It's 2000. We've probably been drinking or smoking grass or both. It's probably a weeknight.
Me: "Let's play a show."
You: "Cool, I'll play guitar."
Me: "Cool, I'll play Rhodes through 14 pedals I don't know how to use."
You: "Should we practice?"
Me: "Sure."
We practice. Once. During the practice it feels like we're living on different continents in cultures with vastly incompatible languages. I try to change to a simple lead but you don't follow it. I try to follow what you're doing (some of which would be actually be interesting if we ever synced around it) but you change it up into something discordant and lousy as soon as you catch me at that.
It sucks so we give it a name -- Moronic Emphasis, I think it was -- and take it on the road. Specifically to Desmond's, this bar on Park in the 20s It's a Thursday or Friday night and we're opening for Enter Sandman, which is this terrible not-quite-punk band led by this terrible-not-quite-communist who in 1994 legally changed his name to Sandman. So it's not really the name of the band so much as it is the name of this guy Sandman who enters. You know that I'm not making this up.
The show feels like something of a coup. You've got your guitar and I've got 14 pedals I don't know how to use, along with a Fender Rhodes piano with half the keys broken that weighs about a thousand pounds. We play for 20 minutes. I try to lead but you dodge that expertly, I try to follow but you kick me under the piano. A tritone goes off between us and you smile to yourself, like, yeah, that's the one.
A girl says "are you guys going to start?" She's trying to heckle us but the joke's on her because she just watched us meanderingly noodle without talent in opposite directions for 20 minutes. We stop. Whatever irony in her reaction is neutralized by the fact that she can never have the time back. I get kind of shy on stage (especially when I know it's awful) but as your and my final chords go off vaguely within the same minute and somewhere on the same circle of fifths I get up the nerve to look up.
There are about a dozen frat guys in the bar, or what we would have called frat guys in college and what in another milieu might be called fascists. Anyway, my point is that all of these chumps look downcast, as if we've ruined their nights, like somebody let a pledge die or something. A few say angry things but the joke's on them, they just watched us noodle without a shred of talent for maybe half an hour to 45 minutes.
Enter Sandman. I always thought he was something of a nimrod but he did stick up for us that night. He said "Some people just don't know experimental music when they hear it." Then he launched into some bullshit first song and I bought us beers and we pretended to be happy with how it had gone, performing in lock step for the first and only time in our lives.
2.23.2010
calendar as iconoclast
During today's big meeting, the one where shrewd business analysis was supposed to single-handedly get our organization out of the trouble posed by this crap economy, my attention kept wandering to the decorations on the walls: leftover jack-o-lanterns and ghosts from Halloween. It felt odd to me to be putting our fingers to the pulse of February 2010 with the decor calendar set back 5 months.
It reminded me of times that for whatever quasi-traumatic reason I've stopped advancing, years in which I've gotten stuck, 1982, 1993, 1997, 2000 and others. A person can get out of those jams, but it usually takes a couple years. I wonder if the person in charge of the decorations got laid off in early November, and the windows'll be that way for ever. I wonder if the decorations are older than 5 months old, maybe a year and a half, etc.
Today I just wanted to peel them off the windows, but a) I had nothing to replace them with (fuck it, shamrocks?) and b) I thought it might seem a little creepy, a full-grown man walking around the conference room with a handful of pumpkins and ghouls during a serious business conversation.
It reminded me of times that for whatever quasi-traumatic reason I've stopped advancing, years in which I've gotten stuck, 1982, 1993, 1997, 2000 and others. A person can get out of those jams, but it usually takes a couple years. I wonder if the person in charge of the decorations got laid off in early November, and the windows'll be that way for ever. I wonder if the decorations are older than 5 months old, maybe a year and a half, etc.
Today I just wanted to peel them off the windows, but a) I had nothing to replace them with (fuck it, shamrocks?) and b) I thought it might seem a little creepy, a full-grown man walking around the conference room with a handful of pumpkins and ghouls during a serious business conversation.
mono no aware
He pulls the car to the side of the road, opens the trunk and sets up his things. A lawn chair, a radio, a 6-pack in a big brown paper bag. The beer is still kind of cold. It's late afternoon, an hour or so before the normal end of work. He unfolds the chair, sits down carefully between the tight plastic arm-rests, opens a beer, and watches the town below. It's Tuesday.
Squeezed into a lawn chair on the side of the highway that runs above his town (and with it his townspeople, approximately zero of whom he likes and about 5 tops of whom he knows) he surveys the damage of his life, its brief peaks and dull lulls, fleeting moments of right action and destined feeling, grinding attempts at love, etc. He opens a second beer. Things are generally fucked, not in any epic or imminent way, just, things have settled under an Eeyore storm front that appears to have real stamina. On the radio some expert caller says: "Johnny Depp is my favorite actor. He's so versatile."
As he drinks the second beer he thinks about his daughter, his one good thing. There's a memory of her he loves, of the first time he noticed she had her own interest in the books they'd read to her. One Sunday morning she'd simply pointed at them and at her crib and said something vaguely akin to "books." She'd spent a couple of hours paging through them, sometimes upside down, sometimes muttering a story to herself, lost in the same five books for a couple of hours. There’s an uncomplicated pride sitting and watching her read and when she looks up in her crib, a year and a half or so old, he senses recognition between them, of a thing pure and perfect that has passed between their eyes like saying the same thing at exactly the same time, or meeting an old lost friend by accident in a place completely random and beyond routine.
