Burning My Face Away

"If I took this cigarette and put it out on you, would you love me?" Dax Riggs asks on the track named "Jezebel" from the "When the Kite String Pops" album. Sometimes I like to play dumb and find my antecedents unreckonable to my current reality but this has done little in the way of gaining me friends or the esteem of my loved ones or any sort of positive notoriety. Indeed, it is a great secret to be kept from anyone in tertiary circles in which I swim. Can one imagine being at work, as an elementary school janitor, blasting out lyrics like "Turn on all the lights, so I can watch you die," in swamp metal growling along which I accompany not as sung, but plainly stated, as if I'd given that order any number of times. Or, "You bleed so easy, let the blackness roll on." Haha, I'm trending ever higher on those watch lists I surely populate. Ooh, fun idea for an experiment, try to purchase a firearm and see if I can or if I'm blackballed. Haha. 

It's officially the holiday season, even though we had our Thanksgiving early when Uly's grandma was here. I was so stressed making the dinner that not only did I have to puke, I couldn't eat any substantial quantity of the food once prepared. That's okay. I do that a lot, much to the chagrin of my special lady. I explained to her that one thing I learned from childhood was that if you burn the gravy, everything else is also, by default, ruined and you've wasted everyone's time and inflicted a wholly inedible meal upon them. Shit is definitely on the line when it comes to gravy and god help you if the fowl is dry. You'd best just pack your shit and leave forever because while your family might say it's okay, they certainly will resent you for the rest of time and nurse a deep, unshakable disgust at your very presence in the home. Oh, they'll say it's fine but you know how those closest to you lie straight to your face, every damn day. 

Working at an elementary school is legit insane, especially when you're there when all the ghosts are awake. The one I'm at is PreK - 2nd grade and bizarre labels like this abound. There are all sorts - "door", "window", etc. etc. There are also wholly deranged tablets set out like some anachronistic slates dictating the order of the day. "Good morning, Today is {day and date}. We will have Mrs. {name} for {some specified activity and time of day}. The letter of the day is {letter in lower and uppercase}. Love, Ms. {name}" all laid out in a strange, epistolary style but with certain words underlined or differently colored. I think perhaps the most absurd is the closing as all the classrooms that do this exercise sign off with "Love". Plus, add in the grossly propagandizing school mascot, "Skip the squirrel", exhorting students to "kindness" and the respect of property. Insert wholly obvious and unsubtle critiques of the clanking abysmal chimera that is American education. I suppose it's better than child labor in a textile mill, but by how much one is unsure.

Sometimes, the students, when they're not trashing the classroom with cupcake frosting or sugary "juice" drinks provided at the teacher's, not the school's, expense, crank out found gems like this one above. As all art, this can be interpreted any number of ways but I like, given the disconnect with human anatomy, that this artist was imagining a scene played out on some alien world but with referents from their earthbound life. "Mom" is dressing down some other child, perhaps not her own as that individual is unnamed. Maybe they're on the playground and "Mom" has activated her Karen genes at some perceived affront from the anonymous, Yoda-like creature. Who can say? Maybe that's the allure? The ignorance of the scene's motives? I try to never throw away these treasures in the hope that whoever created this will be pleasantly surprised by its rediscovery the following day.

"The skyscrapers look like gravestones from out here."

Every Last Time I Come Home

It's three (FAKE) in the morning. {Try that again} 

It's the last watch of the night {Better} and I've got Fall Out Boy on the personal juke and a mid strength ale and I woke up from a dead sleep because I had a verb in my head for a reimagining of the story of Ilium that will never be published.

To think, I left the warm, welcoming bed of my special lady and her cat and the probable location of the dog with whom we will cosplay a Scooby Doo Halloween situation to sit in the cold and weirdly deficient central heating of my house to write the verb (gerund?) brumbling in regards to a smoldering fire. Haha. I'm insane.

Obsessions, man. They're a thing. I've recently gotten into horse racing and college football. Watching those camblet hided beauties, both human and equine, pulse down the green makes one want, makes one desire, makes one crave that atavistic power of thighs, of shoulders. Lucifer only had to glimpse Eve how good things might be if she only partook. She knew what was up. Adam was a dumbass. 

