August 10, 2009 - Coffee Break - 54th & Troost - Kansas City Missouri

More and more the school year is gearing up. The younger women faculty are showing off their summer tans. The smarter students (or maybe the more ambitious ones) are attending workshops. The clerical and maintenance staffs are reporting and puttng everything into working order. The chimney of the educational system is starting to emit smoke - soon they will be stroking the fires of learning again.

They are giving the numbers (housing prices and employment) the best spin that they can - what else can they do? But there a big difference between things getting better and things not gettng worse as fast as they were - one is when your parachute deploys and the other is when it does not but due to the drag of air on your body your're not falling any faster - somewhere at about 140 mph.

Something unknown is doing we don’t know what – that is what our theory amounts too. It does not sound a particular illuminating theory. I have read something like it elsewhere – The slithy troves / did gyre and gimble in the wabe – Arthur S Eddington

Out there one cicada is out chirring
     All the others
And as his chirring diminishes
     Another picks it up
In his territory a cicada will try
     To outdo everyone else
And its clear who made the most noise
     As the female makes her choice


All this noise about sex
So typical of us animals

For a long time now / I’ve chosen to corrupt way. / I had a choice. Or else, / simply, the merely easy. / Over the virtuous. Or the difficult – Raymond Carver – All of US, 1989 p194

COUNTRY MUSIC – Part I

Country music all morning long at the coffeehouse

Tammy Wyanette – that Alabama acent

     I can’t understand a word – George

    Where are you when you’re not drunk?

I’m pourd to be a coal miner’s daughter
No its not Tammy but what’s her name

     Moody – but that is his name

     Oh yes, Lorreta Young – no that’s

The actress and that was Robert Young who played Marcus Welby

And isn’t Moody married to that girl from Pigeon Ford

      Who looked so small standing next to Porter Wagoner

      And that suit of his – covered in big rhinestone wagon wheels

Circle the wagons around, I’m closing in on the name

I do know that her first name is Lorreta
     But who was that in “Nine to Five”
     It's a fiction that we get paid for our lunchhour
          Except on the factory floor where they need
          Three shifts of eight hours each to make twenty-four

I go on casually eating from the bowl /; of raspberries. If I were dead / I remind myself, I wouldn’t / be eating them. It’s not so simple. / It is that simple – Raymond Carver – All of US, 1989 p216

COUNTRY MUSIC – Part II


Then the name Barbara Mandrell pops into my head
     But this is not her either - she is another one
Wait! Be patient! It will come to me
Oh yes, Loretta Lynne

      The coffee house has been vacated

      That was some time ago
      It is uselses information when it comes
But at least it gets the question out of my head
And also the quandry as to whether
      I’m losing my marbles


And when the dots get connected
      Oh, it is so obvious
So now what’s the name of the tiny blond
Standing there beside Porter – Dolly, yes
      Dolly Pardon, that’s her name
      How could I have forgotten

See! The motor is running

Quite turning the key

Quite grinding the starter motor

      Get her out on the highway

      Open it up; put it on cruise
Feel the wind in your face
See the telephone poles flash past
       (but that was another age)
       Do they still have telephone poles anymore?

What I said was never exactly what I felt, what I feel was never what it seemed I should feel, thought the feelings were genuine, and right, and inescapable – John Banville – Body of Evidence p124

God, I’m making a mess

      With the coffee in this cup

I trimmed my mustache and can’t

      Do a thing with it

The liquid drains through my beard

      And dribbles onto my shirtfront

Leaving big brown blobs to match my
      Liver sports
God, I’m getting old

If you are planning simultaneous tea bagging all around the country, you’re going to need a Dick Armey - David Shuster

Being a Buddhist priest

In this modern world

Means driving a red SUV

      To match you robe
But a little one
      Not an ostentatious big one


SUNDAY NIGHT: Make use of the things around you. / This light rain / Outside the windows , for one. / This cigarette between my fingers, / These feet on the couch: / The faint sound of rock-and-roll / The red Ferrari in my head. / The woman bumping drunkenly around in the kitchen… / Put it all in, / Make use – Raymond Carver - All of Us, 1989 p.257

From the Notebooks (#2 – January 19, 2004 - Oakland California - San Francisco/Millbare Bart Train.

This is the one-month anniversary of this enterprise – this journaling (I’ve begun calling them field notes – the name is still up for debate). The only restriction that I am placing on this effort is that I not commercialize it or make a product out of it until the anniversary of its first year (this should not be difficult as I don’t see any commercial possibility).

