Right Now Keeps Happening

13JUN2012 – The moments are fast-ticking away, the floor dropping out from under my feet like an amusement park ride in which I’m glued to the spinning wall, my stomach straddling my spine as though on horseback.  (See also: bomb bay door / ordinance analogy) 

The movers will be here in less than a month, descending upon my meager herd of possessions like a flock of hungry mummy vultures; the vicious rip and squawk of packing tape will ricochet off these walls.  Boxes imagined as lepers, suffering from a plague of red numbered splotches.  The ubiquitous clipboard.  “Sign here, date here.”  Fast in, fast out.

Dear Future Me Now Living in California,

I hope you were able to leave your unrest behind on the other side of the country.  If not, please remember: when you’ve got the day to yourself, go for an epic ride.  Be Here Now.  Go further than you did yesterday and don’t come home until the pain tells you to.  When that dark vertigo of loneliness creeps up from behind like timber wolves to a campfire, hit the weights.  Do some sit-ups.  Hang from your chin-up bar and pretend that it’s life or death.  When you feel knotted and confused, buy yourself some bullets and get to the range.  The sharp scent of clarity, the focus, the breathing.  The chemical afterglow, the sight of the slide shrugged back in the “feed me” position.  Do whatever it takes to get through those moment without selling out, without going back on your word, or spending days at a time locked in your apartment with the blinds drawn devouring online movies because you can’t bring yourself to speak to another human being.

The clock is always ticking, and everything is understood during the boom of the second hand.  Each instant ripples outward like the shock of an explosion seen but not heard.  With every step, the plans we make take a step toward us, meeting us halfway and half again.

The force of your body descends through your legs as though on an elevator and arrives at the ground floor with a collapsing punch, pushing down against the earth in that heavy Western turn signal, the telegraph read and interpreted by American Indians who learned everything they needed to know about the white man.  Forever falling forward, the instant is cemented.  Everything is understood during the boom of the second hand.

Somewhere, one bite of a condemned man’s last meal is chewed.  A flap of a wing is observed shoving a sparrow through the air.  One piston stroke of an internal combustion engine drives a woman that much further away; a man carves a single pen stroke into a sheet of paper in the too-late-letter begging her to come back (but it never works out that way…)

Demonstrate the practiced gait of the hominid:  Your arms are pendulums matching the silent song of your stride.  Your arms swing easy at your side, rippling like the crack of a whip as you stroll down the city streets, maneuvering through the crowd like a tiny aircraft.  Maybe you imagine yourself falling from an airplane, skydiving through a slow-motion explosion, stepping carefully across spinning debris like flat rocks in a stream.  Everything is understood during the boom of the second hand.

The fingertips of your middle finger and thumb casually collide in unison, counting coup as you come between the left edge of a bodega doorway and a utility pole, wordlessly documenting and describing their parallel relationship.  In your mind you can see the diagram of a million such connections branching out around you like radio waves and everything is explained, everything is understood during the boom of the second hand.

The moment passes, your foot rolls forward; weight shifts to the toes, heel rising into the air like the last chopper out.  Determined survivors cling to the landing struts, lose their grip; plummet flailing, perish fearing. Moving into the future one step at a time.

Everything is understood during the boom of the second hand.

See you soon,

Speak to no one about this.

15APR2012 – Part of this is my job description, part of this is a dream. There are moments in the light of day when I cannot tell them apart. Sometimes, I travel from place to place at the direction of (a certain government agency) and perform tasks — which began as uncomfortable and tedious but have grown progressively more rewarding.

“Head south, drive for twenty miles. Pull over at (a certain gas station) just outside (a certain town). The station will be abandoned. Open the envelope located under the passenger seat. You will find a pair of gloves. Put them on and pocket both the lighter and the box containing paraffin-soaked cotton. You will break into the office at the back of the building without being observed. Force the lock on the top left-hand desk drawer. There will be a large square package wrapped in plain brown paper. Do NOT open it. Instead, carry it with you to the lot behind the gas station and look for an old rusted drum. Place the package in the drum and set fire to the package using the lighter and paraffin, making certain to scatter the ashes thoroughly and bury the fire. Once you’ve finished, return home. Speak to no one about this.”

Next. “Catch the first flight to (a certain place). Rent a car and drive to (a certain pier) and wait there for six hours. Purchase a sandwich from a food cart at the end of the pier if you get hungry. When (a certain vessel) moors to the pier, board and ask to speak to the captain. When you meet him, hand him a one-dollar bill and take his picture. He’ll know what it means. Once you have his photograph, return to the airport and fly home. Speak to no one about this.”

Next. “Travel by train to New London, Connecticut. Be at (a specific address) by 0800 Wednesday. Someone there will give you a large green bag containing a knife, a compass, a space blanket, a warm coat and a whistle. Purchase sufficient food and water. Then, drive to an old airfield at the edge of town. There you will board the large white military aircraft with an orange stripe on the side. They’re expecting you. It will take you to Newfoundland. When you arrive, walk to the end of the runway and board another white plane. This one will have the word ‘surveillance’ painted along the side in big red letters. They’ll be expecting you. They will fly approximately 375 SE to position 41° 46′ North, 50° 14′ West. When you arrive, there will be a boat waiting. Photograph the boat and any activity you observe. The aircraft mechanic will jettison an object through a drop tube located in the rear of the aircraft. Photograph this event and anything you think might be of interest. Return home. Speak to no one about this.”

