EXTENDED MANUFACTURER’S REALITY

I try out an “extended stay rate” hotel. Too run down to charge regular rates. After the Indians can no longer make any money out of ‘em they cater to people without credit. I am curious. It was a long way to another campground and it was getting dark and I was tired. And I as I said I was curious. So I pulled in. It’s a fleabag. The door to the room shows evidence of having been previously busted in – perhaps the result of a “no knock” policy. It must be a headache for these places to have to constantly repair their doors. I can imagine myself flat on my stomach on the floor, spread-eagled. Rifle barrel up my butt and guys in body armor and helmets rushing about shooting and vicious dogs barking. A lot of clunkers in font of open doors. Beer and bar-b-q on the walk. Noise and arguing late into the night. I’m not curious anymore.  I slept on top of the bed in my sleeping bag. I am shedding my bourgeoisie phobia  one by one – identify and eradicate. I once checked out a place in Bleaker St in the Village. I was young and it was cheap. But it turned out to be a bigger adventure that I cared to have. Instead I stayed in a cinema on 42th street until it closed around 2AM and then rode the Staten Island ferry back and forth until the sun came up. Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot, I cry out. To tell the truth, I’m more afraid of the legals than the illegals. When you’re down, your out for the count whether in Paris or London or here in El Dorado. It’s back to the woods tomorrow night. It’s not the marginalized that one should worry about but them that’s marginalized ‘em.

As a word carp is so crap – Martin Amis

And Ballard’s particular perversion

Needs all the actualizing it can get;

Beside it Joyce’s pendent for excrement

And Burroughs’s interest for scaffolds

Seem sadly quaint

All we know

For certain is

That what they wrote,

Would not have been composed,

Could not even

Be guessed at,

By anyone else

If your heart

Rejects it, retreats from it,

That’s age, that’s time

Fucking with you

Sucking the life from you

Remember that a persuasion

Is not the same as a conviction

A man fights....

With his asshole

Power comes...

In the form of anger,

Up through the asshole

Contrails of distant airplanes

Formed incandescent spermatozoa,

Sent out to fertilize the universe

To inhabit the streets as one’s living room is quiet a different thing from needing them as a bedroom, bathroom or kitchen – Susan Buck-Morss – The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore

Hash browns or grits – boy you’re in the South now. This is a workingman’s town.  The rich own the rundown building but it’s the workingmen who pay the rent. And now the immigrants are moving in. The good old boys are moving into the woods to cook meth. Everyone is dreaming of making money. I visited America’s only diamond mine yesterday. I didn’t find anything. Its like the lottery, it gives the fore-lone some hope. One in a million is enough. Find a diamond, cash in a wining ticket. It could happen. The ones that have a real chance got a head start and live on the other side of town. The rich get richer. The poor get poorer. I go to a Mexican restaurant. The waiter sits down with me and starts talking. He wants to know about my Spanish. I understand it better than I speak it, I tell him, in English . “Are you Mexican,” he wants to know? “Indian,” I reply, “but then aren’t Mexicans mostly Indian anyway.”  He is from Michowacan, he says. Says he is married an Indian, Cherokee, he thinks.  I turn on the radio as I leave town. Dolly Pardon. It’s 7:21 in the morning.

The suspect, as such, always deserved a certain punishment; one could not be the object of suspicion and be completely innocent – Michel Foucault – Discipline and Punish, 1979 p42

Some of what is called ‘forgetfulness’ that supposedly comes with age is really a lack of direct feedback. Having done the same thing over and over for years and years one goes into automatic pilot and carries out tasks without thinking about the individual steps. Take driving a vehicle. One needs a checklist when learning – adjust the seat, check the mirrors, fasten the seat belt, insert the key… But after a while it becomes automatic. Its only when something unusual happens that we think about what we are doing; say we step on the gas pedal instead of the brake. We know immediacy something is wrong – that is called negative feedback. We take corrective action. But say there is no immediate consequence. Say we’re going to the store. We’ve got the baby strapped in his baby carrier. We put him down beside the car to unlock the door. Now we’re at the store parking lot. We get out and go to get the baby. He’s not there. We’ve left him beside the driveway. That’s not forgetfulness it’s a failure of the feedback loop. As we get older the more or our activities are done in auto-pilot mode and unless there is some negative feedback when we skip a step we are likely to have a “forgetful” moment once we realize (or someone tells us) that we skipped a step. And then there is also just plain old senility also. Did I forget to turn off the gas?

