Fingers For Shoehorns

".....If you didn't go and pick the shoes without the loop on the back you wouldn't have had anything to worry about. These aren't like the last pair, with the softer-than-cotton strip sewn inside the loop with enough room for your strongest finger (and maybe another small finger) to hold onto that spared your pointer finger or middle finger plenty of pain, this new pair has nothing at all to hold onto and you now are left every morning and busy evening with a surprisingly annoying burn that takes more time each day to die down and less time each day to start you swearing. __How much could it cost to get one? A shoe horn? It can't be much. You could probably find a nice one around town. Maybe at an antiques tent with dark marbled swirls like preserved smoke from 1923. What do they make those out of these days? Neoprene? Bakelite?...Lucite? __Thats not what I think of, when I think of a shoehorn. I think of one from Algiers or somewhere like that, made from ivory and polished compulsively by a thin veiled woman in an extravagant cart-house with a compact fire rolling in place outside the window on the temporary lawn that exotic clippers had laid down low, coiling each blade of grass behind them as they went, ...or tigers eye. __Mica schist from China comes to mind, blown flat and smooth like river pebbles by the constant wind across those great angular and mossy grey mountains you see standing alone in the ocean. Isn't that where wind is born? China? I think I heard that once. It starts there and makes it's way across the planet. Always coming from there, and leaving from there. Never arriving there from somewhere else. Sounds like legend right? It's great when science does that. That's what makes it worthwhile, I think. __Shoehorns seem like an old, outdated thing right? Your grandfather used them and you saw one in his drawer with his special wooden box with a marine map on the lid. Mysterious keys and buttons all around it.__ Just unlace your shoes every time before you put them on and the problem is solved, you say? Impossible! You know that this is too much to ask. It can't be done! Not by me, and especially not by someone young, like you and that kid you are always are hanging around with now, the kid with the cool house and a colorful ladder up to his bedroom loft with a huge defunct x-ray machine set into a recess in the wall that made for hours of sci-fi pretend games. __Kids's hardly have to use their imaginations these days (as older people are always saying "these days"). Instant gratification just might rob you of something valuable like the patience that leaves you to yourself and stirs up creative thoughts. __He had the little star stickers on the ceiling right? The little ones that would end up in his uncombed hair on mornings when we carpooled to school. You said something about them, that he arranged them at random but insisted that they predicted newly forming constellations, like he was some kind of child prodigy cosmological prophet, and he did it humming along arrogantly to Bach playing on a phonograph, and mumbled as he strained his draining eyes into a  powerful telescope in the hopes that he find his bearings out in directionless space. He said that when a star ran out of hydrogen fuel and "died", the sticker from his map of the system fell down and landed on him in his sleep. He said that any day this happened, he was in mourning, and purposefully did not remove the small flattened bead from his head out of respect for the departed. Sometimes he had a pair of them. I guess his imagination wasn't really hurting after all. __Do you play pretend that your fingers are shoehorns? I guess that is one way of going about it. Do you pretend that it doesn't hurt if do it when your shoes are too tight? Would you pretend that your impatience didn't leave you with a blister? No, you don't have one, but I can see how it could happen. No, you don't have a pretend band-aid on your finger, it is real. but no, it's not from using your finger as a shoe horn. It's from pretending that your finger is a breaded mozzarella cheese stick..."

Currently listening : Outside in By Freeform Release date: 31 May, 2005

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Furtive Glance

I have a chance and I look. Without drawing notice. Without anybody figuring I was looking at anything other than the dark fish tank against the paisley wall with the light bulb burned out. Actually the bulb had been removed and taken in order to find a replacement. The bulb had been a little too bright, and it was thought that a softer, less flourescent light would be better. The fish didn't need to glow, and the anemone's freckles looked better when they werent jumping out at you. But one hadn't been found, and so I couldn't see the fish in there if I really had been looking at the tank, which I wasn't, because the fish tank was just a point. A point to focus on, that absolved me from any suspicions of staring just to the right of the real subject__a girl of course__or maybe actually an electromagnet disguised as a woman that I couldn't help but watch that radiatied soft colorful photons of electromagnetic fields from electrons excited photoelectrically by other light just barely coming down from the colored skylights, being pleasantly interferred with by the leaves and branches of rocking trees outside  the skylight that night, __Fields from particles changing energy states sharply in a flurry of absortion and ejection of quanta that left as invisible bowed lines of force and sank into my eyes with crystalline superconductive hooks that pierced my optic nerves and shot disruptive impulses
through my face that flashed red and made their way into all parts of my body, with some ending up in my intestines and contributing to the denaturing of violet bile. __For time away from this location, this subject, my eyes worked against incredible odds, against the whims of the great magnet and would be soon pulled back to their previous position to find the signal gone, having moved again, and an empty lawn chair with a cup holder there in it's place. But I would only have to wait a moment before my field of vision was guided laterally sideways and smudgy, less refined than the way the picture pans when you watch a movie on network television taken out of letterbox form and squashed to fit inside the confines of your sorry set with some network stiff leaning attentively forward with his hand on a sticky joystick guiding the picture with expert aim so that we at home might not miss a moment of leading lady physiognomical greatness in tearproof mascara, or high speed boat chases and briefcases fallin into the water and soggy wet tuxedoes__back to this preoccupation that was chosen for me and dragged my sight along with a growing interest further and further away from the unlit fish tank and closer to the object that had strayed from being near it, steadily moving, until a change occured and a black dot grew bigger and deeper into a hole that was filled with an illusion that darkened my eyes and seemed to turn them around to face the inside of my head to witness a revelation beginning in my mind, snapping away from the hooks and leaving the braided fiberglass cables to fall in a sweeping slow succesion down to the floor leaving a trail in the dust as they retracted and rewound back to her to ball up and wait while they were refitted with hooks, which allowed me more time away to explore the idea, or a hint of an idea.
This idea or realization, was that the combination of incident wavelengths of radiation resulting from the excitations had a name, and I felt sure I knew it. Certain signals oscillate at special frequencies, when the numbers and ratios that describe them are those of the sort that are usually recurring in the patterns and motifs we  generally regard as being of the highest order of simplistic beauty in design, and just as these quantities recieve special attention, some places along the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation__spaced out in a certain musical ratio__are involved in most of the more noteworthy natural events and phenomenon, and are in turn given latin names which were all those of girls. I felt like I knew of this one. I think it was usually preoccupied with the aurora borealis and usually never made it down this close to the equator, but here it was, and damn me I couldn't pronounce her name. I was sure I had it wrong, and the accents around the letters went misunderstood by my inverted eyes as they traced the cursive glow stretched by the concave curve of the back of my head. I mouthed it probably as I felt the buzz of a coronal mass ejection on a far away sun. Was I seeing magnetic field lines? radiation? The form of a name? A woman? A combination of these parts? Most likey so... 

