I try out an “extended stay rate” hotel. Too run down to
charge regular rates. After the Indians can no longer make any money out of ‘em
they cater to people without credit. I am curious. It was a long way to
another campground and it was getting dark and I was tired. And I as I said I was
curious. So I pulled in. It’s a fleabag. The door to the room shows evidence of
having been previously busted in – perhaps the result of a “no knock” policy.
It must be a headache for these places to have to constantly repair their doors.
I can imagine myself flat on my stomach on the floor, spread-eagled. Rifle
barrel up my butt and guys in body armor and helmets rushing about shooting and
vicious dogs barking. A lot of clunkers in font of open doors. Beer and bar-b-q
on the walk. Noise and arguing late into the night. I’m not curious
anymore. I slept on top of the bed in my
sleeping bag. I am shedding my bourgeoisie phobia one by one – identify and eradicate. I once
checked out a place in Bleaker St in the Village. I was young and it was cheap.
But it turned out to be a bigger adventure that I cared to have. Instead I
stayed in a cinema on 42th street until it closed around 2AM and then rode the
Staten Island ferry back and forth until the sun came up. Don’t shoot! Don’t
shoot, I cry out. To tell the truth, I’m more afraid of the legals than the
illegals. When you’re down, your out for the count whether in Paris or London
or here in El Dorado. It’s back to the woods tomorrow night. It’s not the
marginalized that one should worry about but them that’s marginalized ‘em.
As a word carp is so crap – Martin Amis
And Ballard’s
particular perversion
Needs all the
actualizing it can get;
Beside it Joyce’s
pendent for excrement
And Burroughs’s
interest for scaffolds
Seem sadly quaint
All we know
For certain is
That what they
wrote,
Would not have been
composed,
Could not even
Be guessed at,
By anyone else
If your heart
Rejects it, retreats
from it,
That’s age, that’s
time
Fucking with you
Sucking the life
from you
Remember that a
persuasion
Is not the same as a
conviction
A man fights....
With his asshole
Power comes...
In the form of
anger,
Up through the
asshole
Contrails of distant
airplanes
Formed incandescent
spermatozoa,
Sent out to
fertilize the universe
To inhabit the streets as one’s living room is quiet a
different thing from needing them as a bedroom, bathroom or kitchen – Susan
Buck-Morss – The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore
Hash browns or grits – boy you’re in the South now. This is
a workingman’s town. The rich own the
rundown building but it’s the workingmen who pay the rent. And now the immigrants
are moving in. The good old boys are moving into the woods to cook meth. Everyone
is dreaming of making money. I visited America’s only diamond mine yesterday. I
didn’t find anything. Its like the lottery, it gives the fore-lone some hope. One in a
million is enough. Find a diamond, cash in a wining ticket. It could happen. The
ones that have a real chance got a head start and live on the other side of town.
The rich get richer. The poor get poorer. I go to a Mexican restaurant. The
waiter sits down with me and starts talking. He wants to know about my Spanish.
I understand it better than I speak it, I tell him, in English . “Are you
Mexican,” he wants to know? “Indian,” I reply, “but then aren’t Mexicans mostly
Indian anyway.” He is from Michowacan,
he says. Says he is married an Indian, Cherokee, he thinks. I turn on the radio as I leave town. Dolly
Pardon. It’s 7:21 in the morning.
The suspect, as such, always deserved a certain punishment;
one could not be the object of suspicion and be completely innocent – Michel
Foucault – Discipline and Punish, 1979 p42
Some of what is called ‘forgetfulness’ that supposedly comes
with age is really a lack of direct feedback. Having done the same thing over
and over for years and years one goes into automatic pilot and carries out
tasks without thinking about the individual steps. Take driving a vehicle. One
needs a checklist when learning – adjust the seat, check the mirrors, fasten
the seat belt, insert the key… But after a while it becomes automatic. Its only
when something unusual happens that we think about what we are doing; say we
step on the gas pedal instead of the brake. We know immediacy something is
wrong – that is called negative feedback. We take corrective action. But say
there is no immediate consequence. Say we’re going to the store. We’ve got the
baby strapped in his baby carrier. We put him down beside the car to unlock the
door. Now we’re at the store parking lot. We get out and go to get the baby.
He’s not there. We’ve left him beside the driveway. That’s not forgetfulness
it’s a failure of the feedback loop. As we get older the more or our activities
are done in auto-pilot mode and unless there is some negative feedback when we
skip a step we are likely to have a “forgetful” moment once we realize (or
someone tells us) that we skipped a step. And then there is also just plain old
senility also. Did I forget to turn off the gas?
I remember that I
wanted to inhale myself – A Artaud
Moreover I have
Definitively broken with
Art, style and talent
I MEAN THAT
I curse anyone
Who is going to consider these
As
Works of art,
Works that
Aesthetically
Simulate
Reality...
None of them,
To speak exactly,
Is an art 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
Never studied anything,
But I have lived everything,
And that has taught
Taught me something
I have thrown
The communion,
The Eucharist,
God and his Christ
Out the window
And I 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 a perfectly organized world, foot fetishists would no
doubt become chiropodists – P D James – Shroud of a Nightingale, 1971 p65
Ginny is telling me she will not listen to me any more. She
doesn’t have time. “Well,” I said, “I wasn’t demanding much time.” “I can’t give
you any time at all, I’ve got my stuff to do,” she says. Two years ago she had
a booth at the street fair and had only three piece of jewelry to show. She
tried to take orders. That’s not the way street fairs work, we had tried to
explain to her. “Oh, I’m getting so inspired.” She intends to have a booth
again this year. “There is so much I want to do. They will be so beautiful.”
She’s thumbing through a jewelry catalog getting ideas. She says she’s
inspired. Now she needs to go home and get busy. I had this weird dream last
night and I had wanted to share. “This isn’t kindergarten,” she said. Well
anyway there were this company that was run by computer but the computers could
not deal with anything unanticipated. The company’s office is old building with
inoperative elevators. The executives drive their cars up a ramp to the sixth
floor. Snowplows have to constantly keep the ramps clear and are a hazard to
the executives. The snowplow drivers like to intimidate the executives on the
ramps. There is a directive from the CEO (the computer) “Reality is no longer
fixed either spatially or temporally.” Another directive states that performance
ratings (and thus bonuses) will henceforth be based on how much data the
computer contains on each individual. No one is actually doing anything but
manipulating data – adding to their own files and deleting data relevant to
others. In conformance with the new “reality” memo they can zip about in time
and space so long as they have computer access. There are a few fundamentals
about how this works, for example, nothing an happen twice at both the same
time and in the same place. Rules are changing by the nanosecond. Another
fundamental rule of neurology is that noting changes the computer’s
instructions and the computer can
countermand any executive action. The objective is to freeze everyone else out.
“Is this music form Bladerunner,” I ask? “What?” “You know the film
Bladerunner.” Osama shrugs his shoulders. A man dressed in black with gold
chains around his neck says, “Ridley Scott” as he paces back and forth. “Great
movie by the way,” he says and dashes for the door and heads down the ramp. He is
squished flat by a snowplow. The driver just laughed. Ginny has her hands over
her ears, “I’m not listening,” she says. But neither has she going home and
getting to work on her merchandise. My guess it that she’ll be lucky to have
three pieces this year. She’s still flipping through her catalog. “I’am getting
s many great ideas.”
