thee istsfor manity reader

Two Views: A Cut-Up Bedtime Story

I.

X.’s home was a shambles:

piles of amber eyes,

clouds of fleas and other debris,

the ritual heads against our legs;

red bodies were discovered –

strong and sharp –

in the refrigerator’s freezer

relying on a stethoscope,

crowbar and chisel to make a hole

beyond salvation

II.

Has anyone seen

I could eat your heart 

    for dinner

with such conviction…

you?

probably be scared

“Ask me if I’ve ever had to use
bottle caps as breadcrumbs to help
my brother find his way back home.
He never could tell the taste between
a scar and its wounding, an angel or demon.”

— Tanaya Winder / “Becoming a Ghost”

photo courtesy 100 word story.

Sangfroid I-IV

i.  The Ashen Landscape

“He’s got what?  Days left?  I don’t want to be there when he dies.”

“Sangfroid.”

“I’m cold-blooded?”

“You didn’t wish to come back to the village — to the sea?”

“I see… a Rothko — canted, a lost apocryphal work — an ashen landscape in three gradations.  My father tore out its center and revealed there’s no heart to the universe, only a corrugated armature — frozen, encased — as if the sky were stapled to the sea with liminal ice.”  

“You see wasteland?”  

“I see ghosts.  I was eleven.  My father placed the gun to his temple — then mine.  He abandoned me here.”

ii.  A Song for the Plague Year

I find my father supine on the bathroom floor, limned by a bloody halo — a pinpoint hole in his left temple.  Gorgeous.

The floor seethes and the ceiling lowers its claim upon me.  I’m extruded out of the bathtub spigot.  Suffering.  Wait.  Wait.  Suffering.  I’m in the heart of darkness.  I’m in the heart of the work now.  Shiver.  Fertile.  Gorgeous.

iii.  Molecular Organic Nano-machines

I’m at the morphine station.

I’m a soft machine inside a hard silicone husk.  I’m a warped machine rattling out flickering images: images of a gun.

I’m a soft machine in a hard exoskeleton — silicone dark inside — silicone smooth and white outside.  My memories play back on the cryoscreen. Here memories are particulate existences transformed into nano-globules (n-g.’s) that are secreted from the ferrules at the end of your iPuffer: smoky, hormonal, and projected inside and beyond your eyes.

“Please cue n-g. 173-A: the day I met my father at CBGB’s; and frame n-g. 173-B: the moment that punk rock saved my life.  Please add the blue 17 gelatin filter.”

A puff from the ferrule and the images resolve, but this memory is faulty.  The memory warps and echoes: a radiator squeals, brass electrodes buzz, my father is blood-crusted, ignored in a dusty corner, covered with mites escaping the evil heat.  Batista’s henchmen torture another… no, stop, this is not my memory but the anecdote he told me that night… 

“This is not the n.g. I requested. STOP.  STOP.  Press the eject…” 

Blood, on the tip of my tongue.  Where is it coming from?  Then a bestial din: the sound of a million cicadas’ lament before the seventeen year death — a rupture tectonically within me.  The smell of hissing green plantains dropped into overheated oil — the splattering: tinny, spastic —  and then the loss of control.

iv.  missing  STOP

im not who i was once was   STOP   aposiopesis   STOP   STOP   im a perfectionist   im obedient    get away from here    get away from that gun   STOP   STOP   STOP   dr x said im not my thoughts    im not my feelings   dont relive it    dont rehash it   and if it finds you   then embrace it    embrace the thoughts    embrace the feelings    be one with it and then release it     youre not your memories    youre not your feelings   be one with the thoughts   be one with the feelings   and then release them   STOP   

punk rock changed my life    no punk rock saved my life    the songs of the minutemen   no not that memory   STOP  STOP   dont touch him there   dont touch me stop it   put down that gun   38 snubnose    it weighs a ton    STOP   STOP   STOP    embrace this memory   embrace this emotion   im not my memories   not my emotions   STOP   aposiopesis   apoplexies   apophatic   and aphasic   STOP   STOP    dr x said    whatever happens   its ok    whatever happens is ok   im ok    whatever happens    im not my thoughts    im not my feelings   youre doing the best that you can   im doing the best that i can   STOP   STOP   STOP

“Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.”

