beardlessness/continued drunken bloggage

i was supposed to be shoveling storm-dragged sand from the driveway today. i said it was a good day for working outdoors, but then i cleaned the house and shaved my head and beard and am getting more and more drunkerer. it feels freeing to remove a winter beard, like i am new to myself. my hands are not the hands of a writer. they are the hands of a blacksmith, a farrier, a cooper, a potter, a carpenter, a butcher, a mason, a steeplejack, a thatcher, an arborist, a gardener, a builder of railroads, a coal miner, a mighty simpleton, a fanatic preacher, a sailor. the callouses come and go, but my palms remain gigantic. one of my russian acting teachers made us look at our hands for a few minutes at the outset of each day's exercises. we sat the arc of us in institutional chairs and stared at our palms, fingers, knuckles, divining the stories encoded therein. wicked.


on the frozen lake in february


shorn in april

yee-HAW! fuck. it's about allowing the poetry into each day of our lives, about asking every moment what it means, what it's good for. i don't mean asking in a reductionist, utilitarianist sense, but in a fish-eating, beauty-seeking, ugly-seeky, instants-of-actuality-vore sense. am i slamming too many suf- and prefixes together into these frankenwords? fuck you, i don't care. i like my frankenwords. i like smoked salmon and slippery cunt. not necessarily on the same plate mind you, but i like them both.

FHD • Day 2

Yesterday became hungry as it wore on. Today I am not hungry at all, but BOY do I feel strange. I mean, who the fuck listens to Chopin nocturnes before 10 am? Kind of just want to go back to bed. But so much to do... Bed. Do. Be-doo be-doo wah-wah, be-doo be-doo wah... Um. Wow. Absolutely an empty head.

Faster, Harder, Deeper • Day 1

Ten days without solid food. I'm a little bit apprehensive about what will happen to me and where I will go. This morning I had my first serving of The Stuff. A tall glass of it consists of the juice of half of an organic lemon, two tablespoons of grade B maple syrup, a dash of cayenne pepper, and about a pint of hot water. I get to drink as much of it as I want. It will be my only sustenance until next Wednesday. I've had two glasses so far today, and am happy to find that the flavor is quite agreeable. The next few days will be somewhat busy with work and related preparations, but at least I'll be busy in the comfort of my own home and free to wander about and stare at the sea as I please. I will attempt to add to this account every day for the duration of the fast.
Yikes.

Dear Raùl,

It's after three in the morning. Why am I still awake? I'm sober. I had caffeine at about four this afternoon, almost twelve hours ago. I'm sensitive to caffeine, but not that sensitive.

Focus.

Ah...

Focus.



I understand why you would want to tattoo what you tattooed on your wrist on your wrist. Read that sentence again, slowly. It will make sense. Anyway, I understand. I don't think it would work for me, but if it works for you you are lucky and I am happy for you.

Sometimes it's as if my wires get crossed, or the wrong thing gets plugged into the wrong thing and vice-versa. I focus on upwelling manifestation, and scatter into purpose. The bears wear tutus and make lollipops, the hummingbirds drive the cement truck, icicles ride bicycles in the zambezi circus, and I run in circles trying to get somewhere. You know that if it works for the Red Queen through the looking glass it's got to be a thoroughly cockeyed and ineffective way to operate here on the mortal coil. (No, really, I am sober.) I'm sure the I Ching has something wise and elliptical to say about all things being in their proper places and the people living in harmony under a properly organized leader. In Polar Star, Martin Cruz Smith claims that a single slime eel can produce a whole bucketful, which for our purposes let's call two gallons, of slime in only moments. In the book the only way to deal with these things was to chop them up with axes as soon as they tumbled out of the net. Fucking grody. So: the pipes that are misplugged in the steam-works of my inner labyrinth are nameless slime eels. I can't tell them apart, I don't know what they're supposed to be plugged into, and you get the idea about convincing them to do what you want them to do. Is it time for axes?



