14 January 2002 Mauro just walked into the co-op. Over the ratcheting of the coolers’ motors he reminds me how to say his name. I cup my fingertips behind my ear because I didn’t hear. He repeats: Mauro. With the faintest roll of the “r.” He is blustery-faced, wide, round, smiling. I like him. 16 January 2002 I don’t know much about anything. What hard-bitten cynicism I appear to possess is generally phony, a comforting device. I like to be warm, I like the feeling of sleeping in the morning. What can I say? I know one tiny bit about one tiny thing: standing in the starry river, moaning liquid gold for the one one one I love. 19 January 2002 I’ve never seen anyone so antagonistically sick as she. Every sneeze is an accusation. 20 January 2002 Why did I just piss in the sink? Because I am a poet and a king. 26 January 2002 You ask me what I know. I’ll tell you what I know. I know what this world needs. We need an infusion of joy. We are a grid of sad chickens. There aren’t that many eggs to go around, The sap of one gets cracked open and trickles a little ways, maybe to one pen, maybe to another, maybe to another and another. And it dries up. It is barely enough. It is not enough to sustain us all. Where is our crackling, our singing? Where is our electric current? We need a naked jesus christ to go screaming through the chicken factory, busting everything open til the rich ripe yellow juice pours out and runs free again. What am I saying? We can’t wait for jesus christ. We have to now. We have to him now. We have to be him now. U now. I now. Free runs and out pours juice yellow ripe rich til the open everything bursting factory, 27 January 2002 There are backpackers who have died of thirst with water in their canteens, just as there are poets whose souls have perished, fingers inches away from their keyboards. 28 January 2002 Why did those people who were born in the 20’s write so well? Saramago . . . . On finishing All the Names, I feel I have never been more certain that I am just a man, doing the best I can, and that this feeling will remain across the imaginary boundaries of young, old, living, dead. As long as a feeling can remain. Which is, how long, I don’t know. And when will the veil be so thin again? When will the rusty, howling soul of poetry once more surge onto the driftwood beaches of our consciences? The time is coming soon. Will I miss it? Will I be at home when it arrives? Does a time arrive at all? Where, oh where, will I be. Where am I now? I have a cold. My head is stoppered up with rubber and my love is gone to snot. My hands tremble, my shoulders are stiff, I hear a dull ringing over everything else, everything else is a distant crowd murmuring either inanities or else essential, important information that is totally beyond my comprehension. I am not at home. I am at the Greenfield Public Library, in Milwaukee County. My card is good here. There is nothing I want to check out. There are a few uncozy tables with maroon-backed chairs, a peppering of paperbacks, worn and tired stacks of half-used hardbacks, magazines. People. Everyone I see is gazing down at something. In quiet, admittedly trivial defiance, I glance at the ceiling, a relatively huge, barn-shaped, tiled white space, with two white fans whirring crazily above everybody’s heads, over everybody’s consciousness. It’s noon. In a couple more hours, my car’s oil leaks will have been repaired, at least I hope so, and I will be another couple hundred dollars further from free of debt. Funny, I don’t feel concretely more indebted. I just feel a mosquito twinge, a nagging reproachment, how am I going to buy Ann’s maternity clothes, how can I afford to have a baby, how are we ever going to, how did we ever, how, how, how, and why, why, why. The magazines all lie. Pathetic, glossy, slapdash things, how can they even convince themselves? Chips and bits of pulp, hollow-eyed golems, and yet I fear them. I fear for my life when I see their frozen, staring happinesses. I want to go to the bathroom, find a hole, and escape down it darkly. Raymond Carver said Bukowski said you have to have been in love to be a poet. My questions are, a) Why do I care what they said, and b) Have I ever been in love? My immediate answers are, a) Because their writing gets me off, and I think I might learn something about how to get myself and possibly others off if I pay attention to what they have said, and b) Yes, although I very nearly missed it because I am so obtuse, so drugged, so barely alive. We in this dream world are caught. We need your help. Individuals are paired with individuals. I did not seek you out because you are special, or a special genius, or jesus christ or anything. I sought you out because your temporary address is convenient. I sought you out because the vagaries of chaos and order have placed that bit that you appear as, close to that bit that I would like to appear as. Or need to appear as, this time. Whatever that, time, may be--do you understand? Can you possibly understand? Will you take my word for it even if you do not understand? As I understand your world, the free world, the waking world, something is usually offered in return. What I offer in return is this: If you do not choose to accept my offer and help me, there will be no hard feelings. There will be no feelings at all. This time. I am offering you another chance. 300102 Acres and reams, stacks and scads. Crates and conveyors, packets and pallets, bins and bubble-packs. It’s TEXT, and it’s cheap. It draws no conclusions of its own accord. It’s not about YOU. There is nothing remarkable about YOU. YOU are simply IT, disguised as an infinitesimal BIT of the field, the web, the net, the collection, the inter- and intra-vinous fractal-helix of everyday everythingness. Uh. Yeah. Right. 010202 Melaine voluntErz @ “Eighth Note,” an UWM Student- Union coffE house Tpe thng. She’z Bng really swEt 2 me. Givez me coffE. Lendz me an ex10sion cord. We trade tripz 2 the b@hroom 4 w@chng each other’z lap2p. Melaine. I like th@ name. I think I’ll add it 2 the list. 1 more cigarette, then we go. I’m happiR now than I have bEn N wEkz. I’m sharng thiz space with a bunch of gamng gEkz, + Melaine, + some glimmerng shard. 2dA I made myself a little document (semi-accidental) th@ kinda Bginz 2 outline, 4 me, wh@ makez good writng (both procesz +, so far it sEmz, product) good. I’m thinkng back 2 “ME & HIM” (thinkng back, + ahead on th@ 1), “RECALL,” the index cardz, +, of course, the lovely, lost, “GRATE AMER’CIN NOVEL.” Ah, good old MistR Haaz. WRITE DOWN EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT ROCKS! 040202 I’m back @ the UWM 8th-note. It’z middA mondA, + the viB’z a lot different. All these college people millng about. I smokng drinkng coffE. There’z some kind of pulsng dancey music on. My nose itchez from comng N from the cold. Ah-ah, ah-ah, a-ah, ah-ah, come N from the cold. There R people talkng earnestly here. I could try 2 make fun of them, claim superioriT by virtue of havng bEn through all th@ college stuff. But the fact iz, I like the sound of them. It’z like WAKING LIFE. It’z like Bng passion8. Even N a ho- hum, humdrum wA when U don’t even know th@ U’re Bng passion8 Bcoz U don’t know anythng else yet. U don’t know yet wh@ it fElz like 2 have Ur passion ripped from U N slow motion, 2 leave a drippng, sulkng hulk N tepid search of a reasonable facsimile of a sense of wondR. 070202 The smell + slap of lotion. Ann makez lunch 4 me 2 take 2 work. Turkey pastrami with h1y mustard on whe@. SunflowR sEdz. Sugar cookiez, which I actually e@ 4 breakfast. A small, grEn apple. Can it B sed th@ anythng iz wrong with thiz? Outside N February, the sun iz as2nishng. 080202 Both Taelin + Glenn sed, on different occasionz, I’ve nevR had a friend like U. N my mind, of10 since 1 died + 1 drifted awA, I’ve continued th@ convers@ion by sAng, I know, + U nevR will. I didn’t know th@ wh@ I waz referrng 2 waz the dream rel@iviT fac2r. Y do dream cre@urez cR about uz? Y do they come 2 uz, pA @10tion 2 uz, delight + instruct uz, + lead uz on bold adventurez? Y do they fall 2 our swordz + Bg 4 our cockz + Bnd uz on our knEz? Bcoz we’re the 1z dreamng. It’z real, 4 uz. It’z real 4 everybody, but everybody getz 2 B the hero, or @ least the anti-hero, of hiz own dream, if he wantz 2. RememBr howevR, if these rel@ionshipz R 2 B nurtured, kept alive, the soul there4e kept alive, sometimez They will require @10tion + help from Uz. Thiz mA B wh@ our livez R leadng 2: the convergence of all these dreamz. When the drifted + the dead will mEt again. Fuel Café. Man-Who-Mimez iz ovR there. Makng some sort of spindly pipe- cleaner-esque construction out of a seriez of straw-wrapperz, or some damn thng. I love th@ guy. I contact with him iz alwAz flEtng, + az such, fElz like an early mornng secret. Some dA, when I’m a gre@ or small enough poet 2 B able 2 make poemz about wh8vR I want, whenevR I want, I’ll make 1 about him, + I’ll dig it so much I’ll want 2 give it 2 him. I hope I can find him. Somethng iz missng from thiz paragraph, + I think it haz somethng 2 do with the fact th@ he iz sittng right ovR there, + I am sittng right ovR here. Man-Who-Mimes yearns, Man-Who-Mimes oscillates tomorrow, Man-Who-Mimes orchestrates, Man-Who-Mimes rolls Man-Who-Mimes goes Man-Who-Mimes squirts forever amiably Man-Who-Mimes buzzes enticingly. Man-Who-Mimes shouts enticingly angrily gently... He jibes enticingly most of us are not you 2/13/02 I cant see out i cant see in 2/18/02 I will be all right as long as I don’t turn into her dad. He didn’t stand up for himself. He is funny, imaginative, strange, generous, good, but he didn’t stand up for himself. I don’t know if she did this on purpose or not. It doesn’t matter; it’s done now & it’s not the kids’ fault. But I am not going to live up to her fantasy if that means turning into her dad. 2/19/02 PLACES I’VE HAD THAT REALLY WORKED: Dad’s office Room at dad’s house Illicit apartment on Grand in KC Apartment across from Taelin’s in Columbia Front room in Bremen apartment, Milw. Fratney & Burleigh, Milw. Attic, Keefe & Burleigh, Milw. It’s worth pointing out that most of these only worked after a while, after I had pretty much given up expecting them to work! 2/20/02 I’ve figured out what’s wrong with me. Drift. I’m rootless. I’m unconnected. If this sounds like an insult to my family, I don’t mean it that way. I just mean, who the hell am I, and what could I possibly have to say about anything, or even granting provisionally that I do know something about something, no matter how infinitesimal, to whom could I possibly have to say it? Suddenly (does this have to do with the impending arrival of the twins, or is it another of my phantasms?) I feel a need to experience my roots beyond a generation or two. I was just reading an interview with Dennis Newsome in which he points out that the United States of America is not a race of people it is a European-dominated financial and military institution founded by the British. So where does that leave me, my friends and neighbors? Who the fuck are we, I mean, WHAT the fuck are we? Automata? Units? Products? Drones? By-products? Effluvium? Accidents? Waste? Actually, Newsome is being a little imprecise, isn’t he, I mean the founding was taken over by lots more than the British, but still the point is telling. I am remembering The Importance of Being Earnest: “One has to be serious about something if one is ever to have any fun.” (my paraphrasing) I feel a need to delve into something, anything really, just seriously, so I can begin to feel like a man who knows something about something, so maybe I can take that stance, that collection of instincts and responses, and translate it into getting some answers about these other questions, and perhaps still other, even more fundamental questions which may be lurking within. 2/21/02 So at least one of the things that just happened is I’m sitting in Rochambo, Brady St, Milwaukee, and this girl with slightly pointy features on a bright, round head just gave me a baggy with free condoms and a little phial of clear lube. She works for the AIDS outreach centre, and told me about their free tests, etcetera. Then a mocha-colored guy with a wry expression bummed a rollie off me. I said, help yourself. Then I had a conversation with a scientific-y sounding guy about Apples and laptops. He’s looking to buy one and I told him I’d give his e-mail address to Kate, who’s looking to sell one. Sometimes just being in a cafe like this is regenerative, do I need to explain this any better than that? Still don’t quite want to go home becuase home’s still not quite home. What to do about that, what to do, what to do..... 2/22/02 I think a lot of us are a little embarrassed at how hushed we were, how grave and reverent, when we thought the world had changed forever. I guess it did, but then again, it didn’t. 2/23/02 these lame dj’s. i don’t have to do anything except sit up here in the attic and listen or not listen to them, the radio, the background the middle ground the so on and so forth. I am a bit. An antelope. A lichen. A star’s pinpoint visible from somewhere else. A cell. I die in isolation and overcrowding, and I pop into existence when I have exactly the right number of neighbors. I am also a neighbor. Dance! Picture a man with rubber bands tied to his fingers, and a player piano rigged up so that it forces him, as it plays its cranky, yellowed ivory song, to type these words: I LACK DISCIPLINE and then he runs away from home. Now why would I want to picture something like that? asks a tired restaurateur, as he scratches one eyebrow refractively. The most essential, the least sensational things seem to be either harbingers of great ecstacy or else a slump into futile, wasted depression. To wit: the fact that I am driven to do this even though it will never amount to anything. The fact that I am a human, and as such I unfold in the pattern of a human even though there is nothing extraordinary about me. The fact that I am aware, yet that awareness changes exactly nothing. Or very nearly exactly nothing, I can’t even have the purity of exactitude! The passing of a city bus. That lumbering barometer of so much, so much, my mental state, the state of democracy, the rapid descent of a great people into dissent, unrest, and finally inglorious extinction. We shall not die without first being paralyzed. But who, or what, is the glorious anaconda? Will we taste its vastness as we turn to poison and become its nutriments? One eye on the clock the clown plays digeridoo and walks bigfooted on the permafrost of his serious vacation The oblivious philosopher knots his tie I am not denying that I am a fish or a flower. Little crumbs are enough to feed me. Hot summer tires of joy: the driver pats the seat the radio plays A one-liner: a practical joke Smoke Passion is born of narrowness of vision exploding beyond its own ability to see What? Okay, let me try that one again The edge of her laughter a memory Again Her laughter is a carp exploding Ha ha. One more time Her laughter rose up and broke the surface and the ripple that it left I swallowed Every word decries its obstinate stupidity! Shooting at fish from miller’s bridge you were a boy and I was the smell of the heat the planks and the tar So much I wanted to tell you- lucky thing I was only the summer and could not speak! These words in translation from themselves These spider webs Bless the dj’s! preservers of irreverence! play, radio, play! steal me a reason to keep on living! if “the third period implies chaos” then the last little nip of the tiniest nibble of shadow at the terminus of the rueful second period must imply its own utterly laughable ignorance! i hope what we were groping at in seventh grade has stood you in good stead, my friend the ghost i don’t want to dance but my electrons do! you were right about one thing: it sustains you but you missed another part of it (until now): even if no-one else gives a rat’s bald ass, it still sustains you. I mean, who appreciates the apple more, the orchard or the lumberjack? does anything really “pop” into your mind? masturbation! “This is your last chance” the radio said, and I believed it. You should, too. Ground we’ve tread before becomes mud we’ve never seen before! (Just add water) Edgeriding becomes an olympic sport but not before olympia has fallen duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.............. my one neighbor’s TV is always on. Hot bastard he lights the stove cooks the fish i caught him I am not proud of myself, i am swamped at johnson’s shut-ins! i am teeming! clutching under a boulder of self-delight as the current blasts me from all sides! 3 months ago or so i might’ve said: let’s keep it our little secret, but now- i say: let’s take the kids there! and a picnic, why the hell not? Is it a crime that I’m up here thinking about: my self, the letters, the smoke, the radio, the rafters, the sky, the windows, the weird antennae, sometimes the kids, my self and not my wife? much? Cuz I guess I just thought about her.... After all.... the chaos, the third period..... I guess the first period was childhood, the second period was awkwardness, and the third period, about to begin, is the “profound change” rich predicted for me. the seventh period is death, the seventh period is death...! what happened to 1998 and 1999? some little bits of it are in the black leather book. maybe some in that green clothbound book. otherwise, i don’t really know!(?) oh i just found some in the basement. 2/24/02 the basement, the basement, the second story basement. duh, i love compyooders. kate called. she is a selfish controlling bitch and i still love her hot breasts, her compact chest, her sinful eyes and her sweet sweet aura. But you know what? I’m actually not wishing, not right now at any rate, that it was her i was having the kids with. Because i look back at all the old journals, and every time i was miserable. In my perfectland, I would still get to make love with her once in a while. We’ll see. Who knows. Stranger, I mean FAR stranger things have already happened! At least with Ann, when I get miserable I can leave. I mean, leave and come back. Come up here for instance, to the attic. I don’t know how much that has to do with who’s who, or with me finally having begun to develop some balls. Either way, it’s working. For now, at any rate. We’ll see. We’ll see. And it’s like, I don’t know, with Ann it’s like there’s not always this spectre of disapproval. Kate’s got this idea of how things should be, and no matter how good and how right it is, she’s never going to find anybody that caves in to it ALL the time. Certainly not me. I feel like with Ann I can be less than perfect, and it’ll still come out all right. Ann’s crazy enough to have a genuine sense of adventure. At least some of the time, which is all you can ask of anyone, including yourself. I mean, she and I are both pathetic failures in some ways, but I just get these glimmerings sometimes that our dreams could erupt into this world in a flash. I hope if I’m decieving myself the deception breaks the veil and I get what I pay for. You usually do, or so I am told. I was first drawn to Ann so much because the veil was thin. Because she had a dream world. Not that Kate doesn’t, I guess, but, I don’t know. I don’t really know what it is. I don’t really know, but it was something. It is something. We’ll see. And not to mention the fact, this is how it is. This is who I’m having the kids with, so my own sense of adventure (which is simply the built-in necessity of my soul) is saying, Go with it. So I must. That helplessness is the only real joy of being human. I mean, you always need more than one person. I need to have Kate’s mind to be friends with. I desperately want her body to be friends with. I want her and Dad and Ruth to calm the fuck down and share my family life with me, despite the fact it’s not coming out how they wanted it to. Or something. Dad & Ruth, that’s a whole nother story. I wish they’d fucking lighten up. I love computers, I love time travel, I love typing, I love words, I love the attic, I love the farmhouse we’re going to live in, I love my kids. And the dogs, and the birds that eat the seeds that we got at Sam’s club, and the fish, and the bull rushes, and the mud and the mud and the mud and dear old dead good beautiful best man Glenn. Where are you my brother, cuz you’re going to be with us too. I just know it. We are inviting you. You are always welcome. I trust my kids with you. betrayal of plot sandwiched between words make no sense like barbedwire goes gunlike where it wants keep smokin: your mustache stinks pool water brittle night candy automatons of joy eye on the world: I’ve brought the wine up here: invincible age in numbers of no import: arrogance in me strong i can do it these four words: aflame! bullfrogs titwillows treefrogs wet rocks glistening night creek sycamore moon shadow laughter of ghosts come back! come Listen, Bjork, I have nothing but respect for what you’re doing and everything, but shit you’re annoying on the radio. I mean, Christ, can’t you sing once in a while instead of all this gasping! Today I ate: eggs, cheese, sweet red pepper, apple passion mango juice, coffee, bacon, toast, currant jelly, margarine, cheezits, donuts, eggrolls, coke, tater tot casserole, more bread, margarine, lettuce, orange vinaigrette, peanut butter cookies, brownies, starburst, wine i’m not saying this means anything i’m in a play set with: computer, tv table, chair, uncle bob’s chair, lamp, extension cord, radio, rug, rug, blanket, windows, sheet of plastic and blanket over one window (the broken one), wine box, wine glass, tobacco, papers, carboard ashtray, tapestries on the walls, the rest of the attic with its one big window i piss out of sometimes, and lego dancing houses full of shame / not shame 50 year old linoleum crackling up from the floor beneath my cheap-shod feet socks, jeans, long-underwear shirt, belt, plaid shirt, long black duster, trinkets and wallet and so on, bottle with water in it still matches lighter a button with a picture of an old typewriter, “love warps the mind a little” 2/25/02The greats are dead John Wayne is plasticized Economics is a computer simulation theory forum Weird Al said it best: “Everything you know is wrong!” 