by Tomorrow's Man
Saturday 1 June, 2002 Jacksonville Notes
4:18 PM:
We hit Jacksonville Beach, the place where tiny bikinis war with the bright Florida sunshine over what causes more squinting. I have no complaints. Meet a fine young chap with more muscle tone in his ankles than I've had in my history who tells us about all the jellyfish in the water, which we don't see until he points out three of them floating right by my feet. I quickly revert to landlubber as he tells me, "Don't worry, they only sting certain times of the year. My friends and I, we grab'em up and throw 'em right at each other. It's just slimy. And fun." I don't want to know how they figure out when stinging season begins. I suggest tequila.
5:00 PM:
Paradise Alley Bar. Lord, I've made it to heaven; er, Paradise. If the big outside veranda isn't enough to turn your crank, and the live music doesn't blow off your sombrero, the menu of 587 different beers [no kidding] will. I've never had so much fun reading 7-point type (printed purposely small so the drunker you get, the less you can order is my guess). I have finished 22 oz. of Rogue Mexicali Ale, 16 oz. of Kristall Weissbeier, a draught pint of Rogue Standard Ale and um...
...
...where was I?
6:00 PM:
Been drinking up quite a little hurricane since the Beach. Tequila and any longitude between the 25th and 35th parallel combine into quite a potent, magical mix. Sweet, luscious agave nectar. It jes' don't taste the same up North.
8:00 PM:
I have yet to exit any establishment -- be it restaurant, bar, porto-potty or coffee shop, without a bright yellow Jacksonville police car parked no more than five feet from where I've decided to stumble. Lucikly, none of them seem to be occupied...I wonder if it's true that they plant empty cars around the city to keep folks in line...scarecops, amidst the human cornrows...
10:59 PM:
Hit the club, do not remember which one or what name. The band playing is named Star Is Satan, Is Words -- which is a scrawny white guy with a Casio keyboard doing treacly readings of the doom 'n gloom lyrics of a local death metal band called Star Is Satan, Is Swords. Well, personally, I don't get it, but the young buck is not on long enough for me to figure it all out before five black-clad guys from Tampa take the stage to render live the only extant examples of a music genre I can only call "hillbilly goth." Hey, you could dance to it, and they had one crazy banjo.
Sunday 2 June, 2002 Jacksonville Notes
8:30 AM:
Ah, yes. That's what hell feels like. Now I remember where I had witnessed that infinite train before...it rolls through every hangover. However, after a couple of Krispy Kreme Hot Ones -- doughnuts that should be dropped on Afghanistan to control the war (after a couple of these melt-in-your-mouth rings of supercondensed sugar and fat no one will move from any cave) -- the hangover is assaulted by the million-calorie rictii now expanding in my stomach and I'm left unconscious from my neck to my knees. I grunt at the doughnut's goodness, unable to do more. I bet they'd be even better if it wasn't 99 degrees outside. Now, these puppies should be up North, where they can be truly appreciated....
9:30 PM: Boston, Massachusetts
Home sweet home. It's 62 degrees, a whole season cooler than Florida. I miss the heat already. As soon as I find my nipples, which have shivered off of my chest and are rolling around the taxi stand like a couple of tiny manhole covers (which, now that I think about it, is exactly what they are), I'm going home.
Monday 3 June, 2002
I'm going to take this, this existence, and place it in a boat, a small boat, afloat upon a thick river deep black water full of miracles and murder, and with a cast-iron pole I'm going to push at the bottom and push, slowly, down this river, and with every stroke I will recall and uncover all I've forgotten that I've ever loved, I'll dredge with eyes and smiles and memory this thick river, its deep black water full of miracles and murder, and hum songs of what I remember into this endless cavern.
Tuesday 4 June, 2002
I don't smoke for three four five days then suck down three cloves in seventeen minutes and let the suffocation and nicotine float me through the cool slik of the clouds, above the nausea and anxiety, where I decide that never going to sleep again is still higher on my agenda than never waking up.
Wednesday 5 June, 2002
I'm in a costume of thin glasses and black clothes and dance like a dervish by excited lamplight but refuse the open gazes that I always have wondered why don't I enter but, hey, that's just me, dancing by like a dervish....
Thursday 6 June, 2002
It's too early and too cool for June and this wet kitty is staring at me with that look of yeah, you think you're uncomfortable... which he seems to share with most people I pas each day; nevertheless, with the pressure building and storms coming and my arthritis trying to turn me to a Medusa stone, I do feel brittle, every movement precipitating through a waterfall of slivered glass.
Friday 7 June, 2002
12:04 A.M.
