JENNIFER STEPS INTO THE SHOWER - STEAM OBSCURES THE ROOM AND FOGS THE MIRRORS

I relit the fire this morning. Not that it was that cold. Yesterday had actually been hot. I’ll probably stay here another night. They have flush toilets and hot showers here (count your luxuries where you can). Sitting here in the woods watching the fire burn, avoiding all the chores that need to get done. The least that I can do is start a pot of coffee. I’ve been in the woods a week now without having turned on a radio – media, the self-medicating disease. Fire is calming. I’m shedding my anxieties. It’s the damn media that I blame, especially TV. Anxiety sells products, which buys time. I burn logs which also buys time. Consume for success – a healthy lifestyle. I sit and watch the fire. I’ll eventully get around to making breakfast – bacon and eggs and hash brown potatoes. The coffee is ready. Pour this morning’s first cup.

Incoherence is preferable to a distorting order –  Andre Gide

Property values is all that keeps them out of the streets

The politicians know that and weep

Bad news causes markets to plummet

We shall only have good news

             They have decreed

Or perhaps get them adicted

            To reality TV

And load them down

            With student loan

            Obligations

A lifetime’s worth and a subprime

            Mortgage to go

The best thing learned by these struggles is, how to prepare for another – Wendell Phillips, 1855

A third of high-school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives, and neither do 42% of college graduates

Anecdotal thinking comes naturally, science requires training – Michael Shermer – The Believing Brain, 2011 p63

According to Walter

He has, he claims,

Invented a new form of poetry.

It happened at four o’clock

            This morning

He had to find something

Other than watching Infomercials

            To keep himself occupied

So he recited to us:

            There was a young man from Nantucket

            Who kept show and tell in a bucket

Things that he found just lying around

Nice, I said

But is it not a Limerick

Just without the innuendo?

I had, said he, said,

That it was based on an older form.

According to Walter

A lemon half squeezed is no better that a lime.

And I said to Walter:

A lime a day will make you a sailor boy.

And why didn’t you just go to bed?

Veering toward/ the work of the world, / the days come / pearl handled / (and cold) / as a well oiled pistol – Theodore Enslin – Then and Now –1999 p161

Corporations get 40% of all federal discretionary spending

Three big noses Mrs Mother has, / they grow and grow in the night. / Sniff sniff sniff here naughty naughty dear! / And she also can smell with her ears – James Broughton – Special Deliveries, 1989 p6

Now it is time to play

Now it is time to work

Kick the ball, swing that hammer

Go to school and study hard

Work hard but play hard too

Ding-dong school is out, the wicked witch is dead

Blue collar, white collar, ring around the posy

Red neck, white lie, blue tie

Apply yourself, impress the boss

From the factory floor to the office door

The silver spoon and a golden paraschute

Pink slips, green cards, poker faces

Get good grades, earn big bucks

You too can be Mr. President

A poet crawling out from under the historical steamroller is better prepared to assume the tasks assigned to him than his colleagues in happier countries – Charles Simic – New York Review of Books, 12/22/11 p28

A debauched elite is faced with its own death. It’s choice is only in regard to the manifestation of it’s own demise. But instead it choses to fight on – try to keep the gravy train on its tracks. The bridge ahead is on fire. Insurgents are everywhere.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creatures, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions – Karl Mark – Contriutions to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1843

It’s only half past twelve,

But I don’t care. I don’t care.

If we don’t have a hurricane, I’ll go insane.

A record high predicted today

Mountain strawberries and huckleberries,

Blueberries in the meadows cranberries in the bogs

Fields of corn, thrashing time coming soon

Jimmy Buffet down in New Orleans,

Margaritas and martinis

Grain fed hogs on steamboats coming from up north.