I think of you in regards to this business because maybe you have experienced a similar state of topsy-turvy-tude. Maybe it didn't dominate you like it's dominating me, but the choice to go with permanent ink reflects a certain gravity of inner confrontation. What has it been like inside your squash, dealing with attention that seems to obey but maybe doesn't want to? I mean like on the scale of weeks and months. We can all clean our rooms and put the right shoes on the right feet and walk down the street and maintain a consistent destination, right? (Okay, that shit gets difficult on some days, but you get the point.) But how many of us can sustain coherent focus across major life distractions? Maybe it's not that hard, maybe everyone does it, but I have my doubts. People who exist in (more or less) constant awareness and purpose can't be as prevalent as one might think. I did it one time and now I can't do it any more. It's as if I used up my get-out-of-jail-free card and now the shoe and the dog and the thimble and the top hat and the wheelbarrow go swooping by every few minutes and I'm stuck here. Hoooly mother of gobstoppers it's four in the morning.

I have got. to go. to bed. What do you make of all this?

A few weeks ago my friend Daniel visited me. We were merry far into the night, and at some point he said something that I asked him to write down. He took a slice of note paper and scrawled "Other People Need To See , What You SEE." If you were as fucked up as we were the grammar wouldn't seem so unorthodox. Daniel's thought stuck in my mind, and its little brother (What do I see?) stuck with me as well.

So what do I see? What is it that you need to see that I already see?

I see order and chaos as loving siblings. I see war as a necessary growing pain of humanity. I see an overcast April sky enfolding me and my love and a pair of dark-haired children in an extended game of sitting and chasing and throwing grass at each other. I see a desolate coastline where the wind gnaws at your fingers and the surf arrives in endlessly varied monotony. I see shades of directionless blue-grey twilight which I will not embarrass myself by attempting to describe. I see myself at the brink of understanding myself, but not quite there and therefore infinitely distant. Understanding is a binary thing. You may be able to feel it coming, but in the end you've either got it or you haven't. So it is possible to have advanced right to the edge and not to have advanced at all. I see my life as a failure, doomed to further failure. I see nothing but glory ahead. I see a past so intricate it merges into staring at the sun. I see shining webs of awareness, human beings who will be in my life until one or the other of us dies. I see all of us on a beach for my wedding feast. We eat lobsters, clams, ribs, corn on the cob. Pitchers of margaritas are drained and refilled, a keg of fine dark beer flows.

I see that I'm getting something out of the way at a relatively young age that would cause greater devastation twenty years from now. It would be nice to skip this altogether, but as long as it's going to happen I'd rather it happen now. Right now.
HA!


I see Kiki grow in wisdom and beauty each year.

winter

germans make large things

dogs

my cousin got an additional dog. it snowed. they ran around. see?

mapping the scarcely present

nasa has managed to create a three-dimensional model of dark matter.

illy:

no thanks

i love small towns

This from the minutes of the Town of Chilmark Selectmen's Meeting, 7 March 2006:

Film Festival

Thomas Bena requested permission to erect two tents at the Community Center for the Film Festival March 17th - 19th. Mr. Fenner reminded Mr. Bena that no CCC furniture could be taken outside. Mr. Doty addressed a letter from the Custodian regarding some concerns he had about the couch legs scratching the wood floor, trash and the building not being well cleaned up last year. Mr. Bena said it was an exaggeration and that the center was clean by 11 am Monday. He said he felt he was providing a service to the town by holding the film festival and pointed out that some towns pay to have festivals like this in their town. Mr. Fenner commended him on providing a good service, but said that duct tape should be substituted for a better material and that Thomas should be there Monday morning to supervise the clean up to make sure it was done right and the center was ready for the morning exercise class.

Mr. Parker said that Mr. Bena gives a good service, but that he also gets a good deal from the town. Mr. Bena said that we were all getting a good deal. Mr. Doty noted that the film Fisher Poets was on Saturday. Jane Slater said that it was a good festival. Pat Jenkinson spoke in favor of the festival.

Mr. Doty moved and Mr. Parker seconded a motion to approve the two tents outside the center on the condition he coordinated with the Building Inspector and that the propane heater was inspected by the Gas Inspector or Fire Chief. SO VOTED: Three Ayes.

Thomas Bena asked for permission to erect their Film Festival wooden sign in front of the center tomorrow. The board approved his request.

Thomas Bena asked for permission to use the center for one hour this Monday for staff orientation. Mr T. Carroll said he would check the schedule for any conflicts.

I was lucky enough to attend and contribute to the festival in its first year. Maybe I can make it back again in 2007...

small moving pictures

holy fuck this is hilarious:

animator vs. animation

(then watch part II)

movementé

i like to make up stupid words.



holosync makes the inside of my head all tingle-y, like the squishy electric feeling you get when someone you don't know very well touches you in an innocuous but friendly manner, crossing a boundary but it's not unwelcome. while centerpointe's publicity material seems to be a bit, uh, overenthusiastic, i feel like the technology is at the very least an interesting treat. nothing takes the place of being quiet and still, but that's not to say that we can't or shouldn't enjoy the other experiences made possible by machinery.

aaaaand now i have to start driving and keep driving for much of the afternoon, but when i return i will bring with me TREASURES and TREATS!

stay tuned...

---

(lookit pictures while you wait:)

period

this from the atlantic monthly's word court, by barbara wallraff:

ADAM GORDON, of Los Gatos, Calif., writes, “At the advertising and marketing agency where I work, we have an ongoing debate about the number of spaces between a terminating period and the first letter of a new sentence. We writers were all taught to use two; my artists insist that one is the current rule. Would you be so kind as to adjudicate?”

Do anything you like in letters, e-mail, business memos, and other writing that’s an end in itself, but put one space between sentences in writing that’s going to be published, whether in print or on the Web. It’s standard.

This wasn’t always the case. You can find extra space between sentences in books from as late as the 1960s. No doubt this was in part an aesthetic choice. But I suspect that extra space between sentences became common mainly because type used to be set by hand, and it was easier to justify the lines by adding substantial spaces between sentences than by inserting smaller spaces between all the words. When automated typesetting came in, the machines could readily add space throughout the line, and the old practice died away. Then came computerized typesetting. In its early days, two spaces between sentences that came at the end of a line sometimes turned into one awkward space at the beginning of the next line—so publishers told typesetters to break the two-space habit if they hadn’t already. And here we are.

and now we know.

iGrind

diffusion of focus, how to make avoiding of

1. solitude
2. coffee
 2a. and/or tea
3. a Table or Desk
4. whole days
5. simple food
6. fresh water
7. space to walk outdoors
 7a. if summer, to bicycle
8. paper and
 8a. pen
 8b. typewriter
 8c. computer
 8d. all of the above
 8e. pencil not to be countenanced
9. scotch
 9a. or bourbon
10. sticktoitiveness

---

at you?

hi.

caffeinohol is the writer's best friend. wheee!

freaking out.



(happily) freaking. out.

here i am in a house by the sea where an unusally low tide is exposing rocks usually submerged and i think: sometimes the best way to deal with having to exist is to get moderately blasted on the demented still-life of a motionless friday afternoon, tall silvery cans of repellent if highly effective jet-powered malt liquor augmented with every legal strain and variety of water soluble stimulant, translucent ribbons of fragrant smoke whispering between the rapidly vibrating density of roomspace under the influence of Loud Music, and allow my adjectives to proliferate into a flesh-eating epidemic as i filter the style of salman rushdie through my own gills and liver by concocting expansive sentences of luxurious, sprawling, multiply-jointed centipede monstrosity.
it's easy! yaHA!



this solitude quenches me like a mint-laden spring in the dry red mountains— not as an exclusion of company, but by its own inherent value. perhaps with enough days alone alone alone i will be able to see my feet again, to wipe the jungle grime from the glass face of my friend the compass. everyone is so impossible these days, diffident and distracted in person, and then on the telephone spilling their guts in a reach for actual oppenness, intimacy, inter-dareisayit-subjectivity. i mean, me too, guilty as charged absolutely onehundredpercent, but someone's got to come out and say this shit. it's hard, living in the world we live in makes it hard to stay alive and awake. mistake me not: to the wee extent that that statement can be interpreted as political, it does not stand against, rather for. it is anyway pointless to examine that thought from a solely political standpoint, for while it envelops realities which manifest in the socio-political sphere it cannot be effectively interpreted using only the limiting prism of that arena, or even by expanding to the demi-totality of the rational-materialist thoughtspace.


