Saturday, October 11, 2008
AN INTRODUCTION
A variance in individuals, who when asked to communicate in a show/tell fashion, ergo reveal things about what it is to be the person who they are, in this resolute and at times highly articulate way, has been established with an aberration rate of less than .013 times the previously held acceptable “norm” for behavior in such individuals, i.e. those who are exhibiting these “anhedonial” or “hybrid lugubrious/ennui otiose/torpid inclined” symptoms (e.g. staring at leaves until they fall from tree branches) such as those ere thought to be classified into (of course in a streamlined all-or-nothing take-the-cake-and-eat-it-too type of way) obsessive or egoistic objectivism coteries, or also, even though never penetrating a façade of no-bullshit-warped-impression-illogical and untenable deviations from the baseline rate of change, give or take a couple decimal points worth of distraction (e.g. kids playing video games and acquiring what was years ago commonly referred to as “Nintendo Thumb” with symptoms ranging from mild discomfort to almost total immobility of the opposable digit rendering such child unfit for accomplishing even the most basic of tasks necessary for his or her survival, which of course would include properly gripping a doorknob or tying ones shoes, and also, needless to say, putting the prospect of playing said video games on hold while the child was “laid up” and nursing his or her affliction, therefore exhibiting a marked increase in attention span for this N.T. period, very similar to a shortstop going on the 15-day DL with a bum elbow and, when he does return to take some tentative B.P. realizing that he was over-swinging on changeups and is actually a better hitter when he doesn’t try to do too much and just tries to be patient, stay back, keep his front shoulder in, and make solid contact, where as the child has less to divert his or her gaze from the simple velleities of their little lives and in this NT phase the child will tend to lessen his or her “distraction rate” to a degree very semblable to the one proposed for our purposes here) there is really no evidence either way of said individuals fettered to this mindset modifying his or her actions or reactions to comply with the “mores” of the cadre whom they happened to be grouped/involved/immersed/tempered in or to. Assuming an omniferous and constant rate of change in a subject’s modality (said subject being the before mentioned “type” and also being held in thrall by the sway/aura/menace of his or her specified “others” or coevals residing in his or her same grouping) and that he or she are even slightly amenable (slight=.0001% of the lowest common known rate of change versus rigidity as defined in the Lungst-Foreman analogy where the snake is not the mouse but is, by happenstance, inside both snake and mouse at once, i.e. nobody knows what the hell to think anymore so just forge on ahead and shut the hell up about it already) there happens to be a picayune, though not always diminishing, differential in the subject’s patterns of accepting/rejecting his or her status as a human being. Now, if we take into account the Darwinian nature of this survival/fitting-in pattern displayed so across-the-board or ubiquitously by these subjects when placed into what we believe to be their proper cadre, there often times seems to be a bifurcation in their previous modes of making sense of what they ascertain to be their idea of the world, though not the typical Branch-Wellemeyer sort of splitting (presuming that this paradigm-shift-incipient, and some would say insidious, formulaic, if not fatidic, dispelling of held notions, indeed has some validity, spuriously flim-flam and debatable as it may be) that we have observed in the flippant/irate field tests w/r/t parameters 6 and 14 of their so resilient, sanguine, and unyieldingly adamantine way of conducting these experiments, though I am not here today to belittle their findings by making disparaging, uncouth, gauche, or otherwise sinister remarks about their means of attaining them, i.e. slash, burn, burn, burn, slash, burn, burn, slash, um, oh yes, burning bright in the forests of the…no, that is exactly not correct, but, well, you get my point. It is too uncomplicated to be rationally explained or expounded on with tedious palaver by the likes of me, and for all of our intents and purposes here…well, that is not for me to say. So, let’s move on then. Okay. Now, this being assumed as tacit, this bifurcation of thought process that occurs in the subjects in these very specific instances, we can now look upon a symptom as being a thing apart from the condition that engendered it. We can make up our own sense, or own innocence in a sense. We can make matter matter before we pay the mind any mind. In a more simplified way we can winkle the sickness from the shell of disease, take it out and start to comprehend it, get our hands around it, and begin to make those cooing noises so often associated with post-coital bliss or speaking motherese to an infant. It is in these things, and in these things alone, that we can place our trust for building a truer and more shining example of what it means to be a human being living in this world. This is our goal here, right folks? So, without any further ado, let’s bring out the next act. I think you are all really going to enjoy this one. Hey, I think I hear them now. That tinkling of bells, the steady hum of the dishwasher, the faint buzz of the television set. Yep. You guessed it. Here, all the way from the smoky valley of Bulloondurf nestled in the steep foothills of Brymtin Canyon, where the houses are all flanked by movie screens and the rivers flow full of gasoline and the flood lights shine all night long…Yes, they’ve come a long way to be here folks, and you know what? They are really quite charming in person, just the nicest and most polite young people I’ve never met. Really. I just can’t say enough good things about them. So, come on folks, let me here you out there. Let’s make some noise! For the first time in National Bandwidth history, live and in all their hi-def glory, I give you…Grande Geoffrey And His Bestial Micro Media Flash Dancers!
Saturday, September 27, 2008
The Cracker Eater (circa 1998)
Well, it just so happens that I was eating Triscuits this morning when I had what Walt Whitman would refer to as a special revelation. I was sitting there at the table and picking crackers out of the box two and three at a time, breaking them in half, and then eating them. The salty taste on my tongue was pleasant as I chewed them, and the grainy texture felt good in my mouth as they broke up in there. I started staring at the box for some reason, reading all the words on it, just to do something, just to kind of pass the time I guess. I’d just woken up and I was kind of lightheaded and still caught up a bit in sleep. Everything started coming to me in a fugue. Every new thing that came to me, or at me, kept building slightly on the last thing. I read: “BAKED WHOLE WHEAT CRACKERS” “Improved Wheat Taste!” “Not for nibblers!™” “NET WT 9½ OZ (269g)” “NABISCO®” My eyes just kept reading everything. It all seemed really important and super interesting. The top flap on the box had this little recycling symbol on it, you know, with the arrows going around in a kind of triangle in the black circle, and it said on it, “Carton made from 100% recycled paperboard.” And under that in this really tiny print it read, “Minimum 35% post-consumer content.” I had no idea what this meant, but like I said before it all seemed extremely important. I decided to make coffee. I began to wonder about how the wheat taste had been improved. The crackers didn’t taste any better than I’d remembered them tasting before, but I really couldn’t be sure. Maybe the taste had been improved. It seemed really important that I figure this out. I wanted to be very sure of this fact. I grabbed a coffee filter from a box of coffee filters sitting on my table and put the filter, which was a superior quality brown-colored filter, into the top part of the coffee maker where the filter goes. The box of filters had these words on it: “Flavor Pores,” and, “FEEL the quality…Taste the difference!” and also, “FOUR TREES are planted for every ONE used in the production of our filter paper.” I wondered about these trees. Who was planting them? What kind of trees were they? Where were they being planted? How many trees does it take to make a coffee filter? Well, I scooped the coffee grounds into the filter with a little measuring spoon that I keep in the coffee can to measure out my coffee. I closed the tray with the filter and coffee grounds inside of it, and set the glass coffee pot under there to catch the drips of hot coffee. I poured water from my water-filtration pitcher into the back compartment until it went up to the 5-cup line on the thermometer-looking measuring device on the side. After doing this I sat back down and grabbed a few more Triscuits. I noticed that on the tab that keeps the box closed after it’s been broken open for the first time it read, “To open slide finger under the flap and loosen gently,” and under that flap it read, “To close insert tab here.” I inserted the tab and the box stayed closed. I was extremely pleased by this. Turning the box around I read the side of it where the nutrition facts and ingredients were listed. I wanted to find some significance in these things. It read, “No Cholesterol” “Low Saturated Fat (Contains 5g per serving)” “Good source of Dietary Fiber.” It also said on it that one serving size was seven crackers. I wondered who had come up with the number. Why not five? Or Ten? There was some deeper meaning there. Something spiritual. I read the ingredients: “Triscuit crackers are made by a unique process from whole wheat, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, salt.” It seemed odd to me that there was no, “and,” in there. I felt that it should have said, “and salt.” So again I pondered things. What was so unique about this cracker making process? Were there actually people specially trained to make these crackers? Did they go to school? Did they have a license? And how the hell had they improved the whole wheat taste? It seemed a mind-boggling mystery of infinite depths and immeasurable longitudes of thought. I listened to the coffee drip and gurgle, and watched the steam rise from the coffee pot. Then I turned the box of Triscuits over and looked at the bottom. It read in really tiny black print, “This package is sold by weight, not by volume. Packed as full as practicable by modern automatic equipment, it contains the full net weight indicated. If it does not appear full when opened, it is because contents have settled during shipping and handling.” For some reason I thought of all those bags of chips I’d opened over the course of my chip-eating life, and how there would be a popping sound and sometimes only like five chips in there when you opened the bag. There was some esoteric kind of language being transmitted in all this. All these words, all of this language being used. I felt like I was deciphering some kind of code, some kind of hidden world of symbols and wonderful mysteries. Why else would the folks at Nabisco go through all the trouble of putting this stuff on the box? It didn’t make the crackers taste any better. It didn’t change my opinion of the crackers. I’ve always liked Triscuits. I probably always will. And even if they keep improving the whole wheat taste, I’ll probably continue not to notice. I started to think of all the words on all of the boxes and bottles and crates and trucks in the whole world, all of that language out there being wasted, beating against deaf ears, all of this noise and distraction going unnoticed. I started imagining this giant cartel of word smugglers going from one town to the next with their cereal boxes and their ammunition of slogans and fine print. They’d go unnoticed just like their words. People wouldn’t even see them. They’d be overlooked. And they could communicate to each other through paper products and box tops and commercial jingles. Only they would know what the words really meant. And nobody would care. They could do as they pleased. Just what would they do? Who knows? Maybe nothing. But as I was sitting there this morning it seemed like I was on the verge of some miraculous breakthrough. Like I was at the mouth of a river of endless possibility. I fell into this delirium, this foggy muddled kind of state. I read the bar code on the bottom of the box. 04422903. The coffee pot stopped making coffee, and it kind of whistled like it does when it stops making coffee. The numbers made no sense. I turned the box over and over in my hand. I read the address of Nabisco: East Hanover, NJ 07936. It said that when writing to them one should enclose the top flap with the printed code on it. My mind flashed. That was it. That was how they did it. Finally, I felt like I was on to something. It was more than just words. Maybe the words were just a distraction. It was all bar codes. What else would they have all of those numbers for? They were communicating with box tops and cardboard flaps and numbers. But who was doing all of this communicating? Then it kind of just came to me. We all were. All of us who bought things and sold things and felt like we owned things and lived out our lives so cut-off from each other. We had found this new way to get our messages across. It was more than numbers and words or even symbols. It was more than blips and bleeps and digital beeps. We were talking to each other, comforting each other, and sharing our lives with one another in this new and profound way: by buying things. We were all partaking, as consumers, in something larger than own tiny selves, fitting into the whole, becoming a member of society, fulfilling our duty as a proud citizen of this nation. And we had somehow invented a new way of doing all of these things, of spreading our culture, of making ourselves feel like our lives were more worthwhile. It seemed really epiphanic at the time. Something like the essence of God was around in that kitchen there. So, I got up and grabbed my coffee mug and I poured my coffee into my cup and I blew on the hot coffee as it steamed there under my nose. I stood there sipping my coffee and staring at the clock for a long time.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
From 'The CIA's Lost Transcripts'
Woman enters kitchen and finds man sitting on chair facing a pot of water. Pot of water is on stove directly in front of him.
She says—What are you doing?
He says—Testing the theory that a watched pot never boils.
Woman laughs and looks at table where they usually eat and tries to pick up a napkin from a stack of napkins in a partially ripped plastic packaging. Napkins are powder blue. She ends up lifting three napkins out of stack.
She says—Why can’t I ever get just one? They always come off in bundles.
Man continues to watch pot of water on stove. He does not say anything, nor does he move at all.
Woman stands with arms crossed. She holds three napkins in her left hand.
Man lifts his right arm towards the table. He continues to look unwaveringly at pot of water on stove. His index finger points to package of Top Ramen. Top Ramen is beef flavored. His gaze is steady and unperturbed.
He says—Hand me that please.
Woman looks at package of Top Ramen lying there on table and proceeds to pick up package and then hand it to man.
He says—Thanks.
She says—That pot is never going to boil if you keep staring at it.
He says—We’ll see.
Man places package of Top Ramen on sink counter with right hand. He does not move from his seat nor does he look away from stove. He breaks apart Top Ramen noodles in unopened package with his right palm, crushing noodles into tiny pieces. Then he sets now crushed and still unopened Top Ramen package on his lap while continuing to stare straight ahead. He opens package at one end using both hands and takes out silver flavor packet. Flavor packet has red letters on it: Beef Flavor. Setting flavor packet on sink edge with right hand he creases his brows as if in deep concentration. Package of crushed noodles still remains in his lap. Package reads - Cooks in Three Minutes - on front under picture of cooked steaming noodles.
Woman sighs deeply and rolls her eyes.
She says—I got a raise today. You know that? They finally gave in.
Man continues staring ahead as if nobody has spoken to him.
Woman pushes out lower lip and frowns sullenly. She then puts on a fake smile and pretends to light up her face with happiness.
She says—That’s great honey! You really deserve that! Good going! Yipee! Let’s celebrate!
Man is unmoved by woman’s playful sarcasm.
Woman walks away.
Man looks at her go.
Pot of water starts to boil.
She says—What are you doing?
He says—Testing the theory that a watched pot never boils.
Woman laughs and looks at table where they usually eat and tries to pick up a napkin from a stack of napkins in a partially ripped plastic packaging. Napkins are powder blue. She ends up lifting three napkins out of stack.
She says—Why can’t I ever get just one? They always come off in bundles.
Man continues to watch pot of water on stove. He does not say anything, nor does he move at all.
Woman stands with arms crossed. She holds three napkins in her left hand.
Man lifts his right arm towards the table. He continues to look unwaveringly at pot of water on stove. His index finger points to package of Top Ramen. Top Ramen is beef flavored. His gaze is steady and unperturbed.
He says—Hand me that please.
Woman looks at package of Top Ramen lying there on table and proceeds to pick up package and then hand it to man.
