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.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Monday, July 19, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
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
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
Thursday, August 20, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Time flips the coin
When you are young and very open and see the division between things, and align yourself with the things on either side of the line. It doesn't matter so much which side you choose but that you are definitive, and that you ring clear and loud. You are a bell on the sidewalk.
When you are young and you buy everything at the Salvation Army or the Church Mouse you are secure in your non conformity, and sure that you're doing the right thing, almost always, and most likely all the time. All your clothes cost a quarter or a dollar, and you know that Emma Goldman was right and that anarchy is not the chaos that most people assume but instead the freedom for humans to rule themselves as they choose, and you also know that the sun will come up tomorrow and that you believe.
You consume no alcohol, meat, or cigarettes, but you try not to be annoying about your abstinence, since all of your friends do. You plug along, in bands or writing zines, putting up fliers, believing in movements that are happening very far away in the warehouses of Oakland or in Tompkins Square Park, far removed from the cornfields surrounding you. You try to connect yourself with grit, with despair in the dollar, with revolutionaries of extraordinary height and of pure silver consciousness.
Somehow you grow away from the lines, somehow when you start to read Baudelaire and Sartre and began to watch the straight trees felled from their roots, when the people that hold up the architecture of idealism begin to stoop, when they get tired, as all beings do, because it is tiring having to be fucking perfect all the time.
You move to a place like Las Vegas where the people are as decimated as the baked earth, where they have tried to raise families for 30 years against the backdrop of corrupt, booze-soaked, cocaine-driven, insatiable casinos and the people who thought that they'd be a good idea to start, who think that the world's fools need anymore opportunities to screw themselves and to lose their children's money. As if the bars and streetcorners in Newark and south Peoria don't already provide that opportunity every day of the week, although clothed in less glittery gowns. The generations there of circus performers and casinos bosses, pockmarked and bewildered at their progeny and their inability to articulate what exactly went wrong, except that they moved to a soulless place in a gutted environment that even the Anasazi abandoned when they could.
So slowly, you become lost to ideas and cling to things instead, which is the inevitable process of growing up in America, because it is easier to go out and buy stuff than it is to admit that you don't know where any of your ideas went, or why you believed in them in the first place, because money always wins in the end, and at that point it becomes clear that it has conquered even YOUR consciousness, and you, who though yourself immune to such frivolity and used your water bottles over and over, you who would spend $5 on a night out seeing a band, start to believe in the lie of accumalation. That more is better, and after all, more is UP.
Your solution to this creeping realization is to drink, drink as much as you possibly can (and lots of cocaine too)and still look good doing it, since you're only in your mid 20s no one will notice will they? Numb yourself to the possibility that you have embraced the machine you hated, that you have let it fuck you on a regular basis and that even worse, you LIKED IT WHEN IT FUCKED YOU
Sooner or later you have too much stuff and nowhere to put it. The moneys gone and you're still alone inside your head. Darkness fills the alcoholic void of space between you and the past and it begins to resemble blood, and you begin to notice the sunlight, you begin to feel that you have finally walked through a door and into the light of your life, and that you don't have to be anything you don't want to be. That free will, although western and not exclusive, is either a great or a terrifying thing.
But time flips the coin against you, time hustles you along a dark street and swipes your wallet, time puts something in your ecstasy, and 8 or 9 years later your 5 year old son mentions 'knockout drops' while shopping at target. Time is unreal except in the tiny handprints on the clock, time is unreasonable and difficult to pack, time is lopsided and memory is drunk. The real thing is the moment, the light, the expanse of space between you and the past. The real thing is to believe in the real thing. Nothing else really matters.
When you are young and you buy everything at the Salvation Army or the Church Mouse you are secure in your non conformity, and sure that you're doing the right thing, almost always, and most likely all the time. All your clothes cost a quarter or a dollar, and you know that Emma Goldman was right and that anarchy is not the chaos that most people assume but instead the freedom for humans to rule themselves as they choose, and you also know that the sun will come up tomorrow and that you believe.
You consume no alcohol, meat, or cigarettes, but you try not to be annoying about your abstinence, since all of your friends do. You plug along, in bands or writing zines, putting up fliers, believing in movements that are happening very far away in the warehouses of Oakland or in Tompkins Square Park, far removed from the cornfields surrounding you. You try to connect yourself with grit, with despair in the dollar, with revolutionaries of extraordinary height and of pure silver consciousness.
Somehow you grow away from the lines, somehow when you start to read Baudelaire and Sartre and began to watch the straight trees felled from their roots, when the people that hold up the architecture of idealism begin to stoop, when they get tired, as all beings do, because it is tiring having to be fucking perfect all the time.
You move to a place like Las Vegas where the people are as decimated as the baked earth, where they have tried to raise families for 30 years against the backdrop of corrupt, booze-soaked, cocaine-driven, insatiable casinos and the people who thought that they'd be a good idea to start, who think that the world's fools need anymore opportunities to screw themselves and to lose their children's money. As if the bars and streetcorners in Newark and south Peoria don't already provide that opportunity every day of the week, although clothed in less glittery gowns. The generations there of circus performers and casinos bosses, pockmarked and bewildered at their progeny and their inability to articulate what exactly went wrong, except that they moved to a soulless place in a gutted environment that even the Anasazi abandoned when they could.
So slowly, you become lost to ideas and cling to things instead, which is the inevitable process of growing up in America, because it is easier to go out and buy stuff than it is to admit that you don't know where any of your ideas went, or why you believed in them in the first place, because money always wins in the end, and at that point it becomes clear that it has conquered even YOUR consciousness, and you, who though yourself immune to such frivolity and used your water bottles over and over, you who would spend $5 on a night out seeing a band, start to believe in the lie of accumalation. That more is better, and after all, more is UP.
Your solution to this creeping realization is to drink, drink as much as you possibly can (and lots of cocaine too)and still look good doing it, since you're only in your mid 20s no one will notice will they? Numb yourself to the possibility that you have embraced the machine you hated, that you have let it fuck you on a regular basis and that even worse, you LIKED IT WHEN IT FUCKED YOU
Sooner or later you have too much stuff and nowhere to put it. The moneys gone and you're still alone inside your head. Darkness fills the alcoholic void of space between you and the past and it begins to resemble blood, and you begin to notice the sunlight, you begin to feel that you have finally walked through a door and into the light of your life, and that you don't have to be anything you don't want to be. That free will, although western and not exclusive, is either a great or a terrifying thing.
But time flips the coin against you, time hustles you along a dark street and swipes your wallet, time puts something in your ecstasy, and 8 or 9 years later your 5 year old son mentions 'knockout drops' while shopping at target. Time is unreal except in the tiny handprints on the clock, time is unreasonable and difficult to pack, time is lopsided and memory is drunk. The real thing is the moment, the light, the expanse of space between you and the past. The real thing is to believe in the real thing. Nothing else really matters.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Summer Drive
drive in the summer night the sensation of time flies away from fingertips music on the radio we connect to exterior scene the cornfields billow in bluish tips in segments elongated through the rows the regiments of stalks reach out to the horizon
the backseat was plastic or like plastic when we were kids there was hard round piping that differentiated the parts of the seats from each other and kept us apart too kept us from ripping each other’s hair out or from tearing off the shirt of another girl
I can’t travel anymore I am rooted into the ground I have lost my privileges to voyage beyond the confines of the present and what is happened to the day since it has lost its light as days blend into nights and become one thing that is only separating them is the clock and how it plays out hours
to remember in cars don’t fear the reaper or the twilight zone when you turn to stone and why oh why can’t we be friends in this chocolate city oh Bernadette its a hot time summer in the city with the incense & peppermints all of smells of my best friend’s girl but no one knows the cracklin rose or the king of the road and hey good lookin, Cindy tells me that under the milky way tonite
& im still waitin for my ruca i barely pulled up w/ my heina or whats tonite will be behind her and there are lights of stars ive been runnin down a dream you know a change will do you good will do you good before you know the gold dust woman and theres Christian zombie vampires I am the father the father of nothing oh what you do to me what you do to me the words escape melt on the dashboard a conglomeration between action and experience between inside our minds without speaking everyone knows the radio wants to play your song because of course humans want a continuous soundtrack a tremolo experience of within and without a reverberation of time connect between dark and light and sever the witness of time
the backseat was plastic or like plastic when we were kids there was hard round piping that differentiated the parts of the seats from each other and kept us apart too kept us from ripping each other’s hair out or from tearing off the shirt of another girl
I can’t travel anymore I am rooted into the ground I have lost my privileges to voyage beyond the confines of the present and what is happened to the day since it has lost its light as days blend into nights and become one thing that is only separating them is the clock and how it plays out hours
to remember in cars don’t fear the reaper or the twilight zone when you turn to stone and why oh why can’t we be friends in this chocolate city oh Bernadette its a hot time summer in the city with the incense & peppermints all of smells of my best friend’s girl but no one knows the cracklin rose or the king of the road and hey good lookin, Cindy tells me that under the milky way tonite
& im still waitin for my ruca i barely pulled up w/ my heina or whats tonite will be behind her and there are lights of stars ive been runnin down a dream you know a change will do you good will do you good before you know the gold dust woman and theres Christian zombie vampires I am the father the father of nothing oh what you do to me what you do to me the words escape melt on the dashboard a conglomeration between action and experience between inside our minds without speaking everyone knows the radio wants to play your song because of course humans want a continuous soundtrack a tremolo experience of within and without a reverberation of time connect between dark and light and sever the witness of time
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