Currently listening : Lovers Rock By Lovejoys Release date: 31 January, 2006

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From Jupiter, Florida to Neptune, New Jersey

"Place-names: the name"

I listened dolefully as this guy was going on about a planet caravan he was planning to take with a group of people. Talking about going from Jupiter, FL to Neptune, NJ. He was asking if I knew of any other cities with names the same as planets. I told him I didn't. He didn't believe me. He said that there were others, and they would make their way towards them after their run of the east coast. He said that the names corresponded to these places on more than just a superficial level, that it was not just by chance that these names were given, that these places represented and resembled the identitiy of their planetary counterparts, and that by travelling from one to the next in succession, you are in essence tied to, and mimicing indirectly the events of space travel and tourism that familiarizes one with the rest of our solar system and imparts upon one the experience of having visited exotic planets. I marveled at his resolve.

He was starting the trip here in Florida. Said it had been years in the making. He asked if I wanted to come along. I said I had to be in Ganymede, Georgia early tomorrow, and that if I left now I could still make it there with time left for a good nights sleep. He noted my sarcasm and lisping with dissatisfaction he told me that I should try Defiance, Ohio. "It was my kind of place," he said. I said I hadn't been there and asked him if the name of that place had any significance. "Of course" he said. "People are difficult there. Everyone is difficult there." I said I didn't mean to be difficult and that it's just hard to take seriously someone you believe to have ingested a healthy dose of lsd 25 and was likely to continue the trend for the duration of this "caravan." Why talk of space travel and psychedelic substances always have to share the same page with these zealots, I wondered.

He trailed off with his colorful line of vehicles, linked and hitched to one another, that swerved and skidded in a snake-like motion as it moved up the edge of the coast and almost fell off twice. I watched as I tried to think of other cities with planet names. I came up with nothing. I became very curious. I really wanted to know if there were others. I stopped for a second holding my breath and feeling like I had been somehow inoculated with this persons hysteria, like it was contagious. My brain felt oxygen starved briefly. My eyes widened at the thought that he might have been successful in introducing some chemical into my bloodstream. My breath still held, I was sure that I remember detecting, in his breath, if only subconciously, the faintly perceptable indication of a slight disturbance in some ulterior PH table of acids and bases that became evident, not so much through actual odor, as from a certain introduction of a drastic ionic concentration drop, or in this case a rise, that left one sniffing quietly in a search for classification of the tinge of cold at the end of the nose that only became more futile as more air was gathered for extrapolation. My throat closed and my eyes narrowed as I cursed while thinking that by sampling more air than was necessary, I probably only increased the dosage of what was intended for me, which was most likely ample to begin with, and that unpleasant things lay in store for me. I waited. I felt better. Nothing happened. I waited.