There’s never a definite end to the tasks. Sometimes they come in the middle of the night. Sometimes they come very early in the morning. “Tomorrow at 0400, you will don this dress uniform complete with colorful ribbons, insignia and a fancy hat. You will travel to attend (a certain function) at (a certain place). You will be introduced to (a certain person). When you meet him, take his picture. Wait twenty minutes. When he is introduced to (a certain person), you will photograph them together. The photograph should appear natural. It must NOT appear posed. After this, you are free to go. Speak to no one about this.”

Next: “Catch the first flight to New Orleans. Rent a car, drive to (a certain place) and wait for instructions. After two weeks, you will drive to an airfield on the edge of town and board a helicopter. They will be expecting you. It will take you to an oilrig located in the Gulf of Mexico. Upon arriving, you will photograph the drilling equipment, the interior of the control room and anything you think might be of interest. Once you have these photographs, board the helicopter and return to (a certain place). Speak to no one about this.”

Sometimes I receive these instructions in the middle of the task I’m completing ordering me to drop what I’m doing and begin another task, or walk from it away entirely. The standard guidance is simple: “Travel light. Pack a duffel bag of clothes, a laptop, a camera and your passport. Use this card for expenses, and present this piece of paper when challenged. Speak to no one about this…”

TWM

The Phone Call of Cthulhu

Deployment of World Ocean Circulation Experiment buoy, one each.

27JAN2012 – I’m in an office on the second floor of a shoebox-shaped building on the southern tip of Manhattan. It’s raining; the background hiss is partially clouding my thinking. I can’t help but wonder if the static-based sound of falling water impacting like gentle ordinance on filthy concrete might have the same effect on the human brain as noise-cancelling headphones; impeding one’s overall ability to think or act clearly.

I wonder about a lot of things. I’m not saying any of the questions I ask are valid, or even that important in the greater scheme. In this day and age you can ask all the questions you want; the answers are probably out there somewhere. But what you do with the result is up to you.

There’s no one else here at the moment, so I’m listening to Pigface (rather loudly) and packing for my trip. I’ll catch a train to New London, Conn., and then a military C-130J south to Elizabeth City, N.C., before heading north again to St. John’s, Newfoundland, where I’ll be flying further still out over the North Atlantic with a crew whose job is to spot icebergs orphaned from Mother Greenland and translate this information into assorted charts and helpful warnings. I’ll be taking photos, handling the media who’ve signed up to fly with us, re-reading Neal Stephenson’s fucking awes*me work of maximum geekery, Cryptonomicon, and fighting to stay awake whilst the vibrating tremors from mighty engines work themselves under my skin.

Camera bodies, batteries, cables, lenses, chargers and a MacBook Pro are shoved into my camera bag with all the enthusiasm of the “gear-up” scene from a Rambo movie. All that’s missing is a fuck-off big hunting knife in the sheath at my hip, a red headband made fast around my brow and some heavy-lidded mumbling about war, weapons and drawing first blood. I’ve got enough equipment in this bag to document a revolution and I’ve planned my trip to the nth degree. Nothing to it but to do it, and hope my planning reveals no signs of potroasticus cerebellum.

29JAN2012 – Amtrak 160 headed northeast, easy like Sunday morning. The shifting perspective of the countryside as viewed through the horizontal arrow slit of this shiny metal worm reveals a large-scale zoetrope of naked trees and pulsing bursts of sunlight. It’s giving me a fucking Japanese seizure is what’s it doing. That, and allowing me the rare opportunity to experience e-ink properties in my actually-analog book which I can’t seem to concentrate on, so I close my eyes.

Blood-red shockwaves inspired by the flashing sunlight pulse violently against my lowered eyelids, which keeps perfect time with the dated sounds of Ministry’s ‘Jesus Built My Hotrod’. My ear goggles are flooded with the warm honey of crashing bass. Turns out I can’t sleep either, so I open my eyes and look around; first at the slumbering Asian girl with the British accent and gentle overbite sitting across the aisle from me, then back out the window again, and finally down to the much-abused notebook on my lap. The rocking motion of the train has transmogrified my commonly-careful cuneiform into a document prophesying the coming of what appears to be multiple earthquakes.

The landscape rolls and yaws like a fighter jet alongside our forward surging inchworm, affording the passengers on the right side of the car with fleeting glimpses of backyard wealth and modest prosperity; seasonally-stranded fishing boats, multiple modes of muddied transportation and sprawling houses with oversized windows, each overlooking bodies of water — no matter how insignificant. These are the outward symptoms of a fortunate soul in an uncertain economy. And where there is stability such as this, there is typically found the Bounty of Favor and the unspoken Marital Return On Investment.

What I’m trying to say here is that the MILF of a rich man probably fucks like she owns the place. She knows from whence her bread is buttered. With her primal needs and American dreams of food, shelter and matching drapes fully realized, her nesting instincts rev right into the red faster than a NASCAR Napoleon on nuptial night. She’s met a man she can depend upon; a steadfast sumbitch who can help to unclench her ovaries, change her flat tire, slap her up a spice rack from leftover floor shims and drive her to the hospital with one calloused hand tied behind his L.L. Bean red plaid shirt…

–

Where the passing riverbeds are revealed, the smoothed earth echo of mental mud is exposed as the individual folds of a great brain. This section of the Earthbrain’s purpose is to do x. A few miles over, that dry winter lakebed’s folds are designed to execute function y. The Earth is alive, its cognitive abilities spread out over its entire body like skin. (If someone cuts off your hand, you can’t think clearly. Follow?) People still wave at passing trains, swaying their limbs overhead like friendly flags of surrender, a gesture one doesn’t see much of inside the 11216 zip code.

