“Sure, go north,” the man says. “Proceed past the turnpike interchange and…” He stops pointing west north west, rubs his chin and says, “whatever you were talking about… wait, what are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about getting up at 6:30 in the morning and driving 16 hours to have an affair in a friend’s apartment, who isn’t really a friend just a big burly kissy-guy that likes to hug and give me cloth-band watches. There’s no sex, just a lot of staring at each other from opposing sofas.
There’s no telling what journaling will do. I wrote a story about semiotics in French, and according to him it’s tantamount to liberalism — or is it illiberalism?
Or it may be Antioch in antifreeze — or was it Antioch and antifreeze? It’s the preponderance of the evidence, which in this case is scant, but also attractive to dogs and super furry stuffed animals placed in reverence at the base of a tzompantli.
Hey, are you listening to me? Are you listening to this that I’m telling you on the Day of the Dead?”
She rolls down window fully, so that he could get an unobstructed view of her face, so that he could see that she is serious.
“Technically, it’s the day after the Day of the Dead, lady,” the man says. He shoves his hands in his pockets. Fingers his keys, a quarter, some lint. “I believe you’re the one that missed it, m’am. Just go ahead and drive off, and have yourself a day while you’re at it.”
“Everyone is drunk today.
Everyone is preparing for sex today. Little
turquoise boxes with white ribbon are hand-
delivered around town today. The smell of
beef is powerful. The cemeteries are still full.”
October is in the rear view. The rear view is in the river. Pelagic creatures are flopping about in the shallows wondering where the encroaching oceans went.
The monks are illuminating by the gallows. The henchmen are getting soused.
Bring me freedom in reused wrapping paper and take your sleep wherever you can get it.
My knees are knocked by hummingbird buzz and candle wax. I’ve turned into a fairy but my wings are made of iron ore.
The Department of Divestiture is out on a declination of compasses decimated by degaussing — and the polarities have fled to Argentina and the Argentinians have decamped to Mauritania.
So I’ll content myself by washing my submarine and whistling a tune from a future era.
Hallowed is thy appendix. Here’s November!
“Reconsider writing by hand. There is a kind of story that comes from hand. Writing which is different from a tapping-on-a-keyboard-kind-of-story. For one thing, there is no delete button, making the experience more life like right away.”
You’re normally truculent and foul-breathed in the morning, but even the ubangi bangi car sputtering down the street can’t spoil a morning like this: a pastel yellow, peach and powder blue sky, and the world is frosted and heavy with snow.
And you finally got eight hours sleep and you feel rested and your schpilkas ain’t up yet.
And you just crunched around on the snow outside getting a picture — and proof positive that there is a smidgen of beauty in this world before the spigot opens and the torrent of shit starts to flow.
You could live in this world with a modicum of hope.
But you know it’s a cheap simulacrum, because later the demons and ghouls will appear — and you ain’t thinking about the kids dressed up for Halloween. No, you’re thinking about the people you depend on — leaders, neighbors, family, and friends — LIFE writ large ain’t this beautiful.
But you enjoy this sliver while you’re able.
This is Fall, at 7:09 a.m., on 10/31/2020. Jamaica Plain, MA. (31/31)
“I think writers need tolerant people around them. They’re prickly and strange and needy, yet they demand to be left alone.”
— Hilary Mantel / “How Writers Learn to Trust Themselves”
The Romans are meeting at the Forum — more like the Colosseum — deciding the fate of the legions off at war; and somehow, I, a hero, am embroiled in the decision. But I find myself hiding in a clothes closet off to the side of the meeting. I have an oblique view of the stands where people are assembled hashing these issues out. I should be visible to some of the people at this convocation, but they can’t see me — and just in case they can, I move to a deeper hiding place among the many frocks in dry cleaning plastic bags.
And again, there’s this palpable feeling of the presence of Charlton Heston but no sight of him. Then it’s dark, and I’m in the catacombs and holding cells below the Colosseum. There are cells with bars, and some skeletal remains in theses cells propped up in poses. I’m looking out from behind the bars onto a ramp, and out of the gloaming comes Charlton Heston.
Charlie, friggin’, Heston!
Somehow, even though this is an early role for me I tell him he’d be surprised at what my favorite film of his was when I was five years old.
He instantly says, “Planet of the Apes.”
“Absolutely,” I say. “It’s a madhouse! A madhouse!”
I challenge him to guess what my second favorite film of his was — to which he says, “Omega Man.”
