12FL/OZ 355ML

Home: It's where you keep your stuff.

Pause from a sip of Belhaven on this hot September night in Brooklyn while the ghost party rages next door…

For three days they’ve been at it; Latino pop, an unfortunate backside selection of lesser known Motown hits, shoddy R&B and cheap reggae covers of even worse songs and now — for some entirely unholy reason — they’ve jammed the dial on “dance music of the late 90s” and abandoned responsibility for the jukebox entirely.  A giant treble clef in white rope lights adorns the chain link fence at the back of a yard filled with tables, a tent and a hit squad of ubiquitous white plastic chairs, probably hot stamped into existence by some vapor damaged 12-year-old in a far away factory where clean water is a fairy tale and Zouzou always needs more medicine. But until tonight, there were no guests!

Suddenly this end of the block has become a swirling stew of double-parked cars and unusual food smells.  People are eating potato chips and laughing at jokes.  Here and there, a sibilant ”s” slips out from behind a hand, denoting a polite aside or perhaps some private concern.  Crackling murders of teenage crows hop and cock on the steps, arguing listlessly about nothing essential, puncturing the dead night with shrill howls of o-shaped disbelief and “No, you didn’t!”  Staccato bursts of “um-hm” and “I was like…” dominate the front stoop.  Whiffs of this harmless patter force their way through the dusty grid of my windscreen and stain the floorboards below; layer upon layer of audio memories forever trapped in the varnish like insects in the amber, to be later extracted by an avuncular but well-meaning scientist figure and turned first into a theme park, then into a movie and perhaps, Hollywood willing, a sequel.

My previous apartment, the Fortress of Solitude, was surgically clean and hermetically sealed against all enemies, foreign and domestic.  It was a great granite haven, a solid silent place to make a stand, a posh pillbox in which to bivouac myself away during my initial year in New York City.  It was the ultimate shelter, designed to keep zombies out and my paranoia in.  It could even sustain a direct hit should the pigs ever lose their grip on the wheel of the nation.

The air conditioning always worked, the counters were pristine and easy to clean.  My landlord held all my packages.  My grocery store was just around the corner.  My local bar was one block over and five blocks down.  My favorite coffee hole was two blocks over and four blocks down.  The L, two blocks over and five blocks down, would take me anywhere I wanted to go and there was always eye candy on the train.

I was the first person to live in that apartment since the building was remodeled and I found it reassuring; no matter what happened, no matter where I roamed, I could count on coming home to immaculate granite surfaces, freshly laundered towels and thick walls designed to keep out the peals of wicked laughter and unexplained shrieks of the city until I eventually learned what was what and allowed them to drown in the background of the sea.  I don’t do so good with crowds.

Entering my incense-laden sanctuary at the end of any long day, I could drop my bags to the floor and breathe deeply of my governed space.  The clothes in my closet were always pressed, hanging on identical IKEA hangars and spaced exactly one finger apart.  The towels were folded boot camp style on a gleaming metal rack in a spotless bathroom complete with heated floors.  The kitchen sink was devoid of both dirty dishes and water spots.  The desk was exactly black.  The books were arranged first according to subject and then by alphabetical order.

I could hide here from the filth and noise.  I could do my laundry in peace.  I could do chin-ups while my dinner bubbled away in various pots and pans on a five-burner range.  I had room to pace.  The middle of the living floor was completely bare; I could swing a cat without hitting a wall and stretch my long-limbed frame in all cardinal directions.  My altar, a stack of military ordinance crates layered in incense ash and dried flowers, was adorned with candle stubs, sentimental rocks, statues of obscure deities, dog tags, spent rounds of ammunition and assorted skulls.  It held a place of honor at the center of the room beneath the main window.

Clearly, I had the freedom to express myself.  And I should’ve been churning out volumes of new material, but oddly there was nothing forthcoming.

I was too safe.

A ship isn’t designed to stay in the harbor and the Fortress wasn’t meant to last.  The rent was costing me an entire check each month.  I was hemorrhaging money and plugging the holes with sticky rice and red beans.  Poor is only sexy when you’re young.

I knew couldn’t stay there forever.

So I decided to move.  Moreover, I decided to get a roommate, someone with whom I could split the bills and the groceries and spend some time being human.  I genuinely love being alone but to tell the truth I was maybe getting kinda weird…

I weighed the pros against the cons and I tried hard to find a fault with my plan but it was just too good of an idea to fail.