30JAN2012 – I haven’t flown aboard a C-130 since my days in Alaska, but the sensation comes flooding back; I’m buckled into a row of surplus theater seats (my luggage is strapped to the deck about where the orchestra pit would be) and I’m facing a wall of tool chests that would make the eyes of any self-respecting hillbilly gearhead turn green with envy. The seats are bolted to a large slab of aluminum locked partway between a series of rollers, further attached to the floor of what appears to be an immaculate but highly complicated basement workshop during a long and gentle earthquake. You’d need a plane this big just to cart around the instruction manuals that go with it. There’s likely to be a jargon-rich chapter for each and every screw, bolt and wingnut aboard.

Warm wind blowing across my face from an overhead vent makes my eyes heavy for a time, and I remember nothing until our overfed tires punch the earth in the face and I am jolted from my slumber. Presently the engines wind down; the rear ramp of the plane performs a complex raising and lowering procedure and fresh North Carolina night air boards the aircraft, chasing away the sand of sleep. I blink myself awake and assist with the offload process inasmuch as it involves helping the other personnel with their luggage before jumping down to the tarmac for a look-see. The tail of the aircraft towers above me, lit in false moonlight generated by the white lights from the hangar. I can see the stars and you have no idea how happy this makes me… I gather my bags and we head for the gate, we head for the hotel, we head for dinner. Later, I head for a bed.

–

01FEB2012 – We stop off at a Food Lion for sandwiches and lunch supplies enroute to the airfield. The store is full of nourishing foodstuffs but my needs are specific, bordering on demanding.

The item must be small in size, marginally ruggedized and reinforced against accidental mashing. It must require minimal preparation (i.e. unwrap it), and offer maximum protein output when weighed against the aforementioned size and weight guidelines. After a considerable amount of clinical analysis, I select a turkey and cheese sub from the deli, although somewhat wary of biting into moist bread later…

Now for the important stuff. I carefully select my fuel cells; a pair of 355ml aluminum cylinders containing a highly-caffeinated and sugar-free substance, the packaging of which features a duel of blood-red bovine engaged in violent conniptions at the center of a burning star. (Red Bull doesn’t give me wings so much as it allows me to vibrate my way into other dimensions.) Just tell them, “I wanted to go higher.”

I score a Skor bar and a pack of gum while waiting in line. The man ahead of me is buying a case of Coors and a generous supply of Sparks. It is not quite 8:30 a.m. Shine on, you crazy diamond…

–

One hour later, our baggage and equipment is aboard and we’re at last preparing for our departure to St. John’s, Newfoundland. I’m seated closest to the door. It’s not by choice. It was the only pair of seats left available, and my camera bag requires a crush-free zone of its own. My legs are longer than Beowulf so I have to sit sidesaddle in order to keep my giraffe knees clear of the narrow aisle as the air crew rush back and forth shining their lights into overhead spaces and checking things off their lists. That’s what aviators do.

The engines kick in and the lonely patch of tarmac still visible outside the open hatch begins to flicker and blur as the props gain speed, turning faster and faster until their shadows fall away, dissolving to nothingness, evaporating in the sunlight. Suddenly the ground becomes crystal clear again. Wheels up at 1007. Time to read.

Welcome to Gander. Abandon warmth ye who enter here.

1700: Welcome to Gander, Canada. We’re here for a quick “how-do-you-do” with the local aviation authorities and a perfunctory conversation with customs officials, who give us the once-over for cash, knives and guns. (Fuck! I left my passport on the plane. I really wanted a new stamp…) We’re waved through regardless. The airport is deserted – and I mean literally. It feels like the setting for a video game. I pretend we’re being watched. It helps pass the time.

I ducked away from the group to use the restroom and as I stood there, imminently vulnerable, ejecting five degrees of my core temperature into a ready-made sculpture, the following thought crossed my mind: “This is it – this is the scene where the Red Shirt wanders away from the landing party and gets his face chewed open by a toilet-squatting zombie.” Figures it’d be the photographer who gets it first. The others will no doubt pilfer my supplies and reach the objective without me.

The waiting lounge, however, was sumptuous; a full-sized pool table, a full-sized coffee maker, a big screen TeeVee and a generous selection of video games, none of which we had time to enjoy–

“Say, how much time do we have?” One person answered five minutes; another replied with half an hour. Weighing the difference, I plopped down in a leather chair by the window and called AT&T to request a Canadian phone plan. (Or maybe it was a firing plan. Sometimes I have these unfortunate moments where I black out and ask Santa for what I really want:

“Come on, lady. The code is Almighty, coordinates 090264712. It’s all in here!”
“I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t do that! I’m going to need to speak to my supervisor…”

The air traffic control center was a bit more populated; grizzled old men in tucked shirts with carefully trimmed beards and the look of church about them sat in glad adoration of enormous monitors bursting with crisscrossing neon lines. They spoke strings of alphanumeric incantations into headsets, pronouncing the magic spells necessary to guide multiple aircraft safely toward their destinations: “Alpha Charlie one Tango, I have you at two-six-seven, request you two-seven-five northwest at five-thousand…”

We were wheels up an hour later.

