Lettres Ideaux

(Here are some of the blogs I've been working on. None of them are finished, but some are more fleshed out than others.)

Laura's

Littoral Plants

I've never told this story to anyone before. I felt terrible then as I do now. Laura may not even remember but that winter she loaned me her plants. You see, her apartment looked down facing northward onto my apartment with the southernmost window of my building. To the west of us both was the frozen lake.

"They're not getting enough sun," she said "but thank you so much for agreeing to take care of them. This is Ganja and this is Planty."

"You name your plants?"

"Of course! But you don't have to talk to them if you don't want to, they just like it better if you do. Otherwise they're real easy to take care of. Just a little water once in a while and they're copacetic."

So suddenly I went from having no roommates to three and the winter got cold that year. I kept the heat on for them when I was gone, which was most of the time, and watered them in the mornings when I got back, the sun shining through stiriated branches that blossomed come springtime into buds of light baby green.

Thinking to be gone for about a week I skipped town before report cards came out to drink and swim and be free. The letter that came to my parents' address set me freer than I imagined.

It was more than a month before I found my way back there. Riding with a trucker from my hometown he loaned me no more than three hours to pack up my stuff and haul out. He had a schedule. I had a dorm room full of shit with Laura's plants in the south-facing window and when I unlocked the door for the last time it reaked of dry dead dessication. Both had died in the summer-sun and it was my fault. I tossed their sad beige remains in the trash and tossed my books and clothesmounds into a backpack. Rode away from there heading east again. Away from the lake, and Laura, her two bedazzled plant pots wrapped in bathtowels at the bottom of a duffle bag like sad guilty secrets, bouncing remorselessly in the back of a roaring red Kenworth.

Linguistic Anomalies

(Because recently I realized that love is how you think as much (or more) than what you do I wanted to write a story that started with the line "She was confused because she hadn't yet realized that love is how you think of love as much if not more than what you do."

That's about all I've got though so after I wrote it down and revelled in how smart it would make me sound I turned on Sesame Street and started daydreaming about the stories we tell each other and how there are unexplored depths in the ostensibly simple stories, or formula stories we tell. How I tend to view television shows as Freudian cryptograms in which even the most straightforward of episodes must be treated as dark message from the vast social unconscious where we unknowingly ignore the conscious level machinations of plot in order to fish unceasingly for sexual imagery, all of it, probably supererogatory and banal but——

then I realized that no one ever stays, if you stretch out the timeline long enough and that would be how my story would end. "'Stay' she said, but he knew that no one ever stays, especially if you stretch the timeline out long enough. No one ever ever stays."

Now I just gotta write in the middle bit.)

Lubrication (Buying a Condom in Poland) In the excitement I said yes, Tak okay and had run down the street under-dressed. Walked in and the little bell announced me daintily as I realized just what it was I was supposed to do. Shit. Two tall wall-length windows on either side spatting a barrage of natural white light at me from behind him, standing there behind the counter with a halo of cigarettes and a cuspidor at his feet browned by chinspit. A radio playing Disco polo. I panicked.

I had forgot the word.

He wore a shirt with a nametag on it. Unpronounceable. Prowling back and forth in front of his desk, the god of the convenience mart sharply lit by the bright sunlight streaming in. I could feel myself stiffen even as I told myself to be calm. His gray shock of hair glistening, bushy eyebrows shading his deep eye sockets, he radiated impatience from the grinding of his chew-squared jaw. A cockroach of sweat scrawled down the penumbra of my back, I try to negate the inevitable by slipping down an aisle of handyman tools I didn't need. Grabbed a hammer anyway and reemerged holding my breath only to catch a glimpse of him again, eyes on me like a knife to the scrimshaw, fat fists rammed in hip pockets and I dove down another, grabbing a bag of something, onion something, 10zł. Whatever. Finally I gave up the ghost.

I put the items on the counter and indicated one more thing was required. Co to he spat. What more do you want kind, besides this hammer and these onion shavings? I fumbled and flubbed, awkwardly tightening my fingers into a rigid flank and slipping the other hand over them like a cap. Christ I looked like a moron miming something so basic: How the fuck do you say condom is this fucking country?

Lethargy and Laxity

I don't want to do anything, I don't want anything, or anyone. Okay want versus need. I want sex, but need solitude and no, I don't event want sex. I don't want both, to both I feel equally repellant, and don't even feel bad wasting time indoors watching porn for a half hour or more unless it's sunny out. There is nothing to feel bad about anymore. I blew an emotional fuse. I can't feel anything. Shame rage love jealousy frustration anxiety ok sure I can feel anxiety and frustration but not caring. Isn't uncaring the antitheses of love? If it is then I've never loved anything and so none of this is new. Not news. But I've tried to hide it because the prevailing wisdom is that you're no good to anyone if you don't have all these passions coming out of your ass and I don't! I don't even care if anyone does! I am single and childless and I feel a level of irrelevancy lately that I don't know what to do with but I'm not one of those people who can just work harder at their job and find satisfaction. The people who have way more stuff to do than time, I ain't that kind of junky, I like to do childish things like play video games but after 8 hours of killing space zombies I'm bored and fucking tired and I just want someone to laugh with again, to have a sense of humor and to listen and talk. That's all I care about really, if I were to care about something. Conversation would do it. Empty, uncharged conventional unpretentious conversation that goes nowhere and there isn't really any point to any of it and it blows on and on like a soft wind. I don't want to talk about books or philosophy or a new idea for a painting or a song because I don't give a fuck about any of that right now and people who do care about those things are boring to me because everyone is just fucking off no matter what they do so why do they have to take themselves and all that they do so damn seriously? I just want to laugh again. I miss people and everything I want to do is too much to do, so much that I can't even bring myself to commit to doing them and I lie down on a couch and want get hugged. That's it! I'm tired of not hugging people. Somebody hug me! I'm tired of losing all my hugging investments. I invested everything I had into people who shorted me (or I allowed myself to short) and now I'm sitting here digging for lint in my pockets and wondering where all of my coins went. Oh right, I put them into broken machines and now I'm broke. Fix me I'm not supposed to be this way! Or don't. Maybe I am. I don't care.

