Have you ever seen page five?

20MAY2012 – Concept: a human life is fully-realized within five weathered pages of a paperback novel, one pressed between many on a shelf near the back of an old bookstore, just to the left of a hand-lettered cardboard sign: FICTION.

Background characters in a novel are summoned forth from the No Thing and brought to life with such mastery, such clarity and depth of definition that the Reader can’t help but identify with these imaginary beings, understanding and identifying with them in a sudden flash of entirety. The Devil lives in the details. These fictional lives brush up against the Reader’s own with unexpected force, jarred into creation by vivid descriptions of spilled drink, flowing tears, clever plans, the rasp of whiskers or raucous laughter, such that the Reader can’t help but cheer them on.

Don’t get cocky. They used to cheer for lions, too.

But then the thumb is licked and the fourth page is turned and somewhere near the bottom of page five, the character is killed off. Is this cruel? Not particularly, that’s just how the story needed to be told.

“We are stories telling stories.” We have control over our own story right up until the moment when it collides with the storyline of another character. (Either we happen to them, or they happen to us. Depends on your perspective, really.)

These fictional characters live so completely on these yellowed plains, covered from head to toe in every aspect of what makes them real, existing behind and between each and every single letter on the page. The postcards, the tickets stubs, the dryer lint, the bar tabs, the take-out containers, the music collections, the book collections, the love letters, the grocery lists – all of the debris and mementos of their imaginary lives – are just dust trapped in the cracks and crevices of every foot of serif of every word of every sentence of every paragraph of the few pages they’re given, compacted by years of fucking and fighting and fear of failure, French fries and Friday nights, the whole thing rusted over with sweat like the pocketknife of an old man. Every word breathes, every letter hums. The characters aspire to learn everything there is to learn about the pages on which they exist; the height, the width and the location of the strange indentation at the upper edge of the third page where a worm ate its way into their falsified reality…

We can tell ourselves what free and wonderful beings we are and insist that everything is one big gorgeous goddamn pageantry. But you and I both know that we can’t travel beyond our own sixth page, and we can’t escape what’s coming up fast from the bottom of the fifth one.

Our destiny, too, is to be fed feet-first and screaming into the Great Grinder of Storytelling; we are brought to life so that the Reader may identify with us and we are killed off in such a way as to propel the story along and make the survival of the remaining characters that much more dear.

“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.” – Chuck Palahniuk

We are trapped like dolphins in a round tank, pinging ourselves into madness. (I think, therefore I am/very sad) We burn brightly while we can, but in the end we simply aren’t equipped to make it to the epilogue.

##

The above (crudely) illustrates a nagging sensation I’ve had for many years, that I left the factory incomplete, minus some very important pages from my owner’s manual, that I’m not a fully fleshed-out character in my own right. I don’t mean that I lack experience – hell, no. I’ve been a-many places and I’ve seen a-many things, and I’m just as impressed by life as you are.

But the miles aren’t long enough, and the dreams aren’t bright enough. I feel like a simulation, a placeholder, the storekeeper in an early Nintendo game, a character on the Holodeck — something programmed with a limited number of responses despite being part of a greater complexity. A one-act play in five pages. Trapped on the stage, unable to see past the lights…

(I can’t give you tomorrow.)

TWM

Phantom Limb Syndrome

12FEB2012 – Dutch Boy, Franklin Avenue, Brooklyn. Waiting for coffee and eggs Benedict amidst the sonic swath of: the singing click of washing plates, running water and loud reggae flowing forth from the kitchen; the layers of conversation bolted to the cafe walls by sibilant hooks ejected into fricative fucking existence by the deadlier of the species dominating the room; the silence of couples exchanging a kiss on the sidewalk outside.

On top of the world one minute, lying prostrate in the valley with a face full of frozen pig shit the next. It’s not as complicated as you make it. (In fact, it’s much, much worse…) The clock ticks louder, each second resounding like a rifle shot until the explosions are loud enough to wring water from blood. Each blastwave shakes the table, rattling flatware and clinking the glasses. I am beyond screaming at this point. This goes unnoticed by everyone else.

Everything we do takes place in this world, during this timeline and in this dimension. We are captive court jesters; reciting our lines at the top of our lungs and juggling just as fast as we can, giving our all to a sleepy king who yawns once an hour, resting his fat head on a meaty palm. No escape pod, and no way to hug the beyond from here.

While escorting a friend to Grand Central Station on Saturday, I theorized that our emotions were somehow anchored to the ocean. When we enter this world, we are issued an anonymous measure of the sea which goes about behaving as the sea is meant to behave, all the while manipulating our moods, governing our capacity to give and our eventual tendency to need something in return for ourselves. The throbbing desire to give is proportional to the clawing need to receive. Some of the blocks are subsurface, cold and salty. Some of them crash frequently upon sunny shores and white sand beaches, aerated like blue champagne. When we pass on from this world, our block of ocean is returned. Renew, reduce, recycle. Our emotions are by no means new. Sign and date here, please.

Maybe I’m getting it right but I’m not loud enough. Maybe I’m doing it wrong and thankfully no one has noticed. Or maybe I’m doing it wrong but no one has bothered to tell me, like the elderly deaf uncle who shows up to a funeral with his fly open. I have no choice but to carry on — the desire to write burns as brightly as ever.

On good days, it feels like having lengths of exposed copper hair shoved deep beneath my skin; there is a stink of ozone and tiny sparks are born to die as the wires are scraped across the leads of a battery with a pop, propelling my left hand to spasm and flail for the nearest pen and begin stabbing words into existence across the surface of anything that will carry ink. Those of us afflicted by this terrible disease meet twice weekly in anonymous church basements, sharing our shame over stale donuts and buckets of burnt coffee. It is foolish, embarrassing and wrong but I know I’ll never be able to stop, even if I fail.

Putting way too much thought into the expression “I don’t mind”,

FOUND

A scrap of paper pressed between the pages of a book, a wrinkled and ruined shred of memory folded twice and covered in the barely legible scratches of my own drunken hand:

“29SEP2010 – Sitting in a pub somewhere among the wet shadows of the French Quarter listening to music that was born before I was a gleam in my daddy’s eye; anthems of parties gone away, time frozen in the white sparks of bodies of bottles behind the bar. Keeping things in focus is like nailing a fried fucking egg to the wall…”

An Explanation of Subway Stickers and Additional Information

Please refrain from A) the use of a phantom fetus-conjuring blunderbuss B) the levitation of more than three novelty-themed Rubik’s cubes during a single séance, and C) the piloting of a square-wheeled tank boasting ineffective armaments in public places.

We’ll have more news of this at eleven. And now, tonight’s top story:

There’s something living behind the walls of this Brooklyn-time summer moment that paws, sniffs and stamps restlessly at the scattered ground, sifting through the raped and littered soil with a decidedly pointed hoof for telltale signs of a missing future.  And as it just so happens, this creature and I are hunting the same mouse; a secret stashed safely below the surface of the immediate past and cleverly camouflaged by the present tense.

Imagine if the universe worked differently; suppose every minute in history is essentially a separate world which must be built, maintained and torn down once the world finishes with it. And further contemplate that somewhere, someone decided that this particular instance, one containing a living photograph of alien world, needed to archived and viewed again for whatever reason. Okay, but why? What was so important about that moment, that planet and that dimension? Was it worth saving because it wasn’t ours? Was the archivist hoping to somehow rescue this civilization and provide a how-to or an example of how different life could be if it were DIY’d in another part of the universe?  Was this about “art”? Perhaps it was the archivist’s job to catalog civilizations and somehow this fragment was inappropriately absorbed by the bandwidth of my dreams. I have no fucking clue.

What I do know is this: I’m attempting to reverse-engineer a fragment of a memory using the mnemonic equivalent of a gasoline-scented scratch-n-sniff sticker, an oft-folded illustration torn from a science-fiction magazine and a die-cast metal toy.  And someone off-camera is demanding that I use these items to return a forgotten city to its former glory. The simplified instruction manual provided to me was downloaded as a zip file and stored somewhere in my skull but the link is 404’d, and now I’ve got this… thing bumping around in my not-so-big upstairs with a case of amnesia, creating unwanted bulges in my reality.

Anything I attempt to do while in this state becomes ten times more difficult; everything gets sped up and pinched, as though one were fishing for a shell fragment in a bowl of yolk. Time (yolk) is distorted, flowing faster between the outer shell of this 404′d object (thumb) and the walls of my perceived reality (bowl); images of some mysterious and misplaced Martian market become momentarily visible, projected against the ghostly flicker of heat waves of this New York Minute, brought to you in part by Friday, June 10, 2011, the letter thirteen, and viewers like you.

