Suffocating girl with a shiitake-colored face. —Kim Hyun
We all want to look good. And from so far back (was it that far?) we have tried. It is oh so sub jective, this good looking. And how harsh we can be, thinking ourselves on the perimeter, out
of bounds (way outside the boundary), butt ugly. It’s a ridiculous thing that is perpetuated from day to day, from month to month and year to year. WE DO NOT LOOK GOOD! Who says? Mama? Daddy?
And why was that? How long ago? Still, it rings in our ears. Or perhaps that perception came from the books we’d read alone in our rooms every day and night (flashlights under the covers). “How old were
you when you realized you were sexy?” asks Chuck, the gay cheerleader. “Forty-five,” answers Fred, the dance-a-holic. To be Fred. Oh, to be Fred. And last forever and a day past forty-five on that dancefloor.
Boy-man takes control, wants the power, has it. The room is stifling for the rest of the adults as this goes on and on. Something in Japanese plays loudly in the room that is normally so quiet nobody notices anything
except breath. “What this room needs is a girly-gal,” mumbles the Grandpa, half-asleep. Once, as he sat in the worn reclining seat in what was once called a den (there was a gas fireplace), he’d have the control – the mechanism
by which a thing called a television could be switched from station to station. But televisions went out of fashion long ago, then out clean out of existence. A bit of drool at the left hand corner of Grandpa’s dry lips falls like a teardrop
onto his bare leg. The chair no longer reclines. Boy-man laughs at a scene in Japanese. Japanese laughter is quite unique, thinks Grandmother, who sits on the most unworn portion of the long sofa, directly across from the gas fireplace
that can no longer be lit, no longer warms, warmth being so completely unnecessary. She is moving her arms around. It is an imaginary blanket made of yarn that she thinks she is building. The crochet needle had been used years hence to
eliminate Man-boy’s mother and father. Did Grandpa do it? Did Grandmother? Maybe neither knows. Maybe both know.
The main character is calm. Perhaps you’ve been following (me), which means I should maybe put a spoiler alert warning? Spoilers. They don’t exist any more here,
presumably. At least in most generic cases. The train snakes through the once overpopulated desert terrain. They’re playing croquet with lesbian undertones before they head to a diner that looks a
lot like the one from Paradise. The mind wants to know what the writer is feeling, and she tells the mind that she used to have long yellow legal pads that she stole from her office job. I’ve made myself breakfast but I don’t feel like
eating it. Is it the barebecue flavor? I never lked barbecue. Especially sweet barbecue. And it’s messy. “You’re going to have a visitor,” says the mind, after reminiscing for the first time from when she was an individual. as not part of the hive mind.
Then there’s my breakfast. I am getting an upset My stomach from the sickly sweet smell of the barbecue. And me from the south, too. The show is over. She’s going to get a visitor. It’s become quite the suspenseful motivation to keep watching the show,
among all the other wonderful things I could tell you about it, that makes it an incredibly fresh show. This, of course, is an opinion, and I begin to wonder what being an actual television critic might be like. My stomach sours thinking about the show.
Because they eat each other. They eat people. This has become a pretty significant plot point. They don’t kill the people they eat. The will starve in a determinedly rather short period of time (not climate change). But they sustain, among utilizing other ways,
perhaps, by eating other people. People who died. There is always death and there is always living. Oh, I could tell you so much more, but I’ve definitely lost my appetite for my breakfast. Who east barbecue for breakfast? And these new humans, if that’s what they are, eat people.
Am I trying to tell: a) a story? b) feelings? c) what might have happened within these stories (these dreams) that might have led to a series of breakdowns? to a breakdown? d) to get it all out? or (the easy out), e) all of the above?
I could go on to say that this is an opportunity to perform a task, a set of tasks or, rather, to continue with a rather large task, to perform it, for you (me?) – Gawd! – in a, here we are, in a fresh way? Over the past few years, I have come to use that word (fresh) to describe to you (me and you) a preferable or more elevated item of a standard
art form. It could be a song. could be a poem. It could be a structure (a building, a city, a sculpture, a man-made something-or-other that creates a certain zing) ... to this admirer. The freshness causes a zing to occur at me. Within
me. Oh you ain’t got a thing if you don’t have that _____. Which in 1931 would have been fresh.
