The World Passing By

Flying, spiraling, swimming.

Through the air, the wind, the water.

Currents moving, trailing, guiding, mending.

Not dancing, but being danced.

Looking out the window at the world passing by.

Cole

Cole is thinking about his loss. He can’t quite put his finger on it. But it’s there. And it irritates him like a fly buzzing around his bedroom late at night while he’s trying to sleep. He shakes his head, drinks more beer and changes the music. But the feeling comes back eventually.

He kicks back the chair he’s sitting in and leans against the metal wall. The yellow porch light is dimming and about to go out. The generator is almost out of fuel. But it’s summer, so it doesn’t matter. When the electricity goes out, he’ll probably just sit there in the dark and keep drinking. He doesn’t work till Monday, and his rent is paid.

He looks out over the yard and off into the fading light casting blue shadows across the mesa and considers his state. All alone, but finally free, and fuck, a place to stay, even if it is a crappy trailer. He turns the music down and pulls a joint out from behind his ear and sniffs it. But so much has happened, even up to this very moment.

He sparks it up and takes a drag. That blonde hair. He can’t forget it. The way it smelled like cotton candy. Charlie wasn’t even affectionate but he can still remember each time he hugged him. That golden blonde hair always brushing against his cheek and tickling his nose. He must’ve loved him, he guesses.

But it’s not just Charlie, but his dad and his grandmother and the long fucked-up journey that brought him to this trailer, this job, this life. It’s like he just got out of a war and his body is still in tact but he still feels like he lost something. But can’t quite figure out what it is.

Home was only six months ago. From a baby till his 20^th birthday. Then so many hours on the highway and here he is, hundreds of miles away, in a warm sunny place, but pretty much all alone. Charlie came into his life for a few weeks, but somehow it all got fucked up.

The generator kicks off and the lights finally die. Which is fine. He’d rather be in the dark anyhow, now that he’s catching a buzz and the stars are coming out. Violent Femmes is on and seems to fit perfectly. He taps his iPod and sees it’s still only 7 o'clock. The night is young. When he runs out of beer, he’ll have to go into town to get more.

What Can I Do?

You are angry when I am apathetic. 

You are angry when I care. 

Sometimes

Sometimes I want to throw myself down on the ground and weep, howl with disgust, sadness and outrage. This hourly persistence... stalwart plodding with minimal purpose through the days of drear, boredom, spiritual void, and accepting without question my own acquiescence until a valve turns, a piece of music strikes, an emotion rises and I feel a breakdown opening beneath me like a crack in the earth. What keeps me from falling into it is the same psychology that keeps me moving resignedly through this empty life.

Fear of movement.  What, am I dead?

Fear of deviation.  What, am I a machine?

Fear of disruption.  What, am I that delicate?

Fear of loss.  What, losing this near empty bucket. What shit is that?

Isherwood and Auden

This is my first image on this blog. And I'm glad it's this one, because I like it and it's not tawdry.

It's Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden, reclining together in some garden, or in some park. I don't know where it is, but somehow I like to think it's San Francisco or Los Angeles.

Isherwood looks great, as he always did, but even Auden looks good. (Didn't we ALL at one time?)

I love this photo because they were both very eloquent men, and both VERY gay. You know that they weren't messing around, but were well aware of their inclinations (god, how I hate that word!) and LOVED MEN, but also LOVED WORDS!

And that makes this photo even sexier to me.

Also, I love their style, their pose, and their... okay, once again, THEIR STYLE!!!

Quentin Crisp was certainly a 'poofter' but he was right about everything he said, especially style.

The nose and hairstyle on Isherwood are fabulous. More men look like that every day in Portland, if only they'd don the suits. Auden looks dorkishly sexy... those big ears and wallflower-pensive gaze are so fuzzy. Damn he was a fucking amazing poet, too!

I hope they got plenty laid.

Reunited

After only two entries, I lost this blog site for months... my own, which is strange, I know... but having such an un-catchy title I'd forgotten my own witty device.

Yet here I am, once again:

So much to say, yet so little. Always the same as this. I crawl an inch forward, and then am shoved back by some existential hand and told, "No! You get back in line, maggot!" And I, always the obeyer, slink back into emptiness and feeling less until the cracked shell hath mended itself, sealed itself shut, and I'm once again embryonic.

A face swims in my eye-hole. A handsome face. It towers and then shrinks... vanishes for days... then is relived. The face is a man's (no surprise) and wispy, wistful, weeping, waifish, willowy, wan, and wonderlicious. All those W things. It's always my distant lover coming back to haunt me. A grand autopsy of all that's come before, and visions (lusts!) of what's to come in the future. That is, if anything EVER comes again.

Catty, tawny (yes these adjectives continue), jester-like, sprite-like, wayfarer-hippie-dippy-like, long haired, long cocked, long eye lashes, long lisped... continue onward and this shit could get DULL! Cool, un-attached, dark, light, happy, twisted, hopeful, despondent... no wonder I'm never satisfied.

The face swims and I find it throughout my day, and into my night world. But a face is only a sliver, a sickle moon. So little, yet pronouncing so much.


Okay, enough of that! Had to get the juices flowing with some automatic writing.

Dream

"Madonna, look at these. They are a bit amateurish, but still pretty interesting, don't you think?"

"I don't see what you like about them. They are horrific."

"We bought this house and remodeled it, and turned the living room into a gallery. Don't you think it's grand?"

The house takes up the entire block. I look out the window and across the street a line of dramatically ruined and poverty-infested shacks stare back me, a few dirty white inhabitants mingling on the front porches.

I leave the group and walk back out onto the street, pass the row of shacks and move deeper into the ghetto. The mood is very quiet and still until I come around a bend in the road and find long rows of Mexican stalls on either side. It's some kind of day market with tarp-covered stalls selling food, clothing, toys, household items, etc., and throngs of people mill up and down the street in long lines.

I become very excited by the prospects of the food, as well as the attractiveness of the ethnic density. Soon, oddly, I realize there are Thai stalls as well, and that somehow Thais and Mexicans have merged into a shared ghetto. I walk beyond the market and into the next neighborhood and down all the streets are small stilted wooden houses inhabited by Thai families, and even a few ramshackle shops with signs and advertisements.

Though I am enthralled with all these manifestations, I am aware that I am still in the US and this is as illusory as a Hollywood set. I am aware I am in a mid-western, recession-oppressed city, and these people are just immigrants, refugees. Then, I am suddenly saddened to consider than so many of these people left their homes during episodes of strife or even terror, and now find themselves entrenched within a new version of strife and utterly culturally dislocated from any familiar moorings, and begin weeping.

No Meaning.

Unavailing  achieving little or nothing; ineffective.


Scrim  in theater a piece of gauze cloth that appears opaque until lit from behind, used as a screen or backdrop; a thing that conceals or obscures something.




The words come or they don't. Sometimes they come when there is nowhere to put them. Sometimes they come when there is, and that is a lucky time.

They have meaning and yet they don't. They tell, yet they conceal.

Like carving a single sculpture, but starting with a different block of wood each time so nothing is ever finished, nothing formed... only chips and scrapes, something writhing out of nothing. An ugly white gallery of these deformed blocks stacked one upon the other like poorly executed corpses.

The voice is someone telling. Someone who is no one. Telling something. Something that is nothing.