–

The runway at St. John’s, Newfoundland, was under attack by a squadron of tiny tornadoes of dry white snow reminiscent of hourglass sand, and the wind gnashed blindly at our props. Once we’d come to a complete stop and the hatches were open, I grabbed my camera and hustled to the hangar hoping to catch some shots of the plane being towed to shelter.

“This is the worst part of the trip,” said the pilot. He’d appeared behind me undetected while I was framing images in my viewfinder.

“Oh? Because you’re not in control?” I asked, turning to face him, realizing this might have been a presumptuous thing to say, and regretting it immediately. Sometimes I clear leather before I check the safety on my mouth.

“Exactly.” He either didn’t hear me or he ignored it. Or I was right about something for a change. “Last time we were here, a jet blew past us on the runway and the wash almost knocked an empty box into the side of the plane. The nose cone is where all the radar equipment lives and it’s worth at least $500,000. I love to fly, but this is really the only part that makes me nervous.”

St. John’s appears mostly deserted. Minimal traffic, fewer lights. A skewed yellow trapezoid announcing the Best place to Buy electronics burns bright like molten gold against the swirling mass of starry ice. Apparently Bryan Adams is playing a show here this week. Somehow this makes sense.

Once I’d checked into my room and changed into clean clothes, I headed for the hotel bar for a salad and a pint. I was tired and stretched a little thin but genuinely happy to be on the move again.

The waitress was wicked cute as waitresses go, but I think she hates Americans. (Hates. Present tense. Pay attention. She’s still out there… waiting.) I say this because I was the only person in the room she didn’t smile at. She smiled at the dopey guy with matching hair, a gold chain and no chin who was drinking white wine and reading a book at the next table. She smiled at the old codgers in ball caps talking about tractor parts. She smiled at the two older ladies in — I mean, she literally stopped smiling when she saw me! If she remembered me from a past life, I had no idea what I might have done to piss her off.

“Hello! I’d like a beer, please.” I placed my hands palms down on the table where she could see them. No sudden movements. She could probably smell fear.

“Well, we have sixteen of them on tap.” Her voice was frosty, her body language clear: Take your pick, fuckstick. I’ll personally pee in whichever pint you choose. Hesitantly, I glanced over at the bar. There’s no way I could read the labels from here and she didn’t appear to be forthcoming with name brands, so…

“Okay, I guess I’ll just wander over and pick one out…?” I was preparing to slide out the booth and review the selection myself if only it meant we could end this uncomfortable standoff. I was hungry and my brain was being unusual.

She repeated her previous statement but slower this time, as though she were addressing a partially-deaf dog rapist who suffered from a terrible learning disorder, and she couldn’t decide between abject hate, or burning pity. How could the number of beers on tap possibly apply to my inability to visually discern between the labels? On a whim, I asked for Guinness. The fates smiled upon me.

Presently my food and drink arrived. I sipped at my (pee-free) stout and devoured my salad, jotting impressions in my notebook and humming quietly along to The Clash’s “London Calling” when it came up on the jukebox.

–

02FEB2012 – Next Bat-night, same hotel Bat-bar. Today was all about gym, pale, and laundry. Clean clothes, quick workout. Read a lot, wrote more.

Somewhere to my left, the synthetic blue thunderbolt of a camera flash erupts in the brown wood darkness of the room. Morrissey howls piteously from the stereo. Just doesn’t fit the vibe of the room.

Spent all day alone. It felt good, like when your doctor and your priest and your boss and everyone else tells you the next drink is going to kill you, but you drink it anyway because what the fuck do they know? Solitude only hates you when you’re new to the game.

You know what’s weird? Accepting that a place like St. John’s is populated. It’s the edge of the world. I mean, sure it’s the year 2012 — people have to be born somewhere and I bet it’s drop dead gorgeous in the summer — but it feels small in a way I can’t properly describe. And it’s back-dated somehow, like maybe the city was founded by visiting aliens who’d gleaned all they could about Western Civilization from television signals they’d intercepted on the way here and thought it’d be a hoot to build their own ant farm, so they placed a sizable credit card order with some sort of aliens-only, Wile E. Coyote-based Acme City Store in order to bring their creation into lockstep with the 21^st century:

“Oh, look! It’s finally here! Let’s open it!”
“Wait — do you think we should maybe do this outside?”
“Good idea!”

These far-born city planners eased their giant wooden baby onto a dolly and together they cart it to a nearby clearing, eventually dropping the handles with a joint huff of exertion. One of them slits opens a document pouch on the side of the crate with a trusty penknife, dons a pair of reading glasses, licks a thumb and begins reading the first page of instructions:

“Congratulations on your new future, it will bring you years of enjoyment… all new, lifetime guarantee… let’s see here… yeah, it says here we get a Best Buy, 2-for-1 pitchers of Budweiser and something called… Sirius XM radio?” He peers over the top of his reading glasses and licks his bottom lip, eyes full of question. “Does that mean it’s big?”

“No, dear. You’re thinking of XL.”
“Huh.” Reads some more, rubs hands together. “Well, here goes nothing!”