The sun's starting to set. On the radio another Rhodes scholar says: "New Jersey is just alright, but our part of it is pretty cool." He opens the third can off beer and watches a flock of cognitively impaired birds trying to make up its mind whether to stay or go. Maybe they're just practicing for an imminent departure, maybe the weather has gone crazy and confused the shit out of them and they now think an hour is a season. How birds know to fly together, who decides when it's time to pack it in for the night or change the flight path. He imagines for a minute what it would look like if he and Rachel were birds, birds twenty years married, arguing like total dicks about which way to fly. The better metaphor would be of people who argued with the same innate skill and synchronous rhythm that birds flew, for people to pause and look in wonder, how do they do it.
It isn't that things are absolutely unsalvageable. Yes, there is his divorce from Rachel (five years final, still echoing in his mind as if it happened a day ago), his weight (epic, out of hand), his job (a man up to his neck in shit and those are the coffee breaks, like the old joke about hell), his love life (stilted despite being chiefly imaginary), his utter lack of meaningful pastimes (never-opened birdwatcher’s manual, 35-mm camera with roll of mediocre natures shots from 1997 he knows he will never develop), but in the pro column there are also dinners with Joanna, and within those, subsets of dinners in which her eyes and his align in that old recognition of books, of alone together, of we are here in this each of us their own and we will never knowingly hurt each other and that is love. He never lets his daughter pay for dinner. Sometimes the tip if she really gives him shit about it. Once on his 50th birthday he let her pay half. His hope is that she’ll be happy, that all of this that has come to pass might have a purpose.
Cars on the highway. If one skidded out of control this way he could kick himself out of the chair and roll down the embankment, still holding the beer. How did he survive that, etc. Then he’d collect himself (running with the beer) to check on the car, now further down the embankment, flames shooting out the windows. The courageous final sip of beer, the sign of the cross and the dive into the car, emerging with 3 survivors (including an infant still in the safety seat, held in one hand). And from then on things would be different, he would awaken in a hero’s glow of right purpose. Maybe he should beg one of those cars to skid, sipping and drinking beer looking straight ahead like bring it on, forward the light brigade.
It’s hard to tell how things would have gone had Rachel’s mother not died of cancer, just a couple weeks after Joanna’s 12th birthday. How it did go was that he tried to be there for her, to put away the dooming angst that flowed between them like festering water in the blocked up sewer system of a doomed suburban town. But no matter what posture he assumed (hand on shoulder, hand in small of back, hand held out to her sleeping form, resting awkwardly on the top of her head so as not to wake her on those nights when she did sleep straight through). He had tried to extract the tension from his voice, to replace it with a gentleness that must have felt foreign and insincere to them both. Then things had gotten fine, it seemed, fine and sort of quiet between them, and a couple of years had passed before he knew it, years that pushed them as far apart as two under the same roof could get. When they saw each other now around Joanna milestones they managed a civility and warmth that surprised him, as if nothing had happened, as if they had known each other in a completely different life, a life they remembered as bad but possibly not so bad as the loneliness that followed, and could they love other people as the damage faded.
On the radio someone’s trying to make war sound positive. The sun is less a factor now as the night takes over and draws the town and him into it. Lights go on below, one by one and in clusters. He opens the fourth and fifth beer together, taking sizable gulps of each as the last color fades from the sky. Now it’s true dark and each light is a life, each light is a life that could be broken or whole, each light is a life in flux if it knows it or not.
Squeezed into a lawn chair on the side of the highway that runs above his town (and with it his townspeople, approximately zero of whom he likes and about 5 tops of whom he knows) he surveys the damage of his life, its brief peaks and dull lulls, fleeting moments of right action and destined feeling, grinding attempts at love, etc. He opens a second beer. Things are generally fucked, not in any epic or imminent way, just, things have settled under an Eeyore storm front that appears to have real stamina. On the radio some expert caller says: "Johnny Depp is my favorite actor. He's so versatile."
As he drinks the second beer he thinks about his daughter, his one good thing. There's a memory of her he loves, of the first time he noticed she had her own interest in the books they'd read to her. One Sunday morning she'd simply pointed at them and at her crib and said something vaguely akin to "books." She'd spent a couple of hours paging through them, sometimes upside down, sometimes muttering a story to herself, lost in the same five books for a couple of hours. There’s an uncomplicated pride sitting and watching her read and when she looks up in her crib, a year and a half or so old, he senses recognition between them, of a thing pure and perfect that has passed between their eyes like saying the same thing at exactly the same time, or meeting an old lost friend by accident in a place completely random and beyond routine.
The sun's starting to set. On the radio another Rhodes scholar says: "New Jersey is just alright, but our part of it is pretty cool." He opens the third can off beer and watches a flock of cognitively impaired birds trying to make up its mind whether to stay or go. Maybe they're just practicing for an imminent departure, maybe the weather has gone crazy and confused the shit out of them and they now think an hour is a season. How birds know to fly together, who decides when it's time to pack it in for the night or change the flight path. He imagines for a minute what it would look like if he and Rachel were birds, birds twenty years married, arguing like total dicks about which way to fly. The better metaphor would be of people who argued with the same innate skill and synchronous rhythm that birds flew, for people to pause and look in wonder, how do they do it.
