I rarely do. Have a comp- lete thought (you know, without start- ing another one, I mean). Take the rock I’ve been sleeping on for a week now, for ex- ample. Nice view and all. But it’s a rock! And a very cold one at that. And however heavy the wind blows (also, quite cold!), it never really carries me, my thoughts or that confound- ed rock (from which what an extraordinary view!) away. “Aw, shaddap, Jim!” “Okay, okay,” says I, “good night, Slim.” “Good night to you, too, Mis- ter Jim.” To which he just has to add, with his arms and his four fing- ers in the air, look- ing just like the metal- head he never was, “You rock!” Then morn- ing crows. And it’s funny how the aches are never terribly funny until years later. “Years later, Jim?” To which we don our Devo ziggurat hats and fan out into the wilderness
I gave myself sun- burn! And look who’s at the doorway, look- ing just as sinister as he never looked, the halo almost a floating aura around this month’s bangs. Why, it’s YOU, that’s WHO! If, for ex- ample, we were to ex- change a glance or two (we do, we did), I’d think “and just to think, it all started with I don’t know you, you don’t know me. Right?” Right. But somebody must have really wanted to know something. (Right?) (And what a shame, ignorance?) (Right?). “Hey, sonny, can you make the burn go a-way?” Or can you at least make it go thattaway. And to think, the burn was the burn of the party cake, the slight heartburn of a heart having a panic attack. And the angel reminded the heart that there was no panic at all, was there? No panic at all. T hen the burp. Then the twinned laughter. “Can you make the burn go away, kiddo!” started without the de- ranged scream, was more of a simple whis- per: “Burn it up daddy, just burn it all up.” Does burn ever really go up?
In that sense? It goes down, for sure. “Look,
it’s all burnt down,” said Sally, walking down Conifer Lane for the fif- teenth time in a row, thirty months after it all burnt down. The 5-alarm fire that didn’t even fry the doorway. If you look, or at least when Sally looks, she can almost see the cherub, his red flowing cape, and long ash-
Who’s funnier when you’re fifty (than when you’re in your late thirties). I, be- fore e, except after sex. Which somehow sounded just as good at fifteen. This is everything, almost the very end of everything, the everything that gets stolen right from between my legs. Just got, that is. What’s the difference be- tween two black and gray camouflage backpacks? Funny just will not do for this wise-ass crackpot, will it? Speaking of off- color humor ... just will not do for this wisecrack. More comedy ensues, it never fails. For example, take all of the instructions at the Tenderloin Police Department (a charmer of a community haven, please allow me to ensure you). When asked about the report I’d be filing, I begin with fifteen pages of handwritten words (“it’s part of a much-larger pro- ject,” I try to get out of the dry craw near my goozle, and somehow manage before the now imaginary “and much, much more...” comes out like the square wheel of my father’s long lost verb- alized breath). Ah, libido, how surreal! I think, smooth as a song sung by Mel Tillis. “...all of my important files, you know, with labels like ‘bills,’‘housing,’‘job- search,’ and ‘urgent.’” “It was really just a back- pack filled with earnest modesty and endless ‘im- portance,’” croons Tillis, as if honey from my stut- ters, “just a backpack that fell alseep in the wrong man’s backyard.”
No one would believe my story. And yet it would bore pretty much anyone to tears. My story, it ain’t no good. A story can come in many sizes and a good one will work on multiple levels, they say. The same could be said of the icons of today's blockbuster cinema: Superman, Spiderman, Naruto, Wolverine, Magneto, the Avatar, Captain Underpants (he IS a cinematic superhero,
right? I just ran into a 5 year old sporting an under-sized t-shirt with this unlucky official moniker), Jack Black, Captain Jack Sparrow, Cap’n Crunch, Peter Pan, etc. “I was born in the Summer of Love,” I say, just to throw people off. I mean, look at me, do I look like the son of hippies (I certainly am not)?? And then I wear a grimace for the rest of the day. What happened to all of the love, I mumble intermittently from, I dunno, 4:00 to 11:00 pm
(the latter couple of hours I mumble somewhat drowsily until later:)? “I wasburn in a Smermer of Loovthe!” I shout somewhere on Haight Street, knowing that most people confuse this summer (not my mumbles, necessarily) with 1969, the summer the twins were born (my little brothers), and the summer those men landed on the moon (or else the year that Stanley Kubrick was an unusually prolific, not to mention quite stealthy director).
Reality? Do most people don’t get 1969 confused with 1967? On any level? Um. Perhaps on some level, almost everyone (of a certain age) gets 1969 confused with 1967. But what of 1968, 1971, 1975, or even 1979....1973? Presently, I’m either depressingly or at least toyingly toodling with the distance between the present and that grand demarcation: the Summer of Love. Now let’s all poke some fun at glaring half-centuries which ogle back at me like oversized
bobbleheads (aren’t they all?). And above those blurred bobs – in a precisely delineated neon yellow – flashes the appropriate word, one we’d take on decades later: “D’uh!” So did folks living in the Summer of Love realize that they were participants in the Summer of Love? Or did that realization arrive years later as a posthumous (so-to-speak) appellative? And how subsequent, if so? This I am pretty certain is a fact that I should know, but, my memory.