On the count of three, they tug hard on the bright red handle marked PULL ME and take a few careful steps back as the gossamer gold balloon begins to expand at a terrific rate… highway off-ramps, strip malls, strip joints, breakfast shops, lunch specials, fine dining, small businesses and hotel chains—all of it begins somersaulting its way free of the confines of the box and sliding into position, clicking and whirring and turning this way and that with a terrific amount of rushing wind and noise, finally locking into place with the imperfect click of casual Chinese craftsmanship, bristling mazes of big screen TeeVees, and clone-grown actors destined to run screaming for New York City just as soon as their legs finish cooling—

“Did you want to order something, sir?” I’m jolted from my reverie by the earnest expression of the winner of the 2012 Cutest High-School Senior competition (Runner-up: Best Rack). I have no idea how long she’s been standing there and I’m taken aback by her display of sudden ninja trickery, but I manage to stammer out something that sounds an awful lot like ‘chicken garden salad with no dressing and black coffee with one sugar, please,’ but it could have been – well, it could have been anything, really…

I glance up at the TeeVee screen while I await my repast: a sporting team consisting of giant people from the newer city of York are scheduled to engage in a mock land war across a mighty lawn with a group of patriots in the name of lucrative contracts. The winner of this contest shall be eligible to have their likeness displayed on cereal boxes across the land. Apparently these contests take place annually…

Huh.

–

03FEB2012 – Flew today. Somewhere along the line the plane became 250-plus-pounds lighter; minus the weight of a current-tracking WOCE buoy; minus the weight of foodstuffs and sandwiches purchased from the local Sobe needed to feed thirteen people; minus the amount of fuel burned; minus the amount of engine heat and carbon dioxide lost to the *fuck-you-cold of the North Atlantic (*that’s metric, by the way), but plus the infinitesimal weight gained across three flash drives by taking photos and videos of the aircraft. In another lifetime, I’d kick the shit out of pure math. Not this one. Next time, maybe.

So. Today. What a weird state of affairs. Three or so hours into the flight, the tail of the plane yawned awake with a high-pitched whine. One section raised, the other lowered and between them the cold air of the North Atlantic bum-rushed our show. I was about six feet back behind the buoy crate, one arm wrapped through a loop of cargo net, crouched low and braced for stability whilst trying not to fall against the leg of the CBC cameraman I’d positioned front and center of the action.

Seconds later, two members of the aircrew shoved the box into the wild blue yonder. A peppermint parachute snapped open and the box disappeared into the frigid waters below. A successful launch.

An estimated eighty percent of an iceberg is below the water line and, much like a sailboat, they are pushed along by ocean currents. These buoys, part of the World Ocean Current Experiment, will allow scientists to track said currents in the areas where icebergs are typically found, giving them a better idea of where to look and thereby keep mariners safe. But you probably knew that already.

–

04FEB2012 – There are no flights today. In fact, nothing is happening today. St. John’s is being audited by a blizzard. Or maybe it’s more of a snow transfusion; out with the old, in with more of the same shit. Knowing in advance that this was going to happen, I stayed awake till 5 a.m., writing and consuming Red Bull like it was my job. This morning, as I sat in the hotel restaurant, someone brought me a Denver omelet and a pot of black coffee.

Minus 24-hour access to the pool and an unlimited supply of fresh Alaskan halibut, brown rice and steamed spinach, this, my friends, is my American dream!

There’s a young boy sitting at a table across the restaurant with two older men. I can remember what it was like to be that kid; I’d rather have been outside playing tag until dark, riding my bike, reading a book or dreaming up reasons why a salt shaker would make an awesome spaceship (figure out the propulsion system, locate the bridge, decide upon a classification and determine if it was built on Earth or in orbit), versus wasting a perfectly good snow day being held captive to the natural ebb and flow of boring adult conversation. The nearer of the men appears to be the boy’s father, as he is looking down at the child with an unmistakable love and pride. The shortest member of the three is busy sipping different liquids through his straw, oblivious to the gaze of admiration.

I watch as a young girl loads a spearful of prostrated chicken bodies into Hell’s Ferris wheel. She performs a last rite of sprinkled herbs and spices before sealing the door of the inferno. Immediately, the tiny cube is filled with hot light and every aspect of the birds’ bodies is revealed. The slow orbit begins. In ten minutes time, the tender pink of their skin will turn a lazy golden brown, like the tan of a college girl with time on her hands and too much rum in her system…

To Be Continued…

Resume simulation.

30DEC2011 – Back from my bi-annual trip to Hoth to see the Padawan.  I gifted him with Diamond Age technology and in return I received a mild cold.  I managed to keep it from getting serious; I gulped down the Emergen-cee I carry in my bag and slept 12 hours.  And at some point during that endless night I dreamed I still hadn’t graduated from boarding school.

I was in the bedroom I’d occupied at student home Plainfield, a spacious ranch house with its own dairy barn and acres of punishment lawns located deep in Amish territory.  The desk was the same, as was the lamp, the too-thin bedspread and the cork board on the sliding closet door.  Every detail, preserved just for me.  Waiting for my return.  Oh, no.  Not here again…

Suddenly I felt as though I’d never actually left, as though I’d spent the last twenty years in a cobwebbed cryostasis, keeping mute watch over all the fictional characters I’d become as I evolved through the years, each one taking their shift at living my life for me.  There was a sensation of unfolding hopeless helplessness and it felt like “forever” in the way that holding a snowball feels “cold”.  There was no signal strength, no connectivity, and no memory.  I’d never traveled the world, I’d never actually written any of the words I’d carved out on paper, and I’d certainly never fallen in love.  There was nothing.  How many times had I dreamed I was waking up and getting dressed and taking the subway to the office only to wake up and discover I was still in bed?  My simulation had paused, allowing reality to come crashing in.