— Francis Bacon

Havana Bouncy Ball

It’s a Havana bouncy ball… a buena Havana bouncy ball… una bola Habanera rebotante… say Havana bouncy ball!

Florence Shaw is going on and on about all manner of global cities’ bouncy balls — except Havana bouncy balls.

So thankful this month is moribund.

This is Fall at 8:22 a.m. on 11/30/20. Jamaica Plain, MA. (4/4)

“Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead.”
— Susan Sontag

Another found art treasure found inside a used $1.00 copy of Melville’s Moby-Dick.

“Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.”

— Jane Yolen

Cease to Resist

My pantaloons are full of persistence at the edge of insistence.

This is an instance of passionate persuasion — perfectly pitted prior to priapic penitence which is pertinent to the power of poseurs in preprandial punctuality of the pepperpots, perhaps in privy council with the pastor of pap.

Perhaps.

“‘We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we’ll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won’t. And we’re just learning this fact,’ Tyler said. ‘So don’t fuck with us.’”

— Chuck Palahniuk / Fight Club

Billingsgate and Balderdash

You are like the tuber of calcaneous, necessary but non-articulating.

Without you there is no ambulating me…

The things you’ve said to me in your gasps and low moans:

“Starting rotation from blackbird…”

“They transferred me to room 15…”

“It’s the same to die here or there.”

Meant nothing to me at the time, but mean everything now, in this age of torn Achilles.

We’re five words short of three thousand in an existence where words don’t count for nuthin’.

I miss you my tuber of calcaneus.

I miss the hole in my head.

“Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.”

— André Breton

“A Thanksgiving Prayer” by William S. Burroughs

There’s no improving on thee Thanksgiving classic, so I’ll repost the great “Uncle Bill” as I did last Thanksgiving day — just in case you didn’t drop by last year.

Again, thank you for reading this past year, and I trust (as I imagine you do) that next year is bound to be an improvement on this one.

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

— Anne Lamott / Bird by Bird

Bluetoothing the Novel

Maple bacon cheddar pizza, I say, repeating what she just said to me.

I need a snack soon, she says.

A swoony-jazzy song plays like it’s 1967– remember the smarmy song playing in The Graduate when Bancroft is making the hard play for Hoffman — well some white bread m.o.r. tripe like that is playing in our background. But we’re both the same age, she’s only 3 months older than I am. We’re just living through a pandemic.

She stands up, unable to take it anymore and announces, snack! What snack do you want?

Before I can answer she’s walked out of the room and turning on the kitchen light.

She says, snack! What snack do I want? In a husky manner like she’s a hibernant bear just awoken.

Then comes the crackling of the plastic bag and the tinkling pretzels. I imagine the blue bag of organic pretzel twists — the pretzels falling and caroming around a small glass bowl until the scale reads 1 oz or 28 grms, depending on the setting she used — she’s a 1 oz type.

The crackling of the bag again. The clasping of the white chip clip on the bag — it might have been the black clip — and she walks into the room again. A deep guttural sort of crunching amplified in her mouth as she walks past me to the desk.

These are extra crunchy, she says, facing the laptop. The crunching continues, a gravelly molar-assisted deep crunch.

Today is the 8-month anniversary of the day Gov. Baker sent people home to work out the pandemic. That’s Massachusetts.

Everything But the Girl’s debut album, is bluetoothing through the blue Sony SRS-X33 speaker. It’s not really smarmy music, I just felt that particular conceit at the moment.

She asks why I want to know the make of the speaker.

I was researching how porn would sound through the speaker, I say. (Obviously not, folks, I was writing this!)

Huh, she says. Did you say corn or porn?

Corn porn!, I say. It’s supposed to sound amazing through the speaker.

She ignores me. She knows me.

I should be working on my 50,000 word novel right now, but I’m procrastinating. I’m at 40,329 words as of 11:39 am yesterday, but I haven’t written a word on that project since then — but I have written many other words nonetheless.

(Take these for instance)

Anyway, there are only 6 days left until the artificially imposed November 30th NaNoWriMo deadline.

(NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month, now in its 21st year! My third consecutive year participating.)

Like I said, I’m procrastinating.

