September 26, 2007

In a wild frenzy induced by tripping over a cord, our cameraman executes an opening scene that Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick, and Quentin Tarantino wouldn't have come up with if they were having Sunday "dinner" at Martin Scorsese's house on a red-and-white plaid tablecloth with Mario Batali in the kitchen and Bruce Springsteen in the bathroom. And there, with ambiguously-striated focus, greyscale color imbalance, a cracked lens, and flickering light from a fountain of sparks at the site of the rupture, our hero opened his eyes and noticed a cameraman in his bedroom.

"Good morning son, what did I tell you about sending your feed to the editing software in real-time? Only problems, only problems my son." And so it was. Our hero stood up and cracked his meaty knuckles, leaned forward a little bit and reached for his toes, coming just fourteen inches short as his back cracked. Smoothly, seamlessly, like an American submarine in the Gulf, he torqued left and right, cracking some other stuff. He reached for the ceiling, formed mighty fists and more stuff cracked. He stretched his arms out to the side and briefly rotated them as he began a yawn large enough to end the day here at 4:30 a.m. But his day was only getting started, our hero had awoken, and his son returned to his room.

With a sponge the size of a small stubby brick, he alternated scrubbing. What was more valuable, the carefully-cultivated patina on the all-copper shower walls, or his tropical skin that had endured the pressures of a society that had grown complacent about having him in it? Probably the walls. You could fit an 18" pizza within the shower head's perimeter, and our hero'd have it bigger! On one wall a mirror, on the ceiling - a map of his homeland (interrupted by the shower head's pipe). He swished some hydrogen peroxide in his mouth, and allowed a little to trickle halfway down his esophagus - when, like an economy toilet in reverse...

At our hero's deli, which he owned in another life, he was putting new tape in the register when a little kid placed a Gatorade on the counter between the thick glass covered in lotto tickets and the beef jerky or whatever. The little guy then reached into his pockets, cupped his hands and began lifting his arms up over his head. His hands descended on the counter and he slowly let one hundred and seventy-five pennies cascade onto the immaculately clean surface (underneath which a black Sharpie had scribbled "100" beside "Million Dollars"). As the copper-plated coins fell on top of each other, our hero had a vision of the little guy's future.

Like the beginning of a trailer for a bad movie, the little guy’s silhouette (he was 18) contrasted with the setting sun and heat lines waved tensely in orange and red all around him. A slick black assault rifle bumped up and down against his back. He turned around and mouthed something in a foreign, barbaric tongue. The little guy was great at rolling laterally, springing to his feet, and firing like a stud. He entered a hut and shot someone in the thigh, saying “you won’t be so cheap next time!” (rough translation). The little guy had been on his own since he was eleven, climbing mountains, killing wild animals, enamoring little village girls, stealing from dusty markets, etc. He went into another hut and shot someone in the arm. Their elbow exploded, he said, “you won’t ever know me!” (same). When the little guy wasn’t off shooting people, he would bring girls to the top of a mountain that overlooked the Atlantic Ocean. “Woman, one day I’m going to get out of here altogether” (same). He had a vision of himself with two prosthetic falcon-feather-wings that he had been working on for a while. The little guy ran and jumped off the mountaintop. He glided eternally.

It actually took a while for him to get the hang of it, he took some pretty drastic plunges. Luckily, the mountaintop was about 10,000 feet above sea level – a fortunate buffer. The trick was to let air under the wings so as to glide – no need to keep flapping. See but it actually was eternal, he didn’t get tired, the wings didn’t erode, he didn’t get bored. He’s still up there because he earned it and because there’s always something to see.