2/26/02 Tits and roses. Slight pangs of guilt at how much I look at old journals lately. But shit, I made them! They’re all mine! And they help, give you a perspective, let you know that even if you’re feeling a tad defeated NOW, even back THEN it wasn’t all just tits and roses. And you managed to slither your way out of THAT juicey hot mud hole. And you remember the slithering as life! So..... What now? 2/26/02 My chest is three quarters of the way full of Scott telling me in his e’mail that he loves my poems and his favorite so far is the dumb show. being so full of this, how can the magic work for me tonight? And yet, the eight ball never lies, and so something has to happen because the eight ball gave me, for once, a bold, bright, unequivocal YES! when I asked it if the magic is going to work tonight. I didn’t ask it if I would recognize it when it happened, though..... Just listen to the radio and smoke for a while, then I’m going downstairs. you have to do a little sailing whenever you go sailing; other than that you’re on your own. 2/28/02Um, it’s not as if I necessarily have to. I mean. I. Um. See. The thing is. It’s like. The sex drive sleeps. No matter who I may or may not have sex with, if I’m going to, I have to cultivate, or at least allow to develop, the kind of space in which it feels good and right. I just have less interest in doing this with women than with men. Not because women aren’t attractive, some of them are quite lovely. It’s just, I feel like going into that space with a man. So then, why don’t I? Caffeine makes me want to poop, the Fuel Cafe makes me squirm, smoke makes me feel like a stupid baboon. Addixion! A text-producing tree. Object-specific ambiguity. Pregenerative recoil. Upside-down turtles on sideways-reaching elder log. Plop! one splashes in, plop! plop! there go its brother & its sister. Type arranged on a mutative grid. Apoplexy. Light. A white fudgey substance. What the hell! The sad exclamation mark, being lower than a lower-case “l” says What the hell. It is the curse of the exclamation mark to speak always with inflection! This is painful for it, sometimes, when it would much rather quietly inquire, or even just declare! I guess Man-who-Mimes’s name is Steve, at least that’s what Gabe called him at the co-op the other day. A lot of people are called Steve. But most of them are not Man-who-Mimes. People come and go with their disgusting... coffee! I wonder if anyone will steal my shit if I go take a shit. Would I give a shit? Shit, I hope no-one does, because this shit is starting to get to my shit. Shit! Nobody stole it, but it’s colder out here now. Man, my shit stunk! More pinch-faced talkies warble in on their... cel phones! Why don’t I want to go home? It is a high-level, trivial question, and it consumes a vast portion of my tiny being. It consumes it because I am afraid of knowing the answer. So I blindside myself, comfortable with the discomfort of sitting here, not settled, and yet not willing to go home yet. Home yet. Home yet. For the first time in my life, I don’t want any of my ex-girlfriends back. Many of them are beautiful, sweet, lovely, brave, invigorating, smart or just plain cool, but I am content to let them be. So just what DO I want? Nothing? Then am I content? Am I also afraid of the answer to that question? I think what I want is to feel the swell of friendship around me like the sea. Teeming waves come in and rock you bodily... tsunami! I want to not think about every laugh, every smoke, every syllable! I want someone to bullshit with. Someone else, I mean. Ann & I have a great deal, and we have (as yet unborn) kids in common, but we need something else. Something outside the bent circle of us. We are such looming figures in each others’ lives, we need our separate confidants to tell about each other, and other things. We need the school hall, the green tile, the dusty truck, the swinging vine. WHEN is this grasshopper going to click and whir and jump out at me? When is this tick going to shock my sunny leg hairs? When is this goose’s hiss going to turn into a strange salute? When am I going to know some of his secrets, and respect them as well as my hot blood will allow? When is the terrible commonality of his lampshade going to drape me with golden reassurance? When? When am I going to sit on the weight bench and crack wise? When am I going to fall off and be delighted to hear him laugh at me? Women were always a kind of third party, an audience perhaps, but participating. Catalysts? There’s got to be something besides thesis, antithesis and synthesis. A third initial element. What is it? Does my bipedalism, my bisymmetrical built-in bias blind me to it? Need I see it to feel it? Can you see yourself? Would you stumble if you did? Run into the mirror in the fun-house bifurcation? Shit, I don’t know dude. Greg Brown said, I sung what I was given, some was good and some was bad. Sickness is the mother of health? I think I need to listen to Greg Brown again. i am in a twisty tube going down with all the reds and yellows whirling! blood sugar goes up as the morning time goes down / feet first / a leaf going faster than a leaf / ever should! empty carpal tunnel echoes clean my god damn brain! Time to go downstairs. perhaps to have anal sex now. 3/1/02 I have been missing the point for seven years now. Okay. Components. Particles. Bits- It was Wayne (my capoeira teacher) and how he showed me how not to be hollow when you throw yourself backwards at the ground It was Wayne’s girlfriend doing funk-aerobics, the way she danced in place, that girl-funk-hip way only some girls do It was when she didn’t smile back or seem to notice me at all after that first class (it was how i told myself the thing to do about that was to cajole, be jocular with myself, how i coached myself not to care) It was the barely indulgent, barely tolerant smile she gave me when she was trying to play the drum and I was on the floor with a tambourine It was the pulsing tight whirling-in-place of her ass in blue sweat-pants, it was the plump tightness of her underwear underneath, it was the vortex at the center of her dancelike kicks It was none of these times because it was any moment when I didn’t get caught looking at her, knowing already her hypothetical scorn, knowing how I would deal with it, thus: I don’t need you anyway, I’m more of a threat to you in terms of stealing your boyfriend if anything, I don’t need you and I don’t care because I like boys, the most attractive person to me here is, is, is, um, just a second- Oh my god those rich full lips pressed into that almost smile the sweat on her breasts the strands of red braided in her deep brown hair It was, okay, okay, it was this: It was when we were in the circle, I mean, everybody was in the circle and I was almost in the circle, I was barely stuck to it, ready to bolt at the first sign of anybody knowing I was there, clapping my hands though, pretending I was there, because I wished that I could- well, nevermind. It was this: It was when she left the circle to go talk to someone, for just a second, and it was how her gaze lanced past me, I swear I could hear it slice past my ear to ask someone else to drum the drum while she was gone, it will just be a second, and then it was how she walked, she strode, she sailed across the inside of the circle- right in front of me! right in front of me without looking sideways and it was how I moved in perfect time out of her way, bowing out of her way because of course she would not think of going outside the circle because that would have meant that I was really there, so I bowed, I was graceful, I was well-behaved, I did it perfectly, she didn’t bump into me she didn’t have to swerve she cut right through that chord of that circle and she did it again when she came back. That’s when I really noticed what was happening. But wait-there’s more! It was the slow blooming of the canopy overhead. It was the rustle and heat of the people clapping, singing, chanting, playing. My god, a martial art? this is a game! They stand on their heads and act like monkeys. Some of them are slow, some of them are swift. Some of them are radiant, perfect dancers, dancers of intelligence and sweat! It was my numbness beginning to tingle with almost dread as I saw this incredible thing uncoiling. These were just people. These were not on TV. These were not in a book. These were in the basement of a strip mall, the southtown branch of the YMCA where the locker room is as big as my bedroom and there’s one shower stall in the corner. These are people with pimples, unruly moustache hairs, dirty clothes. These are people who sing, chant, clap, kick, yell, crouch, pray- play. And I was watching it, resisting its pull because I have been resisting for seven years. NO- for almost as long as I can remember. and I am not dead yet. and I am not dead yet and I am not dead yet. what am i going to do with this seed that was planted in me? Submission is not weakness. Submission is a body being acted on by a force. It’s going back to class. It’s releasing the howl. It’s giving in to the funk. It’s looking stupid. It’s bending, getting down, in the mud, on the floor. It’s being as strong as you can be, even though you’re not the strongest. Even though you’re the weakest. Even though a tiny child named Marcel is stronger. It’s playing the monkey game. It’s surrending to your own awareness. Anyone can do it. Anyone can do it. But no one can do it for you. Wake up. You don’t get the thrill of losing if you play to lose. I’m going to say that again: You don’t get the thrill of losing if you play to lose. This is the central paradox of submission, and it is why faking it doesn’t work. It is why merely playing the role, acting, doesn’t work. It is why even a submissive doesn’t want a consolation prize. What matters is not how well you play the game, it’s that you play the game at all! And pretending to play doesn’t count. The only thing that counts is whole surrender! And surrender is not the same as giving up! They say 10 per cent of guys are fags, well I bet ninety percent of those are guys who gave up. Even if I want a man, I want a man, by god. And that goes double for what I want to be. We’re getting an entire winter’s worth of snow in one night. I think I’m not going in to work tomorrow. I think I’m taking a snow day. What am I going to do with it? Walk in the snow, I guess. You see, the easiest habit in the world to make is the habit of stopping, of stalling out when you touch on the true story. Why did I quit going to karate? Because of that one day when Greg’s girlfriend stopped by while Greg was leading the class. I looked at myself in my drab t-shirt and my clueless moves, and I realized I was a baby. I realized it, it scared me, and before I even knew it I had a dozen reasons to have something else more pressing to do next week at that time. You can always find, see, this is the tricky part, this is the trap- you can always find someone who will be or act impressed by the safe games you’ve set up for yourself never to lose at. The only person guaranteed not to be fooled forever by this scam is, you guessed it, yourself. And even then, you can go on eating and shitting and buying groceries if you want to, in this state, this corporate sexless state, but what’s the point? What’s the point after you’ve tasted something else? After you’ve tasted what it’s like when the howl rips out of your throat? What’s amazing about the typing monkey is not that he can type, not even that he can type Hamlet, but THAT HE IS A MONKEY! As for today, it was the mud show, all right. And the Arena. Funny how the teh-dsa really works. Just like the eight-ball. Now it’s saying Storyteller. What could be in store for me tomorrow? 3/2/02 Holy shit! I slept like a snu'ox and dreamed that I had friends! 3/3/02 Letterpress Room, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Kate bustles about trying to cut her paper. It is a raggy, heavy stock, called “Rives BFK White.” Racks and racks of type hover nearby. A sign on the wall says, “There is only SO MUCH VALUE in THINKING about things you can’t CONTROL.” The paper is not square. It is not, according to Kate, Kate’s fault. The fans hum ominously. Does creative energy wane? How quickly? There is only SO MUCH VALUE in THINKING about things you can’t CONTROL. Go, little squirrel, go! I misspelled your name in second-grade spelling bee, and it cost me the championship, but GO#! I sware it’s not too late! Poetry is bullshit, gleefully. 3/4/02 Christ I don’t want to go 3/4/02 Back in Milwaukee. The attic room. I came up here to smoke, perchance to type, perchance to fiddle around a bit. Mostly to get away from the omnipresent presence of the not knowing what to do. So . . . smoke em if you got em. 3/5/02 I come up here to smoke. Drink tea, sometimes words. 3/6/02 About 11:35 pm. Okay. So I’m up in the attic. I just closed an appleworks document. Then the macintosh chanted, in the voice “Cellos”, “I am not just a series of ones and zeros. I have feelings too.” I said, “Okay. I don’t have a problem with that. Can you tell why you chose just now to tell me that?” But it said nothing more. The thing is, I don’t have talking alerts turned on in the speech control panel, and there was no alert anyway. The voice cellos was not even selected in the control panel. It was Fred, in fact. Perhaps this is some kind of an easter egg left in by the macintosh people. If so, it’s a very good one. Was it waiting for this date, this time, or was there some combination of system events I performed without realizing it? Or, was the macintosh talking to me? The thing it said seems a little too predictable for me to want to believe that. But of course, despite this, I still want to believe it. At least a little. Okay, you may now go on with your night, smoke, etcetera. Oh, and did I mention, I participated, albeit somewhat cloddishly, in the angola roda at the end of capoeira class tonight? I am glad i did. I earned this time tonight. 3/7/02 ran into (sara’s ex) Patrick and that odd guy john at rochambo today. i was typing and they were talking; before P recognized me i had been sensing their presence as “waking life” type characters in the animated periphery. i told them so, then they started talking about making a film about dreams. Otherwise, what’s new. Ann had a pain in her abdominal area. It seems to be getting better. She was scared to tears. We watched Moulin Rouge. The best part was Toulouse, his face, and also the part where the guy comes running in to the “emergency rehearsal” and says, “I hope my piano’s in tune!” and slams his fingers down on the keys and an awful wrenching honk comes out. That’s about it. Drink, smoke, Twain said keep some vices so you’ll have something to quit when it all really comes down. I mean, not in those words, he said it better than that, but I took it to heart, that’s the point. Klepack said don’t say anything until you’ve got something you have to say. 3/9/02 It’s like she’s out to prove I’m a selfish no-good bastard who doesn’t care about anybody, no matter how much energy I pour into helping and trying to do the right thing. It’s like she won’t be happy until my entire soul is dead. She says “I just want you to do what will make you happy” but then when I tell her what will make me happy she puts on this world-weary long-suffering mask and says Oh you always just do what you want for yourself, you don’t care how it affects anyone else. It’s my own god damn fault for letting it get this far. Congratulations to the queen of guilt. How anybody could have managed to make me feel this guilty for intervening in her pseudo-suicide attempt, I never could have imagined. It’s my own fault for being too weak to not give a shit that she looks so pathetic when she cries. The best I can do now is to offer what I can offer, and if that’s not good enough why should I even try to explain myself, because it’s not going to be good enough anyway. Her model seems to be, “I should be miserable so someone else can be happy” and she mistakes that for generosity, when all a commitment to being miserable does is invite others to break themselves against you as they try in vain to shore you up. 3/12/02 The conception that an artist must be drunk, insane, or ineffectual is yet another poison fed us in our corporate milk, to keep us weak. Besides my kids, here is the reason I cannot kill myself (after all): Rosa called me “a weaver and a bard-to-be.” Now see what I have read in Whitman’s letter to Emerson. <from letter to RWE> 3/18/02Why do I seek a career change? Because I’m well on my way to becoming either a zombie or dead, and I need to do something to alter the course of this progression. 3/29/02There is a class of problems that you really need to do something about, that are substantial problems, and then there is a class of problems such that the problem IS the problem, and it’s really okay if you just relax and let it be. This latter is the largest class. I mean, it’s those things that capoeira class lets you not worry about. It’s those things that having friends makes you not worry about. It’s those things that drumming and break dancing and harrison’s ribs and chest taut as he swirls upside down let you not worry about. It’s those things that you know, at certain moments, are really okay, even if you can’t put your finger on why at so many other moments. This large class includes all the reasons I can’t be a writer. I mean, let’s review. Whitman said all the types of literature count, right down to the pulp novels, and everyone’s little bit goes toward building the steps on which giants may ascend. Rilke said you just need to have survived childhood. Bukowski said no one can stop you but yourself. Kerouac said we should all be writing our stories in our own words so we’ll have something interesting to read when we get old. Miller said every man is capable of uttering profound truths if he gets real quiet and listens. Antler said put your poetry where your mouth is. Campbell said it’s just the American-style dragon that tries to make you think you can’t. Rosa said I was a weaver and a bard-to-be. My dad said I was a writer. I said it is alive to be a bit. Marcel leaps and jumps and kicks and laughs. With compadres like that on my side, what need I fear from the likes of isolation, self-doubt, loneliness, despair, depression, addiction and laziness? 