your face. We touched, palms to palms, embracing.
You still moved with the hubris of the living, and I, already dead, dead by your hand, immortal by your lust and greed, I liked you then, I liked you for all your unevolved, petulant, selfish energy, and as your grin turned to grimace and you thought to use me as another of your rungs to Heaven, I crushed you, I reminded you of human pain, I collapsed you in an agony deliverable only by the dead to the living or, in your case, blindly vain, I crushed your bones and your veins and your body and I cast you, broken and forever in pain, from my cloud.
I will always like you enough to keep that dream alive.
Monday 14 January, 2002
You know you're hungover when cheese curls taste like feet smell.
Tuesday 15 January, 2002
Love, it has been said, is "life's greatest reward."
I would like to argue for cheese.
More people can handle it; even the lactose intolerant can have special lactic-acid-free cheese (or, when they crave flavor, they just deal with regular cheese making them feel like pus-filled dirigibles approaching New Jersey).
Sometimes I get so caught up in my love of cheese I will peel the slightly warmed slice of American or Provolone from my fingertips, and before I put it in my sandwich I peer closely at its surface which mimics my fingerprints...cheese, that loves me so much it wants to be me. It never makes it to my sandwich, but gets lovingly consumed da sč.
I imagine a suit of cheese, an encasing molded to my body, mimicking in its surface my every hair, bump, scar, and sore. It would be all I could do not to devour it immediately, or, just maybe, if I had had a lot of cheese recently, I would be able to hold off long enough to fold my cheese-self in between two five-foot eight-inch long slices of fresh scali bread, which I could then coat with a bit of butter and pesto and place in my human-sized George Foreman Grill, sizzling it in five minutes to melty-cheesy perfection.
Love is God; God is Love.
God is Cheese.
Wednesday 16 January, 2002
splash splash wet sigh electric shock when I touched my finger to your plug we ground out the music and whirled the pool let the beat drown without a reason not to splash splash and we wet the night soaked the stars in shivers as the trees leaned in for a better sight of our splash splash as the music frizzed through my fingers up my arms down my skin to the water up your thighs to your soft hairs standing out straight waving to me come here come here how could I resist I waded in and splash splash splash splash
hips held high
wet sigh.
Thursday 17 January, 2002
Okay. Here's the whole world. Right here.
Now, over there, those are all the adorable creatures. See? There a bunch of kittens...and a whole heck of a lot of baby rabbits...and some otters...a few chicks...a pony...two foals, just beginning to walk...oodles and oodles of little green tree frogs...some inchworms (though don't look too closely at them - scrutiny compromises their cuteness)...a koala...baby giraffes...not really many adorable lizards, but then, they are lizards...I even see a young kinkajou peeking out from the underbrush.
Now, over here, here's you. You are over here because you are the most adorable thing in the whole world, and you stand apart from every other cute thing there is.
C'mere, cutie. Give us a kiss.
Friday 18 January, 2002
Why did that man with the red eyepatch just spit at me?
Why did the water buffalo die out in Greater Uzbekistan, but not in Boston, where the rabid ones still maul fourteen people a day?
Why has the moon fallen into the Pacific Ocean, and how long do we have to throw rotten eggs at our landlords?
Where did that eagle go, the one that was carrying the weasel?
Where were you when I had to shoot that man last night (when you were supposed to be holding down his sword)?
Where can we climb a hot mound of just-out-of-the-oven glazed donuts and roll about on the top naked, licking each other clean?
Who was that man who ran by screaming just now with the leeches hanging from his naked calves exposed below his PowerPuff Girls boxer shorts with THURSDAY stitched in pink copperplate lettering along the worn-out elastic waistband?
Who told God he could get away with sneaking Satan back into Heaven for a quick fuck whenever he feels like it?
Who left the clothes-iron turned on, the one that fell onto the infantšs face, upturned in wonder?
