Everyone is gone. I have the place to myself or at least I
do for tonight. I would be out sailing but there is no breeze. I am drinking
the last of the moonshine. Alcohol and weed makes for a laid back feeling. I am
contemplating but I am not sure what it is that I am contemplating. I woke up
this morning with an exaggerated sense of self-importance or maybe it was
insignificance. It was so long ago and I can barely remember. Today I’ll be
back on the road again.
Money becomes time
When time became money
Appearances are not self-explanatory – Guy Deutscher –
Through the Language Glass, 2010 p14
I leave the Café Treste which sufficient time to make the 12:30
concert at St Patrick’s. I’m a block down Columbus. City Lights is across the
street. In front of the bookstore is the bus stop. I see a lady with red hair who seems to be
waving at me. She is. It’s Leslie. I
wait for her. She’s on her way to work at the Children’s Museum at Fort Mason I
turn and walk along with her. The great thing about not working is that you
don’t have to stick to an agenda. Later I head out to Ocean Beach. I bask in
the sun and take a walk along the beach. Little purple sail boats. Dragon kites
high above the sand. What looked like a blanket of purple iris petals blanketed
the sand above high tide. They didn’t smell like flowers. Dead limpets. The
kite masters untangled their control lines looping their kites clockwise and
then counterclockwise – elderly Chinese men. A large wave crashes ashore. I
stop by the Beach Chalet and have a Park Chalet Amber. The barmaid said that
she’d give me taste the hand pumped Dee’s Bitter Ale. I wait. She forgets. The
view of the beach is fantastic from up here but the bar faces away from the
window and I can only see the ocean from its reflection in the mirror. It’s
only three-thirty. This is a tony place. Too upscale for me. I go back to North
Beach, my regular spot. Cynthia and Paddy are bickering like lovers. They are
telling each other how much they dislike each other.
The way to move upon water / Is to work lying down, as in
love – James Dickey – The Whole Motion, 1992
p66
Lift the seat when you pee
If there is a urinal plese use it
Instead)
Save the stall for the shy pee-ers
And if you must lower the seat
When
finished
Shame on
you
If you didn’t lift the seat
It’s a
rotten experience
Sitting in
someone’s pee
And don’t forget to flush
Thataboy!
After a few minutes of this, [he] stopped alerting us to
snakes; it was too like shouting “Fly!” on a warm evening in a barnyard. There
a lot of snakes… Nothing so well represented people’s sense of being violated
by the [flooded] river as the image of the cottonmouth in the child’s crib –
Jonathan Raban – Driving Home, 2010
p124
What is important and what is not. There is not…Oh, my pen
just ran out of ink. That is important, I think
Venue 9 closed down last night and now they’ll put up a
parking lot - Paradise. We all made rain together - snap your fingers, rub you
our palms, slap your thighs, stomp your feed and then do it all again in
reverse (feet, thighs, palms & fingers). Goodbye Venue 9
Photographs provide an alternative way of looking into
history. Not into general history – but into a specific moment, a specific
place. It is as if we have reached into the past and created a tiny peephole –
Errol Morris – Believing is Seeing, 2011 p31
The world does not exist without its smells
And the well worn stone steps
And the polished wood of dark oil stained pews
The nature of the artificial is that it
Leaves nothing behind
Each day the world is scrubbed clean
Without need for charwoman
With her
lye and antiseptic
And Franco served Primo a banquet of egg dishes
Those who wanted to get out, he told him
Have no further need of them
Franco had made an elaborate pun
(you have
to be Spanish to understand,
We might
have served calf fries instead)
But Franco has no humor
Evil laughs but is not funny
Amoral brutes certainly commit torture, but in their hands
it doesn’t become part of a legally sanctioned system – Cullen Murphy – The
Atlantic, Jan/Feb 2010 p77
Not since Nazi Germany has any country been so prone to
waving the flag as hasn been done the United States since 9/11 (although there
was no shyness about waving it before then either).
The Inquisition with its stipulation that torture and
interrogation not jeopardize life or cause irreparable ham, actually set a more
rigorous standard than some proponents of torture insist on now – Cullen Murphy
– The Atlantic, Jan/Feb 2010 p76
As a word carp is so crap – Martin Amis
And this particular
perversion
Needs all the
actualizing it can get;
Beside it Joyce’s
pendent for excrement
And Burroughs’s
interest for scaffolds
Seems sadly quaint
If your heart
Rejects it, retreats
from it,
That’s age, that’s
time
Fucking with you
Sucking the life
from you
A persuasion is not
conviction
All we know
For certain is
That what he will
write,
Would not have been
composed,
Be guessed at,
By anyone else
A man fights....
With his asshole
Power comes...
In the form of
anger,
Up through the
asshole
Contrails of more
Distant airplanes
Incandescent
spermatozoa,
Sent out to
Fertilize the
universe
The problem was much deeper that the failure to understand…
[They] did not even understand that there was something there to understand –
Guy Deutscher – Through the Language Glass, 2010 p133
I go out with the Hobie. The wind dies down. Next time bring
the dog and a six pack. A woman will do you no good on such a small boatn (of
course the dog won’t either, but the beer will).
The first two commandments for any great thinker: (1) Thou
shall be vague, (2) Thou shall not escape self-contradiction – Guy Deutscher –
Through the Language Glass, 2010 p136
I remember that I wanted to inhale myself – A Artaud
I have moreover
I definitively broke with
Art, style and talent
I mean that
I curse anyone
Who is going to consider them
As
Works of art,
Works that
Aesthetically
Simulate
Reality...
None of them,
To speak exactly,
Is a work.
They are all attempts,
That is to say blows – probings or thrustings
In all the directions of hazard,
Of possibility,
Of chance
Or
Of destiny
I have never
Studied anything,
But lived everything,
And that has taught
Taught me something
I have thrown
The communion,
The Eucharist,
God and his Christ
Out the window
And have decided...
I remember that
Ever since I was eight years old,
And even before that,
I always wondered who I was,
What I was,
And why I was alive?
I remember at the age of six
In a house, a number 29, to be precise,
Just as I was eating my afternoon snack
I asked myself what it meant
to exist,
to be alive,
What it meant
to be conscious
of oneself breathing,
And I remember that
I wanted
to inhale myself
In order to prove
that I was alive
And to see if
I liked being alive,
And if so,
Why
In the long journey out of the self, / There are many
detours, washed-out interrupted raw places / Where the shale slides dangerously
/ And the back wheels hang almost over the edge – Theodore Roethke – The Far
Field, 1964
Two deep tokes and I was in slow motion watching everything
as if in a microscope. I could concentrate on every little detail, one detail at
a time. There were immense gaps of contemplation before anyone spoke and then
they spoke with slow deliberation. People who I had considered dull suddenly
had become wise. I’m two tokes over the line.
The mark of an exceptional mind is its ability to question
the self-evident – Guy Deutscher – Through the Language Glass, 2010 p31
Love is not rational
Love is not blind
Love is a lot of things but
Love is not everything
Love is defiantly not eternal
At least no more than hate is
For me the Crimean War is the ‘perfect war.’ It was started for obscure reasons, was
hopelessly murderous and accomplished nothing – Errol Morris – Believing is Seeing, 2011 p36
The cicadas begin to chirr as the air begins to heat up. The
leaves rustle in ripples as if at the beach. The sounds intensify in pitch, in
volume as waves break.
Put down those seed in your hand. / These trees have no yet
been planted – James Dickey – The Whole Motion, 1992 p49
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