4/8/02 Of all the Satyr people, I run into Dave. On the bus, at Fuel, and today, at UWM’s Eighth Note. Cheap tea, annoying music, nice couches. He’s odd, I like him. “Did you ever feel like nothing can stop you? Like no matter what happens, you’ll find a way to do what you want to do?” 4/14/02 what this country lacks is rioting and peasant revolts. Why do we keep waiting for them to tell us the truth about anything? They are never going to, and we keep being bought off by one “real truth” after another. It really is all about oil, at the present time anyway. Not terrorism, not drugs--those are handy excuses. It’s about oil in Venezuela, Columbia, the middle east, former soviet union (including afghanistan, caspian sea region, etcetera), eventually even canada and mexico. Fuck alaska, that’s nothing. No matter what they say, it is really about oil, and they aren’t going to admit any of it because they don’t want it for Us. They want it for Themselves. We are the child laborers, too stupid to know what we’re fighting for because if we did know, we would be mad as fucking hell. Iran and Iraq? They are not part of an Axis of Evil. Bush et al couldn’t fucking care less if anybody is Evil or not. They are an Axis of Oil, you fucking bastards, and don’t fucking forget it. Remember that: It’s never about morals, right or wrong, “freedom,” or any of that. It’s always about resources. What was that? It’s always about resources. Tell me again? It’s always about resources. I saw a news blip on TV the other night in which a congresswoman, I can’t remember her name right now, was shown to be implying that Bush knew about the 9/11 attack and had some sort of ties to it. The news piece was captioned, “The Unthinkable...” and most of it was spent showing other politicians talking about how ridiculous and dangerous and irresponsible this woman’s insinuations were. Yeah, okay, sure. But dangerous to whom? Ari Fleisher was up on the stage snickering about her. God damn that man looks like a contemptible weasel. God damn he looks like a cushiony yes-man with everything to hide. 4/15/02 Sitting at Fuel again, smoky. Wall to my right has a map of a digitized country slowly breaking apart at the edges. Bad paint. Not stoned any more. Don’t have to be. Don’t hardly even have the stomach for it. Have to stay alert. Don’t quite know what for, but sense it. One of these days we’ll be sitting by a campfire, my little clan, and some others, some new friends perhaps, or old ones, and there will be a little intermission, an oasis, a gap, a space between the spaces, where we will be able to say, yes, pass me that joint, and the fire will chuckle and crackle and hiss and make music, peasant music and the trees Need Music Need Rocks Need Moss Need Stones Need Water Flowing Down Hill Naked Love This place hurts my fucking ears. But they have tables, and nobody will really bug you. That’s good and bad, of course. Of course. where to go from here? Back to the Place of the Way, of course, of course. How to get there? One blank field at a time. Why’s it always so hard to get back once you leave? Security measures, of course. Woman over there brought a house in to the cafe, set it down on a table. There is no back wall to it, and you can see its ply-board imperfections. There are no apparent denizens. I want to be a fag today. But--where? Boots, bikes, bellies are out-n-about today. Where’s my boy friend? He’s late, the bastard, I know I told him to meet me here. Or was it here? Maybe it was somewhere else. But where? Somebody was teasing that woman about bringing her house with her. She said she couldn’t help it. “Guess that’s why they call me Gypsy!” Chris, the guy who gave me a massage a couple of years ago, who could never remember whether he was shooting solids or stripes, who tried to explain to Julia (the lonely girl with the hello-to-aliens code tattooed on her arm) that there was something awry with my kidney but then said, ah forget it, I’m drunk--just walked by looking sad and wrinkly. Spaceships are flying in and out of here at an alarming rate. They flutter and leap, skirl and sweep over the heads of the coffee drinkers, smokers, and lookers on Christ folks, we can’t spend our whole lives in cafes, can we? In cafes and bookstores, movies and libraries, restaurants and bars and parks by the lakefront with trails for bikers and bladers and kites that dance in confusion and gulls and lizards, toads and sparrows and gulls. Can we? I gotta go somewhere, I don’t care where. God dammit, I hate these days off sometimes but I need them so much. Electric anxiety. As the hydrocarbons guzzle, sizzle, gulp, drain away..... 4/16/02 What I need is a multidimensional space for text, rather than a heirarchical system which delineates files and folders. Because a file is basically linear, and it tends to be a stopping point. I don’t want those divisions, I don’t want those walls. I want it to be like the cirrus and the stratus clouds, and the blue and the breeze, and the breathtaking polyfurcations of the wet, naked tree branches--how it all flows continuously, dramatically, smoothly or suddenly--but always with such Imperfection as is so far unattainable by human artifice!--together! So you would be able to put text anywhere on the computer you wanted, in whatever-sized chunks because it’s all really one big chunk, being viewed from various perspectives at various times. User-definable dimensionality. Great. Now where do I get it? 4-22-02 I wish I had something to smoke. I’m going to get a little uglier. I’m kind of a gawky looking guy, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I think I want to move to Mexico when the kids are old enough. I think I want the sap to glow again. I think I want the stars’ ruddy taste to infiltrate my nerves again. The smell, the smell. I think I want the sea to ruin my house, take me back to the fingernailed dirt behind the garage 4-26-02 I was misled by several things. I’m not saying that’s anybody’s fault. I am getting pudgy. But spring is here. What do I want to say about the episode with Kiara? What do I not want to say? What if I were in the piney loft in the bothy, talking with my best girl friend, and I was trying to explain (because it was my turn, we’d both relaxed into the rhythm of guileless conversation) what it was, what it was . . . . What part are you avoiding? she says, poking me in the ribs, and it is nice because it is a rib-poke, not a rib-poke qua overture to obligatory kiss or other such sentiment. It’s not that she’s not beautiful and attractive; she is. It’s just that I want to talk to her, not fuck with her, and she is aware of this. More importantly, I am aware of this. It’s not that I think men are pretty or even sexy-looking. It’s not that I want to fawn over one or act weak or any of that stuff. It’s just that I have this, this I mean, I tell her, the next morning I had this urge to contact Kiara and explain everything to her, everything I had left out of my supposedly uninhibited self- disclosure the night before! I wanted to say, look, I’m a half-closeted bisexual, or I mean I’m gay but obviously bisexual enough to have impregnated a woman, but that’s not the point, the point is I want to be friends with you, if you really want to, I mean, literally. I don’t want to be your lover. I don’t want a woman for a lover. It’s not a big deal, I just don’t. I don’t mean to misrepresent myself over and over again! I like talking to women in bars. I like their faces, their bright, open eyes, the little crow’s feet that show how much they care, the strong softness, that aura, I love all that! Yes, I love women! But you were right when you said “you’re not dude!” You didn’t know how right you were. See, all these years I’ve gotten away with thinking I was so special. I was like this fucking godsend to weary women everywhere, because I was cute, sexy, funny, available, caring, polite but still irreverent enough- I mean, I was like this perfect find because I was so unlike all the bastards they’d gone out with before. But there’s a catch, and I never wanted to admit it! Who would, when for the price of scrunching up your eyes and faking it a little you could have all that love, all that attention, all that good-humored approval from the men, the men, the men, my god, the men!!! But it’s not working any more, I say, and exhale finally, and sink back into the plump cushion we’re sharing. My girl friend is cool, she understands, but I know that she knows it’s not enough yet. I mean, I can’t just dump out all this drama and not change anything. Unless that’s how I want to keep living my life, that is. She doesn’t even have to tell me. But she does any way. That’s what kind of a friend she is. We just have to find you a boyfriend, she says, and we are departing from the straight track of wisdom here, and she knows it, and I know it, and that’s what makes it good. “Your task is to stay here. Stay here and be prepared for anything.” “Get it right this time. Because this time is all you get.” -Prot 5-6-02 water in my ear from swimming at the Y. Got a couple of weeks til my 32nd birthday. Going back to the bike, the air, the foliage. Leaving behind the smoke and the heavy drink. In silence easy to be born again. Got things to do. Not too late. 5-7-02 faraway sirens the attic room again going back downstairs soon knowing i’m not done yet fairly happy see you tomorrow. 5-12-02in case i hadn’t reminded you lately, my computer, this disk and what jumps out of it IS my poem. I’m still be working on it. I’m at kates place and she gave me a collar. Crazy. Crazy for bein so crazy. she’s over there painting and breathing and being in love take me way way way back 5-14-02 i have all kinds of vices up here. beer. pot. tobacco. box fan. the only problem is, i think i might have to poop soon! I am going to go down and do my e-mailing but i just wanted to say i had a great time up here playing the teh-dsa, we’d like to thank all you for coming, we want you to have a safe trip home, and we’ll see you again real soon. bye bye. and don’t forget: we love you ps if you forget how to do it, just start asking around 5-14.5-2 see here’s the thing. i’m turned on by her other lover, but i don’t want him stealing my kids. but i can’t fake it just to keep him away. i’ll tell you the rest tomorrow 5-15-02 Well, i told her i would talk to her later about it all, but just what am i going to talk about? well. well. well. well. well. it’s like this. i am not going to pretend that i can offer the same things that an eric can to her. i don’t even want to, and i don’t think it would work out if i were to try to fake it. i can offer some other things. bottom line, i want to be my kids’ father. now. is she going to be okay getting some things from me and some other things from someone else? am i going to be okay doing the same thing on my side? can either of us ever find anybody who will want to be in on this odd little aggregation? i mean, i’ve been saying i want what’s best for the kids, and i want to be their dad because i don’t trust anybody else to do it, but that’s not the whole story, is it? it’s also that i don’t want them to like some other man better than me. but what it comes down to is this: i will do everything in my power to have a good relationship with them. it’s like i said to kate when she said it was uncertain how she was going to be involved: yes it’s uncertain, i want you to be involved, i don’t know exactly how it’s going to be, i’ll let the gods or whatever figure that out, but as far as the legwork down here- i’ll do it. so. yes, her other lover turns me on. yes, i like it dramatic, perverse, kinky, weird. yes, i can be open and really let it be about the kids getting the love they need. yes, there are other people in the world as weird as we are. yes, i have to do my part no matter what she does. it always comes back to that, that standing up for myself bit. that seems to be one of the things this world has to teach. i mean, it’s like, what if she decides she likes getting the neck kisses and the flowers and the video game fixing and the earnest fucking of eric so much that she doesn’t need my half-faggit ball-gag shit-eatin spaceship-wranglin gawky self anymore, and she tries to take the kids and go off with him? i mean, it’s doubtful she’ll need me for money for much longer; she’ll probably be making more than i do soon. then i guess i’ll have to have a quirky adventure love-comedy mystery movie until i get through to them. this sounds so much more glib than it is in my head, how can i explain this. but i’m not bitter, and i’m not so scared, now. everything up til now has been preparing me for this. the simple knowledge that i like the weird places- that alone is a great supply of calm and power. i can’t lose if i play it’s about letting go & holding on i think i got it quite some time ago, the bit about you can do whatever you want if you just let yourself. what’s taken me longer to get is that what you want doesn’t have to be what you see on tv, what your dad wanted, what your dad didn’t want, what any of the people in your favorite books wanted- any of that. the tricky part has been allowing myself to want what i want. i want to type & be a weaver & a bard. i want to love a man. i want to be a bitch & a cuckold & feel the pure, hi, clean rush of that perversion. i want to teach my kids about spaceships & standing up for yourself. i want all that. & that’s what i came here for (i gather). so let’s go. 5-16-02. This i have to say: Putting something in your journal is about as intimate as putting something in your ass. Here’s a little story for you, and then I’ll go downstairs. One day, when I was tripping my merrily way through printing school, I came back out of the ink closet with a new can of ink. I was feeling pretty good about myself. I had an apron on. As I got back over by my press (AB DICK 9840, very sexy) and the group i was assigned to it with, I heard a conversation stop, with these words trailing out: as a three dollar bill.” and then some chuckling, and averted eyes. I remember thinking my closest partner on the press, this black guy i kinda liked, hadn’t had a sneer in his chuckle like the others had. Any way, he never seemed to treat me any differently after that. So the moral of the story is, if you feel a little resentful or a little embarrassed or a little impotent or a little weak or a little gay or a little furious or a little whipped or little dicked or gawky or lanky or too tall or too short or pallid or squalid or limp wristed limp dicked and too white one day you’re going to feel like you’re flying when you give in and let the kid that said that lift up your skirt, feel you there, hurt you, force you down and make you suck his cock in front of everyone 5-19-02 just some specific generalities: pigeons look utterly mundane and ordinary on the outside, which is part of their appeal, and each one holds a memory gulls are a little bit preachy. sometimes their outsides interact with their insides in a tricky way. I’m so excited. I have a confession to make: I’m so excited about the teh-dsa. Check this out: right now, it’s like this forest of not trees, right, but like cards, or pockets, or something but they’re organisms. They’re organic. They have lives. In and about this forest are stones, which have lives inside them too, sometimes even each other, and grass although i don’t really know what that’s for yet, and water which invites you to jump in, and boy & girl mambas, and pigeons and gulls, mirrors which reflect whatever they want to reflect, sometimes even themselves, a worm hole, and roving stands of aspen, which when you look close, have rows and flows and little worlds of black--the rough black lines on the aspen bark, which you, the locust, put there, and which you got from god knows where. I’ve drunk my own piss to prepare me, make me strong. little do i know how little i’ve drunk would she ring the bell to make me come down and eat her shit? unfortunately, i doubt it, unless i asked her to which would take away from it a little bit. but not totally. if you can’t work on pleasure, work on business until it becomes pleasure again 5-20-02 tonight i’m piney, aching a little for a sweet love story i used to believe in but didn’t recognize. tonight in the teh-dsa, thieu found little max alone by the barbed wire fence, and thieu picked him up and took him in his arms, and is holding him and staying with him. i sent them a couple of pigeons to cheer them up. writing’s not real because you print it up and put it in a for chrissake portfolio, writing’s only real when you give it to someone else. and then you don’t have to worry about it so much any more. it’s “finished” when you give it away. 6-3-02 And so the queen / is once again my guest / and why is this? / was Princess / unimpressed? There is a secret room in a thrumming house There is a rusty rollercoaster track that leads out of the aching concrete beach through the troubling forest sideways loop-the-loop thru your (other) dimension to the secret room this room is here now this room is where i come I’m still alice 6-4-02 I’ve FOUND IT!!!!! The Answer to What the CROWS (green) DO! It’s like this: Go to the Roda (or anywhere else it happens to be) Find a Knife (assignment, what-you-have-to-do) Execute! Do it! Get in There! Play! When you’re done, IT TURNS GREEN and goes home (flies away). !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So... a pigeon is a memory a gull is a script a boy is a girl & a girl is a boy a river says jump in, continue! a crow is a thrown knife and a stone . . . what can i say, a stone is a stone Therefore a crow is a promise that you can tell a story. 6-5-02 apparently i’m being a real ass, lately. at least that’s what the teh-dsa is saying. 6-7-02 I wish you could designate a file’s label in the save-as dialog. 6-8-02 I sure do love my little room. I’m up here right now with the computer and all that that implies, some weed, some water cuz i drank the last beer with the steak dinner me & ann made, & a fan trying to get a good smelling breeze going. it smells like a secret room up here, a lair, a loft, a nest, a den, and i like it. all i need now is some music. from here i can see a couple kissing in the lee of a half-open car door. they’re coming home or else leaving, either way they stopped to smooch. that’s nice. it’s officially summer now. When we were in Missouri and I touched Rich’s head and he said he got a feeling of incredible peace—what about that? What about that? Dexter’s a little mopey. What about that? He’s a den animal too, after all. learned something else: the names of things change, fluidly. It keeps you guessing. the cool thing is, you change them yourself. You’re hiking through unfamiliar (I mean, familiar, of course they’re familiar, and you breathe them in and they sing out of your lungs as pipe organs!) woods and even mountains, and you pause each time you find a tree adorned by trail markers, orange, yellow, dark, inverted, routed out of rusty barnboard, blue, to whistle and spin, to turn it back the way you’ve come, or up a tree, or towards the creek, or into nettles of nowhere the teh-dsa field day: it’s so obvious, i am amazed i discovered it! if you see something you like, take a picture of it. then go let it evolve into something else! see now i can look back at a picture and say, hey, remember when the surface was dappled by all those beautiful little multi-colored nodes, just raining out their glowingness, and i can wonder if maybe i’d like to see them again that way sometime, or else just a little bit different! learned something: the pigeon’s name is its NAME, man, not just a quirky device attached to its wings! you can’t empty the trash while you watch. it won’t let you. i’m gonna say that again: you can’t empty the trash while you watch. it won’t let you. 6-9-02 i’m up here. just had a marvelous time with joe ramirez and erik, playing music. it was really nice. gentle. and I just want to say this, before I go on to whatever else it is I’m going to do up here, mainly not watch tv, whatever, the point is, what i wanted to say is, this: joe is really beautiful. 6-11-02 I honestly don’t know how much ann is manipulating me. sometimes i suspect she weaves elaborate stories in order to keep me enchanted and devoted. You know, I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with that. This could be another definition of love. And if she doesn’t intend it, well, that’s okay too. It speaks to the hearts of both of us that we both enjoy a tangled skein. sometimes i think “mama” is a character some of her characters play. i suspect ruby is the most adept at it. and speaking of the weaving and enchanting, what if I’m doing it to her as well? Well, okay. When I was blushing and stammering at the end of the session with Joe and Erik, I said, “It’s actually really nice to have a chance to play where the music, actually, is enjoyable to listen to....” And it is. And I hope my telling them that came close to giving them the same kind of glow their compliments gave me. 6-12-02 aspen move less often, gulls tend to gather by water, pigeons tend to go in groups I just looked through the entire dump, and found a pigeon, a gull, and an aspen whip. Also several photographs. 6-14-02 Max took Alex and Melanie on a long walk. They walked on the railroad tracks and saw a thousand cow birds, and a gull. Max almost stepped on a nail, but his friend Tinker was there, and warned him in time. i’ve been going to other fuels besides cafe lately 6-15-02 I sure do want Glenn to help take care of Megan. I think they’d both like that. a chain game: when you find the worm hole (or the dragon, or anybody or anything) ride it around a while. Let it eat one thing everywhere you light, and then go on. Repeat until ready to do something else. 616-02 i’m home and i don’t wish the tv was on. i got home from joe & eric & music and these two irish babes that played chello and one of em wailed & the other sang pretty and they had a guy play drums for them and he rocked and there was all these little girls like so many exotic goldfish swirling around in the square dance floor area in front of the stage and some of them looked so blue & some so big & some so chunky & some so downy & some so scared & some so thin & some so happy & i missed my little dyke friend kate & i missed my little guitar player cute butt carolyn & i missed the fire & i missed being so much like a puppy. god i miss that most of all. whiskey. 6-26-02 bored of sex bored of tears bored of whiskey bored of beers bored of dancers bored of screams bored of stories bored of dreams bored of this bored of that bored of food but getting fat Did you know Kennedy made his speech about the decision to shoot for the moon on my birthday (in 1961)? 071002 There’s bugs that sound like aliens outside everybody will bend to what makes them hard who would have thought that there is a whole “lifestyle” out there for men who want to be cuckolds? 