OPENING DAY

Met was walking down Bush street one day and I saw him walking there but he didn’t see me. You might think Met is a strange name for a guy. And it is. But you see his parents wanted him to be a baseball player. They were both diehard Mets fans. They wanted him to be a Met. So they named the poor bastard Met. That’s that. But anyway, he’s walking down Bush street, over by Japan Town, and he’s looking all over the place. That guy’s always looking all around, always running into things too. He’s all elbows and knees, a real stick-and-bones knobby kind of guy. Long and lanky I guess you’d say if you were being nice about it. His arms are long and rubbery, like over-cooked noodles, and they’re always flapping around when he’s walking. It’s funny how his head looks on him, like a pumpkin on a stick. See, he’s got a really skinny long neck. And all his frizzy blond hair is always sticking up there on that big old head like frayed, knotted rope. The guy sure is something to see. It’s like seeing a Scarecrow walking around. So, I’m walking coming from the other way and I’m on the other side of the street, see? And so I see Met just kind of frolicking around there, skipping a little, and coming towards me over on the other side of the street there. I think, hey, maybe I’ll just go on over there and say hi to the guy. But instead, you see, I just kind of keep my distance and try to make myself there really inconspicuous, very secret-like, you see. So as he wouldn’t get wind of me. Of course Met’s so oblivious that he’d hardly notice if one of those there nuclear bombs went off right next to him. He’d just keep walking along like some guy high on gas after the dentist, looking at all the flowers, like some dickwad who’s just huffed a bunch of gas and is like seeing colors and shit all over the place. He’s almost like one of those hippie types, you know? Just real lost and not with it, out there, all airy and kind of, well, just in his own little world there. So I’m watching him walk along, and he’s going real slow and looking at all the houses and trees and stopping all the time to check out cars parked on the street and the house address numbers painted on the curb and even some trash that he finds on the sidewalk there. He seemed really whacked out. It wasn’t that unusual for him to be acting this way, so I wasn’t too concerned. It was kind of fun watching him there like that, and I started kind of laughing there to myself a little. I kept imagining like some pianola music playing, like he was in a silent film or something, and it was really funny watching him kind of trip along there like that to the music playing in my head. I was whistling and kind of clapping my hands. Boy, I must’ve looked silly standing there like that. But I was too absorbed there, what with watching Met fumbling about, to even be aware of what I was doing. I remember distinctly that I was tapping my foot and even making some clucking noises with my tongue on the roof of my mouth, and kind of swaying a little back and forth there too. I remember all of this now for some reason. Like I said, I wasn’t really aware of it then. Weird, huh? So Met was getting closer and closer to where I was. Now, I’ve never really cared for the Mets. You know how they got their blue and orange colors? They took the orange from the Giants and the blue from the Dodgers. They took the colors of two teams that left New York for the west coast, two teams that hated each other mind you, and combined them to make their uniforms. The team is like anathema to itself. Two opposing forces, two teams that screwed over Manhattan and Brooklyn respectively, two bitter rivals with a long and storied history in their ballparks, both of which were destroyed shortly after the teams left, the Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field. And now you are going to come along and create this new team that combines both of these teams into one and call them the Mets? It just seems stupid to me. Anyway. That’s not here and it definitely is not there. So, Met gets so he is almost right across the street from me. He still doesn’t see me. He stumbles over a crack in the sidewalk and almost goes down, but he doesn’t. He catches his balance and rights himself just in time, just before he bites the dust, you know? But when he gets back to his upright position he still seems kind of wobbly. He reminded me of a town drunk in an old movie. For some reason I started humming the theme song from Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I must’ve been humming it pretty loud because Met looked over at me for the first time. He recognized me and waved and started crossing the street to come chat with me and say hi. So we talked for a little. I said, “You ever meet any meat you would eat yet, Met?” I always say that to him when I see him. He doesn’t think it’s as funny as I do. After that we both said see you later and walked on our way in different directions. That was it. My fun was over. I was kind of mad at myself. I was really enjoying just watching Met like that without him knowing.

Interlude

I saw my soul up for sale
On eBay the other day
Three people had bid on it
It was at $3.95
Shipping was free
There was only an hour left
Until the auction closed
I didn’t make a bid

Solitude In One Act

(a tape recorder lies on a small end table in an otherwise empty room. A rangy old man with a long white beard and crumbs on the corners of his mouth comes along and picks it up. He is wearing blue overalls and adjusts an imaginary tie on his neck a few times before looking towards something indefinable in the distance. He seems to be looking at a crowd of people who he assumes are watching him intently, maybe like people looking at an animal in a zoo. His face becomes serious and intense as he scans the faces he imagines he sees out there. Picking up the tape recorder he smiles briefly, raises his free hand in the air and holds up a finger as if signaling everybody to pay attention. He clicks on the recorder and turns the volume all the way up. After some empty air a voice begins speaking.)

I tell the time by television shows. Look at the TV and see what’s on and then I know, okay, Jeopardy is in the Double Jeopardy round with about half the questions gone. Must be about 7:15 or so. It works. Whatever. So, I mean, what you need to like understand is that, when it really comes down to things like compassion, you know, caring for others, giving a shit about their little lives they’re going around living, it’s all about like stacking up this like invisible bundle of good deeds in your soul. Making this like portfolio of existence out of all of your best work. Stuff like that is good grub for your spirit, man. Compassion makes you better, gets you on the bonus side of things, in the black, making celestial money that you can only blow on the after life. Or in the after life, I guess. That’s what it comes down to man. It’s all about getting in the fucking good graces of the lord. All that kind of shit. Being all buddy-buddy with the big boy upstairs. The exchange rate in Heaven is probably pretty fucking good these days on kindness and charity. You’ve gotta just like, well, even if you just like pretend to care about others, you know? Just as long as you do things for them. It’s all about the deeds bro. Making it happen. Let’s say you see this like despicable homeless bum guy like begging for change on the street, you know, he’s like sitting there with his fucking cardboard sign. Whadda they call that? Spanging? Flying signs? Something like that. Any who-how’s’it. Well, bra, you’ve gotta just like look at that pathetic fucking parasite sucking at the diseased and rotting teat of society, and you’ve gotta be like, okay, I’m gonna like help this dude out. I’ve gotta show some fucking empathy, you know? Just say things to yourself like, ‘That could be me. Poor guy. Never got a break. Bad luck.’ That kind of stuff. So you just like reach in your pocket and pull out some change that’s like totally not a big deal to you at all, and then just hand it over to the bum, just put it in his coffee can or his violin case or whatever. And these little fucking meaningless coins, these pieces of metal made out of like zinc and copper and nickel, these fucking tiny round little discs that ain’t worth as much as what they’re made out of, these rattling things that people sometimes collect in glass jars, these things that you fucking bestow on this poor dude camped out on the sidewalk with his raggedy unwashed dog like make his whole fucking day. He might even like smile at you and say thanks. And this should make you feel pretty damn good about yourself. You should be walking around with some like major points under your belt. Score. You know? It’s like you’re building all these like aqueducts in your soul for love and goodwill and all that other crap to flow through, and it doesn’t go unnoticed. Heaven is the reward, right? And so you should be nice to people, do unto others and all that shit, because it might really matter, you might need some of that like karma or whatever for the next phase of your existence, that is if death really isn’t the end. And who cares if you’re doing all the right things for maybe what some might wanna argue are the like totally wrong reasons? At least you are doing the right things, right? I mean, what if everybody in the whole world was like forced to like just be nice to each other. Even though they were just being nice because they had to, like if they weren’t nice then some dude with a big old Japanese sword would like come and cut their head off or something, the world would still be a better place. I mean, we wouldn’t have any wars or any shootings or people fucking other people over and all that stuff. Things would be pretty like mellow and just chill and it would be like some John Lennon song or something, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the ends justifying the means kind of thing. I don’t know. All I know is that the next time you see some gnarly, whacked-out, dirty-ass, scumbag bum dude passed out on the sidewalk where he’s just shat himself you should give the guy a few bucks or whatever you can. You know what would be really something? If you then like don’t tell anybody about it. That’s the really hard part, see? Because if you really are doing this “good deed” for no other purpose then just trying to help somebody else out, I mean if it really is a totally like selfless act, then why should you feel this need to like brag about it? That would mean that you were just doing it for like selfish reasons, to make yourself feel better, to make other people think you’re like a good guy. I think there’s this Buddhist thing that’s like about this fucking monk, right? And the monk is like wandering through the desert or some other kind of place where there ain’t much agua around, and he gets really fucking thirsty, and he’s like really fucking parched, and he keeps wandering around trying to find nirvana or something and he stumbles on this like little pool of water. And then, instead of drinking the water he just keeps on going by, showing restraint I guess. He just keeps roaming around in the desert and he’s like dying of thirst and he never drinks any of this water. I guess he somehow like fucking extricates himself from this like really arid situation, and like finds some transcendental Zen paradise or whatever. The thing is, the dude never tells anybody about this incident for the rest of his life. He never like brags about it to anybody to show how fucking great of a Buddhist he is, to make people see how he exercised all this restraint and shit and, I don’t know, passed this test of willpower or whatever. Shit. Try doing that. That would really be something. Of course, it’s just a story man. I mean, if the monk dude would have really done that shit and never told anybody about it, then how could anybody know the story? No. It’s just another fucking myth, a legend. But you should give change to those street people, those beggar dudes you see all over the place these days. All those scraggily unkempt bastards piping the fucking stem and pissing in alleys. It doesn’t matter why. Trust me. Just do good things, even if it’s just because you want good things back in return. It doesn’t matter. Don’t you believe me? What? No. I don’t have any change. I would if I could, you feel me? Gotta keep it real. A friend in need. I’m a little low on the funds right now, ya know? So. Um, you gonna finish that burrito? Well. Sure. I’ll have it. I mean, I wouldn’t want it to go to waste. Waste not want not, right? Thanks. That’s some good shit. Hey…don’t tell anyone. Okay?