When did the women all begin smelling like sticky warm vanilla-and-clove candy being turned by rambunctious preschoolers during an unscheduled Saturday evening family taffy-pull?
When did you glue together all the pages in my Book of Homemade Prayers, the one I write by hand and draw all the little birds and flowers in meticulous detail before I send it to Oprah each year (and what the heck did you use for glue it smelled more like cod-liver oil than Elmeršs)?
When we get there and I at last pet the neck of a giraffe, will you make sure the first blow is the last?
What was that large baseball player trying to say after you threw your burning, lice-infested laundry on him from the right-field bleachers?
What was the name of that town near that city in that province of that country where I kissed her three times, fucked her twice, fell in love once, and died forever?
What did the moment feel like when you looked into yourself, really peered deep through to the core of your Self and realized that, for better or for worse, aside from all your posturing and hubris, away from your desires, your wishes, your strengths, and your ambition, removed from the influence of your biases, your attitudes, your cynicism, and your caveats, and beyond the shelter of your beliefs your religions, your philosophies that you are one more simple human unit, just like everybody else?
Oh...and where did I leave my sunglasses....
Saturday-Sunday 19-20 January, 2002
Montreal Notes:
It is cold up here, colder than your glare when you found out I'd been pissing in the ice cube trays. If I had tits they'd frozen off back on St. Urbain, as I stumbled across the glaciers coating the sidewalks in lugubrious defiance of heat and time, my lost tits, fallen to the ground and wobbling for moments like flesh-tone frostbitten hairy Chinese singing bowls, wobb wobb wobbbbwobwobwob until they come to a canted stop, tilting on their stiffened nipples.
It's cold enough to feel my balls and penis lurch like a rebounding bungee jumper into my torso. I now possess aggies and a stack of dimes. I need crotch defrost.
"It's not that cold!" she says, boldly showing her pierced nipples and tattooed chest as we skip down St. Catherine. She's Quebecois, a race of humans who have become numb to temperatures that don't go above 0 Celcius from December to March. Weirdos. Though, they did invent poutine, the single-most wonderful french fry dish known to man. It's fries, and it's cheese curds, and it's duck-broth gravy, and it's awesome.
I needed poutine. I went to Montreal for poutine. There is no other reason to be there before May or after October. The drive up from Boston took 8 hours, as we sat trapped in gridlock traffic for 40 miles of desolate, nowhereland New Hampshire. I was surrounded by SUVs packed with scrubbed-clean white families, or rowdy, Natty-Light pounding, Limp-Biskit-listening white college freaks off to three-day ski weekends. They were all white people. They were all idiots. They were all in SUVs. ALL of them. I prayed to God with invective not heard before in this land, a forty-mile ranting wish for rocket launchers, flame throwers, and a sudden burst of hot weather that would melt the moutains clean and green and flood out these sick lemmings.
But I digress.
Saturday night, after we left the club where a German man the size of Rhode Island asked me in a gruff Ah-Nold accent if I would like to engage in some Knockwurst-knocking in the stall next to the urinal where I was pissing, I stumbled into the hotel room at 3 A.M. I stumbled out at 3:05. Poutine.
I needed poutine.
Rue de St. Catherine, where poutine (french fries, gravy, and hot, melty cheese) and poutin (filthy rotten whores with legs right up to their necks oh my is that price in Canadian dollars, Whooo...) are both common as comedy and easily obtained was only a block away. I was drunk and sockless. I had on a t-shirt, my jacket, pants, and my untied, quick run to the store boots. Except that I was in a foreign country at 3 AM, it was 20 below, and I was leaving my seedy hotel in Chinatown to walk to the Combat Zone for some french fries in gravy.
Live a little, die alot. Live alot; die a little, just a little, each time. But you'll get your poutine.
I just remembered there was a tallish, creepy woman at the club who showed me her ferret...or lemur...or something, some furry creature nuzzled in her pants around her crotch. It may have been a mongoose. Or the woman may have been Canadian; now I understand how they beat the cold. Perhaps it was a mating ritual. I don't know.