Magnolias, dogwood, the fragrance of roses

Feedlots sheep-dip

Goat ropers chuck wagons

Bacon, hamburger and hot dogs

            (pink slime – mechanically

            separated)

Miller, Bud light or PBR

This one’s for you bud

            Icy cold

The red, white and the blues,

Jazz, rag and the hucklebuck

Sousaphone, saxophone and vibraphone

And don’t forget Ken Nordine

Basketball football baseball

Season tickets, SRO, bleachers

            Box seats for the big shots

Play by the rules – respect private

            Property

‘Private life’ changes according to the Doxa one addresses: if it is a Doxa of the right… it is the sexual private life which exposes most. But if it is a Doxa of the left, the sexual exposition transgresses nothing: here ‘private life’ is trivial actions… less exposed in declaring a perversion than in uttering a taste – Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 1977 p82

JENNIFER LET THE FLUFFY WHITE TERRYCLOTH ROBE SLIP OFF HER SHOULDERS AND FLOAT TO THE FLOOR

102 yesterday. It is supposed to get to 104 today. Damn it, I need to quite listening to the radio. It doesn’t do me any good at all. Can’t do anything about it. Walk outside and you’ll know everything you need to know about it. Ain’t putting up any hay, so what difference does it make anyhow? And beside if you’re like most folks you’d stay inside, in the house, at the store, at the office or in the car traveling back and forth (in-between), but your out here in the woods and you ain’t got no AC except for an occasional light breeze if and when it pleases. You’re a fool. And it’s hot. And oh your’re so miserable. Lay in the hammock all day and drink lukewarm beer until you pass out.

I prefer the wrong way… for at least the cracks and flaws and awkwardness show signs of life – Charles Bernstein – A Poetics, 1992 p2

I Have Some Questions

            Do you have any too?

What were you doing?

Remember what you were doing?

            (Watching on TV no doubt)

Rephrase that one

            Remember where you were watching the TV

What you were thinking as you watched

            What is he thinking

            That slow chase down the Florida highway

                        In the white bronco

And when the verdict came in

White people were stunned

And black people jumped

And we wondered how well we knew each other

We asked questions that we hadn’t asked in a while

Jesus is the answer?

The license plates all proclaim it

But what I want to know

Is what was that question again?

Can you give it to me in a sentence?

The art of living has no history: it does not endure: the pleasure which vanishes, vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing: no progress in pleasure: nothing but mutations – Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 1977 p50

They had just come off the trail. Said they needed the time alone. They weren’t very sociable. An image of the movie “Brokeback Mountain” came to my mind even thought there were no sheep anywhere around. “What brought you guys all the way up here”, I asked?  I answered by own question, “The nearest mountains, I suppose.” “Yes,” they replied. There was a big fire in the woods to the side of the road and I had passed through its smoke yesterday afternoon. A controlled brush fire I suppose as there didn’t seem to be any effort going on to contain it. It made for a great sunset.  Forest fires are good for that  as are volcanic eruptions (think of what nuclear bombs could have done for Turner). This place is too near the highway. I hear the jake brakes of big trucks all night. A car from with Minnesota tags pulled in during the night. The Tulane students left early in shower of gravel. There’s a blue and green tent pitched two sites away. We are on a ridge and the wind blows continuously. I break camp. Still no one is stirring in nearby tent. I stop at the Pines Café for breakfast – two scrambled eggs, sausage and hash browns with coffee. A big ORV assembly in the parking lot; two dozen four wheelers. “Big trail ride?” “Oh yes”, the waitress replies, “trails all over the place, if your adventurous.” Down here an ATV is considered a second car; mobile homes on cinder blocks surrounded by old rusting hulks of yesterdays trucks. The café is a family operations; grandpa, grandma, daughter and granddaughter is my guess. The old man is fussing with the paperwork as his granddaughter, Linda tells him about Peter, “He’s working out with weights. He just started. His deltoids are really sore today.” She comes up on weekends to help out. She is complaining about the reception on her cell phone. Next door is an hand painted sign: “Ozark Woodcraft for Sale”.

The Crows were skilled horse thieves and stole from everybody, including each other. They claimed never to have killed a white man except in self-defense. They explained to one trader that if they killed white men there would be fewer to rob – Ian Frazier – Great Plains, 1989 p52

This is the time in which it is

            Not so hard to do anything

So long as obscurity is not

            The obstacle

No it is not a hard time – No

            Harder than a hard-boiled

Egg

            Two minutes at the

                         Most

Chasing and unnamable dream, / Unclassifiable, the dream of our youth, / Which is to  say the bravest of all / Our dreams – Roberto Bolano – The Romantic Dogs, 2006  p121

I hate this process (not so much hate it as fear it) of inventing, creating this world – such a responsibility – but I will not have it any other way.

