by Tomorrow's Man
February 2002
Friday 1 February, 2002
Is it Friday yet?
Is it March yet?
Is it Summer yet?
Is it Christmas yet?
We're on February time now. The shuffling lurch through winter. Buckle yer seatbelts, folks...it'll keep you warm.
Saturday 2 February, 2002
My kind of trouble is a fadeaway death song. An elephantine ball-squeeze. A sugar high, real high. My kind of trouble is redheaded and angry. Knife-wielding and blind. Despairing and trigger-happy. My kind of trouble is a sun gone out. Vomit ready. Insomnia at sea. My kind of trouble is the word. Is this word. Is every word to follow.
Sunday 3 February, 2002
I put the finger to pen I put the pen to page I put the page in book I put the book for sale I take the sale to heart I leave my heart on sleeve I burn the sleeve with joy I turn the joy to mud I scrape the mud from my veins I open my veins to the sun I take the sun inside me and live it all again.
Monday 4 February, 2002
The mother comes home, rushes from her Lexus into the house with the cookies steaming the plastic wrap gripped 'round the plate, offers me one that I refuse quickly, waving my gloved hand through the cold February air.
The daugther comes home, saunters from her boyfriend's sports car with the quiet squish of liquid maing rainforest noises from between her vaginal lips, her mouth caked in crusted commas at the sides with his semen. Cocaine drilling her corneas to the wind, she smiles tightly at me, slows a step, another, her pace slowing though her legs spread wide. I nod, turn away.
The mother leaves, quick words thrown toward me through the storm about a child's party, and she the mother, eternal mother, cookies and smile equally sweet. Jitters to car, speeds away.
The son comes home, truck the size of Missoula saving us from the storm chewing up the sea, head hunkered down. I nod to him, he nods to me.
15 degrees out today, and no one asks why I'm standing outside in the cold.
Tuesday 5 February, 2002
You fucking idiots.
Not all of you. Of course.
Just finished a couple of books. Interesting books. About Henry Ford, you know him. The now-dead guy there with that big family and the big car company. Yep, him.
Ford was a Nazi. Nope, not a Nazi spympathizer, a Nazi. He didn't just support Hitler etc., he published a regular newsletter, in Michigan, that went to great lengths to deride and despise Jews. I've seen the picture of him getting a medal, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, from the Nazis in 1938 or so, the highest honor a non-German Nazi could get. Big smile on his face. He was a happy dude, wearing that medal.
Ford sold 4 million cars last year. 4.2 mil in 2000. I wonder how many of those middle-of-the-bell-curvers who couldn't wait to get behind the wheel of their Explorers and Aerostars were Jewish.
Ford likes Hitler, makes cars for Hitler cheap, shows him the assembly line methodology, gets a medal; Hitler saves money, puts the money into Auschwitz-Birkenau, Mauthausen, Dachau, etc.; Hitler has an epiphany - the assembly line methodology! Jews get marched into ovens and showers and graves more efficiently. Some survive, have kids, kids grow up...and buy themselves the ever-irresistible Ford Explorers, Rangers, Tauruses, Aerostars, etc., to shunt their Jewish kids from soccer game to psychiatrist's chair.
Just a scenario. Of course.
Some of you are really hateable.
Wednesday 6 February, 2002
I screamed, ran in a little circle, checked my hands, backed away, got very nauseous, doubled over but didn't throw up, checked my hands again and stood, moved closer, poked it with a plastic fork, relaxed a bit, picked it up with one tine of the fork, dropped it in the garbage disposal, turned on the water, hit the switch, cringed at the roar, shut the power and the faucet, continued filling my water bottle, and went back to my desk.
Well, what would you do if you found a severed fingertip in the sink at work?
Thursday 7 February, 2002
2:24 A.M.
My wife had to throw out my old, used maxi-pad tonight.
You know, that probably doesn't happen much, you know, in the general scheme of things.
2:25 A.M.
Friday 8 February, 2002
Take the language from the Man. Make him create again. Scratch, claw, strain, think. Make he put it all into new words.
What is the first word? [What would be your first word?]
The mouth opens...what is it he says? [What is it you say...?]
Speak.
Saturday 9 February, 2002
You know what was really bad? Last November 17th, when I was cornholed to death by that big black guy in that Detroit jail. Wayne County, I think it was. Yeah, that was pretty bad, when he bent me over and ripped me wide, having no idea my head was so close to the brick wall of our cell, and as his thrusting hammered my skull to splinters and my brain to jelly, 'yeah,' I thought, 'this is really uncomfortable.'