It isn't that things are absolutely unsalvageable. Yes, there is his divorce from Rachel (five years final, still echoing in his mind as if it happened a day ago), his weight (epic, out of hand), his job (a man up to his neck in shit and those are the coffee breaks, like the old joke about hell), his love life (stilted despite being chiefly imaginary), his utter lack of meaningful pastimes (never-opened birdwatcher’s manual, 35-mm camera with roll of mediocre natures shots from 1997 he knows he will never develop), but in the pro column there are also dinners with Joanna, and within those, subsets of dinners in which her eyes and his align in that old recognition of books, of alone together, of we are here in this each of us their own and we will never knowingly hurt each other and that is love. He never lets his daughter pay for dinner. Sometimes the tip if she really gives him shit about it. Once on his 50th birthday he let her pay half. His hope is that she’ll be happy, that all of this that has come to pass might have a purpose.
Cars on the highway. If one skidded out of control this way he could kick himself out of the chair and roll down the embankment, still holding the beer. How did he survive that, etc. Then he’d collect himself (running with the beer) to check on the car, now further down the embankment, flames shooting out the windows. The courageous final sip of beer, the sign of the cross and the dive into the car, emerging with 3 survivors (including an infant still in the safety seat, held in one hand). And from then on things would be different, he would awaken in a hero’s glow of right purpose. Maybe he should beg one of those cars to skid, sipping and drinking beer looking straight ahead like bring it on, forward the light brigade.
It’s hard to tell how things would have gone had Rachel’s mother not died of cancer, just a couple weeks after Joanna’s 12th birthday. How it did go was that he tried to be there for her, to put away the dooming angst that flowed between them like festering water in the blocked up sewer system of a doomed suburban town. But no matter what posture he assumed (hand on shoulder, hand in small of back, hand held out to her sleeping form, resting awkwardly on the top of her head so as not to wake her on those nights when she did sleep straight through). He had tried to extract the tension from his voice, to replace it with a gentleness that must have felt foreign and insincere to them both. Then things had gotten fine, it seemed, fine and sort of quiet between them, and a couple of years had passed before he knew it, years that pushed them as far apart as two under the same roof could get. When they saw each other now around Joanna milestones they managed a civility and warmth that surprised him, as if nothing had happened, as if they had known each other in a completely different life, a life they remembered as bad but possibly not so bad as the loneliness that followed, and could they love other people as the damage faded.
On the radio someone’s trying to make war sound positive. The sun is less a factor now as the night takes over and draws the town and him into it. Lights go on below, one by one and in clusters. He opens the fourth and fifth beer together, taking sizable gulps of each as the last color fades from the sky. Now it’s true dark and each light is a life, each light is a life that could be broken or whole, each light is a life in flux if it knows it or not.
2.21.2010
how do I build a model rocket?
Q: I am 15 years old and saw people make a rocket on TV. I want to make one too. Can you please tell me if it is possible for me to make a rocket (given that I have limited resources), and if it is possible how I can build one?
A: Well, I don't know much about making rockets from scratch, but it's very easy to make a model rocket from a kit. The largest provider of model rocket kits is Estes.
As for making rockets(not-from-a-kit), these rockets can be extremely dangerous, so you need to be very careful when launching them. And keep in mind that most places have limits on the height that you can launch anything to. So if you make a rocket that's too powerful you might end up in a large amount of trouble. To launch anything that goes higher than small model rockets with approved engines (or smallish bottle rockets) you'll need to get permission, and I'm not sure how to go about doing this or what the restrictions are.
With that said up front, I am something of a model rocket enthusiast and an episode from my own experience may be instructive. In the summer of 1983 I transported myself and a team of astronomers in a full-scale rocket to the far reaches of our solar system.
Space is an unforgiving environment that does not tolerate human errors or technical failure. For humans leaving Earth's orbit for extended periods, there are even more dangers. One is the near absence of gravity in space; the presence of high-energy, ionizing cosmic ray (HZE) nuclei is another. Observations of astronauts traveling on the Space Shuttle and Russian cosmonauts' long-term visits to the Mir space station indicate that time spent in 0g has serious effects on bone and muscle physiology and the cardiovascular system. Fortunately, I was able to emerge from the month-long journey unscathed. You may find my captain's log instructive:
Crew: Freeman, Jones, Robinson, Eckels, Smith, Turgevsky, Goldstein, Hodges, Stapleton, Billingsworth, Porforio-Diaz, Gleichik, Brown.
Week 1: Mars. Robinson below decks to find crackers. Eckels/Smith space-sick. Earth and Venus fade into background, general sense of no turn back now, etc. Turgevsky below decks to find Robinson and crackers. Mars! Excitement curtailed by lack of crackers and several crew. Eckels and Smith dispatched to recover and (health permitting) to establish a forward base of operations for future missions.
Week 2: Jupiter, Saturn. Continued lack of crackers and a growing number of crew members (Hodges, Goldstein). Memorable conversation with Stapleton on expected birth of his son, present feeling of closeness to God, etc. Much staring into space. Jupiter! Billingsworth and Stapleton below decks in search of crackers/other crew.