(the old man hits the stop button on the tape recorder and sets it back down on the table. He then begins speaking in a rather dulcet, if not eloquent voice to the audience)


So you can see, probably it is pretty obvious, that this subtle kind of egotistic kindness, not too different from the whole kill-them-with-kindness genre of thought that we were discussing and making so much fuss over earlier, is only a substitute for a seeming of self-centeredness, an outward appearance, the way others see one, and in so much as it is a “replacement gesture” or a “bluff of compassion” or whichever phrase one should choose to assign to its more egregiously flawed superficial-beneficial aspects, of which none is more suitable to our “false representation of self” than the cowering con-artist in disguise aspect, less crook than conniver if you will. Now, following a logic of slippery-slope abstraction and modality, not just using our syllogistic knee-jerk least-common-denominator centers of reasoning, and overcoming our need for predication and allowing for multiple types of reality and generality in our analysis, we can safely assume and convince ourselves that what we are doing is for the common good. Our actions, that we think will make us better people, even though magnanimity may not be at their core, may often still have beneficial results, though not unintended ones, for we do intend for these results, though we only do so as a consequence of our initial craving for self satisfaction. We can also deal in dialectics here, but, and I’m sure to all of your collective relief, we will not be covering critical thinking here at this particular juncture. Just be aware that there is a lot more to this than just basic conditioning and relationship-to-the-other types of suggestion…Ow! Stop that! You’re hurting me. No! Please. Stop! Okay, okay…I’ll…Ah! That hurts! Okay. I’ll just be going now, okay? No more. I’ll go back to my room and…no, no, not the chain! I promise I’ll stop talking. I won’t think anymore. Please! Where are we…what? No! Not the pit! I can’t go back there. I can’t live like that. The rats gnaw at my feet all night. I can feel them. It’s so dark and cold and I can’t stand it anymore. Just a little fresh air. Just some sunshine. No! No! I promise. Ah! You are killing me! Stop! Murder! Murderers! Mur….

(sounds of gagging and defecation and vomiting and a conflagration of great magnitude and more cacophony and then just white noise and then silence as the old man is dragged off stage)

