Origin

"Hello?  Hello? Hello"

My mother is Scottish and my father is floating somewhere.  It’s where I get the Irish, which I am American, respectively.  And I am Irish which I american.  And I american. 

I read a wonderful story today about a man whose father died of lung cancer.  He shot himself in the head to meet him in heaven but his father wasn’t there. An angel told him that there was lung cancer in heaven too, and it had gotten his father again.  I thought this was the funniest thing I’d read in years. 

My mother works in a predominantly school Mexican which is to say that they are all Americans. So for this job (that she had to take because my father had started floating and quit working) she had to learn Spanish.  Not Spanish Castilian.  But on the contrary Spanish Mexican.  My sister and I inherited an interest in America Latin.  It’s a coincidence grand.

My stepfather Joe is German and I think a Jew.
He's good with cars too.

My sister doesn’t really like Joe and I feel
bad for that but families are difficult.
For instance my mother’s side has shaky
hands and I can't reach my father’s side .
But I’ve always had a good relationship with Joe
who I have taken as my father.

How would Hitler have    

Died were the Russians not                                                                                             
To have won Stalingrad and
Pushed all the way into
Berlin to take down     
The old city and make it rubble?                                                               

                                                                                                                                                                 

     
It was            lung  cancer              that would   have    killed    Hitler because all that smoke from the bombs and    bullets   of the last stand    in       Berlin              that failed    and led him to put a gun to his head   and say,    “eins,      zwei,              drei!“  in lovely         little         iambs so the Russians    wouldn’t do googly 

things with  his body

And remember, if you're looking

For Hitler, he won't be there

Because of what he did in Poland

There's lung cancer in heaven too.

Type

I was on the porch a few minutes ago and could see the moon move because I had the reference point of a power line. 

On the internet I could find a man in seconds bending down to lick a woman’s vagina at a party while he masturbates.  Never try to subtract words, or anything fancy the time for that is over.  And God, if mothers were sexual what could we rely on!  Even if it’s light out or chemicals are on your hands take someone else’s food right out of the saucepan and put it in your mouth. 

It is right to talk about time going backwards because we just did.  And not playing with time is the wrong thing to do.  This is Georgia font.  A new one.  Invented in 1993 specifically for the internet.  There's really some awful stuff on the internet.  

Georgia is tall.  Look how high that IT goes.  Love, oh be with me, you know your name, say it, type anything, because they're just letters TO SHOW THE VARIATIONS, but you're saying something without saying something because where this is black are noises and people you've never met.  

This A is in Times New Roman and has 4 serifs.  See the little knobs jutting out from each leg?  These are serifs. Serif letters create the illusion of a pen-stroke.  A sans-serif a looks like this: A. This is Verdana.  Notice how the bottoms are flat?  I find these letters are more honest.  True to their formation.  For there was never a pen here.  

Verdana was designed to be easily read on computer screens (so this is the time for looking at pictures of Goldie Hawn on the internet). Verdana is a portmanteau, a word made of two preexisting words:  verdant means “something green” and Ana is the eldest daughter of the inventor of Verdana.  

Smog is made because the eye perceives smoke and fog together. 

Chatroulette.com is a website that pairs strangers from around the world for webcam-based conversations. Visitors to the website begin an online chat (video, audio and text) with another visitor who is chosen at random.

Recently we’ve been talking about the noises in our house: the little clicks and nudges that accompany the clock when you're alone and nobody else can say exactly what anything means.  
 

At any point either user may leave the current conversation by initiating another random connection.

There’s one from Tunisia.  And a little farmboy who looks wistfully away from the screen.  Behind him a fake fireplace shows the image of fire.  There is a shirtless child sitting all the way across the room.  There is a man dancing in his wheelchair, a furious masturbator, a shadowy room empty in Costa Rica.  And with a flash, a Chinese boy takes a picture of my face and turns the camera on himself.     

Waverly TN

“Thisser buldin’ useta sell guns onna black market round World War I,” the little boy said rocking on his heels and pointing to a black building, “an ma uncle owns a treller park four miles down that roud.”  On alone my rumbling bike I chased was.  

He again says behind me running, “Ma uncle owns a treller park four miles down that roud!” 

Like I said, he was behind me running in little circles in little feet sticking shortly out of his denim overalls which looked like cold water the way night hit them “four miles. Ma uncle owns a treller park jess four miles down that roud.”

