Never Pawn Your Astrolabe

08/25/02

(Drama, drama, everywhere. A comedy of absurd despair. I don't live for this.)

08/05/02

Where is my astrolabe? Who waits for a ship to come in? Lonesome girls, often conspiring with the ocean to assuage their guilt. Longshoremen, figuring they have time to sober up. Those who report to some one or other.  They ask the same question every day with their perpetually concerned expression, which is answered day to day with an empty harbor.

One day their ships will come in. In the meantime, I am looking for one going out. One day a grey-beard loon I be.

One contradiction corrects another.

Time Passes, just like Space

Time moves slowly by.

The rain is perfect, and this month is extremely quiet. Everyone has left. Annoying crime is common, and the racaille have a buffet. That isn't just because of it being Aout, though. My suspicion is that one must live here for the fall and winter. Parisiennes know the world from Paris, like New Yorkers frame everything with their rivers, boroughs, and subway lines.

Not afraid, but sensing possible tragedy of deeply wounding experiences. Am I the hanged man? I am afraid of a dreamlike explanation of someone else's unwarranted divinations. Not really.

Again, I am minuscule in a vast and vacant universe. At night I wake up and can not sleep or find comfort on my metallic mattress. I try to read and eat when I am not hungry. Sometimes have to re-read the same page 5 times before i recognize that it's in french and the part i didn't understand is still not understood.

Never could figure out, there isn't a very easy way to determine if Prof was really just got bamboozled. Either way, he asks me for too many cigs and beers. I don't have the money for that kinda nonsense. Prof also sleeps in the catacomb subway platform at St. Michele, behind some utility cabinets, maybe with fuckloads of electricity coursing through for all I know. Lots of passenger loogies, dried on the wall, pigeon shit, feathers everything else.

Prof isn't the healthiest person I've ever met. Not the most sensible. He's not an idiot though. .. I like the way he speaks. His name, "prof" is, according to him, from his way of speaking. Also, the amount that he speaks. He's been in prison a few times. For some reason, I can't imagine having to do time with him.

Granted, he's pretty obviously an alcoholic and shoplifter, but if he had a job or something and a lot of rehabilitation, I bet he'd be great company. He's got that adolescent boy thing where he's always making a scene and annoying people by hitting them ion the back of the head. That would get old.

He tells stories of being in the alps and finding clean water. Some old hermit who owns the property of the source, the spring, chases him off and tells him to go downstream, but letsProf know that the water is still good. Prof lies in the sunshine and cleans himself with water. the old country man brings some meat and bread and prof is elated. They share some bond in polite respect, although in the cite Prof shows much different character. His last name is Gologol or Golgoli or some russian name. I forget his first name at the time, but i am not sure how important it is. Nickolas? Alexander?

I have no idea why Prof was way out in nowhere, or how he got back into the cities. I just hope that my life isn't like his.

Jay Tigabinowitz reports from Seattle. He seems to have a similar problem where he ends up going the opposite cardinal direction he plans on going when traveling. The phenom I speak of isn't being or becoming lost, and isn't meant on the smaller scale of local daily trips and explorations of a place, but is one strange curse where after deciding to go East across the US, one goes West. Similarly, then trying to go North, I have ended up South and so on.

No compass or GPS unit can prevail the bizarre currents of destiny. They only allow you to confirm that you are indeed going the opposite direction you expected to be going.

I miss all of those who tired of my antics, all those who I simply couldn't behave myself around. There are loads of people that I don't miss. People that have helped me spend money. People that have been very kind to me, but one way or another I have betrayed or failed. It all seems the same in some ways. To betray or be betrayed. But I miss more those relationships which are null because of misconception, in various forms. It passes.

Life continues. Even when it seems unbearable. Agoraphobia subsides with a tidal rebirth of some comfortable evening when the feeling of breathing air and the last of the sun are symbolically and actually amniotic and redemptive in giving the strength and peace to go on.

I honestly believe that automotive exhaust on city streets is enough to give one the feeling of being trapped and drowning in the ether of superreal or maybe sub-surreality of urban life. A deep breath leads me sometimes to pant for another.

If San Francisco hadn't been so vicious or maybe if San Diego wasn't turning into the turn of the century corporate culture sprawl of mundane pointlessness I could have kept breathing that air. Los Angeles is notorious for its poor air, and to be honest I think I have some fear of that city.

Show me purity, and tranquility in America. She's never promised that to me. I never promised anything to her, other than allegiance to her flag and the republic as one sovereignty situated under God with freedom and balance of interests for each and every person! That wasn't entirely my choice. She describes herself poorly.

A Sunday the 4th of August, 2002

The last of my Skenan 100mg
Morphine Sulphate, rough going in
Enough to worry me until it subsides
And the Morphine sets in, washing
Through me like a tide of hope
It reminds me that I can live on
Through every devastating tragedy
Life is neither short nor long
When you aren't afraid of death
And don't know your fate.