The good news is that I can almost feel what it was like to live in this place, but I can’t put the experience into words. Not yet. The bad news is that it has to come out.

The key to unlocking this thing’s got something to do with the way that Kanji seems at once ancient and futuristic (likewise Arabic, likewise the art of Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest), so I try to focus on that.  It also smacks roundly of the early issues of Heavy Metal magazine I devoured as a teen, the art of Jean Giraud (a.k.a. Moebius), selected writings of William Gibson and the feel of films like Fifth Element and Blade Runner, where the overt alien undertones are just part of the experience:

- a Bodega cat seeks relief from the summer heat on the lid of an ice-cream freezer.

- a matronly Ugnaught of a woman, with cast-iron breasts like matching Civil War cannons, stomps and sneers and stabs at her sequined-pink cellphone with the gold-painted nails of a velociraptor, talkin’ ‘bout how she gonna “fuck that dumb bitch up!”

- a hovering trade ship from some dusty distant world waits patiently above the East River for permission to land.

… and it’s all part of the Mise-en-scène.

Primarily, it’s got something to do with that fucking sticker.

I scratch at it furiously and press my nose against it, breathing deep. It works, albeit feebly. Something churns in my stomach and my field of vision becomes momentarily faded and narrow.  Encouraged, I scratch and huff at it some more. This goes on for about ten minutes. Beads of sweat begin to form along my arms and a rising sense of vertigo develops in my stomach. Now I’ve got the half-summoned memory of a lost alien world caught like a cat hair at the back of my throat and I’m desperate to cough it loose.

I cram my fingers down my throat and after a moment’s salivation I begin spewing forth watery chunks of buildings and backgrounds which slap at the pavement like horse piss on a flat rock before standing up slowly on their own, like a prizefighter ready to talk serious business at the end of the seventh round. Slumped against a wall with one hand on my knee, the sensation rises up again, coursing through me like a tidal wave as a half-completed grid of city streets soaked in stomach acid snakes forth like umbilical ropes from the enraged space between my lips, anchoring themselves to the soil like plant tendrils and immediately taking root, unfolding like ugly flowers. My jaws are pried open against miles of sewer lines and buried electrical cables and in a brief reprieve I take a few breaths in through my nose. Soon, my abdominal muscles are convulsing and contracting again as the five o’clock skyline of a world I’ve only imagined rockets the wrong way up my esophagus and my mouth gives birth to an alien sunset. It splatters first on the sidewalk before instinct drives it to its feet on doddering legs and it takes its place at the top of the page.

I gasp air for few minutes, wiping the puke from my lips and spitting out the taste of concrete and anodized metal, surveying the half-formed thing that I’ve made.

I’m obviously not done yet, but it’s a start.

TWM

110,410

(Apparently I have not accepted that it *is* in fact 2011. Written today.)

Stevie Wonder, Me, and The Death of The Fightin’ 88th

So, there I am at my favorite diner in the valley.

It’s a bright Saturday morning; I’m tucking into a stack of Silver Dollar pancakes smothered in blueberry syrup and a damn good cup of coffee, and enjoying the company of the man seated across the booth from me – one Stevland Hardaway Judkins, born May 13, 1950. You know him better as the genius who wrote ’Higher Ground’, released on his 1973 album ‘Innervisions’.

We were talking about this, that and the other thing and before long the conversation turned to dreams, so I told him about the time I dreamt I was being chased across the Gobi Desert by a vengeful Mariachi band…

I ran until I could run no more and when they finally ran me down, they marched around me in an ever-tightening circle, blowing their mighty trumpets as if to crumble the walls of Jericho.  I lay where I fell, battered by the force of the angry sound, balled into the fetal position and doing all I could to protect my head while they stomped ever closer.  Spikes of hot sunlight glinted off their polished golden instruments and the sequins of their exquisite costumes; their brown leather sandals kicked up mile-high plumes of hot dust and desert sand like explosions in an old war movie…

It was a dream within a dream.

I can see it now; the four of us, the only ones left from the Fightin’ 88th - Little Joe, Arizona Frank, Mikey-from-the-Bronx and me, the MoPic – running like Hell while the Devil took potshots at our unprotected backsides.  We dove as one for the relative safety of a foxhole, blown over the top of the uncoiled concertina wire by the force of a nearby explosion.

“Well,” gasped Little Joe a few moments later, ”Whadda’ we got left?”  We dumped out our bags. It didn’t look good. We had 40, maybe 45 rounds of pistol ammo between us, 23 rounds for a Thompson with a jammed feed, three hand grenades, two canteens of water and no rations to speak of.

Arizona patiently counted the ammo a second time.  “We’ll be fine,” he says looking at the rest of us with a bemused grin, ”so long as there’s only 39 of them left and none of us miss.”

As for me, I’ve got three frames left on this roll and a bagful of stuff that will probably never see the inside of a dark room.  I snap three quick portraits of the other men – something for grieving widows to frame and place on the mantle right next to the wedding photo.  Hurriedly, I jot my name and rank, the date, I.D. for each of the men, my serial number, press affiliation, and some final ironic observations about the brutality of war into my field notebook before stuffing it and the camera back into my old canvas bag, covering it with my pock-marked helmet and covering the whole thing with a pile of stones and a white handkerchief.  Hopefully one of our guys finds it. Looks I’ll have to accept that Pulitzer posthumously.

The eyes of the haunted stare back at me, their faces drawn.  It is silent for a moment, save for the boom of distant shelling.  The minds of the doomed men reach out to the friends and families they know they will never see again.

Little Joe suddenly grabs the radio, twisting the crank on the front like a man possessed.  Arizona slowly reaches over and points out, yet again, the gaping bullet hole in the face plate that prevents it from working.  Disgusted, Joe casts it aside.  “This is it,” he fumes.

“I reckon yo’ right about that.”  Arizona speaks slower than a sunset.

“No way!  We’ll get out of this! Right? I’m supposed to get married!” That’s Mikey-from-the-Bronx, dumb kid, still green.  Brand new to the unit, barely 17, lied about his age to impress his old man, killed his first Kraut about an hour ago.

The explosions creep closer, slamming into the ground like a giant’s footsteps… closer, closer still… I jump with each blast, as dirt and debris rain down around our heads.  They’re zeroing in on us… better this way, I guess.  Faster.  A mighty pressure builds in my chest, and try as I might I cannot breathe… we’re not gonna make it out of here, not this time.  We’d pushed our luck taking out that machine gun nest.

Suddenly the air is filled with the Doppler scream of an incoming round.  This is it.  Without thinking, I light up a smoke and jam my fingers into my ears – I don’t know where I’m going next, but there’s no sense in showing up deaf… I close my eyes, shouting to be heard above the banshee wail of the mortar shell.., louder, louder!  “It’s been a hell of run, gentlemen!”

I awoke with a start to discover my own hands clutching my pillow tight against my face and my alarm clock beeping like a dump truck in reverse.

Stevie clapped his hands and laughed with delight, swaying back and forth the way you imagine he might.

We called for more coffee, and continued to talk as the morning sun shone brightly.

 

 

WE ARE HERE TO MAKE WORDS.

I wanted to be an astronaut until I realized that I sucked at math.  That was the fourth grade.  I’d failed the same stupid test for the third time in a row, consequently developing a deep, psychological hated for red ink pens…

My next “when-I-grow-up moment” didn’t really come until high school, when I decided I was either gonna be the guy who made monster suits and spaceships on movie sets, or I was gonna be a writer.  I’d been writing since I could hold a Crayon and figured it was as good a destiny as any.

I was still a freshman in high school when I typed up a nine page short story about a guy who drove around the country hunting down the losers of a state-sanctioned lottery as an alternative to global thermonuclear warfare.  I sent the story to my parents, who unbeknownst to me sent it to a publisher, who in turn called me up and told me that if I finished the story before the end of the summer, I’d have myself a book deal.  I panicked, blindly polishing every spark of creativity out of the story, missed the deadline and shelved it forever.

But the experience gave me a real push toward words.  From that point on, I became obsessed with writing.  Maybe this was a doable destiny!  I started forming the idea in my head that if I just focused on this lone and immaculate objective, I’d someday perform a great and magnificent feat: I envisioned doing something amazing, something that could change the course of history and unite the world in a common emotion, like an athlete who trains their whole life for one shining moment while overcoming great obstacles along the way.