My niece, Leslie and I have gone to the Jazz House in Berkeley to hear a women’s orchestra with kelp, voice pipe, cello and percussion. I had stood in the Berkeley Bart station, gesturing wildly with arms and hands trying to explain my concept for the “John Walsh School of Acting”. Have you noticed that talking heads no longer wave there arms about. I think that thsy School would have been very short-lived and even John Walsh toned it down but that may have been as a result of a stroke. We also discusses how serious people come to be that way - do they wake up one morning resolving to be serious, were they born that way. I look around the platform and notice that no one in the station other than myself jumping up and down and waving their hands in the air. Do I become self conscious about this – hell no!

So how do you play kelp – we had discussed the options: you can rustle it, you can wave it in the air(that was my theory). We discovered that there are more ways than can be imagined. In this case the kelp was dried out and it was the bulbous part that served as a floater with a short section of stalkattached  that was being used as a horn. Cut off the top half of the bulb, add a moth piece (or not - she played it both ways) and you have an organic horn.

The bus stop smell like oatmeal this morning. I have no phone messages awaiting at work. Ade calls and I explain how to register to get IEA data. Keo wants some Dun & Bradstreet reports but does not have a charge number. My time sheet is due.

I am out of the office by 3:30 and sitting in the coffee shop by 4 listening to the Buena Vista Social Club soundtrack - solo guitar and voice. I was asked again if a novel was in the works - why is writing always associated with novels. Have you been published? Would I recognize your name?

August 6, 2009 - Coffee Break - 54th & Troost - Kansas City Missouri

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The black cat did not come back. A little head scratch is nice but not a necessity. As Soseki's cat says it takes three times. There is a rule of three, it's an unstable number. When you don't want something to work you appont three members to a special committe - the Russian's call it a Toika. Three destabilizes and moves systems through chaos from one stable order to another - Snak's rule - there I've said it thrice so it must be true. Will maybe not all trinities are unstable. Three on a match is bad.

Prime numbers tend to have more good and bad connotatons than not non-primes - 3, 13 are bad, but 7 and 11 are good. And it is not surprising that we should fine most of the good and bad number to be the lowest ones because as the get bigger they thin out even though there is an infinite number of them (both good ones and evils ones as well as indifferent ones). At first almost ever other number is a prime, but near 100 on only one in four is prime, and never 1,000 one in seven, and near 10 billion only one in 23 is prime. No one knows what the largest evil prime number is - only that it must exist. It is not know if the largest evil prime is larger or smaller than the largest good prime number either (I suspect that the evil one is larger). After some very very large number all larger primes will be Manichean neutral. Forever and ever. Amen!

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[He] never paid up, authority having the privilege of being able to change the rules – Andrew Hodges – Alan Turing: The enigma, 1983 p32

When we have a habit
       We won’t call it an addiction
There must be rules

I limit myself to a pack a day

       (and at midnight I sneak out to buy another)

And I never begin to drink before 3PM

       (as I never awoke before then anyway

        it wasn’t really a legitimate rule)

And whether the rules lead to the habits
Or it’s the habits that demand the rules
        No one knows

What we do know is that where we find the one

        There is the other

Our rationality is limited to rule making
Its one of the rules of how rationality works
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For the world is the world… / And it writes no histories / That end in love – Stephen Spender

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Hardly the signs of careful premeditation – it would be ludicrous to accuse me of that – indifference yes, I plead guilty of that – I plead guilty of willful indifference
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The fact is, I was not thinking at all, not what could really be called thinking. I was content to sail along these dappled back roads, one hand on the wheel and an elbow out the window, with the scents of the country in my nostrils and the breeze whipping my hair – John Banville – The Body of Evidence, 1989 p102
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It’s quite except for the hum of distant rubber

Then a small breeze blows in and the cottonwood

       Trees begin to rustle

The ears are unique in that way where once

They become atuned there no shutting them off

       It was only then that I noticed the commuter traffic


And this morning’s birds? I notice one – then another
The whole forest is alive with their chatter
       And then the cottonwoods rustle again


And when the morning’s commute dies down
There is the sound of men at work in the limestone quarry
       By now I’m fixated by what there is to hear