He says—Thanks.
She says—That pot is never going to boil if you keep staring at it.
He says—We’ll see.
Man places package of Top Ramen on sink counter with right hand. He does not move from his seat nor does he look away from stove. He breaks apart Top Ramen noodles in unopened package with his right palm, crushing noodles into tiny pieces. Then he sets now crushed and still unopened Top Ramen package on his lap while continuing to stare straight ahead. He opens package at one end using both hands and takes out silver flavor packet. Flavor packet has red letters on it: Beef Flavor. Setting flavor packet on sink edge with right hand he creases his brows as if in deep concentration. Package of crushed noodles still remains in his lap. Package reads - Cooks in Three Minutes - on front under picture of cooked steaming noodles.
Woman sighs deeply and rolls her eyes.
She says—I got a raise today. You know that? They finally gave in.
Man continues staring ahead as if nobody has spoken to him.
Woman pushes out lower lip and frowns sullenly. She then puts on a fake smile and pretends to light up her face with happiness.
She says—That’s great honey! You really deserve that! Good going! Yipee! Let’s celebrate!
Man is unmoved by woman’s playful sarcasm.
Woman walks away.
Man looks at her go.
Pot of water starts to boil.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Dhammapada Idioticus
I’m just not intelligent enough to be that profoundly depressed, to know what it is like to not be able to take this life for one more moment, to not believe that other moments will follow, other moments that may or may not be good, but, most importantly, have that chance to be good. I don’t know. I’m basically a low-skill-level idiot. I just bide my time between despair and hope. That’s about it. There’s not much to me. We are all, basically, defined by our actions, by what we do, not really by what we think. Though what we think does determine to a large extent who we are and that in turn creates what we do as people in this world, you know, this place of things that we exist in. So, yes, we are what we think, but also we are, more so then, really, what we do, right? So, as I was saying, I am not smart enough to have all these engaging viewpoints and grand thoughts about things, and I really don’t exert any effort into making myself into, well, something. But what the hell is that something? Can you really be anything but who you are? And what the hell is that? Who you are. That seems like an absurdity. I have to know that I am me all the time to exist, right? If I stop being me then I stop existing as this thing, not only the abstract notion of what it is to be this person who I am, but also the real meat-and-potatoes part of what that constitutes, what that thing is in the flesh and bone, you know? So, I am always aware, you could say even hyper-aware, of what amalgamates into this temporal cohesive structure that I call myself, or would that be meta-aware? Anyway. I know that I am me. I am very sure of that. I walk around in this body and I know whom it belongs to, who is making it function and do the things that it does. All of these myriad parts making the whole that is the person I constantly can identify, and do identify, as being me. We all have to be aware of this at all times, sensitive to this fact that we are this person who is moving through time and space in such and such a way, in a very specific type of way too, and that helps us define this sense of our selves, this entity that is separated from all else. We have a self awareness, we have to, a self consciousness about us, that is just one continuous stream of thought saying over and over, “I am this.” It is always ringing somewhere in there behind our eyes. I don’t know. Like I said, I’m not too bright. I say, “nauseous,” when I mean, “nauseated.” And I use, “further,” sometimes when I’m talking about physical distance. But mostly people don’t care about such things. They’re all too busy saying, “I am this,” over and over in their heads. I do it too. It’s okay. It’s all going to be alright. I will do these deeds, make these acts upon the world while I am in it, and that will be who I am. It doesn’t matter. Sure, I fashion myself, but I don’t claim to be wise. Just like a bunch of trash piled up on the side of the freeway could have a nice smelling flower sprouting up from it, I could rise up and do some good stuff in this wrecked and diseased world. I don’t have to talk about it though. I’ve just got to do it. Just rouse myself I guess, shake my feathers a little. It’ll be okay. Everything will work out. Don’t worry. I get sad and scared sometimes too. It’s all just part of this thing here, see? We’re all in this together. Here. See? My hand? I am this. I am this.
Hello….
Hello….
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Forever Undone (PARTS 1.5-2)
−−Tell me some more about the bricks in those buildings downtown.
−−I think I was talking about the Mills building at some point. The shadows creeping up its yellow-buff brick walls that have all of these very intricate designs done in terra cotta. The bricks just look old, kind of ochre colored, weathered I guess you’d say. But the bottom part of the building’s façade is all white marble, I think it’s from Inyo County or something, and the entrance arch is really something. It’s very high and grand, very Romanesque, with all these Doric pillars or columns and there are also these intaglios, or maybe etchings in bas-relief all over the top of the entrance, I can’t remember exactly. I was going to have the character walk around for a while just noticing things like this. I was going to have him walk by the old Pacific Stock Exchange building, which is now an Equinox gym, and sit around on the steps for a bit, maybe have him walk down to check out the Newhall Building with its rich red brick piers, the ornate cream terra cotta decorations, the eagles in the spandrels of the top floor, that wonderful Renaissance/Baroque ornamentation designed by Mr. Lewis Hobart way back in nineteen hundred and ten that is still standing ten-stories tall on the corner of Battery and California. Maybe he would start to wonder about what had happened to all those years, all that time, all those things that had been occurring for almost a hundred years on these streets and in these same buildings, all of it gone yet at the same time still there. Maybe he’d go and sit in St. Mary’s Square and stare up at the tall buildings that seem to be hemming him in from all sides. Maybe something would happen to him while he is sitting there, or he’d go off and look up at what he believes to be Grim Reapers glowering down at him from the 23rd floor of 580 California. Or he’d remember about Muriel Castanis and her ideas about “Corporate Goddesses.” He’d wonder about the certain way the sunlight would strike the windows across the street from his house, for just a moment, at a particular time of the day, so that he’d be suddenly blinded from where he sits and watches TV, and the way the sun had, as it was going down, of stenciling an ovoid shadow on the wall with the shapes of shutters that were like the bars of a jail cell. Or about how echoes just sound different downtown, car horns, the delivery trucks making all their noise, and the deep bellow of traffic and wind and rumblings from some mysterious place down below where sewer rats got fat on the leftovers of subterranean alligators.
−−I wish you had a better memory. You seem kind of hazy on details. All this limning. It’s kind of skimpy.
−−Well, you can’t put everything in there. You’ve got to leave a bunch of stuff out. That’s really what writing is. You spend most of your time paring things down, filtering out the unnecessary, separating the chaff of experience from the grain of life. What’s left is just a tiny remnant of what reality might once have been, a tiny pebble on the sands of experience. And if you’re lucky what you are left with will be maybe one hundredth of what you wanted to be there when you started off, and that’s if you’re lucky. It’s a very low percentage game, like baseball I guess, but even lower. I was even thinking of having the character wander into the Cala Foods on Hyde. The roof is so strange. It seems like it’s really warped and caving in all over, with all of these depressions or indentions of some kind, dimplings of the concrete like craters. It seems porous, or muddy, like wet plaster or stucco or something. Is there such a thing as mudcrete? I’ve always imagined that walking on that roof would be like walking on the moon. And the giant wall of the place on the north side with all of those rectangular windows arranged on it. He was going to kind of go into a trance staring at the those windows in that giant wall on the north side.
−−Oh yeah. All those rectangles lined up like some kind of, I don’t know, checkerboard?
−−No. But yes. Those windows. They kind of remind me of a bad piece of modern art you’d find on the walls of a dental office or something. You can see these rectangular pieces of the houses and buildings across the street through them. It’s like somebody’s been putting together a puzzle that is a photograph of the buildings over there when it’s done, but they’ve only been able to put together these rectangular parts and the rest is just the white of the wall. Does that make any sense?
−−No. Not at all. I just don’t get what you are trying to do with these diversions. Do you expect the reader to follow all of this nonsense? Who the hell is Muriel Castanis?
−−I’m not really sure. I guess it’s just something to pass the time.
−−I’d rather pass my time getting dragged through the street tied to the back of a speeding car by a chain.
−−If you had your druthers.
−−I’d rather.
−−You’d rather. D’rather. Druther. Get it?
−−No.
−−Yeah. I don’t either. I think it has something to do with Bret Harte or something.
−−What the fuck are you talking about?
−−Nothing. Nobody cares.
−−You’re right about that.
−−So this character was going to go into this trance, start contemplating things, thinking some really odd thoughts. E.B. White type of stuff.
−−He wrote about a tree once. Which tree was it from the corner? The third?
−−No. The second. Anyway. He’s standing there in the vegetable section, you know with all of the tropical storm sounds going off and the mist coming down, and he’s starting to think about things like who invented the doorknob? Where do the pigeons sleep at night? What do lice sound like when they eat? When am I going to die? Do streetlights look like alien eyes at night or iridescent pearls on the long necks of headless swans? Where do all of my dreams go when I’m awake? Is the butterfly effect lepidopterous? What’s the greatest pop song ever written?
−−Okay so he’s thinking about all of these odd things, asking all of these stupid pointless questions. So what? Sorry for all the caviling, but I still don’t get what’s so great about all of this. It seems so unexceptional. So mundane.
−−It is. I guess that’s part of the point. Something for the botched and bored, the expendable masses, the grocery clerks and the janitors and the delivery boys and bellhops and the garbage men, the people who sew buttons all day and repair fire hydrants. Nobody wants to be reduced to a chemical reaction or a system of random particles, a hodgepodge of events happening for no discernible reason. Life is various and endless in all of its so-called jewel boxes. We all want to be real, to be something more than just ourselves, more than this person that other people see as being us, this fleshy thing that goes around wearing our name like an epaulette. I play along with other people’s assumptions about who I am, pretending to be this thing that they see and talk to, and in turn I expect them to feel a certain way about me, this “me” that is really just this thing I create, this social construction that I try to give these attributes to, this fake “personality”, this unreal person that I control like a puppet, though not in an unattached way, for I am an acting player in this game too, and sometimes it is hard to tell where my papier-mâché souled self begins and the reality of being me ends. People only see what I try to make them see about me. I am what I’d most like to pretend to be. I lose my self in the creation of this false self, and in doing so I somehow find a new self, a part to play that is the real “me” at the same time that it is nothing but emptiness. So I end up spending time cultivating this idea of being me, this image I create and that I imagine to be me, that is and is not me at the same time.
−−I am what I am.
−−What does that consist of? Money in your bank account. A nine-digit number. A job that defines what you are, that is what you do. You are what you do, right? Or are you more than just that? Let’s see. I think there was something I wanted to say about Alexander Pope. Something about how hope springs eternal because we are never blessed, but are always going to be one day. A soul must be more than the sum of its parts.
−−Words, words, words. Heaven. Earth. Philosophy. A world of words making a world of things.
−−It gets to be too much. I have all of these things that I keep on the inside because there is no place for them out in the world of things. So I dwell in squalor, live in isolation, collect junk mail, and keep making up this person whom I wish I could be. I was going to somehow use this poem by Cavafy in the story. It’s called As Much As You Can.
−−Oh great. A fucking recitation from memory. This should be fun.
−−Fuck you. This is important. It goes, “And if you cannot make your life as you want it, at least try this as much as you can: do not disgrace it in the crowding contact with the world, in the many movements and all the talk. Do not disgrace it by taking it, dragging it around often and exposing it to the daily folly of relationships and associations, till it becomes like an alien burdensome life.”
−−So, let’s say you just stay in your room. Sit around like Pascal and stare at walls waiting for your afflatus to come and galvanize your imagination. Stop taking yourself out and schlepping all over and exposing yourself to the world or whatever the fuck you call it. Is that really living? Is that what you want to do with the time of your life—this short thing we do while were alive? Fuck that. There is no being healthy and happy and kind and all of that Saroyanian shit you are always going on about if you’re just locked up in your dingy little room all the time. Hiding away from the world is no solution. You’ve got to go out into that D. Thomas night and burn burn burn and all of that shit, right? Just like your man Ehrmann says, with all of its drudgery and shams and broken dreams, it is still a pretty fucking beautiful world to live in.
−−I don’t necessarily agree with that. This lust for life, this joie de vivre, this hedonistic I-wanna-rock’n’roll-all-night-and-party-every-day attitude, it’s all just a front, a diversion, a compensatory gesture to ward off the demons lurking under the bed and writing their names on your back in the dark. There’s nothing golden about suffering. For the most part it isn’t even bronze.
−−Hey. I know that last part. What is that?
−−Just my faulty anamnesis. It’s a paraphrasing of something from Somewhere Else Rather Than Here Is Where The Horses Chase Rain. It’s from a poem called “The Eyes Of Pistol Pete” about the old basketball player Pete Maravich.
−−Now you’re getting all mythopoeic and self-referential. I can’t take this anymore. I can’t exist inside of your imaginary world anymore. You’ve got to let me out. Let’s at least go back to talking about buildings again.
−−You know the name Timothy Pflueger? He’s the guy that built the Castro Theatre and the Paramount in Oakland, among many other gems of the thirties and forties like 450 Sutter and the white terra-cotta-clad tower that is the Pacific Telephone Building at 140 New Montgomery.
−−Sure, he built the YMCA building down by the Civic Center, right?
−−Yeah. He’s one of the great architects in San Francisco history. A. A. Cantin actually did a lot of the designs for the Pacific Telephone Building, but he worked closely with Pflueger and his company. Sometimes I go down to New Montgomery and sit on a bench across the street from that building and just stare at it for hours, taking in all the street sounds and people walking by not noticing things. I just feel like there is all of this beauty all around and people just choose not to notice it. Nobody ever looks up, and if they did I feel like it would significantly impact their lives, bring about a real change in the way they see things and the way they feel things too.
−−Hold on. So what? Big deal. People don’t notice things. You can’t notice everything. Distractions are everywhere, and you’ve only got so much time to just go around staring at things. And even if you do notice something, and you are able to somehow appreciate the beauty of it, which is probably a-whole-nother problem, what the hell are you going to do with that? Where can you put that in the suitcase of your life experience? You see something and you enjoy it in some way and then it is over and you move on. I don’t really see what it matters. To-morrows will still keep coming and flushing out the yesterdays and pushing them farther and farther away into the dustbin of your past. What’s it going to matter if you were plodding along down the street one day and happened to notice the old sooty verdigris opaque windows in the archway of an old building? Where are you going to put that? Where does it go? You just can’t do anything with it. You might as well just keep staring at your shoes.