Awakened at midnight by a thunderclap so loud that it felt like the Ocean had just rolled over on itself. Behind my closed eyelids I saw the flash of the lightning (go into the light, they say, now I know why) and it stirred me startled from sleep; then the thunder hit, and hit, and hit. It took a third of a second from dreamstate to jarred awake.
I love summer storms. I love hosting them the way a McDonald's hosts a championship-winning hockey team; you just let the maelstrom come in, swirl like tornadoes, then leave you stunned and in need of repair.
Of course, I like lightning just a wee bit more than hockey.
Saturday 8 June, 2002
I've just realized where it was that maybe America, maybe the race, maybe the species, may have begun going dreadfully wrong. I now feel it had to have been the day that we began ordering Cheesy Bread -- pizza crusts covered in melted cheese -- as a side order to go with our pizzas.
I have to grit my teeth until I bleed whenever I find myself agreeing with the Christians, but damn, people, let's reign in our battery of the sixth deadly sin, shall we?
Sunday 9 June, 2002
Holy crap...I think my right ear just fell off...
Yep. Yep, sure did.
Monday 10 June, 2002
The drone of the cell phone having fits in the waterglass, the alarm clock in foot-cutting pieces across the bedroom floor, the sun blacked out by towels and sheets glued in thick layers across the windows, but the bed wet with urine as I resist and resist, damn, I'll get up on this again this again this again Monday morning.
Tuesday 11 June, 2002
I can make the tip of my tongue flicker back and forth 180 times per minute. I can keep up that pace for seven minutes at a time. If I put my lips a certain way, my barbell buzzes against my lower teeth like a heat-seeking vibrator.
I can also breathe while swallowing.
[Inventory.]
Wednesday 12 June, 2002
Do you know what?
I can turn my tongue into a tube. I said, I CAN TURN MY TONGUE INTO A TUBE.
Now, if I could turn my tube into a tongue, right then, I'm sure I'd be quite the rapscallion amongst the fair lassies!
Thursday 13 June, 2002
I spent the morning, awake way to early for even Howard Stern to be broadcasting, thinking about existence, about everything from a centipede on up to me and you is so complicated, such different scales of life, and then I thought even smaller, about single cell 'life' and how cocky we are to use up the world and kill and kill and dare to believe in the nugatory, pathetically ignorant cachets of religion, all of them cults that take nothing into account but power and domination (in one way or another, whether through the obvious such as the Christians who will literally fuck little boys to get their God across or even those who believe in peace and Nirvana and the swallowing of the self into a great phantasmic whole [i.e., the destruction of the self, which, no offense, on a daily basis I tend to enjoy, but I understand their point when someone else's self, for insance, a Catholic Priest, forces his self into places it shouldn't be, small, tight places that have no place being 'educated' in such aggressive ways]) and inevitably one being's right to murder other, less evolved, or less intelligent, or less ephemeral beings, and that's when the thinking got to be too much and I watched pirated episodes of The Simpsons that I downloaded until Howard Stern came on the radio and he described beautiful strippers' breasts in great, satisfying detail until I took my long, hot, evaporating shower.
Friday 14 June, 2002
For you:
MUH!
Saturday 15 June, 2002
Watching the sun leave a sticky pink line over Boston. My city as nuclear cotton candy. I'm playing the organ, the speakers turned up high. I mix D major with the sunset as the sounds and the sky turn orange.
On the street below my window a funeral procession goes by. The hearse is followed by black cars and a thousand orange flowers.
As orange fades to bruised indigo, I switch to D minor.
Sunday 16 June, 2002
She's miles away, can you feel her, I said to myself. Yes, I replied. Her soft skin. Her love. Her motherly smile, coming naturally, that I need more than I reveal. Her eyes, stars. I imagine her, so far away, and I feel everyone else in between, I told myself. I feel their heartbeats. I feel those who lie next to another's warmth, and I feel those who sleep alone. Some don't mind that, I said. Some like to sleep alone. I used to like it, I used to need it...I told myself to close my eyes. But now I can't sleep at all. All I can do is lie in the bed, stare at the redness of time sneaking by, and listen to the heartbeats and sighs of millions between me and her, those asleep, and those lonely.
Monday 17 June, 2002
I'm not even sure what day it is. Throat swollen. Muscles sore. And not even a Bender Sunday. I feel like a bag of colicky babies.
I hate having a cold.
Tuesday 18 June, 2002
Wine. Whyne. Woin. Wi-yin. Hwoynn. Waah, haa, hee, yun. Wyn.
Whine.
Sick. Fine.
Fine. Fhyne. Foin....
