November 28, 2011

Cooperation Is Appreciated and/or Futile


Doing like 82% of smartphone owners.

That's not so great (sounding).

Other groups all over the news.

On our way to trying to figure out clusters and other economic systems.

Non-contiguous everything.

Massive living things.

Really massive living things.

A sturdy backing still means a lot around here.

A trade and a wrapper and the future of salt.

The future is salt.

The future is nitrogen.

The future is mostly water with some trace elements.

And then the future is clay and ash and lots and lots of hydrogen.

Always lots of hydrogen.

One is the most common random number.

The future-er gets further and further and then farther.

It'll all be neutrinos, we've talked about it before.

But twice they are moving faster than light some say.

Well then some and others others say that begs chicken-egg questions,

But you say they're wrong.

You know ladders go up and ladders go down.

And if you lay a ladder on the ground it'll go north or south or wherever the fuck you want it to go.

Crazy, I know.

Just don't make it hurt.

Everybody.

Slowly now.

Temperate.

Heading to gray and ever after.

November 23, 2011

Between Us and First Class, The Thinnest Curtain


Some songs remain the same.

Maybe four-ish years ago I read a bunch of Cloud Atlas-and-earlier David Mitchell alternating books with Murakami and it's all mixed up in my head.

My favorites moments of each stay separate, the egg glowing in their hands... being able to see stars from the bottom of the well during daytime... the flaying in Manchuria.

I have a thing for flaying in stories and I guess that's probably a little gross.

But who has the goatman and the stories in the RV?

Yakuza plots crossing back and forth.

In Palo Alto I half-fell down some unlit stairs (a small set -- maybe four steps) and caught myself with the back of my hand against a concrete wall leaving three scrapes on my knuckles where I caught myself.

They are well-scabbed and on their way to gone now.

I didn't know the stairs were there.

In Palo Alto I banged my leg against a handle that stuck out of the desk in my room and got a pretty nasty bruise.

That's almost gone now.

Heading into Palo Alto, I got a wicked headache in the descent. A real skull-splitter up front.

My heads feeling good right now.

When we land it'll be Baltimore, middle of the night and I'll be all congested and blowing my nose will make me dizzy and my ears pop.

Happens everytime I fly.

The cocktail is an American invention, I hear. I'm proud of that.

Vodka came to America by way of the Moscow Mule, San Francisco. Try one some time.

If you already have. I know! Crazy.

Soda with bitters at the end of a good vacation.

Sleeping in your own bed at the end of a good vacation.

Just a little more cheese at the end of a good vacation.

Seeing your daughter at the end of a good vacation.

The news is still there, though I hear the Supercommittee is done.

Pepper spray and all kinds of shit.

But I'm not quite back yet.

Gonna head upstate for a little bit.

November 22, 2011

How It All Happens So Quickly


We talk about how incentives change behavior.

We talk about being able to tell you speed or location.

We tell you about the invention of the spoon, or oil paint, or the computer and how they changed what we did with our mouths and hands and eyes and stomachs and so on.

This Tuesday in San Francisco is one of those on a much smaller and right here scale.

I had the opportunity to tell you this was written from the Friends of Dorothy Travel Service or the Masonic Center or something less exciting and yet just as less true, Huntington Park. This new app asks me to pick a location from a short list instead of just telling me -- I went with the neighborhood.

It didn't give my hotel as a choice. And it certainly didn't have my room number, or the chair by the window in that room.

It didn't have this place I'm at where I wish I was here a few more days (so much great food to be eaten) even while I'm hoping for no problems as we race eastward shortly to make it to a ceremony at my daughter's school tomorrow.

...and then a sushi boat dinner with her, or adventure sushi, or maybe we can find a boat-based adventure sushi like Margaret and I saw in Chinatown a couple days ago.

Embrace tourism.

Embrassez those you love.

Chinese donuts stuffed with red beans? Embrassez them, too.

Or lotus bean-filled pancakes? Embrassez.

Steep steep hills, up or down, by car or by foot? Embrassez, even if they make you a little queasy.

Rush hour traffic to the Bay Bridge? Fuck it. Embrassez that, too. It's vacation and you have cell phones and they'll understand why you're late and certainly you can find a good radio station in the Bay Area.

If we were trying to make a plane, it'd be a different story.

But now it's almost 7am and this has gone worthless.

You didn't pay for it in any real way, though.

