by Tomorrow's Man
March 2002
Friday 1 March, 2002
Okay, what are you going to do with all that ground? It's everywhere, allwhere, it's every direction you could move.
What do you do with just two feet (ten toes) in a situation so new as this? Reach down, hands to dew, stroke green gently verdant. Lush. Untouched. Until you.
But your hands can't take you from here. They can salute the sky; they can clap for joy; they can pray. But your feet, your two feet will be carrying you, your big decision:
All that ground, roadless, streetless, pathless. Even God didn't walk here. And now your feet -- see them down there, toes wiggling, ready -- will choose the only beginning. You are Point A. Point B, too, soon you'll be. And C, and D, and 1-A, and 495, and red and blue and black lines tracing the ways around a world. You're the first traffic, the first commute, the first pedestrian.
You're the first progress.
Yeah, you'd better take a moment on that one. Let your butt feel some of all that ground for a bit. Give your feet a rest...'cos they're going to be busy.
Progress isn't so stigmatic. Don't worry. As you flatten the grass and pavement appears in your pace, smile and whistle to the melody of Entropy, always just a few bars behind, but catching up. Skipping up your path, Entropy will walk alongside you soon enough.
Okay, stand up. Deep breaths. Notice not a creak in your knees (you're one of those folks who never need fixing, now). Brush chaff from the newly minted chlorophyll rorsach splayed across the seat of your jeans. Check your watch -- oh, yes, there's no time (yet). It's always early morning, for now.
Warm sunshine, smile begetting. Maybe you've already imagined the sound of a cherry-feathered cardinal warbling a threnody for a hopeful mate...and maybe, just maybe...now you can hear it really.
Let's find some trees, shall we? Time to take the first step. It's always better to start the road than follow it, eh? The only other option, of course, is to learn to fly.
But you'll need a runway....
Saturday 2 March, 2002
Whenever you're up against the wall and the odds are against you, remember to say: "I have no idea what I did with my chicken." You shall be saved.
Sunday 3 March, 2002 Madison, Wisconsin
10:43 A.M.
Nothing better before that jiggery flight home than a few drinks, some damned fine bacon, and conversation as cool as playing foozball with the constellations, with friends I don't see often enough.
First, a Bloody Mary. CBI's Bloody Marys are the best in the Madison morning -- especially when you're hungover at eight degrees below zero with a foot of snow covering the miles you've left to trudge. Surprise-spicy, mild but with enough of an occasional clasp at your throat to keep you on your toes, manzanilla olives like goiters, pickles that could have canoed whole tribes of Patawatomi across the Peshtigo, and a cold chaser of Dab's golden best to round it all off. Thus begin the positive vibrations.
Next, breakfast. Eggs, taters, standard hearty fare; but...there's your usual bacon-type bacon, and then there's the bacon at CBI: Four strips of deep-fried porcine ass-muscle bible-thick and Atlantic-salty. This bacon could gang up and side a house. This is Über-Bacon. Bacon that would make immortals take up jogging. This is storing-along-the-gumline-for-later bacon. "That there's some gooooood goddamn bacon."
11:11 A.M.
(Blood Mary and her saucy entourage have joined my bleeding ulcer and the Über-Bacon in an international Chiquita-banana warehouse rave of belly revelry (I can hear the pickle using the olive as an Ashiko...I think the pimento is on tamborine). The bacon is loosening up, falling out of their goose-stepping and gettin' jiggy wit' Mary, trying to get her out of all those darned clothes. Watch it boys, she's got a reputation.)
Time for conversation, with only the finest of friends.
My bestest in the midwestest, the thing that's him, is insane, with strange legions of bugs that populate his brain. Their fornications form his lurid, leering dreams. Couldn't live without him.
