110318 it’s ok to try sometimes too. just leave off the parts that are fancy and artistic and mugging for the psychic omnipresent cameras, and just strip it bare. but don’t make stripping it bare into a virtue, either. just do it. just tell as much of it as you can remember, in plain terms, in whatever order you can remember it. was at a cafe after an all night sesh of having my eyes opened one way or another. cafe was sideways on a sidewalk on a busy street that looked like broadway of cape girardeau if broadway had been a big city. not down the slope by the river but a few blocks up. was in ther at a booth with a camera. talking ort hinking about something. this guy comes up , this light skinned black guy with a modest slightly ratty fro--“natural” i think delany would have called it. makes conversation. because i’ve just been having my eyes opened and i feel pretty open i make conversation back. dont even remember what we talked about. feel pretty good. doesnt feel like i’m being sold anything or even really asked for anything. he wanders off. i go back outside later and ther he is, leaning into the open door of my van. going through my stuff. he has (a different?) my camera in his hand i’m like HEY!! YOU!! pointing like an enraged nightmare. he looks up, a little startled but not much. i grab the camera back, give me that! You know what sucks? I say, all disappointed, is that had you just asked me for this i probably would have given it to you. He gets off down the street pretty fast after that. south, toward the river. then i notice that the sliding door of the van on thestreet side is open and at least one of the bikes is gone. yep, it’s mine. i think about trying tochase him but he’s long gone. shit, by the time i wouldve got the van closed up and locked--hadn’t i locked it? how the fuck did he get in?--he’d be even more long gone. i look carefully--the blue one, megan’s, used to be ann’s, is still there--oh shit, is the mongoose gone? i’m going to hate having to tell millie that--nope, it’s there. the only one missing is mine. alternate between rage and a weird kind of relief, because even though i don’t have the moeny i kind of wanted a new bike anyway. but i’m not going to Patio bike shop, no way. they sold me a demo model ten year old mongoose for higher than its ORIGINAL msrp! WTF. SO i start thinking about what kind of bike i want. Maybe find a ’92 nishiki katmandu hahaha. but oh yeah, i’m still pissed. i notice several red shopping bags--looks like baby gifts--on the sidewalk. put them in the car. later some lady comes up looking for her baby gifts. oh yeah, as i’m mulling about still deciding what to feel or do, there’s this guy messing around with the parking meter next to where my van is. I GRAB HIM from behind and wheel him around because i’m pretty sure it’s the guy. But of course it isn’t. it’s a white guy with sort of half dreads. “I apologize profusely,” I say. “I thought you were the guy that stole my bike, because you--“ “--look just like him,” he finishes wryly/ruefully. “Yeah.” feeling lame. Later on I’m in a dark gravel parking lot and i hear a rhythmic clumping and a bunch of people singing a semi-popular pop song. then they go by--on roller skates--some in the middle of the street, some on the sidewalk--singing and dancing and clomping the concrete with their skates in synchrony. I smile. Way before all of this I was at a hospital, visiting some lady who had a tiny little puppy. The puppy was in the hospital. before that the puppy had been her baby girl. she left, and i was over by the little girl, who was in some kind of not quite intensive care thing but a speciall little basinet or wahtever all the same. some cops/guards/nurses came in and eyed me up suspiciously but when they saw how i was with the baby they were fine. she came back and got her dog or daughter (when it was a dog it was so cute, like a classic tiny perfect puppy--white with caramel spots. when it was a baby girl i didn’t see her but it felt good to be by her, stroke her little hair and feel that baby hypnosis) and i went over and for some reason started talking to this guy, this young guy in a hospital bed. the whole place was just basically open. it was also basically the basement of the house on themis. this guy had red marks around his eyes and arms--bruises? he’d been through something. he was wearing ragged stuff, like a taelin except more city. he got up. we started talking a little bit. he got up on a shelf you obviously weren’t supposed to go on and started turning a giant valve wheel and i was like dude. maybe you should see what that does before you-- you need to stop-- i’m going to have to go get someone-- i’m not above being a narc-- i don’t owe you nothin. So he came down, and we went together over to the other side (by where the laundry used to be) and climbed up this little hidden staircase that he knew about. it led to a little room above and behind everything. there was a window to the outside--weeds, a hillside, a sidewwalk up at the top, the rest of the city a little ways off, busy, smoldering, corupt-- and also a tiny little window to the inside--of pagliai’s. it was someone’s little reclusive sanctuary. a little hiding place from the vicissitudes of food service and the world. it was lathe and ragged boards and raw brick. there was a little chair. it was low and mean but had a certain charm. I was like, oh yeah, I do remember this place now. SO i talked to the citified taelin-esque guy. he had been in prison. he had a wife, her name was Ethmerelda or something odd like that. he said it was spanish, that’s why the “th.” his wife and kids had kicked him out. And then i was like “and you wandered around, not sure what to do, made some bad choices, and ended up--?” No, he said, not exactly. Also, yesterday, Megan said some kids on the bus yelled at her because she has that (ironic) tag thingy on her backpack that says “THOT.” They were like “Is that what you are? Is that you? Are you a THOT? Are you a *whore?*” I’d really kind of like to lose my shit and just start killing people one of these days. It would take a lot of work and planning though, and I don’t know if it’s really warranted or if it would help much. But still. Always good to keep in mind. Better than just succumbing to the feeling of being not fierce enough, ineffectual, not macho enough, not enough of a man to defend my daughters’ honor. Weird. But. Whatever. Our society is so diffused. hardly anyone knows anyone. that’s why kids can act this way. we’re not puritan enough anymore. we’ve gone too far the other way. there’s too much individuality. we what happens when thoreau gets a mcmansion and a steady job and there’s a walmart and a starbucks and no real problems except the gradual conversion of america into a third world banana republic. but hey. if you keep talking about it it makes it go away, right? if you read concerned think pieces on the internet? if i keep going i’ll eventually get to someplace redemptive where it’s ok that i don’t find who those kids were and personally kick their asses? right? i can’t be going to jail for assault, right? I have kids, right? the sun’s making my tattered old tapestry and my walmart dark green curtain get saturated with gold. it’s gold for free, man. i’m rich. i’m rich. woo hoo. there’s gold pouring right in through my dirty windows. i’m a listener. that’s what i want to be. a listener. kind of a baboon, kind of a mandrill. kind of a bonobo, to be sure, if there’s any slots left open in that penny opera. i don’t need to be the genius. i just want the genius to flow through me, to use me as a host, to make love to me and leave me on the threadbare rug on the floor of a cheap hotel, somewhere out on the plains of early morning, liquid gold pouring in the windows and swirling all around my sleepy ears, slowly lifting me up in my dreams and turning me around and around, slowly, like i’m in a big slow eddy somewhere out in the middle of some dream mississippi. i just want to be the piece of driftwood that lands on the cobblestones by some forgotten river town, and gets picked up by some little kid, some little kid telling stories to himself and his family and the birds of his imagination can fly off somewhere, over the hill that leads broadway up into town, over the town, over the power lines, over the plains, over the cheap motels and the rest stop highway night scene diesel smelling gas station naked fluorescent hollowed out lonely empty vibrating singing out into the night sky, out into the galaxy, from this pale blue dot on out into nothing, signal, signal, searching, searching, no signal, searching, searching.