I decided that I wanted to be able to express human emotion in a way that no one had ever done before.

Still in high school, I looked into haiku on the advice of a much-respected English teacher, quickly becoming a fan of the medium’s prison shiv beauty — short, sharp and, inserted just beneath the ribcage, designed to take your breath away.

In just seventeen
syllables, I swore I could
smell cherry blossoms.

As you can imagine, I was crap at writing haiku.  Everything I wrote looked suspiciously like something someone else had already written a long time ago and I felt ashamed.  Plus, I’d made the mistake of telling the wrong people my dreams.  Presently I gave up on haiku.  Why not?  I was nowhere near a temple, and there were no monks to guide me.  Sweeping the floor was just sweeping the floor, and a glass of water was just a stupid fucking goddamn glass of water.

Still obsessed with words, I then had the notion that a person could somehow open their mouth and let brand new sounds tumble forth — words and phrases never before spoken by a human mouth, in any language, by any race, anywhere on the face of the Earth.  Beyond dead languages, beyond glossololia.  I thought that maybe the key to expression was locked inside this new box…

Except I had no database or monthly scientific journals to base my findings upon.  So I made a lot of retarded noises and jotted them down, hoping one of them might be even slightly virginal in nature.

(It’s no wonder that I remained in a similar physical state until I was in my early 20s.)

After that, I wanted to come up with an answer for the question of why we find some people more attractive than others.  I thought that maybe it had something to do with the measurements of the human face — the height, width or angle of the nose, the spacing of the features, the length of the jawline, the width of the mouth, or the specific color of the eyes.  What if all these factors added up to some sacred number, one that doomed a small group destined to succumb as prey to holy integers?  Years later, I would find this on the internet:

It’s nice to know that as an adolescent, I wasn’t completely off the mark; just off my rocker.  And understandably horny.

Following high school, I gave up on my dream of being a special effects artist.  It seemed the only way to achieve this was to move to Los Angeles and hang around on movie sets until I found someone to teach me.  Instead, I applied and was accepted to a prestigious Midwest art college.  I was hopeful — until they told me how much it would cost.  So I revisited my writing dream and, after reading too much Hunter S. Thompson, decided I wanted to be a war correspondent.

And Uncle Sam was gonna fund it, because I sure as fuck couldn’t.

At first I considered a stint in the army, or maybe the Marines.  I’d need to learn some very valuable survival skills before setting out into the wild.  I had a vision of myself in four or five years time; a half-smoked cigarette permanently attached to my bottom lip, a gaggle of battered cameras slung around my neck, an ancient carbine across my back, dust-caked goggles pushed high on my forehead, and an ancient Underwood under one arm.  Once I finished my enlistment, I’d take any assignment, no matter how dangerous.  And wandering to some of Earth’s far-flung shit holes, I’d explore the last remaining exotic lands still hidden from the light of Western progress.  I would write stories about the things I saw there, and take photographs of the fascinating people I met.

And one day I would simply miss my deadline, never be heard from again.  That was my retirement plan.

I was not yet 21.

So I approached several recruiters and attempted to make an intelligent decision based on the horrible lies they were paid to tell me.  I tested well, and applied for jobs in photography, journalism and for some reason, cryptology.  But the recruiters all told me those fields were closed, and that I should pick something else.  We went round and round in this manner until finally, disgusted and hopeless, I stormed into an office and spoke thusly to a Navy recruiter:

“I want the most far-flung, whacked-out job you have, something that will take me to the far side of the globe, without threatening to bring me one inch closer to the chair I’m sitting in.”  And that’s the story of how I never became an astronaut, or a war correspondent, or the guy who makes monster suits or spaceships for movies.

Had I known that recruiters are instructed to ‘guide’ people into certain job fields where their respective service was experiencing shortages, or had I only been willing to wait.  Well, the outcome might have been different.

Instead, I went to Europe and built bombs for four years.

I’m pleased to say that the desire to write came with me.  I started keeping a journal just after high school, and I took it with me where ever I roamed.

Journal writing frustrated the fuck out of me at first.  I lacked skill, and I was impatient.  I was in a big damn hurry to write perfect things and powerful sentiments.  I didn’t know the first fucking thing about real writing but I still wanted to do something amazing, something so insightful that it could lift the veil of reality, and part the curtain to another world.  I wanted to write modern spells and conjure new truths.

I wanted to surpass all previously written works for their ability to inspire and split foreheads with the lightning of the profound.  I didn’t even know what the fuck I was gonna write about, but I figured that once people read these holy words the message would spread like wildfire…

The world would lay down arms.  Millions of people would wake from a terrible dream, weeping and gnashing their teeth.  The leaders of the world would turn to one another and exclaim, “Goddamn, but we’ve been going about this all wrong!  The last book has been written, all words can rest!  We must now aspire to fuck one another with the cock of peace and harvest grain together under the same sun, washing our clothes together in the great river and turning our swords back to plowshares yet again.  God won’t save the world.  Science won’t save the world.  The earth plain-ass wasn’t meant to be saved.  This book has said everything we’ve been trying to say, everything we ever thought about saying, and everything we probably would have said in the next ten thousand years, but didn’t know it yet!”

Sure, I was a pretentious ass.  I wanted to write magic holes through mountains, and weave spells, blah, blah, blah.  But I also genuinely wanted to understand beauty, and lust, and savagery.  I secretly hoped I’d go crazy when I got old so I could map my experience in a journal, holding on clarity like a fading lamplight as I ventured down that last and darkest of tunnels.  I was convinced that there was so much more to the world, but I didn’t know how to express it beyond my diet of tabloid headlines, song lyrics and science fiction movies.  Sometimes the words were right there on the tip of my tongue.  I wanted to be able to communicate anything to anyone, and make the whole world understand everything.

But how could I?  I didn’t understand myself, and I couldn’t separate myself from what I wanted to write about.  I didn’t know where to begin, or where I ended.  I didn’t know jack shit.

So I kept writing.

I continued to write through my early twenties, but without success.  Journals came and journals went.  I wrote letters about this, that and the other thing.  My friends were full of praise, and they let me live in the world I’d created.  I was The Writer.

I devoted years of attention to the recommended greats – the Beats, those who’d come before me and who by measure of their poverty and fearlessness were far more devoted to the craft than I knew how to be, each of them a pioneer in some regard.  They explored and exploited their own wormhole, staking their claim to a particular voice or style one step ahead of the gold rush.

The voices that called loudest to me were: drugs, music, sex, and road trips – oh, my!  And the strangest of those voices?  Assassins.  (Giant fucking millipedes??  Really??)

I wasn’t prepared to give up on writing, but I also realized I wasn’t very good.  Still, I promised myself one drunken night in a land very far away that if I ever became homeless I’d still carry a pen and a piece of paper.  “You can abandon your work, but your work will never abandon you.”

Years passed, and I thought that perhaps stronger measures were called for.  Suppose I made a Robert Johnson deal with You-Know-Who, and waited my turn at the midnight crossroads, armed with the wing of a bat and the eyes of a newt.  Would the Horned One grant me my deepest desire based on the strength of a pinkie swear, or was I going to have to slit my palm with a crude dagger carved from the jaw bone of a murdered stag?  Headless hooves stomping in the bloodied winter grass, the end result of my quest to harness above as the below…

But I didn’t believe in the Devil, and I didn’t actually think I could murder a stag.  So that plan was out.

Time passed.  Journals were purchased and filled.  The majority were dog-eared, covered in duct tape and existed pretty much as ad space for my ego, their pages weighted with stapled concert stubs, proclamations, one-liners written on airliners, photographs of models, quotes torn from magazines, strange things and coffee rings, but mostly drunken heartache.  Twenty years, nine countries, five states, three islands, one Indian reservation, and one snow globe later, and still I have no idea of what I was trying to say.

My apartment is pitch black tonight, and my hands look so much older by the glow of this laptop screen.  Time is out there, snorting and stomping the snow, exhaling demons from its nostrils, waiting… sometimes I think I can almost feel it at my elbow.

Like right now.

I’ll be 40 in a few months, and no closer to writing anything more powerful than a good one-liner.  In the absence of my all-powerful epic, I’ve managed one novel, sixty short stories and thanks to a second enlistment in the other nautical-sounding of our Armed Forces, a stack of official-sounding press releases — none of which has ever escaped being disemboweled by a red pen.

There is the known, which we sometimes tire of.  And then there’s the rest of it.