I remember that I wanted to inhale myself – A Artaud

Moreover I have 

Definitively broken with

Art, style and talent

I MEAN THAT

I curse anyone

Who is going to consider these

 As

Works of art,

Works that

Aesthetically

Simulate

Reality...

None of them,

To speak exactly,

Is an art work.

They are all attempts,

That is to say blows – probings or thrustings

In all the directions of hazard,

Of possibility,

Of chance

 Or

Of destiny

I have never

Never studied anything,

But I have lived everything,

And that has taught

Taught me something

I have thrown

The communion,

The Eucharist,

God and his Christ

Out the window

And I have decided...

I remember that

Ever since I was eight years old,

And even before that,

I always wondered who I was,

What I was,

And why I was alive?

I remember at the age of six

In a house, a number 29, to be precise,

Just as I was eating my afternoon snack

I asked myself what it meant

 to exist,

 to be alive,

What it meant

 to be conscious

of oneself breathing,

And I remember that

I wanted

to inhale myself

In order to prove

 that I was alive

And to see if

 I liked being alive,

And if so,

 why

In a perfectly organized world, foot fetishists would no doubt become chiropodists – P D James – Shroud of a Nightingale, 1971 p65

Ginny is telling me she will not listen to me any more. She doesn’t have time. “Well,” I said, “I wasn’t demanding much time.” “I can’t give you any time at all, I’ve got my stuff to do,” she says. Two years ago she had a booth at the street fair and had only three piece of jewelry to show. She tried to take orders. That’s not the way street fairs work, we had tried to explain to her. “Oh, I’m getting so inspired.” She intends to have a booth again this year. “There is so much I want to do. They will be so beautiful.” She’s thumbing through a jewelry catalog getting ideas. She says she’s inspired. Now she needs to go home and get busy. I had this weird dream last night and I had wanted to share. “This isn’t kindergarten,” she said. Well anyway there were this company that was run by computer but the computers could not deal with anything unanticipated. The company’s office is old building with inoperative elevators. The executives drive their cars up a ramp to the sixth floor. Snowplows have to constantly keep the ramps clear and are a hazard to the executives. The snowplow drivers like to intimidate the executives on the ramps. There is a directive from the CEO (the computer) “Reality is no longer fixed either spatially or temporally.” Another directive states that performance ratings (and thus bonuses) will henceforth be based on how much data the computer contains on each individual. No one is actually doing anything but manipulating data – adding to their own files and deleting data relevant to others. In conformance with the new “reality” memo they can zip about in time and space so long as they have computer access. There are a few fundamentals about how this works, for example, nothing an happen twice at both the same time and in the same place. Rules are changing by the nanosecond. Another fundamental rule of neurology is that noting changes the computer’s instructions and  the computer can countermand any executive action. The objective is to freeze everyone else out. “Is this music form Bladerunner,” I ask? “What?” “You know the film Bladerunner.” Osama shrugs his shoulders. A man dressed in black with gold chains around his neck says, “Ridley Scott” as he paces back and forth. “Great movie by the way,” he says and dashes for the door and heads down the ramp. He is squished flat by a snowplow. The driver just laughed. Ginny has her hands over her ears, “I’m not listening,” she says. But neither has she going home and getting to work on her merchandise. My guess it that she’ll be lucky to have three pieces this year. She’s still flipping through her catalog. “I’am getting s many great ideas.”

SUBJECT TO SUSPICION

Trail Dog tries his paw at action - He playing a
Scottish terrier named Falla

My tomatoes and peppers bought the farm. I don’t know how they got the money. They did it last night. Good luck boys. I plan to rent out their empty beds to some Herbs. Big Boy and Better Boy were both gone when I got up.

Its Sunday

But don’t bother

            To flip

Through the sections

            If there still

            Are any

The comics

            Aren’t there

            Anymore

Turn on the TV instead

            And watch sports

           