And my fave couple, the Jonathan and Jennifer Hart of the s&m post-apocalypse. Okay, they don't have a little dog named Freeway, they have a Ball Python named Ananta. And they don't have a chauffeur named Max, they have a Hookah named Delilah that whispers gossip to me when I suck peach tobacco from her smoke-spiraling nipple-arms. These people are every superstar I've ever wanted to be, they're my Jonathan and Jennifer Hard, Mish Munnepenneah, they're my Mishter and Mishush Jamesh Bondage.
She hands me a Troll doll with screaming orange hair, both of them wide-eyed. Then there's the girl, the girl, she from the womb of stars, the dark belly of the crescent moon. She's deranged and dynamic, she's lost and liquid, crazy, callow, callous and sparkling like the warm summer sea. She's out by Saturn and heavy-metal magnetic, a fully-female pulsing red moon, rising.
We order beers, Lake Louis Scotch Ale. Delicious, incredible, a sweet and perfect apertif. I sip and smile as the talk turns from the war (very brief and enough of that) to a thousand other topics in a perpetual melody. We hold a classical conversation, compose an enduring suite of speak, then write our libretto with eighty-dollar Ambrosia Maple pens on multi-color construction paper. We are rarefied and we know it.
We are talking about consensual sex with 6-inch high anatomically correct female Troll dolls in airplane bathrooms. The Half-Foot-High Club. I wonder if they have a mini-membership card. Sadly, it's time for me to go.
Brite morning cackles of joy. The wings are cold (even though it's all the way up to 7 outside), but the plane idles, warming, shards of time dropping to the ground with the icicles. It is time to depart...and one of us is falling, falling down the stairs. And laughing.
Ah, no -- it's all of us, pens in hand, songs in head.
Falling, and laughing.
Monday 4 March, 2002
In one of those conditions where anyone would be better to talk to than just watching my breath form a fog around the receding full moon of this Guinness glass...sit down, please, ask me anything, about my piercings, about my ghastly eyes, about my wedding ring, about my troubled, anxious smile...ask me anything, remove me from the here where is only me and mono voices diluted static in my ear...give me a word, phrase, a 'hi,' a 'hello' or a 'howdy,' anything to distill the static, please, carry me from this noise...
Tuesday 5 March, 2002
I wonder if anyone has ever been murdered while they were already crying for a different despair...I wonder that now, while sitting here alone at midnight, headphones on, not caring what is behind me.
Some days are worse than others.
Wednesday 6 March, 2002
Sometimes, it's just better for everybody if you take yourself out of context.
Thursday 7 March, 2002
Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps they used to call it, but of course I don't wear those kind of shoes. Bucking up, perhaps....
Does luck congeal around you? Maybe that is the root of my itching-skin discomfort right now...maybe I'm about to be enveloped by a thick, viscous jelly of luck, an oozing shroud of the best luck I've ever had, a choking vesicle of all of my wildest dreams coming true within a suffocating swirl of days....---
Maybe I should just listen to more Beck: "Things're gonna change I can feel it..."
Friday 8 March, 2002
I just found out that "Tomorrow's Man" is the name of a monthly gay & lesbian periodical published out of NYC.
"Go, me...it's my birthday...go, me...kray-zee...."
I've also recently discovered that I have Pseudo-Narcoleptic Sitting-Down Disorder (PNSDD), an affliction that makes me seemingly black out for the briefest moment every time my ass is half-way to a chair, couch, futon, beach, see-saw, pony, whatever it is I'm about to sit on, causing me to collapse into my seat like a sack of bowling balls.
Explains my Schwarzenegger-esque buttocks....
Saturday 9 March, 2002
6:28 PM
...4 year old...singing to me in Chinese and Spanish....not here, over the phone, flanging...god, am I on the phone? is she really pregnant? not my wife...right? silences scare me, when I'm on the phone...I hear a movie, it sounds like there's circus taffy...."why is that dalmation blue and purple?" she asks the child. "says you it is..." she replies....
wait the screen is blue and purple...here come the drugs gotta go now okay bye...
