And hello Everyone!!!
It's good to have you. get comfy. Imagine we're in the same room, imagine I'm handing you a cup of coffee, or a beer, or cigarette.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Butter the Other Side
Dear College,
why can't we be together? Why can't we see eye to eye? Why can't you let me sleep as i would sleep and I'll let you teach as you would teach? Why is my bed better than you?
and all the while, all the dreams, i wish to hold you steady. I wish to keep you close. I abuse you with my indifference and apologize in full.
love waning or never known.
Sean Williamson
Sunday, November 28, 2010
sleep
miserable creations float around you like apparitions from an old dream and never come close to touching you. they might have been something you watched on television half asleep with the walking pneumonia or mono, the kissing disease. and these are just the things you see between the three-dimensional sequences, the commercials between acts, the black and white funny pages between sunday color spreads. and what doesn't matter? in some cases, the things that you do while at work: what you think about, organize, put off, choices, resentments, near misses, mistakes, even emotions. what does matter: these exact same things when you're with people you care about. what is important to a person who doesn't care about other people? could it be themselves? that seems doubtful that you could really value yourself if you don't value other people that either support you or you support. how could you care about art or literature or cooking if you didn't care about other people? it would be like being a dentist who believed teeth were hollow. my very best guess is that they don't care about anything and, paradoxically, they act as if they did just because otherwise it would look funny to the other people in the world, all of whom they despise. phantoms and tangibles overlap, or, to put it differently, they are the same thing. people, places, and things have a perforated edge and can be torn out and pasted elsewhere. coordinates are like dyslexic numbers in a nightmare.
6:36 AM
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
!!!HAPPY TURKEY LEG EATING COMPETION!!!
Hello and welcome to the annual turkey and mashed potato, cranberry sauce, running into your ex-girlfirend at the bars, avoiding talking about that weird shit your uncle got into, football watching, Detroit Lion losing watching, Dallas Cowboys being arrogant fuck-heads watching, drinking to much Schnapps, fist fighting your brother over something that happened six years ago, stuffing, High Life, low lives, sleeping, watching the Sopranos, cigarette smoking, say mean things half jokin, wild-terrible-wonderful-horrible Thanksgiving hot-mess contest.
Love ya'll stay safe, and warm and tidy.
DIRT
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Monday, November 22, 2010
You gotta open your eyes little girl...times are a'changin.
You want to be like this...
Saturday, November 20, 2010
statement for last 2 days
$2.25 - 10 bus from 3rd and wisconsin to highland & vilet
$2.25 - ironstone cafe, one 16 oz cup of tangerine ginger tea, plus tip
$1.05 - convenient corner, 16 oz can arnold palmer
$10 - michigan street diner, fish sandwich, coca-cola, tip
$2.25 - 10 bus from humboldt & vilet to wisconsin & water
$20 - chopsticks, crab rangoon, eggroll, general tso's chicken, tip
$25 - henry's tavern, 2 x gin & tonic, 2 x jameson shot, 1 red stripe, tips
18 ¢ - uwm library, 3 printed pages
$4.88 - hawley road mobil, philly cheesesteak hot pocket, orange gatorade, king sized hershey's w/ almond
1) distill image to black dots, distanced as stars in a constellation, assign each a sequential numeral.
2) connect dot to dot using straight line segments, according to numeric progression.
3) your paper should resemble diagram in lower left hand corner. if it doesn't, ask your teacher for help.
"it's all a big nothing... it's coming from here. it's not my fucking head. it's my stomach. i'm nauseous. jesus. fuck. fuck. oh, fuck. it's the chicken vindaloo. fucking motherfucking woks." - tony soprano, "funhouse"
"and it was cold and it rained and i felt like an actor
and i thought of ma and i wanted to get back there.
your face, your race, the way that you talk.
i kiss you, you're beautiful, i want you to walk."
- david bowie, "five years"
"do you need help finding anything?" - me, yesterday, about 6 times
Friday, November 19, 2010
good Sir. Jacobson
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
When the city bus is wierder that usual
it takes some time.
to mentally sift through factory workers,
(they're silent)
and non-workers-
who talking about football,
sound suprisingly like John Gruden and Chris Collinsworth.
but not like Aikmen. He's alright by me.
then Baby-Phat chimes in about-
a restaurant, a pet food store.
hmmm. I don't recall.
...
here's my stop.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Highway Guilt Trip
Component to my new book A Wild Introduction
1978
“And if that’s what you believe, that’s what you believe. What you’re doing is trying to put a definite on something that is entirely open to interpretation."
"You're saying the afterlife is open to interpretation? C'mon.."
"Aw hell, it aint just God, you know. We are swimming in specters, clawing through ghosts."
"Now, I don't know what you think this is sir but WRTO is a radio station that cherishes the gospel, cherishes the satisfaction that, after life, good Christians will join their savior Jesus Christ in Heaven ... I don't like where this is going. Good day to you sir and God Bless...Next caller, Mary in Menasha. How you doin hun? Welcome to Words Of Worship."
"Hi Jim. Now my sister Celia has been seeing this man down in Rockford, there's something evil stirring in that city, let me tell you..."
...
George Thurston turned off the radio and drove down south from Marietta. His son’s Matty and Chuck rode in the back seat. They didn’t speak. Matty thumbed a few Lego’s his mother had given him. There was a red one and a blue one but they weren’t put together. He rolled them in his hand.
Chuck stared out the window of the Eldorado and watched the northern hills and Valleys rise and fall, the earth stabbed neatly with windmills and silos. He was the quieter of the two boys. He spoke when spoken to. The sun was falling.
It would have already been dark if George hadn’t insisted that he and the boys head home. It was always hard to leave his mother’s house but George understood. She had started the whole deal; him the kids, the houses , the car, the kisses and misses and everything. Since the divorce he watched his mother's expressions fight themselves as he and the boys would leave the house and head home. He saw her hide her pity for his solitary life. She would smile and make a joke but the edges were there, George could see them.
He didn’t worry about his own driving; he worried about other drivers and galloping deer busting through the windshield.
...
It happened when George was younger. Twenty years back, he was working in Iowa and drove to meet his parents at his aunts in Cedar Rapids. He was thinking about the cold days spent laying cement at the site of the new plant and the long nights in empty motel rooms.
He was thinking about the woman he met in Atkins and spent the night with in Betram. She was twenty five years older than him and had a kid George's age. Her husband had a heart attack in the drivers seat of his rig a couple years back. So he was dead.
George was driving along that night pondering, and a doe darted out into the road and slammed through his windshield. It didn't come through on his side but its two front legs stuck through the passenger side, kicking the seat, running in place. Lucky for George the road was empty and he was alone with the trapped deer.
He opened the door and walked to the front of the car. The night was a hard cold and the fields were silent. The deer was beating its broken neck and head against the hood. George went to the trunk and got the tire iron and killed the deer. He pulled it off the hood and made it to the next way station. It was a hell of a thanksgiving story.
...
Today George drove along with his boys in the back seat. They stared and got in each others space and complained and asked a few questions. He used to long for things like being home, having a cold beer, uninterrupted showers, night at the movies, meatloaf, sunday football, saturday fishing and then Jo-Ann split. She found out what he did and left, no questions asked. He wanted to undo it all. That was it, he couldn't long. He wanted to have it all back.
But he did what he did. He knew there was no undoing. She was living with Steve now, he had to split time with the boys. That was that.
Two semi's swam like whales on the highway in front of him. Wind busted against their sides and they buckled and shone in the sunlight. George sped up a little to get around the trucks.
The truck buckled just as they rode along next to it. The trucks trailer detached and toppled onto the Eldorado. It crushed George Thurston and his boys to death.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Roy and Nina
on to the old list.
you want to be satisfied,
and free,
moving endlessly, being everywhere,
forgetting nothing, remembering nothing,
chicken wings,
fish fry,
gas station cheese nuggets,
cats and screens,
streaming episodes of old show,
chapped lips,
showered less, caring less,
no laughs like a last gasp throw.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Russian Report
It's been a haul- Talking teachers out of failing you,
well, it's nothing like it used to be.
She drove a Mazda and was proud -
and worked in a mall- is it?
squinting through.
...
You know you blew it. even though one said one thing, the other guy another.
...
If you can't face it i will. -friendship is a long line of people submitting bad advice.
if you just listen once, or try to concede, tall pulleys and laces.
we'll walk alone please.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
"Now that they won, the Republicans got to figure out what they're going to do with themselves," he said. "Try to make it a better, stronger country." He paused while his mother said something, he said, "I hope so too."
And this affected me to a degree that surprised me. It does not make me sad or mad. The riff from "The Dolphins" started strumming. Everything was quieter or clearer than usual and it affords me a piece of mind that is rare for me, like a connection to something larger.
When the call ended, I bowed my head and for the first time saw the furry red and green undergrowth that lines the area of the keyboard underneath the letter buttons. It looks to be made of shredded construction paper and many pinches of various spices and herbs.
The Fred Neil song goes:
"This old world may never change
the way it's been,
And all the ways of war can't change it
back again.
I've been a-searchin' for the dolphins
in the sea.
And sometimes I wonder, do you ever
think of me?
I go searching for the dolphins
in the sea."
I am at work as I write this, interrupted every few sentences by a call. The pen I write with, from Staples, is lousy and it forces me to press unnaturally hard on the paper to allow the ink to spill out. These things have, as I knew something would, dissolved my euphoria. It is something i have experienced before. It is always brief, always unexpected, always when I am sober. Traces of it hang now in my mind like pastel streamers left over from a birthday party last week, torn and wilted and waiting for me to feel okay about crumpling them and mingling them with the rotted trash in the can under the sink. It's not time yet.
And all this is about the elections somehow. I just noticed today that presidential elections come the same year as summer olympics and halfway between them we get winter olympics and these elections.
So, now the president is a democrat and our house is republican and I think what has caused this feeling in me is the idea that nothing will be resolved or accomplished. There is a tug of war above me and right now I feel like playing in the mud pit in the middle. I feel free because I did my patriotic duty and voted today. That's what that guy on the phone called it. Earlier today, I was trying to figure out why I voted and I guess that is actaully the best way to put it. It felt like my duty. And now I did it. My mom said back in the 60's, what people call the 60's, meaning the late 60's, they all thought the world was going to end and they found a freedom in that. I don't think the world is going to end. It is the knowledge that it will keep revolving forever that gives me my freedom. I, in this moment in this place right now, love you all and want to be all over you. I picture you all blowing kisses at me and them forming in a rosy cloud above me and then descending on my body all at once. Me in a fetal womb of thousands of kisses is what I am picturing and I am for real. I really want all of you to too.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Before This Goes Any Further...
like how we could have considered.
and we'll say the nicest things.
cause truth, and noble speak, they all run.
like we'd run -
if we were older and smarter and better,
and wanted.
and if that seems impressive,
Wish to agree.