Week 3: Uranus, 134340. Missing crew discovered below decks in various states of inebriation and undress. Cracker supply diminished. Possible cannabis smell. Uno pack tells remaining tale. Distrustful hording of remaining crackers.
Souvenir from asteroid 134340 of crate marked do-not-open.
Week 4: Return (non-stop). Generally uneventful. Optimism of outward voyage replaced by over-familiarity and impatience. Heckling of Saturn, Jupiter. In reboarding at Mars, Eckels and Smith add only additional body odor and impatience. Billingsworth, Stapleton, Hodges, Goldstein eaten by invisible alien lifeform. Porforio-Diaz tunes mournful folk guitar and is eaten by invisible alien lifeform. Great chewing below decks. Paranoia of remaining crew. Tin of peanuts (unsalted); 2 Capri-Suns. Noble in-this-together speech, etc. Eckels rambling in apocalyptic Latin on loudspeaker. Smith briefly successful in battle with invisible alien lifeform. Robust chewing. Apocalyptic Mandarin of Eckels on loudspeaker. Smith, Turgevsky chewed. Spontaneous reappearance of Jones in beard of cracker crumbs. Robinson elects to jettison self into cold vaccuum of space. Chaos. Dismal burden of lost crackers. Unknown status of invisible alien lifeform. Apparent sustained presence of invisible alien lifeform. Chewing (of Gleichik, Robinson). Landing successful! Great fanfare. Unknown status of Brown. Chewed status of Brown confirmed near open crate.
A: Well, I don't know much about making rockets from scratch, but it's very easy to make a model rocket from a kit. The largest provider of model rocket kits is Estes.
As for making rockets(not-from-a-kit), these rockets can be extremely dangerous, so you need to be very careful when launching them. And keep in mind that most places have limits on the height that you can launch anything to. So if you make a rocket that's too powerful you might end up in a large amount of trouble. To launch anything that goes higher than small model rockets with approved engines (or smallish bottle rockets) you'll need to get permission, and I'm not sure how to go about doing this or what the restrictions are.
With that said up front, I am something of a model rocket enthusiast and an episode from my own experience may be instructive. In the summer of 1983 I transported myself and a team of astronomers in a full-scale rocket to the far reaches of our solar system.
Space is an unforgiving environment that does not tolerate human errors or technical failure. For humans leaving Earth's orbit for extended periods, there are even more dangers. One is the near absence of gravity in space; the presence of high-energy, ionizing cosmic ray (HZE) nuclei is another. Observations of astronauts traveling on the Space Shuttle and Russian cosmonauts' long-term visits to the Mir space station indicate that time spent in 0g has serious effects on bone and muscle physiology and the cardiovascular system. Fortunately, I was able to emerge from the month-long journey unscathed. You may find my captain's log instructive:
Crew: Freeman, Jones, Robinson, Eckels, Smith, Turgevsky, Goldstein, Hodges, Stapleton, Billingsworth, Porforio-Diaz, Gleichik, Brown.
Week 1: Mars. Robinson below decks to find crackers. Eckels/Smith space-sick. Earth and Venus fade into background, general sense of no turn back now, etc. Turgevsky below decks to find Robinson and crackers. Mars! Excitement curtailed by lack of crackers and several crew. Eckels and Smith dispatched to recover and (health permitting) to establish a forward base of operations for future missions.
Week 2: Jupiter, Saturn. Continued lack of crackers and a growing number of crew members (Hodges, Goldstein). Memorable conversation with Stapleton on expected birth of his son, present feeling of closeness to God, etc. Much staring into space. Jupiter! Billingsworth and Stapleton below decks in search of crackers/other crew.
Week 3: Uranus, 134340. Missing crew discovered below decks in various states of inebriation and undress. Cracker supply diminished. Possible cannabis smell. Uno pack tells remaining tale. Distrustful hording of remaining crackers.
Souvenir from asteroid 134340 of crate marked do-not-open.
Week 4: Return (non-stop). Generally uneventful. Optimism of outward voyage replaced by over-familiarity and impatience. Heckling of Saturn, Jupiter. In reboarding at Mars, Eckels and Smith add only additional body odor and impatience. Billingsworth, Stapleton, Hodges, Goldstein eaten by invisible alien lifeform. Porforio-Diaz tunes mournful folk guitar and is eaten by invisible alien lifeform. Great chewing below decks. Paranoia of remaining crew. Tin of peanuts (unsalted); 2 Capri-Suns. Noble in-this-together speech, etc. Eckels rambling in apocalyptic Latin on loudspeaker. Smith briefly successful in battle with invisible alien lifeform. Robust chewing. Apocalyptic Mandarin of Eckels on loudspeaker. Smith, Turgevsky chewed. Spontaneous reappearance of Jones in beard of cracker crumbs. Robinson elects to jettison self into cold vaccuum of space. Chaos. Dismal burden of lost crackers. Unknown status of invisible alien lifeform. Apparent sustained presence of invisible alien lifeform. Chewing (of Gleichik, Robinson). Landing successful! Great fanfare. Unknown status of Brown. Chewed status of Brown confirmed near open crate.