You constitute yourself in fantasy, as a ‘writer’ or worse still: you ‘constitute yourself’ – Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 1977s p82

His teeth are tobacco stained. He sis on the curb in front of the Citgo Station. He wants to tell me his story. I give him five minutes. He is from Marshall. Wanted to know if I knew were that was. I told him that I did. Said he’d didn’t have a driver’s license even though he’d passed the test on the first try (I’m sure there’s more to the story), not that he didn’t know where it was (it had probably been revoked, that would be my guess). He’d been down here for two years now, living with his grandmother. He came down here because there was too much trouble in big cites (meaning …). But in these small towns you can’t hide and everyone’s into your business, I said. His five minutes are up. I’m not very curious. I pay for my gas. Don’t ask – don’t tell. Have a great day, I say as I drive off. It takes time and patience to draw out the good (interesting) stories. I could have made the time but I didn’t have the patience.

O little squeeze shoes / on the pinchy tiptoe, / how long is the run through the tick-tack dark – James Broughton – Special Deliveries, 1989  p7

I played good cop bad cop

If you park there the ranger

            Will cite you.

Oh thank you, thank you

            I didn’t know

Later I just blamed the           

            Agency

The [unnamed agency] requests

            That you not park

            On the grass

Fuck you! Are you some

            Type of ranger, dude?

People react to fear, not love; they don’t teach that in Sunday school, but it’s true – Richard M Nixon, 1990

I’m drinking cheap wine and I’m listening to feminist radio on a community station - women’s issues – women’s voices – brought to you by some pet communicator – intitutive findings - readings to guide your relationship with your cat - searching desperate for sponsorships. Feminist radio – community broadcasting.

Runaway thought, I wanted to write it; instead I wrote that it has run away – Pascal

The library and the brewery

A beer and a book

The bear and the bull

Then to the apothecary

And well

            If only…

Haven’t seen you

            In

Here before

            Now

Don’t go often

            This far

            North

With the other refugees

And now

            I’m one too

Never thought

            It’d come to

            This

And if I plan to leave / a mark / I leave so little / - mark that means a thing / as any - / less than a pisshole in the snow – Theodore Enslin – Then and Now – 1999 p186

Hugh Hefner reportedly paid $85,000 to reserve a crypt next to Marilyn Monroe’s. Jump them bones Hughie. Bones rattling in the dark when the moon is new.

Your conclusions are only as sound as your premises – Michael Shermer – The Believing Brain, 2011 p23

JENNIFER ADJUSTS THE TEMPERATURE OF THE WATER

I’ve arrived at my summer home. Dave and Patty have come and gone. (It’s now July 12 I’ve left – it got too hot without any AC. I promised I come back next year if they put in electricity, but with budgets the way they are, I’m higly doubtful that they will. And besides it ok for a little while but I don’t know that I like playing the role of the responsible adult). The sheriff’s deputy came out and talked to the troublemakers. The refugees from Prophet Chuck Profit are still there across the road. The ORVs are longs gone. Deputy Brian tells me to call whenever I feel uneasy (but the only time that I called was when the guy in the next campsite committed suicide). The heat comes and it goes. The tomatoes grow and grow. Occasionally a breeze blows and rustles the leaves. I can’t get up or the dog will claim my chair. He wants to nip at me if I try to make him move.  He thinks he’s in charge. He needs to be disabused of this notion, but he’s so cute and so small. The battery is dead. The refrigerator smells. Everything goes into the cooler while I do a through housecleaning. I need to buy a generator but I hate the noise they make.