Ludic masking

"[there is] a strange manifestation of the new-media world [in that] it taps into the drive to reflect oneself in a chosen mask."

-Richard Brody

Then let rip the preoccultation of selves! Look beyond my masked exterior and see glowering fire of a federal agent within. Special Agent Cooper of the bifurcated mind! You are not alone. Wrong show but not really. It's the transformation of individual experience—involution—the transpersonalization of the persona into a cultural everyman. The things that have up until now been internal—fetishes, conspiracy theories, paranoid fixations and obsessions—are now all out there: all you have to do is click once Dorothy and you're home sweet wiki home where the Kennedy autopsy or the neo-Nazi salute or hog-tied Swedish flight attendants all reside like Larry, Moe and Scarecrow. Wait. (You were there and You were there) But things that were once external and subject to the social rules of caution and embarrassment—above all, our interactions with other people—are now easily internalized, made to feel like mere workings of the id left entirely on its own.

(My Id, left on its own, traveled the world far and wide, sending reports back to his boyhood friends, simmering doleful into crimson fucks and looking years later back over the the deprivations of libidinal investments like things you'd find nestled in a pile of green plastic grass on Easter morning. (And that would be my point.) )The Proverbial compression of the cosmos into horrifyingly underwrought outlines is what is known as a ludic mask. When you focus on those pure, well-defined, and easily discernible objects like triangles, or more abstract simplifications like social notions of friendship or love, it comes at the cost of ignoring those objects of seemingly messier and less tractable structures and the Einsteinian montage that they covallate. There's nothing wrong with seeing yourself as the occasional model of the masses but What I'm looking for here is some Husserlian epistomology (awareness of self, things, others). Although there is no way for us to not contain our distinct differences from person to person, know where it is appropriate to extend the branched metaphor. We're all distinctly alone, but no one needs be absolutely alone.

Luminous News

The fire broke out about 1:50 a.m., and firefighters arrived to find the residence "fully engulfed," said Police Chief Olsen. The heat was intense enough that vinyl siding melted on the homes on either side of the blaze, Olsen said. The identity of the man found dead has yet to be released

Love is the Sea

Oh God I miss that touch I think stroking.

As someone once said your flesh knows

words that you mouth can never fathom

and I flash to recollect the scent where it

clung, remembering now I never said I'm

sorry for all the washing of your sheets

I left you to. Skuffle and slide, slip inside

the grand evasion. I am dreaming yes.

I miss the furor and the ride, the grind,

the climax wrought and sweaty, I miss

your sheets undone, the saltkissed

cleavage kisses, our bodies aligned

to your moans then the geometry

of slack comfort ahh yes peaceful comma

bodies sleep. I miss what I lack and I lack,

you. Dammit. Now the horn gone slack,

wrap once again in porn mine eye and see

it fiddlewake, ah yes. And yet, you gone

I must wonder

where resides that remaining

impulse, fear the heart of,

were you the source

or merely a conduit

charged

by some secret hideaway me?

Logical Positivism

(I wanted to write a blog about Logical Positivism. I don't really have anything unique to say. This is all I've got:)

Logical positivism (also called logical empiricism and neo-positivism) is a school of philosophy that combines empiricism– the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge of the world – with a version of rationalism incorporating mathematical and logico-linguistic constructs and deductions in opposition to all metaphysics, especially ontology and synthetic a priori propositions; the rejection of metaphysics not as wrong per se but as having no reasonably equivalent meaning when all criterions of meaning based on Ludwig Wittgenstein's early work were that the idea that knowledge should be codifiable into a single standard scientific language rationally reconstructed over a graduated time frame from ordinary-language concepts into a more precise replacement. Until the 1950s, logical positivism was the leading school in the philosophy of science in America.

(And)

"It's on the strength of observation and reflection




that one finds a way.




So we must dig and delve unceasingly!" -Claude Monet

(or just drink)

[it's the] live ones [we're running out of.]Walking home bars and restaurants closed and boarded up the coat I put on inside out what is the nature of that tragic and yet inevitable link between pain and desire Taco vans this city dead a sodden seethe of leaves aside the gutter paved park ballpark and sirens from a distant planet the night sky all stars blazing down at me critically, like dandruff speck and laughing coarsely at my pitiable but pitiless existence a million million occluded twinkling jerks up there collectively sneering like little kid bullies staring down amused remember recess when we would try to run away and we thought that by wearing disguises like your older brother's hoodie and sunglasses and hiding behind the snowy climb-tires we could escape no one would see us I feel like that now trying to outrun the dawn and finding myself trapped by the the western ocean held in thrall beach darkness remember love comes in splurts Take this tin can and sail her away! Round the distant dreamy shore They've got a wall in China to keep out the Mongols you know but they hold to it with such pride one might think that the wall was really built to hold the Chinese in. Ya gotta know yer cage. I am enclosed in a prison of language everything I have ever said is who I am. Like that. That there. Like the voice of the earth, the sea, everything and nothing all BOOM at once.