This is Infidelity

Gown Blowing, Hi-ho.

2011-03-29T12:13:00.003-07:00

Laudable, at least, from the edge - she, alike in hair color, to the growth: it was, perhaps, moving, in and out, up and down - she watched and considered: Oh, how nice. It was going to kill her, then. She was unattached, aloof, and foolish. The apes had congregated at the far end of the field.

And it was unbearable the howling. We aren't even paying, Mars said, disgruntled. His distasteful demeanor suggested coming torture. We would all pray for that. I didn't choose any of this, none, blindfolded and formulaic, disposed to cheat and scurry under the mattress, I over-cooked myself: how fabulous.

A + C * (2y - 1) = .

the argument

2010-08-02T20:52:00.002-07:00

don't point the wrong end
at all the people you love the most

the sky is full of stars and their ghosts
the singer says wo oh

speech is the flower blooming in silence

2010-08-02T20:48:00.001-07:00

I enjoy remembering when you ran your hands through my hair
it isn't there
now it isn't there

and the sparks from the subway flash like a camera;
congratulations - you are famous today
today is your day
today is the day

7 plague forecast and the man on the train knows whose to blame; the black, the Jews; I was in a
sad mood all morning coffee full of holes and I could not
remember my own divinity; like jesus and the tree
driven to cross the space between you & me

as the porch light goes out and no song (no song) can turn it on
and no song (no song) can make it right
no song (no song) can save our light
the father is an echo of the father before him
back to the first word ringing out from the lips of our Father
who has always been there, will always be waiting for us
to come home

the mother is an echo of the mother before her back to the first mother who birthed us all

Me at 3

2010-06-03T22:03:00.006-07:00

Walking across the garden --

this is a memory, and that is what scientists say looks the same when observed in the brain as does the future does when we imagine it--

I found no place to stand but inside the tomato plants. Everything my eye went to --

full, ripe & red --

was what I needed. I filled my mouth with answers, I was never hungry.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town...

2010-04-22T23:30:00.000-07:00

http://makeyourselftransparent.tumblr.com/

The Bible, as read from a text file, displaying the bytes as colors : "In the beginning God..." to "...morning were the sixth day."

2010-04-13T01:27:00.004-07:00

The Bible, as read from a text file, displaying the bytes as hexadecimal values: "In the beginning God..." to "...morning were the sixth day."

2010-04-13T01:14:00.006-07:00

31 20 49 6e 20 74 68 65 20 62 65 67 69 6e 6e 69 6e 67 20 47 6f 64 20 63 72 65 61 74 65 64 20 74 68 65 20 68 65 61 76 65 6e 20 61 6e 64 20 74 68 65 20 65 61 72 74 68 2e 0d 0a 32 20 41 6e 64 20 74 68 65 20 65 61 72 74 68 20 77 61 73 20 77 69 74 68 6f 75 74 20 66 6f 72 6d 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 76 6f 69 64 3b 20 61 6e 64 20 64 61 72 6b 6e 65 73 73 20 5b 77 61 73 5d 20 75 70 6f 6e 20 74 68 65 20 66 61 63 65 20 6f 66 20 74 68 65 20 64 65 65 70 2e 20 41 6e 64 20 74 68 65 20 53 70 69 72 69 74 20 6f 66 20 47 6f 64 20 6d 6f 76 65 64 20 75 70 6f 6e 20 74 68 65 20 66 61 63 65 20 6f 66 20 74 68 65 20 77 61 74 65 72 73 2e 0d 0a 33 20 41 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 73 61 69 64 2c 20 4c 65 74 20 74 68 65 72 65 20 62 65 20 6c 69 67 68 74 3a 20 61 6e 64 20 74 68 65 72 65 20 77 61 73 20 6c 69 67 68 74 2e 0d 0a 34 20 41 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 73 61 77 20 74 68 65 20 6c 69 67 68 74 2c 20 74 68 61 74 20 5b 69 74 20 77 61 73 5d 20 67 6f 6f 64 3a 20 61 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 64 69 76 69 64 65 64 20 74 68 65 20 6c 69 67 68 74 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 74 68 65 20 64 61 72 6b 6e 65 73 73 2e 0d 0a 35 20 41 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 63 61 6c 6c 65 64 20 74 68 65 20 6c 69 67 68 74 20 44 61 79 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 74 68 65 20 64 61 72 6b 6e 65 73 73 20 68 65 20 63 61 6c 6c 65 64 20 4e 69 67 68 74 2e 20 41 6e 64 20 74 68 65 20 65 76 65 6e 69 6e 67 20 61 6e 64 20 74 68 65 20 6d 6f 72 6e 69 6e 67 20 77 65 72 65 20 74 68 65 20 66 69 72 73 74 20 64 61 79 2e 0d 0a 36 20 23 20 41 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 73 61 69 64 2c 20 4c 65 74 20 74 68 65 72 65 20 62 65 20 61 20 66 69 72 6d 61 6d 65 6e 74 20 69 6e 20 74 68 65 20 6d 69 64 73 74 20 6f 66 20 74 68 65 20 77 61 74 65 72 73 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 6c 65 74 20 69 74 20 64 69 76 69 64 65 20 74 68 65 20 77 61 74 65 72 73 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 74 68 65 20 77 61 74 65 72 73 2e 0d 0a 37 20 41 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 6d 61 64 65 20 74 68 65 20 66 69 72 6d 61 6d 65 6e 74 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 64 69 76 69 64 65 64 20 74 68 65 20 77 61 74 65 72 73 20 77 68 69 63 68 20 5b 77 65 72 65 5d 20 75 6e 64 65 72 20 74 68 65 20 66 69 72 6d 61 6d 65 6e 74 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 74 68 65 20 77 61 74 65 72 73 20 77 68 69 63 68 20 5b 77 65 72 65 5d 20 61 62 6f 76 65 20 74 68 65 20 66 69 72 6d 61 6d 65 6e 74 3a 20 61 6e 64 20 69 74 20 77 61 73 20 73 6f 2e 0d 0a 38 20 41 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 63 61 6c 6c 65 64 20 74 68 65 20 66 69 72 6d 61 6d 65 6e 74 20 48 65 61 76 65 6e 2e 20 41 6e 64 20 74 68 65 20 65 76 65 6e 69 6e 67 20 61 6e 64 20 74 68 65 20 6d 6f 72 6e 69 6e 67 20 77 65 72 65 20 74 68 65 20 73 65 63 6f 6e 64 20 64 61 79 2e 0d 0a 39 20 23 20 41 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 73 61 69 64 2c 20 4c 65 74 20 74 68 65 20 77 61 74 65 72 73 20 75 6e 64 65 72 20 74 68 65 20 68 65 61 76 65 6e 20 62 65 20 67 61 74 68 65 72 65 64 20 74 6f 67 65 74 68 65 72 20 75 6e 74 6f 20 6f 6e 65 20 70 6c 61 63 65 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 6c 65 74 20 74 68 65 20 64 72 79 20 5b 6c 61 6e 64 5d 20 61 70 70 65 61 72 3a 20 61 6e 64 20 69 74 20 77 61 73 20 73 6f 2e 0d 0a 31 30 20 41 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 63 61 6c 6c 65 64 20 74 68 65 20 64 72 79 20 5b 6c 61 6e 64 5d 20 45 61 72 74 68 3b 20 61 6e 64 20 74 68 65 20 67 61 74 68 65 72 69 6e 67 20 74 6f 67 65 74 68 65 72 20 6f 66 20 74 68 65 20 77 61 74 65 72 73 20 63 61 6c 6c 65 64 20 68 65 20 53 65 61 73 3a 20 61 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 73 61 77 20 74 68 61 74 20 5b 69 74 20 77 61 73 5d 20 67 6f 6f 64 2e 0d 0a 31 31 20 41 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 73 61 69 64 2c 20 4c 65 74 20 74 68 65 20 65 61 72 74 68 20 62 72 69 6e 67 20 66 6f 72 74 68 20 67 72 61 73 73 2c 20 74 68 65 20 68 65 72 62 20 79 69 65 6c 64 69 6e 67 20 73 65 65 64 2c 20 5b 61 6e 64 5d 20 74 68 65 20 66 72 75 69 74 20 74 72 65 65 20 79 69 65 6c 64 69 6e 67 20 66 72 75 69 74 20 61 66 74 65 72 20 68 69 73 20 6b 69 6e 64 2c 20 77 68 6f 73 65 20 73 65 65 64 20 5b 69 73 5d 20 69 6e 20 69 74 73 65 6c 66 2c 20 75 70 6f 6e 20 74 68 65 20 65 61 72 74 68 3a 20 61 6e 64 20 69 74 20 77 61 73 20 73 6f 2e 0d 0a 31 32 20 41 6e 64 20 74 68 65 20 65 61 72 74 68 20 62 72 6f 75 67 68 74 20 66 6f 72 74 68 20 67 72 61 73 73 2c 20 5b 61 6e 64 5d 20 68 65 72 62 20 79 69 65 6c 64 69 6e 67 20 73 65 65 64 20 61 66 74 65 72 20 68 69 73 20 6b 69 6e 64 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 74 68 65 20 74 72 65 65 20 79 69 65 6c 64 69 6e 67 20 66 72 75 69 74 2c 20 77 68 6f 73 65 20 73 65 65 64 20 5b 77 61 73 5d 20 69 6e 20 69 74 73 65 6c 66 2c 20 61 66 74 65 72 20 68 69 73 20 6b 69 6e 64 3a 20 61 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 73 61 77 20 74 68 61 74 20 5b 69 74 20 77 61 73 5d 20 67 6f 6f 64 2e 0d 0a 31 33 20 41 6e 64 20 74 68 65 20 65 76 65 6e 69 6e 67 20 61 6e 64 20 74 68 65 20 6d 6f 72 6e 69 6e 67 20 77 65 72 65 20 74 68 65 20 74 68 69 72 64 20 64 61 79 2e 0d 0a 31 34 20 23 20 41 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 73 61 69 64 2c 20 4c 65 74 20 74 68 65 72 65 20 62 65 20 6c 69 67 68 74 73 20 69 6e 20 74 68 65 20 66 69 72 6d 61 6d 65 6e 74 20 6f 66 20 74 68 65 20 68 65 61 76 65 6e 20 74 6f 20 64 69 76 69 64 65 20 74 68 65 20 64 61 79 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 74 68 65 20 6e 69 67 68 74 3b 20 61 6e 64 20 6c 65 74 20 74 68 65 6d 20 62 65 20 66 6f 72 20 73 69 67 6e 73 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 66 6f 72 20 73 65 61 73 6f 6e 73 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 66 6f 72 20 64 61 79 73 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 79 65 61 72 73 3a 0d 0a 31 35 20 41 6e 64 20 6c 65 74 20 74 68 65 6d 20 62 65 20 66 6f 72 20 6c 69 67 68 74 73 20 69 6e 20 74 68 65 20 66 69 72 6d 61 6d 65 6e 74 20 6f 66 20 74 68 65 20 68 65 61 76 65 6e 20 74 6f 20 67 69 76 65 20 6c 69 67 68 74 20 75 70 6f 6e 20 74 68 65 20 65 61 72 74 68 3a 20 61 6e 64 20 69 74 20 77 61 73 20 73 6f 2e 0d 0a 31 36 20 41 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 6d 61 64 65 20 74 77 6f 20 67 72 65 61 74 20 6c 69 67 68 74 73 3b 20 74 68 65 20 67 72 65 61 74 65 72 20 6c 69 67 68 74 20 74 6f 20 72 75 6c 65 20 74 68 65 20 64 61 79 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 74 68 65 20 6c 65 73 73 65 72 20 6c 69 67 68 74 20 74 6f 20 72 75 6c 65 20 74 68 65 20 6e 69 67 68 74 3a 20 5b 68 65 20 6d 61 64 65 5d 20 74 68 65 20 73 74 61 72 73 20 61 6c 73 6f 2e 0d 0a 31 37 20 41 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 73 65 74 20 74 68 65 6d 20 69 6e 20 74 68 65 20 66 69 72 6d 61 6d 65 6e 74 20 6f 66 20 74 68 65 20 68 65 61 76 65 6e 20 74 6f 20 67 69 76 65 20 6c 69 67 68 74 20 75 70 6f 6e 20 74 68 65 20 65 61 72 74 68 2c 0d 0a 31 38 20 41 6e 64 20 74 6f 20 72 75 6c 65 20 6f 76 65 72 20 74 68 65 20 64 61 79 20 61 6e 64 20 6f 76 65 72 20 74 68 65 20 6e 69 67 68 74 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 74 6f 20 64 69 76 69 64 65 20 74 68 65 20 6c 69 67 68 74 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 74 68 65 20 64 61 72 6b 6e 65 73 73 3a 20 61 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 73 61 77 20 74 68 61 74 20 5b 69 74 20 77 61 73 5d 20 67 6f 6f 64 2e 0d 0a 31 39 20 41 6e 64 20 74 68 65 20 65 76 65 6e 69 6e 67 20 61 6e 64 20 74 68 65 20 6d 6f 72 6e 69 6e 67 20 77 65 72 65 20 74 68 65 20 66 6f 75 72 74 68 20 64 61 79 2e 0d 0a 32 30 20 41 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 73 61 69 64 2c 20 4c 65 74 20 74 68 65 20 77 61 74 65 72 73 20 62 72 69 6e 67 20 66 6f 72 74 68 20 61 62 75 6e 64 61 6e 74 6c 79 20 74 68 65 20 6d 6f 76 69 6e 67 20 63 72 65 61 74 75 72 65 20 74 68 61 74 20 68 61 74 68 20 6c 69 66 65 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 66 6f 77 6c 20 5b 74 68 61 74 5d 20 6d 61 79 20 66 6c 79 20 61 62 6f 76 65 20 74 68 65 20 65 61 72 74 68 20 69 6e 20 74 68 65 20 6f 70 65 6e 20 66 69 72 6d 61 6d 65 6e 74 20 6f 66 20 68 65 61 76 65 6e 2e 0d 0a 32 31 20 41 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 63 72 65 61 74 65 64 20 67 72 65 61 74 20 77 68 61 6c 65 73 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 65 76 65 72 79 20 6c 69 76 69 6e 67 20 63 72 65 61 74 75 72 65 20 74 68 61 74 20 6d 6f 76 65 74 68 2c 20 77 68 69 63 68 20 74 68 65 20 77 61 74 65 72 73 20 62 72 6f 75 67 68 74 20 66 6f 72 74 68 20 61 62 75 6e 64 61 6e 74 6c 79 2c 20 61 66 74 65 72 20 74 68 65 69 72 20 6b 69 6e 64 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 65 76 65 72 79 20 77 69 6e 67 65 64 20 66 6f 77 6c 20 61 66 74 65 72 20 68 69 73 20 6b 69 6e 64 3a 20 61 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 73 61 77 20 74 68 61 74 20 5b 69 74 20 77 61 73 5d 20 67 6f 6f 64 2e 0d 0a 32 32 20 41 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 62 6c 65 73 73 65 64 20 74 68 65 6d 2c 20 73 61 79 69 6e 67 2c 20 42 65 20 66 72 75 69 74 66 75 6c 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 6d 75 6c 74 69 70 6c 79 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 66 69 6c 6c 20 74 68 65 20 77 61 74 65 72 73 20 69 6e 20 74 68 65 20 73 65 61 73 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 6c 65 74 20 66 6f 77 6c 20 6d 75 6c 74 69 70 6c 79 20 69 6e 20 74 68 65 20 65 61 72 74 68 2e 0d 0a 32 33 20 41 6e 64 20 74 68 65 20 65 76 65 6e 69 6e 67 20 61 6e 64 20 74 68 65 20 6d 6f 72 6e 69 6e 67 20 77 65 72 65 20 74 68 65 20 66 69 66 74 68 20 64 61 79 2e 0d 0a 32 34 20 23 20 41 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 73 61 69 64 2c 20 4c 65 74 20 74 68 65 20 65 61 72 74 68 20 62 72 69 6e 67 20 66 6f 72 74 68 20 74 68 65 20 6c 69 76 69 6e 67 20 63 72 65 61 74 75 72 65 20 61 66 74 65 72 20 68 69 73 20 6b 69 6e 64 2c 20 63 61 74 74 6c 65 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 63 72 65 65 70 69 6e 67 20 74 68 69 6e 67 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 62 65 61 73 74 20 6f 66 20 74 68 65 20 65 61 72 74 68 20 61 66 74 65 72 20 68 69 73 20 6b 69 6e 64 3a 20 61 6e 64 20 69 74 20 77 61 73 20 73 6f 2e 0d 0a 32 35 20 41 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 6d 61 64 65 20 74 68 65 20 62 65 61 73 74 20 6f 66 20 74 68 65 20 65 61 72 74 68 20 61 66 74 65 72 20 68 69 73 20 6b 69 6e 64 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 63 61 74 74 6c 65 20 61 66 74 65 72 20 74 68 65 69 72 20 6b 69 6e 64 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 65 76 65 72 79 20 74 68 69 6e 67 20 74 68 61 74 20 63 72 65 65 70 65 74 68 20 75 70 6f 6e 20 74 68 65 20 65 61 72 74 68 20 61 66 74 65 72 20 68 69 73 20 6b 69 6e 64 3a 20 61 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 73 61 77 20 74 68 61 74 20 5b 69 74 20 77 61 73 5d 20 67 6f 6f 64 2e 0d 0a 32 36 20 23 20 41 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 73 61 69 64 2c 20 4c 65 74 20 75 73 20 6d 61 6b 65 20 6d 61 6e 20 69 6e 20 6f 75 72 20 69 6d 61 67 65 2c 20 61 66 74 65 72 20 6f 75 72 20 6c 69 6b 65 6e 65 73 73 3a 20 61 6e 64 20 6c 65 74 20 74 68 65 6d 20 68 61 76 65 20 64 6f 6d 69 6e 69 6f 6e 20 6f 76 65 72 20 74 68 65 20 66 69 73 68 20 6f 66 20 74 68 65 20 73 65 61 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 6f 76 65 72 20 74 68 65 20 66 6f 77 6c 20 6f 66 20 74 68 65 20 61 69 72 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 6f 76 65 72 20 74 68 65 20 63 61 74 74 6c 65 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 6f 76 65 72 20 61 6c 6c 20 74 68 65 20 65 61 72 74 68 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 6f 76 65 72 20 65 76 65 72 79 20 63 72 65 65 70 69 6e 67 20 74 68 69 6e 67 20 74 68 61 74 20 63 72 65 65 70 65 74 68 20 75 70 6f 6e 20 74 68 65 20 65 61 72 74 68 2e 0d 0a 32 37 20 53 6f 20 47 6f 64 20 63 72 65 61 74 65 64 20 6d 61 6e 20 69 6e 20 68 69 73 20 5b 6f 77 6e 5d 20 69 6d 61 67 65 2c 20 69 6e 20 74 68 65 20 69 6d 61 67 65 20 6f 66 20 47 6f 64 20 63 72 65 61 74 65 64 20 68 65 20 68 69 6d 3b 20 6d 61 6c 65 20 61 6e 64 20 66 65 6d 61 6c 65 20 63 72 65 61 74 65 64 20 68 65 20 74 68 65 6d 2e 0d 0a 32 38 20 41 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 62 6c 65 73 73 65 64 20 74 68 65 6d 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 73 61 69 64 20 75 6e 74 6f 20 74 68 65 6d 2c 20 42 65 20 66 72 75 69 74 66 75 6c 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 6d 75 6c 74 69 70 6c 79 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 72 65 70 6c 65 6e 69 73 68 20 74 68 65 20 65 61 72 74 68 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 73 75 62 64 75 65 20 69 74 3a 20 61 6e 64 20 68 61 76 65 20 64 6f 6d 69 6e 69 6f 6e 20 6f 76 65 72 20 74 68 65 20 66 69 73 68 20 6f 66 20 74 68 65 20 73 65 61 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 6f 76 65 72 20 74 68 65 20 66 6f 77 6c 20 6f 66 20 74 68 65 20 61 69 72 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 6f 76 65 72 20 65 76 65 72 79 20 6c 69 76 69 6e 67 20 74 68 69 6e 67 20 74 68 61 74 20 6d 6f 76 65 74 68 20 75 70 6f 6e 20 74 68 65 20 65 61 72 74 68 2e 0d 0a 32 39 20 23 20 41 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 73 61 69 64 2c 20 42 65 68 6f 6c 64 2c 20 49 20 68 61 76 65 20 67 69 76 65 6e 20 79 6f 75 20 65 76 65 72 79 20 68 65 72 62 20 62 65 61 72 69 6e 67 20 73 65 65 64 2c 20 77 68 69 63 68 20 5b 69 73 5d 20 75 70 6f 6e 20 74 68 65 20 66 61 63 65 20 6f 66 20 61 6c 6c 20 74 68 65 20 65 61 72 74 68 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 65 76 65 72 79 20 74 72 65 65 2c 20 69 6e 20 74 68 65 20 77 68 69 63 68 20 5b 69 73 5d 20 74 68 65 20 66 72 75 69 74 20 6f 66 20 61 20 74 72 65 65 20 79 69 65 6c 64 69 6e 67 20 73 65 65 64 3b 20 74 6f 20 79 6f 75 20 69 74 20 73 68 61 6c 6c 20 62 65 20 66 6f 72 20 6d 65 61 74 2e 0d 0a 33 30 20 41 6e 64 20 74 6f 20 65 76 65 72 79 20 62 65 61 73 74 20 6f 66 20 74 68 65 20 65 61 72 74 68 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 74 6f 20 65 76 65 72 79 20 66 6f 77 6c 20 6f 66 20 74 68 65 20 61 69 72 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 74 6f 20 65 76 65 72 79 20 74 68 69 6e 67 20 74 68 61 74 20 63 72 65 65 70 65 74 68 20 75 70 6f 6e 20 74 68 65 20 65 61 72 74 68 2c 20 77 68 65 72 65 69 6e 20 5b 74 68 65 72 65 20 69 73 5d 20 6c 69 66 65 2c 20 5b 49 20 68 61 76 65 20 67 69 76 65 6e 5d 20 65 76 65 72 79 20 67 72 65 65 6e 20 68 65 72 62 20 66 6f 72 20 6d 65 61 74 3a 20 61 6e 64 20 69 74 20 77 61 73 20 73 6f 2e 0d 0a 33 31 20 41 6e 64 20 47 6f 64 20 73 61 77 20 65 76 65 72 79 20 74 68 69 6e 67 20 74 68 61 74 20 68 65 20 68 61 64 20 6d 61 64 65 2c 20 61 6e 64 2c 20 62 65 68 6f 6c 64 2c 20 5b 69 74 20 77 61 73 5d 20 76 65 72 79 20 67 6f 6f 64 2e 20 41 6e 64 20 74 68 65 20 65 76 65 6e 69 6e 67 20 61 6e 64 20 74 68 65 20 6d 6f 72 6e 69 6e 67 20 77 65 72 65 20 74 68 65 20 73 69 78 74 68 20 64 61 79 2e

R-etur-n Monster (ab-ab-baab_esc1`)

2010-04-12T11:14:00.004-07:00

Banished, most suitably, by the posturing elite, expansive in succession, following, meekly, but a casual and fortunate power siege. The hordes, Sheila exclaimed (yes, Sheila, the heroine princess, rejuvenated by the irrational reappraisal - the haunting taunts of ubiquitous fetterment). I will not be [slave], yes, I will not, she continued, her English but imperfect. She is conned, hmph, mislead by intonation. A far unusual excuse. We have returned, dear martyrs, to plant this filthy sword in the washed skin - no one is to hijack the purposes of our novel journey.