I wish all things were level. / I mistrust mountains. / There are things I dislike, / but none / is worth an argument. / I do take pride in this: / I am a good neighbor – Theodore Enslin – Then and Now – 1999 p73

See little; say nothing

No tales tall or short

            Nothing at all

Long or small

The rich are loved for making actual the wishes of everybody; while the poor, conversely, are despised as the lackeys of unattainable desire – James Buchan – Frozen Desire: the meaning of money, 1997  p152

A slow cruise of the Great Lakes – the dirigible Zenobia is taking passengers for a tour. It’s advertised right here in “Senior Living”. Many aged and the infirm have signed up. This is the cruise that they had always promised themselves.  It was not as expensive as one might have thought, but they were operating on a very tight budget. "We hovered over a wooded island in the Lake Superior. Those of us who wanted to explore were lowered down on a rope. The island was occupied by a colony of Amazons." Are there lots of you Amazons out here in the woods on isolated islands near the border? What are they up to?  The cruise mostly occurred at night. The lights of cars on the highways were visible when there was no cloud cover. Streaks of red and light lights pointed to glowing skies on the horizon.  No additional excursions on the ground occurred. It was pretty boring, but then a cruise is about food and drinking and they didn’t provide anything in that way either - a lot of nouveau cuisine and mineral water. Passengers were notified that it would be BYO. There was a weight limit of 300 pounds per passenger self and luggage. There were scales at the boarding ramp. Many were obese. A pile of discarded items due to the weight limit piled up as they boarde.  It was a lighter than air craft and it wouldn’t have been without this weight limitation. The ship landed somewhere in North Dakota and disgoruged its passengers. It had run out of fuel and was low on helium and there was no money for any more. A discussion was held as to whether to take up a collection from among the passengers to replenish the Zenobia or just let the passengers find their own ways home. Several of the passengers had a rare blood disease for which there was a non-profit foundation with lots of money (too few eligible recipients). It was looking for ways to disburse its funds. A grant proposal was quickly written and faxed in. A credit line was set up. A bus was hired and the Zenobia was left sitting in a wheat field. A storm arose. The wind picked up. The Zenobia had not been tethered down. It was blown aloft and away. It was last seen in the glow of a flash of lightning. That was around midnight.

Is it important

            As you die

            Slowly and deliberately

To remember

And there is so little time

            To remember it all

One last time

            Choose

Choose just a few

But which ones

            For a final rollcall

            And then gone

Forever

Desire… is extinguished by sickness and death – James Buchan – Frozen Desire: the meaning of money, 1997  p125

I did some reasearch on this story but could not find anything about a Zeppelin called the Zenobia. All airships druring that time belonged to the Navy and there were only three – the Macon, the Shanadoaha and the Los Angeles. I could find no reference to any private airships and no craft that carried passengers or was lost in North Dakota. There was no mention any similar incident in the press of the time and no mention of it in historical accounts of lighter-than-air ships, but I have interviewed five people who swear that they had a relative on that cruise. Maybe if I an identify the un-named blood disease I can identify the foundation that provived the funds to get the stranded passengers home. They may have some record of that transaction. They might even have a copy of the funding application in their files. The story of the Amazons on an island in Lake Superior I find dubious. I think that it might have been a later detail added to make an otherwise mundane excursion seem more exiting in the retelling. Also you would thing there would have been some type of law suite given the way the passengers were dumped in that North Dakota wheat field in the middle of the night, but then if was settled out of court those records would have been sealed. 

When a group of them [buffalo hunters] walked into a bar, they would reach into their clothes, and the last one to catch a louse had to buy – Ian Frazier – Great Plains, 1989 p58

A coming of age

A new generational naming

            Having run out of letters

            Generations A to Zed

Generation by generations

            A generation ago

            The coming generations

Generation to generation

            Self-generating

            My generation

            This generation!