A Life Of Quiet Desperation

I want to tell you about something that happened to me many years ago, something that may or may not be relevant in discussing this so called “privilege of perception” issue. It might assist you in evaluating this internecine in-fighting that’s been going on between the lawnmowers and the landowners over in Gulliver’s Square, though I’m not sure if either side would listen to what I’m sure would be your most thoughtful and enlightened and well-meaning ideas on the subject. I’ll proceed anyway. It’s something to do besides the collecting of bugles and frog pillows and partially digested mints from the gummed-up and unmoving parts of AssembleLine machines. So, this event that I am about to describe to you, as best I can describe any one thing with words, is a thing that really did happen, an occurrence that was at once particular and corporeal and very lucidly trapped in the ever-happening prison walls of time, and yet was also eerie and surreal, more than just our common place occurrence, though it was a common thing, a thing seen and witnessed by yours truly who possesses all the ordinary tethers of sense which filter out much more than they take in and digest and are just as dull as anybody else’s. And it must be beared in mind that my particular faculty for making sense of what I observe, of putting those random accumulations of material brought brainward by my faulty organs of perception, as privileged as they may be, nonetheless are still only frayed and malfunctioning conduits that lose much more than they could ever transport untampered and pure into this dunder sopped and damaged jalopy of a head of mine. I cannot avoid biased and subjective observation. I cannot make any promises of these events being told to you in such a fashion that is not in some way clouded by my own personal makeshift, benighted, egoistic, figurative, muddled, cloudy, ill-conceived, boa constrictor like whim. That this story is true, that it sticks to the facts, doesn’t veer from the actuality of all that happened the way my brain remembers it happening (not, sadly, how I remember remembering it happening…for that would be something else all together for which I am quite unprepared and also unwilling to go into at this juncture, and anyway it would not assist you in this current situation, and so I shall not digress) is not important, though it is true, as any truth must have at least some hint of veracity. I can smell the corn oil cooking in the BellPot mechanical StoveStomachs and it is making me thirsty for BullyGrub and HastyMud. There is a certain temper in the air tonight. I will try not to let it invade my thoughts. So if I can be granted license to stray from the GrandMaster’s tempo for a moment, if I can let my heart swell with terrible things like memories and GunderFlies, if I can sew my SupperBeads a little prematurely, then I will attempt, in my feeble and mercurial way, to relate this tale to you from my past and give what I hope to be some differing sense of what it means to be a garden in these arid times. I was in a town that used to be called New Orleans back a few years before the turn of the century. My grandchildren will be sad to hear that the most exciting illicit substance that I partook of regularly was a cup of coffee at the old Coffee Shops that used to bloom all over the city like dandelions. I would walk the streets early in the morning, watching the sun start to spill all over things, splash on the French Quarter and drip down the walls of buildings, drinking my hot coffee from what they used to call Styrofoam cups. This was long before the ban. But this much is obvious. I was drinking caffeine for Obed’s Sake. But that’s not what we used to say. We used to say for Christ’s Sake. But those were much different times. Forgive me for the nostalgia. It is common to those of us who grew up during the first ClintonBush cycle. Those who came of age during the 2nd and 3rd cycles were much more inclined to think of the present as their everything. And now that the BushClinton dictatorship has evolved into it’s more hydra-headed, beastly, and all encompassing form, there really is no need for such sentimentality. The Now is The Only How. The Here Is Near. Keep Up Or Give Up. I know. I know. Such slogans are really very pleasant to such a euphony-loving old geezer as myself. The advertising industry retains a good ear for such things. Obed would be proud. But this was all long before the resurrection and BornAgainians and The Chaplainanots and so on and so on and all that jazz. Jazz. That was something we used to have. And New Orleans was filled with it. You could hear it coming out of windows, tearing up the floorboards beneath your feet, wafting through alleyways and pounding behind walls. I would go to a place called Preservation Hall and sit in a folding chair and watch a Dixieland jazz band play right there before my eyes. You could do such things then. Music wasn’t restricted by so many laws then, and people could assemble in places together to watch people play it. It was our right as citizens. Those were different times. People smoked cigarettes and drank bottles of beer and some even danced when the music played. It felt good to be there listening to that music, enjoying it with other people, feeling free and a little wild. It made you feel good to be alive. Oh, and at this my grandchildren’s eyes may widen and their lips may form giant rictuses, but it was in the evening of one of these days that I will begin this tale, and it will begin in a bar! Just think of it. A place where anybody over a certain age could go and drink all the alcohol they wanted. And you could get drunk. I know. It seems like some fairy tale, but I assure you, these places really did exist, and I was in one of them on this evening. An old acquaintance of mine was in town for a few days on business. This fellow wanted to get bibulous and to, as we used to say, let loose three sheets to the wind or tie one on, get soused or some ribald and equally unchivalrous thing. So we went to a local bar just off of Bourbon Street that was the habitué of many local dipsomaniacs: out-of-work mechanics, sleep-deprived janitors, ex-cons, dirty bohemians, surly cabbies with most of their teeth gone, under-tipped waiters, unwed mothers, minor league infielders, ten-dollar prostitutes, pilots, trumpet players, euro-trash, hooligan night watchmen, P.E. teachers, and other such stool pigeons and lunatics. We sat down at the bar. Everybody was smoking. The air was thick with gritty and toxic gray smoke, which smelled like PonTreks or GullingDates. Now behind the bar you have to realize there was a bar tender, or barkeep, a man who was authorized to serve alcoholic beverages to the patrons. This man was built like a question on a positional geometry exam, or as we used to say, a study of circles. He was wide as a movie screen, corpulent yet sturdy and stout, built like an old tank or a CrunchWail machine. His face was like tooled leather and his beard grew all the way up to his eyeballs. I had to shout my order to him. My progeny will again swell with pride when they hear that their grizzly, white-haired atavist made a request for two beers. Now, beer was not anything like the BoozePlus that so many of us swill down now. It was rich and deep and frothy and made you think of Oregon in the morning when the air is crisp and windlessly cool...Oregon in the morning when the year still has a number attached to it and it is the time before the wars, before the refashioning and reshaping of desires and the dulling of dreams and the complete restructuring of the world that you thought would always be, a world you thought you knew, and maybe even cared about, when one still could care about such things. The bartender took two pint glasses and filled them up from a spout or spigot which drew from a large wooden keg somewhere below. He plunked the glasses down in front of us on the bar top, a head of beautiful white foam on each one, and we paid him with paper money, with actual bills, greenish gray papers that were once called buckskins and greenbacks. These bills were tough and had a texture like dead leaves or a worn chamois rag, and long dead once famous men were on them, leaders that people had maybe voted for in an election, when they still had elections, when they still had people to vote for. The bartender took the money and my friend and I drank our beers. One of the most salient side effects of beer drinking is the need for micturation, and because of my smaller than average-sized bladder, which quickly became, shall we say, replete, I very soon had the urgent and pressing need to use the facilities. I bid my friend adieu for a moment and went on to find the bathroom. This was a place like a SeptiLounge, though much more base and frowzy and open. The public ones were especially grime laden and sordid. I found the bathroom in the back of the place behind a pool table. The table’s wooden rails were chipped and worn and its baize billiard cloth was badly ripped, kind of shredded with a lot of divots in it, and there were no nets in the pockets. Nobody was playing pool just then. I went in the bathroom. There was just one toilet, in the old fashion, white porcelain style with a flush tank, and this toilet was right in the middle of the room. There were no barriers, no stall walls that one of these toilets would usually have around it for privacy. It was just plopped down there right in the center of the room. A black midget was sitting on the toilet with his legs sticking straight out in front of him, extended at a perfect 45 degree angle from his body. (Such terms as “black” and “midget” may or may not have been acceptable at the time. It is sometimes hard for an old duffer like me to remember. Neither can I recollect what the correct term would be under current official guidelines, of which I am fully aware that I am flouting, so I will continue to use the anachronistic ones here.) This diminutive dark-skinned soul was squirming around a little on the toilet seat with his pants around his ankles, his black cowboy boots just hanging there in the air. He was smoking a giant cigar that was propped and sticking up out of his mouth, like what people do with toothpicks sometimes. His eyes were big and his arms were straight at his sides. He was straining. His fists were clenched. I looked right into his eyes and he looked right back at me. He just kept straining and pushing with his abdominal muscles and biting down hard on that big old cigar. He had a green hat on that was very long and conical, like a dunce cap that came to a point at the top where there was a gold bell. I just stood there staring at him and he just kept staring right back. The whole thing reminded me vaguely of a sequence in a cartoon, or maybe it was a comic strip, little boxes of lines and color and bubbles filled with words. Now that we live in more fastidiously controlled and manipulative times, amongst abjurations of free will and pleasure, in the structured confines of worship and mass conformity on a scale so vast and all encompassing that it seems tacitly eternal, it is hard to imagine such things, but let me tell you, they did exist. It was an extremely complex situation there in that bathroom, one of which I am almost at a loss to explain, as it was painstakingly difficult to grasp the dimensions and whirling patterns of time and conceptual space that were so lightly and indifferently and continuously happening and also not happening, that were ricocheting off of every last quark and lepton in little pinpricks of flashing momentum and also much hidden microscopic brilliance I’m sure, and were also scabbing and scarring empty space, leaving spindly gashes and willowy wens in the skein of now, a now that was impossible to categorize except to say that it was a moment that hadn’t yet happened, would never happen, and yet would always be happening and had always been happening. There was something odd gestating at a molecular level, some faint stirring of strings, the very low whiff of a thin breath on the reed of a fingernail-sized clarinet, a lisp only heard by grasshoppers. We are not good enough for such things. We are not built to interpret these puny gestures of life. We are monsters too enormous to see and too loud to be able to listen. I could only intuit this event or I might have just almost detected a lump in the rhythms of myself, discerned a pale and unthinkable luminosity, a brief levity of being that seized me with horror and awfulness. There was a sense of failure, a keening tryst with doom, a bowling over of my concrete conceptions of consciousness, a raft of newly awakened incisions in the thinning crust of my own hemispheres of sorrow. Things were not as they seemed. And this made me sad. Sad not in our manufactured way of being sad, but in the old way of being down and out and weary of the world. That black midget was staring at me and he was not a clown and he was not an angel and he was not an illusion or some manifestation of my own diseased fantasy and he was not a child nor a God and he sure as hell wasn’t a human being at all and we are all lonely for something real in this world of made up things we all are lost and drifting and don’t even know that we don’t know this and I am going to tell you something real now and I am going to make you feel something and that something is all that matters and that something is…

Afternoons To Throw Away Like Old Napkins

The small flies and the large flies
fight it out on my windowpane.
The large ones sit on the outside of
the glass
hovering and landing and hovering again.
The small ones are inside and
do much the same,
only faster.
They don't seem to like each other.
The large ones jealous of quickness.
The small ones wanting size of course.
I don't exactly envy them
and their little lives
played out in a day there on the pane of glass,
gazing either forever in
or forever out,
never quite satisfied with where they are.
Always buzzing around
but never going very far,
just moving
from one little spot on the glass to the next.
I try to kill them every chance I get.

Joseph P. Cardullucio Finally Opens Up To His Shrink (Part Three Of Seven)

