Meaning is the consequence of random events

The dog is lying on the ‘anti-gravity’ chair. The chair is situated under the awning. I am preparing a second chocolate waffle as I read Wodehouse. Bertie says to his aunt that Jeeves’ handling of the Fink-Nottle (she calls him Spink-Bottle) case was ‘footless’. Aunt Dahlia had said of the buterl “What a man! I’m going  to put the whole thing up to him.”

Lines of affection

Angles of dissatisfaction

The hypothinous of truth

The arc of covenant

The geometry of this life

The more alike people are the more they struggle to be different

There are perhaps as many as 3,000 extent languages but only 78 of them have literatures

When you get to where you want to be you discover that you no longer want to be there.

Employers spend $3.5b a year on remedial writing courses for their employees. 72% of employers rate high school graduates as deficient in writing. 28% of college graduates are rated as deficient in written communication by employers.

History is often determined by who you hang out with

This is our destiny: subject to opinion polls, information, publicity, statistics; constantly confronted with the anticipated statistical verification of our behavior, and absorbed by the permanent refraction of our least movements, we are no longer confronted with our own will. We are no longer even alienated, because for that it is necessary for the subject to be divided in itself, confronted with the other, to be contradictory… Each individual is forced despite himself or herself into the undivided coherence of statistics – Jean Baudrillard, 1985

Time forgives

            Everyone
Every one time

            Is forgiven

Foregone in time

            Forlorn

Be forwarned

Time is forever

You need a reservation. Can’t do noting without one.  Gotta a reservation? No. First at the ferry and now the campground. I arrived at the slip just after eight. I was first in line (the ‘if space becomes available’ line). The lines for those with reservations were rapidly filling up.  Two or three more without reservations arrive. I had assumed that this being Sunday there would not be a lot of traffic. No, said the man with the beard and the big nose, it’s our busiest day – all the vacationers returning home. We don’t have any commercial traffic. I may be able to get you on. Not a promise, you understand. May not be the first boats but I expect we can get you out today. Next time I’ll know. Gotta a reservation? No. Maybe able to get you a spot for tonight. Wait a minute #6 is leaving. That’s a first come first serve spot (they only have a few). Later I spotted another on the back side. Soon you won’t be able to go anywhere without a reservation. The reservation will be equalevant to a travel visa. Yes we have the privilege of traveling without permits but it doesn’t do you any good if you can’t pay for the gas and if you don’t have a reservation. The closer to the sea the higher the demand. Sorry by reservation only. Can’t do nothing without a reservation.

First banana – first palm trees.  At last, the South. Temperature in the eighties. T-shit, shorts and flip fops all winter long. Rain possible. Hail and gusting winds forecast, maybe around four, John tells me. I trim my tomato plants. They were getting unruly, a little top heavy. It hurts clipping off all that unripe fruit and the numerous blossoms. They look just like new recruits. On your bellies, grunts. Sprawled in the mud with fifty caliber rounds whizzing overhead – thump, thump, thump.

Enclosures shut-in what was intended to be shut-out

The greater our knowledge, the more obscure the overall scheme – Claude Levi-Stauss – The Savage Mind, 1966 p89

The Great Gatsby Curve: (Alan B Kruegar) as income inequity increases, social mobility falls

Twice – a rumble, but otherwise the sky is clear. The sun is shining. Maybe something is happening over the ocean, beyond the trees. I move all the tomato plants to safety, behind the trailer. Snow-birds are in migration, headed southward. Many idiots among them (my neighbor across the way in particular). Two yellow butterflies flitter by.

If we didn’t work so hard at un-creating we wouldn’t have to work as hard at re-creating

Time

            After time

In time

            Time out

Time of

Time for

Time to

Time off

The time

A time

Some time

Any time

More time

Less time

Time something

Time some one

Time anything

Time anyone

            Any time

            Every time

For all time

Time

            After time

In a cinematic dream you don’t have to do anything but watch, you don’t have to participate, but in this one I played the part of cop. I was a well know black actor, can’t remember his name but he had big shinny eyes and he always played cops even on Broadway. And since the movie was already in commercial release, I wasn’t really acting a role in but rather watching myself in a role that I had previously acted. Now I was playing the role of the guy who had been the actor who had played the cop. Then at some point I actually became the cop and was no longer watching myself play the cop. I was teamed up with a female rookie. She had a red sports car and liked to drive fast. She had gotten a lot of tickets, which she had ignored. She wasn’t worried, she said because cops don’t have to pay tickets. Not entirely true, I explained to her. There was a five dollar processing fee for each ticket which had to be paid to clear the record and if you don’t and accumulate three or more in a year you driver’s license was subject to being revoked for thirty days and you’ll have to work behind the desk at reduced pay. Here, she said handing me a fist full of wadded up tickets, take care of these for me. I never saw here again. I was now working at a precinct. I had been a departmental cop, working out of headquarters. The was a lot of animosity between us and the precinct guys. The precinct guys were used to street violence and slammed people around a lot. We thought they were crude. Today while I was bringing in a suspect for booking the the young thug got the better of me managed wrestle my weapon from me. All the tough guys were out on calls. I later discovered that this had been a set up. I was abducted and taken to the gang hideout where I was stripped and released and had to make my way the station in my boxers.