I'm planning to make a slow cooker chili today. Bison, kidney beans, Serrano chili, garlic, onions, diced tomatoes, bacon, dried chilies, bell pepper, chili powder, salt.

We all inhabit the realities that we'd rather not.  

But I Know I'm Funny, Haha

Maybe I've read Blood Meridian too many times, but it seems like I spend an inordinate amount of my mental space evaluating people for their scalps. Haha, I just put myself on a watchlist somewhere (Haha, I'm a white male with tangential access to firearms. You go to the top of the list.) More seriously, I ended work at the farm because A: I'm old and everything hurts, B: elementary nighttime janitor season starts soon, and C: I wanted to fuck off and go see my youngest's godmother, T, and spend some recuperative, asylum type, sanatorium style time in a yurt in Homer. My god was that good. Making fire. Eating halibut. Spending copious amounts of unreplenishable monies churning through foods and goods. Living it up in stupendous crashes. That has nothing to do with the nebular dust cloud that emitted from my farm hat upon the bar table when I dropped it there after a shift under a brutal July sun that is pictured above. Anyway, upon leaving the refuge of T's graciously provided lodgings, I told her that visiting her place felt like coming home and I hope that sentiment held the weight I wished it to impart.

Haha, the VA just denied my claim that military service really fucked my mental health. But that's got nothing to do with these lettuces that we cultivated for our community gardening project, Grow Palmer. This (the VA claim, not the lettuces) will likely have employment ramifications for me in the future and, I fear, conspire to make things not as I wish them to be. But right now, in the cafe, before I descend to the bar for NASCAR, this consideration does nothing to detract from the awe of living, sitting near an attractive man with great teeth and a table of women ten years my senior discussing something and taking direction from jots lined out in a spiral, college ruled notebook and a couple standing, making decisions about seating, shielded from the world with surgical masks and the mother and adult daughter deciphering the Sunday (Haha, what a fake designation of "time".) crossword. 

Yesterday, after a public reading of some truly insane shit to celebrate the corporatist fuck stains that comprise the UAA administration's decision to ignominiously axe the MFA program, we went out for Korean food. I ate ox feet in a soup. Sad is not the right word to describe the reading's venue, held on the Anchorage museum's lawn but I can see, in a certain filter, how one might think of the proceedings as such. The readers persisted in spite of airplane, motorcycle, 18 wheeler (Haha, no one outside of Mississippi calls them that.), seagull, SUV thumping, truck revving noise with a certain gravitas, like eulogizers, as they read. I came with the crazy, but it was well received and then I watched A read and fell in love like some swooning teen. A priest has entered the cafe and I feel a joke is about to conspire but where is the rabbi accompanying? (Haha, I'm mentally infirm.) But that has nothing to do with the image of these boys up on Archangel rocks situated above. It was a grand hike and, much like the cafe and the priest, evidence of the fragility of existence. 

 

Just this morning, before I departed on my LARPing attempt at being alive, A told me that a chancery court in Tennessee ruled that a church affiliated establishment that received state funding could display signage that informed patrons that customers of the Jewish persuasion were automatically denied service. (Haha, the courts are really wildin' out these days.) That has nothing to do with this stove in beaver dam that we had the absolute pleasure of trodding upon during our Archangel stroll pictured above. Nor does it have anything to do with the scene of a woman ladened with bread loaves and chasing a toddler from the cafe. But maybe it makes the point I'm aiming at? (Haha, no son.) 

Haha, people are entitled trash.

Alter My State, To Get To This State

Ceci n'est pas un chapeau that looks like one that belonged to my 1st ex-wife 20 (twenty? LMAO) years ago sitting on a middle school gymnasium floor where I was a night janitor. There's a sentence I wouldn't have imagined stating as objective fact and not some chimeric fiction in an unpublishable story before the start of COVID insanity. You can see the phone's shadow under the overhead fluorescents, proof of my witness. I have (had?) a photo of her wearing it somewhere, where if memory serves, she's smiling, but there's no chance I'm going looking for that.