Currently listening : Paranoid By Black Sabbath Release date: 25 October, 1990

5:53 AM - 5 Comments - 1 Kudos - Add Comment

Waste Mismanagement

-"What's  funny? What makes you want to watch me like that?"
-"I don't know. I guess I just haven't ever seen anybody throw away so much dirt before."
-"Well what do you suppose I do with it? just leave it everywhere? I have got to do something
with it. I have to put it somewhere."
-"No, it's just that you are are throwing away so much of it at one time guess."
-"Well, I don't know what you would want me do with it. I have got to get rid of the stuff, or I will get in trouble, you see. It's bad enough I have to deal with it without you bothering about what I do with it."
-"Well it just seems kind of weird you know, usually I think of the dumpster being used for trash; stuff we dont need, or broken stuff, or the containers and packaging that new things come in; food rappers, empty cans and bottles, you know, stuff like that. If you walk 10 feet out there, you are gonna see more dirt. It's everywhere. Always around in good supply."
-"Yeah I know, thanks for the reminder. I know it is everywhere, afterall I am the one who usually cleans it up. But since you are so damn interested in it, maybe you should be the one doing it. And like I said, what do you suggest for me to do with it? and why do you care?"
-"Uhh... I don't know what should be done with it, I never said I had a better plan for it, I was just noticing how it seemed funny; the idea of throwing away dirt."
-"What, you never noticed before? it's been going on like this since you came here."
-"I guess not, I guess I just took it for granted. Figured that's what you do with dirt."
-"And all of a sudden, you start worrying about where I put the damn dirt. I wish I had the time and energy to think about crap like that; things other than what really matters!"
-Who's to say it doesn't matter? Maybe you are doing something harmful by tossing all that dirt in the dumpster."
-Oh goddamn, do you really think it changes anything? Would you be happier if I hauled all this shit out there, and dumped it with the rest of it's kind? It would just be back in here in a week or so, with all this wind and drought, and besides, what the hell do you propose that I do with it?"
-"I guess it seems funny because it's always just around, dirt you know, it's not something we made, so it's funny to see it get thrown in the trash with all the rest of the stuff that we made, have used, and are done with."
-"You ever seen yard clippings and leaves and shit thrown away? or were you too busy fucking off? That is the same thing really. Does that seem funny to you?"
-"Well I guess now that you mention it..."
-"Oh come on! What would you do with those? Got any ideas?
-"I guess burn it. That would take care of it alright."
-"Well like you said, how do you not know that it wouldn't be harmful, and besides, that is not always an option for people, depending on where they live."
-Yeah you're right, or maybe mulch it all up, and use that stuff for whatever, maybe it would make good insulation for houses."
-"Thats ridiculous. Why the hell would you think that would work?"
-"Can you think of a reason why it wouldn't?"
-"No, but I am sure there are reasons why it isn't used, and I'm sure that it has been tried before by people who know about that kind of thing."
-"Dont be so sure. You never know what ideas have not been allowed a chance to be implemented."
-"Sounds like you are in the wrong business then, smartass!"
-"Of course I am! Isn't almost everybody?"
-"So come on then, what do we do with the dirt?"
-"Well what do you do with water you don't want?"
-"Uh..., usually I pour it down the sink, but that's just it; water comes from the sink. That is it's place. Why would you even think of that?"
-"Well then where is the dirt's place? Outside with the other dirt?... that's not where you have been puttin it."
-But that's different, there isn't some utility, some station, where dirt is dispensed and where dirt could be disposed of. There isn't a special goddam dirt support system!"
-"Do you think it is time that there is one? Would you like it if there was a network of underground dirt transportation tunnels, powered by pneumatics, which had receptacles popping up every so often; wherever they were specially ordered by customers, and where the county thought they would be most useful? Something you could pour all your unwanted dirt into and then shut the lid, to have it whisked away to some processing plant where I am sure they could find some productive use for it, and not have to ever worry about cleaning up the same dirt twice? Because when you entrust the handling of your dirt to the waste management corporations, you can't really be sure that they will act responsibly, and that you won't find yourself doing the same job twice, fighting the same damn dirt twice like some prisoner of war you allowed to go free, only to fight him again after he had been picked up by his own men and put back into circulation?"
-"Yeah well, that might make my job easier, as ridiculous as your idea is, but I still don't understand what the problem with putting it in the dumpster is."
-"Well, if you ever watch them as they empty a dumpster into the truck, a dumpster that has been filled with dirt, you will see that a whole lot of it becomes airborne as it is stirred up by the fall, and then mostly settles back down not very far from the very place it had been collected."
-"Yeah well they still get most of it!"
-"Most of it yes, but wouldn't you like greater efficiency?"
-"Shit! at this point I don't really care at all! Besides, it keeps me busy; cleaning up dirt, and the busier I am, the less I have to worry about bullshit! Tell me this; do you think one day getting out of bed and coming to work will seem funny all of a sudden? Will you sit there in wonder at what you have been doing here all along, and realize some brilliant alternative that would spare me and your co workers your fool headed ramblings?"
-"Hopefully! I very seriously hope that day is near!"
-"Maybe I don't want to bother about it, you ever think about that?maybe I don't really see the use in devoting my day to considering what we both know is never gonna happen, or what I should be, or could be doing, cause you know what? I'm here now, with only this in front of me, and all the rest just seems like horseshit. So what about what could be different? You want it done? Go do it. I'm not gonna stop you. Rabble-rouser wanna-be's like you do nothing to change anything. I'm not inspired. I'm not enlightened. I'm not even the slightest bit entertained. I'm only distracted and annoyed, and my productivity, which up until this point was at an all time high, has just been severely fuckin affected. Maybe you should handled in the way you would be in one of these dystopian facist nowhere regimes you seem to think this country so closely resembles. Maybe you need to be straightened out, get your priorities in order. Maybe people like you should be dealt with they way they handled Socrates, although it's of course a stretch to be mentioning him with the likes of a peon like you, and be made to drink poison!"
-"Oh don't worry, I have been drinking poison;... that slow poison. Actually I have been using several poisons, some working faster, and others more slowly. If you hang aroung long enough, you may just get to see some of the effects."
-"Let's hope so!"