Question: Was the Windex commercial, which used the same tune, fresh when it started hitting the airwaves, it says here, in the early 1990s, a consensus would be around 1993?
Visions of a terrace with a cell phone ought to be engraved on the waiting skull, like Brahms. —John Ashbery (Was this a misreading? I’m not embarrassed to include it.)
Doesn’t that just sound like the title of a piece by yours truly? Thinking of vulnerability, in general, as a broadly realized topic. Realized as in I know it well. (She’s decorating her home with items she has picked up at a museum dedicated to the works of Georgia O’Keefe. Singing snippets of popular songs from mostly bygone eras. The 1970s. The 1980s. The 1990s. Perhaps the 2000s. Those bygone eras. She does seem to have gone through some sort of an upgrade. Taking on luxuries. This, an alternate apocalypse.) But not vulnerability based on being as embarrassing as I can be. That’s a type. A vulnerability concoction. Sure. But not that one. Does it seem that I’m laying bare my soul here? No.
Between each of these snaggled sentences are many others that are not written. Never spoken. The Paraguayan (am I dismantling that proper signifier as well?) fingers La Virgen Del Carmen. How holy is this intersection? But there is no cross. Only a depiction the size of thumb-able. He is stoic, but he has his own luxuries. Has he reached The Baja? Or is it just Baja? Well of course it’s not The Baja.
They were doozies. They all were. I wonder how many I can remember, sitting here, days later. But I can come up with several scenes and snippets from that last one, which I’m not sure wasn’t actually the last two. Or so. So let me shut
up and set the scene. Polynesia. Isn’t that an antiquated, perhaps erroneous, perhaps derogatory way to name a particular place.
Vulnerability. It turns out it’s not really a place. I mean it is a region? But more than anything else it’s a people. Now isn’t that American of me? Not to know something that,
before I speak about it, I should? Broad strokes.
But I didn’t ask for a code to terminate Facebook. Which might also be a place, but maybe could be better defined as a people. Oh, is this science fiction? You tell me. Or no, I’m telling you. Yes, it was science fiction. In many of the dream segments I was in (or above)
a place called Polynesia. Yes, for most of the duration I can re
member, hovering over it in an airplane. Oh, look! A bunny rabbit!
I’ve switched over to Pluribus, season 1, episode 7, The Gap.
When the house falls you wonder If there will ever be poetry —Jack Spicer
I think the main reason for the irrational emotional disarray that occurred off and on for a few days recently might have been the dreams.
Would you like to hear some blasphemy? I’ve gotten rather annoyed with the inordinate amount of stacked Jack Spicer lines that have found me reading them, quickly lately, this
present Spicer era is moving fast, because I’m attempting to get my body through them? I break them into servings less eternal, less infernal with my favorite television shows.
To think that I can intersperse my days and nights with these brilliant burbling brooks.
Miley Cyrus going on to Jimmy Kimmel about the one Christmas song she ever put out – I think she said it was called “Sad Christmas.” And how nobody ever
heard it because who wants a sad Chri stmas, or something. Immediately I think of Elvis Presley and his version of “Blue Christmas.” And how “We Three
You have not listened to a word I have sung —Jack Spicer
Sometimes I wake up singing. I remember there were a few months, close to when I was down with Covid, I think? Anyway, I’d wake up for mornings, like a month of morn
ings, speaking. I’d be talking distinctly. It would become less distinct the more awake I got, so it wouldn’t last very long, but what I was saying, well, what I was saying was
never clear in the end. Perhaps if you’d have been there you might could tell me. But I do know that each morning I woke up that way, I’d solved one of the world’s biggest problems.