The paper      

            Doesn’t spill

            Out and make

A mess that occupies

            The afternoon

On a cold country

Sunday after a big

            Chicken dinner

After chugging along to church

            In the old truck

Making ruts in the

            Pristine snow

That are half covered again

            When you return

Change into your ordinary clothes

            Lie in front of the stove

            On your belly and read the funnies

Now you can watch golf

            From Augusta

While the Goodyear blimp

            Hovers overhead

Via Direct TV

            Or lean what the celebrities

            Wore at the gala last night

I refilled my wine cup. I sliced some hunks of cheese. I went back outside to the campfire. I took a bite of cheese and a sip of wine. I almost puked. God, this stuff is horrible. I had filled my cup with coffee insteaf of Merlot. I dumped it back into the pot and made sure that it was wine that I was decanting this time. And now everything is fine. But this morning, I poured a cup of coffee from the pot and put it in the microwave. When hot I sat down and took a sip. God, this is horrid stuff. There was about a third a cup of wine in the cup when I had refilled inadvertently with coffee last night. Now there was a third of a cup of wine in my coffee pot. Yesterday’s coffee reheated is bad enough but with wine, yuk? I dumped it out and brewed a fresh pot. That’s better, but not a much better. It was the bottom of the tin of a cheep brand of coffee, but this is as good as this coffee is going to get.

The winged man likes to jump off bridges, or off the roofs of houses or out of his office window. My commute to and from work is literally a breeze a way, he says – Anthony Caleshu – The Siege of the Body and a Brief Respite, 2004  p59

I’m wearing my Hawaiian shirt. It’s warm (not the shirt but the weather). And shorts (I’m wearing shorts rather than slacks, do I have to provide explinations for everything I say? I think not!). A brid mistakes my shirt for a flower (one of those printed on it, I’m going to stop doing this, this is the last time I swear). All I see is a blur of gray as I hear the purr of its wings. Bizzip plur plur plur. It tries to land on my elbow. I was zoned out. Sitting there vegetating. It’s too early to be fullly functioning. I am fully awake now. The coffee is starting to perk. It won’t be long. It’s dawn – neither light nor dark. The British went so far as to stone Dauchunds during World War I. We renamed French Fries after the French refused to let us overfly their country on some raid or another to bomb some tents in one desert or another. What does Freedom Fries have to due with birds trying to suck your blood? I don’t know but there it is running through the mind. Maybe Freud knows. Bringing democracy one bomb at a time. Liberty cabbage is what we called sauerkraut during World War I. Day breaks. Coffee is ready. Jingoism. There is a splash in the lake. Concentric rings. Here comes the sun. Kerplunp, another fish jumps. I see it this time. It was in the middle of the cove that the pair of mating geese are trying lay claim to. Breakfast – hotcakes, bacon & coffee. Well almost. I only manage to salvage a single dollar sized pancake. The griddle is not hot enough. I’m not paying enough attention to what I’m doing.

When a door is slammed, it’s immediate; but when a cicada’s / legs itch, it takes forever to scratch – Anthony Caleshu – The Siege of the Body and a Brief Respite, 2004  p92

A sudden hail storm comes up. No rain, just a few marbles of ice bouncing off the ground. Then the sun comes out again. I’m still sitting here starring out at the lake. I’m not looking at anything in particular. Zoned out again. I’ve got an image of the Lock Ness monster in my head. Sort of like an earworm but this is a bit of cinema, something like the McGrudder film – Kennedy shot over and over.  There might be one out there in the cove. You can’t be absolutely sure.  I’m looking for anything strange out there. Remember the B&W film of the supposedly monster’s head moving across a placid Lock Ness. Yes, I know that was Scotland. But I’m staring out at the lake and the mind wants to be active, so I imagine a prehistoric monster. Why not? Then I ponder unicorns for no specific reason either. Unicorns are supposed to lead you to virgins (they say a male thinks of sex at lealst once every thirty seconds). No I don’t think Carla was a virgin. Though she did have a nice milky white belly button. She and Misty had been comparing their mid-riff bulges. “Great belly button,” I had sad. Misty says to Carla, “really there is nothing there.” The ranger says that the temperature it is supposed to be in the thirties tonight.

All these were the billboards around him – Don DeLilo

A band plays live Muzak

All terror is local now

All technology refers to the bomb

And people say, ‘Let’s go eat,”

Or whatever people say

When a thing begins to be over

Are secrets a tunnel

To a dream world

Where you control events

Another postmodern sunset,

Rich in romantic imagery

And how do you know that it is

When you’re starting on a project,

You know how you sometimes have to start

With a series of misunderstandings

And what’s the point

In waking up in the morning

If you don’t try

To match the enormousness

Of the known forces

Of the world with something

Powerful of your own

And how can you tell

If this is true

When you’re already systemed under,

Prepared to half believe everything

Because this is the only intelligent response?

Airtime is valuable.