Sunday 10 March, 2002
You wanna talk about lucky farts. Boy, did Marty ever have a lucky one. He walked into the men's room, feeling that pressure down below, but just as he put his middle fingertip to the closed door of the stall he let out a three-chord methane ripper, shrinking his waistline by a few millimeters and evaporating his urge. Instead, he just used the urinal, washed his hands, and left, never opening the stall door to find what was left of his boss hanging by the coat-hook on the other side of it -- and also the thing that had turned his boss into a confusion of flesh still clawed to his boss's body, still feeding.
Yep, you could say that was just about the luckiest fart of Marty's life.
Monday 11 March, 2002
Everyone is beautiful out here today.
Tuesday 12 March, 2002
No one is beautfiul anywhere today.
Wednesday 13 March, 2002
From this day forward I will walk with the Magician and the High Priestess, I will learn from their bickerings and love-noises, and I will grow my feet to fill their mutable footsteps.
Springtime trundles indefatigably forth, and the time for change is upon me like drizzling honey -- bring the birds and the bears and the bees, I am ready to bloom.
Thursday 14 March, 2002
I feel like streaking by in the night, appearing in your eyes as a star through tears cried in surprised joy, I wish to swoop and swirl through the dark, a rainbow bat feasting on fireflies and gaining their glow, I wish to write the names of the gods with the afterimage I leave behind your lashes, or maybe I just wish to write your name in the dark sky, for the world to see, as aglow as you appear to me.
Friday 15 March, 2002
Why does the weekend sometimes start with a Monday, or at least a Monday-round-the-corner feeling? It's March, I swear it's March, the Ides of March, this day is just not meant to be enjoyed.
I bet Julius Caesar wish'd he'd called in that day...I bet March 15, 44 B.C., was a Monday.
Saturday 16 March, 2002
The flies tell me, and the fleas tell me, the rats and the mice and the bees tell me, the spider spinning at the corner of your walls let's me know what you're doing right now; the mites in the pillow where you lay your head, the crows cawing atop the telephone pole, the cat who stares without a blink, the June beetle drowning in your kitchen sink, the silverfish in your Bible scurries back to me, rife with stories whipered of thee, and though the earwigs and bats find it hard to get in, a moth or three might, an ant or two can, even one aphid -- about the size of the head of a pin -- can alight in a wake of silence into your life, and with tiny ears, listen in....
Sunday 17 March, 2002
The scene shifts downstairs, to upstairs. Downstairs the typer, the kitchen, upstairs the bathroom, the bedroom...the typer. Downstairs, feed and consume fowl, and rice and brew and live a bit longer and type away at the keys. Upstairs relieve, expulse, hit tips against the keys. Downstairs, walk, dance, defy, gravity in ballet; upstairs wonder and dream, walk from Dark Room to warmth and cold, maybe, and then, heat. Downstairs, discover a way in, enter or criminal intrude, eschew known rules while upstairs de-clothe, break those rules you know. Downstairs, host and alter the atmosphere, with song, with story, with clothing or wine, upstairs touch, or soak in wet heat. Downstairs stroke pets, listen to purrs, upstairs stroke, just stroke, listen for purrs. Downstairs, smile, snicker, joke and cavort, upstairs prance, engage. Downstairs, lick colors from sweet sugar sources, upstairs lick pink, devour, taste sugar.
Downstairs, lick wonder. Downstairs, wonder. Downstairs, shift scene, bring power upstairs. Downstairs, long for upstairs.
Monday 18 March, 2002
Sniffles, sniffles start, burning eyes, fingertips that dry to powdered confections, follicles in pain on the head of many and in the abdomens of women, visions that refuse hues outside of gray, shivers and shakes, sounds from the throat mimicking deranged dogs in need of the sea or maybe the whole of the moon, spine a calcium column of low-tide sand and hot tears though the temperature of you stays the same, it's the sickness of desire, this is the sickness of desire, this is the fear of the loss of that which you have never had.