I hear your partner got himself kidnapped, I told the rookie cop (the one with all the tickets). I was watching the movie again rather than being a cop myself and this was another cop talking. Oh, she replied, I hadn’t heard. I suddenly realized at this point that the kidnapping and release may only be a dream. Wouldn’t I look stupid if I started relating this story to her. I decided not to say anything else. I wanted to wait and get some verification that it was more than a mere dream. Good thing that I did shut up. I was unable to verify any of this.

Through me, two red cows walk; / From a crowning glory / Of slowness they are not taken. / Let on hoof knock on a stone, / And off it a spark jump quickly – James Dickey – The Whole Motion, 1992 p63

Time table

Time clock

Time watch

Time travel

Times tables

In The Times

These times

Rachel’s head aches. Terrance is displaying a lot of concern. Helen tells her to go to bed and it will go away in a couple of hours. So now we are heading towards the ending – death – of “A Voyage Out” – we are in the final lap and Rachel will be dropping back. What will Terrance do? Will he join the army and die at Yeppes? It is too early to tell. This is 1915. Great Britain is still in its days of glory killing a generation of its young men. Is it best that we are still living. It would have been better not to have to experience all this blood and the mud. Wishful thinking. And what about Hirsch, I doubt that he would have served, but he might have. His health was not very good. He had no chance of surviving if he had. Hewitt never was as good as Thackeray and Hirsch never the great man of promise and Rachel was first of them to die.

There is a phrase, ‘to catch one’s breath’. It is time to pause and realize who the real you is between having lain down one novel and before picking up another – having set one thing aside and started something else – having said goodbye to someone and introducing yourself to a stranger – maybe not quite so true with the second and only partially true with the later. There was a long rumbling and a cracking to the north. It is only thunder. There are dark clouds gathering to the south.  It begins to  sprinkle. Time passes and wood burns.  It too pops and crackels.  It’s difficult to tell where the sun is. It takes courage and fortitude to sit still and wait.

War is such a peculiar thing – inaugurated by the whims of few, affecting the fate of many. It is a difficult, if not impossible, thing to understand, yet we feel compelled to describe it as though it has meaning – even virtue. It starts for reasons hopelessly obscure, meanders on, then stops – Errol Morris – Believing is Seeing, 2011 p30

Behind the glassware is a mirror, the width of the bar. On the opposite wall another. Between them there is an infinity of receding reflections. They are discussing Eagle Scouts and girls. He is complaining that too much money is going to girls’ sports. “Who cares to watch them play field hockey? You know there are only three all male schools left in this country. There are things you need to think about as your child gets older”, he says. “You need to tell them just to stay away from girls (just say no). It’s so easy at that age. Just don’t get involved, it’s that simple. You’ll be better off if you don’t get involved. Finish your education. Start your career.” Life is so simple if you’re an Eagle Scout.

“I’m the one who put LSD in Bukowski’s wine. Why, because I wanted to fuck his wife, why else. Do you think I give a fuck about Bukowski? I don’t give a damn if he does get a Jewish lawyer. Why should I? I’m a bad ass mother fucker, and don’t you forget it. Much better than…” [and his ranting become incoherent at this point but sounded like – “taking car force incentive programs”]. …”Ha, Ha, Ha. Good. It’s like caffeine”

Now I am writing lines

On a scrap of paper

Donald Hall pulled over to the side of the road

When he had the image of a skeleton

Strapped in the seat of the cockpit

Of a Grumman Hellcat

Up in the vines of the New Guinea jungle

The image overpowered him as he drove

After all he said, it was an emergency

I have already written these words in the margins

Of a scrap piece of paper

It doesn’t allow me to be too free

            There isn’t enough white space

I keep running out of room

            Resorting to drawing arrows

            To show the continuity of the text

I’ll have to stop here. I have about run out of space

There is almost a full sheet of empty space

In the front of my book of Rimbaud’s works

So I shall use that instead

It’s good that it is not a library book

Traveling (and one might as well say ‘living’) turns us into creatures of hap and contingency… Things are constantly happening, but we’re in no position to judge their meaning and significance – Jonathan Raban – Driving Home, 2010 p202