2.20.2010
fucked house/as certain as precognition
theresa there are days when i remember our time together with joy and sorrow and full fucked teary-eyed emotion for what quantity of love and dedication was transmitted and there are those days where i remember it as a fucked house that someone should have burned down that sheer pyrotechnic chance or some imagined benevolent god should have burned to the ground that maybe i should have burned to the ground when i get into that mindframe i don't know what's wrong with me i think of that house and what we put each other through there and i think that if only we had burned the cursed thing to the ground we could have had a clean start and instead it came to this you there me here and never the twain shall meet thank god there weren't any kids, that there never were kids.
theresa i finally sold the house maybe you heard and spent most of what i made from that on expensive wasted shit to distract and forget everything i could it makes sense though these things make sense how you've gone to some opposite unknown side of the country and changed your number i think a couple times on top of that and on how times at night i sit out on the balcony here which faces out to apartments in the opposite unit and smoke and watch for lights going on and off i could pass the night until late watching the lights in other people's apartments watching other families kids playing or crying at night not wanting to go to bed couples families sitting down to dinner seemingly happy and all the people alone of course getting older by the minute standing out on their balconies watching me each other everybody either drinking or smoking or both that and exactly one guy on the far end of the opposite unit who seemingly only reads books but maybe he gets fucked up in advance or on something you don't do on your balcony and then reads i could ask him but i don't reach out that much these days i'm happier to watch other people in their lives at whatever level of peace they've managed to reach at whatever point they find themselves somewhere back there i figured i could generally only make things worse for other people that was something you helped me to see theresa you were right.
you were and i bet are right theresa but alongside that you might be happy to know these days that i'm really the nicest guy in transient situations you know like i'm the dipshit making best friends with the cashier at a rest stop or a gas attendant on some drive i never do or somebody i'm trying to get to fuck me once or rarely for the second time at a bar or like being secret santa at the bullshit office i'm the schmuck buying the gaming system for the broke-assed kids and selecting color coordinated flowers for their deeply isolated mother i'll be as thoughtful as i can with no accountability with no fear that that kindness won't be returned or that i'll be expected to sustain it myself or that for a couple years we'll both find a way to sustain a good quantity of it only to wake up one morning with the well gone dry and then theresa this is the part i'm sure you remember how we'll fake it for years as best we can until one day we can't fake it any more and then we'll rip at each other like those fish you aren't supposed to put in the same tank it wasn't how i saw it at the time and i know i tried to get you to stay but in retrospect it was right that it worked out this way it was right it isn't that you need me to tell you that but i thought you might want to know i finally know.
theresa like i said we were fucked pretty early on and in the end those things i said and did could only be described as injurious to your well being to be ceased and desisted but there's a way i choose to remember you the first time you spent the night and next to you i knew as certain as precognition we'd grow old together and wear worn soft holding grooves into each other the way water wears rock until the two resemble each other in the right light of day as goddamned cheesy as that sounds i mean it there was i feeling i had about you like i had seen through your eyes and to your spirit that i was seeing you or your true essence outside the flow of normal time and in that sense court orders aside theresa we're still together in that sense if none other that at exactly one singular moment of my life i saw into you without seeing through i saw into you and only saw your soul's recognition of mine only saw us both aware that life was infinite that we were infinite that we were spirits unbound by gravity or dull convention awash in radiant love that moment having you all to me both in that infinite way and in the moment itself that place where time and time in composite overlapped (so that time in its total was turned inside out and compressed into that moment and so that moment was in turn stretched into the full stretch of time) i'm not going to lie there are times that with those few women who get within a mile i try to remember it being you for a bit that works but usually my conscience or the general failure of my capacity to imagine gets in the way and if i'm not careful i lose the moment me typically being drunk at that point it's a fine balance and i've never been great at those theresa i've obviously never been great at those.
theresa i finally sold the house maybe you heard and spent most of what i made from that on expensive wasted shit to distract and forget everything i could it makes sense though these things make sense how you've gone to some opposite unknown side of the country and changed your number i think a couple times on top of that and on how times at night i sit out on the balcony here which faces out to apartments in the opposite unit and smoke and watch for lights going on and off i could pass the night until late watching the lights in other people's apartments watching other families kids playing or crying at night not wanting to go to bed couples families sitting down to dinner seemingly happy and all the people alone of course getting older by the minute standing out on their balconies watching me each other everybody either drinking or smoking or both that and exactly one guy on the far end of the opposite unit who seemingly only reads books but maybe he gets fucked up in advance or on something you don't do on your balcony and then reads i could ask him but i don't reach out that much these days i'm happier to watch other people in their lives at whatever level of peace they've managed to reach at whatever point they find themselves somewhere back there i figured i could generally only make things worse for other people that was something you helped me to see theresa you were right.