You don’t do that with the eyes or the nose
       Well the nose if you’re into find wine
       But that has to be trained
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Why, this time next week I won’t remember / What I was feeling when I wrote this. / I’ll have forgotten that I slept badly / and dreamed for a time this evening… - Raymond Carver – All of US, 1998 p167
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I woke up feeling wiped out. God knows where I’ve been all night, but my feet hurt – Raymond Carver – All of US, 1998 p186
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From the Notebooks (#2 -- 01/18/04 - San Francisco - Royal Ground Coffeehouse – California & Fillmore
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I am getting a little to bold for my own good. It all started with my public readings. Now I am conducting a conversation with the Muni driver from the back of a half full bus. It starts when the driver announce, “Here it is!” “Here what is?” I ask. We leave the bus stop. He is creeping along talking in a loud voice, asking if anybody wanted to be a Muni driver. No one volunteered, rightly assuming that he might abandon the vehicle to one of them if he could find a volunteer. “It’s easy” he announced. He turned his #47 off of Mission and headed north onto Van Ness . There was a #49 directly ahead of us, “That one is 8 minutes late and I am on time” he proclaims. He appears to be conducting a soliquey. It’s his stage, his driver’s seat after all. That throne looks like and operates like the captain’s chair up on the bridge of a big ship. The young woman across from me has big ‘rag-a-muffin’ eyes (which in itself is no relevant) but she clutching her companion tightly by the pant leg. The remaining passengers are all quite (the normal condition except for couples and small group interacting). “That 49 is skipping stops and making me pick up everyone - and yet - I will still pass him by California St” he announces. “No, it will probably be Broadway. Yes, Broadway. Can anyone guess how late he is (referring to the number 49 ahead of us)?” I pipe up “My guess is that he is about eight minutes behind schedule”. “Someone has been paying attention” he announces. “Rag-a-muffin’s” companion attempted several timid responses but other wise its only the driver and I. I was playing ‘Doc Severson’ to his Johnny Carson..

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“See that man, you never want to pick him up” “Oh”, I reply “I didn’t know that you could chose your passengers” “When it’s a danger to the public’s health and the environment you can” he says. “You know what ‘septic’ means? Do you know what antiseptic means?” “So” I ask “why do not all Muni drivers exercise this discretionary power?” “Because” he relied “they can’t read” I was amused. The other passengers appeared to be about to go into shock. It was not the topic. It was the protocol of the situation that worried them. It was like staring a conversation with a single female on the elevator after the door has closed and just you and her are standing alone in that small confined space. She has three choices - panic, ignore you or converse. My fellow passengers were obviously uncomfortable. The next stop was opposite the Opera House and a small group boarded. “Who won?” asked the driver. His comment was not directed at anyone in particular. “It was an opera!” a man finally replied, with a look of distain on his face. At the next stop several more opera fans boarded and the driver badgered them also. Finally one may replies “Renaldo won”. “Hear that folks, ‘Renaldo’ won the opera” I’m enjoying this banter - other than a few other less timid folks, everyone is looking around and whistling to themselves. If they ignore it, it will go away. No one has yet taken the third option and panicked.

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Today on the same bus (the #47) the bus driver stopped at the California St stop but didn’t activate the exits, even though I had signaled a “stop requested”. When the bus ahead of us got out of the way we proceeded on to the next stop. “Hey, driver, how about letting us off here, since you wouldn’t let us off at our requested stop” I hollered from mid bus. No reply. “I guess that that means no” I holler. I getting in the habit of speaking up - No one else will say anything – I should have just politely waited like everyone else for the next stop and walked back. And in the end that is what I and the other passengers had to do but it was not without protest- I’m becoming more compulsive. I’m becoming more interactive. I’m getting more aggressive. I think it’s due to this process of writing that I’m forcing myself to do But, I tell myself I need to be a little more cautious. I knew that the worst thing that could happen to me was to get thrown off the bus and I wanted off anyway. But there were open-ended situations out there where it was best to keep your mouth shut and did I know which was which.
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Sunday morning and I’m sitting on a bench in Lafayette Park waiting with my laundry in the dryer. All my bills have been paid and I’m reading Habermas - well actually the book is sitting here on the bench next to me. What I’m actually doing is writing in my journal. The sun comes out. It feels good as I watch the dog walkers. Mothers (and a dad) are watching their children play.

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August 5, 2009 - Coffee Break - 54th & Troost - Kansas City Missouri

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The stray black cat has found a friend. It had been slinking across the back yard in the evenings. This is not a cat friendly neighborhood. Dogs run in packs and Katlin and Baby Boy’s cat Blackie had gotten mauled. Maybe it was just as well – they  have had such a disastrous record with pets anyhow - and now the have twin  baby brothers. I startled it on its trek to the woods for its nightly hunt, it looked up and froze – most creatures are unaware of other animals unless the move – I had been sitting at my garden table (with parasol) reading. Then last night I looked down and it was sitting beside my chair. It sniffed my fingers and meowed – I scratched its head – It jumped up top of the table and meowed for more. Then it headed off into the woods. I went back to reading Soseki’s I Am A Cat.

