how soon is now?

Riddles often don’t beg solutions, but choice. And so the riddles remain, their understanding somewhat improved. Most deceptive are those riddles intimate with their solution; their alloy betraying all hopes of choice. How many ways to choose are aborted by such prejudice? By solution?

Consciousness is most effective when gauging differential. This is stimulating, and the conscious mind will crave it. Much harm has been done by the sheer ability for the consciousness to create it for itself.

What is confusion? To crack it as one would some lexical geode, it appears to be a contradictory state wherein competing thoughts are co-mingled beyond individual discernment. What then rises to decipher it?

This imminence of present-mindedness is a messy, messy business. How ‘thick’ is the now? Thick enough for the mental space required for efforts of projection into the past or future. But it must fluctuate also, determined by those minds consensual of the shared moment. Also, I still do not trust the idea of ‘being in the now’… what does that mean? Opening the senses? Reading the symbols? Destroying the past/future (both of which a could be said to take the form of remembrance)? Taken too literally, we might spite our gifts of intelligence.

Tractable familiarity saddens me, which might be why I get upset when people forget that they’ve already told me something. It makes me feel interchangeable with anyone else. This interchangeability is likely all too true, hence my sadness. When someone’s warmth ebbs and flows, I am distressed, perhaps because at that point I am more them than they are me.

sounds

communities used to convey information through the use of bells: marriage, commemoration, time, religious observance, victory, defeat. now this news is quietly embedded in our self-phones. and bells, when they bell, are a sort of vestigial emotion. a nostalgic tracing similar to Bjork when she gets to that part of the song where she plays with the limn of words’ sound and meaning

i have a collection of 8 foot bamboo rods in my bedroom right now, they crackle softly like a bored Geiger counter. harvested from my yard, i wonder if i wouldn’t love giving it all up and becoming a bamboo treehouse guy

toast is quite sonorous when the lights are out. spreading butter sounds somewhat like someone ox-plowing a parking lot

my alarm clock does not wake me up. but my sister’s one, 35 feet away and through 3 doorways, does. by some feature of harmonics, it’s soft enough to be piercingly loud. that and its bleeps are akin to a truck backing up

extractor fan drones; ear-bud hiss; people dragging their feet in libraries; the noise of another’s single mistake that you somehow know is antecedent to their declaration that they’re having a bad day; sailboat clanks as the water passes its waves through the boat and to your ears; the ticking of an unseen bicycle being walked past your window; the sound shadow an object creates as you pass, such as how bench curves the susurrus of a fountain; the ubiquitous use of power heels and jangled keys forecasting arrival of authority

sub/merge

striking in its grandeur, the West Coast resonates in and around me as holding its mysteries in its heights. the persistent reminders of altitude flattens the mid-lands, portraying promises as being ‘over there’. this vertical hazes on nearly every horizon, creating a ciel-ing of great magnitude. the past and the future is up, and i often feel that i live in tomorrow’s ruins (upon which i might survive to look down upon, hidden by roiling currents and revisionary stories of a pre-delugional world.)

this is much unlike my memories of the european mystery, which is locked down by water and sediment and buildings. it is hidden, and there is a prominent sense of ‘down’ – something beneath every surface, as if, like water, history abhors the steeps and instead collects beneath the feet. the stories are below, and in need of excavation. here, above, and in need of expedition.

in this vein, one might be able to extend the analogy to perception of memory. here it feels that memory for me is futural. as if i am nostalgic for something that has not yet happened, it could be the wide sky, the occasional murky weather, the high gusting winds, the mountain-locked microclimates… the history is thrown forward temporally. one just does not cast their mind to what lies beneath the ocean.. not truly, not in the way one would in the Mediterranean or English Channel. not in that inherited identity. identity here is created, not sought.

i now work at a bakery in dockside green. and as the construction guys and gals clamber all over their scaffolding (sometimes with a pilfered pastry in their bellies, the punks), it seems as if they are not so much building a new building, but preparing inevitable rubble. and due to the large amount of marketing and spin put onto this complex (immediated narrative) it is building its story right into it as it goes up. however, ‘in these uncertain economic times’ several phases of the complex have been stalled to wait for consumer confidence (aka best chances of return). so what this means is that the foundations that had been blasted prior to construction (so that residents would not have to suffer hip-rattling booms once moved in) will now be left fallow until the money returns. so it’s now a ruin before even being built. i am very excited for this, as this will reveal this building community’s true intentions: how will a self-proclaimed ‘environmentally conscientious’ for-profit PRESTIGE DEVELOPMENT/VERTICAL GATED-COMMUNITY respond to an unplanned open space on their lot? a market? a venue space? a temporary garden? racket sports? a reservoir? tent space for the city’s homeless?

