25Jan / 2010

It was the seventh day, I was the seventh son

The God of the Office took the elevator all the way up to his floor. The forty-ninth floor. Seven times seven. He had to think of AC/DC every time he hit the button. “It was the seventh day, I was the seventh son, and it scared the hell out of everyone.”

He could tell something was wrong, off somehow, as soon as he swiped his ID card through the reader and went inside, past the big hydroponic plants that the guys came and traded out for healthier-looking ones once every six months (they used to do it every three months but in times such as these). The office manager and the assistant office manager and one of the um one of the assistants, those guys who… like apprentices only they work for free, the one of the oh fuck am I senile, the office manager, her assistant and one of those guys working there for free were standing around the office manager’s desk, which stood in the entry way, beneath some somehow contractually-required wall art, a large abstract painting that the God of the Office rather liked, and they all looked up when he came in and the guy working for free – the Intern, shit, intern, intern, intern, broke off their animated conversation, discussion, even, to state with some relief: Here he is!

What’s up? asked the God of the Office.

He’s out on the ledge! all three of the others said, simultaneously, in unison, whatever, in stage whispers.

What, again? Said the God of the Office.

Yeah, they all said.

Aw, Christ, said the God of the Office and put his stuff down by his desk in his office and hung his jacket from his chair and in his shirtsleeves climbed out onto the ledge to try to talk the God of the Ledge back in.

Don’t come any closer! said the God of the Ledge.

The God of the Office sort of behind his back motioned at the others to stick their heads the hell back in the windows and leave the two of them alone. The God of the Office sat down on the ledge, carefully, and dangled his feet.

The ledge was a regular highrise ledge, a foot or two wide, going all the way around the building. The street was forty-nine, fifty stories down. The office buildings across the street were way closer than the ground. It felt as if, if you jumped, or fell, maybe you could reach out if you could get any sort of trajectory going, and catch yourself on one of those buildings before you hit the ground, but both Gods knew this was not true, this was not the case. The science of ballistics did not work like that.

The people working inside those other buildings looked like – and I guess were – biological specimens on display in well-lit dioramas, for it was a darkish morning, with a fog rolling in. A very thick fog. They looked like someone else’s dreams you heard about once and which somehow stuck with you for some reason, and in the hearing they became so much more vivid than your own.

Don’t come any closer, said the God of the Ledge.

I heard you, said the God of the Office.

Yeah, but you keep sidling closer. I’m not stupid. You do this every time.

The God of the Office was about an arm’s length away. Okay, okay, he said.

They sat there, the two of them, and watched as the lights in the buildings a couple blocks away twinkled and went out, disappeared from sight as the fog swallowed the city. The sounds from the street grew muffled and stopped. After another minute, even the offices across the street had disappeared and they were alone out there on the ledge, in silence, dimly lit in the thick morning fog.

I love the fog, said the God of the Office.

The God of the Ledge shrugged and nearly slipped off the ledge. He scrambled back and leaned against the building. So you always say, he said.

And this, wow, I don’t want to oversell it or anything, but this is some nice fog, said the God of the Office. When the God of the Ledge looked away the God of the Office handcuffed himself to the God of the Ledge, wrist to wrist.

You have a death wish? said the God of the Ledge.

No, said the God of the Office. I have a life wish. For both of us.

Yeah, well, not me. You might be regretting this later. If you’re betting I won’t take you with me.

The God of the Office shrugged, and almost fell off the ledge. Shit! he muttered as he scrambled further back on the ledge. The God of the Ledge helped him. They both, the two of them, sat there, hearts beating wildly, and leaned against the building and stared into fog for a while until their heart rates normalized.

There are worse deaths than leaping into fog, said the God of the Ledge.

I was just thinking the same thing, said the God of the Office. Last night watching an Alec Baldwin movie with my wife, I nearly choked to death on a piece of stale popcorn. All I could think, while it was happening, is what a sucky death that would be.

I was thinking of something slow and nasty, said the God of the Ledge.

