Adz, Blur and Om

"Things are not always what they seem, nor are they otherwise."

-Well-known Zen Adage

The heat is palpable. You can see it throbbing the air, waves of distortion rising up in tandem on the horizon, the edge of every vista like bubbles of boiling batter, are we in an oven? 

Walking inside, into the slough of AC. Soothe is the word. It wetlicks my skin, like a balm I guess. 

What is a balm?

A weird old word.

Where does that leave us then? Finger wading stacks upon stacks in the office. An avalanche of rejection.  A glare on the wallclock’s number 3.  Maybe it doesn’t say three…  I am thinking about your cheek.  A kiss on that tender blush. Like an apple.  The fleshy lines of your arms…

Where does that leave us then?  Not where but when.  A long time from when we started. 

I did not walk here all the way from the airport to listen to myself talking.
I came here to watch you.
I came here to watch you all.
To see you listening.
Listening to me talk.
Talk without thinking…

Parking lot snowbank remnants beneath the springtime stars, “it's open mic night muthafuckas!”

Remember? 
 

No, you weren’t there.  Maybe even I wasn’t there.  My head was elsewhere. Yes certainly.  Was I walking home? Dusty boys playing by the side of the road. I check online. Weather in GoogleMaps is always fixed. Is that old home still there?  Where was it exactly?  Streetview.  I was leaving work. What was that job?  Did I drive or take the train?  A plane, a boat? 

I seem to recall
air fanned by a flock of hands,
the cats flanks flecked with burrs,
veiled windows, lit by sunset, or streetlights…
the smell of wood floors and coffee grounds,
the smell of lost causes, the taste of boredom
your Jacobean mouth…

Remember? 

Am I my own vision?  Yes most certainly, but how am I stretched beyond it? 

And what is it beyond my own vision?  Heat, for sure, the lines all rubbing together but beyond that, what name this stage, this set, a wind from other oceans we hadn’t known, the codenames of lost continents. 

What is this place called?  Not where but when.  The camera clicks, flash a light.  What do I see?  When did we enter?  Let's give it a name to say when it starts.  How should we stay? The points aren’t fixed.  

Like a starlit lake in the midst of San Francisco.  Midst or mist?  
The moon was late tonight.
Tonight I touched the dry warm skin 
of the building
because the night is the cure
the cure is the beginning

 Let me through.

The streetlight glare on the digitalclock number 3.  

Everywhere blurry hot and halogen.

My ideas no longer ideas
just two fine French doors you live inside
like I live inside this promise
like we live inside dreams
the best dreams where you did not yet exist
Yet not where but when
when inside I knew 
knew you in the universe
the universe would create you eventually
and the universe would continue to burn,
A dream fire fueled by a heart’s promise.


Or youth.

I was the lithe flower then and now I am the fat fruit. I am ready for a fall.  I am ready to fall apart.  I am ready for the seed somewhere within me to spring.

Jabalíes Van Winkle

"Those who can't repeat the past are condemned to remember it"
-Mark O'Donnell

Swine Flu? What the hell is this? A guy is sick for three weeks and wakes up to a world caught in the pandemic grips of sensational panic derived from an illness no one ever heard of before! I should just go back to sleep for another three weeks and it'll all be over with.
Unless I have the Swine Flu. My mother thinks I have it. To spare her from worry-lines of concern I gave her the same speech but implemented the time frame of 3 days instead of 3 weeks. Both are true, but in a world gone mad with sensationalism, why add to the ruckus?

Swine Flu! Ha! While it lasts, let's make a game day of it? (Remember Game Day? Yay! It's what we used to Play before I hit the Hay, Oh So Long before Today) It's a game like Hot Potato, only our overcrowded global culture is the circle and the potato is Swine Flu.

TRY NOT TO CATCH IT!
YAYGO!

You wake up and everything's changed. Like Rip Van Winkle, with more Mexican pigs and the days now longer but more night hours and fewer co-workers at your job where you no longer get matching 401K benefits but are expected to do more although you don't know what it is they are expecting you to do.

"I have no idea what I'm doing," I said to the cute secretary whose name I never learned. The sunset light haloing the distant treetops, skyscraper skirts bright, like illumined lights eyeing up a woman's thigh towards home and everything else, vanishing.