Earlier, deposed by the starlit interrogator, she proposed, but only in hint, at a collaborative piece of journalistic expose - ultimately, a short fact-based (meandering) perspectivo. How dear! The proposal, authentic in its bold and humane intent, was flatly ignored and later discarded by each member of the ruling parliamentary. I am freezing, she admitted later, smoking, outside the embassy, embarrassed by her freakish tanned skin (in the kremlin).

The opening prescription, prompted I am certain, by the disillusionment of the state (yes, yes, by the aging and fretting male population), called for a disarming of adequate and functional communication assets. In a nutshell, Sheila shouted (you pigs!), the racist fringe has demanded a reduction and elimination of the overly archaic scientific process.

It is our return, consequently, bridging the gap between two generally opposed but progressively united counterparts that posed as the reconciliation of the red block, the iron curtain. But these were just feeble interjections, anecdotal in that they witnessed the surface, irrelevant in that the surface was no longer dictated by governable laws but instead, of course, by visceral supposition.

I suppose, really, it is not possible. And I am only crying, Sheila announced. She was bawling and had two hands in her pants.

How I Live Is My Masterpiece

2010-02-14T22:12:00.010-07:00

I.

Calvin, having recently received notification that his long poem, "How I Live Is My Masterpiece," would be published in the New Yorker, went out for a walk across 5th Avenue to feel the snow on his face and more generally life itself, when he started seeing a swarm of black dots filling his field of vision in the middle of which there appeared a light a little too white and rapidly expanding against the swarm. The poem began like

I am quitting my night job
of tapping words together to make heat
because the bodies on the train today
made me warmer than the mind is wide;
wider than the sky, sure, but not warmer
than blood, so let's go for a swim--
who's with me?

and ended with a rapid succession of imagery, including:

...of lightposts, broken arms, the watches we left behind, the wallets lost, and every argument and mending gone up to heaven on waves broadcast in every language to the black space beyond heaven...

which he liked. Calvin knew that he never could have gotten this one in, not right off the bat, not even close. But the other publications were opening doors and those doors in turn opened even more doors, so it was more like running through a house and turning on every light, only to find that the neighbors were doing the same in response, and their neighbors, house after house until all the globe was illuminated.

Years ago, when getting his eyes checked, Calvin was told by Dr. Harrison to watch out if he ever happened to see a myriad of dark spots swarming through his vision. Dr. Harrison was a good man; like most doctors he believed in benevolent deception, such as when he deftly and without explicit consent inserted contact lenses in Calvin's eyes after Calvin hit an internal wall he was unable to push past by actually touching his own eyeballs, badly as he wanted contacts and tired as he was of the fuzzy border of the world always peaking in beyond his glasses. None of this went through his mind, however, as he fell into the snow, which it turned out felt cold and painful on his cheeks. What Dr. Harrison was warning him about was the possibility of retinal break, given that Calvin's FBN1 gene was mutated, like his father's, and that the resulting condition known as Marfan's Syndrome left him at higher risk for a tear in the retina, which experience is accompanied subjectively by rapid onset of photopsia. Dr. Harrison's own son suffered a retinal break at an early age, after years of what Dr. Harrison sadly realized only later was obsessive-compulsive disorder, in this case the behavior being a compulsive darting of the eyes every night before the boy could fall asleep, afraid as he was of a murderer or thief or after watching Fire in the Sky, an alien's strange face suddenly pressing itself against his un-curtained windows. The memory of that night in particular, and his son's horrible insistence that his photopsia was in fact the light of the UFO coming to get him and "take him through the walls," as the boy put it -- over and over again, wailing actually, "They're coming out of the walls! They're coming out of the walls!" -- was why Calvin was warned at all, and why Dr. Harrison, deceptive or not, was a good doctor who did not see himself exempt from the physical failures that paraded before him daily.

The odd thing is that what did go through Calvin's head as he thrashed about in the snow were the nearly same images that came as if from outside himself not quite exactly three years ago, on the famous night that Calvin first pulled over to the side of the road and went running through the woods and which lead to everything else -- the poems, Lauren, and everything that he didn't know yet was coming. It was the same sense that the earth was in danger, and scenes of trees burning, and children's hands sticky from chemical burns; but now this time there was also a satellite exploding silently in space, and the face of a man who looked perhaps Korean laughing in a way that left Calvin more disturbed than did any other image or foreign sensation. It was all in the poem, one way or another. Was it unforgivable that he caught himself thinking, well, at least I'll get another poem out of this?

*

Several hours earlier, Dr. Harrison sat down with a new patient, a walk-in actually, but anyway his last patient had cancelled and because he was not a man who went home early when someone was waiting, Dr. Harrison had Sheila prepare the file and send him in.

"You live in the neighborhood?" he asked.

"I just moved here."

"Great, great... Hm. It looks like you wrote here under current medical conditions -- am I getting this right -- anophthalmia...?"

"Yes, that's right." Dr. Harrison stopped and looked at the patient.

"Anophthalmia?"

The man looked back at him, blinking.

"That's what I'm told."

"Mind if I take a look?"

In the waiting room Sheila thought she heard a sound like a tree snapping, but then again the radio was on, and though it was low it nonetheless filled the room with waves of various frequencies including those which when translated sounded like

ah ah ah
I got you I can't let you go

to Shelia's ears and brain.

II.

At home Dr. Harrison's basement is filled with stacks of cassette tapes. Above ground, there is a long narrow hall with slices of sunlight and paintings on the wall which runs past the bedroom where he and his wife sleep and up the stairs beside which hangs a painting made for him by Mark Rothko, who always wanted to say things simply even as he felt his pictures impaired by vulgar eyes and cruel powerless people who would extend their affliction to the world. Here is Dr. Harrison's studio. Here is the wide canvas of yesterday's work. Here is the sun coming through the skylight, which is cloudy, and here are the paints spilled on the floor. Calvin might say, ah, those accidents are your masterpiece! Stare at the sun and close your eyes -- whose art is that? But in the cabinets that stand in the corner of the room are more tapes, and transcripts, some typed on a typewriter and then the later ones printed, of words from people all over the world who heard about what Dr. Harrison does and sought him out so that they at the very least would not feel so alone. Of course they really wanted answers.

Before Rothko died, he promised that if he chose to commit suicide, everyone would know it. But no one was sure afterwards, when he was found on the ground with cuts in his arms and his glasses off. It was this last thing that threw off some people; he was severely myopic; how could he have killed himself if he couldn't even see?

Questions

2010-02-14T21:06:00.002-07:00

Coming down the country road, wide-awake even at this hour, Elsa took a turn a little too fast and found herself take flight, like a giant metal insect, over the sharply rolling hill. In the air there hung innumerable stars, sure. But she knew in the back of her mind that the question of "what hung in the air" was answerable in different ways, depending on one's perspective: danger, romance, molecules, probability waves, time, pollen, dust, pollution... fortunately for her the car was not an insect, and not meant for flying. The moment passed. Everything changed, including the questions.

Rogers to the Rescue

2010-02-05T00:14:00.000-07:00

"Johnny."

"Johnny."

"Yeah?"

I said his name into the phone.

"There's been a problem."

"What kind of problem?"

"The kind I need to talk to about in person."

"It's too fuckin early."

"Fuck man you have no idea. Get up and come meet me."

"If it's so fuckin important you come here."

"Fine."

I took off towards his place. I had Cliff in the back seat, breathing. His eyes were open as if looking out the sunroof at the early AM sky. Except they were looking red and dry.

John Mitchell Rogers M.D. was a friend of mine from school. In the very beginning we used to get high once every few months and though we hadn't done that in years, there was a bond. He once told me if he knew he had another life he'd spend this one stoned. Instead he was neurologist who liked to learn functional programming languages for fun.

I rang and he opened the door.

"What is it?"

I showed him Cliff in the car.

"Jesus, Klein, what are you doing?"

"He hacked into the dream machine. He took it from my office."

"Hacked into it?"

"I know, I know. But I need him to get out of this. I don't like not knowing what he did and where is."

"Where he is, is lying in what could very well be a vegetative state in the fuckin back seat of your car. Your car, Klein. What are you thinking?"

He leaned in over Cliff and looked and listened.

"If I were you," he said, "I'd wash my hands of all this immediately."

"I can't."

"Why?"

"I'm the one who pulled the tube. While he was in there."

"And now you want him out."

"Yes."

"And you want me to help you."

"Yes."

Forget what we said before: Cliff is staring at the sky. A flock of birds pass overhead, splitting up and then coming together. He watches them, and inside his skull dense patterns of electrical activity move that way, just like that.

(...)

2010-02-04T23:59:00.003-07:00

Uncertain what to do, we smiled and shook everyone's hand. Instead of complaining about the work, or the weather, we took careful measures to say only what was needed to build hospitals out of thin air. Now everyone comes around when it rains and we turn no one -- not even the pigeons -- away.

reboot

2010-02-03T22:55:00.001-07:00

Bum bump -- bum bump -- bum bump. This is what Cliff experiences next. There is a sound like pounding on the walls -- can you call them walls? they look cold and wet to touch. He can move his limbs, this is good. This is good, he thinks. Then he is not so sure.

Across town Calvin is in the back of a police car.

Dr. Klein is not sure what to do next. Lauren is gone and I am gone. We were never there. The world closes up around our bodies and we become something that can never be spoken or imagined.

So he turns toward the light. The computers are emitting waves at irritating frequencies, it makes his skin itch. I am too late, he thinks. The dream machine has clearly been altered. But how? I thumb through the notes but it is like hieroglyphics, Cliff's writing, and I can't tell what is idiosyncratic and private from what I simply do not know enough to comprehend. I look back at Cliff's body. He looks dead but there is smaller machine displaying his heart rate, which is fine, good even. But he's like a dead man. He won't talk. I should kill him but I won't. I need to know what he did, and then I need to undo it.

The cops lets him sleep it off in the jail in the morning Calvin is out, blinking at the winter sun. He moves like a deep sea diver through the subway station. People's faces open up with a touch of his eyes. Everything feels Too Much.

At the end of a hall, if you can call it that, is an opening and past that the walls narrow considerably and Cliff has to wiggle belly-down through some strange wet stuff. It's vicious, like hair-gel. It doesn't smell. In fact, nothing does. Cliff realizes this as his head suddenly feels like it's being drilled clean through and one eye goes out and then the other and then they both come back. The walls keep beating, massive muscles, carrying him through a chamber like someone's giant wet heart.

lyrics without a song

2010-02-03T22:39:00.001-07:00

You won't believe but I did it again, I'm not sorry this time I have to say. Because there is someone waiting inside me, that's who I am today. All the teardrops all the years pooling at my feet. We believed yes what did we believe, what did we believe my sweet.

Take, your hands, off me. What we did we believe?

Take your hands off me. Off me.

You won't believe it but the astronauts in the space, they get paid to do the things that they do. Hard work, a little less complete, I am either contradiction and complete. (or perfectly consistent and small.)

take your hands off me. are you incomplete?

what did we believe what did we believe.

I believe I am here to say the names of everything that comes across my face. I try I will try to touch I will try to make it all a part of me. All the teardrops all the years, falling like a rocket down through space. did you believe what did you believe take your hands off me I am complete.

An elegy for being younger

2010-02-02T22:45:00.005-07:00

Not sad but determined, the fire inside burns on different stuff. I feel the same things but feel differently about them. Is it a tragedy that everyone dies, at last? Does it matter how we live? I'd like to go and alleviate everyone's suffering out of respect for the times I could not alleviate my own. The trick was seeing the mirror's limit and using it well: I see myself in the world. If we burn we burn together.

We appreciate the poetry

2010-02-02T22:20:00.007-07:00

I could not begin to imagine the way it feels to dip into something so still, so strong, that the suffering of the world becomes just another song. I try. The sidewalk catches my eye or maybe it's the sunlight hitting something metal or glass and bouncing back. Or given a crowded set of stairs, I look at everyone's face for as long as I dare.

Most kids in America don't play marbles anymore, some must, and maybe some play outside under the sky and have a good clean shot. I'll take anything that makes it easier to look out from myself -- and what do I see? Glass marbles of the eyes, a good clean shot straight across the heart.

[for J.D. Salinger]

The Ant and the Cube

2010-01-31T22:59:00.005-07:00

When Dr. Klein breaks the glass to reach in and unlock the window, Cliff is in another world.

Cliff's World: floating, I can see colors like you never seen when you're awake. They are spinning in a cube, and for a moment I hang in the open space watching it pull one side through the other and then it slips down again through the top. It has more dimensions than I can understand. This is Shaina's dream. I see her on the other side, she is watching the cube. Not at all like a zombie. She floats quickly, then stomps her foot on the grass that appears beneath just in time. Has a tantrum, then abruptly stops and watches the cube.

Did you know about the ant on the wire? Say it's a wire strung between two telephone poles. If the ant walks in a straight line towards the other pole and it will make it there. If, however, it starts tracing a path parallel to the pole it will walk indefinitely, never reaching the end, never knowing that it's going in circles. Because the ant is so small, and its world which is the wire is curved, right? The miles it travels are not flat but curled up in the shape of the world.

I wanted you to know because I am thinking of killing Shaina. But something feels wrong. Is this thought wrong? Is it the feeling? I can't tell, so I am going to keep moving. I move towards her. And then I--------------------------------------->

*

Dr. Klein, bleeding from the hand, moves through Cliff's house. The living room, the clean kitchen, bathroom -- he is not there. "Where is he?" He pauses, scratches his head. It hurts. So does his arm, he thinks. That's when notices a trap door mostly covered by a rug. He lifts it -- the rug is glued to the door -- and goes downstairs. Cliff lying in a room lit by computer screens. The dream machine is attached to his head, and the computers are displaying squiggly functions of things moving in value against time. Dr. Klein pauses. The next move is an important one. What will it be, what will it be--

He yanks the tube out of Cliff's mouth and every machine fills the room with a solid white light as Cliff sits up screaming and then is flung back against the floor, a little faster than people can usually fall.

*

The next morning, Shaina wakes up, turns off her alarm, and makes it through a day of work without anyone saying anything.

(exercise #1)

2010-01-31T22:43:00.000-07:00

We stood in the center of the room and Jen drew a circle around us in chalk. What were our habits, what were our peculiarities -- whatever made us who we are went inside. Outside went everything else.

Q: What went outside?

*

I named every body part for her, kneeling as I was on one knee, hurting vaguely. "This one, this one, that one!" Each time I said the name to the best of my ability. Funny bone was funny. So were toes, pinky, and earlobe. Clavicle, neck, head -- nothing funny about that.

*

Jen said, "Remember when we were in college? You tried to kiss me."

"I remember. The kiss failed."

"But I remembered it."

"Well, that's something."

"It is."

We put it in the circle.

*

Where does that favorite writer of yours lead to? I mean, in the sequence. Who did you find because of him?

It's like a great mystery up, hurry up before the case is closed.

Lauren

2010-01-27T01:45:00.002-07:00

You should know Lauren when she was a little girl. Let's try: see her in the backyard, going through her father's garden. She's asking: is this one ripe? is this one? about the tomatoes. This is all on video. Her father is kind of humoring her, paying attention to the new camera and its colors, kind of not sure what to say to his daughter who wants to know what everything is. Later you can find her going from tree to tree, collecting cattle-pillars that become gypsy moths. Her father says, they eat the garden. So she inspects every tree, takes every one she can find, and puts them in a plastic fishbowl. Then she fills it with water. Somehow she seems both to know and not know that she's drowning them. She moves away to the next thing.

That Famous Bump-and-Go Action

2010-01-26T23:58:00.004-07:00

Dr. Klein stepped out of the train at Penn Station, in the middle of Manhattan on an afternoon when 30 million people were going places, seated, or talking nearby. He hurried toward the subway uptown.

"Oh! Watch where you're going you asshole--"

"I'm sorry I--"

"You spilled coffee all over me."

Raina had coffee spreading warmly across her white shirt. In her hand was a coffee cup. She held her elbows up and arms out to the side.

"You're going to pay for this."

"Look," Dr. Klein said. He had stopped. "Look, I can pay whatever, but I'm in a hurry. Take my card and send me the cleaning bill."

"No, you're going to pay me right now. This was a brand new shirt. Brand new."

"You have to trust me. Take it." He thrust the card into Raina's hand and walked off towards the platform.

"Asshole."

Raina went into the magazine shop.

"Can I get some napkins?"

"They over there."

She took a handful and blotted herself uselessly.

&&

Raina's Dream

George and I are floating in a big empty room. "Don't be afraid," he keeps saying. But I don't feel afraid, so I get mad at him but when I try to talk nothing comes out. Like I lost my voice. He looks at me and his eyes get a little bigger. It's weird. "Raina, my grandmother died." I'm sad now, and I forget where we are and float over to him to try and hold him, but the closer I get it's like the wind from my movement pushes him away. "It's okay George," I'm saying, but his body is shrinking and his eyes keep getting bigger. Suddenly he's a little boy, with great big eyes, and he's running around in a circle. We are in my parents' house. He's running around and saying, No NO No NO NO NO and I'm trying to hush him. My mother walks in and she's got a apron on with a lobster on it. She's bleeding from her crotch. I ask her what's wrong, but she can't hear me. The lobster becomes real and scuttles across the floor towards George, and I see him pick it up and put it in his mouth. I can't say anything. Then I wake up.

&&

"I think that was George," Lauren says and looks back.

"You know who I see?" I say.

"Who?"

I point across the street. Dr. Klein is walking away from the uptown stop.

"Your boss."

"No way."

"Look."

"It's been like two days."

"Let's follow him."

"What?"

Lauren stops and look at me. She says it again.

"Let's follow him."

"You're kidding."

"He looks hurt, doesn't he?"

"I didn't notice. So what if he is? And what if he sees us?""

"We wave and say, Hey, we didn't see you there."

"No. It's not professional. I'm not going to follow him."

"Fine, then don't. But I'm going to."

She takes off in the direction Dr. Klein was headed. I look back, and then down the street where I can see him about to turn the block and head north.

"Lauren--"

"Lauren--"

"Wait."

...

2010-01-26T23:57:00.002-07:00

When Calvin woke up, he was in a steel gray room lying on a table facing the light. He could not move, and could not tell why. Without willing it, he saw images in his head that felt like strangers casually going through his things: trees on fire, hot wind across a blasted landscape and sand between the tops of office buildings; and then a streaking of pain down the center of his forehead straight to his gut and he thought he could feel the suffering coursing through the network of all conscious things -- stinging limbs after a bombing; everyone crying for something that could not be changed; and then after an excruciating moment (he had no idea how long) the pain relaxed its grip and his body filled with the feeling of plants moving towards light, the frantic scattering of an electron deep inside his eye; what a spider sees. That you are making harm on the planet. Watch for the man with mouths for eyes.

It was this last thing he remembered first, when Calvin found himself running down the Belt Parkway, cars honking from behind him, no shoes.

&

Cliff sat with his headphones on, staring at the ceiling in the dark. He believed that music was a mood-altering substance. Made of waves, not particles like weed or caffeine. He thought it worked by causing the firing frequency of select neuronal groups in the auditory system the match the frequency of the incoming pressure waves. Then those select groups gave an electric tug to the neurons they are connected to, and those groups tugged on groups even further out, and soon the whole brain was dancing. That was why drums made people go crazy, swinging their bodies and seizing up. Or why people like Alexa, who Cliff used to date and always took him to long slow drone shows where everyone listened with their eyes closed in the dark, why people could hear those low waves and drift off. Like a coma.