What We Celebrate

Fall Comes to the Alleghenies

I got lost twice in Athens, Ohio. Wandered around the University campus, through dorm parking lots with students scurrying about late for their class as I pulled a travel trailer behind me. It was a mess. I missed my turn. The street became a one way. Do Not Enter. The only way to turn was into the campus. If delivery trucks can do this so can I. And finally I did emerge. Got onto the highway at last. But it was the wrong one. I was headed south instead of southeast. I was traveling downstream along the Ohio River. I shouldn’t be traveling along the river. I pulled over and looked at the map. Yep, took the wrong road. Oh well, I crossed the bridge at Gallipolis (Napoleon almost immigrated here but his mother would not allow  – mama’s boy -  it and instead he became Emperor). Next stop Kanawha. Goodbye Ohio.

In the forties this morning. Maples are turning red. Flowers are going to seed. Puff balls balloon. Temperature expected to reach the lower eighties today. Birds are chirping

The sun is sitting

Its yellow orb is caught in bare tree branches

Clouds flow by low and dark out of the North

The light dims, the sun frees itself and sinks

A distant specter

I went to see the documentary film on Bukowski. It was almost two hours long. I decide to read some Bukowski. What should I read. I had seen Barfly with Mickey Rorake, how about Barfly.  Bukowski wrote the screenplay but not a book of that title, but he did write Hollywood which was about writing Barfly. I’ll read that. I head on down to the Brewery. They are out of Alcatraz so I have a Gripman’s. All is quite. Tom is back from Spain. He says he did a tour of all the Irish bars there. Tom wants to know what the difference is between a porter and stout. I myself have asked that question many times and never gotten a satisfactory answer. Someone says if it has oatmeal in it it’s a stout. But then not all stouts have oatmeal. The best answer I have yet heard is that if it’s called a porter it’s a porter and if its called a stout it’s a stout. But that's not answering my question, Tom complains. That’s the problem, I tell him, I don’t think there is a distinguishing difference. Oh, he replies. It’s quiet in here for a Friday afternoon. The guy to my left switches from the Albatross Larger to the porter. Is there anything happening in the world that needs my attention. I suppose not. They need me here at the bar as much as they do anywhere else. Tom sees me writing. Writing a book, he asks? No, just writing. Everyone assumes that writing means publishing as they assume reading means teaching, except of course, for fellow writers and readers. They want to know if your are somebody. Of course I’m somebody. Anyone that I would know. Someone whose name I would recognoize? No, nobody that you would recognize.

An oncoming vehicle

            Bright head lights

Swerve to meet

            An onrushing car

            So little effort

Just a quick jerk

            On the wheel

A truck would be best

            No chance in hell

A car might be evasive

Swerve on to the shoulder

            Or into the opposite lane

And besides there maybe

            Kids in a car

Also a truck driver

            Might just survive

A bridge abutment

            Would be best

But that must be planed

I knew someone

            Who took that route

It only takes

            A split second

On rushing head lights

            In your eyes

I let this one pass

God, I hate driving

            At night

There is always a new flavor of potato chips: ketchup or tomato and basil. My latest addiction is Cheddar and Horseradish. It would make an god awful jelly-bean but it makes for a damn fine crisp. Lays is having a contest for a new potato chip flavor -  one million dollars for the best suggestion. I bet they have it ready for production. Just waiting to declare the contest winer as soon as they find the right marketing spokesperson (the advertising equilant of reality TV). It’s usually the small companies that come out with the new flaovrs. I saw “Hot Dog” flavored chips at Wal-Mart yesterday. Some off-brand that I’d never heard of.

With a little rain the fall colors emerge. Fall foliage season is just a couple of weeks away. I hope to be long gone by then. Fall colors in the Appalachians.

I Have Found God – Henry Miller

A great hulk of a man

Like a liner that’s been battered by a typhoon

Again, as if the brain were a uterus,

The walls of the world gave way

Age comes, the body withers –

But hernia can be cured

At bottom, they’re angels

Pissing poison from the sky

And while it’s all nice to know

That a woman has a mind,

Literature coming from the cold corpse of a whore

Is the last thing to be served in bed.

As long as that spark of passion is missing

There is no human significance in the performance.

The machine is better to watch.

And those two are like a machine

Which had slipped its cogs.

It needed the touch of a human hand to set it right.