All I’ve learned about life is that I don’t know much.  And from what I can tell, neither does anyone else.  Everything we think we know takes place on this planet, and in this dimension.  We are born here, and we die here.  We are bound to this rock.  The stories we tell are of this world, for this world, and by this world.  They describe our experiences in this dimension, and how we live this life.  And we know only these stories and their endless spin-offs.  We’ve described our home to death, and pretty much worn out our tongues.  I don’t think there are any virginal sounds left.

I recently deleted The Doors from my music collection, but I’ll give Jim Morrison one last nod: “No one gets out of here alive.”

There’s no such thing as magic, only science we haven’t figured out yet.  Emotions are not facts, and love – as much as you wish it wasn’t true – is purely chemical.  Relationships are all about timing, security and chemistry.  And one man’s words aren’t gonna change the world, so long as there are people around to disagree with them.

Being successful in this life only means that your physical needs and comforts will be taken care of while you’re alive; inhabiting your body, existing in this dimension and playing your role in this traveling production.

The pawn and the bishop go back in the same box when the game is over.

But there has to be more!  Something just beyond, something left behind, maybe something we’ve forgotten?  I feel as though we’re living in a collective dream, standing tall on the edge of a trance:  All the while you thought you were having a lengthy conversation with Iggy Pop in a half empty bar late one summer night in 1993, in reality you’ve been standing in the checkout line of a Memphis convenience store for the past ten minutes, transfixed by the mutated face staring back at you from a Pringles can on the conveyor belt, and frankly people are beginning to notice…

In the end, maybe Words have failed me.  Maybe I failed the Words.  Maybe there was nothing to fail.  George Washington Carver once said that if you love something long enough, it would give up its secrets.  Was I deemed not worthy to peek behind the curtain?  Did I perform the wrong spells?  Whatever the reason, whenever the moment, when it came time to select my Holy Path, I chose the soft option.

And so my reward was a different life.  Instead of leaving this world on a pillar of fire to walk among the stars; instead of traveling to distant lands and capturing beauty reserved for only the bravest; instead of a day-to-day fight for survival and a life lived on the edge of a fast-moving knife; instead of summoning sentences both sage and surreal, crafting tales with the power of the Old Gods like the Jackie Chan of Juxtaposition, or the Wolverine of the Who, What, Where, Why and When…

Instead, I’m writing this blog.

Thanks for reading.

(There may be secrets left, but I’ll be damned if I know where to look for them.)

Operation: Sweet Tea – Dispatches from Dagobah

The Inner Voice is never quiet.  It creates characters, it writes dialog.  When it can’t think of anything better to do, it writes letters.  It fills a legal pad here, a Post-it note there, or the glossy back of a drink special menu swiped from behind the bar of some REDACTED roadside attraction, the glossy surface of which is valued for its ability to work well with Sharpies.

EARLY SEPTEMBER 2010, LOCATION UNKNOWN

Nyx,

How goes?  Things here are ramping down.  Word on the street is that I’ll take over for REDACTED and then transfer to REDACTED or hopefully REDACTED.  I’d like to spend a week in REDACTED before I REDACTED, however.  (Ha!  I bet you thought I was gonna say REDACTED.)  Things to do on my off-time: visit Cafe REDACTED, get photos of buskers, drink absinthe, and browse the dusty knot of voodoo stores orbiting REDACTED Park.  I need something suitably ugly and unspeakably disturbing for my work desk.  A shrunken head, a fertility doll perhaps, something along those lines.

I can’t imagine what the REDACTED was like during the apex of the thing.  They should have called it OPERATION: MONKEY FUCKS A/N REDACTED COCONUT. I’ll just say that and change the channel.

But heavens, people do a lot of “turning around” down here!  The following are examples of their quaint speech patterns:

“Well, this fella turns aroun’ and sez…”
 “Now, mah daddy turns around and sez…”
 “Well now you turn around and just drive down to the Piggly-Wiggly…”

Oh, and this one! “…‘Well mebbe if’n yoo gotcher head outta yer asshole yoo woodn’t smell shee-it.’”

Time: slows to a crawl. Think ‘Matrix’.

I swear to fuck, that last line was delivered with so much weight and solemnity, and infused with Southern wherewithal: It’s as Bubba had personally re-invented fire and was awaiting my unbridled praise, or at least a retort.

In the mind’s eye, I could see him leaning back, crossing his mighty arms over his barrel chest and slowly nodding his head, further treasuring the weight of his corn-fed decree… Seconds passed.

You know what I’m like: My brain — furiously struggling to diagram, dissect, connect, detect, analyze and reduce the hundredfold layers of subtle communication in this simple moment to a Lego-simple observation (or better still, a haiku!) designed to knock his fucking socks off and demonstrate my mental prowess — takes just a cunt-hair too long to export viable verbal content, and the moment passes.  This strategic error is misinterpreted as dumbstruck idiocy and Bubba walked away, the victor by default, mumbling and slowly shaking his head. “That feller ain’t got no sense no how.  Must be a Yankee.”

Side note: I’ve passed along my thoughts on the iPad to you.  It looks like a wicked good travel tool, but the governing principle of my life is LESS NOT MORE.  I can’t justify owning an iMac, an iPhone AND a laptop, etc. (And planning to reward myself with the iPhone 4 upon my return!)  And yes, should I decide to ditch my iMac/television set, I’ll certainly let you know.  We’ll talk money, or trade.  I’ll need to wipe it dumb and sort out shipping, unless you get the urge to visit your brother in REDACTED.

Ultimately, I’d like to own only what I could carry around in an old Army half ton: Move all of my books into the clouds.., reduce my bags down to two or three.., move to a warmer climate and ditch my winter gear.., keep a loaded .45 under the seat and make my coffee over a different fire each morning.  You get the idea.  I feel we amass far too many things in our lifetime, and that we expend our limited and valuable energy trying to move, store, protect, purchase, dispose of, maintain and figure out how to upgrade to MORE THINGS.

Right.  I’m off the soap box, I’m sure someone else needs the firewood.  Bravo tango whiskey, it looks like I’ve got a few more weeks ahead of me.  You know how our Uncle works: “Hey! How far would you be if we hadn’t called you back?” And yes, per our texts from REDACTED: Look into Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” (the first book I ever stole!), and seek ye also the clever, clever writings of Grant Morrison.  And Warren Ellis.  The foul-mouthed comic book genius, not the wild-bearded manticore who plays git-fiddle for Nick Cave.  A different Warren Ellis. Although Grinderman will blow your shitting mind just as well. (Click it. Trust me.)

Many thanks for the BBT infusions, BTW! A little nerd in the Savage Land goes a long way.

Go, see, do.

Yours in Christ,

TWM

//

11SEP2010

Dear Cass,

Fuck, yes.

Hello from a Chili’s somewhere in REDACTED after a two-day sick fit full of fevered dreams and fearful images; I’m drinking cold beer and sweet tea like they’re going out of style, but I’ve always got time for coffee.  The sharp laughter of sassy black girls rolls out of the kitchen in a tumbled wave, shrill gossip and delighted decadence bursting through the double doors dressed in the metallic jangle of empty pans and the steamy clink of hot flatware.  I’m reading, writing. I’ve ordered as healthy an option as can be expected.

September 11^th.  Nine years ago to the day, when certain buckets of excrement were striking the blades of certain exhaust systems, and certain planes were hate-tackling certain buildings in the East Coast concrete convention I temporarily call home, my life was at a perfect stand still. I remember launching pine cones from a leaf blower in the parking lot of a tiny rescue station on an Indian reservation somewhere in the REDACTED REDACTED thinking that my life as I knew it was over; that I was free to fail, and that I would probably go nowhere else in life because I simply wasn’t in a position to assume differently. I hated my life, hated my decisions, and despised my surroundings.  I had way too many regrets and not enough good stories to tell.  I was no longer relevant.  I was removed from the equation.  My, how things cha– Oh, hey.  My food is here, we’ll talk later.

19SEP2010

Dear Cass,

Hello again from REDACTED.  I’m writing this from the weathered grey deck of a beach house.  The surf roars and the gulls scream and the wind is warm and sweet.

Ten minutes ago: The door was open, so I walked in holding the key in one hand.

“Hello?  Don’t shoot, they said I could live here…”  I walked from room to room in search of what I felt would be angry (or at the very least confused) homeowners and listened carefully for the click of a rifle bolt, but the place was empty.  Nobody here but us aliens.