Paris under the occupation… becomes the twentieth century's premier study in which to reach the depressing conclusion that even the most liberal convictions buckle very easily under totalitarian pressure, unless there are extraordinary reserves of character to sustain them – Clive James – Cultural Amnesia, 2007 p36

I check to see if Raymond Carver was living on the Olympic Peninsula at the same time that I was in Port Townsend, but no, I had proceeded him and had left before he and Tess showed up together (saving me the trouble of asking what if our paths had crossed). It was that poem about the young man reading his book at a table by the window in the restaurant – “reading among the coming and going of dishes and voices.” That could have been me, I thought, but now I know that that was impossible.

There’s no point in even trying to be a businessman unless your love of money is so absolute that you’re ready to accompany it on the walk to a double suicide. For money, believe you me, is a hard mistress and none of her lovers are left off lightly – Soseki Natsume – I Am a Cat II, 1979 p43

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After Reading Raymond Carver’s THE CAR – All for Us, 1996 p151-152
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This car, that car, the car

My car, her car, our car

Old car, new car, used car

Broken down car on blocks, rusty car falling apart

           Car Beside the road with a pink tag
Car in the shop, reposed car, car
            That smoked
Family car, sports and white with a cherry on top
             Any color you want as long as its black
Car insurance, car title registration, car payment due
Autobiography by car, suicide by car
             See America by car
My mother the car, not your father’s car
The car left on the moon
Take a ride in the car car – rumph rumph rumph

Nothing / was happenings. Everything was happening. Life / was a stone, grinding and sharpening – Raymond Carver – All of US, 1996 p150

Poetic language is always a foreign language – Svetlana Boym (The Future of Nostalgia 2001 p290

From the Journals (#1 – January 17, 2007 – The Royal Ground, San Francisco – Fillmore and California)

They were discussing a business venture that involved graft, corruption and exploitation in a third world country. It sounded sleazy to me. It sounded like they thought it was sleazy too. But a business opportunity is a business opportunity and they talked of admiration of the beauty of the scheme. They talked how a wise entrepreneur could get his equity out along with a promised profit in a very short time. They talked of how this promoter was really sharp - a real role model. Sleazyness is rarely a hindrance in money making. There was more talk about junior trustees, IPOs, overseeing first deals and how they were going to do some good deeds with their business degrees. They were now discussing nonprofits, CEOs and doing good in the world - “I want to care about someone. For that scale in the world some compromise is necessary. I just don’t like that he needs this platform…”

When he was going for his MBA he had a roommate in Law school. They are discussing jobs and firms of which they had a common knowledge. They talked of friends that are now attorneys. Talking are about taking on the ‘skin’ of a role and becoming comfortable with it. They are talking about getting some ‘real’ responsibility , right out of college - going with the Justice Department perhaps. They were talking about how ‘real” responsibility helped you mature and become ‘comfortable’ in the professional world. “I did a deal by my second year, a relativity small deal. I had a senior partner form Simpson and a senior associate on the team. The Associated was a girl in her second year out of law school. She had probably just passed the bar. By this time I had done enough deals to know in thirty minutes what it was that we needed to discuss. She was not in a position to advise us. She was in a position to go to a database. To be worth anything you have to be trained. I have learned enough in business to know all the law I need to know to do a transaction. You’ve got to identify issues. I wouldn’t benefit from law school. It doesn’t get you a job. Doesn’t prepare you. It doesn’t get you the job.

Having once written something down it is always available for an act of bricollage. It is then real. It has a life. It becomes a thing. It can be grasped. It can be exploited (you are its owner). It can be messaged and reworked. It can be transformed into a new context. It is a building block that once the old building has been torn down can be reused; it’s a brick from a burned out building that can be salvaged and made to function again. Or maybe not.

Linda says that the red headed lady pounding the table was praying. She must have been a ‘Holly Roller’ , I replied

Café Fiore - Market St in the Castro – Having breakfast - Sitting in a sunny corner – lots of couples – all kinds – some singles like me – only one child - “Good morning - How are you? - Good - That’s what we like to hear - Larger than life, Charlie - Hello - How you doing - Good morning - Thank you - Good morning, How are you?” Later at the Library I advise a man, newly homeless, looking for Orwell’s Down and Out (which happens to be checked out) to try Road to Wiggen Pier instead - Its about poverty and the smell of the poor. Its similar to ‘Down and Out’” and he tells me his story.