I had poutine late late Saturday night, then I had it for breakfast on Sunday morning. And I brought home leftovers, which I had for lunch.
Oh, yeah, and while I was in Montreal I visited friends. Hi, friends. Bring me back some poutine, would you?
Monday 21 January, 2002
Poetry poetry poetry here in this squishy ball I grip it stick it to my fingers try to toss it in the air miss the sky hit my head stuck to hair poetry poetry poetry sticking to this head my squishy ball oozing into my ears and echoing.
Tuesday 22 January, 2002
Magic bumps I'm hot to skin, kiss your forehead giggle a sin, rub the buttons make them rise, bread and butter slick salty thighs, echoes rise throat to face, open wide, open wide, magic ride, state of grace.
Wednesday 23 January, 2002
Roe roe roe this boat, wadeing through the rain...amazing that we're so close to universal epiphany, yet still ruled by religious freaks. When did our evolution cease? Maybe with the belief that every womb-blip should live.
Nature has boundaries, the final being extinction; humans, ruled by those wanting soldiers and sinners to bulk their ranks, are steaming headlong toward a sorry end, unculled. I only hope I am alive (me myself avoiding through a sliver of chance the Charybdis of a silver saline suctioned end three decades ago) when the day comes that the scores of bitter unaborted, the forced-to-live, march on the preachers of pro-life and fall on their flabby necks, screaming, beneath the decaying city towers of our collapsing world.
Thursday 24 January, 2002
The average American, by the age of 31, has consumed (approximately): four pounds of dust (including animal dander) and dirt, one dollar and seven cents in change, 23 insects, whole, 17 grams of insect and arachnid parts, 1.2 ounces of human saliva, 9.7 ounces of human urine, 2.3 ounces of animal urine, 9 mililiters of human semen, just under one mililiter of non-human semen (mostly canine), three animal retinas, 2.5 ounces of animal feces, 7.1 ounces of human feces, 240 human hairs, and 403 animal hairs.
Of course, I'm making all of this up, so don't you fret a bit the next time you go to that restaurant you enjoy so very much.
Friday 25 January, 2002
Bad bad bad bad bad night bad tension distraction a million ideas big ideas grand songs and melodies and magma-squeezing poems boiling through the brain and boiling off to a thick gravy mud burn skinned stuck in the head bad tension and pressure along fault lines of the catbox and the bills and the job and the commute home with the dumbfounded thousands of meat-grinder populance ideas and pomes bristling through the pores porcupine sharp from the inside out screaming as becoming roadkill and angry blood in mouth and fighting while dying and unable to scratch it with broken nails to paper to skin to flammable creosote wall to sand before the tide ideas and poems and bad night tension distraction exploding from the inside out from the inside out hydrogen reaction my thin skin flammable and igniting gone in a burst in a blast in a final flame out goes the light and I'm charred an ember cooling under the sinking cold breath from the flume close it down, close me down, close these big thoughts great poems from my brain keep the surface occupied with television and distraction fight tension fight tension fight tension until pressure explodes release like a star, release now, supernova, extinction.
Saturday 26 January, 2002
Something so sensual, so delicate and precious, seeing through her thin CVS bag to the words in white across the aqua box, she only stands about five-foot-two and twenty inches away from me as the Red Line train shunts us across the Charles River (confused and liquid in this 40-degree January); her long, dark-blonde hair is damp from the rain, her face ruddy from the wind, she is slim and she has average looks - maybe just a smile shy of pretty - warranting from me a respectful glance-then-turn-away until, until, I catch sight of the small box in her thin bag, white letters on aqua cardboard, and it isn't that the tampons inside the box will enter her body; it is the gravity of the ritual, the absorbtion of her blood, the evolution of her cycle, come round again; the tenderness, the complexity, and again, the delicacy of the act, of the history, of the pink of her body, now clothed before me, just a smile shy of pretty, as the train carries us on.