we’ll see, we’ll see.. either way, i’m going to step up and confront any corruption of ideal within the project (i suspect this corruption will occur, if not had from the original inception)

vertiklarity

building big.. i’m not sure it’s worth it. proponents claim that densification is the major objective of bigness, but some of the most densely populated areas of the globe barely have one storey, and if it weren’t for the dire poverty and health risks of living there, it might be said that their existence and spread is proof enough that they work. no, i’d propose that the purposes of the big build are of very few things, far less noble: investment return, commercial floor space (rent money), prestige and arrogance. who really owns these buildings? silverstein owned the WTC complex to lease, which would’ve cost some hundreds of millions -if not billions- of dollars to clear of asbestos (recall the post-collapse respiratory problems locals suffered?), instead he received some 4.5 billion in the insurance bid (to which, due to poor phrasing, he was able to negotiate as if there were 2 terrorist attacks.. i forget the name for it, but there’s a phrase for where a private institution lumps the health costs on the general populace.. good thing it wasn’t intentional, or else it would seem as if the company benefited) that’s an unimaginably large payout on what was technically 5 years away from becoming a nightmare of a white-elephant. but, i digress.

who owns the buildings? credit card companies!? yes, they do. they’ve got/had the best credit rating around for a while (self-regulation has its rewards, eh?). the nature of credit is that it necessarily swallows asset, and the only TRUE form of asset yet quantifiable is land (though potable water will become so in the next decade).. which the individual can’t really own, as why then are they compelled to pay yearly land tariffs, especially if the government isn’t distributing it as they see fit. no, most people ‘own’ through credit, so, to be frank, they are serfs working the land. but, i digress.

credit card/investment buildings have styled their buildings as ‘sky-scrapers’. and they seem so intent on raising the sky’s limits that yesteryear’s sky-scraper is now this year’s thigh-draper. they’re towers of purposeful religious semblance: since their inception, you’ll notice that no cathedrals are yet being built (barring gaudi’s, but perhaps there are others). and for what the church lent in absolution, the credit companies can now lend in relativity. the spacious resonance of the cathedral dome has been replaced by hard, phallic, inscrutable presence. and further, the reflectivity of their surfaces are not just for the sake of pretty. they are one-way mirrors, and we’re the captives. simply stated: you can’t watch the watchtower. the panoptic prison has been developed on the metropolitan scale, and our depressions, our minuscule, compounded worries have been greatly amplified by this further estrangement from the hegemony. this effect, i’d readily argue, has been committed with the utmost of calculation. the reflective planes act as both as paring sheaths and urban[e] limit. you can’t SEE the opulence anymore, just feel it, yet not know from whence that feeling originates. but, i digress.

i saw a film on manhattan island a few days ago. it said, that until the advent of the elevator, the most exclusive, prestigious commercial spaces were located on the lower floors. quite a concept in this present era. as the street level has degenerated, until now it is scorned and vilified, even by those who claim to act on its behalf. all streets are now alleyways, where the garbage, in various packages, is pushed, conning us into wanting it, needing it, feeling something about it. in the case of dumpsters, the effect is one of revulsion. in the gaud and bric-a-brac we’re meant to buy, desire. but all the lightin and flashy signs, all that fantasy does not disguise the fact that the street has lost its political power: it has been relegated back to an alleyway of the body-politic, where people wander quietly in scream, marginalized on the one level at which they are ENTITLED to feel most powerful. but, i digress.

above all this, shining high, as if we all agree, are these looming symbols of power. but in a few quick months, as snickersnack as a vorpal blade, a few of these reflective windows have been broken and an awful stench has wafted out from what lies within: as symbols, they are not now crumbling as consumer/borrowing confidence has waned, but they’ve perverted, and twisted themselves to their true form: we are being watched, bullied and manipulated. and all it takes is an elevator to keep you away from stopping it.

