22Oct / 2009

What the sailor told the magician’s assistant

“I was not old when I left home. My father beat us and we took refuge in my mother’s stories of a tree house sanctuary. We’d move someday to a leafy hide out where we’d see him way before he us, and play Aggravation and checkers, and read in hammocks, library books we’d check out when the coast was clear. Once I realized it was only a dream and not a plan, I left. I was a long haul driver’s punk for a year or two, after the money I stole from my father ran out. Then one night I heard a fight out in the lot of some poor bar as I huddled in the sleeper cab of my master’s rig, and him getting the worst of it. They abandoned him for dead and words bubbled from his lips when I went to him before the dawn. Get help he mumbled, so I did. I took the key to the strongbox and left with his savings, my second treasure. It was a lot for a kid. After that were dishes washed and unwatched tills. I never actually killed a man and all my loot I deserved more than the ones I robbed, high pressure systems move to low.
At eighteen I found myself at sea. I actually swabbed actual decks, and painted steel and served up slop and climbed up through whatever ranks one rose through and my foot locker filled with cash from paychecks never spent and jewels I bought to save space. One day, standing on the deck I realized I was at the place furthest from a tree as if I’d kept an oath sworn as a boy, which I had in fact not consciously sworn. But life can take us to these junctures unawares, where had we sworn an oath it would be fulfilled: no more love, no more trust, no more hope or faith, no dreams of trees it was for me.
And now I’m here with you on the bed of the sea they took my ship in a storm just like you. It’s over there, full of cargo. I’ve made my bed in a container full of mattresses, king size, and wander this shining city at all hours, looking for a place to spend my loot. Would you like to make a bet?”

“I’d wager that your trucker’s dead,” the magician’s assistant said. “I stole the clipping from your purse, that was my old profession, as you spoke and gestured. So you didn’t kill him but you let him die.”

The sailor shrugged. “To remind me of my life on land. My father beats my mother still for all I know and she still dreams of trees.” He got down on his knees. “Will you marry me? I’ll pay you well. I didn’t think so.” He stood back up. “I say that to all the girls, pro forma. If only we had a big casino with roulette wheel and blackjack and a stage and a red whorehouse in the back, or a mall.
A hobo robbed me down by the creek between my father and the truck. Or drifter, if you subscribe to the romantic notion that all hobos are above board by definition. I fought him and he knocked me down and pocketed my cash. Someday you’ll see how illusory this really is,” he laughed.

“Here’s your clipping back,” she said, the magician’s assistant. “And your other stuff I took. Are there many others here?”

“There are a few. Maybe more, who hide from me. I feel their thoughts and eyes. Captain Nemo is down here, the old liar, with his lying song of death.”

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22Oct / 2009

Good night, bonuses

Good night, moon.

Good night, Fox. Good night, war. Good night, neoconservatism. Good night turbocapitalism.

Good night patenting of living organisms. Good night extinction. Good night genetic modification. Good night waste. Good night, pesticides. Good night, feedlots. Good night, canola. Good night, cars. Good night, obliviousness. Good night, chemical fertilizer poisoning our water. Good night, overfishing depleting our stocks. Good night, Walmart. Good night consumerism. Good night exploitation. GOod night social inaction. Good night ignorance. Good night immunity for cronies. Good night corporations. Good night cats, plotting our demise. Good night flies. Good night old lady whispering, hush.

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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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21Oct / 2009

Good night, moon

Good night, moon.

Good night cats, sleeping in our laps. Good night bees, with colony collapse. Good night frogs, with two heads and no pudenda. Good night overfished stocks of tuna. Good night salmon,with no place to spawn. Good night oceans, choked with acidic mucous. Good night, whales. Good night fish, except for jelly fish. Good night, Gulf of Mexico, poisoned by toxic runoff from the agriculture industry. Good night peace. Good night, democracy, thanks to stupidity and voting machines. Good night, human rights, abdicated in fear. Good night, education. Good night, culture. Good night, infrastructure. Good night history, dictated by victors who cannot read to dead scribes. Good night, old lady whispering hush.

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21Oct / 2009

My mom

Just got off the phone with my mom. She just had two bionic knees installed. My understanding is this works like this: they take a saw and trade your old knees for new knees. The funny part is, she’s already walking around, and is not taking any painkillers. Zero. This woman should be cage fighting.

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20Oct / 2009

What the mermaid told the magician’s assistant about her dream about the crater of day

The crater of day, the mermaid said, a list of things forgotten. People I’ve seen wearing bandages. Child athletes as adults. Cars I’ve driven as a function of phases of the moon. People I’ve witnessed vomiting. The fish in the river are acting weird. They’re lining up like birds and singing, not like people, like cables in the wind.