Sunday 27 January, 2002
I don't care how much of a media controlled, corporately cogged, controlled-thought Orwellian Prole I might be, the fact is:
New England Patriots 24, Pittsburgh Steelers 17
and "we" -- whoeverinhell that means, are going to the Superbowl.
Take this to heart, y'all, as you smirk or smile, worry, or weep, assume, wish, or fear; I'm HAPPY.
Monday 28 January, 2002
A day of full-moon flushes and hours of drink been drunk for days no sleep and whipping insomnia tied to the bed and tickled to pee but forgot the rubbber sheets maybe just I'll eat some meat red meat and hit the hay what was I thinking, it's Monday....
Tuesday 29 January, 2002
Not so long ago fire entered the world, burned up and down the coast in a spin-spun sticky trail of sugar and lust, shamed the jewel-navelled belly dancers into showing their faces and shaming the snakecharmers with their hard-on potions shipped from the blushing Orient, shook her moneymaker and brought down Alcatraz and The Great Wall, rusted the Eiffel Tower with her red juices, here she comes, bye bye Big Ben swallowed hole, skirt to hair she's flaming across the ocean and she lands steaming in New England, welcome to the home by the sea, she fits right in beneath the sunlight smoke in the home of the crazies, welcome home, witchy one, happy birthday, Dragonbait.
Wednesday 30 January, 2002
Wnat an odd day...everyone I know is depressed, suicidal, or simply numb, cold, and uncaring. Must be the season...or maybe humanity's truths are finally catching up to them.
So of course last night, after four days of insomnia, alcoholism, and dirks of unrequited horny stabbing through every muscle in my body, I had my first ever DREAM. I mean a DREAM, like a Dream Come True DREAM.
I scored a point for the Boston Bruins. I have no idea why, since I'm a terrible skater and only ever played floor hockey, but in the dream I was in a Bruins uniform, one of the ugly yellow ones the B's are forced to wear on FOX Broadcast games that look like Fred Flintstone pajamas. I stumbled out of a long, dark hallway, not knowing why I couldn't walk straight or where I was, when boom! into the light I went, and I was on the Bruins bench, ice skates on feet, hockey stick in hand.
Before I could think, Robbie Ftorek, the Bruins coach, pointed at me and said "Out There! Now!" I leaped over the railing, wondering how I did it without falling onto the ice, and immediately saw the puck shooting behind Byron DaFoe in the Bruins home net. I rushed behind the net and got my stick on the puck, just as one of the Washington Capitals checked me to the boards. It was only a glancing blow, and he just knocked me off my feet; my forward momentum carried me out of the brunt of the check, and I still had the puck in front of me, slowly pulling away from the blade of my stick.
I scrambled to me feet and regained control of the puck, then began lurching sloppily down the ice toward the Washington zone. I couldn't believe how easy it was...though I kept wondering when I had learned to skate. As I approached the red line, the Washington defense moved into their zone, and I was suddenly facing two guys the size of small foreign automobiles who got paid to stop the likes of me.
I sped up and cut through center ice; and just as I did, my hero -- Raymond Bourque -- retired Bruins defenseman, sure, and wearing #92 instead of #77 for some reason (like he had come out of retirement, but didn't want to take down his number from the rafters), shot in front of me left to right. I sped left, then flipped a quick wrist shot at the blade of Bourque's stick; we split the defense perfectly, fooling the Capitals' goalie, and Bourque plowed in for a top shelf goal.
The alarms sounded, the sirens blared. The Garden (Boston Garden, not the Fleet Center) was going wild...and I realized it was the final goal. I wasn't sure of what; the game, the playoffs...but it was something important. We had won. And I got the assist.
As the place emptied out, I skated shakily back to the bench, where my mother, sister, and nephew were jumping and applauding. I grabbed up my nephew...
...and woke up to pee, at 4:30 this morning.
At 4:33, I went back to bed, smiling.