∴


really, these things are important to say: by articulating a previously vague facet of reality, one begins to gain power over it; not in a magical sense but in the way that objectification can lead to clarity, calmer perspective. the better we know what this world is, the better we can dream beyond it.



dear liagushka:
for we the wanderers the pinnacular eden will always be

⇒ CONTINUITY ⇐

whereas this ceaseless psychogeographical pounding (all the while going nowhere) makes it difficult to keep the stitching between the rags of our skin from dissolving away into pff. this continuing effort to reconcile my kaleidoscopic existence wears! ‹inhale› (not the verdant garment of le printemps, but us down.) and whereas the futility of truly knowing oneself or the world through or in a morass of inconstancy is overwhelming, and whereas a chain of whereas is difficult to get out of.

and i incant:

we must strive to embody that within us which is changeless.
we must strive to embody that within us which is constant truth.
we must strive to embody that within us which encompasses time and space yet cannot be defined by time or space.

saturday morning staying in bed

then kiki came in and we tried to take a pictures of us together sitting up in bed with no shirts on but it kept coming out blurry so you'll just have to use your imagination, ok?

see

this is my window in jamaica plain a year or two ago.


this is my window now.


this is the boat that i lived on for the last couple months, before coming to where i am now.


this is where i am now.


this is a table in the back room of a bar on the upper west side of manhattan,

on a night that started well but ended by my getting BOOM! disenchanted with everybody's fun-having happiness, leaving without saying goodbye, walking a freezing hour to the subway because the subway entrance thingies were closed because the jubongous inflatable creatures for the macy's thanksgiving day parade were sprawled all over central park west, changing trains eleventy hundred times and finally getting home around three or four or five in the morning and passing out drunkish on the couch and waking up cold and uncomfortable having mostly on purposefully missed my six am bus to boston and then climbing into bed and freaking the fuck out and crying for hours and hours and probably freaking the fuck out of my (calm and understanding) brother on the phone and generally missing thanksgiving that year.

but that was in another town, in another time.



here is the boat again, but different, and smaller.

oc to pu ss an ge

all these stories try to leap against the glass and slide down in one coherent system.

::rereading posts from last winter ··· i like the low-sky-ed rumble of this one. it doesn't sound like it was claustrophobic, but i remember it being claustrophobic when i had it. strong dreams always feel like they happen in small places even when they don't happen in small places.

hello aaron. i remember your dream of the underwater machine with the serpentine many-jointed arms. i like that machine. i like how we achieve detail in our sleep.



six characters have to do something in act two. they can't all just stand around exotic places the whole time looking like an album cover. that might be pretty to look at but it would be murderously tedious to write.



i hate writing. i hate my writing.
why do i do this? it's not as good as bacon.

lying. (clams)

well, she just came out with an album called—

no.



i think that i may have broken through at the edge of nothingness—

no.



my friend,
i am no poet.



i guess...

well...

without giving up any of the razor vision that leads to sadness, hopelessness, and panic, i am beginning to hope. and since the wolf-crying boy has no villagers left to listen to his story, he tells the world. hello. it is not hope for any particular thing, it is only hope for its own sake. i have spent years waiting for the freedom that comes from total renunciation of desire, hope, ambition... how does eliot (again with the eliot) put it? "to get to the place where you blah blah, you must go by the way in which you are not blah blah..."? please forgive the inaccuracy of the quotation; i am on the road and that book is not with me.

these are all lies: i have not tasted the freedom to desire by giving up my desire.
these are all lies: i have not found the liberation of movement by giving up the possibility of movement.
these are all lies: my hope fades with the setting sun. darkness fills the sky, and like my scarcely human ancestors, i grow afraid once more.

THESE are all lies:
my four year journey into nothingness may in fact be more than running in circles with the red queen. the long emptiness does yield some understanding, some liberation. standing in the center, i open my eyes at last and see that the place where all the roads have ended is also the place where all the roads begin.

for want of a nail the kingdom was lost

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

stealing pretty pictures from the BBC

holi looks

like a

good time

moh-no...

so last week i'm in portland, i'm taking a little quiet time to think.


molasses

one night, kiki calls:
"hi. i'm on the way home from work, and your truck just died on the highway."
it's the clutch. the clutch is dead. this truck doesn't really deserve to have another six hundred smackers poured into her bottomless gullet, but it's fucking murder to lose our wheels. suck 1.

the next night, (still in portland) i get home from the coffee shop and open up my laptop to show kendra and igor the design work i did for them that afternoon, and all we see on the screen is eight-bit pastel vomit, like if your atari ate a bunch of blueberries and raspberries and strawberries and threw up all over the inside of its molecular cage. toast. as they say, my WHOLE LIFE is on this thing. suck 2.

there are a number of shitty occurences that make decent candidates for Third Shoe, but i will not take it onto myself to play kingmaker to any of them.

pray for me.