071202Last night after the show, Joe said “thanks for a good show” and hugged me. The hug was a little too short. But still infinitely good. believe it or not i’m about ready for another road trip with ann. music heat bugs irony wind formica table tops in cafes overhearing strangers coming home Dogs seem instinctively to accept and know how to live by laws of dominance and submission. So do humans, but many of us don’t know we know it, or else we deny it. Acceptance opens many great vistas. While I am busily, mindfully convincing myself that I am manipulating her into treating me like a bitch overtly, she is all along manipulating me in far more subtle ways, ways far more demeaning and entwining than the constant arousal I seem to think I crave. i know this is not going to be news to ya, but there is a helluvan element of the teh-dsa that can never be archived, because it is an experience. a thousand verbal clitori aquiver in my head! spaek Morik, and then he cruised on home. 071502have felt love for ann these last few days. also sexual attraction, not separate but overlapping with the sweet jealousy, humiliation fantasy, etc. hey, whatever works. i am insecure; i hope she keeps playing with me. she seems to know how to do it enough, she comes up with things like that one story. i think some women know how to do it instinctively. she is aware of it consciously which makes it more tenuous but at the same time more successful. i am more aware of it now than say when kate was torturing me, there are pro’s and con’s to being aware. unaware is sometimes more emotionally intense, but aware is a more lasting relationship and you can probably more explore freaky physical things. who knows. never trapped. even if we were to get married we would still each have the freedom to look for our nads wherever we may find them. and when she gets dissatisfied and goes looking, i get excited which makes her more satisfied too. hot in attic giving up today did administrative work only oh well wish good dream maybe hot maybe more creatures of the swishy worlds 072302Again in attic my head hurts needed: a generic field spaceship a true blank page an unassuming potentiality a complete tear-down and rebuild of the a myth stop telling me these lies! sitting up here with nobody in particular stories falling out of my ears no sieve to catch them in one week perhaps until my child is born am i mad? stories die when i try to tell them to myself when i light a cigarette, only smoke comes out a best friend who always knows what you need (most especially when you do not) I do love it when the wind blows in across the Lake. All the nests I have built for myself have become mired and fouled with mud and lazy serpents/ sometimes too many answers not too few you aren’t listening anyway i do not blame you, whoever you are you will listen when you want to, when you can until then: feel better! bounce! breathe! go outside! come back in! fuck! take a bath! walk in the woods! do some work that doesn’t feel like work! Sometimes I love her and sometimes I don’t. Looking back at 1994, one thing is sure, regardless: I want my life back. 072502in a sense, they all could be rivers and they all could be birds. There are a fucking lot of birds in the worlds. When you think about it <RANDOM STUFF APPEARS> 072702ann just got home. i’m up in the attic with dexter and seven alarms are sounding in my poor brain. my life is an urgent runaway downhill brokedown train and i can’t even tell 073002 tonight Kate looked around in the teh-dsa, with my blessing of course. On impulse I made a new “rule:” whoever looks through it is invited to change any of the names in the untitled folder. What was odd was that she didn’t chance across any structures, mirrors, or elephants. She liked the pigeons the best. I took her on a field trip, and as expected she was taken aback by the collage of her when it came up. But I think she was flattered too. What good is flattery if it doesn’t fluster? 073102 It could be said that roy was the most affected by the Roda. While in there, he recieved his Capoeira name, and it is “Sing.” 080202 She’s here at last. She’s beautiful. I love her. Our lives begin. 081302Megan has an eye infection and it makes her grumpy and whiny. She reminds me of the little girl with the strawberry curl. At the doctor’s office today, I held her and sang to her and walked up and down in the hall, and she stopped crying and relaxed. It was my single greatest moment of redemption since the last time I believed I made her feel better. 081402 I am trying hard not to be ashamed of enjoying the music they’re playing in starbucks. Actually it’s not that hard. Some things haven’t changed. I like sweet fat gurls with evil feet. I like thinking about shiny dick heads. I can’t think of what to type. Life is okay. There’s a lot more to say than this, and it’s not all sun, but I’m going to pause a moment something that was sleepy got awakened waiting nervously with keys in her hands held together at her midriff she gets her mocha latte and leaves i see her thru the window walking to her car. it’s white with a black roof its butt dips down as she gets in i look again the car is gone one of her shoulders was bare. i was ready for her who’s next? I’m more fascinatable by how things grow now, how things grow and change under their own power and the power of what for lack of a better word I’m going to have to call “nature.” The little display in here showing how a coffee plant grows berries that spread little labia and turn into beans makes me think of Megan of course. 081802 this is the first attic session i’ve had since becoming a daddy. also the first smoke. last night i dreamed of the jack of clubs, and later the king and queen. also there was a slender therapist with slightly shorter than shoulder length straight brown hair, with whom i was having a session. we were playing role-playing games, and i kissed her, and then i kissed her hard, and tasted her thin little tongue, and knew that we were in some kind of love. later, down at the docks by the great big blue water, beside a tremendous cement levee, getting ready to go somewhere by motor launch, holly was helping cover for me so ann wouldn’t know, even though it didn’t seem all that earthshattering were she to find out. holly and i were saying, yeah, it’ll probably take at least 20 or so more sessions with the therapist.... 082702 I’m not going to bore me with a long tirade about how I had the perfect situation- twice!-and threw it all away. There’s plenty of dumb blues songs for that. Let’s just say, Anne cheated on me, Kate cheated on me- and told me to my face that she was going to!- and not just because I asked them to! I was miserable, I was in heaven! And I didn’t even know it. Or did I? 082802 dude, i just realized that the names in the untitled ƒolder are parasitic revolution album names! 083002 tonight coming home from the video store megan cried and cried and cried. it hurt, it jet-airplaned my chest and i almost panicked and when we got to the garage i lifted her out of her carseat as if i were lifting her out of a burning building and i rocked and swayed around the alley with her in my arms until she softened up, and cooed, and was quiet and i melted. i haven’t loved anyone that much in a long time. she has awakened something that was sleeping in me. it’s a good thing i’m not alone, though i’m not sure yet what that means. when she looks at me and knows me, who will she see? 090302 I’d like to see the emergence of a road thru the teh-dsa. I am not going to try to pave one immediately, not going to force the issue. But I want to let it roll around a while and see what happens. I have in mind the kind of changing scenery and micro-detail of the bike path by the river parkway. Endless zoom factors, weeds with individual personalities, sites, attractions, forgotten bifurcations, random destinations, non-dimensionality expressed through the distorting filter of a linear perspective. Megan and Ann came by work today, smelling of Obssession. Megan was a grouchy ladybug. a picture of a perfect sky with one cartoon-perfect cloud a felty field of stars wistful rough-edged rusty old van dollar beer & a shot of smooth whiskey why does coming here and failing to feel good make me so sad? 090402 my fucking thighs hurt. i started riding to work again. through the parks & the parkways. on unbelievably small and cracked asphalt through secret quiet trees of unforgetting. then i went to class. wayne says, “we need to talk about your initiation.” this is the farthest i have ever gotten in any situation like this. the hint comes up, and i fade away. but not this time, this time it’s going to happen. i can just feel it. smoking is nasty. beer is good. i’d rather drink than smoke any time. it took me so long to figure out what i wanted. to be cuckolded. the signs were all there. from that play at the rep in the central sea to anne’s slender cruelties to kate’s juicy globular demands to anh’s white trash perfect medium hard ass- the problem is now, that i have figured it out. awareness/consent tends to defuse it a little, diffuse it a little. it takes away some of the mindfuck power. that’s some catch . . . . when you don’t realize it’s what you want, you run away, come back, run away, until it’s finally too late to come back, but when you do realize it’s what you want, and you find someone who’s willing to do it for you, their very willingness undermines the thrill. i mean, you can’t be shocked by a thunderstorm on purpose. but we’ll see. 090502 smoky drinky attic house with people in it dumanstupid is basically the guy who is made up of all the life goo that didn’t quite coalesce into anybody else. he’s been there all along; we just didn’t have an icon for him up til now. really, if I could be anything I’m not (or don’t quite think I am) right now, I’d be a girl; I’d be a slut; I’d be a cock sucker. I’m sitting up here not “writing” anything in particular, knowing that even not “writing” is not “not ‘writing’“ but “not” really “caring” except i do, o i do. did i mention that while i was assigning random names to the aliases in the untitled folder, my fingers accidentally swiped out “poem” for one of them? of course it doesn’t MEAN anything, you fucking cock sucker (yes, yes!). But my point is, my point is of course that still doesn’t mean i want to make anything as pedestrian as a book. A book is a fucking tombstone, and I’m not dead yet. Okay, okay, I don’t really have anything to say. My face is a brick wall. I’m going back downstairs. I just wanted to say one more thing before I went down there, and a cream pie hit me in the face. 090602 more conversation with the fucked up 8-ball am i going to feel desolate tonight? yes am i going to talk to kate tonight? without a doubt am i going to masturbate again before the night is over? yes definitely am i going to talk with ann? most likely are we going to talk sex? yes definitely do i want her? signs point to yes will she ever be goddess and cruel enough to make me fly again? don’t count on it will i fly again? very doubtful will i do something else that makes up for not flying again? concentrate and ask again if i can’t fly again, will i find some sort of redemption or at least another good old fashioned cheap thrill by crawling? signs point to yes am i going to have to figure it out for myself? don’t count on it is it a woman who is going to help me? yes is it ann? it is decidedly so does kate still figure into the picture as more than a phantom of a phantasy? my reply is no what about guys? do i get one of those? my sources say no? why not? why not? why not? cannot predict now 090902 house with people in it is really where the people live (it is the space inbetween death) they throw their aliases into whereisit so they can play games with each other and the animals and everything can get fucked up a bit 091102A year has passed since a year ago. In a few hours, airplanes will be crashing into buildings and I will be floating around in a safe bubble with ann, and I will look very mournful and say, “I was afraid that this was going to happen” and when she wakes up, she will tell me of her dreams, and she and I and Megan Rosa will begin again, this year, every year, and every other year after that. I seem to have gotten this idea somewhere that good stories have people in extreme situations. As far as I can tell, that means I either have to put myself into extreme situations, or recognize the extremity of the situations I am already in. Or both. I need to invent my own serenity prayer. 091302I am sitting at a half-rotten picnic table by the milwaukee river, in the long shadows of the Parkway. A man is playing a flute nearby. Yes, a lot of poetry sucks, not the least of which is mine, but I think the world is not such a bad place after all. “I” am not this body nor this brain. Not even some such cookie-dough construction as a soul. There are gnats here. They, too, deserve praise. Why did Erputiba die? Because his contents had become (though delightful) stagnant. Why does Erputiba live on? Because when he died, his contents were scattered among the teh-dsa. I kind of wish I had a smoke. And I’m kind of glad I don’t. Open up the message box. Ask yourself this question: What is the next word in this sequence? You can find the stardust for poems in literature (as in other places). But poems are not themselves literature. What are they? Snails, scraggly hard weedy rocks, islands, swimming harder than you knew you could across a lake, thick with the terror of the unimagined I could have been a drunk if I’d really stuck with it. 091802 nonsense rebellions one of the biggest amazingest triumphantest elephantus things about the index cards was, early on I decided i could do it however i wanted, not be a slave to my own “system,” and consequently i threw some cards out, i moved some around, i changed some, and some i just stuck in there as they arrived. i was free. i mean that exactly as profoundly as i say it. 091902 allow me to resort to a cliche. Life, this life, is in fact a game. But here’s the part I missed before: you have to choose to play in order to have any fun. Even that sounds like a cliche. Well, it is. But that doesn’t make it any less true. Every day I get up and go to work and sometimes I have the glint of the sun or the round road through the park to make me smile, but every day at least once I conclude that I am powerless. I decide I am cursed by normalcy, devoid of firepower, and dry of passion. That’s because I’m refusing to play. To play, you have to break rules. You have to pick things up you’re not supposed to. You have to talk to people and ask outrageous questions. You have to be ready to run like mad with your shirt tails hanging out after midnight. It doesn’t matter that I’m not smart enough, strong enough, or sexy enough. I am a disposable game piece, and therefore I owe it to myself to stop treating myself as a sacred and precious doll! Use me up! Use me up! Use me up! Can’t I hear me begging me? people from all over dimensions have been trying to call out to me, to call me out (‘...capoeira called me to the forest...’) and i don’t know how much longer i can pretend not to hear them before i implode. The dogs wouldn’t care if I was naked when I walked them. They probably wouldn’t even notice. 092002 meggie’s got the hickups and is sitting in her swing. willie’s singing teatro on the dvd, with, alas, the woofer turned off so as not to annoy The People Upstairs. Meggie’s a little kid, she’s really little, she’s like only a foot and a half tall. she’s so fucking cute. she sure can bitch and she sure can suck. she sure can fly around in a circle with eyes wide. tonight i touched her story spot, it’s what ann would call her third eye, on her forehead above and between her other two eyes. i think she sees stories when you touch her there, she got that from her mom. i think she likes it when you touch her normally instead of being all feathery-gooey ultra- cautious. i do too. maybe she got that from me. hickup, hickup! i just made a noise and she looked over here, with her HUGE eyes, her cavernous eyes, her brilliant spatial galaxial super mega EYES! 092302 just watched a movie about a piano player and all i want to do is smoke. meggie slept on my lap, crooked in my arm, for the last half of it and i realized by noticing which parts of the movie made me want to cry-and more importantly, which parts didn’t-that she’s the thing that’s stronger than glenn’s death. her life. her life. her life. ann put a delicate necklace around my neck. the necklace has a clear blue stone set in a silver circle with some sort of celtic knotwork. knotwork. that’s a funny word. i’m not sure why she put the necklace there, on me, but it looks nice from up here in my eyeballs, and it makes me feel like i look like melanie everyone has one good story in them. who’s a person who can tell theirs passionately? who’s a person who can weave a bunch of people’s together? who’s a person who knows where they all fit in? who’s a person who appreciates--no, who needs them all! in every person he meets, he sees the flickering flame, he feels the warmth, he eats it and it eats him until who’s a person who can elicit someone else’s, and love someone else thereby? Fuck the blues. ann’s voice changes when she talks to jordan. she has the unabashed immodesty to deny it. and i’ll lay even odds (even though i’m not really sure what that means) that she’s down there talking to him right now. It’s a good thing I don’t care. Right? every house has a candle every candle is a ghost every eye has a story every story has another story only it can hear truly who has the soul of a poet, and who can recognize the soul of a poet in someone else? who, on hearing from someone else, “you have the soul of a poet, friend,” will have the bravery to cast eyes down, grin, or chuckle, and realize what this means. it means, “you stay here; i’m going someplace else.” perhaps we’ll meet again. 092402 A house that has twenty-five people in it. 19 are boys, three are girls, two are both, and one is some sort of weird stowaway ghost. Odd place. Also there are salt & pepper shakers in the weirdest places. 092502 Well they said this tea was earthy, and right now I am in no position to disagree. I taste the woods in it. The woods I ate with taelin. the woods we smoked together, him the leaf & i the bark, when werewolves ruled the land and anything you said could be held in your mouth like steaming, rich, autumnal mutan white tea. and now? something else to smoke. but i don’t want to talk about what it is. because it comes in a box and i might start crying judging from past journals- records? time capsules?- i’m less horny, generally, these days than in my early twenties. Also I dance in public less. Could there be a correlation? (as chris would say: yes, but it’s not necessarily one of cause and effect) i just don’t remember being this tired. even when i wrote “i am tired....” it just doesn’t sound tired to me, because i was inflamed when i wrote it. or so it sounds to me now, looking back. maybe writing it was what woke me up. maybe it still is. physically, now, i feel draggier. and it’s not just because megan keeps us up. i wasn’t getting much sleep before she came along. <here is the blank space where i can feel a clue; i can sense the rest of this passage exists, but i am, once again, too willfully blind to see it> i’m going to the roda for a second. i’ll see you back here in a few. * 32 years old and still trying to grow some real hair. 32 years old and i just now realized what the frog from bugs bunny was all about. you know, the one that sang, but only for the one guy, never with any other audience, never for money or glory in the world at large? and how it wrecked that one guy and he ended up on skid row with cartoon stubble and downcast hound dog cartoon sad eyes? frog as “genius,” “freedom,” etc . . . 092602 what happened was, i just typed the word “sequin” as the name of a pigeon, and it took me back to the forest smell and the dark feel of being in mom’s closet, with the shimmering shoes, the rustling gowns, and the burgeoning secret . . . * NOTE: the fact that you have done or experienced something that could be labelled or described with the same words as the label or description of something someone else has done or experienced, does not guarantee that you and that someone are going to feel like kindred souls. 