He’d said this before when I was on the bench. My feet touching the ground then, one below the other on the lip of a downhill, my bike unturning by my side not waiting or resting for it was and is a bike.  I was on the bench there and he faced gravely and pointed with his whole arm to where the light stopped in a circle of blackness where it began 

on the outskirts with hills and cows.  I think they are hills.  The town begins to stick itself up from the woods and fields with dog legged brick walls with their tops made white; then granite slabs poking sideways out of the river: lonely red and yellow gas stations with one light above them. 

The speeding bike below me pumped toward the hotel as a hundred faces at a restaurant, their picnics laid out on the lawn sprawled basking in the sun that was not there for it was night, turned toward me their voices growing up big across the street and their wide mouths open in dotted calls till I me was behind them.  

Alone I was on the bench and a rugged dirty-looking couple with a small concerned boy in light overalls approached and the boy had a face and and rocked on his heels like a grandfather whistling on a porch with grass poking through the boards.  They told me about a hotel down the hill where the light was.  

Though the man was not a man at all and the girl too had the stain of age behind her small face.  They stood six inches below me and he had a mustache. She wrapped her arms around the boy who looked sadly for me, grewing old and younger when their two heads came one.

Just a children.  All young stood seriously pitch-forked gray in the joyless.  This were not costumes and never were.  Children paced slow like adults in dim in streets in lines, stopping at trees with lights in them to fondle up padded hills with eyes free.

And the boy began to talking fast and metallic as I grabbed my bike he said “jess four miles down that roud, jess four miles down that roud, jess four miles down that road!” raising his arm to point to a dircle of carkness with chills and hows here it all began.

Stepping out of divine then in front of me a line of redheaded schoolgirls all braced up said “I’ve never seen anybody ride a bicycle before!” coming or going from a what, falling almost into me in a line of themselves like a blown stack, the boy merely a baby now silence standing over his feet, "I've never seen anybody ride a bicycle before!” or the sun cutting through buildings, "I've never seen anybody ride a bicycle before!” behind me went I, though she often had, and I know she had, often, seen someone often ride a bicycle before. 

And my eyes and I move suspended to a blue doored motel with a white eyed man inside a smoky television room with cigarettes in a broken machine where a tributary runs by a waffle house in the parking lot and I in the sharp neon lite through the window take sleep until the next day and afterwards when the town was bathed in true sunlight and sitting old folks drank coffee on the streets all around and I humbled walking my bike past all folks homes and slept at the bottom of a hill in hard blue sheets where I’d slept the night before.  

Pretending

We need the power of Jesus to keep us sane.  One who begins writing in this way I suppose is considered religious.  If I began today to write like that and continued until I died people they would say I was a believer.  That is the power of words.  But I’m not a believer.

He woke me up with something I couldn't discern.  A mumble perhaps.  Something about the night.  I told Adam when I'd gathered myself that the men around the corner were good men.  They would give cigarettes to any man who approached them. I'd already asked for two before falling asleep on a bench.  He returned a minute later empty-handed.  His puffy 49ers jacket reminded me of those I would buy from Sears with my mom as a kid and she would check the tag to see if it was down or not those were low times.  

Adam said he was from DEEtroit.  He had a young spirit.  His face looked like the hood of an old car.  One tooth stuck out his deserted mouth at all times like a tic tac.  I told him I was glad it was warming up as if I’d been out there several days and turned a bit on my side.  I said my old lady threw me out.  Shiet, aint that a bitch, he said.  He had a comforting smile.  I lied about how poor I was and made my life plans sound humble.  Like I expected his were.  I was vague. 

God befit me to wander more.  I told Adam (goodnight) that we weren’t to be hopping trains or eating fruit out of the woods together and went in not the direction of home in case he followed me.  

I asked a trash man at La Madeline’ for (surely he would) have a cigarette as the thundering arm crashed down above our heads, he said that no he quit thirty years ago during Vietnam.  I had assumed that war made people smoke. I looked at him.  He was a garbage man who talked like a poet for a brief second and smiled at me as napkins fell down around his head. 

People were setting up signs for various elected offices up and down St. Charles. Figures with mallets drove crosses into the ground and stapled signs to them without looking up.  There was a large circle of hip democrats setting up a tent.  Cool I said, feeling like a creepy uncle, that you’re involved, doing a tango with myself, at the local level.