August 4, 2009 - Coffee Beak - 54th & Troost - Kansas City Missouri

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There is always at last one unsated morning mosquito – the runt of the litter – it’s never bold enough and won’t survive. Then Dave and Nick Nick came along. Dave sits down in a chair at my patio table and the dog hops up into my lap. Later I put the dog up onto the table while Dave and I talk – mostly about the weather and how truck fuel can gel in the winter if it is cold enough. He almost died once, he said, when the fuel line on the second tank gelled. It hasn’t been really cold in the last ten years, he says. At the depot he claimed they used a propane torch to get the fuel to flow. And in Siberia I had seen them light fires under trucks to do the same thing. And I doubted that anyone would know that the climate had reached its tipping point and gone beyond until it had already happened and it was too late. Just another Mastodon caught in the ice. The dog sniffs around and then settles down to licking itself and gets a big bonner. Dave says that he tells Brenda that she ought to stud him out. Does she have papers on him, I ask? She says she does, but I’ve never seen them. We talk a lot about the weather but don’t do anything about it. Air-conditioning, Joe claims is the one modern invention that he could not do without. But Joe claims to be a Luddite. And I try to explain to him that a true Luddite is not against technology per se, but against the lack of control over its local impact. All technology is a done deal and it’s only a matter of time until we become nostalgic for the way things used to be. Having a decision over its imlementation is a forgotten concept, and isn’t that what democracy is really about – how we are to live and make real decisions?

I met two women. / One of them loved opera and the other / was a drunk who’d done time / in jail. I took up with one / and began to drink and fight a lot. / The way this woman could sing and carry on! – Raymond Carver – All Of Us, 1996 p.88

John Banville writes (in Body of Evidence) ‘his flies were open’. Is it a plural like the pants and the slacks and the shorts that it (they) adorn? Shouldn't it be singular as it joins the two halves of those pants, slacks and shorts; those two halves that make them plural in the first place – shouldn’t it have been ‘his fly is open’. I was writing about a crazy lady (see previous blog) and wrote ‘madwoman’ but that just didn’t seem right. There are crazy ladies and madmen, but not crazy men and madwomen.

All of us, all of us, all of us / trying to save / our immortal souls, some way / seemingly more round- / about and mysterious / than others – Raymond Carver – All Of Us, 1996 p101

The only safe thing to do is nothing
And noting is what being safe is

The inferno of the living is not something that will be, if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno that we live every day….There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first one is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is riskier and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then let them endure, give them space – Italo Calvino – Invisible Cities, 1974 p165

What is a list? An arrangement
Of words or statements that
Have some logical connection
(or maybe not). Well then
Is a paragraph a list? (obviously
Not) – having some logical
Spatial or temporal connection.


Is not a story a list of events
Is not an argument a list of inferences
Is not a Commonbook a list of quotes
Is this a list?

I know more than I express in words, and the little I can express I would not have expressed had I not known more – Vladimir Nabokov

When I become
      Conscious
Of my own presence
It’s awe-inspiring
      And intimidating
I try not to do it
      To often

The long process of his dying wearied and exasperated me in equal measure. Of course, I pitied him, too, but I think pity is always, for me, only the permissible version of an urge to give weak things a good hard shake – John Banville – Body of Evidence, 1989 p46
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To call down vengeance, you should have at least been a victim – and if vengeance is deserved that should not be difficult to demonstrate.

Essayists who stake everything on writing the kind of spangled style that glitters in the limelight near the top of the tent must wish sometimes, as they sweat to keep a sentence alive, that that tightrope could be laid down on the ground – Clive James – Cultural Amnesia, 2007 p32

From the Journals (#1 - 01/16/2004 - San Francisco - Royal Ground, Fillmore & Calfornia) - THE MENDOCINO DEPARTS FOR LAKESPUR

I’m sitting here on a bench enjoying a bit Schaffberg & Beggre semisweet chocolate with a cup of Peet’s on one of the benches facing the water behind the Ferry Building (Schaftfberg & Beggre maintain a boutique outlet inside). I’m watching the catamaran Mendocino as it pulls in to disgorge a load of passengers from across the Bay. A woman approaches and says “any one sitting here?” “Not at the moment” I reply. She sits down, “but I guess there is now” I add – the initial words of politeness end in silence unless someone takes the plunge. Let a glance or a phrase go unaddressed and any chance is dead. “Great place to eat lunch” she says “Did the fog clear yesterday?” “I don’t know” I tell her “I didn’t pay any attention to it” “Are you from around her?” she asks “Yep” I reply. The Mendocino is now boarding, a light load - maybe fifty or so. A few stragglers are making their way up the ramp. “Yourself?” I ask. “Down from Lake County to pick up my husband” she replies (that can kill any chance too). We sit the rest of the time in silence. I finish my coffee and begin writing. She finishes her take out and then gets up and disposes of the container in the trash receptacle to my right. “Have a good day” I call after her. “And you too. Thanks for sharing your bench” she replies. “Oh, its not mine” I tell her “it was just here”.