The Unemployed

Griffins and lovely silver airplanes. Smooth ass train rides. Brief and well ventilated buses, particularly on exhausted afternoons. Half empty subway cars. Driving spans of large countries, before you even are old enough to have a license. Listening to music that you usually can't realize you like while in a car. Scrolling highway. Summarized cities. Walking through the barrio, not giving a fuck about not being able to afford anything on Madison, and going in and telling them that you want, 'pants' without any further description. If they ask more, you explain that you'd like them to fit. Realizing that you have stumbled into the late night rush hour on St. Denis, and that explains all of the available real estate in such a convenient place as the 2nd. Sleeping outside in Barcelona, comfortable because you have nothing to steal, and look hurt enough that a villain would certainly choose a better prospective victim or at least have a little compassion. Not being able to stand being dirty, but taking messy showers without curtains and having water in the bathroom for stepping in in your socks for the next 24 hours. Early morning olive oil fires while you fry potatoes or make your special fried flour flatbreads with flour you have convinced the boulanger, who is a lovely Italian girl and adorably nervous but a compelled conspirator. The first fire you ever lost control of happened in a pan, and took care of itself more or less. You tried to discretely fan the house out, while concerned about missing class because you would be late dealing with your kitchen fire. Your mother showed infinite tolerance. You dared her to show less. Someone has needed to smack that grin off your face for your entire existence, but for some reason it always comes back, no matter what.

Thinking you lost your passport one wrathfully hungover morning, you giggle to yourself knowing how wonderful an excuse it is to become a farmhand. Think of all the bureaucracy you can reasonably evade. You miss drinking pitchers of sangria, but know that you can only ever drink too much. Drinking too much is bad. Proven so.

You read in some newspaper about a guy that knows people that have been featured in the lenses of bancs, shot themselves, believe for real as far as can be determined that they have been abducted by aliens, old money, dirty laundry, cuban mages who work the cuchifritos counters, gentlemen who are very careful with the straight razor, a woman that is just impossible to please, coots, kooks, docs, dock workers, and omelet cookers.

Yesterday you took a walk and ended up in the ghetto, again. Always the ghetto it seems. Hopped on a perimeter bus and hoped that you would find an escape route from this lukewarm city. Found a nice suburb, previously neglected but being industrialised, with old buildings. You notice a perfectly commandeerable one, but notice also that it seems inhabited even though the front door is masoned up quite sloppily. A man asks you in really rapid language you don't understand what you think of this building when you see it and no one lives there. You tell him you think that it is sad, and he proceeds to explain that three months ago its inhabitants were 'evicted' by the police because the city began to reinforce it's summertime and I suppose perpetuated policy against the adoption of homeless houses. You wonder why this is so bad since it looks like the city will allow the perfectly sound building to deteriorate otherwise until it will be destroyed. If I only had a camera.

He tells you that he's looking for a house too, but he appears to have the resources and intention to buy or rent one. You say goodbye and he asks you where you are going, and you explain that you will find a new house. You don't trust him anymore.

***

Where can I get a boat? Where can I get some cash to pay my rent. Where can I get a boat again? Nothing fabulous, just a bit better than a Gargantuan AirStream Jiffy Pop style trailer. Silver will do. Maps, a satellite net connection, a month supply of salted fresh pistachios. No pink or red shit though.

Better yet, a job.

How can so many people not have jobs?

Pate pur Canard

Relishing ancient memories. Makes me almost want to eat those cheeses which are far too expensive for me to buy and that I'm afraid of anyway. Sad about eating pate pur canard because it seems perverse to relish flesh in a form so mangled. Like you're not really appreciating it, you're making mush out of a part of a creature that could be honored with a little more recognition than a little duck icon.

Amazed at the altitude of mausoleums, wondering how long they will really last, and what happens when they fall. Tempted by the idea of finding ancient chambers run through by subways. Curious about how outdoor plumbing with the lye, or whatever it is, works.

Where is my vineyard and how should I find it? Some would probably say that it is impossible to grow garlic and grapes on the same land, but to them I say, "we shall see." They haven't said this yet, and I have not said it either, so it is sort of insignificant. Feel free to IM me your suggestions at "scrapplelove", my omage to meat products that have been wrought through the griffin fingers of our culinary conventions.

I could grow garlic and even a few bales of cotton.

I was laying in bed, thinking about what I should do and fairly certain that would be to go to sleep. I ate more pasta than I actually had an appetite for. Thinking about how impossible it is to sleep in the city, and that I could grow garlic and even a few bales of cotton.

The truth is that I should have stayed in bed. My right hand is fully operational again. Been for a while. Heckling poets gets boring quickly. Should have made some phone calls. Did not. Wondering why it is that I always get ripped off in public transit systems. Not by the passengers, by the payment control systems.

What are we going to do on this planet? I don't think I am going to be able to get off of it. Who wants what? Why. Is it possible? How can the impossible be made more possible.

I feel like the level of my coherence has dropped below that of text on a bottle of Dr. Bronner's.

Where there are steps, and an amazing view. I play polite but vocal vigilante to discover I make more enemies than allies. Some kids did not get their belongings lifted, but then again who had my back when there was a knife and an angry man in the shadows. He would not have even been annoyed with me if I had not intervened with his operations, in interest of protecting the kids that had been nice to me. Battles will be chosen carefully.

He did not have the wherewithal to stab me first, and I was not in a position to explain myself to the amphibious police.

Ferlinghetti signs my transit penaltie, I am not going to buy his 18.00 book. Coca cola gets expensive, miss the old 5 cent days. Blanched and sometimes parched, I live in the right place for the time.

Painting furniture with the tea, it evaporates quickly and eventually gets lacquered. Difficult times call for breezy measures such as a pinch, a jigger, a taste, or a "little".

no, jigger is NOT that scientific

I feel like the level of my coherence has dropped below that of text on a bottle of Dr. Bronner's. At least compositionally. In dialogue I can stick to rhyme, reason.