The gay nineties then the naughts

I began - / but I found there / no beginning, / no part of it. / The human condition formed / in clusters - / grew upon the vine / as grapes – Theodore Enslin – Then and Now – 1999 p80

All books are interconnected

Not accumulations of wisdom

            Or even of knowledge

Maybe Aristotle would not agree

            But you are a spider

Yout web is in memories

            That you weave

Year after year sucreting

My interconnections are

            My obsessions

These are my confessions

And if the flower / Flowers / let it by all means / in itself flower – Theodore Enslin – Then and Now – 1999 p85

English ladys call them Silver Ladies

Lepish Saccharina means

Sugar bug – sounds so sweet

They like their own company

So much

They often eat one another

Described in twelve pages

Of Teutonic text

Molt and mate

Molt and mate

And eat one another

That’s a Silverfish’s life

They regard man tenderly

We are good

But not that dependable

To be a victim alone is not an honor – Jean Amery – At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a survivor on Auschwitz and its realities, 1980 p.ix

A culture is subject to a Heisenberg principle of sorts: you can’t both describe it and know its becoming – you can either live it or talk about it.

I spun on single wings / down / like a maple key but / aimless / aimless. / What I felt / was empty – full of / emptiness – Theodore Enslin – Then and Now – 1999 p116

The man in the tan truck (who will later try to commit suicide) is back – three days in a row now and the three people in a beat up black sedan – back after skipping three nights – they ran over the curb at site #8 and wanted to borrow a flashlight to check on the damage. The guy who is hard of earing and talks constantly on the phone, got out and walked back to site #3 cursing in the dark. They have quieted down and have pitched their tent. Peace reigns for the time being.

Only fever or poverty provoke visions. / Only love and memory. / Not these paths on the plains. / Not these labyrinths – Roberto Bolano – The Romantic Dogs, 2006  p41

If there ware no multiverse

We’d have to invent one

            Or perhaps several

For if  the universe/multiverse were

            A singularity

Science would be an impossiblity

Philosophy and poetry, in essence the story of and unhappy love affair – Durs Grunbein – Bars of Atlantis, 2010  p234

Something small and black and fury and that can run like a bat out of hell just crossed my path. It leaps and  it bounds and it is gone. Later I see a red fox. It was rather large for a fox. I’d never seen a fox in the wild before. A blue van in sitting in campsite #8 with the motor running. It pulls out after I passed by and the woman on the passenger side waved frantically and smiled. The dog and I walk the campgrounds regularly and check on everything. Was she is distress? It didn’t seem so. Maybe she just felt guilty at being so she supposed caught giving head

A VIEW IN THE DANDELIONS: Full bloom / miles of / bull bloom - / the eye / revolts - / dances in the heart - / nothing else. / It is the eye / seeing the eye – Theodore Enslin – Then and Now – 1999 p111

JENNIFER TAKES A SHOWER

Another Friday night – three parties tonight here in the campgrounds. But the two gay dudes couldn’t get their tent set up and left. The guys with the guitar left before ten. That only left the group throwing the hatchets but they quieted down around midnight and left early the next morning. I picked off at least thirty ticks today, not including the ones that Trail Dog brought to bed with him. Someone had trapped a raccoon and brought it out here to let loose. The first thing that it did was to attack Trail Dog. Mister, mister, a big raccoon is attacking your dog. I feared the worst. Poor little guy. I ran as fast as my flip-flops would let me go - flap, flap, flap. He was ok – he’d chased of the critter off and was prancing about. He doesn’t know enough woodcraft to keep out of harms way. I’m always expecting him to get bitten by a snake when he has his nose in the leaves poking about. He is beginning to lose his curosity of turtles – they refuse to play, clam up and hid away

But all the world’s ones come out by two / for a four-legged waltz of whom and who – James Broughton – Special Deliveries, 1989  p34

It rained last night – lovers are at it; out early. They are in their mid-thirties. Mid-live liaisons – breakfast from brown-paper bags in the park. Of the modern conveniences, electricity is the best. But then it’s not really a convenience in itself is it? It is plastic. It’s what you can do with your life. My advice Benjamin is plastics. Get into plastics.