He thought about Alexa and the sex they had. She had weird dreams and like to tell him about it in the morning. Aometimes what's wrong doesn't even hurt. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, and let the music stop.

un-becoming, perhaps (daresay) but encouraged by such ambition

2010-01-26T19:30:00.003-07:00

She has little that will prevent her from becoming that dismal and distant (no close!) realized, oh dear [oh my! I shall not say] - that whore has little that will prevent her from becoming that eventual clone, the slobbering, indeed, indeed--she is the wench, that prostituted and evaluated clown, oh, he--no she!--indeed, oh she, so mesmerized by the watch, yes, time, while it went, yes, while it went, it did go, indeed it did go from one, to two, to three, to four, yes, it did go, all around, all around, in those same fucking circles, yes, yes, she is that beastily copy, that monstrous allusion (illusion! dear mate) of course, she is but a slobbering [again with the license, brute] a fabricated whole, a visionary of description, such detail I could not possibly require, not ever demand, not upon such a soul, a sole-less itinerant - you fucking assholes.

She has little that will prevent her from becoming the recitation of repitition, of their song in her song, of her hands in her hands, of her image (her clarity) in definition of only definition of reponse, that looking glass self (dear cooley, sir), that is the imagined then relized hope, unless, against the better halves, there were a broken window (my indeed) that posited, just perhaps, that she has little that will prevent her from becoming and indeed that little is just her little chance that she herself will not be ever performing the requiem, the simple ever reminder of the life that is to be lived as suggested by the ever fruitful and once magnificent tree - that we did, upon a sand dune, give up all that we cherish, each freedom, in order (but not death! dear me not death!) to retain the peace that ours, yes ours, will not be taken.

She has little - do not tell it as it is that she has little. There is no proper analysis, no excuse, not for the social contract, lad. Do not tell it as such. We have agreed in promise and in purpose.

Faint Music

2010-01-25T18:37:00.004-07:00

"There certainly is something wrong with it." Shaina hit the clock again.

"That won't help."

"It might."

It was the kind that couldn't be set; it just knew somehow, Shaina thought, and imagined it had to do with satellites whirling around in space. Cliff watched her.

"Just get a new clock. Use your phone for tonight."

"Fine, fine..." She breathed out and came into bed.

"I'm too tired," she said.

"Me, too."

So they closed their eyes.

&

Calvin stumbled over roots he couldn't see in the dark. From somewhere up ahead he heard something like faint music. But it wasn't music exactly. It sounded more like the way it is to almost remember the name of something. Calvin stepped into a clearing. There were clouds that moved between purple and red parts of the sky, holding water that reflected the distant city lights. Calvin turned his head both ways to try and localize the sound. For a moment he felt like something other than a man whose guard was down after leaving his car by the side of the road. His legs ached a little. He started to run.

Across the clearing, the trees on the other side got closer and he thought there was something in him that was finally getting some air. It moved through him and woke up everything it touched. He stopped, took of his shoes, and kept on running.

He was about halfway through the clearing when a light shot out from between the trees and hit him in the face. He stopped short, suddenly aware that everything was quiet; no faint music, no crickets, no wind by his ears.
&

"Tell me about your dream."

"I can't remember most of it. Just parts here and there."

"That's okay. Tell me what you remember."

"I remember feeling fat. Very fat. And unattractive."

"You dreamt you were fat?"

"I don't know, I just remember the feeling. It was harder to walk down the street -- it was a street from the town I grew up in -- and people around me, they were looking at me as I passed and I thought it was because of how I looked, my body."

"Let me ask you, Shaina -- can you think of a time you felt that way before? Other than in your dream?"

"When I felt fat?"

"Sure, or when you thought people were looking at you."

"Dr. Klein, people look at me all the time. Living in the city makes men act a little more like animals."

"So tell me what it feels like. When men look at you."

"It feels... uncomfortable. Anxious, I guess. It makes me feel anxious."

"Anxious?"

"Yes, anxious and sometimes I feel afraid."

"Afraid of what?"

"Afraid if one of them decided to do something to me, I couldn't stop them."

"What else about it makes you feel afraid?"

"Beside that?"

Shaina was quiet. The confidentiality machine made a sound like the ocean.

"I think... I guess I feel afraid that they can see something in me. A weakness. And if I don't hide it, they will do something to me."

"It sounds like you feel responsible for their behavior -- that this acting like animals is your fault."

"I'd rather feel this way than like I have no control at all. At least I feel like I can just put out a certain vibe, I'm safe."

"Shaina. Do ever feel that way here? That you have to put out a vibe, to be safe?"

"I don't know. I never thought about it."

"I want you to take a moment and think about it now."

"This feels like some weird therapist trick."

" I am not trying to trick you. I want you to think about the answer, and let me remind you that there is nothing you can say that will upset me, or get me mad. This is for your benefit."

They looked at each other.

"Okay. Sometimes."

"Sometimes, what?"

"Sometimes I feel like I have to act a certain way in here, to give you the answer you want."

"What would happen if you didn't give me the answer you think I wanted?"

"I don't know. Maybe you would say that I can't be helped."

"I'm glad you told me this. I do have another question for you, though: does feeling this way, like you put out a certain vibe or else be somehow abandoned -- can you think of any other times you've felt this way?"

She thought.

"With Cliff."

"With Cliff?"

"Yes. With Cliff."

dearest Marie - (alas) what troubles I have. . . !

2010-01-25T10:56:00.005-07:00

The untastiest - certainly, dear (and tragically but again most certainly), the trashiest - of propositions, first gained its imminent momentum during the third movement (oh the grayest of movements, the inelegant autumnal turn, the sheer blissless oboe cackling, dear!). He was suggestive, oh my, and yes, quite clearly, and in a manner unfitting even a boorish marauder. He, without even the proper shame. I was taken, well, I was taken aback, and I must admit, even in the face of the most improper audiences I would refrain from such a noticeable response, such a crude, a cunning bastard - a wolf!

I blushed.

Oh dear, Marie, I did. I blushed. In such a heat I have not found myself, not nearly for perhaps ever, not so crudely acknowledged and discarded, abandoned to the bestial qualities that (and of this I am sure) have not adequate housing even in my corporal skin. No, if they are ever even squatting, perhaps, momentarily confused by the pristine contentment of order, purpose, and place. They would cower, those impetuous unnatural audiences, they would perish in the guise of this costume, forced into the backward woods of the insatiable mortal unfearing mite. Such is the house I keep! Such it is. That they, dear Marie, that they were, those blithering and unwanted carriages, oh my, that they were permitted the sole possession of my reaction, that I was, without the cultured hand, at once persuaded by the audience of my rigid enforcement and at once again, persuaded, acutely, by the other hands, by the false witnesses of this bleakness, that even in this caste, I am like all that is only ever breakable. I am at such a loss, such a dear loss of such failure at composure.

This is, as I witness, the most horrible of outcomes. I shall not leave the house, not but once, for this entire coming season. Of course I shall be terribly lonely, desperate indeed, for the companion of such an assembly as he commanded at that hall, induced to poetic composition by the dynastic mandate, brought into the fingers of the whitest of hands with ease and delicately bonded to the emotional destruction of the earthly prison. Such a joy, I had in his company, in the audience of such delicate and expanded vision. Only to be devastated, at that purest moment, of course, of such vulnerable disposition, by that brute, that unguarded baron - that lout. I shall not leave again, bar no occasion to even the coming festivities. I am ruined by such a man. I have been ruined by such a man.

Break-In

2010-01-24T00:07:00.001-07:00

Technically speaking, Max had no right to be there. Without the proper clearance, anyone on security could ask him for the tag and then he'd be out of there. What would happen then? Max decided it was best left unconsidered. So he walked swiftly across the lab, through the double doors, and down two floors to LL2. Then it was a short walk through the hallway, one more right, and there it was.

At which point things became significantly more complicated. The sample had to be located, removed carefully and placed into an airtight container, which itself then had to be concealed so that Max could walk out the front doors, essentially, without giving any indication to the guards that he did in fact have a very small, very expensive, piece of what might arguably be called life inside his coat.

Which is exactly what he did.

He pulled out of the parking complex, turned on the radio, and by the time he reached the highway he was deep in the second chorus of Easy Lover. When he was young, Max managed two small rock clubs in Manhattan. There was always a revolving door of bands who would come, bring anywhere between a hundred people and no one, and settle for a small slice of money from the door. They weren't in it for the money -- not that money. They were in it for the money they imagined waiting for them, if only they were good enough in the right way at the right time, and looked the right way slightly ahead of the time, to earn it. It depressed him. This work was better. He felt a lot of things in the course of doing it, but never sadness. And in the locked glove compartment of his car, Max knew waited something that would make sure he wouldn't have to work for a few months, maybe more. It depended on if he tried to push it with the client. How far the client would go. What they each were capable of, which in turn hinged on their own personal relationships with the future.

For Max, the future was mostly imagination. That's why those kids in the bands got to him. They were prisons of their own imagination, and everyday the world went on with its very real members doing very real things, and the sun very really directing the movement of the very real earth, and yet no where on it or in the vastness around it lay the future. He switched to falestto voice and said, "You're the one that wants to hold her / hold her and control her / you'd better forget it." Then he turned his head toward the window in time to see the SUV slam into the side of his car, the left side of his body, and then the airbag went off and that was that.

&

Cliff's Dream

I am in a large meadow. I can't see the end of it; in all directions is mostly flat land, bright green greens of grass. I walk and walk this way for what feels like several minutes and suddenly I reach a sharp drop. I realize the meadow is a large green plateau, and below me is rock. I see Shaina down there, on the edge of a cliff. I know somehow that she is scared. I say, "Shaina, hold on!" But when she looks up I realize it's not Shaina, it's someone who looks like her but it's not her. And she looks at me and says, "Don't you have somewhere you're supposed to be?" Then I realize she's not wearing any pants, no underwear, and on her pussy is a tattoo like a weird tribal symbol. Suddenly we are lying in bed next to each other, and the room is dark and there is no roof just the sky full of stars like in New Mexico when we went camping, and now this woman who is not quite Shaina is on top of me and she says, "Tell me about your childhood." I get the sense we are trying to recover from something painful that happened. I tell her, "It doesn't matter" and she says, "You always say that" and starts fucking me. It feels good but then before I am about to come she closes her eyes and when they open they're gone and instead she had two little mouths and they say "You always say that" and I scream.

Is He Like Me?

2010-01-23T23:58:00.000-07:00

Teltron took his first careful steps into the world. I need a new name, he thought. He did not know where the thought came from, and did not worry about its origins or ask himself questions. He thought, I will call myself Adam, because like the Bible I am the first man like myself here in the world.

Adam went about naming things. He recognized what grew from the soil outside the house as trees, so he parted his lips and said trees. The machines that rolled on the street with four wheels were cars, and what reached his ears were vibrating waves called sounds. They were very slow compared to what reached his eyes, which he called light.

From there it was a several block walk to the subway. He passed the hospital and watched the ambulance unload, and the medical technicians smoking outside near the man in the wheelchair. Adam watched him closely, and inside his skull were many more active processes than one could easily count. Dr. Klein raised him to carry out as many active processes as Adam could. His head was insulated so he could not hear them or feel their heat. Is he like me? Adam wondered. The man in the wheelchair looked back at him as he passed.

The sounds in this part of the city felt good and so did the light coming through the trees. It was altogether different in the subway. The vibrating waves bounced in every direction off the flat walls and dirty floor. The smell was warm and unpleasant. To avoid it, Adam began to daydream. He imagined a green park and in it a small fountain with water catching sunlight as it fell.

&

Dr. Klein was on the express train back to New York City. He thought of Cliff.

"I'm going to kill him," he said to himself. Then he thought about how. This was a distraction, though, from what was really worrying him. Which was the dream machine. And what Cliff was going to do with it. His head hurt. Dr. Klein looked at the bandage under his arm. He wanted badly to sleep, but didn't.

"I can't risk it."

&

The machines in the basement stopped working. It was suddenly quiet. Cliff put the end of the wire in his mouth, and closed his eyes.

The Edge of Everything

2010-01-23T23:57:00.000-07:00

The ocean moved out in the dark. Coming down the beach, I heard it and it got louder and louder the further from the city I walked. It felt like the end of everything: darkness, waves emitting all frequencies known by the neural system in our heads, and underneath it a force older than language applied right to the scared human heart.

"Cliff -- it feels like the end of the world."

"It feels like manifest destiny, to me." Across the sand I saw Cliff's cigarette, a orange button in the dark. "Our own personal manifest destiny."

We had just finished driving from Long Island to San Francisco. I was about to start school in LA and he was going back to Cambridge. That's where he would work in the lab with Thomas Chen, and start his work on generative deep learning algorithms. We would lose touch.

Today we were at Ocean Beach. The coast was dotted with bonfires with kids and adults come to be by the Pacific in the dark. I felt a similar when we were in Alaska, looking at the raw young mountains by the harbor. Then I said it was like looking at where the world was born.

"But maybe the world is born inside the brain and the rest is a conversation," he said. "Between whatever's outside -- some limitless, undifferentiated lump -- and how the wet particles inside carve it up."

"I don't know."

"How can you not think about it?"

"I do. But the more I think about it, the more I don't know."

&

The shot didn't kill him. Dr. Klein was coming to, and first the world was bright and gauzy and then he could see a dumpster. He smelled garbage, and something tasted like copper on his tongue. His right side, under his arm, was bandaged and the bandage was bloody. It hurt in a way that made him worried.

"Cliff."

Dr. Klein got to his feet. Where was he? Outside the alley the street spilled into Market Street and then towards City Hall. It was Philadelphia. He didn't know this yet. Meanwhile Cliff was in the basement lab. The computers were producing heat with every calculation. Everything has its price. They were learning, and the wires strapped to Cliff's skull gave them the pattern of information they needed. Cliff taught the machine to learn how to learn. They did not need to be told what they were learning. From the massive amount of data that came from his skull, transmitted electrically into a digital signal, the machines monitored the amplitude and frequency of the sampled pulses. From there, higher level features were extracted, and Cliff did not need to tell the machines what they were. They knew how to organize the data, like a statue waiting inside a block of marble. They waited, and then they dug.

&

"I don't want to go back. I like it here."

"Yeah, that's easy to say when you're here with no work and nothing to do but get high and look at things."

Cliff inhaled deeply.

"That's true, that's true." He passed me the joint. "But when I'm out here, it feels like the rest of my life back there is a dream. This feels much more real."

Now I inhaled.

"It's the weed. It has a way of making me feel like the world is more itself when I'm on it." I exhaled. "That's why I can't keep doing it, not after this."

Cliff looks thoughtful.

"Enjoy it now, my friend. Cheers."

"What about Shaina?"

"What about her?"

"She's back there... does that feel like a dream?"

"That... I don't know what that feels like. I don't want to think about it right now. Right now I am looking at the those stars over the Pacific and I am thinking, the mind is wider than the sky, right? Because it can hold the sky inside..."

"The sky is holding me. And God is holding the sky."

"My mind is holding God."

"No, God is what your can't hold."

"You're high."

"I know. Give me another hit."

&

Shaina's Dream

I forgot my ATM card so I have to go back, but the streets are confusing and I keep taking the wrong turn. Everyone around me is in a good mood, it's Christmas time in Little Italy, it looks like. I see all the lights and someone says, "What a year for love!" But I am getting nervous, I hope my card is there so I pick up the pace. Then all at once I turn into a street and it's totally empty. At the end is a light and I think that it's the ATM so I go towards it but someone is after me, I can feel him. I know he has a knife and if he get close I'll get stabbed. I keep moving faster and then start to run but I heard footsteps and they are moving fast. I am almost at the ATM when I realize it's not an ATM at all, it's a glass house full of Christmas lights. I open the door and inside it's so bright, I can barely see but I think I hear my name and then Cliff is there, he tries to stab me but he's moving slow like he's stuck in molasses so I can get around him. I wonder why he's moving so slow and then I realize that this is a dream. I decide if I am dreaming I can do anything and so I fly up and away from Cliff and straight through the roof of the glass house. Then I wake up, alone and sweating.

Demons

2010-01-19T01:01:00.000-07:00

After years of waiting Greg decided to see a psychologist. It was not that he was opposed to going to a psychologist. He respected the profession and knew many people helped by therapy. But for him to go -- it felt like admitting something was perhaps wrong with his life, perhaps deeply wrong, and he was afraid what would come up if he grabbed the problem by the roots and pulled.

The latest advances in dream technology convinced him. When the dream machine first started getting press on the blogs and then made its rounds on the news, Greg watched closely. This was something altogether different. Larry King interviewed Dr. Chen, head of the development lab and a the kind of man who never appeared comfortable on TV, and Greg saw as Larry inserted the tube into his mouth and spent the next 60 seconds of air time experiencing his own dream as an outsider. That was both the apex of public interest and televised use of the machine; it was both too weird and too abstract for mainstream news viewers. Callers were vocal and evenly split in their opinions.

Greg was not split. He wanted to try it. He had recorded his dreams on and off for several years. Some of it was hard to understand when he looked at it later:

Greg's Old Dream

I wanted to show dad the youtube video of our first house, filmed in the 50s;
dad in his office, smell of cigarette smoke, with two japanese or chinese men;
the feeling of coming to the door excited and being shut out or turned away;
going in the car to the synthetic place;
computers stored at the gate, to let out heat;
otherwise effectively sealed;
insects made of clay with hard metal framework inside with motors;
all programmed with variants of genetic algorithms done as a Java Apps;
the programmer was Nate or Nat;
being here had something to do with grandma's legacy;
the room with the gun, the bullets; what was real? could it really kill?
the place was beautiful; the water; the plants; all man-made
I tried to tell the young girl about it; we liked each other; we held hands...

For example. What is it I want, Greg wondered. What could I get from a dream machine? Without answers, just a feeling, he got referred by his primary physician to Dr. Klein.

The first session went like this:

"Greg, it's nice to meet you."

"Nice to meet you, too."

"Before we get started, I need to explain to you a few things about our sessions. First off, and most importantly, everything you say in this room is confidential. That means I can't tell anyone what we talk about, unless there is strong evidence to suggest that you are danger to yourself or others, in which case I could break confidentiality to contact emergency services, for example. Other than that situation, what we talk about stays here. Do you have any questions about that?"

"No, I understand."

"Good. The second issue: if at any point you or you and I decide that psychiatric medication would be beneficial to you, this is something we can discuss and I can refer you to a psychiatrist. I cannot prescribe medication. I am a licensed dream machine operator, and if that is something you are interested in we can discuss it as well and decide whether it would be beneficial to your work here."

"The dream machine -- do you use it with other patients?"

"Well, I can't talk about the details of other's sessions, just like I can discuss what happens here with them. But I can say that some of my clients have used the dream machine and found it to be useful in our work. It is not a substitute for therapy, of course, but a powerful tool if we use it right."

"What does it feel like, to use it?" Dr. Klein smiled.

"You are interested in the dream machine?"

"Well, yes... I -- I just can't imagine what it's like."

"It is difficult to imagine, yes. Maybe this will help. You can compare it to being underwater. Imagine opening your eyes at the bottom of a swimming pool and walking around. It is different than walking on land, yes? Things are harder to see, and it takes more effort to move around. It is like this with the dream machine, too."

"Have you ever used it?"

"That is a very fair question of you to ask, and I am happy to answer it. But first let me ask you, how come you'd like to know if I've used it?"

Greg paused.

"I guess just to see if you know what it's really like. Kind of like wondering if you've taken pills that you're about to prescribe."

"Would it make a difference to you if I hadn't used it, but had only seen others use it?"

"I don't know... I was just wondering, really."

"Greg," Dr. Klein takes off his glasses. "This is a good time as any to tell you something that I think is very important about therapy. This time we have together, it is your time. And it is as productive as you allow it to be. They say work in equals work out, yes? This is very true here. However much of yourself you bring to sessions, that is how much you will get out. It is easy to go slow, try to stay in comfortable places, but I urge you to take the chance to step out of your routines as much as possible. I don't mean routines like, wake up, drink coffee, comb your hair in a certain manner, etcetera. I mean other routines, the ones that are made from the ways we tend to think, feel, and understand our world. The goal of therapy is to make the toxic invisible visible. Once you can see what your demons are, Greg, you will be able to develop a fundamentally different relationship to them."

"My demons?"

"Yes. Your demons. The dream machine can help with this, but please be aware that confronting yourself and your actions with quiet eye can be very upsetting, even in your dreams. In here things will go best if you strive to meet yourself with a non-judgemental eye. I am not here to judge you, and neither should you. I am sure there are many ideas of yourself you carry that are burdensome, or worse, painfully limiting. Is this true?"

"I -- I'm not sure about that."

"Just keep it in mind, Greg. And be prepared: you will have to meet demons in this room, whether asleep or awake. The critical question is not can you defeat them, but will you recognize them at all?"

Calvin

2010-01-18T00:02:00.001-07:00

The tricky part was letting go. Calvin gripped the wheel tight and kept his eyes fixed on the double lines snaking from the darkness. He thought, "Well if this doesn't change everything, I don't know what will." But he had doubts. There seemed a basic but essential lesson he was missing.

Then he hit a deer and went headfirst into the exploding airbag. Everything went quiet.

