3

Out the studio window, on view of the train yard, over the occasional sound of cars clashing along the lengths of rail, about a thousand gulls sleep on the roof of the school bus repair facility. When the cars screech so do a few of the birds in protest. They arrange themselves evenly spaced along the expanse. They showed up a few days ago, triggered, I believe, by a change in the weather.

Earlier today I saw a man laid out on in the intersection with his bike mangled and onlookers awaiting ambulance response. I put the van in park, opened the door and resisted the urge to do anything. Some off duty official was already on the scene. The man was squirming in pain. Onlookers urged him not to move presumably for fear of spinal injury. It was dark. The man likely ran through the light while riding along the sidewalk and got struck. I keep thinking, I should have gone to reassure him, no one was doing that. I backtracked and drove away instead. That unknown person is the most significant man I've encountered all month.

A week ago I was working in the studio when lightening hit outside the studio window. A deafening boom filled the room. I was stunned with blindness like a punch to the jaw. When I came to I stared out the east window and thought of home. If I had the choice I would travel east, pass home, completely circle the globe and return again from the west.

Prose and Poems

I call myself arrogant but I know it’s not true. It’s hard for me to even hold a grudge for an extended period. After a while, I see both views and understand and empathize with my aggressor or assailant or betrayer or victim. The problem is, with humans, you can never really know the experience of the other. Understanding may not help. It usually doesn’t. Know yourself, know what you want, act on this, stay focused. It’s all the makings of a good consumer, it is capital culture, knowing what you want and seeking out the means to that consumption. Time is the most costly and time is what often is needed most. To slip past danger with restraint and reason. With less.

Yellowstone burnt over in ‘88. The fires razed nearly three quarters of the forest and grasslands in that already hostile environment. I arrived after that for the first time. Before I had traveled there I hadn’t really considered it a destination. A break from the cyclical dronery of suburban squalor was more on my mind than a dormant volcano. I got both. Yellowstone is a bit in spirit like eastern Canada; there’re some wild things by way of tourism but the really outstanding places require exiting the vehicle and traversing land on foot. Rivulet’s and waterways and old stone and deep pools. Yellowstone can easily find your limits and test them. For example, a trek across the pitchstone plateau requires strategic water rationing. A few wrong decisions and you could perish in a few hours or a few days, in either case, a relatively short period of time. Moments then become acute and preparations essential. There’s no glamour in it, the challenge is against your own body and its corporeal limits and by extension really, death. Because death can come in an instant or over a day or a few days in a world where your safety is not a valued concern. You are out there, alone, or maybe with a friend and pass from the world as it is comfortable and connected and fast and instead into to the vulnerability of it. So I got used to vulnerability except that political death is far more violent a death and far more slow, and lessons of the land are useless to the dumb ass brawlers of NY State. These are no metro sexual pansies on the streets, they’re beasts hunting other beasts in vast droves of unemployment. The kind that on occasion will overrun police on foot patrol in order to score a Glock. I think of this and then the quiet life of obedience or the boredom of safety or the wretched possibility of failure. So everyday a story. Most days a failure. Rip a new asshole for the Romantics. Run away, make it yours and tie it up, bound to earth like a rotten bone. Your rotten bone.

The vast majority of stories go untold. There are more I’d like to tell here and now, more of the real thing, as it happens but as it is there are good reasons for silence. And some have counseled the best of reasons. They have stories too. Still, soon, relatively soon they’ll come out from the crust like hordes of marching insects.

Asian Marketing

All good stories start with a tragedy. It could be a small one or a peripheral one but you’ll find it there, the event that put bodies in motion. What makes a story truly tragic and/or terrible is if the motion produces unredeemable disaster and/or a dullard heroine. I like the sound of that, a dullard heroine, tragic.

The pills made me nauseous so I made myself puke around 3AM by shoving a finger to the back and fondling the soft palate. Up came the burger and rings from hours before still largely undigested. Maybe it was the food. More likely I was sick with worry. Down to the wire, no reliable jobs surface and money tight, to the point of necessitating a change, an immediate one. No real worries except that no job makes a whole bunch of shit difficult. Not the least of which is, where to lay ones head and possibly, where to lay ones girlfriends head? No matter, what’s another year of this in the long run, probably divine guidance. Maybe not the pills n shit but what the hell, if it relieves pain for a short time why not? It’s not like they make me lazy, matter of fact it’s the opposite, they provide relief well into the early morning hours when the machine hums with connective blips and rumbles in electronic accord, storing and shifting, compiling and stacking. Please forgive these words, their blatant poetics, they come out that way. It’s the way I sort of think, backwards, as if the sentence is being constructed like a baseball in flight, so by the time it reaches the batter the thing has twisted around so many times that only a hope keeps it intact, each time a fear that it’ll be batted out of the park like drunken swine. See what I mean?

Bah! No worries, more prayers, a different approach, another one, hours, days, wasted. It’s almost as if success requires a cross but probably not. I keep thinking, I should have left here a long time ago or I should have never come. Like Tommy say, “misery’s the river of the world” and/or “the world is kept alive by bestial acts.” Sure there’s good advice but most of it isn’t real. Take the lessons of the poor, when poor. Fuck. Refreshment, young coconut juice:

FRUITA with meat. FRUITA is a mouthwatering avalanche of flavor that will quench any type of thirst. By selecting only the choicest of fruits and picking them at the pinnacle of ripeness, nothing but the best is ever put in our drinks. That’s why we say. “when you want fresh and delicious, nothing satisfies you like a FRUITA”. Product Name: Coconut Juice. Ingredients: Young coconut juice, Sugar, Young coconut pulp.

hypoPalliasse

eVeryday a board meeting, a drawing board, a paddle, a tool, a palette, a rusted nail, a stool, a heap, a plastic toy, electronics, a magazine, entertainment, a dullard reflex, a musical, a mansion, a box, a babe, a hairy guy, a meddlesome cop, an overweight rogue, a depressed wife, a good friend, a horse, a Samaritan, a vagrant, a bastard, a lover, a mortgage, a fucking cardboard box, everyday something new, something more, something overwhelming, delicious poultry, a glass bead, a concrete block, everyday something a little bit more toward an itch and toward the relief of that itch, everyday exhausted and completely satiated and sane under hot, dry Western silt or icy Southern seas or Eastern florae or Northern loose sealed permafrost thin veiled sun. Everyday slumped in a fine leather saddle. A glorious thing.