Currently listening : One to Three By Thomas Fehlmann Release date: 1999

7:47 PM - 2 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Lair of the Bugbear

"By now he had no desire to sleep and with the determined step of a frustrated man he went down the covered lime-tree avenue" - Tolstoy

Drifting to sleep I heard something. A mixture of a thump and a knock, at the same time, very large and sluggish, still distant but against the wall opposite of my bed, from the other side where an empty bedroom with a view opening along continuous windows onto a dark avenue of lime trees seemed to hold paradoxically, judging from the size of the sounds I heard sleepily, a vast echoing hall or spacious tunnel with room enough to house an impossibly enormous diabolical shadowy thing, round and elongated, halfway transparent and starry, with fat rings of tissue around its long torso that rippled and set the whiskers and fur stretched across its back into motion like the black bristles of a bright caterpillar on the move, and crooked nubby molars all in the front and in the back too (actually as a matter of fact nothing but) that ground together as it rolled and met the wall the two rooms shared in a clearly unfriendly gesture with it's eyes rolled back and saliva draining through the wide gaps in its obsidian teeth. Dust and humidity out it's stub of a snout that was flat like a pig's and as big as my head on a clean hair day. Festering with parasites as long as my finger bobbing and weaving their way through dense matted fur smeared with children's blood and prickly sharp ends with burrs and knots on each thick greasy strand. It's cramped paws, shriveled and arthritic, on short malnourished appendages, barely made their way out of the mess of fur, and dangled uselessly as the creature rolled and writhed it's way along, feared by youngsters and simple adults, and disturbed and bullied after dark and when unsuspected or disbelieved in.

I layed half alarmed with my eyes still closed and while my concern with my safety lessened as the subsequent seconds ticked away from the unsure moment that a shudder of sound came from the shaded area not too far below the netting my sleepy self and mind hung imaginatively onto until it gently broke apart and I fell onto the gaseous green atmosphere of a fabled planet that sustained, through the spores in the air, incompacitation, and the presentation of the impaired comedy of a dream sequence, that began, while technically still awake, with a tricky slow murmur of firstly unfamiliar voices, then more obviously common and recognizable dialogue in a still secretive muffled dialect, and then the later blurry start of a dusty slide show with what looked like medievel times, with crossbows and antique weapons: shields of oxidized copper, a rock sling, a dragon-scaled breastplate, a mace and a high powered sling shot, a sharpened club to name a few, a war headress of browning red leaves laced up with dry brittle thread from hearts of palm harvests, after which appeared an unrelated metal awning off the side of a yellow house in more modern times, providing shelter for a raincoated toddler, hungry, ready for lunch and beginning to grow fussy, and then proceeding on with a first person excursion through a multitude of events and sensations that time's grasp couldn't reach with it's cloudy fingers, and by then a ball shaped pink gauze strip had been pressed into my ears that turned and deflected sounds from far above awake-land that tried sinking down or sliding from the side like a slick stream of oil surreptitious through less dense water- I moved on to addressing the rushing revelation that shook me and said "wait, you know this sound, from long forgotten repeated nightly exposure, when you felt much as you do now; in that state" and I searched blindly and tried to recall this past, like Proust after his famous tea soaked madeleine, and after a few concentrated submersions into moldy mnemonic holding tanks spilling old dates and engagements as I dropped in, I emerged, mucousy with the recollection, at last again, that my brother would sleep in the room next to mine, and knock with his knee or maybe head against the wall regularly that separated my room from his.

I would hear the framed pictures on the wall buzz as the vibration shook them momentarily and straightened them slightly. It sounded very forceful at times, and I often times wondered were the bruises on his body were, or why there were none, and even went as far as to develop the theory, based on the impression I had that the healing of injuries or maladies is accelerated during sleep, that if an injury is sustained while sleeping, the effects are lessened, and mostly taken care of by morning.

What pulled me from this thinking was the second occurrence of the noise. Again, now, I clearly heard the second time this Bugbear battered the wall. It had taken the time I spent distracted by my nostalgia to roll over to the other end of the room, and start again across the floor, pushing the unused bed out of the way and hitting even harder this time. It was no doubt pleased with itselt, as I could hear it's teeth grinding more loudly as they do when it is nearing the crescendo of it's angry rapture; the splinters and sharp chips that broke from the pressure, as they always do, scattered across the wood floor as it rolled and sunk deep after being rolled over, and fell into it's marbled lacerated eyes that shifted and spun, leaving accretions of slivered serrated vitreous matter in the the underdeveloped eyelids and tear ducts that adaptation had sealed forever, because Bugbears don't ever cry, which fueled and encouraged devilishly the masochistic tantrum that was currently escalating.

I envisioned the room next door and what had now become it's lair, and cringed at the sight of rapidly generating sinister stalactites dripping from the ceiling green and black and slimy horrible with budding growths of acidic flowers breathing foul noxious fumes, and the windows covered over with stringy chunks of evil insulation. The room was becoming distorted and in danger of complete collapse from the stresses of the swelling as the black magic brought in unstable reactions that pulled the space like taffy, insubordinate to the laws of decent and respectable nature, and gave the fucking monster more and more room to gain momentum in its assault on my wall, to fester and ruminate, to rot and self digest, to itch and peel, shedding fur and dander in apalling clumps that it balled up when resting and rolled to the far end of the room, for some unknown and no doubt unsavory later purpose. The room was sealed, door and all, but the smell found its way out and into my room. Like brown sugar and road kill. Sweet also, of all things, on top of it all.