Tuesday 19 March, 2002
She's a crime, in agony, wrinkles not yet lines on young forehead, she's a crime, legs shivering agape, she thinks it's strength but it's just a robbery, she's a crime, has a glance automatic like what-comes-next-then-anyway, she's in silver, she's in black, she tells time and knows who died in 1963, but never asked her lips slim to hide her mind and she's a crime, silent, only feet away, 'life's' a habit, and 'rescue' is obsolete, agony is life, agony is life, and life, the habit, is agony.
Wednesday 20 March, 2002
We trade glares at silver. We bare teeth at talismen and dare. There's a conversation of bitter blue three feet wide between us and a fingernail scratches VOODOO into the thick air wafting,
she blows out a candle from three feet and coats me in cold cobalt blue, she closes down my glare like a government decree, the teeth in her face are Emminent Domain and then suddenly, clutching at a talisman and I do not know whose, I find the pleasure of becoming blind.
Thursday 21 March, 2002
I imagine the swan in there must have been quite large, a bold three-foot high gander at least, as it sat there cleaning and preening itself, whiteout-wingspan shaking the air, drops inspired to rainbow;
Or perhaps three very young girls, muses in their infant forms, were frolicking in a fountain on a hot Summer day, age but a number as they sing-sang epics to stun the Gods in their eighth-octave pre-pubescent caterwauls;
Or, maybe, Jesus himself, ready for the Big Comback, was practicing the creation of a ruby Merlot, the finest vintage a vineyard has ever seen, a silken slaking of every thirst, the Holy Quench, the Bringer of Buzz, Sandals flapping on the slippery tiles he runs out shouting 'Eureka! Someone bring the Brie!' as the dripping door swings shut behind him;
I have to think it was one of these events that occurred...because nothing else explains why the small bathroom here at my office is soaked from floor to ceiling and wall to wall to wall to wall, water dripping from the stall's tan door, water drops giggling on the fire extinguisher nozzle on ceiling, water drying on every surface, water, water everywhere.
What the heck goes on in there....
Friday 22 March, 2002
Ah, same pants, different day, that's what I always say. This Friday, pants and all, has the eyes of a cat, I can feel it, a browless gaze content and daring, a look that knows the key to getting from HERE to THERE: Whatever carries you and keeps the balls warm, that's what I always purr.
So, pants and all, I'm warm-balled and ready for my 1,115th Friday, maybe smiling, maybe hungry, maybe as usual fretting about the weather, the breeze shusshing back on my fur, but I'll meet today head-on, gaze golden-wide and unblinking.
Saturday 23 March, 2002 >I Hate Going to the Dentist Day
The dentist glares into my mouth and sees his daughter going to Stanford. Salivating to the point of almost needing the suction-tube placed beneath his own tongue, he uses a slim silver spike to point out what is going on between my lips:
"Well, Chris, you see back here, where you have your big teeth, are the renovations on the sundeck for my Summer cottage on the Cape; and here, where you seem to have an impacted something-or-other is that other Lexus I've been wanting; and of course, the business you've got going on over on this side of your mouth is my daughter's tuition to Stanford -- she's sixteen you know, you can't let dental problems like this go untreated for too long!"
"Aren't you wearing deodorant?" My wife asks.
"No." I grumble. "I want him to smell my fear." I'm going to swallow a lot of my own blood today, but hey, I'll be one step closer to having a Brendan Frasier Smile...
Just as soon as his daughter graduates from Stanford, of course.
Sunday 24 March, 2002
Love at first sight: That moment when you lock eyes with each other, unable to blink, your gaze the building force of an electromagnet, your bodies hot metal.
I never realized the logistics of love at first sight.
It is based purely on the physical: attraction to the first impression -- the body -- then communion with body language itself. If first you find a person irresistibly cute, then you interact before communicating like sand and tide, the term 'Love at First Sight' begins to be thrown around like tissues.
But -- what if you're one honestly, no-other-way-to-defire-you ugly bastard? Ah hah, no one ever realized that Love at First Sight has some strict rules.