--So, this, incident, you speak of…
--Yes. We were driving. She was driving.
--The girl.
--Yes. I was sitting in the passenger seat of her car. It was the time right after my parents split up.
--Four, five years ago?
--No. More like ten.
--Really?
--Yes. Is that so long of a time?
--No. It is…it’s not I guess. I just thought, well, that we were talking about something more…recent.
--Maybe I make things seem that way. But, so, I was sitting there, and she’s driving along through the streets. I don’t remember what we were doing, where we were going, things like that. But she was going on about the guy she was dating…
--Going on about. Interesting.
--Yeah. I mean. No. Not like that. It wasn’t like she was being petulant or whining or anything. She was just really upset. And she was talking about all these things, all these bad and sad things that were happening to her.
--What things?
--Well, that’s just the thing. I wasn’t really listening to her. That’s what I’m getting at. I was just sitting there staring out the window, feeling miserable about my own self, my own worries and tribulations.
--Tribulations. You don’t hear people use that word too often.
--
--Go on.
--So I was just so obsessed with my own little world of sorrow that I, like, I don’t know, I couldn’t conceive of hers. I couldn’t make myself care about her problems.
--You had no empathy.
--Yes. No. I don’t know. All I know is that I was just kind of zoning her out. I could hear her voice but the words were meaningless to me. And she caught on. And she says, “You don’t even care about what I’m saying,” or something like that. And she goes on to tell me that she feels like she is just bothering me, that I’m making her feel like her problems are just minuscule, that they are bogus, that they’re nothing, stupid, worthless.
--Interesting. She caught on. Bogus. Go on.
--Ok. So, well, the thing is, I just didn’t say anything. Or I don’t remember saying anything. I mean, we were good friends, close, had talked on the phone every night during high school, gone through all the teenage melodrama and malaise and ennui together. And now here we were, like, separated by miles of emotional distance. I was completely gone. I think I just sat there and like grunted or something. And she maybe started whimpering or crying or something. None of it seemed to matter to me. I just stared ahead all steely eyed and trapped inside my own head.
--So the wall was up again.
--Yeah. This time it seemed palpable. Like I could see the outlines of the bricks, feel their grainy and rough texture, knock my head against them if I wanted to.
--What happened after this?
--I’m not too clear. Like I said, this was about ten years ago. I was about twenty or twenty one at the time. I was a totally different person.
--Really?
--You know what I mean.
--I do?
--Well, I don’t know. I was just thinking about how much everything’s changed. But, I mean, there’s something Steinbeck said once, about growing old…something about years not changing a man, just adding more sorrow to him. Maybe I haven’t really changed at all.
--Hmm.
--So I think she just drove me home. And we didn’t really talk anymore after that. We became like strangers or distant cousins who met once and then went their separate ways. I don’t know what happened. We just reached some kind of breaking point, some kind of…
--Sorry. But just so as we are on the same page here. Is this the incident that you were referring to earlier, the unprecedented lapse in the peripheral structures of time and space that let you see, how did you put it?
--Into the “it” of things.
--Yes. That’s right.
--Well, kind of. It wasn’t until many years later that I spoke to her again. We were living in the same city. I think it was five or six years later, maybe more. She looked me up, as they say, and gave me a call. Her place was only about ten or so blocks from mine, on another hill, the hill right next to mine.
--You both lived on hills?
--Yes. She was married by then, didn’t have any kids though.
--That’s good.
--What? Why is that good?
--I hate children. Don’t you?
--Well, yes, sort of, but…wha…?
--Just go on. We’ll come back to this later when we are discussing your childhood. Now. You are living, um, on the next hill over from her, and…
--And, well, she calls me up and we make plans to get together for a beer or something.
--Just like that? No awkward getting-back-to-knowing-you stuff? No, I don’t know, jitters? Cold-feet type behavior?
--What the hell? Um. No. I mean. We just picked right up were we left off, I mean before the car-ride thing. It was like talking to an old friend.
--It was talking to an old friend.
--I know. But, I mean, it was just normal, you know? We got along fine. Just made normal conversation like normal everyday people make. Chit chat. Shooting the breeze. Where are you working, how’s the folks, that kind of stuff. The changeless weather of day-to-day existence.
--Interesting. Changeless.
--So we make these plans, and I’m of course pretty nervous about the whole thing. And I’m sure she was too. But neither of us were letting on. Just keeping everything…how do they put it? A white elephant in the room?
--Something like that. Go on.
--Okay. So the day comes and I go out to this bar where we are supposed to meet. It’s called Charlie’s. A little divey shack by the waterfront. Just a few drunks at the bar and some wooden tables and stuff like that. They’ve got a dart board. I got there about half an hour early. I wanted to make sure I was the first one there. You know, sit down, have a beer, look calm and at ease and in control. Let her walk in and find me.
--Makes sense.
--So I go in, and I can tell right away something is off. Like, I don’t know, there’s just something in the air. Some kind of imbalance in the atmosphere, like the air pressure is maybe not what it’s supposed to be? I don’t know how else to explain it. It was very strange. I’d never felt anything quite like it before. There were a few greasy looking guys at the bar eating peanuts out of little paper cups and drinking beer from bottles. They looked like maybe they were bikers or some other kind of tough guys. Maybe they’d just escaped from a chain gang or something. I just got a bad feeling about them. They looked angry and kind of gave me a mean look when I walked in. The bartender was a ratty sunburned old geezer with scrawny arms and a giant white mustache. He had really worn out tattoos on his arms, battleships and hearts and World War 2 type of stuff. It looked like somebody had taken an eraser to them…
--As if the were drawn on by a pen you mean?
--Yeah. Like they were fake and had started to wash off I guess. That’s what time will do to you.
--Like getting washed clean of your sins?
--No. Not like that. It’ll just smear them into your skin deeper, so they are more inside than out.
--I don’t think I follow you there.
--He made me think of a retired cowboy for some reason, all worn down from too many summers out on the range.
--On the range?
--Yeah. Rustling cattle or whatever. He didn’t seem to care for me much either. He kind of spit down onto the floor next to him when I came up to the bar. His eyes were like black marbles dug into the deep pits of his skull. They stared right through me. And his eyebrows were actually arching. These big fluffy white eyebrows just arching into an actual V.
--Wow. That really happens?
--It did then. So I got all my courage up and said, unfortunately rather meekly, “Could I get a beer please?”
--You said it like that? To this burly, eyebrow arching, sunburned old character?
--Yeah. It was very unfortunate.
--To say the least.
--So of course this guy wants like absolutely zero to do with me. And he just kind of stares at me, stares right through me really. It was like he could’ve burned a hole in my chest.
--I’ve heard of that. I think.
--So I kind of, of course, became a bit uncomfortable and started kind of hiccupping around and blinking a lot and making tiny imperceptible movements with my fingers, little taps and stuff and snaps and, well, I don’t know, just stupid stuff I do when I get nervous and can’t keep still, probably cracking my neck a lot and maybe even letting out a few yawns too.
--Busy guy.
--All these multitudinous gestures of unease.
--So what’s the barkeep doing?
--That guy. Well, he just keeps standing there and staring at me. He’s a real gnarly old dude. Finally he’s like, “what that?”
--What that?
--Yeah. And I’m like okie.
--Okie? Who are you, Raymond Chandler?
--Okay. So I try to toughen up a bit and kind of snarl a little and say, “Just a Bud there.”
--What an odd thing to say. I mean, if you took that out of context…
--And he stares a little more and then turns around and swings one of his arms down below the bar into a little fridge or something and grabs a Budweiser bottle out of there and sets it down really hard on the bar. I’m surprised the thing didn’t like break apart and explode into a thousand slivers and shards of glass. And it’s like over flowing all over the top. I take it and lay down a five dollar bill. And the guy grabs it and makes some kind of disapproving grunt or some such type of noise. The register is really old, like one of those ones you’d see in a drugstore in an old movie, a soda fountain type of place, you know, like it was made by James Ritty himself. An ancient obtuse contraption with big old levers and keys like on a typewriter. It made all kinds of noise when he hammered on the thing and when he shoved my money in there and closed the drawer it was like a medium-sized earthquake had hit the place. I figured I needed some change and I also figured I wasn’t going to get any. The beer had spilled all over the bar top. I made some kind of feeble motion with my arm like a keep-the-change kind of thing and winked at him.