It could have just been my problem. It’s quite vague, but I had the solution, of that much I’m confident. It’s not like when I wake up singing, which I’ve done on again and off again for as
far back as I can remember. It’s a bit rare, but waking up singing is easy – it means I’ve gotten up in good spirits, a rarefied good. That is what
When it’s Thanksgiving Day, say, and you’ve gotten used to flying solo (even after decades of dom estic partnership holidays with in- laws and romantic excursions and men who cook turkeys in ovens, and you think it’s a day like any
other, the familiarity with those words and with being alone, but yet it’s Thanksgiving, a significant holiday, or it always was for you however you’d wind up spend ing it, whether in Charleston or Conway or Little Rock or Fort Smith (in the hospital with a burst appendix), Arkansas or in Bowling
Green, Ohio (why, oh, why, oh?),
or a few miles north in the Old West
End of Toledo in the same state, all
flat and windswept with a spindrift
of snow dust swirling just above the
ground most days and nights for nearly six months each year, or Ann Arbor, Mich igan in the heart of winter in the early 1990s so in love and so romantic, in that tiny little apartment with all of
its potatoes and peas and episodes of
The Next Generation, and what about
in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts while working in Boston or Cambridge at MIT and all of the Thanksgivings, so far there have been twenty-five, spent in San Fran cisco, which is now called home. Except, well, the past eight years of holidays, the big ones, that begin with turkey and go through Christmas and into the New Year, all times that were historically milestones,
celebrations to be remembered with loved ones, to be cherished, and in many ways they still are, only the ones up to a certain time, say, around 2015, or perhaps a couple of years before that, when Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s got reduced to whatever they’ve been since then. Never theless these have been historically monu mental days, events that mark time, that become nostalgic, marking moments or eras ing whoever it was we were at each of those given monumental moments. And now to poke a bit, there is this project which you (I) alone have put together, bucking the system, and publishing it in blog format, having been
one of the first publishers to dispense with the
notion that a book has to be something you can hold, or something that’s made of wood and has a semblance of soft or hard paper and a cover, but
this has the intentional appearance of a modern
day diary, the ones that, rather than locked with a key that you hold on a chain around your neck, say, are viewed and always available, somewhat for free, in a public manner, as democratically available as things get, in many ways. and within
this past year, only a few short months ago, not
only did you make a big deal of celebrating the
20th anniversary of its existence, building your
own fanfare, much as it is often not the easiest
thing to do, and from this compendium, you
have never really read from it with actual people
around, or not in a very long time (but you
definitelty want to), so instead you make vid
eos of you reading each piece, settling it further into that same modern bookless vein, what has been called a vlog, on top of the diaristic twenty-years of entries posted most
every day, literally much of which has been
stolen or half-stolen from your own previous journals written at most every age of your life.
and sometimes you want to stay under the radar, you know how embarrassing diaries can be, but then maybe that’s the point and you’re fine with it, and you want to tout it
as loudly and proudly as you possibly can
because this is who you are. but then that
seems a bit much, as you are not the
fondest of showcasing your artistic acc omplishments, if that is, indeed, what
they should be called, but you can, in a disc iplined fashion, use the modern powers that be to make sure that people maintain an aw areness that you’ve got this thing going on over here, even though you never really discuss what it is or why you do it or how maybe it has saved your life or how it’s been the most consistent thing, the only thing, that’s remained constant in some stretch close to twenty-two years now, with no signs of a slowdown. and then one day shortly after its big birthday you find yourself finishing up the four thousand nine hundredth entry and poem and photo and video to post into this book that is not
a book thing that has taken up so much of your life. that IS your life. that is perhaps
the most accurate representation of it and
of who you are, the best and the worst of
you, not just an idealization of who you want
to be, even though it’s just poetry, collaged
from slices of the many days that you’ve lived
thus far, turned semi-fictional often, or heartfelt and very real, but you have done all of this, it is quite an accomplishment, of what it’s hard for you to, with any objectivity, relay, yet who else might relay such a thing better, given that you’ve now written that 4,900th piece.
and it’s done and you don’t even really have to
look at it again .you just make sure there are
no glaring errors, you pair a photo that seems appropriate or inappropriate in some poignant way that is all your own, that gives you away a bit, just like you have done for the many pages
in the compendium, in a composite way that might begin to tout a life that has, for several years now, felt quite unrelatable, quite ineffable.