092702 turn everything on... whiskey, smoke, coffee, music, computer, lights, ceiling fan, fruity lip gloss, black tights, short flowery skirt, sandals, blue bra, “we can do it” t-shirt, buoyant perfume oil, just a little, here, here, here and... here 092802 it’s not as though i expect to sleep through her coming home. But sometimes it would be nice to feel cared for enough that she would make even a token attempt to be softer and quieter when she gets here and I’m obviously asleep. I don’t think she even knows that I think she’s inconsiderate. I think she’s just naturally not a very quiet person. And that small detail bugs me out of all proportion sometimes. Like tonight. The minor indignities of my life here threaten to eat me sometimes. Like how I always bump my head on this stupid candle thing she has hanging above this desk. I still, even after all this time, don’t really feel at home here. Maybe it’s my own fault. Maybe I don’t work enough at it. But sometimes (like tonight) I feel I never will, with her. * well, okay. My annoyance is humbled by her stories from the nursing home. It seems they have this thing called “comfort care” which is basically like pulling the plug on people who are dying, just keeping them comfortable for a while. But there’s this one woman who has cancer and her son won’t authorize treatment for it, and she’s in this comfort care mode, and that means, incredibly, she can’t have any food or water. What the hell is comforting about that? Ann says a lot of the ones who are dying don’t want any food or water. There was one that died tonight I guess who was like that. Fine. But this other woman was moaning and begging. Her mouth was so dry she couldn’t even dissolve the morphine they weren’t giving her enough of. Ann gave her some water despite the cruel and unusual rules. We are so weird, this society. Why don’t we just take care of our own? Would that really be so hard? 093002 a pernicious conflagration leather shoes bandolero shirt broad eyes full mouth low voice simple sincerity wise youth big room ancient breeze orange music through halcyon trees can this be? was i here? is that my footstep in the river? * we would like you to know that for more than 140 years people have turned to Early Times for consistently high quality and smooth taste. What exactly is smooth taste? okay, nevermind. i have to admit, aleutia’s thong underwear kind of turns me on. I just don’t like them skinny polished girls. I like the bigmouthed ones, the ones who are just a little too too much to be contained. and her clompy shoes. mud show mush oh the fan’s going “rain rain rain rain rain rain” in its dry voice can you tell i don’t have much to say? i watched “that 70’s show” tonight. it made me cry a little. the big beautiful girl and the little cute guy went to prom, didn’t have sex, and he said, “what if this is our only chance?” and she said, “it won’t be,” and he said, “okay.” and they went back to the prom and had the rest of a good time. if there is one door in the castle... anne & i lying on the rock. sun oil sweat granite sun shining skin and the great, the vast, the laughing, the silent hey- that’s a good pigeon. fly away! i’ve never been so old & young as i think i am [right now ] It appears that Megan may have this rare condition, called- something that starts with a “c.” [colobomas] Her pupils may never become completely round, but may always look like little ink blots. Ann said the doctor said it wouldn’t affect her vision, and if that’s the case- then I think it’s kind of cool. Little ghosty-eyed inkblot megan-head. * Dear Ann: I don’t know how to say this yet. Sometimes I hate you but I love you. You’re fat right now and I love that too. I love your big ass and your huge milky tits and your big smooth white underwear. I love how you always press back into me and murmur when I finally come around and embrace you at night. I love how you’re such a stubborn bitch. I love how you love megan. I love how you’re always telling me that I’m okay, better than okay. I want to marry you. I want you to cheat on me. I want you to come to me. I want you to hurt me. I want to suck on your boots. I want you to shit on me and kick me in the face and fuck my best friend on our wedding night. I am finally realizing what you are and how sexy you are and that is the only way it is really going to hurt when you abuse me, and that is what I want. Because I really love you and I really want you. I read in my old journals about all these people that I ditched because I was skinny and young and stupid and afraid. Well that stops here, now, with you. No better time. Marry me. Fuck with me. Let’s go to Seattle and Oregon and Tibet and Mexico. Let’s be starfuckers & dogfuckers & bankrobbers. Let’s raise our little thug, our ladybug, our little ghosty-eyed ink-blot baby megan so she can be strong and crazy too. Let’s make another one. Fuck it, let’s fuck, fuck me, suck me in hold me down push me up, make me come. Come home. I love you. Did I tell you this? I have your birthday present. I just have to figure out how to say it. * Yes, being bisexual can be confusing, but it only needs to be a sob story if that’s how you want it. Just drink the wine you like. Don’t say yes to something when you mean not now, maybe, no, or anything but yes yes. Look her in the face and say I’m going out. Look him in the face and say I have a wife. Look them in the face and say I love you. 100102 I am not yet so sad & tired that I cannot speak. Many are invited; all eventually come twelve rocks on the floor; one in my pocket named Will this small hotel room where i fly to each night is dressed in we dress up and wear dresses together: the ghost of my starfucker sister the ghost of my personal whore the ghost of my gravel bar friend the ghost of an underwater mischief making dream girl who laughed at me when i asked her name; and she lives with me now, and she lives downstairs with that woman who lives with me now (there is a pipe organ in the church of what once was my sadness ghosts goldfish goldfish goldfish (i just wanted to say goldfish * nine of pentacles from the celestial tarot: looks like my mom only more fuckably evil; like a mom you have a wretched, baleful, diabolical permission to suckle at and be cossetted by; to be sissy-boy fucked and whipped good boy and ann is still downstairs with her big sleek milky tits every writer’s room should have some non-famous things written by someone else. open, on the floor (the way i like to be) wet with the rocks and the royal family of sticks and the tiny, fluttering, cut-up arabesques & moons of your gone gone sister 100202 “I stink!” You can’t create a meandering, interwoven, ancient, arcane, pliable, living text simply by reffering to it obliquely when the mood strikes. #or can you# slava over there by the window this fall, 2nd floor rochambo. suddenly i need him to be here. suddenly he is the only source of moisture for this poor fish. he taps and pads gently on a little doumbec. he looks out the window. he sounds himself a little like the rain. if he were to disappear, never to have been, this whole picture would fall apart, but more than just the picture. none of us would have been or will be. his white socks, in between his loafers and the edge of his blue jeans, hop up and down. my midriff’s turning into a lazy rabbit, and no skyscraper cares anywhere still waiting for an attractive man, the street hovers inches above itself try a few kicks to loosen up, she says, and her black tights pinken reflexively [still raspberries flap past the racing window; we reach out to be grabbed by one. can you hold it just a little longer? the tease] my daughter explains it all to me: it’s okay to play illegal games, as long as you don’t break the rules! how shall i let go of a past i haven’t circularity is over-rated- but the ratings are irrelevant i want to be covered in mud i want you to slick my breasts with muddy hands and i want you to play the drum and i want you all to watch me get fucked in slow muddy motion- from behind by a fat bear from in front by a slim weasel and i want you to know i did it but not for you on page 0B10: 6F 72 20 79 6F 75 0D 0D 6F 6E 20 70 61 67 65 20 it says this get it? (i didn’t either) proximity of numerous bodies is no guarantee of a house with people in it (neither is the appearance of solitude. neither is loneliness.) absence of guarantee is no guarantee of absence (however) heartburn and having to piss is (unfortunately?) more real than any of this * it’s funny that the one russian guy i know, whom i don’t really know but who serves as a sort of quirky, organic icon for something at once familiar and foreign, is named “Slava.” that’s almost too good to be fiction! I know I have some poems and clippings about or containing sadness. But I’m okay. No, I’m really fine. The sadness is a part of something. I haven’t been depressed in years. My depression was [mechanical | strategic | practical | software-driven | a parking meter] and it has expired! i’m not trying to be cutesy when i say “there is a god:” because here in this strange coldwarm house of tea, while it’s falling down dark outside the closedopen windows, van is singing “and we’ll all go together / in the wild mountain thyme . . .” 100702 lots and lots of wine. lotsanlotsa wine. what kind of wine is that? it’s “Lotsanlotsa!” 100802 god I was working so hard at making pigeons, I almost forgot to drink maybe i need some music. i’ll tell you this much. i walked a gauntlet tonight. i went the other way around the block with the dogs. the streetlights all were out. it was dark, uncannily dark, deliciously dark. i could hardly see the poop to pick it up. there were some people standing outside Albanese’s spaghetti restaurant. I was ready for one of them to be him. I was ready to say, I never did anything to you, so just leave me alone. But it was just two other people and I said Hi, and they said Hi, and we left it at that. But I was ready. I ask the teh-dsa again one of my favorite schoolgirl mysticism questions and this time it says, with the imperturbable impatience only it can resurrect, she’s known so much more than me, she’s known so much less, she’s known the same as me (as usual, i have no idea what this fucking means.) I’ll ask it something else: Nah, forget it. Every time in passion i ask ann if she really fucked eric at thanksgiving (and if therefore there is really doubt as to whether i am really meggie’s father), she always tells me a story about her begging him to fuck her but him not doing it because they didn’t have a condom. And every time, like grandma with her cookie recipies, she adds something to the story that i didn’t know before. Last night, it was that she rubbed her pussy up and down on his cock while she was begging him. Probably my fiercest fantasy at this moment is the night she finally screams, Yes, Yes, He fucked me! He fucked me hard and long! God, Yes! my dream is a half life this autumn always dead tired always afire 100902 another gay man walked out of here, coffee in hand, reflected in nineteenth-century bricks. i need to oil the world in the artificial comfort of this environment, a dove drops another long-nosed woman walks in. what is going on here? you cannot edit the dead! SCREAMS A VOICE but the voice is WRONG return to picking a single brick. Okay. Got one picked out? No, don’t show me which one it is. Just hold it with your eyes. Now... zoom out the steamroom calls pray there be a few remaining men who have their penises intact everyone is a foreigner here “have you ever been honest, and wished you hadn’t been?” asks a ponytail girl two tables over, past the shave-headed foreign guy who captivates her cute attention his answer sounds like a chipmunk megaphone in a long log i’ve got news for you, buddy. this is not technology. this is the long neglect of the mechanism of our own elevation you look around you like a fish why can’t you swim up? an ambulance driver just walked in here, got halfway up the entryway. his voicebox clacked and he stopped. a voice said, “okay santos, you win,” and gave him the address. he turned around with his jaw and left without getting any coffee. in the next line, i demand you give me a word i don’t use very often. make it a striking word. okay? here goes how about dipping down the rushen river in our own canoe? i asked for striking, and you came back with “rushen.” let’s see. it’s a good word, very bluegreen and sensuous, but I’m afraid striking it ain’t quite. go back out and try again, please. how about, the procacity of her upturned nose drove me to my knees! Brava! I like it! You’ve engaged my enthusiasm for the latinate! Procacity. It’s like an android with impudence. Very shiny and sexy. Good going! Thank you ever so much. Yeah, okay dude. I mean, like, WHOA. it’s funny how things work you can say that like a swingset chain a hammer a bucket with paint drops dried on the side I’d better go. The steamroom beckons. And yet... 101002 click the assfucked girl’s ass to open the journal. coffee in a thermal. stuffed crow intensely focused. feeling the wisp of the dress of anticipation. dick hard through pajama bottoms. up here in the attic. life. Dear Glenn: I just had to interrupt my transcription of the acid night notes to say I don’t feel guilty anymore. We saw Ann get the sore cheeks disease from smiling too much. I pointed it out to you. I showed you in my notebook. Brother. I deserved her. We fought. I won. You got mad. Let’s get over it. Love, Matt * I know how these things can change, but right now I am not feeling Kate as a sexual being. Even her pictures are not arresting me. Because I’ve found someone younger and dirtier. Fatter yes, but younger and dirtier, hallelujah! 101202 as far as war goes: did you ever kill a fly? did you ever want to go one step further? a taste for killing- that’s natural, and comes in degrees. a taste for escalation, expansion, development, climbing mountains, breaking records, growth, growth growth. That’s natural too. So why does Bush’s jihad on Iraq (et al) seem so distasteful? Because it’s in bad taste! Bad form! Bad form! It’s not fighting that’s bad, it’s his lack of respect for them, us, or anyone. He’s a bad artist. He’s a better enemy than the enemy. I think it’s because he fails to serve anyone other than himself, and he lies about that. I heard on the radio a guy named munakata shiko say, “I do not follow in the footsteps of the great masters. I seek what they sought.” I like that. 101502 Sometimes it still hits me like that, big and deep and quiet and unfathomable... as when, coming home from a long, dramatic trip up the Door peninsula, full of smoky cheese and winding-road conversation, flushed with the heady peace of Megan’s finally having gone to sleep, still nuk-nuk-nuk in her blankets in her car seat as I clamber with her up the boards of the porch steps: I’m carrying my daughter into the house! My daughter! 101502 Hmm. Hm hm hm hm hm. I am a woman. So? (And that IS a question, not a dismissal.) * Funny how that works: to the questions “What’s the best thing you’ve ever heard?” and “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever heard?” I can give the same answer: my baby crying. * I am 32 years old. There are some very good things about this. I have largely gotten over the dread I felt when I was 28 and 29. But I am only now realizing the great sorrow, the great regret, the great loss. Because it isn’t what I feared it would be, at all. It is that I have waited past the optimal time to change into a woman physically. Had I gone through with it the first time it occurred to me to do so, in my early twenties, my chances for hormonal and cosmetic success would have been greater. But the sense of grief I am feeling is deeper than this, more subtle in origin than a simple, mathematical repercussion. The depth of the well out of which my grief pours forth is- unfathomed. This stuck in my head tonight, so I dug thru and found the notebook it was in: <<2-8-00 Time, fate, and circumstances have conspired to make me a woman in a man’s body. This fact is part of the pershidium converter at the core of my being, that drives all my [actions] and so it is significant to me, but at the same time it is irrelevant, because it does not change the fact that what tools I have I have, what world I’m faced with is what I have to work and play with, and what risks are staring me in the face will stare patiently until I take note of them, and act.>> You know, I have this vague recollection of almost wanting not to have written that after I wrote it, a sense of relegating it to the merely experimental, allowing it to fade into scrap-paper status, exercise status, a clipping merely, from a parallel reality where anything you say can’t be used against you. Naive was I then. Not like now. A year and a half and a million frosty, starry cornfields in some direction arbitrarily called later. If only there were some way to know what I was really thinking when I was 9, or 8, or at any time during the actual 70’s, I feel that would be very illuminating. But alas. All I remember for sure is wearing a new year’s eve hat and blowing on a crazy paper pipe and saying, “goodbye, 1976!!!! Goodbye!!!” 101602 I have a hole in me. I look around and can’t believe what I see. Women. Big, strong, smooth, glowing women. Would I look like her? How about her? Only I wouldn’t wear my hair like that. Would I wear a coat like that? How would that feel? Imagination tastes like flat soda and unsalted saltines right now. I have a hole in me. There is nothing left, in this starry state, but to go to the roda. See ya. 101702 Why are people so afraid to lose their lives? Why bargain with the reaper? Constant stimulation. Ambiguity. Ambivalence. Tea in a dirty cup. Ahhhh... smoke. * masturbation relieves some of the grief, letting one of the floodgates open, and maybe now i can get down to some lovemaking or fishing or just spinning about in a small boat on hydroelectric turbulence! 101802 No wait! I’ve got it! I’m not a man, I’m not a woman, I’m not gay or straight or any of that claptrap. What I am, is, I’m two men and a woman. Just ask Esriel. I closed my eyes with my finger on the trigger and asked the teh-dsa: “Where will fulfillment be found?” Is the fact that in the closest thing it has to a reply, it gave me Erputiba 2/07 a) too fucking weird, man b) simple, with a twist of irony c) really, really sad d) scintillating, delightful e) utterly, completely meaningless f) a rocket full o’ shootin’ stars g) scary. very scary h) any or all (but almost certainly not none) of the above. oh, i) don’t know anymore Fuck this body! I’m drunk on the window! A black lego is a mirror! A face is a pumpkin! Outside it is cold. Windows never open. You have to break them. A ship is half-submerged. I can’t see the half I have to get to. To drive it. Back to someplace I know full of suntan-oiled people. Fuck people. Fuck dolphins. I am a dolphin. Sometimes we fuck by rubbing skins. The skin is immense, a sexual organ full of pipe dreams. Fuck the night. The night is as big as the sea and all of it at once. If you ever really feel the bigness of the sea, you go crazy. Then you can come down here with us. We have no up or down. We are fascinated by your pips and squeaks. Swim with us? You barely scratch the surface. We love you for your speciousness. We remember when we were blind like you. Rocket rollercoaster bucket of now. I am at the crest of a moment. I am blazing jazz out of a dirty horn. I am in command of a plummetting elevator. The cables are broken. Thank god for that. We fall into the shimmering city streets and are, yes, born again and again and again until we die. Soon. This is the only glory, this impermanence. Just joking. So glad to have known, you. I WISH THERE WERE SOME WAY I COULD EXPRESS the perfect brilliance of a sidewalk summer mess (every little piece of dirt that got stuck to a young man’s scuffling shoe, skyward when he had no home looking for a place to get wet Times: the halloween party in that guy’s basement, with satyr, getting bra-strap-snapped and flirted with all night, cullen saying he would have ravished me if he hadn’t been there with his girlfriend getting ready to play the show at The Couch, going and getting Dan’s sandwich for him and saying, “there you go, dear!” with pam in the hotel room, of course, and going out very nervously but thrillingly to the 7-11 (and that big fat dumb guy behind the counter, shaking his head with the utter immorality of it all) in the online chat room, being a woman giving advice about love to some guy named steve being alex’s slut, sucking his cock and telling him to piss on me just the act of coming home and putting on a skirt, the breathing-out of this and the weird way it makes me walk differently no matter what leaning back into Patrick, watching that dumb movie on that first (only real) date with Scott S. Him buying me dinner at my favorite restaurant. Me giggly, giddy! Astonished, even! How fucking good the wine was! 102102 later, in a cafe of my own making. exhausted. feeling like the lion after the picture of the lion is caged? anne sent me a card. she’s been proclaiming her love for me again still. Audrey Hepburn looks a little like her when Audrey Hepburn is old enough. Remember all those years ago when Anne told us a little story about her & me, getting together again years later, sitting down with our respective families to have dinner, the hub-bub and the kids and the food and the lights, and she said she & I would smile at each other through the middle of all this, a smile known only between us, or at least the depths known only to us though maybe the surface and what it glimmers of spied by one of our other ones, and the smile would be a little sad? And remember how we both cried when she told us that story? In the card I got from her today she said “How are you? Megan? Ann? A whole little family, eh?... I always thought we would have boys.” In my notes about my dreams about Megan (from early November 2001, before I even knew who Megan was or what was going to happen) it says at one point, right before she talks to me, “I’m apart from the others now but still connected....” I think that pretty much says quite a lot. Today was monday, and Ann & Megan & I lounged around. Watched movies. Ate pancakes (Megan ate milk). When I came back in from the chill with another couple of dvd’s, I said to Ann (still on the couch), “It smells like bacon in here.” I had a half smile on my face after I said this. It was similar to one I’ve seen on other people’s faces, other people in families of their own. But I liked the one on my face better than the ones I’ve seen on theirs. Because I knew what was behind it. And it was more than it looked like. Cain’t think of much else to say. Wish I could I guess. I think I’m kind of tired. Annie just brought me some rice pudding. 