January ’13 (reminiscent ’12) -ii)

The holidays.
The fucking holidays. 

They stole my heart. Beat me down. They disappeared my cat Drama.I cried like a baby. I slept like i never slept before. Like sleep was going out of fashion. I waited in line to pay for my character defects. Stopped taking my meds. Stopped writing. My computerswallowed a system driver I had fed it accidentally, back in early December, and it took me three weeks of troubleshooting to figure it out. Meanwhile,my eyes shot blood.

 I was drinking tea. Well, I was supposed to be drinking tea. I had bought this dope electric kettle at Target. She was a beauty. All chrome chassis. I tried to show her off, but I guess I was the only one impressed. She was a miracle machine! She told you what temperature she would cook the water. She gave me choices. I liked having choices. I could turn her . I could turn her down from 212 degrees to 190, 180, and so on.

I would have been drinking tea if I could do anything at all. I thought about drinking tea with my ex of the year previous. Maybe to make amends. Maybe to heal. Last year was bad. Real bad. We were facing the holidays together, hoping to support one another through it all. The plan backfired, however. We turned on eachother. We were stressed. The earth quaked below us. Grand mal seizure style. We did not play nice, once the game got to a certain point. Like that point in Monopoly when someones getting raped by hotels and all they do is roll the dice and pray they will hit income tax or any other inbetween spot on the board…cause they haven’t  a chance...

watching you watching them watching you

The cost we pay to live in the USA…. may be exemplified by a simple road trip cross country, trans America (USA). Try it out. You will find towns beneath highways that resemble other towns beneath highways. People behind cash registers that appear as tired as other people behind cash registers. In their tired uniform uniforms. Tired of it. Watching you. Watching you watching them. Watching you watching them watching you. Tired. If blindfolded and turned around ten times, then asked to locate ourselves… we might not have a clue. I am the pot that calls the kettle black.

Even  mother nature grows weary as she is stripped of her plentiful bounty and forced to push high fructose corn syrup up out of her chilled soil. These are only the touch of the surface of problems growing wider and deeper every day in this beautiful country we have pledged our loyalty, too, or pledged allegiance too, the republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God (of our understanding), indivisible. Though factions may develop at times, united we stand. For we know in our hearts that divided, we will fall. We have become willing, some of us, to lay down our lives for our country. The rest of us (worth mentioning) atleast try and pay our taxes. The rest of us may simply be marginalized, paying dues. I am the pot that calls the kettle black.

The solution? I cannot guess what it is, exactly. Another ascetic experiment like Walden Pond? Heavier drinking? More bed-in protests? Polyamory? Washing down pharmaceuticals? Attempts to colonize Mars? That could generate some good hearty laughs. The money may get pushed around, but that wont necessarily grow it, rather it may keep the virtual cash flow propped up until some recluse mathematician tells us in no uncertain terms we are fucked. Royally.

Look for China to bring her influence to your doorstep, USA. Look for history to be rewritten to account for the dynasties. Look for the Color Red. Streaming quickly like a dragon, in and out of chinatown locales, ever expanding and contracting and expanding again, demonstrably, tangibly! You will learn the difference between Cantonese and Mongolian cuisine! You will be careful where you post your Free Tibet! decals.

I say look to the youth. The baby boomer babies. Only they may be our saving grace. For they are naturals on computers. They embrace diversity. They may best manifest the new paradigm overtaking us, whether we like it or not. Stay open-minded, my friends. Be flexible. Let your pride down, but not your guard. Work on your credit score. Resist that four foot flat screen on sale at best buy! Or read a fucking book for a change. Get off your ass and ride a bicycle, perhaps. For godsakes, people! The 2-liters of cola littering your floor? Recycle them, ok? Change your ways! Give a damn about the environment! Look around you to your atmosphere, don’t shut yourself inside and soak into your imprint! You don’t have that luxury anymore! I am the pot that calls the kettle black.

Be a man! Be a woman! Find your heart! Your spirit! Rejuvenate your soul, I don’t care if its shock therapy! Jump off a pier into cold winter waters! Go camp out with the Occupiers for a night! Talk to your children, you might learn something you don’t already know! Humble yourself. Your ego thinks you’re a celebrity. Center of the world. Commander of all electronic devices you survey. Hero in your own head! Knock knock! Anybody home? I am the pot that calls the kettle black.

East meets West takes on a whole new meaning, now. Its not doing yoga inside your home theatre anymore. Its more like pot stickers…we are the pot stickers, frying in the pan, not quite feeling the heat thanks to our doughy second skin. But the heat has been turned up and insensitivities are giving way to hypersensitivities, you know. Check it out. Walk around. Look and listen. Drop and roll. You ain’t gonna survive if you cannot find and heal your poor lost (and truly discarded) taxed out past credit, beleaguered soul. I am the pot that calls the kettle black.

A weak argument

He had scant evidence for what he accused her. Little behind his hypothesis. Certainly none of the evidence was empirical. The kind of evidence he would demand of himself to require to prove his point in his own formulated system. Which was by the way, inherently flawed. Rudimentary, actually, like drop the info in a slot and let it get manipulated and come out something he could neatly digest. No matter if the product was devoid of nutrition. Like boiling broccoli instead of steaming it. He didn’t care, so long as it tastes hella good.

They were driving roads north, in the eastern part of the western world. Passing lobster shacks. Military bases. Fast food joints. Malls. Parking lot theatres. Blue collar hoods. Blue light specials. Seaports of the north atlantic. He was driving. He was calm, never frantic. He was older. A black and white thinker. Not borderline but you might have guessed borderline. Like most guys he was engineering built, both mind and body. More mathematically intelligent.

She found mathematics at first to be irrelevant. Her algebra teacher sucked. Her calculus teacher would have to make up for lost time, to reach her. And she was reachable. Maybe not as teachable as reachable. Aka: open-minded, with a blaze of independent spirit like a shooting star across her canvas. He and she were politically opposed. Every fiber of her young being wove out of her energetics, and seeped through her clothes. The crosshairs of cotton were overtaken and lay down upon her skin. She bled liberal. Which to him amounted to a grave sin.

As far as she was concerned, half their misunderstanding in those days on the seaboard of the Atlantic, were simply semantic. Nevertheless he calmly pronounced her a communist one day when she was only nineteen and reading Marx and Engels, behind her seatbelt  crunching Pringles. She laughed so hard,  when she heard him. Fell into one of those rare laughing fits that used to take her to the ground unable to breathe when she was a child. She had learned how to breathe and laugh circa nineteen eighty-six or seven. Without the prerequisite girls finishing school etiquette.

His psychology was to get attention any way possible from her. This was his little sister after all. The training ground for all his failed relationships, and for that very reason. He naturally waited until the last moment for anything. Which had a direct correlation to the availability of almost nothing. He was declined invitations. He was a designed imitation. He was subject to subconscious limitation. He refused to drop to the floor even if his house was on fire.  His situation: dire. He found solid reasons to hide from immaterial beings. His angels were forced to pray for him from a distance; he rarely cracked a tinted window, from the confines of his private limousine. He would turn on her simply because he yearned for her approval. Her laughter hit him in the gut. He fled for the comfort of his intellect, and left his heart in the alley. For removal.

(more) on being american

I am trying. I tried, and i continue to try. I hope i never let up on it. I hope i never give up trying. I hope i never give up on you and me. I try and look at my entitlement and back it off when i can. i stay focused on being honest. I hope i never stop.  i am often honest to a fault. I hope you are, too. Even if it’s to our own detriment.  I doubt im really american. Though i was born and raised here and have been on this soil for about forty years of my forty years and four months in this life. Irregardless. I offer up what i have, my way of of knowing or thinking or believing what i need to know and defending it, or not having to defend it, or becoming someone who believes something in a slightly diferent way or understands something in a completely new way. or being content with knowing on my sliding slope of awakening… or not being content and becoming uncomfortable and becoming someone slightly re-adjusted or assuaged or massaged into a deeper way of feeling what i know or do not know or feeling my way into a new way of living, breathing, and experiencing myself from the inside out, feeling in my veins in my blood in my marrow a telltale shift of currents, drawing up from the eddies the gyres, the labryinths of my mind a bit of old blood to recirculate again and remember that which i have forgotten, stirring up sensual and essential sounds sights and aromas, tasting the old life again and hungering to drop that shit right into the new paradigm of my life, thirsting out the light of my eyes to connect with the light in yours and find that  old abiding love i lost. and let me tell ya. fuckin- A. tastes hella sweet, yes indeed. yes indeed it does. yes indeed.

life fully hydrated -vii/fin)

The curtain closes and lights go down. Everyone and desperation herself comes along and bulldozes through everything, just to get in touch. Human resource department? So and so demands we run that by such and such. Now and then but no later than now. And no sooner than then. Translated? do not put it off. Rather than be something distasteful, choose to be nothing at all. Nothing. Nada. Substance? Dissipates like the audience down the aisle… like confetti, down, tumbling down from the sky.

Okay, well, i keep tryin real hard to turn this moment, this day, this memory falling like heavy sitting room drapes over me; my thin and fragile half-broken quarter-bleached thin volume of a history of my life as dramatically raced through the last seven or eight years i suppose, the length, so very recent some days or weeks in my memory, and much of the rest falls out into moodswings of greater density and greater into an anonymous telltale of a nervous lovin heart (52 bpm on the average this week). And how would i possibly be truthfully reporting dedicated personal vitals to you? Who do i feel like today? Well, this is personal but I will tell you, no bullshit… an unemployed, overeducated, working-class downgrade. From automaton to human being. The best fuckin dowgrade you ever fuckin seen.

As for the rest of them? The contradictions were stoppages of their so called progress with questions filling up all that cold air in their heads, teeth showing with rembrandt smiles. Twenty thirteen, and the whole operation suddenly seemed on edge of the ice ready to fall into the pond. Back to serene. No longer obtuse. No longer obscene.

For you and me, me and you? Like waking out from under the worst of worst dreams. Like that time back in ’98, you know, up in Chicago. Where latin kings played with queens behind victory gardens on Pulaski. There we were. Homeless in the mind. Looking for the same old shit. Fragments of water, dripping off the lake street el trax. When what was underground rose to the surface, and into thin cold air. So easily. Icicle clear.  Meeting your conscious understanding, even at any odd angle. Life fully hydrated. Frozen into stalagtite-hard times.

This was life on her terms.

life fully hydrated -vi)

So clearly daylight walks ahead of the dark night of some yahoo castrated of its exclamation point these past few years, outsourcing all its last place finishes  from some closeted tech geek commanding six figs on the phone, while multitasked out on some crappy, xbox played out, carjack of a game not worth a five finger discount on the breath of a four letter word. Clearly daylight walks ahead of a couple decades of experience, fabricated just to break into the upper levels of a lower tier player with a high profile corporate name. This kind of ‘mishap’ as it is presented to the world on online news outfits, is no mistake at all. No accident. This kind of event often shows the exact moment clarity in time, truth. The real real. This is your corporate behemoth entity  number now and never again. This is a snapshot. Not an anomaly. You can trust it to burn through the bullshit and deception in our atmosphere, like a polaroid in a cold case file of some undeniable evidence. No matter if the eyes are red and the Kodachrome has been discontinued. This is daylight.Anything else falls behind…