Maybe you'll never be back.

That bruise? It's pretty much gone.

November 20, 2011

I Could Use Some Telepath Friends


I just found the oddest bruise on my thigh. It's all mottled... one of those polka-dotted ones -- a base of that aged blood-seep yellow-brown with red-pink dots. Almost like the dots you see on ostrich leather?

It is ostritch leather, right? The dotted kind of leather you see on cowboy boots some times.

I like it when ridiculous and ridiculously good keep switching places. If I catch myself catching it, it always makes me think of electrons not really being in orderly orbits at all.

But hopping back and forth, and really somewhere in between and there's not really a word for it.

But then not that either, and more like clouds of percentages all the way to the edges of the universe.

Some joke about going broad here.

Some joke about pieces of me moving through pieces of you, even if it is years from now.

So many years even that I'm dead and the information churns on.

Like -- and I mean the joke about the pieces, not the dead part -- that Donne poem where his blood mixes with his date's in a flea that's bitten them both, so -- you know -- they might as well fuck.

That John Donne. He had a way with words.

I have a way with memory and reality though -- and it's likely that it wasn't even Donne.

And I know he didn't say "fuck," though that poem is aching for an update.

And that update belongs in a scene in a play that maybe feels a bit like Rent.

And that scene itself, I guess would be echoing that "let's do it for our country" scene from Grease in the bomb shelter.

Was that Grease 2? The movie.

Michelle Pfieffer. Seeing visions of her she-thinks-he's-dead Australian hottie in white leather.

She's dressed as a season. Winter?I can almost see it.

And she's lost the thread of the song all the other girls are singing and she's staring off at the boy who isn't there.

San Francisco surely steeped into me quickly.

Somewhere Kevin Killian is waking up or heading to brunch and he feels a disturbance in the force.

And he's peering into the astral plane (because I'm pretty sure he can do that) and he's telepathing at me, "Jamie you're doing this all wrong."

"I mean, shit, who cares about Michelle Pfieffer."

If I could telepath back at him I'd apologize and then cover my tracks by asking him if Pfeiffer to Cameron Diaz to the Olssen Twins looked like someone working through drafts of something to him.

Does to me.

And then more of the not caring about these starlets.

But more with the telepathing, he could just read that off the surface of my brain.

And if I was lucky he'd drop some suggestions for dim sum places while he was in there.

Telepaths don't need Yelp.

And on good days, their friends don't need it either.


--
Ed note: Did this just come around to being dedicated to Chris Toll? I thought I was heading toward telling you about remembering the first lists I ever wrote... and how I realized this list thing that I talk about sometimes and chide myself for at others goes way farther back than I thought. Further? Farther? I'll write all that this week sometime.

Ed note 2: I haven't thought / read about Killian's work in ages (more than 10 years I bet), and I'm surely going to let a San Francisco bookstore help me with that today. I'm willing published copies of his celebrity plays into existence right now if they don't exist already somewhere. Listen up universe. I'm willing.

November 16, 2011

The Smells of the Cincinnati Airport

Haven't done this early-morning-commute-by-air thing in quite a while.

This is the "with rain" version.

Memories of the "with snow" version coming into Lansing the day after a blizzard.

Memories of the "with in the middle of reading a Harry Potter hardcover on the shuttle from terminal to terminal (Dallas?) in a wicked storm" version.

Little bits and pieces that have gotten so bitten and pieced like sugar does in coffee.

I'm not platinum. I'm not gold.

Garlic.

Roaster chicken.
Fresh. The fresh and the green.
Plastic against a heating element.
The guy at the Sunglasses Hut.

I'm heading to San Francisco and I'm surrounded by people heading to San Francisco.

It's Boots Season.

It's You See It Everywhere Season.

Who wouldn't like a little more time? That's no way to separate.

Memories of borders and all the things I want to get done or get going in the next six months.

Visions of the get-got, tasting the get-gotten and how good that'll be.

One, two, three.

Let's do this thing, k?

November 14, 2011

I Once Tried to Figure Out a Written Version of Crashing the One


Coughing, sniffling, skating, skimming.

Treading, getting, keeping, holding.

If and or but.

On by with without.

Before I'm through I'll change the size.

So we can all get better.

Get it better.

I mean, read it better.

The tense will change. You'll turn the perspectives round.

I was in a conversation about Rubik's Cubes this weekend hot on the heels of one on the supercommittee.