Five minutes ago: The front of my rental car was encrusted with dead protein, so I hosed it off while I considered my options.  I decided that my options included relaxing, so I hauled my gear onto the porch, kicked off my shoes and put my tired feet on the rail.  Took a beer from the fridge, left a dollar. Goddamn, it’s good to smell the ocean again.  (It’s like having your face buried between the thighs of Mother Nature. It’s a briny, primal smell. Makes me feel like a centaur, or some such…)

Two hours ago: My drive from REDACTED was uneventful, unless you count knocking off the passenger side mirror and putting a tiny gouge in the door of the rental.  Oops. It was purely accidental.  I’d parked the car at the side of the road to photograph a mural in REDACTED and when I was backing up to turn around, I was only watching the oncoming traffic side – not the side where that no-good, goddamn egg-sucking sumbitch Murphy up and decided to install a speed limit sign. Glad I had insurance.

Yesterday: I woke up at 0630.  Showered, shaved, brushed my teeth.  Filled my pockets with small black rectangles: my wallet, my iPhone, and the pretty-much useless REDACTED cellphone.  See also: Keys, gum, a scrap of paper to write on, and a pen.  Out the door by 0700.  I was told the helicopter would be taking off at 0800, so I felt I had plenty of time to get where I was going.

Except I didn’t.

Twenty minutes later, my phone rings.  It’s the REDACTED producer I’m supposed to meet at the airfield.  He wants to know where I am.

“On my way.  Why, what time are we taking off?”

“Uh, probably in the next few minutes?”

“Uh, I’ll call you back?” I stomped hard on the gas.

The drive from to the REDACTED airport was only twenty minutes, and the map showed a straight line.  Unfortunately, my GPS put me in someone’s driveway and then took me through the only underground tunnel in the whole fucking state of REDACTED.  More wrong turns took me more wrong places before I whipped around the corner onto Main Street where the airport lives, all four tires squealing like fucked pigs.   Things were getting tight, but I was in the home stretch.  Almost.  There were no cars on the road at this hour, which explains why I was traveling at speeds of 75 and 80 and running red lights like it was election year in a brothel.

The producer called back.  I was screeching around a corner at the time, so yeah, maybe I shouted into the phone a little.

“HELLO?”

“Uh.., where are you?  We’re ready to fly.”

“Sorry, on my way, I just came out of the tunnel.”

“There’s a tunnel in REDACTED?”

“Yeah. I’ll tell you all about it when I get there.”

I finally found the airfield and slid into a parking spot, tires skidding to a ragged halt on the dusty gravel.  Popped the trunk, grabbed my camera bag and started for the gate when a older woman in a shabby security guard uniform and a slow Southern accent appeared out of thin air.  She spoke so soft and slurred that I almost ran past her.

“Now, sugah, I’m ahfraid you cain’t park yo car heah, because you’s taking spots away frum t’others who work heah.  You just pahk it two blocks over thatch way, ah’m sho yo’ little friends’ll wait…” (What did reality look like from inside this woman’s head??)  I tried Reason, I tried Manners, I tried Jedi, and I tried to explain the tight schedule and complicated mechanics of the fantastic flying machine that was, even now, spinning up for take-off.  But she would have none of it.

Fuck.  Sometimes you gotta let the little old lady win.  (And sometimes you gotta jump back in the rental cars and stuff it three spots to the left when the little old lady isn’t looking.)

I ran for the terminal, slapping the open thigh pockets of my pants.   Something felt wrong.  Nothing says ‘sloppy’ like Velcro that refuses to close and — shit did I just lose a REDACTED cellphone?  No time for that now.  As long as I have my iPhone, my wallet, the car keys, my camera gear and my GPS, the whole Western world could bake itself into an apple fucking pie.

Seven minutes later: I’m stuffed into a black and yellow Sikorsky 76-C that resembled a giant carpenter bee sitting on the tarmac.  There would be no window seat for this trip.  “The needs of the many,” as Spock said.  No, I was informed that this was a media escort, first and foremost.  Whatever I snapped or captured on video was strictly for documentation.  The co-pilot seated me in between the REDACTED camera operator and a REDACTED photographer.  On-screen talent rode in back on the right opposite the sound guy, and the producer squeezed in front left, with the REDACTED liaison opposite him.  The passengers were separated from the pilot and co-pilot by a thin curtain but thanks to the headsets we all wore, we could carry on a conversation.

A moment aside: I’m really not comfortable with video and I’ve had less than zero experience in using one.  Framing is different, the controls are awkward, there’s the constant jarring, you can’t turn it over for vertical shots like you can with a still camera, and you always have to worry about the sound.  Yet they insisted I bring one, so last night I opted to drive all the way to REDACTED to pick one up from REDACTED.  The understanding was that I’d meet some of the REDACTED staff for dinner, and I based my decision on this.  I arrived at the city limits with no problems, but I got turned around in all the construction and the traffic surrounding the REDACTED.  I ended up turning off the GPS and hanging half out the window of the rental, driving it like I stole it.  By then, it was getting late and my calls inquiring about dinner plans had gone unreturned.  Found the address, got the camera bag, tossed it into the trunk and, pretty much disgusted by this point, hauled ass back to my hotel in REDACTED before I turned inside out from hunger.

Back on the helicopter: It was a long flight out to the platform and I nodded off more than once, swaddled up safe like a crash test Jesus in my kapok life jacket that felt like something out of WWII; I was further snugged by the radio headset pinching my skull, the five-point safety harness collapsing my lungs, the D700 snug around my neck and the Sony HD video camera on my lap.

Once we arrived at the platform, I listened as the pilots recited the necessary spells and incantations to get the bird on the ground, or in this case, a tiny green hexagon balanced on the edge of the platform which stood like a steel tarantula in the middle of the REDACTED REDACTED.  The pilot powered down the engines, and we shrugged out of our many restraints.

At this point, I was only vaguely aware of my directions.  Had we come from this way, or that?  The water stretched out in all directions.  It was a surreal experience to say the least, and I half expected a bald man in a wheelchair with a white cat on his lap to meet me on the deck.  “We’ve been expecting you, Mr. Bond.”

We filed inside and I dropped my bag, making a beeline for the coffee to clear the fog of sleep.  Safety brief: No rings, no jewelry, no weird piercings.  Hardhats, gloves and hearing protection were issued; tiny bullets of yellow foam that fill my ear canals like the larva of some strange insect, growing slowly, devouring all sound.  Suddenly, I could hear myself think and breathe, and my voice was clear in my head. I was well into my Darth Vader impression when I looked up, noticing the puzzled expressions of the rest of the group staring back at me. Way to be.

Up a flight of stairs, a few lefts and rights and suddenly we came to the drilling deck where a giant robot arm called an “iron roughneck” was unscrewing hundred-foot sections of pipe fresh from the seafloor, as another arm high overhead stacked the pipe snug into a vertical rack.  It was an awesome sight.  It was also screaming loud, and everything was covered in the mud of a ten thousand hunting dogs.

Time for work.  Out come the cameras.  Right off the bat, I’m frustrated by the safety gloves; a size too small, depriving my hands of complex motor function. Plus, every time I lined up a shot, the sound guy would step in front of my lens, or drop the boom into my frame. (I would mention this to him a few times, but receive only blank looks in return.)

Next stop, the control booth where two men are seated in front of what looks like the most expensive flight simulator I’ve ever seen.  They sip coffee from white paper cups and make small adjustments to the iron roughneck via joysticks in their hands.  A row of computer screens above their heads tells them everything they need to know about return rates, fluid viscosity, and bottom pressure.  The room was crowded. Got a few good shots, though.

More tours, more wonders, and more “holy shit” moments from me.  Helicopter rides!  Robots!  The REDACTED!  Later, I ate freshly grilled steak  from a barbecue deck on the back of the platform and drank wicked good sweet tea.  I gathered more footage, and took a few more shots.  Then we got back in the helicopter and returned to REDACTED. Conversations clicked in and out in my headphones, but I was silent during the trip, thinking about this, that and the other thing.

I drove back to my room, stopping only for more coffee and quarters for the laundry machine.  I had just five hours to write my cutlines, process, edit and upload my video before I’d need to wash my clothes, pack my bags and make prepartatins for the morning drive to REDACTED.

Right away, technical difficulties were experienced.  My camera wouldn’t show up on my laptop.  Tried different things, tried downloading drivers. Nothing worked. Grabbed the camera body and my 8GB flash drive and headed for the hotel business center to coax their tired-ass PC into moving my files. Thirty agonizing minutes later, I had the images transferred.  “The faster technology gets, the more impatient we are for it.  (Note to self: Stop shooting in RAW until you get your photo editor sorted out, and never leave home without a card reader!)

I spent an hour making sense of my notes and handouts from the platform until I had something decent, before turning my attention to the video.  And then, horror of horrors: I discover there was no audio on my footage.

A thousand foul litanies.  I shouted and punched the air in frustration, but I knew there were no options and fewer excuses.  I’d just have to transport the video with me to REDACTED, dodge the embarrassing phone calls asking for product, and figure a way to salvage this horrid fucking mess.

20SEP2010

Dear Cass,

Experienced a moment akin to “Apocalypse Now” today; a long ride upriver in a barebones metal workboat toward a place called REDACTED.

I’d neglected to acclimate my camera to the humidity, and as I opened the door of the air conditioned trailer and headed for the pier I watched the lens fog over like San Francisco, my glasses included.  Nothing says sexy like being blind as a fucking bat.  Once aboard, I used an old rag from under the seat to wipe my camera down.

Then I spent the next few hours on the receiving end of a shouted, albeit fascinating education on pirates, illiteracy in southern REDACTED and the mating habits of bald eagles from the animated old skeleton at the wheel, shouting to be heard over the roar of the twin outboard engines.  He had the strangest, most expressive hands I’ve ever seen, the sort of thing you can’t ignore once you’re aware of it.

His earlobes flapped in the wind.  I’m not making that up.

It was a long and droning experience, even at safest speed.  Occasionally we’d catch air on the wake of another fast-moving vessel and come down hard enough to rattle the teeth in my head.  It sounded as though something very large and very angry was trying to tunnel in through the bow of the boat.

The trip was part of an area familiarization tour, the idea being that I’d photograph REDACTED as he handed out awards to two men who’d worked hard, done their part, and were ready to go home.  The ceremony was rushed, mumbled and everyone squinted in the sun.

Frustrations were mounting; first I’d failed to bring what I felt were the right lenses for the job, and I only brought one camera body.  Second, the boom microphone on the video unit failed to work, and then the media encoder on my copy of Premiere had failed to load, meaning I couldn’t export product, and now, decent subject matter was getting harder and harder to come by!  The REDACTED in REDACTED were screaming for imagery, but seemed to change their minds about what they wanted day by day.  I’m not one to use sports terminology to express myself, but this trip was filled with strikes and foul balls. I desperately needed a base hit or, dare I hope, a home run.

22SEP2010

Dear Cass,

Drinks tonight at Artie’s, a rundown road house about four miles down the road, listening to Pantera. That’s the secret purpose of loud bars.  “Shut up and drink up.”

23SEP2010

Dear Cass,

I've always wanted to pull over and take a picture.

Hello from an alternate universe, where Hiroshima never happened and Glenn Danzig found his true calling as a summer camp counselor.  My nails are in rough shape.  Chewed up, dry.  Everything down here is covered in dust and pollen.  Had to rinse off the car again this morning just to see out the windows.  Sent you a picture of the sunrise, hope it made you smile.

This morning: took a drive to locate the airfield in anticipation of an event scheduled for tomorrow.  I amused myself by doing funny voices as I steered the car along the rugged asphalt and long-neglected potholes as I made my share of wrong turns.  Still, I’d rather fuck up today on no timetable, than screw the pooch tomorrow when it really matters.  I read the names of the streets aloud in a high-pitched voice and tried to use each of them in a sentence.  I began a monologue about a poor little backwoods girl with an abnormally strong Southern accent who lived alone in a cardboard shack with her determined, albeit slightly psychopathic father:

“Mah daddy’ll gut you quicker’n sheeit… Ah seen ‘em skin a rev-uh-new-er man and burry th’ body out near Hog Lake, quick as you puhlease.  Made me a pair uh shoes from his hide, too.  That was the first pair o’ shoes I ever owned, and I liked ‘em real well.  My daddy looked at me when he wuz guttin’ that man and said ‘Ah got to fend for me an’ mine’. Yessir, he said that.”

Then I found different ways to pronounce “hog jowls” for the next twenty minutes.  Made me laugh, anyway.

Half the streets on REDACTED Isle are named for trees, and the other half are named for berries or other random words.  At the end of REDACTED is a large dusty compound presently occupied by a number of trailers.  Prior to the month of REDACTED, it was an empty lot.  Now it’s populated by ATVs and massive pickup trucks, and a large white tent in the center, where the food comes from.  I’m pretty sure the swamp wants the land back though, because the plywood threshold of the tent sinks a good inch into the gurgling ground when you step on it.

My office is in a small utility trailer along the left side of the compound, just past the porta-potties.  Step out the door and everything goes white hot in an instant, the heat punching you square in the face.  I can be at the pier in 15 seconds, my car in 30 seconds, taking a piss in 10 seconds, or back at the beach house in about three minutes.

Most of the people here work on the REDACTED response teams.  Their job consists of accompanying the boat crews out to document REDACTED, and ensuring that REDACTED in the field are equipped with water, safety equipment, and other supplies.  REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED.

24SEP2010

Dear Cass,

We picked up some REDACTED from REDACTED today; met their helicopter at the airfield, then took them on a boat ride out to REDACTED, an island a few miles distant from here, where a lot of people are working very hard to clean up the REDACTED.  White tents dot the horizon, and Day-Glo orange is a fashion accessory.  Forklifts cart pallets of supplies from place to place and everyone travels around in all-terrain beach buggies. There is nothing ecological about a REDACTED. You’ve never seen so many water bottles in your entire life; plastic bags of disposable gloves and disposable tyvek suits. The whole thing is like some weird deleted scene from Dune.

I carried two cameras this time; a D700 with a monster 80-200mm lens, and a D200 with a 28mm wide.  Vast improvement to my mood! (Note to self: arm yourself with two bodies from here on out, plus the SB-900 flash.  Uninstall ALL your CS2/3 software, and replace it with CS5.  And learn the shit out of Premiere.  Do it now!) I rode along in a separate ATV, calling out instructions to my driver, bracing myself against the rollbars, my dusty boots wedged hard against the dash.  It felt like a fashion shoot on the Kalahari Desert: “Closer, okay now get me to the left side– hey, what’s their driver’s name?  Ask him to point over there, yeah, by those gulls. Great, thanks!  Now swing in behind them, slow, good, hold that!  Awesome!”  I probably seemed like an asshole, but I got the shots I needed.

(Don’t try to go all fucking Aslan on me/ I’ve been outside the War Drobe a time or three…)

Later, now, night: The moon is lightly clouded, and the small part of the sky still visible peeks down at me, her eyes full of little stars.  I’m upstairs at Arties, pretty much the only bar in town.

Downstairs is for the roughnecks, the last of the hippies and the surviving tribe of classic rock fans.  Pimps and animals take the stairs in the back and party on the open deck where autotuned dance and gangsta jumps and throbs, and four barely-legal cherubs dressed in their sluttiest denim skirts try their damnedest to play the part of jaded, worldly sirens while serving modestly priced drinks to the thirsty citizens of an REDACTED-impacted, shrimp-fishing community. Everyone has a role to play.

Artie’s is where REDACTED parties when it’s not spending all day, every day on the water, in the marshes or slaving to clean up REDACTED beneath the glaring REDACTED sun, REDACTED REDACTED of the biggest REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED in U.S. history.  Which is an odd statement to make, because I can’t think of a bigger REDACTED anywhere else in the world.

Now: I lean against the hexagonal wooden bar and sip my devil gin while observing the bright lights of the shrimp boats anchored out at sea, and the mothership glow of a REDACTED about a mile down the beach to my left.

Artie’s, and REDACTED on the whole I suspect, has a decidedly poor male-to-female ratio.  Great for the girls, hard luck for the guys.  I’ve got a strong drink, a good vantage point, a freshly unfolded drinks menu, and a new Sharpie.  I take a sip, uncap my weapon, and wait for the words to arrive.

Looking around the bar: “These are the people who make things happen.  They live fast and bright and blind to their own terrible beauty.  They turn the wrenches that file the forms that bus the tables that serve the burgers that tend the lines that fish the waters that Jack built, and they keep the Great Machine running full tilt boogie, despite the inevitable fact that said Machine is headed straight for a real Fall of the Roman Empire kinda showdown when all this lovely REDACTED REDACTED is extracted from the ground.  Nothing lasts forever except nothing and forever, but there’s no talk of that tonight.  Here and now, these folks plain ass don’t care; so long as the music is loud, the drinks are moderately priced, and hopefully, maybe they can find someone to love them back…”

(Three Bombay gin and tonics with squeezed lime later… necessary cohesion fades, switching to inner dialog…)

At some point: the music fades quietly away and the old familiar curtain lowers and your drink loses appeal, and once again you find yourself staring at your surroundings in mild confusion, not entirely certain of how you arrived on a scarred wooden stool at the edge of the Gulf of REDACTED.

