Journal 81 - Time Wraps Mathematical Models

Time wraps around my space the way a snake
wraps around a wet rat, wriggling but unable to
scream. Soon the clouds bellow with their water world
and grimace in anger, dropping their wet weight down
upon our hairy heads. I raise my head and poke out
my tongue to taste the moisture and absorb it into my
overheated self, hoping it would surge me like brown
bourbon on labor day...or any day really. Water means so
much to our hot world. My kids and I dance in the
rain and the rain puddles in the gutters in the street
stomping on time like a child's beach ball, waiting for it
to explode and sing its exhausted dilated tune for the
leftover observers in this virtually unobserved world of
ontologically suspicious elements - but who doubts explanatory
models really but the foolish? I do. That's who do. I
laugh at the beryon who briefly appears and then exits
like an actor who enters before her cue. Time is brief but
it's matter in the end, wrapped in a warped singular
nothing that pops in and out of existence in reported
symmetry - nothing being re-defined as something becoming
nothing close to being. I see the stars and I hear the
music of the spheres, the land of darkness and the helping
phriendly book; I see the elements burning and recombining;
I see the dust and I see the black decay. I see the stars
and I see the heavens. I hear the angelic host singing
their angelic song to the Creator. I hear the chorus of
man and lizards and I laugh heartily at God our Father,
the warm laugh a friend laughs upon seeing a long-lost
friend emerge from a snow storm. I see the pink on
God's cheeks and know He cares. He cares about waves
and particles and music and words and symbols and
love and hate and all our lovely labels.  He smiles at
our incomplete mathematical models, no matter how well
they predict and account for our observations. There is
an order and there is a mystery. There is music to
the subatomic spheres, bending the laws of our words
as we have described them. Particle physics doesn't know
it but it's a blues scale, bending reality in 3rds and 5ths
trying to reflect the experience of our rational minds
in an irrational world.


9.1.12

Journal 80 - Word Games on Bourbon Street

Words are games the philosophers say. Words are games

and games we play, but words as games leave nothing to say.

Words may not mean much and words may be sophomoric games

but beautiful women in the distance, blond and tan and wearing

a yellow sundress and smoking a cigarette in the rising moon

light mean something. And it isn't naughty. I cough when

the wind blows beauty my way. The world is wrapped in

beauty like in a child's worn blanket, and the world throws

rhythmic fits of coughing like a James Brown hit - levelling

knees and leaving smiles and rainbow eyes. The night bugs

click behind me in some natural Motown accompaniment. They

make their music and they make their itchy presence known.

Beauty itches when it moves your blood. Dragons live inside of

slender flies; they are the color of ready-to-burst soap

bubbles outside Gilead I hear. Beauty pops as Beauty should,

if the Buddhists have their way. I think Beauty should

stay and play and dance the simple pentatonic jig with all

our Southern souls. Beauty paraded is Beauty unbraided

and decomposed in a cold pedantic distinction of atomic

parts, atonal splatters of night-time blood on a warm hand.

Bloodletting is an ancient practice of God's mosquitoes,

desperate in their desire to appropriate your life for their

insignificant symphonies. The symphonies of nefarious bugs

pale in comparison to their larger cousins. There is no metaphor

for us. I know it's been long but I had a little break you

see. (stolen) I stumble across Beauty on bourbon streets and

wet humid sidewalks shifting and swinging in a warped

nocturnal dance with the streetlights of our present universe.

Despite diesel I still love our world and those who drive.

I wish I was a rain drop falling from the black sky, consorting

with my siblings to assimilate ourselves into some large slung

stream of water to clean and nurture the world, slung as

though from the large water pale of God - smiling as he

knocks us backward in our dehydrated comfort. I would

slide down the stalk and nestle in the nutrient filled earth,

while others slapped the smiling homeless soul man across the

cheek, drenching him in cleanliness while the self-rinsed

rich man cursed me for disintegrating his rich "Do." I

would leap up and slap him one last time from my sharp flagellum.

