the innocent eye test

He, by that aleatory name,
Compounding his lush tenses
Once laced with lassitudes,
Found solace in
A whinnying firestorm;
That cumbersome fixation
On the sublime.

To take refuge in yesterday
Would rile up past wonders
Like a ponderous procession
Touched with blueprints trivially dissected
With plagued platitudes,
Distending into the outer reaches
Of yesterday.

A fledgling connotation invoking
Vain periods of recollection
Stifling the literature that
Permeated minds of simple persuasion.
In his neurasthenia, whelming
Lots of persistent pixellation
Freeze into permanence.

His lots actualize, fructifying, beginning
With the shields of solace
That fall to the wayside.
And then, mind deliquescing
Into its vitriolic candescence,
He battles the suzerain's foliate
With vindictive torment. Excoriate.

Made it through Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Turkey, and now, in Greece, am thinking about getting my super gnarly cough looked at. Perhaps I'll just wait until Romania as I hear their hospitals are top notch.

I should have done what I should have done but I did not do what I should have done which was not what I had to do or should have done necessarily but for the sake of argument it may have been wrong to lead some to believe that I had not done that which I had obviously been doing since those kind of suspicions don't come out of nowhere now do they and yet I'm not saying that I did anything wrong and the multitudes outside my office would lend credence to that I believe as they are quite multitudinous indeed but will anything happen well I'm sure something will happen but will that something have any sort of consequence on me well I should have done things differently although I don't think I could have done things any differently and those multitudes will agree with me on that and well we have Oscar nominated fellow himself now endorsing me because I don't know we do share some similarities that maybe need not align ourselves as meticulously as all that but it seems to and well Harvey Milk wanted to get rid of age of consent laws in San Francisco didn't he and maybe he would have if it had not been for well what I'm certainly not comparing myself as I lack the gumption for such and well is it all just about money of course not these fellows with signs trying to lock up their bikes so they don't get stolen by people who might get cited on public transit for not having proper identification for their honored citizen status which in this state some might actually hack off a limb to get as it far surpasses even that Canadian system as far as propagating abuse but that's state business which I have absolutely no influence and little concern for if I were to be completely honest because we're talking about borderlines at this point barely legality which of course is that much more ridiculous in those fat guys watching hustler dvds but ok I waited until the night of maybe even waiting for the clock to strike tic tic toc keeping within the bounds of legality by millimeters like an olympic swim meet well wait that was something that was said about me and not by me itself which is odd because I ought to know what I'm saying and what is being said about me well how about this I am not guilty of any real crime here I am guilty of lying but there is no law against that unless it involves credit cards or lawsuits and this did neither of those so I lied and that's not so bad compared to like the war in Iraq or something that's really bad stuff and we should all be glad that that's over that was real corruption let me tell you this does not hold a drop of water compared to what the corruption involved in that illegal war does illegal by a well we could say a series of manufactured mandates by a manufactured committee maybe not as concrete as we lefties might say yeah I just referred to lefties with a hint of degradation because how would I have ever been elected had I not had reservations about we could say both sides of the argument yeah I have some complexities like maybe Harvey Milk did although I'm not so sure that he did it's still a difficult situation I mean I still think I can do some really great things for this great city but I mean we all know in politics I mean we were all Obama getting elected goes to show you can achieve whatever you want if you just try hard enough bullshit you have to be blemish-free from the moment you learn to walk and you sure can't be like Wesley Snipes level of black to become such a historic president in such a historic moment giving a historic speech on a historic podium into a historic microphone wearing a historic suit sporting a historic haircut and well you can sense my reservations about this victory that we are all supposed to be so zealous about in fact you ought to be able to sense them even more acutely than the media has as obviously I don't give two shits about what they think even though I'm continuously being told that I better and maybe that makes me a good mayor but not by the standards set by my greatest proponents which would depress even the most successful and maybe that's why I can't make up my mind because I'm not as stalwart as some may think there is nothing exterior involved this is just the way things come to happen in society as fabricated as this one

one of the only things I remember were these drunk guys outside of some yuppie nightclub arguing about who was going to drive and walking by this girl in a tube top and her going "hey, could one of you guys at least stand over here with me?"

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
`By thy long beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me ?...


The Sun now rose upon the right:
Out of the sea came he,
Still hid in mist, and on the left
Went down into the sea...


There passed a weary time. Each throat
Was parched, and glazed each eye.
A weary time ! a weary time !
How glazed each weary eye,
When looking westward, I beheld
A something in the sky...


`I fear thee, ancient Mariner !
I fear thy skinny hand !
And thou art long, and lank, and brown,
As is the ribbed sea-sand...


Oh sleep ! it is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole !
To Mary Queen the praise be given !
She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven,
That slid into my soul...


`But tell me, tell me ! speak again,
Thy soft response renewing--
What makes that ship drive on so fast ?
What is the ocean doing ?'


This Hermit good lives in that wood
Which slopes down to the sea.
How loudly his sweet voice he rears !
He loves to talk with marineres
That come from a far countree...

Best things about living in Portland:
Blazers/Timbers/Winterhawks
Powells
Good food scene (or so I hear)
A pretty sweet record store on damn near every block
Movie Madness
Mountain Goats several times a year
PInball in most dive bars
...and this guy

Born today:
Fela Kuti (1938)
Foucault (1926)
Calvino (1923)
C.P. Snow (1905)
P.G. Wodehouse (1881)
Nietzsche (1844)
Lermontov (1814)
Virgil (70 BCE)

Racing season opened yesterday, but I'm damned pleased that I have the good sense not to venture into the arena of placing wagers on the Swedish Academy's fanciful notions on world literature. Pleased because I know I would not be able to check my personal preferences against growing, if not utter, cynicism about the institution's competence. The president of the National Book Foundation offered to send Herr Engdahl a reading list for a crash course in contemporary American fiction. It would certainly be in order.

