Monkeys Drink Lattes As They Drive Limos and Pretend to Talk on Cell Phones and Laugh

By eight all the seats are occupied – women are arriving in convertibles – men are resting from their weekly labors  – Sunday morning some place other than Starbucks – many leave with cardboard carrying cases loaded with  lattes carefully balanced – dangled by their handles as they return to their autos. Or they may take a  lattie in each hand with lids securally attached – one for mommy (that’s me) and one for daddy whose still at home – where we shall be returning soon. I take a sip. I’m awake. It’s gonna be a great day. At church time time stands still. One must stay awake.

Put out your hand, / isn’t there / an ashtray, suddenly there? Beside / the bed? And someone you love enters the room / and says wouldn’t / you like the eggs a little different today? / And when they arrive they are / just the plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather / is holding – Frank O’Hara – The Collected Poems of, 1994 p214

Off to see Willie and the Boys – a four hour drive to Cleveland and than back. Two days ago it was the Boss – home after midnight – up for a four o’clock flight out of O’Hara. Being middle class means not worrying about how you’re going to make both the house and the car paymenta. The health care industry is recession proof – there is no pressing concerns – everything things needs a physician's signature – fee per service required (each and every time). Cash flow to match out flow is the key to happiness. The headline today proclaimed that overloaded doctors made more mistakes. Duh!

A nurse waits with a purse / and a murderer escapes the detectives by taking a public // conveyance through the summer’s green reflections. / There’s too much lime in the world and not enough gin, // they gasp. The gentle are curious, but the curious are not gentle – Frank O’Hara – The Collected Poems of, 1994 p225

BURSTING OUT


The cracked egg
       Mr Humpty Dumpty
       I presume!
The egg on its head
       Columbus’ egg
       Egg on your face

             Ferdinand
Just as cracked trying
To make the world
        Mean what you
        Want it to mean
Walking on egg shells
Egging each other on
The Easter Egg
      An egg of a different color
The egg in the sky
That’s what an egg tooth’s
       For

The detective is one who looks, who is listening, who moves through this morass of objects and events in search of the thought, the idea that will pull all these things together and make sense of them. In effect, the writer and the detective are interchangeable – Paul Auster – The New York Trilogy, 1990 p9

Game time but first
        Time for the sponsor
Airtime, space-time
Time warp – time for a
        Change
The sands of time are
         Running out

No time left – I don’t
         Have time
I don’t have the
         Time
I don’t have any
         Time


Good time, bad time
The time approaches
There will be a time
Geologic time
Universal time
Daylight savings time
This is not the time – what
           Time is it


Time of our lives
Time on our hands
This time around
            Eyes on the clock
Time and time again


Its time
In no time
In time – outside of time
Another time – a long
       Time ago
Time out

Before space-time, / before there was before, / at the beginning, when there wasn’t even beginning, / was the reality of the word. / When all was night, when / all beings were still obscure, before being beings, / a voice existed, a clear word, / a song in the night – Ernesto Cardenal – Pluriverse, 2009 p194

So misty – rain is in the forecast and I without a car – below normal they say – two and a quarter inches – and the occasional sprinkle doesn’t do much to correct it. Weather is much like baseball – a game of statistics – the game is rained out – the game is the rain.

It [Capitalism] has drowned the most heavenly state of religions fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation – Karl Marx – Marx-Engels Collected Works, v6 p486-87


Everybody seems to be going onto or coming off of the Atkins diet. “You are not in balance…All sugar would not be good for you …I am not a naturalist…but the biological mechanism runs on sugar. You are right…and you are not a naturalist.” Henry and Nancy go back to discussing the process of trying to find a good mechanic for a ‘54 Buick. Henry says “…ideally it would be someone who can network who can network with the farmer in Nebraska with thirty six old cars abandoned in his corn field. Someone who can get the right part”. The guy next to him is filming a documentary about the City College football team. He says that he knows some (farmers in Nebraska or people who know farmers in Nebraska?). Nancy gets out her notebook.

Sunday morning - or at least I thought it was until I was ready to leave my apartment and went to select a book to read. On weekdays I take one of my own books so that if I loose it I will not have to deal with the library Gestapo. I started to pickup a loaner. I got this fuzzy recollection of having bought the Sunday paper yesterday. It would have been possible to have done that on Saturday but I never get the Saturday edition of the Sunday paper. If that was true then this would be Monday. Is there any confirming evidence for this suspicion? I had been operating on auto-pilot on the assumption that this was Sunday for about an hour by now. It would take more than a slight suspicion to alter my inclination. I could call a friend and ask what day this was (that would have created more problems that it would have solved). I could log on to my computer and check its clock. Then I remember having had a conversation about the Chronicle Date book. I slowly accept that it was possible that this was Monday.

Then I remembered the Super bowl was played yesterday. “OK” I said to myself, “this really is Monday” This is all part of my pre-retirement disengagement – a type of disorientation. The regime of work is losing its grip I am already resenting having to work past 3PM and can no longer even imagine working on a Friday.

[Her] feral reek, for me the stewy fragrance of life itself, and which the strongest perfume could not quite suppress, was the thing that first drew me to her, all those years ago. My hands now, eerily have a trace of the same smell, her smell, I cannot rid them of it, wring them though I may. In her last months she smelt, at her best, of the pharmacopoeia – John Banville – The Sea, 2005 p34

Such temporal disorientations are rare. I have never shown up for work on a Saturday or Sunday and have never forgotten to go to work.. Spatial disorientation is common – waking up in the middle of the night and being confused as to which home I am in – thinking I might be some former residence – I take mental stock of the floor plans of all of the places where I had once lives – one by one - until one of them seem correct - otherwise i might put my feet on the floor, stand up and walk smack into a wall in the dark. It takes a lot of effort to get the correct floorplan associated with this residence. When I get it right I instantly know it. I can now get up and not worry about smacking into a wall of wondering out into the hall looking for the bathroom.

I did laundry yesterday. I always do my laundry on Sunday morning. It is raining today

This spatial disorientation is probably not the meaning of that saying about “getting up on the wrong side of the bed” which generally means that you are cranky – “Did you get up on the wrong side of the bed or what?” – but then if you did and smacked into the wall or walked out into the street in your underwear you would rightly be cranky.

Going to places is not like appreciating diamonds into which all that is valuable has been concentrated into the hardest possible stone: nor even paintings on which the painter has selected his visual experience in order to create his form. Travel is an art which has to be created by the traveler… A re-creation of these places in our minds is an art by which we fuse our conception of their pasts with our scrappy experience of their present. To do this we have to reconcile with the past a great deal of fragmentary contemporary material – Stephen Spender – World Within World, 1974 p179-80