Wednesday 19 June, 2002
I feel like I smell like feet. Not that I can smell a damned thing, but every tiny waft that enters my nose seems to be of feet. Maybe a sinus infection, maybe just the mucus clogging my life right now. Or, maybe, since I've been sick with this dog-whipping cold, everything in the world has begun to smell like feet. It would not surprise me...though you're all being very secretive about it....
Thursday 20 June, 2002
I had a dream last night that I can not remember, though it left me feeling jarred and anxious this morning. Fleeting images, lurid feelings, complicated by being ill and being awakened at 4 AM by a guy whacking off on the phone at me. Yes, guys still do that -- with all the free porn available on the internet, live and otherwise, this yokel, this A#1 yoyo, calls me to groan and whisper about his "big swollen head oooh." Maybe he thought I was the emegency room and he had a head wound. I ever track him down, he'll be worrying about his head wound. I promise.
But back to my point.
It jarred me in other ways, this dream. It jarred me to think that I had the gall to try to interpret it. Thousands of forms of expression of thought; thousands of philosophies; the science of neurology; atmosphere and surroundings; diet; the ineffable. So many factors can make a dream a 'dream' -- why does it have to have A meaning? And if it can have more than one, then can't it have them all? Who is anyone to say, 'oh, your dream of riding a train into a tunnel with your friend's wife means you want to slip her the high hard one.' Maybe, just maybe, it meant nothing at all. Maybe, just maybe, it meant I saw a picture of riding on a train.
Maybe dreams mean nothing at all. Mental Hollywood. Neural Fiction.
It occurred to me, this morning, quite sudddenly, that all of my best dreams I have had while I was awake. Maybe, just maybe, all this need to interpret dreams is just more fighting of The Fear; the reason we turn to religion, to God, we turn to dreams. 'Please, dreams, explain all this to me...otherwise, I might curl up into a ball and, no, oh no, continue to live....'
I'm lucky. I no longer ask the question why.
Okay, back to the NyQuil box for me. Goodnight.
Friday 21 June, 2002
2:25 PM. I've been awake, off and on without sleep, for going on 100 hours. My cold is dying, but my body, weakening more and more because of this insomnia, is begining to give up ground.
At least it is hot out, finally. Fitting for the solstice.
And I sit here in my studio looking out my window over the beach. Looking out at the woman in the Ford F150 frigging monster truck who is trying to squeeze it into TWO parking places. I look up and down the beach, and the 50 parking places are taken up by maybe 30 vehicles, most of them gargantuan SUVs that serve almost no purpose except as ego trips for their pathetic, insecure owners who don't give a damn about equality, the Golden Rule, or the atmosphere.
This woman and her by-blows hop down from the truck. She weighs maybe 120 pounds, 5 foot five, bleached-blonde. Of course. Two sons, both under 10 years old. Of course. They take with them one folding chair, three towels, and a football. Everything and more could have fit in the back sea of my Honda.
Hundreds of people out there. Breeders. The parents desperately trying to keep their kids entertained while they desperately try to find peace from the creatures. Most of the adults are pushing 30, or pushing 40, pushing some age where they feel they're about to lose something. Women in bikinis, men ogling, everyone playing the Breeding Game.
Meanwhile, I sit up here, unable to escape to the beach, unable to escape even into sleep, and choke on the exhaust of the exhausted, trucks for miles, the earth torn and turned to piles of ego, baking in the sun.
Saturday 22 June, 2002
7:07 A.M.
Off and on sleep. Even a dream. In it, me, my friend Kat, and Paula Porizkova left the Paradie Bar in Madison, Wisconsin and turned to walk down State Street. As we did, the song "Baby Makes Her Blue Jeans Talk" by Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show began playing, and everybody stopped in their tracks to watch our asses as we sauntered cockily by, bad-ass and bitchy.
Not too much of a dream, eh, but I hit REM sleep for the first time in a week.
I'm racked with coughing now. Wow, it hurts. But maybe, just maybe, it's the sign of an upturn.
Sunday 23 June, 2002
Not sure of the time.
I thought I had a good idea about how to beat insomnia. Activity. They say you need to exercise a bit, get the critters in yer blood leveled off and less antsy. So, see, what I did was, I took the seven ice cube trays in the freezer and threw them against the walls of the kitchen (the fact that I was in tears and nearly screaming was probably a coincidence, you know, critters-in-the-blood levels being off and all). Then I got on my hands and knees and tried to scoop up the thousands of shards of ice before they melted down and flooded the kitchen. Funny, they can be pretty sharp when they're still hard, ice can cut right through flesh, as I found out when I crawled over a chunk and my kneecap began bleeding all over the floor.