−−I don’t know. You’re probably right. For some reason I just find these things extremely important. Maybe I’m just overcompensating for other things that are lacking in my life. Anyway, so I go down there on New Montgomery and they have these nice benches attached to the building across the street in front of these plate glass windows. Sometimes I think all I’m really looking for in life is just a good place to sit. And so I just sit there and lean my head back against the glass and stare up at that old Pacific Telephone Building that still has BELL carved into the floral decal molding over the entrance. The building is closed now. I don’t know what’s going on with it. There are a few tattered curtains in some of the windows still and there is a handwritten sign taped up on the front door that says the building is closed. I think it’s going to be turned into a five-star luxury hotel or something. At least it’ll be preserved.
−−No wrecking ball for now. What else do you do for fun?
−−Sometimes, like say on a Wednesday afternoon when the weather is agreeable and I feel hearty and hale and like walking around, I’ll just go around aimlessly ambling all over the city, running my hands through my hair and pulling it up in the front like Stan Laurel, just basically trying not to let the way the wind is blowing affect my mood. Maybe I’ll get a song stuck in my head like some guy in a Saroyan story, you know, whistling The Daring Young Man On The Flying Trapeze and all that, or I’ll pretend I’m Philip Marlow out snooping around and looking for a lead. It’s not a completely uninteresting way to make time pass. Sitting on benches and smoking cigarettes is also a good show. I love watching smokestacks puffing up gray clouds behind brick buildings, and those silver cylindrical ventilation tubes that run up the sides of buildings, and the few remaining water towers all rusted and smashed and lonely on top of old tenements. Just stuff like that. Ordinary things. Things everybody does.
−−I think I was talking about the Mills building at some point. The shadows creeping up its yellow-buff brick walls that have all of these very intricate designs done in terra cotta. The bricks just look old, kind of ochre colored, weathered I guess you’d say. But the bottom part of the building’s façade is all white marble, I think it’s from Inyo County or something, and the entrance arch is really something. It’s very high and grand, very Romanesque, with all these Doric pillars or columns and there are also these intaglios, or maybe etchings in bas-relief all over the top of the entrance, I can’t remember exactly. I was going to have the character walk around for a while just noticing things like this. I was going to have him walk by the old Pacific Stock Exchange building, which is now an Equinox gym, and sit around on the steps for a bit, maybe have him walk down to check out the Newhall Building with its rich red brick piers, the ornate cream terra cotta decorations, the eagles in the spandrels of the top floor, that wonderful Renaissance/Baroque ornamentation designed by Mr. Lewis Hobart way back in nineteen hundred and ten that is still standing ten-stories tall on the corner of Battery and California. Maybe he would start to wonder about what had happened to all those years, all that time, all those things that had been occurring for almost a hundred years on these streets and in these same buildings, all of it gone yet at the same time still there. Maybe he’d go and sit in St. Mary’s Square and stare up at the tall buildings that seem to be hemming him in from all sides. Maybe something would happen to him while he is sitting there, or he’d go off and look up at what he believes to be Grim Reapers glowering down at him from the 23rd floor of 580 California. Or he’d remember about Muriel Castanis and her ideas about “Corporate Goddesses.” He’d wonder about the certain way the sunlight would strike the windows across the street from his house, for just a moment, at a particular time of the day, so that he’d be suddenly blinded from where he sits and watches TV, and the way the sun had, as it was going down, of stenciling an ovoid shadow on the wall with the shapes of shutters that were like the bars of a jail cell. Or about how echoes just sound different downtown, car horns, the delivery trucks making all their noise, and the deep bellow of traffic and wind and rumblings from some mysterious place down below where sewer rats got fat on the leftovers of subterranean alligators.
−−I wish you had a better memory. You seem kind of hazy on details. All this limning. It’s kind of skimpy.
−−Well, you can’t put everything in there. You’ve got to leave a bunch of stuff out. That’s really what writing is. You spend most of your time paring things down, filtering out the unnecessary, separating the chaff of experience from the grain of life. What’s left is just a tiny remnant of what reality might once have been, a tiny pebble on the sands of experience. And if you’re lucky what you are left with will be maybe one hundredth of what you wanted to be there when you started off, and that’s if you’re lucky. It’s a very low percentage game, like baseball I guess, but even lower. I was even thinking of having the character wander into the Cala Foods on Hyde. The roof is so strange. It seems like it’s really warped and caving in all over, with all of these depressions or indentions of some kind, dimplings of the concrete like craters. It seems porous, or muddy, like wet plaster or stucco or something. Is there such a thing as mudcrete? I’ve always imagined that walking on that roof would be like walking on the moon. And the giant wall of the place on the north side with all of those rectangular windows arranged on it. He was going to kind of go into a trance staring at the those windows in that giant wall on the north side.
−−Oh yeah. All those rectangles lined up like some kind of, I don’t know, checkerboard?
−−No. But yes. Those windows. They kind of remind me of a bad piece of modern art you’d find on the walls of a dental office or something. You can see these rectangular pieces of the houses and buildings across the street through them. It’s like somebody’s been putting together a puzzle that is a photograph of the buildings over there when it’s done, but they’ve only been able to put together these rectangular parts and the rest is just the white of the wall. Does that make any sense?
−−No. Not at all. I just don’t get what you are trying to do with these diversions. Do you expect the reader to follow all of this nonsense? Who the hell is Muriel Castanis?
−−I’m not really sure. I guess it’s just something to pass the time.
−−I’d rather pass my time getting dragged through the street tied to the back of a speeding car by a chain.
−−If you had your druthers.
−−I’d rather.
−−You’d rather. D’rather. Druther. Get it?
−−No.
−−Yeah. I don’t either. I think it has something to do with Bret Harte or something.
−−What the fuck are you talking about?
−−Nothing. Nobody cares.
−−You’re right about that.
−−So this character was going to go into this trance, start contemplating things, thinking some really odd thoughts. E.B. White type of stuff.
−−He wrote about a tree once. Which tree was it from the corner? The third?
−−No. The second. Anyway. He’s standing there in the vegetable section, you know with all of the tropical storm sounds going off and the mist coming down, and he’s starting to think about things like who invented the doorknob? Where do the pigeons sleep at night? What do lice sound like when they eat? When am I going to die? Do streetlights look like alien eyes at night or iridescent pearls on the long necks of headless swans? Where do all of my dreams go when I’m awake? Is the butterfly effect lepidopterous? What’s the greatest pop song ever written?
−−Okay so he’s thinking about all of these odd things, asking all of these stupid pointless questions. So what? Sorry for all the caviling, but I still don’t get what’s so great about all of this. It seems so unexceptional. So mundane.
−−It is. I guess that’s part of the point. Something for the botched and bored, the expendable masses, the grocery clerks and the janitors and the delivery boys and bellhops and the garbage men, the people who sew buttons all day and repair fire hydrants. Nobody wants to be reduced to a chemical reaction or a system of random particles, a hodgepodge of events happening for no discernible reason. Life is various and endless in all of its so-called jewel boxes. We all want to be real, to be something more than just ourselves, more than this person that other people see as being us, this fleshy thing that goes around wearing our name like an epaulette. I play along with other people’s assumptions about who I am, pretending to be this thing that they see and talk to, and in turn I expect them to feel a certain way about me, this “me” that is really just this thing I create, this social construction that I try to give these attributes to, this fake “personality”, this unreal person that I control like a puppet, though not in an unattached way, for I am an acting player in this game too, and sometimes it is hard to tell where my papier-mâché souled self begins and the reality of being me ends. People only see what I try to make them see about me. I am what I’d most like to pretend to be. I lose my self in the creation of this false self, and in doing so I somehow find a new self, a part to play that is the real “me” at the same time that it is nothing but emptiness. So I end up spending time cultivating this idea of being me, this image I create and that I imagine to be me, that is and is not me at the same time.
−−I am what I am.
−−What does that consist of? Money in your bank account. A nine-digit number. A job that defines what you are, that is what you do. You are what you do, right? Or are you more than just that? Let’s see. I think there was something I wanted to say about Alexander Pope. Something about how hope springs eternal because we are never blessed, but are always going to be one day. A soul must be more than the sum of its parts.
−−Words, words, words. Heaven. Earth. Philosophy. A world of words making a world of things.
−−It gets to be too much. I have all of these things that I keep on the inside because there is no place for them out in the world of things. So I dwell in squalor, live in isolation, collect junk mail, and keep making up this person whom I wish I could be. I was going to somehow use this poem by Cavafy in the story. It’s called As Much As You Can.
−−Oh great. A fucking recitation from memory. This should be fun.
−−Fuck you. This is important. It goes, “And if you cannot make your life as you want it, at least try this as much as you can: do not disgrace it in the crowding contact with the world, in the many movements and all the talk. Do not disgrace it by taking it, dragging it around often and exposing it to the daily folly of relationships and associations, till it becomes like an alien burdensome life.”
−−So, let’s say you just stay in your room. Sit around like Pascal and stare at walls waiting for your afflatus to come and galvanize your imagination. Stop taking yourself out and schlepping all over and exposing yourself to the world or whatever the fuck you call it. Is that really living? Is that what you want to do with the time of your life—this short thing we do while were alive? Fuck that. There is no being healthy and happy and kind and all of that Saroyanian shit you are always going on about if you’re just locked up in your dingy little room all the time. Hiding away from the world is no solution. You’ve got to go out into that D. Thomas night and burn burn burn and all of that shit, right? Just like your man Ehrmann says, with all of its drudgery and shams and broken dreams, it is still a pretty fucking beautiful world to live in.
−−I don’t necessarily agree with that. This lust for life, this joie de vivre, this hedonistic I-wanna-rock’n’roll-all-night-and-party-every-day attitude, it’s all just a front, a diversion, a compensatory gesture to ward off the demons lurking under the bed and writing their names on your back in the dark. There’s nothing golden about suffering. For the most part it isn’t even bronze.
−−Hey. I know that last part. What is that?
−−Just my faulty anamnesis. It’s a paraphrasing of something from Somewhere Else Rather Than Here Is Where The Horses Chase Rain. It’s from a poem called “The Eyes Of Pistol Pete” about the old basketball player Pete Maravich.
−−Now you’re getting all mythopoeic and self-referential. I can’t take this anymore. I can’t exist inside of your imaginary world anymore. You’ve got to let me out. Let’s at least go back to talking about buildings again.
−−You know the name Timothy Pflueger? He’s the guy that built the Castro Theatre and the Paramount in Oakland, among many other gems of the thirties and forties like 450 Sutter and the white terra-cotta-clad tower that is the Pacific Telephone Building at 140 New Montgomery.
−−Sure, he built the YMCA building down by the Civic Center, right?
−−Yeah. He’s one of the great architects in San Francisco history. A. A. Cantin actually did a lot of the designs for the Pacific Telephone Building, but he worked closely with Pflueger and his company. Sometimes I go down to New Montgomery and sit on a bench across the street from that building and just stare at it for hours, taking in all the street sounds and people walking by not noticing things. I just feel like there is all of this beauty all around and people just choose not to notice it. Nobody ever looks up, and if they did I feel like it would significantly impact their lives, bring about a real change in the way they see things and the way they feel things too.
−−Hold on. So what? Big deal. People don’t notice things. You can’t notice everything. Distractions are everywhere, and you’ve only got so much time to just go around staring at things. And even if you do notice something, and you are able to somehow appreciate the beauty of it, which is probably a-whole-nother problem, what the hell are you going to do with that? Where can you put that in the suitcase of your life experience? You see something and you enjoy it in some way and then it is over and you move on. I don’t really see what it matters. To-morrows will still keep coming and flushing out the yesterdays and pushing them farther and farther away into the dustbin of your past. What’s it going to matter if you were plodding along down the street one day and happened to notice the old sooty verdigris opaque windows in the archway of an old building? Where are you going to put that? Where does it go? You just can’t do anything with it. You might as well just keep staring at your shoes.
−−I don’t know. You’re probably right. For some reason I just find these things extremely important. Maybe I’m just overcompensating for other things that are lacking in my life. Anyway, so I go down there on New Montgomery and they have these nice benches attached to the building across the street in front of these plate glass windows. Sometimes I think all I’m really looking for in life is just a good place to sit. And so I just sit there and lean my head back against the glass and stare up at that old Pacific Telephone Building that still has BELL carved into the floral decal molding over the entrance. The building is closed now. I don’t know what’s going on with it. There are a few tattered curtains in some of the windows still and there is a handwritten sign taped up on the front door that says the building is closed. I think it’s going to be turned into a five-star luxury hotel or something. At least it’ll be preserved.
−−No wrecking ball for now. What else do you do for fun?
−−Sometimes, like say on a Wednesday afternoon when the weather is agreeable and I feel hearty and hale and like walking around, I’ll just go around aimlessly ambling all over the city, running my hands through my hair and pulling it up in the front like Stan Laurel, just basically trying not to let the way the wind is blowing affect my mood. Maybe I’ll get a song stuck in my head like some guy in a Saroyan story, you know, whistling The Daring Young Man On The Flying Trapeze and all that, or I’ll pretend I’m Philip Marlow out snooping around and looking for a lead. It’s not a completely uninteresting way to make time pass. Sitting on benches and smoking cigarettes is also a good show. I love watching smokestacks puffing up gray clouds behind brick buildings, and those silver cylindrical ventilation tubes that run up the sides of buildings, and the few remaining water towers all rusted and smashed and lonely on top of old tenements. Just stuff like that. Ordinary things. Things everybody does.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Shoeless Joe In Exile
Shoeless Joe didn’t think
That Ty Cobb would know him,
In a dry goods store,
Working behind the counter,
So many years after 1919 had happened to him.
Didn’t think he’d want to,
All those summers gone by
Between them.
Cobb had to bait him:
"Don't ya recognize your old pal Ty?"
Joe looked incredulous.
Said,
"I didn’t think anyone from back then
would want to remember me now."
The old exiled ballplayer
So far fallen from grace,
Everything so far away
All the time now,
Everything lost,
Still trying to say
It isn’t so.
That Ty Cobb would know him,
In a dry goods store,
Working behind the counter,
So many years after 1919 had happened to him.
Didn’t think he’d want to,
All those summers gone by
Between them.
Cobb had to bait him:
"Don't ya recognize your old pal Ty?"