It needed a mechanic

Anything is a poem

If it has time in it

At the extreme limits of his spiritual being

Man finds himself again naked as a savage.

When he finds God, as it were,

He has been picked clean;

He is a skeleton.

One must burrow into life again

To put on flesh.

The word must become flesh;

The soul thirsts...

I have found God,

But he is insufficient

Am I to walk forever

Along this endless pasteboard street,

This pasteboard which

I can blow down with my breath,

Which I can set fire to with a match?

The world has become a mystic maze

Erected by a gang of carpenters during the night.

Everything’s is a lie, a fake. Pasteboard

Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrements – W B Yeats

What we celebrate are the anomalies that we wish would prove the rule, but alas they do not.

In 1859 only 3,000 American slaves were manumitted

The rituals of the day are not as concise in a camper has they are in a tent. Everything comes so much easier. The dog’s demands are the same – his stretching and yawning. I let out a yawn and he’s on top of me licking my face. Now he flips on his back and wants his belly scratched. If you stop he waves his front paws in the air. Everyone calls me his daddy. Your daddy's looking out for you? You’re the cutest little thing. Yes, you’re precious. Yes you are. Waving your paws in the air until I do his  bidding again. I get up and make the bed. He finds his way out from under the bedspread. We go for a walk. Then he gets a slice of baloney. I tear it up into bite sized chunks otherwise he’d devour the entire slice. He has no way of chewing his food. He can only tear off chunks. Meat on the bone is what dogs are designed for. I take my pills. I brush my teeth. I make coffee. I won’t make breakfast for another couple of hours. It’s now 8:15

The world’s notorious indifference – Virginia Woolf

And she would not say of him,

She would not say of herself,

I am this, I am that

As the current answers won’t do,

One has to grope for answers;

And the process of discarding the old,

When one is by no means certain

What to put in their place, is a sad one

And the supreme mystery…

Was simply this:

Here was one room,

There an another.

Did religion solve that,

Or love?

Already he no longer cried with conviction.

Chaos; details return.

She was no longer amazed

By names written over shop windows.

She did not feel: why human?

Why catch trains?

The sequence returns;

One thing leads to another –

The usual order

All is merged in one turning wheel

Of single sound.

All separate sounds –

Wheels, bells, the cries of drunkards, of merry makers –

Are churned into one sound,

Steel blue, circular

Anyone moderately familiar

With the rigors of composition

Will not need to be told the story in detail:

How she wrote and it seemed good;

Read and it seemed vile;

Correct and tore up; cut out; put in;

Was in ecstasy’ in despair;

Had her good nights and bad mornings;

Snatched at ideas and lost them;

Saw her boat plain before her

And saw it vanish;

Acted her people’s parts as she ate;

Mouthed them as she walked;

Now cried; now laughed;

Vacillated between this style and that;

Now preferred the heroic and pompous;

Next the plain and simple;

And could not decide whether

She was the divinest genius

Or the greatest fool in the world

And these long histories in many volumes –

Surely someone was now beginning

At the beginning in order to understand

The Holy Roman Empire, as one must

And moving to the table

Where her husband sat reading

She lent her chin in her hands

And thought of the peasants,

Of suffering,

Of her own beauty,

Of the inevitable compromise,

And how she would write it down

Accentuating all these difficulties

And making them harder to bare

Is the world’s notorious indifference.

It does not ask people to write

Poems and novels and histories;

It does not need them...

Naturally it will not pay for,

What it does not want

It’s fine to say all ducks quack, but why is ‘this’ duck quacking? – Errol Morris – Believing is Seeing, 2011 p99

Arsene Lupin – French detectives joint their host in  asumptuous lunch and drink wine with the aristocracy. This is something that a British inspector would never do. They honor their class distinctions.

It is not so cold that I need to don my long sleeve shirt. The fall takes on more and more color. The greatest variety of campers that I’ve seen in a long while – Oregon, Florida, Wisconsin and North Carolina. Generally I’m the only out-of-stater. Coffee is brewing. Gotta go make coffee, Jim says. I’ve gotta brew a pot myself, I said. I don’t think I’d want to talk politics with Jim. There's a USDA guy camped near the entrance. A rabies eradication program. Fresh out of college, Jim says. One of the few good things the government does, he adds. Later we get to talking about the Swamp Fox. The Francis Marion National Forest in South Carolina was the connection. I talked about watching the Disney version as a kid. Everyone’s gotta have heroes, he says. Yeah, I add, but now days he’s what we would label a terrorist. I ain’t going there Jim, replies. He also let pass my comment about the Durrecto out of Illinois in late June. Yeah, I had said, we can expect more and more of that kind of freakish weather.