A Missive Long Overdue

I’ve written many posts lately and then let them age unposted in my draft folder. This one has been something I’ve thought about for ages, talked about for around a year or two, and only recently thoroughly committed myself to. I DID post it last Friday, but then went out on the town with an old, old friend and ray-gunned my sobriety into a soft gooey puddle; came home and read it and felt it seemed a bit taut, or idyllic, or manic, or vague, or immodest, or overcooked, or something. But now that I’ve revisited, I think all that’s ok if it helps me get going on it. It’s definitely assisted in that it’s helped my see what parameters there are (or aren’t) in the region. After this, I’ll be ready for phase 2:

A recent article about Watt, a Rotterdam night club that literally generates energy from the motions on the dancefloor – an innovation several friends and I had talked about for about half a decade (except our version would also map and project the tactility of the dancefloor to a mad visual display for the dancers to see their rhythmic steps and cross-floor movements) – lends me the fortitude to know that I’m on the right track. While I feel slightly indignant about concepts reaching reification without me, I know that’s just the irrational itch of feeling removed from the process. Logically, a dancefloor like that isn’t too much of a leap of imagination, whereas the strategies of implementation really and truly are. Bravo to you, dancefloor revolutionaries! And thank you.

For years now, I’ve been spiraling around a locus that I can only really call landscape architecture: a transitional zone where disparate, and perhaps even incompatible behaviours, ideas and attitudes overlap and conflict, but also irremediably and necessarily coexist. Nominally, I think of this zone as liminal space, perhaps an overexertion of liminal’s true meaning, but, for my purposes, it works. This space is far stabler than say a TAZ, as it is found everywhere, both public and private, purposeful or inadvertent, new and old, organic and inorganic, authoritarian or anarchist. For example, go now to the sea or a river embankment, approach the lip of wave rubbing its gums against the rocks and dip your finger in where land meets water meets air meets sunlight. Now extend that analogy to that of the human experience as it breathes through the manifold complexities of itself: sitting on your stoop is a liminal act, as you interact with the street from the vantage of your homelife; taking cover from the rain in an alcove; waiting in line for a slice of pizza… the list is simply only exhausted by the imagination’s conception of intermediacy. Places like dancefloors, pubs, traditional marketplacesare but ritualized variants of such spaces. In essence though, you could simply host a party or political rally or just invite a friend round and your private habitat would become such a transitional zone (though there are many such spaces and artifacts already in your home, even when alone: doorways, office, bathroom, bedroom, windows, computers, radios, TVs, and, I’d argue, books).

Since its advent, architecture has shown that it can determine behaviour. Not only that, but reinforce ethical values. Take Haussmann’s oft-cited tribute to baroque power through hisreinvention of Paris. Or read the first few lines of NGM’s timelyPersia: Ancient Soul of Iran. And then relegate all this environment-altering power to the codification of built forms around you. The function of these composite landscapes are to project ideas onto mind: ideology, politics, philosophy, consumption and breeding habits. Except, it is the point at which your mind starts interacting with, toward and across this landscape at which the liminal space is formed, and wherein new function is wrought by way of innovation. Our built environment IS dialect, a stored wealth of perceptibly privileged knowledge, edificial and so directly manifest that it has the power to influence your thinking without you even noticing. Take the banks and credit bureaus panoptical skyscrapers downtown. They can see you, they can see all, but you cannot see them. Take old colonial buildings in Mozambique, and their neo-classical facades hiding, or even brassing, their criminal history. Take the International Style pervading and subjugating traditional stores of culture and identity in Iraq, Vietnam, Lebanon etc. Take schools built as prisons, or malls, or sanitariums. Take condominiums erupting out of the ground near you, like beached cruise ships, choking vibrant street life and segregating the haves from the have-nots. Now while I’m not really a behaviourist, I do believe that the writing is not only on the wall, but also in it.

And that’s about where I want to step in. Though I’ve researched and perused and sketched and thought so very much about this, often having a tough time articulating this obsession to those others more politically charged, I hereby deliver my utmost in resolve to find immersion in this landscape architecture. When delineated in the fashion above, this field opens onto an immeasurably broad and deep scope. I do not wish to define myself within this purview, mostly as I really have no idea how to. However, I can say this: I want to help build a world that engenders self-awareness, inspiration, free-thought, egalitarianism, psychological well-being and ecological immersion, wherein the processes are transparent, educational, playful and stimulating. It will acknowledge change as the constant, and find the emergent planes to speak of the opportunities found within it.
And I will accept no less.