Joe looked incredulous.
Said,
"I didn’t think anyone from back then
would want to remember me now."
The old exiled ballplayer
So far fallen from grace,
Everything so far away
All the time now,
Everything lost,
Still trying to say
It isn’t so.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
All Upon An Overcast Sunday Afternoon
Staring at the sidewalk, the poured concrete ribbon with cross-lying strain relief grooves, the tiny pebbles inside some of the squares of the cement, the cement that is more gray and ashy than white, all of those tiny stones of many colors, those things you never notice until you really look, the grime yellowing in the cracks, the various stains, bird shit, more dog shit than you’d expect, tree wells and the coverplates of electrical boxes all worn and dimpled with a thousand seasons of wear, water damage, bumps from roots under the ground coming up and breaking apart the surface, the surface that is rough and hard and chipped and sad, speckled with black tarry splotches of unknown origin, too many cigarette butts to count.
The iron peel and trundle, blastings of metal scraping, and a rumble like a craven groan croak out from under old trolley cars on Market Street. The electric sizzle of busses going by attached to wires up above by long white poles. With a fluttering and a quick scuffle-like pattering of wings, pigeons dodging traffic in the street, bicycles, and, on the grand wide redbrick sidewalk, pedestrians too. I listen to the sound of a lone saxophone wailing on the corner of Sutter and Market, put a dollar in the guy’s hat, move on and go across the street to stare at the buildings on Sutter. I walk up Sansome. The fog is scudding just over the top of the Bank of America Building. It’s a gray afternoon of moody wanderers lurking like silent ghosts along the sidewalk. A pan handler cries out at me, accusing me of stealing his pencil, calling me a rotten bastard as he sits against the plate glass window of a 7-11 and stews in his own urine. I try to pretend that I’m walking around on the soundstage of a Frank Capra movie. It doesn’t work. A lady with a beach towel wrapped around her head like a turban is walking down Geary carrying a croquet racquet with the end sharpened like a spear. I walk a little faster to avoid her. There isn’t much light left in the sky.
…Later that day
--It’s this movie called Harvey. Jimmy Stewart plays a guy named Elwood P. Dowd, who is a dipso, and is very good natured, much bonhomie and munificence and all the likes, a simpleton with a benevolent heart and compassion, who also has this invisible friend, a six foot three rabbit named Harvey.
--Yeah, I know that one. Elwood lives with his sister and her daughter in this huge house. The lady who plays his sister is pretty great. She’s…um, exuberant. Wild. Very temperamental and loud, and really fun to watch. There are some great lines in that movie.
--“Nobody ever brings anything small into a bar.”
--Yep. That’s great. That whole monologue he goes into outside the bar is really quite wonderful.
--Quite. I love that story he tells abut his friend who has had too much whiskey and gin.
--Yeah. And how he was in need of some conveyance. So he put him in a cab.
--And that’s when he meets Harvey for the first time. A miracle leaning on a lamppost at 18th and Fairfax. I love that too. About his friend needing some conveyance. It sounds like something that Tom Waits would say during a story.
--Yeah. He’s actually got that line about people not bringing anything small into a bar in one of his songs.
--That’s right. I wonder if it’s related or just some kind of odd chance thing. Coincidental.
--That movie is really kind of a madcap comedy too. Like when his sister gets all fondled and frisked and thrown in a bathtub at the mix-up at the madhouse. There’s a lot of good slapstick going on.
--It’s made from a Pulitzer Prize winning play. That always seemed odd to me. I can’t see anyone but Jimmy Stewart in the role, putting his arm around that invisible giant rabbit. He calls it a Pooka. Something out of Celtic lore I think. He has the ability to stop time.
--Another great thing is that Dowd is always trying to give people his cards. They’re not business cards. I don’t know what they are. Just his name and phone number on them. And he’s always inviting everybody he meets over for dinner. He’s really adamant about it. Making them commit to a time and date. But he always wants to meet up for a little drink at a bar somewhere. The guy loves his whiskey.
--Yeah. I remember how he gets mad at the old doctor when the doctor is telling him about his ultimate fantasy, about the girl on the beach in Akron saying, “You poor thing,” and holding his hand. Elwood wants the guy to have whiskey, but the doctor will only drink beer.
--And I think there’s something great with the taxi driver at the end.
--Sure. Yeah. It’s where he says how he thinks normal human beings are just a bunch of stinkers.
--Stinkers. That’s right. That part gives me goose bumps. His sister saves him from normalcy, you know, knocking on the door, stopping the injection of that potion…what is it called again?
--Formula number 977.
--Ha. Yeah. That’s so weird. Just a MacGuffin I guess. But it’s so great how the old hag saves him from being normal, so he can keep on having his hallucinations, can keep being himself, with all of his quirks and habits and his odd personality, and can keep all the things that are best about him. He can keep quoting Ovid and picking flowers and having wonderful conversations with his imaginary rabbit friend named Harvey. He can keep making other people happy.
--That’s really it. Isn’t it? Making other people happy, and in doing so he makes himself happy. Everybody just can’t help liking him.
--Just a commentary on the way society doesn’t want to accept outsiders, people who are a little different, how it wants people to conform to the way it wants them to be. No deviations from the norm, no uniqueness or originality allowed. Leave your daydreams at the door. And your soul too while you’re at it.
--Elwood P. Dowd, that affable tippler, is left high and dry and boring as hell…I mean if he gets the injection of Formula 977.
--No more taking the road less traveled for him. No more good times or bad times. Just bland, anesthetized, boring old reality. No six-foot rabbits to keep you company. No bats in the belfry.
--The recalcitrant given electric shocks to the brain to make them fit in.
--Or anti-depressants.
--Remember how he makes those holes in Harvey’s hat, for his ears?
--Yeah. And he’s always trying to introduce people to Harvey. It scares most people away. But not everyone. Not the bartenders, the drunks, the insane people he knows, the people that know him best. In the end his sister even admits that she loves having Harvey around.
--Do you ever talk to yourself?
--All the time. In my head mostly. But sometimes when I’m alone I’ll do it out loud. I’ve never created another being that I’m having these conversations with, but I guess I kind of do have someone that I’m talking to. I must. It’s just some kind of specter, some idea of myself…that is also not myself. It’s not a rabbit, but maybe it’s not something too dissimilar from that. I just haven’t given it a persona. I haven’t materialized my imaginings into a concrete thing. I can keep reality separated from this discussion going on in my brain.
--Are there really two of us talking?
--What?
--I mean…I just get the feeling that maybe there is no substance to us. That we are merely figments of somebody’s imagination. That we’re dreamed up. Or maybe we are just some conversation going on in somebody’s head. Is that possible?
--Anything’s possible I guess. But, shit, I don’t want to think like that. It’s like imagining that the whole universe is merely a speck of dirt on the back of a giant’s shoulder, and that when he takes a shower everything that we know of will cease existing. That kind of thinking doesn’t get you anywhere. Sure we could all be just living in somebody else’s dream. When they wake up finally we’ll all be gone. Or a giant meteor could strike the earth and do the same thing. Why contemplate life like that? What good does it do?
--I know. I know. But, I mean…I just can’t help it. Every day this thing gnaws at me. It’s getting worse and worse. This feeling that I’m just a dreamt up voice in a dull tale told by some moron filled with…fuck, I don’t know…all this sound…all of this…fury. I don’t want to be just some fictional thing, some character in somebody else’s story, some minor player doing a bit part in the story of somebody else’s life. I really am starting to think that I am just the fucking stuff that goddamn dreams are made on. Nothing but empty words…hollow…nothingness.
--Why all the dots?
--You see? Why did you say that? About the dots.
--Dots?
--Yeah. What the hell does that mean?
--I don’t know. It just seemed like you were saying stuff with a lot of dots in it.
--Saying? How can there be dots in what I’m saying? Is that some kind of metaphor or something?
--I don’t know. I don’t know what it means. Shut up! Just shut the hell up!
--Do you see what I’m saying now? Scary, huh?
--Fuck you. This is over. I just wanted to talk about this movie and now you’re turning it into this diatribe on…
--
--
--
--…
THE END
--Hey. That’s not fair. That’s not the end. This is not the end. Thdafdsafere#@$#&^%fjk%$#dhlsfjkahdslfjkh***HELP!**vbcnmxz5y34o785yq478fuiagf34fdkafv(&*)(*$%#@%#$FDfdsafdskhafjdkhfkjhlwrhewhriuwhlfr***HELP ME!!!!!dfhdjsa8947385hfusadlhfjdbs***AWWW!!!!..........
THEENDTHEENDTHEENDTHEENDTHEENDTHEENDTHEENDTHEENDTHEENDTHEEND
The iron peel and trundle, blastings of metal scraping, and a rumble like a craven groan croak out from under old trolley cars on Market Street. The electric sizzle of busses going by attached to wires up above by long white poles. With a fluttering and a quick scuffle-like pattering of wings, pigeons dodging traffic in the street, bicycles, and, on the grand wide redbrick sidewalk, pedestrians too. I listen to the sound of a lone saxophone wailing on the corner of Sutter and Market, put a dollar in the guy’s hat, move on and go across the street to stare at the buildings on Sutter. I walk up Sansome. The fog is scudding just over the top of the Bank of America Building. It’s a gray afternoon of moody wanderers lurking like silent ghosts along the sidewalk. A pan handler cries out at me, accusing me of stealing his pencil, calling me a rotten bastard as he sits against the plate glass window of a 7-11 and stews in his own urine. I try to pretend that I’m walking around on the soundstage of a Frank Capra movie. It doesn’t work. A lady with a beach towel wrapped around her head like a turban is walking down Geary carrying a croquet racquet with the end sharpened like a spear. I walk a little faster to avoid her. There isn’t much light left in the sky.
…Later that day
--It’s this movie called Harvey. Jimmy Stewart plays a guy named Elwood P. Dowd, who is a dipso, and is very good natured, much bonhomie and munificence and all the likes, a simpleton with a benevolent heart and compassion, who also has this invisible friend, a six foot three rabbit named Harvey.
--Yeah, I know that one. Elwood lives with his sister and her daughter in this huge house. The lady who plays his sister is pretty great. She’s…um, exuberant. Wild. Very temperamental and loud, and really fun to watch. There are some great lines in that movie.
--“Nobody ever brings anything small into a bar.”
--Yep. That’s great. That whole monologue he goes into outside the bar is really quite wonderful.
--Quite. I love that story he tells abut his friend who has had too much whiskey and gin.
--Yeah. And how he was in need of some conveyance. So he put him in a cab.
--And that’s when he meets Harvey for the first time. A miracle leaning on a lamppost at 18th and Fairfax. I love that too. About his friend needing some conveyance. It sounds like something that Tom Waits would say during a story.
--Yeah. He’s actually got that line about people not bringing anything small into a bar in one of his songs.
--That’s right. I wonder if it’s related or just some kind of odd chance thing. Coincidental.
--That movie is really kind of a madcap comedy too. Like when his sister gets all fondled and frisked and thrown in a bathtub at the mix-up at the madhouse. There’s a lot of good slapstick going on.
--It’s made from a Pulitzer Prize winning play. That always seemed odd to me. I can’t see anyone but Jimmy Stewart in the role, putting his arm around that invisible giant rabbit. He calls it a Pooka. Something out of Celtic lore I think. He has the ability to stop time.
--Another great thing is that Dowd is always trying to give people his cards. They’re not business cards. I don’t know what they are. Just his name and phone number on them. And he’s always inviting everybody he meets over for dinner. He’s really adamant about it. Making them commit to a time and date. But he always wants to meet up for a little drink at a bar somewhere. The guy loves his whiskey.
--Yeah. I remember how he gets mad at the old doctor when the doctor is telling him about his ultimate fantasy, about the girl on the beach in Akron saying, “You poor thing,” and holding his hand. Elwood wants the guy to have whiskey, but the doctor will only drink beer.
--And I think there’s something great with the taxi driver at the end.
--Sure. Yeah. It’s where he says how he thinks normal human beings are just a bunch of stinkers.
--Stinkers. That’s right. That part gives me goose bumps. His sister saves him from normalcy, you know, knocking on the door, stopping the injection of that potion…what is it called again?
--Formula number 977.
--Ha. Yeah. That’s so weird. Just a MacGuffin I guess. But it’s so great how the old hag saves him from being normal, so he can keep on having his hallucinations, can keep being himself, with all of his quirks and habits and his odd personality, and can keep all the things that are best about him. He can keep quoting Ovid and picking flowers and having wonderful conversations with his imaginary rabbit friend named Harvey. He can keep making other people happy.
--That’s really it. Isn’t it? Making other people happy, and in doing so he makes himself happy. Everybody just can’t help liking him.
--Just a commentary on the way society doesn’t want to accept outsiders, people who are a little different, how it wants people to conform to the way it wants them to be. No deviations from the norm, no uniqueness or originality allowed. Leave your daydreams at the door. And your soul too while you’re at it.
--Elwood P. Dowd, that affable tippler, is left high and dry and boring as hell…I mean if he gets the injection of Formula 977.
--No more taking the road less traveled for him. No more good times or bad times. Just bland, anesthetized, boring old reality. No six-foot rabbits to keep you company. No bats in the belfry.
--The recalcitrant given electric shocks to the brain to make them fit in.
--Or anti-depressants.
--Remember how he makes those holes in Harvey’s hat, for his ears?
--Yeah. And he’s always trying to introduce people to Harvey. It scares most people away. But not everyone. Not the bartenders, the drunks, the insane people he knows, the people that know him best. In the end his sister even admits that she loves having Harvey around.
--Do you ever talk to yourself?
--All the time. In my head mostly. But sometimes when I’m alone I’ll do it out loud. I’ve never created another being that I’m having these conversations with, but I guess I kind of do have someone that I’m talking to. I must. It’s just some kind of specter, some idea of myself…that is also not myself. It’s not a rabbit, but maybe it’s not something too dissimilar from that. I just haven’t given it a persona. I haven’t materialized my imaginings into a concrete thing. I can keep reality separated from this discussion going on in my brain.
--Are there really two of us talking?
--What?
--I mean…I just get the feeling that maybe there is no substance to us. That we are merely figments of somebody’s imagination. That we’re dreamed up. Or maybe we are just some conversation going on in somebody’s head. Is that possible?
--Anything’s possible I guess. But, shit, I don’t want to think like that. It’s like imagining that the whole universe is merely a speck of dirt on the back of a giant’s shoulder, and that when he takes a shower everything that we know of will cease existing. That kind of thinking doesn’t get you anywhere. Sure we could all be just living in somebody else’s dream. When they wake up finally we’ll all be gone. Or a giant meteor could strike the earth and do the same thing. Why contemplate life like that? What good does it do?
--I know. I know. But, I mean…I just can’t help it. Every day this thing gnaws at me. It’s getting worse and worse. This feeling that I’m just a dreamt up voice in a dull tale told by some moron filled with…fuck, I don’t know…all this sound…all of this…fury. I don’t want to be just some fictional thing, some character in somebody else’s story, some minor player doing a bit part in the story of somebody else’s life. I really am starting to think that I am just the fucking stuff that goddamn dreams are made on. Nothing but empty words…hollow…nothingness.
--Why all the dots?
--You see? Why did you say that? About the dots.
--Dots?
--Yeah. What the hell does that mean?
--I don’t know. It just seemed like you were saying stuff with a lot of dots in it.
--Saying? How can there be dots in what I’m saying? Is that some kind of metaphor or something?
--I don’t know. I don’t know what it means. Shut up! Just shut the hell up!
--Do you see what I’m saying now? Scary, huh?
--Fuck you. This is over. I just wanted to talk about this movie and now you’re turning it into this diatribe on…
--
--
--
--…
THE END
--Hey. That’s not fair. That’s not the end. This is not the end. Thdafdsafere#@$#&^%fjk%$#dhlsfjkahdslfjkh***HELP!**vbcnmxz5y34o785yq478fuiagf34fdkafv(&*)(*$%#@%#$FDfdsafdskhafjdkhfkjhlwrhewhriuwhlfr***HELP ME!!!!!dfhdjsa8947385hfusadlhfjdbs***AWWW!!!!..........
THEENDTHEENDTHEENDTHEENDTHEENDTHEENDTHEENDTHEENDTHEENDTHEEND
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Nothing Can Be Taken From Us But Our Lives
You’ve got street corners and baseball teams
and mops and buckets to catch the rain
and handouts and apple cores and used coffee grounds scattered in the bottom of the garbage can
and ice and a few forks and electricity and water that is sometimes hot too
and diseases
and a job and people who care
and moths in the bathroom and spiders everywhere
and a television set that works most of the time
and strange habits and bad manners
and whiskey and sweet vermouth
and a few clean shirts and many empty beer bottles on the floor
and some pride but not much
and novels that nobody will ever read
and music to play all night long
and a voice to sing with
and a few bucks in the bank and don’t owe a man a penny
and you are one lucky bastard goddamn it
and mops and buckets to catch the rain
and handouts and apple cores and used coffee grounds scattered in the bottom of the garbage can
and ice and a few forks and electricity and water that is sometimes hot too
and diseases
and a job and people who care
and moths in the bathroom and spiders everywhere
and a television set that works most of the time
and strange habits and bad manners
and whiskey and sweet vermouth
and a few clean shirts and many empty beer bottles on the floor
and some pride but not much
and novels that nobody will ever read
and music to play all night long
and a voice to sing with
and a few bucks in the bank and don’t owe a man a penny
and you are one lucky bastard goddamn it
memories
It was nineteen eighty something and we were eating dinner at the counter at the bar and my mother was on the other side where she always sat where she did the cooking on the other side of the table of the counter of the bar my mother over there eating and serving my father and me and my brothers and never getting a moment’s peace and doing all the dishes too and my little brother’s first memories of having his face smashed into the screen door by my father because he had spilled his milk on the counter at the counter where we sat in silence while he choked on his peas that he didn’t want to swallow as my father’s fist cracked hard against his back and he ended up on the floor choking and spitting up peas and the screen door was all dented in the shape of his little body and my mother was on the other side of the table sitting miles away and we were all silent at the table sitting at the bar on our barstools my feet dangling there way up high from the ground from the blood-red fake-brick tile floor and nobody was saying anything until my father said to finish our peas that they were some damn good peas and everyone ate their peas and didn’t say a word…
boxscores boxscores boxscores
We were just kids and a mile was the distance to the moon
And an hour seemed like an eternity
We hadn’t been going through life too long yet
And a thirty-year-old seemed ancient
I used to read the box scores every morning during baseball season
When my father would finish with the sports section of the newspaper
I would grab it and quickly turn to the back
And feast my eyes on all the numbers
All those perfect lines of digits
The categories marked by a few letters
AB R RBI HR SB
ERA W L SV
I would read them intently
Feverishly
Like I was looking at some sacred text for the first time
My fingers turning black from the ink
Drool dripping onto the page below
I loved the long abbreviated vowelless player names
Sometimes a letter or two from their first name
EDavis Mttngly DHndrsn Lnsfrd RgJcksn
Or some that just came out plain
Gwynn Boggs Weiss
I loved the aesthetics of a 4 for 4 night
The way a 1 for 4 with a run and 3 RBIs
Stood out as an obvious Home Run
The complete game shutout was a thing of beauty
As was the perfect ninth of 3 Ks for the save
I still look at the box scores every morning
While I’m drinking my coffee and enjoying the sun before work
And it always brings me this sense of excitement
And also peace
A sense that everything is right with the world
As I mumble to myself and add things up in my head
Scan the standings
And try to forget about the rest of the world for a while
And an hour seemed like an eternity
We hadn’t been going through life too long yet
And a thirty-year-old seemed ancient
I used to read the box scores every morning during baseball season
When my father would finish with the sports section of the newspaper
I would grab it and quickly turn to the back
And feast my eyes on all the numbers
All those perfect lines of digits
The categories marked by a few letters
AB R RBI HR SB
ERA W L SV
I would read them intently
Feverishly
Like I was looking at some sacred text for the first time
My fingers turning black from the ink
Drool dripping onto the page below
I loved the long abbreviated vowelless player names
Sometimes a letter or two from their first name
EDavis Mttngly DHndrsn Lnsfrd RgJcksn
Or some that just came out plain
Gwynn Boggs Weiss
I loved the aesthetics of a 4 for 4 night
The way a 1 for 4 with a run and 3 RBIs
Stood out as an obvious Home Run
The complete game shutout was a thing of beauty
As was the perfect ninth of 3 Ks for the save
I still look at the box scores every morning
While I’m drinking my coffee and enjoying the sun before work
And it always brings me this sense of excitement
And also peace
A sense that everything is right with the world
As I mumble to myself and add things up in my head
Scan the standings
And try to forget about the rest of the world for a while
Saturday, June 28, 2008
from interviews with my friend the rock star (II)
(Lyrics to part of 'Mood Swing Addict' by The Four Sqaures)
I’m a mood swing addict / smoke ‘em if you got ‘em / I’m a born modulator / got my foot on the pedal / I’m a mood swing addict / smoke my brains when I gottta / I’m a real vacillator / strung out with indecision / I’ll sleep and see you later / I wanna run on the ocean / I’m a mood swinger / mood swung at a mood swing / a mood swing / a mood / I lost me I found me I lost me I found me I…am…lost…
Sure. I get fan mail. I don’t look at it. They cart it off somewhere so I don’t have to deal with it. Why? Let me tell you about it. So, I think this is about six or seven years ago, when we first started getting really popular and things were starting to get exciting for me. I would sift through these letters and skim them. It was kind of exhilarating back then, kind of filled me with this strange short-lived kind of exuberance, to get all of these letters from fans, from people I didn’t know who enjoyed my music enough to write a letter to me. One day I get a letter from this kid, I don’t know, about thirteen or fourteen years old. You know, and he’s at about that age when things are starting to really change and get screwed up and you don’t know what the hell the world is and what you are and it’s all just a confused mess. He’s one of those depressed types, losers I guess, geeks, whatever, the kids that huddle in corners where nobody notices them. And he somehow got a hold of one of our albums, and he starts listening to it all the time. And I think the kid’s got real serious issues, like he’s manic depressive or starting to become schizophrenic, just in the really early stages, you know? So he listens to this album all the time. It was Sutpen’s Hundred. The one with Mood Swing Addict on it. In this letter the kid starts telling me how this song has like got him through a real hard time in his life. He was real suicidal, hell-bent on some kind of felo-de-se, and every time he got real bad he’d just lie in bed and listen to this song Mood Swing Addict over and over. I guess he felt some kind of connection there with what was going on in the music. You know that song, I thought it up real fast when I was in the shower one morning. I sing a lot in the shower and I actually get quite a lot of good songs out of it. The tunes just come to me out of the steam and hot water. Anyway, the thing just kind of spirited itself around and it was all done in a matter of a few hours. That doesn’t happen very often. Where a song comes out already full formed from beginning to end like that. It was a really curious thing, but I try not to think about stuff like that too much. It ruins the whole feel of the thing, the essence of it becomes stale and lost if you fuck around with it too much. But you know, the song is really this perfect example of form fitting function. It starts out with these great power chords that hook you in, kind of like a catchy pop song, and my vocals are crisp and clear and melodic, kind of chanting-like too, and then goes into this dark and wonderful disharmonious jangle, and my voice drops down to an alto, and the drums slow and start plodding. Things become chaotic and muddled for a while. Then it starts to build back up again, the drums now kind of like a march pushing forward faster and faster, and my vocals start to work back up to a higher pitch and then almost into a screaming wildness while the bass pushes everything up to this pulsating crescendo where the guitars start wailing for joy again in this feverish power chord frenzy. My voice is filled with this tense energy that just wants to explode every word like a bomb on top of the whole mess. It turns into this kind of stripped-down garage rock kind of thing, this basic rock’n’roll kind of trashing temper pervades everything. The song, which is almost ten minutes long I think, keeps oscillating between all of these different states of mind, these various ways of feeling and of not being able to feel, of anhedonia and sybaritism, of morbidity and jubilant laughter and everything in between, and the music at all times mirrors these differing mindsets. In the letter the kid is telling me how he feels so disconnected from the world, and how when he feels totally cut-off and like there is nothing he can do to bring himself out of this slough of despond he just listens to this song over and over and it somehow makes him feel connected to something, to feel I guess that somebody else understands, that these things are okay, that he’s okay, and that everything is going to be all right. That was really something. I remembered being like that kid once. Listening to Penelope of The Avengers sing, “I believe in me. I make my dreams real.” It was sort of the same thing going on. I was a lonely kid. I’d stay up late at night and read dictionaries and draw pictures with pencils on blue-lined white paper, these pictures of stick figures on piers drowning under tidal waves. I’d felt like this kid once. And music had given me the gumption and the chutzpah to do something, whatever it was, that I wanted to do. It’d given me that sense of purpose and self-confidence that I’d lacked. I wasn’t going to let anybody tell me I was no good anymore. Anyway, this kid’s letter obviously meant a whole lot to me. I went around in a daze for a few days there after reading it. It was the first time in my life I’d ever felt like I’d given something back to the world, that I’d made a difference in somebody else’s life, that I wasn’t in this just for me, you know? All the fame and the accolades and the gold records, it’s all bullshit, it’s a pipe dream, an insulated little world where you can feel safe and secure. But it’s a fake, it’s a trap, and it’s suffocating and it’ll end up killing you in the end if you get sucked in too far. One letter like that is worth more than all of that other shit combined. I always thought that I wanted to be famous, but really I guess my idea of fame was more a Saroyanian idea of it. I just wanted to be famous to a few people who mattered to me, and I’d already had that the whole time. To my wife I’m the most famous man in the world. I always have been, and I hope I always will be. Nothing can change that. And nothing should. I was famous to my parents when I was born. My good friends have always been famous to me and I’ve always been a famous person to them too. This might seem odd. Well, it is. I guess we all have our own ways of defining these things, these different ways of existing in this world. But the kind of fame that this kid saw in me, what he idolized and adored, what the music brought him, well, that’s the kind of fame that matters. I was famous to this kid because of what my music had opened up inside of him, and fame is just a mirror we hold up to ourselves, just the personification of our own idealized hopes and desires. It is what we keep telling ourselves we’d most like to be. Or sometimes we maybe trick ourselves into believing that. I am not famous because thousands of people listen to my records, or because many people pay a lot of money to go see me play music on a stage. Their adulation is petty, it’s a trick, a canard, a bluff to get through the day. And I’ve never wanted that kind of fame. Shit. Jesus. I get a lot of fan mail. I don’t read it anymore. I don’t want any more letters like that one. I just want to play my music and live my life. I just want things to be simple and good and real. Shit. It's funny. I keep thinking about that Rilke poem where he says, "You must change your life." Fuck. I don’t know. It's confusing. You got a smoke?