A twelve foot cat boat with a blue and white sail passes on the bay behind the loading ferry. The membe of the ferry’s crew is talking with someone on the dock as the occasional traveler boards. The boats engine hums with a throb and there is a swoosh of water exiting its idling jets. The pilot is at the wheel, the last boarder is on

The speaker announces final departure for Larkspur. The three crew members on the gangway are stirring – They amble board. The gang way is raised. A crewman comes out onto the bow to release the line there. The ferry starts moving backwards as the volume and pitch of the engine’s rumble begins increasing. The Container ship ‘Genoa Bridge’ sails in towards Oakland. The Mendocino makes its turn. The engines throb ever louder as it accelerates forward with a twin spay of water sprouting up from the rear of each of its hulls. The ‘Genoa Bridge’ is not heavily laden even with all those stacks of containers on its deck. The bow and its red water line project high above the waves. Perhaps it is carrying empty containers back to Asia. It fades away to the right headed for a passage under the Bay Bridge. The Sausalito ferry ‘Golden Gate’ berths at the just vacated slip. The ‘Genoa Bridge’ is sounding its horn at a steady pitch as it crosses below the bridge.

Time to buy another notebook. This one is almost filled.

“It’s one of the darker tunnels in Canada” dialogue from “The Station Agent”. Another attempt to make conversation or to fill in the gap. You must really be comfortable with someone to not feel uncomfortable during the silences

August 3, 2009 - Coffee Break - 54th & Troost - Kansas City Missouri

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Laundry time – didn’t I just do the laundry – that was the linens and the floor mats – oh yes, so it was. Sunday morning go to meeting time – no one wears their Sunday best anymore – there was a time one put on a suit to get on an airplane and probably a time when it was done when one went into town – but not any more – now that is just for the dead and his pallbearers.

My daughter’s kitchen / in winter. I fork the pie in / and tell myself to stay out of it. / She says she loves him. No way / could it be worse – Raymond Carver (All the Rest, 1996 p87)

Whether it is Joyce’s grave
        In Zurich or Baudelair’s
In Paris (a Baudelair sandwich
        The guard joked)

Things will never be what
        They might have been
                  OR
        Should have been
                  OR
        Could have been
This close to the crypt

They were our crowd, our set, our friends. We rarely knew their names, or they ours, we called each other pal, chum, captain, darling. We drank our brandies or our ouzos, whatever was the cheapest local poison – John Banville, The Body of Evidence 1989 p10

It’s high tech inside there
You notice that when almost
         All of the chips have been consumed

         While fishing for the last few crumbs
It’s the benefit of the space program
These developments in the packaging industry
          Atomized aluminum sprayed onto plastic
          Shrink-wrap applied with a hair dryer

Flies and moths, it turns out, are both poetic and antipoetic things par excellence – Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia 2001 p265

Being a man is knowing the lay of this land
        And not just its women either
Talking of sports the way
        A woman talks of her priest
Oh it’s much more than memorizing
        The statistics and hating math
It’s chatting up one’s expertise
        She says she did this and then that
And he says the same about the players
        On the field of his dreams

He is play-acting their lives, negotiating their
        Contracts and moving them about the league
        It makes no difference if they are dead
She at least is talking about people she knows
        Up close and personal
In sports that’s all pretense even if you
        Watch them every day religiously
Umberto Eco calls it chatting about chatting
         About chatting and claims it’s a substitute
         For politics – this democracy called sports
An admission that you’re impotent at least
         In the realm of affecting your own life

Perhaps contempt was for us a form of nostalgia, of homesickness, even? … I used to dream of rain – real, daylong, Irish rain – as if it were something I had been told about but never seen – John Banville, The Body of Evidence 1989 p67

She showed me her flower
Irises? A little late in the season
         Isn’t it?