They can’t go into long tortured descriptions

And how can you tell the difference

Between the orange juice and Agent Orange

If the same massive system

Connects them at levels

Outside your comprehension

All these were the billboards around him,

Systematically linked in some self-referring relationship

That had a kind of neurotic tightness,

An inescapability,

As if the billboards were generating reality

Its been raining. Its not raining right now. There is a rumble. One of those rumbles that travels from horizon to horizon. Then the ping ping ping begins. A heavy intense rain then quiet again. On and off since three. The owls were getting their hooting done early. It’s called hooting but its soyunds more like cats fighting.  They don’t know when they have another chance. No Internet. Closest Internet is 15 miles away by back roads. I found my way in here by following the signs.  I don’t think they have signs showing me the way back out. I drink all my wine and eat all my crackers. It will be an early bedtime tonight. I have the heater on. The dog is asleep. He generally sleeps all day when its raining. I would too but then I’d lie awake most of the night. When he has slept all day he has a habit of jumping up on my chest several time in the middle of the night, usually when I’ve just fittully managed to fall asleep. I cratch him behind the ears and he goes and lies down again after turning around three times. I shouldn’t reward him for such behavior. The turning around three times, that’s ok; its hopping on top of me and waking me up that I shouldn’t be rewarding.

Good wine is not acidic

But vinegary wine is better than no wine

And any Shostakovich

Is better than no Shostakovich at all

Potato chips make me fat

            But that’s ok

There’s no lovin’ comin’

            My way anyway

No one to compain of having

            To sew the buttons

Back on my pants

I’m old old and lame

But they still call me honey

So long as I’ve got any money

But I refuse to live

Without my Shostakovich

And I admired Richard Feynman too

            And his goddamn o-rings

If only everything was

            As simple

As that bucket of ice water

I Don't Think This is Hinckley

I DON”T THINK WE”RE NOT IN HINKLEY ANYMORE  TOTO

What’s wrong with America (you say the glass is half full); I say what’s right (that the class is half empty). Everything’s right. That’s the problem. That’s why I left. We both can’t be right. Love it or leave it. I’ve got rights too you know.

All for me – Everything – Nothing for you – It’s the Capitalist version of “One for all – All for one.” Get it while you can. Get it while its hot. Poor Baby Bear – Poor BooBoo Bear. Smarter than the average picnic basket. Goldilocks. The Three Little Pigs. Peter and the Wolf.

My orange juice has fermented, turned to wine. How long has it been sitting here. Most people would throw it away – spoiled. Not me – I taste it. I’m very curious. My name is George. It’s been about a week, I think. There is no scum on top it or under the cap, at least nothing blue or green. I kind of like it. I perform some experiments – controlled environments. When all of the sugar is fermented it turns sour, but until then its very effervescent – tingling on the nose and to the tongue, it has a bit and a small kick. I haven’t gotten drunk on any yet so unless you drink a whole lot (and I only make a quart at a time) you won’t get shit faced. A wine is something that ferments naturally like palm wine.  Birds can get drunk on it eating berries, but you won’t, there is not enough of it there. Beer is something for which the starches have to be converted into sugars (if it has sugar it will ferment naturally, there is yeast in the air although not always the optimal type, unless it’s a Belgium stable). That’s why beer is brewed (heated) before fermenting. That’s what makes it beer and not wine. Back to my experiments – orange juice is ok (just ok). Avoid anything with cranberries they seem to inhibit the yeast. Drinks sweetened with HFCS take longer to ferment. Put that ingredient down there with cranberries on the shitlist. My favorites are frozen mixes of pomegranate juice ( with cherries or blueberries). They ferment fast (especially if contained in the bottle that had been used for the previous batch) – within a day if it is warm. Alcohol content? Probably about 2%. Unscrew the cap (I reuse old quart juice containers I got at the store) and listen to it fizz. No the bottle won’t explode, but you sure can tell when the yeasties have been busy. It seems to taste a lot better (a lot of trouble for something if it didn’t) and I like the tingle (nature’s soda pop). It is refreshing on a hot day even if without any ice. There are buzzards soaring overhead in the thermals. Them and the turkeys crash land in the trees when they come home to roost at night. You can hear off in the woods along the creek bank just after dusk.