This is four hundred feet of rhubarb and it does not give a fuck about your lower back and will continually sprout flowering bodies that the farm owner demands you to rip out as they are an energy suck to the parts of the rhubarb he does want to grow. The bushes are three feet high and six feet across. The flower stalks shoot up over the bush like some kind of xenomorphic antennae. The pruning must be done every four or five days or else the biology gets away from the farmer's ability to curtail it with his own. So, yeah, I started work as a hand seasonally at a local, mostly potato, family farm. This is also a sentence that is grand in its absurdity while simultaneously capital t "True".  It's pretty wild, the farm, and I feel like I'm in a Wes Anderson movie as I'm moving around, being transported to a field in the back of a 1970's-ish diesel fueled Isuzu, or walking behind a tractor drawn planting implement that is depositing squash starts into a plastic sheet. I know the camera crew is out there and if I try only a little I can dream up an appropriate emo soundtrack to accompany the footage. 

Here's a picture of where the squash would eventually find their summer homes. This is where we sealed the desired portion of earth with a plastic sheet. My job was to anchor the plastic and the irrigation tape as the tractor unspooled the roll down 400 feet of powdery soil. After the tractor would descend the row, another hand severed the tape and plastic and then served as anchor as the tractor returned to me. I sat, waiting, in the shade of portoshitter and watched the tractor crawl back like some kind of live action Andrew Wyeth painting. Later, I would watch a wolf spider hop about and later still a beetle would try to employ me as a rock. Later still, on some other day back at the same field, a flock of sandhill cranes flew over, croaking, about thirty feet off of the ground. I took a video and considered that I was an "intelligent" ape using a highly specialized rock to access updates from people all across the globe. Haha. Man, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. 

The River. One thing I've really grooved to, working at the farm, is how much time I spend outside, tuning into the animal nature that's carrying these dumb thoughts around. It's hot, labor intensive, and often miserable, yet at day's end when I peel off my filthy socks and clap on my flip flops and wash my face and hands and head for the bar I feel a great satisfaction with nothing, almost as if the physicality of it drains one of existential dread. Just the other day, I felt I knew a little more intimately what Cain felt when his brother's offering curried more favor with Yahweh than his own had. I'd kill a motherfucker with a rock too. Then again, wouldn't we all?

They Said It Would Be Good For You

I recently adventured, katabasis style, back to the wilds of my fostering. The aims and strategic goals of which may come to light later, but suffice to say it was complete and utter garbage. Maybe more on that later, but the cafe here, in Palmer, is slapping with all the muted violence of civilization and the denied and deeply rooted understanding of necessary bloodshed. Then again, maybe I've just read too much and this has informed my poor opinion of my fellow being. Then again, it could just be that I'm trash, like my momma used to say of other folks not to her liking. Who knows?

Mr. Hendrix here on the wall of a Hardy St. brewpub (Keg and Barrel if you're interested and in the vicinity.). This place was legit and by legit I mean it was a thinly veiled attempt at white gentrification in what had, in my memory, been a black neighborhood. Indeed, there were still many black folks going about their lives on the aforementioned street, blasting up and down the lanes, blowing loud dro out of their windows and blasting rap music of a kind unknown to me that rattled trunks and speakers. The brewpub featured many local brews from Gulfport, Hattiesburg, Kiln - the most delicious of which were the sour beers that perfectly matched the perpetual zeitgeist of the failed South in their bitterness, a perfect match to the humid, hot, racist environs of the region. Who knows what it is I'm trying to say here? The pub was nice. They had outdoor seating next to juvenile magnolia trees and yet to flower hydrangeas with beds strewn with pine straw and the hot afternoon sun warded off by giant umbrellas and a light breeze while inside was cool and quiet with close captioned sports channels. A vast oasis among the revving cars and birdnoise and human drama unspooling all around me.

I witnessed a uniquely human event during my travels - the presentation of music and the gathering of the masses on the public green - complete with brews and food provided by mostly black folks for the whites in attendance. The occasion was a Friday and it being hot in the Hub City and the need to congregate to establish that we are goddamn alive and this will all end but in the meantime we need to get in some recreation. I was poncho'd up, owl style, and received no small manner of looks. It would be some time before the train took me to the airport with the ultimate destination of home and I watched the folks behaving in strangely magnanimous ways, only taking the barest necessities from the commons - spreading their chairs and blankets with utmost respect and consideration of the other, even in a place as violent as the South, with a certain deference for their neighbors. I was stricken by the oddness of it.

This trip I spent much time amongst the dead, in their cities and beds, in the bardo of their transition, them still here somehow, yet somehow not. I marveled at their absurd monuments, the gravitational pull of their stones, the stupid desire to persist. My own journey was one of attempted right-making, taking someone where they should be and had not been for some time. A giant waste of time and resources, much like the mausoleums pictured here. And yet one hopes my charge ended up where he was destined to be.

I visited the zoo, usually not my jam because, you know, the unethical nature of housing inmates, but I had time to burn after I had completed my mission. I saw many beasts - tapirs, wild hogs, hyenas, flamingos, giraffes, alligators, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I was baffled more by the patrons, mostly white, mostly barking at their children in a way that seems not to happen elsewhere and would likely be frowned upon in other regions. There, in that place, no one gave a second look, as if that manner of aggression was preferred with regards to urchins. I saw this many places and I marveled at my own upbringing. The peacock and I communed for a good long while, within close proximity, he in his livery and me in mine, and I asked him if he regarded my plumage as a threat. He eyed me close and did not answer.

Back home at the Moosehead, I studied these things - the journey, the people, the muted disapproval of a freak such as myself flying his flag in southern Mississippi, on a mission to put someone somewhere, to close a thing, to finish a chapter, to find the right azimuth, to reconcile an existence, to be. No answers apparated and I was left alone, plunging magically toward oblivion. Perhaps I have not said what I have wanted to convey, perhaps I have been intentionally vague due to personal reasons, perhaps I have opted for obfuscation rather than clarity, yet here this thing is, signifying nothing.

Suffering from a Case of Sobriety

I just sat down in the cafe where an older white woman sitting behind me said, "It's been a month of a week." I had to move because my back was to the window and I couldn't see the street and had to keep both exits in view because, obviously, if you're not watching the street in addition to the entryways, that's how they get you. So, I moved to have my back to a wall and still have eyes on the exits but I felt like going back to the lady and asking her if she, like I had last night, inadvertently pissed their pants, toddler style, while trying to navigate the labyrinth of my belt, or that I have eaten no food for 36 hours (and counting), or that I couldn't stop anxiety vomiting all day yesterday, or that I had just cried and cried in my vehicle while on the phone with a representative from the VA, a nice lady, who helped me begin to a file claim. I refrained from the dickwaving. But yeah, I hear her and I'm sure her week has been similarly challenging.

This is a book I'm currently loving. It's atrocious. Containing lines like, "Remember, this is top secret!" and "The porter was an oriental." and a raft of characters one of whom, whose greatest affliction was not the mysterious plague broken out on a military installation or the various shady and definitely nefarious conservative agents bent on upending the nation but was the problem of his sexual impotency, in a moment of self-reflection exclaims inside his head "Goddamn, I feel horny!" The book was published in 1986 by the now defunct "Leisure Books". Things like this used to greatly upset me, but the comedy on display here is SUBLIME. I'm halfway through and it is a gasser. Few things have pleased me as much as this in some time. Make your own conclusions about this set of data.

I am a fraud. I moved on from the work at Job Corps only to move from the move and I am reminded about all the times I told the students inane, unheard, and definitely unbelievable messages about career planning and making sound, adult decisions. In the interim, I've been forced to return to taking care of things I've let slip in the wake of trying to "fix" others (e.g., the VA call mentioned above, basic hygiene - I changed out of my pissed pants and put on the first pair of clean pants in a month). It's strange, as if the dormancy of adulting for myself has erupted to the surface and I'm accomplishing all manner of concerns not to be discussed on the internet, almost like a waking from sleep. Things are terrifying, clear, crystalline, pure horror, yet right.

We've had fools' spring here in the valley. Now it's back to snow and overcast. I'm still in the cafe, spending money I shouldn't and listening to music instead of looking for employment. I'm sure you all know the feelings - the guilt, the irresponsibility, the shame - of doing so but I'm pushing away at those emotions, in a gentle, non-hostile way. As for the Pabst above, I'd advise against. It tastes like a mix of Yoohoo and a mocha flavored Monster energy coffee drink and I knew, after the first sip, I'd finish the drink and regret it. The experience brought back memories of childhood, when my mother would pack shelf stable boxes of Yoohoo into my lunch. She'd have preferred my drinking milk, but was afraid of spoilage due to lack of refrigeration at school and so she went with the next best thing, one supposes. She would have, and sometimes did, give me money for lunch at school but my middle brother tuned me onto the scam of pocketing the money, a cool $6.25 per week, and going hungry during the day. She wanted me to eat and could have saved the money I was embezzling by applying for a free or reduced lunch but there was a strict taboo in the house against getting things "for free". Hence the brown bagged lunches and the Yoohoo. Again, make your own hypotheses about those data points and their inclusion here.