ON A BAD WORD
For me, the word ‘sustainable’ is flawed, and actually points to a turpitude that appears to carve deep throughout the building industry (the world’s single largest industry, as our recent financial market crises have brayed): ‘sustainability’ is an arrogant and dismissive interpretation of a systemic problem. To underline that point, I ask you, haven’t we always considered ourselves to have built sustainably? What really determines a buildings sustainability?Embodied energy? Psychological impact? Ecological principles? Economics? While sustainability grazes these ideas, it acts more as an apologetic syllogism for core building practice than helping stimulate the radicalization of building, nay, living tenets. I believe that the word sounds static, boring, and dangerously self-righteous: buildings are declared sustainable by reaching set conditions, but then are free to disrupt the environment in other, discreet manners, ostensibly hidden behind the noble mantle of SUSTAINABILITY. Look at the site plans of Dockside Green, found here in Victoria. Looks lovely, a sweet little bioremediation brook babbling between passively heated condo buildings and waterfront townhouses. In life though, the building are cramped, policed by design, and have missed vital opportunities to fully integrate nature (eg. by gradating the shoreline gently down to the water instead of dumping a cache of large boulders, or allowing a meadow area for nesting birds etc.)
Sustainability is a banner though, I give it that, and as long as it supports the dynamic evolution of dialogue around its procedure, I guess it’ll be ok in the long run. I am afterall going to see about getting my LEED qualification over the next year, so who knows, maybe I’ll be its biggest advocate soon.

cadavre exquis

back in March, I received a dazzling Fa-bo transmission from Alain entitled simply: “story take it where ever you want”. enchanted by both his high-arched concepts and his rich, sensorially transpositive but devastating descriptions, i gave to agreement that this would be fun. turned out that the exercise became a new way to discourse about how we were navigating -and venerating- our most recent wounds. a romantic bleed if you will. for what it lacks in cohesion it gains in bombast. the correspondence lasted for about 9 alternating segments.

Red dust on blue winds and she sifts for golden sea shells upon a seemingly endless coast…where the waves in delicious foam don’t move…a small wooden table where she paints impressionist canvases of the sea … with a bowl of oranges and pomegranates and cinnamon scented turkish coffee to fortify her…the wind still speaks in a secret language and sings children lullabies and operas and declares immovable prophecy. The birds call to an invisible paradise and small temples litter the coast and sometimes a putrid half eaten fish carcass washes up and she kneels and worships it and then casts it back into the waters…when the electrical storms come, warm and moody , they cast their secret shadows upon the glittering indigo horizon she breathes in the ozone and cries for what she knows and then shouts and does cartwheels and remembers what the world was before it ended…

These were but a few of her daylight activities.
He called his surveillance system The Eyectopus, a clumsy nominative approximation of its dendritic sensory network. He could leave it unchaperoned, allowing him to work his target from another vantage, and then review the tapes later. It eased the boredom of his job, though experts in his trade, many of them his peers, went to extremes to explain the critical and functional role boredom played in their profession. Boredom was thoroughness, they maintained. But he cared not a fig, and spent many wild and loose-clocked hours in activities meant to attract her attention. ‘Survey this!’ he appeared to be saying to her. From the breakers where he played in the surf, he could see her shape on the reed-rustled dunes, a singular point around which the creased skies and verbigerative waves accreted. She became like a radio to him, left on in a room otherwise devoid of human presence. From a wind-withered ridge, she’d overlook the waters, standing braced as if hunting fowl, and he’d tread water for hours, buoyed only by his dogged instinct to find the trophy for which she seemed to so hungrily search…..

…though he was wide eyed with hunger and demonic with godly love, eyectopus was his child , the immaculate starfish , the glittering gem of his precious techno emotional crown … like a prism of divine light it expanded into a rainbow…eden like… in that it reminded him that the paradise of art and love that he sought was forever gone, and the technological nation of Yacmar would rise and rise but the precious source of creation, the soma of modern life…real emotion… had been usurped by the cold calculating monolithic…mind… and he wept in crowds of robots automated and listless and lifeless who looked on mute and dumb as if a lost tribe upon a wasted burning napalmed shore of a former lush jungle fertile with secret emerald magick…the muse of light…the beacon of life, the frequency of intimacy, joy and humanity faded like a blue sun…in ivory golden tones …and the moan of the celestial winds and black angels lent their wavering voice to his search for a god to resuscitate…

He recognized his sickness in her. Every nerve that connected them had been pinched tight by hypermediation. Trapped in the segues of their carapaces. Cinched tight by their exoskeletal yokes. She had become more than him, but by virtue of their solitary communion, less. Yacmar, the nation that had homogenized to the point at which entire cities yawned awake, and ripping themselves from the ground, stood up on giant feet and roved the Earth in plunder. On occasion, these massive automatons would lock in combat, but this warring was only a disguised act of merging. It was designed to extirpate, for what other objective could there be? Simply disguise the grim future of mind, that of deindivuation, by the destraction of intractable war. Blame your foes for spiting your individuality by being not you. And forget that the only difference between soldiers and terrorists were that the soldiers got paid. She, daughter of the empire, knew this all too well, and one day made her terrifying decision: She opened a hatch in one of the creature-citadel’s abdomens, dropped through, and avoiding the offal that spewed from its base, picked her way through the digested lands in search of the Water Gypsies. He, commissioned for what was mistakenly construed as obeisance by a thin-lipped Yacmar agent, was tasked to find her. And bring her back.