--You winked at this guy?
--It was a kindly wink.
--I can’t see this guy interpreting a wink.
--No. He was none too happy about it. If I’d had my druthers this would’ve been it for me. I’d have jetted. But I had to wait for this girl, you know?
--I almost forgot about her.
--Me too. I just stood there trying to drink the beer, which was really foamy, and then I thought, shit, I should just go on and sit down at one of these unoccupied tables and start my waiting. So I went back and did just that. The bar tender had stopped noticing me and went back to doing whatever it is bartenders do when they aren’t serving drinks. Maybe taking a towel and wiping out shot glasses. Like, making them really shiny. Mainly nothing I guess. I sat at the table all by myself and drank my beer and looked at the scenery. There were a lot of mirrors with beer advertisements on them. A few fans were spinning slowly on the ceiling where there were a lot of pennants of minor league baseball teams and gonfalons from colleges I’d never heard of and some tacky artifacts from another more joyous and unfettered and freewheeling era of beer drinking for this now defunct mostly desolate place. I just sat there and kind of ruminated on my now precarious position in the world, in this particular tiny corner of the world that I was now calling my own, this lonely and insecure place I called being me, this place that was now being somehow threatened by this unexpected intrusion from my past, like a door I thought I’d locked but hadn’t and that had now let in a thief to try to steal away or intrude on my solitary and woebegone existence.
--So you were not happy about this.
--No. Not at all. Well, not exactly. It wasn’t that I was upset at her. It was more like I was just upset at this sudden turn in events that had now brought me back to this more primordial form of my development as a full fledged member of the human race.
--Put you back into a now ill-fitting past version of your self.
--Yes. Brought me back to this “me” that I thought I’d left behind. And now here I was going to have to face all of this again. And I didn’t want to. At least I didn’t think that I did. Maybe I thought we could just talk around things, get over it, not have to really jump the proverbial hurdle. I didn’t want to go back to all that fear and pain that had been suffocating me way back then when we’d taken that last car ride together.
--Would you describe your pain as existential?
--Then? I don’t think so. I was really in a bad way back then when my dad split. But, at the same time, it was like I was putting up this kind of shield that was deflecting the reality of the situation. A kind of border that I wouldn’t let anything cross. I was inside and untouchable and everything else that could hurt me was outside and couldn’t get in. I made myself safe and unaffected. But at the same time I knew that I really should be feeling bad about the whole thing. About my mom’s nervous breakdown and my father’s perfidiousness and my own bleak moneyless situation and slow march towards alcoholism.
--You were an alcoholic?
--Later. Another time, ok?
--Sure.
--So I just lived inside this bubble, rather carefree I guess. Do people still say fancy-free? That was more like it. I was feigning all of this lugubriousness and madness because I wouldn’t let any of the real thing touch me. But it was there and I knew I should have been feeling sad. So I pretended to feel the way I should have been feeling anyway. But I really wasn’t feeling that way at all. I wouldn’t let any of that stuff inside my sphere of emotional space.
--Sphere of emotional space. Did you just make that up?
--I don’t know. So here I was acting the way I thought I should’ve been acting if I were really feeling the way the things around me were supposed to be making me feel.
--Sounds rather convoluted.
--It’s no way to live. Let me tell you. Existing in the constantly devaluating currency of your own made-up consciousness, and subconscious too for that matter. I had to pretend to have all these subconscious motives for my behaviors.
--That doesn’t really make any sense. You can’t control your own subconscious like that. Then it would no longer be subconscious. It would be a conscious effort to be…um…go on.
--I guess my pain, in a way, was really just existential grief. I was not feeling anything concrete. But at the same time my faked pain was based on real pain, um, it was a pain I felt I should have had, but it wasn’t there. It just wasn’t. I had to make it up to believe in it. I had to play make believe with my own emotional state. It worked though. I tricked everybody around me. Maybe I just wanted people to feel sorry for me and now here I had my chance. I had a reason I could use to make everyone feel bad for me. I had a reason for acting the way I was, for moping around and sitting alone in my room and staring at the walls and going on long walks all night long and into the morning. All of my life I’d always just wanted people to leave me alone, and now, finally, they were, and I guess I was really happy about that. Damn. It was such a mess. Because I was really feeling guilty about that. Imagine sitting up all night and listening to your mother crying herself hoarse and also feeling good about yourself and things in general. I knew I shouldn’t have been feeling that way. But I couldn’t help it. I finally had a reason to feel morose and devastated and I loved it.
--But the guilt was still there.
--Yes. Of course. Because I knew that the way I was feeling was all wrong. So I felt very guilty about what I was doing and I’d get really pissed off at myself and started drinking a lot to numb the pain. But the drinking just made me feel better about my suffering. It gave me a gilt-edged and glorious shining coat of armor to wear around it. I would go off with a bottle of whiskey and break into my old high school, jump the chain-link fence and run around on the football field and baseball diamond. I’d play entire games of baseball all by myself. And I’d lie down on the blacktop of the outdoor basketball courts and stare up drunkenly at the stars, all those damn myriad constellations up there, and the moon too, that big old orange-yellow eye up there staring down at me. I talked to God a lot lying there like that. I’d stretch my arms out and cross my feet pretending that I was Jesus. Those were some good times.
--You seem to get a lot of joy through suffering.
--Is that perverse?
--In your case? I’m not sure.
--Joy through suffering. There’s something to that.
--So what happened with the girl you were meeting at this bar.
--Oh. That. Well, she was rather late. I think I was on my third beer when she finally showed up. They bar tender had warmed up to me a little. I’d put some songs on the jukebox by this point and I was getting a little nostalgic. Music has always had a big effect on me. I’m easily affected by such things. So I was sitting there drinking my beer and feeling good and melancholy and enjoying the sad songs I’d put on the jukebox, existing in my own little world of sorrow. I almost forgot she was coming. And then there she was. It’s odd when you haven’t seen somebody in a really long time and you have this idea of how they look, that isn’t really how they look, or how they ever looked, because you know your memory can do all kinds of things to a face, as if you ever really remember a face anyway, besides just the miracle of recognition, this ineffable thing that makes you attach a person to this set of eyes and ears and teeth and hair and cheeks and mouth and all these other very undifferentiated things about each individual person, things that are really so similar it is amazing that we can tell each other apart.
--Human beings are very good at this I hear. Face recognition.
--It’s incredible when you think about it. Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror for a really long time? Just kind of let your eyes go fuzzy and stare and stare into your own eyes until you don’t know which side of the mirror you’re on? It’s hard to remember what you look like. It’s hard to tell what these things are that make you the person that you are.
--This isn’t going to turn from digression into lecture here, is it?
--Probably not.
--Good. We are limited by time here. Go on.
--So I do recognize her, though she looks different, older, more mature I guess. Like a woman and not a girl. Not the girl I used to know and like so well.
--Oh. Was there some kind of romantic involvement? What type of intimacy are we talking about here?
--What? No. It was a very platonic friendship. Though she was very attractive. Sometimes that happens between two people. You just get to know each other in a different kind of way, as people and not objects? That’s not it. Something like that I guess.
--You know what objects are to Germans?
--People. I know. What I’m saying is we knew each other in a way that was not tinged by any hint of sexuality. We were just, friends.
--Okay. I get it. Nothing like sex to get in the way of companionship and a rich and pure relationship.
--Pure? That’s interesting that you would say that. I guess. So I waved to her and got up and gave her a hug, less self conscious now that I was a little drunk, and we smiled and said how good it was to see each other and all that.
--You seem to have a predisposition for keeping people at a distance. For maybe pushing them away before they get too close.
--You’re quick doc. You had to go to college to figure that kind of stuff out? Why don’t you tell me something I don’t already know?
--
--
--Would you like to continue?
--Isn’t our time almost up?
--Oh. Well. I guess so. So, we can continue next week. If you’d care to.
--Maybe. I’ll think about it.
--Good enough.