Loominous

"Well I just wish you wouldn't test me, that's all."
Gaaaahd, I thought. Well I mean I thought that after the fact.
"I'm not testing you, I didn't intend it to be a test."
As soon as someone confronts you, go into defensive clarification mode. That's how the intellectual never loses an argument.
"Hand me my brush." I picked up her brush and handed it to her.
"What? Are you mad at me n--?"
"No."
See there it is. She's got the upper hand. She cut me off and cut me off with a response to my question, proving not only that my presumption is wrong, but that she knew the rest of the question.
"I just don't see why you couldn't do it in the first place like you always do?"
"Liste--"
Again.
"I mean if you're not happy doing it you should have just been honest with me instead of not doing it and testing me. I'm not averse to doing it I'm just used to doing it and I'm the kind of person who falls into routines for mundane tasks. I need to have my mundane tasks in proper order so I don't waste mental preparedness on such trivial things."
So basically, I just should have done it. From here there's nowhere to take it except maybe to escalate it to a major altercation. Well, I'm feeling a bit whimsical today. I'm a little loose. I'm kind of bored with the way things are going, why not mix it up?

"I'm tired of your bullshit, you never would've done it because you don't even know how. I wasn't testing you. I didn't think of the 'you' component of it when I didn't do it, I just didn't do it, because I didn't feel like doing it at the time."
"What is that supposed to mean I never would've done it? I would have done it if you asked me to, that's how people who don't usually do things assume responsibility for doing something they usually don't do. So if you would've asked me, I'm sure I would've been fine with doing it. And what is that supposed to mean I don't even know how, I am sick of the chip on your shoulder about the mundane things you can do that I can't."
I swear a little bit of everyone's arguing prowess derives from the snippets of Ricki Lake and Jerry Springer they've seen through the years. Yeah, our personalities are inexpensive cocktails - until the MPAA hires better lawyers.
"I'm not saying that you can't do it." A little of her own medicine! But not really because I didn't craft that strategy on the fly. It was just me lowering my standards and committing the intellectual crime I had just identified on her end. "All I'm saying," I mean, it's pretty clear that it's not all I'm saying, but this and other mini-prefaces are futile attempts to patronize the adversary into subconsciously thinking your argument is straightforward, "is that not everything I do is done with you in mind."
"Well, that's very clear to me."

Let's talk about open doors. Let's talk about opening doors. Then, we'll talk about closing them, and after that: the reluctant ajaredness of doors. The sometimes persistent nature of door-ajaricity. Or, the constitutional right of my door to have hinges on the same side as your dominant hand or there will be hell to pay in the form of you being thrown in an airtight room with a black bag over your head - door closed.

So there I sat, in a cushiony room that I am ashamed to say immediately reminded me of an old boy band video from the 90s. I believe it was the N*Sync (I never know where to put the asterisk! roflmao!) music artist, perhaps for one of their pop hits, perhaps, "I Drive Myself Crazy." Anyway, whiiish, I got all sentimental and laaamerz.

That's when you fall. Sitting there in the padded room assessing the current circumstance. I look up and there is a mirror and I am not who I think I am. I am Jenny McCarthy sitting on Santa's lap. The one and only...well-dressed missionary. I start laughing and dancing and laughing and dancing all around the padded room. When I look up again I'm Carmen Electra and I'm 80% nude and the floor in the mirror is the nighttime sky through dusty dirty grimey slimey city blinds, and in the full moon between the blinds I see myself again. I'm Lieutenant General James Longstreet, who probably never saw anyone like Carmen Electra, who I used to be before I looked up and realized I was the commander of the First Corps on a night like no other. I looked down at myself and indeed, I had the green soldier uniform on. It was tattered because if it wasn't then I'd have known something was up. I'm ready to serve! I can serve! The sanitation route? How come?

I fastened my canteen to my bayonet (probably the most useless independent clause I've ever constructed) and flipped open my Sony Vaio (clearly the rebels wouldn't have Macs). "Motherfucker," I snapped, "I'm going to need a cable resurgence, I'm way too heavy in Sterling."
"Longstreet! God damn it son, what did I tell you about checking your stocks before gameday!"
"No, sir, I wasn't - I was reviewing the battle plan for tomorrow sir."
This wasn't good, my stomach sunk. I knew that if he asked for proof I wouldn't even have the map in my history trail. If only there were some kind of configurable audit simulator. Ahhh he's gonna ask to see it, fuck I am fucked. I felt a bug on my shoe.
"Let's see what you think about Little Roundtop," he inched closer and I knew I was caught. Should I go into my apology now or should I wait on a miracle. I opened the Vaio and to my surprise, a damned Yankee pop-up ad had appeared on the screen and obstructed the portfolio view. Coast clear I figured.
"God damn it Longstreet, why doesn't this corps have better servers?"
He was so straightforward. I am a barbarian, he is a superpower. We were barbarians, the North were a civilized people. As a continent, we were civilized, and those in the tropical climates are barbarians.
"Bahhh, let's add seven months and make every month only have 19 days. Then, at the end, we'll add however many days short of the lunar calendar we are."

"Born in the U.S.A." is a c-r-i-t-i-q-u-e, and anything that's negative about it as a song is negative because it's supposed to be. Get it?

The Ballad of Calendar Math

As our pudgy little stick-figure frames slog through the screechy terrain of September, we occasionally pause for a bite to eat. When we eat our minds tuck themselves into the cozy inertia we've recklessly purchased...again. And just as our minds begin to shut their eyes, we are reminded by the speciously apologetic nudge of similarly listless travelers, ordering something similarly acrylamidic. The path we're on is the pit, and everyone here is 100% legal. We look out at the bright lights whizzing in the distance and say, "It's always so backed up."

Back on the road there are two choices in front of us: "Merge" or "Return" We rarely choose the former. It makes us sleepy. And when we sleep...a glorious procession of gears and other submachinery, to their beds...we sometimes travel down the path marked "Merge." Complicated by all that precedes us, our driver turns his head briefly to see his briefcase then quickly turns his head back and focuses on the road. He sticks out his hand towards the briefcase and twists the combination on the right side to 6-2-4 and then again on the left side. The case flicks open and parenthetical fumes suffuse the back seat, where we have been seated all this time.

An explosive mixture of chemicals and poor decisions emulsify at once and traditions grow taboo under the intense glow of a halogen flashlight - strapped to the helmet, the yellow plastic helmet, of the leader, of our team of miners. We employ about four miners, so... Sometimes gases from the crust of the earth ignite the mixture and we spin out of control as the last domino in a chain of people who aren't the last domino. Our hands tied behind us, we see a lineup of the alleged perpetrators. An unfriendly, dishonest officer asks us to pick out the one who's done this to us and we all start to cry - and I become nostalgic.

Moven

In a hole, a deep dark one, there spouts a steady stream of fecal matter. At its source, you. You are the source of a reprehensible fountain of feces. I like it. Last night, I had a dream about you. I dream of you often. All kinds of positions, all kinds of sensations, those dreams with the wide hips and crooked yellow teeth. The dreams with softly prominent nipples in a beige Baniyaan.

So then Johnny went walken...he went walken, without you. He said, "Banksy dog, why you always gotta shit right here? Ha, dog knows we about to get out this nice shit, so he gotta shit right before we hit the ghetto." Do you remember? "I'm just more of a minimalist, ya know, I hate kitsch." Johnny looked at that clown and wished Banksy had shat on his foot.

I wish my dreams came true...oooh. I don't know what to do. This month, in this month, I need to stop dreaming of you. When your hair is just right, there lies a cemetary of gelatinous coffins atop your head. And beneath the graveyard, a landing spot, for the stones I will throw when I destroy you. Lovingly, I muttered the rest of what I always say - it's the undisputed truth.

Burnt by a Tuft of Fire

Immediately after [human catastrophe], the [human] villains were identified. They received the usual treatment of a villain: lots of press, some roundtable discussions, some new hardcovers. "Inside the mind of [villain]" by [human expert]. If their CV is lengthy, we'll pay the intern a bit more to buff up all the graphics. Maybe we'll do a special edition. Maybe [partisan pundit] will weigh in. Maybe [unrelated subject's radio talk show host] comments, and maybe [I] will shake [my] head. [Local news co-anchor, male] shakes head at [local news co-anchor, female]: "What a shame." [Homemaker] [temporarily completes homemaker task], forming an expert knowledge base of what they heard, which comes in handy in the [social realm]. [Web aggregator] reports [10^(# references to barbarian nation-state [from America's perspective] or terrorism [perceived/actual/both]) multiplied by top story average] stories are being aggregated for [human catastrophe] topic.

I remember questioning the existence of my "permanent record." After The Net, I decided that more energy should be expended questioning the validity of my permanent record. My first fear was of bumblebees, my second, cicadas; third, wasps; fourth, roaches; fifth, tornados; 6th, genital papercuts; 7th, caterpillars, 8th, lightning, and my ninth fear was tarnishing my permanent record. That probably had more to do with my discovering of the difference between "permanent" and "temporary." When the mind stores a pristine copy of the word "permanent (and the semantics thereof)," after it has done the same for the concept of death, the word "permanent" is an air-conditioned hut on a desert island.

But more than any of this is the desire to tempt the fates with relatively villainous deeds, and so to light a flame and hope for a clear calm day. Turbulence begets tufts of fire that swirl upwards and tempt the body-canister into exploding, ending it all. The skeins of white organic matter swirl and become whiter. Nothing about an egg is black or blue.

September 5, 2007

A secretly traitorous journalist would never have stood for the abhorrent treatment of La Stuarda. It would have shocked him out of his insincere complicity with the king - and that would have been amazing.

Here's the idea: station 5 testers with laptops on 34th Street. One at 10th Ave., one at 7th, at 5th, at Madison, and at 2nd. Each one has 2000 tests to administer. The test is simple: you start each person at a web browser with the standard Google homepage showing - fine. You tell them to type 'america' into the Google search bar plug-in. The autocomplete function will list about 10 choices that begin with 'america:' '-n airlines, express, eagle, idol, apparel, ...' - then, you let the person select whichever one they want, and repeat the process using words on the first page that comes up after the selection is made. For example, if I did it ten times, I would be on the following web site: http://www.riowild.com/saquarema.asp.


Another: Ok, so because physical discomfort sucks, I thought it would be good, while still young, to record how my body feels when it is at its maximum comfort. As a young person, it's still quite possible that more than half of the year, this level of physical comfort is sustainable. If I record that data, and then record days where I don't feel as good, rating the discomfort relative to the maximum comfort level, my days in advanced age would be significantly more enlightening. I could be fifty and in the hospital for some random heart condition, and I could reflect on 1) how maximum comfort felt, with resolution down to specific body parts, 2) the ridiculously outdated technologies I used to construct this system. If you want the idea, take it.

One more: A hit TV show about changing life career on a dime. For example, depressed NYC 20-something moves to Chicago and joins AIDS consultancy, meets prestigious guests in swanky hotel restaurant where blues from the fifties is playing, falls in love with waitress, older, married. Goes back to NYC, meets depressed 20-something, female, who receives protagonatory baton from the first guy. She quits her job, becomes more honest with people, gets a little crazy in the head - starts yelling "Get me off this plane" at 20,000 feet. Emergency landing at airforce base, angry passengers, advertising spot. Take it, publish it, but if you're going to chop my head off, make the first chop count.

September 4, 2007

Gesturing wildly, he told me that there was nothing to worry about. "We go in through the open window, wearing stockings over our heads. Then, you stand in the bathroom, lock the door, and change into this outfit." He picked up a college sweatshirt and a white vest.

"Are you serious? Why would I be wearing that?"