I think this is the obvious key to the bottle-rocket longevity of Hollywood marriages -- two gorgeous people have a much easier time of falling in love-at-first-sight than two homely, unwashed wrecks. To wit: If the few teeth you have in your frouzy mouth are the color of French Roast coffee, you haven't bathed since there was an honest President, and you force the bell-curve of definition to reclassify the obese people around you as 'deliciously svelte,' then Jennifer Aniston probably isn't going to fight her way out of Nobu to ask what a 'guy like you is doing picking at his scalp outside a place like this.' (Which, of course, is how she met Brad Pitt -- Love at First Sight was a cinch when you're those two.)
On the other hand, if, when you discard the hunk of stuff you had picked off your forehead, you glance up and see someone as equally noisone as you and you can not take your eyes off each other, then dammit man, I'll take you odds-on in support of the true existence of Love at First Sight over those pretty Hollywood faces anyday.
Monday 25 March, 2002
"I would like to hold your dirty underwear between my teeth and spin around in the rain like a washing machine."
Ya just don't get to hear that stuff every day. Poetry. Pure found poetry.
Tuesday 26 March, 2002
I need a kiss. This isn't an esoteric longing, I mean I need a kiss, a series of them, her woman's lips to mine. I'm sitting here at work thinking of nothing other than kissing, and being kissed, the soft tip of her tongue in my mouth, gentle kisses, a hundred sweet kisses.
Wednesday 27 March, 2002
An ocean displaced, curved in a bowl, clear waters and contents living, glows of neon and blue then gold, eyes always open, mouths too, everything moves, forms a current, a lesson to us -- we do this too, form our currents, in lives, in the air, in our atmospheres, butterflies in the Congo and tears on your pillow, everything moves, currents unbiased move us, move all, through our curve of space, our bowls, displaced.
Thursday 28 March, 2002
As simple as wanting to smile and laugh, as simple as hearing a gag, as simple as needing the release of humor and the feeling in the brain of getting the joke, as simple as this feeling is I'm desperate to even fake a smile.
Friday 29 March, 2002
Okay, you, get over here. It's time for some Weekend. Turn around, yes back to me. Very lovely, very soft silk...I like how the green wars with your eyes. Your hair looks good up like that, I can smell your neck. Sweat and rose, rosewater, rose petals, blood of the rose inciting me to rise.
Me forward, you back...me poled forward, you scoot back. Let's make like Legos.
You are the door to the Animal Kingdom. I am the apple in August, swollen, sweet, red. You are a roar, kitty, you are a bellow. I am seed and spore, dust off the volcano, vibrating: breathe and I'll enter you. Sigh and I'll enter you. Bellow, roar, and I'll enter you.
Inhale. I shall enter you, in a cloud of the blood of roses.
Saturday 30 March, 2002
Dancing on the beach and spraying yellow vitamins to the stars, hot water, music, I'm a hummmmmm to the clouds, hey up there, I see that now, that thumb poking from your billowing gray, is that a thumb? Oh, maybe not, maybe something male and lower, maybe now just a finger, maybe I'm being touched by a priest, better put my fountain away, I'm an unrated movie you know me, but I'm not religious pornography.
Sunday 31 March, 2002
I'm a shell of lint until the summer comes. I need it to be warm. These 47 degree days are blowing my soft grayness right out to sea.
If it doesn't heat up around here soon, I'm crawling back in the dryer.
Monday 1 April, 2002
It be April first, fool.
Mr. T. Yep. Get it? Yep.
It's 47 degrees out. Again. And raining. I've had it with this, really now. Even when the temps go up to 50 or 55, the winds kick in to make sure we're all leveled off in an atmosphere of annoying 47.
Too cold to shed the jackets. Too hot to wear them. Add a dash of rain, and a pinch of snow. Spring Gumbo. Chill at 47 degrees for 2-3 months. Stir. Crazy.
Sunday. Monday. Need a new one. Ughday. Right in between: