modern thoughts

The numb required affective treatment.

The emotional burst and asunder, as shot from the gun,

left a hole only silence could fill.

Now they come for their scheduled fair dosing of real hell all fucked over. Through one of any of the senses. Pick one. This is not no rocking chair turn of pages, in some dim lit dusty living room. No. Too dead end for this century. Seems most imaginations are no longer built to overcome that kinda scene…more like efficient, careful, non-impact modern cars. Modern thoughts. Compartmentalized. Prepackaged, prelabelled, shipped. Big brown cardboard boxes picked up by big brown burly men. Taken to big brown trucks, double parked. Modern. All Quiet and eco-friendly. From sender to sendee.  No more sweet thundering like some mid-century chevy. Without any smoke trails, train whistles become   uselessly gigantic like beached whales. Modernity.

We lift battery powered cigarrettes against their cuban cigars perched like hindenberg hydrogen bombs, on hang nails.  We label the old ways sleepy, and ship them away with an old paradigm stamp. Feels good. Until we realize something is missing. It’s too quiet, spell-checked out and passported –century now come of age @ twenty-one — halfway creepy.

Well there will be some. But mostly what was and less is. Presence is a motherfucker in a technologically-formfitted times.  Hard to be sorry for those whose bases got stolen out from under them. Hard to be sorry for you and me. On our cell phones, about to get mugged. Best of luck to those who still guard them. The old ways, I mean. May you not go senile before  you have lost  all our disinterest. Favor moves fast, from Myspace to Facebook, then down into the Tumblr, non-plussed and discarded. Like some underage kid tossed out the bar. Poor boy,  slurs our century behind heineken and glass. Fucking carded.

life fully hydrated -iv-

The future will come into view, and tend the artificial light. Someone’s gotta do it. Maybe the ones who like to make points. Or the ones smoking freely of their legal painful swollen  joints. So what if we face reality. What’s the big deal about turning from it? Why not more embracing of the broke upon the broken? It doesn’t mean you like it. It may not mean you’re next. You’re eyes might change , for sure, might lose a little color. But the pale truth of compassion may be best in black and white. Those are the eyes you wanna stare into….all damn night. The closed become open minded, to air out their shuddering great depths of chilling pain. Those who ascend in great haste, from personally selected lands of sordid waste. Some to broadcast and podcast their pain, others lobbying  for just a taste.

Comedy is a wonderful treatment plan. And walking or hiking. Watch out for the men, girls. Their kinda hiking is hiking skirts. Parting the fabric seas for the young sprouts, the future of the human race… the wannabe materialists and the gonna feel deprived. The wannabe famous and the gonnabe famous… the future chicken tenders of the couch (to replace the current tenders of the couch). Turkeys. Cornish Hens. Nightwatchmen and women of the virtual screens (television junkies). Eyes fixed with such discipline. Clucking in all the right places. Pecking when necessary. Necking during commercial breaks. Braking to a perfect stop, when the feature doubles the creature… the wanna get paid for their efforts, the gonnabe disappointed again and again (myself included).

life fully hydrated -iii-

Sorry for the truth. Beforehand. I never wanted her, but she came and found me, stabbed me, and left me on the ground bleeding. And that’s what needed to happen. I needed to die by her hand, truth, and be reborn. Fucking A right. The bitch found me and killed me, and she’s coming after you, t00.  Our world of confusion wants us confused.  A land where lies are institutional.  Now do you feel dejected, alone and insane? Need some essential space by which to breathe or possibly ‘recover’ ? Good luck, she whispered to me in that degenerate, hissing breathe. She ruptured my left eardrum. Pain for a half hour, followed by sleep. Woke up deaf. In the left.

life fully hydrated -ii-

There go the highly sought after somebodies. Up on stage for more awards. Dressed to the nines. Some even dressed to the tens. Look! This one goes to eleven. There they go, winning competitions. Beating cancer. Beating one another up. Infantilized by the grocery store rag magz. Retiring then coming out of retirement. Sucking on testosterone lollipops. Representing the USA. Glorified. Representing themselves. Making money. Demonized. Going broke. Gone crazy. Come back. Facing borderline treatment by the press and the public. Loved today. Despised tomorrow. Gimme your autograph. Gimme some time. Gimme some money.

In contrast were the lives of the overwhelming majority. Who felt the economic setbacks. Who faced days which seemed increasingly full with markedly lean or linear certainties. Which could put your worries at ease, what with the simplicity of it all. Any day could of course turn into a complicated entangled mess, of course, like free hanging hair after a ride on someone’s Harley. But the larger truth of a life became more transparent the longer you lived. Yet here we were in this manic-depressive atmosphere. Sometimes it was all we could do to remember to breathe and drink water. Live life fully hydrated, when at all possible.

Technology began to take up more of our time and energy. I guess we felt like we were learning more from our phones than from one another. And we were, I mean, we had to learn to use the technology to get the most out of what it offered. But there was clearly a problem. Some of the skills we had developed in life we were now outsourcing to our phones and tablets and computers. This was bad. Everyone around me was deluged. One got a phone call, two others got texts, and then I got MMS ‘d to my eyeballs. The situation was deteriorating. Still, we were better off than the one who ate too much buttered bread for breakfast and stroked right out, hydrogenated to the gills. Sunk like oil into the soil, some said.

Meanwhile the air smelled of roasting corn in its husk on the grill, wisconsin style, soaked in water so long it needed no foil. Bluetooth looked on enviously at the androids bumping to share secrets with one another. Goddamn androids. Acted like they owned the place. Always getting into fights nowadays with the iphones, Well, the iphones were kind of pretentious. And kinda acted like they were in a cult. I wanted to get away from all these bitches, Blueteeth to Androids to iphones to humans. All of them! Sometimes I just drifted off into my own thoughts.

I thought learning was a bloody hell of a darkened doorway to the depths of naught wasteland, in a landfill fucked space you cannot trespass but just watch further encompass your own, until one day your anxiety’s got you pressed up against the glass, howling out loud, cursing cause you can’t even turn your head… as though you’re in a crowded rush hour subway in manhattan, or the time i got jammed in an elevator to the top of the Sears Tower, Chicago, ten minutes before the blue angels flew past, taking me up off my tired, weak feet. During fleet week.

 

life fully hydrated

what is home

Massachusetts and New Hampshire are completely dissimilar. I remember Massachusetts like I remember milk and cookies slapped out of my fumbling hands. Starch fighting my every natural kind of expression right there and then in the middle eighties, a stone throw from Walden Pond, drowning in the glorified history of the birth of a nation, your damn right. Did i say drowning? I meant immersed.  Cindy Lauper and Tears For Fears were the passion plays to offset the upbeat shit like the Cars or the B-52s, who bombed us into submission every other weekend lookalike chaperoned dance, had us digging all the way down to rock lobster. Only the DJ who put us up to going down was not digging, paradoxically.

Massachusetts was the half-baked dancefloor one of those suburban shelter nights in my formerly sanctioned sheltered kinda burning hell of smothering love of sweet greasy pizza. We rode our ten speeds up and down the hills forever. The Celtics took us deep into the spring, forever like the eighties. Between the rough real of country and the hard beat of urban lives i woulda died for, yet was scared to death of…

Luckily, I had the getaway trip, our family escape to Live Free or Die land. All the way north past the noise and the pushing and pulling, to the duty free liquor warehouses making bank just over the border on every highway including 128 (aka I-95, she run from maine to florida) and tangent to the old McDonalds arches hitting the ground in Portsmouth, NH.  I mean the pitstop our family made halfway to Wolfeboro, at the best little Mac-D touch down in the middle of nowhere, well, just adjacent to Pease AirForce base.

The air changed and everything. The lakes began to appear. The pine forests were fucking endless and beautiful wild. The wild came back into my eyes and the suicidal tendencies fell back to just a band that everyone knew from the soundtrack to Repo Man, if everyone was anyone in their adolescence coming-of-age in the large and wonderful wake left by the loud and original (if hokey) style, shameless exposee poseurs comme Madonna, Boy George, Duran Duran, Billy Idol, Pet Shop Boyz, Van Halen, MJ, Devo, Bowie and, uhhh… only thousands more.

Cause once fashion got hit with jumpsuits and moonboots, Roo shoes and Shoe Goo, well, there was this tabula rasa experience which gave a canvas to all the heads with enough balls to splatter themselves colorfully into play. Frankie went to Hollywood, and unfortunately most of us had to follow him there. Why? I couldnt tell you. All i know was in between Rod Stewarts gravelly heterotic lullabies, Casey Casem belched out some new bio of some clean (but not so fresh) face of some plugged in, shot up, glammed out new bitch or boy who could make a nice cover for a one-hit wonder on the top 40, with atleast a semi-scandalous bio Casey could perk up between rancid anal barking at his studio crew, until the jokers smile finally hit air and dropped his act like a jello mould into pound cake square…