And, on a related note, as luck would have it, I’ve already lost all interest. Except in how it might pertain to me, as usual. You know, that particularly easy-going plump babe was born the second Thursday of a June; during what (in towns, such as the one in which I was born), lovingly (or laughingly), is called the morning rush hour (actually two fantastical l-words of my own bias, because most citizens hereof had
never even been anywhere else in the world - another fantasy/bias, if you’ll allow); when it comes to the rush of an hour, to even realize there can be a difference. I was such an easy birth, too, just ask my mother, (who definitely knows from worse). That’d be me, born as I was in none other than THE summer of love, a summer which will never again be half a
century in distance from anywhere else in the world (be that anywhere: Vesta, Arkansas; Kyoto, Japan; Skopje, Macedonia; or either of the multi- tudinous but each unique canals of Venice, Amsterdam or St. Petersburg).
That part you have right. That part of me wading in all of the bullshit, you de scribe it differently, and it’s your bod given right, abso lutely, because your attention is sick, and not in a good way, sick as the victims you point at all day long, thinking nothing, per taining to the victims, but even moreso how you feel about this sys tem we spent time building, applauding, lauding, up setting and rearranging, along with our values, how wonder fully precious to have one or two of them, but eviscerated? I don’t recom mend it, nope. I believe that’s what’s so shock ing about these stocking-stuffers so heavily weight ed with self-esteem issues, depressions, the inactive ideas of each yesterday’s gung- ho, being solidly put in to a place where nobody can remember (the idea, yesterday, the solidity, the action of inaction), the pitch-perfect abuse (sitting in front of Life time television yelling Why stay with such a son-of-a-bitch!? I, the killing of the hap py (where did those drugs go, right?) as a sneaky mur derer, or worse, creeps into our universe of val ues and such, wow, what a valuable uni verse (because, yes, of course, it’s since been completely re veresed!), ig noring con sequences, as if what are those?
Let’s pause for just a moment to prepare for what otherwise would be a lethal isolation. Which means ignore my pleas, ignore my please, snub ev ery last one of my pleases, take a step closer, just one step, and recall how much further it was from
me than the step be
fore, from the bleak fix that is me, how dar ling of me to nostalgic ally imagine it so, ano ther step closer/further and we might even re discover that release sensation, the valve and value of which we lost, broke, or just forgot to keep their forwarding addresses...
(to be continued, always at some futuristic hour, so long as we are still skipping and beating, breathing and slipping. So, by all means, stay tuned.)
Who you say you are is mostly every- one. While some do, most people never add that part to them- selves. Admit- ting the fault that is yours isn’t half the battle, but owning up to what one’s sub- tracted from oneself. Hon- ing that down inside even your great- est others is nothing about vul- nerability. It is quite simply about the truth, which, when all is said and done, turns out to be nothing but a hole.
Many apologies. In all the years of our correspondence, I do not recall broaching this subject, which has been many. And this particular topic is uncannily important, especially with regard to our ‘relationship.’ So it is with all due respect that I respond in this way. Because this is what we do. The answer is not when will I become my old self; that’ll never happen. But sometimes never is a blesséd thing. When I took the Hippo Oath, I never thought was a hypocrite. Maybe the Greeks were all Geminis, I dunno (I certainly don’t remember any screwing that occurred Halloween). “I wasn’t on hand for
that particular heartbreak,” he says nostalgically, without even utilizing his pretty hands to make the point. Amused by this,
Art begins to sing La Isla Bonita while the rest of the knights are brashly serving all of their grunts dinner (shining armor, indeed!). Then the henchmen agree upon specifically what to do about history. The agreement, stacked as it were, rock upon rock (as I recall, it was mostly slate, done in the classic style so predominant in those less volatile but much more tawdry times), was thread throughout about seven triptychs. “What do you mean,
what is there to do about all of this history?” Jenna asked
the by then vanished (vanishéd) capitan while astral
projecting herself into a different parlor, one which housed all the same strange people that were milling about the pre vious parlor, except this newer group looked a lot more exhausted. I agreed as I twitched back and forth amongst extreme clarity, warped juxtaposition (again, in the nature
of that particular era), a perverted cynicism pulsing through
this very oddly-whetted comedy which, while watching, I
could but squeeze out a rare and very dry chuckle.
I woke up this morning with no hang- over (I mean like the ones that occur without the aid of a yes- terday of drinking or participating in alternative festivities). Meaning: I’m young again. Check Roger slither- ing out of the bedroom and into the L- shaped hall- way. Check. Roger. I’m slithering as well, out from under my blank- ets to grab my favorite pull- over, head to the shower for a quick scald and a comb- over. Mostly happy, like al- most al- ways; re- lieved with- in the con- viction that I’m in no need of a do-over. “Check,” shouts Roger with both arms up in the air.