The republican tent for Fenn French held a sleeping black man in a chair covering his face with his hands.  I looked at the creamy and red cheecked faces of the democrats then back at the cold solitary figure beside them.  The sun was coming up.  I saw flashes of love.  I had a bit of a 24 ounce Bud Lite remaining.  A girl looked at me with wide eyes.  I went home and let myself inside.  I watched some pornography and laid down alone in bed to sleep.  

Communion

Something like precision

The journey of Man is intrinsically linked to science and technology.  Together, they form the narrative of human history.  Time is on the X axis and technology is on the Y axis and the relationship between the two is like this:  /


Modernity postulates, by looking from the future backwards, that the present state was inevitable.  It purports to write its own history, following that skinny line (/) right back to the bone. 

enumerates space

Conventional physics says:  force= mass x acceleration.

Ok. 

and purports to have answers

But Einstein said “an event may be the cause of another only if both take place in the same point of space.”  This means that there is no guaranteed cause and effect relationship between two separate things. 

Einstein also said “God doesn’t play dice with the universe,” which means that when we see chaos, it’s only that our eyes cannot see.  And last week I heard we sped up a particle past the speed of light.  The implication of us shooting a particle past the speed of light is that it briefly traveled somewhere else in time. 

This leaves us with a serious philosophical problem: if a direct relationship between G and D or X and Y or J and C can never be established to a certainty, it follows that 1+1 is sometimes 0.  It’s also sometimes eggsnfishnkneesntoes.  Sometimes it’s cornmealhashumbrellasquare.  The universe must have space for these realities. 

to lymph pus and salt water;

This is us.  Blobs. 

to one misguided glance

There is an inherent flaw in the nature of understanding. 

or chosen word.

The Arabs said that the body of a woman is like a fruit.  The Greeks said it was like a tree.  The English said it was a landscape. 

A thousand ways I could tell you one solitary thing;

We cannot simultaneously know the speed and location of particles without interfering in their nature.  These particles rear their heads at our microscopes and begin to spin because they are, themselves, the size of light.  To see them you must force them to be seen. 

The problem looks like this:  r=E(w{i}) (a{i}) (a{i})

I see you from a distance. As you come nearer I see faces on your body.  A white shawl clings to you and becomes erect with the wind.  You see me sitting patiently in a lime green chair and the clothes begin to fall off. 

Do you know how to construct a man? 

That in the end,

The paramount effect of sexuality is its production of involuntary physical reactions from without.  Flesh perceives flesh is drawn to flesh.  Sex suggests sex.  Every perception is responded to.  And every reaction is in turn perceived.  Our bodies are distinct, yet in their silent knowledge of each other move closer.  And every possibility that is suggested becomes so:

arms and legs and asses shaking in the air like tambourine players but in silence or groaning.

all food comes down

Start by cutting the shape of a Man from cardboard.  Make it life-sized.  Give it feet to stand on.  Put paint on its face.   Build him in front of the sprawling hills of Algeria.  Make holes where his eyes are.  Poke one where his penis is.  Put slits in his hands so he can be proven to bleed. 

To eating;

Splatter a heart on his chest in red—it will stand out so much against the rocky sand.  Let him float and explore until the landscape changes and his feet become dirty.     

Every partner, one meal

If you bring him near the ocean he will expire quickly.  The land near the sea is flat and lined with brambles.   His eyes will become large and his knees will sag and he will fall into the brush with his mouth open. 

you never tire of.

The last part of him will be some insignificant bit like his arm or foot and a small hill will form where he was. 

And between them is for once nothing,

The way entering you feels.

My mind goes white.

Love that little space

I look at you and you begin to look like me. 

Where your ass

I try and remember my task.

Meets your back  

My mind fills with the names of roads and sound. 

A Test of Will

I told my friend Will to write the start of this thing for me.  Sorry if it’s a waste of time.  

So, Mr. Schugrue asked me to write this paper, essay, literature review for him. He insited it must be me that writes it. So I will write what he requests. Sp often you teachers require a  paper that is x amount of  pages, But what I believe is that you request a story that has meaning behind it. A story that has as a moral dilemma. What yoyu want is a story that has a story thWhat at has conflict, and resurrection. What I will tell yoyu tonight is ba story that has neither of these cxlauses. What I want to tell you is a story that has a normal stlory> “normal” as you would call it> what you want is a girl who is a damsal is disteess. What I will give you is a story that is a girl (because you want it) that fails. because what life is is a successun on failures. You put your self on a pedestal. you think because you write you are a great god. what I want to terll you is that you are a humnna. A NO BODY. you think you can survive in this world but what you have to realive I s that you wil fail. when you understand this fact then you can start to write.

So ;et me start my story. I am a man. Yes A person who has a penis. But what I want to tewll you is that if you create a universe.. anything can happen. Fuck this world. think about something outside of this world.  What if … What if the world as you know it where to be exint .. then we must start over. and how must we start over. with a sence of community. Community involves loving peple for whjo they are. I and let us design a place where we can all live together. thjis can not happen. so let us give the benefit of the doubt to the person you dojt lknow. know him learn him. give human kind a chance… fuck this future. what thios future involves is fucking other people. … liven with them …. live to them .. live .. fucking live fucki society live.

He just went to take a pee. 

Now he wants to delete it.  But I won’t let him.  I read over what he wrote, and I suppose my part of the story will be to interpret what he said.  Now he’s stumbling across the bar.  

I had the idea to write this blog as I was getting drunk.  Then I realized that is a stupid idea for several reasons.  One, I am starting to feel odd writing this at the bar; two, something will be spilled on the computer, and three, the chances of writing something substantive are extremely small.  Maybe I’m getting there. 

First course of action: acknowledge the gorgeous bartender.  No.  Done that.  Second, turn to the reserved couple sitting straight up in their seats to my right.

Time to spy: “any other elicit drugs?” he asks,  “cocaine exstasy?”  I can’t hear what she says.  He looks into his beer, “I did alright with them.  Weed?”  She perks up, crosses her pudgy legs “I did smoke weed.  But then I started to get really paranoid.”  He laughs.  “Yeah I used to make brownies for Mardi Gras.”
They’re a couple in their thirties.  They must not know each other very well.  They're quiet.

“I’ve actually done LSD twice,” she says and looks embarrassed.  She doesn’t know why.  Something about college.  The man says “always, always.”  The conversation is getting deeper.  He says something I can't hear then something about not going to the bathroom on LSD.  She says she came back from the kitchen once with a mouthful of food and sat on the  couch and all the sudden thought she was eating the couch so she spit it out everywhere.  Then I guess they took her outside.  They laid her in the grass and said to calm down.  To feel the weight of the world underneath her.    She felt she was going to feel like that for the rest of her life.  The man says his friend thought that everyone was dead once.  And he had to take his wallet out and show him pictures of himself and his parents to convince him they were alive. 

The man goes to pee and she checks her cell phone.  Stirs her drink happily, reflecting on something.  His forthcoming company.

I guess this post will be about drugs.  As it began, in a way.  

Three years ago I did mushrooms with eight of my high school friends.  For hours we all riled in a park repeating “that’s there, that’s there” and “it’s all about water, it’s all about water”.  Which it is. And everything was moving.  The drugs really turned on me suddenly we were watching a spider eating something.  I ran away from everyone, rolled in trash, took my shirt off and called my sister.  A girl gave me a cat-call from a passing car.  It hit really hard and I started crying.  

Will is back from peeing.  He is watching me type this right now.  

He says, “three years ago?  Fuck that!  These people you’re writing about were just trying to fuck people in sophomore year of college.  I’ve gotten past ‘fucking bitches’.” 

He says I am specifically trying to intellectually stimulate myself, but actually I am stimulating myself at “fucking Madigans.”  Now he sees I am copying everything he’s saying.  Now he is mad.  He says I am like a “court…..” but he can’t think of the word….I say register.  He says that sounds right and he’s quiet. “Observer”, he says.  “Right now what you’re doing is fucking observing.  That’s it.  What you’re failing to do is introduce your synthesis.  You are summarizing a fucking bar conversation, writing down everything those people are saying.”  

He’s getting too mad to talk to.  “You are paying the fucking money and you play by the rules and you’ll get your fucking degree!” he yells.  “That’s bullshit!” He’s watching my fingers while I type this right now like it’s magic.  “Just because you follow the rules and paid the money,” he repeats slowly, “doesn’t mean you know JACK SHIT.” 

So I am given a degree because I am following the rules.  It’s getting serious again:  I must break the rules.  He asks me without wanting an answer who the people are who make the rules.    

I have to take a break to defend myself…

Now he is attacking paragraphs and spaces.   And the fact that I need a computer at all to express what I want to say.  I say I can’t read my handwriting.  He says:

“If you can’t read your own handwriting you’re a failure!”

Now I have to go pee.  Let’s give Will another go:  Here is Will:

He went to pee. Our generation. generation xz, generatiojn y . ;ltgh,u8upoyt087i8utpyoit

Ok I’m back, but now we’re talking about the idea of the draft and what heroism means.  He feels awful about never having been challenged by anything before.  He wants adversity; says our generation has yet to be tested.  I cannot write anymore. 

Two hours later I decided to give Will the computer one more time.  His head is on a table with a napkin stuck to it.  Here's what he wrote,

"so..im sitshit has gome dowm doing it doing it closing uop shjopting here next to this gurl..."

That's all.

Diner

I was at a diner this summer.  I felt like I could still light up a cigarette inside, though that's illegal pretty much everywhere in Chicago.  It was a real old one.

Her hair’s bright.  Unnaturally red.  Not half-bad from behind.  That’s the idea.  The walls are maroon.  Aqua, surf, and palm tables are scattered throughout.

A creak from the door.  A short middle aged man steps in quietly.  Frizz meets him at the register.  Frizz is the waitress with the unnaturally red hair not half bad from behind.  A little terrier by his black shoes.  He looks past her.

Romero approaches quickly from the kitchen wiping his hands on a towel.

-        God man where u been?

-        Romero!

-        Acupulco, you?

-        U know…workin’ hard.

Both laugh.  Romero does a little dance in his skeleton’s frame.  Michael stands up.

-        Romero.

-        Yees Michael?

-        Corn.

-        Yees.

He bows.  Acapulco follows him closely.  My eyes fall to his bulging crotch as he walks by.  He sits at the counter by the kitchen.  His black straight seamless shirt is unbuttoned down to his hairless sternum.  Bald head too.  Hiding some sort of ethnicity.  He settles in.  Orders five meatballs.  Sauce on the side.  The bright red in the white china.  Then the meat

-Yeah, five.

He holds his hand up.    

In walks an older man wearing a Hawaiian shirt.  He announces “BLT” and seats himself in the corner by the window, facing the wall.  Frizz asks Romero to take his order.

-       BLT please.

-        Flies?

He smiles, exposing a gold tooth under his unfortunate mustache.

-        No rice.

-        Flies.

-        Hold the rice please. 

-        Eff arr i eee ess

-        No fries. 

Hawaiian nods.  A bar of sunlight lies across Acapulco’s shoulders and neck.  He looks pensively into the steel kitchen.  Michael holds a newspaper up over his shoulder.  The headline is about the terrorist attack in Norway. 

-        You see this Joe?

-        Yeah.

Acapulco cuts a meatball in half. 

-        Jesus.  I got fifty graves over there. 

-        Where? 

-        Norway.

-        Who?

-        Family.  Ancestors.  Fifty or so graves. 

Acapulco chews slowly. 

-        You gonna’ get buried there?

-        No.  I’ll probably go with dad—mom n’ dad.  Over here in Glenvi—Jesus H Christ!

Michael leans back in his chair and looks up at Frizz, letting his newspaper float to the table. 

-        Just glance at it.  Every time I read my paper, you try and read the whole damn thing over my shoulder. 

-        Oh I—

-        —you walk by and glance at what I’m reading.  Glance.  Don’t read.

And a man walked in talked about dead people that used to come there.  He paid and on the way out he paused triumphantly by the door and told Frizz that nobody carries five dollar bills anymore.

Cafe'

My metro stopped (metro buses are absolutely packed in Mexico City, people really don’t want to be late.  Once a guy dove through the doors horizontally and onto a lady).  A beauty met my eyes I looked at her up and down and up finally keeping her gaze safe behind the glass.  I started smiling.  She did.  Laughed even, if I remember correctly.  The doors were closing I glanced at them.  My heart was going.  I wondered what was happening.  The apathetic driver started the bus and she raised her hand for me.  Bent four fingers at me in a little wave.  A real ghost.  I see her outline in my head. 