THE MEADOWS (Excerpt #1)

This here is a sneak peek at the beginning of my new book. It is a work of fiction based on make-believe people and events. It has yet to find a publisher, so don't go looking for it at your local Borders any time soon. I might put some more of it on here in the coming weeks though, if people show an interest. This part here may end up being the first 5 or so pages of the book. The action takes place about 2/3 way through the story. Our weary, drug-dazed protagonist and his companions have been in Las Vegas for 3 days and are now trying to check into a fancy hotel.

The back of Scott’s head is on the check-in desk at the MGM Grand hotel. He’s laughing and shaking his head back and forth like a cuckoo clock gone berserk. His eyes are even laughing, and his legs are wobbling like faulty table supports buckling under a heavy load while he arches his back, as if almost wanting to attempt a back dive but not quite being able to extend back all the way. There’s something fizzy and maybe froth-like in his mustache, which I take to be some sort of illicit substance, or maybe just foam from the warm beer in his dangling left hand. The desk clerk pays him no attention. Erik’s trying to check us in this whole while, and I decide suddenly that I need to take Scott away from the desk. He seems spry and reckless. Something about the whole situation seems dangerous, like at any moment something will just crack and send him over the line, or over the desk maybe to strangle the attendant or baggage handler or the lady in the suit holding a clipboard to her chest who keeps eyeing us suspiciously. So I grab him and mumble something about a cigarette. He jumps up like a break-dancing Gumby and high kicks at the domed glass ceiling way above us, tearing free of my grip and darting off into the Byzantine ornamentation of the lobby. I follow.
After consoling him with a smoke we stumble around an extravagant flower planter in the middle of the lobby. A good-sized, gold-coated statue of a lion is perched on it, supposedly guarding things. It looks bored, like a lion in a zoo, ready to yawn and waiting to be fed. The planter is an elaborate, well-kept garden filled with diverse plant life of many petals of vibrant colors, and shapes of stem and leaf, a wild collection of flora and inflorescence from all over the world. Scott starts ashing in the flowers. And then there’s a moment where I glance up and see the suited clipboard-hugging woman coming over to us and I just know she’s up to no good. I try to grab Scott but she beats me to it.
She snarls, “You know there’s no smoking in the lobby.” Her thin and uptight tiny lips, which are crusted over with some brown flakey matter, barely spread wide enough to let air pass through. “You can only smoke over there on that side, where the red carpet is.”
We look over to where she is pointing, trying to find some rigid, insuperable non-smoking parapet, this supposed bulwark of the lobby’s pristine atmosphere. It’s only about twenty feet away. We don’t see any physical barrier there. It’s just the place where the red carpet ends and the lobby’s tile floor begins. This strictly enforced regulation makes no sense, but maybe the smoke can’t penetrate the tile floor’s zone of smokeless air. Maybe an invisible wall emanates from the carpet’s edge and is made of fibers too porous and resilient for any carcinogens to pass through.
Scott arranges his face in a serious manner and, with much savoir-faire, deeply inhales on his cigarette. As he blows the smoke out he says, “We are deeply sorry. Our most sincere and humblest apologies to you and the great lords of MGM Grand. Though what you say makes absolutely no sense, we agree, we acquiesce, we concede that we are most egregiously wrong and will sashay over to the carpeted area to partake in our nicotine indulgence.”
We begin walking away as he continues talking in this odd way. The lady just smiles and nods and holds her clipboard a little tighter to her chest. I start to wonder what the hell is on that clipboard. If I could just get it away from her. Maybe it contains secrets of the universe, or maybe the only sure fire way to win at Black Jack, or good recipes, or maybe just the names of people that MGM is keeping a watchful eye on. Maybe my name is on there.
Scott is now smoking on the carpet and wandering around checking out all the slot machines, his arms circling like the broken blades of a windmill and his head cranking around energetically looking all over the place at once. I come up behind him and stick a finger in his back. “I told you not to ash on those fucking flowers. You mindless twisted shit-licking idiot!” Scott puts his hands up and tilts his head back nodding from side to side. He finishes his gesture with a crippling flourish, a frazzled cadenza of his limbs like the last surge of motion in a windup toy, and then every twirling thing comes to an abrupt stop. He stands there frozen in a very awkward pose, his arms hanging out like thin, crooked, gnarled tree branches. A bent and squashed cigarette is hanging out of his mouth. He seems to be chewing on it slightly. Somehow, through all of this, he has managed not to spill a single drop of beer from the can that he is now crushing in his left hand. He looks like the Tin Man, all rusted in place before Dorothy comes along and oils him up.
I try some more abuse, “Come on man. Keep it together. We need to get into our hotel room. We can’t make any more mistakes. Just look. There’s Erik over there trying to convince that damn clerk to give us the keys. Look at that poor fuck.”
Erik is gesticulating madly at the clerk and seems to be having quite an animated conversation. It worries me and I decide, in a sudden epiphanic flash, that he needs some succor. I grab Scott’s chewed and flattened cigarette out of his mouth and put it out on the plush red carpet. Directing a hushed stern voice towards where his face is I say, “Come on man. Look at Erik. He’s in trouble. He needs our help.” The ends of his mouth turn down making his mustache droop like a black hairy caterpillar. He glances lazily towards the lobby. I take the hush out of my voice this time. “And wipe that spume off of your mustache. It’s making me sick.”
So we start running like purse-snatchers over to Erik at the desk, which is longer than any football field, like a baggage check station at an airport. We speed by the long marble countertop with only a few clerks behind it who are busy punching keyboards and looking at computer screens. Erik is all the way at the other end.
I see immense cream-colored drapery suspended from a gold banister. I stop and stare at it. It is lovely. It is flowing down in all kinds of folded egg-white textures. I am lost. My head is melting in meringue. There is no escape. This body doesn’t seem to be holding me inside of it anymore. I want to reach up and grab all that fabric, let my hands run all over its milky marshmallow skin and then pull myself up into to it, hang from it like I’m catching a ride on a cloud, kick my feet in the air and laugh at all the middling creatures twittering and bustling around below me. You don’t need a body to do these things. Mine will be alright without me. Let me just get out of this skin here and…There is no place to put things here. There is no here here. No space to be in. Drowning in drapes. No air to be…can’t be…falling…down.
Damn. I can feel my toes again.
I start back up with the running.
Scott beats me to Erik by a first down and puts his face right up in the Desk Clerk’s face. “Is something wrong here what seems to be the problem gentleman can I be of any help here?” He breathes it all out at once with his last puff of smoke just before I show up. Shit. I’m too late. This could get ugly. I try to stand very still and quiet. I try to make my face look resolute.
Erik seems calm. The Clerk seems okay. I can’t figure it out. I give Erik a confused glance. He just smiles and says, “Oh. We were just talking about this blind girl I work with and how fast she types, and how the computer screen can’t even keep up with her and it just goes blank.” Scott and I just look at each other and then we stare back at the Clerk who doesn’t look even slightly amused by anything happening. Nothing makes sense, but soon we have our room key and some oleaginous guy with a pencil-thin mustache comes over and puts all of our luggage onto a cart for us. This is good. I don’t feel like carrying anything up to the room.
The mustachioed bellhop is like a crane, gaunt and towering over us. He is all knobby elbows and knees, with Nile-long, skinny drumsticks for legs. Scott pulls me aside and whispers in my ear through a cupped hand, “This lummox of a man is filled with paranormal activity. He’s a walking nuclear waste dump. Don’t follow him too close. We could be sprouting ears from our necks soon. He may be an apparition, a slim poltergeist, some sort of lost figment of the ether spiriting around this place like a… ”
A sudden severe and mechanical look from this gangly fellow stops Scott mid-sentence. Then the bellhop smiles, again rather stolidly, and I push Scott away from me, trying to distance myself from his lunacy, and Erik is walking up ahead towards where we are told the elevators are. The skeletal Bellhop stretches his long arm out for us to go on ahead with Erik. This seems like a good idea. We go on ahead hoping the guy will come up with our luggage behind us. There’s no way to know for sure.
I start imagining ways to grab that irascible suited lady’s clipboard away from her. I mumble to myself things like, “Got to just…burglar it away…somehow…burglar the damn thing. Just have myself a little…looksy,” as I swivel my head around like a blind man playing the piano, casting my eyes her way. She’s still standing in the lobby behind us, which for some reason has gone all out-of-focus. The planter, the ceiling festooned with lines of many bright light bulbs, the tiles glinting under them, the golden lion baby-sitting the planter, and a thousand other stippled explosions of gold and coruscation are all just a woozy blur.
Everything is mashed-up. Some kind of flocculation going on. Not sure. I start to say something resembling the word, “quicksilver,” but all that seems to come out is a dull moan. Am I here? Where’d my…how’d I get to this…walking? Walk. Yes. I must walk to the…Damn! Clipboardhuggingwoman…now if I keep this…watch out! Buttons…el…E…Vador? Numbers and lights, murders and fights, lumbers and nights…well, well. Hello there Mr., um, W.A. Spooner I presume? Stop it! Got to keep things…that thing, that giraffe, that thin man pushing that luggage cart…got to keep him away from me…he’s stealing our…clothes? Just the clothes on my back…Run! Run you fool! The carpet needs a shave. A mow…needs to be mowed…mowed down…lower its damn ears…toast popping up, a fire alarm, a dial tone, a blip, a beep, a bong on a gong…time’s up…soup’s up…order’s ready…somebody’s at the door…no! The opening of a tomb. Get in that little room. All aboard. Cram in there. Hold the door! I’ve got to go…Up…Up…and…away…
This is not then. This was now. Either way I start to, started, I start, I am starting, I will be…I started yodeling.
We got a place up on the 20th floor. We are strangers here. They gave us keys. They were given to us. There we are, and there we were, walking all together, lost in stunned disbelief as we ride up, then, in an elevator, now. The room was, and probably still is, a fucking miracle of air-conditioned splendor. Immaculate. I am content at last. I was content then. When is it now? When is then? What is this now? Where are these things, this television, this incredible view of the Las Vegas strip, New York New York out the window? Is there a now? The beds are huge and luxurious. Is this a Sunday? The bathroom is clean and large and I want to shower in very hot water for a very long time. There are clean glasses and an actual ice bucket. I appreciate every last beautiful detail of this clean large and plush room. I was there in a when that seems like now and there are many pools below and maybe a tropical paradise and 110° heat. Cool air, clean air, a remote control, a large metal tray of unknown use, my face is no longer melting off of my face. This is nice. This was nice. This will be a good thing.

And The Oscar Goes To...