Diane, I don’t remember all these cartoons. I have novel-sized reams of mail you sent me during the nineties (in particular). Was your intention to send me both Mary Worth AND Apartment 3-G? The latter, what ever the case, seems hilarious, looks like it would be a total scream to me (now - I certainly did not get them at the time). Also, The Far Side never grows old, apparently. I love the one you sent of a young Captain Hook who’s seeing a “job therapist” (I could definitely use one of those, by the way) because he’s torn between two potential careers: pirating or massage therapy. The look on the therapist’s face is priceless. Or did I make that part up? Anyway, one thing I didn’t make up were two “Special Report” sidebars you must have cut from something (From what, though? Was there a magazine called “Special Report” to which someone in your family – or, just as likely, you – subscribed?) that were entitled “Special Report 2” and “Special Report 3.” They remind me of the pamphlets that folks in and around Chinatown are always passing out about the ... Falun Gong ... I think? I’ve no recollection beyond that, at the moment, because I’m reminded of the man (I actually really miss him) who stood on a dais made of a couple of milk crates, I believe, on the corner of Grant and Washington Streets (or Grant and one of the cross-streets nearby Washington Street) literally all day long sing-saying “Happy Happy Happy” over and over and over again. Only it sounded more like “Appy Yappy Yappy” to me. So I’d be sing-saying the same, all the rest of a day when I had the joy of running into him. It gave me a very warm feeling, and I felt reassured and okay, as in I’m gonna be okay because Appy Yappy Yappy. There really are a lot of these letters, Diane. All in one envelope, for example, there’s an 8 1/2" x 11" handwritten letter, along with a Gil Thorpe strip, an always seemingly worthless comic (to me) that again, only now, as I read through your letters and their various surprise enclos ures, seem to be getting. Like, I GET Gil Thorpe! How crazy is that? And then there’s Mary Worth, another soap opera strip with only two or three frames a day, like the soapy and oh-so-slow- moving Dick Tracy, a strip I actually read and read, but never actually got, to be per- fectly honest. Who knows why, though, because even back then I loved soap operas (I’d watch Days of Our Lives and The Young & the Restless – which starred David Hasselhoff, at the time – with my mom before I even started school. I remember this!) I always felt in these drawn-out dramas that there was some sort of humor that I must surely have been totally missing. And there must have been. Because you sent me strip after strip after strip, along with your three- to seven- paged incredibly engaging letters, most all of which I took photographs of before everything in my storage unit went to auction. These are the things that life is made of. Of which life is made. Which make life. For which I am beyond grateful.
Greetings, beneficiary! There’s the “ick” of St. Petersburg. And then there’s the “ugh” of St. Petersburg. Lucy lives in St. Petersburg, but she is not to be confused with that person in the sky with diamonds. No, but she has immeasurable amounts of gold. Scads of it. During the warm season, and sometimes during the not-so-warm seasons, the gold cascades down the mountaintops that surround Lucy’s daringly hip (for Russia, you know) mansion. So, yes, lots of gold. Urp! And lots of icky sky. Ugh! But the golden icing on the peaks of the summits surround- ing her dainty mansion, and the gold itself, seem to be the only pollution in Russia’s Amsterdam (however, I will always prefer Venice). The pol- lution wraps the city into a singularity, so it can be stuck into a sentence all the more disgustingly, all the more gaudily, with the common sway of the boughs, the overly- ornate parlor parquetry, the kitchen cabinets that are so often open, hanging limply like lower parts of the human body around a broken bone, a leg bone, say, as it sways ever so slight
ly, to and fro (for purposes of this missive, we can deny the pain of it all; there’s enough in the beautifully warped city of St. Peters- burg, whose inhabitants seem endlessly enraptured by the sunken rooms in their own homes; rooms we’d probably call dens. In fact, “Down with dens!” is the somewhat unofficial motto of the city of St. Petersburg. A den with an extra e is of course Eden, after all.) And always he sways and she sways, in unison, in solidarity, it seems with the boughs and the buroughs. He sways, she sways. And do I ever love it when you sway on your uniquely bland (for St. Petersburg, anyway) porch-swing in the indelibly heartwarming city of St. Petersburg, Russia.
What a beautiful and violent day today is! —Joe Brainard
The city slowly exhales. It ex- hales forever. I know this be- cause I hear it out my new win- dow all night. No- thing going in. It is not a direction tonight. I’m a slave to the clouds that carry away this incessant breath. Gulp- ing everything I can from this vacuum, I scream Come back to the ground, you mon- grel clouds!! Come back. Be fog. Be like I am. Square in the face. Hazy. Pinwheel of in- determinate temperance. At a loss. Death, that last gasp for breath, is but the clean sweep of this infernal breeze.