102202 The Proprietor just brought me a whiskey. Would you like a whiskey? The Guest just brought me a gold dollar. Could I have a whiskey? Where did the little brain people go? Thru a slat in the empty door. Heaps of rubble adorn the back alley. The sodium arc lite wanes gibbous. That can’t be all! They are cleaning out the ashtrays. A young man in black and white is cleaning out the ashtrays. His butt is crisply curved under his apron strings. Dame Martella sashays home drunk. Her legs don’t work as well as when she was twenty. Peanut shells of expectation litter the cocktail floor. Death comes easily to a cigarette butt. These are the trappings, these are the properties. Everything you would expect except one thing. That grey taste behind your throat is not unique. Hundreds of people on this street alone are going home also. Let us not speak of poetry in terms of privelege. Privelege is a matter of clothing, cigarettes, candles, safety, a warm bed. A narrow man stands on a lectern. Privelege, he says, is a relative matter. Poetry is absolute! But he is speaking to an empty room. * bang roda. It reminded me that my favorite kind of situation is the kind of hopeless situation. And it called out Thieu. It said, Thieu, I’m gonna need you bud. And I was reminded of when it said, The key to capoeira is letting yourself be a girl. Kind of cool how that works, isn’t it? 102302 So I asked the teh-dsa again today for some insight into my ritual gang- bang roda, which is coming up in a couple of hours (I’m nervous). The teh-dsa said, “Thanks for making raisin pie.” Sometimes I want to slap the teh-dsa. I don’t care who you are- if you’re honest and keep looking, sooner or later you’re going to find someone who you really think doesn’t deserve the benefit of social services. Yes, we should have public health care. But how do you make sure the benefits are disbursed justly? It’s a subjective area, isn’t it? You could say only people who have a job get “free” insurance, but of course some people are kept from having jobs who would work. You could maybe offer something for them to do in return if they don’t have a job. What would that be? Administrative jobs in the social services, of course! Community service. Poetry service. Independent study- the pay sucks but the freedoms are great! Hey! Sign me up! A nation of monks and sidewalk eroticists! Someone’s gathering rainwater for a project down on Compton Street. Someone’s taking a trip up the river, with stops every hundred feet downtown for speechifying and sporadic music! Someone’s being a doctor in exchange for being taken care of. Okay so I asked the teh-dsa how it’s going to go tomorrow, at my ritual gang- When do you have enough that suddenly you look at yourself and say, hey- I could give some of this to somebody else! Maybe social services should just be more social, the government be damned. Well I’m going to the batfuck ritual roda-doda-loda in a few more minutes here. Nervousness this resonant hasn’t coursed thru me in so long! I had all but forgotten what it’s like! I feel it in my jaw, my knuckles, the back of my throat. It’s almost like the onset of a shroom trip, only I’m not tripping, you know? Crazy! This must be one of the reasons people do this sort of thing! It’s like drugs only a little less sensational. It’s cheaper, legal, better for you in many ways, and more social. Hmm.... Also it requires a little more effort. You have to put a little more of your body and heart into it to get the results you want. And the results are a bit more unpredictable. Which is a plus, of course, it means it doesn’t wear out so much. Also there is more at stake, particularly for the ego. I’m afraid of looking foolish. I never really worried about impressing the drugs I took. Although there were times, high, when I was acutely aware that I was hiding from people around me. I was being invisible. In this, on the other hand, you have to do a visibility spell. It’s counterintuitive for me. I haven’t had as much practice. Okay, one more dip of the dart into the teh-dsa’s poison: all work and no play makes for alarmingly predictable lyrics -david lee roth 102402 Drinking wine. Wine good. No gangbang roda tonight. Did Wayne forget? Is he a fucking bubblehead? Or something else. We’ll see next week. Whatever. I was ready. I rock. I fuckin rock dude. I’m a fucking capoeirista. I don’t care if I suck. Sucking’s all part of it. And I bared a little dirty part of my soul to K8 tonight via email. Life’s pretty swell. Wine. Wine good. Fuck me. Annie home soon. Big hugs. Funny typo almost said big “jugs” tee hee. What else? Work seems so unreal. Having to deal with other people. Machine environment. Production environment. Emptiness. Zombies. All working so hard at something we don’t care we forget we don’t care about. Think about envelope zombie robots scrambling around trying hard to get envelopes ready. Who fucking cares? Emptyheaded sons of bitches. Why am I one of them? Why am I in their company? Hell I don’t know. Need new gig. Need new infusion of daredevil smartness to find new way to provide for eucalyptuseating pocketpouch beautifulcute meggietot. Need to give her food and money and love. Love no problem. Food and money, that costs. How to get without being zombie robot? Must find out. Capoeira called me to the forest. Find out how nonzombie organic chimp creature lives. Find out how. Find out now. Kill the prez. Fuck the war. 102402 This morning, preparing to go out into the dank drizzle, I gave Ann a long squirmy hug. Naked and warm, rumpled and sleepy, she said, “I think the pollywog should paddywag back to the bedroom!” Then she said “Oh no...” in a muppet-like, it’s-happening-again tone, more tickled than hapless. Oh I do love her sometimes. * Well. I know there have been many of these entries before, and alas, there will be many more: I can think of absolutely nothing to say. So maybe I should take my cue from the line of ants marching from skillet to skillet on the sticky peach- coloured wall, and think of nothing. I got my silk jacket out of the closet because I wanted to wear something nice for nobody up here in the attic. What did my fingers pry thru on the way to extricating it? Because now they smell of Victoria and of course those days, those snail days & flute days & days of black & white & spit & come In grey mode, I can’t tell the difference between a pigeon and an elephant, a gull and a stone. One ladybug remains (after the others have gone) One lady bug, one pinecone, twelve clothespins. I always felt an affinity for ladybugs. Or lady bugs. And mayflies (because May flies) Ladybug, mayfly, sycamore, sassafrass, sumac. Tapestry, incense, beaded curtain, filmy skirt. Small, firm, pale breast with just a hint of freckle. Small, pert, green bottle. Overwhelmingly dark woodwork against white wall wavy with the undulance of time. Narrow disappearing staircase to bedrooms of mystery and someone else’s life upstairs. Old suitcase with the elastic compartment inside. Your fresh underthings in there. Old typewriter in a square, black box. The smell of oil. Milk crates in the sun and going to every place they say they should never have been stolen from. * I kwwp forgetting to gbirng some lotion up here. Lets go into the buton-blatshfi+ for a while. It is oddly comforting and yet offly discontcerting. It is more a quiestion of which tpes to eat and which tacos to bake. I can’t remember the last thing that hole in the wall said to me. Damn! Tomorrow I will get up and out of bed the first time, instead of snoozing. Why? Coral 102502 I just ordered a book of essays about “PoMoSexuals.” I wonder if it could be considered PoMo that one of the best things Ann & I do for our relationship is deliberately stay apart physically- her at her mom’s and me at home- and talk via computer. Or is that just a reprisal of Wilde’s “ideal love affair ... conducted by post”? I have hardly read any books the last few months. This is not because I’ve been “so busy” but because I had kept skipping around the topics that were most fascinating to me. I kept assuming I would find the same old things absorbing. Right now, I am fascinated- obsessed?- with transgenderism and transsexuality, so that’s what I’ve been reading about on the Internet. Now I’ve ordered some books. 102802 Here we are again, Nosmas. Let’s see if the spell has been broken. Did you bring the material components? Ah- YE-uhSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS. Prove it. Here they are: whisky coffee poop can fish quivering stuffed crow I have to go to the bathroom now. I knew it! I KNEW you would forget the most important one!!! Dammin You to Hail!!!!! Whatever, dude. Any symptoms, like doorknob licking or chicken-imitating? The computer’s hard drive seems insanely loud up here, now. I don’t think it used to be that loud. What the hell. It’s all I can think about now, this high-pitched, fervent whine. It bores into my ears, spraying bits of flesh and bone out both sides of my head. Digging a tunnel through which anything might pass, but only in, not out. Oh hell. Poop can? stuck. stuck stuck stuck stuck stuck stuck stuck stuck stuck. Dear Liddy: I don’t know you and you don’t know me and chances are probably pretty good that’s the way things will remain. But I wanted to say to at least your ghost that I just typed some stuff that could be seen as defaming you but that I see, and I hope the ghost of you would see, as celebrating you. Thanks for stepping into my dead friend’s life. Thanks for piping stories into him, making him wonder, giving him some friction. He told some of the stories to me, and for that I am grateful. -Nosmas Now I’m pretty much done typing for now but I got a fat finger of whiskey left in the half-clean glass. What to do, what to do as the windows get colder and this flea- bitten rug gets older and older. Smoke! Thank heaven for this picayune destruction! Hey. If my finest hours on this earth consist of making symphonies for myself out of a bike ride through the parkway (the clipclipclip of tires over curled leaves, the sough of exhaust, a kid making soccer yells, two squirrels) and coming back here and trying to tell anyone who will listen all the stories my dead old sonofabitching best friend pumped into me, then that’s fine, that’s a song, that’s a holler, art be damned. But that’s the key, isn’t it? That “anyone who will listen” part. Because I do want someone to listen. I have to admit that. 102902nothing’s working much lately. something needs to get broken. this is when i’ve traditionally gotten stoned. surely there’s another way to disassemble and start anew. what is it?aching keening signal signal is signal maybe i just need to masturbate maybe not i need to play a game. I need to play a game. pArt of the problem is, i’m taking the wrong drugs. i keep going up there and drinking whiskey & smoking out of habit of course, when ginseng and tea or even coffee are better suited to my biorhythmic needs of the moment. try again tomorrow. 103002 God, isn’t October over yet? Spomon Steller walking down the sidewalk. Says when you bump up against him, What? Me? Monkey in the Roda like the rest of you ridiculous clogs? I am Spomon Steller, author of The Guide to the Known Universe! I don’t care if I did plagiarize half of it! The appendices alone are worth three of your wormy atubaki! I am not just another people! I am one in twenty six! I am the Steller! And then you pop him in the jaw so he HAS to play with you. * Ah, the next thing just occurred to me: HOUSE WITH PEOPLE IN IT is now synonymous with RODA. You don’t need a separate Roda folder. Cool. I like it. So that’s it, then, really, isn’t it? That’s my thing. “House with people in it.” That’s my book, my work, my poem, my thing I’m working on. So if I die right now, that’s what I left. And I can say that tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow (as the man said). It is always unfinished and it is always complete. Just like me. I’m glad I got that settled before going to class. It’s always better to have THIS go well in some small way, before going to do THAT. In the Roda (House) you can either stick two (or more) (or fewer) people in the middle and have them play with (among) each other (himself/herself), or you can pick any of the people to tackle a bit that you stuck in the middle before (and the bit, whatever it started out as, can turn into a crow, or whatever else it wants to turn into). Well, I guess it really is time to go. Thanks, Mat. Talk to you later. Have fun at class. 103102 Well I had my ritual gang-bang roda after all. I was of course tired and unprepared and it went GREAT! Can you actually believe I didn’t give up before I got this far? I’m actually an initiate, no longer a neophyte. Of course last night’s ultra high has moderated, but I still feel different. Like just a little bit of a different person- more solid & more fluid than I was before. It’s MY capoeira group now. I play with them. I can say “we.” Everybody was cool, but my favorite adversary from my roda (MY roda!) was Johnny. He was so good-humored, good-natured. He’s so civilized. His smiles were encouraging. When he kicked me in the ass it felt like an honor, no kidding. And he patted my shoulder on the way out. The one person who wasn’t there who I really wish could have been was Harrison. And Sapu too, that would have been nice. * Starbuck’s? What the fuck am I doing in Starbucks on Brady Street? Oh yeah- I don’t have any cash. I wrote a poem once about the sadness of an old computer. I just recognized the happiness of an old computer too though. You see all this software (usually expensive, whether in terms of money or energy invested in learning) and hype --i interrupt this whatever it is to say: two french-speaking people just came in. The guy answered his cel phone and said, “Alo.”-- about automating repetitive tasks, more efficient working, faster speeds, blah blah blah. I just spent a few minutes doing a repetitive task the old way- by repetition- to some of my folders on this disk, and it was fun. It was melodic and relaxing, just like the cachunkcachunk of the typewriter used to be. So anyway whatever. Starbucks, ha! They give you a paper cup whether you’re staying or going. What’s the sense in that? Today at work, Mike said “Happy Halloween” to me. He’s an odd one. It was nice though, in a silly sort of way. Yip yip yip iyip yip. people obviously checking people out hiding from each other dumanstupid is kind of like the tarot fool, and i guess spomon steller must be the magician. one hand on the future & one hand up my ass, i lead my house of fractional dimensional electro-souls across a page that doesn’t exist woohoo sometimes i like to lead them all on a bit. Like, kind of fail to discourage each of them in turn from thinking they are in fact the real piece, the actual kernel of the work, and everyone else in the house is there to feed into them, keep them charged. Of course it’s not a lie. It’s just true for each of them, that’s all. find the secret compartments. wherever you are. find them. break into them. steal their contents. this is a mandate from off to the left and down. some people’s eyes in cafes and public lit-up places anywhere look so sad, so tired, so sunken and so far away what happened? it looked like a slab of luminous marble! raving at the flesh 110102 I killed Spomon Steller. He was just too much of an asshole. * A clipping’s lifespan is determined largely by how interesting it remains. As soon as it definitely disappoints when I open it, I’m going to throw it away. * Nothing much has to happen. You can make a clipping, even one for someone you’ve become enamored of such as Esriel, in which nothing much happens. This is the area of pink space, after all. This is the chaosium. This is the macroscopic venture where everything can, and does, and in fact must happen! There are infinite pages. You do not have to certify the stones on the beach. * Who are Xarcan and Ylkmor? And what is their relationship. Ylkmor is older, I know that. Old enough to go in bars. And Xarcan is a kid, an odd little kid. But something happened or happens or is happening between them, something I can’t really explain. What? * I asked the candle, “Why are you still fucking smoking?” Jesus. That’s a good fucking question. (It asked back.) 110402 You always marry a stranger, so I’ve been told. I don’t know about that. I can’t seem to type today. It feels like morning but it’s 3:45 pm. I really can’t type worth a shit. My fingers are big and dry. The keyboard is too flat. The keys are in the wrong places. My beverages aren’t pleasing me. I think’ll smoke. Whot the fick. Fick fuck fack. Chilly in the attic but warm in the heart. Mister bun is out by the feeder. Doesn’t appear to know I’m looking down on his squat form. Nibble, nibble. The birds will come back. Mister bun says the birds will come back. 110502 Not too interested right now in fiction that sounds like fiction. More interested in fiction that sounds like the gamboling of a wild creek, deer eating berries, thoughts of a salmon as it wanders upstream towards my exgirlfriend, pattern of lightning at the top of the ranger tower, two people talking and how that sounds through the soles of their shoes to the grit of the sidewalk below Given that apparently I’m going to get married, I think it’s very important that I get married in a skirt. * The dumb photographer from the Rave cut off the picture of me & Holly at bust level. Which means you get to see my stubble and ridiculous wig, but not my svelte legs, slitted skirt, or even a hint of my ass which is my best feature. Dumb photographer. 111302 Dad must have said a dozen times, “It’s natural” for a baby to cry. “Nothing wrong with a baby crying.” Do I do research? I do research. I lack organization, but I do research. Organization- mental, psychic, spiritual, what have you- is probably the biggest thing for me right now. That lack is probably the biggest void. Maybe. Or maybe I just think that because I just read part of an interview with a (successful) writer who says he does a lot of research about a body of knowledge he wants his character to be based on. It sounds like a cool idea. Any other ideas? Or is it finally going to- well, at any rate I know it finally comes down to just doing the work (to get to the play). At least I’m not trying to avoid that fact any longer. (Or maybe....) Sitting here at Starbuck’s looking at my collection of naughty pix. Am going to want to jerk off more than play capoeira if this keeps up. Stubbly legs in the sauna? Stubbly underarms? I can’t write right now, I don’t know why, I just can’t. I think it’s because of the crappy system I’ve set up in here. It’s too limiting. I anticipate every phrase as a plug-in, and therefore everything has to fit. I need to get back to that on-purpose accidental free state where the things that don’t fit [fragment] Can I just get some regular coffee. Please. More drugs. Neon desire missile. See what you lost when you left this world. This sweet old world. Maybe when “my mind isn’t working” or “I can’t write” it’s because I’m doing some kind of research. Maybe I should just let myself enjoy that phase. The veil is thick; the veil is thin. I’m a queer writer. Congratulations. Let’s go stand on the bridge and watch the water take over the city. Let’s take over the water. Let’s get in and go under. Subsume. Drown. But I’m still breathing! Not even to wonder how this can be. Sunrise dusk. Small animals with many teeth arrayed on the lawn. A young girl comes up to you, is. Speak. When I think of all that time I spent trying to decide “which one” I was! I hafta laugh. Even if “queer” is more of an evasion than a definition, I’ll take it! And it’s not, anyhow. It’s simply... an invitation. Quantum. Groovy. Permissive. Open. Possible. Exciting, even. It’s the only thing- this could be considered the important part- that makes sense. 