Presently I turned to the window and looked out upon a towering oil refinery that stood where farmland and cornfields once reigned.  I used to hide in those fields on summer afternoons, holding my breath and listening hard to the tiny rifle crack of the dried stalks beneath my shoes and the buzz of the insects swarming around me.  It was the first time I’d thought of crickets as tiny machines, built in a factory somewhere.

There was a great explosion somewhere to the right, and I could see clouds billowing and unfolding like a great flower, a shiny, shimmering burst of all the colors of post-rain oil sheen in strip mall parking lot.  Then I could see heavy oil surging toward me and I reached out to crank the window closed, knowing this fragile operation would be enough to hold it back.

One moment ended, the next began.

Then I was sitting next to Romero Alverez in the main auditorium of Founders Hall, a great marble R2D2 where all the big events and assemblies were held.  Inside the main rotunda were the flags of all fifty states beneath a vaulted ceiling so fucking majestic you could fly a UAV around inside without bumping into the great brass statue of Willy Wonka himself.

It’s not like Romero and I were friends, and I couldn’t tell you anything about him, really.  We didn’t travel in the same social circles.  (Come to think of it, I didn’t even have a social circle.  More of an elliptical arc, like the Hale-Bopp comet.)  I turned to Romero and asked him if he remembered graduating back in ’89.  “I think so?” he said.

Maybe that’s what happened to my graduating class; maybe that’s why we appear to have fallen off the face of the earth.  Because we’re all caught fast in the amber web of the same nightmare.  Sleepers, sleeping.

Bottom line, I was horrified to be re-living this event again.  How many more times is this going to happen?  What does it mean?  It was like climbing to the top of one mighty mountain only to open my eyes and realize I was still crawling around on the ground, and as I lay there panting with exhaustion I wondered how many layers I had left to go before the air tasted like air again, and the numbers on the clock would stand still long enough to be recognized.

We’re at the end of the year, now.  Tomorrow night, Mickey will bring his big hand and his little hand high over his head and clap them once, just long enough to propel the whole wide world through the doorway of the universal danger room of 2012.

Resume simulation,

Mind and Purpose

Approximately 345,125 days have passed since the Battle of Hastings…

Summer is officially over.  Earlier this hour I sat on the back deck of a nearby ice cream and confection shop and enjoyed the last double cone of the season.  Thirty-two minutes after the hour smelled like a lit match, and passed through my body like a lingering acid trip, casting echoes of anti-reality across the yard like ripples on a still pond.

As is my habit, I attempted to put the moment into words: a helicopter circles low overhead, fucking the humidity with five swords in a rough approximation of gunfire…  Navigation lights keep time with 80s era Depeche Mode leaking from a window above the shop where twin Caribbean accents clink and click away behind the dishes, chatting softly about the washing up…   Multicolored pendant lamps hang condemned from the underside of the deck umbrella…  Beyond them, rusted iron straps bolt across the back wall, supporting sagging sections of the aged brick structure and –

Yeah.  Okay.  Great.  “I marveled at the complexity of eternity and the invisible quantum orgy, and I reveled in the giddiness of the moment” — whoop-di-freaking-do! — before my euphoria was crushed by an avalanche of sad realization: I didn’t really know how to capture this.  I didn’t know how to make it stay.

I could give away my worldly possessions and forward my mail to a high mountain monastery, surrendering the remainder of my days to the relentless pursuit of truthful description and worshipping the holy fucking glory of the written word and still I wouldn’t be able to drive a nail deep enough to make this moment or any other linger longer, despite all my longing.

I sat in a Juneau bar one night many nights ago, teetering on the edge of fall-down-drunkenness and thinking carefully about what makes women beautiful (like you do), struggling to capture an ever-elusive essence in a haiku or some such shorthand measure.

What a fucking load of noise!  I might as well have tried to work out why light is bright or why it hurts when I fall down.  But I have no academic training, I (still) don’t know what beauty really means, and to make matters worse I suck at haiku.  Plus I was blind drunk and getting dumber by the shot.

Notes salvaged from that night: “Something about the eyes, some measurement of the face, some mystical number or secret formula.  Sometimes a rock climber’s fingers or the strong jawline like a bow across the strings (and the hips) of a cello, but now and again and again it’s the neck but it’s not always the body and usually the soul but frequently it’s just the way they carry themselves.  Is it this way for everyone?  Do others see them as I do? Am I crazy or just retarded?”

There are writers, and then there are writers.  Me, I’m just a guy who takes notes.  I try.  I really do.  Ultimately, my doctor says I suffer from a curious affliction experienced by a tiny selection of monkeys doomed to live out their brief and answerless lives anchored to a spinning speck at the ass end of an endless universe.

I’ve been given a pen, he says, but there is no ink.

It’s difficult to resist committing each and every mortal monkey moment to paper, documenting them in some electronic manner.  I want to show that I lived.  I want to demonstrate that I felt, that I saw, and that yes, I bought the ticket.  But I realized on that drunken night, and tonight — and probably I’ll discover it again tomorrow — how completely futile it is to try, but how addictive it is to keep going any damn way.