Of course you were, said the God of the Office. Here. He took a sip from a pocket flask and passed it to the God of the Ledge and they sat there drinking single malt and staring into the nothing of the fog until they began to hallucinate shapes rotating there in the nothingness.

I heard what I thought was a muezzin, said the God of the Office, finally, breaking the silence after a minute. Even though he spoke gently it sounded loud and he lowered his voice further. But it turned out to be boys yodeling “Jingle Bells” as they ran through the snow.

I saw a ring of bird feathers in the snow under the bird feeder, said the God of the Ledge. A perfect circle, all pointing outward, with just a little blood, and two bird feet standing up in the center of it. As if a bird had exploded in some weird cartoon.

Aren’t cats great? said the God of the Office. Speaking of nasty ways to die.

A person I love was unkind, said the God of the Ledge.

What, to you? said the God of the Office. He shrugged, carefully. He stared out into the fog. The whisky had sort of a metallic aftertaste that he reckoned came from the metal flask. The fog was so thick that he could no longer see even the God of the Ledge, only hear him, and that only barely. He shrugged again, for practice, testing how strongly he could shrug without falling.

I was at an exhibition, he said. I was at an exhibition of impressionist art and I watched my wife looking at the art and fell in love with her all over again. The way she looks at a painting, I really like to watch that, you know?

Now the fog had grown so thick he couldn’t hear an answer, if one came. He couldn’t even see the ledge upon which he sat, couldn’t see himself. Visibility zero, hand in front of your face, nothing.

The God sat there and sat, and thought about small things that had amazed him.

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19Jan / 2010

2010 Metamorphosism St. Valentine’s Day Limerick Contest

IMPORTANT NOTICE: THERE HAS BEEN A LAST-MINUTE RULE CHANGE! SEE BELOW!

Things you should know, in no particular order:

This contest has been going for years, and is extremely popular. The entries are awe-inspiring. Last year some of the winners got a prize. This year, I have saved one or more of my books (Little-Known Facts) and will award it/them as a prize. I think I will get someone else to adjudicate the contest for me this year. THE DEADLINE IS 13 FEBRUARY 2010. Winners will be announced on Valentine’s Day.

RULES ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE. That’s just the way life is. Anything else would be, like, trying to deny this fact about our existence. Here are the rules at the present moment:

Entries must be a limerick. Go to wikipedia.org, type “limerick” in the box, go to the entry about the poetic form, not the town, and read.
Or google it, or whatever you people do.
Limericks must include a structural misconception.
Extra points for composers, musical forms, and Mahatma Gandhi jokes.
Report on last year’s contest here.
The arbitrary structural misconception rule was throwing people off (it was that, right?) so that has been eliminated. And composers have been done before, I think. And Gandhi wasn’t really being milked for the maximum comedy there, despite the fact that he used to sleep naked with young women to test his resolve, according to Wikipedia or someplace.
So instead, the following rules will be in place:
The limericks must be, as limericks often are, about love, especially its dodgier aspects BUT however use of the word “love” will result in instant disqualification. (Gamma suggested that one, I’m so proud.)
Extra points will be awarded for the following: disgraced medical treatments, freshwater amoeba, character actors from the “That Guy” list of actors, skeletal bones, Irish politics, Irish writers, legal concepts, punctuation, and apocrypha.

SUBMIT ENTRIES IN THE COMMENTS TO THIS POST! Please include a valid email address (not posted) so that you can be contacted in case you win. Or don’t, whatever.

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17Dec / 2009

Amalgam fillings found to cause Gypsy curses

Wow, the mojo asana post was a real spam magnet.

I love my new yoga mat so much.

I still feel energetic, although at a more socially acceptable level. I was a bit talkative yesterday. When the cat got me up at 4 this morning, I was, four, okay, cool, an hour more to fuck off.

And I’m really looking forward to the effects doodads Santa is bringing me, although I sort of dread a little bit the look on Alpha’s face when I stick the oyster mic on the saw and run it through the one with all the buttons.

Maybe I’ll wait until her next business trip to do that, in fact.

New goal: clean out my workshop so I have a place to put all this junk.

And lose weight.

And memorize some new jokes, as long as I’m at it.

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16Dec / 2009

The Mojo Asana

So we were all like, wah, do we have to go to yoga, last night, Alpha and I, by “we” I mean “I”, and not really “wah” but, it’s cold out, a nice fire is a tempting thing, but we went, both of us, readily in the end, and willingly, a new yoga place with a new teacher because Alpha got robbed at the last place and it gave us a bad feeling sort of, and the people here looked nice, and hey, she had yoga mats for sale so I got a new yoga mat first off, and we ordered yoga cushions, so it was worth it right there, because I hadn’t had a yoga mat before, always just borrowed spares. Plus there was a fairly pretty, young brunette with nice hips I did a good job of not staring at, sort of a sad look in the depths of her eyes, just the way I like, sad and vulnerable, and the teacher instructed in more detail and the asanas were in general more strenuous than at the last place. Less exotic-language singing, just an Om at the end and Namaste, and at the beginning a story about a little boy who wanted to meet god and had lunch with an old lady at a park, shared his lunch with her on a bench, no conversation, just smiles, and when he got home his mom asked him what he had been up to all day since he was in such a good mood, and he said he had lunch with god and she has a nice smile, and the old woman when she got home was asked by her son the same question and she said, I had lunch with god and he is a lot younger than I expected which story, okay, but OTOH it pretty much sums up my personal theology right there.¹ So another good sign, I guess, or at least not bad. And in the relaxation winding-down thing at the end she — the instructor — talked about “sending smiles” to various body parts, such as feet and legs etc.

And we came home and went to bed and fuck if I didn’t wake up at 2 in the morning so fucking pumped up with energy, mojo and ideas, my legs so full of fucking smiles, like restless-leg syndrome on crystal meth, that I ran downstairs so as not to wake my wife and licked all the Christmas card envelopes, and sorted them by country of destination for easier postal service and read another chapter in Inherent Vice. It was like being plugged into a wall socket. Ideas for novel chapters and blog posts, such as the following:

Beta visited me at lunch yesterday to sign Christmas cards and chat. She was wearing a frilly sort of sleeveless black mini-dress over jeans and I told her that she looked like someone who had escaped from a circus. She was all, huh? I meant it in a positive way. I have always admired and enjoyed her unique, personal fashion sense. Dunno if she took it the way I intended. And I have liked the dress over jeans thing since (one of) my beautiful cousin(s) used to visit back in the, I guess, early 70s dressed like that, she and her hippie friends, and I thought it looked cool.

I also had a series of footnotes to include in that post there but, no time! I didn’t get started writing or painting or surfing the internet because it was 2AM and I wanted sleep. I went back to bed and mananged to sleep from about 3 to 4.30 or 5. Had some dream about sex, at least I think it was about sex, may have involved fucking, or not. It is unclear.

On the way to school, I was telling Gamma how hyper I was, thanks to whatever new mojo asanas we had done, talking at a marvelous rate and she was like, Heh, I believe you. And she told me about an end-of-the-world dream she had had, one of a lot she’s been having apparently, and I would have been, gee, interesting, except it was a spookily close match for a similar dream a friend of mine had a couple days ago so I was like, paying close attention and asking questions such as, How was the weather? and Who was in it? and all the details were matching. It was snowing. I was in it.

And right now, I look out the window and see: it is snowing. And I am here, reflected in the window.

Whoa.

_____

1 My only, or main, problem with this theology is it means the douche in the Doblo who cut me off in traffic this morning is also god. Which, man.

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21Oct / 2009

The Monster Index, I

The number eight looks so round and feels so eckig. Angular.

What color will the sky be when the sun expands to consume its child? Will mankind retreat to the outer planets? Will it be calculable, when to move to Mars, when beyond? When to seek a new galaxy?

Is it out of proportion, how we who know ourselves to be finite cling to infinity with our stories of afterlife, of reincarnation, of scientific possibility?

Here on this weenie little mote.