Well, shit, what are you doing?

Would I Have You in My Dreams

I harbor a disturbing fear that my kin, the crab at the Anchorage museum, has passed. Yesterday, we went to the museum for the free day and to scope the wares of the Alaska Black Chamber of Commerce. I was so white I didn't even know such a thing existed and the atrium that is usually quiet jammed with noise and action and vendors and the solitary representative from the Anchorage police department, the lone white woman manning a table at the expo. The place was too busy for me and I sought out the crab in its (hers, his, theirs?) enclosure to find it voided save the anemones and the kelp and the rocks. I became distraught and began to curse loudly at grief and general bullshittery such as to prompt my special lady to remind me where I was. I sat and watched the tank for a moment. Later I would discover via the internet that king crabs can live in captivity or without human predation for up to 20 years. (This may figure later in the narrative, who knows.)

The museum experience grandly astounded, as it does. And it made one reflective and moody, quiet and stupidly reserved. Water spilled onto a drum. Globes turned in a darkened nook. Mapmakers and sorcerers conversed about known and unknown territories. The top floor of the museum is always a treat and this day's exhibit, part of a lending from an Italian artist, was the figurative cherry on top - a cube of screens that one steps into to view images and hear lies. The docents made us wear paper booties, like surgeons, and the screens showed us images of all kinds, from the world over, and a gentle, almost robotic voice recited a litany of lies the world has heard from any manner of "trusted sources". (My favorites were "Saddam Hussein orchestrated 9/11" and "Prostitution is illegal in every country in the world." Say what that does about my memory and who the meat brain is.)

After the museum, Ulybear's grandparents had gifted him a theater performance, his first, to see the dance, percussion, spectacle exhibition that is STOMP. It was the first time congregated with many folk in quite a while and as we all sat and breathed and coughed, the show came up and what followed was a true epic, a ritual, a sacrimony, an offering, truly human. I wept, my favorite parts being the symbolic combat, the high prayer for deliverance preceded by thunderous drums, the warriors' triumphant return. Man, it's getting me right now, even in memory, yet I remain confused by my fellow show-goers' inappropriate, to me, responses. They kept clapping and hooting like mad apes presented with higher ordered intelligences, somehow instinctually afraid of what, what portent they were beholding. The performers bled white while these imbeciles cheered. I am tormented by things and places, yet the desire to keep experiencing these events persist. Later, A drove us home.

After dinner at Klondikes, I stayed downtown and watched the scene. I have not been out, later than about 6 PM, on a Saturday, in some time. I described the experience later, to A, as it being like the late night bar scene, but for middle aged people, one of which I am. There was no desire to party, however, to cut loose, to "live in the moment" as it were. I read some poetry and tried to write about the experience referenced in the cave above. Failed. Wrote about the inane instead. Ditching the scene, I walked home in the dark, trailing my book filled purse like a schoolboy. Later, I would search for record of a similar act I watched in the same venue as STOMP years prior yet could not find evidence of it being penned and spammed on the tubes. (I know I've written it, probably even here, but it was a field trip for G when he was a kinder.) The search brought me into a time capsule that burned with the acknowledgement that I've never been as kind as I should have been.

I hope the goddamn crab made it a full twenty. They were (are?) my friend.

You Want Maximum Stupid I am the Guy

Lately I've taken to wandering around and watching the world on mute. It's strange with no auditory input. Really sharpens the edges. Take, for instance, just now at the Moosehead where I am ostensibly "working from home" there is a gigantic television playing the series "Supernatural". I've never seen this show outside of the bar and the only reason I know of it is that it airs on TNT network which sometimes has hockey games but must fill the day drinker's viewing schedule with reruns and trash until said time as puck drops. All manner of spooky things are happening - a car drives without a pilot, a little girl's playground goes maliciously poltergeistish, a child is lured by a malevolence to be locked inside a refrigerator. The adult actors are trying with all their might to be serious, dramatic, full of affect. It's like watching your children in a school play. ("Aww honey, you were so good up there!" Proceeds to nurse a hidden whisky flask in the middle school theater lobby.) Is it bad? Is it shlocky? Maudlin? Disingenuous? Outright lies? How far from poetry has this performance drifted? How far have we?  