The line on William Gass is 100/1. In his words:

Now this was written in 1985, the last year the Nobel went to, in my view, a worthy recipient. Well wait, Toni Morrison certainly deserved it. But Claude Simon seems to me the last true visionary to be given due credit. And then there's the time Gass himself served on a "cumbersome committee," jointly bullying, along with Mary McCarthy, an unknown third party into compliantly selecting JR for the 75 National Book Award.

Like most students of literature, I treated the nobel prize like a grocery list in high school. Will future students be deprived of insular ignoramuses like Gass, Vollman, Coover, John Barth, Gene Wolfe, Cormac, Pynchon, McElroy, Delillo, Richard Ford and Delany becuase of European xenophobia?

Yeats was the least compensated of laureates, monetarily, winning before the foundation was exempted from Swedish tax. From "Under Ben Bulben," fifteen years later.

-I know you, I know you. You're the only serious person in the room aren't you, the only one who understands, and you can prove it by the fact that you've never finished a single thing in your life. You're the only well-educated person, because you never went to college, and you resent education, you resent social ease, you resent good manners, you resent success, you resent any kind of success, you resent God, you resent Christ, you resent thousand-dollar bills, you resent Christmas, by God, you resent happiness, you resent happiness itself, because none of that's real. What is real, then? Nothing's real to you that isn't part of your own past, real life, a swamp of failures, of social, sexual, financial, personal, . . . spiritual failure. Real life. You poor bastard. You don't know what real life is, you've never been near it. All you have a thousand intellectualized ideas about life. But life? Have you ever measured yourself against anything but your own lousy past? Have you ever faced anything outside yourself? Life! You poor bastard.

--The Recognitions

"Nous embrassons tout, mais nous n'estreignons que du vent" -Montaigne

What does it mean to eat your enemy? To boil him, to chop him up, and eat him? It was a good deed for the more utilitarian primitive societies, protecting the body from more ignominious violations, wolves and the like. And yet, for the more mystical tribes, it was the greatest punishment imaginable: forbiddance from entering the sacred pyre. For how else would one's soul rise? How could it be distilled from the corporeal if not by fire? At a heretic's burning in the middle ages they'd measure the wind's direction lest some unfortunate beholder catch a whiff of the hell-bound fumes. Had Christ's tree been used as firewood instead of framing, how things might have changed! But for all their esteem, the Romans could never reach Grecian understanding. Imagine the early martyrs, limbs torn by lions, grinning with satisfaction at their murderers' shallow thinking.

Smoke was the Ojibwean medium for prayer; the peace pipe, where it wasn't possible to break your promise because it already resided in another realm, already condensed into ethereal mandate. So then, to inhale directly, and it must be directly, which excludes the foil/bic pen method, it must be unadulterated, contained, and then expired. It consists of nothing less than a communion with nature's inestimable complexity, and then, with exhalation, resulting in submission to the sublime.

Jessie got a lot of shit for smoking her oxy. I remember when she thought that the oxy referred to was the acne medicine and was all like "hey, I've got lots of that stuff!" Then, a few months on, she started positioning it on the aluminum like puzzle pieces, it took a lot of practice. Others griped with righteous indignation, as if pills improperly used didn't really belong to those who had acquired them. But she remained steadfast in her methods, saying that inhalation was more mellifluous, that it might not get you as high but that it was a more otherworldly experience, like slowly slicing through the gossamer between heaven and hell as opposed to experiencing the latter or the former in more extreme degrees.

I remember, in a meeting, comparing my addiction to a scene in Our Hospitality where a distraught Buster Keaton, dangling hopelessly on a cliff, finds his salvation in a rope cautiously lowered in his direction. He grips it with a desperate hope only to realize that, upon his arrival on sure ground, his saviour, who he is now tethered to, is trying to kill him, and had only saved him for the purpose of finishing him off himself. He must now attempt to hide behind whatever objects are in his and his assailant's immediate radius, which proves to be quite scarce. Slapstick abounds until finally they find themselves on opposite sides of a train-track where, sure enough, a locomotive blithely sets him free.

I maintained that there is an element of luck to it! That where we live, what we do, who we love, most likely plays a larger role in recovery than our self-motivation/control does. Which isn't necessarily an avenue towards empty excuses. We all have some single moment that, if we are willing to recognize it, is more than enough motivation than we need. If we are willing to recognize it, willing meaning open to. It's not a matter of self-salvation, but hearing the distant bellowing of an approaching train which lacks the kinetic resources to stop, even if it intended to.

But part of me dislikes this metaphor as well. It lends itself easily to "demon possession" or, its secular counterpart, "illness." I am not ill, I have no more claim to this country's fucked up healthcare system than anyone else. Had a 28 year old patient on medicare earlier tonight. Previous medical history consisted of "migraines," "depression," "irritable bowel syndrome," and "restless leg syndrome." I've got the first three nailed down and could most likely rustle my legs into a syndrome if it meant social security and all the vicodin I could eat for the remainder of my helpless days.

No, I will not acknowledge any outside source in this battle. I am not a victim to some haphazard genetical game of chance. For all of psychology's supposed great strides in this century the discipline remains, at least popularly, Cartesian, as a means of disassociating ones self from ones self-inflicted illness as if it were a poltergeist.

And doesn't Buster end up finding a use for the shortened piece of rope he's still attached to?

Oh shit, no good youtube videos. Of what real use is this goddamn website!

Spoiler alert.

He saves his true love from a waterfall.

She had sought him out.
Trying to save him.