111402 I still don’t know what to call that feeling I get when I’m driving down KK Ave, on my way to steal a little cafe time in the fading hour between work and home, and I look out the window at the branch library and there are two girls coming out. One of them is tall, slender, dark. Her midriff’s bare. I feel weak but I don’t know why. She is arrogant, yes? I am her, a little. I long for her weakness- no! her vulnerability- and it thrills me beyond sense! Her vulnerability is her power. Her utter unawareness of me is my power that I cannot control. And I am not yet ready to go home. This is good coffee. The cute rough-edged young boy who recognized me at the dog park once is getting my hummus plate together. There is some music thumping, and it is not offensive. Headlights play outside the window. Christmas races toward us all with a vengeance. Are you ready? The pert-breasted bob-haired tall girl brought my food out. I said thank you loudly enough to be heard. She said “You’re welcome.” I am alive. Thank you. KK Ave is lit up so bright and pale it looks like it snowed. Three girls, wide with winter coats, frisk across the street toward Siegel’s liquor store. What is happening here? What is happening? A man on the radio said if you don’t like how your political system is working, get more involved. Citizens do have options, he said. It’s hard. People have busy lives but they can get more involved. He said. Watching people sex. It doesn’t have to be a train. He holds himself. She bows. He drinks. She pooches. He leaves. Have a good day. People sex. People sex. People sex. Watch another. One. This is the decade of choice. Race car body. Orders politely. Cash noise. Orange, orange, orange, hallowed light cafe obscene performance perfect! Watch. Penny scrape. Thank you. Thank you. Congratulations. Low voice dirt. Eye raise. Ridge. Sun broken moon. Shoulders. Death. End. Start. Exit. Bell rings. Cash noise. Clink clank cup. Door squeak. Freedom laughing. What if we all just went home smoke-scrape match. Tiny galaxy death glory! soon as you “think” you’re in there, becomes out or too deep I am speaking this way because I have lost my French. That fat man may have gone home without physical access priveleges but he didn’t leave before he loved her orange shirt there is illegality in the sublime Do you have a fetish? I got a wife and kid at home. I’m not much of a storyteller. What is that? Where did you get it? How much did it cost, etc etc. You’re funny, you make me laugh. Get it? Roll over I’ll rub your back. Turn on the stereo. There. That one. Yes. I know. Me too. Calm down! You’re so tense! Where’d you get that scar? I have one. Do you have any others? Well, maybe some other time. I feel like things are just, getting out of control. You know? I thought that. I mean, when I first saw you I thought you were someone I could talk to. I think we could really be friends. Do you think we could? I hope so. Because let me tell you, I don’t know too many people up here yet and this is a very strange town. No, I didn’t mean. I didn’t mean strange like that, I just mean. I don’t know. It’s just hard sometimes. I guess I’m still adjusting. You have a knot right there. Feel that? Does that hurt? Let me know if I push too hard. There’s cold air coming in from that window. Do you have a blanket? I’ll cover up your legs. Hold on. You’re welcome. If there’s one thing my father did, it’s never give up. He tried to teach me that. I don’t know if I got it! I think I got it. Right now it feels like I got it. Did you ever have something that you just knew you were going to do, like something you just have to do no matter what and you aren’t going to give up ever, no matter what? No shit. That’s awesome. No, I’m serious, that’s really fucking awesome. I think that’s the trouble with this world. Too many people don’t have that. There. Right there. I like that part. This curve right here. It’s nice, I like it. Can I ask you something? Would it be okay if we just. There. Is that all right? Yeah. That’s nice. I can’t believe it’s so early still. It feels so late. You know what I like about you? I feel like I can let down the performance around you. You know what I mean? Well, yeah, I guess you’re right. But you got to let it go sometimes, or else you just. I don’t know. Go crazy or something. Stay crazy. Or too sane, whatever. Shit, I don’t know. The point is. What was the point? Ha. Yeah. Well, anyway. Thanks. It’s so quiet in here. Are you working tomorrow? Me neither. Which do you like better, the beginning of the river or the end? I like the middle. Or the beginning. But the endings, I don’t know, just tend to get too heavy or something. It’s like it had all these places it could go, the only requirement was to go downstream, right, and then by the time it gets to the delta or whatever, it’s already been everywhere. Gravity is too great. You can’t go back and like, decide to go to the left around that rock instead of to the right. And who knows if it would have made any difference or not, but I mean, that’s just the point. Who knows? You know? Do you have enough blanket? Here. Do you ever just get the feeling that everything is going to be all right? It doesn’t make any sense, but I get that sometimes. Just every now and then. You’re so warm. How did you get to be so warm? Guilt is an instrument of abstrusion. kiss formica marks on my ass cheeks the arrogance of narrative: perspective you fool! you want some more coffee? i was worried about you. You didn’t come home for so long. A leather skirt is almost always an effective statement but you can’t control it. The anguish of silence: conversation. You look tired. You look like a tired old Indian. Tire tracks. Leather phallus. Brokedown. Cheers! Guess it’s time to go home and face the pusic. 111502 I’m having the too-many keys problem. 1900, the piano player that lived on a ship his whole life, had that problem. He tried to get off the ship once, and go into New York, but he turned back because whereas he could deal with 88 keys, he couldn’t handle the seemingly infinite possibilities of the City. I’m having that trouble here. My technology has outstripped my simplicity. What am I working on? I don’t even know today. Dirty pictures. Naughty pictures. Naughty pictures are good. I like them. They are lugubrious. They invigorate. Flip thru them like a deck of cards, decide who you want to be and enter that world thru a cartoon device-like cardboard box. Bweeeeee-eeep! Bit bit bit bit bid-oooop! Adjust the dials. Be transmogrified. It’s getting late. You’re getting hotter. Stretch your long, muscled legs, and dip into the molten pool with the unicorn, the stag, the pentagram, and me. a deck of decks of decks of cards... every clip a stolen moment * The first response to most web sites, random or otherwise, is “Why should I care?” 111602 It’s snowing outside the print shop window. I think Christmas, if we can just hold it together a little longer and get a little rest, is going to be all right this year. 111902 Things change pretty fast around here. * Tried unsuccessfully to locate Pam Burks (is that even her name any more?) on the Internet. If I really wanted to find her, I would just ask Kate to ask Tanya. But I think I wanted to sneak up on her, as my motivations are less than honorable. Ah, who will be a sneaky perv with me? Anh will, I think she would with a little more coaching. Take it on yourself, Mat. Else look back at now from years hence with the same sense of loss you feel, looking back now, looking back.... Too much looking back can’t be healthy, right? Also Anne sent me some naked pix (alas, quite tasteful) of her. I had sent her the pic I found on the 'net that looks like her, saying, “Hey! This looks like you! Weird, huh?” And why did I send her that? Because I had this sneaking little suspicion that she would send me naked pix of her in return. Which she did. How nice. She still looks good. Her butt is very slightly more dimpled by fat, but shit, she still looks really really good. Ah, her breasts: my introduction into the world of going stark raving mad.... I don’t exactly want to fuck her, now, but lord I do want to play.... * Trying to type, trying to pretend to be a writer. But all I want to do is scream out the frustration, horniness, desperation, loneliness and self-hatred that steeps through my veins as I sit here, not a student, at a college, dreading worse than cumming too soon the onslaught of wishing I were back there, back there, back there before it all coalesced into too too solid. Back when I was a godless wraith, and happy, by god. A vast oil tanker sank today off the coast of Spain, taking thousands of tons of oil down with it. That oil, so I have heard on the radio, will now proceed to leak out, either fast or slow, over the next weeks or years, and come to the surface in a giant, killing cloud. Also the Senate is about to pass a bill amassing dozens of government agencies into one mega-bureaucratic Homeland Security department. “Do you feel safer?” asks the talk show host on the radio. Yeah. I feel safe as a lovingly sodomized kitten. End the quip there? Be ironic and philosophical and useless? Or do something? What? End the question there? Appear bold and trepidacious but neglect to make an answer? Or answer it? When? And so on.... Horniness, backache, rage.... I think the biggest thing wrong with me is I haven’t had enough sex. Tin can music bad coffee Ann hasn’t blown in my ear lately; no one has. Then again, I haven’t blown in anyone’s ear lately. Maybe I should. That’s activism for ya! Get off your hug bun sticky butt, right hon? Right. Make pancakes. Rub her feet. Feed Megan til she goes to sleep. Then make love. Have you ever done that before? It’s not hard. I’ll show you. Don’t worry. All you have to do is strip yourself of every preconceived shell of anger and defense you’ve built up over the last couple of decades. And crawl around in your fleshy stew without a snail shell. So you might get squished. It’s worth it, right? Better than living like this all the time, no? You calcified mass of solid fear! Dreams come early and they too early go Think how many millions of eyes you’ve avoided today That gaunt asshole with black hair and mopey face upstairs in the union: he sat smoking in the obviously non-smoking section. Told myself in a microjerk to hate him, think he was an asshole. Two things remain: the smell of smoke was good, and I haven’t stopped thinking about him since. Even as dozens of bots and droids troll past my little pathetic table. Once again, Joni: “I’m afraid of the devil but I’m drawn to those ones that ain’t afraid.” The devil. The devil does not subscribe to your magazine. But he might be reading it in the bathroom while he takes a massive, hot, satanic, slippery shit. He doesn’t flush and he leaves the seat up. He smokes in your living room. He doesn’t have the qualifiers that tell the rest of us do-good bad-boys when to stop. That is why we worship him. Because we cannot control him, and we have chosen not to control our lusts. We justify our chosen path: He ain’t as bad as all that! But he is. He is. There is no path. There are only our choices, one wrong after another- or many, simultaneous, side by side by side by side by side. There’s so much that needs to be said about these kids, these men and women here in the Union. Good god, where to start? Glenn asked me how you know what to leave out or not. He said you’re always going to leave out some central, important thing. I said you do it anyway. I’m a fool. But-- Like that boy. As cashier he gave me the six cents I lacked for coffee. I said thank you very much. I don’t remember what he said after that. No problem? You’re welcome? Something along those lines. But I don’t remember what he said exactly, and maybe that’s my problem. Now I see he has smooth skin. Bangs, a young boy haircut. Fluorescent light bounces off the stylishly narrow ovals of his glasses. He is talking and grinning with the necessary modern touch of irony. He is not marked, not chasmous, not dirty, not hard. But what IS he? If I met him in a nightened bathroom with his pants unzipped I might be able to say more precisely. For now, I can but speculate. Contrast with the boy who is talking now with these other people who just walked up. This one has a charcoal grey felt coat that in itself is a statement of disaffection. He leans forward, his shoulders lean forward, he is a collapsing flower, black and delicate. His eyebrows are sharp, his smile flashes like a pocketknife, his sideways eyes say “disappear.” And he will. They all will, of course, as will I. As I already might have. He is gentler than he looks. And sturdier than he looks. I wish him luck, the luck of the stick thrown in the creek. Maybe he won’t jam up in the barbed wire or the tree root mess. Maybe he won’t circle around and stagnate. Maybe he’ll rush between the contoured rocks that form the little waterfall, and plunge, plunge! taking our wholesome imagination with him on the journey. The journey. I wish him luck. I wish us all luck. You always go before you’re ready. 112002 Assignment: just notice and really grok who turns you on- and in what situations!!! Open your senses. I’m not saying what we are or aren’t going to do with this information yet. Just take it in. I have had and can remember distinct lives, each marked by its one most special mermaid: Anne. Pam. Kate. I give them each their space. Plenty of untyped space in which to flow, simmer, steep, and breathe. To let the spices mingle. And this life? What sea am I in now? Will I look back as fondly at Ann; is she a mermaid too? And what manner of beast am I? To simplify: it didn’t work out with Anne because she wants a man. It didn’t work with Pam because... of emotional issues, mostly, and temperamental differences. I don’t know her any more, so I can’t say if she wants a man or a woman or what. It didn’t work with Kate why? Because she thought, was certain I was a man, and I thought I was supposed to be. Also because I was afraid and had nothing to force me to keep trying. It isn’t working with Ann because, despite our various strong bonds and her genuine open-mindedness, I think she mostly wants a man too. I know she likes women, but oh I don’t know. It’s too early to tell. All I know is, something in our relationship doesn’t feel alive and enlightened, no matter how much I beg and plead it to. Sex, sex, sex, sexuality, gender, transgender, blah fuck blah fuck blah. Whatever else I am, I am a frustrated writer. I am a lonely writer. A writer. Where is my Russia? Where is my Paris? Where is my America? Where is my Milwaukee? Fuck Milwaukee. Where is my charcoal black on white? Where is the pounding of hammers and the clanging of bells? Where is the drip drip drip in the alley and where the faltering blue paint of the rotten back door? Where does the rain make everything shine? Where do I stay all night with my rotten co-adventurers? Where do we get into trouble? Where do we bleed? What use this solitude without contrasting company? What does a raven sound like? Have I destroyed myself? Where do I go from here? Is the exit from this maze at the center? Where is my ancient suitcase? The one with elastic filmy pouch to hold elastic silken panties, articles of a personal nature? Where is my suitcase? Where are the items I have left in there? Let’s be drunk and sing. And sing. And sing. People with kids walk through here, you maniac. And you’re looking at dirty pictures on your fucking computer. What’s wrong with you, you misanthropic neanderthal? Next are you going to whangle your schlong in front of your picture window while the trickortreaters dance down the street and look in? You freak. You iceman. You mudcaked grub. Those thermoses for sale over there look like slender, glamourous dildos lined up on display. The track lite gives them a nailpolish fuckme shine. They are pylons of sisterhood and they tease me insensately. Fear is rigid as ball bearings in the mud. People in cities going about cautioning each other; they are the faces of death and I hate them. Do I have to forgive them not to become one of them? This then is a most odious task and it lingers before me hugely, lapping like a pearl-grey sea, not peaceful though its quietness is vast. I must take off my shoes to feel the ribs of the beach. If I can touch this wetness even once, I can go home. It is night. Dogs and seaweed and bits of shells. No stars. We are lost. 112102 I have an idea for what might make me less lonely as a writer: more reading! Yeah, that, and maybe eschewing total anonymity but not at the expense of dignity? Or is that too complicated? The billiard girl’s toes peek out from under my diary. How convulsive! Did you ever wonder where that wonderful RUBBER BANDS gets ’em every time! welcome to the CLUB DOOM DUB ROOM skinny girls in ugly caps standing by fire it wouldn’t be the first time smoke loved hibiscus detonation of derision is canteloupe without alms perfunctory sideburns salve the calm lambs pugnacious raptor burns recondite *an amoeba is a protean animalcule* 3 : capable of acting many different her toes are like milk jugs but her balls are the cream o to spend half the morning invested in those fleshly pads you degenerates from the 21st century have no memory of the pain of being a lesbian i refuse to be nameless i refuse to be bodiless i am a protean animalcule as a matter of fact i have no credentials i will be slapped by girls and women who think i can’t know anything it’s getting smoky INSIDE the train! ahead, a tunnel we toy with staying inside in the dank, but duty is a lumbering freight * Frank and maybe Harrison said that one day Capoeira just hits you, and you’re playing instead of going through the motions. If it’s anything like writing it’s not really one day but a whole bunch of days, sometimes clustered together, sometimes wanly scattered. But it does hit you. It hits you slow and hard, fast and gentle, over the course of years. Faith. 112202 While I was in the bathroom, Sruky tried to steal my computer! I said “hey what’s up” to him when I came upstairs. He’s seen me here and other places enough to know I always have the computer in my backpack. I set it down on a chair by a table, and went in the bathroom, just to wash my hands and face. When i came back out, the backpack and Sruky were gone. I heard fast clomping on the stairs! I scrambled downstairs after him and just saw him flying out the front door. I almost knocked over the sommelier on my way through the bar. I caught Sruky at the corner and tackled him on the pavement. “Sruky! What the fuck were you thinking!” I said and I actually started laughing. The wind in my lungs and the buzz in my feet felt good. Sruky said, “Oho, itv aya den soh blem!” and as usual I couldn’t understand a word of it. I pulled the backpack out of his gravelly hands and helped him up, and we walked back up the street together. What a day. What a way to end a day. Or begin a night, which is hopefully what I’m doing.... I haven’t had a night in such a long time. * As a woman, I take pleasure in women again. I want to show myself to them, share myself with them, mingle with them as I never did when I was a man. Then, they made me uneasy. Now, they are vessels of spreading joy. I’m not sure why it is different, but it is different. Before, they were too soft. They were something that sucked you in and might not let you go. They were goopy, they were soupy. They were too sweet, and they were deceitful. Now, they’re teachers, playmates, lavish lands of the imagination. We laugh together. The relationship is more than binary. Dominance and submission are mutable, secondary to sensation and whole experience. My checkerboard world broke up through a prism when I changed. When I became whole. * Couldn’t get away without leatherpants rachel bring it on, alligator winter sun 112302 How many times have I said, “One more smoke, then I go.” It’s not a bad thing. It’s not all bad. What the hell. Empty shoes with indentations like places leaves fell, decayed, and left their sweet bitterness. One more smoke, then I’ll go. (as if to punish my affected serenity, the smoke hits me in the eye) 112502 Lickable. Batuk is the unofficial historian of the roda. Lickable neck, doe ears. i guess that fat woman didn’t know how to help the drinking chinese guys either. But I mean come on: “I have a reservation at a hotel, but I forgot the name and the address so I have to search the Internet and send email tonight!” I’m getting sick again & I have to pee. I mean not sick, but queasy. Slosh, slosh, my innards are unsettled. 