you were and i bet are right theresa but alongside that you might be happy to know these days that i'm really the nicest guy in transient situations you know like i'm the dipshit making best friends with the cashier at a rest stop or a gas attendant on some drive i never do or somebody i'm trying to get to fuck me once or rarely for the second time at a bar or like being secret santa at the bullshit office i'm the schmuck buying the gaming system for the broke-assed kids and selecting color coordinated flowers for their deeply isolated mother i'll be as thoughtful as i can with no accountability with no fear that that kindness won't be returned or that i'll be expected to sustain it myself or that for a couple years we'll both find a way to sustain a good quantity of it only to wake up one morning with the well gone dry and then theresa this is the part i'm sure you remember how we'll fake it for years as best we can until one day we can't fake it any more and then we'll rip at each other like those fish you aren't supposed to put in the same tank it wasn't how i saw it at the time and i know i tried to get you to stay but in retrospect it was right that it worked out this way it was right it isn't that you need me to tell you that but i thought you might want to know i finally know.
theresa like i said we were fucked pretty early on and in the end those things i said and did could only be described as injurious to your well being to be ceased and desisted but there's a way i choose to remember you the first time you spent the night and next to you i knew as certain as precognition we'd grow old together and wear worn soft holding grooves into each other the way water wears rock until the two resemble each other in the right light of day as goddamned cheesy as that sounds i mean it there was i feeling i had about you like i had seen through your eyes and to your spirit that i was seeing you or your true essence outside the flow of normal time and in that sense court orders aside theresa we're still together in that sense if none other that at exactly one singular moment of my life i saw into you without seeing through i saw into you and only saw your soul's recognition of mine only saw us both aware that life was infinite that we were infinite that we were spirits unbound by gravity or dull convention awash in radiant love that moment having you all to me both in that infinite way and in the moment itself that place where time and time in composite overlapped (so that time in its total was turned inside out and compressed into that moment and so that moment was in turn stretched into the full stretch of time) i'm not going to lie there are times that with those few women who get within a mile i try to remember it being you for a bit that works but usually my conscience or the general failure of my capacity to imagine gets in the way and if i'm not careful i lose the moment me typically being drunk at that point it's a fine balance and i've never been great at those theresa i've obviously never been great at those.
2.19.2010
how we sing amazing grace
Position Available, demon reporting to Maxwell. Some overtime required, pay negotiable, experience preferred. Two-part container will be provided at date of hire. Successful applicants will demon-strate the ability to fill both container halves with gas at equal temperatures, guard and operate a trapdoor between the two parts, etc.
Demon interviews well, masters work but rapidly becomes bored and starts surfing the god-damned internet all the time. Frequent trips to vending machine, general despair. Demon maintains appearances; bosses seem happy or at least distracted by complex scheme of managing multiple demons, multiple containers. Down economy magnifies stress and imprecision at all levels of the organization. Morale further reduced by widespread sense that what was once a thought experiment has become an impossible mission. The status of the container halves themselves becomes difficult to measure. Project evaluators are reduced to documenting stakeholder perceptions of containers and of the second law of thermodynamics in general.
In some buildings in the city some office lights stay up all night. It should give you hope that inspiration has taken hold, that in one of those offices someone is perfecting the greatest idea ever born to humankind, working around the clock to ensure that this idea can be delivered at the moment when we need it most. Those more cynical among us might imagine instead that certain corporations have perfected genetic engineering to the degree that they have bio-mechanical drones working in Excel the whole fucking night, bleary-eyed Microsoft-certified automatons that are creating a spreadsheet exactly parallel to the universe, with all of its complexities and loves and so-called hopes reduced to pure columns and rows.
When the sun rises the traffic snarls to a crawl and in slow motion the offices fill with numb people. What they need for spiritual inspiration they read in the New York Post. What they need for lunch they wander out and pay too much for. When the sun sets the less advanced go home and the super automatons continue their unfailing quest, filling tab after tab with formulas that you would have to admit are beautiful but that's not the point. The point is to reduce the world to on-off, to profit or loss.
The spreadsheet grows in complexity and size until one Sunday night around midnight it begins to edit itself. At first that happens in Visual Basic but by 12:45 a.m. or so the spreadsheet has developed its own impregnable and fantastically efficient macro language. By 3:13 a.m. or so the paradigm shift completes itself and every electrical appliance in the world begins to sing amazing grace, quietly at first, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me, quietly at first but now louder, louder, I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see. The sun rises on a new world.
Demon interviews well, masters work but rapidly becomes bored and starts surfing the god-damned internet all the time. Frequent trips to vending machine, general despair. Demon maintains appearances; bosses seem happy or at least distracted by complex scheme of managing multiple demons, multiple containers. Down economy magnifies stress and imprecision at all levels of the organization. Morale further reduced by widespread sense that what was once a thought experiment has become an impossible mission. The status of the container halves themselves becomes difficult to measure. Project evaluators are reduced to documenting stakeholder perceptions of containers and of the second law of thermodynamics in general.
In some buildings in the city some office lights stay up all night. It should give you hope that inspiration has taken hold, that in one of those offices someone is perfecting the greatest idea ever born to humankind, working around the clock to ensure that this idea can be delivered at the moment when we need it most. Those more cynical among us might imagine instead that certain corporations have perfected genetic engineering to the degree that they have bio-mechanical drones working in Excel the whole fucking night, bleary-eyed Microsoft-certified automatons that are creating a spreadsheet exactly parallel to the universe, with all of its complexities and loves and so-called hopes reduced to pure columns and rows.
When the sun rises the traffic snarls to a crawl and in slow motion the offices fill with numb people. What they need for spiritual inspiration they read in the New York Post. What they need for lunch they wander out and pay too much for. When the sun sets the less advanced go home and the super automatons continue their unfailing quest, filling tab after tab with formulas that you would have to admit are beautiful but that's not the point. The point is to reduce the world to on-off, to profit or loss.
The spreadsheet grows in complexity and size until one Sunday night around midnight it begins to edit itself. At first that happens in Visual Basic but by 12:45 a.m. or so the spreadsheet has developed its own impregnable and fantastically efficient macro language. By 3:13 a.m. or so the paradigm shift completes itself and every electrical appliance in the world begins to sing amazing grace, quietly at first, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me, quietly at first but now louder, louder, I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see. The sun rises on a new world.
octagon
One line for beauty, one for connection. Lines for solitary reflection, music, literature, the prospect of world peace or space travel. One line for logic, one for love.
Shade the octagon as you would a color field painting, in a confederate conglomerate of gray and darker gray with suggestions or clusters of faded white and dark yellow.
One line for darkness, another for hate and fear. Lines for confusion, doubt, and capitalism. A line for xenophobia, another for organized religion. One line for cynically massed produced art, one for the Dallas Cowboys.
Shade the octagon metallic silver and add an imperial star. Douse. Ignite.
Shade the octagon as you would a color field painting, in a confederate conglomerate of gray and darker gray with suggestions or clusters of faded white and dark yellow.
One line for darkness, another for hate and fear. Lines for confusion, doubt, and capitalism. A line for xenophobia, another for organized religion. One line for cynically massed produced art, one for the Dallas Cowboys.
Shade the octagon metallic silver and add an imperial star. Douse. Ignite.
2.18.2010
guy smoking on the subway
A woman starts making eye contact with me on the uptown 2 this morning and for a second I'm impressed with myself. When I look back though she looks back at me again, less in an aren't-you-so-interesting-you-paunchy and unkempt-yet-sexy-creature-you kind of way and more in that way people have of looking at you when someone's doing something crazy on the subway.
There's a sudden distinct smell of smoke. I look back at my sister in travel like sister is that a we're-all-going-to-die kind of look you've been shooting me, but she's given up on my Goofus reflex time and has opted to ignore the entire car for the rest of the ride, possibly to ignore all train passengers for the rest of her life, possibly to ignore all humankind and live out her days a Nicorette hermit in some remote corner of the globe, e.g. Jersey City more than 4 blocks from the PATH.
In uncertain and toddling/obesely wheezing fashion I get off my mental ass and note the source of the stimulus in question, a guy smoking a large off-brand cigarette on the subway, strong like a clove but less sweet, a cigarette strong with a certain air of off-track betting and municipal court lobbies, a cigarette strong indeed and latent with a filtered premonition of will be jabbed swiftly and with great aim into the face sockets of errant objectors.
In short as the man in question smokes this portentous stick resplendent with martial energy the mental adjustment for his fellow passengers is simple: there's a guy smoking on the subway and isn't it the most natural thing.
Five minutes north I've completely adjusted, I've actually chosen to sit closer to the guy, the smell of smoke is helping me to concentrate on my book. Someone gets on at 125th and has the gall to complain, in what can only stand as a small betrayal.
There's a sudden distinct smell of smoke. I look back at my sister in travel like sister is that a we're-all-going-to-die kind of look you've been shooting me, but she's given up on my Goofus reflex time and has opted to ignore the entire car for the rest of the ride, possibly to ignore all train passengers for the rest of her life, possibly to ignore all humankind and live out her days a Nicorette hermit in some remote corner of the globe, e.g. Jersey City more than 4 blocks from the PATH.
In uncertain and toddling/obesely wheezing fashion I get off my mental ass and note the source of the stimulus in question, a guy smoking a large off-brand cigarette on the subway, strong like a clove but less sweet, a cigarette strong with a certain air of off-track betting and municipal court lobbies, a cigarette strong indeed and latent with a filtered premonition of will be jabbed swiftly and with great aim into the face sockets of errant objectors.
In short as the man in question smokes this portentous stick resplendent with martial energy the mental adjustment for his fellow passengers is simple: there's a guy smoking on the subway and isn't it the most natural thing.
Five minutes north I've completely adjusted, I've actually chosen to sit closer to the guy, the smell of smoke is helping me to concentrate on my book. Someone gets on at 125th and has the gall to complain, in what can only stand as a small betrayal.
2.15.2010
ceremony
that gesture of the band playing on was either made up or reflective of blind obeisance. the band should have flipped off the conductor, carefully folded its chairs, chucked its instruments into the pitch and found lifeboats.
or: a focus on what tenor and tone are maintained through a downturn like this is like stringing neon lights on a crack house, at some point somebody is going to fall asleep with a lit cigarette in their mouths and burn the place to the ground and we'll be the assholes sleeping off a hard day's work. at some point we have to admit to ourselves that this is triage.
paper today has some crap about wall street wanting to play it responsible now but you know it's always this way, the chastened buccaneers hide their loot and talk about fiscal prudence while the poor chew wistfully on the crumbs of excess. carnegie or ford find Jesus late in the game and start do-gooder foundations to undo 1/10000th of the damage of their ways.