You observe the measurements of timeless impossibility etched in the faces of strangers as illuminated by cheap cigarette lighters; you gaze at each of them in turn, and wonder who they were as children.  You’re searching, as always, for meaning, seeking the Ancient, the Hidden, the spark that will at last make sense of it all.  It’s damn sure not gonna be found in a bar, but it seems to be the only time you look for it anymore.  Drink is no decent way to take your brain off the hook, but for the moment it’s the only option you have.

You watch and you record and you commit to present tense the various acts of the macro-theater playing out before you in this tiny REDACTED bar, trying in vain to make sense of the patterns, until you remember once again that random is just shorthand for a pattern too big for our monkey brains to comprehend.  It is what it is, and what will be will be again.  Sometimes it’s the same time all over the world:  All the Friday night smiles and scowls, the closing time rejections, the tiny victories and desperate lonely movies have happened before: here, there, and there.  This moment is happening at every bar at the same time; wherever there is darkness, wherever Friday night draws a breath, there is celebration and hope and drinks and music and wisdom and magic.  Yet, without fresh external stimulation, you feel the human race is destined for stagnation, eternity spent beneath the muddied boot of the Overlords who drive the Great Machine.  We’re like dolphins in captivity, each sequestered in a separate tank, bouncing our forehead-emitted radar off the circular walls of our prison and slowly but surely pinging ourselves to insanity.  There’s got to be something more out there, buried in space, asleep in the sheets of forever.  If we can see it, why can’t we touch it?

I wanna walk way out to the Hut at the Edge, where the Old Man tends the Flame, and I’ll show my soul and he’ll cut my writing hand with the edge of a sharp tooth and smear in the Ashes; so empowered, I promise not to die until I can write something so almighty powerful that it makes wood melt and the stones burst into flame, and every hunting dog from here to Glasgow will sing your favorite song…

You slid gracefully from your stool around 1230, popped in your headphones, and did a high-speed drunk march three-plus miles back to the beach house, pausing only to dart across a partially-lit lawn, scale the grassy dunes at the edge of private property and carve the following the polite request in giant letters in wet sand with the heel of your Chucks:

ALIENS PLEASE LAND HERE.

25SEP2020

Dear Cass,

Got the day off.  Literally nothing happened.  Starting drinking Southern Comfort around noon, and spent much of the day typing up my notes.  Then I went for a walk and thought about the epic feel of the right words in the right order. Must have listened to this song about 25 times on this trip:

Harshly awakened by the sound of six rounds of light-caliber rifle fire, followed minutes later by the booming of nine rounds from a heavier rifle (but you can’t close off the wilderness).  He heard the snick of a rifle bolt and found himself peering down the muzzle of a weapon held by a drunken liquor store owner.

“There’s a conflict,” he said.  “There’s a conflict between land and people.  The people have to go.  They’ve come all the way out here to make mining claims.., to do automobile body work to gamble.., take pictures, to not have to do laundry, to own a mini-bike.., have their own CB radios and air conditioning.., good plumbing, for sure, and to sell Time/Life books and to work in a deli.  To have a little chili every morning, and maybe… maybe own their own gas stations again.  And take drugs, have some crazy sex, but above all, above all, to have a fair shake.  To get a piece of the rock, and a slice of the pie and spit out of the window of your car and not have the wind blow it back in your face…”

–Wall of Voodoo “Call of The West”

TWM

26SEP2010

Dear Cass,

An hour ago: I did it.  I finally launched my book.  The initial thrill was a rush but after a few minutes, it was all over.  I had a glass of wine and listened to a few specific songs to celebrate the closing of ten years worth of work, and then I turned and walked away from it.  Now I can worry about the next one.  I doubt it will sell, but now I can say “I’ve written a book.”

It rained last night and it looks as though it might do so again.  I took a walk on the beach today; the water was warm and the sand looked almost artificial, raked smooth by big machines that sat silent about a mile down the beach. Hungry, more later.

01OCT2010

Dear Cass,

Now in REDACTED. (Hint: It’s French-sounding.)  Notes from this period are hard to come by.  I remember it as bits and pieces of shiny crazy, bright seconds of screaming laughter, uncomfortable wooden stools, the drunken stumble of cobblestone streets, the clatter of beads skidding across ruined asphalt, candle-lit basements, one million tasteless t-shirts, endless excellent jukeboxes, and the omnipotent stench stench of the REDACTED.

Mommy drinks because you cry.

If REDACTED were a real person, it’d be best embodied by an unemployed uncle who; drives an LTD, is missing the majority of his teeth, sleeps on a thrift store couch above an auto repair shop, and has predictably vomited into his own lap nearly every night since May 7, 1718.

These moments dwell in contrast to the cold black blocks of solid concrete and the geometric shapes of authority, acts of soul-sucking drudgery committed while toiling away on the 14^th floor of an anonymous office building somewhere in downtown REDACTED, and the real reason I was in town…

My creativity lives in a small village somewhere on the fall side of the world, and it is only when I sleep that I am able to have any communication with it. A hatch on the top of my head yawns open in the night with the quiet whine of hydraulics, and a long, golden tendril of monofilament line yawns forth, uncoiling itself from a tiny spool; winding this way and that, it crosses the ocean, drifts over fields, mystifies cows, and is largely invisible to all but buskers, fools and unemployed uncles living in the streets below.

Said filament knocks on the door of my creativity and forms an outstretched palm, as though begging for alms. Sometimes my creativity has something to offer, and sometimes the tendril comes home empty-handed. My first impulse, upon waking, is to check my mailbox and see what treasures await. Nothing makes my day like a good breakfast, a solid cup of coffee, the right song playing in my headphones, and a tiny parcel in the inbox of my dreams.

Unfortunately, society has seen fit to schedule me to show up at a job during my peak creativity period. This must be kept a closely guarded secret from REDACTED, lest a ham-handed conversation threatens to begin with, “Well, why not use that creativity to [fulfill dull task X]?” as I’m being hipped to death by Cool Hand Douche and his twin fingered six-guns.

I get it, REDACTED.  You win at parties. I can’t swing a cat within your city walls without hitting a place to drink, eat, or lose track of the time.  You’ve got absinthe and hand grenades and Scotch and all my favorite foods, and some I think you made up.  (Fried macaroni? Who the fuck are you fooling? Didn’t stop me from eating it, though.)  Your architecture, enthralling; your history, visibly evident. You win, REDACTED! Isn’t that what you wanted to hear?  You’re a town full of spooky hippies and beautiful gypsies and starving dancers and I could probably spend the rest of my life trying to separate your magical madness from your common trash for the sole purpose of preservation and documentation, but I’d probably self-destruct inside of five years, if I didn’t get diabetes or go broke first. I know there’s more to you, REDACTED, but I can’t help running to the bad parts first…

Wish you were here.

10OCT2010

Dear Cass,

I miss you, and I’ll see you soon.

TWM

“KnoWare Man” – my debut novel available on Lulu

It’s taken me ten years, six computers, five drafts, four states, and two operating systems, but the big day is here.

My first novel is available for purchase.

Time to start the next one,

TWM

Letter to a friend

(Letter to my good friend @GoFrankGo)

Frankly (Mr. Shankly!),

Sorry I missed your call on Sunday.  It’s been a rough weekend:

Friday night, I ate some takeout Chinese and washed it down with a Red Bull while watching “Venture Bros.”  As one does.  (Fuck, I have GOT to stop eating like I’m 20…) You’re right.  In fact, everyone who has ever recommended “Venture Bros.” to me was right about that show.

That night, I had dreams where I was dying of thirst even though I was drinking as much as physically possible – a sure sign that my body wasn’t happy with the choice I’d made.  (I have those dreams when I eat pepperoni or sausage on pizza, too.  Mmmm, sausage and mushrooms.… )  In these dreams, I’m drinking from the garden hose on full stream, or pounding gallon jugs of ice water straight from the fridge but nothing’s coming out.  Woke up the next morning and I was sore all over, like I was coming down with something.  Showered, went back to bed for a few hours.  Can’t nap too late, though…

Oddly enough, Katie Orlando was in town this weekend with her boyfriend to shoot the Cherry Blossom festival. My plan was to leave a few hours early to say hello (she being only the fourth TLC postboard persona I’d have met!), then head over to Dupont Circle to meet up with Cass (see also: Special Lady) for fancy salads, and then take in a Bach Concert at the Kennedy Center. Eventually: I got up, dragged on clean clothes (NOT feeling like doing any of the above now), packed my faithful bag, and headed for the bus stop.