‘bring her back’

the intention was with surgical precision, digitally implanted in his computer enhanced emotional network…the god voice…the priest therapist… looked at him with reservation and wondered why he had been chosen for this perilous journey after all was he not a ‘skipper’, did he not dream unreal irrational logics…was he not better suited to be a code breaker… such a low frequency spirit that enjoyed coasting like an opium addict in netherlands of no importance,a vampiric krishna! A low learner who still worshipped the moon and earth and stars even though fifty class m planets had been discovered in one month of old earth time…

‘there will be no holy grails’
‘you will eat and shit and stare ahead transfixed’
‘god has died…magic is science…is power’
‘your queen has abandoned Yacmar…we knew this would happen,’
a solitary tear barely perceptible formed like a cosmic star at his tear duct.
‘you are expendable…you chose to love in this world…we reserve that duty for the next…so you have been chosen…now you will show us your love’
little orbs of pink and green energy clung like weightless water to his eyes and heart region…
‘you do not know how to surrender and for this we are grateful…bring Oshea to the edge of the luconian desert where all the rovers congregate and let her hear the voice of recreation…

he knew the voice would erase all her memories and make her a child again…so she could begin the reconditioning process…’may she remain damaged forever!’ Are we not all wayward children.. are not angels bound to abandon us eventually…so we can each experiece the god moment…the weightlessness of being completely primordial and alone again?

he scattered his thought in symbols and let them reconvene in his heart, this was how he produced arbitrary visions …and the stars moaned, and the sun smiled, and the deserts broke down and fish crept near the shores and leapt into heavenly light because they knew the inevitable truth that love itself was on the verge of expressing itself through
imperfection…

His expendability was that of a solitary indivisible in an infinite series of spines vomiting more spines. For all he was supposed to know he was just an operative. The meat casing for the delivery of an idea. Nothing special. Everything normal.

But he’d ‘skipped’ to get here, recanting time so that his present became the past, and his memories the unformed future. He’d spent a month in cerebral quarantine in an attempt to ready him for the skip. The isolation breaking his attachments to a phase of a world he’d never return to. Or so it was supposed, for the notion of time-travel altered all measurement of valency and left conventional ethics with the boatman who casually disposed of them in the river Lethe.

‘Bring her back,’ they’d said. ‘Bring your mother back to Yacmar.’

‘o mother’
‘god preserve my soul for what i do’

The Luconian desert glittered in specks of crimson and gold as the sun set and the slivered silver faded crescent moon shone luminent over the long horizon.
The shrubs and fauna glowed a radioactive green like some mythic reptile
and he held her by the hand and all that could be heard were their shallow breaths as they ran…no historical exodus could match the breathless love of these two lovers united…was she a mother, a sister , a lover, or simply a god materialized from another dimension, it did not matter no barrier from the present life could take away the urge to run together, to escape into the dreamlike mist, to become absorbed in the golden fields of immaculate lotuses , but she was already reprogrammed he had failed , the Yacmar systemizers had found her three earth seconds before he could commune with the central all knowing eye…he had been recruited and all had progressed as planned … but who was the hero, he who knew all and tried to change it or those who enforced the strictest rules of time to the atomic millisecond? Oshea had always been a renegade and double agent and deeply flawed in some mysterious divine manner , she was a fallen queen but all empires had to fall and this was the crown jewel of Yacmar that they needed their queen to bring their own knowing to an end, to silence their own evil and ingenuous plans to break the back of time, like a dying sinner they knew the light all too well when the dying breath beckoned them to the otherside they cried for renewed life through surrender…but Icmot was beyond the eternal dance of devil and god , of sun and moon, of life and death…time was a figment of some sentient race imaginations but beauty, love and unity stood above like an demonic god, or beautified lucifer who refused to follow the heavy conventions of the gods of the absolute, yes there was no hope the struggle was endless, the love of the conqueror must fade and the father will always reign supreme but for the moment when two twin souls pierce the veil of the forever with the unending laughter of having known and the clear song of victory of having overcome all others then…somehow something would transcend and so they ran like refugees into the still silence of the desert and with the magnificence of two suns they shone…immovable and infinitely devoted…