First came the apartment hunt, then the logistical scramble followed by twelve hours of slave labor which took place on one of the hottest days of the year.  My new roommate and I first emptied her tiny fourth-floor Flatbush apartment before tackling the Fortress.  (Thankfully we were assisted part of the way by my boss and his always-smiling girlfriend.)  We finished the move, returned the piece of shit, graffiti-covered meat wagon at around eleven that night and ached like zombies for the next three days.

 

My new apartment is on one end of a shady street just three long, loping blocks from Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.  The interior of this 1901 railroad-style Huxtable hideaway has been painted over so many times it’s probably lost an inch of actual real estate from the doors and walls.  The outlets, when and where they exist, are all two prong.  There are no outlets in the bathroom.  The honey-colored floors warp and creak like a fat man’s belt when you walk on them.  I need a road flare to navigate my tiny all-black closet.  There’s a three-foot patched-and-painted depression on one wall of the back room, as though something large from another dimension stopped by for tea one Sunday and left a crater-shaped ripple in its wake.  I drop my laundry off at an establishment on the corner; it comes back folded.  I’d need to clone myself and stand on my own shoulders in order to change the light bulbs in the living room, the double doors of which stick and drag against the friction caused by decades of paint and varnish.  There are bars on all the windows (though I’m not sure whom they’re meant to protect.)  The books are on the shelf with no particular care to their order…

But I like it.  There is life here.  This apartment requires me to relax.  I cannot control it.

Reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer on this hot September night in Brooklyn while the ghost party rages next door…  New York is practically built for writers and artists too (and I suppose even that poor, miserable, disgusting wretched subspecies of worm human, the fashion photographer).  All you have to do is close your eyes and listen.

Capture.  Import.  Decipher.  Interpret.  Express.  Repeat.

What one might first dismiss as the mindless chatter of ignorant gossip or uneducated bleating is actually the complex interpretation of the new battlefield translated by the secret medium that cannot and will not go away.  At every second, we stand on the gentle arc of the present tense and we talk about what Is.  As much as I hate gossip, it’s a fucking necessity.

In order to write about people, you have to put yourself out there in the biomass.  Find the words, capture the No Thing.  Get involved.  Stick your dick in the mashed potatoes.

William S. Burroughs referred to something called the restless word, a silent power that ebbed and ached and yearned to be described.  “Close your eyes for ten seconds and try to think of nothing,” he said.  “The word will still be there.”

Scott Adams wrote, [SIC] “We are the slowly reforming nervous system of a suicidal god.”  When we speak we convey information in rough tree shapes that, properly diagrammed, resemble a map of the human nervous system.  This is an offshoot of this, which relates to this, which is part of this larger branch…  We build roads and rail systems that branch like the human nervous system.  We should know better than to build mega weapons and super gases and ultra guns, but we do it anyway.  We give in to fear.  We cannot leave well enough alone.  It’s as though we were programmed to do these things.  As if we were not only marching determinedly toward the destruction of our species, but through it.  Beyond it, even.

We want to believe we were designed for something.  We’d like to think we happened for a purpose.  We can spend our lives guessing at why we’re really here, but I don’t think those answers will come for a long, long time and when they do we may not even recognize them for what they are.  We come, we do, we go.

We are only stories telling stories,

Weapons Grade Bath Towel

Few things worse than what happened to the country I knew so well; all glad hands and “yee haw” among friends.  I wait for an again.  That to me is death.  Have left town in this is gonna end badly address.  I don’t sleep, I am a ghost.  

Even now, my night walks beneath the surface of the present tense into scattered drowning men with a photograph and scraps of reading and rereading. In making this pamphlet, all my modest domicile.  The better to help you prepare for this world, lines of threats and the illegal closets spill onto the shelves. Bombs can be constructed, just paper and ink.  Anything can be placed, any number of ways.  They cross the room to a stereo by a pair of sawhorses.

After fixing a sandwich, 12:45 creeps by slowly.  I try to write something horizontal, door supported fanfare.  Fountains bubble, but nothing comes which doubles as my desk. Meekly the sunshine again, studying the document, my place of employment is worn spots in the carpet, nicks in the woodwork and fallen predictable because a cheap tavern room window, which overlooks weeks classic black and the biggest crack bar, but it’s rumored years of so.  I’m exhausted, humming in my legs, rippling like water, I jump start.  Went to a party last night, figured it out on cardboard, I am only nothing observing.

This pamphlet is designed my good moods gone, and without a great deal. Private sectors prepare invincible young man and the small fans whir and hiss, threat of explosives.  Where is love, where are the glass doors of my ideas set forth herein, answer but not receive right and sharp.  I’m information provided is hurry, leaving no forward.  I’ve read it so many of sources, including the anymore.  I spend my Chuck Taylor’s last special agents, street scribbling the white to replace the pair and Firearms (ATF). 