The pretzels are consumed.

It’s time to get to work…

But I keep on writing this…

Such is life.

“Write even when you feel like it’s shit. You can’t tell what’s good and what’s bad while you’re writing it. Don’t ever rewrite until the whole thing is done. Once you start thinking about what you’re writing, you lose the ability to stop writing it.”

— Cory Doctorow

Another Sleep of Treason

Rudy can’t fail, but he also can’t answer for the dream he dropped into my head.

After complications, and scenes upon scenes, it unravels. I make my way in to a motel room. Now, mind you, this is a round — or is chock full of recurrences — an ouroboros of sorts. I can’t tell the tail end from the head in this rem maelstrom.

I’m in a small plywood anteroom there’s a faded pink carpet worn bare. Someone next to me is holding a silver serving bowl of couscous custard clatter furtively looking about, not wanting to be seen.

Sticky spots and stains pockmark the plywood. Lots of slatted windows. Who has jalousie windows anymore? Why is childhood Florida popping in my occipital lobe at 2am?

In a second the anteroom is transformed. We’re in front of a squat olive-brown building out by some deserted fairground. The room has landed in the middle of a rocky unpaved traffic circle.

The person next to me disappears and I’m left holding the couscous custard clatter — not platter(!) I intuit this is a clatter; it’s the most germane thing in this pestilent life, this clatter.

I’m on a swivel chair and the anteroom is now composed of hundreds of wooden branches — there are large gaps between the branches, and the room is completely open behind me. No fourth wall. I turn and I’m facing a parking lot. I notice there are people inside the parked cars staring at me. Oh!

I turn toward the building and through the branches I see people on picnic benches staring too. They spot my couscous custard clatter. Oh no!

The next moment I’m in a brown 1983 diesel Cadillac Seville (specific enough?) backing out of the traffic circle, but there is some difficulty: cars too close, other cars not allowing me to back up — where the fuck is my couscous custard clatter? Shit. No!

I’m reeling when an AT thru hiker appears and waves me down for a resupply ride in to town. I tell her I know she is a prior thru hiker she has the look of an experienced AT trekker. She is reluctant to admit that she is a former thru hiker, that she’s done this before, and finished the trail.

I know, I’ve done it before, I say, multiple times. She seems thankful and gives me a card to follow her online hiking journal, and says, get started early and you’ll be back here before I move on — or something to that effect. And she adds something about the Trail Days Festival this year, and how much the trail has changed in Pennsylvania.

Visual dissonance. Repeat.

It all seems to begin again without my couscous custard clatter. The dream merges into two other recurring dreams from the pandemic year:

1. about being out on snow skiing slopes, then driving through hilly Swiss country to get to Barcelona for a mixed grill featuring salivary glands… and…

2. the grassy knoll / icy knoll dream set near a baseball state championship featuring a Cuban professional team v. a central Florida little league team…

Neither of those dreams feature a couscous custard clatter. It’s done with a jolt at 4:30 am. The friggin’ ubangi bangi car drives by earlier than usual.

Where is that damnation couscous custard clatter?!

“Trincapollas! sighed Alba, raising her glass, but all men are homo-sexy, I wish to Christ I’d been born a lesbian.”

—Samuel Beckett / Dream of Fair to Middling Women

Primitive Trails From This Point

Panda cycling and recycling, panda-demics, and panda demotics. Find yourself in the world of widespread fraud and plate tectonics in response to politic-tonics — those gestures and flourishes that are not of this society, of this culture, right? Write!

Go on and write so much so that you can pare down and shape it into something resembling cohesion — that will catch a sovereign ear rather than the father of the mishmash masterclass, of the pell mell muttering, and argy-bargy desultory twister.

Meaning is at once nonsense and resoundingly salient only to itself, its maker, and to ladies who lunch coiffed in Viking hair and festooned with scratchcard lanyards. Heep hoop!

Pick up the dry cleaning.

“Every time I start a new post, I never know for sure where it’s going to go. This is what writing and making art is all about: not having something to say, but finding out what you have to say. It’s thinking on the page or the screen or in whatever materials you manipulate. Blogging has taught me to embrace this kind of not-knowing in my other art and my writing.”

— Austin Kleon / AustinKleon.com