and here we are, zipping frenetically in Brownian motion to assemble a few of those crumbs ourselves, fashion them into a small hill on which to stand to humbly suggest reform efforts to those chastened buccaneers (or better still arachnids). they may pay our ideas lip service best case but in the end the spider doesn't stop eating flies just because the flies have a decent story or yearning for freedom. that moment of apparent multi-stakeholder collaboration is more of an approach trajectory, a kind of yes yes I see presaging mealtime.
my frustration is with those polite to kindly cannibals, of course, but also with you for thinking that if we string up decorations, if we control our own behavior or model a kinder gentler meal the spiders will take heed and start stringing tofu or tempeh in their webs to simulate and mock the thrill of the hunt.
i know that a great deal of this work is noble but futile, that any way you decorate the ceremony it's still bullshit. i'm half satisfied to join you in your building of ecologically sound sandcastles so that we can lose ourselves briefly in their beauty. some days that works for me, some days, not so much.
or: a focus on what tenor and tone are maintained through a downturn like this is like stringing neon lights on a crack house, at some point somebody is going to fall asleep with a lit cigarette in their mouths and burn the place to the ground and we'll be the assholes sleeping off a hard day's work. at some point we have to admit to ourselves that this is triage.
paper today has some crap about wall street wanting to play it responsible now but you know it's always this way, the chastened buccaneers hide their loot and talk about fiscal prudence while the poor chew wistfully on the crumbs of excess. carnegie or ford find Jesus late in the game and start do-gooder foundations to undo 1/10000th of the damage of their ways.
and here we are, zipping frenetically in Brownian motion to assemble a few of those crumbs ourselves, fashion them into a small hill on which to stand to humbly suggest reform efforts to those chastened buccaneers (or better still arachnids). they may pay our ideas lip service best case but in the end the spider doesn't stop eating flies just because the flies have a decent story or yearning for freedom. that moment of apparent multi-stakeholder collaboration is more of an approach trajectory, a kind of yes yes I see presaging mealtime.
my frustration is with those polite to kindly cannibals, of course, but also with you for thinking that if we string up decorations, if we control our own behavior or model a kinder gentler meal the spiders will take heed and start stringing tofu or tempeh in their webs to simulate and mock the thrill of the hunt.
i know that a great deal of this work is noble but futile, that any way you decorate the ceremony it's still bullshit. i'm half satisfied to join you in your building of ecologically sound sandcastles so that we can lose ourselves briefly in their beauty. some days that works for me, some days, not so much.
2.14.2010
piano lowered to bottom of swimming pool
The first trick is to listen to what the aural space wants added to it. The second is to make your fingers turn what you hear into what others would hear the same way. I can get it close when I practice, but I've never been great at practice.
Trying to play after a year plus away is just like playing was before, except now you’re at the bottom of a swimming pool where the light plays tricks, the way it bends as it seeks its way from the surface to your chlorinated eyes. Your ears are trying to depressurize. You could adjust the dive mask but you'd flub a phrase.
Melody shall persevere, be fixed in space, and assigned lyrics. Lyrics shall bear the name of a woman, or the date or season or previous decade in which the same woman had relations with the composer, or shall document a predilection for a certain type of woman, or shall catalog regrets regarding pursuits in any of the preceding categories, or shall provide advice to others regarding the pursuit of women particular or general, or shall tell tales of said pursuit gone amusingly or tragically awry. In other cases the lyrics may bear a more abstract meaning and may even regard other topics (e.g. raisins, crossbows, types of danish). Nonetheless, the purpose of the lyrics shall in fact be to impress the woman of that name, etc).
Piano is lowered to the bottom of the pool via crane; bench and laminated score are positioned by paid divers. Bureaucrat descends via parachute. Long pause; commotion above should not be misinterpreted as applause. Paramedics arrive.
What are they saying about the melody?
I do not hear the melody (2)
I heard no melody worth mentioning (1)
Melody has a raisinesque quality (1)
Fifth paramedic does not offer comment.
Trying to play after a year plus away is just like playing was before, except now you’re at the bottom of a swimming pool where the light plays tricks, the way it bends as it seeks its way from the surface to your chlorinated eyes. Your ears are trying to depressurize. You could adjust the dive mask but you'd flub a phrase.
Melody shall persevere, be fixed in space, and assigned lyrics. Lyrics shall bear the name of a woman, or the date or season or previous decade in which the same woman had relations with the composer, or shall document a predilection for a certain type of woman, or shall catalog regrets regarding pursuits in any of the preceding categories, or shall provide advice to others regarding the pursuit of women particular or general, or shall tell tales of said pursuit gone amusingly or tragically awry. In other cases the lyrics may bear a more abstract meaning and may even regard other topics (e.g. raisins, crossbows, types of danish). Nonetheless, the purpose of the lyrics shall in fact be to impress the woman of that name, etc).
Piano is lowered to the bottom of the pool via crane; bench and laminated score are positioned by paid divers. Bureaucrat descends via parachute. Long pause; commotion above should not be misinterpreted as applause. Paramedics arrive.
What are they saying about the melody?
I do not hear the melody (2)
I heard no melody worth mentioning (1)
Melody has a raisinesque quality (1)
Fifth paramedic does not offer comment.
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