Hello. Wow. For some reason, standing here tonight before you, under the harsh glare of these stage lights, I now suddenly want to talk about my life these days. My hum-drum daily routines. About observing the old rotting rainwet wood of ruined houses, warped and peeling paint, the burgundy flakes chipping off and washing down the sidewalk, if there really were a sidewalk, if the world truly does exist, because sometimes when I’m walking, say on a pluvial Monday afternoon of umbrellas and tenebrous skies and the mooing of fog horns calling out their sad and stentorian cries, and almost getting run over by large trucks while I’m crossing the street on a green light, sometimes I look down and there is really no street there under my shoes, no plashing tap of my feet there at all, just the smoky distance of time padding in the mush of a vacuum where nothing can ever occur, and I am kind of free there for the timeless moment, which really is no moment because to have a moment of any substance you must also have time, and there is no time, just a slight budding hunch of something without substance or form creeping along the darkest borders of consciousness, like the feeble cloudy semblance of emotional transmogrifications and other piecemeal ideas of happening, things that always seem right on the cusp of happening, but never do. I stare at stop signs, the water dripping down the loudly red aluminum of their crisp and sharp flat faces and plopping slowly onto the ground, the steely glinting ways of their poles stuck like stakes into the concrete, creating gloomy shadows that look like popsicle sticks with circles of paper cut-out heads on their tops slanting and distorted by the angle of the light shaping them, stop signs that don’t work as cars slow down some and then keep going. I sit in not-so-sad cafes without ballads or music of any sort playing, watching distressed and harried faces hurrying by with purpose and a disquieting speciousness, in relentless pursuit of numismatic and unattainable things, bleary transitory and meaningless compensations for getting through another day, wearing shop-worn expressions of stale tremulous defeat, a façade of content masquerading as liveliness in the atmosphere’s distillation of consumerism-as-culture shrouding these timid souls trapped in the cages of their myopia, duped into a perceived uniqueness where all change just makes them more the same. I am embarrassed of my ineffectual and inefficient modes of communication, the dry well of my personal lexicon unable to sustain even the most meager conversation. So I sit in parks, uncomfortably aloof on sodden benches of despair. I watch people walking their dogs. I see old men in tatterdemalion suits of ancient styles wander by unaware, lost in the bare rooms of gutted mansions where their memories used to live, throwing crumbs to pigeons, shifty anachronisms weighted down by senility and the desuetude of their senescence, their lapels holding the wilted remains of dead roses. I close my eyes and smile. I feel the rain start up again. It collects in the depressions of my face, gathers and forms tiny pools in the corners of my eyes and runs down my cheeks in wild rivulets like tears. It is soothing and all is right with the world. As I stand here before you, holding this oddly shaped, tin and copper statuette of gold-plated britannium standing on a black metal base, this brave and fastidious looking knight rendered in Art Deco style and holding this toy-soldier crusader’s sword, standing on a nickel-sized reel of film. As I stand here at this podium, giving this impromptu and unexpected speech, my voice filling up space into the farthest recesses and great caverns of this auditorium, a winner, though maybe to some an undeserved one, of this award of merit, I can’t think of a damn thing to say. Not because I am incapable of making speeches, and thanking people, and feeling grateful and all that other sentimental and namby-pamby jibber jabber. But because I have seen long faces with even longer scars of memories staring off into emptiness not two inches from my own face on crowded subway trains, because I have been abused by venomous tongues of insidious and malicious intent, because I could sell this award back to The Academy for a buck, because I have shopped in supermarkets at 3 a.m. and have seen those who stumble by lost in darkness under bright lights, and because I have lived as a human being in this frenzied world of consumerism, of consume or be consumed, of inveterate desiring and constant, one-after-the-other ephemeral gratifications, of unreal expectations and expensive clothes and insipid entertainment and self-centered egoism and, yes, I admit also, sad-eyed mules of men, and the pipe-dreamed hallucinations of grandeur by a deluded populace raised on television and high-fructose corn syrup. I have lived with the sad sound of waves crashing fecklessly against both sides of an oblivious continent for too long. And now I am tired. Good night.

the other half of the last part of a random conversation

…(garbled sounds like a tape recorder being dropped or muffled by something, little toboggans of grunts and sighing types of things followed by this--with the other half of the conversation being removed at the request of the speaker, who shall remain anonymous and voiceless for legal reasons)
That’s just the thing. You hit that goddamn proverbial nail right on the fucking head. I don’t want somebody selling their idea of inspiration to me. Some discounted afflatus of questionable value. Something that will most certainly not lift my spirits or throw me into some kind of fucking creative tizzy or something, um, similar? Less than real? Well, kind of just a momentary loss of satisfaction with the world going on around me. Disaffection. So, that’s kind of what I’m saying, you know, when people start asking about favorites. What the hell am I supposed to say? My favorite movie? Book? How the hell can I answer that question? How can I even begin? Make a fucking list? Fuck you. I can’t make a fucking list. My top ten favorite…whatever. It’s ridiculous. You just can’t make these comparisons between things that have like all these subtle variations in texture and strain, and all these varying accounts and interpretations and years and years of, use? Life? Something like that. Things take on their own life outside of whatever the original creator instilled them with or breathed into them. I mean, of course, right? But, also every person who comes to these things with their own mind, well, all those, whatever, thousands, maybe millions of people, well, they not only make their own judgments and maybe mistaken observations about these things, but they, I believe, all add something to the thing they are observing. They turn it into something new every time their minds try to wrap around it. They each form their own warped image of the thing, some kind of MacGuffin of the mind, when their eyes perceive the thing and send all these various signals to the mind which then in turn tries to make sense of it all using the contents of its stored history of knowledge, all of its experience, which of course varies from person to person, if only speciously in some cases, it all still matters a lot. And everything in that mind is always in flux. All there is to know is change, change, and more change. Nothing just is. All these objects are just mutating forms that our brains try to make into concrete things so we can assimilate them into our consciousness and access them more readily when we need them, making memories and so on. No work of art is ever the same as it was the last time you looked at it. You’ve changed. Your brain has changed. You are different. All these other myriad things have happened to you since the last time you tried to make sense of this inchoate and marvelously mutating thing, that really has no “thingness” at all. The way we remember a movie being is never the way that movie really was. Sometimes we just see what we want to see. Sometimes our memory forms false things to fill gaps. And our emotions of course come into play, whatever it was that we were going through or feeling at the time, that hinders our perception. We bring all of our stupid little opinions with us, all of our a priori conceptions of how things are, when that, of course, is most definitely not the way things are. What is real to us is just a sort of tempered and solidified mass of images that we sculpt with our brains. So, let me give you a dumb exempli gratis of this. I’ve read ________ a bunch of times. Like twenty or more. And every time I read it, my mind being in a completely different place from the previous times I’ve read it, I feel like it is a new book to me, a profoundly different experience, and everything I go through while I’m reading it is also very different. Now, I’m not saying that this is because the author has created such a profound work of brilliance that can be interpreted in so many ways. It’s actually a rather simple book. I don’t think the author was trying to do anything spectacular. He was probably just trying to write a decent story, and maybe he even failed at that. It wasn’t a very popular book. Yeah. It went out of print a long time ago, didn’t it? Thirty years? I thought so. So you see? It is me that brings this complexity to it, this grand gallop of my imagination if you will. And everything changes every time I read it. The book no longer belongs to the author. It takes on a life of its own. A raison d'etre it makes for itself. I know that sounds trite, but it’s damn true in this case, and in all cases I would argue. There is no objective “thing” anymore. It’s all part of the collective mass, the ever-expanding ether of the whole. I think all art does this same thing. The artist can try to do things to make people see things in a certain way, but it just won’t work. Everyone is going to see that piece of art in their own way and it will be a completely different thing to everybody. Maybe it won’t even exist for some people. They will just block it out. But whatever happens, it will surely not exist as the mere symbol or whatever the fuck it was that the artist made it up to be. It will just be an always transmogrifying slice of each person’s mind, of their unconscious desires and dreams and all that other folderol. Nothing really exists anyway. That’s the whole point I guess. The world you exist in is the world you make for yourself. You could be trapped inside a box in total darkness, completely deprived of your normal sensations and ways of being, and you would still be able, eventually, to make your own world to exist in. What other life do you have besides the life of your mind? You might want to use that old drop-a-rock-on-your-foot argument, but that’s bullshit. Pain is only a product of the mind. People with CIPA can’t feel pain because their brains are all fouled-up and won’t register the sensation of it. Hot and cold won’t even register. They can’t sweat. Smart people call that anhidrosis. Things will still damage them, but they won’t notice it. The brain can also register pain where there is none, where there is not even a body part anymore, as any amputee will tell you. We can also trick our brains into all kinds of things. Hallucinations, dreams, etcetera. There is a world inside the world inside the world inside a grain of sand. There are even endless worlds beyond that. No. I don’t want to go into the physics of it, but, as I can tell from your arrangement of facial muscles, a slight yet noticeable tensing of your zygomatics there, you know what I mean. So, in answer to your question, I do not have a favorite movie or a favorite book. I feel like Neruda’s fish trapped inside the wind. It’s that whole what-you-shall-assume-I-shall-assume thing. What? Whitman I think. It’s not something, obviously, that I agree with. Your question is just way too vast. I mean, over the course of human history how many books have been written? Millions? Billions? And what about all the ones that were never published, or only sold a handful of copies? Maybe there is a book that was never written that I would have really liked a lot. Or a movie that was never made, only dreamed up inside somebody’s head who later that day got hit by a bus and died without ever telling anybody about their idea. I guess your question needs some type of parameters. Like say, if you asked me what my favorite movie of 1940 was. Or maybe what my favorite Academy Award winner for Best Picture was from the years 1941-1945. But even then, shit, it is just too confusing. There is too much involved, and all this cerebration gets dull and stressful after a bit. What? Oh. My favorite color is green. I thought you knew that.