She looked puzzled. No maybe not
I thought they were Irises
         The same purple color
No, it’s something that begins with a ‘C’
         Carnia or Cadamus but not Carnation


Is that the Ventures on Siris Radio
          Either that or Dick Dale
No it’s someone with a nostalgic
          Fondness for surf music
          That electronic drum beat


Gladiola! Gladiolas, I said
That’s what they’re called
            Yes, she replied, that’s what it is


Same driving guitar and steady beat
But with the precision and sharpness
            Of electronics


I’d never seen Gladiolas of that
           Color before and I was not sure
           About this homage to the Ventures
But it was probably better than to have
           To actually hear them – Telstar, Pipeline
‘
Syncope is the opposite of symbol and synthesis – Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia 2001 p281


I put up a petition annually for as much snow, hail, frost, or storm, of one kind or other, as the skies can possibly afford us. Surely everybody is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a winter fireside, candles at four o’clock, warm hearth-rugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies on the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without – Thomas De Quincy – Confessions of an Opium Eater (1821)

Suddenly I had a void, queasy sense of myself, not the tanned pin-up now, but something else, something pallid and slack and soft. I was aware of my toenails, my anus, my damp constricted crotch. And I was ashamed – John Banville, The Body of Evidence 1989 p46

From the Notebooks (#1 – January 15, 2004 - San Francisco - Royal Ground – California & Fillmore)


A beefy red haired woman in a green raincoat who could propel herself no further along the sidewalk plunks down in a chair along Fillmore in front of the shop. She buried her face in a book - not reading it - literarily burying her face in it. She sat slumped over, tired, exhausted. She was now trying to find a comfortable way to flop her head so that she would rest.

Butts - Taxi’s drivers use there’s a lot. Recent research has shown that driving and obesity are directly related. I am off and running with today’s theme not just sitting on it.

The fat lady is now pounding on the table with her hand. She appears to be having some mental distress - is it something that happened today or is she always like this. No it not distress. She’s on her cell phone. She appears to be holding it in her right hand, away from my view. That is probably why I had not noticed it before. She probably just sat down to continue her conversation to an unknown party. And I had jumped to the conclusion that it was an unseen party (an imaginary friend). She just could not walk and talk at the same time. Walking alone had obviously been strenuous for her. No it is actually a pretend conversation – he has no cell phone. She’s yelling at her imaginary friend now – that’s not nice.. She just pretends to be talking on the phone in order to appear more normal. She’s not doing a very good job of it.

No, she doesn’t appear to have a cell phone at all. My first conjecture proves to be right. I just wanted to believe the best about everybody (Linda would have laughed at this), but then who am I to be commenting on her distress. What would someone else think about me as they watched me scribbling away- who’s to say that someone is not watching now. Here's someone trying to find stories about butts to write about - a little strange you might think. But you wouldn't say it out loud.

“So Michael do you want to be immortalized?” “And with you writing about derrieres all day” he replied. “No thank you”

The raucous parrots of Washington Square could be heard two blocks away. The whole flock sounded like it was in the tree, light green plumage among the dark cypress needles with an occasional patch of red and they are still difficult to spot. It’s their movement that gives them away and they were big birds.

-

They are showing “The Station Agent” at the Embarcadero @ 1:30. I shall go.

August 2, 2009 - Broadway Cafe - Kansas City Missouri

Its noisy sitting out here on the patio, this lawn mowing is a necessity with all this rain – the vacant lot behind had gotten a little seedy – Senator Jolleen is due at nine for her weekly community meeting – I’m finishing up Hubert Harrison and Abu-Lughod. I had too much beer (last night) with Paul – at least five – it took me fifty years and he only half of that to get so cynical but maybe it is the zeitgeist – it takes a fool to have big dreams in these times – but the question remains – where do we go from here – what can you do that will give meaning to your existence (other that slobber in your beer, screw around and procreate – maybe there isn’t, how sad). Begrudgingly you might admire the dedicated souls who only want to make money or get into heaven.

[It is] better to vote for that which you want, and not get it, then to vote for what you don’t want – and get it – Hubert Harrison [The Coming Election, The Voice Oct 18, 1917]

Call it quits
Gotta do it

         Every night

Nothing sincere

Inauthentiicity rules

         Except for the fireflies
         Blinking in the night

Once we’ve done a thing more that three times over, the act becomes a habit and its performance a necessity of our daily life – Soseki Natsume (I am a cat II, 1979 p13)

WALKING ON WATER

The faithful – The beautiful

Have faith – Take time

Interfaith - Intercept

Faithful to – Faithful too
Taken on faith – Taking on water
Having faith – Walking on water

Daylight… comes in two intensities; either it is not enough to see by, or it sears the sight. Of the various kinds of darkness I shall not speak – John Banville (The Book of Evidence, 1989 p4)

The inflationary cost of loyalty inducement is the ultimate downfall of any system

Sunshine, unlike other things, is distributed fairly – Natsume (1979 p29)

And isn’t the past inevitable / now that we call the little / we remember of it “the past” – William Matthaus