*

Calvin's Dream

I am walking on a very thin wire above a circus. People are watching and pointing, and laughing at me, but I don't understand why or what I did. I am just trying to cross the wire. Then comes these guests of wind -- and I almost lose my balance. "What are you laughing at?" I shout down. I see someone who looks like Mom, but isn't Mom, and she laughing really hard and then says, "You look like you just got out of bed!" I don't understand and then suddenly the top of the tent is sliced open by a giant pair of scissors being held in a giant hand, and I think Oh shit it's God and that's when I wake up.

*

"Ugh...." Calvin moans. There's a bit of blood on his forehead, and a taste of it in his teeth. He looks out the window. There's darkness in every direction. No street lights, no lights in the sky but stars. He struggles and gets out of the car. It's wrecked. The hood is smashed up like a brick of clay against the tree. The deer is nowhere in sight.

A pair of headlights come streaming down the road. Calvin hobbles over, his leg killing him but not broken, he thinks. And starts waving. The car slows and stops.

"Need some help?"

"Oh God, yes. I think I just hit a deer."

"You alright?"

"Yeah, yeah I think so. But my car is not. And I don't get any cell phone service out here."

"Yeah, we are a ways away from any city. You heading to New York?"

"I was."

"Me too," Dr. Klein says. "Get in."

"It's okay, thanks for that offer. But I just need to use a phone, if that's okay, to call the police or something."

"How about this -- I'll drive you to the next rest stop, and call the police along the way. I don't like the thought of waiting out here in the dark." Calvin pauses and looks back. There are trees like the edge of a forest beyond the wreck.

"Actually... you know, I think I am going to stay. Thanks again for the offer."

"Well," Dr. Klein says, "at least use my phone." Calvin looks back at the trees again.

"No, thanks. I'll be okay."

Dr. Klein watches his face. "Okay then. Good luck."

"Thanks."

"I can tell you are a man who has something on his mind."

"No, just -- no. Thanks, though." The car pulls away. Calvin, limping a little, walks down the thick tree line. He moves up and down, shining his cellphone light into the woods, and enters at the darkest spot.

Teltron's Big Day

2010-01-16T02:23:00.000-07:00

Teltron moved in deliberate paces towards the door. Outside was the world; the world was wonderful. But he had never seen it with his own eyes. He knew it through the machines of his mind. What was it like, he wondered, to feel it -- for real? "Don't go out there, Teltron," Dr. Klein said. "The world is not meant for someone like you."

"Why, Dr. Klein? Why can't I go outside?"

Dr. Klein turned and looked Teltron in the eyes. "You can't go outside because you are not ready to. I have to protect you, or else you will die."

"What happens then, when I die?" Teltron asked. Dr. Klein sighed.

"When you die, Teltron, you will be gone from the world forever."

"But why? Why should I worry about dying? If I will be gone then, how can I worry about what happens to me -- if there is no me at all?"

"It is questions like these," Dr. Klein said, "that make me think you are not ready for the world yet." And with that he bent down and carefully unscrewed Teltron's chest. Inside was his heart, and it was warm and wet. Around it were the wires that kept it warm; the tubes that kept it lubricated and wet; and the wireless senders and receivers that connected it to the rest of his body.

"When you are ready, Teltron, you will feel it -- here." Dr. Klein lightly pressed his finger into Teltron's heart. His face -- warm skin, blue eyes, milk-white teeth -- flushed with the sudden rush of blood. "Then you will go and receive the world."

&

So Teltron waited for the feeling. The rain outside sounded small and smooth on the windows. "How can that be?" he wondered. "What is rain, what makes it like rain and not like sunlight?" He asked Dr. Klein, who was busy in front of the computers, but Dr. Klein did not answer.

"I am working," he said.

"What are you working on?" Teltron asked.

"I am working on a machine to help you understand the world," he said. "It is called a dream machine. When you wear it, you will understand what it is like to be other people. You will see them in their dreams. Then maybe you will know better what makes rain rain, and not sunlight or a conversation."

"How come there are different things, and not just one thing? One thing that looks differently at different times, to different people." As he said it, Teltron felt it was true, though he did not know how he could know it. Dr. Klein stopped working.

"The dream machine will help you understand. Sometimes it is the question and not the answer that will matter most. You will see, Teltron, you will see."

&

The day after Dr. Klein was shot was not raining. It was beautiful. Teltron waited but Dr. Klein did not come. Something inside him was wrong. He kept looking out the window, into the world. "Something is wrong," he said, though he did not know why. The door was waiting. He opened it. And stepped outside.

&

Cliff dragged Dr. Klein inside. His home was a three stories on the upper west side, a block west of the park. He took Dr. Klein through a trap door on the first floor and down the stairs. The basement was lit by the blue light of many computer screens, each working quietly and producing heat. Cliff took the box Dr. Klein had been holding. He looked inside.

"The dream machine," he said.

Dr. Klein's Dream

I am floating in the water inside someone's body, I don't know whose body or how I know but I know I am inside a tiny ocean. The way out is through. I push myself towards light and then there is a crack and a rush and then the Gods come down through the light and burn my eyes until the world reveals itself as what it is; one desire; one mouth swallowing itself; I am allowed to know the names of things and then trace them down through the roots to the buzzing center that spins out all the differences. I see my face and my parents; and the people I've hurt and the plants and animals I've eaten. I see everything that could be; and it collapses into a dense point which I too am sucked in and when I feel myself dissolving that's when I hear the voice saying let yourself happen let yourself happen and like electricity I let it come through and that's when I wake up and realize I'd been shot.

The Second Fetish

2010-01-14T23:58:00.001-07:00

"I can't explain it, but it's always been this way. Since I was a kid."

"When do you remember it starting?"

"I don't know... maybe I was ten, or eleven? I had never even cum before. Never masturbated, never saw a woman naked. Except my mom, one time, I saw her topless. But that was just weird, I remember thinking: what are those flappy things? Not in those words."

"So tell me more about what you remember, how you felt when you first knew and how you came to know at all."

"I was sitting at the kitchen table. There was a sound in the room, a soft sound, maybe a siren in the distant coming through. And I started getting afraid, like what if there was a murderer out there in the dark through the windows and the police were looking for him, but what if he found us? What if as I looked out the window, suddenly I'd see a face -- something crazy, the face of a crazy murderer -- staring big-eyed back at me? I mean, it was a terrifying thought. And yet at the same time, I felt a strange sensation... a stirring in my pants. Things were getting tighter down there. I thought, What if there was a face... what if he broke into the house and held my mom with a knife to her throat, like a hostage? Well I thought I'd be able to take him. I'd pretend to be all upset, but then when he dismissed me as a crying mess I'd run into him full speed to take him down. The knife would go flying, and my mom would slide it across the floor to me and then -- wham! I'd take it straight into his heart."

"And what -- what about this -- do you remember what the strange sensation, as you called it, what it felt like?"

"It felt good. It was a erection. I had never had one before."

"What about that fantasy made you erect, do you think?"

"Being a hero. Being in control. I think that's what it is."

"Being in control? Do you feel in control now, Henry?"

"Now? I don't feel anything now. Not really. I feel nervous telling you this, embarrassed I think."

"Embarrassed about what?"

"Embarrassed that this turns me on. It feels so... I don't know, it makes me feel guilty. Like, how obvious this must be for you."

"Obvious?"

"Yeah, I mean, here I am tell you that my first erection came when I fantasied that I save my mom from an imaginary killer holding her at knifepoint. I didn't have to study psychology to know that there's something weird and uncomfortably obvious going on here."

"Maybe you feel like by telling me this, you're not in control. You're exposed."

"Yes. I suppose that's why I do it. To expose myself. Then why don't I go run around the city in a trench-coat showing off my dick? If I like exposing myself?"

"Henry. How are you feeling now?"

"Angry. Angry that you are-- hey. Do you smell that?"

Henry looks around and see the walls of the office are coming closer.

"Holy shit, doc, what's happening?" Suddenly no one is there. "Doc?" And from the walls: penises pushing through. They are on fire. And the walls are closing in.

The Psychologist's Thoughts

2010-01-14T23:33:00.002-07:00

Taking the long way home, we crossed the street and passed under a line of trees with lights wrapped in their branches. The lit up in order, stop to bottom, to give the impression that of snow falling brightly. I wrestled with thoughts: who I am, what it means to be someone, moving forward in time. I wondered again if the future was real; if the past was mainly imagined; if the moment was like rock dropped on the surface of pond. Was I the sum total of the ripples? Or the water? She hadn't said anything for a block. I watched her look at the buildings, the lights, and then ahead. I didn't know what she was thinking, but I could see her doing it, thinking.

The subway stairs lead down into the dirty bright light. Through the turnstiles, past the men playing flutes, onto the platform. There was a man in front of us, an Indian man wearing a heavy winter coat. He walked briskly, maybe for about 20 feet, and then took off his coat and brought it to the bench. Walked again, came back, put it on. I had to watch him for several minutes before I realized something was wrong. I began to wonder: schizophrenia? Maybe, maybe he was experiencing psychosis. It was a feeling more than any fact. Many disorders are like that; you feel them first, but only after you open yourself to others. Like opening your pores. Then everything comes in and how it moves tell you what you need to know. You use yourself to know another. It's a sacrifice.

Imagine burning at an altar. Imagine the smoke rising up into God's nostrils, pleasing him. And so He comes down into your mind and gives you some of His light. You can get something for nothing. This is how I know other people, what love is like -- all kinds of love. Not just romantic love, or the kind of love it ripens in when the weather is right and its carefully tended to. Also platonic love, of friends, neighbors; familial love, of brothers and sisters and parents; love for a child, a son or daughter; all swallowed up by the one hungry love that does not distinguish between any of the others. Past boundaries. That love like water filling up the container you give it.

All my life, I try to make myself wide enough to hold as much as I can. I am greedy for love. I'd rather lose myself than not keep trying to hold more.

&

Dr. Klein arrives at Cliff's house. The night before, Cliff had a dream:

I am running in a meadow and the meadow is full of children. I don't recognize any of them; they are people I have never seen before. Then the sun went down suddenly like someone turning off a light and a gray spinning circle came down from the stars in the sky. The children started screaming and I guess I was a child too, so I ran with them back along the path towards the schoolhouse. My mind was suddenly filled with images of tress on fire, and I smelled the planet burning. The circle sped past our heads and I heard it making a sound like piano wire before it stopped in front of us. Shaina came out of the circle, but it was not quite right; her eyes where all black and her fingers were too long. "I don't love you anyway," she said. And I said something like "What do you mean, anyway?" And she lifted her shirt and beneath her breasts were holes like open mouths, writhing along the edges as if say something in slow motion. I felt scared and said it again, "What do you mean, anyway?" Shaina said "Cliff this planet is in danger. I am going to eat you all up and keep you safe." Then her arms grew very long and she reached out and grabbed a girl with pigtailed blonde hair and pulled her to her chest, where the mouths grew and grew until she stuffed the girl in and said to me something that sounded like DEAD and that's when I woke up.

"Cliff. What's going on?"

"Did you bring it?

"I brought it."

Then Cliff shoots Dr. Klein.

(...)

2010-01-14T00:39:00.003-07:00

Greg stood in the bedroom with only his underwear on, holding the phone. It was dark outside; the time of year when night comes on suddenly. Through the living room is a small balcony. "Godamnit," he says. "God fucking damnit." And throws the phone against the mirror. Shatters. He imagines sparks and fire but the phone stays silent.

"What's wrong?"

"Who said that?" He turned around.

"I can help you, Greg," the voice said. Male voice, low, calm. But there was no one there. The door was locked, Amber moved out almost month ago. There were clothes and empty boxes, food in the kitchen sink, dishes on the table. "Don't bother looking, you can't see me."

His heart started beating fast.

"Oh no oh no oh no--"

"Can you hear me?"

Greg is sobbing.

"Greg, can you hear me?"

"Yes, I can hear you."

"Step onto the balcony."

He did as he was told. The TV was shattered, and the mirror in the bathroom had blood on it. These are things Greg was dimly aware of.

"Look down," the voice said. "Do you see me now?"

A car went by. Someone was riding a bike by the park. The sky over Queens in the distance was turning black from purple in streaks.

"What-- what am I looking for?"

"Look across the street."

A man by the park bench was looking up at him. His skin was like white light. He had mouths were he should have eyes. That's what it looked like from the 17th floor. Greg cried harder.

"What's going on here?"

"I am here to save you," the voice said, and as it did the mouths all moved, looking like dark holes in the man's white face. Dressed in surgical scrubs. Holding something small and silver. He put it in his mouth.

And then Greg jumped. The fall was so fast he barely had time to change his mind.

Later that day, Greg is found dead

2010-01-12T21:53:00.004-07:00

Watch dogs in the parking lot. The moon empty and full. Henry stumbles and swears and catches himself against the fence. The dogs come running up and he steps back.

"I'll kill you fuckers," he says.

"No, you won't."

By the time he's turned around there's no one there, and then crack in the air followed by pain. Henry's head is on fire. He's spinning but there's no one, and the dogs are going crazy, they're jumping and drooling and barking against the fence.

"Show yourself," he says. Henry feels someone around him, just out of sight. And then there's another crack, and time skips. "Pass the potatoes." It's dinner. He's sitting with his parents at their house. "Honey, pass the potatoes."

"Here Mom," he says. His head hurts. There's a feeling like something shaking in his heart.

"Oh it looks like it's really coming down out there," his father says, and the three of them look across the table full of turkey and potatoes past the big bay windows to the street. Filling up with snow.

"It's lovely," his mother says and smiles at him.

"I-- I think I'm bleeding."

"Henry...?"

"What's wrong with your head?"

"Henry?"

He hits the floor, the side of his face on the carpet, bleeding, filling up with warm snow.

&

Greg kept calling. "Goddamn it Klein pick up, pick up--"

"Dr. Klein's office," Lauren answers. Greg is silent. For a moment Lauren listens to him on the other end of the line. She hears breathing, but doesn't know whose. Then he hangs up.

The office is quiet. Dr. Klein stepped out and Lauren is on the internet, watching the clock. Once she had a dream she was at work, and all along the perimeter of the floor was a barbed wire fence. Beyond that was the outside. The patients were milling about with her, and she sat on a bench underneath a clock. One of them told her: follow me, I know a way out. He had strange teeth. She watched him slip through a hole in the fence and beckoned her from the outside. But she couldn't do it. He left, and soon Dr. Klein came but he was dressed like a solider, with a pointy hat and red armband with a big black K on it. You are irresponsible Lauren, he said to her. She couldn't speak. You've been playing it fast and loose. Then he took off his belt and she woke up. I could see it still bothered in the morning, when she told me about it.

"A red armband? It sounds like Klein was dressed as a Nazi."

"I don't know, there was just something very -- cruel about him. Ugh, I don't even want to talk about it anymore."

"Remember that dream I had, with the Nazis?"

"Of course. It was epic."

"You're telling me. I still wonder what it meant. It felt so important."

"This one wasn't like it. It just felt -- like something was very, very wrong."

I suddenly felt it too. The kitchen was bright and the coffee smelled good, but there was a moment where something felt cold in my body. And then it was gone.

"Don't go to work today. Just call in."

"No, don't be silly. Plus I want to save those sick days. Take an extra long vacation." She got up.

"But you've got plenty of sick days."

"It was just a dream."

"I know, I know. But come on... if you play hooky, I will too..." She kissed me.

"Not today. Today we go to school."

Lauren thinks about this and then jumps when the phone rings. She picks up and this time there's no breathing, no static -- just a clear connection, and silence.

Everybody's Working for the Weekend

2010-01-12T00:17:00.001-07:00

There was the issue of salary; of getting up early and staying late; and of course the reasons to be there at all, what you missed, what you didn't get to be part of. There were deals to be made, prescriptions written and filled. Lots of talk in the air, in between more talk, all those people waiting to be seen. There was a long line of people waiting to be seen, every day. This didn't change.

&

Cliff strolled through the waiting room and made a left down the white halls. He whistled and played with his watch. The nurses walked by, and he turned to watch them go. "I am in a good mood today," he thought. Made another left, then a right, through a series of doors that required codes, then a hand-scanner, in which Cliff laid his right hand. It beeped.

One more door, then another, and now the rooms are metal gray and reflective. Large windows on the far end of the room he now moved through looked out into the lab, and this is where Cliff walked in and sat down in front of the machine. It was blinking a blue light on and off at a regular pace.

Next to it was a computer, and next to that a slab of material on which neurons were growing. The machine was connected to the slab, and the computer connected Cliff to the machine. He began to load the software he wrote over many nights, late nights with caffeine in the lab while Shaina left work for yoga, made dinner and watched TV, and went to bed. Cliff was proud of the software. The Dr. Chen was proud of it, too. They published together in several journals, Cliff as the second author, Dr. Chen the first. Chen knew how to manage Cliff; he left him alone.

The neurons were receiving electrical signals from the machine. On the other side of the slab, wires ran from the exposed brain of a monkey back to the machine. The monkey was strapped in place, and at this moment it was sleeping. Cliff watched it sleep on the screen, which mapped out neural activity in a large collection of regions of interest. The ROIs here were much smaller than in other labs, but there were many more of them and they together formed a distributed network of activity and interaction between neurons throughout the cortex and the thalmus. The interactions formed long, reverberant loops.

It was thought that to see animal's brain in a dream foretold mental suffering, unless the brain is eaten and then it meant the coming of knowledge, and unexpected profit.

&

A Girl's Dream

i dreamed i died. i died wihth one big boy who didnt have much brain and one other boy that was pretty tipical, we had our belongings from the real world but thats all. the place where we were waiting 4 heavon was dark but lighht. the sky was black but it wasnt pich black like you could see. there were 3 beds and a fence around us. the biig boy was playing with toy monkeys and me and the other boy wwere laying on the couch and i saw two snakes slithering in sync with eachother around the cage adn behing them i saw a ine of 5 light brown bunnys with bit white spots on their right side. after that i called my ex and told him i loved him then i called my dad and i was crying and i told him i was dead and i loved him so much. then soldiers came....... then i woke up

&

Cliff remembered how Shaina brushed her hair after the shower. Then he looked back at the computer, and adjusted the values that would regulate the balance between the specific electrical patterns in the monkey's brain at this time, and the kinds of patterns the monkey's brain might exhibit in general. It was always a balancing act between the general and the particular. That was the dance Cliff was good at. Shaina liked to dance to salsa music, pop ballads when sung by women, and late 80s hard rock. Different dances for different occasions. The monkey wakes up and begins shrieking what Cliff usually thinks of as some kind of alarm, like a warning for the others, if there were others.

Problem

2010-01-10T19:02:00.005-07:00

Some Kid's Dream

Crept down the stairs while the trees move past outside their feet deep in earth
I am not bound to anything like that
except the present
and I had something to prove tonight

an hour away from the sides of buildings the light shine
everyone seems sexy or in love or otherwise hungry in the village
met a man he said he knew how to get me high
and this was the night I died

&

Dr. Klein wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Lauren in the next room, taking his calls. He sat back and imagined the rest of the day, and then to see if he could, imagined the day after, and the day after that.

"Dr. Klein, Cliff is on the line," Lauren buzzed in.

"It's okay, Lauren, I'll take it."

"Okay."

"Cliff."

"Dr. Klein, how are you?"

"I'm fine, Cliff, how can I help you?"

"I'm having a bit of a crisis. I was wondering if I could meet you."

"Cliff, we're not scheduled until Thursday. Can it wait until then?"

"No, no, it can't."

He looked over his appointment book.

"Well, this is difficult, Cliff, but maybe I can fit you in... let me see... can you come in at 7? There was a cancellation."

"Well, Dr. Klein, I know this is unusual but this crisis is -- it's complicated. I was hoping you would come to see me."

"Ah, Cliff, I never go to a client's home. It's nothing personal, of course, it's just that there are guidelines about these things. It's a liability, though again of course I mean no offense to you personally at all."

"Dr. Klein. It's about the dream machine."

The office was quiet for a moment. There was the sound of the white noise makers, keeping conversations from coming out into the lobby through the office walls and door.

"What about it?"

"I need to show you. In person."

"Okay Cliff. But I can't get out until 7."

"That's fine. Just hurry."

"Okay. I will see you then."

"And Dr. Klein?"

"Yes?"

"Please bring it. Bring the machine."

Dr. Klein exhaled.

"I'll see what I can do. Bye, Cliff."

But he had already hung up.

Lauren

2010-01-10T02:12:00.002-07:00

Broken down, we waited at the side of the road. Lauren looking very worried in the day's last light, on the cellphone, waiting for the car to be towed. Ah God I feel how much I love her sometimes. A physical sensation in my heart. I never knew, when I was younger, that feelings could be so literally something you feel. "We're going to be sooo late," she said.

I laughed a little. "I don't think we're going to make it at all."

"My sister's going to be so mad..."

"She's always gets mad. And it's not your fault. You didn't break the car." I hugged her and she put her head on my shoulder.

"Remember the story you told me?" she asked. "About Olivia?" I laughed again.

"Of course."

"Was that true?"

"I don't know why I'd make something like that up."

"You really asked her if you could rest your head on her shoulder, and then changed your mind?"

"I was fourteen years old! I think that was the first time I ever touched a girl I thought was beautiful. I panicked."

"Funny, that made you panic." I thought about that.

"Yeah, I guess it was."

"Instead of enjoying it."

"Hey-- let's just go to dinner. We'll get oyster's at the place on Court. We haven't been there in a while."

Lauren looked at me.

"I used to worry you were being a psychologist, when you said comforting things."