Something about the way they grit their teeth.

The river banks are hardpacked clay. Practically only blackberries grow there and when it rains the layer of mud that forms is thin and slick. There are barns and trailers and beyond that a mall and houses. Once it was fields and it’ll be fields again.

The colors in your crayon box are brighter than the colors in your life. Pastel houses, white truck, grey carpet, brown paneling, cork floor. Blue jeans, t-shirt, blue jacket that you got on sale. Brown fridge in a brown kitchen. Even the produce section has gone dry and is a uniform red and green, red and green, maybe orange.

The fish running in the river are silver and making a silver sound. Nothing is golden, nothing is salmon, not even the salmon. A kid at school has over 100 crayons in his box. You thought a couple dozen was a lot, it’s more than you got last year. For you it’s a lot.

Even the peaches in the U-pick orchard are washed out in this light, brighter than seems good. It stuns your retinas even if you squint. When you’re used to darkness nine miles down that’s bound to happen. The fish tank burbling in your room is no comfort so far removed from your natural habitat, and plus the snails are taking over.

What is the difference between a refuge and a prison cell, a cage and a lifeboat, I wonder. The bathtub needs a little hot water. If a zookeeper chains you to the tub it’s a cage. If kids bicker outside the door it’s a refuge.

The tiles are a brown that somehow looks as faded as the somehow faded blue walls and tub.

(Some dream, thinks the mermaid.)

Traffic today was like an unmedicated insane asylum and someone was crying at work. Two old guys got in a fight at the store, about something. One was a customer one was boxing the customer’s groceries. He cried too, when the store manager sent him home.

Bath beads of a brownish-yellowish cast are arranged on the counter in an accidental pentagram, just out of reach. From whom were they a gift? What is their scent? Honey?

Vanilla?

(The mermaid wonders about colony-collapse disorder, like so many phrases more beautiful than what it signifies. The mermaid tries to remember what she was doing before the dream, what she will do when she wakes. Watch coins of sunlight through the holes in a sunken pirate ship? Fly somewhere on a business trip?)

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19Oct / 2009

The giant Moroccan sunset bats

He went to Morocco because he’d always wanted a fez. He could wear it in the bar back home plus he’d liked Burroughs and Bowles when he was younger. Not understood everything but liked to read them on the bus, be seen holding a paperback to a coffee house table like a bird he’d found at the curb and was dissecting with a dirty knife. He went to Morocco for a goddamn fez and maybe a little hash from a water pipe in some nasty back room and here he was in the back of some SUV pointed at the hottest heart of the desert.

He’d woke up here, bumping across a trackless landscape with a guy from the back room he vaguely recalled telling he was “a reporter, we’re all reporters in a sense,” and two more men he’d never seen. Well the joke was on them all he wanted was a fez and to get back to his hotel. But none of them spoke his language not even the guy he’d talked to the previous night.

He wasn’t a reporter in fact most reporters weren’t really reporters, either.

They tied him to an overstuffed recliner from the feel of it, overlooking a gully and beyond that desert. Cliffs the color of cliffs in Morocco loomed behind him like skyscrapers looming over a guy who’s just been fired from a job in one of the skyscrapers. Had it been a shitty job? Did it hate him and he it? Was it torture or was it okay all things considered, or even great? Did it pay the bills or would he be manning a tommy gun the day the shareholders and managers were lined up against the wall?

It depends on viewpoint. It depends on what you compare it with: J.R. Ewing plus I Dream of Jeannie, or life in a fourth world slum.

Then the sky filled with a swarm of giant Moroccan sunset bats. Suddenly.

Whoa!

He tried to recline to get a better look and that’s when he realized he wasn’t tied to an easy chair at all, he was tied to a bull carcass.

The bats, attracted by the carcass, swooped. They were the size of gigantic boomerang-shaped airplanes, stealth fighters. Several glided by him, close enough for him to feel the wind from their wings. A wing tip made contact with the toe of his boot and popped like a whip cracking. The bats shrieked and flew away, tumbling toward the darkening night until they were no longer red, but black, and then gone, taking their ancient wisdom with them.

He squinted after them as long as he could, then had a dream in which he could fly and the air was bumpy. When he opened his eyes he was in a nasty back room, neck sore from hanging his head backwards over his chair back. He straightened up and said, Whoa, what a dream.

“You must report about this,” said the man from the car. “Report about your ‘dream’.”

“How much for the fez?” he asked the man.

“The fez is not for sale, but I know a shop shall I take you?”

An insect of some kind, a beetle, moved quickly over the table, seeking sanctuary.

“Yes, take me please.”

His hotel contacted the embassy when he failed to return. They contacted the police, but he was never found.

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