Sunday 10 February, 2002
They kissed her feet, kissed them, the blue toes cool with shed sweat; they rose, and lips glanced across molecules of lips, theirs and then hers; there, then, below her torn, tattered dress, one blue-violet toe and then another wriggled, and above them her eyes opened, and she sighed, sighed, screamed, the sound of life.
Monday 11 February, 2002
I've got it bad, I've got it good, what's the difference, I've got it, okay? It's not just a finger-greased low E on an abused blues guitar, it isn't just a cherry become a liar's moon, it's full and filling and as empty as a calorie's dream of becoming a sun and heating a galaxy, we all want to heat a galaxy, and I've got this, this feeling bad, I've got this feeling, oh, I've got it oh so good.
Tuesday 12 February, 2002
When you know the night has an edge...a moment that becomes morning and you've lost without fighting...the too honest sun only scars the wounds, battering you about from dawn to dusk...their darkness is your prayer by moments as the only thing that could heal you, clear the pores, slough the skin, and promise to you as you drift away that the dark will never end, will not abandon you to the bruising day.
Leaving for Iceland in 28 minutes. Shadows on the sky, wind daring and daring me. Here I come again, land of eruption...a clean phoenix, soon arriving.
Thursday 14 February, 2002 Reykjavik, 0700GMT - Valentine's Day
Cloud tops and tundra peaks tips on white-iris lips and petals a-snow on the crannied land, delicay of hot brought blood and white warms to pink, peaks of Esja pure and suckling ready-tipped, gold vapors erupt and satan-breath steam heats and slicks petals, skin, hot rush blood flush petals and skin arouse rose-to-red, rise, rise volcano your cresting hips and lava heat water steam erupt sulfur-steam and slish red hot pink tundra-melt across my white skin slicked North, I drink your South, I can taste you even far away, white, red, and pink.
Friday 15 February, 2002 Downtown Rejkjavik, 1430GMT - Café Paris
Don't mind the name; the café is quite nice. Lots is Reykjavik is culture-borrowed; Dilon's, O'Brien's, and the Dubliner from Ireland, Café Paris (complete with thin, snooty black-clad waitstaff and a wall-map of the Seine) from France, Caruso's yellow-candled ambience from Italy, and even a trusty 'n musty McDonald's serving a Tex-Mex Chicken Sandwich. This here is an International place.
The weather outside this window...I'll tell ya...realtime:
14:35 - Snow.
14:40 - Clearing.
14:42 - Heavy Snow.
14:49 - (A quick inch of snow later) No precipitation. Some sun breaking through.
14:53 - Blizzard conditions.
14:57 - Lighter snow...soft hail (an Icelandic specialty).
15:00 - Good ol' thick-flaked March-in-New-England snow.
15:05 - Nothing falling, just churning clouds tinged yellow by the geysers blasting sulfur to Heaven...a religious implication there? Maybe I'll get to that later.
15:10 - Flurries...hail....soft hail want...wanting to snow...I think...
I got a 750 cl Stór Kronenbourg (strong beer) when we came in about 45 minutes ago and it is really doing its thing...ooh, baby, strooong beer...stóóóóóór beer...strooong...over and out....snow man time....
Saturday 16 February, 2002 Reykjavik, 2017GMT
Iceland is penis happy.
Okay, sure, it is a very liberal nation, with an ex-female President already, and legal same-sex marriage, but they're really happy with the penis overall.
Everywhere at the spas it is taboo to shower in your bathing-suit; the showers are not co-ed, so it is one big happy sausage-wash on every corner (if you catch all the men in the showers turning and scrubbing at the same time when you are on enough psychedelic drugs the rhythmic swinging of so many dangling members may make you think of odd things, like that time they did the Spinners' song "Rubberband Man" on the Muppet Show with the neon rubberbands against the black background...but I digress).
I also noticed that the bathrooms in all of the clubs and bars have urinals that jut a foot straight out of the walls, with no type of separators, so there is no way to have a slash without having your peripheral vision pick up the phallic fountains of adjacent yellow flow as they wax and wane beside you.
Not yet convinced? Well, if I could have, I would have brought home pictures from the Phalological Museum -- a natural history and exposition in sculpture, picture, and craft of penises throughout the animal kingdom (nevermind what being on enough psychedelics will do to you in there) -- except that during the winter they are only open from 2-5 on Tuesdays and Saturdays; naturally, their hours shrink because of the cold.
Sunday 17 February, 2002 Reykjavik
The familiar feelings this time of year, brutalized by the cold and distance from everything called home, the constant gale whipping off the sea to wring tears of blood from my skin and shards from my eyes, the disorientation of not knowing where or why I'm here or anywhere, I felt all of this last year, the dark cold and the deep empty; but this time I can place an airmail stamp to the reason and deliver it with a lonely kiss: I miss my wife, and more than wishing she were here, I am wishing me to be home.