"I am a psychologist."

"I know, but you know what I mean. Remember how I used to worry you were doing it because you knew how, and I was taking advantage of that?"

"Remember how I used to say, 'I'm not being your psychologist because you don't pay me. And because we have sex.'" She smiled.

"I do remember that. I don't feel that way anymore."

"Good." We called a cab after they took the car away, ate oysters and drank wine and when I was asleep whatever I dreamt was gone in the morning.

The First Fetish

2010-01-09T00:21:00.002-07:00

"I do. It's part of me. Since I was a kid I wanted to be kidnapped. I remember watching an episode of A Current Affair. Maury Povich showed a photograph left in the empty parking space where two teenage girls had been waiting for their mom. It showed them tied and gagged in the back of a van. Duct tape and no shoes on. The first time I came I tied myself up on the bathroom floor in shoelaces.

"Years later, in college, I discovered through the internet I was turned on by images of women tied. I wanted to see them kidnapped, too. And the rest is history. I first tried it with Susan. We did it for about a year, before we broke up. It was good, so good sometimes. But different."

"Different how?"

"Less clean. The things crept in that always creep in: is she enjoying it, am I enjoying it, is this tight enough, what does she think of me for wanting to do this, or that, or that... but most of all, it wasn't real."

"Not real?"

"I know it sounds crazy, because how could it be less real than jerking off to internet porn, right? But it just felt... too much like a game. The problem is, if she wanted me to, I had to let her out. And that's what worried me most."

"Were you worried you wouldn't let her out?"

Dr. Klein looked at me. "No. I was just disappointed that I did."

How It Works

2010-01-09T00:14:00.003-07:00

Imagine watching yourself in a dream. What would it be like, to meet your dreaming self? The dream machine allows just that. It uses deep learning algorithms to isolate the brain activity that correlates with consciousness while you are awake. Consciousness itself is not contained in single neuron or neuronal group; it arises from particular kinds of interactions.* It comes from the relationship between neurons, especially those in the thalmus and the cortex. The dream machine learns those relationships.

The dream machine allows you to experience your own dreams as if you were inside a virtual world. You are free to move about; you can see your dream self, doing what your dream self decides to do; you can see what your dream self is seeing and hearing what he is hearing. In fact, you can see more. The brain abhors a perceptual vacuum, so wherever you look, your brain fills in the gaps -- even the parts that your dream self does not see. Imagine it: you dream you are climbing a staircase. You get to the top where you hear a voice say, "The world is elliptical..." and then you jump into a fountain. The "you" here is your dream self. Unless you dream lucidly, your awake self does not choose the actions of your dream self. With the dream machine, your awake self still cannot make those choices. But you can visit your dream self, watch him climb the staircase, pause to examine the steps, and go in a different direction to explore whatever lies at the bottom of the stairs. Your brain fills in those details. You can watch your dream self get tired as he sweats on the steps. You can hear the voice speak, and try to find its source. The dream world is yours to move in, as freely as you move in the real world. And when the dream is over, you will remember everything as if it had happened to you while awake.

You cannot interfere, though. You are a ghost in the dream world, and so you cannot help your dream self up the stairs; cannot drink from the fountain or be seen by anyone you encounter. You are a spectator in a virtual world that cannot sense your presence.

When the dream machine was developed, researchers found that they could effectively impose the patterns of neuronal activity that characterize wakeful consciousness onto the brain during REM sleep. The breakthrough came when they observed that this essentially created two minds in the patient; that of the dream self, and that of the awake self. Consciousness cannot be split. Even patients with a severed corpus callosum, for whom the left and right halves of the brain cannot communicate, do not experience two consciousnesses. One will always dominate the other. What the researchers saw in early tests was that the wakeful consciousness always dominated** the dream consciousness, meaning that the patient would experience the dreams as his awake self even while his dream self went about his own experience of the dream, inaccessible to the awake self as someone else's thoughts. This observation provided the basis for the dream machine's current use in treatment today, making it an invaluable tool in the treatment of psychological disorders, psychoanalytic dream analysis, as well as many other therapeutic treatment modalities.

* Doesn't this make sense? Wisdom is relational. Knowledge allows a man to contruct a light bulb or a rifle; but wisdom exists in the between we create together, and it is dynamic. This is why the wise man who sits on the mountain, the guru, is no longer valued. The new century is about speed and dynamic functions, changing relationships between changing parts, and infinity moving at infinite speed... --Chen, editor

** almost.

The Dream Machine

2010-01-07T23:46:00.004-07:00

"Sometimes the future is like a long tunnel that gets narrower as I move through it. It's like the trick of drawing perspective -- you make the four lines intersect to give the illusion of depth."

"The illusion of depth? Tell me what you mean by that."

Roger pauses. "I guess I mean... I don't know, like the tunnel is literally narrowing. The future, I mean. Narrows as I move through it."

Dr. Klein leans back. "Roger, try to tell me how it feels, as you imagine moving through this tunnel. Don't tell me what you think it means, tell me what your feelings are."

Oh Roger, you can fuck me harder, it's okay okay aaah that's it! that's it! You like it like this? harder Roger you can have me any way you want, any waaaah Any way, how about like this? like this? you like this?

"Lonely. It feels really, deeply lonely--"

Now Roger crumples. Dr. Klein sees him try to hold back, in his body and his face, but the tears come and they are very hot.

"Lonely," Dr. Klein says. He softens his voice. "It sounds awfully lonely, I imagine it you feel as if there is no one to be with you when you are in this place." Roger nods, his hands on his face.

"It feels like I can't breathe. It's like claustrophobia. I can't go further but I have to, like I'm being pushed. Like there's this huge wall behind me, and it's closing up the tunnel as I move through and I don't want to keep going but I can't turn back..."

That was perfect. Whoa. I know, right? Absolutely perfect. Move your arm. Like this? No, like... this. Like you're curling me. There. Isn't that perfect? Ahh. It absolutely is.

Then they fell asleep.

&

Mandy's Dream

I am waiting for a number to be called, I guess it's on the TV like the lotto or something. I am waiting for my number to come up
and it is the first ball
it reads
42
and the second ball
I can't remember but then the machine
on the TV catches on fire
and then the TV goes too

and now I'm panicking, I'm shouting Mom Mom the TV's on fire! But when I turn
I see it's not Mom
it's a something dressed as her
though it looks exactly like Mom
I know it's not really her
it's not a man it's something else
like a machine
and I scream and there's an axe in my hand and I swing it and hit her, hard,
right in the chest
and it opens up
and there's a fire there too
it's so hot

and when I wake up the radiator is hissing loudly like electric sparks and that's when I realized what had happened and what the doctor had done--

&

"Roger."

He does not reply.

"Roger, I want you to listen to me."

"Okay."

"You are not alone."

"But I am."

"Roger. There is no future. What you imagine, the tunnel, the wall, it exists in your imagination. It has no body. The mind can't move through time. I can't go forwards and see what will be. I can't go back and see what was. I can only imagine and in either direction the latest science agrees that the bulk of we think we see we make ourselves. The remembered present. That's where we live."

"It feels so bad, though."

Dr. Klein sighs, leans back and put his hands where Roger can't see them behind the desk.

"Does it have to?"

&

"What is that?"

&

"It's a dream machine."

"A dream machine?"

Dr. Klein shakes his head. "Well, not a dream machine exactly. The name dream machine historically refers to device built by Ian Sommerville. Have you heard of Ian Sommerville, Roger? He spent time with Burroughs in the 60s. That dream machine was a cylinder with holes cut in it, and there was a light inside. The cylinder rotated on a record player. People stared at it and saw things. This is not that kind of dream machine. This is more properly a brain-machine interface. It maintains the specific patterns of reverbant loops between your thalmus and cortex during REM sleep."

"What does that do?" Roger is staring at the machine.

"It lets you experience your dreams as if you were awake."

"So.... this is like lucid dreaming?"

"No. Lucid dreamers can control their dreams. Which I dislike the idea of. It is an unfortunate loss of information."

Dr. Klein extends a wire from the base of the dream machine and hands the tip to Roger.

"This is something different. Here. Put this in your mouth."

The First Two Murders

2010-01-06T23:56:00.003-07:00

Dr. Klein left the office underneath a telephone pole covered in birds. Inside his head words were swimming:

I remember the time I thought I told the truth, but it was a lie. What does that mean, that I might believe what I say when I don't mean it? What are the meanings behind words, what truth lies underneath them, what happens if I cut their skin, what bleeds, what is language's blood and what

"Oh! Dr. Klein."

Shaina was startled.

"I almost -- I didn't recognize you for a second, outside the office, I mean."

"Shaina. How are you doing?"

She paused, touched her hair. The sun was moving slowly above their heads, and beyond that the universe slightly shifted. Shaina had blonde hair. When she first started coming, it was brown.

"Is that a professional question?"

"Of course not."

"I'm just joking, doctor. Not funny, I know, but--"

"Well Shaina, I'd best be going."

Better to create triangles. Better to find her again, and walk away leaving her feeling that there was something guiding them towards each other, the movement of heavenly bodies, something in their cells, magnetic nuclei, something about the way things are meant to be, yes, meant to be, yes, that's what I'm trying to make

"See you Thursday."

She smiled and looked down.

"See you Thursday," she said.

&

The Doctor's Dream

little elephants come up form the soil and shook their trunks at the sky. I was breaking something down, it was either a stone or a word, or maybe a word carved into a rock. I tried to tell them, hey, elephants, you don't belong here, get back. But they came up and split open at the seams. Butterflies came from their skin loosened and in little piles on the ground. Little elephant skin never forgets, I remember thinking. I was swimming in something thick, it was air but not air, it was a venus fly trap and the thick liquid in its gut. the burning light above me, hot air, long ride back home, I remember thinking that right before she came into the dream. I knew her but I didn't. I could see her face but can't remember now. She said the meaning of the world is not the world, and then wake up and I said what does that mean, and she said wake up wake up and I said I am trying and then I did.

&

meanwhile it was jazz city USA
int other part of town
some kids were trying to get back
to a different time
jazz time
wanted to be wild in the night

horns like sex
right right right
that's why they wore their hats like that
two of them

young-looking but maybe not really kids
can't tell right now
in the this light
can't tell now with what's on their faces

all this dark shadow
and blood

&

"I have strange fantasies, doctor. Strange I guess is a weird way to put it. They are mine, I know, so I guess I should try to own them, own that part of me. But I can't help but step back and look at them like another person might, and then I can't escape the sense that they are strange. I want to put people in the microwaves. I know it's impossible but the thought of it turns me on. Not any people, just certain ones. Shelley from work, I've told you about her. And Keila. From the bank. I can't imagine getting them in but I can imagine seeing them pressed against that plastic. On the door. And the light on inside. Doctor, I know it's weird. It gets me hard, a little even now just talking about it. God I don't understand. It seems obvious, in a way, like it has to with power and control. I get that but it -- knowing that doesn't -- it doesn't change anything. What I want to do. And I can't tell Karen. I couldn't. What would she say? I don't want to even think about it. And she's had her share -- in a totally different way I mean -- but her weird fantasies. I know they feel unwelcome in her case, but they do in mine, too, mine are just less vivid. I mean, she said she used to see things. Penises on fire, pushing through the bedroom wall. That was before the olanzapine. I'm glad she got on that doctor, you have no idea what you did for us. No idea."

Treatment

2010-01-05T00:53:00.005-07:00

"I am interested in the various things we talk about when we think we are talking about something else."

Dr. Klein leaned back. I wasn't sure what to do.

"What things?"

"What?"

"What things do we think we are talking about?"

He paused. I felt distant from myself a bit, and tried to focus. The burbling from the small stone fountain on the desk filled up the room. Underneath that sound, I could hear the hiss of the noise machine outside the door.

"Well, Cliff, what do you think we're talking about?"

"Frankly I'm not so sure right now."

"Not so sure?"

"No."

The noise maker kept the conversation private, helped ensure confidentiality, which is an important part of the relationship that we are trying to build in this room. The relationship is an important part of growth; it is in fact a vessel for change, in that it carries us each from one way of living to another. The distance cannot be measured in flat miles. It is more a game of inches, but that is what I am resolved to.

"I think we are talking about sex."

As he said it, I remembered several things at once: Maureen in my bedroom, trying to get me to fuck her without admitting that she was trying; and Elena, who screamed just as I was about to press myself inside her. I remember the feeling of losing my erection, which if it -- the feeling -- were a sound it would sound like a sad clown's whistle: waw waaaw.

"Tell me what you are thinking about."

"I am thinking about whether I need to have it at all; if the army ever gets bored of following orders or if it wants to try something different for a change, collectively; how come it takes so long to conceive of a way of living that might lead to greatness; and why greatness comes in moments and not some more enduring capsule. I am just riffing here. Just letting it flow. I am thinking of the trees I climbed outside the house when I was a boy, and why I tried to push my sister off them so many times. Did I hate her? Do I hate her now? I try to take care of her in a way that feels like love, but is it? How do I know? How did the first spaceship make it to the moon and back? Getting there I can imagine. But getting back..."

I regard him carefully. He is not an unattractive man, to me. I think about the patients he treats. I have never met them, and he has never mentioned them, but I have a clear picture of one in my head: a woman, blonde, short and cute, I can picture her talking and thinking about herself and her life's patterns, trying to climb to a height from which it becomes possible for her to actually see them, trusting Dr. Klein to hold her up there and believing -- and this is most important -- that once she sees them, the patterns, she can put her hands on them and make herself something new.

"I don't believe you," I tell him. "In my office I can only make space for you to do the work. I cannot make you work, and if you don't want to, if you'd like to keep riffing and telling me that these feeling truly matter to you, even when you and I both know they don't, well, I will not stop you. I get paid regardless."

Dr. Klein sat up. I continued. I told him I was sorry if that seemed crass, but the fact is he knows as well as I do that we get paid to do what we do -- to listen, and yes that does help on its own, but really (and I tried to make this point very clear, very eloquent, like a kind of music I hoped or the water on the rocks) it did not matter what I did. And then I told him why.

*

The next session Dr. Klein cried about what he had done, what he shouldn't have done. I listened and made a mental note to check on the noise machine's batteries. It's part of the job.

Wolfram

2010-01-04T00:39:00.004-07:00

Shaina waited on the beach for Cliff to come down. The stars were watery above her head. What are the odds, she wondered, that my life feels the way I want it to, always? It depended on so many variables, each in changing relationships with known and unknown entities, and the entities too were in changing relationships with each other and themselves. Shaina waited for Cliff because he believed this web was navigatable. Cliff believed in Stephen Wolfram, and what Wolfram believed in could be found in the private world he moved through, tailed by young men with hair sticking out from behind their ears, watery eyes, reflective glasses. The key was computation.

Cliff built sequences that made parts inside computers move. Dance, he thought. "Move," he told Shaina, "I mean, that's really what it comes down to, in the end." It was their first date; the wine bar had a fireplace and they ate oysters, which Cliff had never eaten and Shaina loved. "I love them sooo much," she squealed. He never felt that way about anything, the way Shaina felt about oysters. He thought he might fall in love. "In the end?" she asked. "There is remarkable uniformity everywhere," he told her. "If you can make inanimate materials do math, in the end you can make everything do anything."

But did he believe it? That was the question Shaina thought about, in different words, on the beach while she waited. The answer's absence clung to the wet stars. It clung to the sky and the sky opened and suddenly there was rain in the air and on the beach and in her brown hair. Out past the beach crest was the house they rented for the week, and on the second floor there was a light and in that light Cliff sat, internet pornography on the computer screen, divided equally into pixels, fundamental cells of digital images, moving up and down. Dancing? He stared at the changing relationships.

Moving.

123109 draft

2009-12-30T23:57:00.001-07:00

We needed a reason to believe
and so built these homes
these cities
and gave ourselves the work
we do everyday

I was born not a saint
but a psychiatrist
and in the town by the sea
I learned by watching
what people believe
and what trees believe
all organisms must be met where they are
and to each our own time scale

so I spent time in the backyard
with a pair of binoculars
and a telescope on the roof
and I watched what went on

while inside the knots were being tied
tighter
inside the house I mean
it was a different world

consider this an introduction
the first splitting of things from each other
in the shadow of the garden
I played investigator of the world
while inside life was trying to keep itself
apart

this is the first crime
and the rest
is ripples

&

consider a different time entirely
and then the pressure of language
and then the force of numbers

consider a entirely different perspective
what it is like to be a bat
a different man
consider the genders
fluid in the body
fluid in the mind
consider all the options
the skin pigmentation
the density of bones

then take your magnifying glass
and go

&

1942 and with the fire raging
in his heart Mr. Goldenslicker drove his secretary
in his car
over the bridge
and died
the war was on
but for him
and the woman he made love to

it was all over

&

fragmenting out comes time
and boundaries

the crime I am investigating, that the police called me in for, is boundary violation. someone crossed a line that we agreed would not be crossed. Josephine lay in the living room with a small hole in her head and another slightly larger right over her heart. The fan is still spinning; it is late august in NYC, the year is 2010, and I am running late.

when I arrive, the police scatter in all directions. "They used to call psychics," Charlie says as I pass. "Now they call you."

"Yeah. Well I'm glad they do."

"I bet you are."

"Got to eat."

"You don't look hungry."

"Business is good." I regret saying that, the way it sounded. I meant

"Business is booming. Unlimited inventory. Unlimited demand."

&

I bend close over her body. Josephine was beautiful. Still is, even with the holes and the blood. Her eyes are half closed, one less than the other. Her hair on her forehead falls away from the skin that falls in towards her brain. I am sweating. I crouch down.

I remember one case, Tyrell Govan, age 32, black male of African-American descent, low IQ but not retarded, who had sex with the bodies. He didn't kill them; he came after the crime, before the police, which confused the hell out of them. They thought there was a serial murderer rapist on their hands. Tyrell wasn't murdering -- and he just kept leaving his semen inside the women and the men. Polymorphus perverse, almost except I think he preferred them dead because they were closer to objects. He was oriented away from life in that way...

Working out the plot.

2009-12-29T00:07:00.002-07:00

We needed a crime. In order for the story to work. What did we mean, work? For whom does the story work? Not the victim, whether she be hung by a belt in the closet so no one would suspect homicide by the gardener, whom she loved once; or a man mowed down by a bus, it's a shame but it happens sometimes, people will say but will they guess that the driver owed him a fortune he would never be able to repay?

No no we are wrong. The story works for the victim too. Without it, she makes love in the garden one last time and is shocked at how few years need to pass before the details of that time are forgotten. And meanwhile the man makes it across the street, the driver lets him pass and the debt is perfectly ordinary, that is, invisible to literally almost everyone.

And the killer? Well it's clear to us what he gets. And we will be secretly rooting for him, even up to the moment when he is finally (inevitably) caught. His action took him to a place in which whatever he does, no matter how ordinary, will seem charged with meaning, electric, which is why he must be punished; but only after we get what we want from him.

And what about us? We get the chance to both be away from lives and deep in them, feeling everything--

Professionalism

2009-12-28T00:03:00.005-07:00

Now I can. Listen: breaking in, trying to do it right. Looking like a chandelier cyrstal hanging from a wire. Somewhere else there is lamp light, the slow pulse of trains on the tracks. A broken whisle, listening, the listener got tired and for a minute dozed off. I saw him in the therapist's office, where I went with a heavy heart loaded up with things I needed to get out. Broken toyys, trucks, the reason I didn't stay and say this or that.. it was getting too much so I went like I said to unloud. When the doctor fell asleep. I looked at him, waited. He woke up and asked the next question.

draft 0.1

2009-12-26T13:08:00.001-07:00

... a recklessness with others, to be able to hurt without feeling that you have done so, these gifts come untethered from weights of responsibility that comes from empathy; this is Joseph's advantage, what he tries to give to his son. It is raining in Park Slope. The windows outside the house give off ceiling light to the dull daylight shine. This is better than the way it used to be. Before Joseph was a raging animal, caged inside himself and poked at by time and other concerns the children did not get let in on, or his wife. Anne was quiet for several years, and then very quiet, before anyone noticed she wasn't eating much and then I found the laxatives in the bathroom, and first made the diagnosis.

I am a psychiatrist. I am the hero of this story.

When Joseph first came to me, he presented his world so well and so meticulously that it was hard to believe he needed to be there at all -- everyone else in his life, on the other hand, sounded like monsters. Human monsters. These things exist. It is important to realize that, to grasp the importance. I am not just talking about pedophiles, or murderer. I mean that there are people we encounter every day who warp the interpersonal fabric of the universe in such a way that others suffer. The question of intention, of syntonos with self, is a different discussion.

Joseph's life was populated by such monsters. He believed that he was always honest, and that his care for others was plain for all to see, if only they possessed decent enough eyes to recognize such things when they saw it. There was a rose garden he kept, and he worked hard to keep the insects who ate petals away, though he understood they needed to eat to, and so kept a few roses for them as a kind of sacrifice. For Christmas he brought me dried roses pressed in a book. The gift almost seemed romantic, but his way of giving it -- loudly, saying, "Hey Doc, their are people I don't like and there are people I do. This is because you're a good guy... I don't care about the holidays -- if you ask me, no matter how you slice it, it's all baloney, but think of this as a just a token of my appreciation..." -- distracted me from the fact of the gift itself: roses, carefully dried and placed in a small book, handed to me in my office.

Outside the park rolled over into the distance. There were no children out there today, too wet, but the dogs came with women in boots walking them and some men smoking and talking on the phone, the animals electrocuted with life. The men and women usually walk alone and don't talk, except when their animals intervene, and then the right is theirs to decide what they want.

*

The Present

2009-12-21T22:01:00.004-07:00

We took enough bread and cheese to last for several days. Up here, the days end early and so it gets colder in the afternoon. I was in love with Helen; she was in love with the world. I wanted to be like that, too, but for me the only way to the world was through someone I could love. When I am not near her, I am stranded in myself. Helen gives me the gift of feeling the value of things.

When we left she was angry. "The mosquitos, the mosquitos, always the mosquitos... I forgot how it is up here."

"They're hungry -- they need your blood to stay alive."

Am I explaining or being compassionate? For life in even it's weirder forms. And to think of it the mosquito is a strange shape life has taken in its drive to eat itself. I am strange looking myself, too. How many living things need me to stay alive? These are the kinds of questions that do nothing to drive away loneliness, though it seems like they could, if I only I believed in them stronger. I don't think Helen considers things this way. I watched her apply the spray that would keep the mosquitos away.

When I was Jesus' age, I first became aware I was slowly learning that everything that had happened to me was gone. I understood that it was a part of me, but not as deeply as I once thought it was. In my head were the constant ripples of experience but they were not the rock in the pond, and they faded. This meant I was not the sum of my experiences. I started to think at that age I was truly a man of the present. It was Christmas in the woods. Helen gave me another piece of bread and from inside the tent we watched the insects and the trees work, each at their own time scales. To everything its own pace. My heart is slow, but it knows what it wants. Set me into time lapse film and it will be startling clear: who I was, whose blood I needed.

Quite the opposite, so we don't mind what comes out.

2009-12-17T00:32:00.006-07:00

If I am perfectly open to everything, then everything will come through. It gets noisy; yes there are rocks, and sometimes my wrists hurt. From lifting up my hands which do the talking for the voiceless endless deciding

without choosing

which everything

is everywhere

when

I am in two halves and reduced, but I am not being and not knowing what is being a bat

2009-11-30T08:17:00.003-07:00

Against the better success of the intransigent malingerer, we have come across the only two halves that are incensed and deceased. There are not those halves in the dressing areas of the morgue, she remarks, casually, convinced of the towering hell that is upon us. It is not hell. The quirky staircase (lovely) is dispelling rumours of discomfort, displeasure, and even, though against the general odds of approval, mistruths--mistrust, she corrects, fixing her skirt and glancing, quickly, at the doused miracle. She is a beast, he admits, next to us, agog, a fleeting man of sense. She is not uncomfortable, however.

It is a cryptic sense of failure--nothing is so confusing, vexing, as the black pit of this beast. His is a mouth of disgust and I am longing, though unconvinced by my clearly pseudo hedonism, for a separation from the heightened attack of mis-numbers. This is a death. And they are admiring and staring at only the ever glaring peak of absence, a truthful stare into the misery of absolute denial, emptiness.

I am not in death, surely, but against my better self, I am without a doubt, in bounty. I owe too, she declares. It is a price of self-pity which I am un-eager to repay. We have too many hands, of a distant reclamation, perhaps an authentic re-connection with the lurid hands of impostors (ha!). This is hell, he admits, again, casually.

I am not in death.

Cheer Up

2009-11-25T06:42:00.005-07:00

I don't know who I am. All my feelings are paper-feelings.
The wind blows them away unless you poke holes in them first.
In the busy microcircuits of my mind I am constantly gathering myself
from the remembered present, and everyone I've known is there to lend a hand.
Whether or not I loved them, or they me I am constantly constructed
in a conspiracy several thousand years old of colluding parties like
wind and particles and great migrations,
and then I'm gone--
unknowable to all investigating forces.

Just Getting Started

2009-11-24T22:31:00.003-07:00

I am committed to showing the world that there is no difference between it and everyone and everything in it. It is not a religious trick -- "Close your eyes," the neuroscientist said, "and all you see is God in the dark" -- but a moral lesson. That's the worst kind to try to teach, because it must be felt. It can't be learned through imitation. When we are kids we are too young to know how to guess, so we play the odds. If it rains four out of seven days a week, we predict tomorrow will bring rain. Only later do learn how to imitate the world's patterns in our mind, so that tomorrow it could be sunny, you never know, we'll just have to wait for the weatherman and see...

But what if you can't see the pattern? I can't see it but I know there are trees outside the window living their lives without pronouns, no possessive; once I was high and watched them grow in fast motion on the TV and right then and there I knew a truth: we are not alone. I have seen fungus sprout from the brain of a dead ant. I have shaken hands with people who fuck children. There is a porousness to all boundaries, DFW was right, and if we don't feel the holes we will fall through them: holes in the head, in my heart, in other people's eyes and intentions, and what do you hate the most? "Other people's needs," said the comedian.

I am afraid too. When I die I think I won't ever be me again. What a loss! So huge I can't imagine myself without it. And then there's all the pain, and regret, which is worse. But right now I can reach through the screen and find you. If you take apart these words maybe you can write something else with the letters. Maybe you can press yourself into the alphabet and leave behind a career. Before you disappear. I am trying to point without pointing. Close your eyes. Open them.

Mada

2009-11-24T13:17:00.002-07:00

As it so occurred, I was not as wise as the world, Mada. I left it with but a thread of my tunic. Perhaps that was far more than the longest concrete strip. But it was far less than the hammering symphony of the string ochestra.

They put long barrels of trash here, Mada. Where once I sat and wondered (in glee), now it is only long barrels of trash.

The Gunshine State

2009-11-20T16:32:00.005-07:00

“The distance from the audience to the event is a factor in news judgement. What happens in your own town is more important to you than an occurrence in another town. If your own Boy Scout troop changed its cap style, that would be more newsworthy in your own town then elsewhere.”

--JOURNALISM pg. 7 of the Boy scouts of American Merit Badge Series.

When I left Miami, guns left me too.

My beloved shotgun remains in North Carolina where a friend shoots it, on occasion, at tree stumps.

My pistol remains in New York State –but, by no means, by my side. I live in New York City now. Guns are criminal items. I seem to recall a friend whose Brooklyn apartment caught fire while she was in it. She escaped, frazzled and sans cats. When firemen discovered the charred remains of several handguns in the wreckage of charred furniture and felines, she was doomed. The guns weren’t doing anything in her apartment. As far as I know, they hadn’t done anything in their past aside from sit in a bag some rich kid drug dealer had left there.

But they were there. And that was enough to put her in jail.

Guns are terrifying things in New York. During my Special Patrolman training (I am an Urban Park Ranger) our NYPD instructor told us never to touch guns, for any reason. “If you find a firearm,” we were warned during out pepper spray training seminar, “put a trashcan on top of it and wait for the police to arrive.”

Though I have been issued a baton, handcuffs and the powers of arrest, the notion of giving myself—or any Urban Park Ranger— a gun strikes a chord of lunacy. No psychological profile is necessary to become an officer in the Urban Parks Service. Furthermore, some thirty percent of my graduating class (there is a Park Ranger academy) had been arrested at some point or another.

Beyond our general lack of mental balance, the notion of carrying a gun in our job seems outright ridiculous. The worst crime I ever witnessed in Central Park was a drunken disorderly pissing on a tree in plain sight. I yelled at him until he left. Though I never patted him down, I was able to conclude from his lack of functional pants, that he was not carrying a firearm.

To our credit, no one in the Urban Parks Service has used his or her baton –beyond one nutjob who beat a suspect in cuffs; he no longer works with us.

I’m letting all of this be known simply to let you know that guns are bad here. For most people, they are not things you own or think about owning. You may fear them. You may even fetishize them. But not own them. Never. Are you crazy?

I recall having dinner with friends (a non-profit organizer and an art handler) who spent the better part of an evening talking about what a slimeball one of their cousin’s had brought to a family reunion. The poor bastard had mentioned, while sledding in the Berkshires, that his father had given him a gun that had been in the family for generations.

The cousin had later confronted them, in tears. “Please,” she pleaded. “He’s not that bad.” But they could not be convinced. Nobody decent owns a gun.

I forget how different things are once you pass a certain latitude.

On a recent road trip, the signs began cropping up once we hit North Carolina. It was a certain brand of bumper sticker which would become increasingly prevalent as we continued south. “I’ll take my freedom, money and guns,” it read. “And you can keep the change.”

Whatever else you may think about the Obama administration, he as provided a healthy shot-in-the-arm to the gun industry. People are buying up guns with a frenzied gusto, believing, in earnest, that he will surely outlaw them. On several Asheville area print ads, tag lines urged potential customers to “buy ‘em before they’re outlawed.”

As we continued South, through Georgia, gun shops began appearing along the roadside with a bizarre frequency. They were advertised on billboards along I-75 urging drivers to turn off at upcoming exits –as though they provided an essential service: bathrooms, food, a place to sleep. And guns.

Once in Miami, guns began to pop up in all kinds of social situations. While drinking beer in the very suburban living room of an old homebrewing pal, I suddenly found myself sitting before a small arsenal. Handing me a glass of Heffeweizen, he struggled, tensely with the magazine release on a Ruger bolt-action .22 that he had purchased for his son. “I wanna take him out to shoot some jugs of water,” he said. “I want him to know what they can do.”

No situation seemed inappropriate for guns to make their appearance.

My girlfriend’s father, in the midsts of a breakfast table discussion about his misgivings about taking anti-depressants brought out his pistols (a .357 revolver and a Ruger .380). He too struggled with the magazine release –though he stored both of his weapons fully loaded.

Despite his recent battles with significant psychiatric problems, he is currently on a waiting list to renew his concealed weapon permit.

His son, my girlfriends’s brother, likewise lamented the difficulties in procuring a concealed weapons permit. Despite having his hours cut back at work and encountering difficulties in making ends meet at home, he described plans for buying a handgun, in addition to spending hundreds of dollars on requisite classes, FBI fingerprinting and background checks.

The most alarming case of Florida’s gun mania came from a young attorney. I’ll call him Larry Espositio and tell you that, after becoming a licensed lawyer, he decided to just hang out in Miami and teach sailing to children.

He exhibited a jerky, nervous energy when he spoke and sometimes made jokes that involved screaming at you.

Esposito had grown up in an academic family in Coral Gables. Even in Miami, this demographic is typically hard sold on guns and the wisdom in owning them. Nevertheless, when Larry’s grandmother died he spent nearly a thousand dollars of his inheritance on firearms. They were a good investment –he reasoned. If, one day, he came to his senses, he could count on selling them back for (at least) 80% of his original investment. I didn’t want to tell him that something you lose %20 of your money on cannot, in any real way, be considered an investment. He now owned four guns, a fact he was never comfortable discussing in front of anyone.

“Not in public,” he would whisper, when I prodded him to discuss his gun love in a bar.

Weeks earlier, while driving in Miami, an incensed driver had rammed into his vehicle, pushing him off the road. Esposito kept a handgun in a Crown Royal bag under the driver’s seat. “It fucked me up,” he said. “If he had tried to kill me, I would have shot him and then run into a closet, balled up into the fetal position and cried about it.”

Luckily the driver drove on and Esposito’s gun remained under his seat. Besides, that guy coulda had a gun.

If this piece goes online, I can already predict the response. A phalynx of comment dropping morons will unleash a volley of peudo-patriotic nonsense.

I am vexing as an entity, because I like guns in the sense that they are fun items for me to play with. From a policy perspective, however, anyone with half a brain could tell you that they are an incorrigible scourge.

People are very stupid. Every year, busloads of them chop their fingers off unclogging lawnmowers, get their genitals caught in vacuum cleaners and crash heavy machines into one another every second of the day.

Miniature cannons are not a good idea for these creatures—everyone agrees with that.

A lot of people, however, believe they are a good idea for “me.”

And, who knows, they just might be.
Every time I go down this road, someone hauls out the quote “an armed society is a polite society.” They believe that, rather than limiting guns, we should be making them readily available to all.

More guns=less crime + more freedom.

Get ‘em into the national parks to cut down on all those picnic basket snatchings. Put some in the employee parking lot and people will stop stealing shit out of the minifridge in the break room. Pack a gun into every purse in Miami and date rape will go the way of the Do-Do.

Hell, if every airline barf bag on September 11^th had contained a loaded .357, those planes never would have crashed into the world trade center.

We’ll see.

As Florida’s CCW continues to be honored in more places and more people come to want them, this theory will be put to the true test –though I doubt it will yield positive results.

While all the fearmongering is good for the gun business, I wouldn’t believe the hype. The gun industry has won the war, for now. While it seems unlikely to me that Florida and other libertarian states will be able to have their CCW’s honored in New York City any time soon, Obama hasn’t seemed to want to do anything about the assault weapon-toting protesters showing up to his town hall meetings.

The barbarians have lined up at the gates.

Don’t worry Florida. You’ll get there.

Note to Self

2009-11-16T18:35:00.005-07:00

The world, including our environments and our bodies, is cleaved by our senses into discrete perceptual categories. How we sense is determined by our genetics and our experiences, shaped by cultural, personal, and evolutionary history. In this way, we make the world and ourselves by perceiving it. Outside our senses is the undifferentiated universe. Our senses make it knowable, and limit how we can know it.

Let us consider these limits. Take Thomas Nagel, for example.

It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflect high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But this is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.

Nagel's question -- what is like to be a bat? -- is often repeated in scientific articles on the nature of consciousness. What is not stressed, however, is the closeness between this question and another one perhaps more relevant to the quality of our lives: what is like to you? Your early development is guided by the genes we share and the variations within your body, and as your brain grows it is changed by your experiences, giving rise to a morphology unique to you and you alone. If I try to imagine what it is like to be you, I may very well get farther than Nagel when imagining hanging upside and emitting high-frequency sound. But returning to Nagel:

... I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imaging segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications.

the counter-attack, partly, (among) a zealot

2009-11-16T08:10:00.004-07:00

Assessed, as opposed to determined, and quite contrary to assumed, yes, perhaps, it was his casual assessment in the nature of the disguised (though clearly) hostile appointed secretary. She stared too much, like she was frothy, ever so frothy--the minx, he mutters, behind his desk, then, panicking, of course, about the imminent intrusion, this ghastly dark hire, she bleached her eyes! He is considering, most removed, about the straight curve, into her sock when his consumption returns, bloody fucking hell. The usual discourse out of a frighteningly tragic commencement is to slowly retreat (he repeats, reading, out of the office, yes) into the confines of the upper most attic of your head. Where they keep the drafts of union statements, declarations, deep vows of infidel cessation (hot). My own bank of security, she had lamented, after (why of course) the toga dressed men, from some sort of country with a desert, attacked and burned her dear square house (1/2 acre, nested inbetween the town woods) down to the ground. They did, she implied, why no, she shouted, still convinced, and unaware I might add, that she was most certainly unwittingly supporting the intrusion, the condemnation of her fable-happy partner, her dear mercury--the planet! It is irrelevent now, he proceeds, without notes, that the claim of injustice, though claimed to be an act of hatred, is unfounded, yes, without merit (oh, thank you). The arrests are warranted on suspicion, at least suspicion, he muses now, again, protecting himself, only slightly from the advancing (the possibility, the mere possiblity) door -- it will open! He harbors himself loosely, then, against the desk, pondering, oh my, grasping, yes, quite cleanly. That was, he admits, her entry into this post, her appointment, by god, she was handpicked by the look of it, her own ethos possessed by the (latent?--good god no!) remarkably clear misdirection. Illogical, the accusor had accused, dressed fittingly in western attire, more mockery than poise, less than his blank dangling monstrous intent. I have read into this intent, more than once, she, that darling counterpart to this illustrious judge, speaks coyly, nudging the crude suited man (dear hell, externally rather elegant, but crude otherwise) and promising him, in her puffy lips that she will take him in her mouth, if, yes, if it is only because the safety is harbored more or less in the procreation of the non-togan state, that cheap bastard, he cries suddenly (oh he too agog? my, dear!). The others, quite so, are silent. There wasn't even an instant, not in the hours that were prior to this one, to see that door charging and him to rise to full height, imagined not of her leg into that sock (oh) - but the breath of a scandal, a merciless jolt into print. I have decided to ignore the allegations, he poses, and she, against the better judgement of her failing husband, accepts, in part, that it is all the most useful to detach the fledgling from its nest and birth, in office, the unwanted and useless (the foul) bird.

2009-11-16T00:19:00.002-07:00

Has it always been a dirty secret to be afraid of dying? Now I wonder how many times we think of it, before we go, and how much easier it is to pretend it doesn't occur to us, or better yet, claim to be able to push it away. Like a mountain. It's that easy.

de-friend

2009-11-16T00:15:00.003-07:00

Awful, awful: to be sad in America...

So many middle classmates, and yet all these empty spaces! I count pigeons between the electrical wires,

they don't carry conversations through the wires anymore--

all our voices must find each other through unbounded space.

It's hard not to think of you sometimes, and just now I guess I closed a door

I didn't know was open

which explained the draft,

and
the breeze

The Difference

2009-11-12T00:28:00.003-07:00

I didn't want to collapse the difference between everyone.
I wanted to sing a song that was specific, and unique
to my throat; and whatever physics said about its shape
the precise measurements of my hollow spaces
and how they related to where I am full
was only as interesting as the handwriting
of a beautiful poem.
Like the way my voice sounded when I lay in the basement
and told a friend which girl from class
I secretly loved.

Now I enjoy taking a moment to add them all up and see what I find.
The difference is between taking a moment to make something
and making something of a moment,
which is what I do each day thanks to the specific foldings
inside my head that so many hands have touched,
fingerprints like handwriting: unique--
all of them

Safeway cab--Is it too disjointed? Between Fred and Ugly?

2009-11-09T19:39:00.002-07:00

Fred used to sell Jewelry before gold went crazy.
He travelled all over America and never thought much of anywhere but Brooklyn.
"Cleveland is shit," he said, from behind the wheel of his Lincoln Town car. "Chicago is Shit! Everywhere is boring, boring."
"New York," he continued. "Is a powerful city. You feel alive here."
Fred stopped drinking recently and lived alone. He had a five year old daughter, whom he wanted to spend more time with. Sometimes, he went to the saunas. His favorite was the old one. He didn't quite know why. It was reasonably priced and old. He liked the fact that it was old.
To pass the rest of his time, he went to the Safeway Car Company's dispatch center and worked the board. When he was really lonely or bored, he would drive the car.
A night before, I had met Fred over the phone when I called for a car to pick me up at a Haitian restaurant in Canarsie.
When the driver showed up, I couldn't believe my eyes.
It seemed as though Danny Devito's Penguin had died and come back as some sort of a woman. She Wore a New York city shirt and a schlubby jacket. She had dandruff and a bald spot. The fat of her face and body seemed to be launching a full retreat from the rest of her.
She led me to the car and then excused herself. "I gotta use the toilet."
She ducked inside the Haitian restaurant and left me sitting in the back of the car for a good twenty minutes with a broken window cracked open on Avenue L.
"You're still here," she said as she slouched back into the driver's seat. "My stomach ain't so good. That's why I only drive a couple nights a week."
She was quick to anger --particularly when you mis-named the neighborhood you happened to be passing through or put on aires regarding the most appropriate way to get from A to B.
She knew.
She had been born in Marine Park and now lived alone in a place in Kensington. She pointed out every KFC we passed. "There's a Kentucky Fried Chicken outfit right there," she said, as though noting glorious city landmarks..
The initial ugliness that she projected as a human specimen only swelled as she spoke. Everyone black (the Haitian restaurant, the man who stole her car, the types you hadda pick up when you drove a yellow) struck her as predictably malignant and bad for her. She couldn't stand spicy food or driving for more than two days a week.
During her off time, she slept and watched Direct TV. She watched the movies, only. Her favorite was "An Affair to Remember." Her other favorites all belonged to the same ilk--breathless romance of a bygone era. It was her only humanizing quality, you could say. Or her only pretty one.
When pressed for a hobby, she said that she read sexy novels, when she was in the mood. Her favorites were written by Joan Rivers' sister --she was so hot, she hadda write her a letter. She hadn't ever done anything else with her life --cept drive a yellow. That was terrible because she had to pick anyone up who hailed her, by law.
"With a car service I don't have to pick you up if I don't want to," she said. "Fuck that. I can tell just by looking' at you if you're gonna be ok. I use my women's intuition."
SHe projected an Aristotelean ugliness. Or maybe it was Dickensian --the spirit of South Brooklyn Present. Whatever it was, it wasn't exactly human. In this way, the ride felt like a dream and every dark and depressing detail of her life only fed my desire for more. What was the weirdest thing that had ever happened to her while driving a car? A guy ("a black guy, of course") had punched her in the face, stolen her car and smashed it into seven vehicles before abandoning it in Queens.
Fred knew her well. He hated her in fact. Every night he offered the rest of the drivers a thousand dollars, cash, if anyone would fuck her. Every night, they offered him $2,000 back.
"She is shit," Fred said. "Disgusting."
THey had fired her a couple of times. "She fucked up a car though," Fred said. "So they took her back. She owes them money."
As we neared the end of the ride, I asked Fred what he weirdest thing that had ever happened to him was.
"Three people fucking in my cab," he said. "Some people need to fuck while you drive fast. It's a sickness."
Fred told them to just keep on fucking. It had happened a few times, he said. On the weirdest occasion, they had asked him to join in.
Fred said no. But he didn't tell them to stop. If you tell them to stop they complain. If you let them keep going you get tipped, big.

the harboring (danger) of this exalted appetite

2009-11-09T08:33:00.004-07:00

Admitted, in passing, to the rather rude pleasure of the skeleton, now un-sewn and straddling that dragging mule (pompous in age, rejecting, now, perhaps even pleasantly, my advances--I have tender advances on wild animals now tamed)--he is not ever wild, she exclaims, though notably, she too, it is again admitted, has found comfort in the softly crumpled frame, skinned, and bleached, humped across the rider's seat, all but a glimpse that it was indeed a once un-skinned habitual thief. It is unbecoming, she supposes, aloud, for once, no longer attacking her upper jaw with her jowl, ha, her sense (why it is potentially an over extending hand, an applause to the myriad of the helpless cyclops village - yes, those, I did not make such sure advances, no, I was more cautious), at least in pretense, in the purposed suggestion, that it would be appropriate, most suitable, to engage in a more circuitous path, one far more adequate, though inadequate certainly in multiple uncomfortable hindrances. But the mere explosive nature, though far from the skinned and bleeding man, of a skeletoned and harbored offender, a now crude example of that egoist diatribe, well, certainly, against perhaps better sense (again that cultural supposition), it is agreed, for their normative induction - deduction - will condemn this exploitation. Hah, she scoffs, again unforgiving, it is an exhibition, we should, in all haste, make for the marsh villages, parading as such, a skinned head, a skull, at the very height of our philosophical identity, returning to them, those rogue imbeciles, that very glimpse of doubt. I am not an ape, he interrupts, quite aggressively, perchance, exhausted by the utter melt of dominant metaphors (the ghastly possibility of such horror) now realized without poetic distance, but merely truthful, yes, she is correct, truthful exhibition, oh, dear mule, you cruel sexual magnet. How evasive! It is a gentle discourse, for certain, we are so certain, yes, our philosophical hierarchy far surpasses that of the meager collective utilitarian latrine, but, yes, but it is certainly not adequate, not nearly sufficiently adequate a path to be taken, to be ventured, against that damning contradiction, those damning counterculture whores--I have said it, she agreed, and dearly that dear mule acquiesced, abides by my will, lingered, momentarily, and (how courageously) turned toward the high mountain pass, but a fool of a thief skinned on his back, slumped without skin, without muscle, without organ. But a fool.

Where I First Fell in Love with Reality

2009-11-02T23:50:00.005-07:00

I met Batgirl on Halloween in Brooklyn, 2008. We immediately agreed on the following things: that all new buildings in district 7 should not exceed ten stories; that the blocks of New York were in fact much like neuronal groups in the brain, and how it was better to imagine that after imagining the 8 million people here and that each one carries within their skull 10 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex alone, forming 50 billion connections; and that we would never be able to work in a lab torturing monkeys for science.

Afterwards, on the walk home I felt a peculiar sensation in my chest and somehow recognized that it was connected to the way the wet trees were making me feel as if they were all I ever needed. I don't remember if I used the word love, but why not put it out there now? Aren't we going to die, like the leaves outside Ferlingetti's pennycandy store -- crying too soon, too soon? So why not love a Batgirl, even if she does only date assholes? She's got an asshole, I've got an asshole -- we're a perfect match! And in the meantime, there's the lesson here, which isn't that it's better to go out than stay in or that the endless endlessness makes no promises to carry your personal ass, monkey-tortured soul, or god with it as it flows and so it goes--

No, the lesson is nothing can be reduced. I'll say it again: It was Halloween in Brooklyn, 2008. There are 8 million people here. Count them.

True Story

2009-11-02T23:43:00.003-07:00

Like that the veil lifted for one moment in my mind and ohmygod

how it hurt

to see all our bones

and the air

turn to dust

swept into oblivion

after a very short time

(and then, right after, I was back; the lamp shook as I typed
the strangely pleasant awareness I had of my breath
lifting my ribs letting them go

back)

When you are on a planet in space

2009-10-28T22:45:00.002-07:00

It's only when the closest star is out of sight that the others come into focus. So that's the lesson: let go of what keep you warm, and the whole universe is waiting.

Everything is Connected to Everything Else

2009-10-20T20:06:00.006-07:00

1.

When I was a kid I kept saying it. "It's divine! It's divine! Everything is connected to everything else." But nobody listened. My friends, my teachers, the kids at school kept on being themselves, like little locked safes inside of locked houses. "Let go," I begged. "Open up."

"He's so spiritual," they said and left the room.

So I spent a lot of time in the backyard. There were oak trees, and a blue view of the harbor between the leaves. It was a good place to practice what I preached. I breathed the air, which was molecules, into my lungs, which were molecules, and if I pictured it just right the boundaries between me and the world blurred and I felt an electric tingling start from the base of my spine and spread up and across my shoulders, tiny electric wings, until I exhaled:

Everything is connected to everything else.

Sure, it was lonely sometimes, and sure, I didn't have sex for a very very long time after all that, but at least I had something important, even if no one else wanted it.

2.

And now you're sitting in here, and you're telling me, you're asking me, "Did I know? There's a divine connectedness in all things!" You have the science to prove it. All the Buddhists agree, and certain mystical sects of Judaism do too. They've been meeting with the scientists, and everyone is starting to get real excited about this, I mean it's a real breakthrough, you tell me:

Everything is connected to everything else.

"Aren't you excited??" you ask, and I have to admit, I am a little bit, there is something like excitement or maybe the shock -- of recognition, like picking up the newspaper to find a story about your cock on the cover -- sure, excitement, yes I'm feeling something like that. And I am very glad this is common knowledge now; glad you found it, proved it, no faith required; glad that this makes you happy and isn't that what this was about all along, you being happy?

"You're so spiritual," I said. "And beautiful." So you blush, little molecules come to the surface of your cheek, and later in your bed you do it again and I get that feeling again, those little wings and I think to myself, Oh yeah, I forgot what this was all about:

Everything is connected to everything else.

2009-10-19T21:19:00.002-07:00

The season was all wrong: icicles forming under the edges of roofs, the feeling that we were all very far away... it was too soon. October hadn't let go its leaves yet and already there were outbreaks of loneliness amongst my friends, I'm sure amongst strangers too though I didn't ask. The subway moved slowly, I had dreams of glaciers inching back and forth.

But when I was little, there was bright cold air, the subtle turning of sunlight as the planet moved. Do I miss it? I do, I do I do

into where (dublin!) resists -- you werent woods to come out of

2009-10-19T07:15:00.003-07:00

His growing presence, certainly, admits, (enough) concedes: the task force revamps its rights to interrogate, just a pleasant introduction, of course (for clarity suggestively interject in the closed forumn), to increase the saddened state of heathens. They have closed, at a most convenient a speed, and joined, quiet estatically, the disjointed, mismatched, and ill-advised conversation, a most unsuitable synopsis of progress, indeed, and, throughout, with little thought to presentation (bewitched!--she is agog!), but most careful consideration of rhythm, yes, my the celestial fog of this meekly mistated glory, you wretched hooker! (alas, it is her suited role, though unsuited as she may be--naked?), yes, she, the poisonous conductor, a mere and meager wimp, frightened, I dare admit, by that which, through (aghast, she stumbled, quite white, into her hands, her watered and filthy hands, they were inside that!), yes, through her ever meandering explanation, like she was witless, with the owner of a lone saloon, belching (just perchance) by mediocrity, confusion, and that, that sense, that, yes, I suppose (I? again, the seldom yet acquired dignity in dismissal, in adherence to normative definitions), without will, without much sight, against, supposedly, merely supposedly, meagerly supposed ha, against, she insists, for she is most poignant a jelly, without much sight, no sight, just purely anectodotal inference, hmph, against his better liking, his more appropriate liking, he is chosen (she defers, yes, later, like a bug, to the quick and crude nature of that boar), deference, my dear, intrigued, at last, but initially, oh how out of sheer steam, that beast roared, quite magnificiently, though unprotected and unwarranted (an attack?), certainly against, again, I must deny, against the general flooding rise of such a morose and dull and (bland), a rise, indeed (nonetheless), but cruel to the hobo, oh my sire, he rose, again, out of that great monstrous, yes again again!, I cherish again, he rose, and then, oh, how could I be numb, no, you silly panderer, the lout he rose and (ah, dear, my dear), he--A most rambling, a most inconsiderate fool.

Progress [a song without music]

2009-10-16T22:02:00.002-07:00

when the scientists found a way
to make life last forever
I picked you up
and drove us down
to the clinic
near where you grew up

"this place has changed so much"
you said and touched your face
I know I know I know
what that means
I know I know I know
what that means

you did the same thing
in the kitchen when we first fought
it was snowing outside
light came through the blinds
like tiny hands like tiny
light came through the blinds
like tiny hands like tiny
the light came through the blinds
like tiny hands to touch your face
tiny hands to touch your face
tiny hands touching me touching you
touching your face

and now the scientists found a way
to make that last forever

The Singularity is Near

2009-10-12T22:14:00.005-07:00

The issue of soul's precise location in the body came up at dinner and everyone was angry and disappointed. Angry, because everyone else was wrong, and disappointed because we hadn't seen each other in such a long time, not all together, and it seemed like a waste of an occasion. After dessert, no one stayed for coffee except for Anne and Patrick, who although not in total agreement at least believed the corpus callosum played a central role in the soul's organization, which gave them some comfort. It figures, everyone said, they're both libras, and later we heard that anyway after they had sex Patrick got all upset when Anne said it would always be a physical impossibility to relocate the same soul to a different brain, which Patrick vehemently denied and apparently even went so far as to mention Anders Sandberg and whole brain emulation, which is certainly a post-coital faux pas if there ever was once, as far as everyone else is concerned.

Still I get a chuckle out of imagining him shirtless and sweaty, hurrying to put on his pants and talking about Sanderg's computational assumptions while Anne sat up and pulled the covers over her breasts, which I've always admired, and were my vote anyway.

Example

2009-10-12T21:53:00.003-07:00

Or put another way, a guy we knew in college asked us, "Do you ever wonder if everyone is a robot but you?" We had to laugh at the time, and secretly think well he didn't mean us of course, we're friends, but come a year later when a girl accused him of sexually assaulting her after a party, well, you can be sure we thought of that remark again. After that blew over, we walked with him across the campus. It was a fresh snow on the ground, icicles hanging from the buildings, and while he was talking about something a snowball hit him square on the shoulder. We all looked back, but there was no one in sight, no buildings near enough, in fact no one at all but what seemed to be an extremely old man walking with great care and deliberation through the ice. His head down. Now, we are not the type inclined to throw snowballs at old men, but the guy, our friend, he looked at us with wide eyes and we looked back and had to admit, yes, it definitely seemed like this particular old man had decided to throw a snowball at our friend. There wasn't enough time to think it through -- our friend wanted revenge. "Should I do it?" he asked us as he reached into the snow. "He had to have done it, right?" We sort of agreed, though not without a funny feeling creeping along the edges as we watched him pack a very dense, very excellent snowball and launch it full force at the old man.

Did we think he was right? No, of course not. Did we stop him? It all happened so fast -- that's the expression, but well we could have said, "No no, it probably just fell from a tree," which of course it had, it had in fact fallen from the branches of the oak above us and that seemed obvious no sooner than our friend's snowball hit the old man right on the top of his bare bald head, and when he looked up shaking with cold or anger and began asking us why it was very clear at this point that our friend, who wondered about robots, and us, well we could only laugh though years later what stands out most is not that we didn't stop him but that we didn't because we were friends, which we're not now, no falling out just time, and though he of course has new friends who must like him it still makes us wonder a bit, wonder

Not like their blood

2009-10-12T16:43:00.002-07:00

I been all over it, again, just all over it, you know, back and forth in my head, like they been telling me I got to do, like they saying to me, over and over, that I got to remember, I got to remember what it was like, just like that, in that room, exactly what it was like, you know, with all them walking in and out and them other ones lying on their backs staring at the wall, real dumb like, you know, like they couldn't even talk or nothing, that was it, really, I don't remember nothing else, nothing about any of them other faces, them other faces coming in and out, it was real tough to see them, it must have been tough, like they was all shaded, or covered or something, but I been over this, I been over it with that other fellow who come down here asking all these questions, like he was real serious and he was gonna get to the bottom of this, like he was gonna find some answers, shit, like he was the law or some damn thing, but he just like the rest of them, just as dirty like the rest of them, stuck his face in that mud, right about then, and he don't like what he see, he can't like what he see, there ain't nothing to like what you see, not like that, and then he just left, all mighty and shit, he just left and I never heard about this thing til now, and I been over it, I been over it then, I been over it again and again, you know, sitting out here, just sitting out here thinking, really thinking, like how is it that they come to be all looking dumb like at the wall, with all them people coming in and out and nobody not even thinking anything about it, not wondering if they was gonna do anything about it, just like they don't even see them there, but I been thinking about it, I know the rest of them aint thought about it, cause I know they aint got no cause to think on it, but I been thinking on it and I been thinking they had no cause to be there, none of them had no cause to be there, not like that, not like they was all dumb, lying there, just like that on the floor. Not with that blood that was in the place, not next to that place where they slaughter them herds, not like that, they had no place being like that. I been thinkin on that, sure, but you'll see, you just like that last man, thinking you all like the law, when out here, it just that some people, you know, like they weren't ever here, like they don't never want them here, some people, they just don't care for other types of people, not out here, and they just don't think on them like they do their own people.

I thought about what you said

2009-10-09T23:32:00.003-07:00

all air is actual air
and no relationships are just "in our heads"

so don't go down that road unless you are ready
to shut all the windows and close the blinds

in a sensory deprivation tank
even the dumbest people hallucinate
the busy galaxy of the mind has all it needs

and if it what goes on between people
is only in there

then so is the air and the dust,
the blood, the tall buildings many people made

once breathing now gone

actual people

they don't belong to anyone

weather report

2009-10-08T15:59:00.003-07:00

but then again sometimes these days

when the clouds arrange themselves into a wrinkled brain

and it is partly cloudy in my head with a chance of rain

electrical storms

striking thoughts

little needles

wired to my heart

spasms

2009-10-07T21:22:00.003-07:00

i thank you god for most this amazing night
to be alive in october
to be alive

i am 30 years old today--
30 years of gifts from you wrapped up in skyscrapers, trees--
and what am i to do?

what else am i to do but give myself back

Reductionism, II

2009-10-05T20:04:00.005-07:00

1.

There are a countable number of possible universes but an infinite space to cross in each one. Why do it alone? you might ask.

But there is no one there.

2.

And why not? When everything done is done, and all the new things have started themselves up, single finite cells of infinite depth, will that be a good time to talk about God? There never is, lately, unless you happen to have a magnetic resonant imaging machine, several underpaid graduate students, and a Lonely Planet's guide to the human brain. Then you might hit on the g-spot right in the center of that old wrinkly white and gray mass, the God spot, and when you do it will light up the charts.

"There He is": a functional MRI of self-reported religious experiences.

3.

Still in the end the alligators will blink their complexly-lidded eyes; the flies will live so fast if you were them then this morning was childhood, tomorrow you die. What then? Fly heaven must be an infinite space too, and if there are particles there (mustn't there be?) you can bet they contain a whole heavenly depth of their own.

Ruth was right: better stick close to the surface of things. Everyone who's everything is there.

Reductionism, I

2009-09-30T22:28:00.006-07:00

I'm more of emergent properties man myself. That's why the talk of dreams. I like the life that emerges from my own when I am finally, totally quiet.

MFF -- 31:15

2009-09-29T17:27:00.003-07:00

I could have wringed him in his neck, right then, and taken him down, right on down, in to the hallow, and sent him straight, straight to his god-fearing sonuvabitch matron whore, right then, mixing up himself in the midst of a firecracking sex escapade, a damn x-rated hooker jerk--crying, I bet, by the time he come around, just ever crying, beating himself and whimpering and beating himself, real bad like, sure, like he done it before, thousand times, just beating himself and crying and making himself feel all like he is just damn rotten and fallen into the big pit of shit up by that knee high cradle strip club, there he'd gotten, there he'd gotten for sure, by then at least, by then he gotten there, at the time he wasn't crying no more, wasn't beating himself to blisters, waiting til he could climb back inside through the basement window, all gutted and pissed on and whimpering, right, whimpering like a ragged bitch dog, then he'd gotten hiself out of the blisters, red torn skin and just red skin--ing him off, like a shit trick placed in the middle of a damn fucking b-rate film, him all riled up, and goated, goated like he done it before, like he done it a thousand times before and like he knew he was gunnin to tell you about it, just grinning, all bloodshot and pissy, woozy like he been dropping pints in the laboratory on south street, right there in front of them frosted hoes dumping their damn feces all over their fingers lick--johns, they just ate, wishing, lately, less lately perhaps, that they just too clever, just sneaking out for ciggarrettes and finding them hoes, finding them hoes in the tall grass and just riding them silly. Its all like that, then, just there, typed in all up front, I could have wrung his neck, wrung it good and give me blisters but I watched them hoes instead and wrung my own head, right there, crawling down between the basement, and I got them hands all worked over like sandpaper and me just thinking I been sucked out of this place, sucked out of this world and left like there wasn't nothing ever in me, nothing by that raft in the river next to the place they take them hookers and ball them til they think it time to turn it off and walk in the other room. Shit, there ain't no balling like that -- its just wringing my neck in the showering and thinking maybe it looked like something else, something like that wouldn't be, just couldn't be.

September 21, 2009: to do list

2009-09-20T23:09:00.002-07:00

Remember to listen
to myself
and do what I love:

all the cells humming faintly
in the brain--
uncertainty

"If there is no cell doctrine
there is no single place to stand"
so there you have it

stand nowhere
straddling everything

banging your head against the wall (overheard)

2009-09-14T16:01:00.001-07:00

"you think you got it bad?

the first year is nothing.

the second year it hurts like hell.

after that, you start to stop noticing.

I think it's been four years now

and I'm not even sure--

am I still doing it?"

he said. and banged his head.

Why we suffer / How I am like Mom

2009-09-13T20:30:00.001-07:00

I press myself into my being.

The world presses itself into me.

I change myself, and the world changes
how I change.

Do not worry; the world will always win!

Respect the world--

it will always win.

once upon a time

2009-09-04T23:04:00.004-07:00

Faithful, faithful, faithful. Samuel knelt by the oak tree in the snow. The year was 1987 -- the world was different then. Circuits were not yet crawling through the soil.

What if he wrote you a poem right there? He fights the urge to lick the flakes from the air. Samuel is faithful so he will not bend or else he might tear and out will come his faith. This is a problem; poems require flexibility, a certain carelessness about the joints. Impossible not to leak, even just a little.

When the world is pixelated, later, pixelater, there is a threshold past which it becomes impossible for you to tell yourself apart from the sofa and the window with the view, and your hand. Fortunately since feeling is first it is the last to go. You will know your hand on your knee even if you cannot see the distinction. And if you write poems -- if you write at all -- it will be like closing your eyes in the dark.

When Samuel closes his eyes now he see the whiteout and the tree swallowed up by the world come to meet him, years ago, and what happened next he knew then would change absolutely everything. Now he thinks of the line "closing your eyes in the dark" and tries to type where the difference is there is no difference at all

but mistakes his lap for the keyboard and writes until he feels such joy that he leaks out all this best thoughts on the floor.

I am not the life that is this life

2009-08-29T21:16:00.003-07:00

There isn't where we, no, it is not where, yes, it is, perhaps, and then--like it could not be as it is to be, like it could not be as it would, like it is, perhaps, when these are the ways that that world, without itself, the other world, the world that is not the all, is the all that we do not consider, is the fiction that is not our fallacious past, present, future. But. We are, alas, yes, we are, forever consumed by that image that is our self, though foreign and random, and but a spiral of dispair, we are forever obsessed by this image, that is ourself, and is only ourself while, we are, if ever, I, again, suppose, perhaps, only not worth the strength and if, just once, we are to commit, once again, the suicide that is our skin, that is worth our skin, that is the only truth we would ever admit, just, yes, perhaps, just once, to permit our own skin, this very fur, to allow a vision into this world, but a world around a fire, but a fire around a vaccuum, and I, alone, do venture, that it is all, perpetually, yes, yes, perpetually, forever, forever and again, it is all, a glimpse and a forever suicide. We do, I admit, as life, upon this earth in birth, commit only ourselves ever to self imposed death. Aha!

but as I was saying

2009-08-24T22:24:00.002-07:00

the baby in the womb

does not know

she is a baby

in the womb.

later there will be lightning

fireflies in the grass

and books full of the names

of things (but

for now

there is one world,

and it is only by leaving

that she gets to

eat

it
up)

JG

2009-08-24T21:52:00.003-07:00

I must acknowledge, perhaps, that the better haves, the ones in the base compartments of memory, yes, yes, where it is to be (uneasy, but confined, and convinced, at once that the glamorous and novel post of a dear friend, an ally, an absolute artist--one beyond comparison, for certainly, I confide, there is no greater companion in this, in this, this discovery of abandonment, hah!, you fool!)--again, I suppose, where it is to be, where it has been, often times, places, discarded, against what would be [description! dear lord, my lord, description!]. We have, alas and yet ever with great success and fortune, encountered, a location that will permit us entry into the world that is not this closet. Yes, yes. Yes, yes. Unless, we commit ourselves to such mortal sin that would encourage a sort, of (fuck you!) revolt, a rebellion of sorts, a soft removal (due! due! due!) due to the difference of opinion.

She is caught, oh god. And I, this troubled sour beast have taken the plunge into the world that is not mine, will not be mine, should not be mine.

AND made it once, and if there ever were a wheel, oh dear god, if there ever were the turn back into the grave that was that wheel, if there was, dear soul of mine, if there ever were a ground that did not demand its own sacrifice to unbecome itself--damn, damn--to unbecome itself, then, yes, that would be our beacon, our hope, our--

Fuck. It is his light. He is not so forgotten. I have it here, close to my chest, it is so dear to me that I could see like he does if only I could remember that I am only ever, yes, yes, only ever being taught [those are only assholes].

To see. Alas, I have no eyes.

8

2009-08-23T02:34:00.002-07:00

The problem is now. The endless stream of nows, not discretizeable, so the computers can't do anything with them. Sure there are floating point numbers, and double precision, but there are limits to these things. The problem is precisely beyond those limits.

It used to be no one could talk about it until a gentleman sorted out a few centuries worth of thought and came up with infinity. It had been around forever, of course, but it needed rules to work. Otherwise you're just talking about a mess and that is far from the stream, the endless endlessness flowing through you, now and now and now now now now now

But the computers still can't model it, and neither can the typefaces looking at you, all pupil, from the whitespace of the page. Discrete words -- the best you can do it arrange them so they point, like a finger at the moon. But every dog knows how that one goes. He'll just look at your hand, tail wagging. Doesn't seem to be bothered by the problem at hand. Then again, he knows he did something wrong when you come home and he's slinking around the silent stain on the carpet. How? Somewhere in his mind -- now the preferred term is brain -- he held on to a piece of a now, even as it passed several hours ago downstream while you and Carol were at dinner talking about the relative merits of slow vs. fast moving zombies in film. Remember that? (You agreed faster = scarier and now that too is downstream, bobbing with the pee and the release of one canine's unbearable urges).

How do you remember? It can't be caught, yet somehow it stays, sometimes horribly permanent, sometimes like little clearings in the wild of your mind. Brain. Apparently what infinity needed was a set of relationships to something not infinite. That's what he figured out. That's where you come in.

Trust

2009-07-07T20:32:00.004-07:00

Close your eyes.

Fountain falling, the water shines under the sun. It is difficult to tell the news from words, a poet almost said, but without them we are lonely. Is it because then we are adrift in the senses? Somewhere a few days ago an information theorist reminds his audience: "Our world is 80% vision."

So whose voice is that, in my head each day?

*

I am remembering a path in the garden. Tomatoes pull on the arms of green vines, they are almost all red except for the curved window of sunlight reflecting off their side. Which is where I put my teeth to. And the juices, I am remembering the taste, outside of words, inside of time, back all the way across the days, unnumbered; before the machines came and needed to know how many before we could know what it meant.

....

2009-07-06T06:48:00.003-07:00

I startle, indeed, I harbor, I pledged, once, again, perhaps in upended circumstances, to un-nerve the hostess, and return, once, upon re-entry, to my appropriate place, against the wall: myself, as ever, only a fucking ending.

I want to know what happens -- I am curious to know what happens, she says. She mutters. The goddamn process, I tell her. I am spitting. Quite enraged. The goddamn process.

Who gives a shit what happens. Who gives a shit where it takes you. Like you even fucking know when you got there.

I am troubled, indeed, later, to know that she is committing suicide, right now, by sticking a pen in her eye, because that was where it was that she knew, she knew where she would go, at least in immediacy, when she stabbed herself with her pen. I am pledging, yet again, and this I admit is most foolish, to abet the next wishes of the next woman. Even she will, I suppose, stab herself with a pen.

on approaching the speed of light

2009-06-29T11:10:00.004-07:00

Johnny broke up the band and decided he'd become a pilot. Took the $$$ from the guitars and amps, stole the remaining band fund, and bought himself an introductory lesson. Later, years later, when the computers failed and he knew it was the end, he wondered if he made the right choice until he saw the ocean, and remembered flying a kite with his father by the shore; and how time passes faster (empirically) for everyone on the ground you've left behind.

Miserable

2009-06-26T11:22:00.003-07:00

Instead Jim understood microclimates: micropolitics, microanxieties. There was nothing too small for him to attend to. Was it raining today, Jim? Should I bring an umbrella?

It is raining inside these blood vessels, like tiny boats in my arms.

So we all get wet.

abababa

2009-06-25T15:38:00.002-07:00

Raging, he is able to see through the open places in between himself an the world, which is on fire. Of course! That's a story I heard when I was a kid. Dad in the other room, cracks between the kitchen tiles, and me outside on the patio, drowning ants. They all got to go sometime. I tried different ways -- water, straight; water, soapy; water and windex and some other stronger stuff from underneath the sink.

Today it didn't rain, and that's newsworthy to me. So let's post it using the internet, and not ask how it got there. Take it as a given. Take it with a grain of salt. Take time, take time, take time, before the soap cleans us out.

.

2009-06-15T17:04:00.002-07:00

Anything remarkable?
.

The collection, though very dear to her heart, and exquisite in nature (obtained illegally from an Iranian gypsy seeking safe passage into the artic states) became expendable during her third marriage -- indeed, her entire wealth became expendable. As she once imagined herself forever attached, certainly most secure, in her foundation, her physical harness to the world of the elite, the frightful fall from twenty seven thousand feet cleared her of any misconception concerning endless love and, more severely, about the possibility of harboring wealth beyond her tragic and now imminent death.

.

Aftewards, the obtuse captain proclaimed (quite fittingly) the outer door did not close upon take-off and we were forced to shed some weight to regain balance. Of course, the proceedings, during the following days, focused predominantly on the assumed heirs, only one of which was excused from any possible wrongdoing. Oh he is quite too mentally ill to be engaged in criminal offending. Besides, his suicidality is right off the charts, it is about a nineteen and a half. He wants to kill himself so badly the doctor has to duct tape his hands to his legs. Why would anybody that mad desire a collection of Iranian gold coins?

.

We are ever desperate in this cube.

.

I think it is timing that is coming and going -- but not at all -- all that coming and going is just wasting time collecting things and thoughts about other things until -- all that coming and going stops and we aren't really fixed at ever.

.

Boy, I liked that distraction. It cost me about twenty-seven years.

.

There are whores down that alley, Frankie. And they cost $35, at least. You want the other alley, next to the department store.

.

Period.

oh, mercy, there isn't even a button on his stomach

2009-06-02T08:42:00.004-07:00

Oh, the flaking tool -- he's a degenerate asshole, she mutters and she is, oh, yes most certainly (yes, she is! she is!) she is angry, annoyed, terribly vexed. I am beside myself with such rancor, she admits, but softly to her teddy bear, that I would literally rip the teeth out of a squirrel. A squirrel? That is mighty fine and feminine of you -- damn you, doctor, she suddenly screams and tears her poor teddy bear to pieces, you witch bear, you monster witch bear, he is a tool, oh, I have seen him on his little side jobs, his extra fucking curricular activities, running over to that fucking tramp, you said little witch bear, trying to turn me into a princess, no? Trying to turn me into a pacified wench, the one that is just taking it in the basement, learning to love on the wheel, against the cupboards of an apothecary, the old sell out gold-maker : yes, yes: "I doubt that I would desire such an opportunity, just to be afforded the chance to stand stoic by your side, even through the [ahem]" -- even through the cursed in and out, the stampede of wolves, spit me out you fucking tool, I will not step aside. Oh, heavens, dear, you are beside yourself, you are quite mad, out of control, flailing like, oh I don't know, a fucking witch -- you stay away from me you teddy bear and again she attacks the bear and stabs him in his puffy fake heart, I will kill you bear! I will kill you bear!

Is she here yet? Has she arrived. Please ensure that the tables are properly set and that our guest, this fine gentleman, is seen delicately into the drawing room. I would hate for any activity (especially on such a fortuituos occasion) to disrupt what must be considered to be an inevitable future. A remarkable bond. He is here? He has arrived? Like this, I am not even prepared, not even dressed, why I have forgotten all about my own self, how irresponsible, yes, yes, show him into the drawing room, ensure that he is with tea or drink or whatever it is his pleasure is -- I am beside myself, I have erred, this union will not take place, I have completely and utterly forgotten myself, to such a post I do not think I have ever been, how has this occurred, how has this transpired, I such a wench.

She runs out of the room, muttering ever so fiercely to herself: that fucking teddy bear, I will find that bear and let him know his tricks are not acceptable and will not derail this princess. I cannot believe I have forgotten myself for such a time, at such a momentous occasion. That brute bear will pay for this!

restorative justice

2009-05-13T13:33:00.002-07:00

"She is merry -- the whore." What were you thinking? What was I thinking? That's all I was thinking, you know, sitting there and thinking, she is fucking merry -- and then, like that, it wasn't like I was trying to think like that, it wasn't like I was thinking I got to get my mind to thinking like that, to thinking like all the rest of them, you know, to dig into some really disappointing and dark place in my head and look what is there, you know, like, look around, and say, ah shit, I'd like to pick this up and put it in the slot and see what comes out this fuckers mouth, of course not, no, it couldn't be like that. You ddin't plan it, then. No, I didn't plan it, I said that, you know, I said what I said, I'm not trying to come out and say that I didn't say what I said because I said it, I was there, I mean I know what I fucking said, and I said it like I said it because I was pissed, you know, angry, real mad at the whole picture painted on something that I said or wrote, I don't know, ten years ago, something that good put out there, somethign that was really just a far fetched load -- well -- a bit pile of nothing that I care about now, how's that? She's knowing that too, I can see her knowing that too right now, she's knowing that I haven't been anywhere near any of this since then and that I haven't even, yeah, you know, yeah you know I haven't, ah come on, you know I haven't even thought about this in like ten years, you know that, she's just trying to play with us, you know all of us here, she knows, I mean why would I, I mean look at me, why would I come back into this right now? You wouldn't. Exactly, I wouldn't, you see, what would be the sole purpose of me coming back into this, I wouldn't. This man just said it, I wouldn't come back into this because that wouldn't make any sense, its not, its not like I've been sitting here waiting, only waiting to get caught and to get caught up in this again, I mean, you have it, you can look at it, you can look back through, go ahead, go ahead and look back through all that time and see if you can see any point in time, anything at all, that reminds you -- you know that looks like to you -- that it was something different from what I'm telling you, from what I'm saying was happening from that moment on until now, because, well, if you don't, if you don't do that, then you aren't really affording me any reasonable, you know, assessment or whatever and then we're just two guys you know talking back and forth and see -- she knows look at her, she knows, you aren't even looking at her, she knows I haven't been off roaming around and looking for her, not like that, not like I was trying to come and hurt her, not like that, and no don't play it again, we've seen it, don't, because that isn't me anymore, that's not what I am about, that's not at all what I'm like, not me, here, not me. Don't play it again, no, because, I'm still the same person, walking around, I mean I still sound the same but I don't think like that, I probably still talk like that but, just don't play it again, you know, just don't play it again.

Aside from apart, once: it was suitable

2009-04-29T12:31:00.002-07:00

She is over-spoken, over-fond, of herself -- and in admiration, most dearly of her darling purchase. He is indifferent but present in the manner (only ever, certainly) in which he readjusts the cushions on the sofa, readjusts them so she will be in discomfort and forced to readjust them again, if only to be in comfort. He is unnoticeable beyond that -- and offers, as a simple component to his arbitrarily true indifference a composition of meager worth, noting that it is not even of a timely nor culturally suitable subject matter. In defiance, she admits under heavy medication -- assuming failure and praying, eventually, for hypnosis (but not until Tuesday afternoon at four thirty) -- in defiance, she echoes. This time: hmph. It is rather far from bold interjection or even a purposeful attempt at redirection, completion, or, if ever (oh if ever!) reconciliation. You are angered by him? She had supposed, in reflection, at a later time, that her immediate reaction to such a cleverly stupid comment was dismissive in a far more subconscious way, so dismissive (and in fact so overtly submissive was her self-possessed madness) that she did not even recall a course of action, a logical course of action, that could effectively introduce and explicate the process of beating a therapist close to death with the base of an iron lamp.

He bought the lamp in Lisbon after witnessing a spectacle, indeed a state execution, he should most likely never forget. It is the lamp owned by a religious zealot a socially labeled vagabond, who had suspiciously murdered fifteen children in the back of an alley and set them on fire. He has insisted. She has accepted, eventually. Suspiciously, though? No, she mused, I suppose not. Nevertheless, he wouldn't ever forget a spectacle like that -- and even if there were a course of reality that brought a self-bought lamp to be the lever of his own maiming. But, as matters seemed to transpire, not even the general public felt her actions at a distance from the normal hectic meanderings of those under strict supervision due to mental instability. She couldn't have possibly understood such ramifications, it was illustrated in the daily monitor, but to assume that one who already seeks help has but no wall to protect her from such illness is to assume we are a state of unseemly and crude aliens. I for one am not, she snickered, even in court, pretentious and without veil. The manner in which a man begins to introduce authentic altercation -- yes, yes, the manner in which he begins to offer -- as opposed to simply imply -- a contribution without the threat or disguise of reward is, of course, a manner in which he is seen to know and favor the wells of intimate humanity and not merely enjoy to drink.

This I couldn't possibly describe, she admits -- and even admitted, later. Though, perhaps against the better (urbanely) pleas of her casual acquaintances, assumed romantic bothers, she would acknowledge weakly, maybe to only herself, that it was the other he she meant to kill.

"I can tell you two things:

2009-04-19T08:27:00.001-07:00

make sure the top lock and bottom lock are different;
and you have to hide from darkness
with darkness."

by george, they changed the law

2009-04-15T09:03:00.003-07:00

"Zounds, by Pete, they are at it again!" Oh, soundless remorse -- the pity, upon the fifth regime was without equal, a particular handicapp, yes, given the natural recourse of action - reaction; consequence after impact. We, alas, the Mistress intoned, are of primary affluent noble descent, yet our unprecedented admission (and dare say act) of such failure will not be attenuated by our simply magnificent reflections. Indeed, ponder to watch Melissa, she is enraged by the chance exclusion of her prized mirror (that is the exclusion in the wagon items, as listed by the general accountant, ahem).

I admit. I exhaustively admit that we were without recourse. Our own fingers, bless their bleeding by my own sight, epitomized failure -- and alcohol. The Countess, so taken to service by our --(sure, yes, regardless of the admitted, the admittedly deplorable and realized legal enslavements of crude and improper populations)-- but this countess, again, so taken to service by our tragic and isolated and defeated image swore an oath, to such a height there must have been a doctrine of angelic mandate, reminded demands of man over angel, serve the un-servable, the indolent indigents! Serve us who have lost our people, our followers, serve us who now have no voice!

It surely, upon my own brow, I swear, it must have been this calling, though Melissa, sour and uncouth, against the better likings of her proper feudal mother, dismissed such aid as inadequate, indeed repellent to the (mind you a woman endlessly inculcated by, again, noble doctrine) skin of such grace, perfection, and ah, the angel. And dare I admit, by Pete, that there was such crude interruption, such crude intrusion into the inner estates of the dear lord and provider that, upon, my head, by which was included notes of treasonous and seductive intent --

"Zounds, by Pete, they shot her dead!"

jebarb and mildren

2009-04-13T12:29:00.003-07:00

In a sheer whimper of a storm -- an unconvincing act, pretense, sure -- in a sheer thunderous entrance -- a mild and yet oddly appealing, though half asleep, modernized and adapted on numerous occasions (cliche? -- no, in and of itself, that mere interruption is actually the character and action of the inquisition -- odd and ironic and like a ball) -- in a sheer downright dog-gone hollow of a storm, the most usual and conventional path toward adulthood was momentarily unpassable, though, for certain no one could predict how lengthy the momentary break would indeed last, a final lapse? Oh, my, I would dare venture that I hope not. But, in truth, perhaps. Though the bridge had been rebuilt and even remodeled on countless occasions in the past half century, its usefullness was waning and the more structured and well equiped highway was a much more popular (and really, let us admit, a more suitable) choice for passage. Those, however, a coy Mildren remarked, are not headed toward maturation, not in the strict biological and social sense. An unnecessarily long pause, thereafter, lasting well into the fifth and sixth breaths of the young traveler, ensued. Oh, sure, she smelled quite awful for an elderly woman, lacking in appropriate care, abandoned halfheartedly by willful and drunken grandsons. I opine rather with doubt, Mildren confessed, that you are unlike to attempt the fallen earth? The traveler, by now most confused by the ancient worm, decided, though unagreeable to him at the time (and most unagreeable to him in the near future) to disregard her feverish and rather uninviting disposition, and venture a question in regards to the trail now coined as "muy fea". The damn naturalists. It is by far a better option -- perhaps a far better outcome, though it is without its merits and without its recompense. I think. By now a third member had eagerly, though ever slowly, joined the standing and half snarled half eated duo. It is not completely fallen away, Jebarb motioned, though he himself had aged in such a manner to resemble the grandfather tree and in each gesture it is true his hands began to appear as tattered paper. You are just a sad drawing, the traveler thought, but now thoroughly unamused by the still growling storm and the incomplete directions by an unashamed and stoned innkeeper, remanded his own initial distaste and insisted (for he was a man of great will power and strong cognitive discipline) he must encounter the path back out of the town at the lake and on toward the city. Of course, Jebarb continued, it may but be a monster of a storm and little could we ever expect what to know from either path. Though this one is certain to have fallen. For it is always falling.

she just came in short, black eyed, and bleeding

2009-04-13T09:29:00.003-07:00

She is a hooker, I count her money. She comes in here, once or twice, you know, a week, with her stack of ones and fives, and I give her a receipt. She gets it into the bank that way -- so she can have an account. She can't take that money, with all the blood that is usually on it, she can't take that to a teller, she can't walk in all beat up, with her eyes black, smoking, like she does, and hand the teller a stack of bills that are grimy, crunched up, and bleeding. She is a hooker. She gives me her money. I deposit it for her and I tell her, usually, that she isn't living that swell a life, I say that and she sometimes smiles, like she had heard it on tv too, and it was a good memory. But she is living a shit life, you know, and she lets these marks beat the shit out of her and they really beat the shit out of her. But what can I do, I count her money, so at least she isn't squating in some crack house, or running into the basements of the city buildings to get from the weather. You know, this way, she keeps a place, she keeps some food and she makes, it from today until tonight and maybe even til tomorrow. I don't know, you know, she is just walking through this day to that day, thinking, well, hell, not thinking, but getting her money this way and that way and then bringing it here, and I take only a small fee, a modest fee, because I have to clean the money, you know, and make sure its not bleeding anymore, not like it is when she gives it to me, and then I have to be putting in these deposits into an account for her so that she can have the money for the place she has but in an account that they can't find her, because you know, those tax men, they don't really think that hooking is all that proper or legal so even if she could pay her taxes, she can't really pay her taxes, not down and out like she is. So I take a modest fee, a small fee, really, and adjust the account accordingly and we see the results. And she doesn't complain, not after all that, not now that she can walk up to a money machine and take out her money like she is just another woman in the city, just another woman making errands, you know, and paying bills -- but really, she isn't, you know, she's a hooker. And she gets the shit kicked out of her. I'd help her, but you know, its not like she isn't surviving, its not like it really is gonna come down to something that different for me or for her or for anybody even driving down here from the hills, I mean, on that last day, you know, that last day when you think that that sky is gonna be differnt, its just the last day, and she is going on the same boat as everybody else, even though she lived like this, like a rat, in the sewer. So what's the point, what's the point but make it, survive, and let her survive, I'm not trying to not let her survive. But what's the point. So she gets beat up real bad and one day she is gonna be dead and there she'll be, sitting right next to the whole bunch of assholes that thought there wasn't gonna be any room for a whore like her.

my own sad puppet show

2009-04-08T05:38:00.002-07:00

This is what it reads:

"...the tall one says its accustomed to difficult inference -- and manipulated, only slightly, by the disjointed bridge to appropriate, certainly legal and justifiable resources -- it would, it implies, only use generally agreed upon and specified courses of action. In such a situation, while disposing of competitors efficiently (and in an unbiased seemingly random fashion) would greatly benefit the syndicate in legal gambling gains, political contributors, and even in the number of average dull normal conservative check writers (the fucking balls of the abused)..."

She is watering flowers, afterwards, in the garden, in the back. It might rain, she mutters. That would be the fucking day, he thinks. He is reading a napkin:

1. Everybody wants it.
2. It is accessible to everybody.
3. Everybody does it on their own.
4. Only the self is to blame for failure.

I'd rather pour gasoline on myself and ride through town on fire, he says. Then it'd be the hell they'd see, not the hell they'd let themselves walk. You aren't ever gonna ascend beyond the barbershop, dad. Stop yelling at the radio. All they see is that black mud on your face.

You're blocking my sun, she says, and it is about to cloud up. I don't think I'm the one blocking your goddamn sun, he mutters. Recognition is the same fucking goal -- and we'll give up the natural world -- the one that is not in pieces, is not picked apart by the reductionist illusionist -- because it all happens tomorrow.

and she said, you know, I get high

2009-04-07T08:02:00.004-07:00

She, you know, well, shit--
she says she suggested a solution
a reasonable solution
to a hyper-allergic drug addicted bond salesman --

she was numerating, you know,
making it happen,
making it happen.

All the while,
she was just making the numbers roll,
you know,
back and forth,
like it wasn't anybody's,

wasn't nobody's business,
not to start the slashing,
the slashing and the cutting,
the bleeding,
the slashing and the cutting --
she didn't even like the dissections

not that she was making them,
not that she was asking him to make,

just a punk bond salesman.
just a punk bond salesman.