Cmmnwlth's Atty. Atticus Psychopannychism: "Mr. Ecks, how does a man sleep for eight or nine years and live to tell ..."; "A Night at a Time, ...?"

State's Atty. Ilene Nathan: Mr. Little, how does a man rob drug dealers for eight or nine years and live to tell about it?
Omar: Day at a time I suppose?

I've learned somewhere along the way that REM, dreams are an indication of the health of one's psyche. Specifically, that if you aren't dreaming, something that needs to happen isn't happening. That's my medical view on the matter. I have spent the better part of a week asleep without dreaming. I was not right.

Last night I wore a patch when I went to sleep. Let me light a cigarette to tell this tale...

An important person, a very gentle and quiet and loving person died last week. I was told she died peacefully, almost on her own terms and without the tariff of a long and arduous medical exit. Personally, I'm not even sure if I am actually alive, but that's an entertainment. A notion to muse over when realities aren't convincingly or tolerably real. The general opinion, if there is one, is that she was indeed alive. Now she is not. I woke up at about 5am with an unusual vision in my head. She died at 4:48 I believe. The person closest to her said to me something like, "She's fine. We're all fucked."

I was tired. Very tired. So, I slept. Oh I went to work, I went to a show, I did all sorts of things, but I was very much asleep. I'm not even speaking allegorically.

Now I will have to make my bed. I've already done the "lay in it" part.

So last night I wore the patch when I went to bed. You know, so I can cut back on my smoking while I'm sleeping. Let me tell you, and let yourself take this to be as veritable as anything else you hold true: the nicotine patch makes you have technicolor psychonautical ether piercing dreams. Like nonstop. You have to wake up periodically to get a breath, like a diver collecting divine pearls at the bottom of the dreamworld sea. I had a freaking psychonautical odyssey last night. One of the most prominent features went as follows:

I was in the U.K., without a home. I had a new old friend that doesn't really exist as far as I know in the waking world, and he took me to this large manse without windows. Think of an old and dirty church with a roof but no other structural protection from the weather. Up some stairs the friend, who I will name Fred after a Portuguese fiend I had in London when I stayed there, had some mates who basically kept a very secure and sinister bacchanalian vigil. Like when people party for so long that it no longer becomes a celebration but a curse. There was something about the environment in the church. Like it was some sort of divine entropy, some sort of holy decay. What happens when g-d leaves the building. They had this area of this abandoned church physically secured with bolts and gates.

The were high like some Pete Doherty characters, all perverse and obscene and fear & loathing. I was mostly just trying to be comfortable with the assault some of their vague antics imposed. I set up an old bed outside a window, on a ledge and in the dream I spent some time, some hours, some days, some weeks on the bed. The hellish party continued. It became normalcy.

I felt a comfortable air in the church. It wasn't homeless, stale air, it was some sort of barometric and humid familiarity, like a blanket that doesn't get twisted around you, that you can walk around in, that keeps you dry and soothes you. I have seen this church, or parts of it in different forms in different dreams. Like it's some sort of 'home' for me, in my psyche.

From somewhere, a friend, some widely co-orbiting angelic celestial body came up the stairs and they let her in the gates. She completely disregarded the other occupants, giving no courtesy or deference to the owned space. Her only intention was to talk to me. And so she did.

She took me aside, we went out on my window ledge and told me that I needed to get out of there. I didn't have to ask why, she just went on to explain that the other characters, the Pete Dohertys were more like Omar Littles in that they perpetually robbed drug dealers and as such were becoming black holes. This was the source for their perpetual narcotic victuals. Many people representing the organizations they had robbed wanted these Libers, these Dionysian children to pay a price for their impositions. She told me that I should get and stay very far away from them. She explained that I could already be a target because of any observed association I may have with them (which in reality would be unlikely, since no one really would have seen me sleeping for however long on the window ledge, but this is not reality, this is a dream). She took my hand, kissed me on the cheek and then left just as quickly and with as little formality as she had come.

Then I was distraught and I woke up. And then fell back to sleep.

In the second episode of this dream, I had found a new building to claim. It was another church. My psyche sure can put the 'b' in subtle. This was basically the same building, but it was only me in it, and I had set up camp on the ground floor and there were still windows. So I settled in and was very happy and safe and felt that I could undertake the construction of my greatest laboratory. Then my dreams moved on to other psychically spasmodic symbols.

Thank You. Try a 7mg patch one night, even if you don't smoke.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_sleep

Symbolic similarities between two characters does not make a comparative set.

Call me Captain Obvious. Call me PFC Intolerable. And call me and tell me what the fuck this tablet says.

It's the Haghia Triada 31 tablet. It appears that Haghia means "Divine" in a Grecian language. Triada can be interpreted as Trinity and thus Haghia Triada as "Holy Trinity", the name of the location that this tablet was uncovered.

The study at Linear A Texts in phonetic transcription HT (Haghia Triada) indicate there is a significance in the use of vessels: vases, jars, handled jars, cauldrons, etc. Perhaps it's a recipe. Perhaps one needs to stretch further with symbolism and interpretation. Onomastic reference could provide keys, and more questions. As a complete outsider and newcomer to Linear A, an approach to make the very consuming effort to become familiar with all of the cultural, historical, and comparative elements of any script family this may be a part of portends me in a perverse way. Demotic Proto-Greek? Minoan? I don't even know enough to ask myself the right questions.

It does make me curious about divination, and the divination in inkslinging. Scrivening.

It could be a freaking hobby, I suppose.

In your lifetime and your days

בְּחַיֵּיכוֹן וּבְיוֹמֵיכוֹן

A Lament for the Living

We wake, we drink coffee. Some of us smoke cigarettes. Some of us drink juice or take other drugs. Whichever it is, we wake up. Personally, I invest much effort in staying asleep, which feels guilty like a contemptuous and ungrateful rejection of the gift that the magic that the day can provide. Even if that magic is only a skeleton, a sketch for the divine notions I experience in sleep. My favorite time.

Am I different? No more than anyone else. Am I well-adjusted? That's unnecessary rhetoric.

Oscar Wilde said:

"God knows; I won't be an Oxford don anyhow. I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious. Or perhaps I'll lead the life of pleasure for a time and then—who knows?—rest and do nothing. What does Plato say* is the highest end that man can attain here below? To sit down and contemplate the good. Perhaps that will be the end of me too."

I like Oscar Wilde. I feel a bond when I see his jaded and beautiful levity.



* Can't source O. Wilde's bathroom wall graffiti on that.

"No human thing is of serious importance."
Plato's The Republic, X, 604-C works well though.

We Two Fish

We're the other fish
The ones that live in the sea
We're thrown back & swim away free
I am the other fish that swims happily

So when you're in Marianas
Keep an eye out for me
When you're on a beach
In Hawaii

I ride the waterspouts
I ride the streams
I'm not afraid
Drowning at sea.

ne plus

All these things
Could have been
It did happen
Up to when?

Rome did fall
Atlantis sank
All the soldiers
In file and rank.

All the matter
All the while
Has been through
a turnstile.

All the ships
And all the seas
All the reefs
And all the pleas.

So pay your dues
And take your heed
The scales account
For every deed.

Much Loved. Or Coffee & ?

Herman. He had a saved image of a page from The Little Prince. By Saint-Exupery. He had a copy of this book when he was young, like 10, but didn't understand it. Well, it had nothing for reference, since the book is about life, and he only knew young experiments and young insanity. The good.

What it meant now was... It was still abstract, but it made sense. He had to give it to something else. A character. Personally, Herman didn't like to drive cars. It just wasn't his thing. He wondered if he could fly a plane. There is less stuff to hit. He had no intentions of flying a plane, but did wonder if he were capable of it. You know, in a pinch. Just in case.

Gravity increases with time. He wasn't light, but still mistook that his socks had Icarus wings. Sometimes he understood the tales of people on drugs "convinced they could fly." Like if he believed it enough, levitation and other escapades were entirely possible. He flexed reality constantly, so where were these limitations, these consistencies born? No god was he, he couldn't even create a mite. But he did play with the backdrop for whatever was playing out.

The first thing he thought of when he woke up at 5Am was when trees are hollow but still standing in the forest. He had a bird's eye view in his head of a forest of hollow trees, without tops, just empty vases made from wood, dark and empty vases. They had water in them. This wasn't a dream, these were his first thoughts. Of a dark, dead forest. And it was beautiful.

my BIG interest, by the Aspergian

I like flint knapping. I like to use snowflake obsidian. I also like to collect slate from the creek and paint it with clear nail-polish. Then I like to make it into a useless axe. The slate is an excellent material for modeling prototypes. It can be hard to find obsidian at first. One day I hope to make a razor, so that I can get my boy-beard off. I can make a cheese knife, for cutting cheeses. Mr. Goff taught me about flint knapping. It's how you knap flint. Conchoidal fracture. Ever since I had my first rock collection, I loved obsidian. Snowflake obsidian is like natural glass but not like a fulgurite. It's different. A fulgurite is when lightning strikes sand at the beach, fusing it into a glass model of the path the static took when it discharged into the earth at that area of sand. And snowflake obsidian has spherulites. My spelling checker doesn't like it when I write about flint knapping. It makes lots of words red. Spherulites are most common in glassy rocks. Glassy rocks are largely composed of silica. So is glass. So is sand. Spherulites are -also- crystals. Devitrification means the process of making glasses crystalline and brittle. Sometimes they are clear, but usually nature makes them opaque. That's why I like spherulites. Glasses also don't have any regular repeated molecular structure, so they can be considered not solids. Obsidian is formed when acidic lava cools very quickly when it comes into contact with the atmosphere. If it cooled slowly, it would crystallize and become solid and be called a rhyolite. Obsidian is a rhyolite, but its molecular structure is still fluid. Pliny the Elder wrote that it was named obsidian after Obsius. Obsius was a Roman and he discovered obsidian in Ethiopia. But back then. The spherulites you can see in snowflake are made of cristobalite. Cristobalite is quartz and tridymite when it's been polymorphed into a spherulite. I can't explain polymorphism to you right now, but I can do that tomorrow. Right now I want to tell you about flint knapping. Snowflake obsidian is my favorite flint to knap, even though it's not flint. I just call it flint knapping because then people know what I'm talking about. It should be called obsidian knapping, or more specifically snowflake obsidian knapping. I almost knap obsidian exclusively. Because slate is just a modeling tool. You can knap slate, but it's not done like glasses with their ability to fracture conchoidally. It sort of flakes apart. You probably can't shave with it.

If I ever go to school to become a Ninja, I will make sure to tell my teacher about how I can make weapons out of rocks. I will show him with a game called Rock, Paper, Scissors, Knap! Where:

1.00 Knap beats Rock
1.01 Knap beats Paper
1.02 Knap beats Scissors (by a longshot)
1.03 Knap beats Knap (this is where it gets interesting for the layman)

Knapping is a small craze. I'm crazy about it, anyway. I have an Ishi stick, which is named after the Native American Ishi who taught anthropologists and historians about flint knapping. The Ishi stick is good for making long pressure flakes. You can make arrowheads and stuff, but slate isn't a good material. I could also make flints for flintlock rifles, except I made a vow to never make a weapon that will kill, like Hattori Hansö. He was a famous Ninja from Japan in the 1500s. He was also called Hattori Masanari. If I ever become a Ninja, I am going to revive the clan. Until then, I will never make a weapon that will kill. Unless I am attacked. Even then I won't make firearm weapons from snowflake obsidian. Besides, it wouldn't EVEN WORK.

Knap beats Knap means that you have to specify your material. The most common knapping materials are flint, chert, agate, and obsidian and they're usually listed in that order. The reason they're listed in that order is because it's a list in ascending order of their viability as weapons, flint being the weakest and obsidian being the strongest. That's another reason that I like obsidian best. And when you play rock, paper, scissors, knap, you can always beat your opponent by saying "knap: obsidian" because most people don't know this. But if you're playing a game that doesn't exist, one called "rock, paper, scissors, knap, gun" then you might lose. Unless you knew that flint is the only type of flintlock gun and they specified a flintlock gun with obsidian for flint, because then you could just laugh at them and then cut their hand that is holding their gun off with knap: obsidian. Then they would have to caulderize it. If they were going to make you take out the trash or whatever, like if you had a reason.

Well, I've got a lot of rocks in my pockets and my pants are heavy so I have to stop telling you about obsidian knapping. Sometimes I get holes in my pockets.

You don't remember? No.

Joseph ate his teeth. That's what his jaw did all day (&night?). It moved around, locking, grinding, & shifting, making sounds like he was eating his teeth. Once someone observed, "man you can tell when this cunt is thinking, you can see his jaw go." He could stop it, it was to a degree controllable, but once he was distracted, engaged, or consumed with something, it would start again. He wished he could take off his skin and dance around in his bones, Mr. Seward B. style. His bones made similar protests.

His tongue almost constantly inventoried his teeth. Their anomalies, the sharp ones, the wiggly ones. He was also very interested in the tastes he experienced with different cultures in his mouth, at different times of day with inconsistent hygiene. They weren't placed, but he would feel an association with a taste. Almost an emotion. Cigarettes eventually gave him an old & familiar taste. Sometimes he would try coupling cigarettes with beverages like coffee to try to re-create a taste. The challenge was in the administration, the punctuation of the cigarettes. There was also a great suspicion that minerals and vitamins and different foods lent him certain frameworks for these magical tastes.

Whenever his left hand, the palm itched, he would refuse to scratch it because it should mean that he would come into money. The problem with this was that he wondered if he continued to do or acknowledge this sort of thing that it would condition him to itch before regularly anticipated pay dates, thus robbing the mysticism by replacing it with monkey-style conditioning.

This particular Friday he wanted to throw away anything that didn't have a strong & beautiful power, wasn't imbued with happiness and start over. His management of his memories had been a recent consideration, though it wasn't a new development, in that it was often convenient & spotty. In truth, his head would rummage around when left alone and find all sorts of awkward things to show him, like that rubble lady in some movie. You know the one. Stay away from peaches & flower fields in Oz, he thought to himself. And bodysuits. Unless getting into the ocean and only when it's needed. Cover the bases.

In the video game where you are a spaceship and you shoot asteroids that move more and more quickly until they overwhelm you or you slow them down by cheating, there is a function, a feature where you can hyperspace to another coordinate. Just *Zip*, and you're somewhere else. If there was such a button, and Joseph was able to just relocate and abandon the imminent doom of asteroids with big, fuckoff memories and their ores, he had done so countless times. One of the problems with such a mechanism is that you don't know if you will end up hopelessly in front of the biggest unseen asteroid only a useless fraction of a second before you're done.

So his teeth were inventoried. And often his psyche would inventory itself as he counted and associated his teeth with his tongue. Fortunately, his teeth didn't evoke unwelcome emotions without a small effort. If he decided to go looking for things in the great heap of the Past, he could find things. Not anything that he was looking for, but random things which he could piece together with other things until they evoked an emotion. It felt to him that it was an enormous and useless crime scene, anything of beauty rendered clinical and cold, and disregarded as outside the scope of the useful. This too was not a good habit.

As he took a shower, he thought about the time in Crown Heights, one of the last times he tentatively lived in Crown Heights, on Sterling Ave, that he was in the shower, having taken a drug, a relatively harmless one, and he experienced the universe disintegrate around him, starting with the tiles in the shower, then his field of vision, then everything else until he was alone in a void. He surmised that he had died, and that it just didn't end. Even dead, maybe especially dead it kept on going. Maybe still standing / lying in the shower in Brooklyn, maybe dead, he confronted the metaphysical challenge with defiance. He may have shouted his own name, to remind the Universe who he was, and to remind himself. The bathroom window was always open, though at this moment it was not there. Eventually, the Universe reintegrated and he laughed hysterically that it had put him back where he left off. He wondered what he would have to do to actually die for good, if it were possible.

So in his shower, as he performed the loosely organized ritual of washing that went from top down, he remembered that he could actually be dead right now. Not in that he was still alive in spite of insanity, but that he could be actually dead, not alive at present. A dead entity having a shower. Or a non-existing entity. A solipsistic soap bubble. He considered how it was imperfect that all rituals had association to previous executions of the rituals, and they could not be performed properly with such imperfections. Did he have to redo, redevelop the ritual, or make a new protocol to provide sincerity, authenticity to the ritual? Or was all that comedy, a warm and playful notion from the top of his monkey skull? Fuck if he knew, but in the process whatever entity he was stopped feeling oily and sweaty and he was finished.

He met Ms. Briggs at a very dark moment. Neither of them cared. She was staying in an apartment, an empty apartment that everyone had moved out of and was welcome to him for company. He didn't have a place, just a bag. There were insects and the windows were all permanently open to the amber lit and black night & the insistent sun. There was art in the neighborhood, on shop signs and wherever, in the same colors and style of a sort of angelic flying picture. There was an inscription on the piece they had found painted on the inside of the panel where a transom may have been at one point above the door. Inside the apartment. He couldn't remember the words, but he remembered the colors of the wings. When he left NYC, she saw him off at the top of the stairs and the elevator doors to the platform in Penn Station. She was a friend. He promised that he would see her another day. He has called her parents' in the desert of Southern California and exchanged emails early on. He didn't know her email or physical address, but knew she was in Australia. As of the last time he heard from her, by postcard. She may not exist either, for all he knew. Or she may be dead, or may have always been dead. His memory of her was she as a desert moth on a moonless night. Silent & invisible, unpredictable.

He also promised himself he would return to Barcelona. At least make it back once more. If he had ever been there. There were tables of this type of obligation in his psyche, some of which he had to take at face value without supporting evidence.

In the shower in Crown Heights where he died, he remembered a conclusion of the experience being his addled head stumbling around a Poe poem. The poem is:

A Dream Within a Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

But he didn't know anything but the last four lines. As Joseph considered the poem, he was ambushed by the first time he had heard and interpreted Castles in the Sand by Jimi Hendrix. It was a precarious memory, an object surrounded by spent bullet casings and possible murder weapons all on a carpet the color of dried blood. So he disregarded the elucidation of that experience to himself, as it meandered off on a trail towards his father. Maybe the piles of memories were organized, not chronologically, or alphabetically, or even experientally. In some organic & divine calibration of category. Maybe they were.

Riders

It would be any time of year, but often in the summer. Other kids weren't in school. Our lot had spotty graduation. There were nights where we'd get ripped off getting a homeless man to buy us beer. We'd get the beer, but it would be the cheapest kind. I, of course, complained. We would drink in the graveyard by the tracks. Malt Liquor was always a safe bet.

Those tracks were used by freight trains. The Tropicana train cars always promised warm & exotic, no matter which direction they were heading and what time of year. Int'l, Will, Yarny, Ted, and others had somehow discovered that the freight signals were governed by completion of a circuit across both tracks, by some conductive bit of metal like a train. Or a strip of steel arranged across the tracks, even a very thin one. One that would be broken by the passing of a train over it, thus distampering the signal.

There was a purpose to this mischief. If the signal indicated that there was another train, even if the conductor had information which contradicted the signal, the train would slow to a crawl. The advantage to this is that it became hoppable. Hoppable as in, one could run alongside it and grab a ladder or whatever. This wasn't of hobo caliber odyssey, this was a short ride through town. If one stayed on as the train regained speed, one would end up somewhere between Philadelphia & Baltimore presumably. There were plenty of tales.

The ones we saw or made to be that were slow were "Slow Boys". We would do this in the hottest part of the day, because we were stupid kids, almost all of which had families of one sort or another. This provided no cover of darkness, but there were always places to hide as the engine went by. We were very stupid. There were shotguns with salt-shot. We knew they existed. There were tales. Hand-me-downs, maybe, the oral history of train-hopping from our great grandfather hobos, or 1st or 2nd person experience. Whichever, they were entirely, absolutely credible.

Where the Tropicana cars go, that's where we wanted to go. But most of us had to make dinner or streetlights, or their own beds. I did not, but didn't have the courage to just hop an open boxcar and go. I'd probably have brought cigarettes for my journey, and maybe have eaten before I left. Documentation makes it clear that you are supposed to have cans of sardines and whiskey, but I was winging the theory. And theory it remained.

Sure, I'd get on on the south side of town, and ride victoriously up to the center of town, débarquement before getting into an area where the police would likely see me hanging off the side of the train as it crossed Main Street or whatever (though that had certainly been done, as well as a ride from another town 5 miles away into another set of tracks on the opposite side of town), but never just let the train go. I never let it speed up and just settled in for the long-haul.

Regrets, maybe. Things happen & don't happen. There are still trains, and there is still time. In fact, I know someone who needs to take a ride. Soon is always the time to do so. And in my age, I know to bring sardines & dramamine.

A Much Better Writer Than Myself, the Good Doctor

(2008-05-08 11:48:38) Dr. Namlhuk: finally your orange globe is now green
(2008-05-08 11:48:56) Me: how metaphysical.
(2008-05-08 11:49:15) Dr. Namlhuk: so what did you wanna do in green pernt
(2008-05-08 11:49:41) Me: we could take a long walk of doorbell dixie. that used to be fun in NYC.
(2008-05-08 11:49:48) Me: so many buttons.
(2008-05-08 11:49:54) Me: or if we could just get a monkey...
(2008-05-08 11:50:05) Dr. Namlhuk: a vervent chimpanze perhaps
(2008-05-08 11:50:54) Me: i had to look that up.
(2008-05-08 11:51:04) Dr. Namlhuk: you dont remember
(2008-05-08 11:51:08) Me: no.
(2008-05-08 11:51:10) Dr. Namlhuk: what
(2008-05-08 11:51:17) Dr. Namlhuk: that was your finest moment
(2008-05-08 11:51:26) Me: no idea what you're talking about.
(2008-05-08 11:51:35) Dr. Namlhuk: prague
(2008-05-08 11:51:44) Dr. Namlhuk: pharmacists
(2008-05-08 11:51:48) Me: oh shit.
(2008-05-08 11:51:54) Dr. Namlhuk: good
(2008-05-08 11:52:02) Me: and that funny ass stuff that couldn't have been right
(2008-05-08 11:52:05) Dr. Namlhuk: circus animals
(2008-05-08 11:52:09) Me: what?
(2008-05-08 11:52:13) Dr. Namlhuk: lisbon
(2008-05-08 11:52:15) Me: you have to tell this story.
(2008-05-08 11:52:22) Me: to me and my girlfriend.
(2008-05-08 11:52:26) Dr. Namlhuk: ok
(2008-05-08 11:52:43) Me: i have a vague recollection of standing in an old-fashioned pharmacy as a veterinarian or something.
(2008-05-08 11:52:53) Dr. Namlhuk: oh sit
(2008-05-08 11:52:55) Dr. Namlhuk: down
(2008-05-08 11:53:17) Dr. Namlhuk: cause your past self is about to astound your present self
(2008-05-08 11:53:53) Me: was i drunk?
(2008-05-08 11:54:00) Me: nevermind.
(2008-05-08 11:54:07) Me: that's a stupid question.
(2008-05-08 11:54:19) Me: like an apothecary or something?
(2008-05-08 11:54:34) Dr. Namlhuk: you were scouring the city looking for K
(2008-05-08 11:54:42) Dr. Namlhuk: which you found
(2008-05-08 11:54:57) Dr. Namlhuk: by pretending to be a vets assistance for a circus
(2008-05-08 11:55:37) Dr. Namlhuk: you told them that you had a vervent chimpanze which, due to some emergency or other, needed to be shipped to lisbon
(2008-05-08 11:55:58) Me: oh shit.
(2008-05-08 11:55:58) Dr. Namlhuk: you really dont remember that
(2008-05-08 11:56:07) Me: are you sure? i knew what a vervent chimpanzee was?
(2008-05-08 11:56:17) Dr. Namlhuk: i am positive
(2008-05-08 11:56:24) Dr. Namlhuk: i have pictures
(2008-05-08 11:56:42) Dr. Namlhuk: the evap was all salty cause the goodies were in saline
(2008-05-08 11:56:53) Me: yeah, i remember this part.
(2008-05-08 11:57:43) Me: thank you.
(2008-05-08 11:57:46) Me: that made my day.
(2008-05-08 11:58:01) Dr. Namlhuk: i think back on that and laugh my ass off
(2008-05-08 11:58:22) Me: i remember helping them try to find it with their computer.
(2008-05-08 11:58:27) Me: did we have to wait a day or something?
(2008-05-08 11:58:48) Me: which could obviously have been an issue with the vervent.
(2008-05-08 12:01:54) Dr. Namlhuk: you had me wait by the phone in case they called. I was to be the veterinarian
(2008-05-08 12:02:26) Me: holy shit.
(2008-05-08 12:02:29) Dr. Namlhuk: what was the name of the superstar veterinarian chatractor we invented on the plane
(2008-05-08 12:02:35) Me: i can't remember!
(2008-05-08 12:02:42) Me: but i remember superstar veterinarian!
(2008-05-08 12:02:47) Me: and "we neeeed whiskey"
(2008-05-08 12:02:56) Me: after that it gets fuzzy.
(2008-05-08 12:03:05) Dr. Namlhuk: i know his love interest was name sylvia wormhaven
(2008-05-08 12:03:46) Dr. Namlhuk: and the detective who was sworn to take him down
(2008-05-08 12:03:51) Dr. Namlhuk: i forgot his name too
(2008-05-08 12:04:18) Me: god that is sick. so good.
(2008-05-08 12:04:48) Dr. Namlhuk: the superstar vet cam from a long line of distinguished vets
(2008-05-08 12:04:54) Me: i'm sure he did.
(2008-05-08 12:05:02) Me: i wish you would write a book so i could laugh.
(2008-05-08 12:05:15) Dr. Namlhuk: his grandfather had removed a goiter from one pf jefferson davis' prized heffers
(2008-05-08 12:05:50) Dr. Namlhuk: fuck what was his name

Last Night I Dreamt I Was In an Athelon

At first I was running. On country roads, long & challenging country roads, in the Northeast maybe, with uncultivated fields & trees along the road I started running. I wasn't concerned with running faster, but worried about missing the course, and running through a turn. Then I had a bicycle. It was a fine machine.

While I was on the bicycle, I ended up under water, underwater bicycling. There were Pacific Islander warriors training for the next Athelon by running while propelling a person flatways for the most water resistance.

Then I was in a series of privately owned and organizationally owned edifices. It was a work-break from the Athelon. We were repairing & remodeling a cathedral for an organization. I was on a floor where I got a side view across the bottom of the dome of the altar. I ended up drunk & asleep, on the roof above the "Nartex"? Someone came and found me.

Later I woke up on a small piece of land with several houses. We were talking about the basement, with all the water in it, or at least that was what I was listening to people talk about. We could only smoke if we put on galoshes and went down and worked on getting the water out. I felt like it was a pointless effort. The water, the galoshes, the cigarettes, all being purposeless. Yet, I put on a pair of galoshes that were shorter than the depth of the water.

Then I was in the last part of the Athelon. The one where we had to get down a river. Most people had floating devices, except some were just wading as fast as they could. I found a variety of devices I tried, including just swimming. I couldn't get lost on the river, but I was really trying to go faster. At times I was propelled without effort past the other competitors, and at other times I had to work to just keep behind some small person.

Towards the end, there was a queue for some people. Like when you cross a bridge in NYC and there are the EZPass lanes, but if you don't have EZPass you have to get in the line of cars. I got in line. Then I woke up.

Nero Burning Down the Trailer Park

Some sons of abitches just don't know any better. It could be their strength, but they just don't know when to quit. I'm talking about the fools that know they're fighting the wrong losing battle, but get up when they should stay down. The trailer park is a magical place. Mobile homes that can't realistically move anywhere. 35x12 or 70x12 or 35x24. Aluminum eggs, rows and rows of them all arranged like dominoes waiting to be hatched by some profound omen like a tornado. No one fears a tornado like the gestating trailer occupant. Well since people aren't living in wigwams much anymore.

The trailer park was a step up from somewhere for some. An aspiration. I didn't have much choice in the matter, but now I hold it close to my heart. I have a very sincere nostalgia for those days. Glasgow Trailer Park, D street. The streets were actually named alphabetically in order but the named are forgotten. Duncan perhaps.

I do remember other things though, like finding porn in a shed in someone's lot. Often, the sheds people had were matching colors and design correspondent to their trailer. This shed was aluminum and a washed out and oxidized painted brick red. The porn was of a woman, a blonde woman, in a military theme. In one photo, she sat on a wooden crate wearing army boots and a camouflage bandanna. She appeared to be holding a potato. While I was cautious to jump to conclusions about the meanings and symbolism in such alien and unprecedented photographic composition, further and thorough inspection revealed that the object was in fact a partially skinned potato. Contextual clues included a pot and a sack which one would naturally presume contained plenty more. She had her work cut out for her.

Perhaps imagery and conferral from movies like Ben Hur or some other reference to Spartan warrior creation culture had offered rationale that in the military such practices as nude food preparation was another of the bizarre features of our existence that I had yet to fully grasp. Certainly, the well noted boots seemed to lend functionality and purpose well suited to a soldier-chef's duties. Nonetheless, I had several unanswered questions.

The photo, and the context in the series, seemed somehow and inexplicably unlike those found in the magazine photo media I had previously encountered. I love to sort through most of the 1970-1980 decade of National Geographic at my grandparents'. I was no greenhorn when it came to pictures in magazines, and nudity, although not quite like this, wasn't entirely strange.

Finally, I resorted to asking the slightly older girl what the woman in the photo was doing. My soapy smelling and staged co-discoverer informed me, without condescension, but with great certainty that the woman was peeling potatoes. This seemed to support my observations but left me without a comprehensive conclusion as far as why this was featured and why this endeavor was undertaken without clothing.

Knowing the taboos of nudity, my concern for being discovered doing something wrong was distracting me from further investigation. The location and presentation on the floor of some shack behind someone's trailer contributed to a sense of clandestine guilt. I abandoned my research, but still search for the association between the preparation of potatoes and naked women.

Steven Graves also lived in our trailer park, although further down towards N. Nearer to Oliver and Erwin Puffinberger. While I feared the Puffinbergers' attention, as destiny would have it, Steven, a rather malnourished but taller boy was to become my formal nemesis. Surely I'd had and would have more formidable psychological tormentors, but Steven's impositions came in violent form. The older Puffinbergers never did much more than factlessly and foundlessly publicise that I had no hair on my balls. This didn't bother me so much, as I had no particular interest in hair on my balls, but what was uncomfortable was the extent to which the older and more attractive trailer park girls found this to be amusing.

My contentions with Mr. Graves were more frustrating. He liked to fuck with me, and he like to inflict pain on me. That all continued for a while, until at the counsel of a future friend (and much later, an alias) I chose to change bus stations. My mornings were much more enjoyable after the switch, and if anything, a chance encounter with Steven was much more escapable outside the confines of a bus stop.

One afternoon an early skate session and nearby mini-stripmall parking lot set the scene for a showdown.

Mr. Graves appeared at the far end of the parking lot, silhouetted in his skeletonlike form against a setting sun. If tumbleweeds grew where I was from, one would have crossed between us.

He became recognizably jolly at his fortune of having this chance encounter with me. That didn't do much to his pace of approach though, which maintained a casual, savory slither. My friend was equally unhappy with the turn of social affairs.

I want to villainise by recalling that he made his antagonistic salutation and after those formalities were addressed proceeded to take some trivial amount of money I may have had. The exact pretense for his attack is not clear to me now, though, so instead I will give you the battle summary.

Steven feigns a right punch, with superior boxing jab distraction techniques to my long studied and frequently drilled kung-fu stance. Kung-fu poses always seemed to convey a physical dominance over my sister, and I was taken off-guard by his, "What? You know karate?" taunt. The battle courting dance was coming to a close, and the realisation that a fight was imminent and present scared the shit out of me.

"Dear god, I hope I really am a Ninja like I pretend!" was the sum of my feelings.

Having more experience in the art of the showdown, Steven moves in for a strike, but I raise my skateboard by the trucks in defense. His blow is blocked by the griptaped side of the skateboard. He gets pissed, is suprised by my inclusion of the skateboard in our engagement, assesses damage to his hand, which begins to show abrasion bleeding on his skinned knuckles.

Considering that my Skateboard Style kung-fu may be more difficult to challenge than expected, he brazenly launches a psychological offense geared to disarm me. Making no ground, be blitzes and makes a failed attempt to strip me of my skateboard, with war cries of intention to beat me with my own weapon.

Using my advantages of control of the skateboard by the trucks, I deter further attempts and make controlled and effective warning counterstrikes and maneuvers showing intent and potential for further attack on my part.

Deciding a new strategy is necessary, Mr. Graves announces, in showdown protocol, that he will arm himself with a stick. Which he does. My friend is supportive, and approving of my kung-fu.

Armed with an absurdly large and unwieldy branch, my opponent returned for re-engagement of combat; not sure whether to wield his weapon in the style of an oversized club or a jousting spear, he experiments with both -- first mounting a joust attack, which my skateboard serves to deflect, followed by a lumbering chop from above. His downward strike is met by my raised board, and his staff-spear breaks. This shortens his weapon and range, but increases his maneuverability by a significant margin.

Feigning first another joust, he opts for the downward strike again, with a repeat of outcome and a further shortened stick.

Concerned about the greater threat he now poses with a useable weapon, I prepare for the hardest part of the battle. By getting scared again. He, however, is discouraged in perceiving superiority of my weapons technology and disengages from battle with announcements of the recruitment of his older brother and the horrible fate that awaits me, and my friend.

The battle was over. Oh, the trailer park.

There's nothing like moving out of the trailer park. No matter where. Soon we were living in a newly and quickly fabricated compositeboard and insulation, drywall and aluminum framed house in a development full of developing developments.

Both of my parents worked at the Post Office. In fact, my mother met my stepfather at work. We had previously lived with my mother & father, and then just later with my mother in our trailer.

The Old Man Living At 5 Rue Constance

The old man living at 5 Constance
On the floor I would call three
Named Claude, an Algerian Jew
Has received my most hostile generosity
And the girl in his bar
The one who charges me too much
by far
Has seen the spectacle of
my drunken honesty.

Simultaneously
In San Francisco and another
Part of Paris

Two women wait for me
To fulfill unmade promises
To be a brother to those
Whose legs no longer
Carry them so easily.

Skateboarders don't recognize
That I am one of them anymore
But I still love them
Because they have the opportunity
To see
Everything that happens in the street
In passing.

The expiry of the pen of "X"

Sam, 08.Juin.2002

Hello Mon Cher/Ami
While I'm certain that an attempt at writing this in French would improve my French, I just don't fucking feel like it. C'est mon vie.

I landed in CDG quite hungover and eventually got in touch with my friend Benjamin who gave me instructions to go to Bayonne, which I did. On the TGV train I continued to get drunk on Johnny Walker at a ridiculously expensive price. I arrived in Bayonne "trashed" and my friends were not there. I saw this attractive & mischievous looking French girl and left with her. She had two friends. The asked me what went into a Tequila Sunrise (I suspect they'd been watching some horrid Tom Cruise movie). I explained that I didn't know but would guess grenadine, teq., & triple sec. They were amused at my proposition of "Triple Sex" but defensively announced their homosexuality in a sort of maneuver that I can only guess was maybe a provocation to see whether that pleased or disappointed me. I wanted nothing to do with the conversation anymore so I "Je demande champagne"'ed and they took me to the store, where I purchased the largest freaking bottle they had.

Of course, my friends suddenly resurface, just as I'm making Progress (with the Champagne, of course) and whisk(ey) me away to a house full of French surfer-types, circus performers (seriously), surf-bettys, and pretentious French pseudo-intellectuals. All of them fun.

I drink, I smoke, etc. and then almost drown in the Atlantique (TWICE) Seriously... I was at the mercy of the Ocean and She wasn't being particularly maternal.

My plan is tentatively to go back to Paris (I'm on the train now, about to arrive), get a wire transfer, go to Italy, get more wires, move to Barcelona, master Catalan, make money, buy land, grow grapes, make love, drink wine, make love, help the kids, have some kids, cook, eat, try to avoid cleaning, swim in the ocean and not drown and drink hella iced tea with mint.

I hope that your life is not too tangled up. I may end up in a monasterie someday anyway,

This pen is beginning to expire.

. . . . . . .

\

09/Jun/02 Montparnasse, Paris, Waiting for Sophie @7:30 PM

This humble scry is made to the honor of Sophie Russo. May she live a life charmed by god.

This better be good... I had (thought at least) to steal a pen chained to a bank desk, and I was absurdly, conspicuously obvious about it... Then I find out I've stolen a dead pen.

The pen which ran out of ink as I signed a letter with "X" has been resurrected.



I went to Mass
And got drunk on Holy Water
Then baptised myself in wine


I took a bath in Gin
Then painted myself in Blood
And washed me down with Mercury


For breakfast I breathe Champagne
Make bullets out of Morphine
To create & kill the Pain


I shoot them right into my head
Then climb up on to my bed
& turn the Television on.

Gardens

There was a backyard behind the house, which could be entered out the kitchen door. The kitchen door was the back door. There were smooth cement steps painted a latex grey. Fonzie, the 20 year old dog, shat everywhere back there, so one had to be careful where to tread. There was a garage, painted a muted pastel green, almost a green-grey. In front of the garage, there lay a Flower Bed. That was where the flowers grew. Fonzie didn't even shit there. And in spite of the surety that one wouldn't step in shit in the Flower Bed, it was an unpardonable offense to "get into the Flower Bed."

Fuck if he knew why, but Joseph just tried not to, in spite of being accused regularly. One day, he and his uncle went to the stream and flipped over rocks and caught like 11 small crayfish and put them in a preserving jar with holes in the lid filled with stream water. They were much more interesting than sea monkeys, and they had weapons. The jar sat on the windowsill over the kitchen sink, through which the Flower Bed could and would be watched. Joseph was more interested in the jar, and sat at the kitchen table amazed that the little bastards lived in water. That was the mystery of fish and underwater life. They lived UNDER WATER!

Joseph ate some butter pecan ice cream. Then he went to bed.

In the morning, there were no longer 11 small crayfish, but one LARGE crayfish. They had integrated like Voltron. Crayfish not only lived in water, but they had the biological ability to combine into a larger form. This fucking mystified Joseph. He was so innocently overwhelmed that he stared at the jar for minutes as his uncle stared at him without saying anything. The results were obvious. The process he missed as he slept. Could he make it happen in the daytime? Could he stay up until they did it again if he went and collected more mini-crayfish, enough of them to make a mega-crayfish?

Joseph's uncle confirmed that crayfish were indeed special beings. A mystery, nature. A mystery.

From Very Long Ago

I asked my mother if she ever had it happen to her. I couldn't have been very old. It's
being fully dreaming and awake. Ioanna said that when she was 15 or so she thought she was
dead or that everyone else was dead, even though she went right along talking with everyone
and she was ok with that. Some sort of fractalisation of reality. I would try very hard
to understand extremes like 'nothing' and 'forever' when I was going to sleep. This was
just a sort of ritual, not anything that was consuming me. When I would go to bed and it
was quiet (maybe sometimes not quiet) and my brain could play with itself. Fantastic and
simple. Now the palatte is much larger. The question games turn away too much from
existence. Experiencing existence as a scientist, a young mind that is very scientific
because it doesn't expect a certain pattern. There is no introduction to God. Now I
question how safe it is to meet God so young, when one wants to test and experiment with
all things.
I am impatient. I want to dream all the time. The worst part is that
I've forgotten that it's very easy to go to sleep. I want to force myself into some
sleep-state but it's so easy. Death seemed delicious, quiet. Nothing and perfect. Now I'm
compelled to gain enough to have access to the most comfortable. In exchange I fill up my
head with strange forces pushing machines and people. Ink, paper, glass, plastic, metal,
electricity, light.

I love this album.

From an email to a wise & prophetic friend.

Yeah. I love the Dead Kennedys for a similar reason. Nothing I put on at night when I'm going to sleep or listen to before work to get me in the right mindset, but they're definitely a part of me. I love Fugazi. I used to rock a Clutch tape on the way to school. I used to love Ministry (i think you actually turned me on to Ministry or maybe Josh L- / Bob or somebody). I also have a taste for the Sex Pistols. Makes me wanna fuck shit up. Unfortunately, that in the past has also meant myself.

I also got into electronic stuff, but there's not much that really MEANS much there. Just beats. Beastie Boys always make me happy. But they're creative and clever. I asked you for copies of those, remember?

Really though, when I felt like I found -my- music it was Jeff Mangum's Neutral Milk Hotel that I heard when I was living in NYC. Andrea gave me or I stole a tape. I listened to it in a cassette walkman on a LIRR platform and actually cried. I'm sure you can understand that at various parts of my life, with my family, my traveling, my drugs I have felt very alone. I remember it was really hard living in a single room in Harlem being very young and knowing that it was me vs. the Universe. I wanted my own team I suppose.

It gets mighty lonely when it's you vs. the Universe. Sometimes, like for a sailor to see a shore, -- for me to hear someone sing something that I feel and can't describe or find anyone that convinces me they relate, that they understand -- makes me feel something really good and really big. From my core, my heart.

Anyway, I'm attaching the song that made me cry. It's the lyrics. He explained in the album cover that when he says Jesus Christ he doesn't care what you believe. He's referring to the magic, the mystical side of existence. But the rest of the lyrics really really resonate with me. Particularly:

Up and over we go
Through the wave and undertow
I will float until I learn how to swim
Inside my mum in a garbage bin
Until I find myself again again oh oh

Up and over we go
Mouths open wide and spitting still
And I will spit until I learn how to speak
Up through the doorway as the sideboards creek
With them ever proclaiming me me ohh

And it means to me that I will survive until I learn how to live. That's my life J-. Maybe other people's too, but definitely my own. It also means (the garbage bin) that this body, this world, and my mom are all mundane. Precious garbage, but garbage nonetheless. Disposable.

I also notice that a lot of the music I really like is like large waves, sometimes whole tides of orchestral sound. Strings, horns, synthesizers. Another feature I've noticed is that sometimes I really love simple, almost childish melodies on pianos / xylophones -- sometimes on top of the ebb & flow of strings or horns or whatever, or sometimes just at other parts as a sort of arabesque flourish or even as their own song structure.

The one thing I feel about the music I gravitate towards though is that it isn't formulaic. At least not by the standard Rock & Roll formula, or the Punk formula, or anything like that. I feel a bond with the artists because I feel like they are doing something they know is close to divine. They're using a supreme human ability. They're drawing on math, sound, patterns, contrast, time meted out to reflect their experience and emotion and they're _extremely_ articulate. And I love them for that. 866-NEON-BIB(LE).

God Save the Queen,
J-

The Arch Above

Joseph. He found himself in Paris again. He was lying on a very old cemetery wall staring up at the cool blue Parisian sky laughing hysterically at God & existence. Literally, hysterically crying with laughter at the Universe and that he had any role in it. It could have been an episode of mania, and surely the passers-by widened their birth as they passed on the sidewalk across from the Seine. Eventually that intoxicating levity subsided, and whatever resentments he may have caught along the way about it all crept back to the periphery. He had been criticised about being "flippant" before, and not knowing what the word meant definitively he interpreted it loosely as not giving a fuck. After all, that was when he got into trouble. In actuality, he very much gave a fuck.

The separation between comedy & tragedy he thought to himself as he walked, was a very much mundane thing. Something that humans deal in. He thought about this as he passed Notre Dame and saw that the two doors were under an arch. The arch was complete in its hemisphere, unbroken & undivided. The doors completed a divided lower hemisphere of a circle with a total of three parts with their handles and that, he thought, represented the duality of the mundane: the division between positive & negative, good & bad, and the elaborate host of relative polarisations of our experience. The purity of geometrical completion above represented the divine. What he struggled with was the line at the top of the doors, and by extension that there were doors at all. Surely that must be funny, or the consequences would be unbearable to Joseph. Along with the comedy in the mundane, he was equally sensitive to the tragedy. The only way he knew to bring this ship to an even keel was heroin.

He walked along the Seine, eventually allowing himself to be drawn into the plaza at the center of the Louvre's entrance, then walking along considering how he should phrase in his limited French his desperate need for opiates to survive. Sitting under a tree was a grimy punk-rock looking man with a very pale complexion that matched his bald head. The man was sitting on a tattered old blanket asking for money. Joseph approached and asked in very young French if the man spoke English or Spanish. The man replied in a German accent 'ja' and nodded his head with a quick and short enthusiasm that was welcoming. They had a very short exchange in English, where Joseph explained that he was a heroin addict from NYC and needed a fix. The man stood up, and Joseph offered him 10 euros to show him where to satisfy this need and establish a working relationship with a supplier on the condition that he be paid when confidence was of accord. Without delay, the two men had hopped the turnstile to the Metro and were on their way to a place that Joseph had never been to, didn't know the name of, and was very much eager to reach. The man introduced himself as 'Gogol', and disclosed that heroin was harder to find than morphine. Morphine would be perfect.

They arrived at the Metro station Chateau Rouge in north Paris and emerged to the street to find a KFC. For some reason, the KFC reassured Joseph that this mission was legitimate, that he would soon be high. They walked just a block east and the neighborhood turned into some sort of north african open air market, with carts presenting fruits, vegetables, fish, meat and other colors. Suspicious vendors were selling obviously stolen cameras along the market. Gogol explained in broken English how he had recently been beaten and robbed. This made the walking pass more quickly. When a junkie is on the mission to cop, to get what he needs to feel better and encounters the usual obstacles: police, delays, thieves, scams, weather, traffic, marathons, parades, terrorist attacks, whatever..., the time creeps to a stop. Minutes seem to stretch on for hours, hours for days, and any communication with a supplier isn't entirely reassuring as "I'm on my way" or even "10 minutes" are -not- reliable. In fact, they prove all too often to be lies the supplier has made to keep the sick junkie on ice waiting for the man. Joseph knew that the best way to avoid this was to cultivate a relationship with a dealer, where they were in their little sick way accountable to each other. That scale of accountability or expectation was always weighed in the supplier's favor, but in some cases evened out so that the sickness of 'Waiting for the Man' wasn't entirely taken for granted. In this case, Joseph had no such luxury. Gogol's broken, spitten speech was the only thing pushing the seconds along.

Even when a junkie isn't physically dependent, but particularly so when they have a habit, the wait and the anticipation of the alleviation of the sickness, the relief and the calm that wash through the body of the addict who has just fixed as his stomach settles and his appetite returns, that anticipation exaggerates and antagonizes the sense the addict has of dysphoria, nausea, and anxiety. Sometimes, it can feel as though you can't breathe, that standing on two legs is a herculean task, and that the ground is too cold and unforgiving to offer any rest. The only thing, not even death, that will still the addict's skeleton and soul is the beautiful sight of the man coming down the block or ringing on the phone, the exchange, and the injection of narcotics. Gravity then tunes itself down, the cold night ceases to sting and the stark streetlights assume a warm glow. The addict, still sliding through the metamorphosis from Sick to Well, begins to bounce along the sidewalk with the grateful levity that the narcotics have given. Joseph was sick, and his patience for walking in circles through a north african neighborhood in search of an unknown person with a stringy, unclear hired junkie was wearing thin.

Soon enough Gogol stopped as a north african man with a backpack uttered 'Skenan' under his breath. He and the man spoke in a French that Joseph understood none of. Gogol indicated with a hand gesture to produce money and Joseph made a mental photograph of the man. Then Gogol took a small flat box from the man, opened the end, slid out a foil sheet of 7 capsules, nodded, and closed the box back up. Joseph handed the man 20 euros and he walked off. The German seemed frustrated by something and admonished Joseph, "It's 15 euros for 7, not 20." They had bought 7 100mg capsules of Morphine Sulfate extended release, branded "Skenan". Gogol kept the box and they walked back to the Metro. When they reached a safer station, closer to the quarter where they had met, they disembarked but did not leave the station. Leading Joseph over the handrail of an escalator, Gogol showed Joseph to a secretive spot in the station protected by metallic boxes shielding some utility or mechanics. It was like a very small locker room, but instead of lockers, they were solid metal cabinets.

There was a wooden spool on its side, the kind used for wires but this one was bare and on its end being used as a table. Gogol produced from his bag a strange and very French kit for Joseph, which Joseph would later learn are available at French chemists for 1 euro. It contained a sealed syringe, a thin flat aluminum cooker with a handle like a measuring spoon with a flat cup, water, and cotton filters. He then removed one of the capsules from the foil pack, and twisted apart the two halves of the capsule, carefully emptying the little beads of candied morphine into a folded piece of paper. The paper was folded around the small, hard bits and he used a lighter to crush them into a powder, which he emptied into his cooker. He drew from his own water, made a solution which he cooked for better solubility and sterility, then with the urgency of the sick addict drew his solution up.

By this point, Joseph had imitated the steps and was crushing the tiny pellets into a powder, and with the same urgency completed his draw, lowered his arm, found his flag, and carefully emptied most of the syringe into his arm. He did not do the whole shot, as he felt pins & needles creep from the base of his heels up his calves, through his legs, up his back and neck and over the top of his head, settling on the tops of his ears. This frightened him, but as he began to panick the morphine began its comforting caress and the same frightening swarm of tiny vampiric bats became loving and flirtatious pixies, upon which he exhaled the most complete sense of relief and warmth. He emptied the rest of the barrel and calmly packed his works up. He gave Gogol two of the capsules and a 10 euro note and they emerged to a bright and intoxicated Paris, parting ways with the dismissive chalance of long-time employees at some brave factory where they had completed a shift. They weren't concerned with the politics or ambitions anymore. They were on their way home, though both of them were homeless.

Flatrock

As a young boy, Joseph had one charge, one duty, and one honor that he respected above any other domestic or mundane one that his caretakers or parents assigned him. He was the Custodian of Flatrock. Flatrock was a large piece of granite embedded in the ground where a stream, in its icy might, had split a perfect canyon through which to run. When he woke up in the morning and could smell the breakfast that Polly was cooking, he went downstairs to eat and then certainly made his rounds to the rock so that he could clear it of leaves and debris. When it flowed freely and clear, his world was restored to natural order.
The natural order of things. This was intuively important to Joseph. Pockets could be full of napkins or tissues or wrappers, but never thrown on the ground. One could spit into streams, or even onto the dust in the woods, but not onto a sidewalk or near the house. Socks had to be worn pulled up as high as they were made, as the makers certainly intended for them to be worn as such. It was acceptable to roll them down into little sock anklets, although this usually provoked antagonism by his aunt who found it comical. She, apparently, had decided this was "gay". In any event, Joseph was already chained to ritual, symbol, perfection, and order.
Joseph excelled at his early schooling, he was tested and given special priveleges and access to programs which would engage him. He would sometimes feel superior to other students, but mostly he just performed to the best of his abilities, which were not for wont, because that was the natural order of things. Problems had solutions, and information was romantic and mysterious. When he read National Geographic magazines, he wondered if he was learning something secret. Something hermetic, maybe occult. He once read an article about fulgurites, natural glass forms which were created when lightning struck sand on beaches and fused the silicon and other minerals into winding glass sculptures that represented the discharge's patterns into the earth.
He loved rubber band driven propeller planes made of balsa wood that he would buy from the variety store in the neighborhood for 25 cents or so, army men with plastic parachutes made from the same material a clear plastic bag would be made from and strung to the little plastic soldier by thin strings, legos that were never enough to build anything like a cathedral, just little square houses that looked more like prison cells than a home to live in.
Mostly he felt like luggage. He was moved about from one house, Polly & Roy's, to his father's apartments when his father had them, to his mother's apartments, to Beatrix & Desmonds'. Too often he wasn't sure where he was going when he got into the car with his mother or whomever may be driving. The things he loved were rarely ported, so he had to make due with what was available where he was staying.
Joseph often had one of three recurring dreams as a child. One was a small him bring thrown out a car window over a bridge crossing an autumn valley, where he would fall with his heart flipped in his chest until he woke up landing on the soft padding of his mattress. Another was the visitation of two characters from Sesame Street that brought compound words together. They were aliens, and would take turns, "Tele," ... "Phone," until they completed the single compound word. Those two fuckers would be bouncing against the door window in the living room where he slept at the Wardells' house like a moth on a light bulb, singing, "Jos," .. "Eph." That frightened the fuck out of him. He did not want any late night messages from aliens, puppets or not. Their mouths circulated in a perverse oscillating ovulation, and they chorused, "yip yip yip, uuuuhhuuuh uuuuuhhuuh." The third dream was that he was able to breathe underwater, like Jacques Cousteau but without any mortal breathing apparatus. He loved Jacques Cousteau and the whole underwater world. He would want the ability to breathe underwater at that point in his life if he could be given any superpower. He would pray for it.

The Start of Something

There were three [type] oysters on the plate in front of Joseph. On the half-shell and placed in crushed ice. There was a little bottle of Tabasco, the size of a thumb, a ramekin of horseradish, and several lemon wedges arranged on the small plate so that it looked full and bountiful. He chose to smoke and admire the fullness of the plate rather than eat them. It gave him a satisfaction, one similar to that a child might have when his sibling has finished their ice cream and he is still enjoying his. Anyway, the bloody mary was fantastic and his Lucky Strike was ruining his palate. They looked pretty, with their glistening violets and blues and white shells with bright blue crescent patterns barely visible under the edges of the shells. Surely that was worth the fifteen dollars.
What was worth more was the moment he was enjoying. It was January in New York City and he was sitting outside a cafe on the UWS under a heat lamp. It was Sunday morning, so the traffic was calm and unitrusive, a quiet scrape like waves on a windy day at the ocean. The sky was a cold blue, and the clouds were brilliant white fluffy ships serenely gliding across the frame of the avenue. The waitress kept eying his ashtray as he ashed on the pavement. He liked this.
The coat he was wearing was a wool peacoat with just a few holes that looked like they were eaten by ancient moths. It was dirty, but it was black so for some reason he felt it was good to wear. He buttoned it so that the flap wouldn't interfere with drawing a sword, but the lack of button-holes for every button when done up left-over-right in the peacoat sometimes gave him the suspicion he was wearing a womens' garment. He didn't care at the moment. No one else was outside at the cafe, just him, his oysters, and his heatlamp. As he looked down the avenue, entranced by the clouds crossing the avenue he considered that a trip on the Staten Island Ferry may be a good way to pass the morning. There was something magical about the free ferry. At least for one round-trip. After that it became a trampsome, anxiety-ridden, prison. And who, after all, is really consoled by hot-dogs?
He flicked his cigarette into the street, managing to avoid entirely the sacrifice of dirtying up his table with the beautiful oysters by using the ashtray. He liked the clean glass ashtray, and put it in his pocket without making any attempt to be covert or even discreet. The waitress, who had been watching the ashtray in case she should have to replace it with a clean one, came over and asked if everything was ok. He said that the oysters were beautiful and that she should have them. She was too concerned with making sure she was doing her job right to accept the gift and asked if he would like to send them back. He said, "No love, I want -you- to have them. I don't expect you to quit your job, sit down with me, and slurp down these oysters but I want you to take them back into the restaurant and enjoy them." Then he killed the Bloody Mary and took out another cigarette from his peacoat. She took the oysters in and came back out immediately with a new ashtray and the check in a black check-presenter. He put a twenty dollar bill in the presenter and walked to the curb to hail a cab.
As he stood on the curb and waited for the light to change to send a wave of cabs down the block, a song crept through his lips. The song was "Antichrist Television Blues". He held his hand up as a cab slowed to a stop in front of him. He sat in the car, and told the driver "Staten Island Ferry Terminal, please." As the car pulled away he saw the waitress pick up the presenter and remove the 20 dollar bill.
The trip downtown was a classic Broadway drive through Sunday traffic. The cab driver made efforts to stay in the undulation of green lights that the signals iterate in their traffic pattern. He felt like he was riding a wave through the island of Manhattan. Times Square's glowing commerce was eclipsed by the bright morning sun, leaving an illumination of the general grime that is the street in NYC. They rode through the scaffolding, people with causes, tourists, electronics shops, the occasional surviving porn vendor, and restaurants and skyscrapers.
The Staten Island Ferry Terminal is stark, on both sides. The car let him out at the base of a curving walkway around the terminal. The water was brown, red, & green, like some kind of metropolitan tea. The ferry wasn't there yet, but he could see it coming off in the distance. They left every 30 minutes at this time of day.

Joseph had spent significant time on public transport going nowhere for any particular practical purpose. In Berlin, he had ridden the Trams to unknown destinations & back. He had ridden the A train to JFK and back, just to see the people that were on their way to the planes that seared white through the cold sky. The sight of a plane on its way up always moved his heart a little bit, evoking some sentimentality about the relief he always felt when on his way to a new city or a new country. He didn't have a driver's license and didn't really want one.
The ferry bumped its way into the dock. He could hear the passengers laugh and shout at the clumsy approach. As the ferry secured itself to the dock, the rails lifted and the platforms lowered that support the auto passenger traffic. The ferry disgorged everyone except the sleepy, perhaps drunken men in dingy clothes and wool pull-down hats. As Joseph walked into the inside of the ferry, he saw a rather short New York Police Officer in a uniform that was too big for him. The policeman looked like he was wearing his father's uniform. The cop walked up and down the rows of plastic benches, banging each one with a sleepy, drunken man with his club so that the report would wake the man. It was a symbolic effort, and not much more.
There had been nights where Joseph tried to sleep on the ferry. Times when his addiction had stripped him of everything and he was too embarrassed to ring the buzzer of a friend so late to ask to sleep on their sofa. The police at night seemed to find a greater importance in dislodging the disenfranchised. Still, he would get 25-30 minutes of sleep at a stretch, maybe a solid hour here or there with the sole interruption of the cessation of the consoling hum of the engines and the sway of the ship. Usually, a policeman would order him off the ferry at one terminal or another and threaten arrest if he saw Joseph again. Joseph once sleepily wandered around the Staten Island side of the terminal, finding a cleanish mattress on top of a small building at a park on which he uncomfortably drifted in and out until the morning when the sun reminded him that he was a heroin addict and had miles to go before he could sleep.
This was the burden of being a heroin addict. The endless and constantly challenging procession of errands to run in order to stave off the sickness that creeps upon the body and psyche of the unwell junkie. Joseph wasn't the best criminal, and had typically found that the best way to maintain an opiate habit was to have a regular, well-paying job and to develop a solid reputation as a good customer with a heroin dealer. Still, credit was always an awkward request, a request that drugs be provided without payment on good faith that the debt will be settled. Eventually, though, any budget became stretched as a habit grew to fit its potential. As a result, Joseph would be condemned to giving the dealer all of his money from his salary without ever achieving the consolation, the warm and loving relief that was a 'fix'. The greatest effect was a settling of his stomach, a return of his appetite, and a small relief as the encroaching anxiety and weakness was alleviated.
Joseph didn't know any other way to live. At 13, he was sleepless and lonely at his grandparents' house. It was late, in the middle of the night. He stood in front of the corner-wrapping bookshelf where there were hundreds of National Geographic magazines and looked at all the spines for anything he hadn't read -- or at least hadn't read and would be interested in. On the other shelf were miscellaneous classic books in hard bindings. ***Robinson Carusoe shit.*** On a shelf above these was a book titled 'PDR: Physicians Desk Reference'. The idea of a reference appealed to him. He liked the library, and the library wouldn't let you borrow their references, so he imagined the book must contain information of Encyclopaedic variety and drew it from the shelf. He flipped the pages and saw categorizations of Indications, Contra-Indications, Effects, Dosages, Side-Effects, etc. The side-effects interested him. To a degree, he understood that they were effects on the body that went along with a drug or an activity.
He saw Morphine Sulfate and read that it was an opiate. It described side-effects of sleepiness, drowsiness, constipation, nausea, and euphoria. Euphoria was a new word and in spite of trying to Latin out it's roots (it's Greek) he couldn't understand it, but the dictionary was on the same shelf. He looked up the word 'euphoria'. It read:

"euphoria: a feeling of well-being or elation; especially : one that is groundless, disproportionate to its cause, or inappropriate to one's life situation -- compare DYSPHORIA"

Joseph had been a phenomenal student. He tested exceptionally well, and was granted unusual liberty and privilege at school. He had always been involved in the strongest academic groups and was awarded praise across the spectrum of studies. At school and on T.V., messages that drugs kill were strongly promoted. Posters, speakers, audiences, commercials, and articles all strongly made the point that 'Drugs Kill'. As a child, he would often pray:

"Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take."

This prayer upset his younger cousin, David. The idea of dying made David afraid. Joseph hadn't considered that it would be a bad thing, and in recent had mourned the death of his paternal grandparents, Polly and Roy within two months of each other. She died on October 24th. Polly had spent a lot of time, in fact raised Joseph for periods. She was beautiful, superstitious, magical, loving, and had an old sense of humor. She was in a lot of pain as she died, from a host of cancers over some time. Joseph was only ever able to help her in one way. She asked him how he managed to fall asleep so easily at night, in contrast to his sister and cousin, and her own self struggling with anxiety and pain. He told her to think of the color green. "Just Green?" she asked. "Green, like the ocean, and trees, and fields," was his answer. She told him the next morning that it helped. His young mourning of his grandmother was classical and romantic.
Roy shot himself to death 2 months later on Christmas eve. When Joseph's mother answered the phone that night Joseph knew what had happened before she said "Hello." Christmas morning brought a numbness, an addled trance set to the music of the video game Roy had bought him.
Even before this, he had had a conversation with his stepfather about the fact that the sun was expected to eventually burn out, thus rendering death on Earth. That conversation had a profound effect on Joseph. He laid in bed at night considering that the fact that he was anything at all was a mystery, and that this mystery was a precarious thing with a predetermined futility. He prayed that god would take it back, that he be nothing at all. Nothing made more sense than that as nothing, no grief or failure, no frustration or disappointment could be felt. There is no loss from nothing. These ideas didn't depress him, and he was very calm and sure that this was a good solution to the greatly painful experiences he knew, experiences which were now framed in a universe which was fleeting and ethereal.
This prayer was not answered, and he was being treated with a revolting tenderness by adults.
In any event, he realized that there were medicines that were not his in his maternal grandparents' cabinet, and that this reference would describe what they were for and what they did. 'Euphoria' was exactly what he wanted. He would have promoted it from side-effect had he been a doctor.
Joseph went to the medicine cabinet with the PDR. He looked first at the bottles with label stickers that had dizzy heads or martini glasses.

The Tinfoil Umbrella

If Joseph lined an umbrella with aluminum foil, he considered, he would be protected from the mind control rays that people fashioned hats from the same foil to protect their heads with. But an umbrella is a much less conspicuous device, and if he were to line it with something like copper screen that flexes without creasing or making sounds, it may just be the perfect solution. -Something- was compelling him, and it wasn't his own heart.

Joseph wasn't insane, no more than anyone walking on the street, but he held nearly superstitious beliefs about ritual, and symbol. To fashion a parabolas that would reflect his own soul to his own heart from the underside of the umbrella and filter out the cosmic interference from above was a strong symbol which gave him a comic mania. Surely, there were matters which demanded more attention and priority, but not to Joseph's heart. "The natural order of things." a beautiful girl once accused him of upsetting. "I am the natural order of things, the universe made me and I am nature itself."

So Joseph fought his battles on the cosmic level, the metaphysical warrior who waged contention in symbol and ritual, and from this he won confidence and purpose, relief and the spoils of irreverence. He was wary of astrology, because the gods did not take Promethean foresight away from man for naught. And it should be noted that Prometheus did not end up well.

Destro & Sinestro

I met her at that party
Pretense & Chateaudun
Lots of tipping cups
And glances around the room

She folded herself
Up against the wall
I took more morphine
And paraded down the hall

She fancied the pants off
I fancied the pants off
She's a good lover
She's a little blue

We drank wine by the litre
And grinned through red teeth
We looked down on Paris stars
Red lips met through grief

I prayed she'd know love, joy
She waited for me alone & sad
Cold and dark in wet winter Brixton
She was the best girl I ever had

She fancied the pants off
I fancied the pants off
She's an amazing lover
She's a little blue

She waited all the way
From Brixton to Philadelphia
I took dope to kill our pain
Pain too painful to share

I prayed childrens' prayers
And I prayed for death
My prayers were never answered
I was dying and she left


She fancied the pants off
I fancied the pants off
She's a lovely lover
She's a little blue

Legs

Ghosts

My god, my Ghosts

A lifelong collector of Ghosts
I've got one for every alley
And one for every midnight
Every Ghost alive in its time

I've got little boy Ghosts
And prison shank Ghosts
I've got a Ghost in an ambulance
Or two or three maybe

I think I love them all
Even the sick strung out thieves,
The liars, the cheats,
The Ghost that shoots himself but never dies.

The ugly sinister silhouettes
I want to give them Love
Like I want to give Love
To every special child.

I've got Ghosts that make love
to a beautiful girl
Ghosts that stand on mountaintops
And Ghosts that fly maritime

These ghosts are light like air
Light like angels
They're quiet winds
They sun reflects in their eyes.

Those Ghosts are as real
As I ever was
Maybe you can't see them
But I know them all so well.

My Ghosts can cook
But they can't eat
My ghosts wear socks
But have bare feet

I believe in my Ghosts
And I believe in the Ether
And I believe in a god
God! My time, my Ghosts.

What friends I have
So many so far
And so relieved am I
That ne is still alive.

A palm

To see a face.

l'Chute

The Office of the Elephant

Make a ghetto child grin

Crowned Heights

New York Cocaine

♥♥♥ A Prayer ♥♥♥

I WANT MY LAST HOUR
TO BE A THUNDERSTORM
REPLETE WITH HAIL
WIDESPREAD POWER OUTAGE
AND YOUNG LOVERS
MAKING AN OPPORTUNITY
TO MAKE OUT,
TAUNTING THEIR CURIOUS APPETITE
INNOCENCE
TO THE SOUND OF AN OLD RADIO
RUNNING OUT OF BATTERIES
WHILE HER MOTHER
SHOULD HAVE BEEN HOME
BUT IS STUCK IN TRAFFIC
AND THE RADIO IN
THE CAR
BLENDS INTO THE DROWNING SOUND
OF THE RAIN CLOAKING ANY SUSPICION

IF THIS CAN BE ARRANGED,
THEN LET THESE TWO
NEVER SEE
THE PETRIFYING THINGS
I HAVE SHOWN MYSELF.

Transit Penalty

My home is Harlem
But I am not on holiday
I'm more than lost
This time and this trip
Reminds me of everything
I love.

In Tito Puente, Ella, and
The express that either
Never got me all the way home
Or let me sleep
Until 4Am 207th/5th

French transit cops don't
Look too sympathetic today
And the 4:21 is, although
So inviting, certainly
Ominous in its scheduling

Nevermind the fact
That they storm the train
As it pulls out of the station.

Get under your desks, children. 09.07.03

He awoke from a nightmare that was characteristically absurd. Standing at the top of the steps of Paris Opera House, he was alone but for a few flocks of Asian tourists looking out across the plaza to the deep storm clouds that encompassed the city to the horizon. A flash like lightning without a bolt so bright it made everything difficult to interpret like some divine camera flash that whited out the world. He could hear a nearby voice, a computer sounding voice, in a sterile counting down in seconds from 11. Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven, Six, Five, Four, blast in One Second, and a wash of singing hot air cast him sliding back across the marble until he was pushed up to the wall.
He curled into a ball while the blast charred his skin and clothing and melted his hair into his skin. He held his breath while the wind cooked him alive, knowing now it was atomic and the radiation was inescapable; the blast roared on for most of a minute, followed by the undertow of a vacuum of so much explosive air.
He woke up in Paris with a hangover.

Some people wake up on Monday mornings - Andrew Bird

The Noble Savage. My hero. He's the protagonist. The martyr. The manifest of good.

Kill him, he has no use here.

I'd be the assassin as much as I'd be an ally. I just can't keep my pretenses in order. So I don't think I'd get the job done right. I'm waking from a brutal sleep, a sleep I chose. For what reason? I don't know. I'm alive. And I can't bear to tie my shoes.

"I'm serving time all for a crime I did commit. You want the truth, you know I'd do it all again."

I have dreams & hopes, but the way I'm living they're relegated to so much sewage. Just flush it, I feel like.

We're all in the gutter, after all... but some of us are looking up their skirts. - Listless Reg Syndrome