"Listen, there's no time to question things now, you come out of the bathroom once you hear that the guy and his wife have realized I'm in the house. You scream, "COPS!" and you hold this bat." He handed me a black maple bat.

"Why would a cop be wearing a Columbia sweatshirt, with a white vest over it, swinging a black baseball bat?"

"Are you in or not man? Think about the payoff, you probably won't even have to come out. If they don't wake up I just take the shit and we leave." He clapped his hands together and sent his right hand shooting off into leavedom, towards my face. Ironic.

We staggered behind the house, we put our stockings on, and in we went. I ran into the bathroom and locked the door. I immediately took my wallet out of my pocket and put it on the sink. I said to myself, "What am I doing?" Apparently we hadn't been very quiet entering through the window, both the wife and the guy were downstairs confronting my accomplice. I took one of my house keys off the keyring and placed it on the sink.

"You get the fuck out of the bathroom, whoever you are!" yelled the big man. I felt lots of footsteps real close to the door and then a pounding on the door. The wife was calling the real cops. I didn't really think about what could be happening out there. I knew what I had to do. Kick open the door, wave the bat around say I was the cops. Well, no. First I had to unlock the door so when I kicked it it opened. I put on the sweatshirt and the white vest over it. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. I put my hand through my hair to fix the stocking-hair. I wasn't very excited. Being in that bathroom felt safe. I wasn't up for the challenge of kicking the door, angling my eyebrows, and raising my voice. I didn't really hear anyone anymore. I heard the real cops outside.

"Yeah we have two dead. Yeah. Washington Avenue. 125. Looks like the husband strangled the burglar after the burglar strangled his wife. The husband said there's someone else in the main bathroom, I sent Randy in to check."

I fumbled around and put my wallet back in my pocket and the key back on the keyring but I couldn't really get it on so I stabbed the key and my keyring into my pocket. I threw the bat in the tub and turned the shower on. I fumbled with the bathroom lock, I could hear the footsteps coming down the main hall. I slowly opened the door and then bolted out into the hall and didn't turn around to see if the officer had reached the hallway and seen me. I ran out the back door into the backyard. There were two kids smoking pot on the pool deck. I don't know who they were and they didn't ask whom I was. I jumped from the pool deck to the gate of the neighbors and then onto their pool deck, and so on for about 5 houses.

As I was making my escape. I heard the voices of the cops ringing in my head. Autumn came and settled on these suburban backyards. "The husband will get manslaughter. Probably get off, he's a reputable guy. Once we find the accomplice the judge will slap him with some other armed burglary, 5-10, he'll plea and take 90 days, who wouldn't take 90 over 5-10?"

I didn't want to go to jail and I thought maybe there was a way I could get off with this. I kept hopping pools and decks and something happened that I was scared would happen. The white river all around us kept swirling and the silver sky made the leaves moist and slippery. Some were red-brown others were green-brown. I hopped over a gate and saw the two kids smoking pot on a different pool deck. All the pools were covered with black tarps and asymmetrical ponds had formed. Some of the leaves were on the bold green grass, but most were neatly packaged in bundles. I stopped running and sat in the corner of a backyard. I walked up a slight incline to the back of a backyard. I took off my sweatshirt and so my vest, I was wearing a black t-shirt underneath. I put my key back on the keyring. I sat with my knees bent at my chin. The unforgiving wind of the white river blew indistinguishable brown specs into social frenzies that speckled the dark gray outlines of the clouds.

I still hadn't thought about my accomplice and that he was dead. Instead I thought of jail. I was haunted by the voice of the judge which came in so clearly as I made my escape. I knew I had to get out here. I had enough money in my bank account, I could go South. I'd never make it over the swirling white river without being identified. My fingerprints would be on the knob, so if I were to make an escape on a plane, I'd have to do it soon, as the judicial bureaucracy would crawl to actually place a deadlock on my commercial travel. Where could I go? Where did I want to go?