Notebooks crammed full of long ago, like a thousand moments gone forever, and I feel the gentle.  If there is one point the dog-eared volumes that fit my arms and chest, overemphasized, it is the documentation of my time should take a few pills to overemphasize.

Do not allow a bomb, explodes out of surprise.  By developing the floor, suffocate the Harbortown, had a considering, possible meaning of life, physical security plan, space in the room, safe keeps.  Potential for personal space in the room.

30NOV07 in the City

With a tremendous rush, the 5 o’clock yellow line comes thrusting out of the tunnel near the platform where I’m standing, driving before it the musty and mysterious smells of a dozen subterranean concrete wombs that it’s penetrated along the way. Headphones in, hat pushed back on my head, squinting into the wave of grit and wind, I wait till it stops before boarding the last car and sliding into a seat. Never cheat children, women, the elderly, or the infirm of a place to sit. These are rules to keep you honest, rules to live by. Remember them. A pair of gushing teenage girls take a seat to my left, giggling about something on their camera. I think for a moment about how much power and kinetic energy they hold. In their young lives, they will gain access to places I only read about in magazines based solely on their looks and implied access to their sexual favors. Spending this currency too readily means they’ll have the hardest time being taken seriously when they get older. I can’t remember being that excited about anything when I was their age, and that’s probably a damn shame. I’m sitting in a rail car moving backwards at X speed telling you first hand that the distance between Crystal City and DCA is remarkably short.

It’s Friday. Don’t believe me? Look it up.

TWM

01DEC07 – Sitting in Chipotle on King Street on a Saturday afternoon nearly paralyzed with pleasure, my legs tingling from the cold bite of the wind, my lips basked in flames from the heat of the salsa. The girl who assembled my burrito asked me twice if I was sure I wanted it this hot. I’ve been indoors for most of the day (the internet is evil!) but I got some work done as well. I have a camera, a notebook, coffee, and food. My Maslow’s are met for the moment.

The brown paper wrapping used to cushion my burrito is covered with the names of musicians. I read through them, and wonder at the tastes of someone who might own all of these albums. The selection is so bland! Who the fuck was the marketing department hoping to reach? Thirty-something’s in pressed jeans and color coordinated wardrobes, the relaxed faces of people you see in advertisements. Every race and gender represented, all with perfect teeth. They have a lot to laugh about. Their sparsely decorated homes feature the latest in labor saving devices, check their bank balances at the beach, and they drove there in a brand new Acura, maybe a Saab. These are decent people who live in respectable neighborhoods, vote responsibly, engage in vanilla sex, and spend lots of time shopping. They genuinely like Jack Johnson, and invite their college friends over for taco night.

Who the fuck has taco night? Men with perfect feet, lean physiques and six-figure incomes, that’s who. Women who own their own businesses and never get periods, that’s who. Couples with picture perfect weddings who name their daughters McKenzie and their sons Blake. People who shop at Eddie Bauer, wear their alma mater on sweatshirts, talk down to their children, and refer to themselves in the third person as mommy and daddy, that’s who. I don’t know what fucking planet these aliens came from. I only hope they come in peace.

Later, walking down King Street as I often do, immersed in observations and remote participation, exercising caution on the wet cobblestones. DASH buses entombed in a soft blue glow glide past on glass wheels, carrying no passengers. Everyone gives a stink eye to the poor around here, and no one wants to be reminded of the Facts this close to the Season of Giving, or how unpleasant things can get just beyond the walls of their personal Empire. A dollar won’t do shit. Anyone who knows anything knows that. That’s almost as good as taking the money and flinging it into the street. People only give to make themselves feel better.

Passers-by emit clean wi-fi, broadcasting their likes and dislikes in the clothes they wear, the products they sip, the shoes on their feet, and still we fail to understand one another. Someone once told me that ninety-five percent of the people you meet in your entire life are sound asleep, but that the remaining five live in a state of panicked awe, doomed to stomp the high ground alone, misunderstood and feared.

