July 30, 2009 - Coffee Break - Kansas City, Missouri

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All the teachers are getting bored with their summer vacations and they are hanging out here in the coffee houses, but not him. He is just back from bicycling Egypt – an adventure rather than a vacation, he says. They want you on the tourist trains not peddling down the roads. The risk is too great the police explain. There are a lot of fanatics lurking about. Or it could be that he's viewed by authority as a  vagabond – more trouble than he's worth – stimulate the economy – spend your tourist dollars here. But I have digressed and he is telling his story to a group of avid listeners, too many to get their chairs all up to the table.

Some teachers are anxious for the new year to begin and some dread the day it will. Some are bored and happy to have the opportunity to be so. Some are bored and want to escape back into the routine. They are counting their time now in days rather than months and those that went on an adventure rather than a vacation are returning to tell their tales. I really envy you – all that time to do just what you want.

Homecoming does not signify a recovery of identity; it does not end the journey in the virtual space of imagination. A modern nostalgic can be homesick and sick of home at once – Svetlana Boym

The past is porous and the present is fluid. If it were not there would be no need for a future.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting – Milar Kundera

A quotidian poem

This is, it shall not soar

No seeing over

            The horizon

There’s no bird’s eye
View from here
Inch along the worm
            That you are
Nose to the grindstone

The mind would like to get out of here / onto the snow. It would like to run / with a pack of shaggy animals, all teeth // under the moon, across the snow, leaving / no prints or spoor, nothing behind. / The mind is sick tonight – Raymond Carver

Plaques offer facts
       Bare facts
That can be relied
       Upon
The plainer  the facts
The clearer the truth


And what we learn
From the autocrat
         Is to read
Between the lines
Look
         For what remains unsaid
Even then
There’s no guarantee


When each word
Must be weighed
         And agreed upon
By consensus
Reality is under
         Construction

There are tests that have right answers, which are returned with a number on top in a red circle, and there are test with open-ended questions, which provide insight into the test-taker’s mind – Noam Cohen

A special elevator
One of twenty-eight
Ascends directly
         From the underground
         To the high altar
Reserved for VIPSs
Whose big cars need

          Oversized accommodation
The Cathedral of Christ
          The Savior
Has re-arisen among the dead
Constructed in record time
           By the heroes of labor
This First Church of the
           Mercedes

[One forgets] not by cancellation but by superimposition, not by absence, but by multiplying presences – Umberto Eco

The test for the bureaucrat is how to turn the one into the other. Everything must have a measure. Be on a scale. Be Manician. The bureaucrat can only thrive in a clearing defined environment. The world must be made save for the bureaucrat. And it was said that God must love the bureaucrat cause he made so many of them.

From the Notebooks (#1 – Jan 12, 2004 – San Francisco – The Royal Ground @ Fillmore & California

From the Peruvian Indian basket I grasp my glasses, wallet, bus pass, keys and loose bills and fifty cents in change. I check to make sure I have a pen in my shirt pocket (the green checked shirt). I grab the notebook and some reading material. That is the big choice of the morning - what book shall I take. I head for the front door, automatically feeling my front right pocket to make sure that I have my keys. They are there, good (the last time I had forgotten them was Labor Day and it cost me $140 to get back in). I open the door and exit (sometimes I wait to verify the presence of my keys until the door has already closed - kind of a useless gesture by that time). The lock goes click and the door closes and I verify that the keys are in my pockest one last time – a form of paranoia. Sometimes I have to do it a third time.

So is it alright to talk to yourself as long as you do it silently or in text. Is it only a problem when you do it out loud. What is they say, its ok to talk to yourself just don’t answer. But this writing just is not the same as my talking to myself; its an entirely different cognitive process. After I boarded the #1 California I remembered that I had made a mental note to myself to write something down but could not for the life of me remember what It was, I just knew that I would think of it sooner or later and that it might not even be worth having worried about (most things aren’t) once I did remember what it was that I had reminded myself to jot down. And when trying to remember one thing something else comes to mind – oh yes the barmaid at the Cha-Cha-Cha was Linda and not Mary which is what I had written down (I went back a corrected that entry). How obvious once you remember what it was that you were trying to recall and it just pops into your head – “so obvious what am I stupid!” and you hit yourself on the forehead. And it comes as an isolated word, “Linda, Linda, Linda, why is that name on my mine, oh yes, the barmaid who paints transvestites and fires and I had called her Mary.”

Generally you can make the connection. But when you don’t - Oh that’s really annoying..

So I am sitting here on the bus thinking that there was something that I was supposed to remember to write down and that it had nothing to do with my green checkered shirt. Then I remember, it was that mundane process of checking my keys when leaving my apartment in the morning that I wanted to write down..

Catholic school girls in uniform - wash your armpits with soap and don’t use deodorant. They are conducting a body order science experiment. Someone is doing a science fair project and needs to gather data. Miss Nolan handed out textbooks…science book…have at home…have mine…so annoying…In our class Ms Gearson and Patrica were high school buddies…that was the most boring project in my life… no it was hole punches…out of cardboard. Thin cardboard. Did you hear my story about the guy. No, and we don’t care Aerial. He sat next to me and he was so gross…shatter, shatter, shatter

At the next to the last stop (before I got off) a bunch of pubescent boys got on and the whole back of the coach was reverberating.

She say, “I like the color of your green shirt. It looks like springtime”. “Yes”, I say that’s what I thought this morning when I chose to put it on..

A cup of coffee, regular, in a glass mug. And time – I have plenty of that today. A long faced red-haired lady sits knitting a bright pink yarn. She’s sitting in my usual window seat. Walter comes in and says that he has a new name for me - he is replacing “Steve Freightliner” with “Peter Built” and is changing his own name from “Mack Torque” to “Max Torque”. “With an ‘X’” he says.

David was complaining that he continued to write the same thing over and over. After he read a passage back to himself from the year prior he stopped keeping a journal. He had written exactly that day what he had written on this day - verbatim he had complained about the difficulty of writing. He is trying to write a screen play (everyone is) but is having difficulty coming up with a project that will sell. He had been working on one about Emperor Norton but then learned that someone else had already sold that idea and a film was in the works. I told him that I thought this would have been a great opportunity for a stream of conscious self analysis - why was he using the same words? Did they mean the same thing this time as the previous time?

Writing has to be about the mundane because that is all that we can ever know. Reading is about the exotic because we are just discovering something new or looking at the familiar with different eyes. “Do you ever go back and read what you have written” he asked. “Sure”, I said “A writer also needs to be a reader.

The objective is to make tomorrow different from yesterday, but not too different.