8.7.12

Journal 79 - Serial Killers and Conformism

I caught a glimpse of two lovers sneaking a kiss behind the

trees on the other side of the Art building. I found a virgin

furtively watching from a nearby car, rubbing her hands together

but not smiling, studying like a sexual anthropologist. I wanted

to open the door to her car and grab her and bring her head

to mine, kissing her with longing and remembrance, kissing

through her into that reticence yet no further. I wanted to

kiss her on her lusty wet lips then smile and say, "You're

right. It's better when it matters." Then thank her for re-

giving me my lapsed youth, my lapsed youth spent chewing

nicotine gum, staring at pointillistic dots on my computer

screen - green dots of distinct individuality, before the virtue

of the technological beauty and superiority of conformism,

at least regarding visual artistry. I think conformism is under-

rated. Conformism can be good, like the computer screen, or

the serial killer. Serial killers are bad but to succeed is to

conform. Hiding in plain sight. Of course I'm always suspicious

of the non-conformist. The tattooed, pierced vamps who

make me wonder if there is any substance underneath the

makeup, the painful makeup of black and more black clothes.

Screaming children screaming "Look at me, I'm different and

I matter, I promise; can't you see? Don't judge a book by

its cover but don't ask to open me." Forcing me to see you

as different leads me to believe there isn't much there to

see. But surprises rise from the steam of the gutters and

the cabins in the dark lovely woods. It's Frost I hear.

I want to walk the path most travelled and still make

it mater, versus the easy way of the path less travelled

where anything you do (shit in the woods) or say (there

are ghosts in the machine) catapults you to original infamy.

Anyone can be original when it's never been done. Give

me blue jeans and SUVs and corporate jobs, then make

an original work of Art so I can shove it up your

outcast ass. I of course am not me, but some other

similar who actually is original and actually can shove it

up your vampiric ass. Originality is personalised, infused

derivation of those personalized copyists before you who

also stand on the shoulders of their original peers. That

which has been done is that which will be done. No new sun.

8.4.12

Journal 78 - Forged Dreams and Rotten Teeth

I wonder where dreams are forged, in molten imaginary

lava to spur on the inquisitive dreamer. I wonder who thinks

these dream thoughts of unicorns and iron-clad monkeys, parading

around the circle like two storm clouds hovering over a zoo

with their broad brooding wings of circumspect clouds. Just

as a car needs wiping for its windshield eyes in the thick

of an August storm, so my eyes need a passing wipe of

their reconjugated vision of a modern heaven and hell.

Hell is so blase in this post-everything world. We live

for tolerance of everyone but always exempt ourselves as mere

satirists satirizing such unenlightened traditional nightmares

inculcated by our evolving and devolving times, our post

intellectual pasture is littered with the bird shit of

yesterday's "dire portents." Premonitions aunt our western sub-

conscious like a wolf in the shade of the evergreen mountain

shades his hunt for the procreating jack-rabbit. We hunt

our prey from the pedestal of enlightened tolerance aiming

beady eyes and eagle fingers at our subordinates to Shhh

and Suppress their bigoted outcry with our satirical holier-

than-thou spittle flying through the vapid void separating

us in some wet attempt to reconstruct our parched ways

of communication with winks and smiles, hugs and light

pats on the back saying "Yes" and "No" but I'm hearing

you not mocking you with my sardonic puerile gapped teeth -

my teeth are clean and it takes work to make teeth clean.

Ideas are like teeth. Rot, molded with colored rubber-bands

they are born and nurtured until unwieldy and coached to

truth by some B- doctor who forgets that grades matter.

We don't like our judges to judge us in public with marks

that could walk the line too far to the right or the left -

we who think with laughter in our thoughts and red wine

on our teeth want our thoughts to blend two realms of

faulty lore - the liberal with her satire and her wit

with the rigter and his certainty even when the shit

of words covered in tradition's blankets lands on tongues wiped

without a working blade. I try to navigate these wave-worn

words with oars on both sides and eyes in front and behind -

but pulled on each side by the undercurrent of their venom -

I gulp and yelp with water drowning every thought I give them.

8.1.12

Journal 77 - Music in Starry Nights

I'm quick to ramble about sad themes and sad stories
of sad people crying in the bathtub at night with their
wine or bourbon, but what of the beautiful happy joy
that envelopes each day? What of the hug of a friend
just returned from some dreadful trip? (see how I snuck
that minor mode juxtaposition in there?) What of sunsets on
the beach with bacchi ball and volleyballs and surfing
and beer and dogs, laughs saturated with the sound of
the waves and the music? Music keeps the world from
imploding or bursting into flames. Music is our world
and our sustenance the way water is to the colorful
fish swimming in that undiscovered land of wet joy.
Music is our life and our breath in it we live and move
and have our meaning. Music is the breath of God, the
soul of our Creator - the creative (and saving) force that
holds the very strings of our being together in their never-
ending dance of ecstasy and survival. What drives dance
but music, and what are we but dancing strings? Again,
music is our life and our marrow. I've got to get away
to where men don't wear masks or hide their out-of-tune
motives. Discordance drives the mad man. Tolkien knew
the creative force of music, and the power of dissonance.
How many people were conceived to the prompting joy
of the notes of the guitar or piano or violin? Lyrics are
second fiddle to the swaying motion of the drums and
the bass. It ain't over till it's over. Music is the seed
that grows the purple flower and the yellow bird and
the magenta clouds and the green frog and the red lady-bug
and the blue-black Starry night; the green algae on the
wet gutter is beautiful as it glistens in the soft distance
rays of the moon. The moon patrols the undeserted streets
at night, or so I've heard. I don't want to get away,
but I do want to fly high with the eagle and the red-
tailed hawk. My friend the slug draws silver streaks of
snail art on my floor - gross and beautiful in its turn
of shiny nastiness. Music watches from the cheap seats
and laughs a hilarious laugh at those jaunty folk fighting
over a front row seat to the show. She closes her happy eyes
and soaks in the Art defecated by the magisterial flies.


7.21.12

Journal 76 - Buzzing Voices and Bladder Ruled Thoughts

Voices are like busy buzzing bees buzzing their cute
buzz words around my slish-slosh ear. My ear is
distracted by these tattooed words like a ship tossing
about in the ocean on a full moon at medium tide. Words
come slovenly to the thoughtful minds of the drunk at
the nearest Irish bar. They've left their minds under
the oil-can of their rusted car, lost in a neighborhood
wanting localized context, like a man glued to his
phone at the meetings at the office and the bar. It's the
experience of getting the tattoo not the tattoo itself -
tattoos are words that you can never recant no mater
the depth of regret. The pain and significance brings meaning
and uncovers the thought that mattered most at the time.
The tattoo is the permanent timeline of the life you lived
and the regret means nothing except that the idea is
something you once loved. The skin changes and renews
but tattooed ideas persist like roaches and mosquitoes.
I forgot to mention that the blimp is the hot-air balloon
of the intellectual thoughts of drunk minds splattering
their thoughts of life and death and permanence against the
swollen ears of the laughing scientist, so sure of his
warm logical analysis of the life and death of the
unfortunate child. The night is filled with still-born
dreams and dismal flights of fancy about the future -
whether dates or work or hobbies or roaring trophies
in their taxidermist grin. It won't be awkward to
dream about a life of egalitarian equality, a life where
the man and the woman and the rich and poor and the
black and white are the same, sitting at the dark bar
ordering white russians arguing over who can afford to
pay the bloated tab. My thoughts are ruled by my bladder,
and a swallow-tailed kite is kissing me in my tattooed
dreams, wearing a cap to block the black and white shite
that parisails down the nighttime sky in tiny bombs of a
glassy-eyed terrorist drinking the purple tea of ideological
ecstasy tauting the virgins in the wet ether with their
dopamine smiles and serotonin smiles making grandiloquent
excuses for their credulity. I see the kite in its thermal
soaring for the world, drugged in tattooed words, flustering
downy birds.


7.20.12