I have a story, incessantly traversing my thoughts, about before; the most slipshod shred of journalism ever constructed on thin ice. I want to unsubscribe from the national hand-wringing contest, swap out misery for mystery. It’s time to stop outsourcing joy and rediscover it in our own unlicensed, unauthorized selves; the beginnings of which are untraceable, the power, unimaginable.
I’m fuel-injected and turbocharged, internally combusting the fruits of green pastures. I’m amazed that my race ever took enough time off from mutual destruction to study marsupials’ baby pouches, inventing the useful pockets of my carpenter jeans.
Pinwheels and Tom Terrific propeller-hats harvest small local breezes. Who is digging their spurs into the mighty wind? I heard about a guy who started practicing breathing through a straw, refining his respiration of earth’s atmosphere to extract the intoxicating parts, a kind of soda shop pranayama. Within months he was breathing so deeply, he accidentally blew down the third little pig’s red brick house. Meanwhile continents away, a Belgian monastery secretly brews an ale darker than the total eclipse.
early mornings I sit
watching nature rule my backyard
the warp speed strumming of hummingbird wings,
their brief utterances like gargling a thousand tiny glass beads
at night the thrumming of crickets keeping perfect time
since long before clocks or metronomes were born
When I walk slow – feeling all the way down through the carpet, the finished floor, subfloor, joists, mudsills, the steel and concrete – copper pipes are quietly conducting electricity from the center of the earth.
I go inside at midnight
when the skunks and raccoons saunter across the deck
with insolent citizenship.
By day I climb down from Redwood Heights
to catch a bus to the city where I work with waning enthusiasm,
in a tall tower of pain where money rolls in, treachery abounds,
and nothing of substance is ever accomplished.
All the stories about daily life must be taken with an antacid chaser; the behaviors of bloated predators who lack the fitness for any actual hand to claw predation. I will pay some of my own precious attention, acquired miraculously through anonymous donation from the accident of my birth and the ineffable electricity of knowingness. Before exchanging that for the slim rewards I might have already won in sweepstakes or become eligible to buy on installment, I will invest it in truthfulness.
When the workday is done I catch a transbay bus home.
It crawls through the chaos of downtown San Francisco
where forty, skyscraper-high cranes are madly adding buildings
to the slowly sinking financial district.
We creep, by inches and car lengths into a perpetually snarled freeway,
the antithesis of free.
After the bridge, I hike back into the Mediterranean of Redwood Heights, drenched in the sweat of our micro climate.
If this was my last day on earth, I wouldn’t spend it fixing the roof. That’s for someone with a future. As the sum of human behavior thus far gets reckoned, magnificence and abject narcissism will fall through the same cracks, into the same shredder, becoming recyclable. The difference must be, subatomic particles participating in magnificence were in contact with it, tinged with it, possibly carrying forward some residue of it. Where is forward? What will happen next?
Doing is the buzz-kill that interrupts my bliss.
I wonder when someone will notice that I’ve already retired.
It could take 40 days and 40 nights of doing nothing to unchain my being.
If you were raised in small towns of America like I was, you might be surprised someday to find out that people continue to resent a colonialism we never learned much about from the textbooks – homogenized by committees for general consumption – which we barely read. Descendants of European conquistadors are still landing in Mexican harbors, thousands at a time on massive flotillas. Unlike their half starved, pox infested ancestors – crew members of Pizarro and Cortez – these passengers are well scrubbed, marinated in antibiotics, and overstuffed with cruise ship dinners. While their paychecks and investments fund the time-share real estate fraud, Mayan and Aztec and Incan royalty are mowing and blowing many lawns.
Rather than being loose, your screws,
according to the International Standards Organization,
ride in elongated sockets, making them adjustable,
like the interest rates on risky debt,
like the pulley’s tension on the drill press quill.
Catching the toe of my size 12 on a 5/4 stair tread nosing, I could have tumbled like Buster Keaton, or fallen into grace. I had to learn to dance with thoughts in order that they don’t keep me up at night. Sometimes I step back from the whirling carbide of the table saw to fumble through the pantry of my recollection for a reckless phrase, forgotten tone or reinvented color – amazed when I consider that we’re all jitterbugging the same semaphores, launching fireworks into our helplessly uninsulated nerves. Feeding stories into a machine that grows fat on a strict meal plan of zeroes and ones.
Sometimes I take unexpected vacations from the fight against earth’s rotation, the wind sprints on a glacier, the racing between red lights.
There seems to be no limit on how the deck can be shuffled
One small card when I was miniature
Opening into vast arrays as I wander into seniority
If you become the richest man in prison, holding most of the chips, you’re still incarcerated.
Where will you go to cash in your untold chip-richness?
In Baluchistan, 1973 there was hashish for the dollar equivalent of 5 cents a gram. The sales counter was manned by a young boy. In the next room the hash makers were extracting resins, stomping Ganja flower tops through large plastic sheets, the hard core smokers hyperventilating nearby on the ‘Hubble bubble’ pipe. There was a man who could blow smoke rings that gave birth to smaller rings; he had sparse English, explaining to me about the guy with the distantly focused eyes and mad disconnected grin next to him, “this man, no public”.
Crossing the border from Pakistan into Iran, outside the little customs room, a Dutch junky shamed me for not trying to smuggle something in. Maybe I could have. Toward the end of the long train ride, I had watched dozens of passengers leap into the desert before the border checkpoint and disperse into the dunes, carrying whatever illicit substances or identities they were hiding.
Still I’m persuaded, there’s no unlicensed trafficking of goods between this two stroke engine powered merry go round and whatever lies beyond the ride. So much shame and envy and aspiration expended over dead-ends. When we moved some years ago and had to put our belongings in storage until we could find a new home, the storage facility seemed modeled after a penitentiary.
While we launch across speed bumps,
Breaking the limit at a hundred plus,
Burning inches of rubber in sideshows,
The sun constantly hurls us nourishment from before history,
at the speed of light.
It doesn’t notice our infinitesimal accelerations.
Even blatant corruptions are undetectable from outer space.
The same unearned light keeps coming.
You might surpass the soup, but not the broth. You’re free-soloing a stack of razors, wondering about the sound of one shoe dropping. Mornings the dam breaks and the peace of nightly absence drowns in white water. Later, released, shivering the cyclonic force, you’re still not sure if the storybook self can find love.
Once there was the To Do list and then the Action Items were identified.
Every increasing decibel of the alarm disguises a reluctance.
One might become zero on the list of events that set off the motion detector of day to day surveillance.
I’m amazed at how notes can be arranged with each other; one before, one after another, as if to keep me off the straight and narrow. Words put together, justifying certain outcomes. Will anyone ever not have to learn to be treated badly? Will there be that exemption, toll roads around it eventually?
If people have less energy for charades these days, is it because they’re so strung out by their digital devices constantly trying to guess what they want to say?
In junior high we had Industrial Arts classes. Oblivious to our good fortune, we wasted some of that time, sneaking out to inhale and exhale the embers of dried plants and explore our adolescent uselessness, previously uninspected. I don’t remember the name of the crew-cutted, short sleeved button down shirt, pocket-protector wearing Technical Drawing instructor. Much later when I started designing real world things, some shred of what he taught must have stuck with me and I had a notion of how to draw it.
The wood shop teacher’s name I remember: Red Vile. I later learned of his reputation for muscle cars and roughneckedness. And then he showed up on stage at a high school holiday season assembly, wearing a red handkerchief headband and a shirt cut off at the arm pits, lighting up an enormous hay field spliff, mocking Hippies and draft dodgers. But how I originally remembered him, I had to complete a woodshop project which I had chosen to be a bookcase. Decades later I ran across that bookcase in the attic of my parents house, cleanly cut grooves which I didn’t remember cutting, still housed the shelves. Somehow Red helped students execute stuff like that, which they had no idea how to do, on the table saw, stationary sander, drill press and such, without any loss of limb that I knew of. We used to be the abilities that appliances got modeled after.
The earth has hosted all kinds of parties. From one-celled organisms to giant rats and sloths, and even gianter reptiles, eventually extinguished by glaciers, or meteors with earth in their trajectory. Sometimes the earth belches a volcano. Sometimes it sneezes and farts simultaneously and shits the bed so to speak, producing some freak shows like the one that’s going on now: the lowest among us, blithering into smithereens.
We’re just a species among many; optional, like the other endangered ones. If you were subletting somebody’s place and started talking shit to the landlord, you would find out fast how optional you are.
We’re incinerating our energy inheritance – placed in Trust hundreds of millions of years ago, held in escrow miles below visible sedimentary crusts, for future discovery – on a drunken binge of 24/7 lighting and entertainment, pouring concrete onto every inch of the lush habitat as though we have a better plan than the miraculous intelligence that produced it, and us. Stoking and prodding power plants for our dirty lights day and night to illuminate every TV show, every reckless casino gamble, every brief spasmodic ejaculation onto a porn star’s face, every call center server farm customer experience.
What is the purpose of the next project on our plan, who will have the courage to ask? If you need immunity you probably don’t have impunity. Maybe one shouldn’t be repairing a transcontinental bridge with the local watchmaker’s tools, or opening a bud of springtime with an electric can opener. All I’m saying is, use the right tools for the job. There’s a right situation for the magnifying glass, the telescope, microscope or binoculars. Not every job requires a tool; gelatin chainsaw doesn’t sound necessary. But every tool needs a job.
It’s hard to wrap it all up in one taco, not possible to say what it is or even whether it isn’t. Someone could get hurt, woken up on a subway hurtling into the outskirts of the greater metropolitan boroughs of heaven, peering into a smoky broken window where Bukowski is revising the King James Bible on an oil cloth place mat, hammering typewriter keys into pages stained with bourbon.
The fewer fights I have a dog in, the better I feel.
Regardless of my restlessness, there isn’t anything else to get,
anywhere else to get to.
My brother was exquisitely difficult. It was an art for him. Not many years after his terminal diagnosis, he started doing social experiments: what would happen if he let loose this or that Interestingly unacceptable behavior, as though he deeply understood that the rules didn’t apply to a condemned man.
Hanging out with that predicament, maybe I sensed that I too am condemned; since I was born I’ve been dying of natural causes, like everyone. My brother would probably say that if there’s more to you than your expiration date, you might have to do some experiments to find it. What if, for starters, Dolly Parton, who seems like a really great gal, had a meeting with the Dalai Lama, who seems like a really great guy, and they exchanged the wisdom of the diamond heart and the country tune.