"That's funny," she laughed, "you do look-like you don't know what you're doing."

"I'm like Rip Van Winkle."

"Hey while you're over here can you sign these?"

"You know, the older I get the more I come to appreciate that those elders who seemed like the firmament of existence when I was younger were just making it up. And now that I'm making it up too..."

"You just signed your name Washington Irving."

"I always sign my name Washington Irving. Unless I'm bored. Then I sign it Irving Washington."

"What happens when you get bored of signing it Irving Washington? Do you change it back, or do you sign things with your real name?"

"No, then I sign Charles Bronson."

Of course living as I do on the page I am limited in the kinds of preventative actions that I can take to save myself from the new dangers of this world I have arisen to find myself in. And I don't mean living on the page in the sense that at any moment I may turn to ink and fade away. We don't live in a world of ink anymore, the souls of modern letters aren't comprised of water, they are pixelated, and when pixels die it is electric, they do it with a zap-- (Sad to think this whole mad little masquerade could end in such a measly little Jetsonsesque three-letters) but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about living my life so as not to live it at all. I never make any decisions unless I absolutely have to, and consequently I am almost always in a difficult situation beyond my control because not making any decisions is a decision in itself. Simply letting things happen to me has always seemed to work out advantageously enough, because it allows me to narrate the continuous experience of navigating the shallow depths of misery in which I am constantly submerged. I live by not really living, I float, more like, bob, submerged right under the surface of bad experiences that are never quite my fault.

I could start making decisions— living my life, but that runs the risk of making myself happy, and thus running out of new material.

Typically, when faced with a Yes or No question, my answer is masked in Maybes. If you Maybe long enough, most people give up asking in annoyance and assume you are a No. But on rare occasions there are audacious souls who take an initial Maybe for a tentative long-term Yes. And it was one of these who asked if, two summers ago, I would help out at a summer camp for boys.

"I couldn't sleep last night."

"Because you were sick?"

"Yes. Swine Flu. And I was thinking about when we helped out at that camp."

"200 Boys. A dozen of us. No TV. I was reading that book about how you were going to die."

"And I had just started going out with Amy."

"Us counselors drank so much beer at those meetings! Ha ha, ‘meetings’."

"Every night, after the boys went to sleep. There were nights I didn't even know how I got back to bed. I drank so much I blacked out."

"And then we got up at 5AM, to wake them all up and do it all over again."

"That was such a good week."

"I was glad when you didn't die like in the book."

"Later I found out that Amy started going out with this other guy during the week I was away."

Maybe everything starts to end as soon as it starts.
Like this Swine Flu thing.
Like This Masked Man Blog.
Like Waves in the Ocean.
Each beginning is just the tortured overture to a tragic foregone conclusion.

"Only the cleaning lady noticed that I got a haircut."

"Maybe they noticed but they didn't think it polite to say anything."

"I long ago gave up any hope of exerting control over the hair on my head. Lately it's looking like some sort of cotton-country rockabilly-wannabe kid had a dream where he woke up restless to find his reflection mirrored that of Samuel Beckett."

"What did the cleaning lady say?"

"She said looked good. Asked how I'd been, so I did the same. Then she looked me in the eyes and told me her son had died."

"Oh man. I hate awkward moments like that. I was at a Circuit City a while back when I recognized a guy from my Statistics class. He recognized me, and when I asked him if he'd lost weight he said 'yeah, cancer'll do that do ya'."

"Oh man! Awkward indeed. This woman told me her son died a month ago, some sort of heart eurythmi— the John Ritter thing, only it wasn’t quite so out-of-the-blue. Then she just looked me in the eyes. Big, watery brown eyes, just starting up at me. What could I do? I said sorry. I said you've just got to face the day. Get up in the mornings, go to sleep at night, and get up and face the day again. Is that from a movie?"

"Sleepless in Seattle."

"It sounded better the first time I said it."

"What can ya do?"

"Laugh."

"Wanna hear a joke?"

"Sure."

"What's worse than finding half a worm in your apple?"

"I dunno what?"

"The Holocaust."