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,

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

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.)

The time of the BertHorse has come…

AWAKE, AND SMELL THE BERTHORSE!

BertHorse was born during a Friday morning email exchange between myself and two friends, co-workers of mine from The Project, waaay back in Disco Charlie.  (I’m being vague for a reason.)  We’d had some laughs about an online article featuring Google map photos of people wearing horse masks in unusual settings.  We began brainstorming professionally inappropriate events to wear such a mask to, ignoring the gawking crowds and shrugging in an oblivious manner. “They must be talking about some other fellow in a horse mask! How interesting!”  We imagined BertHorse making his cameos at trade shows, being the quiet hit of cake-fed office parties, giving a rousing PowerPoint presentation to a cheering crowd of fresh-faced go-getters at a quarterly conference, making off-color jokes at a Monday morning planning meeting, or blowing off steam at a Friday night punk show at the 930 Club.  I spent all of ten minutes that night creating a Twitter account for @BertHorse and the weekend generating content, a personality, and followers.  This is a more recent email conversation between five BertHorse-savvy fellows.

MV:  BertHorse as Voltron would be a smashing Saturday morning hit.  Of course, for prime time television, they’re already shopping the BertHorse Vigilante pilot to cable…

Me: (dramatic voiceover) “His left leg is LAW.  His right leg is ORDER.  And his front legs are both called JUSTICE.  He’s the one horse you can bet on when the chips are down… Coming to NBC this fall!

OX: STARRING Ernest Borgnine as DETECTIVE LEFTY “LUCKY” McGILLICUTTY, the hardened, alcoholic police veteran and the only one in the department who trusts BertHorse.  His catchphrase, uttered every episode: “Dammit to Hell, BertHorse!”

ALSO STARRING Paul Simon as PIETRO DE LOS CAMPÁSIOSO, the plucky cub reporter whose journalistic instincts put him in the thick of the caper!  He wears a false moustache and sideburns, mirrored aviator sunglasses and a fringe leather jacket when working undercover — which is every episode.

Delta Burke as TALLULAH BERTHORSE, BertHorse’s ex-wife whose hard heart can’t let go.  She’ll say this at least once in every episode: “BertHorse … be careful out there.”

Larry Hagman as DR. RECKETT VON FORTHLIN VII, the powerful crime syndicate super villain billionaire and BertHorse’s sworn adversary.  His schemes usually involve hijacking something — every episode.

-and-

BertHorse as HIMSELF

Me: (practically wetting myself with laughter at his desk) Roll title sequence! A flaming brand comes whooshing out to the forefront of the screen and burns away one confident, fiery word: BERTHORSE!

We see: BertHorse in a denim shirt unbuttoned to mid-chest and turquoise belt buckle! BertHorse punches up the bad guys!  He falls onto a hay bale!  There’s an explosion!  BertHorse makes a phone call from a phone booth!  He jumps onto a speedboat!  BertHorse drives down the highway in his red Mustang convertible.  He lowers his aviator sunglasses as bikini-clad women climb out of pools.  He cocks a sawed-off shotgun and kicks in a door!  BertHorse, disguised as a dockworker in a knit cap and plaid shirt, knocks a guy off a ledge!  A bad guy falls onto a pile of cardboard boxes and the boys in blue swarm in to arrest him! Hooray!

Each of the main characters freeze on the screen place as their names scroll up. The theme music is fast, catchy.  Lots of guitar riffs.  Somebody get Dire Straits on the phone!

OX:  Also, we need a car chase where the bad guy’s car — preferably a late ’70s Plymouth Gran Fury — goes careening off a dock into the water.  When the bad guy surfaces, BertHorse is standing there, hands on hips.  A Coast Guard response boat pulls up, blue lights flashing, and the crew begins hoisting the bad guys out of the water:

MCGILLICUTTY (observing the scene with a look of satisfied determination on his long face):  ”What in the hell, BertHorse!?”

BERTHORSE: “I called in a favor to some old shipmates, detective… Take ‘em away, boys!”

Me: Oh, yeah!  And the guys on the boat will mention their days “in the shit”; turns out BertHorse and his buddies were in some “special unit”. That way you can do a flashback episode where the daughter of one of his war buddies comes to BertHorse for help when her father, a little league coach who worked with at-risk youth, gets killed by gang members from the Golden Triad who are pushing dope in his neighborhood.  ”Oh, BertHorse!  I don’t know who else to trust!” She sobs once, and buries her face in his large horsey chest. I’m telling you, this thing would go GOLD.  A live-action 80s retro shoot ‘em up, and the protagonist just *happens* to have a horse’s head??  Why not?  It’d be like Matt Houston, Riptide and Magnum P.I. all in one.

HK: [Mac and OX sit in Francis Ford Coppola's office, brief case and laptop in hand]

Me: “He’s like Magnum P.I., but with a horse head!”

OX: “It’s like Charles Bronson meets Secretariat.  The kids love Secretariat!”

Coppola’s finger taps lightly on the ejector seat button… the moment is tense.

FFC: “Alright kids, let’s do it, but if one of you mentions Brando being involved, you’re all taking a short ride to the glue factory.”

-END-

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.

…And Someone Shouted ‘MacIntyre’

Feels like a thousand nights ago that I quit smoking. Fat lot of good that did me.

The smell in here is terrible, hot, and choking. I imagine I’m trapped inside a giant Plexiglas box, the walls of which are covered in a filthy yellow film, as I gulp down lungfuls of swirling second hand smoke in the name of relaxation.

The room is so fucking loud I can’t hear myself think, and I’m pinched between two rickety tables in the middle of the floor. Result – every time one of the painted, shrieking secretaries behind me wants to have a pee, she shoves her chair hard into my back.

At first, the old girls were aware enough of their surroundings to mouth the word ‘sorry’, to which I’d reply with a tight grin and a wave of the hand signifying, ‘No problem.’ We are nothing without manners.

As the night wears on, they’re lucky if they can stand up on their own let alone apologize for whacking me in the fucking shoulders, or spilling my drink. I grit my teeth and ask my friends (once again) if there isn’t another table available. No such luck from these fuckers.

“No way!” They’re all smiles. “This is a great table! We’re right in front of the stage! Rocky’s playing tonight!” Somehow, this answers everything. Outnumbered and outgunned, cheap beer and simple times are all that matter to this lot, adhering to a simple philosophy: Any bad situation can be easily mended with a tired joke or a gander at some pretty bird across the room. “You just need more beer!”

“No, I don’t.” I shake my head, confused, somewhat irritated. “And your logic is fucking retarded.”

Relax, calm down. Something must be done. I examine my options. One, I could lose my shit. Stand up, shout my good-byes, call everyone a bunch of dirty names and stomp out early. Bad form. I’ll become an instant asshole, and no one will understand the real cause and effect of it all.

Two, I can quietly get up, thank everyone for a good time, and slink back to my depressing little apartment near the Metro for a late snack and a movie, which sounds so utterly fucking depressing that I decide against it straight away and head straight to option three, which is ignore the bad vibes entirely and lose myself in a conversation with my trusty notebook, as I’ve done a hundred nights before, as I’m doing even now.

So why am I here in the first place? Because the few friends I have in my immediate life graciously invited me. They haven’t known me for very long, but they told me when I arrived in Old Town that ‘Murphy’s was the place for a guy like me.’ I never got a real explanation.

Now, being lower-class, an atheist, and a spin doctor for the Man you’d think I’d employ some really effective anti-bullshit measures, making me completely impervious to such shameless ego-stroking wankery. You’d think. It should in fact make me ninja smart, a man who carries out his personal affairs with the steady precision of the Godfather himself. It should, at that. Instead, it makes me just another sheep on the abattoir ramp, albeit with his eyes open.

Granted, I didn’t have to come tonight; no one held a gun to my head and demanded that I enjoy myself. I like being alone, it lets me charge my batteries. But after awhile the batteries are full and the charger gets hot, and what’s the point of charging your batteries if you never use them?

Which brings us back to another Saturday night sitting around a wobbling, sticky table trying to decide how best to forget my work week. There’s Scotch – quick on the draw, but hard on the wallet. There’s bourbon – the sticky sweet nectar of my youth. And there’s beer, which will make me feel like I’ve shot-gunned a loaf of wheat bread and give me hellacious mud shits tomorrow.

Murphy’s is your ‘completely unique, one-of-a-kind, quirky little neighborhood Irish experience,’ …and not really just another wooden hole along the street where a fellow with a touch of the Auld Country and an acoustic guitar sings the same tired repertoire of drinking songs passed along from generation to generation, night after fucking night. (Yes, it is.)

Another song starts in, and the whole place lights up like they’ve never heard it before. Judging by the reaction, you’d think a goddamned meteor just crashed through the roof, cracked in half and shat out a man with two heads and an acoustic guitar, who launched into a never-before-heard rendition of ‘Who The Fuck is Alice?’

Nothing lasts forever and as the end of the night draws near, the beer-fueled solidarity begins to unravel, cracking and drifting apart like ice floes. The ringleader gets his feelings hurt in a simple miscommunication and wanders off into the night in search of chicken, refusing to answer the calls and text messages that chase after him.

I just wish things were different. Why can’t I make friends with people who build robots in their spare time, or find someone in the area looking for another person to round out their geocaching party? Why the beer logic? Why the tired façade?

Why anything?

TWM