Another smack and I am awake for sure, in bed, at age 6, after dreaming I was much older, with a monster in the next room; a monster that had spawned from a night fear, and chased me, from my last moments awake, into my feeble sleep, into my future, and used the sound of my brother bumping into my wall to intimidate me, to terrify me, to give me the idea that I was under attack by the disfigured supernatural, and that I was reminded by this sound of something from deep in my past, which was actually part of my immediate young present, and that I had read Proust and Tolstoy, and that I didn't believe in fictional creatures evoked to frighten children, and that I could understand why anybody would want to scare children for fun with the threat of a thing such as this, and that I had went to sleep hungry with nobody around, and that the elusive little frog(s) in the miniature pond outside were croaking loud like a big baloon blown up to absolute capacity being grappled by a dry hand, and pinched and pulled at like an upright bass or roughly stroked like a harp. Such big sound from such a little thing.

Currently listening : Ascenseur Pour L'Echafaud (Lift To The Scaffold): Original Soundtrack By Miles Davis Release date: 25 October, 1990

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Meridian Apoplexy

"He thinks as he thinks, and feels as the feels, through the work machines have wrought upon him." - Samuel Butler


Rain beginning to fill the bucket. That is what eventually woke him some mornings. When he anticipated rain, he slept in the overturned bucket that he had to crawl along on his stomach to get inside through the low opening. The opening on either side under the reinforced lip. The side with the steel relief of a milled arrowhead tacked on expertly and evenly stained dark with patina by the steady hand of a jumpsuited masked man aside the hum of an arc welder. A wheel loader bucket. Usually one of the bigger ones, that stood out among the disorganized group of them, for use with other different machines, like; excavators or combinations that varied in height, in width, number of teeth, type of teeth; like tiger, that forked with green prongs of creased heat treated ore, or flat chisel extensions that deftly raked through years of drugery and contamination, swinging back and forth along a dull predetermined arc that prescience removed of any of the elegance the motions should have normally exhibited, or should have been acknowledged, or a bucket that had no teeth, but a discarded cutting edge from a dozer blade, welded across the shanks that the different kinds of teeth are usually fastened to, for de-mucking, as they call it: removing the top layer of wet sludge that qualifies a kind of marshy wetland environment, along with whatever brand of organisms had indifferently settled themselves deep in the dark underworld among hollow bones from the wings of birds that sank as if in grainy quicksand up to their necks and exhaled under the pressure the dense slop outside all around their pink bloodshot lungs exerted with lumpy force and massaged them to sleep while their bodies began painlessly disolving from the bottum up.

A wide bucket, so he could stretch out if he wanted to, which is usually how he began his prepartion for sleep, but usually ended up, just before falling asleep, turning on his side and pulling his knees in towards his chest moderately. If rain looked doubtful, he slept in one of the buckets right side up, in the extent of the curve which sort of cradled him at an angle comfortably tipping the body sideways although sometimes he regretted this feature as he woke once or twice a night to turn his body around inside the bucket, placing his head where his feet were, which could prove to be a daunting task, depending on how handicapped he was by sleep, he was for the most part extremely fond of the way it felt to lay perfectly motionless watching for cosmological swells in that position, although it took some getting used to in the beginning.

When it looked like rain, he'd quote Tolstoy's Valenchuk with "what a nuisance lads!" and wiggle his way inside the metal den that he knew would only offer so much protection, because if the rain persisted beyond a certain point, he would wake from the hypnotizing low ringing of the reverberating noise as the water beat the thick steel with weakling flicks of hundreds of wet fingers with thicknesses that changed sometimes abruptly to a greater intensity, then gradually, with periods of uniformity lasting for unapproximated minutes, begin to dwindle to a light drumming of long thin fingernails softened by soaking before brushing away any inconsistencies in the sheen of still liquid that glazed the chipped paint and pock mark dents that riddled the exterior with cupped strokes that ran from middle top to bottom- to water in his ear and exhaling bubbles as water pooled and seeped across the concentration gradient into the drier ground that the shelter of the bucket promised, and usually delivered, but occasionaly was forced to surrender up to the will of nature and tropical climate.

If he knew a certain bucket would be out of use for a while, he would take certain steps to combat the molestation of the intrusive rain. If the rotation of the bucket usage was high and unpredictable, he wouldn't bother, because he was powerless as to the placement of incoming buckets from the field, and no matter how much fuss he made, the buckets came and went uncaringly, and would never usually be placed again over the very same place that he had hollowed a shallow dug-out lined with plastic, and used the dirt to form a continuous mound that would function as a lip for the curling edge of the polyvinyl chloride bed whose edges rose several inches above the surrounding ground level, which provided an impassable obstacle for the rain (within usual limits). It was or course difficult to work with tools such as shovels or spades within the confines of the bucket, unless he cut the handles considerably shorter, which of course would leave him subject to serious reprimand from the overbearing employers that unsympathetically ran the nearby machine shop in which he was employed, so he had only the option of the meager utilities of simple garden tools and beach toy digging supplies, which were secondhand, and brittle from time in the strong sun on belts of beaches on alternating sides of the meridian which encircled the planet, and easily snapped and broke into sharp, hard pieces that doggedly hid in the shadowy grass where no electricity was used to aid in the study of the piece of land that the suitable bucket happened to be covering.