Not only am I shouting into a wind tunnel against the rest of human expression, but memories tend to fit the shape of our hands.  We scoop them to our perspective.  They are never as we remember them.  Flashes of unspeakable beauty happen like a gunshot.  They are vivid once and then they begin to heal as a puckered scar, closing the portal behind them.  (A captured memory would most likely rot like fruit in that well-intentioned bowl you placed on your kitchen table.)

Where is the proof of yesterday?  It survives as a dry cleaning stub in my wallet, right next to the the Metrocard I purchased from an underground kiosk twelve hours ago; close to the rats and upwind from the piss.  Yesterday is the delicious meal I recently shat into the sewer.

(Sometimes when a meal is really good, I laugh.  At least I used to.)

We inhale these spectral seconds in order to keep them close to us, refusing to let the flame flicker out, straining to hold onto important occurrences just a little while longer before coughing in to the basic need for air.  An explosive exhalation precedes an involuntary gasp for fresh O2 and then the moment is lost to the wind and the second hand ticks once like a bomb, never to return.  So many such seconds will fade like photographs on the wall, polished mute like the rocks I’ve gathered on walks without remembering why, or when, much less where they began.

(Morale of the story: Stop playing the movie.  The ending never changes, and the film gets warped the longer you leave it on the bulb.)

From Wikipedia: “The Finnish have an expression for the will to push forward.  Sisu, loosely translated, is defined as strength of will, determination, perseverance and acting rationally in the face of adversity. However, the word is widely considered to lack a proper translation into any language.  Sisu has been described as being integral to understanding Finnish culture.  The literal meaning is equivalent in English to ‘having guts’, and the word derives from sisus, which means something inner or interior.  However sisu is defined by a long-term element in it; it is not momentary courage, but the ability to sustain an action against the odds.  Deciding on a course of action and then sticking to that decision against repeated failures is sisu.  It is similar to equanimity, except the forbearance of sisu has a grimmer quality of stress management than the latter.  The noun sisu is related to the adjective sisukas, one having the quality of sisu.”

…

Hours later in the darkness, sitting in a large orange dish chair near an open window in my living room.  Cool air files in and takes a quiet seat.  A short glass of chilled apple moonshine rests in my left hand.  A man walks down the near side of the street repeatedly muttering something about real estate.  As you do.

Tomorrow I will write a letter to a friend and talk about the fire virus in the trees, and how Brooklyn is beginning to burn…

Tonight I am imagining things; a dark spot on the floorboards near my foot has crawled toward me, twice.  Each time I pin it down with my eyes, it reverts to being just a dark stain on the floorboard, the 78 of an old conversation trapped beneath the varnish.  When I turn my eyes to the laptop screen, it becomes a mouse again, or a roach, or something larger.

I’m not afraid.  I just wish it would make up its mind.

TWM

Nobody rides for free

There’s nothing worse than going to sleep hungry, especially when it’s for six months.

I’ve been dreaming about food since I went into freeze — and I mean real food, hot and proper, not the slippery nutrient crap they slop down your gullet, stuff all made of fish eggs or some such.  When the Apes get orders for a new driver, they start prepping you for cold shipment to the Raceway.

You want me to tell you I’m innocent?  I got news for you, friend.  Everybody in this motherfucker was set up, framed, or otherwise “didn’t do it”.  No one in prison is particularly guilty.  We just kill for the same reasons anybody kills anymore.  To stay off the Raceway.

I could tell you about Naptime, but that’s too short a tale.  You get your head shaved, you get dipped in vitamins to shut your bowels down for six months while you sleep thirty-five high and eighteen wide in a frozen tube wired for sound on a one-way trip.  End of story.

Imagine being spot-welded into the cockpit of a ground-bound cruise missile powered by the sun, or in this case, PEDL — the Perpetual Energy Drive Link.  Once in, no out.

There’s three suns in close proximity to the Raceway.  Orbiting each one is a kind of hard-core processing platform that converts energy harvested from coronal mass ejections and photon emissions into useable plasma.  From there, it’s beamed several million miles to a second processor, which uses it to fuel a vehicle with so much potential for pure speed and final power that it never sees the same pilot twice.

The Mechs coat you in a special foam which constricts your body like a giant snake, forcing your blood to your brain, keeping you conscious.  But once the speedometer moves from green to red, all you can do is hang on and hope your heart doesn’t burst.  Crossbolts aren’t equipped with a brake.

The IRF prefers to use condemned cons, but they’ve been known to take terminally ill war heroes.  Those boys volunteer in droves.  Beats punching themselves in the face forever or flinging poop at the walls, a fate typical of most of the grunts involved in chemical warfare or sufferers of survivor’s guilt.

Once you’re sealed into a Crossbolt, you race until every other driver dies from exhaustion, starvation, inertia, or what the IRF terms ‘sudden involuntary deceleration’, i.e. slamming into a wall, or another driver.  Then you race again.

Most of the runs don’t go beyond a day or two but on occasion you’ll get two old goats with something to prove and they’ll lap the planet again and again, meters apart, barely visible, reduced to a high-speed blip on the lap clock while the triple suns rise and set and rise again.

The action aboard the betting ships gets hotter until one of the racers finally passes out from starvation, heat exhaustion, or their skull plain ass cracks from the pressure of whipping around the surface of the globe at plus-times normal gravity.  There’s no getting away from the future when it travels this fast.