Man! How does he do it!? How does he know?
He holds an open palm to my face and then up to the sky and says, “from my cold dead hands, Mr President. From my cold dead hands.”
I think, but don’t dare say, Wha’? Huh?! Then I go through the calculations… he said that during Clinton, right? Wasn’t he already dead by Obama? Whatever.
It doesn’t much matter. We’re fast friends now and heading to a combination bar and full service gas station atop the Los Angeles Colosseum, but it really seems to be the press box at the Daytona Race Track. Heston asks me about Soylent Green, and I tell him I didn’t see that until I was an adult 30 years later.
He says, “Ah! It was people you know? The green crackers… people!”
“Sure, whatever,” I say.
We’re getting familiar and there’s a hubbub behind the bar. Everyone around the square bar is clapping and cheering the muscular bleached blonde bartender who’s wearing a classic gas station attendant’s shirt — with the sleeves cut off and ripped jean shorts — he’s getting his trapezius muscles massaged by a waiter, and they’re both wearing Oakland Raiders caps backwards.
Charlton looks over to me and says, “everyone is an actor in LA.” He points at the TV and says, “every time one of the commercials or TV shows they appear play people take a moment to recognize them.” Another cheer and clapping is heard from the adjoining rooms as other staff memebers are seen on the dozens of televisions throughout the bar / gas station.
A couple of guys wearing cageless football helmets, modified to look like motorcycle helmets, are causing a ruckus at the edge of the bar and punches are thrown.
Heston says “let’s get out of here,” and we walk through the window and hover 80 feet in the air over the racetrack. In a flash we’re in the pits, but it’s really an old time gas station and Heston has disappeared — but the guys who were just causing the scene at the bar are in a car backing up, coming at me slowly.
I step out of the way on the passenger side and tap lightly on the trunk. It’s one of the troublemakers, in the cheap plastic helmet made to look intimidating, flexing his fist open and closed. They exit the car with ill intent. The smell of motor oil and cigarettes wafts out of the car.
We’re crunching on small beads of tempered glass as we make our way toward the rear of the car — it now appears as a hatchback made of thin, pliable tin. It’s broken and missing a section.
“Look at what you did,” the driver says in a menacing tone. I tell him I didn’t do that. “I lightly tapped the trunk. This wasn’t like this before. This car wasn’t even a hatchback!”
The one with the helmet says, “you did it, man!” and they pin me to the rear of the car. The glass below our feet is gone and I say, “see here, there’s no glass. This hatchback was already in this condition.”
Then I’m in my darkened apartment. But instead of being on the 16th floor in Boston. It’s on the 60th floor of a condo building at a crossroads in mid-Manhattan — something like a combination of Times Square, FDR drive somewhere near the UN, an open air version of Grand Central Station, and Columbus Circle all at once.
All the lights in the city are out, and it’s my duty to turn them on before my partner gets home with Charlton Heston. I’m feeling my way down the hall in the dark toward the fuse box to trip the switch, but I hear the refrigerator start to hum, and some light streams from the open refrigerator door.
I hear my partner at the door, and she gets to me just as I’m pulling the switch. We hear a earth shaking noise outside.
She says, “was that a car accident?”
“It didn’t sound like cars,” I say. “It sounded like a detonation of something large. I don’t know what it was,” I say.
We run to the balcony windows. Darkness. Then it dawns on me: “hey, where the hell is Charlton Heston?”
This is Fall, at 5:01 p.m., on 10/30/2020. Jamaica Plain, MA. (30/31)
“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”
I think Satina had enough the day I slagged her student film. It’d been a difficult year between us. She was so independent so different than the Cuban girls I knew from home. Clingers. They wanted to know where I was at every hour — EVHA’s, I said to Sven one day at the radio station: “Every Hour Accountable women,” I said.
It was our running joke.
If I told Satina I was working on my radio show production with Sven at the station — or off shooting footage for my films — she accepted it, never questioned it. Sven and I usually weren’t doing any of those things. Satina expected the same from me, but I was socialized in a different manner. My fawning often turned into control, and Satina wouldn’t have it.
The final meltdown came at the end of our first semester senior year. She was working on the first half of her senior thesis film, and I’d convinced her — well, maybe, I browbeat her into using Throbbing Gristle in her soundtrack. She thought the energy was too dark for her film — a tone poem about the second wave of feminism. Frankly, I though her entire concept sucked. Dark, turgid, disjunctive — a mess. And this section of the film was particularly bad. I still don’t know why she caved in to me in that one instance.