Once awake and soaking wet, he might determine that there wasn't much point in trying to return to sleep and slide out the low opening of his makeshift sleeping quarters through mud and wet grass cursing with perturbed earthworms tickling his face.

Currently listening : Collusion By :zoviet*france: Release date: 01 August, 1995

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Blind Fortuna

What if I told you that I had found her? Told you that she lived in a cave by the ocean? Not that I had gone looking for her, or that I even realized who it was sitting there in that soggy sand that I was stared at, squinting in the dark, way farther back than I would have liked to have been from the entrance of that dark cave that birds would gather around and fidget on the damp sand across the cooler shadow left by the big rocks above, interested yet intimidated by what they felt drew them there in neglect of food gathering and nest building, maybe by the magnetite bars in their brains, on that day by complete chance while I let curiosity get the better of me and decided to test a theory that some friend had argued to another during a car ride with two other people, one of whom upheld the other end of the debate while I passively listened and drove, and doubted the validity of the others' claim that if you stayed in a pitch black cave long enough, you would first start to see some light, or better stated, it would start to seem like you could see your surroundings again, but in some different kind of light, like you were now receiveing some different information other than light, that came through dimmer but much more defined and articulated, and yet still somewhat less trustworthy, and then, slowly, it becomes as if your thoughts and imaginings take on a more discernable and dynamic visual form, like in a sensory deprivation chamber, but not like hallucinations, nothing that you felt tricked into seeing, just what you would probably see if you had no sense of sight, like blind, you know? which was what would have regularily been going on in your mind, dig? which is why it seemed strange when I saw her in there, because I can't say that I can recall having thought of her, on that or any other day, and found it hard to believe that something so random and unfamiliar could come from my pasing thoughts, as people often times do, just usually not me, and definitely not her, with "wall eyes" as Lermontov called them, and sand in her hair, old and beautiful as she ran the palms of her hands across tops of the puddles in the sand around her and patted and lightly tapped the surface tension with childlike amusement and honest appreciation and though her eyes were blank the expression on her face around them was that of someone who stared in amazement for the first time at something that was a complete surprise, a surprise that was far better even than what they would have imagined had they had been prepared beforehand with the knowledge that they were about to experience something truly wonderful, and you could tell that she was in fact seeing or looking at something, or better stated, was witness to a sensation that thought alone gave a luminous outline, and was simultaneously transforming subtle touch messages into crashing torrents of happy stimulus which unified and at times overwhelmed the cascade of irrational and ingenious revelations that linked ambiguously one moment to the next in her mythological mind.

Currently listening : Aimee Tallulah Is Hypnotised By Emperor Machine Release date: 26 October, 2004

1:26 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Guerdon

Lucas Guerdon did not die in a duel like Pushkin. No, he died in an estate fire. Not his estate, or even the estate of someone he knew. An estate of two thousand souls, whatever this means. Whatever he was doing there, in that estate, on that evening, is not well understood, but the origin of the fire was regarded unanimously as having started along the river of ethanol which detoured the estate narrowly by way of the eastern divide that set the estate considerably higher that the neighboring plateaus and plains of starched grass and bark chips made into paths dipping and detouring around posts ordered with complex sequence codes implicating the system of dated yet favored orientation in terms of points in time and places in the forest that entered into relation with another and others from time to time, but usually kept to themselves as discrete positions of reference __through banded reminders of color awareness of current location and reference points to help those who traversed the region on nights like the one Guerdon died. __This river, ethanol as was said, came from the north, high and cold, and fell deeply and abruptly near the east wall of the estate into darkness crushed by the base of the ravine and forced between columns which often surfaced in the river, but before this fall, it passed shortly below the low first branches of the last tree before the sudden drop in elevation that left the east estate wall looking far down into the geographic incision left by abitious tectonic manipulation efforts. It was at this point, where the river, or more accurately the blue stringy flames that erupted from the river some distance north, were able to begin their fateful climb up through the branches, scattering mice and fat owls and melting the math in waxy honeycombs filled with sleepless bees before they reached the top and jumped, as if from a slow moving railway cart, to the shiny lacquer-tiled roof of the estate in discussion that has been made mention of many countless times through the years in descriptions by the people of towns neighboring the estate, as well as those in towns further back from the eruption of grief and disbelief at the loss of such a citizen, and has succeeded in being mentioned at least several times already in the contents of this first and possibly only paragraph in the story of a much larger and probably epic drama that this exposition describes in shamefully stingy detail. __This fire that was set carelessly along the top of this river of ethanol by the match of an absent minded wanderer who had stopped to rest and smoke with his pantslegs rolled up and his legs dangling off the edge of the dusty terra cotta bridge that happened to connect two of the least explored regions of the forest state this traveler had, up until the previous evening, never bothered to visit. The rare and exotic birds whose home had been designated the attic of the estate, were the first to be affected by the fire. As the beams began to drip thick globs of burning splattering lacquer that had heated and melted while crackling loudly, it ran through the saturated insulation with the excess sliding helplessly and spilling off the edges and especially the corner of the roof. Despite the cooling effect produced by the long drop, some and many of the fiery lobes that landed in the dense hedgework that articulated the entry paths and lined the lower windows was hot enough to begin melting the fine porous plaster work that gave a look of impressive sophistication to the facade of the towering estate. While the fire was taking it's time with the lower levels, the entire roof had quickly begun to burn sickly purple and discharged inky black clouds like a frightened octopus that seemed to refuse to dissipate into the wind and were carried off whole, resisting strongly to being dragged away like an impossible drunk, intent on darkening whoevers mood they could reach most quickly. The birds, which were not caged, squeaked and wailed as they dodged falling debris and waited for what looked like the best time to take flight out of the burning attic up through one of the opening holes lined with infected glowing flames as more fire came from around and poured through, peeling back more tile and unevenly spreading the circumference of this unexpected circular window to the precious night sky shuffling about a dozen or so mild flat bottomed clouds in slowly turning and vaguely orbital flights around the piece of the moon that lay exposed from the blanket of dense smoke that the fire had used to smother the heavens. It wasn't long before they looked back along their spearlike diagonal trajectories to see the estate swallowed into the earth in it's entirety by a closing fist of soot and fire that imploded falling inward before quickly opening again to spew dirt and flame out across mostly perpendicular planes, these being; straight up first in a lunge for the sky that failed, grabbing but finding nothing to hold, tumbling back down hugged by gravity onto the smoldering foundations, and then out and away as it reached a compromise with a flat but effective swipe spreading along the grounds and gardens, knocking through fences and running head first into rock walls, but thankfully never reaching the volatile river which could have carried the fire into the city and filled bathtubs and vases with deadly blue flames.