The worst part of it — for me, anyway — is the cameras.  There’s two of those and one microphone mounted in the cockpit of every Crossbolt.  One camera sees what the pilot sees; a blurry mess of readouts and control lights just below the glass-flat surface of the planet, hemmed-in by two high walls that ring the equator and prevent escape.  Crossbolt goes forward, not up.  The other camera stares straight in the pilot’s face; you see the fear in their eyes in the instant before he dies.  The microphone picks up all kinds of shit; screams of fear, pleas for mercy, cries for mommy, rants, raves, hallucinations, last minute confessions, a man vomiting his terrified soul back into his own face — a live broadcast the Apes are more than happy to pipe directly into our cells, day and night.  I’ve known men who swallowed their own tongues or bashed their heads against the wall as a way to turn it off.

So that’s my story.  If I win, I race until I die.  And when I die,  my soul will be thrown clear of the cockpit on a high-speed head start to a better place.

Jesus Built My Hotrod,

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.)

Here and Now With a Baked Potato – Bits of Pieces of My Recent Then

03JAN2011 – Winter’s been here for awhile but happily, today was the perihelion.  We were closer to the sun today than we will be all year.  It’s about damn time.  I’ve been hibernating, spending chunks of days indoors pacing the floor, watching movies and reading the used books I seem to be ordering at a fantastic rate.

I’ve been into this caveman diet for awhile now.  No more pasta, no more junk food, or ice cream.  Only things I could have conceivably eaten 1,400 years ago. Lots of steamed spinach, blueberries, tuna fish, whole tomatoes, and red meat.  And by hooking my toes on my kitchen counter and bridging my body to the chin-up bar above my bedroom door, I can manage some rather strenuous inverted body dips, face down, 10-15 up from zero.  I curl dumbbells while I watch movies.

I go to work, I do my thing, I come home.  I consciously choose the places I’m going to be alone.  Every few days I’ll get off the subway and think about how much money I have in my wallet. Based on this decision, I’ll turn right for a pint of Guinness at Harefield Road, or left for a cup of Americano at the Variety.  Icy sidewalks, dirty snow, and winter coats fill my vision.  I swear I can smell diapers when I walk these same streets each morning on my way to the subway.

Now more than ever, I want to spend some time in the desert being uncomfortable; climbing on hot rocks, sweating like a hostage, feeling the sun warm my bones and browning my skin like a 6-foot solar panel.  At night, I wanna watch the stars watching me, and listen to the No Thing.

Haven’t seen my own words for awhile.  Maybe they’re down deeper in the sleep than I can go right now.  Every time I open my mouth, it’s your voice that comes out.  My brain needs to be quiet, at rest in order for good things to come out. It’ll come back — all things are always moving toward their opposites.

Spent New Year’s Eve alone on my rooftop, bundled against the cold night air with a half a bottle of red wine plunged deep into the snowbank beside the old wooden chair on which I sat. From my vantage point, I could hear the roar of the crowd all the way over in Time’s Square.

It is what it is.

STANDBY TO DEPART CAUSAL LOOP

23AUG2010, 1730 – Riding home on the Brooklyn-bound “L”, midway between Lorimer and Graham, I experienced a sudden and overwhelming sense of deja vu.

The car was slowing down, and I moved toward the door.  Looking down to my left, I saw an olive-skinned girl in a black polo shirt, unbuttoned. Black hair pulled back in an end-of-the-day ponytail. Blue jeans, battered Chucks. Eating pretzels from a brown bag. Me, I’m listening to Lamb’s “Lusty”:

When the echoing sound from 1:58 began to chime, everything hit me at once. I had been here before!

When I move to a new place, it is understood that a significant amount of time has to pass before I start to get the feeling that everything prior to that moment was just a dream, and that I’d always been there. Getting it this early isn’t a good sign; it implies burnout. I’ve been in NYC since June 3.

As soon as the car stopped and the doors opened, I did something I’d never done before; I stepped out of the car and walked to the left, knowing full well and good that the exit was to the right. Then I halted, right-faced and without thinking, I walked over and touched the wall. Turned back around and walked toward the exit but stopped short again, sat down on a bench, pulled out my notebook and began to scribble furiously: STAND BY TO BREAK CAUSAL LOOP. Stupid Uni-Ball let me down, threw it at the tracks, dug out a felt-tip, kept going, waiting for something…

Looked up. Checked my watch. Nothing happened. The ragged tunnels were as unapologetic as ever: no back-masked dwarves, no parquet floors, no red curtains. No offers of coffee:

Instead, I was alone on the platform. Just me and my dementia.

I stuffed my notebook back into my bag and capped my pen. The next mechaWorm had arrived, and I joined a fresh wave of tired bipeds as they shuffled toward the turnstile. We climbed the steps to the street. We waited for the light. We crossed Metropolitan, but I headed home alone.

I keep trying.

TWM

Performance art for a co-worker

Dear Brian,

I’ve think I’ve got just the thing for the next communication managers meeting. We may have to do it offsite, though. That shouldn’t be a problem, right?

Performance art: I’m sitting center stage in a walrus costume with a microphone, reciting the following: “Who can take tomorrow, dip it in a dream, separate the sorrow and collect up all the cream? Yeah. Brian Olexy can.” Then I scream out some leftover frustration from the Mondale election and hurl myself across a pile of broken glass and concertina wire before bumming cab fare from the audience.

Fame awaits. Let me know.

TWM