The day before the film was due Satina was finishing the final edit of the film. I told her: “‘Hot on the Heels of Love’ is the worst Throbbing Gristle song you could have chosen. It’s so unrepresentative and it’s sung by Cosi Fan Tutti. It has to be a Genesis P. Orridge song!”
“Tadeo! Listen, back off,” she said. She rewound the A and B rolls of film but I pinched the soundtrack reel on the Steenbeck machine and the roll snapped, and flapped wildly off the side of the editor.
“Now you listen to me,” I said. “I know this fucking band! This group is changing the sound of music as we know it. God damn it, they’re responsible for an entirely new subgenre of music —“
“Oh fuck off,” she said. “You’re going to fix that magnetic track. You’re going to splice that back together and you’re going to reset the Steenbeck. I can’t afford any more delays on this.”
She was glowing red, small blood vessels reticulating on her temples. “And furthermore you don’t know what you’re talking about. A lot of what Throbbing Gristle is doing was done in music concrete: James Tenney, Pauline Oliveros, John Cage — hell, even your hero William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin were doing this in the early 60’s. So don’t give me any shit about what goes on. I know my shit, and you’re not going to tell me otherwise.”
I told Sven she didn’t know shit. Sven and I spent a lot more time together that winter.
This is Fall, at 5:07 p.m., on 10/29/2020. Jamaica Plain, MA. (29/31)
“Any form of human creativity is a process of doing it and getting better at it. You become a writer by writing. There is no other way.”
I have a relative who is chronically ill. Long-term antibiotic use has left him with severe indigestion, brain fog, and fatigue.
As you may know, we have friendly gut microbes (called the “microbiome”) that help our metabolism, immune system, brain function, etc. Extensive antibiotic use can deplete and imbalance the microbiome, disrupting its key functions.
The cure is to transplant a healthy microbiome from a suitable donor, age 3 to 30, via their STOOL – this is called fecal microbiota transplant (FMT).
STOOL quality can be assessed by its appearance and a few questions about the donor.
We made snares from long grasses,
We caught one in ten; then
We prodded a bite and
We wore them as earrings.
I pinched their their necks for dewlaps —
Their red-ringed and speckled yellow arcs.
You, transfixed, favored not color but
Their harrassed concitations.
Was it the yelp of surprise
At the first bite?
Or was it watching them wriggle by their tails, defying gravity
A St. Anthony or St. Vitus?
We heard their tails grew back, but
We lacked the patience;
We prayed to see
Our dismemberments regenerate.
This is Fall, at 8:54 a.m., on 10/26/2020. Jamaica Plain, MA. (26/31)
“Poetry takes care of itself. All art does — that is paramount. In a survival race, I’m quite sure poetry will long outlast reality TV and Twitter.”
your subconscious
font of sedition and secession
irrefragable and heretical
be on your way
dripping devil
demoniacal
the way is full of obstacles
there is no such thing as herd immunity
only herds of gun-wielding oafs
demographic crunch?
worry not
you’ll soon be alone
untouchable
imperceptible
indistinct
This is Fall, at 9:56 a.m., on 10/25/2020. Jamaica Plain, MA. (25/31)
“Poverty, unemployment, inferior schools, social isolation, widespread availability of guns, and substandard housing are all breeding grounds for trauma. Trauma breeds further trauma; hurt people hurt other people.”
Convinced you’re lost, laying there in that Amazonian outpost — covered by a mosquito net — the masses of mosquitos, a deluge through the open windows. All that keeps you from complete ruination is the scrim of heavenly white fabric — as shear as your head feels, as empty of answers on how to get back. Your stomach roils with an invasion that can’t be stopped.
The stomach virus eats away at you from the inside, gnawing at the stuff of life within — at the hole in your heart glued over with spit and spent cartridges.
The siege inside lays waste to you, filling you up with legions of your own dead cells that are conscripted and committed to the front as fast the virus can kill them. And it kills them.
It kills them all.
A malarial waft, an unseen hand spreads hot unguent on your forehead.
Then a thick fetid smell: a melange of upturned earth with carcass of marmoset, and capybara.
(All I can say is… stop. Stop!)
Your time nears conclusion.
This is Fall, at 8:33 a.m., on 10/24/2020. Jamaica Plain, MA. (24/31)
“All words are Dada if they are correctly misused.”
thee istsfor manity reader 