A fiesta with the queen on a float (its really the local butcher’s truck and she’s high up on top waving and at sixteen she really thinks that she is royalty in her white gown with silver glitter) and little girls in tutus are doing cartwheels down the sidewalks on both sides of the street. All the females whom I had ever been acquainted with were watching or in the process of getting their kids or grandchildren out the door and finding a place from which they can see. There is Ila my sister. There is Socorro my secretary when I was in Bakersfield. There is my first love, the first one that let me go all the way and the grade school cook. Over there is my Latin teacher. There is the lady who sat next to me on the flight to London. That is thee nurse’s aid from my dad’s ‘assisted living’ facility. And what does it mean when everyone from every phase of my life is gathering in this one spot – not that they are getting acquainted with each other; they are all just gathering to watch the parade go by. They probably are not even aware that there is this commonality to their lives and even if they were told they would probably only shrug their shoulders – the have more important things on their minds (they are all mothers or grandmothers now). And it is only women and babies who are gathering along the parade route and it is only young girls who are in the parade – and I know them all (where are the men? Maybe they are watching from upper story windows as I am doing).

The urban “love at last sight” discovered by Benjamin and Baudelaire, that produces a sexual shudder with a simultaneous shock of recognition and loss, is more than a melancholic passion; it reveals itself as the miracle of possibilities. “Love at last sight” strikes the urban stranger when that person realizes he or she is onstage, at once an actor and a spectator – Svetlana Boym (The Future of Nostalgia 2001 p254)

Constant change in itself is a tool of social control – it turns everyone into an exile – subject to the commercialization of nostalgia

The real secret of the ruby slipper is not that there is no place like home, but rather that there is no longer such a place as home – Solman Rushdie (The Wizard of Oz, 1996)

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I said, “a forge, and a scythe.” / I talk to myself like this. / Saying names of things - / capstan, hawser, loam, leaf, furnace – Raymond Carver [All of Us, 1998 p97)

From the Journal (#1 - 01/14/04 - San Francisco - Royal Ground – California &  Fillmore)

There is a man in a dark suite, yellow tie and a white button down shirt standing, just standing, in front of the ATM machine and smiling. He has a pocket full of mobile electronic devices. He has just moved away from the ATM and is now standing between two empty tables. He is in front of the window that faces onto California St. He is facing towards me. He does not sit down. He does not pace back and forth. He just stands there. I quietly whisper to Walter - “see that guy with the yellow tie? He is conducting surveillance”. “FBI, CIA, or Treasury Department” asks Walter. “No” I say “I think he is doing a marketing survey”. He (our man not Walter) calls Denise on his cell phone. He gives his name. It sounds like ‘Shanks’. Finally he sits down and begins fiddling with his phone. He dials it and puts it to his ear. He not talking, probably listening to his voice mail. He does not take down any notes. He dials again. No answer. ‘Click” goes the top of the cover as he flips the device shut with a flick of his wrist and he lays it upon 5h3 table with a single long fluid motion of his arm. He’s done this many times before or else he practices it a lot at home, like I used to practice lighting a match still attached in its matchbook with one hand (and yes I did singe the pad of my right thumb on occasion). A leather jacket clad Indian gentleman enters and introduces himself to the our man. The both walk out together.

I have started reading back my notebook entries. Not only silently to myself, but out loud also - to others. This morning right after the suit left I read the passage that I had written about him to Walter and Linda.

An unknown man on my left had been listening to. When I got to the part about the man not sitting - Walter says “but he did sit down”. “I know”, I tell him “but that comes later”. I finish reading and the eavesdropper turns and says “I thought he as a cardboard silhouette” I read this same passage to Michael as well as the part about the cool cat with yellow pants. Later I read the later passage along with another selection to David. That’s when he asked when the book was coming out. I assured everyone that I had not written anything about them, but of course they would be unable to verify this without reading the entire ouveur. Will they now be reluctant to converse openly with me? The answer to that hypothesis proved to be a resounding no! - In Walter’s case, it made him even more talkative.

“Well Linda do something, so that I can write about it” I say. “I could take down my pants and moon the staff” she replies. “And I will write about it” I promise. She takes a cigarette and walks outside for a smoke. “Writing is such a minimalist activity“, I tell myself. “You selected a bit from here and a piece from there in the rich panorama around you as the only record of anything having taken place”

“I’m immortalized”, says Linda after she returns and I read her my new entry. “Yes, your bare ass and a cigarette for posterity”, I tell her. I announce the theme for today - “It will be posteriors, derrieres, rumps, bottoms, buttocks – in plain English -. asses”