And yet: the dice stood on their corners. Did his hand touch mine when I picked them up for another roll?

Why do we need ghost stories? Because we see ghosts. Why do we need monster stories? Because we are monsters. Because we walk at night and sleep during the day and hide our true selves.

A society so adept at channeling desires, at controlling thoughts must perforce create monsters. When I think thoughts not my own, when experts tell me what to want and feel, and someone else’s desires steer me and my own die or hide, I am a monster. Never in recorded history have there been so many of us.

Unless religion did the same thing. Maybe it did. Was religion the advertising, marketing and entertainment of its age?

The democrats have a majority everywhere and still refuse to get anything big done. How would that work? What would be a step on the path to a big thing? How do you throw out those who should be thrown out, but have been preparing for the fight, without triggering 1. a (fake) civil war followed by 2. a (real) draconian crackdown?

Thanks for everything.

You’re welcome.

It’s over so fast, the world, so constant and permanent at first, changing so quickly here towards the end. Concerns not so important as we take them to be. So many ways to hurt a soul, to inflict pain, and so many blown opportunities to allay it. Also, though, this: so much more to every second than just this.

There is curiosity. There are lions prowling our neighborhoods. There is the possibility of everything while we (I) eat our (my) breakfast rolls and quietly die vor uns hin, someone talks to foxes in their dreams.

My wife met a fox on the sidewalk before our house one night, for real, which (reality) although hard to nail down we sometimes see as the opposite of dreaming.

Rod Serling: But is it?

What is the difference between loving someone and touching someone? Why touch them, anyway? Does it reduce pain or multiply it?

Five thirty in the morning, dark as shit, he looks for something at the kitchen table. Will he find it? He looks for peace and love and happiness. He finds joy and sadness do not contradict. He wants his daughters to smile, and mean it.

Do you know I’m here for you? Am I failing you? Isn’t that what father’s do?

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15Oct / 2009

Raptor reloaded

RAPTOR is a sound system designed to scare birds out of your vineyard with recordings of raptors etc. Raptor Reloaded is a project by alien productions in which contemporary composers provide other sounds to keep starlings out of your grapes. You can listen to a sample here. This is the coolest thing. I hope they do this again next year.

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21Dec / 2005

There is that cartoon of someone standing in front of a map that is blank but for a dot and an arrow labled “you are here”.
Like, who’s not lost?
As a kid, it used to worry me because, you know, your parents are acting, say, a little weird, you go on an outing (“The things we used to do together when you were a kid,” they’ll say to you later) somewhere way the hell out somewhere and you have neither any idea where you are nor how you would get anywhere else should they abandon you nor a good reason why they wouldn’t abandon you. You are entirely at their mercy. They think they are doing some nice family thing, and you’re scared stiff because what if?
Because everything is a matter of life and death.
As a kid, I thought you outgrew it.
Adults can drive cars, they can read maps and they have money, ergo adults don’t get lost. Perhaps the condition of unlostness is what defines an adult, defined one to me as a kid.
An adult knows the ropes. Knows where they are. Can change a lock.
I can assemble the trickiest furniture Ikea can think up, but I still am lost.
That doesn’t change.
I think if you’re not lost, you’re just not looking hard enough.
I think if you’re not lost, climb up on something and look over the walls of your cubicle.
But it doesn’t matter. Because you’re here.
It no longer bothers me. You live, what, a few days without food under most conditions, and I’ll never be somewhere so isolated where I’d go longer without a bite or a drink.
I get lost, it’s usually in cities, or in the woods near where I live.
I do it on purpose now. For enjoyment.
Nothing more fun than wandering aimlessly in the woods (of course, these woods, they’re finite and bordered by a river and villages and roads. Walk in any direction and you’re back out in half an hour, hour tops. I’m not advocating, you know, madcap behavior), unless it’s wandering aimlessly in the city, which I’m going to do with my daughter in about an hour.
I’m just saying, getting lost is not the problem. The problem is usually starving, freezing, or being eaten by a large predator.
Lost is, who’s not lost?
Lost is this. This is lost.

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