Fucking tourists. Seems I can never get away from them. They swarmed me in Hilton Head, South Carolina; they clogged the streets of Juneau, Alaska; and now they fuck up my chi each Spring when the blossoms bloom in Disco Charlie.  They clog the Metro, make a mess of the escalators and generally get in the way.  As I get sicker, I grow… angrier.

Short story long, I missed out on seeing Katie but she lives in New York; no worries, we’ll have time to say hello later.  Waited for Cass for almost an hour before she shows up and tells me she was waiting at the other entrance to DuPont Circle – and, her new cellphone’s not working. Google phone can’t get a T-Mobile signal in D.C.?  Who’dve thought it?

We ate our fancy salads and relished every bit — no, wait.  I’m lying.  Because, oh yeah, the salads sucked.  Now, I’m a member of the clean plate club.  All the time.  That’s just how I roll.  And when I tell you my favorite fantasy is taking shelter in an empty hotel in the middle of hurricane season with nothing to do but write (and I’ve got the keys for the bar, the pool, and access to a generous supply of fresh fish, steamed veggies, fresh oranges and brown rice) well, you come to understand what sort of sick, salad-humping son of a bitch I really am.

So when I say I couldn’t finish this salad — well, let’s just not repeat that sentence.

Cass was still hungry (her salad sucked, too! A word to the wise: SweetGreen? SweetFail.  I mean… look at the menu! It’s vegetable PrØn!  How could they fuck it up!?)

…so we ducked into a Subway. She ate half a sub, stashed the rest in my bag. Offered me some, but at this point I couldn’t imagine ever eating again. (I had a feeling of perfect balance, and the following thought occured: “Never eat again!  Why not?  It’s like being a character in a Tom Robbins novel and deciding not to age anymore.”)

On to the Kennedy Center!

Wait!  Go back!  When Special Lady told me we were gonna catch a Bach mass for twenty bucks, I, in my present state of physical delusion, assumed that my attire of camouflage shorts, a clean polo shirt and my beat-to-shit hiking shoes were perfectly AOK for the occasion. What the hell do I know from the Kennedy Center? (What the hell do I know from a mass??) We show up, and of course everyone is wearing suits. Yeah, I looked like a painted turd.  But fuck it, we paid for our tickets so we took our seats.  I slumped down extra low to hide my poor fashion sense from Jesus.

Catholic masses… wait, aren’t those–?  Long as fuck?  Yes.

I experienced a specific mental meme,  a soundbite from a skit starring a Catholic priest who “really thought the world of a GOOD LONG MASS!” (*fist punched into palm for enthusiasm and emphasis*. Might be an old episode of ‘Father Ted’?)  Now, I own recordings by Vivaldi, Wagner, and Mozart, and my first favorite song ever was the Pachebel Canon in D Minor.  So I’m not a culture buffoon.  But this was about the most boring goddamn thing I’d ever seen!  No plot, just grovelling. “Oh, Lord, please forgive us!  We’re not worthy!  Just you!  Only you are worthy!  You’re number one!  We’re number two!  Please let us into your special club!”

Just then, Special Lady (dressed in suitable jeans, top and a shawl — making me look even shittier, thanks) writes on her program and slides it over: WHY ARE THEY SINGING ABOUT CHEESE AND RICE?  I try not to laugh, makes my head hurt, can’t help it.  She’s wearing a mischievous grin, her bright eyes sparkling. I’m feeling like smeared death… sore limbs, and a raging headache, and the chairs are built for tiny beings, not 6′ 4″ motherfuckers like myself.  So we start passing notes back and forth. Hilarity ensues.  We are comedic geniuses the likes of which the world has never seen.

Then she writes: IF THERE’S AN INTERMISSION, LET’S BAIL. I slide her a low-five… aw, yeah. Dig this girl…

We slip out, she finished her sandwich and we discuss an important new opera called “The Cheese and The Rice” on the way to the Metro.  She performs a few scenes for me, in falsetto, at the top of her lungs.  More tourists.  Back to her place, finally.  I’m sore, shivering, and I’ve got a headache strong enough to make a horse squint. I crawl under the covers and I’m out…

Next morning, her godawful rooster alarm wakes me up at zero-dark. She has to go to work, but tells me I can sleep in late, shower, and catch a cab to the Metro.  No worries. I’ll make up the bed.

Conversation courtesy of Jesus of Bastardeth

Back to sleep, in and out of dreams. Head throbbing. (At one point, you texted me. Or maybe it was Jesus trying to sneak in a little self-promotion. You can’t blame the man, everybody has bills to pay.) Back to sleep, more dreams.

Wake up weak with a squinteriffic headache. It’s almost 3 p.m. Shower, dress, and lock up. Check iPhone app for local cab companies while standing in the driveway. Seven numbers appear, three of which are limo service and airport shuttles. Read: expensive. Two numbers don’t even answer. The last picks up: “Yeah? Naw, we don’t pick up there no more. You gotta call someone else.”  He gives me a number, hangs up.  In my feverish, fucked up condition I hope I’ve got it right.  Dialed it.  A Hindu voice answers.  “We don’t pick up there.  You gotta call someone else.”  I dialed the third number.  The sun is beating down, I’m shivering, and my head is SCREAMING.  Cars are whipping past carrying bored expressions and bad sunglasses.  Seems folks’re already sick of sunlight around here.  The last number is a winner.  They’ll be here in ten, and they take plastic.

Get to the Metro station. There’s a guy with a dazed look on his face, standing with his face pressed against the chain link fence, headphones in, his toneless voice rapping along: “Tryin’ ta get her pregnant, tryin’ to get her pregnant…” His eyes are dark and dead.  I’m shredding my taxi receipt into tiny pieces because it has my card number on it, and I throw it into a trashcan that reeks of piss. Everyone looks mean, cheap, like someone pissed in their Cheerios a long time ago and they’ve just kept eating it. I’m still not a fan of the ghetto, I don’t care how much we stand to learn from its residents.

Remember those tourists?  And remember that part about Chinese food and Red Bull being the last thing I’ve eaten all weekend?  I almost lost my temper and starting shouting at some tourists who were wide-eyed as amazed deer that the doors on a Metro car don’t bounce open when they encounter your arm or leg.  “Goodness!”  But I bite my tongue, ever polite.  Off the train now, walking faster and faster, dodging and moving through gaps in the crowd. Muttering, swearing.  Moments from losing it.  Don’t wanna be in a crowd if I do.  Through the Metro, up the escalator (“The RIGHT side is for standing, people!”) and get to the top, spot a cab.  Give the intersection of my neighborly hood, and asked if he took plastic.  He shrugs his shoulders. “I don’t know how to work the machine..?”  Try another cab.  He is apparently certified to work the machine.  I pile in.  The cab is clean, and smells of incense. “Nice weather, yes?”  I agree wordlessly, staring out the window, thinking thunderclouds.

I get home, check the mail, unpack, toss my dirty clothes in the laundry basket, gun a handful of ibuprofen and some other stuff Cass had given me before diving under the covers, trying to wish away the intense brain pain.  Sleep, and more weird dreams…

In this one, I wake up in my first-ever bedroom, which was haunted.  I know there are visitors downstairs, and I’m supposed to go see them.  But I have to get dressed.  I can’t turn on any of the light switches (sure sign that I’m dreaming) so I use my cellphone camera for light.  As one does.  I put on a black shirt, black slacks and black dress shoes.  I look like I’m ready for Vegas.  Or a Miami funeral.  I go downstairs and suddenly I’m in a cab.  And we’re driving  - have been driving for quite some time, actually. Eventually, I speak to the driver.  “Say, man. We’ve been at this for awhile, and, like, I don’t remember telling you where I wanted to go..? So how’s about we go a little further for scenery’s sake, and then you drop me off at where ever it was that you picked me up?”

Suddenly, I’m walking under a clear night sky.  The weather is perfect.  The stars are bright and plentiful, like when you’re out at sea, or in a country with minimal light pollution.  I’m aware that I’m walking ahead of a great multitude of people, and they’re waiting for me to do something, but it’s dark and I can’t see them.  The stars are huge and perfect…

Woke up at midnight. Headache and soreness gone. Wrote this letter to pass the time, which may explain the typos.

That’s why I missed your call.

TWM