Everyone has issues, no one is exempt, all of us serving time here on the Pale Blue Dot. We are born, we become aware of ourselves, our surroundings, but seldom do we grasp the length and breadth of our lives until somewhere close to the end of the film, looking back over our shoulders one night with a glass of Scotch and seeing at last that our wild adventures took place within the narrow confines of a dog run, understanding for once and all that we lived each day according to a set of rules we didn’t vote for, experiencing a sense of guilt when we sought to please only ourselves. Then one day, we’re introduced to the concept of our own mortality, and it becomes the only name and face we remember, despite having met literally thousands of interesting and attractive people at parties throughout the years. Nothing lasts forever except nothing and forever, and there is no such thing as security. Our lives are over in the blink of an eye, like the shadow of a great bird crossing the surface of a lake by the light of the moon. There are no rollover minutes, and nothing is carried over, because none of us believe in the same version of today, tomorrow, forever, Heaven, or Hell. It’s just that simple, and just that complicated.

People in their cars
scatter like sparks from a fire.
Who knows where they go?

TWM

11JAN08 – I have difficulty with time; an ailment if you will. Things that happened to me years ago feel like yesterday, and vice versa. I think most physicians would refer to it as a Billy Pilgrim moment. Walking to the Metro, I suddenly find myself slinging ‘Pink Panty Pull Downs’ split three ways and bottles of Bud Lite served ice cold at that crappy little dive in Hilton Head, making hundred dollar bills hand over fist and spending all my free time inebriated pool side. When I opened my eyes again, I was on a Metro train twenty minutes late for work in the year 2008, older, wiser, and just as uncertain about tomorrow. How did my predecessors manage to live in this world, and create the great works that made the world sit up and take notice? I’m barely able to keep my head above water, spending much of my day finding new ways to stay interested in my job, with little success. My roaring 20s are just a memory, and I’m nearing the end of my depression-era 30s. Time just keeps marching. Most of the greats died young, unheralded.

Burroughs managed to hang on for the long haul with only his guns and his cats for company in the end. Kerouac drank himself into regressive stupidity, mummified in his mother’s apron strings and denying all that he’d accomplished. Thompson far exceeded his own predetermined finish line, and put his wife on hold while he ate the business end of a shotgun. Kesey went quietly, Casssady died counting railroad ties. These Junkies, drunks, malcontents, wandering madmen, Zen poets, and acid-suckling Pranksters were heroes to me, and yet I spend my days slumped in an ergonomic chair, manipulating electrons and shuffling file folders for Big Brother, living a life straddling both sides of the fence. I feel spikes of pride when I read about the lives we’ve saved, but this false sense of security, this wet blanket I live under is sapping me dry, and every day I’m that much closer to breathing my unhappy last.

“Well, I’m sorry you feel that way, but it’s a fact of life,” chides a co-worker. “We all have to work!” says this stupid son of a bitch with a pair of dog’s balls sitting in the pan where their brains were meant to go. Is this your call to arms? Is this the trumpet call that spurs you to battle every morning? Maybe you’re in worse shape than me.

Enough of this talk. It’s Friday, and for once it’s not freezing.

Two days later, making observations in Murphy’s (God Hell, I swore I’d never come back here again.) Some relationships go on much longer than they’re meant to, like a Christmas sweater from your grandmother you’re told to keep wearing long after you’ve outgrown it. You get sick of the role you forced yourself into when you were lonely and you’d rather be anywhere else, but here but Here is the only game in town. Don’t think I’m alone in this. Someday you’ll get to a point where you can’t call the shots anymore. They’ll call you, and you’ll have to wait by the phone.

Still, these precious hours are the apex of the weekend, the part we all wish could go on forever. It’s as though we were in a carnival ride, swinging high out over the cornfields, closer to the stars in this moment that we have been all week. In this time and place we can see forever, and in a few more hours we will have begun our re-entry into the atmosphere of Sunday morning. Right now everything is clean and holy, and all we need is a few dollars in our pocket, a place to sit, and a strong drink with which to wet our lips. We can ignore the slappers, the bad Irish music, and the constant sports feed (on not one but two big screens!) Our ancient home continues its orbit around a prolonged nuclear explosion. All we ask is a few more precious seconds of this warmth, this innocence, this endless stretch of hassle-free nothingness. Monday morning is coming up like a sunrise on the horizon, but right now the Earthbound tedium of our workaday existence is a million miles away…

CUT TO: Monday morning. The hustle and bustle on the road to Doom, people racing each other out of the Metro station, up the escalators, fighting for a seat on the shuttle – just headed to work. The faster they travel up the ramp to that daily abattoir, the better they like it. The girl with the violin legs is back, in her tall brown leather boots and a skirt like theater curtains…I’m listening to the Rolling Stones, watching it all happen, as I always have, as I always will.

(“Tell me, Sister Morphine / when are you… coming ‘round again?”)

TWM