There I was: Sentencing myself to death / by red ants and also / by black ants, traveling through empty villages: / fear that grew / until it reached the stars – Roberto Bolano – The Romantic Dogs, 2006  p41

Youth is focused on style

Age shifts it to content

            Time is running out

            For any meaning

A love brief as the sigh of a guillotined head, / The head of a King or a Breton count, / Brief like beauty, / Absolute beauty – Roberto Bolano – The Romantic Dogs, 2006 p37

Some coonass hunters running dogs show up as it gets dark. This is the first night that it was warm enough to sleep without wearing longjohns. When I have to get up in the middle of the night – unzip the bag and crawl out into the dark wearing only my boxers – I don’t freeze my ass off. For the fist time since leaving home I have a fellow camper. No they are just letting their dogs out to let them run. Though there were hounds barking down along the river last night, there is no one here in the campground this morning. The stars had come out big and bright. The sun is up now and I can no longer see my breath. The fire is banked and dying. I am packed and ready to head out. Eighty per-cent of campground fees goes to improvements and towards maintenance – hell, that’s a much better return on your investment than most charities.

One is taken hostage, if not to say prisoner, by space – Durs Grunbein – Bars of Atlantis, 2010  p196

In the heart of bohemia I write

Thinking of Spicer, Snyder or Rexroth

Here where they crisscrossed

Their aura is still here – this is bohemia

The Beat exhaled the word and puncturated it with jazz

And they did it right here on Columbus

Yes this is bohemia but the beat is gone

            Pasty men in berumuda shorts

            Checking out the sex clubs

Get frightened by Bush Man

            Down at the Wharf

            Take a photograph

‘X’ marks the spot

If small babies possessed the physical strength and co-ordination of adolescents we should indeed live in a destructive world – Anthony Storr – Human Destructiveness, 1972

Oh shit, I’m having transmission problems – its slipping badly. I check the fluid. It is low. There are several different types of transmission fluid. The wrong one will cause even more problems. The correct type was embossed on the end of the dip-stick. The manual says to drive for twenty miles and leave the engine running while parked on level ground. I couldn’t find the fill point. I asked someone. He said that its usually the same as the measurement point. How do you get it in that tiny hole. I go to Wal-Mart and buy a turkey baster. I get about half a quart it. You don’t want to overfill it as that will also cause problems according to the manual. It drives better now. There is no skipping now. Woo, I hadn’t budgeted for the replacement of a transmission after having just bought the vehicle. The next time I might not be so lucky (and I wasn’t and it happened on the some far off Montana mountain).

The things which are usually one way, / can as will be / another - / as if one took / something from one pocket, / put it in another,     and / said nothing about it – Theodore Enslin – Then and Now – 1999 p71

It means something

            Else – in South America

            The Disappeared

September 11, but on

            Second thought

            Maybe not

It always been the

            Same – the Return

Of the dictators

The fear – the need to

            Restore order

Gets translated into

             A nightmare

A restoration of order

            Violence as a means

                        To an end

No end is in site

            Violence is extended

            Across generations

Always the same

            In the name

Of security and well being

Its official – Its in the rules

            Your not allowed

            To hit back

There is sadness / and desperate / hatred / In the close-in / of winter / it becomes / unbearable – Theodore Enslin – Then and Now – 1999 p52

Both stupidity and beauty are in the eye of the beholder.

You think OWS is radical? You think 350.org was radical…? We’re not radical. Radicals work for oil companies. The CEO of Exxon gets up every morning and goes to work changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere. No one has ever done anything as radical as that, not in all of human history… Corporate power has occupied the atmosphere – Bill McKibben – CommonDreams.org

For everything new that can be said, is there something old that can no longer be told?

Lights at the far side / punctuate / a coast / line / Those who live there / separated / from me – Theodore Enslin – Then and Now – 1999 p108

She sighed and heaved her chest

As  she said “Happy Thanksgiving”

            I know how she feels

This is the beginning of my darkness too

After solstice I begin to count backwards

                        [the days]

Until  I’m back to today

And then I give my thanks

And know that the sun shall rise

            On this wintery drearyness

And I replied, “And you have

A great Thanksgiving to”

But the turning is a long way away

            And I’m already in a bad way

The dead / stay with the living, / much as cut corn stalks, half-burried in / turned / wet soil – Theodore Enslin – Then and Now – 1999 p122

All geniuses are innovators of expressiveness

All the hideous new condominiums are made from the same stuff as the indifferent dreams of their occupants – Durs Grunbein – Bars of Atlantis, 2010  p198