I got the ice cleaned up with minimal defrost. Then I wiped up all the blood (even though it was spelling words across the kitchen tile, maybe it was my fortune) and limped upstairs. Then I watched 'Aliens - Special Edition.' Then I watched 'The Scorpion King' or something. Then I did some other things.
Then I typed this.
Monday 24 June, 2002
I try to share revelations. I try to expand thought, yours and mine, I try to make us think in new ways, weird ways. I try to tell the truth, and I try to create fictions so real they come alive. I try to make each and every letter glowing from within this ethereal non-space a serendipity, an expulsion of light; indeed, a life-altering revelation.
However, today, I just want to say that:
I like pigeons. Really. I mean, I really like pigeons. Cute beaks. Neat wobble when they walk.
Pigeons are just so cute. I love'em.
Tuesday 25 June, 2002
Enrique wanted to touch me. Damned beautiuful creature, and he always wanted to touch me. He kept putting those elongated fingers on my shoulders. It was hard to resist, that massage. I saw his brown knuckles, brown forearms tensing, glancing higher and higher, I see his brown chin and curved neck, his deep brown eyes. Enrique smiles, and I felt the pit of my stomach cartwheel, as if we had just sped up, over, and down a steep hill at high speed.
Wait. We did. I really wish Enrique would not massage me while we were trying to flee the government. As we screech around a corner, I see the barricade of big black cars ahead, the gunmen tensing. I ask Enrique one last time What Did You Do, and he just smiles that smile and grabs my shoulders in that black widow grip.
I grin like a full dragon as the car speeds toward the government.
Wednesday 26 June, 2002
Touch me. Just a hand on my hip. Please. I'm so dry, so dry. Your palm on my thigh. That would fill me like a sponge. Just lay it upon me, your hand, touch my chest, my belly, my forehead. Feel my fever, my dry dry fever. I do not have enough wet. I need wet.
I need wet.
Thursday 27 June, 2002
95 degrees outside, 70 percent humidity. The air is holding me inside a metal box of panting Dalmatians. We're being rotated in a microwave as we shed fur.
I'm inspired.
I get a hot dog and lemonade for lunch. Perfect day.
Thursday 27 June, 2002 Addendum
7:06 P.M.
I love when Thor gets his groove on, has one too many large iced coffees from Dunkin Donuts, and plays pinball with New England. I got to watch as he used the coast as bumpers for his thunder, the houses his bonus flaps falling through the board with every godly hip-check at the corner of the sloped machine, and -- the biggest thrill -- his Bonus Bumper, the Boston Light, the country's oldest lighthouse (it's been winking an erotic eye since 1716) stalwart atop Little Brewster Island (about two miles off the coast of Winthrop, well within my lazy, gazy sights), getting struck by 'porn-star-of-the-Gods' penis-thick bolts of lightning four times in five minutes.
Loki, Ymir, and even Odin must have paid dearly for the bets they put on this game -- Thor was in rare, Brooke-Shields-"Tilt"-era form, and it was a joy to feel the beers clatter to the floor from the glass of the board as he slammed Mjollnir through the final, winning score.
Friday 28 June, 2002
My hands smell like I know you taste, it does not matter that you're so far away, I can inhale you any time I need, by pointing my palms in prayer to the heart of the moon, and simply breathing in.
Saturday 29 June, 2002
Place me in a large box, a box among thousands of boxes. Hide me in the warehouse. Stamp the side -- "DANGEROUS. TOXIC. LETHAL. DEADLY." Push me into the back of the warehouse, up against the corrugated metal side that sits fluish with the canyon wall. Leave the building, seal the door, and camouflage the entrance because I am the waking power of God.
Sunday 30 June, 2002
Congratulations, Brazil. Your women have wonderful breasts.
The streets of Boston yesterday were wild with the chaos of thousands celebrating Brazil's win in the World Cup. It was Mardi-Gras class revelry: Hooting, hollering, horn honking, flag waving, raucous excitement on the sidewalks, in the streets, in the windows of buildings and churches. But the best aspect by far was the 90-degree heat and nihilistic abandon (after all, why care about Monday when your team has won the World Cup today?) combined to magnetically yank up the arms of dozens of women hanging from windows and cars, seemingly tearing their green and gold shirts from their bodies. The result: dozens of exposed, sweating Brazilian breasts.
I've been to baseball games. I love hockey. I've seen football and basketball played. I have never seen breasts at any of these events, and the pertness and quality of those gracing the torsos of our South American friends were fleshy feathers in the afternoon's cap.
I may have to reconsider soccer as a serious pass-time. Or, I might simply move to Brazil.
Felicitações a sua equipe do soccer, e a seus peitos bonitos!