Currently listening : Worn Copy By Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti Release date: 03 May, 2005

1:46 PM - 2 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Steel wool I'm talking to you.

"... but what may not have been accounted for is the amazing versatility of this item... (this ghostly sales pitch comes up barely audible from a sleepy television set faded from the labor of the years in the service of an elderly woman who has confused it for company along with an imbecile cat who stayed at the opposite end of the room from her usually, pushing itself into the walls and corners of her dark apartment as if in a yearning for distance from the strained eyes and outdated appliances that it seemed to encounter at every turn, though this may not have been all that it (the cat) wanted distance from, or maybe it simply found comfort in the security of the orientation of it's cat senses through nice steadily applied pressure)... and you would be better equipped for living with at least one or more batches of these things (Steel Wool, (back to that now (the parentheses ended))). You could listen to the accounts of wild eyed customer satisfaction, or hell just ask you neighbors about it, but clear your calender becuase they just might carry on at excessive length about the benefits and marvels of an invention like this. They will tell you about how it is (s)catapaulting mankind into the next big era of advanced living. Scraping, scouring and removing through rubbing in repetitious circular patterns is now shown to improve cardiovascular functions, help you win big on poker night, improve your judgment and decision making skills, and is just darn mindlessly therapeutic in general. The personal redemption achieved through the religiously regular usage of this and other products like it will be limited only by the boundaries of the hearts and minds of the noble consumers and you. ... Feel younger.... and ... breathe.. ... ... ea ... si..er ... .. ... forget ... noth ... ing ... "

But lets have this monologue subside into foggy obscurity andthose ideasleak out and shrink to size of dots, with the volume down, because there are much more reverent and subtle ways to speak on this subject, and we should now begin to assess the elusive and austere nature of this matter in a more sincere and humble tone. Are you wondering where to buy it (Steel Wool)? Or why you can start a fire by rubbing it on a nine volt battery? Maybe you should be. Are you afraid to touch it? Are you convinced it may do irreparable to your hands or whatever other body part it may touch? It may, but only if your heart is not pure. You may have seen people handling it with thick rubber gloves. The thicker the glove, the higher the degree of impurity in the heart of the handler. Not to worry though, because through careful and respectful dilligence, these "apple eaters", as Salinger's Teddy may have referred to them as, may have a chance at remdemption, and some may very well someday realize the errors of their ways and be able to cast off their foil blindfolds and view in wonder these compostitions of staggering grace and intricacy in a new and warming light, though it cannot be denied that some others will still fail to realize that they have unfortunately mistaken the subject for an inanimate and even boring topic.

Talented ascetics are said to have slept and rolled themselves up in beds of it (Steel Wool), with the most dedicated and enlightened among them tailoring full body suits to be worn as they go about their fasting and laboring.

It (Steel Wool) seems to be respected among the scientific community for it's usefulness in experiments demonstrating the mysterious generation of heat.

The debate regarding the invention of the substance rages on as the different groups battle for the privelige of taking credit for it's existence. Modern day alchemists swear up and down that it's arrival came well before many believe, during the reign of Henry II, and was kept secret for years by those involved out of fear of being charged with heresy. Clandestine rituals centered around the magical properties of the stuff were a common occurence. Necromancers found it to be a useful tool, and eagerly put it to use in their efforts of divination. Now corporation giants like 3M (and others) claim to have engineered the spongy metal nests after a surge of collective inspiration and technological advances.