I was watching pair bonds happening in the cafe earlier. My god what a wonder. There were two tall, thin, Celtic-looking motherfuckers hunched at a table, over their phones, sharing each others' air and tertiary attention. I imagined a cave-dwelling couple, hunched next to a fire, both working  individual pieces of chert, each to their own crafting and purpose. (Oh look, the malevolence is conspiring to drown the episode's child protagonist in a public pool! Much drama. There is an 11th hour rescue. All is saved.) There were other folks there too. Olds. Witches. Shamans. Warriors. Fathers. I could say any number of things about them. Women with children spaced roughly two years apart, lugging their brood around with such insouciance, trailing bags and car seats and whole corteges of misery and plastic. I watched a woman smile at her baby and fortuitously enough, my friend Nick had recently supplied a quote from Denzel Washington that roughly said "when a mother has her first child, it's the last time she ever falls in love again."   

I recently discovered a new, to me, band named Alvvays. It's probably basic indie pop and a nothingburger critically, cranked up on echo effects and subtle production autotuning with a hint of reverb. Who knows? I'm certainly not qualified to say, but the lead singer's voice makes you want her to scoop you up and pet your head while you cry about being alive in that dualistic way of wanting to be off the ride yet not wanting the fun to stop. Who knows what she's even saying in these lyrics? All I know is she's a true savior, a right bastion of goodness. (Hey, look another episode of something. There is a wedding, delightfully sporting not one but TWO whole interracial couples, graciously black female/white male and black male/white female, maybe one of the guys is Latino. What could they be trying to teach us about race in contemporary America? Black bride affixes her tiara'd veil to a young blonde girl's head. I think it is the cop-drama is "Bones"?) I don't know the woman's name, the lead singer that is, but her existence is like being in the forest and spying a particularly fantastic fruiting body of some sort that only you will see before its decay into the nitrogen cycle. 

For work I went to Talkeetna. An episode of uselessness and terror. I vomited 8 times in one day due to stress induced anxiety at having to talk to strangers in some sort of professional capacity. A true Gallipolli, none of the objectives planned were achieved save the tenuous beachhead but I met some good (false modifier) people along the way. A sorceress in the library, a gremlin hooked to an emphysema pump, a sundry goods store cat, the barkeep who was so glad I'd said I was from Palmer rather than Wasilla, the bar patrons who then proceeded to roundly trash Wasilla. Talkeetna's a place, that's for sure, and the pic above is from the only bar that was open on 25 January and only one of four establishments of any sort that was open to commerce. My friend D has written about this very inn and I highly recommend his collection of stories that contain said experience. I stayed in a cabin that my employer was supposed to pay for but didn't and I turned in early after watching Wheel of Fortune. It reminded me of my old man when, one of the contestants asked to buy a vowel and then solved the puzzle, I protested loudly as to the contestant's dumbness at having thrown money away when the phrase was so obvious. (Now there is a pro-adoption commercial featuring a black family wherein the adopted teen discovers how to create a dish before heading off to independence and his adoptive mother finds a prepped dinner for mother and father after he'd gone. I cried. Idiocy. Cretinism. Other stigmatized words indicating less than average mental function.)

As always, the puzzle of existence, of sentience remains. As always, not in any methodical, rationed way but more in a vacant catatonic internal scream reverberating in a standing wave inside the skull's bowl. Sometimes I wonder what it's like to be a person who has "no bad days". There is a couple that comes into the bar, retirees, every Thursday afternoon to share two Coors Lights and hash out their week. Here comes the second round right now. There's a guy, slim, likely white, awkward, who plays predictable oldies on the juke and sings along as he shoots terrible pool on Wednesdays at 3PM sharp. It's Mike's birthday today and there is a cake and balloons for when he arrives in about 30 minutes. The afternoon bar is a hell of a scene. You can do anything here. Take a shit. Read poetry. Cry. Watch sports. Vomit. Listen to dead people sing via a hand computer. Write. Be.

Be.