Monday 18 February, 2002 Over Greenland, 1900GMT
Love that look, sky high, I kiss down onto the tops of the clouds, I rest my fingertips in them, stir their surface with a thumb-twiddle and the tickle of a wrist-twitch; I pull my fingers free and watch the crystals dance to steam in the palm of my pink hand, I lift a kiss to the cerulean sky above, horizon-free and always flying, and blow snow-kisses home, clean.
Tuesday 19 February, 2002
Swans and turtle-doves taste sulfur and see the orange contrails burned into the backs of warm chickadees leaving laugh-lines in the snow;
'round here they don't run when you approach, they only peep and watch you shiver and shake and whimper at the wind, their little-bird voices wondering at you, "It's Iceland in February...peep...what on Earth were you thinking?"
Wednesday 20 February, 2002
That alligator he gots no restin' legs but he no extinct expired ex-pirate! He here on this plane, zip-tripping the miles and dirty dancin' like Jesus right with me hip to leather hip, heading for ze hills, that don't be no done gator no, he one still-stiffy dancin' croc-OH!-dile and it look somethin' like this: ._._._._._._._:
Thursday 21 February, 2002
(Found at the bottom of my Iceland suitcase scribbled madly onto a red scarf with god knows what...)
I tried and I tried but I had to capitulate...As the fable says, it does indeed "take one man more than four beers to piss a glacier away."
...
...or was that, "It takes more than one man and four beers to piss a glacier away."? The second is more feasible, but quite less esoteric, in that fun-martyr sense.
Either way, it's true...I've been out here for six hours and gone through a half-case of Egils Gull, and all I've done is turn a wee bit o' the Vatnajökull glacier a sorry shade of yellow...not that you can tell against the sulfur....
...
...I hope that cab comes back soon...200K is a hell of a jaunt at 20 below, and my walkman batteries are dying...and I'm out of beer....
...
Friday 22 February, 2002
I just bent backwards in my chair to stretch and my spine snapped in four places, shaking my eyeballs...I'm afraid to lean forward as I type this with my middle-finger tips...maybe I'll just stay here a while...
...I'm beginning to taste tapioca...
Saturday 23 February, 2002
2:12 A.M.
This is what I say, I say, "I think I love you." the first time, and I make it a joke, a joke like you don't have to take it seriously, but then I joke again, after many days and drinks, a joke like, "I could really love you." and to you and in my demeanor it is still a joke but there is the air of maybe about it, and then comes the wall I have to climb, the wall where, at the top, is an Etch-A-Sketch, which I was never very good at, and in shaky script with interconnected letters buffetted by a cold wind trying to push me off the top of that wall I write, "No really, I love you, though I can't tell you, because no one can know...", and that is when the gusts carry me over the wall and across the hard pavement and maybe (if I am lucky) to my empty bed, where I wonder, again, what this pillow would have smelled like with your hair having laid for a few hours upon it.
These are the nights of dreams of you.
Sunday 24 February, 2002
I have never had the head of a rubber ducky in my ass.
Okay, just that once. But the duckie asked nice.
Monday 25 February, 2002
Fingers on a lake, a lake, and blonde, blonde, such soft hair and eyes, heart-swelling eyes, and the down of baby birds, soft, soft, and brunette, brunette, long and waving with short hairs on the neck that tickle against your lips, and the sigh, the sigh, beneath short black hair, oil-black and smooth as lies, short black and tell me lies, tickle me here, beneath your long red hair, that red hair, such art and desire, such catastrophy, let me breathe here beneath the colors and sleep.
Tuesday 26 February, 2002
Shorten this month one more day, let's get it out of here now it's still too long still too long too long and cruel and nothing but a mastodon reminder of every other February that's speared you on its tusks before, lumbering toward extinction but stubborn and strong (it's one gored red eye Valentine's Day, our last attempt at fight when it mauled us under), let's get rid of this stinking beast of a month once and for all, I'll carry the poison-spears, someone give March a call.
Wednesday 27 February, 2002
Stream of consciousness dreaming at dawn to the low red moon and rising sun in the bitter cold both coming on to chill me to the bones rubbed together for warmth a shiver escapes the land and prays for Spring to come...
Thursday 28 February, 2002
Candles. Shaped as lovers. I touch the match to two wicks. I watch them burn with alacrity, and what I think is alarm. But, but...they melt, they join...they're together now, a puddle of one. I place a map of my lips in their warm wax.