A small part of a larger story called, "Dreaming In Carnival Time"

I can see it now, the massive metal wheel of the Ferris Wheel turning giant cartwheels in the pimpled dusk of an August sky, the moon softly rising in the smeared thin blur of sight at the edge of the world, kids screaming high and quick and loud, sudden screeches like car crashes; pink tufts of cotton candy and the frozen explosions of corn kernels, which make the tiny cauliflower shapes of popcorn, spilled or dropped or thrown all over the dirt paths that are crowded with people moving in both directions, their faces just vague featureless things lost somewhere in my memories farthest universe. I can see my grandparents standing beside me. I can feel my hand lost in my grandmother’s hand, so much smaller than hers it seems ridiculous, as if she were holding onto a kewpie doll or a cigarette lighter. But she is holding my hand tight and it feels good and warm and safe. My grandfather is wearing red suspenders, a wrinkled white short-sleeved dress shirt with yellow stains under the arm pits, a purple tie with tiny bubbles on it, and faded blue jeans that are splattered with mud at the cuffs. He is watching people swing around on a giant Chair-O-Planes. The people sit on swings attached to long chains that swing out as the top turns. As the top turns faster the swings go out real far, and it’s like they are going to just fly away. They go almost sideways they go out so far. People scream and wave their arms. I hold onto my grandmother’s hand tight, without even knowing it. I want to be one of those people, to be flying high above the ground, lost in the sky, being wild and free and careless. My grandfather is smiling and smoking a cigarette. He laughs as he watches the swings spin faster and higher, and he turns to me and asks if I want to go up in one of those swings. His breath smells like cigarettes and whiskey, and his smile is gigantic. The wattles under his neck shake as he laughs and looks at me expectantly, mussing my hair with a large, calloused palm. Shaking my little head emphatically I tell him yes, yes, I want to go up in the air, I want to swing with the people in the sky, and he tells me ok kid let’s go get you a ticket, and I go with him and the air is dusty and the sun is going down and I know that there isn’t much time, that it will be dark soon, and I try to make him go faster and he is up way high above me and I can smell funnel cakes and hot dogs cooking and I see gum on the ground and leap over it, still holding fast to his hand, and people keep getting in the way but he pulls me through all the way to the ticket booth. His grip is strong and reliable and I don’t ever want to let go.
A dizzy rush, like my stomach has gone outside of me somewhere, and my head is lifting a little higher above my body than I’m used to. The belt holding me in is tight around my hips and shoulders. The swing shakes when I move so I hold as still as I can. Excitement is running over me like warm water in a bathtub. I look at my grand parents standing on the railing. They are waving to me and smiling and saying my name. The kids on the swings around me look scared and maybe like they have to go to the bathroom. The top of the ride is like a carousel with all kinds of colored light bulbs and painted pictures of animals all over it. It is so high up that I have to tilt my head all the way back to see it all, like I’m looking at clouds. The engine grinds and starts to whirr like my mom’s vacuum cleaner. My feet get lifted up off of the ground and I keep kicking them in the air as the swing starts to move forward and up. I look out ahead of me at some other kid’s back and it seems impossible that the swings will go as high as I saw them going from the ground. They move so slowly, and some bigger kids are dragging their feet in the dirt as they start to go in a circle. My grandfather is standing there, his smile like a sideways crescent moon, with his arm around my grandmother. His head is bald and round and he has big, gray sideburns crawling on his face. The skin on his face is rugged, worn and chapped and wrinkled. He holds my grandmother close, her head spilling out dark brown and silvering curls, her face shining and full, smiling too at me from a round face of sunspots and tanned, leathery skin. The smoke from my grandfather’s cigarette coils and curls and wraps around the air like a caduceus, little cloud tails whipping the air around his head and then disappearing. As I circle I try to find them again, but I lose track of where they are and I am starting to go up higher into the air. Some of the kids are swaying back and forth in their swings, but I try to hold really still, to keep the chains on my swing as straight as I can, so I can fly sideways, so I can go really fast like I want. The music is playing, some kind of harmonium or Wurlitzer organ, but it gets fainter as the swings pick up speed and start to splay out. Human voices are lost in the sound of wind. I can’t see the ground below me and the swing is up higher than I’ve ever been before, up where the clouds would be if there were any. The swings pick up speed, spinning faster and faster, but I’m not getting dizzy. I feel unattached from everything, out on my own, and there’s a certain kind of silence up here that gives me goose bumps and makes my head airy and light. There are no people down there on the ground, there is nothing, no world, no people walking around trying to win prizes at booths by throwing balls at stacks of bowling pins, licking ice-cream cones and staring at funhouse mirrors, only me up here spinning around in a giant fast circle on this swing, holding onto the chains so tight my fingers start to chaff, squinting hard against all of this wind blowing at my face, which prickles my skin and makes my eyes water. I look out and see mountains and open fields, and just below my left sneaker, when my swing comes around to just the right place, the moon. I lean into the turns, which are all just one turn forever turning, and my swing goes up sideways. I kick-out my feet and scream, louder than I’ve ever been in my whole life. Nobody can hear me way up here. I don’t ever want to go back down.

barthelme never did this..

--you ever drive a car around here, maybe say, late at night?
--sometimes.
--were you drunk?
--sure. Probably had a lot of things going on, a lot of pills and what not.
--pills and what not?
--sure. Yeah. Whatever, you know?
--seems like not the safest way to be going through the streets at dawn when maybe you’ve been up all night too, and are all hopped up on…
--hopped up on? You can’t talk like that. Not to me. Let’s get one thing straight.
--ok
--no more bullshit about drugs or whatever. Got it.
--got it.
--now what the hell has all this, whatever you said, late night driving got to do with anything.
--it seemed important at the time. I’m not sure now. Just trying to make a living.
--yeah. Me too. What else can you do?
--I don’t know. Drive around late at night in cars I guess.
--so you’re sitting at a red light, right?
--sure. Sure I am.
--and then you kind of, I don’t know, start revving the engine.
--revving?
--just putting your foot to the pedal a little, you know, put the car in park and just rev the engine a bit.
--a bit?
--yes. So you start to kind of make up a story in your head about who you are.
--who am I?
--an asshole. So you do this and the story isn’t anything you want to keep telling yourself. It’s something, I don’t know, idiotic, pointless, nothing.
--so why am I telling this story? What’s the…
--it’s just a stupid story and you realize it doesn’t matter what it is, you’re just distracting yourself from really living, from being a thing out in the world.
--man is the social animal.
--what? Anyway. This thing has been going on your whole life. Everyone you know expects you to be this things that you’ve created, this thing that keeps changing just to try to stay the same. But it’s all a lie. There’s nothing really real about you.
--really?
--I mean, you are you of course.
--of course.
--but there’s still that whole deal with what really constitutes being you. Just this random accumulation of particles and bacteria, this solar-powered biped with opposable thumbs and a medulla oblongata and all the rest. What makes you you.
--you.
--shut up, I…
--no really. You make me the person I am. Without other people I don’t really exist. I mean not in reality, not in other people’s reality, which is what the world is, a giant soup bowl of other people’s reality. Otherwise it’s just solipsism to the infinite power. And that doesn’t work because I can drop a rock on your foot, and that pain will be real to you, not just some separate kind of real.
--it’s useless talking to you.
--I agree. But think about it. What makes you a person, an individual with a soul and mind and thoughts and all that other garbage? It’s all other people. They see you therefore you are who you are, to them, to yourself, it’s all part of a giant game we play, a lie we keep telling ourselves, that there’s any difference.
--between who I am and who everyone thinks I am? Or between who I am and what other people are?
--you’re not asking the right question. Or maybe you just need to see that those two questions are the same question, and the neither matters at all.
--they matter to me. I don’t want to just spill away into the ocean of everybody else, to be like a droplet of water in a waterfall that slams into the water below to join all the other droplets in a river. I don’t like that. I want to be separate, alone, untouched by others.
--that’s impossible. Even that fucking droplet of water you speak of came from a river filled with innumerable other droplets, and then there were no drops, it was all one thing, one body of water flowing on and on, and it came to a cliff and for a short time each droplet was formed and had an identity of its own, its little life that each drop thought would be forever, and it was really just a short time, but it was forever, because before the cliff there were no droplets, and after they were no more.
--have fun while it lasts.
--until another cliff comes around.
--sure. But those droplets, they won’t be the same droplets anymore.
--it won’t matter. It’s all the same. You just have to look at things differently. You are part of something much larger and more beautiful than you could ever imagine. A drop of water can’t imagine a river as it’s falling. You can’t get outside of your own head, you can’t be greater than the whole. But you are the whole at the same time. It is all one thing.
--no cliff can change that I guess. It’s all only temporary.
--that’s about it. It’s all a dream, and when you wake up to a river you will no longer be the you that you’d always thought you had been before.
--so in the mean time don’t run to try to catch busses, drive around late at night if you like, and don’t worry too much about things. The river will still be there in the end.
--there is no end. But that’s okay. I think living more will take care of that too.
--shit. I could really go for some French fries.
--yeah. I love dipping French fries in ketchup. It’s a simple pleasure. Something about the hot fries and the cold ketchup.
--you never stop this shit do you?
--what?