A Poem about Bugs or Not

Maybe I had’t written any bug poems

Because I had’t read any bug books of late

            -Or-

Or maybe it was just

Because I hadn’t seen any bugs for a while

Maybe this is a bug poem

So actual bugs might not be necessary

Imagination is sufficient

            -Or-

Maybe this is not a bug poem

And imagination and inspiration

Are necessarty but not sufficient

The latest scheme to privatize – Lexus lanes. These are low traffic volume vehicular lanes for which a toll is charged. The larger the traffic volume becomes in such a lane the higher the toll becomes. Tolls on Washington’s Beltway Lexus Lane have no cap. They keep going up and up until the number of cars using the lane beomes fewer and fewer. And traffic speed resumes (at least in that lane). All the tolls on the Beltway Lexus Lane for the next seventy-five years will go to the firm which constructed it. The more slowly traffic moves in the regular lanes the more money they make. The worse our infrastructure becomes the more money there is to be made (in it being bad – not in improving it, although money could be made there too if there was funding). Bad performance in general is incentivized.  The states where the rich have made the greatest gains (with the highest levels of income inequity) during the last twenty-five years are also the states with have the lowest levels of infrastructure development. The rich always have options. The rich have all the options.

Middle Age – Virginia Woolf

A load of snow slipped and fell from a branch…

Later there was a mournful cry…

A motorcar came along the road shoving the dark before it…

The dark shut down behind it…

Space of complete immobility, separated each of these moments

“What is lost? What is ours?”

And “over and done with”

Solacing myself with words.

People noticed the vacuity of my face

And the aimlessness of my conversation.

The last words of my sentance tailed away.

And I buttoned on my coat to go home.

I said more dramatically, “I have lost my youth.”

‘Let us suppose that I make reason of it all –

One poem, one page, and then die.

I can assure you it will not be unwillingly...

Perhaps I shall never die,

Shall never attain

Even that continuity, and parlance

‘Time passed over me’, I thought,

Trying to collect myself,

‘This is the one come of middle age.

How strange it is!

Nothing is any longer one thing

“How do you spend your day?” he asked...

These divisions were absolutely rigid,

The contents of the day having to

Accommodate themselves within

The four rigid breaks...

‘Breakfast, nine;

Luncheon, one;

Tea, five;

Dinner, eight”, I said

As perhaps at midnight,

When all boundaries are lost,

The country reverts to its ancient shape,

As the Romans saw it,

Lying cloudy, when they landed,

And the hills had no names

And the rivers wound they knew not where

Everything was partly something else…

The wine glasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson;

Had been emptied;

Had been filled

The kettle boils and its breath comes thicker

And thicker issuing in one jet from the spout –

So life fills my veins.

So life pours through my limbs.

So I am driven forward,

Till I could cry as I move

From dawn to dusk opening and shutting.

‘No more. I am glutted with natural happiness.”

Yet more will come,

More children;

More cradles,

More baskets in the kitchen

And hams ripening,

And onions glistening;

And more beds of lettuce and potatoes

To awaken us

From the depths of content and belief

One must pay back from this

Secret deposit of exquisite moments

Money is to the capitalist as words are to the poet. The principles of finance are the capitalist’s grammar.

First stage of institutional development: knowledge is applied towards the solution of a social problem and progress towards that solution is accomplished. Second stage: the resulting solution creates a process and the solution becomes the end in itself wherin pursuit if for the benefit of its practitioners rather than its clients occurs. If fact an institution in its second stage beings to create its own problems which it can then solve and create daughter institutions.

Each year about 100,000 Americans are shot by guns. Every day 87 die and 183 are injured. Since 1968 over one million Americans have died as a result of gun-shot wounds. The CDC estimates the gun violence cost this country about $100 billion a year. Solution – arm more people.

Give me a disease! Give me a disease, something that I won’t soon forget you by, please. She says, don’t whine. Make this a night for me, one I’ll long remember. Baby I want your disease! Oh yes, I have to have it. She said thanks but not thanks and I didn’t get my disease. Now its thigh high leather laces up boots that climb taut summer flesh. Baby I want your disease! Oh baby, I want your please. Stop whining, she repeated. I sit here with my chin in my right palm wandering what the hell am I doing and do I really care. What will tomorrow morning bring. Will it be any different (probably not).  Her white teeth glisten. I want to unntie those laces.  Unbuckle the straps. Slip off the silk. Then she laughs and bestows upon me those teeth that glow like  neon signage. Oh baby I want your disease. And oh those boots of Spanish leather from across the sea. I can’t help whinning.There’s only me.f