No shit. And at a birthday party.

I had coffee with milk.

The DMV closed before I could get there, only it was the MVA because this is Maryland.

Later, my team would lose.

Earlier, I don't remember what I was up to.

I didn't sleep well.

My stomachs was aching.

But the weather

It was gorgeous out.

I've got some travel coming.

[UPDATED: Photo updated... It got crunched and became illegible when posted from the phone... New blog app time for my phone?]

November 10, 2011

That Happened


A flows into B and so on

A bunch of students at Penn State

A bunch of ex-students on Wall Street

A bunch of ex-cons on work release programs

Cons stacked up with seldom a pro in sight

Words and things are funny that's why

Rhetoric and right has been on my mind all year

More than that

It is natural for a person to have trust issues surrounding an alien lifeform

What do they eat?

I just now realized that Breaking Bad was a play on "breaking bread." I wish I had the time to get into that show.

I'm checking out Walking Dead which is so obviously Lost-yearning at moments with less talented writers. I hope it wasn't a mistake.

Sunk cost vs. Season Two

Return on investment vs. cocktail chatter-bound opportunities

The Ask vs. this Fall's fashion

I'm echoing Justin all over the place lately. Or maybe aping. And other tines I think on aping him aping me

Ape, chameleon, interloper, in-betweener, legion, legionnaire (sp?), father, inspiree, wide-eyed keeper, official wister, clutcher, boyfriend, friend, absentee something, checker, striver, try-er, complainer. I see hundreds of glasses half full, but I'm not always thirsty. (Self portrait at 37)

The reflex is a lonely number that pales against the wall.
Ay-yie yie yie yie yie-yie-yie
Try not to lose it
It's waiting in the dark

Enter moose and bears and the new band

Enter that new chapters are odd as paragraphs and words and things

There are things you won't unsee
There are things you won't unlearn
There are things you won't forgive

But those automated responses can be de-automated, dissembled, and re-automated from the ground up.

Liking coffee
Coming to like tequila again

Getting past nausea

It's in every ball joint

So lace 'em up and let's go punch them in the nose.

Har har!

November 8, 2011

And We Do


Some of the greatest titles ever _______

Late nights and the clothes you choose

Always transit with time and space splitting the difference

Getting right with not having to be right

Getting right with not wanting to be right

When good's enemy comes to town, who sets the terms?

When better's peers head into court, who stands last?

There's a hill and a crown, where do you sit?

There's water, the future, payments, and decisions to be made.

There are all kinds of shoes and little conversations and victories.

There are hexagons. More than you can count.

There's evening. Fall. Trains. Waiting. More trains.

Confidant steps.
Confidant haircut.

Something hoped for.

Forward, everybody. Can't you taste it?

Good night, Mr. Frazier





November 1, 2011

The Evil that Men and Women Who Are Character in Movies Do


That's my daughter and I and our costumes (admittedly mine is a little slight and hers is more than a little awesome) and a stick I found while we were out.

The stick made it much more of a costume. I mean, look at that shit! It doesn't even fit in the frame.

A different kind of four more years, and there's one of them.

And now Halloween is eight minutes behind me (and counting).

I'm going to listen to some Feist tomorrow I think. Oooooh! Evil!
(And I thought this first -- when it was still Halloween -- and wrote this first, though I think it was already not-Halloween.)

And watched Paranormal Activity 2 when it was still Halloween and maybe as much for the rave reviews of 3 reminding me how much I loved the first.

Well more like box office figures.

I haven't read any reviews.

And I opened and then closed a story about 3's deleted scenes being even scarier than what's in the movie.

It warned me of spoilers straight off.

It warned me off.

Who doesn't love American? The language and the dialects I mean.

Tomorrow to the shop again.

It's like every line should end in "Ooooh! Evil!"

I might go back and fix that.

Relativity. Light speed. Alternatives and fission. Sexual amoebas? Really? Really.

Countdown to the end of this and the beginning of next.

Moving my stuff out of the practice space felt like Sweatpants was really open.

Suck.

Better not be.

I'll bite you in your face.

Evil! Evil! Evil! Evil'
Ha lemme-be! Ha lemme-be!
Ha! Ha! Ha!
Tabouleh is good!
Tabouleh is great!
Tabooouleh!
Run-it back!
Run-it back!
Run-it back!
Run-it back!

(This monkey goes to heaven.)