Unfortunately it seems I have digressed, and although providing historical facts (these have of course been no such thing) may produce a heightened sense of interest and help in getting people involved, it by no means does a damn thing to provide insight into the profound implications and far reaching relevance of a thing like steel wool. Time spent alone with it can be worthwhile and even beautiful. You start to admire more and more and more each painstaking loop and twist. You stare and wonder where it might begin and end and start to draw absurd analogies to time and space and the universe itself and foolishly run to the door and meet the mailman and tell him that in your hand you hold what may be a universal microcosm and that each is different and singularly unique like a snowflake. You ask him to what extent this theme extends, and whether it is folly to even consider the idea of multiple universes. He tells you with arrogant impatience that you are late to realize that this is the nature of cosmological truth (one of them) and asks condescendingly if you really thought that there was only this one discernable dimension (rolls his eyes) as people once thought that our Milky Way galaxy was the extent of the existing space-time. You drop the mail, fall on the floor and wipe you nervous sweat with handfulls of steel wool of course, and feel deeply enlightening furious burning that you liken to the heat of radiation from inconceivable distant chaos and emerging complexity stirring at the edges of existing normal phenomena and law. The painful indications of your flawed selfish mortality light your face and you swell with the glaring reminder of the sovereignty in the neglected expanse of your own basic conciousness. For a moment it strikes you as terrible, even unbearable, but you dispel the panic and surrender yourself shivering with scratches and rash on your knuckles. You knew the truth would hurt, but it's what you wanted. You beg your mother to knit you a wool sweater, made from steel of course, and she cries and leaves you forever to reflect on what she considers your carelessness. Bright shiny bunches squish underfoot in your dreams and you find yourself shrunken considerably and lost among dark obstacles, struggling through a constricting maze of stainless strands of unbreakable loops getting caught in your mouth like hair and stuck inbetween your teeth like floss. Bleeding gums and itching eyes follow your movements and continue to sting after you squeeze your way out onto a woven recovery cot.

These experiences should be subjective however, and in no way are guaranteed to resemble what I have described here.

"... Find how yours will be. Go out and buy yourself some (Steel Wool) today."

Currently listening : The Doldrums By Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti Release date: 12 October, 2004

7:05 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

The staghorn waits

"Don't walk under the staghorn," he told me. "It's been saturated with water and it's really heavy. It could fall down."

"Oh yeah," I complied, with manufactured nonchalance. I stared up at it and secretly reproached myself for not paying more mind of the so called "staghorn". I say "so called" because I found no entries in the several references I consulted in my attempts to research the so called plant. I again say "so called" because it seems to be singular in character and quite unique among most plants you would expect to find among your usual suburban landscape plots hanging by a thick chain to whichever lowest, yet still high enough, tree branch had been determined to be sturdy enough to endure the suffering years when this densely layered ball of slow and stubborn growth would pull with all it's might in a bitter struggle to dislodge itself and mightily thump it's weight maliciously upon the Earth.

I thought back and recalled different instances, by seperate unrelated peoples, where I am sure that the plant was referred to as a "staghorn." Whether this would be two words with a hyphen I can not confirm. Maybe it was a local or secondary term for this thing, and it's official name was some intimidating and impractically long peculiarity that was done away with by non pundits almost as quickly as it had been applied to the hulking monstrosity that was to be known by it. I admit that I have been lazy and my efforts to dispell this confusion have lacked rigor, but maybe there is an inclination on my part to leave this intrigue undisturbed.

Since I can remember, I had refrained from walking under, and usually even near the hanging beast. In flights of superstitious hallucinations I imagined that the dangling ends of what could have been called leaves looked like fingers, and would no doubt love a chance at grabbing a young boy by the hair and doing whatever was in the habit of a heartless and unapologetically carnivorous plant.

It looked foreign. Alien. Even prehistoric. I thought how they would look right at home launched from medieval catapaults over gates and walls, crushing and maiming frantic men in the appropriate dress of that time. They may have been specially grown and cultivated strictly to be used to that end. They may even have been lit on fire and then catapaulted, though that seems far too imhumane, even for men of such periods.

They seem to have enormous life spans. Lasting generations and being passed down from fathers to sons and even surviving when the family line had been cut, and sold for high prices at estate auctions. They seemed to never stop growing, altough they have a way of decieveing you by growing extremely slowly, counting on you not to notice. Very patiently creeping larger and facing you as you search their sinister architecture from your arcing window.

I listen suspiciously to the opinions of people as they discuss and debate the staghorn. Somehow it appears to highly regarded and even coveted by some. As I already said I believe that they even hold considerable value, once they reach a certain size. I wonder whether these people would even go as far as to call a staghorn "attractive", and would only believe that they would out of some baseless obligation to common taste.

It seems logical to assume that they were created by man, because I have never seen one in the wild, and they seem to only live suspended in the air. Maybe that is the only way we can be safe. Once on the ground they may use their many fingers and hands to move and would probably outrun any poor fool who happened to find his unlucky self in the vicinity of a loose and very unfriendly staghorn.

Maybe they are a military experiment gone wrong. Genetically modified vegetation trained for war. Syntesized from hostile dna and released into the public. Maybe by spies. From another country. Planted here (pun intended) to end our frivolous lives.

What's it waiting for? Still has to grow bigger. Bigger still. Always getting bigger. More layers. More water. Layers like a cabbage or brussel sprout. Still more.

I gotta warn the others.

Currently listening : Thembi By Pharoah Sanders Release date: 10 March, 1998

6:29 PM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment