The Field

The Field

myflourescenceandmyterribleneed to say what is not what is and what ever shall be what is the future or the past when you stand on the bridge of tomorrow and you sway because swaying is all you’ve ever known and you want to feel good you want that warm rush of euphoria that comes from first love from first taste from first hit from first dance from first boots outta the box all outta the inside trying to fish and finagle its way out into the world

When you stand on the streetcorner and absorb the surroundings when you can smell your own terrible humanity your terrible dry weakness and the fact that one moment you’d never been afraid of anything in the world and the next minute you’re afraid of everything in the world including the cigarette butts that line the gutter and the fact that that stupid gutter has been there for a hundred years soaking up all the grime filth effluvia of a century what an occupation to be a gutter! Can there be anything worse! Maybe to be a sewer rat but I don’t know they don’t seem particularly unhappy do they. If the sewer is all they’ve known, what’s so bad about it to them?

There the question of perspective I won’t and I will, I don’t and I drill, I’ve never  been I before and I is a shell of interaction anyway a pink blobbedy perserverance and pounding of hearts and lungs and brains and don’t forget ovaries those tiny but insanely painful little nodes that press on the rest of my body a painful reminder of the fact that im supposed to be procreating but no it can’t happen no it’s not in the cards

What does it mean to see? What filter of mindlessness comes to shine down on the objects that we perieve and the objects that are witwithin and without. What do we do with them when we have decided we see them what do we do with each categorization each percieved limit of understanding and the whole world recedes everything fades away except for that moment in time when the sun dips below the oceans edge before the sun makes that gilded awful searing line that tells you that the day is done you’ve used up your chances and you’ve spent your success, whatever success is on that particular day and in that particular field

When a field is a bunch of grass swaying in the wind all together now or a field is a bag of skittles candy that is a bunch of different colors but somehow becomes one color all together what does that mean? Is time a field on which we run and try to etch some meaning or is it a void field where we scrabble across trying to figure out our reason for being there, or to find the edge, or to scrape and divide the field so that one half is ours and one half is our ex wifes. I don’t know but im sure Ill spend my life trying to find out. What for the whiteness of the field, or maybe the blue green turning to brown green of the oceans depths, where great behemoths glide throught nightscapes that they love and that we don’t understand, where the great depths of an abyss are really the beginning of something, something else that I don’t understand but that might be the portal to another world, or might just be the lightest and most preternaturally earth bound place that there really is, considering that it’s the closest to the bowels of the earth and to her own utuerus of core

The fields that switch their own identity, the show one face today and then flash another tomorrow, the guy that one day has one face but the next is unrecognizable even though we know he’s the same person, his face altered by how much he did or didn’t drink the night before or whether he had any sleep or gave up smoking, point being that his face a malleable clay mask has turned pink and strange in the morning light at the bustop where we bum a smoke from him one day our friend next day a total stranger

And the stranger that strangers do, can you trust them or hate them, and which should your feeling be at the outset, especially men if you’re a girl, how do you see into their black hearts to know if they were the kind of guy to tie you up in the trunk and dump you off in the woods or were the type to ask you to their hotel room to ask you questions that were certainly intended to make you feel as if  they’re going to dump[ you in the woods but then don’t do it which is more evil which is the monster walking around in the world and some of them have childrens’ faces those children who were never allowed to be children chained to their own walls never allowed to leave their rooms and suddenly thrust out into a world of people who all look like that original mother the screaming banshee of darkness

But the field is a field of poppies too a field of relief and a field of soft welcoming rest it’s just why is it that some people are dealt  such terrible hands and some aren’t, why are some of us so lucky and some so tragically doomed, where does doom come from it certainly isn’t god what kind of god would doom a little three year old boy what reason is there for that I can never believe in something that says there is a reason behind that I refuse to ever think any good can come of that

And so the darkness descends but the darkness isn’t evil outside only inside people’s brains and consciousness and their destitute need to belong to something to someone and to love and to be heard and to play and run and be free like a child once more once more taking the wonderful droplets of light from the sky and making them their making each golden teardrop a universe, a terrarium a star

The Evil Jealousy Web of Facebook Sucks Me In

I am so fucking sick of facebook and the way that it infiltrates my mind and my doings and my comings and goings and the stupid headspace im going to be in for that day and whether or not a feel successful or pretty much a total failure

Dependent on what my classmates from Earlham college are doing a place where the people were completely ahead of me in the game before they even got to college with trust funds cars of their own private schooling and lineage coated in gold leaf a palimpsest of genetic heritage going back generations and me with my crappy public school education and my twenty dollar bill to live on a week

Im not sure I even felt inferior at the time but that’s because I didn’t know any better and they were slumming so as not to make the rest of us feel bad about it I didn’t know I was lower middle class until I found out what some of my classmates had in the bank

I was oblivious to all of this however I was so keenly excited to be in a place where somebody actually cared what I thought and I had a chance for the first time in my life to explore subjects in depth and to be actually challenged, challenged so much for me who had slid by on straight As in Peoria’s bullshit public schools

I can’t believe I even let it get to me let the solidity of jealousy creep in and make me less of a human being it drives me crazy that they seem to be STILL either wildly wealthy or famous or still doing really good extra good things for the poor of the world or just being better than me in multitudinous ways!

The women don’t seem to have kids very much and the men seem to have married women much younger than them oh some things never change thanks for fucking nothing facebook! I’d have never known ANY of that unless I’d decided to go to my reunion which for me doesn’t even apply because I couldn’t stick out the incestuous nature of Earlham’s dating scene you’d sleep with somebody and then they’d sleep with someone else (who you of course knew) and then on and on…ad nauseum

Those east coast kids with their Waldorf and Montessori and Friends school pasts, already eating off the plate of second helpings that they were entitled to by birthright, and then me being mad about it because I wasn’t from that class it is so STUPID it makes me CRAZY to even think about how DUMB I AM BEING when I know that in actuality they tended to be the best people I have ever known the most sincere and conscientious and kind although it’s easier to be all of those things when you never had to worry about your future or being smart or having enough money

Fuck you facebook! Thanks for ruining a nice memory for me! Or thank you for bringing the absolute worst out in my personality! FACECRACK CAN FUCK A DUCK

Memories of Thinness

I often think about a dream place where I'll be thin again--like 1970s thin, which was different than today's straight-up-and-down female thinness. It's some sort of amalgamation of the impressions that ruled my childhood, Fast Times at Ridgemont High crossed with Charlie's Angels, sprinkled with a few Blondie and Duran Duran videos. In the late 70s and early 80s everyone was still effortlessly thin (or so it seemed to be effortless) as those days were still largely untainted by the effects of hydrogenated fats, corn syrup, or fast food bigger than the single McDonald's hamburger. My mom and all her friends were very thin, as is attested to by the photographs of the time, and everybody still smoked. Although the past was never the halcyon time that it seems in retrospect, the large majority of people one saw anywhere were slender to very thin, and they seemed to be so without any effort (the extent of exercise at the time being tennis, bowling, and disco dancing). "Overweight" was the 50 year old guy with skinny arms and legs and a slight beer belly, and I mean SLIGHT by today's standards. But, maybe this was only my child's perception of the 1970s--that everybody was so effortlessly svelte.

After all, dexedrine and benzedrine were still prescribed to "tired" housewives on a regular basis, as were quaaludes, Valium, and even Demerol, all of which are powerful appetite suppressants. Not to mention how much cocaine most of my childhood idols imbibed. My sense that all these people were "naturally" thin was most likely an illusion that the era created by proxy. Betty Ford still drank and popped pills then. Did anybody notice that Americans sort of began to balloon in the 1980s? Not that I'm advocating drug taking for weight control. It's just an interesting coincidence, and perhaps not any coincidence at all. The 70s were, after all, the ten years just before Nancy Reagan's declaration of the "War on Drugs," which occurred right at the time that every major American city was being decimated by the scourge of crack cocaine. Unfortunately, that "war" could never be won--the effects of which can be seen in crack's stranglehold on both urban and rural communities still today.

But I digress. If there is a link between the preternaturally thin masses of the 70s and the rise of the drug culture after the 1960s, it doesn't much explain the previous decades of the 20th century. Of course, before the 1950s, most people in the U.S. had to work very hard for any food that they would be lucky enough to get on their table. The rise of time-saving household appliances, the social welfare programs enacted after the Great Depression, mass-produced food stuffs, and urban migration lessened the American's connection between hard physical labor and food. Ironically, though, until the 1920s, if you had any kind of health problem (from sleeping problems to "digestive ailments") you could go to your local pharmacy and retrieve a sizable amount of cocaine hydrochlorate or tincture of laudanum, both excellent appetite suppressants.

My dream of ideal thinness isn't marred by drug addiction or the influence of a culture of pharmaceuticals. It remains a child's dream, in all ways hopelessly idealized and connected to my sensory impressions and recollections of the late 70s-early 80s. There is always a pool, sparkling & kidney shaped under a bowl of Idaho or Long Beach sky (two places my relatives lived at the time). The water reflects & absorbs that sky, as the hard glare of desert air bounces off my can of Coke (sweetened with cane sugar) and the bag of Clover Club potato chips my brother and I are eating. Hall & Oates and "Betty Davis Eyes," "Abacadabra" waft over the concrete from the transistor radio. We are all tan, feathery, enveloped in striped terry cloth shorts and the puffy iron-ons of our T-shirts. A jet plane intersects the turquoise sky. And no one, not anyone in the picture, is fat.

Vision

Everybody needs a vision. This vision can take the shape of many things--it can be visual art, it can be music, cooking, crafts, photography, writing, skateboarding, whatever. The more the vision relies on things outside the self, the more restorative and nutritive it will be. This vision provides joy when there is no joy in the immediate day; it sustains when there is no sustenance to feed the physical body; it loves when there is no love left in a person. Without vision, we are just automatons, just getting through the stupid frustrating day, of getting the things that our money culture tells us we need, the stuff that is supposed to make us happy. We're supposed to have that 36" plasma TV--if we don't have it there's something wrong with us. If we don't even want it, then there's REALLY something wrong with us.

I know that while I write this I am being untrue to my vision, because it's a lie to say that my vision has always made me happy. That is one of the great untruths, I think, about vision--that it is always supposed to make you happy. No--sometimes, in fact your vision can make you stay for awhile in your unhappiness, really considering it, turning it over and over like a new-found stone, examining it for flaws, nicks, or even the hint of quartz shining through. That consideration of sorrow is one of the points of vision. It forces you to slow down. You can't just pass through the stages of life when you have to express every detail of it through your vision--every tear becomes a desolate note played in discord, every cry to whatever a god may be becomes a brush stroke on the canvas, every day spent waiting for change becomes another touch to your child's face or the loving embrace you give them every morning.

My vision has been writing for a long time, but hasn't always been--although it's always been part of my life, since I was old enough to write. I always painted, and sang, and played guitar, but by college writing for me had emerged as my preeminent form of expression, and I knew at that time that I would work my vision through words. Why? Some people develop that real mode of expression through the musical instrument, through their bodies in dance, through the fluidity of the paint, through the wood they hew and form together into the peaceful eaves. The mode doesn't matter--only that you have the vision.

Every little girl needs a vision encouraged in them early in life, and every little boy does too. Everyone needs something they love that is not a person--something not rooted in flesh, that cannot die or disappoint. The vision that causes an electric surge of energy to flow from the brain to the fingers to the external world. This is the conduit of the internal sea to the outside, to the material world. The outside world is where autonomous things exist and where they are perceived, categorized, and translated back into the heteronymous nature of the human mind. That the sky can be "blue" is relative to how each individual perceives "blue." That is the relationship between the internalized vision and the literal vision of sensory perception.

But back to the purpose of vision, which is to transport, to transfer the worry of the everyday into something that makes that worry bearable. The purpose of vision is to sustain. When pain becomes unbearable or the problems of life are a sea of darkness, your vision is what keeps you getting up every day. That's what people must mean by faith, although I've never been religious. But vision is the same thing. It keeps you getting up, loving the sun, thankful to be alive & allowed to even have a vision. Because if you can believe in your vision, everything else will become a part of that belief. The sustenance that your vision provides sees you through the longest day, the interminable night.

For we can connect to each to each other through the extension of language, through our fingertips, through our voices, our touch, our love. But without connection, we are still whole, because we have seen the light come after dark and are therefore autonomous. Both modes are we--heteronymous is what connects us to each other and the earth, and to things that are eternal. Your vision will lead you into worlds just being born, and to where worlds are erased. It's your reward for being human, and for being alive.

Cornchippers and Punkrockers in Peoria...a commemoration

It’s been nearly twenty years since I’ve heard the word “cornchip” snarled at me epithetically. In fact, the slur is so associatively tied up with high school in my memory that I think in many ways I’ve conflated the two. So it’s extremely fitting that we’re having a reunion of after twenty years—the same time most people go to their high school reunions—because many cornchippers and punkrockers won’t be going to their 20-year high school reunions. After all, why would you really want to see the people who assailed you with the incomprehensible name-calling “Cornchip!!! Hey cornchip!!!” for four miserable years of your life?
The curious (and uniquely Peorian) term is generally agreed upon to have its roots at East Peoria high school, somewhere in the Stepe brother era (early 80s). I don’t know exactly how the absurdist term caught on with the jocks and stoners, but I do know that by 1987 it was being jockeyed around the playground at Calvin Coolidge, where I spent one miserable year. All of a sudden, if you listened to New Wave (or in my case the Stray Cats) and wore a lot of black (or in my case huge Herman Munster-like Creepers that I saved all summer to mail order from London), people followed you home from school screaming “CORN CHIP!!!! CORN CHIP!!!!” It was as perplexing as it was irritating. I mean, I could’ve understood “FREAK” or “HEY WEIRDO,” etc., but cornchip???? Suffice it to say, if you were in any way different, or weird—and you didn’t care for the garbage being churned out by KZ-93 at the time—you were most definitely a cornchip. And, relentlessly, the school bullies made sure you paid dearly for your difference.
All nostalgia aside, the 1980s were lame. Maybe they seem cool now—because the project of nostalgia is to distract you from the greatness of the present moment—but at the time they sucked. Reagan wouldn’t leave the White House, and his wife had launched the laughable “War on Drugs,” which, if anything, only seemed to fuel the ever-ballooning crack epidemic. Until at least 1985, I lived in daily fear that the U.S.S.R. (remember that acronym???) would nuke the U.S. to smithereens, that The Day After (whoever made that TV movie has it coming) was sure to happen any moment that Khrushchev or Andropov got a bad bowl of borscht. I admit I was excited when Thriller came out, even more so by Madonna’s first two records, but they were quickly eclipsed by Bon Jovi’s overthrow of the radio waves. Bon Jovi was solely responsible for my deepening immersion in the Clash. Spandex and hair metal??? I thought that had all gone the way of Thin Lizzy. As it turned out, I couldn’t have been more wrong. (Hair metal never really went away, and it never will, I’m sure).
Peoria, unexpectedly, was rife for a youth revolution. Working-class, perched on an industrialized river and suffering from a bad case of identity crisis due to its seedy, whiskey-producing history, in retrospect it was the perfect town for a punk rising. Although in the mid to late 80s it seemed anything but to us. If only we could Get Out!!! If only we could Make Them See!!! (because there’s always a “they” in adolescence, isn’t there?) We were too young and unwise to appreciate the goldmine we had on our hands. Part of that had to do with the fact that it was always difficult to see “our” music live.
To see live music at that point in Peoria you basically had to be willing to put it on yourself. If you weren’t going to be solely responsible, you were going to have to go to every stinkin VFW show (even if you didn’t like the bands playing), because without the 3 or 4 bucks they were charging at the door, the next show wouldn’t happen. This sucked at the time, but it made us more creative people than we would’ve been if we would’ve grown up in Chicago and been able to see a great band at the Metro every night of the week. Despite the fact there were a lot of fights at Peoria shows—there were almost always fights, a phenomenon which if you weren’t actively being attacked made the whole scene take on a carnivalesque demeanor—we had a lot going for us, us cornchips. If there wasn’t a show happening, we called up a VFW or American Legion hall, pooled our resources from our crappy part time jobs, hired the hall & made it happen. Things were harder to get, yet easier to achieve, since if you didn’t do it nobody was going to do it for you. I saw Leviathan play once in a barn in utter darkness, in the pouring rain. That do-it-yourself spirit was the most significant, and most enduring, facet of the cornchips and punkrockers of Peoria. There’s no time in life to wait around for something to happen. That “stick together” philosophy also explains why we had shows were there would be a folk band, a goth band, a metal band, and a Jim Morrison impersonator all on the same bill. We couldn’t afford to be picky about genre.
The teenage years create a kind of hyper-reality, a heightened state of existence where everything in your life seems to hang on one night seeing Dollface or Sub 13 or on one phone call (which, in the pre-cell phone era, you might hang around all night at your house waiting for), or if your parents might be kind and decide to let you go to Thrills. Tomorrow? Tomorrow be damned. What mattered was TONIGHT, tonight and your new Descendents of Joy Division or Bauhuas t-shirt and the pocketful of rush you picked up from Playmate Video (which, coincidentally, had the area’s only copies of Suburbia and Decline of Western Civilization and Thrashin’, not to mention all the John Waters’ films). You were on your way to break bottles at the Flumes, to a party at The Barn, exorcise a soul at the Witches’ Circle in Springdale Cemetery, to see Naked Raygun at ICC or G.G. Allin in the piss stained basement of Co-Op Records. There were cigs to be smoked, houses to be TP’d, children to scare at Northwoods Mall, curbs to grind at Fulton Plaza. Possibility hung in the air like so many molecules of youth, each one split and dispersed in every passing moment. Tomorrow be damned, but in a way, it was already happening. If only we’d known that at the time.

7th and C

7th and C

Hurry let me slide
out of the doorway
onto the street
although the threshold
is ancient
so flat that inside
and outside
are the same

Sharp sharp lines
of the night shot
in a hole
hurry hurry must breathe
again must make whole
again

Darkness dusts
my shoulder
a crow’s wing
and the pigeon’s breath

Hide in the shadows
that run crevassed
against the light
the crumbled ruins
of industry
shouldering rock
that once housed
hardtoiling and earnest
ancestors

While we toil
into memory
the idea
that we can escape
through the white light
up and up
darkness surrounds us
blankets the memories
disassembles our sight
The burnt out corner
of a lifetime spent
searching

übertragung

This mind you have right now
isn’t the one you’ll have in twenty years.
No, it won’t be a transplant. Or futuristic DNA
meddling. Or an augmentation. (Apologies
to the surgeons). It’s that your brain
was borne to you a membrane. It will grow,
and grow, and outgrow you. It will grow over
the wall of your garden.
Your neighbors will be pissed.

Some things you just know. Those things
you find beautiful. The back of your five
year old’s neck. The feeling of the first taste
of a Coca Cola, when the bubbles go up
your nose. Sweat. The determined sun rising,
even though it happens day, after day, after day.

Kant called it übertragung. Thinking
without concepts. Transfer. Transmission.
As the dark horizon is replaced by the splinters
of dawn, as the idea of love overcomes its physical
unreality, as the green of the trees is replaced
by the chlorophyll in your science textbook.
It all existed before we discovered it.
We only try to siphon it off, to feed
ourselves. The food of life is in ideas.

You know what I know and we know it together.

The things you find beautiful may change,
or they may not. Most likely, they will grow
in number. Things you never noticed before.
The aesthetic is in your heart. You divide
and recreate each beautiful compartment, each symbol
of your essence. Every time you breathe,
your mind drinks the world. Every time,
it opens a new door. Every time, you are
delivered.