112602 it doesn’t really matter what day it is. I’m feeling a little down on me because of my lack of military experience. How am I going to tell war stories for christ’s sake. Everybody has to tell war stories for christ’s sake. At least everybody who wants to be a man. Oh. Wait- Well then, what do I have to do? I have to have to do something or else I will evaporate like red construction paper water. I don’t care what anybody said; I like semicolons and I like flavored coffee. At least some of the time. Here we are in the north shore area where women go around with pinched faces not looking at you. Their hundred dollar hair cuts don’t make them very beautiful. Their hair cuts make them look like knives. Knives with dead green eyes. Expensive shoes cloak passionless feet. Get out while you still can, kids. This place may have spawned you but it’s sterile now. AH. Fresh salt bagels, coming up. Fuck me they’re hot and good! Well, they’re not as good as the Columbia ones were. But then what is, right Matt? Oh lots of things. Like what? And I don’t want the meaningless data. What real things are better here than there? Spill it. Teh-dsa. Family. Krispy Kreme. Capoeira. * Ann’s ma had a 64-crayon box out the other day. It smelled great and wistful. Flesh is peach now and there’s a color called tickle-me-pink that I don’t remember being there before. But the old heavyweights are still there, like raw sienna and periwinkle and burnt sienna. I couldn’t find any umbers though. Weren’t there some umbers? Kirsten wanted to take them all out of the box and throw some on the floor. I didn’t want her to but I managed not to make too much of a fuss about it. You’ve got to let kids teach you how to play a little bit, after all. Even if the lesson stretches your obsessive zone. Wish ta god I could smoke in here. Bruegger’s Bagels. Home of the most offensive background music in Mil-wok-kee! 112702 All I have to do is act like I’m trying for 25 more minutes, then I can go and get panked. What fills it up for you? What fills it up for you? What fills it up for you? How full is filled up? Are you a gusher or a trickle? A seeper or a geyser? Do you even know? Do you even know what water tastes like? The water of you? The water you are? Do you even feel yourself against plump wet leaves and autumn-stiffened grass? Do you even hear the deer? the laughing sound of their drinking? Smell the musk of their fear? they are trying to name upstairs. candidates include tnuwan ynuwan tuwwon pnywon tekwon dind. they settled finally on npydyuan (pronounced “piddy wan”) 120402 Not much to report. Poised again at the edge of something. Back from vacation, everybody loved Megan of course. Ruth gave me a hesitating hug when we left Dad & Ruth’s house. But she gave Ann a good hug. I don’t know how I have hurt her feelings this time. Not spending enough time with them versus other parents? Old fucking story. That we’re going to Florida and not to Cape over xmas? Sorry. Dad didn’t seem to withhold anything. He gave me a good hug and said he loves me. When we were watching TV over at Nancy’s and Nancy and I had smoked, the show was on where people redecorate their neighbors’ houses. When I was a little shit, Dad (and I assume Ruth) redecorated my bedroom for (I think) my birthday. I went upstairs and it was bright, fresh, toylike and lit up like a fucking circus. That’s how much he loved me and now I can start to understand what that’s like, now that Megan is here. He didn’t do it to be on TV. It didn’t cost a fortune. * Tonight’s epiphany concerns CAPOEIRA: I’M NOT GOING TO GET ANY BETTER UNLESS I PRACTICE OUTSIDE OF CLASS. I mean, we’re talking percecptible progress here. Cuz right now I’m basically not getting anywhere. I sense that even a little practice could make a hugely noticeable difference. Nothing fancy, just balancing and getting good solid kicks and defenses. Tonight’s epiphany is not a directive; it is an invitation. IMing with Kate I realize why it felt like an epiphany & not a truism: it came with the feeling that also I WILL make progress if I DO practice. The positive side. * a marriage arranged by fate will we find love? 120502 I’m sitting here waiting for her to get home. I’m wearing a leather collar with a big metal ring, a silky green chemise, a filmy white robe (hers), and leg shackles which permit only the most mincing and ridiculous steps. And here is the rub: there is truly a part of me which wishes I wasn’t. There is truly a part of me which looks on in sadness, even dismay, anticipating regret and self-disgust. And that part is locked in a wet, unholy embrace with the part that it makes excited and erect. They feed, these parts, each other their tongues; the one tries to bite and the other eludes, and sucks, and sucks, and sucks * I want sex the most when I haven’t had it for a while. Usually. My constant compromise> one more smoke Ann thinks there are no villages left. If so then what’s a village mouse to do? 120602 Sometimes I hate her. 120702 Women: if young, plump or cruel; if older, trashy and well-oiled. Men: tragic * I love my daughter but I hate my life. if there is one door in this castle I haven’t gone through, can you find it? the rest is all smoke smoke smoke reading about other people’s crossings i always missed the point that mine wouldn’t look like theirs. mine would look like mine. their bravery, their anguish, their storytelling might relate, but the details kept throwing me off as i tried to copy them. tried to graft theirs onto mine like an ill fitting carapice. i am still latent, i am still in denial at this moment i suffer the clarity of the perfectly sane * our next door neighbor, the guy who works for the beer company, comes home while i am taking the dogs out. He likes Dexter. He says, “Where’s my dog? There he is. Hi, baby!” Dexter wags. Orion is high and clear in the sky. Then our neighbor says to me, “Have a good night, will you?” and I thank him, and wish him the same. Warmth. 121002 I have yelled at Megan for not stopping crying. I had better get happy before it gets too late. 121102 Ann locked herself and the dogs outside with the baby inside today. I had to go home from work to open the door. She’s been in rollercoaster mode again lately, a little bit. Not as bad as when I first met her, but enough to be scary. But then, that’s the thing about roller coasters, isn’t it? They’re scary. But you still get back on and ride them. How to teach the roller coaster though to lean with itself? Sometimes all I have to do is read the word “smoke” on newsprint and I want to smoke. I have tabac in my pouch but I’m in a clean air place. This week’s PS MUELLER in THE ONION said: “War is coming. Too bad we had to sell the couch.” It was a picture of two people sitting on the bare floor, watching TV. That’s the best PS MUELLER I’ve seen yet. Men are so pathetic. Especially the straight ones, with their pasty throats and hollow eyes. But also most of the gay ones, with their pants and attitudes. And I? I am pathetic but that is because I am an infant with a bulky camera. This morning I was up at 6:30, alert and awake, but I went back to bed for sex I didn’t end up enjoying. That was dumb. I am dumb. I keep missing a point. I can feel it slipping away past me every dawn and dusk. I am lying. But the idea is right. It feels like something that would evade crepuscularly. I tell Ann she needs to have a good time, as if that could cure her depression, and then I frown on my own attempts at lightheartedness. I feel so guilty so often. I am so sick of being a pervert. I want to be a guy in love who gets hurt and jealous and gets off on it-but not completely on purpose! I want to suck a lot of cock. I’ll wear lipstick if you want. Just give me the shaft to glisten with my spit. Maybe I’ll go to the snoke tonight. My leg hairs are almost grown out. Every scene you visit and find absent is absent because you are not really there. Taking photographs illuminates your cowardice. Where are you afraid to be seen with a camera and why? I value my outside perspective. I value being inside. This is another of the pershidium-force paradoxes that simultaneously drive and choke me. So what? It still doesn’t mean anything unless unless unless what? motherfucker a self-portrait that incorporates isolation, philosophical swagger, graininess, indecision, troubled peace, and smoke and the omnipresent human element: familial connections tenuous and absurd and, though only a shadow of a shadow near the indistinct middle of the edge of the imaginary frame, all-important Sruky is here again(/always) practicing his heel-toe-heel-toe on his little drum. 121202 The mood changes as rapidly as the lighting in these early hours. Likewise it is a secret privelege to be awake through the changes. I would just like to say, in case the picture doesn’t turn out at all and so I don’t have proof, that I did take a picture of Slava in the coffeehouse last night. I walked up to him and said, “Do you mind if I take your picture?” and he shrugged his assent. I didn’t use the flash. I used about a four second exposure at f8. We’ll see. The most exciting was that I did it. I felt a little bit brave at that moment. If the pictures you fail to follow illuminate your cowardice, then the ones you DO pursue.... THAT is how Sruky taught me about dream travel. Because I imagined it. And I did it. 121702 And that really happened. Smoke, snoke, spke that cigarette, boys. Suck suck that nose. I’d rather have an unintelligible beautiful mark than a cartoonishly legible icon any day. You know, Katy once told me she thought of me as a visual artist. I think I see that she was right, even though my primary medium is still text, and not even text in a line-and-form sense but text as one often thinks of it- as something you read. But the things I try to make with text are definitely photographs- light writings- and the teh- dsa is becoming a silver halide, pixel, or mind’s eye. and what that one woman said: “There is no such thing as a still life.” still movie? We were watching a movie on dvd and every time I pressed pause, a good photograph was on the screen. Is that ideal cinematography? Every frame a good photograph, AND the whole being a greater movie than the sum of all the frames? I guess that’s one way I could like the teh-dsa to turn out. I can hear meggie crying two floors below. I think I’ll go on down soon again until next time. 121802 Jim Linneman is going on with his chums about his favorite topic, local music. A bumper sticker from the third year I lived in this town, “Live to Ride 95th Anniversary,” is yellowed and peeling off the wall. There is one pretty lady here, showing a small crescent moon of her back. I swear I recognize the bartender from somewhere. Riverwest White sucks but they were out of Eastside Dark. Yes, it is Wednesday but instead of going to the Roda I came here because when I stepped out of Rochambo onto Brady, the rain and the christmassy lights hit me softly and I had to go have a beer with Glenn. I thought about Up & Under, thought about the Tasting Room, but eventually I had to come here, to see if he would show up. Here by the open stage. Here by the dark wood. Here by Jim Linneman who never remembered me. Here by the pool table in the back room where Sara used to be, where sloppy scruffy Chris used to be, where Julia the raven girl was and where Kathy with a K was, where any number of perfectly lovely, funky, sad, shapely, perfectly glowing people used to be. And the huge old tree trunk chair that’s such a great idea but really isn’t very comfortable to sit in. 122002 sitting at hifi, this guy just volunteered another cigarette several minutes after i bummed and smoked the first one. if that isn’t nice, what is? i’m reading thru some old ann letters. it’s all so weird. we’re getting married. it’s going to be a pot luck. a picnic. a real picnic with ants and turf and ketchup and dirt, and a host of big wet storm clouds gathering in the west He just gave me another smoke. I’m not getting much typing done, but I’m smoking and drinking coffee and watching the cars circle outside the tank, neon in the black 122402 I wish I was a girl. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was a girl. I wish I was a girl. 122602 While it is still December. I have to say this. Dyed-red gossip by the plank fence. I want to go out. Boulevard. Under the viaduct, under the railroad bridge, the careful dissolution of rusty cement. Sruky just came up to me and said merry christmas. All because I took his picture. Why do we orient on the horizon? Why trucks dusty with cornfield? Why faded red? Why the diameter of a cigarette? Why can’t you leave your club at home this once? Why did he menace him with a stick? Why fish? Why are some faces broad and white and soft? Why the stars o’clock? Why the basement light on? how to get down there Why accidents happy? Why so much space so infinitesimal? finity impossible to imagine, not the other How long can you sit in one space? How often do you save? the toaster doesn’t look alone olive green the colour of dense despair the colour of impossible sunshine two colours in this society: despair, laugh Why sick? stomach or something else Why do some eyebrows curve sharply down at the outside? Why shadow slivers? Why no change in the payphone? What is the percentage? Why would you want blonde hair with brown roots & brown eyebrows? someone over there ancient reading the curl of the question mark rest against the face the face half shadow the orange faded edges the smell of pulp the pulp of words real words eaten by termites you take your home with you reader og (memory condensation)(compressed file type indexFUNNY CHARACTRE ZAP: find funny characters tall fierce hat the forward tilt of the head in stern greeting generous melon breasts give welcome to a room invite respect Why are some cheeks fat ingenuous? Why eyes like freckled wet pussy nipple why baby feet so small there is killers in every world; waste of time find one that ain’t the drink was consuming him; his ecclesiastes way off what? the drink was pine tree rough caress him soul down; he broke wet give of himself rust orange strata in the sun i eat him rough with glad thank not his eye who said “first the penis is sucked, then the balls are sucked, and finally there is ejaculation in the mouth” josh choose to lose in seventeen ninety three do this: say, “it seems like we’re kinda goin down,” then drink some coffee nodding. whatever she says then say, “you know the thing of it is,” as soon as she gets back to the table you’re both leaning on you are making love to her know it because it is fleeting why some buckets fat, the pelvis is a bucket, those staring eyes, gesture, ain’t gonna live like a god damn slave, drunk on gin national steel guitar the peering eyes of the freckledface enthralled girl How come Otis Redding so brass? focal length not word count but punctuation why some faces moon goddess pure & simple only moon goddess know true sad rest of us jagged cardboard only moon goddess true alone rest of us pitch in the fire only moon goddess big translucent rest of us give shadow, crumbs & pebbles Why cream whip so good? Why some faces hairnet tight? Why some faces nude stocking frost? you belong in a magazine but not the part of the magazine you thought Why whip cream so good? Why some hands hold coffee just so; why some caress The hand without the question mark more soft, alert why some hands live rabbits escaping rain we’re all going to die in the tower; this is what we do until then why i don’t care sometimes man forehead has lines like beach? why some gazes uterine? why so forward parenthesis? what windowpane she looking out of glinting ? slow down dumb fuck, you’re talking too fast. didn’t you listen to my little poem about you? take my advice, don’t listen to me, you’re making love to her not me unmemory is an anodyne who’d of thought of december why are you talking to that brain tumor? is it because your girl is a poodle? dance! why some smiles open sideways too many teeth! when asking how long can this go on, if it is a joke then it is making love i don’t even know how we were doing that! (she was bent back like a wet parenthesi naturally, the stocking frost face is talking nude to the grease tattoo arm sharp she has a furry parka, he has open underarms love neon on the inside opaques the outside fog Why I gotta pee so much? Why is it so bright in here? It’s unusually so... dark Why some faces pinched and sleek mouse tired? dear smiling as if at secret: are you really? If i get up to pee, will it all still be here when I get back? damn why some girls sticks? same reason some boys fatheads guess pick your moment it’s gone in this cafe it is always morning you can always get coffee and breakfast is the line of people clustered at the counter. it is in the morning that we are most in love gossip by the green flecks wet bottom of the fence some guy with a wave came up to me and said are you a writer i’m writing too i’m working on a novel what are you writing rad. that’s cool. i won’t read your writing in this cafe it is always morning sruky’s voice again coarse not sandpaper gravelpaper! sruky rocks someone else to sleep with that voice thank god why some men hawk sideways too metallic brown thin facial hair? man is a twig it’s okay to admit that some people’s tattoos look dumb six hundred hour the edge of magic cuts why some men still got baby noses? delicate eyelash why some women always eyebrow raised avian pierce? round block of a woman red green apron fat fat fat stout posts of red (had to say fat three times) why stuff newspaper in bag little dick poking conversation tickles why one man in a thousand crowds perfect silhouette? queer GOD I LOVE SAYING THIS: One more smoke & then I go Wouldn’t it be cool if it was always a surprise what kind of genitals you would find? They just dimmed the lights. * I come up here and surprise! there’s a beer in the windowsill for me! Like Mole discovering his old home. Now I’ve got everything I need. Beer. Canadian cigarettes. Busy Box. Beat up silk jacket.† The teh-dsa with all the vainglorious blood and vinegar and hops and molasses and silver rocks and hissing streets and fat sweet sexy women like my very own fiancee who would do just about anything for me. As long as it didn’t hurt Megan. Tits & a penis would be perfect. Unless I could have a pussy. That would be double perfect. †The silk jacket is beat up because Ann washed it in the washer. The magic is of this is that I don’t not only care but I also think it makes it better. Now it’s a discovered old theatre prop instead of a stuffy, effete possession. So, am I in love? Read over those last few paragraphs again, and you tell me. Actually the smoke and beer is kind of compounding my nausea. Ann & I are soul tribe companions who have lived each other’s lives many times, sometimes as the infamous Alex and Melanie. Or that’s just something we made up. Megan chose us as her door into this world because she has some important reason to be here now. Or that’s just something we made up. Ann sees other worlds and I am honored to be invited into them. Or she just leads me on with phantastic stories. We’ve come through a lot together. Or we’ve caused a lot of problems for each other. I stayed with her because she drives me crazy in a good way. Or I stayed with her out of a sense of obligation, having intervened in her self destruction. I love her or I’ve settled for her. I can be free if I keep my spine strong or I’ll always be tied down now. I’m happy now or else I’m secretly miserable. I think she’s sexy or else I just think she’s fat. We’re getting married because we’re in love or else we’re getting married because I’m afraid she’d get mad and keep Megan from me otherwise. We are the last two people on earth. The tower collapsed. We arise from the wreckage and the rubble and walk together dazed in the smouldering haze. We fuck. We sweat and grunt and squish and shit and fuck. We find a smashed grocery store and bust open some cans of beans and eat. We find some jugs of water and drink. We find some bottles of liquor and drink. The sun is high overhead and it is almost dark. We fuck again, in a basement underneath the ashes of a bookstore. The sludge of the river shoves obscenely toward the craterous lake. I get come on her and me and she pisses and I drink. I have to piss and my dick is slick and smudged with dirt. In the middle of all this our daughter decides to be born. We rebuild the parts of the world we need, the parts we can, the parts we want to, and we leave the rest to fester and grow strange, new creatures and pseudo-plants. We are astronauts on a world killed by a comet. Our daughter’s laugh, when she begins, sounds strange, and it makes us laugh and it makes us amazed. 122802 Christmas is a long three days ago. This age is rusted iron and slag, melted plastic of a zillion colours. Meaningless twisted circuitry. Wireless pollution. Good morning. Let’s work out the kinks together, hiking on the glacier. Skiffing thru the skyline. Let’s go downtown and build a fire. We can check out some more remains today. See if we can find your friend. Your large, nameless, quiet friend. Food distracts, smoke helps. Usually. Why this is, I don’t know. Coffee helps. Tea helps. Actually, only potently attractive food distracts. These tangerines, for instance, these are fine. But if I were to start eating chips or crackers or cookies--no way. 123002 Came upstairs to smoke. The wind howls like an old LP. The green walls hold, slowly crumbling around me and everyone else that lives up here. Everything is falling into place They have good coffee in this dingy cafe. Good coffee, cheap, and decent smokes too. Somehow the taxes are different in here than out there. Somehow in here you don’t have to pay as much. Everything lasts longer in here, too. A cup of coffee is an experience you can live through. A smoke is a red bird in a dewy forest singing something profound and meaningless. The windows are fibrillating. Something depends on knowing at any given moment your deepest fear. I can’t think of what I’m afraid of right now. No fears deep enough to wear the looming handle “deepest.” So what? What does this mean? Something bad is going to happen? I can’t imagine it because I am not afraid right now. Of anything? Okay, of one thing. . . . something’s just not working tonight. what is it? answer that and you’ll have answered that I know what it is. I need random people! People noise! Suspicion! Calumny! Intrigue! Apathy! All of it, stinking farting retching all of it! (what smije== fir) the man who got close enough to the geese fantasy usually better than reality: That man you saw pissing out the second story window’s dick not as hard as you imagine. But then again, something else you didn’t imagine, something harder, longer, juicier, more impossible insane inane and if you go inside him, if you go inside him you might Smoking just feels good. Is that pathetic? Good!