I’m a mood swing addict / smoke ‘em if you got ‘em / I’m a born modulator / got my foot on the pedal / I’m a mood swing addict / smoke my brains when I gottta / I’m a real vacillator / strung out with indecision / I’ll sleep and see you later / I wanna run on the ocean / I’m a mood swinger / mood swung at a mood swing / a mood swing / a mood / I lost me I found me I lost me I found me I…am…lost…
Sure. I get fan mail. I don’t look at it. They cart it off somewhere so I don’t have to deal with it. Why? Let me tell you about it. So, I think this is about six or seven years ago, when we first started getting really popular and things were starting to get exciting for me. I would sift through these letters and skim them. It was kind of exhilarating back then, kind of filled me with this strange short-lived kind of exuberance, to get all of these letters from fans, from people I didn’t know who enjoyed my music enough to write a letter to me. One day I get a letter from this kid, I don’t know, about thirteen or fourteen years old. You know, and he’s at about that age when things are starting to really change and get screwed up and you don’t know what the hell the world is and what you are and it’s all just a confused mess. He’s one of those depressed types, losers I guess, geeks, whatever, the kids that huddle in corners where nobody notices them. And he somehow got a hold of one of our albums, and he starts listening to it all the time. And I think the kid’s got real serious issues, like he’s manic depressive or starting to become schizophrenic, just in the really early stages, you know? So he listens to this album all the time. It was Sutpen’s Hundred. The one with Mood Swing Addict on it. In this letter the kid starts telling me how this song has like got him through a real hard time in his life. He was real suicidal, hell-bent on some kind of felo-de-se, and every time he got real bad he’d just lie in bed and listen to this song Mood Swing Addict over and over. I guess he felt some kind of connection there with what was going on in the music. You know that song, I thought it up real fast when I was in the shower one morning. I sing a lot in the shower and I actually get quite a lot of good songs out of it. The tunes just come to me out of the steam and hot water. Anyway, the thing just kind of spirited itself around and it was all done in a matter of a few hours. That doesn’t happen very often. Where a song comes out already full formed from beginning to end like that. It was a really curious thing, but I try not to think about stuff like that too much. It ruins the whole feel of the thing, the essence of it becomes stale and lost if you fuck around with it too much. But you know, the song is really this perfect example of form fitting function. It starts out with these great power chords that hook you in, kind of like a catchy pop song, and my vocals are crisp and clear and melodic, kind of chanting-like too, and then goes into this dark and wonderful disharmonious jangle, and my voice drops down to an alto, and the drums slow and start plodding. Things become chaotic and muddled for a while. Then it starts to build back up again, the drums now kind of like a march pushing forward faster and faster, and my vocals start to work back up to a higher pitch and then almost into a screaming wildness while the bass pushes everything up to this pulsating crescendo where the guitars start wailing for joy again in this feverish power chord frenzy. My voice is filled with this tense energy that just wants to explode every word like a bomb on top of the whole mess. It turns into this kind of stripped-down garage rock kind of thing, this basic rock’n’roll kind of trashing temper pervades everything. The song, which is almost ten minutes long I think, keeps oscillating between all of these different states of mind, these various ways of feeling and of not being able to feel, of anhedonia and sybaritism, of morbidity and jubilant laughter and everything in between, and the music at all times mirrors these differing mindsets. In the letter the kid is telling me how he feels so disconnected from the world, and how when he feels totally cut-off and like there is nothing he can do to bring himself out of this slough of despond he just listens to this song over and over and it somehow makes him feel connected to something, to feel I guess that somebody else understands, that these things are okay, that he’s okay, and that everything is going to be all right. That was really something. I remembered being like that kid once. Listening to Penelope of The Avengers sing, “I believe in me. I make my dreams real.” It was sort of the same thing going on. I was a lonely kid. I’d stay up late at night and read dictionaries and draw pictures with pencils on blue-lined white paper, these pictures of stick figures on piers drowning under tidal waves. I’d felt like this kid once. And music had given me the gumption and the chutzpah to do something, whatever it was, that I wanted to do. It’d given me that sense of purpose and self-confidence that I’d lacked. I wasn’t going to let anybody tell me I was no good anymore. Anyway, this kid’s letter obviously meant a whole lot to me. I went around in a daze for a few days there after reading it. It was the first time in my life I’d ever felt like I’d given something back to the world, that I’d made a difference in somebody else’s life, that I wasn’t in this just for me, you know? All the fame and the accolades and the gold records, it’s all bullshit, it’s a pipe dream, an insulated little world where you can feel safe and secure. But it’s a fake, it’s a trap, and it’s suffocating and it’ll end up killing you in the end if you get sucked in too far. One letter like that is worth more than all of that other shit combined. I always thought that I wanted to be famous, but really I guess my idea of fame was more a Saroyanian idea of it. I just wanted to be famous to a few people who mattered to me, and I’d already had that the whole time. To my wife I’m the most famous man in the world. I always have been, and I hope I always will be. Nothing can change that. And nothing should. I was famous to my parents when I was born. My good friends have always been famous to me and I’ve always been a famous person to them too. This might seem odd. Well, it is. I guess we all have our own ways of defining these things, these different ways of existing in this world. But the kind of fame that this kid saw in me, what he idolized and adored, what the music brought him, well, that’s the kind of fame that matters. I was famous to this kid because of what my music had opened up inside of him, and fame is just a mirror we hold up to ourselves, just the personification of our own idealized hopes and desires. It is what we keep telling ourselves we’d most like to be. Or sometimes we maybe trick ourselves into believing that. I am not famous because thousands of people listen to my records, or because many people pay a lot of money to go see me play music on a stage. Their adulation is petty, it’s a trick, a canard, a bluff to get through the day. And I’ve never wanted that kind of fame. Shit. Jesus. I get a lot of fan mail. I don’t read it anymore. I don’t want any more letters like that one. I just want to play my music and live my life. I just want things to be simple and good and real. Shit. It's funny. I keep thinking about that Rilke poem where he says, "You must change your life." Fuck. I don’t know. It's confusing. You got a smoke?
Friday, June 27, 2008
from interviews with my friend the rock star (I)
My music, well, it’s not anything I think about, you know, after it’s done. It’s a gut thing. You know. It’s just something I do. It’s this expression of myself that I don’t want to, well, like come up with any equations to explain it, to give this kind of chart, this way of being scientific about creativity, of cataloging things, being all cerebral about it. Not that there’s not a place for that kind of thing, and not that I myself don’t enjoy doing those kinds of things too sometimes. It’s just that when it comes down to it, that kind of stuff, well, it shouldn’t be the point. You should be trying to express whatever it is inside of you, and if you can do that, as honestly as possible, then you’ve succeeded. That should be the whole point of doing these things. Anyone can sit down and…well, I mean a computer can be programmed to write hit songs, to follow a certain formula, to create certain diversions and modulations of sounds and to make hooks and catchy rhythms and put words to it and to play any instrument absolutely like technically perfectly and it all sounds great, really, but there’s always going to be something missing, um…that human element, that irreplaceable emotional quality, that ineffable momentum of the spirit that just flows and goes and knows not whither nor why it goes, um, but, well it just fucking goest, doesn’t it? You have to be free, to be totally unattached and uninhibited, wild and uncontrollable, reckless, and just throw all your luck at the wind and go, "Fuck it, this is it, this is inside of me and it must have out, and I don’t give a rat’s ass what the hell the world thinks." And you can always go back and try to make it sound perfect and give it a way of feeling that you might think you might have wanted it to have when you first made the thing come to life…but the song, the life, the way, it’s all one thing and it’s all the same and it’ll never be as good as it could have been. You can talk about atonal mood swings and submediant switches from major and minor chord progressions and swinging major tonic sevenths and ninths and octave ascents and Aeolian cadences until you’re blue in the face and you still won’t understand any of it. That’s why we make music, to explain things we can’t explain in any ordinary sort of way, to create a state of mind that is unreachable by any other means, to move worlds and make galaxies collide, to breathe. If you can write this song and play it well and sing it so other people enjoy it, well, that’s great. I’m not saying that’s not a good thing. But there’s always got to be something more to it, something that you can only judge at that gut level, you know, that thing that stirs your dreams and shakes your soul and keeps you awake staring at walls at 4 a.m. until it just bursts out and leaves you oddly sapped yet also fulfilled, with this near-death kind of unthinking logic all over it, like you’re some Lazarus come back from the dead to explain things, but only you’ve got nothing to say, just this dizzy tinkling of sounds and a melody that goes round and round in your head and won’t leave on its own. Observing time as it flies by. When it stops so do I. It’s hard to talk about these kinds of things. That’s why we write songs instead. Does that answer your question?
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Some Advice To A Young Boy Dreaming Of The Big Leagues
The good lord
didn’t intend for youto hold your
left arm
up
over your
head
&
jerk
it
down vio
le
nt
ly
about a hundred times
every five days.
Fifteen Seconds Before The End Of The World
Give me both your hands
And I’ll tie them behind your back
And I’ll make a lot of speeches and
Say everything’s just rosy
And then we’ll have a dance
Where everyone is happy
Nobody says a thing
And I’m an unelected king
Who throws you all in prison
Take me to your leader
He’s the one with his head bowed
Listening for robins nesting in his bath tub
Throw them all some rice
And we’ll pretend we’re all married
Ceremonies are drab
But what a nice procession
Nothing stands in the way
Of losing all of your possessions
And I am not a person
Not one who takes things lightly
Giving away tokens
That light up all the machines
Glowing red and orange and yellow
While the sky falls on your heads
And the days are getting shorter
And time is running faster
And nobody just questions
The way things should be happening
The way things should be going
Everything is on my shoulders
The world is always sinking
Don’t forget to bring your lunchpails
Dinner is a long ways away
The bells have all been ringing
Since I learned to tie my shoes
And count up to eight
Sing a song of things found upon a trash heap
We all know the ways
To forget our ambition
To destroy our elation
To empty our jubilation
To chew on our frustration
To mind someone else’s manners
This is just something
You can’t quite call your own
This is just somewhere
You can’t quite call your home
And I’ll tie them behind your back
And I’ll make a lot of speeches and
Say everything’s just rosy
And then we’ll have a dance
Where everyone is happy
Nobody says a thing
And I’m an unelected king
Who throws you all in prison
Take me to your leader
He’s the one with his head bowed
Listening for robins nesting in his bath tub
Throw them all some rice
And we’ll pretend we’re all married
Ceremonies are drab
But what a nice procession
Nothing stands in the way
Of losing all of your possessions
And I am not a person
Not one who takes things lightly
Giving away tokens
That light up all the machines
Glowing red and orange and yellow
While the sky falls on your heads
And the days are getting shorter
And time is running faster
And nobody just questions
The way things should be happening
The way things should be going
Everything is on my shoulders
The world is always sinking
Don’t forget to bring your lunchpails
Dinner is a long ways away
The bells have all been ringing
Since I learned to tie my shoes
And count up to eight
Sing a song of things found upon a trash heap
We all know the ways
To forget our ambition
To destroy our elation
To empty our jubilation
To chew on our frustration
To mind someone else’s manners
This is just something
You can’t quite call your own
This is just somewhere
You can’t quite call your home
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Forever Undone
--Nobody will care. That’s just the thing. Nobody cares.
--But why should they? Tell me that.
--I don’t know why. I just do these things and I guess I just need a place to put them. I need a place to put all of these things. I don’t have anywhere to put them anymore.
--That’s just a bunch of nonsense.
--It’s the only way I can explain it. And I do feel that people should care.
--That’s such egotistic bullshit. You should try being a nihilist. It’s much easier.
--Wha…?
--Nobody is going to always care about your little life and the things you do with it. They have their own little lives to lead and, if you can believe this, they think that their lives are important too. You ain’t that special. Why should somebody else invest their limited amount of leisure time in reading these little, um, vignettes? Whatever you call them. These things that you can’t find a place for. I mean, shit. I’m busy. I’ve got stuff going on. It’s baseball season.
--Ok. I understand these things.
--I don’t think you do.
--I just want somebody else to care.
--Nobody cares. Give me one good reason that somebody should care about what you’re doing say, um, like on a Wednesday morning.
--Yes. That’s just it. So, just hear me out.
--I’ll try. It won’t be easy. Like waiting for the Giants to score a run.
--So I’m working on this thing, well actually I’m just thinking of working on this thing. I do a lot more thinking about doing things than actually doing them.
--I know.
--It’s a story of some sort about a guy who spends some time sitting around downtown really early in the morning, like at five am or something, you know, just when the sun’s coming up and the fog is still smeared all over everything like mashed potatoes starting to get buttered.
--Starting to get buttered?
--You know, like when the sun starts getting all over the buildings and it looks like butter melting on all the fog.
--Is that what they call a mixed metaphor? Is that even true? I’ve never noticed anything like that at five am.
--Anyway. It’s really early in the morning and the city is just starting to wake up and people are starting to spill onto the streets coming out in larger and larger droves from the Bart stations and the buses. There is just a feel to that time of day, a sort of lingering energy that seems to suffuse everything, to slap motion and promise like a fresh coat of paint on the crisp morning air.
--Wait. Now I don’t know much, but I know what you just said doesn’t make much sense.
--That doesn’t matter. Just hold on.
--Sure thing.
--So this guy is going to just kind of hang around and watch things, look at them, wander around, check it all out…he’s going to get a cup of coffee at the Peet’s on Montgomery and sit outside the building and watch the shadows start to climb up the façade of Willis Polk’s Mills Building across the street.
--Sorry. I was waiting for a metaphor. Climb like…
--Peet’s is in the Russ building there on Montgomery. It’s an incredible building. A landmark. Neo-gothic, steel frame, thirty-two stories of terra cotta tile and brick. When it was built in 1927 it was the tallest building in San Francisco. Sometimes I just stand on the sidewalk and stare up at it until I get dizzy.
--Sounds like a blast.
--If I stare up long enough it starts to seem like I’m looking at it horizontally, like I could just walk right up the side of it like spider man.
--Please don’t ever try to do that.
--So I was going to have this guy in the story just sit there outside of Peet’s for a while and just watch things from there, notice things, describe what’s going on, that kind of thing.
--Sorry. I fell asleep there. What?
--But the thing is, I really wanted to do this good, make the thing really, um, descriptive.
--Really?
--So now I’m planning on waking up at the crack of dawn, you know, really early for a whole week, and going down to the Peet’s and get a coffee and just sit there with my notebook writing things down all morning.
--You have a notebook?
--Well, no. But I’m planning on buying one soon.
--What’s the story going to be about?
--Oh, I don’t know. Nothing really. I’ll figure that out later. It’s not very important.
--And you wonder why nobody cares about this shit?
--I’m going to walk all over the Financial District and watch people and look all around at the buildings and the shadows and the sunlight and the thin rectangles of sky between the buildings becoming blue. I’m going to drink my coffee and feel good about the world and write all of these things down in my notebook. These are the kinds of things I want to have in the story. This feeling about what it’s like to be up early and to be unattached from all of this busyness going on all around you, to be alone in this massive pulsating and always fast moving crowd, all these people marching purposefully towards nothing, trying not to be late and lost in their own little world of meanings. But it’s hard for me to wake up early. I don’t sleep well, you know, and any time before like ten is rough. I’m having a hard time not resetting that alarm when it goes off at five.
--I bet. I still can’t see much of a readership for this thing.
--Yeah. But that doesn’t matter. I just want to do this thing, to have this plan of this thing I’m going to do, to have something that I’m working on, a project, a purpose. It’ll feel good to be out there like that in the early morning. I used to do things like that all the time when I was younger, just because I liked doing them. I didn’t have to force myself to do enjoyable things back then. Now, I’m not so sure anymore. Is it really worth it? Is anybody going to care?
--But why should that matter? You shouldn’t even be thinking about that. It shouldn’t be of even the slightest fucking concern to you what somebody else is going to think about this thing. It’s you story. Make it like you want it. And have a good time doing it. You shouldn’t have to force yourself to have a good time. The doing of it is all that matters. Everything else is just gravy.
--I hate when people say that.
--Why?
--I don’t know. It just bothers me. Maybe it’s the word gravy. It sounds too similar to my name. Like when somebody says, “baby carrots,” and I turn around.
--So…who cares what the final outcome of all this is? It is the living of life that matters, not the writing about it afterwards.
--Make your art in how you live your life, right? Something like that?
--Maybe. But no. You should try to make art in your life too, or, art in your art? Life in your art into life? Life into…?
--Stop it. So I guess my main problem with the whole thing is that I know it will be a failure. It’s impossible for it not to be. I have this idea of how it will be in my mind, of how it is supposed to turn out, and there is no way it could possibly live up to this impossible set of expectations I’ve set up for it. It’ll never be what it could have been. Just another magnificent mistake. But in the end if it isn’t entertaining, if people are not entertained by it, then I guess people won’t have a reason for reading it. That’s mostly what people want, isn’t it? To be mindlessly entertained, to be passive, inactive, reduced to the least common denominator of their being?
--I think you may not be giving people enough credit.
--But really. Is anybody going to care? I mean, take this for example. I was going to have part of my story be about the guy staring at this building at 130 Bush. It’s this really tall slender building that’s squashed between two much larger and much taller buildings. It was built on a lot that was only 20 feet wide and eighty feet deep. Originally it was a necktie, belt, and suspender factory. It was built in 1910, and at the time its ten stories made it the tallest building around. It’s got a gothic façade and it’s faced with glazed terra cotta tiles, and each story has hammered copper tiles outside and bowed windows with prisms that direct the sunlight into the narrow interior. The Grant and the Shell buildings smash the thing in from both sides, seeming to squash its narrow frame and cause the bowed windows to bend. It’s a great optical illusion of a sort. So, I was going to have this guy stare at it for a while and think about all these things and about the building and its history and the history of the world going on around it, and all this really being just a disguise for the character thinking all these things about himself, about the way he is and why, and the whole history behind that. It’s just this idea I have about objects merely being a reflection of who you are, like what you see is what you want to see, what you superimpose on the object making it something more or maybe less than what it really is, but never really what it is.
--That’s a mouthful.
--So everybody sees something different when they look at the same thing. And whatever this character sees and describes is really just a way of expressing what is going on with him, inside his head.
--You’re right. That’s not going to be very entertaining, except maybe to you.
--Nobody is going to care.
--Isn’t there a sushi place in that building on Bush?
--Yeah. It used to be a restaurant called The Iron Duke. It was really popular when they finished the Crown Zellerbach building across the street in the sixties.
--You really know a lot about this damn building, don’t you?
--I guess so. It’s really something. You should check it out sometime.
--I just might do that. Though according to you I won’t really be seeing the building. At least not in the same way that you do, right?
--Well, not really. It’s hard to explain.
--Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe if you worked on figuring out what you really wanted to say, and made it clear and less abstract, and if you got across what all of this really meant in a way that’s not obfuscated and muddled and rambling and incoherent, maybe, just maybe, it would matter to other people. They would start to…care.
--But that wouldn’t be real. That wouldn’t be genuine. It wouldn’t do justice to the kernel of the idea of what all of this really is, this life we are leading, these things we observe and digest and spit out, and they come out just the way they are because that’s just how they happen to come out. I can’t change them anymore than I can make myself start breathing without any oxygen or tell a leaf to stop being a leaf and turn into a cow or turn my arms into wings and fly away. It’s just how it happens and there’s nothing I can do about it.
--I’ve completely lost you. Slow down.
--Ok. Let me see. This story, when and if it happens to be written, by me, will be a random assortment of chaotic things all jumbled together, a hodgepodge or a gallimaufry of ideas just flowing by, a feeling, a sense, a stone a leaf a door, memory, all these things fluttering in the breeze of imagination, and they are all just going to happen as they do. Nothing can change that. I don’t want anything to change that. Whatever the end result is doesn’t matter. It’s the act, the process of creating the thing that is important.
--So what you want to do, and let me know if I’m correct here because I’m utterly befuddled by all of this and really fucking confused, is to create this “story” or whatever it is that you want to call it, and you want other people to care about it, but you don’t care what the actual story ends up being on the page. All you care about is the process of writing the damn thing. But at the same time you have all these ideas that you want to explore and make other people see while they are reading the thing, but you only want to hint at these ideas in some metaphorical sort of way, like you’re making a puzzle that you expect other people to want to put together without any help from you. In fact, you want to make it extremely difficult for people to figure out what the hell is going on. And you want to do all of this spontaneously, without really trying to do it, while at the same time not being entertaining in any sort of traditional way, going off on all kinds of tangents and digressions to the ultimate distraction and perturbation of the reader, and putting in all of this stuff about old buildings and esoteric architecture and sunlight and shadows…am I missing anything?
--Yes. You are missing everything.
--Ok. Please. Enlighten me.
--Don’t you think people will feel somehow rewarded when they figure the thing out? Won’t they want to bring their own lives to the story, to think about themselves in the shoes of the character, and won’t this make it seem important, if not urgent, that they get to the bottom of this thing? And maybe they’ll have a better appreciation of the world going on around them afterwards. Maybe they’ll see things with new eyes and maybe have a little more appreciation of beauty, or at least a better sense of things…of the fact that none of us knows what the hell is going on. That we are all alone and that we just spend our lives pretending that what we do matters. And in the end that is what makes everything meaningful. Nothing matters so everything is important. The world and our lives are only what we make them. We make our own meaning.
--It’s like when you were talking about people only seeing what they want to see, that superimposing of their own lives on to objects. They’ll come to your story with all of their own baggage of experience, all of their own ideas about things, and they’ll put all of those things onto your story. They’ll see themselves in the reflection of the story. The story will be the object that they are superimposing themselves on. Nobody will see the story in the same way. There will be no story at all. Am I getting close?
--I think so. I like that. There will be no story at all. There’s something comforting in that.
--And you are going to do all of this without really trying?
--That’s harder to explain.
--Oh shit.
--Just wait. I guess it’s part of the same thing. There is this theory I have about energy…
--Another theory? Hold on, let me get my pen. I think I might need to take notes on this.
--It’s like entropy. Kind of. First you have to realize that writing, like any art form, is a very high-energy activity. It takes a lot out of you. It involves a huge amount of concentration and focus. A lot of zeal. You have to really believe in what you’re doing and you’ve got to put a big dose of yourself into it, and you’ve got to have loads of time to do nothing but write for hours and hours on end. It’s not how I’d recommend spending your life.
--So why do you do it?
--I don’t have any choice. It chooses you. You don’t choose it.
--That’s stupid. Go on.
--Ok. So as I was saying, there is a huge expenditure of energy any time you attempt to write. And this energy has to come from somewhere, and once it’s gone it can’t be replaced. No amount of caffeine or amphetamines or whatever can make up for it.
--I’d beg to differ.
--You’d be wrong. Trust me. I’ve tried. I’ve spent my whole chasing this phantom of expendable energy. Nothing can take its place. If it’s not there, it’s not there. Nothing can change that. You just have to wait. And when it comes sometimes you’re not ready for it, you can’t make anything happen. People talk about inspiration. I’m not sure. I don’t know. I’ll I know is that nobody is going to care.
--It must be frustrating.
--No. It’s probably one of the most worthwhile things you could do with your time. But you only have so much of this energy and so much time to use it and once you use it up that’s it, that’s all you can do, and whatever happens on the page, well, you can’t change it, you can’t put more energy back into a closed system. Any changes you might make would ruin the thing that you’ve created.
--So what you’ve created is still born. It’s dead, fossilized, set in stone. With all of its imperfections and blemishes and tiny built-in disasters.
--It’s hard to even look at it sometimes. You lose that, um, I don’t know…that ecstatic moment that just happens before you could ever think to invent it. I think Keats called it a spontaneous overflowing of feelings. There is really no way to describe it, but when you have it you know it, and there’s nothing you can do to force it to happen, it just has to happen, and you can’t spend time worrying about commas and compound words or paragraphs or you lose it and you might not find it again.
--Does this certain strategy of yours ever work? I mean, does the thing say what you want it to say? It doesn’t seem like you are very careful about it, like you’re not very methodical about it or even think about what you’re going to do at all, like maybe you think it’s all subconscious or even effortless.
--Not effortless…but made to seem that way. Um. No. I’m not sure. Writing is just that act of constantly giving away little pieces of yourself to others.
--Tell me some more about the bricks in those buildings downtown.
--I think I was talking about the Mills building at some point. The shadows creeping up its yellow-buff brick walls that have all of these very intricate designs done in terra cotta. The bricks just look old, kind of ochre colored, weathered I guess you’d say. But the bottom part of the building’s façade is all white marble, I think it’s from Inyo County or something, and the entrance arch is really something. It’s very high and grand, very Romanesque, with all these Doric pillars or columns and there are also these intaglios, or maybe etchings in bas-relief all over the top of the entrance, I can’t remember exactly. I was going to have the character walk around for a while just noticing things like this. I was going to have him walk by the old Pacific Stock Exchange building, which is now an Equinox gym, and sit around on the steps for a bit, maybe have him walk down to check out the Newhall Building with its rich red brick piers, the ornate cream terra cotta decorations, the eagles in the spandrels of the top floor, that wonderful Renaissance/Baroque ornamentation designed by Mr. Lewis Hobart way back in nineteen hundred and ten that is still standing ten-stories tall on the corner of Battery and California. Maybe he would start to wonder about what had happened to all those years, all that time, all those things that had happened for almost a hundred years on these streets and in these same buildings, all of it gone yet at the same time still there. Maybe he’d go and sit in St. Mary’s Square and stare up at the tall buildings that seem to be hemming him in from all sides. Maybe something would happen to him while he is sitting there, or he’d go off and look up at what he believes to be Grim Reapers glowering down at him from the 23rd floor of 580 California. Or he’d remember about Muriel Castanis and her ideas about “Corporate Goddesses.” He’d wonder about the certain way the sun has of hitting the windows across the street from his house for just a moment at a particular time of the day so that he’s blinded from where he sits and watches TV.
--I wish you had a better memory. You seem kind of hazy on details. All this limning. It’s kind of skimpy.
--Well, you can’t put everything in there. You’ve got to leave a bunch of stuff out. That’s really what writing is. You spend most of your time paring things down, filtering out the unnecessary, separating the chaff of experience from the grain of life. What’s left is just a tiny remnant of what reality might once have been, a tiny pebble on the sands of experience. And if you’re lucky what you are left with will be maybe one hundredth of what you wanted to be there when you started off, and that’s if you’re lucky. It’s a very low percentage game, like baseball I guess, but even lower. I was even thinking of having the character wander into the Cala Foods on Hyde. He was going to kind of go into a trance staring at the giant wall on the north side with all the windows in it.
--Oh yeah. All those rectangles lined up like some kind of, I don’t know, checkerboard?
--No. But yes. Those windows. They kind of remind me of a bad piece of modern art you’d find on the walls of a dental office or something. You can see these rectangular pieces of the houses and buildings across the street through them. It’s like somebody’s been putting together a puzzle that is a photograph of the buildings over there when it’s done, but they’ve only been able to put together these rectangular parts and the rest is just the white of the wall. Does that make any sense?
--No. Not at all. I just don’t get what you are trying to do with these diversions. Do you expect the reader to follow all of this nonsense? Who the hell is Muriel Castanis?
--I’m not really sure. I guess it’s just something to pass the time.
--I’d rather pass my time getting dragged through the street tied to the back of a speeding car by a chain.
--If you had your druthers.
--I’d rather.
--You’d rather. D’rather. Druther. Get it?
--No.
--Yeah. I don’t either. I think it has something to do with Hart Crane or something.
--What the fuck are you talking about?
--Nothing. Nobody cares.
--You’re right about that.
--But why should they? Tell me that.
--I don’t know why. I just do these things and I guess I just need a place to put them. I need a place to put all of these things. I don’t have anywhere to put them anymore.
--That’s just a bunch of nonsense.
--It’s the only way I can explain it. And I do feel that people should care.
--That’s such egotistic bullshit. You should try being a nihilist. It’s much easier.
--Wha…?
--Nobody is going to always care about your little life and the things you do with it. They have their own little lives to lead and, if you can believe this, they think that their lives are important too. You ain’t that special. Why should somebody else invest their limited amount of leisure time in reading these little, um, vignettes? Whatever you call them. These things that you can’t find a place for. I mean, shit. I’m busy. I’ve got stuff going on. It’s baseball season.
--Ok. I understand these things.
--I don’t think you do.
--I just want somebody else to care.
--Nobody cares. Give me one good reason that somebody should care about what you’re doing say, um, like on a Wednesday morning.
--Yes. That’s just it. So, just hear me out.
--I’ll try. It won’t be easy. Like waiting for the Giants to score a run.
--So I’m working on this thing, well actually I’m just thinking of working on this thing. I do a lot more thinking about doing things than actually doing them.
--I know.
--It’s a story of some sort about a guy who spends some time sitting around downtown really early in the morning, like at five am or something, you know, just when the sun’s coming up and the fog is still smeared all over everything like mashed potatoes starting to get buttered.
--Starting to get buttered?
--You know, like when the sun starts getting all over the buildings and it looks like butter melting on all the fog.
--Is that what they call a mixed metaphor? Is that even true? I’ve never noticed anything like that at five am.
--Anyway. It’s really early in the morning and the city is just starting to wake up and people are starting to spill onto the streets coming out in larger and larger droves from the Bart stations and the buses. There is just a feel to that time of day, a sort of lingering energy that seems to suffuse everything, to slap motion and promise like a fresh coat of paint on the crisp morning air.
--Wait. Now I don’t know much, but I know what you just said doesn’t make much sense.
--That doesn’t matter. Just hold on.
--Sure thing.
--So this guy is going to just kind of hang around and watch things, look at them, wander around, check it all out…he’s going to get a cup of coffee at the Peet’s on Montgomery and sit outside the building and watch the shadows start to climb up the façade of Willis Polk’s Mills Building across the street.
--Sorry. I was waiting for a metaphor. Climb like…
--Peet’s is in the Russ building there on Montgomery. It’s an incredible building. A landmark. Neo-gothic, steel frame, thirty-two stories of terra cotta tile and brick. When it was built in 1927 it was the tallest building in San Francisco. Sometimes I just stand on the sidewalk and stare up at it until I get dizzy.
--Sounds like a blast.
--If I stare up long enough it starts to seem like I’m looking at it horizontally, like I could just walk right up the side of it like spider man.
--Please don’t ever try to do that.
--So I was going to have this guy in the story just sit there outside of Peet’s for a while and just watch things from there, notice things, describe what’s going on, that kind of thing.
--Sorry. I fell asleep there. What?
--But the thing is, I really wanted to do this good, make the thing really, um, descriptive.
--Really?
--So now I’m planning on waking up at the crack of dawn, you know, really early for a whole week, and going down to the Peet’s and get a coffee and just sit there with my notebook writing things down all morning.
--You have a notebook?
--Well, no. But I’m planning on buying one soon.
--What’s the story going to be about?
--Oh, I don’t know. Nothing really. I’ll figure that out later. It’s not very important.
--And you wonder why nobody cares about this shit?
--I’m going to walk all over the Financial District and watch people and look all around at the buildings and the shadows and the sunlight and the thin rectangles of sky between the buildings becoming blue. I’m going to drink my coffee and feel good about the world and write all of these things down in my notebook. These are the kinds of things I want to have in the story. This feeling about what it’s like to be up early and to be unattached from all of this busyness going on all around you, to be alone in this massive pulsating and always fast moving crowd, all these people marching purposefully towards nothing, trying not to be late and lost in their own little world of meanings. But it’s hard for me to wake up early. I don’t sleep well, you know, and any time before like ten is rough. I’m having a hard time not resetting that alarm when it goes off at five.
--I bet. I still can’t see much of a readership for this thing.
--Yeah. But that doesn’t matter. I just want to do this thing, to have this plan of this thing I’m going to do, to have something that I’m working on, a project, a purpose. It’ll feel good to be out there like that in the early morning. I used to do things like that all the time when I was younger, just because I liked doing them. I didn’t have to force myself to do enjoyable things back then. Now, I’m not so sure anymore. Is it really worth it? Is anybody going to care?
--But why should that matter? You shouldn’t even be thinking about that. It shouldn’t be of even the slightest fucking concern to you what somebody else is going to think about this thing. It’s you story. Make it like you want it. And have a good time doing it. You shouldn’t have to force yourself to have a good time. The doing of it is all that matters. Everything else is just gravy.
--I hate when people say that.
--Why?
--I don’t know. It just bothers me. Maybe it’s the word gravy. It sounds too similar to my name. Like when somebody says, “baby carrots,” and I turn around.
--So…who cares what the final outcome of all this is? It is the living of life that matters, not the writing about it afterwards.
--Make your art in how you live your life, right? Something like that?
--Maybe. But no. You should try to make art in your life too, or, art in your art? Life in your art into life? Life into…?
--Stop it. So I guess my main problem with the whole thing is that I know it will be a failure. It’s impossible for it not to be. I have this idea of how it will be in my mind, of how it is supposed to turn out, and there is no way it could possibly live up to this impossible set of expectations I’ve set up for it. It’ll never be what it could have been. Just another magnificent mistake. But in the end if it isn’t entertaining, if people are not entertained by it, then I guess people won’t have a reason for reading it. That’s mostly what people want, isn’t it? To be mindlessly entertained, to be passive, inactive, reduced to the least common denominator of their being?
--I think you may not be giving people enough credit.
--But really. Is anybody going to care? I mean, take this for example. I was going to have part of my story be about the guy staring at this building at 130 Bush. It’s this really tall slender building that’s squashed between two much larger and much taller buildings. It was built on a lot that was only 20 feet wide and eighty feet deep. Originally it was a necktie, belt, and suspender factory. It was built in 1910, and at the time its ten stories made it the tallest building around. It’s got a gothic façade and it’s faced with glazed terra cotta tiles, and each story has hammered copper tiles outside and bowed windows with prisms that direct the sunlight into the narrow interior. The Grant and the Shell buildings smash the thing in from both sides, seeming to squash its narrow frame and cause the bowed windows to bend. It’s a great optical illusion of a sort. So, I was going to have this guy stare at it for a while and think about all these things and about the building and its history and the history of the world going on around it, and all this really being just a disguise for the character thinking all these things about himself, about the way he is and why, and the whole history behind that. It’s just this idea I have about objects merely being a reflection of who you are, like what you see is what you want to see, what you superimpose on the object making it something more or maybe less than what it really is, but never really what it is.
--That’s a mouthful.
--So everybody sees something different when they look at the same thing. And whatever this character sees and describes is really just a way of expressing what is going on with him, inside his head.
--You’re right. That’s not going to be very entertaining, except maybe to you.
--Nobody is going to care.
--Isn’t there a sushi place in that building on Bush?
--Yeah. It used to be a restaurant called The Iron Duke. It was really popular when they finished the Crown Zellerbach building across the street in the sixties.
--You really know a lot about this damn building, don’t you?
--I guess so. It’s really something. You should check it out sometime.
--I just might do that. Though according to you I won’t really be seeing the building. At least not in the same way that you do, right?
--Well, not really. It’s hard to explain.
--Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe if you worked on figuring out what you really wanted to say, and made it clear and less abstract, and if you got across what all of this really meant in a way that’s not obfuscated and muddled and rambling and incoherent, maybe, just maybe, it would matter to other people. They would start to…care.
--But that wouldn’t be real. That wouldn’t be genuine. It wouldn’t do justice to the kernel of the idea of what all of this really is, this life we are leading, these things we observe and digest and spit out, and they come out just the way they are because that’s just how they happen to come out. I can’t change them anymore than I can make myself start breathing without any oxygen or tell a leaf to stop being a leaf and turn into a cow or turn my arms into wings and fly away. It’s just how it happens and there’s nothing I can do about it.
--I’ve completely lost you. Slow down.
--Ok. Let me see. This story, when and if it happens to be written, by me, will be a random assortment of chaotic things all jumbled together, a hodgepodge or a gallimaufry of ideas just flowing by, a feeling, a sense, a stone a leaf a door, memory, all these things fluttering in the breeze of imagination, and they are all just going to happen as they do. Nothing can change that. I don’t want anything to change that. Whatever the end result is doesn’t matter. It’s the act, the process of creating the thing that is important.
--So what you want to do, and let me know if I’m correct here because I’m utterly befuddled by all of this and really fucking confused, is to create this “story” or whatever it is that you want to call it, and you want other people to care about it, but you don’t care what the actual story ends up being on the page. All you care about is the process of writing the damn thing. But at the same time you have all these ideas that you want to explore and make other people see while they are reading the thing, but you only want to hint at these ideas in some metaphorical sort of way, like you’re making a puzzle that you expect other people to want to put together without any help from you. In fact, you want to make it extremely difficult for people to figure out what the hell is going on. And you want to do all of this spontaneously, without really trying to do it, while at the same time not being entertaining in any sort of traditional way, going off on all kinds of tangents and digressions to the ultimate distraction and perturbation of the reader, and putting in all of this stuff about old buildings and esoteric architecture and sunlight and shadows…am I missing anything?
--Yes. You are missing everything.
--Ok. Please. Enlighten me.
--Don’t you think people will feel somehow rewarded when they figure the thing out? Won’t they want to bring their own lives to the story, to think about themselves in the shoes of the character, and won’t this make it seem important, if not urgent, that they get to the bottom of this thing? And maybe they’ll have a better appreciation of the world going on around them afterwards. Maybe they’ll see things with new eyes and maybe have a little more appreciation of beauty, or at least a better sense of things…of the fact that none of us knows what the hell is going on. That we are all alone and that we just spend our lives pretending that what we do matters. And in the end that is what makes everything meaningful. Nothing matters so everything is important. The world and our lives are only what we make them. We make our own meaning.
--It’s like when you were talking about people only seeing what they want to see, that superimposing of their own lives on to objects. They’ll come to your story with all of their own baggage of experience, all of their own ideas about things, and they’ll put all of those things onto your story. They’ll see themselves in the reflection of the story. The story will be the object that they are superimposing themselves on. Nobody will see the story in the same way. There will be no story at all. Am I getting close?
--I think so. I like that. There will be no story at all. There’s something comforting in that.
--And you are going to do all of this without really trying?
--That’s harder to explain.
--Oh shit.
--Just wait. I guess it’s part of the same thing. There is this theory I have about energy…
--Another theory? Hold on, let me get my pen. I think I might need to take notes on this.
--It’s like entropy. Kind of. First you have to realize that writing, like any art form, is a very high-energy activity. It takes a lot out of you. It involves a huge amount of concentration and focus. A lot of zeal. You have to really believe in what you’re doing and you’ve got to put a big dose of yourself into it, and you’ve got to have loads of time to do nothing but write for hours and hours on end. It’s not how I’d recommend spending your life.
--So why do you do it?
--I don’t have any choice. It chooses you. You don’t choose it.
--That’s stupid. Go on.
--Ok. So as I was saying, there is a huge expenditure of energy any time you attempt to write. And this energy has to come from somewhere, and once it’s gone it can’t be replaced. No amount of caffeine or amphetamines or whatever can make up for it.
--I’d beg to differ.
--You’d be wrong. Trust me. I’ve tried. I’ve spent my whole chasing this phantom of expendable energy. Nothing can take its place. If it’s not there, it’s not there. Nothing can change that. You just have to wait. And when it comes sometimes you’re not ready for it, you can’t make anything happen. People talk about inspiration. I’m not sure. I don’t know. I’ll I know is that nobody is going to care.
--It must be frustrating.
--No. It’s probably one of the most worthwhile things you could do with your time. But you only have so much of this energy and so much time to use it and once you use it up that’s it, that’s all you can do, and whatever happens on the page, well, you can’t change it, you can’t put more energy back into a closed system. Any changes you might make would ruin the thing that you’ve created.
--So what you’ve created is still born. It’s dead, fossilized, set in stone. With all of its imperfections and blemishes and tiny built-in disasters.
--It’s hard to even look at it sometimes. You lose that, um, I don’t know…that ecstatic moment that just happens before you could ever think to invent it. I think Keats called it a spontaneous overflowing of feelings. There is really no way to describe it, but when you have it you know it, and there’s nothing you can do to force it to happen, it just has to happen, and you can’t spend time worrying about commas and compound words or paragraphs or you lose it and you might not find it again.
--Does this certain strategy of yours ever work? I mean, does the thing say what you want it to say? It doesn’t seem like you are very careful about it, like you’re not very methodical about it or even think about what you’re going to do at all, like maybe you think it’s all subconscious or even effortless.
--Not effortless…but made to seem that way. Um. No. I’m not sure. Writing is just that act of constantly giving away little pieces of yourself to others.
--Tell me some more about the bricks in those buildings downtown.
--I think I was talking about the Mills building at some point. The shadows creeping up its yellow-buff brick walls that have all of these very intricate designs done in terra cotta. The bricks just look old, kind of ochre colored, weathered I guess you’d say. But the bottom part of the building’s façade is all white marble, I think it’s from Inyo County or something, and the entrance arch is really something. It’s very high and grand, very Romanesque, with all these Doric pillars or columns and there are also these intaglios, or maybe etchings in bas-relief all over the top of the entrance, I can’t remember exactly. I was going to have the character walk around for a while just noticing things like this. I was going to have him walk by the old Pacific Stock Exchange building, which is now an Equinox gym, and sit around on the steps for a bit, maybe have him walk down to check out the Newhall Building with its rich red brick piers, the ornate cream terra cotta decorations, the eagles in the spandrels of the top floor, that wonderful Renaissance/Baroque ornamentation designed by Mr. Lewis Hobart way back in nineteen hundred and ten that is still standing ten-stories tall on the corner of Battery and California. Maybe he would start to wonder about what had happened to all those years, all that time, all those things that had happened for almost a hundred years on these streets and in these same buildings, all of it gone yet at the same time still there. Maybe he’d go and sit in St. Mary’s Square and stare up at the tall buildings that seem to be hemming him in from all sides. Maybe something would happen to him while he is sitting there, or he’d go off and look up at what he believes to be Grim Reapers glowering down at him from the 23rd floor of 580 California. Or he’d remember about Muriel Castanis and her ideas about “Corporate Goddesses.” He’d wonder about the certain way the sun has of hitting the windows across the street from his house for just a moment at a particular time of the day so that he’s blinded from where he sits and watches TV.
--I wish you had a better memory. You seem kind of hazy on details. All this limning. It’s kind of skimpy.
--Well, you can’t put everything in there. You’ve got to leave a bunch of stuff out. That’s really what writing is. You spend most of your time paring things down, filtering out the unnecessary, separating the chaff of experience from the grain of life. What’s left is just a tiny remnant of what reality might once have been, a tiny pebble on the sands of experience. And if you’re lucky what you are left with will be maybe one hundredth of what you wanted to be there when you started off, and that’s if you’re lucky. It’s a very low percentage game, like baseball I guess, but even lower. I was even thinking of having the character wander into the Cala Foods on Hyde. He was going to kind of go into a trance staring at the giant wall on the north side with all the windows in it.
--Oh yeah. All those rectangles lined up like some kind of, I don’t know, checkerboard?
--No. But yes. Those windows. They kind of remind me of a bad piece of modern art you’d find on the walls of a dental office or something. You can see these rectangular pieces of the houses and buildings across the street through them. It’s like somebody’s been putting together a puzzle that is a photograph of the buildings over there when it’s done, but they’ve only been able to put together these rectangular parts and the rest is just the white of the wall. Does that make any sense?
--No. Not at all. I just don’t get what you are trying to do with these diversions. Do you expect the reader to follow all of this nonsense? Who the hell is Muriel Castanis?
--I’m not really sure. I guess it’s just something to pass the time.
--I’d rather pass my time getting dragged through the street tied to the back of a speeding car by a chain.
--If you had your druthers.
--I’d rather.
--You’d rather. D’rather. Druther. Get it?
--No.
--Yeah. I don’t either. I think it has something to do with Hart Crane or something.
--What the fuck are you talking about?
--Nothing. Nobody cares.
--You’re right about that.
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