the hiss of sidewinding sands covered their tracks as they strode in the wind-shadow of the pack mule. the clank of the pots and the occasional sigh from the beast were the only perforations in the madness of quiet fury they willed themselves into. the sand was red with rust from the oxidized iron of weapon dust, and their landmarks were the harrowed buildings of a people lost, standing broken and lonely, like corpse fingers apportioning blame. they seldom spoke. she seemed to be a dream within a dream, her self-assurance and autonomy possible only through willed ignorance. he kept his attention drawn to practical gains: feeling the mule’s muted ability to find water and cropped greenery; the collection of desert jetsam as fuel for their night fires. they saw noone on their haphazard path, though once heard the scream of engines in combat high above their ordeal. at night, he’d lie awake and attempt once more to please her with stories. of her future majesty, the mystery of the father she would choose for him, her breath of life that would be celebrated by the entire empire. and then, exhausted and embarrassed by her silence, they’d drift into the scrabbling sounds of the desert as the timid, big-eyed animals arose. neither of them could fathom the true danger of the ruins that provided their bivouac. that this mutated landscape might have horrors that muttered in the lost corridors beneath its sands was unguessable to either, until one particular night….

the sky was a breezy one hundred and ten degrees, an algorithm of skull and bone really, dry deserted heat, heat so hot that it made frying pans scream like tea kettles and lizards sing like chameleons on fire…a chamber chorus of high sharp symphonic alien like trance goblin rock played by trolls in lutes screaming ‘stop the revolution’ stopped in celestial perfection and a crimson gem was brought forward by two elvish creatures…there obviously was a little psychedelic property to this place…the stars spread out like dancing starfish in an aquarium of black n gold and sirens with pinkish hued skin chanted songs of blue… of water and sky and communication… and the trinity of two was accomplished in an instant…the love making broke out like a southern lynching everybody new it was coming but in hindsite no one could stop it…and never had the musty brown and auburn shadow streaked craggily ruins looking slightly orange at dawn been so pink with afterglow!The image of an empire hanging by a thread loomed over the passing days…they were merely termites, gnats, lice or even dare i say mosquitoes in this sodom and gomorrah which made the eastern wind that graced there cool dewy skin at dawn even more gracious and there escape even more blessed…their brown skins moaned with hot red pangs of heat burn but they would cut cactus and use the soft melon like interior to salve their wounds and even in this there was small glories …
they found desert fruit…buried several feet beneath the surface of the parched earth and enjoyed it’s tough leathery peel…with juice running down their faces like upon a child’s cheeks they began to laugh and dream of the sea…’if only this sea of stars could rain every day’ she said and he of course dreamt of wine which quickly deteriorated into pitchers of beer then of course water…clear cool and clean…the only liquid man has every needed truly began to impinge upon this romantic interlude…’what is an empire to a queen, when i am neither a worthy king nor prince…we may actually die of thirst’ a buddhist sun set was taking place, one twangy flower red and green hung low and smiled like an emerald at the crow of silence that descended in the sardonic face of the sun…they ought to have known that beneath the surface there was not only water but they would soon discover the city of Oshante which translated from the desert rover language simply means ‘floating water lotus’…

euphrenia – live here now

So I am now in BC. I live here.
Somehow the public parts of me got tanned without going through the stage that usually makes me look like a blob of mayonnaise that was held down and pink-bellied. Somehow I am buffing up. Somehow my mind is enjoying itself. Somehow I can see past myself to the greater caravan. Somehow I ate sausages every day for 10 days. I just ate one, and it tasted like bad breath, so I’m done with them till Beerfest.
I went on a wine tour on Sunday. It was my birthday. On it, it occurred to me that:
1. ‘debauch’ finds itself from Bacchus. well, obviously, but it’d been a tacit connection for me until then.
2. white, heterosexual cliques are not much fun in confined spaces. when sober.
3. a lot of wine sucks, but the people who make it are rich so the tasters are nice about it all. it stays freer that way.
4. due to their environmental sensitivity, rose bushes are planted amongst the vines and used to detect potential plagues or diseases before they occur in the crop.
5. people hide their most egregious infidelities behind their most cherished and celebrated values. the universality of this both horrifies and fascinates me.
6. everyone else here finds the story of feet washing up on beaches interesting too. though i still think calling the foot-falling-off-and-floating-away process ‘disarticulation’ to be a bit abstruse. ‘yet another case of anaquapodischism has been reported upon disarticulately.’

Why I called but hung up when you answered.

“So what’s your tattoo of?” You lean over the table, your finger finding a sinuous path through the dinner’s debris. Your elbow almost touches the baby-corn that I pushed off my plate over an hour ago. I’d left it there, hoping you might perceive it as erotic, or mildly provocative, or at least very casual of me. Back when freshly lubricated by black bean sauce, it had seemed a tad more tumescent. Now it just looks RE-vocative. Like a rolled up post-it note in a patch of dried beer. Or a giant Lego-man poo.

I gulp as the tip of your index finger grazed my bicep. I’ve been told that I gulp frequently. And loudly.
“I think I can just make out the edge of it…” you continue. “Is it a wisp of smoke emerging from a bullet hole? Or… hmmm… would one follow it to find Tacitus’ refutation of Nero’s incendiary solo?” Your finger jumps as you hiccup, catching the edge of my shirt. I gulp again.
“Um,” I break eye contact. “Actually, I sneezed in the ashtray when you were in the bathroom. I must’ve scratched myself, my armpits have been so itchy all day. I think I’m allergic to my new antiperspirant. I hope I don’t get hives, my aloe plant died last week. I’m not very good with objects. Physical objects. Er, ones that live.”

Armpit hives? Somewhere I’m sure a Happy Elf falls off his Happy Branch. Dead. Or at least hemorrhaging quite badly from the ear.

“So it’s kind of like dermography? I wonder what word is written?” I have no idea what dermography is, so I default-laugh and look frantically around for the manifest inspiration of a witty word.
“HA! I think it would say… fortune nookie. COOKIE! It would say fortune cookie.”
You smile your crooked smile, a good, winning smile for the tail-end of a dangerous second date. Your arm is still stretched across the table, playing with my cuff.

“That’s a far cuff for you!” I give you what I think to be the flirtatious frown of admonishment. Your smile falters slightly.
“What…?”
“Oh, no, I didn’t mean. Er… you know, I am thinking of getting a tattoo though. Yeah. A big one of the life-cycle of the lancet fluke Dicrocoelium dentriticum. Breeds in the digestive tracts of grazing ungulates, the eggs of which are eaten from the dung by slugs, which then cough them up in these slime-plaques which are subsequently consumed by ants. The eggs pupate and form these cysts in the heads of the ants and then control their brains, making them climb grass-stalks so that they complete the loop by getting eaten again by cattle.”
I pause.
“Now that I think about it, that might actually be the single most repulsive idea for a tattoo that I’ve ever heard. I think I’d rather get a portrait of Dick Cheney water sliding naked. Or one of that baby corn by your elbow there. With syphilis.”
You retrieve your hand so quickly, you clink your bracelet against a bottle, thankfully disguising my latest gulp.
“Nakedly,” you correct me. “I think I’m going to take my fortune cookie with me, if that’s OK with you? And I’ll call a cab. It’s only a $30 ride from here……..”

And it is THIS line of deleterious imaginative projection of how our second date will go which prevents me from mustering up the courage to ask you out again. I wish I could instead pretend that you are an arsonist or that I find your elbows too flabby.

Actually, we didn’t even have a first date. I thought all this in between glances at you in the candy aisle at Blockbuster.
It’s why I didn’t smile back. Sorry.

Spurs or The Space Between Fingers

I asked the lake about you.
The whole lake,
not just the piece
held
in the muted eyes of the stag;
That piece of whetted
guillotine sky
that cannot be withdrawn from the block.
Evidence of people
content in appearing content
wrinkle the hems of the sheet.
I want to crawl under it,
to fill it,
yet still ask for the door to be left
slightly ajar.
The worst offense
of the feud’s forgotten origins,
is that we anthropomorphize
people
and bind ourselves to each other instead
with smoke lanyards,
and whistles,
and gifts with hooks in their bellies.
Suddenly I wish I’d bought some apples
from the basket-faced man
at that roadside stall.
He would have declared that
“apples are for walking”
but I would have stayed awhile
unfairly thinking
too much of him.
A friend once told me
that he was told
that something is only worth saying
if it adds to the silence.
And I was annoyed,
as if he had just laid claim
to my grandfather’s patronage.
As if crumbs of time
didn’t get caught in the headstone’s lettering.
Turns out I just admired my friend’s purpose.
But the lake.
It heals over my question,
the cambial silver
polished from beneath by old stories.
So I smile to the face I know
the least -
the leased?
And retreat to the boathouse
where I left the book
which taught me the word
anomie
even though I already knew the meaning.

a quick sketch

The boy looked like a clump of semi-articulated rhubarb. Though not especially tall, his stringy frame lent him that illusion. His stiff limbs betrayed neither evidence of elbow nor knowledge of knee, and gave the impression that he was always hugging himself. To his mind though, he was hugging the world. Like rhubarb, he didn’t seem worth chewing on directly, and his face was always scrunched up as if he was attempting to battle the astringent taste of himself.

Though he had one already, he had always wanted a brother. A real, tough, principled, confident brother. The brother he had was also that: older, imperious, impertinent and devil-may-care… but never what Roob imagined. His brother was a master of karate, a particular skill-set that Roob had felt quite directly involved in his brother aquiring and perhaps explaining why Roob reflexively kept his limbs where he could count them.

“You’re still such a boy.” His brother sat on the corner of his bed looking around at Roob’s room in mock-horror. A pair of drum-sticks walrused out from beneath his toque.
“You should take up a martial-art. That way you could pick up chicks. And then use them as weapons!”
“Hrrr!” said the bassist hovering in the doorway, leaning in for a high-five.
Roob glanced at him from his desk.
“What does that even mean? Use as a weapon?”
“Oh man. Roob. You’re killing me here. I meant it as a play on words, don’t be so reactive. Martial-arts! You know. You flow over your environment, when you feel danger, everything in the environment becomes dangerous, and every object a weapon.”
“Doesn’t have to be a physical weapon neither. It can be like, psycho-logical,” growled the bassist.
“Object?” Asked Roob, still turned towards his desk.
“Why are you such a Roob? We’re all ready to be used. We’re all objects awaiting weaponization. If you don’t fill your environment with your mind, someone else will fill it with theirs. And then you’re at their mercy.”
“Hrrr. Mercy Beaucoup. That’s our new band name, dude!”
“But don’t environments overlap? Let’s go back to the ‘picking up chicks’ bit.” Roob was well-practised at ignoring bassists.
“Let’s go back to you being a prick. It’s no small wonder you’re still stuck in Mom’s basement, playing with your self, rubbing the rhubarb. Wow, if ever there was a metaphor…”
“Hrrr. Metaforeskin. Hrrr.”
“I said ‘pick up chicks’ cause that’s what people think alpha-men do. Finding a girl’s just an expression of confidence, you know? The whole ‘weapon’ thing is a joke, like in The Yakuza, where the guy says to Tanaka: ‘I see you’ve picked up the sword again.’”
“I don’t want to just find a girl. I want full planetary fusion. The unity of mind. I want someone to devote myself to. To be my advocate. An equal partner.” Roob had finally swivelled his chair around to face his brother.
“Oh no. No you really don’t little dude. Trust me. You won’t respect each other that way. That’s a romantic disguise for leprosy. A freakin myth. Only the one in the weaker position looks for equality. Looking for that is playing catch-up all the time. And if you both feel weak, hell forbid!”
“I didn’t say I was looking for it, I said I wanted it.”
“Yeah, yeah. But you gotta find a way to exceed each other to be together. You’re just defaulting on your own problems if you devote yourself to someone else. Take Lily and me right now. We’re together because we have a common love: the band.”
“Do you love her though?”
“Well yeah, but she’s not my everything. And nor would I want to be hers. Give up her… whatsit… her volition? To me? Creepy.”
“Hrrr. Let alone boring. Who wants to hang out with someone you have to make decisions for?”
Roob passed a stalky hand over his pale, pinched face and sighed.
“Aren’t you guys supposed to be rehearsing right now?”
“Hrrr. Yeah, but we thought we’d fuck with your Morosey ass for a bit first.” Yet another high-five was exchanged.
“Roob, little dude, you gotta stop trying to create your world from scratch. Love is bigger than you. Come upstairs to the garage. Grab a Bud. Drink in some Ohio air. Lily’s sister’s coming over in a bit. She’s pretty pretty. Cutely cute. She’ll look like a slice of pie balanced on a briefcase full of money compared to this monkey-boy outfit you got going here. Maybe you and she could help us come up with some lyrics for our new tune.”
The brother plucked the drumsticks out of his hat, rattled a quick tattoo on Roob’s chair, and left. The bassist stayed a moment, pulling on his goat, then also left. And Roob turned back to his desk. Rumed over his ‘weaponized environment’ for a moment before sharpening his pencil. Flipping over the sheet of paper, he started to write afresh.
I was in love with you, and you were there too…

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