I'm writing at a coffee shop.  This pretty girl is packing up.  I need a coffee.  I don’t want to be jumpy though.  Wait for some eye contact...There!  My lips are chapped.  She looks Jewish.  I've been tinkering about Jewish people a lot recently.  Her acne is appealing for some reason.  Wearing spandex.  Sex in the bathroom under that first God.

The cashier is pretty too.  Skinny.  Doesn’t smile too much.  I could tell her I look at cloud formations with the seriousness of a car accident.  Maybe write that down, slide it across the counter and wink at her.  Who knows what she might say.

One time I fell asleep on the bus and a pretty high school girl shook me awake.  We were in a poor neighborhood on a steep hill.  She had on a short plaid skirt.  Long, tanned legs.  Coin-sized ankles.  While we waited I wrote this poem called “Dialysis” in one go watching birds hop around on the sidewalk.

I knew a little bird once.
The little round type
That hops around.

He lay in a hospital bed
For months
Waiting for a healthy kidney.
When he got a new one,
The meds he was taking
Fucked him up so bad

He got an infection
In his brain and
He died.

The next morning,

My father paced
The sidewalk before first light.

I walked by.

He glanced at me,
Stuttered once,

Twice,
Then flew away.

Eventually I lost my patience and started walking.  There was a dead construction worker lying in the middle of the road.  The birds landing all around him. 

There it was: 

"cars crept up and down the hill, blinded drivers honked at the backs of buses, the man's orange helmet created a protective ring around itself on the sidewalk"

And there were birds everywhere.  

I pay for my coffee silently and pretend to look at something by my hands when the barista's eyes near mine.  I think about the clouds briefly in the marble counter and the rain where coffee beans come from.  The humidity somehow being released in the coffee.  If I had the guts I'd tell her my father passed away when I was only five and show her my poem.

I've never told anyone but "Dialysis" is a rip-off of a John Lennon poem called

"I Sat Belonely".

"I sat belonely down a tree,
humbled fat and small.
A little lady sing to me
I couldn't see at all.

I'm looking up and at the sky,
to find such wondrous voice.
Puzzly, puzzle, wonder why,
I hear but I have no choice.

'Speak up, come forth, you ravel me',
I potty menthol shout.
'I know you hiddy by this tree'.
But still she won't come out.

Such sofly singing lulled me sleep,
an hour or two or so
I wakeny slow and took a peep
and still no lady show.

Then suddy on a little twig
I thought I see a sight,
A tiny little tiny pig,
that sing with all it's might

'I thought you were a lady',
I giggle,-well I may,
To my surprise the lady,
got up-and flew away."

Why I write

You ever get that feeling in the bottom of your spine?  That’s called your "writing".  It’s large.  Rounded. Shaped like a human skull.  Itchy.  Maybe you’re wondering where your leftovers are?  In your fat ass. The thing about writing is that it’s something one can always do. Any time you want.  It’s ‘allowed’ so to.  It’s also very difficult to make a living doing it because really to be a writer is to be gay, poor, Jewish then confused and smart as all hell struggling in good lighting with interesting friends and people to watch over you.  Eventually you will make it and you will be redeemed by everyone who snubbed you.  In actuality you need to do some apologizing.  I’m doing it right now. 

Writing to me is an escape from loneliness.  There’s no other way to be truly sexed than someone knowing what it is you mean. 

Death is everyone’s big problem.  Really. 

An important thing to keep in mind is that we all write within a genre.  It’s important to find what genre you are!  There shouldn’t be any thing called a genre.  Fiction I like comes out like poetry.  That’s what I like.  Is it windy out there?  Check and see if my writing’s OK.  It’s fine?  Oh good.  Click.  Well. 

Imagine all of this is in Chinese.  I learned the other day about early English.  Old English.  So old it would give you a tummy ache.  So back then it came out like German and everyone was walking around talking German.  Then some French bros came in and flipped the script right?  So talking talking talking; try listening for the German next time a friend is speaking to you in English. 

I miss my mother.  That’s another good reason to write is missing your mother.  She’s not dead or anything drastic but maybe I’ll send her a poem every now and again. One time I even named one after her but in the poem she smoked.  And her skin rolled up like chicken skin.